The Roman people sought to centralize within their walls the power of governing and taxing all the nations of the earth, and to a great extent they succeeded; but in the effort to acquire power over others they lost all power over themselves. As the city grew in size and as its great men became greater, the proportions of the people everywhere became less. The freemen of the Campagna had almost disappeared even in the days of the elder Scipio, and their humble habitations had given way to palaces, the centre of great estates, cultivated by slaves. Step by step with the increase of power abroad came increased consolidation of the land at home, and, as the people were more and more driven from the soil the city grew in numbers and magnificence, and in the poverty and rapacity of its inhabitants. The populace needed to be fed, and that they might be so there was established a great system of poor-laws, carried into effect by aid of the taxation of distant provinces, at whose expense they were both fed and entertained. They demanded cheap food, and they obtained their desires at the cost of the cultivators, abroad and at home, who became more and more enslaved as Rome itself was more cheaply supplied. Desires grew with their indulgence, and the greater the facility for living without labour, the greater became the necessity for seeking "new markets" in which to exercise their powers of appropriation, and the more extensive became the domain of slavery. Bankers and middlemen grew more and more in power, and while the wealth of Cra.s.sus enabled him to obtain the control of the East, enormous loans gave to Caesar the command of the West, leaving to Pompey and his moneyed friends the power to tax the centre and the South. Next, Augustus finds the city of brick and leaves it of marble; and Herodes Atticus appears upon the stage sole improver, and almost sole owner, in Attica, once so free, while bankers and n.o.bles acc.u.mulate enormous possessions in Africa, Gaul, and Britain, and the greater the extent of absentee ownership the greater becomes the wretchedness and the crime of the pauper mob of Rome. Still onward the city grows, absorbing the wealth of the world, and with it grow the poverty, slavery, and rapacity of the people, the exhaustion of provinces, and the avarice and tyranny of rulers and magistrates, until at length the empire, rotten at the heart, becomes the prey of barbarians, and all become slaves alike,--thus furnishing proof conclusive that the community which desires to command respect for its own rights _must_ practise respect for those of others; or in other words, must adopt as its motto the great lesson which lies at the base of all Christianity--"Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you."
A survey of the British Empire at the present moment presents to view some features so strongly resembling those observed in ancient Rome as to warrant calling the attention of the reader to their careful observation. Like Rome, England has desired to establish political centralization by aid of fleets and armies, but to this she has added commercial centralization, far more destructive in its effects, and far more rapid in its operation. Rome was content that her subjects should occupy themselves as they pleased, either in the fields or in the factories, provided only that they paid their taxes. England, on the contrary, has sought to restrict her subjects and the people of the world in their modes of employment; and this she has done with a view to compel them to make all their exchanges in her single market, leaving to her to fix the prices of all she bought and all she sold, thus taxing them at her discretion in both time and money. She has sought to compel all other nations to follow the plough, leaving to her the loom and the anvil, and thus to render it necessary that they should bring to her all their products in the rudest form, at great cost of transportation, and total loss of the manure yielded by them, thus exhausting their soil and themselves; and the consequences of this are seen in the ruin, depopulation, and slavery of the West Indies, Ireland, India, Portugal, Turkey, and other countries that have been partially or wholly subjected to her dominion. Hence it is that she is seen to be everywhere seeking "new markets." Bengal having been in a great degree exhausted, it became necessary to annex the North-west provinces, and thence we find her stretching out her hand at one moment to seize on Affghanistan, at another to force the Chinese into permitting her to smuggle opium, and at a third to expel the Sikhs and occupy the Punjab, as preliminary to this invasion and subjection of the Burman Empire. She needs, and must have new markets, as Rome needed new provinces, and for the same reason, the exhaustion of the old ones. She rejoices with great joy at the creation of a new market in Australia, and looks with a longing eye on the Empire of j.a.pan, whose prosperous people, under a peaceful government, prefer to avoid entering on the same course of action that has resulted in the reduction of the wealthy and powerful Hindostan to its present distressed condition.
It was against this system that Adam Smith cautioned his countrymen, as not only a violation of "the most sacred rights" of man, but as leading inevitably to consequences in the highest degree injurious to themselves, in depreciating the value of both labour and capital. Up to his time, however, it had been carried out in a very small degree.
