When the great body of the people of a country are so generally educated as to know that it is the interest of the humblest and the poorest that property shall be secure, there will be little occasion for fencing round property with guards, against the secret violence of the midnight robber, or the open daring of the noonday mob. "It is an enlightened moral public sentiment that must spread its wings over our dwellings, and plant a watchman at our doors."[35] A very little insecurity destroys the working of capital. The cloth trade of Verviers, a town in France, was utterly ruined, because the morals of the people in the town were so bad, and the police so ineffectual, that the thefts in the various stages of the manufacture amounted to eight per cent. upon the whole quantity produced. The trade of the place, therefore, was destroyed; and the capital went to encourage labour in places where the rights of property were better respected.
But, generally speaking, the security of property is not so much weakened by plunder, as by those incessant contentions which harass the march of capital and labour; and keep up an irritation between the classes of the capitalists and the labourers, who ought to be united in the most intimate compact for a common good. These irritations most frequently exhibit themselves in the shape of combinations for the advance of wages. We have no hesitation in declaring our opinion that it is the positive duty of the working-man to obtain as high wages as he can extract out of the joint products of capital and labour; and that he has an equal right to unite with other workmen in making as good a bargain as he can, consistently with the rights of others, for his contribution of industry to the business of production. But it is also necessary for us to declare our conviction that, in too many cases, the working men attempt an object which no single exertion, and no union however formidable or complete, can ever accomplish. They attempt to force wages beyond the point at which they could be maintained, with reference to the demand for the article produced;—and if they succeed they extinguish the demand, and therefore extinguish the power of working at any wages. They drive the demand, and therefore the supply, into new channels;—and they thrust out capital from amongst them, to work in other places where it can work with freedom and security. Above all, such combinations, and the resistance which they call up, have a tendency to loosen the bonds of mutual regard which ought to subsist between capitalists and labourers. Their real interests are one and the same.
All men are united in one bond of interests, and rights, and duties; and although each of us have particular interests, the parts which we play in society are so frequently changing, that under one aspect we have each an interest contrary to that which we have under another aspect. It is in this way that we find ourselves suddenly bound closely with those against whom we thought ourselves opposed a moment before; and thus no class can ever be said to be inimical to another class. In the midst, too, of all these instantaneous conflicts and unions, we are all interchangeably related in the double interest of capitalists and consumers,—that is, we have each and all an interest that property shall be respected, and that production shall be carried forward to its utmost point of perfection, so as to make its products accessible to all. The power of production, in its greatest developments of industry, is really addressed to the satisfaction of the commonest wants. If production, as in despotic countries, were principally labouring that some men might wear cloth of gold whilst others went naked, then we should say that production was exclusively for the rich oppressor. But, thank God, the man who exclusively wears "purple and fine linen every day" has ceased to exist. The looms do not work for him alone, but for the great mass of the people. It is to the staple articles of consumption that the capitals of manufactures and commerce address their employment. Their employment depends upon the ability of the great body of the people to purchase what they produce. The courtiers of the fifteenth century in France carried boxes of sugar-plums in their pockets, which they offered to each other as a constant compliment; the courtiers of the next age carried gingerbread in the same way; and lastly, the luxury of snuff drove out the sugar-plums and the gingerbread. But the consumption of tobacco would never have furnished employment to thousands, and a large revenue to the state, if the use of snuff had rested with the courtiers. The producers, consequently, having found the largest, and therefore the most wealthy class of consumers amongst the working men, care little whether the Peer wears a silk or a velvet coat, so that the Peasant has a clean shirt. When capital and labour work with freedom and security, the wants of all are supplied, because there is cheap production. It is a bad state of society where
"One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade."
Those who like the brocade may still wear it in a state of things where the rights of industry are understood; but the rags, taking the average condition of the members of society, are banished to the lands from which capital is driven,—while those who labour with skill, and therefore with capital, have decent clothes, comfortable dwellings, wholesome food, abundant fuel, medical aid in sickness, the comfort and amusement of books in health. These goods, we have no hesitation in saying, all depend upon the security of property; and he that would destroy that security by force or fraud is the real destroyer of the comforts of those humbler classes whose rights he pretends to advocate.
The principles which we maintain, that the interests of all men, and of the poorer classes especially, are necessarily advanced in a constantly increasing measure by the increase of capital and skill, have been put so strikingly by a philosophical writer, that we cannot forbear quoting so valuable an authority in support and illustration of our opinions:—
"The advantage conferred by the augmentation of our physical resources, through the medium of increased knowledge and improved art, have this peculiar and remarkable property,—that they are in their nature diffusive, and cannot be enjoyed in any exclusive manner by a few. An eastern despot may extort the riches and monopolize the art of his subjects for his own personal use; he may spread around him an unnatural splendour and luxury, and stand in strange and preposterous contrast with the general penury and discomfort of his people; he may glitter in jewels of gold and raiment of needle-work; but the wonders of well-contrived and executed manufacture which we use daily, and the comforts which have been invented, tried, and improved upon by thousands, in every form of domestic convenience, and for every ordinary purpose of life, can never be enjoyed by him. To produce a state of things in which the physical advantages of civilized life can exist in a high degree, the stimulus of increasing comforts and constantly elevated desires must have been felt by millions; since it is not in the power of a few individuals to create that wide demand for useful and ingenious applications, which alone can lead to great and rapid improvements, unless backed by that arising from the speedy diffusion of the same advantages among the mass of mankind."[36]
In looking back upon all the various circumstances which we have exhibited as necessary for carrying industry to the greatest point of productiveness, we think that we must have established satisfactorily that the two great elements which concur in rendering labour in the highest degree beneficial, are, 1st, the accumulated results of past labour, and 2nd, the contrivances by which manual labour is assisted,—those contrivances being derived from the accumulations of knowledge. Capital and skill, therefore, are essential to the productive power of labour. The different degrees in which each possesses capital and skill make the difference between an English manufacturer and a North American savage; and the less striking gradations in the productive power of the English manufacturer of the present time, and the English manufacturer of five hundred years ago, may be all resolved into the fact that the one has at his command a very large amount of capital and skill, and that the other could only command a very small amount of the same great elements of production.
We think, also, that we have shown that the accumulation of former labour in the shape of tangible wealth, and the accumulation of former labour in the shape of the no less real wealth of knowledge, are processes which go on together, each supporting, directing, and regulating the other. Knowledge is the offspring of some leisure resulting from a more easy supply of the physical wants; and that leisure cannot exist unless capital exists; which allows some men to live upon former accumulations. Capital, therefore, may be said to be the parent of skill, as capital and skill united are the encouragers and directors of profitable labour.