Turning Every Good Thing Into a Mode of Exaction More from" Mother Country"

Note Update March 2014 below

We have never ceased to talk about overpopulation, though true instances of it seem very rare.  The English workingman Francis Place, having contrived to educate himself under astonishingly unfavorable circumstances, became the first writer in English to argue for birth control.  He accepted Malthus's view that workers were poor because there were too many of them, and he argued that their improvement lay in self-restraint.  Of course, like poor people almost everywhere, they had children for their economic value.  As late as the present century the prosperity of a family fluctuated with the number of employed people in it, and the early redundancy of the father, as well as such vicissitudes as sickness and injury, were more easily borne the more shoulders they fell on.  Any glut of labor was the result of employing people from childhood, for sixteen hours a day or more, at wages that denied them any possibility of withholding their labor.  A higher wage would have relieved the glut by allowing women to stay home with their new infants, or allowing families to keep older children at home to attend to younger children.  Physical efficiency would have been enhanced at the same time.  
But "working class" is the primary term in British social thought.  The coercive implications of the phrase are glossed in every version and institution of the Poor Laws, right through Fabianism and the Welfare State, which is only the latest version of the ancient view that what the worker earns, his wage defined as subsistence, is not his by right, as property.  The welfare system indeed assures that the wage will never amount to any specific sum of money but will be nuanced to provide subsistence itself, not in a money equivalent, however calculated.  In other words, workers earn their existence by working.  At the same time, their employment exists at the pleasure of those who employ, first of all, the government.  The Welfare State, being designed for the employed, is designed for the less necessitous   Those who do not work are historically regarded as a sort of scandalized aversion, exactly like people without caste in a society based on caste.  

Place accepted the blame for poverty on behalf of the working people, and accepted the notion that there could be an excess of people relative to their economic usefulness, and that that excess should be eliminated by sexual abstinence so that it need not be carried off by disease and starvation.  He accepted the notion that there was a natural balance, a marketplace of survival glutted with laborers. 

Darwin was likewise indebted to Malthus, and freely acknowledged his influence.  Overbreeding relative to available food sources harrowed out those less well adapted to survive, in Darwin's view.   Herbert Spencer, who was to Beatrice Webb as Aristotle to Alexander, seized upon the ida immediately as a model drawn from nature, which justified just such horrors as had been Malthus's point of departure one hundred years previously.  Competition supposedly described the hard scrabble existence of the laboring classes, who sold their labor by the day and were constantly thrown out of work by a change of season or fashion, or the invention of a new machine  It was a commonplace that they helped one another as best they could thorough these disasters.  The idea nevertheless had great impact because it made death a legitimate part of the social and economic order, a function rather than a malfunction of political economy  a measure of the extent to which the new industrial society cleaved to the ways of nature rather than departing from them.  It affirmed the idea that there exited a human surplus, whose survival could only be secured at the cost of creatures worthier to survive.  In such a context subsistence would be a positive reward, easily withdrawn, as in Darwinian nature. 

The penchant for developing theories to account for the suffering and death proved useful.  Press and parliamentary reports of the Victorian period describe a system of exploitation which ravaged the culture, extruded every ounce of labor from those able to work - including small children and women recently delivered -  starved them, beat them, poisoned them, housed them in cellars into which sewage drained from the streets, taking from them everything that could be taken,  turning every good thing into a mode of exaction. 

If you read the passage above and noted something that seemed uncomfortably familiar  you've been paying attention to the political and economic reports.  The language is more modern and less explicit but the trend is to reenacting British social policy in the United States.  Even as innocuous seeming a concept as Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" divides the deserving from the "undeserving", it sets even the deserving against each other in a competition for meager resources as a means of exacting an alleged benefit.  The extent to which that kind of elite British thought pervades the ruling, Ivy League educated elite of the United States,  from which our "liberal" ruling class is drawn, should be troubling.  Read the speeches of Barack Obama and compare them with those of Lyndon Johnson to see how far the American tradition of liberalism has been overrun with a similar concept of the world laid out in these excerpts.

The Republican accusation that Obama is too European is, of course, ridiculous. If anything he's too British. 

As an aside, it's pretty telling that in the thousands of hours of British costume drama that PBS and the movies have presented to us, I don't recall the Poor Law being mentioned once*.  Not once.  Considering the totalitarian impact it has had on the lives of the large majority of those who lived under it, you have to wonder why it's so effectively swept under the rug.  Clearly, it's seen as something to be hidden.

*  Update March 2014 Someone told me, though I am not able to confirm it, that last season's Downtown Abby mentioned work houses.   And I can also say that there was one other example I can confirm, an episode of "Call the Midwife" mentioned the true depravity of the work houses that were an intrinsic part of the New Poor Law, though in its considerably less depraved, 20th century manifestation.  The Poor Law, officially, ended in 1948, within living memory- though seldom mentioned as compared to scandal of the "Magdalene Laundries". British government depravity of that sort during our lifetimes is oddly ignored as compared to any that can be attributed to religious institutions.  But only oddly if you discount the biases involved in popular culture.

My research last year, into the work houses, after I did this series, exposed me to the terrible fact that they were, in practice and, clearly, by intention DEATH CAMPS that were a prelude to those that would be established by Germany and the Soviet Union in the next century.  The numbers of deaths listed in the horrific roles of deaths of internees in work houses, the numbers of those listed as dying of STARVATION months and years after the detainees were incarcerated in them, exposes their true nature.  The literature dealing with the starvation and death of internees due to the purposely squalid and cruel conditions within them was entirely public and known at the time.   Reading that literature, recalling that Charles Darwin regretted the existence of work houses and the poor law, NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE CRUEL AND CRIMINAL BUT BECAUSE THEY WOULD LEAVE TOO MANY OF THE POOR ALIVE TO HAVE CHILDREN OF THEIR OWN, was a definitive experience,  entirely overturning the last part of my own willfully pretending that he was anything but a full supporter of even more depravity than the British law instituted.