Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government
List of M. De SISMONDI's Works..
19th Century J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi English- I began, the year after my arrival in Tuscany, my Recherches sur les Constitutions des Peuples libra, inquiries into the constitutions of free nations. This work, which has never been finished nor published, occupied me five years.
In the two first books were contained the exposition of my principles on liberty and government, in the third the analysis of the British constitution, the fourth that of the French republic, fifth on the ancient constitutions of Spain, sixth that of the Italian republics; the four following, on Sweden, Poland, the Hanseatic towns, and the United States of America, were scarcely sketched out.
My inquiries into the constitutions of the Italian republics obliged me to study their history, and from this period are dated my endeavours to become master of it, and my resolution to write it.
At the end of my abode in Tuscany, I wrote my Tableau de l Agriculture Toscane, which I published at Geneva, in 1 vol. 8vo., 1801.
I then undertook my first work on Political Economy, which I published at Geneva, under the title of Richesse commercielle, 3 vols. 8vo., 1803.
I undertook to furnish all the articles on the History of Italy for the Biographie Universelle. I had written them all, and sent them to Messrs. Michaud, booksellers at Paris, long before the first volume of this biography appeared in 1811.
I at last succeeded in getting the two first volumes of my History of the Itlian Republics published by Geasner at Zurich, in French and German.
The following year he published the 3 rd and 4 th volumes
Gessner being dead, Nicolle, at Paris, made a new edition of the four first volumes of the Italian Republics, and a first of the four following ones.
I prepared, in 1811, and I gave in the winter of 1811-12, my course of lectures on the Literature of the South of Europe.
I worked at it in Italy, and I published it the following year, with Treuttel and Wurtz, in four volumes 8vo.
I published with Treuttel and Wurtz, the five last volumes, the 12th, 18th, 14th, 15th, and 16th, of my Italian Re- publics.
I composed for Dr. Brewster the article on Political Economy, for his Edinburgh Encyclopedia. In this I had down my first sketch of my system of Political Economy, on the abuse of labour, of competition, and on the excom of production.
- I published with Delaunay my New Principles of Political Economy, or wealth in its relation to population, 3 vols. 8vo.
In the month of May, 1818, I decided on undertaking the History of the French (Histoire des Français) and I had begun to make extracts from books, and to engage in the preparatory studies. In the year,
I published the three first volumes with Treuttel and Wurtz.
I published Julia Severa, or the year four hundred and ninety-two, 3 vols. 12mo.
Published the 4th, 5th, and 6th volumes of Histoire des Français.
Published the 7th, 8th, and 9th volumes.
Published a new edition of Nouveaux Principes d'Economie Politique, very much increased.
Volumes 10, 11, and 12 of my History.
Volumes 13, 14, 15.
I published in Lardner's Cyclopaedia an abridgment of the History of the Italian Republics, under title of Italian Republics of the Middle Ages, I vol. 16mo.; and immediately afterwards the same work in French, under the title of Histoire de la Renaissance de la Laberté on Itatie, et ses Progrées, et sa Décadence, et sa Chute, 2 vols. 8vo.
I published successively, volumes 16 and 17 of the History.
The 18th.
I published in Lardner's Cycloædia, in English, and at the same time with Treuttel and Wurtz, in French, the History of the Fall of the Roman Empire, and the decliDe of civilization, from the year 250 to 1000, 2 vols. 8vo. It was a course of lectures which I had given at Geneva, in 1820–21, on the History of the first half of the Middle Ages. The same year I published, one after another, vols. 19 and 20 of the History.
Volume 21 of the History, and the first voltune of Etudes sur les Constitutions des Peuples Libres. No. 1, des Sciences Sociales.
Volume 2, des Sciences Sociales. No. 1, d'Etudes sur l'Eeonomie Politique.
Volume 3, des Sciences Sociales. No. 2, d'Etudes sur l'Economie Politique.
I published the abridgment of the History of the French, 2 vols. 8vo., which I had written at Pescia; and after my return, volume 22 of the History.
Volumes 23 and 24.
Volumes 25 and 26.
Volumes 27, 28, and 29.
G. Woodfall and Son Printers, Angel Court, skinner Street, London
Read to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, (at the public sitting of the 17th of May. 1845,) of which M. de Sismondi was Foreign Associate, and of which M. Mignet is Permanent Secretary.
The letters between parentheses refer to the Appendix of Notes at the end of the Historical Notice.
The conseils de prud'hommes were instituted by divers laws and imperial decrees in 1806, 7.
They are formed by an election of manufacturers, foremen, and ouvriers, patentés, that is, workmen who purchase what is called a patente licence to open a shop on their own account.
There are conseils de prud'hommes for each arrondissement, and one general one.
They are commissnioned to reconcile and to decide on the differences which arise among the manufacturers, or between them and their workmen, on questions of wages, the performance of work, contracts of apprenticeship, and the right of each manufacturer to put a mark on his fabrics.
In 1840, 59 conseils de prud hommes had to decide 15,578 contested cases; but 13,664 only came before the court of conciliation, (bureau, de conciliation,) 1914 having been amicably arranged between the parties; 12,672 cases were made up by private courts, 972 were sent up to the general court to be tried, 468 only were brought before it; of these 468, 297 were finally decided, 172 admitted of appeals, but of these 12 only were referred to the higher courts.