The colonies were then few in number, but, those were heavily taxed, as has been shown in the candid admission of _Joshua Gee_, that the colonists carried home but one-fourth of the value of the commodities they brought to the great market.[127] The system was then only in its infancy. In India, the Company had but then first obtained the concession of a right to act in the capacity of tax-gatherer for Bengal. On this continent, the right thus to tax the colonists was seriously contested, and _The Wealth of Nations_ had not been long before the world before it came to be explicitly and successfully denied. The tendency of the system was, however, so obvious to its author, that he desired to warn his countrymen against the effort to build up "colonies of customers," as unworthy of a great people, and worthy only of "a nation of shopkeepers,"--and happy for them would it have been had his advice been taken. It was not. From that day to the present, every step has been in the direction against which he cautioned them, as was shown in a former chapter, and from year to year the people of England have become more and more the mere traders in the products of the labours of other men, and more and more compelled to seek "new markets," as did the Roman people,--the only difference being that in every case the exhaustion has been accomplished with a rapidity unparalleled in the annals of Rome, or of the world. A century since, India was rich, and now her government, collecting annually one-fifth of the whole value of the land, is sustained only by means of a monopoly of the power to poison and enslave the Chinese by means of a vile drug, and the poor Hindoo is forced to seek for food in the swamps of Jamaica and Guiana. Half a century since, Ireland had a highly cultivated society, with a press that sent forth large editions of the most valuable and expensive books produced in England, and now her people are decimated by famine and pestilence. Twenty years since, there existed some little prospect that the poor negroes of Jamaica and Guiana might at some future time become civilized, but that hope has pa.s.sed away, as has the value of the land upon which they have been employed. What has been the effect of this course of policy upon the condition of the people of England we may now inquire.
In the days of Adam Smith it was estimated that there were in that country 220,000 owners of land, and as a necessary consequence of this extensive ownership of property, there was a very decided tendency toward an increase in the freedom of man, as shown in the efforts made but a few years later for obtaining a reform in various matters of government. The French Revolution came, however, and now the doctrine of "ships, colonies, and commerce" had much to do in bringing about a state of war, during the whole of which England enjoyed almost a monopoly of the trade of the world. Having all the woollen and cotton machinery, and almost all the machinery for the production of iron, she was enabled to buy produce and sell manufactures at her own prices; and thus were the already wealthy greatly enriched. The poor- houses were, however, everywhere filled with starving labourers, and so rapidly did their number increase that it became at length necessary to give to the statute of Elizabeth a new and enlarged construction; and here do we find another coincidence in the working of Roman and British centralization. A still further one will be found in the fact that precisely as the labourer was losing all power of self-government, the little proprietors of land disappeared, to be replaced by day-labourers.
The peace, however came, and with it a desire on the part of other nations to supply themselves with cloth, iron, and other manufactured commodities; and to enable them to carry into effect their wishes, many of them imposed duties having for their object the bringing together of the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow. This produced, of course, a necessity for new exertions to underwork those nations, leading to constant improvements of machinery, each tending to enable the capitalist more and more to acc.u.mulate fortune and purchase land, the consolidation of which has been continued until at length it has resulted in the fact, that in place of the 220,000 English land-owners of the days of Adam Smith, there now exist but 30,000, while all the land of Scotland has, as is stated, acc.u.mulated in the hands of 6000 persons.
As the 190,000 proprietors came by degrees to be represented by day-labourers, pauperism increased, and the labourer became from year to year more enslaved, and more dependent for existence upon the favours of farmers, parish beadles, and constables, until at length a reform of the system having become absolutely necessary, it was undertaken. Instead, however, of inquiring into the causes of this increased dependence with a view to their abolition, it was determined to abolish the relief that they had rendered necessary, and hence the existence of the new poor-law. By virtue of its provisions, inability to obtain food became a crime punishable by the separation of husbands from wives and parents from children; and thus we see that in the last twenty years English legislation has tended greatly in the same direction with the domestic slave trade of this country.
Consolidation of the land drove the labourers from the cultivation of the soil, while improved machinery tended constantly to drive them out from the factory, and thus were the poor made poorer and weaker, as the rich grew richer and stronger. Ireland, too, contributed largely to the same result. As the Act of Union gradually closed her factories and drove her people to cultivation as the sole means of supporting life, they found themselves, like the Italians of olden time, forced to emigrate to the place where taxes were distributed, in the hope of obtaining wages, and their compet.i.tion threw the English labourer still more in the hands of the capitalist. From year to year the small proprietor was seen to pa.s.s into the condition of a day-labourer, and the small employing mechanic or tradesman to pa.s.s into a receiver of wages, and thus did the whole people tend more and more to become divided into two great cla.s.ses, separated from each other by an impa.s.sable gulf, the very rich and the very poor, the master and the slave.
