SHOOTING    NIAGARA	207
be to repudiate laissez-faire. For many years past great teachers
like Ruskin and T. H. Green at Oxford had impressed on
younger consciences the ideal of social responsibility. A new
generation of educated men and women was now growing up
whose minds were contemplating the necessity of solving the
problems created by a century of industrialism
But it was too late to undo what laissez-faire had done. In
fifty years its hold on English thought had transformed the face
of society. By 1881 seventeen and a half out of twenty-six millions
were living in towns: by 1891 twenty-one millions out of twenty-
nine millions. Eager Americans visiting Britain in the 'eighties
and 'nineties looked in vain in the city streets for the hordes
of rosy, golden-haired, blue-eyed children whom they had
been led to expect in the Anglo-Saxon island. The national
type, already affected in London by the constant influx of cheap
foreign labour, was growing smaller and paler. Bad teeth,
pasty complexions and weak chests were becoming British
traits.
For the great mass of the population the traditionary, religious
and rural England of the past had already passed out of memory.
In its place had risen a new Britain of, "male employment, boy
labour at relatively high wages, early marriages, over-worked
mothers, high birth and death rates, high infant mortality, bad
housing, a landscape scarred and smudged."^1 In the interests of
capital the majority of the British people had assumed lives that
bore little resemblance to those of their country forebears. The .
age-long birthright of man—pure air, fresh food, the sight and
touch of growing nature, space for reflection—had ceased to
be theirs. In its place they had been given the atmosphere
of the smoke-stack and the pea-souper fog, the herd society
of the streets, the gin palace and the halfpenny newspaper.
After a generation they scarcely any longer missed what they
had lost.
It was therefore idle to hope to return, with William Morris
and the socialists, to the days of peasant communities and hand-
craftsmanship. Capitalism had created the proletariat, and the
proletariat was not a theory but a fact. It could not be destroyed
or ignored: it could only be transformed by education and
improved urban conditions. It was in this that the problem of
the reformers lay.
^1 fifty Tears, 1882-1933, Thomas Jones, The Lift of the People, 177.