WEBVTT NOTE The Industrial Revolution - Part One 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 The Industrial Revolution, Part 1 2 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:13.000 If scholarship is correct, human beings once lived in a hunting, foraging economy. 3 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:20.000 That is to say, most of the human beings in existence at that time, long, long ago, 4 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:27.000 spent their time in hunting in the forests and along the prairies 5 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:29.000 The Theory of Money and Credit 6 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:26.200 The first major economic revolution occurred. This began to take place when men discovered that they could assist the processes of nature by growing plants rather than by 7 00:01:57.000 --> 00:02:03.600 We had a major revolution in economic development, which has sometimes been referred to as the 8 00:02:03.600 --> 00:02:09.840 agrarian revolution. In some parts of the world it is still taking place, but it is, 9 00:02:09.840 --> 00:02:15.000 of course, the earliest in the development of human society. 10 00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:24.520 Then about 200 years ago a second major revolution occurred, and it is called the Industrial 11 00:02:24.520 --> 00:02:32.000 At that time it was discovered that human beings could improve their lot significantly, not 12 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:38.640 only through processes of agriculture and agrarian development, but they could improve 13 00:02:38.640 --> 00:02:47.120 their lot significantly if they would learn how to mass produce various devices that most 14 00:02:47.120 --> 00:02:52.720 people wanted to use because it would make life better for them. And the Industrial Revolution 15 00:02:52.720 --> 00:03:02.320 was born. It may be that at the present time we are on the threshold of a third major economic revolution. 16 00:03:03.360 --> 00:03:07.360 I am not certain of this, because it is not possible to foretell the future. 17 00:03:08.080 --> 00:03:14.560 But one of the things that we can note in both of the earlier economic revolutions 18 00:03:15.200 --> 00:03:22.160 was that in both of them, government played a major role. Government, as a matter of fact, 19 00:03:22.160 --> 00:03:30.000 was probably not even organized until we had the agrarian revolution. Prior to that time, 20 00:03:30.640 --> 00:03:36.240 men lived in hunting and foraging groups and wandered over the face of the earth as the game 21 00:03:36.240 --> 00:03:44.560 trails directed. However, once they found land to be valuable and began to hold it and to build 22 00:03:44.560 --> 00:03:52.080 permanent type dwellings on it, it became necessary for them to hold the land, and they deemed 23 00:03:52.080 --> 00:03:59.960 the use of force as a viable tool under those conditions, and governments were born in process. 24 00:03:59.960 --> 00:04:06.300 Probably the first governments were those invoked over city-states. They undoubtedly 25 00:04:06.300 --> 00:04:15.260 had a theological or a theocratic origin, but in any case, however they developed, characteristic 26 00:04:15.260 --> 00:04:23.820 of Governments as they emerged was the idea of a military force combined with the necessity 27 00:04:23.820 --> 00:04:31.380 for holding land. Actually, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the original governments 28 00:04:31.380 --> 00:04:37.460 were organized along predatory lines with the idea of seizing land occupied or controlled 29 00:04:37.460 --> 00:04:45.020 by other people. Be that as it may, the control of the land and the operation of a military 30 00:04:45.020 --> 00:04:53.380 are co-equal with the development of the state. Now later on, about 200 years ago, when the 31 00:04:53.380 --> 00:05:03.100 Industrial Revolution came along, although we did not have any real modern government, 32 00:05:03.100 --> 00:05:08.820 which we could compare the current situation with in terms of what had happened previously, 33 00:05:08.820 --> 00:05:17.580 Nonetheless, there was a tendency to turn again to the state, and the Industrial Revolution emerges, 34 00:05:17.580 --> 00:05:23.860 primarily in England and then afterwards in other