3. A third motive, with many persons, for postponing matrimony, is the desire of first accumulating sufficient wealth to enable them to maintain a domestic establishment of such elegance and cost as will bring them within the caste or circle distinguished by wealth and display. But if the system proposed were carried into effect, it would produce such a comparative equality in men’s conditions, that there would be no rank or caste founded on such distinctions; and thus this motive to the postponement of marriage would be removed.
Thus the various motives, of a pecuniary nature, which now operate to dissuade or deter men from early matrimony, would be, in a great measure, removed by the system proposed; and the morals of society would be very greatly purified by the change.
Under the present system, we see society agitated by the efforts of individuals, associations, and of society as large, to check the several crimes, frauds, and vices, that have now been enumerated, and that seem sometimes to threaten all human virtue. Legislatures, courts, prisons, churches, schools, and moral associations of all sorts, are sustained at an immense cost of time, labor, talent, and money. Yet they only mitigate, they do not cure the disease. And like all other efforts to cure diseases, without removing the cause, they must always be inadequate to the end in view. The causes of vico, fraud, and crime, to wit, excessive wealth and excessive poverty, must be removed, before society can be greatly changed. Just in proportion, or very nearly in proportion, as these causes are removed, will the ignorance, the vices, the frauds, and the crimes of all sorts naturally resulting from them, disappear.
Intellectual Results. The intellectual advancement of society would be immensely promoted by the adoption of the system proposed. To be convinced of this, we have only to consider the following facts:
1. The mental independence of each individual would be greatly promoted by his pecuniary independence. Freedom of thought, and the free utterance of thought, are, to a great degree, suppressed, on the part of a large portion of the poor in all countries, by their dependence upon the will and favor of others, for that employment by which they must obtain their daily bread. They dare not investigate, or if they investigate, dare not freely avow and advocate those moral, social, religious, political, and economical truths, which alone can rescue them from their degradation, lest they should thereby sacrifice their bread by stirring the jealousy of those on whom they are dependent, and who derive their power, wealth, and consequence from the ignorance and servitude of the poor.
2. The mass of the poor in all countries have but little leisure, or means, or opportunity for intellectual cultivation. Wherever capital is in the hands of the few, the competition for employment among laborers becomes so great as to reduce the price of labor to a sum that will give the laborer but a mean and wretched subsistence in return for the severest toil of which his body is capable. Under these circumstances, intellectual culture, to any considerable extent, becomes an impossibility. Even the desire of it is in a great measure crushed, and but feebly animates the breast of the mass of them. Their thoughts are confined, by the pressure of their physical necessities, almost wholly to the questions of what they shall eat, and how they shall live.
When it is considered how large a portion of the human race have in all ages been thus condemned, by extreme poverty, to an almost brutish and merely animal existence; that their minds were, nevertheless, naturally susceptible of the same cultivation and development as those other minds that have been cultivated and developed; that they needed, for their growth, but such an opportunity as all might have enjoyed, if each man could have controlled his own labor, and possessed its fruits; that their intellects, thus enlightened, would have contributed their share, equally with others, to the general progress of knowledge; that among them must have been a due proportion of superior minds, capable of becoming discoverers in science, inventors in the arts, and teachers in morals, religion, and law; when we consider these facts, we cannot entirely shut out the idea, although we can form no adequate idea, of what the world might now have been, if so large a portion of its intellectual light had not been thus needlessly and wickedly extinguished.
3. The system proposed would speedily result in the universal education of children. The universal education of children can, in the nature of things, never be accomplished except through the universal ability of parents to provide the means of educating their own children respectively. In some small portions of the most civilized parts of the world, educational systems have been established, which give knowledge to the children of the poor, at the public expense. Yet under these systems children are but partially and poorly educated, in comparison with what they would be, if all parents were able to meet the necessary expenses of educating their own children. These systems too, defective and inadequate as they are, prevail in but small districts of the world; and if extended at all, can be extended but slowly. Moreover they are but the unnatural and forced productions of an unnatural state of society, consequent on the unnatural distribution of wealth. They merely constitute one of the remedies, by which government attempts to mitigate the evils of its own injustice, to wit, the evils of that monopolizing legislation, by which they keep capital in the hands of the few; deprive the many of their right to labor independently for themselves; rob them of the fruits of their labor; and thus render it impossible for them to educate their children. Such being the character of public systems of education, their perpetuity cannot be relied on; nor can it even be advocated, except on the supposition that a large, or at least somewhat considerable, portion of the people are always to remain too poor to educate their own offspring. And if they cannot be relied on as permanent institutions where they already exist, still less can they be looked to as the means by which the world at large is over to be universally educated. The universal education of children can, in the nature of things, never come from any other source than the universal ability of parents to provide for their education. And this universal ability of parents can come from no other sources than their liberty to labor; their liberty to borrow capital on which to labor; and their liberty thus to secure to themselves all the legitimate fruits of their labor.
4. The intellect of society would be much better directed, under the system proposed, than under any that has ever existed. It would be directed more to the service and improvement of man, as man; and less to the aggrandizement of one portion of mankind, at the expense of the other portions, than it is, or ever has been under systems where wealth and power are distributed by arbitrary, instead of natural and equal laws. This system would present no such great prizes, either of wealth or power, as are presented by existing systems, to tempt the avarice and ambition of those stronger minds, that have great capacities for both good and evil, and that generally follow good or evil according to the respective influences of each upon their own elevation. The system proposed would bring such men down very nearly to the same social, political, and pecuniary level with the mass of men; and place entirely beyond their reach and their hopes those great fortunes, and that great political power, which can now be obtained, and which can only be obtained, by means of those arbitrary political arrangements that produce a corresponding poverty and subjection on the part of the masses.
So long as society, or its institutions, offer a few great prizes, either of wealth or power, for the acquisition of any one, so long many of the more powerful minds