The Slave Trade, Domestic And Foreign Part 25

"The gardens, which belong to the town labourers and small shopkeepers, afford their proprietors the healthiest possible kind of recreation after the labours of the day. But, independently of this, the mere amus.e.m.e.nts of the poor of these countries prove the civilization, the comfort, and the prosperity of their social state."

* * * "There are, perhaps, no peasantry in the world who have so much healthy recreation and amus.e.m.e.nt as the peasants of Germany, and especially as those of Prussia and Saxony. In the suburbs of all the towns of Prussia and Saxony regular garden, concerts and promenades are given. An admittance fee of from one penny to sixpence admits any one to these amus.e.m.e.nts." * * * "I went constantly to these garden- concerts. I rejoiced to see that it was possible for the richest and the poorest of the people to find a common meeting ground; that the poor did not live for labour only; and that the schools had taught the poor to find pleasure in such improving and civilizing pleasures.

I saw daily proofs at these meetings of the excellent effects of the social system of Germany. I learned there how high a civilization the poorer cla.s.ses of a nation are capable of attaining under a well-arranged system of those laws which affect the social condition of a people. I found proofs at these meetings of the truth of that which I am anxious to teach my countrymen, that the poorer cla.s.ses of Germany are much less pauperized, much more civilized, and much happier than our own peasantry." * * * "The dancing itself, even in those tents frequented by the poorest peasants, is quite as good, and is conducted with quite as much decorum, as that of the first ballrooms of London. The polka, the waltz, and several dances not known in England, are danced by the German peasants with great elegance. They dance quicker than we do; and, from the training in music which they receive from their childhood, and for many years of their lives, the poorest peasants dance in much better time than English people generally do."--Vol. i. 235, 237, 240, 244.

How strikingly does the following view of the state of education contrast with that given in a former chapter in relation to the education of the poor of England!--

"Four years ago the Prussian government made a general inquiry throughout the kingdom, to discover how far the school education of the people had been extended; and it was then ascertained that, out of all the young men in the kingdom who had attained the age of twenty-one years, _only two in every hundred were unable to read_.

This fact was communicated to me by the Inspector-General of the kingdom.

"The poor of these countries read a great deal more than even those of our own country who are able to read. It is a general custom in Germany and Switzerland for four or five families of labourers to club together, and to subscribe among themselves for one or two of the newspapers which come out once or twice a week. These papers are pa.s.sed from family to family, or are interchanged." * * * "I remember one day, when walking near Berlin in the company of Herr Hintz, a professor in Dr. Diesterweg's Normal College, and of another teacher, we saw a poor woman cutting up in the road logs of wood for winter use. My companions pointed her out to me, and said, 'Perhaps you will scarcely believe it, but in the neighbourhood of Berlin poor women, like that one, read translations of Sir Walter Scott's novels, and of many of the interesting works of your language, besides those of the princ.i.p.al writers of Germany.' This account was afterward confirmed by the testimony of several other persons.

"Often and often have I seen the poor cab-drivers of Berlin, while waiting for a fare, amusing themselves by reading German books, which they had brought with them in the morning expressly for the purpose of supplying amus.e.m.e.nt and occupation for their leisure hours.

"In many parts of these countries, the peasants and the workmen of the towns attend regular weekly lectures or weekly cla.s.ses, where they practise singing or chanting, or learn mechanical drawing, history, or science.

"As will be seen afterward, women as well, as men, girls as well as boys, enjoy in these countries the same advantages, and go through the same, school education. The women of the poorer cla.s.ses of these countries, in point of intelligence and knowledge, are almost equal to the men."--P. 63, 65.

These facts would seem fully to warrant the author in his expression of the belief that

"The moral, intellectual, and social condition of the peasants and operatives of those parts of Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and France where the poor have been educated, where the land has been released from the feudal laws, and where the peasants have been enabled to acquire, is very much higher, happier, and more satisfactory than that of the peasants and operatives of England; and that while these latter are struggling in the deepest ignorance, pauperism, and moral degradation, the former are steadily and progressively attaining a condition, both socially and politically considered, of a higher, happier, and more hopeful character."--Vol.

i. 7.

