PBINCIPLES 
 
 OF 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 PRINCIPLES 
 
 OF 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY 
 
 WITH 
 
 SOME OF THEIR APPLICATIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I. 
 
 SEVENTH EDITION. 
 LONDON: 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, READER AND DYER. 
 1871.
 
 LONDON : 
 
 8AV1LL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, fHANDOS STREET. 
 COTRNT GARDEN.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 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. 
 
 To supply, however, these deficiencies in former 
 treatises bearing a similar title, is not the sole, pr 
 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. 
 
 a 2
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The most characteristic quality of that work, and 
 the one in which it most differs from some others 
 which have equalled and 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 Economy 
 is inseparably intertwined with many other branches 
 of social philosophy. Except on matters of mere 
 detail, there are perhaps no practical questions, 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 far larger 
 considerations than pure Political Economy affords 
 that he gives that well-grounded feeling of command 
 over the principles of the subject for purposes of 
 practice, owing to which the " Wealth of Nations," 
 alone among treatises on Political Economy, 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
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 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 progress, 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 in- 
 creased knowledge since acquired of its theory, or to 
 exhibit the economical phenomena 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 philosophy of his century. 
 Such is the idea which the writer of the present 
 work has kept before him. To succeed even partially 
 in realizing it, would be a sufficiently useful achieve- 
 ment, 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
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 mere exposition of the abstract doctrines of Political 
 Economy, he is also desirous that such an exposition 
 should be found in it. 
 
 The present edition, with the exception of a few 
 verbal corrections, corresponds exactly with the last 
 Library Edition and with the People's Edition. Since 
 the publication of these, there has been some in- 
 structive discussion on the theory of Demand and 
 Supply, and on the influence of Strikes and Trades 
 Unions on wages, by which additional light has been 
 thrown on these subjects; but the results, in the 
 author's opinion, are not yet ripe for incorporation in 
 a general treatise on Political Economy.* For an 
 analogous reason, all notice, of the alteration made in 
 the Land Laws of Ireland by the recent Act, is 
 deferred until experience shall have had time to pro- 
 nounce on the operation of that well-meant attempt 
 to deal with the greatest practical evil in the eco- 
 nomic institutions of that country. 
 
 * The present state of the discussion my be learnt from a review 
 (by the author) of Mr. Thornton's work " On Labour," in the " Fort- 
 nightly Keview" of May and June, 1869, and from Mr. Thornton's 
 reply to that review in the second edition of his very instructive book;
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 OF 
 
 THE FIRST VOLUME, 
 
 Pa.-e 
 PRELIMINARY KEMAKKS 1 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 PRODUCTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. Of the Requisites of Production. 
 
 1. Requisites of production, what 21) 
 
 2. The function of labour defined 31 
 
 3. Does nature contribute more to the efficacy of labour in 
 
 some occupations than in others ? 33 
 
 4. Some natural agents limited, others practically unlimited, 
 
 in quantity 34 
 
 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 .... 37 
 
 2. Labour employed in producing subsistence for subsequent 
 
 labour 39 
 
 3. in producing materials 42 
 
 4. or implements 44 
 
 5. in the protection of labour 46 
 
 fi. in the transport and distribution of the produce . . 47 
 
 7. Labour which relates to human beings 50 
 
 8. Labour of invention and discovery 51 
 
 9. Labour agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial . . 53
 
 Vlll CONTEXTS. 
 
 CHAPTER III. Of Unproductive Labour. 
 
 Ptgf 
 
 1. Labour does not produce objects, but utilities .... 55 
 
 2. which are of three kinds ........... 57 
 
 3. Productive labour is that -which produces utilities fixed 
 
 and embodied in material objects ........ 58 
 
 4. All other labour, however useful, is classed as unproductive 61 
 
 5. Productive and Unproductive Consumption ..... (M 
 
 6. Labour for the supply of Productive Consumption, and 
 
 labour for the supply of Unproductive Consumption . . 65 
 
 CHAPTER IV. Of Capital 
 
 1. Capital is wealth appropriated to reproductive employment 68 
 
 2. More capital devoted to production than actually employed 
 
 in it .................. 71 
 
 3. Examination of some cases illustrative of the idea of Capital 74 
 
 CHAPTER V. Fundamental Propositions respecting 
 Capital. 
 
 1. Industry is limited by Capital .......... 79 
 
 2. but does not always come up to that limit ..... 81 
 
 3. Increase of capital gives increased employment to labour, 
 
 without assignable bounds .......... 83 
 
 4. Capital is the result of saving .......... 86 
 
 5. All capital is consumed ............ 88 
 
 6. Capital is kept up, not by preservation, but by perpetual 
 
 reproduction ............... 92 
 
 7. Why countries recover rapidly from a state of devastation 94 
 
 8. Effects of defraying government expenditure by loans . 95 
 
 9. Demand for commodities is not demand for labour ... 99 
 10. Fallacy respecting Taxation .......... Ill 
 
 CHAPTER VI. Of Circulating and Fixed Capital. 
 
 1. Fixed and Circulating Capital, what 114 
 
 2. Increase of fixed capital, when at the expense of circu- 
 
 lating, might be detrimental to the labourers . . . . 117 
 
 3. but this seldom if ever occurs ... . 121
 
 CONTENTS. IX 
 
 CHAPTER VII. On what depends the degree of Productive- 
 ness of Productive Agents. 
 
 Page 
 1. Land, labour, and capital, are of different productiveness 
 
 at different times and places 126 
 
 2. Causes of superior productiveness. Natural advantages . 127 
 
 3. greater energy of labour 129 
 
 4. superior skill and knowledge 132 
 
 5. superiority of intelligence and trustworthiness in the 
 
 community generally 134 
 
 6. superior security 139 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. Of Co-operation, or the Combination 
 of Labour. 
 
 1. Combination of Labour a principal cause of superior 
 
 productiveness 144 
 
 2. Effects of separation of employments analyzed .... 147 
 
 3. Combination of labour between town and country . . . 150 
 
 4. The higher degrees of the division of labour 152 
 
 5. Analysis of its advantages 154 
 
 6. Limitations of the division of labour 162 
 
 CHAPTER IX. Of Production on a Large, and 
 Production on a Small Scale. 
 
 1. Advantages of the large system of production in manufactures 164 
 
 2. Advantages and disadvantages of the joint-stock principle 170 
 
 3. Conditions necessary for the large system of production . 176 
 
 4. Large and small farming compared 179 
 
 CHAPTER X. Of the Law of the Increase of Labour. 
 
 1. The law of the increase of production depends on those of 
 
 three elements, Labour, Capital, and Land 194 
 
 2. The Law of Population 195 
 
 3. By what checks the increase of population is practically 
 
 limited 198 
 
 CHAPTER XI. Of the Law of the Increase of Capital. 
 
 1. Means and motives to saving, on what dependent . . . 203 
 
 2. Causes of diversity in the effective strength of the desire 
 
 of accumulation 205 
 
 3. Examples of deficiency in the strength of this desire . . 208 
 
 4. Exemplification of its excess 216
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. Of the Law of the Increase of Production 
 from Land. 
 
 Pa&e 
 
 1. The limited quantity and limited productiveness of land, 
 
 the real limits to production 220 
 
 2. The law of production from the soil, a law of diminishing 
 
 return in proportion to the increased application of 
 labour and capital 221 
 
 3. Antagonist principle to the law of diminishing return ; 
 
 the progress of improvements in production .... 226 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. Consequences of the foregoing Laws. 
 
 1. Remedies when the limit to production is the weakness of 
 
 the principle of accumulation 236 
 
 2. Necessity of restraining population not confined to a state 
 
 of inequality of property 237 
 
 3. nor superseded by free trade in food 241 
 
 4. nor in general by emigration 245 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 DISTRIBUTION. 
 CHAPTER I. Of Property. 
 
 1. Introductory remarks 249 
 
 2. Statement of the question 251 
 
 3. Examination of Communism 254 
 
 4. of St. Simonism and Fourierism 263 
 
 CHAPTER II. The same subject continued. 
 
 1. The institution of property implies freedom of acquisition 
 
 by contract 270 
 
 2. the validity of prescription 272 
 
 3. the power of bequest, but not the right of inheritance. 
 
 Question of inheritance examiiud ........ 27:5
 
 CONTENTS. XI 
 
 Pase 
 
 4. Should the right of bequest be limited, and how ? . . . 279 
 
 5. Grounds of property in land, different from those of pro- 
 
 perty in moveables 28 1 
 
 6. only valid on certain conditions, which are not always 
 
 realized. The limitations considered 285 
 
 7. Rights of property in abuses 291 
 
 CHAPTER III. Of the Classes among whom the 
 Produce is distributed. 
 
 1. The produce sometimes shared among three classes . . 293 
 
 2. sometimes belongs undividedly to one 294 
 
 3. sometimes divided between two 295 
 
 CHAPTER IV. Of Competition and Custom. 
 
 1. Competition not the sole regulator of the division of the 
 
 produce. 298 
 
 2. Influence of custom on rents, and on the tenure of land . 299 
 
 3. Influence of custom on prices 302 
 
 CHAPTER V. Of Slavery. 
 
 1. Slavery considered in relation to the slaves 306 
 
 2. in relation to production 308 
 
 3. Emancipation considered in relation to the interest of the 
 
 slave-owners , 310 
 
 CHAPTER VI. Of Peasant Proprietors. 
 
 1. Difference between English and Continental opinions 
 
 respecting peasant properties 313 
 
 2. Evidence respecting peasant properties in Switzerland . 315 
 
 3. in Norway 322 
 
 4. in Germany 326 
 
 5. in Belgium 332 
 
 6. in the Channel Islands 338 
 
 7. in France 341
 
 CONTEXTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. Continuation of the same subject. 
 
 Papc 
 
 1. Influence of peasant properties in stimulating industry . 347 
 
 2. in training intelligence 350 
 
 3. in promoting forethought and self-control 351 
 
 4. Their effect on population 353 
 
 5. on the subdivision of land . . . 364 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. Of Metayers. 
 
 1. Nature of the metayer system, and its varieties .... 371 
 
 2. Its advantages and inconveniences 372 
 
 3. Evidence concerning its effects in different countries . . 375 
 
 4. Is its abolition desirable ? 388 
 
 CHAPTER IX. Of Cottiers. 
 
 1. Nature and operation of cottier tenure 391 
 
 2. In an overpeopled country its necessary consequence is 
 
 nominal rents 394 
 
 3. which are inconsistent with industry, frugality, or 
 
 restraint on population 397 
 
 4. Eyot tenancy of India 399 
 
 CHAPTER X. Means of abolishing Cottier Tenancy. 
 
 1 . Irish cottiers should be converted into peasant proprietors 404 
 2. Present state of this question 412 
 
 CHAPTER XI. Of Wages. 
 
 1. Wages depend on the demand and supply of labour in 
 
 other words, on population and capital 419 
 
 2. Examination of some popular opinions respecting wages . 420
 
 CONTENTS. Xlll 
 
 Page 
 
 3. Certain rare circumstances excepted, high wages imply 
 
 restraints on population 427 
 
 4. which are in some cases legal 431 
 
 5. in others the effect of particular customs 434 
 
 6. Due restriction of population the only safeguard of a 
 
 labouring class 436 
 
 CHAPTER XII. Of Popular Remedies for Low Wages. 
 
 1. A legal or customary minimum of wages, with a guarantee 
 
 of employment 441 
 
 2. would require as a condition, legal measures for repres- 
 
 sion of population 443 
 
 3. Allowances in aid of wages 448 
 
 4. The Allotment System 450 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. Remedies for Low Wages further 
 considered. 
 
 1. Pernicious direction of public opinion on the subject of 
 
 population 456 
 
 2. Grounds for expecting improvement 459 
 
 3. Twofold means of elevating the habits of the labouring 
 
 people : by education 465 
 
 4. and by large measures of immediate relief, through 
 
 foreign and home colonization 467 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. Of the Differences of Wages in 
 different Employments. 
 
 1. Differences of wages arising from different degrees of 
 
 attractiveness in different employments 471 
 
 2. Differences arising from natural monopolies 477 
 
 3. 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 .... 490 
 
 6. Differences of wages arising from restrictive laws, and 
 
 from combinations 491 
 
 7. Cases in which wages are fixed by custom 493
 
 XIV CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. Of Pro/its. 
 
 Page 
 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 parti- 
 
 cular 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 Rent. 
 
 1. Rent the effect of a natural monopoly 516 
 
 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 
 
 circumstances 522 
 
 5. Is payment for capital sunk in the soil, rent, or profit ? . 525 
 
 6. Rent does not enter into the cost of production of agricul- 
 
 tural produce 530 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 EXCHANGE. 
 CHAPTER I. Of Value. 
 
 1. Preliminary remarks 535 
 
 2. Definitions of Value in Use, Exchange Value, and Price . 537 
 
 3. What is meant by general purchasing power 538 
 
 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
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER II. Of Demand and Supply, in their 
 relation to Value. 
 
 Page 
 
 1. Two conditions of Value : Utility, and Difficulty of At- 
 tainment 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 550 
 
 5. Miscellaneous cases falling under this law 552 
 
 CHAPTER III. Of Cost of Production, in its relation 
 to Value. 
 
 1. Commodities which are susceptible cf indefinite multipli- 
 cation 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 
 
 Labour 562 
 
 2. Wages not an element in Cost of Production .... 564 
 
 3. except in so far as they vary from employment to em- 
 
 ployment 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 574 
 
 CHAPTER V. Of Rent, in its relation to Value. 
 
 1. Commodities which are susceptible of indefinite multipli- 
 cation, but not without increase of cost. Law of their 
 Value, Cost of Production in the most unfavourable 
 existing circumstances 577 
 
 2. Such commodities, when produced in circumstances more 
 
 favourable, yield a rent equal to the difference of cost . 580 
 
 3. E-ent of mines and fisheries, and ground-rent of buildings 583 
 
 4. Cases of extra profit analogous to rent 586
 
 XVI CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. Summary of the TJieory of Valae. 
 
 Page 
 
 1. The theory of Value recapitulated in a series of proposi- 
 tions 588 
 
 2. How modified by the case of labourers cultivating for 
 
 subsistence 591 
 
 3. 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. Mourner 
 and Rubichon and to the Quarterly Review, on the 
 Subdivision of Landed Property in France 597
 
 PRINCIPLES 
 
 OF 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY. 
 
 PRELIMINARY EEMARKS. 
 
 IN every department of human affairs, Practice long pre- 
 cedes 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 concep- 
 tion, accordingly, of Political Economy as a hranch of science 
 is extremely modern ; hut 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 con- 
 dition 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 
 
 VOL. i. B
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 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. 
 
 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 enlight- 
 ened, brave, or humane : that the questions how a nation is 
 made wealthy, and how it is made free, or virtuous, or emi- 
 nent in literature, in the fine arts, in arms, or in polity, are 
 totally distinct enquiries. Those things, indeed, are all indi- 
 rectly 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 powerfully upon their economical con- 
 dition ; and this again, by its influence on their mental 
 development and social relations, 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 require. 
 But, little as it might be expected that any mischievous 
 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 existed 
 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 direction to the policy 
 of Europe. I refer to the set of doctrines designated, since 
 the time of Adam Smith, by the appellation of the Mercantile 
 System. 
 
 While this system prevailed, it was assumed, either ex- 
 pressly or tacitly, in the whole policy of nations, that wealth
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 5 
 
 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 
 a country added to its wealth. Whatever sent the precious 
 metals out 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), because, 
 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 instru- 
 ments of some industry practised in the country itself, they 
 gave the power of producing exportable articles at smaller 
 cost, and thereby effecting a larger exportation. The com- 
 merce 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 absur- 
 dity, 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 
 
 B 2
 
 4 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 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 would have 
 escaped the delusion if he had lived at the time when it pre- 
 vailed. All the associations engendered by common life, and 
 by the ordinary course of business, concurred in promoting 
 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 economical 
 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 inventory 
 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 precisely 
 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 
 themselves 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
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 5 
 
 person himself the ultimate end of the whole. It often 
 happens that he is not paid in money, but in something 
 else ; having hought 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 eventually than the price at which they were 
 made over to him. A dealer doing a large amount of busi- 
 ness, and turning 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 credited 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 plea- 
 sures 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 assumption 
 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 every other kind of valuable pos- 
 session. We really, and justly, look upon a person as possess- 
 ing the advantages of wealth, not in proportion 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
 
 6 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 agreeable ; the power he possesses of providing for any exi- 
 gency, or obtaining any object of desire. Now, money is itself 
 that power ; while all other things, in a civilized state, seem 
 to confer it only by their 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 of it, you have first to sell it, or to 
 submit to the inconvenience and delay (if not the impos- 
 sibility) 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 whatever things are for sale : 
 and one whose fortune is in money, or in things rapidly 
 convertible into it, seems both to himself 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 quan- 
 tity, 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 im- 
 pression upon governments, as it is one of considerable 
 importance to them. A civilized government derives com- 
 paratively 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 
 subsidies, either for the sake of conquering or of not being 
 conquered (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 remote
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 7 
 
 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 absurdity 
 when we have discovered what were the appearances which 
 made it plausible ; and the Mercantile Theory could not 
 fail to be seen in its true character when men began, 
 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 reflected 
 that money, like other things, is only a desirable possession 
 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. Great as the difference would be between a 
 country with money, and a country altogether without it, 
 it would be only one of convenience ; a saving of time and 
 trouble, like grinding by water power instead of by hand, or
 
 8 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 (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 
 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 gra- 
 tuitously : to accumulate a stock of it would yield no profit 
 or advantage to any one ; and the laws of its production 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 supplying 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 customary to sojourn 
 long in places where the air does not naturally 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 mono- 
 polized, air might acquire a very high marketable 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 increased, by what
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 9 
 
 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 individual, 
 and to those of a nation, or of mankind. In the wealth of 
 mankind, nothing is included which does not of itself answer 
 some purpose of utility or pleasure. To an individual any- 
 thing is wealth, which, though useless in itself, enables 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 nationally, 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 ab- 
 straction of wealth from certain members of the community, 
 for the profit of the government, or of the tax-payers. 
 Funded property therefore cannot be counted as part of the 
 national wealth. This is not always borne in mind by the 
 dealers in statistical calculations. 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
 
 10 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 excluded : though the tax-payers are assessed on their whole 
 nominal income, without heing permitted to deduct from it 
 the portion 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 
 foreign countries, and other debts due to them from abroad. 
 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. 
 
 Another example of a possession which is wealth to the 
 person holding it, but not wealth to the nation, or to mankind, 
 is slaves. It is by a strange confusion of ideas that slave pro- 
 perty (as it is termed) is counted, at so much per head, in an 
 estimate of the wealth, or of the capital, of the country which 
 tolerates the existence of such property. If a human being, 
 considered as an object possessing productive powers, is part 
 of the national wealth when his powers are owned by another 
 man, he cannot be less a part of it when they are owned by 
 himself. Whatever he is worth to his master is so much 
 property abstracted from himself, and its abstraction cannot 
 augment the possessions of the two together, or of the country 
 to which they both belong. In propriety of classification, 
 however, the people of a country are not to be counted in its 
 wealth. They are that for the sake of which its wealth exists. 
 The term wealth is wanted to denote the desirable objects 
 which they possess, not inclusive of, but in contradistinction 
 to, their own persons. They are not wealth to themselves, 
 though they are means of acquiring it. 
 
 It has been proposed to define wealth as signifying " instru- 
 ments :" meaning not tools and machinery alone, but the whole 
 accumulation possessed by individuals or communities, of 
 means for the attainment of their ends. Thus, a field is an
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 11 
 
 instrument, because it is a means to the attainment of corn. 
 Corn is an instrument, being a means to tbe attainment of 
 flour. Flour is an instrument, being a means to the attain- 
 ment 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 instruments, 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 conveying 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 illustration. 
 
 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 defini- 
 tion, the only objection seems to be, that it leaves in uncer- 
 tainty a question which has been much debated whether 
 what are called immaterial products 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 as requiring discussion, will be more conve- 
 niently considered in another place.* 
 
 These things having been premised respecting wealth, we 
 shall next turn our attention to the extraordinary differences 
 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. 
 
 * Infra, book i. chap. iii.
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 There is, perhaps, no people or community, now existing, 
 which subsists entirely on the spontaneous produce of vegeta- 
 tion. But many tribes still live exclusively, or almost exclu- 
 sively, on wild animals, the produce of hunting or fishing. 
 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 community consists solely 
 of the skins they wear ; a few ornaments, the taste for which 
 exists among most savages ; some rude utensils ; the weapons 
 with which they kill their game, or fight against hostile com- 
 petitors for the means of subsistence; canoes for crossing rivets 
 and lakes, or fishing in the sea ; and perhaps some furs or 
 other productions of the wilderness, 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 added 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 community of human beings is known to exist; though 
 there are much richer communities in which portions of the 
 inhabitants 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 
 annual 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
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 13 
 
 of the earth are not yet so fully occupied as to be consumed 
 more rapidly than they are spontaneously reproduced, 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, in- 
 equality 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 dependents 
 to fight for them in war and to serve them in peace. One of 
 the features of this state of society is, that a part of the com- 
 munity, 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 gratification. A desire arises for 
 better clothing, utensils, and implements, than the savage state 
 contents itself with ; and the surplus food renders it practi- 
 cable 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
 
 14 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 is ample evidence 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 
 spinning, weaving, and dyeing woollen garments, in the pre- 
 paration 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 characteristic of this 
 stage of social progress. The earliest astronomical observations 
 are attributed, by a tradition which has much appearance of 
 truth, to the shepherds of Chaldea. 
 
 From this state of society to the agricultural the transition 
 is not indeed easy (for no great change in the habits of man- 
 kind is otherwise than difficult, and in general either painful 
 or very slow), but it lies in what may be called the spon- 
 taneous course of events. The growth of the population of 
 men and cattle began in time to press upon the earth's capa- 
 bilities 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 precipitate themselves upon those 
 which had already become agricultural ; until, these having 
 become sufficiently powerful to repel such inroads, the in- 
 vading nations, deprived of this outlet, were obliged also to 
 become agricultural communities. 
 
 But after this great step had been completed, the subse- 
 quent progress of mankind seems by no means to have been 
 so rapid (certain rare combinations of circumstances excepted) 
 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 im- 
 perfect tools and unskilful processes which are for a long
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 15 
 
 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 
 subject, or by individuals, who by superior force, or by 
 availing themselves of religious or traditional feelings of 
 subordination, 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 cha- 
 racter, 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 provided for, the 
 government, by collecting small contributions from great 
 numbers, is enabled, with any tolerable management, to make 
 a show of riches quite out of proportion to the general condi- 
 tion of the society ; and hence the inveterate 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 collecting it, many persons of 
 course participate, besides the immediate household of the 
 sovereign. A large part is distributed among the various 
 functionaries of government, and among the objects of the 
 sovereign's favour or caprice. A part is occasionally em-
 
 16 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 ployed 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 possession of those using them, 
 owe their existence to the liberality ,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 handling 
 the public revenues. A demand thus arises for elaborate 
 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 communities, 
 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 per- 
 ception and observation, and manual dexterity, without 
 any considerable knowledge of the properties of objects : 
 such as some of the cotton fabrics of India. These arti- 
 ficers are fed by the surplus food which has been taken by 
 the government and its agents as their share of the produce. 
 So literally is this the case, that in some countries the work- 
 man, 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.
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 17 
 
 The insecurity, however, of all possessions in this state of 
 society, induces even the richest purchasers to give a pre- 
 ference 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 govern- 
 ment. 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 government, 
 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 and continuing 
 their cultivation, and are repaid with enormous 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 assignments on the 
 revenue collectors, or by having certain districts put into 
 their possession, that they may pay themselves from the 
 revenues ; to enable them to do which, a great portion of 
 VOL. i. c
 
 18 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 the powers of government are usually made over simul- 
 taneously, 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 periodically 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, wherever 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 
 unoccupied country, or in one from which the former inha- 
 bitants had been expelled, the land which was taken pos- 
 session 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 
 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, pro-
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 19 
 
 bably not an undesirable one ; and under it, in some cases, 
 the advance of mankind in intellectual culture was extraor- 
 dinarily 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 were already occupied by settled communities. The 
 knowledge which in such a position was acquired of foreign 
 productions, and the easy access of foreign ideas and inven- 
 tions, made the chain of routine, usually so strong in a rude 
 people, hang loosely on these communities. To speak only 
 of their industrial development ; they early acquired variety 
 of wants and desires, which stimulated them to extract frorn 
 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 proh't. 
 
 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 pressure 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 emi- 
 grated en masse, or sent forth a swarm of its youth, to seek, 
 sword in hand, for some less warlike 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 con- 
 quered. In some cases, the conquering state contented itself 
 
 c 2
 
 20 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 with imposing a tribute on the vanquished : 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 obtained a surplus of wealth, 
 available for purposes of collective luxury or magnificence. 
 From such a surplus the Parthenon and the Propylasa were 
 built, the sculptures of Pheidias paid for, and the festivals 
 celebrated, for which ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and 
 Aristophanes composed their dramas. But this state of 
 political relations, most useful, while it lasted, to the pro- 
 gress and ultimate interest of mankind, bad not the elements 
 of durability. A small conquering community which does 
 not incorporate its conquests, always ends by being con- 
 quered. Universal dominion, therefore, at last rested with 
 the people who practised this art with the Komans; 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 remainder. It is unneces- 
 sary 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 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 private ; but at length so dwindled 
 under the enervating influences of misgovernment, that what 
 remained was not even sufficient to keep those edifices from
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 21 
 
 decay. The strength and riches of the civilized world became 
 inadequate to make head against the nomad population which 
 skirted its northern frontier ; they overran the empire, and a 
 different order of tilings 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 
 Koman empire, predial slavery had extensively transformed 
 itself into a kind of serfdom : the coloni of the Komans were 
 rather villeins than actual slaves ; and the incapacity and 
 distaste of the barbarian conquerors for personally superin- 
 tending industrial occupations, left no alternative 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 addi- 
 tional produce they could raise. Under this system during 
 the Middle Ages it was not impossible, no more than in 
 modern Russia (where, up to the recent measure of emanci- 
 pation, the same system still essentially prevailed), for serfs 
 to acquire property ; and in fact, their accumulations are the 
 primitive source of the wealth of modern Europe. 
 
 In that age of violence and disorder, the first use made 
 by a serf of any small provision which he had been able to 
 accumulate, 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
 
 ZZ PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 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 fellows. 
 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 pro- 
 prietors. This gave rise to a sort of European counterpart of 
 the economical condition of Asiatic countries; except that, 
 in lieu of a single monarch and a fluctuating body of favourites 
 and employes, there was a numerous and in a considerable 
 degree fixed class of great landholders ; 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 govern- 
 ment, rendered indispensable 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 pro- 
 perty grew slowly, but steadily ; the arts of life made con- 
 stant progress ; plunder ceased to be the principal source of 
 accumulation ; and feudal Europe ripened into commercial 
 and manufacturing Europe. In the latter part of the Middle 
 Ages, the towns of Italy and Flanders, the free cities of Ger- 
 many, 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 
 industry, or by trading in the produce of such industry. The 
 Commons of England, the Tiers-Etat of France, the bour- 
 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
 
 . PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 23 
 
 degrees substituted themselves for the latter as the owners of 
 a great proportion of the land. This natural tendency was 
 in some cases retarded by laws contrived for the purpose of 
 detaining the land in the families of its existing possessors, 
 in other cases accelerated by political revolutions. 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 de- 
 scendants 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 occupa- 
 tion at all. The food thus raised supports a far larger popu- 
 lation 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 quan- 
 tity of food, it has greatly improved in quality and variety ; 
 while conveniences and luxuries, 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
 
 24 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 , 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 inhabi- 
 tants, 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 compared with 
 former ages, they do so in very different degrees. Even of 
 the countries which are justly accounted the richest, some have 
 made a more complete use of their productive 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 engaged 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 
 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 sharers. 
 Manufactures, again, are sometimes carried on by scattered 
 individuals, who own or hire the tools or machinery they
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. *Q 
 
 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 difference exists 
 in the operations of trade. The wholesale operations in- 
 deed are everywhere carried on by large capitals, where such 
 exist; but the retail dealings, which collectively occupy a 
 very great amount of capital, are sometimes 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 com- 
 munities still exist in America, nomadic in Arabia and the 
 steppes of Northern 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 
 Europe. Every one of the great types of human society, down 
 to that of the Esquimaux or Patagonians, is still extant. 
 
 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 
 and the physical arts of life. Many other causes co-operate ; 
 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 of wealth. 
 
 In so far as the economical condition of nations turns 
 upon the state of physical knowledge, it is a subject for the
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 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 materials 
 of the globe, is evidently not an arbitrary thing. It has 
 its necessary conditions. Of these, some are physical, de- 
 pending on the properties of matter, and 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 produc- 
 tion 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 governments 
 or nations have the power of deciding what institutions 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 dependent, and the manner 
 in which the distribution is effected 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. 
 
 PRODUCTION.
 
 BOOK I, 
 
 PKODIJCTION, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OF 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 tbe dis- 
 tinction more comprehensively, either muscular or nervous ; 
 and it is necessary to include in the idea, not solely the exer- 
 tion 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 appropriate 
 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 appro- 
 priating them. In all but these few and (except in the very 
 commencement of human society) unimportant cases, the
 
 30 BOOK I. CHAPTER I. 1. 
 
 objects supplied by nature are only instrumental to human 
 wants, after having undergone some 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 required for appropriating them must 
 yet, before they are used as food, be killed, divided into frag- 
 ments, and subjected 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 resemblance between a piece of a mineral substance 
 found in the earth, and a plough, an axe, or a saw. There 
 is less resemblance 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 them- 
 selves 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 co-operates 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 improved
 
 REQUISITES OF PRODUCTION. 31 
 
 is still the common practice of the East. The muscular 
 exertion, however, which it required, was very severe and 
 exhausting, insomuch that it was often selected as a punish- 
 ment 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 co-operation 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 instrument 
 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,
 
 32 BOOK I. CHAPTER I. 2. 
 
 held together ? By the tenacity, or force of cohesion, of 
 the fibres : which is one of the forces in nature, and which 
 we can measure exactly against other mechanical 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 nature, we shall find in like manner 
 that the powers of nature, or in other words the properties 
 of matter, 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, flowers, 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 particular 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 motion, 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-
 
 REQUISITES OF PRODUCTION. 33 
 
 nitely greater. He exerts this power either by availing him- 
 self of natural forces in existence, or by arranging objects in 
 those mixtures and combinations by which natural forces are 
 generated ; as when by putting a lighted match to fuel, and 
 water into a boiler over it, he generates the expansive 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 motion; the properties of 
 matter, the laws of nature, do the rest. The skill and inge- 
 nuity 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 mus- 
 cular 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, con- 
 sisting 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 industry 
 or in another ; and have said that in some occupations labour 
 does most, in others nature most. In this, however, there 
 
 * 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. 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 84 BOOK I. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 seems much confusion of ideas. The part which nature has 
 in any work of man, is indefinite and incommensurable. It 
 is impossible to decide that in any one thing nature does 
 more than in any other. One cannot even say that labour 
 does less. Less labour may be required ; but if that which 
 is required is absolutely indispensable, the result is just as 
 much the product of labour, as of nature. When two con- 
 ditions are equally necessary 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 agricul- 
 ture, than in manufactures. This notion, held by the French 
 Economistes, and from which Adam Smith was not free, 
 arose from a misconception 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 conside- 
 ration of the subject 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 sparingly supplied, and could, like land, be engrossed 
 and appropriated, 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 un- 
 limited, 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:
 
 REQUISITES OF PRODUCTION. 85 
 
 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 carriage, is 
 generally limited in quantity : there is not so much of- it as 
 persons would gladly occupy and cultivate, or otherwise turn 
 to use. In all old countries, land capable of cultivation, land 
 at least of any tolerable fertility, must be ranked among 
 agents limited in quantity. Water, for ordinary purposes, 
 on the banks of rivers or lakes, may be regarded as of un- 
 limited 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 applicable by its mechanical force to 
 the service of industry, may be exceedingly limited, com- 
 pared with the use which would be made of it if it were 
 more abundant. Coal, metallic ores, and other useful sub- 
 stances 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. Fisheries, 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 cost 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 ob- 
 tained in a quantity sufficient for every possible use ; and so 
 
 D 2
 
 36 BOOK I. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 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. 
 
 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 unlimited, it 
 cannot, unless susceptible of artificial monopoly, bear any 
 value in the market, since no one will give anything 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 appropriated and 
 used if it could be obtained for asking; the ownership or 
 use of the natural agent acquires an exchangeable value. 
 When more water power is wanted in a particular 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 suggestion, principles and deductions 
 which we have not yet reached the place for exhibiting and 
 illustrating fully.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 OF LABOUR AS AM AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 
 
 1. THE labour which terminates in the production of 
 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 different 
 states. Without disputing about this question of mere lan- 
 guage, 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 remuneration 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 equi- 
 valent could be assigned for the labour of the plough-maker. 
 If the produce is to be used or consumed in the form of 
 bread, it is from the bread that this equivalent must come. 
 The bread must suffice to remunerate all these labourers, and 
 several others; such as the carpenters and bricklayers who
 
 38 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 1. 
 
 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 instruments 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 con- 
 siderable : flour is transported to England from beyond the 
 Atlantic, corn from the heart of Russia; and in addition 
 to the labourers immediately 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, however, 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 1 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 blacksmith, and 
 the tools used in making those tools, and so back to the 
 origin of things? But after mounting one or two steps in 
 this ascending scale, we come into a region of fractions too 
 minute for calculation. Suppose, for instance, that the same 
 plough will last, before being worn out, a dozen years. Only
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION, 39 
 
 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 appreciable 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 his tools, is as much, therefore, as has been ex- 
 pended 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 ac- 
 count for any practical purpose connected with the commo- 
 dity. 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 consi- 
 deration 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. Except 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 completed, he can undertake no labour but 
 such as can be carried on at odd intervals, concurrently with 
 the pursuit of his subsistence. He cannot obtain food itself 
 in any abundance ; for every mode of so obtaining it, requires 
 that there be already food in store. Agriculture only brings
 
 4-0 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 2. 
 
 forth food after the lapse of months ; and though the lahours 
 of the agriculturist are not necessarily continuous during the 
 whole period, they must occupy a considerahle part of it. 
 Not only is agriculture impossible without food produced in 
 advance, but there must be a very great quantity in advance 
 to enable any considerable community to support 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 some- 
 where else, sufficient food to support their agricultural popu- 
 lation until the next harvest. They are only enabled to pro- 
 duce 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 subsis- 
 tence, 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 remune- 
 ration 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 necessary to the 
 ultimate result, the bread of the present harvest, as any of 
 those other portions of labour ; but is not, like them, remu- 
 nerated from it. That previous labour has received its remu- 
 neration from the previous food. In order to raise any pro- 
 duct, there are needed labour, tools, and materials, and food 
 to feed the labourers. But the tools 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.
 
 LABOUR AS AX AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 41 
 
 The food, on the contrary, is intrinsically 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 be remunerated over again from the produce of 
 the subsequent labour which it has fed. If we suppose tbat 
 the same body of labourers carried on a manufacture, and 
 grew food to sustain themselves 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 labourers 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 equivalent for 
 this forbearance : he will expect his advance of food to come 
 back to him with an increase, called in the language of busi- 
 ness, 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 consumption; 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 workmen while producing the 
 tools or materials, must have been provided in advance by 
 some one, and he, too, must have his profit from the ultimate 
 product ; but there is this difference, that here the ultimate 
 product has to supply not only the profit, but also the
 
 42 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 remuneration of the labour. The tool-maker (say, 'for in- 
 stance, 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 n'ot undertake 
 this outlay unless he expected 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 suffi- 
 cient 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 consumed 
 by productive labourers ; for the main end and purpose of 
 this labour is the subsistence itself; and though the posses- 
 sion 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 production, 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 industry, 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 industry, however, is not con- 
 fined to the extraction of materials. Coal, for instance, is 
 employed, not only in the process of industry, but in directly 
 warming human beings. When so used, it is not a material 
 of production, but is itself the ultimate product. So, also, in
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 43 
 
 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 destination, that of ornament, is a direct use ; 
 though they commonly require, before being so used, some 
 process of manufacture, which may perhaps warrant our re- 
 garding them as materials. Metallic ores of all sorts are 
 materials merely. 
 
 Under the head, production of materials, we must include 
 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 material into what 
 may be termed prepared material. In strictness of speech,
 
 44 BOOK 1. CHAPTER II. 4. 
 
 almost all food, as it comes from the bauds 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 
 production, from a flint and steel for striking a light, to 
 a steam ship, or the most complex apparatus of manufac- 
 turing 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 
 phraseology being shaped out by a different class of neces- 
 sities from those of scientific exposition. To avoid a multipli- 
 cation 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 
 considered 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 purpose 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 consumed, 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 deteriorated in some small degree by
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGEXT OF PRODUCTION. 45 
 
 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 con- 
 tributed remains in existence. 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 suspended, until the exhaustion of 
 the first use. Not so with the things classed as implements ; 
 they may be used repeatedly for fresh work, until the time, 
 sometimes very distant, at which they are worn out, while 
 the work already done by them may subsist unimpaired, and 
 when it perishes, 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 susceptible 
 
 * The able and friendly reviewer of this treatise in the Edinburgh Review 
 (October 1848) conceives 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 exchangeable 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.
 
 46 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 5. 
 
 of repeated employment, the whole of the products 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 accumu- 
 lations that labour was supported. It is enough if each 
 product contributes a fraction, commonly an insignificant one, 
 towards the remuneration of that labour and abstinence, or 
 towards indemnifying the immediate producer for advancing 
 that remuneration to the person who produced the tools. 
 
 5. Thirdly : Besides materials for industry to employ 
 itsglf on, and implements to aid it, provision must be made 
 to prevent its operations from being disturbed, and its pro- 
 ducts 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 ; namely, 
 when employed for the protection of industry. Sueh is the 
 object of all buildings for industrial purposes; all manu- 
 factories, warehouses, docks, granaries, barns, farm-buildings 
 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 remu- 
 neration of their labour. There are many modes in which 
 labour is still more directly applied to the protection of pro- 
 ductive operations. The herdsman has little other occupa- 
 tion 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 em- 
 ployed exclusively in the protection of industry, nor does 
 their payment constitute, to the individual producer, a part 
 of the expenses of production. But they are paid from the
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 47 
 
 taxes, which are derived from the produce of industry ; and 
 in any tolerably governed country they render to its opera- 
 tions 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 suffi- 
 cient 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 govern- 
 ment affords to the operations of industry were not afforded, 
 the producers would be under a necessity of either with- 
 drawing a large share of their time and labour from produc- 
 tion, 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 present arrangements, the product pays its quota towards 
 the same protection, and notwithstanding the waste and pro- 
 digality 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 : mule- 
 teers, waggoners, bargemen, sailors, wharfmen, coalheavers, 
 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 gratuitously 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 convenience ;
 
 48 BOOK I. CHAPTER IE. 6. 
 
 and if made with any tolerable judgment, they increase the 
 returns to his industry by far more than an equivalent 
 amount. 
 
 Another numerous class of labourers employed in render- 
 ing 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 
 diminish this loss of time and labour, the contrivance of fairs 
 and markets was early had recourse to, where consumers and 
 producers might periodically meet, without any intermediate 
 agency ; and this plan answers tolerably well for many arti- 
 cles, especially agricultural produce, agriculturists having at 
 some seasons a cert'ain 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 continuous 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 Jong beforehand, or must remain so 
 long unsupplied, that even before the resources of society 
 admitted of the establishment 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
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 49 
 
 where there are sufficient consumers near at hand to afford 
 them a remuneration. 
 
 In many cases the producers and dealers are the same per- 
 sons, 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 manufacturer and 
 retailer is only expedient when the article can advantage- 
 ously he 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 agency ; and even shoes and 
 coats, when they are to be furnished in large quantities at once, 
 as for the supply of a regiment or of a workhouse, are usually 
 obtained not directly from the producers, but from interme- 
 diate 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 manufac- 
 tories, 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 dis- 
 tributing them to the retailers, to be by them further distri- 
 buted among the -consumers. Of these various elements is 
 composed the Distributing Class, whose agency is supple- 
 mentary to that of the Producing Class : and the produce so 
 VOL. r. E
 
 50 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 7. 
 
 distributed, or its price, is the source from which the distri- 
 butors are remunerated for their exertions, and for the 
 abstinence which enabled them to advance the funds needful 
 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 economy, need not be taken into 
 account as expenses of production. But the technical or 
 industrial education of the community; the labour employed 
 in learning and in teaching the arts of production, in ac- 
 quiring and communicating skill in those arts ; this labour is 
 really, and in general solely, undergone for the sake of the 
 greater or more valuable produce thereby attained, and in 
 order that a remuneration, equivalent or more than equiva- 
 lent, may be reaped by the learner, besides an adequate remu- 
 neration 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 operations, or in 
 other words, as part of what the produce costs to society, so
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 51 
 
 too may the labour employed in keeping up productive 
 powers ; in preventing them from being destroyed or weak- 
 ened by accident or disease. The labour of a physician or 
 surgeon, when made use of by persons engaged 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 produc- 
 tive members. To the individuals, indeed, this forms but a 
 part, sometimes an imperceptible part, of the motives that 
 induce them to submit to medical treatment : it is not prin- 
 cipally 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 pro- 
 duction, 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 occa- 
 sion to assert respecting productive labour : though, when 
 society and not the individuals are considered, this labour 
 and outlay must be regarded as part of the advance by which 
 society effects its productive 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, performs a 
 function partly intellectual ; so much so, indeed, that the most 
 intelligent dog or elephant could not, probably, be taught to 
 do it The dullest human being, instructed beforehand, is 
 
 E 2
 
 52 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 8. 
 
 capable of turning a mill ; but a horse cannot turn it without 
 somebody 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 not have 
 produced the Principia without the bodily exertion either of 
 penmanship or of dictation ; and he must have drawn many 
 diagrams, and written out many calculations and demonstra- 
 tions, 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 produc- 
 tion 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 remuneration from the produce. The labour of 
 invention is often estimated and paid on the very same plan 
 as that of execution. Many manufacturers of ornamental 
 goods have inventors in their employment, who receive wages 
 or salaries for designing patterns, exactly as others do for 
 copying them. All this is strictly part of the labour of pro- 
 duction ; 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 in 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 exten- 
 sion of knowledge of the powers of nature being fruitful of 
 applications to the purposes of outward life. The electro- 
 magnetic telegraph was the wonderful and most unexpected 
 consequence of the experiments of CErsted and the mathe- 
 matical investigations of Ampere : and the modern art of 
 navigation is an unforeseen emanation from the purely specu-
 
 LABOUR AS AN AGENT OF PRODUCTION. 53 
 
 lative and apparently merely curious enquiry, by the mathe- 
 maticians 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 pursuits of savants, nor 
 is their remuneration in general derived from the increased 
 production which may be caused incidentally, and mostly 
 after a long interval, by their discoveries; this ultimate influ- 
 ence does not, for most of the purposes of political economy, 
 require to be taken into consideration ; and speculative 
 thinkers are generally classed as the producers only of the 
 books, or other useable or saleable articles, which directly 
 emanate from them. But when (as in political economy one 
 should always be prepared to do) we shift our point of view, 
 and consider not individual acts, and the motives by which 
 they are determined, but national and universal results, intel- 
 lectual speculation 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 employing 
 labour in furtherance of production, I have made little use of 
 the popular distinction of industry into agricultural, manu- 
 facturing, and commercial. For, in truth, this division 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 manufacturing 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
 
 54 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 9. 
 
 soil before it is handed over to them : this, however, might 
 he 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 remu- 
 neration 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 con- 
 monly termed manufactures, belong in many respects to the 
 same division in the economy of society as manufacturers. 
 The cotton-planter of Carolina, 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 consequences depend, and which distinguish 
 it from all the subsequent 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 generally mean this, and this exclusively, unless the 
 contrary is either stated or implied in the context. The 
 term manufacturing 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. LABOUR 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 Pro- 
 ductive and Unproductive. There has been not a little con- 
 troversy 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 in some material ob- 
 ject, 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 produces a benefit 
 or a pleasure worth the cost. The labour of officers of 
 government, of the army and navy, of physicians, 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 " stigmatized " as unpro- 
 ductive, an expression which they appear to regard as syno- 
 nymous with wasteful or worthless. But this seems to be a 
 misunderstanding of the matter in dispute. Production not 
 being the sole end of human existence, the 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. Differences of language, however,
 
 56 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 1. 
 
 are by no means unimportant, 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 pro- 
 duced is not the matter composing them. All the labour of 
 all the human beings in the world could not produce 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 matter 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 com- 
 posed 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 sur- 
 geon 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 teacher from whom I learn 
 an art by which I can gain my bread, and accord it to the 
 confectioner who makes bonbons for the momentary pleasure 
 of a sense of taste ? 
 
 It is quite true that all these kinds of labour are pro-
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 57 
 
 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 pro- 
 ductive, 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. Pro- 
 ductive 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 phy- 
 sical or mental efficiency ; of the teachers of bodily exercises, 
 and of the various trades, sciences, and arts, together with 
 the labour of the learners in acquiring them ; and all labour 
 bestowed by any persons, throughout life, in 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
 
 58 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 3. 
 
 pleasure given, an inconvenience or a pain averted, during a 
 longer or a shorter time, but without leaving a permanent 
 acquisition 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 declaim er 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 enjoyment of the spectators ; 
 or instead of good there may be harm ; but neither the one 
 nor the other is the effect intended, is the result for which the 
 exhibitor works and the spectator pays ; nothing but the im- 
 mediate pleasure. Such, again, is the labour of the army and 
 navy ; they, at the best, prevent a country from being con- 
 quered, or from being injured or insulted, which is a service, 
 but in all other respects leave the country neither improved 
 nor deteriorated. 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 service 
 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, 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
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 59 
 
 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 performed, cannot 
 be spoken of as wealth, except by an acknowledged meta- 
 phor. 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 pro- 
 duced 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 em- 
 bodied in human beings, or in any other animate or inani- 
 mate objects. This nomenclature I have, in a former publi- 
 
 * Some authorities look upon it as an essential element in the idea of wealth, 
 that it should be capable not solely of being accumulated but of being trans- 
 ferred ; and inasmuch as the valuable qualities, and even the productive capa- 
 cities, of a human being, cannot be detached from him and passed to some one 
 else, they deny to these the appellation of wealth, and to the labour expended 
 in acquiring them the name of productive labour. It seems to me, however, 
 that the skill of an artisan (for instance) being both a desirable possession, and 
 one of a certain durability (not to say productive even of national wealth), there 
 is no better reason for refusing to it the title of wealth because it is attached 
 to a man, than to a coalpit or manufactory because they are attached to a place. 
 Besides, if the skill itself cannot be parted with to a purchaser, the use of it 
 may ; if it cannot be sold, it can be hired ; and it maybe, and is, sold outright 
 in all countries whose laws permit that the man himself should be sold along 
 with it. Its defect of transferability does not result from a natural but from a 
 legal and moral obstacle. The human being himself (as formerly observed) I 
 do not class as wealth. He is the purpose for which wealth exists. But his 
 acquired capacities, which exist only as means, and have been called into 
 existence by labour, fall rightly, as it seems to me, within that designation.
 
 60 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 3. 
 
 cation,* recommended, as most conducive to the ends of 
 classification ; and I am still of that opinion. 
 
 But in applying the term wealth to the industrial capa- 
 cities of human beings, there seems always, in popular 
 apprehension, 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 
 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 accomplishments 
 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 language, to 
 make the distinction turn upon the permanence rather than 
 upon the materiality of the product, yet when employing 
 terms which 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 improvement in ter- 
 minology 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 those kinds of exertion which 
 produce utilities embodied in material objects. But in limit- 
 ing 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, provided that an 
 
 * Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy. Essay III. 
 On the words Productive and Unproductive.
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 61 
 
 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 abun- 
 dance, could not exist. Such labour may be said to be pro- 
 ductive indirectly or mediately, in opposition to the labour 
 of the ploughman and the cotton-spinner, which are pro- 
 ductive immediately. They are all alike in this, that they 
 leave the community richer in material 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 crea- 
 tion of material wealth ; which, however largely or success- 
 fully 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, 
 unproductive, which ends in immediate enjoyment, without 
 any increase of the accumulated stock of permanent means 
 of enjoyment. And all labour, according to our present de- 
 finition, must be classed as unproductive, which terminates 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 productive, unless 
 the friend is a productive labourer, and produces 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
 
 62 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 4. 
 
