VII.9. The Worker Has a Right to a Guarantee from the Man Who Employs Him

It is not a consequence of the nature of man or of that of labour that every kind of work should be accomplished by the cooperation of two classes of citizens with opposed interests: I mean the class of the owners of accumulated labour, who rest, and the class of men who have nothing but their vital strength and who offer to work. Their separation, their opposition of interest, is the consequence of the artificial organisation we have given to human society. Everything that is our work is subject to our criticism, and the authority of the legislator extends above all to the abuses that are the result of his own laws.

The cooperation of capital with labour is not the concord I mean; that cooperation lies in the very nature of things and does not depend on us. But the natural order of social progress did not tend to separate men from things, or wealth from labour. In the fields the owner could remain a cultivator; in the towns the capitalist could remain an artisan. The separation of the class that works from the class that rests was not essential either to the existence of society or to that of production. We introduced it for the greater advantage of all; it is for us to regulate it so that we may in fact reap that advantage.

In the social organisation we have adopted, all work is done by the constant cooperation of these two classes, those who have wealth and those who put it to work. No work is produced without wealth and toil. The worker is necessary to the man who pays him, as the payer is to the worker. Each keeps the other alive; there exists, therefore, or at least there ought to exist, a kind of solidarity between them.

The land can be cultivated by its owner. He will then unite in his own person the ownership of the soil, the ownership of the capital that works it, and the ownership of the labour that makes it fruitful. We see examples of this often enough to leave no doubt that in this way the soil is very well cultivated, the cultivator very happy, and society very abundantly supplied with food. But the owner, in order to enjoy the leisure of wealth, prefers not to cultivate the land himself; he lets it to a farmer. The farmer in his turn, having become a great gentleman, no longer wishes to work like a peasant, and has all his work done by day labourers. Very well: society does not oppose it; it refrains from interfering with private transactions; but it must suffer no damage from them. It may have allowed idle owners and big farmers to create, for their own use and their own convenience, a new class in the nation, that of the agricultural day labourers; it must never allow that class to fall back as a burden on the nation.

If every owner cultivated his lands himself, with his own hands; if, his strength not sufficing, he divided his lands among his children; and if the class of peasant proprietors grew to its natural limits, that is, until its manual strength was sufficient for the working of its land, it is evident that there would be no day labourers, and consequently no poor in the countryside and no poor rates charged on agriculture.

When this order was changed, and the owners gave their lands to be worked by another class of men, if these men were themselves either farmers or métayers, if they did all the work with their own hands under a permanent contract that gave them a right in the property they worked, there would still have been no poor, or hardly any, in the countryside, and no poor rates charged on agriculture.

The great owners and the great farmers have brought into existence the day labourers, whom they cannot do without. The property of the former would be worth nothing without the latter; the latter are of use to no other class of society but the former. There is therefore a solidarity between them, and the day labourers ought to live exclusively on the wealth they create on the great farms. They may be left to bargain as they please with the owners over the price of their day’s work; but if that price is insufficient, if the labourer’s family, after receiving it, still finds itself obliged to ask for a supplement, it is the great owner alone, or the great farmer, for whose advantage this class exists, who is called upon to give that supplement. In the wholly barbarous and inhuman organisation of feudal countries and slave countries, this essential principle of justice was not ignored. No lord ever thought of putting his vassals, his serfs or his slaves on the charge of the province in their calamities, their old age or their sickness; he knew very well that it was for him alone to provide for the needs of those who felt them only for his own advantage. Often, it is true, he discharged this duty with the harshness and stinginess that must result from so odious a social organisation; but in the system of large farms the true debtor throws this sacred debt on the rest of his fellow countrymen.

Can anything more unjust be imagined than to make the small owner and the small farmer pay, under the name of the poor rate, a supplement to the necessary wages of the workers who till the lands of the rich? Of what use are these day labourers to the owner or the farmer who holds the handles of his own plough, and who without outside help does all the work of his fields with his children? How, on the contrary, could those who will not work themselves do without day labourers? And is not the supplement of wages that the parish gives to their day labourers as unjust as if the same parish were charged with providing the oats for their horses?

The great owners and the great farmers perhaps find no real benefit in having the day labourers, who exist only for them and ought to be paid only by them, maintained in part by the community; for this same community, of which they in turn are members, maintains other labourers, those of the arts and trades, for whom the landowners ought in no way to be answerable. It is essential, indeed, before anything else, to separate the administration of relief to the rural poor from that of relief to the poor artisans. It is not the same people who have plunged them into misery, and it is not the same people who ought to relieve them.

