[127. See page 71, ante.]

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 accumulate 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, accumulated 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 competition threw the English labourer still more in the hands of the capitalist. From year to year the small proprietor was seen to pass into the condition of a day-labourer, and the small employing mechanic or tradesman to pass into a receiver of wages, and thus did the whole people tend more and more to become divided into two great classes, separated from each other by an impassable 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 competition. Now I assert, that under the buy cheap and sell dear principle, brought to bear on foreign competition, the ruin of the working and small trading classes 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 COMPETITION--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. Competition 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 mass 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 competition 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 accumulated 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 assures 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, assures 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]

[128. Kay's Social Condition of England and of Europe, vol. i. 70]

[129. Ibid. 359.]

Under such circumstances, the middle class tends gradually to pass away, and its condition is well expressed by the term now so frequently, used, "the uneasy class." 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 snatch 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 godliness.

"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 passion, 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 passions, 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 God has given to man, as in England.

"In no country in the world do the middle classes 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 pass into all society, the excuse for many frailties, and the mask for numerous deformities."

[130. Kay's Social Condition of England and of Europe, vol. 1, 183.]

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 class, under the combined influence of the struggle for life, and the assurance 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 God service."

[131. On a recent occasion in the House of Lords, it was declared to be important to retain Canada, on the express ground that it greatly facilitated smuggling.]

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 emancipated 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 competitor? 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 quantity of cotton, the Manchester operative eats less than his average quantity 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.

[132. Alton Locke.]

"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 constitutes 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 principally suited to one great market. Her commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, has been taught to run principally 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 associate with boys who have been in prison, and who have there been hardened in crime by evil associates; 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 amusements 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 amusement and excitement to the gratification of sensual desires and appetites. 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]

[133. Lord Ashley informs us that there are 30,000 poor children such as these in London alone.]

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 classes; 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 Massachusetts 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 masses 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, prostitutes are kept for the express purpose of enticing the operatives to frequent them, thus rendering them doubly immoral and pernicious. I have been assured 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 prostitutes 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 amusement or relaxation.

"In those taverns where prostitutes 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 sexes, 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 circumstances, 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 class, 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!

"These 30,000 are quite independent of the number of mere pauper children, who crowd the streets of Londen, and who never enter a school: but of these latter nothing will be said here.

"Now, what are the pursuits, the dwelling-houses, and the habits of these poor wretches? Of 1600, who were examined, 162 confessed that they had been in prison, not merely once, or even twice, but some of them several times; 116 had run away from their homes; 170 slept in the "lodging-houses;" 253 had lived altogether by beggary; 216 had neither shoes nor stockings; 280 had no hat or cap, or covering for the head; 101 had no linen; 249 had never slept in a bed; many had no recollection of ever having been in a bed; 68 were the children of convicts,"--Vol. i. 394.

In the towns of the manufacturing districts there are, says the same author--

"A great number of cellars beneath the houses of the small shopkeepers and operatives, which are inhabited by crowds of poor inhabitants. Each of these cellar-houses contains at the most two, and often, and in some towns generally, only one room. These rooms measure in Liverpool, from 10 to 12 feet square. In some other towns, they are rather larger. They are generally flagged. The flags lie "directly" upon the earth, and are generally wretchedly damp. In wet weather they are very often not dry for weeks together. Within a few feet of the windows of these cellars, rises the wall which keeps the street from falling in upon them, darkening the gloomy rooms, and preventing the sun's rays penetrating into them.

"Dr. Duncan, in describing the cellar-houses of the manufacturing districts, says[134]--'The cellars are ten or twelve feet square; generally flagged, but frequently having only the bare earth for a floor, and sometimes less than six feet in height. There is frequently no window, so that light and air can gain access to the cellar only by the door, the top of which is often not higher than the level of the street. In such cellars ventilation is out of the question. They, are of course dark; and from the defective drainage, they are also very generally damp. There is sometimes a back cellar, used as a sleeping apartment, having no direct communication with the external atmosphere, and deriving its scanty supply of light and air solely from the front apartment.'"--Vol. i. 447.

[134. Reports of the Health of Towns Commission, vol. i. 127.]

