История Великобритании

      The white colonies, unlike the others, were soon allowed to govern themselves, and no longer depended on Britain. They still, however, accepted the British monarch as their head of state. The move towards self-government was the result of trouble in Canada in 1837. A new governor, Lord Durham, quickly understood the danger that Canada might follow the other American colonies into independence. His report established the principle of self-government, first for the white colonies, but eventually for all British possessions. It prepared the way from empire to a British "Commonwealth of Nations" in the twentieth century.

        By the end of the nineteenth century Britain controlled the oceans and much of the land areas of the world. Most British strongly believed in their right to an empire, and were willing to defend it against the least threat. This state of mind became known as Jingoism, after a famous Music Hall song of 1878:

      We don't want to fight, but, by jingo if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.

       But even at this moment of greatest power, Britain had begun to spend more on its empire than it took from it. The empire had started to be a heavy load. It would become impossibly heavy in the twentieth century, when the colonies finally began to demand their freedom.

      Wales, Scotland and Ireland

      As industrialisation continued, the areas at the edge of British economic power became weaker. Areas in Wales, Scotland and Ireland were particularly affected.

      Wales had fewer problems than either Scotland or Ireland. Its population grew from half a million in 1800 to over two million by 1900, partly because the average expectation of life doubled from thirty to sixty. In south Wales there were rich coal mines which quickly became the centre of a rapidly growing coal and steel industry. In their search for work, a huge number of people, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the total Welsh population, moved into the southeast corner of the country. By 1870 Wales was mainly an industrial society.

      This new working-class community, born in southeast Wales, became increasingly interested in Nonconformist Christianity and radicalism. It created its own cultural life. In many mining villages brass bands were created, and these quickly became symbols of working-class unity. Other people joined the local Nonconformist chapel choir, and helped to create the Welsh tradition of fine choral singing. Wales was soon a nation divided between the industrialised areas and the unchanged areas of old Wales, in the centre and north.

      The parliamentary reforms of the nineteenth century gave Wales a new voice. As soon as they were allowed to vote, the Welsh workers got rid of the Tories and the landowning families who had represented them for 300 years.

      Scotland was also divided between a new industrialised area, around Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the Highland and Lowland areas. Around the two great cities there were coal mines and factories producing steel and iron, as well as the centre of the British shipbuilding industry on the River Clyde. Like Wales, Scotland became strongly Liberal once its workforce gained voting rights.

      The clearances in the Highlands continued. In the second half of the century it became more profitable to replace the sheep with wild deer, which were hunted for sport. Many old clan lands were sold to new landowners who had no previous connection with the Highlands, and who only occasionally visited their estates. The Highlands have never recovered from the collapse of the clan system, either socially or economically. It is probable that the Highland areas would have become depopulated anyway, as people moved away to find work in the cities. But the way in which it happened was not gentle, and left a bitter memory.

      The Irish experience was worse than that of Scotland. In the nineteenth century, an increasing number of Protestant Irish turned to England as a protection against the Catholic inhabitants. To the Catholics, however, most Irish Protestants were a reminder that England, a foreign country, was still as powerful in Ireland as it had been in 1690. The struggle for Irish freedom from English rule became a struggle between Catholic and Protestant. The first great victory for Irish freedom was when Catholics were allowed to become MPs in 1829. In fact in Ireland this decision was accompanied by a repression of civil and political liberties. Even so, the fact that a Catholic could enter Parliament increased Irish national feeling.

      But while this feeling was growing; Ireland suffered the worst disaster in its entire history. For three years, 1845, 1846 and 1847, the potato crop, which was the main food of the poor, failed. Since the beginning of the century, the population had risen quickly from five to eight million. In these three years 1.5 million (about 20 per cent) died from hunger. At the same time Ireland had enough wheat to feed the entire population, but it was grown for export to England by the mainly Protestant landowners. The government in London failed to realise the seriousness of the problem.

        Many Irish people had little choice but to leave. At least a million left during these years, but many more followed during the rest of the century because of the great poverty in Ireland. Most settled in the United States. Between 1841 and 1920 almost five million settled there. Some went eastwards to the towns and cities of Britain. Many helped to build Britain's railways.

