THE LABOR PROBLEM FROM A CHRISTIAN STANDPOINT.

Evening Star, Issue 7266, 18 July 1887, Page 4

THE LABOR PROBLEM FROM A CHRISTIAN STANDPOINT.

TO TUB EDITOR. Siu, —Attached herewith is the report of a lecture recently delivered in Ballarat by the Rev. Dr Roseby, late of Dunedin. The subject the Doctor deals with is of supreme importance, affecting the colonists of New Zealand in every respect as those of Victoria. It is almost unnecessanr to refer to the position Dr Roseby occupied in our midst as a public man. To the functions of the Christian minister he added those of the social and political reformer. His utterances on the problems of “ this life ” were known to be the sentiments of a thoughtful student and ripe scholar, and his opinions were valued accordingly. At the present juncture of our political life, when fiscal changes and the rela'ive merits of various modes of taxation are being pressed on the attention of the people, the opinions of so thoughtful and so capable a man as the late minister of Moray place chapel ai e both opportune and valuable. The reforms advocated by Dr Roseby will no doubt rank in the first importance in the new social arrangements, which I am convinced will shortly be demanded by educated Demos; but it appears to me that the complete emancipation of labor will involve the total abolition of private enterprise so far as it relates to the hiring of labor, and that the State or the community or the municipality -the people in some organised form —will have to enter on the happy hunting ground over which capitalists and profit-mongers have hitherto roamed. —I am, etc., W. M. Bolt. Dunedin, July 10. One o( the first things that strikes the thoughtful observer at the present day is tho enormous increase of wealth. Ktfieot for a moment on the fact that tho British Empire (and ourselves, of course, as part of it) has had a long course of almost uninterrupted prosperity There have been no great or prolonged wars to deplete cur wealth. Each succeeding generation has entered into the inheritance of tho accumulated wealth of its predecessors ; and (what is more significant stiU) during ths last fitly years there has been added to tho productive power of tho community throo marvellous labor-saving nuchino?, which arc the wonder and pride of this nineteenth century. According to the singularly apt illustration of a recant writer, a whole army of perfectly docile, mechanically moved, automatic servants, with hands and foot of iron and heart of sloe), who work as well by day as night; who work without weariness ; who work as well in the master's absence as when ho is there ; and whose divine and providential function it is (if we, who can discern the face cf the sky, could only' discern the sign of tho times) to render the lot of man an easier lot, to render painful, prolonged, and exhausting toil no longer necessary, and to make fiaupcriem as the chrysalis of a former grub state now eft behind for ever. But there are other facts which present tho aspect of a startling, bewildering, perfectly anomalous contrast. We find that there are largo classes of people—and these tho most numerous in the comm-nity-who can hardly be’said to have derived any benefit from these things at ail. At least tho amount of benefit is a subject of controversy. I believe, on the whole, they have derived some benefit; but assuredly if the benefit to them as a part hid been at all commensurate with the enormous increase of the national wealth as a whole, there need have been no controversy about it. When the sun rises we do not need the doubtful aid of spectacles to see if there is any more light. Look at tho facts. One of tho books over which in my early student days I burnt tho midnight oil was Dallam. And no one who knows Hallam will deny that be differs from most historians as a judge differs from an advocate. He is one of tho most dispassionate writers in all literature. But Hallam makes what he justly calls the very unpleasing remark, which (he says) everyone who attends to the subject oLprioes will .be induced to make, that the laboring classes, especially these engaged in agriculture, were better provided with tho means of subsistence in the reign of Edward HI. and Henry VI thin they are at present. They could buy more bread and more meat for their families then than now. The human and ulmost Christian passion of John Slu irt Mill breaks through tho cold exterior (f his.exaot sentences. He says : “ Hitherto, it Is questionable if ail the mochanicii inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, but they have not yet produced their legitimate effect of abridging labor.” What effect (hen, I go on to ask, it not this legitimate effect mentioned by tho great economist, what illegitimate effect have these mechanical inventions and this vast inherited and expand! d wealth produced ? Where shall wc go to sec its effect ? Look at a fact like this. The manufactured products of the United States of America amounted in 1880 to L 360,000,000 sterling. Twenty years afterwards, in 1880, they bad risen to L 1,000,000,000 sterling. The population had increased In the twenty years about 0J per cent., but the manufactured products had increased 300 per cent. The manufactured wealth had increased at five times tho rate of tho increase of population. Who got the benefit of that enormous, rapid, and startling increase? Did the workmen pet tho benefit of it ? I do not lose sight rf the claim of capital to its share, or the claim cf tho inventor to the fair contributing value of his ingenuity and skiT, But tho vast wage-earning masses, by whoso land (maim) this manufacturing (or hardmade) increase had been actually effected—did they get their share of this enormously-increased value of the products cf their industry? Wo know pcifectly well they did not, They could only get it by a rise of wages. And the rate of wages has not increased. Then who got it ? Let me quote from a New York newspaper reviewing the finances of th» preceding year in the month of January, 1880 “ The profits of tho Wall street kings during the past year were enormous. It is estimated that Vanderbilt made 30,000,000dol; Jay Oould, 16,000,000dol; Russel Say, lO.OOO.OOOdol; Sidney Dillon, 10,000,000doi; James R. Keene, 8,000,000dol; making a grand total for ten or twelve estates of about 80,000,000dol.” Turn to the Old Country, and you will find precisely tho same state of things. At the very time that England Is described as the wealthiest nation in the world, while her commerce stretches out its hands to tho remotest corners of the earth, and her argosies cover every sea, how intolerable is the reflection that one person in every twenty of the population is a pauper, that the struggles of a largo number of her host and bravest children barely suffice to obtain tor them a precarious subsistence, that millions of her people exist under conditions which doom them to a life of misery, or vice, or crime, living in habitations less commodious by far than those in which the horses of the wealthy ate stabled, habitations which area mockery cf the sweetness of home, wherein a whole family la often found huddled together within the compass of a single apartment; and that from all this misery there is not the remotest prospect of escape except in the workhouse or the grave. Ail the wealth of the world is ultimately derived from the land. And all the increasing riches of the world ate really increments of value arising upon land. Capital only secures its profits by entering into alliance with land. He who owns the land-end it is wealth or capital that owns it—is in a position to dictate the terms on-which labor shall occupy it. For the ownership of eligible or desirable land is praotl-

