Knowledge is power

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Title: Knowledge is power
A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.

Author: Charles Knight

Release date: December 22, 2011 [eBook #38367]

Language: English

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KNOWLEDGE IS POWER:

A VIEW OF

THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES OF MODERN SOCIETY,

AND THE

RESULTS OF LABOUR, CAPITAL, AND SKILL.

BY CHARLES KNIGHT.

Illustrated with numerous Woodcuts.

"The empire of man over material things has for its only foundation
the sciences and the arts."--BACON.

_THE SECOND EDITION._

WITH TWENTY-FOUR ADDITIONAL CUTS OF MANUFACTURING PROCESSES.

LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1859.

_The right of Translation is reserved._

EXTRACT FROM THE INTRODUCTION.

"Without attempting to give this volume the formal shape of a
treatise on _Political Economy_, it is the wish of the author to
convey the broad parts of that science in a somewhat desultory
manner, but one which is not altogether devoid of logical
arrangement. He desires especially to be understood by _the young_;
for upon their right appreciation of the principles which govern
society will depend much of the security and happiness of our own
and the coming time."

LONDON: PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD-STREET,
AND CHARING CROSS.

NEIL ARNOTT, ESQ., M.D.,

WITH SINCERE ADMIRATION OF THE DISINTERESTED SPIRIT IN WHICH HE HAS
DEVOTED HIS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE TO THE PUBLIC GOOD; AND IN GRATEFUL
ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS NEVER-FAILING KINDNESS DURING A LONG FRIENDSHIP,

THIS VOLUME

IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION Page 1

CHAPTER I.

Feeble resources of civilized man in a desert--Ross Cox,
Peter the Wild Boy, and the Savage of Aveyron--A Moskito
Indian on Juan Fernandez--Conditions necessary for the
production of utility 6

CHAPTER II.

Society a system of exchanges--Security of individual
property the principle of exchange--Alexander Selkirk and
Robinson Crusoe--Imperfect appropriation and unprofitable
labour 14

CHAPTER III.

Adventures of John Tanner--Habits of the American
Indians--Their sufferings from famine, and from the absence
among them of the principle of division of labour--Evils of
irregular labour--Respect to property--Their present improved
condition--Hudson's Bay Indians 23

CHAPTER IV.

The Prodigal--Advantages of the poorest man in civilized life
over the richest savage--Savings-banks, deposits, and
interest--Progress of accumulation--Insecurity of capital,
its causes and results--Property, its constituents--
Accumulation of capital 38

CHAPTER V.

Common interests of Capital and Labour--Labour directed by
Accumulation--Capital enhanced by Labour--Balance of rights
and duties--Relation of demand and supply--Money
exchanges--Intrinsic and representative value of money 49

CHAPTER VI.

Importance of capital to the profitable employment of
labour--Contrast between the prodigal and the prudent man:
the Dukes of Buckingham and Bridgewater--Making good for
trade--Unprofitable consumption--War against capital in the
middle ages--Evils of corporate privileges--Condition of the
people under Henry VIII. 60

CHAPTER VII.

Rights of labour--Effects of slavery on production--Condition
of the Anglo Saxons--Progress of freedom in England--Laws
regulating labour--Wages and prices--Poor-law--Law of
settlement 71

CHAPTER VIII.

Possessions of the different classes in England--Condition of
Colchester in 1301--Tools, stock-in-trade, furniture,
&c.--Supply of food--Comparative duration of human life--Want
of facilities for commerce--Plenty and civilization not
productive of effeminacy--Colchester in the present day 82

CHAPTER IX.

Certainty the stimulus to industry--Effects of
insecurity--Instances of unprofitable labour--Former notions
of commerce--National and class prejudices, and their remedy 96

CHAPTER X.

Employment of machinery in manufactures and
agriculture--Erroneous notions formerly prevalent on this
subject--Its advantages to the labourer--Spade-husbandry--The
principle of machinery--Machines and tools--Change in the
condition of England consequent on the introduction of
machinery--Modern New Zealanders and ancient Greeks--
Hand-mills and water-mills 106

CHAPTER XI.

Present and former condition of the country--Progress of
cultivation--Evil influence of feudalism--State of
agriculture in the sixteenth century--Modern
improvements--Prices of wheat--Increased breadth of land
under cultivation--Average consumption of wheat--Implements
of agriculture now in use--Number of agriculturists in
Great Britain 124

CHAPTER XII.

Production of a knife--Manufacture of iron--Raising coal--The
hot-blast--Iron bridges--Rolling bar-iron--Making
steel--Sheffield manufactures--Mining in Great
Britain--Numbers engaged in mines and metal manufactures 139

CHAPTER XIII.

Conveyance and extended use of coal--Consumption at various
periods--Condition of the roads in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries--Advantages of good roads--Want of roads
in Australia--Turnpike-roads--Canals--Railway of
1680--Railway statistics 157

CHAPTER XIV.

Houses--The Pyramids--Mechanical power--Carpenters'
tools--American machinery for building--Bricks--Slate--
Household fittings and furniture--Paper-hangings--Carpets--
Glass--Pottery--Improvements effected through the
reduction or repeal of duties on domestic requirements 174

CHAPTER XV.

Dwellings of the people--Oberlin--The Highlander's
candlesticks--Supply of water--London waterworks--
Street-lights--Sewers 199

CHAPTER XVI.

Early intercourse with foreign nations--Progress of the
cotton manufacture--Hand-spinning--Arkwright--Crompton--
Power-loom--Cartwright--Especial benefits of machinery in
this manufacture 213

CHAPTER XVII.

The woollen manufacture--Divisions of employment--Early
history--Prohibitory laws--The Jacquard loom--Middle-age
legislation--Sumptuary laws--The silk manufacture--
Ribbon-weaving--The linen manufacture--Cloth-printing--
Bleaching 233

CHAPTER XVIII.

Hosiery manufacture--The stocking-frame--The circular
hosiery-machine--Hats--Gloves--Boots and shoes--Straw-plat--
Artificial flowers--Fans--Lace--Bobbin-net machine--Pins--
Needles--Buttons--Toys--Lucifer-matches--Envelopes 255

CHAPTER XIX.

Labour-saving contrivances--The nick in Types--Tags of
laces--Casting shot--Candle-dipping--Tiring a wheel--
Globe-making--Domestic aids to labour--Aids to mental
labour--Effects of severe bodily labour on health and
duration of life 276

CHAPTER XX.

Influences of knowledge in the direction of labour and
capital--Astronomy: Chronometer--Mariner's compass--
Scientific travellers--New materials of manufactures--
India-rubber--Gutta-percha--Palm-oil--Geology--Inventions
that diminish risk--Science raising up new employments--
Electricity--Galvanism--Sun-light--Mental labourers--
Enlightened public sentiment 295

CHAPTER XXI.

Invention of printing--Effects of that art--A daily
newspaper--Provincial newspapers--News-writing of former
periods--Changes in the character of newspapers--Steam
conveyance--Electric telegraph--Organization of a London
newspaper-office--The printing-machine--The
paper-machine--Bookbinding--Paper-duty 323

CHAPTER XXII.

Power of skill--Cheap production--Population and
production--Partial and temporary evils--Intelligent
labour--Division of labour--General knowledge--'The Lowell
Offering'--Union of forces 344

CHAPTER XXIII.

Accumulation--Productive and unproductive consumption--Use of
capital--Credit--Security of property--Production applied to
the satisfaction of common wants--Increase of
comforts--Relations of capitalist and labourer 361

CHAPTER XXIV.

Natural law of wages--State-laws regulating wages--Enactments
regulating consumption--The labour-fund and the
want-fund--Ratio of capital to population--State of industry
at the end of the seventeenth century--Rise of
manufactures--Wages and prices--Turning over capital 381

CHAPTER XXV.

What political economy teaches--Skilled labour and trusted
labour--Competition of unskilled labour--Competition of
uncapitalled labour--Itinerant traders--The contrast of
organized industry--Factory-labour and garret-labour--
Communism--Proposals for state organization of labour--
Social Publishing Establishment--Practical co-operation 398

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

1. African Hut 12
2. Robinson Crusoe (from a design by Stothard) 20
3. Dying lion 25
4. Penn's treaty with the Indians 33
5. Pine-marten 37
6. Treasure-finding 45
7. Brindley 63
8. The hock-cart 66
9. Adam Smith 71
10. "Under his own vine" 100
11. Centre of gravity 113
12. A tool made a machine 115
13. Spinning a rope 118
14. Analysis of a cable 119
15. Mill at Guy's Cliff 122
16. Oriental plough 126
17. Clod-crusher 132
18. Scarifier 133
19. Horse-hoe 134
20. Moveable steam-engine and thrashing-machine 135
21. Thrashing-machine with horse-power 136
22. Draining-tile machine 137
23. The first iron bridge, Colebrook Dale 147
24. Rolling bar-iron 149
25. File-cutters 152
26. Cupids forging arrows (from Albani) 156
27. Telford 162
28. Modern Syrian cart 165
29. Brindley's aqueduct over the Irwell 168
30. Railway locomotive 171
31. Reindeer 173
32. Beaver 174
33. Pyramid and sphinx 176
34. Boulton 179
35. Carpenters and their tools (from an old German woodcut) 181
36. Egyptian labour in the brick-field 183
37. Scotch carpet-loom 188
38. Sheet-glass making 192
39. Potter's wheel of modern Egypt 195
40. Moulds for porcelain, and casts 196
41. Wedgwood 197
42. Ancient shadoof 202
43. Conduit in Westcheap 206
44. Old water-carrier of London 208
45. Plug in a frost 209
46. London street-lights, 1760 211
47. Cotton; showing a pod bursting 214
48. Distaff 216
49. A Hindoo woman spinning cotton 217
50. Sir Richard Arkwright 219
51. Arkwright's original spinning-machine 220
52. Samuel Crompton, inventor of the spinning-mule 222
53. Hindoo weaver at work in a field 228
54. Dr. Cartwright, inventor of the power-loom 229
55. Flemish weaver (from a print of 1568) 230
56. Mechanism of power-loom 242
57. Jacquard cards 243
58. Hanks of silk 247
59. Egyptian winding-reel 247
60. Silk-winding machine 248
61. Indigo-harvest In the West Indies 252
62. Gloves for the great 260
63. Cobbler's stall, about 1760 261
64. Men'seg, or Egyptian embroidery frame 263
65. Bobbin-net meshes 264
66. Essential parts of the bobbin-net machine 265
67. Stamping the eye of a needle 269
68. Stamping, pressing, and punching buttons.--Elliott's
factory 271
69. Envelope-making machine 275
70. Compositor at work 277
71. Machine for fixing tags to laces 278
72. Inclined plane for separating shot 279
73. Candle-dipping machine 281
74. Tiring a wheel 281
75. Harrison 298
76. Greenwich Observatory 299
77. Linnaeus in his Lapland dress 302
78. Elaeis Guineensis, and Cocoa butyracea, yielding palm-oil 306
79. Franklin medal 310
80. Newton 313
81. Ambrose Pare 314
82. Sir Walter Scott (from Sir F. Chantrey's bust) 319
83. Statue of Bacon 322
84. Old hand-gunner 330
85. Carrier-pigeon 332
86. Cowper's printing-machine 335
87. The 'Times' printing-machine 338
88. Papyrus 343
89. Medal to Locke 380
90. Vision of Henry I 381
91. Irish mud cabin 393
92. "Feed the hungry" (from Flaxman) 401
93. Costermonger 407
94. "Pots to mend" 411
95. Statue of Watt 424

* * * * *

THE PRESENT EDITION IS ILLUSTRATED WITH TWENTY-FOUR
ADDITIONAL CUTS, ON SEPARATE PAGES, OF MANUFACTURING
PROCESSES, &C., WHICH ARE TO BE PLACED AS FOLLOWS:--

Bursting of Dykes. The forces of Nature overcoming the
industry of Man 99
Making ropes by machinery 119
Steam-boiler making 145
Shear and tilt-hammers--Steel Manufacture 151
Ancient lead-mine in Derbyshire 154
Coal-railway 157
Locomotive-engine factory 170
Stone quarry, Portland 177
Timber rafts of the Tyrol 178
Glass-cutting 191
Plate-glass factory 192
The English potter 194
Mill-room of a pottery 196
Cotton mule-spinning 222
Power-looms 229
Jacquard power-looms 241
Interior of Marshall's flax-mill, Leeds 250
Calico-printing by cylinder 252
Bleaching-ground at Glasgow 254
Electro-gilding 311
Pianoforte manufactory 320
Bas-relief on Gutenberg's monument 323
Paper-making by hand 341
Processes of bookbinding 342

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

INTRODUCTION.

It has been wisely said by a French writer who has scattered abroad
sound and foolish opinions with a pretty equal hand, that "it requires a
great deal of philosophy to observe once what is seen every day."[1] To
no branch of human knowledge can this remark be more fitly applied than
to that which relates to the commonest things of the world,--namely, the
Wants of Man and the Means of satisfying them.

Man, it has been maintained, has greater natural wants and fewer natural
means than any other animal. That his wants are greater, even in the
rudest state of the species, than the wants of any quadruped--to say
nothing of animals lower in the scale of being--there can be no doubt.
But that his natural means are feebler and fewer we cannot believe; for
the exercise of his understanding, in a variety of ways which no brute
intelligence can reach, is the greatest of his natural means,--and that
power enables him to subdue all things to his use.

It is the almost unlimited extent of the wants of man in the social
state, and the consequent multiplicity and complexity of his means--both
his wants and means proceeding from the range of his mental
faculties--which have rendered it so difficult to observe and explain
the laws which govern the production, distribution, and consumption of
those articles of utility, essential to the subsistence and comfort of
the human race, which we call Wealth. It is not more than a century ago
that even those who had "a great deal of philosophy" first began to
apply themselves to observe "what is seen every day" exercising, in the
course of human industry, the greatest influence on the condition and
character of individuals and nations. The properties of light were
ascertained by Sir Isaac Newton long before men were agreed upon the
circumstances which determined the production of a loaf of bread; and
the return of a comet after an interval of seventy-six years was pretty
accurately foretold by Dr. Halley, when legislators were in almost
complete ignorance of the principle which regularly brought as many
cabbages to Covent Garden as there were purchasers to demand them.

Since those days immense efforts have been made to determine the great
circumstances of our social condition, which have such unbounded
influence on the welfare of mankind. But, unhappily for themselves and
for others, many of every nation still remain in comparative darkness,
with regard even to the elementary truths which the labours of some of
the most acute and benevolent inquirers that the world has produced have
succeeded in establishing. Something of this defect may be attributed to
the fact that subjects of this nature are considered difficult of
comprehension. Even the best educated sometimes shrink from the
examination of questions of political economy when presented in their
scientific form. Charles Fox said that he could not understand Adam
Smith. And yet Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' is essentially an
amusing book in many parts. Matters affecting the interests of every
human being, and involving a variety of facts having relation to the
condition of mankind in every age and country, are not necessarily, as
has been supposed, dry and difficult to understand, and consequently
only to be approached by systematic students. In this belief it is
proposed in this volume to exhibit the natural operation of the
principles by which Industry, as well as every other exchangeable
property, must be governed. The writer has to apply all the universal
laws which regulate the exchanges of mankind to the direction of that
exchange which the great bulk of the people are most interested in
carrying forward rapidly, certainly, and uninterruptedly--the exchange
of Labour for Capital. But he has also to regard those laws with
especial reference to that mighty Power which has become so absorbing
and controlling in our own day--the Power of Science applied to the
Arts, or, in other words, Knowledge. It is not too much to assert that,
henceforth, Labour must take its absolute direction from that Power. It
is now the great instrument of Capital. In time it will be understood
universally to be the best partner of Labour. "Wherever education and an
unrestricted press are allowed full scope to exercise their united
influence, progress and improvement are the certain results, and among
the many benefits which arise from their joint co-operation may be
ranked most prominently the value which they teach men to place upon
intelligent contrivance; the readiness with which they cause new
improvements to be received; and the impulse which they thus unavoidably
give to that inventive spirit which is gradually emancipating man from
the rude forms of labour, and making what were regarded as the luxuries
of one age to be looked upon in the next as the ordinary and necessary
conditions of human existence."[2]

The present volume is founded upon two little works which the author
wrote more than twenty years ago, and which were widely circulated. One
of these books, 'The Results of Machinery,' was published, in connexion
with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, at a period of
great national alarm, when a blind rage against a power supposed to
interfere with the claims of labour was generally prevalent, and led, in
the southern agricultural districts especially, to many acts of daring
violence. Happily that spirit is passed away. The spirit of knowledge
has arisen; and we are told now, by an unquestionable authority, that
labourers themselves begin to regard the tedious work of the flail as
too irksome[3]--the same class that in 1830 broke the thrashing
machines. In remodelling that portion of the present volume it is
unnecessary to deprecate the evils of hostility to machinery; but rather
to look forward to its more complete union with skilled labour as the
triumph of the productive forces of modern society. In the other little
book upon which this volume is founded, 'Capital and Labour,' the
general subject of the _Production_ of wealth was popularly treated, and
the argument is here carried forward. But in the present work it will be
the further endeavour of the writer not to overlook the general
relations of Capital and Labour in the _Distribution_ of wealth. As the
mistakes about Production have yielded, in a great degree, to improved
education, so may those which belong to Distribution also yield to the
progress of Knowledge. These are not mistakes which are confined to one
class, and that the most numerous. The freedom of Industry has as much
claim to be regarded as the security of Capital. We have distinct
evidence that in another country these principles are better understood.

"The results which have been obtained in the United
States, by the application of machinery wherever it has
been practicable to manufactures, are rendered still more
remarkable by the fact that combinations to resist its
introduction there are unheard of. The workmen hail with
satisfaction all mechanical improvements, the importance
and value of which, as releasing them from the drudgery of
unskilled labour, they are enabled by education to
understand and appreciate. With the comparatively
superabundant supply of hands in this country, and
therefore a proportionate difficulty in obtaining
remunerative employment, the working classes have less
sympathy with the progress of invention. Their condition
is a less favourable one than that of their American
brethren for forming a just and unprejudiced estimate of
the influence which the introduction of machinery is
calculated to exercise on their state and prospects. I
cannot resist the conclusion, however, that the different
views taken by our operatives and those of the United
States upon this subject are determined by other and
powerful causes, besides those dependent on the supply of
labour in the two countries. The principles which ought to
regulate the relations between the employer and the
employed seem to be thoroughly understood and appreciated
in the United States; and while the law of limited
liability affords the most ample facilities for the
investment of capital in business, the intelligent and
educated artisan is left equally free to earn all that he
can, by making the best use of his hands, without let or
hindrance by his fellows."[4]

Without attempting to give this volume the formal shape of a treatise on
Political Economy, it is the wish of the author to convey the broad
parts of his subject in a somewhat desultory manner, but one which is
not altogether devoid of logical arrangement. He desires especially to
be understood by _the young_; for upon their right appreciation of the
principles which govern society will depend much of the security and
happiness of our own and the coming time. The danger of our present
period of transition is, that theory should expect too much, and that
practice should do too little, in the amelioration of the condition of
the people.