      The Irish population has still not yet grown to the same level. Today it is less than five million (three million in the Republic of Ireland, 1.5 million in Northern Ireland), only a little more than half what it was in 1840. Emigration from Ireland continues.

      The Irish who went to the United States did not forget the old country. Nor did they forgive Britain. By 1880 many Irish Americans were rich and powerful and were able to support the Irish freedom movement. They have had an influence on British policy in Ireland ever since.

      Meanwhile, Charles Parnell, a Protestant Irish MP, demanded fuller rights for the Irish people, in particular the right to self-government. When most Irish were able to vote for the first time in 1885, eighty-six members of Parnell's Irish party were elected to Parliament. Most Liberals supported Parnell, but the Tories did not and Ireland did not gain the right to self-government, or "home rule", until thirty years later. But then Britain's war with Germany delayed it taking place, and by the time the war ended Irish nationalists had decided they could only win their freedom by fighting for it.

      14    The end of an age

      Social and economic improvements

      Between 1875 and 1914 the condition of the poor in most of Britain greatly improved as prices fell by 40 per cent and real wages doubled. Life at home was made more comfortable. Most homes now had gas both for heating and lighting. As a result of falling prices and increased wages, poor families could eat better food, including meat, fresh milk (brought from the countryside by train) and vegetables. This greatly improved the old diet of white bread and beer.

      In 1870 and 1891 two Education Acts were passed. As a result of these, all children had to go to school up to the age of thirteen, where they were taught reading, writing and arithmetic. In Scotland there had been a state education system since the time of the Reformation. There were four Scottish universities, three dating from the Middle Ages. In Wales schools had begun to grow rapidly in the middle of the century, partly for nationalist reasons. By the middle of the century Wales had a university and a smaller university college. England now started to build "redbrick" universities in the new industrial cities. The term "redbrick" distinguished the new universities, often brick-built, from the older, mainly stone-built universities of Oxford and Cambridge. These new universities were unlike Oxford and Cambridge, and taught more science and technology to feed Britain's industries.

      The face of the towns had greatly changed in the middle years of the century. The organised improvement of workers' homes, of factory conditions, public health and education had all come fast, once the Victorians had developed the administrative and scientific means!/ Sidney Webb, an early socialist, amusingly described the pride of the new town authorities, or municipalities, which carried out these changes:

      The town councillor will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water and, seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market, that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school . . . will use the national telegraph system to tell them not to walk through the municipal park, but ... to meet him in the municipal reading room.

      It was easy to see the physical changes such as the growth of towns and cities and villages. It was less easy to see the social changes. But in fact, power had moved from the shires to the towns. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the country squire could use his power to rule the village, send children to work in the workhouse, and enclose common land for his own use. By 1900 he was a harmless reminder of an earlier age. JPs lost all their local government and administrative powers in 1888, and could now only make judgements in very small cases. New county councils took their place, which were made up of elected men and women, with a staff of administrators to carry out their decisions, a system which still operates today.

        The authority of the Church was also weakened. In the country, the village priest no longer had the power he had had a century earlier." Churches were now half empty, because so many people had gone to live in the towns, where they stopped going to church. By 1900 only 19 per cent of Londoners went regularly to church. Those who did usually lived in richer areas. This remains true today, when under 10 per cent are regular churchgoers.

      Why did the poor no longer go to church? One reason was that the Church of England offered them no help with the problems of their daily lives. Staying away from church was also a kind of rebellion against the ruling establishment with which the Church was still closely connected. In the village, many people had gone to church because they were forced to do so by the squire, who probably employed them. In the great cities of industrial Britain they were free, and they chose to stay away.

      They were also attracted by other ways of spending their Sundays. By the 1880s, for the first time, working people could think about enjoying some free time. Apart from museums, parks, swimming pools and libraries recently opened in towns, the real popular social centre remained the alehouse or pub. Thousands of these were built in the new suburbs.

      From the middle of the century many people had started to use the railway to get to work. Now they began to travel for pleasure. The working class went to the new seaside holiday towns. The middle class enjoyed the countryside, or smaller seaside resorts of a more expensive kind. But for both, the seaside was a place where families could take holidays together.

