This shewed that our labor market was overstocked. When the fish market is overstocked the fish are thrown back into the sea. Emigration was, in effect, throwing men and women into the sea with a ship to cling to and a chance of reaching another country in it. The value of men and women in England, unless they could do some sort of work that was still scarce, had fallen to nothing. Doctors and dentists and lawyers and parsons were still worth something (parsons shamefully little: £70 a year for a curate with a family); and exceptionally skilled or physically powerful workmen could earn more than the poorer clergy; but the mass of manual employees, those who could do nothing except under direction, and even under direction could do nothing that any ablebodied person could not learn to do in a very short time, were literally worth nothing: you could get them for what it cost to keep them alive, and to enable them to bring up children enough to replace them when they were worn out. It was just as if steam-engines had been made in such excessive quantities that the manufacturers would give them for nothing to anyone who would take them away. Whoever took them away would still have to feed them with coal and oil before they could work; but this would not mean that they had any value, or that they would be taken proper care of, or that the coal and oil would be of decent quality. You see, people without property have no other way of living than selling themselves for their market value, or, when their value falls to nothing, offering to work for anyone who will feed them. They have no land, and cannot afford to buy any: and even if land were given to them few of them would know how to cultivate it. They cannot become capitalists, because capital is spare money, and they have no money to spare. They cannot set up in business for themselves with borrowed money, because nobody will lend them money: if anyone did, they would lose it all and become bankrupt for want of the requisite education and training. They must find an employer or starve; and if they attempt to bargain for anything more than a bare subsistence wage they are told curtly but only too truthfully that if they do not choose to take it there are plenty of others who will.