It may be asked, however, if this diminution of the prices of foreign produce is not beneficial to the people of England. It is not, because it tends to reduce the general price of labour, the commodity they have to sell. Cheap Irish labour greatly diminishes the value of that of England, and cheap Irish grain greatly diminishes the demand for labour in England, while increasing the supply by forcing the Irish people to cross the Channel. The land and labour of the world have one common interest, and that is to give as little as possible to those who perform the exchanges, and to those who superintend them—the traders and the government. The latter have everywhere one common interest, and that is to take as much as possible from the producers and give as little as possible to the consumers, buying cheaply and selling dearly. Like fire and water, they are excellent servants, but very bad masters. The nearer the artisan comes to the producer of the food and the wool, the less is the power of the middleman to impose taxes, and the greater the power of the farmer to protect himself. The tendency of the British system, wherever found, is to impoverish the land-owner and the labourer, and to render both from year to year more tributary to the owners of an amount of machinery so small that its whole value would be paid by the weekly—if not even by the daily—loss inflicted upon the working population of the world by the system.[148] The more the owners of that machinery become enriched, the more must the labourer everywhere become enslaved.
That such must necessarily be the case will be obvious to any reader who will reflect how adverse is the system to the development of intellect. Where all are farmers, there can be little association for the purpose of maintaining schools, or for the exchange of ideas of any kind. Employment being limited to the labours of the field, the women cannot attend to the care of their children, who grow up, necessarily, rude and barbarous; and such we see now to be the case in the West Indies, whence schools are rapidly disappearing. In Portugal and Turkey there is scarcely any provision for instruction, and in India there has been a decline in that respect, the extent of which is almost exactly measured by the age of the foreign occupation.[149] In the Punjab, the country last acquired, men read and write, but in Bengal and Madras they are entirely uneducated. Ireland had, seventy years since, a public press of great efficiency, but it has almost entirely disappeared, as has the demand for books, which before the Union was so great as to warrant the republication of a large portion of those that appeared in England. Scotland, too, seventy years since, gave to the Empire many of its best writers, but she, like Ireland, has greatly declined. How bad is the provision for education throughout England, and how low is the standard of intellect among a large portion of her manufacturing population, the reader has seen, and he can estimate for himself how much there can be of the reading of books, or newspapers among an agricultural population hired by the day at the rate of six, eight, or even nine shillings a week—and it will, therefore not surprise him to learn that there is no daily newspaper published out of London. It is, however, somewhat extraordinary that in that city, there should be, as has recently been stated, but a single one that is not "published at a loss." That one circulates 40,000 copies, or more than twice the number of all the other daily papers united. This is a most unfavourable sign, for centralization and progress have never gone hand in hand with each other.
The system, too, is repulsive in its character. It tends to the production of discord among individuals and nations, and hence it is that we see the numerous strikes and combinations of workmen, elsewhere so little known. Abroad it is productive of war, as is now seen in India, and as was so recently the case in China. In Ireland it is expelling the whole population, and in Scotland it has depopulated provinces. The vast emigration now going on, and which has reached the enormous extent of 360,000 in a single year, bears testimony to the fact that the repulsive power has entirely overcome the attractive one, and that the love of home, kindred, and friends is rapidly diminishing. How, indeed, could it be otherwise, in a country in which labour has been so far cheapened that the leading journal assures its readers that during a whole generation "man has been a drug, and population a nuisance?"
The fact that such a declaration should be made, and that that and other influential journals should rejoice in the expulsion of a whole nation, is evidence how far an unsound system can go toward steeling the heart against the miseries of our fellow-creatures. These poor people do not emigrate voluntarily. They are forced to leave their homes, precisely as is the case with the negro slave of Virginia; but they have not, as has the slave, any certainty of being fed and clothed at the end of the journey. Nevertheless, throughout England there is an almost universal expression of satisfaction at the idea that the land is being rid of what is held to be its superabundant population; and one highly respectable journal,[150] after showing that at the same rate Ireland would be entirely emptied in twenty-four years, actually assures its readers that it views the process "without either alarm or regret," and that it has no fear of the process being "carried too far or continued too long."
