LABOR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS PROSPECTS. 
AN ADDRESS 
DELIVERED BEFORE 
THE YOUNG MEN'S 
MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, 
OF CINCINNATI, 
On Tuesday, February 1, 1848. 
BY ROBERT DALE OWEN. 
" Were the benefits of Civilization to be partial, not universal, it would be only a bitter 
mockery and cruel injustice."-Duchatel. 
CINCINNATI: 
HERALD OF TRUTH PRINT, WALNUT STREET, BELOW SECOND. 
1848. CORRESPONDENCE. 
Cincinnati, February 2nd, 1848. 
Hon. Robert Dale Owen,- 
Dear Sir: Believing your Lecture on " Labor, its History and 
Prospects," delivered before the Young Men's Mercantile Library 
Association, to be eminently worthy of a public record, inasmuch as 
its general perusal will greatly promote the public good, we most 
cordially unite in requesting a copy for publication. 
Respectfully, 
J. P. FOOTE, 
A: RANDALL, 
W. D. GALLAGHER, 
HARVEY HALL, 
JAMES F. PERKINS, 
L. A. HINE, 
CHARLES CIST, 
STANLEY MATTHEWS, 
EDW. D. MANSFIELD, 
HENRY HOWE, 
JAMES F. MELINE, 
S. I. KELLOGG. 
Cincinnati, February 3rd, 1848. 
Gentlemen: I place the manuscript of my Address, with pleasure, 
at your disposal; and have added, in the shape of notes, certain de- 
tails and references to authorities, which may serve as evidence 
that the statements made, startling as some of them may seem, 
have not been put forth without a careful investigation of the sub- 
ject. I am, gentlemen, 
With much respect, 
Your obedient servant, 
ROBERT DALE OWEN. 
Messrs. J. P. FOOTE, A. RANDALL, &c. labor: its history and prospects. 
I never stand before an audience, as here to-night- 
many eyes upon me, many ears listening for what is to be 
said-without deeply feeling the responsibility he assumes 
who thus accepts an invitation to engross, if only for a 
brief season, an assembled portion of the public mind. 
My ambition reaches farther than to amuse-than merely 
to interest you for the time. Life is short. Its years pass 
by, even while we are reflecting how they shall be spent. 
The little good a man can do in this world, he must do 
quickly. I pass by, then, what might furnish pleasant 
theme for the conversation of an hour; 1 pass by much 
that might supply subject for literary recreation, matter 
for scientific research. Not that I love these less; but that 
there is a subject of broader scope, of wider range, more 
influential on human destiny; and to that subject I desire 
to speak to-night. 
I desire to speak to you of human powers and of human 
sufferings; of the powers and the sufferings, not of the se- 
lected Few to whom Fortune has assigned property and 
station, and, along with these, voice and influence in the 
world's councils; but of the Children of Labor; of the mil- 
lions, who say little and do much; by whom the world is 
fed and clothed; by whom cities are built, and forests sub- 
dued, and deserts reclaimed. I desire to speak of those 
whose strong arms, ceaselessly tugging at the oar, have 
impelled, through all time, the bark of life; and briefly to 
ask of the Past, how it has treated them; of the Present, 
what is their actual condition; of the Future, what may 
be their coming fate. 
In an inquiry touching the fate and the sufferings of La- 
bor, I have chiefly looked for my illustrations out of this 
prosperous valley, beyond the limits of our favored repub- 
lic. The physician seeks to study the disease there where 
its type is the most malignant. 
Though I speak of disease and the physician, do not 
imagine that I am going to spread before you systems of 6 
sweeping reform. It is no part of my present intention 
to preach radical changes in the structure of society. 1 
would indicate the symptoms, not dictate the cure. I 
seek more to inform than to instruct; not so much to give 
you my thoughts, as to call forth and lend direction to 
your own. We cannot think for each other; but we can 
work for each other. We can collect of the materials for 
thinking that lie scattered abroad throughout the world. 
We can condense, collate, promulgate these. This is the 
extent of my purpose. I place an array of facts before 
you. My hope is, that they may fix attention and enlist 
many minds in the good service of inquiry. In the multi- 
tude of councillors, it has been well said, there is safety; 
and no great problem, moral, social, or political, was ever 
yet worked out in practice, until the minds of thousands 
had been bent, earnestly and long, to the task of its solu- 
tion.* 
There is a Great Question, unanswered, before the world. 
It may not be answered to-day, nor to-morrow-this year, 
nor the next. Yet the answer must come sooner or later. 
And if to some nations it come not soon, that answer may 
be in thunder, amid the tempest of a revolution. 
It is no subtle question of the schools, no curious specula- 
tive inquiry; but a plain, practical, home-striking question; 
reaching to the hearths of men, touching the lives of some, 
involving the property of all. 
Hardly may a question command the deep attention of 
the world now, unless it be connected with property. So 
many millions of mankind expend every thought and en- 
ergy of a toilsome lifetime, to obtain what they shall eat, 
and what they shall drink, and wherewithal they shall be 
clothed; and, of these millions, so many thousands miser- 
ably fail, even in that humble effort, that, on the strictest 
principle of utility, questions regarding wealth and its dis- 
tribution seem the most important that can occupy the 
time of the wise and good. 
The theorist may call this a sordid view of society. Let 
him close his books and enter the world. Let him read 
* Much of the matter here following was furnished by me, 
?ome years since, to an Eastern Review, and there published with- 
out my name. If, in consequence, to any one, many of the details 
here presented seem familiar, their importance is the sufficient 
apology for their repetition. 7 
men, not words-men in crowded cities-men in their 
work-shops, their manufactories; in their garrets, in their 
prisons. And then sad realities will correct crude theories. 
Men, in the mass, cannot be miserable and virtuous. A 
people contending against famine necessarily become im- 
moral. * While abject poverty broods over men and 
* The statistics of crime in Great Britain exhibit frightful re- 
sults. It is continually increasing, in a ratio far beyond the popu- 
lation. 
In " Blackwood's Magazine " for May, 1844, is a compilation of 
statistical tables on this subject, drawn from official sources. Here 
are the principal results : 
" Since the year 1805, when regular tables of commitments first 
began to be kept in England, commitments have increased six-fold. 
They have swelled from five to thirty-one thousand. During the 
same period population has advanced about sixty per cent.: in other 
words, detected crime has advanced four times as fast as the num- 
bers of the people."-p. 533, 534. 
In another portion of the kingdom the increase has been more 
startling still:- 
"In the year 1805, eighty-nine criminals were brought before 
the whole tribunals, supreme and inferior, in Scotland ; but in the 
year 1842, the committals for serious offences were nearly four 
thousand! During the same period, population has advanced about 
fifty per cent. So that in moral, staid and religious Scotland, se- 
rious crime, during the last forty years, has risen twenty-five times 
as fast as the number of the people."-p. 534. 
This would be incredible, if it were not vouched by the actual 
tables of committals officially kept. The writer in Blackwood adds: 
" What renders this prodigious increase of crime in so short a 
period, in all parts of the British Empire, in a peculiar manner ex- 
traordinary and alarming, is, that it has taken place at the very 
time when unheard-of efforts were made, in every part of the coun- 
try, for the moral and religious instruction of the people. We are 
very far from saying that enough has been done in this way; no 
one is better aware that the vast debt which the prosperous wealth 
of England owes, in this respect, to its suffering indigence, is still, 
in great part, undischarged, and that, till it is taken up and put on 
a proper footing by the State, it never can be completely liquida- 
ted ;-still, more has been done to discharge it during the last thirty 
years, than in the whole previous centuries which have elapsed 
since the revolution."-p. 535. 
It would be difficult to find a more striking illustration of the 
great truth, that the first step towards making a people virtuous is 
to render their condition comfortable and happy; and that to hope- 
less misery the preacher preaches in vain. 8 
presses them to the earth, their minds are crushed and 
their hearts are withered. But the words of the wisest 
teacher are spoken in vain to crushed minds and withered 
hearts. If it be sometimes true of the individual, it is al- 
ways false of the mass, that sharp adversity purifies and 
ennobles. The deadliest part of the curse of Cain-the 
curse on those who toil to live, and live only to die-is, 
that they are blighted in mind as well as in body; it is, 
that they lose not only rational enjoyment, but all taste 
for it; it is, that they are deprived not alone of the know- 
ledge that elevates and improves, but of all desire to ob- 
tain it. The iron enters into the soul, and corrupts its 
health, and destroys its beauty. 
Therefore a great question of public wealth becomes a 
great question of public morals. 
Upon us, here in young America, the question to which 
I am about to refer does not force itself; it invites only, 
not compels, our attention. For in these vigorous States 
there is, as yet, no famine, and little hopeless poverty. 
Hardship there is, and occasional embarrassment; but 
nothing which a strong hand and a bold heart cannot 
overcome. 
It is in Europe that the question I refer to rises up, im- 
portunate, imperative; not to be denied, not to be set 
aside, scarcely to be put off from day to day; knocking at 
the palace gate, thundering at the council door. For, in 
the old world, thousands are dying for lack, not of comfort, 
but of food; and millions are selling their youth, and their 
health, and their strength, and their leisure, even to the 
last moment that nature can struggle against sleep; and 
their happiness, down to the merest and coarsest gratifi- 
cation of animal appetite; and, at last, their short and 
weary lives;-all for so miserable a pittance, that the 
wages of a week's slavish toil may hardly suffice to pur- 
chase one bushel of wheat. 
And it is in England-the proudest, and mightiest, and 
wealthiest of Europe's Powers-it is in England, whose 
Briarean factory system mocks at consumption, whose 
workshops overstock the world-where riches elbow indi- 
gence, and industry manufactures famine,-it is in that 
little island of marvel and misery, where men understand 
everything, except how to enjoy some moderate fraction 
of the enormous wealth they produce;-it is there that 9 
problem must soon be solved-by her statesmen or her 
people, peacefully or violently, in reform or in revolution. 
Nor should we delay its examination, until, in turn, it 
knocks at our doors. 
I do not propose here to venture a solution of the prob- 
lem I have in view; distinctly to state it, is my humbler 
intention. As a useful preliminary, I propose to touch on 
some points of comparison between the condition and re- 
sources of former ages and those of the present; and as, 
beyond two centuries past, the ancestry of North America 
must chiefly be sought in Great Britain, to her early his- 
tory I first direct my search. 
In England, as throughout Europe, during the feudal 
ages, war was the trade of men. To this, agriculture, 
commerce, and all handicrafts, were strictly subservient. 
The soil was held by military tenure; and the protection 
of the law, such as it was, purchased of the noble by the 
peasant, at the price of military service. It is difficult to 
imagine a state of things less favorable to the production 
of wealth. At any moment the serf might be taken from 
the plow, to arm in his liege lord's quarrel; or the crafts- 
man called from his bench or his loom, to bear the spear 
or bend the bow. And the loss of time and interruption 
of regular labor was but one item, and a small one, in the 
list of burdens imposed by the spirit of the age. If, spite 
of all interruption, the seed was sown and the harvest 
ripened, the chance yet remained, that it might be cut 
down by the sword of the forager, or trampled under the 
hoof of the war-horse. The wording of the Borderer's 
account of a hostile inroad, in Scott's " Lay," is charac- 
teristic : 
" They crossed the Liddell at curfew hour, 
And burnt my little lonely tower. 
The fiend receive their souls therefor, 
It had not been burnt this year or more! " 
It seems a marvel that labor, thus harassed and pillaged, 
unassisted, too, save by the rudest aids of science to pro- 
duction, should have sufficed to furnish to society the ne- 
cessaries of life. And, in truth, for one or two centuries 
after the conquest, the peasantry, or rather villeinry, of 
England, of whom many were but thralls, spoken of and 
valued as any other personal property, either received no 10 
wages at all, except necessary food and clothing, or else a 
scanty and uncertain compensation. "At this period," 
says a modern writer, " the food of the laborer consisted 
principally of fish, chiefly herrings, and a small quantity 
of bread and beer. Mutton and cheese were considered 
articles of luxury which formed the harvest home, of so 
much importance in ancient times." " Their habitations 
were without chimneys, and their principal furniture con- 
sisted in a brass pot valued at from one to three shillings, 
and a bed valued at from three to six shillings." * 
In the course of the fourteenth century, however, the 
condition of the English peasant became independent and 
comfortable. During Edward the Third's long wars in 
France, he was compelled to manumit many bondsmen, 
in order to recruit his armies. The forced services of vil- 
leinage were gradually exchanged for free labor, paid by 
wages; and, by the middle of the fourteenth century, these 
wages, made statutable by the ultra-legislation of those 
days, furnish authentic evidence, when compared with the 
price of staple necessaries at the same period, that the 
condition of the British laborer was already far better than 
it is to-day. Of this assertion let us review some of the 
proofs. 
The act of 23d of Edward III., (that is, in 1350,) com- 
monly called the " Statute of Laborers," fixed rate of wages 
as follows: For common labor on a farm, three pence half- 
penny per day; a reaper, per day, four pence; mowing an 
acre of grass, six pence; threshing a quarter of wheat, four 
pence; and other labor in proportion. In Bishop Fleet- 
wood's " Chronicon Preciosum," a work of reputation, are 
found various ancient accounts kept by bursars of con- 
vents. From one of these, dated in the fourteenth century, 
the following items are taken: A pair of shoes, four pence; 
russet broadcloth per yard, thirteen pence; a stall-fed ox, 
twenty four shillings; a fat goose, two pence half-penny; wheat 
per quarter, (that is, eight bushels,) three shillings and Jour 
pence. Sir John Cullum, quoted by Hallam, corroborates 
these estimates. "In the fourteenth century," says he, " a 
harvest man had four pence a day, which enabled him in 
a week to buy a comb of wheat (that is, four bushels); but 
to buy a comb of wheat, a man must now (he wrote in 
* Wades ''History of the Working Classes," p. 11-12. 11 
1784) work ten or twelve days." * This brings the price 
of wheat, in the fourteenth century, to four shillings a 
quarter, or six pence a bushel. 
The act of 23d Henry VI. (in 1444) fixes the reaper's 
wages at jive pence, and others in proportion. And the 
account book of a convent, quoted by Sir Frederick Eden, 
dated between 1415 and 1425, gives us :-wheat per quar- 
ter averaging jive shillings; oxen, from twelve to sixteen shil- 
lings; sheep, from fourteen to sixteen pence; butter, three far- 
things per pound; cheese, a half penny per pound; and 
eggs, twenty-five for a penny. Fleta, who wrote about 1335, 
gives four shillings per quarter as the average price of 
wheat in his day. Hallam, whose general estimates agree 
with the above, calculates butcher's meat, in the fifteenth 
century, at a farthing and a half per pound. This seems a 
just estimate; for in the next century, namely, by 24th 
Henry VIII., it was decreed that "no person shall take for 
beef or pork above a half penny, or for mutton or veal 
above three farthings a pound, and less in those places 
where they are now sold for less." 
Taking the average of these various prices, it would 
appear, that, in the fourteenth and fifteeth centuries, the 
weekly wages of an English day-laborer would procure 
for him about half a quarter of beef, or one and a half 
sheep, or about ten geese, or (the most important item) 
four bushels of wheat. Manufactured articles were some- 
what higher in proportion. Yet a day's labor in harvest 
sufficed to pay for a pair of shoes, and a trifle over a 
week's wages to purchase broadcloth enough for a coat. 
Cullum, already quoted, reminds us, that towards the 
close of the last century, about a fortnight's labor had 
become necessary to purchase four bushels of wTheat. 
How is it now ? The exertions of that excellent associa- 
tion, the Anti-Corn Law League, have supplied, as the 
Westminster Review has expressed it, " an accumulation 
of facts so incontrovertible, that no person who has any 
reputation for accuracy or intelligence, will risk it upon 
the denial of the terrible truth." They inform us, that the 
average wages of farm laborers throughout Great Britain, 
are now rather under, than over, eight shillings a week ; just 
the average price in that country, for years past, of one 
* "History of Hawsted," p. 258. 12 
bushel of wheat. One month's labor now supplies the 
same quantity of bread to the British laborer as a week's 
labor did five hundred years ago ! * 
* The above calculations in regard to the rates of wages, now 
and in former days, in Great Britain, were originally made by 
me and published in February, 1844. Since then, I have seen a 
series of articles, by " a barrister," in the " League" of August 
1844, on the subject of agricultural wages, evidently compiled with 
minute care and accuracy of research ; and as the result obtained 
from the collation of a multitude of authorities, including all the 
statutable enactments on the subject, from 1349 down, the writer 
comes to the following conclusions : 
" About the middle of the eighteenth century, the laborer could 
earn 157 pints of wheat, by a week's labor in harvest; equal to 
about seventeen shillings a week at the present time ; (that is, August 
1844;) but in the reign of Henry VII. (say about 1500,) he could earn 
two pecks ; and in the reign of Richard II, (say about 1380,) he 
could earn two and three-quarters, or nearly three pecks by one 
day's labor; equal to about thirty shillings a week at the present 
time."-League of August 31, 1844 ; p. 788. 
If we put the present average wages of the farm laborer in Great 
Britain at eight shillings a week, it will be seen, that the above 
results tally very closely with those to which I had previously 
arrived. If we make allowance for wages in harvest, always some- 
what higher than at other seasons, we snail still find the farm labor- 
ers' wages in Great Britain, at this day, not more than one-third, as 
high as they were four or five centuries ago. 
As to wages of operatives in manufactories, their average in 
Great Britain is variously estimated from eight to eleven shillings a 
week, when fully employed. In populous districts, their employ- 
ment is very precarious ; and the evidence taken before parlia- 
mentary committees opens up to us a state of things, in and about 
manufacturing towns, that is dreadful to contemplate. 
In the " Minutes of Evidence before a select committee of the 
House of Commons, connected with the woolen and fancy trades 
of the West-riding of Yorkshire," taken in 1833, Mr. Wm. Stocks, 
Jun'r, deposed, that he was Secretary of a committee composed of 
a number of masters, visiting the cottages of the laborers in and 
around Huddersfield, to ascertain their actual condition. He states 
the plan pursued, thus : " A committee of masters was formed, and 
that committee deputed certain workmen that they had confidence 
in, and that they knew were honest and upright, to take different 
districts of country, allotted to them by that Committee. When the 
returns came to me, I sent them to the masters to be examined 
by the masters' books, and when the masters found any thing they 13 
Nor is the proportion confined to bread stuffs alone. In 
the fifteenth century, a week's labor purchased sixty-four 
pounds of butcher's meat. Now (at six pence half penny, 
its average value per pound,) eight shillings a week pro- 
cures the peasant hardly fifteen pounds; less than one- 
fourth what his ancestor obtained. Procures for him, did 
I say ? the estimate is imaginary ; for no such luxury as 
believed was wrong, that was returned to the men who had taken it 
to go and re-examine ; and when the masters pronounced it correct, 
then I took the calculation." * * * " The result was, that we 
found 13,226 individuals that averaged two pence halfpenny (five 
cents) per day to live on, out of a population of 29,607." * * 
* " This sum of two pence half penny per day, included all 
parish relief; and they had not the whole of that applicable to meat 
and drink, because they had to pay rent and every thing out of it, 
including the wear and tear of the looms."-Minutes of Evidence, 
28th July and 3d August, 1833. 
