The Slave Trade, Domestic And Foreign Part 21

Wool.................................... 83,000,000 lbs.

Cotton.................................. 700,000,000 "

Silk.................................... 5,020,000 "

Flax.................................... 135,000,000 "

Eggs.................................... 115,000,000 "

Oxen, cows, calves, sheep, hogs, &c..... 300,000 "

Corn.................................... 8,147,675 qrs.

Flour................................... 5,384,552 cwts.

Potatoes................................ 635,000 "

Provisions.............................. 450,000 "

b.u.t.ter.................................. 354,000 "

Cheese.................................. 338,000 "

Hams and lard........................... 130,000 "

The wool imported was more than was required to produce the cloth exported, and from this it follows that the whole export represented foreign wool. The cotton, silk, flax, dyeing-materials, &c. exported were all foreign, and the food imported was adequate, or nearly so, to feed the people who produced the goods exported. Such being the case, it would follow that the total exports of British and Irish produce could scarcely have amounted to even 15,000,000, and it certainly could not have exceeded that sum--and that would give about 10s. per head, or one-fourth as much as in 1815.

The difference between the two periods is precisely the same as that between the farmer and the shoemaker. The man who, by the labour of himself and sons, is enabled to send to market the equivalent of a thousand bushels of wheat, has first _fed himself and them_, and therefore he has _the whole proceeds_ of his sales to apply to the purchase of clothing, furniture, or books, or to add to his capital.

His neighbour buys food and leather, and sells shoes. He _has been fed_, and the first appropriation to be made of the proceeds of his sales is to buy more food and leather; and all he has to apply to other purposes is _the difference_ between the price at which he buys and that at which he sells. Admitting that difference to be one-sixth, it would follow that his sales must be six times as large to enable him to have the same value to be applied to the purchase of other commodities than food, or to the increase of his capital. Another neighbour buys and sells wheat, or shoes, at a commission of five per cent., out of which he has _to be fed_. To enable him to have an amount of gross commissions equal to the farmer's sales, he must do twenty times as much business; and if, we allow one-half of it for the purchase of food, he must do forty times as much to enable him to have the same amount with which to purchase other commodities, or to increase his capital. Precisely so is it with a nation. When it sells its own food and leather, _it has fed itself_, and may dispose as it will of the whole amount of sales. When it buys food and leather, and sells shoes, _it has been fed_, and must first pay the producers of those commodities; and all that it can appropriate to the purchase of clothing or furniture, or to the increase, of its capital, is the _difference_; and, to enable it to have the same amount to be so applied, it must sell six times as much in value. When it acts as a mere buyer and seller of sugar, cotton, cloth, or shoes, it has _to be fed_ out of the differences, and then it may require forty times the amount of sales to yield the same result.

These things being understood, we may now compare the two years above referred to. In the first, 1815, the sales of domestic produce amounted to.................... 38,600,000

And if to this we add the difference on 13,000,000..................................... 2,166,667 ----------- We obtain the amount, applicable to the purchase of other commodities than food................. 40,766,667

In the second, 1851, the sales of domestic produce were ........................................... 15,000,000 To which add differences on 53,492,000, say.... 9,000,000 ---------- We have, as applicable to other purposes than the purchase of food............................... 24,000,000

Divided among the population, of those years, it gives 2 per head in the first, and 16s. in the other; but even this, great as it is, does not represent in its full extent the decline that has taken place. The smaller the change of form made in the commodity imported before exporting it, the more nearly does the business resemble that of the mere trader, and the larger must be the quant.i.ty of merchandise pa.s.sing, to leave behind the same result. In 1815, the export of yarn of any kind was trivial, because other countries were then unprovided with looms. In 1851 the export of mere yarn, upon which the expenditure of British labour had been only that of twisting it, was as follows:--

Cotton.................................. 144,000,000 lbs.

Linen................................... 19,000,000 "

Silk.................................... 390,000 "

Woollen................................. 14,800,000 "

The reader will readily perceive that in all these cases the foreign raw material bears a much larger proportion to the value than would have been the case had the exports taken place in the form of cloth.

