When a Professor of _Political Economy_ was first established in the
University of Oxford, a controversy presently arose in the academical
common rooms concerning the just meaning of the phrase. Among elder and
conservative men, the most active-minded insisted that it ought to
receive the full width of meaning attached to it by Aristotle in his
Treatise on Economy, which, with him, was essentially the economy of the
State--that is, in pure Greek, _political_ economy, although this
epithet is not annexed to his title. By this interpretation, the science
naturally and necessarily became implicated with moral considerations,
which never can be excluded from the statesman's view. But the actual
students and professors of the new science--eminently Mr. Nassau Senior
and Dr. Whately, shortly afterwards Archbishop of Dublin--naturally
feared that by such an interpretation political economy would become
confounded with politics; would, indeed, cease to be a science; and by
so great an enlargement of its area, would fail to receive that special
and definite cultivation which Adam Smith had bestowed on it, as the
theory of national wealth. Whately indeed, to avoid this inconvenient
extension of the sense, proposed to call the topic, not political
economy, but _Catallactics_--that is, the science of exchanges.
Excellent in many respects as the last title was, it might have seemed
to exclude the whole doctrine of taxation, and still more decisively all
discussion of Malthus's theory of population, which belongs to politics
or to morals, not at all to the doctrine of exchange. In the end, the
economists ruled that their science does not at all teach what _ought_
to be, but simply what _is_, what _goes on_, and _will go on_, as an
inevitable result of individuals holding exchangeable right in definite
articles. Thus they seemed to have driven moral considerations out of
their science, as much as out of gardening or medicine. To call their
political economy, on that account, _heartless_ (as so many have done)
may seem ridiculous; but this form of attack on it arose from a
perception or belief that its professors were claiming for it an
_imperative_ force, while disclaiming morality, and were assuming that
it was a sufficient and supreme rule for political action.
Of late it has been maintained on a special ground that moral
considerations cannot wholly be excluded from political economy. Dr. W.
B. Hodgson, first holder of a new chair in Edinburgh as Professor of
_Mercantile_ Economy, has urged that, in so far as morality or
immorality in individuals affects wealth and the markets, we do not
exhaust the discussion on exchanges while we neglect this consideration.
Perhaps indeed no one, in discussing taxation, has omitted to consider
what taxes lead to fraudulent evasion or to smuggling; but economists
hitherto, with great unanimity, have resolved that, in their character
of economists, they will not notice moral evils from an opium trade, or
from sale of deadly weapons and ammunition, or from traffic in
intoxicants; nor can one in general discover from their writings that
they know vice to be wasteful, or national expenditure on needless and
foolish objects undesirable. They have a right to select what topics
they will treat, and what they will not treat. They have a right to say:
"Such and such considerations belong to morals, not to _our_ political
economy." But, on the one hand, if they are resolved that their science
shall be as unmoral as engineering or navigation, they must not claim
for it any decisive weight in State-politics; on the other hand, the
topics which they neglect need, so much the more urgently, to be treated
by others, especially since we have no professors of practical morals,
and (for more reasons than one) questions of the market are not thought
suitable to the pulpit.
That an exchange of one thing for another does, on the whole, _please_
both parties to the exchange, is evidently testified by the fact that
each acts voluntarily; hence, the inference is too lightly made that
each is _benefited_ by the transaction. Not only so, but from an
increasing magnitude of exchanges increase of wealth is inferred,
without any reference to the nature of the things exchanged. In a rough
estimate, this reasoning has, no doubt, a _primâ facie_ weight, for we
may not dictate to the tastes of others, nor assume that tastes which
are not ours are therefore silly. Yet, evidently things which perish in
the using quickly cease to be wealth, and things which are not likely to
be approved continuously cannot long command the same high price. No
article could fetch a price at all if it were not intended to be
enjoyed, used, or consumed; the final purchase is called expenditure,
and all expenditure is liable to moral judgment, approving or censuring.
