NEW AGE GOVERNMENT is founded on one single Law or Principle: Do No Harm. It is a Principle of Non-Imposition, the Principle that none should impose upon, injure or exploit another or others. But humankind is born with more basic instincts than respect for others. Our primary concern is self-preservation, the provision of food, clothing, shelter,and the enhancement of personal wealth and lifestyle.

God gives every bird its food, but He doesn't throw it into the nest. Likewise with humans: in order to provide ourselves with the lifestyle to which we may aspire, we need to work, to invent, to add labour to the resources of nature. And throughout the ages, those who are stronger and more cunning have discovered that it can be a lot easier to expropriate the results of other people's labour, rather than labour oneself.

A Predatory Society

Throughout history, humans consistently ordered society in ways which permitted those enjoying superior wealth, background and the political influence that goes with it, to live comfortably from the proceeds of other people's toil.

This transfer of work and wealth from the poor to the powerful took place through three major phases: slavery, feudalism, and low-wage industrial employment.

In early Greek and Roman times, a gentleman owned slaves; in the Middle Ages he owned land which was worked for him by peasants who were bound to him; in Victorian times he owned factories, paying workers barely enough to buy food and shelter.

Then Karl Marx and friends invited the "poor masses" to throw off the yoke of oppression, turn the tables and plunder the riches of their old masters. And this, encouraged by the newly invented doctrines of Socialism and Communism, they did.

Finally, the politically more advanced countries adopted Democracy or Majority Rule, in which everyone tries to enlist the aid of Government to provide them with subsidies or welfare which someone else - anybody or everybody, this generation or the next or the next - will have to pay for.

Whether autocratic monarchy or dictatorship, constitutional or democratic, government was not instituted by idealists to protect the general liberty.

The history of politics and social relationships is a history of continuous imposition exercised by people over one another with government "turning a blind eye", or with government's active participation.


Slaves and Serfs

There is no parallel in history to the achievement which Greek civilization attained in Athens.

This single city produced great statesmen, poets, sculptors, historians, teachers. Here the very concept of philosophy was invented and expounded. Here were created the first popular governments, in which ordinary citizens were to practise another Greek "invention": Democracy.

Yet in this enlightened city over a third of the population were slaves, many obtained as prisoners of war or as criminals purchased from non-Greek lands around the Mediterranean. In neighbouring Thrace the people sold their children for export. As the demand for slaves increased traders roamed further afield, gathering in Persians, Egyptians and Libyans.

Slaves were used by households, landholders on large agricultural estates, in industry, and especially in the mines and quarries. At one time there were some 30,000 slaves in the silver mines and processing mills. In the large Laurion mine near Athens conditions were appalling. The underground galleries were dug only two feet square, and the miners had to crawl through them dragging their iron shackles. They worked a ten-hour day, and the mortality rate was extremely high.

Most Greek households had several slaves. Greeks spoke of the necessities of life as "cattle and slaves". Records show that when the philosopher Plato died he left five domestic slaves in his will. His pupil Aristotle left fourteen. The very rich would have as many as fifty slaves in their households. Many household slaves would have been treated relatively well; but as slaves they were the property of their masters who "owned" them and had the right to demand their work and its products. The wellbeing of the master was built in part upon the work and consequent diminishing of others.

Slavery was also to become big business. Following the successful Punic Wars with Carthage, Rome rapidly grew to a position of pre-eminence in the Mediterranean and became the centre of its trade. Chief among the commodities traded was the human slave arriving on the market in enormous quantities, bringing profit and prosperity to Rome's merchants and bankers.

Rome came to depend on large numbers of slaves to maintain its industries and agriculture. But its wealth and power rested upon untold suffering. Diodorus wrote of the conditions in Rome's gold and silver mines in Egypt:

"There they throng, all in chains, all kept at work continuously day and night. There is no relaxation, no means of escape. No one could look upon the squalor of these wretches, having not even a rag to cover their loins, without feeling compassion for their plight. They may be sick, or maimed, or aged, or weakly women, but there is no indulgence, no respite. All alike are kept at their labor by the lash until, overcome by hardships, they die in their torments. Their misery is so great, the punishments are so severe, that death is welcomed as a thing more desirable than life."