 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 numher of mis- 
 sionaries or clergymen a nation maintains, the less it has to 
 expend on other things; while the more it expends judi- 
 ciously in keeping agriculturists and manufacturers at work, 
 the more it will have for every other purpose. By the former 
 it diminishes, ceeteris paribus, its stock of material products ; 
 by the latter, it increases them. 
 
 Unproductive may be as useful as productive labour; it 
 may be more useful, even in point of permanent advantage ; 
 or its use may consist only in pleasurable sensation, whicli 
 when gone leaves no trace ; or it may not afford even this, 
 but may be absolute waste. In any case society or mankind 
 grow no richer by it, but poorer. All material products 
 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 grows no richer by unproductive labour, the indivi- 
 dual 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 previously 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. Thus the community collectively 
 gains nothing by the actor's labour ; and it loses, of his 
 receipts, all that portion which he consumes, retaining only 
 that which he lays by. A community, however, may add to 
 its wealth by unproductive labour, at the expense of other com- 
 munities, as an individual may at the expense of other indivi-
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 63 
 
 duals. 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 
 themselves to the princes and satraps of the East to carry 
 on useless and destructive wars, and returned with their 
 savings to pass their declining years in their own country : 
 these were unproductive labourers, and the pay they received, 
 together with the plunder they took, was an outlay without 
 return to the countries which furnished it ; hut, 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 accom- 
 plishments : these were mainly unproductive 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 mate- 
 rial wealth ; if useless, all that these labourers consumed was 
 to the world waste. 
 
 To be wasted, however, is a liability not confined to un- 
 productive labour. Productive labour may equally be wasted, 
 if more of it is expended than really conduces to production. 
 If defect of skill in labourers, or of judgment in those who 
 direct them, causes a misapplication of productive industry ; 
 if a farmer 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 perfecting the invention and 
 in carrying it into practice, though employed for a productive 
 purpose, is wasted. Productive labour may render a nation
 
 64 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 5. 
 
 poorer, if the wealth it produces, that is, the increase it makes 
 in the stock of useful or agreeable things, he 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. Some of the States of North America, by making 
 premature railways and canals, are thought to have made this 
 kind of mistake ; and it was for some time doubtful whether 
 England, in the disproportionate development of railway 
 enterprise, had not, in some degree, followed the example. 
 Labour sunk in expectation of a distant return, when the 
 great exigencies or limited resources of the community require 
 that the return be rapid, may leave the country not only 
 poorer in the meanwhile, by all which those labourers con- 
 sume, 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 produc- 
 tively. Whoever contributes nothing directly or indirectly 
 to production, is an unproductive consumer. The only pro- 
 ductive consumers are productive labourers ; the labour of 
 direction being of course included, as well as that of execu- 
 tion. But the consumption even of productive labourers is 
 not all of it productive consumption. There is unproduc- 
 tive 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 consumption. 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 unpro- 
 ductive : with a reservation perhaps of a certain quantum of
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 65 
 
 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 number 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 champagne, 
 must be reckoned unproductive, since these things give no 
 assistance to production, nor any support to life or strength, 
 but what would equally be given by things much less 
 costly. Hence it might be supposed that the labour em- 
 ployed in producing them ought not to be regarded as pro- 
 ductive, in the sense in which the term is understood by poli- 
 tical economists. I grant that no labour tends to the perma- 
 nent 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 productive 
 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 character 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 
 
 VOL. I. F
 
 66 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 6. 
 
 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 
 employed otherwise. Of the produce of the country, a part 
 only is destined to be consumed productively ; the remainder 
 supplies the unproductive consumption of producers, and the 
 entire consumption of the unproductive classes. Suppose 
 that the proportion of the annual produce applied to the 
 first purpose amounts to half; then one-half the productive 
 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 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 consumed unproduc- 
 tively. Suppose that this second half of the labouring popu- 
 lation ceased to work, and that the government 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 undimi- 
 nished : the unproductive classes, indeed, would be either 
 starved or obliged to produce their own subsistence, and the 
 whole community would be reduced during a year to bare 
 necessaries ; but the sources of production would be unim- 
 paired, 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 suspended their accustomed occu- 
 pations, and the second half had continued theirs, the country 
 at the end of the twelvemonth would have been entirely im- 
 poverished. 
 
 It would be a great error to regret the large proportion 
 of the annual produce, which in an opulent country goes to
 
 UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR. 67 
 
 supply unproductive consumption. It would be to lament 
 that the community has so much to spare from its necessities, 
 for its pleasures and for all higher uses. This portion of the 
 produce is the fund from which all the wants of the commu- 
 nity, other than that of mere living, are provided for; the 
 measure of its means of enjoyment, and of its power of accom- 
 plishing all purposes not productive. That so great a surplus 
 should he 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 inequality 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 persons who render no equivalent service in 
 return.
 
 CHAPTER 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 without 
 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 production, it is 
 of the utmost importance thoroughly to understand, since a 
 number of the erroneous notions with which our subject is 
 infested, originate in an imperfect and confused apprehension 
 of this point. 
 
 Capital, by persons wholly unused to reflect on the sub- 
 ject, is supposed to be synonymous with money. To expose 
 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 capable of contributing to 
 production in the same degree. What capital does for pro- 
 duction, 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 requires from past, and from the produce of 
 past, labour. Whatever things are destined for this use 
 destined to supply productive labour with these various 
 prerequisites are Capital.
 
 CAPITAL. 69 
 
 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 his 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, according 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 and valets, or maintaining hunters 
 and hounds, or in educating his children, or in paying 
 taxes, or in charity. What then is his capital ? Precisely 
 that part of his possessions, whatever it be, which is to 
 constitute his fund for carrying on fresh production. It is 
 of no consequence 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 
 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
 
 70 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 1. 
 
 of the destination of these 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 intention, 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 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 otherwise 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 unproductive 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 allow- 
 ance : but the consequence of this change in the demand for 
 commodities, 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 jewellery. So 
 that again, without having had anything to do with the food 
 of the labourers directly, the conversion by 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
 
 CAPITAL. 71 
 
 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. 
 Their shape, whatever it may be, is a temporary accident : but 
 once destined for production, they do not fail to find a way of 
 transforming themselves into things capable of being applied 
 to it. 
 
 2. As whatever of the produce of the country is devoted 
 to production is capital, so, conversely, the whole of the capital 
 of the country is devoted to production. This second pro- 
 position, however, must be taken with some limitations and 
 explanations. A fund may be seeking for productive employ- 
 ment, and find none, adapted to the inclinations of its pos- 
 sessor : it then is capital still, but unemployed 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 unem- 
 ployed 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 govern- 
 ment 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 is required for, or is actually employed in, the pro- 
 duction which he carries on. He must have a larger capital, 
 to maintain the same quantity of productive labour ; or (what
 
 72 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 2. 
 
 is equivalent) with a given capital he maintains less labour. 
 This mode of levying taxes, therefore, limits unecessarily 
 the industry of the country : a portion of the fund destined 
 by its owners for production being diverted from its purpose, 
 and kept in a constant state of advance to the government. 
 
 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 produc- 
 tive 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 im- 
 plement (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 pay- 
 ment out of capital, makes it requisite that there should be a 
 greater capital, a greater antecedent accumulation of the pro- 
 duce of past labour, than is naturally necessary, 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 indispen- 
 sably necessary for production. As much of it as exceeds 
 the actual necessaries of life and health (an excess which in 
 the case of skilled labourers is usually considerable) is not 
 expended in supporting labour, but in remunerating it, and
 
 CAPITAL. 73 
 
 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 unfortunately 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 remuneration 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 
 accumulated, that the practice of paying in advance any re- 
 muneration of labour beyond a bare subsistence, could pos- 
 sibly have arisen : since whatever is so paid, is not really 
 applied to production, but to the unproductive consumption 
 of productive 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 labourers 
 are always subsisted from capital : and this is obviously the 
 fact, though the capital needs not necessarily be furnished 
 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 pro- 
 ceeds of the work he has in hand, but on those of work pre- 
 viously executed and disposed of. Each is supported by a 
 small capital of his own, which he periodically 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 remune-
 
 74 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 ration of his labour at the market price, must he considered 
 a part of his capital, expended, like any other capital, for pro- 
 duction : and his personal consumption, so far as it consists of 
 necessaries, is productive consumption. 
 
 3. At the risk of heing tedious, I must add a few more 
 illustrations, to bring out into a still clearer and stronger 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 prevail in it may 
 be traced to the want of a thorough mastery over the elemen- 
 tary ideas. Nor is this surprising : a branch may be diseased 
 and all the rest healthy, but unsoundness 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 pos- 
 sess, without being personally engaged in production, can be 
 regarded as capital. It is so called in common language, and, 
 with reference to the individual, not improperly. 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 innu- 
 merable 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 sup- 
 position 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 
 much capital as if it belonged to B. A is really a farmer or 
 manufacturer, not personally, but in respect of his property. 
 Capital worth ten thousand pounds is employed in production 
 in maintaining labourers and providing tools and materials ;
 
 CAPITAL. 75 
 
 which capital belongs to A, while B takes the trouble of em- 
 ploying it, and receives for his remuneration 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 proprie- 
 tor, by whom they are employed in improving the productive 
 powers of his estate, by fencing, draining, road-making, or 
 permanent manures. This is productive employment. 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 increased 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 manufacturer to extend his business, 
 it is still capital, because productively 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 
 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.
 
 76 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 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 received the fair 
 value for his expenditure in articles of subsistence or luxury, 
 which 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 con- 
 sumed without return. C's tradesmen may have made a 
 profit during the process ; but if the capital had been ex- 
 pended 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 any 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 diffe- 
 rence 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 ? 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. 77 
 
 capital, but from some other source of income 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 diminished 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 com- 
 munity, since 1 what was devoted to the use and consumption 
 of the proprietor was only the interest ; the capital itself was, 
 or would have been, employed in the perpetual maintenance 
 of an equivalent number of labourers, regularly reproducing 
 what they consumed : and of this maintenance they are 
 deprived without compensation. 
 
 Let us now vary the hypothesis still further, and suppose 
 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 tl e 
 money in making a railroad, this might be a productive em- 
 ployment, and A's property would still be used as capital; 
 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 govern- 
 ment is in the situation of C, the spendthrift landlord, 
 and A's ten thousand pounds are so much national capital 
 which once existed, but exists no longer : virtually thrown 
 into the sea, as far as wealth or production is concerned ; 
 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 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 lost and gone, and what he now
 
 78 BOOK I. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 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 afterwards 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 substi- 
 tutes 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 community are 
 neither increased nor diminished. The breach in the capital 
 of the country was made when the government spent A's 
 money : whereby a value of ten thousand pounds was with- 
 drawn or withheld from productive employment, placed in 
 the fund for unproductive consumption, and destroyed with- 
 out equivalent.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS RESPECTING CAPITAL. 
 
 1. IF the preceding explanations have answered their 
 purpose, they have given not only a sufficiently complete pos- 
 session 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 individual circum- 
 stances surrounds it, to have prepared even the -unpractised 
 reader for certain elementary propositions or theorems respect- 
 ing capital, the full comprehension of which is already a con- 
 siderable step out of darkness into light. 
 
 The first of these propositions is, That industry is 
 limited by capital. This is so obvious as to be taken for 
 granted in many common forms of speech; but to see a 
 truth occasionally 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 legislators and political writers ; and doctrines irrecon- 
 cileable with it are still very commonly professed and in- 
 culcated. 
 
 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 manufac- 
 ture is to invest capital in the manufacture. This implies 
 that industry cannot be employed to any greater extent than 
 there is capital to invest. The proposition, indeed, must be 
 assented 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-
 
 80 BOOK 1. CHAPTER V. L 
 
 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 co-operate with labour. The food of labourers and 
 the materials of production have no productive power ; but 
 labour cannot exert its productive power unless provided 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, without 
 providing additional funds, could create additional employ- 
 ment. 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 with a new 
 branch of industry, would parade in statistical tables the 
 amount of produce yielded and labour employed in the
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 81 
 
 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 industry 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 probably 
 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. Capital 
 may be temporarily unemployed, as in the case of unsold 
 goods, or funds that have not yet found an investment: 
 during this interval it does not set in motion any industry. 
 
 * An exception must be admitted when the industry created or upheld 
 by the restrictive law belongs to the class of what are called domestic manu- 
 factures. These being carried on by persons already fed by labouring fami- 
 lies, in the intervals of other employment no transfer of capital to the occu- 
 pation 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 to 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 doctrine of free 
 trade. Domestic manufactures cannot, from the very nature of things, require 
 protection, 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 com- 
 petition, it is 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. 
 
 VOL. I. G
 
 8E BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 2. 
 
 Or 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 
 uselessly for want of labour : the Swan Eiver settlement (now 
 called Western Australia), in the first years after its founda- 
 tion, was an instance. There are many persons maintained 
 from existing capital, who produce nothing, or who might pro- 
 duce 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 employ- 
 ment 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 productive 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 
 paramount consideration for the time. 
 
 When 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 governments 
 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 fundholder, when paid off, 
 would still desire to draw an income from his property, most 
 of which therefore would find its way into productive employ- 
 ment, while a great part of it would have been drawn from 
 the fund for unproductive expenditure, since people do not
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 83 
 
 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 any increase in the productive power 
 of capital (or, more properly speaking, of labour) by improve- 
 ments 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 in- 
 crease will be saved and converted into capital ; especially 
 when the increased returns to productive industry hold out 
 an additional temptation to the conversion of funds from an 
 unproductive 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 ; and 
 this without assignable limit. I do not mean to deny that 
 the capital, or part of it, may be so employed as not to 
 support 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 co-operate 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 them 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 
 
 G 2
 
 84 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 3. 
 
 had hardly been questioned ; and even since his time, authors 
 of the highest name and of great merit* have contended, 
 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 country, 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 
 capable of it, to whom it allowed a share in the food, and could 
 be in no danger of wanting a field for the employment of this 
 productive 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 benevolent 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-conducted labourer, he ought not 
 to fare better ; and accordingly 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 
 
 * For example, Mr. Malthus, Dr. Chalmers, M. de Sismondi.
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 85 
 
 nsked, how is the increased capital to find employment ? 
 Who is to buy the goods which it will produce ? There are 
 no longer customers even for those which were produced 
 before. The goods, therefore, (it is said) will remain unsold ; 
 they will 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 consumers 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 employment. 
 Now, there are two possible suppositions in regard to the 
 labourers ; either there is, or there is not, an increase 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 land- 
 lords, 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 production 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 production, 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
 
 86 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 4. 
 
 of consumers, but of producers and productive power. 
 Every addition to capital gives to labour eitber additional 
 employment, or additional remuneration ; enriches either the 
 country, or the labouring class. If it finds additional hands 
 to set to work, it increases the aggregate produce : if only the 
 same hands, it gives them a larger share of it ; and perhaps 
 even in this case, by stimulating them to greater exertion, 
 augments the produce itself. 
 
 4. A second fundamental theorem respecting Capital, 
 relates to the source from which it is derived. It is the 
 result of saving. The evidence of this lies abundantly in 
 what has be^n 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 person 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 speedily as if it had been 
 consumed in idleness. We may imagine a number of indi- 
 viduals or families settled on as many separate 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 consumption) as much as 
 is necessary for seed. Some saving, therefore, 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
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 87 
 
 work of their own hands. All that any one employs in sup- 
 porting 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, without material inaccuracy, that all 
 capital, and especially all addition to capital, are the result of 
 saving. 
 
 In a rude and violent state of society, it continually 
 happens that the person who has capital is not the very per- 
 son who has saved it, but some one who, being stronger, or 
 belonging to a more powerful community, has possessed him- 
 self of it by plunder. And even in a state of things in which 
 property was protected, the increase of capital has usually 
 been, for a long time, mainly derived from privations which, 
 though essentially the same with saving, are not generally 
 called by that name, because not voluntary. The actual pro- 
 ducers have been slaves, compelled to produce as much as 
 force could extort from them, and to consume 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, he 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-im- 
 posed privation of the master ; but more probably by that of 
 the slaves themselves while free ; the rapine or war, which 
 deprived them of their personal 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
 
 88 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 5. 
 
 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 ob- 
 vious that whatever increases the productive power of labour, 
 creates an additional fund to 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 scien- 
 tific 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 ; 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 for- 
 getting that to increase capital there is another way besides 
 consuming less, namely, to produce more. 
 
 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 consumption is de- 
 ferred ; but only that, if consumed immediately, it is not con- 
 sumed 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 altogether by the con- 
 sumption of the ultimate product. The remainder is paid 
 in wages to productive labourers, who consume it for their
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 89 
 
 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 
 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 distributing it among others. 
 The person who expends his fortune in unproductive con- 
 sumption, 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 of 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 
 portion 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 
 dependents ; but without reaching the ultimate destination 
 in either case. Saving (for productive investment), and 
 spending, coincide very closely in the first stage of their 
 operations. The effects of both begin with consumption ; 
 with the destruction of a certain portion of wealth ; only
 
 90 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 5. 
 
 the things consumed, and the persons consuming, are dif- 
 ferent. There is, in the one case, a wearing out of tools, a 
 destruction of material, and a quantity of food and clothing 
 supplied to labourers, which they destroy by use : in the 
 other case, there is a consumption, that is to say, a destruc- 
 tion, of wines, equipages, and furniture. Thus far, the con- 
 sequence to the national wealth has been much the same ; an 
 equivalent 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 dis- 
 appeared, and there is nothing left ; while, on the contrary, 
 the saving person, during the whole time that the destruc- 
 tion 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 
 operation admits of being repeated indefinitely without 
 any fresh act of saving, a saving once made becomes a 
 fund to maintain 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 pheno- 
 mena. 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 destruction 
 which takes place in the case of unproductive expenditure. 
 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, equipages, and furniture, are not sub- 
 sistence, tools, and materials, and could not in any case have
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 91 
 
 teen applied to the support of labour ; that they are adapted 
 for no other than unproductive 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 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 luxu- 
 ries, 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, mate- 
 rials, and food which they annually consume being so much 
 subtracted from the general stock of the community appli- 
 cable to productive purposes. In proportion as any class 
 is improvident 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 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 
 persons of frugal habits. Large accumulations are continually made by the
 
 92 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 6. 
 
 6. To return to our fundamental theorem. Everything 
 which is produced is consumed ; hoth 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 trans- 
 
 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, actually 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 observed 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 increase 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 consequence 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 personal 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 
 iii subsistence and in the instruments 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 savings 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.
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 93 
 
 mitted 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 heen 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 heen produced 
 by human hands within the last twelve months. A very 
 small proportion indeed of that large aggregate was in exist- 
 ence ten years ago ; of the present productive capital of the 
 country scarcely any part, except farm-houses and manu- 
 factories, 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 unpro- 
 ductive 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 preser- 
 vation, but by perpetual reproduction : every part of it is 
 used and destroyed, generally very soon after it is produced, 
 but those who consume it are employed meanwhile in pro- 
 ducing more. The growth of capital is similar to the growth 
 of population. Every individual who is born, dies, but in 
 ctich year the number born exceeds the number who die: 
 the population, therefore, always increases, though not one
 
 94 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 7. 
 
 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 hy earthquakes, floods, hur- 
 ricanes, 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 inhabi- 
 tants are ruined, and yet in a few years after, everything is 
 much as it was before. This vis medicatrix natures has been 
 a subject of sterile astonishment, or has been cited to exem- 
 plify 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 destroyed 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 con- 
 suming what had been produced previously. The possibility 
 of a rapid repair of their disasters, mainly depends on whether 
 the country has been depopulated. 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 improve- 
 ments undestroyed, and the more durable buildings probably 
 unimpaired, or only partially 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
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 95 
 
 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 in- 
 tentional abstinence, but involuntary privation. 
 
 Yet so fatal is the habit of thinking through the medium 
 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 far as I am 
 aware) by any political economist before Dr. Chalmers ; a 
 writer many of whose opinions I think erroneous, but 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 
 increased 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 pros- 
 perity : the wealth and resources of the country, instead of 
 diminishing, 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 temporary credence; almost all tending to exalt
 
 96 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 8. 
 
 unproductive expenditure, at the expense of productive. 
 Without entering into all the causes which operated, and 
 which commonly do operate, to prevent these extraordinary 
 drafts on the productive resources of a country from heing 
 so much felt as it might seem reasonable to expect, we will 
 suppose the most unfavourable case possible : that the whole 
 amount borrowed and destroyed by the government, was 
 abstracted by the lender from a productive employment in 
 which it had actually been invested. The capital, there- 
 fore, of the country, 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 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 build- 
 ings. 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 pro- 
 ductive employment not only capital, but likewise labourers ; that the funds 
 withdrawn 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 coun-
 
 FUNDAMENTAL, PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 4) 
 
 This leads to the vexed question to which Dr. Chalmers 
 has very particularly adverted ; whether the funds required 
 by a government for extraordinary unproductive expenditure, 
 are best raised by loans, the interest only being provided 
 by taxes, or whether taxes should be at once laid on to the 
 whole amount; which is called in the financial vocabulary, 
 raising the whole of the supplies within the year. Dr. Chal- 
 mers is strongly for the latter method. He says, the com- 
 mon notion is that in calling for the whole amount in one 
 year, you require what is either impossible, or very incon- 
 venient ; that the people cannot, without great hardship, pay 
 the whole at once out of their yearly income ; and that it is 
 much better to require of them a small payment every year 
 in the shape of interest, than so great a sacrifice 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 
 
 teracts 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 example, 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 pro- 
 ductive employment, to supply munitions of war and support armies for her Con- 
 tinental allies. Consequently, as shown in the text, her labourers suffered, her 
 capitalists prospered, and her permanent productive resources did not fall off. 
 
 VOL. i. H
 
 98 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 8. 
 
 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. Whenever 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 paying it off is actually made : only 
 it is paid to the wrong persons, and therefore does not extin- 
 guish the claim ; and paid by the very worst of taxes, a tax 
 exclusively on the labouring class. And after having, in this 
 most painful and unjust way, 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 employed 
 in productive industry within the country. The practical 
 state of the case, however, seldom exactly corresponds 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 con- 
 stantly making from income, and often with a part of them 
 which, if not so taken, would have migrated to colonies, or 
 sought other investments abroad. In these cases (which will 
 be more particularly examined hereafter*), the sum wanted 
 may be obtained by loan without detriment to the labourers, 
 or derangement of the national industry, and even perhaps 
 
 * Infra, book iv. chaps, iv. v.
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 99 
 
 with advantage 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 country which makes so great yearly additions to its wealth 
 that a part can be taken and expended unproductively with- 
 out diminishing capital, or even preventing a considerable 
 increase, it is evident that even if the whole of what is so 
 taken would have become capital, and obtained employment 
 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 anticipa- 
 tion of a discussion which will find its proper place elsewhere, 
 appeared necessary to prevent false inferences from the 
 premises previously laid down. 
 
 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 sup- 
 ports and employs productive labour, is the capital expended 
 in setting it to work, and not the demand of purchasers 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 of produc- 
 tion the labour and capital shall be employed ; 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. 
 These depend on the amount of the capital, or other funds 
 directly devoted to the sustenance 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 occu- 
 pation, there will be no velvet made, and consequently none 
 bought ; unless, indeed, the desire of the intending purchaser 
 
 PI 2
 
 100 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 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 hypo- 
 thesis, 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 preference on the part of capital 
 for making velvet. Manufacturers 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 con- 
 sumption. So that the employment afforded to labour does 
 not depend on the purchasers, 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 com- 
 modity 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 dis- 
 continued 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
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 101 
 
 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 equivalent 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 illustra- 
 tion it can receive. It is, to common apprehension, a paradox ; 
 and even among political economists of reputation, 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, 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 employment increased, demand 
 for commodities does not constitute demand for labour. I con- 
 ceive 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 classes, 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 exca- 
 vators to dig artificial lakes, or labourers to make plantations 
 and lay out pleasure grounds; or, instead of this, he may
 
 102 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 expend the same value in buying velvet and lace. The ques- 
 tion 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 
 employs 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 laceinakers 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 manufacturer. 
 Suppose that he had been in the habit of expending 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, how- 
 ever, 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 purpose 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, therefore, which formerly 
 produced necessaries for the use of these bricklayers, are
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 103 
 
 deprived of their market, and must look out for other em- 
 ployment ; 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 two things to make the 
 velvet, or to produce necessaries for the journeymen brick- 
 layers ; 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 necessaries. 
 
 For further illustration, let us suppose the same case 
 reversed. The consumer has been accustomed to buy velvet, 
 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 
 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 main- 
 taining bricklayers ; it is a second fund. There are, there- 
 fore, 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. 
 
 In answer to this it is said, that though money laid out 
 in buying velvet is not capital, it replaces a capital; that
 
 104 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 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, extinguish- 
 ing 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 capital. 
 It is perfectly true that if I expend 1000Z. in buying velvet, 
 I enable the manufacturer to employ 1000L in the main- 
 tenance 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, 1 undoubtedly 
 create no new demand for labour : for while I employ 1000L 
 in hiring labour on the one hand, I annihilate for ever JOOOZ. 
 of the velvet-maker's capital on the other. But this is con- 
 founding 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 crea- 
 tion, 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
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 105 
 
 liberated, and would not be given until it was liberated. But 
 every one knows that the capital invested in an employment 
 can be withdrawn from it, if sufficient time be allowed. If 
 the velvet-maker had previous notice, by not receiving the 
 usual order, he will have produced 1000Z. less velvet, and an 
 equivalent portion of his capital will have been already set 
 free. If he had no previous notice, and the article conse- 
 quently remains on his hands, the increase of his stock will 
 induce him next year to suspend or diminish his production 
 until the surplus is carried off. When this process is com- 
 plete, 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 demand for labour will be merely 
 changed, not increased : but as soon as it has taken place, 
 the demand for labour is increased. Where there was for- 
 merly only one capital employed in maintaining weavers to 
 make 1000Z. worth of velvet, there is now that same capital 
 employed in making something else, and 1000Z. distributed 
 among bricklayers besides. There are now two capitals em- 
 ployed in remunerating 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 manufacturer, 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 him- 
 self, but solely by what he does not so consume. If instead 
 of laying out 100J. in wine or silk, I expend it in wages, 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,
 
 106 BOOK 1. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 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 contra- 
 diction. When less is not produced, what one person forbears 
 to consume is necessarily added to the share of those to whom 
 he transfers his power of purchase, in the case supposed I 
 do not necessarily 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 
 postponed 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. 
 
 There cannot be a better reductio ad absurdum of the 
 opposite doctrine than that afforded by the Poor Law. If it 
 be equally for the benefit of the labouring classes whether I 
 consume my means in the form of things purchased for my 
 own use, or set aside a portion in the shape of wages or alms 
 for their direct consumption, on what ground can the policy 
 be justified of taking my money from me to support paupers ? 
 since my unproductive expenditure would have equally bene- 
 fited them, while I should have enjoyed it too. If society 
 can both eat its cake and have it, why should it not be allowed 
 the double indulgence ? But common sense tells every one 
 in his own case (though he does not see it on the larger scale), 
 that the poor rate which he pays is really subtracted from his 
 own consumption, and that no shifting of payment backwards 
 and forwards will enable two persons to eat the same food. If 
 Jie had not been required to pay the rate, and had consequently 
 laid out the amount on himself, the poor would have had as
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 107 
 
 much less for their share of the total produce of the country, 
 as he himself would have consumed more.* 
 
 It appears, then, that a demand delayed until the work 
 is completed, and furnishing no advances, but only reim- 
 
 * 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 
 coarse food, by the receivers. A dies, leaving his property to B, who dis- 
 continues 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 subject 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 expensive 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 conformable 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 objectors 
 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
 
 108 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 bursing advances made by others, contributes nothing to the 
 demand for labour ; and that what is so expended, is, in all 
 its effects, so far as regards the employment of the labouring 
 class, a mere nullity ; it does not and cannot create any em- 
 ployment except at the expense of other employment which 
 existed before. 
 
 Bat 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 existed, 
 into that particular channel instead of any other ; still, to the 
 producers already engaged in the velvet manufacture, and not 
 intending to quit it, this is of the utmost importance. 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 
 
 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 
 potatoes 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 com- 
 modities, 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 
 showing, time is the only thing wanting to render the expenditure of B con- 
 sistent with as large an employment to labour as was given by A, why may 
 we not suppose 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 predecessors. Undoubtedly he would ; but why ? Because 
 his income would be expended 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 ex- 
 pending the amount, as far as he is personally concerned, in A's manner 
 nor in his own, really saves that portion of his income, and lends it to the 
 farmer. And if, in subsequent years, confining himself within the year's 
 income, he leaves the farmer in arrears to that amount, it becomes an addi- 
 tional capital, with which the farmer may permanently employ and feed A's
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. 109 
 
 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, turning 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 employment to be given to labour by 
 the same capital. The mistake lies in not perceiving that in 
 the cases supposed, 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 
 proportional to the increased demand, the advantage itself 
 ceases. 
 
 The grounds of a proposition, when well understood, 
 usually give a tolerable indication of the limitations of it. The 
 
 labourers. Nobody pretends that such a chaDge as this, a change from spending 
 an income in wages of labour, to saving it for investment, 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 our 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 ease, 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 
 adaptation 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, and 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, produced 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.
 
 110 BOOK T. CHAPTER V. 9. 
 
 general principle, now stated, is that demand for commodities 
 determines merely the direction of labour, and the kind of 
 wealth produced, hut not the quantity or efficiency of the 
 labour, or the aggregate of wealth. But to this there are two 
 exceptions. First, when labour is supported, but not fully 
 occupied, a new demand for something which it can produce, 
 may stimulate the labour thus supported to increased exer- 
 tions, of which the result may be an increase of wealth, to the 
 advantage of the labourers themselves and of others. Work 
 which can be done in the spare hours of persons subsisted 
 from some other source, can (as before remarked) be under- 
 taken without withdrawing capital from other occupations, 
 beyond the amount (often very small) required to cover the 
 expense of tools and materials, and even this will often be 
 provided by savings made expressly for the purpose. The 
 reason of our theorem thus failing, the theorem itself fails, 
 and employment of this kind may, by the springing up of a 
 demand for the commodity, be called into existence without 
 depriving labour of an equivalent amount of employment in 
 any other 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. 
 
 The second exception, of which I shall speak at length in 
 a subsequent chapter, consists in the known effect of an ex- 
 tension of the market for a commodity, in rendering possible 
 an increased development of the division of labour, and hence 
 a more effective distribution of the productive forces of society. 
 This, like the former, is more an exception in appearance than 
 it is in reality. It is not the money paid by the purchaser, 
 which remunerates the labour ; it is the capital of the pro- 
 ducer: the demand only determines in what manner that 
 capital shall be employed, and what kind of labour it shall 
 remunerate ; but if it determines that the commodity shall 
 be produced on a large scale, it enables the same capital to
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL. Ill 
 
 produce more of the commodity, and may by an indirect effect 
 in causing an increase of capital, produce an eventual increase 
 of the remuneration of the labourer. 
 
 The demand for commodities is a consideration of im- 
 portance rather in the theory of exchange, than in that of 
 production. Looking at things in the aggregate, and perma- 
 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 divi- 
 sion of employments being one of the principal means of 
 increasing the productive power of labour, the power of ex- 
 changing 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 our- 
 selves the operation of exchange, whether conducted by barter 
 or through the medium of money, as the mere mechanism by 
 which each person transforms 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 continually 
 reproducing themselves in new forms. For example, 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 spar- 
 ing 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 if 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
 
 112 BOOK I. CHAPTER V. 10. 
 
 the maintenance and wages of servants or of any class of un- 
 productive 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 pro- 
 duced in a greater or less degree, it is impossible so to tax the 
 rich as that no portion whatever of the tax can fall on the 
 poor. But even here the question arises, whether the govern- 
 ment, after receiving the amount, will not lay out as great a 
 portion 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 
 consumed in the form of commodities (or even expended in 
 services if the payment has been advanced by a capitalist), 
 this, according to the principles we have investigated, falls 
 definitively 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 in the 
 produce of labour, the labouring classes pay all the taxes. 
 The same argument, however, equally proves, that it is im- 
 possible 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
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ON CAPITAL.. 113 
 
 the effects produced not on the money, which merely changes 
 hands, but on the commodities which are used and con- 
 sumed, we see that, in consequence 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 out of what they would other- 
 wise 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 probably 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 intended. 
 
 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 con- 
 sumption, 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 person on whom the 
 tax really falls. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 CHAPTER 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 manufacture, are 
 destroyed as alkali and tallow ; and cannot be employed 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 manufacture. 
 In the same division must be placed the portion of capital 
 which is paid as the wages, or consumed as the subsistence, 
 of labourers. The 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 consume, no longer exists 
 as capital at alt : even if they save any part, it may now be 
 more properly regarded as a fresh capital, the result of a second 
 act of accumulation. Capital which in this manner fulfils the 
 whole of its oflice in the production in which it is engaged, 
 by a single use, is called Circulating Capital. The term,
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 115 
 
 which is not very appropriate, is derived from the circum- 
 stance, that this portion of capital requires to be constantly 
 renewed hy 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 
 character; which produce their effect not by being parted 
 with, but by being kept; and the efficacy of which is not 
 exhausted by a single use. To this class belong buildings, 
 machinery, and all or most things known by the name of 
 implements or tools. The durability of some of these is con- 
 siderable, and their function as productive instruments is 
 prolonged 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, some kinds require to be occasionally or 
 periodically renewed. Such are all implements and build- 
 ings : 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 implements, but fall 
 back into the class of materials. In other cases, the capital 
 does not, unless as a consequence of some unusual accident, 
 require entire renewal : but there is always some outlay 
 needed, either regularly or at least 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 
 
 i 2
 
 116 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 1. 
 
 unless an earthquake or some similar catastrophe has filled 
 it up : but regular and frequent 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 permanent of all kinds of fixed capital is that em- 
 ployed in giving 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 improve- 
 ment of land by subsoil draining, which adds so much to 
 the productiveness of the clay soils; or by permanent 
 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 consider 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 capital, like all other capital, 
 has been consumed. It was consumed in maintaining the 
 labourers who executed the improvement, and in the wear
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 117 
 
 and tear of the tools by which they were assisted. But it was 
 consumed productively, 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 with- 
 drawn, 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 used, and a profit besides. This, however, 
 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 deterioration 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. 
 
 From this it follows that all increase of fixed capital, 
 
 * Infra, book ii. chap. xvi. On Rent.
 
 118 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 when taking place at the expense of circulating, must be, at 
 least temporarily, prejudicial to the interests of the labourers. 
 This is true, not of machinery alone, but of all improvements 
 by which capital is sunk ; that is, rendered permanently in- 
 capable of being applied to the maintenance and remunera- 
 tion 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 pro- 
 duces him annually two thousand four hundred quarters, 
 being a profit of twenty per cent. This profit we shall sup- 
 pose 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 improvement of his 
 land, which is executed by half his labourers, 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 pre- 
 viously 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 thousand 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 quantity of labour, pro- 
 duces 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 conceivable that this
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 119 
 
 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 quar- 
 ters ; since this will replace the one thousand quarters form- 
 ing his present circulating capital, with a profit of twenty- 
 five per cent (instead of 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.* 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 case require 
 the same number of labourers as before, at the same wages. 
 But where will he find the means of paying them ? He has 
 
 * The clearing away of the small farmers in the North of Scotland, within 
 the present century, was, however, a case of it ; and Ireland, since the potato 
 famine and the repeal of the corn laws, is another. The remarkable decrease 
 which has lately attracted notice in the gross produce of Irish agriculture, is, to 
 all appearance, partly attributable to the diversion of land from maintaining 
 human labourers to feeding cattle ; and it could not have taken place without 
 the removal of a large part of the Irish population by emigration or death. 
 We have thus two recent instances, in which what was regarded as an agricul- 
 tural improvement, has diminished the power of the country to support its 
 population. The effect, however, of all the improvements due to modern 
 science is to increase, or at all events, not to diminish, the gross produce.
 
 120 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 no longer his original capital of two thousand quarters dis- 
 posable for the purpose. One thousand of them are lost and 
 gone consumed in making the improvement. If he is to 
 employ as many labourers as before, and pay them as highly, 
 he must borrow, or obtain from some other source, a thou- 
 sand 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 crea- 
 tion ; 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 in- 
 creased 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 compositors and 
 pressmen who took their place ; and the number of labouring 
 persons now occupied in the cotton manufacture is many 
 times greater than were so occupied previously to the inven- 
 tions of Hargreaves and Arkwright, which shows that besides 
 the enormous fixed capital now embarked in the manufacture, 
 it also employs a far larger circulating capital than at any 
 former time. But if this capital was drawn from other em- 
 ployments ; if the funds which took the place of the capital 
 sunk in costly machinery, were supplied not by any additional 
 saving consequent on the improvements, but by drafts on the 
 general capital of the community; what better were the labour- 
 ing classes for the mere transfer ? In what manner was the 
 loss they sustained by the conversion of circulating into fixed 
 capital made up to them by a mere shifting of part of the
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 121 
 
 remainder of the circulating capital from its old employments 
 to a new one ? 
 
 All attempts to make out that the labouring classes as a 
 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 consumption 
 of others, thereby increasing the demand for other kinds of 
 labour. This is 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, unless 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 departments there- 
 fore will not take place ; and the increased demand for com- 
 modities by some consumers, will be balanced by a cessation 
 of demand on the part of others, namely, the labourers who 
 were superseded by the improvement, and who will now be 
 maintained, if at all, by sharing, either in the way of compe- 
 tition 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
 
 122 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. & 3. 
 
 f 
 
 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 production, but 
 are made by the employment of the annual increase. There 
 are few if any examples of a great increase of fixed capital, 
 at a time and place where circulating capital was not 
 rapidly increasing likewise. It is not in poor or backward 
 countries that great and costly improvements in production 
 are made. To sink capital in land for a permanent return 
 to introduce expensive 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. Although, 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 improbable 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 sup- 
 plies the old : difficulties generally much more than sufficient 
 to prevent enterprises that involve the sinking of capital, 
 from extending themselves with such rapidity as to impair the 
 sources of the existing employment for labour.
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 123 
 
 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 hoth. They 
 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 hundred, 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 sub- 
 tracted from his circulating capital. Now the extension of 
 business which almost certainly follows in any department 
 in which an improvement has been made, affords a strong 
 inducement to those engaged 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
 
 124 BOOK I. CHAPTER VI. 3. 
 
 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 improvement, 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 conclu- 
 sive.* But this does not discharge governments from the 
 obligation of alleviating, and if possible preventing, the evils 
 of which this source of ultimate benefit is or may be produc- 
 tive 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 incumbent on legislators 
 to take measures for moderating its rapidity : and since 
 improvements which do not diminish employment on the 
 whole, almost always throw some particular 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 pos- 
 terity. 
 
 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 
 
 * Infra, book iv. chap. v.
 
 CIRCULATING AND FIXED CAPITAL. 125 
 
 to be sold or exchanged, that is, converted into an equiva- 
 lent 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 the 
 materials of his manufacture, and partly provide new build- 
 ings 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 requirements 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 employ- 
 ment of labour, as fixed capital does. What is expended 
 in materials is as much withdrawn from the maintenance 
 and remuneration of labourers, as what is fixed in machinery ; 
 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 seldom, if ever, 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 interest of the labourers 
 has no detriment to apprehend from this source.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ON WHAT DEPENDS THE DEGREE OF PRODUCTIVENESS 
 OF PRODUCTIVE AGENTS. 
 
 1. WE have concluded our general survey of the 
 requisites of production. We have found that they may 
 be reduced to three : lahour, 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 production. 
 The remaining requisite, capital, is itself the product of la- 
 bour : 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 application of 
 labour to produce the capital required for consumption during 
 the work, is no less essential than the application of labour to 
 the work itself. Of capital, again, one, and by far the largest, 
 portion, conduces to production only by sustaining in exist- 
 ence the labour which produces: the remainder, namely the 
 instruments and materials, contribute 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 political 
 economy ; on what the degree of productiveness of these 
 agents depends. For it is evident that their productive 
 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 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.
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS, 127 
 
 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 
 Eoman 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 cannot 
 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, 
 silk, figs, olives, 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 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
 
 128 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 2. 
 
 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 Southern Europe 
 over those of England in the richness and clearness of many 
 of their colours, is ascribed to the superior quality 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 
 lessening 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 keep- 
 ing up the animal heat, and for supplying the necessary 
 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, 
 which do so much to compensate its inhabitants for the dis- 
 advantages of climate ; and the scarcely inferior resource
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 129 
 
 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 navigable rivers. These 
 advantages consist indeed wholly in saving of cost of car- 
 riage. But few who have not considered the subject, have 
 any adequate notion how great an extent of economical ad- 
 vantage this comprises ; nor, without 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 communi- 
 cation capable of rivalling the natural. In the ancient world, 
 and in the Middle Ages, the most prosperous communities 
 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, 
 ceBteris 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 and soil, 
 been either the richest or the most powerful ; but (in so 
 far as regards the mass of the people) generally among the 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 130 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 8. 
 
 poorest, though, in the midst of poverty, prohably 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 persevering labour : and as they 
 seldom concern themselves enough about remote objects to 
 establish good political institutions, the incentives to industry 
 are further weakened by imperfect protection of its fruits. 
 Successful production, like most other kinds of success, de- 
 pends 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. Accord- 
 ingly the tribes of mankind who have overrun and conquered 
 others, and compelled 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 Komans, by the artificial ones of a rigid military disci- 
 pline. From the time when the circumstances of modern 
 society permitted the discontinuance of that discipline, the 
 South has no longer produced conquering nations ; mili- 
 tary vigour, as well as speculative thought and industrial 
 energy, 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 
 possesses, kept longer at their utmost stretch, than the 
 North American Indian ; yet his indolence is proverbial, 
 whenever he has a brief respite from the pressure of pre- 
 sent wants. Individuals, or nations, do not differ so much
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. J31 
 
 in the efforts they are able and willing to make under strong 
 immediate incentives, as in their capacity of present exertion 
 for a distant object; and in the thoroughness of their appli- 
 cation to work on ordinary occasions. Some amount of these 
 qualities 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 bar- 
 barous, 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 indulgence 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 systematic labour, and 
 so acquire or maintain habits of voluntary 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 attaining which it is not 
 required. Every real improvement in the character of the 
 English, whether it consist in giving them higher aspi- 
 rations, 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 dimmish the strenuous and business- 
 like application to the matter in hand, which is found in the 
 best English workmen, and is their most valuable quality. 
 
 K2
 
 132 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 The desirable medium is one which mankind have not 
 often known how to hit : when they 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 know- 
 ledge therein existing ; whether it be the skill and know- 
 ledge 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 -knowledge of 
 natural powers and of the properties of objects, which is 
 turned to the purposes of industry. That the productive- 
 ness 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 objects 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 consists 
 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 pre- 
 sent: it will be found explained and exemplified, in a manner 
 at once scientific and popular, in Mr. Babbage's well-known 
 " Economy of Machinery and Manufactures." An entire 
 chapter of Mr. Babbage's book is composed 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 steam-engines or 
 otherwise, the water which collects in mines could not in
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 133 
 
 many situations be get 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 exca- 
 vated ; a plough, or at least a hoe, 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 perfec- 
 tion, and, above all, with a greatly diminished quantity of 
 labour : the labour thus saved becoming disposable for other 
 employments. 
 
 The use of machinery is far from being the only mode in 
 which the effects of knowledge in aiding production are exem- 
 plified. In agriculture and horticulture, machinery is only 
 now beginning to show that it can do anything of importance, 
 beyond the invention and progressive improvement 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 neces- 
 sity of leaving the land uncultivated for one season in every 
 two or three ; improved manures, to renovate its fertility 
 when exhausted by cropping ; ploughing and draining the 
 subsoil as well as the surface; 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 
 completely 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.
 
 134) BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 5. But the effects of the increased knowledge of a 
 community in increasing its wealth, need the less illustration 
 as they have hecome 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 eco- 
 nomical value of the general diffusion of intelligence among 
 the people. The number of persons fitted to direct and super- 
 intend 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 between 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 in- 
 stance, their domestic economy so improvident, lax, and irre- 
 gular must disqualify them for any but a low grade of intel- 
 ligent labour, and render their industry far less productive 
 than with equal energy it otherwise might be. The impor- 
 tance, 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 countries 
 they often find great intelligence wholly apart from instruc- 
 tion, but that if an English labourer is anything but a hewer 
 of wood and a drawer of water, he is indebted for it to edu- 
 cation, 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 dif- 
 ferent 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 Con- 
 tinental 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 meaning of
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 135 
 
 their employer, of adapting themselves to new circumstances, 
 much beyond what any other classes have. The French work- 
 men have the like natural characteristics, only in a somewhat 
 lower degree. The English, Swiss, German, and Dutch work- 
 men, 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 employer would best like to be surrounded, I should, 
 however, decidedly prefer the Saxons and the Swiss, but more 
 especially 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 understand that, and no- 
 thing 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 mechanics." 
 
 On the connexion between mental cultivation and moral 
 trustworthiness in the labouring class, the same witness says, 
 "The better educated workmen, we find, are distinguished 
 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 respect- 
 fully, and consequently find much readier admittance to it ; 
 thoy cultivate music; they read; they enjoy the pleasures of 
 scenery, and make parties for excursions into the country; 
 they are economical, and their economy extends beyond their 
 own purse to the stock of their master ; they are, conse-
 
 136 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 quently, honest and trustworthy." And in answer to a ques- 
 tion respecting the English workmen, " 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, de- 
 bauched, 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 
 oi' iron discipline in which they have been restrained by their 
 employers 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 observa- 
 tion is borne out by experience in England itself. As soon 
 as any idea of equality enters the mind of an uneducated 
 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 important 
 to the efficiency and worth of their labour, as the intellec- 
 tual. Independently of the effects of intemperance upon their 
 bodily and mental faculties, and of flighty, 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 effect 
 of their labour depends on their trustworthiness. All the 
 
 * The whole evidence of this intelligent and experienced employer of labour 
 is deserving of attention ; as well as much testimony on similar points by other 
 witnesses, contained in the same volume.
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 137 
 
 labour now expended in watching that they fulfil their 
 engagement, or in verifying that they have fulfilled it, is so 
 much withdrawn from the real business of production, to he 
 devoted to a subsidiary function rendered needful not by 
 the necessity of things, hut by the dishonesty of men. Nor 
 are the greatest outward precautions more than very im- 
 perfectly efficacious, where, as is now almost invariably the 
 case with hired labourers, the slightest relaxation of vigi- 
 lance is an opportunity eagerly seized for eluding perfor- 
 mance 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 persons 
 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 neces- 
 sary by the first. The exorbitantly - paid profession 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 
 hecome less. But this positive saving would be far out- 
 weighed by the immense increase in the produce of all kinds 
 of labour, and saving of time and expenditure, which would 
 he obtained if the labourers honestly performed 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 faithfully according to 
 their contracts. Conjoint action is possible just in propor-
 
 138 BOOK T. CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 tion as human beings can rely on each other. There are 
 countries in Europe, of first-rate industrial capabilities, where 
 the most serious impediment to conducting business con- 
 cerns 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 commodi- 
 ties are looked shily upon by merchants, because they 
 cannot depend on finding the quality of the article conform- 
 able 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 remarkably 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 ex- 
 changing a written document." Spread over a year's trans- 
 actions, 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 esta- 
 blished character in producing confidence operated in a very 
 remarkable manner at the time 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 inflicted on all those 
 who contravened the Berlin and Milan decrees. The English 
 manufacturer continued, nevertheless, 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
 
 DEGREES OP PRODUCTIVENESS. 139 
 
 in some instances they were without any signature at all. 
 These orders were executed, and in no instance was there the 
 least irregularity in the payments."* 
 
 (5. 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- 
 
 * Some minor instances noticed by Mr. Babbage may be cited in further 
 illustration of the waste occasioned to society through the inability of its 
 members 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 contracts. 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 customers. 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 considered 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 might 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
 
 140 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 6. 
 
 tcction which society affords to its members. This consists 
 of protection by the government, and protection against the 
 government. The latter is the more important. Where a 
 person known to possess anything worth taking away, can 
 expect nothing but to have it torn from him, with every cir- 
 cumstance of tyrannical violence, by the agents of a rapacious 
 
 market price would be enhanced by this process from five to twenty-five 
 shillings a hundred- weight. But the greatest evil arose from the circumstance 
 of these processes 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 after- 
 wards; vhilst about eighty or ninety percent 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 injurious, 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 
 fraudulent and bad articles : that "a kind of lace called single-press was manu- 
 factured," (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 thousand 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 j and that in another similar article, 
 called warp-lace, such aid was essential."
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 141 
 
 government, it is not likely that many will exert themselves 
 to produce much more than necessaries. This is the ac- 
 knowledged explanation of the poverty of many fertile tracts 
 of Asia, which were once prosperous and populous. From 
 this to the degree of security enjoyed in the best governed 
 parts of Europe, there are numerous gradations. In many 
 provinces of France, before the Revolution, a vicious system 
 of taxation on the land, and still more the 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 cultivate badly. The only in- 
 security which is altogether paralysing to the active energies 
 of producers, is that arising from the government, or from 
 persons invested with its authority. Against all other depre- 
 dators 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 turbulent ; person and property were ex- 
 posed to a thousand dangers. But they were free countries ; 
 they were in general neither arbitrarily oppressed, nor syste- 
 matically plundered 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, were constantly on the increase. 
 The Roman despotism, putting an end to wars and in- 
 ternal conflicts throughout the empire, relieved the sub- 
 ject population 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 of person and property in modern
 
 142 BOOK I. CHAPTER VII. 6. 
 
 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 re- 
 straints imposed by established usage, no subject felt prac- 
 tically in the smallest danger of having his possessions arbi- 
 trarily seized or a contribution levied on them by the govern- 
 ment. There must, however, be in such governments much 
 petty plunder and other tyranny by subordinate agents, for 
 which redress is not obtained, owing to the want of publicity 
 which is the ordinary character of absolute 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 protection to property, when they afford 
 it only at such a cost as renders submission to injury in 
 general the better calculation. 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 
 direct operation of the law and the courts of justice. 
 
