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Dec. 7, 1850.] ©#$ &*&>*!?+ 877
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SOCIAL REFORM. EPISTOL-Sl OBSCUROEUM YIR...
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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The Glaziers' Strike At The Crystal Pala...
of that word , in society at all ; but when working inen shall be associated in voluntary partnerships under real masters of industry , undertaking work on reasonable terms on their own account , and not scamping it .
Dec. 7, 1850.] ©#$ &*&>*!?+ 877
Dec . 7 , 1850 . ] © #$ &*&>*!? + 877
Social Reform. Epistol-Sl Obscuroeum Yir...
SOCIAL REFORM . EPISTOL-Sl OBSCUROEUM YIRORUM . XX . —Le Dboit atx Tbava . il , No . 5 . To Thobnton Hunt , Esq . " Where'there is a will , there is a way "—out of the pit oi pauperism . Kawden , near Leeds , Dec . 3 , 1850 . Dear Sir , —In my former letters I argued for the acknowledgment of the Droit au Travail as a principle of British law .
But , granting all these arguments to be proved , how far , you . may ask , do they advance us ? The difficulty is in finding the work , not in proving that it ought to be found : grant the right to labour , and the duty and interest of society to enforce it ; how is it to do so ? Enough , and more than enough , you may say , of abstract talk about first principles ; what practical suggestions do you propose ? what actual measure would you have Government to take ? what law would you have passed ? In a word , what thing would you get done ?
These would be questions fair enough ; and yet I think you will agree with me that we are doomed to a vast deal more of this kind of talk before we shall get to much practice . A right must be acknowledged de jure before it can be realized de facto 2 and how much of the cry against what is called theorizing about first principles springs not from the wish for practice , but from fear of the principles , fear of the trouble of defining them , or of the sacrifice of realizing them . If I learn that my neighbour has a right to work , I learn also that
it is my duty to try my best to find him work ; no wonder , then , if I would let alone that branch of learning—keep off it as unprofitable ; for I want no new duties , am quite contented with old ones ; and this is not only a new duty , but no easy one : and it is because I judge of other men by myself ( for which I beg their pardon , but cannot help it ) , that , knowing my own temptation to shirk this duty by denying it , or terming it useless theory , which comes to the same thing , I have tried to show how it is bound up with the very existence of society ; that it is , in fact , the tie which binds me to my
fellows . Moreover , we are forced by our opponents to define and defend our principles , their objections attacking not so much the details of any particular plan , as the inherent nature of all possible plans ; declaring either that they are in themselves injurious—must do harm—or that they are impracticable —can do no good ; and therefore , it is added , may , and probably will , do harm . Mr . Mill , for example , in that chapter of hi p Political Economy in which he discusses " remedies for low wages , "
dismisses the proposition of guarantees of employment by the State almost with contempt , as sure to relax all restrictions of population , and , therefore , to aggravate the disease it attempts to cure . I will not weary you by reiterating the arguments in my last letter , which seemed to me to show that the result would be precisely opposite ; but Mr . Mill is an authority for whom I have so profound a respect , and with whom , if I differ , I am so doubtful of my own judgment , that I would gladly take counsel with others on the matter , and so would
beg you and all our friends to read over the chapter I allude to ( Book 2 , cap . 12 ) , asking , Would or could he have taken this view , had he not ignored the rights and duties of the question ? for had he admitted the duty of society to right the labourer by employing him , he would not have feared the consequence of its performance , but would have felt that , in the long run , duty is sure to take care of itself . Moreover , he seems to me to dwell too
little on hope as a motive , and too much on fear ; or rather , to overrate man ' s power to force man to prudence , and to underrate the influence of circumstances to persuade him : forgetting that , as I said in my last , fear follows hope as its shadow , and that , therefore , the more hope the more fear ; and a man once put in a way to get on in the world , would feel that the bar which an improvident marriage would raise across his path , is far more dreadful to him than is the union-house to the
aimless drudge whose life has no hope but to shun that starvation from which even its prison walls are a refuge . Depend upon it , if a man can , by the strength of his sinews or the sweat of his brain , raise a house about him which is a home , he will
dread being driven out of it by his own imprudence far more than he will being driven from a house which is no home , but a den , a miserable homeeven though he be forced to exchange it for the " Bastille . " After all , no " Bastille" can be framed so fearful as famine ; and that the fear of famine is no preventive check to population , a few days' tour in Connaught or Munster would quickly convince any one . And now , one word as to the charge of
impracticability made so often and so loudly by men of practice and men of theory , by official politicians whose sole science is expediency , and by doctrinaire professors who would leave men to govern themselves by the rules of political economy , or rather by their interpretation of them . " Your plan is impossible , " they all cry . ' * You may talk as you will of man ' s right to work , and the state ' s duty to find it ; but if the labourer cannot right himself , the state cannot right him—its duty cannot exceed its power , and it has no power to employ labour ,
for it can get neither employers nor labourers : not employers , for all whom it appoints are incapable or untrustworthy , any way unfit—know not how to fill their office , or would make it subserve their own interest : not labourers , because state labour is sham labour , ' like masters like men ; ' the master will not care to get the work done , and the man will not care to do it , for the interests of neither will be involved . Your object may seem work , but is wage ; you do not want to get work done , you want the labourer
to be doing it in order that you may pay him : you may succeed in your real object , get what you want—for a time : you may give wage for sham work till you have exhausted your capital or wagefund ; you may pay men for doing nothing till you have nothing left wherewith to pay them ; or , if the superintendents you set over them do succeed in getting work out of them , it will be because they get it for themselves ; and , so if you tax the community to employ the unemployed , one of two results must follow—either , bv setting them to work