An examination of these facts can scarcely fail to satisfy him how deceptive are any calculations based upon statements of the amount of exports and imports; and yet it is to them we are always referred for evidence of the growing prosperity of England. With every year there must be an increasing tendency in the same direction, as the manufacturers of India are more and more compelled to depend on England for yarn, and as the nations of Europe become more and more enabled to shut out cloth and limit their imports to yarn. From producer, England has become, or is rapidly becoming, a mere trader, and trade has not grown to such an extent as was required to make amends for the change. She is therefore in the position of the man who has subst.i.tuted _a trade_ of a thousand dollars a year for _a production_ of five hundred. In 1815, the people of the United Kingdom had to divide among themselves, then twenty millions in number, almost forty millions, the value of their surplus products exported to all parts of the earth. In 1851, being nearly thirty millions in number, they had to divide only fifteen millions, whereas had production been maintained, it should have reached sixty millions, or almost the total amount of exports. In place of this vast amount of _products_ for sale, they had only the _differences_ upon an excess trade of 40,000,000, and this can scarcely be estimated at more than eight or ten, toward making up a deficit of forty-five millions. Such being the facts, it will not now be difficult for the reader to understand why it is that there is a decline in the material and moral condition of the people.

How this state of things has been brought about is shown by the steady diminution in the proportion of the population engaged in the work of production. Adam Smith cautioned his countrymen that "if the whole surplus produce of America in grain of all sorts, salt provisions, and fish," were "forced into the market of Great Britain," it would "interfere too much with the prosperity of our own people." He thought it would be a "great discouragement to agriculture." And yet, from that hour to the present, no effort has been spared to increase in all the nations of the world the surplus of raw produce, to be poured into the British market, and thus to produce compet.i.tion between the producers abroad and the producers at home, to the manifest injury of both. The more the linen manufacture, or those of wool, hemp, or iron, could be discouraged abroad, the greater was the quant.i.ty of raw products to be sent to London and Liverpool, and the less the inducement for applying labour to the improvement of English land. For a time, this operation, so far as regarded food, was restrained by the corn-laws; but now the whole system is precisely that which was reprobated by the most profound political economist that Britain has ever produced. Its consequences are seen in the following figures:--In 1811, the proportion of the population of England engaged in agriculture was 35 per cent. In 1841 it had fallen to 25 per cent., and now it can scarcely exceed 22 per cent., and even in 1841 the actual number was less than it had been thirty years before.[143]

Thus driven out from the land, Englishmen had to seek other employment, while the same system was annually driving to England tens of thousands of the poor people of Scotland and Ireland; and thus forced compet.i.tion for the sale in England of the raw products of the earth produced compet.i.tion there for the sale of labour; the result of which is seen in the fact that agricultural wages have been from 6s.

to 9s. a week, and the labourer has become from year to year more a slave to the caprices of his employer, whether the great farmer or the wealthy owner of mills or furnaces. The total population of the _United Kingdom_ dependent upon agriculture cannot be taken at more than ten millions; and as agricultural wages cannot be estimated at a higher average than 5s. per week, there cannot be, including the earnings of women, more than 6s. per family; and if that be divided among four, it gives 1s. 6d. per head, or 3 18s. per annum, and a total amount, to be divided among ten millions of people, of 40 millions of pounds, or 192 millions of dollars. In reflecting upon this, the reader is requested to bear in mind that it provides wages for every week in the year, whereas throughout a considerable portion of the United Kingdom very much of the time is unoccupied.

Cheap labour has, in every country, gone hand in hand with cheap land.

Such having been the case, it may not now be difficult to account for the small value of land when compared with the vast advantages it possesses in being everywhere close to a market in which to exchange its raw products for manufactured ones, and also for manure. The reader has seen the estimate of _M. Thunen_, one of the best agriculturists of Germany, of the vast difference in the value of land in Mecklenburgh close to market, as compared with that distant from it; but he can everywhere see for himself that that which is close to a city will command thrice as much rent as that distant twenty miles, and ten times as much as that which is five hundred miles distant.

