then more mills will be needed; and then the quantity of labor applied to the work of conversion, or transportation, may advantageously be increased; but not otherwise. In the case before us, the proportion of the labor given to conversion increases in the direct ratio of the diminution of the necessity for it; and the proportion given to production diminishes in the ratio of the increase in the machinery used for the conversion of the things produced. There is, therefore, a constant increase in the number of people requiring to be fed and clothed, accompanied by as constant a decrease in the number of persons employed in furnishing the raw material to be used by those who need supplies of food and clothing.

One-fourth only of the people of England being engaged in increasing the quantities of things, while three-fourths are either entirely unoccupied, or are occupied in effecting changes in their places, in their forms, or in their ownership, it follows necessarily that the major part of the things produced is absorbed in its passage from the place of production to that of consumption. That such is really the case, we learn from a leading British journal,* which tells its readers that "the number of retail traders and shopkeepers is out of all proportion to the requirements of society, or the numbers of the producing classes. There are in many places," as it continues, "ten shopkeepers to do the work which one would suffice for such at least is Mr. Mill's estimate. Now these men, industrious and energetic as they are, do not add to the production, and therefore not to the wealth, of the community; they merely distribute what others produce. Nay more, in proportion as they are too numerous, do they diminish the wealth of the community. They live, it is true, many of them, by 'snatching the bread out of each other's mouths ;' but still they do live, and often make great profits. These profits are made, it is obvious, by charging a per-centage on the article they sell. If, therefore, there are two of these retailers to be supported by a community when one would suffice to do the work, the articles they sell must cost that community more than needs to be the case, and so far the country is impoverished by supporting an 'unproductive laborer' too many. Any one who examines into the subject is surprised to find how small a portion of the * North British Review, November, 1852.

price paid by the consumer for any article goes to the producer or importer, and how large a portion is absorbed by the distributor.*"

We have here the real difficulty of British society, and the source to which we are indebted for the suggestion of the extraordinary theory of Mr. Malthus. The system tends unnaturally to increase the proportion of consumers, and to cause the absorption of so large a portion of the product of labor on its passage from the field in which it is produced, to the mouth that needs to eat it, or the back that needs to wear it, that its producer finds it difficult to obtain the means of supporting life. The man who labors in the field upon land yielding thirty or forty bushels to the acre, receives but six shillings, or the price of a single bushel, for his week's work; and yet, the product of his year's labor is probably but little short of a thousand bushels. His share is, therefore, six, eight, or ten, per cent., while ninety, or more, per cent. is absorbed by those who own the machinery with which he works -by those who control its management-by those who direct the government, those who carry arms, those who live in almshouses

and those who, in a thousand other ways, stand between the production of the food and its consumption.

The poor man of the west of Ireland is glad to get five pence for a pair of chickens that will sell in London for as many shillings; and thus does he receive eight per cent. as the price of his labor-the remaining ninety-two per cent. being absorbed by the class of middlemen.† When, however, he desires to invest the

*

*

"I think any one who has had occasion to inquire, in particular cases, what portion of the price paid at a shop for an article really goes to the person who made it, must have been astonished to find how small it is. It is of great importance to consider the cause of this." * 66 It does not arise from the extravagant remuneration of capital. I think it proceeds from two causes: one of them is, the very great, I may say the extravagant, portion of the whole produce of the community which now goes to the mere distributors; the immense amount that is taken up by the different classes of dealers, and especially by retailers. Competition has, no doubt, some tendency to reduce this rate of remuneration; still, I am afraid that, in most cases, and looking at it as a whole, the effect of competition is, as in the case of the fees of professional people, rather to divide the amount among a larger number, and so diminish the share of each, than to lower the scale of what is obtained by the class generally." f If the business

*

*

of distribution, which now employs, taking the different classes of dealers and their families, perhaps more than a million of the inhabitants of this country, could be done by a hundred thousand people, I think the other nine hundred thousand could be dispensed with." -J. S. MILL: Evidence before a Committee of the House of Commons, June 6, 1850.

† See page 332, ante.

proceeds in sugar, he pays five pence for that which had not yielded to its original producer as much cloth as could be purchased with a farthing — and thus is more than nine-tenths of the product of labor absorbed by intermediate men, who live by means of the exercise of their powers of appropriation. The poor Hindoo sells his cotton for three halfpence a pound, of which the government takes one-half, and the money-lender half of the remainder; and when, after the lapse of years, it comes back to him in the form of cloth, he pays for it twelve, fifteen, or twenty pence-being forty or fifty times more than it had yielded him. What goes with all the difference? It is absorbed on the road from the land on which it has been produced to the house, perhaps on that same land, in which reside the people by whom. it is to be worn. The farmer of Iowa sells his corn at ten cents a bushel, but by the time it reaches the consumer in Manchester, it has so much increased in value that it pays for several days of labor. That labor yields hundreds of yards of cotton cloth, but by the time the latter reaches Iowa, it has, in its turn, so much increased in value that a bushel of corn is given in exchange for a single yard — not less than eighty per cent. of the whole having been absorbed in the process of making the exchanges.

