which we express the aggregate normal functional activity of vegetable
and animal organisms necessarily differing in degree, if not in kind,
with each different organization? To talk of immortal life and yet to
admit the decay and destruction of the organization, is much the same as
to talk of a square circle. You link together two words which contradict
each other. The solution of the soul problem is not so difficult as many
imagine. The greatest difficulty is, that we have been trained to
use certain words as "God," "matter," "mind," "spirit," "soul,"
"intelligence," and we have been further trained to take these words as
representatives of realities, which, in fact, they do not represent. We
have to unlearn much of our school lore. We have specially to carefully
examine the meaning of each word we use. The question, lies in a
small compass. Is there one existence or more? Of one existence I am
conscious, because I am a mode of it. I know of no other existence. I
know of no existence but that existence of which I am a mode. I hold it
to be capable of producing every effect. It is for the man who alleges
that there is another, to prove it. I know of one existence. I do
not endeavor to demonstrate to you my existence, it needs no
demonstration--I am My existence is undeniable. I am speaking to you You
are conscious of my existence. You and I are not separate entities, but
modes of the same existence. We take cognizance of the existence which
is around us and in us, and which is the existence of which we are
modes. Of the one existence we are certain. It is for those who affirm
that the universe is "matter," and who affirm that there also exists
"spirit," to remember that they admit the one existence I seek to prove,
and that the onus lies on them to demonstrate a second existence--in
fact, to prove there is the other existence which they term spiritual.
There can not exist two different substances or existences having the
same attributes, or qualities. There can not be two existences of
the same essence, having different attributes, because it is by the
attributes alone that we can distinguish the existences. We can only
judge of the substance by its modes. We may find a variety of modes
of the same substance, and we shall find points of union which help to
identify them, the one with the other--the link which connects them with
the great whole. We can only judge of the existence of which we are a
part (in consequence of our peculiar organization) under the form of
a continuous chain of causes and effects--each effect a cause to the
effect it precedes, each cause an effect of the causative influence
which heralded its advent. The remote links of that line are concealed
by the darkness of the far off past. Nay, more than this, the mightiest
effort of mind can never say, _This is the first cause_. Weakness and
ignorance have said it--but why? To cloak their weakness, to hide
their ignorance. Knaves have said it--but why? To give scope to their
cunning, and to enable them to say to the credulous, "Thus far shalt
thou go and no farther." The termination is in the as yet unknowable
future; and I ask you, presumptuous men, who dare to tell me of God
and soul, of matter and creation--when possessed you the power to sunder
links of that great chain and write, "In the beginning?" I deny that by
the mightiest effort of the strongest intellect man can ever say of any
period, at this point substance began to be--before this existence was
not.
Has man a soul? You who tell me he has a soul, a soul independent
of material conditions, I ask you how it is that these immortal souls
strive with one another to get mortal benefits? Has man a soul? If
man's soul is not subject to material conditions, why do I find knavish
souls?--Why slavish souls?--tyrannous souls? Your doctrine that man has
a soul prevents him from rising. When you tell him that his soul is not
improvable by material conditions, you prevent him from making
himself better than he is. Man's intelligence is a consequence of his
organization. Organization is improvable, the intelligence becomes more
powerful as the organization is fully developed, and the conditions
which surround man are made more pure. And the man will become higher,
truer, and better when he knows that his intelligence is an attribute,
like other attributes, capable of development, susceptible of
deterioration, he will strive to effect the first and to guard against
the latter.
Look at the number of people putting power into the hands of one man,
because he is a lord--surely they have no souls. See the mass cringing
to a wretched idol--surely these have no souls. See men forming a
pyramid of which the base is a crushed and worn-out people, and the apex
a church, a throne, a priest, a king, and the frippery of a creed--have
those men souls? Society should not be such a pyramid, it should be
one brotherly circle, in which men should be linked together by a
consciousness that they are only happy so linked, conscious that when
the chain is broken, then the society and her peace is destroyed. What
we teach is not that man has a soul apart and independent of the body,
but that he has an ability, an intelligence, an attribute of his
body, capable of development, improvable, more useful, according as he
elevates himself and his fellows. Give up blind adhesion to creeds and
priests, strive to think and follow out in action the result of your
thoughts. Each mental struggle is an enlargement of your mind, an
addition to your brain power, an increase of your soul--the only soul
you have.
LABOR'S PRAYER.
"Give us this day our daily bread" is the entreaty addressed by the
tiller of the soil to the "Our Father," who has promised to answer
prayer. And what answer cometh from heaven to this the bread
winner's petition? Walk among the cotton workers of Lancashire,
the cloth-weavers of Yorkshire, the Durham pitmen, the Staffordshire
puddlers, the Cornish miners, the London dock laborers, go anywhere
where hands are roughened with toil, where foreheads are bedewed with
sweat of work, and see the Lord's response to the prayer, the father's
answer to his children! The only bread they get is the bread they take;
in their hard struggle for life-sustenance the loaves come but slowly,
and heaven adds not a crust, even though the worker be hungry, when he
rises from his toil-won meal. Not even the sight of pale-faced wife, and
thin forms of half-starved infants can move to generosity the Ruler of
the world. The laborer may pray, but, if work be scant and wages low, he
pines to death while praying. His prayer gives no relief, and misery's
answer is the mocking echo to his demand.
It is said by many a pious tongue that God helps the poor; the
wretchedness of some of their hovel houses, found alas! too often,
in the suburbs of our wealthiest cities, grimy black, squalid,
and miserable; the threadbare raggedness of their garments; the
unwholesomeness of the food they eat; the poisoned air they breathe in
their narrow wynds and filthy alleys; all these tell how much God helps
the poor. Do you want to see how God helps the poor? go into any police
court when some little child-thief is brought up for hearing; see him
shoeless, with ragged trousers, threadbare, grimy, vest hardly hanging
to his poor body, shirt that seems as though it never could have been
white, skin dull brown with dirt, hair innocent of comb or brush,
eye ignorantly, sullenly-defiant, yet downcast; born poor, born wretched,
born in ignorance, educated among criminals, crime the atmosphere in
which he moved; and society his nurse and creator, is now virtuously
aghast at the depravity of this its own neglected nursling, and a poor
creature whom God alone hath helped. Go where the weakly wife in a
narrow room huddles herself and little children day after day; and where
the husband crowds in to lie down at night; they are poor and honest,
but their honesty bars not the approach of disease, fever, sorrow,
death--God helps not the line of health to their poor wan cheeks. Go
to the county workhouse in which is temporarily housed the wornout farm
laborer, who, while, strength enough remained, starved through weary
years with wife and several children on eight shillings per week--it
is thus God helps the poor. And the poor are taught to pray for a
continuance of this help, and to be thankful and content to pray that
to-morrow may be like to-day, thankful that yesterday was no worse than
it was, and content that to-day is as good as it is. Are there many
repining at their miseries, the preacher, with gracious intonation,
answers rebukingly that God, in his wisdom, has sent these troubles
upon them as chastisement for their sins. So, says the church, all
are sinners, rich its well as poor; but rich sinners feel that the
chastising rod is laid more lightly on their backs than it is upon those
of their meaner brethren. Weekday and Sunday it is the same contrast;
one wears fustian, the other broadcloth; one prepares for heaven in the
velvet cushioned pew, the other on the wooden benches of the free seats.
