Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

once make itself apparent. The revolution from hand labour to machine labour does itself demand the use of men and money. While our great railway system was being made everybody had work and everybody was well paid. The railways were all made and trade dropped into sullen dullness. Then came the repeal of the Corn Laws and the splendid effect of removing monstrous and artificial barriers. But still the same causes were at work and trade began to sink. The American War revived her. The cotton operatives felt for a while the effect of losing the sources of their supply, but trade in general assumed after a little time the greatest activity to fill up the sad and serious gap caused by a fierce and destructive war. The same effect sprang more apparently from the bloody and meaningless strife of Germany and France. Men still sigh when they think of the good years that followed 1870. Last in the order of trade revivals came one which was powerful, but only partial, caused by the spendid discoveries in the art of making steel, which completely revolutionised the shipping trade of the country.

All this means that the ordinary trade of the country, immense as it is, does not supply the ordinary wants of the country. Before our enormous natural produce and vast imports can be properly divided among the population we need external wars or internal economic revolutions. While we are setting our house in order we can feed our workers, but after it is set in order we can only feed them by setting them to do our neighbours' work, while our neighbours are pursuing the fascinating amusement of cutting one another's throats. The position is very startling. It seems that our bad trade is simply the natural state of our society as at present constituted, and that good trade depends on accidents which may, or may not, occur. We are not likely to have another speedy revolution in trade. There is one limit to science, and that limit is the power of science to pay its way. Cheapness bars progress. The electric light does not turn out gas, because gas is cheaper. Many scientific improvements are at present being made. They do not cause much work to be expended in perfecting them, but when they are perfected they will turn many men out of employment. Everybody is thinking just now how to economise fuel, and if they can do with less coal they can do with fewer miners. We must not depend upon the unnatural circumstances, we must try to adopt the natural circumstances. We must not wait for a flood to come and float our boat, we must cut a way for it to the sea,

To me it seems that the Knights of Labour are upon the right road. If two men are doing the work of three they must divide their working hours with the third. Suppose that each of the two works ten and a half hours every day, then the two together accomplish twenty-one hours' work. But twenty-one hours' work divided among three men is seven hours. Thus, where before a workman would have worked for ten and a half hours each man should only work seven, or let us say eight, hours. Machinery is doing every day more work with fewer men, and if some arrangement like this be not made it is quite within scientific probabilities that some day there will be employment for only one workman out of ten, and the other nine will be left to starve. Already, it is said— and there is no reason to doubt the statisticsthat large farming and machine farming in America enables four hundred men to do in the same time the work of five thousand small French farmers, and to raise the same amount of produce. Now, that simply means the displacement of four thousand six hundred men, and since each man employs another man in the cities to furnish him with clothes and farm instruments, this "improvement"-which is really an improvement in the abstract-in practice is simply, under our present system, the displacement of nine thousand two hundred workers, or, with their families, about thirty thousand human souls from the position where they could earn a livelihood. It is to turn them out of the charmed circle of machinery-holders and landholders to starve in whatever way they find most convenient. In order that all workmen may have work, just as much as the powers of machinery grow greater so must the hours of work be lessened. There must be a definite proportion kept between the two, and exactly as the one increases must the other decrease; for in this way alone can all workmen have work.

But if we have short hours will we not also

have short pay? I say, no. And here comes in for proof that idea which Henry George makes so clear, but which nobody really disputes. We are all agriculturists. You, making knives in Birmingham or weaving cloth in Manchester, are as really tilling the ground and reaping the harvests as if you used plough and spade. We find that we get most out of the ground when one man digs and another man supplies him with instruments of agriculture. The man who digs is like his own spade. The iron flat of the spade goes into the earth, the stock pushes down that iron flat, and the handle is used to more conveniently press the stock. So our whole social system is one great spade

