and the power of the physical elements, that all may, if they so choose, contribute in this the great temporal duty of the human race-a duty thus far essential and important, that those who perform it frequent the earth as a benefit to their fellowcreatures, and as part of the active circulation which the Deity has designed for the human family; while those who do not perform it are the sores and morbid portions of humanity-useless, offensive, and dangerous.

CHAPTER VI.

CAPITAL.

Has no Privileges beyond its Natural Influence-Labour free to Compete with it-Inquiry whether Workmen would find its Profits worth Dividing among them-Never gives Large Profits without being attended either by Risk or Exertion-Manufacturing Capital-Its Effect in Enlarging the Field of Labour -Advantages to the Working-Classes of making Capital for themselvesExtent to which Small Sums would assist them-Value to their OffspringExtent to which Capital may act Injuriously.

No one, of course, objects to the existence of capital-it is the portion that has been preserved, and not consumed, of what the industrious people of the earth have created by their industry; and among the designers of new systems, and the repudiators of all that has been done, none have been ungrateful enough to wish that our ancestors had not performed these services, or that, having performed them, they had consumed the produce, and prevented it from being at the disposal of the existing generation. No one says that capital ought not to exist; but there are people who maintain that it is not properly distributed, and there are others who desire that its advantages should be obtainable by people who do not possess it.

On the last point it may be well to remember that capital has no peculiar privileges in this country. Though there are laws which nourish the creation of large hereditary estates, they do not tend to nourish capital to be expended in mercantile or manufacturing adventure, unless in those few instances in which hereditary landowners have so much surplus wealth as to be tempted to embark in such speculations. Whatever capital accomplishes, either for its possessors or other people, it performs through its own natural and inherent powers, which, like the fructifying principle of vegetation, may be directed and influenced, but cannot be artificially created. If any person can produce and enjoy the effect of capital without using it as a means, he is as much entitled to do so as he is to produce artificial vegetation. If the working-classes can do without the capitalist, they may; there is no law that binds them to him-he has no more authority over them than they have over him. They are as free to produce without his aid, as he is to invest his capital without theirs. The relation between the parties is one of mutual accommodation, treated in the purest spirit of free trade; the law only seeing that, whichever party takes what the other possesses, does so on the terms which may

be mutually agreed on. If a number of workmen can unite together, and, dispensing with the capitalist, bring their commodities into the market, the law allows them to compete with him, and undersell him if they can. There are many capitalists, and supporters of capital, who would be disposed to go farther than the law, were this necessary to secure the contentment of any extensive discontented body among the people, by giving some encouraging privileges to labourers producing and selling their own commodities; and they would do so in the conviction that some restless people might be thus quieted, by finding that, unless the privileges granted to these producers were extravagantly extensive, they could not compete with the natural power of capital.

There are no solid temptations for classes of men to invade each other's rights and possessions. The contemplated advantage of robbery, theft, and all descriptions of fraudulent crimes, arises in the perpetrator believing that either through his criminality or his talent he has a monopoly; if the pillagers in any country were one-fourth part as numerous as the producers, there would soon be nothing to steal. Classes cannot commit spoliation with any profit to themselves. The wealth of any order of society goes on with a steady produce from day to day; and it is not in what it is worth at this moment, but what it will continue to afford to-morrow, and day after day, and year after year, while it remains protected, that its value consists. When you seize it, you stop this continuance-you take it, such as it is, at the moment, and it is often of as little value in comparison to its prospects as the goose to the future golden eggs. Thus it is that war and internal convulsions are so destructive to capital. Of this phenomenon it is unnecessary to adduce instances. It would be difficult to find any one in this country who, in denying it, would find listeners. Projects violently to seize on the wealth of capitalists, we may safely indeed class among those with which exasperated political partisans may charge their opponents, but which no body of men really entertain as a practical design.