In heaven it will be different--all there above are to wear crowns of
gold and fine linen, and, therefore, here below the poor man is to be
satisfied with the state of life into which it has pleased God to
call him. The pastor, who tells him this, looks upon the laborer as an
inferior animal, and the laborer by force of habit regards the landowner
and peer, who patronizes his endeavors, as a being of a superior order.
Is there no new form of prayer that labor might be taught to utter, no
other power to which his petition might be addressed? Prayer to the
unknown for aid gives no strength to the prayer. In each beseeching he
loses dignity and self-reliance, he trusts to he knows not what, for an
answer which cometh he knows not when, and mayhap may never come at all.
Let labor pray in the future in another fashion and at another altar.
Let laborer pray to laborer that each may know labor's rights, and be
able to fulfill labor's duties. The size of the loaf of daily bread must
depend on the amount of the daily wages, and the laborer must pray for
better wages. But his prayer must take the form of earnest, educated
endeavor to obtain the result desired. Let workmen, instead of praying
to God in their distress, ask one another why are wages low? how can
wages be raised? can we raise our own wages? having raised them, can
we keep them fixed at the sum desired? What causes produce a rise and
fall in wages? are high wages beneficial to the laborer? These are
questions the pulpit has no concern with. The reverend pastor will tell
you that the "wages of sin is death," and will rail against "filthy
lucre;" but he has no inclination for answering the queries here
propounded. Why are wages low? Wages are low because the wage-winners
crowd too closely. Wages are low because too many seek to share one
fund. Wages are lower still because the laborer fights against unfair
odds; the laws of the country, overriding the laws of humanity, have
been enacted without the laborer's consent, although his obedience to
them is enforced. The fund is unfairly distributed as well as too widely
divided. Statutes are gradually being modified, and the working man may
hope for ampler justice from the employer in the immediate future than
was possible in the past, but high and healthy wages depend on the
working man himself. Wages can be raised by the work-ing classes
exercising a moderate degree of caution in increasing their numbers.
Wages must increase when capital increases more rapidly than population,
and it is the duty of the working man, therefore, to take every
reasonable precaution to check the increase of population and to
accelerate the augmentation of capital.
Can working-men, by combination, permanently raise the rate of wages?
One gentleman presiding at a meeting of the National Association for the
Promotion of Social Science for the discussion of the labor question,
very fairly said, "It is not in the power of the men alone, or of the
masters alone, or of both combined, to say what shall be the amount of
wages at any particular time in any trade or country. The men and the
masters are, at most, competitors for the division, at a certain rate,
of a certain fund, provided by [themselves and] others--that is, by the
consumers. If that fund is small, no device can make the rate of profit
or rate of wages higher." This is in theory quite correct, if it means
that no device can make the total divisible greater than it is, but not
if it refers to the increase of profit or wages by partial distribution.
In practice, although it is true that if the fund be small and the
seekers to share it be many, the quotient to each must be necessarily
very small, yet it is also true that a few of the competitors--_i.e._
the capitalists, may and do absorb for their portions of profits an
improper and unfairly large amount, thus still further reducing
the wretchedly small pittance in any case receivable by the mass of
laborers. It is warmly contended that the capitalist and laborer contend
for division of the fund appropriable in fair and open field; that the
capitalist has his money to employ, the man his labor to sell; that
if workmen are in excess of the capitalist's requirements, so that the
laborer has to supplicate for employment, wages can not rise, and will
probably fall; but that if, on the contrary, capital has need to invite
additional laborers, then wages must rise. That is the law of supply and
demand brought prominently forward. In great part this is true, but it
is not true that capital and labor compete in fair and open field, any
more than it is true that an iron-clad war vessel, with heavy ordnance,
would compete in fair field with a wooden frigate, equipped with the
material in use thirty years ago. Capital is gold-plated, and carries
too many guns for unprotected labor.
The intelligent capitalist makes the laws affecting master and servant,
which the uneducated laborer must obey, but has no effective voice to
alter. The capitalist forms the government of the country, which in
turn protects capital against labor; this government the laborer must
sustain, and dares not modify. The capitalist does combine, and
has combined, and the result of this combination has been an unfair
appropriation of the divisible fund. Why should not the laborer combine
also? The answer is truly that no combination of workmen can increase
the rate of wages, if at the same time the number of laborers increases
more rapidly than the capital out of which their wages must be paid.
But the men may combine to instruct one another in the laws of political
economy; they may combine to apply their knowledge of those laws to the
contracts between employer and employed. They may combine to compel the
repeal of unjust enactments under which an unfair distribution of the
labor fund is not only possible but certain. Organizations of laborers
are, therefore, wise and necessary; the object of such organizations
should be the permanent elevation and enfranchisement of the members. No
combination of workmen, which merely dictates a temporary cessation
from labor, can ultimately and permanently benefit the laborer; while it
certainly immediately injures him and deteriorates his condition,
making his home wretched, his family paupers. Nor can even co-operative
combination, praiseworthy as it certainly is, to procure for the laborer
a larger share of the profits of his labor permanently benefit him,
except in so far that temporarily alleviating his condition, and giving
him leisure for study, it enables him to educate himself; unless, at the
same time, the co-operator is conscious that the increase or reduction
in the amount of wages depends entirely on the ratio of relation
preserved between population and its means of subsistence, the former
always having a tendency to increase more rapidly than the latter. It
is with the problem of too many mouths for too little bread that the
laborer has really to deal: if he must pray, it should be for more bread
and for fewer mouths. The answer often given by the workman himself to
the advocate of Malthusian views is, that the world is wide enough for
all, that there are fields yet unplowed broad enough to bear more corn
than man at present could eat, and that there is neither too little
food nor are there too many mouths; that there is, in fact, none of that
over-population with which it is sought to affright the working man.
