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

by Henry Charles Carey

The poor people who are expelled from the land cannot be sold. The hammer of the auctioneer cannot be allowed to separate parents from children, or husbands from wives, but poverty, drunkenness, and prostitution produce a similar effect, and in a form even more deplorable. In the five years preceding 1840, every fifth person in Glasgow had been attacked by fever, and the deaths therefrom amounted to almost five thousand.

It is impossible to study the condition of this portion of the United Kingdom without arriving at the conclusion that society is rapidly being divided into the very rich and the very poor, and that the latter are steadily declining in their power of self-government, and becoming more and more slaves to the former. Centralization tends here, as everywhere, to absenteeism, and "absenteeism," says Dr. Forbes of Glasgow [126] —

"Is in its results everywhere the same. All the transactions and communications between the richer and the poorer classes, have thus substituted for them the sternness of official agency, in the room of that kind and generous treatment which, let them meet unrestrained, the more prosperous children of the same parent would in almost every case pay to their less fortunate brothers. * * * Where the power of sympathy has been altogether or nearly abolished among the different ranks of society, one of the first effects appears in a yawning and ever-widening gulf of poverty which gathers round its foundations. As the lofty shore indicates the depth of the surrounding ocean, the proud pinnacles of wealth in society are the indices of a corresponding depression among the humbler ranks. The greatest misery of man is ever the adjunct of his proudest splendour."

Such are the results everywhere of that system which looks to converting England into a great workshop and confining the people of all other nations to the labours of the field. In Jamaica, it annihilated three-fifths of all the negroes imported, and it is now rapidly driving the remainder into barbarism and ultimately to annihilation. In the Southern States, it causes the export of men, women, and children, and the breaking up of families. In India, it has caused famines and pestilences, and is now establishing the slave trade in a new form. In Ireland, it has in half a century carried the people back to a condition worthy only of the darkest part of the Middle Ages, and is now extirpating them from the land of their fathers. In Scotland, it is rapidly dividing the population into two parts—the master on one hand, and the slave on the other. How it has operated, and is now operating, in England itself, we may how examine.

CHAPTER XIV.

HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN ENGLAND.

The Roman people sought to centralize within their walls the power of governing and taxing all the nations of the earth, and to a great extent they succeeded; but in the effort to acquire power over others they lost all power over themselves. As the city grew in size and as its great men became greater, the proportions of the people everywhere became less. The freemen of the Campagna had almost disappeared even in the days of the elder Scipio, and their humble habitations had given way to palaces, the centre of great estates, cultivated by slaves. Step by step with the increase of power abroad came increased consolidation of the land at home, and, as the people were more and more driven from the soil the city grew in numbers and magnificence, and in the poverty and rapacity of its inhabitants. The populace needed to be fed, and that they might be so there was established a great system of poor-laws, carried into effect by aid of the taxation of distant provinces, at whose expense they were both fed and entertained. They demanded cheap food, and they obtained their desires at the cost of the cultivators, abroad and at home, who became more and more enslaved as Rome itself was more cheaply supplied. Desires grew with their indulgence, and the greater the facility for living without labour, the greater became the necessity for seeking "new markets" in which to exercise their powers of appropriation, and the more extensive became the domain of slavery. Bankers and middlemen grew more and more in power, and while the wealth of Crassus enabled him to obtain the control of the East, enormous loans gave to Cæsar the command of the West, leaving to Pompey and his moneyed friends the power to tax the centre and the South. Next, Augustus finds the city of brick and leaves it of marble; and Herodes Atticus appears upon the stage sole improver, and almost sole owner, in Attica, once so free, while bankers and nobles accumulate enormous possessions in Africa, Gaul, and Britain, and the greater the extent of absentee ownership the greater becomes the wretchedness and the crime of the pauper mob of Rome. Still onward the city grows, absorbing the wealth of the world, and with it grow the poverty, slavery, and rapacity of the people, the exhaustion of provinces, and the avarice and tyranny of rulers and magistrates, until at length the empire, rotten at the heart, becomes the prey of barbarians, and all become slaves alike,—thus furnishing proof conclusive that the community which desires to command respect for its own rights must practise respect for those of others; or in other words, must adopt as its motto the great lesson which lies at the base of all Christianity—"Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you."

