The Slave Trade, Domestic And Foreign Part 22

"In ten years repealed or reduced the duties on coffee, timber, currants, wool, sugar, mola.s.ses, cotton wool, b.u.t.ter, cheese, silk manufactures, tallow, spirits, copper ore, oil and sperm, and an amazing number of other articles, which produced a small amount of revenue, with respect to which it is not material, and would be almost preposterous, that I should trouble the House in detail. It is sufficient for me to observe this remarkable fact, that the reduction of your customs duties from 1842 has been systematically continuous; that in 1842 you struck off nearly 1,500,000 of revenue calculated from the customs duties; that in 1843 you struck off 126,000; in 1844, 279,000; in 1845, upwards of 3,500,000; in 1846, upwards of 1,150,000; in 1847, upwards of 343,000; in 1848, upwards of 578,000; in 1849, upwards of 384,000; in 1850, upwards of 331,000; and in 1851, upwards of 801,000--making an aggregate, in those ten years, of nearly 9,000,000 sterling."

The reason of all this is, that the cultivator abroad is steadily giving more raw produce for less cloth and iron. The more exclusively the people of India can be forced to devote themselves to the raising of cotton and sugar, the cheaper they will be, and the larger will be the British revenue. The more the price of corn can be diminished, the greater will be the flight to Texas, and the cheaper will be cotton, but the larger will be the slave trade of America, India, and Ireland; and thus it is that the prosperity of the owners of mills and furnaces in England is always greatest when the people of the world are becoming most enslaved.

It may be asked, however, if this diminution of the prices of foreign produce is not beneficial to the people of England. It is not, because it tends to reduce the general price of labour, the commodity they have to sell. Cheap Irish labour greatly diminishes the value of that of England, and cheap Irish grain greatly diminishes the demand for labour in England, while increasing the supply by forcing the Irish people to cross the Channel. The land and labour of the world have one common interest, and that is to give as little as possible to those who perform the exchanges, and to those who superintend them--the traders and the government. The latter have everywhere one common interest, and that is to take as much as possible from the producers and give as little as possible to the consumers, buying cheaply and selling dearly. Like fire and water, they are excellent servants, but very bad masters. The nearer the artisan comes to the producer of the food and the wool, the less is the power of the middleman to impose taxes, and the greater the power of the farmer to protect himself. The tendency of the British system, wherever found, is to impoverish the land-owner and the labourer, and to render both from year to year more tributary to the owners of an amount of machinery so small that its whole value would be paid by the weekly--if not even by the daily--loss inflicted upon the working population of the world by the system.[148] The more the owners of that machinery become enriched, the more must the labourer everywhere become enslaved.

That such must necessarily be the case will be obvious to any reader who will reflect how adverse is the system to the development of intellect. Where all are farmers, there can be little a.s.sociation for the purpose of maintaining schools, or for the exchange of ideas of any kind. Employment being limited to the labours of the field, the women cannot attend to the care of their children, who grow up, necessarily, rude and barbarous; and such we see now to be the case in the West Indies, whence schools are rapidly disappearing. In Portugal and Turkey there is scarcely any provision for instruction, and in India there has been a decline in that respect, the extent of which is almost exactly measured by the age of the foreign occupation.[149] In the Punjab, the country last acquired, men read and write, but in Bengal and Madras they are entirely uneducated. Ireland had, seventy years since, a public press of great efficiency, but it has almost entirely disappeared, as has the demand for books, which before the Union was so great as to warrant the republication of a large portion of those that appeared in England. Scotland, too, seventy years since, gave to the Empire many of its best writers, but she, like Ireland, has greatly declined. How bad is the provision for education throughout England, and how low is the standard of intellect among a large portion of her manufacturing population, the reader has seen, and he can estimate for himself how much there can be of the reading of books, or newspapers among an agricultural population hired _by the day_ at the rate of six, eight, or even nine shillings a week--and it will, therefore not surprise him to learn that there is no daily newspaper published out of London. It _is_, however, somewhat extraordinary that in that city, there should be, as has recently been stated, but a single one that is not "published at a loss." That one circulates 40,000 copies, or more than twice the number of all the other daily papers united. This is a most unfavourable sign, for centralization and progress have never gone hand in hand with each other.

