Page:The Laboring Classes of England.djvu/152

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146
CONCLUSION.

are elegantly clothed, and sumptuously fed, whilst we are in rags, and struggling against difficulties to support existence. Luxuries and comfort await you in your mansion. A poisonous atmosphere and cheerless poverty await us in our miserable abode. You are a new order, influential from your wealth. We are an old order, who have become beggared and exhausted in giving birth to you. You are the patrons of charity. We are the recipients of it. Contemporaneous with the extension of your magnificent factories, is the establishment of a new system of parochial relief; new modes of punishment, and enlarged conveniences for the reception of felons. Capital may have given the soft pillow to your head, and a flowery path to your footsteps; to us it has made an easy transition from the factory to the prison and the poor-house! The doctrine, "that capital owes no allegiance to the soil," is one of the finest illustrations that ever presented itself to the mind, of the gross principle of selfishness pervading the thoughts, feelings, and visions of the millocracy. Capital has increased beyond the means of profitable employment—it has increased to overflowing; and contemporaneous with this excess is the augmentation of poverty, wretchedness, and crime, in the humble instruments of its creation. Does capital owe no allegiance to those who have produced it? Is it, after having been wrung out of their exertions, to depart to happier climes? Can no portion be spared to alleviate the misery which its production has occasioned? The doctrine, that capital owes no allegiance to the soil, is certainly perfectly new. It never, in any country or at any time, in its most shadowy or indistinct form, suggested itself to the mind. Important truths are generally got at piecemeal. One amount of discovery leads to another, until the truths, whole or in majestic fragments, break upon the understanding. This truth, however, sent no