while the field of those who rise through the favour or generosity of others is always limited; 2d, That those who rise by the former means are essentially producers, each step they take in their ascent being placed on some benefit conferred on the human race; while the other class add nothing to the possessions of their fellow-creatures, but merely compete with each other for the fund, whatever it may be, that is free for distribution among them. To an individual, if he have as good chances of personal success in the latter as in the former department, it may be of no moment which he adopts; but to the community, and to those who endeavour to speak for the community, it is of moment that the productive class should be encouraged, at least by precept and the influence of public opinion.

We have hitherto spoken simply of man as a producer; let us now devote a few words to the class of productive agents which do not appear directly to embody man's labour, yet are in reality mere shapes and developments of labour-machinery.

It is now generally admitted that machinery, by multiplying at a cheap rate the necessaries and the luxuries of life, puts at the command of the poorer classes a widened source of comfort and enjoyment; and in this view it has been said that each great invention has been to those among whom its produce has been distributed, as if the earth had grown more fruitful or the sun warmer. On the other hand, it is stated that every invention is a permanent evil to the working-classes, by superseding human labour, and doing through insensate instruments that which the human being gained his bread by doing with his hands. incidental hardship is often suffered by those whose hand labour is immediately superseded, cannot be denied; but that the change has a general effect in reducing the aggregate amount of hand labour in the community, admits of contradiction.

That

The amount of available employment in any country will of course bear a proportion to the amount of its capital. If a man has so much capital to invest in manufacturing production, on what can he spend it? Part of it may go to pay the rent of the land on which his raw produce has grown; that can never be a large proportion. Another part will go to pay the profits of the various persons through whose hands the commodity passes; the amount of this will depend on incidental circumstances, and it is not likely to be a greater proportion in machine manufacture than in hand manufacture. We have now the remaining and largest share; and whether machinery intervene in the operation or not, this portion must be spent as wages of labour, and not otherwise. We must, then, presume either that the capitalist will have less to spend when he supersedes hand labour by machine power, or that he will be disposed to spend a smaller proportion of his capital. It is quite possible, as we shall show presently, to sink

capital in machinery; but, practically, this is not done, and the capital not only continues entire, but generally, from the rapid market obtained, and the consequent addition to profits, becomes gradually enlarged. On the other hand, the owner cannot keep his capital from being invested if he would. If he leave it in his bank, or if he lend it on security, it is employed by other people, and it must be employed in the same way-on the wages of labour. Let us exemplify the necessity of capital finding its way to the worker in the form of wages by a simple supposition. A man has £1000, which he chooses to invest in the making of stockings. If he employ women to knit them, he pays wages directly to these women. If he erect a machine for making them, he will of course have less wages to pay for the conversion of the worsted threads into a knitted texture; but on the other hand he will have to pay the machine-makers who construct the frame, and those through whose hands the materials have passed, back to the collier who extracts the coals out of the earth, and the miner who extracts the iron. With the small exceptions we have above-mentioned, his £1000 must go as payment of wages just as it did before; and the general effect which his operations produce on the community is, that he multiplies the number of stockings which he can bring into the market. In reality it will be found that the £1000 employs fewer persons-for the machine-maker and the miner demand higher wages than the knitter, and something must generally be understood as paid to the inventor of the machinery, as the reward of his labours; but still the money goes to producers, and is virtually wages of labour.

It has been very ingeniously argued, however, that machinery tends to contract capital, and consequently the reward of hand labour, since the price of the machine, though it has once given employment to labour, is sunk in producing the machine, and cannot again be employed. Thus, should a man have £2000, which he proposes to embark in manufacturing production, if he buy a machine with £1000, he has only thenceforth £1000 which he can continue to embark in production; and though it is true that the £1000, with the aid of the machine, will produce more than the £2000 without its aid, yet this is not by hand labour, the market for which must be thus so far contracted. If the machine were a permanent object-like water-power, or the wind, never requiring repair or replacement, and never superseded by new inventions and improvements-this would be so far true; and it may be observed in passing, that it is an argument which has much more applicability to agricultural improvements, and to permanent fixed works, such as warehouses, harbours, &c. than to machinery. In fact every worker in tile-draining, which is a means of increasing the produce of the soil without labour, and

every erector of piers, harbours, and other permanent structures, is absorbing the capital that forms the fund of wages. Thus it may be said that every mason and excavator works to reduce the amount of capital to be devoted to the support of the labouring population. We had indeed lately a melancholy instance of the truth of this theory. In the making of a railway, for instance, the capital employed is sunk, and constitutes so much removed from the general fund for the payment of wages, until it is restored by the tedious realisation of profits. The railway bills obtained in 1846 authorised the expenditure of £132,617,368, and those of the ensuing year an expenditure of £35,000,000. Many of the vast operations thus commenced became paralysed by insufficiency of capital; but enough was laid down upon the earth in iron, stone, and wood, materially to narrow the sum available for the wages of labour, and cripple the resources of the labouringclasses.