See note at the end.
The electors are divided in France into colleges or assemblies.
But things do not go on well, please your Royal Highness; all these changes will not do. We will have no more of these ancient law. and taxes, and such follies.
“Among the many evils which at this time tend to depress the agricultural poor, the law of settlement is exercising a very unfavourable influence. Settlement, as regards the labouring poor, being now practically confined to the place of their birth, the owners of property are exerting themselves to throw the burden off their own estates, and to fix it upon others. If they can drive the poor from the parishes in which their own property lies, they calculate that they shall be exempted from the pressure of poor's rates. In this object the farmers unite heartily with their landlords, for the payments are made by them, and the occupier is equally interested with the owner in keeping down the burden upon land. There is no settled purpose in all this of oppressing the poor: it arises from selfishness—the caring for none but themselves. But the consequences to the poor are grievous. If cottages are pulled down instead of being built up, if no harbouring is provided for the labouring poor in those parishes where their settlement is, they must either go to the workhouse or find shelter elsewhere. As long as they have health and strength, we know that our industrious labourers will strain every nerve to maintain their families in independence. Hence, they seek the nearest village to their own, where shelter is to be found, however exorbitant the rent. Wherever there are small freeholds in a parish, there speculators will be found to reap a profit from the necessities of these homeless families. Streets of miserable dwellings are erected, where £5, £6, £ 7, are charged for only two or three small rooms. These villages are perhaps from three to six miles from their own parish, where alone they can find employment; and this distance have these poor men to walk morning and night, in addition to their day's labour, for no allowance is made by the farmer for the distance which his labourer has to come to his work, and unless he is there to his appointed hour at all seasons, he will employ him no longer.”—Times.
Some curious accounts of speculation in the iron trade, I received from a gentleman in that business. The iron trade is always a fluctuating one; but in this, as in other trades, when the price rises unreasonably there is a check; persons will not buy at a price beyond bounds, partly from prudence, partly to resist imposition. When so many railways were proposed, it was calculated that it would be impossible to make the quantity of iron required, in any time approaching to that in which it would be wanting. Iron rose. The trade is considered in a prosperous state when it is nine or ten per cent. above the medium price; it rose to thirteen and fifteen. Seven gentlemen came to Liverpool to make sudden fortunes by speculating in iron; they expected to make thirty Per cent. on the usual price. One of them was offered a price by which he would have cleared £40,000: he scorned it, and said he should make £80,000; the rest acted on the same principle. Iron did not rise above fifteen per cent. Six of the seven were bankrupts, and one cecsped simply from refusing to fulfil any bargain that was not advantageous to himself.
At a meeting of the factory operativea, Manchestor, December 3,1845, Mr. J. T. Collins said he had worked in the mill many year, and from sad experience he did not hesitate to declare that the present factory hours were too long for human nature to endure. Such was the state of weakness to which he was reduced by twelve hours' labour in the mill, that he had no taste for learning, or time for the performance of those domestic duties which are so dear to every Englishman.
Among the resolutions were these:-
There never appeared to us any substantial reason why factory operatives, who are generally of the most delicate class of workers, including a very large proportion of females, should be compelled to follow the never tiring motions of the machine for a longer period in each day than the athletic mechanic, or the robust and healthy agriculturist, are required to work at their respective labour.
Because there is every reason to believe, so far as experience goes, that the present system of long hours is not attended with any pecuniary advantage to you, as our employers, whilst to us it is destructive of health, and materially limits the average duration of human life.
Because it deprives us of all mental intercourse with the intelligent portion of Society, with whom we might, if we had leisure enough, intermix in our Athenæums, Mechanics' Institutions, and other places of the sort, established for the improvement of the working classes, but hitherto closed against us, because we have neither time nor taste for such intellectual enjoyments, after so much bodily and mental exertion during the present long hours of factory work.
If public parks and pleasure grounds were now open to the inhabitants of Manchester, they would be a dead letter to us without a reduction of the hours of labour.
For these and numerous other reasons, we are convinced that the boon we now seek, if granted, would materially tend to the benefit of us all, by enabling us to improve the mind and morals of the rising generation of factory workers, and thereby, in numerous instances, substitute virtue for vice, sobriety for intemperance, and in some degree restore happiness to our families, serf-esteem for ourselves, and gratitude for our employers.
At a meeting of the operatives employed by Mr. Robert Gardner, to thank him for reducing the hours to eleven, an operative spinner stated that the advantage which he had derived from the eleven hours were, that he had better health, and at the end of the week received more wages for his work than formerly.
The book-keeper of the establishment said, that when the system had been in operation a few weeks, he found that the sick list was much diminished, and that very few had to leave work from ill health. On referring to his books, he found that for a period of six weeks, not a single spinner was off work from sickness, a circumstance which had never before been seen. On the whole he was fully warranted in saying that the work was much better uader the new than the old system.
A power-loom worker said his wife was working in the mill, and he had no hesitation in saying that a considerable saving to him had been effeeted, even by the single hour a day which she could now give to her affairs at home. Many other hands made similar statements.
Preston, March 7th, 1845.