"One of the city missionaries, describing the state of the Mint district in the city of London, says, 'it is utterly impossible to describe the scenes, which are to be witnessed here, or to set forth in its naked deformity the awful characters sin here assumes. * * * In Mint street, alone, there are nineteen lodging-houses. The majority of these latter are awful sinks of iniquity, and are used as houses of accommodation. In some of them, both sexes sleep together indiscriminately, and such acts are practised and witnessed, that married persons, who are in other respects awfully depraved, have been so shocked, as to be compelled to get up in the night and leave the house. Many of the half-naked impostors, who perambulate the streets of London in the daytime, and obtain a livelihood by their deceptions, after having thrown off their bandages, crutches, &c., may be found here in their true character; some regaling themselves in the most extravagant manner; others gambling or playing cards, while the worst of language proceeds from their lips. Quarrels and fights are very common, and the cry of murder is frequently heard. The public-houses in this street are crowded to excess, especially, on the Sabbath evening.[135]

[135. City Mission Magazine, Oct. 1847.]

"In the police reports published in the Sun newspaper of the 11th of October, 1849, the following account is given of 'a penny lodging-house' in Blue Anchor Yard, Rosemary Lane. One of the policemen examined, thus describes a room in this lodging- house:--'It was a very small one, extremely filthy, and there was no furniture of any description in it. There were sixteen men, women, and children lying on the floor, without covering. Some of them were half naked. For this miserable shelter, each lodger paid a penny. The stench was intolerable, and the place had not been cleaned out for some time.'

"If the nightly inmates of these dens are added to the tramps who seek lodging in the vagrant-wards of the workhouses, we shall find that there are at least between 40,000 and 50,000 tramps who are daily infesting our roads and streets!"--Vol. i. 431.

In the agricultural districts, whole families, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law, sleep together, and here we find a source of extraordinary immorality. "The accounts we receive," says Mr. Kay--

"From all parts of the country show that these miserable cottages are crowded to an extreme, and that the crowding is progressively increasing. People of both sexes, and of all ages, both married and unmarried--parents, brothers, sisters, and strangers--sleep in the same rooms and often in the same beds. One gentleman tells us of six people of different sexes and ages, two of whom were man and wife, sleeping in the same bed, three with their heads at the top and three with their heads at the foot of the bed. Another tells us of adult uncles and nieces sleeping in the same room close to each other; another of the uncles and nieces sleeping in the same bed together; another of adult brothers, and sisters sleeping in the same room with a brother and his wife just married; many tell us of adult brothers and sisters sleeping in the same beds; another tells us of rooms so filled with beds that there is no space between them, but that brothers, sisters, and parents crawl over each other half naked in order to get to their respective resting-places; another of its being common for men and women, not being relations, to undress together in the same room, without any feeling of its being indelicate; another of cases where women have been delivered in bed-rooms crowded with men, young women, and children; and others mention facts of these crowded bed-rooms much too horrible to be alluded to. Nor are these solitary instances, but similar reports are given by gentlemen writing in ALL parts of the country.

"The miserable character of the houses of our peasantry, is, of itself, and independently of the causes which have made the houses so wretched, degrading and demoralising the poor of our rural districts in a fearful manner. It stimulates the unhealthy and unnatural increase of population. The young peasants from their earliest years are accustomed to sleep in the same bed-rooms with people of both sexes, and with both married and unmarried persons. They therefore lose all sense of the indelicacy of such a life. They know, too, that they can gain nothing by deferring their marriages and by saving; that it is impossible for them to obtain better houses by so doing; and that in many cases they must wait many years before they could obtain a separate house of any sort. They feel that if they defer their marriage for ten or fifteen years, they will be at the end of that period in just the same position as before, and no better off for their waiting. Having then lost all hope of any improvement of their social situation, and all sense of the indelicacy of taking a wife home to the bedroom already occupied by parents, brothers, and sisters, they marry early in life,--often, if not generally, before the age of twenty,--and very often occupy, for the first part of their married life, another bed in the already crowded sleeping-room of their parents! In this way the morality of the peasants is destroyed; the numbers of this degraded population are unnaturally increased, and their means of subsistence are diminished by the increasing competition of their increasing numbers."--Vol. i. 472.

A necessary consequence of this demoralization is that infanticide prevails to a degree unknown in any other part of the civilized world. The London Leader informs its readers that upon a recent occasion--

"It was declared by the coroner of Leeds, and assented to as probable by the surgeon, that there were, as near as could be calculated, about three hundred children put to death yearly in Leeds alone that were not registered by the law. In other words, three hundred infants were murdered to avoid the consequences of their living, and these murders, as the coroner said, are never detected."

The reader may now advantageously turn to the account of the state of education in Leeds, already given,[136] with a view to ascertain the intellectual condition of the women guilty of the foul and unnatural crime of child-murder. Doing so, he will find that out of eighteen hundred and fifty that were married there were one thousand and twenty who could not sign their names--and this in the centre of civilization in the middle of the nineteenth century!

