The material condition of landed aristocracy could only get great advantages from the changes in cultivation and breeding. So they became even richer in these years (1742-1784). The contrasts between Tories and Whigs diminished, actually because they had the same interests and views as regards the change. But the new rising class, the industrialists, started to ask for law, order, and efficient administration. At the forefront of this new view of State were the towns, the new industrial towns. As soon as the industrial town ceased to be a large village, the complete lack of local government and local administration became unbearable. Central Government didn’t want to touch local privileges and local ancient corporations. So citizens in Westminster between 1761 and 1765 secured Private Acts of Parliament by which they were enabled to levy a house rate for providing paving and lighting.

There was no general law issued by the Parliament, but many individual acts. Citizens of town after town secured rights and powers to run social services in their towns. Paving commissioners, Improvement commissioners, Lighting commissioners, even Police commissioners. This growth of local authorities is the most important social development of the second half of the XVIII century. It fostered both social conscience and civic pride which became in their children’s children the base for the great Victorian Liberalism. Both London and provincial towns for cleanliness and orderly living became the wonders of Europe. This of course contributed to lower the rate of death connected to filth.

In London it would rise again after the introduction of the water closet(!!) In fact instead of being carried away in the country, excrement was swept into the Thames which provided London’s drinking water.

The children of the poor had always worked as soon as they could walk, now their work was valuable for factory owners: children can do simple repetitive operations, they are cheap, and they are easy to discipline. So it was a hard world for children, but for their parents it could have been not so hard. The quick changing situation opened new possibilities. Work in the factory was paralleled by the resistance of work inside the domestic walls. The jenny, invented by Hargreaves, was also compatible with work in private houses. Many lesser capitalists, micro-capitalists arose. All of them dreaming of social advance.

The lowest layers of the working class generally spent Mondays and Tuesdays in drinking, cock-fighting, bear baiting. They worked for the remaining four days up to seventeen hours a day. There were no trade unions or other organizations for the working classes.