The returns of the factory commissioners show that of 220,134 persons employed in cotton factories, only about one-fourth of the whole were males above eighteen years of age.
Of the excise and customs, two thirds, or nearly half are paid by the industrious classes.
A labouring man who gets £24 a year, pays £8 of it in indirect taxes.
The Corn Importation Bill may lessen the amount to him, but not the proportion. 200,000 persons with incomes just above £150 a year, pay one-fifth of the income tax.
Supplementary Paper to the Report on the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, 1842.
In 1836 a Committee of the Liverpool Corporation made a report on the number and earnings of criminals in that town, from which it appeared that £ 734,240 were annually obtained by unlawful means—National Distress, its Causes and Remedies, by Samuel Laing, Jun., p. 21.
We boast ourselves on being a more moral and religious people than our neighbours: yet the police returas show that in Liverpool there are 7,401 criminals, abandoned and suspected persons. In Paris, with a population of 900,000, above three times that of Liverpool, there are 13,300 of the same class (Frequier, Chef de Bureau de la Préfecture de Seine). If they bore the same proportion to the population, as in Liverpool, there would be 22,233.
At the fête given by the mill people in the employ of Messrs. Courtauld, Taylor, and Co., to their employers, there walked in the procession a handloom weaver, getting from ten to thirteen shillings a week. By denying himself from time to time his half pint of beer, he made up his threepence weekly subscription during the three months which his fellow workmen devoted to plan and preparation.
Soon after the procession moved onwards, there came to Appleton's cottage the overseer of the parish, demanding instant payment of the last poor. rate, and threatening that a summons should be taken out unless the money was put into his hands by twelve o'clock that very morning. Although he was known to be away for the day, the summons was taken out, was served the next morning, with an additional charge of about 6s. 8d. for fees, &c.
Appleton, who had a sickly wife, and had had nine children, had hitherto been excused from paying poor rates. He understood that this exemption continued as to the present rate. His wife had attended with others before the Bench to represent their inability to pay, and had been told by the magistrates that “they would let it rest.”This was, not unreasonably, taken as a remission, to which it seems it did not amount. A subsequent formality, of which the hand-loom weaver was not aware, and therefore neglected, left him technically and legally out of the excused list.
The magistrates hold themselves bound to wait the recommendation of the overseer to put any name on the excused list; and to all pleadings of the unexpected nature of the demand, the exemption in former years, the aggravation of added expenses, the time selected for this abrupt enforcement, the circumstances of the family, and the fact that distraint for poor's rates must bring an distraint for rent, break up the humble establishment of the victim, and consign him with his wife and four remaining children to the workhouse; the cool reply of the overseer is, that a man who can give a dinner to his masters shall pay the rate; and he will excuse him “no, not one farthing.”
Loud have been the complaints of a portion of the British Peerage that the poor rates fall heavily on their large estates. We see in this case how they fall on the cottage of the operative. We also see how they can be made the means of punishment—of punishiment it may be for no just cause of offence; but for conduct which the well-disposed must generally regard with complacency. In our apprehension, poor-rates ought never to be levied below the line of demarcation drawn by the income tax.
A poor law is, as we understand it, a public charity. There are those who know how to make it a public nuisance, to infuse into it the venom of all uncharitableness, and render it the instrument of oppression and cruelty.—From a letter by a Correspondent to the Daily News, July 7th, 1846.
I am now an old man, and I have been all my life a Norfolk farmer. I have lived in the times when farms were of a moderate size, and when there existed a respectable class of people called small farmers, who formed a link between the yeomen of the county and the agricultural labourer, but these have all been swept away.
I have witnessed the pulling down of homesteads, the small farmer turned out, and after a period of unavailing struggles, gradually sink down and become incorperated with the labouring mass. I have seen six or seven farms thrown into ene, because it was found cheaper to work large farms than small ones; and as fewer labourers and fewer cattle were required, the consequence was that many a poor fellow was deprived of his employ.
This increase in the size of farms was the first blow to the agricultural labourer. —Letters of a Norfolk Farmer to Sir Robert Peel, in the Examiner.
Unhappily, while other classes were progressing, the moral and physical condition of the labourer was retrograding. In order to understand this retrogression, and its effect upon agriculture, and a naturally honest and industrious class, we must go back 40 or 50 years, when occupations were not so extensive, when the demand for labour was above the supply, and production more adequate to consumption. At that period most of the farm servants were lodged in the houses, the master and servant often worked together, and hence arose mutual respect and attachment, which mutual dependence and mutual aid almost universally create. The system of weekly wages was the first blow towards weakening the ties which had hitherto bound the farm servant to his employer. Expelled from the long cherished “home of the estate,”and thus cut off both from those social communications which insure confidence, and that supervision which imposes a wholesome restraint, the labourur sought a new dwelling, too often an improvident marriage, and his interest centered in his own hearth. As a natural consequence population increased, not at first perhaps, in proportion to the demand for labour, but certainly beyond the rate of wages, which underwent no addition correspending to the rise of prices in the necessaries of life. In almost all the inquiries which have been made on this point, we have almost invariably found the rate of wages higher in proportion when the price of corn was low, than when higher prices have been obtained. Bacon's Report on the Agriculture of Norfolk.
