ia
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY] 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below 
 
 
 VIA, 
 
 
 library 
 
 Graduate School of Business Administration 
 
 University of California 
 
 Los Angeles 24, California
 
 PRINCIPLES 
 
 OF 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY 
 
 SOME OF THEIR APPLICATIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I. 
 
 fSOM TBX FIFTH LONDON SDITI01T. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 
 1920
 
 - Admin. 
 Library 
 
 W 
 
 H 
 V.I 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ' -'V 
 
 THE appearance of a treatise like the present, on a 
 subject on which so many works of merit already 
 exist, may be thought to require some explanation. 
 
 It might perhaps be sufficient to say, that no 
 existing treatise on Political Economy contains the 
 latest improvements which have been made in the 
 theory of the subject. Many new ideas, and new 
 applications of ideas, have been elicited by the dis- 
 cussions of the last few years, especially those on 
 Currency, on Foreign Trade, and on the important 
 topics connected more or less intimately with Colo- 
 nization: and there seems reason that the field of 
 Political Economy should be re-surveyed in its 
 whole extent, if only for the purpose of incorporating 
 the results of these speculations, and bringing them 
 into harmony with the principles previously laid 
 down by the best thinkers on the subject. 
 
 9S5989-
 
 4 PREFACE. 
 
 To supply, however, these deficiencies in former 
 treatises bearing a similar title, is not the sole, or 
 even the principal object which the Author has in 
 view. The design of the book is different from that 
 of any treatise on Political Economy which has been 
 produced in England since the work of Adam 
 Smith. 
 
 The most characteristic quality of that work, and 
 the one in which it most differs from some others 
 which have equalled or even surpassed it as mere 
 expositions of the general principles of the subject, is 
 that it invariably associates the principles with their 
 applications. This of itself implies a much wider 
 range of ideas and of topics, than are included in 
 political economy, considered as a branch of abstract 
 speculation. For practical purposes, political econ- 
 omy is inseparably intertwined with many other 
 branches of social philosophy. Except on matters 
 of mere detail, there are perhaps no practical ques- 
 tions, even among those which approach nearest to 
 the character of purely economical questions, which 
 admit of being decided on economical premises alone. 
 And it is because Adam Smith never loses sight of 
 this truth ; because, in his applications of Political 
 Economy, he perpetually appeals to other and often
 
 PREFACE. 5 
 
 far larger considerations than pure Political Economy 
 affords that he gives that well-grounded feeling of 
 command over the principles of the subject for pur- 
 poses of practice, owing to which the " Wealth of 
 Nations," alone among treatises on Political Econ- 
 omy, has not only been popular with general readers, 
 but has impressed itself strongly on the minds of 
 men of the world and of legislators. 
 
 It appears to the present writer, that a work 
 similar in its object and general conception to that 
 of Adam Smith, but adapted to the more extended 
 knowledge and improved ideas of the present age, is 
 the kind of contribution which Political Economy at 
 present requires. The " Wealth of Nations " is in 
 many parts obsolete, and in all, imperfect. Political 
 Economy, properly so called, has grown up almost 
 from infancy since the time of Adam Smith : and the 
 philosophy of society, from which practically that 
 eminent thinker never separated his more peculiar 
 theme, though still in a very early stage of its prog- 
 ress, has advanced many steps beyond the point at 
 which he left it. No attempt, however, has yet been 
 made to combine his practical mode of treating his 
 subject with the increased knowledge since acquired 
 of its theory, or to exhibit the economical phenomena
 
 6 PREFACE. 
 
 of society in the relation in which they stand to the 
 best social ideas of the present time, as he did, with 
 such admirable success, in reference to the philoso- 
 phy of his century. 
 
 Such is the idea which the writer of the present 
 work has kept before him. To succeed even par- 
 tially in realizing it, would be a sufficiently useful 
 achievement, to induce him to incur willingly all the 
 chances of failure. It is requisite, however, to add, 
 that although his object is practical, and, as far as 
 the nature of the subject admits, popular, he has not 
 attempted to purchase either of those advantages by 
 the sacrifice of strict scientific reasoning. Though he 
 desires that his treatise should be more than a mere 
 exposition of the abstract doctrines of Political Econ- 
 omy, he is also desirous that such an exposition 
 should be found in it. 
 
 The present fifth edition has been revised through- 
 out, and the facts, on several subjects, brought down 
 to a later date than in the former editions. Addi- 
 tional arguments and illustrations have been inserted 
 where they seemed necessary, but not in general at 
 any considerable length.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 OF THE FIRST VOLUME, 
 
 P1G1 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS, ...-..17 
 
 . PBODtfOTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. Of the Requisites of Production. 
 
 1. Requisites of production, what, 45 
 
 2. The function of labour defined, . . ... .47 
 
 3. Does nature contribute more to the efficacy of labour in 
 
 some occupations than in others? 49 
 
 4. Some natural agents limited, others practically unlimited, in 
 
 quantity, 60 
 
 CHAPTER II. Of Labour, as an Agent of Production. 
 
 \ 1. Labour employed either directly about the thing produced, 
 
 or in operations preparatory to its production, . . 53 
 
 2. Labour employed in producing subsistence for subsequent 
 
 labour, 55 
 
 3. in producing materials, 58 
 
 4. or implements, 60
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 P1O 
 
 5. Labour employed in the protection of labour, ... 62 
 
 6. in the transport and distribution of the produce, . . 68 
 
 7. Labour which relates to human beings, .. . . . 66 
 
 8. Labour of invention and discovery, 67 
 
 9. Labour agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial, . . 69 
 
 CHAPTER III. Of Unproductive Labour. 
 
 1. Labour does not produce objects, but utilities, ... 71 
 
 2. which are of three kinds, 73 
 
 8. Productive labour is that which produces utilities fixed and 
 
 embodied in material objects, 75 
 
 4. All other labour, however useful, is classed as unproductive 77 
 6. Productive and Unproductive Consumption, ... 80 
 6. Labour for the supply of Productive Consumption, and la- 
 bour for the supply of Unproductive Consumption, . . 81 
 
 CHAPTER IV. Of Capital. 
 
 1. Capital is wealth appropriated to reproductive employment, 83 
 
 2. More capital devoted to production than actually employed 
 
 in it, 86 
 
 3. Examination of some cases illustrative of the idea of Capital, 89 
 
 CHAPTER V. Fundamental Propositions respecting 
 Capital. 
 
 \ 1. Industry is limited by Capital, 94 
 
 2. but does not always come up to that limit, ... 96 
 8. Increase of capital gives increased employment to labour, 
 
 without assignable bounds, 98 
 
 4. Capital is the result of saving, 101 
 
 6. All capital is consumed, 103 
 
 6. Capital is kept up, not by preservation, but by perpetual re- 
 
 production, 107 
 
 7. Why countries recover rapidly from a state of devastation, 108 
 
 8. Effects of defraying government expenditure by loans, . 110 
 
 9. Demand for commodities is not demand for labour, . .114 
 10. Fallacy respecting Taxation, 124
 
 CONTENTS. 9 
 
 CHAPTER VI. Of Circulating and Fixed Capital. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 1. Fixed and Circulating Capital, what, 127 
 
 2. Increase of fixed capital, when at the expense of circulating, 
 
 might be detrimental to the labourers, . . . .130 
 
 3. this seldom if ever occurs, 134 
 
 CHAPTER VII. On what depends the degree of Productive- 
 ness of Productive Agents. 
 
 1. Land, labour, and capital, are of different productiveness at 
 
 different times and places, 189 
 
 2. Causes of superior productiveness. Natural advantages, . 140 
 
 3. greater energy of labour, 142 
 
 4. superior skill and knowledge, 145 
 
 5. superiority of intelligence and trustworthiness in the com- 
 
 munity generally, 147 
 
 6. Superior security, 152 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. Of Co-operation, or the Combination 
 of Labour. 
 
 1. Combination of Labour a principal cause of superior produc- 
 
 tiveness, 156 
 
 2. Effects of separation of employments analysed, . . . 159 
 
 3. Combination of labour between town and country, . .162 
 x 4. The higher degrees of the division of labour, . . . 164 
 
 5. Analysis of its advantages, 166 
 
 6. Limitations of the division of labour, 174 
 
 CHAPTER IX. Of Production on a Large, and 
 Production on a Small Scale. 
 
 1. Advantages of the large system of production in manufac- 
 
 tures, 176 
 
 2. Advantages and disadvantages of the joint-stock principle, . 182 
 
 3. Conditions necessary for the large system of production, . 188 
 
 4. Large and small farming compared, 190
 
 10 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER X. Of the Law of the Increase of Labour. 
 
 PAOR 
 
 1. The law of the increase of production depends on those of 
 
 \ three elements, Labour, Capital, and Land, . . . 205 
 
 2. The Law of Population, 206 
 
 3. By what checks the increase of population is practically 
 
 limited, 208 
 
 CHAPTER XI. Of the Law of the Increase of Capital. 
 
 1. Means and motives to saving, on what dependent, . . 213 
 
 2. Causes of diversity in the effective strength of the desire of 
 
 accumulation, 215 
 
 3. Examples of deficiency in the strength of this desire, . . 218 
 
 4. Exemplification of its excess, 226 
 
 CHAPTER XTT Of the Law of the Increase of Produc- 
 tion from Land. 
 
 1. The limited quantity and limited productiveness of land, the 
 
 real limits to production, 229 
 
 2. The law of production from the soil, a law of diminishing 
 
 return in proportion to the increased application of labour 
 and capital, 230 
 
 3. Antagonist principle to the law of diminishing return ; the 
 
 progress of improvements in production, . - . 235 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. Consequences of the foregoing Laws. 
 
 \ 1. Remedies when the limit to production is the weakness of 
 
 the principle of accumulation, 243 
 
 2. Necessity of restraining population not confined to a state of 
 
 inequality of property, 244 
 
 3. nor superseded by free trade in food, .... 248 
 
 4. nor by emigration, 252
 
 CONTENTS. 11 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. Of Property. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 1. Introductory remarks, 257 
 
 2. Statement of the question, 259 
 
 3. Examination of Communism, 262 
 
 4. of St. Simonism and Fourierism, 271 
 
 CHAPTER II. The same subject continued. 
 
 1. The institution of property implies freedom of acquisition by 
 
 contract, 278 
 
 2. the validity of prescription, 280 
 
 8. the power of bequest, but not the right of inheritance. 
 
 Question of inheritance examined, 281 
 
 4. Should the right of bequest be limited, and how ? . . 287 
 
 5. Grounds of property in land, different from those of prop- 
 
 erty in moveables, 291 
 
 6. only valid on certain conditions, which are not always 
 
 realized. The limitations considered, .... 293 
 
 7. Rights of property in abuses, 298 
 
 CHAPTER HE. Of the Classes among whom the 
 Produce is distributed. 
 
 1. The produce sometimes shared among three classes, . .301 
 
 2. sometimes belongs undividedly to one, .... 302 
 8. sometimes divided between two, 303 
 
 CHAPTER IV. Of Competition and Custom. 
 
 1. Competition not the sole regulator of the division of the prod- 
 
 uce, 306 
 
 2. Influence of custom on rents, and on the tenure of land, . 307 
 
 3. Influence of custom on prices, 310
 
 12 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER V. Of Slavery. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 1. Slavery considered in relation to the slaves, . . .314 
 
 2. in relation to production, 316 
 
 8. Emancipation considered in relation to the interest of the 
 
 slave-owners, . .. . .318 
 
 CHAPTER VI. Of Peasant Proprietors. 
 
 1. Difference between English and Continental opinions respect- 
 ing peasant properties, 821 
 
 2. Evidence respecting peasant properties in Switzerland, . 323 
 
 8. in Norway, 330 
 
 4. in Germany, 334 
 
 5. in Belgium, 340 
 
 6. in the Channel Islands, 345 
 
 7. in France, . 348 
 
 CHAPTER VII. Continuation of the same subject. 
 
 1. Influence of peasant properties in stimulating industry, . 354 
 
 2. in training intelligence, , . 357 
 
 3. in promoting forethought and self-control, . . . 358 
 
 4. Their effect on population, 359 
 
 6. on the subdivision of land, 870 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. Of Metayers. 
 
 1. Nature of the metayer system, and its varieties, . . . 876 
 
 2. Its advantages and inconveniences, 378 
 
 3. Evidence concerning its effects in different countries, . . 381 
 
 4. Is its abolition desirable ? . . 393 
 
 CHAPTER IX. Of Cottiers. 
 
 1. Nature and operation of cottier tenure, .... 896 
 
 2. In an overpeopled country its necessary consequence is nomi- 
 
 nal rents, 399 
 
 3. which are inconsistent with industry, frugality, or re- 
 
 straint on population, 402 
 
 4. Ryot tenancy of India, 404
 
 CONTENTS. 13 
 
 CHAPTER X. Means of abolishing Cottier Tenancy. 
 
 PACK 
 
 1. Irish cottiers should be converted into peasant proprietors, . 409 
 
 2. Inapplicability of this advice to present circumstances, . 417 
 
 CHAPTER XI. Of Wages. 
 
 1. Wages depend on the demand and supply of labour in other 
 
 words, on population and capital, 420 
 
 2. Examination of some popular opinions respecting wages, . 421 
 
 3. Certain rare circumstances excepted, high wages imply re- 
 
 straints on population, 428 
 
 4. which are in some cases legal, 432 
 
 5. in others the effect of particular customs, . . . 434 
 
 6. Due restriction of population the only safeguard of a labour- 
 
 ing class, 437 
 
 CHAPTER XII. Of Popular Remedies for Low Wages. 
 
 1. A legal or customary minimum of wages, with a guarantee of 
 
 employment, 442 
 
 2. would require as a condition, legal measures for repres- 
 
 sion of population, , . . . 444 
 
 3. Allowances in aid of wages, .1 449 
 
 4. The Allotment System, 451 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. The Remedies for Low Wages further 
 considered. 
 
 1. Pernicious direction of public opinion on the subject of pop- 
 ulation, . . . . 457 
 
 2. Grounds for expecting improvement, 460 
 
 3. Twofold means of elevating the habits of the labouring peo- 
 
 ple : by education, 466 
 
 4. and by large measures of immediate relief, through for- 
 
 eign and home colonization, 467 
 
 CHAPTER XIY. Of the Differences of Wages in 
 different Employments. 
 
 1. Differences of wages arising from different degrees of attrac- 
 tiveness in different employments, 471 
 
 3. Differences arising from natural monopolies, . . . 477
 
 14 CONTENTS. 
 
 MM 
 
 8. Effect on wages of a class of subsidized competitors, . . 482 
 
 4. of the competition of persons with independent means of 
 
 support, . . ..... . . . . 485 
 
 5. Wages of women, why lower than those of men, . . . 489 
 
 6. Differences of wages arising from restrictive laws, and from 
 
 combinations, 491 
 
 7. Oases in which wages are fixed by custom, .... 492 
 
 CHAPTER XV. Of Profits. 
 
 1. Profits resolvable into three parts; interest, insurance, and 
 
 wages of superintendence, 495 
 
 2. The minimum of profits ; and the variations to which it is 
 
 liable, . 498 
 
 3. Differences of profits arising from the nature of the particu- 
 
 lar employment, 500 
 
 4. General tendency of profits to an equality, .... 502 
 
 5. Profits do not depend on prices, nor on purchase and sale, . 508 
 
 6. The advances of the capitalist consist ultimately in wages of 
 
 labour, 510 
 
 \ 7. The rate of profit depends on the Cost of Labour, . . 512 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. Of Bent. 
 
 1. Rent the effect of a natural monopoly, 616 
 
 2. No land can pay rent except land of such quality or situa- 
 
 tion, as exists in less quantity than the demand, . . 517 
 
 3. The rent of land consists of the excess of its return above 
 
 the return to the worst land in cultivation, . . .519 
 
 4. or to the capital employed in the least advantageous cir- 
 
 cumstances, 521 
 
 6. Is payment for capital sunk in the soil, rent, or profit ? . 625 
 6. Bent does not enter into the cost of production of agricul- 
 tural produce, 631 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 EXCHANGE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. Of Value. 
 
 | 1. Preliminary remarks, 585 
 
 2. Definitions of Value in Use, Exchange Value, and Price, . 637 
 
 3. What is meant by general purchasing power, . . . 638
 
 CONTENTS. 15 
 
 PAGE 
 
 4. Value a relative term. A general rise or fall of Values a 
 
 contradiction, 540 
 
 5. The laws of Value, how modified in their application to 
 
 retail transactions, 541 
 
 CHAPTER II. Of Demand and Supply, in their 
 relation to Value. 
 
 1. Two conditions of Value : Utility, and Difficulty of Attain- 
 
 ment, 544 
 
 2. Three kinds of Difficulty of Attainment, .... 546 
 
 3. Commodities which are absolutely limited in quantity, . 548 
 
 4. Law of their value, the Equation of Demand and Supply, . 549 
 
 5. Miscellaneous cases falling under this law, . . . . 552 
 
 CHAPTER III. Of Cost of Production, in its relation 
 to Value. 
 
 1. Commodities which are susceptible of indefinite multiplica- 
 tion without increase of cost. Law of their Value, Cost 
 
 of Production, . 555 
 
 2. operating through potential, but not actual, alterations of 
 
 supply, 557 
 
 CHAPTER IY. Ultimate Analysis of Cost of Production. 
 
 1. Principal element in Cost of Production-^Quantity of La- 
 bour, 562 
 
 2. Wages not an element in Cost of Production, . . . 564 
 
 3. except in so far as they vary from employment to employ- 
 
 ment, 566 
 
 4. Profits an element in Cost of Production, in so far as they 
 
 vary from employment to employment, .... 568 
 
 5. or are spread over unequal lengths of time, . . . 569 
 
 6. Occasional elements in Cost of Production : taxes, and 
 
 scarcity value of materials, 573 
 
 CHAPTER V. Of Rent, in its Relation to Value. 
 
 1. Commodities which are susceptible of indefinite multiplica- 
 tion, but not without increase of cost. Law of their
 
 10 CONTENTS. 
 
 MM 
 
 Value, Cost of Production in the most unfavourable exist- 
 ing circumstances, 577 
 
 2. Such commodities, when produced in circumstances more fa- 
 vourable, yield a rent equal to the difference of cost, . 580 
 8. Rent of mines and fisheries, and ground-rent of buildings, . 583 
 4. Cases of extra profit analogous to rent, .... 585 
 
 CHAPTEB VI. Summary of the Theory of Value. 
 
 1. The theory of Value recapitulated in a series of proposi- 
 tions, 588 
 
 2. How modified by the case of labourers cultivating for sub- 
 sistence, 591 
 
 8. by the case of slave labour, 593 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Substance of three articles in the Morning Chronicle of llth, 
 13th, and 16th January, 1847, in reply to MM. Mounier 
 and Rubichon and to the Quarterly Review, on the Sub- 
 division of Landed Property in France, .... 597
 
 PRINCIPLES 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY, 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 IN every department of human affairs, Practice long 
 precedes Science : systematic enquiry into the modes of 
 action of the powers of nature, is the tardy product of a 
 long course of efforts to use those powers for practical ends. 
 The conception, accordingly, of Political Economy as a 
 branch of science, is extremely modern ; but the subject 
 with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages 
 necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of 
 mankind, and, in some, a most unduly engrossing one. 
 
 That subject is Wealth. Writers on Political Economy 
 profess to teach, or to investigate, the nature of Wealth, and 
 the laws of its production and distribution : including, 
 directly or remotely, the operation of all the causes by 
 which the condition of mankind, or of any society of human 
 beings, in respect to this universal object of human desire, 
 is made prosperous or the reverse. Not that any treatise 
 on Political Economy can discuss or even enumerate all 
 these causes ; but it undertakes to set forth as much as is 
 known of the laws and principles according to which they 
 operate. 2
 
 18 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 Every one has a notion, sufficiently correct for common 
 purposes, of what is meant by wealth. The enquiries which 
 relate to it are in no danger of being confounded with those 
 relating to any other of the great human interests. All 
 know that it is one thing to be rich, another thing to be 
 enlightened, brave, or humane ; that the questions how a 
 nation is made wealthy, and how it is made free, or vir- 
 tuous, or eminent in literature, in the fine arts, in arms, or 
 in polity, are totally distinct enquiries. Those things, 
 indeed, are all indirectly connected, and react upon one 
 another. A people has sometimes become free, because it 
 had first grown wealthy ; or wealthy, because it had first 
 become free. The creed and laws of a people act power- 
 fully upon their economical condition ; and this again, by 
 its influence on their mental development and social rela- 
 tions, reacts upon their creed and laws. But though the 
 subjects are in very close contact, they are essentially 
 different, and have never been supposed to be otherwise. 
 
 It is no part of the design of this treatise to aim at meta- 
 physical nicety of definition, where the ideas suggested by a 
 term are already as determinate as practical purposes re- 
 quire. But, little as it might be expected that any mis- 
 chievous confusion of ideas could take place on a subject so 
 simple as the question, what is to be considered as wealth, 
 it is matter of history that such confusion of ideas has ex- 
 isted that theorists and practical politicians have been 
 equally, and at one period universally, infected by it, and 
 that for many generations it gave a thoroughly false direc- 
 tion to the policy of Europe. I refer to the set of doctrines 
 designated, since the time of Adam Smith, by the appella- 
 tion of the Mercantile System. 
 
 While this system prevailed, it was assumed, either ex- 
 pressly or tacitly, in the whole policy of nations, that wealth 
 consisted solely of money ; or of the precious metals, which, 
 when not already in the state of money, are capable of being 
 directly converted into it. According to the doctrines then 
 prevalent, whatever tended to heap up money or bullion in
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 10 
 
 a country added to its wealth. Whatever sent the precious 
 metals oat of a country impoverished it. If a country pos- 
 sessed no gold or silver mines, the only industry by which 
 it could be enriched was foreign trade, being the only one 
 which could bring in money. Any branch of trade which 
 was supposed to send out more money than it brought in, 
 however ample and valuable might be the returns in another 
 shape, was looked upon as a losing trade. Exportation of 
 goods was favoured and encouraged (even by means ex- 
 tremely onerous to the real resources of the country), be- 
 cause, the exported goods being stipulated to be paid for in 
 money, it was hoped that the returns would actually be 
 made in gold and silver. Importation of anything, other 
 than the precious metals, was regarded as a loss to the nation 
 of the whole price of the things imported ; unless they were 
 brought in to be re-exported at a profit, or unless, being the 
 materials or instruments of some industry practised in the 
 country itself, they gave the power of producing exportable 
 articles at smaller cost, and thereby effecting a larger ex- 
 portation. The commerce of the world was looked upon as 
 a struggle among nations, which could draw to itself the 
 largest share of the gold and silver in existence ; and in this 
 competition no nation could gain anything, except by 
 making others lose as much, or, at the least, preventing 
 them from gaining it. 
 
 It often happens that the universal belief of one age of 
 mankind a belief from which no one was, nor without an 
 extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time 
 be free becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurd- 
 ity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a 
 thing can ever have appeared credible. It has so happened 
 with the doctrine that money is synonymous with wealth. 
 The conceit seems too preposterous to be thought of as a 
 serious opinion. It looks like one of the crude fancies of 
 childhood, instantly corrected by a word from any grown 
 person. But let no one feel confident that he should have 
 escaped the delusion if he had lived at the time when it pre-
 
 OQ PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 vailed. All the associations engendered by common life, 
 and by the ordinary course of business, concurred in favour- 
 ing it. So long as those associations were the only medium 
 through which the subject was looked at, what we now 
 think so gross an absurdity seemed a truism. Once ques- 
 tioned, indeed, it was doomed; but no one was likely to 
 think of questioning it whose mind had not become familiar 
 with certain modes of stating and of contemplating econom- 
 ical phenomena, which have only found their way into the 
 general understanding through the influence of Adam Smith 
 and of his expositors. 
 
 In common discourse, wealth is always expressed in 
 money. If you ask how rich a person is, you are answered 
 that he has so many thousand pounds. All income and 
 expenditure, all gains and losses, everything by which one 
 becomes richer or poorer, are reckoned as the coming in or 
 going out of so much money. It is true that in the in- 
 ventory of a person's fortune are included, not only the 
 money in his actual possession, or due to him, but all other 
 articles of value. These, however, enter, not in their own 
 character, but in virtue of the sums of money which they 
 would sell for ; and if they would sell for less, their owner 
 is reputed less rich, though the things themselves are pre- 
 cisely the same. It is true, also, that people do not grow 
 rich by keeping their money unused, and that they must be 
 willing to spend in order to gain. Those who enrich them- 
 selves by commerce, do so by giving money for goods as 
 well as goods for money ; and the first is as necessary a part 
 of the process as the last. But a person who buys goods for 
 purposes of gain, does so to sell them again for money, and 
 in the expectation of receiving more money than he laid 
 out : to get money, therefore, seems even to the person him- 
 self the ultimate end of the whole. It often happens that 
 he is not paid in money, but in something else ; having 
 bought goods to a value equivalent, which are set off against 
 those he sold. But he accepted these at a money valuation, 
 and in the belief that they would bring in more money
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 21 
 
 eventually than the price at which they were made over to 
 him. A dealer doing a large amount of business, and turn- 
 mg over his capital rapidly, has but a small portion of it in 
 ready money at any one time. But he only feels it valuable 
 to him as it is convertible into money: he considers no 
 transaction closed until the net result is either paid or cred- 
 ited in money : when he retires from business it is into 
 money that he converts the whole, and not until then does 
 he deem himself to have realized his gains : just as if money 
 were the only wealth, and money's worth were only the 
 means of attaining it. If it be now asked for what end 
 money is desirable, unless to supply the wants or pleasures 
 of oneself or others, the champion of the system would not 
 be at all embarrassed by the question. True, he would say, 
 these are the uses of wealth, and very laudable uses while 
 confined to domestic commodities, because in that case, by 
 exactly the amount which you expend, you enrich others of 
 your countrymen. Spend your wealth, if you please, in 
 whatever indulgences you have a taste for ; but your wealth 
 is not the indulgences, it is the sum of money, or the annual 
 money income, with which you purchase them. 
 
 While there were so many things to render the assump- 
 tion which is the basis of the mercantile system plausible, 
 there is also some small foundation in reason, though a very 
 insufficient one, for the distinction which that system so 
 emphatically draws between money and evei-v other kind 
 of valuable possession. We really, and justly, look upon a 
 person as possessing the advantages of wealth, not in propor- 
 tion to the useful and agreeable things of which he is in the 
 actual enjoyment, but to his command over the general fund 
 of things useful and agreeable ; the power he possesses of 
 providing for any exigency, or obtaining any object of 
 desire. Now, money is itself that power ; while all othei 
 things, in a civilized state, seem to confer it only by theii 
 capacity of being exchanged for money. To possess any 
 other article of wealth, is to possess that particular thing 
 and nothing else : if you wish for another thing instead oi
 
 22 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 it, you have first to sell it, or to submit to the inconvenience 
 and delay (if not the impossibility) of finding some one who 
 has what you want, and is willing to barter it for what you 
 have. But with money you are at once able to buy what- 
 ever things are for sale ; and one whose fortune is in money, 
 or in things rapidly convertible into it, seems both to him- 
 self and others to possess not any one thing, but all the 
 things which the money places it at his option to purchase. 
 The greatest part of the utility of wealth, beyond a very 
 moderate quantity, is not the indulgences it procures, but 
 the reserved power which its possessor holds in his hands of 
 attaining purposes generally ; and this power no other kind 
 of wealth confers so immediately or so certainly as money. 
 It is the only form of wealth which is not merely applicable 
 to some one use, but can be turned at once to any use. And 
 this distinction was the more likely to make an impression 
 upon governments, as it is one of considerable importance 
 to them. A civilized government derives comparatively 
 little advantage from taxes unless it can collect them in 
 money : and if it has large or sudden payments to make, 
 especially payments in foreign countries for wars or subsi- 
 dies, either for the sake of conquering or of not being con- 
 quered (the two chief objects of national policy until a late 
 period), scarcely any medium of payment except money will 
 serve the purpose. All these causes conspire to make both 
 individuals and governments, in estimating their means, 
 attach almost exclusive importance to money, either in esse 
 or in posse,' and look upon all other things (when viewed as 
 part of their resources) scarcely otherwise than as the re- 
 mote means of obtaining that which alone, when obtained, 
 affords the indefinite, and at the same time instantaneous, 
 command over objects of desire, which best answers to the 
 idea of wealth. 
 
 An absurdity, however, does not cease to be an absurd- 
 ity when we have discovered what were the appearances 
 which made it plausible ; and the Mercantile Theory could 
 ngt fail to be seen in its true character when men began,
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 23 
 
 
 
 even in an imperfect manner, to explore into the founda- 
 tions of things, and seek their premises from elementary- 
 facts, and not from the forms and phrases of common dis- 
 course. So soon as they asked themselves what is really 
 meant by money what it is in its essential characters, and 
 the precise nature of the functions it performs they reflect- 
 ed that money, like other things, is only a desirable posses- 
 sion on account of its uses ; and that these, instead of being, 
 as they delusively appear, indefinite, are of a strictly defined 
 and limited description, namely, to facilitate the distribution 
 of the produce of industry according to the convenience of 
 those among whom it is shared. Further consideration 
 showed that the uses of money are in no respect promoted 
 by increasing the quantity which exists and circulates in a 
 country ; the service which it performs being as well ren- 
 dered by a small as by a large aggregate amount. Two 
 million quarters of corn will not feed so many persons as 
 four millions ; but two millions of pounds sterling will carry 
 on as much traffic, will buy and sell as many commodities, 
 as four millions, though at lower nominal prices. Money, 
 as money, satisfies no want ; its worth to any one, consists 
 in its being a convenient shape in which to receive his 
 incomings of all sorts, which incomings he afterwards, at 
 the times which suit him best, converts into the forms in 
 which they can be useful to him. The difference between 
 a country with money, and a country altogether without it, 
 would be only one of convenience ; a saving of time and 
 trouble, like grinding by water instead of by hand, or (to 
 use Adam Smith's illustration) like the benefit derived from 
 roads ; and to mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of 
 error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest 
 way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and 
 lands themselves. 
 
 Money, being the instrument of an important public and 
 private purpose, is rightly regarded as wealth ; but every- 
 thing else which serves any human purpose, and which 
 nature does not afford gratuitously, is wealth also. To be
 
 24 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 wealthy is to have a large stock of useful articles, or the 
 means of purchasing them. Everything forms therefore a 
 part of wealth, which has a power of purchasing ; for which 
 anything useful or agreeable would be given in exchange. 
 Things for which nothing could be obtained in exchange, 
 however useful or necessary they may be, are not wealth in 
 the sense in which the term is used in Political Economy. 
 Air, for example, though the most absolute of necessaries, 
 bears no price in the market, because it can be obtained 
 gratuitously ; to accumulate a stock of it would yield no 
 profit or advantage to any one ; and the laws of its produc- 
 tion and distribution are the subject of a very different study 
 from Political Economy. But though air is not wealth, 
 mankind are much richer by obtaining it gratis, since the 
 time and labour which would otherwise be required for sup- 
 plying the most pressing of all wants, can be devoted to 
 other purposes. It is possible to imagine circumstances in 
 which air would be a part of wealth. If it became custom- 
 ary to sojourn long in places where the air does not natu- 
 rally penetrate, as in diving-bells sunk in the sea, a supply 
 of air artificially furnished would, like water conveyed into 
 houses, bear a price : and if from any revolution in nature 
 the atmosphere became too scanty for the consumption, or 
 could be monopolized, air might acquire a very high market- 
 able value. In such a case, the possession of it, beyond his 
 own wants, would be, to its owner, wealth ; and the general 
 wealth of mankind might at first sight appear to be in- 
 creased, by what would be so great a calamity to them. 
 The error would lie in not considering, that however rich 
 the possessor of air might become at the expense of the rest 
 of the community, all persons else would be poorer by all 
 that they were compelled to pay for what they had before 
 obtained without payment. 
 
 This leads to an important distinction in the meaning of 
 the word wealth, as applied to the possessions of an individ- 
 ual, and to those of a nation, or of mankind. In the wealth 
 of mankind, nothing is included which does not of itself
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 25 
 
 answer some purpose of utility or pleasure. To an individu- 
 al, anything is wealth, which, though useless in itself, en- 
 ables him to claim from others a part of their stock of 
 things useful or pleasant. Take, for instance, a mortgage 
 of a thousand pounds on a landed estate. This is wealth to 
 the person to whom it brings in a revenue, and who could 
 perhaps sell it in the market for the full amount of the debt. 
 But it is not wealth to the country ; if the engagement were 
 annulled, the country would be neither poorer nor richer. 
 The mortgagee would have lost a thousand pounds, and the 
 owner of the land would have gained it. Speaking nation- 
 ally, the mortgage was not itself wealth, but merely gave A 
 a claim to a portion of the wealth of B. It was wealth to A, 
 and wealth which he could transfer to a third person ; but 
 what he so transferred was in fact a joint ownership, to the 
 extent of a thousand pounds, in the land of which B was 
 nominally the sole proprietor. The position of fundholders, 
 or owners of the public debt of a country, is similar. They 
 are mortgagees on the general wealth of the country. The 
 cancelling of the debt would be no destruction of wealth, 
 but a transfer of it : a wrongful abstraction of wealth from 
 certain members of the community, for the profit of the 
 government, or of the tax-payers. Funded property there- 
 fore cannot be counted as part of the national wealth. This 
 is not always borne in mind by the dealers in statistical cal- 
 culations. For example, in estimates of the gross income 
 of the country, founded on the proceeds of the income tax, 
 incomes derived from the funds are not always excluded : 
 though the tax-payers are assessed on their whole nominal 
 income, without being permitted to deduct from it the por- 
 tion levied from them in taxation to form the income of the 
 fundholder. In this calculation, therefore, one portion of the 
 general income of the country is counted twice over, and 
 the aggregate amount made to appear greater than it is by 
 almost thirty millions. A country, however, may include in 
 its wealth all stock held by its citizens in the funds of for- 
 eign countries, and other debts due to them from abroad.
 
 26 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 But even this is only wealth to them by being a part owner- 
 ship in wealth held by others. It forms no part of the col- 
 lective wealth of the human race. It is an element in the 
 distribution, but not in the composition, of the general 
 wealth. 
 
 It has been proposed to define wealth as signifying " in- 
 struments : " meaning not tools and machinery alone, but 
 the whole accumulation possessed by individuals or commu- 
 nities, of means for the attainment of their ends. Thus, a 
 field is an instrument, because it is a means to the attain- 
 ment of corn. Corn is an instrument, being a means to the 
 attainment of flour. Flour is an instrument, being a means 
 to the attainment of bread. Bread is an instrument, as a 
 means to the satisfaction of hunger and to the support of 
 life. Here we at last arrive at things which are not instru- 
 ments, being desired on their own account, and not as mere 
 means to something beyond. This view of the subject is 
 philosophically correct ; or rather, this mode of expression 
 may be usefully employed along with others, not as convey- 
 ing a different view of the subject from the common one, 
 but as giving more distinctness and reality to the common 
 view. It departs, however, too widely from the custom of 
 language, to be likely to obtain general acceptance, or to be 
 of use for any other purpose than that of occasional illus- 
 tration. 
 
 Wealth, then, may be defined, all useful or agreeable 
 things which possess exchangeable value ; or, in other 
 words, all useful or agreeable things except those which can 
 be obtained, in the quantity desired, without labour or 
 sacrifice. To this definition, the only objection seems to be, 
 that it leaves in uncertainty a question which has been 
 much debated whether what are called immaterial prod- 
 ucts are to be considered as wealth : whether, for example, 
 the skill of a workman, or any other natural or acquired 
 power of body or mind, shall be called wealth, or not : a 
 question, not of very great importance, and which, so far a*
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 27 
 
 requiring discussion, will be more conveniently considered 
 in another place.* 
 
 These things having been premised respecting wealth, 
 we shall next turn our attention to the extraordinary dif- 
 ferences in respect to it, which exist between nation and 
 nation, and between different ages of the world ; differences 
 both in the quantity of wealth, and in the kind of it ; as 
 well as in the manner in which the wealth existing in the 
 community is shared among its members. 
 
 There is, perhaps, no people or community, now exist- 
 ing, which subsists entirely on the spontaneous produce of 
 vegetation. But many tribes still live exclusively, or almost 
 exclusively, on wild animals, the produce of hunting or fish- 
 ing. Their clothing is skins ; their habitations, huts rudely 
 formed of logs or boughs of trees, and abandoned at an 
 hour's notice. The food they use being little susceptible of 
 storing up, they have no accumulation of it, and are often 
 exposed to great privations. The wealth of such a commu- 
 nity consists solely of the skins they wear ; a few orna- 
 ments, the taste for which exists among most savages ; some 
 rude utensils ; the weapons with which they kill 'their game, 
 or fight against hostile competitors for the means of subsist- 
 ence ; canoes for crossing rivers and lakes, or fishing in the 
 sea ; and perhaps some furs or other productions of the vnl- 
 derness, collected to be exchanged with civilized people for 
 blankets, brandy, and tobacco ; of which foreign produce 
 also there may be some unconsumed portion in store. To 
 this scanty inventory of material wealth, ought to be adc*d 
 their land ; an instrument of production of which they make 
 slender use, compared with more settled communities, but 
 which is still the source of their subsistence, and which has 
 a marketable value if there be any agricultural community 
 in the neighbourhood requiring more land than it possesses- 
 This is the state of greatest poverty in which any entire com- 
 munity of human beings is known to exist ; though there 
 
 * Infra, book i. chap. iii.
 
 28 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 are much richer communities in which portions of the in- 
 habitants are in a condition, as to subsistence and comfort, 
 as little enviable as that of the savage. 
 
 The first great advance beyond this state consists in the 
 domestication of the more useful animals ; giving rise to the 
 pastoral or nomad state, in which mankind do not live on 
 the produce of hunting, but on milk and its products, and 
 on the animal increase of flocks and herds. This condition 
 is not only more desirable in itself, but more conducive to 
 further progress ; and a much more considerable amount of 
 wealth is accumulated under it. So long as the vast natural 
 pastures of the earth are not yet so fully occupied as to be 
 consumed more rapidly than they are spontaneously repro- 
 duced, a large and constantly increasing stock of subsistence 
 may be collected and preserved, with little other labour than 
 that of guarding the cattle from the attacks of wild beasts, 
 and from the force or wiles of predatory men. Large flocks 
 and herds, therefore, are in time possessed, by active and 
 thrifty individuals through their own exertions, and by the 
 heads of families and tribes through the exertions of those 
 who are connected with them by allegiance. There thus 
 arises, in the shepherd state, inequality of possessions ; a 
 thing which scarcely exists in the savage state, where no 
 one has much more than absolute necessaries, and in case 
 of deficiency must share even those with his tribe. In the 
 nomad state, some have an abundance of cattle, sufficient 
 for the food of a multitude, while others have not contrived 
 to appropriate and retain any superfluity, or perhaps any 
 cattle at all. But subsistence has ceased to be precarious, 
 since the more successful have no other use which they can 
 make of their surplus than to feed the less fortunate, while 
 every increase in the number of persons connected with 
 them is an increase both of security and of power : and thus 
 they are enabled to divest themselves of all labour except 
 that of government and superintendence, and acquire de- 
 pendents to fight for them in war and to serve them in 
 peace. One of the features of this state of society is, that a
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 29 
 
 part of the community, and in some degree even the whole 
 of it, possess leisure. Only a portion of time is required for 
 procuring food, and the remainder is not engrossed by 
 anxious thought for the morrow, or necessary repose from 
 muscular activity. Such a life is highly favourable to the 
 growth of new wants, and opens a possibility of their grati- 
 fication. A desire arises for better clothing, utensils, and 
 implements, than the savage state contents itself with ; and 
 the surplus food renders it practicable to devote to these 
 purposes the exertions of a part of the tribe. In all or most 
 nomad communities we find domestic manufactures of a 
 coarse, and in some, of a fine kind. There is ample evi- 
 dence that while those parts of the world which have been 
 the cradle of modern civilization were still generally in the 
 nomad state, considerable skill had been attained in spin- 
 ning, weaving, and dyeing woollen garments, in the prep- 
 aration of leather, and in what appears a still more difficult 
 invention, that of working in metals. Even speculative 
 science took its first beginnings from the leisure character- 
 istic of this stage of social progress. The earliest astronom- 
 ical observations are attributed, by a tradition which has 
 much appearance of truth, to the shepherds of Chaldaea. 
 
 From this state of society to the agricultural the transi- 
 tion is not indeed easy, (for no great change in the habits 
 of mankind is otherwise than difficult, and in general either 
 painful or very slow,) but it lies in what may be called the 
 spontaneous course of events. The growth of the popula- 
 tion of men and cattle began in time to press upon the 
 earth's capabilities of yielding natural pasture : and this 
 cause doubtless produced the first tilling of the ground, just 
 as at a later period the same cause made the superfluous 
 hordes of the nations which had remained nomad precipi- 
 tate themselves upon those which had already become agri- 
 cultural ; until, these having become sufficiently powerful to 
 repel such inroads, the invading nations, deprived of this out- 
 let, were obliged also to become agricultural communities. 
 
 But after tliis great step had been completed, the subse-
 
 30 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 quent progress of mankind seems by no means to have been 
 so rapid (certain rare combinations of circumstances except- 
 ed) as might perhaps have been anticipated. The quantity 
 of human food which the earth is capable of returning even 
 to the most wretched system of agriculture, so much exceeds 
 what could be obtained in the purely pastoral state, that a 
 great increase of population is invariably the result. But 
 this additional food is only obtained by a great additional 
 amount of labour ; so that not only an agricultural has 
 much less leisure than a pastoral population, but, with the 
 imperfect tools and unskilful processes which are for a long 
 time employed (and which over the greater part of the earth 
 have not even yet been abandoned), agriculturists do not, 
 unless in unusually advantageous circumstances of climate 
 and soil, produce so great a surplus of food beyond their 
 necessary consumption, as to support any large class of 
 labourers engaged in other departments of industry. The 
 surplus, too, whether small or great, is usually torn from the 
 producers, either by the government to which they are sub- 
 ject, or by individuals, who by superior force, or by avail- 
 ing themselves of religious or traditional feelings of subor- 
 dination, have established themselves as lords of the soil. 
 
 The first of these modes of appropriation, by the govern- 
 ment, is characteristic of the extensive monarchies which 
 from a time beyond historical record have occupied the 
 plains of Asia. The government, in those countries, though 
 varying in its qualities according to the accidents of personal 
 character, seldom leaves much to the cultivators beyond 
 mere necessaries, and often strips them so bare even of 
 these, that it finds itself obliged, after taking all they have, 
 to lend part of it back to those from whom it has been 
 taken, in order to provide them with seed, and enable them 
 to support life until another harvest. Under the regime 
 in question, though the bulk of the population are ill pro- 
 vided for, the government, by collecting small sums from 
 great numbers, is enabled, with any tolerable manage- 
 ment, to make a show of riches quite out of proportion to
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 31 
 
 the general condition of the society ; and hence the invet- 
 erate impression, of which Europeans have only at a late 
 period been disabused, concerning the great opulence of 
 Oriental nations. In this wealth, without reckoning the 
 large portion which adheres to the hands employed in col- 
 lecting it, many persons of course participate, besides the im- 
 mediate household of the sovereign. A large part is dis- 
 tributed among the various functionaries of government, 
 and among the objects of the sovereign's favour or caprice. 
 A part is occasionally employed in works of public utility. 
 The tanks, wells, and canals for irrigation, without which in 
 many tropical climates cultivation could hardly be carried 
 on ; the embankments which confine the rivers, the bazars 
 for dealers, and the seraees for travellers, none of which 
 could have been made by the scanty means in the posses- 
 sion of those using them, owe their existence to the liberal- 
 ity and enlightened self-interest of the better order of 
 princes, or to the benevolence or ostentation of here and 
 there a rich individual, whose fortune, if traced to its source, 
 is always found to have been drawn immediately or remotely 
 from the public revenue, most frequently by a direct grant 
 of a portion of it from the sovereign. 
 
 The ruler of a society of this description, after providing 
 largely for his own support, and that of all persons in whom 
 he feels an interest, and after maintaining as many soldiers 
 as he thinks needful for his security or his state, has a dis- 
 posable residue, which he is glad to exchange for articles of 
 luxury suitable to his disposition : as have also the class of 
 persons who have been enriched by his favour, or by hand- 
 ling the public revenues. A demand thus arises for elab 
 orate and costly manufactured articles, adapted to a narrow 
 but a wealthy market. This demand is often supplied 
 almost exclusively by the merchants of more advanced com- 
 munities, but often also raises up in the country itself a class 
 of artificers, by whom certain fabrics are carried to as high 
 excellence as can be given by patience, quickness of percep- 
 tion and observation, and manual dexterity, without any
 
 32 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 considerable knowledge of the properties of objects : such 
 as some of the cotton fabrics of India. These artificers are 
 fed by the surplus food which has been taken by the govern- 
 ment and its agents as their share of the produce. So lit- 
 erally is this the case, that in some countries the workman^ 
 instead of taking his work home, and being paid for it after 
 it is finished, proceeds with his tools to his customer's 
 house, and is there subsisted until the work is complete. 
 The insecurity, however, of all possessions in this state of 
 society, induces even the richest purchasers to give a pref- 
 erence to such articles as, being of an imperishable nature, 
 and containing great value in small bulk, are adapted for 
 being concealed or carried off. Gold and jewels, therefore, 
 constitute a large proportion of the wealth of these nations, 
 and many a rich Asiatic carries nearly his whole fortune on 
 his person, or on those of the women of his harem. No one, 
 except the monarch, thinks of investing his wealth in a 
 manner not susceptible of removal. He, indeed, if he feels 
 safe on his throne, and reasonably secure of transmitting it 
 to his descendants, sometimes indulges a taste for durable 
 edifices, and produces the Pyramids, or the Taj Mehal and 
 the Mausoleum at Sekundra. The rude manufactures des- 
 tined for the wants of the cultivators are worked up by 
 village artisans, who are remunerated by land given to them 
 rent-free to cultivate, or by fees paid to them in kind from 
 such share of the crop as is left to the villagers by the gov- 
 ernment. This state of society, however, is not destitute of 
 a mercantile class ; composed of two divisions, grain dealers 
 and money dealers. The grain dealers do not usually buy 
 grain from the producers, but from the agents of govern- 
 ment, who, receiving the revenue in kind, are glad to 
 devolve upon others the business of conveying it to the 
 places where the prince, his chief civil and military officers, 
 the bulk of his troops, and the artisans who supply the 
 wants of these various persons, are assembled. The money 
 dealers lend to the unfortunate cultivators, when ruined by 
 bad seasons or fiscal exactions, the means of supporting life
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 33 
 
 and continuing their cultivation, and are repaid with enor- 
 mous interest at the next harvest ; or, on a larger scale, they 
 lend to the government, or to those to whom it has granted 
 a portion of the revenue, and are indemnified by assign- 
 ments on the revenue collectors, or by having certain dis- 
 tricts put into their possession, that they may pay them- 
 selves from the revenues ; to enable them to do which, a 
 great portion of the powers of government are usually made 
 over simultaneously, to be exercised by them until either 
 the districts are redeemed, or their receipts have liquidated 
 the debt. Thus, the commercial operations of both these 
 classes of dealers take place principally upon that part of 
 the produce of the country which forms the revenue of the 
 government. From that revenue their capital is period- 
 ically replaced with a profit, and that is also the source from 
 which their original funds have almost always been derived. 
 Such, in its general features, is the economical condition of 
 most of the countries of Asia, as it has been from beyond 
 the commencement of authentic history, and is still, wher- 
 ever not disturbed by foreign influences. 
 
 In the agricultural communities of ancient Europe whose 
 early condition is best known to us, the course of things was 
 different. These, at their origin, were mostly small town- 
 communities, at the first plantation of which, in an unoccu- 
 pied country, or in one from which the former inhabitants 
 had been expelled, the land which was taken possession of 
 was regularly divided, in equal or in graduated allotments, 
 among the families composing the community. In some 
 cases, instead of a town there was a confederation of towns, 
 occupied by people of the same reputed race, and who were 
 supposed to have settled in the country about the same 
 time. Each family produced its own food and the materials 
 of its clothing, which were worked up within itself, usually 
 by the women of the family, into the coarse fabrics with 
 which the age was contented. Taxes there were none, as 
 there were either no paid officers of government, or if there 
 were, their payment had been provided for by a reserved 
 8
 
 34 PRELIMINARY KEMARKS. 
 
 portion of land, cultivated by slaves on account of the state ; 
 and the army consisted of the body of citizens. The whole 
 produce of the soil, therefore, belonged, without deduction, 
 to the family which cultivated it. So long as the progress 
 of events permitted this disposition of property to last, the 
 state of society was, for the majority of the free cultivators, 
 probably not an undesirable one ; and under it, in some 
 cases, the advance of mankind in intellectual culture was 
 extraordinarily rapid and brilliant. This more especially 
 happened where, along with advantageous circumstances 
 of race and climate, and no doubt with many favourable 
 accidents of which all trace is now lost, was combined the 
 advantage of a position on the shores of a great inland sea, 
 the other coasts of which w r ere already occupied by settled 
 communities. The knowledge which in such a position was 
 acquired of foreign productions, and the easy access of for- 
 eign ideas and inventions, made the chain of routine, usually 
 so strong in a rude people, hang loosely on these communi- 
 ties. To speak only of their industrial development ; they 
 early acquired variety of w r ants and desires, which stimu- 
 lated them to extract from their own soil the utmost which 
 they knew how to make it yield ; and when their soil was 
 sterile, or after they had reached the limit of its capacity, 
 they often became traders, and bought up the productions 
 of foreign countries, to sell them in other countries with 
 a profit. 
 
 The duration, however, of this state of things was from 
 the first precarious. These little communities lived in a 
 state of almost perpetual war. For this there were many 
 causes. In the ruder and purely agricultural communities 
 a frequent cause was the mere pressure of their increasing 
 population upon their limited land, aggravated as that pres- 
 sure so often was by deficient harvests in the rude state of 
 their agriculture, and depending as they did for food upon 
 a very small extent of country. On these occasions, the 
 community often emigrated ~en masse, or sent forth a swarm 
 of its youth, to seek, sword in hand, for some less warlike
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 35 
 
 people, who could be expelled from their land, or detained 
 to cultivate it as slaves for the benefit of their despoilers. 
 What the less advanced tribes did from necessity, the more 
 prosperous did from ambition and the military spirit : and 
 after a time the whole of these city-communities were either 
 conquerors or conquered. In some cases, the conquering 
 state contented itself with imposing a tribute on the van- 
 quished : who being, in consideration of that burden, freed 
 from the expense and trouble of their own military and 
 naval protection, might enjoy under it a considerable share 
 of economical prosperity, while the ascendant community ob- 
 tained a surplus of wealth, available for purposes of collective 
 luxury or magnificence. From such a surplus the Parthenon 
 and the Propylaea were built, the sculptures of Pheidias paid 
 for, and the festivals celebrated, for which ^Eschylus, Sopho- 
 cles, Euripides, and Aristophanes composed their dramas. 
 But this state of political relations, most useful, while it 
 lasted, to the progress and ultimate interest of mankind, had 
 not the elements of durability. A small conquering com- 
 munity which does not incorporate its conquests, always 
 ends by being conquered. Universal dominion, therefore, 
 at last rested with the people who practised this art with 
 the Romans ; who, whatever were their other devices, 
 always either began or ended by taking a great part of the 
 land to enrich their own leading citizens, and by adopting 
 into the governing body the principal possessors of the re- 
 mainder. It is unnecessary to dwell on the melancholy 
 economical history of the Roman empire. When inequality 
 of wealth once commences, in a community not constantly 
 engaged in repairing by industry the injuries of fortune, its 
 advances are gigantic ; the great masses of wealth swallow 
 up the smaller. The Roman empire ultimately became 
 covered with the vast landed possessions of a comparatively 
 few families, for whose luxury, and still more for whose 
 ostentation, the most costly products were raised, while the 
 cultivators of the soil were slaves, or small tenants in a 
 nearly servile condition. From this time the wealth of the
 
 36 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 empire progressively declined. In the beginning, the public 
 revenues, and the resources of rich individuals, sufficed at 
 least to cover Italy with splendid edifices, public and pri- 
 vate ; but at length so dwindled under the enervating in- 
 fluences of misgovernment, that what remained was not 
 even sufficient to keep those edifices from decay. The 
 strength and riches of the civilized w r orld became inade- 
 quate to make head against the nomad population which 
 skirted its northern frontier : they overran the empire, and 
 a different order of things succeeded. 
 
 In the new frame in which European society was now 
 cast, the population of each country may be considered as 
 composed, in unequal proportions, of two distinct nations or 
 races, the conquerors and the conquered : the first the pro- 
 prietors of the land, the latter the tillers of it. These tillers 
 were allowed to occupy the land on conditions which, being 
 the product of force, were always onerous, but seldom to the 
 extent of absolute slavery. Already, in the later times of 
 the Roman empire, predial slavery had extensively trans- 
 formed itself into a kind of serfdom : the coloni of the 
 Romans were rather villeins than actual slaves ; and the 
 incapacity and distaste of the barbarian conquerors for per- 
 sonally superintending industrial occupations, left no alter- 
 native but to allow to the cultivators, as an incentive to 
 exertion, some real interest in the soil. If, for example, 
 they were compelled to labour, three days in the week, for 
 their superior, the produce of the remaining days was their 
 own. " If they were required to supply the provisions of 
 various sorts, ordinarily needed for the consumption of the 
 castle, and were often subject to requisitions in excess, yet 
 after supplying these demands they were suffered to dispose 
 at their will of whatever additional produce they could 
 raise. Under this system during the Middle Ages it was 
 not impossible, no more than in Russia at present (where 
 the same system still essentially prevails), for serfs to acquire 
 property ; and in fact, their accumulations are the primitive 
 source of the wealth of modern Europe.
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 37 
 
 In that age of violence and disorder, the first use made by 
 a serf of any small provision which he had been able to accu- 
 mulate, was to buy his freedom and withdraw himself to some 
 town or fortified village, which had remained undestroyed 
 from the time of the Roman dominion ; or, without buying 
 his freedom, to abscond thither. In that place of refuge, 
 surrounded by others of his own class, he attempted to live, 
 secured in some measure from the outrages and exactions of 
 the warrior caste, by his own prowess and that of his fel- 
 lows. These emancipated serfs mostly became artificers ; 
 and lived by exchanging the produce of their industry for 
 the surplus food and material which the soil yielded to its 
 feudal proprietors. This gave rise to a sort of European 
 counterpart of the economical condition of Asiatic coun- 
 tries ; except that, in lieu of a single monarch and a fluctu- 
 ating body of favourites and employes, there was a numer- 
 ous and in a considerable degree fixed class of great land- 
 holders ; exhibiting far less splendour, because individually 
 disposing of a much smaller surplus produce, and for a long 
 time expending the chief part of it in maintaining the body 
 of retainers whom the warlike habits of society, and the 
 little protection afforded by government, rendered indis- 
 pensable to their safety. The greater stability, the fixity of 
 'personal position, which this state of society afforded, in 
 comparison with the Asiatic polity to which it economically 
 corresponded, was one main reason why it was also found 
 more favourable to improvement. From this time the 
 economical advancement of society has not been further 
 interrupted. Security of person and property grew slowly, 
 but steadily ; the arts of life made constant progress ; 
 plunder ceased to be the principal source of accumulation ; 
 and feudal Europe ripened into commercial and manufac- 
 turing Europe. In the latter part of the middle ages, the 
 towns of Italy and Flanders, the free cities of Germany, and 
 some towns of France and England, contained a large and 
 energetic population of artisans, and many rich burghers, 
 whose wealth had been acquired by manufacturing indus-
 
 38 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 try, or by trading in the produce of such industry. The 
 Commons of England, the Tiers-Etat of France, the hour* 
 geoisie of the Continent generally, are the descendants of 
 this class. As these were a saving class, while the posterity 
 of the feudal aristocracy were a squandering class, the 
 former by degrees substituted themselves for the latter as 
 the owners of a great proportion of the land. This naturai 
 tendency was in some cases retarded by laws contrived foi 
 the purpose of detaining the land in the families of its exist- 
 ing possessors, in other cases accelerated by political revolu- 
 tions. Gradually, though more slowly, the immediate 
 cultivators of the soil, in all the more civilized countries, 
 ceased to be in a servile or semi-servile state : though the 
 legal position, as well as the economical condition attained 
 by them, vary extremely in the different nations of Europe, 
 and in the great communities which have been founded 
 beyond the Atlantic by the descendants of Europeans. 
 
 The world now contains several extensive regions, pro- 
 vided with the various ingredients of wealth in a degree of 
 abundance of which former ages had not even the idea. 
 Without compulsory labour, an enormous mass of food is 
 annually extracted from the soil, and maintains, besides the 
 actual producers, an equal, sometimes a greater number of 
 labourers, occupied in producing conveniences and luxuries 
 of innumerable kinds, or in transporting them from place to 
 place ; also a multitude of persons employed in directing 
 and superintending these various labours ; and over and 
 above all these, a class more numerous than in the most 
 luxurious ancient societies, of persons whose occupations are 
 of a kind not directly productive, and of persons who have 
 no occupation at all. The food thus raised, supports a far 
 larger population than had ever existed (at least in the same 
 regions) on an equal space of ground ; and supports them 
 with certainty, exempt from those periodically recurring 
 famines so abundant in the early history of Europe, and in 
 Oriental countries even now not unfrequent. Besides this 
 great increase in the quantity of food, it has greatly im-
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 39 
 
 
 
 proved in quality and variety ; while conveniences and lux- 
 uries, other than food, are no longer limited to a small and 
 opulent class, but descend, in great abundance, through 
 many widening strata in society. The collective resources 
 of one of these communities, when it chooses to put them 
 forth for any unexpected purpose ; its ability to maintain 
 fleets and armies, to execute public works, either useful or 
 ornamental, to perform national acts of beneficence like the 
 ransom of the West India slaves ; to found colonies, to have 
 its people taught, to do anything in short which requires 
 expense, and to do it with no sacrifice of the necessaries or 
 even the substantial comforts of its inhabitants, are such as 
 the world never saw before. 
 
 But in all these particulars, characteristic of the modern 
 industrial communities, those communities differ widely 
 from one another. Though abounding in wealth as com- 
 pared with former ages, they do so in very different degrees. 
 Even of the countries which are justly accounted the rich- 
 est, some have made a more complete use of their pro- 
 ductive resources, and have obtained, relatively to their 
 territorial extent, a much larger produce, than others ; nor 
 do they differ only in amount of wealth, but also in the 
 rapidity of its increase. The diversities in the distribution 
 of wealth are still greater than in the production. There 
 are great differences in the condition of the poorest class in 
 different countries ; and in the proportional numbers and 
 opulence of the classes which are above the poorest. The 
 very nature and designation of the classes who originally 
 share among them the produce of the soil, vary not a little 
 in different places. In some, the landowners are a class in 
 themselves, almost entirely separate from the classes en- 
 gaged in industry : in others, the proprietor of the land is 
 almost universally its cultivator, owning the plough, and 
 often himself holding it. Where the proprietor himself 
 does not cultivate, there is sometimes, between him and the 
 labourer, an intermediate agency, that of the farmer, who 
 advances the subsistence of the labourers, supplies the
 
 40 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 instruments of production, and receives, after paying a rent 
 to the landowner, all the produce : in other cases, the land- 
 lord, his paid agents, and the labourers, are the only shar- 
 ers. Manufactures, again, are sometimes carried on by 
 scattered individuals, who own or hire the tools or machin- 
 ery they require, and employ little labour besides that of 
 their own family ; in other cases, by large numbers working 
 together in one building, with expensive and complex 
 machinery owned by rich manufacturers. The same dif- 
 ference exists in the operations of trade. The wholesale 
 operations indeed are everywhere carried on by large capi- 
 tals, where such exist ; but the retail dealings, which col- 
 lectively occupy a very great amount of capital, are some- 
 times conducted in small shops, chiefly by the personal 
 exertions of the dealers themselves, with their families, and 
 perhaps an apprentice or two ; and sometimes in large 
 establishments, of which the funds are supplied by a 
 wealthy individual or association, and the agency is that 
 of numerous salaried shopmen or shopwomen. Besides 
 these differences in the economical phenomena presented 
 by different parts of what is usually called the civilized 
 world, all those earlier states which we previously passed 
 in review, have continued in some part or other of the 
 world, down to our own time. Hunting communities still 
 exist in America, nomadic in Arabia and the steppes of 
 Korthern Asia ; Oriental society is in essentials what it has 
 always been ; the great empire of Russia is even now, in 
 many respects, the scarcely modified image of feudal Eu- 
 rope. Every one of the great types of human society, 
 down to that of the Esquimaux or Patagonians, is still 
 extanL 
 
 These remarkable differences in the state of different 
 portions of the human race, with regard to the production 
 and distribution of wealth, must, like all other phenomena, 
 depend on causes. And it is not a sufficient explanation to 
 ascribe them exclusively to the degrees of knowledge, pos- 
 sessed at different times and places, of the laws of nature
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 41 
 
 and the physical arts of life. Many other causes cooperate : 
 and that very progress and unequal distribution of physical 
 knowledge, are partly the effects, as well as partly the 
 causes, of the state of the production and distribution oi 
 wealth. 
 
 In so far as the economical condition of nations turns 
 upon the state of physical knowledge, it is a subject for the 
 physical sciences, and the arts founded on them. But in so 
 far as the causes are moral or psychological, dependent on 
 institutions and social relations, or on the principles of 
 human nature, their investigation belongs not to physical, 
 but to moral and social science, and is the object of what is 
 called Political Economy. 
 
 The production of wealth ; the extraction of the instru- 
 ments of human subsistence and enjoyment from the ma- 
 terials of the globe, is evidently not an arbitrary thing. It 
 has its necessary conditions. Of these, some are physical, 
 depending on the properties of matter, or rather on the 
 amount of knowledge of those properties possessed at the 
 particular place and time. These Political Economy does 
 not investigate, but assumes ; referring for the grounds, to 
 physical science or common experience. Combining with 
 these facts of outward nature other truths relating to human 
 nature, it attempts to trace the secondary or derivative 
 laws, by, which the production of wealth is determined ; in 
 which must lie the explanation of the diversities of riches 
 and poverty in the present and past, and the ground of 
 whatever increase in wealth is reserved for the future. 
 
 Unlike the laws of Production, those of Distribution are 
 partly of human institution : since the manner in which 
 wealth is distributed in any given society, depends on the 
 statutes or usages therein obtaining. But though govern- 
 ments or nations have the power of deciding what institu- 
 tions shall exist, they cannot arbitrarily determine how 
 those institutions shall work. The conditions on which the 
 power they possess over the distribution of wealth is de- 
 pendent, and the manner in which the distribution is effect-
 
 42 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 ed by the various modes of conduct which society may 
 think fit to adopt, are as much a subject for scientific 
 enquiry as any of the physical laws of nature. 
 
 The laws of Production and Distribution, and some of 
 the practical consequences deducible from them, are the 
 subject of the following treatise.
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 PBODUCTIOlSr.
 
 BOOK I. 
 PEODUOTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OP THE REQUISITES OF PRODUCTION 
 
 1. THE requisites of production are two : labour, and 
 appropriate natural objects. 
 
 Labour is either bodily or mental ; or, to express the 
 distinction more comprehensively, either muscular or ner- 
 vous ; and it is necessary to include in the idea, not solely 
 the exertion itself, but all feelings of a disagreeable kind, 
 all bodily inconvenience or mental annoyance, connected 
 with the employment of one's thoughts, or muscles, or both, 
 in a particular occupation. Of the other requisite appro- 
 priate natural objects it is to be remarked, that some 
 objects exist or grow up spontaneously, of a kind suited to 
 the supply of human wants. There are caves and hollow 
 trees capable of affording shelter ; fruit, roots, wild honey, 
 and other natural products, on which human life can be 
 supported ; but even here a considerable quantity of labour 
 is generally required, not for the purpose of creating, but 
 of finding and appropriating them. In all but these few 
 and (except in the very commencement of human society) 
 unimportant cases, the objects supplied by nature are only 
 instrumental to human wants, after having undergone some
 
 46 BOOK I. CHAPTER I. 
 
 degree of transformation by human exertion. Even the 
 wild animals of the forest and of the sea, from which the 
 hunting and fishing tribes derive their sustenance though 
 the labour of which they are the subject is chiefly that 
 Acquired for appropriating them must yet, before they are 
 used as food, be killed, divided into fragments, and sub- 
 jected in almost all cases to some culinary process, which 
 are operations requiring a certain degree of human labour. 
 The amount of transformation which natural substances 
 undergo before being brought into the shape in which they 
 are directly applied to human use, varies from this or a still 
 less degree of alteration in the nature and appearance of 
 the object, to a change so total that no trace is perceptible 
 of the original shape and structure. There is little resem- 
 blance between a piece of a mineral substance found in the 
 earth, and a plough, an axe, or a saw There is less resem- 
 blance between porcelain and the decomposing granite of 
 which it is made, or between sand mixed with sea-weed, and 
 glass. The difference is greater still between the fleece of a 
 sheep, or a handful of cotton seeds, and a web of muslin or 
 broad cloth ; and the sheep and seeds themselves are not 
 spontaneous growths, but results of previous labour and 
 care. In these several cases . the ultimate product is so 
 extremely dissimilar to the substance supplied by nature, 
 that in the custom of language nature is represented as only 
 furnishing materials. 
 
 Nature, however, does more than supply materials ; she 
 also supplies powers. The matter of the globe is not an 
 inert recipient of forms and properties impressed by human 
 hands ; it has active energies by which it cooperates with, 
 and may even be used as a substitute for, labour. In the 
 early ages people converted their corn into flour by pounding 
 it between two stones ; they next hit on a contrivance which 
 enabled them, by turning a handle, to make one of the 
 stones revolve upon the other ; and this process, a little im- 
 proved, is still the common practice of the East. The 
 muscular exertion, however, which it required, was very
 
 REQUISITES OF PRODUCTION. 47 
 
 severe and exhausting, insomuch that it was often selected 
 as a punishment for slaves who had offended their masters. 
 When the time came at which the labour and sufferings of 
 slaves were thought worth economizing, the greater part of 
 this bodily exertion -was rendered unnecessary, by contriving 
 that the upper stone should be made to revolve upon the 
 lower, not by human strength, but by the force of the wind 
 or of falling water. In this case, natural agents, the wind 
 or the gravitation of the water, are made to do a portion of 
 the work previously done by labour. 
 
 2. Cases like this, in which a certain amount of 
 labour has been dispensed with, its work being devolved 
 upon some natural agent, are apt to suggest an erroneous 
 notion of the comparative functions of labour and natural 
 powers ; as if the cooperation of those powers with human 
 industry were limited to the cases in which they are made 
 to perform what would otherwise be done by labour ; as if, 
 in the case of things made (as the phrase is) by hand, nature 
 only furnished passive materials. This is an illusion. The 
 powers of nature are as actively operative in the one case as 
 in the other. A workman takes a stalk of the flax or hemp 
 plant, splits it into separate fibres, twines together several 
 of these fibres with his fingers, aided by a simple instru- 
 ment called a spindle ; having thus formed a thread, he lays 
 many such threads side by side, and places other similar 
 threads directly across them, so that each passes alternately 
 over and under those which are at right angles to it ; this 
 part of the process being facilitated by an instrument called 
 a shuttle. He has now produced a web of cloth, either-- 
 linen or sack-cloth, according to the material. He is said to 
 have done this by hand, no natural force being supposed to 
 have acted in concert with him. But by what force is each 
 step of this operation rendered possible, and the web, when 
 produced, held together? By the tenacity, or force of 
 cohesion, of the fibres : whicji is one of the forces of nature, 
 and which we can measure exactly against other mechanical
 
 48 BOOK I. CHAPTER I. 2. 
 
 forces, and ascertain how much of any of them it suffices to 
 neutralize or counterbalance. 
 
 If we examine any other case of what is called the action, 
 of man upon n j^ure, we shall find in like manner that the 
 powers of nature, or in other words the properties of mat- 
 ter, do all the work, when once objects are put into the 
 right position. This one operation, of putting things into 
 fit places for being acted upon by their own internal forces, 
 and by those residing in other natural objects, is all that 
 man does, or can do, with matter. He only moves one 
 thing to or from another. He moves a seed into the 
 ground ; and the natural forces of vegetation produce in 
 succession a root, a stem, leaves, fiowers, and fruit. He 
 moves an axe through a tree, and it falls by the natural 
 force of gravitation ; he moves a saw through it, in a partic- 
 ular manner, and the physical properties by which a softer 
 substance gives way before a harder, make it separate into 
 planks, which he arranges in certain positions, with nails 
 driven through them, or adhesive matter between them, and 
 produces a table, or a house. He moves a spark to fuel, 
 and it ignites, and by the force generated in combustion it 
 cooks the food, melts or softens the iron, converts into beer 
 or sugar the malt or cane-juice, which he has previously 
 moved to the spot. He has no other means of acting on 
 matter than by moving it. Motion, and resistance to mo- 
 tion, are the only things which his muscles are constructed 
 for. By muscular contraction he can create a pressure on 
 an outward object, which, if sufficiently powerful, will set it 
 in motion, or if it be already moving, will check or modify 
 or altogether arrest its motion, and he can do no more. 
 But this is enough to have given all the command which 
 mankind have acquired over natural forces immeasurably 
 more powerful than themselves ; a command which, great 
 as it is already, is without doubt destined to become indefi- 
 nitely greater. He exerts this power either by availing, 
 himself of natural forces in existence, or by arranging ob- 
 jects in those mixtures and combinations by which natural
 
 REQUISITES Of PRODUCTION. 49 
 
 forces are generated ; as when by putting a lighted match 
 to fuel, and water into a boiler over it, he generates the ex- 
 pansive force of steam, a power which has been made so 
 largely available for the attainment of human purposes.* 
 
 Labour, then, in the physical world, is always and solely 
 employed in putting objects in motionj the properties of 
 matter, the laws of nature, do the rest. The skill and in- 
 genuity of human beings are chiefly exercised in discovering 
 movements, practicable by their powers, and capable of 
 bringing about the effects which they desire. But, while 
 movement is the only effect which man can immediately 
 and directly produce by his muscles, it is not necessary that 
 he should produce directly by them all the movements 
 which he requires. The first and most obvious substitute is 
 the muscular action of cattle : by degrees the powers of 
 inanimate nature are made to aid in this too, as by making 
 the wind, or water, things already in motion, communicate 
 a part of their motion to the wheels, which before that 
 invention were made to revolve by muscular force. This 
 service is extorted from the powers of wind and water by a 
 set of actions, consisting like the former in moving certain 
 objects into certain positions in which they constitute what 
 is termed a machine ; but the muscular action necessary for 
 this is not constantly renewed, but performed once for all, 
 and there is on the whole a great economy of labour. 
 
 3. Some writers have raised the question, whether 
 nature gives more assistance to labour in one kind of indus- 
 try or in another ; and have said that in some occupations 
 labour does most, inj>thers nature .most. In this, however, 
 there seems much confusion of ideas. The part which 
 nature has in any work of man, is indefinite and incom- 
 mensurable. It is impossible to decide that in any one 
 thing nature does more than in any other. One cannot 
 
 * This essential and primary law of man's power over nature was, I believe, 
 first illustrated and made prominent as a fundamental principle of Political 
 Economy, in the first chapter of Mr. Mill's Elements. 
 4
 
 50 BOOK I. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 even say that labour does less. Less labour may be re- 
 quired ; but if that which is required is absolutely indis- 
 pensable, the result is just as much the product of labour, 
 as of nature. When two conditions are equally neces- 
 sary for producing the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say 
 that so much of it is produced by one and so much by the 
 other ; it is like attempting to decide which half of a pair 
 of scissors has most to do in the act of cutting ; or which of 
 the factors, five and six, contributes most to the production 
 of thirty. The form which this conceit usually assumes, is 
 that of supposing that nature lends more assistance to 
 human endeavours in agriculture, than in manufactures. 
 This notion, held by the French Economistes, and from 
 which Adam Smith was not free, arose from a misconcep- 
 tion of the nature of rent. The rent of land being a price 
 paid for a natural agency, and no such price being paid in 
 manufactures, these writers imagined that since a price was 
 paid, it was because there was a greater amount of service 
 to be paid for : whereas a better consideration of the sub- 
 ject would have shown that the reason why the use of land 
 bears a price is simply the limitation of its quantity, and 
 that if air, heat, electricity, chemical agencies, and the other 
 powers of nature employed by manufacturers, were sparing- 
 ly supplied, and could, like land, be engrossed and appro- 
 priated, a rent could be exacted for them also. 
 
 4. This leads to a distinction which we shall find to 
 be of primary importance. Of natural powers, some are 
 unlimited, others limited in quantity. By an unlimited 
 quantity is of course not meant literally, but practically 
 unlimited : a quantity beyond the use which can in any, or 
 at least in present circumstances, be made of it. Land is, 
 in some newly settled countries, practically unlimited in 
 quantity : there is more than can be used by the existing 
 population of the country, or by any accession likely to be 
 made to it for generations to come. But even there, land 
 favourably situated with regard to markets or means of car-
 
 REQUISITES OF PRODUCTION. 51 
 
 riage, is generally limited in quantity : there is not so much 
 of it as persons would gladly occupy and cultivate, or other- 
 wise turn to use. In all old countries, land capable of cul- 
 tivation, land at least of any tolerable fertility, must be 
 ranked among agents limited in quantity. Water, for ordi^ 
 nary purposes, on the banks of rivers or lakes, may be 
 regarded as of unlimited abundance ; but if required for 
 irrigation, it may even there be insufficient to supply all 
 wants, while in places which depend for their consumption 
 on cisterns or tanks, or on wells which are not copious, or 
 are liable to fail, water takes its place among things the 
 quantity of which is most strictly limited. Where water 
 itself is plentiful, yet water-power, i.e. a fall of water appli- 
 cable by its mechanical force to the service of industry, may 
 be exceedingly limited, compared with the use which would 
 be made of it if it were more abundant. Coal, metallic ores, 
 and other useful substances found in the earth, are still more 
 limited than land. They are not only strictly local, but 
 exhaustible ; though, at a given place and time, they may 
 exist in much greater abundance than would be applied to 
 present use even if they could be obtained gratis. Fisher- 
 ies, in the sea, are in most cases a gift of nature practically 
 unlimited in amount ; but the Arctic whale fisheries have 
 long been insufficient for the demand which exists even at 
 the very considerable price necessary to defray the dost of 
 appropriation : and the immense extension which the 
 Southern fisheries have in consequence assumed, is tending 
 to exhaust them likewise. River fisheries are a natural 
 resource of a very limited character, and would be rapidly 
 exhausted, if allowed to be used by every one without 
 restraint. Air, even that state of it which we term wind, 
 may, in most situations, be obtained in a quantity sufficient 
 for every possible use ; and so likewise, on the sea coast or 
 on large rivers, may water carriage : though the wharfage 
 or harbour-room applicable to the service of that mode of 
 transport is in many situations far short of what would be 
 used if easily attainable.
 
 52 BOOK I. CHAPTEB I. 4. 
 
 It will be seen hereafter how much of the economy of 
 society depends on the limited quantity in which some of 
 the most important natural agents exist, and more particu- 
 larly, land. For the present I shall only remark that so 
 long as the quantity of a natural agent is practically un- 
 limited, it cannot, unless susceptible of artificial monopoly, 
 bear any value in the market, since no one will give any- 
 thing for what can be obtained gratis. But as soon as a 
 limitation becomes practically operative ; as soon as there 
 is not so much of the thing to be had, as would be appro- 
 priated and used if it could be obtained for asking ; the 
 ownership or use of the natural agent acquires an exchange- 
 able value. When more water-power is wanted in a par- 
 ticular district, than there are falls of water to supply it, 
 persons will give an equivalent for the use of a fall of 
 water. When there is more land wanted for cultivation 
 than a place possesses, or than it possesses of a certain 
 quality and certain advantages of situation, land of that 
 quality and situation may be sold for a price, or let for an 
 annual rent. This subject will hereafter be discussed at 
 length ; but it is often useful to anticipate, by a brief sug- 
 gestion, principles and deductions which we have not yet 
 reached the place for exhibiting and illustrating fully.
 
 CHAPTEK H. 
 
 OF LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 
 
 1. The labour which terminates in the production ol 
 an article fitted for some human use, is either employed 
 directly about the thing, or in previous operations destined 
 to facilitate, perhaps essential to the possibility of, the sub- 
 sequent ones. In making bread, for example, the labour 
 employed about the thing itself is that of the baker ; but 
 the labour of the miller, though employed directly in the 
 production not of bread but of flour, is equally part of the 
 aggregate sum of labour by which the bread is produced ; 
 as is also the labour of the sower, and of the reaper. Some 
 may think that all these persons ought to be considered as 
 employing their labour directly about the thing ; the corn, 
 the flour, and the bread being one substance in three dif- 
 ferent states. Without disputing about this question of 
 mere language, there is still the ploughman, who prepared 
 the ground for the seed, and whose labour never came in 
 contact with the substance in any of its states ; and the 
 plough-maker, whose share in the result was still more 
 remote. All these persons ultimately derive the remunera- 
 tion of their labour from the bread, or its price : the plough- 
 maker as much as the rest ; for since ploughs are of no use 
 except for tilling the soil, no one would make or use ploughs 
 for any other reason than because the increased returns, 
 thereby obtained from the ground, afforded a source from 
 which an adequate equivalent could be assigned for the 
 labour of the plough-maker. If the produce is to be used
 
 54 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 1. 
 
 or consumed in the form of bread, it is from the bread that 
 this equivalent must come. The bread must suffice to re- 
 munerate all these labours, and several others ; such as the 
 carpenters and bricklayers who erected the farm-buildings ; 
 the hedgers and ditchers who made the fences necessary for 
 the protection of the crop ; the miners and smelters who 
 extracted or prepared the iron of which the plough and 
 other implements were made. These, however, and the 
 plough-maker, do not depend for their remuneration upon 
 the bread made from the produce of a single harvest, but 
 upon that made from the produce of all the harvests which 
 are successively gathered until the plough, or the buildings 
 and fences, are worn out. "We must add yet another kind of 
 labour ; that of transporting the produce from the place of 
 its production to the place of its destined use : the labour 
 of carrying the corn to market, and from market to the 
 miller's, the flour from the miller's to the baker's, and the 
 bread from the baker's to the place of its final consumption. 
 This labour is sometimes very considerable : flour is trans- 
 ported to England from beyond the Atlantic, corn from the 
 heart of Russia ; and in addition to the labourers imme- 
 diately employed, the waggoners and sailors, there are also 
 costly instruments, such as ships, in the construction of 
 which much labour has been expended : that labour, how- 
 ever, not depending for its whole remuneration upon the 
 bread, but for a part only ; ships being usually, during the 
 course of their existence, employed in the transport of many 
 different kinds of commodities. 
 
 To estimate, therefore, the labour of which any given 
 commodity is the result, is far from a simple operation. 
 The items in the calculation are very numerous as it may 
 seem to some persons, infinitely so ; for if, as a part of the 
 labour employed in making bread, we count the labour of 
 the black-smith who made the plough, why not also (it may 
 be asked) the labour of making the tools used by the black- 
 smith, and the tools used in making those tools, and so back 
 to the origin of things ? But after mounting one or two
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 55 
 
 steps in this ascending scale, we come into a region of frac- 
 tions too minute for calculation. Suppose, for instance, that 
 the same plough will last, before being worn out, a dozen 
 years. Only one-twelfth of the labour of making the 
 plough must be placed to the account of each year's harvest. 
 A twelfth part of the labour of making a plough is an ap- 
 preciable quantity. But the same set of tools, perhaps, 
 suffice to the plough-maker for forging a hundred ploughs, 
 which serve during the twelve years of their existence to 
 prepare the soil of as many different farms. A twelve- 
 hundredth part of the labour of making the tools, is as 
 much, therefore, as has been expended in procuring one 
 year's harvest of a single farm : and when this fraction 
 comes to be further apportioned among the various sacks 
 of corn and loaves of bread, it is seen at once that such 
 quantities are not worth taking into the account for any 
 practical purpose connected with the commodity. It is 
 true that if the tool-maker had not laboured, the corn and 
 bread never would have been produced ; but they will not 
 be sold a tenth part of a farthing dearer in consideration of 
 his labour. 
 
 2. Another of the modes in which labour is indirectly 
 or remotely instrumental to the production of a thing, 
 requires particular notice : namely, when it is employed in 
 producing subsistence, to maintain the labourers while they 
 are engaged in the production. This previous employment 
 of labour is an indispensable condition to every productive 
 operation, on any other than the very smallest scale. Ex- 
 cept the labour of the hunter and fisher, there is scarcely 
 any kind of labour to which the returns are immediate. 
 Productive operations require to be continued a certain 
 time, before their fruits are obtained. Unless the labourer, 
 before commencing his work, possesses a store of food, or 
 can obtain access to the stores of some one else, in sufficient 
 quantity to maintain him until the production is com- 
 pleted, he can undertake no labour but such as can be car-
 
 56 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 2. 
 
 ried on at odd intervals, concurrently with the pursuit ot 
 his subsistence. He cannot obtain food itself in any abun- 
 dance ; for every mode of so obtaining it, requires that there 
 be already food in store. Agriculture only brings forth 
 food after the lapse of months ; and though the labours of 
 the agriculturist are not necessarily continuous during the 
 whole period, they must occupy a considerable part of 
 it. Not only is agriculture impossible without food pro- 
 duced in advance, but there must be a very great quantity 
 in advance to enable any considerable community to sup- 
 port itself wholly by agriculture. A country like England 
 or France is only able to carry on the agriculture of the 
 present year, because that of past years has provided, in 
 those countries or somewhere else, sufficient food to support 
 their agricultural population until the next harvest. They 
 are only enabled to produce so many other things besides 
 food, because the food which was in store at the close of the 
 last harvest suffices to maintain not only the agricultural 
 labourers, but a large industrious population besides. 
 
 The labour employed in producing this stock of sub- 
 sistence, forms a great and important part of the past labour 
 which has been necessary to enable present labour to be 
 carried on. But there is a difference, requiring particular 
 notice, between this and the other kinds of previous or pre- 
 paratory labour. The miller, the reaper, the ploughman, 
 the plough-maker, the waggoner and waggon-maker, even 
 the sailor and ship-builder when employed, derive their 
 remuneration from the ultimate product the bread made 
 from the corn on which they have severally operated, or 
 supplied the instruments for operating. The labour that 
 produced the food which fed all these labourers is as neces- 
 sary to the ultimate result, the bread of the present harvest, 
 as any of those other portions of labour ; but is not, like 
 them, remunerated from it. That previous labour has re- 
 ceived its remuneration from the previous food. In order 
 to raise any product, there are needed labour, tools, and 
 materials, and food to feed the labourers. But the tools
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 57 
 
 and materials are of no use except for obtaining the product, 
 or at least are to be applied to no other use, and the labour 
 of their construction can be remunerated only from the 
 product when obtained. The food, on the contrary, is in- 
 trinsically useful, and is applied to the direct use of feeding 
 human beings. The labour expended in producing the. 
 food, and recompensed by it, needs not to be remuneratedj 
 over again from the produce of the subsequent labour whiclj 
 it has fed. If we suppose that the same body of labourers 
 carried on a manufacture, and grew food to sustain them- 
 selves while doing it, they have had for their trouble the 
 food and the manufactured article ; but if they also grew 
 the material and made the tools, they have had nothing for 
 that trouble but the manufactured article alone. 
 
 The claim to remuneration founded on the possession of 
 food, available for the maintenance of labourers, is of 
 another kind ; remuneration for abstinence, not for labour. 
 If a person has a store of food, he has it in his power to 
 consume it himself in idleness, or in feeding others to attend 
 on him, or to fight for him, or to sing or dance for him. 
 If, instead of these things, he gives it to productive labour- 
 ers to support them during their work, he can, and naturally 
 will, claim a remuneration from the produce. He will not 
 be content with simple repayment ; if he receives merely 
 that, he is only in the same situation as at first, and has 
 derived no advantage from delaying to apply his savings to 
 his own benefit or pleasure. He will look for some equiva- 
 lent for this forbearance : he will expect his advance of food 
 to come back to him with an increase, called in the lan- 
 guage of business, a profit ; and the hope of this profit will 
 generally have been a part of the inducement which made 
 him accumulate a stock, by economizing in his own con- 
 sumption ; or, at any rate, which made him forego the 
 application of it, when accumulated, to his personal ease or 
 satisfaction. The food also which maintained other work- 
 men while producing the tools or materials, must have been 
 provided in advance by some one, and he, too, must have
 
 58 BOOK I. CHAPTER II 3. 
 
 his profit from the ultimate product ; but there is thia 
 difference, that here the ultimate product has to supply not 
 only the profit, but also the remuneration of the labour. 
 The tool-maker (say, for instance, the plough-maker) does 
 not indeed usually wait for his payment until the harvest is 
 reaped ; the farmer advances it to him, and steps into his 
 place by becoming the owner of the plough. Nevertheless, 
 it is from the harvest that the payment is to come ; since 
 the farmer would not undertake this outlay unless he ex- 
 pected that the harvest would repay him, and with a profit 
 too on this fresh advance ; that is, unless the harvest would 
 yield, besides the remuneration of the farm labourers (and a 
 profit for advancing it), a sufficient residue to remunerate 
 the plough-maker's labourers, give the plough-maker a 
 profit, and a profit to the farmer on both. 
 
 3. From these considerations it appears, that in an 
 enumeration and classification of the kinds of industry which 
 are intended for the indirect or remote furtherance of other 
 productive labour, we need not include the labour of pro- 
 ducing subsistence or other necessaries of life to be con- 
 sumed by productive labourers ; for the main end and pur- 
 pose of his labour is the subsistence itself ; and though the 
 possession of a store of it enables other work to be done, 
 this is but an incidental consequence. The remaining 
 modes in which labour is indirectly instrumental to produc- 
 tion, may be arranged under five heads. 
 
 First : Labour employed in producing materials, on 
 which industry is to be afterwards employed. This is, in 
 many cases, a labour of mere appropriation ; extractive in- 
 dustry, as it has been aptly named by M. Dunoyer. The 
 labour of the miner, for example, consists of operations for 
 digging out of the earth substances convertible by industry 
 into various articles fitted for human use. Extractive in- 
 dustry, however, is not confined to the extraction of ma- 
 terials. Coal, for instance, is employed, not only in the 
 process of industry, but in directly warming human beings.
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 59 
 
 "When so used, it is not a material of production, but is it- 
 self the ultimate product. So, also, in the case of a mine of 
 precious stones. These are to some small extent employed 
 in the productive arts, as diamonds by the glass-cutter, 
 emery and corundum for polishing, but their principal des- 
 tination, that of ornament, is a direct use ; though they 
 commonly require, before being so used, some process of 
 manufacture, which may perhaps warrant our regarding 
 them as materials. Metallic ores of all sorts are materials 
 merely. 
 
 Under the head, production of materials, we must in- 
 clude the industry of the wood-cutter, when employed in 
 cutting and preparing timber for building, or wood for the 
 purposes of the carpenter's or any other art. In the forests 
 of America, Norway, Germany, the Pyrenees and Alps, this 
 sort of labour is largely employed on trees of spontaneous 
 growth. In other cases, we must add to the labour of the 
 wood-cutter that of the planter and cultivator. 
 
 Under the same head are also comprised the labours of 
 the agriculturist in growing flax, hemp, cotton, feeding silk- 
 worms, raising food for cattle, producing bark, dye-stuffs, 
 some oleaginous plants, and many other things only useful 
 because required in other departments of industry. So, 
 too, the labour of the hunter, as far as his object is furs or 
 feathers ; of the shepherd and the cattle-breeder, in respect 
 of wool, hides, horn, bristles, horse-hair, and the like. The 
 things used as materials in some process or other of manu- 
 facture are of a most miscellaneous character, drawn from 
 almost every quarter of the animal, vegetable, and mineral 
 kingdoms. And besides this, the finished products of many 
 branches of industry are the materials of others. The 
 thread produced by the spinner is applied to hardly any use 
 except as material for the weaver. Even the product of the 
 loom is chiefly used as material for the fabricators of articles 
 of dress or furniture, or of further instruments of productive 
 industry, as in the case of the sailmaker. The currier and 
 tanner find their whole occupation in converting raw ma-
 
 60 BOOK I. CHAPTER n. 4. 
 
 terial into what may be termed prepared material. In 
 strictness of speech, almost all food, as it comes from the 
 hands of the agriculturist, is nothing more than material 
 for the occupation of the baker or the cook. 
 
 4. The second kind of indirect labour is that em- 
 ployed in making tools or implements for the assistance of 
 labour. I use these terms in their most comprehensive 
 sense, embracing all permanent instruments or helps to pro- 
 duction, from a flint and steel for striking a light, to a 
 steam ship, or the most complex apparatus of manufacturing 
 machinery. There may be some hesitation where to draw 
 the line between implements and materials ; and some 
 things used in production (such as fuel) would scarcely in 
 common language be called by either name, popular phrase- 
 ology being shaped out by a different class of necessities 
 from those of scientific exposition. To avoid a multiplica- 
 tion of classes and denominations answering to distinctions 
 of no scientific importance, political economists generally 
 include all things which are used as immediate means of 
 production (the means which are not immediate will be con- 
 sidered presently) either in the class of implements or in 
 that of materials. Perhaps the line is most usually and 
 most conveniently drawn, by considering as a material 
 every instrument of production which can only be used 
 once, being destroyed (at least as an instrument for the pur- 
 pose in hand) by a single employment. Thus fuel, once 
 burnt, cannot be again used as fuel ; what can be so used is 
 only any portion which has remained unburnt the first 
 time. And not only it cannot be used without being con- 
 sumed, but it is only useful by being consumed ; for if no 
 part of the fuel were destroyed, no heat would be generated. 
 A fleece, again, is destroyed as a fleece by being spun into 
 thread ; and the thread cannot be used as thread when 
 woven into cloth. But an axe is not destroyed as an axe by 
 cutting down a tree : it may be used afterwards to cut 
 down a hundred or a thousand more ; and though deterio-
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 61 
 
 rated in some small degree by each use, it does not do its 
 work by being deteriorated, as the coal and the fleece do 
 theirs by being destroyed ; on the contrary, it is the better 
 instrument the better it resists deterioration. There are 
 some things, rightly classed as materials, which may be 
 used as such a second and a third time, but not while the 
 product to which they at first contributed remains in exist- 
 ence. The iron which formed a tank or a set of pipes may' 
 be melted to form a plough or a steam-engine ; the stones 
 with which a house was built may be used after it is pulled 
 down, to build another. But this cannot be done while the 
 original product subsists ; their function as materials is sus- 
 pended, until the exhaustion of the first use. Not so with 
 the things classed as implements ; they may be used re- 
 peatedly for fresh work, until the time, sometimes very dis- 
 tant, at which they are worn out, while the work already 
 done by them may subsist unimpaired, and when it per- 
 ishes, does so by its own laws, or by casualties of its own.* 
 The only practical difference of much importance arising 
 from the distinction between materials and implements, is 
 one which has attracted our attention in another case. 
 Since materials are destroyed as such by being once used, 
 the whole of the labour required for their production, as 
 well as the abstinence of the person who supplied the means 
 for carrying it on, must be remunerated from the fruits of 
 that single use. Implements, on the contrary, being sus- 
 ceptible of repeated employment, the whole of the products 
 
 * The able and friendly reviewer of this treatise in the Edinburgh Review 
 (October, 1848) states the distinction between materials and implements rather 
 differently: proposing to consider as materials "all the things which, after 
 having undergone the change implied in production, are themselves matter of 
 exchange," and as implements (or instruments) " the things which are employed 
 in producing that change, but do not themselves become part of the exchange- 
 able result." According to these definitions, the fuel consumed in a manufactory 
 would be considered, not as a material, but as an instrument. This use of the 
 terms accords better than that proposed in the text, with the primitive physical 
 meaning of the word " material ;" but the distinction on which it is grounded is 
 one almost irrelevant to political economy.
 
 62 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 5. 
 
 which they are instrumental in bringing into existence are 
 a fund which can be drawn upon to remunerate the labour 
 of their construction, and the abstinence of those by whose 
 accumulations that labour was supported. It is enough if 
 each product contributes a fraction, commonly an insig- 
 nificant one, towards the remuneration of that labour and 
 abstinence, or towards indemnifying the immediate producer 
 for advancing that remuneration to the person who pro- 
 duced the tools. 
 
 5. Thirdly : Besides materials for industry to employ 
 itself on, and implements to aid it, provision must be made 
 to prevent its operations from being disturbed and its prod- 
 ucts injured, either by the destroying agencies of nature, or 
 by the violence or rapacity of men. This gives rise to 
 another mode in which labour not employed directly about 
 the product itself, is instrumental to its production ; name- 
 ly, when employed for the protection of industry. Such is 
 the object of all buildings for inchistrial purposes ; all man- 
 ufactories, warehouses, docks, granaries, barns, farm-build- 
 ings devoted to cattle, or to the operations of agricultural 
 labour. I exclude those in which the labourers live, or 
 which are destined for their personal accommodation : these, 
 like their food, supply actual wants, and must be counted 
 in the remuneration of their labour. There are many modes 
 in which labour is still more directly applied to the protec- 
 tion of productive operations. 
 
 The herdsman has little other occupation than to protect 
 the cattle from harm : the positive agencies concerned in the 
 realization of the product, go on nearly of themselves. I 
 have already mentioned the labour of the hedger and 
 ditcher, of the builder of walls or dykes. To these must be 
 added that of the soldier, the policeman, and the judge 
 These functionaries are not indeed employed exclusively in 
 the protection of industry, nor does their payment consti- 
 tute, to the individual producer, a part of the expenses of 
 production. But they are paid from the taxes, which are
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 63 
 
 derived from the produce of industry ; and in any tolerably 
 governed country they render to its operations a service far 
 more than equivalent to the cost. To society at large they 
 are therefore part of the expenses of production ; and if the 
 returns to production were not sufficient to maintain these 
 labourers in addition to all the others required, production, 
 at least in that form and manner, could not take place. 
 Besides, if the protection which the government affords to 
 the operations of industry were not afforded, the producers 
 would be under a necessity of either withdrawing a large 
 share of their time and labour from production, to employ 
 it in defence, or of engaging armed men to defend them ; 
 all which labour, in that case, must be directly remunerated 
 from the produce ; and things which could not pay for this 
 additional labour, would not be produced. Under the pres- 
 ent arrangements, the product pays its quota towards the 
 same protection, and notwithstanding the waste and prodi- 
 gality incident to government expenditure, obtains it of 
 better quality at a much smaller cost. 
 
 6. Fourthly : There is a very great amount of labour 
 employed, not in bringing the product into existence, but in 
 rendering it, when in existence, accessible to those for whose 
 use it is intended. Many important classes of labourers 
 find their sole employment in some function of this kind. 
 There is first the whole class of carriers, by land or water : 
 muleteers, waggoners, bargemen, sailors, wharfmen, coal- 
 heavers, porters, railway establishments, and the like. 
 Next, there are the constructors of all the implements of 
 transport ; ships, barges, carts, locomotives, &c., to which 
 must be added roads, canals, and railways. Roads are 
 sometimes made by the government, and opened gratuitous- 
 ly to the public ; but the labour of making them is not the 
 less paid for from the produce. Each producer, in paying 
 his quota of the taxes levied generally for the construction 
 of roads, pays for the use of those which conduce to his con- 
 venience ; and if made with any tolerable judgment, they
 
 64 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 6. 
 
 increase the returns to his industry by far more than an 
 equivalent amount. 
 
 Another numerous class of labourers employed in ren- 
 dering the things produced accessible to their intended con- 
 sumers, is the class of dealers and traders, or, as they may 
 be termed, distributors. There would be a great waste of 
 time and trouble, and an inconvenience often amounting to 
 impracticability, if consumers could only obtain the articles 
 they want by treating directly with the producers. Both 
 producers and consumers are too much scattered, and the 
 latter often at too great a distance from the former. To di- 
 minish this loss of time and labour, the contrivance of fairs 
 and markets was early had recourse to, where consumer? 
 and producers might periodically meet, without any inter- 
 mediate agency ; and this plan answers tolerably well for 
 many articles, especially agricultural produce, agriculturists 
 having at some seasons a certain quantity of spare time on 
 their hands. But even in this case, attendance is often very 
 troublesome and inconvenient to buyers who have other 
 occupations, and do not live in the immediate vicinity ; 
 while, for all articles the production of which requires con- 
 tinuous attention from the producers, these periodical 
 markets must be held at such considerable intervals, and 
 the wants of the consumers must either be provided for so 
 long beforehand, or must remain so long unsupplied, that 
 even before the resources of society admitted of the estab- 
 lishment of shops, the supply of these wants fell universally 
 into the hands of itinerant dealers ; the pedlar, who might 
 appear once a month, being preferred to the fair, which 
 only returned once or twice a year. In country districts, 
 remote from towns or large villages, the industry of the 
 pedlar is not yet wholly superseded. But a dealer who has 
 a fixed abode and fixed customers is so much more to be 
 depended on, that consumers prefer resorting to him if he is 
 conveniently accessible ; and dealers therefore find their 
 advantage in establishing themselves in every locality where
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 65 
 
 there are sufficient consumers near at hand to afford them a 
 remuneration. 
 
 In many cases the producers and dealers are the same 
 persons, at least as to the ownership of the funds and the 
 control of the operations. The tailor, the shoemaker, the 
 baker, and many other tradesmen, are the producers of the 
 articles they deal in, so far as regards the last stage in the 
 production. This union, however, of the functions of manu- 
 facturer and retailer, is only expedient when the article can 
 advantageously be made at or near the place convenient for 
 retailing it ; and is, besides, manufactured and sold in small 
 parcels. When things have to be brought from a distance, 
 the same person cannot effectually superintend both the 
 making and the retailing of them ; when they are best and 
 most cheaply made on a large scale, a single manufactory 
 requires so many local channels to carry off its supply, that 
 the retailing is most conveniently delegated to other agen- 
 cy : and even shoes and coats, when they are to be fur- 
 nished in large quantities at once, as for the supply of a 
 regiment or of a workhouse, are usually obtained not direct- 
 ly from the producers, but from intermediate dealers, who 
 make it their business to ascertain from what producers 
 they can be obtained best and cheapest. Even when things 
 are destined to be at last sold by retail, convenience soon 
 creates a class of wholesale dealers. When products and 
 transactions have multiplied beyond a certain point ; when 
 one manufactory supplies many shops, and one shop has 
 often to obtain goods from many different manufactories, 
 the loss of time and trouble both to the manufacturers and 
 to the retailers by treating directly with one another, makes 
 it more convenient to them to treat with a smaller number 
 of great dealers or merchants, who only buy to sell again, 
 collecting goods from the various producers, and distribut- 
 ing them to the retailers, to be by them further distributed 
 among the consumers. Of these various elements is com- 
 posed the Distributing Class, whose agency is supplement- 
 ary to that of the Producing Class : and the produce so 
 5
 
 C6 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 7. 
 
 distributed, or its price, is the source from which the dis- 
 tributors are remunerated for their exertions, and for the 
 abstinence which enabled them to advance the funds need- 
 ful for the business of distribution. 
 
 7. We have now completed the enumeration of the 
 modes in which labour employed on external nature is sub- 
 servient to production. But there is yet another mode of 
 employing labour, which conduces equally, though still 
 more remotely, to that end : this is, labour of which the 
 subject is human beings. Every human being has been 
 brought up from infancy at the expense of much labour to 
 some person or persons, and if this labour, or part of it, had 
 not been bestowed, the child would never have attained the 
 age and strength which enable him to become a labourer in 
 his turn. To the community at large, the labour and 
 expense of rearing its infant population form a part of the 
 outlay which is a condition of production, and which is to 
 be replaced with increase from the future produce of their 
 labour. By the individuals, this labour and expense are 
 usually incurred from other motives than to obtain such 
 ultimate return, and, for most purposes of political econ- 
 omy, need not be taken into account as expenses of produc- 
 tion. But the technical or industrial education of the com- 
 munity ; the labour employed in learning and in teaching 
 the arts of production, in acquiring and communicating 
 skill in those arts ; this labour is really, and in general 
 solely, undergone for the sake of the greater or more valua- 
 ble produce thereby attained, and in order that a remunera- 
 tion, equivalent or more than equivalent, may be reaped by 
 the learner, besides an adequate remuneration for the labour 
 of the teacher, when a teacher has been employed. 
 
 As the labour which confers productive powers, whether 
 of hand or of head, may be looked upon as part of the 
 labour by which society accomplishes its productive opera- 
 tions, or in other words, as part of what the produce costs 
 to society, so too may the labour employed in keeping up
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 67 
 
 productive powers ; in preventing them from being de- 
 stroyed or weakened by accident or disease. The labour of 
 a physician or surgeon, when made use of by persons en- 
 gaged in industry, must be regarded in the economy of 
 society as a sacrifice incurred, to preserve from perishing by 
 death or infirmity that portion of the productive resources 
 of society which is fixed in the lives and bodily or mental 
 powers of its productive members. To the individuals, in- 
 deed, this forms but a part, sometimes an imperceptible 
 part, of the motives that induce them to submit to medical 
 treatment : it is not principally from economical motives 
 that persons have a limb amputated, or endeavour to be 
 cured of a fever, though when they do so, there is generally 
 sufficient inducement for it even on that score alone. This 
 is, therefore, one of the cases of labour and outlay which, 
 though conducive to production, yet not being incurred for 
 that end, or for the sake of the returns arising from it, are 
 out of the sphere of most of the general propositions which 
 political economy has occasion to assert respecting pro- 
 ductive labour : though, when society and not the individ- 
 uals are considered, this labour and outlay must be regarded 
 as part of the advance by which society effects its pro- 
 ductive operations, and for which it is indemnified by the 
 produce. 
 
 8. Another kind of labour, usually classed as mental, 
 but conducing to the ultimate product as directly, though 
 not so immediately, as manual labour itself, is the labour of 
 the inventors of industrial processes. I say, usually classed 
 as mental, because in reality it is not exclusively so. All 
 human exertion is compounded of some mental and some 
 bodily elements. The stupidest hodman, who repeats from 
 day to day the mechanical act of climbing a ladder, per- 
 forms a function partly intellectual ; the most intelligent 
 dog or elephant could not, probably, be taught to do it. 
 The dullest human being, instructed beforehand, is capable 
 ,of turning a mill ; but a horse cannot drive it without some-
 
 68 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 8. 
 
 body to drive and watch him. On the other hand, there is 
 some bodily ingredient in the labour most purely mental,, 
 when it generates any external result. Newton could noil- 
 have produced the Principia without the bodily exertion 
 either of penmanship or of dictation ; and he must have 
 drawn many figures, and written out many calculations and 
 demonstrations, while he was preparing it in his mind. 
 Inventors, besides the labour of their brains, generally go 
 through much labour with their hands, in the models which 
 they construct and the experiments they have to make 
 before their idea can realize itself successfully in act. 
 Whether mental, however, or bodily, their labour is a 
 part of that by which the production is brought about. 
 The labour of "Watt in contriving the steam-engine was as 
 essential a part of production as that of the mechanics who 
 build or the engineers who work the instrument ; and was 
 undergone, no less than theirs, in the prospect of a remuner- 
 ation from the produce. The labour of invention is often 
 estimated and paid on the very same plan as that of execu- 
 tion. Many manufa'cturers of ornamental goods have 
 inventors in their employment, who receive wages or sala- 
 ries for designing patterns, exactly as others do for copying 
 them. All this is strictly part of the labour of production ; 
 as the labour of the author of a book is equally a part of its, 
 production with that of the printer and binder. 
 
 In a national, or universal point of view, the labour of 
 the savant, or speculative thinker, is as much a part of pro- 
 duction ia the very narrowest sense, as that of the inventor 
 of a practical art ; many such inventions having been the 
 direct consequences of theoretic discoveries, and every 
 extension of knowledge of the powers of nature being fruit- 
 ful of applications to the purposes of outward life. The 
 electro-magnetic telegraph was the wonderful and most un- 
 expected consequence of the experiments of (Ersted and the 
 mathematical investigations of Ampere : and the modern 
 art of navigation is an unforeseen emanation from the 
 purely speculative and apparently merely curious inquiry,
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 69 
 
 by the mathematicians of Alexandria, into the properties 
 of three curves formed by the intersection of a plane surface 
 and a cone. No limit can be set to the importance, even 
 in a purely productive and material point of view, of mere 
 thought. Inasmuch, however, as these material fruits, 
 though the result, are seldom the direct purpose of the pur-r 
 suits of savants, nor is their remuneration in general derived 
 from the increased production which may be caused inci- 
 dentally, and mostly after a long interval, by their discov- 
 eries ; this ultimate influence does not, for most of the pur- 
 poses of political economy, require to be taken into consid- 
 eration ; and speculative thinkers are generally classed as 
 the producers only of the books, or other useable or sale- 
 able articles, which directly emanate from them. But 
 when (as in political economy one should always be pre- 
 pared to do) we shift our point of view, and consider not 
 individual acts, and the motives by which they are deter- 
 mined, but national and universal results, intellectual specu- 
 lation must be looked upon as a most influential part of the 
 productive labour of society, and the portion of its resources 
 employed in carrying on and in remunerating such labour, 
 as a highly productive part of its expenditure. 
 
 9. In the foregoing survey of the modes of employ- 
 ing labour in furtherance of production, I have made little 
 use of the popular distinction of industry into agricultural, 
 manufacturing, and commercial. For, in truth, this divi- 
 sion fulfils very badly the purposes of a classification. 
 Many great branches of productive industry find no place 
 in it, or not without much straining ; for example (not to 
 speak of hunters or fishers) the miner, the road-maker, and 
 the sailor. The limit, too, between agricultural and manu- 
 facturing industry cannot be precisely drawn. The miller, 
 for instance, and the baker are they to be reckoned among 
 agriculturists, or among manufacturers ? Their occupation 
 is in its nature manufacturing ; the food has finally parted 
 company with the soil before it is handed over to them :
 
 70 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 9. 
 
 this, however, might be said with equal truth of the 
 thresher, the winnower, the makers of butter and cheese ; 
 operations always counted as agricultural, probably because 
 it is the custom for them to be performed by persons resident 
 on the farm, and under the same superintendence as tillage. 
 For many purposes, all these persons, the miller and baker 
 inclusive, must be placed in the same class with ploughmen 
 and reapers. They are all concerned in producing food, and 
 depend for their remuneration on the food produced ; when 
 the one class abounds and flourishes, the others do so too ; 
 they form collectively the " agricultural interest ; " they 
 render but one service to the community by their united 
 labours, and are paid from one common source. Even the 
 tillers of the soil, again, when the produce is not food, but 
 the materials of what are commonly termed manufactures, 
 belong in many respects to the same division in the economy 
 of society as manufacturers. The cotton-planter of Caro- 
 lina, and the wool-grower of Australia, have more interests 
 in common with the spinner and weaver than with the 
 corn-grower. But, on the other hand, the industry which 
 operates immediately upon the soil has, as we shall see 
 hereafter, some properties on which many important conse- 
 quences depend, and which distinguish it from all the sub- 
 sequent stages of production, whether carried on by the 
 same person or not ; from the industry of the thresher and 
 winnower, as much as from that of the cotton-spinner. 
 When I speak, therefore, of agricultural labour, I shall gen- 
 erally mean this, and this exclusively, unless the contrary is 
 either stated or implied in the context. The term manufac- 
 turing is too vague to be of much use when precision is 
 required, and when I employ it, I wish to be understood as 
 intending to speak popularly rather than scientifically.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 
 
 1. LABOUK is indispensable to production, but has not 
 always production for its effect. There is much labour, and 
 of a high order of usefulness, of which production is not the 
 object. Labour has accordingly been distinguished into 
 Productive and Unproductive. There has been not a little 
 controversy among political economists on the question, 
 what kinds of labour should be reputed to be unproductive ; 
 and they have not always perceived, that there was in 
 reality no matter of fact in dispute between them. 
 
 Many writers have been unwilling to class any labour as 
 productive, unless its result is palpable hi some material 
 object, capable of being transferred from one person to 
 another. There are others (among whom are Mr. M'Culloch 
 and M. Say) who looking upon the word unproductive as a 
 term of disparagement, remonstrate against imposing it 
 upon any labour which is regarded as useful which pro- 
 duces a benefit or a pleasure worth the cost. The labour 
 of officers of government, of the army and navy, of physi- 
 cians, lawyers, teachers, musicians, dancers, actors, domestic 
 servants, &c., when they really accomplish what they are 
 paid for, and are not more numerous than is required for its 
 performance, ought not, say these writers, to be " stigma- 
 tized " as unproductive, an expression which they appear to 
 regard as synonymous with wasteful or worthless. But this 
 seems to me a misunderstanding of the matter in dispute. 
 Production not being the sole end of human existence, the
 
 72 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 1. 
 
 term unproductive does not necessarily imply any stigma ; 
 nor was ever intended to do so in the present case. The 
 question is one of mere language and classification. Dif- 
 ferences of language, however, are by no means unimport- 
 ant, even when not grounded on differences of opinion ; for 
 though either of two expressions may be consistent with 
 the whole truth, they generally tend to fix attention upon 
 different parts of it. We must therefore enter a little into 
 the consideration of the various meanings which may attach 
 to the words productive and unproductive when applied to 
 labour. 
 
 In the first place, even in what is called the production 
 of material objects, it must be remembered that what is 
 produced is not the matter composing them. All the 
 labour of all the human beings in the world could not pro- 
 duce one particle of matter. To weave broadcloth is but to 
 re-arrange, in a peculiar manner, the particles of wool ; to 
 grow corn is only to put a portion of matter called a seed, 
 into a situation where it can draw together particles of mat- 
 ter from the earth and air, to form the new combination 
 called a plant. Though we cannot create matter, we can 
 cause it to assume properties, by which, from having been 
 useless to us, it becomes useful. What we produce, or 
 desire to produce, is always, as M. Say rightly terms it, an 
 utility. Labour is not creative of objects, but of utilities. 
 Neither, again, do we consume .and destroy the objects 
 themselves ; the matter of which they were composed 
 remains, more or less altered in form : what has really been 
 consumed is only the qualities by which they were fitted for 
 the purpose they have been applied to. It is, therefore, 
 pertinently asked by M. Say and others since, when we 
 are said to produce objects, we only produce utility, why 
 should not all labour which produces utility be accounted 
 productive ? Why refuse that title to the surgeon who sets 
 a limb, the judge or legislator who confers security, and 
 give it to the lapidary who cuts and polishes a diamond ? 
 Why deny it to the teachey^irom whom I learn an art by
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 73 
 
 which ! can gain my bread, and accord it to the confec- 
 tioner who makes bonbons for the momentary pleasure of a 
 sense of taste ? 
 
 It is quite true that all these kinds of labour are pro- 
 ductive of utility ; and the question which now occupies us 
 could not have been a question at all, if the production of 
 utility were enough to satisfy the notion which mankind 
 have usually formed of productive labour. Production, and 
 productive, are of course elliptical expressions, involving 
 the idea of a something produced ; but this something, in 
 common apprehension, I conceive to be, not utility, but 
 Wealth. Productive labour means labour productive of 
 wealth. We are recalled, therefore, to the question touched 
 upon in our first chapter, what Wealth is, and whether only 
 material products, or all useful products, are to be included 
 in it. 
 
 2. Now the utilities produced by labour are of three 
 kinds. They are, 
 
 First, utilities fixed and embodied in outward objects ; 
 by labour employed in investing external material things 
 with properties which render them serviceable to human 
 beings. This is the common case, and requires no illus- 
 tration. 
 
 Secondly, utilities fixed and embodied in human beings ; 
 the labour being in this case employed in conferring on 
 human beings, qualities which render them serviceable to 
 themselves and others. To this class belongs the labour of 
 all concerned in education ; not only schoolmasters, tutors, 
 and professors, but governments, so far as they aim success- 
 fully at the improvement of the people ; moralists, and 
 clergymen, as far as productive of benefit ; the labour of 
 physicians, as far as instrumental in preserving life and 
 physical or mental efficiency ; of the teachers of bodily 
 exercises, and of the various trades, sciences, and arts, to- 
 gether with the labour of the learners in acquiring them ; 
 and all labour bestowed by any persons, throughout life, in
 
 74 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 2. 
 
 improving the knowledge or cultivating the bodily or 
 mental faculties of themselves or others. 
 
 Thirdly and lastly, utilities not fixed or embodied in any 
 object, but consisting in a mere service rendered ; a pleasure 
 given, an inconvenience or a pain averted, during a longer 
 or a shorter time, but without leaving a permanent acquisi- 
 tion in the improved qualities of any person or thing ; the 
 labour being employed in producing an utility directly, not 
 (as in the two former cases) in fitting some other thing to 
 afford an utility. Such, for example, is the labour of the 
 musical performer, the actor, the public declaimer or reciter, 
 and the showman. Some good may no doubt be produced, 
 and much more might be produced, beyond the moment, 
 upon the feelings and disposition, or general state of enjoy- 
 ment of the spectators ; or instead of good there may be 
 harm ; but neither the one nor the other is the effect intend- 
 ed, is the result for which the exhibitor works and the spec- 
 tator pays ; nothing but the immediate pleasure. Such, 
 again, is the labour of the army and navy ; they, at the 
 best, prevent a country from being conquered, or from being 
 injured or insulted, which is a service, but in all other 
 respects leave the country neither improved nor deteriorat 
 ed. Such, too, is the labour of the legislator, the judge, the 
 officer of justice, and all other agents of government, in 
 their ordinary functions, apart from any influence they may 
 exert on the improvement of the national mind. . The ser- 
 vice which they render, is to maintain peace and security ; 
 these compose the utility which they produce. It may 
 appear to some, that carriers, and merchants or dealers, 
 should be placed in this same class, since their labour does 
 not add any properties to objects : but I reply that it does : 
 it adds the property of being in the place where they are 
 wanted, instead of being in some other place : which is a 
 very useful property, and the utility it confers is embodied 
 in the things themselves, which now actually are in the 
 place where they are required for use, and in consequence 
 of that increased utility could be sold at an increased price,
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 75 
 
 proportioned to the labour expended in conferring it. This 
 labour, therefore, does not belong to the third class, but to 
 the first. 
 
 3. We have now to consider which of these three 
 classes of labour should be accounted productive of wealth, 
 since that is what the term productive, when used by 
 itself, must be understood to import. Utilities of the third 
 class, consisting in pleasures which only exist while being 
 enjoyed, and services which only exist while being per- 
 formed, cannot be spoken of as wealth, except by an 
 acknowledged metaphor. It is essential to the idea of 
 wealth to be susceptible of accumulation : things which 
 cannot, after being produced, be kept for some time before 
 being used, are never, I think, regarded as wealth, since 
 however much of them may be produced and enjoyed, the 
 person benefited by them is no richer, is nowise improved 
 in circumstances. But there is not so distinct and positive 
 a violation of usage in considering as wealth any product 
 which is both useful and susceptible of accumulation. The 
 skill, and the energy and perseverance, of the artisans of a 
 country, are reckoned part of its wealth, no less than their 
 tools and machinery. According to this definition, we 
 should regard all labour as productive which is employed in 
 creating permanent utilities, whether embodied in human 
 beings, or in any other animate or inanimate objects. And 
 this nomenclature I have, in a former publication,* recom- 
 mended, as the most conducive to the ends of classification, 
 though not strictly conformable to the customs of language. 
 
 But in applying the term wealth to the industrial capa- 
 cities of human beings, there seems always, in popular ap- 
 prehension, to be a tacit reference to material products. 
 The skill of an artisan is accounted wealth, only as being 
 the means of acquiring wealth in a material sense ; and any 
 
 * Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy. Easay III. 
 On the worcte Productive and Unproductive.
 
 76 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 3. 
 
 qualities not tending visibly to that object are scarcely so 
 regarded at all. A country would hardly be said to be 
 richer, except by a metaphor, however precious a possession 
 it might have in the genius, the virtues, or the accomplish- 
 ments of its inhabitants ; unless indeed these were looked 
 upon as marketable articles,"by which it could attract the 
 material wealth of other countries, as the Greeks of old, and 
 several modern nations have done. While, therefore, I 
 should prefer, were I constructing a new technical lan- 
 guage, to make the distinction turn upon the permanence 
 rather than upon the materiality of the productTyeTwEen 
 employing terms wliich common usage has taken complete 
 possession of, it seems advisable so to employ them as to do 
 the least possible violence to usage ; since any improve- 
 ment in terminology obtained by straining the received 
 meaning of a popular phrase, is generally purchased beyond 
 its value, by the obscurity arising from the conflict between 
 new and old associations. 
 
 I shall, therefore, in this treatise, when speaking of 
 wealth, understand by it only what is called material 
 wealth, and by productive labour only thpse kinds of exer- 
 tion which produce utilities embodied in material objects. 
 But in limiting myself to this sense of the word, I mean to 
 avail myself of the full extent of that restricted acceptation, 
 and I shall not refuse the appellation productive, to labour 
 which yields no material product as its direct result, pro- 
 vided that an increase of material products is its ultimate 
 consequence. Thus, labour expended in the acquisition of 
 manufacturing skill, I class as productive, not in virtue of 
 the skill itself, but of the manufactured products created by 
 the skill, and to the creation of which the labour of learning 
 the trade is essentially conducive. The labour of officers of 
 government in affording the protection which, afforded in 
 some manner or other, is indispensable to the prosperity of 
 industry, must be classed as productive even of material 
 wealth, because without it, material wealth, in anything 
 like its present abundance, could not exist. Such labour
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 77 
 
 may be said to be productive indirectly or mediately, in 
 opposition to the labour of the ploughman and the cotton- 
 spinner, which are productive immediately. They are all 
 alike in this, that they leave the community richer in ma- 
 terial products than they found it ; they increase, or tend to 
 increase, material wealth. 
 
 4. By Unproductive Labour, on the contrary, will be - 
 understood labour which does not terminate in the creation 
 of material wealth ; which, however largely or successfully 
 practised, does not render the community, and the world at 
 large, richer in material products, but poorer by all that is 
 consumed by the labourers while so employed. 
 
 All labour is, in the language of political economy, un- 
 productive, which ends in immediate enjoyment, without 
 any increase of the accumulated stock 01 permanent means 
 of enjoyment. And all labour, according to our present 
 definition, must be classed as unproductive, which termi- 
 nates in a permanent benefit, however important, provided 
 that an increase of material products forms no part of that 
 benefit. The labour of saving a friend's life is not pro- 
 ductive, unless the friend is a productive labourer, and pro- 
 duces more than he consumes. To a religious person the 
 saving of a soul must appear a far more important service 
 than the saving of a life ; but he will not therefore call a 
 missionary or a clergyman productive labourers, unless they 
 teach, as the South Sea Missionaries have in some cases 
 done, the arts of civilization in addition to the doctrines of 
 their religion. It is, on the contrary, evident that the 
 greater number of missionaries or clergymen a nation main- 
 tains, the less it has to expend on other things ; while the 
 more it expends judiciously in keeping agriculturists and 
 manufacturers at work, the more it will have for every 
 other purpose. By the former it diminishes, cceteria pari- 
 bus, its stock of material products ; by the latter, it in- 
 creases them. 
 
 Unproductive may be as useful as productive labour ; fr
 
 78 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 4. 
 
 may be more useful, even in point of permanent advantage ; 
 or its use may consist only in pleasurable sensation, which 
 when gone leaves no trace ; or it may not afford even this, 
 but may be absolute waste. In any case society or man- 
 kind grow no richer by it, but poorer. All material prod- 
 ucts consumed by any one while he produces nothing, are 
 so much subtracted, for the time, from the material products 
 which society would otherwise have possessed. But though 
 society grow no richer by unproductive labour, the individ- 
 ual may. An unproductive labourer may receive for his 
 labour, from those who derive pleasure or benefit from it, a 
 remuneration which may be to him a considerable source 
 of wealth ; but his gain is balanced by their loss ; they may 
 have received a full equivalent for their expenditure, but 
 they are so much poorer by it. When a tailor makes a 
 coat and sells it, there is a transfer of the price from the 
 customer to the tailor, and a coat besides which did not pre- 
 viously exist ; but what is gained by an actor is a mere 
 transfer from the spectator's funds to his, leaving no article 
 of wealth for the spectator's indemnification. Tims the 
 community collectively gains nothing by the actor's labour ; 
 and it loses, of his receipts, all that portion which he con- 
 sumes, retaining only that which he lays by. A commu- 
 nity, however, may add to its wealth by unproductive 
 labour, at the expense of other communities, as an indi- 
 vidual may at the expense of other individuals. The gains 
 of Italian opera singers, German governesses, French ballet 
 dancers, &c., are a source of wealth, as far as they go, to 
 their respective countries, if they return thither. The petty 
 states of Greece, especially the ruder and more backward 
 of those states, were nurseries of soldiers, who hired them- 
 selves to the princes and satraps of the East to carry on 
 useless and destructive wars, and returned with their sav- 
 ings to pass their declining years in their own country : 
 these were unproductive labourers, and the pay they re- 
 ceived, together with the plunder they took, was an outlay 
 without return to the countries which furnished it ; but,
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOtJfc. 79 
 
 though no gain to the world, it was a gain to Greece. At 
 a later period the same country and its colonies supplied 
 the Roman empire with another class of adventurers, who, 
 under the name of philosophers or of rhetoricians, taught to 
 the youth of the higher classes what were esteemed the 
 most valuable accomplishments : these were mainly unpro- 
 ductive labourers, but their ample recompense was a source 
 of wealth to their own country. In none of these cases was 
 there any accession of wealth to the world. The services 
 of the labourers, if useful, were obtained at a sacrifice to the 
 world of a portion of material wealth ; if useless, all that 
 these labourers consumed was waste. 
 
 To be wasted, however, is a liability not confined to 
 unproductive labour. Productive labour may equally be 
 waste, if more of it is expended than really conduces to pro- 
 duction. If defect of skill in labourers, or of judgment in 
 those who direct them, causes a misapplication of pro- 
 ductive industry ; if a fanner persists in ploughing with 
 three horses and two men, when experience has shown that 
 two horses and one man are sufficient, the surplus labour, 
 though employed for purposes of production, is wasted. If 
 a new process is adopted which proves no better, or not so 
 good as those before in use, the labour expended in perfect- 
 ing the invention and in carrying it into practice, though 
 employed for a productive purpose, is wasted. Productive 
 labour may render a nation poorer, if the wealth it pro- 
 duces, that is, the increase it makes in the stock of useful or 
 agreeable things, be of a kind not immediately wanted : as 
 when a commodity is unsaleable, because produced in a 
 quantity beyond the present demand; or when speculators 
 build docks and warehouses before there is any trade. The 
 bankrupt states of North America, with their premature 
 railways and canals, have made this kind of mistake ; and 
 it was for some time doubtful whether England, in the dis- 
 proportionate development of railway enterprise, had not, 
 in some degree, followed the example. Labour sunk in 
 expectation of a distant r.;tnrn, when the great exigencies or 
 limited resources of the community require that the return
 
 80 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 8. 
 
 be rapid, may leave the country not only poorer in the 
 meanwhile, by all which those labourers consume, but less 
 rich even ultimately than if immediate returns had been 
 sought in the first instance, and enterprises for distant profit 
 postponed. 
 
 5. The distinction of Productive and Unproductive 
 is applicable to Consumption as well as to Labour. All 
 the members of the community are not labourers, but all 
 are consumers, and consume either unproductively or pro- 
 ductively. Whoever contributes nothing directly or indi- 
 rectly to production, is an unproductive consumer. The 
 only productive consumers are productive labourers ; the 
 labour of direction being of course included, as well as that 
 of execution. But the consumption even of productive 
 labourers is not all of rt Productive Consumption. There 
 is unproductive consumption by productive consumers. 
 What they consume in keeping up or improving their 
 health, strength, and capacities of work, or in rearing other 
 productive labourers to succeed them, is Productive Con- 
 sumption. But consumption on pleasures or luxuries, 
 whether by the idle or by the industrious, since production 
 is neither its object nor is in any way advanced by it, must 
 be reckoned Unproductive^ with a reservation perhaps of 
 a certain quantum of enjoyment which may be classed 
 among necessaries, since anything short of it would not be 
 consistent with the greatest efficiency of labour. That 
 alone is productive consumption, which goes to maintain 
 and increase the productive powers of the community ; 
 either those residing in its soil, in its materials, in the num- 
 ber and efficiency of its instruments of production, or in its 
 people. 
 
 There are numerous products which may be said not to 
 admit of being consumed otherwise than unproductively. 
 The annual consumption of gold lace, pine apples, or cham- 
 pagne, must be reckoned unproductive, since these things 
 give no assistance to production, or any support to life or 
 strength, but what would equally be given by tiling nvi.ch
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 81 
 
 less costly. Hence it might be supposed that the labour 
 employed in producing them ought not to be regarded as 
 productive, in the sense in which the term is understood by 
 political economists. I grant that no labour really tends to 
 the enrichment of society, which is employed in producing 
 things for the use of unproductive consumers. The tailor 
 who makes a coat for a man who produces nothing, is a pro- 
 ductive labourer ; but in a few weeks or months the coat is 
 worn out, while the wearer has not produced anything to 
 replace it, and the community is then no richer by the 
 labour of the tailor, than if the same sum had been paid for 
 a stall at the opera. Nevertheless, society has been richer 
 by the labour while the coat lasted, that is, until society, 
 through one of its unproductive members, chose to consume 
 the produce of the labour unproductively. The case of the 
 gold lace or the pine apple is no further different, than that 
 they are still further removed than the coat from the char- 
 acter of necessaries. These things also are wealth until they 
 have been consumed. 
 
 6. We see, however, by this, that there is a distinc- 
 tion, more important to the wealth of a community than 
 even that between productive and unproductive labour ; the 
 distinction, namely, between labour for the supply of pro- 
 ductive, and for the supply of unproductive, consumption ; 
 between labour employed in keeping up or in adding to the 
 productive resources of the country, and that which is em- 
 ployed otherwise. Of the produce of the country, a part 
 only is destined to be consumed productively ; the remain- 
 der supplies the unproductive consumption of producers, 
 and the entire consumption of the unproductive class. Sup- 
 pose that the proportion of the annual produce applied to 
 the first purpose amounts to half; then one-half the pn> 
 ductive labourers of the country are all that are employed 
 in the operations on which the permanent wealth of the 
 country depends. The other half are occupied from year to 
 year and from generation to generation in producing things 
 6
 
 g2 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 6. 
 
 which are consumed and disappear without return ; and 
 whatever this half consume is as completely lost, as to any 
 permanent effect on the national resources, as if it were con- 
 sumed unproductively. Suppose that this second half of 
 the labouring population ceased to work, and that the gov- 
 ernment or their parishes maintained them in idleness for a 
 whole year : the first half would suffice to produce, as they 
 had done before, their own necessaries and the necessaries 
 of the second half, and to keep the stock of materials and 
 implements undiminished : the unproductive classes, in- 
 deed, would be either starved or obliged to produce their 
 own subsistence, and the whole community would be re- 
 duced during a year to bare necessaries ; but the sources of 
 production would be unimpaired, and the next year there 
 would not necessarily be a smaller produce than if no such 
 interval of inactivity had occurred ; while if the case had 
 been reversed, if the first half of the labourers had suspend- 
 ed their accustomed occupations, and the second half had 
 continued theirs, the country at the end of the twelvemonth 
 would have been entirely impoverished. 
 
 It would be a great error to regret the large proportion 
 of the annual produce, which in an opulent country goes to 
 supply unproductive consumption. It would be to lament 
 that the community has so much to spare from its necessi- 
 ties, for its pleasures and for all higher uses. This portion 
 of the produce is the fund from which all the wants of the 
 community, other than that of mere living, are provided 
 for ; the measure of its means of enjoyment, and of its 
 power of accomplishing all purposes not productive. That 
 so great a surplus should be available for such purposes, 
 and that it should be applied to them, can only be a subject 
 of congratulation. The things to be regretted, and which 
 are not incapable of being remedied, are the prodigious in- 
 equality with which this surplus is distributed, the little 
 worth of the objects to which the greater part of it is 
 devoted, and the large share which falls to the lot of per- 
 sons who render no equivalent service in return.
 
 CHAPTEK IV. 
 
 OF CAPITAL. 
 
 1. IT has been seen in the preceding chapters that 
 besides the primary and universal requisites of production, 
 labour and natural agents, there is another requisite with- 
 out which no productive operations beyond the rude and 
 scanty beginnings of primitive industry, are possible : 
 namely, a stock, previously accumulated, of the products of 
 former labour. This accumulated stock of the produce of 
 labour is termed Capital. The function of Capital in pro- 
 duction, it is of the utmost importance thoroughly to under- 
 stand, since a number of the erroneous notions with which 
 our subject is invested, originate in an imperfect and con- 
 fused apprehension of this point. 
 
 Capital, by persons wholly unused to reflect on the sub- 
 ject, is supposed to be synonymous with money. To ex- 
 pose this misapprehension, would be to repeat what has 
 been said in the introductory chapter. Money is no more 
 synonymous with capital than it is with wealth. Money 
 cannot in itself perform any part of the office of capital, 
 since it can afford no assistance to production. To do this, 
 it must be exchanged for other things ; and anything, which 
 is susceptible of being exchanged for other things, is ca- 
 pable of contributing to production in the same degree. 
 What capital does for production, is to afford the shelter, 
 protection, tools and materials which the work requires, and 
 to feed and otherwise maintain the labourers during the 
 process. These are the services which present labour re-
 
 84 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 
 
 quires from past, and from the produce of past, labour. 
 Whatever things are destined for this use destined to sup- 
 ply productive labour with these various prerequisites are 
 Capital. 
 
 To familiarize ourselves with the conception, let us con- 
 sider what is done with the capital invested in any of the 
 branches of business which compose the productive industry 
 of a country. A manufacturer, for example, has one part 
 of his capital in the form of buildings, fitted and destined 
 for carrying on this branch of manufacture. Another part 
 he has in the form of machinery. A third consists, if he be 
 a spinner, of raw cotton, flax, or wool ; if a weaver, of 
 'flaxen, woollen, silk, or cotton, thread ; and the like, accord- 
 ing to the nature of the manufacture. Food and clothing 
 for his operatives, it is not the custom of the present age 
 that he should directly provide ; and few capitalists, except 
 the producers of food or clothing, have any portion worth 
 mentioning of their capital in that shape. Instead of this, 
 each capitalist has money, which he pays to his workpeople, 
 and so enables them to supply themselves : he has also 
 finished goods in his warehouses, by the sale of which he 
 obtains more money, to employ in the same manner, as well 
 as to replenish his stock of materials, to keep his buildings 
 and machinery in repair, and to replace them when worn 
 out. His money and finished goods, however, are not 
 wholly capital, for he does not wholly devote them to these 
 purposes : he employs a part of the one, and of the proceeds 
 of the other, in supplying his personal consumption and that 
 of his family, or in hiring grooms or"vaTiets7~or maintaining 
 hunters and hounds, or in educating his children, or in pay- 
 ing taxes, or in charity. What then is his capital ? Pre- 
 cisely that part of his possessions, whatever it be, which he 
 designs to employ in carrying on fresh production. It is 
 of no cpnsequence that a part, or even the whole of it, is in 
 a form in which it cannot directly supply the wants of 
 labourers. 
 
 Suppose, for instance, that the capitalist is a hardware
 
 CAPITAL. 85 
 
 manufacturer, and that his stock in trade, over and above 
 his machinery, consists at present wholly in iron goods. 
 Iron goods cannot feed labourers. Nevertheless, by a mere 
 change of the destination of the iron goods, he can cause 
 labourers to be fed. Suppose that with a portion of the 
 proceeds he intended to maintain a pack of hounds, or an 
 establishment of servants ; and that he changes his inten- 
 tion, and employs it in his business, paying it in wages to 
 additional workpeople. These workpeople are enabled to 
 buy and consume the food which would otherwise have 
 been consumed by the hounds or by the servants ; and thus 
 without the employer's having seen or touched one particle 
 of the food, his conduct has determined that so much more v 
 of the food existing in the country has been devoted to the 
 use of productive labourers, and so much less consumed in 
 a manner wholly unproductive. Now vary the hypothesis, 
 and suppose that what is thus paid in wages would other- 
 wise have been laid out not in feeding servants or hounds, 
 but in buying plate and jewels ; and in order to render the 
 effect perceptible, let us suppose that the change takes place 
 on a considerable scale, and that a large sum is diverted 
 from buying plate and jewels to employing productive 
 labourers, whom we shall suppose to have been previously, 
 like the Irish peasantry, only half employed and half fed. 
 The labourers, on receiving their increased wages, will not 
 lay them out in plate and jewels, but in food. There is 
 not, however, additional food in the country ; nor any un- 
 productive labourers or animals, as in the former case, 
 whose food is set free for productive purposes. Food will 
 therefore be imported if possible ; if not possible, the 
 labourers will remain for a season on their short allowance : 
 but the consequence of this change in the demand for com- f 
 modities, occasioned by the change in the expenditure of 
 capitalists from unproductive to productive, is that next 
 year more food will be produced, and less plate and jew- 
 ellery. So that again, without having had anything to do 
 with the food of the labourers directly, the conversion by
 
 86 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 2. 
 
 individuals of a portion of their property, no matter of what 
 sort, from an unproductive destination to a productive, has 
 had the effect of causing more food to be appropriated to 
 the consumption of productive labourers. The distinction, 
 then, between Capital and Not-capital, does not lie in the 
 kind of commodities, but in the mind of the capitalist in 
 his will to employ them for one purpose rather than 
 another ; and all property, however ill adapted in itself for 
 the use of labourers, is a part of capital, so soon as it, or 
 the value to be received from it, is set apart for productive 
 reinvestment. The sum of all the values so destined by 
 their respective possessors, composes the capital of the 
 country. Whether all those values are in a shape directly 
 applicable to productive uses, makes no difference. Once 
 appropriated to that end, they do not fail to find a way of 
 transforming themselves into things fitted to be applied 
 to it. 
 
 2. As whatever of the produce of the country is de- 
 voted to production is capital, so. conversely, the whole of 
 the capital of the country is devoted to production. This 
 second proposition, however, must be taken with some 
 limitations and explanations. A fund may be seeking for 
 productive employment, and find none, adapted to the incli- 
 nations of its possessor : it then is capital still, but unem- 
 ployed capital. Or the stock may consist of unsold goods, 
 not susceptible of direct application to productive uses, and 
 not, at the moment, marketable : these, until sold, are in 
 the condition of unemployed capital. Again, artificial or 
 accidental circumstances may render it necessary to possess 
 a larger stock in advance, that is, a larger capital before 
 entering on production, than is required by the nature of 
 things. Suppose that the government lays a tax on the 
 production in one of its earlier stages, as for instance by 
 taxing the material. The manufacturer has to advance the 
 tax, before commencing the manufacture, and is therefore 
 under a necessity of having a larger accumulated fund than
 
 CAPITAL. 87 
 
 is required for, or is actually employed in, the production 
 which lie carries on. He must have a larger capital, to 
 maintain the same quantity of productive labour ; or (what 
 is equivalent) with a given capital he maintains less labour. 
 This mode of levying taxes, therefore, limits unnecessarily 
 the industry of the country : a portion of the fund destined 
 by its owners for production being diverted from its pur- 
 pose, and kept in a constant state of advance to the govern- 
 ment. 
 
