A. Lest there should be any man, woman, or child in England, who requires to be reminded of the fact, we mention that our national debt amounts at present to 800,000,000l., and that the annual interest upon it is 28,000,000l.

B. Property is held by conventional, not natural, right.

As the agreement to hold man in property never took place between the parties concerned, i. e., is not conventional, man has no right to hold man in property.

Law, i. e., the sanctioned agreement of the parties concerned, secures property.

Where one of the parties under the law is held as property by another party, the law injures the one or the other as often as they are opposed. More-over, its very protection injures the protected party: as when a rebellious slave is hanged.

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Human labour is more valuable than brute labour, only because actuated by reason; for human strength is inferior to brute strength.

The origin of labour, human and brute, is the will.

The reason of slaves is not subjected to exercise, nor their will to more than a few weak motives.

The labour of slaves is therefore less valuable than that of brutes, inasmuch as their strength is inferior; and less valuable than that of free labourers, inasmuch as their reason and will are feeble and alienated.

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Free and slave labour are equally owned by the capitalist.

When the labourer is not held as capital, the capitalist pays for labour only.

When the labourer is held as capital, the capitalist not only pays a much higher price for an equal quantity of labour, but also for waste, negligence, and theft, on the part of the labourer.

Capital is thus sunk which ought to be reproduced.

As the supply of slave labour does not rise and fall with the wants of the capitalist, like that of free labour, he employs his occasional surplus on works which could be better done by brute labour or machinery.

By rejecting brute labour, he refuses facilities for convertible husbandry, and for improving the labour of his slaves by giving them animal food.

By rejecting machinery, he declines the most direct and complete method of saving labour.

Thus, again, capital is sunk which ought to be reproduced.

In order to make up for this loss of capital to slave-owners, bounties and prohibitions are granted in their behalf by government; the waste committed by certain capitalists abroad being thus paid for out of the earnings of those at home.

Sugar being the production especially protected, every thing is sacrificed by planters to the growth of sugar. The land is exhausted by perpetual cropping, the least possible portion of it is tilled for food, the slaves are worn out by overwork, and their numbers decrease in proportion to the scantiness of their food and the oppressiveness of their toil.

When the soil is so far exhausted as to place the owner out of reach of the sugar-bounties, more food is raised, less toil is inflicted, and the slave population increases.

Legislative protection, therefore, not only taxes the people at home, but promotes ruin, misery, and death, in the protected colonies.

A free trade in sugar would banish slavery altogether, since competition must induce an economy of labour and capital; i. e., a substitution of free for slave labour.

Let us see then what is the responsibility of the legislature in this matter.

The slave system inflicts an incalculable amount of human suffering, for the sake of making a wholesale waste of labour and capital.

Since the slave system is only supported by legislative protection, the legislature is responsible for the misery caused by direct infliction, and for the injury indirectly occasioned by the waste of labour and capital.

C. It is well known that there are persons in this country, as in France and elsewhere, who hold the opinion that the evils of unequal distribution would be annihilated by annihilating the distinctions of rent, profits, and wages; making the whole society the sole landowner and capitalist, and all its members labourers. It is impossible to doubt the benevolent intentions of the leading preachers of this doctrine, whose exertions have originated in sympathy with the most-suffering portion of the community; but it is equally impossible to their opponents to allow that any arbitrary arrangements of existing resources can exclude want, while the primary laws of proportion are left uncontrolled. When the advocates of a common stock can show that their system augments capital and regulates population more effectually than the system under which individual property is held, their pretensions will be regarded with more favour than they have hitherto engaged. At present, it is pretty evident that in no way is capital so little likely to be taken care of as when it belongs to every body,—i.e. to nobody; and that, but for the barriers of individual rights of property, the tide of population would flow in with an overwhelming force. There may be an age to come when the institution of property shall cease with the occasions for it; but such an age is barely within our ken. Meantime, our pauper system exhibits the consequences of a promise of maintenance without a restriction of numbers by the state. If it were possible now to establish common-stock institutions which should include the entire community, they would soon become so many workhouses, or pauper barracks. If any one doubts this, let him ask himself how capital is to be husbanded and cherished when it is nobody’s interest to take care of it, and how population is to be regulated when even the present insufficient restraints are taken away. If education is to supply the deficiency of other stimuli and restraints, let us have education in addition. We want it enough as an addition before we can think of trying it as a substitution. We must see our fathers of families exemplary in providing for their own offspring before they can be trusted to labour and deny themselves from an abstract sense of duty. As for the main principle of the objections to the abolition of proprietorship, it is contained in the following portion of one of my summaries of principles:—

