Political
Economy
CHAPTER II.
INCREASE
AND LIMIT OF EMPLOYMENT.
1. THE great and immediate demand is for the application
of the external remedies; and, till these have done their uttermost, the
feeling is, that the application of the internal is meanwhile uncalled for. So
long, it is imagined, as there are still unevoked any possible resources from
without, it is yet time to think of a restraint from within. It is readily
admitted, that, as cultivation is carried downward through the gradation of
soils, the last which has been entered on does no more, in the existing state
of our agriculture, than barely remunerate the operations of its husbandry- or,
laying capital at present out of the account, than feed the agricultural
labourers and their secondaries. And it is farther granted, that, if the last
possible limit is ever to be reached, the tendency of the population to
increase must either be corrected by the positive, or kept in by the preventive
checks; and that, were the operation of the moral preventive cheek sufficiently
powerful, there might, even in the ultimate state of the worlds
agriculture, be as high, or a more highly-conditioned peasantry, than at any
preceding stage of the worlds history.
But it is not seen, that,
long anterior to this consummation, the moral preventive check may be
imperiously called for, in order to sustain the comfort and circumstances of
the working population. Nevertheless, this moral restraint is desirable now, as
well as then; and that just because the tendency to an increase in the number
of labourers far outstrips the tendency to an increase in the productive powers
of labour. It is quite true, that, by the inventions of machinery, and the
improvements which are ever taking place, both in the methods of agriculture,
and the implements of agricultural labour, the poorer soils may, for an
indefinitely long period, be made to yield as much, in return for the same
work, as did their predecessor soils in the series of cultivation. Yet there is
nothing in this to supersede the moral restraint - and precisely because, with
every possible enlargement, subsistence will not increase, so fast as
population would increase. And therefore it is, that, notwithstanding all which
may be alleged of the still unexhausted capabilities of the soil, either in
this or in any other country of the world, we cannot possibly be saved from the
present and the perpetual miseries of a redundant population, but by a higher
taste for the comforts and the decencies of life among the population
themselves. This, by its controlling effect on the date of marriage, and so on
the largeness and number of rising families, keeps up the price of labour, by
keeping down the supply of it in the labour market. This we hold to be the
great specific for ensuring a high average style of comfort and enjoyment among
our peasantry, nor do we regard it as a less wise and beautiful connexion in
the mechanism of society, that the most direct way to establish it is through
the medium of popular intelligence and virtue - giving thereby a practical
importance to efficient Christian instruction, unknown to the most of
economists, and which no mere economist can possibly realize.
2. But
though the progress of cultivation, and the produce extracted by labourers from
the last and farthest margin of it, do truly represent both the progress in
numbers, and the state in respect to comfort, of our operative population; and
though, when viewed in this way, the conclusion seems irresistible, that there
is a slowly-receding limit to the means of subsistence, on which population is
ever pressing, so that if it press too hardly, it must straiten and depress the
condition of labourers- yet we hear of a thousand other expedients for an
amelioration in the state of the working classes of society, beside the only
effectual expedient of a general principle and prudence in regard to marriages,
which it is for the working classes of society, and them alone, to put into
operation. What gives plausibility to these expedients is, that society is so
exceedingly complicated a thing; insomuch that, when viewed in some one aspect,
it holds out a promise of improvement or relief, which, under another or more
comprehensive aspect, is seen to be quite illusory. For example, when one
witnesses the vast diversity of trades or employments in society, by each of
which, or at least in the prosecution of which, so many thriving families are
supported, then it is conceived, that, the highway for the relief of the
unprovided is to find them a trade, to find them employment. Or, when looking
to the connexion between capital and labour, and perceiving that the office of
the former is to maintain the latter - then, on the idea that capital may, by
the operation of parsimony and good management, be extended ad infinitum, is it
held, by almost ,every economist of high name, that every accumulation of
capital carries an addition along with it to the subsistence of labourers. Or
again, when one looks to the multitudes supported by foreign trade, in all its
departments, the imagination is, that, as agriculture has its capabilities, so
commerce has its distinct and additional capabilities; and that, whatever limit
there may be to the power of the one for the maintenance of families, this is
amply made up by the indefinite extension which might be given to the other.
Again, we often hear taxation vaguely, though confidently talked of, as the
great incubus on the prosperity of labourers; and that, if this were only
lightened or removed, there would thenceforth ensue a mighty enlargement both
of industry and comfort to the families of the working classes. And then, in
the list of national grievances, we hear of the enormous and overgrown
properties which are vested in the few - and a general abundance diffused among
the many is figured to be the consequence that would result, if not from the
spoliation and forcible division of this wealth, at least from the abolition of
entails, and of the law of primogeniture. Or in the absence, perhaps the
failure, of all the expedients, emigration is held forth as a sovereign
specific for all the distresses of an overcrowded land. And, lastly, after
every thing but the moral habit of labourers themselves has been thought of,
there follows, in this list of artifices for their relief, a scheme which, no
longer existing in fancy, has been bodied forth into actual operation, and is
the one of all-others most directly fitted to undermine the principle and
prudence of labourers - even a compulsory tax on the wealthy for the relief of
the destitute, so as to disarm poverty of its terrors, and proclaim a universal
impunity for dissipation and idleness. Now that this last great expedient has
been adverted to, we need scarcely advert to any of those lesser ones, which,
though but the crudities of mere sentimentalism, have been proposed, each as a
grand panacea, for all the disorders of the social state, - such as the cottage
system, and the cow system, and the village economy of Mr. Owen, and the
various plans of home colonization that have been thought to supersede the
lessons of Malthus, or, at least, practically to absolve us from all regard to
them for centuries to come.