2

for getting as much as possible out of the earth. The agricultural class is the iron close to the earth; the artisan class is the stock giving powerful effect to the iron, and the convenient handle is capital. Now, all invention has simply been to make this spade a better spade. And it is so. The earth is yielding to us such harvests as makes our statistics sound like a fairy tale. Yet many are starving, or are not far from starvation. How is this? It is a simple problem. If there are a hundred pounds to divide between John and James, and John gets a hundred pounds, how much does James get ? The answer is that James is a fool. £1,200,000,000 represent, at the lowest, the annual earnings of this country. Of that enormous sum £700,000,000 go to the classes, and £500,000,000 go to the masses. The cases should be, to say the very least, reversed. The seven hundred millions should go to the masses and the five hundred millions to the classes. Given that, and the working-men of this country, down to the very poorest workman that there is, would have enough and to spare. The problem really is to give everyone a fair share in doing the work of the earth and a fair share in the produce of that work. We are not equality-men; we are not Socialists. We have no childlike faith in human nature. We believe that different talents merit different re wards, that the claims of capital are as just as they are great; and we believe that selfishness must be controlled but cannot be suppressed. Thus we look for a practical scheme that is to say, a scheme that appeals to our reason, which, if adopted by legislation, can be easily set in motion and easily conducted. Such a scheme is the land scheme.

What LAND RESTORATION means is, that we are to take about two hundred millions of money from those who do not earn it and give it to those who do. That £1,200,000,000 is altogether earned by the working men of this country. It simply represents the vast heap of things that during the year they have dug from the earth, or manufactured from the produce dug from the earth. If they pay five hundred millions for the use of capital they pay through the nosc. But that they should pay besides that two hundred millions for land is the height and the depth, the length and the breadth of nonsense. At present, directly or indirectly, they pay all the taxes of the country, which, taking the local taxes with the Imperial taxes, amount at present to about £160,000,000. What they do not pay directly or in their drink, they pay in lessened wages. Enormous taxes press upon the mercantile classes. And

?

these, having to bear the burden that should be borne by the landed classes, must press down the wages of the workmen. Why at present can the workmen not press up their wages Because their employers are themselves so handicapped by bearing the burdens that should be borne by others, that they cannot give a penny more. Look for instance at our mine owners. Take off from them the disgraceful burden of royalties, and at once the wages of the miners would leap up to something like a decent compensation for their toil and danger to life and limb. So it is with every trade in the country. Remove from it the burden of taxation, and not only will wages rise, but the enfranchised trade will be able to undertake and to execute a far greater amount of work. The income of a duke is so much economic waste, so much substance simply flung to the dogs. If that income paid, as it should pay, the taxes and wages of a hundred thousand working men, these men would in spending their income make trade for one another. The alteration would bring about £20 a year into every working home, and that twenty pounds would all be spent in a way that would immensely increase our trade.

It is not the least bit of a paradox to say that short hours and big wages are the only cure for Dull Trade; short hours, because in this way only is overcome the tendency of machinery to shove men out of employment; big wages, because when workmen have big wages mutual demand creates mutual supply, and supply is trade.

All that we have said amounts to this: At present there is plenty of trade doing, but the fruit of it is confined to a few. Hence this trade is the joint effort of all society to make the earth yield its utmost. It does yield enormously, and it could very easily be made to yield as much again as it now yields. What we must then seek is to cure the rotten system of distribution, by which, no matter how great the harvests of the earth, a large and growing proportion of the earth's inhabitants are condemned to starvation. This we propose to do by no angry and revolutionary means, but by business methods adapted to a business and matter-of-fact design. We propose, in the first place, to give the great mass of workmen in the country the benefit of that enormous sum, amounting to about one-third of their present income, of which they are shamefully and tyrannically plundered. And we propose, in order that all may share in the benefit, that the working hours of the country be strictly limited by the country's Parliament.

