them. But, as yet, they have reached only the slave-owner. He has found his property gradually wasting away; he has found that his slaves every year consume a larger and a larger proportion of what they produce; but even still he has something to lose and while that is the case, their situation is unaffected. When the whole produce has become only sufficient to feed the negroes,a time which, under the present system, is rapidly advancing in some of the older islands, the whites must abandon them as a field for all the moral and physical evil that slaves, helpless by education and desperate from want, will mutually suffer and inflict*.

The freeman (using that term in its full meaning) is the master of his exertions, and of his residence. He may refuse to quit the spot, or to change the employment, in which his labour has become unprofitable. As he may refuse to labour at all, he may ask for his services whatever remuneration he thinks fit; but as no one is bound to purchase those services, and as no one is obliged to afford him food, clothing, or any of the necessaries of life, he is forced, if he would subsist, to follow ✓the trade, and dwell in the place, and exert the

diligence which will make his services worth pur

*This is one of the modes in which slavery may be extinguished, but it is a dreadful abuse of language to call it euthanasia,

chasing; and he is forced to offer them for sale, by the same necessity which forces the capitalist to offer him wages in exchange for them. And the bargain is settled, like all other free bargains, by the respective market values of the things exchanged. As marriage has no tendency to increase the value of his labour, it has no tendency to increase his remuneration, He defers it, therefore, till the savings made while he was single afford a fund to meet the expenses of a family; and population is kept down by the only check that is consistent with moral or physical welfare-the prudential check.

To this state of things there is a near approach among the labouring classes in the most advanced districts of the continent of Europe, in the lowlands of Scotland, and even throughout the British, empire, among the best educated of those classes who derive their chief subsistence from their exertions, including professional persons, domestic servants, skilled artisans, and that portion of the shopkeepers whose profits are, in fact, principally the wages of their labour.

The poor-laws, as administered in the southern districts of England, are an attempt to unite the irreconcilable advantages of freedom and servitude. The labourer is to be a free agent, but without the hazards of free agency; to be free

from the coercion, but to enjoy the assured subsistence of the slave. He is expected to be diligent, though he has no fear of want; provident, though his pay rises as his family increases; attached to a master who employs him in pursuance of a vestry resolution; and grateful for the allowance which the magistrates order him as a right.

In the natural state of the relation between the capitalist and the labourer, when the amount of wages to be paid, and of work to be done, are the subjects of a free and open bargain; when the labourer obtains, and knows that he is to obtain, just what his services are worth to his employer, he must feel any fall in the price of his labour to be an evil, but is not likely to complain of it as an injustice. Greater exertion and severer economy are his first resources in distress; and what they cannot supply, he receives with gratitude from the benevolent. The connexion between him and his master has the kindliness of a voluntary association, in which each party is conscious of benefit, and each feels that his own welfare depends, to a certain extent, on the welfare of the other. But the instant wages cease to be a bargain-the instant the labourer is paid, not according to his value, but his wants, he ceases to be a freeman. He acquires the indolence, the improvidence, the rapacity, and the malignity, but not the

subordination of a slave.

He is told that he has

a right to wages, but that he is bound to work. Who is to decide how hard he ought to work, or how hard he does work? Who is to decide what amount of wages he has a right to? As yet, the decision has been made by the overseers and the magistrates. But they were interested parties. The labourer has thought fit to correct that decision. For the present he thinks that he has a right to 2s. 3d. a day in winter, and 2s. 6d. in summer. And our only hope seems to be, that the promise of such wages will bribe him into quiet. But who can doubt that he will measure his rights by his wishes, or that his wishes will extend with the prospect of their gratification? The present tide may not complete the inundation, but it will be a dreadful error if we mistake the ebb for a permanent receding of the waters. A "breach has been made in the sea-wall, and with every succeeding irruption they will swell higher and spread more widely. What we are suffering is nothing to what we have to expect. Next year, perhaps, the labourer will think it unjust that he should have less than 4s. a day in winter and 5s. in summer;-and woe to the tyrants who deny him his right!

It is true, that such a right could not be permanently enforced;-it is true, that if the labourer

burns the corn-ricks in which his subsistence for the current year is stored-if he consumes in idleness or in riot the time and the exertions on which next year's harvest depends if he wastes in extravagant wages, or drives to foreign countries, the capital that is to assist and render productive his labour, he will be the greatest sufferer in the common ruin... Those who have property may escape with a portion of it to some country in which their rights will be protected; but the labourer must remain to enjoy his own works-to feel that the real rewards for plunder and devastation are want and disease..

1

But have the consequences of the present sys tem ever been explained to the labourer? Is not his right to good wages re-echoed from all parts of the country? Is he not told Dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed?'. Does not the Honourable Member, who has affixed this motto to his work, assume, that the fund out of which the labourer is to be fed is practically inexhaustible?/ And can words more strongly imply that his suf ferings arise from the injustice of his superiors? Have not even magistrates and landlords recom-{ mended the destruction, or, what is the same, both i in principle and effect, the disuse of the very ma chines of which the object is to render labour more efficient in the production of the articles