ARTICLE III.

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF GREAT BRITAIN.

[Continued from page 252.]

There is an unavoidable tendency, in all old and wealthy states, for riches to concentrate in the highest ranks, and numbers to become excessive in the lowest. This arises from the different set of principles which, at the opposite ends of the chain of society, regulate human conduct in the direction of life. Prudence, and the desire of elevation, are predominant at the one extremity; recklessness, and the thirst for gratification, at the other. Life is spent in the one in striving to gain, and endeavoring to rise; in the other, in seeking indulgence, and struggling with its consequences. Marriage is contracted in the former, generally speaking, from prudential or ambitious motives; in the latter, from the influence of passion, or the necessity of a home. In the former, fortune marries fortune, or rank is allied to rank; in the latter, poverty is linked to poverty, and destitution engenders destitution. These opposite set of principles come, in the progress of time, to exercise a great and decisive influence on the comparative numbers and circumstances of the affluent and the destitute classes. The former can rarely, if ever, maintain their own numbers; the latter are constantly increasing in numbers, with scarcely any other limit on their multiplication but the experienced impossibility of rearing a family. Fortunes run into fortunes by intermarriage, the effects of continued saving, and the dying out of the direct line of descendants among the rich. Poverty is allied to poverty by the recklessness invariably produced by destitution among the poor. Hence the rich, in an old an wealthy community, have a tendency to get richer, and the poor poorer; and the increase of wealth only increases this tendency, and renders it more decided with every addition made to the national fortunes. This tendency is altogether irrespective of primogeniture, entails, or any other device to retain property in a particular class of society. It exists as strongly in the mercantile class, whose fortunes are for the most part equally divided, as in the landed, where the estate descends in general to the eldest son; and was as conspicuous in former days in Imperial Rome, when primogeniture was unknown, and is now complained of as as great a grievance in Republican France, where the portions of children are fixed by law, as it is in Great Britain, where the feudal institutions still prevail among those connected with real estates.

In the next place, this tendency in old and opulent communities has been much enhanced, in the case of Great Britain, by the extraordinary combination of circumstances-some natural, some

political-which have, in a very great degree, augmented its manufacturing and commercial industry. It would appear to be a general law of nature, in the application of which the progress of society makes no or very little change-that machinery and the division of labor can add scarcely any thing to the powers of human industry in the cultivation of the soil-but that they can work prodigies in the manufactories or trades which minister to human luxury or enjoyment. The proof of this is decisive. England, grey in years, and overloaded with debt, can undersell the inhabitants of Hindostan in cotton manufactures, formed in Manchester out of cotton grown on the banks of the Ganges or the Mississippi; but she is undersold in grain, and to a ruinous extent, by the Polish or American cultivators, with grain raised on the Vistula or the Ohio. It is the steam-engine and the division of labor which have worked this prodigy. They enable a girl or a child, with the aid of machinery, to do the work of a hundred men. They substitute the inanimate spindle for human hands. But there is no steamengine in agriculture. The spade and the hoe are its spindles, and they must be worked by human hands. Garden cultivation, exclusively done by man, is the perfection of husbandry. By a lasting law of nature, the first and best employment of man is reserved, and for ever reserved, for the human race. Thus it could not be avoided that in Great Britain, so advantageously situated for foreign commerce, possessing the elements of great naval strength in its forests, and the materials in the bowels of the earth from which manufacturing greatness was to arise, should come, in process of time, to find its manufacturing bear an extraordinary and scarce paralleled proportion to its agricultural population.

Consequent on this was another circumstance, scarcely less important in its effects than the former, which materially enhanced the tendency to excess of numbers in the manufacturing portions of the community. This was the encouragement given to the employment of women and children in preference to men in most manufacturing establishments-partly from the greater cheapness of their labor, partly from their being better adapted than the latter for many of the operations connected with machines, and partly from their being more manageable, and less addicted to strikes and other violent insurrections, for the purpose of forcing up wages. Great is the effect of this tendency, which daily becomes more marked as prices decline, competition increases, and political associations among workmen become more frequent and formidable by the general popularising of institutions. The steam-engine thus is generally found to be the sole moving power in factories; spindles and spinning-jennies the hands by which their work is performed; women and children the attendants on their labor. There is no doubt that this precocious forcing of youth, and general employment of young women in factories, is often a great resource to families in indigent circumstances, and enables the children and

young women of the poor to bring in, early in life, as much as enables their parents, without privation, often to live in idleness. But what effect must it have upon the principle of population, and the vital point for the welfare of the working classes-the propor tion between the demand for and the supply of labor? When young children of either sex are sure, in ordinary circumstances, of finding employment in factories, what an extraordinary impulse is given to population around them, under circumstances when the lasting demand for labor in society cannot find them employment! The boys and girls find employment in the factories for six or eight years; so far all is well: but what comes of these boys and girls when they become men and women, fathers and mothers of children, legitimate and illegitimate, and their place in the factories is filled by a new race of infants and girls, destined in a few years more to be supplanted in their turn, by a similar inroad of juvenile and precocious labor? It is evident that this is an important and alarming feature in manufacturing communities; and. where they have existed long, and are widely extended, it has a tendency to induce, after a time, an alarming disproportion between the demand for, and the supply of full-grown labor over the entire community. And to this we are in a great degree to ascribe the singular fact, so well and painfully known to all persons practically acquainted with such localities, that while manufacturing towns are the places where the greatest market exists for juvenile or infant labor-to obtain which the poor flock from all quarters with ceaseless alacrity-they are at the same time the places where destitution in general prevails to the greatest and most distressing extent, and it is most difficult for full-grown men and women to obtain permanent situations or wages, on which they can maintain themselves in comfort. Their only resource, often, is to trust, in their turn, to the employment of their children for the wages necessary to support the family. Juvenile labor becomes profitable-a family is not felt as a burden, but rather as an advantage al first; and a forced and unnatural impulse is given to population by the very circumstances, in the community, which are abridging the means of desirable subsistence to the persons brought into exis

tence.

