Laissez faire politics in Victorian Britain. Government and people Today, we take it for granted that the government will pass laws to interfere in the.

Laissez faire politics in Victorian Britain

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Government and people• Today, we take it for

granted that the government will pass laws to interfere in the lives of citizens. It believes that it should do this to ensure that most people will have a better life.

What actions do Governments take

today to make peoples’ lives

better?

Why do some people call the British Welfare State “The Nanny State” or

“Santa Claus Land”?

Others think that where a government acts to look after all its citizens ‘from the cradle to the grave’, it shows a caring community.

• Some historians think that the creation of a Welfare State in Britain, in the years after World War II, was the crowning glory of government: - the best thing any government has done for the country.

Other observers say that the Welfare State has been bad for the country; that it has resulted in people taking welfare for granted and not looking after themselves or ‘saving up for a rainy day’. It has also meant that family values have fallen, with many people saying “ the state will look after my children and my old parents - it’s not my job.”

The staff of Pacific Palisades High in California, being threatened with lawsuits left right and centre from parents of kids not achieving desired grades, voted overwhelmingly to leave the following message

on the school's answering machine."In order to enable us to connect you to the right staff member, please select from

the following:• To lie about why your child is absent, press 1 • To make excuses about why your child did not complete his homework, press 2 • To complain about what we do in this school, press 3 • To swear at a staff member, press 4 • To ask why you did not get the information we have already sent home to you,

press 5 • If you want us to raise your child, press 6 • If you would really rather slap or hit a member of staff, press 7 • To request yet another change of teacher, press 8 • To complain about school transport, press 9 • To complain about school lunches, press 0• If you realise now that this is the real world and that your child must be

accountable for his/her own behaviour, class work, homework etc and that the teacher is not to blame for your child's lack of effort, hang up and have a nice day!"

The Nanny State or the Caring State?• Some people feel that the state interferes too much

these days. Others that it doesn’t do enough. • What is your view? Discuss this in class.

The Victorian view• Victorian society believed that every person

should look out for themselves. It was not government’s job to interfere in the everyday lives of the people.

• The Victorian period is called‘the Age of Individualism’.

• Samuel Smiles wrote:“Heaven helps thosethat help themselves.”

Explain what he meant.

Who was Samuel Smiles?

• He was born on 23rd December, 1812. His parents ran a small general store in Haddington in Scotland. After attending the local school he left at fourteen and joined Dr. Robert Lewins as an apprentice.

• After making good progress with Dr. Lewins, Smiles went to Edinburgh University in 1829 to study medicine. While in Edinburgh, he became involved in the campaign for parliamentary reform. He graduated in 1832 and found work as a doctor in Haddington.

• In 1837 Samuel Smiles began contributing articles on parliamentary reform for the Leeds Times. The following year he was invited to become the newspaper's editor. Smiles decided to abandon his career as a doctor and to become a full-time worker for the cause of political change. In the Leeds Times, Smiles expressed his powerful dislike of the aristocracy and made attempts to unite working and middle class reformers. Smiles also campaigned in his newspaper in favour of factory legislation.

• In the 1850s Samuel Smiles completely abandoned his interest in parliamentary reform. Smiles now argued that self-help provided the best route to success.

• His book ‘Self Help’, which preached industry, thrift and self-improvement, was published in 1859. Smiles also wrote a series of biographies of men who had achieved success through their own hard-work. This included George Stephenson and Josiah Wedgwood. Samuel Smiles died on 16th April, 1904.

Samuel Smiles explained what he meant.

Read his words and put them into your own.• “Whatever is done for men or

classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.”

What did self help mean to mid 19th century Governments?Copy out this list:

• Governments’ main functions were protecting Britain from foreign powers, looking after the Empire; keeping law and order and maintaining the existing order of things NOT interfering with the lives of citizens.

• Government was mainly made up of the aristocratic, landed gentry and rich town-dwellers and had to represent their interests.

• Governments had to keep public expenditure down.

