RELIEF TO UNEMPLOYED OR DESTITUTE A RIGHT, NOT A CHARITY.
Inability of a People ignorant of Social Rights to choose
Representatives--Duties of a wise Democracy--Omnipotency of a
Knowledge of Social Rights--Facility of Application of Social
Reforms--Exposition of the three Provisional Measures necessary.
We have stated, in a former chapter, that the repeal of unjust laws,
and the enactment of a few just and salutary ones, upon Land, Credit,
and Equitable Exchange (the latter including Currency), are all that
is wanted to terminate poverty and slavery for ever; and that nothing
is easier than for Parliament to enact such laws without infringing
the rights of private property, without confiscating to the value of a
shilling of any man’s estate, or otherwise dealing with property than
in the legitimate way of taxation and commutation which the laws of all
countries recognise and practise, and none more so than our own.
The resolutions which we have before cited show clearly how it may
be done. An honest Parliament is of course presupposed; for, without
an honest legislature to begin with, reform is all moonshine. The
first article of the League’s creed is, therefore, a full, free,
and fair representation of the whole people. To that end it demands
the enactment of the “People’s Charter”--not because it regards the
Charter’s plan of representation as perfect, but because that plan is
sufficiently so for all practical purposes, and because, having already
received the sanction of millions of the population, it would be unwise
and mischievous to risk dividing the people by the propounding of any
fresh scheme, the more especially as any defects in the “Charter” may
be easily enough remedied hereafter by a parliament or convention
elected upon Chartist principles.
But although the “People’s Charter” is a _sine qua non_ with the
League, it is, after all, but a machinery for providing the _means_
to an _end_. The _means_ is parliamentary reform; the _end_ is social
reform, or a reformation of society through the operation of just and
humane laws. The “Charter,” in fact, but aims at restoring to the
people the undoubted right of self-government--the right of making the
laws according to which, and to which only, they are to be ruled. It
leaves to the people themselves to do all the rest. It gives them the
power to elect what sort of representatives they choose, and to exact
from them what pledges they like in the way of social and political
reform. With the people themselves, however, it must ultimately rest
whether even the “People’s Charter” shall give them veritable political
and social rights.
If they know how to choose their legislators, and are resolute
to enforce the law, they will have both. But if, from ignorance,
corruption, or other causes, they know not how to make a proper choice,
they will but have escaped Scylla to fall into Charybdis, and, mayhap,
make bad worse. The very men they elect to save them may prove their
direst enemies. These, with the aid (out of doors) of the ignorant
and depraved of all classes, may accomplish the ruin of their best
friends, and then (as the French Convention did, after murdering
Robespierre) destroy universal suffrage itself, under pretence that it
had led to nothing but folly, blood, and crime. These are no imaginary
suppositions. We are but supposing for England, and the present time,
what has heretofore occurred in most other countries and in all times
under similar circumstances. A people ignorant of their true political
and social rights will never elect a Parliament of real political and
social reformers; they will only elect declaiming demagogues and crafty
adventurers, who will promise everything and perform nothing,--who,
professing to be doing everything for the people, will, in reality,
do nothing for them but make them stepping-stones to their own
aggrandisement, and who, as usual, beginning with frightening the
aristocracies of land and money, will end with compromising and going
shares with them for the public spoil, after establishing a reign of
terror over the people for their own conjoint security. How easily
might we demonstrate this by _à priori_ reasoning, were it necessary.