These are no wild dreams, no distempered

[blocks in formation]

And what is true of England is true of nearly every other European State. Everywhere the subterranean giants are incessantly at work. Take Germany, the country of "the man of blood and iron," the classic land of "the slappers and the slapped." There, an absolute monarchy striving to revive the condition of the Middle Ages, is face to face with Universal Suffrage and Socialism. Here, party warfare is merely a mimic combat. It is impossible to distinguish the kites from the crows. Lord Hartington is as good a Liberal as a Howell or a Broadhurst. But in Germany it is quite otherwise. There the fight is à outrance-a war of extermination. Neither the Royalists nor the Socialists dream for a moment of giving quarter. Some day the storm will burst with a fury that will shake the world from centre to circumference. The French Revolution was a political movement. The German Revolution will be social and much more far-reaching. But for the constant exodus to America the crash would have come ere now.

The state of Russia is even more terrible. Every public official, from the Czar downwards, may be said to be a tyrant or a robber, or both. The Government bureaux are cesspools of corruption. The peasantry are brutalised beyond belief, and the cultivated classes in their despair have embraced Nihilism as the only available weapon against such an insupportable state of things. The Czar's life is never safe for a moment. His choice for the present seems to lie between a general Jacquerie or a great European war. Who would be a Czar?

In Austria there are at least ten nationalities filled with mutual distrust and hatred. In every village the majority trample on the minority. They have but one desire in common-a burning wish to rend the Empire in pieces. That they will succeed some fine morning is as good as certain.

[ocr errors]

Italy is ground to the dust by a load of indebtedness far beyond her ability to bear. The " masses are in much the same condition as the Egyptian fellaheen. Their sufferings are terrible beyond measure, as the Camorra and Maffia amply testified. The Monarchy is despised by the educated class who are sincerely Republican. It has taken no firin root because all the best traditions of the country, ancient, mediæval, and modern, are Republican. The land of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Manni, it is safe to predict, will not long float a Monarchical flag.

The same almost may be said of Spain. Her great men-her Castelars, Solmerons, and Margalls —are all inflexibly Republican, and so is a large portion of the Army and Navy. The Government lives in perpetual dread of a pronunciamiento. Indeed, the astonishing thing is that it has been so long delayed. The country is ripe for a Federal Republic.

All countries, the weak as well as the strong, have their own special ailments for which they vainly hope to find relief, by sacrificing countless millions year after year upon the altar of the military, like those persons in medieval times, who hoped to ensure their recovery from some dangerous disease by presenting their wealth to the Church. -Nordau.

For long years and generations it lasted; but the time came. Feather-brain, whom no reasoning and no pleading could touch, the glare of the firebrand had to illuminate, there remained but that method. Consider it, look at it! The widow is gathering nettles for her childrens' dinner; a perfumed seigneur, delicately lounging in the Eil-deBeuf, has an alchemy whereby he will extract from her the third nettle, and call it rent and law. Such an arrangement must end. Ought it not? But oh, most fearful is such an ending. Let those to whom God in His great mercy has granted time and space prepare another and a milder one.

[blocks in formation]

That is a true oracle. The time has at last come when Scotland no longer dearly loves a lord. Her people are nine-tenths democratic, and, depend on it, she will not tolerate much longer that her purely domestic affairs should be mismanaged by an aristocratic English Assembly. A Scottish Parliament, Mr. W. A. Hunter, M.P. for North Aberdeen, told the House in a speech of marked ability, could do more for Scotland in ten years than the Imperial Legislature could do in a hundred. Scotland is

ripe for Free Education, Church Disestablishment, and Land Resumption. Mr. Hunter's demand for a native Parliament, without an Upper House, to give effect to the wishes of the Scottish people was most significant, and will find a responsive echo in every true Scotsman's bosom. Let Scotland but prefer her claim in good earnest and it will infallibly be granted. The Irish and Welsh demands would thus be rendered irresistible.

