Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share. Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them, expanding in bulk as he has been nourished by their increasingly productive labours, and separating them so widely from each other that neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives through the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence. He is the middleman of all labourers; and when we compare what the skilled labour of England produces, with the produce of the untutored labour of the Irish peasantry, the middlemen of England cannot be considered as inferior in their exactions to the middlemen of Ireland. They have been more fortunate, however, and while the latter are stigmatised as oppressors, the former are honoured as benefactors. Not only do they appropriate the produce of the labourer; but they have succeeded in persuading him that they are his benefactors and employers. At least such are the doctrines of political economy; and capitalist may well be pleased with a science which both justifies their claims and holds them up to our admiration, as the great means of civilising and improving the world.
To show the labourer the effects which bestowing this abundant reward on the supposed productive powers of food, clothing and instruments have on his poverty or wealth, I must observe that all political economists agree in saying that all savings in society are usually made by capitalists. The labourer cannot save; the landlord is not disposed to save; whatever is saved is saved from profits and becomes the property of the capitalists. Now let us suppose that a capitalist possesses, when profit is at ten per cent per annum, 100 quarters of wheat and 100 steam engines; he must at the end of a year be paid for allowing the labourer to eat this wheat and use these steam engines with 110 quarters of wheat and 110 steam engines, all in the same excellent condition as the 100 steam engines were at the beginning. It being an admitted principle that, after a portion of fixed capital is prepared, it must be paid for at a rate sufficient to pay the ordinary rate of interest, and provide for the repairs or the remaking of the instrument. Let us suppose that 5 quarters of wheat and 5 steam engines, or the value of this quantity, suffices for the owner's consumption, and that the other 5 of his profit being added to this capital he has the next year 105 quarters of wheat and 105 steam engines, which he allows labourers to eat or use; for these the labourer must produce for him, the following year, supposing the rate of profit to continue the same, a sufficient sum to replace the whole of this capital, with the interest, or 115 quarters 4 bushels of wheat and 155 ½ steam engines. Supposing that the value of the 5 quarters and of 5 steam engines suffices for the consumption of the capitalist, he will have the next year 110 quarters 4 bushels, and 110 ½ steam engines, for the use of which he must be paid at the same rate; or the labourer must produce and give him, the third year, 121 quarters and 1/20th of a quarter, and 121 steam engines and 1/20th of a steam engine. It is of no use calculating all these fractions, or carrying the series further; it is enough to observe that every atom of the capitalist's revenue, which he puts out to use, or, as it is called, saves, which means given orlent to labourers, goes on increasing at compound interest. Dr. Price has calculated that the sum of one penny put out to compound interest at our Saviour's birth, at 5 per cent, would in the year 1791 amount to a sum greater than could be contained in three hundred millions of globes like this earth, all solid gold.
Perhaps I can make the evil effects of capital more apparent by another sort of example. The real price of a coat or a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread, all which nature demands from man in order that he may have either of these very useful articles, is a certain quantity of labour; how much it is almost impossible to say, from the manufacture of a coat, a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread being completed by many persons. But for the labourer to have either of these articles he must give over and above the quantity of labour nature demands from him, a still large quantity to the capitalist. Before he can have a coat, he must pay interest for the farmer's sheep, interest on the wool after it has got into the hands of the wool merchant, interest for this same wool as raw material, after it is in the hands of the manufacturer, interest on all buildings and tools he uses, and interest on all the wages he pays his men. Moreover, he must pay interest or profit on the tailor's stock, both fixed and circulating, and this rate of interest is increased in all these instances by something more being always necessary to pay the rent of all these different capitalists. In the same manner before a labourer can have a loaf of bread he must give a quantity of labour more than the loaf costs, by all that quantity which pays the profit of the farmer, the corn dealer, the miller and the baker, with profit on all the buildings they use; and he must, moreover, pay with the produce of his labour the rent of the landlord. How much more labour a labourer must give to have a loaf of bread than that loaf costs, it is impossible for me to say. I should probably underrate it were I to state it at six times; or were I to say that the real cost of that loaf, for which the labourer must give sixpence, is one penny. Of this, however, I am quite certain, that the Corn Laws, execrable as they are in principle, and mischievous as they are to the whole community, do not impose anything like so heavy a tax on the labourer as capital. Indeed, however injurious they may be to the capitalist, it may be doubted whether they are so to the labourer. They diminish the rate of profit, but they do not in the end lower the wages of labour. Whether there are Corn Laws or not, the capitalist must allow the labourer to subsist, and as long as his claims are granted and acted on he will never allow him to do more. In other words, the labourer will always have to give much about the same quantity of labour to the capitalist for a loaf, whether that loaf be the produce of one hour's or one day's labour. Knowing the vast influence capitalists have in society, one is not surprised at the anathemas which have of late been hurled against the Corn Laws, nor at the silence which has been preserved with respect to their more mighty and, to the labourer, more mischievous exactions.