 For another example : a farmer may enter on his farm 
 at such a time of the year, that he may be required to pay 
 one, two, or even three quarters' rent before obtaining any 
 return from the produce. This, therefore, must be paid out 
 of his capital. Now rent, when paid for the land itself, and 
 not for improvements made in it by labour, is not a pro- 
 ductive expenditure. It is not an outlay for the support of 
 labour, or for the provision of implements or materials the 
 produce of labour. It is the price paid for the use of an 
 appropriated natural agent. This natural agent is indeed 
 as indispensable (and even more so) as any implement : but 
 the having to pay a price for it, is not. In the case of the 
 implement (a thing produced by labour) a price of some 
 sort is the necessary condition of its existence : but the land 
 exists by nature. The payment for it, therefore, is not one 
 of the expenses of production ; and the necessity of making 
 the payment out of capital, makes it requisite that there 
 should be a greater capital, a greater antecedent accumula- 
 tion of the produce of past labour, than is naturally neces- 
 sary, or than is needed where land is occupied on a different 
 system. This extra capital, though intended by its owners 
 for production, is in reality employed unproductively, and 
 annually replaced, not from any produce of its own, but 
 from the produce of the labour supported by the remainder 
 of the farmer's capital. 
 
 Finally, that large portion of the productive capital of a 
 country which is employed in paying the wages and salaries 
 of labourers, evidently is not, all of it, strictly and indis-
 
 88 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 2. 
 
 pensably necessary for production. As much of it as ex- 
 ceeds the actual necessaries of life and health (an excess 
 which in the case of skilled labourers is usually consider- 
 able) is not expended in supporting labour, but in remu- 
 nerating it, and the labourers could wait for this part of 
 their remuneration until the production is completed ; it 
 needs not necessarily pre-exist as capital : and if they unfor- 
 tunately had to forego it altogether, the same amount of 
 production might take place. In order that the whole 
 remuneration of the labourers should be advanced to them 
 in daily or weekly payments, there must exist in advance, 
 and be appropriated to productive use, a greater stock, or 
 capital, than would suffice to carry on the existing extent 
 of production : greater, by whatever amount of remunera- 
 tion the labourers receive, beyond what the self-interest of a 
 prudent slave-master would assign to his slaves. In truth, 
 it is only after an abundant capital had already been accu- 
 mulated, that the practice of paying in advance any remu- 
 neration of labour beyond a bare subsistence, could possibly 
 have arisen : since whatever is so paid, is not really applied 
 to production, but to the unproductive consumption of pro- 
 ductive labourers, indicating a fund for production suf- . 
 ficiently ample to admit of habitually diverting a part of it 
 to a mere convenience. 
 
 It will be observed that I have assumed, that the labour- 
 ers are always subsisted from capital : and this is obviously 
 the fact, though the capital needs not necessarily be fur- 
 nished by a person called a capitalist. When the labourer 
 maintains himself by funds of his own, as when a peasant- 
 farmer or proprietor lives on the produce of his land, or an 
 artisan works on his own account, they are still supported 
 by capital, that is, by funds provided in advance. The 
 peasant does not subsist this year on the produce of this 
 year's harvest, but on that of the last. The artisan is not 
 living on the proceeds of the work he has in hand, but on 
 those of work previously executed and disposed of. Each is 
 supported by a small capital of his own, which he period-
 
 CAPITAL. 89 
 
 ically replaces from the produce of his labour. The large 
 capitalist is, in like manner, maintained from funds provided 
 in advance. If he personally conducts his operations, as 
 much of his personal or household expenditure as does not 
 exceed a fair remuneration of his labour at the market price, 
 must be considered a part of his capital, expended, like any 
 other capital, for production : and his personal consump- 
 tion, so far as it consists of necessaries, is productive con- 
 sumption. 
 
 3. At the risk of being tedious, I must add a few 
 more illustrations, to bring out into a still stronger and 
 clearer light the idea of Capital. As M. Say truly remarks, 
 it is on the very elements of our subject that illustration is 
 most usefully bestowed, since the greatest errors which pre- 
 vail in it may be traced to the want of a thorough mastery 
 over the elementary ideas. Nor is this surprising : a branch 
 may be diseased and all the rest healthy, but unsoundnesg 
 at the root diffuses unhealthiness through the whole tree. 
 
 Let us therefore consider whether, and in what cases, 
 the property of those who live on the interest of what they 
 possess, without being personally engaged in production, 
 can be regarded as capital. It is so called in common lan- 
 guage, and, with reference to the individual, not improp- 
 erly. All funds from which the possessor derives an income, 
 which income he can use without sinking and dissipating 
 the fund itself are to him equivalent to capital. But to 
 transfer hastily and inconsiderately to the general point of 
 view, propositions which are true of the individual, has 
 been a source of innumerable errors in political economy. 
 In the present instance, that which is virtually capital to 
 the individual, is or is not capital to the nation, according 
 as the fund which by the supposition he has not dissipated, 
 has or has not been dissipated by somebody else. 
 
 For example, let property of the value of ten thousand 
 pounds belonging to A, be lent to B, a farmer or manufac- 
 turer, and employed profitably in B's occupation. It is as
 
 f)0 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 much capital as if it belonged to B. A, is really a farmer 
 or manufacturer, not personally, but in respect of his prop- 
 erty. Capital worth ten thousand pounds is employed in 
 production in maintaining labourers and providing tools 
 and materials ; which capital belongs to A, while B takes 
 the trouble of employing it, and receives for his remunera- 
 tion the difference between the profit which it yields and 
 the interest he pays to A. This is the simplest case. 
 
 Suppose next that A's ten thousand pounds, instead of 
 being lent to B, are lent on mortgage to C, a landed pro- 
 prietor, by whom they are employed in improving the pro- 
 ductive powers of his estate, by fencing, draining, road- 
 making, or permanent manures. This is productive em- 
 ployment. The ten thousand pounds are sunk, but not 
 dissipated. They yield a permanent return ; the land now 
 affords an increase of produce, sufficient, in a few years, if 
 the outlay has been judicious, to replace the amount, and in 
 time to multiply it manifold. Here, then, is a value of ten 
 thousand pounds, employed in increasing the produce of the 
 country. This constitutes a capital, for which C, if he lets 
 his land, receives the returns in the nominal form of in- 
 creased rent ; and the mortgage entitles A to receive from 
 these returns, in the shape of interest, such annual sum as 
 has been agreed on. We will now vary the circumstances, 
 and suppose that C does not employ the loan in improving 
 his land, but in paying off a former mortgage, or in making 
 a provision for children. "Whether the ten thousand pounds 
 thus employed are capital or not, will depend on what is 
 done with the amount by the ultimate receiver. If the 
 children invest their fortunes in a productive employment, 
 or the mortgagee on being paid off lends the amount to 
 another landholder to improve his land, or to a manufac- 
 turer to extend his business, it is still capital, because pro- 
 ductively employed. 
 
 Suppose, however, that C, the borrowing landlord, is a 
 spendthrift, who burdens his land not to increase his fortune 
 but to squander it, expending the amount in equipages and
 
 CAPITAL. 91 
 
 entertainments. In a year or two it is dissipated, and with- 
 out return. A is as rich as before ; he has no longer his ten 
 thousand pounds, but he has a lien on the land, which he 
 could still sell for that amount. C, however, is 10,OOOZ. 
 poorer than formerly ; and nobody is richer. It may be 
 said that those are richer who have made profit out of the 
 money while it was being spent. No doubt if C lost it by 
 gaming, or was cheated of it by his servants, that is a mere 
 transfer, not a destruction, and those who have gained the 
 amount may employ it productively. But if C has re- 
 ceived the fair value for his expenditure in articles of sub- 
 sistence or luxury, w r hich he has consumed on himself, or 
 by means of his servants or guests, these articles have ceased 
 to exist, and nothing has been produced to replace them : 
 while if the same sum had been employed in farming or 
 manufacturing, the consumption which would have taken 
 place would have been more than balanced at the end of 
 the year by new products, created by the labour of those 
 who would in that case have been the consumers. By C's 
 prodigality, that which would have been consumed with a 
 return, is consumed without return. C 's tradesmen may 
 have made a profit during the process ; but if the capital 
 had been expended productively, an equivalent profit would 
 have been made by builders, fencers, tool-makers, and the 
 tradespeople who supply the consumption of the labouring 
 classes ; while at the expiration of the time (to say nothing 
 of an increase), C would have had the ten thousand pounds 
 or its value replaced to him, which now he has not. There 
 is, therefore, on the general result, a difference to the 
 disadvantage of the community, of at least ten thousand 
 pounds, being the amount of C's unproductive expenditure. 
 To A, the difference is not material, since his income is 
 secured to him, and while the security is good, and the 
 market rate of interest the same, he can always sell the 
 mortgage at its original value. To A, therefore, the lien of 
 ten thousand pounds on C's estate, is virtually a capital of 
 that amount ; but is it so in reference to the community ?
 
 92 I. CHAPTER IV. 8. 
 
 It is not. A had a capital of ten thousand pounds, but this 
 has been extinguished dissipated and destroyed by C's 
 prodigality. A now receives his income, not from the 
 produce of his capital, but from some other source of in- 
 come belonging to C, probably from the rent of his land, 
 that is, from payments made to him by farmers out of the 
 produce of their capital. The national capital is dimin- 
 ished by ten thousand pounds, and the national income by 
 all which those ten thousand pounds, employed as capital, 
 would have produced. The loss does not fall on the owner 
 of the destroyed capital, since the destroyer has agreed to 
 indemnify him for it. But his loss is only a small portion 
 of that sustained by the community, since what was devoted 
 to the use and consumption of the proprietor was only the 
 interest ; the capital itself was, or would have been, em- 
 ployed in the perpetual maintenance of an equivalent num- 
 ber of labourers, regularly reproducing what they con- 
 sumed : and of this maintenance they are deprived without 
 compensation. 
 
 Let us now vary the hypothesis still further, and sup- 
 pose that the money is borrowed, not by a landlord, but by 
 the State. A lends his capital to Government to carry on 
 a war : he buys from the State what are called government 
 securities ; that is, obligations on the government to pay a 
 certain annual income. If the government employed the 
 money in making a railroad, this might be a productive 
 employment, and A's property would still be used as capi- 
 tal ; but since it is employed in war, that is, in the pay of 
 officers and soldiers who produce nothing, and in destroying 
 a quantity of gunpowder and bullets without return, the 
 government is in the situation of C, the spendthrift land- 
 lord, and A's ten thousand pounds are so much national 
 capital which once existed, but exists uo longer : virtually 
 thrown into the sea, as far as wealth or production is con- 
 cerned ; though for other reasons the employment of it may 
 have been justifiable. A's subsequent income is derived, 
 not from the produce of his own capital, but from taxes
 
 CAPITAL. 93 
 
 drawn from the produce of the remaining capital of the 
 community ; to whom his capital is not yielding any return, 
 to indemnify them for the payment ; it is all lost and gone, 
 and what he now possesses is a claim on the returns to other 
 people's capital and industry. This claim he can sell, and 
 get back the equivalent of his capital, which he may after- 
 wards employ productively. True ; but he does not get 
 back his own capital, or anything which it has produced ; 
 that, and all its possible returns, are extinguished : what he 
 gets is the capital of some other person, which that person 
 is willing to exchange for his lien on the taxes. Another 
 capitalist substitutes himself for A as a mortgagee of the 
 public, and A substitutes himself for the other capitalist as 
 the possessor of a fund employed in production, or available 
 for it. By this exchange the productive powers of the com- 
 munity are neither increased nor diminished. The breach 
 in the capital of the country was made when the govern- 
 ment spent A's money : whereby a value of ten thousand 
 pounds was withdrawn or withheld from productive employ- 
 ment, placed in the fund for unproductive consumption, and 
 destroyed without equivalent.
 
 CHAPTER Y. 
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS RESPECTING CAPITAL. 
 
 1. IF the preceding explanations have answered their 
 purpose, they have given not only a sufficiently complete t 
 possession of the idea of Capital according to its definition, 
 but a sufficient familiarity with it in the concrete, and 
 amidst the obscurity with which the complication of indi- 
 vidual circumstances surrounds it, to have prepared even 
 the unpractised reader for certain elementary propositions 
 or theorems respecting capital, the full comprehension of 
 which is already a considerable step out of darkness into 
 light. 
 
 The first of these propositions is, That industry is limited 
 \>y capital. This is so obvious as to be taken for granted in 
 many common forms of speech ; but to see a truth occa- 
 sionally is one thing, to recognise it habitually, and admit 
 no propositions inconsistent with it, is another. The axiom 
 was until lately almost universally disregarded by legisla- 
 tors and political writers ; and doctrines irreconcileable 
 with it are still very commonly professed and inculcated. 
 
 The following are common expressions, implying its 
 truth. The act of directing industry to a particular employ- 
 ment is described by the phrase " applying capital " to the 
 employment. To employ industry on the land is to apply 
 capital to the land. To employ labour in a manufacture is 
 to invest capital in the manufacture. This implies that in- 
 dustry cannot be employed to any greater extent than there 
 is capital to invest. The proposition, indeed, must be as*
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 95 
 
 sented to as soon as it is distinctly apprehended. The 
 expression " applying capital " is of course metaphorical : 
 what is really applied is labour ; capital being an indispen- 
 sable condition. Again, we often speak of the " productive 
 powers of capital." This expression is not literally correct. 
 The only productive powers are those of labour and natural 
 agents ; or if any portion of capital can by a stretch of lan- 
 guage be said to have a productive power of its own, it is 
 only tools and machinery, which, like wind or water, may 
 be said to cooperate with labour. The food of labourers 
 and the materials of production have no productive power ; 
 but labour cannot exert its productive power unless pro- 
 vided with them. There can be no more industry than is 
 supplied with materials to work up and food to eat. Self- 
 evident as the thing is, it is often forgotten that the people 
 of a country are maintained and have their wants supplied, 
 not by the produce of present labour, but of past. They 
 consume what has been produced, not what is about to be 
 produced. Now, of what has been produced, a part only is 
 allotted to the support of productive labour ; and there will 
 not and cannot be more of that labour than the portion so 
 allotted (which is the capital of the country) can feed, and 
 provide with the materials and instruments of production. 
 
 Yet, in disregard of a fact so evident, it long continued 
 to be believed that laws and governments, without creating 
 capital, could create industry. Not by making the people 
 more laborious, or increasing the efficiency of their labour ; 
 these are objects to which the government can, in some 
 degree, indirectly contribute. But without any increase in 
 the skill or energy of the labourers, and without causing 
 any persons to labour who had previously been maintained 
 in idleness, it was still thought that the government, with 
 out providing additional funds, could create additional em- 
 ployment. A government would, by prohibitory laws, put 
 a stop to* the importation of some commodity ; and when by 
 this it had caused the commodity to be produced at home, 
 it would plume itself upon having enriched the country
 
 96 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 2. 
 
 with a new branch of industry, would parade in statistical 
 tables the amount of produce yielded and labour employed 
 in the production, and take credit for the whole of this as a 
 gain to the country, obtained through the prohibitory law. 
 Although this sort of political arithmetic has fallen a little 
 into discredit in England, it still flourishes in the nations of 
 Continental Europe. Had legislators been aware that in- 
 dustry is limited by capital, they would have seen that, the 
 aggregate capital of the country not having been increased, 
 any portion of it which they by their laws had caused to be 
 embarked in the newly-acquired branch of industry must 
 have been withdrawn or withheld from some other ; in 
 which it gave, or would have given, employment to prob- 
 ably about the same quantity of labour which it employs in 
 its new occupation.* 
 
 2. Because industry is limited by capital, we are not 
 however to infer that it always reaches that limit. There 
 may not be as many labourers obtainable, as the capital 
 would maintain and employ. This has been known to 
 occur in new colonies, where capital has sometimes perished 
 
 * An exception must be admitted when the industry created or upheld by 
 the restrictive law belongs to the class of what are called domestic manufactures. 
 These being carried on by persons already fed by labouring families, in the in- 
 tervals of other employment no transfer of capital to the occupation is necessary 
 to its being undertaken, beyond the value of the materials and tools, which is 
 often inconsiderable. If, therefore, a protecting duty causes this occupation tp 
 be carried on, when it otherwise would not, there is in this case a real increase 
 of the production of the country. 
 
 In order to render our theoretical proposition invulnerable, this peculiar case 
 must be allowed for ; but it does not touch the practical doctriue of free trade- 
 Domestic manufactures cannot, from the very nature of things, require protec- 
 tion, since the subsistence of the labourers being provided from other sources, 
 the price of the product, however much it may be reduced, is nearly all clear 
 gain. If, therefore, the domestic producers retire from the competition, it v 
 never from necessity, but because the product is not worth the labour it costs, in 
 the opinion of the best judges, those who enjoy the one and undergo* the other. 
 They prefer the sacrifice of buying their clothing to the labour of making it. 
 They will not continue their labour unless society will give them more for it, 
 than in their own opinion its product is worth.
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 97 
 
 uselessly for want of labour : the Swan Kiver settlement 
 (now called Western Australia), in the first years after its 
 foundation, was an instance. There are many persons 
 maintained from existing capital, who produce nothing, or 
 who might produce much more than they do. If the 
 labourers were reduced to lower wages, or induced to work 
 more hours for the same wages, or if their families, who are 
 already maintained from capital, were employed to a 
 greater extent than they now are in adding to the produce, 
 a given capital would afford employment to more industry. 
 The unproductive consumption of productive labourers, the 
 whole of which is now supplied by capital, might cease, or 
 be postponed until the produce came in ; and additional pro- 
 ductive labourers might be maintained with the amount. 
 By such means society might obtain from its existing 
 resources a greater quantity of produce : and to such means 
 it has been driven, when the sudden destruction of some 
 large portion of its capital rendered the employment of the 
 remainder with the greatest possible effect, a matter of para- 
 mount consideration for the time. 
 
 Where industry has not come up to the limit imposed by 
 capital, governments may, in various ways, for example by 
 importing additional labourers, bring it nearer to that 
 limit : as by the importation of Coolies and free Negroes 
 into the West Indies. There is another way in which gov- 
 ernments can create additional industry. They can create 
 capital. They may lay on taxes, and employ the amount 
 productively. They may do what is nearly equivalent ; 
 they may lay taxes on income or expenditure, and apply 
 the proceeds towards paying off the public debts. The fund 
 holder, when paid off, would still desire to draw an income 
 from his property, most of which therefore would find its 
 way into productive employment, while a great part of it 
 would have been drawn from the fund for unproductive 
 expenditure, since people do not wholly pay their taxes 
 from what they would have saved, but partly, if not chiefly, 
 from what they would have spent. It may be added, that 
 7
 
 98 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 8. 
 
 any increase in the productive power of capital (or, more 
 properly speaking, of labour) by improvements in the arts 
 of life, or otherwise, tends to increase the employment for 
 labour ; since, when there is a greater produce altogether, 
 it is always probable that some portion of the increase will 
 be saved and converted into capital ; especially when the 
 increased returns to productive industry hold out an addi- 
 tional temptation to the conversion of funds from an unpro- 
 ductive destination to a productive. 
 
 3. "While, on the one hand, industry is limited by 
 capital, so on the other, every increase of capital gives, or is 
 capable of giving, additional employment to industry ; arid 
 this without assignable limit. I do not mean to deny that 
 the capital, or part of it, may be so employed as not to sup- 
 port labourers, being fixed in machinery, buildings, im- 
 provement of land, and the like. In any large increase of 
 capital a considerable portion will generally be thus em- 
 ployed, and will only cooperate with labourers, not main- 
 tain them. What I do intend to assert is, that the portion 
 which is destined to their maintenance, may (supposing no 
 alteration in anything else) be indefinitely increased, with- 
 out creating an impossibility of finding the employment : 
 in other words, that if there are human beings capable of 
 work, and food to feed them, they may always be employed 
 in producing something. This proposition requires to be 
 somewhat dwelt upon, being one of those which it is ex- 
 ceedingly easy to assent to when presented in general 
 terms, but somewhat difficult to keep fast hold of, in the 
 crowd and confusion of the actual facts of society. It is 
 also very much opposed to common doctrines. There is not 
 an opinion more general among mankind than this, that the 
 unproductive expenditure of the rich is necessary to the 
 employment of the poor. Before Adam Smith, the doctrine 
 had hardly been questioned ; and even since his time, 
 authors of the highest name and of great merit* have con- 
 
 * For example, Mr. Mai thus, Dr. Chalmers, M. de Sismondi.
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 99 
 
 tended, that if consumers were to save and convert into 
 capital more than a limited portion of their income, and 
 were not to devote to unproductive consumption an amount 
 of means bearing a certain ratio to the capital of the coun- 
 try, the extra accumulation would be merely so much waste, 
 since there would be no market for the commodities which 
 the capital so created would produce. I conceive this to be 
 one of the many errors arising in political economy, from the 
 practice of not beginning with the examination of simple 
 cases, but rushing at once into the complexity of concrete 
 phenomena. 
 
 Every one can see that if a benevolent government pos- 
 sessed all the food, and all the implements and materials, 
 of the community, it could exact productive labour from all 
 to whom it allowed a share in the food, and could be in no 
 danger of wanting a field for the employment of this pro- 
 ductive labour, since as long as there was a single want 
 unsaturated (which material objects could supply), of any 
 one individual, the labour of the community could be 
 turned to the production of something capable of satisfying 
 that want. Now, the individual possessors of capital, when 
 they add to it by fresh accumulations, are doing precisely 
 the same thing which we suppose to be done by a benevo- 
 lent government. As it is allowable to put any case by 
 way of hypothesis, let us imagine the most extreme case 
 conceivable. Suppose that every capitalist came to be of 
 opinion that not being more meritorious than a well-con- 
 ducted labourer, he ought not to fare better ; and accord- 
 ingly laid by, from conscientious motives, the surplus of his 
 profits ; or suppose this abstinence not spontaneous, but 
 imposed by law or opinion upon all capitalists, and upon 
 landowners likewise. Unproductive expenditure is now 
 reduced to its lowest limit : and it is asked, how is the 
 increased capital to find employment ? Who is to buy the 
 goods which it will produce? There are no longer cus- 
 tomers even for those which were produced before. The 
 goods, therefore, (it is said) will remain unsold ; they will
 
 100 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 8. 
 
 perish in the warehouses ; until capital is brought down to> 
 what it was originally, or rather to as much less, as the 
 demand of the customers has lessened. But this is seeing 
 only one-half of the matter. In the case supposed, there 
 would no longer be any demand for luxuries, on the part 
 of capitalists and landowners. But when these classes turn 
 their income into capital, they do not thereby annihilate 
 their power of consumption ; they do but transfer it from 
 themselves to the labourers to whom they give employ- 
 ment. Now, there are two possible suppositions in regard 
 to the labourers ; either there is, or there is not, an increaee 
 of their numbers, proportional to the increase of capital. 
 If there is, the case offers no difficulty. The production of 
 necessaries for the new population, takes the place of the 
 production of luxuries for a portion of the old, and supplies 
 exactly the amount of employment which has been lost. 
 But suppose that there is no increase of population. The 
 whole of what was previously expended in luxuries, by 
 capitalists and landlords, is distributed among the existing 
 labourers, in the form of additional wages. We will assume 
 them to be already sufficiently supplied with necessaries. 
 What follows ? That the labourers become consumers of 
 luxuries ; and the capital previously employed in the pro- 
 duction of luxuries, is still able to employ itself in the same 
 manner : the difference being, that the luxuries are shared 
 among the community generally, instead of being confined 
 to a few. The increased accumulation and increased pro- 
 duction might, rigorously speaking, continue, until every 
 labourer had every indulgence of wealth, consistent with 
 continuing to work ; supposing that the power of their 
 labour were physically sufficient to produce all this amount 
 of indulgences for their whole number. Thus the limit of 
 wealth is never deficiency of consumers, but of producers 
 and productive power. Every addition to capital gives to 
 labour either additional employment, or additional remune- 
 ration ; enriches either the country, or the labouring class. 
 If it finds additional hands to set to work, it increases the
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 
 
 aggregate produce : if only the same hands, it gives them a 
 larger share of it ; and perhaps even in this case, by stimu- 
 lating them to greater exertion, augments the produce itself. 
 
 4. A second fundamental theorem respecting Capi- 
 tal, relates to the source from which it is derived. It is the 
 result of saving. The evidence of this lies abundantly in 
 what has been already said on the subject. But the propo- 
 sition needs some further illustration. 
 
 If all persons were to expend in personal indulgences all 
 that they produce, and all the income they receive from 
 what is produced by others, capital could not increase. All 
 capital, with a trifling exception, was originally the result 
 of saving. I say, with a trifling exception ; because a per- 
 son who labours on his own account, may spend on his own 
 account all he produces, without becoming destitute ; and 
 the provision of necessaries on which he subsists until he has 
 reaped his harvest, or sold his commodity, though a real 
 capital, cannot be said to have been saved, since it is all 
 used for the supply of his own wants, and perhaps as speed- 
 ily as if it had been consumed in idleness. We may imagine 
 a number of individuals or families settled on as many sep- 
 arate pieces of land, each living on what their own labour 
 produces, and consuming the whole produce. But even 
 these must save (that is, spare from their personal consump- 
 tion) as much as is necessary for seed. Some saving, there- 
 fore, there must have been, even in this simplest of all 
 states of economical relations ; people must have produced 
 more than they used, or used less than they produced. 
 Still more must they do so before they can employ other 
 labourers, or increase their production beyond what can be 
 accomplished by the work of their own hands. All that 
 any one employs in supporting and carrying on any other 
 labour than his own, must have been originally brought 
 together by saving ; somebody must have produced it and 
 forborne to consume it. We may say, therefore,
 
 102 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 4. 
 
 material inaccuracy, that all capital, and especially all addi. 
 tion to capital, are the result of saving. 
 
 In a rude and violent state of society, it continually hap- 
 pens that the person who has capital is not the very person 
 who has saved it, but some one who, being stronge;-. or be- 
 longing to a more powerful community, has posaossed him- 
 self of it by plunder. And even in a state of tilings in 
 which property was protected, the increase of capital hag 
 usually been, for a long time, mainly derived from priva- 
 tions which, though essentially the same witlt saving, ar<j 
 not generally called by that name, because not voluntary. 
 The actual producers have been slaves, compelled to pro 
 duce as much as force could extort from them, and to con 
 sume as little as the self-interest or the usually very slender 
 humanity of their taskmasters would permit. This kind of 
 compulsory saving, however, would not have caused any 
 increase of capital, unless a part of the amount had been 
 saved over again, voluntarily, by the master. If all that he 
 made his slaves produce and forbear to consume, had been 
 consumed by him on personal indulgences, ho would not 
 have increased his capital, nor been enabled to maintain an 
 increasing number, of slaves. To maintain any slaves at 
 all, implied a previous saving ; a stock, at least of food, 
 provided in advance. This saving may not, however, have 
 been made by any self-imposed privatio/i of the master ; 
 but more probably by that of the slaves themselves while 
 free ; the rapine or war, which deprived them of their per- 
 sonal liberty, having transferred also their accumulations to 
 the conqueror. 
 
 There are other cases in which the term saving, with 
 the associations usually belonging to it, does not exactly fit 
 the operation by which capital is increased. If it were 
 said, for instance, that the only way to accelerate the 
 increase of capital is by increase of saving, the idea would 
 probably be suggested of greater abstinence, and increased 
 privation. But it is obvious that whatever increases the 
 productive power of labour, creates an additional fund to
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 103 
 
 make savings from, and enables capital to be enlarged not 
 only without additional privation, but concurrently with an 
 increase of personal consumption. Nevertheless, there is 
 here an increase of saving, in the scientific sense. Though 
 there is more consumed, there is also more spared. There 
 is a greater excess of production over consumption. It is 
 consistent with correctness to call this a greater saving. 
 Though the term is not unobjectionable, there is no other 
 which is not liable to as great objections. To consume less 
 than is produced, is saving ; and that is the process by 
 which capital is increased j not necessarily by consuming 
 less, absolutely. We must not allow ourselves to be so 
 much the slaves of words, as to be unable to use the word 
 saving in this sense, without being in danger of forgetting 
 that to increase capital there is another way besides con- 
 suming less, namely, to produce more. 
 i 
 
 5. A third fundamental theorem respecting Capital, 
 closely connected with the one last discussed, is, that 
 although saved, and the result of saving, it is nevertheless 
 consumed. The word saving does not imply that what is 
 saved is not consumed, nor even necessarily that its con- 
 sumption is deferred ; but only that, if consumed imme- 
 diately it is not consumed by the person who saves it. If 
 merely laid by for future use, it is said to be hoarded ; and 
 while hoarded, is not consumed at all. But if employed as 
 capital, it is all consumed ; though not by the capitalist. 
 Part is exchanged for tools or machinery, which are worn 
 out by use : part for seed or materials, which are destroyed 
 as such by being sown or wrought up, and destroyed alto- 
 gether by the consumption of the ultimate product. The 
 remainder is paid in wages to productive labourers, who 
 consume it for their daily wants ; or if they in their turn 
 save any part, this also is not, generally speaking, hoarded, 
 but (through savings banks, benefit clubs, or some other 
 channel) re-employed as capital, and consumed. 
 
 The principle now stated is a strong example of the
 
 104 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 5. 
 
 necessity of attention to the most elementary truths of our 
 subject : for it is one of the most elementary of them all, 
 and yet no one who has not bestowed some thought on the 
 matter is habitually aware of it, and most are not even 
 willing to admit it when first stated. To the vulgar, it is 
 not at all apparent that what is saved is consumed. To 
 them, every one who saves, appears in the light of a person 
 who hoards ; they may think such conduct permissible, or 
 even laudable, when it is to provide for a family, and the 
 like ; but they have no conception of it as doing good to 
 other people : saving is to them another word for keeping a 
 thing to oneself ; while spending appears to them to be dis- 
 tributing it among others. The person who expends his 
 fortune in unproductive consumption, is looked upon as 
 diffusing benefits all around ; and is an object of so much 
 favour, that some portion of the same popularity attaches 
 even to him who spends what does not belong to him ; who 
 not only destroys his own capital, if he ever had any, but, 
 under pretence ol borrowing, and on promise of repayment, 
 possesses himself of capital belonging to others, and destroys 
 that likewise. 
 
 This popular error comes from attending to a small por- 
 tion only of the consequences that flow from the saving or 
 the spending ; all the effects of either which are out of sight, 
 being out of mind. The eye follows what is saved, into an 
 imaginary strong box, and there loses sight of it ; what is 
 spent, it follows into the hands of tradespeople and depen- 
 dents ; but without reaching the ultimate destination in 
 either case. Saving (for productive investment), and spend- 
 ing, coincide very closely in the first stage of their opera- 
 tions. The effects of both begin with consumption ; with 
 the destruction of a certain portion of wealth ; only the 
 things consumed, and the persons consuming, are different. 
 There is, in the one case, a wearing out of tools, a destruc- 
 tion of material, and a quantity of food and clothing sup- 
 plied to labourers, which they destroy by use : in the othei 
 case, there is a consumption, that is to say, a destruction, of
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 1Q5 
 
 wines, equipages, and furniture. Thus far, the consequence 
 to the national wealth has been much the same ; an equiva- 
 lent quantity of it has been destroyed in both cases. But 
 in the spending, this first stage is also the final stage ; that 
 particular amount of the produce of labour has disappeared, 
 and there is nothing left ; while, on the contrary, the saving 
 person, during the whole time that the destruction was 
 going on, has had labourers at work repairing it ; who are 
 ultimately found to have replaced, with an increase, the 
 equivalent of what has been consumed. And as this opera- 
 tion admits of being repeated indefinitely without any fresh 
 act of saving, a saving once made becomes a fund to main- 
 tain a corresponding number of labourers in perpetuity, 
 reproducing annually their own maintenance with a profit. 
 It is the intervention of money which obscures, to an 
 unpractised apprehension, the true character of these phe- 
 nomena. Almost all expenditure being carried on by 
 means of money, the money comes to be looked upon as the 
 main feature in the transaction ; and since that does not 
 perish, but only changes hands, people overlook the destruc- 
 tion which takes place in the case of unproductive expendi- 
 ture. The money being merely transferred, they think the 
 wealth also has only been handed over from the spendthrift 
 to other people. But this is simply confounding money 
 with wealth. The wealth which has been destroyed was 
 not the money, but the wines, equipages, and furniture 
 which the money purchased ; and these having been 
 destroyed without return, society collectively is poorer by 
 the amount. It may be said, perhaps, that wines, equip- 
 ages, and furniture, are not subsistence, tools, and materials, 
 and could not in any case have been applied to the support 
 of labour ; that they are adapted for no other than unpro- 
 ductive consumption, and that the detriment to the wealth 
 of the community was when they were produced, not when 
 they were consumed. I am willing to allow this, as far as 
 is necessary for the argument, and the remark would be 
 very pertinent if these expensive luxuries were drawn from
 
 106 BOOK I- CHAPTER V. 5. 
 
 an existing stock, never to be replenished. But since, on 
 the contrary, they continue to be produced as long as there 
 are consumers for them, and are produced in increased 
 quantity to meet an increased demand ; the choice made by 
 a consumer to expend five thousand a year in luxuries, 
 keeps a corresponding number of labourers employed from 
 year to year in producing things which can be of no use to 
 production ; their services being lost so far as regards the 
 increase of the national wealth, and the tools, materials, and 
 food which they annually consume being so much sub- 
 tracted from the general stock of the community applicable 
 to productive purposes. In proportion as any class is im- 
 provident or luxurious, the industry of the country takes the 
 direction of producing luxuries for their use ; while not only 
 the employment for productive labourers is diminished, but 
 the subsistence and instruments which are the means of such 
 employment do actually exist in smaller quantity. 
 
 Saving, in short, enriches, and spending impoverishes, 
 the community along with the individual ; which is but 
 saying in other words, that society at large is richer by 
 what it expends in maintaining and aiding productive 
 labour, but poorer by what it consumes in its enjoyments.* 
 
 * It is perhaps worth while to direct attention to several circumstances 
 which to a certain extent diminish the detriment caused to the general wealth by 
 the prodigality of individuals, or raise up a compensation, more or less ample, as 
 a consequence of the detriment itself. One of these is, that spendthrifts do not 
 usually succeed in consuming all they spend. Their habitual carelessness as to 
 expenditure causes them to be cheated and robbed on all quarters, often by per- 
 sons of frugal habits. Large accumulations are continually made by the agents, 
 stewards, and even domestic servants, of improvident persons of fortune; and 
 they pay much higher prices for all purchases than "people of careful habits, 
 which accounts for their being popular as customers. They are, therefore, actu- 
 ally not able to get into their possession and destroy a quantity of wealth by any 
 means equivalent to the fortune which they dissipate. Much of it is merely 
 transferred to others, by whom a part may be saved. Another thing to be ob- 
 served is, that the prodigality of some may reduce others to a forced economy. 
 Suppose a sudden demand for some article of luxury, caused by the caprice of a 
 prodigal, which not having been calculated on beforehand, there has been no in- 
 crease of the usual supply. The price will rise ; and may rise beyond the means 
 or the inclinations of some of the habitual consumers, who may in consequent
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 1Q7 
 
 6. To return to our fundamental theorem. Every- 
 thing which is produced is consumed ; both what is saved 
 and what is said to be spent ; and the former quite as 
 rapidly as the latter. All the ordinary forms of language 
 tend to disguise this. When people talk of the ancient 
 wealth of a country, of riches inherited from ancestors, and 
 similar expressions, the idea suggested is, that the riches so 
 transmitted were produced long ago, at the time when they 
 are said to have been first acquired, and that no portion of 
 the capital of the country was produced this year, except 
 as much as may have been this year added to the total 
 amount. The fact is far otherwise. The greater part, in 
 value, of the wealth now existing in England has been pro- 
 duced by human hands within the last twelve months. A 
 very small proportion indeed of that large aggregate was in 
 existence ten years ago ; of the present productive capital 
 of the country scarcely any part, except farm-houses and 
 
 forego their accustomed indulgence, and save the amount. If they do not, but 
 continue to expend as great a value as before on the commodity, the dealers in 
 it obtain, for only the same quantity of the article, a return increased by the 
 whole of what the spendthrift has paid ; and thus the amount which he loses is 
 transferred bodily to them, and may be added to their capital ; his increased per- 
 sonal consumption being made up by the privations of the other purchasers, who 
 have obtained less than usual of their accustomed gratification for the same 
 equivalent. On the other hand, a counter process must be going on somewhere, 
 since the prodigal must have diminished his purchases in some other quarter to 
 balance the augmentation in this ; he has perhaps called in funds employed in 
 sustaining productive labour, and the dealers in subsistence and in the instru- 
 ments of production have had commodities left on their hands, or have received, 
 for the usual amount of commodities, a less than usual return. But such losses 
 of income or capital, by industrious persons, except when of extraordinary 
 amount, are generally made up by increased pinching and privation ; so that the 
 capital of the community may not be, on the whole, impaired, and the prodigal 
 may have had his self-indulgence at the expense not of the permanent resources, 
 but of the temporary pleasures and comforts of others. For in every case the 
 community are poorer by what any one spends, unless others are in consequence 
 led to curtail their spending. There are yet other and more recondite ways in 
 which the profusion of some may bring about its compensation in the extra sav- 
 ings of others ; but these can only be considered in that part of the Fourth 
 Book, which treats of the limiting principle to the accumulation of capital.
 
 108 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 7. 
 
 manufactories, and a few ships and machines ; and even 
 these would not in most cases have survived so long, if fresh 
 labour had not been employed within that period in putting 
 them into repair. The land subsists, and the land is almost 
 the only thing that subsists. Everything which is produced 
 perishes, and most things very quickly. Most kinds of 
 capital are not fitted by their nature to be long preserved. 
 There are a few, and but a few productions, capable of a 
 very prolonged existence. "Westminster Abbey has lasted 
 many centuries, with occasional repairs ; some Grecian 
 sculptures have existed above two thousand years ; the 
 Pyramids perhaps double or treble that time. But these 
 were objects devoted to unproductive use. If we except 
 bridges and aqueducts (to which may in some countries be 
 added tanks and embankments), there are few instances 
 of any edifice applied to industrial purposes which has been 
 of great duration ; such buildings do not hold out against 
 wear and tear, nor is it good economy to construct them of 
 the solidity necessary for permanency. Capital is kept in 
 existence from age to age not by preservation, but by per- 
 petual reproduction : every part of it is used and destroyed, 
 generally very soon after it is produced, but those who con- 
 sume it are employed meanwhile in producing more. The 
 growth of capital is similar to the growth of population- 
 Every individual who is born, dies, but in each year the 
 number born exceeds the number who die : the population 
 therefore, always increases, though not one person of those 
 composing it was alive until a very recent date. 
 
 7. This perpetual consumption and reproduction of 
 capital affords the explanation of what has so often excited 
 wonder, the great rapidity with which countries recover 
 from a state of devastation ; the disappearance, in a short 
 time, of all traces of the mischiefs done by earthquakes, 
 floods, hurricanes, and the ravages of war. An enemy lays 
 waste a country by fire and sword, and destroys or carries 
 away nearly all the moveable wealth existing in it : all the
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 1Q9 
 
 inhabitants are ruined, and yet in a few years after, every- 
 thing is much as it was before. This vis medicatrix naturae 
 has been a subject of sterile astonishment, or has been cited 
 to exemplify the wonderful strength of the principle of 
 saving, which can repair such enormous losses in so brief an 
 interval. There is nothing at all wonderful in the matter. 
 What the enemy have destroyed, would have been de- 
 stroyed in a little time by the inhabitants themselves : the 
 wealth which they so rapidly reproduce, would have needed 
 to be reproduced and would have been reproduced in any 
 case, and probably in as short a time. Nothing is changed, 
 except that during the reproduction they have not now the 
 advantage of consuming what had been produced previous- 
 ly. The possibility of a rapid repair of their disasters, 
 mainly depends on whether the country has been depopu- 
 lated. If its effective population have not been extirpated 
 at the time, and are not starved afterwards ; then, with the 
 same skill and knowledge which they had before, with their 
 land and its permanent improvements undestroyed, and the 
 more durable buildings probably unimpaired, or only par- 
 tially injured, they have nearly all the requisites for their 
 former amount of production. If there is as much of food 
 left to them, or of valuables to buy food, as enables them 
 by any amount of privation to remain alive and in working 
 condition, they will in a short time have raised as great a 
 produce, and acquired collectively as great wealth and as 
 great a capital, as before ; by the mere continuance of that 
 ordinary amount of exertion which they are accustomed to 
 employ in their occupations. Nor does this evince any 
 strength in the principle of saving, in the popular sense of 
 the term, since what takes place is not intentional absti- 
 nence, but involuntary privation. 
 
 Yet so fatal is the habit of thinking through the me- 
 dium of only one set of technical phrases, and so little 
 reason have studious men to value themselves on being 
 exempt from the very same mental infirmities which beset 
 the vulgar, that this simple explanation was never given (so
 
 110 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 8. 
 
 far as I am aware) by any political economist before Dr. 
 Chalmers ; a writer many of whose opinions I think erro- 
 neous, hut who has always the merit of studying phenomena 
 at first hand, and expressing them in a language of his own, 
 which often uncovers aspects of the truth that the received 
 phraseologies only tend to hide. 
 
 8. The same author carries out this train of thought 
 to some important conclusions on another closely connected 
 subject, that of government loans for war purposes or other 
 unproductive expenditure. These loans, being drawn from 
 capital (in lieu of taxes, which would generally have been 
 paid from income, and made up in part or altogether by in- 
 creased economy) must, according to the principles we have 
 laid down, tend to impoverish the country : yet the years 
 in which expenditure of this sort has been on the greatest 
 scale, have often been years of great apparent prosperity : 
 the wealth and resources of the country, instead of dimin- 
 ishing, have given every sign of rapid increase during the 
 process, and of greatly expanded dimensions after its close. 
 This was confessedly the case with Great Britain during the 
 last long Continental war ; and it would take some space to 
 enumerate all the unfounded theories in political economy, 
 to which that fact gave rise, and to which it secured tem- 
 porary credence ; almost all tending to exalt unproductive 
 expenditure, at the expense of productive. Without enter- 
 ing into all the causes which operated, and which commonly 
 do operate, to prevent these extraordinary drafts on the 
 productive resources of a country from being so much felt 
 as it might seem reasonable to expect, we will suppose the 
 most unfavourable case possible : that the whole amount bor- 
 rowed and destroyed by the government, was abstracted by 
 the lender from a productive employment in which it had 
 actually been invested. The capital, therefore, of the coun- 
 try, is this year diminished by so much. But unless the 
 amount abstracted is something enormous, there is no reason 
 in the nature of the case why next year the national capital
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. HI 
 
 should not be as great as ever. The loan cannot have been 
 taken from that portion of the capital of the country which 
 consists of tools, machinery, and buildings. It must have 
 been wholly drawn from the portion employed in paying 
 labourers : and the labourers will suffer accordingly. But 
 if none of them are starved ; if their wages can bear such 
 an amount of reduction, or if charity interposes between 
 them and absolute destitution, there is no reason that their 
 labour should produce less in the next year than in the year 
 before. If they produce as much as usual, having been 
 paid less by so many millions sterling, these millions are 
 gained by their employers. The breach made in the capital 
 of the country is thus instantly repaired, but repaired by 
 the privations and often the real misery of the labouring 
 class. Here is ample reason why such periods, even in the 
 most unfavourable circumstances, may easily be times of 
 great gain to those whose prosperity usually passes, in the 
 estimation of society, for national prosperity.* 
 
 * On the other hand, it must be remembered that war abstracts from produc- 
 tive employment not only capital, but likewise labourers ; that the funds with- 
 drawn from the remuneration of productive labourers are partly employed in 
 paying the same or other individuals for unproductive labour ; and that by this 
 portion of its effects, war expenditure acts in precisely the opposite manner to 
 that which Dr. Chalmers points out, and, so far as it goes, directly counteracts 
 the effects described in the text. So far as labourers are taken from production 
 to man the army and navy, the labouring classes are not damaged, the capitalists 
 are not benefited, and the general produce of the country is diminished, by war 
 expenditure. Accordingly, Dr. Chalmers's doctrine, though true of this country, 
 is wholly inapplicable to countries differently circumstanced ; to France, for ex- 
 ample, during the Napoleon wars. At that period the draught on the labouring 
 population of France, for a long series of years, was enormous, while the funds 
 which supported the war were mostly supplied by contributions levied on the 
 countries overrun by the French arms, a very small proportion alone consisting 
 of French capital. In France, accordingly, the wages of labour did not fall, but 
 rose; the employers of labour were not benefited, but injured ; while the wealth 
 of the country was impaired by the suspension or total loss of so vast an amount 
 of its productive labour. In England all this was reversed. England employed 
 comparatively few additional soldiers and sailors of her own, while she diverted 
 hundreds of millions of capital from productive employment, to supply munitions 
 of war and support armies for her Continental allies. Consequently, as shown
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 8. 
 
 This leads to the vexed question to which Dr. Chalmers 
 has very particularly adverted ; whether the funds required 
 by a government for extraordinary unproductive expendi- 
 ture, are best raised by loans, the interest only being pro- 
 vided by taxes, or whether taxes should be at once laid on 
 to the whole amount ; which is called in the financial vocab- 
 ulary, raising the whole of the supplies within the year. 
 Dr. Chalmers is strongly for the latter method. He says, 
 the common notion is that in calling for the whole amount 
 in one year, you require w r hat is either impossible, or very 
 inconvenient ; that the people cannot, without great hard- 
 ship, pay the whole at once out of their yearly income ; arid 
 that it is much better to require of them a small payment 
 every year in the shape of interest, than so great a sacri- 
 fice once for all. To which his answer is, that the sacrifice 
 is made equally in either case. Whatever is spent, cannot 
 but be drawn from yearly income. The whole and every 
 part of the wealth produced in the country, forms, or helps 
 to form, the yearly income of somebody. The privation 
 which it is supposed must result from taking the amount in 
 the shape of taxes, is not avoided by taking it in a loan. 
 The suffering is not averted, but only thrown upon the 
 labouring classes, the least able, and who least ought, to 
 bear it : while all the inconveniences, physical, moral, and 
 political, produced by maintaining taxes for the perpetual 
 payment of the interest, are incurred in pure loss. When- 
 ever capital is withdrawn from production, or from the fund 
 destined for production, to be lent to the State and expended 
 unproductively, that whole sum is withheld from the 
 labouring classes : the loan, therefore, is in truth paid off 
 the same year ; the whole of the sacrifice necessary for pay- 
 ing it off is actually made : only it is paid to the wrong 
 persons, and therefore does not extinguish the claim ; and 
 paid by the very worst of taxes, a tax exclusively on the la- 
 bouring class. And after having, in this most painful and 
 
 in the text, her labourers suffered, her capitalists prospered, and her permanent 
 productive resources did not fall off.
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. H3 
 
 unjust of ways, gone through the whole effort necessary for 
 extinguishing the debt, the country remains charged with 
 it, and with the payment of its interest in perpetuity. 
 
 These views appear to me strictly just, in so far as the 
 value absorbed in loans would otherwise have been em- 
 ployed in productive industry within the country. The 
 practical state of the case, however, seldom exactly corre- 
 sponds with this supposition. The loans of the less wealthy 
 countries are made chiefly with foreign capital, which 
 would not, perhaps, have been brought in to be invested on 
 any less security than that of the government : while those 
 of rich and prosperous countries are generally made, not 
 with funds withdrawn from productive employment, but 
 with the new accumulations constantly making from in- 
 come, and often with a part of them which, if not so taken, 
 would have migrated to colonies, or sought other invest- 
 ments abroad. In these cases (which will be more particu- 
 larly examined hereafter*), the sum wanted may be obtained 
 by loan without detriment to the labourers, or derangement 
 of the national industry, and even perhaps with an advan- 
 tage to both, in comparison with raising the amount by 
 taxation, since taxes, especially when heavy, are almost 
 always partly paid at the expense of what would otherwise 
 have been saved and added to capital. Besides, in a coun- 
 try which makes so great yearly additions to its wealth that 
 a part can be taken and expended unproductively without 
 diminishing capital, or even preventing a considerable in- 
 crease, it is evident that even if the whole of what is so 
 taken would have become capital, and obtained employ- 
 ment in the country, the effect on the labouring classes is 
 far less prejudicial, and the case against the loan system 
 much less strong, than in the case first supposed. This 
 brief anticipation of a discussion which will find its proper 
 place elsewhere, appeared necessary to prevent false infer- 
 ences from the premises previously laid down. 
 
 * Infra, book iv. chap. iv. v.
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 9. "We now pass to a fourth fundamental theorem 
 respecting Capital, which is, perhaps, oftener overlooked 
 or misconceived than even any of the foregoing. What 
 supports and employs productive labour, is the capital 
 expended in setting it to work, and not the demand of pur- 
 chasers for the produce of the labour when completed. 
 Demand for commodities is not demand for labour. The 
 demand for commodities determines in what particular 
 branch the production of labour and capital, shall be em- 
 ployed ; it determines the direction of the labour ; but not 
 the more or less of the labour itself, or of the maintenance 
 or payment of the labour. That depends on the amount of 
 the capital, or other funds directly devoted to the sus- 
 tenance and remuneration of labour. 
 
 Suppose, for instance, that there is a demand for velvet ; 
 a fund ready to be laid out in buying velvet, but no capital 
 to establish the manufacture. It is of no consequence how 
 great the demand may be ; unless capital is attracted into 
 the occupation, there will be no velvet made, and conse- 
 quently none bought ; unless indeed, the desire of the 
 intending purchaser for it is so strong, that he employs part 
 of the price he would have paid for it, in making advances 
 to work-people, that they may employ themselves in making 
 velvet ; that is, unless he converts part of his income into 
 capital, and invests that capital in the manufacture. Let 
 us now reverse the hypothesis, and suppose that there is 
 plenty of capital ready for making velvet, but no demand. 
 Velvet will not be made ; but there is no particular prefer- 
 ence on the part of capital for making velvet. Manufac- 
 turers and their labourers do not produce for the pleasure 
 of their customers, but for the supply of their own wants, 
 and having still the capital and the labour which are the 
 essentials of production, they can either produce something 
 else which is in demand, or if there be no other demand, 
 they themselves have one, and can produce the things 
 which they want for their own consumption. So that the 
 employment afforded to labour does not depend on the pur-
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. H5 
 
 chasers, but on the capital. I am, of course, not taking into 
 consideration the effects of a sudden change. If the demand 
 ceases unexpectedly, after the commodity to supply it is 
 already produced, this introduces a different element into 
 the question : the capital has actually been consumed in 
 producing something which nobody wants or uses, and it 
 has therefore perished, and the employment which it gave 
 to labour is at an end, not because there is no longer a 
 demand, but because there is no longer a capital. This case 
 therefore does not test the principle. The proper test is, to 
 suppose that the change is gradual and foreseen, and is 
 attended with no waste of capital, the manufacture being 
 discontinued by merely not replacing the machinery as it 
 wears out, and not reinvesting the money as it comes in 
 from the sale of the produce. The capital is thus ready for 
 a new employment, in which it will maintain as much 
 labour as before. The manufacturer and his work-people 
 lose the benefit of the skill and knowledge which they had 
 acquired in the particular business, and which can only be 
 partially of use to them in any other ; and that is the 
 amount of loss to the community by the change. But the 
 labourers can still work, and the capital which previously 
 employed them will, either in the same hands, or by being 
 lent to others, employ either those labourers or an equiva- 
 lent number in some other occupation. 
 
 This theorem, that to purchase produce is not to employ 
 labour ; that the demand for labour is constituted by the 
 wages which precede the production, and not by the demand 
 which may exist for the commodities resulting from the pro- 
 duction ; is a proposition which greatly needs all the illus- 
 tration it can receive. It is, to common apprehension, a 
 paradox ; and even among political economists of reputa- 
 tion, I can hardly point to any, except Mr. Ricardo and 
 M. Say, who have kept it constantly and steadily in view. 
 Almost all others occasionally express themselves as if a 
 person who buys commodities, the produce of labour, was 
 an employer of labour, and created a demand for it as really,
 
 116 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 and in the same sense, as if he bought the labour itself 
 directly, by the payment of wages. It is no wonder that 
 political economy advances slowly, when such a question as 
 this still remains open at its very threshold. I apprehend, 
 that if by demand for labour be meant the demand by 
 which wages are raised, or the number of labourers in em- 
 ployment increased, demand for commodities does not con- 
 stitute demand for labour. I conceive that a person who 
 buys commodities and consumes them himself, does no good 
 to the labouring classes ; and that it is only by what he 
 abstains from consuming, and expends in direct payments 
 to labourers in exchange for labour, that he benefits the 
 labouring class, or adds anything to the amount of their 
 employment. 
 
 For the better illustration of the principle, let us put the 
 following case. A consumer may expend his income either 
 in buying services, or commodities. He may employ part 
 of it in hiring journeymen bricklayers to build a house, or 
 excavators to dig artificial lakes, or labourers to make plan- 
 tations and lay out pleasure grounds ; or, instead of this, he 
 may expend the same value in buying velvet and lace. The 
 question is, whether the difference between these two modes 
 of expending his income affects the interest of the labouring 
 classes. It is plain that in the first of the two cases he em- 
 ploys labourers, who will be out of employment, or at least 
 out of that employment, in the opposite case. But those 
 from whom I differ say that this is of no consequence, 
 because in buying velvet and lace he equally employs 
 labourers, namely, those who make the velvet and lace. 
 I contend, however, that in this last case he does not employ 
 labourers ; but merely decides in what kind of work some 
 other person shall employ them. The consumer does not 
 with his own funds pay to the weavers and lacemakers their 
 day's wages. He buys the finished commodity, which has 
 been produced by labour and capital, the labour not being 
 paid nor the capital furnished by him, but by the manufac- 
 turer. Suppose that he had been in the habit of expending
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. H7 
 
 this portion of his income in hiring journeymen bricklayers, 
 who laid out the amount of their wages in food and clothing, 
 which were also produced by labour and capital. He, 
 however, determines to prefer velvet, for which he thus 
 creates an extra demand. This demand cannot be satisfied 
 without an extra supply, nor can the supply be produced 
 without an extra capital : where, then, is the capital to come 
 from ? There is nothing in the consumer's change of pur- 
 pose which makes the capital of the country greater than it 
 otherwise was. It appears, then, that the increased demand 
 for velvet could not for the present be supplied, were it not 
 that the very circumstance which gave rise to it has set at 
 liberty a capital of the exact amount required. The very 
 sum which the consumer now employs in buying velvet, 
 formerly passed into the hands of journeymen bricklayers, 
 who expended it in food and necessaries, which they now 
 either go without, or squeeze by their competition, from the 
 shares of other labourers. The labour and capital, there- 
 fore, which formerly produced necessaries for the use of 
 these bricklayers, are deprived of their market, and must 
 look out for other employment ; and they find it in making 
 velvet for the new demand. I do not mean that the very 
 same labour and capital which produced the necessaries turn 
 themselves to producing the velvet ; but, in some one or 
 other of a hundred modes, they take the place of that which 
 does. There was capital in existence to do one of the two 
 things to make the velvet, or to produce necessaries for the 
 journeymen bricklayers ; but not to do both. It was at the 
 option of the consumer which of the two should happen ; 
 and if he chooses the velvet, they go without the neces- 
 saries. 
 
 For further illustration, let us suppose the same case 
 reversed. The consumer has been accustomed to buy vel- 
 vet, but resolves to discontinue that expense, and to employ 
 the same annual sum in hiring bricklayers. If the common 
 opinion be correct, this change in the mode of his expendi- 
 ture gives no additional employment to labour, but only
 
 118 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 transfers employment from velvet-makers to bricklayers. 
 On closer inspection, however, it will be seen that there is 
 an increase of the total sum applied to the remuneration of 
 labour. The velvet manufacturer, supposing him aware of 
 the diminished demand for his commodity, diminishes the 
 production, and sets at liberty a corresponding portion of 
 the capital employed in the manufacture. This capital, 
 thus withdrawn from the maintenance of velvet-makers, is 
 not the same fund with that which the customer employs in 
 maintaining bricklayers ; it is a second fund. There are 
 therefore two funds to be employed in the maintenance and 
 remuneration of labour, where before there was only one. 
 There is not a transfer of employment from velvet-makers to 
 bricklayers ; there is a new employment created for brick- 
 layers, and a transfer of employment from velvet-makers to 
 some other labourers, most probably those who produce the 
 food and other things which the bricklayers consume. 
 
 It may, no doubt, be said, that though the money laid 
 out in buying velvet is not an addition to capital, it replaces 
 a capital ; that though it does not create a new demand for 
 labour, it is the necessary means of enabling the existing 
 demand to be kept up. The funds (it may be said) of the 
 manufacturer, while locked up in velvet, cannot be directly 
 applied to the maintenance of labour ; they do not begin to 
 constitute a demand for labour until the velvet is sold, and 
 the capital which made it replaced from the outlay of the 
 purchaser ; and thus, it may be said, the velvet-maker and 
 the velvet-buyer have not two capitals, but only one capital 
 between them, which by the act of purchase the buyer 
 transfers to the manufacturer, and if instead of buying velvet 
 he buys labour, he simply transfers this capital elsewhere, 
 extinguishing as much demand for labour in one quarter as 
 he creates in another. 
 
 The premises of this argument are not denied. To set 
 free a capital which would otherwise be locked up in a form 
 useless for the support of labour, is, no doubt, the same 
 thing to the interests of labourers as the creation of a new
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 
 
 capital. It is perfectly true that if I expend WOOL in buy- 
 ing velvet, I enable the manufacturer to employ 1000Z. in 
 the maintenance of labour, which could not have been so 
 employed while the velvet remained unsold : and if it 
 would have remained unsold for ever unless I bought it, 
 then by changing my purpose, and hiring bricklayers 
 instead, I undoubtedly create no new demand for labour : 
 or while I employ 1000L in hiring labour on the one hand, 
 I annihilate for ever 1000. of the velvet-maker's capital on 
 the other. But this is confounding the effects arising from 
 the mere suddenness of a change with the effects of the 
 change itself. If when the buyer ceased to purchase, the 
 capital employed in making velvet for his use necessarily 
 perished, then his expending the same amount in hiring 
 bricklayers would be no creation, but merely a transfer, of 
 employment. The increased employment which I contend 
 is given to labour, would not be given unless the capital of 
 the velvet-maker could be liberated, and would not be given 
 until it was liberated. But every one knows that the capi- 
 tal invested in an employment can be withdrawn from it, if 
 sufficient time be allowed. If the velvet-maker had pre- 
 vious notice, by not receiving the usual order, he will have 
 produced WOOL less velvet, and an equivalent portion of his 
 capital will have been already set free. If he had no pre- 
 vious notice, and the article consequently remains on his 
 hands, the increase of his stock will induce him next year to 
 suspend or diminish his production until the surplus is car- 
 ried off. "When this process is complete, the manufacturer 
 will find himself as rich as before, with undiminished power 
 of employing labour in general, though a portion of his 
 capital will now be employed in maintaining some other 
 kind of it. Until this adjustment has taken place, the de- 
 mand for labour will be merely changed, not increased : but 
 as soon as it has taken place, the demand for labour is in- 
 creased. Where there was formerly only one capital em- 
 ployed in maintaining weavers to make WOOL worth of 
 velvet, there is now that same capital employed in making 
 something else, and 1000. distributed among bricklayers
 
 V 
 120 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 besides. There are now two capitals employed in remu- 
 nerating two sets of labourers ; while before, one of those 
 capitals, that of the customer, only served as a wheel in the 
 machinery by which the other capital, that of the manufac- 
 turer, carried on its employment of labour from year to year. 
 The proposition for which I am contending is in reality 
 equivalent to the following, which to some minds will 
 appear a truism, though to others it is a paradox : that a 
 person does good to labourers, not by what he consumes on 
 himself, but solely what he does not so consume. If instead 
 
 . of laying out 100Z. in wine or silk, I expend it in wages or 
 in alms, the demand for commodities is precisely equal in 
 both cases : in the one, it is a demand for 100Z. worth of 
 wine or silk, in the other, for the same value of bread, beer, 
 labourers' clothing, fuel, and indulgences ; but the labourers 
 of the community have in the latter case the value of 100Z. 
 more of the produce of the community distributed among 
 them. I have consumed that much less, and made over my 
 consuming power to them. If it were not so, my having 
 consumed less would not leave more to be consumed by 
 others ; which is a manifest contradiction. When less is 
 not produced, what one person forbears to consume is neces- 
 sarily added to the share of those to whom he transfers his 
 power of purchase. In the case supposed I do not neces- 
 sarily consume less ultimately, since the labourers whom I 
 
 | pay may build a house for me, or make something else for 
 my future consumption. But I have at all events post- 
 poned my consumption, and have turned over part of my 
 share of the present produce of the community to the 
 labourers. If after an interval I am indemnified, it is not 
 from the existing produce, but from a subsequent addition 
 made to it. I have therefore left more of the existing 
 produce to be consumed by others ; and have put into the 
 possession of labourers the power to consume it.* 
 
 * The following case, which presents the argument in a somewhat different 
 shape, may serve for still further illustration. 
 
 Suppose that a rich individual, A, expends a certain amount daily in wages 
 or alms, which, as soon as received, is expended and consumed, in the form of
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 
 
 It appeare, then, that a demand delayed until the work 
 is completed, and furnishing no advances, but only reim- 
 bursing advances made by others, contributes nothing to 
 the demand for labour ; and that what is so expended, is, in 
 
 coarse food, by the receivers. A dies, leaving his property to B, who discon- 
 tinues this item of expenditure, and expends in lieu of it the same sum each day 
 in delicacies for his own table. I have chosen this supposition, in order that the 
 two cases may be similar in all their circumstances, except that which is the sub- 
 ject of comparison. In order not to obscure the essential facts of the case by 
 exhibiting them through the hazy medium of a money transaction, let us further 
 suppose that A, and B after him, are landlords of the estate on which both the 
 food consumed by the recipients of A's disbursements, and the articles of luxury 
 supplied for B's table, are produced ; and that their rent is paid to them in kind, 
 they giving previous notice what description of produce they shall require. The 
 question is, whether B's expenditure gives as much employment or as much food 
 to his poorer neighbours as A's gave. 
 
 From the case as stated, it seems to follow that while A lived, that portion 
 of his income which he expended in wages or alms, would be drawn by him from 
 the farm in the shape of food for labourers, and would be used as such ; while B, 
 who came after him, would require, instead of this, an equivalent value in ex- 
 pensive articles of food, to be consumed in his own household : that the farmer, 
 therefore, would, under B's regime, produce that much less of ordinary food, and 
 more of expensive delicacies, for each day of the year, than was produced in A's 
 time, and that there would be that amount less of food shared, throughout the 
 year, among the labouring and poorer classes. This is what would be conform- 
 able to the principles laid down in the text. Those who think differently, must, 
 on the other hand, suppose that the luxuries required by B would be produced, 
 not instead of, but in addition to, the food previously supplied to A's labourers, 
 and that the aggregate produce of the country would be increased in amount. 
 But when it is asked, how this double production would be effected how the 
 farmer, whose capital and labour were already fully employed, would be enabled 
 to supply the new wants of B, without producing less of other things ; the only 
 mode which presents itself is, that he should first produce the food, and then, 
 giving that food to the labourers whom A formerly fed, should by means of their 
 labour, produce the luxuries wanted by B. This, accordingly, when the objec- 
 tors are hard pressed, appears to be really their meaning. But it is an obvious 
 answer, that on this supposition, B must wait for his luxuries till the second 
 year, and they are wanted this year. By the original hypothesis, he consumes 
 his luxurious dinner day by day, pari passu with the rations of bread and pota- 
 toes formerly served out by A to his labourers. There is not time to feed the 
 labourers first, and supply B afterwards : he and they cannot both have their 
 wants ministered to : he can only satisfy his own demand for commodities, by 
 leaving as much of theirs, as was formerly supplied from that fund, unsatisfied. 
 
 It may, indeed, be rejoined by an objector, that since, on the present show-
 
 122 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 all its effects, so far as regards the employment of the labour- 
 ing class, a mere nullity ; it does not and cannot create any 
 employment except at the expense of other employment 
 which existed before.* 
 
 ing, time is the only thing wanting to render the expenditure of B consistent 
 with as large an employment to labour as was given by A, why may we not sup- 
 pose that B postpones his increased consumption of personal luxuries until they 
 can be furnished to him by the labour of the persons whom A employed ? In 
 that case, it may be said, he would employ and feed as much labour as his prede- 
 cessors. Undoubtedly he would ; but why ? Because his income would be ex- 
 pended in exactly the same manner as his predecessor's ; it would be expended 
 in wages. A reserved from his personal consumption a fund which he paid 
 away directly to labourers ; B does the same, only instead of paying it to them 
 himself, he leaves it in the hands of the farmer, who pays it to them for him. 
 On this supposition, B, in the first year, neither expending the amount, as far as 
 he is personally concerned, in A's manner nor in his own, really saves that por- 
 tion of his income, and lends it to the fanner. And if, in subsequent years, con- 
 fining himself within the year's income, he leaves the farmer in arrears to that 
 amount, it becomes an additional capital, with which the farmer may perma- 
 nently employ and feed A's labourers. Nobody pretends that such a change as 
 this, a change from spending an income in wages of labour, to saving it for in- 
 vestment, deprives any labourers of employment. What is affirmed to have that 
 effect is, the change from hiring labourers to buying commodities for personal 
 use ; as represented by oflr original hypothesis. 
 
 In our illustration we have supposed no buying and selling, or use of money. 
 But the case as we have put it, corresponds with actual fact in everything except 
 the details of the mechanism. The whole of any country is virtually a single 
 farm and manufactory, from which every member of the community draws his 
 appointed share of the produce, having a certain number of counters, called 
 pounds sterling, put into his hands, which, at his convenience, he brings back 
 and exchanges for such goods as he prefers, up to the limit of the amount. He 
 does not, as in our imaginary case, give notice beforehand what things he shall 
 require ; but the dealers and producers are quite capable of finding it out by 
 observation, and any change in the demand is promptly followed by an adapta- 
 tion of the supply to it. If a consumer changes from paying away a part of his 
 income in wages, to spending it that same day (not some subsequent and distant 
 day) in things for his own consumption, afod perseveres in this altered practice 
 until production has had time to adapt itself to the alteration of demand, there 
 will from that time be less food and other articles for the use of labourers, pro' 
 duced in the country, by exactly the value of the extra luxuries now demanded ; 
 and the labourers, as a class, will be worse off by the precise amount. 
 
 * The grounds of a proposition, when well understood, usually give a toler- 
 able indication of the limitations of it. There is a case in which a demand for 
 commodities may create employment for labour, namely, when the labourer is
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 123 
 
 But though a demand for velvet does nothing more in 
 regard to the employment for labour and capital, than to 
 determine so much of the employment which already exist- 
 ed, into that particular channel instead of any other ; still, 
 to the producers already engaged in the velvet manufac- 
 ture, and not intending to quit it, this is of the utmost impor- 
 tance. To them, a falling off in the demand is a real loss, 
 and one which, even if none of their goods finally perish 
 unsold, may mount to any height, up to that which would 
 make them choose, as the smaller evil, to retire from the 
 business. On the contrary, an increased demand enables 
 them to extend their transactions to make a profit on a 
 larger capital, if they have it, or can borrow it ; and, turn- 
 ing over their capital more rapidly, they will employ their 
 labourers more constantly, or employ a greater number than 
 before. So that an increased demand for a commodity does ^ 
 really, in the particular department, often cause a greater j 
 employment to be given to labour by the same capital. 
 The mistake lies in not perceiving that in the cases sup- 
 posed, this advantage is given to labour and capital in one 
 department, only by being withdrawn from another; and 
 that when the change has produced its natural effect of 
 attracting into the employment additional capital propor- 
 tional to the increased demand, the advantage itself ceases. 
 
 The demand for commodities is a consideration of impor- 
 tance rather in the theory of exchange, than in that of pro- 
 duction. Looking at things in the aggregate, and perma- 
 
 already fed, without being fully employed. Work which can be done in the 
 spare hours of persons subsisted from some other source, can (as before remark- 
 ed) be undertaken without withdrawing capital from other occupations, beyond 
 the amount (often very small) required to cover the expense of tools and mate 
 rials. The reason of our theorem thus failing, the theorem itself fails, and em 
 ployment of this kind may, by the springing up of a demand for the commodity, 
 be called hito existence without depriving labour of an equivalent amount of 
 employment in another quarter. The demand does not, even in this case, operate 
 on labour any otherwise than through the medium of an existing capital, but it 
 affords an inducement which causes that capital to set in motion a greater amount 
 of labour than it did before.
 
 124: BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 10. 
 
 nently, the remuneration of the producer is derived from the 
 productive power of his own capital. The sale of the 
 produce for money, and the subsequent expenditure of the 
 money in buying other commodities, are a mere exchange 
 of equivalent values, for mutual accommodation. It is true 
 that, the division of employments being one of the principal 
 means of increasing the productive power of labour, the 
 power of exchanging gives rise to a great increase of the 
 produce ; but even then it is production, not exchange, 
 which remunerates labour and capital. We cannot too 
 strictly represent to ourselves the operation of exchange, 
 whether conducted by barter or through the medium of 
 money, as the mere mechanism by which each person trans- 
 forms the remuneration of his labour or of his capital into 
 the particular shape in which it is most convenient to him 
 to possess it ; but in no wise the source of the remuneration 
 itself. 
 
 10. The preceding principles demonstrate the fallacy 
 of many popular arguments and doctrines, which are con- 
 tinually reproducing themselves in new forms. For exam- 
 ple, it has been contended, and by some from whom better 
 things might have been expected, that the argument for the 
 income-tax, grounded on its falling on the higher and 
 middle classes only, and sparing the poor, is an error ; some 
 have gone so far as to say, an imposture ; because in taking 
 from the rich what they would have expended among the 
 poor, the tax injures the poor as much as it it had been 
 directly levied from them. Of this doctrine we now know 
 what to think. So far, indeed, as what is taken from the 
 rich in taxes, would, if not so taken, have been saved and 
 converted into capital, or even expended in the mainte- 
 nance and wages of servants or of any class of unproductive 
 labourers, to that extent the demand for labour is no doubt 
 diminished, and the poor injuriously affected, by the tax on 
 the rich ; and as these effects are almost always produced 
 in a greater or less degree, it is impossible so to tax the rich
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 125 
 
 as that no portion whatever of the tax can fall on the poor. 
 But even here the question arises, whether the government, 
 after receiving the amount, will not lay out as great a por- 
 tion of it in the direct purchase of labour, as the tax-payers 
 would have done. In regard to all that portion of the tax, 
 which, if not paid to the government, would have been con- 
 sumed in the form of commodities (or even expended in ser- 
 vices if the payment has been advanced by a capitalist), 
 this, according to the principles we have investigated, falls 
 definitely on the rich, and not at all on the poor. There is 
 exactly the same demand for labour, so far as this portion 
 is concerned, after the tax, as before it. The capital which 
 hitherto employed the labourers of the country, remains, 
 and is still capable of employing the same number. There 
 is the same amount of produce paid in wages, or allotted to 
 defray the feeding and clothing of labourers. 
 
 If those against whom I am now contending were in the 
 right, it would be impossible to tax anybody except the 
 poor. If it is taxing the labourers, to tax what is laid out 
 n the produce of labour, the labouring classes pay all the 
 tuxes. The same argument, however, equally proves, that 
 it is impossible to tax the labourers at all ; since the tax, 
 being laid out either in labour or in commodities, comes all 
 back to them ; so that taxation has the singular property 
 of falling on nobody. On the same showing, it would do 
 the labourers no harm to take from them all they have, and 
 distribute it among the other members of the community. 
 It would all be " spent among them," which on this theory 
 comes to the same thing. The error is produced by not 
 looking directly at the realities of the phenomena, but 
 attending only to the outward mechanism of paying and 
 spending. If we look at the effects produced not on the 
 money, which merely changes hands, but on the commodi- 
 ties which are used and consumed, we see that, in conse- 
 quence of the income-tax, the classes who pay it do really 
 diminish their consumption. Exactly so far as they do this, 
 they are the persons on whom the tax falls. It is defrayed
 
 126 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 10. 
 
 out of what they would otherwise have used and enjoyed. 
 So far, on the other hand, as the burthen falls, not on what 
 they would have consumed, but on what they would have 
 saved to maintain production, or spent in maintaining or 
 paying unproductive labourers, to that extent the tax forms 
 a deduction from what would have been used and enjoyed 
 by the labouring classes. But if the government, as is prob- 
 ably the fact, expends fully as much of the amount as the 
 tax-payers would have done in the direct employment of 
 labour, as in hiring sailors, soldiers, and policemen, or in 
 paying off debt, by which last operation it even increases 
 capital ; the labouring classes not only do not lose any 
 employment by the tax, but may possibly gain some, and 
 the whole of the tax falls exclusively where it was in- 
 tended. 
 
 All that portion of the produce of the country which 
 any one, not a labourer, actually and literally consumes for 
 his own use, does not contribute in the smallest degree to 
 the maintenance of labour. No one is benefited by mere 
 consumption, except the person who consumes. And a 
 person cannot both consume his income himself, and make 
 it over to be consumed by others. Taking away a certain 
 portion by taxation cannot deprive both him and them of 
 it, but only him or them. To know which is the sufferer, 
 we must understand whose consumption will have to be 
 retrenched in consequence : this, whoever it be, is the per- 
 son on whom the tax really falls.
 
 CHAPTEK VI. 
 
 ON CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 
 
 1. To complete our explanations on the subject of 
 capital, it is necessary to say something of the two species 
 into which it is usually divided. The distinction is very 
 obvious, and though not named, has been often adverted to, 
 in the two preceding chapters : but it is now proper to 
 define it accurately, and to point out a few of its conse- 
 quences. 
 
 Of the capital engaged in the production of any com- 
 modity, there is a part which, after being once used, exists 
 no longer as capital ; is no longer capable of rendering 
 service to production, or at least not the same service, nor 
 to the same sort of production. Such, for example, is the 
 portion of capital which consists of materials. The tallow 
 and alkali of which soap is made, once used in the manufafc- 
 ture, are destroyed as alkali and tallow ; and cannot be em- 
 ployed any further in the soap manufacture, though in their 
 altered condition, as soap, they are capable of being used as 
 a material or an instrument in other branches of manufac- 
 ture. In the same division must be placed the portion of 
 capital which is paid as the wages, or consumed as the 
 subsistence, of labourers. That part of the capital of a 
 cotton-spinner which he pays away to his work-people, 
 once so paid, exists no longer as his capital, or as a cotton- 
 spinner's capital : such portion of it as the workmen con- 
 sume, no longer exists as capital at all : even if they save 
 any part, it may now be more properly regarded as a fresh
 
 128 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 1. 
 
 capital, the result of a second act of accumulation. Capital 
 which in this manner fulfils the whole of its office in the 
 production in which it is engaged, by a single use, is called 
 Circulating Capital. The term, which is not very appro- 
 priate, is derived from the circumstance, that this portion 
 of capital requires to be constantly renewed by the sale of 
 the finished product, and when renewed is perpetually 
 parted with in buying materials and paying wages ; so that 
 it does its work, not by being kept, but by changing hands. 
 
 Another large portion of capital, however, consists in 
 instruments of production, of a more or less permanent char- 
 acter ; which produce their effect not by being parted with, 
 but by being kept ; and the efficacy of which is not exhaust- 
 ed by a single use. To this class belong buildings, machin- 
 ery, and all or most things known by the name of imple- 
 ments or tools. The durability of some of these is consider- 
 able, and their function as productive instruments is pro- 
 longed through many repetitions of the productive opera- 
 tion. In this class must likewise be included capital sunk 
 (as the expression is) in permanent improvements of land. 
 So also the capital expended once for all, in the commence- 
 ment of an undertaking, to prepare the way for subsequent 
 operations : the expense of opening a mine, for example : 
 of. cutting canals, of making roads or docks. Other exam- 
 ples might be added, but these are sufficient. Capital 
 which exists in any of these durable shapes, and the return 
 to which is spread over a period of corresponding duration, 
 is called Fixed Capital. 
 
 Of fixed capital, somo kinds require to be occasionally 
 or periodically renewed. Such are all implements and 
 buildings : they require, at intervals, partial renewal by 
 means of repairs, and are at last entirely worn out, and 
 cannot be of any further service as buildings and imple- 
 ments, but fall back into the class of materials. In other 
 cases, the capital does not, unless as a consequence of somp 
 unusual accident, require entire renewal : but there is 
 always some outlay needed, either regularly or at least
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 129 
 
 occasionally, to keep it up. A dock or a canal, once made, 
 does not require, like a machine, to be made again, unless 
 purposely destroyed, or unless an earthquake or Borne 
 similar catastrophe has filled it up : but regular and fre- 
 quent outlays are necessary to keep it in repair. The cost 
 of opening a mine needs not be incurred a second time ; 
 but unless some one goes to the expense of keeping the mine 
 clear of water, it is soon rendered useless. The most per- 
 manent of all kinds of fixed capital is that employed in giv- 
 ing increased productiveness to a natural agent, such as 
 land. The draining of marshy or inundated tracts like the 
 Bedford Level, the reclaiming of land from the sea, or its 
 protection by embankments, are improvements calculated 
 for perpetuity ; but drains and dykes require frequent 
 repairs. The same character of perpetuity belongs to the 
 improvement of land by subsoil draining, which adds so 
 much to the productiveness of the clay soils ; or by perma- 
 nent manures, that is, by the addition to the soil, not of the 
 substances which enter into the composition of vegetables, 
 and which are therefore consumed by vegetation, but of 
 those which merely alter the relation of the soil to air and 
 water ; as sand and lime on the heavy soils, clay and marl 
 on the light. Even such works, however, require some, 
 though it may be very little, occasional outlay to maintain 
 their full effect. 
 
 These improvements, however, by the very fact of their 
 deserving that title, produce an increase of return, which, 
 after defraying all expenditure necessary for keeping them 
 up, still leaves a surplus. This surplus forms the return to 
 the capital sunk in the first instance, and that return does 
 not, as in the case of machinery, terminate by the wearing 
 out of the machine, but continues for ever. The land, thus 
 increased in productiveness, bears a value in the market, 
 proportional to the increase : and hence it is usual to con- 
 sider the capital which was invested, or sunk, in making 
 the improvement, as still existing in the increased value of 
 the land. There must be no mistake, however. The capi- 
 9
 
 130 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 tal, like all other capital, has been consumed. It was con- 
 sumed in maintaining the labourers who executed the 
 improvement, and in the wear and tear of the tools by 
 which they were assisted. But it was consumed produc- 
 tively, and has left a permanent result in the improved 
 productiveness of an appropriated natural agent, the land. 
 We* may call the increased produce the joint result of the 
 land and of a capital fixed in the land. But as the capital, 
 having in reality been consumed, cannot be withdrawn, its 
 productiveness is thenceforth indissolubly blended with that 
 arising from the original qualities of the soil ; and the 
 remuneration for the use of it thenceforth depends, not upon 
 the laws which govern the returns to labour and capital, 
 but upon those which govern the recompense for natural 
 agents. What these are, we shall see hereafter.* 
 
 2. There is a great difference between the effects of 
 circulating and those of fixed capital, on the amount of the 
 gross produce of the country. Circulating capital being 
 destroyed as such, or at any rate finally lost to the owner, 
 by a single use ; and the product resulting from that one 
 use being the only source from which the owner can replace 
 the capital, or obtain any remuneration for its productive 
 employment ; the product must of course be sufficient for 
 those purposes, or in other words, the result of a single use 
 must be a reproduction equal to the whole amount of the 
 circulating capital use, and a profit besides. This, how- 
 ever, is by no means necessary in the case of fixed capital. 
 Since machinery, for example, is not wholly consumed by 
 one use, it is not necessary that it should be wholly replaced 
 from the product of that use. The machine answers the 
 purpose of its owner if it brings in, during each interval of 
 time, enough to cover the expense of repairs, and the dete- 
 rioration in value which the machine has sustained during 
 the same time, with a surplus sufficient to yield the ordinary 
 profit on the entire value of the machine. 
 
 * Iiifra, book ii. chap. xvi. On Rent.
 
 CIECULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 
 
 From this it follows that all increase of fixed capital, 
 when taking place at the expense of circulating, must be, at 
 least temporarily, prejudicial to the interests of the labour- 
 ers. This is true, not of machinery alone, but of all im- 
 provements by which capital is sunk ; that is, rendered 
 permanently incapable of being applied to the maintenance 
 and remuneration of labour. Suppose that a person farms 
 his own land, with a capital of two thousand quarters of 
 corn, employed in maintaining labourers during one year 
 (for simplicity we omit the consideration of seed and tools), 
 whose labour produces him annually two thousand four 
 hundred quarters, being a profit of twenty per cent. This 
 profit we shall suppose that he annually consumes, carrying 
 on his operations from year to year on the original capital 
 of two thousand quarters. Let us now suppose that by the 
 expenditure of half his capital he effects a permanent im- 
 provement of his land, which is executed by half his labour- 
 ers, and occupies them for a year, after which he will only 
 require, for the effectual cultivation of his land, half as 
 many labourers as before. The remainder of his capital he 
 employs as usual. In the first year there is no difference in 
 the condition of the labourers, except that part of them 
 have received the same pay for an operation on the land, 
 which they previously obtained for ploughing, sowing, and 
 reaping. At the end of the year, however, the improver 
 has not, as before, a capital of two thousand quarters of 
 corn. Only one thousand quarters of his capital have been 
 reproduced in the usual way ; he has now only those thou- 
 sand quarters and his improvement. He will employ, in 
 the next and in each following year, only half the number 
 of labourers, and will divide among them only half the 
 former quantity of subsistence. The loss will soon be made 
 up to them if the improved land, with the diminished quan- 
 tity of labour, produces two thousand four hundred quarters 
 as before, because so enormous an accession of gain will 
 probably induce the improver to save a part, add it to his 
 capital, and become a larger employer of labour. But it is
 
 132 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 conceivable that this may not be the case ; for (supposing;, 
 as we may do, that the improvement will last indefinitely, 
 without any outlay worth mentioning to keep it up) the 
 improver will have gained largely by his improvement if 
 the land now yields, not two thousand four hundred, but 
 one thousand five hundred quarters ; since this will replace 
 the one thousand quarters forming his present circulating; 
 capital, with a profit of twenty-five per cent, (instead ot" 
 twenty as before) on the whole capital, fixed and circulating- 
 together. The improvement, therefore, may be a very 
 profitable one to him, and yet very injurious to the 
 labourers. 
 
 The supposition, in the terms in which it has been stated, 
 is purely ideal ; or at most applicable only to such a case as 
 that of the conversion of arable land into pasture, which, 
 though formerly a frequent practice, is regarded by modern 
 agriculturists as the reverse of an improvement. The effect 
 of the agricultural improvements of the present day (of 
 those, at least, which operate on the soil itself,)* is to in- 
 crease, not to diminish the gross produce. But this does 
 not affect the substance of the argument. Suppose that the 
 improvement does not operate in the manner supposed' 
 does not enable a part of the labour previously employed 
 on the land to be dispensed with but only enables the 
 same labour to raise a greater produce. Suppose, too, that 
 the greater produce, which by means of the improvement 
 can be raised from the soil with the same labour, is all 
 wanted, and will find purchasers. The improver will in 
 that ease require the same number of labourers as before, at 
 the same wages. But where will he find the means of pay- 
 ing them ? He has no longer his original capital of two 
 thousand quarters disposable for the purpose. One thou- 
 sand of them are lost and gone consumed in making the 
 improvement. If he is to employ as many labourers as 
 
 * For the distinction between these and the other kind of improvements, 
 which do not take effect upon the soil itself, but upon the operation of cultivating 
 it, see infra, chap. xii. of the present book, 3.
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 133 
 
 before, and pay them as highly, he must Mrfow," or dbtain 
 from some other source, a thousand quarters to supply the 
 deficit. But these thousand quarters already maintained, or 
 were destined to maintain, an equivalent quantity of labour. 
 They are not a fresh creation ; their destination is only 
 changed from one productive employment to another ; and 
 though the agriculturist has made up the deficiency in his 
 own circulating capital, the breach in the circulating capital 
 of the community remains unrepaired. 
 
 The argument relied on by most of those who contend 
 that machinery can never be injurious to the labouring 
 class, is, that by cheapening production it creates such an 
 increased demand for the commodity, as enables, ere long, 
 a greater number of persons than ever to find employment 
 in producing it. This argument does not seem to me to 
 have the weight commonly ascribed to it. The fact, though 
 too broadly stated, is, no doubt, often true. The copyists 
 who were thrown out of employment by the invention of 
 printing, were doubtless soon outnumbered by the composi- 
 tors and pressmen who took their place : and the number 
 of labouring persons now occupied in the cotton manufac- 
 ture is many times greater than were so occupied previously 
 to the inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright, which 
 shows that besides the enormous fixed capital now em- 
 barked in the manufacture, it also employs a far larger cir- 
 culating capital than at any former time. But if this 
 capital was drawn from other employments ; if the funds 
 which took the place of the capital sunk in costly machin- 
 ery, were supplied not by any additional saving consequent 
 on the improvements, but by drafts on the general capital 
 of the community ; what better are the labouring classes 
 for the mere transfer? In what manner is the loss they 
 sustained by the conversion of circulating into fixed capital, 
 made up to them by a mere shifting of part of the re- 
 mainder of the circulating capital from its old employments 
 to a new one ? 
 
 All attempts to make out that the labouring classes as a
 
 134: BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 8. 
 
 collective body cannot suffer temporarily by the introduction 
 of machinery, or by the sinking of capital in permanent im- 
 provements, are, I conceive, necessarily fallacious. That 
 they would suffer in the particular department of industry 
 to which the change applies, is generally admitted, and 
 obvious to common sense ; but it is often said, that though 
 employment is withdrawn from labour in one department, 
 an exactly equivalent employment is opened for it in others, 
 because what the consumers save in the increased cheapness 
 of one particular article enables them to augment their con- 
 sumption of others, thereby increasing the demand for other 
 kinds of labour. This i,s plausible, but, as was shown in the 
 last chapter, involves a fallacy ; demand for commodities 
 being a totally different thing from demand for labour. It 
 is true, the consumers have now additional means of buying 
 other things ; but this will not create the other things, un- 
 less there is capital to produce them, and the improvement 
 has not set at liberty any capital, if even it has not absorbed 
 some from other employments. The supposed increase of 
 production and of employment for labour in other depart- 
 ments therefore will not take place ; and the increased 
 demand for commodities by some consumers, will be bal- 
 anced by a cessation of demand on the part of others, 
 namely, the labourers who were superseded by the improve- 
 ment, and who will now be maintained, if at all, by shar- 
 ing, either in the way of competition or of charity, in what 
 was previously consumed by other people. 
 
 3. Nevertheless, I do not believe that as things are 
 actually transacted, improvements in production are often, 
 if ever, injurious, even temporarily, to the labouring classes 
 in the aggregate. They would be so if they took place sud- 
 denly to a great amount, because much of the capital sunk 
 must necessarily in that case be provided from funds already 
 employed as circulating capital. But improvements are 
 always introduced very gradually, and are seldom or never 
 made by withdrawing circulating capital from actual pro-
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 135 
 
 duction, but are made by the employment of the annual 
 increase. I doubt if there would be found a single example 
 of a great increase of fixed capital, at a time and place 
 where circulating capital was not rapidly increasing like- 
 wise. It is not in poor or backward countries that great 
 and costly improvements in production are made. To sink 
 capital in laud for a permanent return to introduce expen- 
 sive machinery are acts involving immediate sacrifice for 
 distant objects ; and indicate, in the first place, tolerably 
 complete security of property ; in the second, considerable 
 activity of industrial enterprise ; and in the third, a high 
 standard of what has been called the " effective desire of 
 accumulation : " which three things are the elements of a 
 society rapidly progressive in its amount of capital. Al- 
 though, therefore, the labouring classes must suffer, not 
 only if the increase of fixed capital takes place at the 
 expense of circulating, but even if it is so large and rapid as 
 to retard that ordinary increase to which the growth of 
 population has habitually adapted itself; yet, in point of 
 fact, this is very unlikely to happen, since there is probably 
 no country whose fixed capital increases in a ratio more 
 than proportional to its circulating. If the whole of the 
 railways which, during the speculative madness of 1845, 
 obtained the sanction of Parliament, had been constructed 
 in the times fixed for the completion of each, this improb- 
 able contingency would, most likely, have been realized ; 
 but this very case has afforded a striking example of the 
 difficulties which oppose the diversion into new channels of 
 any considerable portion of the capital that supplies the 
 old : difficulties generally much more than sufficient to pre- 
 vent enterprises that involve the sinking of capital, from 
 extending themselves with such rapidity as to impair the 
 sources of the existing employment for labour. 
 
 To these considerations must be added, that even if im- 
 provements did for a time decrease the aggregate produce 
 and the circulating capital of the community, they would 
 not the less tend in the long run to augment both. They
 
 136 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 3. 
 
 increase the return to capital ; and of this increase the 
 benefit must necessarily accrue either to the capitalist in 
 greater profits, or to the customer in diminished prices ; 
 affording, in either case, an augmented fund from which 
 accumulation may be made, while enlarged profits also hold 
 out an increased inducement to accumulation. In the case 
 we before selected, in which the immediate result of the 
 improvement was to diminish the gross produce from two 
 thousand four hundred quarters to one thousand five hun- 
 dred, yet the profit of the capitalist being now five hundred 
 quarters instead of four hundred, the extra one hundred 
 quarters, if regularly saved, would in a few years replace 
 the one thousand quarters subtracted from his circulating 
 capital. Now the extension of business which almost cer- 
 tainly follows in any department in which an improvement 
 has been made, affords a strong inducement to those en- 
 gaged in it to add to their capital ; and hence, at the slow 
 pace at which improvements are usually introduced, a great 
 part of the capital which the improvement ultimately 
 absorbs, is drawn from the increased profits and increased 
 savings which it has itself called forth. 
 
 This tendency of improvements in production to cause 
 increased accumulation, and thereby ultimately to increase 
 the gross produce, even if temporarily diminishing it, will 
 assume a still more decided character if it should appear 
 that there are assignable limits both to the accumulation of 
 capital, and to the increase of production from the land, 
 which limits once attained, all further increase of produce 
 must stop ; but that improvements in production, whatever 
 may be their other effects, tend to throw one or both of 
 these limits farther off. Now, these are truths which will 
 appear in the clearest light in a subsequent stage of our 
 investigation. It will be seen, that the quantity of capital 
 which will, or even which can, be accumulated in any 
 country, and the amount of gross produce which will, or 
 even which can, be raised, bear a proportion to the state of 
 the arts of production there existing ; and that every im'
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 137 
 
 provement, even if for the time it diminish the circulating 
 capital and the gross produce, ultimately makes room for a 
 larger amount of both, than could possibly have existed 
 otherwise. It is this which is the conclusive answer to the 
 objections against machinery ; and the proof thence arising 
 of the ultimate benefit to labourers of mechanical inventions 
 even in the existing state of society, will hereafter be seen 
 to be conclusive.* But this does not discharge govern- 
 ments from the obligation of alleviating, and if possible pre- 
 venting, the evils of which this source of ultimate benefit is 
 or may be productive to an existing generation. If the 
 sinking or fixing of capital in machinery or useful works, 
 were ever to proceed at such a pace as to impair materially 
 the funds for the maintenance of labour, it would be in- 
 cumbent on legislators to take measures for moderating its 
 rapidity : and since improvements which do not diminish 
 employment, on the whole, almost always throw some par- 
 ticular class of labourers out of it, there cannot be a more 
 legitimate object of the legislator's care than the interests 
 of those who are thus sacrificed to the gains of their fellow- 
 citizens and of posterity. 
 
 To return to the theoretical distinction between fixed and 
 circulating capital. Since all wealth which is destined to 
 be employed for reproduction comes within the designation 
 of capital, there are parts of capital which do not agree with 
 the definition of either species of it ; for instance, the stock 
 of finished goods which a manufacturer or dealer at any 
 time possesses unsold in his warehouses. But this, though 
 capital as to its destination, is not yet capital in actual 
 exercise : it is not engaged in production, but has first to be 
 sold or exchanged, that is, converted into an equivalent 
 value of some other commodities ; and therefore is not yet 
 either fixed or circulating capital ; but will become either 
 one or the other, or be eventually divided between them. 
 With the proceeds of his finished goods, a manufacturer will 
 partly pay his work-people, partly replenish his stock of 
 
 * Infra, book iv. chap. v.
 
 138 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 3. 
 
 the materials of his manufacture, and partly provide new 
 buildings and machinery, or repair the old ; but how much 
 will be devoted to one purpose, and how much to another, 
 depends on the nature of the manufacture, and the require- 
 ments of the particular moment. 
 
 It should be observed further, that the portion of capital 
 consumed in the form of seed or material, though, unlike 
 fixed capital, it requires to be at once replaced from the 
 gross produce, stands yet in the same relation to the em- 
 ployment of labour, as fixed capital does. What is expend- 
 ed in materials is as much withdrawn from the maintenance 
 and remuneration of labourers, as what is fixed in machine- 
 ry ; and if capital now expended in wages were diverted 
 to the providing of materials, the effect on the labourers 
 would be as prejudicial as if it were converted into fixed 
 capital. This, however, is a kind of change which never 
 takes place. The tendency of improvements in production 
 is always to economize, never to increase, the expenditure 
 of seed or material for a given produce ; and the interests 
 of the labourers has no detriment to apprehend from this 
 source.
 
 CHAPTEE TIL 
 
 ON WHAT DEPENDS THE DEGREE OF PRODUCTIVENESS OF 
 PRODUCTIVE AGENTS. 
 
 1. WE have concluded our general survey of the re- 
 quisites of production. We have found that they may be 
 reduced to three : labour, capital, and the materials and 
 motive forces afforded by nature. Of these, labour and the 
 raw material of the globe are primary and indispensable. 
 Natural motive powers may be called in to the assistance 
 of labour, and are a help, but not an essential, of produc- 
 tion. The remaining requisite, capital, is itself the product 
 of labour : its instrumentality in production is therefore, in 
 reality, that of labour in an indirect shape. It does not the 
 less require to be specified separately. A previous applica- 
 tion of labour to produce the capital required for consump- 
 tion during the work, is no less essential than the applica- 
 tion of labour to the work itself. Of capital, again, one, 
 and by far the largest, portion, conduces to production only 
 by sustaining in existence the labour which produces : the 
 remainder, namely the instruments arid materials, contrib- 
 ute to it directly, in the same manner with natural agents, 
 and the materials supplied by nature. 
 
 We now advance to the second great question in polit- 
 ical economy ; on what the degree of productiveness of 
 these agents depends. For it is evident that their produc- 
 tive efficacy varies greatly at various times and places. 
 With the same population and extent of territory, some 
 countries have a much larger amount of production than
 
 140 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 2. 
 
 others, and the same country at one time a greater amount 
 than itself at another. Compare England either with a 
 similar extent of territory in Russia, or with an equal 
 population of Russians. Compare England now with 
 England in the middle ages ; Sicily, Northern Africa, or 
 Syria at present, with the same countries at the time of 
 their greatest prosperity, before the Roman conquest. 
 Some of the causes which contribute to this difference of 
 productiveness are obvious ; others not so much so. We 
 proceed to specify several of them. 
 
 2. The most evident cause of superior productiveness 
 is what are called natural advantages. These are various. 
 Fertility of soil is one of the principal. In this there are 
 great varieties, from the deserts of Arabia to the alluvial 
 plains of the Ganges, the Niger, and the Mississippi. A 
 favourable climate is even more important than a rich soil. 
 There are countries capable of being inhabited, but too cold 
 to be compatible with agriculture. Their inhabitants can- 
 not pass beyond the nomadic state ; they must live, like the 
 Laplanders, by the domestication of the rein-deer, if not by 
 hunting or fishing, like the miserable Esquimaux. There 
 are countries where oats will ripen, but not wheat, such as 
 the North of Scotland ; others where wheat can be grown, 
 but from excess of moisture and want of sunshine, affords 
 but a precarious crop ; as in parts of Ireland. With each 
 advance towards the south, or, in the European temperate 
 region, towards the east, some new branch of agriculture 
 becomes first possible, then advantageous ; the vine, maize, 
 figs, olives, silk, rice, dates, successively present themselves, 
 until we come to the sugar, coffee, cotton, spices, &c. of 
 climates which also afford, of the more common agricultural 
 products, and with only a slight degree of cultivation, two 
 or even three harvests in a year. Nor is it in agriculture 
 alone that differences of climate are important. Their 
 influence is felt in many other branches of production : in 
 the durability of all work which is exposed to the air ; of
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 141 
 
 buildings, for example. If the temples of Karnac and Luxor 
 had not been injured by men, they might have subsisted in 
 their original perfection almost for ever, for the inscriptions 
 on some of them, though anterior to all authentic history, 
 are fresher than is in our climate an inscription fifty years 
 old : while at St. Petersburg, the most massive works, 
 solidly executed in granite hardly a generation ago, are 
 already, as travellers tell us, almost in a state to require 
 reconstruction, from alternate exposure to summer heat and 
 intense frost. The superiority of the woven fabrics of South- 
 ern Europe over those of England in the richness and clear- 
 ness of many of their colours, is ascribed to the superior 
 equality of the atmosphere, for which neither the knowledge 
 of chemists nor the skill of dyers has been able to provide, 
 in our hazy and damp climate, a complete equivalent. 
 
 Another part of the influence of climate consists in les- 
 sening the physical requirements of the producers. In hot 
 regions, mankind can exist in comfort with less perfect 
 housing, less clothing ; fuel, that absolute necessary of life 
 in cold climates, they can almost dispense with, except for 
 industrial uses. They also require less aliment ; as expe- 
 rience had proved, long before theory had accounted for it 
 by ascertaining that most of what we consume as food is 
 not required for the actual nutrition of the organs, but for 
 keeping up the animal heat, and for supplying the neces- 
 sary stimulus to the vital functions, which in hot climates 
 is almost sufficiently supplied by air and sunshine. Much, 
 therefore, of the labour elsewhere expended to procure the 
 mere necessaries of life, not being required, more remains 
 disposable for its higher uses and its enjoyments ; if the 
 character of the inhabitants does not rather induce them to 
 use up these advantages in over-population, or in the indul- 
 gence of repose. 
 
 Among natural advantages, besides soil and climate, 
 must be mentioned abundance of mineral productions, in 
 convenient situations, and capable of being worked with 
 moderate labour. Such are the coal-fields of Great Britain,
 
 142 BOOK I- CHAPTER VII. 3. 
 
 which do so much to compensate its inhabitants for the dis- 
 advantages of climate ; and the scarcely inferior resource 
 possessed by this country and the United States, in a 
 copious supply of an easily reduced iron ore, at no great 
 depth below the earth's surface, and in close proximity to 
 coal deposits available for working it. In mountain and 
 hill districts, the abundance of natural water-power makes 
 considerable amends for the usually inferior fertility of 
 those regions. But perhaps a greater advantage than all 
 these is a maritime situation, especially when accompanied 
 with good natural harbours ; and, next to it, great naviga- 
 ble rivers. These advantages consist indeed wholly in 
 saving of cost of carriage. But few who have not consid- 
 ered the subject, have any adequate notion how great an 
 extent of economical advantage this comprises ; nor, with- 
 out having considered the influence exercised on production 
 by exchanges, and by what is called the division of labour, 
 can it be fully estimated. So important is it, that it often 
 does more than counterbalance sterility of soil, and almost 
 every other natural inferiority ; especially in that early 
 stage of industry in which labour and science have not yet 
 provided artificial means of communication capable of 
 rivalling the natural. In the ancient world, and in tho 
 middle ages, the most prosperous communitias were not 
 those which had the largest territory, or the most fertile 
 soil, but rather those which had been forced by natural 
 sterility to make the utmost use of a convenient maritime 
 situation ; as Athens, Tyre, Marseilles, Venice, the free 
 cities on the Baltic, and the like. 
 
 3. So much for natural advantages ; the value of 
 which, caster is paribus, is too obvious to be ever underrated. 
 But experience testifies that natural advantages scarcely 
 ever do for a community, no more than fortune and station 
 do for an individual, anything like what it lies in their 
 nature, or in their capacity, to do. Neither now nor in 
 former ages have the nations possessing the best climate
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 14-3 
 
 and soil, been either the richest or the most powerful ; but 
 (in so far as regards the mass of the people) generally 
 among the poorest, though, in the midst of poverty, probably 
 on the whole the most enjoying. Human life in those 
 countries can be supported on so little, that the poor seldom 
 suffer from anxiety, and in climates in which mere existence 
 is a pleasure, the luxury which they prefer is that of repose. 
 Energy, at the call of passion, they possess in abundance, 
 but not that which is manifested in sustained and persever- 
 ing labour : and, as they seldom concern themselves enough 
 about remote objects to establish good political institutions, 
 the incentives to industry are further weakened by imper- 
 fect protection of its fruits. Successful production, like 
 most other kinds of success, depends more on the qualities 
 of the human agents, than on the circumstances in which 
 they work : and it is difficulties, not facilities, that nourish 
 bodily and mental energy. Accordingly the tribes of man- 
 kind who have overrun and conquered others, and com- 
 pelled them to labour for their benefit, have been mostly 
 reared amidst hardship. They have either been bred in the 
 forests of northern climates, or the deficiency of natural 
 hardships has been supplied, as among the Greeks and 
 Romans, by the artificial ones of a rigid military discipline. 
 From the time when the circumstances of modern society 
 permitted the discontinuance of that discipline, the South 
 has no longer produced conquering nations ; military 
 vigour, as well as speculative thought and industrial ener- 
 gy, have all had their principal seats in the less favoured 
 North. 
 
 As the second, therefore, of the causes of superior pro- 
 ductiveness, we may rank the greater energy of labour. By 
 this is not to be understood occasional, but regular and 
 habitual energy. No one undergoes, without murmuring, 
 a greater amount of occasional fatigue and hardship, or has 
 his bodily powers, and such faculties of mind as he pos- 
 sesses, kept longer at their utmost stretch, than the North 
 American Indian : yet his indolence is proverbial, whenever
 
 144 BOOK L CHAPTER VII. 3. 
 
 he has a brief respite from the pressure of present wants. 
 Individuals, or nations, do not differ so mucli in the efforts 
 they are able and willing to make under strong immediate 
 incentives, as in their capacity of present exertion for a dis- 
 tant object ; and in the thoroughness of their application to 
 work on ordinary occasions. Some amount of these quali- 
 ties is a necessary condition of any great improvement 
 among mankind. To civilize a savage, he must be inspired 
 with new wants and desires, even if not of a very elevated 
 kind, provided that their gratification can be a motive to 
 steady and regular bodily and mental exertion. If the 
 negroes of Jamaica and Demerara, after their emancipation, 
 had contented themselves, as it was predicted they would 
 do, with the necessaries of life, and abandoned all labour 
 beyond the little which in a tropical climate, with a thin 
 population and abundance of the richest land, is sufficient 
 to support existence, they would have sunk into a condition 
 more barbarous, though less unhappy, than their previous 
 state of slavery. The motive which was most relied on for 
 inducing them to work was their love of fine clothes and 
 personal ornaments. No one will stand up for this taste as 
 worthy of being cultivated, and in most societies its indul- 
 gence tends to impoverish rather than to enrich ; but in the 
 state of mind of the negroes it might have been the only 
 incentive that could make them voluntarily undergo sys- 
 tematic labour, and so acquire or maintain habits of volun- 
 tary industry which may be converted to more valuable 
 ends. In England, it is not the desire of wealth that, needs 
 to be taught, but the use of wealth, and appreciation of the 
 objects of desire which wealth cannot purchase, or for at 
 taining which it is not required. Every real improvement 
 in the character of the English, whether it consist in giving 
 them higher aspirations, or only a juster estimate of the 
 value of their present objects of desire, must necessarily 
 moderate the ardour of their devotion to the pursuit of 
 wealth. There is no need, however, that it should diminish 
 the strenuous and business-like application to the matter in
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 145 
 
 hand, which is found in the best English workmen, and is 
 their most valuable quality. 
 
 The desirable medium is one which mankind have not 
 often known how to hit : when they do labour, to do it with 
 all their might, and especially with all their mind ; but to 
 devote to labour, for mere pecuniary gain, fewer hours in 
 the day, fewer days in the year, and fewer years of life. 
 
 4. The third element which determines the produc- 
 tiveness of the labour of a community, is the skill and 
 knowledge therein existing ; whether it be the skill and 
 knowledge of the labourers themselves, or of those who 
 direct their labour. No illustration is requisite to show 
 how the efficacy of industry is promoted by the manual 
 dexterity of those who perform mere routine processes ; by 
 the intelligence of those engaged in operations in which the 
 mind has a considerable part ; and by the amount of knowl- 
 edge of natural powers and of the properties of objects, 
 which is turned to the purposes of industry. That the pro- 
 ductiveness of the labour of a people is limited by their 
 knowledge of the arts of life, is self-evident ; and that any 
 progress in those arts, any improved application of the ob- 
 jects or powers of nature to industrial uses, enables the same 
 quantity and intensity of labour to raise a greater produce. 
 
 One principal department of these improvements con- 
 sists in the invention and use of tools and machinery. The 
 manner in which these serve to increase production and to 
 economize labour, needs not be specially detailed in a work 
 like the present : it will be found explained and exemplified, 
 in a manner at once scientific and popular, in Mr. Bab- 
 bage's well-known " Economy of Machinery and Manufac- 
 tures." An entire chapter of Mr. Babbage's book is com- 
 posed of instances of the efficacy of machinery in " exerting 
 forces too great for human power, and executing operations 
 too delicate for human touch." But to find examples of 
 work which could not be performed at all by unassisted 
 labour, we need not go so far. Without pumps, worked by 
 10
 
 BOOK i CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 steam-engines or otherwise, the water which collects in 
 mines could not in many situations be got rid of at all, and 
 the mines, after being worked to a little depth, must be 
 abandoned : without ships or boats the sea could never 
 have been crossed ; without tools of some sort, trees could 
 not be cut down, nor rocks excavated ; a plough, or at least 
 a spade, is necessary to any tillage of the ground. Very 
 simple and rude instruments, however, are sufficient to 
 render literally possible most works hitherto executed by 
 mankind ; and subsequent inventions have chiefly served to 
 enable the work to be performed in greater perfection, and, 
 above all, with a greatly diminished quantity of labour : 
 the labour thus saved becoming disposable for other em- 
 ployment. 
 
 The use of machinery is far from being the only mode in 
 which the effects of knowledge in aiding production are 
 exemplified. In agriculture and horticulture, machinery is 
 only now beginning to show that it can do anything of im- 
 portance, beyond the invention and progressive improve- 
 ment of the plough and a few other simple instruments. 
 The greatest agricultural inventions have consisted in the 
 direct application of more judicious processes to the land 
 itself, and to the plants growing on it : such as rotation of 
 crops, to avoid the necessity of leaving the land unculti- 
 vated for one season in every two or three ; improved 
 manures, to renovate its fertility when exhausted by crop- 
 ping ; conversion of bogs and marshes into cultivable land ; 
 such modes of pruning, and of training and propping up 
 plants and trees, as experience has shown to deserve the 
 preference ; in the case of the more expensive cultures, 
 planting the roots or seeds further apart, and more com- 
 pletely pulverizing the soil in which they are placed, &c. 
 In manufactures and commerce, some of the most important 
 improvements consist in economizing time ; in making the 
 return follow more speedily upon the labour and outlay. 
 There are others of which the advantage consists in economy 
 of material.
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 
 
 5. But the effects of the increased knowledge of a 
 community in increasing its wealth, need the less illustra- 
 tion as they have become familiar to the most uneducated, 
 from such conspicuous instances as railways and steam- 
 ships. A thing not yet so well understood and recognised, 
 is the economical value of the general diffusion of intelli- 
 gence among the people. The number of persons fitted to 
 direct and superintend any industrial enterprise, or even 
 to execute any process which cannot be reduced almost to 
 an affair of memory and routine, is always far short of the 
 demand ; as is evident from the enormous difference be- 
 tween the salaries paid to such persons, and the wages of 
 ordinary labour. The deficiency of practical good sense, 
 which renders the majority of the labouring class such bad 
 calculators which makes, for instance, their domestic econ- 
 omy so improvident, lax, and irregular must disqualify 
 them for any but a low grade of intelligent labour, and 
 render their industry far less productive than with equal 
 energy it otherwise might be. The importance, even in 
 this limited aspect, of popular education, is well worthy of 
 the attention of politicians, especially in England ; since 
 competent observers, accustomed to employ labourers of 
 various nations, testify that in the workmen of other coun- 
 tries they often find great intelligence wholly apart from 
 instruction, but that if an English labourer is anything but 
 a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, he is indebted for 
 it to education, which in his case is almost always self- 
 education. Mr. Escher, of Zurich, (an engineer and cotton 
 manufacturer employing nearly two thousand working men 
 of many different nations,) in his evidence annexed to the 
 Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, in 1840, on the 
 training of pauper children, gives a character of English as 
 contrasted with Continental workmen, which all persons of 
 similar experience will, I believe, confirm. 
 
 "The Italians' quickness of perception is shown in 
 rapidly comprehending any new descriptions of labour put 
 into their hands, in a power of quickly comprehending the
 
 148 BOOK I- CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 meaning of their employer, of adapting themselves to new 
 circumstances, much beyond what any other classes have. 
 The French workmen have the like natural characteristics, 
 only in a somewhat lower degree. The English, Swiss, 
 German, and Dutch workmen, we find, have all much 
 slower natural comprehension. As workmen only, the 
 preference is undoubtedly due to the English ; because, as 
 we find them, they are all trained to special branches, on 
 which they have had comparatively superior training, and 
 have concentrated all their thoughts. As men of business 
 or of general usefulness, and as men with whom an em- 
 ployer would best like to be surrounded, I should, however, 
 decidedly prefer the Saxons and the Swiss, but more espe- 
 cially the Saxons, because they have had a very careful 
 general education, which has extended their capacities 
 beyond any special employment, and rendered them fit to 
 take up, after a short preparation, any employment to 
 which they may be called. If I have an English workman 
 engaged in the erection of a steam-engine, he will under- 
 stand that, and nothing else ; and for other circumstances 
 or other branches of mechanics, however closely allied, he 
 will be comparatively helpless to adapt himself to all the 
 circumstances that may arise, to make arrangements for 
 them, and give sound advice or write clear statements and 
 letters on his work in the various related branches of me- 
 chanics." 
 
 On the connexion between mental cultivation and moral 
 trustworthiness in the labouring class, the same witness 
 says, " The better educated workmen, we find, are distin- 
 guished by superior moral habits in every respect. In the 
 first place, they are entirely sober ; they are discreet in 
 their enjoyments, which are of a more rational and refined 
 kind ; they have a taste for much better society, which they 
 approach respectfully, and consequently find much readier 
 admittance to it ; they cultivate music ; they read ; they 
 enjoy the pleasures of scenery, and make parties for excur- 
 sions into the country ; they are economical, and their econ-
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 
 
 omy extends beyond their own purse to the stock of their 
 master ; they are, consequently, honest and trustworthy." 
 And in answer to a question respecting the English work- 
 men, " Whilst in respect to the work to which they have 
 been specially trained they are the most skilful, they are in 
 conduct the most disorderly, debauched, and unruly, and 
 least respectable and trustworthy of any nation whatsoever 
 whom we have employed ; and in saying this, I express the 
 experience of every manufacturer on the Continent to whom 
 I have spoken, and especially of the English manufacturers, 
 who make the loudest complaints. These characteristics of 
 depravity do not apply to the English workmen who have 
 received an education, but attach to the others in the degree 
 in which they are in want of it. When the uneducated 
 English workmen are released from the bonds of iron dis- 
 cipline in which they have been restrained by their em- 
 ployers in England, and are treated with the urbanity and 
 friendly feeling which the more educated workmen on the 
 Continent expect and receive from their employers, they, 
 the English workmen, completely lose their balance : they 
 do not understand their position, and after a certain time 
 become totally unmanageable and useless." * This result 
 of observation is borne out by experience in England itself. 
 As soon as any idea of equality enters the mind of an ordi- 
 nary English working man, his head is turned by it. When 
 he ceases to be servile, he becomes insolent. 
 
 The moral qualities of the labourers are fully as impor- 
 tant to the efficiency and worth of their labour, as the intel- 
 lectual. Independently of the effects of intemperance upon 
 their bodily and mental faculties, and of nighty, unsteady 
 habits upon the energy and continuity of their work (points 
 so easily understood as not to require being insisted upon), 
 it is well worthy of meditation, how much of the aggregate 
 
 * The whole evidence of this intelligent and experienced employer of laboui 
 is deserving of attention ; as well as much testimony on similar points by other 
 witnesses, contained in the same volume.
 
 150 HOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 6. 
 
 effect of their labour depends on their trustworthiness. All 
 the labour now expended in watching that they fulfil their 
 engagement, or iu verifying that they have fulfilled it, is so 
 much withdrawn from the real business of production, to be 
 devoted to a subsidiary function rendered needful not by 
 the necessity of things, but by the dishonesty of men. Nor 
 are the greatest outward precautions more than very imper- 
 fectly efficacious, where, as is now almost invariably the case 
 with hired labourers, the slightest relaxation of vigilance is 
 an opportunity eagerly seized for eluding performance of 
 their contract. The advantage to mankind of being able to 
 trust one another, penetrates into every crevice and cranny 
 of human life : the economical is perhaps the smallest part 
 of it, yet even this is incalculable. To consider only the 
 most obvious part of the waste of wealth occasioned to 
 society by human improbity ; there is in all rich communi- 
 ties a predatory population, who live by pillaging or over- 
 reaching other people ; their numbers cannot be authenti- 
 cally ascertained, but on the lowest estimate, in a country 
 like England, it is very large. The support of these per- 
 sons is a direct burthen on the national industry. The 
 police, and the whole apparatus of punishment, and of 
 criminal and partly of civil justice, are a second burthen 
 rendered necessary by the first. The exorbitantly-paid pro- 
 fession of lawyers, so far as their work is not created by 
 defects in the law of their own contriving, are required and 
 supported principally by the dishonesty of mankind. As 
 the standard of integrity in a community rises higher, all 
 these expenses become less. But this positive saving would 
 be far outweighed by the immense increase in the produce 
 of all kinds of labour, and saving of time and expenditure, 
 which would be obtained if the labourers honestly per- 
 formed what they undertake ; and by the increased spirit, 
 the feeling of power and confidence, with which works of 
 all sorts would be planned and carried on by those who felt 
 that all whose aid was required would do their part faith- 
 fully according to their contracts. Conjoint action is pos-
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 151 
 
 sible just in proportion as human beings can rely on each 
 other. There are countries in Europe, of first-rate industrial 
 capabilities, where the most serious impediment to conduct- 
 ing business concerns on a large scale, is the rarity of persons 
 who are supposed fit to be trusted with the receipt and 
 expenditure of large sums of money. There are nations 
 whose commodities are looked shily upon by merchants, 
 because they cannot depend on finding the quality of the 
 article conformable to that of the sample. Such short- 
 sighted frauds are far from unexampled in English exports. 
 Every one has heard of " devil's dust : " and among other 
 instances given by Mr. Babbage, is one in which a branch 
 of export trade was for a long time actually stopped by the 
 forgeries and frauds which had occurred in it. On the 
 other hand, the substantial advantage derived in business 
 transactions from proved trustworthiness, is not less re- 
 markably exemplified in the same work. "At one of our 
 largest towns, sales and purchases on a very extensive scale 
 are made daily in the course of business without any of the 
 parties ever exchanging a written document." Spread over 
 a whole year's transactions, how great a return, in saving 
 of time, trouble, and expense, is brought in to the producers 
 and dealers of such a town from their own integrity. " The 
 influence of established character in producing confidence 
 operated in a very remarkable manner at the ti.ne of the 
 exclusion of British manufactures from the Continent during 
 the last war. One of our largest establishments had been 
 in the habit of doing extensive business with a house in the 
 centre of Germany ; but on the closing of the Continental 
 ports against our manufactures, heavy penalties were in 
 flicted on all those who contravened the Berlin and Milan 
 decrees. The English manufacturer continued, neverthe- 
 less, to receive orders, with directions how to consign them, 
 and appointments for the time and mode of payment, in 
 letters, the handwriting of which was known to him, but 
 which were never signed except by the Christian name of one 
 of the firm, and even in some instances they were without
 
 152 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 6. 
 
 any signature at all. These orders were executed, and in no 
 instance was there the least irregularity in the payments." * 
 6. Among the secondary causes which determine the 
 productiveness of productive agents, the most important is 
 Security. By security I mean the completeness of the pro- 
 tection which society affords to its members. This consists 
 of protection 5y the government, and protection against the 
 government. The latter is the more important. Where a 
 person known to possess anything worth taking away, can 
 
 * Some minor instances noticed by Mr. Babbage may be cited in further 
 illustration of the waste occasioned to society through the inability of its mem- 
 bers to trust one another. 
 
 " The cost to the purchaser is the price he pays for any article, added to the 
 cost of verifying the fact of its having that degree of goodness for which he con- 
 tracts. In some cases, the goodness of the article is evident on mere inspection ; 
 and in those cases there is not much difference of price at different shops. The 
 goodness of loaf sugar, for instance, can be discerned almost at a glance ; and 
 the consequence is, that the price is so uniform, and the profit upon it so small, 
 that no grocer is at all anxious to sell it ; whilst on the other hand, tea, of which 
 it is exceedingly difficult to judge, and which can be adulterated by mixture so 
 as to deceive the skill even of a practised eye, has a great variety of different 
 prices, and is that article which every grocer is most anxious to sell to his cus- 
 tomers. The difficulty and expense of verification are in some instances so great 
 as to justify the deviation from well-established principles. Thus it is a general 
 maxim that Government can purchase any article at a cheaper rate than that at 
 which they can manufacture it themselves. But it has, nevertheless, been con- 
 sidered more economical to build extensive flour-mills (such as those at Deptford), 
 and to grind their own corn, than to verify each sack of purchased flour, and to 
 employ persons in devising methods of detecting the new modes of adulteration 
 which miorht be continually resorted to." A similar want of confidence might 
 deprive a nation, such as the United States, of a large export trade in flour. 
 
 Again : " Some years since, a mode of preparing old clover and trefoil seeds 
 by a process called doctoring became so prevalent as to excite the attention of 
 the House of Commons. It appeared in evidence before a Committee, that the 
 old seed of the white clover was doctored by first wetting it slightly, and then 
 drying it by the fumes of burning sulphur; and that the red clover seed had its 
 colour improved by shaking it in a sack with a small quantity of indigo ; but this 
 being detected after a time, the doctors then used a preparation of logwood, fined 
 by a little copperas, and sometimes by verdigris ; thus at once improving the 
 appearance of the old seed, and diminishing, if not destroying, its vegetative 
 power, already enfeebled by age. Supposing no injury had resulted to good 
 seed so prepared, it was proved that, from the improved appearance, the market 
 price would be enhanced by this process from five to twenty-fire shillings a him-
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 153 
 
 expect nothing but to have it torn from him, with every 
 circumstance of tyrannical violence, by the agents of a 
 rapacious government, it is not likely that many will exert 
 themselves to produce much more than necessaries. This 
 is the acknowledged explanation of the poverty of many 
 fertile tracts of Asia, which were once prosperous and popu- 
 lous. From this to the degree of security enjoyed in the 
 best governed parts of Europe, there are numerous grada- 
 tions. In many provinces of France, before the Revolution. 
 a vicious system of taxation on the land, and still more the 
 
 dred-weight. But the greatest evil arose from the circumstance of these pro- 
 cesses rendering old and worthless seed equal in appearance to the best. One 
 witness had tried some doctored seed, and found that not above one grain in a 
 hundred grew, and that those which did vegetate died away afterwards ; whilst 
 about eighty or ninety per cent, of good seed usually grows. The seed so treated 
 was sold to retail dealers in the country, who of course endeavoured to purchase 
 at the cheapest rate, and from them it got into the hands of the farmers, neither 
 of these classes being capable of distinguishing the fraudulent from the genuine 
 seed. Many cultivators in consequence diminished their consumption of the 
 articles, and others were obliged to pay a higher price to those who had skill to 
 distinguish the mixed seed, and who had integrity and character to prevent them 
 from dealing in it." 
 
 The same writer states that Irish flax, though in natural quality inferior to 
 none, sells, or did lately sell, in the market at a penny to twopence per pound 
 less than foreign or British flax ; part of the difference arising from negligence 
 in its preparation, but part from the cause mentioned in the evidence of Mr. 
 Corry, many years Secretary to the Irish Linen Board : " The owners of the flax, 
 who are almost always people in the lower classes of life, believe that they can 
 best advance their own interests by imposing on the buyers. Flax being sold by 
 weight, various expedients are used to increase it ; and every expedient is inju- 
 rious, particularly the damping of it ; a very common practice, which makes the 
 flax afterwards heat. The inside of every bundle (and the bundles all vary in 
 bulk) is often full of pebbles, or dirt of various kinds, to increase the weight 
 In this state it is purchased and exported to Great Britain." 
 
 It was given in evidence before a Committee of the House of Commons that 
 the lace trade at Nottingham had greatly fallen off, from the making of fraudu- 
 lent and bad articles : that " a kind of lace called single-press was manufactured,' 
 (I still quote Mr. Babbage,) " which, although good to the eye, became nearly 
 spoiled in washing by the slipping of the threads ; that not one person in a thou- 
 sand could distinguish the difference between single-press and double-press lace ; 
 that even workmen and manufacturers were obliged to employ a magnifying- 
 glass for that purpose ; and that in another similar article, called warp-lace, aucb 
 aid was essential."
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 6. 
 
 absence of redress against the arbitrary exactions which 
 were made under colour of the taxes, rendered it the interest 
 of every cultivator to appear poor, and therefore to culti- 
 vate badly. The only insecurity which is altogether par- 
 alyzing to the active energies of producers, is that arising 
 from the government, or from persons invested with its 
 authority. Against all other depredators there is a hope 
 of defending oneself. Greece and the Greek colonies in the 
 ancient world, Flanders and Italy in the middle ages, by no 
 means enjoyed what any one with modern ideas would call 
 security : the state of society was most unsettled and turbu- 
 lent ; person and property were exposed to a thousand 
 dangers. But they were free countries ; they were in gen- 
 eral neither arbitrarily oppressed, nor systematically plun- 
 dered by their governments. Against other enemies the 
 individual energy which their institutions called forth, 
 enabled them to make successful resistance : their labour, 
 therefore, was eminently productive, and their riches, while 
 they remained free, was constantly on the increase. The 
 Roman despotism, putting an end to wars and internal 
 conflicts throughout the empire, relieved the subject popu- 
 lation from much of the former insecurity : but because it 
 left them under the grinding yoke of its own rapacity, they 
 became enervated and impoverished, until they were an 
 easy prey to barbarous but free invaders. They would 
 neither fight nor labour, because they were no longer 
 suffered to enjoy that for which they fought and laboured. 
 
 Much of the security to person and property in modern 
 nations is the effect of manners and opinion rather than of 
 law. There are, or lately were, countries in Europe where 
 the monarch was nominally absolute, but where, from the 
 restraints imposed by established usage, no subject felt 
 practically in the smallest danger of having his possessions 
 arbitrarily seized or a contribution levied on them by the 
 government. There must, however, be in such govern- 
 ments much petty plunder and other tyranny by subordi- 
 nate agents, for which redress is not obtained, owing to the
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 155 
 
 want of publicity which is the ordinary character of abso- 
 lute governments. In England the people are tolerably 
 well protected, both by institutions and manners, against 
 the agents of government ; but, for the security they enjoy 
 against other evil-doers, they are very little indebted to 
 their institutions. The laws cannot be said to afford pro- 
 tection to property, when they afford it only at such a cost 
 as renders submission to injury in general the better calcu- 
 lation. The security of property in England is owing 
 (except as regards open violence) to opinion, and the fear of 
 exposure, much more than to the law and the courts of 
 justice. 
 
 Independently of all imperfection in the bulwarks which 
 society purposely throws round what it recognises as prop- 
 erty, there are various other modes in which defective insti- 
 tutions impede the employment of the productive resources 
 of a country to the best advantage. We shall have occasion 
 for noticing many of these in the progress of our subject. 
 It is sufficient here to remark, that the efficiency of industry 
 may be expected to be great, in proportion as the fruits of 
 industry are insured to the person exerting it : and that all 
 social arrangements are conducive to useful exertion, accord- 
 ing as they provide that the reward of every one for his 
 labour shall be proportioned as much as possible to the 
 benefit which it produces. All laws or usages which favour 
 one class or sort of persons to the disadvantage of others ; 
 which chain up the efforts of any part of the community in 
 pursuit of their own good, or stand between those efforts 
 and their natural fruits are (independently of all other 
 grounds of condemnation) violations of the fundamental 
 principles of economical policy ; tending to make the aggre- 
 gate productive powers of the community productive in a 
 less degree than they would otherwise be.
 
 CHAPTEK Vin. 
 
 OF CO-OPERATION, OK THE COMBINATION OF LABOUR 
 
 1. IN the enumeration of the circumstances which 
 promote the productiveness of labour, we have left one 
 untouched, which, because of its importance, and of the 
 many topics of discussion which it involves, requires to be 
 treated apart. This is, cooperation, or the combined action 
 of numbers. Of this great aid to production, a single de- 
 partment, known by the name of Division of Labour, lias 
 engaged a large share of the attention of political econo- 
 mists ; most deservedly indeed, but to the exclusion of other 
 cases and exemplifications of the same comprehensive law. 
 Mr. Wakefield was, I believe, the first to point out, that 
 part of the subject had, with injurious effect, been mistaken 
 for the whole ; that a more fundamental principle lies be- 
 neath that of the division of labour, and comprehends it. 
 
 Cooperation, he observes,* is " of two distinct kinds : 
 first, such cooperation as takes place when several persons 
 help each other in the same employment ; secondly, such 
 cooperation as takes place when several persons help each 
 other in different employments. These may be termed 
 Simple Cooperation and Complex Cooperation. 
 
 " The advantage of simple cooperation is illustrated by 
 the case of two greyhounds running together, which, it is 
 said, will kill more hares than four greyhounds running 
 separately. In a vast number of simple operations per- 
 formed by human exertion, it is quite obvious that two men 
 
 * Note to Wakefield's edition of Adam Smith, vol. i. p. 26.
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 157 
 
 working together will do more than four, or four times four 
 men, each of whom should work alone. In the lifting of 
 heavy weights, for example, in the felling of trees, in the 
 sawing of timber, in the gathering of much hay or corn 
 during a short period of fine weather, in draining a large 
 extent of land during the short season when such a work 
 may be properly conducted, in the pulling of ropes on 
 board ship, in the rowing of large boats, in some mining 
 operations, in the erection of a scaffolding for building, and 
 in the breaking of stones for the repair of a road, so that the 
 whole of the road shall always be kept in good order : in 
 all these simple operations, and thousands more, it is abso- 
 lutely necessary that many persons should work together, 
 at the same time, in the same place, and in the same way. 
 The savages of New Holland never help each other, even 
 in the most simple operations ; and their condition is hardly 
 superior, in some respects it is inferior, to that of the wild 
 animals which they now and then catch. Let any one 
 imagine that the labourers of England should suddenly 
 desist from helping each other in simple employments, and 
 he will see at once the prodigious advantages of simple co- 
 operation. In a countless number of employments, the 
 produce of labor is, up to a certain point, in proportion to 
 such mutual assistance amongst the workmen. This is the 
 first step in social improvement." The second is, when 
 " one body of men having combined their labor to raise 
 more food than they required, another body of men are in- 
 duced to combine their labour for the purpose of producing 
 more clothes than they require, and with those surplus 
 clothes buying the surplus food of the other body of labour- 
 ers ; while, if both bodies together have produced more food 
 and clothes than they both require, both bodies obtain, by 
 means of exchange, a proper capital for setting more labour- 
 ers to work in their respective occupations." To simple 
 cooperation is thus superadded what Mr. Wakefield terms 
 Complex Cooperation. The one is the combination of 
 several labourers to help each other in the same set of opera-
 
 158 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 1. 
 
 tions ; the other is the combination of several labourers to 
 help one another by a division of operations. 
 
 There is " an important distinction between simple and 
 complex cooperation. Of the former, one is always con- 
 scious at the time of practising it : it is obvious to the most 
 ignorant and vulgar eye. Of the latter, but a very few of 
 the vast numbers who practise it are in any degree con- 
 scious. The cause of this distinction is easily seen. When 
 several men are employed in lifting the same weight, or 
 pulling the same rope, at the same time, and in the same 
 place, there can be no sort of doubt that they cooperate 
 with each other ; the fact is impressed on the mind by the 
 mere sense of sight ; but when several men, or bodies of 
 men, are employed at different times and places, and in dif- 
 ferent pursuits, their cooperation with each other, though it 
 may be quite as certain, is not so readily perceived as in the 
 other case : in order to perceive it, a complex operation of 
 the mind is required." 
 
 In the present state of society the breeding and feeding 
 of sheep is the occupation of one set of people, dressing the 
 wool to prepare it for the spinner is that of another, spin- 
 ning it into thread of a third, weaving the thread into broad- 
 cloth of a fourth, dyeing the cloth of a fifth, making it into 
 a coat of a sixth, without counting the multitude of carriers, 
 merchants, factors, and retailers, put in requisition at the 
 successive stages of this progress. All these persons, with- 
 out knowledge of one another or previous understanding, 
 cooperate in the production of the ultimate result, a coat. 
 But these are far from being all who cooperate in it ; for 
 each of these persons requires food, and many other articles 
 of consumption, and unless he could have relied that other 
 people would produce these for him, he could not have de- 
 voted his whole time to one step in the succession of opera- 
 tions which produces one single commodity, a coat. Every 
 person who took part in producing food or erecting houses 
 for this series of producers, has, however unconsciously on 
 his part, combined his labour with theirs. It is by a real,
 
 COMBINATION OP LABOUR. 159 
 
 though unexpressed, concert " that the body who raise more 
 food than they want, can exchange with the body who raise 
 more clothes than they want ; and if the two bodies were 
 separated, either by distance or disinclination unless the 
 two bodies should virtually form themselves into one, for 
 the common object of raising enough food and clothes for 
 the whole they could not divide into two distinct parts the 
 whole operation of producing a sufficient quantity of food 
 and clothes." 
 
 2. The influence exercised on production by the se- 
 paration of employments, is more fundamental than, from 
 the mode in which the subject is usually treated, a reader 
 might be induced to suppose. It is not merely that when 
 the production of different things becomes the sole or prin- 
 cipal occupation of different persons, a much greater quan- 
 tity of each kind of article is produced. The truth is much 
 beyond this. "Without some separation of employments, 
 very few things would be produced at all. 
 
 Suppose a set of persons, or a number of families, all 
 employed precisely in the same manner ; each family settled 
 on a piece of its own land, on which it grows by its labour 
 the food required for its own sustenance, and as there are 
 no persons to buy any surplus produce where all are pro- 
 ducers, each family has to produce within itself whatever 
 other articles it consumes. In such circumstances, if the 
 soil was tolerably fertile, and population did not tread too 
 closely on the heels of subsistence, there would be, no doubt, 
 some kind of domestic manufactures ; clothing for the family 
 might perhaps be spun and woven within it, by the labour 
 probably of the women (a first step in the separation of em- 
 ployments) ; and a dwelling of some sort would be erected 
 and kept in repair by their united labour. But beyond 
 simple food (precarious, too, from the variations of the 
 seasons), coarse clothing, and very imperfect lodging, it 
 would be scarcely possible that the family should produce 
 anything more. They would, in general, require their ut-
 
 160 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 2. 
 
 most exertions to accomplish so much. Their power even 
 of extracting food from the soil would be kept within nar- 
 row limits by the quality of their tools, which would neces- 
 sarily be of the most wretched description. To do almost 
 anything in the way of producing for themselves articles of 
 convenience or luxury, would require too much time, and, 
 in many cases, their presence in a different place. Very 
 few kinds of industry, therefore, would exist; and that 
 which did exist, namely the production of necessaries, 
 would be extremely inefficient, not solely from imperfect 
 implements, but because, when the ground and the domestic 
 industry fed by it had been made to supply the necessaries 
 of a single family in tolerable abundance, there would be 
 little motive, while the numbers of the family remained the 
 same, to make either the land or the labour produce more. 
 
 But suppose an event to occur, which would amount to 
 a revolution in the circumstances of this little settlement. 
 Suppose that a company of artificers, provided wifti tools, 
 and with food sufficient to maintain them for a year, arrive 
 in the country and establish themselves in the midst of the 
 population. These new settlers occupy themselves in pro- 
 ducing articles of use or ornament adapted to the taste of a 
 simple people ; and before their food is exhausted they have 
 produced these in considerable quantity, and are ready to 
 exchange them for more food. The economical position of 
 the landed population is now most materially altered. 
 They have an opportunity given them of acquiring comforts 
 and luxuries. Things which, while they depended solely 
 on their own labour, they never could have obtained, be- 
 cause they could not have produced, are now accessible to 
 them if they can succeed in producing an additional quan' 
 tity of food and necessaries. They are thus incited to in- 
 crease the productiveness of their industry. Among the 
 conveniences for the first time made accessible to them, 
 better tools are probably one : and apart from this, they 
 have a motive to labour more assiduously, and to adopt 
 contrivances for making their labour more effectual. By
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 161 
 
 these means they will generally succeed in compelling their 
 land to produce, not only food for themselves, but a surplus 
 for the new comers, wherewith to buy from them the pro- 
 ducts of their industry. The new settlers constitute what 
 is called a ma/rket for surplus agricultural produce : and 
 their arrival has enriched the settlement not only by the 
 manufactured articles which they produce, but by the food 
 which would not have been produced unless they had been 
 there to consume it. 
 
 There is no inconsistency between this doctrine, and the 
 proposition we before maintained, that a market for com- 
 modities does not constitute employment for labour.* The 
 labour of the agriculturists was already provided with em- 
 ployment ; they are not indebted to the demand of the new 
 comers for being able to maintain themselves. What that 
 demand does for them is, to call their labour into increased 
 vigour and efficiency ; to stimulate them, by new motives, 
 to new exertions. Neither do the new comers owe their 
 maintenance and employment to the demand of the agricul- 
 turists : with a year's subsistence in store, they could have 
 settled side by side with the former inhabitants, and pro- 
 duced a similar scanty stock of food and necessaries. 
 Nevertheless, we see of what supreme importance to the 
 productiveness of the labour of producers, is the existence 
 of other producers within reach, employed in a different 
 kind of industry. The power of exchanging the products 
 of one kind of labour for those of another, is a condition, 
 but for which, there would almost always be a smaller 
 quantity of labour altogether. When a new market is 
 opened for any product of industry, and a greater quantity 
 of the article is consequently produced, the increased pro- 
 duction is not always obtained at the expense of some other 
 product; it is often a new creation, the result of labour 
 which would otherwise have remained unexerted ; or of 
 assistance rendered to labour by improvements or by modes 
 of cooperation to which recourse would not have been had 
 
 * Supra, pp. 114124. 
 11
 
 162 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 if an inducement had not been offered for raising a larger 
 produce. 
 
