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the prices of most articles are artificially enhanced in this country; almost every interest is supported, either by confederacies of the masters against the public, or supported by protecting duties: our timber, our tea, our sugar, and even bread, are all retailed to us at artificially enhanced prices. An artificial price of labour, then, is not an exception, but in accordance with the general system. The trade unions, however, do not seek the support of protecting duties; they do not wish that competition should be excluded or narrowed by fiscal regulations; all they aim at is, not the taxing of rivals, but free liberty, individually or collectively, to fix the price and regulate the sale of the only article in which they deal their industry.

That labour does sometimes need protection may be established by reference to the treatment of factory children, and I refer to this more readily, in order to refute a prevalent error. Legislative interference in this case has been objected to on two grounds: first, that wages are best settled by the master and workmen, without the meddling of a third power; and secondly, that masters always pay as high wages as they can afford to pay at the current rate of profit. The first objection I shall pass over; it is admitted by all, that infant labour forms a special exception to the general rule applicable to adults but it is the assumption that masters pay wages according to the profits they realize by the sale of commodities, I shall notice.

Now, I ask whether the profits realized in the cotton, woollen, and linen manufactures, thirty years

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ago, were not far greater than at present? This will hardly be denied; it cannot be denied, because the immense fortunes rapidly accumulated during the war, and the slowness and rarity with which they have been accumulated since the peace, establish the fact. Having disposed of this interrogatory, I ask another, namely-Whether factory children were treated materially better; whether their wages were higher, and the hours of working shorter from 1800 to 1815 when profits were so much greater, than in 1832 when they are so much less? Answers to this may differ but I happen to know, of my own personal knowledge, that the poor factory child was doomed to the same merciless and unrequited toil in the former as in the latter period. Acts of parliament establish this, independently of my testimony. The 42d Geo. III. c. 73, passed in 1802 (see p. 98), and many subsequent enactments, show that parliament, nearly thirty years since, found it necessary to interfere for the protection of infants against the cupidity of their taskmasters. This, I think, fully demonstrates that the rate of profit does not invariably determine the rate of wages, and that other motives than the mere generosity of employers must occasionally interfere to compel them to a more equitable division of their gains with their workpeople.

One consequence ascribed to the trade unions, I have not yet noticed, namely, their tending to injure foreign trade, by keeping up the price of labour. Wages, as before explained, only affect commerce

when they reduce its gains below the average profit of capital. They are only one element in the prices of commodities, from which, if we suffer disadvantage, it is compensated by our exhaustless beds of coal-by superior capital, skill, and machinerythat will long enable us to undersel our rivals in the markets abroad. When other countries equal us in these, it will be time enough to allege the high rate of wages as an obstacle to commercial industry. Of late years, we have been sustaining a national loss from low rather than high wages. The wealth we ought to have accumulated by our mechanical improvements, has been shared in by other nations, without an equivalent return. Our merchants have been running a race of cheapness, not against the foreigner, but against each other, and selling their goods greatly below the price necessary to keep possession of the markets of Germany and America. Had wages been higher, prices could not have been so far depressed by individual competition; what the foreigner has gained, our own artisans have lost. An over-supply of labour unfortunately afforded too great facilities for an over-supply of commodities. Competition for employment enabled manufacturers to reduce wages-to increase the hours of workingmake one man do the work of two-children, of adults-adding thereto a vast increase of steam power-and the result of all, an unexampled glut of commodities.

The consequences of this over-production are obvious. They are unprecedented LOW PRICES-prices

that neither yield a fair profit to the master, nor fair wages to the workman-and both are dissatisfied.

It must now, I think, be conceded that I have endeavoured to state both sides of a very difficult question. The conflicting claims of capital and industry present new features for the study of the economical writer. I am not an indiscriminate admirer of the Trade's Unions: for I mistrust the honest exercise of all power, whether in governments or the people, which is not open and responsible. My chief aim has been to ascertain, by impartial inquiry, whether they are likely to be productive of more good or evil; whether they are likely to lead to a more equitable apportionment of the aggregate income of the industrious orders, and thereby to an increase of their aggregate happiness ; and whether the machinery of their formation does not offer facilities for disseminating a knowledge of the true principles that govern the price of labour, and which I have endeavoured to explain in the preceding chapters on wages.

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CHAP. XI.

EMPLOYMENT FUND-SOCIETIES.

Principle of Supply and Demand mostly regulates Profits and Wages-Social Evils of Confederacies of Workmen-Effects of a Combination of Shopkeepers-High Wages of Tailors in the Metropolis the result of their Combination-Additional Objects which Trade Societies ought to embrace-Employ ment Fund-Societies-Suggestions for meeting Fluctuations in Trade-Proportion Wages form of Prices-Corn-laws.

FROM the inquiries of the last chapter it is apparent trade societies for the maintenance of highpriced labour are obnoxious to serious objections. They are constantly liable to be perverted from their legitimate objects, either into arbitrary tribunals exercising an oppressive power over workmen not members of them, or into hurtful interferences with the freedom of employers. They are an attempt to establish a monopoly in the sale of labour as hurtful as monopolies in the sale of commodities. The unrestricted operation of supply and demand mostly fixes the equitable price of labour as of merchandise. Under the action of this principle the respective shares of master and workman in the prices of commodities will ordinarily be fairly apportioned. If, by improvements in machinery, or other cause, the profits of the master are augmented, the wages of the workmen will undergo improvement; because

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