[136. See page 224, ante.]

But a short time since, the Morning Chronicle gave its readers a list of twenty-two trials, for child-murder alone, that had been reported in its columns, and these were stated to be but one-half of those that had taken place in the short period of twenty-seven days! On the same occasion it stated that although English ruffianism had "not taken to the knife," it had

"Advanced in the devilish accomplishment of biting off noses and scooping out eyes. Kicking a man to death while he is down," it continued, "or treating, a wife in the same way--stamping on an enemy or a paramour with hobnailed boots--smashing a woman's head with a hand-iron--these atrocities, which are of almost daily occurrence in our cities, are not so much imputed crimes as they are the extravagant exaggerations of the coarse, brutal, sullen temper of an Englishman, brutified by ignorance and stupefied by drink."

On the same occasion the Chronicle stated that in villages few young people of the present day marry until, as the phrase is, it has "become necessary." It is, it continued, the rural practice to "keep company in a very loose sense, till a cradle is as necessary as a ring." On another, and quite recent occasion, the same journal furnished its readers with the following striking illustration of the state of morals:--

"In one of the recent Dorsetshire cases, [of child murder,] common cause was made by the girls of the county. They attended the trial in large numbers; and we are informed that on the acquittal of the prisoner a general expression of delight was perceptible in the court; and they left the assizes town boasting 'that they might now do as they liked.' We are then, it seems, with all our boasted civilization, relapsing into a barbarous and savage state of society."

Lest it might be supposed that this condition of things had been inherited, the editor stated that--

"This deplorable state of morals was of comparatively recent growth. Old people," he continued, "can often tell the year when the first of such cases occurred in their families; and what a sensation of shame it then excited; while they will also tell us that the difficulty now is to find a lowly couple in village life with whom the rule of decency and Christianity is not the exception. It is a disgraceful fact--and one which education, and especially religious education, has to account for--that a state of morals has grown up in which it can no longer be said that our maidens are given in marriage."

Infanticide is not, however, confined to the unmarried. Burial clubs abound. "In our large provincial towns," says Mr. Kay--

"The poor are in the habit of entering their children in what are called 'burial clubs.' A small sum is paid every year by the parent, and this entitles him to receive from 3£. to 5£. from the club, on the death of the child. Many parents enter their children in several clubs. One man in Manchester has been known to enter his child in nineteen different clubs. On the death of such a child, the parent becomes entitled to receive a large sum of money; and as the burial of the child does not necessarily cost more than 1£., or, at the most, 1£.10s., the parent realizes a considerable sum after all the expenses are paid!

"It has been clearly ascertained, that it is a common practice among the more degraded classes of poor in many of our towns, to enter their infants in these clubs, and then to cause their death either by starvation, ill-usage, or poison! What more horrible symptom of moral degradation can be conceived? One's mind revolts against it, and would fain reject it as a monstrous fiction. But, alas! it seems to be but too true.

"Mr. Chadwick says, 'officers of these burial societies, relieving officers, and others, whose administrative duties put them in communication with the lowest classes in these districts,' (the manufacturing districts,) 'express their moral conviction of the operation of such bounties to produce instances of the visible neglect of children of which they are witnesses. They often say, 'You are not treating that child properly; it will not live: is it in the club?' And the answer corresponds with the impression produced by the sight."--Vol. i. 433.

Commenting on these and numerous other facts of similar kind, the same author says--

"These accounts are really almost too horrible to be believed at all; and were they not given us on the authority of such great experience and benevolence, we should totally discredit them.

"But, alas, they are only too true! There can be no doubt, that a great part of the poorer classes of this country are sunk into such a frightful depth of hoplessness, misery, and utter moral degradation, that even mothers forget their affection for their helpless little offspring, and kill them, as a butcher does his lambs, in order to make money by the murder, and therewith to lessen their pauperism and misery?"--P. 446.

How rapid is the progress of demoralization may be seen from the fact that in the thirty years from 1821 to 1851, the consumption of British spirits increased from 4,125,616 to 9,595,368 gallons, or in a ratio more than double that of the population. The use of opium is also increasing with rapidity.[137] Intemperance and improvidence go hand in hand with each other, and hence arises a necessity for burial clubs for the disposal of the children and the maintenance of the parents.

[137. The import of 1850 was 103,713 lbs., and that of 1852, 251,792 lbs.]