 3. From these considerations it appears that a coun- 
 try will seldom have a productive agriculture, unless it has 
 a large town population, or the only available substitute, a 
 large export trade in agricultural produce to supply a popu- 
 lation elsewhere. I use the phrase town population for 
 shortness, to imply a population non-agricultural ; which 
 will generally be collected in towns or large villages, for 
 the sake of combination of labour. The application of this 
 truth by Mr. "Wakefield to the theory of colonization, has 
 excited much attention, and is doubtless destined to excite 
 much more. It is one of those great practical discoveries, 
 which, once made, appear so obvious that the merit of mak- 
 ing them seems less than it is. Mr. Wakefield was the first 
 to point out that the mode of planting new settlements, then 
 commonly practised setting down a number of families 
 side by side, each on its piece of land, all employing them- 
 selves in exactly the same manner, though in favourable 
 circumstances it may assure to those families a rude abun- 
 dance of mere necessaries, can never be other than unfavour- 
 able to great production or rapid growth : and his system 
 consists of arrangements for securing that every colony shall 
 have from the first a town population bearing due propor- 
 tion to its agricultural, and that the cultivators of the soil 
 shall not be so widely scattered as to be deprived by dis- 
 tance, of the benefit of that town population as a market for 
 their produce. The principle on which the scheme is 
 founded, does not depend on any theory respecting the 
 superior productiveness of land held in large portions, and 
 cultivated by hired labour. Supposing it true that land 
 yields the greatest produce when divided into small proper- 
 ties and cultivated by peasant proprietors, a town popula- 
 tion would be just as necessary to induce those proprietors 
 to raise that larger produce : and if they were too far from 
 the nearest seat of non-agricnltnral industry to use it as a
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 163 
 
 market for disposing of their surplus, and thereby supplying 
 their other wants, neither that surplus nor any equivalent 
 for it would, generally speaking, be produced. 
 
 It is, above all, the deficiency of town population which 
 limits the productiveness of the industry of a country like 
 India. The agriculture of India is conducted entirely on 
 the system of small holdings. There is, however, a con- 
 siderable amount of combination of labour. The village 
 institutions and customs, which are the real framework of 
 Indian society, make provision for joint action in the cases 
 in which it is seen to be necessary ; or where they fail to do 
 so, the government (when tolerably well administered) steps 
 in, and by an outlay from the revenue, executes by com- 
 bined labour the tanks, embankments, and works of irriga- 
 tion, which are indispensable. The implements and pro- 
 cesses of agriculture are however so .wretched, that the 
 produce of the soil, in spite of great natural fertility and 
 a climate highly favourable to vegetation, is miserably 
 small : and the land might be made to yield food in abun- 
 dance for many more than the present number of inhabi- 
 tants, without departing from the system of small holdings. 
 But to this the stimulus is wanting, which a large town 
 population, connected with the rural districts by easy and 
 unexpensive means of communication, would afford. That 
 town population, again, does not grow up, because the few 
 wants and unaspiring spirit of the cultivators (joined until 
 lately with great insecurity of property, from military and 
 fiscal rapacity) prevent them from attempting to become 
 consumers of town produce. In these circumstances the 
 best chance of an early development of the productive re- 
 sources of India, consists in the rapid growth of its export 
 of agricultural produce (cotton, indigo, sugar, coffee, &c.) 
 to the markets of Europe. The producers of these articles 
 are consumers of food supplied by their fellow-agriculturists 
 in India ; and the market thus opened for surplus food will, 
 if accompanied by good government, raise up by degrees 
 more extended wants and desires, directed either towards
 
 '64 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 4. 
 
 European commodities, or towards things which will re- 
 quire for their production in India a larger manufacturing 
 population. 
 
 4. Thus far of the separation of employments, a form 
 of the combination of labour without which there cannot 
 be the first rudiments of industrial civilization. But when 
 this separation is thoroughly established ; when it has be- 
 come the general practice for each producer to supply many 
 others with one commodity, and to be supplied by others 
 with most of the things which he consumes ; reasons not 
 less real, though less imperative, invite to a further exten- 
 sion of the same principle. It is found that the productive 
 power of labour is increased by carrying the separation fur- 
 ther and further ; by breaking down more and more every 
 process of industry into parts, so that each labourer shall 
 confine himself to an ever smaller number of simple opera- 
 tions. And thus, in time, arise those remarkable cases of 
 what is called the division of labour, with which all readers 
 on subjects of this nature are familiar. Adam Smith's 
 illustration from pin-making, though so well known, is so 
 much to the point, that I will venture once more to trans- 
 cribe it. "The business of making a pin is divided into 
 about eighteen distinct operations. One man draws out 
 the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points 
 it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head ; to 
 make the head requires two or three distinct operations ; 
 to put it on, is a peculiar business ; to whiten the pins is 
 another ; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the 
 
 paper I have seen a small manufactory where 
 
 ten men only were employed, and where some of them, 
 consequently, performed two or three distinct operations. 
 But though they were very poor, and therefore but indiffer- 
 ently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they 
 could, when they exerted themselves, make among them 
 about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a 
 pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size.
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 165 
 
 Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them up- 
 wards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, 
 therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, 
 might be considered as making four thousand eight hun- 
 dred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separ- 
 ately and independently, and without any of them having 
 been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly 
 could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one 
 pin in a day. 
 
 M. Say furnishes a still stronger example of the effects 
 of division of labour from a not very important branch of 
 industry certainly, the manufacture of playing cards. " It 
 is said by those engaged in the business, that each card, 
 that is, a piece of pasteboard of the size of the hand, before 
 being ready for sale, does not undergo fewer than seventy 
 operations,* every one of which might be the occupation of 
 a distinct class of workmen. And if there are not seventy 
 classes of work-people in each card manufactory, it is be- 
 cause the division of labour is not carried so far as it might 
 be ; because the same workman is charged with two, three, 
 
 * " Ce ne sont point les memes ouvriers qui preparent le papier dont on fait 
 les cartes, ni les couleurs dont on les empreint ; et en ne fesant attention qu'au 
 seul emploi de ces matieres, nous trouverons qu'un jeu de cartes est le reeultat 
 de plusieurs operations dont chacune occupe une serie distincte d'ouvriers et 
 d'ouvrieres qui s'appliquent toujours a la meme operation. Ce sont des per- 
 sonnes differentes, et toujours les memes, qui epluchent les bouchons et gros- 
 seurs qui se trouvent dans le papier et nuiraient a 1'egalite d'epaisseur; les 
 memes qui collent ensemble les trois feuilles de papier dont se compose le car- 
 ton et qui le mettent en presse ; les memes qui impriment en noir le dessin des 
 figures; d'autres ouvriers impriment les couleurs des memes figures; d'autres 
 font secher au r6chaud les cartons une fois qu'ils sont imprim&s ; d'autres s'occu- 
 pent de les lisser dessus et desaous. C'est une occupation particuliere qui de les 
 couper d'egale dimension ; e'en est une autre de les assembler pour en former 
 des jeux ; une autre encore d'imprimer les enveloppes des jeux, et une autre 
 encore de les envelopper ; sans compter les fonctions des personnes chargecs des 
 ventes et des achats, de payer les ouvriers et de tenir les ecritures." SAY, Court 
 d' 'Economic Politique Pratique, vol. i. p. 840. 
 
 It is a remarkable proof of the economy of labour occasioned by this minute 
 division of occupations, that an article, the production of which is the result of 
 luch a multitude of manual operations, can be sold for a trifling sum.
 
 166 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 or four distinct operations. The influence of this distri- 
 bution of employments is immense. I have seen a card 
 manufactory where thirty workmen produced daily fifteen 
 thousand five hundred cards, being above five hundred 
 cards for each labourer ; and it may be presumed that if 
 each of these workmen were obliged to perform all the 
 operations himself, even supposing him a practised hand, 
 he would not perhaps complete two cards in a day : and 
 the thirty workmen, instead of fifteen thousand five hundred 
 cards, would make only sixty." 
 
 In watchmaking, as Mr. Babbage observes, "it was 
 stated in evidence before a Committee of the House of 
 Commons, that there are a hundred and two distinct 
 branches of this art, to each of which a boy may be put 
 apprentice; and that he only learns his master's depart- 
 ment, and is unable, after his apprenticeship has expired, 
 without subsequent instruction, to work at any other 
 branch. The watch-finisher, whose business it is to put 
 together the scattered parts, is the only one, out of the 
 hundred and two persons, who can work in any other 
 department than his own."* 
 
 5. The causes of the increased efficiency given to 
 labour by the division of employments are some of them 
 too familiar to require specification ; but it is worth while 
 to attempt a complete enumeration of them. By Adam 
 Smith they are reduced to three. " First, the increase of 
 dexterity in every particular workman ; secondly, the sav- 
 ing of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one 
 species of work to another ; and lastly, the invention of a 
 great number of machines which facilitate and abridge 
 labour, and enable one man to do the work of many." 
 
 Of these, the increase of dexterity of the individual 
 workman is the most obvious and universal. It does not 
 follow that because a thing has been done oftener it will be 
 
 * Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 3rd Edition, p. 201.
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 167 
 
 done better. That depends on the intelligence of the work- 
 man, and on the degree in which his mind works along 
 with his hands. But it will be done more easily. The 
 organs themselves acquire greater power : the muscles em- 
 ployed grow stronger by frequent exercise, the sinews more 
 pliant, and the mental powers more efficient, and less sensi- 
 ble of fatigue. What can be done easily has at least a 
 better chance of being done well, and is sure to be done 
 more expeditiously. What was at first done slowly comes 
 to be done quickly ; what was at first done slowly with ac- 
 curacy is at last done quickly with equal accuracy. This 
 is as true of mental operations as of bodily. Even a child, 
 after much practice, sums up a column of figures with a 
 rapidity which resembles intuition. The act of speaking 
 any language, of reading fluently, of playing music at sight, 
 are cases as remarkable as they are familiar. Among 
 bodily acts, dancing, gymnastic exercises, ease and bril- 
 liancy of execution on a musical instrument, are examples 
 of the rapidity and facility acquired by repetition. In sim- 
 pler manual operations the effect is of course still sooner 
 produced. "The rapidity," Adam Smith observes, "with 
 which some of the operations of certain manufactures are 
 performed, exceeds what the human hand could, by those 
 who had never seen them, be supposed capable of acquir- 
 ing."* This skill is, naturally, attained after shorter prac- 
 tice, in proportion as the division of labour is more minute ; 
 and will not be attained in the same degree at all, if the 
 
 * " In astronomical observations, the senses of the operator are rendered so 
 acute by habit, that he can estimate differences of time to the tenth of a second ; 
 and adjust his measuring instrument to graduations of which five thousand occupy 
 only an inch. It is the same throughout the commonest processes of manufac- 
 ture. A child who fastens on the heads of pins will repeat an operation requir- 
 ing several distinct motions of the muscles one hundred times a minute for sev- 
 eral successive hours. In a recent Manchester paper it was stated that a peculiar 
 sort of twist or ' gimp,' which cost three shillings making when first introduced, 
 was now manufactured for one penny; and this not, as usually, by the invention 
 of a new machine, but solely through the increased dexterity of the workman." 
 Edinburgh Review for January, 1849, p. 81,
 
 168 BOOK I CHAPTER VIII. 5. 
 
 workman has a greater variety of operations to execute 
 than allows of a sufficiently frequent repetition of each. 
 The advantage is not confined to the greater efficiency ulti- 
 mately attained, but includes also the diminished loss of 
 time, and waste of material, in learning the art. " A cer- 
 tain quantity of material," says Mr. Babbage,* " will in all 
 cases be consumed unprofitably, or spoiled, by every person 
 who learns an art ; and as he applies himself to each new 
 process, he will waste some of the raw material, or of the 
 partly manufactured commodity. But if each man commit 
 this waste in acquiring successively every process, the quan- 
 tity of waste will be much greater than if each person con- 
 fine his attention to one process." And in general each 
 will be much sooner qualified to execute his one process, if 
 he be not distracted while learning it, by the necessity of 
 learning others. 
 
 The second advantage enumerated by Adam Smith as 
 arising from the division of labour, is one on which I can- 
 not help thinking that more stress is laid by him and others 
 than it deserves. To do full justice to his opinion, I will 
 quote his own exposition of it. " The advantage which is 
 gained by saving the time commonly lost in passing from 
 one sort of work to another, is much greater than we should 
 at first view be apt to imagine it. It is impossible to pass 
 very quickly from one kind of work to another, that is car- 
 ried on in a different place, and with quite different tools. 
 A country weaver, who cultivates a small farm, must lose 
 a good deal of time in passing from his loom to the field, 
 and from the field to his loom. When the two trades can 
 be carried on in the same workhouse, the loss of time is no 
 doubt much less. It is even in this case, however, very 
 considerable. A man commonly saunters a little in turning 
 his hand from one sort of employment to another. When 
 he first begins the new work, he is seldom very keen and 
 hearty ; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for 
 some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose. 
 
 * Page 171.
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 169 
 
 The habit of sauntering and of indolent careless application, 
 which is naturally, or rather necessarily acquired by every 
 country workman who is obliged to change his work and 
 his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty 
 different ways almost every day of his life, renders him 
 almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vig- 
 orous application even on the most pressing occasions." 
 This is surely a most exaggerated description of the ineffi- 
 ciency of country labour, where it has any adequate motive 
 to exertion. Few workmen change their work and their 
 tools oftener than a gardener ; is he usually incapable of 
 vigorous application? Many of the higher description of 
 artisans have to perform a great multiplicity of operations 
 with a variety of tools. They do not execute each of these 
 with the rapidity with which a factory workman performs 
 his single operation ; but they are, except in a merely 
 manual sense, more skilful labourers, and in all senses 
 whatever more energetic. 
 
 Mr. Babbage, following in the track of Adam Smith, 
 says, "When the human hand, or the human head, has 
 been for some time occupied in any kind of work, it cannot 
 instantly change its employment with full effect. The 
 muscles of the limbs employed have acquired a flexibility 
 during their exertion, and those not in action a stiffness 
 during rest, which renders every change slow and unequal 
 in the commencement. Long habit also produces in the 
 muscles exercised a capacity for enduring fatigue to a much 
 greater degree than they could support under other circum- 
 stances. A similar result seems to take place in any change 
 of mental exertion ; the attention bestowed on the new sub- 
 ject not being so perfect at first as it becomes after some 
 exercise. The employment of different tools in the succes- 
 sive processes, is another cause of the loss of time in chang- 
 ing from one operation to another. If these tools are sim- 
 ple, and the change is not frequent, the loss of time is not 
 considerable ; but in many processes of the arts, the tools 
 are of great delicacy, requiring accurate adjustment everj?
 
 170 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 5. 
 
 time they are used ; and in many cases, the time employed 
 in adjusting bears a large proportion to that employed in 
 using the tool. The sliding-rest, the dividing and the drill- 
 ing engine are of this kind: and hence, in manufactories 
 of sufficient extent, it is found to be good economy to keep 
 one machine constantly employed in one kind of work : one 
 lathe, for example, having a screw motion to its sliding-rest 
 along the whole length of its bed, is kept constantly making 
 cylinders; another, having a motion for equalizing the ve- 
 locity of the work at the point at which it passes the tool, is 
 kept for facing surfaces; whilst a third is constantly em- 
 ployed in cutting wheels." 
 
 I am very far from implying that these different consid- 
 erations are of no weight ; but I think there are counter- 
 considerations which are overlooked. If one kind of mus- 
 cular or mental labour is different from another, for that 
 very reason it is to some extent a rest from that other ; and 
 if the greatest vigour is not at once obtained in the second 
 occupation, neither could the first have been indefinitely 
 prolonged without some relaxation of energy. It is a mat- 
 ter of common experience that a change of occupation will 
 often afford relief where complete repose would otherwise 
 be necessary, and that a person can work many more hours 
 without fatigue at a succession of occupations, than if con- 
 fined during the whole time to one. Different occupations 
 employ different muscles, or different energies of the mind, 
 some of which rest and are refreshed while others work. 
 Bodily labour itself rests from mental, and conversely. The 
 variety itself has an invigorating effect on what, for want 
 of a more philosophical appellation, we must term the ani- 
 mal spirits; so important to the efficiency of all work not 
 mechanical, and not unimportant even to that. The com- 
 parative weight due to these considerations is different with 
 different individuals; some are more fitted than others for 
 persistency in one occupation, and less fit for change ; they 
 require longer to get the steam up (to use a metaphor now 
 common) ; the irksomeness of setting to work lasts longer,
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 171 
 
 and it requires more time to bring their faculties into full 
 play, and therefore when this is once done, they do not like 
 to leave off, but go on long without intermission, even to 
 the injury of their health. Temperament has something to 
 do with these differences. There are people whose faculties 
 seem by nature to come slowly into action, and to accom- 
 plish little until they have been a long time employed. 
 Others, again, get into action rapidly, but cannot, without 
 exhaustion, continue long. In this, however, as in most 
 other things, though natural differences are something, 
 habit is much more. The habit of passing rapidly from one 
 occupation to another may be acquired, like other habits, 
 by early cultivation ; and when it is acquired, there is none 
 of the sauntering which Adam Smith speaks of, after each 
 change ; no want of energy and interest, but the workman 
 comes to each part of his occupation with a freshness and a 
 spirit which he does not retain if he persists in any one part 
 (unless in case of unusual excitement) beyond the length of 
 time to which he is accustomed. Women are usually (at 
 least in their present social circumstances) of far greater 
 versatility than men ; and the present topic is an instance 
 among multitudes, how little the ideas and experience of 
 women have yet counted for, in forming the opinions of 
 mankind. There are few women who would not reject the 
 idea that work is made vigorous by being protracted, and 
 is inefficient for some time after changing to a new thing. 
 Even in this case, habit, I believe, much more than nature, 
 is the cause of the difference. The occupations of nine out 
 of every ten men are special, those of nine out of every ten 
 women general, embracing a multitude of details, each of 
 which requires very little time. Women are in the constant 
 practice of passing quickly from one manual, and still more 
 from one mental operation to another, which therefore rarely 
 costs them either effort or loss of time, while a man's occu- 
 pation generally consists in working steadily for a long time 
 at one thing, or one very limited class of things. But the 
 situations are sometimes reversed, and with them the
 
 172 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 5. 
 
 characters. Women are not found less efficient than men 
 for the uniformity of factory work, or they would not so 
 generally be employed for it ; and a man who has cultivated 
 the habit of turning his hand to many things, far from being 
 the slothful and lazy person described by Adam Smith, is 
 usually remarkably lively and active. It is true, however, 
 that change of occupation may be too frequent even for the 
 most versatile. Incessant variety is even more fatiguing 
 than perpetual sameness. 
 
 The third advantage attributed by Adam Smith to the 
 division of labour, is, to a certain extent, real. Inventions 
 tending to save labour in a particular operation, are more 
 likely to occur to any one in proportion as his thoughts are 
 intensely directed to that occupation, and continually em- 
 ployed upon it. A person is not so likely to make practical 
 improvements in one department of things, whose attention 
 is very much diverted to others. But, in this, much more 
 depends on general intelligence and habitual activity of 
 mind, than on exclusiveness of occupation ; and if that ex- 
 clusiveness is carried to a degree unfavourable to the culti- 
 vation of intelligence, there will be more lost in this kind 
 of advantage, than gained. We may add, that whatever 
 may be the cause of making inventions, when they are once 
 made, the increased efficiency of labour is owing to the in- 
 vention itself, and not to the division of labour. 
 
 The greatest advantage (next to the dexterity of the 
 workmen) derived from the minute division of labour which 
 takes place in modern manufacturing industry, is one not 
 mentioned by Adam Smith, but to which attention has been 
 drawn by Mr. Babbage ; the more economical distribution 
 of labour, by classing the work-people according to their 
 capacity. Different parts of the same series of operations 
 require unequal degrees of skill arid bodily strength ; and 
 those who have skill enough for the most difficult, or strength 
 enough for the hardest parts of the labour, are made much 
 more useful by being employed solely in them ; the opera- 
 tions which everybody is capable of, being left to those who
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 173 
 
 are fit for no others. Production is most efficient when the 
 precise quantity of skill and strength, which is required for 
 each part of the process, is employed in it, and no more. 
 The operation of pin-making requires, it seems, in its dif- 
 ferent parts, such diiferent degrees of skill, that the wages 
 earned by the persons employed vary from fourpence half- 
 penny a day to six shillings ; and if the workman who is 
 paid at that highest rate had to perform the whole process, 
 he would be working a part of his time with a waste per 
 day equivalent to the difference between six shillings and 
 fourpence halfpenny. Without reference to the loss sus- 
 tained in quantity of work done, and supposing even that 
 he could make a pound of pins in the same time in which 
 ten workmen combining their labour can make ten pounds, 
 Mr. Babbage computes that they would cost, in making, 
 three times and three-quarters as much as they now do by 
 means of the division of labour. In needle-making, he 
 adds, the difference would be still greater, for in that, the 
 scale of remuneration for different parts of the process varies 
 from sixpence to twenty shillings a day. 
 
 To the advantage which consists in extracting the great- 
 est possible amount of utility from skill, may be added the 
 analogous one, of extracting the utmost possible utility from 
 tools. " If any man," says an able writer,* " had all the 
 tools which many different occupations require, at least 
 three-fourths of them would constantly be idle and useless. 
 It were clearly then better, were any society to exist where 
 each man had all these tools, and alternately carried on 
 each of these occupations, that the members of it should, if 
 possible, divide them amongst them, each restricting him- 
 self to some particular employment. The advantages of 
 the change to the whole community, and therefore to every 
 individual in it, are great. In the first place, the various 
 implements, being in constant employment, yield a better 
 return for what has been laid out in procuring them. In 
 
 * Statement of some New Principles on the subject of Political Economy, by 
 John Rae (Boston, U. S.), p. 164.
 
 174: BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 6. 
 
 consequence their owners can afford to have them of better 
 quality and more complete construction. The result of both 
 events is, that a larger provision is made for the future 
 wants of the whole society." 
 
 6. The division of labour, as all writers on the sub- 
 ject have remarked, is limited by the extent of the market. 
 If, by the separation of pin-making into ten distinct employ- 
 ments, forty-eight thousand pins can be made in a day, this 
 separation will only be advisable if the number of accessible 
 consumers is such as to require, every day, something like 
 forty-eight thousand pins. If there is only a demand for 
 twenty-four thousand, the division of labour can only be 
 advantageously carried to the extent which will every day 
 produce that smaller number. This, therefore, is a further 
 mode in which an accession of demand for a commodity 
 tends to increase the efficiency of the labour employed in 
 its production. The extent of the market may be limited 
 by several causes : too small a population ; the population 
 too scattered and distant to be easily accessible ; deficiency 
 of roads and water carriage ; or, finally, the population too 
 poor, that is, their collective labour too little effective, to 
 admit of their, being large consumers. Indolence, want of 
 skill, and want of combination of labour, among those who 
 would otherwise be buyers of a commodity, limit, therefore, 
 the practicable amount of combination of labour among its 
 producers. In an early stage of civilization, when the de- 
 mand of any particular locality was necessarily small, 
 industry only flourished among those who by their com- 
 mand of the sea-coast or of a navigable river, could have 
 the whole world, or all that part of it which lay on coasts 
 or navigable rivers, as a market for their productions. The 
 increase of the general riches of the world, when accom- 
 panied with freedom of commercial intercourse, improve- 
 ments in navigation, and inland communication by roads, 
 canals, or railways, tends to give increased productiveness 
 to the labour of every nation in particular, by enabling each
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 175 
 
 locality to supply with its special products so much larger 
 a market, that a great extension of the division of labour in 
 their production is an ordinary consequence. 
 
 The division of labour is also limited, in many cases, by 
 the nature of the employment. Agriculture, for example, 
 is not susceptible of so great a division of occupations as 
 many brandies of manufactures, because its different opera- 
 tions cannot possibly be simultaneous. One man cannot be 
 always ploughing, another sowing, and another reaping. 
 A workman who only practised one agricultural operation 
 would be idle eleven months of ihe year. The same person 
 may perform them all in succession, and have, in almost 
 every climate, a considerable amount of unoccupied time. 
 To execute a great agricultural improvement, it is often 
 necessary that many labourers should work together ; but 
 in general, except the few whose business is superinten- 
 dence, they all work in the same manner. A canal or a 
 railway embankment cannot be made without a combina- 
 tion of many labourers ; but they are all excavators, except 
 the engineer and a few clerks.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 OF PRODUCTION ON A LARGE, AND PRODUCTION ON A 
 SMALL SCALE. 
 
 1. FROM the importance of combination of labour, it 
 is an obvious conclusion, that there are many cases in which 
 production is made much more effective by being conducted 
 on a large scale. Whenever it is essential to the greatest 
 efficiency of labour that many labourers should combine, 
 even though only in the way of Simple Co-operation, the 
 scale of the enterprise must be such as to bring many 
 labourers together, and the capital must be large enough to 
 maintain them. Still more needful is this when the nature 
 of the employment allows, and the extent of the possible 
 market encourages, a considerable division of labour. The 
 larger the enterprise, the farther the division of labour may 
 be carried. This is one of the principal causes of large 
 manufactories. Even when no additional subdivision of the 
 work would follow an enlargement of the operations, there 
 will be good economy in enlarging them to the point at 
 which every person to whom it is convenient to assign a 
 special occupation, will have full employment in that occu- 
 pation. This point is well illustrated by Mr. Babbage.* 
 
 " If machines be kept working through the twenty -four 
 hours," (which is evidently the only economical mode of 
 employing them,) " it is necessary that some person shall 
 attend to admit the workmen at the time they relieve each 
 other ; and whether the porter or other servant so employed 
 
 * Page 214 et seqq.
 
 177 
 
 admit one person or twenty, his rest will be equally dis- 
 turbed. It will also be necessary occasionally to adjust or 
 repair the machine ; and this can be done much better by a 
 workman accustomed to machine-making, than by the per- 
 son who uses it. Now, since the good performance and the 
 duration of machines depend, to a very great extent, upon 
 correcting every shake or imperfection in their parts as soon 
 as they appear, the prompt attention of a workman resident 
 on the spot will considerably reduce the expenditure arising 
 from the wear and tear of the machinery. But in the case 
 of a single lace-frame, or a single loom, this would be too 
 expensive a plan. Here then arises another circumstance 
 which tends to enlarge the extent of a factory. It ought to 
 consist of such a number of machines as shall occupy the 
 whole time of one workman in keeping them in order : if 
 extended beyond that number, the same principle of econ- 
 omy would point out the necessity of doubling or tripling 
 the number of machines, in order to employ the whole time 
 of two or three skilful workmen. 
 
 " When one portion of the workmen's labour consists in 
 the exertion of mere physical force, as in weaving, and in 
 many similar arts, it will soon occur to the manufacturer, 
 that if that part were executed by a steam-engine, the same 
 man might, in the case of weaving, attend to two or more 
 looms at once : and, since we already suppose that one or 
 more operative engineers have been employed, the number 
 of looms may be so arranged that their time shall be fully 
 occupied in keeping the steam-engine and the looms in 
 order. 
 
 " Pursuing the same principles, the manufactory be- 
 comes gradually so enlarged, that the expense of lighting 
 during the night amounts to a considerable sum : and as 
 there are already attached to the establishment persons who 
 are up all night, and can therefore constantly attend to it, 
 arid also engineers to make and keep in repair any machi- 
 nery, the addition of an apparatus for making gas to light 
 the factory leads to a new extension, at the same time that 
 19
 
 178 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 1. 
 
 it contributes, by diminishing the expense of lighting, and 
 the risk of accidents from fire, to reduce the cost of manu- 
 facturing. 
 
 " Long before a factory has reached this extent, it will 
 have been found necessary to establish an accountant's 
 department, with clerks to pay the workmen, and to see 
 that they arrive at their stated times ; and this department 
 must be in communication with the agents who purchase 
 the raw produce, and with those who sell the manufactured 
 article." It will cost these clerks and accountants little 
 more time and trouble to pay a large number of workmen 
 than a small number ; to check the accounts of large trans- 
 actions, than of small. If the business doubled itself, it 
 would probably be necessary to increase, but certainly not 
 to double, the number either of accountants, or of buying 
 and selling agents . Every increase of business would 
 enable the whole to be carried on with a proportionally 
 smaller amount of labour. 
 
 As a general rule, the expenses of a business do not 
 increase by any means proportionally to the quantity of busi- 
 ness. Let us take as an example, a set of operations which 
 we are accustomed to see carried on by one great establish- 
 ment, that of the Post Office. Suppose that the business, 
 let us say only of the London letter-post, instead of being 
 centralized in a single concern, w T ere divided among five or 
 six competing companies. Each of these would be obliged 
 to maintain almost as large an establishment as is now suf- 
 ficient for the whole. Since each must arrange for receiving 
 and delivering letters in all parts of the town, each must 
 send letter-carriers into every street, and almost every alley, 
 and this too as many times in the day as is now done by 
 the Post Office, if the service is to be as well performed. 
 Each must have an office for receiving letters in every neigh- 
 borhood, with all subsidiary arrangements for collecting the 
 letters from the different offices and re-distributing them. 
 To this must be added the much greater number of superior 
 officers who would be required to check and control the
 
 PRODUCTION OX A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 179 
 
 subordinates, implying not only a greater cost in salaries for 
 such responsible officers, but the necessity, perhaps, of being 
 satisfied in many instances with an inferior standard of 
 qualification, and so failing in the object. 
 
 Whether or not the advantages obtained by operating 
 on a large scale preponderate in any particular case over the 
 more watchful attention, and greater regard to minor gains 
 and losses, usually found in small establishments, can be 
 ascertained, in a state of free competition, by an unfailing 
 test. Wherever there are large and small establishments in 
 the same business, that one of the two which in existing cir- 
 cumstances carries on the production at greatest advantage, 
 will be able to undersell the other. The power of perma- 
 nently underselling can only, generally speaking, be derived 
 from increased effectiveness of labour ; and this, when 
 obtained by a more extended division of employment, or by 
 a classification tending to a better economy of skill, always 
 implies a greater produce from the same labour, and not 
 merely the same produce from less labour : it increases not 
 the surplus only, but the gross produce of industry. If an 
 increased quantity of the particular article is not required, 
 and part of the labourers in consequence lose their employ- 
 ment, the capital which maintained and employed them is 
 also set at liberty ; and the general produce of the country 
 is increased, by some other application of their labour. 
 
 Another of the causes of large manufactories, however, 
 is the introduction of processes requiring expensive machi- 
 nery. Expensive machinery supposes a large capital ; and 
 is not resorted to except with the intention of producing, 
 and the hope of selling, as much of the article as comes up 
 to the full powers of the machine. For both these reasons, 
 wherever costly machinery is used, the large system of pro- 
 duction is inevitable. But the power of underselling is not 
 in this case so unerring a test as in the former, of the bene- 
 ficial effect on the total production of the community. The 
 power of underselling does not depend on the absolute 
 increase of produce, but on its bearing an increased proper-
 
 180 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 1. 
 
 tion to the expenses : which, as was shown in a former 
 chapter,* it may do, consistently with even a diminution 
 of the gross annual produce. By the adoption of machine- 
 ry, a circulating capital, which was perpetually consumed 
 and reproduced, has been converted into a fixed capital, 
 requiring only a small annual expense to keep it up : and a 
 much smaller produce will suffice for merely covering that 
 expense, and replacing the remaining circulating capital of 
 the producer. The machinery therefore might answer per- 
 fectly well to the manufacturer, and enable him to under- 
 sell his competitors, though the effect on the production of 
 the country might be not an increase but a diminution. It 
 is true, the article will be sold cheaper, and therefore, of that 
 single article, there will probably be not a smaller, but a 
 greater quantity sold ; since the loss to the community col- 
 lectively has fallen upon the work-people, and they are not 
 the principal customers, if customers at all, of most branches 
 of manufacture. But though that particular branch of 
 industry may extend itself, it will be by replenishing its 
 diminished circulating capital from that of the community 
 generally ; and if the labourers employed in that depart- 
 ment escape loss of employment, it is because the loss will 
 spread itself over the labouring people at large. If any of 
 them are reduced to the condition of unproductive labour- 
 ers, supported by voluntary or legal charity, the gross prod- 
 uce of the country is to that extent permanently diminished, 
 until the ordinary progress of accumulation makes it up : 
 but if the condition of the labouring classes enables them to 
 bear a temporary reduction of wages, and the superseded 
 labourers become absorbed in other employments, their 
 labour is still productive, and the breach in the gross prod- 
 uce of the community is repaired, though not the detriment 
 to the labourers. I have restated this exposition, which has 
 already been made in a former place, to impress more 
 strongly the truth, that a mode of production does not of 
 necessity increase the productive effect of the collective 
 
 * Supra, chap. vi. p. 132.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 181 
 
 labour of a community, because it enables a particular com- 
 modity to be sold cheaper. The one consequence generally 
 accompanies the other, but not necessarily. I will not here 
 repeat the reasons I formerly gave, nor anticipate those 
 which will be given more fully hereafter, for deeming the 
 exception to be rather a case abstractedly possible, than one 
 which is frequently realized in fact. 
 
 A considerable part of the saving of labour effected by 
 substituting the large system of production for the small, is 
 the saving in the labour of the capitalists themselves. If a 
 hundred producers with small capitals carry on separately 
 the same business, the superintendence of each concern will 
 probably require the whole attention of the person conduct- 
 ing it, buificiently at least to hinder his time or thoughts 
 from being disposable for anything else : while a single 
 manufacturer possessing a capital equal to the sum of 
 theirs, with ten or a dozen clerks, could conduct the whole 
 of their amount of business, and have leisure too for other 
 occupations. The small capitalist, it is true, generally com- 
 bines with the business of direction some portion of the 
 details, which the other leaves to his subordinates : the 
 small farmer follows his own plough, the small tradesman 
 serves in his own shop, the small weaver plies his own 
 loom. But in this very union of functions there is, in a 
 great proportion of cases, a want of economy. The princi- 
 pal in the concern is either wasting, in the routine of a 
 business, qualities suitable for the direction of it, or he is 
 only fit for the former, and then the latter will be ill done. 
 I must observe however that I do not attach, to this saving 
 of labour, the importance often ascribed to it. There is un- 
 doubtedly much more labour expended in the superinten- 
 dence of many small capitals than in that of one large cap- 
 ital. For this labour however the small producers have 
 generally a full compensation, in the feeling of being their 
 own masters, and not servants of an employer. It may be 
 said, that if they value this independence they will submit 
 to pay a price for it, and to sell at the reduced rates occa-
 
 182 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. -2. 
 
 sioned by the competition of the great dealer or manufac- 
 turer. But they cannot always do this and continue to 
 gain a living. They thus gradually disappear from society. 
 After having consumed their little capital in prolonging the 
 unsuccessful struggle, they either sink into the condition of 
 hired labourers, or became dependent on others for support. 
 
 2. Production on a large scale is greatly promoted 
 by the practice of forming a large capital by the combina- 
 tion of many small contributions ; or, in other words, by 
 the formation of joint stock companies. The advantages 
 of the joint stock principle are numerous and important. 
 
 In the first place, many undertakings require an amount 
 of capital beyond the means of the richest individual or pri- 
 vate partnership. No individual could have made a rail- 
 way from London to Liverpool ; it is doubtful if any indi- 
 vidual could even work the traffic on it, now when it is 
 made. The government indeed could have done both ; and 
 in countries where the practice of cooperation is only in the 
 earlier stages of its growth, the government can alone be 
 looked to for any of those works for which a great combi- 
 nation of means is requisite ; because it can obtain those 
 means by compulsory taxation, and is already accustomed 
 to the conduct of large operations. For reasons, however, 
 which are tolerably well known, and of which we shall 
 treat fully hereafter, government agency for the conduct of 
 industrial operations is generally one of the least eligible of 
 resources, when any other is available. 
 
 Next, there are undertakings which individuals are not 
 absolutely incapable of performing, but which they cannot 
 perform on the scale and with the continuity which are ever 
 more and more required by the exigencies of a society in an 
 advancing state. Individuals are quite capable of despatch- 
 ing ships from England to any or every part of the world, 
 to carry passengers and letters ; the thing was done before 
 joint stock companies for the purpose were heard of. But 
 when, from the increase of population and transactions, as
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 183 
 
 well as of means of payment, the public will no longer con- 
 tent themselves with occasional opportunities, but require 
 the certainty that packets shall start regularly, for some 
 places once or even twice a day, for others once a week, for 
 others that a steam ship of great size and expensive con- 
 struction shall depart on fixed days twice in each month, it 
 is evident that to afford an assurance of keeping up with 
 punctuality such a circle of costly operations, requires a 
 much larger capital and a much larger staff of qualified sub- 
 ordinates than can be commanded by an individual capital- 
 ist. There are other cases, again, in which though the busi- 
 ness might be perfectly well transacted with small or mod- 
 erate capitals, the guarantee of a great subscribed stock is 
 necessary or desirable as a security to the public for the 
 fulfilment of pecuniary engagements. This is especially the 
 case when the nature of the business requires that numbers 
 of persons should be willing to trust the concern with their 
 money : as in the business of banking, and that of insur- 
 ance : to both of which the joint stock principle is enr- 
 nently adapted. It is an instance of the folly and jobbery 
 of the rulers of mankind, that until a late period the joint 
 stock principle, as a general resort, was in this country inter- 
 dicted by law to these two modes of business ; to banking 
 altogether, and to insurance in the department oj sea risks ; 
 in order to bestow a lucrative monopoly on particular estab- 
 lishments which the government was pleased exceptionally 
 to license, namely the Bank of England, and two insurance 
 companies, the London and the Royal Exchange. 
 
 These are some of the advantages of joint stock over 
 individual management. But if we look to the other side 
 of the question, we shall find that individual management 
 has also very great advantages over joint stock. The chief 
 of these is the much keener interest of the managers in the 
 success of the undertaking. 
 
 The administration of a joint stock association is, in the 
 main, administration by hired servants. Even the commit- 
 tee, or board of directors, who are supposed to superintend
 
 184 BOOK I- CHAPTER IX. 2. 
 
 the management, and who do really appoint and remove 
 the managers, have no pecuniary interest in the good work- 
 ing of the concern beyond the shares they individually hold, 
 which are always a very small part of the capital of the as- 
 sociation, and in general but small part of the fortunes of 
 the directors themselves ; and the part they take in the 
 management usually divides their time with many other 
 occupations, of as great or greater importance to their own 
 interest ; the business being the principal concern of no one 
 except those who are hired to carry it on. But experience 
 shows, and proverbs, the expression of popular experience, 
 attest, how inferior is the quality of hired servants, com- 
 pared with the ministration of those personally interested 
 in the work, and how indispensable, when hired service 
 must be employed, is " the master's eye " to watch over it. 
 The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise re- 
 quires two quite distinct qualifications : fidelity, and zeal. 
 The fidelity of the hired managers of a concern it is possible 
 to secure. When their work admits of being reduced to a 
 definite set of rules, the violation of these is a matter on 
 which conscience cannot easily blind itself, and on which 
 responsibility may be enforced by the loss of employment. 
 But to carry on a great business successfully, requires a 
 hundred things which, as they cannot be defined before- 
 hand, it is impossible to convert into distinct and positive 
 obligations. First and principally, it requires that the 
 directing mind should be incessantly occupied with the 
 subject ; should be continually laying schemes by which 
 greater profit may be obtained, or expense saved. This in- 
 tensity of interest in the subject it is seldom to be expected 
 that any one should feel, who is conducting a business as 
 the hired servant and for the profit of another. There are 
 experiments in human affairs which are conclusive on the 
 point. Look at the whole class of rulers, and ministers of 
 state. The work they are entrusted with, is among the 
 most interesting and exciting of all occupations ; the per- 
 Bonal share which they themselves reap of the national
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 185 
 
 benefits or misfortunes which befal the state under their 
 rule, is far from trifling, and the rewards and punishments 
 which they may expect from public estimation are of the 
 plain and palpable kind which are most keenly felt and 
 most widely appreciated. Yet how rare a thing is it to find 
 a, statesman in whom mental indolence is not stronger than 
 all these inducements. How infinitesimal is the proportion 
 who trouble themselves to form, or even to attend to, plans 
 of public improvement, unless when it is made still more 
 troublesome to them to remain inactive ; or who have any 
 other real desire than that of rubbing on, so as to escape 
 general blame. On a smaller scale, all who have ever em- 
 ployed hired labour have had ample experience of the 
 efforts made to give as little labour in exchange for the 
 wages, as is compatible with not being turned off. The 
 universal neglect by domestic servants of their employer's 
 interests, wherever these are not protected by some fixed 
 rule, is matter of common remark ; unless where long con- 
 tinuance in the same service, and reciprocal good offices, 
 have produced either personal attachment, or some feeling 
 of a common interest. 
 
 Another of the disadvantages of joint stock concerns, 
 which is in some degree common to all concerns on a large 
 scale, is disregard of small gains and small savings. In the 
 management of a great capital and great transactions, espe- 
 cially when the managers have not much interest in it of 
 their own, small sums are apt to be counted for next to 
 nothing ; they never seem worth the care and trouble 
 which it costs to attend to them, and the credit of liberality 
 and openhandedness is cheaply bought by a disregard of 
 such trifling considerations. But small profits and small 
 expenses, often repeated, amount to great gains and losses : 
 and of this a large capitalist is often a sufficiently good cal- 
 culator to be practically aware ; and to arrange his busi- 
 ness on a system, which if enforced by a sufficiently vigilant 
 superintendence, precludes the possibility of the habitual 
 waste, otherwise incident to a great business. But the
 
 186 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 2. 
 
 managers of a joint stock concern seldom devote themselves 
 sufficiently to the work, to enforce unremittingly, even if 
 introduced, through every detail of the business, a really 
 economical system. 
 
 From considerations of this nature, Adam Smith was led 
 to enunciate as a principle, that joint stock companies could 
 never be expected to maintain themselves without an exclu- 
 sive privilege, except in branches of business which like 
 banking, insurance, and some others, admit of being, in a 
 considerable degree, reduced to fixed rules. This however 
 is one of those over-statements of a true principle, often met 
 with in Adam Smith. In his days there were few instances 
 of joint stock companies which had been permanently suc- 
 cessful without a monopoly, except the class of cases which 
 he referred to ; but since his time there have been many ; 
 and the regular increase both of the spirit of combination 
 and of the ability to combine, will doubtless produce many 
 more. Adam Smith fixed his observation too exclusively 
 on the superior energy and more unremitting attention 
 brought to a business in which the whole stake and the 
 whole gain belong to the persons conducting it ; and he 
 overlooked various countervailing considerations which go 
 a great way towards neutralizing even that great point of 
 superiority. 
 
 Of these one of the most important is that which relates 
 to the intellectual and active qualifications of the directing 
 head. The stimulus of individual interest is some security 
 for exertion, but exertion is of little avail if the intelligence 
 exerted is of an inferior order, which it must necessarily be 
 in the majority of concerns carried on by the persons chiefly 
 interested in them. Where the concern is large, and can 
 afford a remuneration sufficient to attract a class of candi- 
 dates superior to the common average, it is possible to select 
 for the general management, and for all the skilled employ- 
 ments of a subordinate kind, persons of a degree of acquire- 
 ment and cultivated intelligence which more than compen- 
 sates for their inferior interest in the result. Their greater
 
 perspicacity enables them, with even a part of their minds, 
 to see probabilities of advantage which never occur to the 
 ordinary run of men by the continued exertion of the whole 
 of theirs ; and their superior knowledge, and habitual recti- 
 tude of perception and of judgment, guard them against 
 blunders, the fear of which would prevent the others from 
 hazarding their interests in any attempt out of the ordinary 
 routine. 
 
 It must be further remarked, that it is not a necessary 
 consequence of joint stock management, that the persons 
 employed, whether in superior or in subordinate offices, 
 should be paid wholly by fixed salaries. There are modes 
 of connecting more or less intimately the interest of the 
 employes with the pecuniary success of the concern. There 
 is a long series of intermediate positions, between working 
 wholly on one's own account, and working by the day, 
 week, or year for an invariable payment. Even in the case 
 of ordinary unskilled labour, there is such a thing as task- 
 work, or working by the piece : and the superior efficiency 
 of this is so well known, that judicious employers always 
 resort to it when the work admits of being put out in 
 definite portions, without the necessity of too troublesome 
 a surveillance to guard against inferiority in the execution. 
 In the case of the managers of joint stock companies, and 
 of the superintending and controlling officers in many pri- 
 vate establishments, it is a common enough practice to con- 
 nect their pecuniary interest with the interest of their 
 employers, by giving them part of their remuneration in 
 the form of a percentage on the profits. The personal 
 interest thus given to hired servants is not comparable in 
 intensity to that of the owner of the capital ; but it is suf- 
 ficient to be a very material stimulus to zeal and careful- 
 ness, and, when added to the advantage of superior intelli< 
 gence, often raises the quality of the service much above 
 that which the generality of masters are capable of render- 
 ing to themselves. The ulterior extensions of which this 
 principle of remuneration is susceptible, being of great
 
 188 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 3. 
 
 social as well as economical importance, will be more par- 
 ticularly adverted to in a subsequent stage of the present 
 inquiry. 
 
 As I have already remarked of large establishments 
 generally, when compared with small ones, whenever com- 
 petition is free its results will show whether individual or 
 joint stock agency is best adapted to the particular case, 
 since that which is most efficient and most economical will 
 always in the end succeed in underselling the other. 
 
 3. The possibility of substituting the large system of 
 production for the small, depends, of course, in the first 
 place, on the extent of the market. The large system can 
 only be advantageous when a large amount of business is 
 to be done : it implies, therefore, either a populous and 
 flourishing community, or a great opening for exportation. 
 Again, this as well as every other change in the system of 
 production is greatly favoured by a progressive condition 
 of capital. It is chiefly when the capital of a country is 
 receiving a great annual increase, that there is a large 
 amount of capital seeking for investment : and a new enter- 
 prise is much sooner and more easily entered upon by new 
 capital, than by withdrawing capital from existing employ- 
 ments. The change is also much facilitated by the exist- 
 ence of large capitals in few hands. It is true that the 
 same amount of capital can be raised by bringing together 
 many small sums. But this (besides that it is not equally 
 well suited to all branches of industry) supposes a much 
 greater degree of commercial confidence and enterprise dif- 
 fused through the community, and belongs altogether to a 
 more advanced stage of industrial progress. 
 
 In the countries in which there are the largest markets, 
 the widest diffusion of commercial confidence and enter- 
 prise, the greatest annual increase of capital, and the great- 
 est number of large capitals owned by individuals, there is 
 a tendency to substitute more and more in one branch of 
 industry after another, large establishments for small ones.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 189 
 
 In England, the chief type of all these characteristics, there 
 is a perpetual growth not only of large manufacturing estab- 
 lishments, but also, wherever a sufficient number of pur- 
 chasers are assembled, of shops and warehouses for conduct- 
 ing retail business on a large scale. These are almost 
 always able to undersell the smaller tradesmen, partly, it is 
 understood, by means of division of labour, and the economy 
 occasioned by limiting the employment of skilled agency to 
 cases where skill is required ; and partly, no doubt, by the 
 saving of labour arising from the great scale of the transac- 
 tions ; as it costs no more time, and not much more exertion 
 of mind, to make a large purchase, for example, than a 
 small one, and very much less than to make a number of 
 small ones. 
 
 With a view merely to production, and to the greatest 
 efficiency of labour, this change is wholly beneficial. In 
 some cases it is attended with drawbacks, rather social than 
 economical, the nature of which has been already hinted at. 
 But whatever disadvantages may be supposed to attend on 
 the change from a small to a large system of production, 
 they are not applicable to the change from a large to a still 
 larger. When, in any employment, the regime of indepen- 
 dent small producers has either never been possible, or has 
 been superseded, and the system of many work-people under 
 one management has become fully established, from that 
 time any further enlargement in the scale of production is 
 generally an unqualified benefit. It is obvious, for exam- 
 ple, how great an economy of labour would be obtained if 
 London were supplied by a single gas or water company 
 instead of the existing plurality. While there are even as 
 many as two, this implies double establishments of all sorts, 
 when one only, with a small increase, could probably per- 
 form the whole operation equally well ; double sets of ma- 
 chinery and works, when the whole of the gas or water 
 required could generally be produced by one set only ; even 
 double sets of pipes, if the companies did not prevent this 
 needless expense by agreeing upon a division of the terri'
 
 190 BOOK L CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 tory. "Were there only one establishment, it could make 
 lower charges, consistently with obtaining the rate of profit 
 now realized. But would it do so ? Even if it did not, the 
 community in the aggregate would still be a gainer ; since 
 the shareholders are a part of the community, and they 
 would obtain higher profits while the consumers paid only 
 the same. It is, however, an error to suppose that the 
 prices are ever permanently kept down by the competition 
 of these companies. Where competitors are so few, they 
 always end by agreeing not to compete. They may run a 
 race of cheapness to ruin a new candidate, but as soon as he 
 has established his footing they come to terms with him. 
 When, therefore, a business of real public importance can 
 only be carried on advantageously upon so large a scale as 
 to render the liberty of competition almost illusory, it is an 
 unthrifty dispensation of the public resources that several 
 costly sets of arrangements should be kept up for the pur- 
 pose of rendering to the community this one service. It is 
 much better to treat it at once as a public function ; and if 
 it be not such as the government itself could beneficially 
 undertake, it should be made over entire to the company or 
 association which will perform it on the best terms for the 
 public. In the case of railways, for example, no one can 
 desire to see the enormous waste of capital and land (not to 
 speak of increased nuisance) involved in the construction of 
 a second railway to connect the same places already united 
 by an existing one ; while the two would not do the work 
 better than it could be done by one, and after a short time 
 would probably be amalgamated. Only one such line 
 ought to be permitted, but the control over that line never 
 ought to be parted with by the State, unless on a temporary 
 concession, as in France ; and the vested right which Par- 
 liament has allowed to be acquired by the existing companies, 
 like all other proprietary rights which are opposed to public 
 utility, is morally valid only as a claim to compensation. 
 
 4. The question between the large and the small sys-
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 
 
 terns of production as applied to agriculture between large 
 and small farming, the grande and the petite culture 
 stands, in many respects, on different grounds from the gen- 
 eral question between great and small industrial establish- 
 ments. In its social aspect, and as an element in the 
 Distribution of Wealth, this question will occupy us here- 
 after : but even as a question of production, the superiority 
 of the large system in agriculture is by no means so clearly 
 established as in manufactures. 
 
 I have already remarked, that the operations of agricul- 
 ture are little susceptible of benefit from the division of 
 labour. There is but little separation of employments even 
 on the largest farm. The same persons may not in general 
 attend to the live stock, to the marketing, and to the culti- 
 vation of the soil ; but much beyond that primary and sim- 
 ple classification the subdivision is not carried. The com- 
 bination of labour of which agriculture is susceptible, is 
 chiefly that which Mr. "Wakefield terms Simple Co-opera- 
 tion ; several persons helping one another in the same work, 
 at the same tune and place. But I confess it seems to 
 me that this able writer attributes more importance to that 
 kind of co-operation, in reference to agriculture properly so 
 called, than it deserves. None of the common farming 
 operations require much of it. There is no particular 
 advantage in setting a great number of people to work 
 together in ploughing or digging or sowing the same field, 
 or even in mowing or reaping it unless time presses. A 
 single family can generally supply all the combination of 
 labour necessary for these purposes. And in the, works in 
 which an union of many efforts is really needed, there is 
 seldom found any impracticability in obtaining it where 
 farms are small. 
 
 The waste of productive power by subdivision of the 
 land often amounts to a great evil, but this applies chiefly 
 to a subdivision so minute, that the cultivators have not 
 enough land to occupy their time. Up to that point the 
 same principles which recommend large manufactories are
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 applicable to agriculture. For the greatest productive 
 efficiency, it is generally desirable (though even this propo- 
 sition must be received with qualifications) that no family 
 who have any land, should have less than they could culti- 
 vate, or than will fully employ their cattle and tools. 
 These, however, are not the dimensions of large farms, but 
 of what are reckoned in England very small ones. The 
 large farmer has some advantage in the article of build- 
 ings. It does not cost so much to house a great number of 
 cattle in one building, as to lodge them equally well in sev- 
 eral buildings. There is also some advantage in imple- 
 ments. A small farmer is not so likely to possess expensive 
 instruments. But the principal agricultural implements, 
 even when of the best construction, are not expensive. It 
 may not answer to a small farmer to own a threshing ma- 
 chine, for the small quantity of corn he has to thresh ; but 
 there is no reason why such a machine should not in every 
 neighbourhood be owned in common, or provided by some 
 person to whom the others pay a consideration for its use ; 
 especially as, when worked by steam, they are so construct- 
 ed as to be moveable.* The large farmer can make some 
 saving in cost of carriage. There is nearly as much trouble 
 in carrying a small portion of produce to market, as a much 
 greater produce ; in bringing home a small, as a much 
 larger quantity of manure, and articles of daily consump- 
 tion. There is also the greater cheapness of buying things 
 in large quantities. These various advantages must count 
 for something, but it does not seem that they ought to 
 count for very much. In England, for some generations, 
 there has been little experience of small farms ; but in Ire- 
 land the experience has been ample, not merely under the 
 worst but under the best management ; and the highest Irish 
 
 * The observations in the text may hereafter require some degree of modifi- 
 cation from inventions such as the steam plough and the reaping machine. The 
 effect, however, of these improvements on the relative advantages of large and 
 small farms, will not depend on the efficiency of the instruments, but on their 
 costliness. I see no reason to expect that this will be such as to make them 
 inaccessible to small farmers, or combinations of small farmers.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 193 
 
 authorities may be cited in opposition to the opinion which 
 on this subject commonly prevails in England. Mr. Blacker, 
 for example, one of the most experienced agriculturists and 
 successful improvers in the North of Ireland, whose expe- 
 rience was chiefly in the best cultivated, which are also 
 the most minutely divided parts of the country, was of 
 opinion, that tenants holding farms not exceeding from five 
 to eight or ten acres, could live comfortably and pay as high 
 a rent as any large farmer whatever. " I am firmly per- 
 suaded," (he says,*) " that the small farmer who holds his 
 own plough and digs his own ground, if he follows a proper 
 rotation of crops, and feeds his cattle in the house, can 
 undersell the large farmer, or in other words can pay a rent 
 which the other cannot afford ; and in this I am confirmed by 
 the opinion of many practical men who have well considered 
 the subject. . . The English farmer of TOO to 800 acres is a 
 kind of man approaching to what is known by the name of 
 a gentleman farmer. He must have his horse to ride, and 
 his gig, and perhaps an overseer to attend to his labourers ; 
 he certainly cannot superintend himself the labour going on 
 in a farm of 800 acres." After a few other remarks, he 
 adds, " Besides all these drawbacks, which the small farmer 
 knows little about, there is the great expense of carting out 
 the manure from the homestead to such a great distance, 
 and again carting home the crop. A single horse will con- 
 sume the produce of more land than would feed a small 
 farmer and his wife and two children. And what is more 
 than all, the large farmer says to his labourers, go to your 
 work ; but when the small farmer has occasion to hire 
 them, he says, come / the intelligent reader will, I dare say, 
 understand the difference." 
 
 One of the objections most urged against small farms is, 
 that they do not and cannot maintain, proportionally to 
 their extent, so great a number of cattle as large farms, and 
 that this occasions such a deficiency of manure, that a soil 
 
 * Prize Essay on the Management of Landed Property in Ireland, by Wil- 
 liam Blacker, ESQ. (1837,) p. 23. 
 13
 
 194 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 much subdivided must always be impoverished. It will be 
 found, however, that subdivision only produces this effect 
 when it throws the land into the hands of cultivators so 
 poor as not to possess the amount of live stock suitable to 
 the size of their farms. A small farm and a badly stocked 
 farm are not synonymous. To make the comparison fairly, 
 we must suppose the same amount of capital which is pos- 
 sessed by the large farmers to be disseminated among the 
 small ones. When this condition, or even any approach to 
 it, exists, and when stall feeding is practised (and stall feed- 
 ing now begins to be considered good economy even on 
 large farms), experience, far from bearing out the assertion 
 that small farming is unfavourable to the multiplication of 
 cattle, conclusively establishes the very reverse. The abun- 
 dance of cattle, and copious use of manure, on the small 
 farms of Flanders, are the most striking features in that 
 Flemish agriculture which is the admiration of all com- 
 petent judges, whether in England or on the Continent.* 
 
 * " The number of beasts fed on a farm of which the whole is arable land," 
 (says the elaborate and intelligent treatise on Flemish Husbandry, from personal 
 observation and the best sources, published in the Library of the Society for the 
 Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,) "is surprising to those who are not acquainted 
 with the mode in which the food is prepared for the cattle. A beast for every 
 three acres of land is a common proportion, and in very small occupations where 
 much spade husbandry is used, the proportion is still greater. After comparing 
 the accounts given in a variety of places and situations of the average quantity 
 of milk which a cow gives when fed in the stall, the result is, that it greatly ex- 
 ceeds that of our best dairy farms, and the quantity of butter made from a given 
 quantity of milk is also greater. It appears astonishing that the occupier of only 
 ten or twelve acres of light arable land should be able to maintain four or five 
 cows, but the fact is notorious in the Waes country." (pp. 59, 60.) 
 
 This subject is treated very intelligently in the work of M. Passy, " Des 
 Syst6mes de Culture et de leur Influence sur TEconomie Sociale," one of the 
 most impartial discussions, as between the two systems, which has yet appeared 
 in France. 
 
 " Sans nul doute, c'est 1'Angleterre qui, a superficie egale, nourrit le plus 
 d'animaux ; la Hollande et quelques parties de la Lombardie pourraient seules 
 lui disputer cet avantage : mais est-ce la. un resultat des formes de 1'exploita- 
 tion, et des circonstances de climat et de situation locale ne concourent-elles 
 pas ii le produire ? C'es't, a notre avis, ce qui ne saurait etre conteste. En 
 effet, quoiqu'on en ait dit, partout ou la grande et la petite culture ce rencontrent
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 195 
 
 The disadvantage, when disadvantage there is, of small 
 or rather of peasant farming, as compared with capitalist 
 farming, must chiefly consist in inferiority of skill and 
 knowledge ; but it is not true, as a general fact, that such 
 inferiority exists. Countries of small farms and peasant 
 farming, Flanders and Italy, had a good agriculture many 
 generations before England, and theirs is still, as a whole, 
 
 sur les memes points, c'est celle-ci qui, bien qu'elle ne puisse entreteuir autant 
 de moutons, possede, tout compense, le plus grand nombre d'animaux produc- 
 teurs d'engrais. Voici, par exemple, ce qui ressort des informations fournies 
 par la Belgique. 
 
 " Les deux provinces ou regne la plus petite culture sont celles d'Anvers et 
 de la Flandre orientale, et elles possedent en moyenne, par 100 hectares de 
 terres cultivees, 74 betes bovines et 14 moutons. Les deux provinces ou se 
 trouvent les grandes fermes sont celles de Namur tt du Hainaut, et elles n'ont 
 en moyenne, pour 100 hectares de terres cultivees, que 30 betes bovines et 45 
 moutons. Or, en comptant, suivant 1'usage, 10 moutons comme 1'equivalent 
 d'une tete de gros b6tail, nous rencontrons d'un cot6, 76 animaux servant a 
 maintenir la fecondite du sol ; de 1'autre, moins de 35, difference a coup sur 
 enorme. (D'apres les documents statistiques publics par le Ministre de 1'In- 
 terieur, 3me publication officielle.) II est a reniarquer, au surplus, que le 
 nombre des animaux n'est pas, dans la partie de la Belgique dont le sol est divise 
 en tres-petites fermes, beaucoup moiudre qu'en Angleterre. En 1'evaluant dans 
 cette derniere contree a raison seulcment du territoire en culture, il y existe, par 
 centaine d'hectares, 65 betes a come et pr6s de 260 moutons, c.-a-d. 1'equivalent 
 de 91 des premiers, ou seulement 15 de plus que dans 1'autre. Et encore est-il 
 juste d'observer qu'en Belgique presque rien n'est perdu des engrais donnes par 
 des animaux nourris a peu pres toute 1'annee a 1'etable, tandis qu'en Angleterre 
 la pature en plein air affaiblit considerablement les quantites qu'il devient possi- 
 ble de mettre entierement a profit. 
 
 " Dans le departement du Nord aussi, ce sont les arrondissements dont les 
 fermes ont la moindre contenance qui entretiennent le plus d'animaux. Tandis 
 que les arrondissements de Lille et de Hazebrouck, outre un plus grand nombre 
 de chevaux, nourrissent, 1'un 1'equivalent de 52 tetes de gros betail, 1'autre 
 1'equivalent de 46 ; les arrondissements ou les exploitations sont les plus grandes, 
 ceux de Dunkerque et d'Avesnes, ne contienneut, le premier, que 1'equivalent 
 de 44 bfites bovines, 1'autre, que celui de 40. (D'apres la Statistique de la 
 France publiee par le Ministre du Commerce: Agriculture, t. i.) 
 
 " Pareilles recherches tendues sur d'autres points de la France offriraient 
 des resultats analogues. S'il est vrai que dans la banlieue des villes, la petite 
 culture s'abstienne de garder des animaux, au produit desquels elle supplee 
 facilement par des achats d'engrais, il ne se peut que le genre de travail qui 
 exige le plus dc la terre ne soit pas celui qui en entretienne le plus activement
 
 196 BOOK l - CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 probably the best agriculture in the world. The empirical 
 skill, which is the effect of daily and close observation, 
 peasant farmers often possess in an eminent degree. The 
 traditional knowledge, for example, of the culture of the 
 vine, possessed by the peasantry of the countries where 
 the best wines are produced, is extraordinary. There is no 
 doubt an absence of science, or at least of theory ; and to 
 
 la fertility. Assure'raent il n'est pas donne aux petites fermes de poss6der de 
 nombreux troupeaux de moutons, et c'est un inconvenient ; mais, en revanche, 
 elles iiourrissent plus de betea bovines que les grandes. C'est 1& une necesshe 
 a laquelle elles ne sauraieut se soustraire dans aucun des pays ou les besoins de 
 la consommation les ont appelees & fleurir ; elles pe>iraient si elles ne reussis- 
 eaient pas u y satisfaire. 
 
 " Voici, au surplus, sur ce point des details dont 1'exactitude nous parait 
 pleinement attestee par 1'excellence du travail ou nous les avons puises. Ces 
 details, contenus dans la statistique de la commune de Vensat (Puy de Dome), 
 publiee recemment par M. le docteur Jusseraud, maire de la commune, sont 
 d'autant plus precieux, qu'ils mettent dans tout leur jour la nature des change- 
 ments que le d6veloppement de la petite culture a, dans le pays dont il s'agit, 
 apportes au nombre et & 1'espece des animaux dont le produit en engrais soutient 
 et accroit la fertilite des terres. Dans la commune de Vensat, qui comprend 
 1612 hectares divises en 4600 parcelles appartenant & 591 proprietaires, le ter- 
 ritoire exploit6 se compose de 1466 hectares. Or, en 1790, 17 fermes en occu- 
 paient les deux tiers et 20 autres tout le reste. Depuis lors, les cultures se sont 
 morcel^es, et maintenant leur petitesse est extreme. Quelle a 6t6 1'influence du 
 changement sur la quantity des animaux ? Une augmentation considerable. En 
 1790, la commune ne possedait qu'environ 300 betes ^ cornes, et de 1800 ;\ 2000 
 betes & laine ; aujourd'hui elle compte 676 des premieres, et 533 seulement des 
 secondes. Ainsi pour remplacer 1300 moutons elle a acquis 376 boeufs et 
 vaches, et tout compens6, la somme des engrais s'est accrue dans la proportion 
 de 490 a 729, ou de plus de 48 pour cent. Et encore est-il & remarquer que, 
 plus forts et mieux nourris & present, les animaux contribuent bien davantage & 
 entretenir la fertilit6 des terres. 
 
 " Voil ce que les faits nous apprennent sur ce point : il n'est done pas vrai 
 que la petite culture ne nourrisse pas autant d'animaux que les autres ; loin de 
 la, & conditions locales pareilles, c'est elle qui en possede le plus, et il ne devait 
 pas &tre difficile de le pr6sumer ; car, du moment ou c'est elle qui demande le 
 plus aux terres, il faut bien qu'elle leur donne des soins d'autant plus reparateurs 
 qu'elle en exige davantage. Que 1'on prenne un a un les autres reproches ; 
 qu'on les examine & la clart6 de faits bien appre"cics, on s'appercevra bientot 
 qu'ils ne sauraient etre mieux fondes, et qu'ils n'ont et6 formules que parce qu'on 
 a compare 1'etat des cultures dans des contrees ou les causes de la prosperite 
 agricole n'agissaient pas avec la meme energie." (pp. 116-120.)
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 197 
 
 some extent a deficiency of the spirit of improvement, so far 
 as relates to the introduction of new processes. There is 
 also a want of means to make experiments, which can 
 seldom be made with advantage except by rich proprietors 
 or capitalists. As for those systematic improvements which 
 operate on a large tract of country at once (such as great 
 works of draining or irrigation) or which for any other rea- 
 son do really require large numbers of workmen combining 
 their labour, these are not in general to be expected from 
 small farmers, or even small proprietors, though combina- 
 tion among them for such purposes is by no means unexam- 
 pled, and will become more common as their intelligence is 
 more developed. 
 
 Against these disadvantages is to be placed, where the 
 tenure of land is of the requisite kind, an ardour of industry 
 absolutely unexampled in any other condition of agricul- 
 ture. This is a subject on which the testimony of compe- 
 tent witnesses is unanimous. The working of ihepetite culture 
 cannot be fairly judged where the small cultivator is merely 
 a tenant, and not even a tenant on fixed conditions, but (as 
 until lately in Ireland) at a nominal rent greater than can 
 be paid, and therefore practically at a varying rent always 
 amounting to the utmost that can be paid. To understand 
 the subject, it must be studied where the cultivator is the 
 proprietor, or at least a metayer with a permanent tenure ; 
 where the labour he exerts to increase the produce and 
 value of the land avails wholly, or at least partly, to his own 
 benefit and that of his descendants. In another division of 
 our subject, we shall discuss at some length the important 
 subject of tenures of land, and I defer till then any citation 
 of evidence on the marvellous industry of peasant proprie- 
 tors. It may suffice here to appeal to the immense amount 
 of gross produce which, even without a permanent tenure, 
 English labourers generally obtain from their little allot- 
 ments ; a produce beyond comparison greater than a large 
 farmer extracts, or would find it his interest to extract, from 
 the same piece of land.
 
 198 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 And this I take to be the true reason why large cultiva- 
 tion is generally most advantageous as a mere investment 
 for profit. Land occupied by a large farmer is not, in one 
 sense of the word, farmed so highly. This is not on account 
 of any economy arising from combination of labour, but be- 
 cause, by employing less, a greater return is obtained in 
 proportion to the outlay. It does not answer to any one to 
 pay others for exerting all the labour which the peasant, or 
 even the allotment holder, gladly undergoes when the fruits 
 are to be wholly reaped by himself. This labour, however, 
 is not unproductive ; it all adds to the gross produce. With 
 anything like equality of skill and knowledge, the large 
 farmer does not obtain nearly so much from the soil as the 
 small proprietor, or the small farmer with adequate motives 
 to exertion : but though his returns are less, the labour is less 
 in a still greater degree, and as whatever labour he employs 
 must be paid for, it does not suit his purpose to employ more. 
 
 But although the gross produce of the land is greatest, 
 ccderis paribus, under small cultivation, and although, 
 therefore, a country is able on that system to support a 
 larger aggregate population, it is generally assumed by 
 English writers that what is termed the net produce, that 
 is, the surplus after feeding the cultivators, must be smaller ; 
 that therefore, the population disposable for all other pur- 
 poses, for manufactures, for commerce and navigation, for 
 national defence, for the promotion of knowledge, for the 
 liberal professions, for the various functions of government, 
 for the arts and literature, all of which are dependent on 
 this surplus for their existence as occupations, must be less 
 numerous ; and that the nation, (waving all question as to 
 the condition of the actual cultivators,) must be inferior in 
 the principal elements of national power, and in many of 
 those of general well-being. This, however, has been taken 
 for granted much too readily. Undoubtedly, the non-agri- 
 cultural population will bear a less ratio to the agricultural, 
 under small than under large cultivation. But that it will 
 be less numerous absolutely, is by no means a consequence.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AXD ON A SMALL SCALE. 199 
 
 If the total population, agricultural and non-agricultural, is 
 greater, the non-agricultural portion may be more numerous 
 in itself, and may yet be a smaller proportion of the whole. 
 If the gross produce is larger, the net produce may be 
 larger, and yet bear a smaller ratio to the gross produce. 
 Yet even Mr. Wakefield sometimes appears to confound 
 these distinct ideas. In France it is computed that two- 
 thirds of the whole population are agricultural. In Eng- 
 land, at most, one-third. Hence Mr. Wakefield infers, that 
 " as in France only three people are supported by the labour 
 of two cultivators, while in England the labour of two culti- 
 vators supports six people, English agriculture is twice as 
 productive as French agriculture," owing to the superior 
 efficiency of large farming through combination of labour. 
 But in the first place, the facts themselves are overstated. 
 The labour of two persons in England does not quite sup- 
 port six people, for there is not a little food imported from 
 foreign countries, and from Ireland. In France, too, the 
 labour of two cultivators does much more than supply the 
 food of three persons. It provides the three persons, and 
 occasionally foreigners, with flax, hemp, and to a certain 
 extent with silk, oils, tobacco, and latterly sugar, which in 
 England are wholly obtained from abroad ; nenrly all the 
 timber used in France is of home growth, nearly all which 
 is used in England is imported ; the principal fuel of France 
 is procured and brought to market by persons reckoned 
 among agriculturists, in England by persons not so reck- 
 oned. I do not take into calculation hides and wool, these 
 products being common to both countries, nor wine or 
 brandy produced for home consumption, since England has 
 a corresponding production of beer and spirits ; but England 
 has no material export of either article, and a great impor- 
 tation of the last, while France supplies wines and spirits to 
 the whole world. I say nothing of fruit, eggs, and such 
 minor exportable articles of agricultural produce. But, not 
 to lay undue stress on these abatements, we will take the 
 statement as it stands. Suppose that two persons, in Eng- 
 land, do bond fide produce the food of six, while in France,
 
 200 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 for the same purpose, the labour of four is requisite. Does 
 it follow that England must have a larger surplus for the 
 support of a non-agricultural population ? No ; but merely 
 that she can devote two-thirds of her whole produce to the 
 purpose, instead of one-third. Suppose the produce to be 
 twice as great, and the one-third will amount to as much as 
 the two-thirds. The fact might be, that owing to the 
 greater quantity of labour employed on the French system, 
 the same land would produce food for twelve persons which 
 on the English system would only produce it for six : and 
 if this were so, which would be quite consistent with the 
 conditions of the hypothesis, then although the food for 
 twelve was produced by the labour of eight, while the six 
 were fed by the labour of only two, there would be the same 
 number of hands disposable for other employment in the 
 one country as in the other. I am not contending that the 
 fact is so. I know that the gross produce per acre in France 
 as a whole (though not in its most improved districts) aver- 
 ages much less than in England, and that, in proportion to 
 the extent and fertility of the two countries, England has, 
 in the sense we are now speaking of, much the largest dis- 
 posable population. But the disproportion certainly is not 
 to be measured by Mr. Wakefield's simple criterion. As 
 well might it be said that agricultural labour in the United 
 States, where, by a late census, four families in every five 
 appeared to be engaged in agriculture, must be still more 
 inefficient than in France. 
 
 The inferiority of French cultivation (which, taking the 
 country as a whole, must be allowed to be real, though 
 much exaggerated,) is probably more owing to the lower 
 general average of industrial skill and energy in that coun- 
 try, than to any special cause : and even if partly the effect 
 of minute subdivision, it does not prove that small farming 
 is disadvantageous, but only (what is undoubtedly the fact) 
 that farms in France are very frequently too small, and, 
 what is worse, broken up into an almost incredible number 
 of patches or parcellea, most inconveniently dispersed and 
 parted from one another.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 201 
 
 As a question, not of gross, but of net produce, the com- 
 parative merits of the grwnde and the petite culture, especial- 
 ly when the small farmer is also the proprietor, cannot be 
 looked upon as decided. It is a question on which good 
 judges at present differ. The current of English opinion is 
 in favour of large farms ; on the Continent, the weight of 
 authority seems to be on the other side. Professor Rau, of 
 Heidelberg, the author of one of the most comprehensive 
 and elaborate of extant treatises on political economy, and 
 who has that large acquaintance with facts and authorities 
 on his own subject, which generally characterises his coun- 
 trymen, lays it down as a settled truth, that small or 
 moderate-sized farms yield not only a larger gross but a 
 larger net produce : though, he adds, it is desirable there 
 should be some great proprietors, to lead the way in new im- 
 provements.* The most apparently impartial and discrimi- 
 nating judgment that I have met with is that of M. Passy, 
 who (always speaking with reference to net produce) gives 
 his verdict in favour of large farms for grain and forage ; 
 but, for the kinds of culture which require much labour and 
 attention, places the advantage wholly on the side of small 
 cultivation ; including in this description, not only the vine 
 and the olive, where a considerable amount of care and 
 labour must be bestowed on each individual plant, but also 
 roots, leguminous plants, and those which furnish the 
 materials of manufactures. The small size, and consequent 
 multiplication, of farms, according to all authorities, are 
 extremely favourable to the abundance of many minor pro- 
 ducts of agriculture.! 
 
 It is evident that every labourer who extracts from the 
 land more than his own food, and that of any family he may 
 
 * See pp. 352 and 353 of a French translation published at Brussels in 1839, 
 by M. Fred, de Kemmeter, of Ghent 
 
 f " Dans le d6partement du Nord," says M. Passy, " une ferae de 20 hec- 
 tares recueille en veaux, laitage, oeufs, et volailles, parfois pour un millier de 
 francs dans l'aune ; et, les frais deTalqufe, c'est 1'eqiii valent d'une addition au 
 produit net de 15 a 20 francs par hectare." Dea Systeines de Culture, p. 114.
 
 202 B OK I- CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 have, increases the means of supporting a non-agricultural 
 population. Even if his surplus is no more than enough to 
 buy clothes, the labourers who make the clothes are a non- 
 agricultural population, enabled to exist by food which he 
 produces. Every agricultural family, therefore, which pro- 
 duces its own necessaries, adds to the net produce of agri- 
 culture ; and so does every person born on the land, who by 
 employing himself on it, adds more to its gross produce 
 than the mere food which he eats. It is questionable 
 whether, even in the most subdivided districts of Europe 
 which are cultivated by the proprietors, the multiplication 
 of hands on the soil has approached, or tends to approach, 
 within a great distance of this limit. In France, though the 
 sub-division is confessedly too great, there is proof positive 
 that it is far from having reached the point at which it 
 would begin to diminish the power of supporting a non- 
 agricultural population. This is demonstrated by the great 
 increase of the towns ; which have of late increased in a 
 much greater ratio than the population generally,* showing 
 (unless the condition of the town labourers is becoming 
 rapidly deteriorated, which there is no reason to believe) 
 that even by the unfair and inapplicable test of proportions, 
 the productiveness of agriculture must be on the increase. 
 This, too, concurrently with the amplest evidence that in 
 the more improved districts of France, and in some which, 
 until lately, were among the unimproved, there is a con- 
 siderably increased consumption of country produce by the 
 country population itself. 
 
 Impressed with the conviction that, of all faults which 
 can be committed by a scientific writer on political and social 
 subjects, exaggeration, and assertions beyond the evidence, 
 most require to be guarded against, I limited myself in the 
 early editions of this work to the foregoing very moderate 
 
 * During the interval between the census of 1851 and that of 1856, the in- 
 crease of the population of Paris alone, exceeded the aggregate increase of all 
 France : while nearly all the other large towns likewise show an increase.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 203 
 
 statements. I little knew how much stronger my language 
 might have been without exceeding the truth, and how 
 much the actual progress of French agriculture surpassed 
 anything which I had at that time sufficient grounds to af- 
 firm. The investigations of that eminent authority on agri- 
 cultural statistics, M. Leonce de Lavergne, undertaken by 
 desire of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of 
 the Institute of France, have led to the conclusion that since 
 the Revolution of 1789, the total produce of French agricul- 
 ture has doubled ; profits and wages having both increased 
 in about the same, and rent in a still greater ratio. M. de 
 Lavergne, whose impartiality is one of his greatest merits, 
 is, moreover, so far in this instance from the suspicion of 
 having a case to make out, that he is labouring to show, not 
 how much French agriculture has accomplished, but how 
 much still remains for it to do. " We have required " (he 
 says) " no less than seventy years to bring into cultivation 
 two million hectares " (five million English acres) " of waste 
 land, to suppress half our fallows, double our agricultural 
 products, increase our population by 30 per cent., our wages 
 by 100 per cent., our rent by 150 per cent. At this rate 
 we shall require three quarters of a century more to arrive 
 at the point which England has already attained."* 
 
 After this evidence, we have surely now heard the last 
 of the incompatibility of small properties and small farms 
 with agricultural improvement. The only question which 
 remains open is one of degree ; the comparative rapidity of 
 agricultural improvement under the two systems ; and it is 
 the general opinion of those who are equally well acquaint- 
 ed with both, that improvement is greatest under a due 
 admixture between them. 
 
 In the present chapter, we do not enter on the question 
 between great and small cultivation in any other respect 
 
 * Economic Rurale de la France depuis 1789. Par M. Leonce de Lavergtie, 
 Membre de 1'Institut et de la Societe Centrale d' Agriculture de France. 2 me ed. 
 p. 69.
 
 204 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 than as a question of production, and of the efficiency of 
 labour. We shall return to it hereafter as affecting the 
 distribution of the produce, and the physical and social well- 
 being of the cultivators themselves ; in which aspects it de- 
 serves, and requires, a still more particular examination.
 
 CHAPTEK X. 
 
 OF THE LAW OF THE INCREASE OF LABOUR. 
 
 1. WE have now successively considered each of the 
 agents or conditions of production, and of the means by 
 which the efficacy of these various agents is promoted. In or- 
 der to come to an end of the questions which relate exclusive- 
 ly to production, one more, of primary importance, remains. 
 
 Production is not a fixed, but an increasing thing. 
 When not kept back by bad institutions, or a low state of 
 the arts of life, the produce of industry has usually tended 
 to increase ; stimulated not only by the desire of the pro- 
 ducers to augment their means of consumption, but by the 
 increasing number of the consumers. Nothing in political 
 economy can be of more importance than to ascertain the 
 law of this increase of production ; the conditions to which 
 it is subject ; whether it has practically any limits, and what 
 these are. There is also no subject in political economy 
 which is popularly less understood, or on which the errors 
 committed are of a character to produce, and do produce, 
 greater mischief. 
 
 We have seen that the essential requisites of production 
 are three labour, capital, and natural agents; the term 
 capital including all external and physical requisites which 
 are products of labour, the term natural agents all those 
 which are not. But among natural agents we need not take 
 into account those which, existing in unlimited quantity, 
 being incapable of appropriation, and never altering in 
 their qualities, are always ready to lend an equal degree of 
 assistance to production, whatever may be its extent ; as air,
 
 206 BOOK I. CHAPTER X. 2. 
 
 and the light of the sun. Being now about to consider the 
 impediments to production, not the facilities for it, we need 
 advert to no other natural agents than those which are 
 liable to be deficient, either in quantity or in productive 
 power. These may be all represented by the term land. 
 Land, in the narrowest acceptation, as the source of agricul- 
 tural produce, is the chief of them ; and if we extend the 
 term to mines and fisheries to what is found in the earth 
 itself, or in the waters which partly cover it, as well as to 
 what is grown or fed on its surface, it embraces everything 
 with which we need at present concern ourselves. 
 
 We may say, then, without a greater stretch of language 
 than under the necessary explanations is permissible, that 
 the requisites of production are Labour, Capital, and Land. 
 The increase of production, therefore, depends on the prop- 
 erties of these elements. It is a result of the increase 
 either of the elements themselves, or of their productiveness. 
 The law of the increase of production must be a consequence 
 of the laws of these elements ; the limits to the increase of 
 production must be the limits, whatever they are, set by 
 those laws. We proceed to consider the three elements 
 successively, with reference to this effect ; or in other words, 
 the law of the increase of production, viewed in respect of 
 its dependence, first on Labour, secondly on Capital, and 
 lastly on Land. 
 
 2. The increase of labour is the increase of mankind ; 
 of population. On this subject the discussions excited by 
 the Essay of Mr. Malthus, have made the truth, though by 
 no means universally admitted, yet so fully known, that a 
 briefer examination of the question than would otherwise 
 have been necessary will probably on the present occasion 
 suffice. 
 
 The power of multiplication inherent in all organic life 
 may be regarded as infinite. There is no one species of 
 vegetable or animal, which, if the earth were entirely aban- 
 doned to it, and to the things on which it feeds, would not
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF LABOUR. 207 
 
 In a small number of years overspread every region of the 
 globe, of which the climate was compatible with its existence. 
 The degree of possible rapidity is different in- different orders 
 of beings ; but in all it is sufficient, for the earth to be very 
 speedily filled up. There are many species of vegetables of 
 which a single plant will produce in one year the germs of 
 a thousand ; if only two come to maturity, in fourteen years 
 the two will have multiplied to sixteen thousand and more. 
 It is but a moderate case of fecundity in animals to be capa- 
 ble of quadrupling their numbers in a single year ; if they 
 only do as much in half a century, ten thousand will have 
 swelled within two centuries to upwards to two millions and 
 a half. The capacity of increase is necessarily in a geome- 
 trical progression : the numerical ratio alone is different. 
 
 To this property of organized beings, the human species 
 forms no exception. Its power of increase is indefinite, and 
 the actual multiplication would be extraordinarily rapid, if 
 the power were exercised to the utmost. It never is exer- 
 cised to the utmost, and yet, in the most favourable circum- 
 stances known to exist, which are those of a fertile region 
 colonized from an industrious and civilized community, 
 population has continued, for several generations, indepen- 
 dently of fresh immigration, to double itself in not much 
 more than twenty years. That the capacity of multiplica- 
 tion in the human species exceeds even this, is evident if we 
 consider how great is the ordinary number of children to a 
 family, where the climate is good and early marriages 
 usual ; and how small a proportion of them die before tho 
 age of maturity, in the present state of hygienic knowledge 
 where the locality is healthy, and the family adequately 
 provided with the means of living. It is a very low esti- 
 mate of the capacity of increase, if we only assume, that in 
 a good sanitary condition of the people, each generation may 
 be double the number of the generation which preceded it. 
 
 Twenty or thirty years ago, these propositions might 
 still have required considerable enforcement and illustra- 
 tion ; but the evidence of them is so ample and incontesta-
 
 BOOK L CHAPTER X. 3. 
 
 ble, that they have made their way against all kinds of 
 opposition, and may now be regarded as axiomatic : though 
 the extreme reluctance felt to admitting them, every now 
 and then gives birth to some ephemeral theory, speedily 
 forgotten, of a different law of increase in different circum- 
 stances, through a providential adaptation of the fecundity 
 of the human species to the exigencies of society.* The 
 obstacle to a just understanding of the subject does not arise 
 from these theories, but from too confused a notion of the 
 causes which, at most times and places, keep the actual 
 increase of mankind so far behind the capacity. 
 
 3. Those causes, nevertheless, are in no way mys- 
 terious. What prevents the population of hares and rabbits 
 from overstocking the earth ? Not want of fecundity, but 
 causes very different : many enemies, and insufficient sub- 
 sistence ; not enough to eat, and liability to being eaten. 
 In the human race, which is not generally subject to the 
 latter inconvenience, the equivalents for it are war and 
 disease. If the multiplication of mankind proceeded only, 
 like that of the other animals, from a blind instinct, it would 
 
 * One of these theories, that of Mr. Doubleday, may be thought to require 
 a passing notice, because it has of late obtained some followers, and because it 
 derives a semblance of support from the general analogies of organic life. This 
 theory maintains that the fecundity of the human animal, and of all other living 
 beings, is in inverse proportion to the quantity of nutriment : that an underfed 
 population multiplies rapidly, but that all classes in comfortable circumstances 
 are, by a physiological law, so unprolific, as seldom to keep up their numbers 
 without being recruited from a poorer class. There is no doubt that a positive 
 excess of nutriment, in animals as well as in fruit trees, is unfavourable to repro 
 duction ; and it is quite possible, though by no means proved, that the physio 
 logical conditions of fecundity may exist in the greatest degree when the supply 
 of food is somewhat stinted. But any one who might be inclined to draw from 
 this, even if admitted, conclusions at variance with the principle of Mr. Malthus, 
 needs only be invited to look through a volume of the Peerage, and observe the 
 enormous families, almost universal in that class ; or call to mind the large fam- 
 ilies of the English clergy, and generally of the middle classes of England. 
 Whatever the limit to the increase of population among the richer classes in 
 Great Britain may be, it certainly is not the small number of births to a mar- 
 riage.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF LABOUR. 209 
 
 be limited in the same manner with theirs ; the births would 
 be as numerous as the physical constitution of the species 
 admitted of, and the population would be kept down by 
 deaths. But the conduct of human creatures is more or less? 
 influenced by foresight of consequences, and by some im- 
 pulses superior to mere animal instincts : and they do not, 
 therefore, propagate like swine, but are capable, though in 
 very unequal degrees, of being withheld by prudence, or by 
 the social affections, from giving existence to beings born 
 only to misery and premature death. In proportion as 
 mankind rise above the condition of the beast, population is 
 restrained by the fear of want, rather than by want itself. 
 Even where there is no question of starvation, many are 
 similarly acted upon by the apprehension of losing what 
 have come to be regarded as the decencies of their situation 
 in life. Hitherto no other motives than these two have 
 been found strong enough, in the generality of mankind, to 
 counteract the tendency to increase. It has been the prac- 
 tice of a great majority of the middle and the poorer classes, 
 whenever free from external control, to marry as early, and 
 in most countries to have as many children, as was consist- 
 ent with maintaining themselves in the condition of life 
 which they were born to, or were accustomed to consider 
 as theirs. Among the middle classes, in many individual 
 instances, there is an additional restraint exercised from 
 the desire of doing more than maintaining their circum- 
 stances of improving them ; but such a desire is rarely 
 found, or rarely has that effect, in the labouring classes. 
 If they can bring up a family as they were themselves 
 brought up, even the prudent among them are usually 
 satisfied. Too often they do not think even of that, but 
 rely on fortune, or on the resources to be found in legal or 
 voluntary charity. 
 
 In a very backward state of society, like that of Europe 
 in the middle ages, and many parts of Asia at present, 
 population is kept down by actual starvation. The starva- 
 tion does not take place in ordinary years, but in seasons of 
 14
 
 210 BOOK I. CHAPTER, X. 3. 
 
 scarcity, which in those states of society are much more 
 frequent and more extreme than Europe is now accustomed 
 to. In these seasons^ actual want, or the maladies conse- 
 quent on it, carry off numbers of the population, which in a 
 succession of favourable years again expands, to be again 
 cruelly decimated. In a more improved state, few, even 
 among the poorest of the people, are limited to actual neces- 
 saries, and to a bare sufficiency of those : and the increase 
 is kept within bounds, not by excess of deaths, but by lim- 
 itation of births. The limitation is brought about in various 
 ways. In some countries, it is the result of prudent or con- 
 scientious self-restraint. There is a condition to which the 
 labouring people are habituated ; they perceive that by 
 having too numerous families, they must sink below that 
 condition, or fail to transmit it to their children ; and this 
 they do not choose to submit to. The countries in which, 
 so far as is known, a great degree of voluntary prudence 
 has been longest practised on this subject, are Norway and 
 parts of Switzerland. Concerning both, there happens to 
 be unusually authentic information ; many facts were care- 
 fully brought together by Mr. Malthus, and much addi- 
 tional evidence has been obtained since his time. In both 
 these countries the increase of population is very slow ; and 
 what checks it, is not multitude of deaths, but fewness of 
 births. Both the births and the deaths are remarkably few 
 in proportion to the population ; the average duration 
 of life is the longest in Europe ; the population contains 
 fewer children, and a greater proportional number of per- 
 sons in the vigour of life, than is known to be the case in 
 any other part of the world. The paucity of births tends 
 directly to prolong life, by keeping the people in comforta- 
 ble circumstances ; and the same prudence is doubtless 
 exercised in avoiding causes of disease, as in keeping clear 
 of the principal causes of poverty. It is worthy of remark 
 that the two countries thus honourably distinguished, are 
 countries of small landed proprietors. 
 
 There are other cases in which the prudence and fore-
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF LABOUR. 211 
 
 thought, which perhaps might not be exercised by the 
 people themselves, are exercised by the state for their 
 benefit ; marriage not being permitted until the contracting 
 parties can show that they have the prospect of a comforta- 
 ble support. Under these laws, of which I shall speak more 
 fully hereafter, the condition of the people is reported to be 
 good, and the illegitimate births not so numerous as might 
 be expected. There are places, again, in which the restrain- 
 ing cause seems to be not so much individual prudence, as 
 some general and perhaps even accidental habit of the coun- 
 try. In the rural districts of England, during the last cen- 
 tury, the growth of population was very effectually re- 
 pressed by the difficulty of obtaining a cottage to live in. 
 It was the custom for unmarried labourers to lodge and 
 board with their employers ; it w T as the custom for married 
 labourers to have a cottage : and the rule of the English 
 poor laws by which a parish was charged with the support 
 of its unemployed poor, rendered landowners averse to 
 promote marriage. About the end of the century, the great 
 demand for men in war and manufactures, made it be 
 thought a patriotic thing to encourage population : and 
 about the same time the growing inclination of farmers to 
 live like rich people, favoured as it was by a long period of 
 high prices, made them desirous of keeping inferiors at a 
 greater distance, and, pecuniary motives arising from abuses 
 of the poor laws being superadded, they gradually drove 
 their labourers into cottages, which the landowners now no 
 longer refused permission to build. In some countries an 
 old standing custom that a girl should not marry until she 
 had spun and woven for herself an ample trousseau, is said 
 to have acted as a substantial check to population. In Eng- 
 land, at present, the influence of prudence in keeping down 
 multiplication is seen by the diminished number of mar- 
 riages in the manufacturing districts in years when trade 
 is bad. 
 
 But whatever be the causes by which population is any- 
 where limited to a comparatively slow rate of increase, an
 
 212 BOOK I. CHAPTER X. 8. 
 
 acceleration of the rate very speedily follows any diminution 
 of the motives to restraint. It is but rarely that improve- 
 ments in the condition of the labouring classes do anything 
 more than give a temporary margin, speedily filled up by 
 an increase of their numbers. The use they commonly 
 choose to make of any advantageous change in their cir- 
 cumstances, is to take it out in the form which, by augment- 
 ing the population, deprives the succeeding generation of 
 the benefit. Unless, either by their general improvement 
 in intellectual and moral culture, or at least by raising their 
 habitual standard of comfortable living, they can be taught 
 to make a better use of favourable circumstances, nothing 
 
 O 
 
 permanent can be done for them ; the most promising 
 schemes end only in having a more numerous, but not a 
 happier people. By their habitual standard, I mean that 
 (when any such there is) down to which they will multiply, 
 but not lower. Every advance they make in education, 
 civilization, and social improvement, tends to raise this 
 standard ; and there is no doubt that it is gradually, though 
 slowly, rising in the more advanced countries of "Western 
 Europe. Subsistence and employment in England have 
 never increased more rapidly than in the last forty years, 
 but every census since 1821 showed a smaller proportional 
 increase of population than that of the period preceding ; 
 and the produce of French agriculture and industry is 
 increasing in a progressive ratio, while the population 
 exhibits, in every quinquennial census, a smaller propor- 
 tion of births to the population. 
 
 The subject, however, of population, in its connexion 
 with the condition of the labouring classes, will be consid- 
 ered in another place : in the present, we have to do with it 
 solely as one of the elements of Production : and in that 
 character we could not dispense with pointing out the un- 
 limited extent of its natural powers of increase, and the 
 causes owing to which so small a portion of that unlimited 
 power is for the most part actually exercised. After this 
 brief indication, we shall proceed to the other elements.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 OP THE LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 
 
 1. THE requisites of production being labour, capital, 
 and land, it has been seen from the preceding chapter that 
 the impediments to the increase of production do not arise 
 from the first of these elements. On the side of labour 
 there is no obstacle to an increase of production, indefinite 
 in extent and of unslackening rapidity. Population has the 
 power of increasing in an uniform and rapid geometrical 
 ratio. If the only essential condition of production were 
 labour, the produce might, and naturally would, increase in 
 the same ratio ; and there would be no limit, until the num- 
 bers of mankind were brought to a stand from actual want 
 of space. 
 
 But production has other requisites, and of these, the 
 one which we shall next consider is Capital. There cannot 
 be more people in any country, or in the world, than can 
 be supported from the produce of past labour until that of 
 present labour comes in. There will be no greater number 
 of productive labourers in any country, or in the world, 
 than can be supported from that portion of the produce of 
 past labour, which is spared from the enjoyments of its pos- 
 sessor for purposes of reproduction, and is termed Capital. 
 We have next, therefore, to inquire into the conditions of 
 the increase of capital : the causes by which the rapidity of 
 its increase is determined, and the necessary limitations of 
 that increase. 
 
 Since all capital is the product of saving, that is, of absti
 
 214: BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. f 1. 
 
 nence from present consumption for the sake of a future 
 good, the increase of capital must depend upon two things 
 the amount of the fund from which saving can be made, 
 and the strength of the dispositions which prompt to it. 
 
 The fund from which saving can be made, is the surplus 
 of the produce of labour, after supplying the necessaries of 
 life to all concerned in the production : (including those 
 employed in replacing the materials, and keeping the fixed 
 capital in repair.) More than this surplus cannot be saved 
 under any circumstances. As much as this, though it 
 never is saved, always might be. This surplus is the fund 
 from which the enjoyments, as distinguished from the neces- 
 saries of the producers, are provided ; it is the fund from 
 which all are subsisted, who are not themselves engaged in 
 production ; and from which all additions are made to cap- 
 ital. It is the real net produce of the country. The phrase, 
 net produce, is often taken in a more limited sense, to de- 
 note only the profits of the capitalist and the rent of the land- 
 lord, under the idea that nothing can be included in the net 
 produce of capital, but what is returned to the owner of the 
 capital after replacing his expenses. But this is too narrow 
 an acceptation of the term. The capital of the employer 
 forms the revenue of the labourers, and if this exceeds the 
 necessaries of life, it gives them a surplus which they may 
 either expend in enjoyments or save. For every purpose 
 for which there can be occasion to speak of the net produce 
 of industry, this surplus ought to be included in it. When 
 this is included, and not otherwise, the net produce of the 
 country is the measure of its effective power ; of what it can 
 spare for any purposes of public utility, or private indul- 
 gence ; the portion of its produce of which it can dispose at 
 pleasure ; which can be drawn upon to attain any ends, or 
 gratify any wishes, either of the government or of individu- 
 als ; which it can either spend for its satisfaction, or save for 
 future advantage. 
 
 The amount of this fund, this net produce, this excess of 
 production above the physical necessaries of the producers,
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 215 
 
 is one of the elements that determine the amount of saving. 
 The greater the produce of labour after supporting the 
 labourers, the more there is which can be saved. The same 
 thing also partly contributes to determine how much will 
 be saved. A part of the motive to saving consists in the 
 prospect of deriving an income from savings ; in the fact 
 that capital, employed in production, is capable of not only 
 reproducing itself but yielding an increase. The greater 
 the profit that can be made from capital, the stronger is the 
 motive to its accumulation. That indeed which forms the 
 inducement to save, is not the whole of the fund which sup- 
 plies the means of saving, not the whole net produce of 
 the land, capital, and labour of the country, but only a part 
 of it, the part which forms the remuneration of the capital- 
 ist, and is called profit of stock. It will however be readily 
 enough understood, even previously to the explanations 
 which will be given hereafter, that when the general pro- 
 ductiveness of labour and capital is great, the returns to the 
 capitalist are likely to be large, and that some proportion, 
 though not an uniform one, will commonly obtain between 
 the two. 
 
 2. But the disposition to save does not wholly depend 
 on the external inducement to it ; on the amount of profit to 
 be made from savings. With the same pecuniary induce- 
 ment, the inclination is very different, in different persons, 
 and in different communities. The effective desire of accu- 
 mulation is of unequal strength, not only according to the 
 varieties of individual character, but to the general state of 
 society and civilization. Like all other moral attributes, it 
 is one in which the human race exhibits great differences, 
 conformably to the diversity of its circumstances and the 
 stage of its progress. 
 
 On topics which if they were to be fully investigated 
 would exceed the bounds that can be allotted to them in 
 this treatise, it is satisfactory to be able to refer to other 
 works in which the necessary developments have been pre-
 
 216 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 2. 
 
 sented more at length. On the subject of Population this 
 valuable service has been rendered by the celebrated Essay 
 of Mr. Malthus ; and on the point which now occupies us I 
 can refer with equal confidence to another, though a less 
 known work, " New Principles of Political Economy," by 
 Mr. Rae * In no other book known to me is so much light 
 thrown, both from principle and history, on the causes 
 which determine the accumulation of capital. 
 
 All accumulation involves the sacrifice of a present, for 
 the sake of a future good. But the expediency of such a 
 sacrifice, varies very much in different states of circum- 
 stances ; and the willingness to make it, varies still more. 
 
 In weighing the future against the present, the uncer- 
 tainty of all things future is a leading element ; and that 
 uncertainty is of very different degrees. " All circumstan- 
 ces," therefore, " increasing the probability of the provision 
 we make for futurity being enjoyed by ourselves or others, 
 tend" justly and reasonably "to give strength to the ef- 
 / fective desire of accumulation. Thus a healthy climate or 
 occupation, by increasing the probability of life, has a tend- 
 ency to add to this desire. When engaged in safe occupa- 
 tions, and living in healthy countries, men are much more 
 
 * This treatise is an example, such as not unfrequently presents itself, how 
 much more depends on accident, than on the qualities of a book, in determining 
 its reception. Had it appeared at a suitable time, and been favoured by circum- 
 stances, it would have had every requisite for great success. The author, a 
 Scotchman settled in the United States, unites much knowledge, an original vein 
 of thought, a considerable turn for philosophic generalities, and a manner of ex- 
 position and illustration calculated to make ideas tell not only for what they are 
 worth, but for more than they are worth, and which sometimes, I think, has that 
 effect in the writer's own mind. The principal fault of the book is the position 
 of antagonism in which, with the controversial spirit apt to be found in those 
 who have new thoughts on old subjects, he has placed himself towards Adam 
 Smith. I call this a fault, (though I think many of the criticisms just, and some 
 of them far-seeing,) because there is much less real difference of opinion than 
 might be supposed from Mr. Rae's animadversions ; and because what he has 
 found vulnerable in his great predecessor is chiefly the "human too much" in 
 his premises ; the portion of them that is over and above what was either re- 
 quired or is actually used for the establishment of his conclusions.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 217 
 
 apt to be frugal, than in unhealthy or hazardous occupa- 
 tions, and in climates pernicious to human life. Sailors and 
 soldiers are prodigals. In the West Indies, New Orleans, 
 the East Indies, the expenditure of the inhabitants is pro- 
 fuse. The same people, coming to reside in the healthy 
 parts of Europe, and not getting into the vortex of extrava- 
 gant fashion, live economically. War and pestilence have 
 always waste and luxury among the other evils that follow 
 in their train. For similar reasons, whatever gives security 
 to the affairs of the community is favourable to the strength 
 of this principle. In this respect the general prevalence of 
 law and order, and the prospect of the continuance of peace 
 and tranquillity, have considerable influence." * The more 
 perfect the security, the greater will be the effective strength 
 of the desire of accumulation. Where property is less safe, 
 or the vicissitudes ruinous to fortunes are more frequent and 
 severe, fewer persons will save at all, and of those who do, 
 many will require the inducement of a higher rate of profit 
 on capital, to make them prefer a doubtful future to the 
 temptation of present enjoyment. 
 
 These are considerations which affect the expediency, in 
 the eye of reason, of consulting future interests at the 
 expense of present. But the inclination to make this sacri- 
 fice does not solely depend upon its expediency. The dispo- 
 sition to save is often far short of what reason would dictate : 
 and at other times is liable to be in excess of it. 
 
 Deficient strength of the desire of accumulation may 
 arise from improvidence, or from want of interest in others. 
 Improvidence may be connected with intellectual as well as 
 moral causes. Individuals and communities of a very low 
 state of intelligence are always improvident. A certain 
 measure of intellectual development seems necessary to 
 enable absent things, and especially things future, to act 
 with any force on the imagination and will. The effect of 
 want of interest in others in diminishing accumulation, will 
 be admitted, if we consider how much saving at present 
 
 * Rae, p. 123.
 
 218 BOOK t. CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 takes place, which has for its object the interest of others 
 rather than of ourselves ; the education of children, their 
 advancement in life, the future interests of other personal 
 connexions, the desire of promoting by the bestowal of 
 money or time, objects of public or private usefulness. If 
 mankind were generally in the state of mind to which some 
 approach was seen in the declining period of the Roman 
 empire caring nothing for their heirs, as well as nothing 
 for friends, the public, or any object which survived them 
 they would seldom deny themselves any indulgence for the 
 sake of saving, beyond what was necessary for their own 
 future years ; which they would place in life annuities, or in 
 some other form which would make its existence and their 
 lives terminate together. 
 
 3. From these various causes, intellectual and moral, 
 there is, in different portions of the human race, a greater 
 diversity than is usually adverted to, in the strength of the 
 effective desire of accumulation. A backward state of gen- 
 eral civilization is often more the effect of deficiency in this 
 particular than in many others which attract more atten- 
 tion. In the circumstances, for example, of a hunting tribe, 
 " man may be said to be necessarily improvident, and re- 
 gardless of futurity, because, in this state, the future pre- 
 sents nothing which can be with certainty either foreseen or 
 
 governed Besides a want of the motives exciting 
 
 to provide for the needs of futurity through means of the 
 abilities of the present, there is a want of the habits of per- 
 ception and action, leading to a constant connexion in the 
 mind of those distant points, and of the series of events serv- 
 ing to unite them. Even, therefore, if motives be awakened 
 capable of producing the exertion necessary to effect this 
 connexion, there remains the task of training the mind to 
 think and act so as to establish it." 
 
 For instance : " Upon the banks of the St. Lawrence 
 there are several little Indian villages. They are surround- 
 ed, in general, by a good deal of land, from which the wood
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 219 
 
 seems to have been long extirpated, and have, besides, 
 attached to them, extensive tracts of forest. The cleared 
 land is rarely, I may almost say never, cultivated, nor are 
 any inroads made in the forest for such a purpose. The soil 
 is, nevertheless, fertile, and were it not, manure lies in heaps 
 by their houses. Were every family to inclose half an acre 
 of ground, till it, and plant it in potatoes and maize, it 
 would yield a sufficiency to support them one half the year. 
 They suffer, too, every now and then, extreme want, inso- 
 much that, joined to occasional intemperance, it is rapidly 
 reducing their numbers. This, to us, so strange apathy 
 proceeds not, in any great degree, from repugnance to la- 
 bour ; on the contrary, they apply very diligently to it 
 when its reward is immediate. Thus, besides their peculiar 
 occupations of hunting and fishing, in which they are ever 
 ready to engage, they are much employed in the navigation 
 of the St. Lawrence, and may be seen labouring at the oar, 
 or setting with the pole, in the large boats used for the pur- 
 pose, and always furnish the greater part of the additional 
 hands necessary to conduct rafts through some of the rapids. 
 Nor is the obstacle aversion to agricultural labour. This is 
 no doubt a prejudice of theirs ; but mere prejudices always 
 yield, principles of action cannot be created. When the re- 
 turns from agricultural labour are speedy and great, they 
 are also agriculturists. Thus, some of the little islands on 
 Lake St. Francis, near the Indian village of St. Regis, are 
 favourable to the growth of maize, a plant yielding a return 
 of a hundredfold, arid forming, even when half ripe, a plea- 
 sant and substantial repast. Patches of the best land on 
 these islands are, therefore, every year cultivated by them 
 for this purpose. As their situation renders them inacces- 
 sible to cattle, no fence is required ; were this additional 
 outlay necessary, I suspect they would be neglected, like 
 the commons adjoining their village. These had apparent- 
 ly, at one time, been under crop. The cattle of the neigh' 
 bouring settlers would now, however, destroy any crop not 
 securely fenced, and this additional necessary outlay conse-
 
 220 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 quently bars their culture. It removes them to an order 
 of instruments of slower return than that which corresponds 
 to the strength of the effective desire of accumulation in this 
 little society. 
 
 " It is here deserving of notice, that what instruments 
 of this kind they do form, are completely formed. The 
 small spots of corn they cultivate are thoroughly weeded 
 and hoed. A little neglect in this part would indeed reduce 
 the crop very much ; of this experience has made them per- 
 fectly aware, and they act accordingly. It is evidently not 
 the necessary labour that is the obstacle to more extended 
 culture, but the distant return from that labour. I am 
 assured, indeed, that among some of the more remote tribes, 
 the laboui; thus expended much exceeds that given by the 
 whites. The same portions of ground being cropped with- 
 out remission, and manure not being used, they would 
 scarcely yield any return, were not the soil most carefully 
 broken and pulverized, both with the hoe and the hand. In 
 such a situation a white man would clear a fresh piece of 
 ground. It would perhaps scarce repay his labour the first 
 year, and he would have to look for his reward in succeed- 
 ing years. On the Indian, succeeding years are too distant 
 to make sufficient impression ; though, to obtain what 
 labour may bring about in the course of a few months, he 
 toils even more assiduously than the white man." * 
 
 This view of things is confirmed by the experience of 
 the Jesuits, in their interesting efforts to civilize the Indians 
 of Paraguay. They gained the confidence of these savages 
 in a most extraordinary degree. . They acquired influence 
 over them sufficient to make them change their whole man- 
 ner of life. They obtained their absolute submission and 
 obedience. They established peace. They taught them all 
 the operations of European agriculture, and many of the 
 more difficult arts. There were everywhere to be seen, ac- 
 cording to Charlevoix, " workshops of gilders, painters, 
 sculptors, goldsmiths, watchmakers, carpenters, joiners, 
 
 Rae, p. 136.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL 221 
 
 dyers," &c. These occupations were not practised for the 
 personal gain of the artificers : the produce was at the abso- 
 lute disposal of the missionaries, who ruled the people by a 
 voluntary despotism. The obstacles arising from aversion 
 to labour were therefore very completely overcome. The 
 real difficulty was the improvidence of the people ; their 
 inability to think for the future ; and the necessity accord- 
 ingly of the most unremitting and minute superintendence 
 on the part of their instructors. " Thus at first, if these 
 gave up to them the care of the oxen with which they 
 ploughed, their indolent thoughtlessness would probably 
 leave them at evening still yoked to the implement. Worse 
 than this, instances occurred where they cut them up for sup- 
 per, thinking, when reprehended, that they sufficiently ex- 
 cused themselves by saying they were hungry. . . . These 
 fathers, says Ulloa, have to visit the houses, to examine what 
 is really wanted : for, without this care, the Indians would 
 never look after anything. They must be present, too, 
 when animals were slaughtered, not only that the meat 
 may be equally divided, but that nothing may be lost." 
 " But notwithstanding all this care and superintendence," 
 says Charlevoix, " and all the precautions which are taken 
 to prevent any want of the necessaries of life, the mission- 
 aries are sometimes much embarrassed. It often happens 
 that they," (the Indians,) " do not reserve to themselves a 
 sufficiency of grain, even for seed. As for their other pro- 
 visions, were they not well looked after, they would soon be 
 without wherewithal to support life." * 
 
 As an example intermediate, in the strength of the effec- 
 tive desire of accumulation, between the state of things thus 
 depicted and that of modern Europe, the case of the Chinese 
 deserves attention. From various circumstances in their 
 personal habits and social condition, it might be antici- 
 pated that they would possess a degree of prudence and 
 self-control greater than other Asiatics, but inferior to most 
 
 * Rae, p. 140.
 
 222 BOOK L CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 European nations ; and the following evidence is adduced 
 of the fact. 
 
 " Durability is one of the chief qualities, marking a high 
 degree of the effective desire of accumulation. The testi- 
 mony of travellers ascribes to the instruments formed by the 
 Chinese, a very inferior durability to similar instruments 
 constructed by Europeans. The houses, we are told, un- 
 less of the higher ranks, are in general of unburnt bricks, 
 of clay, or of hurdles plastered with earth ; the roofs, of 
 reeds fastened to laths. We can scarcely conceive more 
 unsubstantial or temporary fabrics. Their partitions are of 
 paper, requiring to be renewed every year. A similar ob- 
 servation may be made concerning their implements of hus- 
 bandry, and other utensils. They are almost entirely of 
 wood, the metals entering but very sparingly into their con- 
 struction ; consequently they soon wear out, and require 
 frequent renewals. A greater degree of strength in the 
 effective desire of accumulation, would cause them to be 
 constructed of materials requiring a greater present expen- 
 diture, but being far more durable. From the same cause, 
 much land, that in other countries would be cultivated, lies 
 waste. All travellers take notice of large tracts of lands, 
 chiefly swamps, which continue in a state of nature. To 
 bring a swamp into tillage is generally a process, to com- 
 plete which, requires several years. It must be previously 
 drained, the surface long exposed to the sun, and many 
 operations performed, before it can be made capable of bear- 
 ing a crop. Though yielding, probably, a very consider- 
 able return for the labour bestowed on it, that return is not 
 made until a long time has elapsed. The cultivation of 
 such land implies a greater strength of the effective desiro 
 of accumulation than exists in the empire. 
 
 " The produce of the harvest is, as we have remarked, 
 always an instrument of some order or another ; it is a pro- 
 vision for future want, and regulated by the same laws as 
 those to which other means of attaining a similar end con- 
 form. It is there chiefly rice, of which there are two har-
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 223 
 
 vests, the one in June, the other in October. The period 
 then of eight months between October and June is that for 
 which provision is made each year, and the different esti- 
 mate they make of to-day and this day eight months will 
 appear in the self-denial they practise now, in order to 
 guard against want then. The amount of this self-denial 
 . would seem to be small. The father Parennin, indeed, 
 (who seems to have been one of the most intelligent of the 
 Jesuits, and spent a long life among the Chinese of all 
 classes,) asserts, that it is their great deficiency in fore- 
 thought and frugality in this respect, which is the cause of 
 the scarcities and famines that frequently occur." 
 
 That it is defect of providence, not defect of industry, 
 that limits production among the Chinese, is still more 
 obvious than in the case of the semi-agriculturized Indians. 
 " Where the returns are quick, where the instruments 
 formed require but little time to bring the events for which 
 they were formed to an issue," it is well known that " the 
 great progress which has been made in the knowledge of 
 the arts suited to the nature of the country and the wants of 
 its inhabitants " makes industry energetic and effective. 
 " The warmth of the climate, the natural fertility of the 
 country, the knowledge which the inhabitants have acquired 
 of the arts of agriculture, and the discovery and gradual 
 adaptation to every soil of the most useful vegetable produc- 
 tions, enable them very speedily to draw from almost any 
 part of the surface, what is there esteemed an equivalent to 
 much more than the labour bestowed in tilling and cropping 
 it. They have commonly double, sometimes treble harvests. 
 These, when they consist of a grain so productive as rice, 
 the usual crop, can scarce fail to yield to their skill, from 
 almost any portion of soil that can be at once brought into 
 culture, very ample returns. Accordingly there is no spot 
 that labour can immediately bring under cultivation that is 
 not made to yield to it. Hills, even mountains, are ascend- 
 ed and formed into terraces ; and water, in that country the 
 great productive agent, is led to every part by drains, or
 
 224 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 carried up to it by the ingenious and simple hydraulic ma- 
 chines which have been in use from time immemorial among 
 this singular people. They effect this the more easily, from 
 the soil, even in these situations, being very deep and cov- 
 ered with much vegetable mould. But what yet more than 
 this marks the readiness with which labour is forced to form 
 the most difficult materials into instruments, where these 
 instruments soon bring to an issue the events for which they 
 are formed, is the frequent occurrence on many of their 
 lakes and rivers, of structures resembling the floating 
 gardens of the Peruvians, rafts covered with vegetable soil 
 and cultivated. Labour in this way draws from the mate- 
 rials on which it acts very speedy returns. Nothing can 
 exceed the luxuriance of vegetation when the quickening 
 powers of a genial sun are ministered to by a rich soil and 
 abundant moisture. It is otherwise, as we have seen, in 
 cases where the return, though copious, is distant. Euro- 
 pean travellers are surprised at meeting these little floating 
 farms by the side of swamps which only require draining to 
 render them tillable. It seems to them strange that labour 
 should not rather be bestowed on the solid earth, where its 
 fruits might endure, than on structures that must decay and 
 perish in a few years. The people they are among think 
 not so much of future years as of the present time. The 
 effective desire of accumulation is of very different strength 
 in the one, from what it is in the other. The views of the 
 European extend to a distant futurity, and he is surprised at 
 the Chinese, condemned, through improvidence, and want 
 of sufficient prospective care, to incessant toil, and as he 
 thinks, insufferable wretchedness. The views of the Chinese 
 are confined to narrower bounds ; he is content to live from 
 day to day, and has learnt to conceive even a life of toil a 
 blessing." * 
 
 When a country has carried production as far as in the 
 existing state of knowledge it can be carried with an amount 
 of return corresponding to the average strength of the eflec- 
 
 * Rae, pp. 1515.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 225 
 
 tive desire of accumulation in that country, it has reached 
 what is called the stationary state ; the state in which no 
 further addition will be made to capital, unless there takes 
 place either some improvement in the arts of production, or 
 an increase in the strength of the desire to accumulate. In 
 the stationary state, though capital does not on the whole 
 increase, some persons grow richer and others poorer. 
 Those whose degree of providence is below the usual stand- 
 ard, become impoverished, their capital perishes, and 
 makes room for the savings of those whose effective desire 
 of accumulation exceeds the average. These become the 
 natural purchasers of the lands, manufactories, and other 
 instruments of production owned by their less provident 
 countrymen. 
 
 What the causes are which make the return to capital 
 greater in one country than in another, and which, in cer- 
 tain circumstances, make it impossible for any additional 
 capital to find investment unless at diminished returns, will 
 appear clearly hereafter. In China, if that country has 
 really attained, as it is supposed to have done, the stationary 
 state, accumulation has stopped when the returns to capital 
 are still as high as is indicated by a rate of interest legally 
 twelve per cent, and practically varying (it is said) between 
 eighteen and thirty-six. It is to be presumed therefore that 
 no greater amount of capital than the country already pos- 
 sesses, can find employment at this high rate of profit, and 
 that any lower rate does not hold out to a Chinese sufficient 
 temptation to induce him to abstain from present enjoy- 
 ment. What a contrast with Holland, where, during the 
 most flourishing period of its history, the government was 
 able habitually to borrow at two per cent, and private indi- 
 viduals, on good security, at three. Since China is not a 
 country like Burrnah, or the native states of India, where an 
 enormous interest is but an indispensable compensation for 
 the risk incurred from the bad faith or poverty of the state, 
 and of almost all private borrowers ; the fact, if fact it be, 
 that the increase of capital has come to a stand while the 
 15
 
 226 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 4. 
 
 returns to it are still so large, denotes a much less degree of 
 the effective desire of accumulation, in other words a much 
 lower estimate of the future relatively to the present, than 
 that of most European nations. 
 
 4. We have hitherto spoken of countries in which the 
 average strength of the desire to accumulate is short of 
 that which, in circumstances of any tolerable security, reason 
 and sober calculation would approve. We have now to 
 speak of others in which it decidedly surpasses that stand- 
 ard. In the more prosperous countries of Europe, there 
 are to be found abundance of prodigals ; in some of them 
 (and in none more than England) the ordinary degree of 
 economy and providence among those who live by manual 
 labour cannot be considered high : still, in a very numerous 
 portion of the community, the professional, manufacturing, 
 and trading classes, being those who, generally speaking, 
 unite more of the means with more of the motives for saving 
 than any other class, the spirit of accumulation is so strong, 
 that the signs of rapidly increasing w ealth meet every eye : 
 and the great amount of capital seeking investment excites 
 astonishment, whenever peculiar circumstances turning 
 much of it into some one channel, such as railway con- 
 struction or foreign speculative adventure, bring the large- 
 ness of the total amount into evidence. 
 
 There are many circumstances, which, in England, give 
 a peculiar force to the accumulating propensity. The long 
 exemption of the country from the ravages of war, and tlie 
 far earlier period than elsewhere at which property was 
 secure from military violence or arbitrary spoliation, have 
 produced a long-standing and hereditary confidence in the 
 safety of funds when trusted out of the owner's hands, which 
 in most other countries is of much more recent origin, arid 
 less firmly established. The geographical causes which have 
 made industry rather than war the natural source of power 
 and importance to Great Britain, have turned an unusual 
 proportion of the most enterprising and energetic characters
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 22? 
 
 into the direction of manufactures and commerce ; into sup- 
 plying their wants and gratifying their ambition by pro- 
 ducing and saving, rather than by appropriating what has 
 been produced and saved. Much also depended on the 
 better political institutions of this country, which by the 
 scope they have allowed to individual freedom of action, 
 have encouraged personal activity and self-reliance, while 
 by the liberty they confer of association and combination, 
 they facilitate industrial enterprise on a large scale. The 
 same institutions in another of their aspects, give a most 
 direct and potent stimulus to the desire of acquiring wealth. 
 The earlier decline of feudalism having removed or much 
 weakened invidious distinctions between the originally trad- 
 ing classes and those who had been accustomed to despise 
 them ; and a polity having grown up which made wealth the 
 real source of political influence ; its acquisition was invested 
 with a factitious value, independent of its intrinsic utility. It 
 became synonymous with power ; and since power with the 
 common herd of mankind gives power, wealth became the 
 chief source of personal consideration, and the measure and 
 stamp of success in life. To get out of one rank in society 
 into the next above it, is the great aim of English bourgeois 
 life, and the acquisition of wealth the means. And inas- 
 much as to be rich without industry, has always hitherto 
 constituted a step in the social scale above those who are 
 rich by means of industry, it becomes the object of ambition 
 to save not merely as much as will afford a large income 
 while in business, but enough to retire from business and 
 live in affluence on realized gains. These causes are, in 
 England, greatly aided by that extreme incapacity of the 
 people for personal enjoyment, which is a characteristic of 
 countries over which puritanism has passed. But if accu- 
 mulation is, on one hand, rendered easier by the absence of 
 a taste for pleasure, it is, on the other, made more difficult 
 by the presence of a very real taste for expense. So strong 
 is the association between personal consequence and the 
 signs of wealth, that the silly desire for the appearance of a
 
 228 BOOK I. CHAPTER XL $4 
 
 large expenditure has the force of a passion, among large 
 classes of a nation which derives less pleasure than perhaps 
 any other in the world from what it spends. Owing to this 
 circumstance, the effective desire of accumulation has never 
 reached so high a pitch in England as it did in Holland, 
 where, there being no rich idle class to set the example of a 
 reckless expenditure, and the mercantile classes, who possess 
 the substantial power on which social influence always 
 waits, being left to establish their own scale of living and 
 standard of propriety, their habits remained frugal and 
 unostentatious. 
 
 In England and Holland, then, for a long time past, and 
 now in most other countries in Europe (which are rapidly 
 following England in the same race,) the desire of accumu- 
 lation does not require, to make it effective, the copious 
 returns which it requires in Asia, but is sufficiently called 
 into action by a rate of profit so low, that instead of slacken- 
 ing, accumulation seems now to proceed more rapidly than 
 ever ; and the second requisite of increased production, in- 
 crease of capital, shows no tendency to become deficient. 
 So far as that element is concerned, production is susceptible 
 of an increase without any assignable bounds. 
 
 The progress of accumulation would no doubt be consid- 
 erably checked, if the returns to capital were to be reduced 
 still lower than at present. But why should any possible 
 increase of capital have that effect ? This question carries 
 the mind forward to the remaining one of the three requi- 
 sites of production. The limitation to production, not con- 
 sisting in any necessary limit to the increase of the other 
 two elements, labour and capital, must turn upon the prop- 
 erties of the only element which is inherently, and in it- 
 self, limited in quantity. It must depend on the properties 
 of land.
 
 CHAPTER XLT. 
 
 OF THE LAW OF THE INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM 
 LAND. 
 
 1. LAND differs from the other elements of produc- 
 tion, labour and capital, in not being susceptible of in- 
 definite increase. Its extent is limited, and the extent of 
 the more productive kinds of it more limited still. It is 
 also evident that the quantity of produce capable of being 
 raised on any given piece of land is not indefinite. This 
 limited quantity of land, and limited productiveness of it, 
 are the real limits to the increase of production. 
 
 That they are the ultimate limits, must always have been 
 clearly seen. But since the final barrier has never in any 
 instance been reached ; since there is no country in which 
 all the land, capable of yielding food, is so highly cultivated 
 that a larger produce could not (even without supposing any 
 fresh advance in agricultural knowledge) be obtained from 
 it, and since a large portion of the earth's surface still re- 
 mains entirely uncultivated ; it is commonly thought, and is 
 very natural at first to suppose, that for the present all lim- 
 itation of production or population from this source is at an 
 indefinite distance, and that ages must elapse before any 
 practical necessity arises for taking the limiting principle 
 into serious consideration. 
 
 I apprehend this to be not only an error, but the most 
 serious one, to be found in the whole field of political econ- 
 omy. The question is more important and fundamental 
 than any other ; it involves the whole subject of the causes
 
 230 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 of poverty, in a rich and industrious community ; and 
 unless this one matter be thoroughly understood, it is to no 
 purpose proceeding any further in our inquiry. 
 
 2. The limitation to production from the properties 
 of the soil, is not like the obstacle opposed by a wall, which 
 stands immoveable in one particular spot, and offers no hin- 
 drance to motion short of stopping it entirely. We may 
 rather compare it to a highly elastic and extensible band, 
 which is hardly ever so violently stretched that it could not 
 possibly be stretched any more, yet the pressure of which is 
 felt long before the final limit is reached, and felt more 
 severely the nearer that limit is approached. 
 
 After a certain, and not very advanced, stage in the prog- 
 ress of agriculture ; as soon, in fact, as mankind have ap- 
 plied themselves to cultivation with any energy, and have 
 brought to it any tolerable tools ; from that time it is the 
 law of production from the land, that in any given state of 
 agricultural skill and knowledge, by increasing the labour, 
 the produce is not increased in an equal degree ; doubling 
 the labour does not double the produce ; or, to express the 
 same thing in other words, every increase of produce is ob- 
 tained by a more than proportional increase in the applica- 
 tion of labour to the land. 
 
 This general law of agricultural industry is the most 
 important proposition in political economy. Were the law 
 different, nearly all the phenomena of the production and 
 distribution of wealth would be other than they are. The 
 most fundamental errors which still prevail on our subject, 
 result from not perceiving this law at work underneath the 
 more superficial agencies on which attention fixes itself; but 
 mistaking those agencies for the ultimate causes of effects 
 of which they may influence the form and mode, but of 
 which it alone determines the essence. 
 
 When, for the purpose of raising an increase of produce, 
 recourse is had to inferior land, it is evident that, so far, the 
 produce does not increase in the same proportion with the
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 231 
 
 labour. The very meaning of inferior land, is land which 
 with equal labour returns a smaller amount of produce. 
 Land may be inferior either in fertility or in situation. The 
 one requires a greater proportional amount of labour for 
 growing the produce, the other for carrying it to market. 
 If the land A yields a thousand quarters of wheat, to a given 
 outlay in wages, manure, &c., and in order to raise another 
 thousand recourse must be had to the land B, which is either 
 less fertile or more distant from the market, the two thou- 
 sand quarters will cost more than twice as much labour as 
 the original thousand, and the produce of agriculture will be 
 increased in a less ratio than the labour employed in pro- 
 curing it. 
 
 Instead of cultivating the land B, it would be possible, 
 by higher cultivation, to make the land A produce more. 
 It might be ploughed or harrowed twice instead of once, or 
 three times instead of twice ; it might be dug instead of 
 being ploughed ; after ploughing, it might be gone over with 
 a hoe instead of a harrow, and the soil more completely pul- 
 verized ; it might be oftener or more thoroughly weeded ; 
 the implements used might be of higher finish, or more elab- 
 orate construction ; a greater quantity or more expensive 
 kinds of manure might be applied, or when applied, they 
 might be more carefully mixed and incorporated with the 
 soil. These are some of the modes by which the same land 
 may be made to yield a greater produce ; and when a 
 greater produce must be had, some of these are among the 
 means usually employed for obtaining it. But, that it is 
 obtained at a more than proportional increase of expense, 
 is evident from the fact that inferior lands are cultivated. 
 Inferior lands, or lands at a greater distance from the mar- 
 ket, of course yield an inferior return, and an increasing 
 demand cannot be supplied from them unless at an augmen- 
 tation of cost, and therefore of price. If the additional de- 
 mand could continue to be supplied from the superior lands, 
 by applying additional labour and capital, at no greater 
 proportional cost than that at which they yield the quantity
 
 232 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 first demanded of them, the owners or farmers of those lands 
 could undersell all others, and engross the whole market. 
 Lands of a lower degree of fertility or in a more remote 
 situation, might indeed be cultivated by their proprietors, 
 for the sake of subsistence or independence; but it never 
 could be the interest of any one to farm them for profit. 
 That a profit can be made from them, sufficient to attract 
 capital to such an investment, is a proof that cultivation on 
 the more eligible lands has reached a point, beyond which 
 any greater application of labour and capital would yield, at 
 the best, no greater return than can be obtained at the same 
 expense from less fertile or less favourably situated lands. 
 
 The careful cultivation of a well-farmed district of Eng- 
 land or Scotland is a symptom and an effect of the more 
 unfavourable terms which the land has begun to exact for 
 any increase of its fruits. Such elaborate cultivation costs 
 much more in proportion, and requires a higher price to 
 render it profitable, than farming on a more superficial sys- 
 tem ; and would not be adopted if access could be had to 
 land of equal fertility, previously unoccupied. Where there 
 is the choice of raising the increasing supply which society 
 requires, from fresh land of as good quality as that already 
 cultivated, no attempt is made to extract from land anything 
 approaching to what it will yield on what are esteemed the 
 best European modes of cultivating. The land is tasked up 
 to the point at which the greatest return is obtained in pro- 
 portion to the labour employed, but no further : any addi- 
 tional labour is carried elsewhere. " It is long," says a late 
 traveller in the United States,* " before an English eye 
 becomes reconciled to the lightness of the crops and the 
 careless farming (as we should call it) which is apparent. 
 One forgets that where land is so plentiful and labour so 
 dear as it is here, a totally different principle must be pur- 
 sued to that which prevails in populous countries, and that 
 the consequence will of course be a want of tidiness, as it 
 
 * Letters from America, by John Robert Godley, vol. i. p. 42. See also 
 Lyell's Travels in America, vol. ii. p. 83.
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 233 
 
 were, and finish, about everything which requires labour." 
 Of the two causes mentioned, the plentifalness of land 
 seems to me the true explanation, rather than the dearness 
 of labour ; for, however dear labour may be, when food is 
 wanted, labour will always be applied to producing it in 
 preference to anything else. But this labour is more effec- 
 tive for its end by being applied to fresh soil, than if it were 
 employed in bringing the soil already occupied into higher 
 cultivation. Only when no soils remain to be broken up, 
 but such as either from distance or inferior quality require 
 a considerable rise of price to render their cultivation profit- 
 able, can it become advantageous to apply the high farming 
 of Europe to any American lands ; except, perhaps, in the 
 immediate vicinity of towns, where saving in cost of carriage 
 may compensate for great inferiority in the return from the 
 soil itself. As American farming is to English, so is the 
 ordinary English to that of Flanders, Tuscany, or the Terra 
 di Lavoro ; where by the application of a far greater quan- 
 tity of labour there is obtained a considerably larger gross 
 produce, but on such terms as would never be advantageous 
 to a mere speculator for profit, unless made so by much 
 higher prices of agricultural produce. 
 
 The principle which has now been stated must be re- 
 ceived, no doubt, with certain explanations and limitations. 
 Even after the land is so highly cultivated that the mere 
 application of additional labour, or of an additional amount 
 of ordinary dressing, would yield no return proportioned 
 to the expense, it may still happen that the application of 
 a much greater additional labour and capital to improving 
 the soil itself, by draining or permanent manures, would be 
 as liberally remunerated by the produce, as any portion of 
 the labour and capital already employed. It would some- 
 times be much more amply remunerated. This could not 
 be, if capital always sought and found the most advanta- 
 geous employment ; but if the most advantageous employ- 
 ment has to wait longest for its remuneration, it is only in 
 a rather advanced stage of industrial development that the
 
 234 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 preference will be given to it ; and even in that advanced 
 stage, the laws or usages connected with property in land 
 mid the tenure of farms, are often such as to prevent the 
 disposable capital of the country from flowing freely into 
 the channel of agricultural improvement : and hence the 
 increased supply, required by increasing population, is some- 
 times raised at an augmenting cost by higher cultivation, 
 when the means of producing it without increase of cost are 
 known and accessible. There can be no doubt, that if capi- 
 tal were forthcoming to execute, within the next year, all 
 known and recognized improvements in the land of the 
 United Kingdom which would pay at the existing prices, 
 that is, which would increase the produce in as great or a 
 greater ratio than the expense ; the result would be such 
 (especially if we include Ireland in the supposition) that 
 inferior land would not for a long time require to be brought 
 under tillage : probably a considerable part of the less pro- 
 ductive lands now cultivated, which are not particularly 
 favoured by situation, would go put of culture ; or (as the 
 improvements in question are not so much applicable to 
 good land, but operate rather by converting bad land into 
 good) the contraction of cultivation might principally take 
 place by a less high dressing and less elaborate tilling of 
 land generally ; a falling back to something nearer the 
 character of American farming ; such only of the poor lands 
 being altogether abandoned as were not found susceptible 
 of improvement. And thus the aggregate produce of the 
 whole cultivated land would bear a larger proportion than 
 before to the labour expended on it ; and the general law 
 of diminishing return from land would have undergone, to 
 that extent, a temporary supersession. No one, however, 
 can suppose that even in these circumstances, the whole 
 produce required for the country could be raised exclusively 
 from the best lands, together with those possessing advan- 
 tages of situation to place them on a par with the best. 
 Much would undoubtedly continue to be produced under 
 less advantageous conditions, and with a smaller propor-
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 235 
 
 tional return, than that obtained from the best soils and 
 situations. And in proportion as the further increase of 
 population required a still greater addition to the supply, 
 the general law would resume its course, and the further 
 augmentation would be obtained at a more than proportion- 
 ate expense of labour and capital. 
 
 3. That the produce of land increases, cceteris paribus, 
 in a diminishing ratio to the increase in the labour employed, 
 is, as we have said, (allowing for occasional and temporary 
 exceptions,) the universal law of agricultural industry. This 
 principle, however, has been denied, and experience con- 
 fidently appealed to, in proof that the returns from land are 
 not less, but greater, in an advanced, than in an early, stage 
 of cultivation when much capital, than when little, is ap- 
 plied to agriculture. So much so, indeed, that (it is affirmed) 
 the worst land now in cultivation produces as much food 
 per acre, and even as much to a given amount of labour, 
 as our ancestors contrived to extract from the richest soils 
 in England. 
 
 It is very possible that this may be true ; and even if 
 not true to the letter, to a great extent it certainly is so. 
 Unquestionably a much smaller proportion of the popula- 
 tion is now occupied in producing food for the whole, than 
 in the early times of our history. This, however, does not 
 prove that the law of which we have been speaking does 
 not exist, but only that there is some antagonizing principle 
 at work, capable for a time of making head against the law. 
 Such an agency there is, in habitual antagonism to the law 
 of diminishing return from land; and to the consideration 
 of this we shall now proceed. It is no other than the prog- 
 ress of civilization. I use this general and somewhat vague 
 expression, because the things to be included are so various," 
 that hardly any term of a more restricted signification would 
 comprehend them all. 
 
 Of these, the most obvious is the progress of agricultural 
 knowledge, skill, and invention. Improved processes of
 
 JJ36 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 agriculture are of two kinds : some enable the land to yield 
 a greater absolute produce, without an equivalent increase 
 of labour ; others have not the power of increasing the pro- 
 duce, but have that of diminishing the labour and expense 
 by which it is obtained. Among the first are to be reckoned 
 the disuse of fallows, by means of the rotation of crops ; and 
 the introduction of new articles of cultivation capable of 
 entering advantageously into the rotation. The change 
 made in British agriculture towards the close of the last 
 century, by the introduction of turnip husbandry, is spoken 
 of as amounting to a revolution. These improvements 
 operate not only by enabling the land to produce a crop 
 every year, instead of remaining idle one year in every two 
 or three to renovate its powers, but also by direct increase 
 of its productiveness ; since the great addition made to the 
 number of cattle by the increase of their food, affords more 
 abundant manure to fertilize the corn lands. Next in order 
 comes the introduction of new articles of food, containing 
 a greater amount of sustenance, like the potato, or more 
 productive species or varieties of the same plant, such as 
 the Swedish turnip. In the same class of improvements 
 must be placed a better knowledge of the properties of 
 manures, and of the most effectual modes of applying them ; 
 the introduction of new and more powerful fertilizing agents, 
 such as guano, and the conversion to the same purpose, of 
 substances previously wasted ; inventions like subsoil-plough- 
 ing or tile-draining, by which the produce of some kinds of 
 lands is so greatly multiplied ; improvements in the breed 
 or feeding of labouring cattle ; augmented stock of the 
 animals which consume and convert into human food what 
 \vould otherwise be wasted ; and the like. The other sort 
 of improvements, those which diminish labour, but without 
 increasing the capacity of the land to produce, are such as 
 the improved construction of tools ; the introduction of new 
 instruments which spare manual labour, as the winnowing 
 and threshing machines ; a more skilful and economical 
 application of muscular exertion, such as the introduction,
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 237 
 
 so slowly accomplished in England, of Scotch ploughing, 
 with two horses abreast and one man, instead of three or 
 four horses in a team and two men, &c. These improve- 
 ments do not add to the productiveness of the land, but 
 they are equally calculated with the former to counteract 
 the tendency in the cost of production of agricultural pro- 
 duce, to rise with the progress of population and demand. 
 
 Analogous in effect to- this second class of agricultu- 
 ral improvements, are improved means of communication. 
 Good roads are equivalent to good tools. It is of no conse- 
 quence whether the economy of labour takes place in ex- 
 tracting the produce from the soil, or in conveying it to 
 the place where it is to be consumed. Not to say in addi- 
 tion, that the labour of cultivation itself is diminished by 
 whatever lessens the cost of bringing manure from a dis- 
 tance, or facilitates the many operations of transport from 
 place to place which occur within the bounds of the farm. 
 Railways and canals are virtually a diminution of the cost 
 of production of all things sent to market by them ; and 
 literally so of all those, the appliances and aids for produ- 
 cing which, they serve to transmit. By their means land 
 can be cultivated, which would not otherwise have remu- 
 nerated the cultivators without a rise of price. Improve- 
 ments in navigation have, with respect to food or materials 
 brought from beyond sea, a corresponding effect. 
 
