ABSTRACT
Western society underwent such basic changes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that people living about 1850 found themselves in a world radically different from that of their predecessors, and these radical changes have continued to our own day. Instrumental in effecting change was a phenomenon to which the term Industrial Revolution has been applied. The Industrial Revolution caused tremendous unrest. Most industry previously had been done in the household as a supplement to the meager farming income. People found that they had to move to strange places, give up their farms, and become almost entirely dependent on the new factories for their livelihood. Probably industrial conditions were worse in England than elsewhere in Europe. The philosophical leader of English reform was John Stuart Mill, who argued that liberty must consider the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” in a qualitative sense.
