is more original than the plan itself. Other Liberals than Mr
Carlyle have propounded the doctrine that the pauper is a slave of
the state. A century and a half ago, Fletcher of Saltoun wrote a
treatise to that effect, and probably a more determined republican
than Fletcher never stepped in upper leathers. But somehow or other,
although Scotland was then less scrupulous in matters of personal
freedom than the sister kingdom, the scheme was by no means received
with acclamation. Heritable jurisdictions were all very well in
their way, but the idea of reducing the peasantry to the state of
Russian serfdom, was rather more than the free parliament of the
Scots Estates could contrive to stomach. It has been very shrewdly
remarked that there is a wide circle in politics, whereof the
connecting link lies between ultra-liberalism and absolute tyranny.
Mr Carlyle, without meaning it, gives us a fair exemplification of
this in the present pamphlets. Messrs Cobden and Bright afford us an
unmistakeable exemplification of it, in their endeavours to frustrate
the operation of the Ten Hours' Bill. M. Ledru Rollin demonstrated
it in his circulars, on the occasion of the first French republican
election. Liberty is a beautiful term, but its true signification is
unknown to the thorough-paced demagogue.
According to the spirit of the British laws, labour can only be
enforced as the penalty of crime. Mr Carlyle would change this, and
would place the pauper upon precisely the same level as the convict.
We are not prepared to say that some important improvements might
not be made in the practical operation of the poor-laws. We have
read various pamphlets, published in this city and elsewhere, which
strenuously recommend the employment of the able-bodied poor in the
reclaiming of waste lands, and their immediate removal from the
towns. There is, however, much more philanthropy than philosophy in
these schemes. In order to discover a proper remedy, we ought in
every case to direct our primary attention to the nature and origin
of the disease; and this is precisely what our modern philanthropists
neglect to do. People do not crowd into towns of their own choice.
Give them their free will, and the means of subsistence, and one and
all of them will prefer the fresh air, and the sights and sounds
of nature, to the stifling atmosphere, the reeking filth, and the
discordant cries of the city lanes and courts. But no such free will
exists: the balance has not been kept between the country and the
towns. No encouragement has been given to the small manufactures,
which in former times were the support of villages now rapidly
falling into decay. The gigantic power of machinery, set in motion
by large capital, has nearly abolished the hand-loom. Worsted
knitting, yarn-spinning, straw-plaiting, are now rendered almost
profitless occupations. In order to live, the villagers have been
forced to migrate to the towns. We need hardly refer to the earliest
of the Free-trade measures, which, by substituting Spanish barilla
for kelp, threw whole districts of the West Highlands at once into
a state of pauperism. At this moment, a new cause is aggravating
the evil. The stagnation of agricultural employment occasioned by
the abolition of the corn duties, has given a new impetus to rural
emigration; and those who cannot afford their passage to foreign
parts naturally seek refuge in the towns. In another year--if the
experiment should be continued so long--the effects of this last
change will become more evident than they are now. The able-bodied
ploughman is the last of the agricultural class who will suffer.
