§ On the Order of the Day for the House going into a Committee of Supply,
§ Mr. Fieldenrose to bring forward the motion of which he had given notice, and he had been induced to take this course, in consequence of the determination which this House had thought it right, in its wisdom, to come to, not to allow any further extension of the suffrage, and those other reforms prayed for in the National Petition. One of two things, it appeared to him, it was imperative on the House to do—either to give the labouring people a voice in this House, which they now had not; or to redress their sufferings, and to relieve them from that poverty of which they had so long and so justly complained. Be had had many opportunities, since he became a Member of that House, of inquiring into the condition of the labouring people, and had diligently attended to the investigation of their circumstances in the Committees on which he had sat. That condition, as it had been proved over and over again in his presence, it was his duty to make known to the House. He spent two years in inquiring into the state of the unfortunate handloom weavers, and he had made statements to the House previous to this inquiry, that a very great proportion of these honest and industrious citizens had not more than 2½d. per head per day to provide themselves and their families with food, clothing, soap, candles, and other 1248 necessaries. In the Committee to inquire into their condition, it was proved, and the Committee reported to this House, that their poverty surpassed what he had described, that their means of living was less, and that they had borne up under these sufferings for a number of years with a degree of patience unexampled. The state of the labourers on the land—the most important and the most numerous class of workmen—was proved before the Poor-law Committee, on which he sat in the latter end of 1837, and up to July, 1838, to be little, if at all, better than the state of the destitute handloom weavers. In that Committee a minute investigation was made into the condition and income of the labourers of Westoning, in the Ampthill union, in Bedfordshire, in which union the labourers, in consequence of having straw-platting, from which their wives and children derived employment, and added to the income of the family as a whole, were not so poor as they necessarily must be in many rural districts where employment for the wives and children could not be obtained. But, possessing those advantages over some of the labourers on the land, he would state to the House what the income of six families, numbering forty-four persons, in the parish of Westoning, was proved to be; and from a stanch supporter of the New Poor-law, Mr. Pease, late high sheriff of the county of Bedford. He spoke to the excellent character of those six labourers, and he collected every source of income which they possessed; first, the weekly wages that they had, the benefits which they derived from the harvest months, the benefits that some derived from the cultivation of small plots of garden ground, and the income from the earning of their wives and children; and after having made the most favourable statement he could as to the income of the forty-four persons, he proved that their united incomes only amounted to 4l. 7s. 0¼d. per head per annum—that is, 1s. 8d. per head per week, or less, on the average, than 3d. per head per day, for food, clothing, soap, candles, and other necessaries, for the year 1837. The lowest income per head for his family of these honest labourers was 2d. per day for each person. The names of these labourers and their incomes would be found stated in Appendix No. 2, in the reports 27, 38, and 39 of the Poor-law Committee ordered by this House to be printed, June 1249 These labourers were men of good repute, receiving no parish relief whatever; the number of weeks they were employed during the year averaged 256, the lowest number of weeks' employment for any one of them was 40; the highest number that any one had was 45; the average number of weeks' employment for each was 42 weeks and 4 days; and the average wages which they received for their own labour exceeded 10s. per week. And yet they were in the lamentable condition that he had described. It was impossible for him to understand how the best paid of the labourers could honestly support themselves and their families with a sufficiency of food and clothing, and other necessaries, at the prices they had to pay for these things, taxed as they now are. But if the man with 4d. per bead (and there is only one of the six that had so much) could not maintain his family as a labourer ought to be maintained, what was to become of poor Richard Pedder, an honest industrious labourer with only 2d. per head per day for each member of his family? What was he required to do to prove that he was destitute? Why, he must submit to the workhouse test, be separated from his wife and his children, or otherwise he must beg, or steal, or starve. Now, was that dealing fairly or honestly with this labouring man? Could any man lay his hand upon his heart and say that it was just? Nay, must not every man say, that it was wicked to make this honest labourer, out of the small earnings of himself and family, pay one-half of those scanty means in taxes upon the necessaries of life which he ought to consume? Having stated to the House the condition of these two classes of labouring people, he felt it incumbent on him to state what is the condition of those employed in the factories. It was well known, and had been often urged on that House, that when they are in full employment their labour is excessive, and as they have long prayed this House to lessen, but without effect. But these unfortunate individuals are now suffering from only having partial employment. In the cotton manufacture, which employs more hands than all the other branches of manufactures put together, and