torians for more than a century from discovering its influence. Its very considerable power and importance would otherwise undoubtedly have elicited more extensive contemporaneous comment.71

The comments that have survived are mostly so hostile in nature as to justify the fear of publicity. Arthur Young, as might be expected from the wide range of his observations and his agrarian connections and sympathies, wrote at length concerning the Chamber, and looked with suspicion on the concerted action of the industrial group as a menace to "the landed interest.” The Marquis of Lansdowne, as a public official, spoke with irony and yet not without apparent apprehension concerning an organization which he would probably have denounced, had he been familiar with later political terminology, as a "soviet” of capitalists. He had no doubt, he said, that “the Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain was very respectable,” but he hoped its members “would keep themselves to their simple object, and not harbor the idea of setting themselves up as a body to overawe parliament, or interfere with the political measures of the country.” The prime minister himself spoke in similar tone, as has been seen, of the Chamber's desire to relieve the government of “the trouble of legislation.” 72

Contemporaneous comments hostile and friendly alike are rare, but the General Chamber was an organizaztion far more significant than its obscurity would indicate. Its own immediate influence on public policy was a manifestation of the forces which, though checked by wartime reaction toward aristocratic rule, culminated nevertheless in the indirect domination of the state by the industrial oligarchy.73 It promoted the formation of local business organizations which have had practically continuous existence and have exerted decisive influence. Its own organization broke down due to an internal defect, but even in form it was a forerunner of modern associations of business men for maintaining committees, attorneys, information bureaus, and lobbies for promoting their interests as affected by politics and by other economic groups.

7. The rise of economic liberalism

The fact of greatest significance in the history of the Chamber is suggested by its failure. Its disruption in 1787 was the result of the great and growing divergence between the older petty manufacturers and the great modern industrial capitalists. The former continued to rely on primitive methods and state support and regulation; the latter were tending rapidly toward the technique of the age of machinery and of factories, and toward the commercial liberalism and the laissez-faire policies of the nineteenth-century Manchester school.

The illiberal spirit of the older manufacturers as well as of the merchants is so well known as to need little comment. Their objection to reciprocal tariff reductions in connection with the French commercial treaty was in harmony with their traditional attitude. Their fight for the adoption in 1788 of more rigorous measures against the export of raw materials in the woollen industry is typical of their continued dependence on monopoly. The spirit prevailing among them and the merchants was bitterly assailed by Adam Smith in well-known passages

* A recent conservative observer writes: “It is very generally admitted that the most powerful organization in Britain is not Parliament but the Federation of British Industries." (H. N. Casson, in Phila. Pub. Ledger, Dec. 17, 1923, Bus. Sec., p. 1.) This body is the presentday counterpart of the General Chamber of Manufacturers.

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advocating freedom of trade. The interests of the landed class, he asserted, with curious lack of discernment for so keen an observer, are "strictly and inseparably connected with the general interest of society.” But merchants and manufacturers make up a class "whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public”; members of this class, indeed, "have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public.” The “sneaking arts,” the "impertinent jealousy," the “mean rapacity,” the “monopolizing spirit, and the "interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers [have] confounded the common sense of mankind." To expect freedom of trade in Britain "is as absurd as to expect that an Oceania or Utopia should ever be established in it,” for “the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us” is too strong; they are able to “intimidate the legislature.” 74

Adam Smith's invidious contrast between the landed class and the merchants and manufacturers is obviously untenable. But the fact of the “monopolizing spirit” of the latter at the time when the Wealth of Nations was written is beyond question. Smith's view, however, took no account of the transformation which was then in its initial stage. He was no herald of the rising industrialists. He seems to have had no conception of that profound change by virtue of which the manufacturers were to become the champions as against the landlords of free trade and laissez-faire. But while the Wealth of Nations, even in the later editions, is singularly silent concerning the change, other writings of the time afford striking recognition of the growth of liberalism among the great manufacturers. The merchants, as well as the older types of manufacturers, were contrasted with the men in control of the cotton, iron, and pottery industries in respect to their attitude toward monopoly. Concerning

* Wealth of Nations, I, Bk. I, ch. 11, II, Bk. IV, chs. 2,3 (8th ed., 1796).

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the manufacturers, a contemporary advocate of monopoly observed two “factions” among them. One faction, we are told, is interested essentially in maintaining control of the home markets; the members of the other faction are possessed of a “desire of an open trade,” because they, “from their present ascendancy of skill, have nothing immediate to fear from competition, and everything to hope from the speculation of an increased demand.” The latter faction the author identifies as consisting of the cotton, iron, and pottery manufacturers. Essentially the same distinction was made by other writers, including Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and Arthur Young. Young at various times condemned what he characterized as the narrow, monopolizing spirit of the older manufacturers, and praised the liberal and progressive spirit which he found in the newer industries. “The food that is wholesome and nourishing at Birmingham and Manchester," he wrote in 1792, "will not be poison at Leeds and the Devizes.” 75

The early development of free-trade and laissez-faire tendencies is observable in connection not only with the French commercial treaty but with various other public policies as well. The laissez-faire attitude of the newer types of manufacturers was a principal cause of their opposition to the government's excise policy. This attitude found expression in a large proportion of the statements, petitions, and resolutions issued in opposition to excises. It was declared by the “principal manufacturers” of Manchester that of all methods of taxation, “those under the excise laws are most obnoxious," and that the cotton tax in particular “operates more vexatiously and produces more evils than any heretofore enacted.” The

British Merchant for 1787, 8, 12, 28; Annals of Agriculture, VII, 159-175, IX, 498, 499, XVI, 352, XVIII, 327, 328; Historical and Political Remarks upon the Tariff of the Commercial Treaty, 166-169; View of the Treaty of Commerce with France, 75-83. See also above, pp. 121, 184, 185.

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reasons for the peculiar evils of the cotton excise, it was stated, are "the complex nature of that manufacture," and "the amazing number of excise officers necessary to enforce" the law. It is declared that "such an influx of those gentry [the excisemen] to disturb the harmony and arrangements of their manufactures, to deprive them of personal liberty and the free exercise of their property, is UNWISE, IMPOLITIC, and UNJUST." The amount of the tax, though considerable, was declared to be a minor objection. In a petition to the House of Commons, the boast was made that although they "have never received or solicited any parliamentary aid," nevertheless they "have always been, and still are, ready on all occasions to contribute to the general exigencies of the state." They object to the extent of the taxation, but mainly to "what is still worse," the fact that their "liberty and property," by means of the excise laws, are "fettered and embarrassed." To the same effect was a resolution of the General Chamber of Manufacturers, which denounced the excise methods as "calculated to lay open the secrets of trade, to lock up in excise [by advance payments of excise before sales could be made] the capital before usefully employed, and to infringe upon the liberty of the subject." Birmingham manufacturers, though not so immediately affected, declared in resolutions of the Commercial Committee that "every excise law is irreconcilable with the freedom and secrecy every manufacturer has a right to demand in his own workshop and in the exercise of his business." 76

In view of the prevalence of high taxes and of excise methods not essentially different from those embodied in the cotton tax, the extreme hostility that this tax aroused is explicable only on the grounds that it was in the first place ill-adapted to the changes in technique and busi

Gazetteer, Mch. 9, Apr. 6, 15 18, 1785; Commons Journals, XL, 642, 160; Langford, Century of Birmingham Life, I, 320.