In such a country distress begins, not, as in the case of a free country, with the lower orders, but with the higher. A badsystem, therefore, can continue there much longer, because the class affected have farther to fall; and, for the same reason,the ruin, when it does come, is sudden and irretrievable. While misgovernment, by excessive or ill-placed taxation, bycommercial restrictions, by allowing insecurity of person or property, by applying any artificial stimulus to population, orunder any other of its. numerous forms, is gradually wasting the surplus that belongs to landlords and capitalists, the slavepopulation may scarcely feel its effects. Subsistence is all they are entitled to, and that they must receive as long as theirlabour produces it. But the instant that surplus is gone, and distress reaches those whose previous maintenance was onlyequal to their necessities, what is there between them and absolute destruction? If the evils which have been so longaccumulating in some of our West Indian islands had affected a free country, the whole population would, long ago, haverisen to redress them. But as yet, they have reached only the slave-owner. He has found his property gradually wastingaway; he has found that his slaves every year consume a larger and a larger proportion of what they produce; but even stillhe has something to lose: and while that is the case, their situation is unaffected. When the whole produce has become onlysufficient to feed the negroes, -- a time which, under the present system, is rapidly advancing in some of the older islands,-- the whites must abandon them as a field for all the moral and physical evil that slaves, helpless by education anddesperate from want, will mutually suffer and inflict (1)(1. This is one of the modes in which slavery may be extinguished, but it is a dreadful abuse of language to call it euthanasia.)The freeman (using that term in its full meaning,) is the master of his exertions, and of his residence. He may refuse to quitthe spot, or to change the employment, in which his labour has become unprofitable. As he may refuse to labour at all, bemay ask for his services Whatever remuneration he thinks fit; but as no one is bound to purchase those services, and as noone is obliged to afford him food, clothing, or any of the necessaries of life, he is forced, if he would subsist, to follow thetrade, and dwell in the place, and exert the diligence which will make his services worth purchasing; and he is forced tooffer them for sale, by the same necessity which forces the capitalist to offer him wages in exchange for them. And thebargain is settled, like all other free bargains, by the respective market values of the things exchanged. As marriage has notendency .to increase the value of his labour, it has no tendency to increase his remuneration. He defers it, therefore, till thesavings made while he was single afford a fund to meet the expenses of a family; and population is kept down by the onlycheck that is consistent with moral or physical welfare -- the prudential check:
To this state of things there is a near approach among the labouring classes in the most advanced districts of the continentof Europe, in the lowlands of Scotland, and even throughout the British empire, among the best educated of those classeswho derive their chief subsistence from their exertions, including professional persons, domestic servants, skilled artisans,and that portion of the shopkeepers whose profits are, in fact, principally the wages of their labour.
The poor-laws, as administered in the southern districts of England, are an attempt to unite the irreconcilable advantages offreedom and servitude. The labourer is to be a free agent, but without the hazards of free agency; to be free from thecoercion, but to enjoy the assured subsistence of the slave. He is expected to be diligent, though he has no fear of want;provident, though his pay rises as his family increases; attached to a master who employs him in pursuance of a vestryresolution; and grateful for the allowance which the magistrates order him as a right.
In the natural state of the relation between the capitalist and the labourer, when the amount of wages to be paid, and ofwork to be done, are the subjects of a free and open bargain; when the labourer obtains, and knows that he is to obtain justwhat his services are worth to his employer, he must feel any fall in the price of his labour to be an evil, but is not likely tocomplain of it as an injustice. Greater exertion and severer economy are his first resources in distress; and what they cannotsupply, he receives with gratitude from the benevolent. The connexion between him and his master has the kindliness of avoluntary association, in which each party is conscious of benefit, and each feels that his own welfare depends, to a certainextent, on the welfare of the other. But the instant wages cease to be a bargain -- the instant the labourer is paid, notaccording to his value, but his wants, he ceases to be a freeman. He acquires the indolence, the improvidence, the rapacity,and the malignity, but not the subordination of a slave. He is told that he has a right to wages, but that he is bound towork? Who is to decide how hard he ought to work, or how hard he does work? Who is to decide what amount of wageshe has a right to? As yet, the decision has been made by the overseers and the magistrates. But they were interested parties.