• Governments should not help the lower classes as it would encourage them to become scroungers.

• Governments feared that giving help such as old-age pensions would make the working class even less thrifty than they were and spend their money on drink and other vices.

• The best way to help the poor was through charity.

The name given to this government approach wasLAISSEZ FAIRE.

Write your own definition.

• The phrase ‘laissez faire’ comes from the French meaning ‘let go’- ‘leave alone’. It originally began as a term

meaning that the British Government should not interfere with trade, based on the ideas of Scottish economist

Adam Smith but it came to mean the theory that the state should not interfere in any area of British life.

Why did British government adopt laissez-faire principles?

• British politicians thought they knew best. They were very confident in their beliefs. Throughout the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), the United Kingdom was the world's leading power. Its naval supremacy was unchallenged and its dominant influence in diplomacy and international affairs was acknowledged by all. It was building up a great Empire. It was the strength of Britain's economy which gave them the role of ‘workshop of the world’.

• It was argued that Britain had become so rich because of the hard work of its upper classes and politicians. By the 1860s, it was almost an article of faith that the nation had thrived because of laissez-faire approaches in the economics and in society. Governments had stayed out of Britain’s economic growth - and this had made Britain great. They should do the same with society.

• Why had Britain become the ‘Workshop of the World”?

• Applied to social policy, ‘laissez faire’ indicates minimal government involvement. Left to their own devices, according to this argument, people will develop habits of sturdy self-reliance: they will look after themselves. If they are supported by the state, people would rapidly sink into a mode of dependency and become scroungers off the state: relying on others to look after them. What’s your view?

Darwinism• The ‘leave alone’ approach fitted in with Victorian ideas of Social

Darwinism. This was based on the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin – that mankind had evolved because they fittest had survived.

If weak, less intelligent, less hard-working creatures had survived, evolution would not have taken place.

• Who was Charles Darwin?

• Given a coconut tree and a stone, the stupid monkey will try to eat the stone; the clever ape will throw the stone to knock down a coconut. That animal will eat and live and pass on his genes to a generation of even more intelligent creatures.

• What would happen if he had shared his coconut with the stupid monkey?

Social Darwinism• Applying Darwin’s theory to society, the conclusion reached

by the Social Darwinians was that, in order to ensure that Britain remained great, the idle, unintelligent, stupid good-for-nothings should not be helped. Poverty was regarded as a crime - brought about by stupid behaviour.

For those that did not believe in Darwinian science, they could always blame God.Victorians believed that God had created everyone to fulfil a role in society – and that everyone should know that place - and stay in it. It was not up to the rich to better the poor: as this verse of the Victorian hymn “All things Bright and Beautiful” makes clear. What is it saying?

• The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, GOD made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.

• by Cecil Frances Alexander, 1818-1895, written in 1848

Utilitarianism• Another influential ideology,

Utilitarianism, developed in the early 19th century alongside laissez-faire. Associated primarily

with the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1749-1832), its central belief was that a well-ordered society should seek to secure 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. In theory, laissez-faire could deliver that happiness for the greatest number if indeed ‘looking after Number One’ is what brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people.

• Utilitarianism created the formula that would drive the 19th century reform movement:

• Each institution must be tested by having applied to it the question What is its use? If it had a legitimate purpose, it was considered useful and refined; if it did not, it was to be rejected.

• Usefulness was established by: inquiry by a government commission, corrective legislation, administration of the legislation, and official inspection and reporting.

• Utilitarianism had a positive impact on the period because it reduced privilege: the greatest good for the greatest number, rather than the greatest good for just a few at the top. However, its lasting effects were largely negative in that it expressed a simplified, mechanical view of mankind and led to increased government involvement in everyday life. DISCUSS THIS THEORY.

Bentham thought that, to be remembered everything should be useful: even his dead body!

