the seasonable energy of a single man! Have we no such man amongst us? I
am as sure as I am of my being, that one vigorous mind, without office,
without situation, without public functions of any kind, (at a time when
the want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is,) I say, one such
man, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his own
fortitude, vigor, enterprise, and perseverance, would first draw to him
some few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be in
existence, would appear and troop about him.
If I saw this auspicious beginning, baffled and frustrated as I am, yet
on the very verge of a timely grave, abandoned abroad and desolate at
home, stripped of my boast, my hope, my consolation, my helper, my
counsellor, and my guide, (you know in part what I have lost, and would
to God I could clear myself of all neglect and fault in that loss,) yet
thus, even thus, I would rake up the fire under all the ashes that
oppress it. I am no longer patient of the public eye; nor am I of force
to win my way and to justle and elbow in a crowd. But, even in solitude,
something may be done for society. The meditations of the closet have
infected senates with a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with the
brands of the Furies. The cure might come from the same source with the
distemper. I would add my part to those who would animate the people
(whose hearts are yet right) to new exertions in the old cause.
Novelty is not the only source of zeal. Why should not a Maccabæus and
his brethren arise to assert the honor of the ancient law and to defend
the temple of their forefathers with as ardent a spirit as can inspire
any innovator to destroy the monuments of the piety and the glory of
ancient ages? It is not a hazarded assertion, it is a great truth, that,
when once things are gone out of their ordinary course, it is by acts
out of the ordinary course they can alone be reëstablished. Republican
spirit can only be combated by a spirit of the same nature,--of the same
nature, but informed with another principle, and pointing to another
end. I would persuade a resistance both to the corruption and to the
reformation that prevails. It will not be the weaker, but much the
stronger, for combating both together. A victory over real corruptions
would enable us to baffle the spurious and pretended reformations. I
would not wish to excite, or even to tolerate, that kind of evil spirit
which evokes the powers of hell to rectify the disorders of the earth.
No! I would add my voice with better, and, I trust, more potent charms,
to draw down justice and wisdom and fortitude from heaven, for the
correction of human vice, and the recalling of human error from the
devious ways into which it has been betrayed. I would wish to call the
impulses of individuals at once to the aid and to the control of
authority. By this, which I call the true republican spirit, paradoxical
as it may appear, monarchies alone can be rescued from the imbecility of
courts and the madness of the crowd. This republican spirit would not
suffer men in high place to bring ruin on their country and on
themselves. It would reform, not by destroying, but by saving, the
great, the rich, and the powerful. Such a republican spirit we perhaps
fondly conceive to have animated the distinguished heroes and patriots
of old, who knew no mode of policy but religion and virtue. These they
would have paramount to all constitutions; they would not suffer
monarchs, or senates, or popular assemblies, under pretences of dignity
or authority or freedom, to shake off those moral riders which reason
has appointed to govern every sort of rude power. These, in appearance
loading them by their weight, do by that pressure augment their
essential force. The momentum is increased by the extraneous weight. It
is true in moral as it is in mechanical science. It is true, not only in
the draught, but in the race. These riders of the great, in effect, hold
the reins which guide them in their course, and wear the spur that
stimulates them to the goals of honor and of safety. The great must
submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long
submit to the dominion of the great. _Dîs te minorem quod geris,
imperas_. This is the feudal tenure which they cannot alter.
Indeed, my dear Sir, things are in a bad state. I do not deny a good
share of diligence, a very great share of ability, and much public
virtue to those who direct our affairs. But they are incumbered, not
aided, by their very instruments, and by all the apparatus of the state.
I think that our ministry (though there are things against them which
neither you nor I can dissemble, and which grieve me to the heart) is by
far the most honest and by far the wisest system of administration in
Europe. Their fall would be no trivial calamity.
Not meaning to depreciate the minority in Parliament, whose talents are
also great, and to whom I do not deny virtues, their system seems to me
to be fundamentally wrong. But whether wrong or right, they have not
enough of coherence among themselves, nor of estimation with the public,
nor of numbers. They cannot make up an administration. Nothing is more
visible. Many other things are against them, which I do not charge as
faults, but reckon among national misfortunes. Extraordinary things must
be done, or one of the parties cannot stand as a ministry, nor the other
even as an opposition. They cannot change their situations, nor can any
useful coalition be made between them. I do not see the mode of it nor
the way to it. This aspect of things I do not contemplate with pleasure.
I well know that everything of the daring kind which I speak of is
critical: but the times are critical. New things in a new world! I see
no hopes in the common tracks. If men are not to be found who can be got
to feel within them some impulse, _quod nequeo monstrare, et sentio
tantum_, and which makes them impatient of the present,--if none can be
got to feel that private persons may sometimes assume that sort of
magistracy which does not depend on the nomination of kings or the
election of the people, but has an inherent and self-existent power
which both would recognize, I see nothing in the world to hope.
