REFORMS AS MUCH NEEDED IN AMERICA AND IN COLONIES AS IN EUROPE.
Answer to question, “How is Human Slavery to go
out?”--Insufficiency of mere Political Freedom--Accessibility of
Public Lands in new Countries their chief Advantage--Inadequacy of
Universal Suffrage without a Knowledge of Social Rights--America
falling into same Abyss as Europe.
Before resuming the subject of the foregoing propositions, we pray the
reader to bear in mind, that we are now arrived at that all-important
branch of our inquiry which proposes to answer the question, “How is
human slavery to be made to go out of the world?” To have shown how it
came in,--how it was propagated,--the varied phases it has assumed,
and the hideous, wide-spread proletarianism to which the conversion
of _chattel_-slavery into _wages_-slavery has given rise,--to have
shown all this, without at the same time essaying to show how the fell
monster is to be eradicated from the face of the earth, would be a
mere idle literary dissertation--a contemptible parade of erudition,
without object, without end. A higher purpose will, we trust, be
found to have dictated this inquiry. An earnest, heartfelt desire
to contribute our quota towards rescuing humanity from oppression
and sorrow is the motive we lay claim to. This motive it is which
impelled us, on the part of the National Reform League, to propose
the resolutions embodied in the last chapter. In those resolutions
we profess to answer the question, “How is human slavery to be made
to go out of the world?” It is true, their immediate application is
intended only for our own country; but they are equally applicable
to France, Germany, and every other “civilized” country--America
itself not excepted. America is comparatively free from most of the
political anomalies and exclusive privileges which disgrace Europe,
and degrade the vast numerical majority of its people. There are no
crowned heads there; there is no State Church. Some of the States have
public debts, but they are comparatively light, and, for the most
part, in course of easy liquidation. Moreover, there is no titled
aristocracy claiming, by hereditary right, to legislate for or govern
any of the States. In this respect, men of all grades and conditions
are equally eligible for office, and for places of trust, honour, and
emolument. Universal suffrage may be said to be the general rule, and
property qualifications the exception, for the election of members
of the legislature and officers of government. Treason works no
corruption of blood in America. There is no law of primogeniture or
entail; there is no religion established and maintained by law, and
consequently no legal bars to religious freedom. Taxation is, generally
speaking, equal, uniform, and direct. It was, before the civil war,
comparatively light, too; and when otherwise, the remedy lies with the
people themselves; for, as restrictions upon the suffrage by property
and tax-qualifications exist but in some few of the States (and in
these are not very onerous or stringent), the basis of representation
may, for all practical purposes, be considered _numerical_, and not
territorial or financial. Add to these advantages the fact that the
old common law of England is the common law of America; and that
where any departure from it is made by statute, it is invariably in a
democratic sense. Thus, in Texas and other States, for instance, that
part of the old common law which considers a married woman as dead in
law is abrogated by statute in favour of the gentle sex, and so as to
give her more power than she possesses under the civil law. Thus, any
property possessed by her before marriage remains at her sole disposal
after marriage, as also any property she may become entitled to during
coverture. She may receive from and give to her husband a deed of
conveyance whilst under coverture. And any deed of conveyance made by
the husband requires for its full validity the joint signature of the
wife. In some of the States, too, the homestead can never be taken in
execution of debt; and, at the moment we write, a powerful movement is
going on throughout the States to secure a similar exemption of the
homestead throughout the entire Union. These and other privileges--the
result of her political constitution--America fully enjoys. No European
state can compare with her in these respects--not even Norway or
Switzerland. In a word, America is already possessed of every political
amelioration contended for by the old Radicals of this country, or
by the financial or mere middle-class reformers of the present day.
Indeed, to assimilate us to America is their _summum bonum_--the _ne
plus ultra_ of their reforming aspirations.
Far be it from us to undervalue the political rights secured to the
Americans by their general and State constitutions. Nevertheless, we
unhesitatingly affirm that the foregoing propositions are no less
necessary for the extinction of slavery in America than in England,
France, or any other European country.
Our position is this: It is the land and money laws of a country that
must ever mainly determine the social condition of its people. In other
words, without just agrarian and commercial laws--laws that shall
establish for all classes equal rights in the soil and equal advantages
from the use of money and credit (so as to secure equitable exchange
in trade)--no country can be prosperous, be its form of government
what it may. Now, in these respects America has but little to boast
of over England, France, or any other European country. If she does
not exhibit the wide-spread distress that these countries exhibit, she
owes it not so much to the superiority of her political institutions
(for of these she has as yet but little availed herself), as she
does to her unbounded resources (in the extent and fertility of her
soil), and to the comparative exemption she enjoys from public and
private indebtedness owing to her being a new country. But for these
causes--but for the facility with which unappropriated land may be had,
and but for the fewness of her territorial and commercial aristocracy
as compared with those of older countries--her citizens would very soon
exhibit the same hideous extremes of rich and poor as are to be found
in Europe. Indeed, New York and some of the New England States (where
most of the land is appropriated, and the population crowded) have
already, on more than one occasion, exhibited all the worst features
of British “civilization”--that is to say, wholesale squalor and
destitution (with their necessary consequences) in close proximity to
teeming granaries and warehouses; otherwise, an unemployed labouring
population, in rags and hunger, within sight of merchant-princes and
master-manufacturers worth some hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
And why should it be otherwise? The social system is the same there as
here. Rents are higher in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, &c., than
in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Competition is the same or worse.
Wages-slavery is as rife in Massachusets, Pennsylvania, and New York
as in any part of the British Isles; and if wages be not quite as low
in Philadelphia and Lowell as they are in Manchester and Birmingham,
it is partly owing to the high protective duties laid on foreign
manufactures, partly to the comparative scarcity of hands, but chiefly
to the facility with which the victims of competition can escape from
the mills and factories to the backwoods of Indiana, Missouri, &c.