parts of the world, as a development that, 35 00:05:23.860 --> 00:05:31.900 although it is certainly not state-produced, it is state-dominated to a degree. This is what 36 00:05:31.900 --> 00:05:40.140 What causes me to suggest that at the current moment, as developments are going forward, 37 00:05:40.140 --> 00:05:45.800 we are again in the throes of an economic development of such magnitude that it may 38 00:05:45.800 --> 00:05:53.900 very well lead to a time in the future, possibly in another two or three hundred years, I don't 39 00:05:53.900 --> 00:06:01.020 think it will come immediately, but in the foreseeable future we can detect the probability 40 00:06:01.020 --> 00:06:06.780 or at least the possibility that we are going to have to move in a direction which discards 41 00:06:06.780 --> 00:06:08.420 the state. 42 00:06:08.420 --> 00:06:12.860 Government as we know it today has actually become obsolete. 43 00:06:12.860 --> 00:06:22.340 And although that seems like an extreme term, the fact is that we have become so knowledgeable 44 00:06:22.340 --> 00:06:28.940 in the physical sciences and so capable when it comes to creating military hardware that 45 00:06:28.940 --> 00:06:37.020 We can no longer afford an instrument whose prime reason for existence is the carrying 46 00:06:37.020 --> 00:06:40.020 on of military-type actions. 47 00:06:40.020 --> 00:06:47.500 That is, the police-state concept is outmoded and is going to have to be permitted to die 48 00:06:47.500 --> 00:06:48.940 of its own weight. 49 00:06:48.940 --> 00:06:51.940 I'm not suggesting that we have to take it out and kill it. 50 00:06:51.940 --> 00:06:58.020 It will perish if we are able to come forward with better and more viable forms. 51 00:06:58.020 --> 00:07:05.840 However, the purpose of this discussion now relates to the Industrial Revolution, which 52 00:07:05.840 --> 00:07:13.360 began to emerge in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and so altered conditions 53 00:07:13.360 --> 00:07:20.060 that the entire world has become a different place to live ever since that time. 54 00:07:20.060 --> 00:07:29.940 It is important, whenever we are examining any historic period, that we take a scientific 55 00:07:29.940 --> 00:07:36.700 view of history. There are certain tendencies that we naturally have as human beings which 56 00:07:36.700 --> 00:07:45.420 could lead us astray unless we examine these conditions with a view to the accuracy and 57 00:07:45.420 --> 00:07:51.260 the context in which we place the relevant data. 58 00:07:51.260 --> 00:07:57.700 One of the reasons why the development of a true background in the Industrial Revolution 59 00:07:57.700 --> 00:08:06.420 is important is because there remains today a significant amount of popular belief that 60 00:08:06.420 --> 00:08:13.500 tends to hold the Industrial Revolutionary period as a baneful one. 61 00:08:13.500 --> 00:08:20.780 According to the writers or many of the writers and scholars who have commented on this period 62 00:08:20.780 --> 00:08:30.900 in time, it was a time in which human well-being essentially retrograded, the conditions worsened 63 00:08:30.900 --> 00:08:33.420 for people, we are told. 64 00:08:33.420 --> 00:08:42.500 In other words, it was a time when greedy, rapacious, egotistic, grasping businessmen 65 00:08:42.500 --> 00:08:49.880 When industrialists emerged, they built sweatshops that were incredibly bad with bad air and 66 00:08:49.880 --> 00:08:51.140 bad light. 67 00:08:51.140 --> 00:08:57.740 The conditions were actually inhuman, we are told, and they forced men, women, and even 68 00:08:57.740 --> 00:09:04.940 little children to go into these places and to work at drudgery-type tasks, incredibly 69 00:09:04.940 --> 00:09:11.700 long hours for starvation wages, and in process they treated the people involved with all 70 00:09:41.700 --> 00:09:49.660 just for the purpose of advancing the financial well-being of the businessman or the so-called 71 00:09:49.660 --> 00:09:54.100 capitalist who was in charge of the operation. 72 00:09:54.100 --> 00:09:59.260 This is the kind of background that continues today, and it would be important for us to 73 00:09:59.260 --> 00:10:06.220 examine this to find out whether, in fact, stories of this sort are justified. 