with which he was more particularly acquainted, the consumption of cotton for this year proved to demonstration, that they had not had an average of four days' work per week. 1250 Some are thrown out of employment altogether, and are suffering the most severe distress; a much larger number are suffering from partial employment, and a very few are in a state to provide themselves with a sufficiency of the commonest necessaries of life. He had now shown as briefly as he could the state of the labourers on the land, at the handloom, and in the factories. With regard to the first, he had taken his example from a part of the country where the nominal amount of wages is high, and where the families of labourers have a peculiarly advantageous means of employment. What must it be where the wages are only 7s. a-week, as had been affirmed by many hon. Gentlemen of that House, and where the wives and children have scarcely any employment at all? As to those at the hand-loom, they may be outcasts of society. The fact of their distress has been made known to the House by Committees of the House, and by commissioners. It had had petitions from all parts, praying the House to do something to relieve them from their poverty; the House had refused to allow a bill to be introduced having that object, and all that it had done for them notwithstanding their destitute condition, had been to pass the New Poor-law, and to throw them helpless on their own resources. Those in the factories had received the same want of attention to their repeated petitions, and what the House had done for them has been under the operation of the New Poor-law, to swell the number of applicants for that employment by causing what was called the surplus population on the land to migrate to the manufacturing districts in the north; to bring down the wages of that class, to the same level as those who are suffering on the land and at the hand-loom, which migration had been attended by the most deplorable suffering on the part of many, and the termination of the existence of not a few. For this state of things there must be a cause, and that cause, notwithstanding all he had heard said in that House to the contrary, was taxation on every article of consumption which the people are called upon to pay. There was the corn tax, malt tax, soap tax, hop tax, candle tax, coal tax, sugar tax, tea tax, coffee tax, butter tax, cheese tax, fruit tax, taxes upon raw materials for manufactures, amounting together to upwards of 17,000,000l. annually. These 1251 press peculiarly upon the labouring classes and deprive those who endeavour to employ them, of the means of doing so to the extent which they would do if these taxes did not exist. There are the other taxes amounting in the whole to more than 35,000,000l., which have the same tendency to prevent employment, and to lessen consumption, although some of them being taxes upon luxuries and direct taxes, may not perhaps operate to the same extent injuriously to the poor. Three great mistakes had been made by that House since the return of peace. It passed the corn-law to make food dear, and it repealed the property tax to exempt the rich from paying their fair proportion, in about one year from the close of the war; and in 1819, it passed the bill which bears the name of the right bon. Baronet, the Member for Tamworth, to double the value of money, by which it doubled the pressure of taxation, unjust as the mode of levying it then was, and still is. In proof of this, he had looked at what was the average price of the quarter of wheat for 19 years previous to 1819, and which he found to be 86s. 1d. per quarter, and the average price of wheat for the 19 years that have elapsed since 1819 has been 56s. 10d. per quarter, and this showed that every man engaged in raising wheat, to raise 3l. for taxes in the first 19 years, had to give five bushels and a half of wheat, whereas, in the latter 19 years, he has had to give eight bushels and a half of wheat to raise the same sum. But the evil is still going on; for if he took ten years preceding 1819, he found the quarter of wheat was 90s. 10½d. a-quarter, and the average price for ten years ending 31st January, 1839, was only 56s. 3½d. per quarter. In the first of these ten years, 3l. would buy nearly nine bushels of wheat. This showed that the taxes were nearly doubled, as applied to the produce of the land. With regard to those engaged in manufactures, they have to give the labour of manufacturing four things to raise the same amount of taxes which the labour of manufacturing one thing would command at the close of the war; that is, in the cotton manufacturing branches he knew, that they had 75 per cent. less now for manufacturing than they had during, and at the close, of the war. The 53,000,000l. of taxes, raised last year would purchase as much wheat as 90,000,000l. of taxes would have pur- 1252 chased at the average price of wheat for ten years preceding 1819: and in the cotton manufactures four times the quantity may be purchased with the same amount of money that it would purchase in 1815. It is this increase of taxation that caused the increase of distress. It takes away from those who employ labour, the means of doing so to the extent they would do if they had not these taxes to pay, and it causes them to reduce the labour of the people, and to prevent their consumption of the necessaries of life which they create. It could not be denied by any one that this two-fold operation must be exceedingly injurious to both the employers and the employed. He might he told that the taxes have not this effect, for that they are expended again by those who receive them, in affording employment and the means of living to all engaged in productive industry; but this he denied. Look at the amount that had since the war gone out of this country in foreign loans. Mr. Marshall, in his evidence before the hand-loom committee stated