for some individual capitalist , you will enable such individual to pay less wage for the same work , because you will make him a present of the work for which you pay , and thus you will rob the community for the benefit of a few—and as , by reducing the rate of wages you will encrease the recklessness of the labourer by lowering his standard of living , your effort to employ paupers , as in the allowance system under the old poor-law , will end in making them . Or else if the state , as you advise , really turns employer itself , and for itself , it may , or rather it will , get the process of production under its own management , for it will undersell the
private employer in the produce market , because it will not want a profit , and it will overbid him in the labour market , because it will oft ' er wages for sham work ; and so you will , it is true , prevent the mistakes of the capitalist , for you will take from him the power of making them ; but , in taking his capital from the capitalist , you will destroy it as well as him , for you will waste it . In the place of the present captains of industry you will have one grand generalissimo of idleness . " So much for the philosophy of the objectors ; and then , as to facts , tney give us plenty ; flinging at us more especially the public works of Ireland in the famine and the ateliers nationaux in Paris ;
and , in short , they tell us that ail our experiments have failed and must fail , because we attempt production , disregarding , or rather disclaiming , its chief incitement , and , therefore , its chief element of success , viz ., the individual self-interest of the producer : if the old proverb be true , " whatever is everybody ' s business is nobody ' s , " much more true , they say , is it , that what is everybody ' s interest is nobody ' s . Now . my reply is that this old proverb is true no longer ; the time was when it was true—the true measure of man ' s knowledge of his own interest ;
but now everyday it becomes less and less true , for everyday each man knows his interest better—feels that it is more and more bound up with that of his fellows , and , therefore , that their business is his business , and his business is theirs ; and so he and they together are more and more willing to appoint agents who shall do their joint business , and save the time of both ; and hence we find the tendency of society is to encrease the power and enlarge the functions of Government , while at the same time it encreases its responsibility , and the number of those to whom it is responsible j and so the members of a community will each find it his individual interest to order its governors , who are his servants , to free
him from the pauper who is a burden on his industry , and to trust them in their efforts , because he knows he can , and they know he will , see that they do their best . But it is not alone on this general feeling of community of interest that I would rely—on each man ' s feeling that it would advantage him that this business should be done by the man appointed to do it ; but I would make the interest of the man who is
appointed and all his mates depend upon its being done—make them feel that it would be altogether sacrificed if it was not done—in a word , in the national workshops I would make the wage of both foreman and workmen depend on good work being turned out . Instead of herding our surplus labourers as we do now in pens , which in mockery we call workhouses , or tempting them to idleness at home by diminishing their wants to the lowest possible point , and then supplying them by our gifts—I would make the gratification of their wants
depend on their own industry . Labour , not relief , was , indeed , the original meaning and purpose of our poor-law . The 43 rd of Queen Elizabeth decrees that the " overseers shall take order for setting to to work all such persons , married or unmarried , as have no means to maintain them , " & c . ; and also , " that a convenient stock shall be provided of flax , hemp , & c , to set the poor to work . " But , though our ancestors thus exacted labour from the pauper , they forgot to secure him its reward : they relieved him according to his wants , that is , according to their estimate of his wants , not according to his woik . No wonder , then , that his
labour was inefficient , for it was unpaid : he soon discovered that whether he worked or no his pittance would be neither more nor less , just as much as their fear or conscience induced them to give to save him from starvation , and so being sure of parish pay , he ceased to work for it ; or if he did work the parish paid him , but the private employer , the farmer , got the work . And it was to prevent this last robbery of the parish that the new poor-law was passed , with its General Order , declaring that " the payment of wages of able-bodied persons , wholly or partially , out of the poor-rate , is an abuse which must be prevented . "
But this abuse , and many another , arose because our ancestors made this great mistake ; they looked on the forced idleness of the labourer as a nuisance to themselves instead of an injustice to him ; and so they tried to force him to work for their profit instead of enabling him to work for his own . What , then , I would aim at is the repeal of this general order , which compels paupers to be idle or starve , and to substitute for it regulations which would oblige him to be industrious or destitute . I would have society do its duty to him by enabling
him to do his , and then let him suffer the consequences if he neglects it . I would employ the surplus labourer on condition that his reward should depend on his success ; that is , that he should be set to task work instead of day work , wherever possible—and in almost all cases task work , with ingenuity , is possible—and that the rate of wage for this taskwork , after deducting a subsistence not more than present parish pittance ,
should vary according to the profit . For example , take a hundred paupers in an agricultural district—I would put them on a farm with spades in their hands , and keep account of how much each did ; and then if there were any surplus after paying their subsistence and the interest of the capital advanced , and the expenses of management—as soon as I had ascertained that it was made , 1 would divide it , giving each man his share in proportion to the task which he had done .
Possibly it might be best , in order to make the incitement to industry more immediate , to mako the subsistence itself vary in some degree according to the efficiency of the labour ; but this is a question of detail , as also would be the question whether the salary of the manager should depend in any measure upon the profits . Probably that would not be necessary , for the public is a hard master , and its service no sinecure now-a-days . Besides , the advancement of the managers in their profession would depend on their success ; and , indeed , if they worked as hard as the present poor-law officials there would be little fault to find .
Then , as to interference with the private employer , I would provide that the state labourers be engaged only in what you call " primary employments ; " that is , in the production of necessaries , not nicknacks—of articles the demand for which is only limited by their cost ; but with this limita-
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), Dec. 7, 1850, page 13, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_07121850/page/13/
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