Young workmen are pale, weak, short in stature, and slow to think as well as to move.At fourteen or fifteen years they seem no more developed than children of nine or ten years in the normal state.As for their intellectual and moral development, there are some to be found who, at the age of thirteen, have no notion of God, who have never heard of their duties, and whose first school of morality was a prison.
That is what M.Léon Faucher has seen, to the great displeasure of M.Charles Dupin, and this state of things he declares that the law of March 22 is powerless to remedy.And let us not get angry over this impotence of the legislator: the evil arises from a cause as necessary for us as the sun; and in the path upon which we have entered, anger of any kind, like palliatives of any kind, could only make our situation worse.
Yes, while science and industry are making such marvellous progress, it is a necessity, unless civilization's centre of gravity should suddenly change, that the intelligence and comfort of the proletariat be diminished;
while the lives of the well-to-do classes grow longer and easier, it is inevitable that those of the needy should grow harder and shorter.This is established in the writings of the best -- I mean, the most optimistic -- thinkers.
According to M.de Morogues, 7,500,000 men in France have only ninety-one francs a year to spend, 25 centimes a day.Cing sous! cing sous! (Five cents! five cents!).There is something prophetic, then, in this odious refrain.
In England (not including Scotland and Ireland) the poor-rate was:
1801.-- £4,078,891 for a population of 8,872,980
1818.-- £7,870,801 " " " " 11,978,875
1833.-- £8,000,000 " " " " 14,000,000
The progress of poverty, then, has been more rapid than that of population;
in face of this fact, what becomes of the hypotheses of Malthus? And yet it is indisputable that during the same period the average comfort increased:
what, then, do statistics signify?
The death-rate for the first arrondissement of Paris is one to every fifty- two inhabitants, and for the twelfth one to every twenty-six.Now, the latter contains one needy person to every seven inhabitants, while the former has only one to every twenty-eight.That does not prevent the average duration of life, even in Paris, from increasing, as M.Fix has very correctly observed.
At Mulhouse the probabilities of average life are twenty-nine years for children of the well-to-do class and TWO years for those of the workers;
in 1812 the average life in the same locality was twenty-five years, nine months, and twelve days, while in 1827 it was not over twenty-one years and nine months.And yet throughout France the average life is longer.
What does this mean?
M.Blanqui, unable to explain so much prosperity and so much poverty at once, cries somewhere: "Increased production does not mean additional wealth....Poverty, on the contrary, becomes the wider spread in proportion to the concentration of industries.There must be some radical vice in a system which guarantees no security either to capital or labor, and which seems to multiply the embarrass-ments of producers at the same time that it forces them to multiply their products."
There is no radical vice here.What astonishes M.Blanqui is simply that of which the Academy to which he belongs has asked a determination, -- namely, the oscillations of the economic pendulum, VALUE, beating alternately and in regular time good and evil, until the hour of the universal equation shall strike.If I may be permitted another comparison, humanity in its march is like a column of soldiers, who, starting in the same step and at the same moment to the measured beating of the drum, gradually lose their distances.The whole body advances, but the distance from head to tail grows ever longer; and it is a necessary effect of the movement that there should be some laggards and stragglers.
But it is necessary to penetrate still farther into the antinomy.Machines promised us an increase of wealth; they have kept their word, but at the same time endowing us with an increase of poverty.They promised us liberty;
I am going to prove that they have brought us slavery.
I have stated that the determination of value, and with it the tribulations of society, began with the division of industries, without which there could be no exchange, or wealth, or progress.The period through which we are now passing -- that of machinery -- is distinguished by a special characteristic, -- WAGES.
Wages issued in a direct line from the employment of machinery, -- that is, to give my thought the entire generality of expression which it calls for, from the economic fiction by which capital becomes an agent of production.
Wages, in short, coming after the division of labor and exchange, is the necessary correlative of the theory of the reduction of costs, in whatever way this reduction may be accomplished.This genealogy is too interesting to be passed by without a few words of explanation.
The first, the simplest, the most powerful of machines is the workshop.
Division simply separates the various parts of labor, leaving each to devote himself to the specialty best suited to his tastes: the workshop groups the laborers according to the relation of each part to the whole.
It is the most elementary form of the balance of values, undiscoverable though the economists suppose this to be.Now, through the workshop, production is going to increase, and at the same time the deficit.
Somebody discovered that, by dividing production into its various parts and causing each to be executed by a separate workman, he would obtain a multiplication of power, the product of which would be far superior to the amount of labor given by the same number of workmen when labor is not divided.
