The Industrial Revolution’s Damage to the Working Class

The Industrial Revolution brought forth a torrent of scientific engineering. Hundreds of new inventions were flooding European while industrial growth progressed at breakneck speeds. The rate of expansion was unprecedented. Unfortunately, all great advances in human history have their price. The agricultural revolution and consequent rise of civilization led to the earliest military slaughters. The Industrial Revolution is no different. The Industrial Revolution greatly hurt the working man through poor health, mistreatment of workers and limited education.

The work embarked on by workers resulted in serious medical problems. “Their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully…Great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly with…spinal flexures” (Document 1). Coal haulers within the mines are forced to pull massive loads in small, cramped shafts. These conditions can easily lead to malformed bodies, especially if this occurs during late childhood while the body is still growing. Hauling heavy loads in general can lead to unnatural stress on the human body. Those injuries may also result from mutilations whilst working. A steam powered belt or other driven devise could easily fracture bones, thus causing limping, if the belts are not safely secured and the bone not properly reset.

Workers were cheap and easy to find. Employers don’t care about worker’s rights. If an employee loses a finger or limb, they are simply fired and another peasant hired. Many poor and homeless persons are willing to accept these conditions and work for the meager compensation the employment provided. Urbanization brought large farm families to the cities, and with these families came children. Children were considered property of the parents and seen as less than human. Children had little say in their lives and consequently became common sources of labor. Parents would send their children to work in factories to help bring income. Unfortunately, their abuse by employers was worse than adults. “Sarah Gooder, aged 8 years…I have to trap without a light and I’m scared. I go at four… in the morning, and come out at five and half past. I never go to sleep” (Document 5). Children were things, not old enough to be human.

Joshua Drake, from his questioning before the Sadler Committee, stated that his children worked in deplorable conditions. “Then you would not allow your children to go to these factories under the present system if it was not from necessity? No” (Document 3). The Industrial Revolution brought a new fervor of capitalism throughout Europe. “The necessity compels a man that has children to let them work” (Document 3). Factory workers were paid near nothing; when coupled with high food and housing costs due to skyrocketing demand, children labor was the only option for many families.

Other factors within industry made working miserable. The use of machines has increased the abuse of labor. Machines allow people to work more efficiently. Factory managers, being the capitalists they were, figured that the more hours workers contributed with the more efficient machines, higher output could be achieved. The potential profits were too high to ignore, and thus became a common practice. “…improvements in machinery have gone on…prompted many to exact more labour from their hands than they were fitted by nature to perform” (Document 4). Any workers who wish for labor reform would be faced with either silence or job loss. The factory owners have ultimate control over their workers. They also have the law of their side. For the greater half of the nineteenth century, labor laws were non-existent and misuse of the workers was rampart.

Many of the injuries could be prevented by installing safety precautions or through education of the workers. However, this would cut into the profit margins of the factory owners and worker incentive would suffer. By telling the workers how to safely operate equipment, they lose the majority of the fear of becoming injured. These fears contribute to a solid work ethic, else they be replaced by someone more productive.

The health conditions within the cities were horrible. The cities were not designed to handle the influx of people as a result of urbanization. Cities swelled to many times their original population. City services failed to keep up. Vital services, such as water and sewage management, fell into disarray. “…the removal of all refuse of habitations, streets, and roads, and the improvement of the water supply” (Document 6). Dirty cities are nothing new. However, it is the volume of people within the cities that made them historically important. A city of one hundred thousand is easier to keep clean than a city of two and a half million residents, as was the case with London. The earliest medieval planners could not have foreseen the future populations and cramping was the result.

Education among children was deplorable. The earlier machines and mills required little or no training. The children would remain uneducated without the means of self-improvement. As they grow up, they develop the mentality of money is scarce and it requires much work to obtain. This is exactly what the entrepreneurs want. A working class bent on working long hours with little pay is gold; the hard part of convincing them to work for less is already accomplished. As these child workers grow up, marry and propagate, this mentality is passed on. A class of hard working, low pay expecting laborers emerge, catalyzed by the Industrial Revolution. Education improves somewhat as the technology powering the Revolution becomes more complex, but the polarized focus on the mechanical arts limits the growth of the individual. When individuals focus too much on the mathematical precise, they lose sight of the emotionally free, such as art and philosophy. If man were meant to be a machine, then emotions would be a useless waste of time and simply would not exist.

In this sense, education is another form of abuse. The workers were only taught enough to man the machines. If a worker wanted to switch to a more enjoyable profession, they would need to learn a new trade. Many workers could not afford this downtime from work. It also helped to ensure management’s control over the workers. The workers need to me smart enough to efficiently run the industrial equipment but not smart enough to begin demanding rights.

The Industrial Revolution caused many detrimental problems to many of those who were involved. Early workers were mistreated, abused and treated as an infinite, never ending supply. Health conditions were revolting within the cities. Limited education allowed worker control by factory managers. The Industrial Revolution saw numerous worker violations. These same abuses can now be seen in Asian sweatshops; as they become more industrialized cheap labor is ever more important. Eventually, Asia will see the same worker reforms as Europe saw in the late eighteen hundreds. Capitalism will then move to the next cheep labor pool, most likely Afghanistan and the neighboring vicinities and Africa. As harsh as these worker abuses are, they seem to be a vital component of modern capitalism. Either the global economy must drastically change or society acknowledges that these working conditions are, unfortunately, the cornerstone of America’s beloved capitalism.

