In a former article it has been seen how Mr. Thornton, in the first chapter of his First Book, disproved, on grounds of pure political economy, the supposed natural law by which, in the opinion of many, the price of labour is as strictly determined as the motion of the earth, and determined in a manner unalterable by the will or effort of either party to the transaction.
But whatever in the affairs of mankind is not peremptorily decided for them by natural laws, falls under the jurisdiction of the moral law. Since there is a certain range, wider than has been generally believed, within which the price of labour is decided by a conflict of wills between employers and labourers, it is necessary, as in every other case of human voluntary action, to ascertain the moral principles by which this conflict ought to be regulated. The terms of the bargain not being a matter of necessity, but, within certain limits, of choice, it has to be considered how far either side can rightfully press its claims, and take advantage of its opportunities. Or, to express the same ideas in other phraseology, it has to be decided whether there are any rights, of labour on the one hand, or of capital on the other, which would be violated if the opposite party pushed its pretensions to the extreme limits of economic possibility.
To this Mr. Thornton answers, -- None. As a matter of mere right, both the employer and the labourer, while they abstain from force or fraud, are entitled to all that they can get, and to nothing more than what they can get. The terms of their contract, provided it is voluntary on both sides, are the sole rule of justice between them. No one being under any obligation of justice to employ labour at all, still less is any one bound in justice to pay for it any given price.
Except under the terms of some mutual agreement, the employer is not bound to give anything. Before joining in the agreement he was under no obligation to furnish the labourer with occupation. Either he might not have required his or any one else's services, or he might have preferred to employ some one else. But if he was not bound to furnish employment at all, a fortiori he was not bound to furnish it on any particular terms. If, therefore, he did consent to furnish it, he had a right to dictate his own terms; and whatever else those terms might be, however harsh, illiberal, exorbitant, or what you will, they could not, at any rate or by any possibility, be unjust. For they could only be unjust in so far as they deviated from some particular terms which justice might have exacted. But, as we have seen, there were no such terms, and it is manifestly absurd to condemn a thing merely because its limits do not coincide with those of an abstraction incapable of being realised or defined, incapable, that is to say, of having any limits at all. (Thornton, p. 111.)
The counter-theory, on which the labourer's side of the question is usually argued, "that every man who has not by crime forfeited the right, and who has no other means of living, has a right to live by labour," Mr. Thornton entirely rejects.
Although [he says] these pages have little other object than that of determining how the labouring classes may most easily and effectually obtain fully as much as they ever dreamt of asking, the writer is constrained, even in the interest of those classes, to protest against the theory set up in their behalf. No cause can be permanently maintained that is suffered to rest on fallacies; and one pervading fallacy, beginning at the very first link, runs through the whole chain of reasoning of which the theory consists.
