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2. Those whose industry enables them to save, generally do so, for the purpose of employing those savings productively, and accumulating wealth.

3. This accumulation is desired and is desirable, because it enables the possessor to gratify not only his wants, but his fancies and inclinations; it gives him power and consideration in society by enabling him to assist and to employ those who are in want of property, and are willing to earn it.

4. When a man comes to have a family, his exertions, his self-denials, his savings and accumulations are made far more for their sakes, than his own. Toward the decline of life, a man seldom has more personal wants than a very moderate income will supply. He labours for others at that period, not for himself.

5. Toward the decline of life, a man's experience becomes more productive; it leads him more surely to the sources of gain; self-denial becomes more habitual to him; his motives to exertion are now placed in the welfare of those tied to him by the bonds of family endearment and connexion; his affections are now habitually social, and lose the character of selfishness if he has long been a parent.

6. Wealth thus accumulated, and seeking for productive employment, can only become productive, by means of the labour it hires and remunerates. Hence it creates the great and only demand for labour in the market of labour. It enables the labourer to labour profitably. It affords sustenance and comfort to him and to his family. It is the only bank on which labour can draw with certainty and effect.

7. Hence, it enables the labourer, of whatever description, to marry and to rear a family; which would be impossible if no one could employ and furnish the wages of his labour. To whom can an operative or mechanic apply, but to those who have wherewithal to remunerate his exertions.

8. This remuneration will be higher according to the prevalence of two circumstances; viz. the quantity of wealth thrown into the market of labour, increasing the demand for it-and the fewer the number of competitors among the operatives, mechanics or labourers.

9. Hence, whatever lessens the amount of wealth seeking to be employed productively, or increases the number of competitors to share it, operates against the interest of the workman; detracts from the amount of wages; lessens the ability to engage in matrimony, and to maintain children, and, therefore, lessens the wealth, the strength, the numbers and the comforts of society.

10. Hence, whatever diminishes the motive to industry, frugality and accumulation, lessens the mass of wealth seeking for employment, lessens the amount of wages to be distributed; lessens the means of the operative, and increases the number of the poor who cannot be employed.

11. Whatever or whoever cuts off the inducement to energy, industry and frugality, that the wants of a family give rise to, cuts off the chief source of individual and of national wealth. Every man whose children are more or less estranged from him-educated according to the notions and plans which are forced upon his adoption-maintained without his exertions till they are ready to enter upon the world independently of him— will cease labouring and accumulating for them, and will have but slight inducement to labour and accumulate for himself. Industry will be checked and paralyzed, and the demand for produce, beyond the mere necessaries of life, will go on diminishing. On the plan proposed by the combination of mechanics in New-York State, Philadelphia and Delaware, and increasing in support from that class of society, all enjoyment, beyond the mere necessaries of life, will savour of aristocracy; and a truly drab-coloured community we shall become. While we are writing, the New-York Sentinel of May 19, 1830, is before us, where this chief organ of the combination of operatives and mechanics declares that one great object of the people is, and ought to be, the cutting down the salaries below the mark at which speculators and idlers would care to hold them. Let the servant of the public receive from the public what will secure him, during the term of his service, a decent maintenance, AND NOTHING more. We are no more friends than they are to extravagant remuneration; but we do not think the public will gain by the parsimony here recommended. What that decent maintenance in the city of New-York is, for a public servant, of whatever kind of character, they have already told us, viz. fifteen hundred dollars per annum, as the maximum.

12. For these reasons we think that the proposed plan of education, is a compulsory tax on the property of those who are compelled to maintain this national foundling hospital, little short of wanton plunder; that it will cut off from the most efficient sources of national prosperity; that it will greatly lessen the number of persons who actually labour, and greatly increase the number of pretenders to learning, sciolists and idlers, who will neither work with their heads nor their hands; and finally, we think our readers will see in these proposals, a spirit of hostility toward the possessors of wealth, which, if the plan

succeeds, will render its possession, by and by, equally dangerous and precarious.

Of this combination, having about a dozen newspapers now engaged in its support, it is the interest of men of property to be aware, and against its operation to be upon their guard. Nothing is required effectually to check it, but the good sense of those who having earned property, are desirous of being permitted to use it for themselves and their families, freed from the impertinent intermeddling of those who have none. But they must be alive to what is going on, or they will not be favoured with this permission.

