主题：【原创】驳《中国康乾盛世还不如英国中世纪》（上） -- 厚积薄发

C. The working class, that is, urban factory workers, was entirely the creation of the Industrial Revolution.

1. As on the farm, all members of the family worked as soon as they could do so, certainly by the age of six.

2. Wages were often poor because of the huge labor market. If you did not like the wages, then you could be replaced.

3. Work itself was strictly regimented, repetitive, and quota-driven.

a. Workers put in 12–16 hours a day, winter and summer, six days a week, seven if behind on a quota.

b. Working conditions were often dark, noisy, and dangerous.

c. Given the laissez-faire economic policies that had made all this possible, there was no one to tell factory owners that this was no way to treat workers.

4. Beginning in the early 19th century, some members of the British Parliament began to inquire into the conditions of workers in the factories.

a. The most famous of these was undertaken by the Sadler commission on child labor during 1832.

b. The Sadler commission’s findings were published in Parliamentary Papers, 1831–1832, vol. XV; relevant excerpts are available online at http://www.victorianweb.org/history/workers1.html

5. Living conditions were not much better at the end of the day.

a. Industrial towns grew too fast to plan for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

b. Tenements were hastily thrown up to house these new arrivals.

i. Tenements were essentially row houses.

ii. They had no indoor plumbing or toilets and often no windows.

iii. The air was thick with factory smoke and terrible smells from tanneries, dye-works, animal and human excrement, and assorted river smells.

iv. They were terribly overcrowded, whole families—sometimes extended families—living in a single room.

c. The working class diet consisted of potatoes; weak stew; stimulants, such as tea; and depressants, such as alcohol.

d. It is not surprising that the people in this class were especially prone to diseases, including typhus, cholera, diphtheria, malaria, and smallpox.

e. In 1840, the average death rate in Britain was 1 death in 45 per year, but in Manchester it was 1 in 20.

6. Contemporary writers worried not just about the physical implications of all this but about the spiritual and moral effect on the industrial generations.

a. In Britain, the government-sponsored Poor Law was supposed to be administered at the parish level—which didn’t work very well when there was in fact no parish.

b. The new industrial economy promoted a fluid labor market in which boom and bust cycles caused people to move around the country constantly and broke up families.

c. Close living conditions made privacy impossible and promoted not only disease, but abuse, domestic violence, and sexual promiscuity.

d. It has been estimated that one half of the babies born in European cities between 1830–1850 were illegitimate.

One is reminded of the idealized image of feudal Europe presented by latter-day conservative Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. For them, medieval Christendom was a world of contented peasants living in the secure embrace of their Church, under the more or less benign protection of their lords.55 Again we are invited to accept a particular culture in its idealized form divorced from its murky material history. This means accepting it as presented by its favored class, by those who profited most from it. The Shangri-La image of Tibet bears no more resemblance to historic actuality than does the pastoral image of medieval Europe.

GDP难以作为“盛世”的标准。在我看来，“盛世”的标准，应该是普通人的权利———包括经济（财产）权利和人身权利。