Harmonies of Political Economy
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Title: Harmonies of Political Economy
Author: Frédéric Bastiat
Translator: Patrick James Stirling
Release date: February 24, 2014 [eBook #45002]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Original printed spelling and grammar is generally retained.
Footnotes were renumbered and relocated to the end of the book, into
a new Notes section, ahead of the Index. Original small caps font is
indicated «Herein Thus». Original ‹italics, thus›. The carot symbol
"^" means superscript. See ENDNOTE for more details.
HARMONIES
OF
POLITICAL ECONOMY.
BY
FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT.
TRANSLATED FROM THE THIRD EDITION OF THE FRENCH,
WITH A
NOTICE OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THE AUTHOR,
BY
PATRICK JAMES STIRLING, LL.D., F.R.S.E.,
AUTHOR OF “THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRADE,” “THE GOLD DISCOVERIES AND THEIR
PROBABLE CONSEQUENCES,” ETC.
Second Edition.
EDINBURGH:
OLIVER AND BOYD, TWEEDDALE COURT.
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.
EDINBURGH: PRINTED BY OLIVER AND BOYD, TWEEDDALE COURT.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.
The favour with which the English public has received the First
Edition of this translation of Bastiat’s ‹Harmonies Économiques›,
published originally in separate parts, has induced me to have the
whole reprinted in a cheaper and more accessible form, in the hope of
giving the work a wider circulation, and rendering it more generally
useful.
The first ten chapters were all that appeared in the lifetime of the
gifted author, or that had the benefit of his finishing touch. It
was Bastiat’s intention, had he lived, to recast the work, and to
give it a wider and more comprehensive scope; embracing in his design
not only the principles of Political Economy, but their applications
to Social Philosophy. Prior to his departure for Italy, on what he
foresaw might be his last journey, he had communicated to his friends
MM. de Fontenay and Paillottet a list of the new chapters in the
order in which they will be found in the subjoined Notice of his
Life.[1] To the same friends, in his last moments, he entrusted the
manuscripts intended for the continuation of the work. The duty thus
committed to them they discharged very judiciously, by arranging the
new portions in the order pointed out, without altering the text,
and, except in a very few instances, without additions of their own,
contenting themselves with adding some explanatory notes, consisting
chiefly of references to the author’s other works. [p004]
Some of the chapters thus added are unfortunately mere fragments,
but most of the others indicate very clearly Bastiat’s opinions on
the subjects to which they relate, and several of them display a
breadth, a vigour, and an originality worthy of the best days of
their lamented author.
Many of the questions purely economical which are discussed in the
posthumous portions of the work,—such, for instance, as those of
Wages, Population, and the relations of Labour and Capital, etc.,—are
still deeply engaging public attention in England, as well as on the
other side of the Channel; and on subjects of such vast practical
importance it is surely desirable that the opinions of so profound
and fearless a thinker as Bastiat should be as widely disseminated as
possible.
In conclusion, I may perhaps be permitted to refer to the great
interest taken in this translation by the late Mr Cobden, who was the
correspondent and personal friend of Bastiat, and was, I need not
say, so eminently qualified to form and pronounce an opinion on the
merits of his last great work. A short time after the appearance of
the first ten chapters (26th March 1860), writing from Paris, where
he was then engaged in negotiating the Commercial Treaty, Mr Cobden
says, “My enthusiasm for Bastiat, founded as much on a love of his
personal qualities as on an admiration for his genius, dates back
nearly twenty years. I need not, therefore, express any astonishment
at the warmth with which you speak of his productions. They are doing
their work silently but effectually. M. Guillaumin [the eminent
publisher] tells me the sale of the last edition has been steady and
continuous, and a new one is now in hand. The works of Bastiat, which
are selling not only in France, but throughout Europe, are gradually
teaching those who, by their commanding talents, are capable of
becoming the teachers of others; for Bastiat speaks with the greatest
force to the highest order of intellects. At the same time, he is
almost the only political economist whose style is brilliant and
fascinating, whilst his irresistible logic is [p005] relieved by
sallies of wit and humour which make his ‹Sophismes› as amusing as
a novel. No critic who has read Bastiat will dare to apply again to
Political Economy the sarcastic epithet of the ‘dreary science.’ His
fame is so well established, that I think it would be presumptuous
to do anything to increase it by any other means than the silent but
certain dissemination of his works by the force of their own great
merits.”
A word as to my mode of rendering Bastiat. I have not aimed at
giving a literal translation. Indeed, the language often employed by
Bastiat hardly admits of literal translation. But the more important
object, I trust, has been attained of conveying fully, plainly, and
intelligibly the author’s precise meaning.
The materials of the following notice of the life and writings of
Bastiat have been borrowed partly from a short account of him in
the ‹Dictionnaire de l’Économie Politique›, partly from the Memoir
and Correspondence prefixed to the author’s ‹Œuvres Complètes›, and
partly from an able article in the ‹Revue des Deux Mondes› from the
pen of M. Louis Reybaud.
P. J. S.
CONTENTS.
Page
Notice of the Life and Writings of Frédéric Bastiat, 9
To the Youth of France, 33
«Chapter I.» Natural and Artificial Organization, 47
II. Wants, Efforts, Satisfactions, 63
III. Wants of Man, 75
IV. Exchange, 97
V. Of Value, 131
VI. Wealth, 180
VII. Capital, 196
VIII. Property—Community, 218
IX. Landed Property, 249
X. Competition, 288
XI. Producer—Consumer, 323
XII. The Two Aphorisms, 339
XIII. Rent, 347
XIV. Wages, 352
XV. Saving, 393
XVI. Population, 397
XVII. Private and Public Services, 425
XVIII. Disturbing Causes, 446
XIX. War, 454
XX. Responsibility, 465
XXI. Solidarity, 488
XXII. Social Motive Force, 495
XXIII. Existence of Evil, 504
XXIV. Perfectibility, 508
XXV. Relations of Political Economy with Religion, 513
Index, 518
NOTICE OF THE
LIFE AND WRITINGS OF FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT.
«Frédéric Bastiat», whose last and greatest, though, alas! unfinished
work—the ‹Harmonies Économiques›—I now venture to introduce to the
English public, was born at Bayonne, on the 19th of June 1801. His
father, an eminent merchant of Bayonne, died young, and his wife
having died before him, Frédéric, their only child, was left an
orphan at the early age of nine years.
The care of his education devolved on his paternal grandfather, who
was proprietor of a land estate near Mugron, in the arrondissement of
Saint-Sever. His aunt, Mademoiselle Justine Bastiat, acted towards
him the part of a mother, and her affection was warmly reciprocated
by Bastiat, who, to the day of his death, never ceased to regard her
with filial love and reverence.
Bastiat’s education was begun at Bayonne, continued at Saint-Sever,
and finished at the College of Sorèze. Here his course of study was
occasionally interrupted by indisposition; but, on his recovery,
his quick parts and steady application soon enabled him to overtake
and keep pace with his fellow-students. At Sorèze. Bastiat formed
a boyish friendship with M. Calmètes, to whom his earliest letters
are addressed. The attachment of the youths was so remarkable, that
the masters permitted them to prepare their exercises together, and
sign them with their joint names. In this way they gained a prize for
poetry. The prize was a gold medal, which, of course, could not be
divided. “Keep it,” said Bastiat to his friend: “I am an orphan; you
have both father and mother, and the medal of right falls to them.”
In 1818, Bastiat left College, and, in compliance with the wishes
of his family, entered his uncle’s counting-house at Bayonne. His
[p010] tastes, however, were for study rather than for business,
and while at Bayonne he devoted his leisure hours by turns to
French, English, and Italian literature. “I aim at nothing less,” he
said, “than to become acquainted with politics, history, geography,
mathematics, mechanics, natural history, botany, and four or five
languages.” He was fond of music, sang agreeably, and played well on
the violoncello.
In 1824, he began to study the works of the leading Economists of
France and England—Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say, and Destutt de
Tracy; and even at this early period he took an interest in the
English free-trade measures of Mr Huskisson. From this time he may be
said to have devoted his life to his favourite science.
On the death of his grandfather, in 1825, he gave up commerce as
a profession, and took up his residence on his paternal estate
at Mugron, in the cultivation of which he was at first induced
to engage, but without much success, and he soon relinquished
agriculture, as he had before abandoned trade. Business, in truth,
was not his vocation; he had no turn for details; he cared little
for money; his wants were few and simple; and he had no intention,
as he says in one of his letters, to undergo irksome labour for
three-fourths of his life to ensure for the remainder a useless
superfluity.
It was at this period, and at Mugron, that he formed his lifelong
friendship with M. Felix Coudroy, to whom so much of his
correspondence is addressed, and to whom, a short time before his
death, he had thought of committing the task of finishing the
second volume of the ‹Harmonies›. The two friends, whose tastes and
pursuits were the same, were constantly together,—reading, walking,
or conversing. If Bastiat, whose ardent nature was impatient of
plodding and systematic application, received a new book from Paris,
he immediately carried it to Coudroy, who examined it, and noted the
remarkable passages, which he read afterwards to his friend. Bastiat
would often content himself with such fragments; and it was only when
the book interested him deeply, that he would carry it off to read it
carefully by himself. On these days, says his biographer, music was
laid aside, and the violoncello was mute. It was thus, he continues,
that the two friends passed their lives together, lodging a few paces
from each other, seeing one another three times a-day, sometimes in
their chambers, sometimes in long walks, sauntering together, book
in hand. Works of philosophy, history, politics, religion, poetry,
travels, biography, political economy, socialist [p011] works of
the day,—all passed under the ordeal of this double intelligence. It
was in these conversations that the ideas of Bastiat were developed,
and his thoughts matured. When anything struck him particularly, he
would set to work of a morning and put it into shape without effort.
In this way he wrote his ‹Sophismes›, his article on the French
and English tariffs, etc. It was this literary friendship, which
lasted for more than twenty years, without being once clouded by the
slightest disagreement, which prepared the mind of Bastiat for the
gigantic efforts he was destined afterwards to make, and enabled him,
during the last five years of his life, amid disease and distraction,
to give to the world that mass of original and varied ideas which
compose the six volumes of his collected works.[2]
In the events to which the expulsion of the elder branch of the
Bourbons gave rise in 1830, Bastiat took an active interest. Bayonne
had pronounced in favour of the new order of things. The citadel
alone held out, and continued to display the white flag; and a
concentration of Spanish troops on the frontier was spoken of.
Bastiat did not hesitate. Quitting Mugron, he hurried to Bayonne to
take part in the movement. In conjunction with some of his friends,
he prepared a proclamation, formed an association of six hundred
determined young men, and did not despair of reducing the citadel by
a ‹coup de main›. Happily their martial ardour was not put to the
proof. Before the march of events all resistance gave way, and that
same day the citadel opened its gates. In place of a battle, there
was a feast;—punch, wine, and Béranger enlivened the evening;—and
the officers, like horses just let loose from the stable, were the
merriest of the party.[3] Such was the beginning and the end of
Bastiat’s military career.
In 1831, he became ‹Juge de Paix› of the Canton of Mugron, and, in
1832, a Member of the Council-General of the Landes. The confidence
and esteem of his neighbourhood would have invested him with a trust
still more important, by sending him as a representative to the
Chamber of Deputies; but in this, after three fruitless attempts,
his friends were defeated, and Bastiat did not succeed in becoming a
legislator until after the Revolution of February 1848.
He published, in 1834, ‹Réflexions sur les Pétitions de Bordeaux, le
Havre et Lyon, concernant les douanes›,—a brochure of great vigour,
and which contains the germ of the theory of Value developed fifteen
years afterwards in the ‹Harmonies›. [p012]
In 1840, Bastiat visited Spain and Portugal; and after a sojourn of
some months at Madrid, and afterwards at Lisbon, with great benefit
to his health, he sailed thence for England, and spent a few weeks
in London. On his return to Mugron, he wrote his pamphlet, ‹Le Fisc
et la Vigne›, in which he protests against certain new duties with
which the wine-trade of his native province was threatened. In this
brochure[4] he gives a characteristic anecdote of Napoleon. At the
outset, the duties imposed were so moderate that the receipts would
scarcely defray the cost of collection. The Minister of Finance
remonstrated, and represented that these imposts were making the
Government unpopular, without any benefit to the revenue. “You are a
noodle, Monsieur Maret,” said the Emperor; “since the nation grumbles
at some light burdens, what would have been the consequence had I
added heavy taxes? Accustom them, first of all, to the exercise; and
then we can reform the tariff.” The great captain, adds Bastiat, was
also a skilful financier. Begin by inserting the thin end of the
wedge—accustom them to the exercise—such is the history of all taxes.
In 1843, appeared another pamphlet, entitled ‹Mémoire sur la
question vinicole›; and in 1844, ‹Mémoire sur la répartition de
l’impôt foncier dans le Département des Landes›,—both productions of
extraordinary ability, but having reference principally to questions
of local interest and importance. The great subject of Free Trade, to
which he was afterwards to devote his vast powers, had then assumed
in his mind rather the form of a vague dream of what might perchance
be realized under favourable circumstances at some far distant day,
than of a thing in sober reality to be expected or hoped for. It was
an accidental circumstance which first directed his attention to what
was then passing in England under the auspices of the Anti-corn-law
League.
Among the circle which Bastiat frequented at Mugron there prevailed
a strong prejudice, or rather an inveterate hatred, against England;
and Bastiat, who had cultivated English literature, and imbibed
English ideas, had often to break a lance with his acquaintances on
the subject of this unfounded dislike. One of these ‹Anglophobes›,
accosting him one day, handed him a newspaper. “Read that,” said
he with bitterness, “and see how your friends are treating us!” It
was a translation of a speech of Sir Robert Peel in the House of
Commons, which concluded with the words—“If we adopt this course,
we shall fall, ‹like France›, to the lowest rank among nations.”
His country was insulted, and Bastiat had not a word to say. On
reflection, however, it did [p013] appear strange to him that the
Prime Minister of England should entertain such an opinion of France,
and still more so, that, entertaining it, he should express it openly
and offensively in his place in Parliament. To clear up the matter,
Bastiat wrote instantly to Paris, and became a subscriber to an
English newspaper, requesting that all the numbers for the preceding
month might be sent to him. In a few days the ‹Globe and Traveller›
made its appearance at Mugron, containing Sir Robert Peel’s speech,
when it was discovered that the words “like France,” maliciously
introduced into the French version of it, were ‹not› there, and, in
fact, had never been uttered.
Bastiat continued to read the ‹Globe›, and soon made the more
important discovery that a formidable agitation was at that time
going on in England to which the French newspapers never once
alluded. The Anti-corn-law League was shaking the basis of the
old commercial legislation of England. For two years Bastiat was
thus enabled to watch the progress of the movement, and at length
began to entertain the idea of making known to his countrymen—and,
perhaps, of inducing them to imitate—the important reform about to be
accomplished on the other side of the channel.
It was this feeling which prompted him to send to the ‹Journal des
Économistes› his first contribution, ‹Sur l’influence des tarifs
Anglais et Français›. This article, bearing a signature till then
unknown, and coming from the remote Department of the Landes, was at
once accepted, and created a profound impression. Like Lord Byron,
after the publication of ‹Childe Harold›, Bastiat “awoke one morning
and found himself famous.” Compliments and encouragements showered in
upon him from every side. Further contributions were solicited, and
were sent. The ice was broken, and he was fairly afloat as an author.
Whilst contributing various articles to the ‹Journal›—among others,
the first series of the ‹Sophismes Économiques›—Bastiat began to
write the history of the English Anti-corn-law League; and, in order
to obtain fuller information and more copious materials, he opened
a correspondence with Mr Cobden, with whom he continued to exchange
letters at frequent intervals during the remainder of his life.
It was in 1845 that Bastiat went to Paris to superintend the printing
of this work, which he entitled ‹Cobden et la Ligue, où l’agitation
Anglaise pour la liberté des Échanges›. A luminous and spirited
introduction, giving an account of the economical and political state
of England prior to the Anti-corn-law agitation, and describing the
origin, objects, and progress of the league, is [p014] followed by
extracts from the more prominent speeches of Cobden, Bright, Fox,
Thompson, and the other leaders. All this was new in France,—to the
popular mind of that country it might almost be called a revelation.
“I have distributed a hundred copies in Paris,” writes Bastiat to
Cobden, “and they have produced the best impression. Men who, by
their position and pursuits, ought to know what is going on in
England have been surprised on reading it. They could not believe
their eyes. . . . . . If I had combated directly their prejudices,
I should not have succeeded; but, by allowing the free-traders to
speak and act for themselves—in a word, by simply ‹translating›
you—I hope to have given these prejudices a blow which they cannot
recover—if the book be read.” In a subsequent letter, he says,—“Since
my last letter an unexpected movement has manifested itself in the
French press. All the Parisian, and many of the provincial journals,
in reviewing my book, have given an account of the Anti-corn-law
agitation. They do not, it is true, perceive all its bearings, but
public opinion is awakened, which is the essential point.”
To this work, and the service which it rendered to the cause of Free
Trade, and of sound economic ideas, Bastiat some months afterwards
owed his nomination as a Corresponding Member of the Institute. “I
believe this nomination to be in itself of little importance,” he
writes to M. Calmètes, “and I fear many mediocrities have boasted
of the title; but the peculiar circumstances which preceded my
nomination do not permit me to reject your friendly felicitations. I
have published only one book, and of that book the preface alone is
my work. Having returned to seclusion, that preface has worked for
me, and unknown to me; for the same letter which apprized me of my
candidature announced my election. I had never in my life dreamt of
this honour. The book is entitled ‹Cobden et la Ligue›. I now send it
to you, which will save my saying more about it. In 1842 and 1843 I
endeavoured to attract attention to the subject of which it treats.
I addressed articles to the ‹Presse›, to the ‹Mémorial Bordelais›,
and other journals. They were rejected. I saw that my cause was
about to break down under this ‹conspiracy of silence›, and I had no
resource but to write a book. You see, then, why I have become an
author. And now, engaged in that career, I regret it extremely; for
although always fond of Political Economy, I am reluctant to devote
my attention exclusively to that science, and would rather wander
freely over the whole field of human knowledge. Yet in this science
a single question—freedom of international relations—fascinates and
is about to absorb me,—for, perhaps, you may [p015] have seen that
I have been assigned a place in the association which has just been
formed at Bordeaux. Such is the age; you can take no part in public
life without being garrotted in a speciality.”
At Paris, Bastiat had been introduced to all the leading
Economists, and he was delighted with his reception. “Not one of
these gentlemen,” he says to M. Coudroy, “but had read, re-read,
and perfectly understood my three articles. I might have written
a thousand years in the ‹Chalosse›, the ‹Sentinelle›, and the
‹Mémorial›, without finding a single true reader but yourself. Here
one is read, studied, and understood.” By the whole circle Bastiat
was welcomed and feasted. A desire was expressed that he should
become conductor of the ‹Journal des Économistes›, and there was a
proposal to find him a chair of Political Economy.
