Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/91

 labourer must give at least six times as much labour to acquire a particular commodity as that commodity would require to make. For one loaf the labourer must give the labour of six. The capitalist therefore imposes an infinitely worse tax upon labour than the Corn Laws, but he is sufficiently influential to make it appear that the latter alone are the cause of all the evils under which the labourer suffers.

Under the present system Mr. Ricardo is perfectly correct in stating that the labourer will only obtain from the capitalist as much as will enable him to maintain his kind without increase or decrease. The exactions of capital are the cause of poverty.

In the concluding part of his argument Hodgskin displays the characteristic moderation of the earlier writers. Capital being unproductive, it follows that the labourer ought to receive the whole produce of his labour. But how is this to be determined, seeing that no labourer produces any commodity independently? It can only be determined by the judgment of the labourers themselves as to the value of their labour. Hence the labourers ought to be free to bargain and, if necessary, to combine for the purpose.

Hodgskin allows that the capitalist who directs labour deserves a reward as a working man; but the idle capitalist has no claim at all upon the produce of labour. Trade union action will be good so far as it deprives the idle capitalist of his profits, and bad if it puts the industrious employer out of action.

Thus the whole of the elaborate argument ends in a justification of Trade Unionism. It has an atmosphere of artificiality and sophistry which would rob it of all value for a modern reader. It depends too much for its effect upon the exploitation of the false and verbal distinctions which marred contemporary economic theory. It is clever rather than convincing. It is weak at the one point where it ought to have been strong, namely, the explanation of capital as power over labour. He takes refuge in remote historical theory. Whilst he acknowledges the services which management of industry confers, he justifies a refusal to pay higher wages to the master than to the labourer on the ground that all labour is equally necessary in society—a manifestly false conception.

From the "wrong twist," which Ricardo unconsciously and Hodgskin consciously had given to economic theory, developed several divergent lines of radical and socialist doctrine.