Certainty the stimulus to industry--Effects of
insecurity--Instances of unprofitable labour--Former notions
of commerce--National and class prejudices, and their
remedy.
Two of the most terrific famines that are recorded in the history of the
world occurred in Egypt--a country where there is greater production,
with less labour, than is probably exhibited in any other region. The
principal labourer in Egypt is the river Nile, whose periodical
overflowings impart fertility to the thirsty soil, and produce in a few
weeks that abundance which the labour of the husbandman might not hope
to command if employed during the whole year. But the Nile is a workman
that cannot be controlled and directed, even by capital, the great
controller and director of all work. The influences of heat, and light,
and air, are pretty equal in the same places. Where the climate is most
genial, the cultivators have least labour to perform in winning the
earth; where it is least genial, the cultivators have most labour. The
increased labour balances the small natural productiveness. But the
inundation of a great river cannot be depended upon like the light and
heat of the sun. For two seasons the Nile refused to rise, and labour
was not prepared to compensate for this refusal; the ground refused to
produce; the people were starved.
We mention these famines of Egypt to show that _certainty_ is the most
encouraging stimulus to every operation of human industry. We know that
production as invariably follows a right direction of labour, as day
succeeds to night. We believe that it will be dark to-night and light
again to-morrow, because we know the general laws which govern light and
darkness, and because our experience shows us that those laws are
constant and uniform. We know that if we plough, and manure, and sow the
ground, a crop will come in due time, varying indeed in quantity
according to the season, but still so constant upon an average of years,
that we are justified in applying large accumulations and considerable
labour to the production of this crop. It is this certainty that we have
such a command of the productive powers of nature as will abundantly
compensate us for the incessant labour of directing those forces, which
has during a long course of industry heaped up our manifold
accumulations, and which enables production annually to go forward to an
extent which even half a century ago would have been thought impossible.
The long succession of labour, which has covered this country with
wealth, has been applied to the encouragement of the productive forces
of nature, and the restraint of the destroying. No one can doubt that,
the instant the labour of man ceases to direct those productive natural
forces, the destroying forces immediately come into action. Take the
most familiar instance--a cottage whose neat thatch was never broken,
whose latticed windows were always entire, whose whitewashed walls were
ever clean, round whose porch the honeysuckle was trained in regulated
luxuriance, whose garden bore nothing but what the owner planted. Remove
that owner. Shut up the cottage for a year, and leave the garden to
itself. The thatched roof is torn off by the wind and devoured by mice,
the windows are driven in by storms, the walls are soaked through with
damp and are crumbling to ruin, the honeysuckle obstructs the entrance
which it once adorned, the garden is covered with weeds which years of
after-labour will have difficulty to destroy:--
"It was a plot
Of garden-ground run wild, its matted weeds
Mark'd with the steps of those whom, as they pass'd,
The gooseberry-trees that shot in long lank slips,
Or currants, hanging from their leafless stems
In scanty strings, had tempted to o'erleap
The broken wall."
Apply this principle upon a large scale. Let the productive energy of a
country be suspended through some great cause which prevents its labour
continuing in a profitable direction. Let it be overrun by a conqueror,
or plundered by domestic tyranny of any kind, so that capital ceases to
work with security. The fields suddenly become infertile, the towns lose
their inhabitants, the roads grow to be impassable, the canals are
choked up, the rivers break down their banks, the sea itself swallows up
the land. Shakspere, a great political reasoner as well as a great poet,
has described such effects in that part of 'Henry V.' when the Duke of
Burgundy exhorts the rival kings to peace:--
"Let it not disgrace me,
If I demand, before this royal view,
What rub, or what impediment, there is,
Why that the naked, poor, and mangled peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births,
Should not, in this best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas! she hath from France too long been chas'd;
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in its own fertility.
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned, dies; her hedges even-pleach'd,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair
Put forth disorder'd twigs: her fallow leas,
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory
Doth root upon; while that the coulter rusts,
That should deracinate such savagery:
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness; and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility:
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness;
Even so our houses, and ourselves and children,
Have lost, or do not learn, for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country."
[Illustration: Dykes of Holland: destruction by bursting.]
