Stevie-Lyn Kim
A change in social structure occurred; wealth and commerce gave more power and number to the bourgeoisie and the middle class. Yet, as the walls between the upper and middle
class were depleting, the gap between the middle and lower working class was becoming more and more apparent. As the Industrial Revolution began to urbanize Western society at a fast rate, those people who had once worked on farms had to move into the cities in order to make a living for themselves and to support their families. Cities were built with little planning, leading to unsanitary living conditions for the working class who lived in these industrialized cities. They lived in crowded apartments with sewage from outhouses mixing with well water. There were also poor garbage services. An actual parliament reports on the condition of a London Row reads as the following:
“In the center of this street there is a gutter into which potato parings, the refuse of vegetable and animal matter of all kinds, the dirty water from the washing of clothes and of the houses are all poured, and where they stagnate and putrefy.” (Wes. Civ., 522)
Their working conditions were horrible as well: workers often toiled for inhumane hours in unsanitary conditions, often with little or no ventilation. Factory rules were quite strict and stressed strict timekeeping, with a normal working day starting at “6 A.M. precisely and end[ing], after the usual break of half an hour for breakfast, an hour for dinner and half and hour for tea, at 7 P.M.” (Sources, 136). With overpopulation came unemployment; many of the working class did not even have jobs with which to support themselves.
In 1842, Edwin Chadwick wrote The Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. He also pointed out that these living and working conditions detrimental were not only to the health of the working class but also to the morality of these people. His report, and others like it, opened the eyes of many citizens, leading to a serious consideration concerning social and public health reform.
Stevie-Lyn Kim
People began to question whether laissez-faire really helped all people in the nation. It seemed as if there was indeed a need for government intervention. The English Factory Acts, beginning in 1802, limited the hours of women and children who worked in the factories. In 1834, the British Parliament passed the Poor Law, which aimed to prevent the starvation of the unemployed. However, fearing people would take advantage of the legislation, Parliament saw
to it that these shelters were as degrading as possible. This enraged the workers against the bourgeoisie government, and it lead to the formation of secret unions, often disguised as self-help groups, that banned the workers together, all towards the same goal. It was through these unions that their beliefs on the injustices of their class were strengthened. People now began to seriously support the overthrow of the wage-labor system in favor of socialism, an economic ideology that opposed to the earlier ideas of laissez-faire and capitalism.
In France, the momentum of the socialist movement was more radical than in other European countries. Influenced by revolution-friendly Robspierre, leader of the Jacobin party at the time of the infamous Reign of Terror, writers such as Louis Blanc began to promote the radicalism. In 1848 especially, the working class pushed for a revolutionary movement to save themselves from the effects of the Industrial Revolution. In June of that year, often called the “June Days”, a revolution occurred between the working class and the middle class of Paris in which 1,500 people were killed. In turn, the bourgeoisie government hunted down 3,000 leaders of the revolution and killed them.
Revolution was not as common in Britain. There, the lower class attempted to gain suffrage as well as governmental representation though the Chartist Movement. Although unsuccessful, the British union movement began to expand greatly.
Stevie-Lyn Kim
In the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a great support for extended suffrage and government intervention to undo the injustices caused by the Industrial Revolution. This growth in the concern for the working class was in part due to works written by humanitarians such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hill Green, and L.T. Hobhouse. In his On
Liberty (1859), Mill advocated individual freedom along with the rights of the minority. Green promoted this new liberalism in objecting laissez-faire and pointing out that it condemned the uneducated to remain that way. Hobhouse, in his Justification for State Intervention, stated that “the function of the State is to secure conditions upon which its citizens are able to win by their win by their own efforts all that is necessary to a full civic efficiency…A society in which a single honest man of normal capacity is definitely unable to find the means of maintaining himself by useful work is to that extent suffering from malorgainization (Sources, 191).
Throughout the nineteenth century there is an obvious trend in the growth of liberalism. Just as the middle bourgeoisie class had to fight for their rights during and after the French Revolution, the lower class had to fight for their rights during the Industrial Revolution. It was in this pivotal century that finally gave the lower class their deserved liberty and rights. By the early twentieth century it can be observed that traditional liberalism had evolved into social democracy, which allows for the governmental assistance to those in need. What we also see in the following years is the birth of the Women’s Rights Movement, obviously a continuation and product of the struggle for human rights.