As England became more and more flooded with the wretched people of the sister island, driven from home in search of employment, the wealthy found it more and more easy to accomplish "the great works"
for which, as the London _Times_ inform us, the country is indebted to the "cheap labour of Ireland," and the greater the influx of this labour the more rapid was the decline in the power of both Ireland and Britain to furnish a market for the products of the manufacturing, labour of England. Hence arose, of course, a necessity for looking abroad for new markets to take the place of those before obtained at home, and thus cheap labour, a _consequence_ of the system, became in its turn a _cause_ of new efforts at dispensing with and further cheapening labour. As the Irishman could no longer buy, it became necessary that the Hindoo should be driven from his own market. As the Highlander was expelled, it became more and more necessary to underwork the spinners and weavers of China. As the Bengalese now become impoverished, there arises a necessity for filling the Punjab, and Affghanistan, Burmah and Borneo, with British goods. Pauperism lies necessarily at the root of such a system. "It is," said a speaker at the late Bradford election for representative in Parliament--
"Its root. That system is based on foreign compet.i.tion. Now I a.s.sert, that _under the buy cheap and sell dear principle, brought to bear on foreign compet.i.tion, the ruin of the working and small trading cla.s.ses must go on. Why?_ Labour is the creator of all wealth. A man must work before a grain is grown, or a yard is woven. But there is no self-employment for the working-man in this country. Labour is a hired commodity--labour is a thing in the market that is bought and sold; consequently, as labour creates all wealth, labour is the first thing bought. "Buy cheap! buy cheap!" Labour is bought in the cheapest market. But now comes the next. "Sell dear! sell dear!" Sell what? _Labors produce_. To whom? To the foreigner--ay! and to _the labourer himself_--for labour not being self-employed, the labourer is _not_ the partaker of the first-fruits of his toil. "Buy cheap, sell dear." How do you like it? "Buy cheap, sell dear." Buy the working-man"s labour cheaply, and sell back to that very working-man the produce of his own labour dear! The principle of inherent loss is in the bargain. The employer buys the labour cheap--he sells, and on the sale he must, make a profit: he sells to the working-man himself--and thus every bargain between employer and employed is a deliberate cheat on the part of the employer. Thus labour has to sink through eternal loss, that capital may rise through lasting fraud.
But the system stops not here. THIS IS BROUGHT TO BEAR ON FOREIGN COMPEt.i.tION--WHICH MEANS, WE MUST RUIN THE TRADE OF OTHER COUNTRIES, AS WE HAVE RUINED THE LABOUR OF OUR OWN. How does it work? The high-taxed country has to undersell the low-taxed. _Compet.i.tion abroad is constantly increasing, consequently cheapness must increase also._ Therefore, wages in England must keep constantly falling. And how do they effect the fall? By _surplus labour_. By monopoly of the land, which drives more hands than are wanted into the factory. By monopoly of machinery, which drives those hands into the street; by woman labour, which drives the man from the shuttle; by child labour, which drives the woman from the loom. Then planting their foot upon that living base of surplus, they press its aching heart beneath their heel, and cry "Starvation! Who"ll work? A half loaf is better than no bread at all;" and the writhing ma.s.s grasps greedily at their terms. Such is the system for the working-man. But, electors, how does it operate on you? how does it affect home trade, the shopkeeper, poor"s rate, and taxation? _For every increase of compet.i.tion abroad there must be an increase of cheapness at home._ Every increase of cheapness in labour is based on increase of labour surplus, and this surplus is obtained by an increase of machinery. I repeat, how does this operate on you? The Manchester liberal on my left establishes a new patent, and throws three hundred men as a surplus in the streets. Shopkeepers! Three hundred customers less.
