A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS58.THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
There is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we have here called the mechanical revolution, which was an entirely new thing in human experience arising out of the development of organized science, a new step like the invention of agriculture or the discovery of metals, with something else, quite different in its origins, something for which there was already an historical precedent, the social and financial development which is called the _industrial revolution_. The two processes were going on together, they were constantly reacting upon each other, but they were in root and essence different. There would have been an industrial revolution of sorts if there had been no coal, no steam, no machinery; but in that case it would probably have followed far more closely upon the lines of the social and financial developments of the later years of the Roman Republic. It would have repeated the story of dispossessed free cultivators, gang labour, great estates, great financial fortunes, and a socially destructive financial process. Even the factory method came before power and machinery. Factories were the product not of machinery, but of the “division of labour.” Drilled and sweated workers were making such things as millinery cardboard boxes and furniture, and colouring maps and book illustrations and so forth, before even water-wheels had been used for industrial purposes. There were factories in Rome in the days of Augustus. New books, for instance, were dictated to rows of copyists in the factories of the book-sellers.
The attentive student of Defoe and of the political pamphlets of
Fielding will realize that the idea of herding poor people into
establishments to work collectively for their living was already
current in Britain before the close of the seventeenth century. There
are intimations of it even as early as More’s _Utopia_ (1516). It was a social and not a mechanical development.
Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and economic
history of western Europe was in fact retreading the path along which
the Roman state had gone in the last three centuries B.C. But the
political disunions of Europe, the political convulsions against
monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the
greater accessibility of the western European intelligence to
mechanical ideas and inventions, turned the process into quite novel
directions. Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to Christianity, were
far more widely diffused in the newer European world, political power
was not so concentrated, and the man of energy anxious to get rich
turned his mind, therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave
and of gang labour to the idea of mechanical power and the machine.
The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical invention and
discovery, was a new thing in human experience and it went on
regardless of the social, political, economic and industrial
consequences it might produce. The industrial revolution, on the other
hand, like most other human affairs, was and is more and more
profoundly changed and deflected by the constant variation in human
conditions caused by the mechanical revolution. And the essential
difference between the amassing of riches, the extinction of small
farmers and small business men, and the phase of big finance in the
latter centuries of the Roman Republic on the one hand, and the very
similar concentration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference in the
character of labour that the mechanical revolution was bringing about.
The power of the old world was human power; everything depended
ultimately upon the driving power of human muscle, the muscle of
ignorant and subjugated men. A little animal muscle, supplied by draft
oxen, horse traction and the like, contributed. Where a weight had to
be lifted, men lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped
it out; where a field had to be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the
Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its bank of
sweating rowers. A vast proportion of mankind in the early
civilizations were employed in purely mechanical drudgery. At its
onset, power-driven machinery did not seem to promise any release from
such unintelligent toil. Great gangs of men were employed in
excavating canals, in making railway cuttings and embankments, and the
like. The number of miners increased enormously. But the extension of
facilities and the output of commodities increased much more. And as
the nineteenth century went on, the plain logic of the new situation
asserted itself more clearly. Human beings were no longer wanted as a
source of mere indiscriminated power. What could be done mechanically
by a human being could be done faster and better by a machine. The
human being was needed now only where choice and intelligence had to be
exercised. Human beings were wanted only as human beings. The drudge,
on whom all the previous civilizations had rested, the creature of mere
obedience, the man whose brains were superfluous, had become
unnecessary to the welfare of mankind.
This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture and mining
as it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For ploughing, sowing
and harvesting, swift machines came forward to do the work of scores of
men. The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and degraded human
beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical
power. For a hundred years power has been getting cheaper and labour
dearer. If for a generation or so machinery has had to wait its turn
in the mine, it is simply because for a time men were cheaper than
machinery.
Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance in human
affairs. The chief solicitude of the rich and of the ruler in the old
civilization had been to keep up a supply of drudges. As the
nineteenth century went on, it became more and more plain to the
intelligent directive people that the common man had now to be
something better than a drudge. He had to be educated—if only to
secure “industrial efficiency.” He had to understand what he was
about. From the days of the first Christian propaganda, popular
education had been smouldering in Europe, just as it had smouldered in
Asia wherever Islam has set its foot, because of the necessity of
making the believer understand a little of the belief by which he is
saved, and of enabling him to read a little in the sacred books by
which his belief is conveyed. Christian controversies, with their
competition for adherents, ploughed the ground for the harvest of
popular education. In England, for instance, by the thirties and
forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes of the sects and the
necessity of catching adherents young had produced a series of
competing educational organizations for children, the church “National”
schools, the dissenting “British” schools, and even Roman Catholic
elementary schools. The second half of the nineteenth century was a
period of rapid advance in popular education throughout all the
Westernized world. There was no parallel advance in the education of
the upper classes—some advance, no doubt, but nothing to correspond—and
so the great gulf that had divided that world hitherto into the readers
and the non-reading mass became little more than a slightly perceptible
difference in educational level. At the back of this process was the
mechanical revolution, apparently regardless of social conditions, but
really insisting inexorably upon the complete abolition of a totally
illiterate class throughout the world.
The economic revolution of the Roman Republic had never been clearly
apprehended by the common people of Rome. The ordinary Roman citizen
never saw the changes through which he lived, clearly and
comprehensively as we see them. But the industrial revolution, as it
went on towards the end of the nineteenth century, was more and more
distinctly _seen_ as one whole process by the common people it was
affecting, because presently they could read and discuss and
communicate, and because they went about and saw things as no
commonalty had ever done before.