74 00:10:06.220 --> 00:10:13.600 Certainly it is true that conditions today are much better than they were when the Industrial 75 00:10:13.600 --> 00:10:16.260 Revolution burst on the scene. 76 00:10:16.260 --> 00:10:23.060 And what is important to learn is whether or not these improvements which we can detect 77 00:10:23.060 --> 00:10:30.260 today are the result of the development of industry on a mass scale, or whether they 78 00:10:30.260 --> 00:10:36.480 They are in fact a development of the government intervention in industry, which we are told 79 00:10:36.480 --> 00:10:43.960 did follow once it became known that the businessmen were as cruel and rapacious as they were reported 80 00:10:43.960 --> 00:10:45.080 to be. 81 00:10:45.080 --> 00:10:48.740 So a good look in this area is imperative. 82 00:10:48.740 --> 00:10:54.680 This is why I suggest a scientific attitude, a scientific point of reference. 83 00:10:54.680 --> 00:11:03.000 You see, whenever you want to examine the nature of an historic era or an historic epoch, 84 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:10.080 it is important that we recognize fundamentally that time flows in only one direction. 85 00:11:10.080 --> 00:11:13.160 We are born young and we grow old. 86 00:11:13.160 --> 00:11:19.520 The past is always in one direction behind us, and the future always lies ahead. 87 00:11:19.520 --> 00:11:21.560 It never goes into reverse. 88 00:11:21.560 --> 00:11:29.040 We are locked into a flow of time that moves from the past into the future, and there is 89 00:11:29.040 --> 00:11:35.140 no other type of movement discernible, at least so far as we are presently aware. 90 00:11:35.140 --> 00:11:42.560 And this means, of course, that we have a tendency of examining our own situation, whatever 91 00:11:42.560 --> 00:11:49.360 it may be, and then we look back into history and we discover the milieu in which these 92 00:11:49.360 --> 00:11:53.800 These people lived, and of course it is not as good as ours. 93 00:11:53.800 --> 00:11:58.040 And the consequence is that we make invidious comparisons. 94 00:11:58.040 --> 00:12:03.280 We say, what were the wages back at the time the Industrial Revolution began? 95 00:12:03.280 --> 00:12:04.600 And then we are told. 96 00:12:04.600 --> 00:12:12.360 And we are horrified because we are comparing our wage rate with the wage rate of an earlier 97 00:12:12.360 --> 00:12:13.360 century. 98 00:12:13.360 --> 00:12:20.240 It seems to us incredible that anybody could ever have worked for the low wages prevalent 99 00:12:20.240 --> 00:12:22.220 at that time. 100 00:12:22.220 --> 00:12:25.320 But that is not to look at it properly. 101 00:12:25.320 --> 00:12:33.360 If we want to understand what happened, say, from 1750 to 1800, the basis of comparison 102 00:12:33.360 --> 00:12:38.360 isn't from 1950 to the year 2000. 103 00:12:38.360 --> 00:12:46.440 The basis of comparison would be in an earlier century, where we would go back to, say, 1650 104 00:12:46.440 --> 00:12:51.000 to 1700, and compare that with 1750 to 1800. 105 00:12:51.000 --> 00:13:00.800 Or even better, we might go back to 1550, and compare the half century 1550 to 1600, 106 00:13:00.800 --> 00:13:09.840 from 1650 to 1700, and then we might know what was actually taking place in the 1750 107 00:13:09.840 --> 00:13:15.960 to 1800 period, which is the period that brought us the Industrial Revolution. 108 00:13:15.960 --> 00:13:23.200 You see, it is imperative, if we are going to examine and discuss history, that we go 109 00:13:23.200 --> 00:13:25.200 The Theory of Money and Credit 110 00:13:53.200 --> 00:13:56.920 and depression relating to what had happened before. 111 00:13:56.920 --> 00:14:01.400 We must always find out what had happened before, not what happened afterwards. 112 00:14:01.400 --> 00:14:08.440 And this always is the problem that confronts modern scholarship when it looks from now 113 00:14:08.440 --> 00:14:14.440 into the past and makes comparisons between what we have and what we are today with what 114 00:14:14.440 --> 00:14:19.680 we had and what we were in a century or two ahead of our own time. 115 00:14:19.680 --> 00:14:21.960 So let's attempt to do that. 116 00:14:21.960 --> 00:14:26.840 What we would have to do would be to find out what the conditions were like at least 117 00:14:26.840 --> 00:14:34.480 a hundred years prior to the period under inquiry, and preferably back even further 118 00:14:34.480 --> 00:14:41.440 than that, before we would know whether the accusations made relating to the Industrial 119 00:14:41.440 --> 00:14:45.140 Revolution are valid or invalid. 