Over-population in the sense that the whole world is too full to contain
its habitants, or that it will ever become too full to contain them,
is certainly a fallacy, but overpopulation is a lamentable truth in
its relative sense. We find evidences of over-population in every old
country of the world. The pest of over-population is the existence of
poverty, squalor, wretchedness, disease, ignorance, misery, and crime.
Low rate of wages, and food dear, here you have two certain indices of
relative over-population. Wages depending on the demand for and supply
of laborers, wherever wages are low it is a certain sign that there are
too many candidates for employment in that phase of the labor market.
The increased cost of production of food, and its consequent higher
price, also mark that the cultivation has been forced, by the numbers of
the people to descend to less productive soils. Poverty is the test and
result of over-population.
It is not against some possible increase of their numbers, which may
produce possibly greater affliction, that the working men are entreated
to agitate. It is against the existing evils which afflict their ranks,
evils alleged by sound students of political economy to have already
resulted from inattention to the population question, that the energies
of the people are sought to be directed, The operation of the law of
population has been for centuries entirely ignored by those who have
felt its adverse influence most severely. It is only during the last
thirty years that any of the working classes have turned their attention
to the question; and only during the last few years that it has to any
extent been discussed among them. Yet all the prayers that labor ever
uttered since the first breath of human life, have not availed so much
for human happiness as will the earnest examination by one generation
of this, the greatest of all social questions, the root of all political
problems, the foundation of all civil progress. Poor, man must be
wretched. Poor, he must be ignorant. Poor, he must be criminal; and poor
he must be till the cause of poverty has been ascertained by the poor
man himself and its cure planned by the poor man's brain, and effected
by the poor man's hand.
Outside his own rank none can save the poor. Others may show him the
abyss, but he must avoid its dangerous brink himself. Others may point
out to him the chasm, but he must build his own bridge over. Labor's
prayer must be to labor's head for help from labor's hand to strike
the blow that severs labor's chain, and terminates the too long era of
labor's suffering.
During the last few years our daily papers, and various periodicals,
magazines, and reviews have been more frequently, and much less
partially, devoted than of old to the discussion of questions relating
to the laborer's condition, and the means of ameliorating it. In the
Legislative Assembly debates have taken place which would have been
impossible fifty years since. Works on political economy are now more
easily within the reach of the working man than they were some years
ago. People's editions are now published of treatises on political
economy which half a century back the people were unable to read. It
is now possible for the laborer, and it is the laborer's duty, to make
himself master of the laws which govern the production and distribution
of wealth. Undoubtedly there is much grievous wrong in the mode of
distribution of wealth, by which the evils that afflict the poorest
stragglers are often specially and tenfold aggravated. The monopoly of
land, the serf state of the laborer, are points requiring energetic
agitation. The grave and real question is, however, that which lies at
the root of all, the increase of wealth as against the increase of those
whom it subsists. The leaders of the great trades unions of the country,
if they really desire to permanently increase the happiness of the
classes among whom they exercise influence, can speedily promote this
object by encouraging their members to discuss freely the relations of
labor to capital; not moving in one groove, as if labor and capital
were necessarily antagonistic, and that therefore labor must always have
rough-armed hand to protect itself from the attacks of capital; but,
taking new ground, to inquire if labor and capital are bound to each
other by any and what ties, ascertaining if the share of the laborer
in the capital fund depends, except so far as affected by inequality in
distribution, on the proportion between the number of laborers and the
amount of the fund. The discussing, examining, and dealing generally
with these topics, would necessarily compel the working man to a more
correct appreciation of his position.
Any such doctrine as that "the poor shall never cease out of the land;"
or that we are to be content with the station in life into which it has
pleased God to call us; or that we are to ask and we shall receive,
must no longer avail. Schiller most effectively answers the advocates of
prayer:
"Help, Lord, help!
Look with pity down!
A paternoster pray;
What God does, that is justly done,
His grace endures for aye."
"Oh, mother! empty mockery,
God hath not justly dealt by me:
Have I not begged and prayed in vain;
What boots it now to pray again?"
Labor's only and effective prayer must be in life action for its own
redemption; action founded on thought, crude thought, and sometimes
erring at first, but ultimately developed into useful thinking, by much
patient experimenting for the right and true.
POVERTY: ITS EFFECTS ON THE POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE.
"Political Economy does not itself instruct how to make a nation rich,
but whoever would be qualified to judge of the means of making a nation
rich must first be a political economist."--John Stuart Mill.
"The object of political economy is to secure the means of subsistence
of all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which might render
this precarious, to provide everything necessary for supplying the wants
of society, and to employ the inhabitants so as to make the interests
accord with their supplying each other's wants."--Sir James Stewart.
On one occasion in the world's history, a people rose searching for
upright life, who had previously, for several generations, depressed by
poverty and its attendant hand-maidens of misery, prowled hunger-striken
and disconsolate, stooping and stumbling through the byways of
existence. A mighty revolution resulted in much rough justice and some
brutal vengeance, much rude right, and some terrific wrong. Among the
writers who have since narrated the history of this people's struggle,
some penmen have been assiduous and hasty to search for, and chronicle
the errors, and have even not hesitated to magnify the crimes of the
rebels; while they have been slow to recognize the previous demoralizing
tendency of the system rebelled against. In this pamphlet it is proposed
to very briefly deal with the state of the people in France immediately
prior to the grand convulsion which destroyed the Bastile Monarchy, and
set a glorious example of the vindication of the rights of man against
opposition the most formidable that can be conceived; believing that
even in this slight illustration of the condition of the masses in
France who sought to erect on the ruins of arbitrary power the glorious
edifice of civil and religious liberty, an answer may be found to the
question: "What is the effect of poverty on the political condition of
the people."
In taking the instance of France, it is not that the writer for one
moment imagines that poverty is a word without meaning in our own lands.
