The Outline of History by H. G. Wells (good books to read TXT) 📕

would have given everyone an amount of education, leisure, and freedom such as mankind had never dreamt of before. But though the common standard of living has risen, the rise has been on a scale disproportionately small, the rich have developed a freedom and luxury unknown in the world hitherto, and there has been an increase in the proportion of rich people and stagnantly prosperous and unproductive people in the community; but that also falls to account for the full benefit. There has been much sheer waste. Vast accumulations of material and energy have gone into warlike preparations and warfare. Much has been devoted to the futile efforts of unsuccessful business corn, petition. Huge possibilities have remained undeveloped because of, the opposition of owners, forestallers, and speculators to their economical exploitation. The good things that science and organization have been bringing within the reach of mankind have not been taken methodically and used to their utmost, but they have been scrambled for, snatched at, seized upon by gambling adventurers and employed upon selfish and vain ends. The eighteenth century in Europe, and more particularly in Great Britain and Poland, was the age of private ownership. Private enterprise, which meant in practice that everyone was entitled to get everything he could out of the business of the community, reigned supreme. No sense of obligation to the state in business matters is to be found in the ordinary novels, plays, and such-like representative literature of the time. Everyone is out to make his fortune, there is no recognition that it is wrong to be an unproductive parasite on the community, and still less that a financier or merchant or manufacturer can ever be overpaid for his services to mankind. This was the moral atmosphere of the time, and those lords and gentlemen who grabbed the people's commons, assumed possession of the mines under their lands, and crushed down the yeoman farmers and peasants to the status of pauper laborers, had no idea, that they were living anything but highly meritorious lives.

 

Concurrently with this change in Great Britain from traditional: patch agriculture and common pasture to large and more scientific agriculture, very great changes were going on in the manufacture of commodities. In these changes Great Britain was, in, the eighteenth century, leading the world. Hitherto, throughout the whole course of history from the beginnings of civilization, manufactures, building, and industries generally had been in the hands of craftsmen and small masters who worked in their own houses. They had been organized in guilds, and were mostly their own employers. They formed an essential and permanent middle class. There were capitalists among them, who let out looms and the like, supplied material, and took the finished product, but they were not big capitalists. There had been no rich manufacturers. The rich men of the world before this time had been great landowners or moneylenders and money manipulators or merchants. But in the eighteenth century, workers in certain industries began to be collected together into factories in order to produce things in larger quantities through a systematic division of labor, and the employer, as distinguished from the master worker, began to be a person of importance. Moreover, mechanical invention was producing machines that simplified the manual work of production, and were capable of being driven by waterpower and presently by steam. In 1765 Watt's steam engine was constructed, a very important date in the history of industrialism.

 

The cotton industry was one of the first to pass into factory production (originally with water-driven machinery). The woolen industry followed. At the same time iron smelting, which had been restrained hitherto to small methods by the use of charcoal, resorted to coke made from coal, and the coal and iron industries also began to expand. The iron industry shifted from the wooded country of Sussex and Surrey to the coal districts. By 1800 this changeover of industry from a small-scale business with small employers to a large-scale production under big employers was well in progress. Everywhere there sprang up factories using first water, then steam power. It was a change of fundamental importance in human economy. From the dawn of history the manufacturer and craftsman had been, as we have said, a sort of middle-class townsman. The machine and the employer now superseded his skill, and he either became an employer of his fellows and grow towards wealth and equality with the other rich classes, or he remained a worker and sank very rapidly to the level of a mere laborer. This great change in human affairs is known as the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in Great Britain, it spread during the nineteenth century throughout the world.

 

As the Industrial Revolution went on, a great gulf opened between employer and employed. In the past every manufacturing worker had the hope of becoming an independent master. Even the slave craftsmen of Babylon and Rome were protected by laws that enabled them to save and buy their freedom and to set up for themselves. But now a factory and its engines and machines became a vast and costly thing measured by the scale of the worker's pocket. Wealthy men had to come together to create an enterprise; credit and plant, that is to say, Capital, were required. Setting up for oneself ceased to be a normal hope for an artisan. The worker was henceforth a worker from the cradle to the grave. Besides the landlords and merchants and the money-dealers who financed trading companies and lent their money to the merchants and the state, there arose now this new wealth of industrial capital a new sort of power in the state.

