"A LONG PULL, AND A STRONG PULL, AND A PULL ALTOGETHER,"

FOR BETTER PRICES, BETTER PROFITS, AND

BETTER WAGES.

THE hands of the labourer are the mine out of which the wealth of a nation comes. What is the prince of territories unbounded, or the lord of countless looms,-without the help of his fellow man? The land is but a wilderness; -the factory—but a hideous wall. The labourer is the true foundation of the great social building; and unless he have from his employer what will support a wife and the average number of children, in the necessaries and decent comforts of life, independently, to the end of his days, the labourer's condition is not what it ought to be. If that be so: however interested parties may proclaim a thriving state, and king's speeches may re-echo it,-the fabric of society will totter, for its best timbers are

rotten.

The matter of first interest with the labourer is the profit of his employer. If the profit be good, the master seeks the man. If the profit be bad, the man must seek the master. In the first case, the man makes the best bargain; in the last, the master makes the best, so far as wages are concerned but the master has more customers than workmen: so the rate of wages is of less moment to him than the wealth of his customers, We cannot blind ourselves long to this truth, that things sell best when there is the quickest demand for them. It is so with corn; it is so with cotton, with wool, with iron, with ships, and with all other commodities; and it is equally so with

labour.

to the mark, which will give a remunerating profit to the master producer.

Thus as wages come out of profits, so do profits come out of prices.

There are a great many things which go to form the price of a thing. In agriculture, there is the working the land, sowing, weeding, reaping, thrashing, delivering, &c. In manufactures, there is the building, the machinery, the labour, &c. Now both in manufactures and agriculture all these matters cost something; and if the people, for whose use they are done, cannot give the price which it cost to make them, together with a small profit to pay for the trouble of making and the risk of selling,-why, they are not worth producing, and the labourers who made them are no longer worth employing.

VOL. 1.

B

But there is another serious item in price in these days, which does not appear at first sight,-and that is taxation. Parliament, for the purpose of raising money to pay debts and the expenses of government, has laid a tax on almost every thing which any man can use to make any thing of. Now if the thing, when it is made, will not fetch a price which shall cover the taxation as well as the other expenses; then it may turn out that taxation may prevent any of those things being produced.

If price be so necessary to production: prices are a thing which ought to be attended to. We may take it now as an axiom that prices rise or fall with an increase or decrease of the coin, notes or bills circulating throughout the country.* During the long continental war, the circulating medium was altogether perhaps nearly double what it is now, and prices were for the most part nearly double. Our immense national debt was, the greater portion of it, contracted under those prices. Taxation was relied on to pay the interest of this debt; and so long as the high prices lasted, upon which a heavy taxation was charged, we heard no grumbling; because the taxation was measured by the prices, and the prices were sufficient to meet it. But had the prices not been so high during the war, the taxation then paid, and paid cheerfully, could not even then have been levied; nor could any government have

We will explain this at a future day-it

would interrupt the course of the argument now.

ever dreamed of running into so much debt. If the price of a thing during this period of the war were 10s. ;-out of which 3s. were taxation, 5s. labour and materials, and 2s. profit, it requires no great conjuring to see, that when the price is reduced to 6s. or 5s., (unless the taxation be reduced in proportion) the thing will be no longer produced; or if the producer keep struggling on without profit for a few years, under the hope that times will mend, and to avoid turning off his workmen to starve, it is as easy to see that he must yield at last. His two shillings profit are absorbed by the public debt; and he won't work for the tax-gatherer's benefit alone.

The private debts of the country at the end of the war were supposed to be even larger than the national debt. A man borrowing under the high prices 24s.,-borrowed equivalent to two bushels of wheat; or borrowing 4s., expected that he could pay it with one day's labour. He has, now that prices and wages are fallen, to pay the debt of two bushels, or one day's labour, with two day's labour, or with four bushels. The purse is stolen away which could have paid it. The debt alone remains the same.

Ever since the peace (with two short intervals when we relaxed the system which we have been deluded into adopting) the productive class as a body has been suffering from causes similar to those above described. In consequence of the preparations for, and final consummation of, Mr. Peel's Bill of 1819, the decrease of the currency went on from 1814 to 1829, when the £1. notes finally ceased; prices are down; the debts are up; production is unprofitable, and the labourer out of employment, or at starvation wages. These things are denied by comfortable philosophers. Their truth is too well known to the millions we address. Here and there perhaps a branch of trade may have had a monopoly of the foreign market and not have suffered; or the very largest capitalist by employing innumerable hands may have got a small profit on each; but the great majority, those for whom Parliament used to legislate-the farmers, the small and middle manufacturers, the retail tradesmen in provincial towns, the colonial and shipping interests, the labourers, the operatives, the handloom weavers-all, or most, of these have been writhing under privations that would have driven any but the sober-minded men of this country to utter desperation. It is true that distress drove Reform before it; that Political Unions and Trades' Unions are its children; and it is little to be doubted, that, if not shortly removed, it will drive before it, headlong to destruction, the most sacred institutions of the State.

We are quite aware that these doctrines

will not be palatable to the parties who have profited by the system which we deem it our duty to deprecate. They will appeal to the excise as a proof that distress does not exist: "under every reduction in the taxes on excisable commodities, (they will say) there has been a spring in the consumption of them which has increased the revenue." We shall probably revert to this subject again: it will be sufficient to state here that amidst all the chopping, and changing, and commutation of taxation, which have lately taken place, the excise can be no real test of the condition of the country to consume. If the excise taxation had remained unchanged, there would have been a very good test. At present, it is only a proof that there has been a great deal of bungling, hitherto, in the mode of levying taxation through the excise. Distress has increased the cunning of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and that has enabled them to get by a new mode of taxation, what the greater poverty of the subject disabled them to obtain in the old way. Let all the old modes of excising be re-enacted which have been repealed the last fifteen years, and then let us see what state the revenue from the excise would be in. We shall be met also by the charge of being "currency men," spoliators," "and breakers of public faith." Our readers may make up their minds to these sorts of nicknames, they have been for some time the only weapons and only arguments against those who have endeavoured to see effectual justice done to the productive classes. Our object, we need scarcely repeat, is not to commit injury, but to redress it.

Reform has not given content; it has not filled the belly and clothed the back,which, by whatever names they were called, were the things sought. The safety of the state requires that energetic means should be used to put these disjointed things right. It is quite clear that from Whigs and Tories, as parties, we have nothing to expect. They are both equally pledged to the degrading system. What we have to expect and to hope is, that before another election the constituencies of the country will discover their true friends, and that all the distressed interests, agricultural, manufacturing and commercial, will band themselves together for the common object of relief.

One class alone has flourished all this while,-the man unconnected with production or labour, and who has had a monopoly of low prices. His income being fixed, the more hours labour he got for it out of the sinews of the labourer, and the more goods he bought for it, whether the seller had a profit, or the labourer a livelihood, the better for him, at least for a time, and only for a time. This has been the withering mono