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So much on the institution of property, a subject of which, for the purposes of political economy, it was indispensable to treat, but on which we could not usefully confine ourselves to economical considerations. We have now to inquire on what principles and with what results the distribution of the produce of land and labor is effected, under the relations which this institution creates among the different members of the community.

CHAPTER III.

OF THE CLASSES AMONG WHOM THE PRODUCE IS DISTRIBUTED.

1. PRIVATE property being assumed as a fact, we have next to enumerate the different classes of persons to whom it gives rise; whose concurrence, or at least whose permission, is necessary to production, and who are, therefore, able to stipulate for a share of the produce. We have to inquire, according to what laws the produce distributes itself among these classes, by the spontaneous action of the interests of those concerned; after which, a further question will be, what effects are or might be produced by laws, institutions, and measures of government, in superseding or modifying that spontaneous distribution.

The three requisites of production, as has been so often repeated, are labor, capital, and land; understanding by capital, the means and appliances which are the accumulated results of previous labor, and by land, the materials and instruments supplied by nature, whether contained in the interior of the earth, or constituting its surface. Since each of these elements of production may be separately

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appropriated, the industrial community may be considered as divided into land-owners, capitalists, and productive laborers. Each of these classes, as such, obtains a share of the produce; no other person or class obtains anything, except by concession from them. The remainder of the community is, in fact, supported at their expense, giving, if any equivalent, one consisting of unproductive services. These three classes, therefore, are considered in political economy as making up the whole community.

§ 2. But although these three sometimes exist as separate classes, dividing the produce among them, they do not necessarily or always so exist. The fact is so much otherwise, that there are only one or two communities in which the complete separation of these classes is the general rule. England and Scotland, with parts of Belgium and Holland, are almost the only countries in the world, where the land, capital, and labor employed in agriculture, are generally the property of separate owners. The ordinary case is, that the same person owns either two of these requisites, or all three.

The case in which the same person owns all three, embraces the two extremes of society, in respect to the independence and dignity of the laboring class. First, when the laborer himself is the proprietor. This is the commonest case in the Northern States of the American Union; one of the commonest in France, Switzerland, the three Scandinavian kingdoms, and parts of Germany;* and

"The Norwegian return" (say the Commissioners of Poor Law Inquiry, to whom information was furnished from nearly every country in Europe and America by the ambassadors and consuls there) "states that at the last census in 1825, out of a population of 1,051,318 persons, there were 59,464 freeholders. As by 59,464 freeholders must be meant 59,464 heads of families, or about 300,000 individuals, the freeholders must form more than a fourth of the whole population. Mr. Macgregor states that in Denmark (by which Zealand and the adjoining islands are probably meant)

a common case in parts of Italy and in Belgium. In all these countries there are, no doubt, large landed properties, and a still greater number which, without being large, require the occasional or constant aid of hired laborers. Much, however, of the land is owned in portions too small to require any other labor than that of the peasant and his family, or fully to occupy even that. The capital employed is not always that of the peasant proprietor, many of these small properties being mortgaged to obtain the means of cultivating; but the capital is invested at his risk, and though he pays interest for it, it gives to no one any right of interference, except perhaps eventually to take possession of the land, if the interest ceases to be paid.

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The other case in which the land, labor, and capital, belong to the same person, is the case of slave countries, in which the laborers themselves are owned by the land-ownOur West India colonies before emancipation, and the sugar colonies of the nations by whom a similar act of justice is still unperformed, are examples of large establishments for agricultural and manufacturing labor (the production of sugar and rum is a combination of both) in which the land, the factories, (if they may be so called,) the

out of a population of 926,110, the number of landed proprietors and farmers is 415,110, or nearly one half. In Sleswick Holstein, out of a population of 604,085, it is 196,017, or about one third. The proportion of proprietors and farmers to the whole population is not given in Sweden; but the Stockholm return estimates the average quantity of land annexed to a laborer's habitation at from one to five acres; and though the Gottenburg return gives a lower estimate, it adds, that the peasants possess much of the land. In Wurtemberg we are told that more than two thirds of the laboring population are the proprietors of their own habitations, and that almost all own at least a garden of from three quarters of an acre to an acre and a half." In some of these statements, proprietors and farmers are not discriminated; but "all the returns concur in stating the number of daylaborers to be very small.”—(Preface to Foreign Communications, p. xxxviii.) As the general status of the laboring people, the condition of a workman for hire is almost peculiar to Great Britain.

machinery, and the degraded laborers, are all the property of a capitalist. In this case, as well as in its extreme opposite, the case of the peasant proprietor, there is no division of the produce.

§ 3. When the three requisites are not all owned by the same person, it often happens that two of them are so. Sometimes the same person owns the capital and the land, but not the labor. The landlord makes his engagement directly with the laborer, and supplies the stock necessary for cultivation. This system is the usual one in those parts of Continental Europe, in which the laborers are neither serfs on the one hand, nor proprietors on the other. It was the common system in France before the Revolution, and is still much practiced in some parts of that country, when the land is not the property of the cultivator. It prevails generally in the level districts of Italy, except those purely pastoral, such as the Maremma of Tuscany and the Campagna of Rome. On this system the division of the produce is between two classes, the land-owner and the laborer.

In other cases again, the laborer does not own the land, but owns the little stock employed upon it, the landlord not being in the habit of supplying any. This system generally prevails in Ireland. It is nearly universal in India, and in most countries of the East; whether the government retains, as it generally does, the ownership of the soil, or allows portions to become, either absolutely or in a qualified sense, the property of individuals. In India, however, things are so far better than in Ireland, that the owner of land is in the habit of making advances to the cultivators, if they cannot cultivate without them. For these advances the native landed proprietor usually demands high interest; but the principal land-owner, the government, makes them gratuitously, recovering the advance

after the harvest, together with the rent. The produce is here divided as before, between the same two classes, the land-owner and the laborer.

These are the principal variations in the classification of those among whom the produce of agricultural labor is distributed. In the case of the manufacturing industry, there never are more than two classes, the laborers and the capitalists. The original artisans in all countries were either slaves, or the women of the family. In the manufacturing establishments of the ancients, whether on a large or on a small scale, the laborers were the property of the capitalist. If any manual labor was thought compatible with the dignity of a freeman, it was only agricultural labor. The converse system, in which the capital was owned by the laborer, was coeval with free labor, and under it the first great advances of manufacturing industry were achieved. The artisan owned the loom or the few tools he used, and worked on his own account; or at least ended by doing so, though he usually worked for another, first as apprentice and next as journeyman, for a certain number of years before he could be admitted a master. But the status of a permanent journeyman, all his life a hired laborer and nothing more, had no place in the crafts and guilds of the middle ages. In country villages, where a carpenter or a blacksmith cannot live and support hired laborers on the returns of his business, he is even now his own workman; and 'shopkeepers in similar circumstances are their own shopmen, or shopwomen. But wherever the extent of the market admits of it, the distinction is now fully established between the class of the capitalists, or employers of labor, and the class of laborers; the capitalists, in general, contributing no other labor than that of direction and superintendence.

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