A great number of woodcuts have been for the first time introduced into
this volume, which illustrate mechanical inventions. But the author begs
distinctly to be understood that his object here is not to _describe_
processes. His notices of them, more or less extended, are simply to
illustrate the course of his argument; and in that way to make the book
more useful, because more attractive, for purposes of education.

[1] J. J. Rousseau.

[2] Special Report of Mr. Joseph Whitworth on the New York Industrial
Exhibition.

[3] Mr. Pusey's Report on Agricultural Implements.

[4] Mr. Whitworth's Special Report.

CHAPTER I.

Feeble resources of civilized man in a desert--Ross Cox,
Peter the Wild Boy, and the Savage of Aveyron--A Moskito
Indian on Juan Fernandez--Conditions necessary for the
production of utility.

Let us suppose a man brought up in civilized life, cast upon a desert
land--without food, without clothes, without fire, without tools. We see
the human being in the very lowest state of helplessness. Most of the
knowledge he had acquired would be worse than useless; for it would not
be applicable in any way to his new position. Let the land upon which he
is thrown produce spontaneous fruits--let it be free from ferocious
animals--let the climate be most genial--still the man would be
exceedingly powerless and wretched. The first condition of his lot, to
enable him to maintain existence at all, would be that he should labour.
He must labour to gather the berries from the trees--he must labour to
obtain water from the rivulets--he must labour to form a garment of
leaves, or of some equally accessible material, to shield his body from
the sun--he must labour to render some cave or hollow tree a secure
place of shelter from the dews of night. There would be no intermission
of the labour necessary to provide a supply of food from hand to mouth,
even in the season when wild fruits were abundant. If this labour, in
the most favourable season, were interrupted for a single day, or at
most for two or three days, by sickness, he would in all probability
perish. But, when the autumn was past, and the wild fruits were gone, he
must prolong existence as some savage tribes are reported to do--by raw
fish and undressed roots. The labour of procuring these would be
infinitely greater than that of climbing trees for fruit. To catch fish
without nets, and scratch up roots with naked hands, is indeed painful
toil. The helplessness of this man's condition would principally be the
effect of one circumstance;--he would possess no accumulation of former
labour by which his present labour might be profitably directed. _The
power of labour would in his case be in its least productive state._ He
would partly justify the assertion that man has the feeblest natural
means of any animal;--because he would be utterly unpossessed of those
means which the reason of man has accumulated around every individual in
the social state.

We asked the reader to _suppose_ a civilized man in the very lowest
state in which the power of labour may be exercised, because there is no
record of any civilized man being for any length of time in such a
state.

Ross Cox, a Hudson's Bay trader, whose adventures were given to the
world some twenty years ago, was in this state for a fortnight; and his
sufferings may furnish some idea of the greater miseries of a
continuance in such a powerless condition. Having fallen asleep in the
woods of the north-west of America, which he had been traversing with a
large party, he missed the traces of his companions. The weather being
very hot, he had left nearly all his clothes with his horse when he
rambled from his friends. He had nothing to defend himself against the
wolves and serpents but a stick; he had nothing of which to make his bed
but long grass and rushes; he had nothing to eat but hips and wild
cherries. The man would doubtless have perished, unless he had met with
some Indians, who knew better how to avail themselves of the spontaneous
productions around them. But this is not an instance of the continuance
of Labour in the lowest state of its power.

The few individuals, also, who have been found exposed in forests, such
as Peter the Wild Boy, and the Savage of Aveyron,--who were discovered,
the one about a century ago, in Germany, the other about forty years
since, in France,--differed from the civilized man cast naked upon a
desert shore in this particular--their _wants_ were of the lowest
nature. They were not raised above the desires of the most brutish
animals. They supplied those desires after the fashion of brutes. Peter
was enticed from the woods by the sight of two apples, which the man who
found him displayed. He did not like bread, but he eagerly peeled green
sticks, and chewed the rind. He had, doubtless, subsisted in this way in
the woods. He would not, at first, wear shoes, and delighted to throw
the hat which was given him into the river. He was brought to England,
and lived many years with a farmer in Hertfordshire. During the Scotch
Rebellion, in 1745, he wandered into Norfolk; and having been
apprehended as a suspicious character, was sent to prison. The gaol was
on fire; and Peter was found in a corner, enjoying the warmth of the
flames without any fear. The Savage of Aveyron, in the same manner, had
the lowest desires and the feeblest powers. He could use his hands, for
instance, for no other purpose than to seize upon an object; and his
sense of touch was so defective, that he could not distinguish a raised
surface, such as a carving, from a painting. This circumstance of the
low physical and intellectual powers of these unfortunate persons
prevents us exhibiting them as examples of the state which we asked the
reader to suppose.

Let us advance another step in our view of the power of Labour. Let us
take a man in one respect in the same condition that we supposed--left
upon a desert land, without any direct social aid; but with some help to
his labour by a small Accumulation of former industry. We have instances
on record of this next state.

In the year 1681 a Moskito Indian was left by accident on the island of
Juan Fernandez, in the Pacific Ocean; the English ship in which he was a
sailor having been chased off the coast by some hostile Spanish vessels.
Captain Dampier describes this man's condition in the following words:--

"This Indian lived here alone above three years; and
although he was several times sought after by the
Spaniards, who knew he was left on the island, yet they
could never find him. He was in the woods hunting for
goats, when Captain Watlin drew off his men, and the ship
was under sail before he came back to shore. He had with
him his gun, and a knife, with a small horn of powder, and
a few shot; which being spent, he contrived a way, by
notching his knife, to saw the barrel of his gun into
small pieces, wherewith he made harpoons, lances, hooks,
and a long knife; heating the pieces first in the fire,
which he struck with his gun-flint, and a piece of the
barrel of his gun, which he hardened, having learnt to do
that among the English. The hot pieces of iron he would
hammer out and bend as he pleased with stones, and saw
them with his jagged knife, or grind them to an edge by
long labour, and harden them to a good temper as there was
occasion.[5] With such instruments as he made in that
manner, he got such provisions as the island afforded,
either goats or fish. He told us that at first he was
forced to eat seal, which is very ordinary meat, before he
had made hooks; but afterwards he never killed any seals
but to make lines, cutting their skins into thongs. He had
a little house, or hut, half a mile from the sea, which
was lined with goat's skin; his couch, or barbecu of
sticks, lying along about two feet distance from the
ground, was spread with the same, and was all his bedding.
He had no clothes left, having worn out those he brought
from Watlin's ship, but only a skin about his waist. He
saw our ship the day before we came to an anchor, and did
believe we were English; and therefore killed three goats
in the morning, before we came to an anchor, and dressed
them with cabbage, to treat us when we came ashore."

Here, indeed, is a material alteration in the wealth of a man left on an
uninhabited island. He had a regular supply of goats and fish; he had
the means of cooking this food; he had a house lined with goats' skins,
and bedding of the same; his body was clothed with skins; he had
provisions in abundance to offer, properly cooked, when his old
companions came to him after three years' absence. What gave him this
power to labour profitably?--to maintain existence in tolerable comfort?
Simply, the gun, the knife, and the flint, which he accidentally had
with him when the ship sailed away. The flint and the bit of steel which
he hardened out of the gun-barrel gave him the means of procuring fire;
the gun became the material for making harpoons, lances, and hooks, with
which he could obtain fish and flesh. Till he had these tools, he was
compelled to eat seal's flesh. The instant he possessed the tools, he
could make a selection of what was most agreeable to his taste. It is
almost impossible to imagine a human being with less accumulation about
him. His small stock of powder and shot was soon spent, and he had only
an iron gun-barrel and a knife left, with the means of changing the form
of the gun-barrel by fire. Yet this single accumulation enabled him to
direct his labour, as all labour is directed even in its highest
employment, to the change of form and change of place of the natural
supplies by which he was surrounded. He created nothing; he only gave
his natural supplies a value by his labour. Until he laboured, the
things about him had no value, as far as he was concerned; when he did
obtain them by labour, they instantly acquired a value. He brought the
wild goat from the mountain to his hut in the valley--he changed its
place; he converted its flesh into cooked food, and its skin into a
lining for his bed--he changed its form. Change of form and change of
place are the beginning and end of all human labour; and the Moskito
Indian only employed the same principle for the supply of his wants
which directs the labour of all the producers of civilized life into the
channels of manufactures or commerce.

But the Moskito Indian, far removed as his situation was above the
condition of the man without any accumulation of former labour--that is,
of the man without any capital about him--was only _in the second stage
in which the power of labour can be exercised_, and in which it is
comparatively still weak and powerless. He laboured--he laboured with
accumulation--but he laboured without that other power which gives the
last and highest direction to profitable labour.

Let us state all the conditions necessary for the production of Utility,
or of what is essential to the support, comfort, and pleasure of human
life:--

1. _That there shall be Labour._

The man thrown upon a desert island without accumulation,--the
half-idiot boy who wandered into the German forests at so early an age
that he forgot all the usages of mankind,--were each compelled to
labour, and to labour unceasingly, to maintain existence. Even with an
unbounded command of the spontaneous productions of nature, this
condition is absolute. It applies to the inferior animals as well as to
man. The bee wanders from flower to flower, but it is to labour for the
honey. The sloth hangs upon the branches of a tree, but he labours till
he has devoured all the leaves, and then climbs another tree. The
condition of the support of animation is labour; and if the labour of
all animals were miraculously suspended for a season, very short as
compared with the duration of individual life, the reign of animated
nature upon this globe would be at an end.

[Illustration: African Hut.]

The second condition in the production of utility is,--

2. _That there shall be accumulation of former labour, or Capital._

Without accumulation, as we have seen, the condition of man is the
lowest in the scale of animal existence. The reason is obvious. Man
requires some accumulation to aid his natural powers of labouring; for
he is not provided with instruments of labour to anything like the
perfection in which they exist amongst the inferior animals. He wants
the gnawing teeth, the tearing claws, the sharp bills, the solid
mandibles that enable quadrupeds, and birds, and insects to secure their
food, and to provide shelter in so many ingenious ways, each leading us
to admire and reverence the directing Providence which presides over
such manifold contrivances. He must, therefore, to work profitably,
accumulate instruments of work. But he must do more, even in the
unsocial state, where he is at perfect liberty to direct his industry as
he pleases, uncontrolled by the rights of other men. He must accumulate
stores of covering and of shelter. He must have a hut and a bed of
skins, which are all accumulations, or capital. He must, further, have a
stock of food, which stock, being the most essential for human wants, is
called _provisions_, or things provided. He would require this provision
against the accidents which may occur to his own health, and the
obstacles of weather, which may prevent him from fishing or hunting. The
lowest savages have some stores. Many of the inferior animals display an
equal care to provide for the exigencies of the future. But still, all
such labour is extremely limited. When a man is occupied only in
providing immediately for his own wants--doing everything for himself,
consuming nothing but what he produces himself,--his labour must have a
very narrow range. The supply of the lowest necessities of our nature
can only be attended to, and these must be very ill supplied. The
Moskito Indian had fish, and goats' flesh, and a rude hut, and a girdle
of skins; and his power of obtaining this wealth was insured to him by
the absence of other individuals who would have been his competitors for
what the island spontaneously produced. Had other Indians landed in
numbers on the island, and had each set about procuring everything for
himself, as the active Moskito did, they would have soon approached the
point of starvation; and then each would have begun to plunder from the
other, unless they had found out the principle that would have given
them all plenty. There wanted, then, another power to give the labour of
the Indian a profitable direction, besides that of accumulation. It is a
power which can only exist where man is social, as it is his nature to
be;--and where the principles of civilization are in a certain degree
developed. It is, indeed, the beginning and the end of all civilization.
It is itself civilization, partial or complete. It is the last and the
most important condition in the production of useful commodities,--

3. _That there shall be exchanges._

There can be no exchanges without accumulation--there can be no
accumulation without labour. Exchange is that step beyond the constant
labour and the partial accumulation of the lower animals, which makes
man the lord of the world.

[5] It is difficult to understand how the Indian could convert the iron
gun-barrel into steel, which it appears from Dampier's account that he
did. Steel is produced by a scientific admixture of carbon with iron.
But we assume that the statement is correct, and that a conversion,
partial doubtless, of iron into steel did take place.

CHAPTER II.

Society a system of exchanges--Security of individual
property the principle of exchange--Alexander Selkirk and
Robinson Crusoe--Imperfect appropriation and unprofitable
labour.

Society, both in its rudest form and in its most refined and complicated
relations, is nothing but a system of Exchanges. An exchange is a
transaction in which both the parties who make the exchange are
benefited;--and, consequently, society is a state presenting an
uninterrupted succession of advantages for all its members. Every time
that we make a free exchange we have a greater desire for the thing
which we receive than for the thing which we give;--and the person with
whom we make the exchange has a greater desire for that which we offer
him than for that which he offers us. When one gives his labour for
wages, it is because he has a higher estimation of the wages than of the
profitless ease and freedom of remaining unemployed;--and, on the
contrary, the employer who purchases his labour feels that he shall be
more benefited by the results of that labour than by retaining the
capital which he exchanges for it. In a simple state of society, when
one man exchanges a measure of wheat for the measure of wine which
another man possesses, it is evident that the one has got a greater
store of wheat than he desires to consume himself, and that the other,
in the same way, has got a greater store of wine;--the one exchanges
something to eat for something to drink, and the other something to
drink for something to eat. In a refined state of society, when money
represents the value of the exchanges, the exchange between the
abundance beyond the wants of the possessor of one commodity and of
another is just as real as the barter of wheat for wine. The only
difference is, that the exchange is not so direct, although it is
incomparably more rapid. But, however the system of exchange be carried
on,--whether the value of the things exchanged be determined by barter
or by a price in money,--all the exchangers are benefited, because all
obtain what they want, through the store which they possess of what they
do not want.

It has been well said that "Man might be defined to be an animal that
makes exchanges."[6] There are other animals, indeed, such as bees and
ants amongst insects, and beavers amongst quadrupeds, which to a certain
extent are social; that is, they concur together in the execution of a
common work for a common good: but as to their individual possessions,
each labours to obtain what it desires from sources accessible to all,
or plunders the stores of others. Not one insect or quadruped, however
wonderful may be its approaches to rationality, has the least idea of
making a formal exchange with another. The modes by which the inferior
animals communicate their thoughts are probably not sufficiently
determinate to allow of any such agreement. The very foundation of that
agreement is a complicated principle, which man alone can understand. It
is the Security of individual Property. Immediately that this principle
is established, labour begins to work profitably, for it works with
exchange. If the principle of appropriation were not acted upon at all,
there could be no exchange, and consequently no production. The scanty
bounty of nature might be scrambled for by a few miserable
individuals--and the strongest would obtain the best share; but this
insecurity would necessarily destroy all accumulation. Each would of
course live from hand to mouth, when the means of living were constantly
exposed to the violence of the more powerful. This is the state of the
lowest savages, and as it is an extreme state it is a rare one,--no
security, no exchange, no capital, no labour, no production. Let us
apply the principle to an individual case.

The poet who has attempted to describe the feelings of a man suddenly
cut off from human society, in "Verses supposed to be written by
Alexander Selkirk during his solitary abode in the island of Juan
Fernandez," represents him as saying, "I am monarch of all I survey."[7]
Alexander Selkirk was left upon the same island as the Moskito Indian;
and his adventures there have formed the groundwork of the beautiful
romance of "Robinson Crusoe." The meaning of the poet is, that the
unsocial man had the same right over all the natural productive powers
of the country in which he had taken up his abode, as we each have over
light and air. He was alone; and therefore he exercised an absolute
although a barren sovereignty, over the wild animals by which he was
surrounded--over the land and over the water. He was, in truth, the one
proprietor--the one capitalist, and the one labourer--of the whole
island. His absolute property in the soil, and his perfect freedom of
action, were both dependent upon one condition--that he should remain
alone. If the Moskito Indian, for instance, had remained in the island,
Selkirk's entire sovereignty must have been instantly at an end. Some
more definite principle of appropriation must have been established,
which would have given to Selkirk, as well as to the Moskito Indian, the
right to appropriate distinct parts of the island each to his particular
use. Selkirk, for example, might have agreed to remain on the eastern
coast, while the Indian might have established himself on the western;
and then the fruits, the goats, and the fish of the eastern part would
have been appropriated to Selkirk, as distinctly as the clothes, the
musket, the iron pot, the can, the hatchet, the knife, the mathematical
instruments, and the Bible which he brought on shore.[8] If the Indian's
territory had produced something which Selkirk had not, and if Selkirk's
land had also something which the Indian's had not, they might have
become exchangers. They would have passed into that condition naturally
enough;--imperfectly perhaps, but still as easily as any barbarous
people who do not cultivate the earth, but exchange her spontaneous
products.

The poet goes on to make the solitary man say, "My right there is none
to dispute." The condition of Alexander Selkirk was unquestionably one
of absolute liberty. His rights were not measured by his duties. He had
all rights and no duties. Many writers on the origin of society have
held that man, upon entering into union with his fellow-men, and
submitting, as a necessary consequence of this union, to the restraints
of law and government, sacrifices a portion of his liberty, or natural
power, for the security of that power which remains to him. No such
agreement amongst mankind could ever have possibly taken place; for man
is by his nature, and without any agreement, a social being. He is a
being whose rights are balanced by the uncontrollable force of their
relation to the rights of others. The succour which the infant man
requires from its parents, to an extent, and for a duration, so much
exceeding that required for the nurture of other creatures, is the
natural beginning of the social state, established insensibly and by
degrees. The liberty which the social man is thus compelled by the force
of circumstances to renounce amounts only to a restraint upon his brute
power of doing injury to his fellow-men: and for this sacrifice, in
itself the cause of the highest individual and therefore general good,
he obtains that dominion over every other being, and that control over
the productive forces of nature, which alone can render him the monarch
of all he surveys. The poor sailor, who for four years was cut off from
human aid, and left alone to struggle for the means of supporting
existence, was an exception, and a very rare one, to the condition of
our species all over the world. His absolute rights placed him in the
condition of uncontrolled feebleness; if he had become social, he would
have put on the regulated strength of rights balanced by duties.