Lastly, the close proximity of Ireland, and the improvident habits and rapid increase of its inhabitants, has for above half a century had a most important effect in augmenting, in a degree altogether disproportioned to the extension in the demand for labor, the numbers of the working classes in the community in Great Britain. Without stopping to inquire into the causes of the calamity, it may be sufficient to refer to the fact, unhappily too well and generally known to require any illustration, that the numbers of laborers of the very humblest class in Ireland have been long excessive; and that any accidental failure in the usual means of subsistence never fails to impel multitudes in quest of work or chari

ty, upon the more industrious and consequently opulent realm of Britain. Great as has been the emigration, varying from 200,000 to 250,000 a-year from Ireland, during the last two years to Transatlantic regions, it has certainly been equalled, if not exceeded, by the simultaneous influx of Irish hordes into the western provinces of Britain. It is well known* that, during the whole of 1848, the inundation into Glasgow was at the rate of of above 1000 aweek on an average; and into Liverpool generally above double the number. The census now in course of preparation will furnish many most valuable returns on this subject, and prove to what extent England has suffered by the competition of Irish labor. In the mean time it seems sufficient to refer to this well-known social evil, as one of the causes which has powerfully contributed to increase the competition among the working-classes, and enhance the disproportion between the demand for, and the supply of, labor, which with few and brief exceptions has been felt as so distressing in Great Britain for the last thirty years.

Powerful as these causes of evil undoubtedly were, they were not beyond the reach of remedy by human means-nay, circumstances simultaneously existed which, if duly taken advantage of, might have converted them into a source of blessings. They had enormously augmented the powers of productive industry in the British Empire; and in the wealth, dominion, and influence thereby acquired, the means had been opened up of giving full employment to the multitudes displaced by its boundless machinery and extended manufacturing skill. Great Britain and Ireland enjoyed one immense advantage-their territory was not merely capable of yielding food for the whole present inhabitants, numerous as they were, but for double or triple the number. The proof of this is decisive. Although the two islands had added above a half to their numbers between 1790 and 1835, the importation of foreign grain had been continually diminishing; and in the five years ending with 1835, they had come to be on an average only 398,000 quarters of grain and flour in a year-being not a hundredth part of the whole subsistence of the people. Further, agriculture in Great Britain, from the great attention paid to it, and the extended capital and skill employed in its prosecution, had come to be more and more worked by manual labor, and was rapidly approachingat least in the richer districts of the country-the horticultural system, in which at once the greatest produce is obtained from the soil, and the greatest amount of human labor is employed in its cultivation; and in which the greatest manufacturing states of former days, Florence and Flanders, had, on the decay of their manufacturing industry, found a never-failing resource for a denser population than now exists in Great Britain.

It was ascertained, from an accurate return obtained by the Magistrates of Glasgow, that the number of persons who arrived at that city by the Clyde, or the Ayrshire railway, in four months preceeding 10th April, 1848, was 42,860.

But, more than all, England possessed, in her immense and rapidly increasing colonies in every quarter of the globe, at once an inexhaustible vent and place of deposit for its surplus homepopulation, the safest and most rapidly-increasing market for its manufacturing industry, and the most certain means, in the keeping up the communication between the different parts of so vast a dominion, of maintaining and extending its maritime superiority. This was a resource unknown to any former state, and apparently reserved for the Anglo-Saxon race, whom such mighty destinies awaited in the progress of mankind. The forests of Canada, the steppes of Australia, the hills of New Zealand, the savannals of the Cape, seemed spread out by nature to receive the numerous and sturdy children of the Anglo-Saxon race, whom the natural progress of opulence, the division of labor, the extension of machinery, and the substitution of female and juvenile for male labor, were depriving of employment in their native seats. In the colonies, manual labor was as much in demand as it was redundant in the parent state. No machinery or manufactures existed there to displace the arm of the laborer's industry; the felling of the forest, the draining of the morass, the cultivation of the wild, chained the great majority of the human race to agricultural employments, for generations and centuries to come. Even the redundant number and rapid increase of the Celtic population in Ireland could not keep pace with the demand for agricultural labor in our Transatlantic dominions. The undue preponderance of the female sex, felt as so great and consuming an evil in all old and wealthy cities, might be rendered the greatest possible blessing to the infant colonies, in which the greatest social evil always experienced is the excessive numbers of the male sex. All that was required was the removal of them from the overburdened heart to the famishing extremities of the empire; and this, while it relieved the labor, promissed to afford ample employment to the national navy. The magnitude of this traffic may be judged of by the fact that the 212,000 emigrants who arrived at New York in the year 1850 were brought in 2000 vessels. At the same time the rapid growth of the colonies, under such a system, would have furnished a steady market for the most extensive manufacturing industry at home, and that in a class of men descended from ourselves, imbued with our habits, actuated by feeling our wants, and chained by circumstances, for centuries to come, to the exclusive consumption of our manufactures. What the magnitude of this market might have been may be judged of by the fact that, in the year 1850, Australia and New Zealand, with a population which had not yet reached 250.000 souls, took off in the year 1850, £2,080,364 of our manufactures, being at the rate of £8 a head; while Russia, with a population of 66,000,000, only took off £1,572,593 worth, being not 6d. a head.*

Parliamentary Return, 1851.