What the capitalist really puts out to interest, however, is not gold or money, but food, clothing and instruments; and his demand is always to have more food, clothing and instruments produced than he puts out. No productive power can answer this demand, and both the capitalists and political economists find fault with the wisdom of Nature, because she refuses to minister to the avarice of the former, and does not exactly square in her proceedings with the wishes of the latter.
Of course the ultimate term to which compound interest tends can never be reached. Its progress is gradually but perpetually checked, and it is obliged to stop far short of the desired goal. Accordingly, in most books on Political Economy, one or the other of two causes is assigned for the constant falling off of profit in the progress of society. The political economists either say, with Adam Smith, that the accumulation of capital lowers profits, or, with Mr. Ricardo, that profits are lowered by the increasing difficulty of procuring subsistence. Neither of them has assigned it to the right cause, the impossibility of the labourer answering the demands of the capitalist. A mere glance must satisfy every mind that simple profit does not decrease but increase in the progress of society — that is, the same quantity of labour which at any former period produced 100 quarters of wheat and 100 steam engines will now produce somewhat more, or the value of somewhat more, which the same thing: or where is the utility of all our boasted improvements? In fact, also, we find that a much greater number of persons now live in opulence on profit in this country than formerly.
It is clear, however, that no labour, no productive power, no ingenuity and no art can answer the overwhelming demands of compound interest. But all saving is made from the revenue of the capitalist, so that actually these demands are constantly made, and as constantly the productive power of labour refuse to satisfy them. A sort of balance is, therefore, constantly struck. The capitalists permit the labourers to have the means of subsistence because they cannot do without labour, contenting themselves very generously with taking every particle of produce not necessary to this purpose. It is the overwhelming nature of the demands of capital sanctioned by the laws of society, sanctioned by the customs of men, enforced by the legislature, and warmly defended by political economists, which keep, which every have kept, and which ever will keep, as long as they are allowed and acquiesced in, the labourer in poverty and misery.
It is the overwhelming and all-engrossing nature of compound interest, also, which gives to Mr. Ricardo's theory and his definitions, as I have already described them, though this principle is nowhere brought sufficiently into view in his book, their mathematical accuracy and truth. I refer to them, not as caring much to illustrate the subtleties of that ingenious and profound writer, but because his theory confirms the observations I have just made — viz. that the exactions of the capitalist cause the poverty of the labourer. It is an admitted principle that there cannot be two rates of profit in a country, and therefore the capital of the man who cultivates the best soil of a country procures of its owner no more than the capital of the man who cultivates the worst soil. The superior produce of the best soil is not, therefore, profit, and Mr. Ricardo has called it rent. It is a portion of produce over and above the average rate of profit, and Mr. Ricardo has assigned it to the landlords. The labourer must, however, live, though the exorbitant claims of capital allow him only a bare subsistence. Mr. Ricardo has also been aware of this, and has therefore justly defined the price of labour to be such a quantity of commodities as will enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist, and to perpetuate their race without either increase or diminution. Such is all which the nature of profit or interest on capital will allow them to receive, and such has ever been their reward. The capitalist must give the labourers this sum, for it is the condition he must fulfil in order to obtain labourers; it is the limit which nature places to his claims, but he will never give, and never has given, more. The capitalists, according to Mr. Ricardo's theory, allow the landlords to have just as much as keeps all the capitalist on a level; the labourers they allow, in the same theory, barely to subsist. Thus Mr. Ricardo would admit that the cause of the poverty of the labourer is the engrossing nature of compound interest; this keeps him poor, and prevents him from obeying the commands of his Creator, to increase and multiply.
