Part 18 (1/2)
In looking back upon all the various circ.u.mstances which we have exhibited as necessary for carrying industry to the greatest point of productiveness, we think that we must have established satisfactorily that the two great elements which concur in rendering labour in the highest degree beneficial, are, 1st, the acc.u.mulated results of past labour, and 2nd, the contrivances by which manual labour is a.s.sisted,--those contrivances being derived from the acc.u.mulations of knowledge. Capital and skill, therefore, are essential to the productive power of labour. The different degrees in which each possesses capital and skill make the difference between an English manufacturer and a North American savage; and the less striking gradations in the productive power of the English manufacturer of the present time, and the English manufacturer of five hundred years ago, may be all resolved into the fact that the one has at his command a very large amount of capital and skill, and that the other could only command a very small amount of the same great elements of production.
We think, also, that we have shown that the acc.u.mulation of former labour in the shape of tangible wealth, and the acc.u.mulation of former labour in the shape of the no less real wealth of knowledge, are processes which go on together, each supporting, directing, and regulating the other. Knowledge is the offspring of some leisure resulting from a more easy supply of the physical wants; and that leisure cannot exist unless capital exists; which allows some men to live upon former acc.u.mulations. Capital, therefore, may be said to be the parent of skill, as capital and skill united are the encouragers and directors of profitable labour.
We have shown that the only foundation of acc.u.mulation is security of property--we have shown, too, that labour is the most sacred of properties. It results, therefore, that in any state of society in which the laws did not equally protect the capitalist and the labourer as free exchangers, each having the most absolute command over his property, compatible with a due regard to the rights of the other,--in such a state, where there was no real freedom and no real security, there would be very imperfect production; and production being imperfect, all men, the capitalists and the labourers, would be equally dest.i.tute, weak, ignorant, and miserable.
It is under these several conditions, all working together with united force, that the entire labour of this country, and indeed of all other countries advanced in civilization, must now be directed. The enormous increase of productiveness which we have exhibited, in so many operations of industry, is chiefly the result of production carried on upon a large scale, and working with every possible application of science. It is in this sense that Knowledge is Power; and skilled labour is a part of that power.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Medal to Locke]
The mode in which the respective proportions of capitalist and labourer are a.s.signed in the division of the products of industry, are called by one Profit, by the other Wages. If we were writing a treatise on Political Economy, we should have to regard Rent as distinct from the profits of capital. But for our purpose this is unnecessary. We proceed, then, to consider the practical relations of Profit and Wages, as they exist amongst us. Unquestionably the only solid foundation for these relations must be equal justice; without which there can be neither permanent prosperity nor increasing intelligence. A medal to our great philosopher, Locke, exhibits Justice and Plenty enthroned together.
[33] See p. 61.
[34] An Essay on the 'Relations between Labour and Capital.' By C.
Morison, p. 34.
[35] Everett's 'Address to the Working Man's Party.'
[36] Sir John Herschel's 'Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy.'
CHAPTER XXIV.
Natural law of wages--State-laws regulating wages--Enactments regulating consumption--The labour-fund and the want-fund--Ratio of capital to population--State of industry at the end of the seventeenth century--Rise of manufactures--Wages and prices--Turning over capital.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Vision of Henry I.]
The old chroniclers relate that our Norman king, Henry I., had once a terrible vision, of soldiers, and priests, and peasants, surrounding his bed, one band succeeding another, and threatening to kill him. The legend became the subject of illuminated drawings in an ancient MS.
preserved at Oxford, and one of these represented the tillers of the land, with spade, and fork, and scythe, demanding justice. The cultivators were loaded with heavy exactions, so great that the tenants of the crown even offered to give up their ploughs to the king. They ploughed, but they reaped not themselves. In such a state of things there could be no acc.u.mulation, and no profitable labour. The funds for supplying the wages of labour were exhausted. The country was depopulated.
During the next two centuries, the condition of the people had been materially improved. Capital had increased, and so had population. But capital had increased faster than population, and hence the improvement.