Manufacturing machinery is, however, ever decaying and being replaced. The making of machinery is itself one of the steadiest manufactures in the country; and instead of hearing that a sufficiency of machinery has at any given moment been constructed to supply the general market for manufactures, there is no commodity for which there is so unceasing a demand, and of which the supply is so often deficient.

But if it be admitted that there is some small sinking of capital in manufacturing machinery, and that the rewards of the inventor —a workman, though of a high grade-make some small deductions from the fund for distribution in the wages of labour, it is never denied, on the other hand, that machinery creates great marts of industry, which otherwise never would have existed. It is that development of the fruitful intellects and high inventive powers, which enables us, in our cold northern clime, to compete with and excel the dwellers on the fruitful soils nearer the sun. Without it, cotton would not have come ten thousand miles across the sea to be manufactured into a fabric, and sent back to clothe the Indian who hoes and waters it. Without the productive brains of Arkwright and Watt, we would not have defied all Europe to exclude our produce from their markets, to which their cheapness and excellence gave them access through the thousands of little pores which the most powerful armies and the most vigilant police could not shut up. It is calculated that thus our cotton manufacture, the creature of machinery, gives employment to a million and a-quarter of human beings, and disperses £20,000,000 annually in the shape of wages.

CHAPTER IV.

WEALTH AND PROPERTY.

How Wealth is the Produce of Labour, and held by Transmission from those who have made it-Exceptions to this Rule, and their bad Effect-Sacredness of Property in this Country-Prejudices which interfere with a proper Estimate of it-Railway Legislation an Example-Some kinds require peculiar Protection-Patents and Copyright-Question if Field-Sports entitled to be as laboriously Protected?-Saving and Expenditure.

From labour and production we make a natural step to wealth, for all wealth is the produce of labour. Whatever objects of value we see around us in our great cities or our fruitful agricultural districts the public edifices, the manufactories, the docks and harbours, the railways, the wheat-fields, the pleasure-grounds, the gardens all are the produce of human labour; and if these objects are to be increased in abundance to the next generation, it will be by the instrumentality of human labour that they are so increased. Perhaps if we trace back the history of some articles of property, whether fixed or movable, we may find that they owe their possession to oppression, injustice, or fraud; perhaps we shall find that a jewel was stolen a century ago by the ancestors of those who possess it now; that a house was unjustly obtained by oppressive litigation; that an estate was acquired by an unscrupulous commissioner of inquiry into monastic foundations. These are matters for the law to deal with as they occur; it may be well to guard against such violent or fraudulent changes of possession; and the laxity that permitted them in more barbarous times may well suggest more accurate and stringent rules in future. But when the injurers and the injured have been alike in the grave for centuries, it would serve no good end to open up inquiries on the abstract justice of their mutual transactions. If no person can appear as the loser demanding satisfaction, and there is no person alive who can be charged with committing the injury, surely the tribunals of our day have too much to do with living quarrels to raise up these dead ashes of controversy ?

Political economy tells us that part of the value of fruitful land to its owner is not produced by labour, but by monopoly, and that rent is the difference in value between the produce of the more fruitful fields and that of the least productive soil, which the pressure of population drives into cultivation. Without investigating this principle, or even professing to state it with scientific

accuracy-for it has been stated in various forms, and nearly all of them have been attacked as harbouring some small fallacy-it may be sufficient for the grand question, whether society ought to open up the present disposal of landed property on the ground of its monopolist origin, and re-distribute it, to observe that it would be impossible to analyse the landed property of Britain in such a manner as to separate what had been provided by nature, what had been gained by monopoly, and what had been done by human industry. In our large towns there are pieces of ground not many yards square without an ounce of agricultural produce growing on them, which yet are worth acres of our most prolific corn districts. An inextricable mixture of natural advantages, produce of labour, and legal monopoly, are the elements of this value. There is an often-told story of a hunchback who drew a good income from letting out his bent shoulders as a desk, on which the close-pent mob, who crushed forward to destruction in the French Mississippi Mania, might write their transfers and applications for stock. His revenue was in a great measure the same in character with that of the owner of town-building areasnature did something for him in the bent back; monopoly also did something, in his being the only bent back in that crowd; and labour added something to the ingredients, in his repairing daily to the crowd, and patiently enduring the operation for which he was paid.

Mr Macaulay gives us this rapid sketch of what labour has done for landed property in England:- Could the England of 1685 be, by some magical process, set before our eyes, we should not know one landscape in a hundred, or one building in ten thousand. The country gentleman would not recognise his own fields: the inhabitant of the town would not recognise his own street. Everything has been changed but the great features of nature, and a few massive and durable works of human art. We might find out Snowdon and Windermere, the Cheddar Cliffs and Beachy Head. We might find out here and there a Norman minster, or a castle which witnessed the wars of the Roses. But with such rare exceptions, everything would be strange to us. Many thousands of square miles which are now rich corn-land and meadow, intersected by green hedgerows, and dotted with villages and pleasant country-seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see straggling huts built of wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself would shrink to dimensions not much exceeding those of its present suburb on the south of the Thames. Not less strange to us would be the garb and manners of the people, the furniture and the equipages, the interior of the shops and dwellings. Such a change in the state of a nation