Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844

We said that some of the ideas of Charles Fourier had been adopted by men who do not exactly aspire to the rank of social reformers. We will give an instance, which at the same time will illustrate this tendency to introduce legislation on those very subjects from which it has been the effort of all enlightened minds, during the last century, to expel it. A M. Ducpetiaux, a Belgian, who comes vouched to us for a safe and respected member of society by the number of titles, official and honorary, appended to his name, in a voluminous and chiefly statistical work, Sur la Condition des Jeunes Ouvriers, wherein his views are in the main temperate and judicious, declares himself a partisan of some system similar to what Fourier points out in his famous formula —associer les hommes en capital, travail, et talent. He requires a union of interest, a partnership in fact, between the capitalist and the workman. M. Ducpetiaux does not lay down the proportion in which the profits are to be divided between them; he is too cautious to give any figures – there are some ideas which do not bear the approach of arithmetic – but he adopts the principle. It is thus that he speaks in his introductory chapter.

"In so conflicting a state of things30 there remains but one remedy: to re-establish violated equity, to restore to the producers their legitimate share of what is produced, to bring back industry to its primitive aim and object – such is the work which is now, by the aid of every influence, individual and social, to be prosecuted. It is not a partial relief that is called for, but the complete restoration (réhabilitation complète) of the labourer. The mark which ages of servitude have impressed upon his front, cannot be effaced but by an energetic and sustained effort. The palliatives hitherto employed, have only exposed the magnitude of the evil. This evil we must henceforth attack in its origin, in the organization of labour, and the constitution of society.

"What is the existing base of the relations between master and workman? Selfishness. Every one for himself, that is, every thing for me and nothing, or the least quantity possible, for others. Here is the evil. A blind and bitter contest must spring from this opposition of interests. To put an end to this there is but one means: the recognition of the law of union, (la loi de solidarité,) by virtue of which interests will amalgamate and divisions disappear. This law is the palladium of industry; refuse to acknowledge it, and every thing remains in a state of chaos: proclaim it, and every thing is remedied, every thing prospers. The capitalist comes in aid of the workman as the workman comes in aid of the capitalist; it is a common prosperity they enjoy, and if any thing menaces it, they are united for its defence. The law of union puts an end to an unfeeling employment of our fellow men, (à l'exploitation brutale;) it replaces men in their natural position; it re-establishes amongst them the relations of respect, esteem, and mutual benevolence which Christian fraternity demands; it substitutes association for rivalry; it restores to justice her empire, and to humanity its beneficence."

Translating all this into simple language, there is to be a partition by the legislature, according to some rule of natural equity, between the capitalist and the labourer, of the proceeds of their common enterprise. We confess ourselves utterly incapable of devising any such rule of equity. The share which falls to the capitalist under the name of profits, and the share which falls to the labourer under the name of wages, is regulated under the present system by the free competition amongst the labourers on the one hand, and the capitalists on the other; it is the result of an unfettered bargain between those who possess capital and those who practise industry. This is, at all events, an intelligible ground, and has in it a species of rough equity; but if we desert this position, and appeal to some natural rule of justice to make the division, we shall find ourselves without any ground whatever. For what are the rights of capital in the face of any à priori notions of justice? We shall stumble on from one vague proposition to another, till we find ourselves landed in the revolutionary doctrine of the equal imprescriptible rights of man. This is the first stage at which we can halt. Judged by this law of equality, the capitalist is but one man, and capital is but another name for the last year's harvest, or the buildings, tools, and manufactures which the labourers themselves, or their predecessors, have produced. The utmost the ex-capitalist could expect – and he must practise his handicraft before he can be entitled even to this – is to be admitted on a footing of equality in the extensive firm that would be constituted of his quondam operatives.

We often observe, in this country, an inclination manifested to regulate by law the rate of wages, not with the view of instituting any such naturally equitable partition, but of establishing a minimum below which life cannot be comfortably supported. These reasoners proceed, it will at once be admitted, not on the rights of man, but on the claims of humanity. To such a project there is but one objection; it will assuredly fail of its humane intention. It is presumed that the competition amongst the workmen to obtain employment has so far advanced, that these cease to obtain a sufficient remuneration for their labour. The thousand men whom a great capitalist employs, are inadequately paid. The legislature requires that they should be paid more liberally. But the amount which the capitalist has to expend in wages is limited. The same amount which sustained a thousand men, can, under the new scale of remuneration, sustain only nine hundred. The nine hundred are better fed, but there is one hundred without any food whatever. Our well-intentioned humanity looks round aghast at the confusion she is making.