Large agricultural estates became common throughout the Roman lands, dependent upon the availability of slaves to work them. On many plantations the slaves worked in a chain-gang system. They laboured under overseers in the fields and were locked in the prison house at night.

The Roman tradition of large estates and villas continued into the Middle Ages, evolving as the feudal system. As time passed, the slaves became feudal peasants regulated by the customs of the manorial system, and no longer lived in the complete state of submission that typified true slavery.

The peasants in the Middle Ages were called serfs, from the Roman word servus or slave. The serf was a "bound" tiller, who was compelled by the conditions of his existence as well as by law and custom to remain on the land, and to "donate" a major proportion of his time and labour to the cultivation of the owner's fields. This is still practised today, as can be seen for example in the share-cropping system in India.

Later the peasants gained more freedom; they became responsible for supplying their own needs, they paid rent and could now control more of their own time. Though they often had less to eat they now had more personal freedom. Indeed, the feudal peasants might even have counted themselves fortunate; as the manorial estates grew ever larger during the Middle Ages, and independent holdings dwindled, so rural poverty among those outside the feudal system became widespread.

But other influences were also at work, and as the 1700s drew to a close agriculture would now give way to industry as the engine of production and trade, and land would be replaced by machinery as the source of wealth.


Industrial Poverty

The new industrial era in Britain began in one of the oldest of all industries, the spinning and weaving of cloth. This had traditionally been a small-scale cottage industry. 1785 saw the invention of the power loom, which could weave automatically and much more cheaply. The hand weavers could no longer compete, and were forced by threat of starvation to move from their village homes to the crowded tenements of factory towns, where the over-supply of labour gave the factory owner the opportunity to employ them at minimal wages for long hours.

As the factories increased their output, so their capital costs per unit fell; and with the ability to pay low wages, factory owners found their overall production costs steadily falling. They were also able to maintain high prices; thus the profits and the wealth of the factory owners could only increase. The wealthy became wealthier, the poor remained poor.

The political doctrine of laisser-faire prevalent in the 1700s and early 1800s, happily espoused by factory-owning members of Parliament, opposed any government intervention in industry. No attempt should be made to regulate the price or quality of goods, nor should government fix the hours of work, or try to remedy the often dangerous and unhealthy conditions in factories.

The working classes were thus driven to embark upon a process of direct confrontation with their employers. This was facilitated by the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824, which passed almost unnoticed through Parliament, legalizing the formation of and participation in Trade Unions.

As a result there was a sudden growth in Trade Unions, not only at local level, but also several "Grand General Trades Unions". One of the largest of these was founded in 1833 by the great social pioneer, Robert Owen, called the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which claimed at its peak up to a million members.

Another "self-help" development of this period in Britain was the creation of Co-operative Societies to avoid the ruthless profiteering by shopkeepers whose low-wage customers were eternally bound to them in credit. To assist the many newly created co-operative societies Robert Owen promoted the idea of a Labour Exchange in which products were exchanged for Labour Notes representing so many hours' labour, and which were the only form of currency accepted.

The poor were not without their Liberal humanitarian advocates in Parliament, working throughout the 1800s to help alleviate the sufferings of the working classes.

In 1833 Britain was the first country to pass an Act of Parliament abolishing slavery. In the same year, the Factory Act was passed to prevent the employment of children under the age of nine as well as limiting the excessively long working hours of older children. This was to be the first of several subsequent Acts attempting to improve working conditions and safety.

But such efforts provided small relief against the growing tide of migration from countryside to industrial cities throughout the second half of the 1800s; urban populations increased and living conditions for the poor deteriorated. The competition for work in the factories made it possible for employers to continue paying minimal wages for long hours of work in abysmal and often dangerous working conditions, with corresponding increases in profits and dividends.