The " Report of the Liverpool branch of the Anti-Corn-Law 
League," for 1833, exhibits a similar picture of wholesale misery 
in that city. It states, that " in Vauxhall Ward, Liverpool, con- 
taining about 6000 families, or 24,000 souls, the number of 3,462 
families had but two pence half-penny (^re cents') per individual 
to live on!" 
Can we wonder, that, in the midst of the squalid wretchedness, 
which must result from such a state of things, there should be a 
frightful sacrifice of human life ? Official tables show, that it 
amounts to one-half of all that are horn. 
Chadwick's well known "Report of the Sanitory Condition of the 
Laboring Population of Great Britain," gives, among other tables, 
a statement of the average duration of life, of different classes, in 
manufacturing districts. In Manchester and Liverpool, where the 
proportion does not vary materially from that in other manufactur- 
ing cities, it is found that the average of life is, 
In Liverpool, 1840. 
Among gentry, professional persons, &c. - - 35 years. 
" laborers, mechanics, &c. - - - - 15 " 
In Manchester. 
Among gentry, professional persons, &c. - ■ 38 " 
" laborers, mechanics, &c. - - - - 17 " 
Thus, in these cities, persons in easy circumstances live, on the 
average, more than twice as long as the laborer does. In other 
words, half the laboring population arc perpetually killed off, by 
the influence of the circumstances incident to their present social 
condition. 
And Europeans are dreadfully shocked by infanticide in China 1 14 
animal food now smokes on the table of the down-trodden 
laborer of Britain. * So, if the comparison did not seem 
like mockery, I might proceed to show, that, instead of 
ten geese, two would now absorb a week's wages; that 
instead of a sheep and a half a week, the laborer must now 
toil Jive weeks for a single sheep; that a day's wages will 
now purchase, not eight dozen of eggs as formerly it would, 
but two dozen and a half; not eight pounds of cheese, but 
two ; not Jive pounds of butter, but a pound and a half. 
Four days' labor will now hardly procure the pair of shoes 
which a single day formerly paid for; and two week's labor 
instead of little more than one, would be insufficient in our 
times, to obtain the material for a winter coat; that is, if 
a peasant should ever commit the extravagance of pur- 
chasing broad-cloth for such a purpose.f 
If we assume as correct, Hallam's estimate of the rela- 
tive value of money, which is, that any given sum in the 
thirteenth century must be multiplied by twenty-four, in 
the fourteenth by twenty, and in the fifteenth by sixteen, 
to bring it to the standard of our day ; it will follow, that 
a common laborer's wages in the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries were equivalent to at least Jive shillings of the 
* An estimate quoted by the 11 Westminster Review," on the 
authority of the " Somerset County Gazette," may here usefully 
be adduced. It is the literal account of the usual weekly expenses 
of a family of six, taken from the mouth of an honest and indus- 
trious peasant. s. d. 
Rent of two rooms and a garden, - - - 1 4 
Peck of wheat, 2s. Grinding and barm, 2d. - - 2 2 
Half a bag of potatoes, 2 6 
One pound of lard, ------ 0 7| 
Candles, Id. Soap, Id. Salt, |d. - - - - 0 2| 
Milk, scalded, six pints, ... . . . 02 
Total weekly income and expenditure, 7 0 
t The following may bo considered average retail prices in 
England at the present day ; wheat, 8 shillings a bushel; beef, six 
pence half-penny per pound ; mutton, seven pence per pound ; 
fat sheep, forty to fifty shillings; butter, ten pence per pound ; 
eggs, six pence a dozen ; cheese, seven pence a pound ; a fat goose, 
four shillings. A pair of stout shoes costs at least six to eight shil- 
lings; and broadcloth, for a strong, coarse, winter coat, probably 
sixteen to twenty shillings. 15 
modern English currency, per day; about four times what 
such a laborer actually receives at present. This tallies 
with most of the preceding data. 
The inference to be adduced from the average of the 
above items would be, that the British peasant could obtain 
for his labor, five hundred years ago, about four times as 
much of the necessaries of life as he can to-day. 
But as the materials for comparison are scanty, and the 
estimate rests chiefly on the statutable rate of wages, some 
deduction may be necessary. Hallam says: " Although 
these wages are regulated, as a maximum, by acts of Par- 
liament, which may naturally be supposed to have had a 
view rather towards diminishing than enhancing the cur- 
rent rate, I am not fully convinced that they were not 
beyond it; private accounts, at least, do not always corres- 
pond with these statutable prices." And Cullum's estimate 
we must remember, is for labor in harvest. 
To guard against all chance of exaggeration, let us 
deduct even one-half; and the startling fact still forces 
itself on our attention, that the working classes employed 
in tilling the garden soil of Great Britain, receive now, as 
the price of their toil, but one-half as much as their rude 
ancestors did five centuries ago.* 
* It should be remarked, however, that this encroachment on 
the reward of labor has not, in strictness, been regularly pro- 
gressive. The documents on the subject that have reached us from 
the seventeenth century, are particularly meager; but if we may 
judge from those that are still extant, the price of labor in hus- 
bandry was, throughout the greater part of that century, very much 
depressed; sometimes it would seem nearly, if not quite, as low as 
it is to-day. Indeed, Barton, the author of an " Inquiry into the 
Depreciation of Labor," in his table of wages and prices, from 
near the close of the fifteenth century down to 1813, states it in 
1610 at only about three-quarters of a bushel of wheat per week. 
But this is evidently an error. The average wages of farm labor- 
ers during the reign of James I, were four shillings a week and 
upwards ; the price of wheat averaged about four shillings and 
three pence a bushel from 1606 to 1625 ; and but three and nine 
pence from 1625 to 1645 ; and beef and mutton, at the same time, 
were from three to four pence a pound. (Wade's Working Classes, 
p. 66.) Yet even those estimates exhibit a scale of wages about as 
low as that of the present day. 
A circumstance mentioned by Wade, induces one to doubt, how- 
ever, whether wages, even then, had sunk to their present depres- 16 
I speak here of the wages of farm labor. That the 
aggregate wealth of England has increased, in an acceler- 
ating ratio throughout these centuries, every one knows. 
That the average income of the British population is much 
higher now than it was five hundred years ago, is equally 
notorious. A portion of the people have accumulated 
riches, to an enormous extent, during that period. To 
employ the words of the present Prime Minister of England, 
" The higher classes have advanced in luxury beyond 
measure." * It is a feature the most striking and the 
most revolting in the present condition of Great Britain, 
that the magnificence of the rich and the sufferings of the 
poor, have advanced with steps alike gigantic. The 
sion. Justices of the Peace were empowered to fix the price of 
labor every Easter and Michaelmas, by proclamation ; and in these 
ratings, about 1610, the magistrates calculated half the day's earn- 
ings equivalent to diet for one day. A much greater proportion, 
as Wade justly remarks, would be required at present. 
The same remark is made by Sir Frederick Eden, in his "State 
of the Poor," vol. 1, p. 148. 
In the eighteenth century, the price of labor in husbandry some- 
what revived. It is stated by Barton, in the middle of that century, 
at a bushel and a half of wheat per week. It never, however, 
again reached, nor indeed approached, the rates of the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries. Barton's table goes back no further than 
1495, for which year, he gives the wages of a laboring man as 
equal to upwards of three bushels of wheat. 
* Lord John Russel, in a recent speech in Parliament, says : "If 
we compare the condition of this country (Great Britain) with what 
it was a century ago, it is impossible not to see, that, while the 
higher classes have advanced in luxury beyond measure; while 
the means available for the diffusion of comfort and the enjoyment 
of life have prodigiously increased; while, if we look to the mid- 
dle classes and their means of procuring comfort, they have made 
a very great advance; if we look to the laboring classes-to the 
men who either till the soil or labor in the factories-if we look to 
the quantity of necessaries which their wages would buy in the 
middle of the last century, and that which they can buy now-I 
think we must be convinced that they have not participated in an 
equal degree, in the advantages which civilization and increased 
knowledge have conferred upon us." 
This admission of the British Premier, guarded and qualified 
though it be, is evidence that the Great Problem has suggested itself 
for solution, even to the rulers of European monarchies. 17 
abodes of her nobility and gentry have assumed the sump- 
tuous character of palaces ; but her cottages, smiling once 
with decent comfort and humble peace, alas for them! 
Far more strictly now, than in the day they were written, 
do the words of England's sweetest rural poet apply: 
"Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose, 
Unwieldly wealth and cumbrous pomp repose ; 
And every want to luxury allied ; 
And every pang that folly pays to pride. 
