4.  In all the movements we have described, the spiritual stimulus, the initial drive, and the solid successes have been provided by voluntary association.  The State has not been the pioneer of social reform.  Such a notion is the mirage of politicians.  It has merely registered the insistent demands of organized voluntary effort or given legal recognition to accomplished facts.  This is the distinctive note of English social development in the nineteenth century.

FOR REFERENCE

Dicey, Law and Opinion.

Robinson, The Spirit of Association.

Hovell, The Chartist Movement.

Sombart (tr.  Epstein), Socialism and the Socialist Movement.

[Cd. 9236], Report of Committee on Trusts.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 20:  From the writer’s forthcoming book Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century, to be published by the Cambridge University Press.]

[Footnote 21:  Tooke and Newmarch, History of Prices, v. 356.]

[Footnote 22:  Commons Committee on Emigration, 1827, Q. 1761.]

[Footnote 23:  Commons Committee on the Condition of Labourers employed in the Construction of Railways, 1846, Q. 866.]

[Footnote 24:  Ibid., Q. 217.]

[Footnote 25:  Ibid., Q. 897.]

[Footnote 26:  Ibid., Q. 733.]

[Footnote 27:  Ibid., Q. 193.]

[Footnote 28:  Ibid., Qs. 869-78.]

[Footnote 29:  Report of Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture (1843), pp. 20, 25.]

[Footnote 30:  Ibid., pp. 299-300.]

[Footnote 31:  Report of Commissioners on the Employment of Young Persons in Agriculture, p. 64.]

[Footnote 32:  Dr. Cook Taylor, Letter to the Morning Chronicle, dated from Rossendale Forest (Lancashire), June 20, 1842.]

[Footnote 33:  Rural Rides, i. 219.]

[Footnote 34:  Poor Law Commission of 1834, Appendix.]

[Footnote 35:  Hand-loom Weavers’ Commission, Final Report, 1841, p. 18.]

[Footnote 36:  Hand-loom Weavers’ Commission, Assistant-Commissioner’s Report, 1840, Part IV, pp. 76-81.]

[Footnote 37:  Second Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1836.]

[Footnote 38:  Hand-loom Weavers’ Commission, Assistant-Commissioner’s Report, Part III, p. 551.]

[Footnote 39:  Anti-bread Tax Circular, No. 91, June 16, 1842.]

[Footnote 40:  First Report of the Factory Commissioners, 1833, p. 27.]

[Footnote 41:  Report of Commissioner on the Condition of the Framework Knitters (1845), p. 109.]

[Footnote 42:  Ibid., p. 115.]

[Footnote 43:  William Felkin, History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures (1867), p. 458.]