While London's developers built ever more fine terraces of fashionable homes for the wealthy, the working people spent twelve hours a day in the factories, earning barely enough for minimal food and shelter, living in the expanding areas of urban squalor which the poor accepted as their lot, and which the wealthy knew little or nothing about.

On the morning of September 24th, 1849 wealthy Londoners sat comfortably at their breakfast tables, with bacon and eggs, kippers and fish kedgeree awaiting their pleasure in heated chafing dishes, oven-fresh buns kept warm in covered baskets, freshly brewed tea or coffee steaming in delicate china cups.

Passing the seville orange marmalade and light conversation, many would also be scanning London's Morning Chronicle.

Among the social tidbits, the Military Appointments, the Court Circular and who was wearing what and seen with whom, readers were to find an article contributed by one Henry Mayhew who had just returned with tales of horror from a land, not distant, but only a few miles away in their very own city of London.

This was to be the first in a year-long series which became one of the most thorough surveys of labour and conditions in working-class London during the mid 1800s and was to be influential in formulating the new ideas of Socialism.

The first article described Jacob's Island, a section of south London already made notorious as the setting for Oliver Twist.

"The striking peculiarity of Jacob's Island consists in the wooden galleries and sleeping rooms at the back of the houses which overhang the dark ditch that stagnates beside them. The houses are built upon piles flanking a sewer; little rickety bridges span the huge gutters and connect court with court.

"The water of the huge ditch in front of the houses is covered with a scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it float large masses of green rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction.

"As I gazed in horror at it, a bucket of night soil was poured down from the next gallery.

"In a place called Joiner's Court, with four wooden houses in it, there had been as many as five cases of cholera. Here, I was taken up to a room so dark, that it was several minutes before I could perceive anything within it, and there was a smell of must and dry rot that told of damp and imperfect ventilation, while the unnatural size of the pupils of the wretched woman's eyes showed how much too long she had dwelt in this gloomy place."

In an issue of Punch the following March the distinguished author of Vanity Fair, William Makepiece Thackeray, remarked about these articles on Labour and the Poor written by Mayhew for the Morning Chronicle:

"Of such misery as this, do you confess you had no idea? How should you? You and I, we are of the upper classes; we have had hitherto no contact with the poor... until... some clear sighted energetic man like the writer of the Chronicle travels into the poor man's country for us, and comes back with this tale of terror."

While the consciences of reformers both in and out of parliament were stirred into further acts of charity and legislation, the Labour Unions continued to grow from strength to strength.

One of the largest Union groupings, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers formed in 1851, initiated several major strikes in the 1860s, and successfully achieved a nine-hour working day in 1871 after a five months' strike.

There followed a series of successful strikes, starting in 1888 with the unexpected strike of the overworked and poorly paid girls who made matches for Bryant and May. That same year also saw strikes by the Gas Workers and General Workers' Union for more pay and an eight-hour working day. In 1889 came the Great Dock Strike, lasting a month, which was so successful in drawing public attention to workers' demands that it encouraged a great many more Trade Unions to materialise.

Reformers both in Unions and Parliament may have felt they were making progress; and indeed they were, relatively speaking. But research by Charles Booth in 1891 revealed that one-third of London's population was still living on the verge of starvation.

As the century drew to its close, Humanitarian Liberalism, Trade Union pressure, and perhaps a touch of idealism brought on by the approach of a new century, were to combine with the growth of workers' voting rights to produce a new political doctrine of Socialism. But Socialism would reveal itself as a doctrine of vengeance, taxing the rich, nationalizing industry, and in its more extreme form of Communism, subjecting its people to over-regulation and oppression. More than half a century later Socialism too would be discredited.

Yet despite this long history of self-interest, of man's exploitation of fellow man and its vengeance, idealists and reformers constantly and consistently remained active, pressing not only for humanitarian reforms, but for the wider principles of universality and justice expressed in concepts of constitutional discipline over autocratic monarchies and governments, and ultimately the Supreme Law of Non-Imposition.

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