ABSTRACT
Disastrous effects of the new industrial system—We have already seen in various preceding chapters that the condition of the labourers deteriorated from the time of Elizabeth onwards, but in the middle of the eighteenth century it had been materially improved owing to the increase of wealth from the new agriculture and from the general growth of foreign trade. But then came the great Continental wars and the Industrial Revolution; and it is a sad but significant fact that, although the total wealth of the nation vastly increased at the end of last century and the beginning of this, little of that wealth came into the hands of the labourers, but went mainly into the hands of the great landlords and new capitalist manufacturers, or was spent in the enormous expenses of foreign war. We saw, too, that the labourer felt far more severely than anyone else the burden of this war, for taxes had been imposed on almost every article of consumption, while at the same time the price of wheat had risen enormously. Moreover, labour was now more than ever dependent on capital, and the individual labourer was thoroughly under the heel of his employer. This, it will be remembered, was the result of the system of Assessment of Wages (p. 107), under which the justices of the peace, including of course chiefly manufacturers and land-owners, fixed the wages of labour for their own districts, and fixed them at so low a figure that they had nearly always to be supplemented out of the rates paid by the general public. The labourer had no redress, for all combination in the form now known as Trade Unions was suppressed, and his condition sank to the lowest depth of poverty and degradation.