The system, too, is repulsive in its character. It tends to the production of discord among individuals and nations, and hence it is that we see the numerous strikes and combinations of workmen, elsewhere so little known. Abroad it is productive of war, as is now seen in India, and as was so recently the case in China. In Ireland it is expelling the whole population, and in Scotland it has depopulated provinces. The vast emigration now going on, and which has reached the enormous extent of 360,000 in a single year, bears testimony to the fact that the repulsive power has entirely overcome the attractive one, and that the love of home, kindred, and friends is rapidly diminishing. How, indeed, could it be otherwise, in a country in which labour has been so far cheapened that the leading journal a.s.sures its readers that during a whole generation "man has been a drug, and population a nuisance?"

The fact that such a declaration should be made, and that that and other influential journals should rejoice in the expulsion of a whole nation, is evidence how far an unsound system can go toward steeling the heart against the miseries of our fellow-creatures. These poor people do not emigrate voluntarily. They are forced to leave their homes, precisely as is the case with the negro slave of Virginia; but they have not, as has the slave, any certainty of being fed and clothed at the end of the journey. Nevertheless, throughout England there is an almost universal expression of satisfaction at the idea that the land is being rid of what is held to be its superabundant population; and one highly respectable journal,[150] after showing that at the same rate Ireland would be entirely emptied in twenty-four years, actually a.s.sures its readers that it views the process "without either alarm or regret," and that it has no fear of the process being "carried too far or continued too long."

We see thus, on one hand, the people of England engaged in _shutting_ in the poor people of Africa, lest they should be forced to Cuba; and, on the other, rejoicing at evictions, as the best means of _driving out_ the poor people of Ireland. In all this there is a total absence of consistency; but so far as the Irish people are concerned, it is but a natural consequence of that "unsound social philosophy," based upon the Ricardo-Malthusian doctrine, which after having annihilated the small land-owner and the small trader, denies that the Creator meant that every man should find a place at his table, and sees no more reason why a poor labourer should have any more right to be fed, if willing to work, than the Manchester cotton-spinner should have to find a purchaser for his cloth. "Labour," we are told, is "a commodity," and if men _will_ marry and bring up children "to an overstocked and expiring trade," it is for them to take the consequences--and "_if we stand between the error and its consequences, we stand between the evil and its cure_--if we intercept the penalty (where it does not amount to positive death) we perpetuate the sin."[151]

Such being the state of opinion in regard to the claims of labour, we need scarcely be surprised to find a similar state of things in regard to the rights of property. The act of emanc.i.p.ation was a great interference with those rights. However proper it might have been deemed to free the negroes, it was not right to cause the heaviest portion of the loss to be borne by the few and weak planters. If justice required the act, all should have borne their equal share of the burden. So again in regard to Ireland, where special laws have been pa.s.sed to enable the mortgagees to sell a large portion of the land, rendered valueless by a system that had for long years prevented the Irishman from employing himself except in the work of cultivation.

India appears likely now to come in for its share of similar legislation. Centralization has not there, we are told, been carried far enough. Private rights in land, trivial even as they now are,[152]

must be annihilated. None, we are told, can be permitted "to stand between the cultivator and the government," even if the collection of the taxes "should render necessary so large an army of _employe_ as to threaten the absorption of the lion's share" of them.[153] In regard to the rights to land in England itself, one of her most distinguished writers says that

"When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it should always be remembered that this sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. * * * The claim of the land-owners to the land is altogether subordinate to the general policy of the state. * * * Subject to this proviso (that of compensation) the state is at liberty to deal with landed property as the general interests of the community may require, even to the extent, if it so happen, of doing with the whole what is done with a part whenever a bill is pa.s.sed for a railroad or a street."--_J. S.

Mill, Principles_, book ii. chap. ii.

In regard to the disposal of property at the death of its owner, the same author is of opinion that "a certain moderate provision, such as is admitted to be reasonable in the case of illegitimate children, and of younger children" is all "that parents owe to their children, and all, therefore, which the state owes to the children of those who die intestate." The surplus, if any, he holds "it may rightfully appropriate to the general purposes of the community."--_Ibid_.

