number of births to a marriage. According to all experience, a great increase invariably takes place in the number of marriages, in seasons of cheap food and full employment."

It is in this way that the Malthusians justify the uniform despondency of their views, and refuse to believe that the abolition of the corn-laws, emigration, a widely spread epidemic, a destructive war, or any other cause of cheapened food or lessening for a time the number of competitors for hire, can effect any permanent improvement in the condition of the working classes. Instead of profiting by the occasion to raise their standard of living, the laborers only use it as a means of rearing more children, whose competition must eventually bring back wages to their former proportion to the price of food. The fact is overlooked, that it is the present hopeless. ness of their condition, the impossibility of rising above their present rank in life, or even, as they are already at the bottom of the scale, of falling below it, which renders the laboring poor reckless and improvident in respect to marriages, and which makes them consider children as no encumbrance, and relief in the poor-house as no degradation. Under a different constitution of society, which should give the bulk of the people a right of ownership in the soil, such as the corresponding classes generally possess upon the Continent, and should break down the now impassable barriers between the different classes in the community, leaving the avenues to wealth and honor as open as they are in the United States, they would become more provident and hopeful, or a large family would no longer be esteemed a burden.

Certainly, no one, under present circumstances, would advise either an English or an Irish laborer, who is entirely dependent on wages, to diminish his chance of keeping out of the workhouse by taking upon himself the support of a wife and children. What would be imprudence for an individual, would be imprudence also in the whole class or body of men to which he belongs, or whose position in life resembles his The English Economists do right, then, at the present time, in dissuading the laboring poor from marriage. But we do not hereby acknowledge that the actual wretchedness of this class is the consequence of their having already multiplied up to the farthest limit at which the earth will supply them

own.

with food. Much less do we accept the doctrine which tends to make the wealthier classes in Great Britain hard-hearted and indifferent at the sight of the sufferings of the poor, by teaching that their misery is their own fault, the inevitable result of their own perversity and improvidence in keeping up their numbers too high. On the contrary, the very fact, that it is now imprudent for them to marry, is what they have most right to complain of, since it is not their own fault, but that of the laws and the aristocratic institutions of their country. If the policy of the English law, for the last half-century, had favored the distribution of fortunes as directly as it has actually encouraged their aggregation, or if it had been only neutral in this respect, as it is in this country, and had allowed property to take its natural course of an equal division among all the children when the parent had expressed no wish to the contrary, the laboring classes of England, like the peasantry of France and Switzerland, and the inhabitants of our own land, might now be free to follow their own inclinations without incurring the charge of imprudence. Their right to do so would be established by a fact of the first importance in the eyes of a Malthusian; they would not have become as numerous as they now are. The population of France, under the law which compels an equal division of the parent's estate among his children, increases at the rate of only five per cent in ten years, while the rate for England is about thrice as great. Yet no one supposes that the Englishman is naturally more careless and improvident, or more inclined to excess, than his neighbor across the Channel.

In England, an increase of the population is, pro tanto, an addition to the number of laborers seeking employment, an increase of the supply in the labor-market, and therefore a cause of the depression of wages. In America it is not so. The facilities for collecting a little capital are so numerous, and the expenses of living among a rural population, especially in the Western States, are so moderate, that the class of persons who are dependent exclusively upon wages, and who form the bulk of the community in many European countries, is here very small. The bulk of our people, at least of those who are native-born, may be said to belong to the class of independent laborers or small capitalists. Either by inheritance, or the

assistance of friends, or the facility of obtaining credit, or by savings made from wages earned during his minority, almost every native American may be said to have the option of "beginning life," as it is called, with a little capital. But because this capital is small in amount, the possessor of it is willing, if wages are high, to work for others for a time, either as a journeyman, a farm-laborer, a clerk, or in some other capacity, in order to increase his little store by additional savings from wages, before he commences business on his own account. To be in the receipt of wages is not in America, as it generally is in Europe, to be entirely dependent upon wages. The person employed not unfrequently lends capital to his employer, and is thus placed upon an equality with him, and saves his self-respect, though he is "working for hire." One who either owns, or has the power of purchasing, a small farm, will yet "hire himself out," as the phrase is, for a season or two, in order to obtain the means of stocking his land, or otherwise facilitating his future enterprise.