A recent English journal states that--

"It is estimated that in Manchester there are 1500 'unfortunate females;' that they lead to an annual expenditure of £470,000; and that some 250 of them die, in horror and despair, yearly. In England it is calculated that there are 40,000 houses of ill-fame, and 280,000 prostitutes; and, further, that not less than £8,000,000 are spent annually in these places."

This may, or may not, be exaggerated, but the condition to which are reduced so many of the weaker sex would warrant us in expecting a great decay of morality. When severe labour cannot command a sufficiency of food, can we be surprised that women find themselves forced to resort to prostitution as a means of support?

A committee of gentlemen who had investigated the condition of the sewing-women of London made a report stating that no less than 33,000 of them were "permanently at the starvation point," and were compelled to resort to prostitution as a means of eking out a subsistence. But a few weeks since, the Times informed its readers that shirts were made for a penny a piece by women who found the needles and thread, and the Daily News furnished evidence that hundreds of young women had no choice but between prostitution and making artificial flowers at twopence a day! Young ladies seeking to be governesses, and capable of giving varied instruction, are expected to be satisfied with the wages and treatment of scullions, and find it difficult to obtain situations even on such terms. It is in such facts as these that we must find the causes of those given in the above paragraph.

If we desire to find the character of the young we must look to that of the aged, and especially to that of the mothers. We see here something of the hundreds of thousands of young women who are to supply the future population of England; and if the character of the latter be in accordance with that of the former, with what hope can we look to the future?

Nothing indicates more fully the deterioration resulting from this unceasing struggle for life, than the harsh treatment to which are subjected persons who need aid in their distress. A case of this kind, furnished by the Times, as occurring at the Lambeth workhouse, so strongly indicates the decay of kind and generous feeling, that, long as it is, it is here given:--

"A poor creature, a young English girl--to be sure, she is not a black--a parcel of drenched rags clinging to her trembling form, every mark of agony and despair in her countenance, lifts her hand to the bell. She rings once and again, and at length the door porter appears, accompanied by a person holding a situation under the guardians--his name is Brooke--and he is a policeman. She is starving, she is pregnant, and almost in the pains of labour, but the stern officials will not take her in. Why? Because she had been in the workhouse until Tuesday morning last, and had then been discharged by 'order of the guardians.' Nor is this all. The tale of parochial bounty is not yet half told out. During that long wet Tuesday she wandered about. She had not a friend in this great town to whom she could apply for the smallest assistance, and on Tuesday night she came back to implore once more the kindly shelter of the parish workhouse. For yet that night she was taken in, but the next morning cast forth into the world again with a piece of dry bread in her hand. On Wednesday the same scene was renewed--the same fruitless casting about for food and shelter, the same disappointment, and the same despair. But parochial bounty can only go thus far, and no farther. Charity herself was worn out with the importunity of this persevering pauper, and on Thursday night the doors of the parish workhouse were finally and sternly shut in her face.

"But she was not alone in her sufferings. You might have supposed that the misery of London--enormous as the amount of London misery undoubtedly is--could have shown no counterpart to the frightful position of this unfortunate creature--without a home, without a friend, without a character, without a shelter, without a bite of food--betrayed by her seducer, and the mark for the last twelve hours of the floodgates of heaven. * * * Can it be there are two of them? Yes! Another young woman, precisely in the same situation, knocks at the same workhouse door, and is refused admittance by the same stern guardians of the ratepayers' pockets. The two unfortunates club their anguish and their despair together, and set forth in quest of some archway or place of shelter, beneath which they may crouch until the gas-lamps are put out, and the day breaks once more upon their sufferings. Well, on they roamed, until one of the two, Sarah Sherford, was actually seized with the pangs of labour, when they resolved to stagger back to the workhouse; but again the door was shut in their faces. What was to be done? They were driven away from the house, and moved slowly along, with many a pause of agony, no doubt, until they met with a policeman, one Daniel Donovan, who directed them to a coffee-house where they might hope to get shelter. The coffee-house did not open till 2 o'clock, when they had two hours' shelter. But at that hour they were again cast out, as the keeper was obliged to come into the street with his stall and attend to it. 'At this time (we will here copy the language of our report) Sherford's labour pains had considerably increased, and they again spoke to the same policeman, Donovan, and told him that, unless she was taken into the workhouse or some other place, she must give birth to her infant in the street.' Daniel Donovan accordingly conveyed the two unfortunate creatures to the workhouse once more, at 4 o'clock in the morning. 'The policeman on duty there,' said this witness, 'told him that they had been there before, and seemed to have some hesitation about admitting them, but on being told that one was in the pains of labour, he let them in.'"