When we censure expenditure, not merely because it is excessive, but
because it is essentially foolish or evil, we necessarily deplore and
deprecate the traffic which feeds it--the traffic which it encourages;
hence, some vicious trades are even forbidden by law. Short of this,
there is necessarily a large margin of trades which law does not, and
perhaps cannot successfully, forbid, which nevertheless may be justly
regretted, censured, and, as far as may be, discountenanced. Economists
are not here blamed if they (disowning moral considerations) do nothing
of the kind; but they must not be allowed to blind us to the fact that
some trades, not forbidden by law, are so far from promoting wealth and
weal as to be gravely pernicious. To rejoice in their magnitude, to
announce it triumphantly as a proof of national prosperity, is something
worse than a mistake.
No reader, it is believed, will complain that the last sentence is
mysterious or obscure. Our manufacturers of cotton and woollen have of
late loudly deplored the falling off of their home trade, while the
consumption of intoxicating drink continues to increase. They believe
that if the labouring classes spent less on the brewer and distiller,
they would spend more on the clothier. The most fanatical devotee of
alcohol cannot deny that too much of it is drunk, in face of the
long-continued avowal of the judges that drink is by far the greatest
cause of crime--drink, short of evident and provable drunkenness.
Indeed, it is not from those who are outright drunk, but from those who
have been drinking, that the worst and most numerous outrages come,
while the foot and the eye are steady, though the brain and the passions
are perverted. To boast and rejoice in the magnitude of the drink
traffic, legal as it undoubtedly is, has no moral defence. The topic is
here adduced, not in order to push that argument further, but in order
to insist that the mere increase of a trade does not _in itself_ denote
an increase of wealth; is not _in itself_ necessarily a thing to be
applauded either by the economist or by the moralist. In each case we
must look into detail, and consider whether this or that prosperous
trade, like a huge weed in a garden, dwarfs or kills other growths,
which, but for it, might thrive.
An avowed ardent disciple of Mr. Cobden--a gentleman in some eminence of
place and rank--has recently dissuaded taxes on wine and tobacco for the
sake of revenue, _not_ on the ground which one might expect--viz., that
a Government ought not to base a revenue on what may chance to be public
vice, _but_ on the ground that "the grower of wine in France and of
tobacco in America" can reasonably refuse to trade with us, if "we will
not accept payment in _the only coin_ which he has to offer--namely, in
his wine or his tobacco."[4] As if we were not competent to reply: "Of
wine and tobacco we quickly get more than enough. Preserve your grapes
in sawdust, or make them into raisins, and you will not find our people
averse to enjoy them, nor will you encounter any unreasonable duty from
our Custom-houses. As to tobacco, surely the rich land which alone can
raise it, can raise no end of other products which we are certain to
value." This well-informed writer, in his whole argument, seems to
account wine the only food-product which we receive from France (to
silks and elegant articles he once slightly alludes); but he cannot be
ignorant that the solid food which France sends us in eggs, cheese,
butter, vegetables, chickens, and dry fruit is enormous; she would in
ordinary years send us wheat, did not America, Russia, and Australia
make it needless. To speak of wine as _the only coin_ of France is a
wonderful straining of argument. But the reason for quoting it here is
to illustrate how completely the School of Cobden wishes the State to
ignore moral considerations in trade. Yet the State deserves no
reverence, if it be not moral. Laws and enactments, framed by minds
reckless of morality, are apt to be, on the one side unjust and
oppressive, on the other eminently corrupting. A State which gains
revenue from a vicious trade, such as gambling and debauchery,
demoralizes its people so effectually as to deserve reprobation rather
than reverence. According to the ancients, the lawgiver begins to
civilize society and to earn veneration by establishing marriage and
sanctifying the family. Are we to say, "We have changed all that now;
let the Church care for morality: it is no concern of the State?" Who
first taught such sentiment as wise policy, it is not easy to say; but
it certainly has, in practice, if not in theory, attained a deadly
currency. It never was the doctrine of Adam Smith. It is obviously a
sure road to ruin, if its development be unopposed.