 Independently of all imperfection in the bulwarks which 
 society purposely throws round what it recognises as pro- 
 perty, 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, ac- 
 cording 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
 
 DEGREES OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 143 
 
 own good, or stand between those efforts and their natural 
 fruits are (independently of all other grounds of condemna- 
 tion) violations of the fundamental principles of economical 
 policy ; tending to make the aggregate productive powers of 
 the community productive in a less degree than they would 
 otherwise be.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 OF CO-OPERATION, OR THE COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 
 
 1. IN the enumeration of the circumstances which 
 promote the productiveness of labour, we have left one un- 
 touched, which, because of its importance, and of the many 
 topics of discussion which it involves, requires to be treated 
 apart. This is, co-operation, or the combined action of 
 numbers. Of this great aid to production, a single depart- 
 ment, known by the name of Division of Labour, has engaged 
 a large share of the attention of political economists; most 
 deservedly indeed, but to the exclusion of other cases and 
 exemplifications of the same comprehensive law. Mr. Wake- 
 field was, I believe, the first to point out, that a part of the 
 subject had, with injurious effect, been mistaken for the whole ; 
 that a more fundamental principle lies beneath that of the 
 division of labour, and comprehends it. 
 
 Co-operation, he observes,* is " of two distinct kinds : 
 first, such co-operation as takes place when several persons 
 help each other in the same employment ; secondly, such 
 co-operation as takes place when several persons help each 
 other in different employments. These may be termed Simple 
 Co-operation and Complex Co-operation. 
 
 " The advantage of simple co-operation 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 opera- 
 tions performed by human exertion, it is quite obvious that 
 two men working together will do more than four, or four 
 times four men, each of whom should work alone. In 
 
 * Note to Wakefield's edition of Adam Smith, vol. i. p. 26.
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 115 
 
 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 
 absolutely necessary that many persons should work toge- 
 ther, 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 labour 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 labour 
 to raise more food than they require, another body of 
 men are induced 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 labourers ; 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 labourers to work in their respective 
 occupations." To simple co-operation is thus superadded 
 what Mr. Wakefield terms Complex Co-operation. The 
 one is the combination of several labourers to help each 
 other in the same set of operations ; the other is the corn- 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 146 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 1. 
 
 bination of several labourers to belp one another by a division 
 of operations. 
 
 There is " an important distinction between simple and 
 complex co-operation. 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 conscious. 
 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 co-operate 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 different 
 pursuits, their co-operation 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, spinning 
 it into thread of a third, weaving the thread into broadcloth 
 of a fourth, dyeing the cloth of a fifth, making it into a coat 
 of a sixth, without counting the multitude of carriers, mer- 
 chants, factors, and retailers, put in requisition at the suc- 
 cessive stages of this progress. All these persons, without 
 knowledge of one another or previous understanding, co- 
 operate in the production of the ultimate result, a coat. But 
 these are far from being all who co-operate in it ; for each of 
 these persons requires food, and many other articles of con- 
 sumption, and unless he could have relied that other people 
 would produce these for him, he could not have devoted his 
 whole time to one step in the succession of operations 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, com-
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 147 
 
 bined his labour with theirs. It is by a real, though unex- 
 pressed, 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 sepa- 
 rated, 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 sepa- 
 ration 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 pro- 
 duction of different things becomes the sole or principal occu- 
 pation of different persons, a much greater quantity 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 producers, 
 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 per- 
 haps be spun and woven within it, by the labour probably of 
 the women (a first step in the separation of employments) ; 
 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
 
 148 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 2. 
 
 possible that the family should produce anything more. 
 They would, in general, require their utmost exertions to 
 accomplish so much. Their power even of extracting food 
 from the soil would he kept within narrow limits hy the 
 quality of their tools, which would necessarily 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 pre- 
 sence in a different place. Very few kinds of industry, there- 
 fore, would exist ; and that which did exist, namely the pro- 
 duction 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 with 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, because they 
 could not have produced, are now accessible to them if they 
 can succeed in producing an additional quantity of food and 
 necessaries. They are thus incited to increase the produc- 
 tiveness of their industry. Among the conveniences for the 
 first time made accessible to them, better tools are probably
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 149 
 
 one : and apart from this, they have a motive to labour more 
 assiduously, and to adopt contrivances for making their labour 
 more effectual. By these means they will generally succeed 
 in compelling their land to produce, not only food for them- 
 selves, but a surplus for the new comers, wherewith to buy 
 from them the products of their industry. The new settlers 
 constitute what is called a market for surplus agricultural 
 produce : and their arrival has enriched the settlement not 
 only by the manufactured article 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 main- 
 tenance and employment to the demand of the agriculturists : 
 with a year's subsistence in store, they could have settled side 
 by side with the former inhabitants, and produced 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 pro- 
 duced, the increased production is not always obtained at the 
 expense of some other product; it is often a new creation, 
 
 * Supra, pp. 99111.
 
 150 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 the result of labour which would otherwise have remained 
 unexerted ; or of assistance rendered to labour by improve- 
 ments or by modes of co-operation to which recourse would 
 not have been had 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 
 population 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, appears so obvious that the merit of making them 
 seems less than it is. Mr. Wakefield was the first to point 
 out that the mode of planting new settlements, then com- 
 monly practised setting down a number of families side by 
 side, each on its piece of land, all employing themselves 
 in exactly the same manner, though in favourable cir- 
 cumstances it may assure to those families a rude abundance 
 of mere necessaries, can never be other than unfavourable 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 proportion to its 
 agricultural, and that the cultivators of the soil shall not be 
 so widely scattered as to be deprived by distance, 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 properties and cultivated by peasant pro-
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 151 
 
 prietors, a town population will 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-agricultural 
 industry to use it as a market for disposing of their surplus, 
 and thereby supplying their other wants, neither that surplus 
 nor any equivalent for it would, generally speaking, be pro- 
 duced. 
 
 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 considerable 
 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 combined labour 
 the tanks, embankments, and works of irrigation, which are 
 indispensable. The implements and processes 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 abundance for many more than the 
 present number of inhabitants, without departing from the 
 system of small holdings. But to this the stimulus is want- 
 ing, 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 culti- 
 vators (joined until lately with great insecurity of property, 
 from military and fiscal rapacity) prevent them from attempt- 
 ing to become consumers of town produce. In these cir- 
 cumstances the best chance of an early development of the 
 productive resources 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
 
 152 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 4. 
 
 articles are consumers of food supplied by their fellow-agri- 
 culturists 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 European commodities, or towards things which will 
 require 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 become 
 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 extension of the 
 same principle. It is found that the productive power of 
 labour is increased by carrying the separation further and 
 further ; by breaking down more and more every process of 
 industry into parts, so that each labourer shall confine him- 
 self to an ever smaller number of simple operations. 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 transcribe it. " The business of 
 making a pin is divided into about eighteen distinct opera- 
 tions. 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
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 153 
 
 but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, 
 they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them 
 ahout twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a 
 pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. 
 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 sepa- 
 rately 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 in- 
 dustry 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 because 
 
 * "Ce ne sont point les memes ouvriers qui pre"parent 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 re'sultat de plusieurs operations dont cbacune occupe une se'rie distincte 
 d'ouvriers et d'ouvrieres qui s'appliquent toujours a la meme operation. Ce 
 sont des personnes diffe'rentes, et toujouis les mcmes, qui e'pluchent les 
 bouchons et grosseurs qui se trouvent dans le papier et nuiraient a I'e'galite' 
 d'e'paisseur ; les meines qui collent ensemble les trois feuilles de papier dont 
 se compose le carton et qui le mettent en presse ; les monies qui impriment en 
 noir le dessin des figures; d'autres ouvriers impriment les couieurs des memes 
 figures ; d'autres font se"cher au re"chaud les cartons une fois qu'ils sont im- 
 primis ; d'autres s'occupent de les lisser dessus et dessous. C'est une occu- 
 pation particuliere que de les couper d'e"gale 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
 
 154 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 5. 
 
 the division of labour is not carried so far as it might 
 be ; because the same workman is charged with two, three, 
 or four distinct operations. The influence of this distri- 
 bution of employment 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 work- 
 men, 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 department, and is unable, after 
 his apprenticeship has expired, without subsequent instruc- 
 tion, 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 
 
 lea fonctions des personnes charges des ventes et des achats, de payer les 
 ouvriers et de tenir les Ventures." SAY, Coura d' Economic Politique Pratique, 
 vol. i. p. 340. 
 
 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 such a multitude of manual operations, can be sold for a trifling 
 sum. 
 
 * Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 3rd Edition, p. 201.
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 155 
 
 in every particular workman ; secondly, the saving 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 work- 
 man is the most obvious and universal. It does not follow 
 that because a thing has been done oftener it will be done 
 better. That depends on the intelligence of the workman, 
 and on the degree in which his mind works along with his 
 hands. But it will be done more easily. The organs them- 
 selves acquire greater power : the muscles employed grow 
 stronger by frequent exercise, the sinews more pliant, and 
 the mental powers more efficient, and less sensible 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 accuracy 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 
 brilliancy of execution on a musical instrument, are examples 
 of the rapidity and facility acquired by repetition. In simpler 
 manual operations the effect is of course still sooner pro- 
 duced. " The rapidity," Adam Smith observes, " with which 
 some of the operations of certain manufactures are per- 
 formed, exceeds what the human hand could, by those who 
 had never seen them, be supposed capable of acquiring."* 
 
 * "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 manufacture. A child who fastens on the heads of pins will
 
 156 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 5. 
 
 This skill is, naturally, attained after shorter practice, in pro- 
 portion as the division of labour is more minute ; and will not 
 be attained in the same degree at all, if the workman has a 
 greater variety of operations to execute than allows of a suffi- 
 ciently frequent repetition of each. The advantage is not 
 confined to the greater efficiency ultimately attained, but in- 
 cludes also the diminished loss of time, and waste of material, 
 in learning the art. "A certain 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 quantity of waste will be much greater 
 than if each person confine 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 cannot 
 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 carried 
 on in a different place, and with quite different tools. A 
 
 repeat an operation requiring several distinct motions of the muscles one 
 hundred times a minute for several 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. 
 * Page 171.
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 157 
 
 country weaver, who cultivates a small farm, must lose a 
 good deal of time in passing from bis 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. 
 The habit of sauntering and of indolent careless applica- 
 tion, which is naturally, or rather necessarily acquired by 
 every country workman who is obliged to change his work 
 and his tools every half hoar, 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 
 vigorous 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
 
 158 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 6 5. 
 
 | 
 
 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 hestowed on the new sub- 
 ject not being so perfect at first as it becomes after some 
 exercise. The employment of different tools in the suc- 
 cessive processes, is another cause of the loss of time in 
 changing from one operation to another. If these tools are 
 simple, 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 every 
 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 drilling 
 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 
 velocity 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 conside- 
 rations are of no weight ; but I think there are counter-con- 
 siderations which are overlooked. If one kind of muscular 
 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 matter 
 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
 
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 159 
 
 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 animal 
 spirits ; so important to the efficiency of all work not mecha- 
 nical, and not unimportant even to that. The comparative 
 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, 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 differ- 
 ences. There are people whose faculties seem by nature to 
 come slowly into action, and to accomplish 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 occupa- 
 tion with a freshness and a spirit which he does not retain if 
 he persists in any one part (unless in case of unusual excite- 
 ment) beyond the length of time to which he is accustomed. 
 Women are usually (at least in their present social circum- 
 stances) 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 pro-
 
 160 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 5. 
 
 tracted, and is inefficient for some time after changing to a 
 new thing. Even in this case, habit, I helieve, 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 there- 
 fore rarely costs them either effort or loss of time, while a 
 man's occupation 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 
 characters. Women are not found less efficient than men 
 for the uniformity of factory work, or they would not so gene- 
 rally 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 moi'e 
 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 exclusive- 
 ness is carried to a degree unfavourable to the cultivation of 
 intelligence, there will be more lost in this kind of advan- 
 tage, than gained. We may add, that whatever may be the 
 cause of making inventions, when they are once made, the
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 161 
 
 increased efficiency of labour is owing to the invention 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 Adatn 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 and 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 
 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 different 
 parts, such different degrees of skill, that the wages earned 
 by the persons employed vary from fourpence halfpenny 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 half- 
 penny. Without reference to the loss sustained in quantity 
 of work done, and supposing even that he could make a 
 pound of pins in the same time in which ten workmen com- 
 bining their labour can make ten pounds, Mr. Babbage com- 
 putes 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 greatest 
 possible amount of utility from skill, may be added the ana- 
 
 VOL. I. M
 
 162 BOOK I. CHAPTER VIII. 6. 
 
 logous 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 pos- 
 sible, divide them amongst them, each restricting himself 
 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 
 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 subject 
 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 
 
 * Statement of some New Principles on the subject of Political Economy, 
 by John Rae, (Boston, U.S.) p. 164.
 
 COMBINATION OF LABOUR. 163 
 
 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 practical amount of combination of labour among its 
 producers. In an early stage of civilization, when the demand 
 of any particular locality was necessarily small, industry only 
 flourished among those who by their command 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 accompanied with freedom of com- 
 mercial intercourse, improvements in navigation, and inland 
 communication by roads, canals, or railways, tends to give 
 increased productiveness to the labour of every nation in par- 
 ticular, by enabling each 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 
 branches of manufactures, because its different operations 
 cannot possibly be simultaneous. One man cannot be always 
 ploughing, another sowing, and another reaping. A work- 
 man who only practised one agricultural operation would be 
 idle eleven months of the year. The same person may per- 
 form them all in succession, and have, in most climates, 
 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 superintendence, they all work in 
 the same manner. A canal or a railway embankment cannot 
 be. made without a combination of many labourers ; but they 
 are all excavators, except the engineers and a few clerks. 
 
 M 2
 
 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, tbat 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 person so employed 
 admit one person or twenty, his rest will be equally dis- 
 turbed. It will also be necessary occasionally to adjust or 
 
 * Page 214 et seqq.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 165 
 
 repair the machine ; and this can be done much better by 
 a workman accustomed to machine-making, than by the 
 person 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 eco- 
 nomy 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 workman'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 becomes 
 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, and 
 also engineers to make and keep in repair any machinery, 
 the addition of an apparatus for making gas to light the 
 factory leads to a new extension, at the same time that it 
 contributes, by diminishing the expense of lighting, and
 
 166 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 1. 
 
 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 transac- 
 tions, 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 proportionately 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, were divided among five or six competing 
 companies. Each of these would be obliged to maintain almost 
 as large an establishment as is now sufficient 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 neighbourhood, with all subsidiary arrange- 
 ments 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 subordinates, implying not only a greater
 
 PRODUCTION OX A LARGE AND ON A SMALL. SCALE. 167 
 
 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 machinery. 
 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, wher- 
 ever costly machinery is used, the large system of production 
 is inevitable. But the power of underselling is not in this 
 case so unerring a test as in the former, of the beneficial 
 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 proportion to the
 
 168 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 1. 
 
 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 machinery, 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 perfectly well to the 
 manufacturer, and enable him to undersell 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 collectively has fallen 
 upon the work-people, and they are not the principal cus- 
 tomers, 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 capi- 
 tal from that of the community generally ; and if the labourers 
 employed in that department 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 labourers, supported by voluntary or legal 
 charity, the gross produce of the country is to that extent 
 permanently diminished, until the ordinary progress of accu- 
 mulation 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 em- 
 ployments, their labour is still productive, and the breach in 
 the gross produce of the community is repaired, though not 
 the detriment to the labourers. I have restated this exposi- 
 tion, which has already been made in a former place, to 
 impress more strongly the truth, that a mode of production 
 
 * Supra, chap. vi. p. 119.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL. SCALE. 169 
 
 does not of necessity increase the productive effect of the 
 collective labour of a community, because it enables a par- 
 ticular commodity 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 pro- 
 bably require the whole attention of the person conducting it, 
 sufficiently 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 combines with the busi- 
 ness 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 principal 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 superintendence 
 of many small capitals than in that of one large capital. 
 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
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 2. 
 
 it, and to sell at the reduced rates occasioned by the compe- 
 tition of the great dealer or manufacturer. 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 
 become dependent on others for support. 
 
 2. Production on a large scale is greatly promoted by 
 the practice of forming a large capital by the combination of 
 many small contributions ; or, in other words, by the forma- 
 tion 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 private 
 partnership. No individual could have made a railway from 
 London to Liverpool ; it is doubtful if any individual 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 co-operation is only in the earlier stages 
 of its growth, the government can alone be looked to for any 
 of the works for which a great combination 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, govern- 
 ment agency for the conduct of industrial operations is gene- 
 rally 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 despatching 
 ships from England to any or every part of the world, to carry 
 passengers and letters; the thing was done before joint stock
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 171 
 
 companies for the purpose were heard of. But when, from 
 the increase of population and transactions, as well as of 
 means of payment, the public will no longer content them- 
 selves 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 construction 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 subordinates than can be 
 commanded by an individual capitalist. There are other 
 cases, again, in which though the business might be perfectly 
 well transacted with small or moderate capitals, the guarantee 
 of a great subscribed stock is necessary or desirable as a 
 security to the public for the fulfilment of pecuniary engage- 
 ments. 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 insurance : to both of which the joint 
 stock principle is eminently 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 interdicted by law to these two modes of 
 business; to banking altogether, and to insurance in the 
 department of sea risks ; in order to bestow a lucrative 
 monopoly on particular establishments which the govern- 
 ment was pleased exceptionally to license, namely the Bank 
 of England, and two insurance companies, the London and 
 the Soyal Exchange. 
 
 Another advantage of joint stock or associated manage- 
 ment, is its incident of publicity. This is not an invariable, 
 but it is a natural consequence of the joint stock principle, 
 and might be, as in some important cases it already is, 
 compulsory. In banking, insurance, and other businesses 
 which depend wholly on confidence, publicity is a still
 
 172 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 2. 
 
 more important element of success than a large subscribed 
 capital. A heavy loss occurring in a private bank may be kept 
 secret ; even though it were of such magnitude as to cause 
 the ruin of the concern, the banker may still carry it on for 
 years, trying to retrieve its position, only to fall in the end with 
 a greater crash : but this cannot so easily happen in the case 
 of a joint stock company, whose accounts are published 
 periodically. The accounts, even if cooked, still exercise some 
 check ; and the suspicions of shareholders, breaking out at 
 the general meetings, put the public on their guard. 
 
 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 committee, 
 or board of directors, who are supposed to superintend the 
 management, and who do really appoint and remove the 
 managers, have no pecuniary interest in the good working of 
 the concern beyond the shares they individually hold, which 
 are always a very small part of the capital of the association, 
 and in general but a 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, compared with the ministration 
 of those personally interested in the work, and how indis- 
 pensable, when hired service must be employed, is " the 
 master's eye" to watch over it. 
 
 The successful conduct of an industrial enterprise requires 
 two quite distinct qualifications : fidelity, and zeal. The
 
 PRODUCTION OX A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 173 
 
 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 responsi- 
 bility 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 beforehand, 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 intensity of interest 
 in the subject it is seldom to be expected that any one 
 should feel, who is conducting a business as the hired ser- 
 vant 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 personal share which 
 they themselves reap of the national 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 improve- 
 ment, 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 employed 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
 
 174 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 2. 
 
 not protected by some fixed rule, is matter of common remark; 
 unless where long continuance in the same service, and reci- 
 procal 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, 
 especially 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 whicli 
 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 calculator to be 
 practically aware; and to arrange his business on a system, 
 which if enforced by a sufficiently vigilant superintendence, 
 precludes the possibility of the habitual waste, otherwise inci- 
 dent to a great business. But the 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.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 175> 
 
 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 relate* 
 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 intelli- 
 gence exerted is of an inferior order, which it must neces- 
 sarily 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 candidates superior to the common average, it is pos- 
 sible to select for the general management, and for all th& 
 skilled employments of a subordinate kind, persons of a de- 
 gree of acquirement and cultivated intelligence which more 
 than compensates 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 rectitude 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 ordi- 
 nary 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 con- 
 necting 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
 
 176 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 3. 
 
 unskilled labour, there is such a thing as task-work, or work- 
 ing 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 superintend- 
 ing and controlling officers in many private establishments, 
 it is a common enough practice to connect 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 ser- 
 vants is not comparable in intensity to that of the owner of 
 the capital ; but it is sufficient to be a very material stimulus 
 to zeal and carefulness, and, when added to the advantage of 
 superior intelligence, often raises the quality of the service 
 much above that which the generality of masters are capable 
 of rendering to themselves. The ulterior extensions of which 
 this principle of remuneration is susceptible, being of great 
 social as well as economical importance, will be more particu- 
 larly adverted to in a subsequent stage of the present inquiry. 
 As I have already remarked of large establishments gene- 
 rally, when compared with small ones, whenever competition 
 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 flourish- 
 ing community, or a great opening for exportation. Again, 
 this as well as every other change in the system of produc- 
 tion is greatly favoured by a progressive condition of capital. 
 It is chiefly when the capital of a country is receiving a great
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 177 
 
 annual increase, that there is a large amount of capital seek- 
 ing for investment: and a new enterprise is much sooner 
 and more easily entered upon by new capital, than by with- 
 drawing capital from existing employments. The change is 
 also much facilitated by the existence 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 diffused 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 enterprise, 
 the greatest annual increase of capital, and the greatest 
 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. 
 In England, the chief type of all these characteristics, there 
 is a perpetual growth not only of large manufacturing esta- 
 blishments, but also, wherever a sufficient number of pur- 
 chasers are assembled, of shops and warehouses for conducting 
 retail business on a large scale. These are almost always 
 able to undersell the smaller tradesmen, partly, it is under- 
 stood, 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 ta 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. 
 
 VOL. I. N
 
 178 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 3. 
 
 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 inde- 
 pendent 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 pro- 
 duction is generally an unqualified benefit. It is obvious, 
 for example, 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 pro- 
 bably perform the whole operation equally well ; double sets 
 of machinery 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 
 territory. 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 cheap- 
 ness to ruin a new candidate, but as soon as he has esta- 
 blished 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 purpose of ren-
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 1Y9 
 
 clering 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 in- 
 creased nuisance) involved in the construction of a second 
 railway to connect the same places already united by an ex- 
 isting one ; while the two would not do the work better than 
 it could be done by one, and after a short time would pro- 
 bably be amalgamated. Only one such line ought to be per- 
 mitted, 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 Parliament has allowed 
 to be acquired by the existing companies, like all other pro- 
 prietary 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 
 systems 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 
 general question between great and small industrial esta- 
 blishments. 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 cultiva- 
 tion of the soil ; but much beyond that primary and simple 
 classification the subdivision is not carried. The combina- 
 
 N 2
 
 180 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 
 
 tion of labour of which agriculture is susceptible, is chiefly 
 that which Mr. Wakefield terms Simple Co-operation ; several 
 persons helping one another in the same work, at the same 
 time 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 plough- 
 ing 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 impracti- 
 cability 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 prin- 
 ciples which recommend large manufactories are applicable 
 to agriculture. For the greatest productive efficiency, it 
 is generally desirable (though even this proposition must be 
 received with qualifications) that no family who have any 
 land, should have less than they could cultivate, 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 ad- 
 vantage in the article of buildings. It does not cost so much 
 to house a great number of cattle in one building, as to lodge 
 them equally well in several buildings. There is also some 
 advantage in implements. A small farmer is not so likely to 
 possess expensive instruments. But the principal agricul- 
 tural implements, even when of the best construction, are 
 not expensive. It may not answer to a small farmer to own 
 a threshing machine, for the small quantity of corn he has 
 to thresh ; but there is no reason why such a machine should
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 181 
 
 not in every neighbourhood be owned in common, or pro- 
 vided by some person to whom the others pay a considera- 
 tion for its use ; especially as, when worked by steam, they are 
 so constructed 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 manures, 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 Ireland the experience 
 has been ample, not merely under the worst but under the 
 best management ; and the highest Irish authorities may be 
 cited in opposition to the opinion which on this subject com- 
 monly prevails in England. Mr. Blacker, for example, one of 
 the most experienced agriculturists and successful improvers 
 in the North of Ireland, whose experience 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 com- 
 fortably and pay as high a rent as any large farmer whatever. 
 " I am firmly persuaded," (he says,f) " 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 
 
 * The observations in the text may hereafter require some degree of modi- 
 fication 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. 
 
 t Prize Essay on the Management of Landed Property in Ireland, by 
 William Blacker, Esq. (1837,) p. 23.
 
 182 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 
 
 confirmed by the opinion of many practical men who have 
 well considered the subject. . . The English farmer of 700 
 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 consume 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 
 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 possessed 
 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 feeding 
 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 abundance 
 of cattle, and copious use of manure, on the small farms of
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 183 
 
 Flanders, are the most striking features in that Flemish 
 agriculture which is the admiration of all competent judges, 
 whether in England or on the Continent.* 
 
 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 
 
 * "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 exceeds 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 
 Syste'mes de Culture et de leur Influence sur 1'Economie 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 super6cie gale, nourrit le plus 
 d'animaux ; la Hollande et quelques parties de la Lombardie pourraient seules 
 lui disputer cet avantage : mais est-ce Ik un r^sultat des formes de 1'exploita- 
 tion, et des circonstances de climat et de situation locale ne concourent-elles 
 pas a le produire ? C'est, a notre avis, ce qui ne saurait tre contest^. En 
 effet, quoiqu'on en ait dit, partout oil la grande et la petite culture se rencontrent 
 sur les meines points, c'est celle-ci qui, bien qu'elle ne puisse entretenir autant 
 de moutons, possede, tout compense, le plus grand nombre d'animaux pro- 
 ducteurs 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 oh se 
 trouvent les grandes fermes sont celles de Namur et du Hainaut, et elles n'ont 
 en moyenne, pour 100 hectares de terres cultive'es, que 30 betes bovines et 45 
 moutons. Or, en comptant, suivant 1'usage, 10 moutons comme 1' equivalent
 
 184 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 such inferiority exists. Countries of small farms and pea- 
 sant farming, Flanders and Italy, had a good agriculture 
 many generations before England, and theirs is still, as a 
 whole, probably the best agriculture in the world. The 
 empirical skill, which is the effect of daily and close obser- 
 vation, peasant farmers often possess in an eminent degree. 
 The traditional knowledge, for example, of the culture of 
 
 d'une tete de gros bewail, nous rencontrons d'un c&te, 76 animaux servant 
 a maintenir la fe'condite du sol ; de 1'autre, moins de 35, difference a coup sur 
 enorme. (D'apres les documents statistiques publics par le Ministre de Tin- 
 te"rieur, 3me publication officielle.) II est a remarquer, au surplus, que le 
 nombre des animaux n'est pas, dans la partie de la Belgique dont le sol est 
 divise" en trds-petites fermes, beaucoup moindre qu'en Angleterre. En FeVa- 
 luant dans cette derniere contre"e a raison seulement du territoire en culture, 
 il y existe, par centaine d'hectares, 65 betes a corne et pres de 260 moutons, 
 c.-a-d. l'e"quivalent 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 donne"s par des animaux nourris a peu pres toute l'anne"e a 
 1'^table, tandis qu'en Angleterre la pature en plein air affaiblit consideYable- 
 ment les quantites qu'il devient possible de mettre entierement a profit. 
 
 ' ' Dans le de"partement 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 cbevaux, nourrissent, Puu 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 contiennent, le 
 premier, que 1' Equivalent de 44 betes bovines, 1'autre, que celui de 40. (D'apres 
 la Statistique de la France publiee par le Ministre du Commerce : Agricul- 
 ture, t. i.) 
 
 "Pareilles rechercb.es e"tendues sur d'autres points de la France offriraient 
 des re"sultats analogues. S'il est vrai que dans la banlieue des villes, la petite 
 culture s'abstienne de garder des animaux, au produit desquels elle supple"e 
 facilement par des acbats d'engrais, il ne se peut que le genre de travail qui 
 exige le plus de la terre ne soit pas celui qui en entretienne le plus activement 
 la fertility. Assure"ment il n'est pas donne" aux petites fermes de posse"der de 
 nombreux troupeaux de moutons, et c'est un inconvenient ; mais, en revanche, 
 elles nourrissent plus de btes bovines que les grandes. C'est Ik une n^cessite 
 a laquelle elles ne sauraient se soustraire dans aucun des pays oil les besoins de 
 la consommation les ont appele"es a fleurir ; elles peViraient si elles ne rEussis- 
 saient pas a y satisfaire. 
 
 "Voici, au surplus, sur ce point das details dont 1'exactitude nous paralt
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 185 
 
 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 
 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 reasons do really require 
 
 pleinement attested par Pexcellence du travail ou nous les avons pulse's. Ces 
 details, contenus dans la statistique de la commune de Vensat (Puy de Dome), 
 publie'e recemment par M. le docteur Jusseraud, maire de la commune, sont 
 d'autant plus pre"cieux, qu'ils mettent dans tout leur jour la nature des change- 
 ments que le de"veloppement de la petite culture a, dans le pays dont il s'agit, 
 apporte"s au nombre et a 1'espece des animaux dont le produit en engrais sou- 
 tient et accrolt la fertilite" des terres. Dans la commune de Vensat, qui com- 
 prend 1612 hectares divise's en 4600 parcelles appartenant a 591 proprie"taires, 
 le territoire exploit^ se compose de 1466 hectares. Or, en 1790, 17 fermes en 
 occupaient les deux tiers et 20 autres tout le reste. Depuis lors, les cultures 
 se sont morcele'es. et maintenant leur petitesse est extreme. Quelle a e'te' 
 1'influence du changement sur la quantite" des animaux ? Une augmentation 
 considerable. En 1790, la commune ne posse"dait qu'environ 300 betes a 
 comes, et de 1800 a 2000 bStes a laine ; aujourd'hui elle compte 676 des 
 premieres, et 533 seulement des secondes. Ainsi pour remplacer 1300 
 moutons elle a acquis 376 bceufs et vacb.es, et tout compense", 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 a remarquer que, plus forts et mieux nourris a 
 present, les animaux contribuent bien davantage a entretenir la fertilite" des 
 terres. 
 
 " Voila 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 Ik, a conditions locales pareilles, c'est elle qui en possede le plus, et il 
 ne devait pas 6tre difficile de le pre'sumer ; 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 re"parateurs qu'elle en exige davantage. Que 1'on prenne un a un lea 
 autres reproches ; qu'on les examine a la clarte" de faits bien appre'cie's, on 
 s'appercevra bientot qu'ils ne sauraient etre mieux fonde"s, et qu'ils n'ont e'te' 
 formules que parce qu'on a compart 1'^tat des cultures dans des contre"es ou 
 les causes de la prospe'rite' agricole n'agissaient pas avec la mme e'nergie." 
 (pp. 116-120.)
 
 186 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 large numbers of workmen combining their labour, these are 
 not in general to be expected from small farmers, or even 
 small proprietors, though combination among them for such 
 purposes is by no means unexampled, 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 agriculture. 
 This is a subject on which the testimony of competent wit- 
 nesses is unanimous. The working of the petite 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 proprietors. 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 allotments ; a produce be- 
 yond comparison greater than a large farmer extracts, or 
 Avould find it his interest to extract, from the same piece of 
 land. 
 
 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. There is not nearly so much 
 labour expended on it. This is not on account of any economy 
 arising from combination of labour, but because, by employing 
 less, a greater return is obtained in proportion to the outlay.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 187 
 
 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 he 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, 
 cteteris paribus, under small cultivation, and although, there- 
 fore, 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 sur- 
 plus after feeding the cultivators, must be smaller ; that 
 therefore, the population disposable for all other purposes, 
 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 sur- 
 plus for their existence as occupations, must be less nume- 
 rous ; and that the nation, therefore (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. 
 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
 
 188 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 Mr. Wakefield sometimes appears to confound these distinct 
 ideas. In France it is computed that two-thirds of the whole 
 population are agricultural. In England, 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 cultivators supports six people, 
 English agriculture is twice as productive as French agri- 
 culture," 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 support 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 pro- 
 vides 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 ; nearly all the timber used in France is of 
 home growth, nearly all which is used in England is im- 
 ported ; the principal fuel of France is procured and brought 
 to market by persons reckoned among agriculturists, in Eng- 
 land by persons not so reckoned. I do not take into calcu- 
 lation hides and wool, these products being common to both 
 countries, nor wine or brandy produced for home consump- 
 tion, since England has a corresponding production of beer 
 and spirits ; but England has no material export of either article, 
 and a great importation of the last, while France supplies wines 
 and spirits to the whole world. I say nothing of fruit, eggs, and 
 such minor articles of agricultural produce, in which the export 
 trade of France is enormous. But not to lay undue stress on 
 these abatements, we will take the statement as it stands. 
 Suppose that two persons, in England, do bond fide produce 
 the food of six, while in France, for the same purpose, the labour 
 of four is requisite. Does it follow that England must have a 
 larger surplus for the support of anon-agricultural population ? 
 No ; but merely that she can devote two-thirds of her whole
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ONf A SMALL SCALE. 189 
 
 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 conte nding 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) averages 
 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 disposable 
 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 country, than 
 to any special cause ; and even if partly the effect of minute 
 subdivision, it does not prove that small farming is disad- 
 vantageous, 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 parcelles, most inconveniently dispersed and parted from 
 one another. 
 
 As a question, not of gross, but of net produce, the com- 
 parative merits of the grande and the petite culture, especially
 
 190 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 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 country- 
 men, 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 improvements.* 
 The most apparently impartial and discriminating judgment 
 that I have met with is that of M. Passy, who (always speak- 
 ing with reference to net produce) gives his verdict in favour 
 of large farms for grain and forage ; but, for the kinds of cul- 
 ture 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 products of agriculture.f 
 
 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 
 
 + "Daiis le de*partement du Nord," says M. Passy, "une ferme de 20 
 hectares recueille en veaux, laitage, ceufs, et volailles, parfois pour un millier 
 de francs dans 1'ann^e ; et, les frais de'falque's, c'est 1' Equivalent d'une addition 
 au produit net de 15 a 20 francs par hectare." Dea Systtones de Culture, 
 p. 114.
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 191 
 
 have, increases the means of supporting a non-agricultural 
 population. Even if his surplus is no more than enough to 
 huy 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 subdivision 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 popula- 
 tion. 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 agri- 
 culture 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 considerably 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 assertion beyond the evidence, 
 most require to be guarded .against, I limited myself in the 
 
 * During the interval between the census of 1851 and that of 1866, the 
 increase of the population of Paris alone, exceeded the aggregate increase of all 
 France : while nearly all the other large towns likewise showed an increase.
 
 192 BOOK I. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 early editions of this work to the foregoing very moderate 
 statements. I little knew how much stronger my language 
 might have heen without exceeding the truth, and how much 
 the actual progress of French agriculture surpassed anything 
 which I had at that time sufficient grounds to affirm. The 
 investigations of that eminent authority on agricultural 
 statistics, M. Leonce de Lavergne, undertaken hy desire of 
 the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institute 
 of France, have led to the conclusion that since the Bevolu- 
 tion of 1789, the total produce of French agriculture has 
 douhled ; profits and wages having hoth 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, hut 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, current 
 by 150 percent. 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 agricul- 
 tural improvement under the two systems; and it is the 
 general opinion of those who are equally well acquainted with 
 both, that improvement is greatest under a due admixture 
 between them. 
 
 * Economic Rurale de la France depuis 1789. Par M. Leonce de Lavergne, 
 Membre de 1'Institut et de la Socie"te Centrale d'Agrieulture de France. 2 m ' 
 &L p. 59,
 
 PRODUCTION ON A LARGE AND ON A SMALL SCALE. 19o 
 
 In the present chapter, I do not enter on the question 
 between great and small cultivation in any other respect 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 deserves, and 
 requires, a still more particular examination. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 CHAPTER 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 hy 
 which the efficacy of these various agents is promoted. In 
 order to come to an end of the questions which relate ex- 
 clusively 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 producers 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 pro- 
 duction ; 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 under- 
 stood, or onVhich 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, 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
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF LABOUR. 197 
 
 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 agricultural 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 explanation is permissible, that 
 the requisites of production are Labour, Capital, and Land. 
 The increase of production, therefore, depends on the pro- 
 perties 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 succes- 
 sively, 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 abandoned 
 to it, and to the things on which it feeds, would not in a small 
 number of years overspread every region of the globe, of 
 which the climate was compatible with its existence. The 
 
 o K
 
 196 BOOK I. CHAPTER X. 2. 
 
 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 capable 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 of two millions and a half. 
 The capacity of increase is necessarily in a geometrical pro- 
 gression : 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 exercised to 
 the utmost, and yet, in the most favourable circumstances 
 known to exist, which are those of a fertile region colonized 
 from an industrious and civilized community, population has 
 continued, for several generations, independently of fresh 
 immigration, to double itself in not much more than twenty 
 years.* That the capacity of multiplication 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 the 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 estimate 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. 
 
 * This has been disputed ; but the highest estimate I have seen of the term 
 which population requires for doubling itself in the United States, independently 
 of immigrants and of their progeny that of Mr. Carey does not exceed 
 thirty years.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF LABOUR. 197 
 
 Twenty or thirty years ago, these propositions might still 
 have required considerable enforcement and illustration ; but 
 the evidence of them is so ample and incontestable, 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 circumstances, through a providential 
 adaptation of the fecundity of the human species to the 
 exigencies of society.* The obstacle to a just understanding 
 
 * 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 un- 
 favourable to reproduction ; and it is quite possible, though by no means 
 proved, that the physiological 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 principles 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 families of the English clergy, and generally of 
 the middle classes of England. 
 
 It is, besides, well remarked by Mr. Carey, that, to be consistent with 
 Mr. Doubleday's theory, the increase of the population of the United States, 
 apart from immigration, ought to be one of the slowest on record. 
 
 Mr. Carey has a theory of his own, also grounded on a physiological truth, 
 that the total sum of nutriment received by an organized body directs itself in 
 largest proportion to the parts of the system which are most used ; from which 
 he anticipates a diminution in the fecundity of human beings, not through more 
 abundant feeding, but through the greater use of their brains incident to an 
 advanced civilization. There is considerable plausibility in this speculation, 
 and experience may hereafter confirm it. But the change in the human con- 
 stitution which it supposes, if ever realized, will conduce to the expected effect 
 rather by rendering physical self-restraint easier, than by dispensing with its 
 necessity ; since the most rapid known rate of multiplication is quite compa- 
 tible with a very sparing employment of the multiplying power.
 
 198 BOOK I. CHAPTER X. 3. 
 
 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 be 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 be limited in 
 the same manner with theirs ; the births would be as nume- 
 rous 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 impulses superior to 
 mere animal instincts : and they do not, therefore, propa- 
 gate 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 
 
 * Mr. Carey expatiates on the absurdity of supposing that matter tends to 
 assume the highest form of organization, the human, at a more rapid rate 
 than it assumes the lower forms, which compose human food ; that human beings 
 multiply faster than turnips and cabbages. But the limit to the increase of 
 mankind, according to the doctrine of Mr. Malthus, does not depend on the 
 power of increase of turnips and cabbages, but on the limited quantity of the 
 land on which they can be grown. So long as the quantity of land is practically 
 unlimited, which it is in the United States, and food, consequently, can be 
 increased at the highest rate which is natural to it, mankind also may, without 
 augmented difficulty in obtaining subsistence, increase at their highest rate. 
 When Mr. Carey can show, not that turnips and cabbages, but that the soil 
 itself, or the nutritive elements contained in it, tend naturally to multiply, and 
 that too at a rate exceeding the most rapid possible increase of mankind, he 
 will have said something to the purpose. Till then, this part at least of his 
 argument may be considered as non-existent.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF LABOUR. 199 
 
 and premature death. In proportion as mankind rise above 
 the condition of the beasts, 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 practice 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 consistent with maintaining them- 
 selves 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 main- 
 taining their circumstances of improving them ; but such a 
 desire is rarely found, or rarely has that effect, in the labour- 
 ing 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, popu- 
 lation is kept down by actual starvation. The starvation does 
 not take place in ordinary years, but in seasons of 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 consequent on it, carry 
 off numbers of the population, which in a succession of favour- 
 able 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 necessaries, and to a bare suffi- 
 ciency of those : and the increase is kept within bounds, not 
 by excess of deaths, but by limitation of births. The limita-
 
 200 BOOK I. CHAPTER X. 3. 
 
 tion is brought about in various ways. In some countries, it 
 is the result of prudent or concientious 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 chil- 
 dren ; 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 carefully brought together by Mr. Malthus, and 
 much additional 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 re- 
 markably 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 
 persons 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 comfortable 
 circumstances ; and the same prudence is doubtless exercised 
 in avoiding causes of disease, as in keeping clear of the prin- 
 cipal cause 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- 
 thought, which perhaps might not be exercised by the people 
 themselves, are exercised by the state for their benefit ; mar- 
 riage not being permitted until the contracting parties can 
 show that they have the prospect of a comfortable support. 
 Under these laws, of which I shall speak more fully here- 
 after, 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 restraining cause seems 
 to be not so much individual prudence, as some general and
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF LABOUR. 201 
 
 perhaps even accidental habit of the country. In the rural 
 districts of England, during the last century, the growth of 
 population was very effectually repressed by the difficulty of 
 obtaining a cottage to live in. It was the custom for unmar- 
 ried labourers to lodge and board with their employers ; it 
 was the custom for married labourers to have a cottage : and 
 the rule of the English poor laws by whicb 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 manu- 
 factures, 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 gra- 
 dually drove their labourers into cottages, which the land- 
 lords 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 trous- 
 seau (destined for the supply of her whole subsequent life,) 
 is said to have acted as a substantial check to population. 
 In England, at present, the influence of prudence in keep- 
 ing down multiplication is seen by the diminished number 
 of marriages 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 
 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 circumstances, 
 is to take it out in the form which, by augmenting the popu- 
 lation, deprives the succeeding generation of the benefit.
 
 202 BOOK I. CHAPTER X. 3. 
 
 Unless, either by their general improvement in intellectual 
 and moral culture, or at least hy raising their habitual standard 
 of comfortable living, they can be taught to make a better use 
 of favourable circumstances, nothing 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 propor- 
 tional increase of population than that of the period pre- 
 ceding ; and the produce of French agriculture and industry 
 is increasing in a progressive ratio, while the population ex- 
 hibits in every quinquennial census, a smaller proportion of 
 births to the population. 
 
 The subject, however, of population, in its connexion with 
 the condition of the labouring classes, will be considered 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 unlimited 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.
 
 CHAPTEE XI. 
 
 OF 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 pro- 
 duce might, and naturally would, increase in the same ratio ; 
 and there would be no limit, until the numbers 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 pre- 
 sent 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 possessor 
 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- 
 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.
 
 204 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 1. 
 
 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 em- 
 ployed 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 necessaries, of the pro- 
 ducers are provided ; it is the fund from which all are sub- 
 sisted, who are not themselves engaged in production ; and 
 from which all additions are made to capital. It is the real 
 net produce of the country. The phrase, net produce, is often 
 taken in a more limited sense, to denote only the profits of 
 the capitalist and the rent of the landlord, 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 in- 
 cluded 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 indulgence ; 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 individuals; 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, 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
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 205 
 
 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 yield- 
 ing 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 
 <vhole of the fund which supplies 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 remu- 
 neration of the capitalist, 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 productiveness of labour and capital is great, the re- 
 turns 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 
 he 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 accumula- 
 tion 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 pro- 
 gress. 
 
 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 presented 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
 
 206 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Principles of Political Economy," by Dr. Rae.* In no other 
 book known to me is so much light thrown, both from prin- 
 ciple and history, on the causes which determine the accumu- 
 lation 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 circumstances ; 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 circumstances" 
 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 effective desire 
 of accumulation. Thus a healthy climate or occupation, by 
 increasing the probability of life, has a tendency to add to 
 this desire. When engaged in safe occupations, and living 
 in healthy countries, men are much more apt to be frugal, 
 than in unhealthy or hazardous occupations, and in climates 
 pernicious to human life. Sailors and soldiers are pro- 
 
 * 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 deter- 
 mining its reception. Had it appeared at a suitable time, and been favoured 
 by circumstances, it would have had every requisite for great success. The 
 autbor, 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 exposition and illustration calculated to make ideas tell not only 
 for what they are worth, but for more than they are worth, and which some- 
 times, 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 Dr. 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 required or is actually used for the establishment of his 
 conclusions.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 207 
 
 digals. In the West Indies, New Orleans, the East Indies, 
 the expenditure of the inhabitants is profuse. The same 
 people, coming to reside in the healthy parts of Europe, and 
 not getting into the vortex of extravagant fashion, live eco- 
 nomically. 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 accumu- 
 lation. 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 in- 
 ducement of a higher rate of profit on capital, to make them 
 prefer a doubtful future to the temptation of present en- 
 joyment. 
 
 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 the sacrifice does not 
 solely depend upon its expediency. The disposition 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. Im- 
 providence 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 
 
 * Eae, p. 123.
 
 208 BOOK I. 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 power 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 general 
 civilization is often more the effect of deficiency in this 
 particular, than in many others which attract more attention. 
 In the circumstances, for example, of a hunting tribe, " man 
 may be said to be necessarily improvident, and regardless of 
 futurity, because, in this state, the future presents 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 perception and action, 
 leading to a constant connexion in the mind of those distant 
 points, and of the series of events serving 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 esta- 
 blish it." 
 
 For instance : " Upon the banks of the St. Lawrence 
 there are several little Indian villages. They are surrounded,
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 209 
 
 in general, by a good deal of land, from which the wood 
 seeras to have heen 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, insomuch 
 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 labour ; on the con- 
 trary, they apply very diligently to it when its reward is im- 
 mediate. 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 purpose, 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 returns 
 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 hun- 
 dredfold, and forming, even when half ripe, a pleasant 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 inaccessible 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 apparently, at one time, been under crop. 
 The cattle of the neighbouring settlers would now, however 
 VOL. i. p
 
 210 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 destroy any crop not securely fenced, and this additional neces- 
 sary outlay consequently bars their culture. It removes ther 
 to an order of instruments of slower return than that wind 
 corresponds to the strength of the effective desire of accumu 
 lation 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 perfectly 
 aware, and they act accordingly. It is evidently not the 
 necessary labour that is the obstacle to more extended cul- 
 ture, but the distant return from that labour. I am assured, 
 indeed, that among some of the more remote tribes, the 
 labour thus expended much exceeds that given by the whites. 
 The same portions of ground being cropped without remis- 
 sion, and manure not being used, they would scarcely yield 
 any return, were not the soil most carefully broken and pul- 
 verized, 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 succeeding 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 manner 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. 
 