cally a monopoly. If it is only in making match-boxes-as the'"Bitter Cry' told us they were being made in East London—at 4Jd a gross, tho wretched workman must have a local habitation—some miserable cellar or garret—in whiohto lie, and for which, directly or indirectly, he nuißt p.y rent. When long ago, with competition lets keen, and a standard of living less reduced, the workman refused to manufacture these boxes for loss than Cd a gross, the rent was les?. If it is conccivab'o hereafter that these people can Hvo a little Icsh like human beings and a little more like rats than they do, if thry needs must, under the forco of competition, manufacture these conda at 4d inttcad of 4Jd, that will be their loss, but they may console themselves that what is their loss is another's gain—the farthing perg.oss lout by tho staving operative will help to make some rich man licher. It will not be much for him to gaiD, to be sure, though it was very much for the other to loße ; but he will noS obje. t to take it. It is the Divine principle of competition; it is freedom of contract; the economists and lawyers tell him it is his. My brothers, there Isaprinciplo of Divine righteousness higher thin that of the political economist, and there is a law higher than the statute-book of kings and parliaments, and in tho name of that Divine righteousness and of that higher Law, I protest that It is not his. And now put alongeide of this that remarkable—that anomalous—thing which the economists oall over-production. Is it possible to imagine anything more absurd than that the industry of the world has supplied it too abundantly with the necessaries and comforts and life. For by ovor-produotion is not Bimply meant disproportionate production. It does not mean too much of one thing, and, at the Bame time, too llttlo of another. At the same time a? we hear of an over-production of food supplies on the prairies c f America, we hear of over-production of textile fabrics in English factories. The phrase points to a glutted market everywhere. And what is the causo of a g'.utted market ? The fact that there are too many hands to do the work of the world. Too much labor, too much labor ! But tho less labor there is bestowed on what produces onough to feed and clothe and house tho community tho hotter. Here is land enough and to spare; clothing enough and to spare; buildings enough and to spare; hands enough to keep up the supply of theßO things, and to spare. To what does all that point? To the lightening of the burdens of labor, To tho reduction of the hours of labor from ten hours to eight, from eight to Bix, perhaps oven from six to four. Why not ? We talk of over-production. What docs the phrase mean if It does not mean that men are working too hard and working too long ? It means that machinery has so facilitated production that quite sufficient food and clothing, comforts and necessaries, can be produced with one-half or one-fourth the former amount of labor. That is what it means. The purpose of God's providence in this thing is so obvious that ho who runs nny read it. But this divine purpoee is somehow frustrated. There is some malign force operating in our social machinery, by which the benefit and advantage of these mechanical impiovemcnts, with their boundless possibilities of expansion and progress, are given to others, but denied to labor. Thore is nothing in the existing order of society, with its fearful disparities of condition, with its luxurv and starvation, its people and lis rags, its Insolent affluence and its hopeless poverty, which the careful student of political economy might not beforehand have predicted. And it needs no prophetic foresight, but simply that fcientific knowledge which enablos tho ohomist to prodiot the reactions of the laboratory, to enable ono to say that tho operation of the same principles will produce the same results in these new lands as they have done elsewhere, unless we make up our minds that it shall not. But tho only way to trammel up this consequence is by arresting the operation of these principles. But how is that to be done ?

(1) The retention by tho State of the absolute and effective ownership of lands still alienated, allowing the holder the usufruct only. (2) Limitations, in the case of land already alienated, of tho amount winch any single proprietor may hold. (3) A substantial tax upon the unearned increment of land. 4) The abolition of entails, and a limitation of the extent of land which any single parson oin take by inheritance, tho present laxity being an invasion and a comparatively reoent invasion of common right ß , which most European countries still maintain. (5) The devising of some method by which we may revert to the wise legislation of the great Jewish lawgiver. "The land shall not be sold for ever siith tho Lord, for the land is mine!" God's land, therefore His children's land; thorcfore their patrimony shall not bo alienated for ever. (6) Then, in respect to the specific difficulties surrounding the relations between capital and labor, I look forward with the highest hope—First, to a wise, cautious, and self-restrained usß of the principlo of combination among workmen. They will only he ablo to hold their own by refusing to allow their standard of living to be unduly depressed, and insisting on such a rate of wages as will maintain it. Secondly, by industrial co-oporation—such cD-opcr-ation as will give to combined labor itself the power of the landed capitalist, But, above all, and as summing up all, the great remedy for the existing disorders of society is the Kingdom of Ood and His justice. The communism of the airly Church was but a mistaken expression for that glorious Philadelphia brotherly love- which is the one thing needed to reconcile the conflicting interests of classes and establish a true fraternity of the race.