Alexander Selkirk was originally left upon the uninhabited island of
Juan Fernandez at his own urgent desire. He was unhappy on board his
ship, in consequence of disputes with his captain; and he resolved to
rush into a state which might probably have separated him for ever from
the rest of mankind. In the belief that he should be so separated, he
devoted all his labour and all his ingenuity to the satisfaction of his
own wants alone. By continual exercise, he was enabled to run down the
wild goat upon the mountains; and by persevering search, he knew where
to find the native roots that would render his goat's flesh palatable.
He never thought, however, of providing any store beyond the supply of
his own personal necessities. He had no motive for that thought; because
there was no human being within his reach with whom he might exchange
that store for other stores. The very instant, however, that the English
ships, which finally gave him back to society, touched upon his
shores,--before he communicated by speech with any of his fellow-men, or
was discovered by them,--he became social. He saw that he must be an
exchanger. Before the boat's crew landed he had killed several goats,
and prepared a meal for his expected guests. He knew that he possessed a
commodity which they did not possess. He had fresh meat, whilst they had
only salt. Of course what he had to offer was acceptable to the sailors;
and he received in exchange protection, and a place amongst them. He
renounced his sovereignty, and became once more a subject. It was better
for him, he thought, to be surrounded with the regulated power of
civilization, than to wield at his own will the uncertain strength of
solitary uncivilization. But, had he chosen to remain upon his island,
as in after-years he regretted he had not done, although a solitary man
he would not have been altogether cut off from the hopes and the duties
of the social state. If he had chosen to remain after that visit from
his fellow-men, he would have said to them, before they had left him
once more alone, "I have hunted for you my goats, I have dug for you my
roots, I have shown you the fountains which issue out of my
rocks;--these are the resources of my dominion: give me in exchange for
them a fresh supply of gunpowder and shot, some of your clothes, some of
the means of repairing these clothes, some of your tools and implements
of cookery, and more of your books to divert my solitary hours." Having
enjoyed the benefits which he had bestowed, they would, as just men,
have paid the debt which they had incurred, and the exchange would have
been completed. Immediately that they had quitted his shores, Selkirk
would have looked at his resources with a new eye. His hut was rudely
fashioned and wretchedly furnished. He had fashioned, and furnished it
as well as he could by his own labour, working upon his own materials.
The visit which he had received from his fellow-men, after he had
abandoned every hope of again looking upon their faces, would have led
him to think that other ships would come, with whose crews he might make
other exchanges,--new clothes, new tools, new materials, received as the
price of his own accumulations. To make the best of his circumstances
when that day should arrive, he must redouble his efforts to increase
his stock of commodities,--some for himself, and some to exchange for
other commodities, if the opportunity for exchange should ever come. He
must therefore transplant his vegetables, so as to be within instant
reach when they should be wanted. He must render his goats domestic,
instead of chasing them upon the hills. He must go forward from the
hunting state, into the pastoral and agricultural.

[Illustration: Robinson Crusoe. (From a design by Stothard.)]

In Defoe's story, Robinson Crusoe is represented as going into this
pastoral and agricultural state. But he had more resources than Selkirk;
and he at last obtained one resource which carried him back, however
incompletely, into the social condition. He acquired a fellow-labourer.
He made a boat by his own unassisted labour; but he could not launch it.
When Friday came, and was henceforth his faithful friend and willing
servant, he could launch his boat. Crusoe ultimately left his island;
for the boat had given him a greater command over his circumstances. But
had he continued there in companionship with Friday, there must have
been such a compact as would have prevented either struggling for the
property which had been created. The course of improvement that we have
imagined for Selkirk supposes that he should continue in his state of
exclusive proprietor--that there should be none to dispute his right. If
other ships had come to his shores--if they had trafficked with him
from time to time--exchanged clothes and household conveniences, and
implements of cultivation, for his goats' flesh and roots--it is
probable that other sailors would in time have desired to partake his
plenty;--that a colony would have been founded--that the island would
have become populous. It is perfectly clear that, whether for exchange
amongst themselves, or for exchange with others, the members of this
colony could not have stirred a step in the cultivation of the land
without appropriating its produce;--and they could not have appropriated
its produce without appropriating the land itself. Cultivation of the
land for a common stock would have gone to the establishment precisely
of the same principle;--they would still have been exchangers amongst
themselves, and the partnership would not have lasted a day, unless each
man's share of what the partnership produced had been rendered perfectly
secure to him. Without security they could not have accumulated--without
accumulations they could not have exchanged--without exchanges they
could not have carried forward their labours with any compensating
productiveness.

Imperfect appropriation--that is, an appropriation which respects
personal wealth, such as the tools and conveniences of an individual,
and even secures to him the fruits of the earth when he has gathered
them, but which has not reached the last step of a division of
land--imperfect appropriation such as this raises up the same invincible
obstacles to the production of utility; because, with this original
defect, there must necessarily be unprofitable labour, small
accumulation, limited exchange. Let us exemplify this by another
individual case.

We have seen, in the instances of the Moskito Indian and of Selkirk, how
little a solitary man can do for himself, although he may have the most
unbounded command of natural supplies--although not an atom of those
natural supplies, whether produced by the earth or the water, is
appropriated by others--when, in fact, he is monarch of all he surveys.
Let us trace the course of another man, advanced in the ability to
subdue all things to his use by association with his fellow-men; but
carrying on that association in the rude and unproductive relations of
savage life;--not desiring to "replenish the earth" by cultivation, but
seeking only to appropriate the means of existence which it has
spontaneously produced;--labouring, indeed, and exchanging, but not
labouring and exchanging in a way that will permit the accumulation of
wealth, and therefore remaining poor and miserable. We are not about to
draw any fanciful picture, but merely to select some facts from a real
narrative.

[6] Dr. Whately's Lectures on Political Economy.

[7] Cowper's Miscellaneous Poems.

[8] These circumstances are recorded in Captain Woodes Rogers' Cruising
Voyage round the World, 1712.

CHAPTER III.

In the year 1828 there came to New York a white man named John Tanner,
who had been thirty years a captive amongst the Indians in the interior
of North America. He was carried off by a band of these people when he
was a little boy, from a settlement on the Ohio river, which was
occupied by his father, who was a clergyman. The boy was brought up in
all the rude habits of the Indians, and became inured to the abiding
miseries and uncertain pleasures of their wandering life. He grew in
time to be a most skilful huntsman, and carried on large dealings with
the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company, in the skins of beavers and
other animals which he and his associates had shot or entrapped. The
history of this man was altogether so curious, that he was induced to
furnish the materials for a complete narrative of his adventures; and,
accordingly, a book, fully descriptive of them, was prepared for the
press by Dr. Edwin James, and printed at New York, in 1830. It is of
course not within the intent of our little work to furnish any regular
abridgment of John Tanner's story; but it is our wish to direct
attention to some few particulars, which appear to us strikingly to
illustrate some of the positions which we desire to enforce, by thus
exhibiting their practical operation.

The country in which this man lived so many years is that immense
territory belonging to the United States, which at that period was
covered by boundless forests which the progress of civilization had not
then cleared away. In this region a number of scattered Indian tribes
maintained a precarious existence by hunting the moose-deer and the
buffalo for their supply of food, and by entrapping the foxes and
martens of the woods and the beavers of the lakes, whose skins they
generally exchanged with the white traders of Europe for articles of
urgent necessity, such as ammunition and guns, traps, axes, and woollen
blankets; but too often for ardent spirits, equally the curse of savage
and of civilized life. The contact of savage man with the outskirts of
civilization perhaps afflicts him with the vices of both states. But the
principle of exchange, imperfectly and irregularly as it operated
amongst the Indians, furnished some excitement to their ingenuity and
their industry. Habits of providence were thus to a certain degree
created; it became necessary to accumulate some capital of the
commodities which could be rendered valuable by their own labour, to
exchange for commodities which their own labour, without exchange, was
utterly unable to procure. The principle of exchange, too, being
recognised amongst them in their dealings with foreigners, the security
of property--without which, as we have shown, that principle cannot
exist at all--was one of the great rules of life amongst themselves. But
still these poor Indians, from the mode which they proposed to
themselves for the attainment of property, which consisted only in
securing what nature had produced, without directing the course of her
productions, were very far removed from the regular attainment of those
blessings which civilized society alone offers. We shall exemplify these
statements by a few details.

[Illustration: Dying Lion]

The country over which these people ranged occupies a surface that may
be roughly described as five or six times as large as all England. They
had the unbounded command of all the natural resources of that country;
and yet their entire numbers did not equal the population of a
moderately sized English county. It may be fairly said that each Indian
required a thousand acres for his maintenance. The supplies of food were
so scanty--a scantiness which would at once have ceased to exist had
there been any cultivation--that if a large number of these Indians
assembled together to co-operate in their hunting expeditions, they were
very soon dispersed by the urgent desire of satisfying hunger. Tanner
says, "We all went to hunt beavers in concert. In hunts of this kind the
proceeds are sometimes equally divided; but in this instance every man
retained what he had killed. In three days I collected as many skins as
I could carry. But in these distant and hasty hunts little meat could be
brought in; and the whole band was soon suffering with hunger. Many of
the hunters, and I among others, for want of food became extremely weak,
and unable to hunt far from home." What an approach is this to the case
of the lower animals; and how forcibly it reminds us of the passage in
Job (c. iv., v. 11), "The fierce lion perisheth for lack of prey."[9] In
another place he says, "I began to be dissatisfied at remaining with
large bands of Indians, as was usual for them, after having remained a
short time in a place, to suffer from hunger." These sufferings were
not, in many cases, of short duration, or of trifling intensity. Tanner
describes one instance of famine in the following words:--"The Indians
gathered around, one after another, until we became a considerable band,
and then we began to suffer from hunger. The weather was very severe,
and our suffering increased. A young woman was the first to die of
hunger. Soon after this, a young man, her brother, was taken with that
kind of delirium or madness which precedes death in such as die of
starvation. In this condition he had left the lodge of his debilitated
and desponding parents; and when, at a late hour in the evening, I
returned from my hunt, they could not tell what had become of him. I
left the camp about the middle of the night, and, following his track, I
found him at some distance, lying dead in the snow."

This worst species of suffering equally existed at particular periods,
whether food was sought for by large or by small parties, by bands or by
individuals. Tanner was travelling with the family of the woman who had
adopted him. He says, "We had now a short season of plenty; but soon
became hungry again. It often happened that for two or three days we had
nothing to eat; then a rabbit or two, or a bird, would afford us a
prospect of protracting the sufferings of hunger a few days longer."
Again he says, "Having subsisted for some time almost entirely on the
inner bark of trees, and particularly of a climbing vine found there,
our strength was much reduced."

The misery which is thus so strikingly described proceeded from the
circumstance that the labour of the Indians did not take a profitable
direction; and that this waste of labour (for unprofitable applications
of labour are the greatest of all wastes) arose from the one fact, that
in certain particulars these Indians laboured without appropriation.
They depended upon the chance productions of nature, without compelling
her to produce; and they did not compel her to produce, because there
was no appropriation of the soil, the most efficient natural instrument
of production. If the Indians had directed the productive powers of the
earth to the growth of corn, instead of to the growth of foxes' skins,
they would have become rich. But they could not have reached this point
without appropriation of the soil. They had learnt the necessity of
appropriating the products of the soil, when they had bestowed labour
upon obtaining them; but the last step towards productiveness was not
taken. The Indians therefore were poor; the European settlers who had
taken this last step were rich.

The imperfect appropriation which existed amongst the Indians,
preventing, as it did, the accumulation of capital, prevented the
application of that skill and knowledge which is preserved and
accumulated by the Division of employment. Tanner describes a poor
fellow who was wounded in the arm by the accidental discharge of a gun.
As there was little surgical skill amongst the community, because no one
could devote himself to the business of surgery, the Indian, as the only
chance of saving his life, resolved to cut off his own arm; "and taking
two knives, the edge of one of which he had hacked into a sort of saw,
he with his right hand and arm cut off his left, and threw it from him
as far as he could." The labour which an individual must go through when
the state of society is so rude that there is scarcely any division of
employment, and consequently scarcely any exchanges, is exhibited in
many passages of Tanner's narrative. We select one. "I had no pukkavi,
or mats for a lodge, and therefore had to build one of poles and long
grass. I dressed more skins, made my own mocassins and leggings, and
those for my children; cut wood and cooked for myself and family, made
my snow-shoes, &c. &c. All the attention and labour I had to bestow
about home sometimes kept me from hunting, and I was occasionally
distressed for want of provisions. I busied myself about my lodge in the
night-time. When it was sufficiently light I would bring wood, and
attend to other things without; at other times I was repairing my
snow-shoes, or my own or my children's clothes. For nearly all the
winter I slept but a very small part of the night."

Tanner was thus obliged to do everything for himself, and consequently
to work at very great disadvantage, because the principle of exchange
was so imperfectly acted upon by the people amongst whom he lived. This
principle of exchange was imperfectly acted upon, because the principle
of appropriation was imperfectly acted upon. The occupation of all, and
of each, was to hunt game, to prepare skins, to sell them to the
traders, to make sugar from the juice of maple-trees, to build huts, and
to sew the skins which they dressed and the blankets which they bought
into rude coverings for their bodies. Every one of them did all of these
things for himself, and of course he did them very imperfectly. The
people were not divided into hunters, and furriers, and dealers, and
sugar-makers, and builders, and tailors. Every man was his own hunter,
furrier, dealer, sugar-maker, builder, and tailor; and consequently,
every man, like Tanner, was so occupied by many things, that want of
food and want of rest were ordinary sufferings. He describes a man who
was so borne down and oppressed by these manifold wants, that, in utter
despair of being able to surmount them, he would lie still till he was
at the point of starvation, replying to those who tried to rouse him to
kill game, that he was too poor and sick to set about it. By describing
himself as poor, he meant to say that he was destitute of all the
necessaries and comforts whose possession would encourage him to add to
the store. He had little capital. The skill which he possessed of
hunting game gave him a certain command over the spontaneous productions
of the forest; but, as his power of hunting depended upon chance
supplies of game, his labour necessarily took so irregular a direction,
and was therefore so unproductive, that he never accumulated sufficient
for his support in times of sickness, or for his comfortable support at
any time. He became, therefore, despairing; and had that perfect apathy,
that indifference to the future, which is the most pitiable evidence of
extreme wretchedness. This man felt his powerless situation more keenly
than his companions; but with all savage tribes there is a want of
steady and persevering exertion, proceeding from the same cause. Severe
labour is succeeded by long fits of idleness, because their labour takes
a chance direction. This is a universal case. Habits of idleness, of
irregularity, of ferocity, are the characteristics of all those who
maintain existence by the pursuit of the unappropriated productions of
nature; while constant application, orderly arrangement of time, and
civility to others, result from systematic industry. The savage and the
poacher are equally the slaves of violent impulses--equally disgusted at
the prospect of patient application. When the support of life depends
upon chance supplies, the reckless spirit of a gambler is sure to take
possession of the whole man; and the misery which results from these
chance supplies produces either dejection or ferocity. The author of
this book used to observe the habits of a class of such persons, who
frequent the Thames at Eton; and he thus described them in verses of his
boyhood:--

What boat is this which creeps so lazily
Up the still stream? How quietly falls the drip
Of the slow paddle! Now it shoots along,
As if that lone man fear'd us. Well I ken
His rough and dangerous trade. He knows each hole
Where the quick-sighted eel delights to swim
When clouds obscure the moon; and there he lays
His traps and gins, and then he sleeps awhile;
But rouses up before the prying dawn
Betrays his course; and out he cautiously glides
To try his doubtful luck. Perchance he finds
Stores that may buy him bread; but oft'ner still
His toil is fruitless, and deject he comes
Home to his emberless hearth, and sits him down,
Idle and starving through the busy day.

Mungo Park describes the wretched condition of the inhabitants of
countries in Africa where small particles of gold are found in the
rivers. Their lives were spent in hunting for the gold to exchange for
useful commodities, instead of raising the commodities themselves; and
they were consequently poor and miserable, listless and unsteady. Their
fitful industry had too much of chance mixed up with it to afford a
certain and general profit. The accounts which of late years we have
received from the gold-diggings of California and Australia exhibit the
same suffering from the same cause. The natives of Cape de la Hogue, in
Normandy, were the most wretched and ferocious people in all France,
because they depended principally for support on the wrecks that were
frequent on their coasts. When there were no tempests, they made an easy
transition from the character of wreckers to that of robbers. A
benefactor of his species taught these unhappy people to collect a
marine plant to make potash. They immediately became profitable
labourers and exchangers; they obtained a property in the general
intelligence of civilized life; the capital of society raised them from
misery to wealth, from being destroyers to being producers.

The Indians, as we thus see, were poor and wretched, because they had no
appropriation beyond articles of domestic use; because they had no
property in land, and consequently no cultivation. Yet even they were
not insensible to the importance of the principle, for the preservation
of the few advantages that belonged to their course of life. Tanner
says, "I have often known a hunter leave his traps for many days in the
woods, without visiting them, or feeling any anxiety about their
safety." The Indians even carried the principle of appropriation almost
to a division of land; for each tribe, and sometimes each individual,
had an allotted hunting-ground--imperfectly appropriated, indeed, by the
first comer, and often contested with violence by other hunters, but
still showing that they approached the limit which divides the savage
from the civilized state, and that, if cultivation were introduced
amongst them, there would be a division of land, as a matter of
necessity. The security of individual property is the foundation of all
social improvement. It is impossible to speak of the productive power of
labour in the civilized state, without viewing it in connexion with that
great principle of society which considers all capital as appropriated.

When 'Capital and Labour' was written twenty years ago, the Indian
tribes who were abiding in the territory of the United States were
principally in the condition which has been described by Tanner. The
want of resources in the country of the Indians was so manifest, that,
when commissioners from the government of the United States, in 1802,
gathered together the chiefs of the various tribes of the Creek Indians
in their own country, to propose to them a plan for their civilization,
it became necessary to provide for the support of the people so
assembled by conveying food into the forests from the stores of the
American towns. The Indians have now vanished from their old
hunting-grounds. Where they so recently maintained a precarious
existence, there are populous cities, navigable rivers, roads, railways.
The clink of the hammer is heard in the forge, and the rush of the
stream from the mill-dam tells of agriculture and commerce. But even the
Indians themselves have become labourers. They have been removed to a
large tract of country, far away from the settled parts of the United
States, and have been raised into the dignity of cultivators. The
Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Choctaws, with many smaller tribes, now
breed cattle instead of hunting martens. They have houses in the place
of huts; they have schools and churches. Instead of being extirpated by
famine or the sword, they have been adopted into the great family of
civilized man.