Rate-payers! Three hundred paupers more. But, mark me! The evil stops not there. _These three hundred men operate first to bring down the wages of those who remain at work in their own trade._ The employer says, "Now I reduce your wages." The men demur. Then he adds, "Do you see those three hundred men who have just walked out? _you may change places if you like_, they"re sighing to come in on any terms, for they"re starving." The men feel it, and are crushed. Ah! you Manchester liberal! Pharisee of politics! those men are listening--have I got you now? But the evil stops not yet. _Those men, driven from their own trade, seek employment in others, when they swell the surplus and bring wages down._"
Strong as is all this, it is nevertheless true, England is engaged in a war of extermination waged against the labour of all other countries employed in any pursuit except that of raising raw produce to be sent to her own market, there to be exchanged for the cloth and the iron produced at the mills and furnaces of her _millionaires_, who have acc.u.mulated their vast fortunes at the expense of Ireland, India, Portugal, Turkey, and the other countries that have been ruined by the system which looks to the exhaustion of the soil of all other lands, to the impoverishment and enslavement of their people, and which was so indignantly denounced by Adam Smith. In the effort to crush them she has been crushing her own people, and the more rapid the spread of pauperism at home the greater have been her efforts to produce the surplus labour which causes a fall of wages at home and abroad.
With the consolidation of land in the hands of a few proprietors there is a steady decline in the number of people employed upon it, and an equally steady one in that hope of rising in the world which is elsewhere seen to be the best incentive to exertion. "The peasant knows," says a recent English writer,[128] "that he must die in the same position in which he was born." Again, he says, "the want of small farms deprives the peasant of all hope of improving his condition in life." The London _Times_ a.s.sures its readers that "once a peasant in England, the man must remain a peasant for ever;" and Mr.
Kay, after careful examination of the condition of the people of continental Europe, a.s.sures his readers that, as one of the consequences of this state of things, the peasantry of England "are more ignorant, more demoralized, less capable of helping themselves, and more pauperized, than those of any other country in Europe, if we except Russia, Turkey, South Italy, and some parts of the Austrian Empire."[129]
Under such circ.u.mstances, the middle cla.s.s tends gradually to pa.s.s away, and its condition is well expressed by the term now so frequently, used, "the uneasy cla.s.s." The small capitalist, who would elsewhere purchase a piece of land, a horse and cart, or a machine of some kind calculated to enable him to double the productiveness of his labour and increase its reward, is in England forced to make his investments in savings banks or life-insurance offices, and thus to place his little capital in the hands of others, at three per cent., whereas he could have fifty or a hundred per cent., could he be permitted to use it himself. There is, therefore, a perpetual strife for life, and each man is, as has been said, "endeavouring to s.n.a.t.c.h the piece of bread from his neighbour"s mouth." The atmosphere of England is one of intense gloom. Every one is anxious for the future, for himself or his children. There is a universal feeling of doubt as to how to dispose of the labour or the talents of themselves or their sons, and the largest fees are paid to men already wealthy, in the hope of obtaining aid toward securing steady employment. "This _gloom_ of England," says a late English writer--
"Is in truth one of the most formidable evils of modern times. With all the advance, in morality and decency of the present century, we have receded rather than gone forward in the attainment of that true Christian cheerfulness, which--notwithstanding the popular proverb--I believe to be the blessing next in value to G.o.dliness.
"I truly believe," he continues, "that one of the chief obstacles to the progress of pure living Christianity in this country is to be found in that worldly carefulness which causes our intense gravity, and makes us the most silent nation in Europe. The respectability of England is its bane; we worship respectability, and thus contrive to lose both the enjoyments of earth and the enjoyments of heaven. If Great Britain could once learn to laugh like a child, she would be in the way once more to pray like a saint.
"But this is not all: the sensuality and gross vice, and the hateful moroseness and harshness of temper, which result from our indisposition for gayety and enjoyment, are literally awful to think of. Pride and licentiousness triumph in our land, because we are too careworn or too stupid to enter heartily into innocent recreations.
Those two demons, one of which first cast man out of Paradise, while the other has degraded him to the level of the brutes, are served by myriads of helpless slaves, who are handed over to a bondage of pa.s.sion, through the gloominess that broods over our national character. The young and the old alike, the poor and the wealthy, are literally driven to excess, because there is nothing in our state of society to refresh them after their toils, or to make life as much a season of enjoyment as the inevitable lot of mortality will allow.
"Men fly to vice for the want of pure and innocent pleasures. The gin-shops receive those who might be entertaining themselves with the works of art in a public gallery. The whole animal portion of our being is fostered at the expense of the spiritual. We become brutalized, because we are morbidly afraid of being frivolous and of wasting our time. The devil keeps possession of an Englishman"s heart, through the instrumentality of his carnal pa.s.sions, because he is too proud and too stupid to laugh and enjoy himself.
