CHAPTER VIII. EXPLOITATION-VALUE OF SLAVE AND FREE LABOUR.
Contrast of Plantation-Servants with British Workpeople—Affluence of former American Slaves—Misery of Free Labourers and Artisans—Value of Irish Peasants and English Workers—Free and Slave Children in America.
Look on the life of a modern negro-slave in America, and compare it with the life of a modern Irish or Scotch peasant, or even that of an English hand-loom weaver in the North or of an English labourer in the South and West. Compare, did we say? Alas! the two conditions will not bear a comparison. Contrast is the word we must use. To the damning disgrace of modern civilization be it said, we cannot compare the condition of our free workpeople in Europe with that of the negro-slaves of Louisiana,—we can only contrast them; and the contrast is so truly appalling that, in contemplating it, one cannot help trembling at the prospective destination of humanity.
Mr. Edward Smith says: “Many industrious slaves can thus” (by overwork) “obtain from 50 to 250 dollars per year, which they expend in luxuries of the table and in clothing fit for any European gentleman.” This, be it observed, is over and above an abundant supply of all their ordinary wants by their masters. It includes neither food, drink, ordinary apparel, medicine, firing, nor house-rents,—not even vegetables or poultry, for with these, it seems, the slaves are provided out of their own gardens and fowl-yards. It includes not one of those ordinary expenses which absorb the entire week’s earnings of a modern “free-born Briton.” The American slave’s surplus earnings may be considered as so much pocket-money. He might save, or lay by at interest, the whole of his 250 dollars per annum towards the purchase of his liberty, if he liked to exchange his condition for that of an independent labourer. According to Mr. Smith, however, the negro knows better; for Mr. Smith tells us, “they” (the negroes) “do not usually care to save money wherewith to purchase their freedom, feeling that the protection of their masters is an advantage to them.” If this protection be an advantage in America, where the wages of independent labour are still comparatively high, what would be the negro’s feelings were it proposed to him to give up his master’s protection in exchange for the independence of a Dorsetshire labourer or of a Yorkshire weaver? Ah! then, indeed, he would feel the difference between the two kinds of slavery; then he would know how to appreciate that condition of primitive slavery which Mr. Smith calls a upas-tree, and from which our saints of Exeter Hall so yearn to release him. “Very many slaves,” again quoth Mr. Smith, “own horses kept for their own use; and others own land.” We should like to know how many operative cordwainers or journeymen tailors in London keep horses for their own use, and how many of them own lands purchased with the proceeds of their overwork? We should like to know, too, how many of their masters can afford to keep horses for their own use? We apply this query to the tailors and shoemakers of London, because no other two trades are subject to less variation than these, and because the wages paid in them are higher in London than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. Is there a journeyman tailor or shoemaker in London that can afford to buy and keep a horse out of his wages? We believe not one. And if it cannot be done with London wages, certainly nowhere else can it be done in England, Ireland, or Scotland. As to an English field-labourer, or an artisan in one of our manufacturing towns, keeping a horse or owning land, the idea is absolutely ludicrous. Indeed, we are living in times when very few of their masters, much less themselves, can afford to indulge in such luxuries. For though we have many of that class who, having become millionaires and country squires, can keep carriages as well as horses, yet the majority, if the truth were known, are nearer the Gazette than they are to that easy condition in which men can afford to keep horses for their recreation and amusement. The case of the stewardess whom Mr. Smith met on board the boat in which he descended the Mississippi presents a startling contrast to the ordinary condition of industrious females in England. The stewardess had, it seems, with her own surplus earnings purchased her freedom at from 1,000 to 1,500 dollars; 1,500 dollars, at 4s. 2d. the dollar, is just £312 10s. of our money. Where is the woman engaged in any branch of industry in England that could show £312 10s., or a tithe of that sum, as the result of a few years’ saving of wages? If there be such cases they are not one in ten thousand. According to the commissioner of the Morning Chronicle, to whose valuable revelations we referred in the preceding chapter, “there are now in London some 28,577 needlewomen whose earnings average but 4½d. per day. There are as many more whose earnings hardly exceed 3s. a week all the year round. Contrast (for we dare not say compare) the condition of these unfortunate beings with that of the black female slave who, besides living well, could save 1,500 dollars in a few years wherewith to purchase her independence! Yet there are hypocrites amongst us—hypocrites to be met with in shoals upon our platforms and in our pulpits—who would wring tears of pity from us for the poor negro slave, while not an atom of sensibility have they for their own white slaves whose condition is infinitely more to be commiserated.”
