Social Research and Social Policy in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

x x TE ARE ALL FAMILIAR with the conventional accounts wA/ Of the growth of social policy in the century before I9I4. They T s stress two periods of legislative activity; one in the thirties and forties, the other during the administrations of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. The first was accompanied by the intensive investigational work of Royal (Nommissions, the second was preceded by an intellectual ferment from the eighties onwards and by the surveys of Booth and his successors. The 'good years' between the Great Exhibition and the falling prices and imperial adventures of the last decades of the century were characterized, so this story runs, by declining enthusiasm for social reform and by legislative torpor. Such accounts are usually biographical in method, hagiographical in intention and written as histories of legislative landmarks. They present social policy as the practical embodiment of humanitarian zeal flowing from sensitive and anxious christian consciences to which, in the later phase, were added the pressures of a labour movement increasingly able to squeeze concessions from reluctant property owners. In his Hobhouse Memorial Lecture of I945, Mr. H. L. Beales outlined a different approach. Defining social policy as 'a collective term for the public provisions through which we attack insecurity and correct the debilitating tendencies of our capitalist inheritance', he interpreted its growth not as an efl]orescence of philanthropy, not as a mere sweetener of the 'hard rigours of a system of individualist compulsions', but as an organic process within industrialist society.l In his view, the essential feature of social policy has been the growing capacity to measure, and hence to express in politically constructive ways, the economic costs of the social wastage inherent in unregulated industrialism. It is in terms of this conception that I shall attempt a necessarily impressionistic examination of social research and social policy in this country in the period between the great surveys of Eden and Booth. I shall consider only that