The clamming factory hands in the Lancanshire valleys, the distressed
ribbon weavers of Conventry, and the impoverished laborers in various
parts of Ireland and Scotland would be able to give us a definition of
the word fearful in its distinctness. But in England poverty is happily
partial, while in France in the eighteenth century poverty was universal
outside the palaces of the nobles and the mansions of the church, where
luxury, voluptuousness, and effeminacy were regnant. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries travelers in France could learn from "the
sadness, the solitude, the miserable poverty, the dismal nakedness of
the empty cottages, and the starving, ragged population, how much men
could endure without dying." On the one side a discontented, wretched,
hungry mass of tax-providing slaves, and on the other a rapacious,
pampered, licentious, spendthrift monarchy. This culminated in the
refusal of the laborers to cultivate the fertile soil because, the
tax-gatherer's rapacity left an insufficient remnant to provide
the cultivator with the merest necessaries of life. Then followed
"uncultivated fields, unpeopled villages, and houses dropping to decay;"
the great cities--as Paris, Lyons, and Bordeaux--crowded with begging
skeletons, frightful in their squallid disease and loathsome aspect.
Even after the National Assembly had passed some measures of temporary
alleviation, the distress in Paris itself was so great that at the
gratuitious distributions of bread "old people have been seen to expire
with their hand stretched out to receive the loaf, and women waiting in
their turn in front of the baker's shop were prematurely delivered of
dead children in the open streets." The great mass of the people were as
ignorant as they were poor; were ignorant indeed because they were poor.
Ignorance is the pauper's inalienable heritage. When the struggle is
for the means of subsistence, and these are only partially obtained,
there is little hope for the luxury of a leisure hour in which other
emotions can be cultivated than those of the mere desires for food and
rest--sole results of the laborious monotonousness of machine work; a
round of toil and sleep closing in death--the only certain refuge for
the worn out laborer. Without the opportunity afforded by the possession
of more than will satisfy the immediate wants, there can be little or no
culture of the mental faculties. The toiler badly paid and ill-fed, is
separated from the thinker. Nobly-gifted, highly-cultured though the
poet may be, his poesy has no charms for the father to whom one hour's
leisure means short food for his hungry children clamoring for bread.
The picture gallery, replete with the finest works of our greatest
masters, is forbidden ground to the pitman, the plowman, the poor
pariahs to whom the conceptions of the highest art-treasures are
impossible. The beauties of nature are almost equally inaccessible to
the dwellers in the narrow lanes of great cities. Out of your narrow
wynds in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and on to the moor and mountain-side, ye
poor, and breathe the pure life-renewing breezes. Not so; the moors are
for the sportsmen and peers, not peasants; and a Scotch Duke--emblem
of the worst vices of a corrupt and selfish, but fast-decaying House of
Lords--closes miles of heather against the pedestrian's foot. But
even this paltry oppression is unneeded. Duke Despicable is in unholy
alliance with King Poverty, who mocks at the poor mother and her
wretched, ragged family, when from the garret or cellar in a great
Babylon wilderness they set out to find green fields and new life.
Work days are sacred to bread, and clothes, and rent; hunger, inclement
weather, and pressing landlord forbid the study of nature 'twixt Monday
morn and Saturday night, and on Sunday God's ministers require to
teach a weary people how to die, as if the lesson were not unceasingly
inculcated in their incessant toil. Oh! horrid mockery; men need
teaching how to live. According to religionists, this world's bitter
misery is a dark and certain preface, "just published," to a volume of
eternal happiness, which for 2,000 years has been advertised as in the
press and ready for publication, but which after all may never appear.
And notwithstanding that every-day misery is so very potent, mankind
seem to heed it but very little. The second edition of a paper
containing the account of a battle in which some 5,000 were killed and
10,000 wounded, is eagerly perused, but the battle in which poverty
kills and maims hundreds of thousands, is allowed to rage without the
uplifting of a weapon against the common enemy.
The poor in France were awakened by Rousseau's startling declaration
that property was spoliation, they knew they had been spoiled, the logic
of the stomach was conclusive, empty bellies and aching brains were the
predecessors of a revolution which sought vengeance when justice was
denied, but which full-stomached and empty-headed Tories of later days
have calumniated and denounced.
Warned by the past, ought we not to-day to give battle to that curse of
all old countries--poverty? The fearful miseries of the want of food
and leisure which the poor have to endure are such as to seriously
hinder their political enfranchisement. Those who desire that men and
women shall have their rights of citizens, should be conscious how low
the poor are trampled down, and how incapable poverty renders them for
the performance of the duties of citizenship. So that the question of
political freedom is really determined by the wealth or poverty of the
masses; to this extent, at any rate, that a poverty-stricken people
must necessarily, after that state of pauperism has existed for several
generations, be an ignorant and enslaved people.
The problem is, how to remove poverty, as it is only by the removal of
poverty that the political emancipation of the nation can be rendered
possible. It has been ascertained that the average food of the
agricultural laborer in England is about half that alloted by the jail
dietary to sustain criminal life. So that the peasant who builds and
guards his master's haystack gets worse fed and worse lodged than the
incendiary convicted for burning it down.
How can this poverty be removed and prevented?
I quote the reply from one who has written most elaborately in
elucidation of the views of Malthus and Mill: "There is but one possible
mode of preventing any evil--namely, to seek for and remove its cause.
The cause of low wages, or in other words of Poverty, is overpopulation;
that is, the existence of too many people in proportion to the food,
of too many laborers in proportion to the capital. It is of the very
first importance that the attention of all who seek to remove poverty
should never be diverted from this great truth. The disproportion
between the numbers and the food is the _only real cause_ of social
poverty. Individual cases of poverty may be produced by individual
misconduct, such as drunknness, ignorance, laziness, or disease; but
these and all other accidental influences must be wholly thrown out
of the question in considering the permanent cause, and aiming at the
prevention of poverty. Drunknness and ignorance, moreover, are far more
frequently the _effect_ than the cause of poverty. Population and food,
like two runners of unequal swiftness chained together, advance side by
side; but the ratio of increase of the former is so immensely superior
to that of the latter, that it is necessarily greatly _checked_; and the
checks are of course either more deaths or fewer births--that is, either
positive or preventive."
Unless the _necessity_ of the preventive or positive checks to
population be perceived; unless it be clearly seen, that they must
operate in one form, if not in another; and that _though individuals
may escape them, the race can not_; human society is a hopeless and
insoluble riddle.