The Relationship Between The Scientific Revolution And The Enlightenment

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment are among the most influential periods in history. The Scientific Revolution brought a newfound respect for logic and the scientific process. Science would now be taken as a serious field of study. The Enlightenment reaped some of the greatest philosophical works ever to be contrived by man. Many new ideas of freedom and government sprung forth from this hotbed of intellectual activity. The Enlightenment was dependant on the Scientific Revolution to prepare Europe for new intellectual thought, to crack the Church’s monopoly on and to provide the inspiration for the new philosophy through science.

The Scientific Revolution broke the ice for Locke and others and saved them from the punishment of the scientists. The scientists helped to prepare European society for the new birth of philosophies of the Enlightenment. The scientists were the trailblazers; they swept aside the initial wave of Church assaults through disproving the Church on fundamental levels. The scientists took the brunt of the retaliation exercised by Church officials. One of the most infamous cases of Scientific Revolution era injustice can be seen was Galileo. The Inquisition tried Galileo with heresy and, to no surprise, successfully convicted him. Galileo was then placed under house arrest until his death. His trial, if replicated in the time of Locke, would have sent serious repercussions throughout Europe. The Inquisition’s reign of suppression was ending. They lost the power that was held and prevented other crimes against the later philosophers. The ideas of the Scientific Revolution spread and people began to question the validity of the Church. The vacuous space of doubt created by the discoveries of science provided ample room for the Enlightenment to flourish. This thawing intellectual glacier that was once Europe gave the philosophers a dry and desperate audience for their bold, audacious and absolutely brilliant ideas they were sculpting.

The exchange of the geocentric model for the heliocentric model provided the fuel for John Locke’s theories on freedom and revolt. The Church was the domineering force of philosophy up to this point. Thanks to the strong-arm tactics of the Church, secular philosophies never became prevalent. The Church cornered philosophy to prevent any possible resistance from “rogue” freethinking individuals. As the Scientific Revolution passed, however, the Church’s control on philosophy was potently challenged. Galileo Galilei had thoroughly proved that the geocentric model of the universe that the Church had been pushing was utterly false. His discovery of the Jovian moons and the phases of Venus abruptly ended the geocentric model. This disproval created a fissure so deep within the Church’s philosophical monopoly that brave individuals started speaking out against the Church and promoting other, secular theories. It was only natural that, under the reign of an oppressive and domineering religious estate, new ideas of freedom and rights would spring forth from a repressed Europe. John Locke happened to be one of these men. Locke needed the initial momentum supplied by the Scientific Revolution to allow him to develop his “extreme” political theories.

Locke’s theories included the justification of popular revolt. “Political power is that power, which every man having in the state of nature, has given up into the hands of the society…” (Document 7). Political power was a force the Church knew well. It used politics as a means to forward its agenda and keep itself in control through many wars, treaties, rebellions and a Reformation. According to Locke, political power is ceded by Man. Therefore, Man must have owned it prior to its surrender. If Man can give up this power, then surely Man can reclaim it. It is this reclamation that the Church feared because the Church knew its position was incredibly feeble. Locke’s philosophies gave the citizens of Europe a sound reason for a rebellion and rebellion the Church gravely feared.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was another man born of liberation of Catholic control. “…Until on the violation of the social compact, each regains his original rights and resumes his natural liberty…” (Document 8). Rousseau had similar believes as Locke in the regard of the social contract the governing made with the governed. Rousseau was intentional in his vocabulary when he wrote The Social Contract. The idea of a “natural liberty” implies a fundamental liberty shared be all men. This idea of a fundamental quality is a borrowed concept from the Scientific Revolution. Many of the scientists were either looking for or had found fundamental aspects of nature. Keller discovered that all of the planets’ orbits were elliptical; Newton discovered the three laws of motion. Since science was now discovering these fundamental facets of nature, could it be also applied to human rights? Many Enlightenment philosophers successfully answered that question.

The relationship between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment is undeniable. The Scientific Revolution prepared Europe for the coming philosophies. The validation of the heliocentric model caused a crack in the monopoly of philosophical ideas controlled by the Church. The Scientific Revolution provided many Enlightenment authors the basic principles from which they would create their greatest works. Art and science have always been close companions. Great advances in science or usually paralleled by advances in art, and visa versa. It is then natural to find that there is a bond between the two fields as close as any maternal bond. Parallel advances imply that both fields are describing the same knowable concept, each through a different set of eyes. It was then not unexpected to find such an upwelling in philosophy shortly after the huge strides that occurred in the field of science. With this in mind, the real question is not of liberty or governmental constraints or of calculus or science. The real question is what are the works of Locke, Rousseau, Galileo and Newton all describing and how will this object, each portrayed by these different directions of thoughts, give Man a greater understanding of the true nature of reality.