Though the defective nature of the claims of capital may now be satisfactorily proved, the question as to the wages of labour is by no means decided. Political economists, indeed, who have insisted very strongly on the necessity of giving security to property, and have ably demonstrated how much that security promotes general happiness, will not hesitate to agree with me when I say that whatever labour produces ought to belong to it. They have always embraced the maxim of permitting those to "reap who sow," and they have maintained that the labour of a man's body and the work of his hands are to be considered as exclusively his own. I take it for granted, therefore, that they will henceforth maintain that the whole produce of labour ought to belong to the labourer. But though this, as a general proposition, is quite evident, and quite true, there is a difficulty, in its practical application, which no individual can surmount. There is no principle or rule, as far as I know, for dividing the produce of joint labour among the different individuals who concur in production, but the judgment of the individuals themselves; that judgment depending on the value men may set on different species of labour can never be known, nor can any rule be given for its application by any single person. As well might a man say what others shall hate or what they shall like.
Whatever division of labour exists, and the further it is carried the more evident does this truth become, scarcely any individual completes of himself any species of produce. Almost any product of art and skill is the result of joint and combined labour. So dependent is man on man, and so much does this dependence increase as society advances, that hardly any labour of any single individual, however much it may contribute to the whole produce of society, is of the least value but as forming a part of the great social task. In the manufacture of a piece of cloth, the spinner, the weaver, the bleacher and the dyer are all different persons. All of them except the first is dependent for his supply of materials on him, and of what use would his thread be unless the others took it from him, and each performed that part of the task which is necessary to complete the cloth? Wherever the spinner purchases the cotton or wool, the price which he can obtain for his thread, over and above what he paid for the raw material, is the reward of his labour. But it is quite plain that the sum the weaver will be disposed to give for the thread will depend on his view of its utility. Wherever the division of labour is introduced, therefore, the judgment of other men intervenes before the labourer can realise his earnings, and there is no longer any thing which we can call the natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part having no value or utility of itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: "This is my product, this will I keep to myself." Between the commencement of any joint operation, such as that of making cloth, and the division of its product among the different persons whose combined exertions have produced it, the judgment of men must intervene several times, and the question is, how much of this joint product should go to each of the individuals whose united labourers produce it?
I know no way of deciding this but by leaving it to be settled by the unfettered judgments of the labourers themselves. If all kinds of labour were perfectly free, if no unfounded prejudice invested some parts, and perhaps the least useful, of the social task with great honour, while other parts are very improperly branded with disgrace, there would be no difficulty on this point, and the wages of individual labour would be justly settled by what Dr. Smith calls the "higgling of the market." Unfortunately, labour is not, in general, free; and, unfortunately there are a number of prejudices which decree very different rewards to different species of labour from those which each of them merits.
Unfortunately, also, there is, I think, in general, a disposition to restrict the term labour to the operation of the hands. But if it should be said that the skill of the practised labourer is a mere mechanical sort of thing, nobody will deny that the labour by which he acquired that skill was a mental exertion. The exercise of that skill also, as it seems to me, requiring the constant application of judgment, depends much more on a mental than on a bodily acquirement. Probably the mere capacity of muscular exertion is as great, or greater, among a tribe of Indians as among the most productive Europeans; and the superior productive power of Europeans, and of one nation over another, arise from the different nature of their fixed capital. But I have shown that the greater efficacy of fixed capital depends on the skill of the labourer; so that we come to the conclusion that not mere labour, but mental skill, or the mode in which labour is directed, determines its productive powers. I therefore would caution my fellow labourers not to limit the term labour to the operations of the hands.
