Читать книгу Knowledge Is Power - Charles Knight - Страница 8

What boat is this which creeps so lazily Up the still stream? How quietly falls the drip Of the slow paddle! Now it shoots along, As if that lone man fear'd us. Well I ken His rough and dangerous trade. He knows each hole Where the quick-sighted eel delights to swim When clouds obscure the moon; and there he lays His traps and gins, and then he sleeps awhile; But rouses up before the prying dawn Betrays his course; and out he cautiously glides To try his doubtful luck. Perchance he finds Stores that may buy him bread; but oft'ner still His toil is fruitless, and deject he comes Home to his emberless hearth, and sits him down, Idle and starving through the busy day.

Mungo Park describes the wretched condition of the inhabitants of countries in Africa where small particles of gold are found in the rivers. Their lives were spent in hunting for the gold to exchange for useful commodities, instead of raising the commodities themselves; and they were consequently poor and miserable, listless and unsteady. Their fitful industry had too much of chance mixed up with it to afford a certain and general profit. The accounts which of late years we have received from the gold-diggings of California and Australia exhibit the same suffering from the same cause. The natives of Cape de la Hogue, in Normandy, were the most wretched and ferocious people in all France, because they depended principally for support on the wrecks that were frequent on their coasts. When there were no tempests, they made an easy transition from the character of wreckers to that of robbers. A benefactor of his species taught these unhappy people to collect a marine plant to make potash. They immediately became profitable labourers and exchangers; they obtained a property in the general intelligence of civilized life; the capital of society raised them from misery to wealth, from being destroyers to being producers.

The Indians, as we thus see, were poor and wretched, because they had no appropriation beyond articles of domestic use; because they had no property in land, and consequently no cultivation. Yet even they were not insensible to the importance of the principle, for the preservation of the few advantages that belonged to their course of life. Tanner says, "I have often known a hunter leave his traps for many days in the woods, without visiting them, or feeling any anxiety about their safety." The Indians even carried the principle of appropriation almost to a division of land; for each tribe, and sometimes each individual, had an allotted hunting-ground—imperfectly appropriated, indeed, by the first comer, and often contested with violence by other hunters, but still showing that they approached the limit which divides the savage from the civilized state, and that, if cultivation were introduced amongst them, there would be a division of land, as a matter of necessity. The security of individual property is the foundation of all social improvement. It is impossible to speak of the productive power of labour in the civilized state, without viewing it in connexion with that great principle of society which considers all capital as appropriated.

When 'Capital and Labour' was written twenty years ago, the Indian tribes who were abiding in the territory of the United States were principally in the condition which has been described by Tanner. The want of resources in the country of the Indians was so manifest, that, when commissioners from the government of the United States, in 1802, gathered together the chiefs of the various tribes of the Creek Indians in their own country, to propose to them a plan for their civilization, it became necessary to provide for the support of the people so assembled by conveying food into the forests from the stores of the American towns. The Indians have now vanished from their old hunting-grounds. Where they so recently maintained a precarious existence, there are populous cities, navigable rivers, roads, railways. The clink of the hammer is heard in the forge, and the rush of the stream from the mill-dam tells of agriculture and commerce. But even the Indians themselves have become labourers. They have been removed to a large tract of country, far away from the settled parts of the United States, and have been raised into the dignity of cultivators. The Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Choctaws, with many smaller tribes, now breed cattle instead of hunting martens. They have houses in the place of huts; they have schools and churches. Instead of being extirpated by famine or the sword, they have been adopted into the great family of civilized man.

Penn's Treaty with the Indians.

But this wise and humane arrangement of the United States has not wholly removed the Indians from the wide regions of North America. In the Hudson's Bay territories the life which Tanner described still goes forward. The wants of civilized society—the desire to possess the earth—have transported the Indians from the banks of the Ohio to the lands watered by the Arkansas. The opposite principle has retained them on the shores of Hudson's Bay. They are wanted there as hunters, and are not encouraged as cultivators. They are kept out of the pale of civilization, and not received within it. The rude industry of the Hudson's Bay Indians is stimulated by the luxury of Europe into an employ which would cease to exist if the people became civilized. If agriculture were introduced amongst them—if they were to grow corn and keep domestic animals—they would cease to be hunters of foxes and martens, because their wants would be much better supplied by other modes of labour, involving less suffering and less uncertainty. As it is, the traders, who want skins, do not think of giving the Indians tools to work the ground, and seeds to put in it, and cows and sheep to breed other cows and sheep. They avail themselves of the uncivilized state of these poor tribes, to render them the principal agents in the manufacture of fur, to supply the luxuries of another hemisphere. But still the exchange which the hunters carry on with the European traders, imperfect as it is in all cases, and unjust as it is in many, is better for the Indians than no exchange; although we fear that ardent spirits take away from the Indians the greater number of the advantages which would otherwise remain with them as exchangers. If the Indians had no skins to give to Europe, Europe would have no blankets and ammunition to give to them. They would obtain their food and clothing by the use of the bow alone. They would live entirely from hand to mouth. They would have no motive for accumulation, because there would be no exchanges; and they would consequently be even poorer and more helpless than they are now as exchangers of skins. They are suffering from the effects of small accumulations and imperfect exchange; but these are far better than no accumulation and no exchange. If the course of their industry were to be changed by perfect appropriation—if they were consequently to become cultivators and manufacturers, instead of wanderers in the woods to hunt for wild and noxious animals—they would, in the course of years, have abundance of profitable labour, because they would have abundance of capital. This is the better lot of the tribes with whom the government of the United States has made a far nobler treaty than Penn made with his Indians. As it is, their accumulations are so small, that they cannot proceed with their own uncertain labour of hunting without an advance of capital on the part of the traders; and thus, even[Pg 33]