The system tends to increase the disproportion between the price of the rude product of the earth and the finished one - to produce cheap raw materials and dear manufactures; and that is the road towards barbarism. It seeks to augment the difficulties lying between the consumer and the producer, while building up the fortunes of those who stand between them; and hence it is that it gave birth to the idea of over-population—an idea inseparably connected with that of the ultimate enslavement of man. *

* "When Mr. McCulloch tells us to look at the success of our large properties and larger farms, let us look at the whole population - let us look at the fact that, at the very moment of his writing, about every tenth person in England was a pauper-let us look at our prisons, our poor-laws, our union workhouses, our poisonings for the sake of burial-fees, our emigration, as if our people were flying like rats, helter-skelter, from a drowning ship. Let us sum up the whole, and then perhaps we should find that our boasted system of social distribution was no more successful than the muster of one regiment, when we should find, on the one hand, order and competence; on the other, rags and tatters, wives abandoned, parents neglected, children left to the hazard of casual charity, and too often a dark shadow of vice and wretchedness, following in the train of our vaunted institutions." Hugh Miller.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

§ 1. IN the natural order of events, the necessity for the services of the trader and transporter tends towards diminution; and with every increase in the power of man to maintain direct commerce with his fellow-man, the circulation of society tends to acceleration enabling each and every one to find a purchaser, on the instant, for his time and talents, and thus to become a competitor for the purchase of those of others. Capital then accumulates rapidly, with constant tendency to further development of the various faculties, and constant increase in the facility of combination, and in the tendency to further progress. Whenever, and wherever, the reverse is seen wherever the necessity for the services of the trader and transporter is an increasing one

the opposite effects are seen the circulation becoming more and more languid—the waste of power increasing—and commerce gradually declining, until at length it ceases to exist.

Stoppage of circulation as fatal to the social as it is to the physical body—is the natural tendency of the British system. Hence it is that we have been called upon to remark the total disappearance of so large a proportion of the negroes imported. into the West India islands; and the almost total waste of power among those who still exist. Hence, too, it is that the marks of approaching dissolution are now so clearly obvious in Ireland and in India. To the same cause was due the growth of pauperism in the days of Mr. Malthus; as well as in those later days when England was inundated with crowds of Irishmen, eager to sell their labor at any price — causing her poorhouses to become so filled as to threaten to swamp the land and its owners by the taxation required for their support.

Such being the facts, the question arose, as to what was the cause to which they were to be attributed; and, most naturally,

the advocates of the system which looked to the cheapening of raw materials, ascribed them all to the scarcity, and consequent high price, of food. The land-owners The land-owners-believing, with Adam Smith, that "if the whole produce of America in grain of all sorts, salt provisions, and fish," were "forced into the market of England," it would be "a great discouragement to agriculture"

had endeavored, as the reader has seen, to shield themselves against the operation of the mercantile system, by the passage of laws preventive of the importation of food except under certain circumstances; and to the existence of those laws was now ascribed a state of things that was only the natural product of the policy whose error had been so fully exposed in the Wealth of Nations.

The people were, however, assured that if they wished to find the cause why two laborers had so long been seeking employment when only one could find it, they must look for it in the laws above referred to; and this assurance came from the selfsame persons to whose opinions expression had been given by Mr. Huskisson, twenty years before, when declaring that "to give capital a fair remuneration, the price of labor must be kept down." Now, however, they professed to move in an opposite direction-seeking to raise wages at the expense of capital; not, however, their own capital. Repeal the corn laws, said they, and there will be two employers seeking one laborer, and the price of labor will rise; and then money will be abundant, while corn will be cheap. The laws were repealed, but the effect has been directly the reverse of what was promised - the circulation of society having diminished when it should have increased. Instead of men having been enabled to come nearer to each other, and more and more to dispense with the services of the trader and transporter, they have been constantly receding from each other— emigration from the British islands having far exceeded any thing that had before been known. Instead of tending to restore society to its natural proportions, the repeal has increased the disproportion that before existed—the rural population having fled from the land, and thus created demand for ships and sailors.* Instead

* "The wheel of improvement' is now seizing another class, the most stationary class in England. A startling emigration movement has sprung up among the smaller English farmers, especially those holding heavy clay