The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign / Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished

by Henry Charles Carey

HOW FREEDOM GROWS IN DENMARK.

Compared with Ireland, India, or Turkey, DENMARK is a very poor country. She has, says one of the most enlightened of modern British travellers—

"No metals or minerals, no fire power, no water power, no products or capabilities for becoming a manufacturing country supplying foreign consumers. She has no harbours on the North Sea. Her navigation is naturally confined to the Baltic. Her commerce is naturally confined to the home consumption of the necessaries and luxuries of civilized life, which the export of her corn and other agricultural products enables her to import and consume. She stands alone in her corner of the world, exchanging her loaf of bread, which she can spare, for articles she cannot provide for herself, but still providing for herself every thing she can by her own industry."[182]

That industry is protected by heavy import duties, and those duties are avowedly imposed with the view of enabling the farmer everywhere to have the artisan at his side; thus bringing together the producers and the consumers of the earth. "The greater part of their clothing materials," says Mr. Laing—

"Linen, mixed linen and cotton, and woollen cloth, is home-made; and the materials to be worked up, the cotton yarns, dye stuffs, and utensils, are what they require from the shops. The flax and wool are grown and manufactured on the peasant's farm; the spinning and weaving done in the house; the bleaching, dyeing, fulling done at home or in the village." * * * "Bunches of ribbons, silver clasps, gold ear-rings, and other ornaments of some value, are profusely used in many of the female dresses, although the main material is home-made woollen and linen. Some of these female peasant costumes are very becoming when exhibited in silk, fine cloth, and lace, as they are worn by handsome country girls, daughters of rich peasant proprietors in the islands, who sometimes visit Copenhagen. They have often the air and appearance of ladies, and in fact are so in education, in their easy or even wealthy circumstances, and an inherited superiority over others of the same class." * * * "In a large country-church at Gettorf, my own coat and the minister's were, as far as I could observe, the only two in the congregation not of home-made cloth; and in Copenhagen the working and every-day clothes of respectable tradesmen and people of the middle class, and of all the artisans and the lower labouring classes, are, if not home-made and sent to them by their friends, at least country made; that is, not factory made, but spun, woven, and sold in the web, by peasants, who have more than they want for their family use, to small shopkeepers. This is particularly the case with linen. Flax is a crop on every farm; and the skutching, hackling, spinning, weaving, and bleaching are carried on in every country family."—Pp. 381, 382, 383.

The manufacture of this clothing finds employment for almost the whole female population of the country and for a large proportion of the male population during the winter months. Under a different system, the money price of this clothing would be less than it now is—as low, perhaps, as it has been in Ireland—but what would be its labour price? Cloth is cheap in that country, but man is so much cheaper that he not only goes in rags, but perishes of starvation, because compelled to exhaust his land and waste his labour. "Where," asks very justly Mr. Laing—

"Would be the gain to the Danish nation, if the small proportion of its numbers who do not live by husbandry got their shirts and jackets and all other clothing one-half cheaper, and the great majority, who now find winter employment in manufacturing their own clothing materials, for the time and labour which are of no value to them at that season, and can be turned to no account, were thrown idle by the competition of the superior and cheaper products of machinery and the factory?"—P. 385.

None! The only benefit derived by man from improvement in the machinery of conversion is, that he is thereby enabled to give more time, labour, and thought to the improvement of the earth, the great machine of production; and in that there can be no improvement under a system that looks to the exportation of raw products, the sending away of the soil, and the return of no manure to the land.

The whole Danish system tends to the local employment of both labour and capital, and therefore to the growth of wealth and the division of the land, and the improvement of the modes of cultivation. "With a large and increasing proportion—

"Of the small farms belonging to peasant proprietors, working themselves with hired labourers, and of a size to keep from five to thirty or forty cows summer and winter, there are many large farms of a size to keep from two hundred to three hundred, and even four hundred cows, summer and winter, and let to verpachters, or large tenant farmers, paying money rents. This class of verpachters are farmers of great capital and skill, very intelligent and enterprising, well acquainted with all modern improvements in husbandry, using guano, tile-draining, pipe-draining, and likely to be very formidable rivals in the English markets to the old-fashioned, use-and-want English farmers, and even to most of our improving large farmers in Scotland."—Laing, 52.