Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his encyclical today and tomorrow.
Tarquinial O’Phlahertibus.
Lest I get bogged down in the complexity of the matter, and not only confuse my readers but myself as well, let me run a rough hand over what’s gone before:
The 1832 Reform Act transferred power from the ancien regime, the aristocracy, to the middle class. The middle class had formed a formidable alliance with the poor in order to achieve this goal. Together this grouping was immensely powerful, so much so that when push came to shove, the old aristocratic order, terrified of revolution, and the possibility, in the French manner, of having their heads chopped off, acceded to most of these ‘revolutionary’ demands. However, it wasn’t all one way and there was method tucked away amidst this aristocratic madness. The Whigs were very much aware that this particular British revolution depended for it’s guiding hand on an educated, middle class. They were wholly aware that this ‘guiding hand’ group didn’t want tumbrils, barricades and mass executions. Oh dear me, no. They simply wanted a cast-iron guarantee that they be allowed continue as (in Napoleon’s phrase) ‘a nation of shopkeepers’. Granting the franchise to this grouping gave them that guarantee, whilst at the same time affording them the aspirational opportunity to go hob-nobbing with the nobility, which largely meant fawning over people who belong properly in a lunatic asylum.
As I have said previously, this strategy worked. As in Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ the newly powerful middle class rapidly became indistinguishable from those they had replaced. The working class, the poor, having served their purpose, were abandoned.
At the end of the 18th century there were two schools of thought concerning the ascent of man. The generally held view of the time was that the perfectibility of man was almost inevitable, and that it was only a matter of time. Opposing this view were people like the Rev Robert Malthus who believed (like Hanrahan) that ‘we’ll all be roooned…’ if something wasn’t done about the excesses of the lower orders. Malthus believed that the appalling poverty he saw all around him was directly attributable to the fact that the poor had too many kids and that mass starvation would be the inevitable result. He believed that populations grew exponentially, but the food supply only grew mathematically. The poor should learn the Godly business of abstinence, confine themselves to smaller families, and in this way their wages would go much further. He also believed that certain types should not be allowed to have offspring at all. There were thousands of lower order people who were simply unfit to be parents and a rigorous selection process needed to be introduced to weed these undesirables out.
This was all fine and dandy as far as the Rev. Malthus and his supporters were concerned, but it did tend to ignore one very important detail. Malthus bases his argument on the highly questionable assumption that the poor, by producing overly large families,were responsible for their own poverty. This is dyed-in-the-wool, genteel, middle-class hogwash. Widespread working class poverty had only one cause: permanent, unchanging, subsistence wages.
The idea of subsistence wages was justified by the theory put forward by David Ricardo, a prominent economist of the time that ‘wages always tended to the subsistence level, because population always tended to increase up to the point at which it [the population] could be barely maintained by the available supply of food…’ This of course, bolsters the idea of a ‘Wages Fund’, the 19th century theory that there is a fixed amount of money available for wages, and the more workers there are, the more the individual’s wage is reduced.
This meant, although the Malthusians tried to cover this aspect up, that the poor could never, ever, fight their way out of their poverty. Malthus and Ricardo, hugely influential in their day, thus provided the perfect justification for paying as little as possible to employees.
The poor didn’t like this one bit.
TO BE CONTINUED.