 * Rae, p. 136.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 211 
 
 There were everywhere to be seen, according to Charlevoix, 
 " workshops of gilders, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, watch- 
 makers, carpenters, joiners, dyers," &c. These occupations 
 were not practised for the personal gain of the artificers : the 
 produce was at the absolute disposal of the missionaries, who 
 ruled the people by a voluntary despotism. The obstacles 
 arising from aversion to labour were therefore very com- 
 pletely overcome. The real difficulty was the improvidence 
 of the people ; their inability to think for the future : and the 
 necessity accordingly 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 
 supper, thinking, when reprehended, that they sufficiently 
 excused 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 are slaughtered, not only that the meat may be 
 equally divided, but that nothing may be lost." " But notwith- 
 standing all this care and superintendence," says Charlevoix, 
 " and all the precautions which are taken to prevent any 
 want of the necessaries of life, the missionaries are some- 
 times 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 provisions, 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 
 
 * Eae, p. 140. 
 
 P2
 
 212 BOOK 1. CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 Uieir personal habits and social condition, it might be anti- 
 cipated that they would possess a degree of prudence and 
 self-control greater than other Asiatics, but inferior to most 
 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, unless 
 of the higher ranks, are in general of nnburnt bricks, of 
 clay, or of hurdles plastered with earth ; the roofs, of reeds 
 fastened to laths. We can scarcely conceive more unsub- 
 stantial or temporary fabrics. Their partitions are of paper, 
 requiring to be renewed every year. A similar observation 
 may be made concerning their implements of husbandry, 
 and other utensils. They are almost entirely of wood, the 
 metals entering but very sparingly into their construction : 
 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 expenditure but 
 being far more durable. From the same cause, much laud, 
 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 complete 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 bearing a crop. Though 
 yielding, probably, a very considerable 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 desire of accumulation than exists in 
 the empire. 
 
 " The produce of the harvest is, as we have remarked.
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 213 
 
 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- 
 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 estimate 
 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 forethought 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 productions, enable them very speedily 
 to draw from almost any part of tiie 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. Accord-
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 ingly there is no spot that labour can immediately bring 
 under cultivation that is not made to yield to it. Hills, even 
 mountains, are ascended and formed into terraces ; and water, 
 in that country the great productive agent, is led to every 
 part by drains, or carried up to it by the ingenious and simple 
 hydraulic machines which have been in use from time imme- 
 morial among this singular people. They effect this the more 
 easily, from the soil, even in these situations, being very deep 
 and covered 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 materials 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. European 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
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 215 
 
 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 effec- 
 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 standard, 
 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 produc- 
 tion 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 certain 
 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 at- 
 tained, 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 possesses, 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 enjoyment. What a 
 contrast with Holland, where, during the most flourishing 
 
 * Rae, pp. 1515.
 
 216 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 4. 
 
 period of its history, the government was able habitually to 
 borrow at two per cent, and private individuals, 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 returns to it are still ,so large, 
 denotes a much less degree of the effective desire of accu- 
 mulation, 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 standard. 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 wealth 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 construction or 
 foreign speculative adventure, bring the largeness of the total 
 amount into evidence. 
 
 There are many circumstances, which, in England, give 
 a peculiar force to the accumulating propensity. The long
 
 LAW OF THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 217 
 
 exemption of the country from the ravages of war, and the 
 far earlier period than elsewbere 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, and 
 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 
 into the direction of manufactures and commerce ; into sup- 
 plying their wants and gratifying their ambition by producing 
 and saving, rather than by appropriating what has been pro- 
 duced and saved. Much also depended on the better poli- 
 tical institutions of this country, which by the scope they 
 have allowed to individual freedom of action, have encou- 
 raged 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 trading 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 be- 
 came 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 middle-class 
 life, and the acquisition of wealth the means. And inasmuch 
 as to be rich without industry, has always hitherto constituted 
 a step in the social scale above those who are rich by means
 
 218 BOOK I. CHAPTER XI. 4. 
 
 of industry, it becomes the object of ambition to save not 
 merely as much as \vill afford a large income while in busi- 
 ness, but enough to retire from business and live in affluence 
 on realized gains. These causes have, in England, been 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 accumulation 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 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 possessed 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 accumula- 
 tion 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 slackening, accumu- 
 lation seems now to proceed more rapidly than ever ; and the 
 second requisite of increased production, increase 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 consi- 
 derably checked, if the returns to capital were to be reduced 
 still lower than at present. But why should any possible
 
 LAW OP THE INCREASE OF CAPITAL. 219 
 
 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, lahour and capital, must turn upon the pro- 
 perties of the only element which is inherently, and in it- 
 self, limited in quantity. It must depend on the properties 
 of land.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 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 indefinite 
 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 remains 
 entirely uncultivated; it is commonly thought, and is very 
 natural at first to suppose, that for the present all limitation 
 of production or population from this source is at an indefi- 
 nite 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 eco- 
 nomy. The question is more important and fundamental 
 than any other; it involves the whole subject of the causes 
 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.
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION' FROM LAND. 221 
 
 2. The limitation to production from the properties of 
 the soil, is not like the obstacle opposed by a wall, which 
 stands immovable 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 pro- 
 gress of agriculture, it is the law of production from the 
 land, that in any given state of agricultural skill and know- 
 ledge, 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 obtained by a more than pro- 
 portional increase in the application 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 
 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
 
 222 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 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 ela- 
 borate 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 market, of course yield 
 an inferior return, and an increasing demand cannot be sup- 
 plied from them unless at an augmentation of cost, and there- 
 fore of price. If the additional demand 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 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 cul- 
 tivated by their proprietors, for the sake of subsistence or 
 independence ; but it never could be the interest of any one
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 223 
 
 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 favour- 
 ably 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 an 
 intelligent 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 
 were, and finish, about everything which requires labour." 
 Of the two causes mentioned, the plentifulness of land 
 seems to me the true explanation, rather than the dearness 
 
 * Letters from America, by John Robert Godley, vol. i. p. 42. See also 
 Lyell's Travels in America, vol. ii. p. 83.
 
 224 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 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 
 effective 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 quantity 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 received, 
 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 remu- 
 nerated by the produce, as any portion of the labour and 
 capital already employed. It would sometimes be much 
 more amply remunerated. This could not be, if capital always 
 sought and found the most advantageous employment ; but 
 if the most advantageous employment has to wait longest 
 for its remuneration, it is only in a rather advanced stage of 
 industrial development that the preference will be given to 
 it ; and even in that advanced stage, the laws or usages con- 
 nected with property in land and the tenure of farms, are
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OP PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 225 
 
 often such as to prevent the disposable capital of the country 
 from flowing freely into the channel of agricultural improve- 
 ment : and hence the increased supply, required hy increasing 
 population, is sometimes 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 capital were forthcoming to execute, within the 
 next year, all known and recognised improvements in the 
 land of the United Kingdom which would pay at the exist- 
 ing 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 productive lands now cultivated, which are not parti- 
 cularly favoured by situation, would go out 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 im- 
 provement. 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 dimi- 
 nishing 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 advantages of situa- 
 tion to place them on a par with the best. Much would un- 
 doubtedly continue to be produced under less advantageous 
 conditions, and with a smaller proportional return, than that 
 obtained from the best soils and situations. And in propor- 
 tion as the further increase of population required a still 
 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 226 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 greater addition to the supply, the general law would resume 
 its course, and the further augmentation would be obtained at 
 a more than proportionate expense of labour and capital. 
 
 3. That the produce of land increases, cteteris paribus, 
 in a diminishing ratio to the increase in the labour employed, 
 is a truth more often ignored or disregarded than actually 
 denied. It has, however, met with a direct impugner in the 
 well-known American political economist, Mr. H. C. Carey, 
 who maintains that the real law of agricultural industry is the 
 very reverse ; the produce increasing in a greater ratio than 
 the labour, or in other words affording to labour a perpetually 
 increasing return. To substantiate this assertion, he argues 
 that cultivation does not begin with the better soils, and 
 extend from them, as the demand increases, to the poorer, 
 but begins with the poorer, and does not, till long after, 
 extend itself to the more fertile. Settlers in a new country 
 invariably commence on the high and thin lands ; the rich 
 but swampy soils of the river bottoms cannot at first be 
 brought into cultivation, by reason of their unhealthiness, and 
 of the great and prolonged labour required for clearing and 
 draining them. As population and wealth increase, cultiva- 
 tion travels down the hill sides, clearing them as it goes, 
 and the most fertile soils, those of the low grounds, are 
 generally (he even says universally) the latest cultivated. 
 These propositions, with the inferences which Mr. Carey draws 
 from them, are set forth at much length in his latest and 
 most elaborate treatise, " Principles of Social Science ;" and 
 he considers them as subverting the very foundation of what 
 he calls the English political economy, with all its practical 
 consequences, especially the doctrine of free trade. 
 
 As far as words go, Mr. Carey has a good case against 
 several of the highest authorities in political economy, who 
 certainly did enunciate in too universal a manner the law which 
 they laid down, not remarking that it is not true of the first 
 cultivation in a newly settled country. Where population is
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 227 
 
 thin and capital scanty, land which requires a large outlay to 
 render it fit for tillage must remain untilled; though such lands, 
 when their time has come, often yield a greater produce 
 than those earlier cultivated, not only absolutely, hut pro- 
 portionally to the labour employed, even if we include that 
 which had been expended in originally fitting them for cul- 
 ture. But it is not pretended that the law of diminish- 
 ing return was operative from the very beginning of society : 
 and though some political economists may have believed it to 
 come into operation earlier than it does, it begins quite early 
 enough to support the conclusions they founded on it. Mr. 
 Carey will hardly assert that in any old country in England 
 or France, for example the lands left waste are, or have for 
 centuries been, more naturally fertile than those under tillage. 
 Judging even by his own imperfect test, that of local situation 
 how imperfect I need not stop to point out is it true that 
 in England or France at the present day the uncultivated 
 part of the soil consists of the plains and valleys, and the cul- 
 tivated, of the hills? Every one knows, on the contrary, that it 
 is the high lands and thin soils which are left to nature, and 
 when the progress of population demands an increase of culti- 
 vation, the extension is from the plains to the hills. Once in 
 a century, perhaps, a Bedford Level may be drained, or a 
 Lake of Harlem pumped out : but these are slight and 
 transient exceptions to the normal progress of things ; and in 
 old countries which are at all advanced in civilization, little of 
 this sort remains to be done.* 
 
 Mr. Carey himself unconsciously bears the strongest testi- 
 mony to the reality of the law he contends against: for one of 
 the propositions most strenuously maintained by him is, that 
 
 * Ireland may be alleged as an exception ; a large fraction of the entire soil 
 of that country being still incapable of cultivation for want of drainage. But 
 though Ireland is an old country, unfortunate social and political circumstances 
 have kept it a poor and backward one. Neither is it at all certain that the 
 bogs of Ireland, if drained and brought under tillage, would take their place 
 along with Mr. Carey's fertile river bottoms, or among any but the poorer soils.
 
 228 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 the raw products of the soil, in an advancing community, 
 steadily tend to rise in price. Now, the most elementary 
 truths of political economy show that this could not happen, 
 unless the cost of production, measured in labour, of those 
 products, tended to rise. If the application of additional 
 labour to the land was, as a general rule, attended with an 
 increase in the proportional return, the price of produce, instead 
 of rising, must necessarily fall as society advances, unless the cost 
 of production of gold and silver fell still more : a case so rare, 
 that there are only two periods in all history when it is known 
 to have taken place ; the one, that which followed the opening 
 of the Mexican and Peruvian mines ; the other, that in which 
 we now live. At all known periods, except these two, the 
 cost of production of the precious metals has been either sta- 
 tionary or rising. If, therefore, it be true that the tendency 
 of agricultural produce is to rise in money price as wealth and 
 population increase, there needs no other evidence that the 
 labour required for raising it from the soil tends to augment 
 when a greater quantity is demanded. 
 
 I do not go so far as Mr. Carey : I do not assert that the 
 cost of production, and consequently the price, of agricultural 
 produce, always and necessarily rises as population increases. 
 It tends to do so ; but the tendency may be, and sometimes 
 is, even during long periods, held in check. The effect does 
 not depend on a single principle, but on two antagonizing 
 principles. There is another agency, in habitual antagonism 
 to the law of diminishing return from land ; and to the con- 
 sideration of this we shall now proceed. It is no other than 
 the progress 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 
 agriculture are of two kinds : some enable the land to yield 
 a greater absolute produce, without an equivalent increase of
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 229 
 
 labour ; others have not the power of increasing the produce, 
 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 in- 
 troduction 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 pro- 
 ductiveness : since the great addition made to the number of 
 cattle by the increase of their food, affords more abundant 
 manure to fertilize the corn lauds. 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-ploughing or tile- draining; 
 improvements in the breed or feeding of labouring cattle ; 
 augmented stock of the animals which consume and convert 
 into human food what would otherwise be wasted : and the 
 like. The other sort of improvements, those which diminish 
 labour, but without increasing the capacity of the land to pro- 
 duce, are such as the improved construction of tools ; the in- 
 troduction 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 intro- 
 duction, so slowly accomplished in England, of Scotch plough- 
 ing, with two horses abreast and one man, instead of three or 
 four horses in a team and two men, &c. These improvements
 
 230 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 do not add to the productiveness of the land, hut they are 
 equally calculated with the former to counteract the tendency 
 in the cost of production of agricultural produce, to rise with 
 the progress of population and demand. 
 
 Analogous in effect to this second class of agricultural 
 improvements, are improved means of communication. Good 
 roads are equivalent to good tools. It is of no consequence 
 whether the economy of labour takes place in extracting the 
 produce from the soil, or in conveying it to the place where 
 it is to be consumed. Not to say in addition, that the labour 
 of cultivation itself is diminished by whatever lessens the 
 cost of bringing manure from a distance, 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 ap- 
 pliances and aids for producing which, they serve to transmit. 
 By their means land can be cultivated, which could not 
 otherwise have remunerated the cultivators without a rise 
 of price. Improvements 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 ma- 
 terial of food is subjected after it is separated from the ground. 
 The first application of wind or water power to grind corn,
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 231 
 
 tended to cheapen bread as much as a very important dis- 
 covery in agriculture would have done ; and any great im- 
 provement in the construction of corn-mills, would have, in 
 proportion, a similar influence. The effects of cheapening 
 locomotion have heen 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 mention 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 embank- 
 ments 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 pro- 
 duction 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 practically 
 equivalent. What they do not prevent, they yet, in some 
 degree, compensate for. 
 
 The materials of manufacture 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 manufacturing as well as to 
 agricultural history. As population increases, and the power 
 of the land to yield increased produce 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 portion of the entire cost of the manu- 
 facture, 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 and strongly towards diminution, as the 
 amount of production increases. Manufactures are vastly
 
 232 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 more susceptible than agriculture, of mechanical improve- 
 ments, and contrivances for saving labour ; and it has already 
 been seen how greatly the division of labour, and its skilful 
 and economical distribution, depend on the extent of the 
 market, and on the possibility of production in large masses. 
 In manufactures, accordingly, the causes tending to increase 
 the productiveness 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 diminishing 
 proportional cost This fact has manifested itself in the pro- 
 gressive fall of the prices and values of almost every kind of 
 manufactured goods during two centuries past ; a fall accele- 
 rated 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 con- 
 sequence, 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 augment- 
 ing, that the required amount of labour could be spared from 
 manufactures, and nevertheless a greater produce be obtained, 
 and the aggregate wants of the community be on the whole 
 better supplied, than before. The benefit might even extend 
 to the poorest class. The increased 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 antagonist influence to the law of diminishing return to 
 agricultural labour. Nor is it only industrial improvements 
 which have this effect. Improvements in government, and 
 almost every kind of moral and social advancement, operate in
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OP PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 233 
 
 the same manner. Suppose a country in the condition of France 
 before the Revolution : taxation imposed almost exclusively 
 on the industrial 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 inflicted 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 productiveness of labour, 
 equivalent to many industrial inventions ? 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 restrictions which prevent com- 
 modities from being produced where the cost of their produc- 
 tion is lowest, amounts to a vast improvement in production. 
 When fertile land, previously reserved as hunting ground, or 
 for any other purpose of amusement, is set free for culture, 
 the aggregate productiveness of agricultural industry is in- 
 creased. It is well known what has been the effect in Eng- 
 land of badly administered 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 cheapen- 
 ing of the transfer of property, and whatever else promotes 
 the natural tendency 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, improve- 
 ments in production, as the invention of the spinning-jenny 
 or the steam-engine. 
 
 We may say the same of improvements in education.
 
 234 BOOK I. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 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 intelli- 
 gence, 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 general 
 trustworthiness of labourers are as important as their intelli- 
 gence. Friendly relations, and a community of interest and 
 feeling between labourers and employers, are eminently 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 cha- 
 racter operates with beneficial effect even on industry. In 
 the rich and idle classes, increased mental energy, more solid 
 instruction, and stronger feelings of conscience, 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 agriculture in the precise points in 
 which benefit might be expected from the influence of an 
 educated class, is partly accounted for by the exclusive devo- 
 tion of the richer landed proprietors 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 productive- 
 ness of industry. The intensity of devotion to industrial occu- 
 pations 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 ren- 
 dered 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 
 must ob serve that what we have said of agriculture, is true
 
 LAW OF INCREASE OF PRODUCTION FROM LAND. 235 
 
 with little variation, of the other occupations which it repre- 
 sents ; of all the arts which extract materials from the glohe. 
 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 requires 
 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 exhausted, 
 but even when they as yet show no signs of exhaustion, 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 improvements in production, also applies in a 
 still greater degree. 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 pro- 
 cesses by which the metals are extracted. There is another 
 contingency, of no unfrequent occurrence, which avails to 
 counterbalance the progress of all existing mines towards ex- 
 haustion : this is, the discovery of new ones, equal or superior 
 in richness. 
 
 To resume ; all natural agents which are limited in quan- 
 tity, are not only limited in their ultimate productive power, 
 but, long before that power is stretched to the utmost, 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 extension of their knowledge, 
 and their consequent command, of the properties and powers 
 of natural agents.
 
 CHAPTEK XIII. 
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 
 
 1. FROM 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 hecause 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 v:ill 
 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 forethought 
 sufficient for the adoption of the contrivances by which 
 natural agents are made to do the work of human labour ; 
 the desideratum for such a country, economically considered, 
 is an increase of industry, and of the effective desire of accu- 
 mulation. The means are, first, a better government : more 
 complete security of property ; moderate taxes, and freedom 
 from arbitrary exaction under the name of taxes ; a more per- 
 manent and more advantageous tenure of land, securing to 
 the cultivator as far as possible the undivided benefits of the 
 industry, skill, and economy he may exert. Secondly, im- 
 provement of the public intelligence : the decay of usages or 
 superstitions which interfere with the effective employment of
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 237 
 
 industry; and the growth of mental activity, making the 
 people alive to new objects of desire. Thirdly, the intro- 
 duction of foreign arts, which raise the returns derivable from 
 additional capital, to a rate corresponding to [the low strength 
 of the desire of accumulation : and the importation of foreign 
 capital, which renders the increase of production no longer 
 exclusively dependent on the thrift or providence of the inha- 
 bitants themselves, while it places before them a stimulating 
 example, and by instilling new ideas and breaking the chains 
 of habit, if not by improving the actual condition of the popu- 
 lation, 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 parts of Europe,as Russia, Turkey, 
 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 general 
 thriftiness of the labouring class is much below what is desi- 
 rable, the spirit of accumulation in the more prosperous part 
 of the community requires abatement rather than increase. 
 In these countries there would never be any deficiency of 
 capital, if its increase were never checked or brought to a 
 stand by too great a diminution of its returns. 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 pro- 
 duction altogether, is a result of the necessary and inherent 
 conditions of production from the land. 
 
 In all countries which have passed beyond a rather early 
 stage in the progress of agriculture, every increase in the 
 demand for food, occasioned by increased population, will
 
 238 BOOK I. CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 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 improvements 
 tending to cheapen commodities, can never be obtained 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 custo- 
 mary comforts. Whenever this necessity is postponed, not- 
 withstanding an increase of population, it is because the 
 improvements which facilitate production continue progres- 
 sive ; because the contrivances of mankind for making their 
 labour more effective, keep up an equal struggle with nature, 
 and extort fresh resources from her reluctant powers as fast 
 as human necessities occupy and engross the old. 
 
 From this, results the important corollary, that the 
 necessity of restraining population is not, as many persons 
 believe, peculiar to a condition of great inequality of pro- 
 perty. 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-popula- 
 tion. An unjust distribution of wealth does not even aggra- 
 vate the evil, but, at most, causes it to be somewhat earlier 
 felt. It is in vain to say, that all mouths 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, 
 as, with the existing habits of the people, under such an 
 encouragement, it undoubtedly would in little more than
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 239 
 
 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 
 he resorted to, and the more laborious and scantily remu- 
 nerative cultivation which must be employed on the superior 
 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 increasing 
 or diminishing, and the average condition of the people 
 improving or deteriorating, depends upon whether population 
 is advancing faster than improvement, or improvement 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 people; 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, in- 
 cluding not only new industrial inventions, or an extended 
 use of those already known, but improvements in institu- 
 tions, education, opinions, and human affairs generally, pro- 
 vided 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 advancing num- 
 bers call for an augmentation of produce, it is not neces- 
 sary to obtain that augmentation by the cultivation of soils 
 more sterile than the worst already under culture, or by 
 applying additional labour to the old soils at a diminished
 
 240 BOOK I. CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 advantage ; or at all events this loss of power is compensated 
 by the increased efficiency with which, in the progress 
 of improvement, lahour is employed in manufactures. In 
 one way or the other, the increased population is provided 
 for, and all are as well off as hefore. 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 he 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 
 population has been the more rapid of the two, at others 
 that of improvement. In England during a long interval 
 preceding the French Revolution, population increased 
 slowly ; but the progress of improvement, at least in agri- 
 culture, 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 short of conclusive, inasmuch as the extra- 
 ordinary 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 society. Whether during the 
 same period improvements in manufactures, or diminished 
 cost of imported commodities, made amends for the dimi- 
 nished productiveness of labour on the land, is uncertain. 
 But ever since the great mechanical inventions of Watt, 
 Arkwright, and their cotemporaries, the return to labour 
 has probably increased as fast as the population ; and 
 would have outstripped it, if that very augmentation of 
 return had not called forth an additional portion of the 
 inherent power of multiplication in the human species.
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 241 
 
 During the twenty or thirty years last elapsed, so rapid 
 has been the extension of improved processes of agri- 
 culture, that even the land yields a greater produce in pro- 
 portion 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 increase 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 improvements 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 produce 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 
 
 VOL. i. R
 
 242 BOOK I. CHAPTER XIII. 3. 
 
 before, so much food for so much labour employed in the 
 growth of food : the return is now, a greater quantity of food, 
 for the same labour employed in producing cottons or hard- 
 ware 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 dis- 
 tance : but in the one case as in the other, it immediately 
 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 surface 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 effect in any 
 increased tension of the springs of production, or any en- 
 hancement of the price of food throughout the world. But 
 in this calculation several things are overlooked. 
 
 In the first place, the foreign regions from which corn 
 can be imported do not comprise the whole globe, but 
 those parts of it principally which are in the immediate 
 neighbourhood 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 during 
 an indefinite time for a rapidly growing demand, without an 
 increasing strain on the productive powers of the soil. To 
 obtain auxiliary supplies of corn from the interior in any 
 abundance, is, in the existing state of the communications, in 
 most cases impracticable. By improved roads, and by canals 
 and railways, the obstacle will eventually 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.
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 243 
 
 In the next place, even if the supply were drawn from 
 the whole instead of a small part of the surface of the ex- 
 porting countries, the quantity of food would still be limited, 
 which could be obtained from them without an increase 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 ex- 
 tended. But in such countries population also increases with 
 extraordinary rapidity. Their agriculture 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 lauds, and 
 to modes of cultivation like those of old countries, less pro- 
 ductive 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 transferred 
 full-grown to a rich and uncultivated soil. Among old coun- 
 tries, those which are able to export food, are able only 
 because their industry is in a very backward state ; because 
 capita], and hence population, have never increased suffi- 
 ciently to make food rise to a higher price. Such countries 
 are Eussia, Poland, and the plains of the Danube. In those 
 regions the effective desire of accumulation is weak, the arts 
 of production most imperfect, capital scanty, and its increase, 
 especially 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 
 
 R2
 
 244 BOOK I. CHAPTER XIII. 3. 
 
 produce in the country : they go without them. 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 habits of 
 countries whose agricultural population consists of serf's, or of 
 peasants who have but just emerged from a servile condition, 
 are the reverse of favourable, and even in this age of move- 
 ment these habits 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 com- 
 modities 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 disadvantages. It is opposed by differences of 
 language, differences 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 particular nation. 
 
 The law, therefore, of diminishing return to industry,
 
 CONSEQUENCES OF THE FOREGOING LAWS. 245 
 
 whenever population makes a more rapid progress than im- 
 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 sudden and great 
 cheapening of food, indeed, in whatever manner produced, 
 would, like any other sudden improvement 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 con- 
 tingency connected with freedom of importation, which may 
 yet produce temporary effects greater than were ever contem- 
 plated 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 supplied 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 itself 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 diminished, that it would require perhaps some 
 generations for population, even if it started forward at an 
 American pace, to overtake this great accession to the facilities 
 of its support. 
 
 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 increas- 
 ing population to be met without any falling off in the pro- 
 ductiveness 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 effec-
 
 246 BOOK I. CHAPTER XIII. 4. 
 
 tual. The migration from the older parts of the American 
 Confederation to the new territories, which is to all intents 
 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 difficulty 
 of earning a subsistence. If Australia or the interior of 
 Canada were as near to Great Britain as Wisconsin and Iowa 
 toNewYoi'k; 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 conti- 
 nents 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 judiciously con- 
 ducted emigration is a most important resource for suddenly 
 lightening the pressure of population by a single effort and 
 though in such an extraordinary case as that of Ireland 
 under the threefold operation of the potato failure, 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 ; it still remains to be 
 shown by experience whether a permanent stream of emi- 
 gration can be kept up, sufficient to take off, as in America, 
 all that portion of the annual increase (when proceeding at 
 its greatest rapidity) 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 the community. And unless this can be done, 
 emigration cannot, even in an economical point of view, dis- 
 pense 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 old countries, and the principles on which it should be con- 
 ducted, will be discussed at some length in a subsequent 
 portion of this Treatise.
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 DISTRIBUTION.
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 DISTBIBUTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OF PROPERTY. 
 
 1. THE principles which have been set forth in the first 
 part of this Treatise, are, in certain respects, strongly distin- 
 guished 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 con- 
 ditions, imposed by the constitution 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 perfection of their machinery, and their judi- 
 cious use of the advantages 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.
 
 250 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 1. 
 
 Whether they like it or not, the unproductive expenditure 
 of individuals will pro tanto tend to impoverish the commu- 
 nity, and only their productive expenditure will enrich it. 
 The opinions, or the wishes, which may exist on these dif- 
 ferent matters, do not control the things themselves. We 
 cannot, indeed, foresee to what extent the modes of pro- 
 duction may be altered, or the productiveness of labour 
 increased, by future extensions of our knowledge of the laws 
 of nature, suggesting new processes of industry of which we 
 have at present no conception. But howsoever we may 
 succeed in making for ourselves 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 
 society, or rather of those who dispose of its active force. 
 Even what a person has produced by his individual toil, un- 
 aided by any one, he cannot keep, unless by the permission 
 of society. Not only can society take it from him, but indi- 
 viduals 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 preventing 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 different ages and countries ; and 
 might be still more different, if mankind so chose.
 
 PROPERTY. 251 
 
 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 
 state of knowledge and experience, and the existing condi- 
 tion 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 character 
 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 theory. 
 Among these, our attention is first claimed by that primary 
 and fundamental institution, on which, unless in some excep- 
 tional and very limited cases, the economical arrangements of 
 society have always rested, though in its secondary features it 
 has varied, and is liable to vary. I mean, of course, the insti- 
 tution of individual property. 
 
 2. Private property, as an institution, did not owe its 
 origin to any of those considerations of utility, which pjead 
 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
 
 252 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 2. 
 
 quarrels. With this ohject chiefly in view, they naturally 
 enough gave legal effect to first occupancy, by treating as 
 the aggressor the person who first commenced violence, hy 
 turning, or attempting to turn, another out of possession. The 
 preservation of the peace, which was the original ohject of civil 
 government, was thus attained ; while by confirming, to those 
 who already possessed it, even what was not the fruit of per- 
 sonal 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. "\Ve 
 may suppose a community unhampered by any previous pos- 
 session ; 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 common ownership and col- 
 lective agency. 
 
 If private property were adopted, we must presume that 
 it would be accompanied by none of the initial inequalities 
 and injustices which obstruct the beneficial operation of the 
 principle in old societies. Every full grown man or woman, 
 we must suppose, would be secured in the unfettered use 
 and disposal of his or her bodily and mental faculties ; 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 apportionment, compensation 
 might be made for the injuries of nature, and the balance 
 redressed by assigning to the less robust members of the 
 community advantages in the distribution, sufficient to put 
 them on a par with the rest. But the division, once made, 
 would not again be interfered with ; individuals would be
 
 PROPERTY. 253 
 
 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 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 direction of the labour of the 
 community would devolve upon a magistrate or magistrates, 
 whom we may suppose elected by the suffrages of the com- 
 munity, and whom we must assume 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 con- 
 formable 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 Eapp, and 
 others : and from the hopes which they hold out of relief 
 from the miseries and iniquities of a state of much inequality 
 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 prin- 
 ciples is felt to be inevitable, and when more than at any 
 former period of history the suffering portions of the com- 
 munity 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 various forms 
 which these ideas have assumed : nor is this attention 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 implies
 
 254 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 8. 
 
 absolute equality in the distribution of the physical means 
 of life and enjoyment, and those who admit inequality, 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. At the 
 head of the first class, as the earliest of those belonging to 
 the present generation, must be placed Mr. Owen and his 
 followers. M. Louis Blanc and M. Cabet have more re- 
 cently 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 
 according 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 Communists, 
 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 system 
 which requires that the land and the instruments of produc- 
 tion should be the property, not of individuals, but of com- 
 munities or associations, or of the government. Among such 
 systems, the two of highest intellectual pretension are those 
 which, from the names of their real or reputed authors, have 
 been called St. Simonism and Fourierism ; the former defunct 
 as a system, but which during the few years of its public pro- 
 mulgation, sowed the seeds of nearly all the Socialist ten- 
 dencies which have since spread so widely in France: the 
 second, still flourishing 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 imprac- 
 ticable. No reasonable person can doubt that a village 
 community, composed of a few thousand inhabitants culti-
 
 PROPERTY. 255 
 
 vating in joint ownership the same extent of land which at 
 present feeds that number of people, and producing by com- 
 bined labour and the most improved processes the manufac- 
 tured articles which they required, could raise an amount of 
 productions sufficient to maintain them in comfort ; and would 
 find the means of obtaining, and if need be, exacting, the 
 quantity of labour necessary for this purpose, from every mem- 
 ber 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 
 society is remunerated by day wages or fixed salaries. A 
 factory 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 labourers 
 themselves have not, in most cases, a personal interest in their 
 work, they are watched 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 undertakings, not only the labours 
 of detail but the control and superintendence are entrusted to 
 salaried officers. And though the " master's eye," when the 
 master is vigilant and intelligent, is of proverbial value, it
 
 256 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 must be remembered tbat in a Socialist farm or manufactory, 
 each labourer would be under the eye not of one master, but 
 of the whole community. 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 compelling conformity to the necessary condi- 
 tions of the association. Dismissal, the only remedy at 
 present, is no remedy when any other labourer who may be 
 engaged does no better than his predecessor : the power 
 of dismissal only enables an employer to obtain from his 
 workmen the customary amount of labour, but that cus- 
 tomary 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 un- 
 favourable 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 probably 
 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 
 society 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 associa- 
 tion 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 ful-
 
 COMMUNISM. 257 
 
 filled. Undoubtedly, as a general rule, remuneration by fixed 
 salaries does not in any class of functionaries produce the 
 maximum of zeal : and tbis is as much as can be reasonably 
 alleged against Communistic labour. 
 
 That even tbis 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 
 greater amount of public spirit than the present age is 
 accustomed 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 feel- 
 ing, 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 commu- 
 nity. The same cause, so often assigned in explanation of 
 the devotion of the Catholic priest or nlonk 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 approbation and 
 admiration of others, is borne witness to by experience 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 competition 
 which Socialists repudiate. To what extent, therefore, the 
 energy of labour would be diminished by Communism, or 
 
 VOL. i. s
 
 258 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 whether in the long run it would he 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 member 
 of the community were assured of subsistence for himself and 
 any number of children, on the sole condition of willingness 
 to work, prudential restraint on the multiplication of man- 
 kind would be at an end, and population would start forward 
 at a rate which would reduce the community, through suc- 
 cessive stages of increasing discomfort, to actual starvation. 
 There would certainly be much ground for this apprehension 
 if Communism provided no motives to restraint, equivalent 
 to those which it would take away. But Communism is 
 precisely the state of things in which opinion might be ex- 
 pected to declare itself with greatest intensity against this 
 kind of selfish intemperance. Any augmentation 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 individual 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 opinion 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 Com- 
 munistic scheme, instead of being peculiarly open to the ob- 
 jection drawn from danger of over-population, has the recom- 
 mendation 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 between
 
 COMMUNISM. 259 
 
 different qualities of labour is so strongly felt by Communist 
 writers, that they have usually thought it necessary to provide 
 that all should work by turns at every description of useful 
 labour : an arrangement which, by putting an end to the divi- 
 sion of employments, would sacrifice so much of the advantage 
 of co-operative production as greatly to diminish the pro- 
 ductiveness 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 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 unjust 
 arrangement which could be made of these points, under 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 be- 
 ginning 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 
 private property necessarily carried roth 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 
 
 S 2
 
 260 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 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 dwindling 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 balance. 
 But to make the comparison applicable, we must compare 
 Communism at its best, with the regime of individual pro- 
 perty, 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 com- 
 menced from a distribution of property which was the result, 
 not of just partition, or acquisition by industry, but of con- 
 quest and violence : and notwithstanding what industry 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 prin- 
 ciples 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 impediments 
 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 private property: but 
 if as much pains as has been taken to aggravate the in- 
 equality of chances arising from the natural working of the 
 principle, had been taken to temper that inequality by every 
 means not subversive of the principle itself; if the tendency 
 of legislation had been to favour the diffusion, instead of the 
 concentration of wealth to encourage the subdivision of the 
 large masses, instead of striving to keep them together; the
 
 COMMUNISM. 261 
 
 principle of individual property would have been found to 
 have no necessary connexion with the physical and social evils 
 which almost all Socialist writers 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, transmitted 
 to them without any merit or exertion of their own, is not of 
 the essence of the institution, but a mere incidental conse- 
 quence, which, when it reaches a certain height, does not 
 promote, but conflicts with, the ends which render private 
 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 re- 
 muneration 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 institutions could 
 make the condition of the mass of mankind other than de- 
 graded and miserable. One of these conditions is, universal 
 education ; the other, a due limitation of the numbers of the 
 community. With these, there could be no poverty, even 
 under the present social institutions: and these being supposed, 
 the question of Socialism is not, as generally stated by So- 
 cialists, a question of flying to the sole refuge against the evils 
 which now bear down humanity ; but a mere question of com- 
 parative advantages, which futurity must determine. We are 
 too ignorant either of what individual 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 pro- 
 bably depend mainly on one consideration, viz. which of the 
 two systems is consistent with the greatest amount of human
 
 262 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 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 civi- 
 lization 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 deve- 
 loped. The perfection both of social arrangements and of 
 practical morality would be, to secure to all persons complete 
 independence and freedom of action, subject to no restriction 
 but that of not doing injury to others: and the education 
 which taught or the social institutions which required them 
 to exchange the control of their own actions for any amount 
 of comfort or affluence, or to renounce 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 Communistic organization of society. 
 No doubt, this, like all the other objections to the Socialist 
 schemes, is vastly exaggerated. The members of the asso- 
 ciation need not be required to Jive 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 producing, they would possess. Indi- 
 viduals need not be chained to an occupation, or to a parti- 
 cular 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 occu- 
 pation 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 subjection of one half the species, to which 
 it is the signal honour of Owenism and most other forms of 
 Socialism that they assign equal rights, in all respects, with 
 those of the hitherto dominant sex. But it is not by com-
 
 COMMUNISM. 263 
 
 parison 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 asylum 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 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 whether the Communistic 
 scheme would be consistent with that multiform development 
 of human nature, tbose 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 innumerable notions that he would not have 
 conceived of himself, are the mainspring of mental and moral 
 progression. 
 
 4. I have thus for confined my observations to the 
 Communistic doctrine, which forms the extreme limit of 
 Socialism ; according to which not only the instruments 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-
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 lives to labour derived from private pecuniary interest. Thus 
 it is already a modification of the strict theory of Communism, 
 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 work- 
 men manufacturing on their own account, mostly began by 
 sharing the remuneration equally, without regard to the 
 quantity of work done by the individual : but in almost every 
 case this plan was after a short time abandoned, and recourse 
 was bad to working by the piece. The original principle 
 appeals to a higher standard of justice, and is adapted to a 
 much higher moral condition of human nature. The propor- 
 tioning 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 intel- 
 lectual power which in many respects distinguishes them, 
 and by their large and philosophic treatment of some of the 
 fundamental problems of society and morality, 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 being
 
 ST. SIMONISM. 265 
 
 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 autho- 
 rity, 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 supposed 
 to be persons of genius and virtue, who obtained the volun- 
 tary adhesion of the rest by the force of mental superiority. 
 That the scheme might in some peculiar states of society 
 work with advantage, is not improbable. There is indeed a 
 successful experiment, of a somewhat similar kind, on re- 
 cord, 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 consecutive 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 commu- 
 nity of goods. To the absolute authority of these men they 
 reverentially 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 
 themselves. This social system was of short duration, being 
 prematurely destroyed by diplomatic arrangements and 
 foreign force. That it could be brought into action at all 
 was probably 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 or- 
 ders, either social or intellectual. In any other circum- 
 stances it would probably have been a complete failure. It 
 supposes an absolute despotism in the heads of the associa- 
 tion ; 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 accord-
 
 266 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 ing 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 com- 
 munity ; 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 necessity ; 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 
 commonly known as Fourierisra. This system does not 
 contemplate the abolition of private property, nor even of 
 inheritance ; on the contrary, it avowedly takes into consi- 
 deration, 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 mini- 
 mum is first assigned for the subsistence of every member 
 of the community, whether capable or not of labour. The 
 remainder of the produce is shared in certain proportions, to 
 be determined beforehand, among the three elements, Labour, 
 Capital, and Talent. The capital of the community may be 
 owned in unequal shares by different members, who would 
 in that case receive, as in any other joint-stock company, 
 proportional dividends. The claim of each person on the 
 share of the produce apportioned to talent, is estimated by
 
 FOURIERISM. 267 
 
 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 com- 
 panions. The remuneration, when received, would not of 
 necessity be expended or enjoyed in common ; there would 
 be separate men ages for all who preferred them, and no 
 other community 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 of the buying and selling operations of 
 the community being performed by a single agent, the enor- 
 mous 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 
 arrangement 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 indi- 
 vidually 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 attrac- 
 tive. That this is not impracticable, they contend by very 
 strong arguments ; in particular by one which they have in 
 common with the Owenites, viz., that scarcely any labour, 
 however 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 certainly 
 is a most significant fact, and one from which the student in
 
 268 BOOK II. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 social philosophy may draw important instruction. 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 pleasure ? 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, with- 
 out a wish or a thought tending towards removal, who, if 
 confined to that same place by the mandate of authority, would 
 find the imprisonment absolutely intolerable. 
 
 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 attrac- 
 tive 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 inferred 
 from the diversity of tastes and talents, that every member 
 of the community would be attached to several groups, employ- 
 ing themselves in various kinds' of occupation, some bodily, 
 others mental, and would be capable of occupying a high 
 place in some one or more ; so that a real equality, or some- 
 thing more nearly approaching to it than might at first 
 be supposed, would practically result: not, from the coin-
 
 FOUR1ERISM. 269 
 
 pression, 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 success, 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, either per- 
 sonal 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 " organization of in- 
 dustry" 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 poli- 
 tical economist, for a considerable time to come, will be 
 chiefly concerned with the conditions of existence and pro- 
 gress belonging to a society founded on private property and 
 individual competition ; arid that the object to be principally 
 aimed at in the present stage of human improvement, is not 
 the subversion of the system of individual property, but the 
 improvement of it, and the full participation of every mem- 
 ber 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 
 application 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 work 
 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 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
 
 PROPERTY. 271 
 
 by which the produce of that labour, instead of being ex- 
 pended 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 posses- 
 sor; but it was created by the labour and abstinence -of 
 some former person, who may indeed have been wrongfully 
 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 successive 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 may have in no way deserved, over the 
 industrious whose predecessors have not left them anything ; 
 I not only admit, but strenuously contend, that this un- 
 earned advantage should be curtailed, as much as is con- 
 sistent with justice to those who thought fit to dispose of 
 their savings by giving them to their descendants. But 
 while it is true that the labourers are at a disadvantage 
 compared with those whose predecessors have saved, it is also 
 true that the labourers are far better off than if those prede- 
 cessors had not saved. They share in the advantage, though 
 not to an equal extent with the inheritors. 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 capitalists 
 can do nothing without labourers, nor the labourers without 
 capital. If the labourers compete for employment, the capi- 
 talists 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 necessarily a cause of misery and de- 
 gradation to the labouring class ; as if high wages were not 
 precisely as much a product of competition as low wages. The 
 remuneration of 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 Eugland.
 
 272 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 2. 
 
 The right of property includes then, the freedom of ac- 
 quiring 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 questioned 
 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 generation 
 has elapsed, of the probably bond fide possessors, by the re- 
 vival 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, originally 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. With the injustices 
 of men, as with the convulsions and disasters of nature, the 
 longer they remain unrepaired, the greater become the ob-
 
 INHERITANCE. 273 
 
 stacles 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 disturbing 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 re- 
 commended 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 property, 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 arrange- 
 ment 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 eco- 
 nomy, it is not foreign to the plan of this work to suggest, for 
 the judgment of thinkers, the view of them which most recom- 
 mends itself to the writer's mind. 
 
 No presumption in favour of existing ideas on this subject 
 is to be derived from their antiquity. In early ages, the 
 property of a deceased person passed to his children and 
 
 VOL. I. T
 
 274 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 nearest relatives by so natural and obvious an arrangement, 
 that no other was likely to be even thought of in competition 
 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 society, 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 lather than on an individual : if it consisted 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 magis- 
 trate 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 dis- 
 posed of the property otherwise, 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 influ- 
 ence 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 concep- 
 tion 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 
 descendants of a common ancestor, but the individual; or at 
 most a pair of individuals, with their unernancipated children. 
 
 * See, for admirable illustrations of this and many kindred points, Mr. 
 Maine's profound work on Ancient Law and its relation to Modern Ideas.
 
 INHERITANCE. 275 
 
 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 apart; 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 
 detached 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, 
 cateris 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 pro- 
 perty 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 protector 
 to have done, so 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 
 
 T 2
 
 276 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 individual, the duty of any one to make a pecuniary pro- 
 vision for them. No one now expects it, unless there 
 happen 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 
 descending 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 
 perhaps 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 intel- 
 ligence. On the other hand, when the parent possesses 
 property, the claims of the children upon it seem to me to
 
 INHERITANCE. 277 
 
 be the subject of an opposite error. Whatever 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 neces- 
 sity 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 degree uncertain. 
 It depends on individual character. Without 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 endea- 
 vour 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 desi- 
 rable one. I hold that to no child, merely as such, anything 
 more is due, than what is admitted to be due to an illegi- 
 timate child : and that no child for whom thus much has 
 been done, has, unless on the score of previously raised
 
 278 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 expectations, any grievance, if the remainder of the parent's 
 fortune is devoted to public uses, or to the benefit of indivi- 
 duals on whom in the parent's opinion it is better bestowed. 
 
 In order to give the children that fair chance of a desi- 
 rable existence, to which they are entitled, it is generally 
 necessary that they should not be brought up from childhood 
 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 corre- 
 sponding to the scale of expenditure in which the parents 
 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 pro- 
 vision 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 ex- 
 actly 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 receive 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
 
 BEQUEST. 279 
 
 and of supporting a family, he has to depend on his own 
 exertions. 
 
 A provision, then, such as is admitted to be reasonable 
 in the case of illegitimate children, for younger children, 
 wherever in short the justice of the case, and the real interests 
 of the individuals and of society, are the only things con- 
 sidered, is, I conceive, all that parents owe to their children, 
 and all, therefore, which the State owes to the children of 
 those who die intestate. The surplus, if any, I hold that il 
 may rightfully appropriate to the general purposes of the 
 community. I would not, however, be supposed to recom- 
 mend 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 services and sacrifices, 
 and of bestowing their wealth according to their own pre- 
 ferences, 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 ab intestato, bequest is one of the 
 attributes of property : the ownership of a thing cannot be 
 looked upon as complete without the power of bestowing 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 pro- 
 perty 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 con- 
 flict with the permanent interests of the human race. It 
 does so, when, not content with 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
 
 280 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 4. 
 
 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 exertion, 
 and the incentives in the case of those who have the oppor- 
 tunity of making large fortunes are strong enough without it. 
 A similar abuse of the power of bequest is committed when 
 a person who does the meritorious act of leaving pro- 
 perty 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 
 person to whom property shall pass immediately on the 
 death of the testator, has always been reckoned among the 
 privileges 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 
 bequeath, 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 legitima 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 dispose by 
 will, of a portion equal to the share of one child, each of the
 
 BEQUEST. 281 
 
 children taking an equal portion. This entail, as it may be 
 called, of the bulk of every one's property upon the children 
 collectively, seems to me as little defensible in principle as 
 an entail in favour of one child, though it does not shock so 
 directly the idea of justice. I cannot admit that parents 
 should be compelled to leave to their children even that 
 provision which, as children, I have contended that they have 
 a moral claim to. Children may forfeit that claim by general 
 unworthiness, or particular ill-conduct to the parents : they 
 may have other resources or prospects : what has been pre- 
 viously done for them, in the way of education and advance- 
 ment 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 sentiments, 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 not 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 opportunities, are in- 
 separable from the principle of private property, 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 bis faculties, and in requiring that 
 if he desires any further accession of fortune, he shall work
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 4. 
 
 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 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 division) 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 
 
 * In the case of capital employed, in the hands of the owner himself, in 
 carrying on any of the operations of industry, there are strong grounds for 
 leaving to him the power of bequeathing to one person the whole of the 
 funds actually engaged in a single enterprise. It is well that he should be 
 enabled to leave the enterprise under the control of whichever of his heirs he 
 regards as best fitted to conduct it virtuously and efficiently : and the necessity 
 (very frequent and inconvenient under the French law) would be thus obviated, of 
 breaking up a manufacturing or commercial establishment at the death of its 
 chief. In like manner, it should be allowed to a proprietor who leaves to one 
 of his successors the moral burthen of keeping up an ancestral mansion and 
 park or pleasure-ground, to bestow along with them as much other property 
 as is required for their sufficient maintenance.
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 
 
 283 
 
 longer be employed in over-enriching a few, would either be 
 devoted to objects of public usefulness, or if bestowed on 
 individuals, would be distributed 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 multipli- 
 cation 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 having 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 por- 
 tion 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 
 practice in the matter of inheritance seem to be unusually 
 rational and beneficial.* 
 
 * "Munificent bequests and donations for public purposes, whether cha- 
 ritable 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 capitalists to leave by will a portion of their fortune towards the endow- 
 ment of national institutions, but individuals during their lifetime make mag- 
 nificent 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 themselves 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, chari- 
 table, 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." Lyeil's Travels in America, vol. i. p. 263. 
 
 lu 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.
 
