"A strange result of the terrible statistics of society, that there was upon an average one person out of twenty of the inhabitants of the luxurious metropolis every day destitute of food and employment, and every night without a place for shelter or repose?"--London _Times_.
We have here slavery at home as a consequence of the determination, to subject to slavery people abroad. With each step in the growth of the millers' fortunes, and of the splendour of their residences, land would have become consolidated and production would have diminished, and the whole population would have tended more and more to become a mass of mere traders, producing nothing themselves, but buying cheaply and selling dearly, and thus deriving their support from the exercise of the power to tax the unfortunate people forced to trade with them; a state of things in the highest degree adverse to moral, intellectual, or political improvement.
The reader may now turn to the extracts from Mr. McCulloch's works already given, (page 240 _ante_,) and compare with them this view of the effects of supposed commercial centralization on this side of the Atlantic. Doing so, he will find it there stated that it is to the consolidation of the land, and to the luxury of the style of living of the great landlords, surrounded, as they, "in most cases" are, by "poor and needy dependants," whose necessities finally compel them to seek in large cities a market for their own labour, and that of their wives and children, that we are to look for an augmentation of "the mass of wealth and the scale of enjoyment!" Modern British political economy holds no single idea that is in harmony with the real doctrines of Adam Smith, and yet it claims him as its head!
I. That the system of commercial centralization sought to be established by Great Britain is precisely similar to the one here ascribed to the millers of Rochester, with the difference only, that it has for its object to compel all descriptions of raw produce to pass through England on its way from the consumer and the producer, even when the latter are near neighbours to each other, and England distant many thousand of miles from both.
II. That to carry out that system it was required that all other nations should be prevented from obtaining either the knowledge or the machinery required for enabling them cheaply to mine coal, smelt iron ore, or manufacture machines by aid of which they could command the services of the great natural agents whose value to man is so well described by Mr. McCulloch. (See page 249 _ante_.)