From Paris he passed over to England, where, in July 1845, he met
with Mr Cobden, Mr Bright, and the other chiefs of the Anti-corn-law
League. In a letter to his friend Coudroy, he thus describes his
reception in London:—“Having installed myself at the hotel (at 10s.
a-day), I sat down to write six letters, to Cobden, Bright, Fox,
Thompson, Wilson, and the Secretary of the League. Then I wrote six
inscriptions on as many copies of my book, and went to bed. This
morning I carried my six volumes to the apartments of the League,
desiring that they might be sent to the parties for whom they were
intended. I was told that Mr Cobden was in town, and was to leave
London to-day for Manchester, and that I should find him in the
midst of preparations for his journey. (An Englishman’s preparations
consist in swallowing a beef-steak, and stuffing a couple of shirts
into a carpet-bag.) I hastened to Cobden’s residence, where I met
him, and had two hours’ talk. He knows French very well, speaks it a
little, and, moreover, I understood his English. I explained to him
the state of opinion in France, the effects I expected from my work,
etc. He was sorry to leave London, and was on the point of giving up
his intended journey. Then he remarked, ‘The League is free-masonry,
except that everything is public. We have a house here, which we have
hired to accommodate our friends during the bazaar; it is empty at
present, and we must instal you there.’ I made some difficulty about
this; and he rejoined, ‘This arrangement may not be agreeable to you,
but it will be of use to the cause, for Messrs Bright, Moore, and
other members of the League pass their evenings there, and we must
have you always in the midst of them.’ However, as I am to join him
at Manchester the day after to-morrow, I thought it [p016] hardly
worth while to shift my quarters for a couple of days. He took me
afterwards to the Reform Club, a magnificent establishment, and left
me in the library while he took a bath. He afterwards wrote letters
to Bright and Moore, and I accompanied him to the railway. In the
evening I called on Mr Bright. . . . . . Obliged to speak slowly,
in order to make myself understood, and upon subjects which were
familiar to me, and with men who had all our ideas, I found myself
placed in the most favourable circumstances. He took me afterwards to
the Parliament,” etc.
On his return from England, Bastiat again took refuge in his retreat
at Mugron, where he had his time entirely at his own disposal; but
he was not long suffered to enjoy his literary leisure. In February
1846, he assisted in organizing a Free-Trade Association at Bordeaux,
and afterwards went to Paris with a similar object. In this he was
destined to experience innumerable difficulties, not the least of
which arose from his supposed attachment to English opinions. He
imagined the reform of the English tariff might be the means of
furthering a similar reform in France, but in this he soon found that
he was greatly mistaken.
“Of all the prejudices which reign among us,” says M. Louis Reybaud,
in his admirable notice of Bastiat in the ‹Revue des Deux Mondes›,[5]
“there is none more deeply rooted than distrust of England. It is
enough that England leans to one side to induce us to incline to the
other. Everything which England proposes is suspected by us, and we
not unwillingly detect an ambush in all her measures. In matters of
trade this disposition is especially manifested. In vain we imagine
that England in her reforms has only her own interest in view,—her
true object is only to mislead and ruin us by her seductions! If we
give way we shall be fools or dupes. Such is the language of national
opinion; and although enlightened men resist it, that opinion does
not the less prevail and exhibit itself on all occasions. Better
informed in regard to this bias of public opinion, Bastiat would have
seen that the moment was not opportune, and that in the face of the
English agitation he would have done better to delay, than to hasten,
any agitation in France which might seem to be inspired by the spirit
or example of England.”
In fact, it was upon this rock mainly that Bastiat’s Free-trade
enterprise ultimately foundered, and he soon became convinced of the
intensity of the prejudice against which he had to struggle. In a
letter to Mr Cobden, written in December 1846, he says,—“This cry
against England stifles us, and gives rise to formidable [p017]
obstacles. If this hatred to ‹perfidious Albion› were only the
fashion of the day, I should wait patiently until it passed away.
But it has deep root in men’s hearts. It is universal, and I believe
I told you that my friends dare no longer talk of me in my own
village, but ‹en famille›. This blind passion, moreover, is found so
convenient by protected interests and political parties, that they
avail themselves of it in the most shameless manner.”
Other circumstances contributed to discourage Bastiat: “I suffer from
my poverty,” he tells Mr Cobden. “If, instead of running from one to
another on foot, splashed and bespattered to the back, in order to
meet only one or two people a-day, and obtain evasive and dilatory
answers, I could assemble them at my table in a rich ‹salon›, how
many difficulties would be removed! I want neither head nor heart,
but I feel that this superb Babylon is not the place for me, and I
must hasten back to my solitude.” His heart was constantly reverting
to the happy and peaceful days he had passed at Mugron. “I suffer,”
he says in a letter to Coudroy, “from leaving Mugron, and my old
habits, my desultory labours, and our nice little chats. It is a
frightful ‹déchirement›; but can I recede?” “Paris and I are not made
for each other.” “Often I think of Mugron, its philosophic calm, and
its fruitful leisure. Here life is wasted in doing nothing, or at
least in producing nothing.”
Bastiat’s appearance in Paris at this epoch is thus described by one
of his friends. “He had not had time to call in the assistance of a
Parisian hatter and tailor,” says M. de Molinari; “and with his long
hair, his tiny hat, his ample frock-coat, and his family umbrella,
you would have been apt to mistake him for an honest peasant, who had
come to town for the first time to see the wonders of the metropolis.
But the physiognomy of this apparent clown was arch and spiritual;
his large black eye was luminous, and his square well-proportioned
forehead bore the impress of thought.”
“I remember, as if it were yesterday,” says M. Louis Reybaud, “the
impression which he produced. It was impossible to see a more
characteristic specimen of a provincial scholar, simple in his
manner, and plain in his attire. But, under that homely garb, and
that air of ‹bonhomie›, there were flashes of intelligence, and a
native dignity of deportment; and you were not long in discovering an
honest heart and a generous soul. The eye, above all, was lighted up
with singular brightness and fire. His emaciated features and livid
complexion betrayed already the ravages of that disease which, in
a few years, was destined to carry him off. His [p018] voice was
hollow, and formed a contrast with the vivacity of his ideas and
the briskness of his gestures. When the conversation was animated,
his voice became feebler, and his lungs performed their office with
difficulty. Better taken care of, his constitution, feeble as it was,
might have lasted a long time. But Bastiat took counsel only of his
energy. He never thought of how many days he had to live, but how he
might employ them well.”[6]
“I accept resolutely the hard life on which I am about to enter,” he
says in one of his letters. “What gives me courage is not the ‹non
omnis moriar› of Horace, but the thought that, perhaps, my life may
not have been useless to mankind.”[7]
During the eighteen months that the Free-trade Association lasted,
Bastiat’s life was one of feverish activity and incessant unremitting
toil. Before the doors of the Association could be opened to the
public, a Government ‹autorisation› had to be obtained; and it was
obtained at length with much difficulty and after long delay. On
Bastiat, as secretary, the care of all the arrangements devolved.
He had to communicate with journalists, wait upon ministers, issue
manifestoes, organize committees, obtain subscriptions, correspond
with branch associations, undertake journeys to Lyons, to Marseilles,
to Havre, attend meetings, make speeches, besides conducting a
weekly newspaper, called the ‹Libre-Échange›—the organ of the
Association—and contributing numerous articles to other newspapers,
and to the ‹Journal des Économistes›. “If at daybreak he observed a
Protectionist sophism appear in a newspaper of any reputation,” says
M. de Molinari, “he would immediately seize his pen, demolish the
sophism before breakfast, and our language counted one ‹chef-d’œuvre›
the more.”
It is to the marvellous exertions of this period that we owe the
‹Sophismes Économiques›,—a work which arose out of the circumstances
in which Bastiat found himself placed; and which, although written
from day to day, amid the distractions we have described, exhibits
his genius in its most brilliant light. “As examples of dialectical
skill in reducing an opponent to absurdity,” says Professor Cairnes,
“of simple and felicitous illustration, of delicate and polished
raillery, attaining occasionally the pitch of a refined irony,
the ‹Sophismes Économiques› may almost claim a place beside the
‹Provincial Letters›.” Sprightly, lucid, and conclusive, full of
fire and irony, playfulness and wit, these two little volumes afford
the most unanswerable reply ever given to the [p019] fallacies of
the Protectionist school; and, had Bastiat written nothing else,
they would have conferred on him a just title to be regarded as the
most distinguished economist of his day. The ‹Sophismes› have been
translated into four languages, and are the best known, if not the
most original, of all the works of their lamented author.
The success of the work was instant and complete. Bastiat at first
complained that “three or four pleasantries had made the fortune of
the book, while the serious parts were neglected;” but he afterwards
confessed that “parables and pleasantries had more success, and
effected more good, than the best treatises.” Of these pleasantries,
‹The Candlemakers’ Petition›, in the first series of the ‹Sophismes›,
is perhaps the happiest, and I cannot forbear presenting the reader
with a translation of this choice morsel:—
«Petition» of the Manufacturers of Candles, Wax-Lights, Lamps,
Candlesticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, Extinguishers, and of the
Producers of Oil, Tallow, Rosin, Alcohol, and, generally, of
everything connected with Lighting,
«To Messieurs the Members of the Chamber of Deputies.»
«Gentlemen»,—You are on the right road. You reject abstract
theories, and have little consideration for cheapness and plenty.
Your chief care is the interest of the producer. You desire to
emancipate him from external competition, and reserve the ‹national
market› for ‹national industry›.
We are about to offer you an admirable opportunity of applying
your—what shall we call it? your theory? No; nothing is more
deceptive than theory; your doctrine? your system? your
principle?—but you dislike doctrines, you abhor systems, and as for
principles, you deny that there are any in Social Economy: we shall
say, then, your practice, your practice without theory and without
principle.
We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign
rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to ours
for the production of light, that he absolutely ‹inundates› our
‹national market› with it at a price fabulously reduced. The moment
he shows himself, our trade leaves us—all consumers apply to him;
and a branch of native industry, having countless ramifications,
is all at once rendered completely stagnant. This rival, who is
no other than the Sun, wages war to the knife against us, and we
suspect he has been raised up by ‹perfidious Albion› (good policy
as times go); inasmuch as he displays towards that haughty island a
circumspection with which he dispenses in our case.
What we pray for is, that it may please you to pass a law ordering
the shutting up of all Windows, Sky-lights, Dormer-windows, Outside
and Inside Shutters, Curtains, Blinds, Bull’s-eyes; in a word, of
all Openings, Holes, Chinks, Clefts, and Fissures, by or through
which the light of the Sun has been allowed to enter houses, to the
prejudice of the meritorious manufactures with which we flatter
ourselves we have accommodated our country,—a country which, in
gratitude, ought not to abandon us now to a strife so unequal.
We trust, Gentlemen, that you will not regard this our request as a
satire, or refuse it without at least previously hearing the reasons
which we have to urge in its support.
And, first, if you shut up as much as possible all access to natural
light, and create a demand for artificial light, which of our French
manufactures will not be encouraged by it?
If more tallow is consumed, then there must be more oxen and sheep;
and, consequently, we shall behold the increase of artificial
meadows, meat, wool, hides, and, above all, manure, which is the
basis and foundation of all agricultural wealth.
If more oil is consumed, then we shall have an extended cultivation
of the poppy, of the olive, and of rape. These rich and exhausting
plants will come at the right [p020] time to enable us to avail
ourselves of the increased fertility which the rearing of additional
cattle will impart to our lands.
Our heaths will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of
bees will, on the mountains, gather perfumed treasures, now wasting
their fragrance on the desert air, like the flowers from which
they are derived. No branch of agriculture but will then exhibit a
cheering development.
The same remark applies to navigation. Thousands of vessels will
proceed to the whale fishery; and, in a short time, we shall possess
a navy capable of maintaining the honour of France, and gratifying
the patriotic aspirations of your petitioners, the undersigned
Candlemakers and others.
But what shall we say of the manufacture of ‹articles de Paris›?
Henceforth you will behold gildings, bronzes, crystals, in
candlesticks, in lamps, in lustres, in candelabra, shining forth, in
spacious warerooms, compared with which those of the present day can
be regarded but as mere shops.
No poor ‹Resinier› from his heights on the sea-coast, no Coal-miner
from the depth of his sable gallery, but will rejoice in higher
wages and increased prosperity.
Only have the goodness to reflect, Gentlemen, and you will be
convinced that there is, perhaps, no Frenchman, from the wealthy
coal-master to the humblest vender of lucifer matches, whose lot
will not be ameliorated by the success of this our Petition.
We foresee your objections, Gentlemen, but we know that you can
oppose to us none but such as you have picked up from the effete
works of the partisans of Free Trade. We defy you to utter a single
word against us which will not instantly rebound against yourselves
and your entire policy.
You will tell us that, if we gain by the protection which we seek,
the country will lose by it, because the consumer must bear the loss.
We answer:
You have ceased to have any right to invoke the interest of the
consumer; for, whenever his interest is found opposed to that of the
producer, you sacrifice the former. You have done so for the purpose
of ‹encouraging labour› and ‹increasing employment›. For the same
reason, you should do so again.
You have yourselves obviated this objection. When you are told
that the consumer is interested in the free importation of iron,
coal, corn, textile fabrics,—yes, you reply, but the producer is
interested in their exclusion. Well, be it so;—if consumers are
interested in the free admission of natural light, the producers of
artificial light are equally interested in its prohibition.
But, again, you may say that the producer and consumer are
identical. If the manufacturer gain by protection, he will make the
agriculturist also a gainer; and, if agriculture prospers, it will
open a vent to manufactures. Very well; if you confer upon us the
monopoly of furnishing light during the day,—first of all, we shall
purchase quantities of tallow, coals, oils, resinous substances,
wax, alcohol,—besides silver, iron, bronze, crystal—to carry on
our manufactures; and then we and those who furnish us with such
commodities, having become rich, will consume a great deal, and
impart prosperity to all the other branches of our national industry.
If you urge that the light of the Sun is a gratuitous gift of
nature, and that to reject such gifts is to reject wealth itself
under pretence of encouraging the means of acquiring it, we would
caution you against giving a death-blow to your own policy. Remember
that hitherto you have always repelled foreign products, ‹because›
they approximate more nearly than home products to the character of
gratuitous gifts. To comply with the exactions of other monopolists,
you have only ‹half a motive›; and to repulse us simply because
we stand on a stronger vantage ground than others, would be to
adopt the equation, + × + = -; in other words, it would be to heap
‹absurdity› upon ‹absurdity›.
Nature and human labour co-operate in various proportions (depending
on countries and climates) in the production of commodities. The
part which nature executes is always gratuitous; it is the part
executed by human labour which constitutes value, and is paid for.
If a Lisbon orange sells for half the price of a Paris orange, it is
because natural, and consequently gratuitous heat, does for the one,
what artificial, and therefore expensive heat, must do for the other.
When an orange comes to us from Portugal, we may conclude that
it is furnished in part gratuitously, in part for an onerous
consideration; in other words, it comes to us at ‹half-price› as
compared with those of Paris.
Now, it is precisely the ‹gratuitous half› (pardon the word) which
we contend should be excluded. You say, how can national labour
sustain competition with foreign labour, when the former has all the
work to do, and the latter only does one-half,—the Sun supplying
the remainder? But if this ‹half›, being ‹gratuitous›, determines
[p021] you to exclude competition, how should the ‹whole›,
being ‹gratuitous›, induce you to admit competition? If you were
consistent, you would, while excluding as hurtful to native industry
what is half gratuitous, exclude, ‹a fortiori› and with double zeal,
that which is altogether gratuitous.
Once more, when products, such as coal, iron, corn, or textile
fabrics, are sent us from abroad, and we can acquire them with less
labour than if we made them ourselves, the difference is a free
gift conferred upon us. The gift is more or less considerable in
proportion as the difference is more or less great. It amounts to a
quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product, when
the foreigner only asks us for three-fourths, a half, or a quarter
of the price we should otherwise pay. It is as perfect and complete
as it can be, when the donor (like the Sun in furnishing us with
light) asks us for nothing. The question, and we ask it formally,
is this, Do you desire for our country the benefit of gratuitous
consumption, or the pretended advantages of onerous production? Make
your choice, but be logical; for as long as you exclude as you do,
coal, iron, corn, foreign fabrics, ‹in proportion› as their price
approximates to ‹zero›, what inconsistency would it be to admit the
light of the Sun, the price of which is already at ‹zero› during the
entire day!
In addition to his other engrossing avocations in Paris, Bastiat,
in the end of 1847 and beginning of 1848, delivered a course of
lectures to young men on the principles of Political Economy and
the Harmony of the Social Laws. He had no opportunity of committing
these lectures to writing, as he wished, but we have doubtless
the substance of them in his published works, especially in the
‹Harmonies Économiques›. “Something tells me,” he says in one of his
letters to M. Coudroy, “that this course addressed to the young, who
have logic in their heads, and warmth and fervour in their hearts,
will not be useless.” “My auditors,” he says elsewhere, “are not very
numerous; but they attend assiduously, and take notes. The seed falls
into good ground.”
It was in the midst of these harassing occupations and herculean
exertions that the Revolution of February came to surprise
Bastiat,—to put an end to the Free-trade Association,—and to bring
a far more formidable set of agitators—namely, the Socialists and
Communists—to the surface of society. Bastiat doubted if his country
was ripe for a Republic; but when it came, he gave in his adhesion
to it, and was returned by his native Department of the Landes as
a Deputy to the Constituent, and afterwards to the Legislative
Assembly. He took his seat on the left, says his accomplished
friend and biographer M. de Fontenay, in an attitude of moderation
and firmness; and, whilst remaining somewhat isolated, he was
surrounded with the respect of all parties. A Member of the Committee
of Finance, of which he was named Vice-President eight times in
succession, he exercised a very marked influence on that department,
although quietly and within doors. The increasing feebleness of his
lungs prevented his often ascending the tribune or addressing the
Assembly, although it was often a hard trial for him to be thus,
as it were, nailed to his seat.[8] It is to this he alludes in the
second chapter [p022] of the ‹Harmonies›:—“If, when the much-loved
vessel of the State is beaten by the tempest, I sometimes appear to
absent myself from my post in order to collect my scattered thoughts,
it is because I feel my feeble hands unfitted for the work. Is it,
besides, to betray my mission to reflect upon the causes of the
tempest itself, and endeavour to act upon these causes? And then,
what I find I cannot do to-day, who knows but it may be given me to
accomplish to-morrow?”
In a letter to M. Coudroy, in June 1848, Bastiat thus describes his
daily occupations:—“I rise at six o’clock, dress, shave, breakfast,
and read the newspapers; this occupies me till seven, or half-past
seven. About nine, I am obliged to go out, for at ten commences the
sitting of the Committee of Finance, of which I am a member. It
continues till one, and then the public sitting begins, and continues
till seven. I return to dinner, and it very rarely happens that there
are not after-dinner meetings of Sub-Committees charged with special
questions. The only hour at my disposal is from eight to nine in the
morning, and it is at that hour that I receive visitors. . . . . I am
profoundly disgusted with this kind of life.”
But the grand work of Bastiat in 1848 and 1849—a work to which he
devoted the best energies of his mind and genius—was the open and
incessant war which he waged with the Socialist and Communist writers
and agitators whom the Revolution had let loose on French society,
and who were then shaking the social and political fabric to its
centre. Bastiat, like the porcupine, had a quill pointed against
every assailant. To each error he opposed a pamphlet. With Louis
Blanc and the national workshops, he did battle in the brochure
entitled ‹Propriété et Loi›, in which he exposes the illusions
with which the public mind had been stuffed by the Socialists.
The doctrine of Concidérant he attacked in another little volume,
bearing the title, ‹Propriété et Spoliation›. In another, ‹Justice
et Fraternité›, he demolished the absurdities of Pierre Leroux’s
democratic and social constitution. Proudhon’s doctrine he disposed
of in ‹Capital et Rente›, where he refutes the foolish notions in
vogue in 1848 on the subject of gratuitous loans—a subject which he
again discussed in 1850, in the larger volume entitled ‹Gratuité du
Credit›. In ‹Protectionisme et Communisme›, Bastiat demonstrated that
what is called ‹protection› is nothing else than practical communism
or spoliation. ‹Paix et Liberté, ou le Budget Républicain›, another
brochure from his prolific pen, is a brilliant and vigorous onslaught
on the excessive taxation of that day, and the overgrown military and
naval armaments which gave [p023] rise to it. Many passages of this
admirable production, full of force and practical good sense, might
be read with benefit at the present day, as applicable not only to
France as it was, but to France as it is, and not to France alone,
but to the other nations of Europe.