By the estimate of the Commissioners for England and Wales, the number of paupers relieved was 1,300,928 in 1831; per centage of pauperism to Population, 9.5. Taking the population in 1841, at 15,911,725, as given by the census, this gives an actual per centage of official pauperism to population of 8¼ per cent., or nearly one person out of twelve.
This proportion far exceeds that of any of the other great civilized countries in Europe, except, perhaps, a few exclusively manufacturing districts in France and Belgium.—Laing, p. 9.
See Letters from Dorsetshire in the Times of July and August, 1846.
The meeting at Goatacre has attracted considerable attention, and informed the country of the state of the agricultural population in Warwickshire. Their state in Oxfordshire may not be so, well known. Mr. Ferguson, the minister of the Independent Church st Bicester, says, in a letter to the Patriot, Feb. 28th, 1845,—.
“In the village of Upper Arncott, the mud hovels have been built by the pea-lantry themselves. The height of some of these hovels, from the floor to the ceiling, is from 4 feet 8 inches to 5 feet. They are cold and damp. In several of them from five to nine persons sleep in the same low attic. On the 15th of January I took an experienced tradesman with me, and visited a number of cottages occupied by field labourers in our neighbourhood. In the second we entered, we found three broken chairs, one small table, and one pet. There was something on the damp floor in the shape of a bed, hut not bedstead, on which four persons sleep. In the fifth, we found a mixture of boiled fiour and water on the table for dinner. The quantity of flour was one pennyworth. The family are eleven in number, and they all sleep in one room or low attic. They pay 1s. 6d. a week rent. They had only one young man at work, —is wages were 4s. 6d. a week. On the 20th, we visited some of the pariah cottages in villages near Bicester, and in Oxfordshire. The first house at which we called is without a roof. Three poor creatures live there, and sleep jug behind the dær, on a damp cold floor, catching the rain water, which falls during a wet day, through the broken ceiling, which is the only roof on their devoted heads, I declare solemnly that I never entered so wretched a place, inhabited by human beings, in any part of the Highlands or Islands of Scotland. The second hovel is so small, that a man, his wife, and four children are compelled to do with one bed and bedstead. All the light to the attic comes from a pane of glass 8 inches square. The poor people live rent-free in these dens of woe and wretchedness, but like the poor at Arncott, they drink the muddy and filthy water the ponds supply them.
“The general rate of wages for men with families, is 8s. a week. One of the most frugal, who is in constant work, and has a wife and five children, lays out his wages as follows:—
Thus seven persons must be content with less than a loaf and a half each for seven days; or, if they should get more, the baker must suffer; they sometimes leave him and the landlord unpaid to have a few pence to buy beer to drown their sorrows, or a few yards of cotton to hide their nakedness. Many labourers, particularly in the winter half-year, have only a day's work now and then. A gentleman told me, a few days since, that there are 'thousands starving in Oxfordshire.' ”
These are a very few of the cases Mr. Ferguson details.
In the back streets of Blandford, I am credibly informed, there are living at this time as many as 90 labouring families who have been driven into the town from the impossibility of procuring dwellings in the country. In the Blandford Union, the average weekly cost per head of the in-door paupers, (men, women, and children,) for the quarter ending March, 1846, was, food, 2s. 2¼d.; dress, 5¼d.—2s. 7½d. Now this, for four persons, (and a married labourer's family would not average lower,) amounts to 10s. 6d.,no house rent included.—Letter to the Times, July 2nd, 1846.
An economical mode this of maintaining our poor! Might it not be worth while calculating how much more it costs the nation to keep all these people in idleness, than it would to employ them in agricultural labour, or in great public works?
The following may be taken as a fair and impartial general statement of the condition of the population of above two and a half millions, who appear form the returns to derive their subsistence directly from manufactures, under ordinary cireumstances, and in an average state of trade:—about one-third plunged in extreme misery, and hovering on the verge of actual starvation and one-third or more earning an income something better than the common agricultural labourer, but under circumstances very prejudicial to health, morality, and domestic comfort; viz., by the labour of young children, girls, and mothers of families in crowded factories; and, finally, a third earning high wages, amply sufficient to maintain them in respectability and comfort.—Laing, p. 27.
An enlightened and philanthropic foreign writer, (Eugène Buret—“La Misère des Classes Labourieuses,”) in describing the results of his personal observation in England, says: “That by the side of an opulence, activity, elegance, and wide spread comfort, of which the world has no example, every great city contains a real ghetto, a curesd quarter, a hell upon earth; where the reality of misery, depravity, and every hideous form of human suffering and degradation surpasses any thing that the imagination of a Dante ever conceived in describing the abode of devils.”
Dr. Kay, speaking of the district called Little Ireland, in Manchester, says: “This district has been frequently the haunt of hordes of thieves and desperadoes who defied the law, and is always inhabited by a class resembling savages in their appetites and habits.”
Captain Miller, Superintendent of Police, in his papers relative to the state of crime in Glasgow, respecting the low districts, wynds, and alleys, says: “There is concentrated every thing that is wretched, dissolute, loathcome, and pestilential. These places are filled by a population of many thousands of miserable creatures. (Mr. Symonds estimates them at 30,000. — Arts and Artizans, p. 116.) The houses in which they live are unfit even for sties, and every apartment is filled with a promiscuous crowd of men, women, and children, all in the most revolting state of filth and squalor. In these horrid dens, the most abandoned characters of the town are collected, and from thence they nightly issue, to pour upon the town every species of crime and abomination.