Suppose, it may be said, that a law of this description should be passed at so fortunate a conjuncture, that it should not interfere with the existing relations between the capitalist and the workman, but have for its object to arrest the tendency which wages have to fall; suppose that the legislature, satisfied with the existing state of things, should pronounce it a punishable offence to offer or accept a lower rate of remuneration, would not such a law be wise? The answer is obvious. If there is a tendency at any time in wages to fall, it is because there is a tendency in population to increase, or in capital to diminish; circumstances, both of them, which it is not in the power of criminal jurisprudence to wrestle with.

We hear political economy frequently censured by these advocates for violent and legislative remedies, for paying more attention to the accumulation than the distribution of wealth. But in what chapter of political economy is it laid down, that the distribution and enjoyment of wealth is a matter of less moment than its production and accumulation? The simple truth is, that the same law of liberty, which is so favourable to the accumulation of wealth, provides also the best distribution which human ingenuity has yet been able to devise. Less has been said on this head because there was less to say. But surely no sane individual ever wished that property should accumulate merely for the sake of accumulation, that society should have the temper of a miser, and toil merely to increase its hoards. Still less has any one manifested a disposition to confine the enjoyment of wealth to any one class, treating the labourer and the artisan as mere tools and instruments for the production of it. The fundamental principles of political economy to which we have been alluding, and with which alone we are here concerned, will be always found to embrace the interests of the whole community. They should be defended with the same jealousy that we defend our political liberties with.

It was with regret we heard the argument we have just stated against the legislative interference with the rate of wages, introduced in the discussion of the ten-hours' bill, and applied against the principle of that measure. It was plainly misapplied. Why do we not relish any legislative interposition, on whatever plea of humanity, between workmen and capitalist? Because it will fail of its humane intention. We should heartily rejoice – who would not? – if a reasonable minimum of wages could be established and secured. But it cannot. Is the legislature equally incompetent when it steps in to prevent children and very young persons from being overworked; from being so employed that the health and vigour of ensuing generations may be seriously impaired, (which would be a grave mistake even in the economy of labour;) from being so entirely occupied that no time shall remain for education? We think not. The legislature is not in this case equally powerless. It may here prevent an incipient abuse from growing into a custom. The law cannot create an additional amount of capital to be distributed over its population in the shape of an advance of wages, but the law can say to all parents and all masters – you shall not profit by the labour of the child, to the ruin of its health, and the loss of all period for mental and moral discipline. Such an overtasking of the child's strength has not hitherto been an element in your calculation, and it shall not become one.

All these various schemes – socialist or otherwise – of legislative interference, take their rise from the aspect, sufficiently deplorable, of the distress of the manufacturing population; and it is almost excusable if the contemplation of such distress should throw men a little off their balance. But it is not so easily excusable if men, once launched on their favourite projects, endeavour to prove their necessity by heightened descriptions of that distress, and by unauthorized prophecies of its future and continual increase. What a formidable array of figures – figures of speech as well as of arithmetic – are brought down upon us with gloomy perseverance, to convince us that the manufacturing population of this country is on the verge of irreparable ruin! We think it right to put our readers upon their guard against these over-coloured descriptions. Even when Parliamentary reports are quoted, whose authority is not to be gainsaid, they ought to defend themselves against the first impression which these are calculated to make. The facts stated may be true, but there are other facts which are not stated equally true, and which the scope and purpose of such reports did not render it necessary to collect. If, in this country, there is much distress, if in some places there is that utter prostration of mind and body which extreme poverty occasions, there is also much prosperity; there is also, in other places, much vigorous industry, receiving its usual, and more than its usual recompense. If there are plague-spots in our population, there are also large tracts of it still sound and healthy. Set any one down to read list after list of all the maimed and halt and sick in our great metropolis, and the whole town will seem to him, for the time being, one wide hospital: he must throw open the window and look on the busy, animated, buoyant crowd that is rushing through the streets, before he shakes off the impression that he is living in a city of the plague.

