ESSAY X.
It is to be observed, that a cause has been steadily and powerfully operating to increase the poor rates, wholly independent of the multifarious abuses above specified. I mean the rapid and oppressive reduction of wages, consequent on the wonderful improvements in machinery. Manual labour succumbs in the conflict with steam and water power: and as three-fourths of mankind depend on the labour of their hands for a support; and further, as at the best of times there is always a superabundance of labour in the market, every thing that supersedes the demand for that labour must increase competition; lower wages; produce distress; and, to the same extent, increase the poor rates.
Mr. Brougham has published an elaborate work on the advantages of the improvement of machinery.[1] But unhappily for his argument, he introduces in the very first page a powerful fact which fully proves that the advantages, admitting them to the full extent that he contends for, are accompanied by a mass of suffering that fully counterbalances all the good with which they are pregnant. He states that a certain Jos. Foster, a working weaver of Glasgow, being examined on the subject of wages, in 1827, by a committee of the British House of Commons, declared:
"That he and many others, who had formed themselves into a society, were in great distress; that numbers of them worked at the hand-loom from eighteen to nineteen hours a day; that their earnings, at the utmost, did not amount to more than seven shillings a week; and that sometimes they were as low as four shillings. That twenty years before that time, they could readily earn a pound a week by the same industry: and that as power-loom weaving had increased, the distress of the hand-weavers had also increased in the same proportion."
Here is an overwhelming fact on this subject, which must puzzle the Malthuses, the Seniors, the Editors of the Edinburgh Review, and all those who so loudly declaim against poor rates.
A large body of men, earning, as Foster says, twenty shillings a week in 1807, and gradually reduced to seven, six, or four shillings, in 20 years, might in the early period have been not only able to support themselves comfortably, but to save, in a few years, money enough to commence business on a small scale: whereas in process of time they would be reduced, step by step, to absolute pauperism, unable to support their families, and obliged to rely on eleemosynary aid, public or private. And let it be observed, that this is not a solitary case. The reduction has extended, in a greater or less degree, to almost every branch into which machinery has been introduced.[2]
- ↑ "The notion, that it can be nationally profitable to save the employment of labour by improvements in machinery, when those whose labour is thus supplanted, must be supported in idleness, at the public expense, is as irrational as it would be for the owner of a pair of carriage-horses, who is obliged by law, or the will under which he inherits, to keep them on good provender in his stable, to attempt to save money by setting up a steam coach."—Q. R. vol. xliii. p. 257.
- ↑ The effect of machinery to increase the poor rates is obvious from the following tables, by which it appears that the latter have increased, pari passu, with the increase of the former.
The spinning Jenny was invented by Hargreaves, in 1767 Arkwright's machine, worked by horse power, was invented in 1769 put in motion by water, in 1771 The mule Jenny, worked by hand, was invented by Crompton in 1775 Wm. Kelly applied machinery to it in 1792 It is obvious that the war of machinery upon manual labour was not confined to the cotton