 From similar considerations, it appears that many purely 
 mechanical improvements, which have, apparently, at least, 
 no peculiar connexion with agriculture, nevertheless enable 
 a given amount of food to be obtained with a smaller expen- 
 diture of labour. A great improvement in the process of 
 smelting iron, would tend to cheapen agricultural imple- 
 ments, diminish the cost of railroads, of waggons and carts, 
 ships, and perhaps buildings, and many other things to which 
 iron is not at present applied, because it is too costly ; and 
 would thence diminish the cost of production of food. The 
 same effect would follow from an improvement in those pro- 
 cesses of what may be termed manufacture, to which the
 
 238 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 material of food is subjected after it is separated from the 
 ground. The first application of wind or water power to 
 grind corn, tended to cheapen bread as much as a very im- 
 portant discovery in agriculture would have done ; and any 
 great improvement in the construction of corn-mills, would 
 have, in proportion, a similar influence. The effects of 
 cheapening locomotion have been already considered. There 
 are also engineering inventions which facilitate all great 
 operations on the earth's surface. An improvement in the 
 art of taking levels is of importance to draining, not to men- 
 tion canal and railway making. The fens of Holland, and 
 of some parts of England, are drained by pumps worked 
 by the wind or by steam. "Where canals of irrigation, or 
 where tanks or embankments are necessary, mechanical 
 skill is a great resource for cheapening production. 
 
 Those manufacturing improvements which cannot be 
 made instrumental to facilitate, in any of its stages, the actual 
 production of food, and therefore do not help to counteract 
 or retard the diminution of the proportional return to labour 
 from the soil, have, however, another effect, which is prac- 
 tically equivalent. What they do not prevent, they yet, in 
 some degree, compensate for. 
 
 The materials of manufactures being all drawn from the 
 land, and many of them from agriculture, which supplies 
 in particular the entire material of clothing ; the general 
 law of production from the land, the law of diminishing 
 return, must in the last resort be applicable to manufactur- 
 ing as well as to agricultural history. As population in- 
 creases, and the power of the land to yield increased pro- 
 duce is strained harder and harder, any additional supply 
 of material, as well as of food, must be obtained by a more 
 than proportionally increasing expenditure of labour. But 
 the cost of the material forming generally a very small por- 
 tion of the entire cost of the manufacture, the agricultural 
 labour concerned in the production of manufactured goods 
 is but a small fraction of the whole labour worked up in 
 the commodity. All the rest of the labour tends constantly
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 239 
 
 and strongly towards diminution, as the amount of produc- 
 tion increases. Manufactures are vastly more susceptible 
 than agriculture, of mechanical improvements, and contriv- 
 ances for saving labour ; and it has already been seen how 
 greatly the division of labour, and its skilful and economi- 
 cal distribution, depend on the extent of the market, and 
 on the possibility of production in large masses. In manu- 
 factures, accordingly, the causes tending to increase the pro- 
 ductiveness of industry, preponderate greatly over the one 
 cause which tends to diminish it : and the increase of 
 production, called forth by the progress of society, takes 
 place, not at an increasing, but at a continually diminish- 
 ing, proportional cost. This fact has manifested itself in 
 the progressive fall of the prices and values of almost every 
 kind of manufactured goods during two centuries past ; a 
 fall accelerated by the mechanical inventions of the last 
 seventy or eighty years, and susceptible of being prolonged 
 and extended beyond any limit which it would be safe to 
 specify. 
 
 Now it is quite conceivable that the efficiency of agri- 
 cultural labour might be undergoing, with the increase of 
 produce, a gradual diminution ; that the price of food, in 
 consequence, might be progressively rising, and an ever 
 growing proportion of the population might be needed to 
 raise food for the whole ; while yet the productive power of 
 labour in all other branches of industry might be so rapidly 
 augmenting, that the required amount of labour could be 
 spared from manufactures, and nevertheless a greater pro j 
 duce be obtained, and the aggregate wants of the commu- 
 nity be on the whole better supplied, than before. The 
 benefit might even extend to the poorest class. The in- 
 creased cheapness of clothing and 'lodging might make up 
 to them for the augmented cost of their food. 
 
 There is, thus, no possible improvement in the arts of 
 production which does not in one or another mode exercise 
 an antagonistic influence to the law of diminishing return to 
 agricultural labour. Nor is it only industrial improvements
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 which have this effect. Improvements in government, and 
 almost every kind of moral and social advancement, operate 
 in the same manner. Suppose a country in the condition 
 of France before the Revolution : taxation imposed almost 
 exclusively on the industrious classes, and on such a principle 
 as to be an actual penalty on production ; and no redress 
 obtainable for any injury to property or person, when in- 
 flicted by people of rank or court influence. Was not the 
 hurricane which swept away this system of things, even if 
 we look no further than to its effect in augmenting the pro- 
 ductiveness of labour, equivalent to many industrial inven- 
 tions ? The removal of a fiscal burthen on agriculture, such 
 as tithe, has the same effect as if the labour necessary for 
 obtaining the existing produce were suddenly reduced one- 
 tenth. The abolition of corn laws, or of any other re- 
 strictions which prevent commodities from being produced 
 where the cost of their production is lowest, amounts to a 
 vast improvement in production. When fertile land, pre- 
 viously reserved as hunting ground, or for any other purpose 
 of amusement, is set free for culture, the aggregate produc- 
 tiveness of agricultural industry is increased. It is well 
 known what has been the effect in England of badly admin- 
 istered poor laws, and the still worse effect in Ireland of a 
 bad system of tenancy, in rendering agricultural labour 
 slack and ineffective. No improvements operate more 
 directly upon the productiveness of labour than those in the 
 tenure of farms, and in the laws relating to landed property. 
 The breaking up of entails, the cheapening of the transfer 
 of property, and whatever else promotes the natural ten- 
 dency of land in a system of freedom, to pass out of hands 
 which can make little of it into those which can make more ; 
 the substitution of long leases for tenancy at will, and of any 
 tolerable system of tenancy whatever for the wretched 
 cottier system ; above all, the acquisition of a permanent 
 interest in the soil by the cultivators of it ; all these things 
 are as real, and some of them as great, improvements in 
 production, as the invention of the spinning-jenny or the 
 vsteam-enaine.
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 241 
 
 We may say the same of improvements in education. 
 The intelligence of the workman is a most important ele- 
 ment in the productiveness of labour. So low, in some of 
 the most civilized countries, is the present standard of intel- 
 ligence, that there is hardly any source from which a more 
 indefinite amount of improvement may be looked for in 
 productive power, than by endowing with brains those who 
 now have only hands. The carefulness, economy, and gen- 
 eral trustworthiness of labourers are as important as their 
 intelligence. Friendly relations, and a community of inter- 
 est and feeling between labourers and employers, are emi- 
 nently so : I should rather say, would be ; for I know not 
 where any such sentiment of friendly alliance now exists. 
 Nor is it only in the labouring class that improvement of 
 mind and character operates with beneficial effect even on 
 industry. In the rich and idle classes, increased mental en- 
 ergy, more solid instruction, and stronger feelings of con- 
 science, public spirit, or philanthropy, would qualify them 
 to originate and promote the most valuable improvements, 
 both in the economical resources of their country, and in its 
 institutions and customs. To look no further than the most 
 obvious phenomena ; the backwardness of French agricul- 
 ture in the precise points in which benefit might be expect- 
 ed from the influence of an educated class, is partly account- 
 ed for by the exclusive devotion of the richer landed pro- 
 prietors to town interests and town pleasures. There is 
 scarcely any possible amelioration of human affairs which 
 would not, among its other benefits, have a favourable 
 operation, direct or indirect, upon the productiveness of in- 
 dustry. The intensity of devotion to industrial occupations 
 would indeed in many cases be moderated by a more liberal 
 and genial mental culture, but the labour actually bestowed 
 on those occupations would almost always be rendered more 
 effective. 
 
 Before pointing out the principal inferences to be drawn 
 from the nature of the two antagonist forces by which the 
 productiveness of agricultural industry is determined, we 
 16
 
 24:2 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 8. 
 
 must observe that what we have said of agriculture, is true, 
 with little variation, of the other occupations which it repre- 
 sents ; of all the arts which extract materials from the globe. 
 Mining industry, for example, usually yields an increase of 
 produce at a more than proportional increase of expense. 
 It does worse, for even its customary annual produce re- 
 quires to be extracted by a greater and greater expenditure 
 of labour and capital. As a mine does not reproduce the 
 coal or ore taken from it, not only are all mines at last ex- 
 hausted, but even when they as yet show no signs of ex- 
 haustion, they must be worked at a continually increasing 
 cost ; shafts must be sunk deeper, galleries driven farther, 
 greater power applied to keep them clear of water; the 
 produce must be lifted from a greater depth, or conveyed 
 a greater distance. The law of diminishing return applies 
 therefore to mining, in a still more unqualified sense than 
 to agriculture : but the antagonizing agency, that of im- 
 provements in production, also applies in a still greater de- 
 gree. Mining operations are more susceptible of mechanical 
 improvements than agricultural : the first great application 
 of the steam-engine was to mining ; and there are unlimited 
 possibilities of improvement in the chemical processes by 
 which the metals are extracted. There is another contin- 
 gency, of no unfrequent occurrence, which avails to coun- 
 terbalance the progress of all existing mines towards exhaus- 
 tion : this is, the discovery of new ones, equal or superior in 
 richness. 
 
 To resume ; all natural agents which are limited in 
 quantity, are not only limited in their ultimate productive 
 power, but, long before that power is stretched to the ut- 
 most, they yield to any additional demands on progressively 
 harder terms. This law may however be suspended, or 
 temporarily controlled, by whatever adds to the general 
 power of mankind over nature ; and especially by any ex- 
 tension of their knowledge, and their consequent command, 
 of the properties and powers of natural agents.
 
 CHAPTER Xin. 
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 
 
 1. FKOM the preceding exposition it appears that the 
 limit to the increase of production is two-fold ; -from defi- 
 ciency of capital, or of land. Production comes to a pause, 
 either because the effective desire of accumulation is not 
 sufficient to give rise to any further increase of capital, or 
 because, however disposed the possessors of surplus income 
 may be to save a portion of it, the limited land at the dis- 
 posal of the community does not permit additional capital to 
 be employed with such a return, as would be an equivalent 
 to them for their abstinence. 
 
 In countries where the principle of accumulation is as 
 weak as it is in the various nations of Asia ; where people 
 will neither save, nor work to obtain the means of saving, 
 unless under the inducement of enormously high profits, nor 
 even then if it is necessary to wait a considerable time for 
 them ; where either productions remain scanty, or drudgery 
 great, because there is neither capital forthcoming nor fore- 
 thought sufficient for the adoption of the contrivances by 
 which natural agents are made to do the work of human la- 
 bour ; the desideratum for such a country, economically con- 
 sidered, is an increase of industry, and of the effective desire 
 of accumulation. The means are, first, a better govern- 
 ment : more complete security of property ; moderate taxes, 
 and freedom from arbitrary exaction under the name of 
 taxes ; a more permanent and more advantageous tenure of 
 land, securing to the cultivator as far as possible the undi-
 
 244 BO <> K I- CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 vided benefits of the industry, skill, and economy he may 
 exert. Secondly, improvement of the public intelligence : 
 the decay of usages or superstitions which interfere with 
 the effecdve employment of industry ; and the growth of 
 mental activity, making the people alive to new objects of 
 desire. Thirdly, the introduction of foreign arts, which 
 raise the returns derivable from additional capital, to a rate 
 corresponding to the low strength of the desire of accumu- 
 lation : and the importation of foreign capital, which ren- 
 ders the increase of production no Longer exclusively depen- 
 dent on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants them- 
 selves, while it places before them a stimulating example, 
 and by instilling new ideas and breaking the chains of hab- 
 it, if not by improving the actual condition of the popula- 
 tion, tends to create in them new wants, increased ambition, 
 and greater thought for the future. These considerations 
 apply more or less to all the Asiatic populations, and to the 
 less civilized and industrious part of Europe, as Russia, 
 Hungary, Spain, and Ireland. 
 
 2. But there are other countries, and England is at the 
 head of them, in which neither the spirit of industry nor the 
 effective desire of accumulation need any encouragement ; 
 where the people will toil hard for a small remuneration, 
 and save much for a small profit ; where, though the gen- 
 eral thriftiness of the labouring class is much below what is 
 desirable, the spirit of accumulation in the more prosperous 
 part of the community requires abatement rather than in- 
 crease. In these countries there would never be any defi- 
 ciency of capital, if its increase were never checked or 
 brought to a stand by too great a diminution of its re- 
 turns. It is the tendency of the returns to a progressive 
 diminution,' which causes the increase of production to be 
 often attended with a deterioration in the condition of the 
 producers ; and this tendency, which would in time put an 
 end to increase of production altogether, is a result of the 
 necessary and inherent conditions of production from the 
 land.
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 45 
 
 In all countries which have passed beyond a very early 
 stage in the progress of agriculture, every increase in the 
 demand for food, occasioned by increased population, will 
 always, unless there is a simultaneous improvement in pro- 
 duction, diminish the share which on a fair division would 
 fall to each individual. An increased production, in default 
 of unoccupied tracts of fertile land, or of fresh improve- 
 ments tending to cheapen commodities, can never be ob- 
 tained but by increasing the labour in more than the same 
 proportion. The population must either work harder, or 
 eat less, or obtain their usual food by sacrificing a part of 
 their other customary comforts. Whenever this necessity 
 is postponed, it is because the improvements which facili- 
 tate production continue progressive ; because the contriv- 
 ances of mankind for making their labour more effective, 
 keep up an equal struggle with nature, and extort fresh re- 
 sources from her reluctant powers as fast as human neces- 
 sities occupy and engross the old. 
 
 From this, results the important corollary, that the ne- 
 cessity of restraining population is not, as many persons be- 
 lieve, peculiar to a condition of great inequality of properly. 
 A greater number of people cannot, in any given state of 
 civilization, be collectively so well provided for as a smaller. 
 The niggardliness of nature, not the injustice of society, is '' 
 the cause of the penalty attached to over-population. An 
 unjust distribution of wealth does not even aggravate the 
 evil, but, at most, causes it to be somewhat earlier felt. It 
 is in vain to say, that all months which the increase of 
 mankind calls into existence bring with them hands. The 
 new mouths require as much food as the old ones, and 
 the hands do not produce as much. If all instruments of 
 production were held in joint property by the whole people, 
 and the produce divided with perfect equality among them, 
 and if in a society thus constituted, industry were as ener- 
 getic and the produce as ample as at present, there would 
 be enough to make all the existing population extremely 
 comfortable ; but when that population had doubled itself,
 
 246 BOOK I. CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 as, with the existing habits of the people, under such an en- 
 couragement, it undoubtedly would in little more than 
 twenty years, what would then be their condition ? Unless 
 the arts of production were in the same time improved in 
 an almost unexampled degree, the inferior soils which must 
 be resorted to, and the more laborious and scantily remu- 
 nerative cultivation which must be employed on the supe- 
 rior soils, to procure food for so much larger a population, 
 would, by an insuperable necessity, render every individual 
 in the community poorer than before. If the population 
 continued to increase at the same rate, a time would soon 
 arrive when no one would have more than mere necessaries, 
 and, soon after, a time when no one would have a sufficiency 
 of those, and the further increase of population would be 
 arrested by death. 
 
 Whether, at the present or any other time, the produce 
 of industry, proportionally to the labour employed, is in- 
 creasing or diminishing, and the average condition of the 
 people improving or deteriorating, depends upon whether 
 population is advancing faster than improvement, or im- 
 provement than population. After a degree of density has 
 been attained, sufficient to allow the principal benefits of 
 combination of labour, all further increase tends in itself to 
 mischief, so far as regards the average condition of the peo- 
 ple ; but the progress of improvement has a counteracting 
 operation, and allows of increased numbers without any 
 deterioration, and even consistently with a higher average 
 of comfort. Improvement must here be understood in a 
 wide sense, including not only new industrial inventions, or 
 an extended use of those already known, but improvements 
 in institutions, education, opinions, and human affairs gen- 
 erally, provided they tend, as almost all improvements do, 
 to give new motives or new facilities to production. If the 
 productive powers of the country increase as rapidly as ad- 
 vancing numbers call for an augmentation of produce, it is 
 not necessary to obtain that augmentation by the cultivation 
 of soils more sterile than the worst already under culture, or
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS, 247 
 
 by applying additional labour to the old soils at a diminished 
 advantage ; or at all events this loss of power is compen- 
 sated by the increased efficiency with which, in the progress 
 of improvement, labour is employed in manufactures. In 
 one way or the other, the increased population is provided 
 for, and all are as well off as before. But if the growth of 
 human power over nature is suspended or slackened, and 
 population does not slacken its increase ; if, with only the 
 existing command over natural agencies, those agencies are 
 called upon for an increased produce ; this greater produce 
 will not be afforded to the increased population, without 
 either demanding on the average a greater effort from each, 
 or on the average reducing each to a smaller ration out of 
 the aggregate produce. 
 
 As a matter of fact, at some periods the progress of pop- 
 ulation has been the more rapid of the two, at others, that 
 of improvement. In England during a long interval pre- 
 ceding the French Revolution, population increased slowly ; 
 but the progress of improvement, at least in agriculture, 
 would seem to have been still slower, since though nothing 
 occurred to lower the value of the precious metals, the price 
 of corn rose considerably, and England, from an exporting, 
 became an importing country. This evidence, however, is 
 not quite conclusive, inasmuch as the extraordinary number 
 of abundant seasons during the first half of the century, not 
 continuing during the last, was a cause of increased price 
 in the later period, extrinsic to the ordinary progress of so- 
 ciety. "Whether during the same period improvements in 
 manufactures, or diminished cost of imported commodities, 
 made amends for the diminished productiveness of labour 
 on the land, is uncertain. But ever since the great mechan- 
 ical inventions of Watt, Arkwright, and their cotempora- 
 ries, the return to labour has probably increased as fast as 
 the population ; and would even have outstripped it, if that 
 very augmentation of return had not called forth an addi- 
 tional portion of the inherent power of multiplication in the 
 human species. During the twenty or thirty years last
 
 248 BOOK I. CHAPTER XIII. 3. 
 
 elapsed, so rapid has been the extension of improved pro- 
 cesses of agriculture, that even the land yields a greater 
 produce in proportion to the labour employed ; the average 
 price of corn had become decidedly lower, even before the 
 repeal of the corn laws had so materially lightened, for the 
 time being, the pressure of population upon production. 
 But though improvement may during a certain space of 
 time keep up with, or even surpass, the actual increase of 
 population, it assuredly never comes up to the rate of in- 
 crease of which population is capable : and nothing could 
 have prevented a general deterioration in the condition of 
 the human race, were it not that population has in fact been 
 restrained. Had it been restrained still more, and the same 
 improvements taken place, there would have been a larger 
 dividend than there now is, for the nation or the species at 
 large. The new ground wrung from nature by the im- 
 provements would not have been all used up in the support 
 of mere numbers. Though the gross produce would not 
 have been so great, there would have been a greater prod- 
 uce per head of the population. 
 
 3. When the growth of numbers outstrips the progress 
 of improvement, and a country is driven to obtain the means 
 of subsistence on terms more and more unfavourable, by the 
 inability of its land to meet additional demands except on 
 more onerous conditions ; there are two expedients by which 
 it may hope to mitigate that disagreeable necessity, even 
 though no change should take place in the habits of the 
 people with respect to their rate of increase. One of these 
 expedients is the importation of food from abroad. The 
 other is emigration. 
 
 The admission of cheaper food from a foreign country, is 
 equivalent to an agricultural invention by which food could 
 be raised at a similarly diminished cost at home. It equally 
 increases the productive power of labour. The return was 
 before, so much food for so much labour employed in the 
 growth of food : the return is now, a greater quantity of
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 249 
 
 food, for the same labour employed in producing cottons or 
 hardware, or some other commodity to be given in exchange 
 for food. The one improvement, like the other, throws 
 back the decline of the productive power of labour by a 
 certain distance : but in the one case as in the other, it im- 
 mediately resumes its course ; the tide which has receded, 
 instantly begins to re-advance. It might seem, indeed, that 
 when a country draws its supply of food from so wide a sur- 
 face as the whole habitable globe, so little impression can be 
 produced on that great expanse by any increase of mouths 
 in one small corner of it, that the inhabitants of the country 
 may double and treble their numbers, without feeling the 
 eifect in any increased tension of the springs of production, 
 or any enhancement of the price of food throughout the 
 world. But in this calculation several things are over- 
 looked. 
 
 In the first place, the foreign regions from which corn 
 can be imported do not comprise the whole globe, but those 
 parts of it almost alone, which are in the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood of coasts or navigable rivers. The coast is the 
 part of most countries which is earliest and most thickly 
 peopled, and has seldom any food to spare. The chief 
 source of supply, therefore, is the strip of country along the 
 banks of some navigable river, as the Nile, the Vistula, or 
 the Mississippi ; and of such there is not, in the productive 
 regions of the earth, so great a multitude, as to suffice dur- 
 ing an indefinite time for a rapidly growing demand, with- 
 out an increasing strain on the productive powers of the soil. 
 To obtain auxiliary supplies of corn from the interior in any 
 abundance, would, in the existing state of the communica- 
 tions, be hopeless. By improved roads, and often by canals 
 and railways, the obstacle will be so reduced as not to be 
 insuperable : but this is a slow progress ; in all the food- 
 exporting countries except America, a very slow progress ; 
 and one which cannot keep pace with population, unless the 
 increase of the last is very effectually restrained. 
 
 In the next place, even if the supply were drawn from
 
 250 BOOK I. CHAPTER XJII. 3. 
 
 the whole instead of a small part of the surface of the ex- 
 porting countries, the quantity of food would still be lim- 
 ited, which could be obtained from them without an in- 
 crease of the proportional cost. The countries which export 
 food may be divided into two classes ; those in which the 
 effective desire of accumulation is strong, and those in 
 which it is weak. In Australia and the United States of 
 America, the effective desire of accumulation is strong ; 
 capital increases fast, and the production of food might be 
 very rapidly extended. But in such countries population 
 also increases with extraordinary rapidity. Their agricul- 
 ture has to provide for their own expanding numbers, as 
 well as for those of the importing countries. They must, 
 therefore, from the nature of the case, be rapidly driven, if 
 not to less fertile, at least what is equivalent, to remoter 
 and less accessible lands, and to modes of cultivation like 
 those of old countries, less productive in proportion to the 
 labour and expense. 
 
 But the countries which have at the same time cheap 
 food and great industrial prosperity are few, being only 
 those in which the arts of civilized life have been trans- 
 ferred full grown to a rich and uncultivated soil. Among 
 old countries, those which are able to export food, are able 
 only because their industry is in a very backward state ; be- 
 cause capital, and hence population, have never increased 
 sufficiently to make food rise to a higher price. Such coun- 
 tries are Russia, Poland, and Hungary. In those regions 
 the effective desire of accumulation is weak, the arts of pro- 
 duction most imperfect, capital scanty, and its increase, es- 
 pecially from domestic sources, slow. When an increased 
 demand arose for food to be exported to other countries, it 
 would only be very gradually that food could be produced 
 to meet it. The capital needed could not be obtained by 
 transfer from other employments, for such do not exist. 
 The cottons or hardware which would be received from 
 England in exchange for corn, the Russians and Poles do 
 not now produce in the country : they go without them.
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 251 
 
 Something might in time be expected from the increased 
 exertions to which producers would be stimulated by the 
 market opened for their produce ; but to such increase of 
 exertion, the institutions of countries whose agricultural 
 population consists of serfs, or of peasants in an almost ser- 
 vile condition, are the reverse of favourable, and even in 
 this age of movement these institutions do not rapidly 
 change. If a greater outlay of capital is relied on as the 
 source from which the produce is to be increased, the means 
 must either be obtained by the slow process of saving, under 
 the impulse given by new commodities and more extended 
 intercourse (and in that case the population would most 
 likely increase as fast), or must be brought in from foreign 
 countries. If England is to obtain a rapidly increasing 
 supply of corn from Russia or Poland, English capital must 
 go there to produce it. This, however, is attended with so 
 many difficulties, as are equivalent to great positive disad- 
 vantages. It is opposed by differences of language, differ- 
 ences of manners, and a thousand obstacles arising from the 
 institutions and social relations of the country : and after 
 all it would inevitably so stimulate population on the spot, 
 that nearly all the increase of food produced "by its means, 
 would probably be consumed without leaving the country : 
 so that if it were not the almost only mode of introducing 
 foreign arts and ideas, and giving an effectual spur to the 
 backward civilization of those countries, little reliance could 
 be placed on it for increasing the exports, and supplying 
 other countries with a progressive and indefinite increase of 
 food. But to improve the civilization of a country is a slow 
 process, and gives time for so great an increase of population 
 both in the country itself, and in those supplied from it, 
 that its effect in keeping down the price of food against 
 the increase of demand, is not likely to be more decisive on 
 the scale of all Europe, than on the smaller one of a partic- 
 ular nation. 
 
 The law, therefore, of diminishing return to industry, 
 whenever population makes a more rapid progress than im-
 
 252 BOOK I. CHAPTER XIII. 4. 
 
 provement, is not solely applicable to countries which are 
 fed from their own soil, but in substance applies quite as 
 much to those which are willing to draw their food from 
 any accessible quarter that can afford it cheapest. A sud- 
 den and great cheapening of food, indeed, in whatever 
 manner produced, would, like any other sudden improve- 
 ment in the arts of life, throw the natural tendency of affairs 
 a stage or two further back, though without altering its 
 course. There is one contingency connected with freedom 
 of importation, which may yet produce temporary effects 
 greater than were ever contemplated either by the bitterest 
 enemies or the most ardent adherents of free-trade in food. 
 Maize, or Indian corn, is a product capable of being sup- 
 plied in quantity sufficient to feed the whole country, at a 
 cost, allowing for difference of nutritive quality, cheaper 
 even than the potato. If maize should ever substitute it- 
 self for wheat as the staple food of the poor, the productive 
 power of labour in obtaining food would be so enormously 
 increased, and the expense of maintaining a family so di- 
 minished, that it would require perhaps some generations foi 
 population, even if it started forward at an American pace, 
 to overtake this great accession to the facilities of its sup- 
 port. 
 
 4. Besides the importation of corn, there is another 
 resource which can be invoked by a nation whose increasing 
 numbers press hard, not against their capital, but against 
 the productive capacity of their land : I mean Emigration, 
 especially in the form of Colonization. Of this remedy the 
 efficacy as far as it goes is real, since it consists in seeking 
 elsewhere those unoccupied tracts of fertile land, which if 
 they existed at home would enable the demand of an in- 
 creasing population to be met without any falling off in the 
 productiveness of labour. Accordingly, when the region to 
 be colonized is near at hand, and the habits and tastes of 
 the people sufficiently migratory, this remedy is completely 
 effectual. The migration from the older parts of the Amer-
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 253 
 
 ican Confederation to the new territories, which is to all in- 
 tents and purposes colonization, is what enables population 
 to go on unchecked throughout the Union without having 
 yet diminished the return to industry, or increased the diffi- 
 culty of earning a subsistence. If Australia or the interior 
 of Canada were as near to Great Britain as Wisconsin and 
 Iowa to New York ; if the superfluous people could remove 
 to it without crossing the sea, and were of as adventurous 
 and restless a character, and as little addicted to staying at 
 home, as their kinsfolk of New England, those unpeopled 
 continents would render the same service to the United 
 Kingdom which the old states of America derive from the 
 new. But, these things being as they are though a judi- 
 ciously conducted emigration is a most important resource 
 for suddenly lightening the pressure of population by a sin- 
 gle effort and though in such an extraordinary case as that 
 of Ireland under the threefold operation of the potato fail- 
 ure, the poor law, and the general turning out of tenantry 
 throughout the country, spontaneous emigration may at a 
 particular crisis remove greater multitudes than it was ever 
 proposed to remove at once by any national scheme ; there 
 is no probability that even under the most enlightened ar- 
 rangements a permanent stream of emigration could be kept 
 up, sufficient to take off, as in America, all that portion of 
 the annual increase (when proceeding at its greatest rapid- 
 ity) which being in excess of the progress made during the 
 same short period in the arts of life, tends to render living 
 more difficult for every averagely-situated individual in tho 
 community. And unless this can be done, emigration can- 
 not, even in an economical point of view, dispense with the 
 necessity of checks to population. Further than* this we 
 have not to speak of it in this place. The general subject 
 of colonization as a practical question, its importance to this 
 country, and the principles on which it should be conduct- 
 ed, will be discussed at some length in a subsequent portion 
 of this treatise.
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 DISTEIBTJTIOK,
 
 BOOK II. 
 DISTRIBUTION 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OF PROPERTY. 
 
 1. THE principles which have been set forth in the 
 first part of this Treatise, are, in certain respects, strongly 
 distinguished from those, on the consideration of which we 
 are now about to enter. The laws and conditions of the 
 production of wealth, partake of the character of physical 
 truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them. 
 Whatever mankind produce, must be produced in the 
 modes, and under the conditions, imposed by the constitu- 
 tion of external things, and by the inherent properties of 
 their own bodily and mental structure. "Whether they like 
 it or not, their productions will be limited by the amount 
 of their previous accumulation, and, that being given, it 
 will be proportional to their energy, their skill, the perfec- 
 tion of their machinery, and their judicious use of the ad- 
 vantages of combined labour. Whether they like it or not, 
 a double quantity of labour will not raise, on the same land, 
 a double quantity of food, unless some improvement takes 
 place in the processes of cultivation. Whether they like it 
 or not, the unproductive expenditure of individuals will pro 
 tanto tend to impoverish the community, and only their 
 17
 
 258 B OK II. CHAPTER I. 1. 
 
 productive expenditure will enrich it. The opinions, or the 
 wishes, which may exist on these different matters, do not 
 control the things themselves. We cannot, indeed, foresee 
 to what extent the modes of production may be altered, or 
 the productiveness of labour increased, by future extensions 
 of our knowledge of the laws of nature suggesting new pro- 
 cesses of industry of which we have at present no concep- 
 tion. But howsoever we may succeed in making for our- 
 selves more space within the limits set by the constitution 
 of things, we know that there must be limits. We cannot 
 alter the ultimate properties either of matter or mind, but 
 can only employ those properties more or less successfully, 
 to bring about the events in which we are interested. 
 
 It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a 
 matter of human institution solely. The things once there, 
 mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as 
 they like. They can place them at the disposal of whomso- 
 ever they please, and on whatever terms. Further, in the 
 social state, in every state except total solitude, any disposal 
 whatever of them can only take place by the consent of so- 
 ciety, or rather of those who dispose of its active force. 
 Even what a person has produced by his individual toil, 
 unaided by any one, he cannot keep, unless by the permis- 
 sion of society. Not only can society take it from him, but 
 individuals could and would take it from him, if society 
 only remained passive ; if it did not either interfere en 
 masse, or employ and pay people for the purpose of pre- 
 venting him from being disturbed in the possession. The 
 distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and 
 customs of society. The rules by which it is determined, 
 are what the opinions and feelings of the ruling portion of 
 the community make them, and are very different in differ- 
 ent ages and countries ; and might be still more different, 
 if mankind so chose. 
 
 The opinions and feelings of mankind, doubtless, are not 
 a matter of chance. They are consequences of the funda- 
 mental laws of human nature, combined with the existing
 
 PROPERTY. 259 
 
 state of knowledge and experience, and the existing condition 
 of social institutions and intellectual and moral culture. 
 But the laws of the generation of human opinions are not 
 within our present subject. They are part of the general 
 theory of human progress, a far larger and more difficult 
 subject of inquiry than political economy. We have here 
 to consider, not the causes, but the consequences, of the 
 rules according to which wealth may be distributed. Those, 
 at least, are as little arbitrary, and have as much the char- 
 acter of physical laws, as the laws of production. Human 
 beings can control their own acts, but not the consequences 
 of their acts either- to themselves or to others. Society can 
 subject the distribution of wealth to whatever rules it thinks 
 best ; but what practical results will flow from the operation 
 of those rules, must be discovered, like any other physical or 
 mental truths, by observation and reasoning. 
 
 "We proceed, then, to the consideration of the different 
 modes of distributing the produce of land and labour, which 
 have been adopted in practice, or may be conceived in the- 
 ory. Among these, our attention is first claimed by that 
 primary and fundamental institution, on which, unless in 
 some exceptional and very limited cases, the economical ar- 
 rangements of society have always rested, though in its sec- 
 ondary features it has varied, and is liable to vary. I 
 mean, of course, the institution of individual property. 
 
 2. Private property, as an institution, did not owe its 
 origin to any of those considerations of utility, which plead 
 for the maintenance of it when established. Enough is 
 known of rude ages, both from history and from analogous 
 states of society in our own time, to show, that tribunals 
 (which always precede laws) were originally established, not 
 to determine rights, but to repress violence and terminate 
 quarrels. With this object chiefly in view, they naturally 
 enough gave legal effect to first occupancy, by treating as 
 the acrgressor the person who first commenced violence, by 
 turning, or attempting to turn, another out of possession.
 
 260 BOOK n. CHAPTER I. 2. 
 
 Tlie preservation of the peace, which was the original object 
 of civil government, was thus attained ; while by confirm- 
 ing, to those who already possessed it, even what was not 
 the fruit of personal exertion, a guarantee was incidentally 
 given to them and others that they would be protected in 
 what was so. 
 
 In considering the institution of property as a question 
 in social philosophy, we must leave out of consideration its 
 actual origin in any of the existing nations of Europe. We 
 may suppose a community unhampered by any previous 
 possession ; a body of colonists, occupying for the first time 
 an uninhabited country ; bringing nothing with them but 
 what belonged to them in common, and having a clear field 
 for the adoption of the institutions and polity which they 
 judged most expedient ; required, therefore, to choose 
 whether they would conduct the work of production on the 
 principle of individual property, or on some system of com- 
 mon ownership and collective agency. 
 
 If private property were adopted, we must presume 
 that it would be accompanied by none of the initial inequal- 
 ities and injustice which obstruct the beneficial operation 
 of the principle in old society. Every full-grown man or 
 woman, we must suppose, would be secured in the unfet- 
 tered use and disposal of his or her bodily and mental facul- 
 ties ; and the instruments of production, the land and tools, 
 would be divided fairly among them, so that all might start, 
 in respect to outward appliances, on equal terms. It is 
 possible also to conceive that in this original apportion- 
 ment, compensation might be made for the injuries of na- 
 ture, and the balance redressed by assigning to the less ro- 
 bust members of the community advantages in the distribu- 
 tion, sufficient to put them on a par with the rest. But 
 the division, once made, would not again be interfered 
 with ; individuals would be left to their own exertions and 
 to the ordinary chances, for making an advantageous use of 
 what was assigned to them. If individual property, on the 
 contrary, were excluded, the plan which must be adopted
 
 PROPERTY. 261 
 
 would be to hold the land and all instruments of production 
 as the joint property of the community, and to carry on the 
 operations of industry on the common account. The direc- 
 tion of the labour of the community would devolve upon a 
 magistrate or magistrates, whom we may suppose elected 
 by the suffrages of the community, and whom we must as- 
 sume to be voluntarily obeyed by them. The division of 
 the produce would in like manner be a public act. The 
 principle might either be that of complete equality, or of 
 apportionment to the necessities or deserts of individuals, 
 in whatever manner might be conformable to the ideas of 
 justice or policy prevailing in the community. 
 
 Examples of such associations, on a small scale, are the 
 monastic orders, the Moravians, the followers of Rapp, and 
 others : and from the hopes which they hold out of relief 
 from the miseries and iniquities of a state of much inequal- 
 ity of wealth, schemes for a larger application of the same 
 idea have reappeared and become popular at all periods of 
 active speculation on the first principles of society. In an 
 age like the present, when a general reconsideration of all 
 first principles is felt to be inevitable, and when more than 
 at any former period of history the suffering portions of the 
 community have a voice in the discussion, it was impossible 
 but that ideas of this nature should spread far and wide. 
 The late revolutions in Europe have thrown up a great 
 amount of speculation of this character, and an unusual 
 share of attention has consequently been drawn to the vari- 
 ous forms which these ideas have assumed : nor is this at- 
 tention likely to diminish, but on the contrary, to increase 
 more and more. 
 
 The assailants of the principle of individual property 
 may be divided into two classes : those whose scheme im- 
 plies absolute equality in the distribution of the physical 
 means of life and enjoyment, and those who admit inequal- 
 ity, but grounded on some principle, or supposed principle, 
 of justice or general expediency, and not, like so many of 
 the existing social inequalities, dependent on accident alone.
 
 262 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 8. 
 
 At the head of the first class, as the earliest of those belong- 
 ing to the present generation, must be placed Mr. Owen 
 and his followers. M. Louis Blanc and M. Cabet have more 
 recently become conspicuous as apostles of similar doctrines 
 (though the former advocates equality of distribution only 
 as a transition to a still higher standard of justice, that all 
 should work according to their capacity, and receive ac- 
 cording to their wants). The characteristic name for this 
 economical system is Communism, a word of continental 
 origin, only of late introduced into this country. The word 
 Socialism, which originated among the English Commun- 
 ists, and was assumed by them as a name to designate their 
 own doctrine, is now, on the Continent, employed in a 
 larger sense ; not necessarily implying Communism, or the 
 entire abolition of private property, but applied to any sys- 
 tem which requires that the land and the instruments of 
 production should be the property, not of individuals, but 
 of communities or associations, or of the government. 
 Among such systems, the two of highest intellectual pre- 
 tension are those which, from the name of their real or 
 reputed authors, have been called St. Simonism and Fou- 
 rierism ; the former, defunct as a system, but which during 
 the few years of its public promulgation, sowed the seeds 
 of nearly all the Socialist tendencies which have since 
 spread so widely in France : the second, now nourishing in 
 the number, talent, and zeal of its adherents. 
 
 3. Whatever may be the merits or defects of these 
 various schemes, they cannot be truly said to be impracti- 
 cable. No reasonable person can doubt that a village com- 
 munity, composed of a few thousand inhabitants cultivating 
 in joint ownership the same extent of land which at present 
 feeds the number of people, and producing by combined 
 labour and the most improved processes the manufactured 
 articles which they required, could raise an amount of pro- 
 ductions sufficient to maintain them in comfort ; and would 
 find the means of obtaining, and if need be, exacting, the
 
 COMMUNISM. 263 
 
 quantity of labour necessary for this purpose, from every 
 member of the association who was capable of work. 
 
 The objection ordinarily made to a system of community 
 of property and equal distribution of the produce, that each 
 person would be incessantly occupied in evading his fair 
 share of the work, points, undoubtedly, to a real difficulty. 
 But those who urge this objection, forget to how great an 
 extent the same difficulty exists under the system on which 
 nine-tenths of the business of society is now conducted. The 
 objection supposes, that honest and efficient labour is only 
 to be had from those who are themselves individually to 
 reap the benefit of their own exertions. But how small a 
 part of all the labour performed in England, from the lowest 
 paid to the highest, is done by persons working for their 
 own benefit. From the Irish reaper or hodman to the chief 
 justice or the minister of state, nearly all the work of socie- 
 ty is remunerated by day wages or fixed salaries. A fac- 
 tory operative has less personal interest in his work than a 
 member of a Communist association, since he is not, like 
 him. working for a partnership of which he is himself a 
 member. It will no doubt be said, that though the labour- 
 ers themselves have not, in most cases, a personal interest 
 in their work, they are w r atched and superintended, and 
 their labour directed, and the mental part of the labour 
 performed, by persons who have. Even this, however, is 
 far from being universally the fact. In all public, and 
 many of the largest and most successful private undertak- 
 ings, not only the labours of detail but the control and su- 
 perintendence are entrusted to salaried officers. And though 
 the " master's eye," when the master is vigilant arid intelli- 
 gent, is of proverbial value, it must be remembered that in 
 a Socialist farm or manufactory, each labourer would be 
 under the eye not of one master, but of the whole commun- 
 ity. In the extreme case of obstinate perseverance in not 
 performing the due share of work, the community would 
 have the same resources which society now has for compel- 
 ling conformity to the necessary conditions of the associa-
 
 264 BOOK IL CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 tion. Dismissal, the only remedy at present, is no remedy 
 when any other labourer who may be engaged does no bet- 
 ter than his predecessor : the power of dismissal only ena- 
 bles an employer to obtain from his workmen the custom- 
 ary amount of labour, but that customary labour may be of 
 any degree of inefficiency. Even the labourer who loses his 
 employment by idleness or negligence, has nothing worse 
 to suffer, in the most unfavourable case, than the discipline 
 of a workhouse, and if the desire to avoid this be a sufficient 
 motive in the one system, it would be sufficient in the other. 
 I am not undervaluing the strength of the incitement given 
 to labour when the whole or a large share of the benefit of 
 extra exertion belongs to the labourer. But under the 
 present system of industry this incitement, in the great 
 majority of cases, does not exist. If Communistic labour 
 might be less vigorous than that of a peasant proprietor, or 
 a workman labouring on his own account, it would prob- 
 ably be more energetic than that of a labourer for hire, who 
 has no personal interest in the matter at all. The neglect 
 by the uneducated classes of labourers for hire, of the duties 
 which they engage to perform, is in the present state of so- 
 ciety most flagrant. Now it is an admitted condition of the 
 Communist scheme that all shall be educated : and this 
 being supposed, the duties of the members of the association 
 would doubtless be as diligently performed as those of the 
 generality of salaried officers in the middle or higher classes ; 
 who are not supposed to be necessarily unfaithful to their 
 trust, because so long as they are not dismissed, their pay is 
 the same in however lax a manner their duty is fulfilled. 
 Undoubtedly, as a general rule, remuneration by fixed sala- 
 ries does not in any class of functionaries produce the maxi- 
 mum of zeal : and this is as much as can be reasonably al- 
 leged against Communistic labour. 
 
 That even this inferiority would necessarily exist, is by 
 no means so certain as is assumed by those who are little 
 used to carry their minds beyond the state of things with 
 which they are familiar. Mankind are capable of a far
 
 COMMUNISM. 265 
 
 greater amount of public spirit than the present age is ac- 
 customed to suppose possible. History bears witness to the 
 success with which large bodies of human beings may be 
 trained to feel the public interest their own. And no soil 
 could be more favourable to the growth of such a feeling, 
 than a Communist association, since all the ambition, and 
 the bodily and mental activity, which are now exerted in 
 the pursuit of separate and self-regarding interests, would 
 require another sphere of employment, and would naturally 
 find it in the pursuit of the general benefit of the commun- 
 ity. The same cause, so often assigned in explanation of 
 the devotion of the Catholic priest or monk to the interest 
 of his order that he has no interest apart from it would, 
 under Communism, attach the citizen to the community. 
 And independently of the public motive, every member of 
 the association would be amenable to the most universal, 
 and one of the strongest, of personal motives, that of public 
 opinion. The force of this motive in deterring from any act 
 or omission positively reproved by the community, no one is 
 likely to deny ; but the power also of emulation, in exciting 
 to the most strenuous exertions for the sake of the approba- 
 tion and admiration of others, is borne witness to by experi- 
 ence in every situation in which human beings publicly 
 compete with one another, even if it be in things frivolous, 
 or from which the public derive no benefit. A contest, who 
 can do most for the common good, is not the kind of com- 
 petition which Socialists repudiate. To what extent, there- 
 fore, the energy of labour would be diminished by Com- 
 munism, or whether in the long run it would be diminished 
 at all, must be considered for the present an undecided 
 question. 
 
 Another of the objections to Communism is similar to 
 that, so often urged against poor-laws : that if every mem- 
 ber of the community were assured of subsistence for him- 
 self and any number of children, on the sole condition of 
 willingness to work, prudential restraint on the multiplica- 
 tion of mankind would be at an end, and population would
 
 266 BOOK n - CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 start forward at a rate which would reduce the community 
 through successive stages of increasing discomfort to actual 
 starvation. There would certainly be much ground for this 
 apprehension if Communism provided no motives of restraint, 
 equivalent to those which it would take away. But Com- 
 munism is precisely the state of things in which opinion 
 might be expected to declare itself with greatest intensity 
 against this kind of selfish intemperance. An augmenta- 
 tion of numbers which diminished the comfort -or increased 
 the toil of the mass, would then cause (which now it does 
 not) immediate and unmistakeable inconvenience to every in- 
 dividual in the association ; inconvenience which could not 
 then be imputed to the avarice of employers, or the unjust 
 privileges of the rich. In such altered circumstances opin- 
 ion could not fail to reprobate, and if reprobation did not 
 suffice, to repress by penalties of some description, this or 
 any other culpable self-indulgence at the expense of the 
 community. The Communistic scheme, instead of being 
 peculiarly open to the objection drawn from danger of 
 over-population, has the recommendation of tending in an 
 especial degree to the prevention of that evil. 
 
 A more real difficulty is that of fairly apportioning the 
 labour of the community among its members. There are 
 many kinds of work, and by what standard are they to be 
 measured one against another ? Who is to judge how much 
 cotton spinning, or distributing goods from the stores, or 
 bricklaying, or chimney sweeping, is equivalent to so much 
 ploughing ? The difficulty of making the adjustment be- 
 tween different qualities of labour is so strongly felt by 
 Communist writers, that they have usually thought it neces' 
 sary to provide that all should work by turns at every de- 
 scription of useful labour : an arrangement which by put- 
 ting an end to the division of employments, would sacrifice so 
 much of the advantage of co-operative production as greatly 
 to diminish the productiveness of labour. Besides, even in 
 the same kind of work, nominal equality of labour would be 
 so great a real inequality, that the feeling of justice would
 
 COMMUNISM. 267 
 
 revolt against its being enforced. All persons are not 
 equally fit for all labour ; and the same quantity of labour 
 is an unequal burthen on the weak and the strong, the 
 hardy and the delicate, the quick and the slow, the dull and 
 the intelligent. 
 
 But these difficulties, though real, are not necessarily in- 
 superable. The apportionment of work to the strength and 
 capacities of individuals, the mitigation of a general rule to 
 provide for cases in which it would operate harshly, are not 
 problems to which human intelligence, guided by a sense 
 of justice, would be inadequate. And the worst and most 
 unj ust arrangement which could be made of these points, un- 
 der a system aiming at equality, would be so far short of the 
 inequality and injustice with which labour (not to speak of 
 remuneration) is now apportioned, as to be scarcely worth 
 counting in the comparison. We must remember too that 
 Communism, as a system of society, exists only in idea ; that 
 its difficulties, at present, are much better understood than 
 its resources ; and that the intellect of mankind is only begin- 
 ning to contrive the means of organizing it in detail, so as to 
 overcome the one and derive the greatest advantage from 
 the other. 
 
 If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Com- 
 munism with all its chances, and the present state of society 
 with all its sufferings and injustices ; if the institution of pri- 
 vate property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, 
 that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now 
 see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour the largest 
 portions to those who have never worked at all, the next 
 largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in a 
 descending scale, the remuneration dwindles as the work 
 grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing 
 and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty 
 on being able to earn even the necessaries of life ; if this, or 
 Communism, were the alternative, all the difficulties, great 
 or small, of Communism, would be but as dust in the bal- 
 ance. But to make the comparison applicable, we must
 
 268 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 compare Communism at its best, with the regime of individ- 
 ual property, not as it is, but as it might be made. The 
 principle of private property has never yet had a fair trial in 
 any country ; and less so, perhaps, in this country than in 
 some others. The social arrangements of modern Europe 
 commenced from a distribution of property which was the 
 result, not of just partition, or acquisition by industry, but 
 of conquest and violence : and notwithstanding what indus- 
 try has been doing for many centuries to modify the work 
 of force, the system still retains many and large traces of its 
 origin. The laws of property have never yet conformed to 
 the principles on which the justification of private property 
 rests. They have made property of things which never 
 ought to be property, and absolute property where only a 
 qualified property ought to exist. They have not held the 
 balance fairly between human beings, but have heaped im- 
 pediments upon some, to give advantage to others ; they 
 have purposely fostered inequalities, and prevented all from 
 starting fair in the race. That all should indeed start on 
 perfectly equal terms, is inconsistent with any law of pri- 
 vate property : but if as much pains as has been taken to 
 aggravate the inequality of chances arising from the natural 
 working of the principle, had been taken to temper that in- 
 equality by every means not subversive of the principle it- 
 self; if the tendency of legislation had been to favour the 
 diffusion, instead of the concentration of wealth to encour- 
 age the subdivision of the large masses, instead of striving 
 to keep them together ; the principle of individual property 
 would have been found to have no necessary connexion with 
 the physical and social evils which almost all Socialist writ- 
 ers assume to be inseparable from it. 
 
 Private property, in every defence made of it, is sup- 
 posed to mean, the guarantee to individuals of the fruits of 
 their own labour and abstinence. The guarantee to them 
 of the fruits of the labour and abstinence of others, trans- 
 mitted to them without any merit or exertion of their own, 
 is not of the essence of the institution, but a mere incidental
 
 COMMUNISM. 269 
 
 consequence, which when it reaches a certain height, does 
 not promote, but conflicts with the ends which render pri- 
 vate property legitimate. To judge of the final destination 
 of the institution of property, we must suppose everything 
 rectified, which causes the institution to work in a manner 
 opposed to that equitable principle, of proportion between 
 remuneration and exertion, on which in every vindication 
 of it that will bear the light, it is assumed to be grounded. 
 We must also suppose two conditions realized, without 
 which neither Communism nor any other laws or institu- 
 tions could make the condition of the mass of mankind other 
 than degraded and miserable. One of these conditions is, 
 universal education ; the other, a due limitation of the num- 
 bers of the community. With these, there could be no pov- 
 erty even under the present social institutions : and these 
 being supposed, the question of socialism is not, as generally 
 stated by Socialists, a question of flying to the sole refuge 
 against the evils which now bear down humanity ; but a 
 mere question of comparative advantages, which futurity 
 must determine. We are too ignorant either of what indi- 
 vidual agency in its best form, or Socialism in its best form, 
 can accomplish, to be qualified to decide which of the two 
 will be the ultimate form of human society. 
 
 If a conjecture may be hazarded, the decision will prob- 
 ably depend mainly on one consideration, viz. which of the 
 two systems is consistent with the greatest amount of human 
 liberty and spontaneity. After the means of subsistence are 
 assured, the next in strength of the personal wants of human 
 beings is liberty ; and (unlike the physical wants, which as 
 civilization advances become more moderate and more 
 amenable to control) it increases instead of diminishing in 
 intensity, as the intelligence and the moral faculties are 
 more developed. The perfection both of social arrange- 
 ments and of practical morality would be, to secure to all 
 persons complete independence and feedom of action, sub- 
 ject to no restriction but that of not doing injury to others : 
 and the eduration which taught or the social institutions
 
 270 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 which required them to exchange the control of their own 
 actions for any amount of comfort or affluence, or to re- 
 nounce liberty for the sake of equality, would deprive them 
 of one of the most elevated characteristics of human nature. 
 It remains to be discovered how far the preservation of this 
 characteristic would be found compatible with the Com- 
 munistic organization of society. No doubt, this, like all 
 other objections to the Socialist schemes, is vastly exaggerat- 
 ed. The members of the association need not be required 
 to live together more than they do now, nor need they be 
 controlled in the disposal of their individual share of the 
 produce, and of the probably large amount of leisure which, 
 if they limited their production to things really worth pro- 
 ducing, they would possess. Individuals need not be 
 chained to an occupation, or to a particular locality. The 
 restraints of Communism would be freedom in comparison 
 with the present condition of the majority of the human 
 race. The generality of labourers in this and most other 
 countries, have as little choice of occupation or freedom of 
 locomotion, are practically as dependent on fixed rules and 
 on the will of others, as they could be on any system short 
 of actual slavery ; to say nothing of the entire domestic sub- 
 jection of one half the species, to which it is the signal hon- 
 our of Owen ism and most other forms of Socialism that they 
 assign equal rights, in all respects, with those of the hither- 
 to dominant sex. But it is not by comparison with the 
 present bad state of society that the claims of Communism 
 can be estimated ; nor is it sufficient that it should promise 
 greater personal and mental freedom than is now enjoyed 
 by those who have not enough of either to deserve the 
 name. The question is, whether there would be any asy- 
 lum left for individuality of character ; whether public 
 opinion would not be a tyrannical yoke ; whether the abso- 
 lute dependence of each on all, and surveillance of each by 
 all, would not grind all down into a tame uniformity of 
 thoughts, feelings, and actions. This is already one of the 
 glaring evils of the existing state of society, notwithstanding
 
 COMMUNISM. 
 
 a much greater diversity of education and pursuits, and a 
 much less absolute dependence of the individual on the 
 mass, than would exist in the Communistic regime. No 
 society in which eccentricity is a matter of reproach, can 
 be in a wholesome state. It is yet to be ascertained wheth- 
 er the Communistic scheme would be consistent with that 
 multiform development of human nature, those manifold 
 unlikenesses, that diversity of tastes and talents, and variety 
 of intellectual points of view, which not only form a great 
 part of the interest of human life, but by bringing intellects 
 into stimulating collision, and by presenting to each innu- 
 merable notions that he would not have conceived of him- 
 self, are the mainspring of mental and moral progression. 
 
 4. I have thus far confined my observations to the 
 Communistic doctrine, which forms the extreme limit of 
 Socialism ; according to which not only the instrument of 
 production, the land and capital, are the joint property of 
 the community, but the produce is divided and the labour 
 apportioned, as far as possible, equally. The objections, 
 whether well or ill grounded, to which Socialism is liable, 
 apply to this form of it in their greatest force. The other 
 varieties of Socialism mainly differ from Communism, in 
 not relying solely on what M. Louis Blanc calls the point of 
 honour of industry, but retaining more or less of the incen- 
 tives to labour derived from private pecuniary interest. 
 Thus it is already a modification of the strict theory of Com- 
 munism, when the principle is professed of proportioning 
 remuneration to labour. The attempts which have been 
 made in France to carry Socialism into practical effect, by 
 associations of workmen manufacturing on their own ac- 
 count, mostly began by sharing the remuneration equally, 
 without regard to the quantity of work done by the indi- 
 vidual : but in almost every case this plan was after a short 
 time abandoned, and recourse was had to working by the 
 piece. The original principle appeals to a higher standard 
 of justice, and is adapted to a much higher moral condition
 
 272 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 of human nature. The proportioning of remuneration to 
 work done, is really just, only in so far as the more or less 
 of the work is a matter of choice : when it depends on 
 natural difference of strength or capacity, this principle of 
 remuneration is in itself an injustice : it is giving to those 
 who have ; assigning most to those who are already most 
 favoured by nature. Considered, however, as a compromise 
 with the selfish type of character formed by the present 
 standard of morality, and fostered by the existing social 
 institutions, it is highly expedient ; and until education 
 shall have been entirely regenerated, is far more likely to 
 prove immediately successful, than an attempt at a higher 
 ideal. 
 
 The two elaborate forms of non-communistic Socialism 
 known as St. Simonism and Fourierism, are totally free from 
 the objections usually urged against Communism ; and 
 though they are open to others of their own, yet by the 
 great intellectual power which in many respects distin- 
 guishes them, and by their large and philosophic treatment 
 of some of the fundamental problems of society and moral- 
 ity, they may justly be counted among the most remarkable 
 productions of the past and present age. 
 
 The St. Simonian scheme does not contemplate an equal, 
 but an unequal division of the produce ; it does not propose 
 that all should be occupied alike, but differently, according 
 to their vocation or capacity ; the function of each beii.ig 
 assigned, like grades in a regiment, by the choice of the 
 directing authority, and the remuneration being by salary, 
 proportioned to the importance, in the eyes of that author- 
 ity, of the function itself, and the merits of the person who 
 fulfils it. For the constitution of the ruling body, different 
 plans might be adopted, consistently with the essentials of 
 the system. It might be appointed by popular suffrage. 
 In the idea of the original authors, the rulers were sup- 
 posed to be persons of genius and virtue, who obtained 
 the voluntary adhesion of the rest by the force of mental 
 superiority. That the scheme might in some peculiar
 
 ST. SIMONISM. 273 
 
 states of society work with advantage, is not improbable. 
 There is indeed a successful experiment, of a somewhat 
 similar kind, on record, to which I have once alluded ; 
 that of the Jesuits in Paraguay. A race of savages, 
 belonging to a portion of mankind more averse to con- 
 secutive exertion for a distant object than any other 
 authentically known to us, was brought under the mental 
 dominion of civilized and instructed men who were 
 united among themselves by a system of community of 
 goods. To the, absolute authority of these men they rever- 
 entially submitted themselves, and were induced by them to 
 learn the arts of civilized life, and to practise labours for the 
 community, which no inducement that could have been 
 offered would have prevailed on them to practise for them- 
 selves. This social system was of short duration, being pre- 
 maturely destroyed by diplomatic arrangements and foreign 
 force. That it could be brought into action at all was prob- 
 ably owing to the immense distance in point of knowledge 
 and intellect which separated the few rulers from the whole 
 body of the ruled, without any intermediate orders, either 
 social or intellectual. In any other circumstances it would 
 probably have been a complete failure. It supposes an 
 absolute despotism in the heads of the association ; which 
 would probably not be much improved if the depositaries of 
 the despotism (contrary to the views of the authors of the 
 system) were varied from time to time according to the 
 result of a popular canvass. But to suppose that one or a 
 few human beings, howsoever selected, could, by whatever 
 machinery of subordinate agency, be qualified to adapt each 
 person's work to his capacity, and proportion each person's 
 remuneration to his merits to be, in fact, the dispensers of 
 distributive justice to every member of a community; or 
 that any use which they could make of this power would 
 give general satisfaction, or would be submitted to without 
 the aid of force is a supposition almost too chimerical to be 
 reasoned against. A fixed rule, like that of equality, might 
 be acquiesced in, and so might chance, or an external neces- 
 18
 
 274 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 sity ; but that a handful of human beings should weigh 
 everybody in the balance, and give more to one and less to 
 another at their sole pleasure and judgment, would not be 
 borne, unless from persons believed to be more than men, 
 and backed by supernatural terrors. 
 
 The most skilfully combined, and with the greatest fore- 
 sight of objections, of all the forms of Socialism, is that com- 
 monly known as Fourierism. This system does not con- 
 template the abolition of private property, nor even of 
 inheritance : on the contrary, it avowedly takes into consid- 
 eration, as an element in the distribution of the produce, 
 capital as well as labour. It proposes that the operations of 
 industry should be carried on by associations of about two 
 thousand members, combining their labour on a district of 
 about a square league in extent, under the guidance of 
 chiefs selected by themselves. In the distribution, a certain 
 minimum is first assigned for the subsistence of every mem- 
 ber of the community, whether capable or not of labour. 
 The remainder of the produce is shared in certain propor- 
 tions, to be determined beforehand, among the three ele- 
 ments, Labour, Capital, and Talent. 
 
 The capital of the community may be owned in unequal 
 shares by different members, who would in that case re- 
 ceive, as in any other joint-stock company, proportional divi- 
 dends. The claim of each person on the share of the prod- 
 uce apportioned to talent, is estimated by the grade or rank 
 which the individual occupies in the several groups of 
 labourers to which he or she belongs ; these grades being in 
 all cases conferred by the choice of his or her companions. 
 The remuneration, when received, would not of necessity be 
 expended or enjoyed in common ; there would be separate 
 menages for all who preferred them, and no other commu- 
 nity of living is contemplated, than that all the members of 
 the association should reside in the same pile of buildings ; 
 for saving of labour and expense, not only in building, but 
 in every branch of domestic economy ; and in order that, 
 the whole buying and selling operations of the community
 
 FOURIERISM. 275 
 
 being performed by a single agent, the enormous portion of 
 the produce of industry now carried off by the profits of 
 mere distributors might be reduced to the smallest amount 
 possible. 
 
 This system, unlike Communism, does not, in theory at 
 least, withdraw any of the motives to exertion which exist 
 in the present state of society. On the contrary, if the ar- 
 rangement worked according to the intentions of its con- 
 trivers, it would even strengthen those motives ; since each 
 person would have much more certainty of reaping individu- 
 ally the fruits of increased skill or energy, bodily or mental, 
 than under the present social arrangements can be felt by 
 any but those who are in the most advantageous positions, 
 or to whom the chapter of accidents is more than ordinarily 
 favourable. The Fourierists, however, have still another 
 resource. They believe that they have solved the great and 
 fundamental problem of rendering labour attractive. That 
 this is not impracticable, they contend by very strong 
 arguments ; in particular by one which they have in com- 
 mon with the Owenites, viz. that scarcely any labour, how- 
 ever severe, undergone by human beings for the sake of 
 subsistence, exceeds in intensity that which other human 
 beings, whose subsistence is already provided for, are found 
 ready and even eager to undergo for pleasure. This cer- 
 tainly is a most significant fact, and one from which the 
 student in social philosophy may draw important instruc- 
 tion. But the argument founded on it may easily be 
 stretched too far. If occupations full of discomfort and 
 fatigue are freely pursued by many persons as amusements, 
 who does not see that they are amusements exactly because 
 they are pursued freely, and may be discontinued at pleas- 
 ure ? The liberty of quitting a position often makes the 
 whole difference between its being painful and pleasurable. 
 Many a person remains in the same town, street, or house 
 from January to December, without a wish or a thought 
 tending towards removal, who, if confined to that same 
 place by the mandate of authority, would find the imprison- 
 ment absolutely intolerable.
 
 276 BOOK H. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 According to the Fourierists, scarcely any kind of useful 
 labour is naturally and necessarily disagreeable, unless it is 
 either regarded as dishonourable, or is immoderate in degree, 
 or destitute of the stimulus of sympathy and emulation. 
 Excessive toil needs not, they contend, be undergone by any 
 one, in a society in which there would be no idle class, and 
 no labour wasted, as so enormous an amount of labour is 
 now wasted, in useless things ; and where full advantage 
 would be taken of the power of association, both in increas- 
 ing the efficiency of production, and in economizing con- 
 sumption. The other requisites for rendering labour at- 
 tractive would, they think, be found in the execution of all 
 labour by social groups, to any number of which the same 
 individual might simultaneously belong, at his or her own 
 choice : their grade in each being determined by the degree 
 of service which they were found capable of rendering, as 
 appreciated by the suffrages of their comrades. It is in- 
 ferred from the diversity of tastes and talents, that every 
 member of the community would be attached to several 
 groups, employing themselves in various kinds of occupa- 
 tion, some bodily, others mental, and would be capable of 
 occupying a high place in some one or more ; so that a real 
 equality, or something more nearly approaching to it than 
 might at first be supposed, would practically result : not 
 from the compression, but, on the contrary, from the largest 
 possible development, of the various natural superiorities 
 residing in each individual. 
 
 Even from so brief an outline, it must be evident that 
 this system does no violence to any of the general laws by 
 which human action, even in the present imperfect state of 
 moral and intellectual cultivation, is influenced ; and that it 
 would be extremely rash to pronounce it incapable of suc- 
 cess, or unfitted to realize a great part of the hopes founded 
 on it by its partisans. With regard to this, as to all other 
 varieties of Socialism, the thing to be desired, and to which 
 they have a just claim, is opportunity of trial. They are all 
 capable of being tried on a moderate scale, and at no risk,
 
 FOURIERISM. 277 
 
 either personal or pecuniary, to any except those who try 
 them. It is for experience to determine how far or how 
 soon any one or more of the possible systems of community 
 of property will be fitted to substitute itself for the " organi- 
 zation of industry " based on private ownership of land and 
 capital. In the meantime we may, without attempting to 
 limit the ultimate capabilities of human nature, affirm, that 
 the political economist, for a considerable time to come, will 
 be chiefly concerned with the conditions of existence and 
 progress belonging to a society founded on private property 
 and individual competition ; and that the object to be prin- 
 cipally aimed at in the present stage of human improve- 
 ment, is not the subversion of the system of individual prop- 
 erty, but the improvement of it, and the full participation 
 of every member of the community in its benefits.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 
 
 1. IT is next to be considered, what is included in the 
 idea of private property, and by what considerations the ap- 
 plication of the principle should be bounded. 
 
 The institution of property, when limited to its essential 
 elements, consists in the recognition, in each person, of a 
 right to the exclusive disposal of what he or she have pro- 
 duced by their own exertions, or received either by gift or 
 by fair agreement, without force or fraud, from those who 
 produced it. The foundation of the whole is, the right of 
 producers to what they themselves have produced. It may 
 be objected, therefore, to the institution as it now exists, that 
 it recognises rights of property in individuals over things 
 which they have not produced. For example (it may be 
 said) the operatives in a manufactory create, by their labour 
 and skill, the whole produce ; yet, instead of its belonging 
 to them, the law gives them only their stipulated hire, and 
 transfers the produce to some one who has merely supplied 
 the funds, without perhaps contributing anything to the 
 w r ork itself, even in the form of superintendence. The 
 answer to this is, that the labour of manufacture is only one 
 of the conditions which must combine for the production of 
 the commodity. The labour cannot be carried on without 
 materials and machinery, nor without a stock of necessaries 
 provided in advance, to maintain the labourers during the 
 production. All these things are the fruits of previous 
 labour. If the labourers were possessed of them, they
 
 PROPERTY. 279 
 
 would not need to divide the produce with any one ; but 
 while they have them not, an equivalent must be given to 
 those who have, both for the antecedent labour, and for the 
 abstinence by which the produce of that labour, instead of 
 being expended on indulgences, has been reserved for this 
 use." The capital may not have been, and in most cases was 
 not, created by the labour and abstinence of the present 
 possessor ; but it was created by the labour and abstinence 
 of some former person, who may indeed have been wrong- 
 fully dispossessed of it, but who, in the present age of the 
 world, much more probably transferred his claims to the 
 present capitalist by gift or voluntary contract : and the 
 abstinence at least must have been continued by each suc- 
 cessive owner, down to the present. If it be said, as it may 
 with truth, that those who have inherited the savings of 
 others have an advantage which they have in no way de- 
 served, over the industrious whose predecessors have not 
 left them anything ; I not only admit, but strenuously con- 
 tend, that this unearned advantage should be curtailed, as 
 much as is consistent with justice to those who thought fit 
 to dispose of their savings by giving them to their descend- 
 ants. But while it is true that the labourers are at a disad- 
 vantage compared with those whose predecessors have 
 saved, it is also true that the labourers are far better off 
 than if those predecessors had not saved. They share in 
 the advantage, though not to an equal extent with the in- 
 heritors. The terms of co-operation between present labour 
 and the fruits of past labour and saving, are a subject for 
 adjustment between the two parties. Each is necessary to 
 the other. The capitalist can do nothing without labourers, 
 nor the labourers without capital. If the labourers compete 
 for employment, the capitalists on their part compete for 
 labour, to the full extent of the circulating capital of the 
 country. Competition is often spoken of as if it were neces- 
 sarily a cause of misery and degradation to the labouring 
 class ; as if high wages were not precisely as much a prod- 
 uct of competition as low wages. The remuneration of
 
 280 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 2. 
 
 labour is as much the result of the law of competition in the 
 United States, as it is in Ireland, and much more completely 
 so than in England. 
 
 The right of property includes, then, the freedom of 
 acquiring by contract. The right of each to what he has pro- 
 duced, implies a right to what has been produced by others, 
 if obtained by their free consent ; since the producers must 
 either have given it from good will, or exchanged it for 
 what they esteemed an equivalent, and to prevent them 
 from doing so would be to infringe their right of property in 
 the product of their own industry. 
 
 2. Before proceeding to consider the things which 
 the principle of individual property does not include, we 
 must specify one more thing which it does include : and this 
 is that a title, after a certain period, should be given by pre- 
 scription. According to the fundamental idea of property, 
 indeed, nothing ought to be treated as such, which has been 
 acquired by force or fraud, or appropriated in ignorance of 
 a prior title vested in some other person ; but it is necessary 
 to the security of rightful possessors, that they should not be 
 molested by charges of. wrongful acquisition, when by the 
 lapse of time witnesses must have perished or been lost sight 
 of, and the real character of the transaction can no longer 
 be cleared up. Possession which has not been legally ques- 
 tioned within a moderate number of years, ought to be, as 
 by the laws of all nations it is, a complete title. Even when 
 the acquisition was wrongful, the dispossession, after a gen- 
 eration has elapsed, of the probably bond fide possessors, by 
 the revival of a claim which had been long dormant, would 
 generally be a greater injustice, and almost always a greater 
 private and public mischief, than leaving the original wrong 
 without atonement. It may seem hard that a claim, origi- 
 nally just, should be defeated by mere lapse of time ; but 
 there is a time after which, (even looking at the individual 
 case, and without regard to the general effect on the security 
 of possessors,) the balance of hardship turns the other way.
 
 INHERITANCE. 281 
 
 With the injustices of men, as with the convulsions and dis- 
 asters of nature, the longer they remain unrepaired, the 
 greater become the obstacles to repairing them, arising 
 from the aftergrowths which would have to be torn up or 
 broken through. In no human transactions, not even in the 
 simplest and clearest, does it follow that a thing is fit to be 
 done now, because it was fit to be done sixty years ago. It 
 is scarcely needful to remark, that these reasons for not dis- 
 turbing acts of injustice of old date, cannot apply to unjust 
 systems or institutions ; since a bad law or usage is not one 
 bad act, in the remote past, but a perpetual repetition of bad 
 acts, as long as the law or usage lasts. 
 
 Such, then, being the essentials of private property, it is 
 now to be considered, to what extent the forms in which the 
 institution has existed in different states of society, or still 
 exists, are necessary consequences of its principle, or are 
 recommended by the reasons on which it is grounded. 
 
 3. Nothing is implied in property but the right of 
 each to his (or her) own faculties, to what he can produce 
 by them, and to whatever he can get for them in a fair 
 market : together with his right to give this to any other 
 person if he chooses, and the right of that other to receive 
 and enjoy it. 
 
 It follows, therefore, that although the right of bequest, 
 or gift after death, forms part of the idea of private proper- 
 ty, the right of inheritance, as distinguished from bequest, 
 does not. That the property of persons who have made no 
 disposition of it during their lifetime, should pass first to 
 their children, and failing them, to the nearest relations, 
 may be a proper arrangement or not, but is no consequence 
 of the principle of private property. Although there belong 
 to the decision of such questions many considerations besides 
 those of political economy, it is not foreign to the plan of this 
 work to suggest, for the judgment of thinkers, the view of 
 them which most recommends itself to the writer's mind. 
 
 No presumption in favour of existing ideas on this sub-
 
 282 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 ject is to be derived from their antiquity. In early ages, the 
 property of a deceased person passed to his children and 
 nearest relatives by so .natural and obvious an arrangement, 
 that no other was likely to be even thought of in competi- 
 tion with it. In the first place, they were usually present 
 on the spot : they were in possession, and if they had no 
 other title, had that, so important in an early state of socie- 
 ty, of first occupancy. Secondly, they were already, in a 
 manner, joint owners of his property during his life. If 
 the property was in land, it had generally been conferred by 
 the State on a family rather than on an individual : if it con- 
 sisted of cattle or moveable goods, it had probably been 
 acquired, and was certainly protected and defended, by the 
 united efforts of all members of the family who were of an 
 age to work or fight. Exclusive individual property, in the 
 modern sense, scarcely entered into the ideas of the time ; 
 and when the first magistrate of the association died, he 
 really left nothing vacant but his own share in the division, 
 which devolved on the member of the family who succeeded 
 to his authority. To have disposed of the property other- 
 wise, would have been to break up a little commonwealth, 
 united by ideas, interest, and habits, and to cast them adrift 
 on the world. These considerations, though rather felt than 
 reasoned about, had so great an influence on the minds of 
 mankind, as to create the idea of an inherent right in the 
 children to the possessions of their ancestor ; a right which 
 it was not competent to himself to defeat. Bequest, in a 
 primitive state of society, was seldom recognised ; a clear 
 proof, were there no other, that property was conceived in 
 a manner totally different from the conception of it in the 
 present time.* 
 
 But the feudal family, the last historical form of patri- 
 archal life, has long perished, and the unit of society is not 
 now the family or clan, composed of all the reputed descend- 
 ants of a common ancestor, but the individual ; or at most 
 
 * See, for admirable illustrations of this and many kindred points, Mr. 
 Maine's profound work on Ancient Law in its relation to modern ideas.
 
 INHERITANCE. 283 
 
 a pair of individuals, with their unemancipated children. 
 Property is now inherent in individuals, not in families : the 
 children when grown up do not follow the occupations or 
 fortunes of the parent : if they participate in the parent's 
 pecuniary means it is at his or her pleasure, and not by a 
 voice in the ownership and government of the whole, but 
 generally by the exclusive enjoyment of a part ; and in this 
 country at least (except as far as entails or settlements are 
 an obstacle) it is in the power of parents to disinherit even 
 their children, and leave their fortune to strangers. More 
 distant relatives are in general almost as completely de- 
 tached from the family and its interests as if they were in 
 no way connected with it. The only claim they are sup- 
 posed to have on their richer relations, is to a preference, 
 cceteris paribus, in good offices, and some aid in case of 
 actual necessity. 
 
 So great a change in the constitution of society must 
 make a considerable difference in the grounds on which the 
 disposal of property by inheritance should rest. The rea- 
 sons usually assigned by modern writers for giving the 
 property of a person who dies intestate, to the children, or 
 nearest relatives, are first, the supposition that in so dis- 
 posing of it, the law is more likely than in any other mode 
 to do what the proprietor would have done, if he had done 
 anything ; and secondly, the hardship, to those who lived 
 with their parents and partook in their opulence, of being 
 cast down from the enjoyments of wealth into poverty and 
 privation. 
 
 There is some force in both these arguments. The law 
 ought, no doubt, to do for the children or dependents of an 
 intestate, whatever it was the duty of the parent or protec- 
 tor to have done, BO far as this can be known by any one 
 besides himself. Since, however, the law cannot decide on 
 individual claims, but must proceed by general rules, it is 
 next to be considered what these rules should be. 
 
 "We may first remark, that in regard to collateral rela- 
 tives, it is not, unless on grounds personal to the particular
 
 284 BOOK n - CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 individual, the duty of any one to make a pecuniary pro- 
 vision for them. No one now expects it, unless there hap- 
 pen to be no direct heirs ; nor would it be expected even 
 then, if the expectation were not created by the provisions 
 of the law in case of intestacy. I see, therefore, no reason 
 why collateral inheritance should exist at all. Mr. Bentham 
 long ago proposed, and other high authorities have agreed 
 in the opinion, that if there are no heirs either in the de- 
 scending or in the ascending line, the property, in case of 
 intestacy, should escheat to the State. With respect to the 
 more remote degrees of collateral relationship, the point is 
 not very likely to be disputed. Few will maintain that there 
 is any good reason why the accumulations of some childless 
 miser should on his death (as every now and then happens) 
 go to enrich a distant relative who never saw him, who per- 
 haps never knew himself to be related to him until there 
 was something to be gained by it, and who had no moral 
 claim upon him of any kind, more than the most entire 
 stranger. But the reason of the case applies alike to all 
 collaterals, even in the nearest degree. Collaterals have no 
 real claims, but such as may be equally strong in the case 
 of non-relatives ; and in the one case as in the other, where 
 valid claims exist, the proper mode of paying regard to 
 them is by bequest. 
 
 The claims of children are of a different nature : they 
 are real, and indefeasible. But even of these, I venture to 
 think that the measure usually taken is an erroneous one : 
 what is due to children is in some respects underrated, in 
 others, as it appears to me, exaggerated. One of the most 
 binding of all obligations, that of not bringing children into 
 the world unless they can be maintained in comfort during 
 childhood, and brought up with a likelihood of supporting 
 themselves when of full age, is both disregarded in practice 
 and made light of in theory in a manner disgraceful to 
 human intelligence. On the other hand, when the parent 
 possesses property, the claims of the children upon it seem 
 to me to be the subject of an opposite error. Whatever
 
 INHERITANCE. 285 
 
 fortune a parent may have inherited, or still more, may 
 have acquired, I cannot admit that he owes to his children, 
 merely because they are his children, to leave them rich, 
 without the necessity of any exertion. I could not admit it, 
 even if to be so left were always, and certainly, for the good 
 of the children themselves. But this is in the highest de- 
 gree uncertain. It depends on individual character. With- 
 out supposing extreme cases, it may be affirmed that in a 
 majority of instances the good not only of society but of the 
 individuals would be better consulted by bequeathing to 
 them a moderate, than a large provision. This, which is a 
 common-place of moralists ancient and modern, is felt to be 
 true by many intelligent parents, and would be acted upon 
 much more frequently, if they did not allow themselves to 
 consider less what really is, than what will be thought by 
 others to be, advantageous to the children. 
 
 The duties of parents to their children are those which 
 are indissolubly attached to the fact of causing the existence 
 of a human being. The parent owes to society to endeavour 
 to make the child a good and valuable member of it, and 
 owes to the children to provide, so far as depends on him, 
 such education, and such appliances and means, as will 
 enable them to start with a fair chance of achieving by their 
 own exertions a successful life. To this every child has a 
 claim ; and I cannot admit, that as a child he has a claim 
 to more. There is a case in which these obligations present 
 themselves in their true light, without any extrinsic circum- 
 stances to disguise or confuse them : it is that of an illegiti- 
 mate child. To such a child it is generally felt that there is 
 due from the parent, the amount of provision for his welfare 
 which will enable him to make his life on the whole a desira- 
 ble one. I hold that to no child, merely as such, anything 
 more is due, than what is admitted to be due to an illegiti 
 mate child : and that no child for whom thus much has been 
 done, has, unless on the score of previously raised expecta- 
 tions, any grievance, if the remainder of the parent's fortune
 
 286 BOOK IT. CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 is devoted to public uses, or to the benefit of individuals on 
 whom in the parent's opinion it is better bestowed. 
 
 In order to give the children that fair chance of a desir- 
 able existence, to which they are entitled, it is generally 
 necessary that they should not be brought up from child- 
 hood in habits of luxury which they will not have the means 
 of indulging in after-life. This, again, is a duty often 
 flagrantly violated by possessors of terminable incomes, who 
 have little property to leave. When the children of rich 
 parents have lived, as it is natural they should do, in habits 
 corresponding to the scale of expenditure in which the par- 
 ents indulge, it is generally the duty of the parents to make 
 a greater provision for them, than would suffice for children 
 otherwise brought up. I say generally, because even here 
 there is another side to the question. It is a proposition 
 quite capable of being maintained, that to a strong nature 
 which has to make its way against narrow circumstances, to 
 have known early some of the feelings and experiences of 
 wealth, is an advantage both in the formation of character 
 and in the happiness of life. But allowing that children 
 have a just ground of complaint, who have been brought up 
 to require luxuries which they are not afterwards likely to 
 obtain, and that their claim, therefore, is good to a provision 
 bearing some relation to the mode of their bringing up ; 
 this, too, is a claim which is particularly liable to be stretched 
 further than its reasons warrant. The case is exactly that 
 of the younger children of the nobility and landed gentry, 
 the bulk of whose fortune passes to the eldest son. The 
 other sons, who are usually numerous, are brought up in 
 the same habits of luxury as the future heir, and they re- 
 ceive, as a younger brother's portion, generally what the 
 reason of the case dictates, namely, enough to support, in 
 the habits of life to which they are accustomed, themselves, 
 but not a wife or children. It really is no grievance to 
 any man, that for the means of marrying and of supporting 
 a family, he has to depend on his own exertions. 
 
 A provision, then, such as is admitted to be reasonable
 
 BEQUEST. 287 
 
 in the case of illegitimate children, of younger children, 
 wherever in short the justice of the case, and the real inter- 
 ests of the individuals and of society, are the only things 
 considered, is, I conceive, all that parents owe to their chil- 
 dren, and all, therefore, which the state owes to the chiL 
 dren of those who die intestate. The surplus, if any, I hold 
 that it may rightfully appropriate to the general purposes 
 of the community. I would not, however, be supposed to 
 recommend that parents should never do more for their 
 children than what, merely as children, they have a moral 
 right to. In some cases it is imperative, in many laudable, 
 and in all allowable, to do much more. For this, however, 
 the means are afforded by the liberty of bequest. It is due, 
 not to the children but to the parents, that they should have 
 the power of showing marks of affection, of requiting ser- 
 vices and sacrifices, and of bestowing their wealth according 
 to their own preferences, or their own judgment of fitness. 
 
 4. Whether the power of bequest should itself be 
 subject to limitation, is an ulterior question of great impor- 
 tance. Unlike inheritance ah intestato, bequest is one of 
 the attributes of property : the ownership of a thing cannot 
 be looked upon as complete without the power of bestow- 
 ing it, at death or during life, at the owner's pleasure : and 
 all the reasons, which recommend that private property 
 should exist, recommend pro tanto this extension of it. But 
 property is only a means to an end, not itself the end. Like 
 all other proprietary rights, and even in a greater degree 
 than most, the power of bequest may be so exercised as to 
 conflict with the permanent interests of the human race. It 
 does so, when, not content witji bequeathing an estate to A, 
 the testator prescribes that on A's death it shall pass to 
 his eldest son, and to that son's son, and so on for ever. No 
 doubt, persons have occasionally exerted themselves more 
 strenuously to acquire a fortune from the hope of founding 
 a family in perpetuity ; but the mischiefs to society of such 
 perpetuities outweigh the value of this incentive to exer-
 
 288 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 4. 
 
 tion, and the incentives in the case of those who have the 
 opportunity of making large fortunes are strong enough 
 without it. A similar abuse of the power of bequest is com- 
 mitted when a person who does the meritorious act of leav- 
 ing property for public uses, attempts to prescribe the 
 details of its application in perpetuity ; when in founding 
 a place of education (for instance) he dictates, for ever, what 
 doctrines shall be taught. It being impossible that any one 
 should know what doctrines will be fit to be taught after he 
 has been dead for centuries, the law ought not to give effect 
 to such dispositions of property, unless subject to the per- 
 petual revision (after a certain interval has elapsed) of a 
 fitting authority. 
 
 These are obvious limitations. But even the simplest 
 exercise of the right of bequest, that of determining the per- 
 son to whom property shall pass immediately on the death 
 of the testator, has always been reckoned among the priv- 
 ileges which might be limited or varied, according to views 
 of expediency. The limitations, hitherto, have been almost 
 solely in favour of children. In England the right is in 
 principle unlimited, almost the only impediment being that 
 arising from a settlement by a former proprietor, in which 
 case the holder for the time being cannot indeed bequeath 
 his possessions, but only because there is nothing to be- 
 queath, he having merely a life interest. By the Roman 
 law, on which the civil legislation of the Continent of 
 Europe is principally founded, bequest originally was not 
 permitted at all, and even after it was introduced, a leyitima 
 portio was compulsorily reserved for each child ; and such 
 is still the law in some of the Continental nations. By the 
 French law since the Revolution, the parent can only dis- 
 pose by will, of a portion equal to the share of one child, 
 each of the children taking an equal portion. Tin's entail, 
 as it may be called, of the bulk of every one's property 
 upon the children collectively, seems to me as little defensi- 
 ble in principle as an entail in favour of one child, though 
 it does not shock so directly the idea of justice. I cannot
 
 BEQUEST. 289 
 
 admit that parents should be compelled to leave to their 
 children even that provision which, as children, I have con- 
 tended that they have a moral claim to. Children may for- 
 feit that claim by general unworthiness, or particular ill- 
 conduct to the parents : they may have other resources or pros- 
 pects : what has been previously done for them, in the way 
 of education and advancement in life,- may fully satisfy their 
 moral claim ; or others may have claims superior to theirs. 
 The extreme restriction of the power of bequest in 
 French law, was adopted as a democratic expedient, to 
 break down the custom of primogeniture, and counteract 
 the tendency of inherited property to collect in large masses. 
 I agree in thinking these objects eminently desirable ; but 
 the means used are not, I think, the most judicious. Were 
 I framing a code of laws according to what seems to me 
 best in itself, without regard to existing opinions and senti- 
 ments, I should prefer to restrict, not what any one might 
 bequeath, but what any one should be permitted to acquire, 
 by bequest or inheritance. Each person should have power 
 to dispose by will of his or her whole property ; but riot to 
 lavish it in enriching some one individual, beyond a certain 
 maximum, which should be fixed sufficiently high to afford 
 the means of comfortable independence. The inequalities 
 of property which arise from unequal industry, frugality, 
 perseverance, talents, and to a certain extent even opportu- 
 nities, are inseparable from the principle of private proper- 
 ty, and if we accept the principle, we must bear with these 
 consequences of it : but I see nothing objectionable in fixing 
 a limit to what any one may acquire by the mere favour of 
 others, without any exercise of his faculties, and in requir- 
 ing that if he desires any further accession of fortune, he 
 shall work for it. I do not conceive that the degree of 
 limitation which this would impose on the right of bequest, 
 would be felt as a burthensome restraint by any testator 
 who estimated a large fortune at its true value, that of the 
 pleasures and advantages that can be purchased with it on 
 even the most extravagant estimate of which, it must be 
 19
 
 290 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 4. 
 
 apparent to every one, that the difference to the happiness 
 of the possessor between a moderate independence and five 
 times as much, is insignificant when weighed against the 
 enjoyment that might be given, and the permanent benefits 
 diffused, by some other disposal of the four-fifths. So long 
 indeed as the opinion practically prevails, that the best 
 thing which can be done for objects of affection is to heap 
 on them to satiety those intrinsically worthless things on 
 which large fortunes are mostly expended, there might be 
 little use in enacting such a law, even if it were possible to 
 get it passed, since if there were the inclination, there would 
 generally be the power of evading it. The law would be 
 unavailing unless the popular sentiment went energetically 
 along with it ; which (judging from the tenacious adherence 
 of public opinion in France to the law of compulsory divi- 
 sion) it would in some states of society and government be 
 very likely to do, however much the contrary may be the 
 fact in England and at the present time. If the restriction 
 could be made practically effectual, the benefit would be 
 great. Wealth which could no longer be employed in over- 
 enriching a few, would either be devoted to objects of pub- 
 lic usefulness, or if bestowed on individuals, would be dis- 
 tributed among a larger number. While those enormous 
 fortunes which no one needs for any personal purpose but 
 ostentation or improper power, would become much less 
 numerous, there would be a great multiplication of persons 
 in easy circumstances, with the advantages of leisure, and 
 all the real enjoyments which wealth can give, except those 
 of vanity ; a class by whom the services which a nation hav- 
 ing leisured classes is entitled to expect from them, either by 
 their direct exertions or by the tone they give to the feelings 
 and tastes of the public, would be rendered in a much more 
 beneficial manner than at present. A large portion also of 
 the accumulations of successful industry would probably be 
 devoted to public uses, either by direct bequests to the State 
 or by the endowment of institutions ; as is already done 
 very largely in the United States, where the ideas and prac-
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 291 
 
 tice in the matter of inheritance seem to be unusually 
 rational and beneficial.* 
 
 5. The next point to be considered is, whether the 
 reasons on which the institution of property rests, are appli- 
 cable to all things in which a right of exclusive ownership is 
 at present recognized ; and if not, on what other grounds 
 the recognition is defensible. 
 
 The essential principle of property being to assure to 
 all persons what they have produced by their labour and 
 accumulated by their abstinence, this principle cannot apply 
 to what is not the produce of labour, the raw material of the 
 earth. If the land derived its productive power wholly from 
 nature, and not at all from industry, or if there were any 
 means of discriminating what is derived from each source, 
 it not only would not be necessary, but it would be the 
 height of injustice, to let the gift of nature be engrossed by 
 individuals. The use of the land in agriculture must indeed, 
 for the time being, be of necessity exclusive ; the same per- 
 son who has ploughed and sown must be permitted to reap : 
 
 * " Munificent bequests and donations for public purposes, whether charit- 
 able or educational, form a striking feature in the modern history of the United 
 States, and especially of New England. Not only is it common for rich capital- 
 ists to leave by will a portion of their fortune towards the endowment of national 
 institutions, but individuals during their lifetime make magnificent grants of 
 money for the same objects. There is here no compulsory law for the equal 
 partition of property among children, as in France, and on the other hand, no 
 custom of entail or primogeniture, as in England, so that the affluent feel them- 
 selves at liberty to share their wealth between their kindred and the public ; it 
 being impossible to found a family, and parents having frequently the happiness 
 of seeing all their children well provided for and independent long before their 
 death. I have seen a list of bequests and donations made during the last thirty 
 years for the benefit of religious, charitable, and literary institutions in the state 
 of Massachusetts alone, and they amounted to no less a sum than six millions 
 of dollars, or more than a million sterling." Lyell's Travels in America, vol. i. 
 p. 263. 
 
 In England, whoever leaves anything beyond trifling legacies for public or 
 beneficent objects when he has any near relatives living, does so at the risk of 
 being declared insane by a jury after his death, or at the least, of having the 
 property wasted in a Chancery suit to set aside the will.
 
 BOOK H. CHAPTER II. 5. 
 
 but the land might be occupied for one season only, as among 
 the ancient Germans ; or might be periodically redivided 
 as population increased : or the State might be the univer- 
 sal landlord, and the cultivators tenants .under it, either on 
 lease or at will. 
 
 But though land is not the produce of industry, most 
 of its valuable qualities are so. Labour is not only requi- 
 site for using, but almost equally so for fashioning, the in- 
 strument. Considerable labour is often required at the 
 commencement, to clear the land for cultivation. In many 
 cases, even when cleared, its productiveness is wholly the 
 effect of labour and art. The Bedford Level produced little 
 or nothing until artificially drained. The bogs of Ireland, 
 until the same thing is done to them, can produce little be- 
 sides fuel. One of the barrenest soils in the world, com- 
 posed of the material of the Goodwin Sands, the Pays de 
 Waes in Flanders, has been so fertilized by industry, ae to 
 have become one of the most productive in Europe. Culti- 
 vation also requires buildings and fences, which are wholly 
 the produce of labour. The fruits of this industry cannot 
 be reaped in a short period. The labour and outlay are 
 immediate, the benefit is spread over many years, perhaps 
 over all future time. A holder will not incur this labour 
 and outlay when strangers and not himself will be benefited 
 by it. If he undertakes such improvements, he must have 
 a sufficient period before him in which to profit by them ; 
 and he is in no way so sure of having always a sufficient 
 period as when his tenure is perpetual.* 
 
 * " Ce qui donnait a 1'homme 1'intelligence et la Constance dans ses travaux, 
 qui lui faisait diriger tous ses efforts vers un but utile a sa race, c'etait le senti- 
 ment de la perpetuite. Les terrains les plus fertiles sont toujours ceux que les 
 eaux ont deposes le long de leur cours, mais ce sont aussi ceux qu'elles menaceut 
 de leurs inondations ou qu'elles corrompent par des mar^cages. Avec la 
 garantie de la perp6tuite, 1'homme entreprit de longs et p^nibles travaui pour 
 donner aux marecages un ecoulement, pour clever des digues contre les inonda- 
 tions, pour repartir par dcs canaux d'arrosement des eaux fertilisantes sur les 
 memes champs que les memes eaux coudamnaient a la sterilite. Sous la meme 
 garaiitie, 1'homm^ ne se contentant plus des fruits annuels de la terre, a demele
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 293 
 
 6. These are the reasons which form the justification 
 in an economical point of view, of property in land. It is 
 Been, that they are only valid, in so far as the proprietor of 
 land is its improver. Whenever, in any country, the pro- 
 prietor, generally speaking, ceases to be the improver, politi- 
 cal economy has nothing to say in defence of landed prop- 
 erty, as there established. In no sound theory of private 
 property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of 
 land should be merely a sinecurist quartered on it. 
 
 In Great Britain, the landed proprietor is not unfre- 
 quently an improver. But it cannot be said that he is 
 generally so. And in the majority of cases he grants the 
 liberty of cultivation on such terms, as to prevent improve- 
 ments from being made by any one else. In the southern 
 parts of the island, as there are usually no leases, perma- 
 nent improvements can scarcely be made except by the 
 landlord's capital ; accordingly the South compared with 
 the North of England, and with the Lowlands of Scotland, 
 is still extremely backward in agricultural improvement. 
 The truth is, that any very general improvement of land by 
 the landlords, is hardly compatible with a law or custom 
 of primogeniture. When the land goes wholly to the heir, 
 
 parmi la vegetation sauvage les plantes vivaces, les arbustes, lea arbres qui 
 pouvaient lui etre utiles, il les a perfectionnes par la culture, il a chang6 en 
 quelque sorte leur essence, et il les a multiplies. Parmi les fruits, en effet, on 
 en reconnait que des siecles de culture ont seuls pu amener a la perfection qu'ils 
 ont atteinte aujourd'hui, tandia que d'autres ont ete importes des regions les plus 
 lointaines. L'homme en meme temps a ouvert la terre jusqu'a une grande pro- 
 fondeur, pour renouveler son sol, et le fertiliser par le melange de ses parties 
 et les impressions de Pair ; il a fixe sur les collines la terre qui s'en echappait, et 
 il a couvert la face entiere de la campagne d'une vegetation partout abondante, 
 et partout utile a la race humaine. Parmi ses travaux, il y en a dont il ne 
 recueillera le fruit qu'au bout de dix ou de vingt ans ; il y en a d'autres dont sea 
 derniers neveux jouiront encore dans plusieurs siecles. Tous ont concouru ;'i 
 augmenter la force productive de la nature, a donner a la race humaine un 
 revenu infiniment plus abondant, un revenu dont une portion considerable est 
 consomme6 par ceux qui n'ont point part a la propriety territoriale, et, qui 
 cependant n'auraient point trouve de nourriture sans ce partage du sol qui sein- 
 ble lea avoir desherites." Sismondi, Etude xur fEconomie Politique, Troisieme 
 Essai, De la Richesse Territoriale
 
 294 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 6. 
 
 it generally goes to him severed from the pecuniary re- 
 sources which would enable him to improve it, the personal 
 property being absorbed by the provision for younger chil- 
 dren, and the land itself often heavily burthened for the 
 same purpose. There is therefore but a small proportion 
 of landlords who have the means of making expensive im- 
 provements, unless they do it with borrowed money, and 
 by adding to the mortgages with which in most c/ises the 
 land was already burthened when they received it. But 
 the position of the owner of a deeply mortgaged estate is 
 so precarious ; economy is so unwelcome to one whose ap- 
 parent fortune greatly exceeds his real means, and the vicis- 
 situdes of rent and price which only trench upon the mar- 
 gin of his income, are so formidable to one who can call 
 little more than the margin his own ; that it is no wonder if 
 few landlords find themselves in a condition to make immedi- 
 ate sacrifices for the sake of future profit. Were they ever so 
 much inclined, those alone can prudently do it, who have 
 seriously studied the principles of scientific agriculture : 
 and great landlords have seldom seriously studied any- 
 thing. They might at least hold out inducements to the 
 farmers to do what they will not or cannot do themselves ; 
 but even in granting leases, it is in England a general com- 
 plaint that they tie up their tenants by covenants grounded 
 on the practices of an obsolete and exploded agriculture ; 
 while most of them, by withholding leases altogether, and 
 giving the farmer no guarantee of possession beyond a 
 single harvest, keep the land on a footing little more favour- 
 abe to improvement than in the time of our barbarous an- 
 cestors. 
 
 immetata quibus jugera liberas 
 
 Frujes et Cererem ferunt, 
 
 Nee cultura placet longior annua. 
 
 Landed property in England is thus very far from com- 
 pletely fulfilling the conditions which render its existence eco- 
 nomically justifiable. But if insufficiently realized even in
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 295 
 
 England, in Ireland those conditions are not complied with 
 at all. With individual exceptions (some of them very 
 honourable ones), the owners of Irish estates do nothing 
 for the land but drain it of its produce. What has been 
 epigrammatically said in the discussions on " peculiar bur- 
 thens " is literally true when applied to them ; that the 
 greatest " burthen on laud " is the landlords. Returning 
 nothing to the soil, they consume its whole produce, 
 minus the potatoes strictly necessary to keep the inhabitants 
 from dying of famine ; and when they have any purpose 
 of improvement, the preparatory step usually consists in 
 not leaving even this pittance, but turning out the people 
 to beggary if not to starvation.* When landed property 
 has placed itself upon this footing it ceases to be defensible, 
 and the time has come for making some new arrangement 
 of the matter. 
 
 When the " sacredness of property " is talked of, it 
 should always be remembered, that any such sacredness 
 does not belong in the same degree to landed property. 
 No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of 
 the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question 
 of general expediency. When private property in land is 
 not expedient, it is unjust. It is no hardship to any one, 
 to be excluded from what others have produced : they were 
 not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing 
 by not sharing in what otherwise would not have existed 
 at all. But it is some hardship to be born into the world 
 and to find all nature's gifts previously engrossed, and no 
 place left for the new-comer. To reconcile people to this, 
 after they have once admitted into their minds the idea that 
 any moral rights belong to them as human beings, it will 
 always be necessary to convince them that the exclusive 
 appropriation is good for mankind on the whole, themselves 
 
 * I must beg the reader to bear in mind that this paragraph was written 
 fifteen years ago. So wonderful are the changes, both moral and economical, 
 taking place in our age, that, without perpetually re-writing a work like the 
 present, it is impossible to keep up with them.
 
 296 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 6. 
 
 included. But this is what no sane human being could be 
 persuaded of, if the relation between the landowner and the 
 cultivator were the same everywhere as it has been in Ireland. 
 Landed property is felt, even by those most tenacious 
 of its rights, to be a different thing from other property; 
 and where the bulk of the community have been disin- 
 herited of their share of it, and it has become the exclusive 
 attribute of a small minority, men have generally tried to 
 reconcile it, at least in theory, to their sense of justice, by 
 endeavouring to attach duties to it, and erecting it into a sort 
 of magistracy, either moral or legal. But if the state is at 
 liberty to treat the possessors of land as public functionaries, 
 it is only going one step further to say, that it is at liberty 
 to discard them. The claim of the landowners to the land 
 is altogether subordinate to the general policy of the state. 
 The principle of property gives them no right to the land, 
 but only a right to compensation for whatever portion of 
 their interest in the land it may be the policy of the state 
 to deprive them of. To that, their claim is indefeasible. It 
 is due to landowners, and to owners of any property what- 
 ever, recognized as such by the state, that they should not 
 be dispossessed of it without receiving its pecuniary value, 
 or an annual income equal to what they derived from it. 
 This is due on the general principles on which property 
 rests. If the land was bought with the produce of the la- 
 bour and abstinence of themselves or their ancestors, com- 
 pensation is due to them on that ground ; even if otherwise, 
 it is still due on the ground of prescription. Nor can it 
 ever be necessary for accomplishing an object by which the 
 community altogether will gain, that a particular portion 
 of the community should be immolated. When the prop- 
 erty is of a kind to which peculiar affections attach them- 
 selves, the compensation ought to exceed a bare pecuniary 
 equivalent. But, subject to this proviso, the state is at 
 liberty to deal with landed property as the general interests 
 of the community may require, even to the extent, if it so 
 happen, of doing with the whole, what is done with a part
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 297 
 
 whenever a bill is passed for a railroad or a new street. The 
 community has too much at stake in the proper cultivation 
 of the land, and in the conditions annexed to the occupancy 
 of it, to leave these things to the discretion of a class of per- 
 sons called landlords, when they have shown themselves 
 unfit for the trust. The legislature, which if it pleased 
 might convert the whole body of landlords into fundholders 
 or pensioners, might d fortiori, commute the average re- 
 ceipts of Irish landowners into a fixed rent charge, and raise 
 the tenants into proprietors ; supposing always that the full 
 market value of the land was tendered to the landlords, in 
 case they preferred that to accepting the conditions pro- 
 posed. 
 
 There will be another place for discussing the various 
 modes of landed property and tenure, and the advantages 
 and inconveniences of each ; in this chapter our concern is 
 with the right itself, the grounds which justify it, and (as a 
 corollary from these) the conditions by which it should be 
 limited. To me it seems almost an axiom that property in 
 land should be interpreted strictly, and that the balance in 
 all cases of doubt should incline against the proprietor. 
 The reverse is the case with property in moveables, and in 
 all things the product of labour : over these, the owner's 
 power both of use and of exclusion should be absolute, 
 except where positive evil to others would result from it ; 
 but in the case of land, no exclusive right should be per- 
 mitted in any individual, which cannot be shown to be pro- 
 ductive of positive good. To be allowed any exclusive right 
 at all, over a portion of the common inheritance, while there 
 are others who have no portion, is already a privilege. No 
 quantity of moveable goods which a person can acquire by 
 his labour, prevents others from acquiring the like by the 
 same means ; but from the very nature of the case, whoever 
 owns land, keeps others out of the enjoyment of it. The 
 privilege, or monopoly, is only defensible as a necessary 
 evil ; it becomes an injustice when carried to any point to 
 which the compensating good does not follow it.
 
 298 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 7. 
 
 For instance, the exclusive right to the land for purposes 
 of cultivation does not imply an exclusive right to it for 
 purposes of access ; and no such right ought to be recog- 
 nized, except to the extent necessary to' protect the produce 
 against damage, and the owner's privacy against invasion. 
 The pretension of two Dukes to shut up a part of the High- 
 lands, and exclude the rest of mankind from many square 
 miles of mountain scenery to prevent disturbance to wild 
 animals, is an abuse ; it exceeds the legitimate bounds of 
 the right of landed property. When land is not intended 
 to be cultivated, no good reason can in general be given for 
 its being private property at all ; and if any one is pei*- 
 mitted to call it his, he ought to know that he holds it by 
 sufferance of the community, and on an implied condition 
 that his ownership, since it cannot possibly do them any 
 good, at least shall not deprive them of any, which they 
 could have derived from the land if it had been unappro- 
 priated. Even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, 
 though only one among millions, the law permits to hold 
 thousands of acres as his single share, is not entitled to think 
 that all this is given to him to use and abuse, and deal with 
 as if it concerned nobody but himself. The rents or profits 
 which he can obtain from it are at his sole disposal ; but 
 with regard to the land, in everything which he does with 
 it, and in everything which he abstains from doing, he is 
 morally bound, and should whenever the case admits be 
 legally compelled, to make his interest and pleasure con- 
 sistent with the public good. The species at large still 
 retains, of its original claim to the soil of the planet which 
 it inhabits, as much as is compatible with the purposes for 
 which it has parted with the remainder. 
 
 7. Besides property in the produce of labour, and 
 property in land, there are other things which are or have 
 been subjects of property, in which no proprietary rights 
 ought to exist at all. But as the civilized world has in gen- 
 eral made up its mind on most of these, there is no necessity
 
 PROPERTY. 299 
 
 for dwelling on them in this place. At the head of them, 
 is property in human beings. It is almost superfluous to 
 observe, that this institution can have no place in any 
 society even pretending to be founded on justice, or on fel- 
 lowship between human creatures. But, iniquitous as it is, 
 yet when the state has expressly legalized it, and human 
 beings, for generations, have been bought, sold, and inher- 
 ited under sanction of law, it is another wrong, in abolish- 
 ing the property, not to make full compensation. This 
 wrong was avoided by the great measure of justice in 1833, 
 one of the most virtuous acts, as well as the most practically 
 beneficent, ever done collectively by a nation. Other exam- 
 ples of property which ought not to have been created, are 
 properties in public trusts ; such as judicial offices under the 
 old French regime, arid the heritable jurisdictions which, in 
 countries not wholly emerged from feudality, pass with the 
 land. Our own country affords, as cases in point, that of a 
 commission in the army, and of an advowson, or right of 
 nomination to an ecclesiastical benefice. A property is also 
 sometimes created iri a right of taxing the public ; in a mo- 
 nopoly, for instance, or other exclusive privilege. These 
 abuses prevail most in semibarbarous countries ; but are 
 not without example in the most civilized. In France there 
 are several important trades arid professions, including no- 
 taries, attorneys, brokers, appraisers, printers, even bakers, 
 and (until lately) butchers, of which the numbers are limit- 
 ed by law. The I/revet or privilege of one of the permitted 
 number consequently brings a high price in the market. In 
 these cases, compensation probably could not with justice be 
 refused, on the abolition of the privilege. There are other 
 cases in which this would be more doubtful. The question 
 would turn upon what, in the peculiar circumstances, was 
 sufficient to constitute prescription ; and whether the legal 
 recognition which the abase had obtained, was sufficient to 
 constitute it an institution, or amounted only to an occa- 
 sional license. It would be absurd to claim compensation 
 for losses caused by changes in a tariff, a thing confessedly
 
 gOO BOOK H. CHAPTER II. 7. 
 
 variable from year to year ; or for monopolies like those 
 granted to individuals by Queen Elizabeth, favours of a 
 despotic authority, which the power .that gave was compe- 
 tent at any time to recal. 
 
 So much on the institution of property, a subject of 
 which, for the purposes of political economy, it was indis- 
 pensable to treat, but on which we could not usefully con- 
 fine ourselves to economical considerations. We have now 
 to inquire on what principles and with what results the dis- 
 tribution of the produce of land and labour is effected, under 
 the relations which this institution creates among the differ- 
 ent members of the community.
 
 CHAPTEK IE. 
 
 OF THE CLASSES AMONG WHOM THE PRODUCE IS 
 DISTRIBUTED. 
 
 1. PRIVATE property being assumed as a fact, we 
 have next to enumerate the different classes of persons to 
 whom it gives rise ; whose concurrence, or at least whose 
 permission, is necessary to production, and who are there- 
 fore able to stipulate for a share of the produce. We have 
 to inquire, according to what laws the produce distributes 
 itself among these classes, by the spontaneous action of the 
 interests of those concerned : after which a further question 
 will be, what effects are or might be produced by laws, 
 institutions, and measures of government, in superseding or 
 modifying that spontaneous distribution. 
 
 The three requisites of production, as has been so often 
 repeated, are labour, capital, and land : understanding by 
 capital, the means and appliances which are the accumu- 
 lated results of previous labour, and by land, the materials 
 and instruments supplied by nature, whether contained in 
 the interior of the earth, or constituting its surface. Since 
 each of these elements of production may be separately ap^ 
 propriated, the industrial community may be considered as 
 divided into landowners, capitalists, and productive labour- 
 ers. Each of these classes, as such, obtains a share of the 
 produce : no other person or class obtains anything, except 
 by concession from them. The remainder of the community 
 is, in fact, supported at their expense, giving, if any equiva- 
 lent, one consisting of unproductive services. These three
 
 302 BOOK II. CHAPTER III. 2. 
 
 classes, therefore, are considered in political economy as 
 making up the whole community 
 
 2. But although these three sometimes exist as sepa- 
 rate classes, dividing the produce among them, they do not 
 necessarily or always so exist. The fact is so much other- 
 wise, that there are only one or two communities in which 
 the complete separation of these classes is the general rule. 
 England and Scotland, with parts of Belgium and Holland, 
 are almost the only countries in the world, where the land, 
 capital, and labour employed in agriculture, are generally 
 the property of separate owners. The ordinary case is, that 
 the same person owns either two of these requisites, or all 
 three. 
 
 The case in which the same person owns all three, em- 
 braces the two extremes of existing society, in respect to the 
 independence and dignity of the labouring class. First, 
 when the labourer himself is the proprietor. This is the 
 commonest case in the Northern States of the American 
 Union ; one of the commonest in France, Switzerland, the 
 three Scandinavian kingdoms, and parts of Germany ; * and 
 
 * " The Norwegian return " (say the Commissioners of Poor Law Enquiry, 
 to whom information was furnished from nearly even- country in Europe and 
 America by the ambassadors and consuls there) " states that at the last census in 
 1825, out of a population of 1,051,318 persons, there were 59,464 freeholders. 
 As by 59,464 freeholders must be meant 59,464 heads of families, or about 
 300,000 individuals ; the freeholders must form more thjm a fourth of the whole 
 population. Mr. Macgregor states that in Denmark (by which Zealand and the 
 adjoining islands are probably meant) out of a population of 926,110, the num- 
 ber of landed proprietors and farmers is 415,110, or nearly one-half. In Sles- 
 wick Holstein, out of a population of 604,085, it is 196,017, or about one-third. 
 The proportion of proprietors and farmers to the whole population is not given 
 in Sweden ; but the Stockholm return estimates the average quantity of lan? 
 annexed to a labourer's habitation at from one to five acres ; and though the 
 Gottenburg return gives a lower estimate, it adds, that the peasants possess much 
 of the land. In Wurtemburg we are told that more than two-thirds of the 
 labouring population are the proprietors of their own habitations, and that almost 
 all own at least a garden of from three-quarters of an acre to an acre and a half." 
 In some of these statements, proprietors and farmers are not discriminated ; but 
 ' all the returns concur in stating the number of day-labourers to be very small."
 
 CLASSES WHO DIVIDE THE PRODUCE. 3Q3 
 
 a common case in parts of Italy and in Belgium. In all 
 these countries there are, no doubt, large landed properties, 
 and a still greater number which, without being large, re- 
 quire the occasional or constant aid of hired labourers. 
 Much, however, of the land is owned in portions too small 
 to require any other labour than that of the peasant and his 
 family, or fully to occupy even that. The capital employed 
 is not always that of the peasant proprietor, many of these 
 small properties being mortgaged to obtain the means of 
 cultivating ; but the capital is invested at the peasant's risk, 
 and though he pays interest for it, it gives to no one any 
 right of interference, except, perhaps, eventually to take 
 possession of the land, if the interest ceases to be paid. 
 
 The other case in which the land, labour, and capital, 
 belong to the same person, is the case of slave countries, in 
 which the labourers themselves are owned by the landowner. 
 Our West India colonies before emancipation, and the sugar 
 colonies of the nations by whom a similar act of justice is 
 still unperformed, are examples of large establishments for 
 agricultural and manufacturing labour (the production of 
 sugar and rum is a combination of both) in which the land, 
 the factories (if they may so be called), the machinery, and 
 the degraded labourers, are all the property of a capitalist. 
 In this case, as well as in its extreme opposite, the case of 
 the peasant proprietor, there is no division of the produce. 
 
 3. "When the three requisites are not all owned by 
 the same person, it often happens that two of them are so. 
 Sometimes the same person owns the capital and the land, 
 but not the labour. The landlord makes his engagement 
 directly with the labourer, and supplies the whole or part 
 of the stock necessary for cultivation. This system is the 
 usual one in those parts of Continental Europe, in which 
 the labourers are neither serfs on the one hand, nor pro- 
 
 Preface to Foreign Communications, p. xxxviii.) As the general statn* of 
 the labouring people, the condition of a workman for hire is almoet peculiar to 
 Great Britain.
 
 304: BOOK II. CHAPTER III. 
 
 prietors on the other. It was very common in France be- 
 fore the Revolution, and is still much practised in some 
 parts of that country, when the land is not the property 
 of the cultivator. It prevails generally in the level dis- 
 tricts of Italy, except those principally pastoral, such as the 
 Maremma of Tuscany and the Campagna of Rome. On 
 this system the division of the produce is between two 
 classes, the landowner and the labourer. 
 
 In other cases again the labourer does not own the land, 
 but owns the little stock employed on it, the landlord not 
 being in the habit of supplying any. This system generally 
 prevails in Ireland. It is nearly universal in India, and in 
 most countries of the East ; whether the government re- 
 tains, as it generally does, the ownership of the soil, or 
 allows portions to become, either absolutely or in a qualified 
 sense, the property of individuals. In India, however, things 
 are so far better than in Ireland, that the owner of land is 
 in the habit of making advances to the cultivators, if they 
 cannot cultivate without them. For these advances the 
 native landed proprietor usually demands high interest ; 
 but the principal landowner, the government, makes them 
 gratuitously, recovering the advance after the harvest, to- 
 gether with the rent. The produce is here divided as be- 
 fore, between the same two classes, the landowner and the 
 labourer. 
 
 These are the principal variations in the classification of 
 those among whom the produce of agricultural labour is 
 distributed. In the case of manufacturing industry there 
 never are more than two classes, the labourers and the cap- 
 italists. The original artisans in all countries were either 
 slaves, or the women of the family. In the manufacturing 
 establishments of the ancients, whether on a large or on a 
 small scale, the labourers were usually the property of the 
 capitalist. In general, if any manual labour was thought 
 compatible with the dignity of a freeman, it was only agri- 
 cultural labour. The converse system, in which the capita! 
 was owned by the labourer, was coeval with free labour,
 
 CLASSES WHO DIVIDE THE PRODUCE. 305 
 
 and under it the first great advances of manufacturing 
 industry were achieved. The artisan owned the loom or 
 the few tools h6 used, and worked on his own account ; or 
 at least ended by doing so, though he usually worked for 
 another, first as apprentice and next as journeyman, for a 
 certain number of years before he could be admitted a mas- 
 ter. But the status of a permanent journeyman, all his life 
 a hired labourer and nothing more, had no place in the 
 crafts and guilds of the middle ages. In country villages, 
 where a carpenter or a blacksmith cannot live and support 
 hired labourers on the returns of his business, he is even 
 now his own workman ; and shopkeepers in similar cir- 
 cumstances are their own shopmen, or shopwomen. But 
 wherever the extent of the market admits of it, the distinc- 
 tion is now fully established between the class of capitalists, 
 or employers of labour, and the class of labourers ; the cap- 
 italists, in general, contributing no other labour than that 
 of direction and superintendence. 
 
 20
 
 CHAPTEK IY. 
 
 OF COMPETITION, AND CUSTOM. 
 
 1. UNDER the rule of individual property, the divis- 
 ion of the produce is the result of two determining agen- 
 cies : Competition, and Custom. It is important to ascer- 
 tain the amount of influence which belongs to each of these 
 causes, and in what manner the operation of one is modified 
 by the other. 
 
 Political economists generally, and English political 
 economists above others, have been accustomed to lay 
 almost exclusive stress upon the first of these agencies ; to 
 exaggerate the effect of competition, and to take into little 
 account the other and conflicting principle. They are apt 
 to express themselves as if they thought that competition 
 actually does, in all cases, whatever it can be shown to be 
 the tendency of competition to do. / This is partly intelligi- 
 ble, if we consider that only through the principle of com- 
 petition has political economy any pretension to the charac- 
 ter of a science. So far as rents, profits, wages, prices, are 
 determined by competition, laws may be assigned for them. 
 Assume competition to be their exclusive regulator, and 
 principles of broad generality and scientific precision may 
 be laid down, according to which they will be regulated. 
 The political economist justly deems this his proper busi- 
 ness : and as an abstract or hypothetical science, political econ- 
 omy cannot be required to do, and indeed cannot do, any- 
 thing more. But it would be a great misconception of the 
 actual course of human affairs, to suppose that competition
 
 COMPETITION AND CUSTOM. 307 
 
 exercises in fact this unlimited sway. I am not speaking of 
 monopolies, either natural or artificial, or of any interfer- 
 ences of authority with the liberty of production or ex- 
 change. >uch disturbing causes have always been allowed 
 for by political economists. I speak of cases in which there 
 is nothing to restrain competition ; no hindrance to it either 
 in the nature of the case or in artificial obstacles ; yet in 
 which the result is not determined by competition, but by 
 custom or usage ; competition either not taking place at all, 
 or producing its effect in quite a different manner from that 
 which is ordinarily assumed to be natural to it. 
 
 2. Competition, in fact, has only become in any con- 
 siderable degree the governing principle of contracts, at a 
 comparatively modern period. The farther we look back into 
 history, the more we see all transactions and engagements 
 under the influence of fixed customs. The reason is evident. 
 Custom is the most powerful protector of the weak against 
 the strong ; their sole protector where there are no laws or 
 government adequate to the purpose. Custom is a barrier 
 which, even in the most oppressed condition of mankind, 
 tyranny is forced in some degree to respect. To the indus- 
 trious population, in a turbulent military community, free- 
 dom of competition is a vain phrase ; they are never in a 
 condition to make terms for themselves by it : there is 
 always a master who throws his sword into the scale, and 
 the terms are such as he imposes. But though the law of 
 the strongest decides, it is not the interest nor in general the 
 practice of the strongest to strain that law to the utmost, 
 and every relaxation of it has a tendency to become a cus- 
 tom, and every custom to become a right. Rights thus 
 originating, and not competition in any shape, determine, in 
 a rude state of society, the share of the produce enjoyed by 
 those who produce it. The relations, more especally, be- 
 tween the landowner and the cultivator, and the payments 
 made by the latter to the former, are, in all states of society 
 but the most modern, determined by the usage of the coun-
 
 308 BOOK II. CHAPTER IV. 2. 
 
 try. Never until late times have the conditions of the occu- 
 pancy of land been (as a general rule) an affair of compe- 
 tition. The occupier for the time has very commonly been 
 considered to have a right to retain his holding, while he 
 fulfils the customary requirements ; and has thus become, 
 in a certain sense, a co-proprietor of the soil. Even where 
 the holder has not acquired this fixity of tenure, the terms 
 of occupation have often been fixed and invariable. 
 
 In India, for example, and other Asiatic communities 
 similarly constituted, the ryots, or peasant-farmers, are not 
 regarded as tenants at will, nor even as tenants by virtue of 
 a lease. In most villages there are indeed some ryots on 
 this precarious footing, consisting of those, or the descend- 
 ants of those, who have settled in the place at a known and 
 comparatively recent period : but all who are looked upon 
 as descendants or representatives of the original inhabitants, 
 and even many mere tenants of ancient date, are thought 
 entitled to retain their land, as long as they pay the custom- 
 ary rents. What these customary rents are, or ought to be, 
 has indeed, in most cases, become a matter of obscurity ; 
 usurpation, tyranny, and foreign conquest having to a great 
 degree obliterated the evidences of them. But when an old 
 and purely Hindoo principality falls under the dominion of 
 the British Government, or the management of its officers, 
 and when the details of the revenue system come to be 
 inquired into, it is usually found that though the demands 
 of the great landholder, the State, have been swelled by 
 fiscal rapacity until all limit is practically lost sight of, it 
 has yet been thought necessary to have a distinct name and 
 a separate pretext for each increase of exaction ; so that the 
 demand has sometimes come to consist of thirty or forty 
 different items, in addition to the nominal rent. This cir- 
 cuitous mode of increasing the payments assuredly would 
 not have been resorted to, if there had been an acknowl- 
 edged right in the landlord to increase the rent. Its adop- 
 tion is a proof that there was once an effective limitation, 
 a real customary rent ; and that the understood right of the
 
 COMPETITION AND CUSTOM. 309 
 
 ryot to the land, so long as lie paid rent according to cus- 
 tom, was at some time or other more than nominal.* The 
 British Government of India always simplifies the tenure 
 by consolidating the various assessments into one, thus mak- 
 ing the rent nominally as well as really an arbitrary thing, 
 or at least a matter of specific agreement : but it scrupulous- 
 ly respects the right of the ryot to the land, though until the 
 reforms of the present generation (reforms even now only 
 partially carried into effect) it seldom left him much more 
 than a bare subsistence. 
 
 In modern Europe the cultivators have gradually emerged 
 from a state of personal slavery. The barbarian conquerors 
 of the Western empire found that the easiest mode of man- 
 aging their conquests would be to leave the occupation of 
 the land in the hands in which they found it, and to save 
 themselves a labour so uncongenial as the superintendence 
 of troops of slaves, by allowing the slaves to retain in a cer- 
 tain degree the control of their own actions, under an obli- 
 gation to furnish the lord with provisions and labour. A 
 common expedient was to assign to the serf, for his exclusive 
 use, as much land as was thought sufficient for his support, 
 and to make him work on the other lands of his lord when- 
 ever required. By degrees these indefinite obligations were 
 transformed into a definite one, of supplying a fixed quan- 
 tity of provisions or a fixed quantity of labour : and as the 
 lords, in time, became inclined to employ their income in 
 the purchase of luxuries rather than in the maintenance of 
 retainers, the payments in kind were commuted for pay- 
 ments in money. Each concession, at first voluntary and 
 revocable at pleasure, gradually acquired the force of cus- 
 tom, and was at last recognised and enforced by the tribu- 
 nals. In this manner the serfs progressively rose into a free 
 tenantry, who held their land in perpetuity on fixed condi 
 
 * The ancient law books of the Hindoos mention in some cases one-sixth, in 
 others one-fourth of the produce, as a proper rent ; but there is no evidence that 
 the rules laid down in those books were, at any period of history, really acted 
 apon
 
 310 BOOK II. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 tions. The conditions were sometimes very onerous, and 
 the people very miserable. But their obligations were de- 
 termined by the usage or law of the country, and not by 
 competition. 
 
 Where the cultivators had never been, strictly speaking, 
 in personal bondage, or after they had ceased to be so, the 
 exigencies of a poor and little advanced society gave rise to 
 another arrangement, which in some parts of Europe, even 
 highly improved parts, has been found sufficiently advanta- 
 geous to be continued to the present day. I speak of the 
 metayer system. Under this, the land is divided, in small 
 farms, among single families, the landlord generally supply- 
 ing the stock which the agricultural system of the country 
 is considered to require, and receiving, in lieu of rent and 
 profit, a fixed proportion of the produce. This proportion, 
 which is generally paid in kind, is usually, (as is implied in 
 the words metayer, mezzaiuolo, and medietarius^} one-half. 
 There are places, however, such as the rich volcanic soil of 
 the province of Naples, where the landlord takes two-thirds, 
 and yet the cultivator by means of an excellent agriculture 
 contrives to live. But whether the proportion is two-thirds 
 or one-half, it is a fixed proportion ; not variable from farm 
 to farm, or from tenant to tenant. The custom of the coun- 
 try is the universal rule ; nobody thinks of raising or lower- 
 ing rents, or of letting land on other than the customary 
 conditions. Competition, as a regulator of rent, has no 
 existence. 
 
 3. Prices, whenever there was no monopoly, came 
 earlier under the influence of competition, and are much 
 more universally subject to it, than rents : but that influ- 
 ence is by no means, even in the present activity of mer- 
 cantile competition, so absolute as is sometimes assumed. 
 There is no proposition which meets us in the field of polit- 
 ical economy oftener than this that there cannot be two 
 prices in the same market. Such undoubtedly is the natu- 
 ral effect of unimpeded competition ; yet every one knows
 
 COMPETITION AND CUSTOM. 311 
 
 that there are, almost always, two prices in the same mar- 
 ket. Not only are there in every large town, and in almost 
 every trade, cheap shops and dear shops, but the same shop 
 often sells the same article at different prices to different 
 customers : and, as a general rule, each retailer adapts his 
 scale of prices to the class of customers whom he expects. 
 The wholesale trade, in the great articles of commerce, is 
 really under the dominion of competition. There, the buy- 
 ers as well as sellers are traders and manufacturers, and 
 their purchases are not influenced by indolence .or vulgar 
 finery, but are business transactions. In the wholesale mar- 
 kets therefore it is true as a general proposition, that there 
 are not two prices at one time for the same thing : there is 
 at each time and place a market price, which can be quoted 
 in a price-current. But retail price, the price paid by the 
 actual consumer, seems to feel very slowly and imperfectly 
 the effect of competition ; and when competition does exist, 
 it often, instead of lowering prices, merely divides the gains 
 of the high price among a greater number of dealers. Hence 
 it is that, of the price paid by the consumer, so large a pro- 
 portion is absorbed by the gains of retailers ; and any one 
 who inquires into the amount which reaches the hands of 
 those who made the things he buys, will often be astonished 
 at its smallness. When indeed the market, being that of a 
 great city, holds out a sufficient inducement to large capital- 
 ists to engage in retail operations, it is generally found a 
 better speculation to attract a large business by underselling 
 others, than merely to divide the field of employment with 
 them. This influence of competition is making itself felt 
 more and more through the principal branches of retail 
 trade in the large towns ; and the rapidity and cheapness 
 of transport, by making consumers less dependent on the 
 dealers in their immediate neighbourhood, are tending to 
 assimilate more and more the whole country to a large 
 town : but hitherto it is only in the great centres of busi- 
 ness that retail transactions have been chiefly, or even 
 much, determined, by competition. Elsewhere it rather
 
 312 BOOK II. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 acts, when it acts at all, as an occasional disturbing influ- 
 ence ; the habitual regulator is custom, modified from time 
 to time by notions existing in the minds of purchasers and 
 sellers, of some kind of equity or justice. 
 
 In many trades the terms on which business is done are 
 a matter of positive arrangement among the trade, who use 
 the means they always possess of making the situation of 
 any member of the body who departs from its fixed cus- 
 toms, inconvenient or disagreeable. It is well known that 
 the bookselling trade was, until lately, one of these, and 
 that notwithstanding the active spirit of rivalry in the trade, 
 competition did not produce its natural effect in breaking 
 down the trade rules. All professional remuneration is 
 regulated by custom. The fees of physicians, surgeons, and 
 barristers, the charges of attorneys, are nearly invariable. 
 Not certainly for want of abundant competition in those 
 professions, but because the competition operates by dimin- 
 ishing each competitor's chance of fees, not by lowering the 
 fees themselves. 
 
 Since custom stands its ground against competition to so 
 considerable an extent, even where, from the multitude of 
 competitors and the general energy in the pursuit of gain, 
 the spirit of competition is strongest, we may be sure that 
 this is much more the case where people are content with 
 smaller gains, and estimate their pecuniary interest at a 
 lower rate when balanced against their ease or their pleas- 
 ure. I believe it will often be found, in Continental Eu- 
 rope, that prices and charges, of some or of all sorts, are 
 much higher in some places than in others not far distant, 
 without its being possible to assign any other cause than 
 that it has always been so : the customers are used to it, and 
 acquiesce in it. An enterprising competitor, with sufficient 
 capital, might force down the charges, and make his fortune 
 during the process ; but there are no enterprising competi- 
 tors ; those who have capital prefer to leave it where it is, 
 or to make less profit by it in a more quiet way. 
 
 These observations must be received as a general cor-
 
 COMPETITION AND CUSTOM. 313 
 
 rection to be applied whenever relevant, whether expressly 
 mentioned or not, to the conclusions contained in the subse- 
 quent portions of this treatise. Our reasonings must, in 
 general, proceed as if the known and natural effects of com- 
 petition were actually produced by it, in all cases in which 
 it is not restrained by some positive obstacle. Where com- 
 petition, though free to exist, does not exist, or where it 
 exists, but has its natural consequences overruled by any 
 other agency, the conclusions will fail more or less of being 
 applicable. To escape error, we ought, in applying the con- 
 clusions of political economy to the actual affairs of life, to 
 consider not only what will happen supposing the maximum 
 of competition, but how far the result will be affected if 
 competition falls short of the maximum. 
 
 The states of economical relation which stand first in 
 order, to be discussed and appreciated, are those in which 
 competition has no part, the arbiter of transactions being 
 either brute force or established usage. These will be the 
 subject of the next four chapters.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 t 
 
 OF SLAVERY. 
 
 1. AMONG the forms which society assumes under the 
 influence of the institution of property, there are, as I have 
 already remarked, two, otherwise of a widely dissimilar char- 
 acter, but resembling in this, that the ownership of the land, 
 the labour, and the capital, is in the same hands. One of 
 these cases is that of slavery, the other is that of peasant 
 proprietors. In the one, the landowner owns the labour, in 
 the other the labourer owns the land. We begin with the 
 first. 
 
 In this system all the produce belongs to the landlord. 
 The food and other necessaries of his labourers are part of 
 his expenses. The labourers possess nothing but what he 
 thinks fit to give them, and until he thinks fit to take it 
 back : and they work as hard as he chooses, or is able, to 
 compel them. Their wretchedness is only limited by his 
 humanity, or his pecuniary interest. "With the first consid- 
 eration, we have on the present occasion nothing to do. 
 What the second in so detestable a constitution of society 
 may dictate, depends on the facilities for importing fresh 
 slaves. If full-grown able-bodied slaves can be procured in 
 sufficient numbers, and imported at a moderate expense, 
 self-interest will recommend working the slaves to death, 
 and replacing them by importation, in preference to the slow 
 and expensive process of breeding them. Nor are the slave- 
 owners generally backward in learning this lesson. It is 
 notorious that such was the practice in our slave colonies,
 
 SLAVERY. 315 
 
 while the slave trade was legal ; and it is said to be so still 
 in Cuba. 
 
 When, as among the ancients, the slave-market could 
 only be supplied by captives either taken in war, or kid- 
 napped from thinly scattered tribes on the remote confines 
 of the known world, it was generally more profitable to 
 keep up the number by breeding, which necessitates a far 
 better treatment of them ; and for this reason, joined with 
 several others, the condition of slaves, notwithstanding occa- 
 sional enormities, was probably much less bad in the an- 
 cient world, than in the colonies of modern nations. The 
 Helots are usually cited as the type of the most hideous 
 form of personal slavery, but with how little truth, appears 
 from the fact that they were regularly armed (though not 
 with the panoply of the hoplite) and formed an integral part 
 of the military strength of the State. They were doubtless 
 an inferior and degraded caste, but their slavery seems to 
 have been one of the least onerous varieties of serfdom. 
 Slavery appears in far more frightful colours among the 
 Romans, during the period in which the Roman aristocracy 
 was gorging itself with the plunder of a newly-conquered 
 world. The Romans were a cruel people, and the worthless 
 nobles sported with the lives of their myriads of slaves with 
 the same reckless prodigality with which they squandered 
 any other part of their ill-acquired possessions. Yet, sla- 
 very is divested of one of its worst features when it is com- 
 patible with hope : enfranchisement was easy and common : 
 enfranchised slaves obtained at once the full rights of citi- 
 zens, and instances were frequent of their acquiring not only 
 riches, but latterly even honours. By the progress of milder 
 legislation under the Emperors, much of the protection of 
 law was thrown round the slave, he became capable of pos- 
 sessing property, and the evil altogether assumed a consid- 
 erably gentler aspect. Until, however, slavery assumes the 
 mitigated form of villenage, in which not only the slaves 
 have property and legal rights, but their obligations are 
 more or less limited by usage, and they partly labour for
 
 316 BOOK II. CHAPTER V. 2. 
 
 their own benefit ; their condition is seldom such as to pro- 
 duce a rapid growth either of population or of production. 
 
 2. So long as slave countries are underpeopled in 
 proportion to their cultivable land, the labour of the slaves, 
 under any tolerable management, produces much more than 
 is sufficient for their support ; especially as the great amount 
 of superintendence which their labour requires, preventing 
 the dispersion of the population, ensures some of the advan- 
 tages of combined labour. Hence, in a good soil and 
 climate, and with reasonable care of his own interests, the 
 owner of many slaves has the means of being rich. The 
 influence, however, of such a state of society on production, 
 is perfectly well understood. It is a truism to assert, that 
 labour extorted by fear of punishment is inefficient and un- 
 productive. It is true that in some circumstances, human 
 beings can be driven by the lash to attempt, and even to 
 accomplish, things which they would not have undertaken 
 for any payment which it could have been worth while to 
 an employer to offer them. And it is likely that produc- 
 tive operations which require much combination of labour, 
 the production of sugar, for example, would not have taken 
 place so soon in the American colonies, if slavery had not 
 existed to keep masses of labour together. There are also 
 savage tribes so averse from regular industry, that industrial 
 life is scarcely able to introduce itself among them until 
 they are either conquered and made slaves of, or become 
 conquerors and make others so. But after allowing the full 
 value of these considerations, it remains certain that slavery 
 is incompatible with any high state of the arts of life, and 
 any great efficiency of labour. For all products which 
 require much skill, slave countries are usually dependent on 
 foreigners. Hopeless slavery effectually brutifies the intel- 
 lect ; and intelligence in the slaves, though often encouraged 
 in the ancient world and in the East, is in a more advanced 
 state of society a source of so much danger and an object of 
 6f) much dread to the masters, that in some countries it is a
 
 SLAVERY. 317 
 
 highly penal offence to teach a slave to read. All processes 
 carried on by slave labour are conducted in the rudest and 
 most unimproved manner. And even the animal strength 
 of the slave is, on an average, not half exerted.* The mild- 
 est form of slavery is certainly the condition of the serf, who 
 is attached to the soil, supports himself from his allotment, 
 and works a certain number of days in the week for his 
 lord. Yet there is but one opinion on the extreme inef- 
 ficiency of serf labour. The following passage is from Pro- 
 fessor Jones,f whose Essay on the Distribution of Wealth 
 (or rather on Rent), is a copious repertory of valuable facts 
 on the landed tenures of different countries. 
 
 " The Russians, or rather those German writers who 
 have observed the manners and habits of Russia, state some 
 strong facts on this point. Two Middlesex mowers, they 
 say, will mow in a day as much grass as six Russian serfs, 
 and in spite of the dearness of provisions in England and 
 their cheapness in Russia, the mowing a quantity of hay 
 which would cost an English farmer half a copeck, will 
 cost a Russian proprietor three or four copecks.^ The 
 Prussian counsellor of state, Jacob, is considered to have 
 proved, that in Russia, where everything is cheap, the 
 labour of a serf is doubly as expensive as that of a labourer 
 in England. M. Schmalz gives a startling account of the 
 unproductiveness of serf labour in Prussia, from his own 
 knowledge and observation. In Austria, it is distinctly 
 stated, that the labour of a serf is equal to only one-third of 
 that of a free hired labourer. This calculation, made in an 
 able work on agriculture (with some extracts' from which I 
 have been favoured), is applied to the practical purpose of 
 deciding on the number of labourers necessary to cultivate 
 
 * The unproductiveness and wastefulness of the industrial system in the 
 Slave States of North America, is instructively displayed in the valuable writings 
 of Mr. Olmsted. 
 
 f Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation. By 
 the Rev. Richard Jones. Page 50. 
 
 J " Schmalz, Economic Politique, French translation, vol. i. p. 66." 
 
 " Vol. ii. p. 107."
 
 318 BOOK II. CHAPTER V. 3. 
 
 an estate of a given magnitude. So palpable, indeed, are 
 the ill effects of labour rents on the industry of the agricul- 
 tural population, that in Austria itself, where proposals of 
 changes of any kind do not readily make their way, schemes 
 and plans for the commutation of labour rents are as popu- 
 lar as in the more stirring German provinces of the 
 North."* 
 
 What is wanting in the quality of the labour itself, is 
 not made up by any excellence in the direction and super- 
 intendence. As the same writerf remarks, the landed 
 proprietors " are necessarily, in their character of cultiva- 
 tors of their own domains, the only guides and directors of 
 the industry of the agricultural population," since there can 
 be no intermediate class of capitalist farmers where the 
 labourers are the property of the lord. Great landowners 
 are everywhere an idle class, or if they labour at all, addict 
 themselves only to the more exciting kinds of exertion ; 
 that lion's share which superiors always reserve for them- 
 selves. " It would " as Mr. Jones observes, " be hopeless 
 and irrational to expect, that a race of noble proprietors, 
 fenced around with privileges and dignity, and attracted to 
 military and political pursuits by the advantages and habits 
 of their station, should ever become attentive cultivators as 
 a body." Even in England, if the cultivation of every 
 estate depended upon its proprietor, any one can judge 
 what would be the result. There would be a few cases of 
 great science and energy, and numerous individual instan- 
 ces of moderate success, but the general state of agriculture 
 would be contemptible. 
 
 3. "Whether the proprietors themselves would lose by 
 
 * The Hungarian revolutionary government, during its brief existence, be- 
 stowed on that country one of the greatest benefits it could receive, and one 
 which the tyranny that succeeded has not dared to take away : it freed the peas- 
 antry from what remained of the bondage of serfdom, the labour rents ; decree- 
 ing compensation to the landlords at the expense of the state, and not at that of 
 the liberated peasants. 
 
 f Jones, pp. 63, 54.
 
 SLAVERY. 319 
 
 the emancipation of their slaves, is a different question from 
 the comparative effectiveness of free and slave labour to the 
 community. There has been much discussion of this ques- 
 tion as an abstract thesis ; as if it could possibly admit of 
 any universal solution. Whether slavery or free labour is 
 most profitable to the employer, depends on the wages of 
 the free labourer. These, again, depend on the numbers 
 of the labouring population, compared with the capital and 
 the land. Hired labour is generally so much more efficient 
 than slave labour, that the employer can pay a considerably 
 greater value in wages, than the maintenance of his slaves 
 cost him before, and yet be a gainer by the change : but 
 he cannot do this without limit. The decline of serfdom in 
 Europe, and its extinction in the Western nations, was 
 doubtless hastened by the changes which the growth of 
 population must have made in the pecuniary interests of 
 the master. As population pressed harder upon the land, 
 without any improvement in agriculture, the maintenance 
 of the serfs necessarily became more costly, and their labour 
 less valuable. "With the rate of wages such as it is in Ireland, 
 or in England (where in proportion to its efficiency, labour 
 is quite as cheap as in Ireland), no one can for a moment 
 imagine that slavery could be profitable. If the Irish 
 peasantry were slaves, their masters would be as willing, as 
 their landlords now are, to pay large sums merely to get 
 rid of them. In the rich and underpeopled soil of the West 
 India Islands, there is just as little doubt that the balance 
 of profits between free and slave labour was greatly on the 
 side of slavery, and that the compensation granted to the 
 slave-owners for its abolition was not more, perhaps even 
 less, than an equivalent for their loss. 
 