• In his will, Bentham said that he would leave money to be spent by University College, London - as long as he was present at meetings. He devised a formula to mummify his body so it could attend these meetings. For ten years before his death, he carried around in his pocket the glass eyes which were to be put in his preserved head and would show them off at dinner parties! Unfortunately, when the time came to preserve his head for posterity, the process went disastrously wrong, leaving it decidedly unattractive. A wax head was therefore substituted, and for some years the real head, with its glass eyes, lay on the floor of ‘Bentham’s box’ between his legs. 

• However, Bentham’s head proved an irresistible target for students, and it frequently went missing, turning up on one occasion in a luggage locker at Aberdeen station. The last straw came when it was discovered being used for football practice. Thereafter it was removed to the College vaults, where it remains to this day. The body, with its wax head, is kept in a cupboard in the meeting room of UCL and brought out at all meetings.

The Poor Law also featured:• the principle of 'less eligibility'

(meaning that workhouse conditions should be made less preferable than those of the lowest paid labourer outside)

• the prohibition of outdoor relief (relief outside the workhouse was forbidden)

• the segregation of different classes of paupers (including the separation of married couples)

• the abolition of the 'rate-in-aid' (grants to supplement low wages).

To make the workhouse as harsh as possible- and to make it a useful place, the inmates had to work. These girls (from the movie ‘Oliver Twist’ are picking oakum: old ships rope, picked apart so that it could be used for sealing the decks of ships. The photo shows real women at work.

Other jobs included:Stone-breaking — the results being saleable for road-makingCorn-grinding — heavy mill-stones were rotated by four or more men turning a capstan (the resulting flour was usually of very poor quality)Gypsum-crushing — for use in plaster-makingWood-chopping

• Bone-crushing was where old bones were pounded into dust for use as fertilizer. It was a hard and particularly unpleasant task. Its use was banned after a scandal in 1845 when it was discovered that inmates of Andover workhouse had been so hungry that they had resorted to eating the rotting scraps of flesh and marrow on the old bones they were crushing.

Life in a workhouse:

• People ended-up in the workhouse for a variety of reasons. Usually, it was because they were too poor, old or ill to support themselves. This may have resulted from such things as a lack of work during periods of high unemployment, or someone having no family willing or able to provide care for them. Unmarried pregnant women were often disowned by their families and the workhouse was the only place they could go during and after the birth of their child.

• Prior to the establishment of public mental asylums in the mid-nineteenth century (and in some cases even after that), the mentally ill and mentally handicapped poor were often consigned to the workhouse. Workhouses, though, were never prisons, and entry into them was generally a voluntary although often painful decision. It also carried with it a change in legal status. Until 1918, receipt of poor relief meant a loss of the right to vote.

Many Victorians argued that poverty was a crime. People ended up in the workhouse because they had

been stupid, or imprudent or drunken or immoral during their working days.

Scotland also had Poor Houses, set up under the 1845 Poor Law Act (Scotland). This is the

Linlithgow Combination Poor House.Where was it situated?

The Linlithgow Combination Poor House could hold over 200 inmates and their life was almost as grim as that of paupers in England. It contained a Lunatic Wing which housed those with mental problems, the blind, Downs Syndrome children and the deaf and dumb.

Linlithgow’s Poor House did have children living in – but under Scots law, they could be fostered out to houses in West Lothian (Linlithgow shared the workhouse with its Combination members: Abercorn; Bathgate; Bo’ness; Carriden; Kirkliston; Muiravonside and Whitburn.)

"Hush-a-bye baby, on a tree top,when you grow old, your wages will stop,When you have spent the little you made:

First to the poorhouse, and then to the grave.

• What does this Victorian rhyme tell you about attitudes to the Poor Law?

 IN THE WORKHOUSE - CHRISTMAS DAY by George R. Sims ( 1847 - 1922 )

This Victorian poem tells the story of man in a Workhouse who refuses to eat his Christmas dinner- paid for by the Guardians, because his wife had died rather than go in to one of the hated

institutions. They would not give her outdoor relief.