Extremes generally meet. From the days of Adam Smith to the present time the policy of England has looked in the direction that led necessarily to the impoverishment of the small land-owner, and to the consolidation of land, and during the whole of that period we have been told of the superior advantages of large farms and great tenant-farmers; but now, when the injurious effects of the system are becoming from day to day more obvious, the question of the existence of _any right_ to land is being discussed, and we are told that "public reasons" existed "for its being appropriated," and if those reasons have "lost their force, the thing would be unjust."

From this to confiscation the step would not be a very great one. No such idea certainly could exist in the mind of so enlightened a man as Mr. Mill, who insists upon compensation; but when a whole people, among whom the productive power is steadily diminishing as individual fortunes become more and more colossal, are told that the proprietors of land, great and small, receive compensation for its use, for no other reason than that they have been enabled to possess themselves of a monopoly of its powers, and that rent is to be regarded as "the recompense of no sacrifice whatever," but as being "received by those who neither labour nor put by, but merely hold out their hands to receive the offerings of the rest of the community,"[154] can we doubt that the day is approaching when the right to property in land will be tested in England, as it has elsewhere been? a.s.suredly not. Ricardo-Malthusianism tends directly to what is commonly called Communism, and at that point will England arrive, under the system which looks to the consolidation of the land, the aggrandizement of the few, and the destruction of the physical, moral, intellectual, and political powers of the whole body of labourers, abroad and at home,

Where population and wealth increase together, there is always found a growing respect for the rights of persons and property. Where they decline, that respect diminishes; and the tendency of the whole British politico-economical system being toward the destruction of population and wealth at home and abroad, it tends necessarily toward agrarianism in its worst form. That such is the tendency of things in England we have the a.s.surance of the London _Times_, by which, it has recently been shown, says Mr. Kay,

"That during the last half century, every thing has been done to deprive the peasant of any interest in the preservation of public order; of any wish to maintain the existing const.i.tution of society; of all hope of raising himself in the world, or of improving his condition in life; of all attachment to his country; of all feelings of there really existing any community of interest between himself and the higher ranks of society; and of all consciousness that he has any thing to lose by political changes; and that every thing has been done to render him dissatisfied with his condition, envious of the richer cla.s.ses, and discontented with the existing order of things.

"The labourer," he continues "has no longer any connection with the land which he cultivates; he has no stake in the country; he has nothing to lose, nothing to defend, and nothing to hope for. The word "cottage" has ceased to mean what it once meant--a small house surrounded by its little plot of land, which the inmate might cultivate as he pleased, for the support and gratification of his family and himself. The small freeholds have long since been bought up and merged in the great estates. Copyholds have become almost extinct, or have been purchased by the great land-owners. The commons, upon which the villagers once had the right of pasturing cattle for their own use, and on which, too, the games and pastimes of the villages were held, have followed the same course: they are enclosed, and now form part of the possessions of the great landowners. Small holdings of every kind have, in like manner, almost entirely disappeared. Farms have gradually become larger and larger, and are now, in most parts of the country, far out of the peasant's reach, on account of their size, and of the amount of capital requisite to cultivate them. The gulf between the peasant and the next step in the social scale--the farmer--is widening and increasing day by day. The labourer is thus left without any chance of improving his condition. His position is one of hopeless and irremediable dependence. The workhouse stands near him, pointing out his dismal fate if he falls one step lower, and, like a grim scarecrow, warning him to betake himself to some more hospitable region, where he will find no middle-age inst.i.tutions opposing his industrious efforts."--Vol. i. 361.

This is slavery, and it is an indication of poverty, and yet we hear much of the wealth of England. Where, however, is it? The whole rental of the land, houses, mills, furnaces, and mines of the United Kingdom but little exceeds one hundred millions of pounds sterling, of which about one-half is derived from buildings--and if we take the whole, perishable and imperishable, at twenty years' purchase, it is but two-thousand millions.[155] If next we add for machinery of all kinds, ships, farming stock and implements, 600 millions,[156] we obtain a total of only 2600 millions, or 12,500 millions of dollars, as the whole acc.u.mulation of more than two thousand years' given to the improvement of the land, the building of houses, towns, and cities--and this gives but little over 400 dollars per head. Sixty years since, New York had a population of only 340,000, and it was a poor State, and to this hour it has no mines of any importance that are worked. Throughout the whole period, her people have been exhausting her soil, and the product of wheat, on lands that formerly gave twenty-five and thirty bushels to the acre, has fallen to six or eight,[157] and yet her houses and lands are valued at almost twelve hundred millions of dollars, and the total value of the real and personal estate is not less than fifteen hundred millions, or about $500 per head--and these are the acc.u.mulations almost of the present century.