 More needs not to be said here on a cause so completely 
 judged and decided as that of slavery. It will be curious 
 to see how long the other nations possessing slave colonies 
 will be content to remain behind England in a matter of 
 such concernment both to justice, which decidedly is not at 
 present a fashionable virtue, and to philanthropy, which
 
 320 BOOK II. CHAPTER V. 3. 
 
 certainly is so.* Europe is far more inexcusable than 
 America in tolerating an enormity, of which she could rid 
 herself with so much greater ease. I speak of negro- 
 slavery, not of the servage of the Slavonic nations, who 
 have not yet advanced beyond a state of civilization corre- 
 sponding to the age of villenage in "Western Europe, and 
 who, to all appearance, will be indebted for their liberation 
 from this great evil, to the influence of the ideas of the 
 more advanced countries, rather than to the rapidity of 
 their own progress in improvement. 
 
 * Denmark has the honour of being the first Continental nation which fol- 
 lowed the example of England ; and the emancipation of the slaves was one of 
 the earliest acts of the heroic and calumniated Provisional Government of 
 France. The Dutch Government is now seriously engaged in the same beefi- 
 cent enterprise.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 OF PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 1. IN the regime of peasant properties, as in that of 
 slavery, the whole produce belongs to a single owner, and 
 the distinction of rent, profits, and wages, does not exist. 
 In all other respects, the two states of society are the 
 extreme opposites of each other. The one is the state of 
 greatest oppression and degradation to the labouring class. 
 The other is that in which they are the most uncontrolled 
 arbiters of their own lot. 
 
 The advantage, however, of small properties in land, is 
 one of the most disputed questions in the range of political 
 economy. On the Continent, though there are some dis- 
 sentients from the prevailing opinion, the benefit of having 
 a numerous proprietary population exists in the minds of 
 most people in the form of an axiom. But English authori- 
 ties are either unaware of the judgment of Continental 
 agriculturists, or are content to put it aside, on the plea of 
 their having no experience of larger properties in favour- 
 able circumstances : the advantage of large properties 
 being only felt where there are also large farms : and as 
 this, in arable districts, implies a greater accumulation of 
 capital than usually exists on the Continent, the great Con- 
 tinental estates, except in the case of grazing farms, are 
 mostly let out for cultivation in small portions. There is 
 some truth in this ; but the argument admits of being 
 retorted ; for if the Continent knows little, by experience, 
 of cultivation on a large scale and by large capital, the 
 21
 
 322 BOOK n. CHAPTER vi. 1. 
 
 generality of English writers are no better acquainted 
 practically with peasant proprietors, and have almost 
 always the most erroneous ideas of their social condition 
 and mode of life. Yet the old traditions even of England 
 are on the same side with the general opinion of the Con- 
 tinent. The " yeomanry " who were vaimted as the glory 
 of England while they existed, and have been so much 
 mourned over since they disappeared, were either small 
 proprietors or small farmers, and if they were mostly the 
 last, the character they bore for sturdy independence is the 
 more noticeable. There is a part of England, unfortunate- 
 ly a very small part, where peasant proprietors are still 
 common ; for such are the " statesmen " of Cumberland 
 and "Westmoreland, though they pay, I believe, generally 
 if not universally, certain customary dues, which, being 
 fixed, no more affect their characters of proprietors than the 
 land-tax does. There is but one voice, among those ac- 
 quainted with the country, on the admirable effects of this 
 tenure of land in those counties. No other agricultural 
 population in England could have furnished the originals 
 of Wordsworth's peasantry.* 
 
 * In Mr. Wordsworth's little descriptive work on the scenery of the Lakes, 
 he speaks of the upper part of the dales as having been for centuries " a perfect 
 republic of shepherds and agriculturists, proprietors, for the most part, of the 
 lands which they occupied and cultivated. The plough of each man was con- 
 fined to the maintenance of his own family, or to the occasional accommodation 
 of his neighbour. Two or three cows furnished each family with milk and 
 cheese. The chapel was the only edifice that presided over these dwellings, the 
 supreme head of this pure commonwealth ; the members of which existed in the 
 midst of a powerful empire, like an ideal society, or an organized community, 
 whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which pro- 
 tected it. Neither high-born nobleman, knight, nor esquire was here; but 
 many of these humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that the land which 
 they walked over and tilled had for more than five hundred years been possessed 
 by men of their name and blood. . . . Corn was grown in these vales suffi- 
 cient upon each estate to furnish bread for each family, no more. The storms 
 and moisture of the climate induced them to sprinkle their upland property with 
 outhouses of native stone, as places of shelter for their sheep, where, in tempest- 
 uous weather, food was distributed to them. Every family spun from its own 
 flock the wool with which it was clothed ; a weaver was here and there found
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 323 
 
 The general system, however, of English cultivation, 
 affording no experience to render the nature and operation 
 of peasant properties familiar, and Englishmen being in 
 general profoundly ignorant of the agricultural economy of 
 other countries, the very idea of peasant proprietors is strange 
 to the English mind, and does not easily lind access to it. 
 Even the forms of language stand in the way : the familiar 
 designation for owners of land being " landlords," a term to 
 which " tenants " is always understood as a correlative. 
 "When, at the time of the famine, the suggestion of peasant 
 properties as a means of Irish improvement found its way 
 into parliamentary and newspaper discussions, there were 
 writers of pretension to whom the word " proprietor " was 
 so far from conveying any distinct idea, that they mistook 
 the small holdings of Irish cottier tenants for peasant 
 properties. The subject being so little understood, I think 
 it important, before entering into the theory of it, to do 
 something towards showing how the case stands as to matter 
 of fact ; by exhibiting, at greater length than would other- 
 wise be admissible, some of the testimony which exists res- 
 pecting the state of cultivation, and the comfort and happi- 
 ness of the cultivators, in those countries and parts of coun- 
 tries, in which the greater part of the land has neither land- 
 lord nor farmer, other than the labourer who tills the soil. 
 
 2. I lay no stress on the condition of North America, 
 where, as is well known, the land, wherever free from the 
 curse of slavery, is almost universally owned by the same 
 person who holds the plough. A country combining the 
 natural fertility of America with the knowledge and arts of 
 modern Europe, is so peculiarly circumstanced, that scarcely 
 
 among them, and the rest of their wants was supplied by the produce of the 
 yarn, which they carded and spun in their own houses, and carried to market 
 ither under their arms, or more frequently on packhorses, a small train taking 
 their way weekly down the valley, or over the mountains, to the most com- 
 modious town." A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North oj 
 England, 3rd edit. pp. 50 to 53 and 63 to 65.
 
 324 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 anything, except insecurity of property or a tyrannical gov- 
 ernment, could materially impair the prosperity of the in- 
 dustrious classes. I might, with Sisrnondi, insist more 
 strongly on the case of ancient Italy, especially Latium, that 
 Campagna which then swarmed with inhabitants in the 
 very regions which under a contrary regime have become 
 uninhabitable from malaria. But I prefer taking the evi- 
 dence of the same writer on things known to him by per- 
 sonal observation. 
 
 " C'est surtout la Suisse," says M. de Sismondi, " qu'il 
 faut parcourir, qu'il faut etudier, pour juger du bonheur des 
 paysans proprietaires. C'est la Suisse qu'il faut apprendre 
 a connaitre pour se convaincre que 1' agriculture pratiquee 
 par ceux-la meme qui en recueillent les fruits suffit pour 
 procurer une grande aisance a une population tres nom- 
 breuse; une grande independance de caractere, fruit de 
 1'independance des situations ; un grand commerce de con- 
 sommation, consequence du bien-etre de tous les habitans, 
 meme dans un pays dont le climat est rude, dont le sol est 
 mediocrement fertile, et ou les gelees tardives et 1'incon- 
 stance des saisons detruisent souvent 1'espoir du laboureur. 
 On ne saurait voir sans admiration ces maisons de bois du 
 moindre paysan, si vastes, si bien closes, si bien construites, 
 si couvertes de sculpture. Dans 1'interieur de grands corri- 
 dors degagent chaque chambre de la nombreuse famille ; 
 chaque chambre n'a qu'un lit, et il est abondamrnent 
 pourvu de rideaux, de couvertures, et du linge le plus 
 blanc; des meubles soignes 1'entourent; les armoires sont 
 remplies de linge, la laiterie est vaste, aeree, et d'une 
 nettete exquise ; sous le meme t-oit on trouve de grands ap- 
 provisionnemens de ble, de viande salee, de fromage et de 
 bois ; dans les etables on voit le betail le mieux soigne et le 
 plus beau de 1'Europe; le jardin est plante de fleurs, les 
 hommes comme les femmes sont chaudement et proprement 
 habilles, les dernieres conservent avec orgueil leur antique 
 costume ; tous portent sur leur visage 1'empreinte de la 
 vigueur et de la sante. Que d'autres nations vantent leur
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 325 
 
 opulence, la Suisse pourra toujours leur opposer avec 
 orgueil ses paysans." * 
 
 The same eminent writer thus expresses his opinion on 
 peasant proprietorship in general. 
 
 " Partout ou 1'on retrouve les paysans proprictaires, on 
 retrouve aussi cette aisance, cette securite, cette confiance 
 dans Pavenir, cette independance qui assurent en meme 
 temps le bonheur et la vertu. La paysan qui fait avec ses 
 enfans tout 1'ouvrage de son petit heritage, qui ne paie de 
 fermage a personne au-dessus de lui, ni de salaire 21 personne 
 au-dessous, qui regie sa production sur sa consommation, qui 
 mange son propre ble, boit son propre vin, se revet de son 
 chanvre et de ses laines, se soucie peu de connaitre les prix 
 du marche ; car il a peu a vendre et peu a acheter, et il n'est 
 jamais ruine par les revolutions du commerce. Loin de 
 craindre pour 1'avenir, il le voit s'embellir dans son espe- 
 rance ; car il met a profit pour ses enfans, pour les siecles 
 qui viendront, chacun des instans que ne requiert pas de lui 
 le travail de 1'annee. II lui a suffi de donner peu de mo- 
 mens de travail pour mettre en terre le noyau qui dans cent 
 ans sera un grand arbre, pour creuser 1'aqueduc qui sechera 
 a jamais son champ, pour former le conduit qui lui amenera 
 une source d'eau vive, pour ameliorer par des soins souvent 
 reputes mais derobes sur les instans perdus, toutes les especes 
 d'animaux et de vegetaux dont il s'entoure. Son petit patri- 
 moine est une vraiecaisse d'epargnes, toujours prete a rece- 
 voir tous ses petits profits, a utiliser tous ses momeus de 
 loisir. La puissance toujours agissante de la nature les 
 feconde, et les lui rend au centuple. Le paysan a vivement 
 le sentiment dece bonheur attache a la condition de proprie- 
 taire. Aussi est-il toujours empresse d'acheter de la terre a 
 tout prix. II la paie plus qu'elle ne vaut, plus qu'elle ne 
 lui rendra peut-etre; mais combien n'a-t-il pas raison 
 d'estimer a un haut prix 1'avantage de placer desormais 
 toujours avantageusement son travail, sans etre oblige' de 
 
 * Etudes sur r Economic Politique, Eaaai III.
 
 326 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 1'offrir au rabais ; de trouver toujours an besoin son pain, 
 sans etre oblige de le payer a 1'enchere. 
 
 " Le paysan proprietaire est de tous les cultivatenrs celui 
 qui tire le plus de parti du sol ; parceque c'est celui qui 
 songe le plus a 1'avenir, tout comme celui qui a etc le plus 
 eclaire par 1'experience ; c'est encore lui qui met le inieux 
 a profit le travail humain, parceque repartissant ses occupa- 
 tions entre tous les membres de sa famille, il en reserve 
 pour tous les jours de 1'annee, de maniere a ce qu'il n'y ait 
 de chomage pour personne : de tous les cultivateurs il est le 
 plus heureux, et en meme temps, sur un espace donne, la 
 terre ne nourrit bien, sans s'epuiser, et n'occupe jamais tant 
 d'habitans que lorsqu'ils sont proprietaires ; enfin de tous 
 les cultivateurs le paysan proprietaire est celui qui donne le 
 plus d'encouragement au commerce et a 1'industrie, parce- 
 qu'il est le plus riche." * 
 
 This picture of unwearied assiduity, and what may be 
 called affectionate interest in the land, is borne out in regard 
 to the more intelligent Cantons of Switzerland by English 
 observers. " In walking anywhere in the neighbourhood of 
 Zurich," says Mr. Inglis, " in looking to the right or to the 
 left, one is struck with the extraordinary industry of the 
 inhabitants ; and if we learn that a proprietor here has a 
 
 * And in another work (Nouveaux Principes d 1 Economic Politique, liv. iii. 
 ch. 3,) he says: "Quand on traverse la Suisse presqu'entiere, plusieurs pro- 
 vinces de France, d'ltalie, et d'Allemagne, il n'est pas besoin de demander, en 
 regardant chaque partie de terre, si elle appartient u un cultivateur proprietaire 
 ou a un fermier. Les soins bien entendus, les jouissances preparees au labou- 
 reur, la parure que la campagne a rejue de ses mains, indiquent bien vite le 
 premier. II est vrai qu'un gouvernement oppressif peut detruire 1'aisance et 
 abrutir 1'intelligence que devait donner la propriety, que I'impot peut enlever le 
 plus net du produit des champs, que I'insolence des agens du pouvoir peut 
 troubler la securite des paysans, que Pimpossibilite d'obtenir justice centre un 
 puissant voisin peut jeter le decouragement dans Tame, et que, dans le beau pays 
 qui a et6 rendu a Padministration du Roi de Sardaigne, un proprietaire porte 
 aussi bien qu'un journalier 1'uniforme de la misure." He is here speaking of 
 Savoy, where the peasants are generally proprietors ; and according to authentic 
 accounts, extremely miserable. But, as M. de Sismondi continues, " On a beau 
 se conformer a une seule des regies de 1'economie politique, elle ne puet pas 
 operer le bien a elle seule ; du moins elle diminue le mal."
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 327 
 
 return of ten per cent, we are inclined to say, ' he deserves 
 it.' I speak at present of country labour, though I believe 
 that in every kind of trade also, the people of Zurich are 
 remarkable for their assiduity ; but in the industry they 
 show in the cultivation of their land I may safely say they 
 are unrivalled. "When I used to open my casement be 
 tween four and five in the morning to look out upon the 
 lake and the distant Alps, I saw the labourer in the fields ; 
 and when I returned from an evening walk, long after 
 sunset, as late, perhaps, as half-past eight, there was the 
 labourer, mowing his grass, or tying up his vines. ... It 
 is impossible to look at a field, a garden, a hedging, scarcely 
 even a tree, a flower, or a vegetable, without perceiving 
 proofs of the extreme care and industry that are bestowed 
 upon the cultivation of the soil. If for example, a path 
 leads through, or by the side of a field of grain, the corn is 
 not, as in England, permitted to hang over the path, ex- 
 posed to be pulled or trodden down by every passer by ; it 
 is everywhere bounded by a fence, stakes are placed at in- 
 tervals of about a yard, and, about two or three feet from 
 the ground, boughs of trees are passed longitudinally along. 
 If you look into a field towards evening, where there are 
 large beds of cauliflower or cabbage, you will find that 
 every single plant has been watered. In the gardens, which 
 around Zurich are extremely large, the most punctilious 
 care is evinced in every production that grows. The vege- 
 tables are planted with seemingly mathematical accuracy, 
 not a single weed is to be seen, not a single stone. Plants 
 are not earthed up as with us, but are planted in a small 
 hollow, into each of which a little manure is put, and each 
 plant is watered daily. Where seeds are sown, the earth 
 directly above is broken into the finest powder ; every shrub, 
 every flower is tied to a stake, and where there is wall-fruit 
 a trellice is erected againsf the wall, to which the boughs 
 are fastened, and there is not a single thing that has not its 
 appropriate resting-pace." * 
 
 * Switzerland, the South of France, and the Pyrenees, in 1830. By H. D. 
 Inglis. Vol. i. ch. 2.
 
 328 BOOK II. CHAPTER VL 2. 
 
 Of one of the remote valleys of the High Alps the same 
 writer thus expresses himself: * 
 
 " In the whole of the Engadine the land belongs to the 
 peasantry, who, like the inhabitants of every other place 
 where this state of things exist, vary greatly in the extent 
 of their possessions. . . . Generally speaking, an Engadine 
 peasant lives entirely upon the produce of his land, with 
 the exception of the few articles of foreign growth required 
 in his family, such as coffee, sugar, and wine. Flax is grown, 
 prepared, spun, and woven, without ever leaving his house. 
 He has also his own wool, which is converted into a blue 
 coat without passing through the hands of either the dyer 
 or the tailor. The country is incapable of greater cultiva- 
 tion than it has received. All has been done for it that 
 industry and an extreme love of gain can devise. There is 
 not a foot of waste land in the Engadine, the lowest part 
 of which is not much lower than the top of Snowdon. 
 Wherever grass will grow, there it is ; wherever a rock will 
 bear a blade, verdure is seen upon it ; wherever an ear of 
 rye will ripen, there it is to be found. Barley and oats have 
 also their appropriate spots ; and wherever it is possible to 
 ripen a little patch of wheat, the cultivation of it is at- 
 tempted. In no country in Europe will be found so few 
 poor as in the Engadine. In the village of Suss, which 
 contains about six hundred inhabitants, there is not a single 
 individual who has not wherewithal to live comfortably, 
 not a single individual who is indebted to others for one 
 morsel that he eats." 
 
 Notwithstanding the general prosperity of the Swiss 
 peasantry, this total absence of pauperism, and (it may 
 almost be said) of poverty, cannot be predicated of the 
 whole country ; the largest and richest canton, that of 
 Berne, being an example of the contrary ; for although, in 
 the parts of it which are occupied by peasant proprietors, 
 their industry is as remarkable and their ease and comfort 
 as conspicuous as elsewhere, the canton is burthened with 
 
 * Ibid. ch. 8 and 10.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 329 
 
 a numerous pauper population, through the operation of 
 the worst regulated system of poor-law administration in 
 Europe, except that of England before the new Poor Law.* 
 Nor is Switzerland in some other respects a favourable ex- 
 ample of all that peasant properties might effect. There 
 exists a series of statistical accounts of the Swiss cantons, 
 drawn up mostly with great care and intelligence, contain- 
 ing detailed information, of tolerably recent date, respect- 
 ing the condition of the land and of the people. From these, 
 the subdivision appears to be often so minute, that it can 
 hardly be supposed not to be excessive : and the indebted- 
 ness of the proprietors in the flourishing canton of Zurich 
 " borders," as the writer expresses it, " on the incredible ; " f 
 so that " only the intensest industry, frugality, temperance, 
 and complete freedom of commerce enable them to stand 
 their ground." Yet the general conclusion deducible from 
 these books is that since the beginning of the century, and 
 concurrently with the subdivision of many great estates 
 which belonged to nobles or to the cantonal governments, 
 there has been a striking and rapid improvement in almost 
 every department of agriculture, as well as in the houses, 
 the habits, and the food of the people. The writer of the 
 account of Thiirgau goes so far as to say, that since the 
 subdivision of the feudal estates into peasant properties, it 
 
 * There have been considerable changes in the Poor Law administration and 
 legislation of the Canton of Berne since the sentence in the text was written. 
 But I am 1 not sufficiently acquainted with the nature and operation of these 
 changes to speak more particularly of them here. 
 
 f " Eine an das unglaubliche granzende Schujdenmasse " is the expression. 
 (Historiwh-geographiich-statische Gemdlde der Schweiz. Erster Theil. Der 
 Kanton Zurich. Von Gerold Meyer Von Knonau, 1834, pp. 80-1.) There are 
 villages in Zurich, he adds, in which there is not a single property unmortgaged. 
 It does not, however, follow that each individual proprietor is deeply involved 
 because the aggregate mass of incumbrances is large. In the canton of Schaff- 
 hausen, for instance, it is stated that the landed properties are almost all mort- 
 gaged, but rarely for more than one-half their registered value (Zwolftcr Theil. 
 Der Kanton Schaffhausen, von Edward Im-Thurn, 1840, p. 62,) and the mort- 
 gages are often for the improvement and enlargement of the estate. (Sieben- 
 zehnter Theil. Der Kanton Thurgau, von J. A. Pupikofer, 1837, p. 209.)
 
 330 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 3. 
 
 is not uncommon for a third or a fourth part of an estate to 
 produce as much grain, and support as many head of cattle, 
 as the whole estate did before.* 
 
 3. One of the countries in which peasant proprietors 
 are of oldest date, and most numerous in proportion to the 
 population, is Norway. Of the social and economical con- 
 dition of that country an interesting account has been given 
 by Mr. Laing. His testimony in favour of small landed 
 properties both there and elsewhere, is given with great 
 decision. I shall quote a few passages. 
 
 " If small proprietors are not good fanners, it is not from 
 the same cause here which we are told makes them so in 
 Scotland indolence and want of exertion. The extent to 
 which irrigation is carried on in these glens and valleys 
 shows a spirit of exertion and co-operation " (I request par- 
 ticular attention to this point), " to which the latter can 
 show nothing similar. Hay being the principal winter sup- 
 port of live stock, and both it and corn, as well as potatoes, 
 liable, from the shallow soil and powerful reflection of sun- 
 shine from the rocks, to be burnt and withered up, the 
 greatest exertions are made to bring water from the head 
 of each glen, along such a level as will give the command 
 of it to each farmer at the head of his fields. This is done 
 by leading it in wooden troughs (the half of a tree roughly 
 scooped) from the highest perennial stream among the hills, 
 through woods, across ravines, along the rocky, often per- 
 pendicular, sides of the glens, and from this main trough 
 giving a lateral one to each farmer in passing the head of 
 his farm. He distributes this supply by moveable troughs 
 among his fields ; and at this season waters each rig succes- 
 sively with scoops like those used by bleachers in watering 
 
 * "Denselben Erfolg hat die Vertheilung der ehemaligen grossen Lehenhofe 
 in mehrere kleinere eigenthiimliche Bauerngiiter. Es ist gar nicht selten, dass 
 ein Drittheil oder Viertheil eines solchen Hofes nun eben so viel Getreide liefert 
 und eben so viel Stuck Vieh unterhalt als vormala der ganze Hof." (Ttturgau, 
 p. 72.)
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 331 
 
 cloth, laying his trough between every two rigs. One would 
 not believe, without seeing it, how very large an extent of 
 land is traversed expeditiously by these artificial showers. 
 The extent of the main troughs is very great. In one glen 
 I walked ten miles, and found it troughed on both sides : 
 on one, the chain is continued down the main valley for forty 
 miles.* Those may be bad farmers who do such things ; 
 but they are not indolent, nor ignorant of the principle of 
 working in concert, and keeping up establishments for com- 
 mon benefit. They are undoubtedly, in these respects, far 
 in advance of any community of cottars in our Highland 
 glens. They feel as proprietors, who receive the advantage 
 of their own exertions. The excellent state of the roads and 
 bridges is another proof that the country is inhabited by 
 people who have a common interest to keep them under 
 repair. There are no tolls." f 
 
 On the effects of peasant proprietorship on the Continent 
 generally, the same writer expresses himself as follows.:}: 
 
 " If we listen to the large farmer, the scientific agricul- 
 turist, the " [English] " political economist, good farming 
 must perish with large farms; the very idea that good farm- 
 ing can exist, unless on large farms cultivated with great 
 capital, they hold to be absurd. Draining, manuring, eco- 
 
 * Reichensperger (Die Ayrarfrage) quoted by Mr. Kay (" Social Condition 
 and Education of the People in England and Europe,") observes, "that the parts 
 of Europe where the most extensive and costly plans for watering the meadows 
 and lands have been carried out in the greatest perfection, are those where the 
 lands are very much subdivided, and are in the hands of small proprietors. He 
 instances the plain round Valencia, several of the southern departments of 
 France, particularly those of Vaucluse and Bouches du Rhone, Lombardy, Tus- 
 cany, the districts of Sienna, Lucca, and Bergamo, Piedmont, many parts of 
 Germany, &c., in all which parts of Europe the land is very much subdivided 
 among small proprietors. In all these parts great and expensive systems and 
 plans of general irrigation have been carried out, and are now being supported, 
 by the small proprietors themsdves; thus showing how they are able to accom- 
 plish, by means of combination, work requiring the expenditure of great quanti 
 ties of capital." Kay, i. 126. 
 
 f Laiug, Journal of a Residence in Norway, pp. 36, 37. 
 
 J Note* of a Traveller, pp. 299 et seqq.
 
 332 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 3. 
 
 nomical arrangement, cleaning the land, regular rotations, 
 valuable stock and implements, all belong exclusively to 
 large farms, worked by large capital, arid by hired labour. 
 This reads very well ; but if we raise our eyes from their 
 books to their fields, and coolly compare what we see in 
 the best districts farmed in large farms, with what we see 
 in the best districts farmed in small farms, we see, and there 
 is no blinking the fact, better crops on the ground in Flan- 
 ders, East Friesland, Holstein, in short, on the whole line 
 of the arable land of equal quality of the Continent, from 
 the Sound to Calais, than we see on the line of British coast 
 opposite to this line, and in the same latitudes, from the 
 Frith of Forth all round to Dover. Minute labour on small 
 portions of arable ground gives evidently, in equal soils and 
 climate, a superior productiveness, where these small por- 
 tions belong in property, as in Flanders, Holland, Friesland, 
 and Ditmarsch in Holstein, to the farmer. It is not pre- 
 tended by our agricultural writers, that our large farmers, 
 even in Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, or the Lothians, ap- 
 proach to the garden-like cultivation, attention to manures, 
 drainage, and clean state of the land, or in productiveness 
 from a small space of soil not originally rich, which distin- 
 guish the small farmers of Flanders, or their system. In 
 the best-farmed parish in Scotland or England, more land 
 is wasted in the corners and borders of the fields of large 
 farms, in the roads through them, unnecessarily wide, be- 
 cause they are bad, and bad because they are wide, in neg- 
 lected commons, waste spots, useless belts, and clumps of 
 sorry trees, and such unproductive areas, than would main- 
 tain the poor of the parish, if they were all laid together 
 and cultivated. But large capital applied to farming is of 
 course only applied to the very best of the soils of a coun- 
 try. It cannot touch the small unproductive spots which 
 require more time and labour to fertilize them than is con- 
 istent with a quick return of capital. But although hired 
 time and labour cannot be applied beneficially to such cul- 
 tivation, the owner's own^ time and labour may. He is
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. JJ33 
 
 svorking for no higher terms at first from his land than a 
 bare living. But in the course of generations fertility and 
 value are produced ; a better living, and even very im- 
 proved processes of husbandry, are attained. Furrow 
 draining, stall feeding all summer, liquid manures, are uni- 
 versal in the husbandry of the small farms of Flanders, 
 Lombardy, Switzerland. Our most improving districts 
 under large farms are but beginning to adopt them. Dairy 
 husbandry even, and the manufacture of the largest cheeses 
 by the co-operation of many small farmers,* the mutual as- 
 surance of property against fire and hail-storms, by the co- 
 operation of small farmers the most scientific and expen- 
 sive of all agricultural operations in modern times, the 
 manufacture of beet-root sugar the supply of the European 
 markets with flax and hemp, by the husbandry of small 
 farmers the abundance of legumes, fruits, poultry, in the 
 usual diet even of the lowest classes abroad, and the total 
 want of such variety at the tables even of our middle classes, 
 and this variety and abundance essentially connected with 
 the husbandry of small farmers all these are features in 
 
 * The manner in which the Swiss peasants combine to carry on cheese- 
 making by thMr united capital deserves to be noted. " Each parish in Switzer- 
 land hires a m. i, generally from the district of Gruyere in the canton of Frey- 
 burg, to take care of the herd, and make the cheese. One cheeseman, one 
 pressman or assistant, and one cowherd, are considered necessary for every forty 
 cows. The owners of the cows get credit each of them, in a book daily, for the 
 quantity of milk given by each cow. The cheeseman and his assistants milk the 
 cows, put the milk all together, and make cheese of it, and at the end of the 
 season each owner receives the weight of cheese proportionable to the quantity 
 of milk his cows have delivered. By this co-operative plan, instead of the 
 small-sized unmarketable cheeses only, which each could produce out of his 
 three or four cows' milk, he has the same weight in large marketable cheese 
 superior in quality, because made by people who attend to no other business. 
 The cheeseman and his assistants are paid so much per head of the cows, in 
 money or in cheese, or sometimes they hire the cows, and pay the owners in 
 money or cheese." Note* of a Traveller, p. 351. A similar system exists in the 
 French Jura. See, for full details, Lavergne, Economic Rurale de la France, 
 2nd ed., 139 et seqq. One of the most remarkable points in this interesting case 
 of combination of labour, is the confidence which it supposes, and which experi- 
 ence must justify, in the integrity of the persons employed.
 
 334 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 4. 
 
 the occupation of a country by small proprietor-farmers, 
 which must make the inquirer pause before he admits the 
 dogma of our land doctors at home, that large farms worked 
 by hired labour and great capital can alone bring out the 
 greatest productiveness of the soil and furnish the greatest 
 supply of the necessaries and conveniences of life to the in- 
 habitants of a country." 
 
 4. Among the many flourishing regions of Germany 
 in which peasant properties prevail, I select the Palatinate, 
 for the advantage of quoting, from an English source, the 
 results of recent personal observation of its agriculture and 
 its people. Mr. Howitt, a writer whose habit it is to see 
 all English objects and English socialities en beau, and who, 
 in treating of the Rhenish peasantry, certainly does not 
 underrate the rudeness of their implements, and the inferi- 
 ority of their ploughing, nevertheless shows that under the 
 invigorating influence of the feelings of proprietorship, they 
 make up for the imperfections of their apparatus by the in- 
 tensity of their application. " The peasant harrows and 
 clears his land till it is in the nicest order, and it is admir- 
 able to see the crops which he obtains." * u The peasants f 
 are the great and ever-present objects of country life. They 
 are the great population of the country, because they them- 
 selves are the possessors. This country is, in fact, for the 
 most part, in the hands of the people. It is parcelled out 
 among the multitude. . . . The peasants are not, as with 
 us, for the most part, totally cut off* from property in the 
 soil they cultivate, totally dependent on the labour afforded 
 by others they are themselves the proprietors. It is, per- 
 haps, from this cause that they are probably the most in- 
 dustrious peasantry in the world. They labour busily, early 
 and late, because they feel that they are labouring for them- 
 selves. . . . The German peasants work hard, but they 
 have no actual want. Everyman has his house, his orchard, 
 his roadside trees, commonly so heavy with fruit, that he is 
 
 * Rural and Domestic Life of Germany, p. 27. f Ibid. p. 40.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 335 
 
 obliged to prop and secure them all ways, or they would be 
 torn to pieces. He has his corn-plot, his plot for mangel- 
 wurzel, for hemp, and so on. He is his own master ; and 
 he, and every member of his family, have the strongest 
 motives to labour. You see the effect of this in that unre- 
 mitting diligence which is beyond that of the whole world 
 besides, and his economy, which is still greater. The Ger- 
 mans, indeed, are not so active and lively as the English. 
 You never see them in a bustle, or as though they meant 
 to knock off a vast deal in a little time. . . . They are, 
 on the contrary, slow, but for ever doing. They plod on 
 from day to day, and year to year the most patient, un- 
 tirable, and persevering of animals. The English peasant 
 is so cut off from the idea of property, that he comes habitu- 
 ally to look upon it as a thing from which he is warned by 
 the laws of the large proprietors, and becomes, in conse- 
 quence, spiritless, purposeless. . . . The German bauer, 
 on the contrary, looks on the country as made for him and 
 hi* fellow-men. He feels himself a man ; he has a stake 
 in the country, as good as that of the bulk of his neighbours ; 
 no man can threaten him with ejection, or the workhouse, 
 so long as he is active and economical. He walks, therefore, 
 with a bold step ; he looks you in the face with the air of a 
 freeman, but of a respectful one." 
 
 Of their industry, the same writer thus further speaks : 
 " There is not an hour of the year in which they do not 
 find unceasing occupation. In the depth of winter, when 
 the weather permits them by any means to get out of doors, 
 they are always finding something to do. They carry out 
 their manure to their lands while the frost is in them. If 
 there is not frost, they are busy cleaning ditches and felling 
 old fruit trees, or such as do not bear well. Such of them 
 as are too poor to lay in a sufficient stock of wood, find 
 plenty of work in ascending into the mountainous woods, 
 and bringing thence fuel. It would astonish the English 
 common people to see the intense labour with which the 
 Germans earn their firewood. In the depth of frost and
 
 336 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 4. 
 
 snow, go into any of their hills and woods, and there you 
 find them hacking up stumps, cutting off branches, and 
 gathering, by all means which the official wood-police will 
 allow, boughs, stakes, and pieces of wood, which they con- 
 vey home with the most incredible toil and patience." * 
 After a description of their careful and laborious vineyard 
 culture, he continues,! " In England, with its great quan- 
 tity of grass lands, and its large farms, so soon as the grain 
 is in, and the fields are shut up for hay grass, the country 
 seems in a comparative state of rest and quiet. But here 
 they are everywhere, and for ever, hoeing and mowing, 
 .planting and cutting, weeding and gathering. They have 
 a succession of crops like a market-gardener. They have 
 their carrots, poppies, hemp, flax, saintfoin, lucerne, rape, 
 colewort, cabbage, rotabaga, black turnips, Swedish and 
 white turnips, teazles, Jerusalem artichokes, mangel-wurzel, 
 parsnips, kidney-beans, field-beans, and peas, vetches, Indian 
 corn, buckwheat, madder for the manufacturer, potatoes, 
 their great crop of tobacco, millet all, or the greater part, 
 under the family management, in their own family allot- 
 ments. They have had these things first to sow, many of 
 them to transplant, to hoe, to weed, to clear off insects, to 
 top ; many of them to mow and gather in successive crops. 
 They have their water-meadows, of which kind almost all 
 their meadows are, to flood, to mow, and reflood ; water- 
 courses to reopen and to make anew : their early fruits to 
 gather, to bring to market with their green crops of vege- 
 tables ; their cattle, sheep, calves, foals, most of them prison- 
 ers, and poultry to look after ; their vines, as they shoot 
 rampantly in the summer heat, to prune, and thin out the 
 leaves when they are too thick : and any one may imagine 
 what a scene of incessant labour it is." 
 
 This interesting sketch, to the general truth of which any 
 observant traveller in that highly cultivated and populous 
 region can bear witness, accords with the more elaborate 
 delineation by a distinguished inhabitant, Professor Eau, in 
 
 * Rural and Domestic Life of Germany, p. 44. f Ibid. p. 50.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 337 
 
 his little treatise " On the Agriculture of the Palatinate. " * 
 Dr. Rau bears testimony not only to the industry, but to 
 the skill and intelligence of the peasantry ; their judicious 
 employment of manures, and excellent rotation of crops ; 
 the progressive improvement of their agriculture for gen- 
 erations past, and the spirit of further improvement which 
 is still active. The indefatigableness of the country people, 
 who may be seen in activity all the day and all the year, 
 and are never idle, because they make a good distribution of 
 their labours, and find for every interval of time a suitable 
 occupation, is as well known as their zeal is praiseworthy in 
 turning to use every circumstance which presents itself, in 
 seizing upon every useful novelty which offers, and even in 
 searching out new and advantageous methods. One easily 
 perceives that the peasant of this district has reflected much 
 on his occupation : he can give reasons for his modes of 
 proceeding, even if those reasons are not always tenable ; he 
 is as exact an observer of proportions as it is possible to be 
 from memory, without the aid of figures : he attends to 
 such general signs of the times as appear to augur him either 
 benefit or harm. " f 
 
 The experience of all other parts of Germany is similar. 
 " In Saxony, " says Mr. Kay, " it is a notorious fact, that 
 during the last thirty years, and since the peasants became 
 the proprietors of the land, there has been a rapid and con- 
 tinual improvement in the condition of the houses, in the 
 manner of living, in the dress of the peasants, and particu- 
 larly in the culture of the land. I have twice walked through 
 that part of Saxony called Saxon Switzerland, in company 
 with a German guide, and on purpose to see the state of the 
 villages and of the farming, and I can safely challenge con- 
 tradiction when I affirm that there is no farming in all 
 Europe superior to the laboriously careful cultivation of the 
 valleys of that part of Saxony. There, as in the cantons 
 
 * Ueber die Landwirthxchaft der Rheinpfalz^ ttnd insbesotidere in der Heidcl- 
 beryer Oegend. Von D. Karl Heinrich Rau. Heidelberg, 1880. 
 f Rau, pp. 15, It;.
 
 338 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 4. 
 
 of Berne, Yaud, and Zurich, and in the Rhine provinces, 
 the farms are singularly flourishing. They are kept in 
 beautiful condition, and are always neat and well managed. 
 The ground is cleared as if it were a garden. No hedges 
 or brushwood encumber it. Scarcely a rush or thistle or a 
 bit of rank grass is to be seen. The meadows are well 
 watered every spring with liquid manure, saved from the 
 drainings of the farm yards. The grass is so free from 
 weeds that the Saxon meadows reminded me more of Eng- 
 lish lawns than of anything else I had seen. The peas- 
 ants endeavour to outstrip 'one another in the quantity and 
 quality of the produce, in the preparation of the ground, and 
 in the general cultivation of their respective portions. All 
 the little proprietors are eager to find out how to farm so as 
 to produce the greatest results ; they diligently seek after 
 improvements ; they send their children to the agricultural 
 schools in order to fit them to assist their fathers ; and each 
 proprietor soon adopts a new improvement introduced by 
 any of his neighbours." * If this be not overstated, it denotes 
 a state of intelligence very different not only from that of 
 English labourers but of English farmers. 
 
 Mr. Kay's book, published in 1850, contains a mass of 
 evidence gathered from observation and inquiries in many 
 different parts of Europe, together with attestations from 
 many distinguished writers, to the beneficial effects of peas- 
 ant properties. Among the testimonies which he cites 
 respecting their effect on agriculture, I select the follow- 
 ing. 
 
 " Reichensperger, himself an inhabitant of that part of 
 Prussia where the land is the most subdivided, has pub- 
 lished a long and very elaborate work to show the admirable 
 consequences of a system of freeholds in land. He ex- 
 
 * The Social Condition and Education of the People in England and 
 Europe ; showing the results of the Primary Schools, and of the division of 
 Landed Property in Foreign Countries. By Joseph Kay, Esq., M.A., Barrister- 
 at-Law, and late Travelling Bachelor of the University of Cambridge. Vol. i 
 pp. 138-40.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 339 
 
 presses a very decided opinion that not only are the gross 
 products of any given number of acres held and cultivated 
 by small or peasant proprietors, greater than the gross pro- 
 ducts of an equal number of acres held by a few great pro- 
 prietors, and cultivated by tenant farmers, but that the net 
 products of the former, after deducting all the expenses of 
 cultivation, are also greater than the net products of the 
 
 latter He mentions one fact which seems to prove that 
 
 the fertility of the land in countries where the properties are 
 small, must be rapidly increasing. He says that the price 
 of the land which is divided into small properties in the 
 Prussian Rhine provinces, is much higher, and has been 
 rising much more rapidly, than the price of land on the great 
 estates. He and Professor Rau both say that this rise in the 
 price of the small estates would have ruined the more recent 
 purchasers, unless the productiveness of the small estates 
 had increased in at least an equal proportion ; and as the 
 small proprietors have been gradually becoming more and 
 more prosperous notwithstanding the increasing prices they 
 have paid for their land, he argues, with apparent justness, 
 that this would seem to show that not only the gross profits 
 of the small estates, but the net profits also have been grad- 
 ually increasing, and that the net profits per acre, of land, 
 when farmed by small proprietors, are greater than the net 
 profits per acre of land farmed by a great proprietor. He 
 says, with seeming truth, that the increasing price of land in 
 the small estates cannot be the mere effect of competition, 
 or it would have diminished the profits and the prosperity of 
 the small proprietors, and that this result has not followed 
 the rise. 
 
 " Albrecht Thaer, another celebrated German writer on 
 the different systems of agriculture, in one of his later works 
 (Grundsatze der rationellen Landwirthschaft) expresses his 
 decided conviction, that the nrt produce of land is greater 
 when farmed by small proprietors than when farmed by great 
 proprietors or their tenants. . . . This opinion of Thaer is all 
 the more remarkable, as, during the early part of his life, he
 
 340 BOOK n - CHAPTER VI. 5. 
 
 was very strongly in favour of the English system of great 
 estates and great farms. " 
 
 Mr. Kay adds from his own observation, " The peasant 
 farming of Prussia, Saxony, Holland, and Switzerland is the 
 most perfect and economical farming I have ever witnessed 
 in any country." * 
 
 5. But the most decisive example in opposition to the 
 English prejudice against cultivation by peasant proprietors, 
 is the case of Belgium. The soil is originally one of the 
 worst in Europe. u The provinces, " says Mr. M'Culloch,f 
 " of West and East Flanders, and Hainault, form a far 
 stretching plain, of which the luxuriant vegetation indicates 
 the indefatigable care and labour bestowed upon its cultiva- 
 tion ; for the natural soil consists almost wholly of barren 
 sand, and its great fertility is entirely the result of very skilful 
 management and judicious application of various manures." 
 There exists a carefully prepared and comprehensive treatise 
 on Flemish Husbandry, in the Farmer's Series of the Society 
 for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The writer ob- 
 serves,^: that the Flemish agriculturists "seem to want 
 nothing but a space to work upon : whatever be the quality 
 or texture of the soil, in time they will make it produce 
 something. The sand in the Campine can be compared to 
 nothing but the sands on the sea-shore, which they probably 
 were originally. It is highly interesting to follow step by 
 step the progress of improvement. Here you see a cottage 
 and rude cow-shed erected on a spot of the most unprom- 
 ising aspect. The loose white sand blown into irregular 
 mounds is only kept together by the roots of the heath: a 
 small spot only is levelled and surrounded by a ditch : part 
 of this is covered with young broom, part is planted with 
 potatoes, and perhaps a small patch of diminutive clover may 
 show itself: " but manures, both solid and liquid, are collect- 
 ing, " and this is the nucleus from which, in a few years, a 
 little farm will spread around. ... If there is no manure at 
 
 * Kay,i. 116-8. f Geographical Dictionary, art. " Belgium." \ Pp. 11-14.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 341 
 
 hand, the only thing that can be sown, on pure sand, at first, 
 is broom : this grows in the most barren soils ; in three years 
 it is fit to cut, and produces some return in fagots for the 
 bakers and brickmakers. The leaves which have fallen 
 have somewhat enriched the soil, and the fibres of the 
 roots have given a certain degree of compactness. It may 
 now be ploughed and sown with buckwheat, or even with rye 
 without manure. By the time this is reaped, some manure 
 may have been collected, and a regular course of cropping 
 may begin. As soon as clover and potatoes enable the 
 farmer to keep cows and ^nake manure, the improvement 
 goes on rapidly ; in a few years the soil undergoes a complete 
 change : it becomes mellow and retentive of moisture, and 
 enriched by the vegetable matter afforded by the decompo- 
 sition of the roots of clover and other plants. . . . After the 
 land has been gradually brought into a good state, and is 
 cultivated in a regular manner, there appears much less 
 difference between the soils which have been originally good, 
 and those which have been made so by labour and industry. 
 At least the crops in both appear more nearly alike at harvest, 
 than is the case in soils of different qualities in other coun- 
 tries. This is a great proof of the excellency of the Flemish 
 system ; for it shows that the land is in a constant state of 
 improvement, and that the deficiency of the soil is compen- 
 sated by greater attention to tillage and manuring, especi- 
 ally the latter. 
 
 The people who labour thus intensely, because labouring 
 for themselves, have practised for centuries those principles 
 of rotation of crops and economy of manures, which in Eng- 
 land are counted among modern discoveries : and even now 
 the superiority of their agriculture, as a whole, to that of 
 England, is admitted by competent judges. "The culti- 
 vation of a poor light soil, or a moderate soil, " says the 
 writer last quoted,* " is generally superior in Flanders to 
 that of the most improved farms of the same kind in Britain. 
 We surpass the Flemish farmer greatly in capital, in varied 
 
 * flfmiah Husbandry, p. 3.
 
 34:2 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 5. 
 
 implements of tillage, in the choice and breeding of cattle 
 and sheep, " (though, according to the same authority,* they 
 are much " before us in the feeding of their cows, ") " and 
 the British farmer is in general a man of superior education 
 to the Flemish peasant. But in the minute attention to the 
 qualities of the soil, in the management and application of 
 manures of different kinds, in the judicious succession of 
 crops, and especially in the economy of land, so that every 
 part of it shall be in a constant state of production, we have 
 still something to learn from the Flemings, " and not from 
 an instructed and enterprising Fleming here and there, but 
 from the general practice. 
 
 Much of the most highly cultivated part of the country 
 consists of peasant properties, managed by the proprietors, 
 always either wholly or partly by spade industry. f " When 
 the land is cultivated entirely by the spade, and no horses 
 are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land, and 
 entirely fed on artificial grasses and roots. This mode of 
 cultivation is principally adopted in the Waes district, 
 where properties are very small. All the labour is done 
 by the different members of the family ; " children soon 
 beginning " to assist in various minute operations, accord- 
 ing to their age and strength, such as weeding, hoeing, feed- 
 ing the cows. If they can raise rye and wheat enough to 
 make their bread, and potatoes, turnips, carrots, and clover, 
 for the cows, they do well ; and the produce of the sale of 
 their rape-seed, their flax, their hemp, and their butter, after 
 deducting the expense of manure purchased, which is always 
 considerable, gives them a very good profit. Suppose the 
 whole extent of the land to be six acres, which is not an un- 
 common occupation, and which one man can manage ; " 
 then (after describing the cultivation), " if a man with his 
 wife and three young children are considered as equal to 
 three and a half grown up men, the family will require 
 thirty-nine bushels of grain, forty-nine bushels of potatoes, 
 
 * Ibid. p. 13. t Flemish Husbandry, pp. 73 et seq.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 343 
 
 a fat hog, and the butter and milk of one cow : an acre and 
 a half of land will produce the grain and potatoes, and allow 
 some corn to finish the fattening of the hog, which has the 
 extra buttermilk : another acre in clover, carrots, and pota- 
 toes, together with the stubble turnips, will more than feed 
 the cow ; consequently two and a half acres of land is suffi- 
 cient to feed this family, and the produce of the other three 
 and a half may be sold to pay the rent or the interest of 
 purchase-money, wear and tear of implements, extra manure, 
 and clothes for the family. But these acres are the most 
 profitable on the farm, for the hemp, flax, and colza are in- 
 cluded ; and by having another acre in clover and roots, a 
 second cow can be kept, and its produce sold. We have, 
 therefore, a solution of the problem, how a family can live 
 and thrive on six acres of moderate land." After showing 
 by calculation that this extent of land can be cultivated in 
 the most perfect manner by the family without any aid from 
 hired labour, the writer continues, " In a farm of ten acres 
 entirely cultivated by the spade, the addition of a man and 
 a woman to the members of the family will render all the 
 operations more easy ; and with a horse and cart to carry 
 out the manure, and bring home the produce, and occasion- 
 ally draw the harrows, fifteen acres may be very well culti- 
 vated. . . . Thus it will be seen," (this is the result of some 
 pages of details and calculations,*) " that by spade hus- 
 bandry, an industrious man with a small capital, occupying 
 only fifteen acres of good light land, may not only live and 
 bring up a family, paying a good rent, but may accumulate 
 a considerable sum in the course of his life." But the inde- 
 fatigable industry by which he accomplishes this, and of 
 which so large a portion is expended not in the mere culti- 
 vation, but in the improvement, for a distant return, of the 
 soil itself has that industry no connexion with not paying 
 rent ? Could it exist, without presupposing, at least, a vir- 
 tually permanent tenure ? 
 
 As to their mode of living, " the Flemish farmers and 
 
 * Flemish Husbandry, p. 81.
 
 344 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 8. 
 
 labourers live much more economically than the same class 
 in England : they seldom eat meat, except on Sundays and 
 in harvest : buttermilk and potatoes with brown bread is 
 their daily food." It is on this kind of evidence that Eng- 
 lish travellers, as they hurry through Europe, pronounce 
 the peasantry of every Continental country poor and miser- 
 able, its agricultural and social system a failure, and the 
 English the only regime under which labourers are well off. 
 It is, truly enough, the only regime under which labourers, 
 whether well off or not, never attempt to be better. So little 
 are English labourers accustomed to consider it possible that 
 a labourer should not spend all he earns, that they habitually 
 mistake the signs of economy for those of poverty. Observe 
 the true interpretation of the phenomena. 
 
 " Accordingly they are gradually acquiring capital, and 
 their great ambition is to have land of their own. They 
 eagerly seize every opportunity of purchasing a small farm, 
 and the price is so raised by competition, that land pays 
 little more than two per cent, interest for the purchase- 
 money. Large properties gradually disappear, and are 
 divided into small portions, which sell at a high rate. But 
 the wealth and industry of the population is continually in- 
 creasing, being rather diffused through the masses than ac- 
 cumulated in individuals." 
 
 With facts like these, known and accessible, it is not a 
 little surprising to find the case of Flanders referred to not 
 in recommendation of peasant properties, but as a warning 
 against them ; on no better ground than a presumptive ex- 
 cess of population, inferred from the distress which existed 
 among the peasantry of Brabant and East Flanders in the 
 disastrous year 1816-47. The evidence which I have cited 
 from a writer conversant with the subject, and having no 
 economical theory to support, shows that the distress, what- 
 ever may have been its severity, arose from no insufficiency 
 in these little properties to supply abundantly, in any ordi- 
 nary circumstances, the wants of all whom they have to 
 maintain. It arose from the essential condition to which
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 34.5 
 
 those are subject who employ land of their own in growing 
 their own food, namely, that the vicissitudes of the seasons 
 must be borne by themselves, and cannot, as in the case of 
 large farmers, be shifted from them to the consumer. When 
 we remember the season of 1846, a partial failure of all kinds 
 of grain, and an almost total one of the potato, it is no won- 
 der that in so unusual a calamity the produce of six acres, 
 half of them sown witli flax, hemp, or oil seeds, should fall 
 short of a year's provision for a family. But we are not to 
 contrast the distressed Flemish peasant with an English 
 capitalist who farms several hundred acres of land. If the 
 peasant were an Englishman, he would not be that capital- 
 ist, but a day labourer under a capitalist. And is there 
 no distress, in times of dearth, among day labourers ? Was 
 there none, that year, in countries where small proprietors 
 and small farmers are unknown ? I am aware of no reason 
 for believing that the distress was greater in Belgium, than 
 corresponds to the proportional extent of the failure of crops 
 compared with other countries.* 
 
 6. The evidence of the beneficial operation of peasant 
 properties in the Channel Islands is of so decisive a char- 
 acter, that I cannot help adding to the numerous citations 
 already made, part of a description of the economical con- 
 dition of those islands, by a writer who combines personal 
 observation with an attentive study of the information af- 
 forded by others. Mr. William Thornton, in his " Plea for 
 
 * As much of the distress lately complained of in Belgium, as partakes in 
 any degree of a permanent character, appears to be almost confined to the por- 
 tion of the population who carry on manufacturing labour, either by itself or in 
 conjunction with agricultural ; and to be occasioned by a diminished demand foi 
 Belgic manufactures. 
 
 To the preceding testimonies respecting Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium, 
 may be added the following from Niebuhr, respecting the Roman Campagna. In 
 a letter from Tivoli, he says, "Wherever you find hereditary farmers, or small 
 proprietors, there you also find industry and honesty. I believe that a man who 
 would employ a large fortune in establishing small freeholds might put an end to 
 robbery in the mountain districts." Life and Letters of Niebuhr, vol. ii. p. 149.
 
 346 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 6. 
 
 Peasant Proprietors," a book which by the excellence both 
 of its materials and of its execution, deserves to be regarded 
 as the standard work on that side of the question, speaks of 
 the island of Guernsey in the following terms : " Not even 
 in England is nearly so large a quantity of produce sent to 
 market from a tract of such limited extent. This of itself 
 might prove that the cultivators must be far removed above 
 poverty, for being absolute owners of all the produce raised 
 by them, they of course sell only what they do not them- 
 selves require. But the satisfactoriness of their condition 
 is apparent to every observer. ' The happiest community,' 
 says Mr. Hill, ' which it has ever been my lot to fall in with, 
 is to be found in this little island of Guernsey.' ' No mat- 
 ter,' says Sir George Head, ' to what point the traveller may 
 choose to bend his way, comfort everywhere prevails.' What 
 most surprises the English visitor in his first walk or drive 
 beyond the bounds of St. Peter's Port is the appearance of 
 the habitations with which the landscape is thickly studded. 
 Many of them are such as in his own country would belong 
 to persons of middle rank ; but he is puzzled to guess what 
 sort of people live in the others, which, though in general 
 not large enough for farmers, are almost invariably much 
 too good in every respect for day labourers. . . . Literally, 
 in the whole island, with the exception of a few fishermen's 
 huts, there is not one so mean as to be likened to the ordi- 
 nary habitation of an English farm labourer. ... ' Look,' 
 says a late Bailiff of Guernsey, Mr. De L'Isle Brock, < at the 
 hovels of the English, and compare them with the cottages 
 of our peasantry.' . . . Beggars are utterly unknown. . . . 
 Pauperism, able-bodied pauperism at least, is nearly as rare 
 as mendicancy. The Savings Banks accounts also bear wit- 
 ness to the general abundance enjoyed by the labouring 
 classes of Guernsey. In the year 1841, there were in Eng- 
 land, out of a population of nearly fifteen millions, less than 
 700,000 depositors, or one in every twenty persons, and the 
 average amount of the deposits was 301. In Guernsey, in 
 the same year, out of a population of 26,000, the number of
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 347 
 
 depositors was 1920, and the average amount of the deposits 
 4:01." * The evidence as to Jersey and Alderney is of a 
 similar character. 
 
 Of the efficiency and productiveness of agriculture on 
 the small properties of the Channel Islands, Mr. Thornton 
 produces ample evidence, the result of which he sums up 
 as follows : " Thus it appears that in the two principal 
 Channel Islands, the agricultural population is, in the one 
 twice, and in the other three times, as dense as in Britain, 
 there being in the latter country only one cultivator to 
 twenty-two acres of cultivated land, while in Jersey there 
 is one to eleven, and in Guernsey one to seven acres. Yet 
 the agriculture of these islands maintains, besides cultiva- 
 tors, non-agricultural populations, respectively four and five 
 times as dense as that of Britain. This difference does not 
 arise from any superiority of soil or climate possessed by the 
 Channel Islands, for the former is naturally rather poor, and 
 the latter is not better than in the southern counties of Eng- 
 land. It is owing entirely to the assiduous care of the far- 
 mers, and to the abundant use of manure." f " In the year 
 1837," he says in another place, ^:" the average yield of 
 wheat in the large farms of England was only twenty-one 
 bushels, and the highest average for any one county was no 
 more than twenty-six bushels. The highest average since 
 claimed for the whole of England, is thirty bushels. In 
 Jersey, where the average size of farms is only sixteen acres, 
 the average produce of wheat per acre was stated by Inglis 
 in 1834 to be thirty-six bushels ; but it is proved by official 
 tables to have been forty bushels in the five years ending 
 with 1833. In Guernsey, where farms are still smaller, four 
 quarters per acre, according to Inglis, is considered a good, 
 but still a very common crop." " Thirty shillings an acre 
 would be thought in England a very fair rent for middling 
 land ; but in the Channel Islands, it is only very inferior 
 land that would not let for at least 4Z." 
 
 * A Plea for Peasant Proprietors. By William Thomas Thornton, pp. 99-104. 
 f Ibid. p. 38. J Ibid. p. 9. Ibid. p. 32.
 
 348 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 7. 
 
 7. It is from France, that impressions unfavourable 
 to peasant properties are generally drawn ; it is in France 
 that the system is so often asserted to have brought forth 
 its fruit in the most wretched possible agriculture, and to 
 be rapidly reducing, if not to have already reduced the peas- 
 antry, by subdivision of land, to the verge of starvation. 
 It is difficult to account for the general prevalence of im- 
 pressions so much the reverse of truth. The agriculture of 
 France was wretched and the peasantry in great indigence 
 before the Revolution. At that time they were not, so uni- 
 versally as at present, landed proprietors. There were, 
 however, considerable districts of France where the land, 
 even then, was to a great extent the property of the peasant- 
 ry, and among these were many of the most conspicuous 
 exceptions to the general bad agriculture and to the general 
 poverty. An authority, on this point, not to be disputed, is 
 Arthur Young, the inveterate enemy of small farms, the 
 coryphaeus of the modern English school of agriculturists ; 
 who yet, travelling over nearly the whole of France in 1787, 
 1788, and 1789, when he finds remarkable excellence of 
 cultivation, never hesitates to ascribe it to peasant property. 
 " Leaving Sauve," says he,* " I was much struck with a 
 large tract of land, seemingly nothing but huge rocks ; yet 
 most of it enclosed and planted with the most industrious 
 attention. Every man has an olive, a mulberry, an almond, 
 or a peach tree, and vines scattered among them ; so that 
 the whole ground is covered with the oddest mixture of 
 these plants and bulging rocks, that can be conceived. The 
 inhabitants of this village deserve encouragement for their 
 industry ; and if I were a French minister they should have 
 it. They would soon turn all the deserts around them into 
 gardens. Such a knot of active husbandmen, who turn 
 their rocks into scenes of fertility, because I suppose their 
 own, would do the same by the wastes, if animated by the 
 same omnipotent principle." Again : f " "Walk to Rosseri- 
 dal," (near Dunkirk) " where M. le Brun has an improve- 
 
 * Arthur Young's Travels in France, vol. i. p. 50. f Ibid. p. 88.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 349 
 
 ment on the Dunes, which he very obligingly showed me. 
 Between the town and that place is a great number of neat 
 little houses, built each with its garden, and one or two 
 fields enclosed, of most wretched blowing dune sand, natu- 
 rally as white as snow, but improved by industry. The 
 magic of property turns sand to gold." And again : * " Go- 
 ing out of Gange, I was surprised to find by far the greatest 
 exertion in irrigation which I had yet seen in France ; and 
 then passed by some steep mountains, highly cultivated in 
 terraces. Much watering at St. Lawrence. The scenery 
 very interesting to a farmer. From Gange, to the moun- 
 tain of relish ground which I crossed, the ride has been the 
 most interesting which I have taken in France ; the efforts 
 of industry the most vigorous ; the animation the most live- 
 ly. An activity has been here, that has swept away all 
 difficulties before it, and has clothed the very rocks with 
 verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask 
 the cause ; the enjoyment of property must have done it. 
 Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he 
 will turn it into a garden ; give him a nine years lease of a 
 garden, and he will convert it into a desert. 
 
 In his description of the country at the foot of the West- 
 ern Pyrenees, he speaks no longer from surmise, but from 
 knowledge. " Take f the road to Moneng, and come pre- 
 sently to a scene which was so new to me in France, that I 
 could hardly believe my own eyes. A succession of many 
 well-built, tight, and comfortable farming cottages built of 
 stone and covered with tiles ; each having its little garden, 
 inclosed by clipt thorn-hedges, with plenty of peach and 
 other fruit-trees, some fine oaks scattered in the hedges, and 
 young trees nursed up with so much care, that nothing but 
 the fostering attention of the owner could effect anything 
 like it. To every house belongs a farm, perfectly well en- 
 closed, with grass borders mown and neatly kept around the 
 corn-fields, with gates to pass from one enclosure to another. 
 
 * Arthur Young's Travel* in France, vol. i. p. 61. f Ibid. p. 66.
 
 350 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 7 
 
 There are some parts of England (where small yeomen stil! 
 remain) that resemble this country of Beam ; but we have 
 very little that is equal to what I have seen in this ride of 
 twelve miles from Pau to Moneng. It is all in the hands 
 of little proprietors, without the farms being so small as to 
 occasion a vicious and miserable population. An air of 
 neatness, warmth, and comfort breathes over the whole. It 
 is visible in their new built houses and stables ; in their 
 little gardens ; in their hedges ; in the courts before their 
 doors ; even in the coops for their poultry, and the sties for 
 their hogs. A peasant does not think of rendering his pig 
 comfortable, if his own happiness hang by the thread of a 
 nine years' lease. "We are now in Beam, within a few miles 
 of the cradle of Henry IV. Do they inherit these blessings 
 from that good prince ? The benignant genius of that good 
 monarch seems to reign still over the country ; each peasant 
 has the fowl in the pot" He frequently notices the excel- 
 lence of the agriculture of French Flanders, where the farms 
 " are all small, and much in the hands of little proprietors."* 
 In the Pays de Caux, also a country of small properties, the 
 agriculture was miserable; of which his explanation was 
 that it " is a manufacturing country, and farming is but a 
 secondary pursuit to the cotton fabric, which spreads over 
 the whole of it." f The same district is still a seat of manu- 
 factures, and a country of small proprietors, and is now, 
 whether we judge from the appearance of the crops or from 
 the official returns, one of the best cultivated in France. 
 In " Flanders, Alsace, and part of Artois, as well as on the 
 banks of the Garonne, France possesses a husbandry equal 
 to our own." \ Those countries, and a considerable part of 
 Quercy, " are cultivated more like gardens than farms 
 Perhaps they are too much like gardens, from the smallness 
 of properties." In those districts the admirable rotation 
 of crops, so long practised in Italy, but at that time general- 
 ly neglected in France, was already universal. " The rapid 
 
 * Young, pp. 322-4. f Ibid. p. 325. \ Ibid. vol. i. p. 357. Ibid. p. 364.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 351 
 
 succession of crops, the harvest of one being but the signal 
 of sowing immediately for a second," (the same fact which 
 strikes all observers in the valley of the Rhine,) " can 
 scarcely be carried to greater perfection : and this is a point, 
 perhaps, of all others the most essential to good husbandry, 
 when such crops are so justly distributed as we generally 
 find them in these provinces; cleaning and ameliorating 
 ones being made the preparation for such as foul and ex- 
 haust." 
 
 It must not, however, be supposed, that Arthur Young's 
 testimony on the subject of peasant properties is uniformly 
 favourable. In Lorraine, Champagne, and elsewhere, he 
 finds the agriculture bad, and the small proprietors very 
 miserable, in consequence, as he says, of the extreme sub- 
 division of the land. His opinion is thus summed up :* 
 " Before I travelled, I conceived that small farms, in prop- 
 erty, were very susceptible of good cultivation ; and that 
 the occupier of such, having no rent to pay, might be suffi- 
 ciently at his ease to work improvements, and carry on a 
 vigorous husbandry ; but what I have seen in France, has 
 greatly lessened my good opinion of them. In Flanders, I 
 saw excellent husbandry on properties of 30 to 100 acres ; 
 but we seldom find here such small patches of property as 
 are common in other provinces. In Alsace, and on the 
 Garonne, that is, on soils of such exuberant fertility as to 
 demand no exertions, some small properties also are well 
 cultivated. In Beam, I passed through a region of little 
 farmers, whose appearance, neatness, ease, and happiness 
 charmed me ; it was what property alone could, on a small 
 scale, effect ; but these were by no means contemptibly 
 small ; they are, as I judged by the distance from house to 
 house, from 40 to 80 acres. Except these, and a very few 
 other instances, I saw nothing respectable on small proper- 
 ties, except a most unremitting industry. Indeed, it is 
 necessary to impress on the reader's mind, that though the 
 husbandry I met with, in a great variety of instances on 
 
 * Young, vol. i. p. 412.
 
 352 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 7. 
 
 little properties, was as bad as can be well conceived, yet 
 the industry of the possessors was so conspicuous, and so 
 meritorious, that no commendations would be too great for 
 it. It was sufficient to prove that property in land is, of all 
 others, the most active instigator to severe and incessant 
 labour. And this truth is of such force and extent, that I 
 know no way so sure of carrying tillage to a mountain top, 
 as by permitting the adjoining villagers to acquire it in 
 property ; in fact, we see that in the mountains of Langue- 
 doc, &c., they have conveyed earth in baskets, on their 
 backs, to form a soil where nature had denied it." 
 
 The experience, therefore, of this celebrated agriculturist, 
 and apostle of la grande culture, may be said to be, that the 
 effect of small properties, cultivated by peasant proprietors, 
 is admirable when they are not too small : so small, namely, 
 as not fully to occupy the time and attention of the family ; 
 for he often complains, with great apparent reason, of the 
 quantity of idle time which the peasantry had on their 
 hands when the land was in very small portions, notwith- 
 standing the ardour with which they toiled to improve their 
 little patrimony, in every way which their knowledge or 
 ingenuity could suggest. He recommends, accordingly, that 
 a limit of subdivision should be fixed by law ; and this is 
 by no means an indefensible proposition in countries, if such 
 there are, where the morcellement, having already gone 
 farther than the state of capital and the nature of the staple 
 articles of cultivation render advisable, still continues pro- 
 gressive. That each peasant should have a patch of land, 
 even in full property, if it is not sufficient to support him in 
 comfort, is 'a system with all the disadvantages, and scarcely 
 any of the benefits, of small properties ; since he must either 
 live in indigence on the produce of his land, or depend as 
 habitually as if he had no landed possessions, on the wages 
 of hired labour : which, besides, if all the holdings surround- 
 ing him are of similar dimensions, he has little prospect of 
 finding. The benefits of peasant properties are conditional 
 on their not being too much subdivided ; that is, on their
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 353 
 
 not being required to maintain too many persons, in propor- 
 tion to the produce that can be raised from them by those 
 persons. The question resolves itself, like most questions 
 respecting the condition of the labouring classes, into one 
 of population. Are small properties a stimulus to undue 
 multiplication, or a check to it ?
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 CONTINUATION OF THE SAME SUBJECT. 
 
 1. BEFORE examining the influence of peasant proper- 
 ties on the ultimate economical interests of the labouring 
 class, as determined by the increase of population, let us 
 note the points respecting the moral and social influence of 
 that territorial arrangement, which may be looked upon as 
 established, either by the reason of the case, or by the facts 
 and authorities cited in the preceding chapter. 
 
 The reader new to the subject must have been struck 
 with the powerful impression made upon all the witnesses 
 to whom I have referred, by what a Swiss statistical writer 
 calls the " almost superhuman industry " of peasant pro- 
 prietors.* On this point at least, authorities are unanimous. 
 Those who have seen only one country of peasant proper- 
 ties, always think the inhabitants of that country the most 
 industrious in the world. There is as little doubt among 
 observers, with what feature in the condition of the peas- 
 antry this pre-eminent industry is connected. It is "the 
 magic of property " which, in the words of Arthur Young, 
 " turns sand into gold." The idea of property does not, 
 however, necessarily imply that there should be no rent, 
 any more than that there should be no taxes. It merely 
 implies that the rent should be a fixed charge, not liable to 
 be raised against the possessor by his own improvements, 
 or by the will of a landlord. A tenant at a quit-rent is, to 
 all intents and purposes, a proprietor ; a copyholder is not 
 
 * "7''<*rf GbermentcMiehe Flei**.'" Der Canton Schaff hausen (ut supra), p. 53.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 355 
 
 less so than a freeholder. What is wanted is permanent 
 possession on fixed terms. " Give a man the secure posses- 
 sion of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden ; give 
 him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it 
 into a desert." 
 
 The details which have been cited, and those, still more 
 minute, to be found in the same authorities, concerning the 
 habitually elaborate system of cultivation, and the thousand 
 devices of the peasant proprietor for making every superflu- 
 ous hour and odd moment instrumental to some increase in 
 the future produce and value of the land, will explain what 
 has been said in a previous chapter* respecting the far 
 larger gross produce which, with anything like parity of 
 agricultural knowledge, is obtained, from the same quality 
 of soil, on small farms, at least when they are the property 
 of the cultivator. The treatise on " Flemish husbandry " 
 is especially instructive respecting the means by which un- 
 tiring industry does more than outweigh inferiority of re- 
 sources, imperfection of implements, and ignorance of scien- 
 tific theories. The peasant cultivation of Flanders and 
 Italy is affirmed to produce heavier crops, in equal circum- 
 stances of soil, than the best cultivated districts of Scotland 
 and England. It produces them, no doubt, with an amount 
 of labour which, if paid for by an employer, would make 
 the cost to him more than equivalent to the benefit ; but to 
 the peasant it is not cost, it is the devotion of time which 
 he can spare, to a favourite pursuit, if we should not rather 
 say a ruling passion.f 
 
 * Supra, Book i ch. ix. 4. 
 
 f Read the graphic description by the historian Michelet, of the feelings of a 
 peasant proprietor towards his land. 
 
 " Si nous voulons connaitre la pensee intime, la passion, du paysan de 
 France, cela est fort aise. Promcnons-nous le dimanche dans la campagne, 
 suivons-le. Le voila qui s'en va la-bas devant nous. II est deux heures; sa 
 femme est a vepres ; il est endimanche ; je rdponds qu'il va voir sa maitresse. 
 
 " Quelle maitrosse ? sa terre. 
 
 " Je ne dis pas qu'il y aille tout droit. Non, il est libre ce jour-la, il est 
 maitre d'y ullur uu de n'y pas aller. N'y va-t-il pas assez tous les jours de la
 
 356 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 1. 
 
 We have seen, too, that it is not solely by superior ex- 
 ertion that the Flemish cultivators succeed in obtaining 
 these brilliant results. The same motive which gives such 
 intensity to their industry, placed them earlier in possession 
 of an amount of agricultural knowledge not attained until 
 much later in countries where agriculture was carried on 
 solely by hired labour. An equally high testimony is borne 
 by M. de Lavergne * to the agricultural skill of the small 
 proprietors, in those parts of France to which the petite 
 culture is really suitable. " In the rich plains of Flanders, 
 on the banks of the Rhine, the Garonne, the Charente, the 
 Rhone, all the practices which fertilize the land and increase 
 the productiveness of labour are known to the very smallest 
 cultivators, and practised by them, however considerable 
 may be the advances which they require. In their hands, 
 abundant manures, collected at great cost, repair and inces- 
 santly increase the fertility of the soil, in spite of the activi- 
 ty of cultivation. The races of cattle are superior, the crops 
 magnificent. Tobacco, flax, colza, madder, beetroot, in 
 some places ; in others, the vine, the olive, the plum, the 
 mulberry, only yield their abundant treasures to a popula- 
 tion of industrious labourers. Is it not also to the petite 
 culture that we are indebted for most of the garden produce 
 
 semaine ? Aussi, il se detourne, il va ailleurs, il a affaire ailleurs. Et pourtant, 
 il y va. 
 
 "II eat vrai qu'il passait bien pres; c'etait une occasion. II la regarde, 
 mais apparemment il n'y entrera pas; qu'y ferait-il? Et pourtant il y entre. 
 
 " Du moins, il est probable qu'il n'y travaillera pas ; il est endimanch6 ; il a 
 blouse et chemise blanches. Rien n'empeche cependant d'oter quelque mauvaise 
 herbe, de rejeter cette pierre. II y a bien encore cette souche qui gene, mais il 
 n'a pas sa pioche, ce sera pour demain. 
 
 " Alors, il croise ses bras et s'arrete, regarde, serieux, soucieux. II regarde 
 /ongtemps, tres-longtemps, et semble s'oublier. A la fin, s'il se croit observe, 
 b'il apperjoit un passant, il s'^loigne a pas lents. A trente pas encore, il s'ar- 
 rete, se retoume, et jette sur sa terre un dernier regard, regard profond et som- 
 bre ; mais pour qui sail bien voir, il est tout passionne, ce regard, tout de cceur, 
 plein de devotion." Le Peuple, par J. Michelet, Ire partie, ch. 1. 
 
 * Essai sur VEcwwmie Rurcde de rAngleterre, de FEcosse, et de CIrlande y 
 3me 6d. p. 127.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 357 
 
 obtained by dint of great outlay in the neighbourhood of 
 Paris." 
 
 2. Another aspect of peasant properties, in which it 
 is essential that they should be considered, is that of an in- 
 strument of popular education. Books and schooling are 
 absolutely necessary to education ; but not all-sufficient. 
 The mental faculties will be most developed where they are 
 most exercised ; and what gives more exercise to them than 
 the having a multitude of interests, none of which can be 
 neglected, and which can be provided for only by varied 
 efforts of will and intelligence ? Some of the disparagers of 
 small properties lay great stress on the cares and anxieties 
 which beset the peasant proprietor of the Rhineland or 
 Flanders. It is precisely those cares and anxieties which 
 tend to make him a superior being to an English day-labour- 
 er. It is, to be sure, rather abusing the privileges of fair 
 argument to represent the condition of a day-labourer as 
 not an anxious one. I can conceive no circumstances in 
 which he is free from anxiety, where there is a possibility 
 of being out of employment ; unless he has access to a pro- 
 fuse dispensation of parish pay, and no shame or reluctance 
 in demanding it. The day-labourer has, in the existing 
 state of society and population, many of the anxieties which 
 have not an invigorating effect on the mind, and none of 
 those which have. The position of the peasant proprietor 
 of Flanders is the reverse. From the anxiety which chills 
 and paralyses the uncertainty of having food to eat few 
 persons are more exempt : it requires as rare a concurrence 
 of circumstances as the potato failure combined with an uni- 
 versal bad harvest, to bring him within reach of that danger. 
 His anxieties are the ordinary vicissitudes of more and less : 
 his cares are that he takes his fair share of the business of 
 life ; that he is a free human being, and not perpetually a 
 child, which seems to be the approved condition of the 
 labouring classes according to the prevailing philanthropy. 
 He is no longer a being of a different order from the middle
 
 358 BOOK H. CHAPTER VII. 8. 
 
 classes ; he has pursuits and objects like those which occupy 
 them, and give to their intellects the greatest part of such 
 cultivation as they receive. If there is a first principle in 
 intellectual education, it is this that the discipline which 
 does good to the mind is that in which the mind is active, 
 not that in which it is passive. The secret for developing 
 the faculties is to give them much to do, and much induce- 
 ment to do it. This detracts nothing from the importance, 
 and even necessity, of other kinds of mental cultivation. 
 The possession of property will not prevent the peasant from 
 being coarse, selfish, and narrow-minded. These things de- 
 pend on other influences, and other kinds of instruction. 
 But this great stimulus to one kind of mental activity, in no 
 way impedes any other means of intellectual development. 
 On the contrary, by cultivating the habit of turning to 
 practical use every fragment of knowledge acquired, it helps 
 to render that schooling and reading fruitful, which with- 
 out some such auxiliary influence are in too many cases like 
 seed thrown on a rock. 
 
 3. It is not on the intelligence alone, that the situa- 
 tion of a peasant proprietor exercises an improving influence. 
 It is no less propitious to the moral virtues of prudence, 
 temperance, and self-control. Day-labourers, where the 
 labouring class mainly consists of them, are usually improvi- 
 dent : they spend carelessly to the full extent of their means, 
 and let the future shift for itself. This is so notorious, that 
 many persons strongly interested in the welfare of the 
 labouring classes, hold it as a fixed opinion that an increase 
 of wages would do them little good, unless accompanied by 
 at least a corresponding improvement in their tastes and 
 habits. The tendency of peasant proprietors, and of those 
 who hope to become proprietors, is to the contrary extreme ; 
 to take even too much thought for the morrow. They are 
 oftener accused of pemiriousness than of prodigality. They 
 deny themselves reasonable indulgences, and live wretch- 
 edly in order to economize. In Switzerland almost every-
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 359 
 
 body saves, who has any means of saving; the case of the 
 Flemish farmers has been already noticed : among the 
 French, though a pleasure-loving and reputed to be a self- 
 indulgent people, the spirit of thrift is diffused through the 
 rural population in a manner most gratifying as a whole, 
 and which in individual instances errs rather on the side of 
 excess than defect. Among those who, from the hovels in 
 which they live, and the herbs and roots which constitute 
 their diet, are mistaken by travellers for proofs and speci- 
 mens of general indigence, there are numbers who have 
 hoards in leathern bags, consisting of sums in five-franc 
 pieces, which they keep by them perhaps for a whole gen- 
 eration, unless brought out to be expended in their most 
 cherished gratification the purchase of land. If there is a 
 moral inconvenience attached to a state of society in which 
 the peasantry have land, it is the danger of their being too 
 careful of their pecuniary concerns ; of its making them 
 crafty, and " calculating " in the objectionable sense. The 
 peasant is no simple countryman, no downright " paysan du 
 Danube ; " both in fact and in fiction he is now " le ruse 
 paysan." That is the stage which he has reached in the 
 progressive development which the constitution of things 
 has imposed on human intelligence and human emancipa- 
 tion. But some excess in this direction is a small and a 
 passing evil compared with recklesness and improvidence in 
 the labouring classes, and a cheap price to pay for the in- 
 estimable worth of the virtue of self-dependence, as the gen- 
 eral characteristic of a people: a viitue which is one of the 
 first conditions of excellence in a human character the 
 stock on which if the other virtues are not grafted, they 
 have seldom any firm root ; a quality indispensable in the 
 case of a labouring class, even to any tolerable degree of 
 physical comfort ; and by which the peasantry of France, 
 and of most European countries of peasant proprietors, are 
 distinguished beyond any other labouring population. 
 
 4. Is it likely, that a state of economical relations so
 
 360 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 conducive to frugality and prudence in every other respect, 
 should be prejudicial to it in the cardinal point of increase 
 of population ? That it is so, is the opinion expressed by 
 most of those English political economists who have written 
 anything about the matter. Mr. M'Culloch's opinion is 
 well known. Mr. Jones affirms,* that a " peasant popula- 
 tion, raising their own wages from the soil, and consuming 
 them in kind, are universally acted upon very feebly by in- 
 ternal checks, or by motives disposing them to restraint. 
 The consequence is, that unless some external cause, quite 
 independent of their will, forces such peasant cultivators to 
 slacken their rate of increase, they will, in a limited territory, 
 very rapidly approach a state of want and penury, and will 
 be stopped at last only by the physical impossibility of pro- 
 curing subsistence." He elsewhere f speaks of such a peas- 
 antry as " exactly in the condition in which the animal dis- 
 position to increase their numbers is checked by the fewest 
 of those balancing motives and desires which regulate the 
 increase of superior ranks or more civilized people." The 
 " causes of this peculiarity," Mr. Jones promised to point 
 out in a subsequent work, which never made its appearance. 
 I am totally unable to conjecture from what theory of 
 human nature, and of the motives which influence human 
 conduct, he would have derived them. Arthur Young as- 
 sumes the same " peculiarity " as a fact ; but, though not 
 much in the habit of qualifying his opinions, he does not 
 push his doctrine to so violent an extreme as Mr. Jones ; 
 having, as we have seen, himself testified to various in- 
 stances in which peasant populations, such as Mr. Jones 
 speaks of, were not tending to " a state of want and penury," 
 and were in no danger whatever of coming in contact with 
 " physical impossibility of procuring subsistence." 
 
 That there should be discrepancy of experience on this 
 matter, is easily to be accounted for. "Whether the labour- 
 ing people live by land or by wages, they have always hith- 
 erto multiplied up to the limit set by their habitual stand- 
 ard of comfort. When that standard was low, cot exceed' 
 
 E*xay on the Distribution of Wealth, p. 146. f Ibid, p. 68.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 361 
 
 ing a scanty subsistence, the size of properties, as well as 
 the rate of wages, has been kept down to what would barely 
 support life. Extremely low ideas of what is necessary for 
 subsistence, are perfectly compatible with peasant proper- 
 ties ; and if a people have always been used to poverty, and 
 habit has reconciled them to it, there will be over-popula- 
 tion, and excessive subdivision of land. But this is not to 
 the purpose. The true question is, supposing a peasantry to 
 possess land not insufficient but sufficient for their comfortable 
 support, are they more, or less, likely to fall from this state 
 of comfort through improvident multiplication, than if they 
 were living in an equally comfortable manner as hired 
 labourers ? All d priori considerations are in favour of 
 their being less likely. The dependence of wages on popu- 
 lation is a matter of speculation and discussion. That 
 wages would fall if population were much increased is often 
 a matter of real doubt, and always a thing which requires 
 some exercise of the thinking faculty for its intelligent rec- 
 ognition. But every peasant can satisfy himself from evi- 
 dence which he can fully appreciate, whether his piece of 
 land can be made to support several families in the same 
 comfort in which it supports one. Few people like to leave 
 to their children a worse lot in life than their own. The 
 parent who has land to leave, is perfectly able to judge 
 whether the children can live upon it or not : but people 
 who are supported by wages, see no reason why their sons 
 should be unable to support themselves in the same way, 
 and trust accordingly to chance. "In even the most useful 
 and necessary arts and manufactures," says Mr. Laing,* 
 " the demand for labourers is not a seen, known, steady, and 
 appreciable demand : but it is so in husbandry " under small 
 properties " The labour to be done, the subsistence that 
 labour will produce out of his portion of land, are seen and 
 known elements in a man's calculation upon his means of 
 subsistence. Can his square of land, or can it not, subsist 
 a family ? Can he marry or not ? are questions which every 
 man can answer without delay, doubt, or speculation. It 
 
 * Notes of a Traveller, p. 46.
 
 362 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 is the depending on chance, where judgment has nothing 
 clearly set before it, that causes reckless, improvident mar- 
 riages in the lower, as in the higher classes, and produces 
 among us the evils of over-population ; and chance neces- 
 sarily enters into every man's calculations, when certainty 
 is removed altogether ; as it is, where certain subsistence is 3 
 by our distribution of property, the lot of but a small por- 
 tion instead of about two-thirds of the people." 
 
 There never has been a writer more keenly sensible of 
 the evils brought upon the labouring classes by excess of 
 population, than Sismondi, and this is one of the grounds 
 of his earnest advocacy of peasant properties. He had 
 ample opportunity, in more countries than one, for judging 
 of their effect on population. Let us see his testimony. 
 " In the countries in which cultivation by small proprietors 
 still continues, population increases regularly and rapidly 
 until it has attained its natural limits ; that is to say, inheri- 
 tances continue to be divided and subdivided among several 
 sons, as long as, by an increase of labour, each family can 
 extract an equal income from a smaller portion of land. A 
 father who possessed a vast extent of natural pasture, di- 
 vides it among his sons, and they turn it into fields and 
 meadows ; his sons divide it among their sons, \vho abolish 
 fallows : each improvement in agricultural knowledge ad- 
 mits of another step in the subdivision of property. But 
 there is no danger lest the proprietor should bring up his 
 children to make beggars of them. He knows exactly what 
 inheritance he has to leave them ; he knows that the law 
 will divide it equally among them ; he sees the limit beyond 
 which this division would make them descend from the rank 
 which he has himself filled, and a just family pride, com' 
 mon to the peasant and to the nobleman, makes him abstain 
 from summoning into life, children for whom he cannot 
 properly provide. If more are born, at least they do not 
 marry, or they agree among themselves, which of several 
 brothers shall perpetuate the family. It is not found that 
 in the Swiss Cantons, the patrimonies of the peasants are 
 ever so divided as to reduce them below an honourable
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 363 
 
 competence ; though the" habit of foreign service, by open 
 ing to the children a career indefinite and uncalculable, 
 sometimes calls forth a superabundant population." * 
 
 There is similar testimony respecting Norway. Though 
 there is no law or custom of primogeniture, and no manu- 
 factures to take off a surplus population, the subdivision of 
 property is not carried to an injurious extent. " The divi- 
 sion of the land among children," says Mr. Laing,f " ap- 
 pears not, during the thousand years it has been in opera- 
 tion, to have had the effect of reducing the landed proper- 
 ties to the minimum size that will barely support human 
 existence. I have counted from five-and-twenty to forty 
 cows upon farms, and that in a country in which the farmer 
 must, for at least seven months in the year, have winter 
 provender and houses provided for all the cattle. It is evi- 
 dent that some cause or other, operating on aggregation of 
 landed property, counteracts the dividing effects of partition 
 among children. That cause can be no other than what I 
 have long conjectured would be effective in such a social 
 arrangement : viz. that in a country where land is held, not 
 in tenancy merely, as in Ireland, but in full ownership, its 
 aggregation by the deaths of co-heirs, and by the marriages 
 of the female heirs among the body of landholders, will bal- 
 ance its subdivision by the equal succession of children. 
 The whole mass of property will, I conceive, be found in 
 such a state of society to consist of as many estates of the 
 class of 1000Z., as many of 100., as many of 10., a year, at 
 one period as at another." That this should happen, sup- 
 poses diffused through society a very efficacious prudential 
 check to population ; and it is reasonable to give part of 
 the credit of this prudential restraint to the peculiar adapta- 
 tion of the peasant-proprietary system for fostering it. 
 
 " In some parts of Switzerland," says Mr. Kay,:}; " as in 
 the canton of Argovie, for instance, a peasant never marries 
 before he attains the age of twenty-five years, and generally 
 much later in life ; and in that canton the women very sel- 
 
 * Nouveaux Principes, Book iii. ch. 3. f Residence in Norway, p. 18. 
 
 f Vol. i. pp. 67-9.
 
 364 BOOK If. CHAPTER VU 4. 
 
 dom marry before they have attained the age of thirty. . . . 
 Nor do the division of land and the cheapness of the mode 
 of conveying it from one man to another, encourage the 
 providence of the labourers of the rural districts only. They 
 act in the same manner, though perhaps in a less degree, 
 upon the labourers of the smaller towns. In the smaller 
 provincial towns it is customary for a labourer to own a 
 small plot of ground outside the town. This plot he culti- 
 vates in the evening as his kitchen garden. He raises in it 
 vegetables and fruits for the use of his family during the 
 winter. After his day's work is over, he and his family 
 repair to the garden for a short time, which they spend in 
 planting, sowing, weeding, oi- preparing for sowing a har- 
 vest, according to the season. The desire to become pos- 
 sessed of one of these gardens operates very strongly in 
 strengthening prudential habits and in restraining improvi- 
 dent marriages. Some of the manufacturers in the canton 
 of Argovie told me that a townsman was seldom contented 
 until he had bought a garden, or a garden and house, and 
 that the town labourers generally deferred their marriages 
 for some years, in order to save enough to purchase either 
 one or botli of these luxuries." 
 
 The same writer shows by statistical evidence* that in 
 Prussia the average age of marriage is not only much later 
 than in England, but " is gradually becoming later than it 
 was formerly," while at the same time " fewer illegitimate 
 children are born in Prussia than in any other of the Euro- 
 pean countries." " Wherever I travelled," says Mr. Kay,f 
 " in North Germany and Switzerland, I was assured by all 
 that the desire to obtain land, which was felt by all the 
 peasants, was acting as the strongest possible check upon 
 undue increase of population." J 
 
 * Ibid. pp. 75-9. f Ibid. p. 90. 
 
 | The Prussian minister of statistics, in a work (Der Volkswohlstand im 
 Preussischen Staate) which I am obliged to quote at second hand from Mr. Kay, 
 after proving by figures the great and progressive increase of the consumption 
 of food and clothing per head of the population, from which he justly infers a 
 corresponding increase of the productiveness of agriculture, continues : " The 
 division of estates has, since 1831, proceeded more and more throughout the
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 365 
 
 In Flanders, according to Mr. Fauche, the British Consul 
 at Ostend, * " farmers sons and those who have the means 
 to become farmers' will delay their marriage until they get 
 possession of a farm." Once a farmer, the next object is to 
 become a proprietor. " The first thing a Dane does with 
 his savings," says Mr. Browne, the Consul at Copenhagen,f 
 " is to purchase a clock, then a horse and cow, which he 
 hires out, and which pays a good interest. Then his ambi- 
 tion is to become a petty proprietor, and this class of per- 
 sons is better off than any in Denmark. Indeed, I know 
 of no people in any country who have more easily within 
 their reach all that is really necessary for life than this class, 
 which is very large in comparison with that of labourers." 
 
 But the experience which most decidedly contradicts 
 the asserted tendency of peasant proprietorship to produce 
 excess of population, is the case of France. In that country 
 the experiment is not tried in the most favourable circum- 
 stances, a large proportion of the properties being too small. 
 The number of landed proprietors in France is not exactly 
 ascertained, but on no estimate does it fall much short of 
 five millions ; which, on the lowest calculation of the num- 
 ber of persons of a family (and for France it ought to be a 
 low calculation), shows much more than half the population 
 as either possessing, or entitled to inherit, landed property. 
 A majority of the properties are so small as not to afford a 
 subsistence to the proprietors, of whom, according to some 
 computations, as many as three millions are obliged to eke 
 out their means of support either by working for hire, or by 
 taking additional land, generally on metayer tenure. 
 When the property possessed is not sufficient to relieve the 
 possessor from dependence on wages, the condition of a pro- 
 prietor loses much of its characteristic efficacy as a check 
 
 country. There are now many more small independent proprietors than for- 
 merly. Yet, however many complaints of pauperism are heard among the 
 dependent labourers, we never hear it complained that pauperism is increasing 
 among the peasant proprietors." Kay, i. 262-6. 
 
 * In a communication to the Commissioners of the Poor Law Enquiry, p. 640 
 of their Foreign Communications, Appendix F to their First Report 
 
 f Ibid. 268.
 
 366 
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 to over-population : and if the prediction so often made in 
 England had been realized, and France had become a 
 " pauper warren," the experiment would have proved noth- 
 ing against the tendencies of the same system of agricul- 
 tural economy in other circumstances. But what is the 
 fact ? That the rate of increase of the French population 
 is the slowest in Europe. During the generation which the 
 Revolution raised from the extreme of hopeless wretched- 
 ness to sudden abundance, a great increase of population 
 took place. But a generation has grown up, which, having 
 been born in improved circumstances, has not learnt to be 
 miserable ; and upon them the spirit of thrift operates most 
 conspicuously, in keeping the increase of population within 
 the increase of national wealth. In a table, drawn up by 
 Professor Rau,* of the rate of annual increase of the popu- 
 lations of various countries, that of France, from 1817 to 
 1827, is stated at jVo per cent, that of England during a 
 similar decennial period being 1 f 8 s annually, and that of the 
 United States nearly 3. According to the official returns as 
 
 * The following is the table (see p. 168 of the Belgian translation of Mr. 
 
 Rau's large work) : 
 
 Per cent. 
 United States . . . . 1820-30 . . 2-92 
 
 Hungary (according to Rohrer) 2'40 
 England 1811-21 . . 1'78 
 
 " 1821-31 . . 1-60 
 
 Austria (Rohrer) 1-30 
 
 Prussia 1816-27 . . 1'54 
 
 1820-30 . . 1-37 
 
 " 1821-31 . . 1-27 
 
 Netherlands .... 1821-28 . . 1'28 
 
 But the number given by Moreau de Jonnes, he adds, is not entitled to im- 
 plicit confidence. 
 
 The following table given by M. Quetelet (Sur FHomme et le Developjpement 
 de ses Facultes, vol. i. ch. 7) also on the authority of Rau, contains additional 
 matter, and differs in some items from the preceding, probably from the author's 
 having taken, in those cases, an average of different years : 
 
 Percent. 
 
 Scotland 1821-31 . . 1'30 
 
 Saxony 1815-30 . . 1-15 
 
 Baden . . . 1820-30 (Heunisch) 1-13 
 
 Bavaria 1814-28 . . 1'08 
 
 Naples 1814-24 . . 0'83 
 
 France . . . 1817-27 (Mathieu) 0-63 
 and more recently (Moreau de 
 Jonnes) 0'55 
 
 Ireland 
 Hungary 
 Spain . 
 England 
 
 Per cent. 
 . 2-45 
 . 2-40 
 . 1-66 
 . 1-65 
 
 Per cent. 
 Rhenish Prussia 1 - 33 
 
 Austria . . .1-30 
 Bavaria . . .1-08 
 Netherlands . . 0'94 
 
 Per cent. 
 
 Naples . . . 0-83 
 France . . . 0-63 
 Sweden . . . 0'68 
 Louibardy . . 0'45 
 
 A very carefully prepared statement, by M. Legoyt, in the Journal des
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 367 
 
 analyzed by M. Legoyt,* the increase of the population, 
 which from 1801 to 1806 was at the rate of 1'28 per cent 
 annually, averaged only 0'47 per cent from 1806 to 1831 ; 
 from 1831 to 1836 it averaged 0-60 per cent ; from 1836 to 
 1841, 0-4:1 per cent, and from 1841 to 1846, 0'68 per cent, f 
 At the census of 1851 the rate of annual increase shown 
 was only 1'08 per cent in the five years, or 0-21 annually ; 
 and at the census of 1856 only 0'71 per cent in five years, 
 or 0'14 annually : so that, in the words of M. de Lavergne, 
 " la population ne s'accroit presque plus en France.";}: 
 Even this slow increase is wholly the effect of a dimunition 
 of deaths ; the number of births not increasing at all, while 
 the proportion of the births to the population is constantly 
 diminishing. This slow growth of the numbers of the 
 
 Economises for May 1847, which brings up the results for France to the census 
 of the preceding year 1 846, is summed up in the following table : 
 
 Countries. 
 
 According 
 to the 
 
 According to 
 the excess 
 of births over 
 
 Countries. 
 
 According 
 to the 
 
 According to 
 the excess 
 of birth B over 
 
 
 census. 
 
 deaths. 
 
 
 census. 
 
 deaths. 
 
 
 per cent. 
 
 per cent. 
 
 
 per cent. 
 
 per cent. 
 
 Sweden 
 
 0-83 
 
 1-14 
 
 Wurtemberg 
 
 o-oi 
 
 I'OO 
 
 Norway 
 
 1-36 
 
 1-30 
 
 Holland. . 
 
 0-90 
 
 1-03 
 
 Denmark 
 
 ... 
 
 0-95 
 
 Belgium. . . 
 
 
 0-76 
 
 Russia . 
 
 
 0-61 
 
 Sardinia. . . 
 
 1-08 
 
 
 Austria. 
 
 0-85 
 
 0-90 
 
 Great Britain 
 
 ) 
 
 
 Prussia. 
 
 1-84 
 
 1-18 
 
 (exclusive 
 
 } 1-95 
 
 TOO 
 
 Saxony. 
 
 1-46 
 
 0-90 
 
 of Ireland) 
 
 i 
 
 
 Hanover 
 
 
 0-85 
 
 France . . . 
 
 0-68 
 
 0-50 
 
 Bavaria 
 
 
 0-71 
 
 United States 
 
 3-27 
 
 ... 
 
 * Journal des Economistes for March and May 1847. 
 
 f M. Legoyt is of opinion that the population was understated in 1841, and 
 the increase between that time and 1 846 consequently overstated, and that the 
 real increase during the whole period was something intermediate between the 
 last two averages, or not much more than one in two hundred. 
 \ Journal des Economistes for February 1 847. 
 The following are the numbers given by M. Legoyt: 
 
 annual number ) ( ofthepo- 
 
 of births > 
 
 From 
 
 1824 to 1828 
 1829 to 1833 
 to 1838 
 
 1834 
 1839 to 
 1844 & 
 
 1843 
 1845 
 
 > 981,914, being 1 in 32-30 
 965,444, 1 in 34-00 
 972,993, 1 in 34'39 
 970,617, 1 in 35'27 
 983,573, 1 in 35'58 
 
 pulatiou. 
 
 In the last two years the births, according to M. Legoyt, were swelled by the
 
 368 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 people, while capital increases much more rapidly, has 
 caused a noticeable improvement in the condition of the 
 labouring class. The circumstances of that portion of the 
 class who are landed proprietors are not easily ascertained 
 with precision, being of course extremely variable ; but the 
 mere labourers, who derived no direct benefit from the 
 changes in landed property which took place at the Revo- 
 lution, have unquestionably much improved in condition 
 since that period.* Dr. Rau testifies to a similar fact in 
 
 effects of a considerable immigration. " Cette diminution des naissances," he 
 observes, " en presence d'un accroissement constant, quoique peu rapide, de la 
 population generale et des mariages, ne peut etre attribue qu'aux progres de 
 1'esprit d'ordre et de prevision dans les families. C'est d'ailleurs la consequence 
 prevue de nos institutions civiles et sociales, qui, en amenant chaque jour une 
 plus grande subdivision de la fortune territoriale et mobiliere de la France, deve- 
 loppent au sein des populations les instincts de conservation et de bienetre." 
 
 In four departments, among which are two of the most thriving in Norman- 
 dy, the deaths even then exceeded the births. The last census, that of 1856, 
 exhibits the remarkable fact of a positive diminution in the population of 64 out 
 of the 86 departments. A significant comment on the pauper-warren theory. 
 See M. de Lavergne's analysis of the returns. 
 
 * " Lea classes de notre population qui n'ont que leur salaire, celles qui, par 
 cette raison, sont les plus expos6es a 1'indigence, sont aujourd'hui beaucoup 
 tnieux pourvues des objets necessaires a la nourriture, au logement et au vete- 
 ment, qu'elles ne 1'etaient au commencement du siecle. ... On peut appuyer 
 [ce fait] du temoignage de toutes les personnes qui ont souvenir de la premiere 
 des epoques comparers. . . . S'il restait des doutes a cet egard, on pourrait 
 facilement les dissiper en consultant les anciens cultivateurs et les anciens 
 ouvriers, ainsi que nous 1'avons fait nous-memes dans diverses localites, sans 
 rencontrer un seul temoignage contradictoire ; on peut invoquer aussi les ren- 
 seignemens receuillis a ce sujet par un observateur exact, M. Villerm6 (Jableau 
 de VElat Physique et Moral des fiuvriers, liv. ii. ch. 1.)" From an intelligent 
 work published in 1846, Recherches sur les Causes de V Indigence, par A. Cle- 
 ment, pp. 84-5. The same writer speaks (p. 118) of "la hausse considerable 
 qui s'est manifestee depuis 1789 dans le taux du salaire de nos cultivateurs 
 journaliers ; " and adds the following evidence of a higher standard 01* habitual 
 requirements, even in that portion of the town population, the state of which is 
 usually represented as most deplorable. " Depuis quinze a vingt ans, un 
 changement considerable s'est manifeste dans les habitudes des ouvriers de nos 
 villes manufacturiere : ils depensent aujourd'hui beaucoup plus que par le pass6 
 
 pour le vetement et la parure Les ouvriers de certaines classes, tels 
 
 que les anciens canuts de Lyon," (according to all representations, like their
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 369 
 
 the case of another country in which the subdivision of the 
 land is probably excessive, the Palatinate.* 
 
 I am not aware of a single authentic instance which 
 supports the assertion that rapid multiplication is promoted 
 
 counterpart, our handloom weavers, the very worst paid class of artizans,) " ne 
 se montrent plus comme autrefois couverts de sales haillons." (Page 1 64.) 
 
 The preceding statements were given in former editions of this work, being 
 the best to which I had at the time access ; but evidence, both of a more recent, 
 and of a more minute and precise character, will now be found in the important 
 work of M. Le"onee de Lavergne, Economic Rurale de la France depuis 1789. 
 According to that pains-taking, well-informed, and most impartial enquirer, the 
 average daily wages of a French labourer have risen, since the commencement 
 of the Revolution, in the ratio of 19 to 30, while, owing to the more con- 
 stant employment, the total earnings have increased in a still greater ratio, 
 not short of double. The following are the words of M. de Lavergne (2nd ed. 
 p. 57): 
 
 " Arthur Young evalue a dix-neuf sols le prix moyen de la journee du travail, 
 qui doit etre aujourd'hui (fun franc cinquante centimes, et cette augmentation 
 ne represente encore qu'une partie du gain realise. Bien que la nation rurale 
 soit rest6e a peu pres la m6me, 1'excedant de population survenu depuis 1789 
 s'etant concentre dans les villes, le nombre effectif des journees de travail a 
 grossi, d'abord parce que la vie moyenne s'etant allongee, le nombre des hommes 
 valides s'est elev6, et ensuite parce que le travail est mieux organise, soit par la 
 suppression de plusieurs fetes chomees, soit par le seul effet d'une demande plus 
 active. En tenant compte de 1'accroissement du nombre des journees, le gain 
 annuel de 1'ouvrier rural doit avoir doub!6. . . . Cette augmentation dans le 
 salaire se traduit pour 1'ouvrier en une augmentation au moins correspondante 
 de bien-etre, puisque le prix des principaux objets udcessaires a la vie a peu 
 change 1 , et que celui des objets fabriqu6s, des tissus, par exemple, a sensiblement 
 baisse\ L'habitation est 6galement devenue meilleure, sinon partout, du moins 
 dans la plupart de nos provinces." 
 
 M. de Lavergne's estimate of the average amount of a day's wages is ground- 
 ed on a careful comparison, in this and all other economical points of view, of 
 all the different provinces of France. 
 
 * In his little book on the Agriculture of the Palatinate, already cited. He 
 says that the daily wages of labour, which during the last years of the war were 
 unusually high, and so continued until 1817, afterwards sank to a lower money- 
 rate, but that the prices of many commodities having fallen in a still greater 
 proportion, the condition of the people was unequivocally improved. The food 
 given to farm labourers by their employers has also greatly improved in quantity 
 and quality. " Sie heutigen Tages bedeutend besser ist, als vor ungofiihr 40 
 Jahren, wo das Gesinde weniger Fleisch und Mehlspeisen, keinen Kiise /urn 
 Brote u. dfrl. erhielt." (p. 20.) "Such an increase of wages" (adds the Pro- 
 fessor) " which must be estimated not in money, but in the quantity of neceasa- 
 
 24
 
 870 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 by peasant properties. Instances may undoubtedly be cited 
 of its not being prevented by them, and one of the princi- 
 pal of these is Belgium ; the prospects of which, in respect 
 to population, are at present a matter of considerable un- 
 certainty. Belgium has the most rapidly increasing popula- 
 tion on the Continent ; and when the circumstances of the 
 country require, as they must soon do, that this rapidity 
 should be checked, there will be a considerable strength of 
 existing habit to be broken through. One of the unfavour- 
 able circumstances is the great power possessed over the 
 minds of the people by the Catholic priesthood, whose in- 
 fluence is everywhere strongly exerted against restraining 
 population. As yet, however, it must be remembered that 
 the indefatigable industry and great agricultural skill of 
 the people have rendered the existing rapidity of increase 
 practically innocuous ; the great number of large estates still 
 undivided affording by their gradual dismemberment, a re- 
 source for the necessary augmentation of the gross produce ; 
 and there are, besides, many large manufacturing towns, 
 and mining and coal districts, which attract and employ a 
 considerable portion of the annual increase of population. 
 
 * 
 
 5. But even where peasant properties are accompanied 
 by an excess of numbers, this evil is not necessarily attend- 
 ed with the additional economical disadvantage of too great 
 a subdivision of the land. It does not follow because landed 
 property is minutely divided, that farms w T ill be so. As 
 large properties are perfectly compatible with small farms, 
 so are small properties with farms of an adequate size ; and 
 a subdivision of occupancy is not an inevitable consequence 
 of even undue multiplication among peasant proprietors. 
 
 ries and conveniences which the labourer is enabled to procure, is by universal 
 admission, a proof that the mass of capital must have increased." It proves not 
 only this, but also that the labouring population has not increased in an equal 
 degree ; and that in this instance as well as in France, the morcellement of the 
 land, even when excessive, has been compatible with a strengthening of the pru- 
 dential checks to population.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 371 
 
 As might be expected from their admirable intelligence in 
 things relating to their occupation, the Flemish peasantry 
 have long learnt this lesson. " The habit of not dividing 
 properties," says Dr. Ran,* " and the opinion that this is 
 advantageous, have been so completely preserved in Flan- 
 ders, that even now, when a peasant dies leaving several 
 children, they do not think of dividing his patrimony, 
 though it be neither entailed nor settled in trust ; they pre- 
 fer selling it entire, and sharing the proceeds, considering it 
 as a jewel which loses its value when it is divided." That 
 the same feeling must prevail widely even in France, is 
 shown by the great frequency of sales of land, amounting in 
 ten years to a fourth part of the whole soil of the country ; 
 and M. Passy, in his tract " On the Changes in the Agri- 
 cultural Condition of the Department of the Eure since the 
 year 1800,"f states other facts tending to the same conclu- 
 sion. " The example," says he, " of this department attests 
 that there does not exist, as some writers have imagined, 
 between the distribution of property and that of cultivation, 
 a connexion which tends invincibly to assimilate them. In 
 no portion of it have changes of ownership had a percepti- 
 ble influence on the size of holdings. While, in districts of 
 small farming, lands belonging to the same owner are ordi- 
 narily distributed among many tenants, so neither is it un- 
 common, in places where the grande culture prevails, for 
 the same farmer to rent the lands of several proprietors. In 
 the plains of Yexin, in particular, many active and rich 
 cultivators do not content themselves with a single farm ; 
 others add to the lands of their principal holding, all those 
 in the neighbourhood which they are able to hire, and in 
 this manner make up a total extent which in some cases 
 
 * Page 334 of the Brussels translation. He cites as an authority, Schwerz, 
 Landwirthschaftliche Mittheilungen, i. 185. 
 
 f One of the important papers which have appeared in the Journal dex 
 Econmnistes, the organ of the principal political economists of France, and doing 
 great and increasing honour to their knowledge and ability. M. Passy's essay 
 Jias been reprinted separately as a pamphlet.
 
 372 BOOK H. CHAPTER VII. 6. 
 
 reaches or exceeds two hundred hectares" (five hundred 
 English acres). "The more the estates are dismembered, 
 the more frequent do this sort of arrangements become : 
 and as they conduce to the interest of all concerned, it is 
 probable that time will confirm them." 
 
 " In some places," says M. de Lavergne,* " in the neigh- 
 bourhood of Paris, for example, where the advantages of 
 the grande culture become evident, the size of farms tends 
 to increase, several farms are thrown together into one, and 
 farmers enlarge their holdings by renting parceUes from a 
 number of different proprietors. Elsewhere farms as well 
 as properties of too great extent tend to division. Cultiva- 
 tion spontaneously finds out the organization which suits it 
 best." It is a striking fact, stated by the same eminent 
 writer, f that the departments which have the greatest num- 
 ber of small cotes fonderes, are the Nord, the Somme, the 
 Pas de Calais, the Seine Inferieure, the Aisne, and the 
 Oise ; all of them among the richest and best cultivated, 
 and the first-mentioned of them the very richest and best 
 cultivated, in France. 
 
 Undue subdivision, and excessive smallness of holdings, 
 are undoubtedly a prevalent evil in some countries of peas- 
 ant proprietors and particularly in parts of Germany and 
 France'. The governments of Bavaria and Nassau have 
 thought it necessary to impose a legal limit to subdivision, 
 and the Prussian Government unsuccessfully proposed the 
 same measure to the Estates of its Rhenish Provinces. But 
 I do not think it will anywhere be found that the petite cul- 
 ture is the system of the peasants, and the grcmde culture 
 that of the great landlords : on the contrary, wherever the 
 small properties are divided among too many proprietors, I 
 believe it to be true that the large properties also are par- 
 
 * Economic Rurale de la France, p. 466. 
 
 f P. 117. See, for facts of a similar tendency, pp. 141, 250, and other pas- 
 sages of the same important treatise ; which, on the other hand, equally abounds 
 with evidence of the mischievous effect of subdivision when too minute, or when 
 the nature of the soil and of its products is not suitable to it
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 373 
 
 celled out among too many farmers, and that the cause ia 
 the same in both cases, a backward state of capital, skill, 
 and agricultural enterprise. There is reason to believe that 
 the subdivision in France is not more excessive than is ac- 
 counted for by this cause ; that it is diminishing, not in- 
 creasing ; and that the terror expressed in some quarters, at 
 the progress of the morcellement, is one of the most ground- 
 less of real or pretended panics.* 
 
 If peasant properties have any effect in promoting sub- 
 division beyond the degree which corresponds to the agri- 
 cultural practices of the country, and which is customary on 
 its large estates, the cause must lie in one of the salutary 
 influences of the system ; the eminent degree in which it 
 promotes providence on the part of those who, not being 
 
 * Mr. Laing, in his latest publication, " Observations on the Social and 
 Political State of the European People in 1848 and 1849," a book devoted to the 
 glorification of England, and the disparagement of everything elsewhere which 
 others, or even he himself in former works, had thought worthy of praise, argues 
 that " although the land itself is not divided and subdivided " on the death of the 
 proprietor, " the value of the land is, and with effects almost as prejudicial to 
 social progress. The value of each share becomes a debt or burden upon the 
 land." Consequently the condition of the agricultural population is retrograde ; 
 " each generation is worse off than the preceding one, although the land is 
 neither less nor more divided, nor worse cultivated." And this he gives as the 
 explanation of the great indebtedness of the small landed proprietors in France- 
 (pp. 97-9.) If these statements were correct, they would invalidate all which 
 Mr. Laing affirmed so positively in other writings, and repeats in this, respecting 
 the peculiar efficacy of the possession of land in preventing over-population. 
 But he is entirely mistaken as to the matter of fact. In the only country of 
 which he speaks from actual residence, Norway, he does not pretend that the 
 condition of the peasant proprietors is deteriorating. The facts already cited 
 prove that in respect to Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, the assertion is 
 equally wide of the mark ; and what has been shown respecting the slow increase 
 of population in France, demonstrates that if the condition of the French peasant- 
 ry was deteriorating, it could not be from the cause supposed by Mr. Laing. 
 The truth I believe to be that in every country without exception, in which 
 peasant properties prevail, the condition of the people is improving, the produce 
 of the land and even its fertility increasing, and from the larger surplus which 
 remains after feeding the agricultural classes, the towns are augmenting both in 
 population and in the well-being of their inhabitants. On this question, as well 
 as on that of the morcelleinent, so far as regards France, additional facts and 
 observations, brought up to a later date, will be found in the Appendix.
 
 3T4 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 yet peasant proprietors, hope to become so. In England, 
 where the labourer has no investment for his savings but 
 the savings bank, and no position to which he can rise by 
 any exercise of economy, except perhaps that of a petty 
 shopkeeper, with its chances of bankruptcy, there is nothing 
 at all resembling the intense spirit of thrift which takes 
 possession of one who, from being a day labourer, can raise 
 himself by saving to the condition of a landed proprietor. 
 According to almost all authorities, the real cause of the 
 'morcellement is the higher price which can be obtained for 
 land by selling it to the peasantry, as an investment for 
 their small accumulations, than by disposing of it entire to 
 some rich purchaser who has no object but to live on its in- 
 come without improving it. The hope of obtaining such 
 an investment is the most powerful of inducements, to those 
 who are without land, to practise the industry, frugality. 
 and self-restraint, on which their success in this object of 
 ambition is dependent. 
 
 As the result of this enquiry into the direct operation 
 and indirect influences of peasant properties, I conceive it 
 to be established, that there is no necessary connexion be- 
 tween this form of landed property and an imperfect state 
 of the arts of production ; that it is favourable in quite as 
 many respects as it is unfavourable, to the most effective use 
 of the powers of the soil ; that no other existing state of 
 agricultural economy has so beneficial an effect on the in- 
 dustry, the intelligence, the frugality, and prudence of the 
 population, nor tends on the whole so much to discourage 
 an improvident increase of their numbers ; and that no ex- 
 isting state, therefore, is on the whole so favourable, both to 
 their moral and their physical welfare. Compared with the 
 English system of cultivation by hired labour, it must be 
 regarded as eminently beneficial to the labouring class.* 
 
 * French history strikingly confirms these conclusions. Three times during 
 the course of ages the peasantry have been purchasers of land ; and these times 
 immediately preceded the three principal eras of French agricultural prosperity. 
 
 "Aui temps les plus mauvais," says the historian Michelet, (Le Peuple, Ire
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 375 
 
 We are not on the present occasion called upon to compare 
 it with the joint ownership of the land by associations of 
 labourers. 
 
 partie, ch. 1,) "aux moments de pauvrete universelle, oil le riche meme est 
 pauvre et vend par force, alors le pauvre se trouve en etat d'acheter ; mil ac- 
 quereur ne se presentant, le paysan en guenilles arrive avec sa piece d'or, et il 
 acquiert un bout de terre. Ces moments de desastre ou le paysan a pu acquerir 
 la terre a bon marche, ont toujours ete suivis d'uu elan subit de fecondite qu'on 
 ne s'expliquait pas. Vers 1500, par exemple, quand la France epuis^e par Louis 
 XI. semble achever sa ruine en Italic, la noblesse qui part est obligee de ven- 
 dre ; la terre, passant a de nouvelles mains, refleurit tout-a-coup ; on travaille, 
 on batit. Ce beau moment (dans le style de 1'histoire monarchique) s'est appele 
 le bon Louis XIL 
 
 " II dure peu, malheureusement. La terre est a peine remise en bon etat, 
 le fisc fond dessus ; les guerres de religion arrivent, qui semblent raser tout 
 jusqu'au sol, miseres horribles, famines atroces ou les meres mangeaient leura 
 enfants. Qui croii-ait que le pays se releve de la ? Eh bien, la guerre finit a 
 peiue, de ce champ ravage, de cette chaumiere encore noire et brulee, sort 
 1'epargne du paysan. II achete ; en dix ans, la France a change de face ; en 
 vingt ou trente, tous les biens pnt double, triple de valeur. Ce moment encore 
 baptise d'un nom royal, s'appelle le bon Henri IV. et le grand Richelieu." 
 
 Of the third era it is needless again to speak : it was that of the Revolution. 
 
 Whoever would study the reverse of the picture, may compare these historic 
 periods, characterized by the dismemberment of large and the construction of 
 small properties, with the wide-spread national suffering which accompanied, and 
 the permanent deterioration of the condition of the labouring classes which fol- 
 lowed, the "clearing" away of small yeomen to make room for large grazing 
 farms, which was the grand economical event of English history during the six- 
 teenth century.
 
 CHAPTEK Yin. 
 
 OF METAYERS. 
 
 1. FROM the case in which the produce of land and 
 labour belongs undividedly to the labourer, we proceed to 
 the cases in which it is divided, but between two classes 
 only, the labourers and the landowners ; the character of 
 capitalists merging in the one or the other, as the case may 
 be. It is possible indeed to conceive that there might be 
 only two classes of persons to share the produce, and that a 
 class of capitalists might be one of them ; the character of 
 labourer and that of landowner being united to form the 
 other. This might occur in two ways. The labourers, 
 though owning the land, might let it to a tenant, and work 
 under him as hired servants. But this arrangement, even 
 in the very rare cases which could give rise to it, would not 
 require any particular discussion, since it would not differ 
 in any material respect from the threefold system of labour- 
 ers, capitalists, and landlords. The other case is the not 
 uncommon one, in which a peasant proprietor owns and 
 cultivates the land, but -raises the little capital required, by 
 9. mortgage upon it. Neither does this case present any 
 important peculiarity. There is but one person, the peas- 
 ant himself, who has any right or power of interference in 
 the management. He pays a fixed annuity as interest to a 
 capitalist, as he pays another fixed sum in taxes to the gov- 
 ernment. Without dwelling further on these cases, we pass 
 to those which present marked features of peculiarity. 
 
 When the two parties sharing in the produce are the
 
 METAYERS. 377 
 
 labourer or labourers and the landowner, it is not a very 
 material circumstance in the case, which of the two furnishes 
 the stock, or whether, as sometimes happens, they furnish 
 it, in a determinate proportion, between them. The essen- 
 tial difference does not lie in this, but in another circum- 
 stance, namely, whether the division of the produce between 
 the two is regulated by custom or by competition. We will 
 begin with the former case ; of which the metayer culture is 
 the principal, and in Europe almost the sole, example. 
 
 The principle of the metayer system is that the labourer, 
 or peasant, makes his engagement directly with the land- 
 owner, and pays, not a fixed rent, either in money or in 
 kind, but a certain proportion of the produce, or rather of 
 what remains of the produce after deducting what is con- 
 sidered necessary to keep up the stock. The proportion is 
 usually, as the name imports, one-half; but in several dis- 
 tricts in Italy it is two-thirds. Respecting the supply of 
 stock, the custom varies from place to place ; in some places 
 the landlord furnishes the whole, in others half, in others 
 some particular part, as for instance the cattle and seed, the 
 labourer providing the implements.* " This connexion," 
 says Sismondi, speaking chiefly of Tuscany, f " is often the 
 
 * In France, before the Revolution, according to Arthur Young (i. 403) 
 there was great local diversity in this respect. In Champagne, " the landlord 
 commonly finds half the cattle and half the seed, and the metayer, labour, imple- 
 ments, and taxes ; but in some districts the landlord bears a share of these. In 
 Roussillon, the landlord pays half the taxes ; and in Guienne, from Auch to 
 Fleuran, many landlords pay all. Near Aguillon, on the Garonne, the metayers 
 furnish half the cattle. At Nangis, in the Isle of France, I met with an agree- 
 ment for the landlord to furnish live stock, implements, harness, and taxes ; the 
 metayer found labour and his own capitation tax : the landlord repaired the 
 house and gates ; the metayer the windows : the landlord provided seed the first 
 year, the metayer the last ; in the intervening years they supply half and half. 
 In the Bourbonnois the landlord finds all sorts of live stock, yet the metayer sells, 
 changes, and buys at his will ; the steward keeping an account of these muta- 
 tions, for the landlord has half the product of sales, and pays half the purchases." 
 In Piedmont, he says, " the landlord commonly pays the taxes and repairs the 
 buildings, and the tenant provides cattle, implements, and seed." (II. 151.) 
 
 f Etude* mtr FEconvmie Politiqite, 6me essai : De la Condition des Cultiva- 
 teurs en Toscanc.
 
 378 B OK n - CHAPTER VIII. 2. 
 
 subject of a contract, to define certain services and certain 
 occasional payments to which the metayer binds himself; 
 nevertheless the differences in the obligations of one such 
 contract and another are inconsiderable ; usage governs alike 
 all these engagements, and supplies the stipulations which 
 have not been expressed : and the landlord who attempted 
 to depart from usage, who exacted more than his neighbour^ 
 who took for the basis of the agreement anything but tht 
 equal division of the crops, would render himself so odious^ 
 he would be so sure of not obtaining a metayer who was ai* 
 honest man, that the contract of all the metayers may be 
 considered as identical, at least in each province, and nevei 
 gives rise to any competition among peasants in search of 
 employment, or any offer to cultivate the soil on cheap ei 
 terms than one another." To the same effect Chateau- 
 vieux,* speaking of the metayers of Piedmont. " They 
 consider it," (the farm) " as a patrimony, and never think 
 of renewing the lease, but go on from generation to genera 
 tion, on the same terms, without writings or registries, "f 
 
 2. When the partition of the produce is a matter of 
 fixed usage, not of varying convention, political economy 
 has no laws of distribution to investigate. It has only to 
 consider, as in the case of peasant proprietors, the effects of 
 the system, first, on the condition of the peasantry, morally 
 and physically, and secondly, on the efficiency of the labour. 
 In both these particulars the metayer system has the charac- 
 
 * Letters from Italy. I quote from Dr. Rigby's translation (p. 22.) 
 f This virtual fixity of tenure is not however universal even in Italy ; and it 
 is to its absence that Sismondi attributes the inferior condition of the metayers 
 in some provinces of Naples, in Lucca, and in the Riviera of Genoa ; where the 
 landlords obtain a larger (though still a fixed) share of the produce. In those 
 countries the cultivation is splendid, but the people wretchedly poor. " The 
 same misfortune would probably have befallen the people of Tuscany if public 
 opinion did not protect the cultivator; but a proprietor would not dare to impose 
 conditions unusual in the country, and even in changing one metayer for an- 
 other, he alters nothing in the terms of the engagement." [Nouveauz Principes, 
 liv. iii. ch. 5.]
 
 METAYERS. 379 
 
 teristic advantages of peasant properties, but has them in a 
 less degree. The metayer has less motive to exertion than 
 the peasant proprietor, since only half the fruits of his in- 
 dustry, instead of the whole, are his own. But he has a 
 much stronger motive than a day labourer, who has no 
 other interest in the result than not to be dismissed. If 
 the metayer cannot be turned out except for some violation 
 of his contract, he has a stronger motive to exertion than 
 any tenant-farmer who has not a lease. The metayer is at 
 least his landlord's partner, and a half-sharer in their joint 
 gains. Where, too, the permanence of his tenure is guaran- 
 teed by custom, he acquires local attachments, and much of 
 the feelings of a proprietor. I am supposing that this half 
 produce is sufficient to yield him a comfortable support. 
 Whether it is so, depends (in any given state of agriculture) 
 on the degree of subdivision of the land ; which depends 
 on the operation of the population principle. A multi- 
 plication of people, beyond the number that can be properly 
 supported on the land or taken off by manufactures, is inci- 
 dent even to a peasant proprietary, and of course not less 
 but rather more incident to a metayer population. The 
 tendency, however, which we noticed in the proprietary 
 system, to promote prudence on this point, is in no small 
 degree common to it with the metayer system. There, 
 also, it is a matter of easy and exact calculation whether a 
 family can be supported or not. If it is easy to see whether 
 the owner of the whole produce can increase the production 
 so as to maintain a greater number of persons equally well, 
 it is a not less simple problem whether the owner of half 
 the produce can do so.* There is one check which this 
 
 * M. Bastiat affirms that even in France, incontestably the least favourable 
 example of the metayer system, its effect in repressing population is conspicuous. 
 
 "Un fait bien constate, c'est que la tendance a une multiplication desor- 
 donnee se manifeste principalement au sein de cette classe d'hommes qui vit de 
 salaires. Cette pr6voyance qui retarde les manages a sur elle peu d'empire, 
 parce que les maux qui re'sultent de 1'exces de concurrence ne lui apparaissent 
 que tres-confusement, et dans uu lointain en apparence peu redoubtable. C'est
 
 380 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 2. 
 
 system seems to offer, over and above those held out even 
 by the proprietary system ; there is a landlord, who may 
 exert a controlling power, by refusing his consent to a sub- 
 division. I do not, however, attach great importance to 
 this check, because the farm may be loaded with super- 
 fluous hands without being subdivided ; and because, so 
 long as the increase of hands increases the gross produce, 
 which is almost always the case, the landlord, who receives 
 half the produce, is an immediate gainer, the inconvenience 
 falling only on the labourers. The landlord is no doubt 
 liable in the end to suffer from their poverty, by being 
 forced to make advances to them, especially in bad seasons ; 
 and a foresight of this ultimate inconvenience may operate 
 beneficially on such landlords as prefer future security to 
 present profit. 
 
 The characteristic disadvantage of the metayer system 
 is very fairly stated by Adam Smith. After pointing out 
 that metayers " have a plain interest that the whole prod- 
 uce should be as great as possible, in order that their own 
 proportion may be so," he continues,* " it could never, 
 however, be the interest of this species of cultivators to lay 
 out, in the further improvement of the land, any part of the 
 little stock which they might save from their own share of 
 the produce, because the lord, who laid out nothing, was to 
 get one half of whatever it produced. The tithe, which is 
 but a tenth of the produce, is found to be a very great 
 hindrance to improvement. A tax, therefore, which 
 
 done la circonstance la plus favorable pour un pays d'etre organise de manieto 
 a exc'.ure le salariat. Dans les pays de rm'-tairies, les manages sont determines 
 principalement par les besoms de la culture ; ils se multiplient quand, pp.r 
 quelque circonstance, les m6tairies offrent des vides nuisibles aux travaux ; ils ae 
 raleutissent quand les places sont remplies. Ici, un 6tat de choses facile a eon- 
 stater, savoir, la rapport entre 1'eteudue du domaiue et le nombre des bras, opere 
 comme la prevoyauce et plus suremer.t qu'olle. Aussi voyons-nous que si aucune 
 circonstance n'intervient pour ouvrir des debouches a une population surnuir.6* 
 raire, elle demeure stationnaire. Nos departements m6ridionaux en sont la 
 preuve." Considerations sur le Metayage, Journal des Economises for Febru- 
 ary 1846, 
 
 * Wealth of Nations, book iii. chap. 2.
 
 METAYERS. 381 
 
 amounted to one half, must have been an effectual bar to 
 it. It might be the interest of a metayer to make the land 
 produce as much as could be brought out of it by means of 
 the stock furnished by the proprietor ; but it could never 
 be his interest to mix any part of his own with it. In 
 France, where live parts out of six of the whole kingdom 
 are said to be still occupied by this species of cultivators, 
 the proprietors complain that their metayers take every 
 opportunity of employing the master's cattle rather in car- 
 riage than in cultivation ; because in the one case they get 
 the whole profits to themselves, in the other they share 
 them with their landlord." 
 
 It is indeed implied in the very nature of the tenure, that 
 all improvements which require expenditure of capital, must 
 be made with the capital of the landlord. This, however, is 
 essentially the case even in England, whenever the farmers 
 are tenants-at-will : or (if Arthur Young is right) even on a 
 " nine years lease." If the landlord is willing to provide 
 capital for improvements, the metayer has the strongest- 
 interest in promoting them, since half the benefit of them 
 will accrue to himself. As however the perpetuity of tenure 
 which, in the case we are discussing, he enjoys by custom, 
 renders his consent a necessary condition ; the spirit of 
 routine, and dislike of innovation, characteristic of an agri- 
 cultural people when not corrected by education, are no 
 doubt, as the advocates of the system seem to admit, a serious 
 hindrance to improvement. 
 
 3. The metayer system has met with no mercy from 
 English authorities. " There is not one word to be said in 
 favour of the practice, " says Arthur Young,* " and a thou- 
 sand arguments that might be used against it. The hard 
 plea of necessity can alone be urged in its favour ; the 
 poverty of the farmers being so great, that the landlord must 
 stock the farm, or it could not be stocked at all : this is a 
 most cruel burthen to a proprietor, who is thus obliged to 
 
 * Travels, vol. i. pp. 404 5.
 
 382 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 run much of the hazard of farming in the most dangerous of 
 all methods, that of trusting his property absolutely in the 
 hands of people who are generally ignorant, many care- 
 less, and some undoubtedly wicked. ... In this most 
 miserable of all the modes of letting land, the defrauded land- 
 lord receives a contemptible rent ; the farmer is in the 
 lowest state of poverty ; the land is miserably cultivated ; 
 and the nation suffers as severely as the parties themselves. 
 . . . Wherever* this system prevails, it may be taken 
 for granted that a useless and miserable population is found. 
 . . . Wherever the country (that I saw) is poor and 
 unwatered, in the Milanese, it is in the hands of metayers : " 
 they are almost always in debt to their landlord for seed or 
 food, and " their condition is more wretched than that of a 
 day labourer. . . . Theref are but few districts " (in 
 Italy) " where lands are let to the occupying tenant at a 
 money-rent ; but wherever it is found, their crops are 
 greater ; a clear proof of the imbecility of the rnetaying 
 system." "Wherever it " (the metayer system) " has been 
 adopted," says Mr. M'Culloch,:}: " it has put a stop to all 
 improvement, and has reduced the cultivators to the most 
 abject poverty." Mr. Jones shares the common opinion, 
 and quotes Turgot and Destutt-Tracy in support of it. The 
 impression, however, of all these writers (notwithstanding 
 Arthur Young's occasional references to Italy) seems to be 
 chiefly derived from France, and France before the Revolu- 
 tion. J Now the situation of French metayers under the old 
 regime by no means represents the typical form of the con- 
 tract. It is essential to that form, that the proprietor pays 
 
 * Travels, vol. ii. 1513. f Ibid, ii. 217. 
 
 \ Principles of Political Economy, 3rd ed. p. 471. 
 
 Essay on tJie Distribution of Wealth, pp. 102 4. 
 
 | M. de Tracy is partially an exception, inasmuch as his experience reaches 
 lower down than the revolutionary period : but he admits (as Mr. Jones has him- 
 self stated in another place) that he is acquainted only with a limited district, of 
 great subdivision and unfertile soil. 
 
 M. Passyis of opinion, that a French peasantry must be in indigence and the 
 country badly cultivated on a metayer system, because the proportion of the
 
 METAYERS. 383 
 
 all the taxes. But in France the exemption of the noblesse 
 from direct taxation had led the Government to throw the 
 whole burthen of their ever-increasing fiscal exactions upon 
 the occupiers : and it is to these exactions that Turgot 
 ascribed the extreme wretchedness of the metayers: a 
 wretchedness in some cases so excessive, that in Limousin 
 and Angoumois (the provinces which he administered) they 
 had seldom more, according to him, after deducting all bur- 
 thens, than from twenty-five to thirty livres (20 to 24: shil- 
 lings) per head for their whole annual consumption : " je ne 
 dis pas en argent, mais en comptant tout ce qu'ils consom- 
 ment en nature sur ce qu'ils ont recolte. " * When we add 
 that they had not the virtual fixity of tenure of the metayers 
 of Italy, (" in Limousin," says Arthur Young, f " the metayers 
 are considered as little better than menial servants, remova- 
 ble at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to the 
 will of the landlords,") it is evident that their case affords 
 no argument against the metayer system in its better form. 
 A population who could call nothing their own, who, like 
 the Irish cottiers, could not in any contingency be worse off, 
 had nothing to restrain them from multiplying, and subdi- 
 viding the land, until stopped by actual starvation. 
 
 We shall find a very different picture, by the most accu- 
 rate authorities, of the metayer cultivation of Italy. In the 
 
 produce claimable by the landlord is too high ; it being only in more favourable 
 climates that any land, not of the most exuberant fertility, can pay half its gross 
 produce in rent, and leave enough to peasant farmers to enable them to grow 
 successfully the more expensive and valuable products of agriculture. (Sys- 
 ternea de Culture, p. 35.) This is an objection only to a particular numerical 
 proportion, which is indeed the common one, but is not essential to the system. 
 
 * See the " Memoire sur la Surcharge des Impositions qu'eprouvait la Gene- 
 ralite de Limoges, address^ au Conseil d'Etat en 1766," pp. 260304 of the 
 fourth volume of Turgot's Works. The occasional engagements of landlords (as 
 mentioned by Arthur Young) to pay a part of the taxes, were, according to Tur- 
 got, of recent origin, under the compulsion of actual necessity. " Le propri6- 
 taire ne s'y prete qu'autant qu'il ne peut trouver de metayer autrement ; ainsi, 
 meme dans ce cas-la, le metayer est toujoura reduit & ce qu'il faut pr6cis6ment 
 pour ne pas mourir de faim. (p. 276.) 
 
 f Vol. i. p. 404.
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 first place, as to subdivision. In Lombardy, according to 
 Chateauvieux,* there are few farms which exceed sixty acres, 
 and few which have less than ten. These farms are all 
 occupied by metayers at half profit. They invariably dis- 
 play " an extent f and a richness in buildings rarely known 
 in any other country in Europe." Their plan " affords the 
 greatest room with the least extent of building; is best 
 adapted to arrange and secure the crop ; and is, at the same 
 time, the most economical, and the least exposed to accidents 
 by fire." The court-yard " exhibits a whole so regular and 
 commodious, and a system of such care and good order, that 
 our dirty and ill-arranged farms can convey no adequate 
 idea of. " The same description applies to Piedmont. The 
 rotation of crops is excellent. "I should think J no country 
 can bring so large a portion of its produce to market as 
 Piedmont." Though the soil is not naturally very fertile, 
 " the number of cities is prodigiously great." The agri- 
 culture must, therefore, be eminently favourable to the net 
 as well as to the gross produce of the land. " Each plough 
 
 works thirty-two acres in the season Nothing can be 
 
 more perfect or neater than the hoeing and moulding up the 
 maize, when in full growth, by a single plough, with a pair 
 of oxen, without injury to a single plant, while all the weeds 
 are effectually destroyed. " So much for agricultural skill. 
 " Nothing can be so excellent as the crop which precedes 
 and that which follows it." The wheat "is thrashed by a 
 cylinder, drawn by a horse, and guided by a boy, while the 
 labourers turn over the straw with forks. This process lasts 
 nearly a fortnight; it is quick and economical, and com- 
 pletely gets out the grain In no part of the world 
 
 are the economy and the management of the land better 
 understood than in Piedmont, and this explains the phe- 
 nomenon of its great population, and immense export of 
 provisions." All this under metayer cultivation. 
 
 Of the valley of the Arno, in its whole extent, both 
 
 * Letters from Italy, translated by Rigby, p. 16. 
 f Ibid. pp. 19, 20. $ Ibid. pp. 24-31.
 
 METAYERS. 385 
 
 above and below Florence, the same writer thus speaks ; * 
 " Forests of olive-trees covered the lower parts of the moun- 
 tains, and by their foliage concealed an infinite number of 
 small farms, which peopled these parts of the mountains ; 
 chestnut-trees raised their heads on the higher slopes, their 
 healthy verdure contrasting with the pale tint of the olive- 
 trees, and spreading a brightness over this amphitheatre. 
 The road was bordered on each side with village-houses, not 
 
 more than a hundred paces from each other They 
 
 are placed at a little distance from the road, and separated 
 from it by a wall, and a terrace of some feet in extent. On 
 the wall are commonly placed many vases of antique forms, 
 in which flowers, aloes, and young orange-trees are growing. 
 
 The house itself is completely covered with vines 
 
 Before these houses we saw groups of peasant females 
 dressed in white linen, silk corsets, and straw-hats orna- 
 mented with flowers These houses being so near 
 
 each other, it is evident that the land annexed to them 
 must be small, and that property, in these valleys, must be 
 very much divided ; the extent of these domains being from 
 three to ten acres. The land lies round the houses, and is 
 divided into fields by small canals, or rows of trees, some 
 of which are mulberry-trees, but the greatest number 
 poplars, the leaves of which are eaten by the cattle. Each 
 tree supports a vine These divisions, arrayed in ob- 
 long squares, are large enough to be cultivated by a plough 
 without wheels, and a pair of oxen. There is a pair of oxen 
 between ten or twelve of the farmers ; they employ thorn 
 
 successively in the cultivation of all the farms 
 
 Almost every farm maintains a well-looking horse, which 
 goes in a small two wheeled cart, neatly made, and painted 
 red ; they serve for all the purposes of draught for the farm, 
 and also to convey the farmer's daughters to mass and to 
 balls. Tims, on holidays, hundreds of these little carts are 
 seen flying in all directions, carrying the young women, 
 decorated with flowers and ribbons." 
 
 Pp. 78-9. 
 
 25
 
 386 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 This is not a picture of poverty ; and so far as agricul- 
 ture is concerned, it effectually redeems metayer cultivation, 
 as existing in these countries, from the reproaches of English 
 writers ; but with respect to the condition of the cultivators, 
 Chateau vieux's testimony is, in some points, not so favour- 
 able. "It is* neither the natural fertility of the soil, nor 
 the abundance which strikes the eye of the traveller, which 
 constitute the well-being of its inhabitants. It is the 
 number of individuals among whom the total produce is 
 divided, which fixes the portion that each is enabled to 
 enjoy. Here it is very small. I have thus far, indeed, 
 exhibited a delightful country, well watered, fertile, and 
 covered with a perpetual vegetation ; I have shown it 
 divided into countless inclosures, which like so many beds 
 in a garden, display a thousand varying productions; I 
 have shown, that to all these inclosures are attached well- 
 built houses, clothed with vines, and decorated with flowers; 
 but, on entering them, we find a total want of all the con- 
 veniences of life, a table more than frugal, and a general 
 appearance of privation." Is not Chateauvieux here un- 
 consciously contrasting the condition of the metayers with 
 that of the farmers of other countries, when the proper 
 standard with which to compare it is that of the agricultural 
 day-labourers ? 
 
