HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN PORTUGAL AND TURKEY.
In point of natural advantages, PORTUGAL is equal with any country in
Western Europe. Her soil is capable of yielding largely of every
description of grain, and her climate enables her to cultivate the
vine and the olive. Mineral riches abound, and her rivers give to a
large portion, of the country every facility for cheap intercourse;
and yet her people are among the most enslaved, while her government
is the weakest and most contemptible of Europe.
It is now a century and a half since England granted her what were
deemed highly important advantages in regard to wine, on condition
that she should discard the artisans who had been brought to the side
of her farmers, and permit the people of England to supply her people
with certain descriptions of manufactures. What were the duties then
agreed on are not given in any of the books now at hand, but by the
provisions of a treaty made in 1810, cloths of all descriptions were
to be admitted at a merely revenue duty, varying from ten to fifteen
per cent. A natural consequence of this system has been that the
manufactures which up to the date of the Methuen treaty had risen in
that country, perished under foreign competition, and the people found
themselves by degrees limited exclusively to agricultural employments.
Mechanics found there no place for the exercise of their talents,
towns could not grow, schools could not arise, and the result is seen
in the following paragraph:--
"It is surprising how ignorant, or at least superficially acquainted,
the Portuguese are with every kind of handicraft; a carpenter is
awkward and clumsy, spoiling every work he attempts, and the way in
which the doors and woodwork even of good houses are finished would
have suited the rudest ages. Their carriages of all kinds, from the
fidalgo's family coach to the peasant's market cart, their
agricultural implements, locks and keys, &c. are ludicrously bad.
They seem to disdain improvement, and are so infinitely below par, so
strikingly inferior to the rest of Europe, as to form a sort of
disgraceful wonder in the middle of the nineteenth
century."--_Baillie_.
The population, which, half a century since was 3,683,000, is now
reduced to little more than 3,000,000; and we need no better evidence
of the enslaving and exhausting tendency of a policy that limits a
whole people, men, women, and children, to the labours of the field.
At the close almost of a century and a half of this system, the
following is given in a work of high reputation, as a correct picture
of the state of the country and the strength of the government:--
"The finances of Portugal are in the most deplorable condition, the
treasury is dry, and all branches of the public service suffer. A
carelessness and a mutual apathy reign not only throughout the
government, but also throughout the nation. While improvement is
sought everywhere else throughout Europe, Portugal remains
stationary. The postal service of the country offers a curious
example of this, nineteen to twenty-one days being still required for
a letter to go and come between Lisbon and Braganza, a distance of
423-1/2 kilometres, (or little over 300 miles.) All the resources of
the state are exhausted, and it is probable that the receipts will
not give one-third of the amount for which they figure in the
budget."--_Annuaire de l'Economie Politique_, 1849, 322.
Some years since an effort was made to bring the artisan to the side
of the farmer and vine-grower, but a century and a half of exclusive
devotion to agriculture had placed the people so far in the rear of
those of other nations, that the attempt was hopeless, the country
having long since become a mere colony of Great Britain.
If we turn to Madeira, we find there further evidence of the
exhausting consequences of the separation of the farmer and the
artisan. From 1886 to 1842, the only period for which returns are
before me, there was a steady decline in the amount of agricultural
production, until the diminution had reached about thirty per cent.,
as follows:--
Wine. Wheat. Barley.
----- ------ -------
1836............. 27,270 pipes 8472 qrs. 3510
1842............. 16,131 " 6863 " 2777
At this moment the public papers furnish an "Appeal to America,"
commencing as follows:--
"A calamity has fallen on Madeira unparalleled in its history. The
vintage, the revenue of which furnished the chief means for providing
subsistence for its inhabitants, has been a total failure, and the
potato crop, formerly another important article of their food, is
still extensively diseased. All classes, therefore, are suffering,
and as there are few sources in the island to which they can look for
food, clothing, and other necessaries of life, their distress must
increase during the winter, and the future is contemplated with
painful anxiety and apprehension. Under such appalling prospects, the
zealous and excellent civil Governor, Snr. José Silvestre Ribeiro,
addressed a circular letter to the merchants of Madeira on the 24th
of August last, for the purpose of bringing the unfortunate and
critical position of the population under his government to the
notice of the benevolent and charitable classes in foreign countries,
and in the hope of exciting their sympathy with, and assistance to,
so many of their fellow creatures threatened with famine."