The history of all past revolutions, however, dispenses with any such
necessity. Indeed, the bare fact that universal suffrage is nowhere to
be found now-a-days amongst those ancient states and communities where
it formerly flourished is proof sufficient. A truly intelligent people
would ever remain a self-governing people. A people fully conscious of
the value of their political and social rights could never lose the
franchise. In the first place, they would so use it as to remove or
prevent the growth of those unnatural interests and institutes which
are incompatible with its free exercise and permanent security. In the
next place, they would use it to establish the social rights of the
people upon a basis as broad as the population itself. And, lastly,
they would so know how to appreciate the blessings of self-government,
from a consciousness that they owed their liberties and happiness
to no other source, that they would fight like lions, and die to a
man, rather than surrender their franchises. Such a people might be
exterminated; it could not be enslaved or disfranchised. Xerxes, with
his innumerable hordes, was not a match for a few thousand Greeks
inspired with the love of freedom. A Persian army could not force the
pass of Thermopylæ against three hundred freemen under Leonidas, till
treachery leagued with numbers for his overthrow; and even then the
handful of freemen had to be exterminated, because they could not be
taken alive, nor subdued to slavery. We have a still more striking
example of this in the present day. Of all the European States that
enjoyed universal suffrage a few years ago, France is now the only
one in which it survives. And why? Because France is the only one of
them in which a large proportion of the working-classes are imbued
with a knowledge of their _social_ rights, and consequently the only
one in which the working people are determined to maintain the right
of self-government by fire and sword, if necessary. In Prussia,
Austria, and in most of the German and Italian States the mass of
the people had heard little or nothing of their _social_ rights, and
consequently attached too little value to them to fight for them, or
for the political power through which alone they could be securely
established. Hence their comparative non-resistance to the overthrow of
their respective constitutions. It is otherwise in France. There, at
least two millions out of eight millions of adult males understand so
well the value of their political and social rights that Louis Napoleon
and his _bourgeoisie_ dared not overthrow universal suffrage by their
_coup d’état_. The upper and middle classes hate universal suffrage
quite as much in France as their feudal and money-grubbing brethren
hate it in England, Germany, and Italy. Nevertheless, they dared not
strike the blow, lest it should recoil fatally upon themselves. There
are full two millions of _social_ democrats in France who are resolved
to set the whole country in flames, and, if needs be, perish in the
conflagration, rather than suffer a traitorous conspiracy of landlords
and money-lords to put down their constitution by force. It is in the
stern determination of these two millions that rests the sole real
security for universal suffrage in France. The number of these social
democrats increases, too, every day with the spread of knowledge,
and with their greater experience of the baseness and perfidy of the
commercial villains who seek to eject them from the constitution, and
at whose instigations the present government is continually persecuting
their party, and seeking to goad it into premature insurrection in
order to create an occasion for establishing a pitiless military
despotism. With the increase of social democracy, increases the
security for universal suffrage. Every Social Democrat is essentially a
freeman in heart and soul, in conviction and sentiment. Such men will
fight when slaves would not. They were the freemen of Athens and Sparta
that overthrew the hordes of Xerxes. Had the helots and bondsmen been
sent against them, they would have succumbed to the barbarians, even as
they had to their own masters. The helots of Sparta and the bondsmen
of Athens knew nothing of _political_ and still less of _social_
rights. Hence did they all die, as they had lived, bondsmen and slaves.
For the same reason did the chattel-slaves of the ancient world live
and die in bondage for forty centuries before the Christian era. For
the same reason the serfs and _villains_ of the middle ages suffered
themselves to be _adscripti glebæ_, and quietly transferred from lord
to lord as estates changed hands, just the same as the other live
stock on the lands. For the same reason, and no other, were the modern
serfs of Russia, Poland, &c., no better off than their predecessors
of mediæval times; and precisely for the self-same reason are the
wages-slaves of modern “civilization” so tractable under a system
which, for real though disguised savagery, throws Oriental barbarism
and chattel-slavery completely into the shade.
Impressed with these convictions, the National Reform League sees no
hope for the successful establishment of the “Charter,” and for the
permanent enjoyment of its legitimate fruits, but in the diffusion,
amongst the people at large, of sound political and social knowledge.
Real _political_ they believe to be inseparable from real _social_
power, and the converse. To make the people appreciate universal
suffrage, we must teach them what they lose by the want of it, and
what they may fairly expect from a wise and legitimate use of it. In
answer to Sir Robert Peel and the House of Commons, we repudiate their
doctrine that legislation is not responsible for the sufferings of the
people; and the terms of our repudiation are made good in the seven
resolutions or propositions of the League.
What is, then, demanded in those seven propositions that is not within
the easy compass of a few acts of Parliament? What is there in them
incompatible with the acknowledged rights of individuals or with the
public peace or public security? In what respect can they endanger,
ever so remotely, life, liberty, property, religion, family, home, or
any other thing held sacred amongst men? On the contrary, do they not
go to secure all these with stronger guarantees than they can ever
derive from coercive laws or from the corruption of public opinion?
The “People’s Charter,” unaccompanied by the social reforms we demand,
might possibly prove a danger for all classes, through the poor, in
their ignorance, demanding what they had no right to, and through the
rich, in their selfishness, refusing everything to an enfranchised
people armed with power to take more than their own. But we challenge
the world to prove that the “Charter,” accompanied with the social
reforms we ask, could be a danger or an injustice to any class, or
that it could fail to work out the complete emancipation of the whole
people, politically, socially, morally, and intellectually.