A legislator, of course, ought not to guide his enactments by the
morality of any one school. If, in Greek fashion, we were to set up an
Epimenides, a Solon, a Lycurgus, as plenipotentiary to start us in a new
course, there might be some little danger of one-sided and conceited
morals; yet not much, even so; for a very one-sided or very stupid man
would hardly be elected: every lawgiver wishes his new institutions to
be permanent, and is sure to have some regard to the friction which they
would encounter in working. But where the legislation must have
sanction, not from one man, but from a thousand men, of whom six hundred
are elected from different circles of mixed ranks, from diverse
localities, where forms and schools of religion, based on variety of
thought, prevail, it is evidently impossible that in the laws
collectively approved any moral ideas should dominate, except those
which are common to all who are morally cultivated. To dread moral
considerations in the debates of an English Parliament, lest the
morality prevailing in its laws become one-sided and arbitrary, pedantic
and ascetic, is so baseless, so wanting in good sense, as scarcely to
seem sincere. When people tell us, "We shall be liable to have laws
against dancing and cardplaying, or laws compelling us to go to church,
if we insist that legislation ought to study for the public virtue,"
they not only make themselves ridiculous, they even force us to suspect
that they fear lest vice be repressed in ways inconvenient to the
vicious. So much is premised, lest it be imagined or pretended that in
pointing at moral limits to beneficial commerce any morality is desired
less broad than that which all noble and well-reputed schools
accept--the morals of mankind. At the same time, what is here advanced
is intended to bear less immediately on law than on the general tenor of
public opinion and practical writing.
Many economists write, as assuming that it is a step forward in
civilization when a barbarous people learns artificial wants. If a New
Zealander, instead of being satisfied with a mat for his back, which,
made by himself, will last him for years, betakes himself to an English
coat, which he must buy with a price,--which indeed less effectually
shields him from wet, and sooner wears out,--he does that which is
convenient to the English trader, but to him is a very doubtful gain:
perhaps rather he brings on himself colds, cough, and consumption. If a
thousand Maoris did the same, the commerce might figure in a Maori
budget, and a Maori economist might point to the new trade as a step
forward in national prosperity. The Zulus, as described by Englishmen
who have travelled in Zululand or lived in the midst of them in Natal,
are an upright, generous, faithful, honest race; and strange to say,
Englishmen, who have such experience of them, are found to corroborate
the utterance of Cetewayo, "A Zulu trained by a missionary is a Zulu
spoiled"--that is, when trained in our habits they lose their national
virtues. How can this be? why should it be? Apparently, because from us
they learn artificial wants. While an apron suffices a Zulu for
clothing, and a very simple hut for shelter, he can in many ways afford
to be hospitable and generous. A man with very few wants has all the
feelings of superfluity and wealth while surrounded by possessions so
slender that we count him very poor: and when with an amount of toil
which to his hardihood is not at all severe, he can always calculate on
providing for himself and family all that their simple habits need, he
is not deterred from present generosity by studying for his own future.
But if he learn to covet and count necessary a number of articles which
require from him threefold labour, he feels himself no longer rich, but
poor; then, instead of giving small favours gratuitously, he claims to
be paid for everything; instead of being princely, he becomes mercenary
and stingy. If he imitate the dress, he is liable to envy the wealth of
the Englishman, and in schemes of laying up for the future he easily
becomes avaricious, perhaps fraudulent. Such are the steps by which one
may justly calculate that some or many barbarians degenerate from the
normal goodness of their fellows. The artificial wants which they learn
when housed with our missionaries, or imbibe from the crafty allurements
of traders, are not (_primâ facie_) a benefit at all, do not conduce to
independence, to the sense of wealth, nor to the practice of virtue.
