Our wives will be
forced to sit up night and day to help us--our children must labour from
the cradle without chance of going to school, hardly of breathing the
fresh air of heaven,--our boys, as they grow up, must turn beggars or
paupers--our daughters, as thousands do, must eke out their miserable
earnings by prostitution. And after all, a whole family will not gain what
one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed. You know there will be no
hope for us. There is no use appealing to government or parliament. I don't
want to talk politics here. I shall keep them for another place. But you
can recollect as well as I can, when a deputation of us went up to a
member of parliament--one that was reputed a philosopher, and a political
economist, and a liberal--and set before him the ever-increasing penury
and misery of our trade, and of those connected with it; you recollect his
answer--that, however glad he would be to help us, it was impossible--he
could not alter the laws of nature--that wages were regulated by the amount
of competition among the men themselves, and that it was no business of
government, or any one else, to interfere in contracts between the employer
and employed, that those things regulated themselves by the laws of
political economy, which it was madness and suicide to oppose.
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