The _apparent_ wealth of England is, however, great, and it is so for the same reason that Rome appeared so rich in the days of Cra.s.sus and Lucullus, surrounded by people owning nothing, when compared with the days when Cincinnatus was surrounded by a vast body of small proprietors. Consolidation of the land and enormous manufacturing establishments have almost annihilated the power profitably to use small capitals, and the consequence is that their owners are forced to place them in saving funds, life-insurance companies, and in banks at small interest, and by all of these they are lent out to the large holders of land and large operators in mills, furnaces, railroads, &c.

As the land has become consolidated, it has been covered with mortgages, and the effect of this is to double the apparent quant.i.ty of property. While the small proprietors held it, it was a.s.sessed to the revenue as land only. Now, it is a.s.sessed, first, as land, upon which its owner pays a tax, and next as mortgage, upon which the mortgagee pays the income-tax. The land-owner is thus holding his property with other people's means, and the extent to which this is the case throughout England is wonderfully great. Banks trade little on their own capital, but almost entirely on that of others.[158] The capital of the Bank of England haying been expended by the government, it has always traded exclusively on its deposites and circulation. The East India Company has no capital, but a very large debt, and nothing to represent it; and the example of these great inst.i.tutions is copied by the smaller ones. Life-insurance companies abound, and the capitals are said to be large, but "nine-tenths" of them are declared to be "in a state of ruinous insolvency;"[159] and it is now discovered the true mode of conducting that business is to have no capital whatsoever. The trade of England is to a great extent based on the property of foreigners, in the form of wool, silk, cotton, tobacco, sugar, and other commodities, sent there for sale, and these furnish much of the capital of her merchants. While holding this vast amount of foreign capital, they supply iron and cloth, for which they take the bonds of the people of other nations; and whenever the amount of these bonds becomes too large, there comes a pressure in the money market, and the prices of all foreign commodities are forced down, to the ruin of their distant owners. To the absence of real capital [160] it is due that revulsions are so frequent, and so destructive to all countries intimately connected with her; and it is a necessary consequence of the vast extent of trading on borrowed capital that the losses by bankruptcy are so astonishingly great. From 1839 to 1843, a period of profound peace, eighty-two private bankers became bankrupt; of whom forty-six paid _no dividends_, twelve paid under twenty-five per cent., twelve under fifty per cent., three under seventy-five per cent., and two under one hundred per cent.; leaving seven unascertained at the date of the report from which this statement is derived. The last revulsion brought to light the fact that many of the oldest and most respectable houses in London had been for years trading entirely on credit, and without even a shilling of capital; and in Liverpool the destruction was so universal that it was difficult to discover more than half a dozen houses to whom a cargo could be confided. Revulsions are a necessary consequence of such a state of things, and at each and every one of them the small manufacturer and the small trader or land-owner are more and more swept away, while centralization steadily increases--and centralization is adverse to the growth of wealth and civilization.

The whole fabric tends steadily more and more to take the form of an inverted pyramid, that may be thus represented:--

Ships and mills, L a n d, Labour.

In confirmation of this view we have the following facts given in a speech of Mr. George Wilson, at a _reunion_ in Manchester, a few weeks since:--

"In the five counties of Buckingham, Dorset, Wilts, Northampton, and Salop, 63 members were returned by 52,921 voters, while only the same number were returned by Lancashire and Yorkshire, with 89,669 county and 84,612 borough voters, making a total of 174,281. So that, if they returned members in proportion to voters alone, those five counties could only claim 19; while, if Lancashire took their proportion, it would be ent.i.tled to 207. There were twelve large cities or boroughs (taking London as a double borough) returning 24 members, with 192,000 voters, and a population of 3,268,218, and 388,000 inhabited houses.