There are, however, and there will perhaps long be, among the working-classes and their enthusiastic friends, notions that capital is a vast fund of wealth very unequally distributed, which, by some operations upon society, not of a violent nature, might acquire a tendency to disperse itself more impartially, and thus to neutralise those appalling contrasts of great wealth and extreme penury which society exhibits. It is important that people who harbour such thoughts in a vague shape should see them reduced to practical arithmetic, in order that they may consider whether the fund annually produced to the rich, through the profits of capital, would really so materially raise the wealth of the humbler classes were it distributed among them, as to present them with substantial inducements for great efforts to alter the

existing and natural disposal of capital and profits. The higher we rise in the grade of wealth, the fewer possessors of it we find; and thus those whose great wealth would be the chief temptation for a partition would be found so limited in number, that their united riches would add little to the millions if dispersed among them. Capital represents what is saved. The savings of mankind are, unfortunately, small in comparison with what is consumed; and thus wages, which are the fund of consumption, at the disposal of the great body of the people, form at the same time the great bulk of the annual income of the country-giving rise to the apparent anomaly, that the chief riches of the country pass through the hands of the poor, if it is proper to apply that term to the productive labouring-classes. Chancellors of the Exchequer are well aware of this general fact when they ask for duties on commodities. The main bulk of the annual income of the country consists in that of the working-classes; and, notwithstanding professions and honest efforts to throw more than a proportional per centage of taxation on the rich, the main proportion of the revenue is derived from the tobacco, tea, malt, and spirit duties, which are chiefly paid from the expenditure of wages.

In estimating the aggregate wealth of classes, the greater the individual income the less shall we find to be the whole collective income of the class. If we possessed any means of knowing the aggregate amount of the receipts of hand-labourers, including those who work at the various artisan trades, and the other miscellaneous workers who have acquired no skill but depend entirely on their strength, there is little doubt that the incomes of all the rest of the community, from the richest peer downwards, would bear a small proportion to the aggregate result. Our only means of making an approach to the collective incomes of classes of the community, is through the returns of the income tax, which it is to be hoped are not very far from the truth. In these we find it an invariable law, that as the scale of income ascends, the aggregate general amount of income decreases. Thus, in a return to parliament in 1848 of the various incomes as they paid duty down to April 1846, it appears, in the department of trades and professions, that the whole amount assessed between £150 a year and £200 a year was £6,102,195. This was a difference of £50; but taking the next rise at a difference of £100—namely, incomes from £200 to £300-the amount was not much greater, being £6,585,715. Rising by steps of £100 a year, each step shows a great aggregate decrease. Thus in incomes between £300 and £400, we sink from the amount last quoted down to £4,680,493; and this decrease goes on by acceleration, so that when we come to incomes from £900 to £1000 a year, the whole sum is £863,478. Abandoning the difference by hundreds, and taking it by thousands, we now find the same phenomenon continuing; so that as

the increase in individual incomes becomes larger, the decrease in aggregate incomes is correspondingly conspicuous. The incomes from £1000 to £2000 were £6,924,203, including a range of a thousand pounds, yet not much more than the aggregate between a hundred and fifty and two hundred, including a range of a twentieth part of the extent. Yet when we go to the next step, and take the amount between £2000 and £3000, we find it less than half of the aggregate of the preceding range—namely, £3,313,432. When we go to the amount between £4000 and £5000, it is found to be £1,699,546. The amount of income returned between £5000 and £10,000 was £5,207,535. The amount between £10,000 and £50,000—a range ten times as great, came to an aggregate sum not much greater, £5,672,827—a sum considerably less than the gross sum of the incomes between £150 and £200 a year. The whole aggregate incomes above £50,000 a year were returned as amounting to £1,198,842.

In selecting out of these returns the items which form the profits of the great capitalists, we descend far enough in the scale when we come to £1000 a year-those who realise smaller incomes can scarcely be considered of the class who live in splendour on the wealth made by others. The sum-total of incomes taxed at £1000 a year and upwards amounted, in the return already mentioned, to £26,584,964-considerably less than four times the amount paid for the relief of the poor in England in 1832 (which amounted to £7,036,968). If we should divide the amount of incomes above £1000 a year through the whole population of Britain, it would amount to between 25s. and 30s. a head. It has been doubted, and with reason, whether the income-tax returns contain the full amount of the income of each individual. As the amount above stated contains the incomes of professional workers, as well as capitalists whose income is called profit, let us suppose that the professional incomes are equal to that amount of capitalist income in which the returns are deficient, and on this supposition endeavour roughly to estimate what the artisans and other workmen would gain by adding the profits of capital to their respective incomes. It has been calculated that the population returns of 1841, show the number of males above twenty years of age engaged in 'profitable and for the most part manual occupations' to amount to 3,494,622.* Perhaps the number of working-men above twenty years of age may now be fairly stated in a round number at four millions; and if the sum set forth as the estimated gains of the great capitalists were divided among this class entirely, without women and younger workers participating, it would afford between £6 and £7 a year to each. This is a considerable sum; but perhaps a very small propor

*Porter's Progress of the Nation, p. 65.