Such are the necessary consequences of a system which looks to
compelling the whole population of a country to employ themselves in a
single pursuit--all cultivating the land and all producing the same
commodity; and which thus effectually prevents the growth of that
natural association so much admired by Adam Smith. It is one that can
end only in the exhaustion of the land and its owner. When population
increases and men come together, even the poor land is made rich, and
thus it is, says M. de Jonnes, that "the powers of manure causes the
poor lands of the department of the Seine to yield thrice as much as
those of the Loire."[49] When population diminishes, and men are thus
forced to live at greater distances from each other, even the rich
lands become impoverished; and of this no better evidence need be
sought than that furnished by Portugal. In the one case, each day
brings men nearer to perfect freedom of thought, speech, action, and
trade. In the other they become from day to day more barbarized and
enslaved, and the women are more and more driven to the field, there
to become the slaves of fathers, husbands, brothers, and even of sons.
Of all the countries of Europe there is none possessed of natural
advantages to enable it to compare with those constituting the TURKISH
EMPIRE in Europe and Asia. Wool and silk, corn, oil, and tobacco,
might, with proper cultivation, be produced in almost unlimited
quantity, while Thessaly and Macedonia, long celebrated for the
production of cotton, abound in lands uncultivated, from which it
might be obtained in sufficient extent to clothe a large portion of
Europe. Iron ore abounds, and in quality equal to any in the world,
while in another part of the empire "the hills seem a mass of
carbonate of copper."[50] Nature has done every thing for the people
of that country, and yet of all those of Europe, the Turkish rayah
approaches in condition nearest to a slave; and of all the governments
of Europe, that of Portugal even not excepted, that of Turkey is the
most a slave to the dictation, not only of nations, but even of
bankers and traders. Why it is so, we may now inquire.
By the terms of the treaty with England in 1675, the Turkish
government bound itself to charge no more than three per cent. duty on
imports,[51] and as this could contribute little to the revenue, that
required to be sought elsewhere. A poll-tax, house-tax, land-tax, and
many other direct taxes, furnished a part of it, and the balance was
obtained by an indirect tax in the form of export duties; and as the
corn, tobacco, and cotton of its people were obliged to compete in the
general markets of the world with the produce of other lands, it is
clear that these duties constituted a further contribution from the
cultivators of the empire in aid of the various direct taxes that have
been mentioned. So far as foreigners were interested, the system was
one of perfect free trade and direct taxation.
For many years, Turkey manufactured much of her cotton, and she
exported cotton-yarn. Such was the case so recently as 1798, as will
be seen by the following very interesting account of one of the seats
of the manufacture:--
"'Ambelakia, by its activity, appears rather a borough of Holland
than a village of Turkey. This village spreads, by its industry,
movement, and life, over the surrounding country, and gives birth to
an immense commerce which unites Germany to Greece by a thousand
threads. Its population has trebled in fifteen years, and amounts at
present (1798) to four thousand, who live in their manufactories like
swarms of bees in their hives. In this village are unknown both the
vices and cares engendered by idleness; the hearts of the Ambelakiots
are pure and their faces serene; the slavery which blasts the plains
watered by the Peneus, and stretching at their feet, has never
ascended the sides of Pelion (Ossa;) and they govern themselves, like
their ancestors, by their protoyeros, (primates, elders,) and their
own magistrates. Twice the Mussulmen of Larissa attempted to scale
their rocks, and twice were they repulsed by hands which dropped the
shuttle to seize the musket.