In the tract entitled ‹L’État›, Bastiat maintains his favourite
doctrine that all which a Government owes to its subjects is
security; that, as it acts necessarily through the intervention of
force, it can equitably enforce nothing save Justice; and that its
duty consists in holding the balance equal among various interests,
by guarding the liberty of all, by protecting person and property,
by enforcing covenants, and thereby upholding credit, but leaving
Demand and Supply in all cases to perform their appropriate functions
without restraint and without encouragement. He exposes the absurdity
of men expecting everything from Government, and trusting to public
employments rather than to individual exertion. He shows that, since
the State is only an aggregate of individuals, it can give nothing
to the people but what it has previously taken from them. ‹Tout le
monde›, as he says elsewhere, ‹veut vivre aux dépens de l’état, et on
oublie que l’état vit aux dépens de tout le monde›.
To this tract another is appended, to which he gives the quaint
title of ‹Maudit Argent!› in which he exposes the popular errors
which arise from confounding capital with money, and money with
inconvertible paper. In this little work, Bastiat of course could
not treat the subject systematically and in detail, as M. Michel
Chevalier has since done in his philosophical treatise ‹Sur la
Monnaie›;[9] but Bastiat’s tract contains many excellent passages.
The effect of an enlargement of the volume of currency on the value
of money, for instance, is thus happily illustrated:—
Ten men sat down to play a game, in which they agreed to stake
1000 francs. Each man was provided with ten counters—each counter
representing ten francs. When the game was finished, each received
as many times ten francs as he happened to have counters. One of the
party, who was more of an arithmetician than a logician, remarked
that he always found at the end of the game that he was richer in
proportion as he had a greater number of counters, and asked the
others if they had observed the same thing. What holds in my case,
said he, must hold in yours, for what is true of each must be true
of all. He proposed, therefore, that each should have double the
former number of counters. No sooner said than done. Double the
number of counters were distributed; but, when the party finally
rose from play they found themselves no richer than before. The
stake had not been increased, and fell to be proportionally divided.
Each man, no doubt, had double the number of counters, but each
counter, instead of being worth ten francs, was found to be worth
only five; and it was at length discovered that what is true of each
is ‹not› always true of all.
The pamphlets, ‹Baccalauréat et Socialisme›, and ‹Ce qu’on voit
et ce qu’on ne voit pas›, belong to the following year, 1850,
the last [p024] of the author’s life. In the first of these,
Bastiat complains of the monopoly of university degrees, and
the too exclusive addiction of his countrymen to classical
learning—especially Greek and Roman history—to which he attributes
much of that democratic and revolutionary fervour which was ever and
anon breaking out in France.
The second, ‹Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas›, is a masterpiece
worthy of the author of the ‹Sophismes›, and well deserves its second
title of “Political Economy in One Lesson.” The following extract
from the first chapter of this admirable little work will give the
reader some idea of the argument, and of Bastiat’s lively manner of
treating a subject in itself so dry and uninviting:—
«The Broken Pane.»
Have you ever had occasion to witness the fury of the honest
burgess, Jacques Bonhomme, when his scapegrace son has broken a
pane of glass? If you have, you cannot fail to have observed that
all the bystanders, were there thirty of them, lay their heads
together to offer the unfortunate proprietor this never-failing
consolation,—“There is some good in every misfortune—such accidents
give a fillip to trade. Everybody must live. If no windows were
broken, what would become of the glaziers?”
Now, this formula of condolence contains a theory, which it is
proper to lay hold of, ‹flagrante delicto›, in this very simple
case, because it is exactly the same theory which unfortunately
governs the greater part of our economic institutions.
Assuming that it becomes necessary to expend six francs in repairing
the damage, if you mean to say that the accident brings in six
francs to the glazier, and to that extent encourages his trade, I
grant it fairly and frankly, and allow that you reason justly. The
glazier arrives, does his work, pockets his money, rubs his hands,
and blesses the scapegrace son. This is ‹what we see›.
But if, by way of deduction, you come to conclude, as is too often
done, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it makes money
circulate, and that encouragement to trade in general is the result,
I am obliged to cry halt! Your theory stops at ‹what we see›, and
takes no account of ‹what we don’t see›.
‹We don’t see› that, since our burgess has been obliged to spend his
six francs on one thing, he can no longer spend them on another—‹We
don’t see› that, if he had not had this pane to replace, he would
have replaced, for example, his shoes, which are down at the heels,
or placed a new book on his shelf. In short, he would have employed
his six francs in a way in which he cannot now employ them.
Let us see, then, how the account stands with trade ‹in general›.
The pane being broken, the glazier’s trade is benefited to the
extent of six francs. This is ‹what we see›.
If the pane had not been broken, the shoemaker’s (or some other)
trade would have been encouraged to the extent of six francs. That
is what ‹we don’t see›.
And if we take into account what ‹we don’t see›, which is a
negative fact, as well as what ‹we do see›, which is a positive
fact, we shall discover that trade ‹in general›, or the aggregate
of ‹national industry›, has no interest, one way or other, whether
windows are broken or not.
Let us see, again, how the account stands with Jacques Bonhomme.
On the last hypothesis—that of the pane being broken—he spends six
francs, and gets neither more nor less than he had before,—namely,
the use and enjoyment of a pane of glass.
On the other hypothesis,—namely, that the accident had not happened,
he would have expended six francs on shoes, and would have had the
use and enjoyment both of the shoes and of the pane of glass.
Now, as the good burgess, Jacques Bonhomme constitutes a fraction of
society at large, we are forced to conclude that society, taken in
the aggregate, and after all accounts of labour and enjoyment have
been squared, has lost the value of the pane which has been broken.
Whence, on generalizing, we arrive at this unexpected conclusion,
that “Society loses the value of things uselessly destroyed;” and
we arrive also at this aphorism, which will make the hair of the
prohibitionists stand on end, that “to smash, break, [p025] and
dissipate is not to encourage national industry;” or, more briefly,
that “there is no profit in destruction.”
The reader will take notice that there are not two persons only, but
three, in the little drama to which we have called his attention.
One of them—namely, Jacques Bonhomme—represents the consumer,
reduced by destruction to one enjoyment in place of two. The glazier
represents the producer, whose trade is encouraged by the accident.
The third is the shoemaker (or some other tradesman), whose trade is
discouraged to the same extent by the same cause. It is this third
personage who is always kept in the shade, and who, as representing
‹what we don’t see›, is a necessary element in the problem. It is he
who enables us to discover how absurd it is to try to find profit
in destruction. It is he who will soon teach us that it is not less
absurd to try to discover profit in restriction, which is, after
all, only partial destruction. Go to the bottom of all the arguments
which are urged in favour of restriction, and you will find only a
paraphrase of the vulgar saying,—“‹If no windows were broken, what
would the glaziers do?›”
The distinction thus established between immediate effects and
ultimate consequences, between surface appearances and substantial
realities, between ‹what we see and what we don’t see›, the author
proceeds, in the same happy vein, to apply to taxation, the proceeds
of which are said to come back to the labour-market like refreshing
showers,—to overgrown and unnecessary armaments, and extravagant
public works, which are defended as affording employment to the
working-classes,—to industrial and commercial restrictions, which
are justified on the same ground,—to the questions of machinery, of
credit, of colonization, of luxury and unproductive consumption, etc.
The entire work does not extend to eighty pages, and in every one of
its twelve short chapters Bastiat demolishes a specious fallacy or a
pernicious error.
But Bastiat had been for some time meditating a greater, more
elaborate, and more systematic work than any of those of which
we have hitherto spoken; and it is curious to trace in his
correspondence the progress of the ideas which were at length
developed in the ‹Harmonies Économiques›. Writing to M. Coudroy
in June 1845, he says—“If my little treatise of the ‹Sophismes
Économiques› is successful, we may follow it up by another entitled
‹Harmonies Sociales›. It would be of the greatest utility; for it
would meet the desires of an age in search of artificial harmonies
and organizations, by demonstrating the beauty, order, and
progressive principle of the natural and providential harmonies.” In
June 1846, he writes to Mr Cobden, “I must bring out a second edition
of my ‹Sophismes›, and I should wish much to write a little book to
be entitled ‹Harmonies Économiques›. It will be the counterpart of
the other—the first pulls down, the second will build up.” In another
letter, written the year after, he exclaims—“Oh, that the Divine
Goodness would give me yet one year of strength, and permit me to
explain to my young fellow-citizens what I regard as the true social
theory, under the twelve following heads:—‹Wants›, ‹production›,
‹property›, ‹competition›, ‹population›, ‹liberty›, [p026]
‹equality›, ‹responsibility›, ‹solidarity›, ‹fraternity›, ‹unity›,
‹province of public opinion›. I should then without regret, with joy,
resign my life into His hands!”
On the eve of being elected a Deputy to the National Assembly in
1848, he writes from Mugron, “Here I am in my solitude. Would that
I could bury myself here for ever, and work out peacefully this
Economic synthesis which I have in my head, and which will never
leave it! For, unless there occur some sudden change in public
opinion, I am about to be sent to Paris charged with the terrible
mandate of a Representative of the People. If I had health and
strength, I should accept this mission with enthusiasm. But what can
my feeble voice, my sickly and nervous organization, accomplish in
the midst of revolutionary tempests? How much wiser it had been to
devote my last days to working out in silence the great problem of
the social destinies, for something tells me I should have arrived
at a solution! Poor village, humble home of my fathers, I am about
to bid you an eternal adieu; and I quit you with the presentiment
that my name and my life, lost amidst storms, will not have even that
modest utility for which you had prepared me!” . . . .
In his letters to M. Coudroy at this period, we discover the same
idea working and fermenting in the mind of Bastiat, and struggling
for vent and utterance. Amid the anxieties and distractions in which
his duties as a Deputy involved him, he writes—“I am still convinced
that the practice of affairs excludes the possibility of producing
a work truly scientific, and yet I cannot conceal from you that I
always retain that old chimera of my ‹Social Harmonies›; and I cannot
divest myself of the thought that, if I had remained with you, I
should have succeeded in imparting to the world a useful idea. I long
much to make my retreat.” In another letter to the same friend, after
describing his feebleness, and intimating his intention to leave
Paris to try what effect a change to his native air might produce,
he adds—“I must renounce public life, and all my ambition now is to
have three or four months of tranquillity to write my poor ‹Harmonies
Économiques›. They are in my head, but I fear they will never leave
it.” “The crystal,” he says elsewhere, “is formed drop by drop in
silence and obscurity; but retirement, quiet, time, freedom from
care—all are wanting to me.”
In April 1849, he writes again to M. Coudroy, “I have my theory to
work out, and powerful encouragements have reached me opportunely.
I read those words yesterday in an English Review,—‘In Political
Economy, the French school has had [p027] three phases, expressed by
the three names, Quesnay, Say, Bastiat.’ They assign me this rank and
this part prematurely; but it is certain that I have in my head a new
and suggestive idea, which I believe to be true. This idea I have
never developed methodically. It runs accidentally through some of my
articles, and as that has been enough to attract the attention of the
‹savants›, and as it has already had the honour conferred on it of
being considered as forming an ‹epoch› in the science, I am certain
now that, when I give that theory in its complete state to the world,
it will at least be examined. Is not that all I could desire? With
what ardour I am about to turn to account my retirement in order
to elaborate that doctrine, certain as I am to have judges who can
understand it, and who are waiting for it!”
The three months of leisure, so long and so anxiously wished for,
came at last; and in the beginning of 1850 the ‹Harmonies› (or rather
the portions which the author had intended should form the first
volume of that work) made their appearance. The reception of the work
was not at first what might have been expected; and Bastiat, again
in Paris, writes to his friend M. Coudroy, “The ‹Harmonies› pass
unnoticed here, unless by some dozen connoisseurs. I expected this—it
could not be otherwise. I have not even in my favour the wonted zeal
of our own little circle, who accuse me of heterodoxy; but in spite
of this, I am confident that the book will make its way by degrees.
In Germany it has been very differently received. . . . . I pray
Heaven to vouchsafe me a year to write the second volume; after which
I shall sing, ‹Nunc dimittis›.”
To Mr Cobden, in August 1850, he writes—“I went to my native country
to try to cure these unfortunate lungs, which are to me very
capricious servants. I have returned a little better, but afflicted
with a disease of the larynx, accompanied with a complete extinction
of voice. The doctor enjoins absolute silence; and, in consequence, I
am about to pass two months in the country, near Paris. There I shall
try to write the second volume of the ‹Harmonies Économiques›. The
first has been nearly unnoticed by the learned world. I should not be
an ‹author› if I gave in to that judgment. I appeal to the future,
for I am conscious that that book contains an important idea, ‹une
idée mère›, and time will come to my assistance.”
This great work, the child of Bastiat’s anxious hopes, the subject
of his dying thoughts, although at first but coldly received, is
perhaps the most important and the most original contribution which
the science of Political Economy has received since the days [p028]
of Adam Smith. On that most abstruse and difficult subject, the first
principles of Value, it opens up entirely new views; while on almost
every other branch of the subject, it either propounds a new theory,
or corrects and improves the nomenclature of the science. Throughout,
it treats Political Economy (and it is perhaps the only work which
does so, at least systematically) in connexion with final causes, and
demonstrates the Wisdom and Goodness of God in the economy of civil
society. On some questions we may venture to differ from Bastiat. On
the question of Rent, for instance, he would seem to have followed
too implicitly the theory of Mr Carey, the able American Economist;
but Bastiat’s work, as a whole, has a freshness, a vigour, and an
originality which all must admire. He writes like a man thoroughly
in earnest,—a devout believer in the doctrines which he teaches, and
he seldom fails to carry conviction to the mind of his readers. The
leading idea of the work—the harmony of the social laws—is admirable,
and is admirably worked out. The motto of the book, in fact, might
have been the well-known lines of Dryden,—
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason ending full in Man.
Bastiat undertakes to demonstrate the harmony of the Economic
laws,—that is to say, their tendency towards a common design,
which is the progressive improvement of the human race. He proves
convincingly that individual interests, taken in the aggregate, far
from being antagonistic, aid each other mutually; and that, so far is
it from being true that the gain of one is necessarily the loss of
another, each individual, each family, each country has an interest
in the prosperity of all others. He shows that, between agriculturist
and manufacturer, capitalist and labourer, producer and consumer,
native and foreigner, there is in reality no antagonism, but, on
the contrary, a community of interest; and that, in order that the
natural Economic laws should act constantly so as to produce this
result, one thing alone is necessary—namely, respect for Liberty and
Property. His design is best explained in his own words: “I undertake
in this work,” he says, “to demonstrate the Harmony of those laws
of Providence which govern human society. What makes these laws
harmonious and not discordant is, that all principles, all motives,
all springs of action, all interests, co-operate towards a grand
final result, which humanity will never reach by reason of its native
‹imperfection›, [p029] but to which it will always approximate more
and more by reason of its unlimited ‹capability of improvement›. And
that result is, the indefinite approximation of all classes towards a
level, which is always rising; in other words, the ‹equalization› of
individuals in the general ‹amelioration›.”
Bastiat was not one of those pessimists who persist in looking at the
existing fabric of Society as if it were some ill-made, ill-going
clock, requiring constantly to be wound up, and to have its springs
adjusted, its wheels lubricated, and its hands altered and set right.
Far from this, he regarded Society as a self-acting, self-regulating
mechanism, bearing the stamp of the Divine hand by which it was
constructed, and subject to laws and checks not less wise, not less
immutable, not less trustworthy, than the laws which govern the
inanimate and material world.
“God made the country, but man made the towns,” was the exclamation
of an amiable but a morbid poet. He might as well have said—God made
the blossom, but bees make the comb. Reason asks, who then made the
bees? Who made man, with all his noble instincts, and admirable
inventive reasoning and reflective faculties?
A manlier, because a juster, philosophy enabled Bastiat rather to say
with Edmund Burke, “Art is man’s nature.” Looking at the existing
fabric and mechanism of Society, and the beautiful harmony of the
Economic laws which regulate it, he could see nothing to warrant
constant legislative tampering with the affairs of trade. He had
faith in moral and material progress under the empire of Freedom.
Sweeping away all Socialist Utopias and artificial systems of social
organization, he pointed to Society as it exists, and exclaimed,
‹Digitus Dei est hic›. Unlike the sickly poet, he believed that the
same Good and Wise Being who created both town and country, upholds
and sustains them both; and that the laws of Value and Exchange, left
to their own free and beneficent action, are as much His ordinance,
as the laws of motion, attraction, or chemical affinity.[10]
Engaged upon the second volume of the ‹Harmonies›, Bastiat found
his subject growing upon him, and discovered, as he thought, when
too late, that he had not in the first instance perceived all its
bearings. He felt, as he said, crushed by the mass [p030] of
harmonies which presented themselves to him on every side; and
a posthumous note, found among his papers, informs us that this
expansion of his subject under his hand had led him to think of
recasting the entire work. “I had thought at first,” he says, “to
begin with the exposition of ‹Economic Harmonies›, and, consequently,
to treat only of subjects purely economical—‹Value›, ‹Property›,
‹Wealth›, ‹Competition›, ‹Wages›, ‹Population›, ‹Money›, ‹Credit›,
etc. Afterwards, if I had had time and strength, I should have
directed the attention of the reader to the larger subject of
‹Social Harmonies›, and treated of the ‹Human Constitution›, ‹Social
Motives›, ‹Responsibility›, ‹Solidarity›, etc. The work thus
conceived[11] had been begun, when I saw that it was better to mingle
together than to separate these two classes of considerations. But
then logic required that the study of Man should precede the Economic
investigations; and—there was no longer time.”
Alas! the hours of Bastiat were numbered. He ran a desperate
steeple-chase with death, to use the expression of his biographer,
and he lost the day. His mind, his genius, shone as brightly, worked
as intensely, as ever; but the material frame-work was shattered
and in ruins. By the advice of his physicians, after resorting to
the waters of the Pyrenees without benefit, he repaired to Italy
in the autumn of 1850, and took up his residence at Pisa. Scarcely
had he arrived there, when he read in the newspapers a premature
announcement of his own death, and common-place expressions of regret
for the loss of the “great Economist” and “illustrious author.” He
wrote immediately to a friend to contradict the report. “Thank God,”
he says, “I am not dead, or even much [p031] worse. And yet if the
news were true, I must just accept it and submit. I wish all my
friends could acquire in this respect the philosophy I have myself
acquired. I assure you I should breathe my last without pain, and
almost with joy, if I were certain of leaving to the friends who
love me, not poignant regrets, but a gentle, affectionate, somewhat
melancholy remembrance of me.”
After lingering some time at Pisa without improvement, he went on to
Rome. From Rome he writes to M. Coudroy—“Here I am in the Eternal
City, but not much disposed to visit its marvels. I am infinitely
better that I was at Pisa, surrounded as I am with excellent
friends. . . . . I should desire only one thing, to be relieved of
the acute pain which the disease of the windpipe occasions. This
continuity of suffering torments me. Every meal is a punishment.
To eat, drink, speak, cough, are all painful operations. Walking
fatigues me—carriage airings irritate the throat—I can no longer
work, or even read, seriously. You see to what I am reduced. I shall
soon be little better than a dead body, retaining only the faculty
of suffering.” . . . . Even in this state of extreme debility he was
thinking of his favourite but unfinished work. He adds, “If health
is restored to me, and I am enabled to complete the second volume of
the ‹Harmonies›, I shall dedicate it to you. If not, I shall prefix a
short dedication to the second edition of the first volume. On this
last hypothesis, which implies the end of my career, I can explain my
plan, and bequeath to you the task of fulfilling it.”
Bastiat’s career was in reality fast drawing to a close. His
end was calm and serene. He seemed himself to regard it as an
indifferent spectator, conversing with his friends on his favourite
topics,—Political Economy, Philosophy, and Religion. He desired to
die as a Christian. To his cousin the Abbé Monclar, and his friend M.
Paillottet, who stood by, he said—“On looking around me, I observe
that the most enlightened nations of the world have been of the
Christian faith, and I am very happy to find myself in communion
with that portion of the human race.” “His eye,” says M. Paillottet,
“sparkled with that peculiar expression which I had frequently
noticed in our conversations, and which intimated the solution of
a problem.” He beckoned his friends to come near him, as if he had
something to say to them—he murmured twice the words ‹La verité›—and
passed away.
