The working class benefited from the early Industrial Revolution

Excerpt from "Capitalism And The Historians" by FA Hayek in 1954.

"This kind of opinion can be frequently found not only 
in the political literature hostile to capitalism but even 
in works which on the whole are sympathetic to the 
political tradition of the nineteenth century. It is well 
represented by the following passage from Ruggiero’s 
justly esteemed History of European Liberalism: 

Thus it was precisely at the period of intensest industrial 
growth that the condition of the labourer changed for the worse. 
Hours of labour multiplied out of all measure; the employment 
of women and children in factories lowered wages: the keen 
competition between the workers themselves, no longer tied to 
their parishes but free to travel and congregate where they were 
most in demand, further cheapened the labour they placed on 
the market: numerous and frequent industrial crises, inevitable 
at a period of growth, when population and consumption are 
not yet stabilized, swelled from time to time the ranks of the 
unemployed, the reserves in the army of starvation.^ 

There was little excuse for such a statement even when 
it appeared a quarter-century ago. A year after it was 
first published, the most eminent student of modem 
economic history, Sir John Clapham, rightly complained: 

The legend that everything was getting worse for the working 
man, down to some unspecified date between the drafting of 
the People’s Charter and the Great Exhibition, dies hard. The 
fact that, after the price fall of 1820-1, the purchasing power

of wages in general — not, of course, of everyone’s wages — was 
definitely greater than it had been just before the revolutionary 
and Napoleonic wars, fits so ill with the tradition that it is very 
seldom mentioned, the works of statisticians of wages and prices 
being constantly disregarded by social historians.® 

In so far as general public opinion is concerned, the 
position is scarcely better today, although the facts have 
had to be conceded even by most of those who had 
been mainly responsible for spreading the contrary 
opinion. Few authors have done more to create the 
belief that the early nineteenth century had been a time 
in which the position of the working class had become 
particularly bad than Mr. and Mrs. J. L. Hammond; their 
books are frequently quoted to illustrate this. But toward 
the end of their lives they admitted candidly that 

statisticians tell us that when they have put in order such data 
as they can find, they are satisfied that earnings increased and 
that most men and women were less poor when this discontent 
was loud and active than they were when the eighteenth century 
was beginning to grow old in a silence like that of autumn. The 
evidence, of course, is scanty, and its interpretation not too 
simple, but this general view is probably more or less correct.® 

This did little to change the general effect their writing 
had had on public opinion."