They are simply a convenience to the European trader. If a Maori or Zulu
chief frown upon such trade, which judgment does he deserve--to be
scolded as barbarous, or to be praised as sagacious? With them, perhaps
also with us, to account but few things necessary is a foundation for
many virtues. Our economists often reverse the picture.
No stress is here laid on the fact that the historical saints of
Christendom thought it an excellence to be satisfied with a minimum of
external appliances for the comfort of the body. So much of arbitrary
opinion may be imputed reasonably to them, and so much of fancy and
credulity to their biographers, that it does not occur to the present
writer to account their practices or principles any support to his
argument. But the case of Socrates, and many other Greek philosophers,
is different, and much to the point. With them, high thought, cheap
feeding, and mean circumstantials frequently went together; and perhaps
even those philosophers, who were somewhat mercenary and rich, would
vehemently have renounced the idea that it is a good thing to acquire
habits and tastes which make necessary to us things previously needless.
But there is danger of drawing the reader's thoughts into a new channel
by this allusion to Greek philosophers when an argument of national
economy is chiefly intended, not of personal virtues. As it is better
for an individual to be satisfied with supplies that are sufficient,
close at hand, and easy of attainment, than to have fastidious tastes
which cannot be supplied without considerable effort and labour, so it
is better for a nation to have a taste for its native products, so far
as our lower wants are concerned. If we can get all that the health and
strength of the body needs from our own soil, and with small
expenditure, this is better for us than to be enslaved to artificial
tastes, which multiply labours for mere bodily supply. To fix ideas, let
me illustrate the principle here contained by discussing those popular
beverages, tea and coffee.
Tea undoubtedly, as superseding beer, cider, and wine, has wrought much
benefit to England, even if it have been (when heavily taxed) dearer
than our native intoxicants. When taken with little food, in strong and
frequent cups, it may often have weakened the nerves; but it does not,
like alcohol, pervert the brain and inflame the mind, thus leading to
folly, vice, and crime. The present writer is, and always has been, a
tea drinker; nor have the many assaults on this beverage which have been
sent to him shaken his belief that, taken in moderation, it has no evil
comparable to its good. The present argument does not aim to prove that
tea is in itself bad, only that the too-exclusive addiction to it has
hurtfully excluded the trial of native beverages, which are perhaps
better, certainly cheaper, and far more accessible.
Rigid enemies of alcoholic drink often assure us, in poetical and
ecstatic language, that water is the only reasonable and right drink for
man, as for other animals; but the water which they recommend and
describe as gushing and sparkling in mountain rills does not come to the
hearth and home of every mountain dweller, much less is it attainable by
the inhabitants of cities or boggy plains. The hardy beasts of the
field, if they can get the water pure, manage to endure its coldness in
all seasons; so perhaps might we, if we could recover robustness of the
stomach without losing any advantage of a developed brain. That such
recovery is impossible is not here asserted, but simply that, under the
existing circumstances, the water (through its impurities or its
coldness) often needs to be cooked, to be warmed, to have then some
taste superadded which shall overcome mawkishness. When this is
conceded, the question arises, will no native botany suffice? Are we of
necessity driven to import tea from China or Assam? Such are the
wonderful and deep harmonies of Nature that in each long-inhabited
country the constitution of animals becomes adapted to its plants as
well as to its climate, and finds among them not only its food, but its
remedies for disease. Native herbs are often found more health-restoring
than pretentious foreign drugs; nor is it extravagant to imagine that
native leaves and berries might adapt themselves as well to the palate
of Englishmen as tea and coffee, and better to their stomachs, if,
instead of buying from the foreigner, we had duly studied our home
resources. In the case of coffee, it curiously happens that there are
persons among us who prefer what is called dandelion coffee to the
coffee of Arabia; and that the preference is sincere seems proved by the
accident that the dandelion thus prepared is dearer than the best Mocha.