Those who have already been compelled to change their homes, or to go
upon the parish-list, are the cottars, who derived their subsistence
from the employment given them by resident proprietors. So long
as encouragement to agricultural improvement existed, these poor
people never wanted work; but now the calamitous fall in the price
of produce, and the prospect of a great diminution of rents, have
compelled the landlords to discontinue their improvements, and to
reduce the expenses of their establishments to the lowest possible
limit. In this way, country labour is lessened, and town labour, by
the increasing competition of hands, is cheapened. This is the true
secret of all those startling revelations as to the misery, want,
and positive oppression of the working classes which have lately
appeared in the public journals, and which have engendered in the
minds of many a natural despair as to the destiny of a state in which
such things are suffered to exist. The remedy undoubtedly is neither
an easy nor a speedy one; still, it is by no means to be included
in the category of impossibilities. Machinery, which is the first
great cause of British pauperism, cannot indeed be checked, _but it
may very easily be taxed_. "An acre of land," says a late eminent
writer, "if cultivated, must pay a tithe of its productions to
support the religion of the state, and an equal contribution with any
other property in respect of the poor, county, and church rates; but
mechanical power may exercise its productive faculty _ad infinitum_,
with but a trifling reference or liability to either the one or the
other. The building may be rated at £200, £500, or £1000 a-year, but
it has a power within it which, as compared with landed property
rated at the same amount, will produce a hundredfold as great a
return--a principle in legislation as deteriorating in its operation
on the masses as it is unjust to individuals." That machinery, which
has changed the whole character of our population, and which, in
fact, has been the means of creating this stern reality of pauperism,
is not taxed upon the principle of its productive power. That it
should be so, seems evident upon the smallest reflection. Land is
not taxed on the principle of acreage, but on that of value, which
again depends entirely on production. Why should not the manufactory
be rated in the same manner? It is true that, by such a measure as
this, pauperism could not be removed, but it would be materially
checked, for the fair proportion of the burden would thus be thrown
on the shoulders of those who occasioned it. But nothing effectual
can be done until the nation has finally determined what policy it
is to pursue for the future, and in all time coming, with respect
to native industry. If Free Trade is to go on, pauperism must
continue like a Upas tree to spread and overshadow the land. It is
not within the range of possibility that this can be otherwise. No
church-extension, education, cheap literature, ventilation, sewerage,
public baths, or model lodging-houses, can avail to mitigate the
evil. It is town competition--made triply worse by the operation of
low tariffs--which is driving the working classes to the verge of
the pit of despair; and that town competition is increasing, and
will increase, so long as a fresh daily supply of hands is driven
from country labour. The scheme of the philanthropists to whom we
have referred, is to take the surplusage from the towns and to send
them to the country. This, in the present state of matters, is about
as feasible an undertaking as if we were to try to make a stream of
water run up-hill. Why, the misery and indigence which they seek
to relieve, is not the result of mere idleness, dissipation, or
profligacy--it arises from over-competition in one department of
industry, occasioned by the utter want of profitable employment in
another. There would be no need of industrial regiments to cultivate
the soil, if its cultivation were allowed to be remunerative. But to
set our pauper population at work upon anything which will not repay
private enterprise is mere delusion. We have said this much upon a
topic of the greatest interest, and the utmost importance, because
we are convinced that many persons, who are fully impressed with the
magnitude of the evil, have mistaken the remedy from the want of a
due consideration of the causes from whence that evil has arisen. It
is, however, a subject too large for incidental discussion, and we
shall probably return to it on a future occasion, when we can state
our views without reference to the whimsical vagaries of Mr Carlyle.
So then, the Noblest having made his speech, and wound up with
a significant hint of flogging and pistoling every one of the
unfortunate serfs who shall fail to wield the hoe with becoming
alacrity, what next? Nothing more, in so far as the interests of the
working classes are concerned; at least nothing tangible. Perhaps it
would be absurd to expect anything more. The man who can propound
a scheme to rid us of pauperism, with all its concomitant misery,
would be a greater benefactor to the commonwealth, and to the human
race, than a thousand Howards in one. Mr Carlyle is perhaps the most
strenuous advocate for work that we ever encountered. He would have
made a first-rate taskmaster under the old Egyptian economy. He is,
with great reason, indignant at the state to which our West Indian
Colonies have been reduced by means of Exeter Hall emancipation,
and he scouts emancipation itself as a gross delusion of the fiend.
It is to be regretted that his views have been so late of ripening.
Time was, when a fair and common-sense protest, advanced by a Liberal
philosopher, against the absurdity of attempting to change the hue
of the Ethiopian by a single momentary scrubbing, might have been
of some actual use: now, it is in vain to recommend a protracted
application of the tub. The Noblest, when Mr Carlyle has discovered
him and put him forward, will hardly achieve his ends by using the
following language, even supposing that he wielded the lightning, and
were able to put his threats into execution.
