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Home The Industrial Revolution and Social Progress, 1750-1909 Social Progress in the Nineteenth Century |
Social Progress in the Nineteenth CenturyHaving briefly reviewed the revolution effected by science in trade and industry, we must mention some of its momentous results. First, and most striking, is the growth in population which is, to some extent at all events, the result of the industrial revolution. Previously the growth had been slow. The population of England and Wales, which was estimated to have been in 1570 about four and a quarter millions, took more than two centuries to double itself. But with the close of the eighteenth century came a rapid increase. The population of the United Kingdom has risen from fourteen millions in 1789 to forty-five millions in 1911, the development being greatest in England and Wales, where the population during this period has almost quadrupled.Moreover, not only has the population increased, but the centres of population have shifted from the south to the north. Bristol and Norwich had been in old days next in importance to London; but the growth of cities such as Liverpool and Manchester was startling in its rapidity, and the north, owing partly to the contiguity of coal mines and iron, and partly to the suitability of the Lancashire climate for cotton manufactures, has become the great industrial and progressive part of the nation. Then, again, the population has shifted from the country to the town. In the old days the great mass of the nation had been occupied in agriculture. But the land was unable to support more labour. Indeed, of late years the combined effects of machinery and of the substitution of pasture for arable (Due chiefly to the fact that the growing of corn, owing to American competition, has since 1878 ceased in many districts to be profitable) have been to lessen rather than increase the demand for labour on the land, whilst the higher wages and greater excitements of the town have made the supply of labour hardly adequate even for the lessened demand. The chief reason, however, of the influx into the towns is that the factory system, under which numbers of people are employed in large manufactories, has displaced the old domestic system, under which men worked in their own cottages or in the house of a small master. It is true that even as late as the "'forties" and "fifties" of the nineteenth century many industries were in the hands of domestic workers or very small masters, but the development of machinery and of steam and electric power has made their eventual disappearance inevitable. |
Chronology |
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