The cla.s.s of free labourers had for the most part succeeded to the old cla.s.s of villeins. Labourers for hire, without understanding the great principles which govern the rate of wages, any more than did their masters, would practically seek to measure their earnings according to those principles. The lawgivers determined the contrary.[37] The Statute of Labourers, 23rd Edward III., says:--”Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence, many, seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they receive excessive wages.” They were therefore to be compelled to serve, and they were to serve at the same wages which they had received three years before. The ratio of population, in consequence of the pestilence, had fallen considerably below the ratio of acc.u.mulated capital seeking to employ labour. Under the natural laws of demand and supply, the scarcity of labourers and the excess of capital would have raised the wages of labour. These laws were not to operate. Forty years after this enactment of Edward III., comes the statute of Richard II., which says that ”Servants and labourers will not, nor by a long season would, serve and labour without outrageous and excessive hire, and much more than hath been given to such servants and labourers in any time past, so that for scarcity of the said servants and labourers the husbands and land-tenants may not pay their rents, nor scarcely live upon their lands.” Here was a distinct conflict between the capitalists seeking profits and the labourers seeking wages. The law-makers resolved that the hires of the servants and labourers should be ”put in certainty;” and they fixed the rate of wages throughout the land. They settled the contest in favour of profits, arbitrarily. To avoid this interference with the due payments of their labour in proportion to the ratio of capital and labour, the husbandmen might have fled to the towns, and some did so. But they were met there by the enactment that the artificers should be subject to the same controlling power, and that the boy who had laboured at the plough and cart till he was twelve years old should continue so to labour for the rest of his life. This state of things was truly slavery without the name. Some such marvellous folly and injustice went on for several centuries. But, regulating wages, the laws also undertook to regulate the cost of food and of clothing--their quality, and their consumption--how much people should eat, and what coats they should wear. These absurdities also went on for centuries--of course under a perpetual system of open violation or secret evasion. The people, we may safely conclude, never fully believed what their rulers told them of their prodigious kindness in managing private affairs so much better than individuals could themselves. Mr. Sergeant Thorpe, judge of a.s.size for the northern circuit, in a charge to the grand jury in 1648, tells them to be vigilant against servants taking higher wages than those allowed by the justices,--to enforce the laws against everybody who bought every thing for the sustenance of man, with intent to make a profit by it--against every tradesman who did not produce his wares in conformity with the statutes;--wonderful laws, which would not permit the tanner to sell a piece of leather that had not been kept twelve months in the tan-pit, and which forbade the cloth-maker to use lime in whitening linen cloth.
”And thus you see,” says solemn Mr. Sergeant Thorpe, ”how the wisdom of the common laws of this nation, and of the parliaments, from time to time, hath provided for the security and ease of the people; and hath furnished us with a salve for every sore; and gives us rules and instructions how to govern ourselves, that we may be helpful and useful to one another.”[38] Instead of providing the salve, it probably would have been better not to have made the sore.
But, after all, it is scarcely candid to laugh at the wisdom of ”the good old times” in regulating trades, when in our own day, we have had excise laws which interfered in the most absurd way with production, and some of which still interfere. Nor can we look with perfect complacency at the manifest impolicy and injustice of fixing the rate of wages, when, within the last quarter of a century, we have had justices at work all over the country to keep down the wages of labour, by paying labourers not in proportion to their earnings, but according to their necessities; and raising up a fund for the encouragement of idleness and improvidence, by a diversion of the real funds for the maintenance of labour. The Poor Laws, as they were administered in the beginning and middle of the last half century, did this evil, and a great deal more; and persons of influence, with the most benevolent intentions, could see no difference between the parish allowance to able-bodied labourers, and the wages which they could have really commanded for their labour if this opposing fund had not been called into action. In those times, and even after a strenuous effort had been made to bring about an improvement, educated gentlemen used to say--”something must be done to give the labourers employment upon fair wages;” and they were accustomed to believe that ”some plan should be devised whereby work should be at hand.”[39] These gentlemen, and many others, did not understand that there is a natural fund for the maintenance of labour which is to produce such beneficial results; that this fund cannot be increased but by the addition of the results of _more_ profitable labour; that whatever is paid out of the fund for the support of unprofitable labour has a direct tendency to lower the rate at which the profitable labour is paid,--to prevent the payment of ”fair wages;” and that there is a ”plan” which requires no devising, because our necessities are constantly calling it into operation,--the natural law of exchange, which makes ”work at hand” wherever there is capital to pay for it. Such reasoners also held that the labourers were not to seek for the fund ”about the country on an uncertainty;” but that the work for the labourers ”should be at hand”--”it should be certain.” This clearly was not the ordinary labour-fund. That is neither always at hand, nor is it always certain. It s.h.i.+fts its place according to its necessity for use; it is uncertain in its distribution in proportion to the demand upon it.
The fund which was to work this good was clearly not the labour-fund--it was the _want_-fund; and the mistake that these gentlemen and many others fell into was that the want-fund had qualities of far greater powers of usefulness than the labour-fund; that the parish purse was the purse of Fortunatus, always full; that the parish labour field was like the tent of the Indian queen in the Arabian tale--you could carry it in the palm of your hand, and yet it would give shelter to an army of thousands. All these fallacies are now, happily, as much exploded as the laws for the regulation of wages and the price of commodities. The real labour-fund--the acc.u.mulation of a portion of the results of past labour--is the only fund which can find profitable work and pay fair wages.
It is extremely difficult to ascertain the ratio of Capital to Population at any particular period; yet some approximations may be made, which, in a degree, may indicate the activity or the inertness of the labour-fund, in regard to the condition of the labourer.
At the end of the seventeenth century, about half the land of England and Wales was, according to the best authorities, held to be under cultivation, either as arable or pasture. As the whole area of England and Wales is about thirty-seven millions of acres, this would show a cultivation of eighteen million five hundred thousand acres. The entire quant.i.ty of wheat, rye, barley, oats, pease, beans, and vetches, grown upon these eighteen million and a half acres, was estimated at less than ten millions of quarters, wheat being little more than a sixth of the whole produce. The quant.i.ty of stock annually fattened for food was even more inconsiderable. We may safely a.s.sume that in a century and a half the amount of agricultural produce in England has increased five-fold.
