Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy

sal, and where the remuneration is as equal to the labour.A few more examples of the worlting of the presentsystem will shew us, more clearly, the utter fatuity ofattempting to remedy evils which are inherent in the veryconstitution of society, in any other manner than bya complete reconstruction of the social system.There are in the United Kingdom, at the presentmoment, many thousands of persons who have toilet1 hardall their lives, and yet who are not possessed of property ofthe value of one year's labour; and there arc also manythousands who have never performed one month's labour,and who, nevertheless, arc now possessctl of wealth of thevalue of many h~~ndreds of pountls sterling. I-low camethese rich men in possession of this capital? They havenever laboured, and yet they arc not only enabled to livewithout nrorliing, but their wealth increases every year.Some of them will tell us-and they glory in the confession-thattheir property was acquired in by-gonetimes, by concluest; others say that their riches are thehoarded fruits of their own inclustry,--meaning, thereby,the interest or profit tvhich they have obtained by meansof nnequal exchanges in the employment of capital; andothers, again, merely affirrn that thc wealth which theypossess has been derived from their ancestors, by inheritance.The attainment of wealth by conquest is so glaringlyunjust, that all claims founded upon it stand self-condemnedat once ; and that any individual has a righe totake to himself, or to grant to another, one single foot ofearth, has been denied and disproved alreaiiy,-for tlteearth is the common property of all its inhabitants, andeach one has a just claim, not to a particular part of theearth itself, but n~erely to that wealth which his labourcan compel the earth to ~icld him.Those capitalists who profess to have acquired theirriches by deriving a profit from capital, through theinstrume~itality of unequal exchanges, have a claim but onedegree more just than the claim by conquest. Our dailyexperience teaches us, that if we take a slice from a loaf,the slice never grorv7s on again : the loaf is but an accumillationof slices, and the more we eat of it, the less willthere to be eaten. Such is the case with the loafof the working mnn ; br~t that of the capitalist followsnot this rule. Nis loaf continually increases instead ofdiminishing : wit11 him, it is cut and come again, for ever.Every \rorltrnan knows that if he save a few poundssterling, a11d come to be ill, or out of employment, he canlive only for a certain time upon this money. It is hiscapital-the accumulated produce of his own industryandit ilwindles away until the whole is consumed. Andso, likewise, if excllanges were equal, mould the wealth ofthe present capitalists gradually go from them to theworking classes : every shilling that the rich man spent,would leave him a shilling less rich ; for from the nature ofthings it must follow, that if a part be taken from awhole, that which remains must, as a \vhole, be less thanit was before such pnrt was taken from it.With respect to the acquisition of wedth by inheritance,it requires but little reflection to convince US, thatpast circumstances have re~~rlerctl it impossible for anymember of the prod~ictivc class to have nccumn,ulated, bythe most incessant hoarding of tlie produce of his ownindustry, wealth amounting to one-fiftieth part of suchvast accumn1;~tions as so many tllousands of individualcapitalists and proprietors now hold. It is evident, whenwe take all things illto consideration, that it would requirethe handing down of the savings of many generations of n.working man's family, to :mount to the sum even of onethousand pounds sterling; and that this could be doneonly by a combination of favourable circumstances such aswould not have fallen to the lot of one family in a million.We all know that there have been bloody and exterminatingwars in all ages-that most countries, and GreatBritain amongst the rest, have at times been overrun andplundered by bauds of armed robbers, and consequentlyall production of wealth been at :L ~tand~that the productiveclasses alone, through the mcdlum of unequalexchanges, have always had to support tlie pride and thepomp of aristocracy and its plaything governments-sothat it is all but impossible that any capitalist can havederived even one thousand pounds sterling from tlieactual hoarded labour of his working-class progenitors.From the very conditions laid down by the politicaleconomists-that there shall be labour, and accumulations,and excl~anges-it follows, that there can be no exchangeswithout accun~ulations-no flcc?dmvlalions witjtol~t labour.