We have heard it said that Tenterden steeple was the cause of Goodwin
Sands. The meaning of the saying is, that the capital which was
appropriated to keep out the sea from that part of the Kentish coast
was diverted to the building of Tenterden steeple; and there being no
funds to keep out the sea, it washed over the land.[14] The Goodwin
Sands remain to show that man must carry on a perpetual contest to keep
in subjection the forces of nature, which, as is said of fire, one of
the forces, are good servants but bad masters. But these examples show,
also, that in the social state our control of the physical forces of
nature depends upon the right control of our own moral forces. There was
injustice, doubtless, in misappropriating the funds which restrained the
sea from devouring the land. Till men know that they shall work with
justice on every side, they work feebly and unprofitably. England did
not begin to accumulate largely and rapidly till the rights both of the
poor man and the rich were to a certain degree established--till
industry was free and property secure. Our great dramatic poet has
described this security as the best characteristic of the reign of Queen
Elizabeth:--
"In her days every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants."
[Illustration: "Under his own vine"]
Shakspere derived his image from the Bible, where a state of security is
frequently indicated by direct allusion to a man sitting under the shade
of his own fig-tree or his own vine. In the days of Elizabeth, as
compared with previous eras, there was safety, and a man might
"sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours."
We have gone on constantly improving these blessings. But let any
circumstances again arise which may be powerful enough to destroy, or
even molest, the freedom of industry and the security of property, and
we should work once more without certainty. The elements of prosperity
would not be constant and uniform. We should work with the apprehension
that some hurricane of tyranny, no matter from what power, would arise,
which would sweep away accumulation. When that hurricane did not rise,
we might have comparative abundance, like the people of Egypt during the
inundation of the Nile. We then should have an inundation of
tranquillity. But if the tranquillity were not present--if lawless
violence stood in the place of justice and security--we should be like
the people of Egypt when the Nile did not overflow. We should suffer the
extremity of misery; and that possible extremity would produce an
average misery, even if tranquillity did return, because security had
not returned. We should, if this state of things long abided, by degrees
go back to the condition of Colchester in the fourteenth century, and
thence to the universal marsh of two thousand years ago. The place
where London stands would be, as it once was, a wilderness for howling
wolves. The few that produced would again produce laboriously and
painfully, without skill and without division of labour, because without
accumulation; and it would probably take another thousand years, if men
again saw the absolute need of security, to re-create what security has
accumulated for our present use.
From the moment that the industry of this country began to work with
security, and capital and labour applied themselves in union--perhaps
not a perfect union, but still in union--to the great business of
production, they worked with less and less expenditure of unprofitable
labour. They continued to labour more and more profitably, as they
laboured with knowledge. The labour of all rude nations, and of all
uncultivated individuals, is labour with ignorance. Peter the wild boy,
whom we have already mentioned, could never be made to perceive the
right direction of labour, because he could not trace it through its
circuitous courses for the production of utility. He would work under
control, but, if left to himself, he would not work profitably. Having
been trusted to fill a cart with manure, he laboured with diligence till
the work was accomplished; but no one being at hand to direct him, he
set to work as diligently to unload the cart again. He thought, as too
many think even now, that the good was in the labour, and not in the
results of the labour. The same ignorance exhibits itself in the
unprofitable labour and unprofitable application of capital, even of
persons far removed beyond the half-idiocy of Peter the wild boy. In the
thirteenth century many of the provinces of France were overrun with
rats, and the people, instead of vigorously hunting the rats, were
persuaded to carry on a process against them in the ecclesiastical
courts; and there, after the cause of the injured people and the
injuring rats was solemnly debated, the rats were declared cursed and
excommunicated if they did not retire in six days. The historian does
not add that the rats obeyed the injunction; and doubtless the farmers
were less prepared to resort to the profitable labour of chasing them to
death when they had paid the ecclesiastics for the unprofitable labour
of their excommunication. There is a curious instance of unprofitable
labour given in a book on the Coal Trade of Scotland, written as
recently as 1812. The people of Edinburgh had a passion for buying their
coals in immense lumps, and, to gratify this passion, the greatest care
was taken not to break the coals in any of the operations of conveying
them from the pit to the cellar of the consumer. A wall of coals was
first built within the pit, another wall under the pit's mouth, another
wall when they were raised from the pit, another wall in the waggon
which conveyed them to the port where they were shipped, another wall in
the hold of the ship, another wall in the cart which conveyed them to
the consumer, and another wall in the consumer's cellar; and the result
of these seven different buildings-up and takings-down was, that after
the consumer had paid thirty per cent. more for these square masses of
coal than for coal shovelled together in large and small pieces, his
servant had daily to break the large coals to bits to enable him to make
any use of them. It seems extraordinary that such waste of labour and
capital should have existed amongst a highly acute and refined community
within the last forty years. They, perhaps, thought they were making
good for trade, and therefore submitted to the evil; while the Glasgow
people, on the contrary, by saving thirty per cent. in their coals, had
that thirty per cent. to bestow upon new enterprises of industry, and
for new encouragements to labour.
