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covered, and male available by tools and machinery, makes less labour suffice to reproduce them. It renders iabour more effective, gives it greater command over matter, greater power, more value. Since "value" is a relative term, it may as well be applied to labour, as to that for which labour is exchanged; and in so doing we come back to the original signification of the word, in its Latin primitive, valeo, and the English derivative, avail. The constantly diminishing money price of all manufactured commodities sustains the proposition; and it will be shown in the sequel that the decline of cost, measured by labour, is even greater than that denoted in coin.

The wonders of modern machinery are rehearsed so often, as to require no more than an allusion. It is impossible to estimate the extent to which it has added to animal power. Mr. Mayhew* states that the total estimated machine-power in Great Britain is that of 600,000,000 human beings, and adds that this has all been produced within the last century. This remark only serves to indicate what he had in view in using the term, "machine-power"; for machinery, in the most general sense, has been increasing in the British Islands, as elsewhere, ever since men found that fingers and nails were insufficient implements of work.

The entire population of the United Kingdom, by the census of 1851, was 27,309,346. The machine-power, according to this estimate, equally distributed among them, would give to each man, woman, and child the equivalent of the labour of twenty serfs, and would still leave a surplus, equivalent to more than twice the present population, to furnish the machines with the material necessary for developing their power, and to construct and keep them in going order. But a small fraction of the population, in point of fact, make, keep up, and feed the machines; and the result is, that for every inhabitant of the British Isles there are forces that toil and spin, without wages, and do the work of twenty-two slaves, without even the slaves' pittance of food. The entire products of this labour, mostly in the shape in which they come out of the machines, but a part transmuted by barter into other commodities, of foreign growth or make, are distributed among and enjoyed by the British people. The whole mass is bought by the labour of the kingdom. Such

* London Labour and the London Poor, page 849.

grand results are often spoken of as the Economy of Power; and we speak of machinery as labour-saving. In the original sense of economy, the expression is just; in that which it ordinarily bears, an idea is conveyed as nearly true, and no more so, than the song which ascribes happiness to the soldier

"Who lives on his pay,

And spends half a crown out of sixpence a day."

It is the appropriation of power existing in Nature, and only waiting for human intellect to discover its existence and laws, and to devise the means, in accordance with those laws, of converting it to use.

Engineers inform us that there is virtue in a bushel of coals, properly consumed, to raise seventy millions of pounds a foot high. Such is said to be actually the average effect of an engine working at Hueltown, in Cornwall. This virtue is in the coal at the bottom of a mine, and was in it a thousand years ago, as well as when it lies in the furnace below a steam-boiler. It had been seen for ages exerting its power in boiling water and generating steam, without serving any greater purpose than to cook a dinner. Since the steam-engine was devised, we look at it in the concrete, and attribute power to the machine, whereas the machine is passive, the mere theatre and vehicle of power existing from the foundation of the world. Its contrivance is simply a condition of the action of certain forces in a certain direction, which from everlasting have been passing from equilibrium to motion, and from motion back to a new equilibrium, acting in a certain direction for a certain time, and with a measured intensity. They lay dormant in the one condition, they ran to waste in the other, until man, by observation and thought, found how to awaken them from rest-by assaulting their equilibrium with some previously-discovered force—and to guide their motion into the direction that suits his purposes.

Now, it is obvious that the forces of Nature are inexhaustible, for no one of them is ever destroyed. Motion never stops in one direction, without creating an equal quantity in the other, or in several others, whose resultant is the opposite of its own. All that muscular effort can do is to impart motion; and this it can never do

but at the expense of a waste of fibre, that must be replenished by

food and by rest.

Man's office in the world is that of engineer; all his real power is mental. It is a waste of power for him to take that upon himself, which can be better and more cheaply accomplished by brute matter. He ceases to do so just in proportion as, by studying the laws which his Creator has imposed upon the material world, he rises to his Creator's design and becomes its master.*

It

It is manifest, too, that there is a law of constant progress in man's appropriation of natural forces, independent of the discovery of any new motive powers. Every machine facilitates the construction of new ones, for utilizing those already known. cheapens them; it enables us to undertake those previously impossible, (without regard to cost,) for want of the necessary quantity and duration of force; and it liberates men from physical toil, to study and experiment. Each new truth discovered is the key to a whole magazine, and each new art the parent of a thousand. The motive

