CHAPTER VI.

SOCIOLOGY.

IT is the function of Moral Science to frame the laws by which men can live most happily together; and of Social Science to establish the Institutions or conditions in which those laws can be best put into practice or administered.

All animals have a natural tendency to increase faster than their means of subsistence, but as a rule they do not starve to death, as they live on one another. Man is no exception to this law. It is only, however, among savages that men feed on each other. Civilised men eat up each other's means of subsistence, so that many necessarily die of starvation, or if not directly of famine, of the neglect and disease and ignorance which poverty always engenders. Half the children born die before they are five years of age, and the average term of human existence is about thirty-three years, instead of, as it should be, twice that time. Malthus showed beyond all question that man possesses a power of increase beyond the diminution caused by death, and that this increase was greater than his food could be made to increase on the same area. Consequently man must either limit this natural power of increase by moral or prudential checks, or he must constantly be taking fresh land into cultivation. Failing these, he must die of starvation and the deteriorating influences engendered by it. At present he does all three in about equal proportions. Nevertheless, as I have previously pointed out, from the beginning this pressure of population on the means of subsistence has been the great mainspring of all progress. It has been the struggle for life itself that has forced into activity every intellectual faculty, and has

THE EARLIEST COMPETITION.

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spread mankind over all the globe to the cultivation of new, wild, and barren regions, when they would have much preferred staying at home. It is this law, however hidden and obscured, that has framed all human institutions, Social, Moral, and Political.

As the world is not yet occupied and brought into full cultivation, the means of subsistence never need fall short of even the natural rate of increase of the population if proper arrangements were made for production and distribution. Machinery now does an immense amount of work, and if the produce of a manufacturing country can be freely exchanged for the produce of land in another, all may be well off. But the people in possession, who hold the land and machinery, will not allow those who come into the world without either, to make use of their property except upon their own terms. Hence has arisen the great inequality in the distribution of wealth. If some workmen are sufficiently well off to be able to refuse to take less for their labour than a fair share of what they are instrumental in producing, the natural rate of increase of the population will always furnish some one who is willing-in fact who is obliged to take whatever is offered to him or starve. It is this competition among workmen themselves that has hitherto enabled the capitalist to dictate his own terms and to regulate the rate of wages. The position admits of very simple illustration. with potato plots, and one of them had a spade (machinery), which he offered to lend to the other man on condition that he should dig and plant both lots. It would evidently be the interest of the latter to accept these conditions; and although he did all the work he would get at least half the produce, and that upon easier terms than if he had to set his potatoes without a spade. But suppose the man with the spade was the stronger, and sought a cause of quarrel with the other, and turned him out of his allotment. Having then no other means of subsistence, the dispossessed man

Suppose two men

must starve. Let us, however, suppose further that the man who now was sole proprietor offered him work on condition that he would take only as many potatoes as he required to live upon less he could not offer, or the other consent to take; nature having regulated the rate of wages, and settled the minimum that he should take-as man also might do if he were so disposed. It is evident the dispossessed man, being no longer a proprietor, and having no supply of potatoes by him, must accept this offer of his conqueror or starve. Or suppose that he had some little supply of food by him, so that he could refuse the offer for a time; but suppose also that some other man had not, and that this man or one of his own grown-up children was willing to accept the offer if he refused, the dispossessed man must yield or ultimately starve. Suppose, also, as is the case in fact, that the poor man's family increased much more rapidly than the family of the man who had wronged him, so that ultimately the poor man became the stronger; he might then go and demand restitution, or at least a fairer share of the potatoes; and suppose the other told him that an angel had been with him, and that it was all right, and showed him the "revelation" that had been left with him on the subject, in which it was made clear that the poor were to be always with us, and that although they were very hard-worked and miserable in this world, they had a better chance, in consequence, of being happy in the next, which was eternal, while this was only temporal. We have only greatly to extend this position to nations as well as to individuals, to have a tolerably fair illustration, simple as it may seem, of what has been taking place since the world began. It is competition hitherto that has determined the rate of wages. This wage is necessarily paid in advance, while production is going on, and the fact of its being paid in money hides from the labourer that he is selling his birthright for a mere mess of pottage, and that his wages bear no proportion to what his labour is instrumental in producing.

THE LABOURERS' SHARE.

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There has been very little agreement among political economists as to what ought to constitute the labourers' share of joint produce. Adam Smith says, "the produce of labour constitutes the natural recompense or wages of labour;" Ricardo, that "that which is sufficient to place the workmen, one with the other, in a position to exist, and to propagate his species, without increase or diminution, is the true natural measure of the natural rate of wages; while Herr von Thüner tells us that "the labourer is valued at the cost of his bringing up, as the machine is at the cost of its construction, and the beast of burden at that of its rearing." Lord Derby, when Lord Stanley, took a much more generous and right view of the question; he told the Glasgow students that “he thought a scrupulous and high-minded man would always feel that to pass out of the world in the world's debt -to have consumed much and produced nothing to have dined, as it were, at the feast, and gone away without paying the reckoning-was not, to put it in its mildest way, a satisfactory transaction, however unimpeachable it might be, and rightly so, in the eyes of economic or social law." A statesman's labour is worth a great deal, still it may be fairly questioned whether Lord Derby's labour is equal to the revenues of his House-his production equal to his consumption. It is true he does not himself consume all the large share allotted to him, that he must share it with many others; still it is for the most part consumed non-productively, or leads to the production of many useless things, instead of the necessaries the community require. Mr. Mill holds that the rise in the value of land, which results from the general growth in the community in wealth and population, properly belongs to the state, the quantity of land being limited, and its possession therefore a monopoly. "This proposition," says the Pall Mall Gazette (May 31, 1871), "looks rational enough and harmless enough, but it is impossible to believe that it can be stated by such an authority without greatly

strengthening the 'labour reformer's' doctrine that nobody should pocket any profit, rent or interest, which is not the product of his personal labour, which, laughable as it sounds, is devoutly held by an increasing number of English and Continental workmen, and which, although the seed of a barbarism compared to which that of the dark ages was respectable and hopeful, is yet destined before it disappears to give the civilisation of the Western world a severe shaking."

At the present time Machinery has greatly increased Capital or Production, and a greater approach to Freedom of Trade has facilitated Distribution, and this has greatly improved the condition of the labourer; still competition keeps down his rate of wages, and he nowhere receives a fair share of the joint produce: the system still continues to create enormous wealth on one side and comparative poverty on the other. It is evident that as steam and machinery do most of the work, the owner of the machine, upon the present system, gets the largest amount of the produce of work. Prof. Jacoby, speaking to his constituents at Berlin of this tendency of capital to accumulate in a few hands, and to leave at least a part of the working proletariat exposed to great distress, says:

"In such a condition of things, it is the incumbent duty of every honest and thoughtful man to put to himself the following question : "How can we modify the present relations of society and property so as to realise a more equitable distribution of the common revenue, and to obviate the distress of the working classes, which daily assumes more extended proportions?

"How can we, without restricting the liberty of labour, and without prejudicing the progress obtained by industry (on a large scale), realise a more equitable distribution of the common revenue, and one more suited to the interest of all?

"The answer for us at least cannot be a doubtful one; there is but one means which can lead to this end: The abolition of the wage system and the substitution in its place of co-operative labour.

"Whoever can read the signs of the times will not deny that this is the thought which more or less consciously is at the bottom of all