What are the social reforms we demand? They may be classed under two
heads. The three first propositions demand reforms of a provisional
kind, to meet temporary evils. The remaining four are of a permanent
kind, to cure permanent evils. Resolution I. is as follows:--
“A repeal of our present wasteful and degrading system of poor-laws,
and a substitution of a just and efficient poor-law (based upon the
original Act of Elizabeth), which would centralize the rates, and
dispense them equitably and economically for the beneficial employment
and relief of the destitute poor. The rates to be levied only upon the
owners of every description of realized property. The employment to be
of a healthy, useful, and reproductive kind, so as to render the poor
self-sustaining and self-respecting. Till such employment be procured,
the relief of the poor to be, in all cases, promptly and liberally
administered as a right, and not grudgingly doled out as a boon; the
relief not to be accompanied with obduracy, insult, imprisonment in the
workhouses, separation of married couples, the breaking up of families,
or any such other harsh and degrading conditions as, under the present
system, convert relief into punishment, and treat the unhappy applicant
rather as a convicted criminal than as (what he really is) the victim
of an unjust and vitiated state of society.”
What is there unjust or impracticable in this proposition? Who ought,
by right, to support the poor? Clearly, those who have most profited by
their labour, and whose enormous revenues (derived from the aggregate
labour of the people every year, without yielding any equivalent) are
the main cause of so many labourers falling into pauperism. And who
are these? Clearly, the owners of _realised_ property,--the owners
of lands, houses, mines, collieries, turbaries, fisheries, docks,
wharfs, canals, bank-stock, railway-shares, consols, and every other
description of property yielding an annual income independently of any
labour or service or risk on the part of the proprietor. It is not
upon mechanics, tradesmen, or professional men who have but their own
exertions to trust to for a living, and who may or may not be worth
a groat, that the burden should fall. These parties are supposed to
render to society an equivalent for what they get, and consequently
ought not to be made responsible for keeping others whose poverty they
have not caused. At all events, it will be time enough to tax them
when they have realised something by their respective callings. But
as the others render to society no equivalent for their incomes, as
their incomes are purely and wholly the _creation of law_, and not of
their own labour or services, and as they are therefore the parties
who _make_ the poor, both common sense and common justice demand that
they should be made to _keep_ the poor, or at least enable the poor to
keep themselves by remunerative labour. Moreover, it was upon these
classes, and these only, that the original Act of Queen Elizabeth
contemplated the levies should fall. The 43rd Elizabeth extended the
rate to every other description of _realised_ property, as well as
mere _real_ property; but owing to the comparatively small amount of
_realised_ property (other than what falls within the legal description
of _real_) which existed in Elizabeth’s time, and for 150 years after,
and owing to the difficulty of ascertaining it for assessment purposes,
it escaped its due share of the burden; and, indeed, until about eight
years ago most people fancied that it was _real_ property only, and not
_realised_, that was contemplated in the original Act. The enormous
strides, however, that other descriptions of _realised_ property
(besides lands and houses) have made of late years have opened people’s
eyes to the true intent and purport of the Act; and hence moneymongers,
scrip-holders and annuitants must no longer expect to escape and throw
their burden upon shopkeepers, mechanics, and needy professionals.
In truth, it is not their interest to do so, unless they choose to risk
their all for the sake of a beggarly saving of a few pounds a year,
which they, of all others, ought least to begrudge the poor, their
especial victims. As to centralizing the rate, the selfish conduct of
landed proprietors and others has made such a step almost inevitable.
By preventing the building of cottages on their respective estates
in town and country, and by working the law of settlement to their
own selfish ends so as to debar the poor from having any legal claim
in their respective townships, they have so effectually overcrowded
some parishes with paupers, to spare their own, that nothing but a
centralised rate (to be dispensed according to the number of claimants
in each) can now restore justice as between parish and parish and
union and union. But let those who may entertain any doubt as to the
expediency or necessity of centralization but read Mr. Hutchinson’s
admirable work on the subject, and we think they will at once admit
that such an arrangement ought no longer to be deferred.
As to the liberal and kindly treatment we demand for the unemployed
and destitute poor, it is no more than a fraction of their right. If
they had _justice_ done them they would need no _charity_, and, till
justice is done them, we demand that their treatment shall be what our
resolution describes, and that it shall be considered their _right_,
and not grudgingly doled out as a boon.
Thus far for Resolution No. 1. In the following chapter we shall show
cause for Resolution No. 2.
[Illustration: Decoration]