(From the " Northern Star," Jan. 26.)
Ought those who lend money, to take into consideration the purposes it is to be used for; or merely satisfy themselves as to the rate of interest and the security? Such is, in effect, the question at issue between Mr. Cobden and the Peace Society on the one side, and the Times and the moneymongers on the other.
According to the latter, morality has nothing more to do with money-dealing than with any other branch of commerce, in which it is well known, that to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, is the governing principle. Practically, in many cases, this celebrated maxim resolves itself into downright robbery, and the grossest injustice and oppression. It is essentially immoral. The only moral and just foundation on which commerce can be based, is to give equal value for equal value, as measured by the labour bestowed upon the commodities respectively exchanged. The adoption of the opposite principle has demoralised commerce to its very core. It is systematised fraud— organised swindling upon a large scale. In order to conduct commercial transactions with any other chance of success, a man must forget all the moral precepts instilled into his mind in boyhood — all the instinctive truthfulness and frankness which is constitutional in youth. Falsehood, trick, deception, and equivoque are all "fair in trade." Your "clever man of business," means that, in his particular occupation he is undisturbed by any consciousness of abstract right and wrong. His sole business — his "whole duty of man" — commercially speaking, is to make as large a profit as he can. So long as he does not very glaringly violate the recognised conventional mercantile code in doing this, he is an "honourable man." But he may be so in "City" parlance, while he has in spirit broken every article of the Decalogue. This is the certain and the inevitable demoralising effect of our present commercial system. It creates an artificial conscience, and conventional code of morals, opposed to the genuine conscience of each individual, and the collective moral interests of mankind. Under the influence of this perverted moral feeling, men put evil for good, and call black, white. They are in their own professions and particuliar vocation, afflicted with moral strabismus ; they are unable to look straightforward, or to see objects in their real proportions and relative bearings. As individuals they may be, by constitution and habit, possessed of many excellent natural and acquired qualities — kind husbands, fathers and relatives; warm friends, and generous supporters of public charities, or measures intended to promote the public good. Nay, they may even have a very clear perception of the wrong and the injustice which the practical application of the essential principle of commerce produces, in cases outside of their own walk ; while they are totally unconscious that their own dealings are regulated and controlled by the self-same principle.
Mr. Cobden and his friends do not look upon commerce in this light. On the contrary, they regard it as the great agent of expanding civilisation — the prime element of social progress, and the motive-power of all industrial and natural improvement. Free, unfettered, unlimited competition, appears to them the very highest stage of societarian perfection. They hold the doctrine propounded by the Political Economists — that when every man is doing the best he can for himself, he is necessarily engaged in doing the best he can for society also. That doctrine — like many others propounded by the same school — is a shallow sophism. The merest touch of sound argument refutes it. The every-day experience of mankind demonstrates its practical falsehood. But it has that showy, specious aspect of truthfulness which characterises most of the generalisms emanating from the same quarter, and which have so successfully deluded those who assume the task of regulating national affairs. The opposition of these parties to Austrian and to Russian Loans, proves the hollowness and defectiveness of their economical philosophy. If individual action, and unregulated competition, in the buying and selling of all commodities, be, in very deed, the true gospel on this important subject, why do they interfere with the money dealer, who merely carries the commodity in which he deals to the best market ? The Times, we confess, has Mr. Cobden and his party on the horns of a dilemma from which, with their views, they cannot escape. It asserts— and in a mercantile sense, truly — that "money is as much a marketable article as muskets, or calico, or broad cloths ;" and it asks, "Why the money merchant should not take five per cent. when he can get it, in one market, instead of two and a half per cent., or three, in another ? What is there worse in the Lombard-street capitalist's lending Austria or Russia nine or ten millions of money to put down constitutional freedom in Hungary, than in the manufacturers of Birmingham sending muskets and swords to arm — the Manchester and Yorkshire manufacturers calicoes and woollens to clothe — the soldiers engaged in doing so ? Are not the one as clearly accessory — as decidedly aiders and abettors of the oppression — the tyranny, bloodshed, and misery, as the other ? If you interfere with one, on any presumed ground of public utility, where will you stop ? How is the line to be drawn, and by whom ?"
We repeat, these arguments and queries are perfectly valid, as addressed to the advocates of our present commercial system of unlimited competition, on the principle that all commodities must be sold in the dearest market, and bought in the cheapest, under the general regulating influence of the law of supply and demand. They place Mr. Cobden and his friends in a difficulty from which they do not extricate themselves successfully, because they dare not, unreservedly and fully, adopt the only principle upon which opposition to such loans can be maintained. They attempt to creep out of the difficulty by saying that money is a different commodity from other commodities ; and that, if the dealers in it do not lend it to despotic and brutal Governments, they will not be able to buy muskets and swords, clothing and provisions, for the armies employed to do their butchery. That is true, but it does not meet the commercial argument. It shifts the question on to the moral ground ; but only does so by implication. It begs the very point at issue. Ought the money dealer, as a money dealer, to know or care anything whatever about the purposes to which his money is to be applied ? As a mere merchant in money, and acting upon commercial principles, are not the amount of interest offered, and the security for its payment, all he has to consider in the matter ?