[Pg 34]in the rude tradings of these poor Indians, credit, that complicated instrument of commercial exchange, operates upon the direction of their labour. Of course credit would not exist at all without appropriation. Their rights of property are perfect as far as they go; but they are not carried far enough to direct their labour into channels which would ensure sufficient production for the labourers. Their labour is unproductive because they have small accumulations;—their accumulations are small because they have imperfect exchange;—their exchange is imperfect because they have limited appropriation. We may illustrate this state of imperfect production by another passage from Tanner's story:—

"The Hudson's Bay Company had now no post in that part of the country, and the Indians were soon made conscious of the advantage which had formerly resulted to them from the competition between rival trading companies. Mr. Wells, at the commencement of winter, called us all together, gave the Indians a ten-gallon keg of rum and some tobacco, telling them at the same time he would not credit one of them the value of a single needle. When they brought skins he would buy them, and give in exchange such articles as were necessary for their comfort and subsistence during the winter. I was not with the Indians when this talk was held. When it was reported to me, and a share of the presents offered me, I not only refused to accept anything, but reproached the Indians for their pusillanimity in submitting to such terms. They had been accustomed for many years to receive credits in the fall; they were now entirely destitute not of clothing merely, but of ammunition, and many of them of guns and traps. How were they, without the accustomed aid from the traders, to subsist themselves and their families during the ensuing winter? A few days afterwards I went to Mr. Wells, and told him that I was poor, with a large family to support by my own exertions; and that I must unavoidably suffer, and perhaps perish, unless he would give me such a credit as I had always in the fall been accustomed to receive. He would not listen to my representation, and told me roughly to be gone from his house. I then took eight silver beavers, such as are worn by the women as ornaments on their dress, and which I had purchased the year before at just twice the price that was commonly given for a capote;[10] I laid them before him on the table, and asked him to give me a capote for them, or retain them as a pledge for the payment of the price of the garment, as soon as I could procure the peltries.[11] He took up the ornaments, threw them in my face, and told me never to come inside of his house again. The cold weather of the winter had not yet set in, and I went immediately to my hunting-ground, killed a number of moose, and set my wife to make the skins into such garments as were best adapted to the winter season, and which I now saw we should be compelled to substitute for the blankets and woollen clothes we had been accustomed to receive from the traders."

This incident at once shows us that the great blessing of the civilized state is its increase of the powers of production. Here we see the Indians, surrounded on all sides by wild animals whose skins might be made into garments, reduced to the extremity of distress because the traders refused to advance them blankets and other necessaries, to be used during the months when they were employed in catching the animals from which they might obtain the skins. It is easy to see that the Indians were a long way removed from the power of making blankets themselves. Before they could reach this point, their forests must have been converted into pasture-grounds;—they must have raised flocks of sheep, and learnt all the various complicated arts, and possessed all the ingenious machinery, for converting wool into cloth. By their exchange of furs for blankets, they obtained a share in the productiveness of civilization;—they obtained comfortable clothing with much less labour than they could have made it out of the furs. If Tanner had not considered the capote which he desired to obtain from the traders, better, and less costly, than the garment of moose-skins, he would not have carried on any exchange of the two articles with the traders. The skins of martens and foxes were only valuable to the Indians, without exchange, for the purpose of sewing together to make covering. They had a different value in Europe as articles of luxury; and therefore the Indians by exchange obtained a greater plenty of superior clothing than if they had used the skins themselves. But the very nature of the trade, depending upon chance supplies, rendered it impossible that they should accumulate. They had such pressing need of ammunition, traps, and blankets, that the produce of the labour of one hunting season was not more than sufficient to procure the commodities which they required to consume in the same season. But supposing the Indians could have bred foxes and martens and beavers, as we breed rabbits, for the supply of the European demand for fur, doubtless they would have then advanced many steps in the character of producers. The thing is perhaps impossible; but were it possible, and were the Indians to have practised it, they would immediately have become capitalists, to an extent that would have soon rendered them independent of the credit of the traders. They must, however, have previously established a more perfect appropriation. Each must have enclosed his own hunting-ground; and each must have raised some food for the maintenance of his own stock of beavers, foxes, and martens. It would be easier, doubtless, to raise the food for themselves, and ultimately to exchange corn for clothing, instead of furs for clothing. When this happens—and it will happen sooner or later, unless the remnant of the hunting Indians are extirpated by their poverty, which proceeds from their imperfect production—Europe must go without the brilliant variety of skins which we procure at the cost of so much labour, accompanied with so much wretchedness, because the labour is so unproductive to the labourers. When the ladies of London and Paris are compelled to wear boas of rabbits instead of sables, and when the hair of the beaver ceases to be employed in the manufacture of our hats, the wooded regions of Hudson's Bay will have been cleared—the fur-bearing animals will have perished—corn will be growing in the forest and the marsh—the inhabitants will be building houses instead of trapping foxes;—there will be appropriation and capital, profitable labour and comfort. Three hundred thousand mink and marten-skins will no longer be sent from those shores to London in one year; but Liverpool may send to those shores woven cottons and worsteds, pottery and tools, in exchange for products whose cultivation will have exterminated the minks and martens.

Pine-Marten.

[9] The authorized version has old; the more correct translation is fierce.

[10] A sort of great-coat.

[11] Skins.