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

by Henry Charles Carey

How this state of things has been brought about is shown by the steady diminution in the proportion of the population engaged in the work of production. Adam Smith cautioned his countrymen that "if the whole surplus produce of America in grain of all sorts, salt provisions, and fish," were "forced into the market of Great Britain," it would "interfere too much with the prosperity of our own people." He thought it would be a "great discouragement to agriculture." And yet, from that hour to the present, no effort has been spared to increase in all the nations of the world the surplus of raw produce, to be poured into the British market, and thus to produce competition between the producers abroad and the producers at home, to the manifest injury of both. The more the linen manufacture, or those of wool, hemp, or iron, could be discouraged abroad, the greater was the quantity of raw products to be sent to London and Liverpool, and the less the inducement for applying labour to the improvement of English land. For a time, this operation, so far as regarded food, was restrained by the corn-laws; but now the whole system is precisely that which was reprobated by the most profound political economist that Britain has ever produced. Its consequences are seen in the following figures:—In 1811, the proportion of the population of England engaged in agriculture was 35 per cent. In 1841 it had fallen to 25 per cent., and now it can scarcely exceed 22 per cent., and even in 1841 the actual number was less than it had been thirty years before.[143]

Thus driven out from the land, Englishmen had to seek other employment, while the same system was annually driving to England tens of thousands of the poor people of Scotland and Ireland; and thus forced competition for the sale in England of the raw products of the earth produced competition there for the sale of labour; the result of which is seen in the fact that agricultural wages have been from 6s. to 9s. a week, and the labourer has become from year to year more a slave to the caprices of his employer, whether the great farmer or the wealthy owner of mills or furnaces. The total population of the United Kingdom dependent upon agriculture cannot be taken at more than ten millions; and as agricultural wages cannot be estimated at a higher average than 5s. per week, there cannot be, including the earnings of women, more than 6s. per family; and if that be divided among four, it gives 1s. 6d. per head, or £3 18s. per annum, and a total amount, to be divided among ten millions of people, of 40 millions of pounds, or 192 millions of dollars. In reflecting upon this, the reader is requested to bear in mind that it provides wages for every week in the year, whereas throughout a considerable portion of the United Kingdom very much of the time is unoccupied.

Cheap labour has, in every country, gone hand in hand with cheap land. Such having been the case, it may not now be difficult to account for the small value of land when compared with the vast advantages it possesses in being everywhere close to a market in which to exchange its raw products for manufactured ones, and also for manure. The reader has seen the estimate of M. Thunen, one of the best agriculturists of Germany, of the vast difference in the value of land in Mecklenburgh close to market, as compared with that distant from it; but he can everywhere see for himself that that which is close to a city will command thrice as much rent as that distant twenty miles, and ten times as much as that which is five hundred miles distant. Now, almost the whole land of the United Kingdom is in the condition of the best of that here described. The distances are everywhere small, and the roads are, or ought to be, good; and yet the total rental of land, mines, and minerals, is but £55,000,000, and this for an area of 70 millions of acres, giving an average of only about $3.60 per acre, or $9—less than £2,—per head of the population. This is very small indeed, and it tends to show to how great an extent the system must have discouraged agriculture. In 1815, with a population of only twenty millions, the rental amounted, exclusive of houses, mines, minerals, fisheries, &c., to fifty-two and a half millions, and the exports of the produce of British and Irish land were then almost three times as great as they are now, with a population almost one-half greater than it was then.

The very small value of the land of the United Kingdom, when compared with its advantages, can be properly appreciated by the reader only after an examination of the course of things elsewhere. The price of food raised in this country is dependent, almost entirely, on what can be obtained for the very small quantity sent to England. "Mark Lane," as it is said, "governs the world's prices." It does govern them in New York and Philadelphia, where prices must be as much below those of London or Liverpool as the cost of transportation, insurance, and commissions, or there could be no export. Their prices, in turn, govern those of Ohio and Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, which must always be as much below those of New York as the cost of getting the produce there. If, now, we examine into the mere cost of transporting the average produce of an acre of land from the farm to the market of England, we shall find that it would be far more than the average rental of English land; and yet that rental includes coal, copper, iron, and tin mines that supply a large portion of the world.

Under such circumstances, land in this country should be of very small value, if even of any; and yet the following facts tend to show that the people of Massachusetts, with a population of only 994,000, scattered over a surface of five millions of acres, with a soil so poor that but 2,133,000 are improved, and possessed of no mines of coal, iron, tin, lead, or copper, have, in the short period they have occupied it, acquired rights in land equal, per acre, to those acquired by the people of England in their fertile soils, with their rich mines, in two thousand years. The cash value of the farms of that State in 1850 was $109,000,000, which, divided over the whole surface, would give $22 per acre, and this, at six per cent., would yield $1.32. Add to this the difference between wages of four, six, and eight shillings per week in the United Kingdom, and twenty or twenty-five dollars per month in Massachusetts, and it will be found that the return in the latter is quite equal to that in the former; and yet the price of agricultural produce generally, is as much below that of England as the cost of freight and commission, which alone are greater than the whole rent of English land.

New York has thirty millions of acres, of which only twelve millions have been in any manner improved; and those she has been steadily exhausting, because of the absence of a market on or near the land, such as is possessed by England. She has neither coal nor other mines of any importance, and her factories are few in number; and yet the cash value of farms, as returned by the Marshal, was 554 millions of dollars, and that was certainly less than the real value. If we take the latter at 620 millions, it will gives $50 per acre for the improved land, or an average of $20 for all. Taking the rent at six per cent. on $50, we obtain $3 per acre, or nearly the average of the United Kingdom; and it would be quite reasonable to make the mines and minerals of the latter a set-off against the land that is unimproved.

If the reader desire to understand the cause of the small value, of English land when compared with its vast advantages, he may find it in the following passage:—

"Land-owners possess extensive territories which owe little or nothing to the hand of the improver; where undeveloped sources of production lie wasting and useless in the midst of the most certain and tempting markets of the vast consuming population of this country."—Economist, London.

Unfortunately, however, those markets are small, while the tendency of the whole British system is toward converting the entire earth into one vast farm for their supply, and thus preventing the application of labour to the improvement of land at home. The tendency of prices, whether of land, labour, or their products, is toward a level, and whatever tends to lessen the price of any of those commodities in Ireland, India, Virginia, or Carolina, tends to produce the same effect in England; and we have seen that such is the direct tendency of English policy with regard to the land of all those countries. With decline in value, there must ever be a tendency to consolidation, and thus the policy advocated by the Economist produces the evil of which it so much and so frequently complains.

The profits of farmers are generally estimated at half the rental, which would give for a total of rents and profits about 85 millions; and if to this be added the wages of agricultural labour, we obtain but about 125 millions, of which less than one-third goes to the labourer.[144]