 

Of the working out of these beginnings we shall tell later. The immediate effect of the industrial revolution upon the countries to which it came, was to cause a vast, distressful shifting and stirring of the mute, uneducated, leaderless, and now more and more property less common population. The small cultivators and peasants, ruined and dislodged by the Enclosure Acts, drifted towards the new manufacturing regions, and there they joined the families of the impoverished and degraded craftsmen in the factories. Great towns of squalid houses came into existence. Nobody seems to have noted clearly what was going on at the time. It is the keynote of private enterprise to mind one's own business, secure the utmost profit, and disregard any other consequences. Ugly great factories grew up, built as cheaply as possible, to hold as many machines and workers as possible. Around them gathered the streets of workers' homes, built at the cheapest rate, without space, without privacy, barely decent, and let at the utmost rent that could be exacted. These new industrial centres were at first without schools, without churches . . .

 

The English gentleman of the closing decades of the eighteenth century read Gibbon's third volume and congratulated himself that there was henceforth no serious fear of the Barbarians, with this new barbarism growing up, with this metamorphosis of his countrymen into something dark and desperate, in full progress, within an easy walk perhaps of his door.

 

36.0 The New Democratic Republics of America and France

 

36.1 Inconveniences of the Great Power System

 

36.2 The Thirteen Colonies Before their Revolt

 

36.3 Civil War is Forced Upon the Colonies

 

36.4 The War of Independence

 

36.5 The Constitution of the United States

 

36.6 Primitive Features of the United States Constitution

 

36.7 Revolutionary Ideas in France

 

36.8 The Revolution of the Year 1789

 

36.9 The French Crowned Republic of 1789-1791

 

36.10 The Revolution of the Jacobins

 

36.11 The Jacobin Republic 1792-1794

 

36.12 The Directory

 

36.13 The Pause in Reconstruction and the Dawn of Modern Socialism

 

36.1 Inconveniences of the Great Power System

 

When Gibbon, nearly a century and a half ago, was congratulating the world of refined and educated people that the age of great political and social catastrophes was past, he was neglecting many signs which wein the wisdom of accomplished factscould have told him portended far heavier jolts and dislocations than any he foresaw. We have told how the struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century princes for ascendancies and advantages developed into a more cunning and complicated struggle of foreign offices, masquerading as idealized Great Powers, as the eighteenth century wore on. The intricate and pretentious art of diplomacy developed. The Prince ceased to be a single and secretive Machiavellian schemer, and became merely the crowned symbol of a Machiavellian scheme. Prussia, Russia, and Austria fell upon and divided Poland. France was baffled in profound schemes against Spain. Britain circumvented the designs of France in America and acquired Canada, and got the better of France, in India. And then a remarkable thing occurred, a thing very shocking to European diplomacy. The British colonies in America flatly refused to have further part or lot in this game of Great Powers. They objected that they had no voice and no great interest in these European schemes and conflicts, and they refused to bear any portion of the burthen of taxation these foreign policies entailed. Taxation without representation is tyranny; this was their dominant idea.

 

Of course this decision to separate did not flash out complete and finished from the American mind at the beginning of these troubles. In America in the eighteenth century, just as in England in the seventeenth, there was an entire willingness, indeed a desire on the part of ordinary men, to leave foreign affairs in the hands of the king and his ministers. But there was an equally strong desire on the part of ordinary men to be neither taxed nor interfered with in their ordinary pursuits. These are -incompatible wishes. Common men cannot shirk world politics and at the same time enjoy private freedom; but it has taken them countless generations to learn this. The first impulse in the American revolt against the government in Great Britain was therefore simply a resentment against, the taxation and interference that followed necessarily from foreign, policy without any clear recognition of what was involved in that objection. It was only when the revolt was consummated that, the people of the American colonies recognized at all clearly that' they had repudiated the Great Power view of life. The sentence in which that, repudiation was expressed was Washington's injunction to avoid entangling alliances. For a full century the united colonies of Great Britain in North America, liberated and independent as the United States of America, stood apart altogether from the bloodstained intrigues and conflicts of the European foreign offices. Soon after (1810 to 1823) they were able to extend their principle of detachment to the rest of the continent, and to make all the New World out of bounds for the scheming expansionists of the old. When at length, in 1917, they were obliged, to re-enter the arena, of world politics, it was to bring the new spirit and, new aims their aloofness had enabled them, to develop into the tangle of international relationships. They were not, however, the first to stand aloof. Since the treaty of Westphalia (1648) the confederated states of Switzerland, in their mountain fastnesses, had sustained their right to exclusion from the schemes of kings and empires.

 

But since the North American peoples are now to play an increasingly important; part in our history, it will be well to devote a little more attention than we have hitherto given to their development. We have already glanced at this story in (sec 8) of the preceding chapter. We will now tell a little more fully-though still in the barest outline-what these colonies were, whose recalcitrance was so disconcerting to the king and ministers of Great Britain in their diplomatic game against the rest of mankind.

 

36.2 The Thirteen Colonies Before their Revolt

 

The extent of the British colonies in America in the early half of the eighteenth century