If I saw such a group beginning to cluster, such as they are, they
should have (all that I can give) my prayers and my advice. People talk
of war or cry for peace: have they to the bottom considered the
questions either of war or peace, upon the scale of the existing world?
No, I fear they have not.
Why should not you yourself be one of those to enter your name in such a
list as I speak of? You are young; you have great talents; you have a
clear head; you have a natural, fluent, and unforced elocution; your
ideas are just, your sentiments benevolent, open, and enlarged;--but
this is too big for your modesty. Oh! this modesty, in time and place,
is a charming virtue, and the grace of all other virtues. But it is
sometimes the worst enemy they have. Let him whose print I gave you the
other day be engraved in your memory! Had it pleased Providence to have
spared him for the trying situations that seem to be coming on,
notwithstanding that he was sometimes a little dispirited by the
disposition which we thought shown to depress him and set him aside, yet
he was always buoyed up again; and on one or two occasions he discovered
what might be expected from the vigor and elevation of his mind, from
his unconquerable fortitude, and from the extent of his resources for
every purpose of speculation and of action. Remember him, my friend, who
in the highest degree honored and respected you; and remember that great
parts are a great trust. Remember, too, that mistaken or misapplied
virtues, if they are not as pernicious as vice, frustrate at least their
own natural tendencies, and disappoint the purposes of the Great Giver.
Adieu. My dreams are finished.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Mr. Paine is a Norfolk man, from Thetford.
THOUGHTS AND DETAILS
ON
SCARCITY.
ORIGINALLY PRESENTED
TO THE RIGHT HON. WILLIAM PITT,
IN THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER,
1795.
THOUGHTS AND DETAILS
ON
SCARCITY.
Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is
the most dangerous, and it is always worst in the time when men are most
disposed to it,--that is, in the time of scarcity; because there is
nothing on which the passions of men are so violent, and their judgment
so weak, and on which there exists such a multitude of ill-founded
popular prejudices.
The great use of government is as a restraint; and there is no restraint
which it ought to put upon others, and upon itself too, rather than that
which is imposed on the fury of speculating under circumstances of
irritation. The number of idle tales spread about by the industry of
faction and by the zeal of foolish good-intention, and greedily devoured
by the malignant credulity of mankind, tends infinitely to aggravate
prejudices which in themselves are more than sufficiently strong. In
that state of affairs, and of the public with relation to them, the
first thing that government owes to us, the people, is _information_;
the next is timely coercion: the one to guide our judgment; the other to
regulate our tempers.
To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government.
It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it.
The people maintain them, and not they the people. It is in the power of
government to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good in
this, or perhaps in anything else. It is not only so of the state and
statesman, but of all the classes and descriptions of the rich: they are
the pensioners of the poor, and are maintained by their superfluity.
They are under an absolute, hereditary, and indefeasible dependence on
those who labor and are miscalled the poor.
The laboring people are only poor because they are numerous. Numbers in
their nature imply poverty. In a fair distribution among a vast
multitude none can have much. That class of dependent pensioners called
the rich is so extremely small, that, if all their throats were cut, and
a distribution made of all they consume in a year, it would not give a
bit of bread and cheese for one night's supper to those who labor, and
who in reality feed both the pensioners and themselves.
But the throats of the rich ought not to be cut, nor their magazines
plundered; because, in their persons, they are trustees for those who
labor, and their hoards are the banking-houses of these latter. Whether
they mean it or not, they do, in effect, execute their trust,--some with
more, some with less fidelity and judgment. But, on the whole, the duty
is performed, and everything returns, deducting some very trifling
commission and discount, to the place from whence it arose. When the
poor rise to destroy the rich, they act as wisely for their own purposes
as when they burn mills and throw corn into the river to make bread
cheap.
When I say that we of the people ought to be informed, inclusively I
say we ought not to be flattered: flattery is the reverse of
instruction. The _poor_ in that case would be rendered as improvident as
the rich, which would not be at all good for them.
Nothing can be so base and so wicked as the political canting language,
"the laboring _poor_." Let compassion be shown in action,--the more, the
better,--according to every man's ability; but let there be no
lamentation of their condition. It is no relief to their miserable
circumstances; it is only an insult to their miserable understandings.
It arises from a total want of charity or a total want of thought. Want
of one kind was never relieved by want of any other kind. Patience,
labor, sobriety, frugality, and religion should be recommended to them;
all the rest is downright _fraud_. It is horrible to call them "the
_once happy_ laborer."
Whether what may be called the moral or philosophical happiness of the
laborious classes is increased or not, I cannot say. The seat of that
species of happiness is in the mind; and there are few data to ascertain
the comparative state of the mind at any two periods. Philosophical
happiness is to want little. Civil or vulgar happiness is to want much
and to enjoy much.