But, after all, the real test is this:—What is a negro-slave’s value in the eye of his master, and what is the British or Irish slave’s value in the eye of his master or employer? A sorry, good-for-nothing slave indeed must he or she be whom an American planter could not find a market for! From 800 to 1,200 dollars was a common price for a good stout negro in New Orleans. In the case of the stewardess spoken of by Mr. Smith, we find that her master considered her worth from 1,000 to 1,500 dollars—i.e., of that much value to himself. We know in the case of our own West India slaves, that our Parliament estimated their value to their owners at £20,000,000, the annual interest of which we taxpayers have still to provide. But how stands the British or Irish slave in respect of marketable value? In Ireland his value stands so high that, only a few years ago, the landlords of Kilkenny county, with the Marquis of Ormond at their head, actually memorialized the Government to relieve Ireland from the presence of 2,000,000 of the peasantry, offering to assist the Government even pecuniarily in any scheme of emigration or transportation, or expatriation or extermination, it might set on foot for that purpose! Indeed, hardly a Parliamentary session has passed over, for the last twenty years, without witnessing some kind of project, or proposal, or suggestion for getting rid of Ireland’s “surplus population.” Up to the winter of 1846-47 (the year of the famine) 2,000,000, at least, of the population were uniformly condemned as surplus! Instead of being considered worth so much per head, like the negroes, it was deemed worth making a pecuniary sacrifice to rid the land of them. At £10 per head, these 2,000,000 would fetch just the sum which the West India planters thought a very inadequate remuneration for the loss of their slaves. Instead of asking £10 per head for them, the Irish owners and occupiers of the land were disposed to give £10 per head to get rid of them. They would have jumped at the bargain, could they have found the money and the purchasers. Fortunately for those patriotic and Christian gentlemen, the famine of 1846-47 came to carry off about a million of the surplus. Emigration and starvation have since relieved them of another large batch. Starvation being a cheaper process than emigration, it is the favourite scheme of the Irish proprietary classes. But as there were then, and still are, many refractory Irish who hold the rich man’s laws of meum and tuum in less respect than they do the great law of nature which forbids any man to starve in a land of abundance, the landowners and occupiers have found it necessary, and for their interest, to contribute largely to the emigration of the last few years. They have in this way expended some hundreds of thousands of pounds, besides sacrificing many times that amount in the voluntary cancelling of debts and in the remission of arrears of rent due. At all events, the proprietary classes of Ireland have furnished, and do still continue to furnish, proofs innumerable and irrefragable that they consider their white slaves as not only valueless, but to be worth considerably less than nothing, seeing that they will give something very considerable to get quit of them. There’s the marketable value of an Irish white slave!
And how stands the case in England? Not very dissimilar from Ireland. Are not the ominous words, “surplus population,” as familiar to us upon this side of St. George’s Channel as they are to our Irish brethren upon the other side? Have we not all manner of emigration schemes afloat here, as well as there, to get rid of the surplus? How often has it been proposed to raise a gigantic loan of millions wherewith to promote British emigration upon a gigantic scale, and to mortgage the poor-rates as security for the repayment of the loan! We remember how, some twenty and odd years ago, great numbers of the agricultural parishes in England had it gravely in contemplation to get rid of their surplus in that way. We remember some of the calculations made on that occasion. We remember how certain wise men in certain places laid it down that whole parishes might be cleared at the rate of £30 per family, on the average, and how much better it was to sacrifice the interest of this sum (£1 10s. for each) than to saddle a parish with the maintenance of a whole family of paupers. According to this estimate, a whole family of English white slaves was worth just £30 less than nothing! In other words, their marketable value might be expressed algebraically thus:—
An English white slave and family = minus £30.