Quoting John Stuart Mill, the writer from whom the foregoing extracts
have been made, proceeds:
"The great object of statesmanship should be to raise the habitual
standard of comfort among the working classes, and to bring them into
such a position as shows them most clearly that their welfare depends
upon themselves. For this purpose he advises that there should be,
first, an extended scheme of national emigration, so as to produce a
striking and sudden improvement in the condition of the laborers left
at home, and raise their standard of comfort; also that the population
truths should be disseminated as widely as possible, so that a powerful
public feeling should be awakened among the working classes against
undue procreation on the part of any individual among them--a feeling
which could not fail greatly to influence individual conduct; and also
that we should use every endeavor to get rid of the present system of
labor--namely, that of employers, and employed, and adopt to a great
extent that of independent or associated industry. His reason for this
is, that a hired laborer, who has no personal interest in the work he
is engaged in, is generally reckless and without foresight, living
from hand to mouth, and exerting little control over his powers of
procreation; whereas the laborer who has a personal stake in his work,
and the feeling of independence and self-reliance which the possession
of property gives, as, for instance, the peasant proprietor, or member
of a copartnership, has far stronger motives for self-restraint, and can
see much more clearly the evil effects of having a large family."
The end in view in all this is the attainment of a greater amount of
happiness for humankind. The rendering life more worth the living, by
distributing more equally than at present its love, its beauties, and
its charms. In one of his most recent publications, Mr. John Stuart Mill
observes:
"In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and
so much also to correct and improve, every one who has a moderate amount
of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which
may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws,
or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the
sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find tins
enviable existence, if he escape the positive evils of life, the great
sources of physical and mental suffering, such as indigence, disease,
and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of
affection. Yet no one whose opinion deserves a moment's consideration,
can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in
themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be
in the end reduced within narrow limits. Poverty, in any sense implying
suffering, may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society,
combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. Even that
most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in
dimensions by good physical and moral education and proper control of
noxious influences, while the progress of science holds out a promise
for the future of still more direct conquests over this detestable foe."
In a former pamphlet, "Jesus, Shelly, and Malthus," the reader's
attention was entreated to this grave question. In a few pages it is
impossible to do more than erect a fingerpost to point out a possible
road to a given end. To attempt in a narrow compass to give complete
details, would be as unwise as it would be unavailing. My desire is
rather to provoke discussion among the masses than to obtain willing
auditors among the few, and I affirm it, therefore, as a proposition
which I am prepared to support, "That the political conditions of the
people can never be permanently reformed until the cause of poverty has
been discovered and the evil itself prevented and removed."
WHY DO MEN STARVE?
Why is it that human beings are starved to death, in a wealthy country
like England, with its palaces, its cathedrals, and its abbeys; with its
grand mansions, and luxurious dwellings, with its fine inclosed parks,
and strictly guarded preserves; with its mills, mines, and factories;
with its enormous profits to the capitalist; and with its broad acres
and great rent rolls to the landholder? The feet that men, old, young,
and in the prime of life; that women, and that children, do so die, is
indisputable. The paragraph in the daily journals, headed "Death from
Starvation," or "Another Death from Destitution," is no uncommon one to
the eyes of the careful reader.
In a newspaper of one day, December 24, 1864, may be read the verdict
of a London jury that "the deceased, Robert Bloom, died from the mortal
effects of effusion on the brain and disease of the lungs, arising from
natural causes, but the said death was accelerated by destitution, and
by living in an ill-ventilated room, and in a court wanting in sanitary
requirements;" and the verdict of another jury, presided over by the
very Coroner who sat on the last case, "that the deceased, Mary Hale,
was found dead in a certain room from the mortal effects of cold and
starvation;" as also the history of a poor wanderer from the Glasgow
City Poor House found dead in the snow.
In London, the hive of the world, with its merchant millionaires, even
under the shadow of the wealth pile, starvation is as busy as if in
the most wretched and impoverished village; busy, indeed, not always
striking the victim so obtrusively that the coroner's inquest shall
preserve a record of the fact, but more often busy quietly, in the
wretched court and narrow lane, up in the garret, and down in the
cellar, stealing by slow degrees the life of the poor.
Why does it happen that Christian London, with its magnificent houses
for God, has so many squalid holes for the poor? Christianity from its
thousand pulpits teaches, "Ask and it shall be given to you," "who if
his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?" yet with much prayer the
bread is too frequently not enough, and it is, alas! not seldom that the
prayer for bread gets the answer in the stone of the paved street, where
he lays him down to die. The prayer of the poor outcast is answered
by hunger, misery, disease, crime and death, and yet the Bible says,
"Blessed be ye poor."' Ask the orthodox clergyman why men starve, why
men are poor and miserable; he will tell you that it is God's will; that
it is a punishment for man's sins. And so long as men are content to
believe that it is God's will that the majority of humankind should have
too little happiness, so long will it be impossible effectually to get
them to listen to the answer to this great question.
Men starve because the great bulk of them are ignorant of the great
law of population, the operation of which controls their existence and
determines its happiness or misery. They starve because pulpit teachers
have taught them for centuries to be content with the state of life in
which it has pleased God to call them, instead of teaching them how to
extricate themselves from the misery, degradation, and ignorance which a
continuance of poverty entails.
Men starve because the teachers have taught heaven instead of earth, the
next world instead of this. It is now generally admitted by those who
have investigated the subject that there is a tendency in all animated
life to increase beyond the nourishment nature produces. In the human
race, there is a constant endeavor on the part of its members to
increase beyond the means of subsistence within their reach. The want
of food to support this increase operates, in the end, as a positive
obstacle to the further spread of population, and men are starved
because the great mass of them have neglected to listen to one of
nature's clearest teachings. The unchecked increase of population is in
a geometrical ratio, the increase of food for their subsistence is in
an arithmetical ratio. That is, while humankind would increase in
proportion as 1, 2, 4, 8,16, 32, 64, 128, 256, food would only increase
as 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. The more the mouths the less the proportion
of food. While the restraint to an increase of population is thus a want
of food, and starvation is the successful antagonist of struggling human
life, it is seldom that this obstacle operates immediately--its dealing
is more often indirectly against its victims. Those who die of actual
famine are few indeed compared with those who die from various forms of
disease, induced by scarcity of the means of subsistence. If any of my
readers doubt this, their doubts may be removed by a very short series
of visits to the wretched homes of the paupers of our great cities.
Suicide is the refuge mainly of those who are worn out in a bitter,
and, to them, a hopeless struggle against accumulated ills. Disease,
suffering, and misery are the chief causes of the prevalence of
suicide in our country, and suicide is therefore one form, although
comparatively minute, in which the operation of the law of population
may be traced.
From dread of the pangs of poverty, men, women, and children are driven
to unwholesome occupations, which destroy not only the health of the man
and woman actually employed, but implant the germs of physical disease
in their offspring. A starving woman seeking food mixes white lead with
oil and turpentine for a paltry pittance, which provides bare existence
for her and those who share it; in a few weeks, she is so diseased she
can work no longer, and the hospital and grave in turn receive her.