We cannot help thinking that the root of the evil lies in UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. The right of voting, we conceive, is a right to be earned, before it is enjoyed. It ought not to be conceded to those who can furnish no evidence of a stake in the community-who are here to-day, and gone tomorrow-who, possessing no property of their own, claim the right of legislating over the property of others. In our opinion, the privilege of voting at elections ought to be restricted to [married?] householders who have paid taxes for a year past. Such men will be apt to reflect with some care and attention before they vote. If others claim the right of voting, they may earn it if they please, upon terms too easy to be reasonably complained of. If they dislike these terms, the world is wide-they are at liberty to better themselves elsewhere. They ought not to forget that a political community consists of the soil and its owners. All others are sojourners only; and are present, not of right, but on general sufferance for a common benefit; and, therefore, on those conditions, and those only, which the community chooses to prescribe. No man ought to be considered a permanent member of society, who is a mere lodger and sojourner, without a fixed habitation, occupation, and visible stake in society. Nor is it just that any man should arrogate a right to dispose of the property of others, who has, in fact, none of his own. There is nothing like equality or

reciprocity in such a claim.

Mr. Skidmore takes as the motto to his book, the well-known paragraph from the Declaration of Independence, and alters it as follows:

"I hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; and that among these are life, liberty [and property."

It is also laid down in the "Free Enquirer" or "Sentinel," we forget the page, that "every child has from its birth a right to

maintenance and education," without any reference to its parents, as against whom, we are perfectly ready to acknowledge this right. If it be urged as a right against any other man or men, we deny it.

None of these writers hold the character and talents of Mr. Jefferson in higher estimation than we do: but that does not bind us to swear by all he has thought fit to ad

vance.

We deny that all men are created equal. We deny that any two men that ever lived were created equal in any one assignable circumstance.

We deny that any human creature has any unalienable rights. We deny that there are any natural rights, any rights independent of social contract. We assert that all rights, of whatever description, and without any exception, are the creatures of society, and of society alone.

As to children, we acknowledge that those who brought them into existence are bound to support and maintain them till they are capable of supporting and maintaining themselves. This requires no argument; it is the dictate of nature throughout the animal creation, and is too obvious to be proved by any medium of proof more obvious than the statement itself. But is every woman bound to nurse any or every strange child? Is any man bound by any tie of nature to labour for the support of children not his own? Is this a duty felt by any of the animal creation toward any other than its own offspring?

"All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." This is the assertion. We ask what is meant by "endowed?" How, and when and where did the Creator endow them? What is meant by rights, and by unalienable rights? Let us have, not metaphor, but some plain, intelligible assertion whose meaning can be distinctly seen through.

Right and duty are correlatives; if one man has a right, it is upon or against some other man, whose duty it is to acknowledge and fulfil it; and it must be accompanied by some power or sanction to enforce the performance. A right, without the means of enforcing it, is a word without sense or meaning. But let us see what these enumerated rights are.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." To which, Mr. Skidmore, out of his superabundant liberality, has added, property.

Setting aside, during this argument, the laws and regulations of society, which, as we contend, are the only sources of rights and duties, let us try this question with a human being as he comes out of the hands of his Creator. Look! there is an infant

struggling on the ground under yon tree: a man with half a dozen children passes by, who has enough to do to get food for his own infants. Is he bound to take up, to nurse, to maintain this stranger? What binds him to labour for a child brought into existence by some unknown parents? What means has the infant of claiming his right? What sanction is there in support of it?

Let us, however, suppose the passer-by has no family of his own to put in their interfering claims, upon what principle is any man bound to work and labour for the maintenance of another man's offspring? When and where has the Creator told us this is an unalienable right appertaining to every infant as an infant? and by what sanction has he declared this right shall be enforced? The fruits of every man's labour belong to himself and his family, whom he has undertaken to support: what other human being has a claim upon his labour, unless under the regulations of society enacted for common benefit? But the question before us remember, is not of social, but of natural rights. Let us go on.

The Creator has endowed every human creature with the right to liberty, says the Declaration of Independence. We ask at what period of a man's existence does this right take place? In infancy? when the child would perish in a few hours if it were not for the passive obedience he is compelled to exercise toward his nurse? Is it in boyhood or in youth? when the salutary control, universally acknowledged, of older and wiser beings, is absolutely necessary to his future and permanent good? No doubt he has a right to unconstrained existence, to absolute liberty, whenever he has the power and the means of living without the aid of his fellow creatures, and of resisting effectually every encroachment on his liberty. But as this comfortable state of nature is not so much valued as it ought to be, men are strangely tempted to enter into society for their supposed benefit, and to alien this unalienable right, and submit it to the control of law. And such is, and from all time has been, the case with every human being on the face of the earth.

"The pursuit of happiness." This unalienable right has also been subject, from earliest infancy to the hour of death, to the control of society in the case of every known man, woman and child, from the earliest records of time to the present hour. Every man's pursuit of happiness is checked and controlled by the pursuit of happiness of every other man; and it is regulated, in every possible case, by the law of force as exercised by

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