it to exceed 100,000,000l., and this sum had been augmented since. This had gone to raise up manufacturing competitors in other countries, and thus had deprived us of the power of giving to the people the same employment that we otherwise could have done, and haddeprived us of the means of obtaining that profit which we should have obtained if these loans had not been contracted; and we are now arrived at that state as regards our manufacturing industry, that, notwithstanding all the ingenuity that had been brought into practice, and all the improvements in machinery, we cannot profitably employ our manufacturing people. Another mode of spending the taxes is on luxuries imported from foreign countries in return for our exports, and used here by the rich only, because the great body of the people cannot command these things. This is no better than giving the labour of our people for that which is not bread, and their strength for nought. The labourer being circumstanced as he had described, has a right to complain. Others have described their condition, and shown that they are cruelly treated. Dr. Price, in his day, in his tables on reversionary payments, says,
The nominal price of day-labour is at present no more than four times, or at most, five times, what it was in 1514; but the price of corn is seven times, and of flesh and raiment 1253 about fifteen times higher. So far, therefore, has the price of labour been from advancing in proportion to the increase in the expences of living, that it does not appear that it bears now half the proportion to those expences that it did bear formerly.The labourer he believed to be worse off now than he was when Dr. Price wrote; and, in addition to the sufferings from in. adequate wages, the Legislature had robbed him of his charter, and thrown great difficulties in the way of his obtaining relief. He, therefore, does, and will, continue to complain of his social condition, however the noble Lord, the Secretary for the Home Department, may dislike it; and every well-wisher to society ought, he thought, to urge him to repeat his complaints again and again by petitions to this House until he obtained redress. It was to get an improvement of their social condition that the working people joined in the cry for reform in 1831–2. It was because the reformed Parliament has not reduced the taxes, nor improved the social condition of the people, that they now sought for a further reform. This reform, or an improvement of the social condition of the people, the House must concede, or its doom and the fate of the country is sealed. A change would be made, peaceably or violently, and all the additional force this House was voting would not prevent it, but might accelerate the end. This country was in the condition that the Roman empire was in just before its fall, and that France was in just before the breaking out of the first revolution, as described by Mr. Gibbon and Mr. Arthur Young. Mr. Gibbon, in describing the cause of the fall of Rome, says—The horrid practice of murdering their new-born infants was become every day more frequent in the provinces. It was the effect of distress, and the distress was principally occasioned by the intolerable burden of taxes, and by the vexatious, as well as cruel, persecutions of the officers of the revenue against the insolvent debtors. The less opulent or less industrious part of mankind, instead of rejoicing at an increase of family, deemed it an act of paternal tenderness to release the children from the impending miseries of a life which they themselves were unable to support.
Mr. Arthur Young,who was a resident in France at the outbreak of the revolution, which shook that country to atoms, and scattered its nobility and gentry to 1254 wander over the earth—he who saw it, and examined its cause, wrote these words:—
It is impossible to justify the excesses of the people on their taking up arms; they were certainly guilty of cruelties; it is idle to deny the facts, for they have been proved too clearly to admit of doubt. But is it really the people to whom we are to impute the whole—or to their oppressors, who had kept them so long in a state of bondage? He who chooses to be served by slaves, and by ill-treated slaves, must know that he holds both his property and his life by a tenure far different from those who prefer the service of well-treated freemen; and he who dines to the music of groaning sufferers, must not, in the moment of insurrection, complain that his daughters are ravished and then destroyed, and that his sons' throats are cut. When such evils happen, they surely are more imputable to the tyranny than to the cruelty of the servant. The analogy holds with the French peasants. The murder of a seigneur (a lord), or a country seat in flames, is recorded in every newspaper; the rank of the person who suffers attracts notice; but where do we find the registers of the seigneur's oppressions of his peasantry, and his exactions of feudal services from those whose children were dying around them for want of bread? Where do we find the minutes that assigned these starving wretches to some vile pettifogger, to be fleeced by impositions and mockery of justice in the seigneur's courts (petty courts of justice?) Who gives us the awards of the intendant (head tax-collector) and his subdélégués, which took off the taxes of a man of fashion, and laid them with accumulated weight on the poor who were so unfortunate as to be his neighbours? Who has dwelt sufficiently upon explaining all the ramifications of despotism, regal, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical, pervading the whole mass of the people; reaching, like a circulating fluid, the most distant capillary tubes of poverty and wretchedness? In these cases the sufferers are too ignoble to be known, and the mass too indiscriminate to be pitied. But should a philosopher feel and reason thus? Should he mistake