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difference between helping a laborer by means of his own industry, and subsidizing him in a mode which tends to make him careless and idle. On both these points, allotments have an unquestionable advantage over parish allowances. But in their effect on wages and population, I see no reason why the two plans should substantially differ. All subsidies in aid of wages enable the laborer to do with less remuneration, and, therefore, ultimately bring down the price of labor by the full amount, unless a change be wrought in the ideas and requirements of the laborer; an alteration in the relative value which he sets upon the gratification of his instincts, and upon the increase of his comforts and the comforts of those connected with him. That any such change in his character should be produced by the allotment system, appears to me a thing not to be expected. The possession of land, we are sometimes told, renders the laborer provident. Property in land does so; or what is equivalent to property, occupation on fixed terms and on a permanent tenure. But mere hiring from year to year was never found to have any such effect. Does possession of land render the Irishman provident? Testimonies, it is true, abound, and I do not seek to discredit them, of the beneficial change produced in the conduct and condition of laborers, by receiving allotments. Such an effect is to be expected while those who hold them are a small number; a privileged class, having a status above the common level, which they are unwilling to lose. They are also, no doubt, almost always, originally a select class, composed of the most favorable specimens of the laboring people; which, however, is attended with the inconvenience that the persons to whom the system facilitates marrying and having a family, are precisely those who would otherwise be the most likely to practice prudential restraint. As affecting the general condition of the laboring class, the scheme, as it seems to me, must be either nugatory or

mischievous. If only a few laborers have allotments, they are naturally those who could do best without them, and no good is done to the class; while, if the system were general, and every or almost every laborer had an allotment, I believe the effect would be much the same as when every or almost every laborer had an allowance in aid of wages. I think there can be no doubt that if, at the end of the last century, the Allotment instead of the Allowance system had been generally adopted in England, it would equally have broken down the practical restraints on population which at that time did really exist; population would have started forward exactly as in fact it did; and in twenty years, wages plus the allotment would have been, as wages plus the allowance actually were, no more than equal to the former wages without any allotment. The only difference in favor of allotments would have been, that they make the people grow their own poor rates.

I am, at the same time, quite ready to allow, that in some circumstances, the possession of land at a fair rent, even without ownership, by the generality of laborers for hire, operates as a cause not of low, but of high wages. This, however, is when their land renders them, to the extent of actual necessaries, independent of the market for labor. There is the greatest difference between the position of people who live by wages, with land as an extra resource, and of people who can, in case of necessity, subsist entirely on their land, and only work for hire to add to their comforts. Wages are likely to be high where none are compelled by necessity to sell their labor. "People who have at home some kind of property to apply their labor to, will not sell their labor for wages that do not afford them a better diet than potatoes and maize, although in saving for themselves, they may live very much on potatoes and maize. We are often surprised in travelling on the continent, to hear of a rate of day's wages very high, consider

ing the abundance and cheapness of food. It is want of the necessity or inclination to take work, that makes day labor scarce, and, considering the price of provisions, dear, in many parts of the continent, where property in land is widely diffused among the people." Thus says Mr. Laing,*

and his remark is certainly just. There are parts of the continent where, even of the inhabitants of the towns, scarcely one seems to be exclusively dependent on his ostensible employment; and nothing else can explain the high price they put on their services, and the carelessness they evince as to whether they are employed at all. But the effect would be far different if their land or other resources gave them only a fraction of a subsistence, leaving them under an undiminished necessity of selling their labor for wages in an overstocked market. Their

land would then merely enable them to exist on smaller wages, and to carry their multiplication so much the further before reaching the point below which they either could not, or would not, descend.

To the view I have taken of the effect of allotments, I see no argument which can be opposed, but that employed by Mr. Thornton,† with whom on this subject I am at issue. His defence of allotments is grounded on the general principle, that it is only the very poor who multiply without regard to consequences, and that if the condition of the existing generation could be greatly improved, which he thinks might be done by the allotment system, their succes→ sors would grow up with an increased standard of requirements, and would not have families until they could keep them in as much comfort as they had been brought up themselves. I agree in as much of this argument as goes to prove that a sudden and very great improvement in the

*Notes of a Traveller, p. 456.

† See Thornton on Over-Population, ch. viii.

condition of the poor, has always, through its effect on their habits of life, a chance of becoming permanent. What happened at the time of the French Revolution is an example. But I cannot think that the addition of a quarter or even half an acre to every laborer's cottage, and that too at a rack rent, would (after the fall of wages which would be necessary to absorb the already existing mass of pauper labor) make so great a difference in the comforts of the family for a generation to come, as to raise up from childhood a laboring population with a really higher permanent standard of requirements and habits. So small a portion of land could only be made a permanent benefit, by holding out encouragements to acquire, by industry and saving, the means of buying it outright; a permission, which, if extensively made use of, would be a kind of education in forethought and frugality to the entire class, the effects of which might not cease with the occasion. The benefit would however arise not from what was given, but from what they were stimulated to acquire.

No remedies for low wages have the smallest chance of being efficacious, which do not operate on and through the minds and habits of the people. Whilst these are unaffected, any contrivance, even if successful, for temporarily improving the condition of the very poor, would but let slip the reins by which population was previously curbed; and could only, therefore, continue to produce its effect, if, by the whip and spur of taxation, capital were compelled to follow at an equally accelerated pace. But this process could not possibly continue for long together, and whenever it stopped it would leave the country with an increased number of the poorest class, and a diminished proportion of all except the poorest, or, if it continued long enough, with none at all. For "to this complexion must come at last" all social arrangements, which remove the natural checks to population without substituting any others.

445

CHAPTER XIII.

THE REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES FURTHER CONSIDERED.

§ 1. By what means, then, is poverty to be contended against? How is the evil of low wages to be remedied? If the expedients usually recommended for the purpose are not adapted to it, can no others be thought of? Is the problem incapable of solution? Can political economy do nothing, but only object to everything, and demonstrate that nothing can be done?

If this were so, political economy might have a needful, but would have a melancholy and a thankless task. If the bulk of the human race are always to remain as at present, slaves to toil in which they have no interest, and therefore feel no interest-drudging from early morning till late at night for bare necessaries, and with all the intellectual and moral deficiencies which that implies-without resources either in mind or feelings-untaught, for they cannot be better taught than fed; selfish, for all their thoughts are required for themselves; without interests or sentiments as citizens and members of society, and with a sense of injustice rankling in their minds, equally for what they have not, and for what others have; I know not what there is which should make a person with any capacity of reason, concern himself about the destinies of the human race. There would be no wisdom for any one but in extracting from life, with epicurean indifference, as much personal satisfaction for himself and those with whom he sympathizes, as it can yield without injury to any one, and letting the unmeaning bustle of so-called civilized existence roll by unheeded. But there is no ground for such a view of human affairs. Poverty, like most social evils, exists because men follow 38

VOL. I.

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