“In such receptacles, as they are permitted to remain, crime of every sort may be expected to abound; and unless the evil is speedily and vigorously checked, it must of necessity, increase. The people who dwell in these quarters of the city, regard themselves, from the hopelessness of their condition, as doomed to a life of wretchedness and crime.”—Laing, p. ll.
What strikes us most in reading all these harrowing details is, that there are not more desperate crimes; that, on the whole, life and property arc so secure; that we walk with safety. Surely human nature is very good, if it were but managed with wisdom, justice, and kindness.
The following account, taken from the report of F. Tancred, Esq., will serve as an illustration of the fundamental truth, which can never be too frequently or too forcibly impressed on our minds, that increase of wealth is not necessarily increase of happiness; and that avarice, or, as it is now christened, accumulation of capital, when it gets an undue ascendancy aver moral considerations, invariably produces misery.
Most of our readers will have heard of the invention of the hot blast, or use of hot air instead of cold air, in the smelting of iron. In Mr. Macculloch's statistical account of the British empire, a splendid picture is given of the rapid extension anticipated for the iron trade of the west of Scotland, in consequence of this improvement. This anticipation has been more than realized; properties worth a few years ago, only a few hundreds a year, now yield the proprietor upwards of £12,000 annually. The population of the two parishes of Old and New Monkland, where the most important of these works are situated, has increased from 19,447, in 1831, to 40,193, in 1841.
So much for the economical results; now for the reverse side of the picture.
“At Coatbridge, where a large portion of this population has been located within the last ten years, no church or clergyman has been supplied till very recently, chiefly at the expense of one of the numerous employers of labour in the district. These efforts came, of course too late, as must always be the case, so long as things of this importance are left to accident and chance. In the mean time a population has grown up, immersed more deeply than any I have met with in the disgusting habits of debauchery. Every thing that meets the eye or ear tells of slavish labour, united to brutal intemparance. I visited many of the houses attached to some of the works, and usually found them in a most neglected state, bespeaking an absence of all domestic comfort and attention to social duties. This domestic discomfort seemed attributable, among other causes, to the crowded state of the habitations which, from the want of buildings to contain the rapidly increasing population, were filled with lodgers. An infatuated love of money, for no purpose bet to minister to a degrading passion for ardent spirits, seems the all-pervading motive for action in this quarter. I was informed that almost universally, the higher the wages, the greater the discomfort in which the workmen lived, and the sooner, upon the least “lnese or other cessation of wages, they become destitute.”—Laing, p. 43.
“Capitalists and speculators without capital, in the pursuit of wealth, congregate in vast masses the vital materials which produce wealth, without taking any care for, the moral or physical being of these essential implements. Whenever such accumulations become pestilential, or otherwise dangerous, they are rooted out by a summary process under the authority of parliament, which, while it will not be slow in honouring the principles involved in such measures, will employ month after month, in determining on rival schemes of unprincipled pillage, or in some speculation. The great living mass, who are the creators of wealth, are in its pursuit trampled down with as much indifference as so many weeds.”—Times, Dec. 8th, 1844.
“A still more important consideration is, that a repeal of the Corn Laws, even if it were to be attended with all the consequences which the most sanguine of its advocates predict, would evidently, in a few years, bring us back to the point from which we started, with an increased population, and all our difficulties on an enlarged scale, unless the system on which we have been proceeding for the last fifty years is radically altered. The rapid increase of manufacturing industry during the war did not prevent, if it did not rather occasion, the misery and distress under which we are now suffering. All the worst evils of ignorance, demoralization, infant and female labour, increase of destitution, grew up simultaneously with a more rapid advance of manufacturing wealth than it is possible to expect from a repeal of the Corn Laws. The temporary prosperity of the period from 1833, to 1836, when profits were high, food cheap, and when our export trade took a new and extensive development, terminated in the crisis of 1837, and the lingering decline under which we have been since suffering.”—Laing, p. 95.
To all who would thoroughly understand our social state, its evils, and their remedies, an attentive perusal of Mr. Laing's book is earnestly recommended.
If, on a subject on which almost every thinker has his Utopia, we might be permitted to hare ours; if we might point to the principle on which, at some distant date, we place our chief hope for heating the widening breach between those who toil and those who live on the produce of former toil, it would be that of raising the labour from a receiver of hire, a mere bought instrument in the work of preduetion, having no residuary interest in the work itself, to the position of being in some sort a partner in it. The plan of remunerating subordinates in whom trust must be reposed, by a commission on the returns instead of only a fixed salary, is already familiar in mercatile concerns, on the ground of its utility to the employer. The wisdom, even in a worldly sense, of associating the interests of the agent with the end he is employed to attain, is so universally recognised in theory, that it is not chimerical to expect it may one day be more extensively exemplified in practice. In some form of this policy we see the only or the most practical means of harmonizing the right of industry and those of property; of making the empleyers the real chief of the people, leading and guiding them in a work in which they also are interested; a work of co-operation, not of mere living and servitude; and justifying by the superiors capacity in which they contribute to the work, the higher remuneration which they receive for their share of it.
