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Speenhamland precipitated a social catastrophe. We have become accustomed to discount the lurid presentations of early capitalism as "sob-stuff:' For this there is no justification. The picture drawn by Harriet Martineau, the perfervid apostle of Poor Law Reform, coincides with that of the Chartist propagandists who were leading the outcry against the Poor Law Reform. The facts set out in the famous Report of the Commission on the Poor Law , advocating the immediate repeal of the Speenhamland Law, could have served as the material for Dickens's campaign against the Commission's policy. Neither Charles Kingsley nor Friedrich Engels, neither Blake nor Carlyle, was mistaken in believing that the very image of man had been defiled by some terrible catastrophe. And more impressive even than the outbursts of pain and anger that came from poets and philanthropists was the icy silence with which Malthus and Ricardo passed over the scenes out of which their philosophy of secular perdition was born. (en) |
