The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-12-27 00:00:00

Inanufacturer, when they receive the aid of a cheaper
'Oaf and cheaper labour; but, now, let us ask what
must be the position of the remaining branches of
native industry ? We remember the outcry with which
the recent modification of the tariff was assailed by
Many of our local tradesmen. We believe that some
of those tradesmen have suffered, in consequence of
that rnodifiction—we trust temporarily suffered; but
can they contemplate with equanimity the withdrawal
°f all protection, even though accompanied with a re-
°Weed price of food. '1 hey, or some of them at least,
are neverlikely—as in the case of the manufacturer of
cotton 'goods—to become exporters. The delusive
vision of an opening of the markets of the world to the
Products of British industry is not before their eyes.
Row can they sustain the ruinous competition with
the labour of Europe—which supports itself upon an
average per head of four or five shilli'ags per week—
unless they are prepared to exist upon garbage which
would be spurned by them, as food unfit for the brute
Creation ?

The League orators and their lady-canvassers may,
we have no doubt, attempt to persuade our operative
friends, that no such step as the withdrawal of protec-
tion from any other than agricultural industry is in
contemplation. Again we say to them, " exercise your
"11 judgment and common sense." If the principle
he conceded, which is sought to be established by
free traders, that protection to the native agriculturist
is unjust towards the remaining portion of the com-
munity. And more than that ; the abolition of the
Protecting duties in all cases must follow, and ought to
f°11051), such abolition in any one case ! It will follow
as surely as the night follows the day; and it is the
bounden duty of every working man to contemplate
and prepare for its consequences !

We return to the subject of legislation, having for

its object an improvement in the condition of the
labourer, at which we briefly glanced in our last publi-
cation. We are told by the free traders that this is
not a direction in which a government ought to legis-
late. The labourer should have the free power to sell,
and the capitalist to buy, labour in the best market,
unrestricted by any conditions. We think, however,
we can show that such a doctrine is neither consonant
with justice to our working population, or with the
real interests of the manufacturing employer; and we
know that it cannot, with consistency, be maintained
by the gentry of the Anti-Corn-Law League, for the
fact is notorious that they have recognized the princi-
Ple that a government can and ought to interfere to
regulate the price of labour.
`What, let us ask, would be the result of the absence
of all regulations respecting the contracts between em-
ployers and employed ;—if the former was permitted
to buy their labour and the latter to sell it, where and
how they chose ? It would be, in effect, the reduction
of vast masses of the population of Great Britain to a
state of virtual slavery. The factories, the workshops,
the mines of the country would be filled with infant la-
bour, sold to the capitalist—as effectually sold, as the
African was ever sold to the West India planter. They
would contain, instead of healthy adults, bodies of
indless, soulless human beings, worn down almost to
idiocy, by
an indefinite extension of the hours of la-
bour. Need we point to the horrors which, during the
last session of parliament, were shewn to exist in the
thin-seam coal mines of England ? Need we remind
men conversant with the factory system, as it existed
before laws for its regulation were enacted, of the atro-
cities with which it was rife ? We need not; for we
are certain that by all candid men the principle that
Such interference is wise and salutary is already
conceded.

But, further, the manufaCturer his, within the last
few years, himself distinctly and practically admitted
the right of the executive to regulate, not only the
'lours of labour, and the age at which it is to become
a marketable commodity, but also the price of labour.
The archives of Somerset House contain abundant
evidence of this admission, to which we have, on for-
tiler occasions, called the attention of our readers. A
temporary increase of the demand for labour in the
manufacturing districts, with a consequent increase in
the rate of wages, took place in the years 1835 to
1836. What did the Liberals, par excellence, who are
!li'w agitating, professedly for the benefit of the work-
leg Classes, and who decry all legislative interference
with the market for labour, do in that emergency ?
Ad they recognise the right of the working classes to
the benefit within their reach from the increased de-
Mond for their labour? Did they even suffer the labour
market to recover itself, as other markets do, when
thrown out of balance by over demand or over supply?
They did no such thing ; but, on the contrary, they
forthwith
petitioned the poor-law commissioners to aid
them in swamping the existing body of labourers, by
drafts.„ of pauper labour from the southern counties of
England! Yes ! the Ashworths and Gregs—the poli-
tico-economical philosophers—the exclusive friends of
the working man—resorted to the powers invested in
the poor-law commissioners to reduce wages, on the
very first occasion when the state of the labour market
favoured the labourer and was against themselves !
And it is to the consequences of that Act that we
would now direct attention, with a view to prevent
their recurrence. We cannot recognise it as expe-
dient and wise, that such a power of regulating the
price of labour in any branch of industry should exist
In the hands of a body constituted as is the poor-law
commission. We know that to the large drafts of labour

introduced in 1835 and 1836 is owing a vast amount
of the over production of those years, and of the sub-
sequent misery which has been rife throughout the
Manufacturing districts. How many wretched beings,
seduced in those years from his native fields by the
prospect of an Arcadia, to be found in the busy streets
of our manufacturing towns, have since wandered in the
streets foodless and hopeless, cursing the Malthusian
wiles Which brought them to the midst of the vice and
squalid misery with which they are peopled, instead of
the plenty and comfort which they were painted as
possessing
? How many have since strayed or begged
their Way, broken. hearted, homewards, leaving behind
them, and mourning, children engulphed in the tide
1:1 immorality, which is but too prevalent amidst a
factory population ? Hundreds there are of such ;
hundreds more who toil on in hopelessness—duped,
betrayed, and abandoned—the ties of kindred and as-
sociation broken, and no alternative before them but
to ding to the paltry pittance, earned by a life of semi-
slavery, or embrace the darker and direr wretchedness
of a union workhouse. And certain we are that, if
some member would, on the meeting of Parliament,
Move for a return of the families removed to the ma-
nufacturing districts under the migration system of the

poor-law commissioners, and their subsequent fate,
such return would present a picture of suffering and
cruelty which has rarely been witnessed in a Christian