[Illustration: Penn's Treaty with the Indians.]

But this wise and humane arrangement of the United States has not wholly
removed the Indians from the wide regions of North America. In the
Hudson's Bay territories the life which Tanner described still goes
forward. The wants of civilized society--the desire to possess the
earth--have transported the Indians from the banks of the Ohio to the
lands watered by the Arkansas. The opposite principle has retained them
on the shores of Hudson's Bay. They are wanted there as hunters, and are
not encouraged as cultivators. They are kept out of the pale of
civilization, and not received within it. The rude industry of the
Hudson's Bay Indians is stimulated by the luxury of Europe into an
employ which would cease to exist if the people became civilized. If
agriculture were introduced amongst them--if they were to grow corn and
keep domestic animals--they would cease to be hunters of foxes and
martens, because their wants would be much better supplied by other
modes of labour, involving less suffering and less uncertainty. As it
is, the traders, who want skins, do not think of giving the Indians
tools to work the ground, and seeds to put in it, and cows and sheep to
breed other cows and sheep. They avail themselves of the uncivilized
state of these poor tribes, to render them the principal agents in the
manufacture of fur, to supply the luxuries of another hemisphere. But
still the exchange which the hunters carry on with the European traders,
imperfect as it is in all cases, and unjust as it is in many, is better
for the Indians than no exchange; although we fear that ardent spirits
take away from the Indians the greater number of the advantages which
would otherwise remain with them as exchangers. If the Indians had no
skins to give to Europe, Europe would have no blankets and ammunition to
give to them. They would obtain their food and clothing by the use of
the bow alone. They would live entirely from hand to mouth. They would
have no motive for accumulation, because there would be no exchanges;
and they would consequently be even poorer and more helpless than they
are now as exchangers of skins. They are suffering from the effects of
small accumulations and imperfect exchange; but these are far better
than no accumulation and no exchange. If the course of their industry
were to be changed by perfect appropriation--if they were consequently
to become cultivators and manufacturers, instead of wanderers in the
woods to hunt for wild and noxious animals--they would, in the course of
years, have abundance of profitable labour, because they would have
abundance of capital. This is the better lot of the tribes with whom the
government of the United States has made a far nobler treaty than Penn
made with his Indians. As it is, their accumulations are so small, that
they cannot proceed with their own uncertain labour of hunting without
an advance of capital on the part of the traders; and thus, even in
the rude tradings of these poor Indians, credit, that complicated
instrument of commercial exchange, operates upon the direction of their
labour. Of course credit would not exist at all without appropriation.
Their rights of property are perfect as far as they go; but they are not
carried far enough to direct their labour into channels which would
ensure sufficient production for the labourers. Their labour is
unproductive because they have small accumulations;--their accumulations
are small because they have imperfect exchange;--their exchange is
imperfect because they have limited appropriation. We may illustrate
this state of imperfect production by another passage from Tanner's
story:--

"The Hudson's Bay Company had now no post in that part of the
country, and the Indians were soon made conscious of the advantage
which had formerly resulted to them from the competition between
rival trading companies. Mr. Wells, at the commencement of winter,
called us all together, gave the Indians a ten-gallon keg of rum
and some tobacco, telling them at the same time he would not
credit one of them the value of a single needle. When they brought
skins he would buy them, and give in exchange such articles as
were necessary for their comfort and subsistence during the
winter. I was not with the Indians when this talk was held. When
it was reported to me, and a share of the presents offered me, I
not only refused to accept anything, but reproached the Indians
for their pusillanimity in submitting to such terms. They had been
accustomed for many years to receive credits in the fall; they
were now entirely destitute not of clothing merely, but of
ammunition, and many of them of guns and traps. How were they,
without the accustomed aid from the traders, to subsist themselves
and their families during the ensuing winter? A few days
afterwards I went to Mr. Wells, and told him that I was poor, with
a large family to support by my own exertions; and that I must
unavoidably suffer, and perhaps perish, unless he would give me
such a credit as I had always in the fall been accustomed to
receive. He would not listen to my representation, and told me
roughly to be gone from his house. I then took eight silver
beavers, such as are worn by the women as ornaments on their
dress, and which I had purchased the year before at just twice the
price that was commonly given for a capote;[10] I laid them before
him on the table, and asked him to give me a capote for them, or
retain them as a pledge for the payment of the price of the
garment, as soon as I could procure the peltries.[11] He took up
the ornaments, threw them in my face, and told me never to come
inside of his house again. The cold weather of the winter had not
yet set in, and I went immediately to my hunting-ground, killed a
number of moose, and set my wife to make the skins into such
garments as were best adapted to the winter season, and which I
now saw we should be compelled to substitute for the blankets and
woollen clothes we had been accustomed to receive from the
traders."

This incident at once shows us that the great blessing of the civilized
state is its increase of the powers of production. Here we see the
Indians, surrounded on all sides by wild animals whose skins might be
made into garments, reduced to the extremity of distress because the
traders refused to advance them blankets and other necessaries, to be
used during the months when they were employed in catching the animals
from which they might obtain the skins. It is easy to see that the
Indians were a long way removed from the power of making blankets
themselves. Before they could reach this point, their forests must have
been converted into pasture-grounds;--they must have raised flocks of
sheep, and learnt all the various complicated arts, and possessed all
the ingenious machinery, for converting wool into cloth. By their
exchange of furs for blankets, they obtained a share in the
productiveness of civilization;--they obtained comfortable clothing with
much less labour than they could have made it out of the furs. If Tanner
had not considered the capote which he desired to obtain from the
traders, better, and less costly, than the garment of moose-skins, he
would not have carried on any exchange of the two articles with the
traders. The skins of martens and foxes were only valuable to the
Indians, without exchange, for the purpose of sewing together to make
covering. They had a different value in Europe as articles of luxury;
and therefore the Indians by exchange obtained a greater plenty of
superior clothing than if they had used the skins themselves. But the
very nature of the trade, depending upon chance supplies, rendered it
impossible that they should accumulate. They had such pressing need of
ammunition, traps, and blankets, that the produce of the labour of one
hunting season was not more than sufficient to procure the commodities
which they required to consume in the same season. But supposing the
Indians could have bred foxes and martens and beavers, as we breed
rabbits, for the supply of the European demand for fur, doubtless they
would have then advanced many steps in the character of producers. The
thing is perhaps impossible; but were it possible, and were the Indians
to have practised it, they would immediately have become capitalists, to
an extent that would have soon rendered them independent of the credit
of the traders. They must, however, have previously established a more
perfect appropriation. Each must have enclosed his own hunting-ground;
and each must have raised some food for the maintenance of his own stock
of beavers, foxes, and martens. It would be easier, doubtless, to raise
the food for themselves, and ultimately to exchange corn for clothing,
instead of furs for clothing. When this happens--and it will happen
sooner or later, unless the remnant of the hunting Indians are
extirpated by their poverty, which proceeds from their imperfect
production--Europe must go without the brilliant variety of skins which
we procure at the cost of so much labour, accompanied with so much
wretchedness, because the labour is so unproductive to the labourers.
When the ladies of London and Paris are compelled to wear boas of
rabbits instead of sables, and when the hair of the beaver ceases to be
employed in the manufacture of our hats, the wooded regions of Hudson's
Bay will have been cleared--the fur-bearing animals will have
perished--corn will be growing in the forest and the marsh--the
inhabitants will be building houses instead of trapping foxes;--there
will be appropriation and capital, profitable labour and comfort. Three
hundred thousand mink and marten-skins will no longer be sent from those
shores to London in one year; but Liverpool may send to those shores
woven cottons and worsteds, pottery and tools, in exchange for products
whose cultivation will have exterminated the minks and martens.

[Illustration: Pine-Marten.]

[9] The authorized version has _old_; the more correct translation is
_fierce_.

[10] A sort of great-coat.

[11] Skins.

CHAPTER IV.

The Prodigal--Advantages of the poorest man in civilized
life over the richest savage--Savings-banks, deposits, and
interest--Progress of accumulation--Insecurity of capital,
its causes and results--Property, its
constituents--Accumulation of capital.

There is an account in Foster's Essays of a man who, having by a short
career of boundless extravagance dissipated every shilling of a large
estate which he inherited from his fathers, obtained possession again of
the whole property by a course which the writer well describes as a
singular illustration of decision of character. The unfortunate
prodigal, driven forth from the home of his early years by his own
imprudence, and reduced to absolute want, wandered about for some time
in a state of almost unconscious despair, meditating self-destruction,
till he at last sat down upon a hill which overlooked the fertile fields
that he once called his own. "He remained," says the narrative, "fixed
in thought a number of hours, at the end of which he sprang from the
ground with a vehement exulting emotion. He had formed his resolution,
which was, that all these estates should be his again; he had formed his
plan, too, which he instantly began to execute." We shall show, by and
by, how this plan worked in detail;--it will be sufficient, just now, to
examine the principles upon which it was founded. He looked to no freak
of fortune to throw into his lap by chance what he had cast from him by
wilfulness. He neither trusted to inherit those lands from their present
possessor by his favour, nor to wring them from him by a course of law.
He was not rash and foolish enough to dream of obtaining again by force
those possessions which he had exchanged for vain superfluities. But he
resolved to become once more their master by the operation of the only
principle which could give them to him in a civilized society. He
resolved to obtain them again by the same agency through which he had
lost them--by exchange. But what had he to exchange? His capital was
gone, even to the uttermost farthing; he must labour to obtain new
capital. With a courage worthy of imitation he resolved to accept the
very first work that should be offered to him, and, however low the
wages of that work, to spend only a part of those wages, leaving
something for a store. The day that he made this resolution he carried
it into execution. He found some service to be performed--irksome,
doubtless, and in many eyes degrading. But he had a purpose which made
every occupation appear honourable, as every occupation truly is that is
productive of utility. Incessant labour and scrupulous parsimony soon
accumulated for him a capital; and the store, gathered together with
such energy, was a rapidly increasing one. In no very great number of
years the once destitute labourer was again a rich proprietor. He had
earned again all that he had lost. The lands of his fathers were again
his. He had accomplished his plan.

A man so circumstanced--one who possesses no capital, and is only master
of his own natural powers--if suddenly thrown down from a condition of
ease, must look upon the world, at the first view, with deep
apprehension. He sees everything around him appropriated. He is in the
very opposite condition of Alexander Selkirk, when he is made to exclaim
"I am monarch of all I survey." Instead of feeling that his "right there
is none to dispute," he knows that every blade of corn that covers the
fields, every animal that grazes in the pastures, is equally numbered as
the property of some individual owner, and can only pass into his
possession by exchange. In the towns it is the same as in the country.
The dealer in bread and in clothes,--the victualler from whom he would
ask a cup of beer and a night's lodging,--will give him nothing,
although they will exchange everything. He cannot exist, except as a
beggar, unless he puts himself in the condition to become an exchanger.

But still, with all these apparent difficulties, his prospects of
subsisting, and of subsisting comfortably, are far greater than in any
other situation in which he must labour to live. As we have already
seen, the condition of by far the greater number of the millions that
constitute the exchangers of civilized society is greatly superior to
that of the few thousands who exist upon the precarious supplies of the
unappropriated productions of nature in the savage life. Although an
exchange must always be made--although in very few cases "the fowl and
the brute" offer themselves to the wayfaring man for his daily
food--although no herbs worth the gathering can be found for the support
of life in the few uncultivated parts of a highly cultivated
country--the aggregate riches are so abundant, and the facilities which
exist for exchanging capital for labour are therefore so manifold, that
the poorest man in a state of civilization has a much greater certainty
of supplying all his wants, and of supplying them with considerably more
ease, than the richest man in a state of uncivilization. The principle
upon which he has to rely is, that in a highly civilized country there
is large production. There is large production because there is
profitable labour;--there is profitable labour because there is large
accumulation;--there is large accumulation because there is unlimited
exchange;--there is unlimited exchange because there is universal
appropriation. John Tanner was accounted a rich man by the
Indians--doubtless because he was more industrious than the greater
number of them; but we have seen what privations he often suffered. He
suffered privations because there was no capital, no accumulation of the
products of labour, in the country in which he lived. Where such a store
exists, the poorest man has a tolerable certainty that he may obtain his
share of it as an exchanger; and the greater the store the greater the
certainty that his labour, or power of adding to the store, will obtain
a full proportion of what previous labour has gathered together.

In 1853 the amount of stock vested to the account of depositors in
savings-banks in the United Kingdom was 34,546,434_l._ Since the
establishment of savings-banks, 68,885,283_l._ had been so invested; and
the gross amount of interest paid to the depositors had been
25,733,771_l._ This large capital, which had so fructified as to produce
more than twenty-five millions as interest, was an accumulation, penny
by penny, shilling by shilling, and pound by pound, of the savings of
that class of persons who, in every country, have the greatest
difficulty in accumulating. Habitual efforts of self-denial, and a rigid
determination to postpone temporary gratification to permanent good,
could alone have enabled these accumulators to retain so much of what
they had produced beyond the amount of what they consumed.

The capital sum of more than thirty-four millions now belonging to the
depositors in 575 savings-banks, represents as many products of industry
as could be bought by that sum. It is a capital which remains for the
encouragement of _productive_ consumption; that is, it is now applied as
a fund for setting others to produce,--to enable them to consume while
they produce,--and in like manner to accumulate some part of their
productions beyond what they consume. The millions of interest which the
depositors have received is the price paid for the use of the capital by
others who require its employment. The whole amount of our national
riches--the capital of this and of every other country--has been formed
by the same slow but certain process of individual savings, and the
accumulations of savings, stimulating new industry, and yielding new
accumulations.

The consumption of any production is the destruction of its value. The
production was created by industry to administer to individual wants, to
be consumed, to be destroyed. When a thing capable of being consumed is
produced, a value is created; when it is consumed, that value is
destroyed. The general mass of riches then remains the same as it was
before that production took place. If the power to produce, and the
disposition to consume, were equal and constant, there could be no
saving, no accumulation, no capital. If mankind, by their intelligence,
their skill, their division of employments, their union of forces, had
not put themselves in a condition to produce more than is consumed while
the great body of industrious undertakings is in progress, society would
have been stationary,--civilization could never have advanced.

It may assist us in making the value of capital more clear, if we take a
rapid view of the most obvious features of the accumulation of a highly
civilized country.

The first operation in a newly settled country is what is termed to
clear it. Look at a civilized country, such as England. It _is_ cleared.
The encumbering woods are cut down, the unhealthy marshes are drained.
The noxious animals which were once the principal inhabitants of the
land are exterminated; and their place is supplied with useful
creatures, bred, nourished, and domesticated by human art, and
multiplied to an extent exactly proportioned to the wants of the
population. Forests remain for the produce of timber, but they are
confined within the limits of their utility;--mountains "where the
nibbling flocks do stray," have ceased to be barriers between nations
and districts. Every vegetable that the diligence of man has been able
to transplant from the most distant regions is raised for food. The
fields are producing a provision for the coming year; while the stock
for immediate consumption is ample, and the laws of demand and supply
are so perfectly in action, and the facilities of communication with
every region so unimpeded, that scarcity seldom occurs, and famine
never. Rivers have been narrowed to bounds which limit their
inundations, and they have been made navigable wherever their navigation
could be profitable. The country is covered with roads, with canals, and
now, more especially, with railroads, which render distant provinces as
near to each other for commercial purposes as neighbouring villages in
less advanced countries. Science has created the electric telegraph, by
which prices are equalized through every district, by an instant
communication between producers and consumers. Houses, all possessing
some comforts which were unknown even to the rich a few centuries ago,
cover the land, in scattered farm-houses and mansions, in villages, in
towns, in cities, in capitals. These houses are filled with an almost
inconceivable number of conveniences and luxuries--furniture, glass,
porcelain, plate, linen, clothes, books, pictures. In the stores of the
merchants and traders the resources of human ingenuity are displayed in
every variety of substances and forms that can exhibit the multitude of
civilized wants; and in the manufactories are seen the wonderful
adaptations of science for satisfying those wants at the cheapest cost.
The people who inhabit such a civilized land have not only the readiest
communication with each other by the means of roads and canals, but can
trade by the agency of ships with all parts of the world. To carry on
their intercourse amongst themselves they speak one common language,
reduced to certain rules, and not broken into an embarrassing variety of
unintelligible dialects. Their written communications are convoyed to
the obscurest corners of their own country, and even to the most remote
lands, with prompt and unfailing regularity, and now with a cheapness
which makes the poorest and the richest equal in their power to connect
the distant with their thoughts by mutual correspondence. Whatever is
transacted in such a populous hive, the knowledge of which can afford
profit or amusement to the community, is recorded with a rapidity which
is not more astonishing than the general accuracy of the record. What is
more important, the discoveries of science, the elegancies of
literature, and all that can advance the general intelligence, are
preserved and diffused with the utmost ease, expedition, and security,
so that the public stock of knowledge is constantly increasing. Lastly,
the general well-being of all is sustained by laws--sometimes indeed
imperfectly devised and expensively administered, but on the whole of
infinite value to every member of the community; and the property of all
is defended from external invasion and from internal anarchy by the
power of government, which will be respected only in proportion as it
advances the general good of the humblest of its subjects, by securing
their capital from plunder and defending their industry from oppression.