Before many of our most useful machines and instruments could be invented, a vast deal of knowledge gathered in the progress of the world by many generations was necessary. At present also a great number of persons possessed of different kinds of knowledge and skill must combine and cooperate, although they have never entered into any express contract for this purpose, before many of our most powerful machines can be completed and before thy can be used. The labour of the draughtsman is as necessary to construct a ship as the labour of the man who fastens her planks together. The labour of the engineer, who "in his mind's eye" sees the effect of every contrivance, and who adapts the parts of a complicated machine to each other, is as necessary to the completion of that machine as the man who casts or fits any part of it, without being sensible of the purpose for which the whole is to serve. In like manner the labour and the knowledge of many different persons must be combined before almost any product intended for consumption can be brought to market. The knowledge and skill of the master manufacturer, or of the man who plans and arranges a productive operation, who must know the state of the markets and the qualities of different materials, and who has some tact in buying and selling, are just as necessary for the complete success of any complicated operation as the skill of the workmen whose hands actually alter the shape and fashion of these materials. Far be it, therefore, from the manual labourer, while he claims the reward due to his own productive powers, to deny its appropriate reward to any other species of labour, whether it be of the head or the hands. The labour and skill of the contriver, or of the man who arranges an adapts a whole, are as necessary as the labour and skill of him who executes only a part, and they must be paid accordingly.
I must, however, add that it is doubtful whether one species of labour is more valuable than another; certainly it is not more necessary. But because those who have been masters. Planners, contrivers, etc., have in general also been capitalists, and have also had a command over the labour of those who have worked with their hands, their labour has been paid as much too high as common labour has been under paid. The wages of the master, employer or contriver has been blended with the profit of the capitalists, and he may probably be still disposed to claim the whole as only the proper reward of his exertions. On the other hand, manual labourers, oppressed by the capitalist, have never been paid high enough, and even now are more disposed to estimate their own deserts rather by what they have hitherto received than by what they produce. This sort of prejudice makes it, and will long make it, difficult even for labourers themselves to apportion with justice the social reward or wages of each individual labourer. No statesman can accomplish this, nor ought the labourers to allow any statesman to interfere in it. The labour is theirs, the produce ought to be theirs, and they alone ought to decide how much each deserves of the produce all. While each labourer claims his own reward, let him cheerfully allow the just claims of every other labourer; but let him never assent to the strange doctrine that the food he eats and the instruments he uses, which are the work of his own hands, become endowed, by merely changing proprietors, with productive power greater than his, and that the owner of them is entitled to a more abundant reward than the labour, skill and knowledge which produce and use them.
Masters, it is evident, are labourers as well as their journeymen. In this character their interest is precisely the same as that of their men. But they are also either capitalist, or the agents of the capitalist, and in this respect their interest is decidedly opposed to the interest of their workmen. As the contrivers and enterprising undertakers of new works, they may be called employers as well as labourers, and they deserve the respect of the labourer. As capitalist, and as the agents of he capitalist, they are merely middlemen, oppressing the labourer, and deserving of anything but his respect. The labourer should know and bear this in mind. Other people should also remember it, for it is indispensable to correct reasoning to distinguish between these two characters of all masters. If by combining the journeymen were to drive masters, who are a useful class of labourers, out of the country, if they were to force abroad the skill and ingenuity which contrive, severing them from the hands which execute, they would do themselves and the remaining inhabitants considerable mischief. If, on the contrary, by combining they merely incapacitate the masters from obtaining any profit on their capital, and merely prevent them from completing the engagements they have contracted with the capitalist, they will do themselves and the country incalculable service. They may reduce or destroy altogether the profit of the idle capitalist — and from the manner in which capitalists have treated labourers, even within our own recollection, they have no claim on the gratitude of the labourer — but they will augment the wages and rewards of industry, and will give to genius and skill their due share of the national produce. They will also increase prodigiously the productive power of the country by increasing the number of skilled labourers. The most successful and widest spread possible combination to obtain an augmentation of wages would have no other injurious effect than to reduce the incomes of those who live on profit and interest, and who have no just claim but custom to any share of the national produce.
It has indeed been said by some sapient legislators, both Lords and Commoners, that the journeymen will do themselves incalculable mischief by driving capital out of the country; and one of the reasons urged for the new law was that it would prevent the journeymen injuring themselves. Whenever the devil wants to do mischief he assumes the garb of holiness, and whenever a certain class of persons wish to commit a more than usually flagrant violation of justice it is always done in the name of humanity. If the labourers are disposed blindly to injure themselves I see no reason for the legislature interfering to prevent them; except as a farmer watches over the health of his cattle, or a West India planter looks after the negroes because they are his property, and bring him a large profit. The journeymen, however, know their own interest better than it is known to the legislator; and they would be all the richer if there were not an idle capitalist in the country. I shall not enter into any investigation of the origin of this opinion that the workmen will injure themselves by driving away capital; but it would not be difficult to show that it springs from the false theory I have opposed, and that it is based on a narrow experience. Because there are a few instances of political and religious persecution, driving both masters and journeymen, or a large quantity of national stock of skilled labour, from different countries, greatly, I admit, to the injury, and justly so, of the remaining inhabitants who permitted or practised this persecution, it has been asserted that this injury was caused by the banishment, not of the men but of the capital; and it being, therefore, now concluded that the proceedings of the workmen will in like manner banish capital from this country it has been affirmed that they will injure both themselves and the rest of the inhabitants.