"Beautiful Black Peasantry, who have fallen idle, and have
got the Devil at your elbow; interesting White Felonry, who
are not idle, but have enlisted into the Devil's regiments of
the line,--know that my benevolence for you is comparatively
trifling! What I have of that divine feeling is due to others,
not to you. A universal Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection
Society is not the one I mean to institute in these times, where
so much wants protection, and is sinking to sad issues for want
of it! The scoundrel needs no protection. The scoundrel that
_will_ hasten to the gallows, why not rather clear the way for
him? Better he reach _his_ goal and outgate by the natural
proclivity, than be so expensively dammed up and detained,
poisoning everything as he stagnates and meanders along, to
arrive at last a hundred times fouler, and swollen a hundred
times bigger! Benevolent men should reflect on this.--And you
Quashee, my pumpkin,--(not a bad fellow either, this poor
Quashee, when tolerably guided!)--idle Quashee, I say you must
get the Devil _sent away_ from your elbow, my poor dark friend!
In this world there will be no existence for you otherwise. No,
not as the brother of your folly will I live beside you. Please
to withdraw out of my way, if I am not to contradict your folly
and amend it, and put it in the stocks if it will not amend. By
the Eternal Maker! it is on that footing alone that you and I
can live together. And if you had respectable traditions dated
from beyond Magna Charta, or from beyond the Deluge, to the
contrary, and written sheepskins that would thatch the face of
the world,--behold I, for one individual, do not believe said
respectable traditions, nor regard said written sheepskins,
except as things which you, till you grow wiser, will believe.
Adieu, Quashee; I will wish you better guidance than you have
had of late."
The meaning of this passage is, that the black population of our
colonies ought no longer to be permitted to dwell in perfect
idleness in their provision grounds, rearing pumpkins for their own
consumption, without regard to the cultivation of the sugar-cane.
As we have already remarked, this view is somewhat of the latest;
nevertheless truth, like repentance, can never come too late to
be received. Divorced from the folly of his speech, Mr Carlyle's
sentiment is sound. Twenty millions of British money, wrung from
the hard-taxed labour of our people, were given--for what? Not only
to emancipate the Negroes, but to place them in such a position
that they could effectually control their former masters--our own
colonists and countrymen, to whom our faith was solemnly plighted
for the maintenance of their privileges and commerce. Let it be
granted that slavery was a gross sin, was it incumbent upon us to
elevate the emancipated Blacks so high, that they could control the
labour market--to give them the status of untaxed yoemen, without any
security for the slightest manifestation of their gratitude? It was
more than preposterous that those whose freedom was purchased should
be placed in a better position, and invested with more immunity from
labour and want, than the great bulk of the people who made the
sacrifice in order to secure that freedom; and the result has amply
demonstrated the gross folly of the scheme. There are thousands, nay
millions of men in Britain and Ireland, whose lot, compared with
that of the emancipated Blacks of Jamaica, is one of speechless
misery--and yet their cry to be relieved from a competition which is
crushing them down to the dust, is unheard and uncared for amidst
the din of contending politicians, and the perpetual hum of the busy
proselytes of Mammon.
Here we cannot forbear from quoting a characteristic passage from
Mr Carlyle's tracts. The idea is not original, but the handling
is worthy of Astley's humourist; and we commend it to the special
attention of all free-trading philanthropists.
"Certainly Emancipation proceeds with rapid strides among us,
this good while; and has got to such a length as might give rise
to reflections in men of a serious turn. West Indian Blacks are
emancipated, and it appears refuse to work. Irish Whites have
long been entirely emancipated; and nobody asks them to work,
or on condition of finding them potatoes (which, of course, is
indispensable) permits them to work. Among speculative persons,
a question has sometimes risen. In the progress of Emancipation,
are we to look for a time when all the Horses also are to be
emancipated, and brought to the supply-and-demand principle?
