CHAPTER XVII. RELIEF TO UNEMPLOYED OR DESTITUTE A RIGHT, NOT A CHARITY.
Inability of a People ignorant of Social Rights to choose Representatives—Duties of a wise Democracy—Omnipotency of a Knowledge of Social Rights—Facility of Application of Social Reforms—Exposition of the three Provisional Measures necessary.
We have stated, in a former chapter, that the repeal of unjust laws, and the enactment of a few just and salutary ones, upon Land, Credit, and Equitable Exchange (the latter including Currency), are all that is wanted to terminate poverty and slavery for ever; and that nothing is easier than for Parliament to enact such laws without infringing the rights of private property, without confiscating to the value of a shilling of any man’s estate, or otherwise dealing with property than in the legitimate way of taxation and commutation which the laws of all countries recognise and practise, and none more so than our own.
The resolutions which we have before cited show clearly how it may be done. An honest Parliament is of course presupposed; for, without an honest legislature to begin with, reform is all moonshine. The first article of the League’s creed is, therefore, a full, free, and fair representation of the whole people. To that end it demands the enactment of the “People’s Charter”—not because it regards the Charter’s plan of representation as perfect, but because that plan is sufficiently so for all practical purposes, and because, having already received the sanction of millions of the population, it would be unwise and mischievous to risk dividing the people by the propounding of any fresh scheme, the more especially as any defects in the “Charter” may be easily enough remedied hereafter by a parliament or convention elected upon Chartist principles.
But although the “People’s Charter” is a sine qua non with the League, it is, after all, but a machinery for providing the means to an end. The means is parliamentary reform; the end is social reform, or a reformation of society through the operation of just and humane laws. The “Charter,” in fact, but aims at restoring to the people the undoubted right of self-government—the right of making the laws according to which, and to which only, they are to be ruled. It leaves to the people themselves to do all the rest. It gives them the power to elect what sort of representatives they choose, and to exact from them what pledges they like in the way of social and political reform. With the people themselves, however, it must ultimately rest whether even the “People’s Charter” shall give them veritable political and social rights.
If they know how to choose their legislators, and are resolute to enforce the law, they will have both. But if, from ignorance, corruption, or other causes, they know not how to make a proper choice, they will but have escaped Scylla to fall into Charybdis, and, mayhap, make bad worse. The very men they elect to save them may prove their direst enemies. These, with the aid (out of doors) of the ignorant and depraved of all classes, may accomplish the ruin of their best friends, and then (as the French Convention did, after murdering Robespierre) destroy universal suffrage itself, under pretence that it had led to nothing but folly, blood, and crime. These are no imaginary suppositions. We are but supposing for England, and the present time, what has heretofore occurred in most other countries and in all times under similar circumstances. A people ignorant of their true political and social rights will never elect a Parliament of real political and social reformers; they will only elect declaiming demagogues and crafty adventurers, who will promise everything and perform nothing,—who, professing to be doing everything for the people, will, in reality, do nothing for them but make them stepping-stones to their own aggrandisement, and who, as usual, beginning with frightening the aristocracies of land and money, will end with compromising and going shares with them for the public spoil, after establishing a reign of terror over the people for their own conjoint security. How easily might we demonstrate this by à priori reasoning, were it necessary. The history of all past revolutions, however, dispenses with any such necessity. Indeed, the bare fact that universal suffrage is nowhere to be found now-a-days amongst those ancient states and communities where it formerly flourished is proof sufficient. A truly intelligent people would ever remain a self-governing people. A people fully conscious of the value of their political and social rights could never lose the franchise. In the first place, they would so use it as to remove or prevent the growth of those unnatural interests and institutes which are incompatible with its free exercise and permanent security. In the next place, they would use it to establish the social rights of the people upon a basis as broad as the population itself. And, lastly, they would so know how to appreciate the blessings of self-government, from a consciousness that they owed their liberties and happiness to no other source, that they would fight like lions, and die to a man, rather than surrender their franchises. Such a people might be exterminated; it could not be enslaved or disfranchised. Xerxes, with his innumerable hordes, was not a match for a few thousand Greeks inspired with the love of freedom. A Persian army could not force the pass of Thermopylæ against three hundred freemen under Leonidas, till treachery leagued with numbers for his overthrow; and even then the handful of freemen