"There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still"
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Aesthetics don’t get to veto survival. Goldwin Smith stages that blunt trade-off with the cool assurance of a Victorian moral accountant: yes, the “machines and the Black Country” are ugly, but hunger is uglier. The line is engineered to shame a certain kind of reformer and aesthete - the ones appalled by soot, smokestacks, and the brutalized landscape of industrial England - by forcing them to own the alternative. If you condemn the factory, you’d better have a plan to feed the “manufacturing multitudes.”
The phrasing does quiet ideological work. “They must have work” turns employment into natural law, not a political choice shaped by wages, ownership, and labor power. “Find markets” slips from necessity into imperial logic: if Britain’s people must work, Britain must sell; if Britain must sell, Britain must reach outward. It’s an argument that launders expansion and industrial discipline as humanitarian obligation.
Smith’s “if...famine” construction is a rhetorical trap: it narrows the field to two options - ugly industry or mass starvation - leaving little room for a third possibility like redistribution, regulation, or higher labor standards. That’s the subtextual sleight of hand typical of an era trying to reconcile Christian conscience with industrial capitalism’s collateral damage.
Context matters: by the late 19th century, the Black Country had become shorthand for industrial blight, while unrest, poverty, and the memory of earlier bread crises haunted British politics. Smith doesn’t deny the grime; he weaponizes it, recasting environmental and social degradation as the regrettable price of keeping a nation fed.
The phrasing does quiet ideological work. “They must have work” turns employment into natural law, not a political choice shaped by wages, ownership, and labor power. “Find markets” slips from necessity into imperial logic: if Britain’s people must work, Britain must sell; if Britain must sell, Britain must reach outward. It’s an argument that launders expansion and industrial discipline as humanitarian obligation.
Smith’s “if...famine” construction is a rhetorical trap: it narrows the field to two options - ugly industry or mass starvation - leaving little room for a third possibility like redistribution, regulation, or higher labor standards. That’s the subtextual sleight of hand typical of an era trying to reconcile Christian conscience with industrial capitalism’s collateral damage.
Context matters: by the late 19th century, the Black Country had become shorthand for industrial blight, while unrest, poverty, and the memory of earlier bread crises haunted British politics. Smith doesn’t deny the grime; he weaponizes it, recasting environmental and social degradation as the regrettable price of keeping a nation fed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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