Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/85

 . Hall was a doctor of medicine of considerable attainments who, soon after he gave to the world his famous book, was consigned to the Fleet Prison for debt, and died there about 1820 at the age of eighty. It was natural that a man so circumstanced should take the pessimistic view of civilisation made current by Rousseau's famous Discourse. Hall's work is a terrific denunciation of the oppression of the poor which seems to be the inevitable consequence of the existing state of society. As a doctor of medicine Hall was acquainted to the full with the terrible effects of extreme poverty and overwork undertaken in pestilential factories. These evils are the result of two great faults in the organism of society—Private Property and Manufactures. The latter is even worse in its consequences than the former. By their means Civilisation divides mankind into Rich and Poor, and gives the former power to oppress the latter. Riches is a power directed to oppression. No despotism is worse than that of Capital. Capital is the means whereby the Rich rob the Poor of the larger part of their produce. It is not Nature, as Malthus declares, who condemns the Poor to poverty, starvation, and death, but Capital. Capital is given in the form of wages and material to the labourer that he may produce more goods, but even the goods given as capital were originally taken from the labourer. The latter is powerless to keep more than a very small share of his produce because he is at the mercy of the Rich, and the law will not allow him to combine with his fellows for better protection. The development of manufactures has not, as Adam Smith declared, freed the workers from dependence, but has plunged them into a worse slavery than ever. It is a slavery which propagates disease, vice, ignorance, and revolution. Manufactures are withdrawing labour from agriculture and so increasing the cost of food. Hunger is added to other evils. The more manufactures develop, the greater the gulf between rich and poor. Such a tendency will end in social anarchy and revolt, out of which, as in France, a military despotism will assuredly arise. But the rich may prevent this by declaring a war. The war against France is a case in point.

Hall's furious analysis ought logically to lead to sweeping proposals of remedy, but these are of the most modest description, amounting to no more than the abolition of primogeniture and the restriction of manufacture of articles of luxury.