CHAPTER XVI. REFORMS AS MUCH NEEDED IN AMERICA AND IN COLONIES AS IN EUROPE.
Answer to question, “How is Human Slavery to go out?”—Insufficiency of mere Political Freedom—Accessibility of Public Lands in new Countries their chief Advantage—Inadequacy of Universal Suffrage without a Knowledge of Social Rights—America falling into same Abyss as Europe.
Before resuming the subject of the foregoing propositions, we pray the reader to bear in mind, that we are now arrived at that all-important branch of our inquiry which proposes to answer the question, “How is human slavery to be made to go out of the world?” To have shown how it came in,—how it was propagated,—the varied phases it has assumed, and the hideous, wide-spread proletarianism to which the conversion of chattel-slavery into wages-slavery has given rise,—to have shown all this, without at the same time essaying to show how the fell monster is to be eradicated from the face of the earth, would be a mere idle literary dissertation—a contemptible parade of erudition, without object, without end. A higher purpose will, we trust, be found to have dictated this inquiry. An earnest, heartfelt desire to contribute our quota towards rescuing humanity from oppression and sorrow is the motive we lay claim to. This motive it is which impelled us, on the part of the National Reform League, to propose the resolutions embodied in the last chapter. In those resolutions we profess to answer the question, “How is human slavery to be made to go out of the world?” It is true, their immediate application is intended only for our own country; but they are equally applicable to France, Germany, and every other “civilized” country—America itself not excepted. America is comparatively free from most of the political anomalies and exclusive privileges which disgrace Europe, and degrade the vast numerical majority of its people. There are no crowned heads there; there is no State Church. Some of the States have public debts, but they are comparatively light, and, for the most part, in course of easy liquidation. Moreover, there is no titled aristocracy claiming, by hereditary right, to legislate for or govern any of the States. In this respect, men of all grades and conditions are equally eligible for office, and for places of trust, honour, and emolument. Universal suffrage may be said to be the general rule, and property qualifications the exception, for the election of members of the legislature and officers of government. Treason works no corruption of blood in America. There is no law of primogeniture or entail; there is no religion established and maintained by law, and consequently no legal bars to religious freedom. Taxation is, generally speaking, equal, uniform, and direct. It was, before the civil war, comparatively light, too; and when otherwise, the remedy lies with the people themselves; for, as restrictions upon the suffrage by property and tax-qualifications exist but in some few of the States (and in these are not very onerous or stringent), the basis of representation may, for all practical purposes, be considered numerical, and not territorial or financial. Add to these advantages the fact that the old common law of England is the common law of America; and that where any departure from it is made by statute, it is invariably in a democratic sense. Thus, in Texas and other States, for instance, that part of the old common law which considers a married woman as dead in law is abrogated by statute in favour of the gentle sex, and so as to give her more power than she possesses under the civil law. Thus, any property possessed by her before marriage remains at her sole disposal after marriage, as also any property she may become entitled to during coverture. She may receive from and give to her husband a deed of conveyance whilst under coverture. And any deed of conveyance made by the husband requires for its full validity the joint signature of the wife. In some of the States, too, the homestead can never be taken in execution of debt; and, at the moment we write, a powerful movement is going on throughout the States to secure a similar exemption of the homestead throughout the entire Union. These and other privileges—the result of her political constitution—America fully enjoys. No European state can compare with her in these respects—not even Norway or Switzerland. In a word, America is already possessed of every political amelioration contended for by the old Radicals of this country, or by the financial or mere middle-class reformers of the present day. Indeed, to assimilate us to America is their summum bonum—the ne plus ultra of their reforming aspirations.
Far be it from us to undervalue the political rights secured to the Americans by their general and State constitutions. Nevertheless, we unhesitatingly affirm that the foregoing propositions are no less necessary for the extinction of slavery in America than in England, France, or any other European country.
Our position is this: It is the land and money laws of a country that must ever mainly determine the social condition of its people. In other words, without just agrarian and commercial laws—laws that shall establish for all classes equal rights in the soil and equal advantages from the use of money and credit (so as to secure equitable exchange in trade)—no country can be prosperous, be its form of government what it may. Now, in these respects America has but little to boast of over England, France, or any other European country. If she does not exhibit the wide-spread distress that these countries exhibit, she owes it not so much to the superiority of her political institutions (for of these she has as yet but little availed herself), as she does to her unbounded resources (in the extent and fertility of her soil), and to the comparative exemption she enjoys from public and private indebtedness owing to her being a new country. But for these causes—but for the facility with which unappropriated land may be had, and but for the fewness of her territorial and commercial aristocracy as compared with those of older countries—her citizens would very soon exhibit the same hideous extremes of rich and poor as are to be found in Europe. Indeed, New York and some of the New England States (where most of the land is appropriated, and the population crowded) have already, on more than one occasion, exhibited all the worst features of British “civilization”—that is to say, wholesale squalor and destitution (with their necessary consequences) in close proximity to teeming granaries and warehouses; otherwise, an unemployed labouring population, in rags and hunger, within sight of merchant-princes and master-manufacturers worth some hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
And why should it be otherwise? The social system is the same there as here. Rents are higher in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, &c., than in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Competition is the same or worse. Wages-slavery is as rife in Massachusets, Pennsylvania, and New York as in any part of the British Isles; and if wages be not quite as low in Philadelphia and Lowell as they are in Manchester and Birmingham, it is partly owing to the high protective duties laid on foreign manufactures, partly to the comparative scarcity of hands, but chiefly to the facility with which the victims of competition can escape from the mills and factories to the backwoods of Indiana, Missouri, &c.
