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A Christmas Carol

© Larry Winn

A carol -- it's a song of joy. But it is also a box or enclosure, from which the word carrel derives. Of course, Charles Dickens knew this when he wrote, tongue-in-cheek, A Christmas Carol. His is a story about the effects of the Enclosures Acts and Bills on 19th century England. Every year at this time, I take in the tale again, each season finding myself more in sympathy with Ebenezer Scrooge.

Enclosure, which I have described at length in First Principles, cheapens labor. It also cheapens life. When human beings are pressed to the breaking point, they make decisions based on a premise that resembles the military concept of triage. The word triage means to pick or to cull. It is the sorting of casualties into three groups: those who can be expected to survive without help, those who will die regardless of treatment, and those who will perish unless given immediate aid. When human beings, some of them at least, think themselves in the last category, they are apt to extinguish even their offspring to preserve their lives or their sanity.

"Within the logic of triage, there is nothing sacred about human life," writes Richard L. Rubenstein in The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Over-crowded World. Mothers trapped by enclosure in England of the last century reacted very much as they do virtually everywhere today, by killing their children.

Remember the rats of Universe 25?

Enclosure is working its destructive magic on American families in this culture just as it did in the culture of 19th century England.

These circumstances echo the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson about Europe in the last century. Of the larger European cities, Jefferson observed in his Notes on Virginia (published around 1782 and rewritten in 1804) that a lack of food and other essentials had brought "a depravity of morals, a dependence and corruption, which renders them an undesirable accession to a country whose morals are sound."

In the England of Charles Dickens, it was common wisdom that industrial machinery was responsible for wrecking English families. The big engines made it possible to employ women and children in occupations that formerly required a man's muscle power, the argument went.

Actually, surplus labor is what cheapened wages to the extent that entire families had to work, the same as it does now. We know because of what happened in England when the jobs went away, even though the engines of industry remained. During the American Civil War, when the United States Navy blockaded southern ports, it not only weakened the Confederacy militarily and economically, but inflicted economic pain on Great Britain by preventing the shipment of cotton to English factories. During the so-called "cotton crisis", a physician sent by the English government to investigate the sanitary condition of the cotton operatives discovered that the crisis had produced several advantages. One of them was that women "now had leisure to give their infants the breast, instead of poisoning them with 'Godfrey's cordial'".

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