CHAPTER XV.

OF CHEMICAL AND MECHANICAL CHANGES IN THE FORM OF

MATTER-CONTINUED.

1. Errors of the British system obvious to Adam Smith. His caution to his countrymen in regard to the dangers necessarily incident to an exclusive dependence upon trade. His advice neglected, and hence the growth of pauperism and the origination of the theory of over-population.

2. Warlike and monopolistic character of the system.

3. By destroying among other people the power to sell their labor it destroys competition for the purchase of British labor. Teaching, that to enable capital to obtain a fair remuneration labor must be kept down, it tends to the production of slavery everywhere.

24. Approximation in the prices of raw materials and finished commodities the one essential characteristic of civilization. British system looks to the prevention of that approximation. Its tendency towards reduction of other communities to a state of barbarism.

25. Stoppage of the circulation a necessary consequence of the predominance of the British system. Disappearance of the small proprietors of England. Condition of the agricultural laborer.

26. The higher the organization the more perfect the power of self-government. That power diminishing among the people, and in the government, of England. Gulf dividing the higher and lower classes a constantly widening one.

27. Necessity for careful study of the system under which originated the theory of overpopulation. Inevitable tendency of the Ricardo-Malthusian doctrine that of making slavery the ultimate condition of the laborer. The system of the British school a retrograde one. Had its origin in a retrograde policy. Sees in man a mere instrument to be used by trade.

§ 1. The Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776; and its essential object was that of enforcing upon the author's countrymen the great truth, that trade and manufactures were useful only so far as they contributed to the development of the treasures of the earth, and to the promotion of commerce. Adam Smith saw that the colonial system, looking exclusively to trade, tended unnaturally to increase the proportion of the British population employed in the work of exchange and transportation, thereby raising up "a nation of mere shopkeepers," and forcing industry to run principally in one great channel, instead of in a number of smaller ones; and he warned his countrymen of the dangers they thus incurred. Great, however, as were, even then, those dangers, England was but entering on the effort to reduce the world at large under the system so long imposed upon her colonial dependents. The interdiction of the emigration of artisans dated then back but a single decade, and the battle of Plassy, by which the British power in India was established, was then Lot twenty years old. Five years later came the prohibition

of the export of silk and woollen machinery; and before the close of the century the policy had been perfected by the extension of this prohibition to all other descriptions of machinery, as well as to artisans by whom it might be made, and to colliers.

Prior to 1791, the price of wheat having more than doubled as a consequence of the creation of a great domestic market, there had gradually arisen an import of foreign food for the prevention of which the agricultural interest procured, in that year, the passage of a law limiting the price at which it might be entered. During all this time the policy denounced by Dr. Smith had been still more fully carried out. English armies had been steadily engaged in India in extending trade at the expense of commerce. Trade had stirred up strife between the mother country and her American colonies, and thus produced the war of 1776. The class living by traffic and transportation had constantly increased in numbers and in power, but it was reserved for the war of 1793-a war largely due to the thirst for "ships, colonies, and commerce" -to see it attain its full dimensions. Taxation grew with great rapidity, and with it the splendor of bankers' and traders' fortunes. The price of food advanced while that of labor remained stationary, and the effects of this soon exhibited themselves in the rapid growth of the almshouse population.

Pauperism prevailed to an extent before unknown; and then it was that Mr. Malthus furnished the world with those "Principles of Population," by help of which his readers might, as they were assured, understand the causes of "the poverty and misery observable among the lower classes of the people in every nation," and of "the repeated failures in the efforts of the higher classes to relieve them." Dr. Smith had seen that the policy based upon cheap labor and cheap raw materials was the work of those "higher classes ;" and upon them he had urged the abandonment of a system which, as he so clearly saw, tended towards the pauperism and enslavement of those who labored. Mr. Malthus, on the contrary, found the cause in a great law of God, by means of which he relieved those classes from all responsibility for that poverty, and enabled them to close their purses, and even their hearts, against the commonest dictates of charity, comforting themselves with the reflection that if they should in any manner stand between the error and its consequences," or “intercept the penalty" affixed to the procreation of their

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species by those who had not accumulated the means of support for children-which penalty was poverty, wretchedness, and death-they would but "perpetuate the sin" and thereby become themselves participants in the crime! This theory was precisely what was needed to prevent the adoption of any of the remedial measures proposed by Adam Smith, proving, as it professed to do, that pauperism existed in obedience to the laws of God, and that therefore the rich might safely and conscientiously "eat, drink, and be merry" though surrounded by poverty, wretchedness, disease, and death!

§ 2. The system which looked to foreign trade being more extensively carried out with each successive year, peace rarely existed throughout the British Empire. The war then existing was followed by one with these United States; since which there have been wars for the annexation of Scinde and Affghanistan, of Ava and the Punjaub-for the maintenance of the opium trade-for the extension of power in South Africa for the development of new avenues for trade through- · out the Turkish Empire, and others still,-all having for their essential object the cheapening of the raw products of the earth, and of the labors of the man by whom it is tilled.