Should wages be low, however, persons of small means see little advantage in postponing their introduction to business, and are tempted to employ their own capital at once in some independent occupation. There are innumerable openings for private adventure, which require only an adventurous spirit and a very moderate amount of capital or credit. The step between the situations of a journeyman and a master-mechanic, a clerk and a small tradesman, a farm-laborer and a small farmer, is a short one and very easily taken. If nothing better can be done, there is always the resource of removing to the West, and becoming a pioneer in the settlement of government land, which is first obtained with a squatter's preemption right, and paid for out of the proceeds of subsequent harvests, or out of the enhanced value of the land when the neighborhood begins to be peopled. The tide of emigration westward always becomes fuller and stronger in periods of commercial depression, the stoppage of manufactories, the low prices of agricultural products, and the consequent reduction of the rates of wages. A check is thus immediately applied to the fall of wages, which do not sink as low as might be expected from the general depreciation of property and diminution of the rate of profit. If wages should be considerably lessened, few

operatives for hire could be had, except those of foreign origin. Many have a home in the rural districts, to which they can retire in such an emergency, and wait for a return of the prosperous times which first tempted them to leave the paternal roof, and commence work for high wages in a manufacturing town. Again, hired laborers easily become small tradesmen or master-mechanics, because the business of the manufacturer, the merchant, and the artisan is here not so much concentrated in the hands of a few persons with large capitals as it is in England. The competition of many, each having but a small stock in tools or trade, is not so easily crushed out by the monster undertakings of large houses wielding an immense capital, who can outlive the reverses of trade or the periods of depression in the market that are usually fatal to persons of smaller means. Reverses happen and failures ensue, oftener even than in England, and to the large and small capitalists alike; but, as already mentioned, there are great facilities here for bankrupts to recover their position and try again. Profits and losses are great, speculation is rife, and great fortunes are acquired and dissipated with marvellous rapidity. Hence there is great instability, but also much life and enterprise, in trade, and in all departments of industry. I have already explained some of the causes of the peculiar mobility of society, the ease and frequency of the interchange of social position, which is one of the characteristic features of American life, and a necessary result of our political and social institutions. The particular consequence of it, to which I wish here to direct attention, is, that it keeps down the number of laborers for hire, in spite of the rapid increase of the population, and keeps up the rate of wages, or at least prevents it from falling so rapidly as it would otherwise do.

Here, also, is the explanation of the restless, migratory spirit, and the want of local attachments, which have so often attracted the attention of foreign observers. Of the population of three of our Western States, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin, amounting in the aggregate to nearly one million, according to the census of 1850, only 25 per cent were born within the limits of these States in which they are domiciliated, about 20 per cent were born in foreign countries, and over 51 per cent had their nativity in other States, though still within

the limits of the Union; of about 4 per cent, the places of parentage were unknown. In European countries, the bulk of the population work for hire, and are too poor to be able to change their locality; they lack rather the ability than the disposition to emigrate. But both in Europe and America, the rule holds, that, in general, only the poorer people, the laborers for wages, are inclined to seek a new home. If, therefore, within twenty years, about half a million of our people have migrated into these three States, it is a proof that the laboring class here generally have the pecuniary means for such migration, or, in other words, they have a small capital, which, if they saw fit, (and many of them actually adopt such a course,) they might employ in establishing themselves in business on their own account, in the places of their nativity, and thus ceasing to work for wages. Taking the whole population of the United States together, according to the same census, it appears that about 4,175,000 native-born white Americans, or over 21 per cent of the whole number, are now resident in other States than those in which they had their nativity.

The doctrines of the English Political Economists respecting wages, that any increase of the laboring population is necessarily an evil, as it increases the demand for the means of subsistence without proportionally increasing the supply of those means, and as it increases the competition in the labor market, thereby depressing the rate of wages; that the natural or necessary rate of wages is the smallest sum that will purchase those articles for a family which, according to the custom of the country, are regarded as requisite for the necessaries and decencies of life, or, in other words, that the only limit to the depression of wages is this conventional standard of what is absolutely requisite for the maintenance even of the poorest family, these doctrines, I say, cease to be applicable, or to have even the appearance of truth, here in the United States. Our natural standard of wages is, not the smallest sum which will enable the temperate and industrious native-born laborer to support a family with decency, but the smallest that will enable him to do not only thus much, but to amass capital,that will induce him to forego the independence and the other advantages of trading or working for himself. A true regard for the interests of the class to which he belongs would lead