3. Now the remedies we have just specified,
may be regarded as belonging to the first class. They are all external
remedies; and it will be our distinct aim, to demonstrate, in succession, the
inefficacy of each of them. There is not one of them that will serve as a
measure of permanent relief. In as far as they hold out the promise of an
indefinite harbourage for an ever-increasing population, they but practise a
deceitful mockery on the hopes of the philanthropist. To whichever of the
quarters now specified we may, with fond expectation, turn ourselves, we shall
speedily be met by a check in every way as difficult to force, as is the last
limit between cultivation and barrenness. To this limit, in fact, one and all
of them may be reduced - and just as really, though not so obviously, in
Britain as in Norway, in every society of complicated structure and
widely-diversified interests, many are the distinct propositions that might be
offered for enlarging the sustenance and comfort of the human species. They can
all, however apparently remote and various among themselves, be brought to the
place at which husbandry ceases from her operations, because no longer
profitable; and there the merits of each may be tried and pronounced upon. That
is the place, in fact, though but recently adverted to in the science of
political economy, where many a question can be decided, which involves the
greatest earthly hopes and interests of society.
4. It may be thought,
however, that, without proceeding further in our argument, we might pronounce
at once on the scheme of home-colonization. And we trust it is abundantly
obvious, that it is utterly incompetent to the end of providing indefinite
sustenance for a population proceeding without restraint in the increase of its
numbers. If there be any Sanguine enough to imagine, that cultivation may be so
speeded forward beyond its natural rate, under the auspices of government, as
to absorb all the redundancies of a population, whom the scheme itself may have
helped to emancipate from the checks that would otherwise have restrained them
- we would appeal to the mighty enlargement which has taken place in our own
land within these few years, the millions which have been added to the
inhabitants of Britain and Ireland within the lapse of a single generation. The
progress of agriculture during this period, from individual enterprise alone,
is quite obvious; and it satisfactorily accounts for the commensurate increase
that has taken place in the population. And yet, though a larger, is it a more
comfortable population than before? Has the increase of food worked out any
sensible increase on the average sufficiency of families? Have not the absolute
plenty in the land, and the relative poverty of the people who live in it, kept
pace the one with the other? And if this be all the result of that progress in
our husbandry which has taken plaae under the enterprise of individuals, and
has afforded room for additional millions of human beings - can we anticipate a
more prosperous result from any government enterprise, which at best will but
afford room and sustenance for as many additional thousands? The history of the
last thirty years may well demonstrate, that, with a mighty enlargement in our
means of subsistence, the population may retrograde, or at least be stationary,
in point of comfort, notwithstanding. It affords the clearest experimental
proof of the little which can he done by mere resources for an increasing
population, without restraints on the rate of their increase. There was nothing
in the vast augmentation which has recently taken place of the one, that
superseded the use or necessity for the other. And still less ought it to be
superseded by any paltry augmentation of the means ab extra, which can be
looked for from the scheme in question. The philosophy of Malthus, or rather,
the practical wisdom of families, ought not to be suspended, till home
colonization have made full development of the capabilities which belong to it.
A reckless population, made more reckless by the show and promise of such a
relief, will shoot ahead of all that can possibly be achieved by it. The
additional food that may have been created, will be more than overborne in the
tide of an increasing population. The only difference will be a greater instead
of a smaller number of wretched families - a heavier amount of distress, with
less of unbroken ground. in reserve for any future enlargements a society in
every way as straitened as before, yet nearer to the extreme limit of their
resources than before -in short, a condition, at once of augmented hardship and
diminished hope, with all the burden of an expensive and unprofitable scheme to
the bargain.
5. We cannot complete our view of the system of
home-colonization, without the help of certain ulterior principles, which we
shall afterwards apply to the further consideration of this scheme. We shall
therefore enter immediately on the proper subject of our present chapter; which
is, the increase and limit of employment.
6. But before we commence
this attempt, it will be necessary to premise a general view of the manner in
which the distribution of the labouring classes is regulated by the state of
landed property; and to show how a distinct class of labourers, additional to
the agricultural and secondary, arises in the progress of cultivation, and
increases in number with every descent which it makes among the inferior soils.
Hitherto we have only been attending to the limit of cultivation, where, at the
soils last entered upon, the produce is barely adequate to the expenses of the
husbandry; or, abstracting still from the consideration of profit, where the
produce could do no more than feed the agricultural labourers and their
secondaries. But the produce of the superior soils is more than adequate to
this object. The same improvement in agriculture, in virtue of which we now
draw a full subsistence for its labourers, from land that had long lain beyond
the outskirts of cultivation, will enable us to draw from the fertile land,
that had long lain within its boundary, a greater surplus of produce than
before, over and above the expenses of the farm management. It is this surplus
which constitutes rent, - which, generally speaking, is measured by the
difference between the produce of a given quantity of labour on any soil, and
the produce of the same labour on the soil that yields no rent. It goes in the
shape of revenue to the landlord; who either receives it in kind, or receives
in money the power of purchasing it - a power which, in the act of expenditure,
he transfers in various parts throughout the year, to those who labour in his
service, or who minister in various ways to his accommodation.
7. Now,
it is this expenditure on the part of landlords, which gives rise to another
class of labourers, beside the two that we have already specified. Should the
rent but enable the proprietor to provide himself with the necessaries of life
- then that part of it, which goes to purchase the first necessaries, would but
serve to subsist an idle man instead of a labourer; and that part of it which
went to the purchase of second necessaries, would but serve, to discharge
additional main tenance, and so give additional extent to the secondary
population. But such is the unequal distribution of landed property, and so
large are the shares which fall in general to the possessors, that, in the vast
majority of instances, the rent can do a great deal more than uphold the
proprietor in the necessaries of life. It can enable him to subsist better, and
to lodge and clothe himself better than an ordinary workman. He can afford to
indulge in the luxuries of life: and the preparation of these constitutes the
employment of a very large population. It will be found very convenient to
distinguish them by a particular name, even though we should not for this
purpose fix on the best appellation. We conceive that the fittest term by which
to characterize them, is one descriptive of a circumstance in which their
employment differs from that of the two first classes. The two first classes
are employed in the preparation of articles which cannot be dispensed with -
the preparation of the first and second necessaries of life. The others are
employed in the preparation of articles which can be dispensed with. A
man can want luxuries - he cannot want necessaries. . He might for-go luxuries
altogether; and so dismiss from his service the whole of this third class, who
are employed in preparing them. Or, he might commute one set of luxuries for
another; and so, without dismissing them from his service, he might at least
shift their employment in that service. It is this liability of being
transferred from one employment to another, and this power, on the part of
their employers, of dispensing, if they choose to make a surrender of their
luxuries, with their services altogether, which has led me to affix to this
class the title of the disposable. They form the disposable population, in
contradistinction to the agricultural and the secondary.
