Illustrations of political economy, Volume 4 (of 9)Martineau, Harriet
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Illustrations of political economy, Volume 4 (of 9)
Martineau, Harriet
Didactic fiction, English; Political fiction, English; Social problems -- Fiction
“I have had thoughts already of removing to my new farm some cottages
that belong to me, and of buying others from the speculators in our
parish funds, who are far too ready to build in our neighbourhood. There
will be little encouragement for them to build again when all the
surplus population of the parish is located on my pauper farm, where no
strangers may intermeddle. You must come and see the ground I have laid
out.”
Mr. Jackson readily agreed to go, but had great doubts about the final
results of the scheme. This seemed to Mr. Fellowes very strange, as they
agreed upon the extent of relief at present wanted, and upon the
capability of this farm to supply it.
“It was you yourself who told me, Jackson, that it is not the whole of
the people now distressed that it is necessary to relieve. It is only
the redundancy that we have to take care of.”
“Certainly: but it should be so relieved as not to produce a further
redundancy.—We have among us, as we agree, sixty labourers more than we
want. Of these none actually starve, and they therefore deprive some
others of a portion of necessaries. It appears accordingly that three
hundred are insufficiently fed and clothed because there is a redundancy
of sixty.”
“Well! my district farm will take off sixty at once, and more
afterwards.”
“And will therefore produce an immediate relief, restoring to the
remainder of the three hundred their proper share of necessaries; so
would the emigration of sixty. But mark the difference three generations
hence. Our young people who emigrate carry their descendants with them
to a land where they are wanted. The descendants of your pauper
cultivators must be turned out upon society after all, in greater
numbers than you now abstract from it. It will be well if the
grandchildren of your present dependants have not to emigrate at last,
after the expenditure of much capital that might have been better
employed, and at a much greater ultimate cost than at present.”
“You seem to forget, Jackson, that the capital I am laying out is all to
be reproduced, and that the people on my farm are to work themselves
free. If any reliance is to be placed on calculations which have been
conducted with the utmost care, if experience is to be trusted, if I may
believe what I saw last month with my own eyes in the Belgian colonies
(which it is worth a long journey to see), a good deal more than the
cost of settling my paupers and providing for them will be raised by
their labour upon the ground. The best of them will in time repay me,
and go out with money in their pockets to make room for others.”
“And where are they to go? To carry more labour and new families into a
market which is already overstocked. How much easier to remove them at
once to a labour market where they and their children will be
permanently welcome!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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