120 00:14:45.140 --> 00:14:51.720 You see, according to the popular notion that is so often mentioned by many, many people, 121 00:14:51.720 --> 00:14:58.960 The Industrial Revolution brought an age of cruelty to the fore. People were oppressed. 122 00:14:58.960 --> 00:15:07.200 Unemployment increased. Human health worsened. Conditions rapidly deteriorated until such 123 00:15:07.200 --> 00:15:13.800 time as the government began to move into the area and pass laws regulating wages, regulating 124 00:15:13.800 --> 00:15:20.120 the hours of employment, regulating the conditions of child labor, and so on, at which time a 125 00:15:20.120 --> 00:15:26.520 a Recovery, it is said, began. So that's what we have to examine. 126 00:15:26.520 --> 00:15:31.960 Now the first thing that we want to do as we begin this examination, trying to get it 127 00:15:31.960 --> 00:15:41.160 into a proper context, would be to ask rhetorically the question, where did the Industrial Revolution 128 00:15:41.160 --> 00:15:47.760 first occur, and why did it happen where it did? There is no question about this. There 129 00:15:47.760 --> 00:15:56.360 There has been a consensus, I think without any notable dissenting voice now, the scholars 130 00:15:56.360 --> 00:16:01.000 who have examined the period agree, that the first industrial revolution in the world occurred 131 00:16:01.000 --> 00:16:08.700 in Great Britain, and that it dates from 1760 to 1830 approximately. 132 00:16:08.700 --> 00:16:16.800 In that period of time, which represents about seventy years or eighty years, in that period 133 00:16:16.800 --> 00:16:23.400 of Time, The Face of England Changed, and with it began to change the face of the entire 134 00:16:23.400 --> 00:16:32.640 world. So the incidents that brought about these alterations began in England. Why? That's 135 00:16:32.640 --> 00:16:42.640 a fair question. Why in England? Why not in France? Or Spain? Or Germany? Or Italy? Or 136 00:16:42.640 --> 00:16:49.680 or Why Not in the American Colonies. What was it about England that made the industrial 137 00:16:49.680 --> 00:16:59.360 revolution emerge there rather than elsewhere? Was it because the government planned it better? 138 00:16:59.360 --> 00:17:06.200 Well in point of fact, the government didn't plan it at all. We find no question as to 139 00:17:06.200 --> 00:17:14.100 The fact that government was not aware of the industrial development until it had gotten 140 00:17:14.100 --> 00:17:20.640 underway and gained a very definite momentum, at which time the ruling monarch, who happened 141 00:17:20.640 --> 00:17:27.300 to be George III, began to intervene in the economy in an effort to suppress the changes 142 00:17:27.300 --> 00:17:33.920 which he saw coming, which were disturbing to the economic system that he understood, 143 00:17:33.920 --> 00:17:41.120 which had been around prior to the time that he gained power. So government did not cause 144 00:17:41.120 --> 00:17:47.440 the Industrial Revolution, and it did occur in Great Britain. Now there must be a reason 145 00:17:47.440 --> 00:17:55.060 for that, or possibly a complex of reasons. I have tried to come up with some reasonable 146 00:17:55.060 --> 00:18:01.120 explanation that I could understand and accept myself. Certainly it was true that Great Britain 147 00:18:01.120 --> 00:18:28.120 The economic conditions prior to 1760, not only in Great Britain, but in every other country I've named and all the other countries in existence, was one of dire poverty by modern standards. 148 00:18:28.120 --> 00:18:35.680 The masses of people lived on the brink of starvation. As a matter of fact, famines periodically 149 00:18:35.680 --> 00:18:43.040 swept all the countries of Europe and Asia. The death rate was high. Death was a constant 150 00:18:43.040 --> 00:18:48.840 recurrence because of the fact that there simply wasn't enough to eat. The major diseases 151 00:18:48.840 --> 00:18:54.480 at that time were diseases related to diet. That is, there were diseases of malnutrition 152 00:18:54.480 --> 00:19:01.760 such as scurvy and beriberi and rickets and things of this sort that decimated the populations. 