His death took place at Rome, on the 24th of December 1850, in the
fiftieth year of his age. His obsequies were celebrated in the church
of Saint Louis des Français. It was in the year 1845 that he took up
his residence in Paris, so that his career as an [p032] Economist
had extended over little more than five years. He died a martyr to
his favourite science, and we may well apply to him the beautiful
lines of Lord Byron,—
Oh! what a noble heart was here undone,
When Science’ self destroy’d her favourite son!
Yes, she too much indulged his fond pursuit,
She sow’d the seeds, but death has reap’d the fruit.
’Twas his own genius gave the final blow,
And help’d to plant the wound that laid him low:
So the struck eagle, stretch’d upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View’d his own feather on the fatal dart,
And wing’d the shaft that quiver’d in his heart;
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel
He nursed the pinion which impell’d the steel;
While the same plumage that had warm’d his nest
Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast.
TO THE YOUTH OF FRANCE.
Love of study, and lack of fixed opinions,—a mind free from
prejudice, a heart devoid of hate, zeal for the propagation
of truth,—ardent sympathies, disinterestedness, devotion,
candour,—enthusiasm for all that is good and fair, simple and great,
honest and religious,—such are the precious attributes of youth. It
is for this reason that I dedicate my work to you. And the seed must
have in it no principle of life if it fail to take root in a soil so
generous.
I had thought to offer you a picture, and all I have given you
is a sketch; but you will pardon me; for who, in times like the
present,[12] can sit down to finish a grave and important work?
My hope is that some one among you, on seeing it, will be led to
exclaim, with the great artist, ‹Anch’ io son pittore!› and, seizing
the pencil, impart to my rude canvas colour and flesh, light and
shade, sentiment and life.
You may think the title of the work somewhat ambitious; and assuredly
I make no pretension to reveal the designs of Providence in the
social order, and to explain the mechanism of all the forces with
which God has endowed man for the realization of progress. All
that I have aimed at is to put you on the right track, and make
you acquainted with the truth, that ‹all legitimate interests are
in harmony›. That is the predominant idea of my work, and it is
impossible not to recognise its importance.
For some time it has been the fashion to laugh at what has been
called the ‹social problem›: and no doubt some of the solutions which
have been proposed afford but too much ground for raillery. But in
the problem itself there is nothing laughable. It is the ghost of
Banquo at the feast of Macbeth—and no dumb ghost either; for in
formidable accents it calls out to terror-stricken society—a solution
or death! [p034]
Now this solution, you will at once see, must be different according
as men’s interests are held to be naturally harmonious or naturally
antagonistic.
In the one case, we must seek for the solution in Liberty—in the
other, in Constraint. In the one case, we have only to be passive—in
the other, we must necessarily offer opposition.
But Liberty assumes only one shape. Once convinced that each of
the molecules which compose a fluid possesses in itself the force
by which the general level is produced, we conclude that there is
no surer or simpler way of seeing that level realized than not to
interfere with it. All, then, who set out with this fundamental
principle, that ‹men’s interests are harmonious›, will agree as
to the practical solution of the social problem,—to abstain from
displacing or thwarting those interests.
Constraint, on the other hand, may assume a thousand shapes,
according to the views which we take of it, and which are infinitely
varied. Those schools which set out with, the principle, that ‹men’s
interests are antagonistic›, have done nothing yet towards the
solution of the problem, unless it be that they have thrust aside
Liberty. Among the infinite forms of Constraint, they have still to
choose the one which they consider good, if indeed any of them be so.
And then, as a crowning difficulty, they have to obtain universal
acceptance, among men who are free agents, for the particular form of
Constraint to which they have awarded the preference.
But, on this hypothesis, if human interests are, by their very
nature, urged into fatal collision, and if this shock can be avoided
only by the accidental invention of an artificial social order, the
destiny of the human race becomes very hazardous, and we ask in
terror,
1st, If any man is to be found who has discovered a satisfactory form
of Constraint?
2d, Can this man bring to his way of thinking the innumerable schools
who give the preference to other forms?
3d, Will mankind give in to that particular form which, by
hypothesis, runs counter to all individual interests?
4th, Assuming that men will allow themselves to be rigged out in this
new attire, what will happen if another inventor presents himself,
with a coat of a different and improved cut? Are we to persevere in a
vicious organization, knowing it to be vicious; or must we resolve to
change that organization every morning according as the caprices of
fashion and the fertility of inventors’ brains may dictate? [p035]
5th, Would not all the inventors whose plans have been rejected
unite together against the particular organization which had been
selected, and would not their success in disturbing society be in
exact proportion to the degree in which that particular form of
organization ran counter to all existing interests?
6th, And, last of all, it may be asked, Does there exist any human
force capable of overcoming an antagonism which we presuppose to be
itself the very essence of human force?
I might multiply such questions ‹ad infinitum›, and propose, for
example, this difficulty:
If individual interest is opposed to the general interest, where are
we to place the active principle of Constraint? Where is the fulcrum
of the lever to be placed? Beyond the limits of human society? It
must be so if we are to escape the consequences of your law. If we
are to intrust some men with arbitrary power, prove first of all that
these men are formed of a different clay from other mortals; that
they in their turn will not be acted upon by the fatal principle of
self-interest; and that, placed in a situation which excludes the
idea of any curb, any effective opposition, their judgments will be
exempt from error, their hands from rapacity, and their hearts from
covetousness.
The radical difference between the various Socialist schools (I
mean here, those which seek the solution of the social problem in
an artificial organization) and the Economist school, does not
consist in certain views of detail or of governmental combination. We
encounter that difference at the starting point, in the preliminary
and pressing question—Are human interests, when left to themselves,
antagonistic or harmonious?
It is evident that the Socialists have set out in quest of an
artificial organization only because they judge the natural
organization of society bad or insufficient; and they have judged
the latter bad and insufficient, only because they think they see in
men’s interests a radical antagonism, for otherwise they would not
have had recourse to Constraint. It is not necessary to constrain
into harmony what is in itself harmonious.
Thus they have discovered antagonism everywhere:
Between the proprietor and the ‹prolétaire›;[13]
Between capital and labour;
Between the masses and the ‹bourgeoisie›;
Between agriculture and manufactures;
Between the rustic and the burgess;
Between the native and the foreigner;
Between the producer and the consumer;
Between civilisation and organization;
In a word,
Between Liberty and Harmony.
And this explains why it happens that, although a certain kind of
sentimental philanthropy finds a place in their hearts, gall and
bitterness flow continually from their lips. Each reserves all his
love for the new state of society he has dreamt of; but as regards
the society in which we actually live and move, it cannot, in their
opinion, be too soon crushed and overthrown, to make room for the New
Jerusalem they are to rear upon its ruins.
I have said that the ‹Economist› school, setting out with the natural
harmony of interests, is the advocate of Liberty.
And yet I must allow that if Economists in general stand up for
Liberty, it is unfortunately not equally true that their principles
establish solidly the foundation on which they build—the harmony of
interests.
Before proceeding further, and to forewarn you against the
conclusions which will no doubt be drawn from this avowal, I must
say a word on the situations which Socialism and Political Economy
respectively occupy.
It would be folly in me to assert that Socialism has never lighted
upon a truth, and that Political Economy has never fallen into an
error.
What separates, radically and profoundly, the two schools is their
difference of methods. The one school, like the astrologer and the
alchemist, proceeds on hypothesis; the other, like the astronomer and
the chemist, proceeds on observation.
Two astronomers, observing the same fact, may not be able to arrive
at the same result.
In spite of this transient disagreement, they feel themselves
united by the common process which sooner or later will cause
that disagreement to disappear. They recognise each other as of
the same communion. But between the astronomer, who observes, and
the astrologer, who imagines, the gulf is impassable, although
accidentally they may sometimes approximate.
The same thing holds of Political Economy and Socialism.
The Economists observe man, the laws of his organization, and the
social relations which result from those laws. The Socialists conjure
up an imaginary society, and then create a human heart to suit that
society. [p037]
Now, if philosophy never errs, philosophers often do. I deny not that
Economists may make false observations; I will add, that they must
necessarily begin by doing so.
But, then, what happens? If men’s interests are harmonious, it
follows that every incorrect observation will lead logically to
antagonism. What, then, are the Socialist tactics? They gather from
the works of Economists certain incorrect observations, follow
them out to their consequences, and show those consequences to be
disastrous. Thus far they are right. Then they set to work upon the
observer, whom we may assume to be Malthus or Ricardo. Still they
have right on their side. But they do not stop there. They turn
against the science of Political Economy itself, accusing it of being
heartless, and leading to evil. Here they do violence to reason
and justice, inasmuch as science is not responsible for incorrect
observation. At length they proceed another step. They lay the blame
on society itself:—they threaten to overthrow it for the purpose
of reconstructing the edifice:—and why? Because, say they, it is
proved by science that society as now constituted is urged onwards
to destruction. In this they outrage good sense—for either science
is not mistaken, and then why attack it?—or it is mistaken, and in
that case they should leave society in repose, since society is not
menaced.
But these tactics, illogical as they are, have not been the less
fatal to economic science, especially when the cultivators of that
science have had the misfortune, from a chivalrous and not unnatural
feeling, to render themselves liable, ‹singuli in solidum›, for their
predecessors and for one another. Science is a queen whose gait
should be frank and free:—the atmosphere of the ‹coterie› stifles her.
I have already said that in Political Economy every erroneous
proposition must lead ultimately to antagonism. On the other hand,
it is impossible that the voluminous works of even the most eminent
economists should not include some erroneous propositions. It is
ours to mark and to rectify them in the interest of science and of
society. If we persist in maintaining them for the honour of the
fraternity, we shall not only expose ourselves, which is of little
consequence, but we shall expose truth itself, which is a serious
affair, to the attacks of Socialism.
To return: the conclusion of the Economists is for Liberty. But
in order that this conclusion should take hold of men’s minds and
hearts, it must be solidly based on this fundamental principle, that
interests, left to themselves, tend to harmonious combinations, and
to the progressive preponderance of the general good. [p038]
Now many Economists, some of them writers of authority, have advanced
propositions, which, step by step, lead logically to ‹absolute evil›,
necessary injustice, fatal and progressive inequality, and inevitable
pauperism, etc.
Thus, there are very few of them who, so far as I know, have not
attributed ‹value› to natural agents, to the gifts which God has
vouchsafed ‹gratuitously› to His creatures. The word ‹value› implies
that we do not give away the portion of it which we possess except
for an equivalent consideration. Here, then, we have men, especially
proprietors of land, bartering for effective labour the gifts of God,
and receiving recompense for utilities in the creation of which their
labour has had no share—an evident, but a necessary, injustice, say
these writers.
Then comes the famous theory of Ricardo, which may be summed up in a
few words: The price of the necessaries of life depends on the labour
required to produce them on the least productive land in cultivation.
Then the increase of population obliges us to have recourse to soils
of lower and lower fertility. Consequently mankind at large (all
except the landowners) are forced to give a larger and larger amount
of labour for the same amount of subsistence; or, what comes to the
same thing, to receive a less and less amount of subsistence for
the same amount of labour,—whilst the landowners see their rentals
swelling by every new descent to soils of an inferior quality.
Conclusion: Progressive opulence of men of leisure—progressive
poverty of men of labour; in other words, fatal inequality.
Finally, we have the still more celebrated theory of Malthus, that
population has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the means
of subsistence, and that at every given moment of the life of man.
Now, men cannot be happy, or live in peace, if they have not the
means of support; and there are but two obstacles to this increase
of population which is always threatening us, namely, a diminished
number of births, or an increase of mortality in all its dreadful
forms. Moral restraint, to be efficacious, must be universal, and
no one expects that. There remains, then, only the repressive
obstacles—vice, poverty, war, pestilence, famine; in other words,
pauperism and death.
I forbear to mention other systems of a less general bearing,
which tend in the same way to bring us to a dead-stand. Monsieur
de Tocqueville, for example, and many others, tell us, if we admit
the right of primogeniture, we arrive at the most concentrated
aristocracy—if we do not admit it, we arrive at ruin and sterility.
[p039]
And it is worthy of remark, that these four melancholy theories do
not in the least decree run foul of each other. If they did, we might
console ourselves with the reflection that they are alike false,
since they refute each other. But no,—they are in unison, and make
part of one and the same general theory, which, supported by numerous
and specious facts, would seem to explain the spasmodic state of
modern society, and, fortified by the assent of many masters in the
science, presents itself with frightful authority to the mind of the
confused and discouraged inquirer.
We have still to discover how the authors of this melancholy theory
have been able to lay down, as their principle, the ‹harmony of
interests›, and, as their conclusion, Liberty.
For if mankind are indeed urged on by the laws of Value towards
Injustice,—by the laws of Rent towards Inequality,—by the laws of
Population towards Poverty,—by the laws of Inheritance towards
Sterility,—we can no longer affirm that God has made the moral as
He has made the natural world—a harmonious work; we must bow the
head and confess that it has pleased Him to base it on revolting and
irremediable dissonance.
You must not suppose, young men, that the Socialists have refuted
and repudiated what, in order to wound no one’s susceptibilities,
I shall call the theory of dissonances. No; let them say as they
will, they have assumed the truth of that theory, and it is just
because they have assumed its truth that they propose to substitute
Constraint for Liberty, artificial for natural organization, their
own inventions for the work of God. They say to their opponents (and
in this, perhaps, they are more consistent than the latter),—if, as
you have told us, human interests when left to themselves tend to
harmonious combination, we cannot do better than welcome and magnify
Liberty as you do. But you have demonstrated unanswerably that those
interests, if allowed to develop themselves freely, urge mankind
towards injustice, inequality, pauperism, and sterility. Your theory,
then, provokes reaction precisely because it is true. We desire to
break up the existing fabric of society just because it is subject to
the fatal laws which you have described; we wish to make trial of our
own powers, seeing that the power of God has miscarried.
Thus they are agreed as regards the premises, and differ only on the
conclusion.
The Economists to whom I have alluded say that ‹the great
providential laws urge on society to evil›; but that we must take
care not to disturb the action of those laws, because such action
is happily impeded by the secondary laws which retard the final
[p040] catastrophe; and arbitrary intervention can only enfeeble the
embankment, without stopping the fatal rising of the flood.
The Socialists say that ‹the great providential laws urge on society
to evil›; we must therefore abolish them, and select others from our
inexhaustible storehouse.
The Catholics say that ‹the great providential laws urge on society
to evil›; we must therefore escape from them by renouncing worldly
interests, and taking refuge in abnegation, sacrifice, asceticism,
and resignation.
It is in the midst of this tumult, of these cries of anguish and
distress, of these exhortations to subversion, or to resignation and
despair, that I endeavour to obtain a hearing for this assertion, in
presence of which, if it be correct, all difference of opinion must
disappear—‹it is not true that the great providential laws urge on
society to evil›.
It is with reference to the conclusions to be deduced from their
common premises that the various schools are divided and combat each
other. I deny those premises, and I ask, Is not that the best way of
putting an end to these disputes?
The leading idea of this work, the harmony of interests, is ‹simple›.
Is simplicity not the touchstone of truth? The laws of light,
of sound, of motion, appear to us to be all the truer for being
simple—Why should it be otherwise with the law of interests?
This idea is ‹conciliatory›. What is more fitted to reconcile parties
than to demonstrate the harmony of the various branches of industry:
the harmony of classes, of nations, even of doctrines?
It is ‹consoling›, seeing that it points out what is false in those
systems which adopt, as their conclusion, progressive evil.
It is ‹religious›, for it assures us that it is not only the
celestial but the social mechanism which reveals the wisdom of God,
and declares His glory.
It is ‹practical›, for one can scarcely conceive anything more easily
reduced to practice than this,—to allow men to labour, to exchange,
to learn, to associate, to act and react on each other,—for,
according to the laws of Providence, nothing can result from their
intelligent spontaneity but order, harmony, progress, good, and
better still; better ‹ad infinitum›.
Bravo, you will say; here we have the optimism of the Economists
with a vengeance! These Economists are so much the slaves of their
own systems that they shut their eyes to facts for fear of seeing
them. In the face of all the poverty, all the injustice, all the
oppressions which desolate humanity, they coolly deny the existence
of evil. The smell of revolutionary gunpowder does not [p041] reach
their blunted senses—the pavement of the barricades has no voice
for them; and were society to crumble to pieces before their eyes,
they would still keep repeating, “All is for the best in the best of
worlds.”
No indeed,—we do not think that all is for the best; but I have faith
in the wisdom of the laws of Providence, and for the same reason I
have faith in Liberty.
The question is, Have we Liberty?
The question is, Do these laws act in their plenitude, or is their
action not profoundly troubled by the countervailing action of human
institutions?
Deny evil! deny suffering! Who can? We must forget that our subject
is man. We must forget that we are ourselves men. The laws of
Providence may be regarded as harmonious without their necessarily
excluding evil. Enough that evil has its explanation and its mission,
that it checks and limits itself, that it destroys itself by its
own action, and that each suffering prevents a greater suffering by
repressing the cause of suffering.
Society has for its element man, who is a ‹free› agent; and
since man is free, he may choose,—since he may choose, he may be
mistaken,—since he may be mistaken, he may suffer.
I go further. I say he must be mistaken and suffer—for he begins his
journey in ignorance, and for ignorance there are endless and unknown
roads, all of which, except one, lead to error.
Now, every Error engenders suffering; but either suffering reacts
upon the man who errs, and then it brings Responsibility into
play,—or, if it affects others who are free from error, it sets in
motion the marvellous reactionary machinery of Solidarity.
The action of these laws, combined with the faculty which has been
vouchsafed to us of connecting effects with their causes, must bring
us back, by means of this very suffering, into the way of what is
good and true.
Thus, not only do we not deny the existence of evil, but we
acknowledge that it has a mission in the social, as it has in the
material world.
But, in order that it should fulfil this mission, we must not stretch
Solidarity artificially, so as to destroy Responsibility,—in other
words, we must respect Liberty.
Should human institutions step in to oppose in this respect the
divine laws, evil would not the less flow from error, only it would
shift its position. It would strike those whom it ought not to
strike. It would be no longer a warning and a monitor. It would no
longer have the tendency to diminish and die away by its own [p042]
proper action. Its action would be continued, and increase, as would
happen in the physiological world if the imprudences and excesses of
the men of one hemisphere were felt in their unhappy effects only by
the inhabitants of the opposite hemisphere.
Now this is precisely the tendency not only of most of our
governmental institutions, but likewise, and above all, of those
which we seek to establish as remedies for the evils which we
suffer. Under the philanthropical pretext of developing among men
a factitious Solidarity, we render Responsibility more and more
inert and inefficacious. By an improper application of the public
force, we alter the relation of labour to its remuneration, we
disturb the laws of industry and of exchange, we offer violence to
the natural development of education, we give a wrong direction to
capital and labour, we twist and invert men’s ideas, we inflame
absurd pretensions, we dazzle with chimerical hopes, we occasion a
strange loss of human power, we change the centres of population, we
render experience itself useless,—in a word, we give to all interests
artificial foundations, we set them by the ears, and then we exclaim
that—Interests are antagonistic: Liberty has done all the evil,—let
us denounce and stifle Liberty.
And yet, as this sacred word has still power to stir men’s hearts
and make them palpitate, we despoil Liberty of its ‹prestige› by
depriving it of its name, and it is under the title of ‹Competition›
that the unhappy victim is led to the sacrificial altar, amid the
applause of a mob stretching forth their hands to receive the
shackles of servitude.
It is not enough, then, to exhibit, in their majestic harmony, the
natural laws of the social order; we must also explain the disturbing
causes which paralyze their action; and this is what I have
endeavoured to do in the second part of this work.