It cannot be pretended that Scottish Home Rulers are disloyal to the British Empire. On the contrary, they are, in every department of State, in the army and navy, by sea and by land, the staunchest upholders of the flag. In India, in particular, they have always been noted for an aggressiveness amounting to Jingoism. But the Scottish people feel that they could manage their own domestic affairs better than the Imperial Legislature can, and nobody can seriously doubt it. The Educational System of Scotland was the best in the world before it was deadened by the cold mechanical methods imported from England. Now it is far from the best, and every true Scot sighs to

make the schoolmaster once more the school.

[blocks in formation]

Time's

This is not Lord Salisbury's notion. glory is seemingly, according to him, to wrong the righteous till he can endure no more. The Government find, as THE DEMOCRAT has so often averred, that the Irish judicial rents have been fixed absurdly too high. This being so, one would have naturally expected to see them promptly taken down. But no. The Tory Landlord Ministry know a trick worth two of that. They seriously propose to buy up the over-rented estates with the taxpayers' money, calculating the compensation on the basis of the impossible judicial rent! Was there ever a more unblushing proposition laid before a Legislature? His lordship might just as well turn highwayman or pickpocket at once. A Government, such as that with which the British working man is blessed, of landlords by landlords for landlords, is simply a government of brigands by brigands for brigands. Lord Exmouth bombarded and destroyed Algiers because it was a nest of pirates. But the guilty Dey and his people were a light infliction compared with Lord Salisbury and his brother footpads in and out of the peerage.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[blocks in formation]

Lord Salisbury told the House of Lords on Thursday that it costs the country £3,800 per annum to protect the Earl of Kenmare, and £3,200 to protect a lady who lives in the samo county. How long is this sort of thing to be stood? The cost of the Duke of Argyll's invasion of Tiree, it seems, is to be largely visited on the ratepayers of Argyllshire. No wonder that ominous growls are escaping them. Serve them right for their bigotry in ousting a sound politician because he But this expenditure is far from being the limit took his theology from Rome instead of Geneva. of the charges the taxpayers have to bear on account of Irish landlordism. The cost of evictions is an even greater drain upon the Exchequer. instance, numerous evictions are taking place on an estate in the district of Gweedore, county Donegal. The total yearly rental involved is said to be under £150, but for the past eleven days one hundred and fifty policemen, bailiffs, &c., have been engaged in the work of eviction, at a cost estimated at about £100 per day. So that the enforcement of the law on an estate smaller than a third-rate English farm has already cost £1,100. What next, and next?

The ruined peasant's cot may downward draw
The stately hall that neighbours it. We are
All members of one body, and a flaw

Or lesion here, the perfect whole shall mar;
Therefore let Justice rule and Love inspire!
Walter Smith.

For

Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Act struck 20 per cent. off Irish rents. By so doing the principle for which Land Resumptionists contend was fully conceded. If it is right to take 20 per cent. it is right to take 100 per cent. A Land Court fixing" fair "rents is not a whit less absurd than would be an Interest Court fixing fair interest, a Profit Court fixing fair profits, or a Wages Court fixing fair wages. Gladstone has inserted the wedge into the vile trunk of landlordism. It is for the people to drive it mercilessly home.

Mr.

The people are masters. They have only to express their wants at large and in gross. We are the expert artists; we are the skilful workmen to shape their desires into perfect form and to fit the

utensil to use.

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

Mr. Freeman truly says that it is "history picked up anyhow from the beginning of our lives which really makes the deepest impression on us, and which if the impression unluckily happens to be wrong, it is the hardest to get rid of in after life." Unfortunately, the history taught children is too often a sort of burlesque, and on this early teaching erroneous ideas are formed on topics of vital importance which are not easily eradicated.

"A Word for Ireland," by T. M. Healy.-At the present moment, when the Irish question still occupies the mind of the English people, Mr. Healy has brought out in a new edition a short, clear, and concise account of the treatment Ireland has received at our hands, which formed part of an earlier publication.

He has not based his narrative on the records of Ireland's native historians; each count in his heavy indictment against our rule is given on the authoand in the very words of those who themselves were more or less responsible.