The unprofitable applications of capital and labour which the early
history of the civilization of every people has to record, and which,
amongst many, have subsisted even whilst they held themselves at the
height of refinement, have been fostered by the ignorance of the great,
and even of the learned, as to the causes which, advancing production or
retarding it, advanced or retarded their own interests, and the
interests of all the community. Princes and statesmen, prelates and
philosophers, were equally ignorant of
"What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so;
What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat."
It was enough for them to consume; they thought it beneath them to
observe even, much less to assist in, the direction of production. This
was ignorance as gross as that of Peter the wild boy, or the
excommunication of rats. It has always been the fashion of ignorant
greatness to despise the mechanical arts. The pride of the Chinese
mandarins was to let their nails grow as long as their fingers, to show
that they never worked. Even European nobles once sought the same absurd
distinction. In France, under the old monarchy, no descendant of a
nobleman could embark in trade without the highest disgrace; and the
principle was so generally recognised as just, that a French writer,
even as recently as 1758, reproaches the sons of the English nobility
for the contrary practice, and asks, with an air of triumph, how can a
man be fit to serve his country in Parliament after having meddled with
such paltry concerns as those of commerce? Montesquieu, a writer in most
respects of enlarged views, holds that it is beneath the dignity of
governments to interfere with such trumpery things as the regulation of
weights and measures. Society might have well spared the interference of
governments with weights and measures if they had been content to leave
all commerce equally free. But, in truth, the regulation of weights and
measures is almost a solitary exception to the great principle which
governments ought to practise, of not interfering, or interfering
little, with commerce.
Louis XIV. did not waste more capital and labour by his ruinous wars,
and by his covering France with fortifications and palaces, than by the
perpetual interferences of himself and his predecessors with the freedom
of trade, which compelled capital and labour to work unprofitably. The
naturally slow progress of profitable industry is rendered more slow by
the perpetual inclination of those in authority to divert industry from
its natural and profitable channels. It was therefore wisely said by a
committee of merchants to Colbert, the prime minister of France in the
reign of Louis XIV., when he asked them what measures government could
adopt to promote the interests of commerce,--"Let us alone, permit us
quietly to manage our own business." It is undeniable that the interests
of all are best promoted when each is left free to attend to his own
interests, under the necessary social restraints which prevent him doing
a positive injury to his neighbour. It is thus that agriculture and
manufactures are essentially allied in their interests; that
unrestrained commerce is equally essential to the real and permanent
interests of agriculture and manufactures; that capital and labour are
equally united in their interests, whether applied to agriculture,
manufactures, or commerce; that the producer and the consumer are
equally united in their most essential interest, which is, that there
should be cheap production. While these principles are not understood at
all, and while they are imperfectly understood, as they still are by
many classes and individuals, there must be a vast deal of unprofitable
expenditure of capital, a vast deal of unprofitable labour, a vast deal
of bickering and heart-burning between individuals who ought to be
united, and classes who ought to be united, and nations who ought to be
united; and as long as it is not felt by all that their mutual rights
are understood and will be respected, there is a feeling of insecurity
which more or less affects the prosperity of all. The only remedy for
these evils is the extension of knowledge. Louis XV. proclaimed to the
French that the English were their "veritables ennemis," their true
enemies. When knowledge is triumphant it will be found that there are no
"veritables ennemis," either among nations, or classes, or individuals.
The prejudices by which nations, classes, and individuals are led to
believe that the interest of one is opposed to the interest of another,
are, nine times out of ten, as utterly absurd as the reason which a
Frenchman once gave for hating the English--which was, "that they
poured melted butter on their roast veal;" and this was not more
ridiculous than the old denunciation of the English against the French,
that "they ate frogs, and wore wooden shoes." When the world is
disabused of the belief that the wealth of one nation, class, or
individual must be created by the loss of another's wealth, then, and
then only, will all men steadily and harmoniously apply to produce and
to enjoy--to acquire prosperity and happiness--lifting themselves to the
possession of good
"By Reason's light, on Resolution's wings."
[14] Grey's Notes to Hudibras.