Part 19 (1/2)
The services and persons, lives and liberty of soldiers and of officers, belong to the Government; they are, whilst in service, both property and slaves.
Every white working man, be he clerk, carpenter, mechanic, printer, common laborer, or what else, who contracts to serve for a term of days, months, or years, is, for such term, the property of his employer. He is not a slave, like the wife, child, apprentice, sailor or soldier, because, although the employer's right to his services be equally perfect, his remedy to enforce such right is very different. In the one case, he may resort to force to compel compliance; in the other, he is driven to a suit for damages.
Again: Every capitalist holds property in his fellow men to the extent of the profits of his capital, or income. The only income possibly resulting from capital, is the result of the property which capital bestows on its owners, in the labor of other people. In our first three chapters we attempt to explain this.
All civilized society recognizes, and, in some measure, performs the obligation to support and provide for all human beings, whether natives or foreigners, who are unable to provide for themselves. Hence poor-houses, &c.
Hence all men hold valuable property, actual or contingent, in the services of each other.
If, Mr. Garrison, this be the only difficulty to be adjusted between North and South, we are sure that your little pet, Disunion, ”living will linger, and lingering will die.”
When Mr. Andrews and you have quite ”expelled human nature,” dissolved and disintegrated society, and reduced mankind to separate, independent, but conflicting monads, or human atoms--then, and not till then, will you establish the 'sovereignty of the individual,' and destroy the property of man in man.
CHAPTER x.x.xIII.
THE ”COUP DE GRACE” TO ABOLITION.
The Abolitionists are all willing to admit that free society has utterly failed in Europe, but will a.s.sign two reasons for that failure--”Excess of population, and want of equality and liberty.”
Were the population of England doubled, the labor required to support that population would be lessened, could all labor and expenses be supported alike; because the a.s.sociation and division of labor might be rendered more perfect, and the expenses of a single family, or single individual, might be divided among and borne by many. The Socialists and Abolitionists understand this. When one family has to support its own school, its own mill, its own mechanics, its own doctor, parson, &c., living is expensive; but where these and other expenses are divided among many, living becomes cheap; hence it is far less laborious to live in a densely settled country than in a spa.r.s.ely settled one, if labor and expenses can be equally divided. The soil of England will readily support double its population, if its products be not wasted in luxury, in feeding deer, and game, and horses. England has not attained that density of population which enables men to live by the least amount of labor. Her laboring population has been thinned and labor rendered dearer and scarcer, by emigration, of late years, to America, California and Australia--yet, in the winter of 1854, there was a general outbreak and riot of her operatives, because a fall in prices occasioned a large number of her factories to stop work, and turn their hands out of employment. This happens every day in free society, from the bankruptcy of employers, or from the glut of markets and fall of prices. We will add, that a meeting of the working men of New York, in the Park, a.s.serted that there were 50,000 working men and women, in that city, out of employment last winter.
The compet.i.tive system (so injurious to the laboring cla.s.s) is carried out with less exception or restriction in America than in Europe. Hence, considering the spa.r.s.eness of our population, the laboring cla.s.s are worse off in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, than in London, Manchester or Paris. And this begets more Socialists in the higher cla.s.ses, and more mobs, riots and trade-unions, with the laborers, than in Europe.
Finally, if it be excess of numbers, or want of liberty, that occasions the failure of free society, why are our Abolitionists and Socialists so hot and so active in upsetting and re-organizing society? They have p.r.o.nounced, with entire unanimity, that free society is intolerable, whether a country be densely or spa.r.s.ely settled.
The Abolitionists boast, that lands are dearer and labor cheaper in free than in slave society. Either proposition contains the admission that free laborers work more for others and less for themselves than slaves--in effect, that they are less free than slaves. The profits of land are what the land-owner appropriates of the results of work of the laborer. Where he appropriates most, and leaves the laborer least, there lands are dearest, labor cheapest, and laborers least free. In Europe, lands sell much higher than at the North; hence, laborers are less free in fact than at the North. In the North they sell higher than in the South, because the slaves consume more of the results of their own labor than laborers at the North, and leave less profit to the land-owner. The high price of land is, in the general, an unerring indication of the poverty and actual slavery of the laboring cla.s.s. Its low price, equally proves that the laborers, whether called slaves or freemen, work more for themselves, and less for the land-owners, than where lands are dear.
In settled countries, where all the lands are appropriated, this theory is undeniable and irrefutable.
As this is a short chapter, we take the opportunity to apologize and account for our discursive, immethodical and unartistic manner.
In the first place, the character of the enemy we have to contend with prevents anything like regular warfare. They are divided into hundreds of little guerrilla bands of isms, each having its peculiar partizan tactics, and we are compelled to vary our mode of attack from regular cannonade to bush-fighting, to suit the occasion.
Again, we practiced as a jury lawyer for twenty-five years, and thereby acquired an inveterate habit of c.u.mulation and iteration, and of various argument and ill.u.s.tration. But, at the same time, we learned how ”to make out our case,” and to know when it is ”made out.” The lawyer who observed the Unities in an argument before a jury would be sure to lose his cause; and now the world is our jury, who are going to bring in a verdict against free society of ”guilty.”
We admire not the pellucid rivulet, that murmurs and meanders, in cramped and artificial current, through the park and gardens of the n.o.bleman; but we do admire the flooded and swollen Mississippi, whose turbid waters, in their majestic course, sweep along upon their bosom, with equal composure, the occupants of the hen-roost and the poultry yard, the flocks, the herds, the crops, the uprooted forest, and the residences of man. The Exhaustive, not the Artistic, is what we would aspire to. And yet, the Exhaustive may be the highest art of argument.
The best mode, we think, of writing, is that in which facts, and argument, and rhetoric, and wit, and sarcasm, succeed each other with rapid iteration.
Intonuere poli, et crebris micat ignibus aether!
Again, Artistic execution is un-English. It neither suits their minds nor their tastes. Discursiveness and prurient exuberancy of thought and suggestion, they often possess, but always fail when they attempt a literary or other work of Art. Indeed, we have a strong suspicion that Art went out of the world about the time the Baconian Philosophy came in.
A continuous argument, without pause or break, on a subject profoundly metaphysical, equally fatigues the writer and the reader. n.o.body likes it, and very few read it. ”Desipere in loco” is not only a very agreeable maxim to the author, but a very wise and prudent one.
Lastly. Like Porthos, when ”we have an idea,” we are at once seized with a feverish anxiety to communicate it, and we think it better to break in on the regular thread of our discourse, and do so at once, than to spoil our whole discourse by having our minds occupied with two subjects at a time.
Another idea strikes us. As yet we hardly aspire to the dignity of authors.h.i.+p. We indulge in abandon, because, as a writer, we have no reputation to jeopard or to lose. But, should this book take, we will mount the ant.i.thetical stilts of auctorial dignity--write a book as stale and dry as ”the remainder biscuit after a long voyage,” and as free from originality, wit, thought or suggestiveness, as the Queen's Speech, the President's Message, or a debate in the United States Senate. We do not as yet bore the world with ”respectable stupidity,”