It has indeed been said by some sapient legislators, both Lords and Commoners, that the journeymen will do themselves incalculable mischief by driving capital out of the country; and one of the reasons urged for the new law was that it would prevent the journeymen injuring themselves. Whenever the devil wants to do mischief he assumes the garb of holiness, and whenever a certain class of persons wish to commit a more than usually flagrant violation of justice it is always done in the name of humanity. If the labourers are disposed blindly to injure themselves I see no reason for the legislature interfering to prevent them; except as a farmer watches over the health of his cattle, or a West India planter looks after the negroes because they are his property, and bring him a large profit. The journeymen, however, know their own interest better than it is known to the legislator; and they would be all the richer if there were not an idle capitalist in the country. I shall not enter into any investigation of the origin of this opinion that the workmen will injure themselves by driving away capital; but it would not be difficult to show that it springs from the false theory I have opposed, and that it is based on a narrow experience. Because there are a few instances of political and religious persecution, driving both masters and journeymen, or a large quantity of national stock of skilled labour, from different countries, greatly, I admit, to the injury, and justly so, of the remaining inhabitants who permitted or practised this persecution, it has been asserted that this injury was caused by the banishment, not of the men but of the capital; and it being, therefore, now concluded that the proceedings of the workmen will in like manner banish capital from this country it has been affirmed that they will injure both themselves and the rest of the inhabitants. But they carry on neither political nor religious persecution, and it is somewhat preposterous in the race of politicians, by way, perhaps, of throwing a veil over their own crimes, to attribute to the actions of the workmen the same consequences as have been produced by some of the absurd and cruel proceedings of their own class. If the workmen do not frighten away the skill of the contriver and the master -- and where can that be put to so good a use as where there are plenty of skilful hands -- and even if they should, the wide spread of education among the mechanics and artisans will soon repair the loss, they will frighten away no other part of the national advantages. The merest tyro in political economy knows that the capitalist cannot export any great quantity of food, clothing and machines from this country, nor even the gold and silver which forms the current coin of the realm, to any advantage; either he must bring back an equivalent, which returns him a profit when consumed here, or he must carry with him those skilled labourers who have hitherto produced him his profit as they have consumed his food and used his instruments and machines. There is not a political injury on the one hand and both masters and workmen on the other; but on the one side is the labourer and on the other the capitalist, and however successful the workmen may be, the smallest fraction of their produce which the capitalist can scrape up he will assuredly stay to collect. The combination of the workmen will not frighten away their own skill, nor unlearn them what thy have learned. Their hand will not forget its cunning, when its produce goes no longer into the pocket of the capitalist. Capitalists, who can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers, may probably carry off some of their cloth, and their corn, and their machines to some country like Prussia, where the poor people can learn nothing but what the king and his schoolmasters please; or like France, where a watchful police allows no man to utter a thought but such as suits the views of a government and priesthood anxious to restore despotism and superstition; but they cannot, unless the labourers please, carry with them the mouths which consume, or the hands which make their capital useful; and where these are there will be the productive power. Our labourers already possess in an eminent degree the skill to execute, and they are rapidly acquiring also the skill to contrive. Never was there a more idle threat uttered, therefore, than that the combinations of skilled labourers to obtain greater rewards than they now possess will drive skilled labour from the country.
This analysis also of the operations of capital leads us at once boldly to pronounce all those schemes of which we have of late heard so much for improving countries, by sending capital to them, to be mere nonsense. Of what use, for example, would the butter and salt beef and pork and grain now exported from Ireland be of in that country if they were to be left there, or if they were to be sent back? All these articles form some of the most valuable parts of circulating capital, and so far from there being any want of them in Ireland, they are constantly exported in great quantities. It is plain, therefore, that there is no want of circulating capital in Ireland, if the capitalist would allow the wretched producer of it to consume it. Of what use also would steam engines or power looms or stocking frames or mining tools be to the ragged peasantry of Ireland? Of none whatever. If, indeed, masters and journeymen went over with these instruments and tools, they might use them, and by consuming at the same time the circulating capital now exported from Ireland give the owner of it a large profit; and they might teach the ignorant and helpless natives how to make use of the various instruments I have mentioned. Those who talk of improving Ireland, or any other country, by capital have a double meaning in their words. They know the power of the capitalist over the labourer, and that whenever the master goes or sends, there also must the slave labourer go. But neither the lawmaker nor the capitalist possesses any miraculous power of multiplying loaves and fishes; or of commanding, like the enchanters of old, broomsticks to do the work of men. They must have labourers, skilled labourers, and without them it is nonsense to talk of improving a country and a people by corn and cloth and hatchets and saws.