"Secret sin destroys its myriads, immolated on the altar of outward respectability and of a regard for the opinion of a money-getting world."
The existence of such a state of things is indeed a "formidable evil,"
but how could it fail to exist in a country in which all individuality is being lost as the little land-owner gradually disappears to be replaced by the day-labourer, and as the little shop-keeper gradually sinks into a clerk? How could it be otherwise in a country in which weak women, and children of the most tender age, spend their nights in cellars, and the long day of twelve or fifteen hours in factories, whose owners know of them nothing but, as in a penitentiary, their number--a country in which males and females work naked in coal-mines--and find themselves compelled to do all these things because of the necessity for preventing the poor Hindoo from calling to his aid the powerful steam, and for compelling him, his wife, and his children, to limit themselves to the labour of the field? How could it be otherwise in a country in which "labourers, whether well off or not, never attempt to be better?"[130] How otherwise in a country distinguished among all others for the enormous wealth of a few, for the intensity of toil and labour of all below them, and for the anxiety with which the future is regarded by all but those who, bereft of hope, know that all they can expect on this side of the grave is an indifferent supply of food and raiment? "In no country of the world," says Mr. Kay--
"Is so much time spent in the mere acquisition of wealth, and so little time in the enjoyment of life and of all the means of happiness which G.o.d has given to man, as in England.
"In no country in the world do the middle cla.s.ses labour so intensely as here. One would think, to view the present state of English society, that man was created for no other purpose than to collect wealth, and that he was forbidden to gratify the beautiful tastes with which he has been gifted for the sake of his own happiness. To be rich, with us, is the great virtue, the pa.s.s into all society, the excuse for many frailties, and the mask for numerous deformities."
An Eastern proverb says that "curses, like young chickens, always come home to roost." Few cases could be presented of a more perfect realization of this than is found in the present condition of England.
Half a century since it was decreed that the poor people of Ireland should confine themselves to the cultivation and exhaustion of their soil, abstaining from the mining of coal, the smelting of ore, or the making of cloth; and during nearly all that time they have so flooded England with "cheap labour" as to have produced from the _Times_ the declaration, before referred to, that "for a whole generation man has been a drug and population a nuisance"--precisely the state of things in which men tend most to become enslaved. Cheap corn, cheap cotton, cheap tobacco, and cheap sugar, mean low-priced agricultural labour; and the low-priced labourer is always a slave, and aiding to produce elsewhere the slavery of his fellow-labourers, whether in the field or in the workshop. This, however, is in perfect accordance with the doctrines of some of England"s most distinguished statesmen, as the reader has already seen in the declaration of Mr. Huskisson, that "to give capital a fair remuneration, the price of labour must be kept down,"--by which he proved the perfect accuracy of the predictions of the author of _The Wealth of Nations_.
The harmony of true interests among nations is perfect, and an enlightened self-interest would lead every nation to carry into full effect the golden rule of Christianity; and yet even now, the most distinguished men in England regard smuggling almost as a virtuous act, and the smuggler as a great reformer, because his labours tend to enable their countrymen to do everywhere what has been done in the West Indies, in Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and India--separate the consumer from the producer. They regard it as the appointed work of England to convert the whole earth into one vast farm dependent upon one vast workshop, and that shop in the island of Great Britain. Such being the views of peers of the realm, lord chancellors, ministers of state, political economists, and statisticians, can we wonder at a decline of morality among the middle cla.s.s, under the combined influence of the struggle for life, and the a.s.surance that "the end sanctifies the means," and that false invoices are but a means of working out a great reformation in the commercial system of the world?
Good ends rarely require such means for their accomplishment, and the very fact that it was needed to have Gibraltar as a means of smuggling into Spain, Canada as a means of smuggling into this country,[131] and Hong Kong for the purpose of poisoning the Chinese with smuggled opium, should have led to a careful consideration of the question whether or not the system which looked to exhausting the soil of Virginia and driving the poor negro to the sugar culture in Texas, was one of the modes of "doing G.o.d service."