This capital is ready to be won by the power of every man capable of
work. But he must exercise this power in complete subjection to the
natural laws by which every exchange of society is regulated. These laws
sometimes prevent labour being instantly exchanged with capital, for an
exchange necessarily requires a balance to be preserved between what one
man has to supply and what another man has to demand; but in their
general effect they secure to labour the certainty that there shall be
abundance of capital to exchange with; and that, if prudence and
diligence go together, the labourer may himself become a capitalist, and
even pass out of the condition of a labourer into that of a proprietor,
or one who lives upon accumulated produce. The experience of every day
shows this process going forward--not in a solitary instance, as in that
of the ruined and restored man whose tale we have just told, but in the
case of thriving tradesmen all around us, who were once servants. But if
the labourer or the great body of labourers were to imagine that they
could obtain such a proportion of the capital of a civilized country
except as exchangers, the store would instantly vanish. They might
perhaps divide by force the crops in barns and the clothes in
warehouses--but there would be no more crops or clothes. The principle
upon which all accumulation depends, that of security of property, being
destroyed, the accumulation would be destroyed. Whatever tends to make
the state of society insecure, tends to prevent the employment of
capital. In despotic countries, that insecurity is produced by the
tyranny of one. In other countries, where the people, having been
misgoverned, are badly educated, that insecurity is produced by the
tyranny of many. In either case, the bulk of the people themselves are
the first to suffer, whether by the outrages of a tyrant, or by their
own outrages. They prevent labour, by driving away to other channels the
funds which support labour. In some eastern countries, where, when a man
becomes rich, his property is seized upon by the one tyrant, nobody
dares to avow that he has any property. Capital is not employed; it is
hidden: and the people who have capital live not upon its profits, but
by the diminution of the capital itself. In the very earliest times we
hear of concealed riches. In the book of Job those who "long for death"
are said to "dig for it more than for hid treasures." The tales of the
East are full of allusions to money buried and money dug up. The poor
woodman, in making up his miserable faggot, discovers a trap-door, and
becomes rich. In India, where the rule of Mohammedan princes was usually
one of tyranny, even now the search after treasure goes on. The popular
mind is filled with the old traditions; and so men dream of bags of gold
to be discovered in caves and places of desolation, and they forthwith
dig, till hope is banished, and the real treasure is found in systematic
industry. It was the same in the feudal times in England, when the lord
tyrannized over his vassals, and no property was safe but in the hands
of the strongest. In those times people who had treasure buried it. Who
thinks of burying treasure now in England? In the plays and story-books
which depict the manners of our own early times, we constantly read of
people finding bags of money. We never find bags of money now, except
when a very old hoard, hidden in some time of national trouble, comes to
light. So little time ago as the reign of Charles II. we read of the
Secretary to the Admiralty going down from London to his country-house,
with all his money in his carriage, to bury it in his garden. What
Samuel Pepys records of his doings with his own money, was a natural
consequence of the practices of a previous time. He also chronicles, in
several places of his curious Diary, his laborious searches, day by day,
for 7000_l._ hid in butter firkins in the cellars of the Tower of
London. Why is money not hidden and not sought for now? Because people
have security for the employment of it, and by the employment of it in
creating new produce the nation's stock of capital goes on hourly
increasing. When we read in Blackstone's 'Commentaries on the Laws of
England,' that the concealment of treasure-trove, or found treasure,
from the king, is a misdemeanour punishable by fine and imprisonment,
and that it was formerly a capital offence, we at once see that this is
a law no longer for our time; and we learn from this instance, as from
many others, how the progress of civilization silently repeals laws
which belong to another condition of the people.

[Illustration: Treasure-finding.]

When we look at the nature of the accumulated wealth of society, it is
easy to see that the poorest member of it who dedicates himself to
profitable labour is in a certain sense rich--rich, as compared with the
unproductive and therefore poor individuals of any uncivilized tribe.
The very scaffolding, if we may so express it, of the social structure,
and the moral forces by which that structure was reared, and is upheld,
are to him riches. To be rich is to possess the means of supplying our
wants--to be poor is to be destitute of those means. Riches do not
consist only of money and lands, of stores of food or clothing, of
machines and tools. The particular knowledge of any art--the general
understanding of the laws of nature--the habit from experience of doing
any work in the readiest way--the facility of communicating ideas by
written language--the enjoyment of institutions conceived in the spirit
of social improvement--the use of the general conveniences of civilized
life, such as roads--these advantages, which the poorest man in England
possesses or may possess, constitute individual property. They are means
for the supply of wants, which in themselves are essentially more
valuable for obtaining his full share of what is appropriated, than if
all the productive powers of nature were unappropriated, and if,
consequently, these great elements of civilization did not exist.
Society obtains its almost unlimited command over riches by the increase
and preservation of knowledge, and by the division of employments,
including union of power. In his double capacity of a consumer and a
producer, the humblest man has the full benefit of these means of
wealth--of these great instruments by which the productive power of
labour is carried to its highest point.

But if these common advantages, these public means of society, offering
so many important agents to the individual for the gratification of his
wants, alone are worth more to him than all the precarious power of the
savage state--how incomparably greater are his advantages when we
consider the wonderful accumulations, in the form of private wealth,
which are ready to be exchanged with the labour of all those who are in
a condition to add to the store. It has been truly said by M. Say, a
French economist, "It is a great misfortune to be poor, but it is a much
greater misfortune for the poor man to be surrounded only with other
poor like himself." The reason is obvious. The productive power of
labour can be carried but a very little way without accumulation of
capital. In a highly civilized country, capital is heaped up on every
side by ages of toil and perseverance. A succession, during a long
series of years, of small advantages to individuals unceasingly renewed
and carried forward by the principle of exchanges, has produced this
prodigious amount of the aggregate capital of a country whose
civilization is of ancient date. This accumulation of the means of
existence, and of all that makes existence comfortable, is principally
resulting from the labours of those who have gone before us. It is a
stock which was beyond their own immediate wants, and which was not
extinguished with their lives. It is our capital. It has been produced
by labour alone, physical and mental. It can be kept up only by the same
power which has created it, carried to the highest point of
productiveness by the arrangements of society.

CHAPTER V.

There is an old proverb, that "When two men ride on one horse, one man
must ride behind." Capital and Labour are, as we think, destined to
perform a journey together to the end of time. We have shown how they
proceed on this journey. We have shown that, although Labour is the
parent of all wealth, its struggles for the conversion of the rude
supplies of nature into objects of utility are most feeble in their
effects till they are assisted by accumulation. Before the joint
interests of Labour and Capital were at all understood, they kept
separate; when they only began to be understood, as we shall show, they
were constantly pulling different ways, instead of giving "a long pull,
a strong pull, and a pull altogether;" and even now, when these
interests in many respects are still imperfectly understood, they
occasionally quarrel about the conditions upon which they will continue
to travel in company. In the very outset of the journey, Labour,
doubtless, took the lead. In the dim morning of society Labour was up
and stirring before Capital was awake. Labour did not then ride; he
travelled slowly on foot through very dirty ways. Capital, at length, as
slowly followed after, through the same mire, but at an humble distance
from his parent. But when Capital grew into strength, he saw that there
were quicker and more agreeable modes of travelling for both, than
labour had found out. He procured that fleet and untiring horse
Exchange; and when he proposed to Labour that they should mount
together, he claimed the right, and kept it, for their mutual benefit,
of taking the direction of the horse. For this reason, as it appears to
us, we are called upon to assign to one of the companions, according to
the practice of the old Knights Templars, the privilege of sitting
before the other--holding the reins, indeed, but in all respects having
a community of interests, and an equality of duties, as well as rights,
with his fellow-traveller.

Let us endeavour to advance another step in the illustration of these
positions, by going back to the prodigal who had spent all his
substance. Let us survey him at the moment when he had made the wise,
and in many respects heroic, resolution to pass from the condition of a
consumer into that of a producer. The story says, "The first thing that
drew his attention was a heap of coals shot out of a cart on the
pavement before a house. He offered himself to shovel or wheel them into
the place where they were to be laid, and was employed." Here, then, we
see that the labour of this man was wholly and imperatively directed by
accumulation. It was directed as absolutely by the accumulation of
others as the labour of Dampier's Moskito Indian was directed by his own
accumulation. The Indian could not labour profitably--he could not
obtain fish and goats for his food, instead of seal's flesh--till he had
called into action the power which he possessed in his knife and his
gun-barrel. The prodigal had no accumulation whatever of his own. He had
not even the accumulation of peculiar skill in any mode of labour;--for
a continual process of waste enlarges neither the mental nor physical
faculties, and generally leaves the wretched being who has to pass into
the new condition of a producer as helpless as the weakest child. He had
nothing but the lowest power, of labouring without peculiar knowledge or
skill. He had, however, an intensity and consistency of purpose which
raised this humble power into real strength. He was determined never to
go backward--always to go on. He knew, too, his duties as well as his
rights; and he saw that he must wholly accommodate his power to the
greater power which was in action around him. When he passed into the
condition of a producer, he saw that his powers and rights were wholly
limited and directed by the principles necessary to advance production;
and that his own share of what he assisted in producing must be measured
by the laws which enabled him to produce at all. He found himself in a
position where his labour was absolutely governed by the system of
exchanges. No other system could operate around him, because he was in a
civilized country. Had he been thrown upon a desert land without food
and shelter, his labour must have been instantly and directly applied to
procuring food and shelter. He was equally without food and shelter in a
civilized country. But the system of exchanges being in action, he did
not apply his labour directly to the production of food and lodging for
himself. He added by his labour a new value to a heap of coals; he
enabled another man more readily to acquire the means of warmth; and by
this service, which he exchanged for "a few pence" and "a small gratuity
of meat and drink," he indirectly obtained food and lodging. He
conferred an additional value upon a heap of coals; and that additional
value was represented by the "few pence" and "a small gratuity of meat
and drink." Had the system of exchange been less advanced, that is, had
society been less civilized, he would probably have exchanged his labour
for some object of utility, by another and a ruder mode. He would have
received a portion of the coals as the price of the labour by which he
gave an additional value to the whole heap. But mark the inconvenience
of such a mode of exchange. His first want was food; his next, shelter:
had he earned the coals, he must have carried them about till he had
found some other person ready to exchange food and lodging for coals.
Such an occurrence might have happened, but it would have been a lucky
accident. He could find all persons ready to exchange food and clothes
for money--because money was ready again to exchange for other articles
of utility which they might require, and which they would more readily
obtain by the money than by the food and clothes which our labourer had
received for them. During the course of the unprofitable labour of
waiting till he had found an exchanger who wanted coals, he might have
perished. What then gave him the means of profitable labour, and
furnished him with an article which every one was ready to receive in
exchange for articles of immediate necessity? Capital in two forms. The
heap of coals was capital. The coals represented a very great and
various accumulation of former labour that had been employed in giving
them value. The coals were altogether valueless till labour had been
employed to raise them from the pit, and to convey them to the door of
the man who was about to consume them. But with what various helps had
this labour worked! Mere manual labour could have done little or nothing
with the coals in the pit. Machines had raised them from the pit.
Machines had transported them from the pit to the door of the consumer.
They would have remained buried in the earth but for large accumulations
of knowledge, and large accumulations of pecuniary wealth to set that
knowledge in action by exchanging with it. The heap of coals represented
all this accumulation; and it more immediately represented the
Circulating Capital of consumable articles of utility, which had been
paid in the shape of wages, at every stage of the labour exercised in
raising the coals from the mine, and conveying them to the spot in which
the prodigal found them laid. The coals had almost attained their
highest value by a succession of labour; but one labour was still
wanting to give them the highest value. They were at their lowest value
when they remained unbroken in the coal-pit; they were at their highest
value when they were deposited in the cellar of the consumer. For that
last labour there was circulating capital ready to be exchanged. The man
whose course of production we have been tracing imparted to them this
last value, and for this labour he received a "few pence" and a
"gratuity of meat and drink." These consumable commodities, and the
money which might be exchanged for other consumable commodities, were
circulating capital. They supplied his most pressing wants with
incomparably more readiness and certainty than if he had been turned
loose amongst the unappropriated productions of nature, with unlimited
freedom and absolute rights. In the state in which he was actually
placed his rights were limited by his duties,--but this balance of
rights and duties was the chief instrument in the satisfaction of his
wants. Let us examine the principle a little more in detail.

An exchange was to be carried on between the owner of the coals and the
man who was willing to shovel them into the owner's cellar. The labourer
did not want any distinct portion of the coals, but he wanted some
articles of more urgent necessity in exchange for the new value which he
was ready to bestow upon the coals. The object of each exchanger was,
that labour should be exchanged with capital. That object could not have
been accomplished, or it would have been accomplished slowly,
imperfectly, and therefore unprofitably, unless there had been
interchangeable freedom and security for both exchangers,--for the
exchanger of capital, and the exchanger of labour. The first right of
the labourer was, that his labour should be free;--the first right of
the capitalist was, that his capital should be free. The rights of each
were built upon the security of property. Could this security have been
violated, it might have happened, either that the labourer should have
been compelled to shovel in the coals--or, that the capitalist should
have been compelled to employ the labourer to shovel them in. Had the
lot of the unfortunate prodigal been cast in such a state of society as
would have allowed this violation of the natural rights of the labourer
and the capitalist, he would have found little accumulation to give a
profitable direction to his labour. He would have found production
suspended, or languishing. There would probably have been no heap of
coals wanting his labour to give them the last value;--for the engines
would have been idle that raised them from the pit, and the men would
have been idle that directed the engines. The circulating capital that
found wages for the men, and fuel for the engines, would have been idle,
because it could not have worked with security. Accumulation, therefore,
would have been suspended;--and all profitable labour would, in
consequence, have been suspended. It was the unquestionable right of the
labourer that his labour should be free; but it was balanced by the
right of the capitalist that his accumulation should be secure. Could
the labour have seized upon the capital, or the capital upon the labour,
production would have been stopped altogether, or in part. The mutual
freedom and security of labour and capital compel production to go
forward; and labour and capital take their respective stations, and
perform their respective duties, altogether with reference to the laws
which govern production. These laws are founded upon the natural action
of the system of exchange, carrying forward all its operations by the
natural action of the great principle of demand and supply. When capital
and labour know how to accommodate themselves to the direction of these
natural laws, they are in a healthy state with respect to their
individual rights, and the rights of industry generally. They are in
that state in which each is working to the greatest profit in carrying
forward the business of production.

The story of the prodigal goes on to say, "He then looked out for the
next thing that might chance to offer; and went with indefatigable
industry through a succession of servile employments, in different
places, of longer and shorter duration." Here we see the principle of
Demand and Supply still in active operation. "He _looked out_ for the
next thing that might chance to offer." He was ready with his supply of
labour immediately that he saw a demand for it. Doubtless, the
"indefatigable industry" with which he was ready with his supply created
a demand, and thus he had in some degree a control over the demand. But
in most cases the demand went before the supply, and he had thus to
watch and wait upon the demand. In many instances demand and supply
exercise a joint influence and control, each with regard to the other.
Pliny, the Roman naturalist, relates that in the year 454 of the
building of Rome (300 years before Christ) a number of barbers came over
from Sicily to shave the Romans, who till that time had worn long
beards. But the barbers came in consequence of being sent for by a man
in authority. The demand here distinctly went before the supply; but the
supply, doubtless, acted greatly upon the demand. During a time of wild
financial speculation in Paris, created by what is called the
Mississippi bubble, a hump-backed man went daily into the street where
the stock-jobbers were accustomed to assemble, and earned money by
allowing them to sign their contracts upon the natural desk with which
he was encumbered. The hump-back was doubtless a shrewd fellow, and saw
the difficulty under which the stock-jobbers laboured. He supplied what
they appeared to want; and a demand was instantly created for his hump.
He was well paid, says the story. That was because the supply was
smaller than the demand. If other men with humps had been attracted by
the demand, or if persons had come to the street with portable desks
more convenient than the hump, the reward of his service would naturally
have become less. He must have yielded to the inevitable law by which
the amount of circulating capital, as compared with the number of
labourers, prescribes the terms upon which capital and labour are
united.

By following the direction which capital gave to his industry, the
prodigal, whose course we have traced up to the point when he went into
the condition of a labourer, became at length a capitalist. "He had
gained, after a considerable time, money enough to purchase, in order to
sell again, a few cattle, of which he had taken pains to understand the
value. He speedily, but cautiously, turned his first gains into second
advantages; retained, without a single deviation, his extreme parsimony;
and thus advanced by degrees into larger transactions and incipient
wealth. The final result was that he more than recovered his lost
possessions, and died an inveterate miser, worth 60,000_l._"

He gained "money," and he "purchased" cattle. In the simple transaction
which has been recorded of the first exchange of the prodigal's labour
for capital, we find the circumstances which represent every exchange of
labour for capital. The prodigal wanted meat and drink, and he gave
labour in exchange for meat and drink; the capitalist wanted the produce
of labour--he wanted a new value bestowed upon his coals by labour--and
he gave meat and drink in exchange for the labour which the prodigal had
to give. But the prodigal wanted something beyond the meat and drink
which was necessary for the supply of the day. He had other immediate
necessities beyond food; and he had determined to accumulate capital. He
therefore required "a few pence" in addition to the "meat and drink."
The capitalist held that the labour performed had conferred a value upon
his property, which would be fairly exchanged for the pence in addition
to the food, and he gave, therefore, in exchange, that portion of his
capital which was represented by the money and by the food. This
blending of one sort of consumable commodity, and of the money which
represented any other consumable commodity which the money could be
exchanged with, was an accident arising out of the peculiar
circumstances in which the prodigal happened to be placed. In ordinary
cases he would have received the money alone,--that is, he would have
received a larger sum of money to enable him to exchange for meat and
drink, instead of receiving them in direct payment. It is clear,
therefore, that as the money represented one portion of the consumable
commodities which were ready to pay for the labour employed in giving a
new value to the coals, it might represent another portion--the meat,
for instance, without the drink; or it might represent all the
consumable commodities, meat, drink, lodging, clothes, fuel, which that
particular labourer might want; and even represent the accumulation
which he might extract out of his self-denial as to the amount of meat,
drink, lodging, clothes, and fuel which he might require as a consumer;
and the farthing saved out of his money-payment might be the nest-egg
which was to produce the increase out of which he purchased cattle, and
died a rich miser.

