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

by Henry Charles Carey

"'Very dare, sir,' he replied. 'We pay 5s. for tea, 5d. for brown sugar, and 8d. for white; that is, if we buy a single pound.'"—P.187.

The sugar of the labourer of Jamaica exchanges in Manchester for three shillings, of which he receives perhaps one, and he perishes because of the difficulty of obtaining machinery, or clothing. The Hindoo sells his cotton for a penny a pound, and buys it back in the form of cloth at eighteen or twenty pence. The Virginia negro raises tobacco which exchanges for six shillings' worth of commodities, of which he and his owner obtain three pence. The poor Irishman raises chickens which sell in London for shillings, of which he receives pence, and thus a pound of sugar which had yielded the free negro of Jamaica two pence, exchanges in the West of Ireland for a pair of chickens or a dozen lobsters. The reader who may study these facts will readily understand the destructive effects on the value of land and labour resulting from the absence of markets, such as arise naturally where the plough and the loom are permitted, in accordance with the doctrines of Adam Smith, to take their places by the side of each other. More than seventy years since he denounced the system which looked to compelling the exports of raw produce as one productive of infinite injustice, and certainly the histories of Jamaica and Virginia, Ireland and India, since his time, would afford him, were he now present, little reason for a change of opinion.

It is common to ascribe the state of things now existing in Ireland to the rapid growth of population; and that in its turn is charged to the account of the potato, the excessive use of which, as Mr. McCulloch informs his readers, has lowered the standard of living and tended to the multiplication of men, women, and children. "The peasantry of Ireland live," as he says, "in miserable mud cabins, without either a window or a chimney, or any thing that can be called furniture," and are distinguished from their fellow labourers across the Channel by their "filth and misery," and hence it is, in his opinion, that they work for low wages. We have here effect substituted for cause. The absence of demand for labour causes wages to be low, and those wages will procure nothing but mud cabins and potatoes. It is admitted everywhere throughout the continent of Europe that the introduction of the potato has tended greatly to the improvement of the condition of the people; but then, there is no portion of the continent in which it is used, where it constitutes an essential part of the governmental policy to deprive millions of people of all mode of employment except agriculture, and thus placing those millions at such a distance from market that the chief part of their labour and its products is lost in the effort to reach that market, and their land is exhausted because of the impossibility of returning to the soil any portion of the crop yielded by it. Commercial centralization produces all these effects. It looks to the destruction of the value of labour and land, and to the enslavement of man. It tends to the division of the whole population into two classes, separated by an impassable gulf—the mere labourer and the land-owner. It tends to the destruction of the power of association for any purpose of improvement, whether by the making of roads or by the founding of schools, and of course to the prevention of the growth of towns, as we see to have been the case with Jamaica, so barbarous in this respect when compared with Martinique or Cuba, islands whose governments have not looked to the perpetual divorce of the hammer and the harrow. The decay of towns in Ireland, subsequent to the Union, led to absenteeism, and thus added to the exhaustion of the land, because Irish wheat was now needed to pay not only for English cloth but for English services; and the more the centralization resulting from absenteeism, the greater necessarily was the difficulty of maintaining the productive powers of the soil. Mr. McCulloch, however, assures his readers that "it is not easy to imagine any grounds for pronouncing the expenditure of the rent at home "more beneficial" to the country than if it had been expended abroad. (Principles, 157.) Another distinguished political economist says—

"Many persons, also, perplexed by the consideration that all the commodities which are exported as remittances of the absentee's income are exports for which no return is obtained; that they are as much lost to this country as if they were a tribute paid to a foreign state, or even as if they were periodically thrown into the sea. This is unquestionably true; but it must be recollected that whatever is unproductively consumed, is, by the very terms of the proposition, destroyed, without producing any return"—Senior's Political Economy, 160.