But they carry on neither political nor religious persecution, and it is somewhat preposterous in the race of politicians, by way, perhaps, of throwing a veil over their own crimes, to attribute to the actions of the workmen the same consequences as have been produced by some of the absurd and cruel proceedings of their own class. If the workmen do not frighten away the skill of the contriver and the master — and where can that be put to so good a use as where there are plenty of skilful hands — and even if they should, the wide spread of education among the mechanics and artisans will soon repair the loss, they will frighten away no other part of the national advantages. The merest tyro in political economy knows that the capitalist cannot export any great quantity of food, clothing and machines from this country, nor even the gold and silver which forms the current coin of the realm, to any advantage; either he must bring back an equivalent, which returns him a profit when consumed here, or he must carry with him those skilled labourers who have hitherto produced him his profit as they have consumed his food and used his instruments and machines. There is not a political injury on the one hand and both masters and workmen on the other; but on the one side is the labourer and on the other the capitalist, and however successful the workmen may be, the smallest fraction of their produce which the capitalist can scrape up he will assuredly stay to collect. The combination of the workmen will not frighten away their own skill, nor unlearn them what thy have learned. Their hand will not forget its cunning, when its produce goes no longer into the pocket of the capitalist. Capitalists, who can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers, may probably carry off some of their cloth, and their corn, and their machines to some country like Prussia, where the poor people can learn nothing but what the king and his schoolmasters please; or like France, where a watchful police allows no man to utter a thought but such as suits the views of a government and priesthood anxious to restore despotism and superstition; but they cannot, unless the labourers please, carry with them the mouths which consume, or the hands which make their capital useful; and where these are there will be the productive power. Our labourers already possess in an eminent degree the skill to execute, and they are rapidly acquiring also the skill to contrive. Never was there a more idle threat uttered, therefore, than that the combinations of skilled labourers to obtain greater rewards than they now possess will drive skilled labour from the country.
This analysis also of the operations of capital leads us at once boldly to pronounce all those schemes of which we have of late heard so much for improving countries, by sending capital to them, to be mere nonsense. Of what use, for example, would the butter and salt beef and pork and grain now exported from Ireland be of in that country if they were to be left there, or if they were to be sent back? All these articles form some of the most valuable parts of circulating capital, and so far from there being any want of them in Ireland, they are constantly exported in great quantities. It is plain, therefore, that there is no want of circulating capital in Ireland, if the capitalist would allow the wretched producer of it to consume it. Of what use also would steam engines or power looms or stocking frames or mining tools be to the ragged peasantry of Ireland? Of none whatever. If, indeed, masters and journeymen went over with these instruments and tools, they might use them, and by consuming at the same time the circulating capital now exported from Ireland give the owner of it a large profit; and they might teach the ignorant and helpless natives how to make use of the various instruments I have mentioned. Those who talk of improving Ireland, or any other country, by capital have a double meaning in their words. They know the power of the capitalist over the labourer, and that whenever the master goes or sends, there also must the slave labourer go. But neither the lawmaker nor the capitalist possesses any miraculous power of multiplying loaves and fishes; or of commanding, like the enchanters of old, broomsticks to do the work of men. They must have labourers, skilled labourers, and without them it is nonsense to talk of improving a country and a people by corn and cloth and hatchets and saws.
