If At The Same Time
The Difference Of Cost, Or A Large Portion Of It, Could Find Its
Way Into
The pockets of the manufacturing workmen, thousands
would be raised from want to comfort, from starvation to health,
and would
Be removed from one of the chief incentives to crime.
It is difficult for an Englishman to avoid contemplating with
pride our gigantic and ever-increasing manufactures and commerce,
and thinking everything good that renders their progress still
more rapid, either by lowering the price at which the articles
can be produced, or by discovering new markets to which they may
be sent. If, however, the question that is so frequently asked of
the votaries of the less popular sciences were put here - "Cui
bono?" - it would be found more difficult to answer than had been
imagined. The advantages, even to the few who reap them, would be
seen to be mostly physical, while the wide-spread moral and
intellectual evils resulting from unceasing labour, low wages,
crowded dwellings, and monotonous occupations, to perhaps as
large a number as those who gain any real advantage, might be
held to show a balance of evil so great, as to lead the greatest
admirers of our manufactures and commerce to doubt the
advisability of their further development. It will be said: "We
cannot stop it; capital must be employed; our population must be
kept at work; if we hesitate a moment, other nations now hard
pressing us will get ahead, and national ruin will follow." Some
of this is true, some fallacious. It is undoubtedly a difficult
problem which we have to solve; and I am inclined to think it is
this difficulty that makes men conclude that what seems a
necessary and unalterable state of things must be good-that its
benefits must he greater than its evils. This was the feeling of
the American advocates of slavery; they could not see an easy,
comfortable way out of it. In our own case, however, it is to be
hoped, that if a fair consideration of the matter in all its
hearings shows that a preponderance of evil arises from the
immensity of our manufactures and commerce-evil which must go on
increasing with their increase-there is enough both of political
wisdom and true philanthropy in Englishmen, to induce them to
turn their superabundant wealth into other channels. The fact
that has led to these remarks is surely a striking one: that in
one of the most remote corners of the earth savages can buy
clothing cheaper than the people of the country where it is made;
that the weaver's child should shiver in the wintry wind, unable
to purchase articles attainable by the wild natives of a tropical
climate, where clothing is mere ornament or luxury, should make
us pause ere we regard with unmixed admiration the system which
has led to such a result, and cause us to look with some
suspicion on the further extension of that system.
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