8. It is for
the sake of defining, and not of stigmatising, that we speak of luxuries. By
this term we would comprehend every thing prepared by human labour, and which
enters not into the average maintenance of labourers. The landed proprietor
must at least have the food of other men - but, in as far as, in style and in
quality, it is above that of common labourers, he indulges in luxuries; and so
there are cooks and confectionaries, and many others employed in preparing
delicacies for the table, who should have their place assigned to them among
the disposable population. He must be lodged as well as other men; but then, in
as far as his house exceeds in magnitude and elegance that of an ordinary
workman, for that excess, he must have an additional service of masons, and
carpenters, and roofers, and smiths, who, in respect of their contributing to
this higher style, belong not to the secondary but to the disposable
population. He must be provided also with furniture and clothing, up to the
degree of comfort and tastefulness which prevail among the common people but,
in as far as additional labourers are required, for upholding a higher
tastefulness, or a greater abundance, there is a host of tradesmen, and
artificers, tailors, and shoemakers, and upholsterers, and cabinet-makers, who
must be classified in thousands with the disposable population. We shall not
attempt to enumerate the exceeding diversity of employments, which the taste,
and the humour, and the artificial wants, and the wayward appetency of the
landed proprietors give rise to. It is mainly they who impress on the industry
of the disposable population, any direction which seemeth unto them good; and
who, by spending among them their rents, or, in other words, by making over to
them the surplus produce of their estates, (or, which is the same thing, by
transferring to them the power of purchasing that produce,) do, in return for
their varied services, effuse maintenance upon their families. This disposable
population must, like the agricultural, have a train of secondaries attached to
them; and receive as much from their employers as shall provide themselves with
the first necessaries, and as shall suffice for the food of those who provide
them with the second necessaries of life. It is not enough that the disposable
population are subsisted - this would only imply their being fed by their
employers. They must be maintained, which, in addition to their being fed,
implies their being clothed, and lodged, and furnished, in all those secondary
accommodations that enter into the average comfort of labourers. The price of
their services includes in it the power of purchasing food for themselves, and
food for all the secondary labourers who, either mediately or immediately, are
employed by them,
9. This completes our view of the distribution which
takes place in society of the labouring classes. The agricultural population
are employed in providing all with the first necessaries of life. The secondary
population, in providing all with the second necessaries of life. And the
disposable population, in providing all who are elevated above the condition of
labourers with the higher comforts of life, its luxuries, its elegancies, which
are not essential to the maintenance of human beings, but minister to the
wealthy an endless diversity of gratifications, and give rise to a like
diversity of employments among the people. It is needless to explain here, how
it is that the wages of labour, in all the three classes, are nearly equalized
- insomuch, that they who are toiling at the extreme margin of cultivation, and
there trying to force a return from soils which had never been attempted
before, are equally remunerated for their services, with those who, in the
walks of busy artisanship, are ministering to the most refined enjoyments of
the wealthiest and the noblest in our land. For this, and for many other
doctrines which we presuppose, without any exhibition of their proof, we must
satisfy ourselves with a reference to the general science of political economy.
10. Here, however, we cannot refrain from observing the connexion which
obtains between the state of the soil and the state of human society. Had no
ground yielded more in return for the labour expended on it, than the food of
the cultivators and their secondaries, the existence of one and all of the
human race would have been spent in mere labour. Every man would have been
doomed to a life of unremitting toil for his bodily subsistence; and none could
have been supported in a state of leisure, either for idleness, or for other
employments, than those of husbandry, and such coarser manufactures, as serve
to provide society with the second necessaries of existence. The species would
have risen but a few degrees, whether physical or moral, above the condition of
mere savages. It is just because of a fertility in the earth, by which it
yields a surplus over and above the food of the direct and secondary labourers,
that we can command the services of a disposable population, who, in return for
their maintenance, minister to the proprietors of this surplus, all the higher
comforts and elegancies of life. It is precisely to this surplus we owe it,
that society is provided with more than a coarse and a bare supply for the
necessities of animal nature. It is the original fund out of which are paid the
expenses of art, and science, and civilization, and luxury, and law, and
defence, and all, in short, that contributes either to strengthen or to adorn
the commonwealth. Without this surplus, we should have had but an agrarian
population - consisting of husbandmen, and those few homely and rustic
artificers, who, scattered in hamlets over the land, would have given their
secondary service to the whole population. It marks an interesting connexion
between the capabilities of the soil and the condition of social life, that to
this surplus we stand indispensably indebted, for our crowded cities, our
thousand manufactories for the supply of comforts and refinements to society,
our wide and diversified commerce, our armies of protection, our schools and
colleges of education, our halls of legislation and justice, even our altars of
piety and temple services. It has been remarked by geologists, as the evidence
of a presiding design in nature, that the waste of the soil is so nicely
balanced by the supply from the disintegration of the upland rocks, which are
worn and pulverized at such a rate, as to keep up a good vegetable mould on the
surface of the earth. But each science teems with the like evidences of a
devising and intelligent God; and when we view aright the many beneficent
functions, to which, through the instrumentality of its surplus produce, the
actual degree of the earths fertility is subservient, we cannot imagine a
more wondrous and beautiful adaptation between the state of external nature and
the mechanism of human society.