"'Every arm, even those of the children, is employed in the
factories; while the men dye the cotton, the women prepare and spin
it. There are twenty-four factories, in which yearly two thousand
five hundred bales of cotton yarn, of one hundred cotton okes each,
were dyed (6138 cwts.) This yarn found its way into Germany, and was
disposed of at Buda, Vienna, Leipsic, Dresden, Anspach, and Bareuth.
The Ambelakiot merchants had houses of their own in all these places.
These houses belonged to distinct associations at Ambelakia. The
competition thus established reduced very considerably the common
profits; they proposed therefore to unite themselves under one
central commercial administration. Twenty years ago this plan was
suggested, and in a year afterward it was carried into execution. The
lowest shares in this joint-stock company were five thousand
piastres, (between £600 and £700,) and the highest were restricted to
twenty thousand, that the capitalists might not swallow up all the
profits. The workmen subscribed their little profits, and uniting in
societies, purchased single shares; and besides their capital, their
labour was reckoned in the general amount; they received their share
of the profits accordingly, and abundance was soon spread through the
whole community. The dividends were at first restricted to ten per
cent., and the surplus profit was applied to the augmenting of the
capital; which in two years was raised from 600,000 to 1,000,000
piastres, (£120,000.)'
"It supplied industrious Germany, not by the perfection of its
jennies, but by the industry of its spindle and distaff. It taught
Montpellier the art of dyeing, not from experimental chairs, but
because dyeing was with it a domestic and culinary operation, subject
to daily observation in every kitchen; and by the simplicity and
honesty, not the science of its system, it reads a lesson to
commercial associations, and holds up an example unparalleled in the
commercial history of Europe, of a joint-stock and labour company;
ably and economically and successfully administered, in which the
interests of industry and capital were, long equally represented. Yet
the system of administration with which all this is connected, is
common to the thousand hamlets of Thessaly that have not emerged from
their insignificance; but Ambelakia for twenty years was left
alone."[52]
At that time, however, England had invented new machinery for spinning
cotton, and, by prohibiting its export, had provided that all the
cotton of the world should be brought to Manchester before it could be
cheaply converted into cloth.
The cotton manufacturers at Ambelakia had their difficulties to
encounter, but all those might have been overcome had they not, says
Mr. Urquhart, "been outstripped by Manchester." They _were_
outstripped, and twenty years afterward, not only had that place been
deserted, but others in its neighbourhood were reduced to complete
desolation. Native manufactories for the production of cotton goods
had, indeed, almost ceased to work. Of 600 looms at Sentari in 1812,
but 40 remained in 1821; and of the 2000 weaving establishments at
Tournovo in 1812, but 200 remained in 1830.[53] For a time, cotton
went abroad to be returned in the form of twist, thus making a voyage
of thousands of miles in search of a spindle; but even this trade has
in a great degree passed away. As a consequence of these things there
had been a ruinous fall of wages, affecting all classes of labourers.
"The profits," says Mr. Urquhart--
"Have been reduced to one-half, and sometimes to one-third, by the
introduction of English cottons, which, though they have reduced the
home price, and arrested the export of cotton-yarn from Turkey, have
not yet supplanted the home manufacture in any visible degree; for,
until tranquillity has allowed agriculture to revive, the people must
go on working merely for bread, and reducing their price, in a
struggle of hopeless competition. The industry, however, of the women
and children is most remarkable; in every interval of labour, tending
the cattle, carrying water, the spindle and distaff, as in the days
of Xerxes, is never out of their hands. The children are as
assiduously at work, from the moment their little fingers, can turn
the spindle. About Ambelakia, the former focus of the cotton-yarn
trade, the peasantry has suffered dreadfully from this, though
formerly the women could earn as much in-doors, as their husbands in
the field; at present, their daily profit (1881) does not exceed
twenty paras, if realized, for often they cannot dispose of the yarn
when spun.
Piastres. Paras.
