Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848

It is no doubt true that a large proportion of the persons who have suffered under the system introduced into our colonies, have been the very commercial and manufacturing class who have imposed it upon government. The manufacturing operatives joined the shopkeepers in the cry for free-trade, – and where has it left numbers of them? – in the workhouse and the Gazette. But that is no uncommon thing in human affairs; perhaps the greatest evils which befall both nations and individuals are those which they bring upon themselves by their own folly or grasping disposition. Providence has a sure mode of punishing the selfishness of man, which is to let it work out its natural fruits. If the deserved retribution to selfish and interested conduct were to be taken out of human affairs, how much misery would be avoided here below, but what impunity would exist to crime!

The working classes in the manufacturing districts, who now see how entirely they have been deluded on this subject, and how completely free-trade has turned to their own ruin, have a very simple remedy for the evils under which they labour. They say, "Extend the suffrage; give us a due sway in the legislature, and we will soon protect our own interests. The revolution of 1832 in Great Britain, and that of 1830 in France, has turned entirely to the advantage of the bourgeoisie ; and we must have another Reform Bill to give us the blessings which Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, and the Socialists promise to France." This idea has taken a great hold of the public mind in a certain class of society. It is the natural reaction of experience against the innumerable evils which free-trade and a contracted currency have brought upon the country. The manufacturing and working classes, who joined the trading interest in raising the cry for these measures, finding themselves now crushed, or deriving no benefit from their effects, see no remedy but in taking the matter entirely into their own hands, and putting an end at once, by obtaining the command of the House of Commons, to all those measures which gratuitously, and for no conceivable purpose but the interest of the trades, spread ruin and desolation through the nation.

We object strenuously to any such change; and that from no attachment to the free-trade and fettered currency system, to which we have always given the most determined resistance, but from a firm desire for, and clear perception of, the interests of the great body of the people, to which, though often in opposition to their blind and mistaken wishes, we have uniformly given the most undeviating support.

A uniform system of voting, such as a £5 or household suffrage, which is now proposed as a remedy for all the evils of society, is of necessity a class representation , and the class to which it gives the ascendency is the lowest in whom the suffrage is vested. It must be so, because the poor being always and in every country much more numerous than the rich, the humblest class of voters under every uniform system must always be incomparably the most numerous. It is this circumstance which has given the ten-pounders the command of the House of Commons under the new constitution; they are the humblest and therefore the most numerous class enfranchised by the Reform Act, and consequently, under the uniform household suffrage, they have the majority. They have so for the same reason that, under a similar uniform system, the privates in an army would outnumber the whole officers, commissioned and non-commissioned. But if the suffrage is reduced so low as to admit the representatives of the operatives and "proletaires," or those whom they influence, (which household or a £5 suffrage would undoubtedly do,) what measures in the present state of society in this country, and feeling throughout the world, would they immediately adopt? We have only to look at the newly formed republic of France, where such a system is established, to receive the answer. Repudiation of state engagements, (as in the case of the railways;) confiscation of property under the name of a graduated income tax; the abolition of primogeniture, in order to ruin the landed interest; the issue of assignats, in order to sustain the state under the shock to credit which such measures would necessarily occasion, might with confidence be looked for. And the question to be considered is, would these measures in the end benefit any class of society , or, least of all, the operative, in a country such as Great Britain, containing, in proportion to its population, a greater number of persons dependent on daily wages for their existence than any other that ever existed?

What is to be expected from such ruin to credit and capital but the immediate stoppage of employment, and throwing of millions out of bread? Even if the whole land in the country were seized and divided, it would afford no general relief – it would only shift the suffering from one class to another. What, under such a system, would become of the millions who now exist on the surplus expenditure of the wealthy? They would all be ruined – England would be overrun by a host of starving cultivators like France or Ireland. A plunge down to household suffrage would soon effect the work of destruction, by reducing us all in a few years to the condition of Irish bog-trotters. It is no security against these dangers to say that the working class, if they get the majority, will take care of themselves, and eschew whatever is hurtful to their interests. Men do not know what is to prove ultimately injurious in public, any more than they perceive, in most cases, what is to be for their final interest in private life. The bourgeoisie got the command of the country in France by the Revolution of 1830, but have they benefited by the change? Let the enormous expenditure of Louis Philippe's government, and the present disastrous state of commerce in France, give the answer. The workmen of Paris got the entire command of the government by the Revolution of 1848, and already 85,000 of them are kept alive, only working at the "Ateliers Nationaux," while 200,000 are lounging about, eating up the country with bayonets in their hands. The middle classes got the command of Great Britain by the Reform Act, and their representatives set about free-trade and restricted currency measures, which have spread distress and bankruptcy to an unparalleled extent among themselves. The Reform Bill, by establishing these measures, has destroyed a fourth of the realised capital of Great Britain. 8 8 This is within the mark. It, has lowered the funds from 100 to 80, or a fifth; railway stock on an average a third; West India property nine-tenths; and mercantile stock, in most cases, nearly a half. Household or universal suffrage would at once sweep away a half of what remains, as it has recently done in France. And in what condition would the 30,000,000 inhabitants of the British empire be if three-fourths of the capital – in other words, three-fourths of the means of employing labour, or purchasing its fruits – were destroyed? We should have Skibbereens in every village of Great Britain, and grass growing in half of London.

What, then, is to be done to allay the present ferment, and tranquillise the country, when so rudely shaken by internal distress and external excitement? Are we to sit with our hands folded waiting till the tempest subsides? and if the present system is continued, is there any ground for believing it ever will subside? We answer, decidedly not . We must do something – and not a little, but a great deal. But what is required is not to augment the political power of the working classes, but to remove their grievances; – not to give them the government of the state, which they can exercise only to their own and the nation's ruin, but to place them in such a condition that they may no longer desire to govern it. This can be done only by abandoning the system of class government for the interest chiefly of the moneyed interests, and returning to the old system of general protective and national administration.