11. By this mechanism of human society,
as far as we have explained it, the exceeding diversity of trades and
employments may be accounted for. Even were the barrenness of the land such,
that it only yielded food for an agricultural and a secondary population - this
distribution would of itself give rise to a considerable variety of distinct
occupation; and, under the system of a division in labour, we should have
shoemakers, and tailors, and weavers, and masons, and carpenters, and
artificers in hardware, and dealers, as well as fabricators, in sundry more
articles - making out, on the whole, a pretty copious enumeration of separate
callings, with the separate interests belonging to them. But when, in addition
to the subsistence of an agricultural and a secondary, there is fertility in
the land for the subsistence of a disposable population, the multiplication of
trades and employments is thereby indefinitely extended - being as numerous as
the caprices of human fancy and taste, or the varieties of human indulgence. It
is thus that, in proportion as the mechanism of social life becomes more
complex, it is also all the more bewildering; and, amid the intricacy of its
manifold combinations, we lose sight both of the springs and the limits of
human maintenance. One very tide and prevalent delusion, more especially, and
which has misguided both the charity of philanthropists and the policy of
statesmen, is, that the employment in which men are engaged is the source of
their maintenance, - whereas, it is only the channel through which they draw
that maintenance from the hands of those who buy the products of their
employment. This principle has in it all the simplicity of a truism and yet it
is wonderful with what perversity of apprehension, both the managers of a state
and the managers of a parish miss the sight of it. Whether we look to acts of
parliament, or to the actings of a parochial vestry - we shall find them
proceeding on its being the grand specific for the relief of the poor, to find
employment for them. Now, unless that employment be the raising of food, it
does nothing to alleviate the disproportion between the numbers of the people
and the means of their subsistence, - and if there be a limit, as we have
already demonstrated, to the food, we. may be very sure that this device of
employment will not turn out a panacea for the distresses of an overburdened
land.
12. But the fallacy to which we now advert, is not confined to
the matters of practical administration. It may also be recognised in the
theories of those who have attempted to adjust the philosophy of the subject.
In political economy it will often be found, that the channel is confounded
with the source, and hence a delusion, not in the business of charity alone,
but which has extended far and wide among the lessons of the science.
13. And yet it is a delusion which, one might think, should be
dissipated by but one step of explanation. A single truism puts it to flight.
Nothing appears more obvious, than that any trade or manufacture originates
only its own products. All that a stocking-maker contributes to society is
simply stockings. This, and nothing more, is what comes forth of his
establishment. And the same is true of all the other trades or employments
which can be specified. They work off nothing, they emit nothing but their own
peculiar articles. Were this sure and ample axiom but clearly and steadfastly
kept in view, it would put to flight a number of illusions in political
science, - illusions which have taken obstinate hold of our legislators, and
which to this moment keep firm possession in the systems of many of our
economists, They almost all, in a greater or less degree, accredit a
manufacture with something more than its own products. The inclination is, to
accredit it also with the maintenance of its labourers. In every transaction of
buying and selling, there are two distinct elements, - the commodity, and the
price of the commodity; of which price, the maintenance of the labourers is
generally far the largest ingredient. Now, the thing to be constantly kept in
view is, that a manufacture should only be accredited with its own commodity,
and not, over and above this, with the price of its commodity. These two stand,
as it were, on different sides of an exchange. To the manufacture is to be
ascribed all that we behold on the one side. It furnishes the commodity for the
market. But it did not also create the wealth that supplies the price of the
commodity. It does not furnish society with both itself and its equivalent. The
latter comes from a distinct quarter; and we repeat, that by confounding, in
imagination, two things which are distinct in fact, a false direction has been
given, both to the policy of states, and to the theories of
philosophers.
14. This confusion of sentiment appears in a variety of
ways. When one sees a thriving and industrious village, and that the employment
of the families secures for them their maintenance, it is most natural to
invest the former with a power of command, tantamount to a power of creation
over the latter. The two go together; and because when the employment ceases,
the maintenance ceases, it is conceived of the former, that in the order of
causation it has the precedency. We affirm of a shawl-making village, that all
which it yields to society is shawls. We accredit it with this, but with
nothing more. But it is accredited with a great deal more, by those who talk in
lofty style of our manufacturing interests, and the dependence thereupon of a
nations support and a nations greatness. We hold, that if, through
the exhaustion of the raw material, or any other cause, there were to be an
extinction of the employment, the country would only be deprived of its wonted
supply of shawls; but the prevalent imagination is, that the country would be
deprived of its wonted support for so many hundred families. The whole amount
of the mischief, in our estimation, would be the disappearance of shawls; in
theirs, it would be the disappearance of that which upheld an integral part of
the countrys population. It is forgotten, that though shawls may no
longer be produced or brought to market, the price that wont to be paid for
them is still in reserve, and ready to be expended by the purchasers on some
other article of accommodation or luxury. The circumstances which have brought
the manufacture to ruin, do not affect the ability of those who consumed the
products of the manufacture. The employment is put an end to; but the
maintenance comes from another quarter, and can be discharged in as great
abundance as before, on as large a population. Their employment in making
shawls was not the source of their maintenance; it was only the channel by
which they drew it to their homes. The destruction or stoppage of the channel
does not infer a stoppage at the source; that will find for itself another
channel, through which all that enters into the maintenance of our industrious
families might be effused upon them as liberally as before. We dispute not the
temporary evils of the transition. We allow that a change of employment may
bring individual and temporary distress along with it. But we contend, that the
expenditure of those who support our disposable population will not be
lessened, but only shifted, by this new state of things; and that, after the
change is accomplished in the direction of their industry, we should behold as
numerous a society as ever, upheld with the same liberality in every thing
(with the single exception of shawls, and the substitution of some other luxury
in their place) that enters into the comfort and convenience of families.