We see thus, on one hand, the people of England engaged in shutting in the poor people of Africa, lest they should be forced to Cuba; and, on the other, rejoicing at evictions, as the best means of driving out the poor people of Ireland. In all this there is a total absence of consistency; but so far as the Irish people are concerned, it is but a natural consequence of that "unsound social philosophy," based upon the Ricardo-Malthusian doctrine, which after having annihilated the small land-owner and the small trader, denies that the Creator meant that every man should find a place at his table, and sees no more reason why a poor labourer should have any more right to be fed, if willing to work, than the Manchester cotton-spinner should have to find a purchaser for his cloth. "Labour," we are told, is "a commodity," and if men will marry and bring up children "to an overstocked and expiring trade," it is for them to take the consequences—and "if we stand between the error and its consequences, we stand between the evil and its cure—if we intercept the penalty (where it does not amount to positive death) we perpetuate the sin."[151]
Such being the state of opinion in regard to the claims of labour, we need scarcely be surprised to find a similar state of things in regard to the rights of property. The act of emancipation was a great interference with those rights. However proper it might have been deemed to free the negroes, it was not right to cause the heaviest portion of the loss to be borne by the few and weak planters. If justice required the act, all should have borne their equal share of the burden. So again in regard to Ireland, where special laws have been passed to enable the mortgagees to sell a large portion of the land, rendered valueless by a system that had for long years prevented the Irishman from employing himself except in the work of cultivation. India appears likely now to come in for its share of similar legislation. Centralization has not there, we are told, been carried far enough. Private rights in land, trivial even as they now are,[152] must be annihilated. None, we are told, can be permitted "to stand between the cultivator and the government," even if the collection of the taxes "should render necessary so large an army of employé as to threaten the absorption of the lion's share" of them.[153] In regard to the rights to land in England itself, one of her most distinguished writers says that
"When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it should always be remembered that this sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. * * * The claim of the land-owners to the land is altogether subordinate to the general policy of the state. * * * Subject to this proviso (that of compensation) the state is at liberty to deal with landed property as the general interests of the community may require, even to the extent, if it so happen, of doing with the whole what is done with a part whenever a bill is passed for a railroad or a street."—J. S. Mill, Principles, book ii. chap. ii.
In regard to the disposal of property at the death of its owner, the same author is of opinion that "a certain moderate provision, such as is admitted to be reasonable in the case of illegitimate children, and of younger children" is all "that parents owe to their children, and all, therefore, which the state owes to the children of those who die intestate." The surplus, if any, he holds "it may rightfully appropriate to the general purposes of the community."—Ibid.
Extremes generally meet. From the days of Adam Smith to the present time the policy of England has looked in the direction that led necessarily to the impoverishment of the small land-owner, and to the consolidation of land, and during the whole of that period we have been told of the superior advantages of large farms and great tenant-farmers; but now, when the injurious effects of the system are becoming from day to day more obvious, the question of the existence of any right to land is being discussed, and we are told that "public reasons" existed "for its being appropriated," and if those reasons have "lost their force, the thing would be unjust." From this to confiscation the step would not be a very great one. No such idea certainly could exist in the mind of so enlightened a man as Mr. Mill, who insists upon compensation; but when a whole people, among whom the productive power is steadily diminishing as individual fortunes become more and more colossal, are told that the proprietors of land, great and small, receive compensation for its use, for no other reason than that they have been enabled to possess themselves of a monopoly of its powers, and that rent is to be regarded as "the recompense of no sacrifice whatever," but as being "received by those who neither labour nor put by, but merely hold out their hands to receive the offerings of the rest of the community,"[154] can we doubt that the day is approaching when the right to property in land will be tested in England, as it has elsewhere been? Assuredly not. Ricardo-Malthusianism tends directly to what is commonly called Communism, and at that point will England arrive, under the system which looks to the consolidation of the land, the aggrandizement of the few, and the destruction of the physical, moral, intellectual, and political powers of the whole body of labourers, abroad and at home,
Where population and wealth increase together, there is always found a growing respect for the rights of persons and property. Where they decline, that respect diminishes; and the tendency of the whole British politico-economical system being toward the destruction of population and wealth at home and abroad, it tends necessarily toward agrarianism in its worst form. That such is the tendency of things in England we have the assurance of the London Times, by which, it has recently been shown, says Mr. Kay,