Without a doubt, he who approaches the consideration of the distress of the labouring classes, should have a tender and sympathizing spirit; how else can the subject possess for him its true and profound interest? But it is equally necessary that he bring to it a cultivated and well-disciplined compassion; that he should know where, in the name of others, he should raise the voice of complaint, and where, in the name of suffering humanity at large, he should be silent and submit. It should always be borne in mind, that it is very difficult for persons of one condition of life, to judge of the comparative state of well-being of those of another condition. An inhabitant of cities, a man of books and tranquillity, goes down into the country, without previous preparation, to survey and give report of the distress of a mining or agricultural district. In what age since the world has been peopled, could such an individual be transported into the huts of peasants, or amongst the rude labours of the miner, without receiving many a shock to his sensibility? Perhaps he descends, for the first time in his life, the shaft of a coal-mine. How foul and unnatural must the whole business seem to him! – these men working in the dark, begrimed, half-naked, pent up in narrow galleries. He has gone to spy out hardships – he sees nothing else. Or perhaps he pays his first visit to the interior of the low-roofed crazy cottage of the husbandman, and is disgusted at the scant furniture and uninviting meal that it presents; yet the hardy labourer may find his rest and food there, with no greater share of discontent than falls to most of us – than falls, perhaps, to the compassionate inspector himself. We have sometimes endeavoured to picture to ourselves what would be the result if the tables were turned, and a commission of agricultural labourers were sent into the city to make report of the sort of lives led there, not by poor citizens or the lowest order of tradesmen, but by the very class who are occupied in preparing largo folio reports of their own distressful condition. Suppose they were to enter into the chambers of the student of law – of the conveyancer, for example. They make their way through obscure labyrinths into a room not quite so dark, it must be allowed, nor quite so dirty as the interior of a coal-mine, and there they find an unhappy man who, they are given to understand, sits in that gloomy apartment, in a state of solitary confinement, from nine o'clock in the morning till six or seven in the evening. They learn that, for several months in the year, this man never sees the sun; that in the cheerful season when the plough is going through the earth, or the sickle is glittering in the corn, and the winds are blowing the great clouds along the sky, this pale prisoner is condemned to pore over title-deeds which secure the "quiet enjoyment" of the land to others; and if they imitate the oratory of their superiors, they will remark upon the strange injustice, that he should be bound down a slave to musty papers, which give to others those pastures from which he never reaps a single blade of grass, and which he is not even permitted to behold. These commissioners would certainly be tempted to address a report to Parliament full of melancholy representations, and ending with the recommendation to shake out such unhappy tenants into the fields. It would be long before they could be brought to understand that he of the desk and pen would, at the end of half an hour, find nothing in those fields but a mortal ennui. To him there is no occupation in all those acres; and therefore they would soon be to him as barren as the desert.

If there is any apparent levity in the last paragraph we have penned, it is a levity that is far from our heart. There is no subject which gives us so much concern as this – of the undoubted distress which exists amongst the labouring population, and the necessity that exists to alleviate and to combat it. Coming from the immediate perusal of Utopian schemes, promising a community of goods, and from the reconsideration of those arguments which prove such schemes to be delusive and mischievous, the impression that is left on our mind is the profound conviction of the duty of government, to do whatever lies really in its power for the amelioration of the condition of the working classes. The present system of civilized society works, no doubt, for the good of the whole, but assuredly they do not reap an equal benefit with other classes, and on them falls the largest share of its inevitable evils. May we not say that, whatever the social body, acting in its aggregate capacity, can do to redress the balance – whether in education of their children, in sanatory regulations which concern their workshops and their dwellings, or in judicious charity that will not press upon the springs of industry – it is bound to do by the sacred obligation of justice?

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN

Part XIV"Have I not in my time heard lions roar?Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind,Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?Have I not in the pitched battle heardLoud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"Shakspeare.

Europe had never seen so complete or so powerful an army as that which was now assembled within sight of Valenciennes. The city was already regarded as in our possession; and crowds of military strangers, from every part of the Continent, came day by day pouring into the allied camp. Nothing could equal the admiration excited by the British troops. The admirable strength, stature, and discipline of the men, and the successes which they had already obtained, made them the first object of universal interest; and the parades of our regiments formed a daily levee of princes and nobles. It was impossible that soldiership could be on a more stately scale. Other times have followed, which have shown the still statelier sight of nations marching to battle; but the hundred thousand men who marched under Cobourg to take up their positions in the lines of Valenciennes, filled the eye of Europe; and never was there a more brilliant spectacle. At length orders were sent to prepare for action, and the staff of the army were busily employed in examining the ground. The Guards were ordered to cover the operations of the pioneers; and all was soon in readiness for the night on which the first trench was to be opened. A siege is always the most difficult labour of an army, and there is none which more perplexes a general. To the troops, it is incessant toil – to the general, continual anxiety. The men always have the sense of that disgust which grows upon the soldier where he contemplates a six weeks' delay in the sight of stone walls; and the commander, alive to every sound of hazard, feels that he yet must stand still, and wait for the attack of every force which can be gathered round the horizon. He may be the lion, but he is the lion in a chain – formidable, perhaps, to those who may venture within its length, but wholly helpless against all beyond. Yet those feelings, inevitable as they are, were but slightly felt in our encampment round the frowning ramparts of the city. We had already swept all before us; we had learned the language of victory; we were in the midst of a country abounding with all the good things of life, and which, though far from exhibiting the luxuriant beauty of the British plains, was yet rich and various enough to please the eye. Our camp was one vast scene of gaiety. War had, if ever, laid aside its darker draperies, and "grim-visaged" as it is, had smoothed its "wrinkled front." The presence of so many visitors of the highest rank gave every thing the air of royalty. High manners, splendid entertainments, and all the habits and indulgences of the life of courts, had fled from France only to be revived in Flanders. Our army was a court on the march; and the commander of the British – the honest, kind-hearted, and brave Duke of York – bore his rank like a prince, and gathered involuntarily round him as showy a circle as ever figured in St James's, or even in the glittering saloons of the Tuileries. Hunting parties, balls, suppers, and amateur theatrical performances, not merely varied the time, but made it fly. Hope had its share too, as well as possession. Paris was before us; and on the road to the capital lay but the one fortress which was about to be destroyed with our fire, and of which our engineers talked with contempt as the decayed work of "old" Vauban.