All who want to understand clearly what are the wrongs of which Ireland complains cannot do better than study this excellent pamphlet. Mr. Healy points out that from first to last the greatest tion with the land.

wrongs

inflicted

upon

Ireland have been in connec

and shows how, after the rebellions of Tyrone and He begins his story in the time of Elizabeth, Tyrconnell, 570,000 acres of Irish land were confiscated and granted by her to Court favourites. The work of driving the natives off the soil was carried on yet more extensively in the reign of James I. West Indian sugar plantations to make room for Many miserable wretches were shipped off to the English and Scotch settlers.

"The Making of the Irish Nation and the First Fruits of Federation," by J. A. Partridge. T. Fisher Unwin. Mr. Partridge maintains there is only one solution for the Irish problem.-Federation on a Democratic basis. This he believes would be the commencement of a Federal system which would eventually embrace the whole British empire. The author shows how prosperity increased in Ire-rity land during the brief period of her independence, and how after the Union she sank into bankruptcy. The Tories he characterises as the Calvinists of politics. "Themselves the elect of the Fortunate Isles, they view with composure the millions of the socially and politically predestined, damned, 'whelmed in the whirling flood."" Those who are anxious to study the Irish question will find plenty of material in Mr. Partridge's book, which shows evidence of much research. The shameful story of landlord oppression, of famine and eviction, which the author tells is of special value at the present juncture. In 1876 the value of the potato crop was £12,464,382, in 1878 it had fallen to £7,579,512. "The landlords of 1879," says Mr. Partridge, "justified their traditions, the deeper the distress the more the evictions, and as a climax Mr. James Lowther was the Irish Chief Secretary." In 1876 the evictions were 1,269, in 1879 they rose to 2,667. In 1881, 17,341 persons were evicted, and in June of the same year the population was found by the census to have diminished one-ninth in ten years. Lord Salisbury's "Manacles and Manitoba " policy is simply a continuation of the policy of iniquity which his caste has always pursued in Ireland. The Prime Minister's latest programme, lords must not suffer" whoever else suffers, is highly suggestive of the notorious "Head Act," to which the author alludes. Under this peculiarly Conservative statute it was lawful to kill and cut off the heads of any Irish "going or coming, having no faithful man of good name and fame in their company in English apparel," the slayer being allowed to levy a tribute on the farmers as his reward. For exterminating the Irish Lord Salisbury's protegés are to be similarly rewarded at the expense of the people. Such, at least, is Lord Salisbury's desire.

After the great Civil War the work of subjugation and confiscation was once more commenced, and under Cromwell it was more thoroughly carried out than it had ever been before. The people were almost exterminated by famine and by the sword. The survivors were driven across the Shannon into Connaught, and forced to remain there. Connaught" was the alternative offered them by their foes, and even down to our time the conse"that the land-quence of this act of tyranny may be noted in the crowded condition of the wastes and mountains of the West.

"Hell or

This Cromwellian settlement, which is the basis of Ireland's present system of land tenure, confiscated 5,000,000 acres, and thus the work begun by Elizabeth was consummated, and the land of Ireland was wrested from her people.

The desolation of Ireland during the following years was terrible. The country was so depopulated you might go twenty or thirty miles without meeting man, woman, or child.

The return of the Stuarts did little to improve matters, and after the Restoration new cruelties were inflicted on the Irish. The treaty of Limerick was shamelessly violated, and fresh confiscations deprived the Irish Catholics of five-sixths of the Ox-land still remaining to them. By all these confiscations and by means of the Penal Code, which was in force during the eighteenth century, a landlord class was artificially created in Ireland, of which Mr. Froude says: "Of all the fatal gifts which we bestowed on our unhappy possession

"The Methods of Historical Study." By E. A. Freeman, M.A. Macmillan and Co. The brilliant historian has published in volume form eight lectures read by him in the University of ford in 1884. To every student of history the volume will be of intense interest. History has been taught in such a fashion in this country that a book of this kind has a peculiar value, and it is written in a style that will charm all readers.

« НазадПродовжити »