But in the confusion that reigns today, in which all the poor are thrown indiscriminately on the charge of public charity, whether that charity is regulated by laws, as in England, or left to the impulses of humanity, as in other countries, every rich man pushes the poor off onto society and works to worsen their condition, without considering that, as a member of that society, he will afterwards be called upon to come to their aid, whether by parish rates or by the voluntary contributions he will impose on himself out of love of humanity. If each felt in his own person the consequence of his own efforts, each would give up saving that part of the wage he would soon be called upon to pay back.

There exists a natural solidarity between the big farmer and all the workers needed to work his farm. Once it is recognised, once the farmer knows that he alone will be called upon to provide for their maintenance in their sickness, their old age or their misery, he will look for the way of maintaining them that will be least burdensome to himself or to society; and he will soon find that it is the way that gives them the most lasting interest in life, that best associates them with their own economy, that preserves in them the most cheerfulness, the most health and the most bodily strength, and that consequently comes nearest to property.

Today he tries to reduce their wage to the lowest possible rate and to obtain the most labour possible for that wage. If this labour exhausts them and they fall sick, the parish will provide; if there are dead seasons between the periods of work, the parish will provide; if the fields offer no work suited to women, children and old men, the parish will provide. By means of competition, the big farmer obtains the hardest possible work from the strongest men, in the best season, and for the lowest price; while he shares with the small farmers and the small owners the task of providing compensation to the labourers’ families for all the work he does not put in hand. Under these conditions the small farmer cannot possibly bear the competition of the big ones, and the system of large farms must spread.

But if the big farmer or the big owner knows that he will remain alone responsible, all the year round, for the family of the labourer he needs, he no longer has any interest in reducing the labourer’s wage to the lowest point, or in getting more work out of him than his strength allows. It no longer suits him to choose the most advantageous season to have the work done all at once, but on the contrary to spread it over the course of the year, so that less time is lost. It no longer suits him to set the most robust worker to work, but on the contrary the whole family equally, each according to its strength. On this reckoning it will be better to have servants than workers, to engage families by the year rather than men by the week. It will be better for the owner to have métayers or working farmers than big farmers; and perhaps it will be better still to alienate part of the land to those who will cultivate it themselves. Thus a direction diametrically opposed to the one England is following today would be impressed on the whole of rural cultivation; and everyone, heeding nothing but his own interest rightly understood, would come nearer to the systems we have shown earlier to be best suited to spreading happiness through every class of the nation.

We do not presume to put forward a draft poor law for a foreign country that we know only imperfectly, and which would besides be very little disposed to receive such advice. We confine ourselves to pointing to exemption from the poor rate as a possible encouragement to small cultivation, and to its increase on the great landowners as a compensation, on the contrary, for the advantage, ruinous to the state, that they find in the system of large farms. The administration of the poor attached to agriculture ought to be completely independent of that of the poor attached to the arts and to industry. If the extent of the market in which each poor labourer offers his labour is the same as that of the parishes, the division of the rural poor by parish could be kept. The maintenance of these poor would be laid exclusively on the big farmers who employ them. These would have to provide everything the rural poor needed, but they would be wholly exempted from contributing anything to the maintenance of the poor whom the industrial arts throw on society. Every man who cultivated with his own hands a holding of less than twenty-five acres, which was his own in full ownership, ought to be exempt from the poor rate. Every farmer who cultivated with his own hands, with his family or his servants, a farm of less than fifty acres ought likewise to be exempt from it; and every facility ought to be given by new laws to the great owners to alienate part of their properties in favour of their day labourers, by letting in small parcels, by long leases and by sales on long terms. These labourers are already partly a charge on them; but they would fall on them still more directly once anyone who works his land by day labourers was obliged to maintain alone, in their misery, the labourers he needs for this fatal system of cultivation. On the other hand, anyone who owned ten acres of land, or held twenty on lease, would have no right to be relieved by the parish; and if he came to divide this small patrimony among his children, they too, however small the portion to which they were reduced, would have no right to it.

Such a proposal will probably revolt the great landowners, who alone exercise legislative power in England today; yet it is no more than just. The farmers and the owners who cultivate their small farms with their own hands have no use for day labourers; the great owners alone need them for their use. They made them; let them maintain them. They would soon find that the most economical way of maintaining them would be to bring them back into the ranks of the owners; that the system of large farms is advantageous only by reason of the unjust division that had been established between the man who works and the man who sets him to work, and by reason of the fact that the real wages of those who work are paid to them not only by those who set them to work and advance their daily wage, but by the rest of society, which is compelled to make up for the meagreness of that wage at every moment of hardship. Almost at once one would see the letting of land in small parcels and the sale of great estates in lots, so frequent in France today, succeed in England to the daily absorption of small farms into large ones.