"Had God intended that the work of the world should be done by human bones and sinews, he would have given us an arm as solid and strong as the shaft of a steam-engine; and enabled us to stand, day and night, and turn the crank of a steamship while sailing to Liverpool or Calcutta. Had God designed the human muscles to do the work of the world, then, instead of the ingredients of gun-powder or gun-cotton, and the expansive force of heat, he would have given us hands which could take a granite quarry and break its solid acres into suitable and symmetrical blocks, as easily as we now open an orange. Had he intended us for bearing burdens he would have given us Atlantean shoulders, by which we could carry the vast freights of railroad cars and steamships, as a porter carries his pack. He would have given us lungs by which we could blow fleets before us, and wings to sweep over the ocean wastes, But, instead of iron arms and Atlantean shoulders, and the lungs of Boreas, he has given us a mind, a soul, a capacity of acquiring knowledge, and thus of appropriating all these energies of Nature to our own use. Instead of telescopic and microscopic eyes, he has given us power to invent the telescope and microscope. Instead of ten thousand fingers, he has given us genius inventive of the power-loom and printing-press. Without a cultivated intellect, man is among the weakest of all the dynamical forces of Nature: with a cultivated intellect, he commands them all."-Horace Mann.

forces of Nature first brought into use were the most gross, material, and, therefore, obvious. The weight of running water, the wind that rustled every tree-these forced themselves upon the observation of the earliest men. Steam, caloric, atmospheric pressure, are more subtle and more useful, because they can be developed on the spot where their action is required. The machinery for their use can be carried where it is wanted. can drive itself on its way. Electricity surpasses them in subtlety and power, in rapidity and intensity of action. Invisible, imponderable, of immeasurable velocity, it seems like the link between matter and spirit. So volatile is it, that it has thus far eluded the endeavours of science to make it do the work of which it is undoubtingly believed capable. It separates metals from their ores, it gilds them, it runs of errands on the telegraph wires, and finds its way back through land and water, annihilating space. But of an agent that can work such marvels what are we not authorized to expect? and once having fully mastered it, what yet more tricksy and potent spirit may we not evoke by its aid?

It is admitted by all the Economists that man begins with the worst machinery, and proceeds to the better with the growth of population, and that there is a constant tendency to its improvement in the progress of society.

A plain corollary from the proposition that the value of commodities tends to fall and that of labour to rise, with the progress of society, is that there is increased facility for accumulation. Things newly made being got by less labour, the stock of pre-existing things of the same kind, or any share of them, will be had in exchange for proportionately less of labour. The first men, without tools, found it all they could do to maintain life from day to day, without having any surplus to lay by. The moment they began to construct tools, they began to form some stock of food, clothing, and materialssome share of the products of their labour could be saved. The sum of these, belonging to an individual, we call CAPITAL; and the sum of individual capitals, the capital of the community. It is accumulated labour, the unconsumed products of man and of the natural agents he has brought to his aid. In regard to Value, some portions of it have deteriorated more and some less; as the repro

duction of some has been facilitated in a greater degree than that of others. The gratuity of Nature, infused by means of improved tools, makes up a greater share in the utility of some things than of others, in any given stage of social progress. The substitution of a bronze axe for a stone one, reduces the value of canoes and houses at once and very materially, while exercising a smaller and indirect influence upon that of furs and clothing. But that share in each which has become gratuitous is common property, or, rather, has ceased to be property, and it is at the command of any one who will offer as much labour as still remains requisite for its production. The capital of the community may be likened to a warehouse of liquors, in which every cask has been reduced by water, but in varying proportions. Any one could have a cask, by paying for the spirits it contained. To make the parallel complete, the utility of the liquor must remain undiminished by its dilution. To this point Father Matthew could testify without hesitation.

A community grows by births. As every child must be fed and clothed for several years, without producing anything to contribute to the stock of food and clothing, the increase of capital must necessarily precede that of population. When the youth has attained his growth, and is fit for labour, he is destitute of tools to work with, and of materials to work upon, as well as of food to supply the waste of his muscles, whilst he is producing food, or something with which to pay for food. He is compelled to apply to somebody who has a stock of these essentials, and make a bargain, which shall promote the interests of both and set him at work. They make an association, go into a partnership, and share the benefits. It is none the less a partnership because one or the other usually assumes all the risks. The object is to change the form of the commodities contributed by the capitalist, and increase their value by combining them with a new infusion of labour. The food is to serve as fuel to maintain the animal heat of the labourer, and to be transformed into muscular fibre; for, with every manifestation of mechanical force, (employed always to produce motion,) a part of the muscular substance loses its vitality, separates from the living part, and is thrown off as waste, to be conducted out of the system. The mechanical force and the waste of fibre are mutually proportional, and the

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