In the able and interesting Lettres Politiques of Mr. Charles Duveyrier, some account is given of an attempt which has been succesfully made to carry this principle into practice on a small scale by an employer of labour at Paris. The name of the individual is Leclaire, his occupation that of a house-painter, and he has made his proceedings public in a pamphlet, entitled “Repartition des Bénéfices du travail on 1842.”M. Leclaire pays his labourers and other employés by fixed salaries or weekly wages, in the usual manner. He assigns also to himself a fixed allowance. The result has been most prosperous both to himself and to his labourers, not one of whom, who worked as much as three hundred days, obtained in the year of which he has published the accounts less than 1500 francs (£60), and some considerably more.
In the mining districts of Cornwall, the working miners are invariably joint adventurers in the concern, and for intelligence, independence, and good conduct, as wen as prosperous circumstances, no labouring population in the island is understood to be better than the Cornish miners.—Edinburgh Review for Oct. 1845.
Lord Wallscourt has long pursued a similar plan in the cultivation of his estates in Ireland, and its operation has been such as to stimulate the supine Irish peasant into active industry, and to shed prosperity and gladness over a district that was formerly the abode of famine and despair. In reply to our inquiries, Lord Wallscourt says, “I have tried the plan for seventeen years, and have found it to answer much beyond my hopes; inasmuch as it completely identifies the workmen with the success of the farm, besides giving me full liberty to travel on the Continent for a year at a time; and on my return, I have always found that the farm had prospered more than when I was present.”Lord Wallscourt's practice is to reckon every man the investor of as much capital as will yield, at five per cent. per annum, the sum paid to him in wages.”—Treatise on the Steam Engine, by the Artizans Club; quoted in the Atlas, July 18th, 1846.
The Birmingham Pilot gives a long report of an important public meeting, upwards of one thousand persons being present, lately held in that town, to hear an exposition of the grievances which oppress the journeymen tailors from the unjust and inadequate wages they receive from their employers. The following remarks are judicious, and cannot be too widely disseminated: “The superabundance of labour in the market, no doubt, in some measure accounts for the present depressed state of the tailors' trade, but it cannot be denied that the mammon-worshipping hearts of not a few of the employers are more disposed to screw a penny out of the poor man's labour than a shilling out of the rich man's purchase. The labourer, with a starving wife and family, can ill afford to stand out for a fair price if it be grudged, while the rich man, with his golden purse, can shake it in the merchant's face and beat him down to within an inch of the poor marr's life. Bad as trade is, and keen as competition has become, we verily believe that, until the avarice by which our capitalists are now actuated be uprooted, the rich man will get richer, and the one shuts himself up in himself, and leaves the other to realize that oppression which drives even wise men mad.”— Extracted from the Patriot, March, 1845.
At the meeting on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Distressed Needlewomen, the Chairman, Lord Ashley, in his speech said, he “would press on the attention of the meeting the very great evils arising in all directions from the constant and unceasing efforts to obtain every thing which could be made or executed by a human creature at the very lowest minimum of remuneration upon which it was possible for that mortal and immortal creature to exist within the limits of this side the grave. How did this system work upon this wretched class of persons? He knew one instance of a poor woman having toiled consecutively, day after day, for 20 hours, without intermission, and she desisted only because nature would hold out no longer”
Mr. T. Jeffreys observed, “If the number of needlewomen in London was computed, he believed that, permitting them to work only 10 hours a day, instead of, on the average, 14 or 15 hoars, the result would be, that there would be fewer workwomen in the metropolis than could do the work; consequently, a 10 hours' regnlation would have the effect of curing the evil by raising wages. He thought it would be a good thing if they could get the needlewomen to bind themselves together not to work more than a fixed number of hours. He had understood the large house of Silver and Co, and others had said, ' Force us to pay more, and we shall be happy to do so. If you compel the whole body to comply, we shall be very glad.' ”
Mr. Redmayne said, “There was a general movement in the present day to shorten the hours of labour. Shopmen, warehousemen, and even carriers, had all demanded, and to some extent succeeded, in shortening their hours of labour. But the weaker sex were left to toil on unremittingly or starve; and were half-starved, notwithstanding their ceaseless work. They could not spare time even to ask for justice. He should like to see a strike among them.”
Such societies as this are objected to on the ground that by relieving a part the remainder are thrown into a worse condition: but it doas not appear on the principles of the political economists, why some being employed for shorter hours at rather better prices, should be disadvantageous to those who are conseat to work more for less remuneration, every one, it being allowed, having a right to obtain work on the most advantageous terms. This objection is of weight when work is done in prisons, schools, and workhouses at less than the usual rates. All these evils could only be put a stop to by legislative interference; but it would be very difficult to apply it. The great benefit of such associations is, to call public attention to the evil, and it may be hoped, to inspire employers with a more conscientious sense of their duty to those they employ. The very great competition for work of every kind which can be performed by females, and their utter powerleasness to obtain fair and just terms for themselves, often throw them as completely into the power of their employers as if they were slaves; and it is to be feared that many of these, in not giving sufficient remuneration to support life, act upon the same principle, though probably not acknowledged to their own minds, as the holders of slaves before the abolition of the slave-trade: that it is cheaper to work them out and get fresh, knowing that however great may be the number which every year die from too hard work, or insufficient nourishment, there will always be enough left to take all the employment they can furnish them with.