 284 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 5. 
 
 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 recognised ; 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 accu- 
 mulated 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 indi- 
 viduals. The use of the land in agriculture must indeed, for 
 the time being, be of necessity exclusive ; the same person 
 who has ploughed and sown must be permitted to reap : 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 universal 
 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 requisite 
 for using, but almost equally so for fashioning, the instru- 
 ment. Considerable labour is often required at the com- 
 mencement, 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 besides fuel. 
 One of the barrenest soils in the world, composed of the 
 material of the Goodwin Sands, the Pays de Waes in Flanders, 
 has been so fertilized by industry, as to have become one of 
 the most productive in Europe. Cultivation also requires 
 buildings and fences, which are wholly the produce of labour.
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 285 
 
 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 im- 
 provements, 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.* 
 
 6. These are the reasons which form the justification 
 
 * " Ce qui donnait a 1'homme 1'intelligence et la Constance dans sea travaux, 
 qui lui faisait diriger tous ses efforts vers un but utile a sa race, c'etait le 
 sentiment de la perpe'tuite'. Les terrains les plus fertiles sont toujours ceux 
 que les eaux ont de'pose's le long de leur cours, mais ce sont aussi ceux qu'elles 
 menacent de leurs inondations ou qu'elles corrompent par des ruare'cages. 
 Avec la garantie de la perpe'tuite', 1'homme entreprit de longs et pe'nibles 
 travaux pour donner aux mare'cages *m ecoulement, pour Clever des digues 
 contre les inondations, pour re'partir par des canaux d'arrosement des eaux 
 fertilisantes sur les m^mes champs que les memes eaux condamnaient a la 
 ste'rilite'. Sous la meme garantie, 1'homme, ne se contentant plus des fruits 
 annuels de la terre, a de'rnele' parmi la ve'ge'tation sauvage les plantes vivaces, 
 les arbustes, les arbres qui pouvaient lui etre utiles, il les a perfectionne"s par 
 la culture, il a change" en quelque sorte leur essence, et il les a multiplies. 
 Parmi les fruits, en effet, on en reconnalt que des siecles de culture ont seula 
 pu amener a la perfection qu'ils ont atteinte aujourd'hui, tandis que d'autres 
 ont e'te' iinporte's des regions les plus lointaines. L'homme en meme temps a 
 ouvert la terre jusqu'k une grande profondeur, pour renouveler son sol, et le 
 fertiliser par le melange de ses parties et les impressions de 1'air ; il a fixe" sur 
 les collines la terre qui s'en e"chappait, et il a couvert la face entiere de la 
 campagne d'une ve'ge'tation partout abondante, et partout utile a la race hu- 
 maine. 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 ses derniers neveux jouiront 
 encore dans plusieurs siecles. Tous ont concouru a augmenter la force pro- 
 ductive de la nature, a donner a la race humaine un revenu infiuiment plus 
 abondant, un revenu dont une portion considerable est consorume'e par ceux 
 qui n'ont point part a la proprie'te' territoriale, et qui cependant n'auraient point 
 trouv^ de nourriture sans ce partage du sol qui semble les avoir deshe'rite's." 
 Sismondi, Etude sur V Economic Politique, Troisieme Essai, De la Richesse 
 Territoriale.
 
 286 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 6. 
 
 in an economical point of view, of property in land. It is 
 seen, 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 he the improver, political 
 economy has nothing to say in defence of landed property, as 
 there established. In no sound theory of private property was 
 it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should he 
 merely a sinecurist quartered on it. 
 
 In Great Britain, the landed proprietor is not unfre- 
 quently an improver. But it cannot he said that he is gene- 
 rally so. And in the majority of cases he grants the liberty 
 of cultivation on such terms, as to prevent improvements 
 from being made by any one else. In the southern parts of 
 the island, as there are usually no leases, permanent im- 
 provements 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, it generally goes to 
 him severed from the pecuniary resources which would 
 enable him to improve it, the personal property being 
 absorbed by the provision for younger children, 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 improvements, unless 
 they do it with borrowed money, and by adding to the mort- 
 gages with which in most cases the land was already bur- 
 thened 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 apparent fortune greatly exceeds 
 his real means, and the vicissitudes of rent and price which 
 only trench upon the margin 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 con-
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 287 
 
 dition to make immediate sacrifices for the sake of future 
 profit. Were they ever so much inclined, those alone can pru- 
 dently do it, who have seriously studied the principles of 
 scientific agriculture : and great landlords have seldom seri- 
 ously studied anything. They might at least hold out induce- 
 ments to the farmers to do what they will not or cannot do 
 themselves ; but even in granting leases, it is in England a 
 general complaint that they tie up their tenants hy covenants 
 grounded on the practices of an obsolete and exploded agri- 
 culture; 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 favourable 
 to improvement than in the time of our barbarous ancestors, 
 
 immetata quibus jugera liberaa 
 
 Fruges 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 
 economically justifiable. But if insufficiently realized even in 
 England, in Ireland those conditions are not complied with at 
 all. With individual exceptions (some of them very honour- 
 able 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 burthens" is literally true 
 when applied to them ; that the greatest " burthen on land" 
 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 
 
 * I must beg the reader to bear in mind that this paragraph was written 
 more than twenty 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.
 
 288 BOOK II. CHAPTER IT. 6. 
 
 property has placed itself upon this footing it ceases to be de- 
 fensible, and the time has come for making some new arrange- 
 ment 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 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 disinherited 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 magis- 
 tracy, 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
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 289 
 
 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 whatever, 
 recognised 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 labour and 
 abstinence of themselves or their ancestors, compensation 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 alto- 
 gether will gain, that a particular portion of the community 
 should be immolated. When the property is of a kind to 
 which peculiar affections attach themselves, the compensation 
 ought to exceed a bare pecuniary equivalent. But, subject 
 to this proviso, the state is at liberty to deal with landed pro- 
 perty 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 whenever a bill is passed for a rail- 
 road 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 persons 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, a fortiori, commute 
 the average receipts 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 con- 
 ditions proposed. 
 
 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 
 
 VOL. i. u
 
 290 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 6. 
 
 the right itself, the grounds which justify it, and (as a corol- 
 lary 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 permitted in any indi- 
 vidual, which cannot be shown to be productive of positive 
 good. To be allowed any exclusive right at all, over a por- 
 tion 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. 
 
 For instance, the exclusive right to the land for purposes 
 of cultivation does not imply an exclusive right to it for pur- 
 poses of access; and no such right ought to be recognised, 
 except to the extent necessary to protect the produce against 
 damage, and the owner's privacy against invasion. The pre- 
 tension of two Dukes to shut up a part of the Highlands, 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 permitted 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
 
 PROPERTY IN LAND. 291 
 
 any, which they could have derived from the land if it had 
 been unappropriated. Even in the case of cultivated land, 
 a man whom, though only one among millions, the law per- 
 mits 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 consistent 
 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 
 general made up its mind on most of these, there is no neces- 
 sity 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 fellowship 
 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 inherited under 
 sanction of law, it is another wrong, in abolishing the properly, 
 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 col- 
 lectively by a nation. Other examples of property which 
 ought not to have been created, are properties in public trusts; 
 such as judicial offices under the old French regime, and the 
 heritable jurisdictions which, in countries not wholly emerged 
 
 C 2
 
 292 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 7. 
 
 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 in a right of taxing the 
 public ; in a monopoly, for instance, or other exclusive privi- 
 lege. These abuses prevail most in semibarbarous countries 
 but are not without example in the most civilized. In France 
 there are several important trades and professions, including 
 notaries, attorneys, brokers, appraisers, printers, and (until 
 lately) bakers and butchers, of which the numbers are limited 
 by law. The brevet or privilege of one of the permitted 
 number consequently brings a high price in the market. 
 When such is the case, 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 abuse had obtained, was sufficient 
 to constitute it an institution, or amounted only to an occa- 
 sional licence. It would be absurd to claim compensation for 
 losses caused by changes in a tariff, a thing confessedly 
 variable from year to year; or for monopolies like those 
 granted to individuals by the Tudors, favours of a despotic 
 authority, which the power that gave was competent at any 
 time to recal. 
 
 So much on the institution of property, a subject of which, 
 for the purposes of political economy, it was indispensable to 
 treat, but on which we could not usefully confine ourselves to 
 economical considerations. We have now to inquire on what 
 principles and with what results the distribution of the pro- 
 duce of land and labour is effected, under the relations which 
 this institution creates among the different members of the 
 community.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 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 therefore 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 accumulated 
 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 appropri- 
 ated, the industrial community may be considered as divided 
 into landowners, capitalists, and productive labourers. 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 equivalent, one 
 consisting of unproductive services. These three classes, 
 therefore, are considered in political economy as making up 
 the whole community.
 
 294 BOOK II. CHAPTER III. 2. 
 
 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 Scandi- 
 navian kingdoms, and parts of Germany ;* and a common 
 
 * "The Norwegian return" (say the Commissioners of Poor Law Enquiry, 
 to whom information was furnished from nearly every 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 than 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 
 number of landed proprietors and farmers is 415,110, or nearly one-half. In 
 Sleswick-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 land 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 dis- 
 criminated ; but "all the returns concur in stating the number of day-labourers 
 to be very small." (Preface to Foreign Communications, p. xxxviii.) As the 
 general status of the labouring people, the condition of a workman for hire is 
 almost peculiar to Great Britain.
 
 CLASSES WHO DIVIDE THE PRODUCE. 295 
 
 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, require 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 be so calledj, 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- 
 prietors on the other. It was very common in France before 
 the Revolution, and is still much practised in some parts of
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER III. 3. 
 
 that country, when the land is not the property of the cul- 
 tivator. It prevails generally in the level districts 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 laud, 
 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 retains, 
 as it generally does, the ownership of the soil, or allows por- 
 tions 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 culti- 
 vate without them. For these advances the native landed 
 proprietor usually demands high interest ; but the principal 
 landowner, the government, makes them gratuitously, recover- 
 ing the advance after the harvest, together with the rent. 
 The produce is here divided as before, 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 dis- 
 tributed. In the cas'e of manufacturing industry there never 
 are more than two classes, the labourers and the capitalists. 
 The original artisans in all countries were either slaves, or 
 the women of the family. In the manufacturing establish- 
 ments of the ancients, whether on a large or on a small 
 scale, the labourers were usually the property of the capi- 
 talist. In general, if any manual labour was thought com- 
 patible with the dignity of a freeman, it was only agricultural 
 labour. The converse system, in which the capital was 
 owned by the labourer, was coeval with free labour, and 
 under it the first great advances of manufacturing industry 
 were achieved. The artisan owned the loom or the few tools he
 
 CLASSES WHO DIVIDE THE PRODUCE. 297 
 
 used, and worked on his own account ; or at least ended by 
 doing so, though he usually worked for another, first as ap- 
 prentice and next as journeyman, for a certain number of 
 years before he could be admitted a master. 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 circumstances are their own 
 shopmen, or shopwomen. But wherever the extent of the 
 market admits of it, the distinction is now fully established 
 between the class of capitalists, or employers of labour, and 
 the class of labourers ; the capitalists, in general, contri- 
 buting no other labour than that of direction and superin- 
 tendence.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OF COMPETITION, AND CUSTOM. 
 
 1. UNDER the rule of individual property, the division 
 of the produce is the result of two determining agencies : 
 Competition, and Custom. It is important to ascertain 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 exagge- 
 rate 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 intelligible, if we consider 
 that only through the principle of competition has political 
 economy any pretension to the character of a science. So 
 far as rents, profits, wages, prices, are determined by compe- 
 tition, laws may be assigned for them. Assume competition 
 to be their exclusive regulator, and principles of broad gene- 
 rality and scientific precision may be laid down, according to 
 which they will be regulated. The political economist justly 
 deems this his proper business : and as an abstract or hypo- 
 thetical science, political economy cannot be required to do, 
 and indeed cannot do, anything more. But it would be a 
 great misconception of the actual course of human affairs, to 
 suppose that competition exercises in fact this unlimited 
 sway. I am not speaking of monopolies, either natural or 
 artificial, or of any interferences of authority with the liberty 
 of production or exchange. Such disturbing causes have
 
 COMPETITION AND CUSTOM. 299 
 
 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 arti- 
 ficial 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 engage- 
 ments 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. Cus- 
 tom is a barrier which, even in the most oppressed condition 
 of mankind, tyranny is forced in some degree to respect. 
 To the industrious population, in a turbulent military com- 
 munity, freedom 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. Bights thus ori- 
 ginating, 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 especially, 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 country. 
 Never until late times have the conditions of the occupancy 
 of land been (as a general rule) an affair of competition. The
 
 300 BOOK II. CHAPTER IV. 2. 
 
 occupier for the time has very commonly been considered to 
 have a right to retain his holding, while he fulfils the cus - 
 ternary 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 descen- 
 dants 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 customary 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 de- 
 mands 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 tlie 
 demand has sometimes come to consist of thirty or forty dif- 
 ferent items, in addition to the nominal rent. This circuitous 
 mode of increasing the payments assuredly would not have 
 been resorted to, if there had been an acknowledged right in 
 the landlord to increase the rent Its adoption is a proof 
 that there was once an effective limitation, a real customary 
 rent; and that the understood right of the ryot to the land, 
 so long as he paid rent according to custom, was at some
 
 COMPETITION AND CUSTOM. 301 
 
 time or other more than nominal.* The British Government 
 of India always simplifies the tenure by consolidating the 
 various assessments into one, thus making the rent nomi- 
 nally as well as really an arbitrary thing, or at least a 
 matter of specific agreement : but it scrupulously 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 managing 
 their conquests would be to leave the occupation of the land 
 in the hands iu 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 certain degree the 
 control of their own actions, under an obligation 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 whenever required. By 
 degrees these indefinite obligations were transformed into a 
 definite one, of supplying a fixed quantity 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 payments in money. Each con- 
 cession, at first voluntary and revocable at pleasure, gradually 
 acquired the force of custom, and was at last recognised and 
 enforced by the tribunals. In this manner the serfs pro- 
 gressively rose into a free tenantry, who held their land in 
 perpetuity on fixed conditions. The conditions were sometimes 
 
 * 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 upon.
 
 302 BOOK II. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 very onerous, and the people very miserable. But their obli- 
 gations were determined 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 advan- 
 tageous 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 country 
 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 influence 
 is by no means, even in the present activity of mercantile 
 competition, so absolute as is sometimes assumed. There 
 is no proposition which meets us in the field of political eco- 
 nomy oftener than this that there cannot be two prices in 
 the same market. Such undoubtedly is the natural effect of 
 unimpeded competition ; yet every one knows that there are,
 
 COMPETITION AND CUSTOM. 303 
 
 almost always, two prices in the same market. 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 domi- 
 nion of competition. There, the buyers as well as sellers 
 are traders or manufacturers, and their purchases are not in- 
 fluenced by indolence or vulgar finery, nor depend on the 
 smaller motives of personal convenience, but are business 
 transactions. In the wholesale markets 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 proportion 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 capitalists 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 influ- 
 ence 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 business that retail trans-
 
 304 BOOK II. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 actions have been chiefly, or even much, determined, by 
 competition. Elsewhere it rather acts, when it acts at all, 
 as an occasional disturbing influence ; 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 customs, 
 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 re- 
 gulated 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 pro- 
 fessions, but because the competition operates by diminishing 
 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 pleasure. 
 I believe it will often be found, in Continental Europe, 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 competitors ; those
 
 COMPETITION AND CUSTOM. 305 
 
 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 correc- 
 tion to be applied whenever relevant, whether expressly men- 
 tioned or not, to the conclusions contained in the subsequent 
 portions of this treatise. Our reasonings must, in general, 
 proceed as if the known and natural effects of competition 
 were actually produced by it, in all cases in which it is not 
 restrained by some positive obstacle. Where competition, 
 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 conclusions 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 competi- 
 tion has no part, the arbiter of transactions being either brute 
 force or established usage. These will be the subject of the 
 next four chapters. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 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 
 character, 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 consideration, 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 importa- 
 tion, in preference to the slow and expensive process of breed- 
 ing them. Nor are the slave-owners generally backward in 
 learning this lesson. It is notorious that such was the practice 
 in our slave colonies, while the slave trade was legal ; and it 
 is said to be so still in Cuba.
 
 SLAVERY. 
 
 807 
 
 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 treat- 
 ment of them ; aud for this reason, joined with several others, 
 the condition of slaves, notwithstanding occasional enormities, 
 was probably much less bad in the ancient 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, slavery is divested of one of its worst features when it is 
 compatible with hope : enfranchisement was easy and com- 
 mon : enfranchised slaves obtained at once the full rights of 
 citizens, 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 
 possessing property, and the evil altogether assumed a con- 
 siderably 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 their own benefit ; 
 their condition is seldom such as to produce a rapid growth 
 either of population or of production. 
 
 x 2
 
 308 BOOK II. CHAPTER V. 6 2. 
 
 
 
 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, insures some of the ad- 
 vantages 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 productive 
 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 intellect; 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 so much dread 
 to the masters, that in some of the States of America it was 
 a highly penal offence to teach a slave to read. All pro- 
 cesses carried on by slave labour are conducted in the rudest
 
 SLAVERY. 309 
 
 and most unimproved manner. And even the animal strength 
 of the slave is, on an average, not half exerted. The unpro- 
 ductiveness and wastefulness of the industrial system in the 
 Slave States is instructively displayed in the valuable writings 
 of Mr. Olmsted. The mildest 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 inefficiency of serf labour. The following 
 passage is from Professor Jones,* whose Essay on the Distri- 
 bution 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 cheap- 
 ness in Russia, the mowing a quantity of hay which would 
 cost an English farmer half a copeck, will cost a Russian pro- 
 prietor three or four copecks. f 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 pur- 
 pose of deciding on the number of labourers necessary to cul- 
 tivate an estate of a given magnitude. So palpable, indeed, 
 
 * Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation. By 
 the Rev. Richard Jones. Page 50. 
 
 t "Schmalz, Economic Politique, French translation, vol. i. p. 66." 
 J "Vol. ii. p. 107."
 
 310 BOOK II. CHAPTER V. 3. 
 
 are the ill effects of labour rents on the industry of the agri- 
 cultural 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 popular 
 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 superinten- 
 dence. As the same writerf remarks, the landed proprietors 
 " are necessarily, in their character of cultivators 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 pro- 
 perty 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 themselves. " It would," as Mr. 
 Jones observes, " be hopeless and irrational to expect, that a 
 race of noble proprietors, fenced round 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 indivi- 
 dual instances of moderate success, but the general state of 
 agriculture would be contemptible. 
 
 3. Whether the proprietors themselves would lose by 
 the emancipation of their slaves, is a different question from 
 
 * The Hungarian revolutionary government, during its brief existence, 
 bestowed on that country one of the greatest benefits it could receive, and one 
 which the tyranny that succeeded did not dare to take away : it freed the 
 peasantry from what remained of the bondage of serfdom, the labour rents ; 
 decreeing compensation to the landlords at the expense of the state, and not at 
 that of the liberated peasants. 
 
 f Jones, pp. 53, 54.
 
 SLAVERY. 311 
 
 the comparative effectiveness of free and slave labour to the 
 community. There has been much discussion of this question 
 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 labour- 
 ing 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 
 destruction in the Western nations, were 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 pro- 
 portion to its efficiency, labour is quite as cheap as in Ireland), 
 no one can for a moment imagine that slavery could be pro- 
 fitable. 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 under- 
 peopled 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 com- 
 pensation granted to the slave-owners for its abolition was 
 not more, perhaps even less, than an equivalent for their 
 loss. 
 
 More needs not be said here on a cause so completely 
 judged and decided as that of slavery. Its demerits are no 
 longer a question requiring argument; though the temper of 
 mind manifested by the larger part of the influential classes 
 in Great Britain respecting the struggle in America, shows 
 how grievously the feelings of the present generation of
 
 312 BOOK II. CHAPTER V. 3. 
 
 Englishmen, on this subject, had fallen behind the positive 
 acts of the generation which preceded them. That the sons 
 of the deliverers of the West Indian Negroes should expect 
 with complacency, and encourage by their sympathies, the 
 establishment of a great and powerful military common- 
 wealth, pledged by its principles and driven by its strongest 
 interests to be the armed propagator of slavery through 
 every region of the earth into which its power could pene- 
 trate, discloses a mental state in the leading portion of our 
 higher and middle classes which it is melancholy to see, and 
 will be a lasting blot in English history. Fortunately they 
 stopped short of actually aiding, otherwise than by words, 
 the nefarious enterprise to which they were not ashamed of 
 wishing success ; and at the expense of the best blood of the 
 Free States, but to their immeasurable elevation in mental 
 and moral worth, the curse of slavery has been cast out from 
 the great American republic, to find its last temporary refuge 
 in Brazil and Cuba. No European country, except Spain 
 alone, any longer participates in the enormity. Even serfage 
 has now ceased to have a legal existence in Europe. Den- 
 mark has the honour of being the first Continental nation 
 which imitated England in liberating its colonial slaves ; and 
 the abolition of slavery was one of the earliest acts of the 
 heroic and calumniated Provisional Government of France. 
 The Dutch Government was not long behind, and its colonies 
 and dependencies are now, I believe without exception, free 
 from actual slavery, though forced labour for the public 
 authorities is still a recognised institution in Java, soon, we 
 may hope, to be exchanged for complete personal freedom.
 
 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 authorities 
 are either unaware of the judgment of Continental agricul- 
 turists, or are content to put it aside, on the plea of their 
 having no experience of large properties in favourable cir- 
 cumstances : 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 Continental 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 Con- 
 tinent knows little, by experience, of cultivation on a large 
 scale and by large capital, the 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
 
 314 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 1. 
 
 even of England are on the same side with the general 
 opinion of the Continent. The " yeomanry" who were 
 vaunted 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, unfortunately 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 character of proprietor, 
 than the land-tax does. There is but one voice, among those 
 acquainted 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.* 
 
 The general system, however, of English cultivation, afford- 
 ing no experience to render the nature and operation of peasant 
 properties familiar, and Englishmen being in general pro- 
 foundly ignorant of the agricultural economy of other countries, 
 the very idea of peasant proprietors is strange to the English 
 mind, and does not easily find access to it. Even the forms 
 of language stand in the way : the familiar designation for 
 
 * 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 accommoda- 
 tion 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 
 protected 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 pos-
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 315 
 
 owners of land being " landlords," a terra 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 otherwise be admissible, some of the testimony 
 which exists respecting the state of cultivation, and the com- 
 fort and happiness of the cultivators, in those countries and 
 parts of countries, in which the greater part of the land has 
 neither landlord 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, except in the former 
 Slave States, 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 
 
 sessed by men of their name and blood. . . . Corn was grown in these vales 
 sufficient upon each estate to furnish bread for each family, no more. The 
 storms and moisture of the climate induced them to sprinkle their upland pro- 
 perty with outhouses of native stone, as places of shelter for their sheep, where, 
 in tempestuous 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 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 either 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 commodious town." A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the 
 North of England, 3rd edit. pp. 50 to 53 and 63 to 65.
 
 316 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 anything, except insecurity of property or a tyrannical 
 government, could materially impair the prosperity of the 
 industrious classes. I might, with Sismondi, insist more 
 strongly on the case of ancient Italy, especially Latiuin, that 
 Campagna which then swarmed with inhabitants in the very 
 regions which under a contrary regime have hecome unin- 
 habitable from malaria. But I prefer taking the evidence of 
 the same writer on things known to him by personal 
 observation. 
 
 " C'est surtout la Suisse," says M. de Sismondi, " qu'il 
 faut parcourir, qu'il faut etudier, pour juger du bonheur des 
 paysans proprietaries. 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 nombreuse; une 
 grande independance de caractere, fruit de 1'independance 
 des situations ; un grand commerce de consommation, con- 
 sequence 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'inconstance des saisons 
 detruisent souvent 1'espoir du laboureur. On ne saurait voir 
 sans admiration ces maisons de hois du moindre paysan, si 
 vastes, si bien closes, si bien construites, si couvertes de 
 sculpture. Dans 1'interieur, de grands corridors degagent 
 chaque chambre de la nombreuse famille ; chaque chambre 
 n'a qu'un lit, et il est abondamment 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 toit 
 on trouve de grands approvisionnemens de ble, de viaride 
 salee, de fromage et de bois ; dans les etables on voit le betail 
 le mieux soigne et le plus beau de 1'Europe ; lejardin est 
 plante de fleurs, les hornmes .comme les femmes sont chaude- 
 ment 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
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 317 
 
 vantent leur opulence, la Suisse pourra toujours leur opposer 
 avec nrgueil ses paysans."* 
 
 The same eminent writer thus expresses his opinion on 
 peasant proprietorship in general. 
 
 " Partout oil Ton retrouve les paysans proprietaires, on 
 retrouve aussi cette aisance, cette securite, cette confiance 
 dans 1'avenir, cette independance qui assurent en meme 
 temps le bonheur et la vertu. Le paysan qui fait avec ses 
 enfaus tout 1'ouvrage de son petit heritage, qui ne paie de 
 fermage a personne au-dessus de lui, ni de salaire a person ne 
 au-dessous, qui regie sa production sur sa consommation, qui 
 mange son propre hie, boit son propre vin, se revet de son 
 chanvre et de ses laines, se soucie peu de connaitre les prix 
 du march e ; car il a pen 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 momens 
 de travail pour mettre en terre le noyau qui dans cent ans 
 sera tin 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 
 repetes mais derobes sur les instans perdus, toutes les especes 
 d'animaux et de vegetaux dout il s'entoure. Son petit patri- 
 moine est une vraie caisse d'epargnes, toujours prete a rece- 
 voir tous ses petits profits, a utiliser tous ses rnoinens de 
 loisir. La puissance toujours agissante de la nature les 
 feconde, et les lui rend au centuple. Le paysan a vivement 
 le sentiment de ce bonheur attache a la condition de proprie- 
 taire. Aussi est-il toujours empresse d'achetor 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 
 
 * Etudes sur VEconomie Politique, Essai III.
 
 318 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 a un haut prix 1'avantage de placer desormais toujours avan- 
 tageuseraent son travail, sans etre oblige de 1'offrir au rabais ; 
 de trouver tonjours au besoin son pain, sans etre oblige de le 
 payer a 1'enchere. 
 
 " Le paysan proprietaire est de tous les cultivateurs 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 ete le plus eclaire 
 par 1'experience ; c'est encore lui qui met le mieux a protit le 
 travail huruain, parceque repartissant ses occupations entre 
 tous les membres de sa famille, il en reserve pour tous les 
 jours de 1'annee, de numiere a ce qu'il n'y ait de chotnage 
 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 proprietaries ; enfin de tous les cultivateurs le 
 paysan proprietaire est celui qui donne le plus d'encourage- 
 ment au commerce et a 1'industrie, parcequ'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 
 
 * And in another work (Nouveaux Principes d'Economie Politique, liv. iii. 
 ch. 3,) he says: " Quand on traverse la Suisse presqu'entiere, plusieurs pro- 
 vinces de France, u'ltalie, et d'Allemagne, il n'est pas besoin de deuiander, 
 en regardant chaque partie de terre, si elle appartient a un cultivateur pro- 
 prie"taire ou k un ferniier. Les soins bien entendus, les jnuissances preparees 
 au laboureur, la parure que la canipagne a re9ue de ses mains, indiquent bien 
 vite le premier. II est vrai qu'un gouvemement oppressif peut detruire 
 1'aisance et abrutir 1'intelligence que devait donner la proprie'te', que I'impdt 
 peut enlever le plus net du produit des champs, que 1'insolence des agens du 
 pouvoir peut troubler la se"curitd des paysans, que 1'impossibilitd d'obtenir 
 justice contre un puissant voisin peut Jeter le de'couragement dans 1'ame, et 
 que, dans le beau pays qui a 6l6 rendu a 1'administration du Hoi de Sardaigne, 
 un proprietaire porte aussi bien qu'un journalier 1'uniforme de la missere." He 
 was here speaking of Savoy, where the peasants are generally proprietors ; and 
 according to authentic (though not recent) accounts, extremely miserable. But, 
 as M. de Sismondi continues, "On a beau se conformer k une seule des 
 regies de 1'economie politique, elle ne peut pas op^rer le bien a elle seule ; du 
 moins elle diminue le mal."
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 319 
 
 to the more intelligent Cantons of Switzerland by English 
 observers. " Iii walking anywhere in the neighbourhood of 
 Zurich," says Mr. Tnglis, "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 
 return of ten per cent, we are inclined to say, ' he deserves 
 it.' I speuk 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 between 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, exposed to be pulled or trodden down 
 by every passer by ; it is everywhere bounded by a fence, 
 stakes are placed at intervals 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 even- 
 ing, 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 vegetables 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
 
 320 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 2. 
 
 shrub, every flower is tied to a stake, and where there is 
 wall-fruit a trellice is erected against the wall, to which the 
 houghs are fastened, and there is not a single thing that has 
 not its appropriate resting place."* 
 
 Of one of the remote valleys of the High Alps the same 
 writer thus expresses himself.f 
 
 " In the whole of the Engadine the land helongs to the 
 peasantry, who, like the inhabitants of every other place 
 where this state of things exists, 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 cultivation 
 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 Saowdon. 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 attempted. 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 
 
 * Switzerland, the South of France, and the Pyrenees, in 1830. By H. D. 
 Inglis. Vol. i. ch. 2. 
 t Ibid. ch. 8 and 10.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 321 
 
 peasantry, this total absence of pauperism and (it may 
 almost ba 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 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 example 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, containing detailed information, of 
 tolerably recent date, respecting 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 indebtedness of the proprietors in the 
 flourishing canton of Zurich " borders," as the writer ex- 
 presses 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 
 
 * 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 not sufficiently acquainted with the nature and operation 
 of these changes to speak more particularly of them here. 
 
 f* "Eine an das unglaubliche granzende Schuldentnasse" is the expression. 
 (Historisch-geographisck-statitsche Gemalde der Schieeiz. 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 un- 
 mortgaged. It does not, however, follow that each individual proprietor is 
 deeply involved because the aggregate mass of encumbrances is large. In the 
 Canton of Schaffhausen, for instance, it is stated that the landed properties 
 are almost all mortgaged, but rarely for more than one half their registered 
 value (Zwolfter Theil. Der Kanton Scha/hausen, von Edward Im-Thurn, 
 1840, p. 52), and the mortgages are often for the improvement and enlargement 
 of the estate. (Sielenzehnter Theil. Der Kanton Thiirgau, von J. A. Pupikofer 
 1837, p. 209.) 
 
 VOL. I. Y
 
 322 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 3. 
 
 general conclusion deducible from these books is that since 
 the beginning of the century, and concurrently with the sub- 
 division 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 agricul- 
 ture, as well as in the houses, the habits, and the food of the 
 people. The writer of the account of Thurgau goes so far 
 as to say, that since the subdivision of the feudal estates 
 into peasant properties, it 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 pro- 
 perties both there and elsewhere, is given with great decision. 
 I shall quote a few passages. 
 
 "If small proprietors are not good farmers, 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 particular 
 attention to this point), " to which the latter can show nothing 
 similar. Hay being the principal winter support of live 
 stock, and both it and corn, as well as potatoes, liable, from 
 the shallow soil and powerful reflexion of sunshine from the 
 rocks, to be burnt and withered up, the greatest exertions 
 are made to bring water from the head of each glen, along 
 
 * " Denselben Erfolg hat die Vertheilung der ehemaligen grossen Lehenhofe 
 in mehrere Uleinere eigentliumliclie Bauerngiiter. Es ist gar nicht selten, dass 
 ein Drittheil oder Viertheil eines solchen Hofes nun ebenso viel Getreide liefert 
 und eben so viel Stuck Vieh unterhalt als vormals der ganze Hof." (Thurgau, 
 p. 72.)
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 323 
 
 such a level as will give the command of it to each farmer at 
 the head of his fields. This is done hy 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 perpendicular, 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 the fields ; and at this 
 season waters each rig successively with scoops like those 
 used by bleachers in watering 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 esta- 
 blishments for common 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 
 
 * Reichensperger (Die Agrarfrage) 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 Ilhdne, 
 Lombarily, Tuscany, 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 ex- 
 pensive systems and plans of general irrigation have been carried out, and are 
 now being supported by the small proprietors themselves ; thus showing how 
 they are able to accomplish, by means of combination, work requiring the 
 expenditure of great quantities of capital." Kay, i. 126. 
 
 Y2
 
 321 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 3. 
 
 inhabited by people who have a common interest to keep 
 them under repair. There are no tolls."* 
 
 On the effects of peasant proprietorship on the Continent 
 generally, the same writer expresses himself as follows. f 
 
 "If we listen to the large farmer, the scientific agricultu- 
 rist, the" [English] "political economist, good farming must 
 perish with large farms ; the very idea that good farming can 
 exist, unless on large farms cultivated with great capital, they 
 hold to be absurd. Draining, manuring, economical arrange- 
 ment, cleaning the land, regular rotations, valuable stock and 
 implements, all belong exclusively to large farms, worked by 
 large capital, and by hired labour. This reads very well ; 
 hut 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 Flanders, 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 productive- 
 ness, where these small portions belong in property, as in 
 Flanders, Holland, Friesland, and Ditmarsch in Holstein, to 
 the farmer. It is not pretended by our agricultural writers, 
 that our large farmers, even in Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, 
 or the Lothians, approach 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 distinguish 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 
 
 * Laing, Journal of a Residence in Norway, pp. 36, 37. 
 f Notes of a Traveller, pp. 299 et seqq.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 325 
 
 the fields of large farms, in the roads through them, unne- 
 cessarily wide because they are bad, and bad because they 
 are wide, in neglected commons, waste spots, useless belts 
 and clumps of sorry trees, and such unproductive areas, than 
 would maintain 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 
 country. It cannot touch the small unproductive spots which 
 require more time and labour to fertilize them than is con- 
 sistent with a quick return of capital. But although hired 
 time and labour cannot be applied beneficially to such culti- 
 vation, the owner's own time and labour may. He is working 
 for no higher terms at first from his land than a bare living. 
 But in the course of generations fertility and value are pro- 
 duced ; a better living, and even very improved processes of 
 husbandry, are attained. Furrow draining, stall feeding all 
 summer, liquid manures, are universal 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 assurance of property against fire and 
 hail-storms, by the co-operation of small farmers the most 
 
 * The manner in which the Swiss peasants combine to carry on cheese- 
 making by their united capital deserves to be noted. " Each parish in Swit- 
 zerland hires a man, generally from the district of Gruyere in the canton of 
 Freyburg, to take care of the herd, and make the cheese. One cheesernan, 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 cheesenian 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 ckeeseinan and his assistants are paid so much per head of the cows, in
 
 326 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 4. 
 
 scientific and expensive 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 occupation of a country 
 by small proprietor-farmers, which must make the in- 
 quirer 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 produc- 
 tiveness of the soil and furnish the greatest supply of the 
 necessaries and conveniences of life to the inhabitants 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 tin 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 
 Khenish peasantry, certainly does not underrate the rudeness 
 of their implements, and the inferiority of their ploughing, 
 nevertheless shows that under the invigorating influence of 
 the feelings of proprietorship, they make up for the imper- 
 fections of their apparatus by the intensity of their applica- 
 tion. " The peasant harrows and clears his land till it is 
 in the nicest order, and it is admirable to see the crops 
 
 money or in cheese, or sometimes they hire the cows, and pay the owners in 
 money or cheese." Notes of a Traveller, p. 351. A similar system exists in 
 the French Jura. See, for full details, Lavergne, Economic Jluralede la France, 
 2nd ed., pp. 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 
 experience must justify, in the integrity of the persons employed.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 327 
 
 which he obtains."* " The peasautsf are the great and 
 ever-present objects of country life. They are the great 
 population of the country, because they themselves 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 culti- 
 vate, totally dependent on the labour afforded by others they 
 are themselves the proprietors. It is, perhaps, from this 
 cause that they are probably the most industrious peasantry 
 in the world. They labour busily, early and late, because 
 
 they feel that they are labouring for themselves The 
 
 German peasants work hard, but they have no actual want. 
 Every man has his house, his orchard, his roadside trees, 
 commonly so heavy with fruit, that he is 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 unremitting diligence which is be- 
 yond that of the whole world besides, and his economy, 
 which is still greater. The Germans, 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, untirable, and persevering of animals. 
 The English peasant is so cut off from the idea of property, 
 that he comes habitually to look upon it as a thing from 
 which he is warned by the laws of the large proprietors, and 
 
 becomes, in consequence, spiritless, purposeless The 
 
 German bauer, on the contrary, looks on the country as 
 made for him and his fellow-men. He feels himself a man ; 
 
 * Rural and Domestic Life of Germany, p. 27. 
 t Ibid. p. 40.
 
 328 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 4. 
 
 he has a stake in the country, as good as that of the bulk of 
 his neighbours ; no man can threaten him witb ejection, or 
 the workhouse, so long as he is active and economical. He 
 walks, therefore, with a bold step ; he looks you in the fuce 
 with the air of a free man, 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 fuei. It would astonish the English common people 
 to see the intense labour with which the Germans earn their 
 firewood. In the depths of frost and snow, go into any 
 of their hills and woods, and there you will 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 convey home with the most in- 
 credible toil and patience."* After a description of their 
 careful and laborious vineyard culture, he continues,f " In 
 England, with its great quantity 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 arti- 
 
 * 7?uraZ and Domestic Life of Germany, p. 44. 
 f Ibid. p. 50.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 chokes, 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 allotments. They have had these things 
 first to sow, many of them to transplant, to hoe, to weed, to 
 clear of insects, to top ; many of them to mow and gather 
 in successive crops. They have tlieir water-meadows, of 
 which kind almost all their meadows are, to flood, to mow, 
 and reflood ; watercourses to reopen and to make anew : 
 their early fruits to gather, to bring to market with their 
 green crops of vegetables; their cattle, sheep, calves, foals, 
 most of them prisoners, 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 deli- 
 neation by a distinguished inhabitant, Professor Rau, in 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 em- 
 ployment of manures, and excellent rotation of crops ; the 
 progressive improvement of their agriculture for generations 
 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 occupa- 
 tion, is as well known as their zeal is praiseworthy in turning 
 to use every circumstance which presents itself, in seizing 
 
 * Ucber die Landwirthschaft der Rheinpfalz, undintbesondere in der Heidd- 
 berger Gegend. Von D. Karl Heinricb Rau. Heidelberg, 1830.
 
 330 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 4. 
 
 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 tenahle ; 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."* 
 
 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 can- 
 tons of Berne, Vaud, and Zurich, and in the Rhine pro- 
 vinces, the farms are singularly flourishing. They are kept 
 in beautiful condition, and are always neat and well ma- 
 naged. 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 
 English lawns than of anything else I had seen. The pea- 
 sants endeavour to outstrip one another in the quantity and 
 quality of the produce, in the preparation of the ground, and 
 
 * Rau, pp. 15, ] 6.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 331 
 
 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 peasant 
 properties. Among the testimonies which he cites respecting 
 their effect on agriculture, I select the following. 
 
 " 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- 
 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 
 
 * 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.
 
 832 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 5. 
 
 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, hut the net profits also have been gra- 
 dually 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 Timer, another celebrated German writer on 
 the different systems of agriculture, in one of his later works 
 (Grundsalze der rationellen Landwirthschaft) expresses his 
 decided conviction, that the net 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 
 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, 
 
 * Kay, i. 116-8.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 333 
 
 is the case of Belgium. The soil is Originally one of the 
 worst in Europe. "The provinces," says Mr. M'Culloch,* 
 "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- 
 sen r esf 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 sands in the Campiue can be compared to 
 nothing but the sand 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 unpro- 
 mising 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 
 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 faggots for the 
 bakers and brickmakers. The leaves which have fallen 
 have somewhat enriched the soil, and the fibres of the 
 roots have given a slight degree of compactness. It may 
 
 * Geographical Dictionary, art. "Belgium." 
 t Pp. 1114.
 
 334 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 5. 
 
 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 make 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 culti- 
 vated 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 countries. 
 This is a great proof of the excellency of the Flemish system ; 
 for it shows that the land is in a constant state of improve- 
 ment, and that the deficiency of the soil is compensated by 
 greater attention to tillage and manuring, especially the latter." 
 The people who labour thus intensely on their small pro- 
 perties or farms, 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 Eng- 
 land, is admitted by competent judges. "The cultivation 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 sur- 
 pass the Flemish farmer greatly in capital, in varied imple- 
 ments of tillage, in the choice and breeding of cattle and 
 sheep," (though, according to the same authority, f 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 
 
 * Flemish Husbandry, p. 3. t !bid. p. 13.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 335 
 
 manures of different kinds, in the judicious succession of 
 crops, and especially in the economy of laud, 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.* " 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 mem- 
 bers of the family ;" children soon beginning " to assist in 
 various minute operations, according to their age and strength, 
 such as weeding, hoeing, feeding 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 uncommon occupation, and 
 which one man can manage ;" then (after describing the cul- 
 tivation), " 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, a fat hog, and the butter and inilk 
 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 potatoes, together with the stubble turnips, will 
 more than feed the cow ; consequently two and a half acres 
 of land is sufficient to feed this family, and the produce of 
 
 * Flemish Husbandry, pp. 73 ot sen.
 
 336 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 5. 
 
 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 included ; 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 show- 
 ing 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 horse and cart to carry out 
 the manure, and bring home the produce, and occasionally 
 draw the harrows, fifteen acres may be very well cultivated. 
 . Thus it will be seen," (this is the result of some pages 
 of details and calculations,*) "that by spade husbandry, 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 consider- 
 able sum in the course of his life." But the indefatigable 
 industry by which he accomplishes this, and of which so large 
 a portion is expended not in the mere cultivation, 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 either a virtually permanent tenure, or 
 the certain prospect, by labour and economy on hired land, of 
 becoming one day a landed proprietor ? 
 
 As to their mode of living, "the Flemish farmers and 
 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 English tra- 
 
 * Flemish Husbandry, p. 81.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 337 
 
 vellers, as they hurry through Europe, pronounce the pea- 
 santry of every Continental country poor and miserable, 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 
 accumulated 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 
 excess of population, inferred from the distress which existed 
 among the peasantry of Brabant and East Flanders in the 
 disastrous year 1846-47. 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 
 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 
 VOL. i. z
 
 S38 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 6. 
 
 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 
 wonder that in so unusual a calamity the produce of six 
 acres, half of them sown with 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 capitalist, 
 but a day labourer under a capitalist. And is there no dis- 
 tress, 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 cor- 
 responds 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 cha- 
 racter, that I cannot help adding to the numerous citations 
 already made, part of a description of the economical condi- 
 tion of those islands, by a writer who combines personal 
 observation with an attentive study of the information afforded 
 by others. Mr. William Thornton, in his " Plea for Peasant 
 Proprietors," a book which by the excellence both of its 
 materials and of its execution, deserves to be regarded as 
 
 * 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 
 portion of the population who carry on manufacturing labour, either by itself 
 or in conjunction with agricultural ; and to be occasioned by a diminished 
 demand for 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 em ploy a large fortune in establishing sm:ill freeholds might put an end to 
 robbery in the mountain districts." Life and Letters of Niebuhr, vol. ii. p. 149.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 339 
 
 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 matter,' 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 other, 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 ordinary 
 habitation of an English farm labourer. . . . 'Look,' says a 
 late Bailiff of Guernsey, Mr. De L'lsle Brock, ' at the hovels 
 of the English, and compare them with the cottages of our 
 peasantry.' . . . Beggars are utterly unknown. . . . Paupe- 
 rism, able-bodied pauperism at least, is nearly as rare as 
 mendicancy. The Savings Banks accounts also bear witness 
 to the general abundance enjoyed by the labouring classes 
 of Guernsey. In the year 1841, there were in England, 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 30L In Guernsey, in the same 
 year, out of a population of 20,000, the number of depositors 
 
 z 2
 
 340 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 6. 
 
 was 1920, and the average amount of the deposits 40Z."* 
 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 pro- 
 duces 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 cultivators, non-agricultural popu- 
 lations, 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 
 thaii. in the southern counties of England. It is owing 
 entirely to the assiduous care of the farmers, 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 
 
 * A Plea for Peasant Proprietors. By William Thomas Thornton, pp. 99 104. 
 t Ibid. p. 38. J Ibid. p. 9. Ibid. p. 32.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 311 
 
 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 4i." 
 
 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 peasantry, by 
 subdivision of land, to the verge of starvation. It is difficult 
 to account for the general prevalence of impressions 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 universally 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 peasantry, 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 corypha3us of the modern English school of 
 agriculturists ; who yet, travelling over nearly the whole 
 of France in 1787, 1788, and J789, 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 
 
 * Arthur Young's Travels in France, voL i. p. 50.
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 7. 
 
 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:* "Walk to Rossendal," (near Dunkirk) "where M. 
 le Brun has an improvement 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 dime sand, naturally as white as snow, but 
 improved by. industry. The magic of property turns sand 
 to gold." And again :f " Going out of Gange, I was sur- 
 prised 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 water- 
 ing at St. Lnwrence. The scenery very interesting to a 
 farmer. From Gange, to the mountain of rough 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 lively. 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 pos- 
 session 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 
 Western Pyrenees, he speaks no longer from surmise, but 
 from knowledge. " Take^ the road to Moneng, and come 
 presently to a scene which was so new to nie in France, that 
 I could hardly believe my own eyes. A succession of many 
 well-built, tight, and comfortable farming cottages built of 
 
 Arthur Young's Travels in France, vol. i. p ; 88. t Ibid. p. 51. 
 
 t Ibid. p. 56.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 34<3 
 
 stone and covered with tiles ; each having its little garden, 
 enclosed by dipt 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 
 enclosed, with grass borders mown and neatly kept around 
 the corn-fields, with gates to pass from one enclosure to 
 another. There are some parts of England (where small 
 yeomen still 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 excellence 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 ex- 
 planation was that it "is a manufacturing country, and farm- 
 ing is but a secondary pursuit to the cotton fabric, which 
 spreads over the whole of it."t The same district is still a 
 seat of manufactures, and a country of small proprietors, 
 
 * Young, pp. 3224. f Ibid. p. 325.
 
 344 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 7. 
 
 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 Garonnej France possesses a 
 husbandry equal to our own."* Those countries, and a 
 considerable part of Quercy, " are cultivated more like gar- 
 dens than farms. Perhaps they are too much like gardens, 
 from the smallness of properties."t In those districts the 
 admirable rotation of crops, so long practised in Italy, but 
 at that time generally neglected in France, was already 
 universal. " The rapid 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 exhaust" 
 
 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 subdivision of 
 the land. His opinion is thus summed up : " Before I 
 travelled, I conceived that small farms, in property, were 
 very susceptible of good cultivation ; and that the occupier 
 of such, having no rent to pay, might be sufficiently at his 
 ease to work improvements, and carry on a vigorous hus- 
 bandry ; but what I have seen in France, has greatly les- 
 sened 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, 
 
 * Young, voL i. p. 357. f Ibid. p. 364. J Ibid. p. 412.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 845 
 
 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 properties, except a most unre- 
 mitting 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 little properties, was as bad as 
 can be well conceived, yet the industry of the possessors 
 was so conspicuous, and so meritorious, that no commenda- 
 tions would be too great for it. It was sufficient to prove 
 that property in land is, of all others, the most active insti- 
 gator to severe and incessant labour. And this truth is of 
 such force and extent, that I know no way so sure of carry- 
 ing 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 Languedoc, &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 the 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, notwithstanding 
 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,
 
 346 BOOK II. CHAPTER VI. 7. 
 
 where the morcellement, having already gone farther than the 
 state of capital and the nature of the staple articles of cul- 
 tivation render advisable, still continues progressive. That 
 each peasant should have a patch of land, even in full pro- 
 perty, 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 surrounding 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 not being 
 required to maintain too many persons, in proportion 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 ?
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CONTINUATION OF THE SAME SUBJECT. 
 
 1. BEFORE examining the influence of peasant pro- 
 perties 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, \vhich 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 proprietors.* 
 On this point at least, authorities are unanimous. Those 
 who have seen only one country of peasant properties, 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 peasantry 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 less so than a 
 freeholder. What is wanted is permanent possession on 
 
 * "Fast tibermenschliche Fleiss." Der Canton Schaffhausen (ut supra), 
 p. 53.
 