D. If a rebuke were needed for despondency respecting the prospects of society, it might be found in the experience of the change which a few months have wrought in the popular convictions as to the true direction of charity. Fifteen months ago, it required some resolution to give so much pain to kind hearts as was occasioned by such exposures as those contained in “Cousin Marshall,” and yet more to protest against poor-laws for Ireland. The publications of the Poor-Law Commissioners have since wrought powerfully in the right direction. Conviction has flashed from mind to mind; and now we hear from all quarters of Provident and Friendly Societies, of Emigration, of parish struggles for the rectification of abuses, of the regulation of workhouses, the shutting up of soup and blanket charities, and the revision of charitable constitutions, with a view to promote the employment of labour rather than the giving of alms. The extent of the change of opinion in the same time with regard to poor-laws for Ireland is scarcely less remarkable. On no subject has mistake been more prevalent, and never has it more rapidly given way before the statement of principles and facts. The noblest charity, after all, would be a provision for the regular statement, in a popular form, of principles and facts of like importance. When shall we have a Minister of Public Instruction who will be the angel of this new dispensation? It is for the people to say when.

E. It is incumbent on me to advert to the ill-success of one method of supplying labour to the Australian colonies, which I have represented in much too favourable a light in my tale of “Homes Abroad.” I find that, though I have pointed out (pp. 54, 55) the leading objections to the plan of indenturing servants to colonial settlers, I have represented the issue of such an experiment as more prosperous than it has been proved in fact. The true state of the case will be learned from the following extract from “Papers relating to the Crown Lands and Emigration to New South Wales,” printed by order of the House of Commons, October, 1831.

"The Emigrant, in the cases to which we allude, has bound himself, previously to his departure from this country, to serve his employer for a time at wages which, though higher than those which he could have obtained at home, were much below the ordinary rate in the colony. No attempt has been made to render the advantage obtained by the employer in this manner an equivalent for the expense he has incurred in carrying out the Emigrants; and it can scarcely be doubted that in many instances the bargain, if strictly adhered to, would have been more than reasonably profitable to the employer. Indeed it has been the principal fault of these arrangements that the engagement of the Emigrant has not been on either side regarded as a mere undertaking to repay the expense incurred in his conveyance; and hence he has often been led to look upon the transaction as a disadvantageous hiring of himself, into which he had been misled by his ignorance of the circumstances of the place to which he was going. This has been the frequent cause of discontent on the part of indentured servants; and their masters, unable to derive any advantage from unwilling labourers, have found it more for their interest to discharge these servants than to insist on the right conveyed by their bond. It is obvious that no increased severity in the legal enactments for the protection of contracts could prevent those which we have described from being thus dissolved; for they have been so, not from any insufficiency in the obligations by which the Emigrants have been bound, but from the impossibility of rendering such obligations worth preserving, where one of the parties strongly desires them to be cancelled."—pp. 21, 22.

These objections apply only to cases of binding for more than the repayment of the expenses of removal to the colony. Next to the education of the people at home, there is no way in which charity can now operate so beneficially as in making loans, under security of repayment, to enable working men, and yet more working women, to transport themselves to our Australian colonies; and by diffusing, as widely as possible, correct information respecting the condition and prospects of emigrants to our North American colonies. This correct information, which is to the last degree interesting, may be obtained from the Papers above referred to, and the “Reports of the Emigration Commissioners, for 1832; printed by order of the House of Commons.” Every active philanthropist ought to possess himself of the contents of these papers. The Report, dated 1832, contains the following.

“Before we close this account of our proceedings regarding New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, we must observe that the value of that which has been accomplished cannot be justly estimated by a mere reference to the number already gone out. The general scope and tendency of our measures must be taken into account, as well as the importance, in an endeavour to direct emigration to a quarter comparatively new, of having succeeded in making a commencement. For, after the impulse has once been given towards countries really adapted to emigration, the letters of the settlers themselves, more perhaps than the most elaborate statements from authority, serve to maintain and propagate the disposition to resort to the same quarter. Although, therefore, the measures that have been adopted this year may be limited in their immediate influence, and it may be also impossible to predict with certainty their ulterior results, yet, at least, they are of such a nature that, if successful, they may serve as the foundation of a system sufficient for many years to prevent the progress of the Australian colonies from being retarded by the want of an industrious population adequate to the development of their resources.” (p. 6.) And the mother-country, we may add, from being impeded, by an over-crowded population at home, in her efforts to exalt the social and moral condition of her mighty family.

F. See Homes Abroad.

G. Berkeley the Banker.