153 00:19:01.760 --> 00:19:09.920 The major killer had always been the lack of a sufficiently stable diet, and of course 154 00:19:09.920 --> 00:19:18.360 the death rate was high. So that condition pertained universally. It was no better and 155 00:19:18.360 --> 00:19:26.360 and no worse in England than elsewhere, and yet the Industrial Revolution began in England. 156 00:19:26.360 --> 00:19:32.900 What about raw materials? Actually there would have been a number of places that were more 157 00:19:32.900 --> 00:19:41.080 richly endowed by nature as good sites for industrial breakthroughs than England. England 158 00:19:41.080 --> 00:19:49.200 is not a large country. It is insular, as we know, and it does not have a superabundance 159 00:19:49.200 --> 00:19:58.200 of resources. For instance, the Ruhr Valley would have been a far more amiable place to 160 00:19:58.200 --> 00:20:03.840 develop in terms of the resources at hand. Of course, Britain and Wales do have coal 161 00:20:33.840 --> 00:20:39.740 in England. It certainly was not a unique situation in respect to manpower. Manpower 162 00:20:39.740 --> 00:20:49.000 was available anywhere and everywhere, and it was not a superabundance of natural resources. 163 00:20:49.000 --> 00:20:54.400 There must have been some other factor at work. Actually, there were a number of them, 164 00:20:54.400 --> 00:21:01.120 but there is one leading factor, as I see it, that made it possible for Great Britain 165 00:21:01.120 --> 00:21:07.840 and to be the leading location in the world where industrialization occurred. 166 00:21:07.840 --> 00:21:17.000 And this is a development that began in England, it seems to me, back as early as 1066 with 167 00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:28.000 the Norman conquest. It was at that time when William crossed the channel and subdued the 168 00:21:28.000 --> 00:21:36.460 of the Saxons and the Angles on the British Isles, that the British government as such 169 00:21:36.460 --> 00:21:44.400 became in essence a government of an invading power. The Normans conquered, and they were 170 00:21:44.400 --> 00:21:50.460 never chased from power. The Norman kings became the kings of England, and there was 171 00:21:50.460 --> 00:21:59.060 was a gradual absorption and attrition whereby the people who lived in England were finally 172 00:21:59.060 --> 00:22:06.020 absorbed and the Normans and the Angles and the Saxons and Celts and so on became in time 173 00:22:06.020 --> 00:22:07.380 one people. 174 00:22:07.380 --> 00:22:13.140 But the ruling house, the aristocrats, were fundamentally Norman. 175 00:22:13.140 --> 00:22:20.220 And the consequence of this, I think, is one of the things that led to these much later 176 00:22:20.220 --> 00:22:24.700 Development, several hundred years beyond that point. 177 00:22:24.700 --> 00:22:32.260 You see, one of the things that history has taught us is this. Human beings are quite 178 00:22:32.260 --> 00:22:42.700 willing to accept the rule of a dictator or a despot, providing he is homegrown. If he 179 00:22:42.700 --> 00:22:51.020 When he's foreign, we take a dim view of him. In fact, the early Romans made this discovery. 180 00:22:51.020 --> 00:22:56.700 When they went out and, with their legions, conquered a foreign province, they found that 181 00:22:56.700 --> 00:23:04.700 they had nothing but trouble if they attempted to rule it by an imposed Roman rule centering, 182 00:23:04.700 --> 00:23:11.340 say, in a Roman centurion or a Roman senator who was to take charge of that province. They 183 00:23:11.340 --> 00:23:18.940 They found it much more convenient and much more practical to select a homegrown tyrant, 184 00:23:18.940 --> 00:23:27.520 a quizzling, if you please, a Pierre Laval, a quizzling or a King Herod, someone like 185 00:23:27.520 --> 00:23:32.140 this who was a native of the conquered province. 186 00:23:32.140 --> 00:23:38.520 And then they would associate with him and move him forward as a puppet under their control, 187 00:23:38.520 --> 00:23:40.400 but they would back him. 188 00:23:40.400 --> 00:23:47.080 And the consequence is the people would tend to submit to this type of puppet, because 189 00:23:47.080 --> 00:23:50.240 after all, he was one of their kind. 190 00:23:50.240 --> 00:23:57.020 In a sense, this is exactly the same type of action that we are taking today in Vietnam. 