310 Notes of the Month on [|Sept 



to patriotism, he has at least as much as the rapacious landlord. But 

 what man can feel attachment to a country which refuses him food, 

 which does not shew a single cottage that the poor man can call his own, 

 where day by day the commonage is curtailed, the footpath blocked up, 

 and the immense majority of the population are as much aliens in their 

 native land, as much pilgrims and wanderers, as if they were thrown 

 loose in Africa. 



" We have heard," says the paper, " of cases where a man has his wife and 

 seven or eight children to keep out of 10s. per week, when 7s. 6c?. and 8s. is paid 

 away for bread, and they have not tasted meat for months together. In two 

 other parishes the men, having struck, were met by two of the principal farmers 

 of the parish, who asked them what they desired ? The men replied, they only 

 wanted the promise of a month's harvesting, that they might not be deprived of 

 their bread by strangers. The farmers, immediately upon this, promised the men 

 that their request should be complied with, stating to them that it was a just 

 one. The men immediately dispersed, and went to their labours." 



For this, we allow that mere law can apply no remedy, for mere law 

 cannot prevent the cruelty of screwing up land to a dishonest price, nor 

 half starving labourers, who would rather be half starved than die of 

 hunger. But law should take care how it aggravates the opportunities 

 that guilty and cruel minds will eagerly adopt, to make money at the 

 expense of public good and private humanity. The use of machinery is 

 one of those means. It is impossible to prevent that use. It would be 

 unjust if it were possible; for the inventor and the maker of the machine 

 has as much a title to the profit of his genius or his labour, as the 

 ploughman or thrasher has to the fruit of his toils. But no man is 

 justified, before the tribunal of common feeling, or even of common 

 sense, who does not provide that his labourers, whom the machine may 

 displace, shall previously find employment somewhere. If he must have 

 a thrashing machine, let him not consider himself entitled to its use, 

 while there is a single wretched being in the form of man looking on, 

 and seeing in that machine the sentence of his own dismissal and starva- 

 tion. A humane landlord will remember that the people about him are 

 men like himself, that he is accountable not merely to man, but to more 

 than man, for the use of his power ; and that, if he use it only to make 

 money, and drive his fellow creatures into famine and despair, he is 

 accountable in conscience for every crime that they commit in famine 

 and despair. 



It is for this utter neglect of man as man that we abominate the whole 

 school of the political economists. Money, money is the principle. If 

 more money is to be made by grinding a man's bones into dust for the 

 manure of a field of Norfolk turnips, than by keeping him alive, the 

 question is settled at once by the modern economists. His bones must 

 be ground. With these doctors, the heart of man, the soul, all the 

 attachments and affections, the whole nobler portion, for which the whole 

 fabric of societj-^ has been formed, is nothing. Unless they can grasp 

 the material profit with their earthly fingers, unless they can weigh it in 

 their scales, and sell it by the pound in their shambles, it enters not into 

 their elements of calculation. This gross and bitter product of infidelity, 

 which in France issued in Jacobinism, and here is rapidly tending to the 

 same result, is as unworthy of the name of philosophy as it is of 

 Christianity; and until we gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles, it 

 must be the seed of discontent, rebellion, and all shapes of individual 



