At a touch, the factory system had changed magically the face of England—as soon it was to change the face of the civilized world. in 1750 England was still rural, with only five towns of more than 6,000 people; in 1800„ it had 100 such towns, and its total population had already nearly doubled. In the next 50 years, it doubled again, and the towns much more than doubled in size and number. And this growth of towns — long without water supply or garbage collection — brought new problems which at first no one saw clearly and with which neither science nor law was then fit to grapple.
And in the new cities appeared two new ele ments in human society: the capitalist manu facturer, dwelling in his pompous mansion and soon dominating middle-class society; and the capitalless and landless proletariat of pallid factory workers, with nothing to sell but their hands. This new class was at first made up of old workers drawn away from their rural homes,— with garden spots, fresh air and varied industry,— to herd in squalid, indecently crowded tenements, bordering on pestilential alleys, amid destitution, disease, filth and vice. In 1837, one-tenth the people of the great city of Manchester "lived* in cellars.
These destructive tenement conditions were due to general ignorance, to the poverty of the workers and to the careless greed of the em ployers. Even more disastrous conditions with in the factory itself were due directly to cap italistic selfishness. Multitudes of men were clamoring for work, and much factory work could be done by women and young children. The operatives had not begun to bargain col= lectively; and the employer fixed wages and hours at will. Accordingly, the "dawn-to dark° working day was brought from out of doors — where it was endurable because spent in fresh air and in varied activity--rinto the factory, where it was unendurable because of foul air, poor light, incessant nerve-racking noise of machinery, and because there it crushed women and young children so as to become a menace to the national life. These conditions in England, from 1800 to 1834, are too notorious to need amplification. Even in America as late as 1832 a committee reported that two-fifths of all factory workers were children whose day of toil averaged 14 hours — every day of the year except Sundays and the few holidays— and who had no chance whatever for school ing.
The new society soon begot new social philosophies. The prosperous capitalist class resented all thought of interference in their business by government. Such meddling by the
paternalistic governments of the past, they easily proved, had been harmful, even when best intended; and the new science of political economy, founded by Adam Smith, taught re morselessly that the "greatest good of the greatest number° could be secured only by non interference with the "natural laws° of supply and demand. This Laissez faire, or Manchester, doctrine soon became the religion of the town middle-class; but from the first there were raised voices to protest that it united the strong but was merciless and unchristian to the weak. Against the teachings of that "dismal science,° such thinkers at once set up an opposing set of doctrines; and before 1850 the utopian socialistic dreams of Owen, Fourier and Saint Simon had grown into the scientific socialism of Karl Marx.
Now we may turn back to the course of political history.
From 1815 to the Revolutions of 1820. For more 'than 30 years after the Congress of Vienna reaction held sway in Europe. The restored princes, who "had learned nothing and forgotten nothing," strove to ignore the prog ress from 1789 to 1815. In Sardinia, serfdom was restored; in Spain and the Papal States, the Inquisition and other medizval institutions; in sonic ,places, even street lamps were abolished along with other hateful French reforms. Five states,— Russia, Austria, Prussia, England and France,— determined the policy of Europe. The first three were divine-right despotisms; and though the tsar and the king of Prussia played for a time at liberalism, the first dis orders enabled Austria to draw them over to her own frankly reactionary program. At first, France and England were not much better than these Eastern powers. Louis XVIII had found it necessary to give France a charter; but in that document itself the theory of divine right was preserved, until the revolutionary changes of 1830. That theory could have no place in England; but even there the government was for many years in the hands of an extreme Tory party. The evil genius of the whole Period was the subtle Austrian statesman, Met ternich, with his motto, °Government is no more a matter for debate than religion is," The one good thing to be said for Metternich's long su Premacy is that he permitted no great war; and this was because he felt it necessary to hold the powers in friendly alliance, so as better to arrest progress within the lines drawn at the Congress of Vienna.