We remember, some years ago, when an address was presented to this same Sir Robert Peel by some 6,000 or 7,000 of the merchants, bankers, shipowners, &c., of the City of London, to console him for his temporary expulsion from office by the Whigs,—we remember how the Times (which was then ratting from the Whigs) boasted, by way of demonstrating the respectability of the addressers, that the list contained the names of 1,500 citizens whose aggregate wealth would suffice to redeem the National Debt, and still leave enough to support the owners in opulence. We remember having seen it stated, about the same period, in a City article of the said Times, that so prosperous was trade that ironmasters in Staffordshire and Wales were known to have realised £200,000 in one year. We remember hearing, on the best authority, of the house of Baring & Co. clearing £650,000 by the speculations of a single year. We know a banker died, a few years since, in Liverpool whose estate was computed at from £5,000,000 to £7,000,000. Peel’s father is said to have died worth £3,000,000; and old Arkwright worth twice that much. Soames, the late shipowner, was worth several millions. Rentals varying from £20,000 to upwards of £200,000 a year are numerous in England. The Duke of Westminster’s property will, it is said, be now worth half-a-million per annum of income. London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and other towns abound in millionaires worth from a plum to twenty, thirty, and even fifty plums. A year’s rental of some of our dukes would pay the wages of some 20,000 Irish labourers for a whole twelvemonth, at sixpence per day each, which is more than thousands of them can earn by a hard day’s work. A single bargain on the Stock Exchange will realise, for a Rothschild, a Baring, a Gurney, or a Goldsmid, more than 30,000 needlewomen in London could possibly earn in two years at present wages. Were a few of our great landowners and millionaire capitalists so inclined, they might, by clubbing together, keep an army of 100,000 fighting men about them, whose maintenance, at their present wages, would actually not be missed out of their enormous revenues. At £15 per man, the annual cost would be only a million and a half, which, divided amongst Sir Robert Peel’s 1,500 city addressers, would weigh less heavily upon them than a penny a week subscription upon a poor Chartist weaver.
And while this monstrous hell-begotten opulence stares us in the face wherever we go, what find we to be the condition of the men to whom we owe the very bread we eat, and without whom England would be a howling wilderness, namely, the agricultural labourers? We find them, in order to escape death from starvation, driven to the very brink of rebellion, as may be collected from paragraphs like the following, which may be seen in almost every agricultural journal we may chance to take up. We quote from a Wiltshire paper:—
“Riots in the Agricultural Districts.—The farm-labourers of the district round West Lavington, Devizes, have been resisting an attempt to reduce wages from seven to six shillings a week, by forcibly stopping farm operations. The men having got a hint of the contemplated reduction, a number of them waited upon the steward of Lord Churchill, the owner of the principal farms, with a view of inducing him to intercede in their behalf. This led to no beneficial results; and the men finding that their masters were determined on reduction, about a hundred and fifty of them assembled in front of the house of a Mr. Spencer, and stopped men, horses, and agricultural implements that were proceeding to work by that road. Having persuaded other labourers to join them, they went round to all the farms and completely stopped all operations. They took horses from ploughs, opened sheep-pens, and prevented all labour being proceeded with. On the following day some of them returned to work; but warrants being issued for the ringleaders, more than a hundred men formed themselves into a band and paraded the streets, armed with staves. The assistance of the constabulary was then obtained, and something like order restored. The next day a man named Kite was taken before the magistrates and committed to prison. He had not been long in custody before a large body of his fellow-labourers, armed with sticks, came into the town for the purpose of rescuing him, but were deterred by the presence of a strong military detachment.”
Here we find soldiers and policemen (whose keep costs for each man more than double the labourer’s pay) employed to force Englishmen to choose between starvation and toiling all the week round for six shillings. Supposing these unfortunate labourers to work every day in the year (Sundays excepted), their wages, at six shillings a week, would be just £15 12s. for the whole year! Here is a sum wherewith to keep a wife and, mayhap, five or six young children! Mr. Edward Smith has told us how common it is to see nigger-slaves in America making and spending from 50 to 150 dollars per annum by the labour of their leisure hours—that is to say, exclusive of the maintenance provided for them by their masters in exchange for their regular work. Take the mean—100 dollars. This, at 4s. 2d. per dollar, is just £20 16s. 8d. If he saves or spends 150 dollars, it is upwards of £30. Here, then, we find a nigger-bondsman so far superior in condition to the free-born Englishman, that he can actually afford to throw away upon luxuries (by the earnings of his leisure hours) one-third more than, or even double, the entire sum that a Wiltshire labourer is paid for the whole of his time, though he drudge all the year round, and is never sick a single day. If facts like these do not make the blood of Englishmen rush to their cheeks, and the very cravenest of them take the field for their social rights, they are past redemption.
