Associations for banking or manufacturing purposes are restrained by a system of responsibility that tends to prevent prudent men from taking part in their formation. The whole tendency of the system is to fetter and restrain the productive power; and hence it is that it has proved necessary to establish the fact that the great Creator had made a serious mistake in the laws regulating the increase of food and of men, and that the _cheapened_ labourer was bound to correct the error by repressing that natural desire for association which leads to an increase of population. The consequences of all this are seen in the fact that there is in that country no real freedom of commerce. There is no competition for the purchase of labour, and the labourer is therefore a slave to the capitalist. There is no competition for the use of capital, and its owner is a slave to his banker, who requires him to content himself with the smallest profits. There is scarcely any power to sell land, for it is everywhere hedged round with entails, jointures, and marriage settlements, that fetter and enslave its owner. There is no competition for obtaining "maidens in marriage," for the _Chronicle_ assures us that marriage now rarely takes place until the cradle has become as necessary as the ring;[167] and when that is the case, the man will always be found a tyrant and the woman a slave. In the effort to destroy the power of association, and the freedom of trade and of man abroad, England has in a great degree annihilated freedom at home; and all this she has done because, from the day of the publication of _The Wealth of Nations_, her every movement has looked to the perpetuation of the system denounced by its author as a "manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind." CHAPTER XV. HOW CAN SLAVERY BE EXTINGUISHED? How can slavery be extinguished, and man be made free? This question, as regarded England, was answered some years since by a distinguished anti-corn-law orator, when he said that for a long time past, in that country, two men had been seeking one master, whereas the time was then at hand when two masters would be seeking one man. Now, we all know that when two men desire to purchase a commodity, it rises in value, and its owner finds himself more free to determine for himself what to do with it than he could do if there were only one person desiring to have it, and infinitely more free than he could be if there were two sellers to one buyer. To make men free there must be competition for the purchase of their services, and the more the competition the greater must be their value, and that of the men who have them to sell.