Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar

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      “I should look with some degree of pain, and with much apprehension, upon this extraordinary and almost intoxicating growth, if it were my belief that it is confined to the class of persons who may be described as in easy circumstances,” he said, adding that, thanks to the rapid growth of untaxed income, “the average condition of the British laborer, we have the happiness to know, has improved during the last 20 years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary, and which we may almost pronounce to be unexampled in the history of any country and of any age.”¹³⁰

      Marx’s prediction that his manuscript would be finished by the end of the summer proved wildly optimistic, but fifteen months after Black Friday, in August 1867, he was able to report to Engels that he had put the final set of galleys in the mail to the German publisher. In his note, he alluded in passing to a famous short story by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. An artist believes a painting to be a masterpiece because he has been perfecting it for years. After unveiling the painting he looks at it for a moment before staggering back. “‘Nothing! Nothing! After ten years of work.’ He sat down and wept.”¹³¹ Alas, as Marx feared, “The Unknown Masterpiece” was an apt metaphor for his economic theory. His “mathematical proof” was greeted by an eerie silence. And in the worst economic crisis of the modern age, the great twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes would dismiss Das Kapital as “an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world.”¹³²

       Chapter II Must There Be a Proletariat? Marshall’s Patron Saint

      The horseman serves the horse,

      The neat-herd serves the neat,

      The merchant serves the purse,

      The eater serves his meat;

      ’Tis the day of the chattel,

      Web to weave, and corn to grind;

      Things are in the saddle,

      And ride mankind.

      —Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing”¹

      The desire to put mankind into the saddle is the mainspring of most economic study.

      —Alfred Marshall²

      During the severe winter of 1866–1867, as many as a thousand men congregated daily at one of several buildings in London’s East End. When the doors parted, the crowd surged forward, shoving and shouting, to fight for tickets. From the frenzied assault and the bitter expressions of those who were unsuccessful, a passerby might have assumed that a boxing match or dogfight was starting. But there was no brightly lit ring inside, only the muddy courtyard of a parish workhouse. The yard was divided into pens furnished with large paving stones. A ticket entitled the bearer to sit on one of these slabs, seize a heavy hammer, and break up the grime-encrusted granite. Five bushels of macadam earned him three pennies and a loaf of bread.³

      The men who besieged the workhouses that January were not typical of the sickly, ragged clientele ordinarily associated with these despised institutions. They were sturdy fellows in good coats. Until a few months earlier, they had been earning a pound or two a week in the shipyards or railway tunnels and highways—more than enough to house a family of five, eat plenty of beef and butter, drink beer, and even accumulate a tiny nest egg.⁴ That was before Black Friday brought building on land and sea and underground to an eerie standstill and an avalanche of bankruptcies deprived thousands of their jobs; before a cholera epidemic, a freak freeze that shut down the docks for weeks, and a doubling of bread prices; before the savings of a lifetime were drained away, the last of the household objects pawned, and help from relatives exhausted.

      The poorest parishes were turning away hundreds every day while hard-pressed taxpayers like Karl Marx worried that the rising poor rates would ruin them too. Despite an outpouring of donations, private charities were overwhelmed. “What that distress is no one knows,” wrote Florence Nightingale, the heiress and hospital reformer, to a friend in January 1867:

      It is not only that there are 20,000 people out of employment at the East End, as it is paraded in every newspaper. It is that, in every parish, not less than twice and sometimes five times the usual number are on the Poor Law books. It is that all the workhouses are hospitals. It is that the ragged schools instead of being able to give one meal a day are in danger of being shut up. And this all over Marylebone, St. Pancras, the Strand, and the South of London.⁵

      Bread riots broke out in Greenwich, and bakers and other small shopkeepers threatened to arm themselves against angry mobs.⁶ In May, thousands of East End residents battled mounted police in Hyde Park, ostensibly to show their support for the Second Reform Act and the workman’s right to vote, but mostly to vent their frustration and fury at the rich.⁷

      Middle-class Londoners could hardly avoid knowing of the distress in their midst, for they were living in the new information age, bombarded by mail deliveries five times a day, newspapers, books, journals, lectures, and sermons. A new generation of reporters inspired by the examples of Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, and other journalists of the 1840s filled the pages of the Daily News, the Morning Star, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Westminster Review, Household Words, the Tory Daily Mail, and the liberal Times with sensational eyewitness accounts and firsthand investigations in the East End. Reporters disguised themselves as down-and-out workmen and spent nights in the poorhouse in order to describe its horrors. Robert Giffen, editor at the liberal Daily News, was becoming one of the foremost statisticians of his day. His first major academic article had celebrated the tripling of national wealth between 1845 and 1865, but his second, written in 1867, was markedly different in tone and point of view, an attack on harshly regressive tax proposals that fell on the “necessaries of the poor.” What upset Giffen about the 1866–67 depression, writes his biographer Roger Mason, is that its chief victims had mostly worked, had saved, and had obeyed the law while the more fortunate had donated generously to charity. But virtue had not sufficed to prevent widespread misery.⁸

      The resurgence of hunger, homelessness, and disease in the midst of great wealth radicalized the generation that had grown up during the boom and had taken affluence and progress for granted. Playwrights wrote dramas with proletarian heroes. Poets published works of social criticism. Professors and ministers used their pulpits to denounce British society. Typical of such jeremiads was that of the blind Liberal reformer Henry Fawcett, who held a chair in political economy at the University of Cambridge:

      We are told that our exports and imports are rapidly increasing; glowing descriptions are given of an Empire upon which the sun never sets, and of a commerce which extends over the world. Our mercantile marine is ever increasing; manufactories are augmenting in number and in magnitude. All the evidences of growing luxury are around us; there are more splendid equipages in the parks and the style of living is each year becoming more sumptuous . . . But let us look on another side of the picture; and what do we then observe? Side by side with this vast wealth, closely contiguous to all this sinful luxury there stalks the fearful specter of widespread poverty, and of growing pauperism! Visit the greatest centres of commerce and trade, and what will be observed? The direst poverty always accompanying the greatest wealth!⁹

      Filled with Christian guilt and the desire to do good, university graduates who had earlier anticipated becoming missionaries in remote corners of the empire were discovering that a great deal of good needed to be done at home. William Henry Fremantle, the author of The World as the Subject of Redemption, became the vicar in one of London’s poorest parishes, St. Mary’s, that year. A walk through the СКАЧАТЬ