I have striven to avoid controversy; and, in doing so, I have no
doubt lost an opportunity of giving to the principles which I desire
to disseminate the stability which results from a thorough and
searching discussion. And yet, might not the attention of the reader,
seduced by digressions, have been diverted from the argument taken as
a whole? If I exhibit the edifice as it stands, what matters it in
what light it has been regarded by others, even by those who first
taught me to look at it?
And now I would appeal with confidence to men of all schools, who
prefer truth, justice, and the public good to their own systems.
Economists! like you, I am the advocate of «Liberty»; and if I
succeed in shaking some of those premises which sadden your generous
hearts, perhaps you will see in this an additional incentive to love
and to serve our sacred cause. [p043]
Socialists! you have faith in «Association». I conjure you,
after having read this book, to say whether society as it is now
constituted, apart from its abuses and shackles, that is to say,
under the condition of Liberty, is not the most beautiful, the most
complete, the most durable, the most universal, the most equitable,
of all Associations.
‹Egalitaires!› you admit but one principle, the «Mutuality of
Services». Let human transactions be free, and I assert that they
are not and cannot be anything else than a reciprocal exchange of
‹services›,—services always diminishing in ‹value›, always increasing
in ‹utility›.
Communists! you desire that men, become brothers, should enjoy in
common the goods which Providence has lavished on them. My aim is to
demonstrate that society as it exists has only to acquire freedom
in order to realize and surpass your wishes and your hopes. For all
things are common to all, on the single condition that each man takes
the trouble to gather what God has given, which is very natural; or
remunerate freely those who take that trouble for him, which is very
just.
Christians of all communions! unless you stand alone in casting doubt
on the divine wisdom, manifested in the most magnificent of all God’s
works which have come within the range of our knowledge, you will
find in this book no expression which can shock the severest morals,
or the most mysterious dogmas of your faith.
Proprietors! whatever be the extent of your possessions, if I
establish that your rights, now so much contested, are limited, like
those of the most ordinary workman, to the receiving of services in
exchange for real and substantial services which have been actually
rendered by you, or by your forefathers, those rights will henceforth
repose on a basis which cannot lie shaken.
‹Prolétaires!› men who live by wages! I undertake to demonstrate that
you obtain the fruits of the land of which you are not the owners
with less pain and effort than if you were obliged to raise those
fruits by your own direct labour,—with less than if that land had
been given to you in its primitive state, and before being prepared
for cultivation by labour.
Capitalists and labourers! I believe myself in a position to
establish the law that, in proportion as capital is accumulated,
the ‹absolute› share of the total product falling to the capitalist
increases, and his ‹proportional› share is diminished; while both
the ‹absolute› and ‹relative› share of the product falling to the
labourer is augmented,—the reverse effects being produced when
capital is lessened or dissipated.[14] If this law be established,
the obvious deduction is, [p044] a harmony of interests between
labourers and those who employ them.
Disciples of Malthus! sincere and calumniated philanthropists, whose
only fault has been in warning mankind against the effects of a law
which you believe to be fatal, I shall have to submit to you another
law more reassuring:—“‹Cæteris paribus›, increasing density of
population is equivalent to increasing facility of production.” And
if it be so, I am certain it will not be you who will grieve to see a
stumbling-block removed from the threshold of our favourite science.
Men of spoliation! you who, by force or fraud, by law or in spite of
law, batten on the people’s substance; you, who live by the errors
you propagate, by the ignorance you cherish, by the wars you light
up, by the trammels with which you hamper trade; you who tax labour
after having rendered it unproductive, making it lose a sheaf for
every handful you yourselves pluck from it; you who cause yourselves
to be paid for creating obstacles, in order to get afterwards paid
for partially removing those obstacles; incarnations of egotism
in its worst sense; parasitical excrescences of a vicious policy,
prepare for the sharpest and most unsparing criticism. To you alone
I make no appeal, for the design of this book is to sacrifice
you, or rather to sacrifice your unjust pretensions. In vain we
cherish conciliation. There are two principles which can never be
reconciled—Liberty and Constraint.
If the laws of Providence are harmonious, it is when they act with
freedom, without which there is no harmony. Whenever, then, we remark
an absence of harmony, we may be sure that it proceeds from an
absence of liberty, an absence of justice. Oppressors, spoliators,
contemners of justice, you can have no part in the universal harmony,
for it is you who disturb it.
Do I mean to say that the effect of this work may be to enfeeble
power, to shake its stability, to diminish its authority? My design
is just the opposite. But let me not be misunderstood.
It is the business of political science to distinguish between what
ought and what ought not to fall under State control; and in making
this important distinction we must not forget that the State always
acts through the intervention of Force. The services which it renders
us, and the services which it exacts from us in return, are alike
imposed upon us under the name of contributions. [p045]
The question then comes back to this: What are the things which
men have a right to impose upon each other ‹by force›? Now, I know
but one thing in this situation, and that is ‹Justice›. I have no
right to ‹force› any one whatever to be religious, charitable, well
educated, or industrious; but I have a right to ‹force› him to be
‹just›,—this is a case of legitimate defence.
Now, individuals in the aggregate can possess no right which did
not pre-exist in individuals as such. If, then, the employment of
individual force is justified only by legitimate defence, the fact
that the action of government is always manifested by Force should
lead us to conclude that it is essentially limited to the maintenance
of order, security, and justice.
All action of governments beyond this limit is a usurpation upon
conscience, upon intelligence, upon industry; in a word, upon human
liberty.
This being granted, we ought to set ourselves unceasingly and without
compunction to emancipate the entire domain of private enterprise
from the encroachments of power. Without this we shall not have
gained Freedom, or the free play of those laws of harmony which God
has provided for the development and progress of the human race.
Will Power by this means be enfeebled? Will it have lost in stability
because it has lost in extent? Will it have less authority because
it has fewer functions to discharge? Will it attract to itself less
respect because it calls forth fewer complaints? Will it be more
the sport of factions, when it has reduced those enormous budgets
and that coveted influence which are the baits and allurements
of faction? Will it encounter greater danger when it has less
responsibility?
To me it seems evident, that to confine public force to its one,
essential, undisputed, beneficent mission,—a mission desired and
accepted by all,—would be the surest way of securing to it respect
and universal support. In that case, I see not whence could
proceed systematic opposition, parliamentary struggles, street
insurrections, revolutions, sudden changes of fortune, factions,
illusions, the pretensions of all to govern under all forms, those
dangerous and absurd systems which teach the people to look to
government for everything, that compromising diplomacy, those wars
which are always in perspective, or armed truces which are nearly
as fatal, those crushing taxes which it is impossible to levy on
any equitable principle, that absorbing and unnatural mixing up of
politics with everything, those great artificial displacements of
capital and labour, which are the source of fruitless heartburnings,
fluctuations, stoppages, and commercial crises. All these causes of
trouble, of [p046] irritation, of disaffection, of covetousness,
and of disorder, and a thousand others, would no longer have any
foundation, and the depositaries of power, instead of disturbing,
would contribute to the universal harmony,—a harmony which does not
indeed exclude evil, but which leaves less and less room for those
ills which are inseparable from the ignorance and perversity of our
feeble nature, and whose mission it is to prevent or chastise that
ignorance and perversity.
Young men! in these days in which a grievous Scepticism would seem
to be at once the effect and the punishment of the anarchy of ideas
which prevails, I shall esteem myself happy if this work, as you
proceed in its perusal, should bring to your lips the consoling
words, «I believe»,—words of a sweet-smelling savour, which are at
once a refuge and a force, which are said to remove mountains, and
stand at the head of the Christian’s creed—I believe. “I believe,
not with a blind and submissive faith, for we are not concerned here
with the mysteries of revelation, but with a rational and scientific
faith, befitting things which are left to man’s investigation.—I
believe that He who has arranged the material universe has not
withheld His regards from the arrangements of the social world.—I
believe that He has combined, and caused to move in harmony, free
agents as well as inert molecules.—I believe that His overruling
Providence shines forth as strikingly, if not more so, in the laws
to which He has subjected men’s interests and men’s wills, as in the
laws which He has imposed on weight and velocity.—I believe that
everything in human society, even what is apparently injurious, is
the cause of improvement and of progress.—I believe that Evil tends
to Good, and calls it forth, whilst Good cannot tend to Evil; whence
it follows that Good must in the end predominate.—I believe that the
invincible social tendency is a constant approximation of men towards
a common moral, intellectual, and physical level, with, at the same
time, a progressive and indefinite elevation of that level.—I believe
that all that is necessary to the gradual and peaceful development
of humanity is that its tendencies should not be disturbed, but have
the liberty of their movements restored.—I believe these things, not
because I desire them, not because they satisfy my heart, but because
my judgment accords to them a deliberate assent.”
Ah! whenever you come to pronounce these words, «I believe», you will
be anxious to propagate your creed, and the social problem will soon
be resolved, for, let them say what they will, it is not of difficult
solution. Men’s interests are harmonious,—the solution, then, lies
entirely in this one word—«Liberty». [p047]
HARMONIES
OF
POLITICAL ECONOMY.
I.
NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL ORGANIZATION.[15]
Is it quite certain that the mechanism of society, like the mechanism
of the heavenly bodies, or that of the human frame, is subject to
general laws? Does it form a harmoniously ‹organized› whole? Or
rather, do we not remark in it the absence of all ‹organization›? Is
not an ‹organization› the very thing which all men of heart and of
the future, all advanced publicists, all the pioneers of thought,
are in search of at the present day? Is society anything else than
a multitude of individuals placed in juxtaposition, acting without
concert, and given up to the movements of an anarchical liberty? Are
our countless masses, after having with difficulty recovered their
liberties one after the other, not now awaiting the advent of some
great genius to arrange them into a harmonious whole? Having pulled
down all, must we not now set about laying the foundation of a new
edifice.
And yet, it may be asked, have these questions any other meaning than
this: Can society dispense with written laws, rules, and repressive
measures? Is every man to make an unlimited use of his faculties,
even when in so doing he strikes at the liberties of [p048] another,
or inflicts injury on society at large? In a word, must we recognise
in the maxim, ‹laissez faire, laissez passer›, the absolute formula
of political economy? If that were the question, no one could
hesitate about the solution. The economists do not say that a man may
kill, sack, burn, and that society has only to be quiescent,—‹laisser
faire›. They say that even in the absence of all law, society
would resist such acts; and that consequently such resistance is a
general law of humanity. They say that civil and penal laws must
regulate, and not counteract, those general laws the existence of
which ‹they presuppose›. There is a wide difference between a social
organization, founded on the general laws of human nature, and an
artificial organization, invented, imagined,—which takes no account
of these laws, or repudiates and despises them,—such an organization,
in short, as many modern schools would impose upon us.
For, if there be general laws which act independently of written
laws, and of which the latter can only regulate the action, we must
study these ‹general laws›. They can be made the object of a science,
and Political Economy exists. If, on the other hand, society is a
human invention, if men are regarded only as inert matter, to which a
great genius, like Rousseau, must impart sentiment and will, movement
and life, then there is no such science as Political Economy.
There are only an indefinite number of possible and contingent
arrangements, and the fate of nations must depend upon the ‹Founder›
to whom chance shall have committed their destinies.
In order to prove that society is subject to general laws, no
elaborate dissertation is necessary. All I shall do is to notice
certain facts, which, although trite, are not the less important.
Rousseau has said, ‹Il faut beaucoup de philosophie pour observer
les faits qui sont trop près de nous›—“Much philosophy is needed to
observe accurately things which are too near us.” And such are the
social phenomena in the midst of which we live and move. Habit has
so familiarized us with these phenomena that we cease to observe
them, unless something striking and exceptional forces them on our
attention.
Let us take, by way of illustration, a man in the humble walks of
life—a village carpenter, for instance,—and observe the various
services he renders to society, and receives from it; we shall not
fail to be struck with the enormous disproportion which is apparent.
This man employs his day’s labour in planing boards, and making
tables and chests of drawers. He complains of his condition; yet in
truth what does he receive from society in exchange for his work?
[p049]
First of all, on getting up in the morning, he dresses himself; and
he has himself personally made none of the numerous articles of
which his clothing consists. Now, in order to put at his disposal
this clothing, simple as it is, an enormous amount of labour,
industry, and locomotion, and many ingenious inventions, must have
been employed. Americans must have produced cotton, Indians indigo,
Frenchmen wool and flax, Brazilians hides; and all these materials
must have been transported to various towns where they have been
worked up, spun, woven, dyed, etc.
Then he breakfasts. In order to procure him the bread which he eats
every morning, land must have been cleared, enclosed, laboured,
manured, sown; the fruits of the soil must have been preserved
with care from pillage, and security must have reigned among an
innumerable multitude of people; the wheat must have been cut down,
ground into flour, kneaded, and prepared; iron, steel, wood, stone,
must have been converted by industry into instruments of labour; some
men must have employed animal force, others water power, etc.; all
matters, of which each, taken singly, presupposes a mass of labour,
whether we have regard to space or time, of incalculable amount.
In the course of the day this man will have occasion to use sugar,
oil, and various other materials and utensils.
He sends his son to school, there to receive an education, which,
although limited, nevertheless implies anterior study and research,
and an extent of knowledge which startles the imagination.
He goes out. He finds the street paved and lighted.
A neighbour goes to law with him. He finds advocates to plead his
cause, judges to maintain his rights, officers of justice to put the
sentence in execution; all which implies acquired knowledge, and,
consequently, intelligence and means of subsistence.
He goes to church. It is a stupendous monument, and the book which
he carries thither is a monument perhaps still more stupendous, of
human intelligence. He is taught morals, he has his mind enlightened,
his soul elevated; and in order to this we must suppose that another
man had previously frequented schools and libraries, consulted all
the sources of human learning, and while so employed had been able to
live without occupying himself directly with the wants of the body.
If our artizan undertakes a journey, he finds that, in order to save
him time and exertion, other men have removed and levelled the soil,
filled up valleys, hewed down mountains, united the banks of rivers,
diminished friction, placed wheeled carriages on blocks [p050] of
sandstone or bands of iron, and brought the force of animals and the
power of steam into subjection to human wants.
It is impossible not to be struck with the measureless disproportion
which exists between the enjoyments which this man derives from
society and what he could obtain by his own unassisted exertions. I
venture to say that in a single day he consumes more than he could
himself produce in ten centuries.
What renders the phenomenon still more strange is, that all other men
are in the same situation. Every individual member of society has
absorbed millions of times more than he could himself produce; yet
there is no mutual robbery. And, if we regard things more nearly,
we perceive that the carpenter has paid, in services, for all the
services which others have rendered to him. If we bring the matter
to a strict reckoning, we shall be convinced that he has received
nothing which he has not paid for by means of his modest industry;
and that every one who, at whatever interval of time or space, has
been employed in his service has received, or will receive, his
remuneration.
The social mechanism, then, must be very ingenious and very powerful,
since it leads to this singular result, that each man, even he whose
lot is cast in the humblest condition, has more enjoyment in one day
than he could himself produce in many ages.
Nor is this all. The mechanism of society will appear still more
ingenious, if the reader will be pleased to turn his regards upon
himself.
I suppose him a plain student. What is his business in Paris? How
does he live? It cannot be disputed that society places at his
disposal food, clothing, lodging, amusements, books, means of
instruction, a multitude of things, in short, which would take a
long time not only to produce, but even to explain how they were
produced. And what services has this student rendered to society
in return for all these things which have exacted so much labour,
toil, fatigue, physical and intellectual effort, so many inventions,
transactions, and conveyances hither and thither? None at all. He is
only preparing to render services. Why, then, have so many millions
of men abandoned to him the fruits of their positive, effective,
and productive labour? Here is the explanation:—The father of this
student, who was a lawyer, perhaps, or a physician, or a merchant,
had formerly rendered services—it may be to society in China,—and
had been remunerated, not by immediate services, but by a ‹title› to
demand services, at the time, in the place and under the form that
might be most suitable and convenient to him. [p051] It is of these
past and distant services that society is now acquitting itself, and
(astonishing as it seems) if we follow in thought the infinite range
of transactions which must have had place in order to this result
being effected, we shall see that every one has been remunerated
for his labour and services; and that these ‹titles› have passed
from hand to hand, sometimes divided into parts, sometimes grouped
together, until, in the consumption of this student, the entire
account has been squared and balanced. Is not this a very remarkable
phenomenon?
We should shut our eyes to the light of day, did we fail to perceive
that society could not present combinations so complicated, and in
which civil and penal laws have so little part, unless it obeyed
the laws of a mechanism wonderfully ingenious. The study of that
mechanism is the business of ‹Political Economy›.
Another thing worthy of observation is, that of the incalculable
number of transactions to which the student owed his daily
subsistence, there was not perhaps a millionth part which contributed
to it directly. The things of which he has now the enjoyment, and
which are innumerable, were produced by men the greater part of
whom have long since disappeared from the earth. And yet they were
remunerated as they expected to be, although he who now profits by
the fruits of their labours had done nothing for them. They knew him
not; they will never know him. He who reads this page, at the very
moment he is reading it, has the power, although perhaps he has no
consciousness of it, to put in motion men of every country, of all
races, I had almost said of all time—white, black, red, tawny—to
make bygone generations, and generations still unborn, contribute to
his present enjoyments; and he owes this extraordinary power to the
services which his father had formerly rendered to other men, who
apparently had nothing in common with those whose labour is now put
in requisition. Yet despite all differences of time and space, so
just and equitable a balance has been struck, that every one has been
remunerated, and has received exactly what he calculated he ought to
receive.
But, in truth, could all this have happened, and such phenomena been
witnessed, unless society had had a natural and wise ‹organization›,
which acts, as it were, unknown to us?
Much has been said in our day of inventing a new ‹organization›. Is
it quite certain, that any thinker, whatever genius we may attribute
to him, whatever power we may suppose him to possess, could imagine
and introduce an organization superior to that of which I have just
sketched some of the results? [p052]
But what would be thought of it if I described its machinery, its
springs, and its motive powers?
The machinery consists of men, that is to say, of beings capable of
learning, reflecting, reasoning, of being deceived and undeceived,
and consequently of contributing to the amelioration or deterioration
of the mechanism itself. They are capable of pleasure and pain; and
it is that which makes them not only the wheels but the springs of
the mechanism. They are also the motive power; for it is in them that
the active principle resides. More than that, they are themselves the
very end and object of the mechanism, since it is into individual
pains and enjoyments that the whole definitely resolves itself.
Now it has been remarked, and it is unhappily obvious enough, that
in the action, the development, and even the progress (by those who
acknowledge progress) of this powerful mechanism, many of the wheels
have been inevitably, fatally injured; and that, as regards a great
number of human beings, the sum of unmerited suffering surpasses by
much the sum of enjoyment.
This view of the subject has led many candid minds, many generous
hearts, to suspect the mechanism itself. They have repudiated it,
they have refused to study it, they have attacked, often with
passion, those who have investigated and explained its laws. They
have risen against the nature of things, and at length they have
proposed to ‹organize› society upon a new plan, in which injustice
and suffering and error shall have no place.
God forbid that I should set myself against intentions manifestly
pure and philanthropical! But I should desert my principles, and do
violence to the dictates of my own conscience, did I not declare that
these men are in my opinion upon a wrong path.
In the first place, they are reduced, by the very nature of their
propagandism, to the melancholy necessity of disowning the good which
society develops, of denying its progress, of imputing to it all
sufferings, of hunting after these with avidity, and exaggerating
them beyond measure.
When a man believes that he has discovered a social organization
different from that which results from the ordinary tendencies of
human nature, it is quite necessary, in order to obtain acceptance
for his invention, to paint the organization he wishes to abolish
in the most sombre colours. Thus the publicists to whom I am
alluding, after having proclaimed enthusiastically, and perhaps
with exaggeration, the perfectibility of man, fall into the strange
contradiction of maintaining that society is becoming more [p053]
and more deteriorated. According to them, men are a thousand times
more unhappy than they were in ancient times under the feudal
‹régime›, and the yoke of slavery. The world is become a hell. Were
it possible to conjure up the Paris of the tenth century, I venture
to think that such a thesis would be found untenable.