On the other side, 24 members were returned by Andover, Buckingham, Chippenham, c.o.c.kermouth, Totnes, Harwich, Bedford, Lymington, Marlborough, Great Marlborough, and Richmond; but they had only 3,569 voters, 67,434 inhabitants, and 1,373 inhabited houses. * * The most timid reformer and most moderate man would hardly object to the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of those boroughs which had a population less than 5000, and to handing over the 20 members to those large const.i.tuencies."

As the people of Ireland are driven from the land to London, Liverpool, or America, the claims of that country to representation necessarily diminish; and so with Scotland, as the Highlands and the Isles undergo the process of wholesale clearance. The same system that depopulates them tends to depopulate the agricultural counties of England, and to drive their people to seek employment in the great cities and manufacturing towns; and this, according to Mr.

McCullogh,[161] is one of the princ.i.p.al advantages resulting from absenteeism. The wealthy few congregate in London, and the vast ma.s.s of poor labourers in the lanes and alleys, the streets and the cellars, of London and Liverpool, Birmingham and Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds; and thus is there a daily increasing tendency toward having the whole power over England and the world placed in the hands of the owners of a small quant.i.ty of machinery--the same men that but a few years since were described by Sir Robert Peel as compelling children to work sixteen hours a day during the week, and to appropriate a part of Sunday to cleaning the machinery--and the same that recently resisted every attempt at regulating the hours of labour, on the ground that all the profit resulted from the power to require "the last hour." Many of these gentlemen are liberal, and are actuated by the best intentions; but they have allowed themselves to be led away by a false and pernicious theory that looks directly to the enslavement of the human race, and are thus blinded to the consequences of the system they advocate; but even were they right, it could not but be dangerous to centralize nearly the whole legislative power in a small portion of the United Kingdom, occupied by people whose existence is almost entirely dependent on the question whether cotton is cheap or dear, and who are liable to be thrown so entirely under the control of their employers.

With each step in this direction, consolidation of the land tends to increase, and there is increased necessity for "cheap labour." "The whole question" of England's manufacturing superiority, we are told, "has become one of a cheap and abundant supply of labour."[162] That is, if labour can be kept down, and the labourer can be prevented from having a choice of employers, then the system may be maintained, but not otherwise. Where, however, the labourer has not the power of determining for whom he will work, he is a slave; and to that condition it is that the system tends to reduce the English people, as it has already done with the once free men of India. Alarmed at the idea that the present flight from England may tend to give the labourer power to select his employer, and to have some control over the amount of his reward, the London _Times_ suggests the expediency of importing cheap labourers from Germany and other parts of the continent, to aid in underworking their fellow-labourers in America and in India.

It has been well said that, according to some political economists, "man was made for the land, and not the land for man." In England, it would almost seem as if he had been made for cotton mills. Such would appear now to be the views of the _Times_, as, a quarter of a century since, they certainly were of Mr. Huskisson. The object of all sound political economy is that of raising the labourer, and increasing the dignity of labour. That of the English system is to "keep labour down," and to degrade the labourer to the condition of a mere slave; and such is its effect everywhere--and nowhere is its tendency in that direction more obvious than in England itself.[163]

Consolidation of land on one side and a determination to underwork the world on the other, are producing a rapid deterioration of material and moral condition, and, as a natural consequence, there is a steady diminution in the power of local self-government. The diminution of the agricultural population and the centralization of exchanges have been attended by decay of the agricultural towns, and their remaining people become less and less capable of performing for themselves those duties to which their predecessors were accustomed--and hence it is that political centralization grows so rapidly. Scarcely a session of Parliament now pa.s.ses without witnessing the creation of a new commission for the management of the poor, the drainage of towns, the regulation of lodging-houses, or other matters that could be better attended to by the local authorities, were it not that the population, is being so rapidly divided into two cla.s.ses widely remote from each other--the poor labourer and the rich absentee landlord or other capitalist.

With the decay of the power of the people over their own actions, the nation is gradually losing its independent position among the nations of the earth. It is seen that the whole "prosperity" of the country depends on the power to purchase cheap cotton, cheap sugar, and other cheap products of the soil, and it is feared that something may interfere to prevent the continuance of the system which maintains the domestic slave trade of this country. We are, therefore, told by all the English journals, that "England is far too dependent on America for her supply of cotton. There is," says the _Daily News_, "too much risk in relying on any one country, if we consider the climate and seasons alone; but the risk is seriously aggravated when the country is not our own, but is inhabited by a nation which, however friendly on the whole, and however closely allied with us by blood and language, has been at war with us more than once, and might possibly some day be so again."

