But there is a tacit implication of his argument of no little importance.According to him,the English labourer had been demoralised,and the whole Irish peasantry brought to the edge of starvation,while the French and other peasantries were prosperous and improving.To what historical causes was this vast difference due?The French revolution,however important,can only be understood through its antecedents.Systems of land-tenure,it is obvious,have been connected in the most intricate way with all manner of social,industrial,and political phenomena.Commerce and manufactures may seem in some sense a kind of natural growth-a set of processes at which government can look on from outside,enforcing at most certain simple rules about voluntary contracts.But,in the case of land,we have at every point to consider the action and reaction of the whole social structure and of the institutions which represent all the conflicts and combinations of the great interests of the state.Consequently neither the results actually attained,nor those which we may hope to attain,can be adequately regarded from the purely industrial side alone.Systems have not flourished purely because of their economical merits,nor can they be altered without affecting extra-economical interests.To do nothing is to leave agricultural institutions to be perverted by political or 'sinister'interests.Mill was very little inclined to do nothing.He saw in the superiority of the foreign to the British systems a proof of the malign influence of the 'sinister interests'in our constitution.The landed aristocracy were the concrete embodiment of the evil principle.The nobility and the squirearchy represented the dead weight of dogged obstructiveness.They were responsible for the degradation of the labourer;and the Ricardian doctrine of rent explained why their interests should be opposed to those of all other classes.
Although Mill attributed enormous blessings to the revolution in France,he was far too wise to desire a violent revolution in England,and he was far too just to attribute to individual members of the class a deliberate intention to be unjust.Yet he was prepared to advocate very drastic remedies;and if there were any human being of moderate cultivation from whom he was divided by instinctive repulsion and total incapacity to adopt the same point of view,it was certainly the country squire.The natural antipathy was quaintly revealed when Mill found himself in the House of Commons opposed to thick rows of squires clamouring for protection against the cattle-plague.
So far Mill's position is an expansion or adaptation of Malthus.Obedience to Malthus makes the prosperous French peasant;disobedience,the pauperised English labourer.Malthus,as Mill interprets him,means that all social improvement depends upon a diminished rate of increase,relatively to subsistence;(64)and to diminish that rate the prudential check must be strengthened.'No remedies for low wages,'therefore,'have the smallest chance of being efficacious which do not operate on and through the minds and habits of the people';(65)and every scheme which has not for its foundation the diminution of the proportion of the people to the funds which support them,is 'for all permanent purposes a delusion.'(66)The two propositions taken together sum up Mill's doctrine.Social welfare can be brought about only by stimulating the vis medicatrix or sense of individual responsibility.Every reform which does not fulfil that condition is built upon sand.The application to England is a practical comment.The true remedies for low wages (67)are first an 'effective national education'so designed as to cultivate common-sense.This will affect the 'minds of the people'directly.Secondly,a 'great national measure of colonisation.'This will at once diminish numbers.
Thirdly,a national system for 'raising a class of peasant-proprietors.'This will provide a premium to prudence and economy affecting the whole labouring class.Besides this,Mill approves of the new poor-law,which has shown that people can be protected against the 'extreme of want'without the demoralising influence of the old system.(68)Mill here accepts,though he does not often insist upon,the doctrine upon which Thornton had dwelt in his Over Population:that poverty is self-propagating so far as it makes men reckless:education,as he remarks,is 'not compatible with extreme poverty'.(69)Hence the remedies themselves require another condition to make them effective.He declares emphatically that in these cases small means do not produce small effects,but no effect at all.(70)Nothing will be accomplished,unless comfort can be made habitual to a whole generation.The race must be lifted to a distinctly higher plane,or it will rapidly fall back.Mill,I fancy,would have been more consistent if he had admitted that great social changes must be gradual.But in any case,he was far from accepting the do-nothing principle.Political economy,he says,would have 'a melancholy and a thankless task'if it could only prove that nothing could be done.(71)He holds that a huge dead lift is required to raise the labourers out of the slough of despond,and he demands therefore nothing less than great national schemes of education,of home and foreign colonisation.He speaks,too,with apparent approval of laws in restraint of improvident marriages.(72)It is,indeed,true that upon his schemes government is to interfere in order to make the people independent of further interference.Whether such a compromise be possible is another question.
V.CAPITALISTS AND LABOURERS
