British Politics and Society in 18th Century

Introduction

Eighteenth century is a milestone of the historical events in English society. It is with a feeling of remoteness that the man of to-day looks back upon his ancestor of two or three hundred years ago. An age in which the telephone and wireless, the railway train and steamship, the great industrial plant and the lofty office building, the moving picture and the automobile were not yet in being seems, not two centuries, but ions of time and space away. Equally remote appears an era when man was still bound, body and soul, to tradition. Let us see more concretely the remoteness of the early eighteenth century. It was a period when western nations were wasted and torn by suicidal dynastic conflicts, when scrupulousness in international relations was the exception; when the idea of absolute monarchy by divine right had not yet given way to the principle of popular sovereignty; when millions of workers in field and town were stifled by the paint and powder of privilege. Territorial aggrandizement was dynastic, rather than national. Europe was engulfed at first in the struggle between Bourbon and Hapsburg, later between Hapsburg and Hohenzollern. The history of the century centered about such names as Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Louis XIV, men whose Machiavellian policies, with their scrapping of promises and treaties on the flimsiest excuse, kept international morality at lowest ebb. England alone clung at least to the outward forms of constitutional and representative government.

Socially, even in England, the caste system proved an insurmountable barrier to progress. (Clapham, 12-19) Clergy and nobility were to a considerable extent parasitic, in that they had political power out of all true proportion to their place in the nation. A rapidly growing middle class, vaguely desirous of recognition and consciously ambitious for a share in government, secured the adoption of favorable policies by currying favor with the party in power. At any moment its investments, its plans for the future, might have been wiped out by the failure of Parliament to understand. Coming farther down the social scale, the worker in town or country was without redress from injustice, was uncared for in times of distress. In fact, his very existence was ignored except in times of national need.

Similarly, activities in economic fields were carried on with the outworn utensils of a romantic and inefficient past. Progress in agriculture was woefully hindered by the remnants of feudalism and serfdom: the open-field system, antiquated implements, faulty methods of cultivation. Industry we find restricted by the guild system, a system weakened by age and internal dissension, yet strong enough withal to limit production and hamper progress. In the seaboard nation's commerce was governed by the hydra-headed monster of mercantilism the idea of monopoly within a limited sphere of Endeavour, on an intensely nationalistic basis.

Intellectual effort seemed to offer the sole ray of hope. Considerably before 1700 man's mind had reacted favorably to the voyages of the early mariners, to ...