Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital [7]
whose operations are completed within the period of two successive harvests, how much more evident must this truth be of those operations which are not completed within a year? All the labourers engaged in them have to rely on the baker, miller, butcher, etc., completing their part of the social task; and they must rely on the farmer, and that he will till his ground, and sow it, and reap the harvest of the following year. Mr Mill says and says justly, "what is annually produced is annually consumed." So that, in fact, to enable men to carry on all those operations which extend beyond a year there cannot be any stock of commodities stored up. Those who undertake them must rely, therefore, not on any commodities already created, but that other men will labour and produce what they are to subsist on till their own products are completed. Thus should the labourer admit that some accumulation of circulating capital is necessary for operations terminated within the year -- and I have show how very limited that admission ought to be, if made at all -- it is plain that in all operations which extend beyond a year the labourer does not, and he cannot, rely on accumulated capital. The operations not terminated within the year are neither few nor unimportant. The time necessary to acquire a knowledge of any species of skilled labour, so as to practise it to advantage, which includes almost every art, whether it create wealth or merely contribute to amusement -- the time necessary to perform all distant voyages, and construct most of the canals, roads, harbours, docks, large steam-engines and ships, all of which are afterward to be such powerful instruments in the hands of the labourer, is considerably more than a year, and is, in many cases, several years. All those who set about such undertakings have a practical conviction, though it is seldom expressed, that while they are teaching the rising generation skilled labour, and instructing their children in the useful arts, while they are making canals, roads, docks, ships, steam-engines, etc., that the farmer will continue to grow corn and the miller to grind it, that the baker will make it into bread, the grazier will fatten his cattle and the butcher slaughter them as they are needed, that the cotton and woollen manufacturers will go on preparing cloth and the tailor be always ready to make it up for them into clothes whenever it is ordered. Beyond this conviction they have nothing; they possess no stock of circulating capital themselves, nor do the persons who are afterwards to supply food and clothing during the whole time such undertakings are in progress possess any such stock at the moment when they are commenced. Of all the important operations which require more than a year to complete them -- and that they all are important, as far as the production of wealth is concerned, does not require to be asserted -- by far the most important is the rearing of youth and teaching them skilled labour, or some wealth-creating art. I am particularly desirous of directing the reader's attention to this productive operation, because, if the observations I have already made be correct, all the effects usually attributed to accumulation of circulating capital are derived from the accumulation and storing up of skilled labour; and because this most important operation is performed, as far as the great mass of the labourers is concerned, without any circulating capital whatever. The labour of the parents produces and purchases, with what they receive as wages, all the food and the clothing which the rising generation of labourers use while they are learning those arts by means of which they will hereafter produce all the wealth of society. For the rearing and educating all future labourers (of course I do not mean book education, which is the smallest and least useful part of all which they have to learn) their parents have no stock stored up beyond their own practical skill. Under the strong influence of natural affection and parental love, they prepare by their toils, continued day