About the time this estimate was made of the value of live Englishmen in this country, Burke and Hare, the murderers, were selling dead men’s bodies, in Scotland, at the rate of £10 per head to the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. Consequently, a dead slave was at that time worth some £40 more than a whole family of live ones, unless the latter could be made available for anatomical purposes. Since that period the value both of live slaves and dead ones has greatly fallen in the market. Subjects for the dissecting-table can now be got almost for a song. And as to live slaves, our “surplus population” has so vastly augmented since the time referred to, that, notwithstanding the myriads already disposed of by famine and the cholera, we feel assured our lords and masters have still some 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 more they would gladly get rid of upon any terms. There are full that number at present in the United Kingdom for whom no regular kind of remunerative employment can be had—who are, in consequence, regarded as not only valueless, but as a positive incumbrance upon the soil—as a dead loss to the country—and whose lives are thereby made a burden to themselves as well as to others. To compare the condition of these thoroughly oppressed and neglected beings with that of the well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, well-cared-for negro slaves described by Mr. Edward Smith would be to outrage common sense. As already observed, we may contrast; we cannot, in decency, compare. Why, according to that gentleman’s testimony, any industrious negro, with a kind master, could save more money in twelve months (besides leading a life wholly exempt from care) than some of our hand-loom weavers could earn in two years, or than an Irish white slave could earn in four years at 6d. a day—which is more than their average earnings throughout the year.
The writer of this happening to visit Leicester some twelve months ago, he made diligent inquiry there touching the rate of wages and the condition of the people generally, engaged in the staple trade of the town. From the very best sources of information, he learned that their average wages did not exceed 6s. a week throughout the year, although at that period the hosiery trade was unusually brisk, and all hands full of work. Only twelve months before, nearly one-half the artisans were out of employ, and the streets literally swarmed, at all hours of the day, with men, women, and children roaming about in a state of utter destitution. To beg or steal was their only resource; for they were absolutely starving.
Talk of negro slavery, indeed! No chattel slaves of ancient or modern times ever knew the dire distress and torturing privations of these poor Leicester people. Indeed, except in the midst of a civil war, such sufferings as theirs could not have happened under the ancient system of chattel-slavery. In ordinary times of peace, it could not have been even conceived; for neither masters nor slaves could have possibly had any experience of such a state of things. It was only in desperate civil wars, or occasionally from plagues, pestilences, or famine, that such calamities arose in ancient times; and then all classes shared alike in the visitation. Indeed, upon such occasions the slaves were generally those that suffered least; for as they possessed nothing to invite spoliation, and as their productive uses made it the interest of all parties not to molest them, they necessarily escaped most of the evils which, in times of war and commotion, ravaged every other class. Hence their uninterrupted increase in numbers in Italy, Sparta, and elsewhere; whilst the free citizens, or master-class, were being continually thinned by the calamities, referred to. And seeing that their owners could have valued them as property only on account of their labour, the idea of their roving about in famished gangs, like the poor Leicester weavers, without bread or work, and of then being forced, as a means of preserving life, to beg a brother-worm of the earth to give them leave to toil, is an idea that would be as novel and as difficult of explanation to them as (to borrow an illustration from Locke) the peculiar flavour of a pine-apple would be novel and indescribable to one who had never tasted that particular fruit.