Unsound moral feeling is a necessary consequence of an exclusive devotion to trade such as is now seen to exist in England. It is the business of the trader to buy cheaply and sell dearly, be the consequences what they may to those from whom he buys, or to whom he sells; and unhappily the prosperity of England now depends so entirely on buying cheaply and selling dearly that she is forced to overlook the effects upon those to whom she sells, or from whom she buys, and she therefore rejoices when others are being ruined, and grieves when they are being enriched. Her interests are always, and necessarily so, opposed to those of the rest of the world. She _must_ look at every thing with the eyes of the mere trader who wishes to buy cheaply and sell dearly, living at the cost of the producer and the consumer. The former desires good prices for his sugar, and yet so anxious was she to obtain cheap sugar that she forgot her engagements with the poor emanc.i.p.ated negroes of Jamaica. The former desire"s good prices for his corn, but so anxious was she to have cheap corn, that she forgot having deprived the people of Ireland of all employment but in agriculture, and at once adopted measures whose action is now expelling the whole nation from the scenes of their youth, and separating husbands and wives, mothers and children. She has placed herself in a false position, and cannot now _afford_ to reflect upon the operation of cheap sugar and cheap corn, cheap cotton and cheap tobacco, upon the people who produce them; and therefore it is that the situation of Ireland and India, and of the poor people Of Jamaica, is so much shut out from discussion. Such being the case with those who should give tone to public opinion, how can we look for sound or correct feeling among the poor occupants of "the sweater"s den,"[132]
or among the 20,000 tailors of London, seeking for work and unable to find it? Or, how look for it among the poor shopkeepers, compelled in self-defence to adulterate almost every thing they sell, when they see the great cotton manufacturer using annually hundreds of barrels of flour to enable him to impose worthless cloth upon the poor Hindoo, and thus annihilate his foreign compet.i.tor? Or, how expect to find it among the poor operatives of Lancashire, at one moment working full time, at another but three days in a week, and at a third totally deprived of employment, because goods can no longer be smuggled into foreign countries to leave a profit? With them, the question of food or no food is dependent altogether upon the size of the cotton crop.
If the slave trade is brisk, much cotton is made, and they have wages with which to support their wives and children. If the crop is large, the planter may be ruined, but they themselves are fed. "The weekly mail from America," we are told--
"Is not of more moment to the great cotton lord of Manchester, than it is to John Shuttle the weaver. * * * If he ever thinks how entirely his own existence and that of his own little household depend upon the American crop * * * he would tremble at the least rumour of war with the Yankees. War with America--a hurricane in Georgia--a flood in Alabama--are one and all death-cries to the mill-spinner and power-loom weaver. * * * When the cotton fields of the Southern States yield less than the usual quant.i.ty of cotton, the Manchester operative eats less than his average quant.i.ty of food.
When his blood boils at the indignities and cruelties heaped upon the coloured, race in the "Land of the Free," he does not always remember that _to the slave States_ of America _he owes his all_--that _it is for his advantage_ that the _negro should wear his chains in peace_."--_Household Words_.
"If his "blood boils" at the sufferings of the negro in Brazil, or of the Hindoo in the Mauritius, he must recollect that it is at the cost of those sufferings that he is supplied with cheap sugar. If he be shocked at the continuance of the African slave trade, he must recollect that if negroes ceased to be imported into Cuba, he might have to pay a higher price for his coffee. If he is excited at the idea of the domestic slave trade of this country, he must calm himself by reflecting that it is "for his advantage" it is continued, and that without it he could not have cheap cotton. The labourers of the various parts of the world are thus taught that there is among themselves an universal antagonism of interests, and this tends, of course, to the production of a bad state of moral feeling, and an universal tendency to decline in the feeling of self-dependence. Men, women, and children are becoming from day to day more dependent on the will of others, and as it is that dependence which const.i.tutes slavery, we might with reason expect to find some of the vices of the slave--and were we to find them we should not greatly err in attributing their existence to the system thus described by Adam Smith:--
"The industry of Great Britain, instead of being accommodated to a great number of small markets, has been princ.i.p.ally suited to one great market. Her commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, has been taught to run princ.i.p.ally in one great channel. But the whole system of her industry and commerce has thereby been rendered less secure, the whole state of her body politic less healthful than it otherwise would have been. In her present condition, Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders, scarce incident to those in which all the parts are more properly proportioned. A small stop in that great blood-vessel which has been artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions, and through which an unnatural proportion of the industry and commerce of the country has been forced to circulate, is very likely to bring on the most dangerous disorders upon the whole body politic."