From month to month, and from year to year, we have the same note, always deepening in its intensity,--and yet the dependence increases instead of diminishing. On one day, the great prosperity of the country is proved by the publication of a long list of new cotton mills, and, on the next, we are told of--

"The frightful predicament of mult.i.tudes of people whom a natural disaster [a short crop of cotton] denies leave to toil--who must work or starve, but who cannot work because the prime material of their work is not to be obtained in the world."--_Lawson's Merchants'

Magazine_, Dec. 1852.

What worse slavery can we have than this? It is feared that this country will not continue to supply cheap cotton, and it is known that India cannot enlarge its export, and, therefore, the whole mind of England is on the stretch to discover some new source from which it may be derived, that may tend to increase the compet.i.tion for its sale, and reduce it lower than it even now is. At one time, it is hoped that it may be grown in Australia--but cheap labour cannot there be had. At another, it is recommended as expedient to encourage its culture in Natal, (South Africa,) as there it can be grown, as we are a.s.sured, by aid of cheap--or slave--labour, from India.[164]

It is to this feeling of growing dependence, and growing weakness, that must be attributed the publication of pa.s.sages like the following, from the London _Times_:--

"It used to be said that if Athens, and Lacedaemon could but make up their minds to be good friends and make a common cause, they would be masters of the world. The wealth, the science, the maritime enterprise, and daring ambition of the one, a.s.sisted by the population, the territory, the warlike spirit, and stern inst.i.tutions of the other, could not fail to carry the whole world before them.

That was a project hostile to the peace and prosperity of mankind, and ministering only to national vanity. A far grander object, of more easy and more honourable acquisition, lies before England and the United States, and all other countries owning our origin and speaking our language. Let them agree not in an alliance offensive and defensive, but simply to never go to war with one another. Let them permit one another to develop as Providence seems to suggest, and the British race will gradually and quietly attain to a pre-eminence beyond the reach of mere policy and arms. The vast and ever-increasing interchange of commodities between the several members of this great family, the almost daily communications now opened across, not one, but several oceans, the perpetual discovery of new means of locomotion, in which steam itself now bids fair to be supplanted by an equally powerful but cheaper and more convenient agency--all promise to unite the whole British race throughout the world in one social and commercial unity, more mutually beneficial than any contrivance of politics. Already, what does Austria gain from Hungary, France from Algiers, Russia from Siberia, or any absolute monarchy from its abject population, or what town from its rural suburbs, that England does not derive in a much greater degree from the United States, and the United States from England? What commercial partnership, what industrious household exhibits so direct an exchange of services? All that is wanted is that we should recognise this fact, and give it all the a.s.sistance in our power. We cannot be independent of one another. The attempt is more than unsocial; it is suicidal. Could either dispense with the labour of the other, it would immediately lose the reward of its own industry.

Whether national jealousy, or the thirst for warlike enterprise, or the grosser appet.i.te of commercial monopoly, attempt the separation, the result and the crime are the same. We are made helps meet for one another. Heaven has joined all who speak the British language, and what Heaven has joined let no man think to put asunder."

The allies of England have been Portugal and Ireland, India and the West Indies, and what is their condition has been shown. With Turkey she has had a most intimate connection, and that great empire is now prostrate. What inducement can she, then, offer in consideration of an alliance with her? The more intimate our connection, the smaller must be the domestic market for food and cotton, the lower must be their prices, and the larger must be the domestic slave trade, now so rapidly increasing. Her system tends toward the enslavement of the labourer throughout the earth, and toward the destruction everywhere of the value of the land; and therefore it is that she needs allies.

Therefore; it is that the _Times_, a journal that but ten years since could find no term of vituperation sufficiently strong to be applied to the people of this country, now tells its readers that--

"It is the prospect of these expanding and strengthening affinities that imparts so much interest to the mutual hospitalities shown by British and American citizens to the diplomatic representatives of the sister States."