 Arthur Young says,f " I was assured that these meta- 
 yers are (especially near Florence) much at their ease ; that 
 on holidays they are dressed remarkably well, and not 
 without objects of luxury, as silver, gold, and silk ; and live 
 well, on plenty of bread, wine, and legumes. In some 
 instances this may possibly be the case, but the general 
 fact is contrary. It is absurd to think that metayers, upon 
 such a farm as is cultivated by a pair of oxen, can live at 
 their ease ; and a clear proof of their poverty is this, that 
 the landlord, who provides half the live stock, is often 
 obliged to lend the peasant money to procure his half. 
 
 Pp. 736. f Travels, vol. ii. p. 156.
 
 METAYERS. 387 
 
 The metayers, not in the vicinity of the city, are 
 
 BO poor, that landlords even lend them corn to eat : their 
 food is black bread, made of a mixture with vetches ; and 
 their drink is very little wine, mixed with water, and called 
 aquarolle meat on Sundays only ; their dress very ordi- 
 nary. " Mr. Jones admits the superior comfort of the 
 metayers near Florence, and attributes it partly to straw- 
 platting, by which the women of the peasantry can earn, 
 according to Chateauvieux, * from fifteen to twenty pence 
 a-day. But even this fact tells in favour of the metayer 
 system ; for in those parts of England in which either straw- 
 platting or lace-making is carried on by the women and 
 children of the labouring class, as in Bedfordshire and 
 Buckinghamshire, the condition of the class is not better, 
 but rather worse than elsewhere, the wages of agricultural 
 labour being depressed by a full equivalent. 
 
 In spite of Chateauvieux's statement respecting the 
 poverty of the metayers, his opinion, in respect to Italy at 
 least, is given in favour of the system. " It occupies f and 
 constantly interests the proprietors, which is never the 
 case with great proprietors who lease their estates at fixed 
 rents. It establishes a community of interests, and relations 
 of kindness between the proprietors and the metayers ; a 
 kindness which I have often witnessed, and from which 
 result great advantages in the moral condition of society. 
 The proprietor, under this system, always interested in the 
 success of the crop, never refuses to make an advance upon 
 it, which the land promises to repay with interest. It is by 
 these advances, and by the hope thus inspired, that the 
 rich proprietors of land have gradually perfected the whole 
 rural economy of Italy. It is to them that it owes the nu- 
 merous systems of irrigation which water its soil, as also 
 the establishment of the terrace culture on the hills; 
 gradual but permanent improvements, which common 
 peasants, for want of means, could never have effected, and 
 which could never have been accomplished by the fanners, 
 
 * Letters from Italy, p. 75. f Ibid, pp. 2956.
 
 388 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 nor by the great proprietors who let their estates at fixed 
 rents, because they are not sufficiently interested. Thus the 
 interested system forms of itself that alliance between the 
 rich proprietor, whose means provide for the improvement of 
 the culture, and the metayer, whose care and labours are di- 
 rected, by a common interest, to make the most of these 
 advances. " 
 
 But the testimony most favourable to the system is that 
 of Sismondi, which has the advantage of being specific, and 
 from accurate knowledge ; his information being not that of 
 a traveller, but of a resident proprietor, intimately acquainted 
 with rural life. His statements apply to Tuscany generally, 
 and more particulary to the Yal di Nievole, in which his 
 own property lay, and which is not within the supposed priv- 
 ileged circle immediately round Florence. It is one of the 
 districts in which the size of farms appears to be the small- 
 est. The following is his description of the dwellings and 
 mode of life of the metayers of that district.* 
 
 " Cette maison, batie en bonnes murailles a chaux et a 
 ciment, a toujours au moms un etage, quelquefois deux, au- 
 dessus du rez-de-chaussee. Le plus souvent on trouve a ce 
 rez-de-chaussee la cuisine, une etable pour deux betes a corne, 
 et le magasin, qui prend son nom, tinaia, des grandes cuves 
 (tini) ou 1'on fait fermenter le vin, sans le soumettre au 
 pressoir : c'est la encore que le metayer enferme sous cle ses 
 tonneaux, son huile, et son ble. Presque toujours il possede 
 encore un hangar appuye contre la maison, pour qu'il puisse 
 y travailler a convert a raccommoder ses outils, au a hacher 
 le fourrage pour son betail. Au premier et au second etage 
 sont deux, trois, et souvent quatre chambres a lit. ... La 
 plus spacieuse et la mieux aeree de ces chambres est en 
 general destinee par le metayer, pendant les mois de Mai et 
 de Juin, a 1'education des vers a soie : de grands coffres pour 
 enfermer les habits et le linge, et quelques chaises de bois, 
 sont les principaux metibles de ces chambres; mais une 
 
 * From his Sixth Essay, formerly referred to.
 
 METAYERS. 389 
 
 nouvelle epouse y apporte toujours sa commode de bois de 
 noyer. Les lits sont sans rideaux, sans tour de lit ; mais 
 sur chacun, outre un bon garde-paille rempli de la paille 
 elastique du ble de Tnrquie, on voit un ou deux matelas en 
 laine, ou, chez les plus pauvres, en etoupe, une bonne cou- 
 vertnre piquee, des draps de forte toile de chanvre, et sur le 
 nieilleur lit de la famille, un tapis de bourre de soie qu'on 
 etale les jours de fete. II n'y a de cheminee qu'a la cuisine ; 
 dans la meme piece ou trouve toujours la grande table 
 de bois ou dine la famille, avec ses banes ; le grand coifre, 
 qui sert en meme temps d'arrnoire pour conserver le pain et 
 les provisions, et de petrin ; un assortment assez complet et 
 fort peu couteux de pots, de plats et d'assiettes en terre 
 cuite ; une ou deux lainpes de laiton, un poids a la romaine, 
 et au moins deux cruches en cuivre rouge pour puiser et 
 pour conserver 1'eau. Tout le linge et tons les habits de 
 travail de la famille ont etc files par les femmes de la maison. 
 Ces habits, tant pour les hommes que pour les femmes, sont 
 de Tetoffe qu'ils nomment mezza lana si elle est epaisse, mola 
 si elle est logere. La trame est un gros fil ou de chanvre ou 
 d 'etoupe, le remplissage est de laine ou de coton ; elle est 
 teinte par les memes paysannes qui 1'ont filee. On se 
 figurerait difficilement combien, par un travail assidu, les 
 paysannes savent accumuler et de toile et de mezza lana ; 
 combien de draps se trouvent au depot commun : combien 
 chaque membre de la famille a de chemises, de vestes, de 
 pan talons, de jupons, et de robes. Pour le faire comprendre, 
 nous joignons en note une partie de 1'inventaire de la famille 
 de paysans que nous connaissons le mieux ; elle n'est ni 
 parmi les plus pauvres ni parmi les plus riches, et elle vit 
 heureuse par son travail sur la moitie des recoltes de moins 
 de dix arpens de terre.* Cette epouse avait eu 50 ecus de 
 
 * " Invcntaire du troussoau de Jeanne, fille de Valente Papini, a son mariage 
 avec Giovacchino Landi, le 29 Avril 1835, a Porta Vecchia, pres Pescia: 
 
 " 28 chemises, 3 robes de bourre de soie en couleur, 4 robes de fleuret de 
 soie en couleur, 7 robes d'indienne ou toile de coton, 2 robes de travail d'hiver 
 (mezza lana) 3 robes et joupons de travail d'ete (mola), 3 jupes blanches, 5 ta-
 
 390 BOOK II. CHAPTER 7III. 3. 
 
 dot, dont 20 payes comptant, et le reste a terme, a 2 ecus 
 par annee. L'ecu de Toscane vaut 6 francs. La dot la plus 
 commune pour les paysannes, dans le reste de la Toscane 
 ou les metairies sont plus grandes, est de 100 ecus, 600 
 francs." 
 
 Is this poverty, or consistent with poverty? "When .a 
 common, M. de Sismondi even says the common, marriage 
 portion of a metayer's daughter is 24Z. English money, equiv- 
 alent to at least 5QL in Italy and in that rank of life ; when 
 one whose dowry is only half that amount, has the ward- 
 robe described, which is represented by Sismondi as a fair 
 average ; the class must be fully comparable, in general 
 condition, to a large proportion even of capitalist farmers in 
 other countries ; and incomparably above the day-labourers 
 of any country, except a new colony, or the United States. 
 Very little can be inferred, against such evidence, from a 
 traveller's impression of the poor quality of their food. Its 
 unexpensive character may be rather the effect of economy 
 than of necessity. Costly feeding is not the favourite 
 luxury of a southern people ; their diet in all classes is 
 principally vegetable, and no peasantry on the Continent has 
 the superstition of the English labourer respecting white 
 bread. But the nourishment of the Tuscan peasant, accord- 
 ing to Sismondi, " is wholesome and various : its basis is an 
 excellent wheaten bread, brown, but pure from bran and 
 from all mixture. " " Dans la mauvaise saison, il ne fait que 
 deux repas par jour : a dix heures du matin il mange sa 
 
 bliers de toile peinte, 1 tablier de sole noir, 1 tablier de merinos noir, 9 tabliers 
 de travail (it/tola) en couleur, 4 mouchoirs blancs, 8 mouchoirs en couleur, 3 
 mouchoirs de soie, 2 voiles brodes et 1 voile de tulle, 3 essuie-mains, 14 paires 
 de bas, 2 chapeaux, 1'un de feutre, 1'autre de paille fine : 2 camees d'or, 2 boucles 
 d'oreilles en or, 1 chapelet avec deux piastres romaines, 1 collier de corail avec 
 
 sa croix d'or Toutcs les epouses plus riches ont de plus la veste di seta, 
 
 la grande robe de toilette, de soie, qu'elles ne portent que quatre ou cinq fois 
 dans leur vie. 
 
 " Les hommes n'ont point de trousseaux : 1'epoux en se mariunt n'nvait que 
 14 chemises, et le reste en proportion. II n'a encore a present que 13 paires de 
 draps, tandis que dans la famille de sa femme il y en a 30 paires."
 
 METAYERS. 391 
 
 pollenta, a 1'entree de la nuit il mange la soupe, puis du pain 
 avec quelque assaisonnement (coinpanatico). En ete il fait 
 trois repas, a huit heures, a une heure, et au soir, inais il 
 n'allume de feu qu'une seule fois par jour, pour son diner, 
 qui se compose de soupe, puis d'un plat ou de viande salee 
 ou de poisson sec, ou de haricots, ou d'herbages, qu'il mange 
 avec du pain. La viande salee n'entre que pour une quan- 
 tite bien minime dans cet ordinaire, car il estime que quarante 
 livres de pore sale par individu suffisent amplement a sa 
 provision de 1'annee; il en met deux fois par semaine un 
 petit morceau dans son potage. Le dimanche il a toujours 
 sur sa table un plat de viande fraiche, mais un morceau qui 
 ne pese qu'une livre ou une livre et demie suffit a toute la 
 famille, quelque nombreuse qu'elle soit. II ne faut point 
 oublier que le paysan Toscan recolte en general de Phuile 
 d'olive pour son usage: il s'en sert, non seulement pour 
 s'eclairer, mais pour assaisonner tout les vegetaux qu'il 
 apprete pour sa table, et qui deviennent ainsi bien plus 
 savoureux et plus nutritifs. A dejeuner il mange du pain, et 
 quelquefois du fromage et des fruits ; a souper, du pain et de 
 la salade. Sa boisson se compose du vin inferieur du pays, 
 et de la vinelle ou piquette faite d'eau fermentee sur le marc 
 du raisin. II reserve cependant toujours quelque pen de son 
 meilleur vin pour le jour ou il battra son grain, et pour 
 (juelques fetes qui se celebrent en famille. II estime a dix 
 barils de vinelle parannee (environ cinquante bouteilles) et a 
 cinq sacs de frornent (environ mille livres de pain) la portion 
 requise pour un homme fait. 
 
 The remarks of Sismondi on the moral influences of this 
 state of society are not less worthy of attention. The rights 
 and obligations of the metayer being fixed by usage, and all 
 taxes and rates being paid by the proprietor, " le metayer a 
 les avantages de la propriete sans 1'inconvenient de la de- 
 fendre. C'est au proprietaire qu'avec la terre appartient la 
 guerre : pour lui il vit en paix avec tous ses voisins ; il n'a a 
 leur egard aucun motif de rivalite ou de defiance ; il conserve 
 la bonne harmonie avec eux, comme avec son maitre, avec le
 
 392 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 8. 
 
 fisc et avec Peglise : il vend pen, il achete pen, il touche pen 
 cTargent, mais personne ne lui en demande. On a souveut 
 parle du caractere donx et bienveillant des Toscans, mais on 
 n'a point assez remarque la cause qui a le plus contribue a 
 preserver cette douceur ; c'est celle qui a soustrait tous les 
 agriculteurs, formant plus des trois quarts de la population, 
 a presque toute occasion de querelle." The fixity of tenure 
 which the metayer, so long as he fulfils his known obliga- 
 tions, possesses by usage, though not by law, gives him the 
 local attachments, and almost the strong sense of personal 
 interest characteristic of a proprietor. " Le metayer vit sur 
 sa metairie comme sur son heritage, 1'aimant d'affection, 
 travaillant a la bonifier sans cesse, se confiant dans Tavenir, 
 et comptant bien que ses champs seront travailles apres lui 
 par ses enfans et les enfans de ses enfans. En efiet, le plus 
 grand n ombre des metayers vivent de generation en genera- 
 tion stir la meme terre ; ils la connaissent en detail avec une 
 precision que le sentiment seul de la propriete peut donner. . . 
 Les champs eleves en terrasses les uns au-dessus des autres 
 n'ont souvent pas plus de quatre pieds de largeur, mais il n'y 
 en a pas un dont le metayer n'ait etudie en quelque sorte le 
 caractere. Celui-ci est sec, celui-la froid et humide ; ici la 
 terre est profonde, la ce n'est qu'une croute qui couvre a 
 peirie le roc ; le froment prospere mieux sur 1'un, le seigle 
 sur 1'autre; ici ce serait peine perdue de semer du ble de 
 Turquie, ailleurs la terre se refuse aux feves et aux lupins, 
 plus loin le lin viendra a merveille, et le bord de ce ruisseau 
 sera propre au chanvre : ainsi 1'on apprend du metayer, avec 
 etonnement, que dans une espace de dix arpens, le sol, lea 
 aspects, et 1'inclinaison du terrain, presentent plus de variete 
 qu'un riche fermier n'en sait en general distinguer dans une 
 ferme de cinq cents acres d'etendue. C'est que le dernier 
 sent qu'il n'est la que de passage, que de plus il doit se con- 
 duire par des regies generates, et negliger les details. Mais le 
 metayer, avec 1' experience du passe, a senti son intelligence 
 eveiliee par 1'interet et L'affection pour devenir le meilleur 
 des observateurs, et avec tout 1'avenir devant lui, il ne songe
 
 METAYERS. 393 
 
 pas a lui seulement, mais a ses enfans et a ses petits enfans. 
 Aussi lorsqu'il plante 1'olivier, arbre seculaire, et qu'il menage 
 an fond du creux qu'il fait pour lui un ecoulement aux eaux 
 qui pourraient lui nuire, il etudie toutes les couches de terrain 
 qu'il est appele a defoncer."* 
 
 4. I do not offer these quotations as evidence of the 
 intrinsic excellence of the metayer system ; but they surely 
 suffice to prove that neither " land miserably cultivated " 
 nor a people in " the most abject poverty," have any neces- 
 sary connexion with it, and that the unmeasured vitupera- 
 tion lavished upon the system by English writers, is 
 grounded on an extremely narrow view of the subject. I 
 look upon the rural economy of Italy as simply so much 
 additional evidence in favour of small occupations with 
 permanent tenure. It is an example of what can be accom- 
 plished by those two elements, even under the disadvantage 
 of the peculiar nature of the metayer contract, in which the 
 motives to exertion on the part of the tenant are only half 
 as strong as if he farmed the land on the same footing of 
 perpetuity at a money-rent, either fixed, or varying accord- 
 ing to some rule which would leave to the tenant the whole 
 benefit of his own exertions. The metayer tenure is not 
 
 * Of the intelligence of this interesting people, II. de Sismondi speaks in the 
 most favourable terms. Few of them can read ; but there is often one member 
 of the family destined for the priesthood, who reads to them on winter evenings. 
 Their language differs little from the purest Italian. The taste for improvisation 
 in verse is general. " Les paysans du val de Nievole frequentent le spectacle 
 les jours de fete, en etc, de neuf 11 onze heures du soir: leur admission ne leur 
 coiite gufere que cinq sols de France. Alfieri est leur auteur de predilection ; 
 toute Thistoire des Atrides est familiere & ces hommes qui ne savent pas lire, ct 
 qui vont demander a ce poete austere un delassement de leurs rudes travaux." 
 Unlike most rustics, they find pleasure in the beauty of their country. " Dana 
 les collines du val de Nievole on trouve devant chaque maison, I'aire pour battre 
 le ble, qui a rarement plus de vingt-cinq a trente toises carrees, c'est le plus 
 souvent le seul espace de niveau qu'on rencontre dans toute' la m^tairie. En 
 meme temps c'est une terrasse qui domine les plaines et la val!6e, et d'ou la vue 
 attend sur un pays ravissant. Presque jamais je ne m'y suis arret6 pour 1'ad- 
 mirer, sans que le metayer soit venu jouir de mon admiration, et m'indiquer du 
 doigt les beautes qu'il croyait pouvoir m'avoir 6chappe."
 
 394: BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 4. 
 
 one which we should be anxious to introduce where the 
 exigencies of society had not naturally given birth to it ; 
 but neither ought we to be eager to abolish it on a mere 
 a priori view of its disadvantages. If the system in Tus- 
 cany works as well in practice as it is represented to do, 
 with every appearance of minute knowledge, by so compe- 
 tent an authority as Sismondi ; if the mode of living of the 
 people, and the size of farms, have for ages maintained and 
 still maintain themselves * such as they are said to be by 
 him, it were to be regretted that a state of rural well-being 
 so much beyond what is realised in most European coun- 
 tries, should be put to hazard by an attempt to introduce, 
 under the guise of agricultural improvement, a system of 
 money-rents and capitalist farmers. Even where the metay- 
 ers are poor, and the subdivision great, it is not to be 
 assumed as of course, that the change would be for the bet- 
 ter. The enlargement of farms, and the introduction of 
 what are called agricultural improvements, usually diminish 
 the number of labourers employed on the land ; and unless 
 the growth of capital in trade and manufactures affords an 
 opening for the displaced population, or unless there aro 
 reclaimable wastes on which they can be located, competi- 
 tion will so reduce wages, that they will probably be worsts 
 off as day-labourers than they were as metayers. 
 
 Mr. Jones very properly objects against the French 
 Economists of the last century, that in pursuing their fa- 
 vourite object of introducing money-rents, they turned 
 their minds solely to putting farmers in the place of metay- 
 ers, instead of transforming the existing metayers into far- 
 
 * " On ne voit jamais," says Sismondi, " une famille de metayers proposer ;i 
 son maitre de partager sa m^tairie, a moins que le travail ne soil r^ellement 
 superieur a ses forces, et qu'elle ne sente la certitude de conserver les memes 
 jouissances sur un moindre espace de terrain. On ne voit jamais dans une 
 famille plusieurs fils se marier en meme temps, et former autant de menagcs 
 nouveaux ; un seul prend une femme et se charge des soins du manage ; aucun 
 de ses frres ne se marie, a moins que lui-meme n'ait pas d'enfans, ou que 
 Ton n'offre a cet autre frere une nouvelle metairie." Nouveaux Principe*, 
 liv. iii. cb. 5.
 
 METAYERS. 395 
 
 mers ; which, as he j ustly remarks, can scarcely be effected, 
 unless, to enable the metayers to save and become owners 
 of stock, the proprietors submit for a considerable time to a 
 diminution of income, instead of expecting an increase of it, 
 which has generally been their immediate motive for mak- 
 ing the attempt. If this transformation were effected, and 
 no other change made in the metayer's condition ; if, pre- 
 serving all the other rights which usage ensures to him, he 
 merely got rid of the landlord's claim to half the produce, 
 paying in lieu of it a moderate fixed rent ; he would be so 
 far in a better position than at present, as the whole, in- 
 stead of only half the fruits of any improvement he made, 
 would now belong to himself; but even so, the benefit 
 would not be without alloy ; for a metayer, though not 
 himself a capitalist, has a capitalist for his partner, and has 
 the use, in Italy at least, of a considerable capital, as is 
 proved by the excellence of the farm buildings : and it is 
 not probable that the landowners would any longer consent 
 to peril their moveable property on the hazards of agricul- 
 tural enterprise, when assured of a fixed money income 
 without it. Thus would the question stand, even if the 
 change left undisturbed the metayer's virtual fixity of ten- 
 ure, and converted him, in fact, into a peasant proprietor at 
 a quit rent. But if we suppose him converted into a mere 
 tenant, displaceable at the landlord's will, and liable to 
 have his rent raised by competition to any amount which 
 any unfortunate being in search of subsistence can be found 
 to offer or promise for it ; he would lose all the features in 
 his condition which preserve it from being deterioriated : 
 he would be cast down from his present position of a kind 
 of half proprietor of the land, and would sink into a cottier 
 tenant.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 OF COTTIERS. 
 
 1. BY the general appellation of cottier tenure I shall 
 designate all cases without exception in which the labourer 
 makes his contract for land without the intervention of a 
 capitalist farmer, and in which the conditions of the con- 
 tract, especially the amount of rent, are determined not by 
 custom but by competition. The principal European 
 example of this tenure is Ireland, and it is from that coun- 
 try that the term cottier is derived.* Kearly the whole 
 agricultural population of Ireland might until very lately 
 have been said to be cottier-tenants ; except so far as the 
 Ulster tenant-right constituted an exception. There was, 
 indeed, a numerous class of labourers who (we may pre- 
 sume through the refusal either of proprietors or of tenants 
 in possession to permit any further subdivision) had been 
 unable to obtain even the smallest patch of land as perma- 
 nent tenants. But, from the deficiency of capital, the cus- 
 tom of paying wages in land was so universal, that even 
 those who worked as casual labourers for the cottiers or for 
 such larger farmers as were found in the country, were 
 usually paid not in money, but by permission to cultivate 
 for the season a piece of ground, which was generally 
 
 * In its original acceptation, the word "cottier" designated a class of sub- 
 tenants, who rent a cottage and an acre or two of land from the small farmers. 
 But the usage of writers has long since stretched the term to include those small 
 farmers themselves, and generally all peasant farmers whose rents are deter- 
 mined by competition.
 
 COTTIERS. 397 
 
 delivered to them by the farmer ready manured, and was 
 known by the name of conacre. For this they agreed to 
 pay a money rent, often of several pounds an acre, but no 
 money actually passed, the debt being worked out in 
 labour, at a money valuation. 
 
 The produce, on the cottier system, being divided into 
 two portions, rent, and the remuneration of the labourer ; 
 the one is evidently determined by the other. The labourer 
 has whatever the landlord does not take : the condition of 
 the labourer depends on the amount of rent. But rent, 
 being regulated by competition, depends upon the relation 
 between the demand for land, and the supply of it. The 
 demand for land depends on the number of competitors, 
 and the competitors are the whole rural population. The 
 effect, therefore, of this tenure, is to bring the principle of 
 population to act directly on the land, and not, as in Eng- 
 land; on capital. Rent, in this state of things, depends 
 on the proportion between population and land. As the 
 land is a fixed quantity, while population has an unlimited 
 power of increase ; unless something checks that increase, 
 the competition for land soon forces up rent to the highest 
 point, consistent with keeping the population alive. The 
 effects, therefore, of cottier tenure depend on the extent to 
 which the capacity of population to increase is controlled, 
 either by custom, by individual prudence, or by starvation 
 and disease. 
 
 It would be an exaggeration to affirm, that cottier 
 tenancy is absolutely incompatible with a prosperous con- 
 dition of the labouring class. If we could suppose it to 
 exist among a people to whom a high standard of comfort 
 was habitual ; whose requirements were such, that they 
 would not offer a higher rent for land than would leave 
 them an ample subsistence, and whose moderate increase 
 of numbers left no unemployed population to force up rents 
 by competition, save when the increasing produce of the 
 land from increase of skill would enable a higher rent to be 
 paid without inconvenience ; the cultivating class might be
 
 398 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 1. 
 
 as well remunerated, might have as large a share of the 
 necessaries and comforts of life, on this system of tenure as 
 on any other. They would not, however, while their rents 
 were arbitrary, enjoy any of the peculiar advantages which 
 metayers on the Tuscan system derive from their connexion 
 with the land. They would neither have the use of a capi- 
 tal belonging to their landlords, nor would the want of this 
 be made up by the intense motives to bodily and mental 
 exertion which act upon the peasant who has a permanent 
 tenure. On the contrary, any increased value given to the 
 land by the exertions of the tenant, would have no effect 
 but to raise the rent against himself, either the next year, 
 or at farthest when his lease expired. The landlords might 
 have justice or good sense enough not to avail themselves 
 of the advantage which competition would give them ; and 
 different landlords would do so in different degrees. But 
 it is never safe to expect that a class or body of men will 
 act in opposition to their immediate pecuniary interest ; 
 and even a doubt on the subject would be almost as fatal as 
 a certainty, for when a person is considering whether or not 
 to undergo a present exertion or sacrifice for a comparatively 
 remote future, the scale is turned by a very small proba- 
 bility that the fruits of the exertion or of the sacrifice will 
 be taken away from him. The only safeguard against these 
 uncertainties would be the growth of a custom, insuring a 
 permanence of tenure in the same occupant, without lia- 
 bility to any other increase of rent than might happen to be 
 sanctioned by the general sentiments of the community. 
 The Ulster tenant-right is such a custom. The very consid- 
 erable sums which outgoing tenants obtain from their suc- 
 cessors, for the good will of their farms,* in the first place 
 
 * " It is not uncommon for a tenant without a lease to sell the bare privilege 
 of occupancy or possession of his farm, without any visible sign of improvement 
 having been made by him, at from ten to sixteen, up to twenty and even forty 
 years' purchase of the rent." (Digest of Evidence taken by Lord Devon's Com- 
 mitsion, Introductory Chapter.) The compiler adds, "the comparative tranquil- 
 lity of that district" (Ulster) "may perhaps be mainly attributable to this fact,"
 
 COTTIERS. 399 
 
 actually limit the competition for land to persons who have 
 such sums to offer : while the same fact also proves that full 
 advantage is not taken by the landlord of even that more 
 limited competition, since the landlord's rent does not 
 amount to the whole of what the incoming tenant not only 
 offers but actually pays. He does so in the full confidence 
 that the rent will not be raised ; and for this he has the 
 guarantee of a custom, not recognized by law, but deriving 
 its binding force from another sanction, perfectly well 
 understood in Ireland.* "Without one or other of these 
 supports, a custom limiting the rent of land is not likely 
 to grow up in any progressive community. If wealth and 
 population were stationary, rent also would generally be 
 stationary, and after remaining a long time unaltered, 
 would probably come to be considered unalterable. But all 
 progress in wealth and population tends to a rise of rents. 
 Under a metayer system there is an established mode in 
 which the owner of land is sure of participating in the 
 increased produce drawn from it. But on the cottier system 
 he can only do so by a readjustment of the contract, while 
 that readjustment, in a progressive community, would 
 almost always be to his advantage. His interest, therefore, 
 is decidedly opposed to the growth of any custom com- 
 muting rent into a fixed demand. 
 
 2. Where the amount of rent is not limited, either 
 by law or custom, a cottier system has the disadvantages 
 of the worst metayer system, with scarcely any of thfe 
 advantages by which, in the best forms of that tenure, they 
 
 * " It is in the great majority of cases not a reimbursement for outlay in- 
 curred, or improvements effected on the land, but a mere life insurance or pur- 
 chase of immunity from outrage." (Digest, ut supra.) " The present tenant- 
 right of Ulster" (the writer judiciously remarks) "is an embryo copi/fio/d." 
 " Even there, if the tenant-right be disregarded, and a tenant be ejected without 
 having received the price of his good-will, outrages are generally the conse- 
 quence." (Ch. viii.) " The disorganized state of Tipperary, and the agrarian 
 combination throughout Ireland, are but a methodized war to obtain the Ulster 
 tenant-right."
 
 400 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 2. 
 
 are compensated. It is scarcely possible that cottier agri- 
 culture should be other than miserable. There is not the 
 same necessity that the condition of the cultivators should 
 be so. Since by a sufficient restraint on population, compe- 
 tition for land could be kept down, and extreme poverty 
 prevented ; habits of prudence and a high standard of com- 
 fort, once established, would have a fair chance of maintain- 
 ing themselves : though even in these favourable circum- 
 stances the motives to prudence would be considerably 
 weaker than in the case of metayers, protected by custom 
 (like those of Tuscany) from being deprived of their farms : 
 since a metayer family, thus protected, could not be impov- 
 erished by any other improvident multiplication than their 
 own, but a cottier family, however prudent and self-re- 
 straining, may have the rent raised against it by the con- 
 sequences of the multiplication of other families. Any 
 protection to the cottiers against this evil could only be 
 derived from a salutary sentiment of duty or dignity, per- 
 vading the class. From this source, however, they might 
 derive considerable protection. If the habitual standard of 
 requirement among the class were high, a young man might 
 not choose to offer a rent which would leave him in a worse 
 condition than the preceding tenant ; or it might be the 
 general custom, as it actually is in some countries, not to 
 marry until a farm is vacant. 
 
 But it is, not where a high standard of comfort has 
 rooted itself in the habits of the labouring class, that we are 
 ever called upon to consider the effects of a cottier system 
 That system is found only where the habitual requirements 
 of the rural labourers are the lowest possible ; where, a^ 
 long as they are not actually starving, they will multiply : 
 and population is only checked by the diseases, and the 
 shortness of life, consequent on insufficiency of merely 
 physical necessaries. This was the state of the largest por- 
 tion of the Irish peasantry. When a people have sunk into 
 this state, and still more when they have been in it from 
 time immemorial, the cottier system is an almost insu-
 
 COTTIERS. 401 
 
 perable obstacle to their emerging from it. When the 
 habits of the people are such that their increase is never 
 checked but by the impossibility of obtaining a bare sup- 
 port, and when this support can only be obtained from 
 land, all stipulations and agreements respecting amount of 
 rent are merely nominal ; the competition for land makes 
 the tenants undertake to pay more than it is possible they 
 should pay, and when they have paid all they can, more 
 almost always remains due. 
 
 " As it may fairly be said of the Irish peasantry," said 
 Mr. Revans, the Secretary to the Irish Poor Law Enquiry 
 Commission,* " that every family which has not sufficient 
 land to yield its food has one or more of its members sup- 
 ported by begging, it will easily be conceived that every 
 endeavour is made by the peasantry to obtain small hold- 
 ings, and that they are not influenced in their biddings by 
 the fertility of the land, or by their ability to pay the rent, 
 but solely by the offer which is most likely to gain them 
 possession. The rents which they promise, they are almost 
 invariably incapable of paying ; and consequently they 
 become indebted to those under whom they hold, almost as 
 soon as they take possession. They give up, in the shape 
 of rent, the whole produce of the land with the exception 
 of a sufficiency of potatoes for a subsistence ; but as this is 
 rarely equal to the promised rent, they constantly have 
 against them an increasing balance. In some cases, the 
 largest quantity of produce which their holdings ever 
 yielded, or which, under their system of tillage, they couM 
 in the most favourable seasons be made to yield, would not 
 be equal to the rent bid ; consequently, if the peasant ful- 
 filled his engagement with his landlord, which he ; s rarely 
 able to accomplish, he would till the ground for nothing, 
 arid give his landlord a premium for being allowed to till 
 
 * Evil* of the State of Ireland, their Causes and their Remedy, Page 10. 
 A pamphlet, containing, among other things, an excellent digest and selection 
 of evidence from the mass collected by the Commission presided over by Arch- 
 bishop Whntcly. 
 26
 
 402 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 8. 
 
 it. On the sea-coast, fishermen, and in the northern coun- 
 ties those who have looms, frequently pay more in rent 
 than the market value of the whole produce of the land 
 they hold. It might be supposed that they would be better 
 without land under such circumstances. But fishing might 
 fail during a week or two, and so might the demand for the 
 produce of the loom, when, did they not possess the land 
 upon which their food is grown, they might starve. The 
 full amount of the rent bid, however, is rarely paid. The 
 peasant remains constantly in debt to his landlord ; his 
 miserable possessions the wretched clothing of himself and 
 of his family, the two or three stools, and the few pieces of 
 crockery, which his wretched hovel contains, would not, if 
 sold, liquidate the standing and generally accumulating 
 debt. The peasantry are mostly a year in arrear, and their 
 excuse for not paying more is destitution. Should the 
 produce of the holding, in any year, be more than usually 
 abundant, or should the peasant by any accident become 
 possessed of any property, his comforts cannot be in- 
 creased ; he cannot indulge in better food, nor in a greater 
 quantity of it. His furniture cannot be increased, neither 
 can his wife or children be better clothed. The acquisition 
 must go to the person under whom he holds. The acciden- 
 tal addition will enable him to reduce his arrear of rent, 
 and thus to defer ejectment. But this must be the bound 
 of his expectation." 
 
 As an extreme instance of the intensity of competition 
 for land, and of the monstrous height to which it occasional- 
 ly forced up the nominal rent ; we may cite from the evi- 
 dence taken by Lord Devon's Commission,* a fact attested 
 by Mr. Ilurly, Clerk of the Crown for Kerry : " I have 
 known a tenant bid for a farm that I was perfectly well ac- 
 quainted with, worth 50Z. a-year : I saw the competition get 
 up to such an extent, that he was declared the tenant at 450Z." 
 
 3. In such a condition, what can a tenant gain by 
 
 * Evidence, p. 851.
 
 COTTIERS. 403 
 
 any amount of industry or prudence, and what lose by any 
 recklessness ? If the landlord at any time exerted his full 
 legal rights, the cottier would not be able even to live. If by 
 extra exertion he doubled the produce of his bit of land, or 
 if he prudently abstained from producing mouths to eat it 
 up, his only gain would be to have more left to pay to his 
 landlord ; while, if he had twenty children, they would still 
 be fed first, and the landlord could only take what was left. 
 Almost alone amongst mankind the cottier is in this condi- 
 tion, that he can scarcely be either better or worse off by 
 any act of his own. If he were industrious or prudent, no- 
 body but his landlord would gain ; if he is lazy or intem- 
 perate, it is at his landlord's expense. A situation more 
 devoid of motives to either labour or self-command, imagina- 
 tion itself cannot conceive. The inducements of free human 
 beings are taken away, and those of a slave not substituted. 
 He has nothing to hope, and nothing to fear, except being 
 dispossessed of his holding, and against this he protects him- 
 self by the ultima ratio of a defensive civil war. Rockism 
 and "Whiteboyism were the determination of a people who 
 had nothing that could be called theirs but a daily meal of the 
 lowest description of food, not to submit to being deprived 
 of that for other people's convenience. 
 
 Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which 
 opinions are formed on the most important problems of 
 human nature and life, to find public instructors of the great- 
 est pretension, imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, 
 and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving 
 their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in 
 the Celtic race ? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the 
 consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on 
 the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the 
 diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural dif- 
 ferences. "What race would not be indolent and insouciant 
 when things are so arranged, that they derive no advantage 
 from forethought or exertion ? If such are the arrangements 
 in the midst of which they live and work, what wonder if
 
 404 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 the listlessness and indifference so engendered are not shaken 
 off the first moment an opportunity offers when exertion 
 would really be of use ? It is very natural that a pleasure- 
 loving and sensitively organized people like the Irish, should 
 be less addicted to steady routine labour than the English, 
 because life has more excitements for them independent of 
 it ; but they are not less fitted for it than their Celtic breth- 
 ren the French, nor less so than the Tuscans, or the an- 
 cient Greeks. An excitable organization is precisely that 
 in which, by adequate inducements, it is easiest to kindle a 
 spirit of animated exertion. It speaks nothing against the 
 capacities of industry in human beings, that they will not 
 exert themselves without motive. No labourers work hard- 
 er, in England or America, than the Irish ; but not under a 
 cottier system. 
 
 4. The multitudes who till the soil of India, are in 
 a condition sufficiently analogous to the cottier svstem, and 
 at the same time sufficiently different from it, to render the 
 comparison of the two a source of some instruction. In 
 most parts of India there are, and perhaps have always 
 been, only two contracting parties, the landlord and the 
 peasant : the landlord being generally the sovereign, except 
 where he has, by a special instrument, conceded his rights 
 to an individual, who becomes his representative. The 
 paymnts, however, of the peasants, or ryots as they are 
 termed, have seldom if ever been regulated, as in Ireland, 
 by competition. Though the customs locally obtain ing were 
 infinitely various, and though practically no custom could 
 be maintained against the sovereign's will, there was always 
 a rule of some sort common to a neighbourhood : the col- 
 lector did not make his separate bargain with the peasant, 
 but assessed each according to the rule adopted for the rest. 
 The idea was thus kept up of a right of property in the 
 tenant, or at all events, of a right to permanent possession ; 
 and the anomaly arose of a fixity of tenure in the peasant- 
 farmer, co-existing with an arbitrary power of increasing 
 the rent.
 
 COTTIERS. 405 
 
 When the Mogul government substituted itself through- 
 out the greater part of India for the Hindoo rulers, it pro- 
 ceeded on a different principle. A minute survey was 
 made of the land, and upon that survey an assessment was 
 founded, fixing the specific payment due to the government 
 from each field. If this assessment had never been exceeded, 
 the ryots would have been in the comparatively advan- 
 tageous position of peasant-proprietors, subject to a heavy, 
 but a fixed quit-rent. The absence, however, of any real 
 protection against illegal extortions, rendered this improve- 
 ment in their condition' rather nominal than real ; and, ex- 
 cept, during the occasional accident of a humane and vigor- 
 ous local administrator, the exactions had no practical limit 
 but the inability of the ryot to pay more. 
 
 It was to this state of things that the Englibh rulers of 
 India succeeded ; and they were, at an early period, struck 
 with the importance of putting an end to this arbitrary 
 character of the land-revenue, and imposing a fixed limit to 
 the government demand. They did not attempt to go back 
 to the Mogul valuation. It has been in general the very 
 rational practice of the English Government in India, to 
 pay little regard to what was laid down as the theory of 
 the native institutions, but to inquire into the rights which 
 existed and were respected in practice, and to protect and 
 enlarge those. For a long time, however, it blundered 
 grievously about matters of fact, and grossly misunderstood 
 the usages and rights which it found existing. Its mistakes 
 arose from the inability of ordinary minds to imagine a state 
 of social relations fundamentally different from those with 
 which they are practically familiar. England being accus- 
 tomed to great estates and great landlords, the English 
 rulers took it for granted that India must possess the like ; 
 and looking round for some set of people who might be 
 taken for the objects of their search, they pitched upon a 
 sort of tax-gatherers called zemindars. " The zemindar," 
 says the philosophical historian of India,* " had some of 
 
 * Mill's History of British India, book vi. ch. 8.
 
 406 HOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 the attributes which belong to a landowner ; he collected 
 the rents of a particular district, he governed the cultivators 
 of that district, lived in comparative splendour, and his son 
 succeeded him when he died. The zemindars, therefore, it 
 was inferred without delay, were the proprietors of the soil, 
 the landed nobility and gentry of India. It was not con- 
 sidered that the zemindars, though they collected the rents, 
 did not keep them ; but paid them all away, with a small 
 deduction, to the government. It was not considered that 
 if they governed the ryots, and in many respects exercised 
 over them despotic power, they did not govern them as 
 tenants of theirs, holding their lands either at will or by 
 contract under them. The possession of the ryot was an 
 hereditary possession ; for which it was unlawful for the 
 zemindar to displace him : for every farthing which the 
 zemindar drew from the ryot, he was bound to account ; 
 and it was only by fraud, if, out of all that he collected, 
 he retained an ana more than the small proportion which, 
 as pay for collection, he was permitted to receive." 
 
 " There was an opportunity in India," continues the 
 historian, " to which the history of the world presents not 
 a parallel. Next after the sovereign, the immediate culti- 
 vators had, by far, the greatest portion of interest in the 
 soil. For the rights (such as they were) of the zemindars, 
 a complete compensation might have easily been made. 
 The generous resolution was adopted, of sacrificing to the 
 improvement of the country, the proprietary rights of the 
 sovereign. The motives to improvement which property 
 gives, and of which the power was so justly appreciated, 
 might have been bestowed upon those upon whom they 
 would have operated with a force incomparably greater 
 than that with which they could operate upon any other 
 class of men : they might have been bestowed upon those 
 from whom alone, in every country, the principal improve- 
 ments in agriculture must be derived, the immediate culti- 
 vators of the soil. And a measure worthy to be ranked 
 among the noblest that ever were taken for the improve'
 
 COTTIERS. 4-07 
 
 ment of any country, might have helped to compensate the 
 people of India for the miseries of that misgovernment which 
 they had so long endured. But the legislators were English 
 aristocrats ; and aristocratical prejudices prevailed." 
 
 The measure proved a total failure, as to the main effects 
 which its well-meaning promoters expected from it. Un- 
 accustomed to estimate the mode in which the operation of 
 any given institution is modified even by such variety of 
 circumstances as exists within a single kingdom, they flat- 
 tered themselves that they had created, throughout the 
 Bengal provinces, English landlords, and it proved that 
 they had only created Irish ones. The new landed aris- 
 tocracy disappointed every expectation built upon them. 
 They did nothing for the improvement of their estates, but 
 everything for their own ruin. The same pains not being 
 taken, as had been taken in Ireland, to enable landlords to 
 defy the consequences of their improvidence, nearly the 
 whole land of Bengal had to be sequestrated and sold, for 
 debts or arrears of revenue, and in one generation most of 
 the ancient zemindars had ceased to exist. Other families, 
 mostly the descendants of Calcutta money dealers, or of 
 native officials who had enriched themselves under the 
 British Government, now occupy their place ; and live as 
 useless drones on the soil which has been given up to them. 
 Whatever the government has sacrificed of its pecuniary 
 claims, for the creation of such a class, has at the best been 
 wasted. 
 
 In the parts of India into which the British rule has 
 been more recently introduced, the blunder has been avoided 
 of endowing a useless body of great landlords with gifts 
 from the public revenue. In most parts of the Madras and 
 in part of the Bombay Presidency, the rent is paid directly 
 to the government by the immediate cultivator. In the 
 North-Western Provinces, the government makes its en- 
 gagement with the village community collectively, deter- 
 mining the share to be paid by each individual, but holding 
 them jointly responsible for each other's default. But in the
 
 408 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 greater part of India, the immediate cultivators have not 
 obtained a perpetuity of tenure at a fixed rent. The gov- 
 ernment manages the land on the principle on which a good 
 Irish landlord manages his estate : not putting it up to com- 
 petition, not asking the cultivators what they will promise 
 to pay, but determining for itself what they can atford to 
 pay, and defining its demand accordingly. In many dis- 
 tricts a portion of the cultivators are considered as tenants 
 of the rest, the government making its demand from those 
 only (often a numerous body) who are looked upon as the 
 successors of the original settlers or conquerors of the vil- 
 lage. Sometimes the rent is fixed only for one year, some- 
 times for three or five ; but the uniform tendency of present 
 policy is towards long leases, extending, in the northern 
 provinces of India, to a term of thirty years. This arrange- 
 ment has not existed for a sufficient time to have shown by 
 experience, how far the motives to improvement which the 
 long lease creates in the minds of the cultivators, fall short 
 of the influence of a perpetual settlement. But the two 
 plans, of annual settlements and of short leases, are irrevo- 
 cably condemned. They can only be said to have suc- 
 ceeded, in comparison with the unlimited oppression which 
 existed before. They are approved by nobody, and were 
 never looked upon in any other light than as temporary 
 arrangements, to be abandoned when a more complete 
 knowledge of the capabilities of the country should afford 
 data for something more permanent.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 1. When the first edition of this work was written 
 and published, the question, what is to be done with a cot- 
 tier population, was to the English Government the most 
 urgent of practical questions. The majority of a popula- 
 tion of eight millions, having long grovelled in helpless in- 
 ertness and abject poverty under the cottier system, reduced 
 by its operation to mere food of the cheapest description, 
 and to an incapacity of either doing or willing anything for 
 the improvement of their lot, had at last, by the failure of 
 that lowest quality of food, been plunged into a state in which 
 the alternative seemed to be either death, or to be perma- 
 nently supported by other people, or a radical change in 
 the economical arrangements under which it had hitherto 
 been tlieir misfortune to live. Such an emergency had com- 
 pelled attention to the subject from the legislature and from 
 the nation, but it could hardly be said with much result ; 
 for, the evil having originated in a system of land tenancy 
 which withdrew from the people every motive to industry 
 or thrift except the fear of starvation, the remedy provided 
 by Parliament was to take away even that, by conferring on 
 them a legal claim to eleemosynary support : while, towards 
 correcting the cause of the mischief, nothing was done, be- 
 yond vain complaints, though at the price to the national 
 treasury of ten millions sterling for the delay. 
 
 " It is needless," (I observed) " to expend any argument 
 in proving that the very foundation of the economical evils
 
 410 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 1. 
 
 of Ireland is the cottier system ; that while peasant renta 
 fixed by competition are the practice of the country, to ex- 
 pect industry, useful activity, any restraint on population 
 but death, or any the smallest diminution of poverty, is to 
 look for figs on thistles and grapes on thorns. If our prac- 
 tical statesmen are not ripe for the recognition of this fact ; 
 or if while they acknowledge it in theory, they have not a 
 sufficient feeling of its reality, to be capable of founding 
 upon it any course of conduct ; there is still another, and 
 a purely physical consideration, from which they will find 
 it impossible to escape. If the one crop on which the people 
 have hitherto supported themselves continues to be precari- 
 ous, either some new and great impulse must be given to 
 agricultural skill and industry, or the soil of Ireland can no 
 longer feed anything like its present population. The whole 
 produce of the western half of the island, leaving nothing 
 for rent, will not now keep permanently in existence the 
 whole of its people : and they will necessarily remain an 
 annual charge on the taxation of the empire, until they are 
 reduced either by emigration or by starvation, to a number 
 corresponding with the low state of their industry, or unless 
 the means are found of making that industry much more 
 productive." 
 
 Since these words were written, events unforeseen by any 
 one have saved the English rulers of Ireland from the em- 
 barrassments which would have been the just penalty of 
 their indifference and want of foresight. Ireland, under 
 cottier agriculture, could no longer supply food to its popu- 
 lation : Parliament, by way of remedy, applied a stimulus to 
 population, but none at all to production ; the help, how- 
 ever, which had not been provided for the people of Ireland 
 by political wisdom, came from an unexpected source. Self- 
 supporting emigration the Wakefield system, brought into 
 effect on the voluntary principle and on a gigantic scale 
 (the expenses of those who followed being paid from the 
 earnings of those who went before) has, for the present, 
 reduced the population down to the number for which the
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 existing agricultural system can find employment and sup- 
 port. The census of 1851, compared with that of 1841, 
 showed in round numbers a diminution of population of a 
 million and a half. The subsequent census (of 1861) shows 
 a further diminution of about half a million. The Irish 
 having thus found the way to that nourishing continent which 
 for generations will be capable of supporting in undiminished 
 comfort the increase of the population of the whole world ; 
 the peasantry of Ireland having learnt to fix their eyes on a 
 terrestrial paradise beyond the ocean, as a sure refuge both 
 from the oppression of the Saxon and from the tyranny of 
 nature ; there can be little doubt that however much the 
 employment for agricultural labour may hereafter bo di- 
 minished by the general introduction throughout Ireland of 
 English farming, or even if like the county of Sutherland all 
 Ireland should be turned into a grazing farm, the superseded 
 people would migrate to America with the same rapidity, 
 and as free of cost to the nation, as the million of Irish who 
 went thither during the three years previous to 1851. 
 Those who think that the land of a country exists for the 
 sake of a few thousand landowners, and that as long as 
 rents are paid, society and government have fulfilled their 
 function, may see in this consummation a happy end to Irish 
 difficulties. 
 
 But this is not a time, nor is the human mind now in a 
 condition, in which such insolent pretensions can be main- 
 tained. The land of Ireland, the land of every country, be- 
 longs to the people of that country. The individuals called 
 landowners have no right, in morality and justice v to any 
 thing but the rent, or compensation for its saleable value 
 With regard to the land itself, the paramount consideration 
 is, by what mode of appropriation and of cultivation it can 
 be made most useful to the collective body of its inhabitants. 
 To the owners of the rent it may be very convenient that 
 the bulk of the inhabitants, despairing of justice in the 
 country where they and their 'ancestors have lived and suf- 
 fered, should seek on another continent that property in land
 
 412 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 1. 
 
 which is denied to them at home. But the legislature of the 
 empire ought to regard with other eyes the forced expatria- 
 tion of millions of people. When the inhabitants of a 
 country quit the country en masse because its Government 
 will not make it a place fit for them to live in, the Govern- 
 ment is judged and condemned. There is no necessity for 
 depriving the landlords of one farthing of the pecuniary 
 value of their legal rights ; but justice requires that the 
 actual cultivators should be enabled to become in Ireland 
 what they will become in America proprietors of the soil 
 which they cultivate. 
 
 Good policy requires it no less. Those who, knowing 
 neither Ireland nor any foreign country, take as their sole 
 standard of social and economical excellence English prac- 
 tice, propose as the single remedy for Irish wretchedness, 
 the transformation of the cottiers into hired labourers. But 
 this is rather a scheme for the improvement of Irish agricul- 
 ture, than of the condition of the Irish people. The status 
 of a day-labourer has no charm for infusing forethought, 
 frugality, or self-restraint, into a people devoid of them. If 
 the Irish peasantry could be universally changed into re- 
 ceivers of wages, the old habits and mental characteristics 
 of the people remaining, we should merely see four or five 
 millions of people living as day-labourers in the same 
 wretched manner in which as cottiers they lived before ; 
 equally passive in the absence of every comfort, equally 
 reckless in multiplication, and even, perhaps, equally list- 
 less at their work ; since they could not be dismissed en 
 masse, and if they could, dismissal would now be simply 
 remanding them to the poor-rate. Far other would be the 
 effect of making them peasant proprietors. A people who 
 in industry and providence have everything to learn who 
 are confessedly among the most backward of European 
 populations in the industrial virtues require for their re- 
 generation the most powerful incitements by which those 
 virtues can be stimulated : and there is no stimulus as yet 
 comparable to property in land. A permanent interest in
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 413 
 
 the soil to those who till it, is almost a guarantee for the 
 most unwearied laboriousness : against over-population, 
 though not infallible, it is the best preservative yet known 
 and where it failed, any other plan would probably fail 
 much more egregiously ; the evil would be beyond the 
 reach of merely economic remedies. 
 
 The case of Ireland is similar in its requirements to that 
 of India. In India, though great errors have from time 
 to time been committed, no one ever proposed, under the 
 name of agricultural improvement, to eject the ryots or 
 peasant farmers from their possession ; the improvement 
 that has been looked for, has been through making their 
 tenure more secure to them, and the sole difference of 
 opinion is between those who contend for perpetuity, and 
 those who think that long leases will suffice. The same 
 question exists as to Ireland ; and it would be idle to deny 
 that long leases, under such landlords as are sometimes to 
 be found, do effect wonders even in Ireland. But then, 
 they must be leases at a low rent. Long leases are in no way 
 to be relied on for getting rid of cottierisrn. During the 
 existence of cottier tenancy, leases have always been long ; 
 twenty-one years, and three lives concurrent, was a usual 
 term. But the rent being fixed by competition, at a higher 
 amount than could be paid, so that the tenant neither had, 
 nor could by any exertion acquire, a beneficial interest in 
 the land, the advantage of a lease was merely nominal. In 
 India, the government, where it has not imprudently made 
 over its proprietary rights to the zemindars, is able to pre- 
 vent this evil, because, being itself the landlord, it can fix 
 the rent according to its own judgment ; but under indi- 
 vidual landlords, while rents are fixed by competition, and 
 the competitors are a peasantry struggling for subsistence, 
 nominal rents are inevitable, unless the population is so 
 thin, that the competition itself is only nominal. The 
 majority of landlords will grasp at immediate money and 
 immediate power-, and so long as they find cottiers eager to
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 1. 
 
 offer them everything, it is useless to rely on them for tem- 
 pering the vicious practice by a considerate self-denial. 
 
 A perpetuity is a stronger stimulus to improvement than 
 a long lease : not only because the longest lease, before 
 coming to an end, passes through all the varieties of short 
 leases down to no lease at all ; but for more fundamental 
 reasons. It is very shallow, even in pure economics, to 
 take no account of the influence of imagination : there is a 
 virtue in " for ever " beyond the longest term of years ; 
 even if the term is long enough to include children, and all 
 whom a person individually cares for, yet until he has reached 
 that high degree of mental cultivation at which the public 
 good (which also includes perpetuity) acquires a paramount 
 ascendancy over his feelings and desires, he will not exert 
 himself with the same ardour to increase the value of an 
 estate, his interest in which diminishes in value every year. 
 Besides, while perpetual tenure is the general rule of landed 
 property, as it is in all the countries of Europe, a tenure for 
 a limited period, however long, is sure to be regarded as 
 something of inferior consideration and dignity, and inspires 
 less of ardour to obtain it, and of attachment to it when 
 obtained. But where a country is under cottier tenure, the 
 question of perpetuity is quite secondary to the more im- 
 portant point, a limitation of the rent. Rent paid by a 
 capitalist who farms for profit, and not for bread, may safely 
 be abandoned to competition ; rent paid by labourers can- 
 not, unless the labourers were in a state of civilization and 
 improvement which labourers have nowhere yet reached, 
 and cannot easily reach under such a tenure. Peasant rents 
 ought never to be arbitrary, never at the discretion of the 
 landlord : either by custom or law, it is imperatively nec- 
 essary that they should be fixed ; and where no mutually 
 advantageous custom, such as the metayer system of Tus- 
 cany, has established itself, reason and experience recom- 
 mend that they should be fixed by authority : thus chang- 
 ing the rent into a quit-rent, and the farmer into a peasant 
 proprietor.
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 415 
 
 For carrying this change into effect on a sufficiently 
 large scale to accomplish the complete abolition of cottier 
 tenancy, the mode which most obviously suggests itself is 
 the direct one, of doing the thing outright by Act of Parlia- 
 ment ; making the whole land of Ireland the property of the 
 tenants, subject to the rents now really paid (not the 
 nominal rents), as a fixed rent charge. This, under the 
 name of " fixity of tenure," was one of the demands of the 
 Repeal Association during the most successful period of 
 their agitation ; and was better expressed by Mr. Conner, 
 its earliest, most enthusiastic, and most indefatigable 
 apostle,* by the words, " a valuation and a perpetuity." 
 In such a measure there would not have been any injustice, 
 provided the landlords were compensated for the present 
 value of the chances of increase which they would be pros- 
 pectively required to forego. The rupture of existing social 
 relations would hardly have been more violent than that 
 effected by the ministers Stein and Hardenberg, when, by 
 a series of edicts, in the early part of the present century, 
 they revolutionized the state of landed property in the 
 Prussian monarchy, and left their names to posterity among 
 the greatest benefactors of their country. To the enlight- 
 ened foreigners writing on Ireland, Yon Eaumer and Gus- 
 tave de Beaumont, a remedy of this sort seemed so exactly 
 and obviously what the disease required, that they had 
 some difficulty in comprehending how it was that the thirg 
 was not yet done. 
 
 This, however, would have been, in the first place, a 
 complete expropriation of the higher classes of Ireland : 
 which, if there is any truth in the principles we have laid 
 down, would be perfectly warrantable, but only if it were 
 the sole means of effecting a great public good. In tlie 
 second place, that there should be none but peasant proprie- 
 
 * Author of numerous pamphlets, entitled " True Political Economy of Ire- 
 land," " Letter to the Earl of Devon," " Two Letters on the Rackrent Oppression 
 of Ireland," and others. Mr. Conner has been an agitator on the subject since 
 1832.
 
 416 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 1 
 
 tors, is in itself far from desirable. Large farms, culti- 
 vated by large capital, arid owned by persons of the best 
 education which the country can give, persons qualified by 
 instruction to appreciate scientific discoveries, and able to 
 bear the delay and risk of costly experiments, are an im- 
 portant part of a good agricultural system. Many such 
 landlords there are even in Ireland ; and it would be a pub- 
 lic misfortune to drive them from their posts. A large 
 proportion also of the present holdings are probably still 
 too small to try the proprietary system under the greatest 
 advantages : nor are the tenants always the persons one 
 would desire to select as the first occupants of peasant-prop- 
 erties. There are numbers of them on whom it w ould have 
 a more beneficial effect to give them the hope of acquiring 
 a landed property by industry and frugality, than the prop- 
 erty itself in immediate possession. 
 
 There are, however, much milder measures, not open to 
 similar objections, and which, if pushed to the utmost extent 
 of which they are susceptible, would realize in no inconsid- 
 erable degree the object sought. One of them would be, to 
 enact that whoever reclaims waste land becomes the owner 
 of it, at a fixed quit-rent equal to a moderate interest on its 
 mere value as a waste. It would of course be a necessary 
 part of this measure, to make compulsory on landlords the 
 surrender of waste lands (not of an ornamental character) 
 whenever required for reclamation. Another expedient, 
 and one in which individuals could co-operate, would be to 
 buy as much as possible of the land offered for sale, and sell 
 it again in small portions as peasant-properties. A Society 
 for this purpose was at one time projected under the aus 
 pices of the Tenant Right League, arid on the principles, so 
 far as applicable, of the Freehold Land Societies which 
 have been so successfully established in England, not 
 primarily for agricultural, but for electoral purposes. 
 
 This is a mode in which private capital may be employed 
 in renovating the social and agricultural economy of Ire- 
 land, not only without sacrifice but with considerable profit
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 417 
 
 to its owners. The remarkable success of the "Waste Land 
 Improvement Society, which proceeded on a plan far less 
 advantageous to the tenant, is an instance of what an Irish 
 peasantry can be stimulated to do, by a sufficient assurance 
 that what they do will be for their own advantage. It is 
 not even indispensable to adopt perpetuity as the rule ; long 
 leases at moderate rents, like those of the Waste Land 
 Society, would suffice, if a prospect were held out to the 
 farmers of being allowed to purchase their farms with the 
 capital which they might acquire, as the Society's tenants 
 were so rapidly acquiring under the influence of its benefi- 
 cent system.* When the lands were sold, the funds of the 
 association would be liberated, and it might recommence 
 operations in some other quarter. 
 
 2. Thus far I had written in 1856. I have not 
 changed any of the opinions I then expressed. But I feel 
 that they are no longer susceptible of practical application. 
 The new state of things created in Ireland by the vast de- 
 crease of her population, and by the effects of that greatest 
 of boons ever conferred on her by any Government, the 
 Encumbered Estates Act, has rendered the introduction, on 
 
 * Though this society, during the years succeeding the famine, was forced to 
 wind up its affairs, the memory of what it accomplished ought to be preserved. 
 The following is an extract in the Proceedings of Lord Devon's Commission 
 (page 84), from the report made to the society in 1846, by their intelligent 
 manager, Colonel Robinson: 
 
 "Two hundred and forty five tenants, many of whom were a few years since 
 in a state bordering on pauperism, the occupiers of small holdings of from ten to 
 twenty plantation acres each, have, by their own free labour, with the society's 
 aid, improved their farms to the value of 4396/. ; 605/. having been added dur- 
 ing the last year, being at the rate of 111. 18.s. per tenant for the whole term, 
 and 2/. 9.i. for the past year ; the benefit of which improvements each tenant 
 will enjoy during the unexpired term of a thirty-one years 1 loa.se. 
 
 "These 245 tenants and their families have, by spade industry, reclaimed and 
 brought into cultivation 1032 plantation acres of land, previously unproductive 
 mountain waste, upon which they prow, last year, crops valued by competent 
 practical persons at 3896/., being ii: the proportion of 15/. 18x. each tenant; and 
 their live stock, consisting of cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs, now actually upon 
 the estates, is valued, according to the present prices of the neighbouring inar- 
 27
 
 4:18 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 2. 
 
 a large scale, of the English agricultural system for the first, 
 time possible in that country. The present population of 
 Ireland is now not greater than can be supported on that 
 system in a state of comfort probably equal to the average 
 lot of English farm labourers. The general improvement in 
 agriculture is already most striking ; and the improved 
 scale of subsistence which is now becoming habitual to the 
 people, together with the familiarity they have now ac- 
 quired with the resource of expatriation, will probably pre- 
 vent them for a considerable time from relapsing, through 
 improvident multiplication, into their former degraded 
 state. Ireland, therefore, is not now in a condition to re- 
 quire what are called heroic remedies. The benefits to that 
 country of peasant proprietorship would be as great as 
 ever ; but they are no longer indispensable ; a prospect has 
 opened to her of making a great advance in civilization 
 without that aid. But though she can now do without 
 peasant-properties, she cannot do without the total extinc- 
 tion of cottier tenancy. Unless that is rooted out, the 
 whole fruits of the improvement now in course of being 
 effected, will be and remain precarious. The lapse of 
 another generation will show whether the landlords of Ire- 
 land, now weeded of the reckless and bankrupt portion who 
 formerly held so much of the land, and recruited by the 
 
 kets, at 4162/., of which 1804Z. has been added since February, 1844. being at 
 the rate of 16/. 19.v. for the whole period, and 5. 6s. for the last year; during 
 which time their stock has thus increased in value a sum equal to their present 
 annual rent ; and by the statistical tables and returns referred to in previous 
 reports, it is proved that the tenants, in general, improve their little farms, and 
 increase their cultivation and cropsf in nearly direct proportion to the number 
 of available working persons of both sexes, of which their families consist." 
 
 There cannot be a stronger testimony to the superior amount of gross, and 
 even of net produce, raised by small farming under any tolerable system of 
 lauded tenure ; and it is worthy of attention that the industry and zeal were 
 greatest among the smaller holders ; Colonel Robinson noticing, as exceptions to 
 the remarkable and rapid progress of improvement, some tenants who were 
 "occupants of larger farms than twenty acres, a class too often deficient in the 
 enduring industry indispensable for the successful prosecution of mountain im- 
 provements."
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 419 
 
 substitution of a more moral and intelligent class, will 
 improve the opportunity by the successful accomplishment 
 of this the only real, permanent, and radical reform in the 
 social economy of that long-suffering country. 
 
 I have concluded a discussion, which has occupied a 
 space almost disproportion ed to the dimensions of this 
 work ; and I here close the examination of those simpler 
 forms of social economy in which the produce of the land 
 either belongs undividedly to one class, or is shared only 
 between two classes. We now proceed to the hypothesis 
 of a threefold division of the produce, among labourers, 
 landlords, and capitalists ; and in order to connect the com- 
 ing discussions as closely as possible with those which have 
 now for some time occupied us, I shall commence with the 
 subject of "Wages.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 OF WAGES. 
 
 1. UNDER the head of Wages are to be considered, 
 first, the causes which determine or influence the wages of 
 labour generally, and secondly, the differences that exist 
 between the wages of different employments. It is conve- 
 nient to keep these two classes of considerations separate ; 
 and in discussing the law of wages, to proceed in the first 
 instance as if there were no other kind of labour than com- 
 mon unskilled labour, of the average degree of hardness and 
 d i sagr eeablen ess. 
 
 Wages, like other things, may be regulated either by 
 competition or by custom. In this country there, are few 
 kinds of labour of which the remuneration would not be 
 lower than it is, if the employer took the full advantage of 
 competition. Competition, however, must be regarded, in 
 the present state of society, as the principal regulator of 
 wages, and custom or individual character only as a modi- 
 fying circumstance, and that in a comparatively slight 
 degree. 
 
 Wages, then, depend mainly upon the demand and 
 supply of labour ; or, as it is often expressed, on the propor- 
 tion between population and capital. By population is 
 here meant the number only of the labouring class, or 
 rather of those who work for hire ; and by capital, only 
 circulating capital, and not even the whole of that, but the 
 part which is expended in the direct purchase of labour. 
 To this, however, must be added all Yunds which, without
 
 WAGES. 421 
 
 forming a part of capital, are paid in exchange for labour, 
 such as the wages of soldiers, domestic servants, and all 
 other unproductive labourers. There is unfortunately no 
 mode of expressing by one familiar term, the aggregate of 
 what may be called the wages-fund of a country : and as 
 the wages of productive labour form nearly the whole of 
 that fund, it is usual to overlook the smaller and less impor- 
 tant part, and to say that wages depend on population arid 
 capital. It will be convenient to employ this expression, 
 remembering, however, to consider it as elliptical, and not 
 as a literal statement of the entire truth. 
 
 With these limitations of the terms, wages not only 
 depend upon the relative amount of capital and population, 
 but cannot, under the rule of competition, be affected by 
 anything else. Wages (meaning, of course, the general 
 rate)- cannot rise, but by an increase of the aggregate funds 
 employed in hiring labourers, or a diminution in the num- 
 ber of the competitors for hire ; nor fall, except either by a 
 diminution of the funds devoted to paying labour, or by an 
 increase in the number of labourers to be paid. 
 
 2. There are, however, some facts in apparent con- 
 tradiction to this doctrine, which it is incumbent on us to 
 consider and explain. 
 
 For instance, it is a common saying that wages are high 
 when trade is good. The demand for labour in any par-, 
 ticular employment is more pressing, and higher wages are 
 paid, when there is a brisk demand for the commodity proj- 
 duced ; and the contrary when there is what is called a 
 stagnation : then workpeople are dismissed, and those who 
 are retained must submit to a reduction of wages : though 
 in these cases there is neither more nor less capital than be- 
 fore. This is true ; and is one of those complications in the 
 concrete phenomena, which obscure and disguise the opera- 
 tion of general causes ; but it is not really inconsistent with 
 the principles laid down. Capital which the owner does 
 not employ in purchasing labour, but keeps idle in his
 
 422 BOOK II. CHAPTER XT. 2. 
 
 hands, is the same thing to the labourers, for the time being, 
 as if it did not exist. All capital is, from the variations of 
 trade, occasionally in this state. A manufacturer, finding 
 a slack demand for his commodity, forbears to employ la- 
 bourers in increasing a stock which he finds it difficult to 
 dispose of ; or if he goes on until all his capital is locked 
 up in unsold goods, then at least he must of necessity pause 
 until he can get paid for some of them. But no one expects 
 either of these states to be permanent ; if he did, he would 
 at the first opportunity remove his capital to some other 
 occupation, in which it would still continue to employ la- 
 bour. The capital remains unemployed for a time, during 
 which the labour market is overstocked, and wages fall. 
 Afterwards the demand revives, and perhaps becomes un- 
 usually brisk, enabling the manufacturer to sell his com- 
 modity even faster than he can produce it : his whole capi- 
 tal is then brought into complete efficiency, and if he is able, 
 he borrows capital in addition, which would otherwise have 
 gone into some other employment. At such times wages, 
 in his particular occupation, rise. If we suppose, what in 
 strictness is not absolutely impossible, that one of these fits 
 of briskness or of stagnation should affect all occupations at 
 the same time, wages altogether might undergo a rise or a 
 fall. These, however, are but temporary fluctuations : the 
 capital now lying idle will next year be in active employ- 
 ment, that which is this year unable to keep up with the 
 demand will in its turn be locked up in crowded warehouses ; 
 and wages in these several departments will ebb and flow 
 A accordingly : but nothing can permanently alter general 
 \ wages, except an increase or a diminution of capital itself 
 (always meaning by the term, the funds of all sorts, destined 
 for the payment of labour) compared with the quantity of 
 labour offering itself to be hired. 
 
 Again, it is another common notion that high prices 
 make high wages ; because the producers and dealers, being 
 better off, can afford to pay more to their labourers. I have 
 already said that a brisk demand, which causes temporary
 
 WAGES. 423 
 
 high prices, causes also temporary high wages. But high 
 prices, in themselves, can only raise wages if the dealers, 
 receiving more, are induced to save more, and make an 
 addition to their capital, or at least to their purchases of 
 labour. This is indeed likely enough to be the case ; and 
 if the high prices came direct from heaven, or even from 
 abroad, the labouring class might be benefited, not by the 
 high prices themselves, but by the increase of capital oc- 
 casioned by them. The same effect, however, is often at- 
 tributed to a high price which is the result of restrictive 
 laws, or which is in some way or other to be paid by the 
 remaining members of the community ; they having no 
 greater means than before to pay it with. High prices of 
 this sort, if they benefit one class of labourers, can only do 
 so at the expense of others ; since if the dealers by receiving 
 high prices are enabled to make greater savings, or other- 
 wise increase their purchases of labour, all other people by 
 paying those high prices have their means of saving, or of 
 purchasing labour, reduced in an equal degree ; and it is a 
 matter of accident whether the one alteration or the other 
 will have the greatest effect on the labour market. Wages 
 will probably be temporarily higher in the employment in 
 which prices have risen, and somewhat lower in other em- 
 ployments : in which case, while the first half of the phe- 
 nomenon excites notice, the other is generally overlooked, 
 or if observed, is not ascribed to the cause which really 
 produced it. Nor will the partial rise of wages last long : 
 for though the dealers in that one employment gain more, 
 it does not follow that there is room to employ a greater 
 amount of savings in their own business : their increasing 
 capital will probably flow over into other employments, 
 and there counterbalance the diminution previously made 
 in the demand for labour by the diminished savings of other 
 classes. 
 
 Another opinion often maintained is, that wages (mean- 
 ing of course money wages) vary with the price of food ; 
 rising when it rises, and falling when it falls. This opinion
 
 424 BOOK II. CHAPTER XL 2. 
 
 is, I conceive, only partially true ; and in so far as true, in 
 no way affects the dependence of wages on the proportion 
 between capital and labour : since the price of food, when 
 it affects wages at all, affects them through that law. Dear 
 or cheap food caused by variety of seasons does not affect 
 wages (unless they are artificially adjusted to it by law or 
 charity) : or rather, it has some tendency to affect them in 
 the contrary way to that supposed ; since in times of scarcity 
 people generally compete more violently for employment, 
 and lower the labour market against themselves. But dear- 
 ness or cheapness of food, when of a permanent character, 
 and capable of being calculated on beforehand, may affect 
 wages. In the first place, if the labourers have, as is often 
 the case, no more than enough to keep them in working 
 condition and enable them barely to support the ordinary 
 number of children, it follows that if food grows pemia- 
 nently dearer without a rise of wages, a greater number of 
 the children will prematurely die ; and thus wages will 
 ultimately be higher, but only because the number of peo- 
 ple will be smaller, than if food had remained cheap. But, 
 secondly, even though wages were high enough to admit 
 of food's becoming more costly without depriving the la- 
 bourers and their families of necessaries ; though they could 
 bear, physically speaking, to be worse off, perhaps they 
 would not consent to be so. They might have habits of 
 comfort which were to them as necessaries, and sooner than 
 forego which, they would put an additional restraint on 
 their power of multiplication ; so that wages would rise, 
 not by increase of deaths but by diminution of births. In 
 these cases, then, wages do adapt themselves to the price 
 of food, though after an interval of almost a generation. Mr. 
 Ricardo considers these two cases to comprehend all cases. 
 He assumes, that there is everywhere a minimum rate of 
 wages : either the lowest with which it is physically pos- 
 sible to keep up the population, or the lowest with which 
 the people will choose to do so. To this minimum he as- 
 iuines that the general rate of wages always tends ; that
 
 WAGES. 425 
 
 they can never be lower, beyond the length of time required 
 for a diminished rate of increase to make itself felt, and can 
 never long continue higher. This assumption contains suffi- 
 cient truth to render it admissible for the purposes of ab- 
 stract science ; and the conclusion which Mr. Ricardo draws 
 from it, namely, that wages in the long run rise and fall 
 with the permanent price of food, is, like almost all his con- 
 clusions, true hypothetically, that is, granting the supposi- 
 tions from which he sets out. But in the application to 
 practice, it is necessary to consider that the minimum of 
 which he speaks, especially when it is not a physical, but 
 what may be termed a moral minimum, is itself liable to 
 vary. If wages were previously so high that they could 
 bear reduction, to which the obstacle was a high standard 
 of comfort habitual among the labourers, a rise of the price 
 of food, or any other disadvantageous change in their cir- 
 cumstances, may operate in two ways : it may correct itself 
 by a rise of wages, brought about through a gradual effect 
 on the prudential check to population ; or it may perma- 
 nently lower the standard of living of the class, in case their 
 previous habits in respect of population prove stronger than 
 their previous habits in respect of comfort. In that case 
 the injury done to them will be permanent, and their de- 
 teriorated condition will become a new minimum, tending 
 to perpetuate itself as the more ample minimum did before. 
 It is to be feared that of the two modes in which the cause 
 may operate, the last is the most frequent, or at all events 
 sufficiently so, to render all propositions ascribing a self- 
 repairing quality to the calamities which befal the labour- 
 ing classes, practically of no validity. There is considerable 
 evidence that the circumstances of the agricultural labourers 
 in England have more than once in our history sustained 
 great permanent deterioration, from causes which operated 
 by diminishing the demand for labour, and which, if popu- 
 lation had exercised its power of self-adjustment in obedi- 
 ence to the previous standard of comfort, could only have 
 had a temporary effect : but unhappily the poverty in which
 
 426 BOOK II. CHAPTER XL 2. 
 
 the class was plunged during a long series of years brought 
 that previous standard into disuse ; and the next generation, 
 growing up without having possessed those pristine com- 
 forts, multiplied in turn without any attempt to retrieve 
 them.* 
 
 The converse case occurs when, by improvements in agri- 
 culture, the repeal of corn laws, or other such causes, the 
 necessaries of the labourers are cheapened, and they are 
 enabled with the same wages, to command greater comforts 
 than before. Wages will not fall immediately ; it is even 
 possible that they may rise ; but they will fall at last, so as 
 to leave the labourers no better off than before, unless dur- 
 ing this interval of prosperity the standard of comfort re- 
 garded as indispensable by the class, is permanently raised. 
 Unfortunately this salutary effect is by no means to be 
 counted upon : it is a much more difficult thing to raise, 
 than to lower, the scale of living which the labourers will 
 consider as more indispensable than marrying and having 
 a family. If they content themselves with enjoying the 
 greater comfort while it lasts, but do not learn to require 
 it, they will people down to their old scale of living. If 
 from poverty their children had previously been insuffi- 
 ciently fed or improperly nursed, a greater number will 
 now be reared, and the competition of these, when they 
 grow up, will depress wages, probably in full proportion 
 to the greater cheapness of food. If the effect is not pro- 
 duced in this mode, it will be produced by earlier and more 
 numerous marriages, or by an increased number of births 
 to a marriage. According to all experience, a great in- 
 crease invariably takes place in the number of marriages, 
 in seasons of cheap food and full employment. I cannot, 
 therefore, agree in the importance so often attached to the 
 
 * See the historical sketch of the condition of the English peasantry, pre- 
 pared from the best authorities by Mr. William Thornton, in his work entitled 
 Over- Population and its Remedy : a work honourably distinguished from most 
 others which have been published in the present generation, by its rational treat- 
 ment of questions affecting the economical condition of the labouring classes.
 
 WAGES. 427 
 
 repeal of the corn laws, considered merely as a labourer's 
 question, or to any of the schemes, of which some one or 
 other is at all times in vogue, for making the labourers a 
 very little better off. Things which only affect them a very 
 little, makti no permanent impression upon their habits and 
 requirements, and they soon slide back into their former 
 state. To produce permanent advantage, the temporary 
 cause operating upon them must be sufficient to make a 
 great change in their condition a change such as will be 
 felt for many years, notwithstanding any stimulus which it 
 may give during one generation to the increase of people. 
 When, indeed, the improvement is of this signal character, 
 and a generation grows up which has always been used to 
 an improved scale of comfort, the habits of this new gener- 
 ation in respect to population become formed upon a higher 
 minimum, and the improvement in their condition becomes 
 permanent. Of cases in point, the most remarkable is France 
 after the Revolution. The majority of the population being 
 suddenly raised from misery to independence and compara- 
 tive comfort, the immediate effect was that population, 
 notwithstanding the destructive wars of the period, started 
 forward with unexampled rapidity, partly because improved 
 circumstances enabled many children to be reared who 
 would otherwise have died, and partly from increase of 
 births. The succeeding generation however grew up with 
 habits considerably altered ; and though the country was 
 never before in so prosperous a state, the annual number 
 of births is now nearly stationary,* and the increase of popu- 
 lation extremely slow.f 
 
 * Supra, pp. 365 to 369. 
 
 f A similar, though not an equal improvement in the standard of living took 
 place among the -labourers of England during the remarkable fifty years from 
 1715 to 1765, which were distinguished by such an extraordinary succession of 
 fine harvests (the years of decided deficiency not exceeding five in all that 
 period) that the average price of wheat during those years was much lower than 
 during the previous half century. Mr. Malthus computes that on the average of 
 sixty years preceding 1720, the labourer could purchase with a day's earnings 
 only two-thirds of a peck of wheat, while from 1720 to 1750 he could purchase
 
 428 BOK II. CHAPTER XL 3. 
 
 3. Wages depend, then, on the proportion between 
 the number of the labouring population, and the capital or 
 other funds devoted to the purchase of labour ; we will 
 say, for shortness, the capital. If wages are higher at one 
 time or place than at another, if the subsistence and com- 
 fort of the class of hired labourers are more ample, it is for 
 no other reason than because capital bears a greater pro- 
 portion to population. It is not the absolute amount of 
 accumulation or of production, that is of importance to the 
 labouring class ; it is not the amount even of the funds 
 destined for distribution among the labourers : it is the 
 proportion between those funds and the numbers among 
 whom they are shared. The condition of the class can be 
 bettered in no other way than by altering that proportion 
 to their advantage : and every scheme for their benefit, 
 which does not proceed on this as its foundation, is, for all 
 permanent purposes, a delusion. 
 
 In countries like North America and the Australian 
 colonies, where the knowledge and arts of civilized life, 
 and a high effective desire of accumulation, co-exist with a 
 boundless extent of unoccupied land, the growth of capital 
 easily keeps pace with the utmost possible increase of popu- 
 lation, and is chiefly retarded by the impracticability of 
 obtaining labourers enough. All, therefore, who can pos- 
 sibly be born, can find employment without overstocking 
 the market : every labouring family enjoys in abundance 
 the necessaries, many of the comforts, and some of the luxu- 
 
 a whole peck. The average price of wheat, according to the Eton tables, for 
 fifty years ending with 1715, was 41s. 7fd. the quarter, apd for the last twenty- 
 three of these, 45s. 8d., while for the fifty years following, it was no more than 
 34s. lid. So considerable an improvement in the condition of the labouring 
 class, though arising from the accidents of seasons, yet Continuing for more than 
 a generation, had time to work a change in the habitual requirements of tht 
 labouring class; and this period is always noted as the date of "a marked im- 
 provement of the quality of the food consumed, and a decided elevation in the 
 standard of their comforts and conveniences." (Malthus, Principles of Political 
 Economy, p. 225.) For the character of the period, see Mr. Tooke's excellent 
 Hixtory of Prices, vol. i. pp. 38 to 61, and for the prices of corn, the Appendix 
 to that work.
 
 WAGES. 429 
 
 ries of life ; and, unless in case of individual misconduct, or 
 actual inability to work, poverty does not, and dependence 
 needs not, exist. A similar advantage, though in a less 
 degree, is occasionally enjoyed by some special class of la- 
 bourers in old countries, from an extraordinary rapid 
 growth, not of capital generally, but of the capital employed 
 in a particular occupation. So gigantic has been the prog- 
 ress of the cotton manufacture since the inventions of Watt 
 and Arkwright, that the capital engaged in it has probably 
 quadrupled in the time which population requires for doub- 
 ling. While, therefore, it has attracted from other employ- 
 ments nearly all the hands which geographical circumstances 
 and the habits or inclinations of the people rendered avail- 
 able ; and while the demand it created for infant labour 
 has enlisted the immediate pecuniary interest of the opera- 
 tives in favour of promoting, instead of restraining, the in- 
 crease of population ; nevertheless wages in the great seats 
 of the manufacture are still so high, that the collective earn- 
 ings of a family amount, on an average of years, to a very 
 satisfactory sum ; and there is, as yet, no sign of decrease, 
 while the effect has also been felt in raising the general 
 standard of agricultural wages in the counties adjoining. 
 
 But those circumstances of a country, or of an occupa- 
 tion, in which population can with impunity increase at its 
 utmost rate, are rare, and transitory. Yery few are the 
 countries presenting the needful union of conditions. Either 
 the industrial arts are backward and stationary, and capital 
 therefore increases slowly ; or the effective desire of accu- 
 mulation being low, the increase soon reaches its limit ; or, 
 even though both these elements are at their highest known 
 degree, the increase of capital is checked, because there is 
 not fresh land to be resorted to, of as good quality as that 
 already occupied. Though capital should for a time double 
 itself simultaneously with population, if all this capital and 
 population are to find employment on the same land, they 
 cannot without an unexampled succession of agricultural 
 inventions continue doubling the produce ; therefore, if
 
 430 BOOK n - CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 wages do not fall, profits must ; and when profits fall, in- 
 crease of capital is slackened. Besides, even if wages did 
 not fall, the price of food (as will be shown more fully here- 
 after) would in these circumstances necessarily rise ; which 
 is equivalent to a fall of wages. 
 
 Except, therefore, in the very peculiar cases which I 
 have just noticed, of which the only one of any practical 
 importance is that of a new colony, or a country in circum- 
 stances equivalent to it ; it is impossible that population 
 should increase at its utmost rate without lowering wages. 
 Nor will the fall be stopped at any point, short of that 
 which either by its physical or its moral operation, checks 
 the increase of population. In no old country, therefore, 
 does population increase at anything like its utmost rate ; 
 in most, at a very moderate rate : in some countries, not 
 at all. These facts are only to be accounted for in two 
 ways. Either the whole number of births which nature 
 admits of, and which happen in some circumstances, do not 
 take place ; or if they do, a large proportion of those who 
 are born, die. The retardation of increase results either 
 from mortality or prudence ; from Mr. Malthus's positive, 
 or from his preventive check : and one or the other of these 
 must and does exist, and very powerfully too, in all old 
 societies. Wherever population is not kept down by the 
 prudence either of individuals or of the state, it is kept 
 down by starvation or disease. 
 
 Mr. Malthus has taken great pains to ascertain, for al- 
 most every country in the world, which of these checks it 
 is that operates ; and the evidence which he collected on 
 the subject, in his Essay on Population, may even now be 
 read with advantage. Throughout Asia, and formerly in 
 most European countries in which the labouring classes 
 were not in personal bondage, there is, or was, no restrainer 
 of population but death. The mortality was not always 
 the result of poverty : much of it proceeded from unskilful 
 and careless management of children, from uncleanly and 
 otherwise unhealthy habits of life among the adult popula- .
 
 WAGES. 
 
 tion, and from the almost periodical occurrence of destruc- 
 tive epidemics. Throughout Europe these causes of short- 
 ened life have much diminished, but they have not ceased 
 to exist. Until a period not very remote, hardly any of 
 our large towns kept up its population, independently of 
 the stream always flowing into them from the rural dis- 
 tricts : this was still true of Liverpool until very recently ; 
 and even in London, the mortality is larger, and the average 
 duration of life shorter, than in rural districts where there 
 is much greater poverty. In Ireland, epidemic fevers, and 
 deaths from the exhaustion of the constitution by insufficient 
 nutriment, have always accompanied even the most moder- 
 ate deficiency of the potato crop. Nevertheless, it cannot 
 now be said that in any part of Europe, population is prin- 
 cipally kept down by disease, still less by starvation, either 
 in a direct or in an indirect form. The agency by which 
 it is limited is chiefly preventive, not (in the language of 
 Mr. Malthus) positive. But the preventive remedy seldom, 
 I believe, consists in the unaided operation of prudential 
 motives on a class wholly or mainly composed of labourers 
 for hire, and looking forward to no other lot. In England, 
 for example, I much doubt if the generality of agricultural 
 labourers practise any prudential restraint whatever. They 
 generally marry as early, and have as many children to a 
 marriage, as they would or could do if they were settlers in 
 the United States. During the generation which preceded 
 the enactment of the present Poor Law, they received the 
 most direct encouragement to this sort of improvidence : 
 being not only assured of support, on easy terms, whenever 
 out of employment, but even when in employment, very 
 commonly receiving from the parish a weekly allowance 
 proportioned to their number of children ; and the married 
 with large families being always, from a short-sighted econ- 
 omy, employed in preference to the unmarried ; which last 
 premium on population still exists. Under such prompting, 
 the rural labourers acquired habits of recklessness, which 
 are so congenial to the uncultivated mind, that in whatever
 
 432 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 4. 
 
 manner produced, they in general long survive their imme- 
 diate causes. There are so many new elements at work in 
 society, even in those deeper strata which are inaccessible 
 to the mere movements on the surface, that it is hazardous 
 to affirm anything positive on the mental state or practical 
 impulses of classes and bodies of men, when the same asser- 
 tion may be true to-day, and may require great modification 
 in a few years time. It does, however, seem, that if the rate 
 of increase of population depended solely on the agricultural 
 labourers, it would, as far as dependent on births, and unless 
 repressed by deaths, be as rapid in the southern counties of 
 England as in America. The restraining principle lies in 
 the very great proportion of the population composed of the 
 middle classes and the skilled artizans, who in this country 
 almost equal in number the common labourers, and on whom 
 prudential motives do, in a considerable degree, operate. 
 
 4. Where a labouring class who have no property 
 but their daily wages, and no hope of acquiring it, refrain 
 from over-rapid multiplication, the cause, I believe, has 
 always hitherto been, either actual legal restraint, or a cus- 
 tom of some sort which, without intention on their part, in- 
 sensibly moulds their conduct, or affords immediate induce- 
 ments not to marry. It is not generally known in how 
 many countries of Europe direct legal obstacles are opposed 
 to improvident marriages. The communications made to 
 the original Poor Law Commission by our foreign ministers 
 and consuls in different parts of Europe, contain a consider- 
 able amount of information on this subject. Mr. Senior, in 
 his preface to those communications,* says that in the coun- 
 tries which recognize a legal right to relief, "marriage on 
 the part of persons in the actual receipt of relief appears to 
 be everywhere prohibited, and the marriage of those who 
 are not likely to possess the means of independent support 
 is allowed by very few. Thus we are told that in Norway 
 
 * Forming an Appendix (F) to the General Report of the Commissioners, 
 and also published by authority as a separate volume.
 
 WAGES. 433 
 
 no one can marry without ' showing, to the satisfaction of 
 the clergyman, that he is permanently settled in such a 
 manner as to offer a fair prospect that he can maintain a 
 family.' 
 
 " In Mecklenburg, that ' marriages are delayed by con- 
 scription in the twenty-second year, and military service for 
 six years; besides, the parties must have a dwelling, without 
 which a clergyman is not permitted to marry them. The 
 men marry at from twenty-five to thirty, the women not 
 much earlier, as both must first gain by service enough to 
 establish themselves.' 
 
 " In Saxony, that ' a man may not marry before he is 
 twenty-one years old, if liable to service in the army. In 
 Dresden, professionists (by which words artizans are pro- 
 bably meant) may not marry until they become masters in 
 their trade.' 
 
 " In "Wurtemberg, that ' no man is allowed to marry till 
 his twenty-fifth year, on account of his military duties, un- 
 less permission be especially obtained or purchased : at that 
 age he must also obtain permission, which is granted on 
 proving that he and his wife would have together sufficient 
 to maintain a family or to establish themselves ; in large 
 towns, say from 800 to 1000 florins (from (J6Z. 13$. 4d. to 
 84?. 3$. 4r/.) ; in smaller, from 400 to 500 florins ; in villages, 
 200 florins (16Z. 13.s. 4d.)' " * 
 
 The minister at Munich says, " The great cause why the 
 number of the poor is kept so low in this country arises from 
 tlie prevention by law of marriages in cases in which it can- 
 not be proved that the parties have reasonable means of 
 subsistence ; and this regulation is in all places and at all 
 times strictly adhered to. The effect of a constant and firm 
 observance of this rule has, it is true, a considerable influ- 
 ence in keeping down the population of Bavaria, which is 
 at present low for the extent of country, but it has a most 
 salutary effect in averting extreme poverty and consequent 
 misery." f 
 
 * Preface, p. rxxix. t Ibid. p. xxxiii., or p. 654 of the Appendix itsdf. 
 
 28
 
 434 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 5. 
 
 At Lubeck, " marriages among the poor are delayed by 
 the necessity a man is under, first, of previously proving 
 that lie is in a regular employ, work, or profession, that will 
 enable him to maintain a wife : and secondly, of becoming a 
 burgher, and equipping himself in the uniform of the 
 burgher guard, which together may cost him nearly 4Z." * 
 At Frankfort, " the government prescribes no age for marry- 
 ing, but the permission to marry is only granted on proving 
 a livelihood." f 
 
 The allusion, in some of these statements, to military 
 duties, points out an indirect obstacle to marriage, inter- 
 posed by the laws of some countries in which there is no 
 direct legal restraint. In Prussia, for instance, the institu- 
 tions which compel every able-bodied man to serve for 
 several years in the army, at the time of life at which im- 
 prudent marriages are most likely to take place, are pro- 
 bably a full equivalent, in effect on population, for the legal 
 restrictions of the smaller German states. 
 
 " So strongly," says Mr. Kay, " do the people of Switzer- 
 land understand from experience the expediency of their 
 sons and daughters postponing the time of their marriages, 
 that the councils of state of four or five of the most demo- 
 cratic of the cantons, elected, be it remembered, by universal 
 suffrage, have passed laws by which all young persons who 
 marry before they have proved to the magistrate of their 
 district that they are able to support a family, are rendered 
 liable to a heavy fine. In Lucerne, Argovie, Unterwalden, 
 and I believe, St. Gall, Schweitz, and Uri, laws of this char- 
 acter have been in force for many years." 
 
 5. Where there is no general law restrictive of mar- 
 riage, there are often customs equivalent to it. When the 
 guilds or trade corporations of the middle ages were in 
 vigour, their bye-laws or regulations were conceived with a 
 very vigilant eye to the advantage which the trade derived 
 
 * Appendix, p. 419. f Ibid. p. 567. $ Kay, op. cit. i. 68.
 
 WAGES. 4.35 
 
 from limiting competition : and they made it very effectually 
 the interest of artizans not to marry until after passing 
 through the two stages of apprentice and journeyman, and 
 attaining the rank of master. * In Norway, where the 
 labour is chiefly agricultural, it is forbidden by law to en- 
 gage a farm-servant for less than a year ; which was the gen- 
 eral English practice until the poor laws destroyed it, by en- 
 abling the farmer to cast his labourers on parish pay when- 
 ever he did not immediately require their labour. In conse- 
 quence of this custom, and of its enforcement by law, the 
 whole of the rather limited class of agricultural labourers in 
 Norway have an engagement for a year at least, which if 
 the parties are content with one another, naturally becomes 
 a permanent engagement : hence it is known in every neigh- 
 bourhood whether there is, or is likely to be, a vacancy, and 
 unless there is, a young man does not marry, knowing that 
 he could not obtain employment. The custom still exists in 
 
 * "En general," says Sismondi, "le nombre des mattres 6tait fixe dans 
 chaque communaute, et le maitre pouvait seul tenir boutique, acheter et vendre 
 pour son compte. Chaque maitre ne pouvait former qu'un certain nombre 
 d'apprentis, auxquels il enseignait son metier ; et dans plusieurs communautes, 
 il n'en pouvait tenir qu'un seul. Chaque maitre pouvait de meme tenir un 
 nombre limite d'ouvriers, qui portaient le nom de compagnons; et, dans-les 
 metiers ou 1'on ne pouvait avoir qu'un seul apprenti, on ne pouvait avoir non 
 plus qu'un seul, ou que deux compagnons. Aucun homme ne pouvait acheter, 
 vendre, ou travailler dans un metier, s'il n'elait apprenti, compagnon, ou maitre ; 
 aucun homme ne pouvait devenir compagnon s'il n'avait servi un nombre 
 d'annees determine comme apprenti, ou devenir maitre s'il n'avait servi un 
 nombre 6gal d'annees comme compagnon ; et s'il n'avait de plus fait son chef- 
 d'oeuvre, ou execute un travail design6 dans son metier, qui devait etre jug6 par 
 sa jurande. On voit que cette organisation mettait entierement dans la main des 
 maitres le renouvellement des corps de metier. Eux seuls pouvaient recevoir 
 des apprentis ; mais ils n'etaient point obliges a en prende ; aussi se faisaient-ils 
 payer cette faveur, et souvent a un prix tres-eleve ; en sorte qu'un jeune homme 
 ne pouvait entrer dans un metier s'il n'avait, au prealable, la somme qu'il fallait 
 payer pour son apprentissage, et celle qui lui etait necessaire pour se sustenter 
 pendant la dur6e de cet apprentissage ; car pendant quatre, cinq, ou sept ans, 
 tout son travail appartenait a son maitre. Sa dependance de ce maitre etait tout 
 aussi longtemps absolue ; car un seul acte de la volonte, ou meme du caprice de 
 celui-ci, pouvait lui fermer I'entr6e des professions lucratives. L'apprenti, 
 devenu compagnon, aequerait un peu plus de liberte ; il pouvait s'engager avec
 
 436 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 5. 
 
 Cumberland and Westmoreland, except that the term is 
 half a year instead of a year ; and seems to be still attended 
 with the same consequences. The farm-servants " are lodged 
 and boarded in their masters' houses, which they seldom 
 leave until, through the death of some relation or neigh- 
 bour, they succeed to the ownership or lease of a cottage 
 farm. What is called surplus labour does not here exist." * 
 I have mentioned in another chapter the check to popula- 
 tion in England during the last century, from the difficulty 
 of obtaining a separate dwelling place, f Other customs 
 restrictive of population might be specified : in some parts 
 of Italy, it is the practice, according to Sismondi, among the 
 poor, as it is well known to be in the higher ranks, that all 
 but one of the sons remain unmarried. But such family 
 arrangements are not likely to exist among day-labourers. 
 They are the resource of small proprietors and metayers, for 
 preventing too minute a subdivision of the land. 
 
 In England generally there is now scarcely a relic 
 of these indirect checks to population ; except that in 
 
 quel maitre il voulait, passer de 1'un a 1'autre ; et comme I'entr^e au compag- 
 nonage n'etait ouverte que par 1'apprentissage, il commencait a profiler du 
 monopole dont il avait souffert, et il etait a peu pres sur de se faire bien payer 
 un travail que personne ne pouvait faire, si ce n'est lui. Cependant il d6pendait 
 dc la jurande pour obtenir la maitrise ; aussi ne se regardait-il point encore 
 comrne assur6 de son sort, comme ayant un etat. En general, il ne se mariait 
 point qu'il ne fut passe maitre. 
 
 " II est bien certain, et comme fait et comme theorie, que 1'etablissement des 
 corps de metier empechait et dcvait empecher la naissance d'une population sur- 
 abondante. D'apres les statuts de presque tous les corps de metier, un homme 
 ne pouvait etre passe maitre qu'apres vingt-cinq ans ; mais s'il n'avait pas un 
 capital & lui, s'il n'avait pas fait des economies suffisantes, il continuait bien plus 
 longtemps a travailler comme compagnon ; plusieurs, et peut-etre le plus grand 
 nombre des artisans, demeuraient compagnons toute leur vie. II etait presque 
 sans exemple, cependant, qu'ils se mariassent avant d'etre recus maitres ; quand 
 ils auraient etc assez imprudens pour le desirer, aiicun pere n'aurait voulu don- 
 ner sa fille a un homme qui n'avait point d'etat." Nouveaux Principes, book iv. 
 chap. 10. See also Adam Smith, book i. chap. 10, part 2. 
 
 * See Thornton on Over-Population, page 18, and the authorities there 
 cited. 
 
 f Supra, p. 211.
 
 WAGES. 437 
 
 parishes owned by one or a very small number of land- 
 owners, the increase of resident labourers is still occasion- 
 ally obstructed, by preventing cottages from being built, or 
 by pulling down those which exist ; thus restraining the 
 population liable to become locally chargeable, without any 
 material effect on population generally, the work required 
 in those parishes being performed by labourers settled else- 
 where. The surrounding districts always feel themselves 
 much aggrieved by this practice, against which they cannot 
 defend themselves by similar means, since a single acre of 
 land owned by any one who does not enter into the combi- 
 nation, enables him to defeat the attempt, very profitably 
 to himself, by covering that acre with cottages. To meet 
 these complaints it has already been under the considera- 
 tion of Parliament to abolish parochial settlements, and 
 make the poor rate a charge not on the parish but on the 
 whole union.* If this proposition be adopted, which for 
 other reasons is very desirable, it will remove the small 
 remnant of what was once a check to population : the value 
 of which, however, from the narrow limits of its operation, 
 must now be considerd very trifling. 
 
 6. In the case, therefore, of the common agricultural 
 labourer, the checks to population may almost be consid- 
 ered as non-existent. If the growth of the towns, and of 
 the capital there employed, by which the factory operatives 
 are maintained at their present average rate of wages not- 
 withstanding their rapid increase, did not also absorb a 
 great part of the annual addition to the rural population, 
 there seems no reason in the present habits of the people 
 why they should not fall into as miserable a condition as 
 the Irish previous to 1846 ; and if the market for our manu- 
 factures should, I do not say fall off, but even cease to 
 expand at the rapid rate of the last fifty years, there is no 
 certainty that this fate may not be reserved for us. With- 
 
 * An Act passed in the session of 1861, 'though not going quite this length, 
 has the effect intended in nearly the same degree.
 
 438 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 6. 
 
 out carrying our anticipations forward to such a calamity, 
 which the great and growing intelligence of the factory 
 population would, it may be hoped, avert, by an adapta- 
 tion of their habits to their circumstances ; the existing con- 
 dition of the labourers of some of the most exclusively agri- 
 cultural counties, Wiltshire, Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, 
 Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, is sufficiently painful to 
 contemplate. The labourers of these counties, with large 
 families, and eight or perhaps nine shillings for their weekly 
 wages when in full employment, have for some time been 
 one of the stock objects of popular compassion : it is time 
 that they had the benefit also of some, application of com- 
 mon sense. 
 
 Unhappily, sentimentality rather than common sense 
 usually presides over the discussion of these subjects ; and 
 while there is a growing sensitiveness to the hardships of 
 the poor, and a ready disposition to admit claims in them 
 upon the good offices of other people, there is an all but 
 universal unwillingness to face the real difficulty of their 
 position, or advert at all to the conditions which nature 
 has made indispensable to the improvement of their physical 
 lot. Discussions on the condition of the labourers, lamenta- 
 tions over its wretchedness, denunciations of all who are 
 supposed to be indifferent to it, projects of one kind or 
 another for improving it, were in no country and in no time 
 of the world so rife as in the present generation ; but there 
 is a tacit agreement to ignore totally the law of wages, or to 
 dismiss it in a parenthesis, with such terms as " hard-hearted 
 Malthusianism ; " as if it were not a thousand times more 
 hard-hearted to tell human beings that they may, than that 
 they may not, call into existence swarms of creatures who 
 are sure to be miserable, and most likely to be depraved ; 
 and forgetting that the conduct, which it is reckoned so 
 cruel to disapprove, is a degrading slavery to a brute 
 instinct in one of the persons concerned, and most com- 
 monly, in the other, helpless submission to a revolting 
 abuse of power.
 
 WAGES. 4.39 
 
 So long as mankind remained in a semi-barbarous state, 
 with the indolence and the few wants of the savage, it prob- 
 ably was not desirable that population should be restrained ; 
 the pressure of physical want may have been a necessary 
 stimulus, in that stage of the human mind, to the exertion 
 of labour and ingenuity required for accomplishing that 
 greatest of all past changes in human modes of existence, 
 by which industrial life attained predominance over the 
 hunting, the pastoral, and the military or predatory state. 
 Want, in that age of the world, had its uses, as even slavery- 
 had ; and there may be corners of the earth where those 
 uses are not yet superseded, though they might easily be so 
 were a helping hand held out by more civilized communi- 
 ties. But in Europe the time, if it ever existed, is long 
 past, when a life of privation had the smallest tendency to 
 make men either better workmen or more civilized beings. 
 It is, on the contrary, evident, that if the agricultural labour- 
 ers were better off, they would both work more efficiently 
 and be better citizens. I ask, then, is it true, or not, that if 
 their numbers were fewer they would obtain higher wages ? 
 This is the question, and no other : and it is idle to divert 
 attention from it, by attacking any incidental position of 
 Malthus or some other writer, and pretentling that to refute 
 that, is to disprove the principle of population. Some, for 
 instance, have achieved an easy victory over a passing re- 
 mark of Mr. Malthus, hazarded chiefly by way of illustra- 
 tion, that the increase of food may perhaps be assumed to 
 take place in an arithmetical ratio, while population increases 
 in a geometrical : when every candid reader knows that 
 Mr. Malthus laid no stress on this unlucky attempt to give 
 numerical precision to things which do not admit of it, and 
 every person capable of reasoning must see that it is wholly 
 superfluous to his argument. Others have attached im- 
 mense importance to a correction which more recent politi- 
 cal economists have made in the mere language of the earlier 
 followers of Mr. Malthus. Several writers had said that it 
 is the tendency of population to increase faster than the
 
 440 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 0. 
 
 means of subsistence. The assertion was true in the sense 
 in which they meant it, namely that population would in 
 most circumstances increase faster than the means of sub- 
 sistence, if it were not checked either by mortality or by 
 prudence. But inasmuch as these checks act with unequal 
 force at different times and places, it was possible to inter- 
 pret the language of these writers as if they had meant that 
 population is usually gaining ground upon subsistence, and 
 the poverty of the people becoming greater. Under this 
 interpretation of their meaning, it was urged that the reverse 
 is the truth : that as civilization advances, the prudential 
 check tends to become stronger, and population to slacken 
 its rate of increase, relatively to subsistence ; and that it 
 is an error to maintain that population, in any improving 
 community, tends to increase faster than, or even so fast 
 as, subsistence. The word tendency is here used in a totally 
 different sense from that of the writers who affirmed the 
 proposition : but waving the verbal question, is it not al- 
 lowed on both sides, that in old countries, population presses 
 too closely upon the means of subsistence ? And though 
 its pressure diminishes, the more the ideas and habits of 
 the poorest class of labourers can be improved, to which it 
 is to be hoped that there is always some tendency in a pro- 
 gressive country, yet since that tendency has hitherto been, 
 and still is, extremely faint, and (to descend to particulars) 
 has not yet extended to giving to the Wiltshire labourers 
 higher wages than eight shillings a week, the only thing 
 which it is necessary to consider is, whether that is a suffi- 
 cient and suitable provision for a labourer ? for if not, popu- 
 lation does, as an existing fact, bear too great a proportion 
 to the wages fund ; and whether it pressed still harder or 
 not quite so hard at some former period, is practically of 
 no moment, except that, if the ratio is an improving one, 
 there is the better hope that by proper aids and encourage- 
 ments it may be made to improve more and faster. 
 
 It is not, however, against reason, that the argument on 
 this subject has to struggle ; but against a feeling of dislike,
 
 WAGES. 441 
 
 which will only reconcile itself to the unwelome truth, when 
 every device is exhausted by which the recognition of that 
 truth can be evaded. It is necessary, therefore, to enter 
 into a detailed examination of these devices, and to force 
 every position which is taken up by the enemies of the 
 population principle in their determination to find some 
 refuge for the labourers, some plausible means of improv- 
 ing their condition, without requiring the exercise, either 
 enforced or voluntary, of any self-restraint, or any greater 
 control than at present over the animal power of multipli- 
 cation. Tnis will be the object of the next chapter.
 
 CHAPTEK XII. 
 
 OF POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 
 
 1. THE simplest expedient which can be imagined 
 for keeping the wages of labour up to the desirable point, 
 would be to fix them by law : and this is virtually the ob- 
 ject aimed at in a variety of plans which have at different 
 times been, or still are, current, for remodelling the relation 
 between labourers and employers. No one probably ever 
 suggested that wages should be absolutely fixed ; since the 
 interests of all concerned, often require that they should be 
 variable ; but some have proposed to fix a minimum of 
 wages, leaving the variations above that point to be adjusted 
 by competition. Another plan, which has found many ad- 
 vocates among the leaders of the operatives, is that councils 
 should be formed, which in England have been called local 
 boards of trade, in France " conseils de prud'hommes," and 
 other names ; consisting of delegates from the workpeople 
 and from the employers, who, meeting in conference, should 
 agree upon a rate of wages, and promulgate it from author- 
 ity, to be binding generally on employers and workmen ; 
 the ground of decision being, not the state of the labour- 
 market, but natural equity ; to provide that the workmen 
 shall have reasonable wages, and the capitalist reasonable 
 profits. 
 
 Others again (but these are rather philanthropists inter- 
 esting themselves for the labouring classes, than the labour- 
 ing people themselves) are shy of admitting the interference 
 of authority in contracts for labour: they fear that if law
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 443 
 
 intervened, it would intervene rashly and ignorantly ; they 
 are convinced that two parties, with opposite interests, at- 
 tempting to adjust those interests by negotiation through 
 their representatives on principles of equity, when no rule 
 could be laid down to determine what was equitable, would 
 merely exasperate their differences instead of healing them ; 
 but what it is useless to attempt by the legal sanction, these 
 persons desire to compass by the moral. Every employer, 
 they think, ought to give sufficient wages ; and if he does it 
 not willingly, should be compelled to it by general opinion ; 
 the test of sufficient wages being their own feelings, or what 
 they suppose to be those of the public. This is, I think, a 
 fair representation of a considerable body of existing opinion 
 on the subject. 
 
 I desire to confine my remarks to the principle involved 
 in all these suggestions, without taking into account prac- 
 tical difficulties, serious as these must at once be seen to be. 
 I shall suppose that by one or other of these contrivances, 
 wages could be kept above the point to which they would 
 be brought by competition. This is as much as to say, 
 above the highest rate which can be afforded by the exist- 
 ing capital consistently with employing all the labourers. 
 For it is a mistake to suppose that competition merely keeps 
 down wages. It is equally the means by which they are 
 kept up. When there are any labourers unemployed, these, 
 unless maintained by charity, become competitors for hire, 
 and wages fall ; but when all who were out of work have 
 found employment, wages will not, under the freest system 
 of competition, fall lower. There are strange notions afloat 
 concerning the nature of competition. Some people seem 
 to imagine that its effect is something indefinite ; that the 
 competition of sellers may lower prices, and the competition 
 of labourers may lower wages, down to zero, or some un- 
 assignable minimum. Nothing can be more unfounded. 
 Goods can only be lowered in price by competition, to the 
 point which calls forth buyers sufficient to take them off; 
 and wages can only be lowered by competition until room
 
 444 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 is made to admit all the labourers to a share in the distri- 
 bution of the wages-fund. If they fell below this point, a 
 portion of capital would remain unemployed for want of 
 labourers ; a counter-competition would commence on the 
 side of capitalists, and wages would rise. 
 
 Since, therefore, the rate of wages which results from 
 competition distributes the whole wages-fund among the 
 whole labouring population ; if law or opinion succeeds hi 
 fixing wages above this rate, some labourers are kept out 
 of employment ; and as it is not the intention of the philan- 
 thropists that these should starve, they must be provided 
 for by a forced increase of the wages-fund ; by a compul- 
 sory saving. It is nothing to fix a minimum of wages, 
 unless there be a provision that work, or wages at least, be 
 found for all who apply for it. This, accordingly, is always 
 part of the scheme ; and is consistent with the ideas of more 
 people than would approve of either a legal or a moral 
 minimum of wages. Popular sentiment looks upon it as 
 the duty of the rich, or of the state, to find employment 
 for all the poor. If the moral influence of opinion does 
 not induce the rich to spare from their consumption enough 
 to set all the poor at work at " reasonable wages," it is sup' 
 posed to be incumbent on the state to lay on taxes for the 
 purpose, either by local rates or votes of public money. 
 The proportion between labour and the wages-fund would 
 thus be modified to the advantage of the labourers, not by 
 restriction of population, but by an increase of capital. 
 
 2. If this claim on society could be limited to the 
 existing generation ; if nothing more were necessary than 
 a compulsory accumulation, sufficient to provide perma- 
 nent employment at ample wages for the existing numbers 
 of the people ; such a proposition would have no more 
 strenuous supporter than myself. Society mainly consist? 
 of those who live by bodily labour ; and if society, that is, 
 if the labourers, lend their physical force to protect indi- 
 viduals in the enjoyment of superfluities, they are entitled
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 4.45 
 
 to do so, and have always done so, with the reservation of 
 a power to tax those superfluities for purposes of public 
 utility ; among which purposes the subsistence of the peo- 
 ple is the foremost. Since no one is responsible for having 
 been born, no pecuniary sacrifice is too great to be made 
 by those who have more than enough, for the purpose of 
 securing enough to all persons already in existence. 
 
 But it is another thing altogether, when those who have 
 produced and accumulated are called upon to abstain from 
 consuming until they have given food and clothing, not 
 only to all who now exist, but to all whom these or their 
 descendants may think fit to call into existence. Such an 
 obligation acknowledged and acted upon, would suspend 
 all checks, both positive and preventive ; there would be 
 nothing to hinder population from starting forward at its 
 rapidest rate ; and as the natural increase of capital would, 
 at the best, not be more rapid than before, taxation, to make 
 up the growing deficiency, must advance with the same 
 gigantic strides. The attempt would of course be made to 
 exact labour in exchange for support. But experience has 
 shown the sort of work to be expected from recipients of 
 public charity. When the pay is not given for the sake of 
 the work, but the work found for the sake of the pay, in- 
 efficiency is a matter of certainty : to extract real work 
 from day-labourers without the power of dismissal, is only 
 practicable by the power of the lash. It is conceivable, 
 doubtless, that this objection might be got over. The fund 
 raised by taxation might be spread over the labour market 
 generally, as seems to be intended by the supporters of the 
 droit au tra/vail in France ; without giving to any unem- 
 ployed labourer a right to demand support in a particular 
 place or from a particular functionary. The power of dis* 
 missal, as regards individual labourers, would then remain ; 
 the government only undertaking to create additional em- 
 ployment when there was a deficiency, and reserving, like 
 other employers, the choice of its own workpeople. But 
 let them work ever so efficiently, the increasing population
 
 446 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 could not, as we have BO often shown, increase the produce 
 proportionally : the surplus, after all were fed, would bear 
 a less and less proportion to the whole produce and to the 
 population : and the increase of people going on in a con- 
 stant ratio, while the increase of produce went on in a di- 
 minishing ratio, the surplus would in time be wholly ab- 
 sorbed ; taxation for the support of the poor would engross 
 the whole income of the country ; the payers and the re- 
 ceivers would be melted down into one mass. The check 
 to population either by death or prudence, could not then 
 be staved off any longer, but must come into operation 
 suddenly and at once ; everything which places mankind 
 above a nest of ants or a colony of beavers, having perished 
 in the interval. 
 
 These consequences have been so often and so clearly 
 pointed out by authors of reputation, in writings known 
 and accessible, that ignorance of them on the part of edu- 
 cated persons is no longer pardonable. It is doubly dis- 
 creditable in any person setting up for a public teacher, to 
 ignore these considerations ; to dismiss them silently, and 
 discuss or declaim on wages and poor-laws, not as if these 
 arguments could be refuted, but as if they did not exist. 
 
 Every one has a right to live. We will suppose this 
 granted. But no one has a right to bring creatures into 
 life, to be supported by other people. Whoever means to 
 stand upon the first of these rights must renounce all pre- 
 tensions to the last. If a man cannot support even himself 
 unless others help him, those others are entitled to say that 
 they do not also undertake the support of any offspring 
 which it is physically possible for him to summon into the 
 world. Yet there are abundance of writers and public 
 speakers, including many of most ostentatious pretensions 
 to high feeling, whose views of life are so truly brutish, that 
 they see hardship in preventing paupers from breeding 
 hereditary paupers in the workhouse itself. Posterity will 
 one day ask with astonishment, what sort of people it could 
 be among whom such preachers could find proselytes.
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 44.7 
 
 It would be possible for the state to guarantee employ- 
 ment at ample wages to all who are born. But if it does 
 this, it is bound in self-protection, and for the sake of every 
 purpose for which government exists, to provide that no 
 person shall be born without its consent. If the ordinary 
 and spontaneous motives to self-restraint are removed, others 
 must be substituted. Restrictions on marriage, at least 
 equivalent to those existing in some of the German States, 
 or severe penalties on those who have children when unable 
 to support them, would then be indispensable. Society can 
 feed the necessitous, if it takes their multiplication under 
 its control ; or (if destitute of all moral feeling for the 
 wretched offspring) it can leave the last to their discretion, 
 abandoning the first to their own care. But it cannot with 
 impunity take the feeding upon itself, and leave the multi- 
 plying free. 
 
 To give profusely to the people, whether under the name 
 of charity or of employment, without placing them under 
 such influences that prudential motives shall act powerfully 
 upon them, is to lavish the means of benefiting mankind, 
 without attaining the object. Leave the people in a situ- 
 ation in which their condition manifestly depends upon 
 their numbers, and the greatest permanent benefit may be 
 derived from any sacrifice made to improve the physical 
 well-being of the present generation, and raise, by that 
 means, the habits of their children. But remove the regu- 
 lation of their wages from their own control ; guarantee to 
 them a certain payment, either by law, or by the feeding 
 of the community ; and no amount of comfort that you can 
 give them will make either them or their descendants look 
 to their own self-restraint as the proper means for preserv- 
 ing them in that state. You will only make them indig- 
 nantly claim the continuance of your guarantee, to them- 
 selves and their full complement of possible posterity. 
 
 On these grounds some writers have altogether con- 
 demned the English poor-law, and any system of relief to 
 the able-bodied, at least when uricornbined with systematic
 
 448 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 legal precautions against over-population. The famous Act 
 of the 43 d of Elizabeth undertook, on the part of the public, 
 to provide work and wages for all the destitute able-bodied : 
 and there is little doubt that if the intent of that Act had 
 been fully carried out, and no means had been adopted by 
 the administrators of relief to neutralize its natural tendeu 
 cies, the poor-rate would by this time have absorbed the 
 whole net produce of the land and labour of the country. 
 It is not at all surprising, therefore, that Mr. Malthus and 
 others should at first have concluded against all poor-laws 
 whatever. It required much experience and careful ex- 
 amination of different modes of poor-law management, to 
 give assurance that the admission of an absolute right to 
 be supported at the cost of other people, could exist in law 
 and in fact, without fatally relaxing the springs of industry 
 and the restraints of prudence. This, however, was fully 
 substantiated, by the investigations of the original Poor- 
 Law Commissioners. Hostile as they are unjustly accused 
 of being to the principle of legal relief, they are the first 
 who fully proved the compatibility of any Poor Law, in 
 which a right to relief was recognised, with the permanent 
 interests of the labouring class and of posterity. By a col- 
 lection of facts, experimentally ascertained in parishes scat- 
 tered throughout England, it was shown that the guarantee 
 of support could be freed from its injurious effects upon the 
 minds and habits of the people, if the relief, though ample 
 in respect to necessaries, was accompanied with conditions 
 which they disliked, consisting of some restraints on their 
 freedom, and the privation of some indulgences. Under 
 this proviso, it may be regarded as irrevocably established, 
 that the fate of no member of the community needs be 
 abandoned to chance ; that society can and therefore ought 
 to ensure every individual belonging to it against the ex- 
 treme of want ; that the condition even of those who are 
 unable to find their own support, needs not be one of physi- 
 cal suffering, or the dread of it, but only of restricted indul- 
 gence, and enforced rigidity of discipline. This is surely
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGEa 449 
 
 something gained for humanity, important in itself, and 
 still more so as a step to something beyond ; and humanity 
 has no worse enemies than those who lend themselves, 
 either knowingly or unintentionally, to bring odium on this 
 law, or on the principles in which it originated. 
 
 3. Next to the attempts to regulate wages, and 
 provide artificially that all who are willing to work shall 
 receive an adequate price for their labour, we have to con- 
 sider another class of popular remedies, which do not pro- 
 fess to interfere with freedom of contract ; which leave 
 wages to be fixed by the competition of the market, but, 
 when they are considered insufficient, endeavour by some 
 subsidiary resource to make up to the labourers for the in- 
 sufficiency. Of this nature was the expedient resorted to 
 by parish authorities, during thirty or forty years previous 
 to 1834, generally known as the Allowance System. This 
 was first introduced, when, through a succession of bad sea- 
 ,sons, and consequent high prices of food, the wages of labour 
 had become inadequate to afford to the families of the agri- 
 cultural labourers the amount of support to which they had 
 been accustomed. Sentiments of humanity, joined with 
 the idea then inculcated in high quarters, that people ought 
 not to be allowed to suffer for having enriched their coun- 
 try with a multitude of inhabitants, induced the magistrates 
 of the rural districts to commence giving parish relief to 
 persons already in private employment : and when the 
 practice had once been sanctioned, the immediate interest 
 of the farmers, whom it enabled to throw part of the sup- 
 port of their labourers upon the other inhabitants of the 
 parish, led to a great and rapid extension of it. The prin- 
 ciple of this scheme being avowedly that of adapting the 
 means of every family to its necessities, it was a natural 
 consequence that more should be given to the married than 
 to the single, and to those who had large families than to 
 those who had not: in fact, an allowance was usuall} granted 
 for every child. So direct and positive an encouragement 
 29
 
 450 BOK II. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 to population is not, however, inseparable from the scheme : 
 the allowance in aid of wages might be a fixed thing, given 
 to all labourers alike, and as this is the least objectionable 
 form which the system can assume, we will give it the bene- 
 fit of the supposition. 
 
 It is obvious that this is merely another mode of fixing 
 a minimum of wages ; no otherwise differing from the di- 
 rect mode, than in allowing the employer to buy the labour 
 at its market price, the difference being made up to the 
 labourer from a public fund. The one kind of guarantee 
 is open to all the objections which have been urged against 
 the other. It promises to the labourers that they shall all 
 have a certain amount of wages, however numerous they 
 may be : and removes, therefore, alike the positive and the 
 prudential obstacles to an unlimited increase. But besides 
 the objections common to all attempts to regulate wages 
 without regulating population, the allowance system has a 
 peculiar absurdity of its own. This is, that it inevitably 
 takes from wages with one hand what it adds to them with 
 the other. There is a rate of wages, either the lowest on 
 which the people can, or the lowest on which they will con- 
 sent, to live. "We will suppose this to be seven shillings 
 a-week. Shocked at the wretchedness of this pittance, the 
 parish authorities humanely make it up to ten. But the 
 labourers are accustomed to seven, and though they would 
 gladly have more, will live on that (as the fact proves) 
 rather than restrain the instinct of multiplication. Their 
 habits will not be altered for the better by giving them 
 parish pay. Receiving three shillings from the parish, they 
 will be as well off as before though they should increase 
 sufficiently to bring down wages to four shillings. They 
 will accordingly people down to that point ; or perhaps, 
 without waiting for an increase of numbers, there are un- 
 employed labourers enough in the workhouse to produce the 
 effect at once. It is well known that the allowance system 
 did practically operate in the mode described, and that 
 under its influence wages sank to a lower rate than had
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 451 
 
 been known in England before. During the last century, 
 under a rather rigid administration of the poor-laws, popu- 
 lation increased slowly, and agricultural wages were con- 
 siderably above the starvation point. Under the allowance 
 system the people increased so fast, and wages sank so low, 
 that with wages and allowance together, families were worse 
 off than they had been before with wages alone. When the 
 labourer depends solely on wages, there is a virtual mini- 
 mum. If wages fall below the lowest rate which will enable 
 the population to be kept up, depopulation at least restores 
 them to that lowest rate. But if the deficiency is to be 
 made up by a forced contribution from all who have any- 
 thing to give, wages may fall below starvation point ; they 
 may fall almost to zero. This deplorable system, worse 
 than any other form of poor-law abuse yet invented, inas- 
 much as it pauperizes not merely the unemployed part of 
 the population but the whole, has now been abolished, and 
 of this one abuse at least it may be said that nobody pro- 
 fesses to wish for its revival. 
 
 4. But while this is (it is to be hoped) exploded, there 
 is another mode of relief in aid of wages, which is still highly 
 popular; a mode greatly preferable, morally and socially, 
 to parish allowance, but tending, it is to be feared, to a very 
 similar economical result : I mean the much-boasted Allot- 
 ment System. This, too, is a contrivance to compensate 
 the labourer for the insufficiency of his wages, by giving 
 him something else as a supplement to them : but instead 
 of having them made up from the poor-rate, he is enabled to 
 make them up for himself, by renting a small piece of 
 ground, which he cultivates like a garden by spade labour, 
 raising potatoes and other vegetables for home consump- 
 tion, with perhaps some additional quantity for sale. If he 
 hires the ground ready manured he sometimes pays for it 
 at as high a rate as eight pounds an acre : but getting his 
 own labour and that of his family for nothing, he is able to
 
 452 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 4, 
 
 gain several pounds by it even at so high a rent.* The 
 patrons of the system make it a great point that the allot 
 ment shall be in aid of wages, and not a substitute for them ; 
 that it shall not be such as a labourer can live on, but only 
 sufficient to occupy the spare hours and days of a man in 
 tolerably regular agricultural employment, with assistance 
 from his wife and children. They usually limit the extent 
 of a single allotment to a quarter, or something between a 
 quarter and half an acre. If it exceeds this, without being 
 enough to occupy him entirely, it will make him, they say, 
 a bad and uncertain workman for hire : if it is sufficient 
 to take him entirely out of the class of hired labourers, and 
 to become his sole means of subsistence, it will make him 
 an Irish cottier : for which assertion, at the enormous rents 
 usually demanded, there is some foundation. But in their 
 precautions against cottierism, these well-meaning persons 
 do not perceive, that if the system they patronize is not a 
 cottier system, it is, in essentials, neither more nor less than 
 a system of conacre. 
 
 There is no doubt a material difference between eking 
 out insufficient wages by a fund raised by taxation, and 
 doing the same thing by means which make a clear addi- 
 tion to the gross produce of the country. There is also a 
 difference between helping a labourer by means of his own 
 industry, and subsidizing him in a mode which tends to 
 make him careless and idle. On both these points, allot- 
 ments have an unquestionable advantage over parish allow- 
 ances. But in their effect on wages and population, I see 
 no reason why the two plans should substantially differ. 
 All subsidies in aid of wages enable the labourer to do with 
 less remuneration, and therefore ultimately bring down 
 the price of labour by the full amount, unless a change be 
 wrought in the ideas and requirements of the labouring 
 class ; an alteration in the relative value which they set 
 upon the gratification of their instincts, and upon the in- 
 
 * See the Evidence on the subject, pf Allotments, collected by the Commis- 
 sioners of Poor Law Enquiry,
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 453 
 
 crease of their comforts and the comforts of those connected 
 with them. That any such change in their character should 
 be produced by the allotment system, appears to me a thing 
 not to be expected. The possession of land, we are some- 
 times told, renders the labourer provident. Property in 
 land does so ; or what is equivalent to property, occupa- 
 tion on fixed terms and on a permanent tenure. But mere 
 hiring from year to year was never found to have any such 
 effect. Did possession of land render the Irishman provi- 
 dent ? Testimonies, it is true, abound, and I do not seek 
 to discredit them, of the beneficial change produced in the 
 conduct and condition of labourers, by receiving allotments. 
 Such an effect is to be expected while those who hold them 
 are a small number ; a privileged class, having a status 
 above the common level, which they are unwilling to lose. 
 They are also, no doubt, almost always, originally a select 
 class, composed of the most favourable specimens of the 
 labouring people : which, however, is attended with the 
 inconvenience that the persons to whom the system facili- 
 tates marrying and having children, are precisely those who 
 would otherwise be the most likely to practise prudential 
 restraint. As affecting the general condition of the labour- 
 ing class, the scheme, as it seems to me, must be either 
 nugatory or mischievous. If only a few labourers have 
 allotments, they are naturally those who could do best with- 
 out them, and no good is done to the class : while, if the 
 system were general, and every or almost every labourer 
 had an allotment, I believe the effect would be much the 
 same as when every or almost every labourer had an allow- 
 ance in aid of wages. I think there can be no doubt that 
 if, at the end of the last century, the Allotment instead of 
 the Allowance system had been generally adopted in Eng- 
 land, it would equally have broken down the practical re- 
 straints on population which at that time did really exist ; 
 population would have started forward exactly as in fact it 
 did ; and in twenty years, wages plus the allotment would 
 have been, as wages plus the allowance actually were, no
 
 54: BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 4. 
 
 more than equal to the former wages without any allotment 
 The only difference in favour of allotments would have been, 
 that they make the people grow their own poor-rates. 
 
 I am at the same time quite ready to allow, that in some 
 circumstances, the possession of land at a fair rent, even 
 without ownership, by the generality of labourers for hire, 
 operates as a cause not of low, but of high wages. This, 
 however, is when their land renders them, to the extent of 
 actual necessaries, independent of the market for labour. 
 There is the greatest difference between the position of 
 people who live by wages, with land as an extra resource, 
 and of people who can, in case of necessity, subsist entirely 
 on their land, and only work for hire to add to their com- 
 forts. Wages are likely to be high where none are compel- 
 led by necessity to sell their labour. " People who have at 
 home some kind of property to apply their labour to, will 
 not sell their labour for wages that do not afford them a 
 better diet than potatoes and maize, although in saving for 
 themselves, they may live very much on potatoes and maize. 
 We are often surprised in travelling on the Continent, to 
 hear of a rate of day's wages very high, considering the 
 abundance and cheapness of food. It is want of the neces- 
 sity or inclination to take work, that makes day-labour 
 scarce, and, considering the price of provisions, dear, in many 
 parts of the Continent, where property in land is widely dif- 
 fused among the people." * There are parts of the Conti- 
 nent where, even of the inhabitants of the towns, scarcely 
 one seems to be exclusively dependent on his ostensible em- 
 ployment ; and nothing else can explain the high price they 
 put on their services, and the carelessness they evince as to 
 whether they are employed at all. But the effect would be 
 far different if their land or other resources gave them only 
 a fraction of a subsistence, leaving them under an undimin- 
 ished necessity of selling their labour for wages in an over- 
 stocked market. Their land would then merely enable them 
 to exist on smaller wages, and to carry their multiplication 
 
 * Laiug's Notes of a Traveller, p. 456.
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 455 
 
 so much the further before reaching the point below which 
 they either could not, or would not, descend. 
 
 To the view I have taken of the effect of allotments, I 
 see no argument which can be opposed, but that employed 
 by Mr. Thornton,* with whom on this subject I am at issue. 
 His defence of allotments is grounded on the general doc- 
 trine, that it is only the very poor who multiply without re- 
 gard to consequences, and that if the condition of the exist- 
 ing generation could be greatly improved, which he thinks 
 might be done by the allotment system, their successors 
 would grow up with an increased standard of requirements, 
 and would not have families until they could keep them in 
 as much comfort as that in which they had been brought up 
 themselves. I agree in as much of this argument as goes to 
 prove that a sudden and very great improvement in the 
 condition of the poor, has always, through its effect on their 
 habits of life, a chance of becoming permanent. What hap- 
 pened at the time of the French Revolution is an example. 
 But I cannot think that the addition of a quarter or even 
 half an acre to every labourer's cottage, and that too at a 
 rack rent, would (after the fall of wages which would be 
 necessary to absorb the already existing mass of pauper 
 labour) make so great a difference in the comforts of the 
 family for a generation to come, as to raise up from child- 
 hood a labouring population with a really higher permanent 
 standard of requirements and habits. So small a portion of 
 land could only be made a permanent benefit, by holding 
 out encouragements to acquire by industry and saving, the 
 means of buying it outright : a permission which, if exten- 
 sively made use of, would be a kind of education in fore- 
 thought and frugality to the entire class, the effects of which 
 might not cease with the occasion. The benefit would how- 
 ever arise, not from what was given them, but from what 
 they were stimulated to acquire. 
 
 No remedies for low wages have the smallest chance of 
 being efficacious, which do not operate on and through the 
 
 * See Thornton on Over-Population, chap. viii.
 
 456 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 4. 
 
 minds and habits of the people. While these are unaffected, 
 any contrivance, even if successful, for temporarily improv- 
 ing the condition of the very poor, would but let slip the 
 reins by which population was previously curbed ; and 
 could only, therefore, continue to produce its effect, if, by 
 the whip and spur of taxation, capital were compelled to 
 follow at an equally accelerated pace. But this process 
 could not possibly continue for long together, and whenever 
 it stopped, it would leave the country with an increased 
 number of the poorest class, and a diminished proportion of 
 all except the poorest, or, if it continued long enough, with 
 none at all. For " to this complexion must come at last " 
 all social arrangements, which remove the natural checks to 
 population without substituting any others.
 
 CHAPTEK 
 
 THE REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES FURTHER CONSIDERED. 
 
 1. BY what means, then, is poverty to be contended 
 against ? How is the evil of low wages to be remedied ? 
 If the expedients usually recommended for the purpose are 
 not adapted to it, can no others be thought of? Is the 
 problem incapable of solution ? Can political economy do 
 nothing, but only object to everything, and demonstrate 
 that nothing can be done ? 
 
 If this were so, political economy might have a needful, 
 but would have a melancholy, and a thankless task. If the 
 bulk of the human race are always to remain as at present, 
 slaves to toil in which they have no interest, and therefore 
 feel no interest drudging from early morning till late at 
 night for bare necessaries, and with all the intellectual and 
 moral deficiencies which that implies without resources 
 either in mind or feelings untaught, for they cannot be 
 better taught than fed ; selfish, for all their thoughts are 
 required for themselves ; without interests or sentiments as 
 citizens and members of society, and with a sense of injus- 
 tice rankling in their minds, equally for what they have not, 
 and for what others have ; I know not what there is which 
 should make a person with any capacity of reason, concern 
 himself about the destinies of the human race. There 
 would be no wisdom for any one but in extracting from life, 
 with Epicurean indifference, as much personal satisfaction 
 to himself and those with whom he sympathises, as it can 
 yield without injury to any one, and letting the unmeaning
 
 458 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 1. 
 
 bustle of so-called civilized existence roll by unheeded. But 
 there is no ground for such a view of human affairs. Pov- 
 erty, like most social evils, exists because men follow their 
 brute instincts without due consideration. But society is 
 possible, precisely because man is not necessarily a brute. 
 Civilization in every one of its aspects is a struggle against 
 the animal instincts. Over some even of the strongest of 
 them, it has shown itself capable of acquiring abundant con- 
 trol. It has artificialized large portions of mankind to such 
 an extent, that of many of their most natural inclinations 
 they have scarcely a vestige or a remembrance left. If it 
 has not brought the instinct of population under as much 
 restraint as is needful, we must remember that it has never 
 seriously tried. What efforts it has made, have mostly been 
 in the contrary direction. Religion, morality, and states- 
 manship have vied with one another in incitements to mar- 
 riage, and to the multiplication of the species, so it be but 
 in wedlock. Religion has not even yet discontinued its 
 encouragements. The Roman Catholic clergy (of any other 
 clergy it is unnecessary to speak, since no other have any 
 considerable influence over the poorer classes) everywhere 
 think it their duty to promote marriage, in order to prevent 
 fornication. There is still in many minds a strong religious 
 prejudice against the true doctrine. The rich, provided the 
 consequences do not touch themselves, think it impugns the 
 wisdom of Providence to suppose that misery can result 
 from the operation of a natural propensity : the poor think 
 that " God never sends mouths but he sends meat." No 
 one would guess from the language of either, that man had 
 any voice or choice in the matter. So complete is the con- 
 fusion of ideas on the whole subject ; owing in a great 
 degree to the mystery in which it is shrouded by a spurious 
 delicacy, which prefers that right and wrong should be mis- 
 measured and confounded on one of the subjects most mo- 
 mentous to human welfare, rather than that the subject 
 should be freely spoken of and discussed. People are little 
 aware of the cost to mankind of this scrupulosity of speech.
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 459 
 
 The diseases of society can, no more than corporal maladies, 
 be prevented or cured without being spoken about in plain 
 language. All experience shows that the mass of mankind 
 never judge of moral questions for themselves, never see 
 anything to be right or wrong until they have been fre- 
 quently told it ; and who tells them that they have any 
 duties in the matter in question, while they keep within 
 matrimonial limits? Who meets with the smallest con- 
 demnation, or rather, who does not meet with sympathy 
 and benevolence, for any amount of evil which he may have 
 brought upon himself and those dependent on him, by this 
 species of incontinence ? While a man who is intemperate 
 in drink, is discountenanced and despised by all who profess 
 to be moral people, it is one of the chief grounds made use 
 of in appeals to the benevolent, that the applicant has a 
 large family and is unable to maintain them.* 
 
 One cannot wonder that silence on this great depart- 
 ment of human duty should produce unconsciousness of 
 moral obligations, when it produces oblivion of physical 
 facts. That it is possible to delay marriage, and to live in 
 abstinence while unmarried, most people are willing to 
 allow : but when persons are once married, the idea, in this 
 country, never seems to enter any one's mind that having or 
 not having a family, or the number of which it shall consist, 
 is amenable to their own control. One would imagine that 
 children were rained down upon married people, direct 
 from heaven, without their being ait or part in the matter ; 
 that it was really, as the common phrases have it, God's 
 will, and not their own, which decided the numbers of their 
 offspring. Let us see what is a Continental philosopher's 
 opinion on this point ; a man among the most benevolent 
 of his time, and the happiness of whose married life has been 
 celebrated. 
 
 * Little improvement can be expected in morality until the producing large 
 families is regarded with the same feelings as drunkenness or any other physical 
 excess. But while the aristocracy and clergy are foremost to set the example 
 of this kind of incontinence, what can be expected from the poor ?
 
 460 BOOK n. CHAPTER XIII. 2 
 
 " Lorsque des prejuges dangereux," says Sismondi,* " ne 
 sont point accredites, lorsqu'une morale contraire a nos vrais 
 devoirs envers les autres et surtout envers les creatures qui 
 nous doivent la vie, n'est point enseignee au nom de 1'auto- 
 rite la plus sacree, aucun homme sage ne se marie avant de 
 se trouver dans une condition qui lui donne un moyen assure 
 de vivre ; aucun pere de famille n'a plus d'enfans qu'il n'en 
 peut convenablement clever. Ce dernier compte a bon droit 
 que ses enfans devront se contenter du sort dans lequel il a 
 vecu ; aussi doit-il desirer que la generation naissunte repre- 
 sente exactement celle qui s'en va ; qu'un fils et une fille 
 arrives a 1'age nubile remplacent son pere et sa mere ; que 
 les enfans de ses enfans le remplacent a son tour avec sa 
 femme ; que sa fille trouve dans une autre raaison precise- 
 ment le sort qu'il donnera & la fille d'une autre maison dans 
 'la sienne, et que le revenu qui suffisait aux peres suffise aux 
 enfans." In a country increasing in wealth, something 
 more than this would be admissible, but that is a question 
 of detail, not of principle. " Une fois que cette famille est 
 forme'e, la justice et 1'humanitd exigent qu'il s'impose la 
 meme contrainte a laquelle se soumettent les celjbataires. 
 Lorsqu'on voit combien est petit, en tout pays, le nombre des 
 enfans naturels, on doit reconnaitre que cette contrainte est 
 suffisamment efficace. Dans un pays ou la population ne 
 peut pas s'accroitre, ou du moins dans lequel son progres 
 doit etre si lent qu'il soit & peine perceptible, quand il n'y a 
 point de places nouvelles pour de nouveaux etablissements, 
 un pere qui a huit enfans doit compter, ou que six de ses 
 enfans mourront en bas age, ou que trois de ses contempo- 
 rains et trois de ses contemporaines, et dans la generation 
 suivante, trois de ses fils et trois de ses filles ne se marieront 
 pas a cause de lui." 
 