The wide spread of education among the journeyman mechanics of this country diminishes daily the value of the labour and skill of almost all masters and employers by increasing the number of persons who possess their peculiar knowledge. At the same time, masters and employers cannot hope that the labourers who are not capitalists will remain long ignorant of the manner in which masters who are both labourers and capitalist lend themselves to the views of the capitalists who are not labourers. They are daily acquiring this knowledge, and masters cannot therefore rationally expect a termination to the present contest. On the contrary, it must continue. Even if it should be stopped, it will again and again occur. It is not possible that any large body of men who are acquainted with their rights will tacitly acquiesce in insult and injury. The profits of the masters, as capitalist, must be diminished, whether the labourers succeed in obtaining higher wages, or the combination continues, or it is from time to time renewed. In the former case, the masters, as skilled labourers, will share in the increased rewards of industry; in either of the two latter, not only will their profit be destroyed, but their wages will be diminished or altogether annihilated. Without workmen their own skill and labour are of no use, but they may live in comfort and opulence without the capitalist. Masters and employers, therefore, would do well to recollect that by supporting the claims of capital they diminish their own wages, and they prolong a contest which, independent of the ill temper and hatred it creates and perpetuates, is also injurious to them as inventors, contrivers and skilled labourers, and which must ultimately terminate to their disadvantage.
The improved education of the labouring classes ought, in the present question, to have great weight also with statesmen, and with the community at large. The schools, which are everywhere established, or are establishing, for their instruction, make it impossible for the greatest visionary to suppose that any class of men can much longer be kept in ignorance of the principles on which societies are formed and governed. Mechanics' institutions will teach men the moral as well as the physical sciences. They excite a disposition to probe all things to the bottom, and supply the means of carrying research into every branch of knowledge. He must be a very blind statesman who does not see in this indications of a more extensive change in the frame of society than has ever yet been made. This change will not be effected by violence, and cannot be counteracted by force. Holy Alliance can put down the quiet insurrection by which knowledge will subvert whatever is not founded in justice and truth. The interest of the different classes of labourers who are now first beginning to think and act as a body, in opposition to the other classes among whom, with themselves, the produce of the earth is distributed, and who are now only for the first time beginning to acquire as extensive a knowledge of the principles of government as those who rule, is too deeply implicated by these principles to allow them to stop short in their career of inquiry. They may care nothing about the curious researches of the geologist or the elaborate classification of the botanist, but they will assuredly ascertain why they only of all classes of society have always been involved in poverty and distress. They will not stop short of any ultimate truth; and they have experienced too few of the advantages of society to make them feel satisfied with the present order of things. The mind is rather invigorated than enfeebled by the labour of the hands; and they will carry forward their investigations undelayed by the pedantry of learning, and undiverted by the fastidiousness of taste. By casting aside the prejudices which fetter the minds of those who have benefited by their degradation, they have everything to hope. On the other hand, they are the suffers by these prejudices, and have everything to dread from their continuance. Having no reason to love those institutions which limit the reward of labour, whatever may be its produce, to a bare subsistence, they will not spare them, whenever they see the hollowness of the claims made on their respect. As the labourers acquire knowledge, the foundations of the social edifice will be dug up from the deep beds into which they were laid in times past, they will be curiously handled and closely examined, and they will not be restored unless they were originally laid in justice, and unless justice commands their preservation.
Without joining in any of the commonplace observations against taking interest, and against usury, which, however, support my view of capital, I have show that it has no just claim to any share of the labourer's produce, and that what it actually receives is the cause of the poverty of the labourer. It is impossible that the labourer should long remain ignorant of these facts, or acquiesce in this state of things.
In truth, also, however the matter may be disguised, the combinations among workmen to obtain higher wages, which are now so general and so much complained of, are practical attacks on the claims of capital. The weight of its chains are felt, though the hand may not yet be clearly seen which imposes them. Gradually as the resistance increases, as laws are multiplied for the protection of capital, as claims for higher wages shall be more strenuously and more violently repressed, the cause of this oppression will be more distinctly seen. The contest now appears to be between masters and journeymen, or between one species of labour and another, but it will soon be displayed in its proper characters; and will stand confessed a war of honest industry against the idle profligacy which has so long ruled the affairs of the political world with undisputed authority — which has, for its own security, added honour and political power to wealth, and has conjoined exclusion and disgrace with the poverty it has inflicted on the labourer. On the side of the labourers there is physical strength, for they are more numerous than their opponents. They are also fast losing that reverence for their opponents which was and is the source of their power, and they are daily acquiring a moral strength which results from a common interest and a close and intimate union.
