THE ECONOMIC POSITION

OF

THE BRITISH LABOURER.

CHAPTER I.

Introductory Remarks.

I PURPOSE in the course of the following Lectures to describe the position of the British labourer. The subject, if I can do adequate justice to it, must be particularly interesting, and one which I consider to be peculiarly appropriate for discussion from a Chair of Political Economy. This science has often had to incur the reproach of being unpractical. The business man assuming a confidence which ignorance alone can give, contemptuously sneers at political economy, and assumes that

he is in possession of a superior wisdom which enables him to grapple with all the practical affairs of life, unhampered by theories and unfettered by principles. Our science will therefore in some degree vindicate its claim to utility, if it can show that connected with the position of the British labourer there are rapidly arising questions which are destined to exert a powerful influence upon the production of wealth and upon the distribution of property in this country. Men of business are proverbially acute in observing causes from which result temporary fluctuations in the price of commodities, but they are the last to recognise the slow, but not less inevitable working of more permanent causes, which may perhaps be destined to remodel the social state of a country, or to revolutionise the conditions upon which commerce may be carried on.

One moment's reflection will suggest some of the economic problems which may arise for solution during the next few years. Ireland is becoming depopulated. The Irish have hitherto supplied much of the lowest kind of labour required in England. Our corn has to a great extent been reaped by them, but the day is probably not far distant when Ireland will require English labourers to reap her own harvest. Again, it may be observed, that as the commerce of England has developed, a line

of demarcation more definite and more difficult to be passed has arisen between the employers and the employed. This separation between capital and labour is unnatural, and must be pernicious. The hired labourer, as a general rule, has no pecuniary interest in the success of the work in which he is engaged; his faculties are not stimulated, his energies are not evoked. His life is passed without hope, and a discontent must thus be too frequently engendered, which, if not corrected, may jeopardise the stability of our constitution. If for an instant we consider the past, we shall see how great are the changes which have been wrought in our national industry. In former times the English farmers generally cultivated their own freehold estates. They were the old yeomen of England who played so proud a part in the annals of our country, and the yeoman and his labourers often lived together, and thus became attached to each other by some of the ties of family affection. But three distinct classes, between whom no relation now exists except a pecuniary one, are at the present time concerned in the cultivation of the soil. The landowner obtains the greatest rent he can from his tenant, and the tenant obtains from his labourers the maximum of work for the minimum of wages. The employers and employed are parties to a keenly contested bar