Parliamentary Debate of Social Issues, c. 1815–30: a Conflict between Liberal Utilitarianism and Aristocratic Paternalism

In the period 1815–30, intellectuals were as much influenced by parliamentary debate of social and economic issues as parliamentarians were influenced by intellectual discussion of social ideas and theories. Coleridge took his ‘facts’ for his pamphlets on Peel’s Cotton Factory Bill from the 1816 Select Committee on Child Labour.1 Prior to that, he had very little idea of conditions in factories.2 Indeed, his two pamphlets added nothing new to the debate; they were simply an affirmation of the position adopted by Sir Robert Peel, Lord Kenyon and other paternalist and humanitarian-inspired parliamentarians. At this time, two areas of child employment claimed parliament’s attention: the chimney sweeping trade and textile factories. In both cases, a precedent for government intervention had already been established. Legislation was introduced for chimney sweepers in 1788 and for cotton factory apprentices in 1802. The other major areas of social debate of this period were distress, unemployment and the Poor Laws. Postwar depression, coupled with the recent disbanding of the army and navy, had seen a significant increase in the numbers of unemployed and, in the face of widespread public concern about the mounting cost of poor relief, the question of whether the Poor Laws should be radically reformed or even abolished was central to the whole issue of distress and unemployment. While parliamentarians were searching for solutions to the unemployment problem, the old solutions – the regulation of wages and mediation between employers and employees – were becoming increasingly untenable in an age of laissez–faire and the free market. It was during this period that the Spitalfields Acts were abolished and for no other reason, it seemed to many, than that the principle of regulation was anathema to the new market-driven economists. At the same time, the traditional, pater-nalist outlook continued to influence and shape the discussion and formulation of social policy and the tension between the ‘old world’ paternalist, protectionist ethos and the new laissez–faire philosophy underlies much of the social and political debate in this period. The distinction between these two seemingly incompatible perspectives is not always clear-cut, however, and we find that some parliamentarians subscribed to individualistic and utilitarian ideas at the same time as they defended the community values which underpinned the paternalist outlook. In the previous chapter, we saw that the paternalist ideal could be as readily translated into progressive ideas about social control and the mental and moral improvement of the lower orders as traditional aristocratic ideas about community responsibility and safeguarding the interests of the lower orders. In parliament, this conflation of progressive with traditional ideas was most evident in the immediate postwar period. By the mid–1820s, however, when Ricardianism was at its height and the political economists were more confident of the validity of their laissez–faire doctrine, the non-interventionist principle was not confined to economic and trade matters. It was applied more freely to social issues. Conversely, the proponents of protectionism and old world Tory opinion became more outspoken in resisting the new non-interventionist economic doctrine. Finally, it should be noted that because of the fluidity of party politics during this period, tensions existed between not only the Whigs and the Tories, but within the conservative spectrum of thought, between the liberal and the old world Tories. It was not until after the Catholic emancipation crisis that the more distinctive Tory strand of paternalism of which Sadler was representative began to have a greater influence upon social and economic debate.