This is an accurate picture of that country under a system that seeks to direct the whole energies of its people into one direction, that of "buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest one,"--the pursuit that is, of all others, the least favourable to the development of the moral and intellectual faculties of man. How it is operating may be judged by the following description from an English writer already quoted:--
"Of the children of the poor, who are yearly born in England, vast numbers never receive any education at all, while many others never enter any thing better than a dame or a Sunday-school. In the towns they are left in crowds until about eight or nine years of age, to amuse themselves in the dirt of the streets, while their parents pursue their daily toil. In these public thoroughfares, during the part of their lives which is most susceptible of impressions and most retentive of them, they acquire dirty, immoral, and disorderly habits; they become accustomed to wear filthy and ragged clothes; they learn to pilfer and to steal; they a.s.sociate with boys who have been in prison, and who have there been hardened in crime by evil a.s.sociates; they learn how to curse one another, how to fight, how to gamble, and how to fill up idle hours by vicious pastimes; they acquire no knowledge except the knowledge of vice; they never come in contact with their betters; and they are not taught either the truths of religion or the way by which to improve their condition in life.
Their amus.e.m.e.nts are as low as their habits. The excitements of low debauchery too horrible to be named, of spirituous liquors, which they begin to drink as early as they can collect pence wherewith to buy them, of the commission and concealments of thefts, and of rude and disgusting sports, are the pleasures of their life. The idea of going to musical meetings such as those of the German poor, would be scoffed at, even if there were any such meetings for them to attend.
Innocent dancing is unknown to them. Country sports they cannot have.
Read they cannot. So they hurry for amus.e.m.e.nt and excitement to the gratification of sensual desires and appet.i.tes. In this manner, filthy, lewd, sensual, boisterous, and skilful in the commission of crime, a great part of the populations of our towns grow up to manhood. Of the truth or falsehood of this description any one can convince himself, who will examine our criminal records, or who will visit the back streets of any English town, when the schools are full, and count the children upon the door-steps and pavements, and note their condition, manners, and appearance, and their degraded and disgusting practices."--Kay, vol. i. 33.[133]
This is, however, little different from what might be looked, for in a country whose provision for the education of its people is thus described:--
"About one-half of our poor can neither read nor write. The test of signing the name at marriage is a very imperfect absolute test of education, but it is a very good relative one: taking that test, how stands Leeds itself in the Registrar-General"s returns? In Leeds, which is the centre of the movement for letting education remain as it is, left entirely to chance and charity to supply its deficiencies, how do we find the fact? This, that in 1846, the last year to which these returns are brought down, of 1850 marriages celebrated in Leeds and Hunslet, 508 of the men and 1020 of the women, or considerably more than one-half of the latter, signed their names with marks. "I have also a personal knowledge of this fact--that of 47 men employed upon a railway in this immediate neighbourhood, only 14 men can sign their names in the receipt of their wages; and this not because of any diffidence on their part, but positively because they cannot write." And only lately, the _Leeds Mercury_ itself gave a most striking instance of ignorance among persons from Boeotian Pudsey: of 12 witnesses, "all of respectable appearance, examined before the Mayor of Bradford at the court-house there, only one man could sign his name, and that indifferently." Mr. Nelson has clearly shown in statistics of crime in England and Wales from 1834 to 1844, that crime is invariably the most prevalent in those districts where the fewest numbers in proportion to the population can read and write. Is it not indeed beginning at the wrong end to try and reform men, after they have become criminals? Yet you cannot begin, with children, from want of schools. Poverty is the result of ignorance, and then ignorance is again the unhappy result of poverty. "Ignorance makes men improvident and thoughtless--women as well as men; it makes them blind to the future--to the future of this life as well as the life beyond. It makes them dead to higher pleasures than those of the mere senses, and keeps them down to the level of the mere animal. Hence the enormous extent of drunkenness throughout this country, and the frightful waste of means which it involves." At Bilston, amidst 20,000 people, there are but two struggling schools--one has lately ceased; at Millenhall, Darlaston, and Pelsall, amid a teeming population, no school whatever. In Oldham, among 100,000, but one public day-school for the labouring cla.s.ses; the others are an infant school, and some dame and factory schools. At Birmingham, there are 21,824 children at school, and 23,176, at no school; at Liverpool, 50,000 out of 90,000 at no school; at Leicester, 8200 out of 12,500; and at Leeds itself, in 1841, (the date of the latest returns,) some 9600 out of 16,400, were at no school whatever. It is the same in the counties. "I have seen it stated, that a woman for some time had to officiate as clerk in a church in Norfolk, there being no adult male in the parish able to read and write. For a population of 17,000,000 we have but twelve normal schools; while in Ma.s.sachusetts they have three such schools for only 800,000 of population."
