INTERNATIONAL EXPLOITATION.
As individuals possessing skill or capital exploitate, or compel other
individuals in the same community to work for them for nothing, or for
undue consideration, precisely in the same way do nations possessed of
those advantages exploitate other nations with whom they trade, who are
without them.
England lends, say, five hundred millions of dollars to governments and
individuals in America. In a hundred years, she will have withdrawn from
us, in interest, six times the amount loaned or advanced, and at the
expiration of that time she withdraws the principal itself. We pay
England a tax of at least three thousand million of dollars in a
century; for her loans to us are probably even larger than the amount
assumed. She commands the results of our labor to that extent, and gives
us not a cent of the results of her labor in return--for her principal
loaned represents her labor, and that we return to her intact. We are,
to that extent, her slaves,--"slaves without masters;" for she commands
and enjoys our labor, and is under none of the obligations of a
master--to protect, defend and provide for us.
Her superior skill in the mechanic arts, by means of free trade, taxes
or exploitates us quite as much as her capital. She exchanges her
comparatively light and skillful labor, for our hard, exposed and
unintellectual labor; and, in the general, compels us to labor three
hours for her, when she labors one for us. Thus, after deducting the
cost of the material, a yard of her cloth will exchange for an amount of
our cotton, corn or meat, that cost three times as much labor to produce
as her yard of cloth.
As in society, the skillful and professional tax or exploitate the
common laborer, by exchanging one hour of their light labor for many of
the common workingman's hard labor; as lawyers, doctors, merchants and
mechanics deal with day laborers, so England and New England treat us of
the South. This theory, and this alone, accounts for England's ability
to pay the interest on her national debt, and yet increase her wealth.
She effects it all by the immense profits of the exploitation of her
skill and capital; by the power which they give her to command labor,
and appropriate its results, without consideration, or for a very
partial consideration. She trades with the world, and exploitates it
all, except France. France sets the fashion, and this enables her to
exploitate England. England, in her trade with France, has to pay for
French fashions as well as French labor. In other words, France
possesses superior skill, and exploitates England by means of it. Labor,
not skill, is the just and equitable measure of values.
America sends her cotton, her surplus grain and meats, and other
agricultural products, and her California gold, to England, and gets
worse than nothing in return; for if she were compelled to produce at
home what she procures from England, she must cultivate a thousand
skillful and intellectual pursuits, instead of being, as she too much
is, confined to the coarse drudgery of common labor. The Southern States
of this Union are exploitated of their labor and their brains, in their
trade with England and New England. They produce nothing which we had
not better produce at home. Northern trade exploitates us. Trade further
South would enrich us and enlighten us; for we would manufacture for the
far South. We should become exploitators, instead of being exploitated.
When we were in New Haven, a distinguished abolitionist boasted to us
that mechanics received two dollars per day for their labor, and, by
their China trade, exchanged the products of one day's labor for twenty
days' labor of the Chinese, who worked for ten cents a day. The New
England mechanic was thus the master of twenty Chinese laborers, whose
labor he commanded for one of his own day's labor. Here was an instance
of individual, not of national exploitation. Well might China dread free
trade. It gives her taskmasters, who impoverish her people and depress
her civilization; for they, by their machinery and superior skill,
withdraw her people from a thousand mechanical pursuits that promoted
civilization.
In Sociology, we explained this subject synthetically: we have tried now
to expound it analytically.