the cause for the effect? and, giving all his pity to the few, feel no compassion for the many, because they suffer, in his eyes, not individually, but by millions? The excesses of the people cannot, I repeat, be justified; it would undoubtedly have done them credit, both as men and as Christians, if they had possessed their new-acquired power with moderation. But, let it be remembered, that the populace in no country ever use power with moderation; excess is inherent in their aggregate constitution. And as every government in the world knows, that violence infallibly attends power in their hands, it is doubly bound in common sense, and for common safety, so to conduct itself that the people may not find an intetest in public confusion. They will always suffer much and long before they are effec- 1255 tually roused; nothing, therefore, can kindle the flame but such oppressions of some classes or order in society as give able men the opportunity of seconding the general mass; discontent will diffuse itself around; and if the Government take not warning in time, it is alone answerable for all the burnings, and all the plunderings, and all the devastation, and all the blood that follow.It appeared to him that we were in the state which Mr. Arthur Young had described, in words applied to other countries and other times. We have all the weight of taxes here complained of, and all the consequences described as resulting from them. That, indeed, described by Gibbon, as the "horrid practice of murdering new-born infants," might be supposed, by those unacquainted with the real state of society, not yet to have taken root amongst us. But the country has its eye upon the numerous cases of infanticide resulting from poverty and the operation of the New Poor-law; and it does not forget, that since that law was passed, there has issued from the shop of a respectable bookseller in London, a publication recommending to parents a systematic and wholesale murder of infant children the moment they are ushered into the world, as a wholesome piece of domestic as well as state policy, the means being pointed out with minuteness under the term of "painless extinction." The question is, what should now be done? What he would recommend the House to do to ameliorate the condition of the people, he had stated in a resolution which he should move, and take a division of the House upon. The resolution itself contains the reasons for such a course, and the mode of carrying it out. Its object is to reduce the taxes upon the necessaries of life, in order to bring down the price of the necessaries, and to give the poor people a larger command over them in return for their labour, and he thought its operation would be fair towards those engaged in the cultivation of the soil, and towards those engaged in manufactures, shipping, and commerce. It was not necessary for him to go into any details on the equitable assessment of property which he suggested in his resolution; but he had read "an argument for the general relief of the country from taxation, and eventually front the corn-laws, by an assessment on property," by Mr. Heathfield, an actuary in the city. The argument and the observations with which Mr. Heathfield accompanies it, squared in the 1256 main, with his opinions of the course which should be pursued to carry out what he recommends, and what his resolution proposed. Mr. Heathfield gives an estimate of the assumed value of all descriptions of property, which he was inclined to think somewhat overvalued; but that does not invalidate the principle that ought to be adopted. Mr. Heathfield's proposition is to throw the taxes on the owners of accumulated property, and to do away with the taxes raised through the medium of excise and customs on those articles which he had enumerated in his resolutions. He was a man of property himself, and would very willingly acquiesce in giving up that part which would be required of him to carry out his proposition, with a view to secure peace to the mansion and the homestead, and more comfort and contentment to the inhabitants of the cottage than now existed. He, therefore, begged leave to move the resolution of which he had given notice:—That the taxes imposed on the necessaries of life in this country render them so dear, that the working people cannot command a sufficiency to supply their daily wants; that the taxes imposed on raw material are an obstruction to the productive industry of the country; and that the inability of the people to purchase a sufficiency of the things which their labour would produce, acts injuriously upon those who employ the people, and compels them, from want of a market at remunerating prices, to limit the employment of many, and to refuse employment altogether to others, who are anxious to earn their bread by the labour of their hands, and who, from being denied employment, are compelled to accept relief from the parish in any way that they can obtain it, or starve. That such a state of things is detrimental to the productive classes, and dangerous to all other classes. That, according to the return ordered to be printed by this House on the 10th day of June last, the taxes raised by the Excise and Customs on the following articles amounted, in the year ending the 5th day of January, 1839, to the sum of 17,614,543l. —viz. on malt, 4,932,080l.; hops, 302,906l.; soap, 810,813l.; candles and tallow, 183,669l.; coals, sea-borne, 7,632l.; sugar and molasses, 4,893,684l,; tea, 3,362,035l.; coffee, 684,970l; butter, 251,665l; cheese, 113,907l.; currants and raisins, 300,828l.; corn, 186,760l.; cotton-wool and sheeps', imported, 725,445l.; silk, 254,874l.; hides and skins, 61,478l.; and on paper, 541,788l. That justice, sound policy, and humanity, require that the laws imposing these taxes should be repealed, the corn-laws abolished, and that the revenue should in future be raised by an equitable assessment on property.
