Page:Appeal to the wealthy of the land.djvu/33

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It is to be observed, that a cause has been steadily and powerfully operating to increase the poor rates, wholly independent of the multifarious abuses above specified. I mean the rapid and oppressive reduction of wages, consequent on the wonderful improvements in machinery. Manual labour succumbs in the conflict with steam and water power: and as three-fourths of mankind depend on the labour of their hands for a support; and further, as at the best of times there is always a superabundance of labour in the market, every thing that supersedes the demand for that labour must increase competition; lower wages; produce distress; and, to the same extent, increase the poor rates.

Mr. Brougham has published an elaborate work on the advantages of the improvement of machinery. But unhappily for his argument, he introduces in the very first page a powerful fact which fully proves that the advantages, admitting them to the full extent that he contends for, are accompanied by a mass of suffering that fully counterbalances all the good with which they are pregnant. He states that a certain Jos. Foster, a working weaver of Glasgow, being examined on the subject of wages, in 1827, by a committee of the British House of Commons, declared:

"That he and many others, who had formed themselves into a society, were in great distress; that numbers of them worked at the hand-loom ; that ; and that sometimes they were as low as four shillings. That twenty years before that time, they could readily earn a pound a week by the same industry: and that as power-loom weaving had increased, the distress of the hand-weavers had also increased in the same proportion."

Here is an overwhelming fact on this subject, which must puzzle the Malthuses, the Seniors, the Editors of the Edinburgh Review, and all those who so loudly declaim against poor rates.

A large body of men, earning, as Foster says, twenty shillings a week in 1807, and gradually reduced to seven, six, or four shillings, in 20 years, might in the early period have been not only able to support themselves comfortably, but to save, in a few years, money enough to commence business on a small scale: whereas in process of time they would be reduced, step by step, to absolute pauperism, unable to support their families, and obliged to rely on eleemosynary aid, public or private. And let it be observed, that this is not a solitary case. The reduction has extended, in a greater or less degree, to almost every branch into which machinery has been introduced.