 348 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. & 1. 
 
 
 
 fixed terms. "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." 
 
 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 super- 
 fluous 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 
 untiring industry does more than outweigh inferiority 
 of resources, imperfection of implements, and ignorance of 
 scientific 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. 
 
 + Read the graphic description by the historian Michelet, of the feelings of 
 a peasant proprietor towards his land. 
 
 "Si nous voulons connaltre la pense"e intime, la passion, du paysan de 
 France, cela est fort ais6. Promenons-nous le dimanche dans la campagne, 
 suivons-le. Le voila qui s'en va Ik- baa devant nous. II est deux heures ; 
 sa femme est a ve"pres ; il est endimanche' ; je reponds qu'il va voir sa 
 maltresse. 
 
 " Quelle maltresse ? sa terre. 
 
 " Je ne dis pas qu'il y aille tout droit. Non, il est libre ce jour-Ik, il est
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 We have seen, too, that it is not solely by superior exertion 
 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 Khine, the Garonne, the Charente, the Ehone, all the 
 practices which fertilize the land and increase the productive- 
 ness 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 incessantly increase the 
 fertility of the soil, in spite of the activity 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 
 
 maltre d'y aller ou de n'y pas aller. N'y va-t-il pas assez tons les jours de 
 la semaine ? Aussi, il se detourne, il va ailleurs, il a affaire ailleurs. Et 
 pourtant, il y va. 
 
 " II est 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 nioins, il est probable qu'il n'y travaillera pas ; il est endimanche ; 
 il a blouse et chemise blanches. Ilien n'empeche cependant d'dter 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 sea bras et s'arrte, regarde, serieux, soucieux. H regarde 
 longtemps, tres-longtemps, et semble s'oublier. A la fin, s'il se croit observe, 
 s'il appenjoit un passant, il s'eloigne a pas lents. A trente pas encore, il s'arrete, 
 se retourne, et jette sur sa terre un dernier regard, regard profond et sombre ; 
 mais pour qui sait bien voir, il est tout passionne", ce regard, tout de coeur, plein 
 de deVotion." Le Peuple, par J. Michelet, Ire partie, ch. 1. 
 
 * Essai sur V Economic Rurale de I'Angleterre, de I'Ecosse, el de FIrlande, 
 3me eU p. 127.
 
 350 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 2. 
 
 abundant treasures to a population of industrious labourers. 
 Is it not also to the petite culture that we are indebted for 
 most of the garden produce 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 
 instrument 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 Khineland or 
 Flanders. It is precisely those cares and anxieties which 
 tend to make him a superior being to an English day- 
 labourer. 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 
 profuse dispensation of parish pay, and no shame or reluc- 
 tance in demanding it. The day-labourer has, in the exist- 
 ing 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 
 Continental Europe 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
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 351 
 
 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 
 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 
 depend 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 prac- 
 tical use every fragment of knowledge acquired, it helps to 
 render that schooling and reading fruitful, which without 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 situation 
 of a peasant proprietor exercises an improving influence. It 
 is no less propitious to the moral virtues of prudence, tempe- 
 rance, and self-control. Day-labourers, where the labouring 
 class mainly consists of them, are usually improvident: 
 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
 
 352 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 3. 
 
 take even too much thought for the morrow. They are 
 oftener accused of penuriousness than of prodigality. They 
 deny themselves reasonable indulgences, and live wretchedly 
 in order to economize. In Switzerland almost everybody 
 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 specimens 
 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 generation, unless 
 brought out to be expended in their most cherished gratifica- 
 tion the purchase of land. If there is a moral inconve- 
 nience attached to a state of society in which the peasantry 
 have land, it is the danger of tbeir being too careful of their 
 pecuniary concerns ; of its making them crafty, and " calcu- 
 lating" in the objectionable sense. The French 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 emancipation. But some 
 excess in this direction is a small and a passing evil com- 
 pared with recklessness and improvidence in the labouring 
 classes, and a cheap price to pay for the inestimable worth 
 of the virtue of self-dependence, as the general characteristic 
 of a people : a virtue which is one of the first conditions of 
 excellence in the 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
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 353 
 
 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 
 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 population 
 raising their own wages from the soil, and consuming them 
 in kind, are universally acted upon very feebly by internal 
 checks, or by motives disposing them to restraint. The con- 
 sequence is, that unless some external cause, quite indepen- 
 dent 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 elsewheref speaks of such a 
 peasantry as " exactly in the condition in which the animal 
 disposition to increase their numbers is checked by the 
 fewest of those balancing motives and desires Avhich 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 
 assumes 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 instances in 
 
 * Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, p. 146. 
 t Ibid. p. 68. 
 VOL. I. A A
 
 354 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 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 into contact with "physical impos- 
 sibility of procuring subsistence." 
 
 That there should be discrepancy of experience on this 
 matter, is easily to be accounted for. Whether the labouring 
 people live by land or by wages, they have always hitherto 
 multiplied up to the limit set by their habitual standard of 
 comfort. When that standard was low, not exceeding 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 subsis- 
 tence, are perfectly compatible with peasant properties ; and 
 if a people have always been used to poverty, and habit has 
 reconciled them to it, there will be over-population, and ex- 
 cessive 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 
 a priori considerations are in favour of their being less likely. 
 The dependence of wages on population is a matter of specu- 
 lation 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 recognition. But every peasant can 
 satisfy himself from evidence which he can fully appreciate, 
 whether his piece of land can be made to support several 
 families in the same comfort as 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
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 355 
 
 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 subsis- 
 tence 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 specu- 
 lation. It is the depending on chance, where judgment has 
 nothing clearly set before it, that causes reckless, improvi- 
 dent marriages in the lower, as in the higher classes, and pro- 
 duces among us the evils of over-population ; and chance 
 necessarily enters into every man's calculations, when cer- 
 tainty is removed altogether ; as it is, where certain sub- 
 sistence is, by our distribution of property, the lot of 
 but a small portion 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 con- 
 tinues, population increases regularly and rapidly until it has 
 attained its natural limits ; that is to say, inheritances con- 
 tinue 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, divides it 
 among his sons, and they turn it into fields and meadows ; 
 his sons divide it among their sons, who abolish fallows : each 
 improvement in agricultural knowledge admits of another 
 
 * Notes of a Traveller t p. 46. 
 
 A A 2
 
 356 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 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 him- 
 self filled, and a just family pride, common 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 per- 
 petuate 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 competence ; though the 
 habit of foreign service, by opening to the children a career 
 indefinite and uncalculable, sometimes calls forth a super- 
 abundant 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 division 
 of the land among children," says Mr. Laing,f " appears not, 
 during the thousand years it has been in operation, to have 
 had the effect of reducing the landed properties to the mini- 
 mum 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 pro- 
 vided for all the cattle. It is evident that some cause or 
 other, operating on aggregation of landed property, coun- 
 teracts the dividing effects of partition among children. 
 That cause can be no other than what I have long conjec- 
 tured would be effective in such a social arrangement ; viz. 
 
 * Nouveaux Principes, Book iii. ch. 3. 
 f Residence in Norway, p. 18.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 357 
 
 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 balance 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 1000L, as many 
 of 100L, as many of 10Z., a year, at one period as another." 
 That this should happen, supposes 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 adaptation 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 
 seldom 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, or preparing for sowing or harvest, 
 according to the season. The desire to become possessed 
 of one of these gardens operates very strongly in strengthen- 
 ing prudential habits and in restraining improvident mar- 
 riages. Some of the manufacturers in the canton of Argovie 
 
 * Vol. i. pp. 67-9.
 
 358 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 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 both 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 European 
 countries." " Wherever I travelled," says Mr. Kay,t " 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. "% 
 
 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, || 
 "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 
 
 * Vol. i. pp. 75-9. t Ibid. p. 90. 
 
 J 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 con- 
 sumption of food and clotliing 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 country. There are now many more small independent proprietors than 
 formerly. 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 Poor Law Enquiry, p. 640 
 of their Foreign Communications, Appendix F to their First Report. 
 
 || Ibid. 268.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 359 
 
 persons 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 number 
 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 pos- 
 sessor from dependence on wages, the condition of a pro- 
 prietor loses much of its characteristic efficacy as a check 
 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 nothing 
 against the tendencies of the same system of agricultural 
 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 Eevo- 
 lution raised from the extreme of hopeless wretchedness to 
 sudden abundance, a great increase of population took place. 
 But a generation has grown up, which, having been bom in 
 improved circumstances, has not learnt to be miserable ; and 
 upon them the spirit of thrift operates most conspicuously,
 
 360 
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. .4. 
 
 in keeping the increase of population within the increase of 
 national wealth. In a table, drawn up by Professor llau,* 
 of the rate of annual increase of the populations of. various 
 
 168 of the Belgian translation of Mr. 
 
 Scotland 
 
 Saxony 
 
 Baden 
 
 Bavaria 
 
 Naples 
 
 France 
 
 Per cent. 
 . T30 
 
 * The following is the table (see p. 
 Rau's large work) : 
 
 Per cent. 
 United States . . 1820-30 . . 2'92 
 
 Hungary (according to Rohrer) . 2'40 
 England . . . 1811-21 . . T78 
 
 ... 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 
 implicit confidence. 
 
 The following table given by M. Quetelet (Sur VHomme et le Developpement 
 de ses Facultes, vol. i. ch. 7), also on the authority of Ran, 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 : 
 
 . . 1821-31 
 . . 1815-30 . . 1-15 
 1820-30 (Heunisch) M3 
 . . 1814-28 . . 1-08 
 . . 1814-24 . . 0-83 
 1817-27 (Mathieu) 0-63 
 and more recently (Moreau de 
 Jonnes) - 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 
 
 Naples . 
 France . 
 Sweden 
 Lombardy 
 
 Per cent. 
 . 0-S3 
 
 . 0-63 
 . 0-58 
 . 0-45 
 
 A very carefully prepared statement, by M. Legoyt, in the Journal dcs 
 Economiates for May 1847, which brings up the results for France to the census 
 of the preceding year 1846, is summed up in the following table : 
 
 
 According 
 to the 
 
 According to 
 the excess 
 of births over 
 
 
 According 
 to the 
 
 According to 
 the excess 
 of births over 
 
 
 census. 
 
 deaths. 
 
 
 census. 
 
 deaths. 
 
 
 per cent. 
 
 per cent. 
 
 
 per cent. 
 
 per cent. 
 
 Sweden . . 
 
 0-83 
 
 1-14 
 
 Wurtemburg. 
 
 o-oi 
 
 1-00 
 
 Norway . . 
 
 1-36 
 
 1'30 
 
 Holland . . 
 
 0-90 
 
 1-03 
 
 Denmark . . 
 
 
 0-95 
 
 Belgium . 
 
 
 076 
 
 Russia 
 
 
 0-61 
 
 Sardinia . 
 
 1 : 08 
 
 
 Austria 
 
 0-85 
 
 0-90 
 
 Great Britain 
 
 
 
 Prussia . 
 
 1-84 
 
 1-18 
 
 (exclusive 
 
 1-95 
 
 1-00 
 
 Saxony . . 
 
 1-45 
 
 0-90 
 
 of Ireland) 
 
 
 
 Hanover . . 
 
 
 0-85 
 
 France . . 
 
 0-68 
 
 0-50 
 
 Bavaria . . 
 
 ... 
 
 0-71 
 
 United States 
 
 3-27 

 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 361 
 
 countries, that of France, from 1817 to 1827, is stated 
 t Tnnr per cent, that of England during a siiniliar decennial 
 period being l^o annually, and that of the United States 
 nearly 3. According to the official returns as analysed by 
 M. Legoyt,* the increase of the population, which from 1801 
 to 1806 was at the rate of T28 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, 0'41 percent, 
 and from 1841 to 1846, 0'68 per cent.f At the census of 
 1851 the rate of annual increase shown was only T08 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 diminution of deaths; 
 the number of births not increasing at all, while the pro- 
 portion of the births to the population is constantly diminish- 
 ing^ This slow growth of the numbers of the people, while 
 
 * Journal des Economistes for March and May 1847. 
 
 *r M. Legoyt is of opinion that the population was understated in 1841, and 
 the increase between that time and 1846 consequently overstated, and that tha 
 real increase during the whole period was something intermediate between the 
 last two averages, or not much more than one in two hundred. 
 
 J Journal des Economistes for February 1847. In the Journal for January 
 1865. M. Legoyt gives some of the numbers slightly altered, and I presume 
 corrected. The series of percentages is 1'28, O'Sl, 0'69, 0'60, 0'41, 0-68, 0'22, 
 and '20. The last census in the table, that of 1861, shows a slight reaction, the 
 percentage, independently of the newly acquired departments, being 0'32. 
 
 The following are the numbers given by M. Legoyt : 
 
 From 1824 to 1828 j annual Dumber j 981,914, being 1 in 32-30 } of the P' 
 of births ) ( pulation. 
 
 1829 to 1833 965,444, 1 in 34-00 
 
 ,, 1834 to 1838 972,993, 1 in 34*39 
 
 1839 to 1843 970,617, 1 in 35'27 
 
 ,, 1844 and 1845 ,, 983,573, ,, 1 in 35'58 
 
 In the last two years the births, according to M. Legoyt, were swelled by 
 the effects of a considerable immigration. " Cette diminution des naissances,'' 
 he observes, "en presence d'un accroissement constant, quoique peu rapide, de
 
 362 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 4. 
 
 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 pro- 
 perty which took place at the Revolution, have unquestion- 
 ably much improved in condition since that period.* Dr. Rau 
 testifies to a similar fact in the case of another country in 
 
 la population geneYale et des manages, ne peut etre attribue 1 qu'aux progres de 
 1'esprit d'ordre et de provision dans les families. C'est d'ailleui s 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, 
 deVeloppent au sein des populations les instincts de conservation et de bien- 
 etre." 
 
 In four departments, among which are two of the most thriving in Nor- 
 mandy, the deaths even then exceeded the births. The census of 1856 exhibits 
 the remarkable fact of a positive diminution in the population of 54 out of the 
 86 departments. A significant comment on the pauper-warren theory. See M. 
 de Lavergne's analysis of the returns. 
 
 * "Les classes de notre population qui n'ont que leur salaire, celles qui, par 
 cette raison, sont les plus expos^es a 1'indigence, sont aujourd'hui beaucoup 
 mieux pourvues des objets necessaires a la nourriture, au logement et au vehe- 
 ment, qu'elles ne l'e"taient au commencement du siecle. . . . On peut appuyer 
 [ce fait] du t^moignage de toutes les personnes qui out souvenir de la premiere 
 des epoques comparers. . . . S'il restatt des doutes a cet ^gard, on pourrait 
 facilement les dissiper en consultant les anciens cultivateurs et les anciens 
 ouvriers, ainsi que nous 1'avons fait nous-memes dans diverses locality's, sans 
 rencontrer un seul temoignage contradictoire ; on peut invoquer aussi les ren- 
 seignemens recueillis k ce sujet par un observateur exact, M. Villerme' (Tableau 
 de VEtat Physique et Moral des Ouvriers, liv. ii. ch. i.)" From an intelligent 
 work published in 1846, Reclierches sur les Causes de I' 'Indigence, par A. Cle"- 
 ment, pp. 84-5. The same writer speaks (p. 118) of "la hausse considerable 
 qui s'est manifested depuis 1789 dans le taux du salaire de nos cultivateurs 
 journaliers ;" and adds the following evidence of a higher standard of 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 
 changemeut considerable s'est manifest^ dans les habitudes des ouvriers de nos 
 villes manufacturieres : ils d^pensent aujourd'hui beaucoup plus que par le pass^ 
 
 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. 363 
 
 which the subdivision of the land is probably excessive, 
 the Palatinate.* 
 
 I am not aware of a single authentic instance which sup- 
 ports the assertion that rapid multiplication is promoted by 
 
 counterpart, our handloom weavers, the very worst paid class of artizans, ) " ne 
 se montrent plus comme autrefois cou verts de sales haillons." (Page 164.) 
 
 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"once 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 commence- 
 ment of the Revolution, in the ratio of 19 to 30, while, owing to the more 
 constant 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 journe"e du travail, 
 qui doit etre aujourd'hui <f un franc cinquante centimes, et cette augmentation 
 ne repre"sente encore qu'une partie du gain realise". Bien que la nation rurale 
 soit reste"e a peu pres la meme, I'excedant de population survenu depuis 1789 
 s'e"tant concentre" dans les villes, le nombre effectif des journe'es de travail a 
 grossi, d'abord parce que la vie moyenne s'e'tant allonge"e, le nombre des hommes 
 valides s'est e"leve", et ensuite parce que le travail est mieux organise", soit par 
 la suppression de plusieurs fltes chome'es, soit par le seul effet d'une demande 
 plus active. En tenant compte de 1'accroissement du nombre des journe'es, le 
 gain annuel de 1'ouvrier rural doit avoir double 1 . . . . 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 necessaires a la vie a peu 
 change", et que celui des objets fabrique"s, des tissus, par exemple, a sensiblement 
 baisse". L' habitation est e"galement 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 
 grounded 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 quan- 
 tity and quality. " Sie heutigen Tages bedeutend besser 1st, als vor ungefahr 
 40 Jahren, wo das Gesinde weniger Fleisch und Mehlspeisen, keinen Kase zum 
 Brote u. dgl. erhielt." (p. 20.) " Such an increase of wages" (adds the Pro-
 
 364 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 peasant properties. Instances may undoubtedly be cited of 
 its not being prevented by tbem, and one of the principal 
 of these is Belgium ; the prospects of which, in respect to 
 population, are at present a matter of considerable uncer- 
 tainty. Belgium has the most rapidly increasing population 
 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 unfavourable cir- 
 cumstances is the great power possessed over the minds of 
 the people by the Catholic priesthood, whose influence is 
 everywhere strongly exerted against restraining population. 
 As yet, however, it must be remembered that the indefati- 
 gable industry and great agricultural skill of the people have 
 rendered the existing rapidity of increase practically in- 
 nocuous ; the great number of large estates still undivided 
 affording by their gradual dismemberment, a resource 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 attended 
 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 will be so. As large 
 properties are perfectly compatible with small farms, so are 
 small properties with farms of an adequate size; and a sub- 
 
 fessor) " which must be estimated not in money, but in the quantity of neces- 
 saries 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 that of France, the division 
 of the land, even when excessive, has been compatible with a strengthening 
 of the prudential checks to population.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 365 
 
 division of occupancy is not an inevitable consequence of 
 even undue multiplication among peasant proprietors. 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. Rau,* " and the opinion that this is ad- 
 vantageous, have been so completely preserved in Flanders, 
 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 prefer 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 Agricultural Condition 
 of the Department of the Eure since the year 1800,"f states 
 other facts tending to the same conclusion. " The example," 
 says he, " of this department attests that there does not 
 exist, as some writers have imagined, between the distribu- 
 tion 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 perceptible influence on 
 the size of holdings. While, in districts of small farming, 
 lands belonging to the same owner are ordinarily distributed 
 among many tenants, so neither is it uncommon, in places 
 where the grande culture prevails, for the same farmer to 
 rent the lands of several proprietors. In the plains of Vexin, 
 in particular, many active and rich cultivators do not content 
 themselves with a single farm ; others add to the lands of 
 
 * Page 334 of the Brussels translation. He cites as an authority, Schwerz, 
 Landwirthschaftliche Mittheilunyen, i. 185. 
 
 f One of the many important papers which have appeared in the Journal 
 des Economistes, the organ of the principal political economists of France, and 
 doing great and increasing honour to their knowledge and ability. M. Passy's 
 essay has been reprinted separately as a pamphlet.
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 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 reaches or exceeds two hundred 
 hectares" (five hundred English acres). " The more the estates 
 are dismembered, the more frequent do this sort of arrange- 
 ments 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 parcelles from a 
 number of different proprietors. Elsewhere farms as well as 
 properties of too great extent, tend to division. Cultivation 
 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 number of small 
 cotes foncieres, 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 peasant 
 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 Prus- 
 sian 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 culture is the system 
 of the peasants, and the grande culture that of the great 
 landlords : on the contrary, wherever the small properties are 
 
 * Economic Rurale de la France, p. 455. 
 
 f P. 117. See, for facts of a similar tendency, pp. 141, 250, and other 
 passages 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. 367 
 
 divided among too many proprietors, I believe it to be true 
 that the large properties also are parcelled out among too 
 many farmers, and that the cause is 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 accounted for by this cause ; 
 that it is diminishing, not increasing ; and that the terror 
 expressed in some quarters, at the progress of the morcelle- 
 ment, is one of the most groundless of real or pretended 
 panics.* 
 
 If peasant properties have any effect in promoting sub- 
 division beyond the degree which corresponds to the agri- 
 
 * 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 popula. 
 tion 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 pro- 
 prietors 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 pre- 
 venting 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 Switzer- 
 land, 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 peasantry 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 morcellement, BO far as 
 regards France, additional facts and observations, brought up to a later date, 
 will be found in the Appendix.
 
 368 BOOK II. CHAPTER VII. 5. 
 
 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 pro- 
 motes providence on the part of those who, not being yet peasant 
 proprietors, hope to hecome so. In England, where the agricul- 
 tural 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 con- 
 dition of a landed proprietor. According to almost all autho- 
 rities, 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 dis- 
 posing of it entire to some rich purchaser who has no object 
 but to live on its income, without improving it. The hope of 
 obtaining such an investment is the most powerful of induce- 
 ments, 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 between 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 industry, 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 existing 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
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 369 
 
 to the labouring class.* We are not on the present occasion 
 called upon to compare it with the joint ownership of the land 
 by associations of labourers. 
 
 * 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. 
 
 "Aux temps les plus mauvais," says the historian Michelet, (Le Peuple, Ire 
 partie, ch. 1,) "aux moments de pauvrete" universelle, ou le riche me'me est 
 pauvre et vend par force, alors le pauvre se trouve en e"tat d'acheter ; nul ac- 
 queYeur ne se pre'sentant, le paysan en guenilles arrive avec sa piece d'or, et il 
 acquiert un bout de terre. Ces moments de de"sastre ou le paysan a pu acqueYir 
 la terre a bon marche", ont toujours e"te" suivis d'un elan subit de fecondite" qu'on 
 ne s'expliquait pas. Vers 1500, par exemple, quand la France e"puise"e par 
 Louis XI. semble achever sa ruine en Italic, la noblesse qui part est obligde de 
 vendre ; 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 XII. 
 
 "II dure peu, malheureusement. La terre est a peine remise en bon etat, 
 le fisc fond dessus ; les guerres de religion arriveut, qui semblent raser tout 
 jusqu'au sol, miseres horribles, famines atroces ou les meres mangeaient leurs 
 enfants. Qui croirait que le pays se releve de la ? Eh bien, la guerre unit a 
 peine, de ce champ ravage', de cette chaumiere encore noire et brule"e, sort 
 l'e"pargne du paysan. II achete ; en dix ans, la France a change de face ; en 
 vingt ou trente, tout les biens ont 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 Revo- 
 lution. 
 
 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 
 followed, 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. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 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 labourers, 
 capitalists, and landlords. The other case is the not uncom- 
 mon one, in which a peasant proprietor owns and cultivates 
 the land, but raises the little capital required, by a mortgage 
 upon it. Neither does this case present any important pecu- 
 liarity. There is but one person, the peasant 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 government. Without 
 dwelling further on these cases, we pass to those which pre- 
 sent marked features of peculiarity. 
 
 When the two parties sharing in the produce are the 
 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
 
 METAYERS. 371 
 
 it, in a determinate proportion, between them. The essential 
 difference does not lie in this, but in another circumstance, 
 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 consi- 
 dered 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. Kespecting 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 land- 
 lord commonly finds half the cattle and half the seed, arid the metayer, labour, 
 implements, and taxes ; but in some districts the landlord bears a share of these. 
 In Eoussillon, 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 
 hall'. 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 mutations, 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- Etudes sur V Economic Politiqw, 6me essai : De la Condition des Cul- 
 tivateurs en Toscane. 
 
 BB 2
 
 372 BOOK II. 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 the 
 equal division of the crops, would render himself so odious, 
 he would be so sure of not obtaining a metayer who was an 
 honest man, that the contract of all the metayers may be 
 considered as identical, at least in each province, and never 
 gives rise to any competition among peasants in search of 
 employment, or any offer to cultivate the soil on cheaper 
 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 generation, on the same 
 terms, without writings or registries."t 
 
 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. 
 
 * 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 another he alters nothing in the terms of the engagement." [Nouveaux 
 Principes, liv. iii. ch. 5.]
 
 METAYERS. 373 
 
 In both these particulars the metayer system has the charac- 
 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 indus- 
 try, instead of the whole, are his own. But he has a much 
 stronger motive than a day labourer, who has no other in- 
 terest in the result than not to be dismissed. If the metayer 
 cannot be turned out except for some violation of his con- 
 tract, 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 guaranteed by 
 custom, he acquires local attachments, and much of the feel- 
 ings 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 multiplication of 
 people, beyond the number that can be properly supported on 
 the land or taken off by manufactures, is incident 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 pru- 
 dence 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.* 
 
 * M. Bastiat affirms that even in France, incontestably the least favour- 
 able example of the metayer system, its effect in repressing population is 
 conspicuous. 
 
 " Un fait bien constate", c'est que la tendance a une multiplication de'sor- 
 donne"e se manifesto principalement au sein de cette classe d'hotnmes qui vit de 
 salaires. Cette preVoyance qui retarde les mariages a sur elle peu d' empire,
 
 374 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 2. 
 
 There is one check which this 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 subdivision. I do not, however, 
 attach great importance to this check, because the farm may 
 be loaded with superfluous 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 produce 
 should be as great as possible, in order that their own pro- 
 portion may be so," he continues,* " it could never, how- 
 ever, 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 thev might save from their own share of the 
 
 parce que les maux qui resultent de 1'exces de concurrence ne lui apparaissent 
 que tres-confuse'ment, et dans un lointain en apparence peu redoutable. C'est 
 done la circonstance la plus favorable pour un pays d'etre organise" de maniere 
 a exclure le salariat. Dans les pays de me'tairies, les manages sont de'terniine's 
 principalement par les besoins de la culture ; ils se multiplient quand, par 
 quelque circonstance, les me"tairies offrent des vides nuisibles aux travaux ; ils se 
 ralentissent quand les places sont rernplies. Ici, un e"tat de cboses facile a con- 
 stater, savoir, le rapport entre 1'etendue du domaine et le nombre des bras, 
 ope"re comme la pre"voyance et plus surement qu'elle. Aussi voyons-nous que 
 si aucune circonstance n'intervient pour ouvrir des de'bouche's a une population 
 surnume'raire, elle demeure stationnaire. Nos de"partements meYidionaux en 
 sont la preuve." Considerations sur le Metayage, Journal des Economistes for 
 February 1846. 
 
 * Wealth of Nations, book iii. ch. 2.
 
 METAYERS. 375 
 
 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 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 five 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 carriage 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 cus- 
 tom, 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 hin- 
 drance 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- 
 
 * Travels, vol. i. pp. 404 5.
 
 376 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 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 burden to a proprietor, who is thus obliged to 
 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 
 landlord 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 uu- 
 watered, 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 metaying system." 
 "Wherever it" (the metayer system) "has been adopted," 
 says Mr. M'Culloch,^ " it has put a stop to all improve- 
 ment, 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 Eevolu- 
 
 * Travels, vol. ii. 151 3. 
 
 f Ibid. ii. 217. 
 
 Principles of Political Economy, 3rd ed. p. 471. 
 
 Essay on tiie Distribution of Wealth, pp. 102 4.
 
 METAYERS. 377 
 
 tion.* 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 
 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."f When we add 
 that they had not the virtual fixity of tenure of the metayers 
 of Italy, (" in Limousin," says Arthur Young,! " the metayers 
 
 * 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 
 himself stated in another place) that he is acquainted only with a limited dis- 
 trict, of great subdivision and unfertile soil. 
 
 M. Passy is of opinion, that a French peasantry must be in indigence and 
 the country badly cultivated on a metayer system, because the proportion of 
 the produce claimable by the landlord is too high ; it being only in more favour- 
 able 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 agricul- 
 ture. (Systdmes 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. 
 
 f See the " Me'moire sur la Surcharge des Impositions qu'e'prouvait la 
 Ge'ue'raUte' de Limoges, adresse' au Conseil d'Etat en 1766," pp. 260304 of 
 the fourth volume of Turgot's Works. The occasional engagements of land- 
 lords (as mentioned by Arthur Young) to pay a part of the taxes, were, accord- 
 ing to Turgot, of recent origin, under the compulsion of actual necessity. " Le 
 proprietaire ne s'y prete qu'autant qu'il ne peut trouver de metayer autrement ; 
 ainsi, memo dans ce cas-lk, le metayer est toujours rdduit a ce qu'il faut pre"cis&- 
 ment pour ne pas mourir de faim." (p. 275.) 
 
 J Vol. i. p. 404.
 
 378 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 are considered as little better than menial servants, removable 
 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 subdividing 
 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 
 first place, as to subdivision. In Lombardy, according to 
 Chateauvieux,* there are few farms which exceed fifty acres, 
 and few which have less than ten. These farms are all occu- 
 pied by metayers at half profit. They invariably display 
 " an extentf 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 commo- 
 dious, 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! 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 agriculture must, there- 
 fore, 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 
 
 * Letters from Italy, translated by Rigby, p. 16. 
 t Ibid. pp. 19, 20. J Ibid. pp. 2431.
 
 METAYERS. 379 
 
 destroyed." So much for agricultural skill. " Nothing can 
 he 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 completely 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 phenomenon 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 
 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 
 
 * Pp. 789.
 
 380 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 
 
 are mulberry-trees, but the greatest number poplars, the 
 leaves of \vhich are eaten by the cattle. Each tree supports 
 
 a vine These divisions, arrayed in oblong 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 them successively in the 
 cultivation of all the farms Almost every farm main- 
 tains 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. Thus, on holi- 
 days, hundreds of these little carts are seen flying in all 
 directions, carrying the young women, decorated with flowers 
 and ribbons." 
 
 This is not a picture of poverty; and so far as agriculture 
 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, 
 Chateauvieux'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 con- 
 stitute 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 enclosures, 
 which, like so many beds in a garden, display a thousand 
 varying productions; I have shown, that to all these en- 
 closures are attached well-built houses, clothed with vines, 
 and decorated with flowers ; but, on entering them, we 
 find a total want of all the conveniences of life, a table more 
 than frugal, and a general appearance of privation." Is not 
 Cbateauvieux here unconsciously contrasting the condition 
 
 * Pp. 73-6.
 
 METAYERS. 381 
 
 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,* " I was assured that these metayers 
 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. .... The metayers, not 
 in the vicinity of the city, are so 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 ordinary." Mr. Jones admits the 
 superior comfort of the metayers near Florence, and attri- 
 butes it partly to straw-platting, by which the women of the 
 peasantry can earn, according to Chateauvieux,f 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! ana " constantly 
 interests the proprietors, which is never the case with great 
 
 Travels, vol. ii. p. 156. f Letters from Italy, p. 75. 
 
 J Ibid. pp. 2956.
 
 382 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 proprietors who lease their estates at fixed rents. It esta- 
 blishes 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 advan- 
 tages 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 numerous 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 farmers, 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 labour are directed, 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 particularly to the Val di Nievole, in which his 
 own property lay, and which is not within the supposed pri- 
 vileged circle immediately round Florence. It is one of the 
 districts in which the size of farms appears to be the smallest. 
 The following is his description of the dwellings and mode of 
 life of the metayers of that district.* 
 
 " Cette inaison, batie en bonnes murailles a chaux et a 
 
 * From his Sixth Essay, formerly referred to.
 
 METAYERS. 383 
 
 ciment, a toujours au moins un 6tage, quelquefois deux, au- 
 dessus du rez-de-chaussee. Le plus souvent on trouve a ce 
 rez-de-chaussee la cuisine, une etable pour deux b6tes a corne, 
 et le magasin, qui prend son nom, tinaia, des grandes cuves 
 (tini) ou Ton fait ferm enter 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 couvert a raccommoder ses outils, ou a hacber 
 le fourrage pour son betail. Au premier et au second etage 
 sont deux, trois, et souvent quatre cbambres a lit. . . . La 
 plus spacieuse et la mieux aeree de ces cbambres 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 
 enfenner les habits et le linge, et quelques chaises de bois, 
 sont les principaux meubles de ces chambres ; mais une 
 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 Turquie, on voit un ou deux matelas en 
 laine, ou, chez les plus pauvres, en etoupe, une bonne cou- 
 verture piquee, des draps de forte toile de chanvre, et sur le 
 meilleur 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 on trouve toujours la grande table de 
 bois ou dine la famille, avec ses banes ; le grand coffre, qui 
 sert en meme temps d'armoire pour conserver le pain et les 
 provisions, et de petrin ; un assortiment assez complet et fort 
 peu couteux de pots, de plats et d'assiettes en terre cuite ; 
 une ou deux lampes 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 tous les habits de travail 
 de la famille ont ete files par les femmes de la maison. Ces 
 habits, tant pour les hommes que pour les femmes, sont de 
 1'etofFe qu'ils nomment mezza lana si elle est epaisse, mola si 
 elle est legere. La trame est un gros fil ou de chanvre ou
 
 384 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 d'etoupe, le remplissage est de laine ou de coton ; elle est 
 teinte par les memes paysannes qui 1'ont filee. On se 
 figurerait difficileinent combien, par un travail assidu, les 
 paysannes savent accumuler et de toile et de mezza lana ; 
 combien de draps se trouvent au depot comrnun : combien 
 chaque membre de la famille a de chemises, de vestes, de 
 pantalons, 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 
 dot, dont 20 paves 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 24/. English money, equi- 
 valent to at least 501. in Italy and in that rank of life ; when 
 
 * "Inventaire du trousseau 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 sole 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 jupons de travail d'e"te (mola), 3 jupes blanches, 5 
 tabliers de toile peinte, 1 tablier de soie noir, 1 tablier de me'rinos noir, 9 tab- 
 liers de travail (mola) en couleur, 4 mouchoirs blancs, 8 mouchoirs en couleur, 
 3 mouchoirs de soie, 2 voiles brode's et 1 voile de tulle, 3 essuie-mains, 14 paires 
 de bas, 2 chapeaux, 1'uu de feutre, 1'autre de paille fine : 2came"es d'or, 2 bouciea 
 d'oreilles en or, 1 chapelet avec deux piastres romaines, 1 collier de corail avec 
 
 sa croix d'or Toutes les Spouses plus riches ont de plus la reste 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 mariant n'avait 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 II y en a 30 paires."
 
 METAYERS. 885 
 
 one whose dowry is only half that amount, has the ward- 
 robe described, which is represented by Sisraondi 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 pour jour : a dix heures du matin il mange sa 
 pollenta, a 1'entree de la nuit il mange la soupe, puis du pain 
 avec quelque assaisonnement (companatico). En ete il fait 
 trois repas, a huit heures, a une heure, et au soir, mais 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 1'huile 
 d'olive pour son usage : il s'en sert, non seulement pour 
 s'eclairer, mais pour assaisonner tous les vegetaux qu'il 
 apprete pour sa table, et qui deviennent ainsi bien plus 
 VOL. i. c c
 
 386 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 3. 
 
 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 iuferieur du pays, 
 et de la vinelle ou piquette faite d'eau fermentee sur le inaro 
 du raisin. II reserve cependant toujours quelque peu de sou 
 meilleur vin pour le jour ou il battra son grain, et pour 
 quelques fetes qui se celebrent en famille. II estime a dix 
 barils de vinelle par annee (environ cinquantebouteilles) et a 
 cinq sacs de froment (environ mille livres de pain) la portion 
 requise pour un bomme fait." 
 
 Tbe remarks of Sismondi on tbe 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 defendre. 
 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 harmonic avec eux, comme avec son maJtre, avec le 
 fisc et avec 1'eglise : il vend peu, il achete peu, il touche peu 
 d'argent, mais personne ne lui en demande. On a souvent 
 parle du caractere doux et bienveillant des Toscans, rnais 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, formaut 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 obligations, 
 possesses by usage, though not by law, gives him the local 
 attachments, and almost the strong sense of personal in- 
 terest, characteristic of a proprietor. " Le metayer vit sur sa 
 metairie comrne sur son heritage, 1'aimant d'affectiou, 
 travaillant a la bonifier sans cesse, se confiant dans 1'avenir, 
 et comptaut bien que ses champs seront travailles apres lui 
 par ses enfans et les en fans de ses enfans. En effet, le plus 
 grand nombre des metayers vivent de generation en genera- 
 tion sur la meme terre ; ils la connaissent en detail avec une
 
 METAYERS. 387 
 
 precision que le sentiment seul de la propriete pent donner. . . 
 Les champs eleves en terrasses les uns aa-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 qtielque sorte le 
 caractere. Celui-ci est sec, celui-la froid et humide ; ici la 
 terre est profonde, la ce u'est qu'une croute qui couvre a 
 peine 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 Ton apprend du metayer, avec 
 etonnernent, que dans une espace de dix arpens, le sol, les 
 aspects, et Finclinaison 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 generales, et negliger les details. Mais le 
 metayer, avec 1'experience du passe, a senti son intelligence 
 eveillee par 1'interet et I'affection pour devenir le meilleur des 
 observateurs, et avec tout 1'avenir devant lui, il ne songe pas 
 a lui seulement, mais a ses cnfans et a ses petits enfans. 
 Aussi lorsqu'il plante 1'olivier, arbre seculaire, et qu'il menage 
 au 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."* 
 
 * Of the intelligence of this interesting people, M. de Siamondi 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 fre"quentent 
 le spectacle les jours de fete, en e'te', de neuf a onze heures du soir : leur admis- 
 sion ne leur coftte guere que cinq sols de France. Alfieri est leur auteur de 
 predilection ; toute 1'histoire des Atrides est familiere a ces honimes qui ne 
 savent pas lire, et qui vont demander a ce poete austere un de"lasseinent de 
 leurs rudes travaux." Unlike most rustics, they find pleasure in the beauty of 
 their country. " Dans les collines du val de Nievole on trouve devant ch.-que 
 maison, 1'aire pour battre le ble" ; qui a rarement plus de vingt-cinq & trente 
 
 C 2
 
 388 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 4. 
 
 4. I do not offer these quotations as evidence of the 
 intrinsic excellence of the metayer system ; hut they surely 
 suffice to prove that neither " land miserably cultivated" nor 
 a people in " the most abject poverty" have any necessary 
 connexion with it, and that the unmeasured vituperation 
 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 accomplished 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 according to some rule which would 
 leave to the tenant the whole benefit of his own exertions. 
 The metayer tenure is not 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 Tuscany 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 realized in most European countries, 
 should be put to hazard by an attempt to introduce, under 
 
 toises carries, 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 plainea et 
 la valle"e, et d'ou la vue s'e"tend sur un pays ravissant. Presque jamais je ne 
 m'y suis arrete" pour I'admirer, sans que le me"tayer soit venu jouir de mon 
 admiration, et in'indiquer du doigt les beaute"s qu'il croyait pouvoir m' avoir 
 e'chappe'." 
 
 * " On ne voit jamais," says Sismondi, "une famille de me'tayers proposer 
 a son maltre de partager sa metairie, a moins que le travail ne soit re"ellement
 
 METAYERS. 389 
 
 the guise of agricultural improvement, a system of money- 
 rents and capitalist farmers. Even where the metayers are 
 poor, and the subdivision great, it is not to be assumed as of 
 course, that the change would be for the better. The en- 
 largement 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 are reclaimable wastes 
 on which they can be located, competition will so reduce wages, 
 that they will probably be worse off as day-labourers than 
 they were as metayers. 
 
 Mr. Jones very properly objects against th6 French Eco- 
 nomists of the last century, that in pursuing 'their favourite 
 object of introducing money-rents, they turned their minds 
 solely to putting farmers in the place of metayers, instead 
 of transforming the existing metayers into farmers ; which, 
 as he justly 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 making the 
 attempt. If this transformation were effected, and no other 
 change made in the metayer's condition ; if, preserving all the 
 other rights which usage insures 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, instead of only half the fruits 
 of any improvement he made, would now belong to himself ; 
 
 supeYieur a ses forces, et qu'elle ne sente la certitude de conserver les rne'ines 
 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 manages 
 iiouveaux ; un seul prend une femme et se charge des soins du menage ; aucun 
 de ses freres ne se marie, a inoins que lui-meme n'ait pas d'enfans, ou que Ton 
 n'offre a cet autre frere une nouvelle metairie." Nouveaux Principes, liv. iii. 
 ch. 5.
 
 390 BOOK II. CHAPTER VIII. 4. 
 
 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 consider- 
 able 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 inoveable property on the 
 hazards of agricultural 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 tenure, and converted him, in fact, into a peasant 
 proprietor at a quitrent. 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 deteriorated ; 
 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 contract, 
 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 country that the term 
 cottier is derived.* By far the greater part of the 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 presume 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 permanent tenants. But, from the 
 deficiency of capital, the custom 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 gene- 
 rally 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 
 
 * 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 
 determined by competition.
 
 39 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 1. 
 
 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 compe- 
 titors 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 England, 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 some- 
 thing 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 de- 
 pend on the extent to which the capacity of population to in- 
 crease 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 condition 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 sub- 
 sistence, 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 incon- 
 venience ; the cultivating class might be 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
 
 COTTIERS. 393 
 
 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 capital 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 exer- 
 tions 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 imme- 
 diate 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 probability that the fruits of the exertion or 
 of the sacrifice will be taken away from him. The only safe- 
 guard against these uncertainties would be the growth of a 
 custom, insuring a permanence of tenure in the same occu- 
 pant, without liability 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 considerable sums which outgoing tenants obtain 
 from their successors, for the goodwill of their farms,* in the 
 first place actually limit the competition for land to persons 
 who have such sums to offer : while the same fact also 
 
 * " 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 
 Commission, Introductory Chapter.) The compiler adds, "the comparative 
 tranquillity of that district" (Ulster) "may perhaps be mainly attributable to 
 this fact."
 
 304 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 2. 
 
 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 recognised 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 pro- 
 gress 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 de- 
 cidedly opposed to the growth of any custom commuting 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 the advantages 
 by which, in the best forms of that tenure, they are com- 
 pensated. It is scarcely possible that cottier agriculture 
 
 * " It is in the great majority of cases not a reimbursement for outlay 
 incurred, or improvements effected on the land, but a mere life insurance or 
 purchase of immunity from outrage." (Digest, ut supra.) " The present 
 tenant-right of Ulster' 1 (the writer judiciously remarks) "is an embryo copy- 
 hold." " Even there, if the tenant-right be disiegarded, and a tenant be ejected 
 without having received the price of his goodwill, outrages are generally the 
 consequence." (Ch. viii.) "The disorganized state of Tipperary, and the 
 agrarian combination throughout Ireland, are but a methodized war to obtain 
 the Ulster tenant-right."
 
 COTTIERS. 395 
 
 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 competition for 
 land could be kept down, and extreme poverty prevented ; 
 habits of prudence and a high standard of comfort, once 
 established, would have a fair chance of maintaining them- 
 selves : though even in these favourable circumstances 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 impoverished by any 
 other improvident multiplication than their own, bat a 
 cottier family, however prudent and self- restrain ing, may 
 have the rent raised against it by the consequences of the 
 multiplication of other families. Any protection to the 
 cottiers against this evil could only be derived from a salu- 
 tary sentiment of duty or dignity, pervading 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 as long as 
 they are not actually starving, they will multiply : and popu- 
 lation is only checked by the diseases, and the shortness of 
 life, consequent on insufficiency of merely physical necessa- 
 ries. This was the state of the largest portion of the Irish 
 peasantry. When a people have sunk into this state, and 
 still more when they have been in it from time immemo- 
 rial, the cottier system is an almost insuperable obstacle to
 
 396 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 2. 
 
 their emerging from it. When the habits of the people are 
 such that their increase is never checked hut by the impossi- 
 bility of obtaining a bare support, and when this support can 
 only be obtained from land, all stipulations and agreements 
 respecting amount of rent are merely nominal; the competi- 
 tion 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 holdings, 
 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 posses- 
 sion. The rents which they promise, they are almost inva- 
 riably 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 suffi- 
 ciency 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 could in the most favourable 
 seasons be made to yield, would not be equal to the rent bid ; 
 consequently, if the peasant fulfilled his engagement with his 
 landlord, which he is rarely able to accomplish, he would till 
 the ground for nothing, and give his landlord a premium for 
 being allowed to till it. On the sea-coast, fishermen, and in 
 
 * Evils 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 Whately.
 
 COTTIERS. 897 
 
 the northern counties 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 increased ; 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 accidental 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 occasionally 
 forced up the nominal rent ; we may cite from the evidence 
 taken by Lord Devon's Commission,* a fact attested by 
 Mr. Hurly, Clerk of the Crown for Kerry : " I have known a 
 tenant bid for a farm that I was perfectly well acquainted with, 
 worth 50L 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 any 
 * Evidence, p. 851.
 
 398 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. 3. 
 
 amount of industry or prudence, and what lose by any reck- 
 lessness ? 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 condition, that 
 he can scarcely be either better or worse off by any act of 
 his own. If he were industrious or prudent, nobody but his 
 landlord would gain ; if he is lazy or intemperate, it is at his 
 landlord's expense. A situation more devoid of motives to 
 either labour or self-command, imagination itself cannot con- 
 ceive. 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 himself 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 descrip- 
 tion 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 
 greatest pretension, imputing the backwardness of Irish 
 industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in im- 
 proving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insou- 
 ciance in the Celtic race ? Of all vulgar modes of escaping 
 from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influ- 
 ences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attri- 
 buting the diversities of conduct and character to inherent 
 natural differences. 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
 
 COTTIERS. 399 
 
 arrangements in the midst of which they live and work, what 
 wonder if 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 inde- 
 pendent of it ; but they are not less fitted for it than their 
 Celtic brethren the French, nor less so than the Tuscans, or 
 the ancient 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 harder, 
 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 system, 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 indi- 
 vidual, who becomes his representative. The payments, how- 
 ever, of the peasants, or ryots as they are termed, have 
 seldom if ever been regulated, as in Ireland, by competition. 
 Though the customs locally obtaining 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 collector 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
 
 400 BOOK II. CHAPTER IX. <S 4. 
 
 | 
 
 of tenure in the peasant-farmer, co-existing with an arbitrary 
 power of increasing the rent. 
 
 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 advantageous 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 improvement in their condi- 
 tion rather nominal than real ; and, except during the occa- 
 sional accident of a humane and vigorous 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 English 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 ex- 
 isted 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
 
 COTTIERS. 401 
 
 tax-gatherers called zemindars. "The zemindar," says the 
 philosophical historian of India,* " had some of the attri- 
 butes 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 suc- 
 ceeded 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 considered 
 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 ; from 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 his- 
 torian, " to which the history of the world presents not a 
 parallel. Next after the sovereign, the immediate cultivators 
 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 
 \vith a force incomparably greater than that with which they 
 could operate upon any other class of men : they might have 
 
 * Mill's History of British India, book vi. ch. 8* 
 VOL. I. D D
 
 402 BOOK IT. CHAPTER IX. 4. 
 
 been bestowed upon tbose from whom alone, in every country, 
 the principal improvements in agriculture must be derived, 
 the immediate cultivators of the soil. And a measure 
 worthy to be ranked among the noblest that ever were taken 
 for the improvement of any country, might have helped to 
 compensate the people of India for the miseries of that mis- 
 government which they had so long endured. But the legis- 
 lators 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. 
 Unaccustomed 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 
 flattered themselves that they had created, throughout the 
 Bengal provinces, English landlords, and it proved that they 
 had only created Irish ones. The new landed aristocracy 
 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
 
 COTTIERS. 403 
 
 government by the immediate cultivator. In the North- 
 Western Provinces, the government makes its engagement 
 with the village community collectively, determining the 
 share to be paid by each individual, but holding them jointly 
 responsible for each other's default. But in the greater part 
 of India, the immediate cultivators have not obtained a per- 
 petuity of tenure at a fixed rent. The government manages 
 the land on the principle on which a good Irish landlord 
 manages his estate : not putting it up to competition, not 
 asking the cultivators what they will promise to pay, but 
 determining for itself what they can afford to pay, and 
 defining its demand accordingly. In many districts ,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 village. Sometimes the 
 rent is fixed only for one year, sometimes 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 arrangement 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 per- 
 petual settlement.* But the two plans, of annual settlements 
 and of short leases, are irrevocably condemned. They can 
 only be said to have succeeded, in comparison with the un- 
 limited 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. 
 
