168 Machinery. 



ments of the aptest of their pupils. We quarrel with the economists, 

 in the first place, because they attempt to identify the workings of 

 artificial society with the laws of nature, and represent what is essen- 

 tially changeable, and has been changed a thousand times by the 

 caprices of rulers, as the inevitable results of uncontrolable circum- 

 stances. Capital is power, and those who have it will use it to their 

 own advantage, and those who have it not must submit to its dominion. 

 This is the very shibboleth of the party. The labourer, in the eyes 

 of the economists, is only a more dexterous animal than a horse, or a 

 machine of blood and bone less manageable than one of wood and iron, 

 and it is the interest of the employer to make the most, at the least 

 cost, of his or its qualities. When he has exhausted them he has done 

 with him, and he is only prevented by certain restraints, which he has 

 not yet been able to throw off, from shooting him out of the way, as he 

 does any other worn-out and useless brute. 



Most of these economists, nevertheless, are constitutionalists in 

 politics a party which profess to consider all as free, and all as pos- 

 sessing an interest in the welfare and government of the society of 

 which they form a part. But in reality they are as tyrannical at the 

 bottom, and as resolved, as the most impudent of the opposite faction, 

 to sacrifice the interests of the governed to those of the governors. 

 Government with them, indeed, is an institution not merely for the 

 protection of a man's own, but of all he can, by possibility, make his 

 own. His own is something so sacred and divine, that the common 

 good of society must not touch it; must not, in the slightest degree, 

 interfere with it ; must not check his enlargement of it to the most 

 pernicious extension. And in fact the overgrown possessions and power 

 of ten or twelve individuals already are capable of controlling the 

 government, and resisting regulations, which the mass of society re- 

 cognize as generally desirable. 



We quarrel, again, with the economists, because on the ground of 

 the early and partial advantages of machinery, they represent them as 

 illimitable and universal. Machinery ministers to the wants of men, 

 and they are illimitable, and every man has them. But what then 

 what is this to the purpose, if the results of this machinery are inac- 

 cessible ? if the means of attaining them do not grow with them ? But 

 they do grow with them, exclaims the economist j if an article becomes 

 cheaper, the difference in the price is thus set at liberty, and is avail- 

 able for other and new purchases. No, no ; do you not see that this 

 advantage is applicable only in the cases of those who have fixed re- 

 sources ? Is it not a well-known and general fact, that the resources 

 of the majority diminish, first or last, every where, with diminished 

 prices ? Are not most men not their own masters, but in the employ- 

 ment of others ? And in proportion as the prices of provisions and 

 conveniences fall, are not wages and emoluments reduced ? If so, and 

 who will controvert it ? the power of purchase, in all dependents, is 

 also proportionally diminished. Are we not even now endeavouring to 

 get the salaries of public functionaries cut down, precisely on the ground 

 that they were raised because prices rose, and ought to be lowered 

 again, because those same prices have fallen ? The fact, indisputably, 

 is that the diminished cost of production the boasted result, and in 

 some instances justly so, of machinery benefits only those who have 

 fixed incomes, or those who can resist encroachments and invasions on 