Those homely joys, that plenty bade to bloom, 
Those calm desires, that asked but little room, 
Those healthful sports, that graced the peaceful scene, 
Lived in each look and brightened all the green,- 
These, far departing, seek a kinder shore, 
And rural mirth and manners are no more 1 " 
Historical evidence as to the actual condition of the 
British laborer, proves that there is as much truth as 
poetry in these lines, and corroborates the calculations I 
have made regarding wages and their gradual depression. 
" There is one very unpleasing remark," says Hallam, 
" which every one who attends to the subject of prices, will 
be induced to make, that the laboring classes, especially 
those engaged in agriculture, were better provided with the 
means of subsistence, in the reign of Edward III, or Henry 
VI, than at present." Fortescue, Chancellor of England 
under Henry VI, and writing, therefore, in the fifteenth 
century, after stating that the English are " rich in all the 
necessaries of life," and that they " drink no water except 
at certain times, on a religious score and by way of doing 
penance," adds: 
" They are fed, in great abundance, with all sorts of flesh 
and fish, of which they have plenty everywhere. They 
are clothed throughout in good woolens; their bedding and 
other furniture in their houses are of wool, and that in 
great store. They are well provided with all sorts of 
household goods and necessary implements for husbandry. 
Every one, according to his rank, hath all things which 
conduce to make life easy and happy." * 
Fortescue's item about " drink no water," which seems 
to savor of exaggeration's somewhat amusingly confirmed 
by White, of Selborne, the Naturalist, who, in his history 
* Difference of limited and absolute Monarchies," p. 19. 18 
of his native village, mentions incidentally a record dated 
about 1380, and stating that certain men, for their disor- 
derly conduct, were punished by being " compelled to fast 
on bread and beer." And the industry of Cobbett, who 
quotes the above anecdote, has also dragged to light a 
statute of 1533, the preamble to which, after naming the 
four sorts of meat, " beef, pork, mutton and veal," adds: 
" these being the food of the poorer sort." * 
It is true, and should not be forgotten, that our ancestors 
in the olden time suffered sharply from occasional dearth, 
or by scarcity caused by improvident consumption. Yet 
these were the exceptions, not the rule; and they cannot 
invalidate the direct proofs adduced, that, in the wealthiest 
and one of the most prosperous nations of the civilized 
world, the reward of labor to the producer of wealth has, 
as a general rule, for five centuries past, been gradually 
diminishing from age to age. It has at last sunk down to a 
point, at which, to employ the words of the Westminster 
Review, " there is not a step, but simply a handsbreadth 
between the condition of the agricultural laborer and pau- 
perism." Comfort has disappeared. Famine watches by 
the door. The peasant feeds his family on potatoes and 
salt, with a little bread and lard, and a miserable dole of 
scalded milk. Incessant labor keeps his head just above 
the rising waters of indigence; and, at the first trifling 
accident, these close and overwhelm him. For the thou- 
sand casualties of life, there is not the scantiest provision. 
The indisposition of a day curtails the meager rations dealt 
out around his board, and the sickness of a week threatens 
with starvation his wife and her little ones. 
If we look to one portion of the British Islands, more 
dark, more utterly hopeless yet, is the picture to be drawn. 
Talk of war and its horrors! War is mild and merciful, 
its sufferings and hardships are but as dust in the balance, 
compared with the fearful blight that has fallen, in time of 
peace, on Ireland. For every American that has died by 
disease or in battle, since the struggle with Mexico com- 
menced, ten-ay, more likely twenty-Irish have perished 
in the same period, not by a death of violence alone-by 
* 24th Henry VIII, chap 3. 19 
slow, protracted torture! * Do you recollect that terrible 
story of the tyrant of Pisa?-of that Ugolino, whose fate 
has supplied theme for the painter and the poet, has been 
sung by Chaucer and by Dante? how he, and his sons, and 
his grandsons, were shut up in a lonely tower, all food de- 
nied, the key of his dungeon turned by inexorable hands 
and cast into the waters of the Arno ? how father and 
children were left there miserably to perish, their cries un- 
heard, their sins unshriven! and how, as the historian has 
left it on record, " thenceforth the tower was called the 
tower of famine, and thence shall ever be?" f 
The tower of famine !-What shall Ireland be called ? 
A punishment so horrible, that the whole civilized world 
would revolt against its infliction on the vilest criminal- 
on the wretch reeking from a hundred murders; on the 
parricide-that punishment devised by the ingenuity of 
Italian revenge to pay back the cruelties of a life-time- 
the punishment of Ugolino, to see expire in torments, be- 
fore his eyes, the children of his love, even while he strug- 
gled himself in the last agonies of starvation;-that pun- 
ishment of horror was endured last year in that doomed 
island, not by thousands-by tens of thousands of men, of 
women, without a crime, without a cause of offence! 
The recognition of these terrible truths is the first step 
in the approach to the statement of the problem I refer 
to. A civilized nation cannot afford bread and meat to 
the men who produce these ! And what nation ! A na- 
tion restricted, indeed, in her territory at home, yet pos- 
sessed of colonies and dependencies, some of vast extent, 
in every part of the habitable globe; a nation whose 
proud boast it is, that the sun never sets on her island flag; 
* The exact number of deaths attributable to the late famine in 
Ireland, it must, of course, be very difficult to obtain. Mr. II. 
Grattan recently stated, in his place in Parliament, that 11 one hun- 
dred and fifteen thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine persons 
had died for want of food in Ireland, during the late famine." 
How many perished by levers and other diseases, caused by un- 
wholesome or insufficient nourishment, God alone knows. Lord 
Fitzwilliam stated, in Parliament, that at least two millions of peo- 
ple would require relief this winter. 
The famine of last year cost the British Government forty mil- 
lions of dollars. 
t G. Villani, c. 127. 20 
a nation proverbial for an industry that never tires, a vigi- 
lance that never sleeps, an energy and an enterprize that 
have carried her arms and her commerce to the farthest 
ends of the earth. That nation which now looks on and 
declares that she cannot rescue her own peasantry from 
famine, maintained, not half a century since, a triumphant 
war against the Caesar of modern times, with half Europe 
at his back; poured forth, for ten successive years, men 
and treasure with a profusion that confounded her enemies 
and astonished even herself; and rising in strength and 
resources with the occasion, obtained from her own sub- 
jects alone, without an effort, in the very last year of that 
protracted struggle, a sum so vast, that it would purchase, 
out and out, the fee simple of some half a dozen among 
the States that compose our own Confederacy.* It is in 
the favorite abode of art and of practical science, in the 
* The exertions made by England during the last three-quarters 
of a century, in carrying on her wars, would be incredible, were 
they not avouched by official documents. Colquhoun, in his " Re- 
sources of the British Empire," published in 1814, has collected 
and collated these. They form the foundation of the following de- 
tails: In 1782, at the close of our revolutionary war, England's 
debt had increased to twelve hundred millions of dollars. States- 
men trembled at the amount; a gloom overspread the country; 
consols fell, in August, 1784, to fifty-four; and the nation seemed 
on the verge of bankruptcy. 
Yet, in 1793, when the French revolutionary war began, Eng- 
land had already taken breath; in an eight years' struggle against 
republican principles and revolutionary excesses, she lavished up- 
wards of a thousand millions of dollars; and found herself, in 1801, 
notwithstanding the alleviation promised by Pitt's sinking fund, and 
the enormous sums exacted by his thousand taxes, loaded with a 
debt that exceeded two thousand millions of dollars. Yet, after 
two brief years' interval of peace, England again, in 1803, rushed 
into a war with Bonaparte and Europe. Great as had been the 
preceding expenditures, they were cast into the shade by those of 
this memorable contest. The average taxes levied in the British 
Isles, from 1803 to 1803, reached nearly three hundred millions of 
dollars annually; and the amount borrowed in addition averaged 
over a hundred and fifty millions a year more. As the wars ad- 
vanced, the expenditures increased. In the year 1813, the net 
amount realized by taxation was £64,979,960, to which seven per 
cent, must be added for expenses of collection.-Colquhoun, page 
198. The loan obtained in that year amounted to £64,755,700, 21 
land where Watt, and Arkwright, and Bolton, first fur- 
nished inanimate slaves to mankind; it is there, where the 
magical machinery of the age more than realizes the story 
of Aladdin's fabled lamp, and gorges, at its master's bid- 
ding, one after another, the markets of the civilized world; 
it is there, in the very midst of superabundance, with com- 
plaints of over-production daily ringing in their ears, that 
thousands and tens of thousands, among those who create 
these countless riches, are denied the means to procure 
the coarsest clothing against the wintry blast, or a single 
blanket to cover the rude straw bed on which their weary 
limbs repose I 
Nor is this, even, the most startling phase of the mar- 
velous anomaly. England, at the close of a contest unex- 
ampled in the history of mankind, was no whit exhausted. 
The horse-leech cried give ! give ! and still prompt answer 
was made to the call. The last year's enormous loan 
(that of 1813) was negotiated from the surplus of her own 
citizens alone,* voluntarily seeking investment, without 
the slightest difficulty. British industry but demanded a 
market-something to consume, something to destroy, 
something to swallow up the prodigious resources that 
flowed forth from her mines and her factories, her work- 
shops and her shipyards; and, fast as one pile of wealth 
disappeared in the chasm, another sprung up to supply its 
place. War answered the purpose passing well; but any 
other popular Moloch of destruction would have produced 
a similar effect. Had some huge Polyphemus of the deep, 
prowling around the island, watched her armaments as 
they put out from port, and, wading after them, had sunk 
the vessels, and devoured seamen and soldiers as they 
swam to land, England would have been as rich, except 
in unproductive glory and bootless ardor, as when the 
same death and destruction were dealt forth on the battle- 
field or in the naval action, according to the most approved 
" which was negotiated," says Colquhoun, " without any difficulty." 