Men and women are driven to procure bread by work in lead mines; they
rapidly dig their own graves, and not alone themselves, but their
wretched offspring, are death-stricken as the penalty; the lead poisons
the blood of parent and child alike. Young women and children work
at artificial flower-making, and soon their occupation teaches that
Scheele's and Schweenfurth green, bright and pleasing colors to the eye,
are death's darts too often fatally aimed.
The occupation may be objected to as unhealthy; but the need for food is
great, and the woman's or child's wages, wretchedly little though they
are, yet help to fill the mouths at home: so the wage is taken till the
worker dies. Here, again, the checks to an increase of population all
stop short of starvation--the victims are poisoned instead of starved.
So where some forty or fifty young girls are crowded into a badly
ventilated work-room, not large enough for half the number, from early
in the morning till even near midnight, when orders press; or in some
work-room where slop clothes are made, and twenty-five tailors are
huddled together in a little parlor scarce wide enough for three--they
work to live, and die slowly while they work. They are not starved, but
is this sort of asphyxiation much better? The poor, are not only driven
to unhealthy, but also to noisome, dwellings. There are in London,
Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, and other large cities,
fearful alleys, with wretched houses, and small ill-ventilated rooms,
each room containing a family, the individuals of which are crowded
together under conditions so wretched that disease, and often speedy
death, is the only possible result. In the East of London, ten, eleven,
and, in some cases, fourteen persons have been found sleeping in one
wretched little room. Is it wonderful that some of these misery-stricken
ones die before they have time to starve? From poverty the mother,
obliged to constantly work that the miserable pittance she gets may
yield enough to sustain bare life, is unable properly to nurse and care
for baby-child, and often quick death, or slow but certain disease,
ending ultimately in the grave, is the result.
The poor live by wages. Wages popularly signify the amount of money
earned by the laborer in a given time; but the real value of the
money-wages is the amount in quantity and quality of the means of
subsistence which the laborer can purchase with that money. Wages may
be nominally high, but really low, if the food and commodities to be
purchased are, at the same time, dear in price. An undue increase
of population reduces wages in more than one way; it reduces them in
effect, if not in nominal amount, by increasing the price of the food
to be purchased; and it also reduces the nominal amount, because the
nominal amount depends on the amount of capital at disposal for employ,
and the number of laborers seeking employment. No remedies for low
wages, no scheme for the prevention and removal of poverty, can ever be
efficacious until they operate on and through the minds and habits of
the masses.
It is not from rich men that the poor must hope for deliverance from
starvation. It is not to charitable associations the wretched must
appeal. Temporary alleviation of the permanent evil is the best that can
be hoped for from such aids. It is by the people that the people must be
saved. Measures which increase the dependence of the poor on charitable
aid can only temporarily benefit one portion of the laboring class while
injuring another in the same proportion; and charity, if carried far,
must inevitably involve the recipients in ultimate ruin and degradation
by destroying their mutual self-reliance. The true way to improve the
worker, in all cases short of actual want of the necessaries of life,
is to throw him entirely on his own resources, but at the same time to
teach him how he may augment those resources to the utmost. It is only
by educating the ignorant poor to a consciousness of the happiness
possible to them, as a result of their own exertions, that you can
induce them effectually to strive for it. But, alas! as Mr. Mill justly
observes, "Education is not compatible with extreme poverty. It is
impossible effectually to teach an indigent population." The time
occupied in the bare struggle to exist leaves but few moments and fewer
opportunities for mental cultivation to the very poor.
The question of wages and their relation to capital and population, a
question which interests a poor man so much, is one on which he formerly
hardly ever thought at all, and on which even now he thinks much too
seldom. It is necessary to impress on the laborer that the rate of wages
depends on the proportion between population and capital. If population
increases without an increase of capital, wages fall; the number or
competitors in the labor market being greater, and the fund to provide
for them not having increased proportionately, and, if capital increases
without an increase of population, wages rise. Many efforts have been
made to increase wages, but none of them can be permanently successful
which do not include some plan for preventing a too rapid increase
of laborers. Population has a tendency to increase, and has increased
faster than capital; this is evidenced by the poor and miserable
condition of the great body of the people in most of the old countries
of the world, a condition which can only be accounted for upon one of
two suppositions, either that there is a natural tendency in population
to increase faster than capital, or that capital has, by some means,
been prevented from increasing as rapidly as it might have done. That
population has such a tendency to increase that, unchecked, it would
double itself in a small number of years--say twenty-five--is a
proposition which most writers of any merit concur in, and which may be
easily proven. In some instances, the increase has been even still more
rapid. That capital has not increased sufficiently is evident from
the existing state of society. But that it could increase under any
circumstances with the same rapidity as is possible to population is
denied. The increase of capital is retarded by an obstacle which does
not exist in the case of population.. The augmentation of capital is
painful. It can only be effected by abstaining from immediate enjoyment.
In the case of augmentation of population precisely the reverse obtains.
There the temporary and immediate pleasure is succeeded by the
permanent pain. The only possible mode of raising wages permanently, and
effectually benefiting the poor, is by so educating them that they shall
be conscious that their welfare depends upon the exercise of a greater
control over their passions.
In penning this brief paper, my desire has been to provoke among the
working classes a discussion and careful examination of the teachings of
political economy, as propounded by Mr. J. S. Mill and those other
able men who, of late, have devoted themselves to elaborating and
popularizing the doctrines enunciated by Malthus. While I am glad to
find that there are some among the masses who are inclined to preach
and put in practice the teachings of the Malthusian School of political
economists, I know that they are yet few in comparison with the great
body of the working classes who have been taught to look upon the
political economist as the poor man's foe. It is nevertheless among
the working men alone, and, in the very ranks of the starvers, that the
effort must be made to check starvation. The question is again before
us: How are men to be prevented from starving? Not by strikes, during
the continuance of which food is scarcer than before. No combinations of
workmen can obtain high wages if the number of workers is too great.