What slavery can be worse than this? Here are young women, women in distress, starving and almost in the pains of labour, driven about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post, by day and by night, totally unable to obtain the smallest aid. Assuredly it would be difficult to find any thing to equal this in any other country claiming to rank among the civilized nations of the world.

At the moment of writing this page, an English journal furnishes a case of death from starvation, and closes its account with the following paragraph, strikingly illustrative of the state of things which naturally arises where every man is "trying to live by snatching the bread from his neighbour's mouth."

"It is hardly possible to conceive a more horrible case. A stalwart, strong-framed man, in the prime of life--his long pilgrimage of martyrdom from London to Stoney-Stratford--his wretched appeals for help to the "civilization" around him--his seven days fast--his brutal abandonment by his fellow-men--his seeking shelter and being driven from resting-place to resting-place--the crowning inhumanity of the person named Slade and the patient, miserable death of the worn-out man--are a picture perfectly astonishing to contemplate.

"No doubt he invaded the rights of property, when he sought shelter in the shed and in the lone barn!!!"

The recent developments in regard to Bethlem Hospital are thus described:--

"Some of the cases of cruelty brought to light by the examiners are almost too revolting to describe. It appears that the incurables are lodged in cells partially under ground, where their only conches are troughs filled with straw and covered with a blanket. On these miserable beds, worse than many a man gives to his horse or dog, the victims lie in the coldest weather, without night-clothes, frequently creeping into the straw in order to keep warm. These poor unfortunates also are often fed in a way as disgusting as it is cruel, being laid on their backs, and held down by one of the nurses, while another forces into the mouth the bread and milk which is their allotted food. This revolting practice is adopted to save time, for it was proved on oath that patients, thus treated, ate their meals by themselves, if allowed sufficient leisure. The imbecile patients, instead of being bathed with decency, as humanity and health demands, are thrown on the stone-floor, in a state of nudity, and there mopped by the nurses. Such things would seem incredible, if they had not been proved on oath. Some who were not incurable, having been treated in this manner, exposed these atrocities, after their recovery; and the result was an investigation, which led to the discovery of the abominable manner in which this vast charity has been administered."

These things are a necessary consequence of an universal trading spirit. For the first time in the annals of the world it has been proclaimed in England that the paramount object of desire with the people of a great and Christian nation is to buy cheaply and sell dearly; and when men find themselves, in self-defence, compelled to beat down the poor sewing-woman to a penny for making a shirt, or the poor flower-girl to a scale of wages so low that she must resort to prostitution for the purpose of supporting life, they can neither be expected to be charitable themselves, nor to tolerate much charity in the public officers charged with the expenditure of their contributions. There is consequently everywhere to be seen a degree of harshness in the treatment of those who have the misfortune to be poor, and a degree of contempt in the mode of speech adopted in relation to them, totally incompatible with the idea of advance in real civilization.

The facts thus far given rest, as the reader will have seen, on the highest English authority. It is scarcely possible to study them without arriving at the conclusion that the labouring people of England are gradually losing all control over the disposition of their own labour--or in other words, that they are becoming enslaved--and that with the decay of freedom there has been a decay of morality, such as has been observed in every other country similarly circumstanced. To ascertain the cause of this we must refer again to Adam Smith, who tells us that--

"No equal quantity of productive labour or capital employed in manufacture can ever occasion so great a reproduction as if it were employed in agriculture. In these, nature does nothing, man does all, and the reproduction must always be proportioned to the strength of the agents that occasion it. The capital employed in agriculture, therefore, not only puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than any equal capital employed in manufacture; but, in proportion, too, to the quantity of productive labour which it employs, it adds a much greater value to the annual value of the land and labour of the country, to the real wealth and revenue of its inhabitants. Of all the ways which a capital can be employed, it is by far the most advantageous to society."

This is the starting point of his whole system, and is directly the opposite of that from which starts the modern English politico-economical school that professes to follow in his footsteps, as will now be shown. The passage here given, which really constitutes the base upon which rests the whole structure of Dr. Smith's work, is regarded by Mr. McCulloch as "the most objectionable" one in it, and he expresses great surprise that "so acute and sagacious a reasoner should have maintained a doctrine so manifestly erroneous." "So far indeed," says that gentleman--

"Is it from being true that nature does much for man in agriculture, and nothing for manufactures, that the fact is more nearly the reverse. There are no limits to the bounty of nature in manufactures; but there are limits, and those not very remote, to her bounty in agriculture. The greatest possible amount of capital might be expended in the construction of steam-engines, or of any other sort of machinery, and, after they had been multiplied indefinitely, the last would be as prompt and efficient in producing commodities and saving labour as the first. Such, however, is not the case with the soil. Lands of the first quality are speedily exhausted; and it is impossible to apply capital indefinitely even to the best soils, without obtaining from it a constantly diminishing rate of profit."--Principles of Political Economy.