This view is, as the reader will see, based upon the idea of the total destruction of the commodities consumed. Were it even correct, it would still follow that there had been transferred from Ireland to England a demand for services of a thousand kinds, tending to cause a rise in the price of labour in the one and a fall in the other;—but if it were altogether incorrect, it would then follow, necessarily, that the loss to the country would be as great as if the remittances were "a tribute paid to a foreign state, or even as if they were periodically thrown into the sea." That it is altogether incorrect the reader may readily satisfy himself. Man consumes much, but he destroys nothing. In eating food he is merely acting as a machine for preparing the elements of which it is composed for future production; and the more he can take out of the land the more he can return to it, and the more rapid will be the improvement in the productive power of the soil. If the market be at hand, he can take hundreds of bushels of turnips, carrots, or potatoes, or tons of hay, from an acre of land, and he can vary the character of his culture from year to year, and the more he borrows from the great bank the more he can repay to it, the more he can improve his mind and his cultivation, and the more readily he can exchange for improved machinery by aid of which to obtain still increased returns. If, however, the market be distant, he must raise only those things that will bear carriage, and which from their small yield command a high price, and thus is he limited in his cultivation, and the more he is limited the more rapidly he exhausts his land, the less is his power to obtain roads, to have association with his fellow-men, to obtain books, to improve his mode of thought, to make roads, or to purchase machinery. Such is the case even when he is compelled to sell and buy in distant markets, but still worse is it when, as in the case of the rent of the absentee, nothing is returned to the land, for then production diminishes without a corresponding diminution of the rent, and the poor cultivator is more and more thrown upon the mercy of the land-owner or his agent, and becomes, as we see to have been the case in Jamaica and India, practically a slave. This state of things has in all countries been followed by a diminution of population resulting from starvation or from exportation; and hence it is that we see the destruction of life in Ireland, India, and the West Indies, while from the two former vast numbers are annually exported, many of them to perish in the new countries to which they are driven. Out of 99,000 that left Ireland for Canada in a single year, no less than 13,000 perished on shipboard, and thousands died afterward of disease, starvation, and neglect; and thus it is that we have the horrors of "the middle passage" repeated in our day. It is the slave trade of the last century reproduced on a grander scale and on a new theatre of action.

We are told of the principle of population that men increase faster than food, and, for evidence that such must always be the case, are pointed to the fact that when men are few in number they always cultivate the rich soils, and then food is abundant, but as population increases they are forced to resort to the poor soils, and then food becomes scarce. That the contrary of all this is the fact is shown by the history of England, France, Italy, Greece, India, and every other nation of the world, and is proved in our own day by all that is at this moment being done in this country. It is proved by the fact that Ireland possesses millions of acres of the most fertile soil remaining in a state of nature, and so likely to remain until she shall have markets for their produce that will enable their owners readily to exchange turnips, potatoes, cabbages, and hay, for cloth, machinery, and MANURE.

It is singular that all the political economists of England should so entirely have overlooked the fact that man is a mere borrower from the earth, and that when he does not pay his debts, she does as do all other creditors, that is, she expels him from his holding. England makes of her soil a grand reservoir for the waste yielded by all the sugar, coffee, wool, indigo, cotton and other raw commodities of almost half the world, and thus does she raise a crop that has been valued at five hundred millions of dollars, or five times more than the average value of the cotton crop produced by so many millions of people in this country; and yet so important is manure that she imports in a single year more than two hundred thousand tons of guano, at a cost of almost two millions of pounds, and thus does she make labour productive and land valuable. Nevertheless, her writers teach other nations that the true mode of becoming rich is to exhaust the land by sending from it all its products in their rudest state, and then, when the people of Ireland attempt to follow the soil which they have sent to England, the people of the latter are told by Mr. McCulloch that

"The unexampled misery of the Irish people is directly owing to the excessive augmentation of their numbers; and, nothing can be more perfectly futile than to expect any real or lasting amendment of their situation until an effectual check has been given to the progress of population. It is obvious too," he continues, "that the low and degraded condition into which the people of Ireland are now sunk is the condition to which every people must be reduced whose numbers continue, for any considerable period, to increase faster than the means of providing for their comfortable and decent subsistence."—Principles, 383.

The population of Ireland did increase with some rapidity, and the reason for this was to be found in the fact that poverty had not yet produced that demoralization which restricts the growth of numbers. The extraordinary morality of the women of Ireland is admitted everywhere. In England it is remarked upon by poor-law commissioners, and here it is a fact that cannot fail to command the attention of the most superficial observer. How it is at home we are told by Sir Francis Head, whose statements on this subject cannot be read without interest:—

"As regards the women of Ireland, their native modesty cannot fail to attract the observation of any stranger. Their dress was invariably decent, generally pleasing, and often strikingly picturesque. Almost all wore woollen petticoats, dyed by themselves, of a rich madder colour, between crimson and scarlet. Upon their shoulders, and occasionally from their heads, hung, in a variety of beautiful folds, sometimes a plaid of red and green, sometimes a cloak, usually dark blue or dingy white. Their garments, however, like those of the men, were occasionally to be seen in tatters."—P. 119.