Sir Robert Peel calls all this “civilization;” and the House of Commons cried, “Hear, hear,” and cheered and supported him, when he declared that the remedy for such a state of things lay not within the compass of legislation; that Parliament depended, itself, upon the people, and not the people on Parliament; and that the only and proper remedy for the distressed classes was for them “to take their affairs into their own hands”! Well, in the foregoing paragraph from the Devizes newspaper, we see them essay to take their affairs into their own hands; and we see also, that no sooner do they attempt to do so—no sooner do they proceed to act upon Sir Robert’s advice—than soldiers and police are brought down upon them, and warrants issued for their apprehension. If this be not the perfection of human slavery, as well as the perfection of inhumanity and injustice, we really know not what is.
But is it true that no Parliamentary cure is findable for the disease?—that the evil is one beyond the reach of legislative control?—that, after all, the boasted “omnipotence of Parliament” (which, Blackstone tells us, can do anything and everything not naturally impossible)—is it true that this boasted omnipotence cannot secure for an Englishman the food he has raised, the bread he has earned—nay, doubly, trebly, quintuply, decuply earned? Is this true? No, no; a thousand times no! What Parliament has done, it can undo; what Parliament ought to do, and can do, it ought to be made to do, or else to abdicate. There is not a member in either House of Parliament that does not know, as well as we know, that our land and money laws are at the bottom of all the distress in the country, and that the repeal of bad laws, and the enactment of good ones, are all that is wanted to make England a paradise. There is not a member in either House that does not know that all the slavery in the world, or that has ever been in the world, is, or has been, the work of landlords and money-lords; and that, consequently, the only true and proper way to put an end to slavery is to make laws to deprive landlords and money-lords of the power to enslave and rob their fellow-creatures. If it be said, this cannot be done without interfering with the rights of private property, we answer emphatically that it is laws against robbery, and not against property, that are wanted. We assert emphatically (because we know we can prove satisfactorily) that the repeal of unjust laws, and the enactment of a few just and salutary ones, upon Land, Credit, and Equitable Exchange (the latter including Currency), is all that is needed to terminate poverty and slavery for ever; and that it is perfectly within the compass of Parliament to enact such laws without violating the rights of private property, or confiscating to the value of one shilling of any man’s estate, or otherwise dealing with it than in the legitimate way of taxation and commutation, which the laws of all countries recognise and practise, and none more than our own.
But, before going a step further in this inquiry, we beg to submit here the following resolutions which were proposed to a crowded public meeting by the author of this work, and carried by acclamation without a single dissentient, although the meeting was composed of reformers and philanthropists of all shades and sects:—
“This meeting is of opinion that in addition to a full, fair, and free representation of the whole people in the Commons House of Parliament, upon principles the same, or similar to those laid down in the People’s Charter, the following measures, some of a provisional, the others of a permanent nature, are necessary to ensure real political and social justice to the oppressed and suffering population of the United Kingdom, and to protect society from violent revolutionary changes:—
“1. A repeal of our present wasteful and degrading system of poor-laws, and a substitution of a just and efficient poor-law (based upon the original Act of Elizabeth), which would centralise the rates, and dispense them equitably and economically for the beneficial employment and relief of the destitute poor; the rates to be levied only upon the owners of every description of realized property; the employment to be of a healthy, useful, and reproductive kind, so as to render the poor self-sustaining and self-respecting. Till such employment be procured the relief of the poor to be, in all cases, promptly and liberally administered as a right, and not grudgingly doled out as a boon; the relief not to be accompanied with obduracy, insult, imprisonment in the workhouses, separation of married couples, the breaking up of families, or any such other harsh and degrading conditions as, under the present system, convert relief into punishment, and treat the unhappy applicant rather as a convicted criminal than as (what he really is) the victim of an unjust and vitiated state of society.
“2. In order to lighten the pressure of rates, and at the same time gradually to diminish, and finally to absorb, the growing mass of pauperism and surplus population, it is the duty of the Government to appropriate its present surplus revenue, and the proceeds of national or public property, to the purchasing of lands, and the location thereon of the unemployed poor. The rents accruing from these lands to be applied to further purchases of land, till all who desired to occupy land, either as individual holders or industrial communities, might be enabled to do so. A general law, empowering parishes to raise loans upon the security of their rates, would greatly facilitate and expedite the operation of Government towards this desirable end.