Nor does this dearness weigh against our argument. Twenty years ago
brown bread was charged by bakers as fancy bread; ten years ago lentils
were double their present price; in each case because the demand was so
uncertain. The price of dandelion would quickly come down if it were in
large and daily request. As substitutes for tea many leaves may be named
which will not be called simply medicinal, prominently those of the
sweet bay, the peach, and the black currant. If we were by any cause cut
off from tropical markets, some combination would soon be discovered
which carried off public preference; and when a national taste in it had
once been established, every good purpose would have been attained
without the foreign article. Should we not in that case moralize with
wonder over the vast apparatus of great ships, which had been built, and
manned, and stored, and sent to sea, with loss of sailors' lives,
entailing widowhood and orphanhood, for no better reason than to bring
back leaves, for which adequate substitutes abound at home? This
argument undertakes not to prove, but to illustrate. It is not specially
confined to the case of tea or coffee. It does not make positive
assertion that we can now change the English taste, nor does it urge a
transition which would be violent, if at all sudden. It merely points to
reasonable probabilities, as showing that a vast trade with a distant
country to gratify an artificial want, if it prove how much we can
afford to spend without being ruined, yet does not at all prove that we
enrich ourselves by the exchange. At the same time, so great is the
facility for making drinks, that we might assume higher ground and press
our argument farther. The deliciousness of Oriental sherbet is no matter
of doubt or controversy. Its basis is simply barley-water; to flavour
it, the foreigner, of course, uses some of his own fruits, but we have
plenty of substitutes at hand, at least while sugar abounds to us. It
may be warmed, if necessary: so little need we depend on the Chinese.
Besides, some among us are satisfied with, and warmly applaud, the drink
prepared from simple oatmeal. If we all had this taste, we should
nationally be richer.
It may be retorted, "Did you not name _Sugar_? Do you advocate making
sugar of beetroot?" But no general renunciation of foreign commerce is
for a moment here suggested as expedient. While we can bring sugar made
from cane, and save our lands for other uses than beetroot, we presume
this commerce to conduce to wealth. Not but that we may suspect the
cheapness of sugar to conspire with other causes in slackening our zeal
for _Honey_. Bees do not occupy and use up arable land. An abundance of
cottage gardens and little rockeries satisfy them. Their depredations do
not lessen the sweetness of flowers, nor the savour of herbs. They add
to our wealth, at very small expense. They greatly add to the
fertilization of plants. By all means let us get from the foreigner what
we need; only let us not therefore neglect and forget our native
resources.
In other and greater matters a like topic recurs. When the controversy
against the Corn Laws was at its height, the advocates of repeal were
taunted with wishing to explode native wheat. They replied, "Wheat is
now largely sown in England where the climate or soil is unfavourable;
in such fields only, the culture will be discouraged; where it can be
produced and ripened with greater certainty it will still be grown, and
the price will no longer be forced up; the lands less suited to wheat
may well yield, either some other grain in rotation, or other needful
crop." Valid as this reply seemed, grand and glorious as are the results
of opening our ports to foreign corn, the retrospect of thirty years
nevertheless suggests new lines of thought. Want of food in Ireland when
the potato crop failed was the argument which converted Sir Robert Peel;
but the desire of selling cotton and woollen fabrics, or hardware, to
those whose "chief coin" was wheat, gave an earlier impetus to the
Anti-Corn Law League. Cobden and his associates were in the right, and
performed well the task of the day; but the existing state of our
agriculture is now discerned to be highly unsatisfactory. Every year
widens and deepens the conviction that our laws of Land Tenure are
fundamentally wrong; indeed, they are diverse from those of all the
world; if they are not signally better than those of all other nations,
they are gravely and lamentably worse; and the idea now presents itself,
that the temporary relief given to us by the free importation of wheat
has proved a buttress to an evil system of land laws, and has blinded us
to the essential evils contingent on a perpetual increasing ratio of the
population in great towns to that of the rustic districts. Much
wealthier, no doubt, we are, and our poorer classes are less
hard-worked. To dwell on the drawbacks through higher expectations,
artificial wants, higher prices of coal, bricks, and houses--not to
mention worse matters--might lead into too long digression. But, to
bring out the idea here pointed at, we may speculate as to the results
which must have followed, if no foreign markets had been able to give
us permanent supplies of necessary food. Suppose that barely we had been
able in 1847 to save from starvation as many poor Irishmen as we did
save, but that in succeeding years the United Kingdom had been cast on
its own resources for grain and cattle; will any one maintain that by a
proper use of the land we could not have fed our own population?