--------- ------
Five okes of uncleaned cotton,
at seventeen paras.......................... 2 5
Labour of a woman for two days,
(seven farthings per day)................... 0 35
Carding, by vibrations of a cat-gut........... 0 10
Spinning, a woman's unremitting labour
for a week.................................. 5 30
Loss of cotton, exceeding an oke
of uncleaned cotton......................... 0 20
-------- ------
Value of one oke of uncleaned cotton.... Prs. 9 00
"Here a woman's labour makes but 2d. per day, while field-labour,
according to the season of the year, ranges from 4d.
to 6d. and at this rate, the pound of coarse cotton-yarn cost
in spinning 5d."--P. 147.
The labour of a woman is estimated at less than four cents per day,
and "the unremitting labour of a week" will command but twenty-five
cents. The wages of men employed in gathering leaves and attending
silkworms are stated at one piastre (five cents) per day. At Salonica,
the shipping port of Thessaly, they were ten cents. (Urquhart, 268.)
As a necessary consequence of this, population diminishes, and
everywhere are seen the ruins of once prosperous villages. Agriculture
declines from day to day. The once productive cotton-fields of
Thessaly lie untilled, and even around Constantinople itself--
"There are no cultivated lands to speak of within twenty miles, in
some directions within fifty miles. The commonest necessaries of life
come from distant parts: the corn for daily bread from Odessa; the
cattle and sheep from beyond Adrianople, or from Asia Minor; the
rice, of which such a vast consumption is made, from the
neighbourhood of Phillippopolis; the poultry chiefly from Bulgaria;
the fruit and vegetables from Nicomedia and Mondania. Thus a constant
drain of money is occasioned, without any visible return except to
the treasury or from the property of the Ulema."--_Slade's Travels in
Turkey_, vol. ii. 143.
The silk that is made is badly prepared, because the distance of the
artisan prevents the poor people from obtaining good machinery; and as
a consequence of this, the former direct trade with Persia has been
superseded by an indirect one through England, to which the raw silk
has now to be sent. In every department of industry we see the same
result. Birmingham has superseded Damascus, whose blades are now no
longer made.
Not only is the foreigner free to introduce his wares, but he may, on
payment of a trifling duty of two per cent., carry them throughout the
empire until finally disposed of. He travels by caravans, and is
lodged without expense. He brings his goods to be exchanged for money,
or what else he needs, and the exchange effected, he disappears as
suddenly as he came.
"It is impossible," says Mr. Urquhart, "to witness the arrival of the
many-tongued caravan at its resting-place for the night, and see,
unladen and piled up together, the bales from such distant places--to
glance over their very wrappers, and the strange marks and characters
which they bear--without being amazed at so eloquent a contradiction
of our preconceived notions of indiscriminate despotism and universal
insecurity of the East. But while we observe the avidity with which
our goods are sought, the preference now transferred from Indian to
Birmingham muslins, from Golconda to Glasgow chintzes, from Damascus
to Sheffield steel, from Cashmere shawls to English broadcloth; and
while, at the same time, the energies of their commercial spirit are
brought thus substantially before us; it is indeed impossible not to
regret that a gulf of separation should have so long divided the East
and the West, and equally impossible not to indulge in the hope and
anticipation of a vastly extended traffic with the East, and of all
the blessings which follow fast and welling in the wake of
commerce."--P. 133.
Among the "blessings" of the system is the fact that local places of
exchange no longer exist. The storekeeper who pays rent and taxes has
found himself unable to compete with the pedler who pays neither; and
the consequence is that the poor cultivator finds it impossible to
exchange his products, small as they are, for the commodities he
needs, except, on the occasional arrival of a caravan, and that has
generally proved far more likely to absorb the little money in
circulation, than any of the more bulky and less valuable products of
the earth.
As usual in purely agricultural countries, the whole body of
cultivators is hopelessly in debt, and the money-lender fleeces all.
