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 the mind of the working class. Various truths had been established. The industrial system was flagrantly unjust. The power of capital was founded upon robbery perpetrated generations ago. It was exercised to rob the labourer of three-quarters, nay, five-sixths, of the wealth he created, and to keep him, his fellows, and his posterity, down to the uttermost minimum of subsistence, leaving him a prey to the competing demons of high wages with over-population, and low wages with privations. The monopoly of capital was the great social evil; the destruction of it was the basis of future happiness. The source of all the ills under which the labouring class suffered was revealed. Low wages, fluctuations, insecurity, bad houses, disease, poverty, pauperism, ignorance, and vice—all this was the work of the twin monopolies of land and capital.

The decade 1825–1835 was a very critical period in the history of the working classes of this country. A multitude of hopes and fears, of excitements both internal and external in origin, played upon the minds of the industrious masses. The Industrial Revolution was extending its sway; the improved power-loom of 1825 and the locomotives of 1830 represented its latest triumphs. The commercial crisis of 1826 was a threatening omen, whilst the emancipation acts of 1828 and 1829 inspired hopes of political freedom which rose sky-high with the death of George IV., the return of a reform ministry, and the news of the July Revolution in France. The agitation of 1830–32 for the Reform Bill was mainly political in character, and suspended temporarily agitations of a very different nature. Among these was the Trade Union movement which had taken a new lease of life since 1825, when it had been relieved from the worst of its legal restrictions.

The new Unionism derived its economics from Hodgskin, and its inspiration from Robert Owen. Owen's chief merit was that he filled the working classes with renewed hope at a time when the pessimism, both of orthodox economists and of their unorthodox opponents, had condemned labour to be an appendage of machinery, a mere commodity whose value, like that of all commodities, was determined by the bare cost of keeping up the necessary supply. Owen laid stress upon the human side of economics. The object of industry was to produce happier and more contented men and women. It had not done so hitherto because of the bad system of distribution and exchange. To cure this, Owen made two proposals. The first was a co-operative system of production and