steals my power of production steals all I have.
As long as a man is liable to be deprived of his right to labour where and when and how he likes, he cannot be called a free man; our political liberties are a farce; and you have a machinery at hand for filling your workhouses.
Is it really possible to believe that our legislators could not, if they gave their minds to it, frame an Act by which the workman might make his own bargain as to wages with his employer, with an appeal to courts of justice or other authorities?
Is it possible to believe that, at least in exceptional times of distress, the State could not give productive work at remunerative prices as in Lancashire (not on the principle of 'Ateliers Nationaux')? The State, in one department, does give work, but it is unproductive work. Unproductive work seems as great a blunder as trades' unions ever made.
It is always cheaper to pay labour its full value. Labour underpaid is more expensive. This has been the opinion of the most experienced contractors, employers, and true economists. The great French contractor of the Suez Canal has, it is understood, given every man employed under him 'a direct pecuniary interest in the success of the work and its speedy completion.' Amongst these workmen are Dalmatians, Greeks, Egyptian fellahs, Nubians, &c.—not very promising students of political economy, but in a better way perhaps to learn it practically than our Englishmen with their 'rates in aid of wages.'
Day by day, and year by year, all kinds of reports of associations and advertisements in newspapers indicate that we cannot go on as we are, and that the whole subject of the unemployed poor, in other words, of the working faculty without the will or means of applying it productively, must be taken up by a special commission or committee which will go into the whole question without prejudice, and tell us what is to be done.
Who have risen up to do the real Poor Law work? Müller at Bristol, the Roman Catholic 'Little Sisters of the Poor,' both societies of foreigners, and doing their voluntary part of Poor Law work with more Christianity and more economy than the guardians themselves.
The Poor Law says, there shall not be a single orphan wandering about the streets.
In London, we know that there are 100,000 stray children.
In Bristol Müller collects them and the means to support them. He gets money enough, while half England is clamouring and complaining about the rates.
The unreason of it is unbearable.
Try voluntary effort in a single parish.
When Dr. Chalmers was minister of St. John's at Glasgow, he so managed the voluntary family assistance to the poor that no legal aid was necessary during his incumbency.
If we could suppose for a moment by way of hypothesis that the State could, by seizing and educating the 100,000 homeless children running about the streets of London (even though the education should be free), enable all these to earn their own maintenance honestly and well, without ever coming back as paupers or as thieves upon the rates and the country, even political economy would say, 'Well done'—even those who seem to think that unlimited liberty of the Briton must include that of stealing or of starving or of pauperising his family.
Yet this is not a wild hypothesis. It is an experiment which has been successfully tried. Especially has it been successfully tried in Scotland, where the pauper child has been placed out to board with a