-p. 275. The two sums united and reduced to dollars, give a 
total of nearly six hundred and thirty-nine millions, as Britain's 
public expenditure during a single year 1 
*Out of a debt of £706,000,000, in 1813, about seventeen mil- 
lions only (less than one-fortieth of the whole) was owned by for- 
eigners.-Colquhoun, page 295. 22 
system of warlike tactics. Destruction, in some shape, 
was required. There was too much labor; laborers must 
die: there was over-production; products must be got rid 
of. An insatiable customer must be had; and such a cus- 
tomer was war to England. While that customer lived, 
all went well in the island workshop. Trade throve, 
manufactures flourished, agriculture prospered, commerce 
brought rich returns. But when the curse of peace fell 
on the bustling land, the glory departed from her. When 
there was nothing to squander military stores and muni- 
tions, to wear out swords, and muskets, and cannon, to 
burn powder and scatter bullets and balls-when half the 
army were disbanded, to produce instead of destroying- 
England sank under the reverse. Her powers were there, 
but there was no call for them; her energies, but whither 
should they turn ? her capital, but where might it be pro- 
fitably invested? Her laborers were as willing as ever to 
toil on; but the disbanded warriors, formerly the custom- 
ers of labor, now became its competitors. There were 
more hands to work, and there was less work to do. 
Wages fell. 
And if England had never incurred her debt of three or 
four thousand millions at all-if some powerful and ma- 
lignant spirit of the air had furnished to her, year by year, 
the gold that purchased waste of human life and of human 
property, yet so strangely are the elements of good and 
evil commingled in these modern days, that one scruples 
to decide whether, in that case, the situation of the British 
laborer would have been materially better to-day. The 
market of war would equally have been closed; disbanded 
soldiers would equally have sought employment; yes! and 
even if the debt were cancelled to-morrow by the dash of 
a pen, although the taxes would indeed be lighter, yet 
those who now live by those taxes, the great army of fund- 
holders, disbanded also and cast loose, like their kindred 
consumers, from the ranks of war, to do something useful 
for a livelihood, would, like them, become competitors in 
the market of labor, and, like them, underbidding each 
other, might still depress, to a lower depth, the poor pit- 
tance that goes by the name of wages to the work-people 
of England. Nay, the very reduction of taxes would be 
the all-sufficient plea for the reduction of these wages. 
Labor could be afforded for less. And down to the very 23 
point at which it can be afforded-which means to that 
point on the road to famine, at which men are not starved 
suddenly, but die slowly of toil inadequately sustained by 
scanty and unwholesome food-down to that point of bare 
subsistence, the laborer of Britain is thrust. How ? Why ? 
Wherefore ? By what legerdemain of cruelty and injus- 
tice ? 
Here, then, our problem begins to loom upon us through 
the distance. Why, as the world advances, do the pros- 
pects and the comforts of the great mass of mankind 
darken and decline? How happens it that four or five 
centuries have passed over Britain, bringing peace where 
raged feuds and forays, affording protection to person and 
property, setting free the shackled press, spreading intel- 
ligence and liberality, reforming religion and fostering 
civilization-say ! ye who would solve the mystery of the 
age, how happens it that these centuries of improvement 
have left the British laborer three-fold more the slave of 
toil than they found him? 
If the spirits of the departed might revisit this earth, 
ere while the scene of their joys and their sufferings, with 
what feelings would the bold and sturdy peasant, once 
the pride of " merrie England," look down upon his pale 
and toil-worn descendant of the present day? with what 
emotions, mingled of wonder and of grief, would he re- 
gard the changed aspect of his native home! its marvels, 
of more than fairy-land! the storm's wildest'elements 
tamed down to man's service ; invisible and imponderable 
agents trained to do his daily bidding; steam hurrying his 
person over the earth; the lightning bearing his messages ! 
And from these and ten thousand other bewildering won- 
ders he might turn- 
-And his descendant, the living agent in this new world 
of enchantment, what of him ? If the dead could speak, 
well might his forefather demand: " Where is thy gain in 
all this? What is thy share from out these countless im- 
provements ? Answer! "- 
What shall he answer? Poor laws and vagrant acts- 
the very terms unknown to his ancestor!-the famine fe- 
ver and a pauper's grave ! * 
*From the year 1388 to the year 1530, there appears to have 
been no legislation whatever, in Great Britain, respecting the main- 
tenance of vagrants and beggars.-Reeve's History of English 24 
But it is to the cold decree of judgment, not to the im- 
pulse of feeling, I would submit this question. Nor has 
it yet been stated in all its force. There is one item just 
alluded to, that must be brought forward, in authentic 
shape, to the foreground. 
It relates to the new powers of producing wealth brought 
into operation within the last century. 
When England's statesmen and capitalists sat down, in 
1813, to reflect that their island, with a population of sev- 
enteen millions, had actually produced and expended, in 
a ten years' war, some two thousand millions of doi.lars, 
over and above her former extravagant peace establish- 
ment,-a sum raised without the aid of foreign capitalists, 
and demanding an exertion to which the annals of the 
world furnish no parallel;* and when they saw the elastic 
Law, vol. hi., p. 171; vol. iv., p. 225. The poor law system was 
first rendered secure and permanent by the famous statute of 43d, 
Elizabeth, ch. 2, (that is, in 1601.) At this day, one in every ten 
of the inhabitants of Great Britain is a pauper, receiving parish re- 
lief. Witness the following: 
" In our manufacturing counties every eleventh inhabitant, and 
in our agricultural counties every eighth inhabitant, is a pauper re- 
ceiving parish relief. This, however, by no means represents the 
whole amount of suffering. The horror of being branded as a 
pauper is so prevalent among the industrial population, that thou- 
sands prefer death by gradual starvation, to placing themselves on 
the parish funds.'1''-Report of Liverpool Branch of Anti-Corn 
Law league, 1833. 
Dr. Alison, of Edinburgh, stated, at the meeting of the British 
Association held in Manchester in 1842, before the statistical sec- 
tion, that in that capital of 137,000 inhabitants there were actually 
not less than 23,000 persons (one in six) " in a state of utter desti- 
tution." 
* Colquhoun gives the following as the expense of England's 
wars since 1775. The average each year during the American 
war, was £17,395,480 ; during each year of the French revolution- 
ary war, it was £33,470,857 ; and during each year of the war 
against Bonaparte, the average rose to £50,416,813; in all cases 
deducting the peace establishment.-p. 197. The same writer says 
of the two last wars, that they " occasioned an expenditure, which 
in point of magnitude and extent, exceeds anything that history 
records.-p. 252. 
Great Britain's entire public expenditure, during the wars of 
1803-13, including the peace establishment, averaged about four 25 
energies of the nation still rising to meet the emergency, 
fresh capital eagerly offered on loan, and increasing riches 
and resources flowing in, to fill the enormous chasms yearly 
made by wealth-absorbing war,-their wonder exceeded 
even their self-gratulation. The only plausible solution 
of the problem seemed to lie in the marvelous powers of 
production recently obtained from labor-saving machinery. 
And accordingly the extent of these powers became an 
interesting subject of inquiry. 
It was a great era in the history of the world, the acces- 
sion of George III to the throne of Great Britain. That 
weak monarch witnessed the commencement of changes 
that are destined to work an entire revolution, not of dynas- 
ties, nor merely of forms of government, but a complete re- 
volution in the social condition of the masses of mankind. 
In 1760 he became king; in 1764 Watt commenced his 
improvements on the steam engine; in 1767 Hargraves 
invented the spinning jenny; and in 1769 Arkwright 
obtained his first patent for spinning with rollers. The 
impulse was given ; science and enterprise were engaged; 
and, wave after wave, the vast tide of improvement has 
since unceasingly rolled on. 
The amount of labor which is saved to man by the vari- 
ous mechanical inventions which have since accumulated 
in Great Britain, is estimated by political economists at an 
amount equal to the manual labor of from four hun- 
hundred and fifty millions of dollars annually, thus reaching four 
thousand five hundred millions in the ten years; an amount proba- 
bly equal to the entire property, real and personal, now owned with- 
in the United States. The average wealth in Massachusetts is 
about $350 per individual; in Indiana, about $150; suppose the 
average between these two States to be the average wealth through- 
out the United States, (which may be near the truth,) then $250 is 
the average for each man, woman, and child, throughout the Union. 
Multiplied by eighteen millions, we have $4,500,000,000 as the 
aggregate private property of the United States. Colquhoun states 
the population of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1811, at 17,096,803 
persons, (p. 66,) somewhat less than that of the United States to- 
day. The entire property, real and personal, owned in Great 
Britain and Ireland, at the present day, is estimated at ten thousand 
Jive hundred and sixty millions of dollars.-Lozve's Present State 
of England ; appendix to chap, viii: (the pound sterling converted 
into dollars at $4,80.) 26 
dred millions to eight hundred millions of working adults.* 
It is beyond the scope of this address fully to investigate 
which of these calculations the nearer approaches the 
truth ; but a few particulars of the estimate may be useful 
and interesting. 