"To give capital a fair remuneration," it was needed that "_the price of English labour should be kept down_;" and it has been kept down to so low a point as to have enabled the cotton mills of Manchester to supersede the poor Hindoo in his own market, and to drive him to the raising of cheap sugar to supply the cheap labour of England--and to supersede the manufacturers of this country, and drive our countrymen to the raising of cheap corn to feed the cheap labour of England, driven out of Ireland. Cheap food next forces the exportation of negroes from Maryland and Virginia to Alabama and Mississippi, there to raise cheap cotton to supersede the wretched cultivator of India; and thus, in succession, each and every part of the agricultural world is forced into compet.i.tion with every other part, and the labourers of the world become from day to day more enslaved; and all because the people of England are determined that the whole earth shall become one great farm, with but a single workshop, in which shall be fixed the prices of all its occupants have to sell or need to buy. For the first time in the history of the world, there exists a nation whose whole system of policy is found in the shopkeeper's maxim, Buy cheap and sell dear; and the results are seen in the fact that that nation is becoming from day to day less powerful and less capable of the exercise of self-government among the community of nations. From day to day England is more and more seen to be losing the independent position of the farmer who sells the produce of his own labour, and occupying more and more that of the shopkeeper, anxious to conciliate the favour of those who have goods to sell or goods to buy; and with each day there is increased anxiety lest there should be a change in the feelings of the customers who bring cotton and take in exchange cloth and iron. The records of history might be searched in vain for a case like hers--for a nation voluntarily subjecting itself to a process of the most exhaustive kind. They present no previous case of a great community, abounding in men of high intelligence, rejoicing in the diminution of the proportion of its people _capable of feeding themselves and others_, and in the increasing proportion _requiring to be fed_. England now exports in a year nearly 400,000 men and women that have been raised at enormous cost,[165] and she rejoices at receiving in exchange 300,000 infants yet to be raised. She exports the young, and retains the aged. She sends abroad the sound, and keeps at home the unsound. She expels the industrious, and retains the idle.

She parts with the small capitalist, but she keeps the pauper. She sends men from her own land, and with them the commodities they must consume while preparing for cultivation distant lands;--and all these things are regarded as evidences of growing wealth and power. She sends men from where they could make twelve or twenty exchanges in a year to a distance from, which they can make but one; and this is taken as evidence of the growth of commerce. She sends her people from the land to become trampers in her roads, or to seek refuge in filthy lanes and cellars; and this is hailed as tending to promote the freedom of man. In all this, however, she is but realizing the prophecies of Adam Smith, in relation to the determination of his countrymen to see in foreign trade alone "England's treasure."

In all nations, ancient and modern, freedom has come with the growth of a.s.sociation, and every act of a.s.sociation is an act of commerce.

Commerce, and freedom grow, therefore, together, and whatever tends to lessen the one must tend equally to lessen the other. The object of the whole British system is to destroy the power of a.s.sociation, for it seeks to prevent everywhere the growth of the mechanic arts, and without them there can be no local places of exchange, and none of that combination so needful to material, moral, intellectual, and political improvement. That such has been its effect in Portugal and Turkey, the West Indies, and India, and in our Southern States, we know--and in all of these freedom declines as the power of a.s.sociation diminishes. That such has been its effect in Ireland and Scotland, the reader has seen. In England we may see everywhere the same tendency to prevent the existence of a.s.sociation, or of freedom of trade. Land, the great instrument of production, is becoming from day to day more consolidated. Capital, the next great instrument, is subjected to the control of the Bank of England--an inst.i.tution that has probably caused more ruin than any other that has ever existed.[166]

a.s.sociations for banking or manufacturing purposes are restrained by a system of responsibility that tends to prevent prudent men from taking part in their formation. The whole tendency of the system is to fetter and restrain the productive power; and hence it is that it has proved necessary to establish the fact that the great Creator had made a serious mistake in the laws regulating the increase of food and of men, and that the _cheapened_ labourer was bound to correct the error by repressing that natural desire for a.s.sociation which leads to an increase of population. The consequences of all this are seen in the fact that there is in that country no real freedom of commerce. There is no compet.i.tion for the purchase of labour, and the labourer is therefore a slave to the capitalist. There is no compet.i.tion for the use of capital, and its owner is a slave to his banker, who requires him to content himself with the smallest profits. There is scarcely any power to sell land, for it is everywhere hedged round with entails, jointures, and marriage settlements, that fetter and enslave its owner. There is no compet.i.tion for obtaining "maidens in marriage," for the _Chronicle_ a.s.sures us that marriage now rarely takes place until the cradle has become as necessary as the ring;[167]

