With the decline of manufactures there has ceased to be a demand for the services of women or children in the work of conversion, and they are forced either to remain idle, or to seek employment in the field; and here we have one of the distinguishing marks of a state of slavery. The men, too, who were accustomed to fill up the intervals of other employments in pursuits connected with the cotton manufacture, were also driven to the field--and all demand for labour, physical or intellectual, was at an end, except so far as was needed for raising rice, indigo, sugar, or cotton. The rice itself they were not permitted to clean, being debarred therefrom by a duty double that which was paid on paddy, or rough rice, on its import into England. The poor grower of cotton, after paying to the government seventy-eight per cent.[84] of the product of his labour, found himself deprived of the power to trade directly with the man of the loom, and forced into "unlimited competition" with the better machinery and almost untaxed labour of our Southern States; and thereby subjected to "the mysterious variations of foreign markets" in which the fever of speculation was followed by the chill of revulsion with a rapidity and frequency that set at naught all calculation. If our crops were small, his English customers would take his cotton; but when he sent over more next year, there had, perhaps, been a good season here, and the Indian article became an absolute drug in the market. It was stated some time since, in the House of Commons, that one gentleman, Mr. Turner, had thrown £7000 worth of Indian cotton upon a dunghill, because he could find no market for it. It will now readily be seen that the direct effect of thus _compelling_ the export of cotton from India was to increase the quantity pressing on the market of England, and thus to lower the price of all the cotton of the world, including that required for domestic consumption. The price of the whole Indian crop being thus rendered dependent on that which could be realized for a small surplus that would have no existence but for the fact that the domestic manufacture had been destroyed, it will readily be seen how enormous has been the extent of injury inflicted upon the poor cultivator by the forcible separation of the plough and the loom, and the destruction of the power of association. Again, while the price of cotton is fixed in England, there, too, is fixed the price of cloth, and such is the case with the sugar and the indigo to the production of which these poor people are forced to devote themselves; and thus are they rendered the mere slaves of distant men, who determine what they shall receive for all they have to sell, and what they shall pay for all they require to purchase. Centralization and slavery go thus always hand in hand with each other.