v.  Finally, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the
     world of labour attained to a cash basis, and there was no
     Cobbett to denounce the resumption.

We shall not be guilty of serious exaggeration if we preface our history with the motto: 

’In the nineteenth century the Trade Unions and the Trade Unions alone made the nominal earnings of the working man a cash reality.’

3.  THE SPIRIT OF ASSOCIATION

1.  The student of Dicey’s Law and Opinion in England is invited to distinguish three periods: 

     i.  The period of old Toryism or legislative quiescence (1800-38).

     ii.  The period of Benthamism or individualism (1825-70).

     iii.  The period of collectivism (1865-1900).

Bentham lived during the first period and his name is rightly given to the second period.

The student, therefore, comes to wonder if there is anything which is not Benthamism.  Benthamism, he says to himself, stands for individualism.  How then can the period of Benthamism include the humanitarian legislation which begins with the first Factory Act of 1802 and broadens out during the middle of the century into the elaborate code regulating from then onwards the conditions of employment in workshops, factories, and mines?  How can a monster beget an angel?

We may perhaps throw light on this difficulty by suggesting that the social trend from 1825-70 cannot be compressed into a single word.  Individualism may suffice to define the dominant legal trend, but it conceals the influence exerted on the legislature from without and from below by the action of voluntary associations.  The period of voluntary association coincides with and overlaps the period of individualism.

2.  What Bentham was to individualism, Robert Owen was to voluntary association.  Bentham himself was an admirer of Owen and supported his philanthropy, but, as expressions of a social attitude, Benthamism and Owenism were poles asunder.  The contrast between the two is admirably displayed in the evidence given before the Factory Committee of 1816 by two representatives of the employing class, Josiah Wedgwood of pottery fame and Robert Owen himself.

‘In the state of society,’ said Wedgwood, ’in which there is evidently a progressive movement, it is much better to leave things as they are than to attempt to amend the general state of things in detail.  The only safe way of securing the comfort of any people is to leave them at liberty to make the best use of their time, and to allow them to appropriate their earnings in such way as they think fit.’[65]

Robert Owen thought otherwise.  In a couple of answers he exposed the fallacy of enlightened self-interest.  They seem obvious enough to-day, but in 1816 they were the voice of one crying in the wilderness.  He was asked whether he believed that ’there is that want of affection and feeling on the part of parents, that would induce them to exact from their children more labour than they could perform without injury to their health;’ and he replied: