CHAPTER XIV.

HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN ENGLAND.

The Roman people sought to centralize within their walls the power of

governing and taxing all the nations of the earth, and to a great

extent they succeeded; but in the effort to acquire power over others

they lost all power over themselves. As the city grew in size and as

its great men became greater, the proportions of the people everywhere

became less. The freemen of the Campagna had almost disappeared even

in the days of the elder Scipio, and their humble habitations had

given way to palaces, the centre of great estates, cultivated by

slaves. Step by step with the increase of power abroad came increased

consolidation of the land at home, and, as the people were more and

more driven from the soil the city grew in numbers and magnificence,

and in the poverty and rapacity of its inhabitants. The populace

needed to be fed, and that they might be so there was established a

great system of poor-laws, carried into effect by aid of the taxation

of distant provinces, at whose expense they were both fed and

entertained. They demanded cheap food, and they obtained their desires

at the cost of the cultivators, abroad and at home, who became more

and more enslaved as Rome itself was more cheaply supplied. Desires

grew with their indulgence, and the greater the facility for living

without labour, the greater became the necessity for seeking "new

markets" in which to exercise their powers of appropriation, and the

more extensive became the domain of slavery. Bankers and middlemen

grew more and more in power, and while the wealth of Crassus enabled

him to obtain the control of the East, enormous loans gave to Cæsar

the command of the West, leaving to Pompey and his moneyed friends the

power to tax the centre and the South. Next, Augustus finds the city

of brick and leaves it of marble; and Herodes Atticus appears upon the

stage sole improver, and almost sole owner, in Attica, once so free,

while bankers and nobles accumulate enormous possessions in Africa,

Gaul, and Britain, and the greater the extent of absentee ownership

the greater becomes the wretchedness and the crime of the pauper mob

of Rome. Still onward the city grows, absorbing the wealth of the

world, and with it grow the poverty, slavery, and rapacity of the

people, the exhaustion of provinces, and the avarice and tyranny of

rulers and magistrates, until at length the empire, rotten at the

heart, becomes the prey of barbarians, and all become slaves

alike,--thus furnishing proof conclusive that the community which

desires to command respect for its own rights _must_ practise respect

for those of others; or in other words, must adopt as its motto the

great lesson which lies at the base of all Christianity--"Do unto

others as ye would that they should do unto you."

A survey of the British Empire at the present moment presents to view

some features so strongly resembling those observed in ancient Rome as

to warrant calling the attention of the reader to their careful

observation. Like Rome, England has desired to establish political

centralization by aid of fleets and armies, but to this she has added

commercial centralization, far more destructive in its effects, and

far more rapid in its operation. Rome was content that her subjects

should occupy themselves as they pleased, either in the fields or in

the factories, provided only that they paid their taxes. England, on

the contrary, has sought to restrict her subjects and the people of

the world in their modes of employment; and this she has done with a

view to compel them to make all their exchanges in her single market,

leaving to her to fix the prices of all she bought and all she sold,

thus taxing them at her discretion in both time and money. She has

sought to compel all other nations to follow the plough, leaving to

her the loom and the anvil, and thus to render it necessary that they

should bring to her all their products in the rudest form, at great

cost of transportation, and total loss of the manure yielded by them,

thus exhausting their soil and themselves; and the consequences of

this are seen in the ruin, depopulation, and slavery of the West

Indies, Ireland, India, Portugal, Turkey, and other countries that

have been partially or wholly subjected to her dominion. Hence it is

that she is seen to be everywhere seeking "new markets." Bengal having

been in a great degree exhausted, it became necessary to annex the

North-west provinces, and thence we find her stretching out her hand

at one moment to seize on Affghanistan, at another to force the

Chinese into permitting her to smuggle opium, and at a third to expel

the Sikhs and occupy the Punjab, as preliminary to this invasion and

subjection of the Burman Empire. She needs, and must have new markets,

as Rome needed new provinces, and for the same reason, the exhaustion

of the old ones. She rejoices with great joy at the creation of a new

market in Australia, and looks with a longing eye on the Empire of

Japan, whose prosperous people, under a peaceful government, prefer to

avoid entering on the same course of action that has resulted in the

reduction of the wealthy and powerful Hindostan to its present

distressed condition.

It was against this system that Adam Smith cautioned his countrymen,

as not only a violation of "the most sacred rights" of man, but as

leading inevitably to consequences in the highest degree injurious to

themselves, in depreciating the value of both labour and capital. Up

to his time, however, it had been carried out in a very small degree.

The colonies were then few in number, but, those were heavily taxed,

as has been shown in the candid admission of _Joshua Gee_, that the

colonists carried home but one-fourth of the value of the commodities

they brought to the great market.[127] The system was then only in its

infancy. In India, the Company had but then first obtained the

concession of a right to act in the capacity of tax-gatherer for

Bengal. On this continent, the right thus to tax the colonists was

seriously contested, and _The Wealth of Nations_ had not been long

before the world before it came to be explicitly and successfully

denied. The tendency of the system was, however, so obvious to its

author, that he desired to warn his countrymen against the effort to

build up "colonies of customers," as unworthy of a great people, and

worthy only of "a nation of shopkeepers,"--and happy for them would it

have been had his advice been taken. It was not. From that day to the

present, every step has been in the direction against which he

cautioned them, as was shown in a former chapter, and from year to

year the people of England have become more and more the mere traders

in the products of the labours of other men, and more and more

compelled to seek "new markets," as did the Roman people,--the only

difference being that in every case the exhaustion has been

accomplished with a rapidity unparalleled in the annals of Rome, or of

the world. A century since, India was rich, and now her government,

collecting annually one-fifth of the whole value of the land, is

sustained only by means of a monopoly of the power to poison and

enslave the Chinese by means of a vile drug, and the poor Hindoo is

forced to seek for food in the swamps of Jamaica and Guiana. Half a

century since, Ireland had a highly cultivated society, with a press

that sent forth large editions of the most valuable and expensive

books produced in England, and now her people are decimated by famine

and pestilence. Twenty years since, there existed some little prospect

that the poor negroes of Jamaica and Guiana might at some future time

become civilized, but that hope has passed away, as has the value of

the land upon which they have been employed. What has been the effect

of this course of policy upon the condition of the people of England

we may now inquire.

In the days of Adam Smith it was estimated that there were in that

country 220,000 owners of land, and as a necessary consequence of this

extensive ownership of property, there was a very decided tendency

toward an increase in the freedom of man, as shown in the efforts made

but a few years later for obtaining a reform in various matters of

government. The French Revolution came, however, and now the doctrine

of "ships, colonies, and commerce" had much to do in bringing about a

state of war, during the whole of which England enjoyed almost a

monopoly of the trade of the world. Having all the woollen and cotton

machinery, and almost all the machinery for the production of iron,

she was enabled to buy produce and sell manufactures at her own

prices; and thus were the already wealthy greatly enriched. The

poor-houses were, however, everywhere filled with starving labourers,

and so rapidly did their number increase that it became at length

necessary to give to the statute of Elizabeth a new and enlarged

construction; and here do we find another coincidence in the working

of Roman and British centralization. A still further one will be found

in the fact that precisely as the labourer was losing all power of

self-government, the little proprietors of land disappeared, to be

replaced by day-labourers.

The peace, however came, and with it a desire on the part of other

nations to supply themselves with cloth, iron, and other manufactured

commodities; and to enable them to carry into effect their wishes,

many of them imposed duties having for their object the bringing

together of the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow. This

produced, of course, a necessity for new exertions to underwork those

nations, leading to constant improvements of machinery, each tending

to enable the capitalist more and more to accumulate fortune and

purchase land, the consolidation of which has been continued until at

length it has resulted in the fact, that in place of the 220,000

English land-owners of the days of Adam Smith, there now exist but

30,000, while all the land of Scotland has, as is stated, accumulated

in the hands of 6000 persons.

As the 190,000 proprietors came by degrees to be represented by

day-labourers, pauperism increased, and the labourer became from year

to year more enslaved, and more dependent for existence upon the

favours of farmers, parish beadles, and constables, until at length a

reform of the system having become absolutely necessary, it was

undertaken. Instead, however, of inquiring into the causes of this

increased dependence with a view to their abolition, it was determined

to abolish the relief that they had rendered necessary, and hence the

existence of the new poor-law. By virtue of its provisions, inability

to obtain food became a crime punishable by the separation of husbands

from wives and parents from children; and thus we see that in the last

twenty years English legislation has tended greatly in the same

direction with the domestic slave trade of this country.

Consolidation of the land drove the labourers from the cultivation of

the soil, while improved machinery tended constantly to drive them out

from the factory, and thus were the poor made poorer and weaker, as

the rich grew richer and stronger. Ireland, too, contributed largely

to the same result. As the Act of Union gradually closed her factories

and drove her people to cultivation as the sole means of supporting

life, they found themselves, like the Italians of olden time, forced

to emigrate to the place where taxes were distributed, in the hope of

obtaining wages, and their competition threw the English labourer

still more in the hands of the capitalist. From year to year the small

proprietor was seen to pass into the condition of a day-labourer, and

the small employing mechanic or tradesman to pass into a receiver of

wages, and thus did the whole people tend more and more to become

divided into two great classes, separated from each other by an

impassable gulf, the very rich and the very poor, the master and the

slave.

As England became more and more flooded with the wretched people of

the sister island, driven from home in search of employment, the

wealthy found it more and more easy to accomplish "the great works"

for which, as the London _Times_ inform us, the country is indebted to

the "cheap labour of Ireland," and the greater the influx of this

labour the more rapid was the decline in the power of both Ireland and

Britain to furnish a market for the products of the manufacturing,

labour of England. Hence arose, of course, a necessity for looking

abroad for new markets to take the place of those before obtained at

home, and thus cheap labour, a _consequence_ of the system, became in

its turn a _cause_ of new efforts at dispensing with and further

cheapening labour. As the Irishman could no longer buy, it became

necessary that the Hindoo should be driven from his own market. As the

Highlander was expelled, it became more and more necessary to

underwork the spinners and weavers of China. As the Bengalese now

become impoverished, there arises a necessity for filling the Punjab,

and Affghanistan, Burmah and Borneo, with British goods. Pauperism

lies necessarily at the root of such a system. "It is," said a speaker

at the late Bradford election for representative in Parliament--

"Its root. That system is based on foreign competition. Now I assert,

that _under the buy cheap and sell dear principle, brought to bear on

foreign competition, the ruin of the working and small trading

classes must go on. Why?_ Labour is the creator of all wealth. A man

must work before a grain is grown, or a yard is woven. But there is

no self-employment for the working-man in this country. Labour is a

hired commodity--labour is a thing in the market that is bought and

sold; consequently, as labour creates all wealth, labour is the first

thing bought. 'Buy cheap! buy cheap!' Labour is bought in the

cheapest market. But now comes the next. 'Sell dear! sell dear!' Sell

what? _Labors produce_. To whom? To the foreigner--ay! and to _the

labourer himself_--for labour not being self-employed, the labourer

is _not_ the partaker of the first-fruits of his toil. 'Buy cheap,

sell dear.' How do you like it? 'Buy cheap, sell dear.' Buy the

working-man's labour cheaply, and sell back to that very working-man

the produce of his own labour dear! The principle of inherent loss is

in the bargain. The employer buys the labour cheap--he sells, and on

the sale he must, make a profit: he sells to the working-man

himself--and thus every bargain between employer and employed is a

deliberate cheat on the part of the employer. Thus labour has to sink

through eternal loss, that capital may rise through lasting fraud.

But the system stops not here. THIS IS BROUGHT TO BEAR ON FOREIGN

COMPETITION--WHICH MEANS, WE MUST RUIN THE TRADE OF OTHER COUNTRIES,

AS WE HAVE RUINED THE LABOUR OF OUR OWN. How does it work? The

high-taxed country has to undersell the low-taxed. _Competition

abroad is constantly increasing, consequently cheapness must increase

also._ Therefore, wages in England must keep constantly falling. And

how do they effect the fall? By _surplus labour_. By monopoly of the

land, which drives more hands than are wanted into the factory. By

monopoly of machinery, which drives those hands into the street; by

woman labour, which drives the man from the shuttle; by child labour,

which drives the woman from the loom. Then planting their foot upon

that living base of surplus, they press its aching heart beneath

their heel, and cry 'Starvation! Who'll work? A half loaf is better

than no bread at all;' and the writhing mass grasps greedily at their

terms. Such is the system for the working-man. But, electors, how

does it operate on you? how does it affect home trade, the

shopkeeper, poor's rate, and taxation? _For every increase of

competition abroad there must be an increase of cheapness at home._

Every increase of cheapness in labour is based on increase of labour

surplus, and this surplus is obtained by an increase of machinery. I

repeat, how does this operate on you? The Manchester liberal on my

left establishes a new patent, and throws three hundred men as a

surplus in the streets. Shopkeepers! Three hundred customers less.

Rate-payers! Three hundred paupers more. But, mark me! The evil stops

not there. _These three hundred men operate first to bring down the

wages of those who remain at work in their own trade._ The employer

says, 'Now I reduce your wages.' The men demur. Then he adds, 'Do you

see those three hundred men who have just walked out? _you may change

places if you like_, they're sighing to come in on any terms, for

they're starving.' The men feel it, and are crushed. Ah! you

Manchester liberal! Pharisee of politics! those men are

listening--have I got you now? But the evil stops not yet. _Those

men, driven from their own trade, seek employment in others, when

they swell the surplus and bring wages down._"

Strong as is all this, it is nevertheless true, England is engaged in

a war of extermination waged against the labour of all other countries

employed in any pursuit except that of raising raw produce to be sent

to her own market, there to be exchanged for the cloth and the iron

produced at the mills and furnaces of her _millionaires_, who have

accumulated their vast fortunes at the expense of Ireland, India,

Portugal, Turkey, and the other countries that have been ruined by the

system which looks to the exhaustion of the soil of all other lands,

to the impoverishment and enslavement of their people, and which was

so indignantly denounced by Adam Smith. In the effort to crush them

she has been crushing her own people, and the more rapid the spread of

pauperism at home the greater have been her efforts to produce the

surplus labour which causes a fall of wages at home and abroad.

With the consolidation of land in the hands of a few proprietors there

is a steady decline in the number of people employed upon it, and an

equally steady one in that hope of rising in the world which is

elsewhere seen to be the best incentive to exertion. "The peasant

knows," says a recent English writer,[128] "that he must die in the

same position in which he was born." Again, he says, "the want of

small farms deprives the peasant of all hope of improving his

condition in life." The London _Times_ assures its readers that "once

a peasant in England, the man must remain a peasant for ever;" and Mr.

Kay, after careful examination of the condition of the people of

continental Europe, assures his readers that, as one of the

consequences of this state of things, the peasantry of England "are

more ignorant, more demoralized, less capable of helping themselves,

and more pauperized, than those of any other country in Europe, if we

except Russia, Turkey, South Italy, and some parts of the Austrian

Empire."[129]

Under such circumstances, the middle class tends gradually to pass

away, and its condition is well expressed by the term now so

frequently, used, "the uneasy class." The small capitalist, who would

elsewhere purchase a piece of land, a horse and cart, or a machine of

some kind calculated to enable him to double the productiveness of his

labour and increase its reward, is in England forced to make his

investments in savings banks or life-insurance offices, and thus to

place his little capital in the hands of others, at three per cent.,

whereas he could have fifty or a hundred per cent., could he be

permitted to use it himself. There is, therefore, a perpetual strife

for life, and each man is, as has been said, "endeavouring to snatch

the piece of bread from his neighbour's mouth." The atmosphere of

England is one of intense gloom. Every one is anxious for the future,

for himself or his children. There is a universal feeling of doubt as

to how to dispose of the labour or the talents of themselves or their

sons, and the largest fees are paid to men already wealthy, in the

hope of obtaining aid toward securing steady employment. "This _gloom_

of England," says a late English writer--

"Is in truth one of the most formidable evils of modern times. With

all the advance, in morality and decency of the present century, we

have receded rather than gone forward in the attainment of that true

Christian cheerfulness, which--notwithstanding the popular

proverb--I believe to be the blessing next in value to godliness.

"I truly believe," he continues, "that one of the chief obstacles to

the progress of pure living Christianity in this country is to be

found in that worldly carefulness which causes our intense gravity,

and makes us the most silent nation in Europe. The respectability of

England is its bane; we worship respectability, and thus contrive to

lose both the enjoyments of earth and the enjoyments of heaven. If

Great Britain could once learn to laugh like a child, she would be in

the way once more to pray like a saint.

"But this is not all: the sensuality and gross vice, and the hateful

moroseness and harshness of temper, which result from our

indisposition for gayety and enjoyment, are literally awful to think

of. Pride and licentiousness triumph in our land, because we are too

careworn or too stupid to enter heartily into innocent recreations.

Those two demons, one of which first cast man out of Paradise, while

the other has degraded him to the level of the brutes, are served by

myriads of helpless slaves, who are handed over to a bondage of

passion, through the gloominess that broods over our national

character. The young and the old alike, the poor and the wealthy, are

literally driven to excess, because there is nothing in our state of

society to refresh them after their toils, or to make life as much a

season of enjoyment as the inevitable lot of mortality will allow.

"Men fly to vice for the want of pure and innocent pleasures. The

gin-shops receive those who might be entertaining themselves with the

works of art in a public gallery. The whole animal portion of our

being is fostered at the expense of the spiritual. We become

brutalized, because we are morbidly afraid of being frivolous and of

wasting our time. The devil keeps possession of an Englishman's

heart, through the instrumentality of his carnal passions, because he

is too proud and too stupid to laugh and enjoy himself.

"Secret sin destroys its myriads, immolated on the altar of outward

respectability and of a regard for the opinion of a money-getting

world."

The existence of such a state of things is indeed a "formidable evil,"

but how could it fail to exist in a country in which all individuality

is being lost as the little land-owner gradually disappears to be

replaced by the day-labourer, and as the little shop-keeper gradually

sinks into a clerk? How could it be otherwise in a country in which

weak women, and children of the most tender age, spend their nights in

cellars, and the long day of twelve or fifteen hours in factories,

whose owners know of them nothing but, as in a penitentiary, their

number--a country in which males and females work naked in

coal-mines--and find themselves compelled to do all these things

because of the necessity for preventing the poor Hindoo from calling

to his aid the powerful steam, and for compelling him, his wife, and

his children, to limit themselves to the labour of the field? How

could it be otherwise in a country in which "labourers, whether well

off or not, never attempt to be better?"[130] How otherwise in a

country distinguished among all others for the enormous wealth of a

few, for the intensity of toil and labour of all below them, and for

the anxiety with which the future is regarded by all but those who,

bereft of hope, know that all they can expect on this side of the

grave is an indifferent supply of food and raiment? "In no country of

the world," says Mr. Kay--

"Is so much time spent in the mere acquisition of wealth, and so

little time in the enjoyment of life and of all the means of

happiness which God has given to man, as in England.

"In no country in the world do the middle classes labour so intensely

as here. One would think, to view the present state of English

society, that man was created for no other purpose than to collect

wealth, and that he was forbidden to gratify the beautiful tastes

with which he has been gifted for the sake of his own happiness. To

be rich, with us, is the great virtue, the pass into all society, the

excuse for many frailties, and the mask for numerous deformities."

An Eastern proverb says that "curses, like young chickens, always come

home to roost." Few cases could be presented of a more perfect

realization of this than is found in the present condition of England.

Half a century since it was decreed that the poor people of Ireland

should confine themselves to the cultivation and exhaustion of their

soil, abstaining from the mining of coal, the smelting of ore, or the

making of cloth; and during nearly all that time they have so flooded

England with "cheap labour" as to have produced from the _Times_ the

declaration, before referred to, that "for a whole generation man has

been a drug and population a nuisance"--precisely the state of things

in which men tend most to become enslaved. Cheap corn, cheap cotton,

cheap tobacco, and cheap sugar, mean low-priced agricultural labour;

and the low-priced labourer is always a slave, and aiding to produce

elsewhere the slavery of his fellow-labourers, whether in the field

or in the workshop. This, however, is in perfect accordance with the

doctrines of some of England's most distinguished statesmen, as the

reader has already seen in the declaration of Mr. Huskisson, that "to

give capital a fair remuneration, the price of labour must be kept

down,"--by which he proved the perfect accuracy of the predictions of

the author of _The Wealth of Nations_.

The harmony of true interests among nations is perfect, and an

enlightened self-interest would lead every nation to carry into full

effect the golden rule of Christianity; and yet even now, the most

distinguished men in England regard smuggling almost as a virtuous

act, and the smuggler as a great reformer, because his labours tend to

enable their countrymen to do everywhere what has been done in the

West Indies, in Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and India--separate the

consumer from the producer. They regard it as the appointed work of

England to convert the whole earth into one vast farm dependent upon

one vast workshop, and that shop in the island of Great Britain. Such

being the views of peers of the realm, lord chancellors, ministers of

state, political economists, and statisticians, can we wonder at a

decline of morality among the middle class, under the combined

influence of the struggle for life, and the assurance that "the end

sanctifies the means," and that false invoices are but a means of

working out a great reformation in the commercial system of the world?

Good ends rarely require such means for their accomplishment, and the

very fact that it was needed to have Gibraltar as a means of smuggling

into Spain, Canada as a means of smuggling into this country,[131] and

Hong Kong for the purpose of poisoning the Chinese with smuggled

opium, should have led to a careful consideration of the question

whether or not the system which looked to exhausting the soil of

Virginia and driving the poor negro to the sugar culture in Texas, was

one of the modes of "doing God service."

Unsound moral feeling is a necessary consequence of an exclusive

devotion to trade such as is now seen to exist in England. It is the

business of the trader to buy cheaply and sell dearly, be the

consequences what they may to those from whom he buys, or to whom he

sells; and unhappily the prosperity of England now depends so entirely

on buying cheaply and selling dearly that she is forced to overlook

the effects upon those to whom she sells, or from whom she buys, and

she therefore rejoices when others are being ruined, and grieves when

they are being enriched. Her interests are always, and necessarily so,

opposed to those of the rest of the world. She _must_ look at every

thing with the eyes of the mere trader who wishes to buy cheaply and

sell dearly, living at the cost of the producer and the consumer. The

former desires good prices for his sugar, and yet so anxious was she

to obtain cheap sugar that she forgot her engagements with the poor

emancipated negroes of Jamaica. The former desire's good prices for

his corn, but so anxious was she to have cheap corn, that she forgot

having deprived the people of Ireland of all employment but in

agriculture, and at once adopted measures whose action is now

expelling the whole nation from the scenes of their youth, and

separating husbands and wives, mothers and children. She has placed

herself in a false position, and cannot now _afford_ to reflect upon

the operation of cheap sugar and cheap corn, cheap cotton and cheap

tobacco, upon the people who produce them; and therefore it is that

the situation of Ireland and India, and of the poor people Of Jamaica,

is so much shut out from discussion. Such being the case with those

who should give tone to public opinion, how can we look for sound or

correct feeling among the poor occupants of "the sweater's den,"[132]

or among the 20,000 tailors of London, seeking for work and unable to

find it? Or, how look for it among the poor shopkeepers, compelled in

self-defence to adulterate almost every thing they sell, when they see

the great cotton manufacturer using annually hundreds of barrels of

flour to enable him to impose worthless cloth upon the poor Hindoo,

and thus annihilate his foreign competitor? Or, how expect to find it

among the poor operatives of Lancashire, at one moment working full

time, at another but three days in a week, and at a third totally

deprived of employment, because goods can no longer be smuggled into

foreign countries to leave a profit? With them, the question of food

or no food is dependent altogether upon the size of the cotton crop.

If the slave trade is brisk, much cotton is made, and they have wages

with which to support their wives and children. If the crop is large,

the planter may be ruined, but they themselves are fed. "The weekly

mail from America," we are told--

"Is not of more moment to the great cotton lord of Manchester, than

it is to John Shuttle the weaver. * * * If he ever thinks how

entirely his own existence and that of his own little household

depend upon the American crop * * * he would tremble at the least

rumour of war with the Yankees. War with America--a hurricane in

Georgia--a flood in Alabama--are one and all death-cries to the

mill-spinner and power-loom weaver. * * * When the cotton fields of

the Southern States yield less than the usual quantity of cotton, the

Manchester operative eats less than his average quantity of food.

When his blood boils at the indignities and cruelties heaped upon the

coloured, race in the 'Land of the Free,' he does not always remember

that _to the slave States_ of America _he owes his all_--that _it is

for his advantage_ that the _negro should wear his chains in

peace_."--_Household Words_.

"If his "blood boils" at the sufferings of the negro in Brazil, or of

the Hindoo in the Mauritius, he must recollect that it is at the cost

of those sufferings that he is supplied with cheap sugar. If he be

shocked at the continuance of the African slave trade, he must

recollect that if negroes ceased to be imported into Cuba, he might

have to pay a higher price for his coffee. If he is excited at the

idea of the domestic slave trade of this country, he must calm himself

by reflecting that it is "for his advantage" it is continued, and that

without it he could not have cheap cotton. The labourers of the

various parts of the world are thus taught that there is among

themselves an universal antagonism of interests, and this tends, of

course, to the production of a bad state of moral feeling, and an

universal tendency to decline in the feeling of self-dependence. Men,

women, and children are becoming from day to day more dependent on the

will of others, and as it is that dependence which constitutes

slavery, we might with reason expect to find some of the vices of the

slave--and were we to find them we should not greatly err in

attributing their existence to the system thus described by Adam

Smith:--

"The industry of Great Britain, instead of being accommodated to a

great number of small markets, has been principally suited to one

great market. Her commerce, instead of running in a great number of

small channels, has been taught to run principally in one great

channel. But the whole system of her industry and commerce has

thereby been rendered less secure, the whole state of her body

politic less healthful than it otherwise would have been. In her

present condition, Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome

bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which,

upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders, scarce

incident to those in which all the parts are more properly

proportioned. A small stop in that great blood-vessel which has been

artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions, and through which

an unnatural proportion of the industry and commerce of the country

has been forced to circulate, is very likely to bring on the most

dangerous disorders upon the whole body politic."

This is an accurate picture of that country under a system that seeks

to direct the whole energies of its people into one direction, that of

"buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest one,"--the

pursuit that is, of all others, the least favourable to the

development of the moral and intellectual faculties of man. How it is

operating may be judged by the following description from an English

writer already quoted:--

"Of the children of the poor, who are yearly born in England, vast

numbers never receive any education at all, while many others never

enter any thing better than a dame or a Sunday-school. In the towns

they are left in crowds until about eight or nine years of age, to

amuse themselves in the dirt of the streets, while their parents

pursue their daily toil. In these public thoroughfares, during the

part of their lives which is most susceptible of impressions and most

retentive of them, they acquire dirty, immoral, and disorderly

habits; they become accustomed to wear filthy and ragged clothes;

they learn to pilfer and to steal; they associate with boys who have

been in prison, and who have there been hardened in crime by evil

associates; they learn how to curse one another, how to fight, how to

gamble, and how to fill up idle hours by vicious pastimes; they

acquire no knowledge except the knowledge of vice; they never come in

contact with their betters; and they are not taught either the truths

of religion or the way by which to improve their condition in life.

Their amusements are as low as their habits. The excitements of low

debauchery too horrible to be named, of spirituous liquors, which

they begin to drink as early as they can collect pence wherewith to

buy them, of the commission and concealments of thefts, and of rude

and disgusting sports, are the pleasures of their life. The idea of

going to musical meetings such as those of the German poor, would be

scoffed at, even if there were any such meetings for them to attend.

Innocent dancing is unknown to them. Country sports they cannot have.

Read they cannot. So they hurry for amusement and excitement to the

gratification of sensual desires and appetites. In this manner,

filthy, lewd, sensual, boisterous, and skilful in the commission of

crime, a great part of the populations of our towns grow up to

manhood. Of the truth or falsehood of this description any one can

convince himself, who will examine our criminal records, or who will

visit the back streets of any English town, when the schools are

full, and count the children upon the door-steps and pavements, and

note their condition, manners, and appearance, and their degraded and

disgusting practices."--Kay, vol. i. 33.[133]

This is, however, little different from what might be looked, for in a

country whose provision for the education of its people is thus

described:--

"About one-half of our poor can neither read nor write. The test of

signing the name at marriage is a very imperfect absolute test of

education, but it is a very good relative one: taking that test, how

stands Leeds itself in the Registrar-General's returns? In Leeds,

which is the centre of the movement for letting education remain as

it is, left entirely to chance and charity to supply its

deficiencies, how do we find the fact? This, that in 1846, the last

year to which these returns are brought down, of 1850 marriages

celebrated in Leeds and Hunslet, 508 of the men and 1020 of the

women, or considerably more than one-half of the latter, signed their

names with marks. 'I have also a personal knowledge of this

fact--that of 47 men employed upon a railway in this immediate

neighbourhood, only 14 men can sign their names in the receipt of

their wages; and this not because of any diffidence on their part,

but positively because they cannot write.' And only lately, the

_Leeds Mercury_ itself gave a most striking instance of ignorance

among persons from Boeotian Pudsey: of 12 witnesses, 'all of

respectable appearance, examined before the Mayor of Bradford at the

court-house there, only one man could sign his name, and that

indifferently.' Mr. Nelson has clearly shown in statistics of crime

in England and Wales from 1834 to 1844, that crime is invariably the

most prevalent in those districts where the fewest numbers in

proportion to the population can read and write. Is it not indeed

beginning at the wrong end to try and reform men, after they have

become criminals? Yet you cannot begin, with children, from want of

schools. Poverty is the result of ignorance, and then ignorance is

again the unhappy result of poverty. 'Ignorance makes men improvident

and thoughtless--women as well as men; it makes them blind to the

future--to the future of this life as well as the life beyond. It

makes them dead to higher pleasures than those of the mere senses,

and keeps them down to the level of the mere animal. Hence the

enormous extent of drunkenness throughout this country, and the

frightful waste of means which it involves.' At Bilston, amidst

20,000 people, there are but two struggling schools--one has lately

ceased; at Millenhall, Darlaston, and Pelsall, amid a teeming

population, no school whatever. In Oldham, among 100,000, but one

public day-school for the labouring classes; the others are an infant

school, and some dame and factory schools. At Birmingham, there are

21,824 children at school, and 23,176, at no school; at Liverpool,

50,000 out of 90,000 at no school; at Leicester, 8200 out of 12,500;

and at Leeds itself, in 1841, (the date of the latest returns,) some

9600 out of 16,400, were at no school whatever. It is the same in the

counties. 'I have seen it stated, that a woman for some time had to

officiate as clerk in a church in Norfolk, there being no adult male

in the parish able to read and write. For a population of 17,000,000

we have but twelve normal schools; while in Massachusetts they have

three such schools for only 800,000 of population."

Such being the education of the young, we may now look to see how Mr.

Kay describes that provided for people of a more advanced period of

life:--

"The crowd of low pot-houses in our manufacturing districts is a sad

and singular spectacle. They are to be found in every street and

alley of the towns, and in almost every lane and turning of the more

rural villages of those districts, if any of those villages can be

called rural.

"The habit of drunkenness pervades the masses of the operatives to an

extent never before known in our country.

"In a great number of these taverns and pot-houses of the

manufacturing districts, prostitutes are kept for the express purpose

of enticing the operatives to frequent them, thus rendering them

doubly immoral and pernicious. I have been assured in Lancashire, on

the best authority, that in one of the manufacturing towns, and that,

too, about third rate in point of size and population, there are

_sixty_ taverns, where prostitutes are kept by the tavern landlords,

in order to entice customers into them. Their demoralizing influence

upon the population _cannot be exaggerated_; and yet these are almost

the only resorts which the operatives have, when seeking amusement or

relaxation.

"In those taverns where prostitutes are not actually kept for the

purpose of enticing customers, they are always to be found in the

evenings, at the time the workmen go there to drink. In London and in

Lancashire the gin-palaces are the regular rendezvous for the

abandoned of both sexes, and the places where the lowest grade of

women-of-the-town resort to find customers. It is quite clear that

young men, who once begin to meet their, friends at these places,

cannot long escape the moral degradation of these hot-houses of vice.

"The singular and remarkable difference between the respective

condition of the peasants and operatives of Germany and Switzerland,

and those of England and Ireland, in this respect, is alone

sufficient to prove the singular difference between their respective

social condition.

"The village inn in Germany is quite a different kind of place to the

village inn in England. It is intended and used less for mere

drinking, than, as a place for meeting and conversation; it is, so to

speak, the villagers' club."--Vol. i. 232.

Under such circumstances, we cannot be surprised when told by Mr.

Alison that over the whole kingdom crime increases four times as fast

as the population, and that "in Lancashire population doubles in

thirty years, crime in five years and a half." How, indeed, could it

be otherwise under a system based upon the idea of "keeping labour

down"--one that tends to the consolidation of the land and the

exclusion of men from the work of cultivation, and then excludes them

from the factory, while forcing hundreds of thousands of indigent and

almost starving Irish into England in search of employment? The

process of "eviction" in Ireland has been already described. How the

same work has been, and is being, performed in England is thus stated

by the _Times_:--

"Our village peasantry are jostled about from cottage to cottage, or

from cottage to no cottage at all, as freely and with as little

regard to their personal tastes, and conveniences as if we were

removing our pigs, cows, and horses from one sty or shed to another.

If they cannot get a house over their heads they go to the Union, and

are distributed--the man in one part, the wife in another, and the

children again somewhere else. That is a settled thing. Our peasantry

bear it, or, if they can't bear it, they die, and there is an end of

it on this side of the grave; though how it will stand at the great

audit, we leave an 'English Catholic' to imagine. We only mean to say

that in England the work has been done; cotters have been

exterminated; small holdings abolished; the process of eviction

rendered superfluous; the landlord's word made law; the refuge of the

discontented reduced to a workhouse, and all without a shot, or a

bludgeon, or a missile being heard of."

Thus driven from the land, they are forced to take refuge in London

and Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, and accordingly

there it is that we find nearly the whole increase of population in

the last ten years. Out of less than two millions, more than 400,000

were added to the number of London alone, and those who are familiar

with Mr. Mayhew's work, _London Labour and London Poor_, do not need

to be told of the extraordinary wretchedness, nor of the immorality

that there abound. Inquiries get on foot by Lord Ashley have shown

that "in the midst of that city there are," says Mr. Kay--

"Persons, forming a separate class, having pursuits, interests,

manners; and customs of their own, and that the filthy, deserted,

roaming, and lawless children, who may be called the source of

19-20ths of the crime which desolates the metropolis, are not fewer

in number than THIRTY THOUSAND!

"These 30,000 are quite independent of the number of mere pauper

children, who crowd the streets of Londen, and who never enter a

school: but of these latter nothing will be said here.

"Now, what are the pursuits, the dwelling-houses, and the habits of

these poor wretches? Of 1600, who were examined, 162 confessed that

they had been in prison, not merely once, or even twice, but some of

them several times; 116 had run away from their homes; 170 slept in

the "lodging-houses;" 253 had lived altogether by beggary; 216 had

neither shoes nor stockings; 280 had no hat or cap, or covering for

the head; 101 had no linen; 249 had never slept in a bed; many had no

recollection of ever having been in a bed; 68 were the children of

convicts,"--Vol. i. 394.

In the towns of the manufacturing districts there are, says the same

author--

"A great number of cellars beneath the houses of the small

shopkeepers and operatives, which are inhabited by crowds of poor

inhabitants. Each of these cellar-houses contains at the most two,

and often, and in some towns generally, only one room. These rooms

measure in Liverpool, from 10 to 12 feet square. In some other towns,

they are rather larger. They are generally flagged. The flags lie

"directly" upon the earth, and are generally wretchedly damp. In wet

weather they are very often not dry for weeks together. Within a few

feet of the windows of these cellars, rises the wall which keeps the

street from falling in upon them, darkening the gloomy rooms, and

preventing the sun's rays penetrating into them.

"Dr. Duncan, in describing the cellar-houses of the manufacturing

districts, says[134]--'The cellars are ten or twelve feet square;

generally flagged, but frequently having only the bare earth for a

floor, and sometimes less than six feet in height. There is

frequently no window, so that light and air can gain access to the

cellar only by the door, the top of which is often not higher than

the level of the street. In such cellars ventilation is out of the

question. They, are of course dark; and from the defective drainage,

they are also very generally damp. There is sometimes a back cellar,

used as a sleeping apartment, having no direct communication with the

external atmosphere, and deriving its scanty supply of light and air

solely from the front apartment.'"--Vol. i. 447.

"One of the city missionaries, describing the state of the Mint

district in the city of London, says, 'it is utterly impossible to

describe the scenes, which are to be witnessed here, or to set forth

in its naked deformity the awful characters sin here assumes. * * *

_In Mint street, alone, there are nineteen lodging-houses._ The

majority of these latter are awful sinks of iniquity, and are used as

houses of accommodation. In some of them, both sexes sleep together

indiscriminately, and such acts are practised and witnessed, that

married persons, who are in other respects awfully depraved, have

been so shocked, as to be compelled to get up in the night and leave

the house. Many of the half-naked impostors, who perambulate the

streets of London in the daytime, and obtain a livelihood by their

deceptions, after having thrown off their bandages, crutches, &c.,

may be found here in their true character; some regaling themselves

in the most extravagant manner; others gambling or playing cards,

while the worst of language proceeds from their lips. Quarrels and

fights are very common, and the cry of murder is frequently heard.

The public-houses in this street are crowded to excess, especially,

on the Sabbath evening.[135]

"In the police reports published in the _Sun_ newspaper of the 11th

of October, 1849, the following account is given of '_a penny

lodging-house_' in Blue Anchor Yard, Rosemary Lane. One of the

policemen examined, thus describes a room in this lodging-house:--'It

was a very small one, extremely filthy, and there was no

furniture of any description in it. _There were sixteen men, women,

and children lying on the floor, without covering. Some of them were

half naked._ For this miserable shelter, each lodger paid a penny.

The stench was intolerable, and the place had not been cleaned out

for some time.'

"If the nightly inmates of these dens are added to the tramps who

seek lodging in the vagrant-wards of the workhouses, we shall find

that there are at least between 40,000 and 50,000 tramps who are

daily infesting our roads and streets!"--Vol. i. 431.

In the agricultural districts, whole families, husbands and wives,

sons and daughters, sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law, sleep

together, and here we find a source of extraordinary immorality. "The

accounts we receive," says Mr. Kay--

"From all parts of the country show that these miserable cottages are

crowded to an extreme, and that the crowding is progressively

increasing. People of both sexes, and of all ages, both married and

unmarried--parents, brothers, sisters, and strangers--sleep in the

same rooms and often in the same beds. One gentleman tells us of six

people of different sexes and ages, two of whom were man and wife,

sleeping in the same bed, three with their heads at the top and three

with their heads at the foot of the bed. Another tells us of adult

uncles and nieces sleeping in the same room close to each other;

another of the uncles and nieces sleeping in the same bed together;

another of adult brothers, and sisters sleeping in the same room with

a brother and his wife just married; many tell us of adult brothers

and sisters sleeping in the same beds; another tells us of rooms so

filled with beds that there is no space between them, but that

brothers, sisters, and parents crawl over each other half naked in

order to get to their respective resting-places; another of its being

common for men and women, not being relations, to undress together in

the same room, without any feeling of its being indelicate; another

of cases where women have been delivered in bed-rooms crowded with

men, young women, and children; and others mention facts of these

crowded bed-rooms much too horrible to be alluded to. Nor are these

solitary instances, but similar reports are given by gentlemen

writing in ALL parts of the country.

"The miserable character of the houses of our peasantry, is, of

itself, and independently of the causes which have made the houses so

wretched, degrading and demoralising the poor of our rural districts

in a fearful manner. It stimulates the unhealthy and unnatural

increase of population. The young peasants from their earliest years

are accustomed to sleep in the same bed-rooms with people of both

sexes, and with both married and unmarried persons. They therefore

lose all sense of the indelicacy of such a life. They know, too, that

they can gain nothing by deferring their marriages and by saving;

that it is impossible for them to obtain better houses by so doing;

and that in many cases they must wait many years before they could

obtain a separate house of any sort. They feel that if they defer

their marriage for ten or fifteen years, they will be at the end of

that period in just the same position as before, and no better off

for their waiting. Having then lost all hope of any improvement of

their social situation, and all sense of the indelicacy of taking a

wife home to the bedroom already occupied by parents, brothers, and

sisters, they marry early in life,--often, if not generally, before

the age of twenty,--and very often occupy, for the first part of

their married life, another bed in the already crowded sleeping-room

of their parents! In this way the morality of the peasants is

destroyed; the numbers of this degraded population are unnaturally

increased, and their means of subsistence are diminished by the

increasing competition of their increasing numbers."--Vol. i. 472.

A necessary consequence of this demoralization is that infanticide

prevails to a degree unknown in any other part of the civilized world.

The London _Leader_ informs its readers that upon a recent occasion--

"It was declared by the coroner of Leeds, and assented to as probable

by the surgeon, that there were, as near as could be calculated,

about three hundred children put to death yearly in Leeds alone that

were not registered by the law. In other words, three hundred infants

were murdered to avoid the consequences of their living, and these

murders, as the coroner said, are never detected."

The reader may now advantageously turn to the account of the state of

education in Leeds, already given,[136] with a view to ascertain the

intellectual condition of the women guilty of the foul and unnatural

crime of child-murder. Doing so, he will find that out of eighteen

hundred and fifty that were married there were _one thousand and

twenty who could not sign their names_--and this in the centre of

civilization in the middle of the nineteenth century!

But a short time since, the _Morning Chronicle_ gave its readers a

list of twenty-two trials, for child-murder alone, that had been

_reported_ in its columns, and these were stated to be but one-half of

those that had taken place in the short period of twenty-seven days!

On the same occasion it stated that although English ruffianism had

"not taken to the knife," it had

"Advanced in the devilish accomplishment of biting off noses and

scooping out eyes. Kicking a man to death while he is down," it

continued, "or treating, a wife in the same way--stamping on an enemy

or a paramour with hobnailed boots--smashing a woman's head with a

hand-iron--these atrocities, which are of almost daily occurrence in

our cities, are not so much imputed crimes as they are the

extravagant exaggerations of the coarse, brutal, sullen temper of an

Englishman, brutified by ignorance and stupefied by drink."

On the same occasion the _Chronicle_ stated that in villages few young

people of the present day marry until, as the phrase is, it has

"become necessary." It is, it continued, the rural practice to "keep

company in a very loose sense, till a cradle is as necessary as a

ring." On another, and quite recent occasion, the same journal

furnished its readers with the following striking illustration of the

state of morals:--

"In one of the recent Dorsetshire cases, [of child murder,] common

cause was made by the girls of the county. They attended the trial in

large numbers; and we are informed that on the acquittal of the

prisoner a general expression of delight was perceptible in the

court; and they left the assizes town boasting 'that they might now

do as they liked.' We are then, it seems, with all our boasted

civilization, relapsing into a barbarous and savage state of

society."

Lest it might be supposed that this condition of things had been

inherited, the editor stated that--

"This deplorable state of morals was of comparatively recent growth.

Old people," he continued, "can often tell the year when the first of

such cases occurred in their families; and what a sensation of shame

it then excited; while they will also tell us that the difficulty now

is to find a lowly couple in village life with whom the rule of

decency and Christianity is not the exception. It is a disgraceful

fact--and one which education, and especially religious education,

has to account for--that a state of morals has grown up in which it

can no longer be said that our maidens are given in marriage."

Infanticide is not, however, confined to the unmarried. Burial clubs

abound. "In our large provincial towns," says Mr. Kay--

"The poor are in the habit of entering their children in what are

called 'burial clubs.' A small sum is paid every year by the parent,

and this entitles him to receive from 3£. to 5£. from the club, on

the death of the child. Many parents enter their children in several

clubs. One man in Manchester has been known to enter his child in

_nineteen_ different clubs. On the death of such a child, the parent

becomes entitled to receive a large sum of money; and as the burial

of the child does not necessarily cost more than 1£., or, at the

most, 1£.10s., the parent realizes a considerable sum after all the

expenses are paid!

"It has been clearly ascertained, that it is a common practice among

the more degraded classes of poor in many of our towns, to enter

their infants in these clubs, and then to cause their death either by

starvation, ill-usage, or poison! What more horrible symptom of moral

degradation can be conceived? One's mind revolts against it, and

would fain reject it as a monstrous fiction. But, alas! it seems to

be but too true.

"Mr. Chadwick says, 'officers of these burial societies, relieving

officers, and others, whose administrative duties put them in

communication with the lowest classes in these districts,' (the

manufacturing districts,) 'express their moral conviction of the

operation of such bounties to produce instances of the visible

neglect of children of which they are witnesses. They often say, 'You

are not treating that child properly; it will not live: _is it in the

club_?' And the answer corresponds with the impression produced by

the sight."--Vol. i. 433.

Commenting on these and numerous other facts of similar kind, the same

author says--

"These accounts are really almost too horrible to be believed at all;

and were they not given us on the authority of such great experience

and benevolence, we should totally discredit them.

"But, alas, they are only too true! There can be no doubt, that a

great part of the poorer classes of this country are sunk into such a

frightful depth of hoplessness, misery, and utter moral degradation,

that even mothers forget their affection for their helpless little

offspring, and kill them, as a butcher does his lambs, in order to

make money by the murder, and therewith to lessen their pauperism and

misery?"--P. 446.

How rapid is the progress of demoralization may be seen from the fact

that in the thirty years from 1821 to 1851, the consumption of British

spirits increased from 4,125,616 to 9,595,368 gallons, or in a ratio

more than double that of the population. The use of opium is also

increasing with rapidity.[137] Intemperance and improvidence go hand

in hand with each other, and hence arises a necessity for burial clubs

for the disposal of the children and the maintenance of the parents.

A recent English journal states that--

"It is estimated that in Manchester there are 1500 'unfortunate

females;' that they lead to an annual expenditure of £470,000; and

that some 250 of them die, in horror and despair, yearly. In England

it is calculated that there are 40,000 houses of ill-fame, and

280,000 prostitutes; and, further, that not less than £8,000,000 are

spent annually in these places."

This may, or may not, be exaggerated, but the condition to which are

reduced so many of the weaker sex would warrant us in expecting a

great decay of morality. When severe labour cannot command a

sufficiency of food, can we be surprised that women find themselves

forced to resort to prostitution as a means of support?

A committee of gentlemen who had investigated the condition of the

sewing-women of London made a report stating that no less than 33,000

of them were "permanently at the starvation point," and were compelled

to resort to prostitution as a means of eking out a subsistence. But a

few weeks since, the _Times_ informed its readers that shirts were

made for a _penny a piece_ by women who found the needles and thread,

and the _Daily News_ furnished evidence that hundreds of young women

had no choice but between prostitution and making artificial flowers

at _twopence a day_! Young ladies seeking to be governesses, and

capable of giving varied instruction, are expected to be satisfied

with the wages and treatment of scullions, and find it difficult to

obtain situations even on such terms. It is in such facts as these

that we must find the causes of those given in the above paragraph.