15. But we are further persuaded, that the confusion of sentiment which
we are now attempting to expose, has had a most misleading effect on the views
and the policy of statesmen: at one time, inspiring a false hope on the
promised extension of trade and manufactures; and, at another time, creating a
false alarm on the appearance of their decay. Our legislators do ascribe a
higher function to trade and manufactures, than that of simply furnishing
society with the articles manufactured. They conceive of them as the dispensers
of a transcendently greater benefit than the mere use and enjoyment of these
articles. There are other and nobler interests associated in their minds with
the trade and manufactures of the country, than the mere gratification and
convenience which individuals have in the use of their products. This will at
once be evident, if we resolve the manufacturing interest into its several
parts, as the shawl-making interest, wherewith our senate would not for a
moment concern themselves, if they thought that all which hinged upon it was
the supply of shawls - nor the stocking-making interest, if in their opinion
nothing else depended on it but the supply of stockings nor the carpet-making
interest, if it involved no other or higher consideration than the supply of
carpets, nor the buckle-making interest, if they did not suppose that, beside
owing t it the supply of buckles, we furthermore owed the maintenance and
wealth of bucklemakers. And the remark may be extended from manufactures to
commerce. We should have had no grave deliberations on the China trade, or the
Portuguese trade, or the West India trade, if something far loftier had not
been associated with these respective processes, than that of serving the
families of the land with tea, or wine, or oranges, or sugar, or coffee, or
tobacco. These mighty commercial interests are conceived to be productive of
something greatly more magnificent and national; and not only the income of all
the capitalists, and the maintenance of all the labourers engaged in them, but
the strength, and revenue, and political greatness of the state, are somehow
associated with their defence and preservation. It is forgotten, of each trade
and each manufacture, that it furnishes, and can furnish, nothing but its own
proper and peculiar articles; and that, abstracting from the use and enjoyment
of these, every other associated benefit is comprehended in the equivalent
price which is paid for them. All that the wine trade of Portugal, for example,
furnishes to our nation is wine; and, in reference either to the public revenue
which arises from it, or to the private revenue wherewith it both enriches the
capitalists, and supports the labourers employed in it, these are yielded, not
most assuredly by the wine, but by the price given for the wine. The wine trade
is but the channel through which these flow, and not the source in which they
originate. But, notwithstanding, there is yet a mystic power ascribed to the
wine trade, as if part of the nations glory and the nations
strength were linked with the continuance of it. And hence a legislature
tremulously alive to the state of our relations.with Portugal, lest the wine
trade should be destroyed. Now though, from the interruption of these
relations, or from any other cause, the wine trade, on the one side, were
destroyed, the counterpart wealth, on the other side, would not be destroyed.
It would remain with its owners, to be expended by them on the purchase of some
new luxury in place of the wine; by the natural price of which, the same return
could be made to capitalists and labourers, and by a tax on which, the same
revenue might be secured to government as before.
16. It must be
obvious, that employment in agriculture is not an indefinite resource for an
indefinite population - seeing that it must stop short at the land which
refuses to yield the essential food of its direct and secondary labourers. And
it should be equally obvious, that as little is employment in manufactures an
indefinite resource seeing that the definite quantity of food raised can only
sustain a certain and definite number of labourers. The latter position seems,
on the first announcement, to carry its own evidence along with it; yet there
is a certain subtle imagination in its way, which we have attempted to dispose
of. Our argument rests on the veriest truism - that a manufacture is creative
of nothing beyond its own products. But truism though it is, it has been
strangely overlooked, not only in the devices of the charitable, but both in
the policy of statesmen, and in the doctrinal schemes of the economists. Yet we
think a sufficient explanation can be given, both of the manner in which the
perverse misconception at first arose, and of the obstinacy wherewith it still
lingers and keeps its ground amongst these.
17. In opposition, then, to
the principle, that employment is creative of nothing but its own products, it
might be alleged, that the presentation of these products excites a desire for
the acquisition of them, and so stimulates other employments in the fabrication
of new products, to be given in exchange for the former ones. This was
remarkably exemplified throughout the whole of Europe, at the termination of
the middle ages. Of this we have a masterly sketch by Dr Adam Smith, in his
Wealth of Nations; when he traces the great economic change which took place,
in virtue of a new taste and a new habit on the part of the landholders.
Historically, it was the presentation to their notice of those articles of
splendour and luxury which manufactures had produced, and which commerce
brought to their doors, that prompted the change. This was the moving force,
which shifted their old expenditure, arid gave another direction to it. They
dismissed their idle retainers, and appropriated the surplus produce by which
they had been fed, to the purchase of luxuries in dress, or of luxuries in
equipage and furniture. They furnished subsistence to as many as before, but in
a new capacity, and in return for a different service. The disposable
population were differently disposed of. Instead of so many idle marauders,
living, save at their seasons of warfare, in sloth and sordidness, on the
domain of their feudal lord, they were transmuted into orderly, industrious
citizens - as dependent, for the first necessaries of life, on the country as
before, but yielding, in return for these, not the homage of their personal
attendance, but the tangible produce of their own handiwork. And along with
this economic, there was effected a great moral change in the state of society.
The efforts of violence between adjoining proprietors, were exchanged for the
more peaceful contests and rivalships of vanity. The hundreds, who in other
days would have followed them to the field, on services of revenge or plunder,
were now at peaceful occupation in their workshops - congregated into villages,
which grew into cities, and there placed under the protection of law and social
order. Liberty, and justice, and civilization, and right government, all
emerged from this altered condition of things; and when we reflect, that
commerce was the prime mover in this great transitions by the new desires which
it infused, and the change which it effected in the style of living and habit
of our landlords - it must be allowed, that, historically, to commerce we owe
benefits of a much higher order, than the mere gratification of any of the
physical or inferior appetencies of our nature.
18. But there is still
another reason (beside the new direction given to the expenditure of landlords)
why commerce might be said to have been creative at that period of more than
their own immediate products. When the landlords parted with their idle
retainers, and they were compelled to be industrious for their livelihood along
with a new habit of indulgence among the proprietors, there sprung up a new
habit of industry among the people. At one and the same time, the proprietors
became more luxurious than before, and the people became more laborious than
before. Even these latter participated to some degree in the taste of their
superiors, and were willing also to make their sacrifices, that they might be
admitted to their own humble share in those recent gratifications which were
beginning to be placed too within reach of the peasantry, and were every-where
raising the standard of enjoyment. They accordingly made sacrifice of tleir
indolence and love of ease, even as the grandees above them made sacrifice of
their power and parade of attendance. At the same time, the rights of all were
beginning to be more recognised and respected; and, under the administration of
more benign and equitable laws, the poor man felt a greater stimulus to labour
than before, in the greater security which he now had for the possession and
enjoyment of its fruits. And then the severe and regular industry of
manufactures, was followed by a more severe and regular industry than
heretofore in agriculture. The desire of each man to better his condition, now
began to develop its energies in all the classes of society. Landlords, with a
larger and juster sense of their interests, disposed of their farms in the way
that yielded the greatest revenue to themselves; and husbandmen, with the
benefit of a now more industrious peasantry, so laboured the farms, as to work
out the greatest remainder of produce for themselves. In addition to this, the
business of the country participated, though never to such a degree, with the
business of towns, in the benefits that result from the division of labour, and
in the greater power given by mechanical invention to the implements of labour.