Now, almost the whole land of the United Kingdom is in the condition of the best of that here described. The distances are everywhere small, and the roads are, or ought to be, good; and yet the total rental of land, mines, and minerals, is but 55,000,000, and this for an area of 70 millions of acres, giving an average of only about $3.60 per acre, or $9--less than 2,--per head of the population. This is very small indeed, and it tends to show to how great an extent the system must have discouraged agriculture. In 1815, with a population of only twenty millions, the rental amounted, exclusive of houses, mines, minerals, fisheries, &c., to fifty-two and a half millions, and the exports of the produce of British and Irish land were then almost three times as great as they are now, with a population almost one-half greater than it was then.

The very small value of the land of the United Kingdom, when compared with its advantages, can be properly appreciated by the reader only after an examination of the course of things elsewhere. The price of food raised in this country is dependent, almost entirely, on what can be obtained for the very small quant.i.ty sent to England. "Mark Lane,"

as it is said, "governs the world's prices." It does govern them in New York and Philadelphia, where prices must be as much below those of London or Liverpool as the cost of transportation, insurance, and commissions, or there could be no export. Their prices, in turn, govern those of Ohio and Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, which must always be as much below those of New York as the cost of getting the produce there. If, now, we examine into the mere cost of transporting the average produce of an acre of land from the farm to the market of England, we shall find that it would be far more than the average rental of English land; and yet that rental includes coal, copper, iron, and tin mines that supply a large portion of the world.

Under such circ.u.mstances, land in this country should be of very small value, if even of any; and yet the following facts tend to show that the people of Ma.s.sachusetts, with a population of only 994,000, scattered over a surface of five millions of acres, with a soil so poor that but 2,133,000 are improved, and possessed of no mines of coal, iron, tin, lead, or copper, have, in the short period they have occupied it, acquired rights in land equal, per acre, to those acquired by the people of England in their fertile soils, with their rich mines, in two thousand years. The cash value of the farms of that State in 1850 was $109,000,000, which, _divided over the whole surface_, would give $22 per acre, and this, at six per cent., would yield $1.32. Add to this the difference between wages of four, six, and eight shillings per week in the United Kingdom, and twenty or twenty-five dollars per month in Ma.s.sachusetts, and it will be found that the return in the latter is quite equal to that in the former; and yet the price of agricultural produce generally, is as much below that of England as the cost of freight and commission, which alone are greater than the whole rent of English land.

New York has thirty millions of acres, of which only twelve millions have been in any manner improved; and those she has been steadily exhausting, because of the absence of a market on or near the land, such as is possessed by England. She has neither coal nor other mines of any importance, and her factories are few in number; and yet the cash value of farms, as returned by the Marshal, was 554 millions of dollars, and that was certainly less than the real value. If we take the latter at 620 millions, it will gives $50 per acre for the improved land, or an average of $20 for all. Taking the rent at six per cent. on $50, we obtain $3 per acre, or nearly the average of the United Kingdom; and it would be quite reasonable to make the mines and minerals of the latter a set-off against the land that is unimproved.

If the reader desire to understand the cause of the small value, of English land when compared with its vast advantages, he may find it in the following pa.s.sage:--

"Land-owners possess extensive territories which owe little or nothing to the hand of the improver; where undeveloped sources of production lie wasting and useless in the midst of the most certain and tempting markets of the vast consuming population of this country."--_Economist_, London.

Unfortunately, however, those markets are small, while the tendency of the whole British system is toward converting the entire earth into one vast farm for their supply, and thus preventing the application of labour to the improvement of land at home. The tendency of prices, whether of land, labour, or their products, is toward a level, and whatever tends to lessen the price of any of those commodities in Ireland, India, Virginia, or Carolina, tends to produce the same effect in England; and we have seen that such is the direct tendency of English policy with regard to the land of all those countries. With decline in value, there must ever be a tendency to consolidation, and thus the policy advocated by the _Economist_ produces the evil of which it so much and so frequently complains.