If we desire to find the character of the young we must look to that

of the aged, and especially to that of the mothers. We see here

something of the hundreds of thousands of young women who are to

supply the future population of England; and if the character of the

latter be in accordance with that of the former, with what hope can we

look to the future?

Nothing indicates more fully the deterioration resulting from this

unceasing struggle for life, than the harsh treatment to which are

subjected persons who need aid in their distress. A case of this kind,

furnished by the _Times_, as occurring at the Lambeth workhouse, so

strongly indicates the decay of kind and generous feeling, that, long

as it is, it is here given:--

"A poor creature, a young English girl--to be sure, she is not a

black--a parcel of drenched rags clinging to her trembling form,

every mark of agony and despair in her countenance, lifts her hand to

the bell. She rings once and again, and at length the door porter

appears, accompanied by a person holding a situation under the

guardians--his name is Brooke--and he is a policeman. She is

starving, she is pregnant, and almost in the pains of labour, but the

stern officials will not take her in. Why? Because she had been in

the workhouse until Tuesday morning last, and had then been

discharged by 'order of the guardians.' Nor is this all. The tale of

parochial bounty is not yet half told out. During that long wet

Tuesday she wandered about. She had not a friend in this great town

to whom she could apply for the smallest assistance, and on Tuesday

night she came back to implore once more the kindly shelter of the

parish workhouse. For yet that night she was taken in, but the next

morning cast forth into the world again with a piece of dry bread in

her hand. On Wednesday the same scene was renewed--the same fruitless

casting about for food and shelter, the same disappointment, and the

same despair. But parochial bounty can only go thus far, and no

farther. Charity herself was worn out with the importunity of this

persevering pauper, and on Thursday night the doors of the parish

workhouse were finally and sternly shut in her face.

"But she was not alone in her sufferings. You might have supposed

that the misery of London--enormous as the amount of London misery

undoubtedly is--could have shown no counterpart to the frightful

position of this unfortunate creature--without a home, without a

friend, without a character, without a shelter, without a bite of

food--betrayed by her seducer, and the mark for the last twelve hours

of the floodgates of heaven. * * * Can it be there are two of them?

Yes! Another young woman, precisely in the same situation, knocks at

the same workhouse door, and is refused admittance by the same stern

guardians of the ratepayers' pockets. The two unfortunates club their

anguish and their despair together, and set forth in quest of some

archway or place of shelter, beneath which they may crouch until the

gas-lamps are put out, and the day breaks once more upon their

sufferings. Well, on they roamed, until one of the two, Sarah

Sherford, was actually seized with the pangs of labour, when they

resolved to stagger back to the workhouse; but again the door was

shut in their faces. What was to be done? They were driven away from

the house, and moved slowly along, with many a pause of agony, no

doubt, until they met with a policeman, one Daniel Donovan, who

directed them to a coffee-house where they might hope to get shelter.

The coffee-house did not open till 2 o'clock, when they had two

hours' shelter. But at that hour they were again cast out, as the

keeper was obliged to come into the street with his stall and attend

to it. 'At this time (we will here copy the language of our report)

Sherford's labour pains had considerably increased, and they again

spoke to the same policeman, Donovan, and told him that, unless she

was taken into the workhouse or some other place, she must give birth

to her infant in the street.' Daniel Donovan accordingly conveyed the

two unfortunate creatures to the workhouse once more, at 4 o'clock in

the morning. 'The policeman on duty there,' said this witness, 'told

him that they had been there before, and seemed to have some

_hesitation_ about admitting them, but on being told that one was in

the pains of labour, he let them in.'"

What slavery can be worse than this? Here are young women, women in

distress, starving and almost in the pains of labour, driven about

from post to pillar, and from pillar to post, by day and by night,

totally unable to obtain the smallest aid. Assuredly it would be

difficult to find any thing to equal this in any other country

claiming to rank among the civilized nations of the world.

At the moment of writing this page, an English journal furnishes a

case of death from starvation, and closes its account with the

following paragraph, strikingly illustrative of the state of things

which naturally arises where every man is "trying to live by snatching

the bread from his neighbour's mouth."

"It is hardly possible to conceive a more horrible case. A stalwart,

strong-framed man, in the prime of life--his long pilgrimage of

martyrdom from London to Stoney-Stratford--his wretched appeals for

help to the "_civilization_" around him--his seven days fast--his

brutal abandonment by his fellow-men--his seeking shelter and being

driven from resting-place to resting-place--the crowning inhumanity

of the person named Slade and the patient, miserable death of the

worn-out man--are a picture perfectly astonishing to contemplate.

"No doubt he invaded the rights of property, when he sought shelter

in the shed and in the lone barn!!!"

The recent developments in regard to Bethlem Hospital are thus

described:--

"Some of the cases of cruelty brought to light by the examiners are

almost too revolting to describe. It appears that the incurables are

lodged in cells partially under ground, where their only conches are

troughs filled with straw and covered with a blanket. On these

miserable beds, worse than many a man gives to his horse or dog, the

victims lie in the coldest weather, without night-clothes, frequently

creeping into the straw in order to keep warm. These poor

unfortunates also are often fed in a way as disgusting as it is

cruel, being laid on their backs, and held down by one of the nurses,

while another forces into the mouth the bread and milk which is their

allotted food. This revolting practice is adopted to save time, for

it was proved on oath that patients, thus treated, ate their meals by

themselves, if allowed sufficient leisure. The imbecile patients,

instead of being bathed with decency, as humanity and health demands,

are thrown on the stone-floor, in a state of nudity, and there mopped

by the nurses. Such things would seem incredible, if they had not

been proved on oath. Some who were not incurable, having been treated

in this manner, exposed these atrocities, after their recovery; and

the result was an investigation, which led to the discovery of the

abominable manner in which this vast charity has been administered."

These things are a necessary consequence of an universal trading

spirit. For the first time in the annals of the world it has been

proclaimed in England that the paramount object of desire with the

people of a great and Christian nation is to buy cheaply and sell

dearly; and when men find themselves, in self-defence, compelled to

beat down the poor sewing-woman to a penny for making a shirt, or the

poor flower-girl to a scale of wages so low that she must resort to

prostitution for the purpose of supporting life, they can neither be

expected to be charitable themselves, nor to tolerate much charity in

the public officers charged with the expenditure of their

contributions. There is consequently everywhere to be seen a degree of

harshness in the treatment of those who have the misfortune to be

poor, and a degree of contempt in the mode of speech adopted in

relation to them, totally incompatible with the idea of advance in

_real_ civilization.

* * * * *

The facts thus far given rest, as the reader will have seen, on the

highest English authority. It is scarcely possible to study them

without arriving at the conclusion that the labouring people of

England are gradually losing all control over the disposition of their

own labour--or in other words, that they are becoming enslaved--and

that with the decay of freedom there has been a decay of morality,

such as has been observed in every other country similarly

circumstanced. To ascertain the cause of this we must refer again to

Adam Smith, who tells us that--

"No equal quantity of productive labour or capital employed in

manufacture can ever occasion so great a reproduction as if it were

employed in agriculture. In these, nature does nothing, man does all,

and the reproduction must always be proportioned to the strength of

the agents that occasion it. The capital employed in agriculture,

therefore, not only puts into motion a greater quantity of productive

labour than any equal capital employed in manufacture; but, in

proportion, too, to the quantity of productive labour which it

employs, it adds a much greater value to the annual value of the land

and labour of the country, to the real wealth and revenue of its

inhabitants. Of all the ways which a capital can be employed, it is

by far the most advantageous to society."

This is the starting point of his whole system, and is directly the

opposite of that from which starts the modern English

politico-economical school that professes to follow in his footsteps,

as will now be shown. The passage here given, which really constitutes

the base upon which rests the whole structure of Dr. Smith's work, is

regarded by Mr. McCulloch as "the most objectionable" one in it, and

he expresses great surprise that "so acute and sagacious a reasoner

should have maintained a doctrine so manifestly erroneous." "So far

indeed," says that gentleman--

"Is it from being true that nature does much for man in agriculture,

and nothing for manufactures, that the fact is more nearly the

reverse. There are no limits to the bounty of nature in manufactures;

but there are limits, and those not very remote, to her bounty in

agriculture. The greatest possible amount of capital might be

expended in the construction of steam-engines, or of any other sort

of machinery, and, after they had been multiplied indefinitely, the

last would be as prompt and efficient in producing commodities and

saving labour as the first. Such, however, is not the case with the

soil. Lands of the first quality are speedily exhausted; and it is

impossible to apply capital indefinitely even to the best soils,

without obtaining from it a constantly diminishing rate of

profit."--_Principles of Political Economy_.

The error here results from the general error of Mr. Ricardo's system,

which places the poor cultivator among the rich soils of the swamps

and river-bottoms, and sends his rich successors to the poor soils of

the hills,--being directly the reverse of what has happened in every

country of the world, in every county in England, and on every farm in

each and all of those counties.[138] Had he not been misled by the

idea of "the constantly increasing sterility of the soil," Mr.

McCulloch could not have failed to see that the only advantage

resulting from the use of the steam-engine, or the loom, or any other

machine in use for the conversion of the products of the earth, was,

that it diminished the quantity of labour required to be so applied,

and increased the quantity that might be given to the work of

production.

It is quite true that wheelbarrows and carts, wagons and ships, may be

increased indefinitely; but of what use can they possibly be, unless

the things to be carried be first produced, and whence can those

things be obtained except from the earth? The grist-mill is useful,

provided there is grain to be ground, but not otherwise. The

cotton-mill would be useless unless the cotton was first produced.

Agriculture _must_ precede manufactures, and last of all, says Dr.