A survey of the British Empire at the present moment presents to view some features so strongly resembling those observed in ancient Rome as to warrant calling the attention of the reader to their careful observation. Like Rome, England has desired to establish political centralization by aid of fleets and armies, but to this she has added commercial centralization, far more destructive in its effects, and far more rapid in its operation. Rome was content that her subjects should occupy themselves as they pleased, either in the fields or in the factories, provided only that they paid their taxes. England, on the contrary, has sought to restrict her subjects and the people of the world in their modes of employment; and this she has done with a view to compel them to make all their exchanges in her single market, leaving to her to fix the prices of all she bought and all she sold, thus taxing them at her discretion in both time and money. She has sought to compel all other nations to follow the plough, leaving to her the loom and the anvil, and thus to render it necessary that they should bring to her all their products in the rudest form, at great cost of transportation, and total loss of the manure yielded by them, thus exhausting their soil and themselves; and the consequences of this are seen in the ruin, depopulation, and slavery of the West Indies, Ireland, India, Portugal, Turkey, and other countries that have been partially or wholly subjected to her dominion. Hence it is that she is seen to be everywhere seeking "new markets." Bengal having been in a great degree exhausted, it became necessary to annex the North-west provinces, and thence we find her stretching out her hand at one moment to seize on Affghanistan, at another to force the Chinese into permitting her to smuggle opium, and at a third to expel the Sikhs and occupy the Punjab, as preliminary to this invasion and subjection of the Burman Empire. She needs, and must have new markets, as Rome needed new provinces, and for the same reason, the exhaustion of the old ones. She rejoices with great joy at the creation of a new market in Australia, and looks with a longing eye on the Empire of Japan, whose prosperous people, under a peaceful government, prefer to avoid entering on the same course of action that has resulted in the reduction of the wealthy and powerful Hindostan to its present distressed condition.

It was against this system that Adam Smith cautioned his countrymen, as not only a violation of "the most sacred rights" of man, but as leading inevitably to consequences in the highest degree injurious to themselves, in depreciating the value of both labour and capital. Up to his time, however, it had been carried out in a very small degree. The colonies were then few in number, but, those were heavily taxed, as has been shown in the candid admission of Joshua Gee, that the colonists carried home but one-fourth of the value of the commodities they brought to the great market.[127] The system was then only in its infancy. In India, the Company had but then first obtained the concession of a right to act in the capacity of tax-gatherer for Bengal. On this continent, the right thus to tax the colonists was seriously contested, and The Wealth of Nations had not been long before the world before it came to be explicitly and successfully denied. The tendency of the system was, however, so obvious to its author, that he desired to warn his countrymen against the effort to build up "colonies of customers," as unworthy of a great people, and worthy only of "a nation of shopkeepers,"—and happy for them would it have been had his advice been taken. It was not. From that day to the present, every step has been in the direction against which he cautioned them, as was shown in a former chapter, and from year to year the people of England have become more and more the mere traders in the products of the labours of other men, and more and more compelled to seek "new markets," as did the Roman people,—the only difference being that in every case the exhaustion has been accomplished with a rapidity unparalleled in the annals of Rome, or of the world. A century since, India was rich, and now her government, collecting annually one-fifth of the whole value of the land, is sustained only by means of a monopoly of the power to poison and enslave the Chinese by means of a vile drug, and the poor Hindoo is forced to seek for food in the swamps of Jamaica and Guiana. Half a century since, Ireland had a highly cultivated society, with a press that sent forth large editions of the most valuable and expensive books produced in England, and now her people are decimated by famine and pestilence. Twenty years since, there existed some little prospect that the poor negroes of Jamaica and Guiana might at some future time become civilized, but that hope has passed away, as has the value of the land upon which they have been employed. What has been the effect of this course of policy upon the condition of the people of England we may now inquire.

In the days of Adam Smith it was estimated that there were in that country 220,000 owners of land, and as a necessary consequence of this extensive ownership of property, there was a very decided tendency toward an increase in the freedom of man, as shown in the efforts made but a few years later for obtaining a reform in various matters of government. The French Revolution came, however, and now the doctrine of "ships, colonies, and commerce" had much to do in bringing about a state of war, during the whole of which England enjoyed almost a monopoly of the trade of the world. Having all the woollen and cotton machinery, and almost all the machinery for the production of iron, she was enabled to buy produce and sell manufactures at her own prices; and thus were the already wealthy greatly enriched. The poor-houses were, however, everywhere filled with starving labourers, and so rapidly did their number increase that it became at length necessary to give to the statute of Elizabeth a new and enlarged construction; and here do we find another coincidence in the working of Roman and British centralization. A still further one will be found in the fact that precisely as the labourer was losing all power of self-government, the little proprietors of land disappeared, to be replaced by day-labourers.