Altogether, the limit of cultivation, under the operation of these various
causes, has receded an immense way back within these three centuries. Millions
of acres, that, under the old lazzaroni system, had never been entered on, are
now yielding subsistence to man; and the increase of food has been surely and
speedily followed up by an increase of population. The land of inferior soils,
that formerly yielded nothing, is now productive; and the land that formerly
produced, is now, in virtue of deeper and more laborious culture, of tenfold
greater fertility than before. Now, in Europe, all this may be in a great
measure traced to the reaction of commerce upon agriculture. It was commerce
which gave the impulse; and, in addition to its own products, it, through the
medium of the new system of society which it introduced, called forth products
from the earth, that, but for it, might never have been extracted. In this
instance at least, commerce seems to have been the creator, not of its own
commodities alone, but of the equivalents for these commodities a
fountain-head, not merely for the products of its labour, but for the
maintenance of its labourers.
19. It is not to be wondered at, then,
that he who traced with so graphic and powerful a hand the reflex influence of
commerce upon agriculture, should.have sometimes forgotten the natural order of
precedency betwixt them. He certainly did more than any of his predecessors in
the science, in restoring to agriculture the proper honours and ascendeney
which belong to her. Yet he does give a power to the enterprise and the
accumulation of merchants, which neither experience nor the nature of things
will justify. None was more successful than he, in exposing the crude
imaginations of those who thought to enrich the country by means of a
restricted commerce. But along with this, he greatly overrated the effect of an
emancipated commerce, or of commerce set at liberty from its fetters. He very
clearly demonstrated the impolicy of those artificial checks, which, in the
shape of monopoly or prohibition, had been laid upon trade. But he seems not to
have been fully aware of the natural check which stands in the way of its
indefinite extension - and by which a gradual retardation, and ultimately an
immovable arrest, are laid on the progress of agriculture, and of population,
and of capital, and so of commerce. The truth does appear, throughout the work
of this great author, in occasional glimpses but not so explicitly, or with
such application and effect, as it would have done had the doctrine of
population been understood in his day. This single element alone would have
modified a number of his conclusions; and, more particularly, he would not have
held out to society the promise of an endless advancement, as if every effort
of parsimony, and every accumulation of capital, were infallibly to speed it
forward. He seems to reason as if the simple act of preparing commodities, and
placing them as it were on one side of an exchange, will, through the operation
of stimulus, call forth into existence equivalent commodities on the other side
of it. This process, it is true, was conspicuously and memorably exemplified,
at that period in history, which may be characterized as the period of
transition from the middle to the modern ages of Europe. But that was no
sufficient cause, why it should have been regarded and reasoned upon as the
universal process for all ages.
20. There is, in truth, a wide
difference between the state of things at the commencement, and after the full
establishment and continuance, of this new era. Then the passion for war had
just given place to the passion for wealth and luxury; and this latter passion,
when newly awoke, found a soil of boundless and yet unentered capabilities on
which to expatiate. The rude and infant husbandry of Europe had a mighty career
before it, along which the increasing products of commerce met with their sure
return in the increasing products of agriculture. The spirit of mercantile
adventure could safely indulge in every variety of caprice and speculation; for
the unsated appetite of the landlord found, in the before untouched resources
of his land, the means of extended gratification. Commerce appeared to
anticipate agriculture, and might almost have ventured in reality to do so, yet
not be disappointed; for however it multiplied its wares and its whimsies, it
found a ready admission for them in the growing wealth, and the now stimulated
fancy and taste of its country customers. It is really not to be wondered at,
that men should have been led to imagine, as if commerce had a commencing and a
creative virtue in this process; and that it had only to accumulate, and to
employ, and to produce, in order to carry forward the prosperity of the nation
with uniform, or with accelerated progress. Commerce, in fact, was the prime,
the executive agent in Europe, for unlocking the capabilities of the soil; and,
at a period when these were rapidly evolved, the articles which it fabricated
and brought to market seldom failed to meet with purchasers of sufficient
wealth and sufficient number; and so also with a price which enveloped in it
the profit of all the capitalists, the comfortable subsistence of all the
labourers. It was most natural, in these circumstances, to conceive of commerce
as an efficient cause, not merely for the commodities of its own workmanship,
but for the maintenance of its own workmen; and, if agriculture was not just
made of subordinate rank to commerce, commerce was regarded as of fully
co-ordinate rank with agriculture. Nevertheless it will be found, we think, on
further consideration, that however events may have fallen out historically in
the order of time, there is an order of nature, and an order of influence,
which must be attended to, ere the essential relations of agriculture and
commerce be rightly understood. We hold the real dependence of the latter upon
the former, to be a truth of capital importance in political economy; and that,
if steadfastly kept in view, and carried forward to its legitimate
applications, it would put to flight a number of those delusions and errors
which, in the course of speculation, have gathered around the science.