In M'Culloch's " Statistics of the British Empire," pub- 
lished in 1837, under the superintendence of the "Society 
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," are given many 
details regarding the growth of the cotton manufacture. 
From a recent writer on the subject, who describes the ar- 
rangements of a cotton mill, McCulloch quotes as follows : 
" The operations are numerous, and every one of them 
is performed by machinery, without the help of human 
hands, except merely in transferring the material from one 
machine to another. It is by iron fingers, teeth and wheels, 
moving with exhaustless energy and devouring speed, that 
the cotton is opened, cleaned, spread, carded, drawn, roved, 
spun, wound, warped, dressed, and woven. The various 
machines are proportioned to each other in regard to the 
canabilitv of their work, and are so placed in the mill, as 
* Mr. J. Q. Adams, in his report from the Committee on Manu- 
factures made to Congress in 1832, estimated, that at the conclu- 
sion of the war in 1815, the mechanical inventions in Great Bri- 
tain were equivalent to the manual labor of two hundred millions of 
persons. 
There has, since then, been a vast increase of productive power. 
Gaskell, speaking of the influence of machinery on human labor, 
after stating that wages of operatives, during the last quarter of a 
century, had not materially varied, adds somewhat vaguely, on the 
authority of Marshall, " the astounding fact, that the same quantity 
of work is now performed for one shilling and ten pence, for which 
sixteen shillings were paid in 1814."-Gaskell's Manufacturing 
Population, p. 330. 
It is not only the introduction of new machines that tends to 
abridge human labor, but also, and to a great extent, the gradual 
perfecting of those already introduced. Babbage, in his Economy 
of Manufactures, records the fact, that the machine used in the 
manufacture of cotton, called a "stretcher," and worked by one 
man, produced, in the year 1810, four hundred pounds of spun 
cotton, and in 1832, twelve hundred pounds. " In this instance," 
says Babbage, " production has gradually increased until, at the 
end of 22 years, three times as much work is done as at the com- 
mencement, although the manual labor remains the same."-Econ- 
omy of Manufactures, p. 338. 27 
to allow the material to be carried from stage to stage, 
with the least possible loss of time. All are moving at 
once, the operations chasing each other; and all derive 
their motions from the mighty engine, which, firmly seated 
in the lower part of the building, and constantly fed with 
water and fuel, toils through the day with the strength of 
perhaps a hundred horses. Men, in the meantime, have 
merely to attend upon this wonderful mechanism, to sup- 
ply it with work, to oil its joints, and to check its slight and 
infrequent irregularities; each workman performing, or 
rather superintending, as much work as could have been 
done by two hundred or three hundred men, sixty years ago."* 
Kennedy, also quoted by McCulloch, stated in 1815, since 
which time numerous and highly important improvements 
have been made, that the machines amounted to this, that 
the labor of one person, aided by them, can now produce 
as much yarn as two hundred could have produced fifty 
years ago.f 
Farey, in his "Treatise on the Steam Engine," says: 
" An extensive cotton mill is a striking instance of the ap- 
plication of the greatest powers to perform a prodigious 
quantity of light and easy work. A steam engine of a 
hundred horse power, which has the strength of eight hun- 
dred and eighty men, gives a rapid motion to fifty thousand 
spindles to spin fine cotton thread. Seven hundred and fifty 
men are sufficient to attend all the operations of such a 
cotton mill; and by the assistance of the steam engine, 
they will be enabled to spin as much thread as two hundred 
thousand men could do without machinery." One man 
then, in a cotton Factory, according to Farey's calculation, 
produces, on the average, as much as two hundred and sixty- 
six formerly did. 
A work published in 1843, by W. C. Taylor, D. D., on 
the "Cotton manufacture of Great Britain," says : "Ma- 
chines now enable one man to produce as much yarn as 
three hundred could produce at the accession of George III." 
Dr. Taylor sets down as the wages of " operatives in 
cotton factories," in 1843, 8,659,000 pounds sterling annu- 
ally, and estimates these wages to average from eight to 
ten shillings a week. This would give us upwards of three 
* Baine's " Cotton Manufacture," p. 243. 
t Kennedy's " Rise and Progress of the Cotton Trade." 28 
hundred thousand operatives; with which the actual returns 
by the census of 1841, published in 1844, agree. The 
Parliamentary " Occupation Abstract" from that census 
gives us 302,276 operatives as known to be employed, in 
the cotton factories of Great Britain. Of these, a little 
less than two-thirds may be put down as employed in spin- 
ning mills;* say two hundred thousand. Multiply two 
hundred thousand by two hundred and fifty, the lowest of 
the above estimates of the power imparted to each of the 
above operatives by machinery at the present day, and 
we find that the cotton spinning factories of Great Britain 
alone turn out an amount of work, which would have 
required, less than ninety years ago, the labor of fifty mill- 
ions of adults to perform ! f 
And yet cotton spinning is but one branch of a single 
manufacture, however important. In regard to another 
branch, and a very important one, Dr. Taylor says: "Ma- 
chines enable one man and one boy to print as many 
goods, as a hundred men and a hundred boys could have 
printed at the accession of George 111." The entire num- 
ber of operatives actually engaged in the various branches 
connected with the manufacture and preparation of cotton 
fabrics, is rated at eight hundred thousand.J Then, there 
* By actual returns made to the " Factory Commissioners,'' in 
1833, of 67,819 persons engaged in preparing and spinning cotton, 
there were 42,401 engaged in the spinning department, 23,920 in 
the weaving department, and 1,498, as engineers, mechanics. 
&c.-Sup. Rep. of Factory Commissioners, pp. 123 124 136. 
f This amount tallies very nearly with an estimate made by 
Baines, in 1833. lie says : " The 150,000 workmen in the spin- 
ning mills produce as much yarn as could have been produced by 
forty millions with the one-thread wheel."-Baines' Cotton Manu- 
facture, p. 362. 
The rate of increase for ten years, from 1831 to 1841, in the 
population of Great Britain, was, by the census returns ; in the 
department of trade, commerce and manufactures, about fifteen and 
a third per cent; in fifteen years, then, from 1833 to 1848, it may 
be taken at twenty-three per cent. Then suppose no increase in 
the productive power of cotton machinery in that period, the in- 
crease of operatives alone would raise the amount of power in 1848, 
to upwards of forty-nine millions. 
McCulloch, in his " Dictionary of Commerce," article " Cot- 
ton," sets down " eight hundred thousand as the total number of 29 
are the linen, the silk, and the woolen manufactures, 
employing between seven and eight hundred thousand 
work-people ; * and all aided by machinery somewhat sim- 
ilar to that employed in the cotton manufacture. When, 
in addition, we reflect, that there is hardly a department 
of industry, in which the power of steam or the aid of 
ingenious mechanism abridging human labor, has not been 
adopted ; nay, that such improvementshave extended even 
to agriculture, f we shall hardly resist the conclusion, that 
when considered equal to the labor of four hundred millions 
of adults, the mechanical powers of production obtained 
by Great Britain during the last century, are not extrava- 
gantly rated. 
Yet, to cover all inaccuracies, or over estimates, which 
may be imagined to have crept into a calculation, in 
regard to which we have not the data necessary for entire- 
precision, let us abate, by one-half, the above result. Sup- 
pose the powers in question equal to the labor of two 
hundred millions only-but four times the amount esti- 
mated to be gained in the spinning of cotton alone-still, 
persons directly employed in the different departments of the man- 
ufacture."-Diet. Commerce, p. 443. 
With this calculation, that of Baines agrees-. He asserts, " that 
the number of persons directly employed in the manufacture (of 
cotton) with those dependent on them for subsistence, must amount 
to fifteen hundred thousand"-Baines' Hist, of Cotton Manufac- 
ture, p. 413. 
But the actual returns from manufacturing districts show, that 
out of any given population, wholly supported by cotton factory 
labor, a little more than one-half are actual operatives. Bainesr 
calculation of the operatives engaged in spinning, weaving, lace- 
making, embroidery, hosiery and calico printing, is, for Great Bri- 
tain, upwards of seven hundred thousand ; (page 396); and he ex- 
pressly states, that the bleachers, dyers, calanderers, sizers, and a 
numerous list of other incidental branches are not included. 
* Woolen, about 350,000 ; Silk, over 200,000; Linen, nearly 
200,000. 
f The threshing machine is well known ; and a recent English 
writer on the influence of machinery, mentions a peculiarly con- 
structed plough, lately brought into use for ploughing up potatoes, 
by which " one man and one horse get through as much work 
as would, a few years ago, have required at least thirty laborers." 
-Gaskell's " Manufacturing Population of England," p. 340. 30 
how passing marvelous in connexion with the present 
condition of labor, are the corollaries from that fact! 
The population of Great Britain (not including Ireland) 
by the Census of 1841, was upwards of Eighteen Millions 
and three-quarters. Suppose it twenty millions to-day. 
The proportion of families, in that Island, wholly unem- 
ployed, is estimated at over one-fifth of the entire popula- 
tion ; * and if to this we add the distributors of wealth, 
it will leave but two-thirds of the inhabitants; less than 
thirteen millions and a half. Of these, little more than 
one-third are actual laborers; say, however, five millions. 
