Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1827 edition. Excerpt: ... their existence as a separate class can be prevented. O wretched lot of the productive classes, if such be the only consolations, the only hopes, that political economy, that modern philosophy, can afford them! Strange that the "Labourer" should not have suspected the rottenness of the foundations of the system, of which early habits have made him the partizan, eager himself for the unsocial distinctions of competition, though arbitrarily excluding the acquirers of capital from its pretended benefits! Is it then true, that the wish to secure to labor the whole products of its exertions and the right of freely exchanging them, is a mere fond and unattainable dream? Is it true that, however bad in theory and destructive of human happiness the claims of idle capital to the products of labor may be, those claims must, by a strange fatality, be always acquiesced in and practically enforced? Is there in truth any physical or moral law of nature to be found, sternly forbidding the union of labor, capital, and knowledge? by which the. laborer would not only be rendered of more importance than the clod he treads upon, but would be rendered as much superior in worth and happiness to the present idle capitalist, as he now esteems himself superior to the wretched laborer of civilized life? To solve these questions, let us first see what the competitive school of political economy professes to do towards increasing the remuneration of the laborer. We shall find as many sects in the schools of political economy as in the schools of religion, each of them relying on his peculiar doctrine as the exclusive mean of salvation for the operative, or industrious, classes. The most important of these schools are perhaps the following. The partizans of...
