Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/134

 out of a gross annual produce of £600,000,000 and odd, it is the very extreme of their good fortune. Some of them, we know, get far more than in this proportion—more than a fourth or than a third,—nay, mayhap one-half. But the majority, on the other hand, get less than a fourth; and millions of them less than a sixth or even an eighth of their produce. An Irish labourer or a London needlewoman does not, probably, receive a tithe of the value of their labour. Estimating in this way—striking a balance between all the various descriptions of producers—we do not understate their income when we average it at 10s. per week for each family, or at from £125,000,000 to £130,000,000 for the whole, out of a gross annual production of, say, from £600,000,000 to £630,000,000 sterling. Small as is this proportion allotted to the producer out of his own earnings, it is becoming smaller and smaller every year, as prices and wages decline under the operation of Peel's monetary and free-trade measures. The reason is obvious. To make money scarce, on the one hand, and to invite foreign competition on the other, must of necessity lower prices. Whatever lowers prices swells the burden of debts, taxes, and of all other fixed money obligations. In the same ratio it must reduce the aggregate of profits and wages; for the more the producers (employers and employed) have to give out of the common stock to pay taxes and the interest of public and private debts, the less there must be left for themselves.

Peel's monetary laws of 1819 and 1844-45 have made money scarce, and will keep it permanently so while they remain in force. His free-trade measures of 1846 go to aggravate competition in our home markets, and tend directly to the lowering of prices and wages in favour of the mere annuitant or idle consumer. The effect of both measures, conjointly, is to increase the pressure of debt and taxes to a degree that is already felt to be unbearable. If persevered in, the inevitable result is revolution—violent revolution. Under the conjoint effects of his measures, wheat has already gone down below 40s,—nay, as low as 36s. Bankruptcies have reached an appalling figure; and estates are rapidly changing hands (passing from mortgagors to mortgagees), and not a few of them are going out of cultivation altogether. The Encumbered Estates Commission was sitting hardly three months in Dublin before one-twelfth of the landed property of Ireland, measured by rental, came within its jurisdiction. Scores of Scotch landlords and hundreds of Irish are no longer able to pay interest on their mortgages, owing to the reduced prices of agricultural produce. For the same reason, farmers cannot pay rents, nor the interest of borrowed capital. In England they are universally reducing, or threatening to reduce, wages. In Ireland they are throwing up their farms, or falling into arrears with their rent. In Scotland the same may be said. In all three countries the poor labourers are ground down so low that lower they can hardly be. Hence the agricultural risings and incendiarisms in England; hence the midnight outrages and murders in Ireland; hence the unprecedented tide of emigration from all three countries. No farmer can possibly pay rent, taxes, tithes, and interest of