21. One plain distinction, and a distinction not to be overlooked by
the slight exceptions which can be alleged against it, is, that to agriculture
mainly we owe the necessaries of life; whereas, many of its luxuries cannot be
had without cornmerce and manufactures. This is a most momentous distinction,
and a vast deal turns upon it. We not only see in it, that manufactures must
necessarily, in point of extent, be limited by the produce of the soil; but
that the owners of the soil, in virtue of the property which belongs to them,
have a natural superiority over all other classes of men, which by no device of
politics or law can be taken away from them. The holder of what I cannot want,
is the master of my services. He can impress upon them any direction which
seemeth unto him good. He can transfer his demand from one luxury to another;
and so, as far as his consumption goes, he can extend one manufacture at the
expense of a proportional abridgment on another manufacture. Or, he can part
with the use of some tangible commodity altogether, and, with the price which
went to purchase it, may obtain for himself the use of a menial servant; and,
in so doing, he effects an absolute reduction in the manufactures of the
country. Or, whether in the spirit of a voluntary patriotism, or in submission
to lawful authority, he may render to the state the price of many luxuries; and
thus withdraw so many of the disposable population from the business of trade,
to the business of our national establishments. It is thus that any given
change in the taste or habit of our landlords, would effect a corresponding
change in the employment of the great mass of our disposable population. They
are virtually the holders of the maintenance of this class of labourers; and it
is their collective will which fixes the direction of their labour. Apart from
the importation of food, there can be no more labourers in the country than the
produce of their estates will subsist. It is the quantity of this produce which
fixes the amount of labour; and as far as the labour of the disposable
population is concerned, it is the will of the holders of this produce which
fixes the direction of it. They are the natural masters of the country; and the
ascendancy wherewith their property invests them, hinges on this clear and
simple distinction - Men can want luxuries; they cannot want necessaries.
22. But more than this. Every increase of food is followed up by an
increase of population. It is not so with any other manufactured goods, save in
as far as that may work an increase of food, by pushing on the limit of
cultivation in the way that we have already explained. Such, at all events, is
the difference between the two sorts of produce, that the market cannot
permanently be overladen with corn, even though its growers should persist in
keeping up and increasing the supply of it. Unlike to all other articles of
merchandise, an increased supp]y of food is surely and speedily followed up by
an increased demand for it. It may be a drug in the market for a year or two;
but though it should continue to be sent, in the same, or in superior
abundance, season after season, it will not remain so. The reason is, that,
unlike to other commodities, it creates a market for itself. Through the medium
of the stimulus given to population, it does what no other articles of
merchandise can do - it multiplies its own consumers. A plenty of the
necessaries, is the only species of plenty which surely and largely tells on
the population. A plenty of luxuries has no such effect; and not even a plenty
of the second necessaries, as shoes or stockings, or the materials of
house-building. The proprietors of the first necessaries are on the only sure
vantage-ground. They alone have nothing to fear ultimately from the indefinite
supply of their peculiar commodity. The produce of agriculture may be made to
increase, up to the uttermost limit of its capabilities; for, whatever the
additional number may be which it can feed, that number will rise to be fed by
it.
23. We can therefore be at no loss to perceive, how an indefinite
supply of the products of agriculture, must be followed up by a like indefinite
supply of the, products of manufactures or commerce. The people whom it feeds,
give, in their handiwork, a return for their subsistence. But this does not
hold true of the reverse proposition. The products of manufactures do not
indefinitely call forth the products of agriculture. They did so historically,
at that period when they effected a change in the taste and habit of landlords.
They still do so gradually, when, in virtue of their greater supply by an
improvement in the powers of labour, they reduce the numbers of the secondary
class, and so push cultivation further among the inferior soils. But beyond
this limit they have no power. An increase of agricultural produce will,
through the medium of an increasing population, be followed up, pan
passu, by an increase of manufactured commodities. But a mere increase of
manufactured commodities, cannot force the existing barrier in the way of
cultivation, or force an entrance upon that land which is not able to feed its
agricultural labourers and their secondaries. There is one way in which this
barrier may be made to retire. Labourers may consent to be worse fed than
before, or to put up with fewer of the secondary accommodations. If, with this
reduction in the standard of enjoyment, they still work as hardly, or, if even
with the same, and perhaps a higher standard, they are willing to put forth
more than their wonted labour - this might widen the limits, and so multiply
the products of agriculture. Still, after these modifications are admitted,
there is a wide difference between agriculture and manufactures - the former
influencing the latter, in a way that the latter cannot influence the former.
Agriculture, with every permanent increase of its products, can, through the
medium of an increasing population, command a like increase in the products of
manufactures. Manufactures cannot, by any increase of their products, while the
standard of enjoyment, and the powers of personal and mechanical labour remain
the same, force a like increase in the products of agriculture.
24.
This distinction between agriculture and manufactures, would serve greatly to
modify the reasonings of Dr Smith, when, without reference to any such
distinction, he tells of one species of commodities stimulating the production
of another species of commodities. It follows not, because commerce had the
power, by tempting landlords from an old to a new habit of expenditure, of
extorting additional products from a soil whose capabilities had scarcely been
entered on; it therefore has this power, when agriculture, with its stationary
or slowly-receding limit, has either reached, or is so much nearer the
uttermost length to which it can be carried. The stimulus might be as powerful
as before. There might be as intense a desire for the increase of enjoyments,
whether they be the enjoyments of pleasure, or those of pageantry. But this
moving force is in contact now with an obstacle which stood then at a distance
so remote, as to have permitted an advancing movement, and that a tolerably
free one, for several centuries. We now begin to feel, and may indeed be said
to have long felt the utter powerlessness of mere production in manufactures,
to enlarge the wealth, or speed forward the economic prosperity of a land. What
commerce did in an incipient, it cannot do in an extreme state of agriculture;
and in the oldest and richest countries of Europe, the sanguine, the splendid
anticipations which the earlier experience awakened, checked and chastised as
they have been by the later experience, are now beginning to be abandoned.