We may be excused for calling attention to the fact, which is a very
obvious one, that if the labourer, whose story we have told, had
received a portion of the coals upon which he had conferred a new value
in exchange for the labour which produced that value, he would have been
paid in a way very unfavourable for production. It would have required a
new labour before the coals could have procured him the meat, and drink,
and lodging of which he had an instant want; and he therefore must have
received a larger portion of coals to compensate for his new labour, or
otherwise his labour must have been worse paid. There would have been
unprofitable labour, whose loss must have fallen somewhere,--either upon
the capitalist or the labourer in the first instance, but upon both
ultimately, because there would have been less production. All the
unprofitable labour employed in bringing the exchange of the first
labour for capital to maturity would have been so much power withdrawn
from the efficiency of the next labour to be performed; and therefore
production would have been impeded to the extent of that unprofitable
labour. The same thing would have happened if, advancing a step forward
in the science of exchange, the labourer had received an entire payment
in meat and drink, instead of a portion of the coals, which he could
have exchanged for meat and drink. Wanting lodging, he would have had to
seek a person who wanted meat and drink in exchange for lodging, before
he could have obtained lodging. But he had a few pence,--he had money.
He had a commodity to exchange that he might divide and subdivide as
long as he pleased, whilst he was carrying on an exchange,--that is, he
might obtain as much lodging as he required for an equivalent portion of
his money. If he kept his money, it would not injure by keeping as the
food would. He might carry it from place to place more easily than he
could carry the food. He would have a commodity to exchange, whose value
could not be made matter of dispute, as the value of meat and drink
would unquestionably have been. This commodity would represent the same
value, with little variation, whether he kept it a day, or a week, or a
month, or a year; and therefore would be the only commodity whose
retention would advance his design of accumulating capital with
certainty and steadiness. It is evident that a commodity possessing all
these advantages must have some intrinsic qualities which all exchangers
would recognise--that it must be a standard of value--at once a
commodity possessing real value, and a measure of all other values. This
commodity exists in all commercial or exchanging nations in the shape of
coined metal. The metal itself possesses a real value, which represents
the labour employed in producing it; and, in the shape of coin,
represents also a measure of other value, because the value of the coin
has been determined by the sanction of some authority which all admit.
That authority is most conveniently expressed by a Government, as the
representative of the aggregate power of society. The metal itself,
unless in the shape of coined money, would not represent a definite
value; because the metal might be depreciated in value by the admixture
of baser or inferior metals, unless it bore the impress of authority to
determine its value. The exchangers of the metal for other articles of
utility could not, without great loss of labour, be constantly employed
in reducing it to the test of value, even if they had the knowledge
requisite for so ascertaining its value. It used to cost 1000_l._ a year
to the Bank of England for the wages of those who weighed the gold coin
brought to the Bank; and it has been estimated that 30,000 sovereigns
pass over the Bank counter daily. A machine is now used at the Bank,
which separates the full-weight sovereigns and the light ones, at the
rate of 10,000 an hour. In Greece a piece of gold in the rude times was
stamped with the figure of an ox, to indicate that it would exchange for
an ox. In modern England, a piece of gold, called a sovereign,
represents a certain weight in gold uncoined, and the Government stamp
indicates its purity; whilst the perpetual separation of the light
sovereigns from those of full-weight affords a security that very few
light ones are in general circulation. A sovereign purchases so many
pounds weight of an ox, and a whole ox purchases so many sovereigns. The
great use of the coined metal is to save labour in exchanging the ox for
other commodities. The money purchases the ox, and a portion of the ox
again purchases some other commodity, such as a loaf of bread from the
baker, who obtains a portion of the ox through the medium of the money,
which is a standard of value between the bread and the beef. Our great
poetical satirist, Pope, in conducting his invective against the private
avarice and political corruption of his day, imagines a state of things
in which, money and credit being abolished, ministers would bribe and be
bribed in kind. It is a true picture of what would be universal, if the
exchanges of men resolved themselves into barter:

"A statesman's slumbers how this speech would spoil!
'Sir, Spain has sent a thousand jars of oil;
Huge bales of British cloth blockade the door;
A hundred oxen at your levee roar.'"

CHAPTER VI.

If we have succeeded in making our meaning clear, by stating a general
truth, not in an abstract form, but as brought out by various instances
of the modes in which it is exhibited, we shall have led the reader to
the conclusion that accumulation, or capital, is absolutely essential to
the profitable employment of labour; and that the greater the
accumulation the greater the extent of that profitable employment. This
truth, however, has been denied altogether by some speculative
writers;--and, what is more important, has been practically denied by
the conduct of nations and individuals in the earlier state of
society,--and is still denied by existing prejudices, derived from the
current maxims of former days of ignorance and half-knowledge. With the
speculative writers we have little to do. When Rousseau, for instance,
advises governments not to secure property to its possessors, but to
deprive them of all means of accumulating, it is sufficient to know that
the same writer advocated the savage state, in which there should be no
property, in preference to the social, which is founded on
appropriation. Knowing this, and being convinced that the savage state,
even with imperfect appropriation, is one of extreme wretchedness, we
may safely leave such opinions to work their own cure. For it is not
likely that any individual, however disposed to think that accumulation
is an evil, would desire, by destroying accumulation, to pass into the
condition, described by John Tanner, of a constant encounter with hunger
in its most terrific forms: and seeing, therefore, the fallacy of such
an opinion, he will also see that, if he partially destroys
accumulation, he equally impedes production, and equally destroys his
share in the productive power of capital and labour working together for
a common good in the social state.

But, without going the length of wishing to destroy capital, there are
many who think that accumulation is a positive evil, and that
consumption is a positive benefit; and, therefore, that economy is an
evil, and waste a benefit. The course of a prodigal man is by many still
viewed with considerable admiration. He sits up all night in frantic
riot--he consumes whatever can stimulate his satiated appetite--he is
waited upon by a crowd of unproductive and equally riotous retainers--he
breaks and destroys everything around him with an unsparing hand--he
rides his horses to death in the most extravagant attempts to wrestle
with time and space; and when he has spent all his substance in these
excesses, and dies an outcast and a beggar, he is said to have been a
hearty fellow, and to have "made good for trade." When, on the contrary,
a man of fortune economizes his revenue--lives like a virtuous and
reasonable being, whose first duty is the cultivation of his
understanding--eats and drinks with regard to his health--keeps no more
retainers than are sufficient for his proper comfort and decency--breaks
and destroys nothing--has respect to the inferior animals, as well from
motives of prudence as of mercy--and dies without a mortgage on his
lands; _he_ is said to have been a stingy fellow who did not know how to
"circulate his money." To "circulate money," to "make good for trade,"
in the once common meaning of the terms, is for _one_ to consume
unprofitably what, if economized, would have stimulated production in a
way that would have enabled _hundreds_, instead of one, to consume
profitably. Let us offer two historical examples of these two opposite
modes of making good for trade, and circulating money. The Duke of
Buckingham, "having been possessed of about 50,000_l._ a year, died in
1687, in a remote inn in Yorkshire, reduced to the utmost misery."[12]
After a life of the most wanton riot, which exhausted all his princely
resources, he was left at the last hour, under circumstances which are
well described in the following lines by Pope:--

"In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung,
The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock bed, but repair'd with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red;
Great Villiers lies....
No wit to flatter left of all his store,
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more,
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends."

Contrast the course of this unhappy man with that of the Duke of
Bridgewater, who devoted his property to really "making good for trade,"
by constructing the great canals which connect Manchester with the coal
countries and with Liverpool. The Duke of Buckingham lived in a round of
sensual folly: the Duke of Bridgewater limited his personal expenditure
to 400_l._ a-year, and devoted all the remaining portion of his revenues
to the construction of a magnificent work of the highest public utility.
The one supported a train of cooks and valets and horse-jockeys: the
other called into action the labour of thousands, and employed in the
direction of that labour the skill of Brindley, one of the greatest
engineers that any country has produced. The one died without a penny,
loaded with debt, leaving no trace behind him but the ruin which his
waste had produced: the other bequeathed almost the largest property in
Europe to his descendants, and opened a channel for industry which
afforded, and still affords, employment to thousands.

[Illustration: Brindley.]

When a mob amused themselves by breaking windows, as was once a common
recreation on an illumination night, by way of showing the amount of
popular intelligence, some were apt to say they have "made good for
trade." Is it not evident that the capital which was represented by the
unbroken windows was really so much destroyed of the national riches
when the windows were broken?--for if the windows had remained unbroken,
the capital would have remained to stimulate the production of some new
object of utility. The glaziers, indeed, replaced the windows; but there
having been a destruction of windows, there must have been a necessary
retrenchment in some other outlay, that would have afforded benefit to
the consumer. Doubtless, when the glazier is called into activity by a
mob breaking windows, some other trade suffers; for the man who has to
pay for the broken windows must retrench somewhere, and, if he has less
to lay out, some other person has less to lay out. The glass-maker,
probably, makes more glass at the moment; but he does so to exchange
with the capital that would otherwise have gone to the maker of clothes
or of furniture: and, there being an absolute destruction of the funds
for the maintenance of labour, by an unnecessary destruction of what
former labour has produced, trade generally is injured to the extent of
the destruction. Some now say that a fire makes good for trade. The only
difference of evil between the fire which destroys a house, and the mob
which breaks the windows, is, that the fire absorbs capital for the
maintenance of trade, or labour, in the proportion of a hundred to one
when compared with the mob. Some say that war makes good for trade. The
only difference of pecuniary evil (the moral evils admit of no
comparison) between the fire and the war is, that the war absorbs
capital for the maintenance of trade, or labour, in the proportion of a
million to a hundred when compared with the fire. If the incessant
energy of production were constantly repressed by mobs, and fires, and
wars, the end would be that consumption would altogether exceed
production; and that then the producers and the consumers would both be
starved into wiser courses, and perceive that nothing makes good for
trade but profitable industry and judicious expenditure. Prodigality
devotes itself too much to the satisfaction of present wants: avarice
postpones too much the present wants to the possible wants of the
future. Real economy is the happy measure between the two extremes; and
that only "makes good for trade," because, while it carries on a steady
demand for industry, it accumulates a portion of the production of a
country to stimulate new production. That judicious expenditure consists
in

"The sense to value riches, with the art
T' enjoy them."

The fashion of "making good for trade" by unprofitable consumption is a
relic of the barbarous ages. In the twelfth century a count of France
commanded his vassals to plough up the soil round his castle, and he
sowed the ground with coins of gold, to the amount of fifteen hundred
guineas, that he might have all men talk of his magnificence. Piqued at
the lordly prodigality of his neighbour, another noble ordered thirty
of his most valuable horses to be tied to a stake and burnt alive, that
he might exhibit a more striking instance of contempt for accumulation.
In the latter part of the fourteenth century, a Scotch noble, Colin
Campbell, on receiving a visit from the O'Neiles of Ireland,
ostentatiously burnt down his house at Inverary upon their departure;
and an Earl of Athol pursued the same course in 1528, after having
entertained the papal legate, upon the pretence that it was "the
constant habitude of the high-landers to set on fire in the morning the
place which had lodged them the night before." When the feudal lords had
so little respect for their own property, it was not likely that they
would have much regard for the accumulation of others. The Jews, who
were the great capitalists of the middle ages, and who really merit the
gratitude of Europeans for their avarice, as that almost alone enabled
any accumulation to go forward, and any production to increase, were, as
it is well known, persecuted in every direction by the crown, by the
nobles, by the people. When a solitary farmer or abbot attempted to
accumulate corn, which accumulation could alone prevent the dreadful
famines invariably resulting from having no stock that might be
available upon a bad harvest, the people burnt the ricks of the
provident men, by way of lessening the evils of scarcity. The
consequence was, that no person thought of accumulating at all, and that
the price of wheat often rose, just before the harvest, from five
shillings a quarter to five pounds.

We are accustomed to read and talk of "merry England," but we sometimes
fail to think how much real suffering lay beneath the surface of the
merriment. Herrick, one of our charming old lyric poets, has sung the
glories of the hock-cart--the cart that bore the full sheaves to the
empty barn:--

"The harvest swains and wenches bound
For joy, to see the hock-cart crown'd;
About the cart hear how the rout
Of rural younglings raise the shout,
Pressing before, some coming after,
Those with a shout, and these with laughter.
Some bless the cart, some kiss the sheaves,
Some prank them up with oaken leaves;
Some cross the fill-horse, some with great
Devotion stroke the home-borne wheat."

Assuredly there was joy and there was devotion; for the laden cart made
the difference between plenty and starvation. Before that harvest-home
came there had been many an aching heart in the village hovels, for
there was no store to equalize prices, and no communication to make the
abundance of one district--much less of one country--mitigate the
scarcity of another. It was not a question of the rise or the fall of a
penny or two in the price of a loaf of bread; it was a question of bread
or no bread.

[Illustration: The Hock-Cart.]

During those dark periods the crown carried on the war against capital
with an industry that could not be exceeded by that of the nobles or the
people. Before the great charter the Commons complained that King Henry
seized upon whatever was suited to his royal pleasure--horses,
implements, food, anything that presented itself in the shape of
accumulated labour. In the reign of Henry III. a statute was passed to
remedy excessive distresses; from which it appeared that it was no
unfrequent practice for the king's officers to take the opportunity of
seizing the farmer's oxen at the moment when they were employed in
ploughing, or, as the statute says, "winning the earth,"--taking them
off, and starving them to death, or only restoring them with new and
enormous exactions for their keep. Previous to the Charter of the Forest
no man could dig a marl-pit on his own ground, lest the king's horses
should fall into it when he was hunting. As late as the time of James I.
we find, from a speech of the great Lord Bacon, that it was a pretty
constant practice of the king's purveyors to extort large sums of money
by threatening to cut down favourite trees which grew near a
mansion-house or in avenues. Despotism, in all ages, has depopulated the
finest countries, by rendering capital insecure, and therefore
unproductive; insomuch that Montesquieu lays it down as a maxim, that
lands are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but in
proportion to their freedom. In the fifteenth century, in England, we
find sums of money voted for the restoration of decayed towns and
villages. Just laws would have restored them much more quickly and
effectually. The state of agriculture was so low that the most absurd
enactments were made to compel farmers to till and sow their own lands,
and calling upon every man to plant at least forty beans. All the laws
for the regulation of labourers, at the same period, assumed that they
should be _compelled_ to work, and not wander about the country,--just
in the same way that farmers should be compelled to sow and till. It is
perfectly clear that the towns would not have been depopulated, and gone
to decay, if the accumulation of capital had not been obstructed by
insecurity and wasted by ignorance, and that the same insecurity and the
same waste rendered it necessary to assume that the farmer would not
till and sow, and the labourer would not labour, without compulsion. The
natural stimulus to industry was wanting, and therefore there was no
industry, or only unprofitable industry. The towns decayed, the country
was uncultivated--production languished--the people were all poor and
wretched; and the government dreamt that acts of parliament and royal
ordinances could rebuild the houses and cultivate the land, when the
means of building and cultivation, namely, the capital of the country,
was exhausted by injustice producing insecurity.

But if the king, the nobles, and the people of the middle ages conspired
together, or acted at least as if they conspired, to prevent the
accumulation of capital, the few capitalists themselves, by their
monstrous regulations, which still throw some dark shadows over our own
days, prevented that freedom of industry without which capital could not
accumulate. Undoubtedly the commercial privileges of corporations
originally offered some barriers against the injustice of the crown and
of the nobility; but the good was always accompanied with an evil, which
rendered it to a certain extent valueless. Where these privileges gave
security, they were a good; where they destroyed freedom, they were an
injury. Instead of encouraging the intercourse between one trade and
another, they encircled every trade with the most absurd monopolies and
exclusive privileges. Instead of rendering commerce free between one
district and another, they, even in the same country, encompassed
commerce with the most harassing restrictions, which separated county
from county, and town from town, as if seas ran between them. If a man
of Coventry came to London with his wares, he was encountered at every
step with the privileges of companies; if the man of London sought to
trade at Coventry, he was obstructed by the same corporate rights,
preventing either the Londoner or the Coventry man trading with
advantage. The revenues of every city were derived from forfeitures
upon trades, almost all established upon the principle that, if one
trade became too industrious or too clever, it would be the ruin of
another trade. Every trade was fenced round with secrets; and the
commonest trade, as we know from the language of an apprentice's
indenture, was called an "art and mystery." All these follies went upon
the presumption that "one man's gain is another man's loss," instead of
vanishing before the truth, that, in proportion as the industry of all
men is free, so will it be productive; and that production on all sides
ensures a state of things in which every exchanger is a gainer, and no
one a loser.

It is not to be wondered at that, while such opinions existed, the union
of capital and labour should have been very imperfect; and that, while
the capitalists oppressed the labourers, in the same way that they
oppressed each other, the labourers should have thought it not
unreasonable to plunder the capitalists. It is stated by Harrison, an
old writer of credit,[13] that during the single reign of Henry VIII.
seventy-two thousand thieves were hanged in England. No fact can exhibit
in a stronger light the universal misery that must have existed in those
days. The whole kingdom did not contain half a million grown-up males,
so that, considering that the reign of Henry VIII. extended over two
generations, about one man in ten must have been, to use the words of
the same historian, "devoured and eaten up by the gallows." In the same
reign the first statute against Egyptians (gipsies) was passed. These
people went from place to place in great companies--spoke a cant
language, which Harrison calls Pedler's French--and were subdivided into
fifty-two different classes of thieves. The same race of people
prevailed throughout Europe. Cervantes, the author of 'Don Quixote,'
says of the Egyptians or Bohemians, that they seem to have been born for
no other purpose than that of pillaging. While this universal plunder
went forward, it is evident that the insecurity of property must have
been so great that there could have been little accumulation, and
therefore little production. Capital was destroyed on every side; and
because profitable labour had become so scarce by the destruction of
capital, one-half of the community sought to possess themselves of the
few goods of the other half, not as exchangers but as robbers. As the
robbers diminished the capital, the diminution of capital increased the
number of robbers; and if the unconquerable energy of human industry had
not gone on producing, slowly and painfully indeed, but still producing,
the country would have soon fallen back to the state in which it was a
thousand years before, when wolves abounded more than men. One great
cause of all this plunder and misery was the oppression of the
labourers.

[12] Ruffhead's Pope.

[13] Preface to the Chronicles of Holinshed.

[Illustration: Adam Smith.]

CHAPTER VII.

Rights of labour--Effects of slavery on production--
Condition of the Anglo-Saxons--Progress of freedom
in England--Laws regulating labour--Wages and
prices--Poor-law--Law of settlement.

Adam Smith, in his great work, 'The Wealth of Nations,' says, "The
property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original
foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and
inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and
dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength
and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his
neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property." The right
of property, in general, has been defined by another writer, M. Say, to
be "the exclusive faculty guaranteed to a man, or body of men, to
dispose, at their own pleasure, of that which belongs to them." There
can be no doubt that labour is entitled to the same protection as a
property that capital is entitled to. There can be no doubt that the
labourer has rights over his labour which no government and no
individual should presume to interfere with. There can be no doubt that,
as an exchanger of labour for capital, the labourer ought to be assured
that the exchange shall in all respects be as free as the exchanges of
any other description of property. His rights as an exchanger are, that
he shall not be compelled to part with his property, by any arbitrary
enactments, without having as ample an equivalent as the general laws of
exchange will afford him; that he shall be free to use every just means,
either by himself or by union with others, to obtain such an equivalent;
that he shall be at full liberty to offer that property in the best
market that he can find, without being limited to any particular market;
that he may give to that property every modification which it is capable
of receiving from his own natural or acquired skill, without being
narrowed to any one form of producing it. In other words, natural
justice demands that the working-man shall work when he please, and be
idle when he please, always providing that, if he make a contract to
work, he shall not violate that engagement by remaining idle; that no
labour shall be forced from him, and no rate of payment for that labour
prescribed by statutes or ordinances; that he shall be free to obtain as
high wages as he can possibly get, and unite with others to obtain them,
always providing that in his union he does not violate that freedom of
industry in others which is the foundation of his own attempts to
improve his condition; that he may go from place to place to exchange
his labour without being interfered with by corporate rights or
monopolies of any sort, whether of masters or workmen; and that he may
turn from one employment to the other, if he so think fit, without being
confined to the trade he originally learnt, or may strike into any line
of employment without having regularly learnt it at all. When the
working-man has these rights secured to him by the sanction of the laws,
and the concurrence of the institutions and customs of the country in
which he lives, he is in the condition of a free exchanger. He has the
full, uninterrupted, absolute possession of his property. He is upon a
perfect legal equality with the capitalist. He may labour cheerfully
with the well-founded assurance that his labour will be profitably
exchanged for the goods which he desires for the satisfaction of his
wants, as far as laws and institutions can so provide. In a word, he may
assure himself that, if he possesses anything valuable to offer in
exchange for capital, the capital will not be fenced round with any
artificial barriers, or invested with any unnatural preponderance, to
prevent the exchange being one of perfect equality, and therefore a real
benefit to both exchangers.