Two-thirds of the whole area of England and Wales are now under cultivation; for in the census returns of 1851 we have twenty-five million acres of farm holdings, occupied by two hundred and twenty-five thousand farmers. In the calculations of Gregory King, in 1688, the number of farmers was given at a hundred and fifty thousand; but the number of lesser freeholders, who were doubtless cultivators, was also a hundred and twenty thousand. The produce of the land has increased at a greater rate than the increase of population. According to the commonly received estimates, the population of England and Wales was about five millions and a half, perhaps six millions, at the end of the seventeenth century; it is now eighteen millions. The inhabited houses, according to the hearth-books of 1690,[40] were one million three hundred and twenty thousand. In 1851 they were three million two hundred and seventy-eight thousand. The hearth-books of 1685 show that, of the houses of the kingdom, five hundred and fifty-four thousand had only one chimney--they were mere hovels.
Gregory King has given 'A Scheme of the Income and Expense of the several Families in England, calculated for the year 1688.' He considers that, in the aggregate, there were five hundred thousand families who were acc.u.mulators--that is to say, whose annual expense was less than their income. He values this acc.u.mulation at three millions. The number of persons comprised in the acc.u.mulating families was two million six hundred and seventy-five thousand. Of this number only one-fifth belonged to the trading cla.s.ses--merchants, shopkeepers and tradesmen, artisans and handicrafts. The remainder were the landholders, farmers, lawyers, clergy, holders of office, and persons in liberal arts and sciences. But there was a large non-acc.u.mulating cla.s.s, consisting of two million eight hundred and twenty-five thousand, whom he puts down as ”decreasing the wealth of the kingdom,”--that is to say, that their annual expense exceeded their income; and this excess he computes at six hundred and twenty-two thousand pounds, which reduces the annual national acc.u.mulation to two million four hundred thousand pounds. The positive plunderers of the national capital were thirty thousand vagrants, such as gipsies, thieves, and beggars. We were in a happier condition than Scotland at the same period; where, according to Fletcher of Saltoun, there were two hundred thousand ”people begging from door to door,” out of a population of one million, for whose suppression he saw no remedy but slavery. We were more favoured, too, than France; where, as Vauban records, in 1698, more than a tenth part of the population of sixteen millions were beggars, in the extremity of hunger and nakedness.[41] But we may be sure that in England the two million eight hundred and twenty-five thousand ”labouring people, out-servants, cottagers, and paupers,” who are put down by Gregory King as non-acc.u.mulators, were working upon very insufficient means, and that they were constantly pressing upon the fund for the maintenance of profitable labour. It is a curious fact that he cla.s.ses ”cottagers and paupers” together; but we can account for it when we consider how much of the land of the country was uninclosed, and how many persons derived a scanty subsistence from the commons, upon which they were ”squatters,”
living in mean huts with ”one chimney.”
The small number of ”artisans and handicrafts,” comprising only sixty thousand families, is of itself a sufficient indication that our manufactures, properly so called, were of very trifling amount. In various parts of this volume we have incidentally mentioned how slowly the great industries of this country grew into importance. At the period of which we are now speaking, nearly every article of clothing was, in many districts, of domestic production, and was essentially connected with the tillage of the land. The flax and the wool were spun at home; the stockings were knit; the shoes were often untanned hide nailed upon heavy clogs. Furniture there was little beyond the rough bench and the straw bed. The fuel came from the woods and hedges. About forty thousand of the cottages mentioned in the hearth-books had some land belonging to them; and, to prevent the growth of a ”squatter” population, it was the business of the Grand Jury to present, as a nuisance, all newly-erected cottages that had not four acres of land attached to them. There was a contest perpetually going on between the more favoured portion who had regular means of subsistence, and the unhappy many who were pressing upon those means, in all the various forms of pauperism. One of the means of keeping down this cla.s.s was to prevent them having dwellings.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, then, we see that there was some acc.u.mulation of capital, however small. There was then a vague feeling amongst the acc.u.mulators that something might be saved by setting the unemployed and the starving to other work than was provided for them in the fields. Population was pressing hard upon Capital. It pressed, chiefly, in the shape of increasing demands upon the poor-rate.
The remedy universally proposed was ”to set the poor to work.” The notion was extremely crude as to the mode in which this was to be effected; but there was a sort of universal agreement expressed by sober economists as well as visionary projectors, that the more general introduction of manufactures would remedy the evil. Of course, the first thing to be done was to prohibit foreign manufactures by enormous duties; and then we were to go to work vigorously at home, knowing very little of the arts in which foreigners were greatly our superiors. But we were to go to work, not in the ordinary way of profitable industry, by the capitalist working for profit employing the labourer for wages, but by withholding from the poor the greater part of the want-fund, and converting it into a labour-fund, by setting up manufactures under the management of the poor-law administrators. Here, in these ”workhouses”