 2. Those who think it hopeless that the labouring 
 classes should be induced to practise a sufficient degree of 
 prudence in regard to the increase of their families, because 
 
 * Nouveaux Principes, liv. vii. ch. 6.
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 461 
 
 they have hitherto stopt short of that point, show an inabil- 
 ity to estimate the ordinary principles of human action. 
 Nothing more would probably be necessary to secure that 
 result, than an opinion generally diffused that it was desir- 
 able. As a moral principle, such an opinion has never yet 
 existed in any country : it is curious that it does not so exist 
 in countries in which, from the spontaneous operation of 
 individual forethought, population is, comparatively speak- 
 ing, efficiently repressed. What is practised as prudence, 
 is still not recognized as duty ; the talkers and writers are 
 mostly on the other side, even in France, where a senti- 
 mental horror of Malthus is almost as rife as in this country. 
 Many causes may be assigned, besides the modern date of 
 the doctrine, for its not having yet gained possession of the 
 general mind. Its truth has, in some respects, been its 
 detriment. One may be permitted to doubt whether, except 
 among the poor themselves (for whose prejudices on this 
 subject there is no difficulty in accounting), there has ever 
 yet been, in any class of society, a sincere and earnest desire 
 that wages should be high. There has been plenty of desire to 
 keep down the poor-rate ; but, that done, people have been 
 very willing that the working classes should be ill off. Near- 
 ly all who are not labourers themselves, are employers of la- 
 bour, and are not sorry to get the commodity cheap. It is a 
 fact, that even Boards of Guardians, who are supposed to be 
 official apostles of anti-population doctrines, will seldom hear 
 patiently of anything which they are pleased to designate as 
 Malthusianism. Boards of Guardians in rural districts, prin- 
 cipally consist of farmers, and farmers, it is well known, in 
 general dislike even allotments, as making the labourers " too 
 independent." From the gentry, who are in less immediate 
 contact and collision of interest with the labourers, bettef 
 things might be expected, and the gentry of England are usu- 
 ally charitable. But charitable people have human infirmi- 
 ties, and would, very often, be secretly not a little dissatisfied 
 if no one needed their charity : it is from them one oftenest 
 hears the base doctrine, that God has decreed there shall
 
 462 B O K H. CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 always be poor. When one adds to this, that nearly every 
 person who has had in him any active spring of exertion for 
 a social object, has had some favourite reform to effect which 
 he thought the admission of this great principle would 
 throw into the shade ; has had corn laws to repeal, or taxa- 
 tion to reduce, or small notes to issue, or the charter to 
 carry, or the church to revive or abolish, or the aristocracy 
 to pull down, and looked upon every one as an enemy who 
 thought anything important except his object ; it is scarcely 
 wonderful that since tbe population doctrine was first pro- 
 mulgated, nine-tenths of the talk has always been against it, 
 and the remaining tenth only audible at intervals ; and that 
 it has not yet penetrated far among those who might be ex- 
 pected to be the least willing recipients of it, the labourers 
 themselves. 
 
 But let us try to imagine what would happen if the idea 
 became general among the labouring class, that the compe- 
 tition of too great numbers was the principal cause of their 
 poverty ; so that every labourer looked (with Sismondi) 
 upon every other who had more than the number of chil- 
 dren which the circumstances of society allowed to each, as 
 doing him a wrong as filling up the place which he was 
 entitled to share. Any one who supposes that this state of 
 opinion would not have a great effect on conduct, must be 
 profoundly ignorant of human nature ; can never have con- 
 sidered how large a portion of the motives which induce the 
 generality of men to take care even of their own interest, is 
 derived from regard for opinion from the expectation of 
 being disliked or despised for not doing it. In the particu- 
 lar case in question, it is not too much to say that over- 
 indulgence is as much caused by the stimulus of opinion as 
 by the mere animal propensity ; since opinion universally, 
 and especially among the most uneducated classes, has con- 
 nected ideas of spirit and power with the strength of the in- 
 stinct, and of inferiority with its moderation or absence ; a 
 perversion of sentiment caused by its being the means, and 
 the stamp, of a dominion exercised over other human beings.
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 463 
 
 The effect would be great of merely removing this factitious 
 stimulus ; and when once opinion shall have turned itself 
 into an adverse direction, a revolution will soon take place 
 in this department of human conduct. We are often told 
 that the most thorough perception of the dependence of 
 wages on population will not influence the conduct of a 
 labouring man, because it is not the children he himself can 
 have that will produce any effect in generally depressing 
 the labour market. True, and it is also true, that one sol- 
 dier's running away will not lose the battle ; accordingly it 
 is not that consideration which keeps each soldier in his 
 rank : it is the disgrace which naturally and inevitably at- 
 tends on conduct by any one individual, which if pursued 
 by a majority, everybody can see would be fatal. Men are 
 seldom found to brave the general opinion of their class, un- 
 less supported either by some principle higher than regard 
 for opinion, or by some strong body of opinion elsewhere. 
 
 It must be borne in mind also, that the opinion here in 
 question, as soon as it attained any prevalence, would have 
 powerful auxiliaries in the great majority of women. It is 
 never by the choice of the wife that families are too numer- 
 ous ; on her devolves (along with all the physical suffering and 
 at least a full share of the privations) the whole of the intol- 
 erable domestic drudgery resulting from the excess. To be 
 relieved from it would be hailed as a blessing by multitudes 
 of women who now ne\ 7 er venture to urge such a claim, but 
 who would urge it, if supported by the moral feelings of the 
 community. Among the barbarisms which law and morals 
 have not yet ceased to sanction, the most disgusting surely 
 is, that any human being should be permitted to consider 
 himself as having a right to the person of another. 
 
 If the opinion were once generally established among 
 the labouring class that their welfare required a due regula- 
 tion of the numbers of families, the respectable and well- 
 conducted of the body would conform to the prescription, 
 and only those would exempt themselves from it, who were 
 in the habit of making light of social obligations generally ;
 
 464 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 and there would be then an evident justification for convert- 
 ing the moral obligation against bringing children into the 
 world who are a burthen to the community, into a legal 
 one ; just as in many other cases of the progress of opinion, 
 the law ends by enforcing against recalcitrant minorities, 
 obligations which to be useful must be general, and which, 
 from a sense of their utility, a large majority have volun- 
 tarily consented to take upon themselves. There would be 
 no need, however, of legal sanctions, if women were ad- 
 mitted, as on all other grounds they have the clearest title 
 to be, to the same rights of citizenship with men. Let them 
 cease to be confined by custom to one physical function as 
 their means of living and their source of influence, and they 
 would have for the first time an equal voice with men in 
 what concerns that function : and of all the improvements 
 in reserve for mankind which it is now possible to foresee, 
 none might be expected to be so fertile as this in almost 
 every kind of moral and social benefit. 
 
 It remains to consider what chance there is that opinions 
 and feelings, grounded on the law of the dependence of 
 wages on population, will arise among the labouring classes ; 
 and by what means such opinions and feelings can be called 
 forth. Before considering the grounds of hope on this sub- 
 ject, a hope which many persons, no doubt, will be ready, 
 without consideration, to pronounce chimerical, I will remark, 
 that unless a satisfactory answer can be made to these two 
 questions, the industrial system prevailing in this country, 
 and regarded by many writers as the we plus ultra of civili- 
 zation the dependence of the whole labouring class of the 
 community on the wages of hired labour, is irrevocably con- 
 demned. The question we are considering is, \vhether, of 
 this state of things, over-population and a degraded condi- 
 tion of the labouring class are the inevitable consequence. 
 If a prudent regulation of population be not reconcilable 
 with the system of hired labour, the system is a nuisance, 
 and the grand object of economical statesmanship should be 
 (by whatever arrangements of property, and alterations in
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 465 
 
 the modes of applying industry), to bring the labouring 
 people under the influence of stronger and more obvious 
 inducements to this kind of prudence, than the relation of 
 workmen and employers can afford. 
 
 But there exists no such incompatibility. The causes 
 of poverty are not so obvious at first sight to a population 
 of hired labourers, as they are to one of proprietors, or as 
 they would be to a socialist community. They are, how- 
 ever, in no way mysterious. The dependence of wages on 
 the number of the competitors for employment, is so far 
 from hard of comprehension, or unintelligible to the labour- 
 ing classes, that by great bodies of them it is already recog- 
 nized and habitually acted on. It is familiar to all Trades 
 Unions : every successful combination to keep up wages, 
 owes its success to contrivances for restricting the number 
 of the competitors ; all skilled trades are anxious to keep 
 down their own numbers, and many impose, or endeavour 
 to impose, as a condition upon employers, that they shall not 
 take more than a prescribed number of apprentices. There 
 is, of course, a great difference between limiting their num- 
 bers by excluding other people, and doing the same thing 
 by a restraint imposed on themselves : but the one as much 
 as the other shows a clear perception of the relation between 
 their numbers and their remuneration. The principle is 
 understood in its application to any one employment, but 
 not to the general mass of employment. For this there are 
 several reasons : first, the operation of causes is more easily 
 and distinctly seen in the more circumscribed field : second- 
 ly, skilled artizans are a more intelligent class than ordinary 
 manual labourers ; and the habit of concert, and of passing 
 in review their general condition as a trade, keeps up a bet- 
 ter understanding of their collective interests : thirdly and 
 lastly, they are the most provident, because they are the 
 best off, and have the most to preserve. What, however, 
 is clearly perceived and admitted in particular instances, it 
 cannot be hopeless to see understood and acknowledged as 
 a general truth. Its recognition, at least in theory, seems a 
 30
 
 466 BOOR II. CHAPTER XIII. 3. 
 
 thing which must necessarily and immediately come to pass, 
 when the minds of the labouring classes become capable of 
 taking any rational view of their own aggregate condition. 
 Of this the great majority of them have until now been in- 
 capable, either from the uncultivated state of their intelli- 
 gence, or from poverty, which leaving them neither the fear 
 of worse, nor the smallest hope of better, makes them care- 
 less of the consequences of their actions, and without thought 
 for the future. 
 
 3. For the purpose therefore of altering the habits of 
 the labouring people, there is need of a twofold action, 
 directed simultaneously upon their intelligence and their 
 poverty. An effective national education of the children 
 of the labouring class, is the first thing needful : and, eoin- 
 cidently with this, a system of measures which shall (as the 
 Revolution did in France) extinguish extreme poverty for 
 one whole generation. 
 
 This is not the place for discussing, even in the most 
 general manner, either the principles or the machinery of 
 national education. But it is to be hoped that opinion on 
 the subject is advancing, and that an education of mere 
 words would not now be deemed sufficient, slow as our 
 progress is towards providing anything better even for the 
 classes to whom society professes to give the very best edu- 
 cation it can devise. Without entering into disputable 
 points, it may be asserted without scruple, that the aim of 
 all intellectual training for the mass of the people, should be 
 to cultivate common sense ; to qualify them for forming a 
 sound practical judgment of the circumstances by which 
 they are surrounded. "Whatever, in the intellectual depart- 
 ment, can be superadded to this, is chiefly ornamental ; 
 while this is the indispensable groundwork on which edu- 
 cation must rest. Let this object be acknowledged and kept 
 in view as the thing to be first aimed at, and there will be 
 little difficulty in deciding either what to teach, or in what 
 manner to teach it.
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 46 T 
 
 An education directed to diffuse good sense among the 
 people, with such knowledge as would qualify them to 
 judge of the tendencies of their actions, would be cer- 
 tain, even without any direct inculcation, to raise up a 
 public opinion by which intemperance and improvi- 
 dence of every kind would be held discreditable, and the 
 improvidence which overstocks the labour market would 
 be severely condemned, as an offence against the common 
 weal. But though the sufficiency of such a state of opinion, 
 supposing it formed, to keep the increase of population 
 within proper limits, cannot, I think, be doubted ; yet, for 
 the formation of the opinion, it would not do to trust to 
 education alone. Education is not compatible with extreme 
 poverty. It is impossible effectually to teach an indigent 
 population. And it is difficult to make those feel the value 
 of comfort who have never enjoyed it, or those appreciate the 
 wretchedness of a precarious subsistence, who have been 
 made reckless by always living from hand to moutH. Indi- 
 viduals often struggle upwards into a condition of ease ; but 
 the utmost that can be expected from a whole people is to 
 maintain themselves in it ; and improvement in the habits 
 and requirements of the mass of unskilled day-labourers will 
 be difficult and tardy, unless means can be contrived of 
 raising the entire body to a state of tolerable comfort, and 
 maintaining them in it until a new generation grows up. 
 
 Towards effecting this object there are two resources 
 available, without wrong to any one, without any of the 
 liabilities of mischief attendant on voluntary or legal char- 
 ity, and not only without weakening, but on the contrary 
 strengthening, every incentive to industry, and every mo- 
 tive to forethought. 
 
 4. The first is, a great national measure of coloniza- 
 tion. I mean, a grant of public money, sufficient to remove 
 at once, and establish in the colonies, a considerable fraction 
 of the youthful agricultural population. By giving the 
 preference, as Mr. Wakefield proposes, to young couples, or
 
 468 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 4. 
 
 when these cannot be obtained, to families with children 
 nearly grown up, the expenditure would be made to go the 
 farthest possible towards accomplishing the end, while the 
 colonies would be supplied with the greatest amount of 
 what is there in deficiency and here in superfluity, present 
 and prospective labour. It has been shown by others, and 
 the grounds of the opinion will be exhibited in a subsequent 
 part of the present work, that colonization on an adequate 
 scale might be so conducted as to cost the country nothing, 
 or nothing that would not be certainly repaid ; and that the 
 funds required, even by way of advance, would not be drawn 
 from the capital employed in maintaining labour, but from 
 that surplus which cannot find employment at such profit as 
 constitutes an adequate remuneration for the abstinence of 
 the possessor, and which is therefore sent abroad for invest- 
 ment, or wasted at home in reckless speculations. That 
 portion of the income of the country which is habitually in- 
 effective for any purpose of benefit to the labouring class, 
 would bear any draught which it could be necessary to 
 make on it for the amount of emigration which is here in 
 view. 
 
 The second resource would be, to devote all common 
 land, hereafter brought into cultivation, to raising a class of 
 small proprietors. It has long enough been the practice to 
 take these lands from public use, for the mere purpose of 
 adding to the domains of the rich. It is time that what is 
 left of them should be retained as an estate sacred to the 
 benefit of the poor. The machinery for administering it 
 already exists, having been created by the General Inclosure 
 Act. What 1 would propose (though, I confess, with small 
 hope of its being soon adopted) is, that in all future cases in 
 which common land is permitted to be enclosed, such por- 
 tion should first be sold or assigned as is sufficient to com- 
 pensate the owners of manorial or common rights, and that 
 the remainder should be divided into sections of five acres 
 or thereabouts, to be conferred in absolute property on in- 
 dividuals of the labouring class who would reclaim and
 
 .REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 469 
 
 bring them into cultivation by their own labour. The 
 preference should be given to such labourers, and there are 
 many of them, as had saved enough to maintain them until 
 their first crop was got in, or whose character was such as 
 to induce some responsible person to advance to them the 
 requisite amount on their personal security. The tools, the 
 manure, and in some cases the subsistence also might be sup- 
 plied by the parish, or by the state ; interest for the ad- 
 vance, at the rate yielded by the public funds, being laid on 
 as a perpetual quitrent, with power to the peasant to redeem 
 it at any time for a moderate number of years purchase. 
 These little landed estates might, if it were thought neces- 
 sary, be made indivisible by law ; though, if the plan 
 worked in the manner designed, I should not apprehend any 
 objectionable degree of sub-division. In case of intestacy, 
 and in default of amicable arrangement among the heirs, 
 they might be bought by government at their value, and 
 regranted to some other labourer who could give security for 
 the price. The desire to possess one of these small proper- 
 ties would probably become, as on the Continent, an induce- 
 ment to prudence and economy pervading the whole labour- 
 ing population ; and that great desideratum among a people 
 of hired labourers would be provided, an intermediate class 
 between them and their employers ; affording them the 
 double advantage, of an object for their hopes, and, as there 
 would be good reason to anticipate, an example for their 
 imitation. 
 
 It would, however, be of little avail that either or both 
 of these measures of relief should be adopted, unless on such 
 a scale, as would enable the whole body of hired labourers 
 remaining on the soil to obtain not merely employment, but 
 a large addition to the present wages such an addition as 
 would enable them to live and bring up their children in a 
 degree of comfort and independence to which they have 
 hitherto been strangers. "When the object is to raise the 
 permanent condition of a people, small means do not merely 
 produce small effects, they produce no effect at all. Unless
 
 4:70 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 4. 
 
 comfort can be made as habitual to a whole generation as 
 indigence is now, nothing is accomplished ; and feeble 
 half-measures do but fritter away resources, far better re- 
 served until the improvement of public opinion and of edu- 
 cation shall raise up politicians who will not think that 
 merely because a scheme promises much, the part of states- 
 manship is to have nothing to do with it.
 
 CHAPTEK XIV. 
 
 OF THE DIFFERENCES OF WAGES IN DIFFERENT 
 EMPLOYMENTS. 
 
 1. IN treating of wages, we have hitherto confined 
 ourselves to the causes which operate on them generally, 
 and en masse / the laws which govern the remuneration of 
 ordinary or average labour : without reference to the exist- 
 ence of different kinds of work which are habitually paid at 
 different rates, depending in some degree on different laws. 
 "We will now take into consideration these differences, and 
 examine in what manner they affect or are affected by the 
 conclusions already established. 
 
 A well-known and very popular chapter of Adam Smith* 
 contains the best exposition yet given of this portion of the 
 subject. I' cannot indeed think his treatment so complete 
 and exhaustive as it has sometimes been considered ; but as 
 far as it goes, his analysis is tolerably successful. 
 
 The differences, he says, arise partly from the policy of 
 Europe, which nowhere leaves things at perfect liberty, and 
 partly " from certain circumstances in the employments 
 themselves, which either really, or at least in the imagina- 
 tions of men, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some, 
 and counterbalance a great one in others." These circum- 
 stances he considers to be : " First, the agreeableness or dis- 
 agreeableness of the employments themselves ; secondly, the 
 easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learn- 
 ing them ; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employ- 
 
 Wealth of Nations, book i. chap. 10.
 
 472 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 1. 
 
 ment in them ; fourthly, the small or great trust which must 
 be reposed in those who exercise them ; and fifthly, the 
 probability or improbability of success in them." 
 
 Several of these points he has very copiously illustrated : 
 though his examples are sometimes drawn from a state of 
 facts now no longer existing. " The wages of labour v.ary 
 with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the 
 honourableness or dishonourableness of the employment. 
 Thus, in most places, take the year round, a journeyman 
 tailor earns less than a journeyman weaver. His work is 
 much easier." Things have much altered, as to a weaver's 
 remuneration, since Adam Smith's time ; and the artizan 
 whose work was more difficult than that of a tailor, can 
 never, I think, have been the common weaver. " A jour- 
 neyman weaver earns less than a journeyman smith. His 
 work is not always easier, but it is much cleanlier." A 
 more probable explanation is, that it requires less bodily 
 strength. " A journeyman blacksmith, though an artificer, 
 seldom earns so much in twelve hours as a collier, who is 
 only a labourer, does in eight. His work is not quite so 
 dirty, is less dangerous, and is carried on in daylight, and 
 above ground. Honour makes a great part of the reward 
 of all honourable professions. In point of pecuniary gain, 
 all things considered," their recompense is, in his opinion, 
 below the average. "Disgrace has the contrary effect. 
 The trade of a butcher is a brutal and an odious business ; 
 but it is in most places more profitable than the greater 
 part of common trades. The most detestable of all em- 
 ployments, that of public executioner, is, in proportion to 
 the quantity of work done, better paid than any common 
 trade whatever." 
 
 One of the causes which make hand-loom weavers cling 
 to their occupation in spite of the scanty remuneration which 
 it now yields, is said to be a peculiar attractiveness, arising 
 from the freedom of action which it allows to the workman. 
 " He can play or idle," says a recent authority,* " as feeling 
 
 * Mr. Muggeridge's Report to the Handloom Weavei-s' Inquiry Commission.
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 473 
 
 or inclination lead him ; rise early or late, apply himself 
 assiduously or carelessly, as he pleases, and work up at any 
 time, by increased exertion, hours previously sacrificed to 
 indulgence or recreation. There is scarcely another condi- 
 tion of any portion of our working population thus free from 
 external control. The factory operative is not only mulcted 
 of his wages for absence, but, if of frequent occurrence, dis- 
 charged altogether from his employment. The bricklayer, 
 the carpenter, the painter, the joiner, the stonemason, the 
 outdoor labourer, have each their appointed daily hours of 
 labour, a disregard of which would lead to the same result." 
 Accordingly, " the weaver will stand by his loom while it 
 will enable him to exist, however miserably ; and many, 
 induced temporarily to quit it, have returned to it again, 
 when work was to be had." 
 
 " Employment is much more constant," continues Adam 
 Smith, " in some trades than in others. In the greater part 
 of manufactures, a journeyman may be pretty sure of em- 
 ployment almost every day in the year that he is able to 
 work " (the interruptions of business arising from over- 
 stocked markets, or from a suspension of demand, or from 
 a commercial crisis, must be excepted). " A mason or 
 bricklayer, on the contrary, can work neither in hard frost 
 nor in foul weather, and his employment at all other times 
 depends upon the occasional calls of his customers. He is 
 liable, in consequence, to be frequently without any. What 
 he earns, therefore, while he is employed, must not only 
 maintain him while he is idle, but make him some compen- 
 sation for those anxious and desponding moments which 
 the thought of so precarious a situation must sometimes 
 occasion. When the computed earnings of the greater part 
 of manufacturers, accordingly, are nearly upon a level with 
 the day wages of common labourers, those of masons and 
 bricklayers are generally from one-half more to double those 
 wages. ~No species of skilled labour, however, seems more 
 easy to learn than that of masons and bricklayers. The 
 high wages of those workmen, therefore, are not BO much
 
 474 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 1. 
 
 the recompense of their skill, as the compensation for the 
 inconstancy of their employment. 
 
 "When the inconstancy of the employment is com- 
 bined with the hardship, disagreeableness, and dirtiness of 
 the work, it sometimes raises the wages of the most com- 
 mon labour above those of the most skilful artificers. A 
 collier working by the piece is supposed, at Newcastle, to earn 
 commonly about double, and in many parts of Scotland 
 about three times, the wages of common labour. His high 
 wages arise altogether from the hardship, disagreeableness, 
 and dirtiness of his work. His employment may, upon 
 most occasions, be as constant as he pleases. The coal- 
 heavers in London exercise a trade which in hardship, dirti- 
 ness, and disagreeableness, almost equals that of colliers ; 
 and from the unavoidable irregularity in the arrivals of 
 coalships, the employment of the greater part of them is 
 necessarily very inconstant. If colliers, therefore, com- 
 monly earn double and triple the wages of common la- 
 bour, it ought not to seem unreasonable that coal-heavers 
 should sometimes earn four or five times those wages. In 
 the inquiry made into their condition a few years ago, it 
 was found that at the rate at which they were then paid, 
 they could earn about four times the wages of common la- 
 bour in London. How extravagant soever these earnings 
 may appear, if they were more than sufficient to compen- 
 sate all the disagreeable circumstances of the business, there 
 would soon be so great a number of competitors as, in a 
 trade which has no exclusive privilege, would quickly re- 
 duce them to a lower rate." 
 
 These inequalities of remuneration, which are supposed 
 to compensate for the disagreeable circumstances of particu- 
 lar employments, would, under certain conditions, be natural 
 consequences of perfectly free competition : and as between 
 employments of about the same grade, and filled by nearly 
 the same description of people, they are, no doubt, for the 
 most part, realized in practice. But it is altogether a false 
 view of the state of facts, to present this as the relation which
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 475 
 
 generally exists between agreeable and disagreeable employ- 
 ments. The really exhausting and the really repulsive la- 
 bours, instead of being better paid than others, are almost 
 invariably paid the worst of all, because performed by those 
 who have no choice. It would be otherwise in a favourable 
 state of the general labour market. If the labourers in the 
 aggregate, instead of exceeding, fell short of the amount of 
 employment, work which was generally disliked would not 
 be undertaken, except for more than ordinary wages. But 
 when the supply of labour so far exceeds the demand that 
 to find employment at all is an uncertainty, and to be offered 
 it on any terms a favour, the case is totally the reverse. 
 Desirable labourers, those whom everyone is anxious to 
 have, can still exercise a choice. The undesirable must 
 take what they can get. The more revolting the occupa- 
 tion, the more certain it is to receive the minimum of 
 remuneration, because it devolves on the most helpless and 
 degraded, on those who from squalid poverty, or from want 
 of skill and education, are rejected from all other employ- 
 ments. Partly from this cause, and partly from the natural 
 and artificial monopolies which will be spoken of presently, 
 the inequalities of wages are generally in an opposite direc- 
 tion to the equitable principle of compensation erroneously 
 represented by Adam Smith as the general law of the re- 
 muneration of labour. The hardships and the earnings, 
 instead of being directly proportional, as in any just arrange- 
 ments of society they would be, are generally in the inverse 
 ratio, to one another. 
 
 One of the points best illustrated by Adam Smith, is the 
 influence exerised on the remuneration of an employment 
 by the uncertainty of success in it. If the chances are great 
 of total failure, the reward in case of success must be suffi- 
 cient to make up, in the general estimation, for those ad- 
 verse chances. But, owing to another principle of human 
 nature, if the reward comes in the shape of a few great 
 prizes, it usually attracts competitors in such numbers, that 
 the average remuneration may be reduced not only to zero,
 
 476 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 1. 
 
 but even to a negative quantity. The success of lotteries 
 proves that this is possible : since the aggregate body of ad- 
 venturers in lotteries necessarily lose, otherwise the under- 
 takers could not gain. The case of certain professions is 
 considered by Adam Smith to be similar. "The proba- 
 bility that any particular person shall ever be qualified for 
 the employment to which he is educated, is very different 
 in different occupations. In the greater part of mechanic 
 trades, success is almost certain, but very uncertain in the 
 liberal professions. Put your son apprentice to a shoe- 
 maker, there is little doubt of his learning to make a pair 
 of shoes : but send him to study the law, it is at least twenty 
 to one if ever he makes such proficiency as will enable him 
 to live by the business. In a perfectly fair lottery, those 
 who draw the prizes ought to gain all that is lost by those 
 who draw the blanks. In a profession where twenty fail 
 for one that succeeds, that one ought to gain all that should 
 have been gained by the unsuccessful twenty. The coun- 
 sellor-at-law, who, perhaps, at near forty years of age, be- 
 gins to make something by his profession, ought to receive 
 the retribution, not only of his own so tedious and expen- 
 sive education, but of that of more than twenty others who 
 are never likely to make anything by it. How extravagant 
 soever the fees of counsellors-at-law may sometimes appear, 
 their real retribution is never equal to this. Compute in 
 any particular place what is likely to be annually gained, 
 and what is likely to be annually spent, by all the different 
 workmen in any common trade, such as that of shoemakers 
 or weavers, and you will find that the former sum will gen- 
 erally exceed the latter. But make the same computation 
 with regard to all the counsellors and students of law, in 
 all the different inns of court, and you will find that their 
 annual gains bear but a small proportion to their annual 
 expense, even though you rate the former as high, and the 
 latter as low, as can well be done." 
 
 Whether this is true in our own day, when the gains of 
 the few are incomparably greater than in the time of Adam
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 477 
 
 Smith, but also the unsuccessful aspirants much more numer- 
 ous, those who have the appropriate information must de- 
 cide. It does not, however, seem to be sufficiently consid- 
 ered by Adam Smith, that the prizes which he speaks of 
 comprise not the fees of counsel only, but the places of 
 emolument and honour to which their profession gives ac- 
 cess, together with the coveted distinction of a conspicuous 
 position in the public eye. 
 
 Even where there are no great prizes, the mere love of 
 excitement is sometimes enough to cause an adventurous 
 employment to be overstocked. This is apparent " in the 
 readiness of the common peopje to enlist as soldiers, or to 
 
 go to sea The dangers and hair-breadth escapes of 
 
 a life of adventures, instead of disheartening young people, 
 seem frequently to recommend a trade to them. A tender 
 mother, among the inferior ranks of people, is often afraid 
 to send her son to school at a sea-port town, lest the sight 
 of the ships and the conversation and adventures of the 
 sailors should entice him to go to sea. The distant pros- 
 pect of hazards, from which we can hope to extricate our- 
 selves by courage and address, is not disagreeable to us, and 
 does not raise the wages of labour in any employment. It 
 is otherwise with those in which courage arid address can 
 be of no avail. In trades which are known to be very un- 
 wholesome, the wages of labour are always remarkably 
 high. Unwholesomeness is a species of disagreeableness, 
 and its effects upon the wages of labour are to be ranked 
 under that general head." 
 
 2. The preceding are cases in which inequality of 
 remuneration is necessary to produce equality of attractive- 
 ness, and are examples of the equalizing effect of free com- 
 petition. The following are cases of real inequality, and 
 arise from a different principle. " The wages of labour vary 
 according to the small or great trust which must be reposed 
 in the workmen. The wages of goldsmiths and jewellers 
 are everywhere superior to those of many other workmen,
 
 478 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 2. 
 
 not only of equal, but of much superior ingenuity ; on ac- 
 count of the precious materials with which they are in- 
 trusted. We trust our health to the physician, our fortune 
 and sometimes our life and reputation to the lawyer and 
 attorney. Sucli confidence could not safely be reposed in 
 people of a very mean or low condition. Their reward 
 must be such, therefore, as may give them that rank in 
 society which so important a trust requires." 
 
 The superiority of reward is not here the consequence of 
 competition, but of its absence : not a compensation for dis- 
 advantages inherent in the employment, but an extra ad- 
 vantage ; a kind of monopoly price, the effect not of a legal, 
 but of what has been termed a natural monopoly. If all 
 labourers were trustworthy, it would not be necessary to give 
 extra pay to working goldsmiths on account of the trust. 
 The degree of integrity required being supposed to be uncom- 
 mon, those who can make it appear that they possess it are 
 able to take advantage of the peculiarity, and obtain higher 
 pay in proportion to its rarity. This opens a class of consid- 
 erations which Adam Smith, and most other political econo- 
 mists, have taken into far too little account, and from inat- 
 tention to which, he has given a most imperfect exposition 
 of the wide difference between the remuneration of common 
 labour and that of skilled employments. 
 
 Some employments require a much longer time to learn, 
 and a much more expensive course of instruction than 
 others ; and to this extent there is, as explained by Adam 
 Smith, an inherent reason for their being more highly re- 
 munerated. If an artizan must work several years at learn- 
 ing his trade before he can earn anything, and several years 
 more before becoming sufficiently skilful for its finer opera- 
 tions, he must have a prospect of at last earning enough to 
 pay the wages of all this past labour, with compensation for 
 the delay of payment, and an indemnity for the expenses of 
 his education. His wages, consequently, must yield, over 
 and above the ordinary amount, an annuity sufficient to 
 repay these sums, with the common rate of profit, within
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 479 
 
 the number of years he can expect to live and be in work- 
 ing condition. This, which is necessary to place the skilled 
 employments, all circumstances taken together, on the same 
 level of advantage with the unskilled, is the smallest differ- 
 ence which can exist for any length of time between the two 
 remunerations, since otherwise no one would learn the 
 skilled employments. And this amount of difference is all 
 which Adam Smith's principles account for. When the 
 disparity is greater, he seems to think that it must be ex- 
 plained by apprentice laws, and the rules of corporations 
 which restrict admission into many of the skilled employ- 
 ments. But, independently of these or any other artificial 
 monopolies, there is a natural monopoly in favour of skilled 
 labourers against the unskilled, which makes the difference 
 of reward exceed, sometimes in a manifold proportion, what 
 is sufficient merely to equalize their advantages. If un- 
 skilled labourers had it in their power to compete with 
 skilled, by merely taking the trouble of learning the trade, 
 the difference of wages might not exceed what would com- 
 pensate them for that trouble, at the ordinary rate at which 
 labour is remunerated. But the fact that a course of in- 
 struction is required, of even a low degree of costliness, or 
 that the labourer must be maintained for a considerable time 
 from other sources, suffices everywhere to exclude the great 
 body of the labouring people from the possibility of any 
 such competition. Until lately, all employments which re- 
 quired even the humble education of reading and writing, 
 could be recruited only from a select class, the majority hav 
 ing had no opportunity of acquiring those attainments. All 
 such employments, accordingly, were immensely overpaid, 
 as measured by the ordinary remuneration of labour. Since 
 reading and writing have been brought within the reach of 
 a multitude, the monopoly price of the lower grade of edu- 
 cated employments has greatly fallen, the competition for 
 them having increased in an almost incredible degree. There 
 is still, however, a much greater disparity than can be ac- 
 counted for on the principle of competition. A clerk from
 
 480 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 2. 
 
 whom nothing is required but the mechanical labour of 
 copying, gains more than an equivalent for his mere exer- 
 tion if he receives the wages of a bricklayer's labourer. His 
 work is not a tenth part as hard, it is quite as easy to learn, 
 and his condition is less precarious, a clerk's place being 
 generally a place for life. The higher rate of his remunera- 
 tion, therefore, must be partly ascribed to monopoly, the 
 small degree of education required being not even yet so 
 generally diffused as to call for the natural number of com- 
 petitors ; and partly to the remaining influence of an 
 ancient custom, which requires that clerks should maintain 
 the dre s and appearance of a more highly paid class. In 
 some manual employments, requiring a nicety of hand 
 which can only be acquired by long practice, it is difficult 
 to obtain at any cost workmen in sufficient numbers, who 
 are capable of the most delicate kind of work ; and the 
 wages paid to them are only limited by the price which 
 purchasers are willing to give for the commodity they pro- 
 duce. This is the case with some working watchmakers, 
 and with the makers of some astronomical and optical in- 
 struments. If workmen competent to such employments 
 were ten times as numerous as they are, there would be 
 purchasers for all which they could make, not indeed at the 
 present prices, but at those lower prices which would be the 
 natural consequence of lower wages. Similar considerations 
 apply in a still greater degree to employments which it is 
 attempted to confine to persons of a certain social rank, 
 such as what are called the liberal professions ; into which 
 a person of what is considered too low a class of society, is 
 not easily admitted, and if admitted, does not easily suc- 
 ceed. 
 
 So complete, indeed, has hitherto been the separation, so 
 strongly marked the line of demarcation, between the differ- 
 ent grades of labourers, as to be almost equivalent to an 
 hereditary distinction of caste ; each employment being 
 chiefly recruited from the children of those already em- 
 ployed in it, or in employments of the same rank with it in
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 
 
 social estimation, or from the children of persons who, if 
 originally of a lower rank, have succeeded in raising them- 
 selves by their exertions. The liberal professions are mostly 
 supplied by the sons of either the professional, or the idle 
 classes : the more highly skilled manual employments are filled 
 up from the sons of skilled artizans, or the class of tradesmen 
 who rank with them : the lower classes of skilled employ- 
 ments are in a similar case ; and unskilled labourers, with 
 occasional exceptions, remain from father to son in their 
 pristine condition. Consequently the wages of each class 
 have hitherto been regulated by the increase of its own 
 population, rather than of the general population of the 
 country. If the professions are overstocked, it is because 
 the class of society from which they have always mainly 
 been supplied, has greatly increased in number, and because 
 most of that class have numerous families, and bring up 
 some at least of their sons to professions. If the wages of 
 artizans remain so much higher than those of common la- 
 bourers, it is because artizans are a more prudent class, and 
 do not marry so early or so inconsiderately. The changes, ' 
 however, now so rapidly taking place in usages and ideas, 
 are undermining all these distinctions ; the habits or dis- 
 abilities which chained people to their hereditary condition 
 are fast wearing away, and every class is exposed to in- 
 creased and increasing competition from at least the class 
 immediately below it. The general relaxation of conven- 
 tional barriers, and the increased facilities of education 
 which already are, and will be in a much greater degree, 
 brought within the reach of all, tend to produce, among 
 many excellent effects, one which is the reverse ; they tend 
 to bring down the wages of skilled labour. The inequality 
 of remuneration between the skilled and the unskilled is, 
 without doubt, very much greater than is justifiable ; but it 
 is desirable that this should be corrected by raising the un- 
 skilled, not by lowering the skilled. If, however, the other 
 changes taking place in society are not accompanied by a 
 strengthening of the checks to population on the part of
 
 482 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 3. 
 
 labourers generally, there will be a tendency to bring the 
 lower grades of skilled labourers under the influence of a 
 rate of increase regulated by a lower standard of living than 
 their own, and thus to deteriorate their condition without 
 raising that of the general mass ; the stimulus given to the 
 multiplication of the lowest class being sufficient to fill up 
 without difficulty the additional space gained by them from 
 those immediately above. 
 
 3. A modifying circumstance still remains to be 
 noticed, which interferes to some extent with the operation 
 of the principles thus far brought to view. While it is true, 
 as a general rule, that the earnings of skilled labour, and 
 especially of any labour which requires school education, 
 are at a monopoly rate, from the impossibility, to the mass 
 of the people, of obtaining that education ; it is also true 
 that the policy of nations, or the bounty of individuals, 
 formerly did much to counteract the effect of this limitation 
 of competition, by offering eleemosynary instruction to a 
 much larger class of persons than could have obtained the 
 same advantages by paying their price. Adam Smith has 
 pointed out the operation of this cause in keeping down the 
 remuneration of scholarly or bookish occupations generally, 
 and in particular of clergymen, literary men, and school- 
 masters, or other teachers of youth. I cannot better set 
 forth this part of the subject than in his words. 
 
 " It has been considered as of so much importance that 
 a proper number of young people should be educated for 
 certain professions, that sometimes the public, and some- 
 times the piety of private founders, have established many 
 pensions, scholarships, exhibitions, bursaries, &c. for this 
 purpose, which draw many more people into those trades 
 than could otherwise pretend to follow them. In all Chris- 
 tian countries, I believe, the education of the greater part 
 of churchmen is paid for in this manner. Very few of 
 them are educated altogether at their own expense. The 
 long, tedious, and expensive education, therefore, of those
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 483 
 
 who are, will not always procure them a suitable reward, 
 the church being crowded with people who, in order to get 
 employment, are willing to accept of as much smaller re- 
 compense than what such an education would otherwise 
 have entitled them to ; and in this manner the competition 
 of the poor takes away the reward of the rich. It would be 
 indecent, no doubt, to compare either a curate or a chaplain 
 with a journeyman in any common trade. The pay of a 
 curate or a chaplain, however, may very properly be con- 
 sidered as of the same nature with the wages of a journey- 
 man. They are, all three, paid for their work according to 
 the contract which they may happen to make with their 
 respective superiors. Till after the middle of the fourteenth 
 century, five marks, containing as much silver as ten pounds 
 of our present money, was in England the usual pay of a 
 curate or a stipendiary parish priest, as we find it regulated 
 by the decrees of several different national councils. At the 
 same period fourpence a day. containing the same quantity 
 of silver as a shilling of our present money, was declared to 
 be the pay of a master-mason, and threepence a day, equal 
 to ninepence of our present money, that of a journeyman 
 mason.* The wages of both these labourers, therefore, sup- 
 posing them to have been constantly employed, were much 
 superior to those of the curate. The wages of the master- 
 mason, supposing him to have been without employment 
 one-third of the year, would have fully equalled them. By 
 the 12th of Queen Anne, c. 12, it is declared ' That whereas 
 for want of sufficient maintenance and encouragement to 
 curates, the cures have in several places been meanly sup- 
 plied, the bishop is therefore empowered to appoint by 
 writing under his hand and seal a sufficient certain stipend 
 or allowance, not exceeding fifty, and not less than twenty 
 pounds a year.' Forty pounds a year is reckoned at pres- 
 ent very good pay for a curate, and notwithstanding this 
 act of parliament, there are many curacies under twenty 
 pounds a year. This last sum does not exceed what is fre- 
 
 * " See the Statute of Labourers, 25 Edw. III."
 
 484 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 3. 
 
 quently earned by common labourers in many country par- 
 ishes. Whenever the law has attempted to regulate the 
 wages of workmen, it has always been rather to lower them 
 than to raise them. But the law has upon many occasions 
 attempted to raise the wages of curates, and for the dignity 
 of the Church, to oblige the rectors of parishes to give them 
 more than the wretched maintenance which they themselves 
 might be willing to accept of. And in both cases the law 
 seems to have been equally ineffectual, and has never been 
 either able to raise the wages of curates or to sink those of 
 labourers to the degree that was intended, because it has 
 never been able to hinder either the one from being willing 
 to accept of less than the legal allowance, on account of the 
 indigence of their situation and the multitude of their com- 
 petitors ; or the other from receiving more, on account of 
 the contrary competition of those who expected to derive 
 either profit or pleasure from employing them." 
 
 " In professions in which there are no benefices, such as 
 law (?) and physic, if an equal proportion of people were 
 educated at the public expense, the competition would soon 
 be so great as to sink very much their pecuniary reward. 
 It might then not be worth any man's while to educate his 
 son to either of these professions at his own expense. They 
 would be entirely abandoned to such as had been educated 
 by those public charities ; whose numbers and necessities 
 would oblige them in general to content themselves with a 
 very miserable recompense. 
 
 " That unprosperous race of men, commonly called men 
 of letters, are pretty much in the situation which lawyers 
 and physicians probably would be in upon the foregoing 
 supposition. In every part of Europe, the greater part of 
 them have been educated for the church, but have been 
 hindered by different reasons from entering into holy orders. 
 They have generally, therefore, been educated at the public 
 expense, and their numbers are everywhere so great as to 
 reduce the price of their labour to a very paltry recom- 
 pense.
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 485 
 
 " Before the invention of the art of printing, the only 
 employment by which a man of letters could make any- 
 thing by his talents, was that of a public or private teacher, 
 or by communicating to other people the curious and useful 
 knowledge which he had acquired himself : and this is still 
 surely a more honourable, a more useful, and in general 
 even a more profitable employment than that other of writ- 
 ing for a bookseller, to which the art of printing has given 
 occasion. The time and study, the genius, knowledge, and 
 application requisite to qualify an eminent teacher of the 
 sciences, are at least equal to what is necessary for the great- 
 est practitioners in law and physic. But the usual reward 
 of the eminent teacher bears no proportion to that of the 
 lawyer or physician ; because the trade of the one is crowd- 
 ed with indigent people who have been brought up to it at 
 the public expense, whereas those of the other two are en- 
 cumbered with very few who have not been educated at 
 their own. The usual recompense, however, of public and 
 private teachers, small as it may appear, would undoubtedly 
 be less than it is, if the competition of those yet more indi- 
 gent men of letters who write for bread was not taken out 
 of the market. Before the invention of the art of printing, 
 a scholar and a beggar seem to have been terms very nearly 
 synonymous. The different governors of the universities 
 before that time appear to have often granted licenses to 
 their scholars to beg." 
 
 4. The demand for literary labour has so greatly in- 
 creased since Adam Smith wrote, while the provisions for 
 eleemosynary education have nowhere been much added to, 
 and in the countries which have undergone revolutions have 
 been much diminished, that little effect in keeping down the 
 recompense of literary labour can now be ascribed to the 
 influence of those institutions. But an effect nearly equiva- 
 lent is now produced by a cause somewhat similar the com- 
 petition of persons who, by analogy with other arts, may be 
 called amateurs. Literary occupation is one of those pur-
 
 486 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 4. 
 
 suits in which success may be attained by persons the greater 
 part of whose time is taken up by other employments ; and 
 the education necessary for it, is the common education of 
 all cultivated persons. The inducements to it, independent- 
 ly of money, in the present state of the world, to all who 
 have either vanity to gratify, or personal or public objects 
 to promote, are strong. These motives now attract into this 
 career a great and increasing number of persons who do not 
 need its pecuniary fruits, and who would equally resort to 
 it if it afforded no remuneration at all. In our own coun- 
 try (to cite known examples), the most influential, and on 
 the whole most eminent philosophical writer of recent times 
 (Bentham), the greatest political economist (Ricardo), the 
 most ephemerally celebrated, and the really greatest poets 
 (Byron and Shelley), and the most successful writer of prose 
 fiction (Scott), were none of them authors by profession ; 
 and only two of the five, Scott and Byron, could have sup- 
 ported themselves by the works which they wrote. Nearly 
 all the higher departments of authorship are, to a great ex- 
 tent, similarly filled. In consequence, although the highest 
 pecuniary prizes of successful authorship are incompar- 
 ably greater than at any former period, yet on any rational 
 calculation of the chances, in the existing competition, 
 scarcely any writer can hope to gain a living by books, and 
 to do so by magazines and reviews becomes daily more 
 difficult. It is only the more troublesome and disagreeable 
 kinds of literary labour, and those which confer no personal 
 celebrity, such as most of those connected with news- 
 papers, or with the smaller periodicals, on which an edu- 
 cated person can now rely for subsistence. Of these, the 
 remuneration is, on the whole, decidedly high ; because, 
 though exposed to the competition of what used to be called 
 " poor scholars " (persons who have received a learned edu< 
 cation from some public or private charity), they are 
 exempt from that of amateurs, those who have other means 
 of support being seldom candidates for such employments. 
 Whether these considerations are not connected with some-
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 487 
 
 thing radically amiss in the idea of authorship as a profes- 
 sion, and whether any social arrangement under which the 
 teachers of mankind consist of persons giving out doctrines 
 for bread, is suited to be, or can possibly be, a permanent 
 thing would be a subject well worthy of the attention of 
 thinkers. 
 
 The clerical, like the literary profession, is frequently 
 adopted by persons of independent means, either from reli- 
 gious zeal, or for the sake of the honour or usefulness which 
 may belong to it, or for a chance of the high prizes which it 
 holds out : and it is now principally for this reason that the 
 salaries of curates are so low ; those salaries, though consid- 
 erably raised by the influence of public opinion, being still 
 generally insufficient as the sole means of support for one 
 who has to maintain the externals expected from a clergy- 
 man of the established church. 
 
 When an occupation is carried on chiefly by persons 
 who derive the main portion of their subsistence from other 
 sources, its remuneration may be lower almost to any ex- 
 tent, than the wages of equally severe labour in other em- 
 ployments. The principal example of the kind is domestic 
 manufactures. "When spinning and knitting were carried 
 on in every cottage, by families deriving their principal 
 support from agriculture, the price at which their produce 
 was sold (which constituted the remuneration of their la- 
 bour) was often so low, that there would have been re- 
 quired great perfection of machinery to undersell it. The 
 amount of the remuneration in such a case, depends chiefly 
 upon whether the quantity of the commodity, produced by 
 this description of labour, suffices to supply the whole of the 
 demand. If it does not, and there is consequently a neces- 
 sity for some labourers who devote themselves entirely to 
 the employment, the price of the article must be sufficient 
 to pay those labourers at the ordinary rate, and to reward 
 therefore very handsomely the domestic producers. But if 
 the demand is so limited that the domestic manufacture can 
 do more than satisfy it, the price is naturally kept down to
 
 488 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 4. 
 
 the lowest rate at which peasant families think it worth 
 while to continue the production. It is, no doubt, because 
 the Swiss artizans do not depend for the whole of their 
 subsistence upon their looms, that Zurich is able to maintain 
 a competition in the European market with English capital, 
 and English fuel and machinery.* Thus far, as to the re- 
 muneration of the subsidiary employment ; but the effect to 
 the labourers of having this additional resource, is almost 
 certain to be (unless peculiar counteracting causes intervene) 
 a proportional diminution of the wages of their main occu- 
 pation. The habits of the people (as has already been so 
 often remarked) everywhere require some particular scale 
 of living, and no more, as the condition without which they 
 will not bring up a family. Whether the income which 
 maintains them in this condition comes from one source or 
 from two, makes no difference : if there is a second source 
 of income, they require less from the first ; and multiply (at 
 least this has always hitherto been the case) to a point which 
 leaves them no more from both employments, than they 
 would probably have had from either if it had been their 
 sole occupation. 
 
 For the same reason it is found that, ccsteris paribus, 
 those trades are generally the worst paid, in which the wife 
 and children of the artizan aid in the work. The income 
 which the habits of the class demand, and down to which 
 they are almost sure to multiply, is made up, in those 
 trades, by the earnings of the whole family, while in others 
 the same income must be obtained by the labour of the man 
 alone. It is even probable that their collective earnings 
 will amount to a smaller sum than those of the man alone 
 in other trades ; because the prudential restraint on mar- 
 
 * Four-fifths of the manufacturers of the Canton of Zurich are small farmers, 
 generally proprietors of their farms. The cotton manufacture occupies either 
 wholly or partially 23,000 people, nearly a tenth part of the population ; and 
 they consume a greater quantity of cotton per inhabitant than either France 
 or England. See the Statistical Account of Zurich, formerly cited, pp. 105, 
 108, 110.
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 489 
 
 riage is unusually weak when the only consequence imme- 
 diately felt is an improvement of circumstances, the joint 
 earnings of the two going further in their domestic economy 
 after marriage than before. Such accordingly is the fact, 
 in the case of hand-loom weavers. In most kinds of weav- 
 ing, women can and do earn as much as men, and children 
 are employed at a very early age ; but the aggregate earn- 
 ings of a family are lower than in almost any other kind of 
 industry, and the marriages earlier. It is noticeable also 
 that there are certain branches of hand-loom weaving in 
 which wages are much above the rate common in the trade, 
 and that these are the branches in which neither women nor 
 young persons are employed. These facts were authen- 
 ticated by the inquiries of the Hand-loom Weavers Commis' 
 sion, which made its report in 1841. No argument, how- 
 ever, can be hence derived for the exclusion of women from 
 the liberty of competing in the labour market. Even when 
 no more is earned by the labour of a man and a woman than 
 would have been earned by the man alone, the advantage 
 to the woman of not depending on a master for subsistence 
 may be more than an equivalent. But in the case of chil- 
 dren, who are necessarily dependent, the influence of their 
 competition in depressing the labour market is an important 
 element in the question of limiting their labour, in order to 
 provide better for their education. 
 
 5. It deserves consideration, why the wages of women 
 are generally lower, and very much lower, than those of 
 men. They are not universally so. Where men and women 
 work at the same employment, if it be one for which they 
 are equally fitted in point of physical power, they are not 
 always unequally paid. Women in factories, sometimes 
 earn as much as men ; and so they do in hand-loom weav- 
 ing, which, being paid by the piece, brings their efficiency 
 to a sure test. When the efficiency is equal, but the pay 
 unequal, the only explanation that can be given is custom ; 
 grounded either in a prejudice, or in the present constitu-
 
 490 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 5. 
 
 tion of society, which, making almost every woman, socially 
 speaking, an appendage of some man, enables men to take 
 systematically the lion's share of whatever belongs to both. 
 But the principal question relates to the peculiar employ- 
 ments of women. The remuneration of these is always, I 
 believe, greatly below that of employments of equal skill 
 and equal disagreeableness, carried on by men. In some 
 of these cases the explanation is evidently that already 
 given : as in the case of domestic servants, whose wages, 
 speaking generally, are not determined by competition, but 
 are greatly in excess of the market value of the labour, and 
 in this excess, as in almost all things which are regulated by 
 custom, the male sex obtains by far the largest share. In 
 the occupations in which employers take full advantage of 
 competition, the low wages of women as compared with the 
 ordinary earnings of men, are a proof that the employments 
 are overstocked : that although so much smaller a number 
 of women, than of men, support themselves by wages, the 
 occupations which law and usage make accessible to them 
 are comparatively so few, that the field of their employment 
 is still more overcrowded. It must be observed, that as 
 matters now stand, a sufficient degree of overcrowding may 
 depress the wages of women to a much lower minimum than 
 those of men. The wages, at least of single women, must 
 be equal to their support ; but need not be more than 
 equal to it ; the minimum, in their case, is the pittance ab- 
 solutely requisite for the sustenance of one human being. 
 Now the lowest point to which the most superabundant 
 competition can permanently depress the wages of a man, is 
 always somewhat more than this. Where the wife of a 
 labouring man does not by general custom contribute to his 
 earnings, the man's wages must be at least sufficient to sup- 
 port himself, a wife, and a number of children adequate to 
 keep up the population, since if it were less, the population 
 would not be kept up. And even if the wife earns some- 
 thing, their joint wages must be sufficient to support, not 
 only themselves, but (at least for some years) their children
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 491 
 
 also. The ne plus ultra of low wages, therefore, (except 
 during some transitory crisis, or in some decaying employ- 
 ment,) can hardly occur in any occupation which the person 
 employed has to live by, except the occupations of women. 
 
 6. Thus far, we have, throughout this discussion, pro- 
 ceeded on the supposition that competition is free, so far as 
 regards human interference ; being limited only by natural 
 causes, or by the unintended effect of general social circum- 
 stances. But law or custom may interfere to limit competi- 
 tion. If apprentice laws, or the regulations of corporate 
 bodies, make the access to a particular employment slow, 
 costly, or difficult, the wages of that employment may be 
 kept much above their natural proportion to the wages of 
 common labour. They might be so kept without any as- 
 signable limit, were it not that wages which exceed the 
 usual rate require corresponding prices, and that there is a 
 limit to the price at which even a restricted number of pro- 
 ducers can dispose of all they produce. In most civilized 
 countries, the restrictions of this kind which once existed 
 have been either abolished or very much relaxed, and will, 
 no doubt, soon disappear entirely. In some trades, how- 
 ever, and to some extent, the combinations of workmen pro- 
 duce a similar effect. Those combinations always fail to 
 uphold wages at an artificial rate, unless they also limit the 
 number of competitors. But they do occasionally succeed 
 in accomplishing this. In several trades the workmen have 
 been able to make it almost impracticable for strangers to 
 obtain admission either as journeymen or as apprentices, 
 except in limited numbers, and under such restrictions as 
 they choose to impose. It was given in evidence to the 
 Hand-loom Weavers Commission, that this is one of the 
 hardships which aggravate the grievous condition of that 
 depressed class. Their own employment is overstocked and 
 almost ruined ; but there are many other trades which it 
 would not be difficult for them to learn : to this, however,
 
 492 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 7. 
 
 the combinations of workmen in those other trades are said 
 to interpose an obstacle hitherto insurmountable. 
 
 Notwithstanding, however, the cruel manner in which 
 the exclusive principle of these combinations operates in a 
 case of this peculiar nature, the question, whether they are 
 on the whole more useful or mischievous, requires to be de- 
 cided on an enlarged consideration of consequences, among 
 which such a fact as this is not one of the most important 
 items. Putting aside the atrocities sometimes committed 
 by workmen in the way of personal outrage or intimidation, 
 which cannot be too rigidly repressed ; if the present state 
 of the general habits of the people were to remain for ever 
 unimproved, these partial combinations, in so far as they do 
 succeed in keeping up the wages of any trade by limiting its 
 numbers, might be looked upon as simply intrenching round 
 a particular spot against the inroads of over-population, and 
 making the wages of the class depend upon their own rate 
 of increase, instead of depending on that of a more reckless 
 and improvident class than themselves. What at first sight 
 seems the injustice of excluding the more numerous body 
 from sharing the gains of a comparatively few, disappears 
 when we consider that by being admitted, they would not 
 be made better off, for more than a short time ; the only 
 permanent effect which their admission would produce, 
 would be to lower the others to their own level. To what 
 extent the force of this consideration is annulled when a 
 tendency commences towards diminished over-crowding in 
 the labouring classes generally, and what grounds of a 
 different nature there may be for regarding the existence of 
 trade combinations as rather to be desired than deprecated, 
 will be considered in a subsequent chapter of this work, with 
 the subject of Combination Laws. 
 
 7. To conclude this subject, I must repeat an obser- 
 vation already made, that there are kinds of labour of which 
 the wages are fixed by custom, and not by competition.
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 493 
 
 Such are the fees or charges of professional persons : of phy- 
 sicians, surgeons, barristers, and even attorneys. These, as 
 a general rule, do not vary, and though competition operates 
 upon those classes as much as upon any others, it is by 
 dividing the business, not, in general, by diminishing the 
 rate at which it is paid. The cause of this, perhaps, has 
 been the prevalence of an opinion that such persons are 
 more trustworthy if paid highly in proportion to the work 
 they perform ; insomuch that if a lawyer or a physician 
 offered his services at less than the ordinary rate, instead of 
 gaining more practice, he would probably lose that which 
 he already had. For analogous reasons it is usual to pay 
 greatly beyond the market price of their labour, all persons 
 in whom the employer wishes to place peculiar trust, or 
 from whom he requires something besides their mere ser- 
 vices. For example, most persons who can afford it, pay to 
 their domestic servants higher wages than would purchase 
 in the market the labour of persons fully as competent to 
 the work required. They do this, not merely from ostenta- 
 tion, but also from more reasonable motives ; either because 
 they desire that those they employ should serve them cheer- 
 fully, and be anxious to remain in their service ; or be- 
 cause they do not like to drive a hard bargain with people 
 whom they are in constant intercourse with ; or because 
 they dislike to have near their persons, and continually in 
 their sight, people with the appearance and habits which are 
 the usual accompaniments of a mean remuneration. Sim- 
 ilar feelings operate in the minds of persons in business, 
 with respect to their clerks and other employes. Liberal- 
 ity, generosity, and the credit of the employer, are motives 
 which, to whatever extent they operate, preclude taking the 
 utmost advantage of competition : and doubtless such mo- 
 tives might, and even now do, operate on employers of 
 labour in all the great departments of industry ; and most 
 desirable is it that they should. But they can n.ever raise 
 the average wages of labour beyond the ratio of population
 
 494: BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 7. 
 
 to capital. By giving more to each person employed, they 
 limit the power of giving employment to numbers ; and 
 however excellent their moral effect, they do little good 
 economically, unless the pauperism of those who are shut 
 out, leads indirectly to a readjustment by means of an in- 
 creased restraint on population.
 
 CHAPTEK XV. 
 
 OF PROFITS. 
 
 1. HAVING treated of the labourer's share of the 
 produce, we next proceed to the share of the capitalist ; the 
 profits of capital or stock ; the gains of the person who 
 advances the expenses of production who, from funds in 
 his possession, pays the wages of the labourers, or supports 
 them during the work ; who supplies the requisite build- 
 ings, materials, and tools or machinery ; and to whom, by 
 the usual terms of the contract, the produce belongs, to be 
 disposed of at his pleasure. After indemnifying him for his 
 outlay, there commonly remains a surplus, which is his 
 profit ; the net income from his capital : the amount which 
 he can afford to expend in necessaries or pleasures, or from 
 which by further saving he can add to his wealth. 
 
 As the wages of the labourer are the remuneration of 
 labour, so the profits of the capitalist are properly, according 
 to Mr. Senior's well-chosen expression, the remuneration of 
 abstinence. They are what he gains by forbearing to con- 
 sume his capital for his own uses, and allowing it to be con- 
 sumed by productive labourers for their uses. For this for 
 bearance he requires a recompense. Very often in personal 
 enjoyment he would be a gainer by squandering his capital, 
 the capital amounting to more than the sum of the profits 
 which it will yield during the years he can expect to live. 
 But while he retains it undirninished, he has always the 
 power of consuming it if he wishes or needs ; he can bestow 
 it upon others at his death ; and in the meantime he derives
 
 496 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 1. 
 
 from it an income, which he can without impoverishment 
 apply to the satisfaction of his own wants or inclinations. 
 
 Of the gains, however, which the possession of a capital 
 enables a person to make, a part only is properly an equiva- 
 lent for the use of the capital itself ; namely, as much as a 
 solvent person would be willing to pay for the loan of it. 
 This, which as everybody knows is called interest, is all that 
 a person is enabled to get by merely abstaining from the 
 immediate consumption of his capital, and allowing it to be 
 used for productive purposes by others. The remuneration 
 which is obtained in any country for mere abstinence, is 
 measured by the current rate of interest on the best secu- 
 rity ; such security as precludes any appreciable chance of 
 losing the principal. What a person expects to gain, who 
 superintends the employment of his own capital, is always 
 more, and generally much more, than this. The rate of 
 profit greatly exceeds the rate of interest. The surplus is 
 partly compensation for risk. By lending his capital, on 
 unexceptionable security, he runs little or no risk. But if 
 he embarks in business on his own account, he always ex- 
 poses his capital to some, and in many cases to very great, 
 danger of partial or total loss. For this danger he must be 
 compensated, otherwise he will not incur it. He must like- 
 wise be remunerated for the devotion of his time and la- 
 bour. The control of the operations of industry usually 
 belongs to the person who supplies the whole or the great- 
 est part of the funds by which they are carried on, and who, 
 according to the ordinary arrangement, is either alone inter- 
 ested, or is the person most interested (at least directly), in 
 the result. To exercise this control with efficiency, if the 
 concern is large and complicated, requires great assiduity, 
 and often, no ordinary skill. This assiduity and skill must 
 be remunerated. 
 
 The gross profits from capital,, the gains returned to 
 those who supply the funds for production, must suffice for 
 these three purposes. They must afford a sufficient equiva- 
 lent for abstinence, indemnity for risk, and remuneration
 
 PROFITS. 497 
 
 for the labour and skill required for superintendence. 
 These different compensations may be either paid to the 
 same, or to different persons. The capital, or some part of 
 it, may be borrowed : may belong to some one who does 
 not undertake the risks or the trouble of business. In that 
 case, the lender, or owner, is the person who practises the 
 abstinence ; and is remunerated for it by the interest paid 
 to him, while the difference between the interest and the 
 gross profit remunerates the exertions and risks of the under- 
 taker.* Sometimes, again, the capital, or a part of it, is 
 supplied by what is called a sleeping partner ; who shares 
 the risks of the employment, but not the trouble, and who, 
 in consideration of those risks, receives not a mere interest, 
 but a stipulated share of the gross profits. Sometimes the 
 capital is supplied and the risk incurred by one person, and 
 the business carried on exclusively in his name, while the 
 trouble of management is made over to another, who is en- 
 gaged for that purpose at a fixed salary. Management, 
 however, by hired servants, who have no interest in the 
 result but that of preserving their salaries, is proverbially 
 inefficient, unless they act under the inspecting eye, if not 
 the controlling hand, of tiie person chiefly interested : and 
 prudence almost always recommends giving to a manager 
 not thus controlled, a remuneration partly dependent on the 
 profits ; which virtually reduces the case to that of a sleep- 
 ing partner. Or finally, the same person may own the 
 capital, and conduct the business ; adding, if he will ard 
 can, to the management of his own capital, that of as much 
 more as the owners may be willing to trust him with. But 
 under any or all of these arrangements, the same three 
 things require their remuneration, and must obtain it from 
 the gross profit : abstinence, risk, exertion. And the three 
 parts into which profit may be considered as resolving itself, 
 
 * It is to be regretted that this word, in this sense, is not familiar to an Eng- 
 lish ear. French political economists enjoy a great advantage in being able to 
 speak currently of les pro/its de Fentrcpreneur.
 
 498 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 2. 
 
 may be described respectively as interest, insurance, and 
 wages of superintendence. 
 
 2. The lowest rate of profit which can permanently 
 exist, is that which is barely adequate, at the given place 
 and time, to afford an equivalent for the abstinence, risk, 
 and exertion implied in the employment of capital. From 
 the gross profit, has first to be deducted as much as will 
 form a fund sufficient on the average to cover all losses inci- 
 dent to the employment. Next, it must afford such an 
 equivalent to the owner of the capital for forbearing to con- 
 sume it, as is then and there a sufficient motive to him to 
 persist in his abstinence. How much will be required to 
 form this equivalent, depends on the comparative value 
 placed, in the given society, upon the present and the 
 future : (in the words formerly used) on the strength of the 
 effective desire of accumulation. Further, after covering all 
 losses, and remunerating the owner for forbearing to con- 
 sume, there must be something left to recompense the la- 
 bour and skill of the person who devotes his time to the 
 business. This recompense too must be sufficient to enable 
 at least the owners of the larger capitals to receive for their 
 trouble, or to pay to some manager for his, what to them or 
 him will be a sufficient inducement for undergoing it. If 
 the surplus is no more than this, none but large masses of 
 capital will be employed productively ; and if it did not 
 even amount to this, capital would be withdrawn from pro- 
 duction, and unproductively consumed, until, by an indirect 
 consequence of its diminished amount, to be explained here- 
 after, the rate of profit was raised. 
 
 Such, then, is the minimum of profits : but that mini- 
 mum is exceedingly variable, and at some times and places 
 extremely low ; on account of the great variableness of two 
 out of its three elements. That the rate of necessary remu- 
 neration for abstinence, or in other words the effective desire 
 of accumulation, differs widely in different states of society 
 and civilization, has been seen in a former chapter. There
 
 PROFITS. 499 
 
 is a still wider difference in the element which consists in 
 compensation for risk. I am not now speaking of the dif- 
 'ferences in point of risk between different employments of 
 capital in the same society, but of the very different degrees 
 of security of property in different states of society. "Where, 
 as in many of the governments of Asia, property is in per- 
 petual danger of spoliation from a tyrannical government, 
 or from its rapacious and ill-controlled officers ; where to 
 possess or to be suspected of possessing wealth, is to be a 
 mark not only for plunder, but perhaps for personal ill- 
 treatment to extort the disclosure and surrender of hidden 
 valuables ; or where, as in the European middle ages, the 
 weakness of the government, even when not itself inclined 
 to oppress, leaves its subjects exposed without protection or 
 redress to active spoliation, or audacious withholding of just 
 rights, by any powerful individual ; the rate of profit which 
 persons of average dispositions will require, to make them 
 forego the immediate enjoyment of what they happen to 
 possess, for the purpose of exposing it and themselves to 
 these perils, must be something very considerable. And 
 these contingencies affect those who live on the mere inter- 
 est of their capital, in common with those who personally 
 engage in production. In a generally secure state of socie- 
 ty, the risks which may be attendant on the nature of par- 
 ticular employments seldom fall on the person who lends his 
 capital, if he lends on good security ; but in a state of 
 society like that of many parts of Asia, no security (except 
 perhaps the actual pledge of gold or jewels) is good : and 
 the mere possession of a hoard, when known or suspected, 
 exposes it and the possessor to risks, for which scarcely any 
 profit he could expect to obtain would be an equivalent ; so 
 that there would be still less accumulation than there is, if 
 a state of insecurity did not also multiply the occasions on 
 which the possession of a treasure may be the means of sav- 
 ing life or averting serious calamities. Those who lend, 
 under these wretched governments, do it at the utmost peril 
 of never being paid. In most of the native states of India,
 
 500 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 3. 
 
 the lowest terms on which any one will lend money, even to 
 the government, are such, that if the interest is paid only 
 for a few years, and the principal not at all, the lender is tol- 
 erably well indemnified. If the accumulation of principal 
 and compound interest is ultimately compromised at a few 
 shillings in the pound, he has generally made an advanta- 
 geous bargain. 
 
 3. The remuneration of capital in different employ- 
 ments, much more than the remuneration of Jabour, varies 
 according to the circumstances which render one employ- 
 ment more attractive, or more repulsive, than another. The 
 profits, for example, of retail trade, in proportion to the cap- 
 ital employed, exceed those of wholesale dealers or manu- 
 facturers, for this reason among others, that there is less 
 consideration attached to the employment. The greatest, 
 however, of these differences, is that caused by difference of 
 risk. The profits of a gunpowder manufacturer must be 
 considerably greater than the average, to make up for the 
 peculiar risks to which he and his property are constantly 
 exposed. When, however, as in the case of marine adven- 
 ture, the peculiar risks are capable of being, and commonly 
 are, commuted for a fixed payment, the premium of insur- 
 ance takes its regular place among the charges of produc- 
 tion, and the compensation which the owner of the ship or 
 cargo receives for that payment, does not appear in the 
 estimate of his profits, but is included in the replacement 
 of his capital. 
 
 The portion, too, of the gross profit, which forms the 
 remuneration for the labour and skill of the dealer or pro- 
 ducer, is very different in different employments. This is 
 the explanation always given of the extraordinary rate of 
 apothecaries' profit ; the greatest part, as Adam Smith ob- 
 serves, being frequently no more than the reasonable wages 
 of professional attendance ; for which, until a late alteration 
 of the law, the apothecary could not demand any remunera- 
 tion, except in the prices of his drugs. Some occupations
 
 PROFITS 501 
 
 require a considerable amount of scientific or technical edu- 
 cation, and can only be carried on by persons who combine 
 with that education a considerable capital. Such is the 
 business of an engineer, both in the original sense of the 
 term, a machine-maker, and in its popular or derivative 
 sense, an undertaker of public works. These are always 
 the most profitable employments. There are cases, again, 
 in which a considerable amount of labour and skill is re- 
 quired to conduct a business necessarily of limited extent. 
 In such cases, a higher than common rate of profit is neces- 
 sary to yield only the common rate of remuneration. " In 
 a small sea-port town," says Adam Smith, " a little grocer 
 will make forty or fifty per cent upon a stock" of a single 
 hundred pounds, while a considerable wholesale merchant 
 in the same place will scarce make eight or ten per cent 
 upon a stock of ten thousand. The trade of the grocer may 
 be necessary for the conveniency of the inhabitants, and the 
 narrowness of the market may not admit the employment 
 of a larger capitalin the business. The man, however, 
 must not only live by his trade, but live by it suitably to 
 the qualifications which it requires. Besides possessing a 
 little capital, he must be able to read, write, and account, 
 and must be a tolerable judge, too, of perhaps fifty or sixty 
 different sorts of goods, their prices, qualities, and the mar- 
 kets where they are to be had cheapest. Thirty or forty 
 pounds a-year cannot be considered as too great a recom- 
 pense for the labour of a person so accomplished. Deduct 
 this from the seemingly great profits of his capital, and little 
 more will remain, perhaps, than the ordinary profits of 
 stock. The greater part of the apparent profit is, in this 
 case, too, real wages." 
 
 All the natural monopolies (meaning thereby those 
 which are created by circumstances, and not by law) which 
 produce or aggravate the disparities in the remuneration of 
 different kinds of labour, operate similarly between different 
 employments of capital. If a business can only be advan- 
 tageously carried on by a large capital, this in most coun-
 
 502 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 4. 
 
 tries limits so narrowly the class of persons who can enter 
 into the employment, that they are enabled to keep their 
 rate of profit above the general level. A trade may also, 
 from the nature of the case, be confined to so few hands, 
 that profits may admit of being kept up by a combination 
 among the dealers. It is well known that even among so 
 numerous a body as the London booksellers, this sort of 
 combination long continued to exist. I have already men- 
 tioned the case of the gas and water companies. 
 
 4. After due allowance is made for these various 
 causes of inequality, namely, difference in the risk or agree- 
 ableness of different employments, and natural or artificial 
 monopolies ; the rate of profit on capital in all employments 
 tends to an equality. Such is the proposition usually' laid 
 down by political economists, and under proper explanations 
 it is true. 
 
 That portion of profit which is properly interest, and 
 which forms the real remuneration for abstinence, is strictly 
 the same, at.the same time and place, whatever be the em- 
 ployment. The rate of interest on equally good security, 
 does not vary according to the destination of the principal, 
 though it does vary from time to time very much, according 
 to the circumstances of the market. There is no employ- 
 ment in which, in the present state of industry, competition 
 is so active and incessant as in the lending and borrowing 
 of money. All persons in business are occasionally, and 
 most of them constantly, borrowers : while all persons not 
 in business, who possess monied property, are lenders. Be- 
 tween these two great bodies there is a numerous, keen, and 
 intelligent class of middle men, composed of bankers, stock- 
 brokers, discount brokers, and others, alive to the slightest 
 breath of probable gain. The smallest circumstance, or the 
 most transient impression on the public mind, which tends 
 to an increase or diminution of the demand for loans either 
 at the time or prospectively, operates immediately on the 
 rate of interest : and circumstances in the general state of
 
 PROFITS. 503 
 
 trade, really tending to cause this difference of demand, are 
 continually occurring, sometimes to such an extent, that the 
 rate of interest on the best mercantile bills has been known 
 to vary within a year (even without the occurrence of the 
 great derangement called a commercial crisis) from less 
 than four to more than six per cent. But, at the same time 
 and place, the rate of interest is the same, to all who can 
 give equally good security. The market rate of interest is 
 at all times a known and definite thing. 
 
 It is far otherwise with gross profit ; which, though (as 
 will presently be seen) it does not vary much from employ- 
 ment to employment, varies very greatly from individual to 
 individual, and can scarcely be in any two cases the same. 
 It depends on the knowledge, talents, economy, and energy 
 of the capitalist himself, or of the agents whom he employs ; 
 on the accidents of personal connexion ; and even on chance. 
 Hardly any two dealers in the same trade, even if their com- 
 modities are equally good and equally cheap, carry on their 
 business at the same expense, or turn over their capital in 
 the same time. That equal capitals give equal profits, as a 
 general maxim of trade, would be as false as that equal age 
 or size gives equal bodily strength, or that equal reading or 
 experience gives equal knowledge. The effect depends as 
 much upon twenty other things, as upon the single cause 
 specified. 
 
 But though profits thus vary, the parity, on the whole, 
 of different modes of employing capital (in the absence of 
 any natural or artificial monopoly) is, in a certain, and a 
 very important sense, maintained. On an average (what- 
 ever maybe the occasional fluctuations) the various employ- 
 ments of capital are on such a footing as to hold out, not 
 equal profits, but equal expectations of profit, to persons of 
 average abilities and advantages. By equal, I mean after 
 making compensation for any inferiority in the agreeable- 
 ness or safety of an employment. If the case were not so ; 
 if there were, evidently, and to common experience, more 
 favourable chances of pecuniary success in one business than
 
 504 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 4. 
 
 in others, more persons would engage their capital in the 
 business, or would bring up their sons to it ; which in fact 
 always happens when a business, like that of an engineer at 
 present, or like any newly established and prosperous manu- 
 facture, is seen to be a growing and thriving one. If, on 
 the contrary, a business is not considered thriving ; if the 
 chances of profit in it are thought to be inferior to those in 
 other employments ; capital gradually leaves it, or at least 
 new capital is not attracted to it ; and by this change in the 
 distribution of capital between the less profitable and the 
 more profitable employments, a sort of balance is restored. 
 The expectations of profit, therefore, in different employ- 
 ments, cannot long continue very different : they tend to a 
 common average, though they are generally oscillating from 
 one side to the other side of the medium. 
 
 This pqrmliVjng process, commonly described as the 
 transfer of capital from one employment to another, is not 
 necessarily the onerous, slow, and almost impracticable 
 operation which it is very often represented to be. In the 
 first place, it does not always imply the actual removal of 
 capital already embarked in an employment. In a rapidly 
 progressive state of capital, the adjustment often takes place 
 by means of the new accumulations of each year, which 
 direct themselves in preference towards the more thriving 
 trades. Even when a real transfer of capital is necessary, 
 it is by no means implied that any of those who are en- 
 gaged in the unprofitable employment, relinquish business 
 and break up their establishments. The numerous and 
 multifarious channels of credit, through which, in commer- 
 cial nations, unemployed capital diffuses itself over the field 
 of employment, flowing over in greater abundance to the 
 lower levels, are the means by which the equalization is ac- 
 complished. The process consists in a limitation by one 
 class of dealers or producers, and an extension by the other, 
 of that portion of their business which is carried on with 
 borrowed capital. There is scarcely any dealer or producer 
 on a considerable scale, who confines his business to what
 
 PROFITS. 505 
 
 can be carried on by his own funds. When trade is good, 
 he not only uses to the utmost his own capital, but employs, 
 in addition, much of the credit which that capital obtains 
 for him. When, either from over-supply or from some 
 slackening in the demand for his commodity, he finds that 
 it sells more slowly or obtains a lower price, he contracts his 
 operations, and does not apply to bankers or other money 
 dealers for a renewal of their advances to the same extent as 
 before. A business which is increasing holds out, on the 
 contrary, a prospect of profitable employment for a larger 
 amount of this floating capital than previously, and those 
 engaged in it become applicants to the money dealers for 
 larger advances, which, from their improving circumstances, 
 they have no difficulty in obtaining. A different distribu- 
 tion of floating capital between two employments has as 
 much effect in restoring their profits to an equilibrium, as 
 if the owners of an equal amount of capital were to abandon 
 the one trade and carry their capital into the other. This 
 easy, and as it were spontaneous, method of accommodating 
 production to demand, is quite sufficient to correct any in- 
 equalities arising from the fluctuations of trade, or other 
 causes of ordinary occurrence. In the case of an altogether 
 declining trade, in which it is necessary that the production 
 should be, not occasionally varied, but greatly and perma- 
 nently diminished, or perhaps stopped altogether, the pro- 
 cess of extricating the capital is, no doubt, tardy and dif- 
 ficult, and almost always attended with considerable loss ; 
 much of the capital fixed in machinery, buildings, perma- 
 nent works, &c. being either not applicable to any other 
 purpose, or only applicable after expensive alterations ; and 
 time being seldom given for effecting the change in the 
 mode in which it would be effected with least loss, namely, 
 by not replacing the fixed capital as it wears out. There is 
 besides, in totally changing the destination of a capital, so 
 great a sacrifice of established connexion, and of acquired 
 skill and experience, that people are always very slow in 
 resolving upon it, and hardly ever do so until long after a
 
 506 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 4. 
 
 change of fortune has become hopeless. These, however, 
 are distinctly exceptional cases, and even in these the equal- 
 ization is at last effected. It may also happen that the re- 
 turn to equilibrium is considerably protracted, when, before 
 one inequality has been corrected, another cause of inequal- 
 ity arises ; which is said to have been continually the case 
 during a long series of years, with the production of cotton 
 in the Southern States of North America ; the commodity 
 having been upheld at what was virtually a monopoly price, 
 because the increase of demand, from successive improve- 
 ments in the manufacture, went on with a rapidity so much 
 beyond expectation that for many years the supply never 
 completely overtook it. But it is not often that a succession 
 of disturbing causes, all acting in the same direction, are 
 known to follow one another with hardly any interval. 
 Where there is no monopoly, the profits of a trade are likely 
 to range sometimes above and sometimes below the general 
 level, but tending always to return to it like the oscillations 
 of the pendulum. 
 
 In general, then, although profits are very different to 
 different individuals, and to the same individual in different 
 years, there cannot be much diversity at the same time and 
 place in the average profits of different employments, (other 
 than the standing differences necessary to compensate for 
 difference of attractiveness,) except for short periods, or 
 when some great permanent revulsion has overtaken a par- 
 ticular trade. If any popular impression exists that some 
 trades are more profitable than others, independently of mo- 
 nopoly, or of such rare accidents as have been noticed in 
 regard to the cotton trade, the impression is in all probabil- 
 ity fallacious, since if it were shared by those who have 
 greatest means of knowledge and motives to accurate exam- 
 ination, there would take place such an influx of capital as 
 would soon lower the profits to the common level. It is 
 true that, to persons with the same amount of original 
 means, there is more chance of making a large fortune in 
 some employments than in others. But it would be found
 
 PROFITS. 507 
 
 that in those same employments bankruptcies also are more 
 frequent, and that the chance of greater success is balanced 
 by a greater probability of complete failure. Very often it 
 is more than balanced : for, as was remarked in another 
 case, the chance of great prizes operates with a greater de- 
 gree of strength than arithmetic will warrant, in attracting 
 competitors ; and I doubt not that the average gains, in a 
 trade in which large fortunes may be made, are lower than 
 in those in which gains are slow, though comparatively sure, 
 and in which nothing is to be ultimately hoped for beyond 
 a competency. The timber trade of Canada is one example 
 of an employment of capital, partaking so much of the na- 
 ture of a lottery, as to make it an accredited opinion that, 
 taking the adventurers in the aggregate, there is more money 
 lost by the trade than gained by it ; in other words, that 
 the average rate of profit is less than nothing. In such 
 points as this, much depends on the characters of nations, 
 according as they partake more or less of the adventurous, 
 or, as it is called when the intention is to blame it, the gam- 
 bling spirit. This spirit is much stronger in the United 
 States than in Great Britain ; and in Great Britain than in 
 any country of the Continent. In some Continental coun- 
 tries the tendency is so much the reverse, that safe and quiet 
 employments probably yield a less average profit to the cap- 
 ital engaged in them, than those which offer greater gains 
 at the price of greater hazards. 
 
 It must not however be forgotten, that even in the coun- 
 tries of most active competition custom also has a consider- 
 able share in determining the profits of trade. There is 
 sometimes an idea afloat as to what the profit of an employ- 
 ment should be, which though not adhered to by all the 
 dealers, nor perhaps rigidly by any, still exercises a certain 
 influence over their operations. There is in England a kind 
 of notion, how widely prevailing I know not, that fifty per 
 cent is a proper and suitable rate of profit in retail transac- 
 tions : understand, not fifty per cent on the whole capital, 
 but an advance of fifty per cent on the wholesale prices ;
 
 508 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 6. 
 
 from which have to be defrayed bad debts, shop rent, the 
 pay of clerks, shopmen, and agents of all descriptions, in 
 short all the expenses of the retail business. If this custom 
 were universal, and strictly adhered to, competition indeed 
 would still operate, but the consumer would not derive any 
 benefit from it, at least as to price ; the way in which it 
 would diminish the advantages of those engaged in retail 
 trade, would be by a greater subdivision of the business. 
 The increase of competition however, in England at least, is 
 rapidly tending to break down customs of this description. 
 In the majority of trades, (at least in the great emporia of 
 trade,) there are now numerous dealers whose motto is 
 * small gains and frequent " a great business at low prices, 
 rather than high prices and few transactions ; and by turn- 
 ing over their capital more rapidly, and adding to it by bor- 
 rowed capital when needed, the dealers often obtain indi- 
 vidually higher profits ; though they necessarily lower the 
 profits of those among their competitors, who do not adopt 
 the same principle. Nevertheless, competition, as re- 
 marked * in a previous chapter, has, as yet, but a limit- 
 ed dominion over retail prices ; and consequently the share 
 of the whole produce of land and labour which is absorbed 
 in the remuneration of mere distributors, continues exorbi- 
 tant ; and there is no function in the economy of society 
 which supports a number of persons so disproportioned to 
 the amount of work to be performed. 
 
 5. The preceding remarks have, I hope, sufficiently 
 elucidated what is meant by the common phrase, "the ordi- 
 nary rate of profit; " and the sense in which, and the limita- 
 tions under which, this ordinary rate has a real existence. 
 It now remains to consider, what causes determine its 
 amount. 
 
 To popular apprehension it seems as if the profits of busi j 
 ness depended upon prices. A producer or dealer seems to 
 obtain his profits by selling his commodity for more than it 
 
 * Vide supra, book ii. chap. iv. 3.
 
 PROFITS. 509 
 
 cost him. Profit altogether, people are apt to think, is a con- 
 sequence of purchase and sale. It is only (they suppose) 
 because there are purchasers for a commodity, that the pro- 
 ducer of it is able to make any profit. Demand customers 
 a market for the commodity, are the cause of the gains of 
 capitalists. It is by the sale of their goods, that they replace 
 their capital, and add to its amount. 
 
 This, however, is looking only at the outside surface of 
 the economical machinery of society. In no case, we find, is 
 the mere money which passes from one person to another, the 
 fundamental matter in any economical phenomenon. If we 
 look more narrowly into the operations of the producer, we 
 shall perceive that the money he obtains for his commodity 
 is not the cause of his having a profit, but only the mode in 
 which his profit is paid to him. x 
 
 The cause of profit is, that labour produces more than is 
 required for its support. The reason why agricultural capi- 
 tal yields a profit, is because human beings can grow more 
 food, than is necessary to feed them while it is being grown, 
 including the time occupied in constructing the tools, and 
 making all other needful preparations ; from which it is a 
 consequence, that if a capitalist undertakes to feed the 
 labourers on condition of receiving the produce, he has some 
 of it remaining for himself after replacing his advances. To 
 vary the form of the theorem : the reason why capital yields 
 a profit, is because food, clothing, materials, and tools last 
 longer than the time which was required to produce them ; 
 so that if a capitalist supplies a party of labourers with these 
 things, on condition of receiving all they produce, they will, 
 in addition to reproducing their own necessaries and instru- 
 ments, have a portion of their time remaining, to work for 
 the capitalist. We thus see that profit arises, not from the 
 incident of exchange, but from the productive power of 
 labour; and the general profit of the country is always 
 what the productive power of labour makes it, whether any 
 exchange takes place or not. If there were no division of 
 employments, there would be no buying or selling, but there
 
 510 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 6. 
 
 would still be profit. If the labourers of the country collec- 
 tively produce twenty per cent more than their wages, 
 profits will be twenty per cent, whatever prices may or 
 may not be. The accidents of price may for a time make 
 one set of producers get more than the twenty per cent, 
 and another less, the one commodity being rated above its 
 natural value in relation to other commodities, and the 
 other below, until prices have again adjusted themselves ; 
 but there will always be just twenty per cent divided among 
 them all. s 
 
 I proceed, in expansion of the considerations thus briefly 
 indicated, to exhibit more minutely the mode in which the 
 rate of profit is determined. 
 
 6. I assume, throughout, the state of things, which,, 
 where the labourers and capitalists are separate classes, pre- 
 vails, with few exceptions, universally ; namely, that the 
 capitalist advances the whole expenses, including the entire 
 remuneration of the labourer. That he should do so, is not 
 a matter of inherent necessity ; the labourer might wait until 
 the production is complete, for all that part of his wages 
 which exceeds mere necessaries ; and even for the whole, if 
 he has funds in hand, sufficient for his temporary support. 
 But in the latter case, the labourer is to that extent really 
 a capitalist, investing capital in the concern, by supplying 
 a portion of the funds necessary for carrying it on ; and 
 even in the former case he may be looked upon in the same 
 light, since, contributing his labour at less than the market 
 price, he may be regarded as lending the difference to his. 
 employer, and receiving it back with interest (on whatever 
 principle computed) from the proceeds of the enterprise. 
 
 The capitalist, then, may be assumed to make all the 
 advances, and receive all the produce. His profit consists 
 of the excess of the produce above the advances ; his rate 
 of profit is the ratio which that excess bears to the amount 
 advanced. But what do. the advances .consist of ? 
 
 It is, for the present, necessary to suppose, that the
 
 PROFITS. 511 
 
 capitalist does not pay any rent ; has not to purchase the / 
 use of any appropriated natural agent. This indeed is 
 scarcely ever the exact truth. The agricultural capitalist, 
 except when he is the owner of the soil he cultivates, always, 
 pr almost always, pays rent : and even in manufactures, (not 
 to mention ground-rent,) the materials of the manufacture 
 have generally paid rent, in some stages of their production. 
 The nature of rent, however, we have not yet taken into 
 consideration ; and it will hereafter appear, that no practi- 
 cal error, on the question we are now examining, is pro- 
 duced by disregarding it. 
 
 If, then, leaving rent out of the question, we inquire in 
 what it is that the advances of the capitalist, for purposes 
 of production, consist, we shall find that they consist of 
 wages of labour. 
 
 A large portion of the expenditure of every capitalist 
 consists in the direct payment of wages. What does not 
 consist of this, is composed of materials and implements, 
 including buildings. But materials and implements are 
 produced by labour ; and as our supposed capitalist is not 
 meant to represent a single employment, but to be a type 
 of the productive industry of the whole country, we may 
 suppose that he makes his own tools, and raises his own 
 materials. He does this by means of previous advances, 
 which, again, consist wholly of wages. If we suppose him 
 to buy the materials and tools instead of producing them, 
 the case is not altered : he then repays to a previous pro- 
 ducer the wages which that previous producer has paid. 
 It is true, he repays it to him with a profit ; and if he had 
 produced the things himself, he himself must have had that 
 profit, on this part of his outlay, as well as on every other 
 part. The fact, however, remains, that in the whole pro- 
 cess of production, beginning with the materials and tools, 
 and ending with the finished product, all the advances have 
 consisted of nothing but wages ; except that certain of the 
 capitalists concerned have, for the sake of general conve- 
 nience, had their share of profit paid to them before the
 
 512 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 7. 
 
 operation was completed. Whatever, of the ultimate prod- 
 uct, is not profit, is repayment of wages. 
 
 7. It thus appears that the two elements on which, and 
 which alone, the gains of the capitalists depend, are, first, 
 the magnitude of the produce,|in other words, the produc- 
 tive power of labour ;l and secondly, the proportion of that 
 produce obtained by the labourers themselves ; the ratio, 
 which the remuneration of the labourers bears to the amount 
 they produce. These two things form the data for deter- 
 mining the gross amount divided as profit among all the 
 capitalists of the country ; but the rate of profit, the per- 
 centage on the capital, depends only on the second of the 
 two elements, the labourer's proportional share, and not on 
 the amount to be shared. If the produce of labour were 
 doubled, and the labourers obtained the same proportional 
 share as before, that is, if their remuneration was also 
 doubled, the capitalists, it is true, would gain twice as 
 much ; but as they would also have had to advance twice 
 as much, the rate of their profit would be only the same as 
 before. 
 
 We thus arrive at the conclusion of Ricardo and others, 
 that the rate of profits depends upon wages ; rising as wages 
 fall, and falling as wages rise. In adopting, however, this 
 doctrine, I must insist upon making a most necessary alter- 
 ation in its wording. Instead of saying that profits depend 
 on wages, let us say (what Ricardo really meant) that they 
 depend on the cost of labour. 
 
 Wages, and the cost of labour ; what labour brings in 
 to the labourer, and what it costs to the capitalist ; are ideas 
 quite distinct, and which it is of the utmost importance to 
 keep so. For this purpose it is essential not to designate 
 them, as is almost always done, by the same name. Wages, 
 in public discussions, both oral and printed, being looked 
 upon from the same point of view of the payers, much oftener 
 than from that of the receivers, nothing is more common 
 than to say that wages are high or low, meaning only that
 
 PROFITS. 513 
 
 the cost of labour is high or low. The reverse of this would 
 be oftener the truth : the cost of labour is frequently at its 
 highest where wages are lowest. This may arise from two 
 causes. In the first place, the labour, though cheap, may 
 be inefficient. In no European country are wages so low 
 as they are (or at least were) in Ireland ; the remuner- 
 ation of an agricultural labourer in the west of Ireland not 
 being more than half the wages of even the lowest-paid 
 Englishman, the Dorsetshire labourer. But if, from infe- 
 rior skill and industry, two days' labour of an Irishman 
 accomplished no more worF than an English labourer per- 
 formed in one, the Irishman's labour cost as much as the 
 
 ^**J**. 
 
 Englishman's, though it brought in so much less to himself. 
 The capitalist's profit is determined by the former of these 
 two things, not by the latter. That a difference to this ex- 
 tent really existed in the efficiency of the labour, is proved 
 not only by abundant testimony, but by the fact, that not- 
 withstanding the lowness of wages, profits of capital have 
 never been higher in Ireland than in England. 
 
 The other cause which renders wages, and the cost of 
 labour, no real criteria of one another, is the varying costli- 
 ness of the articles which the labourer consumes. If these 
 are cheap, wages, in the sense which is of importance to 
 the labourer, may be high, and yet the cost of labour may 
 be low ; if dear, the labourer may be wretchedly off, though 
 his labour may cost much to the capitalist. This last is the 
 condition of a country over-peopled in relation to its land ; 
 in which, food being dear, the poorness of the labourer's 
 real reward does not prevent labour from costing much to 
 the purchaser, and low wages and low profits co-exist. The 
 opposite case is exemplified in the United States of America. 
 The labourer there enjoys a greater abundance of comforts 
 than in any other country of the world, except some of the 
 newest colonies ; but, owing to the cheap price at which 
 these comforts can be obtained (combined with the great 
 efficiency of the labour), the cost of labour to the capitalist 
 
 83
 
 t 
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 7. 
 
 is considerably lower than in Europe. It must be so, since 
 the rate of profit is higher ; as indicated by the rate of in- 
 terest, which is six per cent at New York when it is three, 
 or three and a quarter per cent in London. 
 
 The cost of labour, then, is, in the language of mathe- 
 matics, a function of three variables : the efficiency of la- 
 bour ; the wages of labour (meaning thereby the real reward 
 of the labourer) ; and the greater or less cost at which the 
 articles composing that real reward can be produced or pur- 
 chased. It is plain that the cost of labour to the capitalist 
 must be influenced by each of these three circumstances, and 
 by no others. These, therefore, are also the circumstances 
 which determine the rate of profit ; and it cannot be in any 
 way affected except through one or other of them. If labour 
 generally became more efficient, without being more highly 
 rewarded ; if, without its becoming less efficient, its remu- 
 neration fell, no increase taking place in the cost of the arti- 
 cles composing that remuneration ; or if those articles bex 
 came less costly, without the labourer's obtaining more of 
 them ; in any one of these three cases, profits would rise. 
 If, on the contrary, labour became less efficient (as it might 
 do from diminished bodily vigour in the people, destruction 
 of fixed capital, or deteriorated education) ; or if the la- 
 bourer obtained a higher remuneration, without any in- 
 creased cheapness in the things composing it ; or if, without 
 his obtaining more, that which he did obtain became more 
 costly ; profits, in all these cases, would suffer a diminution. 
 And there is no other combination of circumstances, in 
 which the general rate of profit of a country, in all employ- 
 ments indifferently, can either fall or rise. 
 
 The evidence of these propositions can only be stated 
 generally, though, it is hoped, conclusively, in this stage 
 of our subject. It will come out in greater fulness and force 
 when, having taken into consideration the theory of Value 
 and Price, we shall be enabled to exhibit the law of profits 
 in the concrete in the complex entanglement of circum-
 
 PROFITS. 515 
 
 stances in which it actually works. This can only be done 
 in the ensuing Book. One topic still remains to be dis- 
 cussed in the present one, so far as it admits of being treated 
 independently of considerations of Yalue ; the subject of 
 Rent ; to which we now proceed.
 
 CHAPTEK XVI. 
 
 OF RENT. 
 
 1. THE requisites of production being labour, capital, 
 and natural agents ; the only person, besides the labourer 
 and the capitalist, whose consent is necessary to production, 
 and who can claim a share of the produce as the price of 
 that consent, is the person who, by the arrangements of socie- 
 ty, possesses exclusive power over some natural agent. The 
 land is the principal of the natural agents which are capable 
 of being appropriated, and the consideration paid for its use 
 is called rent. Landed proprietors are the only class, of any 
 numbers or importance, who have a claim to a share in the 
 distribution of the produce, through their ownership of 
 something which neither they nor any one else have pro- 
 duced. If there be any other cases of a similar nature, they 
 will be easily understood, when the nature and laws of rent 
 are comprehended. 
 
 It is at once evident, that rent is the effect of a monop- 
 oly ; though the monopoly is a natural one, which may be 
 regulated, which may even be held as a trust for the com- 
 munity generally, but which cannot be prevented from 
 existing. The reason why landowners are able to require 
 rent for their land, is that it is a commodity which many 
 want, and which no one can obtain but from them. If all 
 the land of the country belonged to one person, he could fix 
 the rent at his pleasure. The whole people would be de- 
 pendent on his will for the necessaries of life, and he might 
 make what conditions he chose. This is the actual state of
 
 RENT. 517 
 
 things in those Oriental kingdoms in which the land is con- 
 sidered the property of the state. Kent is then confounded 
 with taxation, and the despot may exact the utmost which 
 the unfortunate cultivators have to give. Indeed, the ex- 
 clusive possessor of the land of a country could not well be 
 other than despot of it. The effect would be much the same 
 if the land belonged to- so few people that they could, and 
 did, act together as one man, and fix the rent by agreement 
 among themselves. This case, however, is nowhere known 
 to exist ; and the only remaining supposition is that of Jree 
 competition ; the landowners being supposed to be, as IrT 
 fact they are, too numerous to combine. 
 
 2. A thing which is limited in quantity, even though 
 its possessors do not act in concert, is still a monopolized ar- 
 ticle. But even when monopolized, a thing which is the 
 gift of nature, and requires no labour or outlay as the con- 
 dition of its existence, will, if there be competition among 
 the holders of it, command a price, only if it exists in less 
 quantity than the demand. If the whole land of a country 
 were required for cultivation, all of it might yield a rent. 
 But in no country of any extent do the wants of the popula- 
 tion require that all the land, which is capable of cultiva- 
 tion, should be cultivated. The food and other agricultural 
 produce which the people need, and which they are willing 
 and able to pay for at a price which remunerates the grower, 
 may always be obtained without cultivating all the land ; 
 sometimes without cultivating more than a small part of it ; 
 the more fertile lands, or those in the more convenient situ- 
 ations, being of course preferred. There is always, there- 
 fore, some land which cannot, in existing circumstances, 
 pay any rent ; and no land ever pays rent, unless, in point 
 of fertility or situation, it belongs to those superior kinds 
 which exist in less quantity than the demand which can- 
 not be made to yield all the produce required for the com- 
 munity, unless on terms still less advantageous than the re- 
 sort to less favoured soils.
 
 518 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 2. 
 
 There is land, such as the deserts of Arabia, which will 
 yield nothing to any amount of labour ; and there is land, 
 like some of our hard sandy heaths, which would produce 
 something, but, in the present state of the soil, not enough 
 to defray the expenses of production. Such lands, unless by 
 some application of chemistry to agriculture still remaining 
 to be invented, cannot be cultivated for profit, unless some 
 one actually creates a soil, by spreading new ingredients 
 over the surface, or mixing them with the existing materi- 
 als. If ingredients fitted for this purpose exist in the sub- 
 soil, or close at hand, the improvement even of the most un- 
 promising spots may answer as a speculation : but if those 
 ingredients are costly, and must be brought from a distance, 
 it will seldom answer to do this for the sake of profit, though 
 the " magic of property " will sometimes effect it. Land 
 which cannot possibly yield a profit, is sometimes cultivated 
 at a loss, the cultivators having their wants partially sup- 
 plied from other sources ; as in the case of paupers, and some 
 monasteries or charitable institutions, among which may be 
 reckoned the Poor Colonies of Belgium. The worst land 
 which can be cultivated as a means of subsistence, is that 
 which will just replace the seed, and the food of the labour- 
 ers employed on it, together with what Dr. Chalmers calls 
 their secondaries ; that is, the labourers required for supply- 
 ing them with tools, and with the remaining necessaries of 
 life. Whether any given land is capable of doing more 
 than this, is not a question of political economy, but of 
 physical fact. The supposition leaves nothing for profits, 
 nor anything for the labourers except necessaries : the land, 
 therefore, can only be cultivated by the labourers them- 
 selves, or else at a pecuniary loss : and a fortiori, cannot in 
 any contingency afford a rent. The worst land which can 
 be cultivated as an investment for capital, is that which, 
 after replacing the seed, not only feeds the agricultural la- 
 bourers and their secondaries, but affords them the cm-rent 
 rate of wages, which may extend to much more than mere 
 necessaries ; and leaves for those who have advanced the
 
 RENT. 519 
 
 wages of these two classes of labourers, a surplus equal to 
 the profit they could have expected from any other employ- 
 ment of their capital. Whether any given land can do more 
 than this, is not merely a physical_ question, but depends 
 partly on the market value^of agricultural produce. What 
 the land can do for the labourers and for the capitalist, be- 
 yond feeding all whom it directly or indirectly employs, of 
 course depends upon what the remainder of the produce can 
 be sold for. The higher the market value of produce, the 
 lower are the soils to which cultivation can descend, consist- 
 ently with affording to the capital employed, the ordinary 
 rate of profit. 
 
 As, however, differences of fertility slide into one an- 
 other by insensible gradations ; and differences of accessi- 
 bility, that is, of distance from markets do the same ; and 
 since there is land so barren that it could not pay for its 
 cultivation at any price ; it is evident that, whatever the 
 price may be, there must in any extensive region be some 
 land which at that price will just pay the wages of the cul- 
 tivators, and yield to the capital employed the ordinary 
 profit, and no more. Until, therefore, the price rises higher, 
 or until some improvement raises that particular land to a 
 higher place in the scale of fertility, it cannot pay any rent. 
 It is evident, however, that the community needs the 
 produce of this quality of land ; since if the lands more fer- 
 tile or better situated than it, could have sufficed to supply 
 the wants of society, the price would not have risen so 
 high as to render its cultivation profitable. This land, 
 therefore, will be cultivated ; and we may lay it down as a 
 principle, that so long as any of the land of a country which 
 is fit for cultivation, and not withheld from it by legal or 
 other factitious obstacles, is not cultivated, the worst land 
 in actual cultivation (in point of fertility and situation to- 
 gether) pays no rent. 
 
 3. If, then, of the land in cultivation, the part which 
 yields least return to the labour and capital employed on it
 
 520 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 8. 
 
 gives only the ordinary profit of capital, without leaving 
 anything for rent ; a standard is afforded for estimating the 
 amount of rent which will be yielded by all other laud. 
 Any land yields just as much more than the ordinary profits 
 of stock, as it yields more than what is returned by the worst 
 land in cultivation. The surplus is what the farmer can 
 afford to pay as rent to the landlord ; and since, if he did 
 not so pay it, he would receive more than the ordinary rate 
 of profit, the competition of other capitalists, that competi- 
 tion which equalizes the profits of different capitals, will 
 enable the landlord to appropriate it. The rent, therefore, 
 which any land will yield, is the excess of its produce, be- 
 yond what would be returned to the same capital if em- 
 ployed on the worst land in cultivation. This is not, and 
 never was pretended to be, the limit of metayer rents, or of 
 cottier rents ; but it is the limit of farmers' rents. No land 
 rented to a capitalist farmer will permanently yield more 
 than this ; and when it yields less, it is because the landlord 
 foregoes a part of what, if he chose, he could obtain. 
 
 This is the theory of rent, first propounded at the end 
 of the last century by Dr. Anderson, and which, neglected 
 at the time, was almost simultaneously rediscovered, twenty 
 years later, by Sir Edward West, Mr. Malthus, and Mr. Ri- 
 cardo. It is one of the cardinal doctrines of political econ- 
 omy ; and until it was understood, no consistent explanation 
 could be given of many of the more complicated industrial 
 phenomena. The evidence of its truth will be manifested 
 with a great increase of clearness, when we come to trace 
 the laws of the phenomena of Value and Price. Until that 
 is done, it is not possible to free the doctrine from every 
 difficulty which may present itself, nor perhaps to convey, 
 to those previously unacquainted with the subject, more 
 than a general apprehension of the reasoning by which the 
 theorem is arrived at. Some, however, of the objections 
 commonly made to it, admit of a complete answer even in 
 the present stage of our inquiries. 
 
 It has been denied that there can be any land in cultiva-
 
 RENT. 521 
 
 tion which pays no rent ; because landlords (it is contended) 
 would not allow their land to be occupied without payment. 
 Those who lay any stress on this as an objection, must think 
 that land of the quality which can but just pay for its cultiva- 
 tion, lies together in large masses, detached from any land 
 of better quality. If an estate consisted wholly of this land, 
 or of this and still worse, it is likely enough that the owner 
 would not give the use of it for nothing ; he would probably 
 (if a rich man) prefer keeping it for other purposes, as for 
 exercise, or ornament, or perhaps as a game preserve. No 
 farmer could afford to offer him anything for it, for pur- 
 poses of culture ; though something would probably be ob- 
 tained for the use of its natural pasture, or other spontane- 
 ous produce. Even such land, however, would not neces- 
 sarily remain uncultivated. It might be farmed by the pro- 
 prietor ; no unfrequent case even in England. Portions of 
 it might be granted as temporary allotments to labouring 
 families, either from philanthropic motives, or to save the 
 poor-rate ; or occupation might be allowed to squatters, free 
 of rent, in the hope that their labour might give it value at 
 some future period. Both these cases are of quite ordinary 
 occurrence. So that even if an estate were wholly com- 
 posed of the worst land capable of profitable cultivation, it 
 would not necessarily lie uncultivated because it could pay 
 no rent. Inferior land, however, does not usually occupy, 
 without interruption, many square miles of ground ; it is 
 dispersed here and there, with patches of better land inter- 
 mixed, and the same person who rents the better land, ob- 
 tains along with it the inferior soils which alternate with it. 
 He pays a rent, nominally for the whole farm, but calcu- 
 lated on the produce of those parts alone (however small a 
 portion of the whole) which are capable of returning more 
 than the common rate of profit. It is thus scientifically 
 true, that the remaining parts pay no rent. 
 
 4. Let us, however, suppose that there were a valid- 
 ity in this objection, which can by no means be conceded
 
 522 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 4. 
 
 to it ; that when the demand of the community had forced 
 up food to such a price as would remunerate the expense of 
 producing it from a certain quality of soil, it happened nev- 
 ertheless that all the soil of that quality was withheld from 
 cultivation, by the obstinacy of the owners in demanding 
 rent for it, not nominal, nor trifling, but sufficiently onerous 
 to be a material item in the calculations of a farmer. What 
 would then happen ? Merely that the increase of produce, 
 which the wants of society required, would for the time be 
 obtained wholly (as it always is partially), not by an exten- 
 sion of cultivation, but by an increased application of la- 
 bour and capital to land already cultivated. 
 
 Now we have already seen that this increased applica- 
 tion of capital, other things being unaltered, is always at- 
 tended with a smaller proportional return. "We are not to 
 suppose some new agricultural invention made precisely at 
 this juncture; nor a sudden extension of agricultural skill 
 and knowledge, bringing into more general practice, just 
 then, inventions already partially in use. We are to sup- 
 pose no change, except a demand for more corn, and a con- 
 sequent rise of its price. The rise of price enables measures 
 to be taken for increasing the produce, which could not 
 have been taken with profit at the previous price. The 
 farmer uses more expensive manures, or manures land which 
 he formerly left to nature ; or procures lime or marl from a 
 distance, as a dressing for the soil ; or pulverizes or weeds it 
 more thoroughly ; or drains, irrigates, or subsoils portions 
 of it, which at former prices would not have paid the cost 
 of the operation ; and so forth. These things, or some of 
 them, are done, when, more food being wanted, cultivation 
 has no means of expanding itself upon new lands. And 
 when the impulse is given to extract an increased amount 
 of produce from the soil, the farmer or improver will only 
 consider whether the outlay he makes for the purpose will 
 be returned to him with the ordinary profit, and not wheth- 
 er any surplus will remain for rent. Even, therefore, if it 
 were the fact, that there is never any land taken into culti-
 
 RENT. 523 
 
 vation, for which rent, and that too of an amount worth 
 taking into consideration, was not paid ; it would be true, 
 nevertheless, that there is always some agricultural capital 
 which pays no rent, because it returns nothing beyond the 
 ordinary rate of profit : this capital being the portion of 
 capital last applied that to which the last addition to the 
 produce was due ; or (to express the essentials of the case 
 in one "phrase), that which is applied in the least favourable 
 circumstances. But the same amount of demand, and the 
 same price, which enable this least productive portion of 
 capital barely to replace itself with the ordinary profit, 
 enable every other portion to yield a surplus proportioned 
 to the advantage it possesses. And this surplus it is, which 
 competition enables the landlord to appropriate. The rent 
 of all land is measured by the excess of the return to the 
 whole capital employed on it above what is necessary to 
 replace the capital with the ordinary rate of profit, or in 
 other words, above what the same capital would yield if it 
 were all employed in as disadvantageous circumstances as 
 the least productive portion of it : whether that least pro^ 
 ductive portion of capital is rendered so by being em- 
 ployed on the worst soil, or by being expended in extorting 
 more produce from land which already yielded as much as 
 it could be made to part with on easier terms. 
 
 It is not pretended that the facts of any concrete case 
 conform with absolute precision to this or any other scientif- 
 ic principle. We must never forget that the truths of polit- 
 ical economy are truths only in the rough. It is not, for 
 example, strictly true that a farmer will cultivate no land, 
 and apply no capital, which returns less than the ordinary 
 profit. He will expect the ordinary profit on the bulk of 
 his capital. But when he has cast in his lot with his farm, 
 and bartered his skill and exertions, once for all, against 
 what the farm will yield to him, he will probably be will- 
 ing to expend capital on it (for an immediate return) in 
 any manner which will afford him a surplus profit, however 
 small, beyond the value of the risk, and the interest which
 
 624 BOOK H. CHAPTER XVI. 4. 
 
 he must pay for the capital if borrowed, or can get for it 
 elsewhere if it is his own. But a new farmer, entering on 
 the land, would make his calculations differently, and would 
 not commence unless he could expect the full rate of ordinary 
 profit on all the capital which he intended embarking in 
 the enterprise. Again, prices may range higher or lower 
 during the currency of a lease, than was expected when the 
 contract was made, and the land, therefore, may be over or 
 under-rented : and even when the lease expires, the land- 
 lord may be unwilling to grant a necessary diminution of 
 rent, and the farmer, rather than relinquish his occupation, 
 or seek a farm elsewhere when all are occupied, may consent 
 to go on paying too high a rent. Irregularities like these 
 we must always expect ; it is impossible in political economy 
 to obtain general theorems embracing the complications of 
 circumstances which may affect the result in an individual 
 case. When, too, the farmer class, having but little capital, 
 cultivate for subsistence rather than for profit, and do not 
 think of quitting their farm while they are able to live by 
 it, their rents approximate to the character of cottier rents, 
 and may be forced up by competition (if the number of 
 competitors exceeds the number of farms) beyond the amount 
 which will leave to the farmer the ordinary rate of profit. 
 The laws which we are enabled to lay down respecting rents, 
 profits, wages, prices, are only true in so far as the persons 
 concerned are free from the influence of any other motives 
 than those arising from the general circumstances of the 
 case, and are guided, as to those, by the ordinary mercantile 
 estimate of profit and loss. Applying this twofold supposi- 
 tion to the case of farmers and landlords, it will be true that 
 the farmer requires the ordinary rate of profit on the whole 
 of his capital ; that whatever it returns to him beyond this 
 he is obliged to pay to the landlord, but will not consent 
 to pay more ; that there is a portion of capital applied te 
 agriculture in such circumstances of productiveness as to 
 yield only the ordinary profits ; and that the difference be- 
 tween the produce of this, and of any other capital of simi-
 
 RENT. 525 
 
 lar amount, is the measure of the tribute which that other 
 capital can and will pay, under the name of rent, to the 
 landlord. This constitutes a law of rent, as near the truth 
 as such a law can possibly be : though of course modified 
 or disturbed in individual cases, by pending contracts, indi- 
 vidual miscalculations, the influence of habit, and even the 
 particular feelings and dispositions of the persons concerned. 
 
 5. A remark is often made, which must not here be 
 omitted, though, I think, more importance has been at- 
 tached to it than it merits. Under the name of rent, many 
 payments are commonly included, which are not a remuner- 
 ation for the original powers of the land itself, but for 
 capital expended" on it. The additional rent which land 
 yields in consequence of this outlay of capital, should, in the 
 opinion of some writers, be regarded as profit, not rent. 
 But before this can be admitted, a distinction must be 
 made. The annual payment by a tenant almost always in- 
 cludes a consideration for the use of the buildings on the 
 farm ; not only barns, stables, and other outhouses, but a 
 house to live in, not to speak of fences, and the like. The 
 landlord will ask, and the tenant give, for these, whatever 
 is considered sufficient to yield the ordinary profit, or rather 
 (risk and trouble being here out of the question) the ordi- 
 nary- interest, on the value of the buildings ; that is, on 
 what it has cost to erect them, or rather, on what it would 
 now cost to erect others as good : the tenant being bound, 
 in addition, to leave them in as good repair as he found 
 them, for otherwise a much larger payment than simple in- 
 terest would of course be required from him. These build- 
 ings are as distinct a thing from the farm, as the stock or 
 the timber on it ; and what is paid for them can no more 
 be called rent of land, than a payment for cattle would be, 
 if it were the custom that the landlord should stock the farm 
 for the tenant. The buildings, like the cattle, are not land, 
 but capital, regularly consumed and reproduced ; and all pay- 
 ments made in consideration for them are properly interest.
 
 526 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 6. 
 
 But with regard to capital actually sunk in improve- 
 ments, and not requiring periodical renewal, but spent once 
 for all in giving the land a permanent increase of productive- 
 ness, it appears to me that the return made to such capital 
 loses altogether the character of profits, and is governed by 
 the principles of rent. It is true that a landlord will not 
 expend capital in improving his estate, unless he expects 
 from the improvement an increase of income, surpassing the 
 interest of his outlay. Prospectively, this increase of income 
 may be regarded as profit ; but when the expense has been 
 incurred, and the improvement made, the rent of the im- 
 proved land is governed by the same rules as that of the 
 unimproved. Equally fertile land commands an equal rent, 
 whether its fertility is natural or acquired ; and I cannot 
 think that the incomes of those who own the Bedford Level 
 or the Lincolnshire Wolds, ought to be called profit and not 
 rent because those lands would have been worth next to 
 nothing unless capital had been expended on them. The 
 owners are not capitalists, but landlords ; they have parted 
 with their capital ; it is consumed, destroyed ; and neither 
 is, nor is to be, returned to them, like the capital of a farmer 
 or manufacturer, from what it produces. In lieu of it they 
 now have land, of a certain richness, which yields the same 
 rent, and by the operation of the same causes, as if it had 
 possessed from the beginning the degree of fertility which 
 has been artificially given to it. 
 
 An American political economist of reputation, Mr. H. C. 
 Carey,* takes away, still more completely than I have at- 
 tempted to do, the distinction between these two sources of 
 rent, by rejecting one of them altogether : he considers all 
 rent as the effect of capital expended. In proof of this, he 
 contends that the whole pecuniary value of all the land in 
 any country, in England for instance, or in the United States, 
 does not amount to anything approaching to the sum which 
 has been laid out, or which it would even now be necessary 
 
 * Principles of Political Economy. Part the First, " Of the Laws of the 
 Production and Distribution of Wealth."
 
 RENT. 527 
 
 to lay out, in order to bring the country to its present con- 
 dition from a state of primaeval forest. This startling state- 
 ment has been seized on by M. Bastiat and others, as a means 
 of making out a stronger case than could otherwise be made 
 in defence of property in land. Mr. Carey's proposition, in 
 its most obvious meaning, is equivalent to saying, that if 
 there were suddenly added to the lands of England an un- 
 reclaimed territory of equal natural fertility, it would not 
 be worth the while of the inhabitants of England to reclaim 
 it : because the profits of the operation would not be equal 
 to the ordinary interest on the capital expended. To which 
 assertion if any answer could be supposed to be required, it 
 would suffice to remark, that land not of equal but of greatly 
 inferior quality to that previously cultivated, is continually 
 reclaimed in England, at an expense which the subsequently 
 accruing rent is sufficient to replace completely in a small 
 number of years. 
 
 Mr. Carey, however, does not mean exactly what his 
 assertion, without his explanations, might seem to imply. 
 He does not assert that the lands of all countries, taken 
 on the average, are not worth what has been laid out in 
 improving them, and that, to the proprietors, the improve- 
 ment of land has been on the whole a miscalculation. In 
 his estimate of the capital sunk in the land, he includes all 
 which has been laid out in making roads and canals ; that 
 is, not in adding to <;he value of land already occupied, but 
 in rendering other and rival lands accessible. Even with 
 this correction, the proposition, in the only sense in which it 
 supports his conclusions, is but a few degrees less unreason- 
 able than the other. In the case supposed, of a second Eng- 
 land, of equal natural fertility, added to the first, can any 
 one doubt that those who were allowed to appropriate the 
 new land, would, in proportion as it was reclaimed and 
 brought under culture, find it answer in a pecuniary sense 
 to make the roads requisite for bringing the produce to mar- 
 ket ? Mr. Carey would probably reply that by making these 
 roads they might raise their own rents, but would certainly
 
 528 BOOK H. CHAPTER XVI. 5. 
 
 lower those of the old territory of England. This is per- 
 fectly correct, and shows the fallacy of the test assumed 
 by Mr. Carey. It is perhaps true that the whole land of 
 the world would not sell for the expense of bringing it 
 into its present state, plus the expense of making all the 
 existing communications. The tendency of improved com- 
 munications is to lower existing rents, by trenching on the 
 monopoly of the land nearest to the places where large 
 numbers of consumers are assembled. Roads and canals 
 are not constructed to raise the value of the land which 
 already supplies the markets, but (among other purposes) to 
 cheapen the supply, by letting in the produce of other and 
 more distant lands ; and the more effectually this purpose is 
 attained, the lower rent will be. If we could imagine 
 that the railways and canals of the United States, instead 
 of only cheapening communication, did their business so 
 effectually as to annihilate cost of carriage altogether, and 
 enable the produce of Michigan to reach the market of 
 New York as quickly and as cheaply as the produce of 
 Long Island the whole value of all the land of the United 
 States (except such as lies convenient for building) would 
 be annihilated ; or rather, the best would only sell for the 
 expense of clearing, and the government tax of a dollar and 
 a quarter per acre; since land in Michigan, equal to the 
 best in the United States, may be had in unlimited abun- 
 dance by that amount of outlay. But it is strange that Mr. 
 Carey should think this fact inconsistent with the Ricardo 
 theory of rent. Admitting all that he asserts, it is still true 
 that as long as there is land which yields no rent, the land 
 which does yield rent, does so in consequence of some advan- 
 tage which it enjoys, in fertility or vicinity to markets, ovei 
 the other ; and the measure of its advantage is also the meas- 
 ure of its rent. And the cause of its yielding rent, is that 
 it possesses a natural monopoly ; the quantity of land, as 
 favourably circumstanced as itself, not being sufficient to 
 supply the market. These propositions constitute the theory 
 of rent, laid down by Ricardo ; and if they are true, I cannot
 
 RENT. 529 
 
 gee that it signifies much whether the rent which the land 
 yields at the present time, is greater or less than the interest 
 of the capital which has been laid out to raise its value, 
 together with the interest of the capital which has been laid 
 out to lower its value.* 
 
 * In a more recent work, entitled " The Past, the Present, and the Future," 
 Mr. Carey takes another ground of objection to the Ricardo theory of rent, 
 namely, that in point of historical fact, the lands first brought under cultivation 
 are not the most fertile, but the barren lands. " We find the settler invariably 
 occupying the high and thin lands requiring little clearing and no drainage ; 
 those which can yield but a small return to labour ; and as invariably travelling 
 down the hills, and clearing and draining the lower and richer lands as popula- 
 tion and wealth increase When population is small, and land conse- 
 quently abundant, the work of cultivation is, and always must be, commenced 
 upon the poorer soils. With the growth of population and wealth, other soils 
 yielding a larger return to labour are always brought into activity, with a con- 
 stantly increasing return to the labour expended upon them." 
 
 It is true that the lands which require the greatest amount of clearing and 
 draining are seldom the first cultivated : it is probably the fact, that in new 
 countries cultivation usually begins on the hills, and descends from these to the 
 valleys ; and for this reason it may not unfrequently happen (though certainly 
 not by any invariable law) that the richest lands remain longer unoccupied than 
 others which are less naturally productive, even in proportion to the smaller 
 amount of labour and outlay which their cultivation requires. Mr. Carey, how- 
 ever, will hardly pretend that in any old country the uncultivated lands are 
 generally those which would pay best for cultivation. But let us even concede 
 the point, and suppose with Mr. Carey that the progress of cultivation is up- 
 wards, from the barren to the fertile lands, not downwards, from the fertile to 
 the barren ; and that the wastes (for example) of England, Scotland, and Ireland 
 are precisely the portions of those countries which are destined hereafter to be- 
 come the most largely remunerative of the labour employed on them. This, it 
 will be admitted, is no trifling concession ; but even this would form no objec- 
 tion to the law of rent as laid down in the present chapter. If Dartmoor and 
 Shap Fells are really the most fertile land in England, when they come to be 
 cultivated they will yield the highest rent, and the lands which at that time will 
 pay no rent will probablj be the Essex Levels and the Carse of Gowrie. In 
 whatever order the lands come into cultivation, those which when cultivated 
 yield the least return, in proportion to the labour required for their culture, will 
 always regulate the price of agricultural produce ; and all other lands will pay 
 a rent simply equivalent to the excess of their produce over this minimum. 
 Whatever unguarded expressions may have been occasionally used in describing 
 the law of rent, these two propositions are all that was ever intended by it. 
 
 If indeed Mr. Carey could show that the return to labour from the land, 
 agricultural skill and science being supposed the same, is not a diminishing re- 
 
 84
 
 530 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 5. 
 
 Mr. Carey's objection, however, has somewhat more of 
 ingenuity than the arguments commonly met with against 
 the theory of rent ; a theorem which may be called the pans 
 asinorum of political economy, for there are, I am inclined 
 to think, few persons who have refused their Assent to it 
 except from not having thoroughly understood it. The loose 
 and inaccurate way in which it is often apprehended by those 
 who affect to refute it, is very remarkable. Many, for in- 
 stance, have imputed absurdity to Mr. Ricardo's theory, 
 because it is absurd to say that the cultivation of inferior 
 land is the cause of rent on the superior. Mr. Ricardo 
 does not say that it is the cultivation of inferior land, but 
 the necessity of cultivating it, from the insufficiency of the 
 superior land to feed a growing population ; between which 
 and the proposition imputed to him there is no less a 
 difference than that between demand and supply. Others 
 again allege as an objection against Ricardo, that if all 
 land were of equal fertility, it might still yield a rent. But 
 Ricardo says precisely the same. He says that if all lands 
 were equally fertile, those which are nearer to their market 
 than others, and are therefore less burthened with cost of 
 carriage, would yield a rent equivalent to the advantage ; 
 and that the land yielding no rent would then be, not the 
 least fertile, but the least advantageously situated, which the 
 wants of the community required to be brought into culti- 
 vation. It is also distinctly a portion of Ricardo's doctrine, 
 that even apart from differences of situation, the land of a 
 country supposed to be of uniform fertility would, all of it, 
 on a certain supposition, pay rent, namely, if the demand of 
 the community required that it should all be cultivated, 
 and cultivated beyond the point at which a further appli- 
 cation of capital begins to be attended with a smaller propor- 
 
 turn, he would overthrow a principle much more fundamental than any law of 
 rent. But in this he has wholly failed. It is not pretended that this natural law 
 applies to a very early stage in the clearing and settlement of a country ; and in 
 this stage only have Mr. Carey's objections any shadow of foundation in the real 
 order of the facts.
 
 RENT. 531 
 
 tional return. It would be impossible to show that, except 
 by forcible exaction, the whole land of a country can yield a 
 rent on any other supposition. 
 
 % 
 6. After this view of the nature and causes of rent, 
 
 let us turn back to the subject of profits, and bring up for 
 reconsideration one of the propositions laid down in the last 
 chapter. "We there stated,- that the advances of the capi- 
 talist, or in other words, the expenses of production, consist 
 solely in wages of labour ; that whatever portion of the 
 outlay is not wages, is previous profit, and whatever is not 
 previous profit, is wages. Rent, however, being an element 
 which it is impossible to resolve into either profits or wages, 
 we were obliged, for the moment, to assume that the capi- 
 talist is not required to pay rent to give an equivalent for 
 the use of an appropriated natural agent : and I undertook 
 to show in the proper place that this is an allowable sup- 
 position, and that rent does not really form any part of the 
 expenses of production, or of the advances of the capitalist. 
 The grounds on which this assertion was made are now ap- 
 parent. It is true that all tenant farmers, and many other 
 classes of producers, pay rent. But we have now seen, that 
 whoever cultivates land, paying a rent for it, gets in return 
 for his rent an instrument of superior power to other instru- 
 ments of the same kind for which no rent is paid. The 
 superiority of the instrument is in exact proportion to the 
 rent paid for it. If a few persons had steam-engines of 
 superior power to all others in existence, but limited by 
 physical laws to a number short of the demand, the rent 
 which a manufacturer would be willing to pay for one of 
 these steam-engines could not be looked upon as an addition 
 to his outlay, because by the use of it he would save in his 
 other expenses the equivalent of what it cost him : without 
 it he could not do the same quantity of work, unless at an 
 additional expense equal to the rent. The same thing is true 
 of land. The real expenses of production are those incurred 
 on the worst land, or by the capital employed in the least
 
 532 BOOK H. CHAPTER XVI. 6. 
 
 favonrable circumstances. This land or capital pays, as we 
 have seen, no rent : but the expenses to which it is subject, 
 cause all other land or agricultural capital to be subjected 
 to an equivalent expense in the form of rent. Whoever 
 does pay rent, gets back its full value in extra advantages, 
 and the rent which he pays does not place him in a worse 
 position than, but only in the same position as, his fellow- 
 producer who pays no rent, but whose instrument is one of 
 inferior efficiency. 
 
 "We have now completed the exposition of the laws which 
 regulate the distribution of the produce of land, labour, and 
 capital, as far as it is possible to discuss those laws independ- 
 ently of the instrumentality by which in a civilized society 
 the distribution is effected ; the machinery of Exchange and 
 Price. The more complete elucidation and final confirma- 
 tion of the laws which we have laid down, and the deduction 
 of their most important consequences, must be preceded by 
 an explanation of the nature and working of that machinery 
 a subject so extensive and complicated as to require a 
 separate Book.
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 EXCHANGE.
 
 BOOK III. 
 EXCHANGE 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 OF VALUE. 
 
 1. THE subject on which we are now about to enter 
 fills so important and conspicuous a position in political 
 economy, that in the apprehension of some thinkers its 
 boundaries confound themselves with those of the science 
 itself. One eminent writer has proposed as a name for 
 Political Economy, " Catallactics, " or the science of ex- 
 changes : by others it has been called the Science of Yalues. 
 If these denominations had appeared to me logically correct, 
 I must have placed the discussion of the elementary laws of 
 value at the commencement of our enquiry, instead of post- 
 poning it to the Third Part ; and the possibility of so long 
 deferring it is alone a sufficient proof that this view of the 
 nature of Political Economy is too confined. It is true that 
 in the preceding Books we have not escaped the necessity of 
 anticipating some small portion of the theory of Yalue, espe- 
 cially as to the value of labour and of land. It is neverthe- 
 less evident, that of the two great departments of Political 
 Economy, the production of wealth and its distribution, the 
 consideration of Yalue has to do with the latter alone ; and
 
 536 BOOK III. CHAPTER I. 1. 
 
 with that, only so far as competition, and not usage or custom, 
 is the distributing agency. The conditions and laws of pro- 
 duction would be the same as they are, if the arrangements 
 of society did not depend on Exchange, or did not admit of 
 it. Even in the present system of industrial life, in which 
 employments are minutely subdivided, and all concerned in 
 production depend for their remuneration on the price of 
 a particular commodity, exchange is not the fundamental 
 law of the distribution of the produce, no more than roads 
 and carriages are the essential laws of motion, but merely a 
 part of the machinery for effecting it. To confound these 
 ideas, seems to me, not only a logical, but a practical blunder. 
 It is a case of the error too common in political economy, of 
 not distinguishing between necessities arising from the na- 
 ture of things, and those created by social arrangements : an 
 error, which appears to me to be at all times producing two 
 opposite mischiefs ; on the one hand, causing political econ- 
 omists to class the merely temporary truths of their subject 
 among its permanent and universal laws ; and on the other, 
 leading many persons to mistake the permanent laws of pro- 
 duction (such as those on which the necessity is grounded of 
 restraining population) for temporary accidents arising from 
 the existing constitution of society which those who would 
 frame a new system of social arrangements, are at liberty to 
 disregard. 
 
 In a state of society, however, in which the industrial 
 system is entirely founded on purchase and sale, each indi- 
 vidual, for the most part, living not on things in the pro- 
 duction of which he himself bears a part, but on things ob- 
 tained by a double exchange, a sale followed by a purchase 
 the question of Value is fundamental. Almost every 
 speculation respecting the economical interests of a society 
 thus constituted, implies some theory of Value : the smallest 
 error on that subject infects with corresponding error all our 
 other conclusions ; and anything vague or misty in our con- 
 ception of it, creates confusion and uncertainty in every 
 thing else. Happily, there is nothing in the laws of Value
 
 VALUE. 537 
 
 which remains for the present or any future writer to clear 
 up ; the theory of the subject is complete : the only dif- 
 ficulty to be overcome is that of so stating it as to solve by 
 anticipation the chief perplexities which occur in applying 
 it : and to do this, some minuteness of exposition, and con- 
 siderable demands on the patience of the reader, are un- 
 avoidable. He will be amply repaid, however, (if a stranger 
 to these inquiries) by the ease and rapidity with which a 
 thorough understanding of this subject will enable him to 
 fathom most of the remaining questions of political economy. 
 
 2. We must begin by settling our phraseology. Adam 
 Smith, in a passage often quoted, has touched upon the most 
 obvious ambiguity of the word value ; which, in one of its 
 senses, signifies usefulness, in another, power of purchasing ; 
 in his own language, value in use and value in exchange. 
 But (as Mr. De Quincey has remarked) in illustrating this 
 double meaning, Adam Smith has himself fallen into another 
 ambiguity. Things (he says) which have the greatest value 
 in use have often little or no value in exchange ; which is 
 true, since that which can be obtained without labour or 
 sacrifice will command no price, however useful or needful 
 it may be. But he proceeds to add, that things which 
 have the greatest value in exchange, as a diamond for ex- 
 ample, may have little or no value in use. This is em. 
 ploying the word use, not in the sense in which political 
 economy is concerned with it, but in that other sense in 
 which use is opposed to pleasure. Political economy has 
 nothing to do with the comparative estimation of different 
 uses in the judgment of a philosopher or of a moralist. The 
 use of a thing, in political economy, means its capacity to 
 satisfy a desire, or serve a purpose. Diamonds have this 
 capacity in a high degree, and unless they had it, would 
 not bear any price. Value in use, or as Mr. De Quincey 
 calls it, teleologic value, is the extreme limit of value in 
 exchange. The exchange value of a thing may fall short, to 
 any amount, of its value in use ; but that it can ever exceed
 
 538 BOOK III. CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 the value in use, implies a contradiction ; it supposes that 
 persons will give, to possess a thing, more than the utmost 
 value which they themselves put upon it, as a means of 
 gratifying their inclinations. 
 
 The word Value, when used without adjunct, always 
 means, in political ecomony, value in exchange ; or as it has 
 been called by Adam Smith and his successors, exchangeable 
 value, a phrase which no amount of authority that can be 
 quoted for it can make other than bad English. Mr. De 
 Quincey substitutes the term Exchange Yalue, which is un- 
 exceptionable. 
 
 Exchange value requires to be distinguished from Price. 
 The words Yalue and Price were used as synonymous by the 
 early political economists, and are not always discriminated 
 even by Ricardo. But the most accurate modern writers, 
 to avoid the wasteful expenditure of two good scientific terms 
 on a single idea, have employed Price to express the value of 
 a thing in relation to money ; the quantity of money for 
 which it will exchange. By the price of a thing, therefore, 
 we shall henceforth understand its value in money ; by the 
 value, or exchange value of a thing, its general power of 
 purchasing ; the command which its possession gives over 
 purchaseable commodities in general. 
 
 3. But here a fresh demand for explanation presents 
 itself. What is meant by command over commodities in 
 general ? The same thing exchanges for a greater quantity 
 of some commodities, and for a very small quantity of others. 
 A suit of clothes exchanges for a great quantity of bread, 
 and for a very small quantity of precious stones. The value 
 of a thing in exchange for some commodities may be rising, 
 for others falling. A coat may exchange for less bread this 
 year than last, if the harvest has been bad, but for more glass 
 or iron, if a tax has been taken off those commodities, or an 
 improvement made in their manufacture. Has the value of 
 the coat, under these circumstances, fallen or risen ? It is 
 impossible to say : all that can be said is, that it has fallen
 
 VALUE. 539 
 
 in relation to one thing, and risen in respect to another. 
 But there is another case, in which no one would have any 
 hesitation in saying what sort of change had taken place 
 in the value of the coat : namely, if the cause in which the 
 disturbance of exchange values originated, was something 
 directly affecting the coat itself, and riot the bread, or the 
 glass. Suppose, for example, that an invention had been 
 made in machinery, by which broadcloth could be woven at 
 half the former cost. The effect of this would be to lower 
 the value of a coat, and if lowered by this cause, it would 
 be lowered not in relation to bread only or to glass only, 
 but to all purchaseable things, except such as happened to 
 be affected .at the very time by a similar depressing cause. 
 We should therefore say, that there had been a fall in the ex- 
 change value or general purchasing power of a coat. The 
 idea of general exchange value originates in the fact, that there 
 really are causes which tend to alter the value of a thing in 
 exchange for things generally, that is, for all things which are 
 not themselves acted upon by causes of similar tendency. 
 
 In considering exchange value scientifically, it is expe- 
 dient to abstract from it all causes except those which 
 originate in the very commodity under consideration. Those 
 which originate in the commodities with which we compare 
 it, affect its value in relation to those commodities; but 
 those which originate in itself, affect its value in relation to 
 all commodities. In order the more completely to confine 
 our attention to these last, it is convenient to assume that all 
 commodities but the one in question remain invariable in 
 their relative values. When we are considering the causes 
 which raise or lower the value of corn, we suppose that 
 woollens, silks, cutlery, sugar, timber, &c., while varying in 
 their power of purchasing corn, remain constant in the pro- 
 portions in which they exchange for one another. On this 
 assumption, any one of them may be taken as a represent- 
 ative of all the rest : since in whatever manner corn varies in 
 value with respect to any one commodity, it varies in the 
 same manner and degree with respect to every other ; and
 
 54:0 BOOK III. CHAPTER 1. 4. 
 
 the upward or downward movement of its value estimated 
 in some one thing, is all that needs be considered. Its 
 money value, therefore, or price, will represent as well as 
 anything else its general exchange value, or purchasing 
 power; and from an obvious convenience, will often be 
 employed by us in that representative character ; with 
 the proviso that money itself do not vary in its general 
 purchasing power, but that the prices of all things, other 
 than that which we happen to be considering, remain 
 unaltered. 
 
 4. The distinction between Value and Price, as we 
 have now defined them, is so obvious, as scarcely to seem in 
 need of any illustration. But in political economy the 
 greatest errors arise from overlooking the most obvious 
 truths. Simple as this distinction is, it has consequences 
 with which a reader unacquainted with the subject would do 
 well to begin early by making himself thoroughly familiar. 
 The following is one of the principal. There is such a thing 
 as a general rise of prices. All commodities may rise in 
 their money price. But there cannot be a general rise of 
 values. It is a contradiction in terms. A can only rise in 
 value by exchanging for a greater quantity of B and C ; in 
 which case these must exchange for a smaller quantity of A. 
 All things cannot rise relatively to one another. If one-half 
 of the commodities in the market rise in exchange value, the 
 very terms imply a fall of the other half; and reciprocally, 
 the fall implies a rise. Things which are exchanged for one 
 another can no more all fall, or all rise, than a dozen runners 
 can each outrun all the rest, or a hundred trees all overtop 
 one another. Simple as this truth is, we shall presently 
 see that it is lost sight of in some of the most accredited 
 doctrines both of theorists and of what are called practical 
 men. And as a first specimen, we may instance the great 
 importance attached in the imagination of most people to a 
 rise or fall of general prices. Because when the price of 
 any one commodity rises, the circumstance usually indicates
 
 VALUE. 541 
 
 a rise of its value, people have an indistinct feeling when all 
 prices rise, as if all things simultaneously had risen in value, 
 and all the possessors had become enriched. That the 
 money prices of all things should rise or fall, provided 
 they all rise or fall equally, is in itself, and apart from ex- 
 isting contracts, of no consequence. It affects nobody's 
 wages, profits, or rent. Every one gets more money in the 
 one case and less in the other ; but of all that is to be bought 
 with money they get neither more nor less than before. It 
 makes no other difference than that of using more or fewer 
 counters to reckon by. The only thing which in this case is 
 really altered in value is money ; and the only persons who 
 either gain or lose are the holders of money, or those who 
 have to receive or to pay fixed sums of it. There is a dif- 
 ference to annuitants and to creditors the one way, and to 
 those who are burthened with annuities, or with debts, the 
 contrary way. There is a disturbance, in short, of fixed 
 money contracts ; and this is an evil, whether it takes place 
 in the debtor's favour or in the creditor's. But as to future 
 transactions there is no difference to any one. Let it there- 
 fore be remembered (and occasions will often arise for calling 
 it to mind) that a general rise or a general fall of values 
 is a contradiction ; and that a general rise or a general fall 
 of prices is merely tantamount to an alteration in the value 
 of money, and is a matter of complete indifference, save in so 
 far as it affects existing contracts for receiving and paying 
 fixed pecuniary amounts. 
 