had to be exterminated, because they could not be taken alive, nor subdued to slavery. We have a still more striking example of this in the present day. Of all the European States that enjoyed universal suffrage a few years ago, France is now the only one in which it survives. And why? Because France is the only one of them in which a large proportion of the working-classes are imbued with a knowledge of their social rights, and consequently the only one in which the working people are determined to maintain the right of self-government by fire and sword, if necessary. In Prussia, Austria, and in most of the German and Italian States the mass of the people had heard little or nothing of their social rights, and consequently attached too little value to them to fight for them, or for the political power through which alone they could be securely established. Hence their comparative non-resistance to the overthrow of their respective constitutions. It is otherwise in France. There, at least two millions out of eight millions of adult males understand so well the value of their political and social rights that Louis Napoleon and his bourgeoisie dared not overthrow universal suffrage by their coup d’état. The upper and middle classes hate universal suffrage quite as much in France as their feudal and money-grubbing brethren hate it in England, Germany, and Italy. Nevertheless, they dared not strike the blow, lest it should recoil fatally upon themselves. There are full two millions of social democrats in France who are resolved to set the whole country in flames, and, if needs be, perish in the conflagration, rather than suffer a traitorous conspiracy of landlords and money-lords to put down their constitution by force. It is in the stern determination of these two millions that rests the sole real security for universal suffrage in France. The number of these social democrats increases, too, every day with the spread of knowledge, and with their greater experience of the baseness and perfidy of the commercial villains who seek to eject them from the constitution, and at whose instigations the present government is continually persecuting their party, and seeking to goad it into premature insurrection in order to create an occasion for establishing a pitiless military despotism. With the increase of social democracy, increases the security for universal suffrage. Every Social Democrat is essentially a freeman in heart and soul, in conviction and sentiment. Such men will fight when slaves would not. They were the freemen of Athens and Sparta that overthrew the hordes of Xerxes. Had the helots and bondsmen been sent against them, they would have succumbed to the barbarians, even as they had to their own masters. The helots of Sparta and the bondsmen of Athens knew nothing of political and still less of social rights. Hence did they all die, as they had lived, bondsmen and slaves. For the same reason did the chattel-slaves of the ancient world live and die in bondage for forty centuries before the Christian era. For the same reason the serfs and villains of the middle ages suffered themselves to be adscripti glebæ, and quietly transferred from lord to lord as estates changed hands, just the same as the other live stock on the lands. For the same reason, and no other, were the modern serfs of Russia, Poland, &c., no better off than their predecessors of mediæval times; and precisely for the self-same reason are the wages-slaves of modern “civilization” so tractable under a system which, for real though disguised savagery, throws Oriental barbarism and chattel-slavery completely into the shade.
Impressed with these convictions, the National Reform League sees no hope for the successful establishment of the “Charter,” and for the permanent enjoyment of its legitimate fruits, but in the diffusion, amongst the people at large, of sound political and social knowledge. Real political they believe to be inseparable from real social power, and the converse. To make the people appreciate universal suffrage, we must teach them what they lose by the want of it, and what they may fairly expect from a wise and legitimate use of it. In answer to Sir Robert Peel and the House of Commons, we repudiate their doctrine that legislation is not responsible for the sufferings of the people; and the terms of our repudiation are made good in the seven resolutions or propositions of the League.
What is, then, demanded in those seven propositions that is not within the easy compass of a few acts of Parliament? What is there in them incompatible with the acknowledged rights of individuals or with the public peace or public security? In what respect can they endanger, ever so remotely, life, liberty, property, religion, family, home, or any other thing held sacred amongst men? On the contrary, do they not go to secure all these with stronger guarantees than they can ever derive from coercive laws or from the corruption of public opinion?
The “People’s Charter,” unaccompanied by the social reforms we demand, might possibly prove a danger for all classes, through the poor, in their ignorance, demanding what they had no right to, and through the rich, in their selfishness, refusing everything to an enfranchised people armed with power to take more than their own. But we challenge the world to prove that the “Charter,” accompanied with the social reforms we ask, could be a danger or an injustice to any class, or that it could fail to work out the complete emancipation of the whole people, politically, socially, morally, and intellectually.
