By making the labourer
himself capital, the conflict ceases, and the interests become
identical.'
Now, I do not know whether there is any working man here who does not
fully or partly realize the meaning of those extracts. They mean this,
that if a man in this neighbourhood (for they pity us very much in our
benighted condition as regards capital and labour, and they have an
admirable way, from their view, of putting an end to strikes)--they say
that, if a man in this neighbourhood had ten thousand pounds sterling in
a cotton or woollen factory, and he employed a hundred men, women, and
children, that instead of paying them whatever wages had been agreed
upon, allowing them to go to the other side of the town, and work where
they liked, or to move to another county, or to emigrate to America, or
to have any kind of will or wish whatever with regard to their own
disposal, that they should be to him capital, just the same as the
horses are in his stable; that he should sell the husband South,--
'South' in America means something very dreadful to the negro,--that
they should sell the wife if they liked, that they should sell the
children, that, in point of fact, they should do whatsoever they liked
with them, and that, if any one of them resisted any punishment which
the master chose to inflict, the master should be held justified if he
beat his slave to death; and that not one of those men should have the
power to give evidence in any court of justice, in any case, against a
white man, however much he might have suffered from that white man.
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