The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-05-05 00:00:00

NOTICES.

Our Free Trade Policy Exatnined with respect to its
real Bearing upon Native Industry, our Colonial Sys-
tem, and the Institutions and-ultimate Destinies of the
Nation. By a Liverpool Merchant. London : Whit-
taker and Co. ; Liverpool : Lace and Addison, and W.
Grapel.
A pamphlet just published, under the above title, affords
us some very seasonable arguments with respect to the
bearing upon the industry of the nation of the measures
about which the House of Commons is at present deba-
ting. Our own opinions as to the tendency of free trade
measures we have never concealed. We conceive their
tendency to be revolutionary. The writer of the pam-
phlet before us, however, takes the ground, and maintains
it very ably, that they are calculated to injure seriously
the manufacturers themselves, by whom they are most
strenuously advocated. We shall give a few extracts,
for the impartial consideration of our readers; and first,
we offer the following for the consideration of the labour-
ing portion of the community, who imagine that they see,
in their promised cheap loaf, a boon which is to raise them
very materially in their social condition :
" In all past contests between capital and labour, the
former has been uniformly the victor; and under our new
policy it will be successful in determining the future posi-
tion of the labourer in the social scale. We are told that
a high or low price of food does not involve a high or low
price of remuneration for industry. We have had figures
paraded before us to prove the fact. We shall find it,
however, to be a law of nature that men will and must
work for the minimum amount vith which life can be
supported. All experience tells us so. In every country,
not newly peopled, where the means of subsistence are
abundant and cheap, the price of labour is low. The
native of our Indian possessions, who can subsist upon a
meal of rice, gives his toil for what will purchase that
meal. The Irish peasant, who can subsist upon potatoes
as his daily food, is content to labour for what will afford
him potatoes. We have recognised this law in our legis-
lation itself. We say to our pauper population—' we can
keep you within the walls of the union workhouse for a
certain amount per head : choose between that and the
money wages which is offered for your labour as indepen-
dent and self-sustaining beings.' We have, moreover,
in our manufacturing system, a coercive power upon the
labourer beyond the ordinary law of human nature. The
steam-engine is incessantly roaring in the ears, and tread-
ing upon the heels, of the manufacturing operative ; and
reminding him painfully of his decreasing value in the
social system. Lessen the cost of fuel—give increased
speed or efficiency to the wheels of the spinning frame or
the power-loom—and you make it incumbent upon the
human being, who competes with the mere machine, to
toil harder, end accept of less remuneration, for his bread.
We have mechanical ingenuity constantly pitted egainst
industry, dictating the terms upon which it shall be em-
ployed. We have, year by year, a less amount of time
and labour entering into the production of a given quan-
tity of manufactured fabrics; and if the power which ca-
pital possesses, combined with other influences and known
tendencies of our human nature, is not regarded as suffi-
cient to determine the result of the struggle of the la-
bourer, I think. that we might very well affo.d to lay
aside all attempts to solve any problem bearing upon our
future destinies as human beings."
Another more vitally interesting consideration to the
mass of the community, is placed before us in the follow-
ing passage :
" Another question, apart from the mere consideration
of -wages, is worth looking at. Say that the experiment
of free trade is successful; that we have. as its result, a
vastly stimulated foreign commerce; that we employ for
a time all the available labour of the country; that we
draw increased masses of our population into our manu-
facturing districts, end that we remunerate them ade-
quately for their industry. Admit all this; but look at
the possible consequences of a reverse or a crisis. We
have, say, one-half of our population dependent upon the
accident of pacific relations being kept up with us by fo-
reign powers. A hostile tariff—the stoppage of a single
market—can throw an entire section of the community
upon the nation for support. The want of prudence and
of forethought of the manufacturer himself can do this.
He may stimulate production. He may draw largely
upon the prospect of the future. He may divert industry
from its accustomed channels by promises of employ-
ment, which he may find it impossible or inconvenient
and unprofitable to fulfil. Where is our remedy for the
eansequences of his improvidence? In our present quasi-
feudal system we have that remedy. If the great land-
owner ceases to employ the labourer upon his property,
or to remunerate him adequately, we have the produce of
that land as a security that he shall not starve. But we
have no security that the millowner, to-day employing a
thousand hands, shall not to-morrow close his factory
and retire into irresponsibility for the subsistence of those
whose labour has realised his fortune, or into the Gazette,
as the result of his want of skill in conducting his affairs.
Look at our present position in the existing crisis of the
nation. We have had three years of prosperity—three
years in which the manufacturer and the merchant have
been growing in wealth. Yet, so little has been the pro-
vident conduct of either, that we have now to devise by
legisla ion a made to protect them from the result of
their own improvidence! The railway mania attracted
their cupidity. They gambled as only maniacs will gam-
ble. The legislature has to step in to provide for them a
mode of exit from their vast and multitudinous engage-
ments. Is industry not suffering from this misconduct
of those by whom it is employed ? It is suffering. We
have bodies of men who have the face to tell us, and to
tell the legislature, that commerce is paralyzed, and will
remain so until the passing of the measures of Sir Robert
Peel is determined upon. Yet every man knows that the
pinching point is the amount of capital locked up in these
ridiculously extended speculations. I hold, however, the
opinion that it has been a happy event for the nation, and
for humanity, that the gains of the commercial and ma-
nufacturing classes have been expended in this direction.
For the good of all they might have been worse applied :
for the good of those applying them they might have been
infinitely better applied. From fifty to a hundred mil-
lions of money is the difference in the value of railway
property between present prices and those of a few months
ago; and yet not a working man—scarcely a trader—is
the richer. But let us canvass for a moment what might
have been the result of a similar mania, directed towards
the stimulation of manufacturing capability. We should
not be asking now what we are to do with a few secreta-
ries, engineers, surveyors, and other similar people, who
can fall back upon their original pursuits and athount of
employment, but what we are to do with masses of our
population brought together to carry on avocations in
which we have been deceived in our hopes of employing
them. A few actions, against provisional directors —a
hubbub amongst disappointed speculators—the claims of
attorneys for their costs, and engineers for their pay—are
different affairs from the demand of a deluded manufac-
turing population for their bread. We should have cre-
ated a few manufacturing hives, and been stung for our
pains."