… That the profits of capital are abstracted from the earnings of labor, and that these deductions, like any other tax on industry, tend to diminish the value of money by increasing the price of all the fruits of labor, are facts beyond dispute; it is equally undeniable that there is a point which capitalists cannot exceed without injuring themselves, for when by their exertions they so far depreciate the value of money at home that it is sent abroad, many are thrown out of employ, and are not only disabled from paying their tribute, but are forced to betake to dishonest courses or starve.
This memorial was full of iron and stern truths, although much of its political economy was that of its own era; a very different petition, it will be noticed, from the appealing, cringing petitions sent timidly to Congress by the conservative, truckling labor leaders of later times. The memorial continued;
The remaining laborers are then loaded with additional burdens to provide laws and prisons and standing armies to keep order; expensive wars are created merely to lull for a time the clamors for employment; each new burden aggravates the disease, and national death finally ends it.
The power of capital, was, the memorial read on, "in the nature of things, regulated by the proportion that the numbers of, and competition among, capitalists bears to the number and destitution of laborers." The only sure way of benefiting labor, "and the way best calculated to benefit all classes," was to diminish the destitution among the working classes. And the remedy proposed in the memorial? A settled principle of national policy should be laid down by Congress that the whole of the remaining of the public lands should forever continue to be the public property of the nation "and accordingly, cause them to be laid out from time to time, as the wants of the population might require, in small farms with a suitable proportion of building lots for mechanics, for the free use of any native citizen and his descendants who might be at the expense of clearing them." This policy "would establish a perpetual counterpoise to the absorbing power of capital." The memorial concluded:
These lands have been bought with public money every cent of which is in the end derived from the earnings of the laboring classes.
And while the public money has been liberally employed to protect and foster trade, Government has never, to our knowledge, adopted but one measure (the protective tariff system) with a distinct view to promote the interests of labor; and all of the advantages of this one have been absorbed by the preponderating power of capital. [Footnote: Executive Documents, First Session, Twenty-third Congress, 1834, Doc. No. 104.]
EMPLOYMENT OF MILITIA AGAINST THE WORKERS.
But it was not only the National Government which used the entire governing power against the workers. State and municipal authorities did likewise. In 1836 the longshoremen in New York City struck for an increase of wages. Their employers hurriedly substituted non-union men in their places. When the union men went from dock to dock, trying to induce the newcomers to side with them, the shipping merchants pretended that a riot was under way and made frantic calls upon the authorities for a subduing force. The mayor ordered out the militia with loaded guns. In Philadelphia similar scenes took place. Naturally, as the strikers were prevented by the soldiers from persuading their fellow workers, they lost the strikes.
Although labor-saving machinery was constantly being devised and improved to displace hand labor, and although the skilled worker was consequently producing far more goods than in former years, the masters—as the capitalists were then often termed—insisted that employees must work for the same wages and hours as had long prevailed.
By 1840, however, the labor unions had arrived at a point where they were very powerful in some of the crafts, and employers grudgingly had to recognize that the time had passed by when the laborer was to be treated like a serf. A few enlightened employers voluntarily conceded the ten-hour day, not on any humane grounds, but because they reasoned that it would promote greater efficiency on the part of their workers. Many capitalists, perforce, had to yield to the demand. Other capitalists determined to break up the unions on the ground that they were a conspiracy. At the instigation of several boot and shoe manufacturers, the officials of Boston brought a suit against the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers' Society. The court ruled against the bootmakers and the jury brought in a verdict of guilty. On appeal to the Supreme Court, Robert Rantoul, the attorney for the society, so ably demolished the prosecution's points, that the court could not avoid setting aside the judgment of the inferior court. [Footnote: Commonwealth vs. Hunt and others; Metcalf's Supreme Court Reports, iv: III. The prosecution had fallen back on the old English law of the time of Queen Elizabeth, making it a criminal offence for workingmen to refuse to work under certain wages. This law, Rantoul argued, had not been specifically adopted as common law in the United States after the Revolution.]