duction of that millenium of enterprise which has already disappointed the hopes of previous generations, you have no right to keep the men, whose grand-children you may perhaps eventually provide with employment, standing idle and starving in the market-place.[1]
- ↑ Mr Fawcett thus speaks of emigration in his essay on the 'British Labourer:'—"From England and Scotland, during the last fifteen or twenty years, there has been a very large emigration, although the people have not been compelled to leave these countries by so sudden and awful a catastrophe as that which caused the Irish exodus . . . . . When we reflect on the pecuniary advantages which every emigrant may reasonably expect to obtain, it seems surprising that our labourers have not left us in much greater numbers . . . . . The ordinary wages of our agricultural labourers are not more than nine or ten shillings a week; many of them live in dwellings which do not deserve the name of human habitations. . . . It seems wonderful that men who are in this condition do not emigrate en masse." Again, he says, "The truth, therefore, becomes irresistibly brought home to our minds, that if a man finds his labour is not wanted in one country he ought not to stagnate there in hopeless poverty. There is placed before him in other lands a great and glorious career: a great career, because he may become the progenitor of mighty nations; a glorious career, because he
supplied, not by the produce of present labour, but of past. They consume what has been produced, not what is about to be produced. Now, of what has been produced, a part only is allotted to the support of productive labour; and there will not and cannot be more of that labour than the portion so allotted (which is the capital of the country) can feed, and provide with the materials and instruments of production. Yet, in disregard of a fact so evident, it long continued to be believed that laws and governments, without creating capital, could create industry."—Mill's Political Economy, p. 80.