Perhaps there would still be some difficulty in reattaching to property the whole existing population of day labourers, above all since the habitual importation of Irish labourers has increased its distress. But England fortunately has the means of doing a great deal for its rural poor by dividing its immense commons among them. In general the English are reluctant to do so today, for fear of thereby increasing a wretched population still further. That is because they know only farms of 400 acres and cottages to which only one or two acres of land are attached. If their commons were divided into freeholds of 20 to 30 acres, they would see reborn that independent and proud class of countrymen, the yeomanry, which they grieve today to see almost extinct.

The same principle of solidarity between the man who works and the man who sets him to work can be extended to the industry of the towns. In the beginning of societies each man possesses the capital on which his labour is exercised, and almost all artisans live on a revenue made up equally of profit and wages. The smith himself supplies the iron and the coal he works with; the shoemaker supplies his leather, the wheelwright his wood. The division of trades would not even make necessary the separation of the workers from the masters: there are manufactures in which each man processes on his own account the raw materials on which he works. But in the end this division of trades, if it did not force the division of conditions, at least naturally brought it about. From then on, in the production of each commodity, instead of simply comparing the costs of production with the price the consumer would pay, to see whether it was worth making the thing demanded, the capitalist was led to calculate whether he could not find, at the expense of the workers who produced it, the profit that the consumers did not offer him.

It is by thus setting the producers against themselves that they have been made to follow a road diametrically opposed to the interest of society. For society, a manufacture is worth carrying on only when it can keep its workers in a state of tolerable comfort; for the head of the manufacture it is enough that it yields profits, even though his workers should languish and finally perish of want.

The cotton manufacturers have successively reduced their workers from a wage of 20 sous a day to 15, to 12, and finally to 8 sous. Since their interests had been wholly separated from those of their workers, they had only to concern themselves, in dealing with them, with the means of securing their services at the lowest possible price at the moment they needed them. They send them away in their sickness, in their old age or in the dead seasons, so that public charity, the hospitals, or, in England, the parish may provide for their wretched existence. They compete with one another, in concert against their workers, over who shall throw this burden most completely on society. Every trade engages in the same kind of struggle; all act in the interest of their own body against the social interest; and each of them forgets that he will have to provide in his turn, by his private charities, by his contributions to the hospitals or by the poor rate, for the maintenance of the wretched creatures he is labouring to make.

In this constant struggle to lower wages, the social interest, in which each nevertheless has a share, is forgotten by all. But let each trade bear its own burden, and each manufacturer will soon recognise whether or not it is in the interest of his manufacture to lower wages; whether, when the permanent maintenance of a man requires 20 sous a day, it is not a hundred times better to give them to him directly, as the immediate reward of his labour, than to give him 8 as wages and make him receive 12 as alms.

It must be admitted, however, that although the principle is the same, it is much more difficult to put into practice for the industry of the towns than for that of the fields; but it is also much more essential and much more urgent to resort to it. So far England is the only country in which agriculturists need to be supported by public charity, whereas there is not a country in Europe, and this is partly, it is true, England’s doing, in which the workers of every manufacture do not see themselves constantly threatened with losing their livelihood or with being reduced to a wage insufficient for their needs.

It is quite evident that if the trades could be re-established as corporations for a charitable purpose only, and if the heads of each trade were placed under the obligation of supplying relief to all the poor of their trade, on precisely the footing on which the parishes supply it in England, an end would at once be put to the sufferings to which the working class finds itself exposed, as well as to the excess of production that is today the ruin of commerce, and to the excess of population that reduces the poor classes to despair.

Today the manufacturer believes he gains whether he sells dearer to the consumer or pays less wages to the worker. He would then learn that he can gain only on the sale, and that everything he cuts from the worker it will no longer be society but he himself who must give back to him as relief. Today the manufacturer lures the worker with a wretched wage and makes him risk his health in a poisonous air, in cotton dust or mercury fumes; he would then learn that every infirmity he makes the worker contract he will have to pay for in so many days of hospital. Today the manufacturer, after drawing numerous families to him, suddenly leaves them without employment because he has discovered that a steam engine can do all their work; he would then learn that the steam engine produces no saving if all the men who worked do not find some way of working still, and if he is obliged to maintain them in the hospital while he stokes his furnaces. This charge, falling on him alone, would be the strictest justice; for today he makes a profit out of men’s lives, and all the damage that results he thrusts onto society. If the wages he pays are sufficient, if they provide not only for the manhood of his workers but for their childhood, their old age and their sicknesses; if the operations he orders them to perform are not unhealthy; if the machines he invents only give occasion, as he assures us, for the employment of a greater amount of labour, then the responsibility laid on him alone will be no burden, and he will have no grounds for complaint. If it is onerous, then his industry is a losing industry, and it is better that he should give it up than make society bear its loss.