The extensive possession of property produces here, as everywhere, respect for the rights of property. "In the neighbourhood of towns,"

says Mr. Kay--

"The land is scarcely any more enclosed, except in the case of the small gardens which surround the houses, than in the more rural districts. Yet this right is seldom abused. The condition of the lands near a German, or Swiss, or Dutch town is as orderly, as neat, and as undisturbed by trespa.s.sers as in the most secluded and most strictly preserved of our rural districts. All the poor have friends or relations who are themselves proprietors. Every man, however poor, feels that he himself may, some day or other, become a proprietor.

All are, consequently, immediately interested in the preservation of property, and in watching over the rights and interests of their neighbours."--P. 249.

How strongly the same cause tends to the maintenance of public order, may be seen on a perusal of the following pa.s.sages:--

"Every peasant who possesses one of these estates becomes interested in the maintenance of public order, in the tranquillity of the country, in the suppression of crimes, in the fostering of industry among his own children, and in the promotion of their intelligence. A cla.s.s of peasant proprietors forms the strongest of all conservative cla.s.ses." * * * "Throughout all the excitement of the revolutions of 1848, the peasant proprietors of France, Germany, Holland, and Switzerland were almost universally found upon the side of order, and opposed to revolutionary excesses. It was only in the provinces where the land was divided among the n.o.bles, and where the peasants were only serfs, as in the Polish provinces, Bohemia, Austria, and some parts of South Germany, that they showed themselves rebellious. In Prussia they sent deputation after deputation to Frederic William, to a.s.sure him of their support; in one province the peasant proprietors elected his brother as their representative; and in others they declared, by pet.i.tion after pet.i.tion forwarded to the chamber, and by the results of the elections, how strongly they were opposed to the anarchical party in Berlin."--Vol. i. 33, 273.

It is where land acquires value that men become free, and the more rapid the growth of value in land, the more rapid has ever been the growth of freedom. To enable it to acquire value, the artisan and the ploughman _must_ take their places by the side of each other; and the greater the tendency to this, the more rapid will be the progress of man toward moral, intellectual, and political elevation. It is in this direction that all the policy of Germany now tends, whereas that of England tends toward destroying everywhere the value of labour and land, and everywhere impairing the condition of man. The one system tends to the establishment everywhere of mills, furnaces, and towns, places of exchange, in accordance with the view of Dr. Smith, who tells us that "had human inst.i.tutions never disturbed the natural course of things, the progressive wealth and increase of the towns would, in every political society, be consequential and in proportion to the improvement and cultivation of the territory and country." The other tends toward building up London and Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, at the cost of enormous taxation imposed upon all the farmers and planters of the world; and its effects in remote parts of the United Kingdom itself, compared with those observed in Germany, are thus described:

"If any one has travelled in the mountainous parts of Scotland and Wales, where the farmers are only under-lessees of great landlords, without security of tenure, and liable to be turned out of possession with half a year's notice, and where the peasants are only labourers, without any land of their own, and generally without even the use of a garden; if he has travelled in the mountainous parts of Switzerland, Saxony, and the hilly parts of the Prussian Rhine provinces, where most of the farmers and peasants possess, or can by economy and industry obtain, land of their own; and if he has paid any serious attention to the condition of the farms, peasants, and children of these several countries, he cannot fail to have observed the astonishing superiority of the condition of the peasants, children, and farms in the last-mentioned countries.

"The miserable cultivation, the undrained and rush-covered valleys, the great number of sides of hills, terraces on the rocks, sides of streams, and other places capable of the richest cultivation, but wholly disused, even for game preserves; the vast tracts of the richest lands lying in moors, and bogs, and swamps, and used only for the breeding-places of game, and deer, and vermin, while the poor peasants are starving beside them; the miserable huts of cottages, with their one story, their two low rooms, their wretched and undrained floors, and their dilapidated roofs; and the crowds of miserable, half-clad, ragged, dirty, uncombed, and unwashed children, never blessed with any education, never trained in cleanliness or morality, and never taught any pure religion, are as astounding on the one hand as the happy condition of the peasants in the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, in the Tyrol, in Saxony, and in the mountainous parts of the Prussian Rhine provinces, is pleasing upon the other--where every plot of land that can bear any thing is brought into the most beautiful state of cultivation; where the valleys are richly and scientifically farmed; where the manures are collected with the greatest care; where the houses are generally large, roomy, well-built, and in excellent repair, and are improving every day; where the children are beautifully clean, comfortably dressed, and attending excellent schools; and where the condition of the people is one of hope, industry, and progress."--Vol. i. 140.