It is not by a mere struggle of class against class that the poor
man's ills can be cured. The working classes can alleviate their own
sufferings. They can, by co-operative schemes, which have the advantage
of being educational in their operation, temporarily and partially
remedy some of the evils, if not by increasing the means of subsistence,
at any rate by securing a larger portion of the result of labor to the
proper sustenance of the laborer. Systems of associated industry are of
immense benefit to the working classes, not alone or so much from the
pecuniary improvement they result in, but because they develop in each
individual a sense of dignity and independence which he lacks as a mere
hired laborer. They can permanently improve their condition by taking
such steps as shall prevent too rapid an increase of their numbers, and,
by thus checking the supply of laborers, they will, as capital augments,
increase the rate of wages paid to the laborer. The steady object
of each working man should be to impress on his fellow-worker the
importance of this subject. Let each point out to his neighbor not only
the frightful struggle in which a poor man must engage who brings up a
large family, but also that the result is to place in the labor market
more claimants tor a share of the fund which has hitherto been found
insufficient to keep the working classes from death by starvation.
The object of this pamphlet will be amply attained if it serve as the
means of inducing some of the working classes to examine for themselves
the teachings of Political Economy. All that is at present needed is
that laboring men and women should be accustomed, both publicly and at
home, to the consideration and discussion of the views and principles
first openly propounded by Mr. Malthus, and since elaborated by Mr. Mill
and other writers. The mere investigation of the subject will of itself
serve to bring to the notice of the masses many facts hitherto entirely
ignored by them. All must acknowledge the terrible ills resulting from
poverty, and all therefore are bound to use their faculties to discover
if possible its cause and cure. It is more than folly for the working
man to permit himself to be turned away from the subject by the cry
that the Political Economists have no sympathy with the poor. If
the allegation were true, which it is not, it would only afford an
additional reason why this important science should find students among
those who most need aid from its teachings.
THE LAND QUESTION.
LARGE ESTATES INIMICAL TO THE WELFARE OF THE PEOPLE
Property in land differs from ordinary property. Wealth, which is the
accumulated result of labor, is sometimes, but not often, accumulated
in the hands of the laborer, and is more frequently accumulated in the
hands of some person who has purchased the result of the laborers
toil. Such personal wealth is capable of indefinite increase; and
the exclusive right to its disposal is protected in the hands of its
possessor, so long as he does not avail himself of this legal protection
to use the wealth mischievously to his fellows. There would be no
incentive in the laborer to economy, or to increased exertion, unless
the State gave him reasonable protection in the enjoyment of his
savings. Unfortunately, to obtain the protection of the authorities,
he has in this country to give up an unreasonably large portion of his
earnings to defray the cost of local and imperial Government. During the
reign of her present Majesty, imperial taxation alone has increased from
about £48,000,000 to £73,833,000. The State has no right to interfere
with a man's daily disposition of his personal wealth, merely on the
ground that he might have used it more advantageously for his fellows.
With land it is quite different; it is limited in extent, and the
portions of it capable of producing food with ease to the cultivator are
still more limited. Every individual member of the commonwealth has an
indefeasible interest in the totality of the land, and no man ought
to assert an absolute freehold in land hostile to the interest of his
fellow. The land is part of the general soil of the State, and should be
held subject to the general welfare of the citizens. No man has a right
so to hold land that his tenure is detrimental to the happiness of the
dwellers upon it or around it. This principle is already recognized in
much of our legislation. A man can not say to a railway company--which
has obtained the usual compulsory powers of taking land--"You shall not
cross my private estate;" the law would answer, if he did, by saying,
"The railway is for the good of the State; you as an individual must
give way to the general good, and must lose your land, receiving a fair
and reasonable money value for it." This principle should be applied
more widely: and if it be for the good of the commonwealth that some
of the enormous land monopolies of this country should be broken up, no
statesman ought to be deterred by the mere dread of interfering with the
so-called rights of private property.
Mr. Mill says: "When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it
should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong
in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the
original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly
a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not
expedient it is unjust." The possession of land involves and carries
with it the duty of cultivating that land, and, in fact, individual
proprietorship of soil is only defensible so long as the possessor can
show improvement and cultivation of the land he holds. To quote again
from Mr. John Stuart Mill: "The essential principle of property being
to assure to all persons what they have produced by their labor, and
accumulated by their abstinence, this principle can not apply to that
which is not the produce of labor, the raw material of the earth."
Mr. Mill urges that property in land "is only valid in so far as the
proprietor of the land is its improver." "In no sound theory of private
property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be
merely a sinecurist quartered upon it." Yet, in England and Wales alone,
the landlords who received for rent, in the year 1800, £22,500,000, now
receive about £67,000,000, and for this have no obligation on them to
cultivate. The holding cultivable land in an uncultivated condition in
this overcrowded country ought to be made a statutory misdemeanor, the
penalty for which should be the forfeiture to the State of the land
so left uncultivated, at, say, a twenty years' purchase of its annual
return in the neglected or misapplied state in which it was found at the
time of conviction. The true theory of landholding should be that the
State should be the only freeholder, all other tenures being limited
in character; and cultivation ought to be a special condition of
tenancy.... The holder of land should either cultivate it with his own
hands, or, as would be most frequently the case, by the hands of others;
but in the latter case, the landed proprietor is bound to allow the
agricultural laborer to live by his labor. By living I mean that the
laborer should have healthy food, shelter, and clothing, and sufficient
leisure in which to educate himself and his family, besides the
necessary leisure for rest from his labors. At present agricultural
laborers do not live; they only drag wearily through a career but little
higher in any respect than--and often not half so comfortable as--that
of many of the other animals on the estate....
Little boys and girls, in the Midland, Eastern, Southern, and
Southwestern counties of England, go into the fields to work, in some
instances, soon after six years of age; in very many cases before they
are seven years old, and in nearly all cases before they have attained
eight. It is true, that the work at first may be the comparatively idle
work of scaring birds or tending sheep, but it involves exposure of the
child's yet delicate frame in the cold and damp of spring, and then to
the heat of the summer sun, from day-dawn to evening. This too often
results in the stunted growth and diseased frame found so frequently
among the English poor. I say nothing of the demoralization of children
consequent on their employment, without regard to sex, in the
field gangs. I pass by the fact that work at this early age utterly
incapacitates them, as a body, for mental effort. It is enough to
declare that no child ought to have to work on the land until he is ten
years of age, and if I am told that the fathers--only earning, in the
majority of instances, from nine to thirteen shillings per week--need
the additional petty wage these wretched babes may bring home, then
again I answer, that it is to the landholder's enormous income that the
State ought to look for the means of educating the too often worse than
savages who are reared on his estate, and who by their labors swell his
rent-roll.
