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CHAPTER 18 The Failure of Utilitarianism By the 182o's, Bentham's principles, even if they had been transmitted in the master's true spirit, had become, if not irrelevant, somewhat out of place. The world that had inspired Bentham, and that even James Mill knew best, the world in which personal relations were all and it was a struggle to make men attend in the least to organization and impersonal techniques, was gone. Melbourne and his like were still about, but they were beginning to look like relics. The men who were replacing them in power and eminence were very well aware of the importance of administrative efficiency, and often aware of and capable of loving little else. There was a greater stir and more rapid development in every sphere of public activity. The change was not revolutionary, but the process that had been transforming England into an industrial society since the seventeenth century had by now become marked enough to attract and deserve more notice. Inventions worked cumulatively to speed up the rate of change and any statistics about industrial output in the first few decades of the century give a striking picture of rapid growth. But much more was involved than a remarkable increase in numbers of power looms and factories. The whole character of industry and commerce was being altered. New methods of administration and selling became popular. Better roads and larger towns made it possible to replace the pedlar and the fair by small shops supplied through a commercial traveller. Production ofall sorts, even offood, came increasingly to be financed and run like factories. Large-scale impersonal organization was taking over everywhere. The businessman developed more deliberate and routine methods of measuring, counting, and observing. He was indifferent to, if not ignorant of, old traditions and customs, many of which were no longer applicable to his work. Tradition belonged with the old regime of 228 John Stuart Mill outmoded techniques. The businessman now preferred to weigh every act as it arose for the profit it would yield, and his success depended on his ability to calculate quickly, boldly, and correctly. The spirit that dominated in business and industry was spread throughout the society. Technical knowledge in all spheres became a special domain, with a status of its own, and occupations formerly open to anyone were transformed into professions. The development of the apothecaries was not unusual : a bill in 1815 gave the Society of Apothecaries the right to examine all apothecaries in England and Wales; to secure their professional prestige, they required an apprenticeship of five years; and soon hospitals organized schools oftheir own which sent out the first general practitioners. By a similar process, the engineer acquired an unprecedented importance. The mechanical engineer , as we now know him, became common in London and Lancashire, and civil engineering was recognized as a profession based upon applied science. Roads, bridges, canals, docks, harbours, drainage, indeed all the technical foundations of modern industrial society, came under the aegis of the new profession. To provide training for the gro~ng numbers of those wishing to rise in the industrial society, new institutions sprang up continuously, and England no longer lagged so far behind the Continent in technical education. The Mechanics Institute movement began in London in 1823. In 1827, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded to educate the artisan class. Many schools were established to use the methods ofLancaster and Bell, "a mechanical system of education," whereby a master taught only the elder children, who taught the younger ones, so that, as Andrew Bell claimed, twenty-four pupils today could overnight be made into twenty-five teachers. The system was, its admirers felt, a cheap way of instilling a number of facts into children's minds, and this seemed to them what education was meant to be. That even men who might have been expected to think differently about education were dazzled by such mechanisms is evident from an article by Brougham, where, in the course of urging education for the poor, he wrote: It is manifest that any rule in algebra may be communicated by the same process [i.e. by one ignorant boy reading the rules to another and making him work examples mechanically] from the simplest to the most intricate and refined .... Every part of geometrical science may be taught by similar meansfrom the first proposition in Euclid, to the sublime theories of Newton and Laplace.... In like manner, whatever branches...

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