In other words, the Americans owe whatever advantage they have over us not to any superiority in their social institutions,—not to better agrarian and commercial laws,—nor even to the acknowledged superiority of their civil and religious system of polity,—but to the territorial and other local advantages to which we have referred, and which no more distinguish them than they do the people of Sydney, Adelaide, Port Phillip, Natal, New Zealand, or any other new country in which land is abundant and labour scarce. But let America (with her present social system) come to be peopled as England is,—let her now unappropriated land be made private property of, and her agrarian and commercial laws remain what they are,—and we venture to say that not one jot better off will her labouring population be than ours now is. Universal suffrage might stem the aristocratic tide for a season (as it has done in other new countries); but the men of land and money would sweep away universal suffrage there, as they have ever done elsewhere, the moment they found it incompatible with landlordism and usury. All the principal States of Europe had universal suffrage a few years ago; France alone possesses it now, and that with a tenure so insecure that it can hardly be said to be established. In all the other States the men of land and money destroyed universal suffrage by brute force; they dispersed diets and national assemblies at the point of the bayonet, and made rights and constitutions to disappear before the cannon of disciplined assassins. It may be the same in France before six months. It would have been the same long ere now, but that some two millions of social reformers were known to be ready to take advantage of the event, in order to wreak vengeance upon the landed and commercial villains who have defrauded them out of the fruits of three revolutions purchased with torrents of blood.
In truth, universal suffrage is no guarantee at all for liberty, unless it be accompanied, on the part of the working classes, with a knowledge of their social rights, and a consequent determination to use political power for their establishment. The Romans, the Spartans and Athenians, the Sicilians, and many other ancient peoples had universal suffrage—at least, a vote for every citizen who was not a helot or a bondsman; but it proved of no use to them, for want of knowing their social rights. For the like reason, the Irish made no good use of their forty-shilling freehold vote, when they had it; and, for the same reason, they offered no resistance when it was taken away. The French people had universal suffrage in 1793. Their Convention of that period was elected by universal suffrage; and the constitution it made was far more democratic than the French constitution of 1848. But, not understanding their social rights then so well as they do now, they suffered their landlords and money-lords to rob them of it, just as the old Romans, Athenians, &c., had allowed their land and money lords to do in their day. After the Convention had succeeded, with the aid of the Parisian shopocracy, in murdering Robespierre and in striking terror into all who, like him, loved justice and the people, they not only abolished the democratic constitution of 1793 and put a middle-class constitution in its place, but they actually decreed that they (the Convention members) should constitute two-thirds of the next Legislative Assembly, and that the nation should be at liberty to choose only the remaining third! Strange to say, too, the people submitted to this, as to every other abomination of the times; they submitted because the great mass of them were too profoundly ignorant of their social rights to take much interest in the franchise question. It ever was so, it ever will be so, with a people ignorant of their social rights: they will never risk life or limb in defence of their political till they comprehend their social rights.
In America there is less danger than anywhere else of the people losing their political rights. This is owing partly to the greater equality in property which subsists there, but chiefly to the agitation of social questions which has been forced upon the working classes of late years by the continuous arrival of European emigrants competing with them in the labour-market, and alarming them, by their example, as to what might prove their own fate hereafter, should they suffer a powerful territorial and commercial aristocracy to grow up amongst them. Hence the springing up of the “Free Soil” and “National Reform” movements in the United States; hence an attempt to radicalize the constitution of Rhode Island; hence the numerous publications which denounced the sale of the public lands—especially to foreigners and companies; hence the hatred of national debts—especially if they arise out of foreign loans—and the determination of the working-classes to repudiate them; and hence, above all, the cheering fact, so well deserving of our notice, that every new revision of an American constitution—whether it be that of a State or of the entire Union—is invariably distinguished by an increase of strength or latitude given to the democratic principle. This is particularly observable in the new States, where the settlers, consisting in great part of exiles forced from Europe by poverty and tyranny, have carried out with them an intense hatred of the systems they fled from, and therefore take all the democratic precautions they can to keep down the aristocratic leaven.
But not even America herself, we predict, will escape the régime of Europe, unless she reform her social institutions while she is yet young and healthy. Her agrarian laws are not a jot better than those of France or England; and her commercial spirit is even more ravenous and unscrupulous. In one respect she is worse than either. We allude to her preference of metallic money to symbolic money; which is a result of the fraudulent paper-systems she has so often smarted under. There is no subject upon which the American working-classes are so lamentably at fault as the subject of money. They fancy that an honest paper-system is impossible, because they have been so often cheated by the worthless rags of fraudulent usurers; and in this suicidal delusion the bullionists and usurers take good care to confirm them. Next to their want of sound views upon the Land question, this delusion as to the real nature and proper functions of Money is the greatest foe to American progress. On the subject of Credit—that most potent of all levers of modern production—the same ignorance prevails in America as here and in France. In truth, were it not that universal suffrage is the fundamental law in France and America, while it is scouted in England, we should be at a loss to know what advantages the French and Americans possess over us, so deplorably similar are the three countries in respect of social rights.
But we shall better comprehend these matters when we come to analyze the propositions of the National Reform League, and to test their value by showing their equal applicability to, and desirability for, all three countries,—indeed, for all civilized countries under the sun.
