pansion of the growing capital, and even by doing so must eternize their dependent relation on their own product, as personified in the capitalists. In reference to this relation of dependence, Sir F. M. Eden in his “The State of the Poor, an History of the Labouring Classes in England,” says “the natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully adequate to our subsistence; we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but in consequence of some previous labour. A portion at least of the society must be indefatigably employed.… There are others who, though they ‘neither toil nor spin,’ can yet command the produce of industry, but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilisation and order.… They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions,[1] which have recognised that individuals may acquire property by various other means besides the exertion of labour.… Persons of independent fortune … owe their superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but almost entirely … to the industry of others. It is not the possession of land, or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the community.… This [scheme approved by Eden] would give the people of property sufficient (but by no means too much) influence and authority over those who … work for them; and it would place such labourers, not in an abject or servile condition, but in such a state of easy and liberal dependence as all who know human nature, and its history, will allow to be necessary for their own comfort.”[2] Sir F. M. Eden, it may be remarked in passing, is the only disciple of Adam Smith during the eighteenth century that produced any work of importance.[3]
- ↑ Eden should have asked, whose creatures then are “the civil institutions?” From his standpoint of juridical illusion, he does not regard the law as a product of the material relations of production, but conversely the relations of production as products of the law. Linguet overthrew Montesquieu’s illusory “Esprit des lois” with one word; “L’esprit des lois, c’est la propriété.”
- ↑ Eden l. c., Vol. I, book I. chapter I. pp. 1, 2, and preface, p. xx.
- ↑ “If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose “Essay on Population” appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due solely to party interest. The French