But man lives not by bread alone; he has other wants besides those of food, clothing, and shelter: he has certain moral wants, and certain sympathies, the gratification of which is as essential to his well-being and happiness as the satisfaction of his mere animal wants. It is in respect of these, even more than in respect of his physical requirements, that the chattel-slave had, and still has, so immeasurably the advantage over the proletarian wages-slave. Waiving, for the present, the numerous proofs and evidences of this to be found in the ancient classics, let us prove it by less fallible evidence—by the actual condition of the chattel-slave in our own time. And here we shall again cite the testimony of an abhorrer of chattel-slavery, to show its superiority over the wages-slavery of proletarianism. What says Mr. Edward Smith, the Abolitionist, in treating of those moral relations between master and negro slave, upon which the well-being and happiness of the latter must depend, as much as upon his physical comforts? He says, “The planters find it their interest to use the negroes kindly.” He says, the cottages built for them “usually partake of the character of the planter’s or overlooker’s house, near to which they stand.” He says, “The young coloured children are brought up with the planter’s children, and thus learn to read a little,” though he admits “the planters forbid their learning to write.” He says, “most of the planters encourage ministers in giving religious instruction to their slaves; for they have discovered that a good Christian is not a bad servant.” He says that, as a consequence of the sort of paternal care bestowed upon the coloured children by the planters, and of their being brought up as companions and playmates with the planter’s own children, “the slaves are deeply attached to the place of their birth and to the planter’s children with whom they were raised, or whom they nursed in infancy;” and he adds, “this attachment is commonly returned by the planter, so that he will not part with the slaves so long as he lives or can retain them.” These are pretty strong evidences. Yet there is a stronger still. It relates to that event in every man’s life, which, next to his coming into the world and leaving it, is accounted the most important of his life; at all events, his happiness, more especially in the humbler ranks, is said to depend more upon it than upon any other event, or upon any other relation in which he may stand towards his species; we mean, of course, marriage and sexual intercourse. Now, how stands the negro-slave in this respect? Let us see whether the planter scowls at him for marrying; let us see whether he incurs the wrath of poor law guardians and commissioners, and the withering anathemas of Malthus, for fulfilling one of the ends of his being. Let us see, in short, whether he is menaced with starvation and death, like a “free-born Briton” of the proletarian order, for obeying a paramount law of his nature, enforced by scriptural injunction. Upon this vitally important point in the negro’s condition Mr. Smith observes:—“They” (the planters) “uniformly encourage marriage amongst their slaves, and do not require a man and woman to marry unless they wish to do so. If the man fancy a woman on another plantation, the masters agree to the marriage, and one will sell the husband or the wife, so that one master may own them both.” Compare these features and conditions of negro marriages with those which characterise marriages amongst the poor of this country. Where do we find a British or Irish landlord encouraging the “peasantry” to marriage? Where do we find an English or a Scotch cotton-lord, coal-king, or ironmaster promoting early marriages amongst their white slaves? Whoever heard of any of these gentry taking a young man or a young woman into his service, in order to facilitate their union with those they love? On the contrary, early marriages are systematically proscribed by these gentry, and, indeed, all marriages, early or late, amongst the poor. Nothing is more common, in this country, than for landlords to make it a condition, when letting a farm to a tenant, that he (the tenant-farmer) shall not, on any account, introduce a son-in-law or daughter-in-law beneath his roof as inmates of the establishment; whilst he (the landlord) takes care, at the same time, that there shall be no other habitations for young couples on his estate. What is this but interdicting marriage by taking the most stringent precautions against it? We know a certain noble lady, now living, who, not many years ago, when appointing a master and mistress to instruct the young people in a boys’ and girls’ school (established upon one of her estates), made it a positive condition of their appointment that, although they were man and wife, they should have no children while they held their situation! This titled Malthusian is by no means a rare specimen of her rank or sex; on the contrary, she is but a sample of the sack; and the sack is judged by the sample. In truth, from Lord John Russell and his Grace of Richmond down to “penny-a-line Chadwick,” of poor-law notoriety, and the very lowest of his understrappers, there prevails but one sentiment on this subject, namely, an unmitigated dread and hatred of affording any encouragement to the labouring classes to marry. And, from the manner in which they have contrived to frame and administer our present system of poor-laws (throwing the weight of the burden where there is least strength to bear it), we may add, with truth, that they have succeeded in making the great body of our ratepayers as anti-matrimonial and as thoroughly Malthusian as themselves.
As the tree is known by its fruit, so may we judge of the relative merits of the system which facilitates and encourages marriages amongst chattel-slaves, and of that which prescribes Malthusianism to our free and independent proletarians. The result of the latter system in this metropolis alone is 100,000 women obliged to subsist themselves, wholly or in part, by prostitution! The result of the former system is prostitution reduced within very narrow limits amongst the slave-class, and what there is of it is directly chargeable to the masters’ own account, and not to that of their male slaves.
But enough has been said to establish our position that chattel-slavery, with all its abominations, is less destructive of life, liberty, and happiness than the wages-slavery of modern proletarianism. Were other facts and arguments necessary, we could supply them to redundancy. We therefore dismiss the subject, and shall proceed to show how Christianity unconsciously caused the greater evil in attempting to rescue humanity from the lesser.