25. But not only is there a visionary hope associated with this
contemplation, - there is also an alarm which, it is comfortable to think, is
alike visionary. They who so count on the reaction of a stimulus, as to
imagine, that every addition beyond their present extent to our manufactures,
will give a proportional enlargement to our agriculture, might also imagine,
that every subtraction beneath their present extent from our manufactures, will
proportionally lessen and contract our agriculture also. The two imaginations,
in fact, are products. of one and the same fallacy.. He who thinks that it was
the creation of a manufacture which stimulated and called forth an increase of
agriculture, may well be apprehensive lest the destruction of the manufacture
should as much throw the agriculture back again. Now, it is not so. Though a
particular manufacture should be brought to ruin, and the employment in it
should cease, the counterpart maintenance will not cease; and our security
against this effect is, that there would still remain a sufficiency of objects,
on which it were not only possible, but felt by the landlords to be desirable,
that they should still spend their incomes. There is not a luxury that can be
named, the loss of which would cause our agriculture to go back; even though,
historically, it may have been the first presentation of that luxury to their
notice, which, by its effect on the appetency of landlords, helped to bring the
agriculture forward. Now that the revulsion has taken place from the habit of
the middle ages, there is no danger of the surplus produce of their estates
lying idle in their hands. They will set their hearts on as large a revenue as
before; and notwithstanding the ruin or disappearance of many separate trades,
they will still find use for it all. In other words, amid the numerous failures
and fluctuations of employment, they in the meanwhile will not let down the
cultivation of a single acre; so that there shall remain as large a maintenance
for the same population as before. The expenditure of its holders would be
changed, but not lessened. The destruction of one manufacture would be followed
up by the creation or the extension of another; or there would be a
proportionate addition to the retinue of our landlords. At all events, we
should behold as large a disposable class as well supported as ever. It may be
Utopianism to expect, that beyond the limits of our present agriculture, there
lies before us a career of endless and ever-advancing prosperity; but we might
at least give up all our sensitive alarms, lest, by any revolution in the
trading world, our prosperity shall ever be sensibly and permanently reduced
beneath that limit. So long as we have law and liberty amongst us, our economic
resources will be found as stable as the constitution of the seasons or of the
soil. Unless we are struck from Heaven with the curse of barrenness, the
present means of our subsistence will remain to us. We may have little to hope
from a great enlargement of these means, yet have every thing to hope from a
right distribution of them. There may be, there is, an impassable limit to the
physical abundance of our products. Ther is no limit to the moral cultivation
of our people. We may not be able greatly to increase our stores; but with the
stores we have, a mighty achievement remains to us. We may indefinitely
increase the virtuous and prudential habits of the community; and on these
mainly, on these we should say exclusively, it depends, whether there shall or
shall not be a high average of sufficiency and comfort among the families of
the land.
26. It is now high time that the statesmen and
philanthropists of the old world should take this direction. It is to a moral
restraint on the numbers of mankind, and not to a physical enlargement of the
means for their subsistence, that we shall be henceforth beholden for
sufficiency or peace in our commonwealth. It is from the power of Christian
education, and not from the devices of the economists, that our deliverance is
to come. And yet we abide almost as reckless of this truth, as if in the
morning of our history we had still the world to begin, or had still in reserve
a land of boundless extent and fertility, on which, as in America, we might
expatiate unchecked by any barrier of physical necessity for many generations.
To employ the language of the schoolmen, we are still looking objectively to
the enlargement of resources in the outer world of matter, instead of looking
subjectively to the establishment of habit and principle in the inner world of
mind. Yet thence, and thence alone, will proceed our help and our emancipation
from the miseries which beset and straiten us; and nothing will more
effectually demonstrate the supremacy of the moral over the physical, in the
system of human affairs, than will the ameliorated condition coming in the
train of ameliorated character, after the tried impotency of all other
expedients.
27. Meanwhile, as the difficulties thicken, and the
pressure becomes more severe, the expedients multiply. This is a teeming age
for all sorts of crudities; and we have no doubt, that our very nearness to the
ultimate and immovable barrier of our resources, has made the necessity to be
all the more intensely felt, and so given additional impulse to the
speculations of philanthropists. Among others, the favourite device of
employment has been acted on to a very great extent; though its inefficacy as a
resource one might think, should be abundantly obvious, on the simple axiom,
that employment is creative of nothing but its own products. It was a far more
rational and likely expedient centuries ago, in the earlier stage of our
agriculture, than it is at present; nor need we wonder, though in these days
they should often have experienced a most convenient absorption of poverty and
idleness in whole masses, simply by providing and dealing out work. There was
room then for such an absorption, when the increasing products of the towns and
villages could be met by the increasing products of a land, whose capabilities
were yet so far from being fully overtaken. We accordingly meet with this
expedient in the innumerable parliamentary acts of other days, for the
suppression or the regulation of mendicity; and it was long the favourite
scheme, both of parochial counsellors, and of individual philanthropists. The
general rule of society is, that each man lives by his business; and the first
natural imagination is, that this conjunction between work and maintenance is
just, in every instance where poverty and idleness are seen together, to be
repeated over again. England is rife with this experiment throughout her
teeming parishes; and quarrying, and roadmaking, and breaking stones, and
digging in gravel pits, and the manifold branches of in-door labour in
workhouses, have all been devised; that, if possible, by the products of their
industry, their surplus people might earn for themselves their subsistence, or
a part of their subsistence. The conception is prevalent all ovor, and has been
endlessly diversified into various ingenuities, alike amiable and abortive. The
platting of straw, and picking of hemp, and various sorts of millinery and
hand-manufactures, have all been tried and found wanting. Tbe effect is a
general depression in the price of the prepared article, whatever it may be; or
if the article be altogether new, the purchasers who are allured to it, are
withdrawn from the purchase of other articles. On either supposition, a whole
body of regular labourers are impoverished by the weight of these additional
projects upon the general market; and so utterly fruitless indeed has it turned
out as a permanent resource, that, in despair, the expedient has been abandoned
in many parishes, and the extra population are suffered to lead a kind of
lazzaroni life in idleness, and in the mischief and crime which are attendant
upon idleness. The truth is, that if home-colonization fails, employment in
manufactures is far more likely to fail. By the former, a certain portion at
least of sustenance, is drawn from the earth in return for labour - though made
adequate to the full maintenance of the labourers. -By the other, something is
produced too, but it is not sustenance; but a commodity to be offered in return
for sustenance; and which cannot earn that sustenance for additional labourers,
save at the expense of all previous labourers. The home-colonist, at work among
the inferior soils, may perhaps extract from them three-fourths of his
maintenance, and leave the remaining fourth a burden upon society. The workman
in a charity manufacture, burdens society with the whole of his subsistence.
The article he prepares becomes cheaper and more plentiful than before; but he
himself becomes the instrument of a general distress, by inducing a dearness
and a scarcity on that which is most essential to families.
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