The owners of land become richer: those who live by labour become poorer. Physical depression works moral depression, and these overcrowded and under-fed labourers, becoming more reckless, are familiarized with a lower standard of comfort, and continue to increase. This law has wrought in every growing nation on the globe which is without domestic slavery. It is felt in Great Britain, in spite of her vast colonies, where she has disgorged her superfluous mouths and hands, to occupy and feed them on virgin soils: in spite of her conquests, which have centred in her lap the wealth of continents. It has begun to work in the Northern States of America, notwithstanding the development of the arts, and the proximity of the Great West. Every where it reduces the quantity or quality of food and raiment which a day's labour will earn, and perpetually tends to approximate that lowest grade at which the labouring classes can vegetate, multiply, and toil. What, now, is the remedy? Not agrarianism: this could only aggravate the evil by taking away the incentive to effort, in making its rewards insecure. Not conquest of new territory: the world is now all occupied; and conquest from our neighbours is unjust. We found the remedy in the much-abused institution of domestic slavery. It simply ended this natural, this universal strife between capital and labour, by making labour the property of capital, and thus investing it with an unfailing claim upon its fair share in the joint products of the two. The manner in which slavery effects this is plain. Where labour is free, competition reduces its price to whatever grade the laws of trade may fix; for labour is then a mere commodity in the market, unprotected, and subject to all the laws of demand and supply. The owner of land or capital pays for the labour he needs, in the shape of wages, just the price fixed by the relation of supply and demand; and if that price implies the severest privation for the labourer or his family, it is no concern of his. Should they perish by the inadequacy of the remuneration, it is not his loss: he has but to hire others from the anxious and competing multitude. Moreover, the ties of compassion and charity are vastly weaker than under our system; for that suffering labourer and his family are no more to that capitalist, than any other among the sons of want. But when we make the labour the property of the same persons to whom the land and capital belong, self-interest inevitably impels them to share with the labourer liberally enough to preserve his life and efficiency, because the labour is also, in the language of Moses, "their money," and if it suffers, they are the losers. By this arrangement also, a special tie and bond of sympathy are established between the capitalist and his labourers. They are members of his family. They not only work, but live, on his premises. A disregard of their wants and destitution is