The artisan has ever been the ally of the farmer in his contests with those who sought to tax him, let the form of taxation be what it might. The tendency of the British system is everywhere toward separating the two, and _using each to crush the other_. Hence it is that in all the countries subject to the system there is an abjectness of spirit not to be found in other parts of the world. The vices charged by the English journals on the people of Ireland are those of slavery--falsehood and dissimulation. The Hindoo of Bengal is a mean and crouching animal, compared with the free people of the upper country who have remained under their native princes. Throughout England there is a deference to rank, a servility, a toadyism, entirely inconsistent with progress in civilization.[177]

The English labourer is, says Mr. Howitt [178]--

"So cut off from the idea of property, that he comes habitually to look upon it as a thing from which he is warned by the laws of the great proprietors, and becomes in consequence spiritless, purposeless."

Compare with this the following description of a German bauer, from the same authority:--

"The German bauer, on the contrary, looks on the country as made for him and his fellow-men. He feels himself a man; he has a stake in the country as good as that of the bulk of his neighbours; no man can threaten him with ejection or the workhouse so long as he is active and economical. He walks, therefore, with a bold step; he looks you in the face with the air of a free man, but of a respectful one."--_Ibid_.

The reader may now advantageously compare the progress of the last half century in Ireland and in Germany. Doing so, he will see that in the former there has been a steady tendency to the expulsion of the mechanic, the exhaustion of the soil, the consolidation of the land, and the resolution of the whole nation into a ma.s.s of wretched tenants at will, holding under the middleman agent of the great absentee landlord, with constant decline in the material, moral, and intellectual condition of all cla.s.ses of society, and constantly increasing inability on the part of the nation to a.s.sert its rights.

Seventy years since the Irish people extorted the admission of their right to legislate for themselves, whereas now the total disappearance of the nation from among the communities of the world is regarded as a thing to be prayed for, and a calculation is made that but twenty-four more years will be required, at the present rate, for its total extinction. In Germany, on the contrary, the mechanic is everywhere invited, and towns are everywhere growing. The soil is being everywhere enriched, and agricultural knowledge is being diffused throughout the nation; and land so rapidly acquires value that it is becoming more divided from day to day. The proprietor is everywhere taking the place of the serf, and the demand for labour becomes steady and man becomes valuable. The people are everywhere improving in their material and moral condition; and so rapid is the improvement of intellectual condition, that German literature now commands the attention of the whole civilized world. With each step in this direction, there is an increasing tendency toward union and peace, whereas as Ireland declines there is an increasing tendency toward discord, violence, and crime. Having studied these things, the reader may then call to mind that Ireland has thus declined, although, in the whole half century, her soil has never been pressed by the foot of an enemy in arms, whereas Germany has thus improved, although repeatedly overrun and plundered by hostile armies.

CHAPTER XVII.

HOW FREEDOM GROWS IN RUSSIA.

Among the nations of the world whose policy looks to carrying out the views of Adam Smith, in bringing the artisan as near as possible to the food and the wool, Russia stands distinguished. The information we have in reference to the movements of that country is limited; but all of it tends to prove that with the growth of population and wealth, and with the increased diversification of labour, land is acquiring value, and man is advancing rapidly toward freedom. "The industry of Russia," says a recent American journal--