The capitalist and labourers form the great majority of the nation, so that there is not third power to intervene betwixt them. The must and will decide the dispute of themselves. Final success, I would fain hope, must be on the side of justice. I am certain, however, that till the triumph of labour be complete; till productive industry alone be opulent, and till idleness alone be poor, till the admirable maxim that "he who sows shall reap" be solidly established; till the right of property shall be founded on principles of justice, and not on those of slavery; till man shall be held more in honour than the clod be treads on, or the machine he guides — there cannot, and there ought not to be either peace on earth or goodwill amongst men.
Those who of late have shown themselves so ready to resist the just claims of labour, who, under the influence of interest and passion, have hurried into the arena with their penal laws, and have come forward, brandishing their parchment statutes, as if they, poor beings, could whip mankind into patience and submission, when these weapons of theirs — these penal laws and parchment statutes — derive all their power, whether for evil or for good, from the sanctity with which we are pleased to invest them, and as if they also did not know that they are as powerless as the meanest individual whom they are so prompt to scourge, except as we are pleased to submit and to honour them — they may thank themselves should their haste and their violence beget a corresponding haste and violence in others; and, should the labourers, who have hitherto shown themselves confiding and submissive — losing that reverence by which laws are invested with power, and to which Government is indebted for its existence — turn their attention from combining for higher wages, to amending the state, and to subverting a system which they must now believe is intended only to support all the oppressive exactions of capital. Ministers are undoubtedly, for the moment, very popular, but it does not require any very enlarged view to predict that by openly committing the Government during the last session of Parliament, when the great mass of the community are able both to scan the motives of their conduct and its consequences, and zealous in doing it, to a contest between capital and labour, taking the side of idleness against industry, of weakness against strength, of oppression against justice, they are preparing more future mischief than any ministry this country has ever seen. They profess liberal principles — and they make laws to keep the labourer in thraldom. By their innovations they encourage inquiry, and convince us the system is neither sacred nor incapable of improvement. They have practically told the labourer there is nothing deserving his reverence, and have excited his hostility both by insult and oppression.
I do not mean, on the present occasion, to point out all the consequences which result from this view of capital, but there is one so important in a theoretical point of view, and so well calculated to relieve the wise system of the universe from the opprobrium which has been cast upon it in these latter times, that I cannot wholly pass it by. An elaborate theory has been constructed to show that there is a natural tendency in population to increase faster than capital, or than the means of employing labour. In Mr. Mill's Elements of Political Economy, a work distinguished by its brevity, several sections and pages are devoted merely to announce this truth. If my view of capital be correct, this, as a theory of nature, falls at once baseless to the ground. That the capitalist can control the existence and number of labourers, that the whole number of the population depends altogether on him, I will not deny. But put the capitalist, the oppressive middleman, who eats up the produce of labour and prevents the labourer from knowing on what natural laws his existence and happiness depend, out of view — put aside those social regulations by which they who produce all are allowed to own little or nothing — and it is plain that capital, or the power to employ labour, and co-exiting labour are one; and that productive capital and skilled labour are also one; consequently capital and a labouring population are precisely synonymous.
In the system of nature, mouths are united with hands and with intelligence; they and not capital are the agents of production; and, according other rule, however it may have been thwarted by the pretended wisdom of law makers, wherever there is a man there also are the means of creating or producing him subsistence. If also, as I say, circulating capital is only co-existing labour, and fixed capital only skill labour, it must be plain that all those numerous advantages, those benefits to civilisation, those vast improvements in the condition of the human race, which have been in general attributed to capital, are caused in fact by labour, and by knowledge and skill informing and directing labour. Should it be said, then, as perhaps it may, that unless there be profit, and unless there be interest, there will be no motives for accumulation and improvement, I answer that this is a false view, and arises from attributing to capital and saving those effects which result from labour; and that the best means of securing the progressive improvement, both of individuals and of nations, is to do justice, and allow labour to possess and enjoy the whole of its produce.
Retornar ao início da página
Clique aqui para acessar a Primeira Página da Revista Práxis na Internet.
Para contatar a Revista Práxis na Internet, mande um e-mail para rvpraxis@horizontes.net Gracias por su contacto. Your comments are important to us.
