labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.… Few, even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.”[1] The labourers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labour. It avails him nothing if he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease … to be labourers for hire; they … become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour market.”[2] Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers—for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.… In ancient civilized countries the labourer, though free, is by law of nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.[3]
What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of
- ↑ l. c., Vol I, p. 131
- ↑ l. c., Vol. II., p. 5.
- ↑ Merivale, l. c., Vol. II., pp. 235-314 passim. Even the mild, free-trade, vulgar economist, Molinari, says: “Dans les colonies où l’esclavage a été aboli sans que le travail forcé se trouvait remplacé par une quantité équivalente de travail libre, on a vu s’opérer la contre-partie du fait qui se réalise tous les jours sous nos yeux. On a vu les simples travailleurs exploiter à leur tour les entrepreneurs d’industrie, exiger d’eux des salaires hors de toute proportion avec la part légitime qui leur revenait dans le produit. Les planteurs, ne pouvant obtenir de leurs sucres un prix suffisant pour convrir la hausse de salaire, ont été obligés de fournir l’excédant, d’ahord sur leurs profits, ensuite sur leurs capitaux mêmes. Une foule de planteurs ont été ruinés dela sorte, d’autres ont fermé leurs ateliers pour échapper à une ruine imminente.… Sans doute, il vaut mienx voir périr des accumulations de capitaux que des générations d’hommes [how generous of Mr. Molinari!]: mais ne vaudrait-il pas mieux que ni les uns ni les autres périssent?” (Molinari l. c., pp. 51, 52.) Mr. Molinari, Mr. Molinari! What then becomes of the ten commandments, of Moses and the prophets, of the law of supply and demand, if in Europe the “entrepreneur” can cut down the labourer’s legitimate part, and in the West Indies, the labourer can cut down the entrepreneur's? And what, if you please, is this “legitimate part,” which on your own showing the capitalist in Europe daily neglects to pay? Over yonder, in the colonies where the lahourers are so “simple” as to “exploit” the capitalist, Mr. Molinari feels a strong itching to set the law of supply and demand, that works elsewhere automatically, on the right road by means of the police.