"Has been built up, as alone the industry of a nation can be, under a system of protection, from time to time modified as experience has dictated; but never destroyed by specious abstractions or the dogmas of mere doctrinaires. Fifty years ago manufactures were unknown there, and the caravans trading to the interior and supplying the wants of distant tribes in Asia went laden with the products of British and other foreign workshops. When the present emperor mounted the throne, in 1825, the country could not produce the cloth required to uniform its own soldiers; further back, in 1800, the exportation of coloured cloth was prohibited under severe penalties; but through the influence of adequate protection, as early as 1834, Russian cloth was taken by the caravans to Kiachta; and at this day the markets of all Central Asia are supplied by the fabrics of Russian looms, which in Affghanistan and China are crowding British cloths entirely out of sale--notwithstanding the latter have the advantage in transportation--while in Tartary and Russia itself British woollens are now scarcely heard of. In 1812 there were in Russia 136 cloth factories; in 1824, 324; in 1812 there were 129 cotton factories; in 1824, 484. From 1812 to 1839 the whole number of manufacturing establishments in the empire more than trebled, and since then they have increased in a much greater ratio, though from the absence of official statistics we are not able to give the figures. Of the total amount of manufactured articles consumed in 1843, but one-sixth were imported. And along with this vast aggrandizement of manufacturing industry and commerce, there has been a steady increase of both imports and exports, as well as of revenue from customs. The increase in imports has consisted of articles of luxury and raw materials for manufacture. And, as if to leave nothing wanting in the demonstration, the increase of exports has constantly included more and more of the products of agriculture. Thus in this empire we see what we must always see under an adequate and judicious system of protection, that a proper tariff not only improves, refines, and diversifies the labour of a country, but enlarges its commerce, increases the prosperity of its agricultural population, renders the people better and better able to contribute to the support of the Government, and raises the nation to a position of independence and real equality among the powers of the globe. All this is indubitably proved by the example of Russia, for there protection has been steady and adequate, and the consequences are what we have described."--_N.

York Tribune_.

The reader may advantageously compare the following sketch, from the same source, of the present position of Russia, so recently a scene of barbarism, with that already laid before him, of her neighbour Turkey, whose policy commands to so great an extent the admiration of those economists who advocate the system which looks to converting the whole world outside of England into one vast farm, and all its people, men, women, and children, into field labourers, dependent on one great workshop in which to make all their exchanges:--

"Russia, we are told, is triumphant in the Great Exhibition. Her natural products excite interest and admiration for their variety and excellence; her works of art provoke astonishment for their richness and beauty. Her jewellers and gold-workers carry off the palm from even those of Paris. Her satins and brocades compete with the richest contributions of Lyons. She exhibits tables of malachite and caskets of ebony, whose curious richness indicates at once the lavish expenditure of a barbaric court, and the refinement and taste of civilization. Nor do we deem it of much account that her part of the exhibition is not exclusively the work of native artisans. Her satins are none the less genuine product of the country because the loveliest were woven by emigrants from the _Croix Rousse_ or the _Guillotiere_, seduced by high wages from their sunnier home in order to build up the industry of the Great Empire and train the grandsons of Mongol savages in the exquisite mysteries of French taste and dexterity. It matters not that the exhibition offers infinitely more than a fair ill.u.s.tration of the average capacity of Russian labour.

It is none the less true that a people who half a century ago were without manufactures of any but the rudest kind, are now able by some means to furnish forth an unsurpa.s.sed display, though all the world is there to compete with them.

"We are no lover of Russian power, and have no wish to exaggerate the degree of perfection to which Russian industry has attained. We do not doubt that any cotton factory in the environs of Moscow might be found imperfect when contrasted with one of Manchester or Lowell. We are confident that the artisans of a New-England village very far surpa.s.s those of a Russian one in most qualities of intelligence and manhood. Indeed, it is absurd to make the comparison; it is absurd to do what travellers insist on doing--that is, to judge every nation by the highest standard, and p.r.o.nounce each a failure which does not exhibit the intellect of France, the solidity and power of England, or the enterprise, liberty, and order of the United States. All that should be asked is, whether a people has surpa.s.sed its own previous condition and is in the way of improvement and progress. And that, in respect of industry, at least, Russia is in that way, her show at the Exhibition may safely be taken as a brilliant and conclusive proof."

Russia is powerful, and is becoming more so daily. Why is it so? It is because her people are daily more and more learning the advantages of diversification of labour and combination of exertion, and more and more improving in their physical and intellectual condition--the necessary preliminaries to an improvement of their political condition. Turkey is weak; and why is it so? Because among her people the habit of a.s.sociation is daily pa.s.sing away as the few remaining manufactures disappear, and as the travelling pedler supersedes the resident shopkeeper.

It is said, however, that Russian policy is unfavorable to commerce; but is not its real tendency that of producing a great internal commerce upon which alone a great foreign one can be built? That it does produce the effect of enabling her people to combine their exertions for their common benefit is most certain; and equally so that it tends to give her that direct intercourse with the world which is essential to the existence of freedom. The slave trades with the world through his master, who fixes the price of the labour he has to sell and the food and clothing he has to buy, and this is exactly the system that Great Britain desires to establish for the farmers of the world--she being the only buyer of raw products, and the only seller of manufactured ones.