If any one is of that opinion, let him consider the phenomena of French
agriculture. A century ago France seemed unable to feed her inhabitants.
Thousands of the population died of starvation, even the king's own
servants. Misery among the peasants and the poorer classes in towns was
universal. No one imagined that the country could afford to export food,
or had any idea of its vast capacity of production. Her climate is not
now superior to what it was; her area is somewhat enlarged by the
sagacious plantings on dunes of sand; the soil is improved by a
century's tillage; the produce is more valuable, because the peasants
have been taught many secrets of fruit culture. Most important of all,
millions of peasants are owners of small freeholds. The "magic of
property" has made them industrious, saving and ever vigilant to
increase and improve the crops. We in England censure and deplore the
compulsion on a French parent to divide his petty freehold and his gains
equally among his children. If this be a grave evil, yet so much the
more remarkable are the marvellous results of the union in one man of
landlord, farmer, and labourer: for we see that by the universal and
untiring industry which this fact elicits, not only were the great
extravagances of the Second Empire and its wars sustained, but, in spite
of the scarcely calculable losses of the Franco-German war, the fine of
two hundred and fifty millions sterling, which France had to pay, was
paid within four or five years, while a larger army than ever was raised
and maintained. No one can dispute that the unexampled buoyancy of
French finance is due mainly to the sound conditions of French landed
tenure. Ireland, Scotland, and England all await a similar development,
and never can be satisfied without it: but we have postponed the day of
necessary reform by buying our food of almost every kind, in dangerous
amount, from foreign countries, while our own arable land goes back into
grass and pasture.
And what reply does the Right Hon. John Bright make, when addressed with
a claim of reformed landed tenure? His name is here adduced for honour,
as an eminent type of the Cobden School; but the habitual reply is,
"Good! we are in favour of Free Trade in land:" as though Free Trade
were in itself a charm which can scare away all evils; as though the
existing freedom to accumulate land to any extent by purchase were not
one of our greatest mischiefs. Men cannot live in the air. Land for a
dwelling is as essential as air and water. Land is very limited in
quantity, especially land conveniently situated, with favourable
conditions. Land primitively belongs to a nation, and no man naturally
has any right to more of it than he can himself cultivate and use. Large
landed estates are a vast power, social and political. Their possession
was originally in England an official trust, coupled with political
duties and customary dues in payment: but without right of ejectment
while those dues were paid. The commercial idea of land is a perversion
and abuse. Those who fancy that the abolition of entails and
primogeniture and whatever makes conveyances expensive, will bring about
the desirable reform, boast that their remedy will hoist up the market
price of land; in other words, it would make an effective purchase by
the State more and more difficult, more and more burdensome to the
community. Nay, it might even delay the necessary reform, until the
patience of a nation under a landlord Parliament broke down, and such a
revolution followed as that of France under Louis XVI. As there is a
moral limit to the magnitude of beneficial commerce with the foreigner,
much more is there a moral limit to the beneficial magnitude of landed
estates. Happily some despots are philanthropic; yet we are not in love
with despotism. Some great landowners are philanthropic: higher honour
be to them! but we must calculate that very many will covet power over
all who reside on the estate, and will use the power not always kindly;
or will employ it as a political engine to win state-offices and
salaries for their families; others, more directly and unblushingly
mercenary, will think chiefly how to raise rent, and will forbid both
crops and inhabitants, if wealthy lovers of occasional sport outbid
ordinary farmers. If from mere pride and love of the romantic a landlord
make his estate a wilderness, the nation still suffers the damage. Its
population is cooped into towns or driven into exile, its markets are
starved, its military force is lowered. While the Cobden School
pertinaciously connives at these great evils, and juggles with the
phrase "Free Trade" as if land were an article which ought to be on the
same footing as moveables, they are playing into the hands of their
nominal adversaries.