If he aids the peasant before harvest, he must have an enormous
interest, and be paid in produce at a large discount from the market
price; The village communities are almost universally in debt, but to
them, as the security is good, the banker charges _only_ twenty per
cent. per annum. Turkey is the very paradise of middlemen--a
consequence of the absence of any mode of employment except in
cultivation or in trade; and the moral effect of this may be seen in
the following passage:--
"If you see," says Urquhart, "a Turk meditating in a corner, it is on
some speculation--the purchase of a revenue farm, or the propriety of
a loan at sixty per cent.; if you see pen or paper in his hand, it is
making or checking an account; if there is a disturbance in the
street, it is a disputed barter; whether in the streets or in-doors,
whether in a coffeehouse, a serai, or a bazaar, whatever the rank,
nation, language of the persons around you, traffic, barter, gain are
the prevailing impulses; grusch, para, florin, lira, asper, amid the
Babel of tongues, are the universally intelligible sounds."--P. 138.
We have thus a whole people divided into two classes--the plunderers
and the plundered; and the cause of this may be found in the fact that
the owners and occupants of land have never been permitted to
strengthen themselves by the formation of that natural alliance
between the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow, so much
admired by Adam Smith. The government is as weak as the people, for it
is so entirely dependent on the bankers, that they may be regarded as
the real owners of the land and the people, taxing them at discretion;
and to them certainly enure all the profits of cultivation. As a
consequence of this, the land is almost valueless. A recent traveller
states that good land maybe purchased in the immediate vicinity of
Smyrna at six cents an acre, and at a little distance vast quantities
may be had for nothing. Throughout the world, the freedom of man has
grown in the ratio of the increase in the value of land, and that has
always grown in the ratio of the tendency to have the artisan take his
place by the side of the cultivator of the earth. Whatever tends to
prevent this natural association tends, therefore, to the debasement
and enslavement of man.
The weakness of Turkey, as regards foreign nations, is great, and it
increases every day.[54] Not only ambassadors, but consuls, beard it
in its own cities; and it is now even denied that she has _any right_
to adopt a system of trade different from that under which she has
become thus weakened. Perfect freedom of commerce is declared to be
"one of those immunities which we can resign on no account or pretext
whatever; it is a golden privilege, which we can never abandon."[55]
Internal trade scarcely exists; and, as a natural consequence, the
foreign one is insignificant, the whole value of the exports being but
about thirty-three millions of dollars, or less than two dollars per
head. The total exports from Great Britain in the last year amounted
to but £2,221,000, ($11,500,000,) much of which was simply _en route_
for Persia; and this constitutes the great trade that has been built
up at so much cost to the people of Turkey, and that is to be
maintained as "a golden privilege" not to be abandoned! Not
discouraged by the result of past efforts, the same author looks
forward anxiously for the time when there shall be in Turkey no
employment in manufactures of any kind, and when the people shall be
exclusively employed in agriculture; and that time cannot, he thinks,
be far distant, as "a few pence more or less in the price of a
commodity will make the difference of purchasing or manufacturing at
home."[56]
Throughout his book he shows that the rudeness of the machinery of
cultivation is in the direct ratio of the distance of the cultivator
from market; and yet he would desire that all the produce of the
country should go to a distant market to be exchanged, although the
whole import of iron at the present moment for the supply of a
population of almost twenty millions of people, possessing iron ore,
fuel, and unemployed labour in unlimited quantity, is but £2500 per
annum, or about a penny's worth for every thirty persons! Need we
wonder at the character of the machinery, the poverty and slavery of
the people, the trivial amount of commerce, or at the weakness of a
government whose whole system looks to the exhaustion of the land, and
to the exclusion of that great middle class of working-men, to whom
the agriculturist has everywhere been indebted for his freedom?
The facts thus far given have been taken, as the reader will have
observed, from Mr. Urquhart's work; and as that gentleman is a warm
admirer of the system denounced by Adam Smith, he cannot be suspected
of any exaggeration when presenting any of its unfavourable results.