It is Christmas Day in the workhouse, And the cold, bare walls are bright With garlands of green and holly, And the place is a pleasant sight;

For with clean-washed hands and faces,

In a long and hungry line The paupers sit at the table,

For this is the hour they dine.

As we have already seen the ideas of laissez faire were being challenged even in Victorian times. In 1885, Charles Booth refused to believe the claim made by H. H. Hyndman, the leader of the Social Democratic Federation, that 25% of the population of London lived in abject poverty. Bored with running his successful business, Booth decided to investigate the incidence of pauperism in the East End of the city. He recruited a team of researchers that included his cousin, Beatrice Potter.

The result of Booth's investigations, Labour and Life of the People, was published in 1889. Booth's book revealed that the situation was even worse than that suggested by H. H. Hyndman. Booth research suggested that 35% rather than 25% were living in abject poverty.

Booth now decided to expand his research to cover the rest of London. He continued to run his business during the day and confined his writing to evenings and weekends. In an effort to obtain a comprehensive and reliable survey Booth and his small team of researchers made at least two visits to every street in the city.

Where did he find most evidence of poverty?

Over a twelve year period (1891 to 1903) Booth published 17 volumes of Life and Labour of the People of London. In these books, Booth argued that the state should assume

responsibility for those living in poverty.

Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree read Booth’s work and argued that it only referred to London – it was such a huge city, it was an exceptional case. Surely, he thought, the beautiful city of York could not have such poverty.

What do you think?

Seebohm Rowntree was born in York on 7th July, 1871. He was the third child of Joseph Rowntree and Emma Seebohm. He was educated at the York Quaker Boarding School and Owen College, Manchester. In 1897 Rowntree was appointed as a director of his father's successful business in York. What do you think the company made?

In the 1860s Joseph Rowntree, had carried out two major surveys into poverty in Britain. Inspired by his father's work and the study by Charles Booth’s ‘ Life and Labour of the People in London’ (1889), Seebohm Rowntree decided to carry out his own investigations into poverty in York. Rowntree spent two years on the project and the results of his study, Poverty, A Study of Town Life, was published in 1901.

Look at the photos and write down what you think he found.

In his study, Rowntree distinguished between families suffering from primary and secondary poverty. Primary poverty, he argued, was where the family lacked the earnings sufficient to obtain even the minimum necessities, whereas families suffering from secondary poverty, had earnings that were sufficient, but were spending some of that money on other things. Whereas some of these were "useful", others, like spending on alcohol, was "wasteful.

WRITE YOUR OWN DEFINTION OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY POVERTY.

Rowntree's study provided a wealth of statistical data on wages, hours of work, nutritional needs, food consumed, health and housing. The book illustrated the failings of the capitalist system and argued that new measures were needed to overcome the problems of unemployment, old-age and ill-health.

Using your textbook write a detailed report on Rowntree’s report!

As we have seen, the old ideas of laissez faire were increasingly being challenged by many people, including Booth and Rowntree whose reports were hugely influential in changing the minds of politicians. Another influential opinion was that of Professor T. H. Green of Oxford University who argued strongly that it was a government’s responsibility to look after its citizens and act on their behalf. Internet work: Find out more about his address “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract” (1881) which gave early expression to ideas central to the modern “welfare state.”

The work of Booth, Rowntree and TH Green influenced some important politicians such as the Liberal MPs: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. They began to push in parliament for more social reform.

Now write your 20 mark essay:

Describe the 1834 Poor Law and its Workhouse System in detail and explaining why it was like that.

Was laissez-faire ever relaxed in Victorian politics?

Ans: YES! It wasn’t abandoned but there was a definite shift

Improvements to the Poor Law• The harshness of the Poor Law system, with its

grim Bastilles (as the workhouses were called) did occasion a lot of criticism.

• Who wrote the story of a workhouse boy and the conditions he faced?

Improvements to the Poor Law• From the 1850s on some relaxation in the rules

were brought in.• The old were given outdoor relief.• Married couples could live together

- but in separate bedrooms.• Infirmaries were built for sick paupers.• Children were increasingly boarded out.