No, no ; in dealing with this very important question, it is necessary to meet it frankly and fairly, and that cannot be done without first giving up the principle which the Times says it has learned at the feet of the Gamaliel of Free Trade. It must at the very outset be laid down as a cardinal position, that mere money profit must in all cases be subordinate to the moral and social well-being of the community. Otherwise, indeed, we have a world without a soul of goodness, or a conscience in it. Nations, no longer held together by the conviction of a supreme moral law, will become a mere aggregation of selfish and hostile atoms, in which present profit and good cash payment, irrespective of general consequences, would be the sole rule. Already we have too much of this — men holding high positions in society, who go to church duly, and consider themselves very good Christians, hardened and perverted by the demoniacal logic of the markets and exchange, see no harm whatever in supplying the means for perpetrating the most wicked outrages against the laws of God and man. It needs but an Imperial hand stretched out for their money, with a promise of five per cent., to induce them to place in it the means of paying the perpetrators of the bloodiest butcheries — the actors in the most infamous of treasons. Professing to be proud of the liberties which our own ancestors have won and bequeathed to us, they are ready to supply two Royal tyrants with money for the special purpose of maintaining the deadliest and cruellest of despotism ? What is Hungary to them, or they to Hungary, that they should feel for her ? Are not the law and the Gospel — duty to God and love to man — all comprised in five per cent ?
But Mr. Cobden and the Peace Society do not unreservedly take the high ground to which we have alluded. They glance at it, and they appeal to the passions ; but they leave the judgment unsatisfied, so far as the abstract question is concerned. While we say this, however, we are ready to admit that we believe they are preparing the way for the recognition of higher moral principles in the government of the world.
For the second time, the justice and policy of lending British money to foreign despots, for the direct and special purpose of enabling them to crush their subjects into the lowest depths of political and mental slavery, has been publicly arraigned in the very heart of the world's metropolis. In the first instance, the denunciation of the iniquity succeeded to a great extent. The Austrian Loan was withdrawn from this country — the small capitalists, who ultimately invest on such securities, got frightened, and would not touch it. Mr. Cobden asserts that, for once, the great loan contractors have been bitten. It has been mainly left in their own hands, and, up to this time, they have suffered a loss upon it to the extent of £145,000 — the precursor of many losses to come.
This is doing a good work for the present time, and laying the foundation for better in future. Its effects, indeed, are perceptible in the fact, that the Emperor of Russia was compelled to coin a lie, in order to give a colourable excuse to the money lenders in this country, to let him have the five millions and a half he asked for. He did not want the money to pay the cost of his execrable and infamous interference in Hungary. Not he. It was to complete the Railway from Petersburgh to Moscow. Mr. Cobden demolished that flimsy falsehood so effectually that even the Times, with its unparalleled audacity of assertion, has never had the hardihood to repeat it. Neither has it dared to question the now proved pecuniary weakness of the Autocrat. Mr. Cobden has destroyed the delusion on that point for ever. Not all the efforts of all the scribes employed by Nicholas, can ever restore the belief that formerly existed as to the greatness of his riches and his power.
Six months ago, he was denounced in the London Tavern as a bankrupt ; who so far from being able to lend his brother Emperor two millions — the Pope half a million, or the Grand Duke of Tuscany another half million — as he boasted he would — was not able to pay his own current expenses. He has now demonstrated the truth of that statement. Instead of lending to others, he comes a-borrowing himself, and comes, too, with a lie on his tongue uniting falsehood with mendicancy, of the approved fashion of the regular street beggar.
But the bait, it appears, was to strong in this instance to be resisted. Nicholas has provided an excuse for them, and offered five per cent, at a time when two and a half or three was the utmost that could be got at home. The money mongers, therefore, eagerly wished to take up the loan, and before Mr. Cobden's meeting, the Times boasted that it was all disposed of. The Times, that so powerfully and so long, denounced the withdrawing of money from current purposes for railways in our own country, where every pound went to set somebody at work, in the agricultural and manufacturing districts — was quite delighted at the abstraction of five and a half millions, ostensibly for a Russian railroad. Why ? Because it is the organ of the moneymongers, and anything that will bring grist to their mill, will always have its support. It we were at war with Russia — and it is almost the only great power from whom war is to be expected — the moneymongers and the Times would rather aid Russia than our own Government, if Russia offered the largest interest. Say that Sir Charles Wood offered five per cent., and Nicholas five and one-eighth, the one-eighth extra would secure him the money, though the moneymongers knew that it was to be employed in shooting Englishmen, and battering English men-of-war to pieces.
All war loans are unjust and immoral in themselves. They lay heavy burdens upon present generations, and upon posterity, for which there is no compensation whatever. They spread bloodshed, sorrow, and destruction, while actually employed, and they leave to the future a heritage of revenge and discontent. We hope that those who have subscribed to the Russian loan for putting down Hungarian independence will reap the consequences by the heavy loss of both interest and principal.
They have been fairly warned of the great iniquity they were abetting — and, as Lord Byron says : —
Methinks I hear a little bird who sings,
The people bye-and-bye will be the stronger.
When they become so — they will not be bound to observe contracts, the very essence of which was fraud, spoliation, cruelty and oppression.
People's Advocate and New South Wales Vindicator (Sydney, NSW : 1848-1856), Saturday 29 June 1850, page 10
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