We are approaching this desirable state in England. Indeed, there is
scarcely any legal restriction acted upon which prevents the exchange of
labour with capital being completely unembarrassed. Yet it is only
within a few centuries that the working-men of this country have emerged
from the condition of actual slaves into that of free labourers; it is
only a few hundred years ago since the cultivator of the ground, the
domestic servant, and sometimes even the artisan, was the absolute
property of another man--bought, sold, let, without any will of his own,
like an ox or a horse--producing nothing for himself--and transmitting
the miseries of his lot to his children. The progress of civilization
destroyed this monstrous system, in the same way that at the present day
it is destroying it in Russia and other countries where slavery still
exists. But it was by a very slow process that the English slave went
forward to the complete enjoyment of the legal rights of a free
exchanger. The transition exhibits very many years of gross injustice,
of bitter suffering, of absurd and ineffectual violations of the natural
rights of man; and of struggles between the capitalist and the labourer,
for exclusive advantages, perpetuated by ignorant lawgivers, who could
not see that the interest of all classes of producers is one and the
same. We may not improperly devote a little space to the description of
this dark and evil period. We shall see that while such a struggle goes
forward--that is, while security of property and freedom of industry
are not held as the interchangeable rights of the capitalist and the
labourer--there can be little production and less accumulation. Wherever
positive slavery exists--wherever the labourers are utterly deprived of
their property in their labour, and are compelled to dispose of it
without retaining any part of the character of voluntary
exchangers--there are found idleness, ignorance, and unskilfulness;
industry is enfeebled--the oppressor and the oppressed are both
poor--there is no national accumulation. The existence of slavery
amongst the nations of antiquity was a great impediment to their
progress in the arts of life. The community, in such nations, was
divided into a caste of nobles called citizens, and a caste of labourers
called slaves. The Romans were rich, in the common sense of the word,
because they plundered other nations; but they could not produce largely
when the individual spirit to industry was wanting. The industry of the
freemen was rapine: the slaves were the producers. No man will work
willingly when he is to be utterly deprived of the power of disposing at
his own will of the fruits of his labour; no man will work skilfully
when the same scanty pittance is doled out to each and all, whatever be
the difference in their talents and knowledge. Wherever the freedom of
industry is thus violated, property cannot be secure. If Rome had
encouraged free labourers, instead of breeding menial slaves, it could
not have happened that the thieves, who were constantly hovering round
the suburbs of the city, like vultures looking out for carrion, should
have been so numerous that, during the insurrection of Catiline, they
formed a large accession to his army. But Rome had to encounter a worse
evil than that of the swarms of highwaymen who were ready to plunder
whatever had been produced. Production itself was so feeble when carried
on by the labour of slaves, that Columella, a writer on rural affairs,
says the crops continued so gradually to fall off that there was a
general opinion that the earth was growing old and losing its power of
productiveness. Wherever slavery exists at the present day, there we
find feeble production and national weakness. Poland, the most prolific
corn-country in Europe, is unquestionably the poorest country. Poland
has been partitioned, over and over again, by governments that knew her
weakness; and she has been said to have fallen "without a crime." That
is not correct. Her "crime" was, and is, the slavery of her labourers.
There is no powerful class between the noble and the serf or slave; and
whilst this state of things endures, Poland can never be independent,
because she can never be industrious, and therefore never wealthy.

England, as we have said, once groaned under the evils of positive
slavery. The Anglo-Saxons had what they called "live money," such as
sheep and slaves. To this cause may be doubtless attributed the easy
conquest of the country by the Norman invaders, and the oppression that
succeeded that conquest. If the people had been free, no king could have
swept away the entire population of a hundred thousand souls that dwelt
in the country between the Humber and the Tees, and converted a district
of sixty miles in length into a dreary desert, which remained for years
without houses and without inhabitants. This the Conqueror did. In the
reign of Henry II. the slaves of England were exported in large numbers
to Ireland. These slaves, or villeins, as is the case in Russia and
Poland at the present day, differed in the degree of the oppression
which was exercised towards them. Some, called "villeins in gross," were
at the absolute disposal of the lord--transferable from one owner to
another, like a horse or a cow. Others, called "villeins regardant,"
were annexed to particular estates, and were called upon to perform
whatever agricultural offices the lord should demand from them, not
having the power of acquiring any property, and their only privilege
being that they were irremoveable except with their own consent. These
distinctions are not of much consequence, for, by a happy combination of
circumstances, the bondmen of every kind, in the course of a century or
two after the Conquest, were rapidly passing into the condition of free
labourers. But still capital was accumulated so slowly, and labour was
so unproductive, that the land did not produce the tenth part of a
modern crop; and the country was constantly exposed to the severest
inflictions of famine, whenever a worse than usual harvest occurred.

In the reign of Edward III. the woollen manufacture was introduced into
England. It was at first carried on exclusively by foreigners; but as
the trade extended, new hands were wanting, and the bondmen of the
villages began to run away from their masters, and take refuge in the
towns. If the slave could conceal himself successfully from the pursuit
of his lord for a year and a day, he was held free for ever. The
constant attraction of the bondmen to the towns, where they could work
for hire, gradually emboldened those who remained as cultivators to
assert their own natural rights. The nobility complained that the
villeins refused to perform their accustomed services; and that corn
remained uncut upon the ground. At length, in 1351, the 25th year of
Edward III., the class of free labourers was first recognised by the
legislature; and a statute was passed, oppressive indeed, and impolitic,
but distinctly acknowledging the right of the labourer to assume the
character of a free exchanger. Slavery, in England, was not wholly
abolished by statute till the time of Charles II.: it was attempted in
vain to be abolished in 1526. As late as the year 1775, the colliers of
Scotland were accounted _ascripti glebae_--that is, as belonging to the
estate or colliery where they were born and continued to work. It is not
necessary for us further to notice the existence of villeinage or
slavery in these kingdoms. Our business is with the slow progress of the
establishment of the rights of free labourers--and this principally to
show that, during the long period when a contest was going forward
between the capitalists and the labourers, industry was comparatively
unproductive. It was not so unproductive, indeed, as during the period
of absolute slavery; but as long as any man was compelled to work, or to
continue at work, or to receive a fixed price, or to remain in one
place, or to follow one employment, labour could not be held to be
free--property could not be held to be secure--capital and labour could
not have cordially united for production--accumulation could not have
been certain and rapid.

In the year 1349 there was a dreadful pestilence in England, which swept
off large numbers of the people. Those of the labourers that remained,
following the natural course of the great principle of demand and
supply, refused to serve, unless they were paid double the wages which
they had received five years before. Then came the 'Statute of
Labourers,' of 1351, to regulate wages; and this statute enacted what
should be paid to haymakers, and reapers, and thrashers; to carpenters,
and masons, and tilers, and plasterers. No person was to quit his own
village, if he could get work at these wages; and labourers and
artificers flying from one district to another in consequence of these
regulations, were to be imprisoned.

Good laws, it has been said, execute themselves. When legislators make
bad laws, there requires a constant increase of vigilance and severity,
and constant attempts at reconciling impossibilities, to allow such laws
to work at all. In 1360 the Statute of Labourers was confirmed with new
penalties, such as burning in the forehead with the letter F those
workmen who left their usual abodes. Having controlled the wages of
industry, the next step was for these blind lawgivers to determine how
the workmen should spend their scanty pittance; and accordingly, in
1363, a statute was passed to compel workmen and all persons not worth
forty shillings to wear the coarsest cloth called russet, and to be
served once a day with meat, or fish, and the offal of other victuals.
We were not without imitations of such absurdities in other nations. An
ordinance of the King of France, in 1461, determined that good and fat
meat should be sold to the rich, while the poor should be allowed only
to buy the lean and stinking.

While the wages of labour were fixed by statute, the price of wheat was
constantly undergoing the most extraordinary fluctuations, ranging from
2_s._ a quarter to 1_l._ 6_s._ 8_d._ It was perfectly impossible that
any profitable industry could go forward in the face of such unjust and
ridiculous laws. In 1376 the Commons complained that masters were
_obliged_ to give their servants higher wages to prevent their running
away; and that the country was covered with _staf-strikers_ and _sturdy
rogues_, who robbed in every direction. The villages were deserted by
the labourers resorting to the towns, where commerce knew how to evade
the destroying regulations of the statutes; and to prevent the total
decay of agriculture, labourers were not allowed to move from place to
place without letters patent:--any labourer, not producing such a
letter, was to be imprisoned and put in the stocks. If a lad had been
brought up to the plough till he was twelve years of age, he was
compelled to continue in husbandry all his life; and in 1406 it was
enacted that all children of parents not possessed of land should be
brought up in the occupation of their parents. While the legislature,
however, was passing these abominable laws, it was most effectually
preparing the means for their extermination. Children were allowed to be
sent to school in any part of the kingdom. When the light of education
dawned upon the people, they could not long remain in the "darkness
visible" that succeeded the night of slavery.

When the industry of the country was nearly annihilated by the laws
regulating wages, it was found out that something like a balance should
be preserved between wages and prices; and the magistrates were
therefore empowered twice a year to make proclamation, according to the
price of provisions, how much every workman should receive. The system,
however, would not work well. In 1496 a new statute of wages was passed,
the preamble of which recited that the former statutes had not been
executed, because "the remedy by the said statutes is not very perfect."
Then came a new remedy: that is, a new scale of wages for all trades;
regulations for the hours of work and of rest; and penalties to prevent
labour being transported from one district to another. As a necessary
consequence of a fixed scale for wages, came another fixed scale for
regulating the prices of provisions; till at last, in the reign of Henry
VIII., lawgivers began to open their eyes to the folly of their
proceedings, and the preamble of a statute says "that dearth, scarcity,
good cheap, and plenty of cheese, butter, capons, hens, chickens, and
other victuals necessary for man's sustenance, happeneth, riseth, and
chanceth, of so many and divers occasions, that it is very hard and
difficile to put any certain prices to any such things." Yet they went
on with new scales, in spite of the hardness of the task; till at last
some of the worst of these absurd laws were swept from the statute-book.
The justices, whose principal occupation was to balance the scale of
wages and labour, complained incessantly of the difficulty of the
attempt; and the statute of the 5th Elizabeth acknowledged that these
old laws "could not be carried into execution without the great grief
and burden of the poor labourer and hired man." Still new laws were
enacted to prevent the freedom of industry working out plenty for
capitalists as well as labourers; and at length, in 1601, a general
assessment was directed for the support of the impotent poor, and for
setting the unemployed poor to work. The capitalists at length paid a
grievous penalty for their two centuries of oppression; and had to
maintain a host of paupers, that had gradually filled the land during
these unnatural contests. It would be perhaps incorrect to say, that
these contests alone produced the paupers that required this legislative
protection in the reign of Elizabeth; but certainly the number of those
paupers would have been far less, if the laws of industry had taken
their healthy and natural course,--if capital and labour had gone hand
in hand to produce abundance for all, and fairly to distribute that
abundance in the form of profits and wages, justly balanced by the
steady operation of demand and supply in a free and extensive market.

The whole of these absurd and iniquitous laws, which had succeeded the
more wicked laws of absolute slavery, proceeded from a struggle on the
part of the capitalists in land against the growing power and energy of
free labour. If the capitalists had rightly understood their interests,
they would have seen that the increased production of a thriving and
happy peasantry would have amply compensated them for all the increase
of wages to which they were compelled to submit; and that at every step
by which the condition of their labourers was improved their own
condition was also improved. If then capital had worked naturally and
honestly for the encouragement of labour, there would have been no lack
of labourers; and it would not have been necessary to pass laws to
compel artificers, under the penalty of the stocks, to assist in getting
in the harvest (5 Eliz.). If the labourers in agriculture had been
adequately paid, they would not have fled to the towns; and if they had
not been liable to cruel punishments for the exercise of this their
natural right, the country would not have been covered with "valiant
rogues and sturdy beggars."

The Law of Settlement, which, however modified, yet remains upon our
statute-book, has been the curse of industry for nearly two centuries.
All the best men of past times have cried out against its oppression.
Roger North, soon after its enactment, in the time of Charles II.,
clearly enough showed its general operation:--"Where most work is, there
are fewest people, and _e contra_. In Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, a
labourer hath 12_d._ a day; in Oxfordshire, 8_d._; in the North, 6_d._,
or less; and I have been credibly informed that in Cornwall a poor man
will be thankful for 2_d._ a day and poor diet: and the value of
provisions in all these places is much the same. Whence should the
difference proceed? Even from plenty and scarcity of work and men, which
happens crossgrainedly, so that one cannot come to the other." When men
honestly went from home to seek work, they were called vagrants, and
were confounded with the common beggars, for whom every severity was
provided by the law--the stocks, the whip, the pillory, the brand. It
was all in vain. Happy would it have been for the land if the law had
left honest industry free, and in the case of dishonesty had applied
itself to more effectual work than punishments and terror. One of our
great judges, Sir Matthew Hale, said, long ago, what we even now too
often forget--"The prevention of poverty, idleness, and a loose and
disorderly education, even of poor children, would do more good to this
kingdom than all the gibbets, and cauterizations, and whipping-posts,
and jails in this kingdom." The whole scheme of legislation for the poor
was to set the poor to work by forced contributions from capital. If the
energy of the people had not found out how to set themselves to work in
spite of bad laws, we might have remained a nation of slaves and
paupers.

CHAPTER VIII.

Possessions of the different classes in England--Condition
of Colchester in 1301--Tools, stock-in-trade, furniture,
&c.--Supply of food--Comparative duration of human
life--Want of facilities for commerce--Plenty and
civilization not productive of effeminacy--Colchester in the
present day.

It will be desirable to exhibit something like an average view of the
extent of the possessions of all classes of society, and especially of
the middling and labouring classes, in this country, at a period when
the mutual rights of capitalists and labourers were so little understood
as in the fourteenth century. We have shown how, at that time, there was
a general round of oppression, resulting from ignorance of the proper
interests of the productive classes; and it would be well also to show
that during this period of disunion and contest between capital and
labour, each plundering the other, and both plundered by arbitrary
power, whether of the nobles or the crown, production went on very
slowly and imperfectly, and that there was little to plunder and less to
exchange. It is difficult to find the materials for such an inquiry.
There is no very accurate record of the condition of the various classes
of society before the invention of printing; and even after that
invention we must be content to form our conclusions from a few
scattered facts not recorded for any such purpose as we have in view,
but to be gathered incidentally from slight observations which have come
down to us. Yet enough remains to enable us to form a picture of
tolerable accuracy; and in some points to establish conclusions which
cannot be disputed. It is in the same way that our knowledge of the
former state of the physical world must be derived from relics of that
former state, to which the inquiries and comparisons of the present
times have given an historical value. We know, for instance, that the
animals of the southern countries once abounded in these islands,
because we occasionally find their bones in quantities which could not
have been accumulated unless such animals had been once native to these
parts; and the remains of sea-shells upon the tops of hills now under
the plough show us that even these heights have been heaved up from the
bosom of the ocean. In the same way, although we have no complete
picture of the state of property at the period to which we allude, we
have evidence enough to describe that state from records which may be
applied to this end, although preserved for a very different object.

In the reign of Edward III., Colchester, in Essex, was considered the
tenth city in England in point of population. It then paid a poll-tax
for 2955 lay persons. In 1301, about half a century before, the number
of inhabitant housekeepers was 390; and the whole household furniture,
utensils, clothes, money, cattle, corn, and every other property found
in the town, was valued at 518_l._ 16_s._ 0-3/4_d._ This valuation took
place on occasion of a subsidy or tax to the crown, to carry on a war
against France; and the particulars, which are preserved in the Rolls of
Parliament, exhibit with great minuteness the classes of persons then
inhabiting that town, and the sort of property which each respectively
possessed. The trades exercised in Colchester were the following:--baker,
barber, blacksmith, bowyer, brewer, butcher, carpenter, carter, cobbler,
cook, dyer, fisherman, fuller, furrier, girdler, glass-seller, glover,
linen-draper, mercer and spice-seller, miller, mustard and vinegar
seller, old clothes seller, saddler, tailor, tanner, tiler, weaver,
wood-cutter, and wool-comber. If we look at a small town of the present
day, where such a variety of occupations are carried on, we shall find
that each tradesman has a considerable stock of commodities, abundance
of furniture and utensils, clothes in plenty, some plate, books, and
many articles of convenience and luxury to which the most wealthy
dealers and mechanics of Colchester of the fourteenth century were utter
strangers. That many places at that time were much poorer than
Colchester there can be no doubt: for here we see the division of labour
was pretty extensive, and that is always a proof that production is
going forward, however imperfectly. We see, too, that the tradesmen were
connected with manufactures in the ordinary use of the term; or there
would not have been the dyer, the glover, the linen-draper, the tanner,
the weaver, and the wool-comber. There must have been a demand for
articles of foreign commerce, too, in this town, or we should not have
had the spice-seller. Yet, with all these various occupations,
indicating considerable profitable industry when compared with earlier
stages in the history of this country, the whole stock of the town was
valued at little more than 500_l._ Nor let it be supposed that this
smallness of capital can be accounted for by the difference in the
standard of money; although that difference is considerable. We may
indeed satisfy ourselves of the small extent of the capital of
individuals at that day, by referring to the inventory of the articles
upon which the tax we have mentioned was laid at Colchester.