The first measure which we need is not one which shall facilitate the
purchase of new and new estates by the over-wealthy, who, if they are
not gamblers or otherwise vicious, often know not what to do with their
vast incomes; but much rather a measure which shall set a maximum area
for estates. The mildest thing to do is, not in the first instance to
pass any new _Act_, but only a resolution or _Vote_ of the Commons,
declaring that it is against the public interest for any individual to
possess more than a thousand acres of rustic land, or more than five
acres of town land; and that whoever bequeaths to one person more than
the above-named, ought to be subjected to a heavy and special land tax.
In the same direction we need other special votes of the House, to the
effect--that by legislation, by purchase, and by taxation the recovery
of the national soil for the nation from year to year ought to be
systematically pursued, wherever now held in large masses by bodies of
men or by individuals; and that in order to give to cultivators the full
results of their own industry, it is expedient that the State, out of
its own present or future domains, carve out numerous small farms to be
held under it as by copyright tenure, not subject to rise of rent.
Space does not permit further detail, or reply to objections; but the
idea intended is to work in the direction of _virtual_ freeholds, ever
increasing in number, which cannot be bought out of the hands of the
cultivators by tempting prices from the rich, because they are legally
State property, and destined to remain as areas of small culture. By
buying up from time to time the lands possessed by large charities, by
legacy taxes directed to discourage bequests of land in great mass, and
by direct purchases of land or rather by taking the legacy tax in land
itself, the State would beneficently in the course of many generations
undo the injustices and frauds of the past.
Land is so far from being a desirable object of unlimited commerce
(called by the Cobden School Free Trade), that, especially under the
modern interpretation which makes the lord (or chief man) _owner_ of the
land, the most jealous limitations ought to be imposed on it by the
State. So long, indeed, as a man holds no more of it than one family can
cultivate, jealousy is needless; for the holder (especially if he pay a
quit-rent for it) is sure to cultivate it, and cannot offend by
excluding population. Town land ought, as soon as possible, to become
town property; and, meanwhile, as early as possible, all town building
to be subjected to a public veto for sanitary reasons. To make away into
mercenary hands, as an article of trade, the whole solid area on which a
nation lives, is astonishing as an idea of statesmanship. There is
another matter connected with land as to which the State may justly feel
great jealousy--namely, as to the consumption and exportation of
material which cannot be reproduced. It is said that Sicily, under the
Romans first, was largely deteriorated by the perpetual exportation of
corn, exhausting even very fertile soil. Ireland in the past may have
suffered by the constant sending out of cattle and pigs, with no
back-current of commerce to restore all that their bones and flesh took
out of the earth. Virginia and other States of the American Union
largely ruined their soil by unceasing exportation of tobacco and other
products. But to come closer home, no crops of coal can be grown in
England and Wales. We reap where we have not sown, where we cannot sow.
We export in enormous mass what we cannot reproduce. We allow
individuals to become, out and out, proprietors of the national coal,
and then sanction their unlimited exportation of it, with the high
probability that this may cripple industry in the near future of
England. This surely is a commerce, the benefit of which is very
doubtful even in a cosmopolitan view. It may seem better to stimulate
other nations to search for coal on their own soil than to use up what
we cannot replace. And as for some other articles of immense commerce,
as tobacco, it may seem doubtful which nation loses more by it--the
importers or the exporters. Surely in all these cases the quality of the
things bought and sold must be considered carefully, before we regard
the magnitude of any trade a national benefit or a source of national
wealth.