The wide spread of education among the journeyman mechanics of this country diminishes daily the value of the labour and skill of almost all masters and employers by increasing the number of persons who possess their peculiar knowledge. At the same time, masters and employers cannot hope that the labourers who are not capitalists will remain long ignorant of the manner in which masters who are both labourers and capitalist lend themselves to the views of the capitalists who are not labourers. They are daily acquiring this knowledge, and masters cannot therefore rationally expect a termination to the present contest. On the contrary, it must continue. Even if it should be stopped, it will again and again occur. It is not possible that any large body of men who are acquainted with their rights will tacitly acquiesce in insult and injury. The profits of the masters, as capitalist, must be diminished, whether the labourers succeed in obtaining higher wages, or the combination continues, or it is from time to time renewed. In the former case, the masters, as skilled labourers, will share in the increased rewards of industry; in either of the two latter, not only will their profit be destroyed, but their wages will be diminished or altogether annihilated. Without workmen their own skill and labour are of no use, but they may live in comfort and opulence without the capitalist. Masters and employers, therefore, would do well to recollect that by supporting the claims of capital they diminish their own wages, and they prolong a contest which, independent of the ill temper and hatred it creates and perpetuates, is also injurious to them as inventors, contrivers and skilled labourers, and which must ultimately terminate to their disadvantage.
The improved education of the labouring classes ought, in the present question, to have great weight also with statesmen, and with the community at large. The schools, which are everywhere established, or are establishing, for their instruction, make it impossible for the greatest visionary to suppose that any class of men can much longer be kept in ignorance of the principles on which societies are formed and governed. Mechanics' institutions will teach men the moral as well as the physical sciences. They excite a disposition to probe all things to the bottom, and supply the means of carrying research into every branch of knowledge. He must be a very blind statesman who does not see in this indications of a more extensive change in the frame of society than has ever yet been made. This change will not be effected by violence, and cannot be counteracted by force. Holy Alliance can put down the quiet insurrection by which knowledge will subvert whatever is not founded in justice and truth. The interest of the different classes of labourers who are now first beginning to think and act as a body, in opposition to the other classes among whom, with themselves, the produce of the earth is distributed, and who are now only for the first time beginning to acquire as extensive a knowledge of the principles of government as those who rule, is too deeply implicated by these principles to allow them to stop short in their career of inquiry. They may care nothing about the curious researches of the geologist or the elaborate classification of the botanist, but they will assuredly ascertain why they only of all classes of society have always been involved in poverty and distress. They will not stop short of any ultimate truth; and they have experienced too few of the advantages of society to make them feel satisfied with the present order of things. The mind is rather invigorated than enfeebled by the labour of the hands; and they will carry forward their investigations undelayed by the pedantry of learning, and undiverted by the fastidiousness of taste. By casting aside the prejudices which fetter the minds of those who have benefited by their degradation, they have everything to hope. On the other hand, they are the suffers by these prejudices, and have everything to dread from their continuance. Having no reason to love those institutions which limit the reward of labour, whatever may be its produce, to a bare subsistence, they will not spare them, whenever they see the hollowness of the claims made on their respect. As the labourers acquire knowledge, the foundations of the social edifice will be dug up from the deep beds into which they were laid in times past, they will be curiously handled and closely examined, and they will not be restored unless they were originally laid in justice, and unless justice commands their preservation.
Without joining in any of the commonplace observations against taking interest, and against usury, which, however, support my view of capital, I have show that it has no just claim to any share of the labourer's produce, and that what it actually receives is the cause of the poverty of the labourer. It is impossible that the labourer should long remain ignorant of these facts, or acquiesce in this state of things.
In truth, also, however the matter may be disguised, the combinations among workmen to obtain higher wages, which are now so general and so much complained of, are practical attacks on the claims of capital. The weight of its chains are felt, though the hand may not yet be clearly seen which imposes them. Gradually as the resistance increases, as laws are multiplied for the protection of capital, as claims for higher wages shall be more strenuously and more violently repressed, the cause of this oppression will be more distinctly seen. The contest now appears to be between masters and journeymen, or between one species of labour and another, but it will soon be displayed in its proper characters; and will stand confessed a war of honest industry against the idle profligacy which has so long ruled the affairs of the political world with undisputed authority -- which has, for its own security, added honour and political power to wealth, and has conjoined exclusion and disgrace with the poverty it has inflicted on the labourer. On the side of the labourers there is physical strength, for they are more numerous than their opponents. They are also fast losing that reverence for their opponents which was and is the source of their power, and they are daily acquiring a moral strength which results from a common interest and a close and intimate union.