Then they are led to condemn the very mainspring of human action—I
mean a regard to ‹personal interest›, because it has brought about
such a state of things. Let us remark that man is so organized
as to seek for enjoyment and avoid suffering. From this source I
allow that all social evils take their rise—war, slavery, monopoly,
privilege; but from the same source springs all that is good, since
the satisfaction of wants and repugnance to suffering are the motives
of human action. The business then is to discover whether this
incitement to action, by its universality—from individual becoming
social—is not in itself a principle of progress.
At all events, do the inventors of new organizations not perceive
that this principle, inherent in the very nature of man, will follow
them into their systems, and that there it will make greater havoc
than in our natural organization, in which the interest and unjust
pretensions of one are at least restrained by the resistance of
all? These writers always make two inadmissible suppositions—the
first is, that society, such as they conceive it, will be directed
by infallible men denuded of this motive of self-interest; and,
secondly, that the masses will allow themselves to be directed by
these men.
Finally, these system-makers appear to give themselves no trouble
about the means of execution. How are they to establish their system?
How are they to induce all mankind at once to give up the principle
upon which they now act—the attraction of enjoyment, and the
repugnance to pain? It would be necessary, as Rousseau has said, ‹to
change the moral and physical constitution of man›.
In order to induce men at once to throw aside, as a worn-out garment,
the existing social order in which the human race has lived and been
developed from the beginning to our day, to adopt an organization of
human invention and become docile parts of another mechanism, there
are, it seems to me, only two means which can be employed—Force, or
Universal Consent.
The founder of the new system must have at his disposal a force
capable of overcoming all resistance, so that humanity shall be in
his hands only as so much melting wax to be moulded and [p054]
fashioned at his pleasure—or he must obtain by persuasion an assent
so complete, so exclusive, so blind even, as to render unnecessary
the employment of force.
I defy any one to point out to me a third means of establishing or
introducing into human practice a ‹Phalanstère›,[16] or any other
artificial social organization.
Now, if there be only two assumed means, and if we have demonstrated
that the one is as impracticable as the other, we have proved that
these system-makers are losing both their time and their trouble.
As regards the disposal of a material force which should subject
to them all the kings and peoples of the earth, this is what these
dotards, senile as they are, have never dreamt of. King Alphonsus
had presumption and folly enough to exclaim, that “If he had been
taken into God’s counsels, the planetary system should have been
better arranged.” But although he set his ‹wisdom› above that of the
Creator, he was not mad enough to wish to struggle with the ‹power›
of Omnipotence, and history does not tell us that he ever actually
tried to make the stars turn according to the laws of his invention.
Descartes likewise contented himself with constructing a tiny world
with dice and strings, knowing well that he was not ‹strong› enough
to remove the universe. We know no one but Xerxes who, in the
intoxication of his power, dared to say to the waves, “Thus far shall
ye come, and no farther.” The billows did not recede before Xerxes,
but Xerxes retreated before the billows; and without this humiliating
but wise precaution he would certainly have been drowned.
Force, then, is wanting to the organizers who would subject humanity
to their experiments. When they shall have gained over to their cause
the Russian autocrat, the shah of Persia, the khan of Tartary, and
all the other tyrants of the world, they will find that they still
want the power to distribute mankind into groups and classes, and
to annihilate the general laws of property, exchange, inheritance,
and family; for even in Russia, in Persia, and in Tartary, it is
necessary to a certain extent to consult the feelings, habits, and
prejudices of the people. Were the emperor of Russia to take it into
his head to set about ‹altering the moral and physical constitution
of his subjects›, it is probable that he would soon have a successor,
and that his successor would be better advised than to pursue the
experiment.
But since ‹force› is a means quite beyond the reach of our [p055]
numerous system-makers, no other resource remains to them but to
obtain ‹universal consent›.
There are two modes of obtaining this—namely, Persuasion and
Imposture.
Persuasion! but have we ever found two minds in perfect accord upon
all the points of a single science? How then are we to expect men
of various tongues, races, and manners, spread over the surface
of the globe, most of them unable to read, and destined to die
without having even heard the name of the ‹reformer›, to accept
with unanimity the universal science? What is it that you aim at?
At changing the whole system of labour, exchanges, and social
relations, domestic, civil, and religious; in a word, at altering
the whole physical and moral constitution of man; and you hope to
rally mankind, and bring them all under this new order of things, by
conviction!
Verily you undertake no light or easy duty.
When a man has got the length of saying to his fellows:
“For the last five thousand years there has been a misunderstanding
between God and man;
“From the days of Adam to our time, the human race have been upon
a wrong course—and, if only a little confidence is placed in me. I
shall soon bring them back to the right way;
“God desired mankind to pursue a different road altogether, but they
have taken their own way, and hence evil has been introduced into
the world. Let them turn round at my call, and take an opposite
direction, and universal happiness will then prevail.”
When a man sets out in this style it is much if he is believed by
five or six adepts; but between that and being believed by one
thousand millions of men the distance is great indeed.
And then, remember that the number of social inventions is as vast as
the domain of the imagination itself; that there is not a publicist
or writer on social economy who, after shutting himself up for a
few hours in his library, does not come forth with a ready-made
plan of artificial organization in his hand; that the inventions of
Fourier, Saint Simon, Owen, Cabet, Blanc, etc., have no resemblance
whatever to each other; that every day brings to light a new scheme;
and that people are entitled to have some little time given them
for reflection before they are called upon to reject the social
organization which God has vouchsafed them, and to make a definite
and irrevocable choice among so many newly invented systems. For what
would happen if, after having selected one of these plans, a better
should present itself! Can the institutions [p056] of property,
family, labour, exchange, be placed every day upon a new basis? Are
we to be forced to change the organization of society every morning?
“Thus, then,” says Rousseau, “the legislator being able to employ
effectively neither force nor persuasion, he is under the necessity
of having recourse to an authority of another kind, which carries us
along without violence, and persuades without convincing us.”
What is that authority? Imposture. Rousseau dares not give utterance
to the word, but, according to his invariable practice in such a
case, he places it behind the transparent veil of an eloquent tirade.
“This is the reason,” says he, “which in all ages has forced the
Fathers of nations to have recourse to the intervention of heaven,
and to give the credit of their own wisdom to the gods, in order
that the people, submitting to the laws of the state as to those ‹of
nature›, and acknowledging the same power in the formation of man
and of the commonwealth, should obey ‹freely› and bear willingly the
yoke of the public felicity. This ‹sublime› reason, which is above
the reach of vulgar souls, is that ‹whose decisions the legislator
puts into the mouth of the immortals›, in order to ‹carry along› by
divine authority those who cannot be moved by considerations of human
prudence. But it is not for every man to make ‹the gods› speak,” etc.
And in order that there may be no mistake, he cites Machiavel, and
allows him to complete the idea: “Mai non fu alcuno ordinatore de
leggi «STRAORDINARIE» in un popolo che non ricorresse a Dio.”
But why does Machiavel counsel us to have recourse to ‹God›, and
Rousseau to ‹the gods›, to the ‹immortals›? The reader can answer
that question for himself.
I do not indeed accuse the modern ‹Fathers of nations› of making
use of these unworthy deceptions. But when we place ourselves in
their point of view, we see that they readily allow themselves to
be hurried along by the desire of success. When an earnest and
philanthropical man is deeply convinced that he possesses a social
secret by means of which all his fellow-men may enjoy in this world
unlimited happiness,—when he sees clearly that he can practically
establish that idea neither by force nor by reasoning, and that
deception is his only resource, he is laid under a very strong
temptation. We know that the ministers of religion themselves, who
profess the greatest horror of untruth, have not rejected ‹pious
frauds›; and we see by the example of Rousseau [p057] (that
austere writer, who has inscribed at the head of all his works the
motto, ‹Vitam impendere vero›), that even a proud philosophy can
allow itself to be seduced by the attraction of a very different
maxim, namely, ‹The end justifies the means›. Why then should we be
surprised that modern ‹organisateurs› should think also “‹to place
their own wisdom to the credit of the gods, to put their decisions in
the mouths of the immortals, hurrying us along without violence and
persuading without convincing us›!”
We know that, after the example of Moses, Fourier has preceded his
Deuteronomy by a Genesis. Saint Simon and his disciples had gone
still farther in their apostolic senilities. Others, more discreet,
attached themselves to a latitudinarian faith, modified to suit their
views, under the name of ‹néochristianisme›; and every one must be
struck with the tone of mystic affectation which nearly all our
modern reformers have introduced into their sermons.
Efforts of this kind have served only to prove one thing, and it is
not unimportant—namely, that in our days the man is not always a
prophet who wishes to be one. In vain he proclaims himself a god; he
is believed by no one; neither by the public, nor by his compeers,
nor by himself.
Since I have spoken of Rousseau, I may be permitted to make here some
observations on that manufacturer of systems, inasmuch as they will
serve to point out the distinctions between artificial and natural
organization. This digression, besides, is not out of place, as the
‹Contrat Social› has again for some time been held forth as the
oracle of the future.
Rousseau was convinced that ‹isolation› was man’s ‹natural state›,
and, consequently, that ‹society› was a human invention. “‹The social
order›,” he says in the outset, “‹comes not from nature›, and is
therefore founded on convention.”
This philosopher, although a passionate lover of liberty, had a very
low opinion of men. He believed them to be quite incapable of forming
for themselves good institutions. The intervention of a founder, a
legislator, a father of nations, was therefore indispensable.
“A people subjected to laws,” says he, “should be the authors
of them. It belongs alone to those who associate to adjust the
conditions of their association; but how are they to regulate them?
By common consent, or by sudden inspiration? How should a blind
multitude, who frequently know not what they want, because they
rarely know what is good for them, accomplish of themselves an
enterprise so great and so difficult as the formation of a system
[p058] of laws? . . . Individuals perceive what is good, and reject
it—the public wishes for what is good, but cannot discover it:—all
are equally in want of guides. . . . Hence the necessity of a
legislator.”
That legislator, as we have already seen, “not being able to employ
force or reason, is under the necessity of having recourse to an
authority of another kind;” that is to say, in plain terms, to
deception.
It is impossible to give an idea of the immense height at which
Rousseau places his legislator above other men:
“Gods would be necessary in order to give laws to men. . . . He who
dares to found a nation must feel himself in a condition to change
human nature, so to speak, . . . to alter the constitution of man in
order to strengthen it. . . . He must take from man his own force, in
order to give him that which is foreign to him. . . . The lawgiver
is in all respects an extraordinary man in the state, . . . his
employment is a peculiar and superior function which has nothing in
common with ordinary government. . . . If it be true that a great
prince is a rare character, what must a great lawgiver be? The first
has only to follow the model which the other is to propose to him.
The one is the mechanician who invents the machine—the other merely
puts it together and sets it in motion.”
And what is the part assigned to human nature in all this? It is but
the base material of which the machine is composed.
In sober reality, is this anything else than pride elevated to
madness? Men are the materials of a machine, which the prince, the
ruling power, sets in motion. The lawgiver proposes the model.
The philosopher governs the lawgiver, placing himself thus at an
immeasurable distance above the vulgar herd, above the ruler, above
the lawgiver himself. He soars far above the human race, actuates it,
transforms it, moulds it, or rather he teaches the Fathers of nations
how they are to do all this.
But the founder of a nation must propose to himself a design. He has
his human material to set in motion, and he must direct its movements
to a definite result. As the people are deprived of the initiative,
and all depends upon the legislator, he must decide whether the
nation is to be commercial or agricultural, or a barbarous race
of hunters and fishers; but it is desirable at the same time that
the legislator should not himself be mistaken, and so do too much
violence to the nature of things.
Men in ‹agreeing› to enter into an association, or rather in
associating under the fiat of a lawgiver, have a precise and definite
design. “Thus,” says Rousseau, “the Hebrews, and, more recently, the
Arabs, had for their principal object religion; the [p059] Athenians,
letters; Carthage and Tyre, commerce; Rhodes, navigation; Sparta,
war; and Rome, virtue.”
What object is to determine us Frenchmen to leave the state of
isolation and of nature, in order to form a society? Or rather—as we
are only so much inert matter—the materials of a machine,—towards
what object shall our great founder direct us?
Following the ideas of Rousseau, there could be but little room for
learning, commerce, or navigation. War is a nobler object, and virtue
still more so. But there is another, the noblest of all: “The end of
every system of legislation is ‹liberty and equality›.”
But we must first of all discover what Rousseau understands by
liberty. To enjoy liberty, according to him, is not to be free,
but to ‹exercise the suffrage›, when we are “borne along without
violence, and persuaded without being convinced;” for then “we obey
with freedom, and bear willingly the yoke of the public felicity.”
“Among the Greeks,” he says, “all that the people had to do they did
for themselves, they were constantly assembled in the market-place;
they inhabited a genial climate; they were not avaricious; ‹slaves
did all their work; their grand concern was their liberty›.”
“The English people,” he remarks in another place, “believe
themselves free,—they are much mistaken. They are so only during the
election of their members of parliament; the moment the election is
over, they are slaves—they are nothing.”
The people, if they will be free, must, then, themselves perform all
duties in connexion with the public service, for it is in that that
liberty consists. They must be always voting and electing, always in
the market-place. Woe to him who takes it into his head to work for
his living! the moment a citizen begins to mind his own affairs, that
instant (to use Rousseau’s favourite phrase) ‹tout est perdu›—all is
over with him.
And yet the difficulty is by no means trifling. How are we to manage?
for, after all, before we can either practise virtue, or exercise
liberty, we must have the means of living.
We have already remarked the rhetorical veil under which Rousseau
conceals the word ‹Imposture›. We shall now see how, by another dash
of eloquence, he evades the conclusion of his whole work, which is
‹Slavery›.
“Your ungenial climate entails upon you additional wants. For six
months of the year you cannot frequent the market-place, your hoarse
voices cannot make themselves audible in the open air, and you fear
poverty more than slavery.”
“You see clearly that you cannot be free.” [p060]
“What! liberty maintain itself only by the aid of servitude? Very
likely!”
Had Rousseau stopt short at this dreadful word, the reader would have
been shocked. It was necessary therefore to have recourse to imposing
declamation, and Rousseau never fails in that.
“All things that are unnatural (it is society he is speaking of) are
inconvenient, and civil society more so than all the rest. There are
unfortunate situations in which one man cannot maintain his liberty
but at the expense of another, and where the citizen cannot be
entirely free unless the rigours of slavery are extreme. As for you,
modern people, you have no slavery, but you are yourselves slaves.
You purchase other men’s liberty with your own. In vain you boast of
this advantage. I see in it rather cowardice than humanity.”
I ask, does not this mean: Modern people, you would do infinitely
better not to be slaves, but to possess slaves?
I trust the reader will have the goodness to pardon this long
digression, which is by no means useless or inopportune. Rousseau
and his disciples of the Convention have been held up to us of late
as the apostles of human fraternity. Men for materials, a ruler
for mechanician, a father of nations for inventor, a philosopher
above them all—imposture for means, slavery for result,—is this the
fraternity which is promised us?
This work of Rousseau to which I have referred—the ‹Contrat
Social›—appears to me well fitted to exhibit the characteristics of
these artificial social organizations. The inventors of such systems
set out with the idea that society is a state contrary to nature,
and they seek to subject humanity to different combinations. They
forget that its motive power, its spring of action, is in itself.
They regard men as base materials, and aspire to impart to them
movement and will, sentiment and life; placing themselves at an
immeasurable height above the whole human race. These are features
common to all the inventors of social organizations. The inventions
are different—the inventors are alike.
Among the new arrangements which feeble mortals are invited to make
trial of, there is one which is presented to us in terms worthy of
attention. Its formula is: ‹Association voluntary and progressive›.
But ‹Political Economy› is founded exactly on the datum, that
‹society› is nothing else than ‹association› (such as the above three
words describe it)—association, very imperfect at first, because
man is imperfect; but improving as man improves, that is to say,
‹progressive›. [p061]
Is your object to effect a more intimate association between labour,
capital, and talent, insuring thereby to the members of the human
family a greater amount of material enjoyment—enjoyment more equally
distributed? If such associations are ‹voluntary›; if force and
constraint do not intervene; if the cost is defrayed by those who
enter these associations, without drawing upon those who refuse
to enter them, in what respect are they repugnant to Political
Economy? Is it not the business of Political Economy, as a science,
to examine the various forms in which men may unite their powers,
and divide their employments, with a view to greater and more widely
diffused prosperity? Does trade not frequently afford us examples
of two, three, or four persons uniting to form such associations?
Is ‹Métayage›[17] not a sort of informal association of capital
and labour? Have we not in recent times seen joint stock companies
formed which afford to the smallest capitals the opportunity of
taking part in the most extensive enterprizes? Have we not certain
manufactures in which it is sought to give the labourers an interest
in the profits? Does Political Economy condemn those efforts of men
to make their industry more productive and profitable? Does she
affirm anywhere that human nature has reached perfection? Quite the
contrary. I believe that there is no science which demonstrates more
clearly that society is still in its infancy.
But whatever hopes we may entertain as to the future, whatever
ideas we may conceive as to the measures that men may adopt for
the improvement of their mutual relations, and the diffusion of
happiness, knowledge, and morality, we must never forget that society
is an organization which has for its element a moral and intelligent
agent, endued with free will, and susceptible of improvement. If you
take away Liberty from man, he becomes nothing else than a rude and
wretched machine.
Liberty would seem not to be wanted in our days. In France, the
privileged land of fashion, freedom appears to be no longer in
repute. For myself, I say that he who rejects liberty has no faith
in human nature. Of late the distressing discovery seems to have
been made that liberty leads inevitably to monopoly.[18] This
monstrous union, this unnatural conjunction, does not exist; it is
the imaginary fruit of an error which the light of Political Economy
speedily [p062] dissipates. Freedom engender monopoly! Oppression
the offspring of liberty! To affirm this is to affirm that the
tendencies of human nature are radically bad—bad in themselves, in
their nature, in their essence. It is to affirm that the natural
bent of man is to deterioration; that the human mind is irresistibly
attracted towards error. To what end, then, our schools, our
studies, our inquiries, our discussions, unless to accelerate our
progress towards that fatal descent; since to teach men to judge, to
distinguish, to select, is only to teach them to commit suicide? And
if the tendencies of human nature are essentially perverse, where
are the organizers of new social systems to place the fulcrum of
that lever by which they hope to effect their changes? It must be
somewhere beyond the limits of the present domain of humanity. Do
they search for it in themselves—in their own minds and hearts? They
are not gods yet; they are men, and tending, consequently, along with
the whole human race, towards the fatal abyss. Shall they invoke the
intervention of the state? The state also is composed of men. They
must therefore prove that they form a distinct class, for whom the
general laws of society are not intended, since it is their province
to make these laws. Unless this be proved the difficulty is not
removed, it is not even diminished.
Let us not thus condemn human nature before studying its laws, its
forces, its energies, its tendencies. Newton, after he discovered
attraction, never pronounced the name of God without uncovering his
head. Yet the celestial mechanism is subject to laws of which it has
no consciousness; and the social world is as much superior to that
which called forth the admiration of Newton as mind is superior to
matter. How much more reason, then, have we to bow before Omniscience
when we behold the social mechanism, which universal intelligence no
less pervades (‹mens agitat molem›); and which presents, moreover,
this extraordinary phenomenon, that every atom of which it is
composed is an animated thinking being, endued with marvellous
energy, and with that principle of all morality, all dignity, all
progress, the exclusive attribute of man—«Liberty». [p063]
II.
WANTS, EFFORTS, SATISFACTIONS.[19]
What a profoundly afflicting spectacle France presents to us!
It would be difficult to say if anarchy has passed from ideas to
facts, or from facts to ideas, but it is certain that it pervades
all, and abounds everywhere.
The poor rise up against the rich, men without fortune or profession
against property; the populace against the bourgeoisie; labour
against capital; agriculture against manufactures; the country
against the town; the provinces against the metropolis; the denizen
against the stranger.