The profits of farmers are generally estimated at half the rental, which would give for a total of rents and profits about 85 millions; and if to this be added the wages of agricultural labour, we obtain but about 125 millions, of which less than one-third goes to the labourer.[144]

We have here the necessary result of consolidation of land--itself the result of an attempt to compel the whole people of the world to compete with each other in a single and limited market for the sale of raw produce. With every increase of this compet.i.tion, the small proprietor has found himself less and less able to pay the taxes to which he was subjected, and has finally been obliged to pa.s.s into the condition of a day-labourer, to compete with the almost starving Irishman, or the poor native of Scotland, driven into England in search of employment; and hence have resulted the extraordinary facts that in many parts of that country, enjoying, as it does, every advantage except a sound system of trade, men gladly labour for six shillings ($1.44) a week; that women labour in the fields; and that thousands of the latter, dest.i.tute of a change of under-clothing, are compelled to go to bed while their chemises are being washed.[145]

Driven from the land by the cheap food and cheap labour of Ireland, the English labourer has to seek the town, and there he finds himself at the mercy of the great manufacturer; and thus, between the tenant-farmer on the one hand, and the large capitalist on the other, he is ground as between the upper and the nether millstone. The result is seen in the facts heretofore given. He loses gradually all self-respect, and he, his wife, and his children become vagrants, and fall on the public for support. Of the wandering life of great numbers of these poor people some idea may be formed from the following statement of Mr. Mayhew[146] :--

"I happened to be in the country a little time back, and it astonished me to find, in a town with a population of 20,800, that no less than 11,000 vagabonds pa.s.sed through the town in thirteen weeks.

We have large cla.s.ses known in the metropolis as the people of the streets."

It will, however, be said that if cheap corn tend to drive him from employment, he has a compensation in cheaper sugar, cotton, coffee, rum, and other foreign commodities--and such is undoubtedly the case; but he enjoys these things at the cost of his fellow labourers, black, white, and brown, in this country, the West Indies, India, and elsewhere. The destruction of manufactures in this country in 1815 and 1816 drove the whole population to the raising of food, tobacco, and cotton; and a similar operation in India drove the people of that country to the raising of rice, indigo, sugar, and cotton, that _must_ go to the market of England, because of the diminution in the domestic markets for labour or its products. The diminished domestic consumption of India forces her cotton into the one great market, there to compete with that of other countries, and to reduce their prices. It forces the Hindoo to the Mauritius, to aid in destroying the poor negroes of Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil; but the more the sugar and cotton that _must_ go to the distant market, the higher will be the freights, the lower will be the prices, the larger will be the British revenue, the greater will be the consumption, and the greater will be the "prosperity" of England, but the more enslaved will be the producers of those commodities. Compet.i.tion for their sale tends to produce low prices, and the more the people of the world, men, women, and children, can be limited to agriculture, the greater must be the necessity for dependence on England for cloth and iron, the higher will be their prices, and the more wretched will be the poor labourer everywhere.

The reader may perhaps understand the working of the system after an examination of the following comparative prices of commodities:--

1815. 1852.

----- ----- England sells-- Bar iron, per ton.... 13 5s. 0d. ..... 9 0s. 0d.

Tin, per cwt......... 7 0 0 ..... 5 2 0 Copper " ......... 6 5 0 ..... 5 10 0 Lead " ......... 1 6 6 ..... 1 4 0

England buys-- Cotton, per lb....... 0 1 6 ..... 0 0 6 Sugar, per cwt....... 3 0 0 ..... 1 0 0