“My earnest wish has been, during my term of power, to impress the people of this country with a belief that the legislature was animated by a sincere desire to frame its legislation upon the principles of equity and justice. I have a strong belief that the greatest object which we, or any other government, can contemplate, should be, to elevate the social condition of that class of the people with whom we are brought into no direct relationship by the exercise of the elective franchise.
I wish to convince them, that our object has been so to apportion taxation, that we shall relieve industry and labour from any undue burden, and transfer it, as far as is consistent with the public good, to those who are better able to bear it.”—hpeecs of Sir Robert Peel on the Third Reading of the Corn Importation Bill, May 19th, 1846.
Extracted from the Revue Eucyclopédique, Sept. 1826.
It must have been observed by all who have endeavoured to obtain charitable assistance for the poor, that though there are some whose benevolence is equal to their affluence, yet that generally those are more ready to give to others, and more interested by distress, who feel the pressure of circumstances, than those who are raised above any knowledge of what deprivation is. Those who think most of their own luxuries, think least of the wants of others. “More is given in charity by indigence than by abundance.”—Tr.
The contract which constitutes the métayer, mezzaiuolo, is the most common form of letting land in Tuscany. The proprietor entrusts to the métayer a house and a (métairie) farm of about ten acres, already in a productive state, with the cattle and agricultural capital necessary to improve it. The métayer in return engages to execute without expense, with his family, all the labour which the estate requires, and to content himself, instead of wages, with half the harvests, whilst he consigns the other half to the proprietor.— Tr.
Val de Nierole contains 158,000 English acres; the domain of the Duke of Sutherland, in Scotland, covers a million.
Taille, an arbitrary tax; cervee a certain time required for labour on the king's domain, or in public works.—Tr.
“Of 1 500 proletaries slain in a battel.”Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 46, ed. 1804.—-Tr.
Extracted from the Revue Mcnsugelle d' Economie Politique, February, 1834.
All this has been much remedied since M. de Sismondi wrote, but it shows the evils to which the system led, until checked by legislative interference. —Tr.
This word is used properly only in speaking of the management of woods and forests; dividing them into portions, and cutting down a certain part every year, so as to prevent waste.—Tr.
“Comme un troc de tous les frais de production qu'elle fair, contre tous les produits qu'elle obtient, troc d'autant plus avantageux, que l'on donne moins pour obtenir plus. Elle est en prog éés éhaque fois qu'elle parvient à obtenir plus d'utilit é pour le m ême frais, ou la même utilté pour de moéndres frais.”
Selon le premier c'est un prix de monopolie, selon le second un Ioyer du trarail de la terre. In his definitions on political economy, Mr. Malthus defines rent to be “that portion of the produce of land which remains to the owner after all the outgoings belonging to its cultivation are paid, including the ordinary profits of the capital employod;” and Mr. Ricardo, in his Principles of Political Economy, calls it, “that portion of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.”—Tr.
The French expression for expense in general, manger son bien, to waste one's estate.—Tr.
Ruins his vines by pruning them to make them bear.—Tr.
“I am far from denying that in the end the country gains, whenever the greatest possible results are obtained by what is called the minimum of labour; but the consequence must ever unavoidably be, that the demand for labour will be diminished in the same ratio. This invention of the thrashing-machine was a proof of this, and it was a heavy blow to the poor labourer. It took from him a large portion of his winter's employ—his employ at a time when he most required it. Allow me, for a short time, to digress and state, as an old practical farmer, my opinion of this invention. I consider that not only has it been the cause of much distress to the poor labourer, but that it has been of serious injury to the farmer, and that no sensible man should use one, if he can help it. This may appear strange, but it is easily explained. In point of expense little is saved by the thrashing-machine. But the great mischief is, that it decrease the quantity of grain produced, as we have no longer the quality of manure in our yards that we used to have before its introduction. As much corn is now thrashed, and as much straw thrown out of the barn doors in one day as would give employment to a labourer for nearly a mouth. The straw is spoilt by the machine, and the cattle will not eat it as they will when thrashed out by the flail. When the flail was need, the quantity of straw thrown out of the barn doors every day was about what was required for the provender of the cattle, and the littering down of the yards and stables; and it came out fresh and sweet. Now it is all thrown out in the early part of the winter, and lies exposed to the weather, which injures it as much, if not more, than the rollers of the thrashing-machine. Before the thrashing - machine was invented, a tenant was obliged to have, besides his stock on the farm, a sufficiency of money to pay his first year's rent; but the thrashing-machine enables him to thrash out the corn of the first year's produce in time to meet the rent of that year. Such is but too often the case at present; a farm is hired without the requisite capital, the tenant struggles on for a few years, till he breaks down; or, should he remain to the expiration of his lease, from want of proper outlay, the lard is given up in so impoverished a state, that the landlord has to make an allowance to the incoming tenant, to enable him to restore it. It may be argued that the law and the covenants of the lease will protect the landlord; very true, but it is useless to go to law with a man who has no money.”—Letter from Norfolk farmer to the Examiner.
