網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

Yes, without doubt, says a believer in the omnipotence of education; increase the number of schools for the poor, and of mechanics' institutions; send teachers into the rural districts; take off the taxes on knowledge; proceed

Stop friend; all this is supposed to have been done with a view to the postponement of universal suffrage.

He continues: Then you suppose the poor taught, that their own comfort depends on themselves, that their well-being is in their own hands, that, by prudently keeping their numbers under the demand for their services, they may exact high wages,

Stop again: All this is good, may be necessary, for the permanent well-being of the labouring class; but the greatest imaginable prudence, though made universal to-morrow, would have no effect on wages for twenty years to come. Would you prudently get rid of children already born? If not, you propose to teach prudence, the highest wisdom, to a miserable race, without leisure, over-worked, anxious and discontented; to make the cart drag the horse; to produce a cause by means of its own effect. Prudence, wisdom, is the end; the means, high wages, leisure, peace of mind and instruction. A world of trouble has been wasted in the endeavour to instruct the wretched. You must begin at the beginning. Bestow ease on the working class,

and then, indeed, you may teach them to dread the return of misery. The first step is to raise wages. "When we deliberate about the means of introducing intellectual and moral excellence into the minds of the principal portion of the people, one of the first things which we are bound to provide for, is a generous and animating diet. The physical causes must go along with the moral; and nature herself forbids, that you should make a wise and virtuous people out of a starving one. Men must be happy themselves, before they can rejoice in the happiness of others; they must have a certain vigour of mind before they can, in the midst of habitual suffering, resist a presented pleasure: their own lives and means of well-being must be worth something, before they can value, so as to respect, the life or wellbeing of any other person. This or that individual may be an extraordinary individual, and exhibit mental excellence in the midst of wretchedness; but a wretched and excellent people never yet has been seen on the face of the earth. Though far from fond of paradoxical expressions, we are tempted to say that a good diet is a necessary part of good education; for in one very important sense, it is emphatically true. In the great body of the people, all education is impotent without it."*

* Art. Education, Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, by James Mill, Esq.

The first step is to raise wages. But how shall wages be raised, except either by increasing the amount of employment or by diminishing the number of labourers? In no other way, beyond a doubt; not by strikes at Manchester, nor by Swing fires in Kent; not by spade husbandry, nor by paper money; not by giving books to hungry paupers, half-starved weavers and parish apprentices, nor by accumulating more capital, and wasting it on foreign loans and far off ruinous speculations; but by increasing the proportion which employment bears to labour. How to raise immediately the proportion which employment bears to labour, and to maintain the higher proportion for twenty years or so; this is the question on which, if I have taken a just view of the political prospects of the English, depends their existence as a wealthy and civilized nation.

Here I must refer to the note, in which I have sought to explain the coincidence in England of overflowing wealth with extensive uneasiness and wide-spread misery. In order to raise wages immediately, the field for the employment of English capital and labour must be enlarged; whereby profits, and the rewards of many services not called labour, would be raised at the same time as the wages of labour. The whole world is before you. Open new channels for the most productive employment of English capital. Let the English buy bread from every people

that has bread to sell cheap. Make England, for all that is produced by steam, the workshop of the world. If, after this, there be capital and people to spare, imitate the ancient Greeks; take a lesson from the Americans, who, as their capital and population increase, find room for both by means of colonization. You have abundance, superabundance, of capital: provide profitable employment for it, and you will improve the condition of all classes at once. Instead of lending your surplus capital to foreign states, or wasting it in South American mines, whereby no additional employment is given to English labour, rather, like the Americans, invest it in colonization; so that, as it flies off, it may take with it, and employ, a corresponding amount of surplus labour, if there be any. How this might be done, and how capital so invested, might be recovered at pleasure, is stated elsewhere, but cannot be thoroughly understood by Englishmen till they shall learn the causes of certain peculiarities in the social condition of America. These, also, I have endeavoured to explain in some of the following notes. May the explanation assist to point out a way, by which the English shall escape from that corrupting and irritating state of political economy, which seems fit to precede the dissolution of empires!

209

NOTE VI.

FREE TRADE IN CORN, AS A MEANS OF ENLARGING

THE FIELD OF EMPLOYMENT

CAPITAL AND LABOUR.

FOR

ENGLISH

Subject of this note stated-wide difference between facts in America and the English theory of rent-American theory of rent-various kinds and degrees of competition for the use of land -facts-effects of a free corn trade on the several kinds of competition for the use of land -with cheap bread, the rental of England must be greater-gradual repeal of the corn laws hurtful, for a time, to landlords and farmers; and not useful to any class of labourers-sudden repeal of the corn laws beneficial to all classes.

WITH respect to the foreign corn trade of England, there is but one point left for examination. The risk of depending on foreigners for the staff of life, the wisdom of protecting domestic agriculture, the folly of importing corn from abroad when you can reap it on your own native soil, the injustice of allowing foreign farmers, who are lightly taxed, to compete in your own market with your own farmers, who are heavily taxed; all these fallacies having been thoroughly exposed

P

« 上一頁繼續 »