and when that is the case, the man will always be found a tyrant and the woman a slave. In the effort to destroy the power of a.s.sociation, and the freedom of trade and of man abroad, England has in a great degree annihilated freedom at home; and all this she has done because, from the day of the publication of _The Wealth of Nations_, her every movement has looked to the perpetuation of the system denounced by its author as a "manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind."

CHAPTER XV.

HOW CAN SLAVERY BE EXTINGUISHED?

How can slavery be extinguished, and man be made free? This question, as regarded England, was answered some years since by a distinguished anti-corn-law orator, when he said that for a long time past, in that country, two men had been seeking one master, whereas the time was then at hand when two masters would be seeking one man. Now, we all know that when two men desire to purchase a commodity, it rises in value, and its owner finds himself more free to determine for himself what to do with it than he could do if there were only one person desiring to have it, and infinitely more free than he could be if there were two sellers to one buyer. To make men free there must be compet.i.tion for the purchase of their services, and the more the compet.i.tion the greater must be their value, and that of the men who have them to sell.

It has already been shown [168] that in purely agricultural communities there can be very little compet.i.tion for the purchase of labour; and that such is the fact the reader can readily satisfy himself by reflecting on the history of the past, or examining the condition of man as he at present exists among the various nations of the earth. History shows that labour has become valuable, and that man has become free, precisely as the artisan has been enabled to take his place by the side of the ploughman--precisely as labour has become diversified--precisely as small towns have arisen in which the producer of food and wool could readily exchange for cloth and iron--precisely as manure could more readily be obtained to aid in maintaining the productiveness of the soil--and precisely, therefore, as men have acquired the power of a.s.sociating with their fellow-men.

With the growth of that power they have everywhere been seen to obtain increased returns from land, increased reward of labour, and increased power to acc.u.mulate the means of making roads, establishing schools, and doing all other things tending to the improvement of their modes of action and their habits of thought; and thus it is that freedom of thought, speech, action, and trade have always grown with the growth of the value of labour and land.

It is desired to abolish the _trade_ in slaves. No such trade could exist were men everywhere free; but as they are not so, it has in many countries been deemed necessary to prohibit the sale of men from off the land, as preliminary to the establishment of freedom. Nothing of this kind, however, can now be looked for, because there exists no power to coerce the owners of slaves to adopt any such measures; nor, if it did exist, would it be desirable that it should he exercised, as it would make the condition of both the slave and his master worse than it is even now. Neither is it necessary, because there exists "a higher law"--a great law of the Creator--that will effectually extinguish the trade whenever it shall be permitted to come into activity.

Why is it that men in Africa sell their fellow-men to be transported to Cuba or Brazil? For the same reason, obviously, that other men sell flour in Boston or Baltimore to go to Liverpool or Rio Janeiro--because it is cheaper in the former than in the latter cities. If, then, we desired to put a stop to the export, would not our object be effectually accomplished by the adoption of measures that would cause prices to be higher in Boston than in Liverpool, and higher in Baltimore than in Rio? That such would be the case must be admitted by all. If, then, we desired to stop the export of negroes from Africa, would not our object be effectually and permanently attained could we so raise the value of man in Africa that he would be worth as much, or more, there than in Cuba? Would not the export of Coolies cease if man could be rendered more, valuable in India than in Jamaica or Guiana? Would not the destruction of cottages, the eviction of their inhabitants, and the waste of life throughout Ireland, at once be terminated, could man be made as valuable there as he is here? Would not the export of the men, women, and children of Great Britain cease, if labour there could be brought to a level with that of Ma.s.sachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania? a.s.suredly it would; for men do not voluntarily leave home, kindred, and friends. On the contrary, so great is the attachment to home, that it requires, in most cases, greatly superior attractions to induce them to emigrate. Adam Smith said that, of all commodities, man was the hardest to be removed--and daily observation shows that he was right.