The error here results from the general error of Mr. Ricardo's system, which places the poor cultivator among the rich soils of the swamps and river-bottoms, and sends his rich successors to the poor soils of the hills,--being directly the reverse of what has happened in every country of the world, in every county in England, and on every farm in each and all of those counties.[138] Had he not been misled by the idea of "the constantly increasing sterility of the soil," Mr. McCulloch could not have failed to see that the only advantage resulting from the use of the steam-engine, or the loom, or any other machine in use for the conversion of the products of the earth, was, that it diminished the quantity of labour required to be so applied, and increased the quantity that might be given to the work of production.

[138. The reader who may desire to see this more fully exhibited is referred to the author's work, "The Past, the Present, and the Future."]

It is quite true that wheelbarrows and carts, wagons and ships, may be increased indefinitely; but of what use can they possibly be, unless the things to be carried be first produced, and whence can those things be obtained except from the earth? The grist-mill is useful, provided there is grain to be ground, but not otherwise. The cotton-mill would be useless unless the cotton was first produced. Agriculture must precede manufactures, and last of all, says Dr. Smith, comes foreign commerce.[139]

[139. See page 59, ante.]

The reader has had before him a passage from Mr. J.S. Mill, in which that gentleman says that "if the law [of the occupation of the land] were different, almost all the phenomena of the production and distribution of wealth would be different from what they now are." In the days of Adam Smith it had not yet been suggested that men began by the cultivation of rich soils, and then passed to poor ones, with constantly diminishing power to obtain food. Population, therefore, had not come to be regarded as "a nuisance" to be abated by any measures, however revolting, and imposing upon Christian men the necessity of hardening their hearts, and permitting their fellow-men to suffer every extremity of poverty and distress "short of absolute death," with a view to bring about a necessity for refraining to gratify that natural inclination which leads men and women to associate in the manner tending to promote the growth of numbers and the development of the best feelings of the human heart. It was then considered right that men and women should marry, and increase of population was regarded as evidence of increased wealth and strength. Dr. Smith, therefore, looked at the affairs of the world as they were, and be saw that the production of commodities not only preceded their conversion and exchange, but that in the work of production the earth aided man by increasing the quantity of things to, be consumed; whereas labour applied in other ways could change them only in their form or in their place, making no addition to their quantity. He, therefore, saw clearly that the nearer the spinner and the weaver came to the producer of food and wool, the more would be the quantity of food and cloth to be divided between them; and thus was he led to see how great an act of injustice it was on the part of his countrymen to endeavour to compel the people of the world to send their raw materials to them to be converted, at such vast loss of transportation. He had no faith in the productive power of ships or wagons. He knew that the barrel of flour or the bale of cotton, put into the ship, came out a barrel of flour or a bale of cotton, the weight of neither having been increased by the labour employed in transporting it from this place of production to that of consumption. He saw clearly that to place the consumer by the side of the producer was to economize labour and aid production, and therefore to increase the power to trade. He was, therefore, in favour of the local application of labour and capital, by aid of which towns should grow up in the midst of producers of food; and he believed that if "human institutions" had not been at war with the best interests of man, those towns would "nowhere have increased beyond what, the improvement and cultivation of the territory in which they were situated could support." Widely different is all this from the system which builds up London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, to be the manufacturing centres of the world, and urges upon all nations the adoption of a system looking directly to their maintenance and increase!

Directly opposed in this respect to Dr. Smith, Mr. McCulloch has unbounded faith in the productive power of ships and wagons. To him--

"It is plain that the capital and labour employed in carrying commodities from where they are to be produced to where they are to be consumed, and in dividing them into minute portions so as to fit the wants of consumers, are really as productive as if they were employed in agriculture or in manufactures."--Principles, 166.