Smith, comes foreign commerce.[139]

The reader has had before him a passage from Mr. J.S. Mill, in which

that gentleman says that "if the law [of the occupation of the land]

were different, almost all the phenomena of the production and

distribution of wealth would be different from what they now are." In

the days of Adam Smith it had not yet been suggested that men began by

the cultivation of rich soils, and then passed to poor ones, with

constantly diminishing power to obtain food. Population, therefore,

had not come to be regarded as "a nuisance" to be abated by any

measures, however revolting, and imposing upon Christian men the

necessity of hardening their hearts, and permitting their fellow-men

to suffer every extremity of poverty and distress "short of absolute

death," with a view to bring about a necessity for refraining to

gratify that natural inclination which leads men and women to

associate in the manner tending to promote the growth of numbers and

the development of the best feelings of the human heart. It was then

considered right that men and women should marry, and increase of

population was regarded as evidence of increased wealth and strength.

Dr. Smith, therefore, looked at the affairs of the world as they were,

and he saw that the production of commodities not only preceded their

conversion and exchange, but that in the work of production the earth

aided man by increasing the _quantity_ of things to, be consumed;

whereas labour applied in other ways could change them only in their

_form_ or in their _place_, making no addition to their quantity. He,

therefore, saw clearly that the nearer the spinner and the weaver came

to the producer of food and wool, the more would be the quantity of

food and cloth to be divided between them; and thus was he led to see

how great an act of injustice it was on the part of his countrymen to

endeavour to compel the people of the world to send their raw

materials to them to be converted, at such vast loss of

transportation. He had no faith in the productive power of ships or

wagons. He knew that the barrel of flour or the bale of cotton, put

into the ship, came out a barrel of flour or a bale of cotton, the

weight of neither having been increased by the labour employed in

transporting it from this place of production to that of consumption.

He saw clearly that to place the consumer by the side of the producer

was to economize labour and aid production, and therefore to increase

the power to trade. He was, therefore, in favour of the local

application of labour and capital, by aid of which towns should grow

up in the midst of producers of food; and he believed that if "human

institutions" had not been at war with the best interests of man,

those towns would "nowhere have increased beyond what, the improvement

and cultivation of the territory in which they were situated could

support." Widely different is all this from the system which builds up

London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, to be the manufacturing

centres of the world, and urges upon all nations the adoption of a

system looking directly to their maintenance and increase!

Directly opposed in this respect to Dr. Smith, Mr. McCulloch has

unbounded faith in the productive power of ships and wagons. To him--

"It is plain that the capital and labour employed in carrying

commodities from where they are to be produced to where they are to

be consumed, and in dividing them into minute portions so as to fit

the wants of consumers, are really as productive as if they were

employed in agriculture or in manufactures."--_Principles_, 166.

The man who carries the food adds, as he seems to think, as much to

the quantity to be consumed as did the one who ploughed the ground and

sowed the seed; and he who stands at the counter measuring cloth adds

as much to the quantity of cloth as did he who produced it. No

benefit, in his view, results from any saving of the labour of

transportation or exchange. He has, therefore, no faith in the

advantage to be derived from the local application of labour or

capital. He believes that it matters nothing to the farmer of Ireland

whether his food be consumed on the farm or at a distance from

it--whether his grass be fed on the land or carried to market--whether

the manure be returned to the land or wasted on the road--whether, of

course, the land be impoverished or enriched. He is even disposed to

believe that it is frequently more to the advantage of the people of

that country that the food there produced should be divided among the

labourers of France or Italy than among themselves.[140]

He believes in the advantage of large manufacturing towns at a

distance from those who produce the food and raw materials of

manufacture; and that perfect freedom of trade consists in the quiet

submission of the farmers and planters of the world to the working of

a system which Dr. Smith, regarded as tending so greatly to "the

discouragement of agriculture," that it was the main object of his

work to teach the people of Britain that it was not more unjust to

others than injurious to themselves.

In a work just issued from the press, Mr. McCulloch tells his readers

that--

"For the reasons now stated, a village built in the immediate

vicinity of a gentleman's seat generally declines on his becoming an

absentee. That, however, is in most cases any thing but an injury.

The inhabitants of such villages are generally poor, needy

dependants, destitute of any invention, and without any wish to

distinguish themselves. But when the proprietors are elsewhere, they

are forced to trust to their own resources, and either establish some

sort of manufacture, or resort to those manufacturing and commercial

cities where there is _always_ a ready demand for labourers, and

where every latent spark of genius is sure to be elicited. Although,

therefore, it be certainly true that absenteeism has a tendency to

reduce the villages which are found in the neighbourhood of the

residences of extensive proprietors, it is not on that account

prejudicial to the country at large, but the reverse."[141]

It is here seen that the people who own large estates are supposed to

be surrounded by "poor and needy dependants," who are to be stimulated

to exertion by the pressure of want, and that this pressure is to be

produced by the absenteeism of the proprietor. We have here the master

administering the lash to his poor slave, and the only difference

between the English master and the Jamaica one appears to be, that

absenteeism in the one case forces the poor labourer to seek the lanes

and alleys of a great city, and in the other causes him to be worked

to death. The slavery of Ireland, Jamaica, and India is a natural

consequence of the absenteeism of the great land-owners; and the

larger the properties, the greater must be the tendency to

absenteeism, centralization, and slavery; and yet Mr. McCulloch

assures his readers that

"The advantage of preserving large estates from being frittered down

by a scheme of equal division is not limited to its effects on the

younger children of their owners. It raises universally the standard

of competence, and gives new force to the springs which set industry

in motion. The manner of living in great landlords is that in which

every one is ambitious of being able to indulge; and their habits of

expense, though somewhat injurious to themselves, act as powerful

incentives to the ingenuity and enterprise of other classes, who

never think their fortunes sufficiently ample unless they will enable

them to emulate the splendour of the richest landlords; so that the

custom of primogeniture seems to render all classes more industrious,

and to augment at the same time the mass of wealth and the scale of

enjoyment."--_ Principles_.

The modern system tends necessarily to the consolidation of land, and

the more completely that object can be attained, the greater must, be

"the splendour of the richest landlords," the greater the habits of

expense among the few, the greater their power to absent themselves,

the greater the power of the rapacious middleman or agent, the greater

the poverty and squalor of "the poor and needy dependants," and the

greater the necessity for seeking shelter in the cellars of

Manchester, the wynds of Glasgow, or the brothels of London and

Liverpool; but the larger must be the supply of the commodity called

"cheap labour." In other words, slaves will be more numerous, and

masters will be more able to decide on what shall be the employment of

the labourer, and what shall be its reward.

Adam Smith knew nothing of all this. He saw that capital was always

best managed by its owner, and therefore had no faith in a universal

system of agencies. He saw that the little proprietor was by far the

greatest improver, and he had no belief in the advantage of great

farmers surrounded by day-labourers. He believed in the advantage of

making twelve exchanges in a year in place of one, and he saw clearly

that the nearer the consumer could come to the producer the larger and

more profitable would be commerce. He therefore taught that the

workman should go to the place where, food being abundant, moderate

labour would command much food. His successors teach that the food

should come to the place where, men being abundant and food scarce,

much labour will command little food, and that when population has

thus been rendered superabundant, the surplus should go abroad to

raise more food for the supply of those they left behind. The one

teaches the concentration of man, and the _local_ division of labour.

The other, the dispersion of man, and the _territorial_ division of

labour. They differ thus in every thing, except that they both use the

_word_ free trade--but with reference to totally distinct ideas. With

the one, COMMERCE has that enlarged signification which embraces every

description of intercourse resulting from the exercise of "man's

natural inclination" for association, while with the other TRADE has

reference to no idea, beyond that of the mere pedler who buys in the

cheapest market and sells in the dearest one. The system of the one is

perfectly harmonious, and tends toward peace among men. The other is a

mass of discords, tending toward war among the men and the nations of

the earth.

As ordinarily used, the word Commerce has scarcely any signification

except that of trade with distant men, and yet that is the least

profitable commerce that can be maintained,--as the reader may satisfy

himself if he will reflect that when the miller and the farmer are

near neighbours they divide between them all the flour that is made,

whereas, when they are widely separated, a third man, the carrier,

intervenes between them and takes a large portion of it, leaving less

to be divided between those who raise the wheat and those who convert

it into flour. The more perfect the power of association the greater

must be the power to maintain commerce, for _every act of association

is an act of commerce_, as it is proposed now to show, beginning at

the beginning, in the family, which long precedes the nation. Doing

so, we find the husband exchanging his services in the raising of food

and the materials of clothing, for those of his wife, employed in the

preparation of food for the table, and the conversion of raw materials

into clothing,--and here it is we find the greatest of all trades. Of

all the labour employed on the farms and in the farm-houses of the

Union, we should, could we have an accurate statement, find that the

proportion of its products exchanged beyond their own limits, scarcely

exceeded one-third, and was certainly far less than one-half, the

remainder being given to the raising of food and raw materials for

their own consumption, and the conversion of that food and those

materials into the forms fitting them for their own uses.

At the next step we find ourselves in the little community, of which

the owner of this farm constitutes a portion; and here we find the

farmer exchanging his wheat with one neighbour for a day's labour--the

use of his wagon and his horse for other days of labour--his potatoes

with a third for the shoeing of his horse, and with a fourth for the

shoeing of himself and his children, or the making of his coat. On one

day he or his family have labour to spare, and they pass it off to a

neighbour to be repaid by him in labour on another day. One requires

aid in the spring, the other in the autumn; one gives a day's labour

in hauling lumber, in exchange for that of another, employed in mining

coal or iron ore. Another trades the labour that has been employed in

the purchase of a plough for that of his neighbour which had been

applied to the purchase of a cradle. Exchanges being thus made on the

spot, from hour to hour and from day to day, with little or no

intervention of persons whose business is trade, their amount is

large, and, combined with those of the family, equals probably

four-fifths of the total product of the labour of the community,

leaving not more than one-fifth to be traded off with distant men; and

this proportion is often greatly diminished as with increasing

population and wealth a market is made on the land for the products of

the land.