Horses too have 'motives;' are acted on by hunger, fear, hope,
love of oats, terror of platted leather; nay they have vanity,
ambition, emulation, thankfulness, vindictiveness; some rude
outline of all our human spiritualities,--a rude resemblance to
us in mind and intelligence, even as they have in bodily frame.
The Horse, poor dumb four-footed fellow, he too has his private
feelings, his affections, gratitudes; and deserves good usage;
no human master, without crime, shall treat him unjustly either,
or recklessly lay on the whip where it is not needed:--I am
sure if I could make him 'happy,' I should be willing to grant
a small vote (in addition to the late twenty millions) for that
object!
"Him, too, you occasionally tyrannise over; and with bad result
to yourselves among others; using the leather in a tyrannous,
unnecessary manner; withholding, or scantily furnishing,
the oats and ventilated stabling that are due. Rugged
horse-subduers, one fears they are a little tyrannous at times.
'Am I not a horse, and _half_-brother?' To remedy which, so far
as remediable, fancy--the horses all 'emancipated;' restored to
their primeval right of property in the grass of this Globe;
turned out to graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner!
So long as grass lasts, I daresay they are very happy, or think
themselves so. And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring
morning, with a sieve of oats in his hand, and agony of eager
expectation in his heart, is he happy? Help me to plough this
day, Black Dobbin; oats in full measure if thou wilt. 'Hlunh!
No--thank!' snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty
and the grass. Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? 'Hlunh!' Gray
Joan, then, my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,--O Heaven! she
too answers Hlunh! Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke
for me. Corn-crops are ended in this world!--For the sake, if
not of Hodge, then of Hodge's horses, one prays this benevolent
practice might now cease, and a new and a better one try to
begin. Small kindness to Hodge's horses to emancipate them! The
fate of all emancipated horses is, sooner or later, inevitable.
To have in this habitable earth no grass to eat,--in black
Jamaica gradually none, as in White Connemara already none;--to
roam aimless, wasting the seed-fields of the world; and be
hunted home to Chaos, by the dire watch-dogs and dire hell-dogs,
with such horrors of forsaken wretchedness as were never seen
before! These things are not sport; they are terribly true, in
this country at this hour."
One other sham, perhaps the greatest which our age has witnessed, Mr
Carlyle accidentally denounces--we mean the late Colonial policy. If
the Whigs have an official aptitude for anything, it is the coopering
up of Constitutions. Is one colony indignant at some outrage or
insult proceeding from headquarters--is another dissatisfied with
the conduct of the Governor, and urgent for his recall--is a third
aggrieved by the commercial vacillation and fiscal measures of a
Parliament in which it has neither voice nor power--the universal
panacea is, Give them a Constitution! We hope the present Ministry
will profit by the following criticism--not volunteered by us, who
neither look upon them with affection, nor entertain any sanguine
hope of their conversion to a patriotic policy,--but penned by a
writer who, not long ago, was considered by their organs as one of
the deepest thinkers of the age.
"Constitutions for the Colonies," says Mr Carlyle, "are now on
the anvil; the discontented Colonies are all to be cured of
their miseries by Constitutions. Whether that will cure their
miseries, or only operate as a Godfrey's Cordial to stop their
whimpering, and in the end worsen all their miseries, may be
a sad doubt to us. One thing strikes a remote spectator in
these Colonial questions: the singular placidity with which
the British Statesman at this time, backed by M'Crowdy and the
British moneyed classes, is prepared to surrender whatsoever
interest Britain, as foundress of those establishments, might
pretend to have in the decision. 'If you want to go from us,
go; we by no means want you to stay: you cost us money yearly,
which is scarce; desperate quantities of trouble too: why
not go, if you wish it?' Such is the humour of the British
Statesman at this time.--Men clear for rebellion, 'annexation'
as they call it, walk openly abroad in our American Colonies;
found newspapers, hold platform palaverings. From Canada there
comes duly by each mail a regular statistic of Annexationism:
increasing fast in this quarter, diminishing in that;--Majesty's
Chief Governor seeming to take it as a perfectly open question;
Majesty's Chief Governor, in fact, seldom appearing on the scene
at all, except to receive the impact of a few rotten eggs on
occasion, and then duck in again to his private contemplations.
