If,indeed,masters and journeymen went over with these instruments and tools,they might use them,and by consuming at the same time the circulating capital now exported from Ireland give the owner of it a large profit;and they might teach the ignorant and helpless natives how to make use of the various instruments I have mentioned.Those who talk of improving Ireland,or any other country,by capital have a double meaning in their words.They know the power of the capitalist over the labourer,and that whenever the master goes or sends,there also must the slave labourer go.But neither the lawmaker nor the capitalist possesses any miraculous power of multiplying loaves and fishes;or of commanding,like the enchanters of old,broomsticks to do the work of men.They must have labourers,skilled labourers,and without them it is nonsense to talk of improving a country and a people by corn and cloth and hatchets and saws.
The wide spread of education among the journeyman mechanics of this country diminishes daily the value of the labour and skill of almost all masters and employers by increasing the number of persons who possess their peculiar knowledge.At the same time,masters and employers cannot hope that the labourers who are not capitalists will remain long ignorant of the manner in which masters who are both labourers and capitalist lend themselves to the views of the capitalists who are not labourers.
They are daily acquiring this knowledge,and masters cannot therefore rationally expect a termination to the present contest.
On the contrary,it must continue.Even if it should be stopped,it will again and again occur.It is not possible that any large body of men who are acquainted with their rights will tacitly acquiesce in insult and injury.The profits of the masters,as capitalist,must be diminished,whether the labourers succeed in obtaining higher wages,or the combination continues,or it is from time to time renewed.In the former case,the masters,as skilled labourers,will share in the increased rewards of industry;in either of the two latter,not only will their profit be destroyed,but their wages will be diminished or altogether annihilated.Without workmen their own skill and labour are of no use,but they may live in comfort and opulence without the capitalist.Masters and employers,therefore,would do well to recollect that by supporting the claims of capital they diminish their own wages,and they prolong a contest which,independent of the ill temper and hatred it creates and perpetuates,is also injurious to them as inventors,contrivers and skilled labourers,and which must ultimately terminate to their disadvantage.
The improved education of the labouring classes ought,in the present question,to have great weight also with statesmen,and with the community at large.The schools,which are everywhere established,or are establishing,for their instruction,make it impossible for the greatest visionary to suppose that any class of men can much longer be kept in ignorance of the principles on which societies are formed and governed.Mechanics'institutions will teach men the moral as well as the physical sciences.They excite a disposition to probe all things to the bottom,and supply the means of carrying research into every branch of knowledge.He must be a very blind statesman who does not see in this indications of a more extensive change in the frame of society than has ever yet been made.This change will not be effected by violence,and cannot be counteracted by force.Holy Alliance can put down the quiet insurrection by which knowledge will subvert whatever is not founded in justice and truth.The interest of the different classes of labourers who are now first beginning to think and act as a body,in opposition to the other classes among whom,with themselves,the produce of the earth is distributed,and who are now only for the first time beginning to acquire as extensive a knowledge of the principles of government as those who rule,is too deeply implicated by these principles to allow them to stop short in their career of inquiry.They may care nothing about the curious researches of the geologist or the elaborate classification of the botanist,but they will assuredly ascertain why they only of all classes of society have always been involved in poverty and distress.They will not stop short of any ultimate truth;and they have experienced too few of the advantages of society to make them feel satisfied with the present order of things.The mind is rather invigorated than enfeebled by the labour of the hands;and they will carry forward their investigations undelayed by the pedantry of learning,and undiverted by the fastidiousness of taste.By casting aside the prejudices which fetter the minds of those who have benefited by their degradation,they have everything to hope.On the other hand,they are the suffers by these prejudices,and have everything to dread from their continuance.Having no reason to love those institutions which limit the reward of labour,whatever may be its produce,to a bare subsistence,they will not spare them,whenever they see the hollowness of the claims made on their respect.As the labourers acquire knowledge,the foundations of the social edifice will be dug up from the deep beds into which they were laid in times past,they will be curiously handled and closely examined,and they will not be restored unless they were originally laid in justice,and unless justice commands their preservation.
Without joining in any of the commonplace observations against taking interest,and against usury,which,however,support my view of capital,I have show that it has no just claim to any share of the labourer's produce,and that what it actually receives is the cause of the poverty of the labourer.It is impossible that the labourer should long remain ignorant of these facts,or acquiesce in this state of things.