 * Since this was written, the resolution has been adopted by the Indian 
 government of converting the long leases of the northern provinces into per- 
 petual tenures at fixed rents. 
 
 D D 2
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 1. WHEN the rst edition of this work was written and 
 published, the question, what is to be done with a cottier 
 population, was to the English Government the most urgent 
 of practical questions. The majority of a population of eight 
 millions, having long grovelled in helpless inertness and 
 abject poverty under the cottier system, reduced by its ope- 
 ration to mere food of the cheapest description, and to an 
 incapacity of either doing or willing anything for the im- 
 provement 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 
 their misfortune to live. Such an emergency b,ad compelled 
 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 Par- 
 liament was to take away even that, by conferring on them a 
 legal claim to eleemosynary support : while, towards correct- 
 ing the cause of the mischief, nothing was done, beyond 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 of 
 Ireland is the cottier system ; that while peasant rents fixed 
 by competition are the practice of the country, to expect 
 industry, useful activity, any restraint on population but
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 405 
 
 death, or any the smallest diminution of poverty, is to look 
 for figs on thistles and grapes on thorns. If our practical 
 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 phy- 
 sical 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 precarious, either some 
 new and great impulse must be given to agricultural skill 
 and industry, or the soil of Ireland can no longer feed any- 
 thing 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 taxa- 
 tion of the empire, until they are reduced either by emigra- 
 tion 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, however, 
 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 
 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
 
 406 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 
 
 further diminution of about half a million. The Irish having 
 thus found the way to that flourishing continent which for 
 generations will he capable of supporting in undiminished com- 
 fort the increase of the population of the whole world ; the 
 peasantry of Ireland having learnt to fix their eyes on a ter- 
 restrial 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 be diminished by the 
 general introduction throughout Ireland of English farming 
 or even if, like che county of Sutherland, all Ireland should be 
 turned into a grazing farm the superseded people would mi- 
 grate 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 thou- 
 sand 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, 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 
 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-
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 407 
 
 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 cul- 
 tivators 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 receivers 
 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 listless at their work ; since they 
 could not be dismissed in a body, 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 regeneration 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 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.
 
 408 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 1. 
 
 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 won- 
 ders, 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 cottierism. 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 advan- 
 tage of a lease was nearly nominal. In India, the govern- 
 ment, where it bas not imprudently made over its proprietary 
 rights to the zemindars, is able to prevent this evil, because, 
 being itself the landlord, it can fix the rent according to its 
 own judgment; but under individual 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 offer them everything, it is useless to rely 
 on them for tempering 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
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 409 
 
 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 a 
 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 impor- 
 tant point, a limitation of the rent. Kent paid by a capitalist 
 who farms for profit, and not for bread, may safely be aban- 
 doned to competition ; rent paid by labourers cannot, 
 unless the labourers were in a state of civilization and im- 
 provement 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 neces- 
 sary that they should be fixed; and where no mutually 
 advantageous custom, such as the metayer system of Tuscany, 
 has established itself, reason and experience recommend that 
 they should be fixed by authority : thus changing the rent 
 into a quit-rent, and the farmer into a peasant proprietor. 
 
 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 Parliament ; making 
 the whole land of Ireland the property of the tenants, subject 
 to the rents now really paid (not the nominal rent), as a fixed 
 rent charge. This, under the name of " fixity of tenure," was 
 one of the demands of the Kepeal Association during the
 
 410 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 1. 
 
 most successful period of their agitation ; and was better ex- 
 pressed 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 were 
 prospectively 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 enlightened 
 foreigners writing on Ireland, Von Raumer and Gustave de 
 Beaumont, a remedy of this sort seemed so exactly and obvi- 
 ously what the disease required, that they had some difficulty 
 in comprehending how it was that the thing was not yet 
 done. 
 
 This, however, would have been, in the first place, a com- 
 plete 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 the second place, that 
 there should be none but peasant proprietors, is in itself far 
 from desirable. Large farms, cultivated by large capital, and 
 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 expe- 
 riments, are an important part of a good agricultural system. 
 Many such landlords there are even in Ireland ; and it would 
 be a public 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 
 
 * Author of numerous pamphlets, entitled " True Political Economy of 
 Ireland," "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.
 
 MEANS OP ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 411 
 
 advantages ; nor are the tenants always the persons one 
 would desire to select as the first occupants of peasant-pro- 
 perties. There are numbers of them on whom it would have 
 a more beneficial effect to give them the hope of acquiring a 
 landed property by industry and frugality, than the property 
 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 inconsider- 
 able 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 waste. It would of course be a necessary part 
 of this measure, to make compulsory on landlords the sur- 
 render of waste lands (not of an ornamental character) when- 
 ever 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 (though the attempt to 
 establish it proved unsuccessful) on the principles, so far as 
 applicable, of the Freehold Land Societies which have been so 
 successfully established in England, not primarily for agricul- 
 tural, but for electoral purposes. 
 
 This is a mode in which private capital may be employed 
 in renovating the social and agricultural economy of Ireland, 
 not only without sacrifice but with considerable profit to its 
 owners. The remarkable success of the Waste Land Im- 
 provement 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
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 2. 
 
 acquiring under the influence of its beneficent system.* When 
 the lands were sold, the funds of the association would be libe- 
 rated, and it might recommence operations in some other quarter. 
 
 2. Thus far I had written in 1856. Since that time 
 the great crisis of Irish industry has made further progress, 
 and it is necessary to consider how its present state affects the 
 opinions, on prospects or on practical measures, expressed in 
 the previous .part of this chapter. 
 
 The principal change in the situation consists in the great 
 
 * 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 1845, 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 4396Z. ; &Q51. having been added 
 during the last year, being at the rate of 171. 18s. per tenant for the whole term, 
 and 21. 9s. for the past year ; the benefit of which improvements each tenant 
 will enjoy during the unexpired term of a thirty-one years' lease. 
 
 "These 245 tenants and their families have, by spade industry, reclaimed 
 and brought into cultivation 1032 plantation acres of land, previously unpro- 
 ductive mountain waste, upon which they grew, last year, crops valued by 
 competent practical persons at 3896Z., being in the proportion of 151. 18s. 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 markets, at 4162?., of which 1304J. has been added since February 
 1844, being at the rate of 161. 19s. for the whole period, and 51. 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 crops, 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 
 landed 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 
 improvements."
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 413 
 
 diminution, holding out a hope of the entire extinction, of cottier 
 tenure. The enormous decrease in the number of small hold- 
 ings, and increase in those of a medium size, attested by the 
 statistical returns, sufficiently proves tha general fact, and all 
 testimonies show that the tendency still continues.* It is 
 probable that the repeal of the corn laws, necessitating a 
 change in the exports of Ireland from the products of tillage 
 to those of pasturage, would of itself have sufficed to bring 
 about this revolution in tenure. A grazing farm can only be 
 managed by a capitalist farmer, or by the landlord. But a 
 change involving so great a displacement of the population, 
 has been immensely facilitated and made more rapid by the 
 vast emigration, as well as by that greatest boon ever conferred 
 on Ireland by any Government, the Encumbered Estates Act ; 
 the best provisions of which have since, through the Landed 
 Estates Court, heen permanently incorporated into the social 
 
 * There is, however, a partial counter-current, of which I have not seen any 
 public notice. " A class of men, not very numerous, but sufficiently so to do 
 much mischief, have, through the Landed Estates Court, got into possession of 
 land in Ireland, who, of all classes, are least likely to recognise the duties of a 
 landlord's position. These are small traders in towns, who by dint of sheer 
 parsimony, frequently combined with money-lending at usurious rates, have 
 succeeded, in the course of a long life, in scraping together as much money as 
 will enable them to buy fifty or a hundred acres of land. These people never 
 think of turning farmers, but, proud of their position as landlords, proceed to 
 turn it to the utmost account. An instance of this kind came under my notice 
 lately. The tenants on the property were, at the time of the purchase, some 
 twelve years ago, in a tolerably comfortable state. Within that period their 
 rent has been raised three several times ; and it is now, as I am informed by the 
 priest of the district, nearly double its amount at the commencement of the 
 present proprietor's reign. The result is that the people, who were formerly in 
 tolerable comfort, are now reduced to poverty : two of them have left the 
 property and squatted near an adjacent turf bog, where they exist trusting for 
 support to occasional jobs. If this man is not shot, he will injure himself 
 through the deterioration of his property, but meantime he has been getting 
 eight or ten per cent on his purchase-money. This is by no means a rare case. 
 The scandal which such occurrences cause, casts its reflection on transactions of 
 a wholly different and perfectly legitimate kind, where the removal of the tenants 
 is simply an act of mercy for all parties. 
 
 "The anxiety of landlords to get rid of cottiers is also to some extent neu- 
 tralized by the anxiety of middlemen to get them. About one-fourth of the
 
 414 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 2. 
 
 system of the country. The greatest part of the soil of Ireland, 
 there is reason to helieve, is now farrred either by the land- 
 lords, or hy small capitalist farmers. That these farmers are 
 improving in circumstances, and accumulating capital, there is 
 considerable evidence, in particular the great increase of de- 
 posits in the banks of which they are the principal customers. 
 So far as that class is concerned, the chief thing still wanted 
 is security of tenure, or assurance of compensation for improve- 
 ments. The means of supplying these wants are now en- 
 gaging the attention of the most competent minds ; Judge 
 Longfield's address, in the autumn of 1864, and the sensation 
 created by it, are an era in the subject, and a point has now 
 been reached when we may confidently expect that within a 
 very few years something effectual will be done. 
 
 But what, meanwhile, is the condition of the displaced 
 cottiers, so far as they have not emigrated ; and of the whole 
 class who subsist by agricultural labour, without the occupa- 
 tion of any land ? As yet, their state is one of great poverty, 
 with but slight prospect of improvement. Money wages, in- 
 deed, have risen much above the wretched level of a gene- 
 ration ago : but the cost of subsistence has also risen so much 
 
 whole land of Ireland is held under long leases ; the rent received, when the 
 lease is of long standing, being generally greatly under the real value of the 
 land. It rarely happens that the land thus held is cultivated by the owner of 
 the lease : instead of this, he sublets it at a rack rent to small men, and lives 
 on the excess of the rent which he receives over that which he pays. Some of these 
 leases are always running out ; and as they draw towards their close, the 
 middleman has no other interest in the land than, at any cost of permanent 
 deterioration, to get the utmost out of it during the unexpired period of the 
 term. For this purpose the small cottier tenants precisely answer his turn. 
 Middlemen in this position are as anxious to obtain cottiers as tenants, as the 
 landlords are to be rid of them ; and the result is a transfer of this sort of tenant 
 from one class of estates to the other. The movement is of limited dimensions, 
 but it does exist, and so far as it exists, neutralizes the general tendency. 
 Perhaps it may be thought that this system will reproduce itself ; that the 
 same motives which led to the existence of middlemen will perpetuate the 
 class ; but there is no danger of this. Landowners are now perfectly alive to 
 the ruinous consequences of this system, however convenient for a time ; and a 
 clause against sub-letting is now becoming a matter of course in every lease," 
 (Private Communication from Profetsor Cairnet.)
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 415 
 
 above the old potato standard, that the real improvement is 
 not equal to the nominal ; and according to the best informa- 
 tion to which I have access, there is little appearance of an 
 improved standard of living among the class. The population, 
 in fact, reduced though it be, is still far beyond what the 
 country can support as a mere grazing district of England. It 
 may not, perhaps, be strictly true that, if the present number of 
 inhabitants are to be maintained at home, it can only be either 
 on the old vicious system of cottierism, or as small proprietors 
 growing their own food. The lands which will remain under 
 tillage would, no doubt, if sufficient security for outlay were 
 given, admit of a more extensive employment of labourers 
 by the small capitalist farmers ; and this, in the opinion of 
 some competent judges, might enable the country to support 
 the present number of its population in actual existence. But 
 no one will pretend that this resource is sufficient to maintain 
 them in any condition in which it is fit that the great body of 
 the peasantry of a country should exist. Accordingly the emigra- 
 tion, which for a time had fallen off, has, under the additional 
 stimulus of bad seasons, revived in all its strength. It is cal- 
 culated that within the year 1804 not less than 100,000 emi- 
 grants left the Irish shores. As far as regards the emigrants 
 themselves and their posterity, or the general interests of the 
 human race, it would be folly to regret this result. The 
 children of the immigrant Irish receive the education of Ame- 
 ricans, and enter, more rapidly and completely than would 
 have been possible in the country of their descent, into the 
 benefits of a higher state of civilization. In twenty or thirty 
 years they are not mentally distinguishable from other Ame- 
 ricans. The loss, and the disgrace, are England's : and it is 
 the English people and government whom it chiefly concerns 
 to ask themselves, how far it will be to their honour and ad- 
 vantage to retain the mere soil of Ireland, but to lose its inha- 
 bitants. With the present feelings of the Irish people, and 
 the direction which their hope of improving their condition 
 seems to be permanently taking, England, it is probable, 
 has only the choice between the depopulation of Ireland,
 
 416 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 2. 
 
 and the conversion of a part of the labouring population 
 into peasant proprietors. The truly insular ignorance of 
 her public men respecting a form of agricultural economy 
 which predominates in nearly every other civilized country, 
 makes it only too probable that she will choose the worse side 
 of the alternative. Yet there are germs of a tendency to the 
 formation of peasant proprietors on Irish soil, which require 
 only the aid of a friendly legislator to foster them ; as is shown 
 in the following extract from a private communication by my 
 eminent and valued friend, Professor Cairnes : 
 
 " On the sale, some eight or ten years ago, of the Thomond, 
 Portarlington, and Kingston estates, in the Encumbered 
 Estates Court, it was observed that a considerable number 
 of occupying tenants purchased the fee of their farms. I 
 have not been able to obtain any information as to what fol- 
 lowed that proceeding whether the purchasers continued to 
 farm their small properties, or under the mania of landlordism 
 tried to escape from their former mode of life. But there 
 are other facts which have a bearing on this question. In 
 those parts of the country where tenant-right prevails, the 
 prices given for the goodwill of a farm are enormous. The 
 following figures, taken from the schedule of an estate in the 
 neighbourhood of Newry, now passing through the Landed 
 Estates Court, will give an idea, but a very inadequate one, 
 of the prices which this mere customary right generally fetches. 
 
 " Statement showing the prices at which the tenant-right of 
 certain farms near Newry was sold : 
 
 Acres. Bent. 
 
 Lot 1 23 74 
 
 2 24 77 
 
 3 13 39 
 
 4 14 34 
 
 5 10 33 
 
 6 5 13 
 
 7 8 26 
 
 8 11 33 
 
 9 2 5 
 
 110 334
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 417 
 
 " The prices here represent on the whole about three years' 
 purchase of the rental : but this, as I have said, gives but an 
 inadequate idea of that which is frequently, indeed of that which 
 is ordinarily, paid. The right, being purely customary, will vary 
 in value with the confidence generally reposed in the good faith 
 of the landlord. In the present instance, circumstances have 
 come to light in the course of the proceedings connected with 
 the sale of the estate, which give reason to believe that the 
 confidence in this case was not high ; consequently, the rates 
 above given may be taken as considerably under those which 
 ordinarily prevail. Cases, as I am informed on the highest 
 authority, have in other parts of the country come to light, 
 also in the Landed Estates Court, in which the price given for 
 the tenant-right was equal to that of the whole fee of the 
 land. It is a remarkable fact that people should be found to 
 give, say twenty or twenty-five years' purchase, for land which 
 is still subject to a good round rent. Why, it will be asked, 
 do they not purchase land out and out for the same, or a 
 slightly larger, sum ? The answer to this question, I believe 
 is to be found in the state of our land laws. The cost of 
 transferring land in small portions is, relatively to the purchase 
 money, very considerable, even in the Landed Estates Court ; 
 while the goodwill of a farm may be transferred without any 
 cost at all. The cheapest conveyance that could be drawn in 
 that Court, where the utmost economy, consistent with the 
 present mode of remunerating legal services, is strictly en- 
 forced, would, irrespective of stamp duties, cost 101. a very 
 sensible addition to the purchase of a small peasant estate : 
 a conveyance to transfer a thousand acres might not cost more, 
 and would probably not cost much more. But in truth, the 
 mere cost of conveyance represents but the least part of the 
 obstacles which exist to obtaining land in small portions. A 
 far more serious impediment is the complicated state of the 
 ownership of land, which renders it frequently impracticable to 
 subdivide a property into such portions as would bring the 
 land within the reach of small bidders. The remedy for this 
 state of things, however, lies in measures of a more radical 
 VOL. i. E E
 
 418 BOOK II. CHAPTER X. 2. 
 
 sort than I fear it is at all probable that any House of Com- 
 mons we are soon likely to see would even with patience con- 
 sider. A registry of titles may succeed in reducing this com- 
 plex condition of ownership to its simplest expression ; but 
 where real complication exists, the difficulty is not to be got 
 rid of by mere simplicity of form ; and a registry of titles 
 while the powers of disposition at present enjoyed by land- 
 owners remain undiminished, while every settlor and testator 
 has an almost unbounded licence to multiply interests in land, 
 as pride, the passion for dictation, or mere whim may sug- 
 gest will, in my opinion, fail to reach the root of the evil. 
 The effect of these circumstances is to place an immense pre- 
 mium upon large dealings in land indeed in most cases 
 practically to preclude all other than large dealings ; and 
 while this is the state of the law, the experiment of 
 peasant proprietorship, it is plain, cannot be fairly tried. The 
 facts, however, which I have stated, show, I think, conclu- 
 sively, that there is no obstacle in the disposition of the people 
 to the introduction of this system." 
 
 I have concluded a discussion, which has occupied a space 
 almost disproportioned 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 un- 
 dividedly 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 coming discussions as closely as pos- 
 sible with those which have now for some time occupied us, I 
 shall commence with the subject of Wages.
 
 CHAPTEK XI. 
 
 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 
 disagreeableness. 
 
 Wages, like other things, may be regulated either by com- 
 petition 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 com- 
 petition. 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 modifying cir- 
 cumstance, 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 proportion 
 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, how- 
 ever, must be added all funds which, without 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 has been called 
 
 E E 2
 
 420 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 2. 
 
 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 important part, and to say that 
 wages depend on population and capital. It will be conve- 
 nient 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 any- 
 thing else. Wages (meaning, of course, the general rate) 
 cannot rise, but by an increase of the aggregate funds em- 
 ployed in hiring labourers, or a diminution in the number of 
 the competitors for hire; nor fall, except either by a diminu- 
 tion 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 contra- 
 diction to this doctrine, which it is incumbent on us to con- 
 sider 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 pro- 
 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 
 before. 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 
 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
 
 WAGES. 421 
 
 a slack demand for his commodity, forbears to employ 
 labourers 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 labour. 
 The capital remains unemployed for a time, during which 
 the labour market is overstocked, and wages fall. Afterwards 
 the demand revives, and perhaps becomes unusually brisk, 
 enabling the manufacturer to sell his commodity even faster 
 than he can produce it : his whole capital 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 employment, 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 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, devoted to 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 high 
 prices, causes also temporary high wages. But high prices, 
 in themselves, can only raise wages if the dealers, receiving
 
 422 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 2. 
 
 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 occasioned by them. The 
 same effect, however, is often attributed 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 otherwise 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 employments : in which case, while the first 
 half of the phenomenon 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 employ- 
 ments, 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 (meaning 
 of course money wages) vary with the price of food ; rising 
 when it rises, and falling when it falls. This opinion is, 
 I conceive, only partially true ; and in so far as true, in no 
 way affects the dependence of wages on the proportion
 
 WAGES. 423 
 
 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 
 Avages (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 con- 
 dition, and enable them barely to support the ordinary number 
 of children, it follows that if food grows permanently 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 people 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 labourers 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 neces- 
 saries, 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 com- 
 prehend all cases. He assumes, that there is everywhere a 
 minimum rate of wages : either the lowest with which it is 
 physically possible to keep up the population, or the lowest 
 with which the people will choose to do so. To this minimum 
 he assumes that the general rate of wages always tends ; 
 that they can never be lower, beyond the length of time 
 required for a diminished rate of increase to make itself felt,
 
 424 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 2. 
 
 and can never long continue higher. This assumption con- 
 tains sufficient truth to render it admissible for the purposes 
 of abstract 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 
 conclusions, true hypothetically, that is, granting the suppo- 
 sitions 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, hut 
 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 com- 
 fort habitual among the labourers, a rise in the price of food, 
 or any other disadvantageous change in their circumstances, 
 may operate in two ways : it may correct itself by a rise of 
 wages brought about through a gradual effect on the pru- 
 dential check to population ; or it may permanently 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 deteriorated 
 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 labouring classes, prac- 
 tically 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 per- 
 manent deterioration, from causes which operated by dimi- 
 nishing the demand for labour, and which, if population had 
 exercised its power of self-adjustment in obedience to the 
 previous standard of comfort, could only have had a tem- 
 porary effect : but unhappily the poverty in which the 
 class was plunged during a long series of years brought that
 
 WAGES. 425 
 
 previous standard into disuse ; and the next generation, 
 growing up without having possessed those pristine comforts, 
 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 en- 
 abled, 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 during this 
 interval of prosperity the standard of comfort regarded as 
 indispensable by the class, is permanently raised. Unfor- 
 tunately 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 labourer 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 insufficiently 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 produced 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 increase 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 repeal of the corn laws, considered merely as a 
 
 * 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 
 treatment of questions affecting the economical condition of the labouring 
 classes.
 
 426 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 2. 
 
 labourers' 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, make 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 im- 
 proved scale of comfort, the habits of this new generation in 
 respect to population become formed upon a higher mini- 
 mum, and the improvement in their condition becomes per- 
 manent. 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, not- 
 withstanding 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 consider- 
 ably 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 population extremely slow.f 
 
 * Supra, pp. 359 to 363. 
 
 t 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 suc- 
 cession 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
 
 WAGES. 427 
 
 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 comfort of the 
 class of hired labourers are more ample, it is for no other 
 reason than because capital bears a greater proportion 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 be- 
 tween 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 advan- 
 tage : and every scheme for their benefit, which does not pro- 
 ceed 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 bound- 
 less extent of unoccupied land, the growth of capital easily 
 keeps pace with the utmost possible increase of population, 
 and is chiefly retarded by the impracticability of obtaining 
 labourers enough. All, therefore, who can possibly be born, 
 can find employment without overstocking the market : every 
 
 could purchase a whole peck. The average price of wheat, according to the 
 Eton tables, for fifty years ending with 1715, was 41s. T%d. per quarter, and 
 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 require- 
 ments of the labouring class ; and this period is always noted as the date of " a 
 marked improvement 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 History of Prices, vol. i. pp. 38 to 61, and for the prices 
 of corn, the Appendix to that work.
 
 428 . BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. '3. 
 
 labouring family enjoys in abundance the necessaries, many 
 of the comforts, and some of the luxuries of life ; and, unless 
 in case of individual misconduct, or actual inability to work, 
 poverty does not, and dependence need not, exist. A 
 similar advantage, though in a less degree, is occasionally 
 enjoyed by some special class of labourers in old countries, 
 from an extraordinarily rapid growth, not of capital gene- 
 rally, but of the capital employed in a particular occupation. 
 So gigantic has been the progress 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 doubling. While, therefore, it has 
 attracted from other employments nearly all the hands which 
 geographical circumstances and the habits or inclinations of 
 the people rendered available ; and while the demand it 
 created for infant labour has enlisted the immediate pecu- 
 niary interest of the operatives in favour of promoting, instead 
 of restraining, the increase of population ; nevertheless wages 
 in the great seats of the manufacture are generally so high, 
 that the collective earnings of a family amount, on an average 
 of years, to a very satisfactory sum ; and there is, as yet, no 
 sign of permanent 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 occupation, 
 in which population can with impunity increase at its utmost 
 rate, are rare, and transitory. Very few are the countries 
 presenting the needful union of conditions. Either the in- 
 dustrial arts are backward and stationary, and capital there- 
 fore increases slowly ; or the effective desire of accumulation 
 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 occu- 
 pied. Though capital should for a time double itself simul- 
 taneously with population, if all this capital and population
 
 WAGES. 429 
 
 are to find employment on the same land, they cannot with- 
 out an unexampled succession of agricultural inventions 
 continue doubling the produce ; therefore, if wages do not 
 fall, profits must ; and when profits fall, increase of capital 
 is slackened. Besides, even if wages did not fall, the price of 
 food (as will be shown more fully hereafter) 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 impor- 
 tance is that of a new colony, or a country in circumstances 
 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 pre- 
 ventive 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 indi- 
 viduals or of the state, it is kept down by starvation or 
 disease. 
 
 Mr. Malthus has taken great pains to ascertain, for almost 
 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 ad- 
 vantage. Throughout Asia, and formerly in most European 
 countries in which the labouring classes were not in per- 
 sonal bondage, there is, or was, no restrainer of population
 
 430 BOOK IT. CHAPTER XI. 3. 
 
 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 un- 
 healthy habits of life among the adult population, and from 
 the almost periodical occurrence of destructive epidemics. 
 Throughout Europe these causes of shortened 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 districts : 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 ac- 
 companied even the most moderate deficiency of the potato 
 crop. Nevertheless, it cannot now be said that in any part of 
 Europe, population is principally 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 what- 
 ever. 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 im- 
 providence : being not only assured of support, on easy 
 terms, whenever out of employment, but, even when in em- 
 ployment, 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 economy, employed in preference to the unmarried ;
 
 WAGES. 431 
 
 which last premium on population still exists. Under such 
 prompting, the rural labourers acquired habits of reckless- 
 ness, which are so congenial to the uncultivated mind that 
 in whatever manner produced, they in general long survive 
 their immediate 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 assertion 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 restrain- 
 ing principle lies in the very great proportion of the popula- 
 tion 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 consider- 
 able 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 custom of 
 some sort, which, without intention on their part, insensibly 
 moulds their conduct, or affords immediate inducements 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 considerable amount of 
 information on this subject. Mr. Senior, in his preface to 
 those communications,* says that in the countries which 
 
 * Forming an Appendix (F) to the General Report of the Commissioners, 
 and also published by authority as a separate volume.
 
 432 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 4. 
 
 recognise a legal right to relief, " marriage on the part of 
 persons in the actual receipt of relief appears to be even-- 
 where 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 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 serve 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 Wurtemburg, that ' no man is allowed to marry till 
 his twenty-fifth year, on account of his military duties, unless 
 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 main- 
 tain a family or to establish themselves ; in large towns, say 
 from 800 to 1000 florins (from 661 13s. 4d. to 8-il, 3s. 4d.) ; 
 in smaller, from 400 to 500 florins ; in villages, 200 florins 
 (161 13s. 4d.)'"* 
 
 The minister at Munich says, " The great cause why the 
 number of the poor is kept so low in this country arises from 
 the 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 
 
 * Preface, p. xxxix.
 
 WAGES. 483 
 
 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."* 
 
 At Lubeck, " marriages among the poor are delayed by 
 the necessity a man is under, first, of previously proving that 
 he 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."f At Frank- 
 fort, "the government prescribes no age for marrying, but 
 the permission to marry is only granted on proving a 
 livelihood."! 
 
 The allusion, in some of these statements, to military 
 duties, points out an indirect obstacle to marriage, interposed 
 by the laws of some countries in which there is no direct 
 legal restraint. In Prussia, for instance, the institutions 
 which compel every able-bodied man to serve for several 
 years in the army, at the time of life at which imprudent 
 marriages are most likely to take place, are probably 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 dis- 
 trict that they are able to support a family, are rendered 
 liable to a heavy fine. In Lucerne, Argovie, Unterwalden, 
 
 * Preface, p. xxxiii., or p. 554 of the Appendix itself. 
 
 f Appendix, p. 419. J Ibid. p. 567. 
 
 VOL. I. F F
 
 434 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 5. 
 
 and I believe, St. Gall, Schweitz, and Uri, laws of this cha- 
 racter 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 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.t In Norway, where the labour is chiefly 
 
 * Kay, op. cit. i. 68. 
 
 t "En general," says Sismondi, "le nombre des maltres e'tait fixe" dans 
 chaque communaute", et le maltre pouvait seul tenir boutique, acheter et vendre 
 pour son compte. Chaque maltre 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 maltre pouvait de meme tenir un 
 nombre limit^ d'ouvriers, qui portaient le nom de coinpagnons ; et, dans les 
 metiers ou Ton ne pouvait avoir qu'un seul apprenti, on ne pouvait avoir non 
 plus qu'un seul, ou que deux coinpagnons. Aucun homme ne pouvait acheter, 
 vendre, ou travailler dans un metier, s'il n'e'tait apprenti, compagnon, ou 
 maltre ; aucun homme ne pouvait devenir compagnon s'il n'avait servi un 
 nombre d'anne"es determine' comme apprenti, ou devenir maltre s'il n'avait 
 servi un nombre e"gal d'anne"es comme compagnon ; et s'il n'avait de plus fait 
 son chef-d'oeuvre, ou execute" un travail designe dans son metier, qui devait etre 
 juge" par sa jurande. On voit que cette organisation mettait entierement dans 
 la main des maltres le renouvellement des corps de metier. Eux seuls pouvaient 
 recevoir des apprentis ; mais ils n'e"taient point obliges a en prendre ; aussi se 
 faisaient-ils payer cette faveur, et souvent a uu prix tres-eleve" ; en sorte qu'un 
 jeune homme ne pouvait entrer dans un metier s'il n'avait, au pre'alable, la 
 somme qu'il fallait payer pour son apprentissage, et celle qui lui etait ne"cessaire 
 pour se sustenter pendant la dure'e de cet apprentissage ; car pendant quatre, 
 cinq, ou sept ans, tout son travail appartenait a son maltre. Sa de"pendance de 
 ce maitre e'tait tout aussi longtemps absolue; car un seul acte de la volonte", ou 
 m6me du caprice de celui-ci, pouvait lui fermer I'entre'e des professions lucra- 
 tives. L'apprenti, devenu compagnon, acquerait un peu plus de liberte" ; il 
 pouvait s'engager avec quel maltre il voulait, passer de 1'un a 1'autre ; et comme 
 I'entre'e au compagnonage n'e'tait ouverte que par 1'apprentissage, il commengait 
 a profiler du monopole dont il avait souffert, et il e'tait k peu pres sur de se faire 
 bien payer un travail que personne ne pouvait faire, si cc n'est lui. Cependant
 
 WAGES. 435 
 
 agricultural, it is forbidden by law to engage a farm-servant 
 for less than a year ; which was the general English practice 
 until the poor-laws destroyed it, by enabling the farmer 
 to cast his labourers on parish pay whenever he did not 
 immediately require their labour. In consequence 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 neighbourhood 
 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 Cum- 
 berland 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 neighbour, they 
 succeed to the ownership or lease of a cottage farm. What 
 is called surplus labour does not here exist."* I have men- 
 tioned in another chapter the check to population in England 
 during the last century, from the difficulty of obtaining a 
 
 il de"pendait de la jurande pour obtenir la maltrise ; aussi ne se regardait-il 
 point encore comme assure" de son sort, comme ayant un e"tat. En general, il 
 ne se mariait point qu'il ne fut passe mattre. 
 
 " II est bien certain, et comme fait et comme theorie, que 1'etablissement des 
 corps de metier empechait et devait empe'cher la naissance d'une population 
 eurabondante. D'apres les statuts de presque tous les corps de metier, un 
 homme ne pouvait 6tre passe inaitre qu'apres vingt-cinq ans ; mais s'il n'avait 
 pas un capital a 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 regus 
 maltres ; quand ils auraient 6te assez imprudens pour le desirer, aucun pere 
 n'aurait voulu donner sa fille a un homme qui n'avait point d'etat." Nouveaux 
 Principes, book iv. ch. 10. See also Adam Smith, book i, ch. 10, part 2. 
 
 * See Thornton on Over-Population, page 18, and the authorities there 
 cited. 
 
 F F 2
 
 436 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 6. 
 
 separate dwelling place.* Other customs restrictive of popu- 
 lation 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 parishes 
 owned by one or a very small number of landowners, the 
 increase of resident labourers is still occasionally 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 elsewhere. The sur- 
 rounding 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 combination, enables him to 
 defeat the attempt, very profitably to himself, by covering 
 that acre with cottages. To meet these complaints an 
 Act has within the last few years been passed by Parlia- 
 ment, by which the poor-rate is made a charge not on the 
 parish, but on the whole union. This enactment, in 
 other respects very beneficial, removes the small remnant 
 of what was once a check to population: the value of 
 which, however, from the narrow limits of its operation, 
 had become very trifling. 
 
 6. In the case, therefore, of the common agricultural 
 labourer, the checks to population may almost be considered 
 as non-existent. If the growth of the towns, and of the 
 
 * Supra, p. 201.
 
 WAGES. 
 
 437 
 
 capital there employed, by which the factory operatives are 
 maintained at their present average rate of wages notwith- 
 standing 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 manufactures 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. Without carrying our anticipations 
 forward to such a calamity, which the great and growing in- 
 telligence of the factory population would, it may be hoped, 
 avert, by an adaptation of their habits to their circumstances ; 
 the existing condition of the labourers of some of the most 
 exclusively agricultural 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 
 common 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, lamen- 
 tations 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
 
 438 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 6. 
 
 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 commonly, in the other, 
 helpless submission to a revolting abuse of power. 
 
 So long as mankind remained in a semi -barbarous state, 
 with the indolence and the few wants of a savage, it probably 
 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 communities. But in Europe 
 the time, if it ever existed, is long past, when a life of pri- 
 vation had the smallest tendency to make men either better 
 workmen or more civilized beings. It is, on the contrary, 
 evident, that if the agricultural labourers 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 pretending that to refute that, is to disprove the 
 principle of population. Some, for instance, have achieved 
 an easy victory over a passing remark of Mr. Malthus, 
 hazarded chiefly by way of illustration, that the increase of 
 food may perhaps be assumed to take place in an arithmetical
 
 WAGES. 439 
 
 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 immense importance to a correction 
 which more recent political 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 means of subsistence. The asser- 
 tion was true in the sense in which they meant it, namely, 
 that population would in most circumstances increase faster 
 than the means of subsistence, 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 interpret 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 allowed 
 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 progressive 
 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
 
 440 BOOK II. CHAPTER XI. 6. 
 
 to consider is, whether that is a sufficient and suitable 
 provision for a labourer ? for if not, population 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 encouragements 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, 
 which will only reconcile itself to the unwelcome 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 improving 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 multiplication. This will be the object 
 of the next chapter.
 
 CHAPTER 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 object 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 advocates 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 ; con- 
 sisting of delegates from the workpeople and from the 
 employers, who meeting in conference, should agree upon a 
 rate of wages, and promulgate it from authority, 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 in- 
 teresting themselves for the labouring classes, than the 
 labouring people themselves) are shy of admitting the inter- 
 ference of authority in contracts for labour : they fear that if 
 law intervened, it would intervene rashly and ignorantly ; 
 they are convinced that two parties, with opposite interests, 
 attempting to adjust those interests by negotiation through
 
 442 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 1. 
 
 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 practical 
 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 existing 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 com- 
 petition, fall lower. There are strange notions afloat con- 
 cerning the nature of competition. Some people seem to 
 imagine that its effect is something indefinite ; that the com- 
 petition of sellers may lower prices, and the competition of 
 labourers may lower wages, down to zero, or some unassign- 
 able 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 is 
 made to admit all the labourers to a share in the distribution 
 of the wages-fund. If they fell below this point, a portion
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 
 
 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 com- 
 petition distributes the whole existing wages-fund among the 
 whole labouring population ; if law or opinion succeeds in 
 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 compulsory 
 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 to work at " reasonable wages," it is supposed 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 popu- 
 lation, but by an increase of capital. 
 
 2. If this claim on society could be limited to the exist- 
 ing generation ; if nothing more were necessary than a com- 
 pulsory accumulation, sufficient to provide permanent em- 
 ployment at ample wages for the existing numbers of the 
 people ; such a proposition would have no more strenuous 
 supporter than myself. Society mainly consists of those 
 who live by bodily labour; and if society, that is, if the 
 labourers, lend their physical force to protect individuals in 
 the enjoyment of superfluities, they are entitled to do so, and 
 have always done so, with the reservation of a power to tax
 
 444 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 those superfluities for purposes of public utility ; among which 
 purposes the subsistence of the people 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 descen- 
 dants 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, inefficiency 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 sup- 
 porters of the droit au travail in France ; without giving to 
 any unemployed labourer a right to demand support in a 
 particular place or from a particular functionary. The power 
 of dismissal as regards individual labourers, would then 
 remain ; the government only undertaking to create additional 
 employment 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 
 could not, as we have so often shown, increase the produce
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 445 
 
 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 constant 
 ratio, while the increase of produce went on in a diminishing 
 ratio, the surplus would in time be wholly absorbed ; taxation 
 for the support of the poor would engross the whole income 
 of the country ; the payers and the receivers 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 educated 
 persons is no longer pardonable. It is doubly discreditable 
 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 pretension 
 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 astonish- 
 ment, what sort of people it could be among whom such 
 preachers could find proselytes. 
 
 It would be possible for the state to guarantee employ-
 
 446 BOOK 11. CHAPTER XII. 2. 
 
 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. Kestrictions 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 multiplying 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 situation 
 in which their condition manifestly depends upon their num- 
 bers, 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 regulation of their wages 
 from their own control ; guarantee to them a certain payment, 
 either by law, or by the feeling 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 of preserving them in that state. You will 
 only make them indignantly claim the continuance of your 
 guarantee, to themselves 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 uncombined with systematic 
 legal precautions against over-population. The famous Act
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 417 
 
 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 tendencies, 
 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 examination of dif- 
 ferent 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 com- 
 patibility 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 collection of facts, experimen- 
 tally ascertained in parishes scattered 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, con- 
 sisting 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 mem- 
 ber of the community needs be abandoned to chance ; that 
 society can and therefore ought to insure every individual 
 belonging to it against the extreme of want ; that the condi- 
 tion even of those who are unable to find their own support, 
 needs not be one of physical suffering, or the dreadj of it, 
 but only of restricted indulgence, and enforced rigidity of 
 discipline. This is surely something gained for humanity,
 
 448 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 3. 
 
 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 consider another 
 class of popular remedies, which do not profess to interfere 
 with freedom of contract ; which leave wages to be fixed 
 by the competition of the market, but, when they are con- 
 sidered insufficient, endeavour by some subsidiary resource 
 to make up to the labourers for the insufficiency. 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 seasons, and consequent 
 high prices of food, the wages of labour had become in- 
 adequate to afford to the families of the agricultural 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 country 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 sanc- 
 tioned, the immediate interest of the farmers, whom it 
 enabled to throw part of the support of their labourers upon 
 the other inhabitants of the parish, led to a great and rapid 
 extension of it. The principle 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 
 usually granted for every child. So direct and positive an
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 449 
 
 encouragement 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 benefit of the supposition. 
 
 It is obvious that this is merely another mode of fixing 
 a minimum of wages; no otherwise differing from the direct 
 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 objec- 
 tions 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 consent, 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 accus- 
 tomed 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 num- 
 bers, there are unemployed labourers enough in the work- 
 house 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 
 
 VOL. i. o G
 
 450 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 4. 
 
 rate than had been known in England before. During the 
 last century, under a rather rigid administration of the poor- 
 laws, population increased slowly, and agricultural wages 
 were considerably above the starvation point. Under the 
 allowance system the people increased so fast, and wages 
 sank so low, that with wages and allowance together, fami- 
 lies were worse off than they had been before with wages 
 alone. When the labourer depends solely on wages, there is 
 a virtual minimum. 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 defi- 
 ciency is to be made up by a forced contribution from all 
 who have anything to give, wages may fall below starvation 
 point ; they may fall almost to zero. This deplorable system, 
 worsa than any other form of poor-law abuse yet invented, 
 inasmuch as it pauperizes not merely the unemployed part of 
 the population but the whole, received a severe check from 
 the Poor Law of 1834 : I wish it could be said that there are 
 no signs of its revival. 
 
 4. But while this is generally condemned, 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 
 Allotment 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 consumption, 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 gain several
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 451 
 
 pounds by it even at so high a rent.* The patrons of the 
 system make it a great point that the allotment 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 precau- 
 tions 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 addition to the gross 
 produce of the country. There is also a difference between 
 helping a labourer by means of his own industry, and subsi- 
 dizing him in a mode which tends to make him careless and 
 idle. On both these points, allotments have an unquestion- 
 able advantage over parish allowances. 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 
 
 * See the Evidence on the subject of Allotments, collected by the Com- 
 missioners of Poor Law Enquiry. 
 
 G G 2
 
 452 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 4. 
 
 which they set upon the gratification of their instincts, and 
 upon the increase 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 
 sometimes told, renders the labourer provident. Property in 
 land does so ; or what is equivalent to property, occupation 
 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 provident ? 
 Testimonies, it is true, abound, and I do not seek to dis- 
 credit 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, com- 
 posed of the most favourable specimens of the labouring 
 people : which, however, is attended with the inconvenience 
 that the persons to whom the system facilitates marrying and 
 having children, are precisely those who would otherwise be 
 the most likely to practise prudential restraint. As Rffect- 
 ing the general condition of the labouring 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 without 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 allowance 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 gene- 
 rally adopted in England, it would equally have broken 
 down the practical restraints 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
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 453 
 
 allotment would have been, as wages plus the allowance 
 actually were, no more than equal to the former wages with- 
 out any allotment. The only difference in favour of allot- 
 ments would have heen, 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 with- 
 out ownership, hy 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 neces- 
 saries, 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 comforts. Wages are likely 
 to be high where none are compelled by necessity to sell 
 their labour. " People who have at home some kind of pro- 
 perty 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 necessity or the 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 diffused among the people."* 
 There are parts of the Continent, where, even of the inha- 
 bitants of the towns, scarcely one seems to be exclusively 
 dependent on his ostensible employment ; 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, 
 
 * Laing's Notes of a Traveller, p. 456.
 
 454 BOOK II. CHAPTER XII. 4. 
 
 leaving them under an undi mini shed necessity of selling their 
 labour for wages in an overstocked market. Their land would 
 then merely enable them to exist on smaller wages, and to 
 carry their multiplication 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 
 regard to consequences, and that if the condition of the 
 existing generation could be greatly improved, which he 
 thinks might be done by the allotment system, their succes- 
 sors would grow up with an increased standard of require- 
 ments, 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 
 happened 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 genera- 
 tion to come, as to raise up from childhood a labouring popula- 
 tion 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 encouragement to acquire 
 by industry and saving, the means of buying it outright : a 
 permission which, if extensively made use of, would be a 
 kind of education in forethought and frugality to the entire 
 
 * See Thornton on Over-Population, ch. viii.
 
 POPULAR REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 455 
 
 class, the effects of which might not cease with the occasion. 
 The benefit would however arise, not from what was given 
 them, hut 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 
 minds and habits of the people. While these are unaffected, 
 any contrivance, even if successful, for temporarily improving 
 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 sub* 
 stituting any others.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 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 them- 
 selves ; without interests or sentiments as citizens and mem- 
 bers of society, and with a sense of injustice 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 des- 
 tinies 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 sympathizes, as it can yield without injury to any one, and 
 letting the unmeaning bustle of so-called civilized existence 
 roll by unheeded. But there is no ground for such a view of 
 human affairs. Poverty, like most social evils, exists because
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 457 
 
 men follow their brute instincts without due consideration. 
 But society is possible, precisely because man is not neces- 
 sarily 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 control. It has artificialized large portions of man- 
 kind 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 statesmanship have vied with one another in 
 incitements to marriage, 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 them- 
 selves, think it impugns the wisdom of Providence to sup- 
 pose 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 confusion 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 mismeasured and confounded on one of the sub- 
 jects most momentous 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. The diseases of society can, no more than corporal 
 maladies, be prevented or cured without being spoken about
 
 458 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 1. 
 
 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 
 frequently told it ; and who tells them that they have any 
 duties in the matter in question, while they keep within matri- 
 monial limits ? Who meets with the smallest condemnation, 
 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 incon- 
 tinence ? While a man who is intemperate in drink, is dis- 
 countenanced 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 department 
 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 art 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 ?
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 459 
 
 "Lorsque des prejuges dan gereux," says Sismondi,* "ne 
 sont point accredites, lorsqu'une morale contraire a nos vrais 
 devoirs envers les autres et surfcout envers les creatures qfti 
 nous doivent la vie, n'est point enseignee au nom de 1'auto- 
 rite la plus sacree, aucun homrae 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 elever. Ce dernier compte a bon droit 
 que ses enfans devront se coatenter du sort dans lequel il a 
 vecu ; aussi doit-il desirer que la generation naissante repre- 
 sents 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 
 femrne ; que sa fille trouve dans une autre maison precise- 
 ment le sort qu'il donnera a 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, some increase of 
 numbers would be admissible, but that is a question of detail, 
 not of principle. " Une fois que cette famille est formee, 
 la justice et 1'humanite exigent qu'il s'impose la rneme con- 
 trainte a laquelle se soumettent les celibataires. Lorsqu'on 
 voit combien est petit, en tout pays, le nombre des enfans 
 naturels, on doit reconnaitre que cette contrainte est suffisam- 
 ment 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 a 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 contemporains 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 
 
 * Nouveaux Principes, liv. vii. ch. 5.
 
 460 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 prudence in regard to the increase of their families, because 
 they have hitherto stopt short of that point, show an inability 
 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 desirable. 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 fore- 
 thought, population is, comparatively speaking, efficiently 
 repressed. What is practised as prudence is still not recog- 
 nised as duty ; the talkers and writers are mostly on the 
 other side, even in France, where a sentimental 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. Nearly all who 
 are not labourers themselves, are employers of labour, 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, better 
 things might be expected, and the gentry of England are 
 usually charitable. But charitable people have human infir- 
 mities, and would, very often, be secretly not a little dissatis-
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 461 
 
 fied if no one needed their charity : it is from them one 
 oftenest hears the base doctrine, that God has decreed there 
 shall 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 taxation 
 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 any- 
 thing important except his object; it is scarcely wonderful 
 that since the population doctrine was first promulgated, nine- 
 tenths of the talk has always been against it, and the remain- 
 ing tenth only audible at intervals ; and that it has not yet 
 penetrated far among those who might be expected 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 com- 
 petition of too great numbers was the special cause of 
 their poverty ; so that every labourer looked (with Sismondi) 
 upon every other who had more than the number of children 
 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 particular 
 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 connected ideas of 
 spirit and power with the strength of the instinct, and of infe- 
 riority with its moderation or absence ; a perversion of senti-
 
 462 BOOK 11. CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 ment caused by its being tbe means, and the stamp, of a 
 dominion exercised over otber human beings. 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 : end it is also true, that one soldier'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 attends on conduct by any one indi- 
 vidual, which if pursued by a majority, everybody can see 
 would be fatal. Men are seldom found to brave the general 
 opinion of their class, unless supported either by some prin- 
 ciple 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 
 seldom by the choice of the wife that families are too nume- 
 rous; on her devolves (along with all the physical suffering 
 and at least a full share of the privations) the whole of the 
 intolerable domestic drudgery resulting from the excess. To 
 be relieved from it would be hailed as a blessing by multi- 
 tudes of women who now never 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 con- 
 sider 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 regulation of 
 the numbers of families, the respectable and well-conducted
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 463 
 
 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 ; and 
 there would be then an evident justification for converting 
 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 voluntarily consented 
 to take upon themselves. There would be no need, how- 
 ever, of legal sanctions, if women were admitted, 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 con- 
 fined 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 re 
 mark, that unless a satisfactory answer can be made to these 
 two questions, the industrial system prevailing in this coun- 
 try, and regarded by many writers as the ne plus ultra of civi- 
 lization 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, whether, of 
 this state of things, over-population and a degraded condition 
 of the labouring class are the inevitable consequence. If a
 
 464 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 2. 
 
