Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/118

 *torial and commercial aristocracy as compared with those of older countries—her citizens would very soon exhibit the same hideous extremes of rich and poor as are to be found in Europe. Indeed, New York and some of the New England States (where most of the land is appropriated, and the population crowded) have already, on more than one occasion, exhibited all the worst features of British "civilization"—that is to say, wholesale squalor and destitution (with their necessary consequences) in close proximity to teeming granaries and warehouses; otherwise, an unemployed labouring population, in rags and hunger, within sight of merchant-princes and master-manufacturers worth some hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

And why should it be otherwise? The social system is the same there as here. Rents are higher in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, &c., than in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Competition is the same or worse. Wages-slavery is as rife in Massachusets, Pennsylvania, and New York as in any part of the British Isles; and if wages be not quite as low in Philadelphia and Lowell as they are in Manchester and Birmingham, it is partly owing to the high protective duties laid on foreign manufactures, partly to the comparative scarcity of hands, but chiefly to the facility with which the victims of competition can escape from the mills and factories to the backwoods of Indiana, Missouri, &c.

In other words, the Americans owe whatever advantage they have over us not to any superiority in their social institutions,—not to better agrarian and commercial laws,—nor even to the acknowledged superiority of their civil and religious system of polity,—but to the territorial and other local advantages to which we have referred, and which no more distinguish them than they do the people of Sydney, Adelaide, Port Phillip, Natal, New Zealand, or any other new country in which land is abundant and labour scarce. But let America (with her present social system) come to be peopled as England is,—let her now unappropriated land be made private property of, and her agrarian and commercial laws remain what they are,—and we venture to say that not one jot better off will her labouring population be than ours now is. Universal suffrage might stem the aristocratic tide for a season (as it has done in other new countries); but the men of land and money would sweep away universal suffrage there, as they have ever done elsewhere, the moment they found it incompatible with landlordism and usury. All the principal States of Europe had universal suffrage a few years ago; France alone possesses it now, and that with a tenure so insecure that it can hardly be said to be established. In all the other States the men of land and money destroyed universal suffrage by brute force; they dispersed diets and national assemblies at the point of the bayonet, and made rights and constitutions to disappear before the cannon of disciplined assassins. It may be the same in France before six months. It would have been the same long ere now, but that some two millions of social reformers were known to be ready to take advantage of the event, in order to wreak vengeance upon the landed and