While these princ.i.p.al articles of raw produce have fallen to one- third of the prices of 1815, iron, copper, tin, and lead, the commodities that she supplies to the world, have not fallen more than twenty-five per cent. It is more difficult to exhibit the changes of woven goods, but that the planters are constantly giving more cotton for less cloth will be seen on an examination of the following facts in relation to a recent large-crop year, as compared with the course of things but a dozen years before. From 1830 to 1835, the price of cotton here was about eleven cents, which we may suppose to be about what it would yield in England, free of freight and charges. In those years our average export was about 320,000,000, yielding about $35,000,000, and the average price of cotton cloth, per piece of 24 yards, weighing 5 lbs. 12 oz., was 7s. 10d., ($1.88,) and that of iron 6 10s. ($31.20.) Our exports would therefore have produced, delivered in Liverpool, 18,500,000 pieces of cloth, or about 1,100,000 tons of iron. In 1845 and 1846, the _home consumption_ of cotton by the people of England was almost the same quant.i.ty, say 311,000,000 pounds, and the average price here was 6-1/2 cents, making the product $20,000,000. The price of cloth then was 6s. 6-3/4 d., ($1.57 1/2,) and that of iron about 10, ($48;) and the result was, that the planters could have, for nearly the same quant.i.ty of cotton, about 12,500,000 pieces of cloth, or about 420,000 tons of iron, also delivered in Liverpool. Dividing the return between the two commodities, it stands thus:--

Average from: 1830 to 1835. 1845-6. Loss.

------------- ------------- ------- ----- Cloth, pieces.... 9,250,000 ... 6,250,000 ... 3,000,000 And iron, tons... 550,000 ... 210,000 ... 340,000

The labour required for converting cotton into cloth had been greatly diminished, and yet the proportion, retained by the manufacturers had greatly increased, as will now be shown:--

Weight of Cotton Retained Weight of given to the by the Cotton used. planters. manufacturers.

------------ ---------------- -------------- 1830 to 1835... 320,000,000... 110,000,000... 210,000,000 1845 and 1846.. 311,000,000... 74,000,000.... 237,000,000

In the first period, the planter would have had 34 per cent. of his cotton returned to him in the form of cloth, but in the second only 24 per cent. The grist miller gives the farmer from year to year a larger proportion of the product of his grain, and thus the latter has all the profit of every improvement. The cotton miller gives the planter from year to year a smaller proportion of the cloth produced. The one miller comes daily nearer to the producer. The other goes daily farther from him, for with the increased product the surface over which it is raised is increased.

How this operates on a large scale will now be seen on an examination of the following facts:--

The declared or actual _value_ of exports of British produce in manufactures in 1815 was.. 51,632,971 And the _quant.i.ty_ of foreign merchandise retained for consumption in that year was....... 17,238,841 [147]

This shows, of course, that the prices of the raw products of the earth were then high by comparison with those of the articles that Great Britain had to sell.

In 1849, the _value_ of British exports was..... 63,596,025 And the _quant.i.ty_ of foreign merchandise retained for consumption was no less than....... 80,312,717

We see thus that while the value of exports had increased only _one-fourth_, the produce received in exchange was _almost five times greater_; and here it is that we find the effect of that _unlimited_ compet.i.tion for the sale in England of the raw products of the world, and _limited_ compet.i.tion for the purchase of the manufactured ones, which it is the object of the system to establish. The nation is rapidly pa.s.sing from the strong and independent position of one that produces commodities for sale, into the weak and dependent one of the mere trader who depends for his living upon the differences between the prices at which he sells and those at which he buys--that is, upon his power to tax the producers and consumers of the earth. It is the most extraordinary and most universal system of taxation ever devised, and it is carried out at the cost of weakening and enfeebling the people of all the purely agricultural countries. The more completely all the world, outside of England, can be rendered one great farm, in which men, women, and children, the strong and the weak, the young and the aged, can be reduced to field labour as the only means of support, the larger will be the sum of those _differences_ upon which the English people are now to so great an extent maintained, but the more rapid will be the tendency everywhere toward barbarism and slavery.

The more, on the other hand, that the artisan can be brought to the side of the farmer, the smaller must be the sum of these _differences_, or taxes, and the greater will everywhere be the tendency toward civilization and freedom; but the greater will be that English distress which is seen always to exist when the producers of the world obtain much cloth and iron in exchange for their sugar and their cotton. The English system is therefore a war for the perpetuation and extension of slavery.

On a recent occasion the Chancellor of the Exchequer congratulated the House of Commons on the flourishing state of the revenue, notwithstanding, that, they had