Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/16

12 take all the rest of the result of that labour. This may be done consciously or otherwise, but legally; without direct violence, and without owning the person. This is not Slavery, though only one remove from it. This is the tyranny of the strong over the weak; the feudalism of money; stealing a man's work, and not his person. The merchants as ft class are exposed to this very temptation. Sometimes it is yielded to. Some large fortunes have been made in this way. Let me mention some extreme cases; one from abroad, one near at home. In Belgium the average wages of men in manufactories is less than twenty-seven cents a day. The most skilful women in that calling can earn only twenty cents a day, and many very much less. In that country almost every seventh man receives charity from the public : the mortality of operatives, in some of the cities, is ten per cent, a year i Perhaps that is the worst case which you can find on a large scale, even in Europe. How much better off are many women in Boston who gain their bread by the needle? yes, a large class of women in all our great cities? The ministers of the poor can answer that; your police can tell of the direful crime to which necessity sometimes drives women whom honest labour cannot feed!

I know it will be said, "Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest; get work at the lowest wages." Still there is another view of the case, and I am speaking to men whose professed religion declares that all are brothers, and demands that the strong help the weak. Oppression of this sort is one fertile source of pauperism and crime. How much there is of it I know not, bu t I think men seldom cry unless they are hurt. When men are gathered together in large masses, as in the manufacturing towns, if there is any oppression of this sort, it is sure to get told of, especially in New, England. But when a small number are employed, and they isolated frc-a one another, the case is much harder. Perhaps no class of labourers in New England is worse treated than the hired help of small proprietors.

Then, too, there is a temptation to abuse their political