Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/133

 The private indebtedness of the country is calculated at more than three times the amount of the Public Debt—say £2,500,000,000. The interest of the Public Debt is at least £30,000,000 per annum, including the expenses of collection. The annual interest of private debts is believed to exceed £100,000,000. Here is a fearful deduction to be made from the aggregate earnings of the people every year, before a shilling can be set aside for wages or profits. This mass of £130,000,000 per annum is all sheer usury—a sheer plundering of the productive classes. Yet it is only a part, and by no means the major part, of the annual sacrifice entailed upon the industrious orders by our agrarian and commercial systems. There is acknowledged to be upwards of £700,000,000 of property insured with our several insurance companies, who of course receive premiums on the whole, varying in the per-centage charged, according to the nature of the property insured, but amounting in the aggregate to an enormous annual sum. This sum, like the interest of the public and private debts, must be provided for every year before wages and profits can begin. Then there is the unmortgaged portion of the incomes derived from lands and houses. Then there is the public and private taxation of the country (not included in the £30,000,000 set aside for the payment of the interest of the debt). There are the tithes; the losses accruing from bad debts; the revenues of railway companies, canal companies, water companies, gas companies, dock companies, mining companies, banking companies, cemetery companies, and countless other companies; the whole of which must be deducted from the annual production of the country before the mechanic and labourer can receive a farthing of wages, or before the mere employer and tradesman can enter upon that margin to which wages and profits must look for their share of the general produce. If we assume our present annual production to be £630,000,000, one-third of this, or some £200,000,000, must be set aside for the interest of public and private debts, the revenues of companies, the claims of taxation, &c. The capitalists and tradespeople may be supposed to pocket some £300,000,000 more, and the miserable remnant, some £130,000,000 per annum, is probably the maximum of what the working-classes receive for producing the whole. At all events, the latter do not average above 10s. per week for each family; and supposing the number of working families to be about 5,000,000, this would give them a gross income of about £130,000,000 per annum.

We pretend not to perfect accuracy in these figures: we profess to deal only with round numbers. An approximation to the actual state of things is all we aim at; for that is all we require to elucidate our position. But if we deviate from arithmetical exactness (as must needs be in such calculations), the deviation will be found to be rather in favour of the producer than against him; and therefore our argument must be held so much the stronger, the less exact we are in figures.

That the producer does not, upon the average, receive a fourth of his produce is a certain fact. If the producers got back £125,000,000