For the attainment of that end the union with Ireland was perfected, and her manufactures annihilated. With that end in view the people of India were required to receive the cotton goods of England duty free, while prevented from procuring more efficient machinery from abroad, and taxed to an unheard of extent for the use of that which they already possessed. For this, Gibraltar has been, and yet is, maintained as a smuggling depot against Spain, while other colonies have been used for smuggling goods into various countries of Europe and America, the smuggler having come to be regarded as "the great reformer of the age. For this, have been formed combinations among the masters to keep down the price of labor at home, and to discourage the growth of manufactures in all the other countries of the world. That all these are really acts of war, is shown in the following extract from an official document first published in 1854, by order of the British House of Commons:

"The laboring classes generally, in the manufacturing districts of this country, especially in the iron and coal districts, are very little aware of the extent to which they are often indebted for being employed at all to the immense losses

which their employers voluntarily incur in bad times in order to destroy foreign competition, and to gain and keep possession of foreign markets. Authentic instances are well known of employers having in such times carried on their works at a loss amounting in the aggregate to three or four hundred thousand pounds in the course of three or four years. If the efforts of those who encourage the combinations to restrict the amount of labor and to produce strikes were to be successful for any length of time, the great accumulations of capital could no longer be made which enable a few of the most wealthy capitalists to overwhelm all foreign competition in times of great depression, and thus to clear the way for the whole trade to step in when prices revive, and to carry on the business before foreign capital can again accumulate to such an extent as to be able to establish competition in prices with any chance of success. The large capitals of this country are the great instruments of warfare (if the expression may be allowed) against the competing capital of foreign countries, and are the most essential instruments now remaining by which our manufacturing supremacy can be maintained; the other elements, cheap labor, abundance of raw materials, means of communication, and skilled labor, being rapidly in process of being analized."

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The system here described is very properly characterized as a warfare," and for what purpose, and against whom is it waged? It is a war to compel the people of all other lands to confine themselves to agriculture, to prevent the diversification of employment in other countries, to retard the development of intellect, to palsy every movement elsewhere looking to the utilization of the mineral treasures of the earth, to diminish the demand for labor, and to produce pauperism both at home and abroad.

§ 3. It is said that this system is beneficial to the people of England. Were this so, it would establish the lamentable fact that nations could, in accordance with a divine law, thrive by the perpetration of injustice. Happily no such law exists. Nations can permanently prosper only by means of obedience to the golden rule of Christianity; and when they fail to yield it, Nemesis never fails to claim her rights. That she has so done on this occasion, and that the pauperism of England is due to failure in this respect the reader may perhaps be satisfied after a brief examination of the effects of the system upon the condition of the English laborer.

The manufactures of Ireland declined from the date of the Union in 1801, and the Irish people were forced to seek employment in the field. Production being thus increased while the home consumption was being diminished, the exports of wheat rose in thirty years from 300,000 quarters to 2,500,000, with a fall of price from 80s. to 52s. This reduction might seem to have been an advantage, but unfortunately, it was accompanied by still greater cheapness of human power. Millions of the Irish people being totally idle, Great Britain was, says a British journal, "flooded with crowds of halfclad Celts, reducing the standard of living" among English laborers. Labor, therefore, fell more rapidly than food, and one-ninth of the total population of England was reduced to pauperism-the poor tax rising in thirty years from twentyfive to forty-five millions of dollars, the price of wheat at the same time falling no less than forty per cent. Food was low, but wages were so very low, that the laborer could not purchase. Labor was low, but food was so cheap that the farmer was unable to pay wages and rent. Manufactures, too, suffered, for the decline of wages in other pursuits was accompanied by a diminution in the power to purchase cloth. All thus suffered alike. The destruction in Ireland of the home market for food and labor, consequent upon the annihilation of Irish commerce, had produced the same effect in England. Did the great manufacturer profit? On the contrary, his market in England had been lessened, while that of Ireland had almost totally failed; and thus had a nation been almost annihilated with no profit to those who had done the work, but with the most serious loss to all, resulting from the fact that the standard of living and of morals had been greatly reduced; that the disease of over-population had more widely spread; and that the gulf dividing the higher and lower classes of English society had greatly widened.

It might, however, be supposed that the other markets which had been acquired were of a character to make some amends for these losses by English land and labor. That we may determine that question, we now turn to the trade with the hundred millions of India. The export of cotton yarn and cloth to that country, at the breaking out of the cotton rebellion of our Southern States scarcely exceeded 70,000,000 of pounds, while the import of India cotton was little more than 80,000,000, and yet this constituted almost the only item of the trade with that country that was of any essential importance. The quantity of cotton then converted into