This little community forms part of a larger one, styled a nation, the

members of which are distant hundreds or thousands of miles from each

other, and here we find difficulties tending greatly to limit the

power to trade. The man in latitude 40° may have labour to sell for

which he can find no purchaser, while he who lives in latitude 50° is

at the moment grieving to see his crop perish on the ground for want

of aid in harvest. The first may have potatoes rotting, and his wagon

and horses idle, while the second may need potatoes, and have his

lumber on his hands for want of means of transportation--yet distance

forbids exchange between them.

Again, this nation forms part of a world, the inhabitants of which are

distant tens of thousands of miles from each other, and totally unable

to effect exchanges of labour, or even of commodities, except of

certain kinds that will bear transportation to distant markets.

Commerce tends, therefore, to diminish in its amount with every

circumstance tending to increase the necessity for going to a

distance, and to increase in amount with every one tending to diminish

the distance within which it must be maintained. As it now stands with

the great farming interest of the Union, the proportions are probably

as follows:--

Exchanges in the family................... 55 per cent.

" in the neighbourhood............ 25 "

" in the nation................... 15 "

" with other nations.............. 5 "

---

Total.................................... 100

It will now be obvious that any law, domestic or foreign, tending to

interfere with the exchanges of the family or the neighbourhood, would

be of more serious importance than one that should, to the same

extent, affect those with the rest of the nation, and that one which

should affect the trade of one part of the nation with another, would

be more injurious than one which should tend to limit the trade with

distant nations. Japan refuses to have intercourse with either Europe

or America, yet this total interdiction of trade with a great empire

is less important to the farmers of the Union than would be the

imposition of a duty of one farthing a bushel upon the vegetable food

raised on their farms to be consumed in their families.

The great trade is the home trade, and the greater the tendency to the

performance of trade at home the more rapid will be the increase of

prosperity, and the greater the power to effect exchanges abroad. The

reason of this is to be found in the fact that the power of production

increases with the power of combined exertion, and all combination is

an exchange of labour for labour, the exchange being made at home. The

more exchanges are thus effected the smaller is the number of the men,

wagons, ships, or sailors employed in making them, and the greater the

number of persons employed in the work of production, with increase in

the quantity of commodities produced, and the _power_ to exchange

grows with the power to produce, while the power to produce diminishes

with every increase in the _necessity_ for exchange. Again, when the

work of exchange is performed at home, the power of combination

facilitates the disposal of a vast amount of labour that would

otherwise be wasted, and an infinite number of things that would

otherwise have no value whatever, but which, combined with the labour

that is saved, are quite sufficient to make one community rich by

comparison with another in which such savings cannot be effected.

Virginia wastes more labour and more commodities that would have value

in New England, than would pay five times over for all the cloth and

iron she consumes.

Again, the quantity of capital required for effecting exchanges tends

to diminish as commerce comes nearer home. The ship that goes to China

performs no more exchanges in a year than the canal-boat that trades

from city to city performs in a month; and the little and inexpensive

railroad car passing from village to village may perform almost twice

as many as the fine packet-ship that has cost ninety or a hundred

thousand dollars. With the extension of the home trade, labour and

capital become, therefore, more productive of commodities required for

the support and comfort of man, and the wages of the labourer and the

profits of the capitalist tend to increase, and commerce tends still

further to increase. On the other hand, with the diminution of the

power to effect exchanges at home, labour and capital become less

productive of commodities; the wages of the labourer and the profits

of the capitalist tend to decrease, and trade tends still further to

diminish. All this will be found fully exemplified among ourselves on

a comparison of the years 1835-36 with 1841-42, while the contrary and

upward tendency is exemplified by the years 1845-6 and 7, as compared

with 1841-2.

The fashionable doctrine of our day is, however, that the prosperity

of a nation is to be measured by the amount of its trade with people,

who are distant, as manifested by custom-house returns, and not by the

quantity of exchanges among persons who live near each other, and who

trade without the intervention of ships, and with little need of

steamboats or wagons. If the trade of a neighbourhood be closed by the

failure of a furnace or a mill, and the workman be thus deprived of

the power to trade off the labour of himself or his children, or the

farmer deprived of the power to trade off his food, consolation is

found in the increased quantity of exports--_itself, perhaps, the

direct consequence of a diminished ability to consume at home_. If

canal-boats cease to be built, the nation is deemed to be enriched by

the substitution of ocean steamers requiring fifty times the capital

for the performance of the same quantity of exchanges. If the failure

of mills and furnaces causes men to be thrown out of employment, the

remedy is to be found, not in the revisal of the measures that have

produced these effects, but in the exportation of the men themselves

to distant climes, thus producing a necessity for the permanent use of

ships instead of canal-boats, with diminished power to maintain trade,

and every increase of this _necessity_ is regarded as an evidence of

growing wealth and power.

The whole tendency of modern commercial policy is to the substitution

of the distant market for the near one. England exports her people to

Australia that they may there grow the wool that might be grown at

home more cheaply; and we export to California, by hundreds of

thousands, men who enjoy themselves in hunting gold, leaving behind

them untouched the real gold-mines--those of coal and iron--in which

their labour would be thrice more productive. The reports of a late

Secretary of the Treasury abound in suggestions as to the value of the

distant trade. Steam-ships were, he thought, needed to enable us to

obtain the control of the commerce of China and Japan. "With our front

on both oceans and the gulf," it was thought, "we might secure this

commerce, and with it, in time, command the trade of the world."

England, not to be outdone in this race for "the commerce of the

world," adds steadily to her fleet of ocean steamers, and the

government contributes its aid for their maintenance, by the payment

of enormous sums withdrawn from the people at home, and diminishing

the home market to thrice the extent that it increases the foreign

one. The latest accounts inform us of new arrangements about to be

made with a view to competition with this country for the passenger

traffic to and within the tropics, while the greatest of all trades

now left to British ships is represented to be the transport of

British men, women, and children, so heavily taxed at home for the

maintenance of this very system that they are compelled to seek an

asylum abroad. In all this there is nothing like freedom of trade, or

freedom of man; as the only real difference between the freeman and

the slave is, that the former exchanges himself, his labour and his

products, while the latter must permit another to do it for him.

Mr. McCulloch regards himself as a disciple of Adam Smith, and so does

Lord John Russell. We, too, are his disciple, but in _The Wealth of

Nations_, can find no warrant for the system advocated by either. The

system of Dr. Smith tended to the production of that natural freedom

of trade, each step toward which would have been attended with

improvement in the condition of the people, and increase in the _power

to trade_, thus affording proof conclusive of the soundness of the

doctrine; whereas every step in the direction now known as free trade

is attended with deterioration of condition, and _increased necessity_

for trade, with _diminished power_ to trade. Those who profess to be

his followers and suppose that they are carrying out his principles,

find results directly the reverse of their anticipations; and the

reason for this may readily be found in the fact that the English

school of political economists long since repudiated the whole of the

system of Dr. Smith, retaining of it little more than _the mere words_

"free trade."

The basis of all commerce is to be found in production, and therefore

it was that Dr. Smith looked upon agriculture, the science of

production, as the first pursuit of man, and manufactures and commerce

as beneficial only to the extent that they tended to aid agriculture

and increase the quantity of commodities to be converted or exchanged,

preparatory to their being consumed. He held, therefore, that the

return to labour would be greater in a trade in which exchanges could

be made once a month than in another in which they could only be made

once in a year, and he was opposed to the system then in vogue,

because it had, "in all cases," turned trade,

"From a foreign trade of consumption with a neighbouring, into one

with a more distant country; in many cases, from a direct foreign

trade of consumption, into a round-about one; and in some cases, from

all foreign trade of consumption, into a carrying trade. It has in

all cases, therefore," he continues, "turned it from a direction in

which it would have maintained a greater quantity of productive

labour, into one in which it can maintain a much smaller quantity."

All this is directly the reverse of what is taught by the modern

British economists; and we have thus two distinct schools, that of

Adam Smith and that of his successors. The one taught that labour

directly applied to production was most advantageous, and that by

bringing the consumer to take his place by the side of the producer,

production and the consequent power to trade would be increased. The

other teaches, that every increase of capital or labour applied to

production must be attended with diminished return, whereas ships and

steam-engines may be increased _ad infinitum_ without such diminution:

the necessary inference from which is, that the more widely the

consumer and the producer are separated, with increased necessity for

the use of ships and engines, the more advantageously labour will be

applied, and the greater will be the power to trade. The two systems

start from a different base, and tend in an opposite direction, and

yet the modern school claims Dr. Smith as founder. While teaching a

theory of production totally different, Mr. McCulloch informs us that

"the fundamental principles on which the _production_ of wealth

depends" were established by Dr. Smith, "beyond the reach of cavil or

dispute."

The difference between the two schools may be thus illustrated: Dr.

Smith regarded commerce as forming a true pyramid, thus--

Exchanges abroad.

Exchanges at home.

Conversion into cloth and iron.

Production of food and other raw materials.

This is in exact accordance with what we know to be true; but

according to the modern school, commerce forms an inverted pyramid,

thus--

Exchanges with distant men.

Exchanges at home.

Conversion.

Production.