 5. Before commencing the inquiry into the laws of 
 value and price, I have one further observation to make. 
 I must give warning, once for all, that the cases I contem- 
 plate are those in which values and prices are determined 
 by competition alone. In so far only as they are thus de- 
 termined, can they be reduced to any assignable law. The 
 buyers must be supposed as studious to buy cheap, as the 
 sellers to sell dear. The values and prices, therefore, to 
 which our conclusions apply, are mercantile values and
 
 542 BOOK III. CHAPTER I. 5. 
 
 prices ; such prices as are quoted in price-currents ; prices 
 in the wholesale markets, in which buying as well as selling 
 is a matter of business ; in which the buyers take pains to 
 know, and generally do know, the lowest price at which an 
 article of a given quality can be obtained ; and in which, 
 therefore, the axiom is true, that there cannot be for the 
 same article, of the same quality, two prices in the same 
 market. Our propositions will be true in a much more 
 qualified sense, of retail prices ; the prices paid in shops for 
 articles of personal consumption. For such things there 
 often are not merely two, but many prices, in different 
 shops, or even in the same shop ; habit and accident having 
 as much to do in the matter as general causes. Purchases 
 for private use, even by people in business, are not always 
 made on business principles : the feelings which come into 
 play in the operation of getting and in that of spending 
 their income, are often extremely different. Either from 
 indolence, or carelessness, or because people think it fine to 
 pay and ask no questions, three-fourths of those who can 
 afford it give much higher prices than necessary for the 
 things they consume ; while the poor often do the same 
 from ignorance and defect of judgment, want of time for 
 searching and making inquiry, and not unfrequently from 
 coercion, open or disguised. For these reasons, retail prices 
 do not follow with all the regularity which might be ex- 
 pected, the action of the causes which determine whole- 
 sale prices. The influence of those causes is ultimately felt 
 in the retail markets, and is the real source of such varia- 
 tions in retail prices as are of a general and permanent 
 character. But there is no regular or exact correspondence. 
 Shoes of equally good quality are sold in different shops at 
 prices which differ considerably ; and the price of leather 
 may fall without causing the richer class of buyers to pay 
 less for shoes. Nevertheless, shoes do sometimes fall in 
 price ; and when they do, the cause is always some such 
 general circumstance as the cheapening of leather : and 
 when leather is cheapened, even if no difference shows it-
 
 VALUE. 543 
 
 self in shops frequented by rich people, the artisan and the 
 labourer generally get their shoes cheaper, and there is a 
 visible diminution in the contract prices at which shoes are 
 delivered for the supply of a workhouse or of a regiment. 
 In all reasoning about prices, the proviso must be under- 
 stood, " supposing all parties to take care of their own in- 
 terest." Inattention to these distinctions has led to im- 
 proper applications of the abstract principles of political 
 economy, and still oftener to an undue discrediting of those 
 principles, through their being compared with a different 
 sort of facts from those which they contemplate, or which 
 can fairly be expected to accord with them.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 OF DEMAND AND SUPPLY, IN THEIR RELATION TO 
 VALUE. 
 
 1. THAT a tiling may have any value in exchange, 
 two conditions are necessary. It must be of some use ; that 
 is (as already explained) it must conduce to some purpose, 
 satisfy some desire. No one will pay a price, or part with 
 anything which serves some of his purposes, to obtain a 
 thing which serves none of them. But, secondly, the thing 
 must not only have some utility, there must also be some 
 difficulty in its attainment. " Any article whatever," says 
 Mr. De Quincey,* " to obtain that artificial sort of value 
 which is meant by exchange value, must begin by offering 
 itself as a means to some desirable purpose ; and secondly, 
 even though possessing incontestably this preliminary ad- 
 vantage, it will never ascend to an exchange value in cases 
 where it can be obtained gratuitously and without effort ; 
 of which last terms both are necessary as limitations. For 
 often it will happen that some desirable object, may be ob- 
 tained gratuitously ; stoop, and you gather it at your feet ; 
 but still, because the continued iteration of this stooping 
 exacts a laborious effort, very soon it is found, that to 
 gather for yourself virtually is not gratuitous. In the vast 
 forests of the Canadas, at intervals, wild strawberries may 
 be gratuitously gathered by shiploads : yet such is the ex- 
 haustion of a stooping posture, and of a labour so monot- 
 onous, that everybody is soon glad to resign the service 
 into mercenary hands." 
 
 * Logic of Political Economy, p. 1 3.
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 545 
 
 As was pointed out in the last chapter, the utility of a 
 thing in the estimation of the purchaser, is the extreme lim- 
 it of its exchange value : higher the value cannot ascend ; 
 peculiar circumstances are required to raise it so high. 
 This topic is happily illustrated by Mr. De Quincey. " Walk 
 into almost any possible shop, buy the first article you see ; 
 what will determine its price? In the ninety-nine cases 
 out of a hundred, simply the element D difficulty of at- 
 tainment. The other element U, or intrinsic utility, will 
 be perfectly inoperative. Let the thing (measured by its 
 uses) be, for your purposes, worth ten guineas, so that you 
 would rather give ten guineas than lose it yet, if the diffi- 
 culty of producing it be only worth one guinea, one guinea 
 is the price which it will bear. But still not the less, though 
 U is inoperative, can U be supposed absent ? By no pos- 
 sibility ; for, if it had been absent, assuredly you would not 
 have bought the article even at the lowest price. U acts 
 upon you, though it does not act upon the price. On the 
 other hand, in the hundredth case, we will suppose the cir- 
 cumstances reversed : you are on Lake Superior in a steam- 
 boat, making your way to an unsettled region 800 miles 
 a-head of civilization, and consciously with no chance at all 
 of purchasing any luxury whatsoever, little luxury or b5g 
 luxury, for the space of ten years to come. One fellow-pas- 
 senger, whom you will part with before sunset, has a power- 
 ful musical snuff-box ; knowing by experience the power 
 of such a toy over your own feelings, the magic with which 
 at times it lulls your agitations of mind, you are vehemently 
 desirous to purchase it. In the hour of leaving London 
 you had forgot to do so ; here is a final chance. But the , 
 owner, aware of your situation not less than yourself, is 
 determined to operate by a strain pushed to the very utter- 
 most upon U, upon the intrinsic work of the article in your 
 individual estimate for your individual purposes. He will 
 not hear of D as any controlling power or mitigating agency 
 in the case ; and finally, although at six guineas a-piece in 
 London or Paris you might have loaded a waggon with 
 85
 
 546 BOOK HI. CHAPTER II. 2. 
 
 such boxes, you pay sixty rather than lose it when the last 
 knell of the clock has sounded, which summons you to buy 
 now or to forfeit forever. Here, as before, only one element 
 is operative : before it was D, now it is U. But after all, 
 D was not absent, though inoperative. The inertness of D 
 allowed U to put forth its total effect. The practical com- 
 pression of D being withdrawn, U springs up like water in 
 a pump when released from the pressure of air. Yet still 
 that D was present to your thoughts, though the price was 
 otherwise regulated, is evident ; both because U and D 
 must coexist in order to found any case of exchange value 
 whatever, and because undeniably you take into very par- 
 ticular consideration this D, the extreme difficulty of attain- 
 ment (which here is the greatest possible, viz. an impossi- 
 bility) before you consent to have the price racked up to U. 
 The special D has vanished ; but it is replaced in your 
 thoughts by an unlimited D. Undoubtedly you have sub- 
 mitted to U in extremity as the regulating force of the 
 price ; but it was under a sense of D's latent presence. Yet 
 D is so far from exerting any positive force, that the retire- 
 ment of D from all agency whatever on the price this it is 
 which creates as it were a perfect vacuum, and through that 
 vacuum U rushes up to its highest and ultimate gradation." 
 This case, in which the value is wholly regulated by the 
 necessities or desires of the purchaser, is the case of strict 
 and absolute monopoly ; in which, the article desired being 
 only obtainable from one person, he can exact any equiva- 
 lent, short of the point at which no purchaser could be 
 found. But it is not a necessary consequence, even of com- 
 plete monopoly, that the value should be forced up to this 
 ultimate limit : as will be seen when we have considered 
 the law of value in so far as depending on the other ele- 
 ment, difficulty of attainment. 
 
 2. The difficulty of attainment which determines 
 value, is not always the same kind of difficulty. It some- 
 times consists in an absolute limitation of the supply.
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 54-7 
 
 There are things of which it is physically impossible to in- 
 crease the quantity beyond certain narrow limits. Such are 
 those wines which can be grown only in peculiar circum- 
 stances of soil, climate, and exposure. Such also are an- 
 cient sculptures ; pictures by the old masters ; rare books 
 or coins, or other articles of antiquarian curiosity. Among 
 such may also be reckoned houses and building-ground, in 
 a town of definite extent (such as Venice, or any fortified 
 town where fortifications are necessary to security) ; the 
 most desirable sites in any town whatever ; houses and 
 parks peculiarly favoured by natural beauty, in places where 
 that advantage is uncommon. Potentially, all land what- 
 ever is a commodity of this class ; and might be practically 
 so, in countries fully occupied and cultivated. 
 
 But there is another category, (embracing the majority 
 of all things that are bought and sold,) in which the ob- 
 stacle to attainment consists only in the labour and expense 
 requisite to produce the commodity. Without a certain la- 
 bour and expense it cannot be had : but when any one is 
 willing to incur these, there needs be no limit to the multi- 
 plication of the product. If there were labourers enough 
 and machinery enough, cottons, woollens, or linens might be 
 produced by thousands of yards for every single yard now 
 manufactured. There would be a point, no doubt, where 
 further increase would be stopped by the incapacity of the 
 earth to afford more of the material. But there is no need, 
 for any purpose of political economy, to contemplate a 
 time when this ideal limit could become a practical one. 
 
 There is a third case, intermediate between the two pre- 
 ceding, and rather more complex, which I shall at present 
 merely indicate, but the importance of which in political 
 economy is extremely great. There are commodities which 
 can be multiplied to an indefinite extent by labour and ex- 
 penditure, but not by a fixed amount of labour and expen- 
 diture. Only a limited quantity can be produced at a 
 given cost ; if more is wanted, it must be produced at a 
 greater cost. To this class, as has been often repeated,
 
 548 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 agricultural produce belongs; and generally all the rude 
 produce of the earth ; and this peculiarity is a source of 
 very important consequences ; one of which is the necessity 
 of a limit to population ; and another, the payment of 
 rent. 
 
 3. These being the three classes, in one or other of 
 which all things that are bought and sold must take their 
 place, we shall consider them in their order. And first, 
 of things absolutely limited in quantity, such as ancient 
 sculptures or pictures. 
 
 Of such things it is commonly said, that their value de- 
 pends upon their scarcity : but the expression is not suffi- 
 ciently definite to serve our purpose. Others say, with 
 somewhat greater precision, that the value depends on the 
 demand and the supply. But even this statement requires 
 much explanation, to make it a clear exponent of the rela- 
 tion between the value of a thing, and the causes of which 
 that value is an effect. 
 
 The supply of a commodity is an intelligible expression : 
 it means the quantity offered for sale ; the quantity that is 
 to be had, at a given time and place, by those who wish to 
 purchase it. But what is meant by the demand ? Not the 
 mere desire for the commodity. A beggar may desire a 
 diamond ; but his desire, however great, will have no in- 
 fluence on the price. Writers have therefore given a more 
 limited sense to demand, and have defined it, the wish to 
 possess, combined with the power of purchasing. To dis- 
 tinguish demand in this technical sense, from the demand 
 which is synonymous with desire, they call the former 
 effectual demand.* After this explanation, it is usually 
 supposed that there remains no further difficulty, and that 
 
 * Adam Smith, who introduced the expression " effectual demand," employed 
 it to denote the demand of those who are willing and able to give for the com- 
 modity what he calls its natural price, that is, the price which will enable it to 
 be permanently produced and brought to market. See his chapter on Natural 
 and Market Price (book i. chap. 7.)
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 549 
 
 the value depends upon the ratio between the effectual de- 
 mand, as thus defined, and the supply. 
 
 These phrases, however, fail to satisfy any one who re- 
 quires clear ideas, and a perfectly precise expression of 
 them. Some confusion must always attach to a phrase so 
 inappropriate as that of a ratio between two things not of 
 the same denomination. What ratio can there be between 
 a quantity and a desire, or even a desire combined with a 
 power? A ratio between demand and supply is only in- 
 telligible if by demand we mean the quantity demanded, 
 and if the ratio intended is that between the quantity de- 
 manded and the quantity supplied. But again, the quantity 
 demanded is not a fixed quantity^ even at the same time 
 and place ; it varies according to the value ; if the thing is 
 cheap, there is usually a demand for more of it than when 
 it is dear. The demand, therefore, partly depends on the 
 value. But it was before laid down that the value depends 
 on the demand. From this contradiction how shall we ex- 
 tricate ourselves ? How solve the paradox, of two things, 
 each depending upon the other ? 
 
 Though the solution of these difficulties is obvious 
 enough, the difficulties themselves are not fanciful ; and I 
 bring them forward thus prominently, because I am certain 
 that they obscurely haunt every inquirer into the subject 
 who has not openly faced and distinctly realized them. 
 Undoubtedly the true solution must have been frequently 
 given, though I cannot call to mind any one who had given 
 it before myself, except the eminently clear thinker and skil- 
 ful expositor, J. B. Say. I should have imagined, however, 
 that it must be familiar to all political economists, if the 
 writings of several did not give evidence of some want 
 of clearness on the point, and if the instance of Mr. De 
 Quincey did not prove that the complete non-recognition and 
 implied denial of it are compatible with great intellectual 
 ingenuity, and close intimacy with the subject matter. 
 
 4. Meaning, by the word demand, the quantity de-
 
 550 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 4. 
 
 manded, and remembering that this is not a fixed quantity, 
 but in general varies according to the value, let us suppose 
 that the demand at some particular time exceeds the sup- 
 ply, that is, there are persons ready to buy, at the market 
 value, a greater quantity than is offered for sale. Compe- 
 tition takes place on the side of the buyers, and the value 
 rises : but how much ? In the ratio (some may suppose) of 
 the deficiency : if the demand exceeds the supply by one- 
 third, the value rises one-third. By no means : for when the 
 value has risen one-third, the demand may still exceed the 
 supply ; there may, even at that higher value, be a greater 
 quantity wanted than is to be had ; and the competition of 
 buyers may still continue. If the article is a necessary of 
 life, which, rather than resign, people are willing to pay for 
 at any price, a deficiency of one-third may raise the price 
 to double, triple, or quadruple.* Or, on the contrary, the 
 competition may cease before the value has risen in even 
 the proportion of the deficiency. A rise, short of one-third, 
 may place the article beyond the means, or beyond the in- 
 clinations, of purchasers to the full amount. At .what 
 point, then, will the rise be arrested ? At the point, what- 
 ever it be, which equalizes the demand and the supply : at 
 the price which cuts off the extra third from the demand, or 
 brings forward additional sellers sufficient to supply it. 
 When, in either of these ways, or by a combination of both, 
 the demand becomes equal and no more than equal to the 
 supply, the rise of value will stop. 
 
 The converse case is equally simple. Instead of a de- 
 mand beyond the supply, let us suppose a supply exceeding 
 the demand. The competition will now be on the side of the 
 sellers : the extra quantity can only find a market by calling 
 
 * " The price of corn in this country has risen from 100 to 200 per cent and 
 upwards, when the utmost computed deficiency of the crops has not been more 
 than between one-sixth and one-third below an average, and when that deficiency 
 has been relieved by foreign supplies. If there should be a deficiency of the 
 crops amounting to one-third, without any surplus from a former year, and with- 
 out any chance of relief by importation, the price might rise five, six, or even 
 tenfold." Tooke's History of Prices, vol. i. pp. 135.
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 551 
 
 forth an additional demand equal to itself. This is accom- 
 plished by means of cheapness ; the value falls, and brings 
 the article within the reach of more numerous customers, or 
 induces those who were already consumers to make increased 
 purchases. The fall of value required to re-establish equal- 
 ity, is different in different cases. The kinds of things in 
 which it is commonly greatest are at the two extremities of 
 the scale ; absolute necessaries, or those peculiar luxuries, 
 the taste for which is confined to a small class. In the 
 case of food, as those who have already enough do not re- 
 quire more on account of its cheapness, but rather expend 
 in other things what they save in food, the increased 
 consumption occasioned by cheapness, carries off, as experi- 
 ence shows, only a small part of the extra supply caused by 
 an abundant harvest ; * and the fall is practically arrested 
 only when the farmers withdraw their corn, and hold it 
 back in hopes of a higher price ; or by the operations of 
 speculators who buy corn when it is cheap, and store it up 
 to be brought out when more urgently wanted. Whether 
 the demand and supply are equalized by an increased de- 
 mand, the result of cheapness, or by withdrawing a part of 
 the supply, equalized they are in either case. 
 
 Thus we see that the idea of a ratio, as between demand 
 and supply, is out of place, and has no concern in the mat- 
 ter : the proper mathematical analogy is that of an equa- 
 tion. Demand and supply, the quantity demanded and 
 the quantity supplied, will be made equal. If unequal at 
 any moment, competition equalizes them, and the manner 
 in which this is done is by an adjustment of the value. If 
 the demand increases, the value rises ; if the demand di- 
 minishes, the value falls : again, if the supply falls off, the 
 value rises ; and falls, if the supply is increased. The rise 
 or the fall continues until the demand and supply are again 
 equal to one another : and the value which a commodity 
 will bring in any market, is no other than the value which, 
 
 * See Tooke, and the Report of the Agricultural Committee of 1821.
 
 552 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 5. 
 
 in that market, gives a demand just sufficient to carry off 
 the existing or expected supply. 
 
 This, then, is the Law of Value, with respect to all com- 
 modities not susceptible of being multiplied at pleasure. 
 Such commodities, no doubt, are exceptions. There is an- 
 other law for that much larger class of things, which admit 
 of indefinite multiplication. But it is not the less necessary 
 to conceive distinctly and grasp firmly the theory of this 
 exceptional case. In the first place, it will be found to be 
 of great assistance in rendering the more common case in- 
 telligible. And in the next place, the principle of the 
 exception stretches wider, and embraces more cases, than 
 might at first be supposed. 
 
 5. There are but few commodities which are natu- 
 rally and necessarily limited in supply. But any commodity 
 whatever may be artificially so. Any commodity may be 
 the subject of a monopoly : like tea, in this country, up to 
 183i ; tobacco in France, opium in British India, at present. 
 The price of a monopolized commodity is commonly sup- 
 posed to be arbitrary ; depending on the will of the monopo- 
 list, and limited only (as in Mr. De Quincey's case of the 
 musical box in the wilds of America) by the buyer's extreme 
 estimate of its worth to himself. This is in one sense true, 
 but forms no exception, nevertheless, to the dependence of 
 the value on supply and demand. The monopolist can fix 
 the value as high as he pleases, short of what the consumer 
 either could not or would not pay ; but he can only do so 
 by limiting the supply. The Dutch East India Company 
 obtained a monopoly price for the produce of the Spice 
 Islands, but to do so they were obliged, in good seasons, to 
 destroy a portion of the crop. Had they persisted in selling 
 all that they produced, they must have forced a market by 
 reducing the price, so low, perhaps, that they would have 
 received for the larger quantity a less total return than for 
 the smaller : at least they showed that such was their opin- 
 ion by destroying their surplus. Even on Lake Superior,
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 553 
 
 Mr. De Quincey's huckster could not have sold his box for 
 sixty guineas, if he had possessed two musical boxes and 
 desired to sell them both. Supposing the cost price of each 
 to be six guineas, he would have taken seventy for the two 
 in preference to sixty for one ; that is, although his mono- 
 poly was the closest possible, he would have sold the boxes 
 at thirty-five guineas each, notwithstanding that sixty was 
 not beyond the buyer's estimate of the article for his pur- 
 poses. Monopoly value, therefore, does not depend on any 
 peculiar principle, but is a mere variety of the ordinary case 
 of demand and supply. 
 
 Again, though there are few commodities which are at 
 all times and for ever unsusceptible of increase of supply, 
 any commodity whatever may be temporarily so ; and with 
 some commodities this is habitually the case. Agricultural 
 produce, for example, cannot be increased in quantity before 
 the next harvest ; the quantity of corn already existing in 
 the world, is all that can be had for sometimes a year to 
 come. During that interval, corn is practically assimilated 
 to things of which the quantity cannot be increased. In the 
 case of most commodities, it requires a certain time to in- 
 crease their quantity; and if the demand increases, then, 
 until a corresponding supply can be brought forward, that 
 is, until the supply can accommodate itself to the demand, 
 the value will so rise as to accommodate the demand to the 
 supply. 
 
 There is another case, the exact converse of this. There 
 are some articles of which the supply may be indefinitely 
 increased, but cannot be rapidly diminished. There are 
 things so durable that the quantity in existence is at all 
 times very great in comparison with the annual produce. 
 Gold, and the more durable metals, are things of this sort ; 
 and also houses. The supply of such things might be at 
 once diminished by destroying them ; but to do this could 
 only be the interest of the possessor if he had a monopoly 
 of the article, and could repay himself for the destruction 
 of a part by the increased value of the remainder. The
 
 554 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 6. 
 
 value, therefore, of such things may continue for a long 
 time so low, either from excess of supply or falling off in 
 the demand, as to put a complete stop to further produc- 
 tion : the diminution of supply by wearing out being so 
 slow a process, that a long time is requisite, even under a 
 total suspension of production, to restore the original value. 
 During that interval the value will be regulated solely by 
 supply and demand, and will rise very gradually as the 
 existing stock wears out, until there is again a remunerating 
 value, and production resumes its course. 
 
 Finally, there are commodities of which, though capable 
 of being increased or diminished to a great, and even an 
 unlimited extent, the value never depends upon anything 
 but demand and supply. This is the case, in particular, 
 with the commodity Labour : of the value of which we have 
 treated copiously in the preceding Book : and there are 
 many cases besides in which we shall find it necessary to 
 call in this principle to solve difficult questions of exchange 
 value. This will be particularly exemplified when we treat 
 of International Values ; that is, of the terms of interchange 
 between things produced in different countries, or, to speak 
 more generally, in distant places. But into these questions 
 we cannot enter until we shall have examined the case of 
 commodities which can be increased in quantity indefinite- 
 ly and at pleasure ; and shall have determined by what 
 Law, other than that of Demand and Supply, the perma- 
 nent or average values of such commodities are regulated. 
 This we shall do in the next chapter.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF COST OF PRODUCTION, IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 
 
 1. WHEN the production of a commodity is the effect 
 of labour and expenditure, whether the commodity is sus- 
 ceptible of unlimited multiplication or not, there is a mini- 
 mum value which is the essential condition of its being per- 
 manently produced. The value at any particular time is 
 the result of supply and demand ; and is always that which 
 is necessary to create a market for the existing supply. But 
 unless that value is sufficient to repay the Cost of Produc- 
 tion, and to afford, besides, the ordinary expectation of 
 profit, the commodity will not continue to be produced. 
 Capitalists will not go on permanently producing at a loss. 
 They will not even go on producing at a profit less than 
 they can live upon. Persons whose capital is already em- 
 barked, arid cannot be easily extricated, will persevere for a 
 considerable time without profit, and have been known to 
 persevere even at a loss, in hopes of better times. But they 
 will not do so indefinitely, or when there is nothing to indi- 
 cate that times are likely to improve. No new capital will 
 be invested in an employment, unless there be an expecta- 
 tion not only of some profit, but of a profit as great (regard 
 being had to the degree of eligibility of the employment in 
 other respects) as can be hoped for in any other occupation 
 at that time and place. When such profit is evidently not 
 to be had, if people do not actually withdraw their capital, 
 they at least abstain from replacing it when consumed. 
 The cost of production, together with the ordinary profit,
 
 556 BOOK III. CHAPTER III. 1. 
 
 may therefore be called the necessary price, or value, of all 
 things made by labour and capital. v Nobody willingly pro- 
 duces in the prospect of loss. Whoever does so, does it 
 under a miscalculation, which he corrects as fast as he is 
 able. 
 
 When a commodity is not only made by labour and 
 capital, but can be made by them in indefinite quantity, 
 this Necessary Yalue, the minimum with which the pro- 
 ducers will be content, is also, if competition is free and ac- 
 tive, the maximum which they can expect. If the value of 
 a commodity is such that it repays the cost of production 
 not only with the customary but with a higher rate of profit, 
 capital rushes to share in this extra gain, and by increasing 
 the supply of the article, reduces its value. This is not a 
 mere supposition or surmise, but a fact familiar to those 
 conversant with commercial operations. Whenever a new 
 line of business presents itself, offering a hope of unusual 
 profits, and whenever any established trade or manufacture 
 is believed to be yielding a greater profit than customary, 
 there is sure to be in a short time so large a production or 
 importation of the commodity, as not only destroys the ex- 
 tra profit, but generally goes beyond the mark, and sinks 
 the value as much too low as it had before been raised too 
 high ; until the over-supply is corrected by a total or partial 
 suspension of further production. As already intimated,* 
 these variations in the quantity produced do not presuppose 
 or require that any person should change his employment. 
 Those whose business is thriving, increase their produce by 
 availing themselves more largely of their credit, while those 
 who are not making the ordinary profit, restrict their opera- 
 tions, and (in manufacturing phrase) work short time. In 
 this mode is surely and speedily effected the equalization, 
 not of profits perhaps, but of the expectations of profit, in 
 different occupations. 
 
 As a general rule, then, things tend to exchange for one 
 another at such values as will enable each producer to be 
 
 * Supra, p. 505.
 
 COST OF PRODUCTION. 557 
 
 repaid the cost of production with the ordinary profit ; in 
 other words, such as will give to all producers the same rate 
 of profit on their outlay. But in order that the profit 
 may be equal where the outlay, that is, the cost of produc- 
 tion, is equal, things must on the average exchange for one 
 another in the ratio of their cost of production ; things of 
 which the cost of production is the same, must be of the 
 same value. For only thus will an equal outlay yield an 
 equal return. If a farmer with a capital equal to 1000 
 quarters of corn, can produce 1200 quarters, yielding him a 
 profit of 20 per cent. ; whatever else can be produced in the 
 same time by a capital of 1000 quarters, must be worth, 
 that is, must exchange for, 1200 quarters, otherwise the 
 producer would gain either more or less than 20 per cent. 
 
 Adam Smith and Bicardo have called that value of a 
 thing which is proportional to its cost of production, its 
 Natural Value (or its Natural Price). They meant by this, 
 the point about which the value oscillates, and to which it 
 always tends to return ; the centre value, towards which, as 
 Adam Smith expresses it, the market value of a thing is 
 constantly gravitating ; and any deviation from which is 
 but a temporary irregularity, which, the moment it exists, 
 sets forces in motion tending to correct it. On an average 
 of years sufficient to .enable the oscillations on one side of 
 the central line to be compensated by those on the other, 
 the market value agrees with the natural value ; but it very 
 seldom coincides exactly with it at any particular time. 
 The sea everywhere tends to a level ; but it never is at an 
 exact level ; its surface is always ruffled by waves, and often 
 agitated by storms. It is enough that no point, at least in 
 the open sea, is permanently higher than another. Each 
 place is alternately elevated and depressed ; but the ocean 
 preserves its level. 
 
 2. The latent influence by which the values of things 
 are made to conform in the long run to the cost of produc- 
 tion, is the variation that would otherwise take place in the
 
 558 BOOK m - CHAPTER III. 2. 
 
 supply of the commodity. The supply would be increased 
 if the thing continued to sell above the ratio of its cost of 
 production, and would be diminished if it fell below that 
 ratio. But we must not therefore suppose it to be necessary 
 that the supply should actually be either diminished or in- 
 creased. Suppose that the cost of production of a thing is 
 cheapened by some mechanical invention, or increased by a 
 tax. The value of the thing would in a little time, if not 
 immediately, fall in the one case, and rise in the other ; and 
 it would do so, because if it did not, the supply would in 
 the one case be increased, until the price fell, in the other 
 diminished, until it rose. For this reason, and from the er- 
 roneous notion that value depends on the proportion be- 
 tween the demand and the supply, many persons suppose 
 that this proportion must be altered whenever there is any 
 change in the value of the commodity ; that the value can- 
 not fall through a diminution of the cost of production, 
 unless the supply is permanently increased ; nor rise, unless 
 the supply is permanently diminished. But this is not the 
 fact : there is no need that there should be any actual alter- 
 ation of supply ; and when there is, the alteration, if per' 
 maiient, is not the cause but the consequence of the altera- 
 tion in value. If, indeed, the supply could not be increased, 
 no diminution in the cost of production would lower the 
 value : but there is by no means any necessity that it should. 
 The mere possibility often suffices ; the dealers are aware of 
 what would happen, and their mutual competition makes 
 them anticipate the result by lowering the price. Whether 
 there will be a greater permanent supply of the commodity 
 after its production has been cheapened, depends on quite 
 another question, namely, on whether a greater quantity is 
 wanted at the reduced value. Most commonly a greater 
 quantity is wanted, but not necessarily. " A man," says Mr. 
 De Quincey,* " buys an article of instant applicability to 
 his own purposes the more readily and the more largely as 
 it happens to be cheaper. Silk handkerchiefs having fallen 
 
 * Logic of Political Economy, pp. 230 1.
 
 COST OF PRODUCTION. 559 
 
 to half-price, he will buy, perhaps, in threefold quantity ; 
 but he does not buy more steam-engines because the price 
 is lowered. His demand for steam-engines is almost always 
 predetermined by the circumstances of his situation. So 
 far as he considers the cost at all, it is much more the cost 
 of working this engine than the cost upon its purchase. 
 But there are many articles for which the market is abso- 
 lutely and merely limited by a pre-existing system, to which 
 those articles are attached as subordinate parts or members. 
 How could we force the dials or faces of timepieces by arti- 
 ficial cheapness to sell more plentifully than the inner works 
 or movements of such timepieces ? Could the sale of wine- 
 vaults be increased without increasing the sale of \dne ? Or 
 the tools of shipwrights find an enlarged market whilst ship- 
 building was stationary ? . . . Offer to a town of 3000 inhab- 
 itants a stock of hearses, no cheapness will tempt that town 
 into buying more than one. Offer a stock of yachts, the chief 
 cost lies in manning, victualling, repairing ; no diminution 
 upon the mere price to a purchaser will tempt into the 
 market any man whose habits and propensities had not al- 
 ready disposed him to such a purchase. So of professional 
 costume for bishops, lawyers, students at Oxford." Nobody 
 doubts, however, that the price and value of all these things 
 would be eventually lowered by any diminution of their 
 cost of production ; and lowered through the apprehension 
 entertained of new competitors, and an increased supply : 
 though the great hazard to which a new competitor would 
 expose himself, in any article not susceptible of any consider- 
 able extension of its market, would enable the established 
 dealers to maintain their original prices much longer than 
 they could do in an article offering more encouragement to 
 competition. 
 
 Again, reverse the case, and suppose the cost of produc- 
 tion increased, as for example by laying a tax on the commod- 
 ity. The value would rise ; and that, probably, immediately. 
 Would the supply be diminished ? Only if the increase of 
 value diminished the demand. Whether this effect followed,
 
 560 BOOK III. CHAPTER III. 2. 
 
 would soon appear, and if it did, the value would recede 
 somewhat from excess of supply, until the production was re- 
 duced, and would then rise again. There are many articles 
 for which it requires a very considerable rise of price, ma- 
 terially to reduce the demand ; in particular, articles of ne- 
 cessity, such as the habitual food of the people ; in England, 
 wheaten bread : of which there is probably almost as much 
 consumed, at the present cost price, as there would be with 
 the present population at a price considerably lower. Yet 
 it is especially in such things that dearness or high price is 
 popularly confounded with scarcity. Food may be dear 
 from scarcity, as after a bad harvest ; but the dearness (for 
 example) which is the effect of taxation, or of corn laws, has 
 nothing whatever to do with insufficient supply : such causes 
 do not much diminish the quantity of food in a country : it 
 is other things rather than food that are diminished in quan- 
 tity by them, since, those who pay more for food not having 
 so much to expend otherwise, the production of other things 
 contracts itself to the limits of a smaller demand. 
 
 It is, therefore, strictly correct to say, that the value of 
 things which can be increased in quantity at pleasure, does 
 not depend (except accidentally, and during the time neces- 
 sary for production to adjust itself,) upon demand and sup- 
 ply ; on the contrary, demand and supply depend upon it. 
 There is a demand for a certain quantity of the commodity 
 at its natural or cost value, and to that the supply in the 
 long run endeavours to conform. When at any time it fails 
 of so conforming, it is either from miscalculation, or from a 
 change in some of the elements of the problem : either in 
 the natural value, that is, in the cost of production ; or in 
 the demand, from an alteration in public taste or in the 
 number or wealth of the consumers. These causes of dis- 
 turbance are very liable to occur, and when any one of them 
 does occur, the market value of the article ceases to agree 
 with the natural value. The real law of demand and sup- 
 ply, the equation between them, holds good in all cases : if 
 a value different from the natural value be necessary to
 
 COST OF PRODUCTION. 561 
 
 make the demand equal to the supply, the market value 
 will deviate from the natural value ; but only for a time ; 
 for the permanent tendency of supply is to conform itself to 
 the demand which is found by experience to exist for the 
 commodity when selling at its natural value. If the supply 
 is either more or less than this, it is so accidentally, and 
 affords either more or less than the ordinary rate of profit ; 
 which, under free and active competition, cannot long con- 
 tinue to be the case. 
 
 To recapitulate : demand and supply govern the value 
 of all things which cannot be indefinitely increased ; except 
 that even for them, when produced by industry, there is a 
 minimum value, determined by the cost of production. But 
 in all things which admit of indefinite multiplication, de- 
 mand and supply only determine the perturbations of value, 
 during a period which cannot exceed the length of time ne- 
 cessary for altering the supply. While thus ruling the os- 
 cillations of value, they themselves obey a superior force, 
 which makes value gravitate towards Cost of Production, 
 and which would settle it and keep it there, if fresh disturb- 
 ing influences were not continually arising to make it again 
 deviate. To pursue the same strain of metaphor, demand 
 and supply always rush to an equilibrium, but the condition 
 of stable equilibrium is when things exchange for each other 
 according to their cost of production, or, in the expression 
 we have used, when things are at their Natural Value. 
 
 36
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 
 
 1. THE component elements of Cost of Production 
 have been set forth in the First Part of this enquiry.* The 
 principal of them, and so much the principal as to be nearly 
 the sole, was found to be Labour. What the production of 
 a thing costs to its producer, or its series of producers, is 
 the labour expended in producing it. If we consider as the 
 producer the capitalist who makes the advances, the word 
 Labour may be replaced by the word Wages : what the 
 produce costs to him, is the wages which he has had to 
 pay. At the first glance indeed this seems to be only a 
 part of his outlay, since he has not only paid wages to la- 
 bourers, but has likewise provided them with tools, materi- 
 als, and perhaps buildings. These tools, materials, and 
 buildings, however, were produced by labour and capital ; 
 and their value, like that of the article to the production of 
 which they are subservient, depends on cost of production, 
 which again is resolvable into labour. The cost of produc- 
 tion of broadcloth does not wholly consist in the wages of 
 weavers ; which alone are directly paid by the cloth manu- 
 facturer. It consists also of the wages of spinners and wool- 
 combers, and it may be added, of shepherds, all of which 
 the clothier has paid for in the price of yarn. It consists 
 too of the wages of builders and brickinakers, which he has 
 reimbursed in the contract price of erecting his factory. It 
 partly consists of the wages of machine-makers, iron-found- 
 
 * Supra, pp. 53 5.
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 563 
 
 ers, and miners. And to these must be added the wages 
 of the carriers who transported any of the means and appli- 
 ances of the production to the place where they were to be 
 used, and the product itself to the place where it is to be 
 sold. 
 
 The value of commodities, therefore, depends principally 
 (we shall presently see whether it depends solely) on the 
 quantity of labour required for their production ; including 
 in the idea of production, that of conveyance to the market. 
 " In estimating," says Ricardo,* " the exchangeable value 
 of stockings, for example, we shall find that their value, 
 comparatively with other things, depends on the total quan- 
 tity of labour necessary to manufacture them and bring them 
 to market. First, there is the labour necessary to cultivate 
 the land on which the raw cotton is grown ; secondly, the 
 labour of conveying the cotton to the country where the 
 stockings are to be manufactured, which includes a portion 
 of the labour bestowed in building the ship in which it is 
 conveyed, and which is charged in the freight of the goods ; 
 thirdly, the labour of the spinner and weaver ; fourthly, a 
 portion of the labour of the engineer, smith, and carpenter, 
 who erected the buildings and machinery by the help of 
 which they are made ; fifthly, the labour of the retail deal- 
 er, and of many others, whom it is unnecessary further to 
 particularize. The aggregate sum of these various kinds of 
 labour, determines the quantity of other things for which 
 these stockings will exchange, while the same consideration 
 of the various quantities of labour which have been bestowed 
 on those other things, will equally govern the portion of 
 them which will be given for the stockings. 
 
 " To convince ourselves that this is the real foundation 
 of exchangeable value, let us suppose any improvement to 
 be made in the means of abridging labour in any one of the 
 various processes through which the raw cotton must pass 
 before the manufactured stockings come to the market to 
 be exchanged for other things ; and observe the effects 
 
 * Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ch, i, sect. 3.
 
 564 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 2. 
 
 which will follow. If fewer men were required to cultivate 
 the raw cotton, or if fewer sailors were employed in naviga- 
 ting, or shipwrights in constructing, the ship in which it was 
 conveyed to us ; if fewer hands were employed in raising 
 the buildings and machinery, or if these, when raised, were 
 rendered more efficient ; the stockings would inevitably fall 
 in value, and command less of other things. They would 
 fall, because a less quantity of labour was necessary to 
 their production, and would therefore exchange for a smaller 
 quantity of those things in which no such abridgment of 
 labour had been made. 
 
 " Economy in the use of labour never fails to reduce the 
 relative value of a commodity, whether the saving be in the 
 labour necessary to the manufacture of the commodity it- 
 self, or in that necessary to the formation of the capital, by 
 the aid of which it is produced. In either case the price of 
 stockings would fall, whether there were fewer men em- 
 ployed as bleachers, spinners, and weavers, persons immedi- 
 ately necessary to their manufacture ; or as sailors, carriers, 
 engineers, and smiths, persons more indirectly concerned. 
 In the one case, the whole saving of labour would fall on 
 the stockings, because that portion of labour was wholly 
 confined to the stockings ; in the other, a portion only 
 would fall on the stockings ; the remainder being applied ' o 
 all those other commodities, to the production of which the 
 buildings, machinery, and carriage, were subservient." 
 
 2. It will have been observed that Ricardo expresses 
 himself as if the quantity of labour which it costs to pn> 
 duce a commodity and bring it to market, were the only 
 thing on which its value depended. But since the cost of 
 production to the capitalist is not labour but wages, and 
 since wages may be either greater or less, the quantity of 
 labour being the same ; it would seem that the value of the 
 product cannot be determined solely by the quantity of la- 
 bour, but by the quantity together with the remuneration ; 
 and that values must partly depend on wages.
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 565 
 
 In order to decide this point, it must be considered, that 
 value is a relative term ; that the value of a commodity is 
 not a name for an inherent and substantive quality of the 
 thing itself, but means the quantity of other things which 
 can be obtained in exchange for it. The value of one thing, 
 must always be understood relatively to some other thing 
 or to things in general. Now the relation of one thing to 
 another cannot be altered by any cause which affects them 
 both alike,, A rise or fall of general wages is a fact which 
 aifects all commodities in the same manner, and therefore 
 affords no reason why they should exchange for each other 
 in one rather than in another proportion. To suppose that 
 high wages make high values, is to suppose that there can 
 be such a thing as general high values. But this is a con- 
 tradiction in terms : the high value of some things is syno- 
 nymous with the low value of others. The mistake arises 
 from not attending to values, but only to prices. Though 
 there is no such thing as a general rise of values, there 
 is such a thing as a general rise of prices. As soon 
 as we form distinctly the idea of values, we see that high 
 or low wages can have nothing to do with them ; but that 
 high _wages_make high jprices, is a popular and widely- 
 spread opinion. The whole amount of error involved in this 
 proposition can only be seen thoroughly when we come to 
 the theory of money ; at present we need only say that if it 
 be true, there can be no such thing as a real rise of wages ; 
 for if wages could not rise without a proportional rise of the 
 price of everything, they could not, for any substantial pur) 
 pose, rise at all. This surely is a sufficient reductio ad db-\ 
 surdum, and shows the amazing folly of the propositions 1 
 which may and do become, and long remain, accredited/ 
 doctrines of popular political economy. It must be remenp 
 bered, too, that general high prices, even supposing them to 
 exist, can be of no use to a producer or dealer, considered 
 as such ; for if they increase his money returns, they in- 
 crease in the same degree all his expenses. There is no 
 mode in which capitalists can compensate themselves for a
 
 566 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 high cost of labour, through any action on values or prices. 
 It cannot be prevented from taking its effect in low profits. 
 If the labourers really get more, that is, get the produce of 
 more labour, a smaller percentage must remain for profit. 
 From this Law of Distribution, resting as it does on a law 
 of arithmetic, there is no escape. The mechanism of Ex- 
 change and Price may hide it from us, but is quite power- 
 less to alter it. 
 
 ; 
 
 3. Although, however, general wages, whether high 
 or low, do not affect values, yet if wages are higher in one 
 employment than another, or if they rise or fall permanent- 
 ly in one employment without doing so in others, these in- 
 equalities do really operate upon values. The causes which 
 make wages vary from one employment to another, have 
 been considered in a former chapter. When the wages of 
 an employment permanently exceed the average rate, the 
 value of the thing produced will, in the same degree, exceed 
 the standard determined by mere quantity of labor. Things, 
 for example, which are made by skilled labour, exchange 
 for the produce of a much greater quantity of unskilled la- 
 bour ; for no reason but because the labour is more highly 
 paid. If, through the extension of education, the labourers 
 competent to skilled employments were so increased in 
 number as to dimmish the difference between their wages 
 and those of common labour, all things produced by labour 
 of the superior kind would fall in value, compared with 
 things produced by common labour, and these 'might be 
 said therefore to rise in value. We have before remarked 
 that the difficulty of passing from one class of employments 
 to a class greatly superior, has hitherto caused the wages 
 of all those classes of labourers who are separated from one 
 another by any very marked barrier, to depend more than 
 might be supposed upon the increase of the population of 
 each class, considered separately ; and that the inequalities 
 in the remuneration of labour are much greater than could 
 exist if the competition of the labouring people generally
 
 . 
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 567 
 
 could be brought practically to bear on each particular em- 
 ployment. It follows from this that wages in different em- 
 ployments do not rise or fall simultaneously, but are, for 
 short and sometimes even for long periods, nearly inde- 
 pendent of one another. All such disparities evidently alter 
 the relative cost of production of different commodities, and 
 will therefore be completely represented in their natural or 
 average value. 
 
 It thus appears that the maxim laid down by some of 
 the best political economists, that wages do not enter into 
 value, is expressed with greater latitude than the truth war- 
 rants, or than accords with their own meaning. Wages do ' 
 enter into value. The relative wages of the labour necessary 
 for producing different commodities, affect their value just 
 as much as the relative quantities of labour. It is true, the 
 absolute wages paid have no effect upon values ; but neither 
 has the absolute quantity of labour. If that were to vary 
 simultaneously and equally in all commodities, values would 
 not be affected. If, for instance, the general efficiency of 
 all labour were increased, so that all things without excep- 
 tion could be produced in the same quantity as before with 
 a smaller amount of labour, no trace of this general diminu- 
 tion of cost of production would show itself in the values of 
 commodities. Any change which might take place in them 
 would only represent the unequal degrees in which 'the im- 
 provement affected different things ; and would consist in 
 cheapening those in which the saving of labour had been 
 the greatest, while those in which there had been some, but 
 a less saving of labour, would actually rise in value. In 
 strictness, therefore, wages of labour have as much to do 
 with value as quantity of labour : and neither Ricardo nor 
 any one else has denied the fact. In considering, however, 
 the causes of variations in value, quantity of labour is the 
 thing of chief importance ; for when that varies, it is gen- 
 erally in one or a few commodities at a time, but the varia- 
 tions of wages (except passing fluctuations) are usually gen- 
 eral, and have no considerable effect on value.
 
 568 BOOK HI- CHAPTER IV. 4. 
 
 4. Thus far of labour, or wages, as an element in 
 cost of production. But in our analysis, in the First Book, 
 of the requisites of production, we found that there is an- 
 other necessary element in it besides labour. There is also 
 capital ; and this being the result of abstinence, the produce, 
 or its value, must be sufficient to remunerate, not only all 
 the labour required, but the abstinence of all the persons by 
 whom the remuneration of the different classes of labourers 
 was advanced. The return from abstinence is Profit. And 
 profit, we have also seen, is not exclusively the surplus re- 
 maining to the capitalist after he has been compensated for 
 his outlay, but forme, in most cases, no unimportant part 
 of the outlay itself. The flax-spinner, part of whose ex- 
 penses consists of the purchase of flax and of machinery, has 
 had to pay, in their price, not only the wages of the labour 
 by which the flax was grown and the machinery made, but 
 the profits of the grower, the flax-dresser, the miner, the 
 iron-founder, and the machine-maker. All these profits, to- 
 gether with those of the spinner himself, were again ad- 
 vanced by the weaver, in the price of his material, linen 
 yarn : and along with them the profits of a fresh set of ma- 
 chine-makers, and of the miners and iron-workers who sup- 
 plied them with their metallic material. All these advances 
 form part of the cost of production of linen. Profits, there- 
 fore, as well as wages, enter into the cost of production 
 which determines the value of the produce. 
 
 Value, however, being purely relative, cannot depend 
 upon absolute profits, no more than upon absolute wages, but 
 upon relative profits only. High general profits cannot, any 
 more than high general wages, be a cause of high values, 
 because high general values are an absurdity and a contra- 
 diction. In so far as profits enter into the cost of produc- 
 tion of all things, they cannot affect the value of any. It is 
 only by entering in a greater degree into the cost of produc- 
 tion of some things than of others, that they can have any 
 influence on value. 
 
 For example, we have seen that there are causes which
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 56!) 
 
 necessitate a permanently higher rate of profit in certain em- 
 ployments than in others. There must be a compensation 
 for superior risk, trouble, and disagreeableness. This can 
 only be obtained by selling the commodity at a value above 
 that which is due to the quantity of labour necessary for its 
 production. If gunpowder exchanged for other things in 
 no higher ratio than that of the labour required from first to 
 last for producing it, no one would set up a powder-mill. 
 Butchers are certainly a more prosperous class than bakers, 
 and do not seem to be exposed to greater risks, since it is 
 not remarked that they are oftener bankrupts. They seem, 
 therefore, to obtain higher profits, which can only arise from 
 the more limited competition caused by the unpleasant- 
 ness, and to a certain degree, the unpopularity of their 
 trade. But this higher profit implies that they sell their 
 commodity at a higher value than that due to their labour 
 and outlay. All inequalities of profit which are necessary 
 and permanent, are represented in the relative values of the 
 commodities. 
 
 5. Profits, however, may enter more largely into the 
 conditions of production of one commodity than of another, 
 even though there be no difference in the rate of profit be- 
 tween the two employments. The one commodity may be 
 called upon to yield profit during a longer period of time 
 than the other. The example by which this case is usually 
 illustrated is that of wine. Suppose a quantity of wine, and 
 a quantity of cloth, made by equal amounts of labour, and 
 that labour paid at the same rate. The cloth does not im- 
 prove by keeping ; the wine does. Suppose that, to attain 
 the desired quality, the wine requires to be kept five years. 
 The producer or dealer will not keep it, unless at the end 
 of five years he can sell it for as much more than the cloth, 
 as amounts to five years profit, accumulated at compound 
 interest. The wine and the cloth were made by the same 
 original outlay. Here then is a case in which the natural 
 values, relatively to one another, of two commodities, do
 
 570 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 5. 
 
 not conform to their cost of production alone, but to their 
 cost of production plus something else. Unless, indeed, for 
 the sake of generality in the expression, we include the 
 profit which the wine-merchant foregoes during the five 
 years, in the cost of production of the wine : looking upon 
 it as a kind of additional outlay, over and above his other 
 advances, for which outlay he must be indemnified at last. 
 
 All commodities made by machinery are assimilated, at 
 least approximately, to the wine in the preceding example. 
 In comparison with things made wholly by immediate la- 
 bour, profits enter more largely into their cost of produc- 
 tion. Suppose two commodities, A and B, each requiring 
 a year for its production, by means of a capital which we 
 will on this occasion denote by money, and suppose it to be 
 1000Z. A is made wholly by immediate labour, the whole 
 1000Z. being expended directly in wages. B is made by 
 means of labour which cost 5001. and a machine which cost 
 500L, and the machine is worn out by one year's use. The 
 two commodities will be of exactly the same value which, 
 if computed in money, and if profits are 20 per cent per 
 annum, will be 1200Z. But of this 1200/., in the case of A, 
 only 200Z., or one-sixth, is profit : while in the case of B 
 there is not only the 2001., but as much of 5001. (the price 
 of the machine) as consisted of the profits of the machine- 
 maker ; which, if we suppose the machine also to have taken 
 a year for its production, is again one-sixth. So that in the 
 case of A only one-sixth of the entire return is profit, whilst 
 in B the element of profit comprises not only a sixth of the 
 whole, but an additional sixth of a large part. 
 
 The greater the proportion of the whole capital which 
 consists of machinery, or buildings, or material, or anything 
 else which must be provided before the immediate labour 
 can commence, the more largely will profits enter into the 
 cost of production. It is equally true, though not so obvious 
 at first sight, that greater durability in the portion of capi- 
 tal which consists of machinery or buildings, has precisely 
 the same effect as a greater amount of it. As we just sup-
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 57J 
 
 posed one extreme case, of a machine entirely worn out by 
 a year's use, let us now suppose the opposite and still more 
 extreme case of a machine which lasts for ever, and requires 
 no repairs. In this case, which is as well suited for the pur- 
 pose of illustration as if it were a possible one, it will be un- 
 necessary that the manufacturer should ever be repaid the 
 500?. which he gave for the machine, since he has always 
 the machine itself, worth 500?. ; but he must be paid, as be- 
 fore, a profit on it. The commodity B, therefore, which in 
 the case previously supposed was sold for 1200?. of which 
 sum 1000?. were to replace the capital and 2001. were profit, 
 can now be sold for 700?., being 500?. to replace wages, and 
 2001. profit on the entire capital. Profit, therefore, enters 
 into the value of B in the ratio of 200?. out of YOO?., being 
 two-sevenths of the whole, or 28 4 per cent., while in the 
 case of A, as before, it enters only in the ratio of one-sixth, 
 or 16| per cent. The case is of course purely ideal, since no 
 machinery or other fixed capital lasts for ever ; but the 
 more durable it is, the nearer it approaches to this ideal 
 case, and the more largely does profit enter into the return. 
 If, for instance, a machine worth 500?. loses one-fifth of its 
 value by each year's use, 100?. must be added to the return 
 to make up this loss, and the price of the commodity will 
 be 800?. Profit therefore will enter into it in the ratio 
 of 200?. to 800?., or one-fourth, which is still a much 
 higher proportion than one-sixth, or 200?. in 1200?., as in 
 case A. 
 
 From the unequal proportion in which, in different em- 
 ployments, profits enter into the advances of the capitalist, 
 and therefore into the returns required by him, two conse- 
 quences follow in regard to value. One is, that commodi- 
 ties do not exchange in the ratio simply of the quantities of 
 labour required to produce them ; not even if we allow for 
 the unequal rates at which different kinds of labour are per- 
 manently remunerated. We have already illustrated this 
 by the example of wine : we shall now further exemplify it 
 by the case of commodities made by machinery. Suppose,
 
 572 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV 5. 
 
 as before, an article A made by a thousand pounds' worth 
 of immediate labour. But instead of B, made by 500Z. 
 worth of immediate labour and a machine worth 500., let 
 us suppose C, made by 500Z. worth of immediate labour 
 with the aid of a machine which has been produced by an- 
 other 5001. worth of immediate labour : the machine requir- 
 ing a year for making, and worn out by a year's use ; profits 
 being as before 20 per cent. A and C are made by equal 
 quantities of labour, paid at the same rate : A costs WOOL 
 worth of direct labour ; C, only 5001. worth, which however 
 is made up to WOOL by the labour expended in the con- 
 struction of the machine. If labour, or its remuneration, 
 were the sole ingredient of cost of production, these two 
 things would exchange for one another. But will they do 
 so ? Certainly not. The machine having been made in a 
 year by an outlay of 500Z., and profits being 20 per cent., 
 the natural price of the machine is 600Z. : making an addi- 
 tional 1001. which must be advanced, over and above his 
 other expenses, by the manufacturer of C, and repaid to him 
 with a profit of 20 per cent. While, therefore, the commo- 
 dity A is sold for 1200Z., C cannot be permanently sold for 
 less than 1320Z. 
 
 A second consequence is, that every rise or fall of gen-, 
 eral profits will have an effect on values. Not indeed by 
 raising or lowering them generally (which, as we have so of- 
 ten said, is a contradiction and an impossibility) : but by al- 
 tering the proportion in which the values of things are af- 
 fected by the unequal lengths of time for which profit is due. 
 When two things, though made by equal labour, are of un- 
 equal value because the one is called upon to yield profit 
 for a greater number of years or months than the other ; 
 this difference of value will be greater when profits are 
 greater, and less when they are less. The wine which has 
 to yield five years profit more than the cloth, will surpass it 
 in value much more if profits are 40 per cent., than if they 
 are only 20. The commodities A and C, which, though 
 made by equal quantities of labour, were sold for 1200Z. and
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 573 
 
 1320., a difference of 10 per cent., would, if profits had been 
 only half as much, have been sold for 1100Z. and 1155Z. a 
 difference of only 5 per cent. 
 
 It follows from this, that even a general rise of wages, 
 when it involves a real increase in the cost of labour, does 
 in some degree influence values. It does not affect them in 
 the manner vulgarly supposed, by raising them universally. 
 But an increase in the cost of labour, lowers profits ; and 
 therefore lowers in natural values the things into which 
 profits enter in a greater proportion than the average, and 
 raises those into which they enter in a less proportion than 
 the average. All commodities in the production of which 
 machinery bears a large part, especially if the machinery is 
 very durable, are lowered in their relative value when 
 profits fall ; or, what is equivalent, other things are raised 
 in value relatively to them. This truth is sometimes ex- 
 pressed in a phraseology more plausible than sound, by 
 saying that a rise of wages raises the value of things made 
 by labour, in comparison with those made by machinery. 
 But things made by machinery, just as much as any other 
 things, are made by labour, namely the labour which made 
 the machinery itself : the only difference being that profits 
 enter somewhat more largely into the production of things 
 for which machinery is used, though the principal item of 
 the outlay is still labour. It is better, therefore, to associate 
 the effect with fall of profits than with rise of wages ; es- 
 pecially as this last expression is extremely ambiguous, sug- 
 gesting the idea of an increase of the labourer's real remu- 
 neration, rather than of what is alone to the purpose here, 
 namely, the cost of labour to its employer. 
 
 6. Besides the natural and necessary elements in cost 
 of production labour and profits there are others which 
 are artificial and casual, as for instance a tax. The taxes on 
 hops and malt are as much a part of the cost of production 
 of those articles, as the wages of the labourers. The ex- 
 penses which the law imposes, as well as those which tho
 
 BOOK HI. CHAPTER IV. 6. 
 
 nature of tilings imposes, must be reimbursed with the or- 
 dinary profit from the value of the produce, or the things 
 will not continue to be produced. But the influence of tax- 
 ation on value is subject to the same conditions as the influ- 
 ence of wages and of profits. It is not general taxation, but 
 differential taxation, that produces the effect. If all produc- 
 tions were taxed so as to take an equal percentage from all 
 profits, relative values would be in no way disturbed. If only 
 a few commodities were taxed, their value would rise : and if 
 only a few were left untaxed, their value would fall. If half 
 were taxed and the remainder untaxed, the first half would 
 rise and the last would fall relatively to each other. This> 
 would be necessary in order to equalize the expectation of 
 profit in all employments, without which the taxed employ- 
 ments would ultimately, if not immediately, be abandoned. 
 But general taxation, when equally imposed, and not dis- 
 turbing the relations of different productions to one another, 
 cannot produce any effect on values. 
 
 We have thus far supposed that all the means and ap- 
 pliances which enter into the cost of production of commo- 
 dities, are things whose own value depends on their cost of 
 production. Some of them, however, may belong to the 
 class of things which cannot be increased ad libitum in 
 quantity, and which therefore, if the demand goes beyond a 
 certain amount, command a scarcity value. The materials 
 of many of the ornamental articles manufactured in Italy 
 are the substances called rosso, giallo, and verde antico, 
 which, whether truly or falsely I know not, are asserted to 
 be solely derived from the destruction of ancient columns 
 and other ornamental structures ; the quarries from which 
 the stone was originally cut being exhausted, or their local- 
 ity forgotten.* A material of such a nature, ifjin much 
 demand, must be at a scarcity value ; and this value enters 
 into the cost of production, and, consequently, into the value 
 of the finished article. The time seems to be approaching 
 
 * Some of these quarries, I believe, have been rediscovered, and are again 
 worked.
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 575 
 
 when the more valuable furs will come under the influence 
 of a scarcity value of the material. Hitherto the diminish- 
 ing number of the animals which produce them, in the wil- 
 dernesses of Siberia and on the coasts of the Esquimaux 
 Sea, has operated on the value only through the greater la- 
 bour which has become necessary for securing any given 
 quantity of the article, since, without doubt, by employing 
 labour enough, it might still be obtained in much greater 
 abundance for some time longer. 
 
 But the case in which scarcity value chiefly operates in 
 adding to cost of production, is the case of natural agents. 
 These, when unappropriated, and to be had for the taking, 
 do not enter into cost of production, save to the extent 
 of the labour which may be necessary to fit them for use. 
 Even when appropriated, they do not (as we have already 
 seen) bear a value from the mere fact of the appopriation, 
 but only from scarcity, that is, from limitation of supply. 
 But it is equally certain that they often do bear a scarcity 
 value. Suppose a fall of water, in a place where there are 
 more mills wanted than there is water-power to supply ; 
 the use of the fall of water will have a scarcity value, suffi- 
 cient either to bring the demand down to the supply, or to 
 pay for the creation of an artificial power, by steam or 
 otherwise, equal in efficiency to the water-power. 
 
 A natural agent being a possession in perpetuity, and 
 being only serviceable by the products resulting from its 
 continued employment, the ordinary mode of deriving ben- 
 efit from its ownership is by an annual equivalent, paid by 
 the person who uses it, from the proceeds of its use. This 
 equivalent always might be, and generally is, termed rent. 
 The question, therefore, respecting the influence which the 
 appropriation of natural agents produces on values, is often 
 stated in this form : Does Rent enter into Cost of Produc- 
 tion ? and the answer of the best political economists is in 
 the negative. The temptation is strong to the adoption of 
 these sweeping expressions, even by those who are aware 
 of the restrictions with which they must be taken ; for there
 
 576 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 6. 
 
 is no denying that they stamp a general principle mor6 
 firmly on the mind, than if it were hedged round in theory 
 with all its practical limitations. But they also puzzle and 
 mislead, and create an impression unfavourable to political 
 economy, as if it disregarded the evidence of facts. No one 
 can deny that rent sometimes enters into cost of production. 
 If I buy or rent a piece of ground, and build a cloth manu- 
 factory on it, the ground-rent forms legitimately a part of 
 my expenses of production, which must be repaid by the 
 product. And since all factories are built on ground, and 
 most of them in places where ground is peculiarly valuable, 
 the rent paid for it must, on the average, be compensated in 
 the values of all things made in factories. In what sense it 
 is true that rent does not enter into the cost of production 
 or affect the value of agricultural produce, will be shown in 
 the succeeding chapter.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 OF RENT, IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 
 
 1. WE have investigated the laws which determine 
 the value of two classes of commodities : the small class 
 which, being limited to a definite quantity, have their value 
 entirely determined by demand and supply, save that their 
 cost of production (if they have any) constitutes a minimum 
 below which they cannot permanently fall ; and the large 
 class, which can be multiplied ad libitum by labour and 
 capital, and of which the cost of production fixes the maxi- 
 mum as well as the minimum at which they can perma- 
 nently exchange. But there is still a third kind of commo- 
 dities to be considered : those which have, not one, but sev- 
 eral costs of production ; which can always be increased in 
 quantity by labour and capital, but not by the same amount 
 of labour and capital ; of which so much may be produced 
 at a given cost, but a further quantity not without a greater 
 cost. These commodities form an intermediate class, par- 
 taking of the character of both the others. The principal 
 of them is agricultural produce. We have already made 
 abundant reference to the fundamental truth, that in agri- 
 culture, the state of the art being given, doubling the la- 
 bour does not double the produce; that if an increased 
 quantity of produce is required, the additional supply is ob- 
 tained at a greater cost than the first. Where a hundred 
 quarters of corn are all that is at present required from the 
 lands of a given village, if the growth of population made it 
 necessary to raise a hundred more, either by breaking up 
 87
 
 578 BOOK III. CHAPTER V. 1. 
 
 worse land now uncultivated, or by a more elaborate culti- 
 vation of the land already under the plough, the additional 
 hundred, or some part of them at least, might cost double 
 or treble as much per quarter as the former supply. 
 
 If the first hundred quarters were all raised at the same 
 expense (only the best land being cultivated) ; and if that 
 expense would be remunerated with the ordinary profit by 
 a price of 20*. the quarter ; the natural price of wheat, so 
 long as no more than that quantity was required, would be 
 20s. ; and it could only rise above, or fall below that price, 
 from vicissitudes of seasons, or other casual variations in 
 supply. But if the population of the district advanced, a 
 time would arrive when more than a hundred quarters 
 would be necessary to feed it. We must suppose that there 
 is no access to any foreign supply. By the hypothesis, no 
 more than a hundred quarters can be produced in the dis- 
 trict, unless by either bringing worse land into cultivation, 
 or altering the system of culture to a more expensive one. 
 Neither of these things will be done without a rise in price. 
 This rise of price will gradually be brought about by the in- 
 creasing demand. So long as the price has risen, but not 
 risen enough to repay with the ordinary profit the cost of 
 producing an additional quantity, the increased value of the 
 limited supply partakes of the nature of a scarcity value. 
 Suppose that it will not answer to cultivate the second best 
 land, or land of the second degree of remoteness, for a less 
 return than 255. the quarter ; and that this price is also 
 necessary to remunerate the expensive operations by which 
 an increased produce might be raised from land of the first 
 quality. If so, the price will rise, through the increased de- 
 mand, until it reaches 25s. That will now be the natural 
 price ; being the price without which the quantity, for 
 which society has a demand at that price, will not be pro- 
 duced. At that price, however, society can go on for some 
 time longer ; could go on perhaps for ever, if population 
 did not increase. The price, having attained that point, 
 will not again permanently recede (though it may fall tern-
 
 RENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 579 
 
 porarily from accidental abundance) ; nor will it advance 
 further, so long as society can obtain the supply it requires 
 without a second increase of the cost of production. 
 
 I have made use of Price in this reasoning, as a conve- 
 nient symbol of Value, from the greater familiarity of the 
 idea ; and I shall continue to do so as far as may appear to 
 be necessary. 
 
 In the case supposed, different portions of the supply of 
 corn have different costs of production. Though the 20, or 
 50, or 150 quarters additional have been produced at a cost 
 proportional to 25s., the original hundred quarters per an- 
 num are still produced at a cost only proportional to 20*. 
 This is self-evident, if the original and the additional supply 
 are produced on different qualities of land. It is equally true 
 if they are produced on the same land. Suppose that land of 
 the best quality, which produced 100 quarters at 20s., has 
 been made to produce 150 by an expensive process, whicli it 
 would not answer to undertake without a price of 25s. The 
 cost which requires 25s. is incurred for the sake of 50 quar- 
 ters alone : the first hundred might have continued for ever 
 to be produced at the original cost, and with the benefit, on 
 that quantity, of the whole rise of price caused by the in- 
 creased demand : no one, therefore, will incur the additional 
 expense for the sake of the additional fifty, unless they alone 
 will pay for the whole of it. The fifty, therefore, will be 
 produced at their natural price, proportioned to the cost of 
 their production ; while the other hundred will now bring in 
 5s. a quarter more than their natural price than the price 
 corresponding to, and sufficing to remunerate, their lower cost 
 of production. 
 
 If the production of any, even the smallest, portion of 
 the supply, requires as a necessary condition a certain price, 
 that price will be obtained for all the rest. We are not able 
 to buy one loaf cheaper than another because the corn from 
 which it was made, being grown on a richer soil, has cost 
 less to the grower. The value, therefore, of an article 
 (meaning its natural, which is the same with its average
 
 580 BOOK HI. CHAPTER V. 2. 
 
 value) is determined by the cost of that portion of the sup- 
 ply which is produced and brought to market at the great- 
 est expense. This is the Law of Value of the third of the 
 three classes into which all commodities are divided. 
 
 2. If the portion of produce raised in the most un- 
 favourable circumstances, obtains a value proportioned to 
 its cost of production ; all the portions raised in more fa- 
 vourable circumstances, selling as they must do at the same 
 value, obtain a value more than proportioned to their cost 
 of production. Their value is not, correctly speaking, a 
 scarcity value, for it is determined by the circumstances of 
 the production of the commodity, and not by the degree of 
 dearness necessary for keeping down the demand to the 
 level of a limited supply. The owners, however, of those 
 portions of the produce enjoy a privilege ; they obtain a 
 value which yields them more than the ordinary profit. If 
 this advantage depends upon any special exemption, such as 
 being free from a tax, or upon any personal advantages, 
 physical or mental, or any peculiar process only known to 
 themselves, or upon the possession of a greater capital than 
 other people, or upon various other things which might be 
 enumerated, they retain it to themselves as an extra gain, 
 over and above the general profits of capital, of the nature, 
 in some sort, of a monopoly profit. But when, as in the 
 case which we are more particularly considering, the ad- 
 vantage depends on the possession of a natural agent of 
 peculiar quality, as for instance of more fertile land than 
 that which determines the general value of the commodity ; 
 and when this natural agent is not owned by themselves ; 
 the person who does own it, is able to exact from them, in 
 the form of rent, the whole extra gain derived from its use. 
 We are thus brought by another road to the Law of Rent, 
 investigated in the concluding cjiapter of the Second Book. 
 Rent, we again see, is the difference between the unequal 
 returns to different parts of the capital employed on the 
 soil. Whatever surplus any portion of agricultural capital
 
 RENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 581 
 
 produces, beyond what is produced by the same amount of 
 capital on the worst soil, or under the most expensive mode 
 of cultivation, which the existing demands of society compel 
 a recourse to ; that surplus will naturally be paid as rent from 
 that capital, to the owner of the land on which it is employed. 
 
 It was long thought by political economists, among the 
 rest even by Adam Smith, that the produce of land is al- 
 ways at a monopoly value, because (they said) in addition 
 to the ordinary rate of profit, it always yields something 
 further for rent. This we now see to be erroneous. A 
 thing cannot be at a monopoly value, when its supply can 
 be increased to an indefinite extent if we are only willing to 
 incur the cost. If no more corn than the existing quantity 
 is grown, it is because the value has not risen high enough 
 to remunerate any one for growing it. Any land (not re 
 served for other uses, or for pleasure) which at the existing 
 price, and by the existing processes, will yield the ordinary 
 profit, is tolerably certain, unless some artificial hindrance 
 intervenes, to be cultivated, although nothing may be left 
 lor rent. As long as there is any land fit for cultivation, 
 which at the existing price cannot be profitably cultivated 
 at all, there must be some land a little better, which will 
 yield the ordinary profit, but allow nothing for rent : and 
 that land, if within the boundary of a farm, will be culti- 
 vated by the farmer ; if not so, probably by the proprietor, 
 or by some other person on sufferance. Some such land at 
 least, under cultivation, there can scarcely fail to be. 
 
 Rent, therefore, forms no part of the cost of production 
 which determines the value of agricultural produce. Cir- 
 cumstances no doubt may be conceived in which it might 
 do so, and very largely too. We can imagine a country so 
 fully peopled, and with all its cultivable soil so completely 
 occupied, that to produce any additional quantity would re- 
 quire more labour than the produce would feed : and if we 
 suppose this to be the condition of the whole world, or of a 
 country debarred from foreign supply, then, if population 
 continued increasing, both the land and its produce would
 
 582 BOOR III. CHAPTER V. 2. 
 
 really rise to a monopoly or scarcity price. But this state 
 of things never can have really existed anywhere, unless 
 possibly in some small island cut off from the rest of the 
 world ; nor is there any danger whatever that it should 
 exist. It certainly exists in no known region at present. 
 Monopoly, we have seen, can take effect on value, only 
 through limitation of supply. In all countries of any extent 
 there is more cultivable land than is yet cultivated ; and 
 while there is any such surplus, it is the same thing, so far 
 as that quality of land is concerned, as if there were an in- 
 finite quantity. What is practically limited in supply is 
 only the better qualities ; and even for those, so much rent 
 cannot be demanded as would bring in the competition of 
 the lands not yet in cultivation ; the rent of a piece of land 
 must be somewhat less than the whole excess of its produc- 
 tiveness over that of the best land which it is not yet profit- 
 able to cultivate ; that is, it must be about equal to the 
 excess above the worst land which it is profitable to culti- 
 vate. The land or the capital most unfavourably circum- 
 stanced among those actually employed, pays no rent ; and 
 that land or capital determines the cost of production which 
 regulates the value of the whole produce. Thus rent is, as 
 we have already seen, no cause of value, but the price of 
 the privilege which the inequality of the returns to different 
 portions of agricultural produce confers on all except the 
 least favoured portion. 
 
 Eent, in short, merely equalizes the profits of different 
 farming capitals, by enabling the landlord to appropriate 
 all extra gains occasioned by superiority of natural advan- 
 tages. If all landlords were unanimously to forego their 
 rent, they would but transfer it to the farmers, without 
 benefiting the consumer ; for the existing price of corn 
 would still be an indispensable condition of the production 
 of part of the existing supply, and if a part obtained that 
 price the whole would obtain it. Rent, therefore, unless 
 artificially increased by restrictive laws, is no burthen on 
 the consumer : it does not raise the price of corn, and is no
 
 RENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 583 
 
 otherwise a de'riment to the public, than inasmuch as if the 
 state had retained it, or imposed an equivalent in the shape 
 of a land-tax, it would then have been a fund applicable to 
 general instead of private advantage. 
 
 3. Agricultural productions are not the only com- 
 modities which have several different costs of production at 
 once, and which, in consequence of that difference, and in 
 proportion to it, afford a rent. Mines are also an instance. 
 Almost all kinds of raw material extracted from the interior 
 of the earth metals, coals, precious stones, &c., are ob- 
 tained from mines differing considerably in fertility, that is, 
 yielding very different quantities of the product to the same 
 quantity of labour and capital. This being the case, it is 
 an obvious question, why are not the most fertile mines so 
 worked as to supply the whole market ? No such question 
 can arise as to land ; it being self-evident, that the most fer- 
 tile lands could not possibly be made to supply the whole 
 demand of a fully-peopled country ; and even of what they 
 do yield, a part is extorted from them by a labour and out- 
 lay as great as that required to grow the same amount on 
 worse land. But it is not so with mines ; at least, not uni- 
 versally. There are, perhaps, cases in which it is impossi- 
 ble to extract from a particular vein, in a given time, more 
 than a certain quantity of ore, because there is only a lim- 
 ited surface of the vein exposed, on which more than a cer- 
 tain number of labourers cannot be simultaneously em- 
 ployed. But this is not true of all mines. In collieries, for 
 example, some other cause of limitation must be sought for. 
 In some instances the owners limit the quantity raised, in 
 order not too rapidly to exhaust the mine : in others there 
 are said to be combinations of owners, to keep up a mo- 
 nopoly price by limiting the production. Whatever be the 
 causes, it is a fact that mines of different degrees of richness 
 are in operation, and since the value of the produce must be 
 proportional to the cost of production at the worst mine (fer- 
 tility and situation taken together), it is more than proper
 
 584 BOOK III. CHAPTER V. 3, 
 
 tional to that of the best. All mines superior in produce to 
 the worst actually worked, will yield, therefore, a rent equal 
 to the excess. They may yield more ; and the worst mine 
 may itself yield a rent. Mines being comparatively few, 
 their qualities do not graduate gently into one another, as 
 the qualities of land do ; and the demand may be such as to 
 keep the value of the produce considerably above the cost 
 of production at the worst mine now worked, without being 
 sufficient to bring into operation a still worse. During the 
 interval, the produce is really at a scarcity value. 
 
 Fisheries are another example. Fisheries in the open 
 sea are not appropriated, but fisheries in lakes or rivers 
 almost always are so, and likewise oyster-beds or other par- 
 ticular fishing grounds on coasts. We may take salmon 
 fisheries as an example of the whole class. Some rivers are 
 far more productive in salmon than others. None, how- 
 ever, without being exhausted, can supply more than a very 
 limited demand. The demand of a country like England 
 can only be supplied by taking salmon from many different 
 rivers of unequal productiveness, and the value must be 
 sufficient to repay the cost of obtaining the fish from the 
 least productive of these. All others, therefore, will if 
 appropriated afford a rent equal to the value of their 
 superiority. Much higher than this it cannot be, if there 
 are salmon rivers accessible which from distance or inferior 
 productiveness have not yet contributed to supply the 
 market. If there are not, the value, doubtless, may rise to 
 a scarcity rate, and the worst fisheries in use may then yield 
 a considerable rent. 
 
 Both in the case of mines and of fisheries, the natural 
 order of events is liable to be interrupted by the opening of 
 a new mine, or a new fishery, of superior quality to some 
 of those already in use. The first effect of such an incident 
 is an increase of the supply ; which of course lowers the 
 value to call forth an increased demand. This reduced 
 value may be no longer sufficient to remunerate the worst 
 of the existing mines or fisheries, and these may consequent-
 
 RENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 585 
 
 ly be abandoned. If the superior mines or fisheries, with 
 the addition of the one newly opened, produce as much of 
 the commodity as is required at the lower value correspond- 
 ing to their lower cost of production, the fall of value will 
 be permanent, and there will be a corresponding fall in the 
 rents of those mines or fisheries which are not abandoned. 
 In this case, when things have permanently adjusted them- 
 selves, the result will be, that the scale of qualities which 
 supply the market will have been cut short at the lower 
 end, while a new insertion will have been made in the scale 
 at some point higher up ; and the worst mine or fishery in 
 use the one which regulates the rents of the superior qual- 
 ities and the value of the commodity will be a mine or 
 fishery of better quality than that by which they were pre- 
 viously regulated. 
 
 Land is used for other purposes than agriculture, espe- 
 cially for residence ; and when so used, yields a rent, deter- 
 mined by principles similar to those already laid down. 
 The ground rent of a building, and the rent of a garden or 
 park attached to it, will not be less than the rent which the 
 same land would afford in agriculture : but may be greater 
 than this to an indefinite amount ; the surplus being either 
 in consideration of beauty or of convenience, the conve- 
 nience often consisting in superior facilities for pecuniary 
 gain. Sites of remarkable beauty are generally limited in 
 supply, and therefore, if in great demand, are at a scarcity 
 value. Sites superior only in convenience are governed as 
 to their value by the ordinary principles of rent. The 
 ground rent of a house in a small village is but little higher 
 than the rent of a similar patch of ground in the open 
 fields : but that of a shop in Cheapside will exceed these, 
 by the whole amount at which people estimate the superior 
 facilities of money-making in the more crowded place. The 
 rents of wharfage, dock and harbour room, water-power, and 
 many other privileges, may be analysed on similar principles. 
 
 4. Cases of extra profit analogous to rent, are more
 
 586 BOOK m - CHAPTER V. 4. 
 
 frequent in the transactions of industry than is sometimes 
 supposed. Take the case, for example, of a patent, or ex- 
 clusive privilege for the use of a process by which cost of 
 production is lessened. If the value of the product con- 
 tinues to be regulated by what it costs to those who are 
 obliged to persist in the old process, the patentee will make 
 an extra profit equal to the advantage which his process 
 possesses over theirs. This extra profit is essentially similar 
 to rent, and sometimes even assumes the form of it ; the 
 patentee allowing to other producers the use of his privilege, 
 in consideration of an annual payment. So long as he, and 
 those whom he associates in the privilege, do not produce 
 enough to supply the whole market, so long the original 
 cost of production, being the necessary condition of produ- 
 cing a part, will regulate the value of the whole ; and the 
 patentee will be enabled to keep up his rent to a full equiv- 
 alent for the advantage which his process gives him. In 
 the commencement indeed he will probably forego a part 
 of this advantage for the sake of underselling others : the 
 increased supply which he brings forward will lower the 
 value, and make the trade a bad one for those who do not 
 share in the privilege : many of whom therefore will gradu- 
 ally retire, or restrict their operations, or enter into arrange- 
 ments with the patentee : as his supply increases theirs will 
 diminish, the value meanwhile continuing slightly de- 
 pressed. But if he stops short in his operations before the 
 market is wholly supplied by the new process, things will 
 again adjust themselves to what was the natural value be- 
 fore the invention was made, and the benefit of the improve- 
 ment will accrue solely to the patentee. 
 
 The extra gains which any producer or dealer obtains 
 through superior talents for business, or superior business 
 arrangements, are very much of a similar kind. If all hia 
 competitors had the same advantages, and used them, the 
 benefit would be transferred to their customers, through the 
 diminished value of the article : he only retains it for hinix 
 self because he is able to bring his commodity to market at
 
 BENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 587 
 
 a lower cost, while its value is determined by a higher. All 
 advantages, in fact, which one competitor has over another, 
 whether natural or acquired, whether personal or the result 
 of social arrangements, bring the commodity, so far, into the 
 Third Class, and assimilate the possessor of the advantage 
 to a receiver of rent. Wages and profits represent the uni- 
 versal elements in production, while rent may be taken to 
 represent the differential and peculiar : any difference in 
 favour of certain producers, or in favour of production in 
 certain circumstances, being the source of a gain, which, 
 though not called rent unless paid periodically by one per- 
 son to another, is governed by laws entirely the same with 
 it. The price paid for a differential advantage in producing 
 a commodity, cannot enter into the general cost of produc- 
 tion of the commodity. 
 
 A commodity may, no doubt, in some contingencies, 
 yield a rent even under the most disadvantageous circum- 
 stances of its production ; but only when it is, for the time, 
 in the condition of those commodities which are absolutely 
 limited in supply, and is therefore selling at a scarcity 
 value ; which never is, nor has been, nor can be, a perma- 
 nent condition of any of the great rent-yielding commodi- 
 ties : unless through their approaching exhaustion, if they 
 are mineral products (coal, for example), or through an in- 
 crease of population, continuing after a further increase of 
 production becomes impossible ; a contingency, which the 
 almost inevitable progress of human culture and improve- 
 ment in the long interval which has first to elapse, forbids 
 us to consider as probable.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SUMMARY OF THE THEORY OF VALUE. 
 
 1. WE have now attained a favourable point for 
 looking back, and taking a simultaneous view of the space 
 which we have traversed since the commencement of the 
 present Book. The following are the principles of the 
 theory of Value, so far as we have yet ascertained them. 
 
 I. Value is a relative term. The value of a thing 
 means the quantity of some other thing, or of things in 
 general, which it exchanges for. The values of all things 
 can never, therefore, rise or fall simultaneously. There is 
 no such thing as a general rise or a general fall of values. 
 Every rise of value supposes a fall, and every fall a rise. 
 
 II. The temporary or market value of a thing, depends 
 on the demand and supply ; rising as the demand rises, and 
 falling as the supply rises. The demand, however, varies 
 with the value, being generally greater when the thing is 
 cheap than when it is dear ; and the value always adjusts 
 itself in such a manner, that the demand is equal to the 
 supply. 
 
 III. Besides their temporary value, things have also a 
 permanent, or as it may be called, a Natural Value, to 
 which the market value, after every variation, always tends 
 to return ; and the oscillations compensate for one another, 
 BO that, on the average, commodities exchange at about 
 their natural value. 
 
 IV. The natural value of some things is a scarcity 
 value : but most things naturally exchange for one another
 
 SUMMARY OF THE THEORY OF VALUE. 589 
 
 In the ratio of their cost of production, or at what may be 
 termed their Cost Value. 
 
 V. The things which are naturally and permanently at 
 a scarcity value, are those of which the supply cannot be 
 increased at all, or not sufficiently to satisfy the whole of 
 the demand which would exist for them at their cost value. 
 
 VI. A monopoly value means a scarcity value. Monop- 
 oly cannot give a value to anything, except through a lim- 
 itation of the supply. 
 
 VII. Every commodity of which the supply can be in- 
 definitely increased by labour and capital, exchanges for 
 other things proportionally to the cost necessary for pro- 
 ducing and bringing to market the most costly portion of 
 the supply required. The natural value is synonymous 
 with the Cost Value, and the cost value of a thing, means 
 the cost value of the most costly portion of it. 
 
 VIII. Cost of Production consists of several elements, 
 some of which are constant and universal, others occasional. 
 The universal elements of cost of production are, the wages 
 of the labour, and the profits of the capital. The occasional 
 elements are, taxes, and any extra cost occasioned by a 
 scarcity value of some of the requisites. 
 
 IX. Rent is not an element in the cost of production of 
 the commodity which yields it ; except in the case (rather 
 conceivable than actually existing) in which it results from, 
 and represents, a scarcity value. But when land capable 
 of yielding rent in agriculture is applied to some other 
 purpose, the rent which it would have yielded is an element 
 in the cost of production of the commodity which it is em- 
 ployed to produce. 
 
 X. Omitting the occasional elements ; things which ad- 
 mit of indefinite increase, naturally and permanently ex- 
 change for each other according to the comparative amount 
 of wages which must be paid for producing them, and the 
 comparative amount of profits which must be obtained by 
 the capitalists who pay those wages. 
 
 XI. The comparative amount of wages does not depend
 
 590 BOOK III. CHAPTER VI. 1. 
 
 on what wages are in themselves. High wages do not 
 make high values, nor low wages low values. The com- 
 parative amount of wages depends partly on the compara- 
 tive quantities of labour required, and partly on the com- 
 parative rates of its remuneration. 
 
 XII. So, the comparative rate of profits does not depend 
 on what profits are in themselves ; nor do high or low profits 
 make high or low values. It depends partly on the compar- 
 ative lengths of time during which the capital is employed, 
 and partly on the comparative rate of profits in different em- 
 ployments. 
 
 XIII. If two things are made by the same quantity of 
 labour, and that labour paid at the same rate, and if the 
 wages of the labourer have to be advanced for the same 
 space of time, and the nature of the employment does not 
 require that there be a permanent difference in their rate 
 of profit ; then, whether wages and profits be high or low, 
 and whether the quantity of labour expended be much or 
 little, these two things will, on the average, exchange for 
 one another. 
 
 XIY. If one of two things commands, on the average, a 
 greater value than the other, the cause must be that it re- 
 quires for its production either a great quantity of labour, or 
 a kind of labour permanently paid at a higher rate ; or that 
 the capital, or part of the capital, which supports that la- 
 bour, must be advanced for a longer period ; or lastly, that 
 the production is attended with some circumstance which 
 requires to be compensated by a permanently higher rate 01 
 profit. 
 
 XV. Of these elements, the quantity of labour required 
 for the production is the most important : the effect of the 
 others is smaller, though none of them are insignificant. 
 
 XVI. The lower profits are, the less important become 
 the minor elements of cost of production, and the less do 
 commodities deviate from a value proportioned to the quan- 
 tity and quality of the labour required for their production. 
 
 XVII. But every fall of profits lowers, in some degree,
 
 SUMMARY OF THE THEORY OF VALUE. 591 
 
 the cost value of things made with much or durable machin- 
 ery, and raises that of things made by hand ; and every rise 
 of profits does the reverse. 
 
 2. Such is the general theory of Exchange Yalue. 
 It is necessary, however, to remark that this theory contem- 
 plates a system of production carried on by capitalists for 
 profit, and not by labourers for subsistence. In proportion 
 as we admit this last supposition and in most countries we 
 must admit it, at least in respect of agricultural produce, to 
 a very great extent such of the preceding theorems as 
 relate to the dependence of value on cost of production will 
 require modification. Those theorems are all grounded on 
 the supposition, that the producer's object and aim is to 
 derive a profit from his capital. This granted, it follows that 
 he must sell his commodity at the price which will afford 
 the ordinary rate of profit, that is to say, it must exchange 
 for other commodities at its cost value. But the peasant pro- 
 prietor, the metayer, and even the peasant-farmer or allot- 
 ment-holder the labourer, under whatever name, producing 
 on his own account is seeking, not an investment for 
 his little capital, but an advantageous employment for his 
 time and labour. His disbursements, beyond his own mainte- 
 nance and that of his family, are so small, that nearly the 
 whole proceeds of the sale of the produce are wages of 
 labour. "When he and his family have been fed from the 
 produce of the farm (and perhaps clothed with materials 
 grown thereon, and manufactured in the family) he may, in 
 respect of the supplementary remuneration derived from the 
 sale of the surplus produce, be compared to those labourers 
 who, deriving their subsistence from an independent source, 
 can afford to sell their labour at any price which is to their 
 minds worth the exertion. A peasant, who supports himself 
 and his family with one portion of his produce, will often 
 sell the remainder very much below what would be its cost 
 value to the capitalist. 
 
 There is however, even in this case, a minimum, or
 
 592 BOOK III. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 inferior limit, of value. The produce which he carries to 
 market, must bring in to him the value of all necessaries 
 which he is compelled to purchase ; and it must enable him 
 to pay his rent. Rent, under peasant cultivation, is not 
 governed by the principles set fortli in the chapters imme- 
 diately preceding, but is either determined by custom, as in 
 the case of metayers, or, if fixed by competition, depends on 
 the ratio of population to land. Rent, therefore, in this case 
 is an element of cost of production. The peasant must work 
 until he has cleared his rent and the price of all purchased 
 necessaries. After this, he will go on working only if he can 
 sell the produce for such a price as will overcome his aversion 
 to labour. 
 
 The minimum just mentioned is what the peasant mus< 
 obtain in exchange for the whole of his surplus produce 
 But inasmuch as this surplus is not a fixed quantity, but maj 
 be either greater or less according to the degree of his indus- 
 try, a minimum value for the whole of it does not give any 
 minimum value for a definite quantity of the commodity. 
 In this state of things, therefore, it can hardly be said, that 
 the value depends at all on cost of production. It depends 
 entirely on demand and supply, that is, on the proportion 
 between the quantity of surplus food which the peasants 
 choose to produce, and the numbers of the non-agricultural, 
 or rather of the non-peasant population. If the buying class 
 were numerous and the growing class lazy, food might be 
 permanently at a scarcity price. I am not aware that this 
 case has anywhere a real existence. If the growing class is 
 energetic and industrious, and the buyers few, food will bo 
 extremely cheap. This also is a rare case, though somo 
 parts of France perhaps approximate to it. The common 
 cases are, either that, as in Ireland until lately, the peasant 
 class is indolent and the buyers few, or the peasants indus- 
 trious and the town population numerous and opulent, as in 
 Belgium, the north of Italy, and parts of Germany. The price 
 of the produce will adjust itself to these varieties of circum- 
 stances, unless modified, as in many cases it is, by the corn-
 
 SUMMARY OF THE THEORY OF VALUE. 593 
 
 petition of producers who are not peasants, or by the prices 
 of foreign markets. 
 
 3. Another anomalous case is that of slave-grown pro- 
 duce : which presents, however, by no means the same degree 
 of complication. The slave-owner is a capitalist, and his 
 inducement to production consists in a profit on his capital. 
 This profit must amount to the ordinary rate. In respect to 
 his expenses, he is in the same position as if his slaves were 
 free labourers working with their present efficiency, and were 
 hired with wages equal to their present cost. If the cost is 
 less in proportion to the work done, than the wages of free 
 labour would be, so much the greater are his profits : but if all 
 other producers in the country possess the same advantage, 
 the values of commodities will not be at all affected by it. 
 The only case in which they can be affected, is when the 
 privilege of cheap labour is confined to particular branches 
 of production, free labourers at proportionally higher wages 
 being employed in the remainder. In this case, as in all 
 cases of permanent inequality between the wages of dif- 
 ferent employments, prices and values receive the impress 
 of the inequality. Slave-grown will exchange for non-slave- 
 grown commodities in a less ratio than that of the quantity 
 of labour required for their production ; the value of the 
 former will be less, of the latter greater, than if slavery did 
 not exist. 
 
 The further adaptation of the theory of value to the 
 varieties of existing or possible industrial systems may be 
 left with great advantage to the intelligent reader. It is 
 well said by Montesquieu, " II ne faut pas toujours tellement 
 cpuiser un sujet, qu'on ne laisse rien a faire au lecteur. II 
 ne s'agit pas de faire lire, mais de faire penser. " 
 
 * Esprit des Lois, liv. xi. adfinem.
 
 APPENDIX.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 IN 1846 there appeared an elaborate treatise,* by two 
 authors, MM. Mounier and Rubichon, the latter of whom 
 was by his own statement a public functionary for ten years 
 preceding the French Revolution, and both appear to take 
 their ideas of a wholesome state of society from the institu- 
 tions and practices of the middle ages. In this book it is 
 maintained, that while French writers and administrators 
 are in a conspiracy to represent their country as making 
 rapid strides in prosperity, the progress of the morcellement 
 is in fact reducing it to beggary. An imposing array of 
 official details, adduced in apparent support of this assertion, 
 gave a degree of weight to it which it could not claim from 
 any correctness of information or capacity of judgment 
 shown by its authors. Their work was cried up as a book 
 of authority by the Quarterly Review^ in an article which 
 excited some notice by proclaiming, on the evidence pro- 
 duced by these writers, that " in a few years the Code 
 Napoleon will be employed in dividing fractions of square 
 inches of land, and deciding by logarithms infinitesimal in- 
 heritances." As such representations ought not to be with- 
 out a permanent answer, I think it worth while to subjoin 
 the substance of three articles in the Morning Chronicle, 
 containing as complete a refutation of these writers and of 
 their reviewer, partly from their own materials, as appears 
 to be either merited or required. 
 
 * De PAgriculture en France, d'apres les Documents officials. Par M. L. 
 Mounier, avec des Remarques par M. Rubichon. Paris, 1846. 
 f For December, 184
 
 598 APPENDIX. 
 
 Substance (with omissions and corrections) of three articles 
 in the Morning Chronicle of llth, 13th, and 16th Janu- 
 ary, 1847, in reply to MM. Mounier and B-ubichon and 
 to the Quarterly Review, on the Subdivision of Landed 
 Property in France. 
 
 THE reviewer makes an extraordinary slip at the threshold of his 
 subject, in estimating the extent to which the morcellement has actu 
 ally proceeded. He finds it stated, that among nearly five millions 
 and a half of landed proprietors, there are 2,600,000 the revenue 
 of whose land, as rated to the land-tax, does not exceed forty shil- 
 lings, which sum, he very candidly says, should rather be sixty, as 
 the rated value is very much lower than the real value. On this he 
 exclaims, " There already exist in France millions of examples that 
 a proprietaire may be poorer than a peasant. . . . 2,600,000 
 families, comprising 13,000,000 persons, of each of which families the 
 rated income does not exceed forty shillings, but say sixty shillings 
 sterling, for the maintenance of five persons and these are proprie- 
 tors ! The poorest day labourer would earn four times as much." 
 He seems actually to suppose that these small proprietors, like great 
 landlords, live only upon the rent of their land, forgetting that they 
 have its whole produce. He might have known from the very docu- 
 ments he has quoted, and might have guessed if he had not known, 
 that the forty shillings at which the land is rated in the collector's 
 books are not the gross produce of the little estate, but its net prod- 
 uce ; the surplus beyond the expenses of cultivation ; which expenses 
 include the subsistence of the cultivators, together with interest on 
 the capital. The reviewer himself shows that the rated revenue of 
 all the landed property of France is about 4 per cent of its rated 
 value, and does not therefore much exceed a reasonable rent. A 
 writer who can mistake this for the whole income of a peasant culti- 
 vating his own land, gives the measure of his competency for the 
 subject, and of the degree of attention he has paid to it. 
 
 We will now attempt to discover, from the reviewer's data and 
 those of his authors, what may really be the condition of these 
 2,600,000 proprietors. As the French Government estimates the 
 land-tax at one-tenth of the revenue of the land, proprietors rated at
 
 APPENDIX. 599 
 
 2 (or 50 francs) pay, it is to be presumed, five francs. The aver- 
 age of the contribution fonciere for all France is 2 francs per hectare, 
 and in the southern half of the kingdom, which is the most divided, 
 two francs. A hectare being about 2 English acres, this gives from 
 five to between six and seven acres as the portion of land which falls 
 to the lot of each of the reviewer's forty -shilling or sixty-shilling free- 
 holders. But, it may be said, this is not the average but the maxi- 
 mum of their possessions. We will therefore take another estimate 
 grounded on official documents, from the reviewer's authorities, 
 MM. Mounier and Rubichon. " It is hardly credible," they say, 
 " that there are in France more than four millions of proprietors so 
 poor, that they pay no more than 5f. 95c." (say 6f.) " to the contri- 
 bution fonciere." In this case the 5f. 95c. are certainly the average. 
 Six francs of land-tax correspond to six acres per family on the 
 average of all France, and to seven and a half on that of the south- 
 ern division, which contains the greatest proportion of small pro- 
 prietors. A still more favourable result is given by the calculations 
 of M. Lullin de Chateauvieux, a much better authority than these 
 authors, who estimates the average holdings of the 3,900,000 poorest 
 proprietors at eight acres and a half. Now, take any one of these 
 computations in a fertile country like France, suppose as bad an 
 agriculture as exists anywhere in Western Europe, and then judge 
 whether a single family, industrious and economical as the French 
 of the poorer classes are, and enjoying the entire produce of from five 
 to eight and a half acres, subject to a payment of only tenpence an 
 acre to the Government, can be otherwise than in a very desirable 
 condition ? We do not forget that the land is sometimes mortgaged 
 for part of the purchase money, and the reviewer makes a great cry 
 about the tremendous encumbrances by which the land of France is 
 weighed down ; not amounting, however, on his own showing, to 
 forty per cent on the rental, which we should think is as favourable 
 a return as could be made by any landed aristocracy in Europe. 
 The interest on the mortgages of all France is estimated at twenty- 
 four millions sterling for one hundred and fourteen millions of acres 
 less than five shillings per acre. The owner of from five to eight 
 acres could afford to pay double this amount, and be very well off. 
 
 We are aware that this is an average, and that four millions of 
 properties, averaging, according to M. de Chzlteauvieux, eight acres 
 and a half, imply a great number of proprietors who have less. But
 
 600 APPENDIX. 
 
 there must be a proportional (though not an equal) number who 
 have more ; and it must not be supposed that this statement includes 
 the large properties, one of which would be enough to keep up the 
 average against a hundred extremely small ones. No properties are 
 included which pay so much as twenty francs land-tax, correspond- 
 ing on the average of France to twenty acres on that of the south 
 to twenty-five. When it is considered that of the whole soil of 
 France only a third * is in the hands of peasant proprietors, and that 
 this third is not more subdivided than we now see, it will probably 
 be thought that hitherto at least, the mischiefs of subdivision have 
 not reached a very formidable height. 
 
 [Facts of a less conjectural character than the above have been 
 afforded by the researches of M. de Lavergne. Of five millions of 
 small rural proprietors, three millions, at least, according to that high 
 authority, pay less than ten francs of taxes, and possess, on an aver- 
 age, only one hectare (2 J acres). Two millions pay from ten to fifty 
 francs, and possess, on an average, six hectares, or fifteen acres. These 
 last, says M. de Lavergne, " enjoy sometimes a real affluence. Their 
 properties are divided by inheritance ; but many of them are continu- 
 ally making new acquisitions by purchase, and on the whole their 
 tendency is more to rise than to descend in the scale of wealth." Re- 
 specting the amount of debts with which the peasant properties are en- 
 cumbered, the facts are highly and unexpectedly favourable. By the 
 latest authentic returns, the average indebtedness of the entire landed 
 property of France, does not, according to M. de Lavergne, exceed 
 one-tenth of the value ; and in the case of rural property, it is only 
 half that average, or one-twentieth. The burthen of interest he esti- 
 mates, not at 40 per cent on the rental, but at 10 per cent only ; and 
 even this, he thinks, would now be an overstatement, " car les der- 
 nieres crises ont amene une tendance generale vers une liquidation."!] 
 
 But it is not what France now is, so much as what she is becom- 
 ing, that is the material point. Is the morcellement increasing, or 
 likely to increase ? The apologists of the French system have never 
 denied that the land in many parts of France is too minutely di- 
 vided. What they deny is, that this is a growing evil. They assert 
 that the subdivision has reached its height, and that the reunions, by 
 purchase, marriage, and inheritance, now balance the subdivisions. 
 How stands the fact in this respect ? Are the small properties tend- 
 
 * Lavergne, Economic Rurale de la France, pp. 23 and 51. f Pp. 451-454.
 
 APPENDIX. 601 
 
 ing to become still smaller, or not ? The reader will be surprised 
 when he finds that, with all their straining, M. Rubichon and his 
 reviewer have failed of proving that the morcellement, in this sense 
 of the term, is making any progress at all. 
 
 The reviewer has a curious theory on the subject. He thinks 
 that " on the calculated average of three children to each inherit- 
 ance," the piece of land now held by one proprietor must necessarily 
 be divided among three in the next generation, and among nine in 
 that which follows. Under what system of landed property could a 
 population increase at this rate, and not be reduced to starvation ? 
 But is it a fact that population is anywhere trebled in the space of a 
 generation ? We have here blunder within blunder of a very com- 
 plicated description. In the first place, he should not have said 
 three children to one inheritance, but to two inheritances ; for as the 
 French law in questions of property observes that impartial justice 
 between the two sexes in which other laws are so often deficient, the 
 mother's patrimony is on an average equal to that of the father. In 
 the next place, could not the reviewer have taken the trouble to 
 ascertain at what rate the French population is actually increasing ? 
 If he had, he would have found that in the 27 years from 1815 to 
 1842 it only increased 18 per cent, and during that period with pro- 
 gressively increasing slowness, namely, in the first eleven years 9 
 per cent, in the next nine years less than 6 per cent, and in the 
 seven years from 1835 to 1842, 3 T ' ff th per cent only.* This retar- 
 dation we must take the liberty of attributing mainly to the prudence 
 and forethought generated in the poorest class by this very subdi- 
 vision of property. 
 
 Instead, therefore, of trebling in a generation, the population in- 
 creased in that period about 20 per cent ; and if the growth of towns, 
 and of employments not agricultural, in the same space of time, is 
 sufficient to absorb this increase, there needs not be, and will not be, 
 even if the law does its worst, any increase of subdivision. Now, 
 the towns of France have increased, and are increasing, at a rate far 
 exceeding the general increase of the population. We read only the 
 other day in the Siecle, as the result of the census just concluded, 
 
 * These facts are taken from M. Pasay. We may now add, in the ten years 
 from 1847 to 1856 not quite 1J per cent. Between 1851 and 1856 the increase 
 in all France was not equal to that of Paris. Nearly all the poorer departments 
 had diminished in population. See the Journal des Econwnistes for February, 
 1857.
 
 602 APPENDIX. 
 
 that Paris, which in 1832 had only 930,000 inhabitants, had in 1846 
 more than 1,350,000, an increase of nearly fifty per cent in fourteen 
 years.* There is every reason, then, to infer, from these general 
 data, that the morcellement is making no progress. 
 
 What facts have M. Rubichon and the Quarterly reviewer to 
 oppose to these ? One fact ; which at first sight appears a very 
 strong one. Between 1826 and 1835, the number of properties 
 rated to the land-tax exhibited an increase of more than 600,000 ; 
 being about six per cent in ten years. Let us first remark, that 
 600,000 separate assessments are equivalent only to about 300,000 
 proprietors ; it being the common estimate of French writers, that on 
 the average about two cotes foncieres, or separate accounts with the 
 land-tax, correspond only to a single proprietor. But if the reviewer 
 had consulted his author just ten pages further on,f he would have 
 found a cause sufficient to account for a considerable portion of this 
 increase. There were sold between 1826 and 1835 domains of the 
 State, to the value of nearly 1 34 millions of francs, or five and a half 
 millions sterling. The very nature of such a sale implies division. 
 And we are the more inclined to ascribe much of the apparent in- 
 crease of division to this circumstance, because in the ten years pre- 
 ceding those in question, the cotes foncieres increased in number by 
 little more than 200,000 ; an alarming proof, according to the re- 
 viewer, of the progressive advance of the evil ; but, as we suspect, 
 arising partly from the fact, that during the earlier decennial period 
 a smaller, though still a considerable, amount of public domains were 
 alienated. 
 
 In addition to the State lands, a great extent of Communal 
 lands were likewise alienated during the same period : and it is fur- 
 ther necessary to subtract all the additions made to the number of 
 cotes foncieres by the extension of building, and by the natural sub- 
 division of town property, during ten years. All these items must 
 be accurately estimated and deducted, before it can be affirmed with 
 certainty that in the rural districts there was during those years any 
 increased division of landed property at all. And even if there was, 
 increased division does not necessarily imply increased subdivision. 
 
 * In 1856 the department of the Seine, which consists almost entirely of 
 Paris, had risen to 1,727,000 inhabitants; while Lyons, Marseilles, St. Etienne, 
 Bordeaux rnd Nantes for at least the departments containing them) had largely 
 increased in population. 
 
 j- Mounier and Rubichon, vol. i. p. 1 10.
 
 APPENDIX. 603 
 
 Large estates may have been, and we believe were, in many in- 
 stances, divided, but the division may have stopped there. We 
 know of no reason for supposing that small properties were divided 
 into others still smaller, or that the average size of the possessions of 
 peasant families was at all diminished. 
 
 It so happens that facts exist, more specific and more expressly 
 to the point than any of M. Rubichon's. A new cadastre, or survey 
 and valuation of lands, has been in progress for some years past. In 
 thirty-seven cantons, taken indiscriminately through France, the 
 operation has been completed ; in twenty-one it is nearly complete. 
 In the thirty -seven, the cotes foncieres, which were 154,266 at the 
 last cadastre (in 1809 and 1810), have only increased by 9011, being 
 less than 18 per cent in considerably more than thirty years, while 
 in many of the cantons they have considerably diminished. From 
 this increase is to be subtracted all which is due to the progress of 
 building during the period, as well as to the sale of public and com- 
 munal lands. In the other twenty-one cantons the number of cotes 
 foncieres is not yet published, but the number of parcelles, or sepa- 
 rate bits of land, has diminished in the same period ; and among 
 those districts is included the greater part of the banlieue of Paris, 
 one of the most minutely divided districts in France, in which the 
 morcellement has actually diminished by no less than 16 per cent. 
 The details may be found in M. Passy's little work, " Des Systemes 
 de Culture." So much for the terrible progress of subdivision. 
 
 We cannot leave this part of the subject without noticing one of 
 the most signal instances which the reviewer has exhibited of his in- 
 competency for the subject he treats of. He laments over the extra- 
 ordinary number of sales of landed property which he says the law 
 of inheritance constantly occasions ; and indeed the sales of land are 
 shown to have amounted in ten years to no less than one-fourth part 
 of the whole territorial property of France. Now, whatever else 
 this extraordinary amount of sale and purchase may prove, the whole 
 of it is one gigantic argument against the reviewer's case ; for every 
 sale of land which is caused by the law of inheritance must be a sale 
 for the express purpose of preventing subdivision. If land, sold in 
 consequence of an inheritance, is nevertheless subdivided, this cannot 
 be an effect of the law of inheritance ; it would only prove that land 
 sella for a higher price when sold in small portions : that is, in other 
 words, that the poor, and even as the reviewer would have us be-
 
 604 APPENDIX. 
 
 lieve; the very poor, are able to outbid the rich in the land market. 
 This certainly does not prove that the very poor of France are so 
 very poor as these writers try to make out, while it does prove that, 
 if so, they must be by far the most industrious and economical peo- 
 ple on the face of the earth, for which some credit ought surely to be 
 given to the system of peasant properties. 
 
 II. 
 
 WE have shown that the four millions of landowners in France 
 who can be reckoned among peasant proprietors, those whose hold- 
 ings fall short of twenty acres, are computed by one of the best 
 authorities to possess on the average eight and a half English acres 
 each, and from no authentic documents can the average be brought 
 much below that amount ; a fact wholly incompatible with their 
 being in the state approaching to starvation in which M. Rubichon 
 and his reviewer represent them to be. It is equally certain that if 
 there is bad agriculture on these small estates, it is from some other 
 cause than their smallness. Farms of this size are consistent with 
 agriculture equal to any on the face of the earth. 
 
 We shall now, however, touch upon another kind of morcellement, 
 which does amount to a serious inconvenience, and wherever it exists 
 must have a strong tendency to keep agriculture in a low state. 
 This is the subdivision, not of the land of the country among many 
 proprietors, but of the land of each proprietor into many detached 
 pieces, or parcelles, as they are technically designated. This incon- 
 venience has been experienced in other countries besides France, as 
 in the canton of Zurich, in the Palatinate, and (as respects holdings, 
 though not properties) in Ireland. In France it is carried to so great 
 an excess, that the number of parcelles is ten times the number of 
 cotes foncieres ; and as there are supposed to be twice as many cotes 
 foncieres as proprietors, the curious fact is disclosed, that on the 
 average of France the estate of every landowner consists of twenty 
 fragments in twenty different places. The consequences are a sub- 
 ject of general and increasing complaint. Great loss of time and 
 labour ; waste of cultivable soil in boundaries and paths ; the inacces- 
 sibility of many parcelles without trespassing on other properties ; 
 endless disputes and frequent litigation are enumerated among the 
 evils : and it is evident what obstacles the small size and dispersed 
 position of the parcelles, and their intermixture with those of other
 
 APPENDIX. 605 
 
 proprietors, must oppose to many kinds of agricultural improve- 
 ment. 
 
 For a considerable portion of this evil the French law of inher- 
 itance may fairly be held responsible. A certain amount of it is 
 inevitable wherever landed properties are undergoing a double pro- 
 cess of division and recomposition : marriages, for example, must in 
 general bring together portions of land not adjacent. But if parents 
 had the power of bequest, the owner of twenty parcelles, even if he 
 adhered to the spirit of the law of equal division, would give some 
 of the portions entire to one child, and others to another. The law, 
 on the contrary, must divide with exact equality ; and as it is gen- 
 erally impossible to adjust the value of patches of unequal fertility, 
 vineyards, meadows, arable, &c. so as to satisfy everybody, it con- 
 tinually happens, especially in the more backward parts of France, 
 that when the settlement is made by division instead of sale, each 
 co-heir insists on taking a share of every parcelle instead of the whole 
 of some parcelles ; from whence, no doubt, the amazing multiplication 
 of these little patches in many parts of France. 
 
 That French agriculture, and the condition of the peasant popu- 
 lation, are injuriously affected by this sort of morcellement, is so far 
 true, that it must considerably retard the improvement which might 
 otherwise be expected, and which, in spite of all hindrances, does 
 even now, to a great extent, take place. More than this we cannot 
 admit. There are conclusive proofs of great and rapid improvement 
 in some parts of France, and M. Rubichon and his reviewer have no 
 evidence whatever of retrogression in any. 
 
 They produce tables of the average amount of different kinds of 
 food consumed by the population ; also tables of the number of 
 cattle, the amount of produce per hectare of the different kinds of 
 cultivation, &c., calculated from the official documents. These esti- 
 mates, assuming, their correctness (which, so far as that quality is 
 attainable, we generally see no reason to discredit,) are indicative, 
 doubtless, of a low and backward state. But statistics are only evi- 
 dence of the present. Where are the statistics of the past ? That 
 the agriculture of a great part of France is rude and imperfect is 
 known to all Europe ; but that it ever was better, is an assertion 
 opposed to all evidence, and we shall not take M. Rubichon's word 
 for it, no more than for the notion that the general condition of the 
 mass of the people has been deteriorating from the time of
 
 606 APPENDIX. 
 
 Louis XIV.* if not earlier. At this last proposition we cannot 
 repress our wonder. In the reign of Louis XIV., Marshal Vauban, 
 a great authority with all who are themselves authorities, and even 
 with M. Rubichon, estimated that one-tenth of the population of 
 France were beggars, and five of the remaining nine-tenths little 
 above beggary. In the same reign, Labruyere claimed credit for 
 apprising the salons of Paris that a strange nondescript sort of ani- 
 mals, who might be seen in the fields, and were much addicted to 
 grubbing in the earth, were, though nobody would suppose it, a 
 kind of men. Some readers may remember the picture drawn by 
 the old Marquis Mirabeau of the rural population in the middle of 
 the eighteenth century ; nor was Arthur Young's, at the opening of 
 the Revolution, much more favourable. Compare this with any 
 authentic account, or with the testimony of any observant resident or 
 traveller, respecting their condition now. M. Rubichon's statistics 
 comprise no returns of the rate of wages. We are quite willing that 
 our case should rest upon the result of an inquiry into that one point. 
 
 As for agriculture, when it is recollected that, at the beginning 
 of this century, in the greater part of France the culture of artificial 
 grasses might be said to be unknown, and that the course of cultiva- 
 tion consisted solely of grain crops and fallows, it will be difficult to 
 make us believe that, even in the most backward parts of the coun- 
 try, there has not been a considerable improvement from so misera- 
 ble a level. 
 
 [Look now at the facts collected by M. de Lavergne. Fallows 
 have been reduced, since 1789, from ten to five millions of hectares. 
 The number of hectares under wheat has risen from four to six 
 millions, while the inferior grain, rye, has fallen off ; that under arti- 
 ficial grasses, from one to three millions ; under roots, from 100,000 
 
 * It did deteriorate in the early part of the reign of Louis XIV. not because 
 the peasants bought land, but because they were compelled to sell it. " Au 
 moment," says Michelet (Le feuple, ch. 1), "ou nos ministres Italiens, un 
 Mazarin, un Emeri, doublaient les taxes, les nobles qui remplissaient la cour 
 obtinrent aisement d'etre exemptes, de sorte que le fardeau double tomba 
 d'aplomb sur les epaules des faibles et des pauvres, qui furent bien obliges de 
 vendre ou donner cette terre a peine acquise, et de redevenir des mercenaires, 
 fermiers, mdtayers, journaliers. . . . Je prie et je supplie ceux qui nous font des 
 lois ou les appliquent, de lire le detail de la funeste reaction de Mazarin et de 
 Louis XIV. dans les pages pleines d'indignation et de douleur ou 1'a consignee 
 un grand citoyen-, Pesant de Boisguillebert, reimprim6 recemment dans la Col- 
 lection des Economistes. Puisse cette histoire les avertir dans un moment ou 
 diverses influences travaillent a 1'envi pour arreter 1'oeuvre capitale de la France, 
 Pacquisition de la terre par le travailleur."
 
 APPENDIX. 607 
 
 to two millions ; under the more peculiar and expensive crops, from 
 400,000 to one million. "Thanks to this better distribution of the 
 soil, which allows six millions more of hectares to be devoted to the 
 feeding of animals, and consequently to the production of manure ; 
 thanks to marling, to irrigation, to draining, to more efficient tillage, 
 the yield of all crops has increased ; wheat, which gave at an average 
 only eight hectolitres per hectare (seed deducted) now gives twelve, 
 and as the breadth sown has also increased, the total produce has 
 more than doubled. The same thing has taken place with cattle, 
 which, receiving twice as much sustenance, have increased, both in 
 numbers and quality, so as to double their produce. The crops for 
 manufacturing use have extended themselves ; silk and colza have 
 quintupled ; home-grown sugar is an entirely new product ; the 
 produce of the vintage has doubled. Even wood, being better de- 
 fended from the ravages of animals, and better managed in conse- 
 quence of an increased market, has obtained an increase of annual 
 profits, though too often at the expense of the capital."*] 
 
 The blind zeal with which M. Rubichon presses everything into 
 the service of his theory, in which he is faithfully echoed by his 
 reviewer, makes them lay great stress upon the increase of roots, 
 and other inferior kinds of culture, as a proof that the population is 
 sinking to an inferior kind of nutriment ; as if the same thing was 
 not happening in England ; as if it was not a necessary condition of 
 an improved rotation of crops, that other cultures should increase in 
 a greater proportion than grain culture, and even at the expense, in 
 some degree, of the inferior kinds of grain. 
 
 We have admitted, and again admit, the unsatisfactory state 
 of cultivation on a very great portion of the soil of France ; but 
 would it be any better if the estates were large ? Is it any better 
 now on the large estates ? When M. Rubichon and his reviewer 
 talk of the small properties as " creating a new Ireland in France," 
 his own pages make it known that the large properties, in the back- 
 ward parts of France, are already an Ireland, in the very worst fea- 
 ture of Irish landed mismanagement, the system of middlemen. It 
 is a general practice, according to M. de Chateauvieux, with the 
 great proprietors of the central departments, to let their land en bloc 
 to a middleman, usually an attorney or a notary, who sublets it in 
 
 * Eeonomie Rurale de la France, pp. 52, 53.
 
 608 APPENDIX. 
 
 small portions on the metayer system, and is not only, as in Ireland, 
 the hardest and most grasping of landlords, but having only a tem- 
 porary tenure, and being no agriculturist, of course expends nothing 
 in improvements. Of fifty-seven millions of acres cultivated by ten- 
 ants, twenty-one milllions only are held by farmers at fixed rents, 
 and thirty-six millions on the metayer tenure; which in France 
 implies all the defects, with very few of the advantages, of proprie- 
 tary cultivation ; the only exceptions being La Vendee, and a few 
 of the adjoining departments, where the large proprietors are resi- 
 dent, a primitive relationship subsists between them and their ten- 
 ants, and the metayers have in general, as in Tuscany, a vivtual 
 fixity of tenure. We do not believe it will be found in any part of 
 France that the small properties are under a bad agriculture, and 
 the large properties under a good one. They are both bad, or both 
 good. Where large farms exist and are well cultivated, the small 
 properties also are well managed and prosperous. 
 
 And this brings us to the principal cause, both now and former- 
 ly, of the unimproved agriculture and scanty application of capital to 
 the soil of France. This is, the exclusive taste of the wealthy and 
 middle classes for town life and town pursuits, combined with the 
 general want of enterprise of the French nation with respect to 
 industrial improvements. It is truly, though epigrammatically, said 
 by M. Rubichon, that the Frenchman, generally, knows but one 
 way of getting rich ; namely, thrift. He does not understand sow- 
 ing money freely to reap it largely. This is the true cause why, 
 when large properties are sold, they bring the greatest price by being 
 much subdivided. The peasants, thanks to the Revolution, to the 
 small properties, and to their own unparalleled frugality, are able to 
 purchase land, and their savings, together with the money which 
 they imprudently borrow for the same purpose, are the only part of 
 the wealth of the country which takes that direction. We are often 
 told, that it does not answer to capitalists to buy land at the ex- 
 travagant price which the passion of the peasantry for land induces 
 them to give, amounting often to forty years purchase. It does not an- 
 swer to pay that price in order to live idly on the rent in Paris, or the 
 large provincial towns. But if there was one particle of the spirit of 
 agricultural improvement in the owners of the monied wealth which 
 is so largely increasing in the manufacturing and commercial dis- 
 tricts, few speculations would be more profitable than to buy land in
 
 APPENDIX. 609 
 
 Many fertile and ill-cultivated parts of France, at even more than 
 forty years purchase of its wretchedly low rental, which would soon 
 be doubled or trebled by the application of capital, with ordinary 
 agricultural knowledge and enterprise. If the petite culture is half as 
 wasteful and unprofitable as is pretended, the profit would be propor- 
 tional of substituting la grande culture for it. But with a people 
 who dislike rural pursuits, and in the pursuit of money^getting prefer 
 the beaten ways, there can be little other farming than peasant 
 farming. 
 
 III. 
 
 THE cheval de bataille of M. Rubichon and his English followers 
 against the petite propriete, is the cattle question ; not without cause, 
 since on this subject they have an indisputable basis of fact, however 
 inadequate to sustain the superstructure they have raised upon it. 
 The supply of butcher's meat to some of the principal towns, espe- 
 cially Paris, is less copious than formerly. It has increased greatly, 
 but in a less ratio than the population. Of the fact there is no 
 doubt, since on this point there are trustworthy statistics of the past 
 as well as of the present. In 1789 the consumption of meat in Paris 
 averaged 68 kilogrammes (150 Ibs.) for each person ; in 1841 it was 
 but 55 (121 Ibs.), and there are also complaints of a falling off in the 
 quality. 
 
 The Quarterly reviewer treats very cavalierly the explanation 
 given of this fact by M. Cunin-Gridaine, Minister of Commerce and 
 Agriculture. " This is to be accounted for by the revolution which 
 has taken place in the working classes : Pans having become the 
 most manufacturing town in Europe." Industrielle is not exactly 
 synonymous with manufacturing, but let that pass. On this the 
 reviewer : " This seems a strange explanation. The new popula- 
 tion of Paris is to starve on an ounce " (five ounces) " of meat per 
 diem. How is that ? Pooh ! says the Liberal Minister, they are 
 only manufacturers. This solution will not be very agreeable to 
 those theorists amongst us who confound the extension of manufac- 
 tures with the welfare and comfort of the working people. The 
 more candid Minister of Louis-Philippe assumes that a manufacturing 
 population must of necessity be worse fed than other classes." The 
 reviewer is evidently no (Edipus. But he might have found in 
 another page of M. Rubichon's treatise, what the Minister meant. 
 39
 
 610 APPENDIX. 
 
 In a town such as Paris before the Revolution, in which there was, 
 comparatively speaking, no production at all, but only distribution 
 the population consisting of the great landlords, the Court and higher 
 functionaries paid by the State, the bankers, financiers, government 
 contractors, and other monied classes, with the great and small deal- 
 ers and tradesmen needful for supplying these opulent consumers, 
 and few labourers beyond those who cannot be wanting in so large a 
 town all will see that the richer must bear an unusually high nu- 
 merical proportion to the poorer consumers in such a city. Suppose 
 now that a Manchester or a Glasgow grows up in the place. It is 
 pretty evident that while this would add a little to the richer class, it 
 would add twenty times as much to the poorer. Considering now 
 that the upper and middle classes in France are great consumers of 
 animal food, while the poor consume very little of it, the portion of 
 each poor person might in these circumstances increase very much, 
 while yet the average consumption per head of the whole city, owing 
 to the diminished proportional numbers of the richer class, might be 
 considerably (diminished. We have little doubt that this is the fact, 
 and that the great increase in the inferior kinds of animal food intro- 
 duced into Paris would prove to be for the use, not of those who 
 formerly used the superior kinds, but in a great measure for those 
 who seldom obtained animal food at all. 
 
 This, however, does not explain the whole of the change which 
 has taken place ; for the price of butcher's meat has also risen in the 
 Paris markets so materially as to be a source of great, privation and 
 complaint. The rise may be ascribed to various causes. In. the first 
 place, " France has till lately always been a large importer of cattle ; 
 and down to 1814 they were exempted from all duty. In that year, 
 however, a duty of three francs was laid on each head of cattle im- 
 ported ; " and in 1822 the duty " was suddenly raised to 55 francs, 
 an increase which has well nigh put a stop to the importation." * 
 Secondly, the octroi, or town custom duty, now so burthensome, did 
 not exist at all in 1789, and has been largely increased at various 
 periods, both in Paris and most other towns, since its first establish- 
 ment. A third cause is that the trade of butcher in Paris is a mo- 
 nopoly, the number of butchers being limited, and to so small a num- 
 ber, that the privilege bears a high pecuniary value.f This we be- 
 
 * M'Gulloch's Geographical Dictionary, art. France. 
 
 f .Now [1862] no longer true, the occupation having been thrown open.
 
 APPENDIX. 611 
 
 lieve to be the principal cause of the high price and diminished 
 consumption of meat in Paris. Two circumstances are almost deci- 
 sive in proof of this opinion. One is that while the consumption per 
 head of butcher's meat has diminished, that of almost every other 
 article of food has largely increased. The other is, that in the ban- 
 lieue of Paris, which differs from Paris itself in no material circum- 
 stance but that of being beyond the octroi, and exempt from the 
 butcher's monopoly, the consumption per head of meat, instead of 
 diminishing, has augmented in a remarkable degree ; as it is 
 affirmed to have also done in all the great towns of France, Paris 
 excepted.* 
 
 But if there were not these causes, there is cause almost sufficient 
 in the very fact of an increased and rapidly increasing population. 
 Paris has added in fourteen years, between four and five hundred 
 thousand to its inhabitants, an increase of nearly one-half. The 
 agriculture of a country must be rapidly improving indeed, if an in- 
 crease like this can take place in a single market without compelling 
 
 * On the first point: "La conaommation du beurre, qui etait represented en 
 1812 par une valcur de 6,935,929 francs, s'elevait en 1847 a 13,303,435 fr. ; 
 celle de la mar6e, qui etait en 1812 de 4,183,532 fr. atteignait en 184*7 la valeur 
 de 6,908,423 fr. ; celle des oeufs, de 3,857,150 fr. en 1823, s'elevait a 6,727,867 
 fr. en 1847. En 1833, la valeur de la volaille consommee s'elevait a presque 
 7,000,000 fr. ; en 1842, c'etait 10,000,000 fr. ; et dans les annees qui ont suivi, 
 cette valeur s'est elev6e a plus de 9,000,000 fr. C'est-a-dire que la consomma- 
 tion des principales denrees, beurre, oeufs, volaille et maree, s'augmentait pendant 
 une periode de trente-cinq annees dans des proportions superieures a 1'accroisse- 
 ment de la population, tandis que la consommation de la viande de boucherie 
 diminuait de 10 kilogrammes par individu ou de 20 pour cent." 
 
 On the eecoud point: "En 1812, la population de la baulieue de Paris etait 
 de 91,000 habitans en nombres ronds. Cette population consommait alors 8930 
 bceufs, 628 vaches, 6844 veaux et 27,558 moutons, donnant un poids total de 
 viande de 3,500,000 kilog. en uombres rouds, soit 38 kilog. et demi, a peu pros, 
 par individu et par an. Dequis 1812, la consommation en viande et la popula- 
 tion n'ont pas cess6 de s'accroitre dans la banlieue ; mais 1'accroissement n'a pas 
 euivi les meraes proportions. En 1821, la consommation etait de 6,400,000 
 kilog. et s'est augmentee constamment depuis; enfin, en 1835, c'etait 8,500,000 
 kilog. En cette meme annee, la population de la banlieue etait de 170,000 
 habitans, dont la consommation individuelle etait de 50 kilog. par an, soit 11 
 kilog. et demi d'augraentation de 1812 a 1835. . . Nous devons faire remarquer 
 que dans ces chiffres de la consommation de la banlieue, nous ne comprenons 
 que la viande achetee sur les marches a bestiaux de Paris : le chifTVe du betail 
 achete par les bouchers extra-muros, dans les foires, dans les femes et sur lea 
 marches des departemens, n'etant pas et ne pouvant pas etre constate. Nous 
 n'avons pas les chiffres de la consommation de la banlieue de Paris depuis 1835. 
 . . L'accroissement prodigieux de la consommation dans la banlieue de Paris, 
 correspond a une augmentation du meme genre dans toutes les grandes villes de 
 France, Paris except^." 
 
 These details are extracted from an article by H. Charles Beranger, in the 
 journal La Republique of January 1, 1861.
 
 612 APPENDIX. 
 
 it to draw its supplies from a larger surface and a greater distance, 
 and therefore at an increased expense. "Where would London have 
 been by this time, for the supply of its markets, were it not for our 
 great coasting trade, and the invention of steam communication, 
 which conveys not only cattle but carcasses from the extremity of 
 Scotland as cheaply as they could formerly be brought from Buck 
 inghamshire ? The cattle for the supply of Paris must travel by 
 land, from distances varying from 50 to 150 leagues (this rests on 
 'the authority of a Committee of the Municipal Council of Paris in 
 1841), and after so long a journey have either to be brought to 
 market out of condition, or to be fattened in the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood. Can any one, then, be surprised that a double population 
 cannot be so cheaply supplied as one of half the number ? 
 
 To these causes of the diminished supply of butcher's meat in the 
 towns, we are not afraid to add another, which, though resting 
 mainly on general considerations, we should not be wholly unable to 
 support by positive evidence. This is, the increased consumption 
 by the country people. They have less animal food, in proportion, 
 to spare for the towns, because they retain more of it for their 
 own use. 
 
 On what evidence is it asserted that small properties imply 
 deficiency of cattle, and consequent deficiency of manure? That 
 they are not favourable to sheep farming seems to be admitted ; yet 
 in France, as well as in the United Kingdom, the number of sheep 
 has doubled in the course of a century.* It is true that in quality, 
 instead of the extraordinary improvement which has taken place in 
 England, they have remained almost stationary. But the breeding 
 and fattening of horned ^cattle is so perfectly compatible with small 
 capital, that in the opinion of many Continental authorities, small 
 farms have the advantage in this respect, and so great an advantage 
 as to be more than a compensation for their inferiority in sheep.f It 
 is argued that the petite propriete must diminish the number of cattle, 
 because it leads to the breaking up of natural pasture. But when 
 natural pasture is fit for the plough, a greater number of cattle than 
 were supported on the whole, may be supported on a part, by laying 
 it out in roots and artificial grasses ; and it is well known that on 
 
 * Lavergne, Essai sur r Economic JRurale de FAngleterre, de PEeoue. et de 
 Flrlemde, 3me ed. p. 16. 
 
 f See this question discussed in Book I. ch. ix. of the present work, pp. 
 198-7.
 
 APPENDIX. 613 
 
 the stall-feeding system there is much greater preservation of manure. 
 The question of petite culture, in relation to cattle, is, in fact, one and 
 the same with the question of stall-feeding. The two things must 
 stand or fall together. Stall-feeding produces, cceteris paribus ) a 
 greater quantity of provisions, but in the opinion of most judges a 
 lower quality. Experience must decide. 
 
 This brings us back to the causes assigned by the committee of 
 the Paris town-council, for the falling off in the quality of the beef 
 consumed at Paris. One is, the extraordinary increase in the con- 
 sumption of dairy produce. Milk is now brought from distances of 
 thirty leagues, and within six or eight leagues of Paris no calves are 
 now bred up, all being sold at the earliest moment possible. In con- 
 sequence, a great part of the beef sold at Paris is the flesh of cows 
 too old to be fit for producing milk. A second cause assigned is, the 
 increase of stall-feeding. But the committee make an instructive 
 distinction. In Normandy, which affords the greatest portion of the 
 supply, the quality, they say, has deteriorated ; but in La Vendee, 
 and the central provinces, the Limousin, Nivernais, Bourbonnais, 
 and La Marche, " there is improvement in weight, in fatness, and 
 from some districts in number," though these countries have also 
 adopted stall-feeding ; and in this, say the committee, there is no 
 contradiction, since " what is a deterioration in the rich pasturages of 
 Calvados, is improvement in the petites herbes of the Allier and the 
 Nievre." 
 
 It may now be left to the reader to judge if the case of our adver- 
 saries has not broken down as completely on this, their strongest 
 point, as it has done on every other point of any importance.* 
 
 "We cannot close this long controversy without producing evi- 
 dence of the extraordinary improvement, extraordinary both in 
 
 * The consumption of butcher's meat at Paris would seem to have consider- 
 ably increased since the first publication of this discussion. The following table 
 la extracted by M. Michel Chevalier (in the Journal des Economises for July, 
 1856) from the elaborate work of M. Husson, entitled " Les Consommationa da 
 Paris : " 
 
 Average annual consumption per head of animal food : 
 
 Viande de boucherie 62 kilog. 686 grammes. 
 
 Pore et charcuterie 10 267 
 
 Volatile et gibier 9 841 
 
 Poisson 12 767 
 
 Total ... 95 kilog. 461 grammes, 
 r about 210 English pounds.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 amount and in rapidity, which is taking place in the productiveness 
 of the agriculture of some parts of France. We quote from another 
 work by an authority already cited, M. Hippolite Passy, several 
 times a minister of Louis-Philippe, and well known as one of the 
 most influential politicians and publicists of France. This tract, 
 published in 1841, is an examination of "the changes in the agricul- 
 tural condition of the Department of the Eure since 1800." The 
 Eure is one of the five departments of Normandy, and belongs to the 
 region of which M. Rubichon admits the agriculture to be the best 
 in France ; but only (as he contends) because the morcellement has 
 not had time to produce its effects, having commenced in that region 
 only from the Revolution, and he assigns to it accordingly no priv- 
 ilege but that of Outis in the Odyssey, to be devoured the last. 
 Let us now see the facts. This department fortunately possesses an 
 accurate agricultural statistique for the year 1800, drawn up by a 
 prefet who took great pains to be correct in his information. M. Pas- 
 sy's pamphlet is a comparison of these returns with those collected by 
 the French Government in 1837. 
 
 In this interval of thirty-seven years, scarcely any new land was 
 taken into cultivation, nearly all fit for culture having been already 
 occupied. But fallows had diminished from 172,000 hectares to a 
 little more than 80,000. The cultures which supply cattle had in- 
 creased in a much greater proportion than any others : instead of 1 7 
 per cent of the cultivated area, they occupied 37 per cent. Horses 
 had multiplied from 29,500 to 51,000, horned cattle from 51,000 to 
 106,000, sheep from 205,000 to 511,000, and as their food had in- 
 creased in a still greater ratio, and there was importation besides, all 
 kinds of live stock were better fed, and had gained in size, weight, 
 and value. The produce per hectare of all kinds of grain, and of 
 most other kinds of produce, had considerably increased, of some 
 kinds nearly doubled. These changes had chiefly been effected dur- 
 ing the second half of the period, so that the improvement was as 
 progressive as on M. Rubichon's theory should have been the 
 deterioration. There had been no perceptible variation in the pro- 
 portion between the grande and the petite culture ; nor had the divi- 
 sion of properties at all promoted the division of farms. On the soils 
 where small farms are most profitable," large properties are rented to 
 small tenants ; where the reverse is the case, a single farmer often 
 rents the lands of several proprietors, and this arrangement extends it-
 
 APPENDIX. 615 
 
 Belf more as the subdivision of property advances. The consumption 
 of food per head of the population had largely increased in the ratio, 
 according to M. Passy, of about 37 per cent , and while the agricul- 
 tural wealth of the department had increased, according to his esti- 
 mate, by 54 per cent, the population had only increased 5 per cent.* 
 
 Though the Eure belongs to the most productive and thriving 
 region of France, it is not the most productive or the most thriving 
 department. The Nord, which comprises the greater part of French 
 Flanders, and is a country of small farms, maintains, according to 
 M. Passy, proportionally to its extent, a third more cattle than the 
 Eure ; and the average produce of wheat per hectare, instead of 
 seventeen, is twenty hectolitres, about twenty-two English bushels 
 per acre. 
 
 Results almost as satisfactory may be deduced from a statistical 
 account of a much less improved district than the Eure, the most 
 eastern district of Brittany, the arrondissement of Fougeres, pub- 
 lished in 1845, by the sous-prefet, M. Berlin. " It is only since the 
 peace," says this intelligent functionary, " that the agriculture of the 
 arrondissement has made much progress; but from 1815 it has im- 
 proved with increasing rapidity. If from 1815 to 1825 the im- 
 provement was as one, it was as three between 1825 and 1835 ; and 
 as six since that period." At the beginning of the century little 
 wheat was cultivated, and that little so ill, that in 1809 the produce 
 per hectare was estimated only at 9 hectolitres. In 1 845, M. Bertin 
 estimates it at 16. The cattle, being better fed, and crossed with 
 more vigorous breeds, have increased in size and strength ; while in 
 number, horned cattle, between- 1813 and 1844, multiplied from 
 33,000 to 52,000, sheep from 6300 to 11,000, swine from 9300 to 
 26,100, and horses from 7400 to 11,600. New and valuable ma- 
 nures have been introduced, and have come largely into use. The 
 extent of meadow land has increased and is increasing, and great 
 attention has of late been paid to its improvement. This testimony 
 comes from an enemy of the morcellement, who, however, states that 
 it is advancing very slowly, and is not likely to advance much fur- 
 ther, the co-heirs not dividing each parcelle, but either distributing 
 the parcelles among them, or disposing of them by private or public 
 
 * During the two last quinquennial periods, the population of this depart- 
 ment, on the showing both of the census and of the register of births and deaths, 
 haa actually diminished.
 
 616 APPENDIX. 
 
 sale. Some farmers, he says, who are also proprietors, have the 
 good sense to sell the few fields which belong to them, in order to 
 increase their farming capital. M. Bertin is an enemy to stall-feed- 
 ing, which, he says, is not practised in his arrondissement. The in< 
 crease of live stock is therefore the more remarkable. It may not be 
 useless to mention an assertion of this writer, that the official pub- 
 lication from which M. Rubichon's data are taken greatly under- 
 states the number of horned cattle in France, by the accidental omis- 
 sion of a column in summing up, by which the number is brought 
 below ten millions, when it ought, according to M. Bertin, to be 
 thirteen. 
 
 Of the food of the inhabitants he says, that not long ago it was 
 composed almost exclusively of milk, buckwheat cakes, and rye 
 bread, but has greatly improved in quantity, quality, and variety, 
 especially in the last ten years, and now consists of wheaten bread, 
 or bread of two-thirds wheat and one-third rye ; with butter, vege- 
 tables, and " in good farms " about a kilogramme (or 2 Ibs.) of 
 pork per week for each person. There is also some consumption of 
 other flesh-meats among the labouring people, and the arrondisse- 
 ment contains 63 butchers' shops, where fifteen years ago there were 
 not 30 ; the increase not being in the towns (or rather town), but in 
 the villages. The clothing of the rural population is substantial, 
 " and different for every season, which is always a sign of general 
 comfort," and " persons in rags are very rare in the arrondissement." 
 
 "We cannot further extend this long discussion ; but enough has 
 been said, to enable our readers adequately to appreciate the terrible 
 predictions of alarmist writers respecting the consequences of tbe 
 Division of Landed Property in France. 
 
 (40) 
 
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