approximate more and more nearly to it, The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this zero. A writer of the 18th century, often quoted already, the author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce,” only betrays the innermost secret soul of English capitalism, when he declares the historic mission of England to be the forcing down of English wages to the level of the French and the Dutch.[1] With other things he says naïvely: “But if our poor” (technical term for labourers) “will live luxuriously … then labour must, of course, be dear.… When it is considered what luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, &c.”[2] He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with eyes squinting heavenward, moans: “Labour is one-third cheaper in France than in England; for their poor work hard, and fare hard, as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit, herbs, roots, and dried fish; for they very seldom eat flesh; and when wheat is dear, they eat very little bread.”[3] “To which may be added,” our essayist goes on, “that their drink is either water or other small liquors, so that they spend very little money.… These things are very difficult to be brought about; but they are not impracticable, since they have been effected both in France and in Holland.”[4] Twenty
- ↑ “An Essay on Trade and Commerce, Lond., 1770,” p. 44. The “Times” of December, 1866, and January, 1867, in like manner published certain outponrings of the heart of the English mineowner, in which the happy lot of the Belgian miners was pictured, who asked and received no more than was strictly necessary for them to live for their “masters.” The Belgian labourers have to suffer much, but to figure in the “Times” as model labourers! In the beginning of February, 1867, came the answer: strike of the Belgian miners at Marchienne, put down by powder and lead.
- ↑ l. c., pp. 44, 46.
- ↑ The Northamptonshire manufacturer commits a pious fraud, pardonable in one whose heart is so full. He nominally compares the life of the English and French manufacturing labourer, but in the words just quoted he is painting, as he himself confesses in his confused way, the French agricultural labourers.
- ↑ l. c., p. 70, 71. Note to the 3rd edition: Today, thanks to the competition on the world-market, established since then, we have advanced much further. “If China,” says Mr. Stapleton, M. P., to his constituents, “should become a great manufacturing country, I do not see how the manufacturing population of Europe could sustain the contest without descending to the level of their competitors.” (“Times,” Sept. 9, 1873, p. 8.) The wished-for goal of English capital is no longer Continental wages but Chinese.