So long as Russia exports only food and hemp, she can trade with Brazil for sugar, and with Carolina for cotton, only through the medium of British ships, British ports, British merchants, and British looms, for she can need no raw cotton; but with the extension of manufactures she needs cotton, which she can draw directly from the planter, paying him in iron, by aid of which he may have machinery. In ill.u.s.tration of this, we have the fact that so recently as in 1846, out of a total consumption of cotton amounting to 310,656 cwts., no less than 122,082 cwts. had pa.s.sed through British spindles; whereas in 1850, out of a total consumption more than one-half greater, and amounting to 487,612 cwts., only 64,505 cwts. had pa.s.sed through the hands of the spinners of Manchester.

The export of raw cotton to Russia has since largely increased, but the precise extent of increase cannot be ascertained, although some estimate may be formed from the growth of the consumption of one of the princ.i.p.al dyeing materials, indigo; the export of which from England to Russia is thus given in the London _Economist_:--

1849. 1850. 1851. 1852.

----- ----- ----- ----- Chests, 3225....... 4105....... 4953....... 5175

We have here an increase in three years of almost sixty per cent., proving a steady increase in the power to obtain clothing and to maintain commerce internal and external, directly the reverse of what has been observed in Turkey, Ireland, India, and other countries in which the British system prevails; and the reason of this is that that system looks to destroying the power of a.s.sociation. It would have all the people of India engage themselves in raising cotton, and all those of Brazil and Cuba in raising sugar, while those of Germany and Russia should raise food and wool; and we know well that when all are farmers, or all planters, the power of a.s.sociation scarcely exists; the consequence of which is seen in the exceeding weakness of all the communities of the world in which the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow, are prevented from coming together. It is an unnatural one. Men everywhere seek to combine their exertions with those of their fellow-men; an object sought to be attained by the introduction of that diversification of employment advocated throughout his work by the author of _The Wealth of Nations_. How naturally the habit of a.s.sociation arises, and how beneficial are its effects, may be seen from a few extracts now offered to the reader, from an interesting article in a recent English journal. In Russia, says its author--

"There does not prevail that marked distinction between the modes of life of the dwellers in town and country which is found in other countries; and the general freedom of trade, which in other nations is still an object of exertion, has existed in Russia since a long by-gone period. A strong manufacturing and industrial tendency prevails in a large portion of Russia, which, based upon the communal system, has led to the formation of what we may term 'national a.s.sociation factories.'"

In corroboration of this view of the general freedom of internal trade, we are told that, widely different from the system of western Europe,

"There exists no such thing as a trade guild, or company, nor any restraint of a similar nature. Any member of a commune can at pleasure abandon the occupation he may be engaged in, and take up another; all that he has to do in effecting the change is to quit the commune in which his old trade is carried on, and repair to another, where his new one is followed."

The tendency of manufacturing industry is

"For the most part entirely communal; the inhabitants of one village, for example, are all shoemakers, in another smiths, in a third tanners only, and so on. A natural division of labor thus prevails exactly as in a factory. The members of the commune mutually a.s.sist one another with capital or labor; purchases are usually made in common, and sales also invariably, but they always send their manufactures in a general ma.s.s to the towns and market-places, where they have a common warehouse for their disposal."

In common with all countries that are as yet unable fully to carry out the idea of Adam Smith, of compressing a large quant.i.ty of food and wool into a piece of cloth, and thus fitting it for cheap transportation to distant markets, and which are, therefore, largely dependent on those distant markets for the sale of raw produce, the cultivation of the soil in Russia is not--

"In general, very remunerative, and also can only be engaged in for a few months in the year, which is, perhaps, the reason why the peasant in Russia evinces so great an inclination for manufactures and other branches of industry, the character of which generally depends on the nature of raw products found in the districts where they are followed."

Without diversification of employment much labour would be wasted, and the people would find themselves unable to purchase clothing or machinery of cultivation. Throughout the empire the labourer appears to follow in the direction indicated by nature, working up the materials on the land on which they are produced, and thus economizing transportation. Thus--