• However, the workhouse was still a grim, forbidding place. The stigma of going there meant that many just suffered grinding poverty.

So, in the light of so many examples of state intervention in various aspects of social life, can we still say that there was 'an age of laissez-faire' in Victorian Britain?

• Some historians have argued it was...1. By the middle of the 19th century, laissez-faire was

firmly established as the guiding principle in economic life.

2. State intervention was grudgingly conceded and limited in its impact until at least the last quarter of the 19th century.

3. The state intervened to prevent those greater evils which might threaten the efficiency of a free-trade economy and not to provide positive benefits for its citizens.

4. Also, the burden of provision rested overwhelmingly with local authorities and not with central government.

• Can you think of any evidence for the opposing view?

• Thus, the range of what local authorities might offer was massively expanded during the Victorian era. What either central or local government must provide remained extremely limited. At the turn of the 20th century, there was no housing policy; there were no old-age pensions and no national insurance schemes. For many English property owners, reliance on local solutions to local problems remained an absolute priority. Charles Dickens's fictional creation in Our Mutual Friend, Mr Podsnap says "Centralization. No. Never with my consent. Not English.”

Helping the poor and unemployed cost money and government’s main aim was to keep

expenditure - and tax - down.

• In the 1860s and 1870s, the age of Gladstone and Disraeli, income tax rates fluctuated between 3d and 6d (1.5 to 2.5p) in the pound. So distasteful did Gladstone find the principle of direct taxation that he even promised to abolish income tax if he won the election of 1874. He lost, and income tax stayed. In 1869, though, only 2.1 per cent of all state expenditure went on government departments.

• Why did Victorian politicians hate income tax?

With government doing so little, there was no

need for a large number of officials.

• The Victorian civil service was very small. Concerns about 'centralisation' and state power, which some critics voiced at the time, seemed ludicrously wide of the mark. One of our most distinguished historians, Eric Hobsbawm, has asserted that, 'By the middle of the nineteenth century government policy in Britain came as near laissez-faire as has ever been practicable in a modern state.'

• It was industrialisation that perhaps did more than anything to develop state involvement in what Victorians called 'the social question'. The industrial revolution meant much bigger towns and huge population increases. Britain's population was almost twice as large in 1800 as in 1700, three times as large by 1850 and more than five times as great by 1900. By that year, it had reached 37 million. Urbanisation and population growth combined to produce social problems on an unprecedented scale.

As early as 1832, a doctor working in Manchester, J.P. Kay, graphically illustrated the key problems. “The state of the streets powerfully affects the health of their inhabitants. Lack of cleanliness and of forethought are found along with dissipation, reckless habits and disease. The population gradually becomes physically less efficient as the producers of wealth. Were such manners to prevail, the horrors of pauperism would accumulate. A debilitated race would be rapidly multiplied. Morality would afford no check to the increase of population: crime and disease would be its only obstacles.”

Summarise this in your own words.

• Here is one historian’s view:• “So, was Manchester better seen as the triumphant

productive capital of the world's first industrial nation or as the 'shock city of the industrial age'? Should the Victorians celebrate their world-beating industrial triumphs or quake at a modern civilisation threatened by numberless hoards of the dirty, the disease-ridden and the ill-educated. All potential recruits to a vast criminal underclass? Evidence steadily accumulated which confirmed Kay's early analysis. Severe social problems afflicted all the large cities of the United Kingdom. The government had to act.”

• Do you agree?

• By the mid-Victorian period, it was also clear that problems of poverty and poor education were not confined to urban areas. Poverty and hopelessness abounded in rural areas now dominated by markets and profit and where the supply of agricultural labour was much greater than the demand for it. The Victorians were great fact-finders and they accumulated evidence about the health and morality of the nation.

• In Britain the evidence of James Kay, Edwin Chadwick and the other Victorian social commentators also demonstrated the fragility of Britain’s role as the ‘Workshop of the World.’ Without state intervention, the whole Victorian economic miracle might be undermined. The solution adopted was central government intervention to mitigate the most damaging effects of unrestrained industrial capitalism. One area that governments intervened in was education.

• Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools were first appointed in 1839 and the first state-sponsored teacher-training scheme followed in 1846. The path to still greater state intervention was securely paved in the early Victorian period and led to the 1870 Education Act, which developed local board schools to fill up the gaps left by church provision.

• Compulsory elementary education followed in 1881 and the opportunity for almost all children to receive free elementary education without payment of any fees was provided by 1891. Responsibility for state-supported education was transferred, as Arthur Balfour put it, to 'those great public assemblies, the borough councils and the county councils of the country' in 1902. So government had again breached the laissez faire mould – as had local government.

Rival nation, Germany, was much further ahead in social welfare:

– The beginning of the national German social welfare system occurred in the 1880s while Chancellor Bismarck was in power. A main reason for social legislation was the government's desire to weaken support for socialism among workers and to establish the superiority of the Prussian state over the churches. The government hoped that provision of economic security in case of major risks and loss of income would promote political integration and political stability.

• Three laws laid the foundations of the German social welfare system: the Health Insurance of Workers Law of 1883, which provided protection against the temporary loss of income as a result of illness; the Accident Insurance Law of 1884, which aided workers injured on the job; and the Old Age and Invalidity Insurance Law of 1889.

• Initially, these three laws covered only the top segments of the blue-collar working class but they were a start.

• Germany had also introduced a form of Labour Exchange where unemployed workers could go and find a job.

Extension of the franchise• With more men getting the

vote, politicians also understood that they would have to listen more to what those men wanted.

• Two Parliamentary Reform Acts had extended the vote to almost all adult males in the country. This increased electorate would vote for the party that would help them most.

The 1867 Reform Act gave the vote to every male adult householder living in a borough constituency. Male lodgers paying £10 for unfurnished rooms were also granted the vote. This gave the vote to about 1,500,000 men.

The 1884 Act gave the counties the same franchise as the boroughs - adult male householders and £10 lodgers - and added about six million to the total number who could vote in parliamentary elections.

The Rise of SocialismThe old political parties had to be seen to be doing something to help working men as a new party was formed which was pledged to represent working class wishes.

What was this party called? What was this party called? Write out some information Write out some information about it.about it.

Who were the Fabians?• The Fabian Society was named after the Roman General, Quintus

Fabius Maximus, who advocated the weakening of the opposition by harassing operations rather than becoming involved in pitched battles. The group included socialists such as Eleanor Marx, Annie Besant, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Clement Attlee, Ramsay MacDonald, Emmeline Pankhurst, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Rupert Brooke.

• FIND OUT SOMETHING ABOUT SOME OF THESE PEOPLE.

• The Fabians believed that capitalism had created an unjust and inefficient society. They agreed that the ultimate aim of the group should be to reconstruct "society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities". The Fabians rejected the revolutionary socialism of H. M. Hyndman and the Social Democratic Federation and were concerned with helping society to move to a socialist society "as painless and effective as possible".

• The fact that there were many famous writers among the group meant that they put huge pressure on the government to change society.

Churchill had fought in the Boer War and was aware that many men volunteering to fight in South Africa had been turned away because they were medically unfit. He knew that Britain’s need for national efficiency – a strong body of strong men needed to fight for their country, was being threatened by poor living and working conditions. In order to ensure a good supply of fit soldiers, the government would need to intervene. Many politicians were worried about Britain’s possible decline in terms of National Efficiency.

National efficiency

• Fears that Britain was in decline as a world power led to the idea that Britain had to improve its national efficiency by taking steps to improve the quality of the workforce and of its soldiers. If Britain was to compete with countries like Germany and the USA, and maintain its position as a world power, then it had to be run efficiently with a strong, healthy and well-educated workforce.

20 mark essay

• To what extent were the works of Booth and Rowntree the reason why governments moved away from laissez faire policies between 1850 and 1906?