That a few landed proprietors should have gigantic incomes, while the
mass of the people are so poor--that in Gloucester, the Rev. Mr. Frazer
describes "type after type of social life almost degraded to the level
of barbarism"--that near Lavenham, "the cottages are unfit for human
habitation"--that in Norfolk the Parliamentary returns speak of their
dwellings in one as "miserable," in a second as "deplorable," in a third
as "detestable," in a fourth as "a disgrace to a Christian community;"
while near Docking, we are told, in consequence of the overcrowding of
the wretched poor, "the whole atmosphere is sensual, and human nature is
degraded into something below the level of the swine." This is a state
of things that if the landholders will not redress willingly they must
be made to remedy before it is too late.
A few men have vast estates and excessive incomes; the millions
have seldom an inch of land until they inherit the grave, and have a
starvation wage out of which a proportion is taken back for rent.
Take the vast property of the Marquis of Westminster, whose income is
credibly stated at something near a million a year; or that of the Duke
of Devonshire, amounting to 96,000 acres in the county of Derby alone,
without regarding his Irish or other estates; or that of the Duke of
Norfolk, whose Sussex estate is fifteen miles in circuit; or that of
the Duke of Sutherland, which stretches across and contains the whole
of Sutherlandshire from sea to sea; or that of the Marquis of Bute,
on which £2,000,-000 sterling were spent by his trustees during his
minority; or that of the Marquis of Breadalbane, who is said to be able
to ride from his own door one hundred miles straight to the sea on his
own freehold land; or those of the Duke of Richmond and Lord Leconfield,
who between them own nearly the whole of the eastern portion of the
county of Sussex, containing nearly 800 square miles. And such estates
have a tendency to increase rather than to diminish. In Northumberland,
the Ducal proprietor, whose titular rank is derived from the county, is
a constant purchaser of any lands put up for sale. Mr. Bright, in 1864,
spoke of one nobleman who devoted £80,000 a year of his income to the
purchase of additional land.
These large properties must all be broken up; they paralyze the people,
and they corrupt their possessors. We prefer that the breaking up shall
be voluntary and gradual, but it must begin at once, for hungry bellies
are multiplying daily.
The State ought to put the peasantry in possession of the land, and this
might be done in several ways at the same time.
1. There is the Prussian Land System, a modification of which might be
made to work well here, and which since 1850 has enabled the smallest
occupiers of peasants' land to acquire the proprietorship at twenty
years' purchase; the amount of which is paid to the landlord, not in
money, but in rent debentures issued by authority of the State, and
bearing four per cent, interest, and gradually redeemable by means of
the one per cent, difference, which at compound interest extinguishes
the principal in a little over forty-one years. The Prussian peasant
has, however, two other options: he may pay less by one-tenth to the
State bank than the rent he formerly paid to his landlord, in which case
the purchase debentures take fifty-six years to redeem; or he may, if
he can raise the cash, compel his landlord to accept eighteen years'
purchase money of the annual rent. By this means nearly 100,000 peasant
proprietors have been created in Prussia. Kent debentures to the extent
of many millions have been issued to the landholders, and in less than
nineteen years more than one-eighth of the debentures issued have been
entirely redeemed and extinguished.
2. The Legislature should declare that leaving cultivable land
uncultivated gave the Government the right to take possession of such
land, assessing it by its actual return for the last live years, and
not by its real value, and handing to the proprietor the amount of, say,
twenty years' purchase in Consolidated Stock, redeemable in a limited
term of years. The land so taken should not be sold at all, but should
be let out to persons willing to become cultivators, on sufficiently
long terms of tenancy to fairly recoup his labor and capital to the
cultivator, who should yearly pay into the National Treasury, in lieu
of all other imperial taxes, a certain proportion of the value of the
annual produce.
3. The game laws should be abolished. Game preserving in England is not
only injurious, in that it diverts land capable of corn-bearing from the
purpose it should fulfill, of growing corn to feed the starving, but
it is injurious in that it prevents proper cultivation of surrounding
farms, and demoralizes and makes criminals of the neighboring
agriculturial laborers, creating for them a kind and degree of crime
which would be otherwise unknown. Poaching, which is so severely
punished, is actually fostered and encouraged by the very landholders
who punish it. Pheasants and partridges' eggs are bought to stock
preserves; the gamekeepers who buy these eggs shut their eyes to the
mode in which they have been procured. The lad who was encouraged to
procure the eggs finds himself in jail when he learns that shooting or
trapping pheasants gains a higher pecuniary reward than leading the plow
horse, or trimming the hedge, or grubbing the plantation. Poaching is
the natural consequence of rearing a large number of rabbits, hares,
partridges, and pheasants, in the midst of an underpaid, underfed,
badly-housed, and deplorably ignorant body of people. The brutal
outrages of gamekeepers of which we read so much are the regretable but
easily-traceable measure of retaliation for a system which takes a baby
child to work in the fields soon after six years of age, which
trains all his worst propensities and deadens and degrades his better
faculties, which keeps him in constant wretchedness, and tantalizes
him with the sight of hundreds of acres on which game runs and flies
well-fed, under his very nose, while he limps ill-fed along the muddy
lane which skirts the preserve--game, which is at liberty to come out of
its covert and eat and destroy the farmer's crop, but which is even then
made sacred by the law, and fenced round by covenants, as in a Leitrim
lease. The game laws must go; they starve our population by using land
which might be golden to the autumn sun with the waving crop of wheat,
barley, and rye; they feed our prisons, and rear a criminal class in
our midst, who have to be prosecuted and guarded at great cost, and
all because hares and pheasants are higher in the landowners' eyes than
human beings.
5. Any person holding more than, say, 5,000 acres of land, should be
taxed at a far heavier rate than those having smaller holdings. That
is, presuming, in order to take a figure as basis, the land-tax on 5,000
acres to be at the rate of 1s. per acre, then on every acre above that
quantity it should be 2s. per acre up to 10,000 acres, and from thence
5s. per acre up to 15,000 acres, and from thence 10s. per acre up to
20,000 acres, so as to discourage all extravagantly large holdings.
6. The law of primogeniture should be repealed; the settlement of
property, except for a widow and her children, be entirely prohibited
and some limitation should be put on the power of devise, so as to
prevent, say, the Marquis of Westminster from leaving the bulk of his
property to his eldest son, while the younger ones are left as noble
paupers, to be provided with places and pensions by the nation. Land
should be made as easily and as cheaply transferable as any personal
chattel.
The present land monopoly must be broken by legislation, or it will be
destroyed by revolution.