And yet one would think the Majesty's Chief Governor ought to
have a kind of interest in the thing? Public liberty is carried
to a great length in some portion of her Majesty's dominions.
But the question, 'Are we to continue subjects of her Majesty,
or start rebelling against her? So many as are here for
rebelling, hold up your hands!' Here is a public discussion of
a very extraordinary nature to be going on under the nose of a
Governor of Canada? How the Governor of Canada, being a British
piece of flesh and blood, and not a Canadian lumber-log of mere
pine and rosin, can stand it, is not very conceivable at first
view. He does it, seemingly, with the stoicism of a Zeno. It is
a constitutional sight like few."
With Earl Grey at the head of the Colonial Department, backed and
assisted by that pattern of candour, Mr Hawes--with Lord Elgin in
Canada, and Lord Torrington in Ceylon--the integrity of the British
empire is certainly exposed to peril. But a more dangerous symptom
is the spirit which of late years has prevailed in the councils of
the nation, and owes its origin to the false views and perverse
unpatriotic doctrines of the political economists. They refuse to
admit into their calculations any element which may not be reduced
to the standard of money-value, and they consider that the worth of
a colony is to be measured solely by the returns of its traffic.
This is a leading dogma of Free Trade; and no doubt, were Free Trade
capable of entire realisation, if the nations of the earth had no
other ambition than to buy and sell, after the manner recommended
by Mr Cobden, and if reciprocity were a thing universal, a good
deal might be urged in its favour. If we apply the same test to
Ireland, we shall find that it is greatly for the advantage of
the people of Great Britain to pronounce in favour of Repeal, and
to allow the young patriots of the Emerald Isle to enter into any
kind of relationship which they may choose with the sympathising
republicans of France. This is Free Trade in its plain, undisguised
form; and to some such consummation as this we must come at last,
by virtue of the grand experiment, should that, like Sir Robert
Peel's temporary Income Tax, be extended to a limitless perpetuity.
At present, in so far as regards the welfare of a great portion of
the inhabitants of the country, it is difficult to perceive what
advantage they derive from the boasted character of Britons, except
the privilege of contributing to the heaviest load of taxation that
was ever laid upon the industry of a people. We acknowledge that the
Free-traders have planned their scheme with consummate adroitness
and dexterity. If their object was, as we believe it was, to sap
those principles of high morality, rectitude, honour, and patriotism,
which carried Great Britain successfully through the dangers of wild
European revolution, anarchy, and war, they could not have hit upon
a better or a surer method. Many a disheartened agriculturist has
lately asked himself, what is the nature of the ties which bind him
imperatively to Britain, when a richer soil and a fairer climate
can be found elsewhere, a home not daily harassed by the knock of
the tax-gatherer, and the London market ever ready to receive the
product of his industry? It is not good that these questions should
arise in the minds of our yeomen, for they are calculated to engender
a train of thoughts very hostile to the maintenance of that credit
which England dare not lose, without forfeiting her reputation, her
fame, her honour, and her sway. The thoughts of the colonies have
long been bent in a similar direction; and we doubt not that many
of them have been amazed to find that, so far from being checked in
their preliminary mutterings of revolt, they have the hearty good
wishes of the Manchester men in dissolving their connection with
the mother country, whenever they may choose to do so. Thus do we
stand at present in our home and colonial relations, the clank of
the constitution hammer resounding from the cooperage, and dull-eyed
Imbecility sitting lazily at the helm.