Henry Fielding also wrote about the Poor Laws, and submitted a plan to Parliament for their reform. He was warmly in favor of workhouses, and wished only to make them more efficient. Fielding was astonished, as a great many writers would be, that “in a country where the poor are, beyond all comparison, more liberally provided for than in any other part of the habitable globe, there should be found more beggars, more distressed and miserable objects, than are to be seen throughout all the states of Europe.” Among these “miserable objects,” however, those unable to work were so few that they should be left to private charity, and the Poor Law system designed to give work to the able-bodied. Streamlined according to his recommendations, the poorhouses would be considerably more profitable — off-loading the lame and the blind would necessarily effect a savings.
Not surprisingly, Fielding has a theory of wages, which is linked to his grand design thus: Wages should be fixed, to discourage idleness. This reform would defeat those who, “if they cannot exact an exorbitant price for their labour, will remain idle.” It will provide magistrates with proof of the willingness to work, or its opposite, for purposes of distinguishing the idle from the incorrigibly idle. Again, work is pried loose from pay. Work proves one deserving — more effectively when the issue of willingness to work is not obscured by the possibility of holding out for a higher wage. In Fielding’s scheme the workhouse is already integrated into the wage system, since to qualify for non-punitive accommodations there, one must have been employed.
The economic and moral argument that wages must and will be kept low is embodied in the work of the earliest English socialist, the cotton manufacturer Robert Owen. Owen built a model factory community called New Lanark, which, through new housing, communal cooking and laundry, schooling of children, and programs of recreation, elevated the living standards of his employees. In an introduction to his New View of Society, he explicitly describes factory workers as human machines among inanimate machines “which it was my duty and interest so to combine, as that every hand, as well as every spring, lever and wheel, should effectually co-operate to produce the greatest pecuniary gain to the proprietors.” Visitors and dignitaries the world over came to admire his success.
In a book entitled Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth (1826) the American socialist L. Byllesby noted dryly that Owen paid only the standard factory wage and realized a healthy profit. He objected that it was still required of “the producers to surrender a part of the avails of their labor to those who hold a claim of proprietorship over the necessary means for putting their labours to use.” Aside from its interest in establishing a sense of the terms of political discourse in America and before Marx, this criticism is a fascinating early example of the American tendency to miss the point entirely where British social reform is concerned. Owen was making a demonstration of the fact that, properly supervised, rationalized, and instructed, working-class lives could be lived decently and wholesomely at market wages. His experiment tended to prove the old wisdom that the “labor fund”—the sum of money considered to be available in the economy to be paid out in wages without inhibiting the creation of capital, thereby diminishing total wealth — was sufficient to provide adequately for workers. Truly what Owen attempted was the minimum of change, in effect a vindication rather than a reform of the capitalist system — and by capitalist I mean exactly what Marx meant, a system in which a working class is exploited to produce wealth in which they have no share, a system which considers subsistence an appropriate compensation for the mass of people, and an appropriate condition of life.
A partner in New Lanark was Jeremy Bentham, who devoted much time and thought to designing a perfect pauper asylum. It was, of course, a workhouse — which still meant “factory.” Bentham’s scheme would find labor suitable to the varying powers of its inmates, so that the very old or young or ill could make themselves useful. He proposed that children born to inmates be detained into their early twenties — that is, through their peak earning years. Altogether, he felt confident that he could turn pauperism into profit. He dreamed of a chain of these asylums, built on a plan that would facilitate supervision of work and policing of morals, as well as the combining of duplicated work, such as the cooking of meals. He reasoned that such good order would create positive happiness, especially among those who, lacking experience of the outside world, could not make comparisons. This vision of philanthropy does not seem to me remote from the system Bentham realized in partnership with Owen. Both dream of creating a circumstance in which profit and happiness will be maximized together, a sort of transfiguration in which the factory system will be revealed in glory. Certainly the condition of Bentham’s paupers approached nearly enough to the conditions of his and Owen’s employees to demonstrate how very fine a distinction it was that separated the great class of the poor into two great categories, worker and pauper, whether as objects of philanthropy or of punishment. In fact, to distinguish between them is usually an error. A History of Socialism by Thomas Kirkup (1906) reports that five hundred of the two thousand workers at New Lanark when Owen came there in 1800 were children “brought, most of them, at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.” In other words, the exploitation of the work of child paupers of which Bentham dreamed was already carried out on a very significant scale. It is startling how often British philanthropists have dreams which if they were to wake they would find true.
The American Byllesby criticized New Lanark on the grounds that it was a profit-making scheme and that it was “directed primarily, to the better formation of human character, and secondarily to ameliorating the condition of the labouring or productive classes.” Byllesby feels this is putting the cart before the horse, that “if pecuniary concerns are first put in a train of amendment, or reform, the human character will, of itself, keep an equal pace in the expansion of its amiable traits, and suppression of its evil capabilities.” But, again, Byllesby has missed the point. His assumptions are the individualist kind, for which we have long been notorious. Owen has no place in his system for “the human character”; it is the worker he is concerned with, a being wholly defined by his class status and his economic function. Owen’s object is to fit him humanely to a role he must occupy in any case.
Owen’s experiment is said to have inspired no imitators in Britain. This remark is misleading, since it implies that the project was a true innovation and that subsequent practice bore no relation to it. Owen set about to stabilize workers in their condition as workers, that is, to proof them against the vices and accidents that created illness, misery, and degeneracy, by regulating the particulars of their existence. It was simply a repetition on a smaller scale and in a more sanguine spirit of the great British project of balancing the working class on the knife edge of subsistence. The minimum of national wealth allowable to the working class was the amount that maintained them in health and vigor. Failing this standard, they fell into illness, despair, and indigency, and became unproductive and, compounding every evil, a charge on the taxpayer. The preempting (exactly the right word in this context) of such small choices of food, drink, and use of leisure as were available to workers encroached far on the small freedom of unenfranchised people. But Owen did not object to actual slavery. Byllesby’s assumption that human nature would flower spontaneously if economic injustice were ended is not a variant of Owen’s idea but its opposite.