best and cheapest body for the transmission of other news. During the War the State operated the railways, handing them back at the close; and coal was among the industries which were closely controlled. There is no demand for the nationalisation of railways or coal mines on the part of railway users and coal consumers. The pressure comes from organised labour, which is concerned primarily with the protection of its standard of life. If the railway shareholders had been wise they would have supported Labour in its demand for nationalisation, but fortunately for the country and unfortunately for them the Government was not so foolish as to buy them out. The economic fabric of pre-war Britain was based on her remarkable past. When the world lived on Lancashire cotton, Cardiff coals, and the London money market, the policy of free trade was justified by the facts. But this situation passed away with the War. In the early days of the industrial revolution other countries had to adjust themselves to the fiscal policy of Great Britain in her ambiguous course towards laissez-faire. The wars of the 18th century were in part their protest; but when they acquiesced, as did India under compulsion and France in moments of surrender to philosophy, they lost industrially. Today it is the task of Great Britain to adjust herself to a world scheme in which the open market is always disappearing over the edge of the fiscal horizon. Therefore the progressive elements in Britain are feeling after a new plan of economic life in finance, population and marketing, as well as in working standards and social insurance. Whether a particular service of production or transport is performed by a department of State, a private firm or a voluntary group of consumers, is altogether secondary to the performing of it well. The general cry against private profit making is as foolish and as suicidal as the fear of State planning; for the healthy society is one which is balanced. An old unitary State like Great Britain has a difficult area problem. The countries of the New World soon found a working division between federal and provincial authority; and their economic life has grown up to it. Great Britain has its 'provinces,' but no provincial areas. Some modern services, as for example electric supply, are too big for the single town or county; and if appropriate areas can be developed, the central government will be free for what it alone can do, the co-ordination of local effort and the arbitration of conflict between class and class. It is misleading to associate deliberate planning with the death of laissez-faire. When our tractarians proclaim its end, they tell us only that economic life must be planned. But the country in which business is least haphazard is the U.S.A. It is also the country which views with the greatest jealousy the curtailment of the field of private enterprise. In 19th-century Britain there was a riot of laissez-faire and social suffering, therefore laissez-faire left an evil odour behind it. In 20thcentury America laissez-faire and material well-being flourish side by side, and therefore to America laissez-faire is generally acceptable. Great Britain has to compete not only with a Europe which like herself is tired of it, but also with an America which would feel very much at home in Arkwright's Lancashire and furthermore has a Federal Reserve Board and high standards of sanitation. CHAPTER XVII REACTIONS OF INDUSTRIALISM Section 1. Population and Emigration. Section 2. The Poor Law and Apprenticeship. Section 3. The Migration to Industry. Section 4. Precise Reaction of Machinery on Hand Workers. Section 5. Employment of Women and Children. Section 6. The Medical Revolution. Section 7. Sanitation and Housing. Section 1. Population and Emigration An important result of man's increasing mastery over nature was the great improvement in the quality and quantity of animal life at his service. The vacant spaces of the New World were populated by choice livestock bred in the Old. It was a monument of human skill. Parallel results were obtained in the increase of crops. Science improved upon art, until to-day the problem of agriculture is to extract from its abundance a living wage for the grower. To these increases of animal and vegetable life man himself reacted by multiplying his species, not deliberately but as a result accruing from the greater ease of winning a livelihood. In the last two centuries there has been a vast transference of population to new lands, under conditions of cruelty as in the slave trade, and with great waste and hardship as in the traffic of emigration from the Motherland. Now at long last we have broken with this gamble in laissez-aller. Emigration is controlled both by the sending and by the receiving countries, by the sending country with a view to the protection of the emigrant, by the receiving country with a view to selecting the right type of settler and establishing him in suitable occupations. Family emigration is generally assisted by friends or organisations, if not by the State. Samuel Gompers, in his Seventy Years of Life and Labour (I. 5), tells us how in 1863 his father emigrated the family with the help of £5 10s. from the Emigration Fund of the Cigar Makers' Society of England. To his dying day the boy in him never forgot the narrow streets of Bethnal Green echoing with the tramp of men walking about in groups and wringing their hands over no work to do.' But the State's share in the aggregate of emigration was trifling. It used transportation as a means of punishment, sending convicts to New South Wales until 1840, to Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land) till 1853, and to |