1

hension of change, the constraints of ignorance and superstition, the attachments of home, country and friends, the helplessness of men in new occupations, the jealousy of imported labor,1 and perhaps more than all else, the inhibition of migration, in the case of perhaps the vast majority of the race, by the want of the supplies of food and money necessary to their removal and immediate subsistence.

Does the comparison seem extravagant? Look at China. There is found a population of three or four hundred millions, of whose mode of life and means of subsistence travellers give accounts that are simply shocking; reduced to the vilest food, the vilest clothing, the vilest shelter, or none at all of the latter two classes of assumed necessaries. Opposite their own land lies a region of great fertility, containing vast expanses with an average population of from one to four, six or ten to the square mile. Why has not this mountain run down into this valley: Why have not untold millions poured upon our shores to relieve the fearful internal pressure of the Celestial Empire? The reasons are too familiar to need to be stated. The fact is what we wish to use here. What a commentary on the political economy which has been reared on the assumption of the absolute mobility of labor! Three or four hundred million Chinese suffering the extremity of misery at home; 63,199 Chinese in the United States in 1870, and that, after the energetic recruiting of Mr. Koopmans

ence of this cause very powerful in preventing emigration from the northern and western parts of Scotland, including the Isles, where the Gaelic is still spoken. [Report p. 20. cf. 4th Report (1870) on the em ployment of women and children in Agr., p. 117.]

1 Miss Martineau notes the jealousy of "imported labor" (from Ireland) during the Napoleonic wars. [Hist England I. 332.] Even so late as 1846, the committee on Railway Laborers reported that not only did the Irish and the Scotch not work on the same gangs with the English navvies, but they were kept apart from each other. [Report p. 5.] There was especial jealousy manifested toward the Irish importations. [Ibid. p. 52, 77.]

choop and his emigrant-runners! The original structure of that mountain, at least, has withstood the effects of gravitation with not a little success. Popocatapet] has lost a larger proportion of his bulk, in the last one hundred years.

But we may turn to a people less strangely constituted and less strongly conserved than the Chinese; a' people longer in contact with the western world, and in' blood, speech and faith far less removed from the nations of Europe. The inhabitants of British India have been moved even less than those of China, by the pressure of population, to seek relief in more sparsely settled portions of the globe. With the wages of manual labor at 3d. a day in good times, and with a scarcity amounting to famine on an average once in four or five years, the East Indians respect the "original structure ” original structure" by which they were placed on the great Asiatic peninsula, and meet their fate where they were born, without thought of change. Wages may rise to any height in America and Australía, but the people of India are even unconscious of any impulse to emigration; and with oriental stoicism and fatalism abide in their lot, like the everlasting hills that guard their northern frontier.

Surely we need not seek more such illustrations to justify Dr. Whewell's comparison. In these two instances, we have seen nearly half the human kind bound in fetters of race and speech and religion and caste, of tradition and habit and ignorance of the world, of poverty and ineptitude and inertia which practically exclude them from the competitions of the world's industry.

In turning now to consider this matter of the power of labor to protect itself, by migration or otherwise, among peoples of a higher industrial civilization, we need to proceed somewhat more analytically. Let us discuss this question under two titles:

1st. The migration of laborers from place to place.

2d. Change of occupation.

1st. The migration of labor. Why should laborers need to migrate at all? Why not stay and work in their lot? Movement involves the expenditure of force: why should this waste be incurred?

It is the unequal development of population and industry that marks the beginning of most of the distresses of labor. Industry and population must, it is evident, fit together throughout the entire extent of both, or loss of power and of production will follow, on the one hand; destitution, squalor, and perhaps starvation, on the other. Labor will suffer both from not being where it is wanted, and from being where it is not wanted. Now in fact, there is ever found a liability in population and industry to grow apart, even though all conditions appear to remain unchanged; while no new cause can begin to operate in the social or political life of a community, which may not very differently affect them. Wherever divergence appears, there is distress. At times the effect is almost instantaneous, when sudden calamities overtake the peculiar industries of states and cities. At times the effect is wrought as gradually as the ruin of a wall into whose seams some slow-maturing vine has thrust its fibres, never to be withdrawn till stone is thrown from stone. Numberless illustrations might be drawn from history and from the statistics of production, of this tendency to divergence between population and industry;1