What are the social reforms we demand? They may be classed under two heads. The three first propositions demand reforms of a provisional kind, to meet temporary evils. The remaining four are of a permanent kind, to cure permanent evils. Resolution I. is as follows:—
“A repeal of our present wasteful and degrading system of poor-laws, and a substitution of a just and efficient poor-law (based upon the original Act of Elizabeth), which would centralize the rates, and dispense them equitably and economically for the beneficial employment and relief of the destitute poor. The rates to be levied only upon the owners of every description of realized property. The employment to be of a healthy, useful, and reproductive kind, so as to render the poor self-sustaining and self-respecting. Till such employment be procured, the relief of the poor to be, in all cases, promptly and liberally administered as a right, and not grudgingly doled out as a boon; the relief not to be accompanied with obduracy, insult, imprisonment in the workhouses, separation of married couples, the breaking up of families, or any such other harsh and degrading conditions as, under the present system, convert relief into punishment, and treat the unhappy applicant rather as a convicted criminal than as (what he really is) the victim of an unjust and vitiated state of society.”
What is there unjust or impracticable in this proposition? Who ought, by right, to support the poor? Clearly, those who have most profited by their labour, and whose enormous revenues (derived from the aggregate labour of the people every year, without yielding any equivalent) are the main cause of so many labourers falling into pauperism. And who are these? Clearly, the owners of realised property,—the owners of lands, houses, mines, collieries, turbaries, fisheries, docks, wharfs, canals, bank-stock, railway-shares, consols, and every other description of property yielding an annual income independently of any labour or service or risk on the part of the proprietor. It is not upon mechanics, tradesmen, or professional men who have but their own exertions to trust to for a living, and who may or may not be worth a groat, that the burden should fall. These parties are supposed to render to society an equivalent for what they get, and consequently ought not to be made responsible for keeping others whose poverty they have not caused. At all events, it will be time enough to tax them when they have realised something by their respective callings. But as the others render to society no equivalent for their incomes, as their incomes are purely and wholly the creation of law, and not of their own labour or services, and as they are therefore the parties who make the poor, both common sense and common justice demand that they should be made to keep the poor, or at least enable the poor to keep themselves by remunerative labour. Moreover, it was upon these classes, and these only, that the original Act of Queen Elizabeth contemplated the levies should fall. The 43rd Elizabeth extended the rate to every other description of realised property, as well as mere real property; but owing to the comparatively small amount of realised property (other than what falls within the legal description of real) which existed in Elizabeth’s time, and for 150 years after, and owing to the difficulty of ascertaining it for assessment purposes, it escaped its due share of the burden; and, indeed, until about eight years ago most people fancied that it was real property only, and not realised, that was contemplated in the original Act. The enormous strides, however, that other descriptions of realised property (besides lands and houses) have made of late years have opened people’s eyes to the true intent and purport of the Act; and hence moneymongers, scrip-holders and annuitants must no longer expect to escape and throw their burden upon shopkeepers, mechanics, and needy professionals.
In truth, it is not their interest to do so, unless they choose to risk their all for the sake of a beggarly saving of a few pounds a year, which they, of all others, ought least to begrudge the poor, their especial victims. As to centralizing the rate, the selfish conduct of landed proprietors and others has made such a step almost inevitable. By preventing the building of cottages on their respective estates in town and country, and by working the law of settlement to their own selfish ends so as to debar the poor from having any legal claim in their respective townships, they have so effectually overcrowded some parishes with paupers, to spare their own, that nothing but a centralised rate (to be dispensed according to the number of claimants in each) can now restore justice as between parish and parish and union and union. But let those who may entertain any doubt as to the expediency or necessity of centralization but read Mr. Hutchinson’s admirable work on the subject, and we think they will at once admit that such an arrangement ought no longer to be deferred.
As to the liberal and kindly treatment we demand for the unemployed and destitute poor, it is no more than a fraction of their right. If they had justice done them they would need no charity, and, till justice is done them, we demand that their treatment shall be what our resolution describes, and that it shall be considered their right, and not grudgingly doled out as a boon.
Thus far for Resolution No. 1. In the following chapter we shall show cause for Resolution No. 2.