Now, in aid of the manual labor of these five millions of 
human workmen, Great Britain may be said to have im- 
ported, from the vast regions of invention, two hundred 
millions of powerful and passive slaves; slaves that con- 
sume neither food nor clothing; slaves that sleep not, 
weary not, sicken not; gigantic slaves, that drain subter- 
ranean lakes, in their master's service, or set in motion, 
at a touch from his hand, machinery, under which the 
huge and solid buildings that contain it, groan and shake ; 
ingenious slaves, that out-rival, in the delicacy of their 
operations, the touch of man, and put to shame the best 
exertions of his steadiness and accuracy: yet slaves, pa- 
tient, submissive, obedient; from whom no rebellion need 
be feared; who cannot suffer cruelty nor experience pain. 
These unwearying and inanimate slaves outnumber the 
human laborers who direct their operations, as forty to one. 
What has been the result of this importation ? 
If we shut our closet doors, and refuse to take the an- 
swer from the state of things as it actually exists, we shall 
say, that aid, thus sent down from Heaven as it were, to 
stand by and assist man in his severest toils, must have 
rendered him easy in his circumstances, rich in all the ne- 
cessaries and comforts of life, a master instead of a slave, 
a being with leisure for enjoyment and improvement, a 
freeman, delivered from the original curse which declared 
that in the sweat of his brow should man eat bread, all 
the days of his life. But if, rejecting mere inference, we 
step out into the world, with our eyes open and our sym- 
pathies awake, then we may begin to feel with the British 
peasant, when he burns up threshing machines, and to 
comprehend, why the barber of Preston was driven from 
* Colquhoun, p. 109. Wade's " Working Classes," p. 549. 31 
Lancashire, by fear of violence from those who earned a 
living by the old mode of spinning. * 
We shall see, throughout the old world, the new ser- 
vants competing with those they might be made to serve. 
We shall see a contest going on in the market of labor, 
between wood and iron on the one hand, and human 
thews and sinews on the other; a dreadful contest, at 
which humanity shudders, and reason turns, astonished, 
away! 
We shall see masters engaging, as the cheapest, most 
docile and least troublesome help, the machine instead of 
the man. f And we shall see the man, thus denied even 
the privilege to toil, shrink home, with sickening heart, to 
the cellar where his wife and children herd, and sink 
down on its damp floor, to ask of his despair, where these 
things shall end? whether the soulless slaves, bred year 
by year from the teeming womb of science, shall, in very 
deed, surely and silently thrust aside, into idleness and 
starvation, their human competitors, until, like other ex- 
tinct races of animals, the laborer perish from the earth ! 
Here, then, is another phase of the mysterious anomaly 
of our day. Mechanical improvements, inevitable even 
if they were mischievous, and in themselves a rich blessing 
as surely as they are inevitable-are becoming, by some 
strange perversion of their use, a cruel and deadly curse. 
They stand in array over against the laborer, instead of 
toiling by his side. They overstock the market; prices de- 
cline ; that lowers profits; and these, in their fall, bring 
down wages with them. 
And yet, will any man, who stands on his reputation for 
sanity, affirm, that the necessary result of over-production 
is famine ? that because labor produces more than even 
* Arkwright. In Hargraves' case it went farther than mere 
threats. " Hargraves for some time kept his invention secret, using 
his jenny only to obtain weft for his own loom. The vanity of his 
wife induced her to betray the secret; the neighboring spinners 
were alarmed; they feared that such an invention would deprive 
them of employment; a mob assembled, forced Hargraves' house, 
broke his machinery to pieces, and menaced his life. He removed 
to Nottingham."-Taylor's Hand Book of Silk, &c., p. 117. 
t " The self-acting mule has the important advantage of render- 
ing the mill owners independent of the combinations and strikes of 
the working spinners."-Baines' " Cotton Manufacture," p. 207. 32 
luxury can waste, labor shall not have bread to eat? If 
we can imagine a point in the progress of improvement, 
at which all the necessaries and comforts of life shall be 
produced without human labor, are we to suppose that the 
human laborer, when that point is reached, is to be dis- 
missed by his masters from their employment?-to be told 
that he is now a useless incumbrance, which they cannot 
afford to hire ? But no such point can ever be reached. 
Very true.. Yet, as the asymptote to the hyperbola, we 
are ever approaching it. And if such a result seem fla- 
grantly absurd in the extreme, it is actually experienced 
in the degree. Men are told, that machines have filled 
their places, and that their services are no longer required. 
For a time, indeed, even the vast machinery of England 
increased, instead of diminishing, the demands for labor. 
Rapidly as accumulated the supply, still more rapidly in- 
creased the demand. England manufactured for half the 
world ; and thus employed both the living laborer and the 
inanimate slave. But other countries-our own espe- 
cially-have learned to manufacture for themselves; Eng- 
land's market is curtailed; the English employer must 
abridge his production by hiring less labor. The living 
laborer-the expensive one, who eats and drinks and 
wears, is dismissed. The country, as a writer in a lead- 
ing London Review has it, is " embarrassed with a super- 
fluity of animal machines." * Unemployed operatives 
crowd the market-places and swarm in the streets. And 
as it will not do, now-a-days, to put these superfluous va- 
grants to death, as the Spartans did their Helots when 
they became inconveniently numerous ; and as gradual 
starvation is very horrible,besides being slow in its effects; 
it has occurred to British statesmen to propose, as a last 
resort, a premium on emigration. The men cannot be 
* A writer in the London Quarterly, quoted by Gaskell, says: 
" We have arrived at a great and most important crisis of social 
arrangement. We are embarrassed with a superfluity of human 
labor, of animal machines, which cannot be absorbed in manufactu- 
ring operations. What is to be done with this superfluous, or rather 
disposable fund of human physical power? Shall these men be 
compelled to eke out a miserable existence, with half employment 
and scanty wages? or shall they be thrown upon their respective 
parishes for eleemosynary relief?"-Gaskell's Manufacturing 
Population, p. 338. 33 
used, therefore they must be got rid of. * To send oil' the 
machines might equally answer the case. But what 
business man would think of such a proceeding? The 
cheaper and more manageable agent must, of course, be 
retained. 
And to this, human labor is reduced!-to be cast out as 
a nuisance; to be driven forth, as they send felons to con- 
vict colonies !-human labor, from which, in one shape or 
other, the world receives every thing of good, of useful, 
of beautiful, that charms the senses or ministers to the 
wants-to which we owe life and all that makes life de- 
sirable ;-labor, without which, to give substance and 
healthy vigor to the character, man is but a fopling, and 
woman a butterfly ! Shall men worship wealth, and yet 
despise and thrust from them its creator? It has been 
sometimes said, with much truth, that the grade of true 
civilization in any nation, may be measured by the posi- 
tion which woman attains in its social circles. A test yet 
stricter, perhaps, is the degree of estimation in which la- 
bor is held there. It is a good sign of a country, when its 
poets put forth such noble lyrics as that of which these arc 
the concluding stanzas : 
Labor is rest-from the sorrows that greet us, 
Best, from all petty vexations that meet us, 
Rest, from sin-promptings that ever entreat us, 
Rest, from world-syrens, that lure us to ill. 
Work-and pure slumbers shall wait on thy pillow ; 
Work-thou shall ride over Care's coming billow ; 
Lie not down wearied 'ncath Wo's weeping willow; 
Work with a stout heart and resolute will. 
* British statesmen calculate, with the utmost coolness, to what 
extent the market is glutted with labor. The permanent surplus of 
laboring people, in Ireland, is officially estimated at one-fifth of the 
entire population.-Parliamentary papers, vol. viii., p. 4; Sess. 
1830. Ensor calculates it at one-fourth. 
In the British House of Commons, Mr. Charles Buller gave no- 
tice of a motion for March 14, 1843, "to move the resolutions on 
the necessity of extensive and systematic colonization, with u view 
of bettering the condition of the people." 34 
Droop not though shame, sin and anguish arc round thcc ! 
Bravely Hing oil' the cold chain that hath bound thee ! 
Look to yon pure Heaven smiling beyond thee! 
Rest not content in thy darkness-a clod ! 
Work-for some good-be it ever so slowly ! 
Cherish some Hower-be it ever so lowly ! 
Labor! All labor is noble and holy! 
Let thy great deeds be thy praise to thy God! * 
It is a source of encouragement to the friend of his spe- 
cies, that such sentiments are spreading, slowly but surely, 
throughout the world. They are spreading in the Old 
World, as well as here in the New. In proof, let me read 
to you the following from the pen of one who seems, more 
than any other of England's modern economists, to have 
written in behalf of the people : 
" There is truly no commodity-if so disparaging an 
epithet may be applied to Nature's noblest production- 
so precious as man. Even an untutored Indian from the 
plains of Africa will fetch a hundred pounds in the slave- 
market of America; but how much more valuable were a 
civilized, instructed and indefatigable European ? Yet see 
how he is depreciated! We give nothing for an article 
with which we are abundantly supplied; not even for air 
and water, though indispensable to support life. But an 
Englishman has become less valuable than cither clement; 
he is not only without price, but is actually become what 
algebraists call a negative quantity ; something worth less 
than nothing; and a premium has positively been offered 
for his expatriation 1" f 
Do we thank God, that such reasoning applies not to our 
case ?-that we are not as other nations, or even as king- 
ridden England? Do we point to our sparse population, to 
our wide-spreading domain ? There is, indeed, an element 
of vast importance in our social condition, that distinguishes, 
and must long continue to distinguish us from the old world. 