In other words, the Americans owe whatever advantage they have over
us not to any superiority in their _social_ institutions,--not to
better agrarian and commercial laws,--nor even to the acknowledged
superiority of their civil and religious system of polity,--but to
the territorial and other local advantages to which we have referred,
and which no more distinguish them than they do the people of Sydney,
Adelaide, Port Phillip, Natal, New Zealand, or any other new country
in which land is abundant and labour scarce. But let America (with her
present social system) come to be peopled as England is,--let her now
unappropriated land be made private property of, and her agrarian and
commercial laws remain what they are,--and we venture to say that not
one jot better off will her labouring population be than ours now is.
Universal suffrage might stem the aristocratic tide for a season (as it
has done in other new countries); but the men of land and money would
sweep away universal suffrage there, as they have ever done elsewhere,
the moment they found it incompatible with landlordism and usury. All
the principal States of Europe had universal suffrage a few years ago;
France alone possesses it now, and that with a tenure so insecure that
it can hardly be said to be established. In all the other States the
men of land and money destroyed universal suffrage by brute force; they
dispersed diets and national assemblies at the point of the bayonet,
and made rights and constitutions to disappear before the cannon of
disciplined assassins. It may be the same in France before six months.
It would have been the same long ere now, but that some two millions
of _social_ reformers were known to be ready to take advantage of the
event, in order to wreak vengeance upon the landed and commercial
villains who have defrauded them out of the fruits of three revolutions
purchased with torrents of blood.
In truth, universal suffrage is no guarantee at all for liberty,
unless it be accompanied, on the part of the working classes, with a
knowledge of their social rights, and a consequent determination to use
political power for their establishment. The Romans, the Spartans and
Athenians, the Sicilians, and many other ancient peoples had universal
suffrage--at least, a vote for every citizen who was not a helot or a
bondsman; but it proved of no use to them, for want of knowing their
social rights. For the like reason, the Irish made no good use of
their forty-shilling freehold vote, when they had it; and, for the
same reason, they offered no resistance when it was taken away. The
French people had universal suffrage in 1793. Their Convention of that
period was elected by universal suffrage; and the constitution it made
was far more democratic than the French constitution of 1848. But, not
understanding their social rights then so well as they do now, they
suffered their landlords and money-lords to rob them of it, just as
the old Romans, Athenians, &c., had allowed _their_ land and money
lords to do in their day. After the Convention had succeeded, with
the aid of the Parisian shopocracy, in murdering Robespierre and in
striking terror into all who, like him, loved justice and the people,
they not only abolished the democratic constitution of 1793 and put a
middle-class constitution in its place, but they actually decreed that
they (the Convention members) should constitute _two-thirds_ of the
next Legislative Assembly, and that the nation should be at liberty
to choose only the remaining third! Strange to say, too, the people
submitted to this, as to every other abomination of the times; they
submitted because the great mass of them were too profoundly ignorant
of their social rights to take much interest in the franchise question.
It ever was so, it ever will be so, with a people ignorant of their
social rights: they will never risk life or limb in defence of their
_political_ till they comprehend their _social_ rights.
In America there is less danger than anywhere else of the people losing
their political rights. This is owing partly to the greater equality in
property which subsists there, but chiefly to the agitation of _social_
questions which has been forced upon the working classes of late years
by the continuous arrival of European emigrants competing with them
in the labour-market, and alarming them, by their example, as to what
might prove their own fate hereafter, should they suffer a powerful
territorial and commercial aristocracy to grow up amongst them. Hence
the springing up of the “Free Soil” and “National Reform” movements
in the United States; hence an attempt to radicalize the constitution
of Rhode Island; hence the numerous publications which denounced the
sale of the public lands--especially to foreigners and companies; hence
the hatred of national debts--especially if they arise out of foreign
loans--and the determination of the working-classes to repudiate them;
and hence, above all, the cheering fact, so well deserving of our
notice, that every new revision of an American constitution--whether it
be that of a State or of the entire Union--is invariably distinguished
by an increase of strength or latitude given to the democratic
principle. This is particularly observable in the new States, where
the settlers, consisting in great part of exiles forced from Europe
by poverty and tyranny, have carried out with them an intense hatred
of the systems they fled from, and therefore take all the democratic
precautions they can to keep down the aristocratic leaven.
But not even America herself, we predict, will escape the _régime_ of
Europe, unless she reform her social institutions while she is yet
young and healthy. Her agrarian laws are not a jot better than those
of France or England; and her commercial spirit is even more ravenous
and unscrupulous. In one respect she is worse than either. We allude
to her preference of metallic money to symbolic money; which is a
result of the fraudulent paper-systems she has so often smarted under.
There is no subject upon which the American working-classes are so
lamentably at fault as the subject of money. They fancy that an honest
paper-system is impossible, because they have been so often cheated by
the worthless rags of fraudulent usurers; and in this suicidal delusion
the bullionists and usurers take good care to confirm them. Next to
their want of sound views upon the Land question, this delusion as to
the real nature and proper functions of Money is the greatest foe to
American progress. On the subject of _Credit_--that most potent of all
levers of modern production--the same ignorance prevails in America
as here and in France. In truth, were it not that universal suffrage
is the fundamental law in France and America, while it is scouted in
England, we should be at a loss to know what advantages the French
and Americans possess over us, so deplorably similar are the three
countries in respect of social rights.
But we shall better comprehend these matters when we come to analyze
the propositions of the National Reform League, and to test their value
by showing their equal applicability to, and desirability for, all
three countries,--indeed, for all civilized countries under the sun.
[Illustration: Decoration]