      The invention of the bicycle was also important. For the first time people could cycle into the countryside, up to fifty miles from home. It gave a new freedom to working-class and middle-class people, who met each other for the first time away from work. More importantly, it gave young women their first taste of freedom. Up till then they had always had an older woman as a companion to make sure that nothing "happened" when they met men. Now these young women had a means of escape, and escape they did.

      The importance of sport

      By the end of the nineteenth century, two sports, cricket and football, had become of great interest to the British public. Cricket, which had started as a "gentleman's" sport, had become an extremely popular village game. Although it had first developed in the eighteenth century, it was not until a century later that its rules were organised. From 1873 a county championship took place each year. Cricket was a game which encouraged both individual and team excellence and taught respect for fair play. As one Englishman said at the time, "We have a much greater love of cricket than of politics." Cricket was successfully exported to the empire: to the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand. But while it was popular in Wales, it never had the same popularity in Scotland.

      Britain's other main game, football, was also organised with proper rules in the nineteenth century. As an organised game it was at first a middle-class or gentleman's sport, but it quickly became popular among all classes. Football soon drew huge crowds who came to watch the full-time professional footballers play the game. By the end of the nineteenth century almost every town between Portsmouth on the south coast of England and Aberdeen in northeast Scotland had its own football, or "soccer" team. These often encouraged local loyalties. Sometimes they symbolised something more. In Glasgow Celtic was supported by the thousands of Irish immigrants and other Catholics, while Rangers was supported by Protestants. But at this time there was no violence. Crowds were well behaved. Britain also exported football abroad, as young commercial travellers took the game with them, particularly to Europe and to South America.

      Changes in thinking

      The most important idea of the nineteenth century was that everyone had the right to personal freedom, which was the basis of capitalism. This idea had spread widely through the book Enquiry into the Wealth of Nations, written by the Scotsman Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. After Adam Smith, several capitalist economists argued that government should not interfere in trade and industry at all.¹ Fewer laws, they claimed, meant more freedom, and freedom for individuals would lead to happiness for the greatest number of people. These ideas were eagerly accepted by the growing middle class.

      However, it soon became very clear that the freedom of factory owners to do as they pleased had led to slavery and misery for the poor, not to happiness or freedom. By 1820 more and more people had begun to accept the idea that government must interfere to protect the poor and the weak. The result was a number of laws to improve working conditions. One of these, in 1833, limited the number of hours that women and children were allowed to work. Another law the same year abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. While this set a new example internationally, factory owners were quick to point out that while slave owners were compensated for the loss of slave labour, they were not compensated for the new limits on labour in Britain.

      Such laws did hot make British factories perfect places in which to work, and many factory owners did their best to avoid obeying them. But by the end of the century, few people thought it was wrong for the government to interfere in factory conditions, health in towns, and education for children. People now saw these as government duties.

      As so often happens, government policy was influenced by individual people. At the beginning of the century Robert Owen, a factory owner in Scotland, gave his workers shorter working hours. He built his factory in the countryside, away from the fog and dirt of the cities, and provided good housing nearby, and education for the workers' children. Owen was able to prove that his workers produced more in less time than those forced to work long hours. Owen also encouraged trade unions, and supported the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Owen's ideas and example began to spread. Other reformers, like the Quaker, Arthur Cadbury, famous for his Birmingham chocolate factory, built first-class housing for their workers.

      In spite of men like Owen, improvements were slow. By the end of the century, 30 per cent of the nation was still extremely poor. It was an uncomfortable fact for the most powerful nation on earth. Again, it was individual people who led the fight against this problem. William Booth started a new religious movement, the Salvation Army, to "make war" on poverty. His book In Darkest England and the Way Out was a reminder that while the British called Africa "the dark continent", areas of possibly greater "darkness" were just down the road in their own towns.

      Literature was influenced by the new mood of change. In the middle of the century Charles Dickens attacked the rich and powerful for their cruelty towards the weak and unfortunate in society. -Painting too was affected. A century earlier it had been the great landowning aristocracy who had bought paintings and paid artists. In the nineteenth century it was the mainly urban middle class, and to please them, artists painted different subjects, such as sentimental scenes of the countryside, and paintings which told a moral story. But some painted industrial scenes which raised questions about the new society Britain had created. "Pre-Raphaelite" painters looked back to the pre-industrial medieval and classical worlds with fresh and romantic eyes. Later on in the century, many of the first socialists in Britain were writers or artists. Some of these belonged to the "Arts and Crafts Movement", whose members turned away from the new middle-class values, and looked to pre-industrial handcraft and to nature for inspiration.