And theorists step in, and form a system of this antagonism. “It is
the ‹inevitable› result, they say, of the nature of things, that
is to say, of Liberty. Man is endued with ‹self-love›, and hence
comes all the evil; for since he is endued with self-love, he seeks
to better his own condition, and he can only do so by entailing
misery on his brethren. Let us hinder him, then, from following his
inclinations; let us stifle his liberty, change the human heart,
substitute other motives for those which God has placed there: let us
invent and constitute an artificial society!”
When they have got this length, an unlimited career opens itself to
their reason or imagination. If they are possessed of a disputatious
turn and a peevish temper, they enter with eagerness into an
analysis of Evil. They dissect it, they put it in the crucible,
they interrogate it, they remount to its causes, they pursue it
to its consequences; and, as by reason of our native imperfection
there is nothing in which Evil is not present, they asperse and
disparage everything. They exhibit to us Property, Family, Capital,
Labour, Competition, Liberty, Personal Interest, only in one of
their aspects, and always on the dark side, the side which injures
or [p064] destroys. Their lectures on the natural history of man
are, if I may use the expression, clinical lectures—the subject is
always on his deathbed. They impiously defy God to reconcile what is
said of His infinite goodness with the existence of evil. They stain
and sully everything; they disgust us with everything; they dispute
everything; and yet they obtain only a melancholy and dangerous
success with those classes whom suffering disposes but too much to
despair.
If, on the other hand, such theorists have a heart open to
benevolence, a mind which is pleased with illusions, they rush to the
region of chimeras. They dream of an Oceania, an Atlantis, a Salente,
a Spensonie, an Icarie, a Utopia, a Phalanstère,[20] and they
people these imaginary regions with a docile, loving, devoted race
who always avoid setting themselves up against the fancies of the
dreamer. He installs himself complacently in the seat of Providence.
He arranges, he disposes, he moulds men after his own fancy. Nothing
stops him. He never encounters deceit. He resembles the Roman
preacher, who, after having transformed his square cap into Rousseau,
refuted warmly the ‹Contrat Social›, and triumphantly reduced his
adversary to silence. It is thus that our Reformers dazzle those who
suffer by means of seductive pictures of ideal felicity, well fitted
to disgust them with the hard necessities of real life.
The theorist, however, rarely confines himself to such innocent
chimeras. The moment he aims at leading mankind, he finds the
people impatient of attempted transformations. Men resist, they get
angry. In order to gain them over, he harangues them not only on
the happiness they reject, but more especially on the evils from
which he professes to deliver them. He finds it impossible to make
too striking a picture. He is continually charging his palette and
deepening his colours. He hunts out the evils of existing society
with as much zeal as another employs in discovering the good. He sees
nothing but sufferings, rags, leanness, starvation, pain, oppression.
He is enraged that society has not a deeper sense of its misery. He
neglects no means of making it throw off its insensibility, and,
having begun with benevolence, he ends with misanthropy.[21]
God forbid that I should call in question the sincerity of any one.
But, in truth, I cannot explain to myself how these writers, [p065]
who see a radical antagonism in the natural order of things, can
ever taste a moment’s calm or repose. Discouragement and despair
would seem to be their unhappy portion. For, to sum up all, if
nature is mistaken in making ‹personal interest› the mainspring of
human society (and the mistake is manifest if it be admitted that
the interests of society are fatally antagonistic), how do they not
perceive that the evil is without remedy? Being men ourselves, and
being able to have recourse only to men, where can be our ‹point
d’appui› for changing the tendencies of human nature? Shall we invoke
the Police, the Magistracy, the State, the Legislature? That would
only be to invoke men, that is to say, beings subject to the common
infirmity. Shall we address ourselves to Universal Suffrage? That
would be to give the freest course to the universal tendency.
Only one expedient remains to these gentlemen. It is to hold
themselves out as discoverers, as prophets, made of different
clay from their fellow-men, and deriving their inspiration from a
different source. This is the reason, no doubt, why we find them so
frequently enveloping their systems and their councils in a mystic
phraseology. But if they are ambassadors of God, let them exhibit
their credentials. In effect, what they demand is sovereign power,
despotism the most absolute that ever existed. They not only wish to
govern our acts, but to revolutionize our thoughts. Do they hope that
mankind will believe them on their word, when they are not able to
agree among themselves?
But before even examining their projects of artificial societies, is
there not one point upon which it is necessary to assure ourselves,
namely, whether they are not mistaken in the very foundation of their
argument? Is it quite certain that «MEN’S INTERESTS ARE NATURALLY
ANTAGONISTIC»; that an irremediable cause of inequality is fatally
developed in the natural order of human society under the influence
of personal interest, and that Providence is manifestly in error
in ordaining that the progress of man should be towards ease and
competency?
This is what I propose to inquire into.
Taking man as it has pleased God to constitute him, capable of
foresight and experience, perfectible, endued with self-love, it
is true,—but self-love qualified by the sympathetic principle, and
at all events restrained and balanced by encountering an analogous
sentiment universally prevailing in the medium in which it acts,—I
proceed to inquire what social order must necessarily result from the
combination and free play of such elements.
If we find that this result is nothing else than a progressive
[p066] march towards prosperity, improvement, and equality,—a
sustained approximation of all classes towards the same physical,
intellectual, and moral level, accompanied by a constant elevation
of that level, the ways of God to man will be vindicated. We shall
learn with delight that there is no gap, no blank, in creation, and
that the social order, like everything else, attests the existence of
those ‹harmonic laws› before which Newton bowed his head, and which
elicited from the Psalmist the exclamation, “‹The heavens declare the
glory of God.›”
Rousseau has said, “If I were a prince or a legislator, I should not
lose my time in pointing out what was necessary to be done—I should
do it or hold my tongue.”
I am not a ‹prince›, but the confidence of my fellow-citizens has
made me a ‹legislator›. Perhaps they will tell me that this is the
time for me to act and not to write.
Let them pardon me. Whether it be truth itself which urges me on, or
that I am the dupe of an illusion. I have never ceased to feel the
want of concentrating those ideas which have hitherto failed to find
acceptance when presented in detached portions. I think I discover
in the play of the natural laws of society sublime and consoling
‹harmonies›. What I see, or think I see, ought I not to try to
exhibit to others, in order to rally round a sentiment of concord
and fraternity many unsettled minds, many imbittered hearts? If,
when the much-loved vessel of the state is beat by the tempest, I
sometimes appear to absent myself from my post, in order to collect
my scattered thoughts, it is because I feel my feeble hands unfitted
for the work. Is it, besides, to betray my mission, to reflect upon
the causes of the tempest itself, and endeavour to act upon these
causes? And then, what I find I cannot do to-day, who knows but it
may be given me to accomplish to-morrow?
I shall begin by establishing some Economical ideas. Availing myself
of the works of my predecessors, I shall endeavour to sum up the
science in one principle—true, simple, and prolific—of which we have
had a glimpse from the beginning, to which we are constantly drawing
nearer and nearer, and of which, perhaps, the time is now come to fix
the formula. By the light thus afforded, I shall afterwards essay
the solution of some yet disputed problems—Competition, Machinery,
Foreign trade, Luxury, Capital, Rent, etc. I shall note some of
the relations, or, I should rather say, the harmonies of Political
Economy, with the other moral and social sciences, glancing at
the important subjects indicated by the terms—Personal Interest,
Property, Community, Liberty, [p067] Equality, Responsibility,
Solidarity, Fraternity, Unity. Last of all, I shall invite attention
to the artificial obstacles which the pacific, regular, and
progressive development of human society encounters. From these two
ideas—Natural harmonic Laws—Artificial disturbing Causes—will be
deduced the solution of the Social Problem.
It is easy to see that there are two rocks ahead upon which this
undertaking may founder. In the middle of the vortex in which we are
carried along, if this work is abstruse, it will not be read; if it
obtains readers, the questions of which it treats will be but glanced
at. How are we to reconcile the exactions of the reader with the
requirements of science? To satisfy all conditions both in form and
substance, each word would require to be weighed, and have its proper
place assigned to it. It is thus that the crystal is formed drop by
drop in silence and obscurity. Retirement, quiet, time, freedom from
care—all are wanting to me—and I am forced to trust to the sagacity
of the public, and throw myself on its indulgence.
The subject of Political Economy is Man.
But it does not embrace the whole range of human affairs. The science
of morals has appropriated all that comes within the attractive
regions of Sympathy—the religious sentiment, paternal and maternal
tenderness, filial piety, love, friendship, patriotism, charity,
politeness. To Political Economy is left only the cold domain of
Personal interest. This is unjustly forgotten when Economical science
is reproached with wanting the charm and unction of morals. How can
it be otherwise? Dispute its right to existence as a science, but
don’t force it to counterfeit what it is not, and cannot be. If human
transactions which have wealth for their object are vast enough,
complicated enough, to afford materials for a special science, leave
to it its own attractions, such as they are, and don’t force it
to speak of men’s Interests in the language of Sentiment. For my
own part, I believe that little good has been effected of late in
exacting from writers on Political Economy a tone of enthusiastic
sentimentality which in their mouth can only be declamation. Of what
do they treat? Of transactions which take place between people who
know nothing of each other, who owe each other nothing but common
Justice, who seek to defend or advance certain interests. It has to
do with claims and pretensions which limit and restrain each other,
and with which disinterestedness and devotion have nothing to do.
Take a lyre, and chant such themes! As well might Lamartine sing his
odes with the aid of the logarithm tables. [p068]
Not that Political Economy is without its poetry. There is poetry
wherever order and harmony exist. But it is in the results, not in
the demonstrations. It is brought out, not created. Kepler did not
give himself out as a poet, and yet the laws which he discovered are
the true poetry of mind.
Thus, Political Economy regards man only in one aspect, and our first
care must be to study man in that point of view. This is the reason
why we cannot avoid going back to the primary phenomena of human
‹Sensibility› and ‹Activity›. Start not, gentle reader! We shall not
detain you long in those cloudy regions of metaphysics, and we shall
borrow from that science only such notions as are clear, simple, and,
if possible, incontestable.
The soul, or (to get rid of the spiritual question) man, is endued
with ‹Sensibility›. Let this sensibility be either in the soul or in
the body, man, as a ‹passive› being, always experiences ‹sensations›
either painful or agreeable. As an ‹active› being, he makes an effort
to drive away the one set of sensations and to multiply the other.
The result, which affects him again as a ‹passive› being, may be
called ‹Satisfaction›.
The general idea of ‹Sensibility› springs from other ideas which are
more precise: pain, want, desire, taste, appetite, on one side; and,
on the other, pleasure, enjoyment, competence.
Between these two extremes a middle term is interposed, and from the
general idea of ‹Activity› spring the more precise ideas of pain,
effort, fatigue, labour, production.
In analyzing ‹Sensibility› and ‹Activity› we encounter a word common
to both; the word ‹Pain›. To experience certain sensations is a
‹pain›, and we cannot put an end to it but by an effort, which is
also a ‹pain›. We ‹feel pains›; we ‹take pains›. This advertises us
that here below we have only a choice of evils.
In the aggregate of these phenomena all is ‹personal›, as well the
Sensation which precedes the effort, as the Satisfaction which
follows it.
We cannot doubt, then, that ‹Personal interest› is the great
mainspring of human nature. It must be perfectly understood, however,
that this term is here employed as the expression of a universal
fact, incontestable, and resulting from the organization of man,—and
not of a critical judgment on his conduct and actions, as if, instead
of it, we should employ the word ‹egotism›. Moral science would be
rendered impossible, if we were to pervert beforehand the terms of
which it is compelled to make use.
Human effort does not always come necessarily to place itself
between the sensation and the satisfaction. Sometimes the [p069]
satisfaction comes of its own accord. More frequently the effort is
exercised upon ‹materials›, by the intervention of ‹forces› which
nature has placed gratuitously at our disposal.
If we give the name of ‹Utility› to all which effects the
satisfaction of wants, there are, then, utilities of two kinds:—one,
vouchsafed to us gratuitously by Providence; the other (if I may use
the expression), requiring to be purchased by an ‹Effort›.
Thus the complete evolution embraces, or may embrace, these four
ideas:
Wants {Gratuitous Utility, Onerous Utility} Satisfaction.
Man is endued with progressive faculties. He compares, he foresees,
he learns, he reforms himself, by experience. If want is a ‹pain›,
effort is a ‹pain› also, and there is therefore no reason why he
should not seek to diminish the latter, when he can do so without
diminishing the satisfaction, which is his ultimate object. This
is the reason of his success when he comes to replace ‹onerous› by
‹gratuitous Utility›, which is the perpetual object of his search.
It follows from the ‹interested› nature of the human heart, that we
constantly seek to increase the proportion which our Satisfactions
bear to our Efforts; and it results from the intelligent nature of
our mind that we manage at each step to augment the proportion which
gratuitous bears to onerous Utility.
Every time a success of this nature is achieved, a part of our
efforts is, so to speak, rendered disposable, and we have the option
of either indulging ourselves with longer repose, or of working
for the satisfaction of new desires, if these are strong enough to
stimulate our activity.
Such is the principle of all economic progress; and it is easy to
see that it is the principle also of all deception; for progress
and error have both their root in that marvellous gift of God to
man—‹Free will›.
We are endued with the faculty of comparing, of judging, of choosing,
and of acting in consequence; which implies that we may form a right
or a wrong judgment, and make a good or a bad choice. It is never
useless to remind men of this when they talk of Liberty.
We never deceive ourselves, it is true, regarding the particular
nature of our sensations, and we discern with an infallible instinct
whether they are painful or agreeable. But how many various forms may
our errors take! We may be labouring under a mistake as to the cause,
and pursue with ardour, as likely to afford us enjoyment, what can
only indict pain upon us; or we may be [p070] mistaken as to the
chain of consequences, and be ignorant that an immediate satisfaction
will be followed by greater ulterior pain; or, again, we may mistake
the relative importance of our wants and our desires.
Not only may we thus give a false direction to our efforts through
ignorance, but also through a perverse will. “Man,” says M. Bonald,
“is an intelligence served by organs.” What! is there nothing else in
us? Have we no passions?
When we speak of harmony, then, we must not be understood to mean
that the natural arrangement of the social world is such that error
and vice have been excluded from it. To maintain that thesis in the
face of plain facts would be to carry the love of system to madness.
To have harmony without dissonance man must either be devoid of free
will or he must be infallible. All we say is this, that the great
social tendencies are harmonious, inasmuch as—all error leading
to deception and all vice to chastisement—the dissonances have a
continual tendency to disappear.
* * * * *
A first and vague notion of property may be deduced from these
premises. Since it is the individual who experiences the sensation,
the desire, the want,—since it is he who makes the ‹Effort›,—the
satisfaction must necessarily redound to him, for otherwise the
effort would be without cause or reason.
The same may be said of ‹Inheritance›. No theory, no declamation, is
required in order to make fathers love their children. People who sit
down to manufacture imaginary societies may think it strange, but
it is so;—a father makes as many ‹Efforts› for the ‹satisfaction›
of his children as for his own. Perhaps he makes more. If, then, an
unnatural law should interdict the transmission of property, not only
would that law violate property by the very act, but it would hinder
its formation by abandoning to inaction one-half at least of our
‹Efforts›.
We shall have occasion to return to the subjects of Personal
interest, Property, and Inheritance. Let us, in the first instance,
mark out the limits of the science with which we have more
immediately to do.
I am not one of those who think that a science, as such, has natural
and unalterable boundaries. In the domain of ideas, as in that of
facts, all things are bound up and linked together; truths run into
one another; and there is no science which, in order to be complete,
might not be made to include all. It has been said with reason that
to an infinite intelligence there is but a single verity. It is,
then, our weakness which obliges us to study separately a [p071]
certain order of phenomena, and the classifications which result from
it cannot escape a certain decree of arbitrariness.
The true merit is to explain accurately the facts, their causes,
and their consequences. It is also a merit, although a much less
and a purely relative one, to determine, not rigorously—for that is
impossible—but rationally, the order of the facts which we propose to
study.
I say this in order that it may not be supposed that I intend to
criticise my predecessors if I give to Political Economy limits
somewhat different from those which they have assigned to that
science.
Economists have of late been reproached with addicting themselves
too much to the study of ‹Wealth›. It has been wished that they had
found a place in their science for all that, directly or indirectly,
contributes to the happiness or sufferings of humanity. They have
even been supposed to deny everything which they did not profess to
teach—for example, the phenomena of sympathy, which is as natural
to the heart of man as the principle of self-interest. It is as
if they accused the mineralogist of denying the existence of the
animal kingdom. What! Wealth, the laws of its production, of its
distribution, of its consumption,—is not this a subject vast enough,
and important enough, to be made the object of a special science?
If the conclusions of the Economist were at variance with those of
morals and politics. I could conceive ground for the accusation. One
might say to him, “In limiting your science you are mistaken, for
it is not possible for two verities to run counter to each other.”
Perhaps one result of the work which I now submit to the public may
be, that the Science of Wealth will be found to be in perfect harmony
with all the other sciences.
Of the three terms comprehended in the human destinies—Sensation,
Effort, Satisfaction—the first and the last are always and
necessarily confounded in the same individuality. It is impossible to
imagine them separated. We can conceive a sensation unsatisfied, a
want unappeased, but it is quite impossible to suppose the ‹want› to
be in one man and the ‹satisfaction› to be in another.
If the same observation applied to the middle term, ‹Effort›, man
would be a being completely solitary. The Economic phenomena would
then manifest themselves in an isolated individual. There might be a
juxtaposition of persons, but there could be no society; there might
be a Personal, but not a Political, Economy.
But it is not so. It is very possible, and very often happens, that
the ‹wants› of one owe their ‹satisfaction› to the ‹efforts› of
[p072] another. This is a fact. If any one of us were to pass in
review all the satisfactions he enjoys, he would acknowledge that
he owes them chiefly to efforts which he has not himself made;
and in the same way, the labour which we undergo, each in his own
profession, goes almost always to satisfy the desires of others.
This tells us, that it is neither in the wants nor in the
satisfactions (phenomena essentially personal and intransmissible),
but in the nature of the mean term, ‹human Efforts›, that we must
search for the ‹social› principle—the origin of Political Economy.
It is in fact to this faculty, given to men, and to men alone,
among all creatures, to ‹work the one for the other›; it is this
transmission of efforts, this exchange of services, with all the
infinite and involved combinations to which it gives rise, through
time and through space, it is «THIS» precisely which constitutes
Economic Science, points out its origin, and determines its limits.
I say, then:
‹Every effort, capable of satisfying, on condition of a return,
the wants of a person other than the man who makes the effort, and
consequently the wants and satisfactions relative to this species of
effort, constitute the domain of Political Economy.›
Thus, to give an example: the act of breathing, although it includes
the three terms which constitute the Economic phenomenon, does not
pertain to that science, and we see the reason. What we have here to
do with is a series of facts, of which not only the two extremes—want
and satisfaction—are incapable of transmission (they are always so);
but the mean term, ‹Effort›, is also incapable of transmission. To
enable us to respire we invoke the assistance of no one; in that
there is neither a service to be received nor a service to render.
The fact is in its nature individual, not ‹social›, and consequently
cannot enter into a science which is essentially one of relation, as
its very name indicates.
But if, in peculiar circumstances, people were to render each other
assistance to enable them to breathe, as when a workman descends
in a diving-bell, when a physician treats a patient for pulmonary
complaints, or when the police take measures for purifying the air,
in such cases there is a want satisfied by a person other than the
person who experiences the want; there is a service rendered; and
respiration itself, as far at least as concerns assistance and
remuneration, is brought within the sphere of Political Economy.
It is not necessary that the transaction should be completed, it is
sufficient that it is possible, in order to impart to the ‹labour›
employed an ‹economic› character. The labourer who raises corn
[p073] for his own use accomplishes an economic fact in this respect
that the corn is capable of being exchanged.