The man who carries the food adds, as he seems to think, as much to the quantity to be consumed as did the one who ploughed the ground and sowed the seed; and he who stands at the counter measuring cloth adds as much to the quantity of cloth as did he who produced it. No benefit, in his view, results from any saving of the labour of transportation or exchange. He has, therefore, no faith in the advantage to be derived from the local application of labour or capital. He believes that it matters nothing to the farmer of Ireland whether his food be consumed on the farm or at a distance from it--whether his grass be fed on the land or carried to market--whether the manure be returned to the land or wasted on the road--whether, of course, the land be impoverished or enriched. He is even disposed to believe that it is frequently more to the advantage of the people of that country that the food there produced should be divided among the labourers of France or Italy than among themselves.[140]

[140. "It may be doubted, considering the circumstances under which most Irish landlords acquired their estates, the difference between their religious tenets and those of their tenants, the peculiar tenures under which the latter hold their lands, and the political condition of the country, whether their residence would have been of any considerable advantage. * * * The question really at issue refers merely to the spending of revenue, and has nothing to do with the improvement of estates; and notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, I am not yet convinced that absenteeism is, in this respect, at all injurious."--Principles, 157.]

He believes in the advantage of large manufacturing towns at a distance from those who produce the food and raw materials of manufacture; and that perfect freedom of trade consists in the quiet submission of the farmers and planters of the world to the working of a system which Dr. Smith, regarded as tending so greatly to "the discouragement of agriculture," that it was the main object of his work to teach the people of Britain that it was not more unjust to others than injurious to themselves.

In a work just issued from the press, Mr. McCulloch tells his readers that--

"For the reasons now stated, a village built in the immediate vicinity of a gentleman's seat generally declines on his becoming an absentee. That, however, is in most cases any thing but an injury. The inhabitants of such villages are generally poor, needy dependants, destitute of any invention, and without any wish to distinguish themselves. But when the proprietors are elsewhere, they are forced to trust to their own resources, and either establish some sort of manufacture, or resort to those manufacturing and commercial cities where there is always a ready demand for labourers, and where every latent spark of genius is sure to be elicited. Although, therefore, it be certainly true that absenteeism has a tendency to reduce the villages which are found in the neighbourhood of the residences of extensive proprietors, it is not on that account prejudicial to the country at large, but the reverse."[141]

[141. Treatises and Essays on Subjects connected with Economical Policy.]

It is here seen that the people who own large estates are supposed to be surrounded by "poor and needy dependants," who are to be stimulated to exertion by the pressure of want, and that this pressure is to be produced by the absenteeism of the proprietor. We have here the master administering the lash to his poor slave, and the only difference between the English master and the Jamaica one appears to be, that absenteeism in the one case forces the poor labourer to seek the lanes and alleys of a great city, and in the other causes him to be worked to death. The slavery of Ireland, Jamaica, and India is a natural consequence of the absenteeism of the great land-owners; and the larger the properties, the greater must be the tendency to absenteeism, centralization, and slavery; and yet Mr. McCulloch assures his readers that

"The advantage of preserving large estates from being frittered down by a scheme of equal division is not limited to its effects on the younger children of their owners. It raises universally the standard of competence, and gives new force to the springs which set industry in motion. The manner of living in great landlords is that in which every one is ambitious of being able to indulge; and their habits of expense, though somewhat injurious to themselves, act as powerful incentives to the ingenuity and enterprise of other classes, who never think their fortunes sufficiently ample unless they will enable them to emulate the splendour of the richest landlords; so that the custom of primogeniture seems to render all classes more industrious, and to augment at the same time the mass of wealth and the scale of enjoyment."-- Principles.

The modern system tends necessarily to the consolidation of land, and the more completely that object can be attained, the greater must, be "the splendour of the richest landlords," the greater the habits of expense among the few, the greater their power to absent themselves, the greater the power of the rapacious middleman or agent, the greater the poverty and squalor of "the poor and needy dependants," and the greater the necessity for seeking shelter in the cellars of Manchester, the wynds of Glasgow, or the brothels of London and Liverpool; but the larger must be the supply of the commodity called "cheap labour." In other words, slaves will be more numerous, and masters will he more able to decide on what shall be the employment of the labourer, and what shall be its reward.

