Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/76

 THE RISE OF ANTI-CAPITALISTIC ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARY THEORY

During the first three decades of the nineteenth century English political and social ideas underwent a profound change. This mental revolution may be attributed to two main causes, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Both of these produced different effects upon the different classes of the community. The French Revolution commenced by arousing the traditional political radicalism of the English middle class, but the violence of the Revolution itself, together with the teachings of the Economists, who apparently demonstrated the incompatibility of the interests of the employing and employed classes, drove the middle class to resist even moderate measures of political change. At the same time the theories and presuppositions of the Revolution, based as they were on the doctrine of the Rights of Man, took a great hold upon the imagination of the working classes and produced levelling theories whose justice seemed all the stronger, as the actual course of events seemed to demonstrate the evils which flowed from social and economic inequality.

The Industrial Revolution, especially during the years 1800–1840, was largely on the social side an instrument of social dislocation. Down to the middle of the eighteenth century English agricultural society was still largely feudal in spirit. The internationalism of feudalism, which had given Western Europe a superficially homogeneous society, was gone, but otherwise feudal conceptions still held sway. The landowner was still the head of a local social system—Mr. Wells's "Bladesover"—which comprised household, farm tenants, labourers, officials. Social relationships consisted largely, on the part of 28