If the happiness of the animal man (which certainly goes somewhere
towards the happiness of the rational man) be the object of our
estimate, then I assert, without the least hesitation, that the
condition of those who labor (in all descriptions of labor, and in all
gradations of labor, from the highest to the lowest inclusively) is, on
the whole, extremely meliorated, if more and better food is any standard
of melioration. They work more, it is certain; but they have the
advantage of their augmented labor: yet whether that increase of labor
be on the whole a _good_ or an _evil_ is a consideration that would lead
us a great way, and is not for my present purpose. But as to the fact of
the melioration of their diet, I shall enter into the detail of proof,
whenever I am called upon: in the mean time, the known difficulty of
contenting them with anything but bread made of the finest flour and
meat of the first quality is proof sufficient.
I further assert, that, even under all the hardships of the last year,
the laboring people did, either out of their direct gains, or from
charity, (which it seems is now an insult to them,) in fact, fare better
than they did in seasons of common plenty, fifty or sixty years ago,--or
even at the period of my English observation, which is about forty-four
years. I even assert that full as many in that class as ever were known
to do it before continued to save money; and this I can prove, so far as
my own information and experience extend.
It is not true that the rate of wages has not increased with the nominal
price of provisions. I allow, it has not fluctuated with that
price,--nor ought it; and the squires of Norfolk had dined, when they
gave it as their opinion that it might or ought to rise and fall with
the market of provisions. The rate of wages, in truth, has no _direct_
relation to that price. Labor is a commodity like every other, and rises
or falls according to the demand. This is in the nature of things;
however, the nature of things has provided for their necessities. Wages
have been twice raised in my time; and they hear a full proportion, or
even a greater than formerly, to the medium of provision during the
last bad cycle of twenty years. They bear a full proportion to the
result of their labor. If we were wildly to attempt to force them beyond
it, the stone which we had forced up the hill would only fall back upon
them in a diminished demand, or, what indeed is the far lesser evil, an
aggravated price of all the provisions which are the result of their
manual toil.
There is an implied contract, much stronger than any instrument or
article of agreement between the laborer in any occupation and his
employer,--that the labor, so far as that labor is concerned, shall be
sufficient to pay to the employer a profit on his capital and a
compensation for his risk: in a word, that the labor shall produce an
advantage equal to the payment. Whatever is above that is a direct
_tax_; and if the amount of that tax be left to the will and pleasure of
another, it is an _arbitrary tax_.
If I understand it rightly, the tax proposed on the farming interest of
this kingdom is to be levied at what is called the discretion of
justices of peace.
The questions arising on this scheme of arbitrary taxation are these:
Whether it is better to leave all dealing, in which there is no force or
fraud, collusion or combination, entirely to the persons mutually
concerned in the matter contracted for,--or to put the contract into the
hands of those who can have none or a very remote interest in it, and
little or no knowledge of the subject.
It might be imagined that there would be very little difficulty in
solving this question: for what man, of any degree of reflection, can
think that a want of interest in any subject, closely connected with a
want of skill in it, qualifies a person to intermeddle in any the least
affair,--much less in affairs that vitally concern the agriculture of
the kingdom, the first of all its concerns, and the foundation of all
its prosperity in every other matter by which that prosperity is
produced?
The vulgar error on this subject arises from a total confusion in the
very idea of things widely different in themselves,--those of
convention, and those of judicature. When a contract is making, it is a
matter of discretion and of interest between the parties. In that
intercourse, and in what is to arise from it, the parties are the
masters. If they are not completely so, they are not free, and therefore
their contracts are void.
But this freedom has no farther extent, when the contract is made: then
their discretionary powers expire, and a new order of things takes its
origin. Then, and not till then, and on a difference between the
parties, the office of the judge commences. He cannot dictate the
contract. It is his business to see that it be _enforced_,--provided
that it is not contrary to preëxisting laws, or obtained by force or
fraud. If he is in any way a maker or regulator of the contract, in so
much he is disqualified from being a judge. But this sort of confused
distribution of administrative and judicial characters (of which we have
already as much as is sufficient, and a little more) is not the only
perplexity of notions and passions which trouble us in the present hour.
What is doing supposes, or pretends, that the farmer and the laborer
have opposite interests,--that the farmer oppresses the laborer,--and
that a gentleman, called a justice of peace, is the protector of the
latter, and a control and restraint on the former; and this is a point
I wish to examine in a manner a good deal different from that in which
gentlemen proceed, who confide more in their abilities than is fit, and
suppose them capable of more than any natural abilities, fed with no
other than the provender furnished by their own private speculations,
can accomplish. Legislative acts attempting to regulate this part of
economy do, at least as much as any other, require the exactest detail
of circumstances, guided by the surest general principles that are
necessary to direct experiment and inquiry, in order again from those
details to elicit principles, firm and luminous general principles, to
direct a practical legislative proceeding.