There, the earth is no longer the heritage of her children- 
7 o o 
of all her children.! To the favored of birth or of fortune, 
*" Labor," by Mrs. Frances S. Osgood; originally published in 
the "Democratic Review." 
t Wade's " History of the Middle and Working Classes," pp. 93, 
94. 
| Daniel O'Connell and the " League" estimate the proprietors of 35 
the children of preference-to them the earth and all her 
fruits belong. The millions come into a world that is al- 
ready appropriated, where there is no spot they can call 
their own; no, not so much as that narrow dwelling-place, 
where, after the toils of a weary life-time, they are laid to 
rest at last! 
But, in our land, there is an alternative, when the terms 
of the employer becomeoppressive to the employed. Here 
there is always, for the white man, escape from a master's 
tyranny. When, in the older States, wages no Ionizer fur- 
nish comfort, there is room, and to spare, here, in the wide 
and ever extending West. The earth, that yields her fruit 
alike to the poor and the rich, is not yet monopolised among 
us ; is not yet denied to him, who would seek, in her bosom, 
a plain but independent support. Our statesmen have not 
yet learned the doctrine, avowed by certain European econ- 
omists, that a man born into a world already occupied and 
overstocked with labor, has no right to claim food; that 
such an one is a being superfluous on the earth, and for whom, 
at the great banquet of Nature, there is no place to be found.* 
land, in Ireland, at ten thousand. If we set down the population 
of that island at eight millions, it results that seven hundred, and 
ninety-nine persons out of every eight hundred, own no portion 
whatever of her soil. 
By the census of 1831, the population of Ireland was 7,707,401. 
As to the number of proprietors of land in England, I can find no 
authentic information. The following paragraph recently appeared 
in, the New York Tribune ; but I know not whence the estimate is 
taken, nor how far it may be depended on: 
" The author of a pamphlet recently published in England, states, 
that the soil of that country, which, in the year 1775, belonged to 
about 240,000 proprietors, in the year 1815, was owned by 30,000 
only ; and that there is every reason to believe, that this process of 
accumulation in the hands of a few has been going on progressively 
since 1815." 
If this statement may be trusted, things in England must be ra- 
pidly hastening to a crisis. 
* A French historian has distinguished the true principle : "Avant 
toutes les lois socialcs, 1'homme avoit le droit de subsister."-Ray- 
nal. Hist, des Indes, vol. x., p. 322. 
One portion of mankind have no right to make laws, or uphold 
institutions, by which another portion, who arc willing to labor, are 
shut out from the means of subsistence. 36 
To the existence of a vast, unoccupied domain, in market 
at a low rate, more than to any other circumstance, is it due, 
that labor, in these states, is a commodity, for which the de- 
mand, as a general rule, as yet exceeds the supply. An 
American, to use the language of the British author, is still 
a positive quantity. As a farm laborer, his wages will ob- 
tain for him as much, or more, than the British laborer 
earned, five hundred years ago; here, in the West, from four 
to six bushels of wheat per week. 
And yet it is an enquiry of deep interest, though it be not 
of pressing necessity, whether the same causes are not si- 
lently at work here, that have brought about so fatal a re- 
sult in the older country. 
The day is indeed distant, when emigration, or specula- 
tion, or both, shall have absorbed our vacant lands. But 
that day must come, at last. And long before it comes, yes, 
even now while I speak, while our nation is yet in what Ad- 
am Smith calls, the progressive state, are not a thousand in- 
fluences rife and active here, that have elsewhere trodden 
down labor to the earth? Is not the laborer here, as in 
Great Britain, a " commodity," bid for in the market, as 
wheat or cotton is ; of much value, if very scarce ; command- 
ing less wages, as population gradually fills up the market of 
labor, and appropriates the region of vacant land; and thus 
liable to become, as in England, a negative quality, a wan- 
derer begging for toil, whenever any causes combine to sur- 
feit the markets that are open to the produce of his labor? 
If his exertions increase, may not the ultimate reward of in- 
creased exertion, in his children's days, if not in his own, be 
an amount of production that will deprive the producer of 
employment? If he obey the command to increase and 
multiply, does not growing population tend to the same re- 
sult? If the inventive genius of America, no whit behind 
that of Europe, brings into being machine after machine, to 
perform the labor, and to take the place of man, is not the 
laborer, here as in England, thereby liable, at last, to be 
crowded out of the permission to work for his daily bread? 
Is it not here, as in older States, a condition under which 
alone labor is assured of a fair reward, that there shall not be 
too much labor? And is it not the direct tendency of inven- 
tion and of population, to violate that condition? But is 
there any reason, in the nature of things, why its violation 37 
shouid produce other than the most cheering and desirable 
results-leisure, comfort, assured competence, independence 
and social equality ? Can there be any reason, other than 
one artificial and arbitrary, why the producers of the neces- 
saries and comforts of life should then only be secure of their 
portion of those necessaries and comforts, when the world 
is not overstocked with these 1 As rationally might we de- 
cide, that when a huge goblet of water stands before a man 
fainting with thirst, he shall not be suffered to put his parched 
lips to the crystal liquid at all, because he cannot drain the 
vessel of its contents to the last drop. 
It is not the question, whether the evil day is upon us; 
but whether time, in its ceaseless flight, will see us run the 
same course, reach the same goal, as other and older Slates 
have reached before us. Take New England, with her busy 
operatives and her splendid machinery. Close to her popu- 
lation the safety-valve of the public lands. Decree, that 
when her work-people feel the iron hand of competition 
pressing too harshly upon them, they shall not be allowed 
to escape to the free woods and rich lands of the Far West. 
And what assurance should we have, that in Lowell, and 
Lynn, and Salem, the same scenes would not soon be re- 
produced that now win our sympathy for the oppressed la- 
borer of Britain? 
And then, too, if there be one element of safety, in our 
particular case; that refuge, namely, which labor finds in the 
unappropriated lands of the new States; there is an element 
of danger also, peculiarly our own. There are to be found, 
in the American market of labor, not alone the inanimate 
powers of mechanism, but also living machines, recognized 
by law as property, and whose services can be commanded 
by their owners, at the cost of maintenance alone. Is it a 
thing so very certain, that the capital and the skill and the 
industry now concentrated in manufacturing enterprise, 
chiefly in the Northern States, may not, hereafter, find pro- 
fitable field and safe investment in the South? It is but a 
few months since, that, in the capital of South Carolina, a 
Cotton Manufacturing Company was organized; and, on 
laying the corner-stone of their building, the occasion was 
improved, to deliver to a numerous and influential audience, 
an Address, in which the speaker confidently predicted, that 
the South, ever distinguished on the battle-field, was about 38 
to enter on a new contest, with the North and with Eng- 
land; a "strife for manufacturing pre-eminence, for com- 
mercial glory." " That beginning," he said, "was but the 
prelude to great success; to changes, that should convert 
dilapidated hovels into handsome streets, and cause those 
who now suffer in poverty to rejoice in comfort." "Then," 
-the orator concluded-" then will this corner-stone be re- 
garded with greater pride than the most splendid obelisk, 
and held in higher honor than lofty temples or triumphal 
arches." 
Are you quite sure, that this is but an idle boast? The 
operations now performed by factory workers are chiefly of 
a simple and mechanical kind, demanding no special exer- 
tion of intellect. A Southern slave of ordinary intelligence 
can readily be taught to perform them. Slave labor, in 
many portions of the South, is becoming, as at present di- 
rected, daily less profitable to the master. Are you quite 
sure that the sharp spur of self-interest will not urge it in a 
new direction ? nay, that the " strife for manufacturing pre- 
eminence" has not in very deed commenced ? And if it 
has-if it is to produce vast combinations of animate and 
inanimate machines, coming into direct competition with 
labor in the Northern market,-then will the American 
statesman have to deal with a new element in our social 
condition. Who shall predict its gradual influence? or its 
ultimate results ? 
But, in truth, the subject of which I have sketched, 
briefly and very imperfectly, some of the bearings to-night, 
is one that rises far above all sectional, all local, even all 
merely national considerations. It is a world-wide subject; 
it involves questions having interest and application, wher- 
ever man lives and labors. As such, the friend of his kind 
will regard it and examine it with deep interest; no matter 
whether he be a subject of some of those old monarchies, 
now in the waning term of their existence, and reaping in age 
the bitter fruit of early errors ; or a citizen of this vigorous 
Republic, yet in the spring-time of her progress, fresh with 
all the hopeful aspirings of youth, yet not absolved from the 
duty of casting a watchful eye, even to the distant future, 
before the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, 
when she shall say, " I have no pleasure in them." 
Alchymists used to expend their lives in search of the 39 
philosopher's stone, which was to turn all baser metals into 
gold. Statesmen, in these modern days, have a different 
task before them ; it is to detect that bud and fatal element 
in the politico-economical systems of the age, that turns all 
good into evil; that renders plenty a curse ; that changes the 
means of creating wealth into prolific sources of poverty ; 
that makes peace a scourge, and war almost a blessing. 
In the prosecution of that task, what vital questions cross 
the enquirer's path! Must the working man continue a 
commodity in the market, underbid by machinery, and 
crushed down even by the best improvements of the age f 
For every one that is benefited by these, must tens of thou- 
sands be destroyed ? Must civilization have her few select- 
ed sons of preference, and her millions of step-children, out- 
cast and forsaken? Must labor, the creator of wealth, lose 
from age to age, and from century to century, one portion 
after another of its just and fitting reward? 
And if not, what is the remedy ? 
When that question is anwered, then will the Great 
Problem of the Age be solved.