Later travellers exhibit the nation as passing steadily onward toward
ruin, and the people toward a state of slavery the most, complete--the
necessary consequence of a policy that excludes the mechanic and
prevents the formation of a town population. Among the latest of those
travellers is Mr. Mac Farlane,[57] at the date of whose visit the silk
manufacture had entirely disappeared, and even the filatures for
preparing the raw silk were closed, weavers having become ploughmen,
and women and children having been totally deprived of employment. The
cultivators of silk had become entirely dependent on foreign markets
in which there existed no demand for the products of their land and
labour. England was then passing through one of her periodical crises,
and it had been deemed necessary to put down the prices of all
agricultural products, with a view to stop importation. On one
occasion, during Mr. Mac Farlane's travels, there came a report that
silk had risen in England, and it produced a momentary stir and
animation, that, as he says, "flattered his national vanity to think
that an electric touch parting from London, the mighty heart of
commerce, should thus be felt in a few days at a place like Biljek."
Such is commercial centralization! It renders the agriculturists of
the world mere slaves, dependent for food and clothing upon the will
of a few people, proprietors of a small amount of machinery, at "the
mighty heart of commerce." At one moment speculation is rife, and silk
goes up in price, and then every effort is made to induce large
shipments of the raw produce of the world. At the next, money is said
to be scarce, and the shippers are ruined, as was, to so great an
extent, experienced by those who exported corn from this country in
1847.
At the date of the traveller's first visit to Broussa, the villages
were numerous, and the silk manufacture was prosperous. At the second,
the silk works were stopped and their owners bankrupt, the villages
were gradually disappearing, and in the town itself scarcely a chimney
was left, while the country around presented to view nothing but
poverty and wretchedness. Everywhere, throughout the empire, the roads
are bad, and becoming worse, and the condition of the cultivator
deteriorates; for if he has a surplus to sell, most of its value at
market is absorbed by the cost of transportation, and if his crop is
short, prices rise so high that he cannot purchase. Famines are
therefore frequent, and child-murder prevails throughout all classes
of society. Population therefore diminishes, and the best lands are
abandoned, "nine-tenths" of them remaining untilled;[58] the natural
consequence of which is, that malaria prevails in many of those parts
of the country that once were most productive, and pestilence comes in
aid of famine for the extermination of this unfortunate people. Native
mechanics are nowhere to be found, there being no demand for them, and
the plough, the wine-press, and the oil-mill are equally rude and
barbarous. The product of labour is, consequently, most diminutive,
and its wages twopence a day, with a little food. The interest of
money varies from 25 to 50 per cent. per annum, and this rate is
frequently paid for the loan of bad seed that yields but little to
either land or labour.
With the decline of population and the disappearance of all the local
places of exchange, the pressure of the conscription becomes from year
to year more severe, and droves of men may be seen "chained like wild
beasts--free Osmanlees driven along the road like slaves to a
market"--free men, separated from wives and children, who are left to
perish of starvation amid the richest lands, that remain untilled
because of the separation of the artisan from the producer of food,
silk, and cotton. Internal commerce is trifling in amount, and the
power to pay for foreign merchandise has almost passed away. Land is
nearly valueless; and in this we find the most convincing proof of the
daily increasing tendency toward slavery, man having always become
enslaved as land has lost its value. In the great valley of
Buyuk-derè, once known as _the fair land_, a property of twenty miles
in circumference had shortly before his visit been purchased for less
than £1000, or $4800.[59] In another part of the country, one of
twelve miles in circumference had been purchased for a considerably
smaller sum.[60] The slave trade, black and white, had never been more
active;[61] and this was a necessary consequence of the decline in the
value of labour and land.
In this country, negro men are well fed, clothed, and lodged, and are
gradually advancing toward freedom. Population therefore increases,
although more slowly than would be the case were they enabled more to
combine their efforts for the improvement of their condition. In the
West Indies, Portugal, and Turkey, being neither well fed, clothed,
nor lodged, their condition declines; and as they can neither be
bought nor sold, they are allowed to die off, and population
diminishes as the tendency toward the subjugation of the labourer
becomes more and more complete. Which of these conditions tends most
to favour advance in civilization the reader may decide.