But the course of victory is like the course of love, which, the poet says, "never does run smooth." The successes of the Allies had been too rapid for their cabinets; and we had found ourselves on the frontiers of France before the guardian genii of Europe, in the shape of the stiff-skirted and full-wigged privy councillors of Vienna and Berlin, had made up their minds as to our disposal of the prize. Startling words suddenly began to make their appearance in the despatches, and "indemnity for the past and security for the future" – those luckless phrases which were yet destined to form so large a portion of senatorial eloquence, and give birth to so prolific an offspring of European ridicule – figured in diplomacy for the first time; while our pioneers stood, pickaxe in hand, waiting the order to break ground. We thus lost day after day. Couriers were busy, while soldiers were yawning themselves to death; and the only war carried on was in the discontents of the military councils. Who was to have Valenciennes? whose flag was to be hoisted on Lille? what army was to garrison Condé? became national questions. Who was to cut the favourite slices of France, employed all the gossips of the camp, in imitation of the graver gossips of the cabinet; and, in the mean time, we were saved the trouble of the division, by a furious decree from the Convention ordering every man in France to take up arms – converting all the churches into arsenals, anathematizing the German princes as so many brute beasts, and recommending to their German subjects the grand republican remedy of the guillotine for all the disorders of the government, past, present, and to come.

Circumstances seldom give an infantry officer more than a view of the movements in front of his regiment; but my intimacy with Guiscard allowed me better opportunities. Among his variety of attainments he was a first-rate engineer, and he was thus constantly employed where any thing connected with the higher departments of the staff required his science. He was now attached to the Prussian mission, which moved with the headquarters of the British force, and our intercourse was continued. I thus joined the reconnoitring parties under his command, and received the most important lessons in my new art. But one of my first questions to him, had been the mode of his escape on the night of our volunteer reconnoisance.

"Escape? Why, I committed the very blunder against which I had cautioned you, and fell into the hands of the first hussar patrole I could possibly have met. But my story is of the briefest kind. I had not rode forward above an hour, when my horse stumbled over something in that most barbaric of highways, and lamed himself. I then ought to have returned; but curiosity urged me on, and leading my unfortunate charger by the bridle, I threaded my way through the most intricate mesh of hedge and ditch within my travelling experience. The trampling of horses, and the murmur of men in march, at last caught my ear; and I began to be convinced that the movement which I expected from Dampier's activity was taking place. I then somewhat questioned my own insouciance in having thrust you into hazard; and attempted to make my way across the country in your direction. To accomplish this object I turned my horse loose, taking it for granted that, lame as he was, he was too good a Prussian to go any where but to his own camp. This accounts for his being found at morn. I had, however, scarcely thus taken the chance of losing a charger which had cost me a hundred and fifty gold ducats, when I received a shot from behind a thicket which disabled my left arm, and I was instantly surrounded by a dozen French hussars. I was foolish enough to be angry, and angry enough to fight. But as I was neither Samson, nor they Philistines, my sabre was soon beaten down, and I had only to surrender. I was next mounted on the croup of one of their horses, and after a gallop of half an hour reached the French advanced guard. It was already hurrying on, and I must confess that, from the silence of the march and the rapid pace of their battalions, I began to be nervous about the consequences, and dreaded the effects of a surprise on some of our camps. My first apprehension, however, was for you. I thought that you must have been entangled in the route of some of the advancing battalions, and I enquired of the colonel of the first to whom I was brought, whether he had taken any prisoners.

"'Plenty,' was the answer of the rough Republican – 'chiefly peasants and spies; but we have shot none of them yet. That would make too much noise; so we have sent them to the rear, where I shall send you. You will not be shot till we return to-morrow morning, after having cut up those chiens Anglais.'"