The price of coals can however have but little effect upon the cost of the gas-lights; because the very refuse, or small coal, which pass through the screen at the pit’s mouth, and which cannot be brought into the market, nay, even the sweepings of the pit, which are thrown away, may be employed for the production of coal-gas. It makes no difference in what form the coal is used. This circumstance may contribute to enable coal-merchants to furnish coals in larger masses, and as they come from the mine, instead of increasing the bulk by breaking them into a smaller size, which is a practice commonly followed.
The demand which the gas-light occasions for inferior sorts of coal may hereafter contribute to lower the price of the superior kinds, and keep a level which cannot be shaken under any circumstances. It may contribute to prevent combinations which do certainly operate to the prejudice of the public, and sometimes put this great town at the mercy of a few proprietors in the north, who deal out this commodity in any way they please. The competition thus produced, it is impossible not to consider as an advantage, which would tend to prevent such combinations, and put the inhabitants of London out of the reach of them.
The advantages which the coal trade must reap from the introduction of the gas-light must be very considerable. There is already less waste, but a greater consumption of coal than formerly. The lower classes of the community are scantily supplied with firing; and nothing but a reduction of price is necessary to increase to a very large amount the average quantity of fuel consumed in the country. The lightness of the coke produced by the gas-light manufacture diminishing the expence of land carriage, facilitates its general diffusion—the comforts of the poor are becoming materially augmented, and a number of useful operations in agriculture and the arts are beginning to be carried on, which have been hitherto checked by the extravagant price of fuel. If any additional vent were wanted for the coke, it would readily be found in the continental market; coke being better suited than coal to the habits of most European nations.
Many, and unquestionable as are the advantages of this new mode of procuring and distributing light, it was not to be expected that an invention which went to impair a branch of trade, in which a large portion of skill and capital had hitherto been successfully employed should escape encountering very considerable opposition. On the first introduction of the gas-lights, great but happily unsuccessful endeavours were made to alarm the public mind by dismal forebodings of the destruction which would ensue to the Greenland trade, and the consequent loss of a valuable nursery of British Seamen. When impartially considered it will be found that there was nothing more in this objection than the common clamour that is always set up against every new means of abridging labour, to which had the public listened, an interdict would have been laid upon the spinning and threshing machines, the steam engine, and a thousand other improvements in machinery.
Such clamour scarcely ever fails to be made when the extension of machinery, the application of inanimate power, and the abridgment of labour consequent on either, is a matter proposed. We are then sure to be told that the scheme of mechanical or chemical improvement is pointed against the human species, that it tends to drive them out of the system of beneficial employment and that, on the whole, the sum of the improvement is not only a less proportion of good to society, but a positive accession of misery to the unemployed poor.
The misfortune of this argument is that to be good for any thing, it would prove a great deal too much. It is not confined in its scope to any particular species or defined extent of improvement, but is equally proscriptive of all improvements whatever. It is a principle for savage life, not for a state of civilization. It takes for its basis that it is an advantage to perpetuate that necessity for hard and incessant labour under which man finds himself originally placed by nature, with all the wants, privations, ignorance and ferocity, which are attendant on that condition, and that every discovery, invention, or improvement which tends to abridge the quantity required of human labour, and to augment the resources for living and enjoyment is a serious injury to society. The advocates of this narrow theory do not go the whole length of maintaining that diminishing labour, and increase of substance, are in themselves positive evils, a position too absurd perhaps for any one to uphold; but they maintain what ends in a consequence nearly as untrue, namely, that neither the one nor the other is of any advantage to society at large. The palpable error of this theory is, that it supposes that all improvements which tend to supersede human labour, are necessarily made for the benefit of a few, and not for the common benefit of the many; that instead of lessening to each individual the share of labour requisite to obtain the means of his subsistence, their only tendency is to lessen the value of each personas labour, and to oblige him to work more in order to live equally well.
Now, however the existing state of things may be in this country, or in other countries, arising out of a variety of arbitrary circumstances, foreign to the natural, and in all cases the ultimately inevitable course of industry, it is a matter of justice, clear and undeniable, that every improvement in society ought to be the property of the many, and not of a few; and that it ought either to lessen the quantity of labour necessary for acquiring the means of living, or to increase the profit to be gained by continuing the same quantity of labour. Nor does there seem any reason for believing that, in point of fact, the actual distribution of things is so far from according with this principle of justice as some superficial and prejudiced observers are fond of representing. The labourer, or artizan, may now work a greater number of hours daily than he did years ago; but how seldom do we find this to be the case without his comforts being more than proportionally multiplied, and his ultimate independence from labour essentially promoted. In general, however, the fact is, if we may give credit to well informed economists, that the working classes do not labour more than formerly, and yet live, or at least have the means of living better; and that by working even less than formerly, they can obtain the means of living quite as well.
Let the real state of matters in this respect, however, be as it may, the question comes to be one merely as to the distribution of the produce of nature and of art, and instead of opposing improvements because they tend to encrease that produce, the object of those who have really the good of their fellow-creatures at heart, ought to be, to encourage such improvements as much as possible, but at the same time to obtain a correction of any partiality or injustice which may have crept into the distribution of their beneficial consequences. It is not to be denied that all new improvements which interfere with and change the occupations and habits of the working classes of people, must at first expose them to inconvenience and distress, against which it is in fairness the duty of society to protect them; but let not that temporary inconvenience and distress which can and ought to be provided against, be held as an insuperable obstacle to the adoption of an improvement the ultimate tendency of which it is to better the condition of mankind.
It is likewise true that the manufacturing classes often suffer great want by the occasional suspension of employment, and sometimes actual oppression, by the demand for labour; but that involves a question more immediately connected with political economy than the present subject.
It is not the machinery that is in fault in such cases, but those speculators who occasion an inordinate excess of employment, or those statesmen who, with their folly, derange the great machine of human interests and intercourse.