To make an effort in order to satisfy another’s wants is to render
him a ‹service›. If a service is stipulated in return, there is
an exchange of ‹services›; and as this is the most ordinary case,
Political Economy may be defined ‹the theory of Exchange›.
Whatever may be for one of the contracting parties the urgency of
the want, or for the other the intensity of the effort, if the
exchange is free, the two services exchanged are ‹worth each other›.
Value, then, consists in the comparative appreciation of reciprocal
‹services›, and Political Economy again may be defined ‹the theory of
Value›.
I have just defined Political Economy, and marked out its domain,
without mentioning an essential element, ‹gratuitous Utility›.
All authors have remarked that we derive a multitude of satisfactions
from this source. They denominate these utilities, such as
air, water, the light of the sun, etc., ‹natural wealth›, in
contradistinction to ‹social wealth›, and having done so, they take
no more notice of them; and in fact it would seem that, as they give
rise to no effort, to no exchange, to no service, as (being destitute
of value) they figure in no inventory of goods, they should not be
admitted into the domain of Political Economy.
This exclusion would be rational if ‹gratuitous› utility were a
fixed invariable quantity, always separated from ‹onerous› utility;
but they are constantly mixed up, and in inverse proportions. Man’s
constant endeavour is to substitute the one for the other, that
is to say, to arrive, by means of natural and gratuitous agents,
at the same results as by efforts. He accomplishes by the wind,
by gravitation, by heat, by the elasticity of the air, what he
accomplished at first only by muscular exertion.
Now what happens? Although the effect is equally useful, the effort
is less. Less effort implies less service, and less service implies
less value. Each step of progress, then, annihilates value; but how?
Not by suppressing the useful effect, but by substituting gratuitous
for onerous utility, natural for social wealth. In one sense the
portion of value thus annihilated is excluded from the domain of
Political Economy, just as it is excluded from our inventories. It is
no longer exchanged, bought, or sold, and mankind enjoy it without
effort and almost without consciousness. It is no longer accounted
relative wealth, but is ranked among the gifts of God.
But, on the other hand, if science takes it no longer into account,
the error is assuredly committed of losing sight of what [p074]
under all circumstances is the main, the essential thing—the
result, the ‹useful effect›. In that case we overlook the strongest
tendencies towards community and equality, and discover much
less of harmony in the social order. If this book is destined to
advance Political Economy a single step, it will be by keeping
constantly before the eyes of the reader that portion of ‹value›
which is successively annihilated, and recovered, under the form of
‹gratuitous utility›, by mankind at large.
I shall here make an observation which will prove how frequently the
sciences unite and nearly run into each other.
I have just defined ‹service›. It is the ‹effort› in one man,
while the ‹want› and the ‹satisfaction› are in another. Sometimes
the service is rendered gratuitously, without remuneration,
without any service being exacted in return. It proceeds, then,
from the principle of sympathy rather than from the principle of
self-interest. It constitutes gift, not exchange. Consequently it
would seem to appertain not to Political Economy (which is the theory
of exchange), but to morals. In fact, acts of that nature, by reason
of their motive, are rather moral than economical. We shall see,
however, that, by reason of their effects, they concern the science
which now engages us. On the other hand, services rendered for an
onerous consideration, on condition of a return, and, by reason of
that motive (essentially economic), do not on that account remain
excluded from the domain of morals, in so far as their effects are
concerned.
Thus these two branches of knowledge have an infinite number of
points of contact; and as two truths cannot be antagonistic, when the
economist ascribes to a phenomenon injurious consequences, and the
moralist ascribes to it beneficial effects, we may affirm that one or
other of them is mistaken. It is thus that the sciences verify and
fortify one another. [p075]
III.
WANTS OF MAN.
It is perhaps impossible, and, at any rate, it would not be of much
use, to present a complete and methodical catalogue of human wants.
Nearly all those which are of real importance are comprised in the
following enumeration:—
Respiration (I retain here that want, as marking the boundary
where the transmission of labour or exchange of services
begins)—Food—Clothing—Lodging—Preservation or re-establishment
of Health—Locomotion—Security—Instruction—Diversion—Sense of the
beautiful.
Wants exist. This is a fact. It would be puerile to inquire whether
we should have been better without wants, and why God has made us
subject to them.
It is certain that man ‹suffers›, and even dies, when he cannot
satisfy the wants which belong to his organization. It is certain
that he ‹suffers›, and may even die, when in satisfying certain of
his wants he indulges to excess.
We cannot satisfy the greater part of our wants without pain or
trouble, which may be considered as ‹suffering›. The same may be said
of the act by which, exercising a noble control over our appetites,
we impose on ourselves a privation.
Thus, ‹suffering› is inevitable, and there remains to us only a
choice of evils. Nothing comes more home to us than suffering, and
hence ‹personal interest›—the sentiment which is branded now-a-days
with the names of egotism and individualism—is indestructible. Nature
has placed ‹sensibility› at the extremity of our nerves, and at all
the avenues to the heart and mind, as an advanced guard, to give us
notice when our satisfactions are either defective or in excess. Pain
has, then, a purpose, a mission. We are asked frequently, whether the
existence of evil can be reconciled with the infinite goodness of
the Creator—a formidable [p076] problem that philosophy will always
discuss, and never probably be able to solve. As far as Political
Economy is concerned, we must take man as he is, inasmuch as it is
not given to imagination to figure to itself—far less can the reason
conceive—a sentient and mortal being exempt from pain. We should
try in vain to comprehend sensibility without pain, or man without
sensibility.
In our days, certain sentimentalist schools reject as false all
social science which does not go the length of establishing a system
by means of which suffering may be banished from the world. They pass
a severe judgment on Political Economy because it admits, what it is
impossible to deny, the existence of suffering. They go farther—they
make Political Economy responsible for it. It is as if they were to
attribute the frailty of our organs to the physiologist who makes
them the object of his study.
Undoubtedly we may acquire a temporary popularity, attract the
regards of suffering classes, and irritate them against the natural
order of society, by telling them that we have in our head a plan of
artificial social arrangement which excludes pain in every form. We
may even pretend to appropriate God’s secret, and to interpret His
presumed will, by banishing evil from the world. And there will not
be wanting those who will treat as ‹impious› a science which exposes
such pretensions, and who will accuse it of overlooking or denying
the foresight of the Author of things.
These schools, at the same time, give us a frightful picture of the
actual state of society, not perceiving that if it be ‹impious› to
foresee suffering in the future, it is equally so to expose its
existence in the past or in the present. For the infinite admits
of no limits; and if a single human being has since the creation
experienced suffering, that fact would entitle us to admit, without
‹impiety›, that suffering has entered into the plan of Providence.
Surely it is more philosophical and more manly to acknowledge at once
great natural facts which not only exist, but apart from which we can
form no just or adequate conception of human nature.
Man, then, is subject to suffering, and consequently society is also
subject to it.
Suffering discharges a function in the individual, and consequently
in society.
An accurate investigation of the social laws discloses to us that
the mission of suffering is gradually to destroy its own causes, to
circumscribe suffering itself within narrower limits, and finally to
assure the preponderance of the Good and the Fair, by enabling us to
purchase or merit that preponderance. [p077]
The nomenclature we have proposed places material wants in the
foreground.
The times in which we live force me to put the reader on his guard
against a species of sentimental affectation which is now much in
vogue.
There are people who hold very cheap what they disdainfully term
‹material wants›, ‹material satisfactions›: they will say, as Belise
says to Chrysale,
“Le corps, cette guenille, est-il d’une importance,
D’un prix à mériter seulement qu’on y pense?”
And although, in general, pretty well off themselves, they will blame
me for having indicated as one of our most pressing wants, that of
‹food›, for example.
I acknowledge undoubtedly that moral advancement is a higher thing
than physical sustenance. But are we so stuffed with declamatory
affectation that we can no longer venture to say, that before we can
set about moral culture, we must have the means of living. Let us
guard ourselves against these puerilities, which obstruct science.
In wishing to pass for philanthropical we cease to be truthful;
for it is contrary both to reason and to fact to represent moral
development, self-respect, the cultivation of refined sentiments,
as preceding the requirements of simple preservation. This sort of
prudery is quite modern. Rousseau, that enthusiastic panegyrist of
the ‹State of Nature›, steered clear of it; and a man endued with
exquisite delicacy, of a tenderness of heart full of unction, a
spiritualist even to quietism, and, towards himself, a stoic—I mean
Fénélon—has said that, “After all, solidity of mind consists in the
desire to be exactly instructed as to how those things are managed
which lie at the foundation of human life—all great affairs turn upon
that.”
Without pretending, then, to classify our wants in a rigorously
exact order, we may say, that man cannot direct his efforts to the
satisfaction of moral wants of the highest and most elevated kind
until after he has provided for those which concern his preservation
and sustenance. Whence, without going farther, we may conclude that
every legislative measure which tells against the material well-being
of communities injures the moral life of nations,—a ‹harmony› which I
commend, in passing, to the attention of the reader.
And since the occasion presents itself, I will here mark another.
Since the inexorable necessities of material life are an obstacle to
moral and intellectual culture, it follows that we ought to find more
virtue among wealthy than among poor nations and classes. [p078]
Good Heaven! what have I just said, and with what clamour shall I
be assailed! But the truth is, it is a perfect mania of our times
to attribute all disinterestedness, all self-sacrifice, all which
constitutes the greatness and moral beauty of man, to the poorer
classes, and this mania has of late been still more developed by a
revolution, which, bringing these classes to the surface of society,
has not failed to surround them with a crowd of flatterers.
I don’t deny that wealth, opulence, especially where it is very
unequally spread, tends to develop certain special vices.
But is it possible to admit as a general proposition that virtue
is the privilege of poverty, and vice the unhappy and unfailing
companion of ease? This would be to affirm that moral and
intellectual improvement, which is only compatible with a certain
amount of leisure and comfort, is detrimental to intelligence and
morality.
I appeal to the candour of the suffering classes themselves. To what
horrible ‹dissonances› would such a paradox conduct us!
We must then conclude, that human nature has the frightful
alternative presented to it, either to remain eternally wretched,
or advance gradually on the road to vice and immorality. Then all
the forces which conduct us to wealth—such as activity, economy,
skill, honesty—are the seeds of vice; while those which tie us to
poverty—improvidence, idleness, dissipation, carelessness—are the
precious germs of virtue. Could we conceive in the moral world a
dissonance more discouraging? Or, were it really so, who would dare
to address or counsel the people? You complain of your sufferings
(we must say to them), and you are impatient to see an end of these
sufferings. You groan at finding yourselves under the yoke of the
most imperious material wants, and you sigh for the hour of your
deliverance, for you desire leisure to make your voice heard in the
political world and to protect your interests. You know not what you
desire, or how fatal success would prove to you. Ease, competence,
riches, develop only vice. Guard, then, religiously your poverty and
your virtue.
The flatterers of the people, then, fall into a manifest
contradiction when they point to the region of opulence as an impure
sink of egotism and vice, and, at the same time, urge them on—and
frequently in their eagerness by the most illegitimate means—to a
region which they deem so unfortunate.
Such discordances are never encountered in the natural order of
society. It is impossible to suppose that all men should aspire
to competence, that the natural way to attain it should be by the
exercise of the strictest virtue, and that they should reach it
[p079] nevertheless only to be caught in the snares of vice. Such
declamations are calculated only to light up and keep alive the
hatred of classes. If true, they place human nature in a dilemma
between poverty and immorality. If untrue, they make falsehood the
minister of disorder, and set to loggerheads classes who should
mutually love and assist each other.
Factitious inequality—inequality generated by law, by disturbing the
natural order of development of the different classes of society—is,
for all, a prolific source of irritation, jealousy, and crime. This
is the reason why it is necessary to satisfy ourselves whether this
natural order leads to the progressive amelioration and progressive
equalization of all classes; and we should be arrested in this
inquiry by what lawyers term a ‹fin de non-recevoir›, a peremptory
exception, if this double material progress implied necessarily a
double moral degradation.
Upon the subject of human wants I have to make an important
observation,—and one which, in Political Economy, may even be
regarded as fundamental,—it is, that wants are not a fixed immutable
quantity. They are not in their nature stationary, but progressive.
We remark this characteristic even in our strictly physical wants;
but it becomes more apparent as we rise to those desires and
intellectual tastes which distinguish man from the inferior animals.
It would seem that if there be anything in which men should resemble
each other, it is in the want of food, for, unless in exceptional
cases, men’s stomachs are very much alike.
And yet aliments which are ‹recherchés› at one period become vulgar
at another, and the regimen which suits a Lazzarone would subject a
Dutchman to torture. Thus the want which is the most immediate, the
grossest of all, and consequently the most uniform of all, still
varies according to age, sex, temperament, climate, custom.
The same may be said of all our other wants. Scarcely has a man found
shelter than he desires to be lodged, scarcely is he clothed than he
wishes to be decorated, scarcely has he satisfied his bodily cravings
than study, science, art, open to his desires an unlimited field.
It is a phenomenon well worthy of remark, how quickly, by continuous
satisfaction, what was at first only a vague desire becomes a taste,
and what was only a taste is transformed into a want, and even a want
of the most imperious kind.
Look at that rude artizan. Accustomed to poor fare, plain [p080]
clothing, indifferent lodging, he imagines he would be the happiest
of men, and would have no farther desires, if he could but reach the
step of the ladder immediately above him. He is astonished that those
who have already reached it should still torment themselves as they
do. At length comes the modest fortune he has dreamt of, and then he
is happy, very happy—for a few days.
For soon he becomes familiar with his new situation, and by degrees
he ceases to feel his fancied happiness. With indifference he puts
on the fine clothing after which he sighed. He has got into a new
circle, he associates with other companions, he drinks of another
cup, he aspires to mount another step, and if he ever turns his
reflections at all upon himself, he feels that if his fortune has
changed, his soul remains the same, and is still an inexhaustible
spring of new desires.
It would seem that nature has attached this singular power to
‹habit›, in order that it should be in us what a rochet-wheel is in
mechanics, and that humanity, urged on continually to higher and
higher regions, should not be able to rest content, whatever degree
of civilisation it attains to.
The ‹sense of dignity›, the feeling of self-respect, acts with
perhaps still more force in the same direction. The stoic philosophy
has frequently blamed men for desiring rather to ‹appear› than to
‹be›. But, taking a broader view of things, is it certain that to
‹appear› is not for man one of the modes of ‹being›?
When, by exertion, order, and economy, a family rises by degrees
towards those social regions where tastes become nicer and more
delicate, relations more polished, sentiments more refined,
intelligence more cultivated, who can describe the acute suffering
which accompanies a forced return to their former low estate? The
body does not alone suffer. The sad reverse interferes with habits
which have become as it were a second nature; it clashes with the
sense of dignity, and all the feelings of the soul. It is by no means
uncommon in such a case to see the victim sink all at once into
degrading sottishness, or perish in despair. It is with the social
medium as with the atmosphere. The mountaineer, accustomed to the
pure air of his native hills, pines and moulders away in the narrow
streets of our cities.
But I hear some one exclaim, Economist, you stumble already. You have
just told us that your science is in accord with morals, and here you
are justifying luxury and effeminacy. Philosopher, I say in my turn,
lay aside these fine clothes, which were not those of primitive man,
break your furniture, burn your books, dine on raw flesh, and I shall
then reply to your objection. It is too much [p081] to quarrel with
this power of habit, of which you are yourself the living example.
We may find fault with this disposition which Nature has given to
our organs; but our censure will not make it the less universal.
We find it existing among all nations, ancient and modern, savage
and civilized, at the antipodes as at home. We cannot explain
civilisation without it; and when a disposition of the human heart is
thus proved to be universal and indestructible, social science cannot
put it aside, or refuse to take it into account.
This objection will be made by publicists who pride themselves on
being the disciples of Rousseau; but Rousseau has never denied the
existence of the phenomenon. He establishes undeniably the indefinite
elasticity of human wants, and the power of habit, and admits even
the part which I assign to them in preventing the human race from
retrograding; only, that which I admire is what he deplores, and he
does so consistently. Rousseau fancied there was a time when men
had neither rights, nor duties, nor relations, nor affections, nor
language; and it was then, according to him, that they were happy and
perfect. He was bound, therefore, to abhor the social machinery which
is constantly removing mankind from ideal perfection. Those, on the
contrary, who are of opinion that perfection is not at the beginning,
but at the end, of the human evolution, will admire the spring and
motive of action which I place in the foreground. But as to the
existence and play of the spring itself we are at one.
“Men of leisure,” he says, “employed themselves in procuring
all sorts of conveniences and accommodations unknown to their
forefathers, and that was the first yoke which, without intending
it, they imposed upon themselves, and the prime source of the
inconveniences which they prepared for their descendants. For,
not only did they thus continue to emasculate both mind and body,
but these luxuries having ‹by habit› lost all their relish, and
degenerated into ‹true wants›, their being deprived of them caused
more pain than the possession of them had given pleasure: they were
unhappy at losing what they had no enjoyment in possessing.”
Rousseau was convinced that God, nature, and humanity were wrong.
That is still the opinion of many; but it is not mine.
After all, God forbid that I should desire to set myself against the
noblest attribute, the most beautiful virtue of man, self-control,
command over his passions, moderation in his desires, contempt of
show. I don’t say that he is to make himself a slave to this or that
factitious want. I say that wants (taking a broad and general [p082]
view of them as resulting from man’s mental and bodily constitution),
combined with the power of habit, and the sense of dignity, are
indefinitely expansible, because they spring from an inexhaustible
source—namely, desire. Who should blame a rich man for being sober,
for despising finery, for avoiding pomp and effeminacy? But are there
not more elevated desires to which he may yield? Has the desire for
instruction, for instance, any limits? To render service to his
country, to encourage the arts, to disseminate useful ideas, to
succour the distressed,—is there anything in these incompatible with
the right use of riches?
For the rest, whatever philosophers may think of it, human wants
do not constitute a fixed immutable quantity. That is a certain, a
universal fact, liable to no exception. The wants of the fourteenth
century, whether with reference to food, or lodging, or instruction,
were not at all the wants of ours, and we may safely predict that
ours will not be the wants of our descendants.
The same observation applies to all the elements of Political
Economy—Wealth, Labour, Value, Services, etc.,—all participate in
the extreme versatility of the principal subject, Man. Political
Economy has not, like geometry or physics, the advantage of dealing
with objects which can be weighed or measured. This is one of its
difficulties to begin with, and it is a perpetual source of errors
throughout; for when the human mind applies itself to a certain order
of phenomena, it is naturally on the outlook for a ‹criterion›, a
common measure, to which everything can be referred, in order to give
to that particular branch of knowledge the character of an ‹exact
science›. Thus we observe some authors seeking for fixity in ‹value›,
others in ‹money›, others in ‹corn›, others in ‹labour›, that is to
say, in things which are themselves all liable to fluctuation.
Many errors in Political Economy proceed from authors thus regarding
human wants as a fixed determinate quantity; and it is for this
reason that I have deemed it my duty to enlarge on this subject.
At the risk of anticipating, it is worth while to notice briefly
this mode of reasoning. Economists take generally the enjoyments
which satisfy men of the present day, and they assume that human
nature admits of no other. Hence, if the bounty of nature, or the
power of machinery, or habits of temperance and moderation, succeed
in rendering disposable for a time a portion of human labour,
this progress disquiets them, they consider it as a disaster, and
they retreat behind absurd but specious formulas, such as these:
‹Production is superabundant›,—‹we suffer from plethora›,—‹the power
of producing outruns the power of consuming›, etc. [p083]
It is not possible to discover a solution of the question of
‹machinery›, or that of ‹external competition›, or that of ‹luxury›,
if we persist in considering our ‹wants› as a fixed invariable
quantity, and do not take into account their indefinite expansibility.
But if human ‹wants› are indefinite, progressive, capable of
increase, like desire, which is their never failing source, we must
admit, under pain of introducing discordance and contradiction
into the economical laws of society, th
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