ABSTRACT
THE most spectacular problems of the new industrial age were the material ones. It was the squalid cellar dwellings, the open drains, and the utter poverty and destitution exposed by the probings of social investigators which roused the middle-class conscience in the forties. Yet ultimately these were not the most intractable of the problems of the new society. In time the housing was improved, the streets were paved and sewered, and here and there a little of Victorian prosperity trickled down to the working classes. The physical problems, enormous as they seemed to sensitive contemporaries, could be solved, given the necessary time and money and will. The more intangible problems of human relations were far more baffling.1 In the new towns of the industrial North had emerged a totally new type of community, in which the old techniques of social living had broken down. The new society was torn by the conflicts of attitudes and interests which marked the disintegration of a traditional culture and the emergence of a wider, technical civilization. A great poverty of social life at all levels marked the new town; and a process of social disintegration paralleled the physical break-up of the town into a series of concentric circles of
suburbs based on social distinction.1 The initiative in the solution of these problems lay with the dominant middle classes, and they had only one answer-to make over the whole of society in their own image. The ideas and standards and methods which had brought them such conspicuous success could do the same for all the people-if only they would let them. ' W h a t some men are,' declared Samuel Smiles in Self-Help, 'all without difficulty might be. Employ the same means, and the same results will follow.' It was a problem in what a later age has come to recognize as social communication, for which adult education appeared to be an eminently suitable device.