The whole stock of a carpenter's tools was valued at one shilling. They
altogether consisted of two broad axes, an adze, a square, and a navegor
or spoke-shave. Rough work must the carpenter have been able to perform
with these humble instruments; but then let it be remembered that there
was little capital to pay him for finer work, and that very little fine
work was consequently required. The three hundred and ninety
housekeepers of Colchester then lived in mud huts, with a rough door and
no chimney. Harrison, speaking of the manners of a century later than
the period we are describing, says, "There were very few chimneys even
in capital towns: the fire was laid to the wall, and the smoke issued
out at the roof, or door, or window. The houses were wattled, and
plastered over with clay; and all the furniture and utensils were of
wood. The people slept on straw pallets, with a log of wood for a
pillow." When this old historian wrote, he mentions the erection of
chimneys as a modern luxury. We had improved little upon our Anglo-Saxon
ancestors in the article of chimneys. In their time Alcuin, an abbot who
had ten thousand vassals, writes to the emperor at Rome that he
preferred living in his smoky house to visiting the palaces of Italy.
This was in the ninth century. Five hundred years had made little
difference in the chimneys of Colchester. The nobility had hangings
against the walls to keep out the wind, which crept in through the
crevices which the builder's bungling art had left: the middle orders
had no hangings. Shakspere alludes to this rough building of houses even
in his time:--

"Imperial Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away."

Even the nobility went without glass to their windows in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. "Of old time," says Harrison, "our country
houses, instead of glass, did use much lattice, and that made either of
wicker or fine rifts of oak, in checkerwise." When glass was introduced,
it was for a long time so scarce that at Alnwick Castle, in 1567, the
glass was ordered to be taken out of the windows, and laid up in safety,
when the lord was absent.

The mercer's stock-in-trade at Colchester was much upon a level with the
carpenter's tools. It was somewhat various, but very limited in
quantity. The whole comprised a piece of woollen cloth, some silk and
fine linen, flannel, silk purses, gloves, girdles, leather purses, and
needle-work; and it was altogether valued at 3_l._ There appears to have
been another dealer in cloth and linen in the town, whose store was
equally scanty. We were not much improved in the use of linen a century
later. We learn from the Earl of Northumberland's household book, whose
family was large enough to consume one hundred and sixty gallons of
mustard during the winter with their salt meat, that only seventy ells
of linen were allowed for a year's consumption. In the fourteenth
century none but the clergy and nobility wore white linen. As industry
increased, and the cleanliness of the middle classes increased with it,
the use of white linen became more general; but even at the end of the
next century, when printing was invented, the paper-makers had the
greatest difficulty in procuring rags for their manufacture; and so
careful were the people of every class to preserve their linen, that
night-clothes were never worn. Linen was so dear that Shakspere makes
Falstaff's shirts eight shillings an ell. The more sumptuous articles of
a mercer's stock were treasured in rich families from generation to
generation; and even the wives of the nobility did not disdain to
mention in their wills a particular article of clothing, which they left
to the use of a daughter or a friend. The solitary old coat of a baker
came into the Colchester valuation; nor is this to be wondered at, when
we find that even the soldiers at the battle of Bannockburn, about this
time, were described by an old rhymer as "well near all naked."

The household furniture found in use amongst the families of Colchester
consisted, in the more wealthy, of an occasional bed, a brass pot, a
brass cup, a gridiron, and a rug or two, and perhaps a towel. Of chairs
and tables we hear nothing. We learn from the Chronicles of Brantome, a
French historian of these days, that even the nobility sat upon chests
in which they kept their clothes and linen. Harrison, whose testimony we
have already given to the poverty of these times, affirms, that if a man
in seven years after marriage could purchase a flock bed, and a sack of
chaff to rest his head upon, he thought himself as well lodged as the
lord of the town, "who peradventure lay seldom on a bed entirely of
feathers." An old tenure in England, before these times, binds the
vassal to find straw even for the king's bed. The beds of flock, the few
articles of furniture, the absence of chairs and tables, would have been
of less consequence to the comfort and health of the people, if they had
been clean; but cleanliness never exists without a certain possession of
domestic conveniences. The people of England, in the days of which we
are speaking, were not famed for their attention to this particular.
Thomas a Becket was reputed extravagantly nice, because he had his
parlour strewed every day with clean straw. As late as the reign of
Henry VIII., Erasmus, a celebrated scholar of Holland, who visited
England, complains that the nastiness of the people was the cause of the
frequent plagues that destroyed them; and he says, "their floors are
commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, under which lie unmolested a
collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrements of
dogs and cats, and of everything that is nauseous." The elder Scaliger,
another scholar who came to England, abuses the people for giving him no
convenience to wash his hands. Glass vessels were scarce, and pottery
was almost wholly unknown. The Earl of Northumberland, whom we have
mentioned, breakfasted on trenchers and dined on pewter. While such
universal slovenliness prevailed as Erasmus has described, it is not
likely that much attention was generally paid to the cultivation of the
mind. Before the invention of printing, at the time of the valuation of
Colchester, books in manuscript, from their extreme costliness, could be
purchased only by princes. The royal library of Paris, in 1378,
consisted of nine hundred and nine volumes,--an extraordinary number.
The same library now comprises upwards of four hundred thousand volumes.
But it may fairly be assumed that, where one book could be obtained in
the fourteenth century by persons of the working classes, four hundred
thousand may be as easily obtained now. Here then was a privation which
existed five hundred years ago, which debarred our ancestors from more
profit and pleasure than the want of beds, and chairs, and linen; and
probably, if this privation had continued, and men therefore had not
cultivated their understandings, they would not have learnt to give any
really profitable direction to their labour, and we should still have
been as scantily supplied with furniture and clothes as the good people
of Colchester of whom we have been speaking.

Let us see what accumulated supply, or capital, of food the inhabitants
of England had five centuries ago. Possessions in cattle are the
earliest riches of most countries. We have seen that cattle was called
"live money;" and it is supposed that the word capital, which means
stock generally, was derived from the Latin word "capita," or heads of
beasts. The law-term "chattels" is also supposed to come from cattle.
These circumstances show that cattle were the chief property of our
ancestors. Vast herds of swine constituted the great provision for the
support of the people; and these were principally fed, as they are even
now in the New Forest, upon acorns and beech-mast. In Domesday Book, a
valuation of the time of William the Conqueror, it is always mentioned
how many hogs each estate can maintain. Hume the historian, in his
Essays, alluding to the great herds of swine described by Polybius as
existing in Italy and Greece, concludes that the country was thinly
peopled and badly cultivated; and there can be no doubt that the same
argument may be applied to England in the fourteenth century, although
many swine were maintained in forests preserved for fuel. The hogs
wandered about the country in a half-wild state, destroying, probably,
more than they profitably consumed; and they were badly fed, if we may
judge from a statute of 1402, which alleges the great decrease of fish
in the Thames and other rivers, by the practice of feeding hogs with the
fry caught at the weirs. The hogs' flesh of England was constantly
salted for the winter's food. The people had little fodder for cattle in
the winter, and therefore they only tasted fresh meat in the summer
season. The mustard and vinegar seller formed a business at Colchester,
to furnish a relish for the pork. Stocks of salted meat are mentioned in
the inventory of many houses there, and live hogs as commonly. But
salted flesh is not food to be eaten constantly, and with little
vegetable food, without severe injury to the health. In the early part
of the reign of Henry VIII., not a cabbage, carrot, turnip, or other
edible root, grew in England. Two or three centuries before, certainly,
the monasteries had gardens with a variety of vegetables; but nearly
all the gardens of the laity were destroyed in the wars between the
houses of York and Lancaster. Harrison speaks of wheaten bread as being
chiefly used by the gentry for their own tables; and adds that the
artificer and labourer are "driven to content themselves with
horse-corn, beans, peason, oats, tares, and lentils." There is no doubt
that the average duration of human life was at that period not one-half
as long as at the present day. The constant use of salted meat, with
little or no vegetable addition, doubtless contributed to the shortening
of life, to say nothing of the large numbers constantly swept away by
pestilence and famine. Till lemon-juice was used as a remedy for scurvy
amongst our seamen, who also are compelled to eat salted meat without
green vegetables, the destruction of life in the navy was something
incredible. Admiral Hosier buried his ships' companies twice during a
West India voyage in 1726, partly from the unhealthiness of the Spanish
coast, but chiefly from the ravages of scurvy. Bad food and want of
cleanliness swept away the people of the middle ages, by ravages upon
their health that the limited medical skill of those days could never
resist. Matthew Paris, an historian of that period, states that there
were in his time twenty thousand hospitals for lepers in Europe.

The slow accumulation of capital in the early stages of the civilization
of a country is in a great measure caused by the indisposition of the
people to unite for a common good in public works, and the inability of
governments to carry on these works, when their principal concern is
war, foreign or domestic. The foundations of the civilization of this
country were probably laid by our Roman conquerors, who carried roads
through the island, and taught us how to cultivate our soil. Yet
improvement went on so slowly that, even a hundred years after the
Romans were settled here, the whole country was described as marshy. For
centuries after the Romans made the Watling-street and a few other
roads, one district was separated from another by the general want of
these great means of communication. Bracton, a law-writer of the period
we have been so constantly mentioning, holds that, if a man being at
Oxford engage to pay money the same day in London, he shall be
discharged of his contract, as he undertakes a physical impossibility.
We find, as late as the time of Elizabeth, that her Majesty would not
stay to breakfast at Cambridge because she had to travel twelve miles
before she could come to the place, Hinchinbrook, where she desired to
sleep. Where there were no roads, there could be few or no markets. An
act of parliament of 1272 says that the religious houses should not be
compelled to _sell_ their provisions--a proof that there were no
considerable stores except in the religious houses. The difficulty of
navigation was so great, that William Longsword, son of Henry II.,
returning from France, was during three months tossed upon the sea
before he could make a port in Cornwall. Looking, therefore, to the want
of commerce proceeding from the want of communication--looking to the
small stock of property accumulated to support labour--and looking, as
we have previously done, to the incessant contests between the small
capital and the misdirected labour, both feeble, because they worked
without skill--we cannot be surprised that the poverty of which we have
exhibited a faint picture should have endured for several centuries, and
that the industry of our forefathers must have had a long and painful
struggle before it could have bequeathed to us such magnificent
accumulations as we now enjoy.

The writers who lived at the periods when Europe was slowly emerging
from ignorance and poverty, through the first slight union of capital
and labour as voluntary exchangers, complain of the increase of comforts
as indications of the growing luxury and effeminacy of the people.
Harrison says, "In times past men were contented to dwell in houses
builded of sallow, willow, plum-tree, or elm; so that the use of oak was
dedicated to churches, religious houses, princes' palaces, noblemen's
lodgings, and navigation. But now, these are rejected, and nothing but
oak any whit regarded. And yet see the change; for when our houses were
builded of willow, then had we oaken men; but now that our houses are
made of oak, our men are not only become willow, but many, through
Persian delicacy crept in among us, altogether of straw, which is a sore
alteration. In those days, the courage of the owner was a sufficient
defence to keep the house in safety; but now, the assurance of the
timber, double doors, locks, and bolts, must defend the man from
robbing. Now have we many chimneys, and our tenderlings complain of
rheums, catarrhs, and poses. Then had we none but rere-dosses, and our
heads did never ache." These complaints go upon the same principle that
made it a merit in Epictetus, the Greek philosopher, to have had no door
to his hovel. We think he would have been a wiser man if he had
contrived to have had a door. A story is told of a Highland chief, Sir
Evan Cameron, that himself and a party of his followers being benighted,
and compelled to sleep in the open air, when his son rolled up a ball of
snow and laid his head upon it for a pillow, the rough old man kicked it
away, exclaiming, "What, sir! are you turning effeminate?" We doubt
whether Sir Evan Cameron and his men were braver than the English
officers who fought at Waterloo; and yet many of these marched from the
ball-room at Brussels in their holiday attire, and won the battle in
silk stockings. It is an old notion that plenty of the necessaries and
conveniences of life renders a nation feeble. We are told that the
Carthaginian soldiers whom Hannibal carried into Italy were suddenly
rendered effeminate by the abundance which they found around them at
Capua. The commissariat of modern nations goes upon another principle;
and believes that unless the soldier has plenty of food and clothing he
will not fight with alacrity and steadiness. The half-starved soldiers
of Henry V. won the battle of Agincourt; but it was not because they
were half-starved, but because they roused their native courage to cut
their way out of the peril by which they were surrounded. The Russians
of our time had a notion that the English could not fight on land,
because for forty years we had been a commercial instead of a military
nation. The battle of the Alma corrected their mistake. When we hear of
ancient nations being enervated by abundance, we may be sure that the
abundance was almost entirely devoured by a few tyrants, and that the
bulk of the people were rendered weak by the destitution which resulted
from the unnatural distribution of riches. We read of the luxury of the
court of Persia--the pomp of the seraglios, and of the palaces--the
lights, the music, the dancing, the perfumes, the silks, the gold, and
the diamonds. The people are held to be effeminate. The Russians, from
the hardy north, can lay the Persian monarchy any day at their feet. Is
this national weakness caused by the excess of production amongst the
people, giving them so extravagant a command over the necessaries and
luxuries of life that they have nothing to do but drink of the full cup
of enjoyment? Mr. Fraser, an English traveller, thus describes the
appearance of a part of the country which he visited in 1821:--"The
plain of Yezid-Khaust presented a truly lamentable picture of the
general decline of prosperity in Persia. Ruins of large villages thickly
scattered about with the skeleton-like walls of caravansaries and
gardens, all telling of better times, stood like _memento moris_
(remembrances of death) to kingdoms and governments; and the whole plain
was dotted over with small mounds, which indicate the course of cannauts
(artificial streams for watering the soil), once the source of riches
and fertility, now all choked up and dry; for there is neither man nor
cultivation to require their aid." Was it the luxury of the people which
produced this decay--the increase of their means of production--their
advancement in skill and capital; or some external cause which repressed
production, and destroyed accumulation both of outward wealth and
knowledge? "Such is the character of their rulers," says Mr. Fraser,
"that the only measure of their demands is the power to extort on one
hand, and the ability to give or retain on the other." Where such a
system prevails, all accumulated labour is concealed, for it would
otherwise be plundered. It does not freely and openly work to encourage
new labour. Burckhardt, the traveller of Nubia, saw a farmer who had
been plundered of everything by the pacha, because it came to the ears
of the savage ruler that the unhappy man was in the habit of eating
wheaten bread; and that, he thought, was too great a luxury for a
subject. If such oppressions had not long ago been put down in England,
we should still have been in the state of Colchester in the fourteenth
century. When these iniquities prevailed, and there was neither freedom
of industry nor security of property--when capital and labour were not
united--when all men consequently worked unprofitably, because they
worked without division of labour, accumulation of knowledge, and union
of forces--there was universal poverty, because there was feeble
production. Slow and painful were the steps which capital and labour had
to make before they could emerge, even in part, from this feeble and
degraded state. But that they have made a wonderful advance in five
hundred years will not be difficult to show. It may assist us in this
view if we compare the Colchester of the nineteenth century with the
Colchester of the fourteenth, in a few particulars.

In the reign of Edward III. Colchester numbered 359 houses of mud,
without chimneys, and with latticed windows. In the reign of Queen
Victoria, according to the census of 1851, it has 4145 inhabited houses,
containing a population of 19,443 males and females. The houses of the
better class, those rented at ten pounds a year and upwards, are
commonly built of brick, and slated or tiled; secured against wind and
weather; with glazed windows and with chimneys; and generally well
ventilated. The worst of these houses are supplied, as fixtures, with a
great number of conveniences, such as grates, and cupboards, and
fastenings. To many of such houses gardens are attached, wherein are
raised vegetables and fruits that kings could not command two centuries
ago. Houses such as these are composed of several rooms--not of one room
only, where the people are compelled to eat and sleep and perform every
office, perhaps in company with pigs and cattle--but of a kitchen, and
often a parlour, and several bedrooms. These rooms are furnished with
tables, and chairs, and beds, and cooking-utensils. There is ordinarily,
too, something for ornament and something for instruction;--a piece or
two of china, silver spoons, books, and not unfrequently a watch or
clock. The useful pottery is abundant and of really elegant forms and
colours; drinking-vessels of glass are universal. The inhabitants are
not scantily supplied with clothes. The females are decently dressed,
having a constant change of linen, and gowns of various patterns and
degrees of fineness. Some, even of the humbler classes, are not thought
to exceed the proper appearance of their station if they wear silk. The
men have decent working habits, strong shoes and hats, and a respectable
suit for Sundays, of cloth often as good as is worn by the highest in
the land. Every one is clean; for no house above the few hovels which
still deform the country is without soap and bowls for washing, and it
is the business of the females to take care that the linen of the family
is constantly washed. The children, very generally, receive instruction
in some public establishment; and when the labour of the day is over,
the father thinks the time unprofitably spent unless he burns a candle
to enable him to read a book or the newspaper. The food which is
ordinarily consumed is of the best quality. Wheaten bread is no longer
confined to the rich; animal food is not necessarily salted, and salt
meat is used principally as a variety; vegetables of many sorts are
plenteous in every market, and these by a succession of care are brought
to higher perfection than in the countries of more genial climate from
which we have imported them; the productions too of distant regions,
such as spices, and coffee, and tea, and sugar, are universally consumed
almost by the humblest in the land. Fuel, also, of the best quality, is
abundant and comparatively cheap.

If we look at the public conveniences of a modern English town, we shall
find the same striking contrast. Water is brought not only into every
street, but into every house; the dust and dirt of a family is regularly
removed without bustle or unpleasantness; the streets are paved, and
lighted at night; roads in the highest state of excellence connect the
town with the whole kingdom, and by means of railroads a man can travel
several hundred miles in a few hours, and more readily than he could ten
miles in the old time; and canal and sea navigation transport the
weightiest goods with the greatest facility from each district to the
other, and from each town to the other, so that all are enabled to apply
their industry to what is most profitable for each and all. Every man,
therefore, may satisfy his wants, according to his means, at the least
possible expense of the transport of commodities. Every tradesman has a
stock ready to meet the demand; and thus the stock of a very moderately
wealthy tradesman of the Colchester of the present day is worth more
than all the stock of all the different trades that were carried on in
the same place in the fourteenth century. The condition of a town like
Colchester--a flourishing market-town in an agricultural
district--offers a fair point of comparison with a town of the time of
Edward III.

CHAPTER IX.

Certainty the stimulus to industry--Effects of
insecurity--Instances of unprofitable labour--Former notions
of commerce--National and class prejudices, and their
remedy.

Two of the most terrific famines that are recorded in the history of the
world occurred in Egypt--a country where there is greater production,
with less labour, than is probably exhibited in any other region. The
principal labourer in Egypt is the river Nile, whose periodical
overflowings impart fertility to the thirsty soil, and produce in a few
weeks that abundance which the labour of the husbandman might not hope
to command if employed during the whole year. But the Nile is a workman
that cannot be controlled and directed, even by capit

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