Such being the education of the young, we may now look to see how Mr.
Kay describes that provided for people of a more advanced period of life:--
"The crowd of low pot-houses in our manufacturing districts is a sad and singular spectacle. They are to be found in every street and alley of the towns, and in almost every lane and turning of the more rural villages of those districts, if any of those villages can be called rural.
"The habit of drunkenness pervades the ma.s.ses of the operatives to an extent never before known in our country.
"In a great number of these taverns and pot-houses of the manufacturing districts, prost.i.tutes are kept for the express purpose of enticing the operatives to frequent them, thus rendering them doubly immoral and pernicious. I have been a.s.sured in Lancashire, on the best authority, that in one of the manufacturing towns, and that, too, about third rate in point of size and population, there are _sixty_ taverns, where prost.i.tutes are kept by the tavern landlords, in order to entice customers into them. Their demoralizing influence upon the population _cannot be exaggerated_; and yet these are almost the only resorts which the operatives have, when seeking amus.e.m.e.nt or relaxation.
"In those taverns where prost.i.tutes are not actually kept for the purpose of enticing customers, they are always to be found in the evenings, at the time the workmen go there to drink. In London and in Lancashire the gin-palaces are the regular rendezvous for the abandoned of both s.e.xes, and the places where the lowest grade of women-of-the-town resort to find customers. It is quite clear that young men, who once begin to meet their, friends at these places, cannot long escape the moral degradation of these hot-houses of vice.
"The singular and remarkable difference between the respective condition of the peasants and operatives of Germany and Switzerland, and those of England and Ireland, in this respect, is alone sufficient to prove the singular difference between their respective social condition.
"The village inn in Germany is quite a different kind of place to the village inn in England. It is intended and used less for mere drinking, than, as a place for meeting and conversation; it is, so to speak, the villagers" club."--Vol. i. 232.
Under such circ.u.mstances, we cannot be surprised when told by Mr.
Alison that over the whole kingdom crime increases four times as fast as the population, and that "in Lancashire population doubles in thirty years, crime in five years and a half." How, indeed, could it be otherwise under a system based upon the idea of "keeping labour down"--one that tends to the consolidation of the land and the exclusion of men from the work of cultivation, and then excludes them from the factory, while forcing hundreds of thousands of indigent and almost starving Irish into England in search of employment? The process of "eviction" in Ireland has been already described. How the same work has been, and is being, performed in England is thus stated by the _Times_:--
"Our village peasantry are jostled about from cottage to cottage, or from cottage to no cottage at all, as freely and with as little regard to their personal tastes, and conveniences as if we were removing our pigs, cows, and horses from one sty or shed to another.
If they cannot get a house over their heads they go to the Union, and are distributed--the man in one part, the wife in another, and the children again somewhere else. That is a settled thing. Our peasantry bear it, or, if they can"t bear it, they die, and there is an end of it on this side of the grave; though how it will stand at the great audit, we leave an "English Catholic" to imagine. We only mean to say that in England the work has been done; cotters have been exterminated; small holdings abolished; the process of eviction rendered superfluous; the landlord"s word made law; the refuge of the discontented reduced to a workhouse, and all without a shot, or a bludgeon, or a missile being heard of."
Thus driven from the land, they are forced to take refuge in London and Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, and accordingly there it is that we find nearly the whole increase of population in the last ten years. Out of less than two millions, more than 400,000 were added to the number of London alone, and those who are familiar with Mr. Mayhew"s work, _London Labour and London Poor_, do not need to be told of the extraordinary wretchedness, nor of the immorality that there abound. Inquiries get on foot by Lord Ashley have shown that "in the midst of that city there are," says Mr. Kay--
"Persons, forming a separate cla.s.s, having pursuits, interests, manners; and customs of their own, and that the filthy, deserted, roaming, and lawless children, who may be called the source of 19-20ths of the crime which desolates the metropolis, are not fewer in number than THIRTY THOUSAND!