'The knitting frame caused stocking-making in England to be transferred from its former seat at Norwich. The woolen manufacture has, within living memory, migrated from Essex and Suffolk to the North. Between 1857 and 1861 occurred a falling off in the muslin embroidery manufacture of Ireland and Scotland, which involved a reduction in the number of persons employed of 146,000 (Statistical Journal XXIV. 516.7). About 1846, the English power-loom caused the absolute destruction of an industry which supported 250, 000 workmen in Flanders. (Ibid, XXVIII, 15.) Seemingly petty changes in fashion will often produce wide-reaching effects in produc

and it will be not less interesting to note the incessant small vibrations of industry which require an almost daily readjustment of population, than to mark the course of those great cyclical changes which transfer the seat of commercial empire, and leave cities and countries forsaken and almost forgotten behind.

1

Such being the tendency of industry to occasional or periodic movement, the mobility of labor 1 becomes, under the theory of competition, an essential condition of its

næum,

tion. Mr. Malthus states that the substitution of shoe ribbons for buckles was a severe blow, long felt by Sheffield and Birmingham. "On a smaller scale and with less notoriety," says a writer in the Athe"the dismal tragedy of the cotton famine, is enacted every year in one or another of our great cities. Every time fashion selects a new material for dress, or a new invention supercedes old contrivances, workmen are thrown out of employment." Prof. Rogers gives the following piquant illustration of the effect of changes in the mere fashion of dress. "A year or two ago every woman who made any pretension to dress according to the custom of the day, surrounded herself with a congeries of parallel steel hoops. It is said that fifty tons of crinoline wire were turned out weekly from the factories chiefly in Yorkshire. The fashion has passed away and the demand for the material and the labor has ceased. Thousands of persons once engaged in this production are now reduced to enforced idleness, or constrained to betake themselves to some other occupation. Again, a few years ago, women dressed themselves plentifully with ribbons. This fashion has also changed; where a hundred yards were sold, one is hardly purchased now, and the looms of a multitude of silk operatives are idle. To quote another instance. At the present time women are pleased to walk about bareheaded. The straw-plaiters of Bedfordshire, Bucks, Hertfordshire and Essex are reduced suddenly from a condition of tolerable prosperity to one of great poverty and distress." (Pol. Econ., 1869, pp. 77-8.)

1 But it may be said, if industry abandons population, and wages become reduced, this of itself constitutes a reason for industry to return, as it will have the advantage of cheap labor. This is much as if one should say the approach of cold induces shivering: shivering is of the nature of exercise: exercise induces warmth; therefore a man may not freeze on a Minnesota prairie in an ice-storm, with the thermometer at 40 degrees below zero; and indeed the colder it gets, the more he will shake, and consequently, the warmer he will be.

well-being. It is of course not necessary that the whole body of laborers should be organized like a Tartar tribe, packed and saddled ready for flight. The great majority of laborers will never be required to move at all; but as it will always prove that of those who could go, many will not, and of those who would go, many cannot, we may fairly say that the laboring population is never likely to be more completely mobilized by intelligence and the possession of property, than is desirable in order to render it certain that just the amount of movement from industry to industry, and from place to place, which may be required, will be effected with the minimum of loss and delay. Such being the necessity for the mobility of labor to enable it to follow the movements, accountable and unaccountable, of industry, it is not needful to go into the history of emigration to show that labor has scarcely, in any country, possessed the readiness and activity which answered the requirement. The United States1 perhaps afford the highest example of a body of labor prepared and equipped to seek its best market, wherever that market may be; and Americans, familiar with the prompt and easy flow of population here, are liable to under-estimate the difficulties which beset the like movements in almost any other country of the world. In part, the activity of labor in the United States is due to the generosity of nature with us, which allows so large a margin of expenditure. In still greater measure, it is due to the wide diffusion of information through the press and the post

1 In 1870, 7,500,000 persons of the native population were living in states other than those of their birth.-See Census Reports. The full-blooded American," says Chevalier, "has this in common with the Tartar, that he is encamped, not established, on the soil he treads upon."-Travels in the United States, p. 129.-In Russia, too, the freedom of migration from place to place, has frequently been noted. Sir Arch. Alison attributes this to the Tartar blood.-History of Europe xv, 164.-See Sir A. Buchanan's account of the industrial nomads of Russia.--Reports, H. B. M. Consuls, etc. 1870, p. 301.