But it is not enough for this measure to be of the most rigorous justice to remove the very great difficulties it presents in execution. On the one hand, the extent of the market for manufactured goods would expose the workers of one province to fall back on the charge of their master as a result of a change in production occurring a hundred leagues away; on the other, the upheavals of commerce often ruin those very masters from whom one would wish to demand relief; and finally there would be the danger of seeing the new corporations revive the privileges of the old ones and, like them, exercise their tyranny over their subordinates. I confess that, having pointed out where, in my eyes, the principle lies and where justice lies, I do not feel equal to tracing the means of execution. The distribution of the fruits of labour among those who concur in producing them seems to me vicious; but it seems to me almost beyond human powers to conceive a state of property absolutely different from the one that experience makes known to us. The suffering of the most numerous, and perhaps the most essential, classes of society has in recent times been sometimes so excessive that in the most civilised countries the minds of several philanthropists have been struck by the need to remedy it. Men filled perhaps more with zeal for humanity than with knowledge of the human heart or with experience have proposed, under the name of the cooperative system, an entirely new organisation of society, which would replace personal interest by that of corporations formed for the purpose of carrying out all the work society needs. Mr Owen of New Lanark is the best-known writer of this sect, which counts a great number of supporters in England, in France and in America. It would be idle, however, to combat its principles. They have not so far been set out in a manner likely to make much impression, and one always feels a kind of remorse in exposing all the errors and inconsistencies of people whose writings breathe so much goodwill towards their fellow men, and whose aims are so pure.

But since there is a connection between the system developed in the writings of Messrs Owen, Thompson, Fourier and Muiron and the reform towards which I believe we must tend, I feel obliged to state precisely that we agree on only one point, and that on all the others we have nothing in common. I should like, as they would, that there should be association between those who cooperate in the same product, instead of setting them against one another. But I do not regard the means they have proposed for reaching this end as able ever to lead to it.

I wish the industry of the towns, like that of the fields, to be divided among a great number of independent workshops, and not united under a single head who commands hundreds or thousands of workers. I wish the ownership of manufactories to be divided among a great number of middling capitalists, and not united in one man, master of several millions. I wish the industrious worker to have before him the chance, almost the certainty, of becoming his master’s partner, so that he will marry only when he has a share in the business, instead of growing old, as he does today, without hope of advancement. But to bring about these reforms I ask only for the slow and indirect means of legislation; only for the execution of complete justice between master and worker, which would lay on the former the whole responsibility for the harm he does the latter. Let the law constantly favour the division of inheritances and not their accumulation; let it give the master a pecuniary advantage, and a political one, in binding his workers more closely to him, engaging them for longer periods and associating them with his profits; and perhaps private interests, better directed, will by themselves repair the harm that private interests have done to society. Then the heads of manufactories would exert their minds to find ways of raising the workers to their own level, of giving them an interest in property and in thrift, of making them, in short, men and citizens, whereas today they never cease labouring to make them machines.

It is unfortunately not in the power of any legislation to free the poor man from all care, all suffering, and even all unjust dependence; but perhaps a great deal has already been done for his happiness when hope is restored to him, and when, instead of the uniformly precarious condition to which he is condemned today, he is shown, as the object of his wishes, a period of rest and comfort that his good conduct may enable him to reach.

No doubt the effect of so great a change in legislation, by rapidly reducing this class of workers who compete with one another over who can best do without even the necessaries of life, and by forcing each trade to bear from its own resources the losses it has brought on itself by untimely production, would be to make it soon recognised that several manufactures regarded as profitable are really losing ones; for the relief that society gives their workers every year more than outweighs their profits. No doubt it would follow that more than one country that lives only by industry would see several of its workshops close one after another, and that the population of the towns, which had grown beyond measure, would soon diminish, while that of the countryside would begin to grow again.

A state ought to welcome with gratitude the new industry that the needs of consumers develop; but it ought also to let the industry that is leaving it go, without any effort to hold it back. All the favours government grants it and all the sacrifices it makes to sustain it in its decline serve only to prolong the suffering either of the masters or of the workers, and it saves the declining manufacture only at the expense of the very people it is supposed to keep alive.

Only one nation, it is true, finds itself today in this forced condition; only one nation sees its apparent wealth constantly contrasted with the frightful misery of a tenth of its population, reduced to living on public charity. But this nation, so worthy of imitation in some respects, so dazzling even in its faults, has seduced by its example all the statesmen of the Continent. And if these reflections can no longer be of use to England itself, I shall at least consider that I have served humanity and my fellow countrymen by showing the dangers of the course it is running, and by establishing, from its very experience, that to rest the whole of political economy on the principle of unlimited competition is to authorise the efforts of each against society, and to sacrifice the interest of humanity to the simultaneous action of all individual greeds.