in common parlance, the distress of the labouring classes."

Acts of parliament, should be acts of public opinion. The great object then of benevolence ought to be, so to rectify public opinion on these points, that acts of parliament such as these alluded to, should make way for acts of public opinion, based on the principle of good will to all, necessarily including equal justice.

We measure our horses' oats to them, in return for their labour, by the feed, not by any money price, which circumstances may put on their services. Why are we thus just to them? Because they are our property; if they die, we lose money. But if we can cheat the poor operative with nominal wages, while we put such a price on corn, and all other necessaries, that he can buy but half a feed, when he should have had a whole feed, we let him take his chance, put himself on short allowance if he chooses, or work the harder; should he die in the effort, we lose nothing, we do not even suffer inconvenience; there are other labourers waiting in the market place, who will do our work as well.

Let us suppose a couple, possessed of a small garden, and having a family of children. Suppose those children able to earn wages at various trades, yet completely under the control of their parents; suppose these parents to forbid their children the use of any other food, than the produce of the said

small garden, and to make them pay out of their wages for that produce, twice or three times the price such food could be procured for in the common market, and that, in consequence of this cruel restriction, the children were obliged to work nearly night and day, and that still all the wages they could earn, would not buy above half enough of such dear food, and that therefore, they were double worked, and but half fed, while their parents, by obliging them to buy the vegetables of the said garden, at the said exorbitant prices, got possession of all their wages, and with those wages, without doing any work themselves, they were enabled to purchase the most wanton superfluities, in luxuries of food, and fineries of clothing, and ostentation of equipage, for their own special use, which they never shared with their children, except, they perchance gave to one who fell sick from hardships and want of food, some remnant of a meal; calling the action charity, and laying claim to the character of benevolence for its performance. Or, perhaps, permitted another to spend the precious hour, due to rest or recreation, in the creation of some superfluous toy, and then bought it of them with a part of the money they had wronged them of in the price of their food, declaring they did not want the toy, and only bought it for charity! What should we think of such parents? Yet, are not those who have possession of the authority, and of the land, and

who would keep up corn laws and other restrictions on the importation of food, that they may be able to exact higher rents than could else be paid, and live in a more splendid style than they could else afford, just such parents to the industrious classes, as have been here described; except, indeed, that there are a thousand collateral and complicated hardships attendant upon the actual national wrong, which the supposed family wrong does not reach.

We ought to be independent of all foreign countries for our supplies of food, say the landlords. But can we make this country also independent of all foreign countries for markets for all its manufactures? If not, we cannot, without crying dishonesty to the labourer, use means (effecting the exchangeable value of labour) to make this country independent of foreign countries for its supplies of food. We have hitherto talked of reciprocal protection, (that is reciprocal robbery,) and "all the same thing to the labourer," etc. and attempted to legislate, as though we had the power of realizing an equal pressure in the artificial scale of prices.

But we seem to have lost sight of one glaring fact, which, while our territory is limited, must upset the balance of any restrictive system; namely, that while we have no surplus, over our own consumption, of the produce of land, we have an immense surplus, over our own consumption, of the produce

of labour, that is of manufactures. Therefore, to protect, nominally, every thing in the home market, is in fact to protect, really, nothing but rents-for, as to agricultural labour, and agricultural profits, they must always suffer with, that is be brought to a level by manufacturing labour, and manufacturing profits.* The option, therefore, of establishing an arbitrary scale of prices, can never rest with us, until our Parliament has the same authority ove rthe markets in which the surplus of our labour, that is, of our manufacture must be sold, if sold at all, that it has in the market in which it compels us to buy our bread, at an artificial price.

But, though Parliament can control price, it cannot control prices! Though it can heap one scale, it cannot put a feather into the other! Buying and selling, therefore, under such necessarily one-sided restrictive laws, is a mere mockery.

As well might legislating landowners levy their arbitrary demands at once, as our ministers of peace and love do their tithes, by the point of the sword, as, like Brennus of old, fling the sword of power into the scale, to enhance the weight of the gold demanded! A majority of a house of landlords, throwing out a bill for the abolition of the corn laws, is merely a modern repetition of the insolent Gaul's "Va victis."+

* See Torrens, on Wages and Combination.

+ "Woe to the conquered!"

CHAPTER III.

ON THE SOURCES OF NATIONAL WEALTH.

There is no country in which the whole annual produce is employed in maintaining the industrious. The idle every where consume a great part of it; according to the proportions in which it is divided between these two orders, its value must increase or diminish.-Adam Smith.

WHAT are the sources of a nation's wealth?

The most important are, first, the marketable value, in the market of the world, of the natural productions of its soil, over and above the cost of production. Secondly, the value added by its labour to raw material, home or foreign, over and above the cost of the raw material, whether imported or produced at home; and the cost of preparing the finished goods for, and bringing them to, market. Thirdly, the amount of its profitably employed capital. Fourthly, the productiveness of the field on which the capital is sown.

If a nation devote its soil to the production of an article which, in the market of the world, would