Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital [5]
or clothing. He pays the labourer his money wages, and the expectation which other labourers have of receiving part of these wages or other wages, induces them in the meantime to prepare the clothing and food the labourer constantly requires. Not to deal, however, in general terms and abstractions, doing which seems to have led other writers astray, let us descend to particulars. A great cotton manufacturer, we suppose, for example, a Sir Robert Peel, or any other of those leviathans who are so anxious to retain their power over us, and who, as legislators, either in their own persons or in the persons of their sons, make the laws which both calumniate and oppress us, employs a thousand persons, whom he pays weekly: does he possess the food and clothing ready prepared which these persons purchase and consume daily? Does he even know whether the food and clothing they receive are prepared and created? In fact, are the food and clothing which his labourers will consume prepared beforehand, or are other labourers busily employed in preparing food and clothing while his labourers are making cotton yarn? Do all the capitalists of Europe possess at this moment one week's food and clothing for all the labourers they employ? Let us first examine the question as to food. One portion of the food of the people is BREAD, which is never prepared till within a few hours of the time when it is eaten. The corn of which the bread is made must, of course, have been grown, or one part of the whole operation, and that the longest part -- that between saving the seed and harvesting the ripe grain, which is necessary to the complete preparation of the food, has been performed; but the corn has afterward to be thrashed, ground, sifted, brought to market and made into bread. For the cotton-spinner to be able to attend only to his peculiar species of industry, it is indispensable that other men should be constantly engaged in completing this complicated process, every part of it being as necessary as the part performed by the agriculturist. The produce of several of the labourers particularly of the baker, cannot be stored up. In no case can the material of bread, whether it exist as corn or flour, be preserved without continual labour. The employer of the working cotton-spinner can have no bread stored up, for there is none prepared; the labouring cotton-spinner himself knows nothing of any stock of corn being in existence from which his bread can be made; he knows that he has always been able to get bread when he had wherewithal to buy it, and further he does not require to know. But even if he did know of such a stock, he would probably give up cotton-spinning and take to preparing food, if he did not also know that while he is making cotton other labourers will till the ground, and prepare him food, which he will be able to procure by making cotton. His conviction that he will obtain bread when he requires it, and his master's conviction that the money he pays will enable him to obtain it, arise simply from the fact that the bread has always been obtained when required. Another article of the labourer's food is milk, and milk is manufactured, not to speak irreverently of the operations of nature, twice a day. If it be said that the cattle to supply it are already there -- why, the answer is, they require constant attention and constant labour, and their food, through the greater part of the year, is of daily growth. The fields in which they pasture require the hand of man; and, though some herds be drilled into the habits of obedience more perfect and certainly more pleasing to see than the obedience of soldiers, yet even they require perpetual attention, and their milk must be drawn from them twice a day. The meat, also, which the labourer eats is not ready, even for cooking, till it is on the shambles, and it cannot be stored up, for it begins instantly to deteriorate after it is brought to market. The cattle which are to be slaughtered require the same sort of care and attention as cows; and not one particle of meat could the