The capitalist and labourers form the great majority of the nation, so that there is not third power to intervene betwixt them. The must and will decide the dispute of themselves. Final success, I would fain hope, must be on the side of justice. I am certain, however, that till the triumph of labour be complete; till productive industry alone be opulent, and till idleness alone be poor, till the admirable maxim that "he who sows shall reap" be solidly established; till the right of property shall be founded on principles of justice, and not on those of slavery; till man shall be held more in honour than the clod be treads on, or the machine he guides -- there cannot, and there ought not to be either peace on earth or goodwill amongst men.
Those who of late have shown themselves so ready to resist the just claims of labour, who, under the influence of interest and passion, have hurried into the arena with their penal laws, and have come forward, brandishing their parchment statutes, as if they, poor beings, could whip mankind into patience and submission, when these weapons of theirs -- these penal laws and parchment statutes -- derive all their power, whether for evil or for good, from the sanctity with which we are pleased to invest them, and as if they also did not know that they are as powerless as the meanest individual whom they are so prompt to scourge, except as we are pleased to submit and to honour them -- they may thank themselves should their haste and their violence beget a corresponding haste and violence in others; and, should the labourers, who have hitherto shown themselves confiding and submissive -- losing that reverence by which laws are invested with power, and to which Government is indebted for its existence -- turn their attention from combining for higher wages, to amending the state, and to subverting a system which they must now believe is intended only to support all the oppressive exactions of capital. Ministers are undoubtedly, for the moment, very popular, but it does not require any very enlarged view to predict that by openly committing the Government during the last session of Parliament, when the great mass of the community are able both to scan the motives of their conduct and its consequences, and zealous in doing it, to a contest between capital and labour, taking the side of idleness against industry, of weakness against strength, of oppression against justice, they are preparing more future mischief than any ministry this country has ever seen. They profess liberal principles -- and they make laws to keep the labourer in thraldom. By their innovations they encourage inquiry, and convince us the system is neither sacred nor incapable of improvement. They have practically told the labourer there is nothing deserving his reverence, and have excited his hostility both by insult and oppression.
I do not mean, on the present occasion, to point out all the consequences which result from this view of capital, but there is one so important in a theoretical point of view, and so well calculated to relieve the wise system of the universe from the opprobrium which has been cast upon it in these latter times, that I cannot wholly pass it by. An elaborate theory has been constructed to show that there is a natural tendency in population to increase faster than capital, or than the means of employing labour. In Mr Mill's Elements of Political Economy, a work distinguished by its brevity, several sections and pages are devoted merely to announce this truth. If my view of capital be correct, this, as a theory of nature, falls at once baseless to the ground. That the capitalist can control the existence and number of labourers, that the whole number of the population depends altogether on him, I will not deny. But put the capitalist, the oppressive middleman, who eats up the produce of labour and prevents the labourer from knowing on what natural laws his existence and happiness depend, out of view -- put aside those social regulations by which they who produce all are allowed to own little or nothing -- and it is plain that capital, or the power to employ labour, and co-exiting labour are one; and that productive capital and skilled labour are also one; consequently capital and a labouring population are precisely synonymous.
In the system of nature, mouths are united with hands and with intelligence; they and not capital are the agents of production; and, according other rule, however it may have been thwarted by the pretended wisdom of law makers, wherever there is a man there also are the means of creating or producing him subsistence. If also, as I say, circulating capital is only co-existing labour, and fixed capital only skill labour, it must be plain that all those numerous advantages, those benefits to civilisation, those vast improvements in the condition of the human race, which have been in general attributed to capital, are caused in fact by labour, and by knowledge and skill informing and directing labour. Should it be said, then, as perhaps it may, that unless there be profit, and unless there be interest, there will be no motives for accumulation and improvement, I answer that this is a false view, and arises from attributing to capital and saving those effects which result from labour; and that the best means of securing the progressive improvement, both of individuals and of nations, is to do justice, and allow labour to possess and enjoy the whole of its produce.
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