Adam Smith knew nothing of all this. He saw that capital was always best managed by its owner, and therefore had no faith in a universal system of agencies. He saw that the little proprietor was by far the greatest improver, and he had no belief in the advantage of great farmers surrounded by day-labourers. He believed in the advantage of making twelve exchanges in a year in place of one, and he saw clearly that the nearer the consumer could come to the producer the larger and more profitable would be commerce. He therefore taught that the workman should go to the place where, food being abundant, moderate labour would command much food. His successors teach that the food should come to the place where, men being abundant and food scarce, much labour will command little food, and that when population has thus been rendered superabundant, the surplus should go abroad to raise more food for the supply of those they left behind. The one teaches the concentration of man, and the local division of labour. The other, the dispersion of man, and the territorial division of labour. They differ thus in every thing, except that they both use the word free trade--but with reference to totally distinct ideas. With the one, COMMERCE has that enlarged signification which embraces every description of intercourse resulting from the exercise of "man's natural inclination" for association, while with the other TRADE has reference to no idea, beyond that of the mere pedler who buys in the cheapest market and sells in the dearest one. The system of the one is perfectly harmonious, and tends toward peace among men. The other is a mass of discords, tending toward war among the men and the nations of the earth.

As ordinarily used, the word Commerce has scarcely any signification except that of trade with distant men, and yet that is the least profitable commerce that can be maintained,--as the reader may satisfy himself if he will reflect that when the miller and the farmer are near neighbours they divide between them all the flour that is made, whereas, when they are widely separated, a third man, the carrier, intervenes between them and takes a large portion of it, leaving less to be divided between those who raise the wheat and those who convert it into flour. The more perfect the power of association the greater must be the power to maintain commerce, for every act of association is an act of commerce, as it is proposed now to show, beginning at the beginning, in the family, which long precedes the nation. Doing so, we find the husband exchanging his services in the raising of food and the materials of clothing, for those of his wife, employed in the preparation of food for the table, and the conversion of raw materials into clothing,--and here it is we find the greatest of all trades. Of all the labour employed on the farms and in the farm-houses of the Union, we should, could we have an accurate statement, find that the proportion of its products exchanged beyond their own limits, scarcely exceeded one-third, and was certainly far less than one-half, the remainder being given to the raising of food and raw materials for their own consumption, and the conversion of that food and those materials into the forms fitting them for their own uses.

At the next step we find ourselves in the little community, of which the owner of this farm constitutes a portion; and here we find the farmer exchanging his wheat with one neighbour for a day's labour--the use of his wagon and his horse for other days of labour--his potatoes with a third for the shoeing of his horse, and with a fourth for the shoeing of himself and his children, or the making of his coat. On one day he or his family have labour to spare, and they pass it off to a neighbour to be repaid by him in labour on another day. One requires aid in the spring, the other in the autumn; one gives a day's labour in hauling lumber, in exchange for that of another, employed in mining coal or iron ore. Another trades the labour that has been employed in the purchase of a plough for that of his neighbour which had been applied to the purchase of a cradle. Exchanges being thus made on the spot, from hour to hour and from day to day, with little or no intervention of persons whose business is trade, their amount is large, and, combined with those of the family, equals probably four-fifths of the total product of the labour of the community, leaving not more than one-fifth to be traded off with distant men; and this proportion is often greatly diminished as with increasing population and wealth a market is made on the land for the products of the land.

This little community forms part of a larger one, styled a nation, the members of which are distant hundreds or thousands of miles from each other, and here we find difficulties tending greatly to limit the power to trade. The man in latitude 40° may have labour to sell for which he can find no purchaser, while he who lives in latitude 50° is at the moment grieving to see his crop perish on the ground for want of aid in harvest. The first may have potatoes rotting, and his wagon and horses idle, while the second may need potatoes, and have his lumber on his hands for want of means of transportation--yet distance forbids exchange between them.

Again, this nation forms part of a world, the inhabitants of which are distant tens of thousands of miles from each other, and totally unable to effect exchanges of labour, or even of commodities, except of certain kinds that will bear transportation to distant markets. Commerce tends, therefore, to diminish in its amount with every circumstance tending to increase the necessity for going to a distance, and to increase in amount with every one tending to diminish the distance within which it must be maintained. As it now stands with the great farming interest of the Union, the proportions are probably as follows:--

    Exchanges in the family................... 55 per cent.
        "     in the neighbourhood............ 25     "
        "     in the nation................... 15     "
        "     with other nations..............  5     "
                                              ---
    Total.................................... 100

                         Exchanges abroad.
                        Exchanges at home.
                   Conversion into cloth and iron.
              Production of food and other raw materials.

                    Exchanges with distant men.
                        Exchanges at home.
                            Conversion.
                            Production.

                             \British ships/
    Producers of raw materials\           / Consumers of cloth and iron
       Europe, Asia, Africa    >         <  in Europe, Asia, Africa
           America            /           \ North and South America
                             /   And rails \

                       \  Wagons and   /
    Producers of food   \             / Consumers of food
      in those states    >           <  in those states
                        /             \ 
                       /Rochester mills\