DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.22140#0090
74
INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL HISTORY.
continuity was essential to the well-being of society, as, for
example, some years since of the gas stokers in London, was treated
as an offence.
Of course if a government deliberately permits or creates a
monopoly in any necessary article, it enables—nay stimulates—
the producer to create an artificial price. Such is the case with
the English land system, which, in towns at least, asfords an
artificial price to the owner of extensive areas, by creating what
is virtually, to use commercial slang, a land ring. I do not asfirm
that the particulars of our land system which produce this result
were designed to bring it about. It is susficient that they do, and
that they are directly responsible for some of the worst conditions,,
at any rate in past time, which have affected the housing of the
poor in large towns. Nor is it just that unoccupied houses and
areas should be exempt from local charges. The State is under
no obligation to assist such owners in finding tenants at artificial
rents, as it virtually does by excusing them from their liabilities
during the period of non-user.
Protection to producers, always to certain producers, for if it
were extended all round it would assuredly defeat itself, is again
one of the means by which prices are artificially heightened. No
one should be forced to sell at the optional price of a purchaser,
for it is clear that such a rule would be spoliation, and a fatal
discouragement to industry. But by parity of reason, nobody
should be forced to buy at the optional price of the vendor, for
such a practice is just as much spoliation, nay, impudent plunder,
and that of the most feeble and helpless. And so it has come to
pass, and that quite naturally, that in the United States, where
protection is maintained by terrorism where possible, and by the
most barefaced falsehoods where it is not, the protected capitalist
detects in all combinations of workmen in all discontent at wages,
a danger to his monopoly, which he must remorselessly persecute.
I know few things in the modern history of labour and capital
more startling than the machinery employed to terrorize workmen
among the ironmasters of Pennsylvania, and recorded in the
published documents of that state.
But scarcity interpreted by dealers or speculators, advantages
permitted by governments, and protective laws forced on com-
INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL HISTORY.
continuity was essential to the well-being of society, as, for
example, some years since of the gas stokers in London, was treated
as an offence.
Of course if a government deliberately permits or creates a
monopoly in any necessary article, it enables—nay stimulates—
the producer to create an artificial price. Such is the case with
the English land system, which, in towns at least, asfords an
artificial price to the owner of extensive areas, by creating what
is virtually, to use commercial slang, a land ring. I do not asfirm
that the particulars of our land system which produce this result
were designed to bring it about. It is susficient that they do, and
that they are directly responsible for some of the worst conditions,,
at any rate in past time, which have affected the housing of the
poor in large towns. Nor is it just that unoccupied houses and
areas should be exempt from local charges. The State is under
no obligation to assist such owners in finding tenants at artificial
rents, as it virtually does by excusing them from their liabilities
during the period of non-user.
Protection to producers, always to certain producers, for if it
were extended all round it would assuredly defeat itself, is again
one of the means by which prices are artificially heightened. No
one should be forced to sell at the optional price of a purchaser,
for it is clear that such a rule would be spoliation, and a fatal
discouragement to industry. But by parity of reason, nobody
should be forced to buy at the optional price of the vendor, for
such a practice is just as much spoliation, nay, impudent plunder,
and that of the most feeble and helpless. And so it has come to
pass, and that quite naturally, that in the United States, where
protection is maintained by terrorism where possible, and by the
most barefaced falsehoods where it is not, the protected capitalist
detects in all combinations of workmen in all discontent at wages,
a danger to his monopoly, which he must remorselessly persecute.
I know few things in the modern history of labour and capital
more startling than the machinery employed to terrorize workmen
among the ironmasters of Pennsylvania, and recorded in the
published documents of that state.
But scarcity interpreted by dealers or speculators, advantages
permitted by governments, and protective laws forced on com-