See notes at the end of this Essay.—Tr.
Extracted from the Revue mensuelle d' Economie politique.—July and August, 1834.
“And the wicked man who had lied to his brothers amassed more wealth than the wicked man who had enchained them. The name of this last is Tyrant, the other has no name except in hell.”—Paroles d'un Croyant, viii.
It is impossible to lay open with more clearness, and at the same time more eloquence, than M. de la Mennnais has done, the double action through which the labour of the operative increases, and his wages diminish; but a believer (un croyani), a charitable man, should not have supposed a wish to injure in the master manufacturer, and called down upon him the vengeance of the multitude, when he only saw the invincible power of things.
“Bow thy head, oh Sciamber, with humility; adore what thou hast burnt, mad burn what thou has adered.”—Gregor. Turon.,liv. ii. § 31, p. 177. The object of politicas eeonomy seems to be to make the entrance into every career easy, without examining how all tan be followed; formerly it as thought desirable to make it difficult to enter upon any career, but once entered, progress was certain. Instead of making it easy for the poor to be born, aud difficult to live, social organization ought to make it difficult to be born man easy to live.
Manners and customs which are now looked upon as merely picturesque, preserve, in the Swiss cantons, in many districts of Italy and Germany, that local indnstry which has not yet been absorbed by great manufactures. Each little district sad its national costume; head-dress, the form and colour of the clothes, ornaments, shoes, all was rigorously fixed; it is so still in that part of Switzerland which is not manufacturing. These costumes are rich and durable, and it is very well. for a girl to know that she cannot decently show herself, consequently not marry, without having amassed the little capital represented by these best clothes (habits de féte); but at the same time these costumes, unknown in the towns, are manufactured in each district. It is the way in which the women of the villages earn their bread, weaving the stuffs and hats, the dress-makers and modistes of the village, working for a market which they very well know, and are in no danger of encumbering. All this employment would disappear, all these industrial resources would be taken away from the women of the mountains of Appenzell, of Schwitz, of Entlibuch, and of Emmenthal, if the inhabitants of these valleys got accustomed to cover their bodies with the calicoes of St. Gall, and their heads with the handkerchiefs of Glarus.
It would be well if this rule were attended to in every attempt to give employment to those who want it, or are selling their labour too low, lest by assisting stress some, others are more died. Tr.
Extracted from the Revue Mensuelle d' Economie Politique: May and June, 1835.
Les colonies da anciennes comparées à celles des modernes, sous le rapport de leur influence sur le bonheur du genre humain.—Tiré de la Bibliothéque universelle de Genève, Jan. 1837.
From civitas, city, we have the words civis, civilis, civilizatio.
A metre is a little more than a yard.
statute labour, which a pesant had to do for his lord.
Exploiter, to make the best of any thing by working it. Exploiter ses terres, to improve his estate. Exploiter une mine, to work a mine. Exploiter une forés, to fell a forest.
Du Suffrage Universel. Fxtrait de la revue mensuelle d' Economie Politique. Mors, 1834.
“Let alip the dogs of war.”
We begin the publication of our essay on the fundamental questions of social order by this little treatise, printed in the year 1825, but which has never been published. It was designed for the Annals of Legislation and of Political Economy, which had just been established at Geneva, and which were almost immediately suppressed by their authors, out of deference for the governmeat, when the threats of all the neighbouring powers, obliged the Swiss to restrain the liberty of the stress, at the period of the conclusa. Circumstances have changed; the allusions, no longer relate to the present time; experience has thrown new light on the subjects here treated ou. We shall make use of it in the following articles, but we have only made slight additions to this first essay, that its date as well as its spirit may render it foreign to any thing polomical.—Extracted from the Revue mensuelle d' Economie Politique, Vol v. 1834.
It is twelve years since this was written, and the new states, formerly Spanish have advanced no farther in the reconatruction of social order. Perhaps no real progress cau be expected, till the whole generation accustomed to civil war, to violence, and to disregard of law, shall have retired from active life: a melancholy example to add to so many others, of the inability of men who have destroyed, to reconstruct. It should not make us renounce revolutions when they are necessary; it rather teaches us how dearly we purchase libterty by their means
We have elsewhere explained that we understand by general will the sam of what is best in all the most eminent opinions, and not the proportionate mean between the most advanced and the most absurd. (See Essay on Universal Suffrage, ante, p. 290.)
Extracted from the Revuee mensuelle d'Economie Politique, October, 1834.
I developed for the first time the principles which will be found here, in 1799, in my researches on the constitutions of free nations, which are not printed. I reproduced them in the History of the Italian Republics in 1807; in 1815 in the examination of the French constitution (acte additionnel), and elsewhere.
Valetage, “flunkeyism.”— Carlyle.
Extracted from the Revue mensuelle d' Economic Politique, July and August, 1835.
Of the French revolutien.
Extracted from Etudes sur les Sciences Sociales, vol. i p. 329.
Sir James Mækintosh's. Journals, vol. i pp. 500, 526.
Prescription, the law which in some countries makes a debt null after a certain period; to interrupt it is arbitrarily to allow the debt still to be prosecuted.