CHAPTER II.

ON THE WEALTH CREATING ATTRIBUTES OF LABOUR, AND THE CONSEQUENT RIGHTS OF THE LABOURING OR WEALTH CREATING CLASSES.

"Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things."-Adam Smith.

No doubt the rights of property are sacred. Not less hallowed, however, are the rights of industry, that most valuable of all property."-Sir Peter Payne, Bart.

THE earth, without labour, will not yield us her increase; that increase yielded to labour, without further labour, is of little value, the gold of the mine itself is not wealth, till labour has brought it forth. Labour then, being the origin of all wealth, while the strength to labour is a possession given by the universal Father in nearly equal portions to all his children, why should any but the idle know the misery of want? and more especially, why should that misery, the misery of want, be the peculiar portion of those whose daily occupation is the creation of wealth? Accumulation is not what

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is here spoken of, but creation. Every shilling accumulated by the capitalist must be first created by some pair of labouring hands; all the capital he employs, in putting labour in motion, must first have been created somewhere by labour. If the idle man's money be out at interest, and he save that interest, we talk of fortunes made by the accumulation of interest; but hands must be at actual labour somewhere creating that interest, or there would be no increase to accumulate. short, wheresoever honey may be found, the working bee alone can have produced that honey. Wherefore, is it then that the creators of all wealth are the poor? That poor man, and labourer, which is wealth creator, are synonimous terms? That those whose labour first causes the earth to yield its produce, and then converts that produce into every necessary, every comfort, every convenience, every luxury, and every means of enjoyment, live themselves without comfort, without luxury, without enjoyment, and yet, though thus consuming next to nothing of all the riches they create, and still continuing to create riches, still continue to be, proverbially, the poor? Is it not manifest that such

a disposition of things " could not possibly have been produced, neither can it be maintained without a fearful perversion of "equal justice some where. For, that if the principle of injustice were not always in active operation, counteracting the constant efforts of industry, that, whatever individual

poverty might at any time have been induced, whether by misfortune, by idleness, or by vice, the prevalence of poverty, generally among the industrious, must have been rendered impossible by the very wealth-creating, and therefore self-renovating attributes of labour. The distress of the labouring classes is a phrase so commonly in use, that we hear it without surprise; yet, when translated into the language of literal truth, what a strange anomaly does it convey the poverty of the creators of riches! By what title then have we, the idle, the enjoying few, thus converted the great mass of our fellow creatures, for our own special convenience, into one enormous non-consuming productive power, resembling that of mere machinery? Non-consuming of comfort or enjoyment is what is here intended to be understood; for, as to the miserable portion of bare sustinance consumed by the generality of labourers, it may be considered as somewhat on a par with the common repairs of the spinning jenny or the steam engine. Nor is it always that even this bare subsistance can be obtained by the labourer in quantities sufficient to keep the human machine in tolerable repair! How did all this arise? Knowledge, we are told, is power. Did the few who first obtained this power misuse it, and by the cunning it imparted get possession of the whole surface of the inhabited earth, and then envying the rest of mankind the only possession they had left them, the strength of

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their own limbs, devise enactments, too intricate for the unlearned to understand, tending to draw to these, the subtle few, all that the strength of the labouring many could produce, with the exception of the smallest possible portion of the coursest necessaries, by which the labouring many can be kept alive, to labour on for the accommodation, in every possible way, of the privileged few? If the answer to this question be in the affirmative, if it be indeed true that even mistaken and partially imparted knowledge was power, and, in the hands of the few, was used for evil and unequal purposes, let enlightened and widely diffused knowledge be still greater power, and, in the hands of the many, who have a common interest in giving that they may receive justice, rectify the evils which, in the hands of the few, its spurious predecessor has produced.

It will probably be said that the existence of property seems to be forgotten, and that property purchases labour. But what is property? With the exception of little more than the briar and the thistle, only another name for the accumulated creations of labour. "What is bought with money or with goods," says Adam Smith, "is purchased by labour as much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased."

By what acts of savage violence, perpetrated

by the demon of war, or by what other means, whether of subtlety, or of oppression, sanctioned by barbarous ages, both the surface of the earth, and all the hitherto accumulated creations of labour, have passed into the hands of the few and the idle, to the utter exclusion of the many and laborious, may well be matter of wondering speculation: it would, however, be at present a useless inquiry. For the sake of order, for the love of peace, for the sake of the property hereafter to be created, let the rights of property, as they now stand, be held sacred. It is the future rights of labour, the honest distribution of the wealth henceforward to be created by labour, that must be regulated on the unerring principle of good-will to all; unerring, because necessarily including equal justice, that good-will not being to all, which sanctions injustice to any: on thus regulating the distribution of the future creations of labour, the relief of all present misery, and the growth of all future prosperity depend. How then this is to be accomplished, is the most vitally important of all practical questions. Let not the reply to it be forgotten! This end then, so desirable, can be attained only, by establishing such relative proportions between the price of raw produce, and the price of labour, as shall secure to the labourer all the necessaries, comforts, and decencies of life, in exchange for a reasonable portion of his time,