At the university, where a large subscription had just been undertaken for famine victims in Bengal, opinion was sharply divided. Middle-class sympathies for the plight of the laborers had been awakened by a number of inquiries, most notably a Royal Commission report by the bishop of Manchester, who had exposed the long hours, low wages, horrific accidents, and diets of “tea kettle broth, dried bread and a little cheese” endured by agricultural workers.65 During the lockout, the Times of London ran stories calculated to horrify Victorian readers, including one description of a cottage whose single bedroom was shared by “the laborer, and his wife, a daughter aged 24, and a son aged 21, another son of 19, and a boy of 14, and a girl of 7.”66 Novelists seized on the subject as well. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which had appeared three years earlier, Dorothea Brooke tells her uncle, a well-to-do landlord, that she cannot bear the “simpering pictures in the drawing-room . . . Think of Kit Downes, uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one sitting-room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!—and those poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the back-kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle.”67
Among conservatives, however, the unrest raised the specter of the Bread Riots of 1816–17 and the burning of hayricks in the 1830s. Most opposed the idea of unionization on principle. In the spring a leading member of the university community, who was of “recognized social position . . . occupying an influential position in one of [Cambridge’s] . . . colleges,” wrote several lengthy “Notes of Alarm” in the Cambridge Chronicle urging the farmers to stand fast. He labeled the union leaders “professional mob orators” and their liberal sympathizers “sentimental busybodies.” The writer—possibly a Cambridge don named William Whewell—signed himself only “CSM,” an acronym probably chosen to provoke his liberal opponents because it stood for Common Sense Morality. On the matter of wages and unionization, CSM invoked the laws of political economy, claiming, “It is simply a question of supply and demand, and ought to have been allowed to settle itself on ordinary principles without the interference of paid agitators and demagogues.”68
The overflowing crowd of union supporters that squeezed into the Barnwell Workingmen’s Hall on Cambridge’s scruffy north side on Tuesday, May 11, 1874, was thus somewhat bemused to find an unlikely set of allies standing on the stage clad in caps and gowns. One of the leaders, the fiery George Mitchell, confessed, amid much laughter, that “when he saw all those gentlemen with their wide-awake hats and tippets he thought he was going to have some put on him.”69 Sedley Taylor, a former Trinity College fellow and prominent reformer, spoke first, proposing a resolution condemning the farmers’ efforts to break the union as “prejudicial to the general interests of the country,” delivering a broadside at his fellow collegian CSM in the process.
Then it was Marshall’s turn. Seconding a motion put forward by a dissident farmer supporting the locked-out laborers, he called for donations: “Let us sympathize with our hearts and with our purses.”
Addressing the farmworkers, Marshall denied that political economy could “direct decisions of moral principle,” which it must instead “leave to her sister, the Science of Ethics.” Writing in the Bee Hive, he argued that “political economy is abused when any one claims for it that it is itself a guide in life. The more we study it the more we find cases in which man’s own direct material interest does not lie in the same direction as the general well being. In such cases we must fall back on duty.”70
The following Saturday, the Cambridge Chronicle dismissed Marshall’s speech as “ingenious sophistry.” In fact, he had successfully demonstrated why labor markets do not always produce fair wages, and why unions can lead to greater efficiency as well as equity. He’d “been asked to speak of the laws of supply and demand,” Marshall began. He poured scorn on the union’s opponents who held wages were at their “natural level” because, if they weren’t, other employers would have offered the workers more, and if a worker’s “wages be raised artificially they will come down again.” This was Ricardo’s iron law of wages, accepted even by many who sympathized with the plight of the workers. The argument was “excellent,” Marshall admitted, but the assumptions false. No farmer would offer a neighbor’s hired hands more to come and work for him. What’s more, higher wages would make the workers more productive by allowing them to be better fed. Admitting that “unions have their faults,” Marshall said that “a union gives men interests and sympathies beyond the boundaries of their parish; it will cause them to feel their need of knowledge, and to vow that their sons shall be educated . . . Wages will rise . . . poor rates will dwindle . . . England will prosper.”71
Despite the support of the university and much of the media, the strike ultimately failed. The farmers held out by acquiring more machinery and employing more boys and girls. When the strike fund ran out in early June, the union called on the workers to return to the fields. Marshall took from the episode that new ideas would prevail over old doctrines only after a carefully plotted, patient campaign to win the hearts and minds of practical men.
Five weeks out of New York City and bound for San Francisco, Marshall stared down on the Horseshoe Falls with a frown. From the Goat Island suspension bridge where he stood, the cataract looked nowhere near as mighty as his Baedeker guide had promised. As a mathematician, he knew that perspective was to blame and engaged in some mental calculations to reassure himself that the falls were truly as colossal as advertised. But the numerical exercise did little to dispel his feeling of having been badly let down. “Niagara is a great humbug,” he wrote to his mother on July 10, 1875. “It takes longer for a man to discover how much greater Niagara is than it seems than it does to discover that an Alpine Valley which appears to be only a mile broad is really six miles broad.”72
Marshall had come to America to study its social and economic landscape. He had left Manhattan on a paddle steamer headed for Albany. In a letter, he recalled how “disgusted and savage” Alexis de Tocqueville had been forty years earlier when he discovered that the finest of the “villas built in Greek style of marble, shining from the banks of the Hudson” were actually made of wood. He, by contrast, “did not find anything like as much sham as I expected.”73
Indeed, everywhere Marshall looked, he seemed to discover more, not less, than met the eye: American architects displayed “daring & strength,” their buildings being of “uniform thoroughness & solidity.”74 An “American drink called ‘mint-julep’ ” was “luxurious.” American preachers gave sermons that were “way out of sight ahead of us,” having achieved “startling improvements” on Anglican liturgy.75 American workers were full of “go.”76 As he reported to the Moral Sciences Club on his return to Cambridge in the fall, “I met no man or woman in America whose appearance indicated an utterly dull or insipid life.”77 By the time Marshall reached Cleveland in mid-July, he was convinced that “nine Englishmen out of ten would be themselves more happy & contented in Canada than in the U.S.; though I myself if I had to emigrate should go to the U.S.”78
Marshall’s magnum opus, Principles of Economics, would not appear for another fifteen years, but he had already worked out the chief tenets of his “new economics”—an alternative to both the old laissez-faire doctrines of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill and the newly ascendant Socialist gospels of Marx. He had spent a decade “laying the foundations of his subject but publishing nothing.”79 His travels in America gave him confidence that he was on the right track.
Marshall’s relations had scoffed at his plan to use a £250 legacy from the same uncle who had financed his university education to tour the United States. He justified himself by saying that he was gathering material for a treatise on foreign trade. While this was perfectly true, the economic historian John Whitaker observes that his actual purpose was broader, part of a growing, “almost obsessive attempt to apprehend in all its aspects an ever-changing economic reality.”80