First, then, I deny that it is in this case, as in any other, of
necessary implication that contracting parties should originally have
had different interests. By accident it may be so, undoubtedly, at the
outset: but then the contract is of the nature of a compromise; and
compromise is founded on circumstances that suppose it the interest of
the parties to be reconciled in some medium. The principle of compromise
adopted, of consequence the interests cease to be different.
But in the case of the farmer and the laborer, their interests are
always the same, and it is absolutely impossible that their free
contracts can be onerous to either party. It is the interest of the
farmer that his work should be done with effect and celerity; and that
cannot be, unless the laborer is well fed, and otherwise found with such
necessaries of animal life, according to its habitudes, as may keep the
body in full force, and the mind gay and cheerful. For of all the
instruments of his trade, the labor of man (what the ancient writers
have called the _instrumentum vocale_) is that on which he is most to
rely for the repayment of his capital. The other two, the _semivocale_
in the ancient classification, that is, the working stock of cattle, and
the _instrumentum mutum_, such as carts, ploughs, spades, and so forth,
though not all inconsiderable in themselves, are very much inferior in
utility or in expense, and, without a given portion of the first, are
nothing at all. For, in all things whatever, the mind is the most
valuable and the most important; and in this scale the whole of
agriculture is in a natural and just order: the beast is as an informing
principle to the plough and cart; the laborer is as reason to the beast;
and the farmer is as a thinking and presiding principle to the laborer.
An attempt to break this chain of subordination in any part is equally
absurd; but the absurdity is the most mischievous, in practical
operation, where it is the most easy,--that is, where it is the most
subject to an erroneous judgment.
It is plainly more the farmer's interest that his men should thrive than
that his horses should be well fed, sleek, plump, and fit for use, or
than that his wagon and ploughs should be strong, in good repair, and
fit for service.
On the other hand, if the farmer ceases to profit of the laborer, and
that his capital is not continually manured and fructified, it is
impossible that he should continue that abundant nutriment and clothing
and lodging proper for the protection of the instruments he employs.
It is therefore the first and fundamental interest of the laborer, that
the farmer should have a full incoming profit on the product of his
labor. The proposition is self-evident; and nothing but the malignity,
perverseness, and ill-governed passions of mankind, and particularly the
envy they bear to each other's prosperity, could prevent their seeing
and acknowledging it, with thankfulness to the benign and wise Disposer
of all things, who obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing
their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own
individual success.
But who are to judge what that profit and advantage ought to be?
Certainly no authority on earth. It is a matter of convention, dictated
by the reciprocal conveniences of the parties, and indeed by their
reciprocal necessities.--But if the farmer is excessively
avaricious?--Why, so much the better: the more he desires to increase
his gains, the more interested is he in the good condition of those upon
whose labor his gains must principally depend.
I shall be told by the zealots of the sect of regulation, that this may
be true, and may be safely committed to the convention of the farmer and
the laborer, when the latter is in the prime of his youth, and at the
time of his health and vigor, and in ordinary times of abundance. But in
calamitous seasons, under accidental illness, in declining life, and
with the pressure of a numerous offspring, the future nourishers of the
community, but the present drains and blood-suckers of those who produce
them, what is to be done? When a man cannot live and maintain his family
by the natural hire of his labor, ought it not to be raised by
authority?
On this head I must be allowed to submit what my opinions have ever
been, and somewhat at large.
And, first, I premise that labor is, as I have already intimated, a
commodity, and, as such, an article of trade. If I am right in this
notion, then labor must be subject to all the laws and principles of
trade, and not to regulations foreign to them, and that may be totally
inconsistent with those principles and those laws. When any commodity is
carried to market, it is not the necessity of the vendor, but the
necessity of the purchaser, that raises the price. The extreme want of
the seller has rather (by the nature of things with which we shall in
vain contend) the direct contrary operation. If the goods at market are
beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise. The
impossibility of the subsistence of a man who carries his labor to a
market is totally beside the question, in this way of viewing it. The
only question is, What is it worth to the buyer?
But if authority comes in and forces the buyer to a price, what is this
in the case (say) of a farmer who buys the labor of ten or twelve
laboring men, and three or four handicrafts,--what is it but to make an
arbitrary division of his property among them?
The whole of his gains (I say it with the most certain conviction) never
do amount anything like in value to what he pays to his laborers and
artificers; so that a very small advance upon what _one_ man pays to
_many_ may absorb the whole of what he possesses, and amount to an
actual partition of all his substance among them. A perfect equality
will, indeed, be produced,--that is to say, equal want, equal
wretchedness, equal beggary, and, on the part of the partitioners, a
woful, helpless, and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all
compulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above; they never raise
what is below; and they depress high and low together beneath the level
of what was originally the lowest.