Mysterious Wisdom Read Online Free PDF

Waterloo, the Napoleonic wars had come at last to an end. A society which had battened down its hatches through decades of conflict had suddenly been flung open. Change had flooded in and with it all sorts of problems. Hundreds of thousands of demobilised servicemen were now looking for civilian work. There was mass unemployment in the towns and cities and, in the farms and villages from which the soldiers had first come, prospects were not hopeful. Harvests were bad for several years in succession. Britain was entering a prolonged period of agricultural depression.
    The five years following 1815 were to bring Britain closer to complete social breakdown than any others in its history. Radical voices which, for so long, had been stifled by an atmosphere of resolute patriotism now rang out. England became a theatre for mass rallies and marches and uprisings. What was subsequently to become known as the industrial revolution had dawned. Manual labour was giving way to the machine; coal and steam power were starting to fuel huge increases in production; and with the creation of improved turnpike roads and the construction of railways and canals, manufactured goods could be transported more efficiently around the country. Trade underwent a tremendous expansion as consumerist appetites steadily swelled.
    A sudden dramatic increase in the country’s population was a powerful driving force, propelling it ever faster towards change. Couples began marrying younger and so producing more children who could be nurtured better as the economy grew. Agricultural methods improved and a public health system slowly emerged. Average life expectancy, which had not risen above thirty-seven for the previous century, now lengthened: by 1820 it had reached forty-one. Census returns show that between 1801 and 1821 the population expanded from 8.9 million to 12 million, an increase of 35 per cent. It would continue to grow rapidly from then on. A rural economy could never be expected to support this flourishing population. People left the countryside to try to make a living in the towns as thriving new industries offered better hope of employment and the prospect of higher wages. At the beginning of the century only about a quarter of the population would have been urban; by 1881 this proportion had risen to 80 per cent.
    Great behemoths of cities grew and grew, engorged by an influx of job seekers. The population of Birmingham more than doubled in the first three decades of the century. Manchester and Liverpool, Bristol and Sheffield expanded apace. But infrastructures were not strong enough to cope. Systems creaked and then cracked under the strain. The industries that were breeding so much wealth were also spawning human misery. People needed housing and, as suburbia swallowed up fields and pastures, the poor were increasingly corralled into squalid urban tenements from which there was less and less chance of escape. Huge, stinking slums spread unsanitary ghettos which developers ignored. An entire urban underclass was being created, its members grist to the economic mill.
    Small wonder, then, that those who could afford the luxury of such fantasies, began to look back nostalgically along the ways that they felt were being lost: to imagine the life of the peasant as a pastoral idyll, to see the countryside as a haven of Arcadian peace. It was a pleasing dream. Primitive man, Rousseau had postulated in the preceding century, was in some ways superior to the denizens of a modern age for, however raw his existence, however basic his lifestyle, a proper sense of mutual responsibility had at least prevailed. Archaic society, he had argued, had been built on foundations of comradeship and sharing and had not given itself over to the greedy arrogation of wealth. Such visions had done much to nurture the idealists of the French Revolution and their plans for establishing a mutually beneficial republic. By Palmer’s day, that particular fantasy,