The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

CHAPTER X THE TRUE FREEDOM

THE COFFIN OF THE WAGE SYSTEM

Do you know that the wage system is the greatest blot on modern civilisation? Do you realise that any man, knowing the evil thing for what it is, who does not protest is committing a sin against the Holy Ghost? Do you understand that the purchase of labour at commodity value is the degradation of human effort? Do you grasp the plain fact that the purchase of labour as a commodity differs only in degree and not in principle from slavery? In the one case the employer buys the man’s labour; in the other he buys the man’s body. And having bought the body he must maintain it; hence under slavery there are no unemployed. But under the wage system, if the employer has no use for the labour, the man can starve.

Slavery and wagery have this in common: they both corrupt the body politic. Where they exist, the moral law is necessarily at a discount. They both create a debased code of morals. In the days of slavery, it was not unusual for quite nice people to keep a buck nigger and twenty or thirty negro women expressly for breeding purposes. It paid handsomely. In this day of wagery, no

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