      Above all, Victorian society was self-confident. This had been shown in the Great Exhibition in 1851. British self-confidence was built not only upon power but also upon the rapid scientific advances being made at the time. In 1857 Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. His theory of evolution, based upon scientific observation, was welcomed by many as proof of mankind's ability to find a scientific explanation for everything. But for churchgoing people, who were mostly to be found among the middle classes, the idea that all animals, including human beings, had developed from more simple creatures shook this self-confidence and led to a crisis in the Church. Most of the churchgoing population believed every word of the Bible. They found it difficult to accept Darwin's theory that the world had developed over millions of years, and had not been created in six days in the year 4004 BC. Even less acceptable was the idea that over a period of thousands of years man had developed from the ape. The battle between "faith" and "reason" lasted for the rest of the century.

      There was one dangerous result of Darwin's book. Some of those who accepted his ideas began to talk of "advanced" and "inferior" races. These ideas soon influenced Britain's imperial policy. Several European countries already shared the view that for reasons of religion and "higher" civilisation, they could justify their colonial policy. But the idea of racial or genetic superiority was a new one, from which the colonised peoples could not hope to escape. They could accept Christianity and could become "more civilised", but they could not change their race.

      Today it is difficult to understand how these ideas could have been accepted. But at the time there was little doubt among most of the British that Britain was the most advanced of the "advanced" races, with a duty to govern the "inferior" races.

      The end of "England's summer"

      At the beginning of the twentieth century people did not, of course, realise that they were living at the end of an age. There was still a general belief in the "liberal idea", that the nation could achieve steady economic and social improvement as well as democracy without revolution. Things for Britain could only get better and better.

      A growing demand for reform led "New Liberal" governments to try to improve social conditions. In 1907 they provided free school meals, to improve the health of Britain's children. The following year they started an old age pensions scheme. It was an astonishing new idea that government should prevent the old from starving or becoming homeless. In 1909 Labour Exchanges were opened, where those without work could look for jobs. Two years later all working people were made to pay for "national insurance". It was another new idea that those unable to earn money through sickness or unemployment would be helped by the state.

      The New Liberals had begun to establish what became the "welfare state". By doing so, they made important changes to the free capitalism of the nineteenth century. Government, said the Liberals, had a duty to protect the weak against the strong. As in the gentlemanly sport of cricket, the Liberals believed that even within capitalism there had to be "fair play".

      In 1911 another important political event occurred. The Liberal drive for reform, both in Irish politics and in social affairs at home, was extremely unpopular with most Conservatives, who had a majority in the House of Lords. They used this majority to stop many of the bills introduced by the Liberal government in the Commons in the years 1906-10. The battle of wills between the two Houses produced a crisis when the Liberals tried to introduce a new budget in 1909 which was intended to increase the taxes paid by the rich, particularly the large landowners. The Lords turned down the new budget. The new king, George V, put an end to the crisis by warning that he would create enough new Liberal lords to give the Liberals a majority. The Lords gave in. One result of the dispute was that taxation was increasingly seen as a social matter as well as an economic one.

      The crisis, however, was not only about money, or about reform. There was a constitutional disagreement. The Conservatives still favoured a two-house parliamentary system, but they now recognised that the Lords would have to be changed. The Liberals wanted one strong house, with the powers of the Lords so weakened that it could not prevent the will of the Commons from being carried out. The result of this constitutional debate was the Parliament Act of 1911. Like much of British political development it resulted from a compromise, but one in which the Liberals won most of what they wanted. The House of Lords lost its right to question financial legislation passed in the Commons. Its powers in all other matters were limited. It could no longer prevent legislation but only delay it, and for not more than two years. The system still operates.

      In the same year, for the first time, the Commons agreed that MPs should be paid. This was a far more important step than it might seem, for it meant that men of low income could now become MPs. In 1906 a new "Labour" party had managed to get twenty-nine representatives elected to Parliament. It was clear to even the most conservative-minded that socialists should work inside the parliamentary system rather than outside it. The dangers of political evolution were far less than those of revolution.