191 00:23:57.020 --> 00:24:05.180 If we were to go into Vietnam and attempt to impose our rule there in the Far East, 192 00:24:05.180 --> 00:24:10.040 we could never anticipate a complete subjugation of the people. 193 00:24:10.040 --> 00:24:16.320 They would resent it and resist us, and that resistance would become deeply rooted and embedded, 194 00:24:16.320 --> 00:24:20.040 and we could predict that it probably would never subside. 195 00:24:20.040 --> 00:24:27.320 However, if we could get a puppet leader, someone that was local there who was friendly 196 00:24:27.320 --> 00:24:32.960 to us because he had to be friendly to us because we gave him the backing that he needed, 197 00:24:32.960 --> 00:24:39.760 both militarily and financially, then we could create a puppet regime that, at least in theory, 198 00:25:09.760 --> 00:25:39.760 and the results seems to me to be quite clear in history, from that time on, from 1066 right on down virtually to the present time, certainly up until the emergence of the Labour government in England during World War II, up until this time, the British people were among the most independent, individualistic, self-thinking 199 00:26:09.760 --> 00:26:14.360 Where in the British people feel that independently and individually they amount to something 200 00:26:14.360 --> 00:26:15.360 too? 201 00:26:15.360 --> 00:26:19.640 And although they will bow humbly to their king, they believe that they have certain 202 00:26:19.640 --> 00:26:24.640 personal rights, and they're not about to step away from those rights. 203 00:26:24.640 --> 00:26:29.800 They feel that those are important to them, and they intend to maintain them. 204 00:26:29.800 --> 00:26:37.080 Now, the reason I feel that this is a key point is because of certain things that happened. 205 00:26:37.080 --> 00:26:44.920 For instance, as early as the year 1215—now that's a very early time. This is in the 206 00:26:44.920 --> 00:26:51.760 midst of the period of the Crusades, for example—we find the British noblemen—that 207 00:26:51.760 --> 00:26:58.580 is, the barons, the dukes, the earls, the various lords—actually unsheathing their 208 00:26:58.580 --> 00:27:05.360 swords and going after their own king. Now keep in mind that the kings at this time were 209 00:27:05.360 --> 00:27:12.320 Presumably Divine, but they got a king called John, and John began to throw his weight around 210 00:27:12.320 --> 00:27:19.040 a little bit, and the barons didn't like it, and they took off after him, got him cornered 211 00:27:19.040 --> 00:27:27.380 on an island called Runnymede, and they captured him. And then they forced him, literally, 212 00:27:27.380 --> 00:27:33.400 to sign the Magna Carta. Now, the Magna Carta is a fantastic document, not because of what 213 00:27:33.400 --> 00:27:40.840 it says, but because of the date in which it is said. Here we are in 1215. That's a 214 00:27:40.840 --> 00:27:48.880 very early time. And here we have the barons and the earls, the lordlings in England standing 215 00:27:48.880 --> 00:27:57.640 up and saying to their king, you may be divine and we love you and we're loyal to you. Nonetheless, 216 00:27:57.640 --> 00:28:02.920 there are certain rights that we have and you may not do as you please without consulting 217 00:28:02.920 --> 00:28:10.120 and the consequence is that we had the Magna Carta and we have that same spirit of independence and 218 00:28:10.120 --> 00:28:18.080 the concept of rights that began to to flourish from that time or at least it began to exist from 219 00:28:18.080 --> 00:28:24.360 that time I can't say that it flourished it did not begin to flourish until much later but the idea 220 00:28:24.360 --> 00:28:32.800 was born and it was born in England that individual human beings had merit too and this was a very 221 00:28:32.800 --> 00:28:39.800 of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money 222 00:29:02.800 --> 00:29:08.480 1760, and during this period, although you will find instances of tyranny and oppression 223 00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:14.720 emerging constantly, nonetheless there is a certain spirit of liberty that you will find 224 00:29:14.720 --> 00:29:21.360 in England that does not emerge as quickly or as early in any other country. 225 00:29:21.360 --> 00:29:22.000 Thank you very much.