Mr. Williamsseconded the motion. He felt great regret that his hon. Friend had not brought forward a motion of this important nature at an earlier period of the Session. His hon. Friend had given a most lamentable description of the state of the productive classes; but he was fully borne out in his tale of woe by their real condition. It had often been his lot to offer all the opposition in his power to acts of extravagance committed. by the government, but he felt convinced that this House would never stop in its career of profuse expenditure, that it would never show any regard for economising the revenues of the country, until the taxes were fairly borne by themselves. In the present state of taxation the poorer and middle classes were burdened much more heavily than the rich. Hence arose the indifference of Members of that house to every proposition for reducing the taxation of the country. He held in his hand a list of eleven articles, the amount arising to the revenue from which was 30,000,000l. out of the 51,000,000l. of annual taxation. All these taxes fell as heavily on the middle and lower classes as on the rich; but there were some of them, consisting of sums levied on the necessaries of life, which pressed with four or five times more weight on the poor than they did on the rich. The tax on British and foreign spirits was 8,000,000l., that on malt 5,000,000l., that on sugar 4,000,000l. Would any hon. Member deny that these taxes fell as heavily on the poor as on the rich? But how stood the case as regarded the indispensable necessaries of life, particularly to those engaged in manufactures? Malt and hops, he need not say, were the ingredients out of which the poor man's beer was made. The profits received by the brewer and seller of this article served to raise the tax on it to 130 per cent. How was the rich man's wine taxed? Why, claret and champagne not 20 per cent.; but taking all wines together, the impost laid on them did not exceed 25 per cent. Let it he recollected, too, that wine to the rich man was a luxury; beer to the poor man was an indispensable necessary. The poor man's tea, was taxed 200 per cent., whilst the rich man did not contribute more than 30 per cent. to the revenue. Tobacco was no doubt a luxury, but he believed there were many poor men who would give up their meals rather than do without tobacco. This article was taxed probably not less 1258 than 800 per cent. Now would they do what his hon. Friend recommended, and place those taxes, which now pressed so heavily and unjustly on the poor, in a fair porportion to their wealth, on the rich? No, they would do nothing of the sort. They would never tax themselves so long as the poor man was shut out from the right of electing Members to that House. Could any man wonder at the dissatisfaction which now existed? Those were the grievances which called it forth, and they were enough to cause it. His hon. Friend had made out a case so strong, that, if any feeling existed in that House for the sufferings of the poor, it would be the means of obtaining for them some relief. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton had proved that the tax on corn cost the country eighteen millions annually. This should be called a tax payable by the poor man through the rich. This unequal system of taxation was producing its natural effects. The diminished means of consumption was proved by the fact that the difference between the amount received for the tax on malt in the year 1836 and in the last year was upwards of a million sterling.
§ The House divided on the original motion. Ayes 58; Noes 15: Majority 43.
| List of the AYES. | |
| Barnard, E. G. | Lowther, J. H. |
| Bernal, R. | Maule, hon. F. |
| Blackburn, I. | Morpeth, Viscount |
| Blair, J. | Norreys, Lord |
| Blake, W. J. | Paget, F. |
| Broadley, H. | Palmer, G. |
| Brownrigg, S. | Parker, J. |
| Bruges, W. H. L. | Parker, R. T. |
| Callaghan, D. | Pigot, D. R. |
| Cowper, hon. W. F. | Pryme, G. |
| Craig, W. G. | Rediugton, T. N. |
| Divett, E. | Rice, right hon. T. S |
| East, J. B. | Rolfe, Sir R. M. |
| Eaton, R. J. | Russell, Lord J. |
| Elliot, hon. J. E. | Russell, Lord |
| Farnham, E. B. | Rutherfurd, rt. hn. A. |
| Gaskell, J. M. | Seymour, Lord |
| Gordon, R. | Shell, R. L. |
| Grattan, J. | Sheppard, T. |
| Grey, rt. hon. Sir G. | Smith, G. R. |
| Grosvenor, Lord R. | Somerville, Sir W. M |
| Hamilton, C. J. B. | Stanley, hon. E. J. |
| Hodgson, F. | Stanley, hon. W. O. |
| Mope, hon. C. | Stock, Dr. |
| Hope, G. W. | Surrey, Earl of |
| Hoskins, K. | Thomson, rt. C. P. |
| Howard, P. H. | Troubridge, Sir E. T. |
| Hutton, R, | Waddington, H, S. |
| TELLERS. | |
| Wilde, Mr. Serjeant | Baring, F. T. |
| Wood, C. | Steuart, R. |
| List of the NOES | |
| Aglionby, H. A. | Hume, J. |
| Brotherton, J. | Humphery, J. |
| Browne, R. D. | O'Connell, D. |
| Duncombe, T. | Scholefield, J. |
| Ewart, W. | Williams, W. |
| Finch, F. | Yates, J. A. |
| Harvey, D. W. | TELLERS. |
| Hector, C. J. | Attwood, T. |
| Hindley, C. | Fielden, J. |