 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 the 
 modes of applying industry), to bring the labouring people 
 under the influence of stronger and more obvious induce- 
 ments 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, however, in 
 no way mysterious. The dependence of wages on the num- 
 ber of the competitors for employment, is so far from hard 
 of comprehension, or unintelligible to the labouring classes, 
 that by great bodies of them it is already recognised 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 im- 
 pose, 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 ; secondly, 
 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 better 
 understanding of their collective interests : thirdly and lastly,
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 465 
 
 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 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 incapable, 
 either from the uncultivated state of their intelligence, or 
 from poverty, which leaving them neither the fear of worse, 
 nor the smallest hope of better, makes them careless 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, coinci- 
 dently 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 pro- 
 gress is towards providing anything better even for the 
 classes to whom society professes to give the very best 
 education 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; i& qualify them for 
 forming a sound practical judgment of the circumstances, 
 by which they are surrounded. Whatever, in the intel- 
 
 VOL. I. H H
 
 466 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 3. 
 
 lectual department, can be superadded to this, is chiefly orna- 
 mental ; while this is the indispensable groundwork on which 
 education 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. 
 
 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 certain, even 
 without any direct inculcation, to raise up a public opinion 
 by which intemperance and improvidence 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 subsis- 
 tence, who have been made reckless by always living from 
 hand to mouth. Individuals 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 charity, 
 and not only without weakening, but on the contrary strength- 
 ening, every incentive to industry, and every motive to fore- 
 thought.
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 467 
 
 4. The first is, a great national measure of colonization. 
 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 prefe- 
 rence, as Mr. Wakefield proposes, to young couples, or 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 prospec- 
 tive 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 re- 
 quired, 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 con- 
 stitutes an adequate remuneration for the abstinence of the 
 possessor, and which is therefore sent abroad for investment, 
 or wasted at home in reckless speculations. That portion of 
 the income of the country which is habitually ineffective 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 I 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 portion 
 
 H H 2
 
 468 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 4. 
 
 should first be sold or assigned as is sufficient to compen- 
 sate 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 indivi- 
 duals of the labouring class who would reclaim and 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 supplied by the parish, 
 or by the state ; interest for the advance, at the rate yielded 
 by the public funds, being laid on as a perpetual quit-rent, 
 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 necessary, be made indivi- 
 sible by law ; though, if the plan worked in the manner de- 
 signed, I should not apprehend any objectionable degree of 
 subdivision. 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 would give security for the price. The de- 
 sire to possess one of these small properties would pro- 
 bably become, as on the Continent, an inducement to pru- 
 dence and economy pervading the whole labouring popu- 
 lation ; 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 he 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
 
 REMEDIES FOR LOW WAGES. 469 
 
 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 
 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 reserved 
 until the improvement of public opinion and of education 
 shall raise up politicians who will not think that merely 
 because a scheme promises much, the part of statesmanship is 
 to have nothing to do with it. 
 
 I have left the preceding paragraphs as they were written, 
 since they remain true in principle, though it is no longer 
 urgent to apply these specific recommendations to the present 
 state of this country. The extraordinary cheapening of the 
 means of transport, which is one of the great scientific 
 achievements of the age, and the knowledge which nearly all 
 classes of the people have now acquired, or are in the way of 
 acquiring, of the condition of the labour market in remote 
 parts of the world, have opened up a spontaneous emigration 
 from these islands to the new countries beyond the ocean, 
 which does not tend to diminish, but to increase ; and which, 
 without any national measure of systematic colonization, may 
 prove sufficient to effect a material rise of wages in Great 
 Britain, as it has already done in Ireland, and to maintain 
 that rise unimpaired for one or more generations. Emigra- 
 tion, instead of an occasional vent, is becoming a steady outlet 
 for superfluous numbers ; and this new fact in modern his- 
 tory, together with the flush of prosperity occasioned by free 
 trade, have granted to this overcrowded country a temporary 
 breathing-time, capable of being employed in accomplishing 
 those moral and intellectual improvements in all classes of the 
 people, the very poorest included, which would render im-
 
 470 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIII. 4. 
 
 probable any relapse into the over-peopled state. Whether 
 this golden opportunity will be properly used, depends on the 
 wisdom of our councils ; and whatever depends on that, is 
 always in a high degree precarious. The grounds of hope are, 
 that there has been no time in our history when mental pro- 
 gress has depended so little on governments, and so much on 
 the general disposition of the people; none in which the spirit 
 of improvement has extended to so many branches of human 
 affairs at once, nor in which all kinds of suggestions tending 
 to the public good in every department, from the humblest 
 physical to the highest moral or intellectual, were heard with 
 so little prejudice, and had so good a chance of becoming 
 known and being fairly considered.
 
 CHAPTER 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 ordi- 
 nary or average labour : without reference to the existence 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 con- 
 sidered ; but as far as it goes, his analysis is tolerably sue 
 cessful. 
 
 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 
 disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, 
 the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of 
 learning them ; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of em- 
 ployment in them ; fourthly, the small or great trust which 
 
 * Wealth of Nations, book i. ch. 10.
 
 472 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 1. 
 
 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 vary 
 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 journey- 
 man weaver earns less than a journeyman smith. His work 
 is not always easier, but it is much cleanlier." A more pro- 
 bable 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 profes- 
 sions. 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 employments, that of public execu- 
 tioner, 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,* 
 
 * Mr. Muggeridge's Report to the Handloom Weavers Inquiry Commission.
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 47$ 
 
 "as feeling 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 sacri- 
 ficed to indulgence or recreation. There is scarcely another 
 condition 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, 
 discharged 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 employ- 
 ment almost every day in the year that he is able to work" 
 (the interruptions of business arising from overstocked markets, 
 or from a suspension of demand, or from a commercial crisis, 
 must be excepted). "A mason or bricklayer, on the con- 
 trary, can work neither in hard frost nor in foul weather, and 
 his employment at all other times depends upon the occa- 
 sional 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 compensation 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,
 
 474 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 1. 
 
 therefore, are not so much the recompense of their skill, as 
 the compensation for the inconstancy of their employ- 
 ment 
 
 " When the inconstancy of the employment is combined 
 with the hardship, disagreeableness, and dirtiness of the work, 
 it sometimes raises the wages of the most common labour 
 above those of the most skilled 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, dirtiness, and disagreeable- 
 ness, almost equals that of colliers ; and from the unavoidable 
 irregularity in the arrival of coal-ships, the employment of 
 the greater part of them is necessarily very inconstant. If 
 colliers, therefore, commonly earn double and triple the wages 
 of common labour, 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 
 labour in London. How extravagant soever these earnings 
 may appear, if they were more than sufficient to compensate 
 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 reduce them 
 to a lower rate." 
 
 These inequalities of remuneration, which are supposed to 
 compensate for the disagreeable circumstances of particular 
 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
 
 DIFFEREXCES OF WAGES. 475 
 
 view of the state of facts, to present this as the relation which 
 generally exists between agreeable and disagreeable employ- 
 ments. The really exhausting and the really repulsive 
 labours, 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 every one is anxious to 
 have, can still exercise a choice. The undesirable must 
 take what they can get. The more revolting the occupation, 
 the more certain it is to receive the minimum of remunera- 
 tion, 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 employments. Partly 
 from this cause, and partly from the natural and artificial 
 monopolies which will be spoken of presently, the inequali- 
 ties of wages are generally in an opposite direction to the 
 equitable principle of compensation erroneously represented 
 by Adam Smith as the general law of the remuneration of 
 labour. The hardships and the earnings, instead of being 
 directly proportional, as in any just arrangements of society 
 they would be, are generally in an inverse ratio to one 
 another. 
 
 One of the points best illustrated by Adam Smith, is the 
 influence exercised 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 
 sufficient to make up, in the general estimation, for those 
 adverse chances. But, owing to another principle of human 
 nature, if the reward comes in the shape of a few great prizes,
 
 476 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 1. 
 
 it usually attracts competitors in such numbers, that the 
 average remuneration may be reduced not only to zero, but 
 even to a negative quantity. The success of lotteries proves 
 that this is possible : since the aggregate body of adventurers 
 in lotteries necessarily lose, otherwise the undertakers could 
 not gain. The case of certain professions is considered by 
 Adam Smith to be similar. " The probability that any 
 particular person shall ever be qualified for the employment 
 to which he is educated, is very different in different occupa- 
 tions. In the greater part of mechanic trades, success is 
 almost certain, but very uncertain in the liberal professions. 
 Put your son apprentice to a shoemaker, 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 counsellor-at-law, who, perhaps, at 
 near forty years of age, begins to make something by his 
 profession, ought to receive the retribution, not only of his own 
 so tedious and expensive 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 generally exceed the latter. But make the same compu- 
 tation 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."
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 477 
 
 Whether this is true in our own day, when the gains of 
 the few are incomparably greater than in the time of Adam 
 Smith, hut also the unsuccessful aspirants much more nume- 
 rous, those who have the appropriate information must 
 decide. It does not, however, seem to be sufficiently consi- 
 dered by Adam Smith, that the prizes which he speaks of 
 comprise not the fees of counsel only, but the places of emo- 
 lument and honour to which their profession gives access, 
 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 people 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 prospect of 
 hazards from which we can hope to extricate ourselves 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 and address can be of no avail. 
 In trades which are known to be very unwholesome, the 
 wages of labour are always remarkably high. Unwholesome- 
 ness 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
 
 478 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 2. 
 
 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, 
 not only of equal, but of much superior ingenuity; on 
 account 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. Such 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 advan- 
 tage ; 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 uncommon, those 
 who can make it appear that they possess it are able to take 
 advantage of the peculiarity, and obtain higher pay in pro- 
 portion to its rarity. This opens a class of considerations 
 which Adam Smith, and most other political economists, 
 have taken into far too little account, and from inattention 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 remunerated. 
 If an artizan must work several years at learning his trade 
 before he can earn anything, and several years more before 
 becoming sufficiently skilful for its finer operations, 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
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 479 
 
 payment, and an indemnity for the expenses of his educa- 
 tion. 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 the number of 
 years he can expect to live and to be in working condition. 
 This, which is necessary to place the skilled employments, 
 all circumstances taken together, on the same level of advan- 
 tage with the unskilled, is the smallest difference 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 explained by apprentice laws, 
 and the rules of corporations which restrict admission into 
 many of the skilled employments. 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 unskilled 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 compensate them for that trouble, at the 
 ordinary rate at which labour is remunerated. But the fact 
 that a course of instruction 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 pos- 
 sibility of any such competition. Until lately, all employ- 
 ments which required even the humble education of reading 
 and writing, could be recruited only from a select class, the 
 majority having had no opportunity of acquiring those attain- 
 ments. 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
 
 480 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 2. 
 
 educated 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 he 
 accounted for on the principle of competition. A clerk from 
 whom nothing is required but the mechanical labour of copy- 
 ing, gains more than an equivalent for his mere exertion 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 gene- 
 rally a place for life. The higher rate of his remuneration, 
 therefore, must be partly ascribed to monopoly, the small 
 degree of education required being not even yet so generally 
 diffused as to call forth the natural number of competitors ; 
 and partly to the remaining influence of an ancient custom, 
 which requires that clerks should maintain the dress 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 produce. This is the case with some 
 working watchmakers, and with the makers of some astrono- 
 mical and optical instruments. 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 em- 
 ployments which it is attempted to confine to persons of a 
 certain social rank, such as what are called the liberal pro- 
 fessions ; into which a person of what is considered too low a 
 class of society, is not easily admitted, and if admitted, does 
 not easily succeed. 
 
 So complete, indeed, has hitherto been the separation, so 
 strongly marked the line of demarcation, between the different
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 481 
 
 grades of labourers, as to be almost equivalent to an here- 
 ditary distinction of caste; each employment being chiefly 
 recruited from the children of those already employed in it, 
 or in employments of the same rank with it in social esti- 
 mation, or from the children of persons who, if originally of 
 a lower rank, have succeeded in raising themselves 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 employments 
 are in a similar case ; and unskilled labourers, with occa- 
 sional 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 popula- 
 tion, 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 labourers, 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 disabilities which chained people 
 to their hereditary condition are fast wearing away, and every 
 class is exposed to increased and increasing competition 
 from at least the class immediately below it. The general 
 relaxation of conventional 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 pro- 
 duce, 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 un- 
 skilled is, without doubt, very much greater than is justifiable ; 
 VOL. i. II
 
 482 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 3. 
 
 but it is desirable that tbis should be corrected by raising 
 the unskilled, 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 
 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 compe- 
 tition, by offering eleemosynary instruction to a much larger 
 class of persons than could have obtained the same advan- 
 tages 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 schoolmasters, 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 sometimes 
 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
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 483 
 
 otherwise pretend to follow them. In all Christian 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 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 a much smaller recompense 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 considered as of the same 
 nature with the wages of a journeyman. 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, supposing 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 suffi- 
 cient maintenance and encouragement to curates, the cures 
 have in several places been meanly supplied, the bishop is 
 
 * " See the Statute of Labourers, 25 Edw. III." 
 
 I I 2
 
 484 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 8. 
 
 therefore empowered to appoint by writing under his hand 
 and seal a sufficient certain stipend or allowance, not exceed- 
 ing fifty, and not less than twenty pounds a year.' Forty 
 pounds a year is reckoned at present 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 frequently earned hy common 
 labourers in many country parishes. 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 competitors ; 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 those 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
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 485 
 
 and physicians probably would be in upon the foregoing sup- 
 position. 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. 
 
 " Before the invention of the art of printing, the only 
 employment by which a man of letters could make anything 
 by his talents, was that of a public or private teacher, or by 
 communicating to other people the curious and useful know- 
 ledge 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 writing 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 greatest practitioners 
 in law and physic. But the usual reward of the eminent 
 teacher bears no proportion to that of the lawyer or physi- 
 cian ; because the trade of the one is crowded with indigent 
 people who have been brought up to it at the public expense, 
 whereas those of the other two are encumbered 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 indigent 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 licences to their scholars to beg." 
 
 4. The demand for literary labour has so greatly 
 increased since Adam Smith wrote, while the provisions for
 
 486 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 4. 
 
 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 pursuits 
 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, independently 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 country 
 (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 supported 
 themselves by the works which they wrote. Nearly all the 
 higher departments of authorship are, to a great extent, 
 similarly filled. In consequence, although the highest pecuniary 
 prizes of successful authorship are incomparably 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 newspapers, or with the smaller
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 487 
 
 periodicals, on which an educated 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 education 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 something radically amiss in the idea of authorship as 
 a profession, 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 religious 
 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 considerably 
 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 clergyman 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 extent, 
 than the wages of equally severe labour in other employ- 
 ments. 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 the labour) was often 
 so low, that there would have been required great perfection 
 of machinery to undersell it. The amount of the remune- 
 ration in such a case, depends chiefly upon whether the quan-
 
 488 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 4. 
 
 tity 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 necessity 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 the lowest rate at which 
 peasant families think it worth while to continue the pro- 
 duction. 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 Euro- 
 pean market with English capital, and English fuel and 
 machinery.* Thus far, as to the remuneration of the sub- 
 sidiary employment ; but the effect to the labourers of 
 having this additional resource, is almost certain to be (un- 
 less peculiar counteracting causes intervene) a proportional 
 diminution of the wages of their main occupation. 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. 
 
 * Four-fifths of the manufacturers of the Canton of Zurich are small 
 farmers, generally proprietors of their farms. The cotton manufacture occu- 
 pies either wholly or partially 23,000 people, nearly a tenth part of the popu- 
 lation; 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 
 
 For the same reason it is found that, cceteris 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 marriage is unusually 
 weak when the only consequence immediately felt is an im- 
 provement 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 weaving, women can and do earn 
 as much as men, and children are employed at a very early 
 age ; but the aggregate earnings 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 authenticated by the inquiries of the Hand- 
 loom Weavers Commission, which made its report in 1841. 
 No argument can be hence derived for the exclusion of 
 women from the liberty of competing in the labour market : 
 since, 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. It 
 cannot, however, be considered desirable as a permanent 
 element in the condition of a labouring class, that the mother 
 of the family (the case of a single woman is totally different) 
 should be under the necessity of working for subsistence, at 
 least elsewhere than in their place of abode. In the case of 
 children, who are necessarily dependent, the influence of their
 
 490 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 5. 
 
 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 weaving, 
 which, being paid by the piece, brings their efficiency to a 
 sure test. When the efficiency is equal, but the pay un- 
 equal, the only explanation that can be given is custom ; 
 grounded either in a prejudice, or in the present constitution 
 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 com- 
 paratively so few, that the field of their employment is 
 still more overcrowded. It must be observed, that as mat-
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 491 
 
 ters 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 pit- 
 tance absolutely requisite for the sustenance of one human 
 being. Now the lowest point to which the most super- 
 abundant 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 support 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 something, their joint wages must be suffi- 
 cient to support not only themselves, but (at least for some 
 years) their children also. The ne plus ultra of low wages, 
 therefore (except during some transitory crisis, or in some 
 decaying employment), can hardly occur in any occupation 
 which the person employed has to live by, except the occupa- 
 tions 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 compe- 
 tition. 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 assign- 
 able 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 producers can 
 dispose of all they produce. In most civilized countries, the
 
 492 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 6. 
 
 restrictions of this kind which once existed have been either 
 abolished or very much relaxed, and will, no doubt, soon dis- 
 appear entirely. In some trades, however, and to some extent, 
 the combinations of workmen produce 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 imprac- 
 ticable 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 evi- 
 dence 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 over- 
 stocked and almost ruined ; but there are many other trades 
 which it would not be difficult for them to learn : to this, 
 however, 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 decided 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 around 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 de- 
 pending 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 compara-
 
 DIFFERENCES OF WAGES. 493 
 
 lively 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 pro- 
 duce, 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 com- 
 binations 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 observa- 
 tion already made, that there are kinds of labour of which the 
 wages are fixed by custom, and not by competition. Such 
 are the fees or charges of professional persons : of physicians, 
 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 trust- 
 worthy 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 services. 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 ostentation, but also 
 from more reasonable motives ; either because they desire that 
 those they employ should serve them cheerfully, and be
 
 494 BOOK II. CHAPTER XIV. 7. 
 
 anxious to remain in their service ; or because 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. Similar feelings operate in the 
 minds of persons in business, with respect to their clerks, 
 and other employes. Liberality, generosity, and the credit 
 of the employer, are motives which, to whatever extent they 
 operate, preclude taking the utmost advantage of competi- 
 tion : and doubtless such motives 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 never raise the average wages of labour beyond the 
 ratio of population to capital. By giving more to each person 
 employed, they limit the power of giving employment to num- 
 bers; 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.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 OF PROFITS. 
 
 1. HAVING treated of the labourer's share of the pro- 
 duce, we next proceed to the share of the capitalist; the 
 profits of capital or stock ; the gains of the person who ad 
 vances 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 buildings, mate 
 rials, 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 in- 
 come from his capital : the amount which he can afford to 
 spend 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 undiminished, 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 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
 
 496 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 1. 
 
 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 security ; 
 such security as precludes any appreciable chance of losing 
 the principal. What a person expects to gain, who superin- 
 tends 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 compen- 
 sation 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 exposes his capital 
 to some, and in many cases to very great, danger of partial or 
 total loss. For this danger he must be compensated, other- 
 wise he will not incur it. He must likewise be remunerated 
 for the devotion of his time and labour. The control of the 
 operations of industry usually belongs to the person who 
 supplies the whole or the greatest part of the funds by which 
 they are carried on, and who, according to the ordinary 
 arrangement, is either alone interested, 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 equivalent for 
 abstinence, indemnity for risk, and remuneration 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 :
 
 PROFITS. 497 
 
 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 remune- 
 rated for it by the interest paid to him, while the diffe- 
 rence between the interest and the gross profits remunerates 
 the exertions and risks of the undertaker.* 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 engaged 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 the 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 sleeping partner. Or finally, the same person 
 may own the capital, and conduct the business ; adding, if he 
 will and 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, 
 may be described respectively as interest, insurance, and wages 
 of superintendence. 
 
 * It is to be regretted that this word, in this sense, is not familiar to an 
 English ear. French political economists enjoy a great advantage in being 
 able to speak currently of les profits de V entrepreneur. 
 
 VOL. I. K K
 
 498 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 2. 
 
 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 incident to 
 the employment. Next, it must afford such an equivalent to 
 the owner of the capital for forbearing to consume it, as is 
 then and there a sufficient motive to him to persist in his 
 abstinence. How much will be required to form this equiva- 
 lent, 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 accu- 
 mulation. Further, after covering all losses, and remune- 
 rating the owner for forbearing to consume, there must be 
 something left to recompense the labour and skill of the 
 person who devotes his time to the business. This recom- 
 pense 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 suf- 
 ficient 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 production, and unpro- 
 ductively consumed, until, by an indirect consequence of its 
 diminished amount, to be explained hereafter, the rate of 
 profit was raised. 
 
 Such, then, is the minimum of profits : but that minimum 
 is exceedingly variable, and at some times and places ex- 
 tremely low ; on account of the great variableness of two out 
 of its three elements. That the rate of necessary remune- 
 ration 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 
 is a still wider difference in the element which consists in 
 compensation for risk. I am not now speaking of the dif-
 
 PROFITS. 499 
 
 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 contin- 
 gencies affect those who live on the mere interest of their 
 capital, in common with those who personally engage in 
 production. In a generally secure state of society, the risks 
 which may be attendant on the nature of particular employ- 
 ments 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 pos- 
 sessor 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 saving life or averting serious 
 calamities. Those who lend, under these wretched govern- 
 ments, do it at the utmost peril of never being paid. In 
 most of the native states of India, the lowest terms on which 
 any one will lend money, even to the government, are such, 
 
 K K 2
 
 500 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 3. 
 
 that if the interest is paid only for a few years, and the prin- 
 cipal not at all, the lender is tolerably well indemnified. If 
 the accumulation of principal and compound interest is ulti- 
 mately compromised at a few shillings in the pound, he has 
 generally made an advantageous bargain. 
 
 3. The remuneration of capital in different employ- 
 ments, much more than the remuneration of labour, varies 
 according to the circumstances which render one employment 
 more attractive, or more repulsive, than another. The profits, 
 for example, of retail trade, in proportion to the capital em- 
 ployed, exceed those of wholesale dealers or manufacturers, 
 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 adventure, the peculiar risks are 
 capable of being, and commonly are, commuted for a fixed 
 payment, the premium of insurance takes its regular place 
 among the charges of production, 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 
 observes, 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 remune- 
 ration, except in the prices of his drugs. Some occupations 
 require a considerable amount of scientific or technical edu- 
 cation, and can only be carried on by persons who- combine
 
 PROFITS. 501 
 
 with that education a considerable capital. Such is the busi- 
 ness 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 required to 
 conduct a business necessarily of limited extent. In such 
 cases, a higher than common rate of profit is necessary to 
 yield only the common rate of remuneration. " In a small 
 seaport-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 capital in 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 dif- 
 ferent sorts of goods, their prices, qualities, and the markets 
 where they are to be had cheapest. Thirty or forty pounds 
 a year cannot be considered as too great a recompense 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 employ- 
 ments of capital. If a business can only be advantageously 
 carried on by a large capital, this in most countries limits so 
 narrowly the class of persons who can enter into the employ-
 
 502 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 4. 
 
 ment, 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 mentioned the case of the gas and 
 water companies. 
 
 4. After due allowance is made for these various 
 causes of inequality, namely, differences 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 
 employment. 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 busi- 
 ness, who possess monied property, are lenders. Between 
 these two great bodies there is a numerous, keen, and intelli- 
 gent class of middlemen, composed of bankers, stockbrokers, 
 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 trade,
 
 PROFITS. 503 
 
 really tending to cause this difference of demand, are con- 
 tinually occurring, sometimes to such an extent, that the rate 
 of interest on the best mercantile bills has been known to vary 
 in little more than a year (even without the occurrence of the 
 great derangement called a commercial crisis) from four, or 
 less, to eight or nine 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 
 commodities 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 (whatever may 
 be the occasional fluctuations) the various employments 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 compensa- 
 tion for any inferiority in the agreeableness or safety of an 
 employment. If the case were not so ; if there were, evi- 
 dently, and to common experience, more favourable chances
 
 504' BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 4. 
 
 of pecuniary success in one business than 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 manufacture, 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 employments, 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 equalizing 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 engaged in the un- 
 profitable employment, relinquish business and break up their 
 establishments. The numerous and multifarious channels of 
 credit, through which, in commercial 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 accomplished. The process 
 consists in a limitation by one class of dealers or producers, 
 and an extension by the other, of that portion of their busi- 
 ness which is carried on with borrowed capital. There is
 
 PROFITS. 505 
 
 scarcely any dealer or producer on a considerable scale, who 
 confines his business to what 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 commo- 
 dity, 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 cir- 
 cumstances, they have no difficulty in obtaining . A different 
 distribution 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 aban- 
 don the one trade and carry their capital into the other. 
 This easy, and as it were spontane ous, method of accommo- 
 dating production to demand, is quite sufficient to correct 
 any inequalities 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 permanently diminished, or perhaps stopped altogether, 
 the process of extricating the capital is, no doubt, tardy and 
 difficult, and almost always attended with considerable loss ; 
 much of the capital fixed in machinery, buildings, permanent 
 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,
 
 506 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 4. 
 
 that people are always very slow in resolving upon it, and 
 hardly ever do so until long after a change of fortune has 
 become hopeless. These, however, are distinctly exceptional 
 cases, and even in these the equalization is at last effected. 
 It may also happen that the return to equilibrium is consi- 
 derably protracted, when, before one inequality has been cor- 
 rected, another cause of inequality 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 improvements 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 
 monopoly, or of such rare accidents as have been noticed 
 in regard to the cotton trade, the impression is in all pro- 
 bability fallacious, since if it were shared by those who 
 have greatest means of knowledge and motives to accurate 
 examination, 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
 
 PROFITS. 507 
 
 means, there is more chance of making a large fortune in 
 some employments than in others. But it would be found 
 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 degree of 
 strength than arithmetic will warrant, in attracting competi- 
 tors ; 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 com- 
 petency. The timber trade of Canada is one example of an 
 employment of capital partaking so much of the nature 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 gambling 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 countries the tendency 
 is so much the reverse, that safe and quiet employments 
 probably yield a less average profit to the capital 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 
 countries of most active competition, custom also has a con- 
 siderable share in determining the profits of trade. There 
 is sometimes an idea afloat as to what the profit of an em- 
 ployment should be, which though not adhered to by all 
 the dealers, nor perhaps rigidly by any, still exercises a cer- 
 tain influence over their operations. There has been in Eng- 
 land a kind of notion, how widely prevailing I know not. that
 
 508 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. <S 5. 
 
 
 
 fifty per cent is a proper and suitable rate of profit in retail 
 transactions : understand, not fifty per cent on the whole 
 capital, but an advance of fifty per cent on the wholesale 
 prices ; 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 the retail trade, would be 
 by a greater subdivision of the business. In some parts of the 
 Continent the standard is as high as a hundred per cent. 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 turning over their 
 capital more rapidly, and adding to it by borrowed capital 
 when needed, the dealers often obtain individually higher 
 profits ; though they necessarily lower the profits of those 
 among their competitors, who do not adopt the same principle. 
 Nevertheless, competition, as remarked* in a previous chapter, 
 has, as yet, but a limited dominion over retail prices ; and con- 
 sequently the share of the whole produce of land and labour 
 which is absorbed in the remuneration of mere distributors, 
 continues exorbitant ; and there is no function in the economy 
 of society which supports a number of persons so dispropor- 
 tioned 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 limi- 
 tations under which, this ordinary rate has a real existence. 
 
 * Vide supra, book ii. eh. iv. 3.
 
 PROFITS. 509 
 
 It now remains to consider, what causes determine its 
 amount. 
 
 To popular apprehension it seems as if the profits of busi- 
 ness depended upon prices. A producer or dealer seems to 
 obtain his profits by selling his commodity for more than it 
 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. 
 
 The cause of profit is, that labour produces more than is 
 required for its support. The reason why agricultural capital 
 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
 
 510 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 6. 
 
 capitalist. We thus see that profit arises, not from the inci- 
 dent of exchange, but from the productive power of labour; 
 and the general profit of the country is always what the pro- 
 ductive power of labour makes it, whether any exchange 
 takes place or not. If there were no division of employ- 
 ments, there would be no buying or selling, but there would 
 still be profit. If the labourers of the country collectively 
 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. 
 
 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, whicn, 
 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.
 
 PROFITS. 511 
 
 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 
 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, 
 or almost always, pays rent : and even in manufactures, (not 
 to mention ground-rent,) the materials of the manufacture 
 have generally paid rent, in some stage of their production. 
 The nature of rent, however, we have not yet taken into con- 
 sideration ; and it will hereafter appear, that no practical 
 error, on the question we are now examining, is produced 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 con- 
 sists 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 repre- 
 sent 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 producer 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
 
 512 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 7. 
 
 as on every other part. The fact, however, remains, that in 
 the whole process 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 convenience, had their share of profit paid to them 
 before the operation was completed. Whatever, of the ulti- 
 mate product, 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 productive 
 power of labour ; and secondly, the. proportion of that pro- 
 duce 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 determining 
 the gross amount divided as profit among all the capitalists 
 of the country ; but the rate of profit, the percentage on the 
 capita], 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 Bicardo and others, 
 that the rate of profits depends on wages ; rising as wages 
 fall, and falling as wages rise. In adopting, however, this 
 doctrine, I must insist upon making a most necessary altera- 
 tion in its wording. Instead of saying that profits depend on 
 wages, let us say (what Eicardo 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
 
 PROFITS. 513 
 
 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 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 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 remuneration 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 inferior skill and industry, 
 two days' labour of an Irishman accomplished no more work 
 than an English labourer performed in one, the Irishman's 
 labour cost as much as the 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 extent really existed in the efficiency of the 
 labour, is proved not only by abundant testimony, but by the 
 fact, that notwithstanding the lowuess of wages, profits of 
 capital are not understood to have 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 
 
 VOL. i. L L
 
 514 BOOK II. CHAPTER XV. 7. 
 
 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 is at 
 least not higher, nor the rate of profit lower, than in Europe. 
 
 The cost of labour, then, is, in the language of mathe- 
 matics, a function of three variables : the efficiency of labour; 
 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 procured. 
 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 
 articles composing that remuneration ; or if those articles be- 
 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 labourer obtained 
 a higher remuneration, without any increased 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 employments 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
 
 PROFITS. 515 
 
 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 circumstances 
 in which it actually works. This can only be done in the 
 ensuing Book. One topic still remains to be discussed in 
 the present one, so far as it admits of being treated inde- 
 pendently of considerations of Value ; the subject of Rent ; 
 to which we now proceed. 
 
 L L 2
 
 CHAPTER 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 society, 
 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 some- 
 thing which neither they nor any one else have produced. 
 If there be any other cases of a similar nature, they will be 
 easily understood, when the nature and laws of rent are com- 
 prehended. 
 
 It is at once evident, that rent is the effect of a mono- 
 poly ; though the monopoly is a natural one, which may be 
 regulated, which may even be held as a trust for the commu- 
 nity 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 dependent on his will 
 for the necessaries of life, and he might make what conditions 
 he chose. This is the actual state of things in those Oriental 
 kingdoms in which the land rs considered the property oY the 
 state. Rent is then confounded with taxation, and the despot 
 may exact the utmost which the unfortunate cultivators have
 
 RENT. 517 
 
 to give. Indeed, the exclusive 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 free competition ; the land- 
 owners being supposed to be, as in 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 
 article. But even when monopolized, a thing which is the 
 gift of nature, and requires no labour or outlay as the condi- 
 tion of its existence, will, if there be competition among the 
 holders of it, command a price, only if it exists in less quan- 
 tity 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 population 
 require that all the land, which is capable of cultivation, 
 should be cultivated. The food and other agricultural pro- 
 duce 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; some- 
 times without cultivating more than a small part of it ; the 
 lands most easily cultivated being preferred in a very early stage 
 of society ; the most fertile, or those in the most convenient 
 situations, in a more advanced state. 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 fer- 
 tility or situation, it belongs to those superior kinds which 
 exist in less quantity than the demand which cannot be 
 made to yield all the produce required for the community, 
 unless on terms still less advantageous than the resort to less 
 favoured soils. 
 
 There is land, such as the deserts of Arabia, which will
 
 518 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 2. 
 
 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 materials. 
 If ingredients fitted for this purpose exist in the subsoil, or 
 close at hand, the improvement even of the most unpromis- 
 ing spots may answer as a speculation : but if those ingre- 
 dients 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 supplied 
 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 labourers 
 employed on it, together with what Dr. Chalmers calls their 
 secondaries; that is, the labourers required for supplying 
 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 themselves, 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 labourers and their seconda- 
 ries, but affords them the current rate of wages, which may 
 extend to much more than mere necessaries ; and leaves for 
 those, who have advanced the wages of these two classes of
 
 RENT. 
 
 519 
 
 labourers, a surplus equal to the profit they could have ex- 
 pected from any other employment of their capital. Whether 
 any given land can do more than this, is not merely a phy- 
 sical question, but depends partly on the market value of 
 agricultural produce. What the land can do for the labourers 
 and for the capitalist, beyond feeding all whom it directly or 
 indirectly employs, of course depends upon what the re- 
 mainder of the produce can be sold for. The higher the 
 market value of produce, the lower are the soils to which 
 cultivation can descend, consistently with affording to the 
 capital employed, the ordinary rate of profit. 
 
 As, however, differences of fertility slide into one another 
 by insensible gradations ; and differences of accessibility, that 
 is, of distance from markets, do the same ; and since 
 there is land so barren that it could not pay for its culti- 
 vation 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 cultivators, 
 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 fertile 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 facti- 
 tious obstacles, is not cultivated, the worst land in actual 
 cultivation (in point of fertility and situation together) pays 
 no rent. 
 
 3. If, then, of the land iu cultivation, the part which 
 yields least return to the labour and capital employed on it
 
 520 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 3. 
 
 gives only the ordinary profit of capital, without leaving any- 
 thing for rent ; a standard is afforded for estimating the 
 amount of rent which will be yielded by all other land. 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 competition 
 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, beyond what 
 would be returned to the same capital if employed on the 
 worst land in cultivation. This is not, and never was pre- 
 tended 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. 
 Hicardo. It is one of the cardinal doctrines of political 
 economy ; and until it was understood, no consistent expla- 
 nation could be given of many of the more complicated 
 industi'ial 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.
 
 RENT. 521 
 
 It has been denied that there can be any laud in cultiva- 
 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 
 cultivation, 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 pur- 
 poses, as for exercise, or ornament, or perhaps as a game 
 preserve. No farmer could afford to offer him anything for 
 it, for purposes of culture ; though something would pro- 
 bably be obtained for the use of its natural pasture, or other 
 spontaneous produce. Even such land, however, would not 
 necessarily remain uncultivated. It might be farmed by the 
 proprietor ; 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 composed 
 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 intermixed, and 
 the same person who rents the better land, obtains along 
 with it the inferior soils which alternate with it. He pays a 
 rent, nominally for the whole farm, but calculated 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 remain- 
 ing parts pay no rent.
 
 522 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 4. 
 
 4. Let us, however, suppose that there were a validity 
 in this objection, which can by no means he conceded to it ; 
 that when the demand of the community had forced up food 
 to such a price as would remunerate the expense of pro- 
 ducing it from a certain quantity of soil, it happened never- 
 theless that all the soil of that quality was withheld from 
 cultivation, by the obstinacy of the owners in demanding a 
 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 labour 
 and capital to land already cultivated. 
 
 Now we have already seen that this increased application 
 of capital, other things being unaltered, is always attended 
 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 in partial use. We are to suppose no 
 change, except a demand for more corn, and a consequent 
 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 for- 
 merly left to nature ; or procures lime or marl from a dis- 
 tance, 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 pro- 
 duce from the soil, the farmer or improver will only con- 
 sider whether the outlay he makes for the purpose will be
 
 RENT. 523 
 
 returned to him with the ordinary profit, and not whether 
 any surplus will remain for rent. Even, therefore, if it were 
 the fact, that there is never any land taken into cultivation, 
 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 disad- 
 vantageous circumstances as the least productive portion of it; 
 whether that least productive portion of capital is rendered so 
 by being employed 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 scientific 
 principle. We must never forget that the truths of political 
 economy are truths only in the rough : they have the certainty, 
 but not the precision, of exact science. 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
 
 524 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 4. 
 
 will yield to him, he will probably be willing 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 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 landlord may be unwilling 
 to grant a necessary diminution of rent, and the farmer, 
 rather than relinquish his occupation, or seek a farm else- 
 where when all are occupied, may consent to go on paying 
 too high a rent. Irregularities like these we must alwnys 
 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 approxi- 
 mate 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 supposition 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
 
 RENT. 525 
 
 to pay to the landlord, but will not consent to pay more ; 
 that there is a portion of capital applied to agriculture in 
 such circumstances of productiveness as to yield only the 
 ordinary profits ; and that the difference between the produce 
 of this, and of any other capital of similar 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, individual 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 
 attached to it than it merits. Under the name of rent, many 
 payments are commonly included, which are not a remunera- 
 tion 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 includes a consi- 
 deration 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 ordinary interest, on the value of 
 the buildings : that is, not on what it has cost to erect them, 
 but 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 interest would of course be required from him. 
 These buildings are as distinct a thing from the farm as the 
 stock o-r the timber on it ; and what is paid for them can no
 
 526 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 5. 
 
 more be called rent of land, than a payment for cattle would 
 be, if it were tbe 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 payments made in consideration for them are properly 
 interest. 
 
 But with regard to capital actually sunk in improvements, 
 and not requiring periodical renewal, but spent once for all 
 in giving the land a permanent increase of productiveness, 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 improved 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 Lincoln- 
 shire 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. 
 
 Some writers, in particular Mr. H. G. Carey, take away, 
 still more completely than I have attempted to do, the 
 distinction between these two sources of rent, by rejecting one 
 of them altogether, and considering all rent as the effect of
 
 BENT. 527 
 
 capital expended. In proof of this, Mr. Carey 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 he necessary to lay out, in order 
 to hring the country to its present condition from a state of 
 primasval forest. This startling statement 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 unreclaimed 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. The 
 doctrine, moreover, is totally opposed to Mr. Carey's own 
 economical opinions. No one maintains more strenuously 
 than Mr. Carey the undoubted truth, that as society advances 
 in population, wealth, and combination of labour, land con- 
 stantly rises in value and price. This, however, could not 
 possibly be true, if the present value of land were less than 
 the expense of clearing it and making it fit for cultivation ; 
 for it must have been worth this immediately after it was 
 cleared ; and according to Mr. Carey it has been rising in 
 value ever since. 
 
 When, however, Mr. Carey asserts that the whole land of any 
 country is not now worth the capital which has been expended 
 on it, he does not mean that each particular estate is worth 
 less than what has been laid out in improving it, and that, to 
 the proprietors, the improvement of the land has been, in the
 
 5&8 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 5. 
 
 final result, a miscalculation. He means, not that the land of 
 Great Britain would not now sell for what has been laid out 
 upon it, but that it would not sell for that amount plus the 
 expense of making all the roads, canals, and railways. This 
 is probably true, but is no more to the purpose, and no more 
 important in political economy, than if the statement had 
 been, that it would not sell for the sums laid out on it plus 
 the national debt, or plus the cost of the French Revolutionary 
 war, or any other expense incurred for a real or imaginary 
 public advantage. The roads, railways, and canals were not 
 constructed to give value to land: on the contrary, their natural 
 effect was to lower its value, by rendering other and rival 
 lands accessible : and the landholders of the southern counties 
 actually petitioned Parliament against the turnpike roads on 
 this very account. 
 
 The tendency of improved communications is to lower 
 existing rents, by trenching on the monopoly of the laud 
 nearest to the places where large numbers of consumers are 
 assembled. Eoads and canals are not intended 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 pro- 
 duce 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 abundance 
 by that amount of outlay. But it is strange that Mr. Carey 
 should think this fact inconsistent with the Eicardo theory of
 
 RENT. 529 
 
 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 advantage 
 which it enjoys, in fertility or vicinity to markets, over the 
 other; and the measure of its advantage is also the measure 
 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 Kicardo ; and if they are true, I cannot 
 see 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. 
 
 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 pons 
 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 instance, 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 supe- 
 rior 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 
 
 VOL. I. MM
 
 530 BOOK II. CHAPTER XVI. 6. 
 
 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 com- 
 munity required to be brought into cultivation. 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 suppo- 
 sition, pay rent: namely, if the demand of the community re- 
 quired that it should all be cultivated, and cultivated beyond 
 the point at which a further application of capital begins to 
 be attended with a smaller proportional 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 pievious 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 capitalist 
 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 supposition, 
 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 apparent. 
 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 
 lent an instniment of superior power to other instruments of 
 the same kind for which no rent is paid. The superiority 
 of the instrument is in exact proportion to the rent paid for
 
 BENT. 531 
 
 it. If a few persons had steam-engines of superior power to 
 all others in existence, hut limited hy physical laws to a 
 nuinher short of the demand, the rent which a manufacturer 
 would be willing to pay for one of these steam-engines could 
 not he locked upon as an addition to his outlay, because hy 
 the use of it he would save in his other expenses the equiva- 
 lent 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 hy the 
 capital employed in the least favourable 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, hut 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 indepen- 
 dently of the instrumentality hy 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. 
 
 M M 2
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 EXCHANGE.
 
 BOOK III, 
 
 EXCHANGE, 
 
 CHAPTER 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, " Oatallactics," or the science of ex- 
 changes : by others it has been called the Science of Values. 
 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 inquiry, 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 Value, 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
 
 536 BOOK III. CHAPTER I. 1. 
 
 consideration of Value has to do with the latter alone ; and 
 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 suhdivided, 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 hy social arrangements : an 
 error, which appears to me to be at all times producing two 
 opposite mischiefs ; on the one hand, causing political eco- 
 nomists 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 indivi- 
 dual, for the most part, living not on things in the production 
 of which he himself bears a part, but on things obtained 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 consti- 
 tuted, 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 conception
 
 VALUE. 537 
 
 of it, creates confusion and uncertainty in everything else. 
 Happily, there is nothing in the laws of Value which remains 
 for the present or any future writer to clear up ; the theory 
 of the subject is complete : the only difficulty 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 considerable demands on the 
 patience of the reader, are unavoidable. 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 example, 
 may have little or no value in use. This is employing 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 judg- 
 ment 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,
 
 538 BOOK III. CHAPTER I. 3. 
 
 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 the value in use, implies a 
 contradiction ; it supposes that persons will give, to possess a 
 thin;/, 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 economy, 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 Value, which is 
 unexceptionable. 
 
 Exchange value requires to be distinguished from Price. 
 The words Value 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 great 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
 
 VALUE. 559 
 
 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 
 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 not 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 
 exchange 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 expedient 
 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-
 
 54-0 BOOK III. CHAPTER I. 4. 
 
 portions in which they exchange for one another. On this 
 assumption, any one of them may be taken as a representative 
 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 the 
 upward or downward movement of its value estimated in 
 some one thing, is all that need 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
 
 VALUE. 541 
 
 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 comm jdity 
 rises, the circumstance usually indicates 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 existing 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 counter 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 difference 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 therefore 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, and (it must be added) as it affects the interests of 
 the producers of money. 
 
 5. Before commencing the inquiry into the laws of 
 value and price, I have one further observation to make. I
 
 542 BOOK III. CHAPTEK I. 5. 
 
 must give warning, once for all, that the cases I contemplate 
 are those in which values and prices are determined hy com- 
 petition alone. In so far only as they are thus determined, 
 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 prices ; such 
 prices as are quoted in price-currents ; prices in the whole- 
 sale 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 pro- 
 positions 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 dif- 
 ferent. 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 neces- 
 sary 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 
 expected, the action of the causes which determine wholesale 
 prices. The influence of those causes is ultimately felt in 
 the retail markets, and is the real source of such variations 
 in retail prices as are of a general and permanent character. 
 But. there is no regular or exact correspondence. Shoes of
 
 VALUE. 543 
 
 equally good quality are sold in different shops at prices 
 which differ considerably ; and the price of leather may full 
 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 cir- 
 cumstance as the cheapening of leather: and when leather 
 is cheapened, even if no difference shows itself in shops 
 frequented by rich people, the artizan 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 understood, 
 " supposing all parties to take care of their own interest." 
 Inattention to these distinctions has led to improper applica- 
 tions of the abstract principles of political economy, and 
 still often 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 THEIK RELATION TO 
 VALUE. 
 
 1. THAT a thing may have any value in exchange, 
 two conditions are necessary. It must he 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 ohtain a thing 
 which serves none of them. But, secondly, the thing must 
 not only have some utility, there must also he some difficulty 
 in its attainment " Any article whatever," says Mr. De 
 Quincey,* " to ohtain 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 advantage, 
 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 obtained gra- 
 tuitously ; stoop, and you gather it at your feet ; but still, 
 because the continued iteration of this stooping exacts a labo- 
 rious 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 exhaustion of a stooping posture, 
 and of a labour so monotonous, that everybody is soon glad to 
 resign the service into mercenary hands." 
 
 As was pointed out in the last chapter, the utility of a 
 thing in the estimation of the purchaser, is the extreme limit 
 
 * Logic of Political Economy, p. 13.
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 545 
 
 of its exchange value : higher the value cannot ascend ; pecu- 
 liar 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 attainment. 
 The other element U, or intrinsic utility, will be perfectly in- 
 operative. 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 difficulty 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 possibility ; 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 circumstances reversed : you are 
 on Lake Superior in a steam-boat, making your way to an 
 unsettled region 800 miles a-head of civilization, and con- 
 sciously with no chance at all of purchasing any luxury 
 whatsoever, little luxury or big luxury, for the space of ten 
 years to come. One fellow- passenger, whom you will part 
 with before sunset, has a powerful musical snuff-box ; know- 
 ing 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 uttermost upon U, upon the intrinsic worth of the 
 article in your individual estimate for your individual pur- 
 poses. 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 such boxes, you pay sixty rather than lose it 
 when the last knell of the clock has sounded, which summots 
 
 VOL. I. N N
 
 546 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 2. 
 
 you to buy now or to forfeit for ever. 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 compression 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 
 particular consideration this D, the extreme difficulty of 
 attainment (which bere is the greatest possible, viz. an 
 impossibility) 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 
 submitted 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 
 retirement 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 grada- 
 tion." 
 
 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 element, 
 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. There
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 517 
 
 are things of which it is physically impossible to increase the 
 quantity beyond certain narrow limits. Such are those wines 
 which can be grown only in peculiar circumstances of soil, 
 climate, and exposure. Such also are ancient sculptures ; 
 pictures by 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 fortifica- 
 tions 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 whatever 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 obstacle to 
 attainment consists only in the labour and expense requisite 
 to produce the commodity. Without a certain labour and 
 expense it cannot be had : but when any one is willing to 
 incur these, there needs be no limit to the multiplication 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 expen- 
 diture, but not by a fixed amount of labour and expendi- 
 ture. Only a limited quantity can be produced at a given 
 cost i if more is wanted, it must be produced at. a greater 
 
 N N 2
 
 548 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 3. 
 
 cost. To this class, as has been often repeated, 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 sculp- 
 tures or pictures. 
 
 Of such things it is commonly said, that their value 
 depends upon their scarcity : but the expression is not 
 sufficiently 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 relation 
 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 pur- 
 chase it. But what is meant by the demand ? Not the 
 mere desire for the commodity. A beggar may desire a dia- 
 mond ; but his desire, however great, will have no influence 
 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 distinguish 
 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 
 
 * Adam Smith, who introduced the expression "effectual demand," em- 
 ployed it to denote the demand of those who are willing and able to give for 
 the commodity 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. ch. 7.)
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 549 
 
 there remains no further difficulty, and that the value depends 
 upon the ratio between the effectual demand, as thus defined, 
 and the supply. 
 
 These phrases, however, fail to satisfy any one who 
 requires 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 intelli- 
 gible if by demand we mean the quantity demanded, and if 
 the ratio intended is that between the quantity demanded 
 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 extricate 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 T 
 cannot call to mind any one who had given it before myself, 
 except the eminently clear thinker and skilful 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 com- 
 patible with great intellectual ingenuity, and close intimacy 
 with the subject matter.
 
 550 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 4. 
 
 4. Meaning, by the word demand, the quantity de- 
 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 supply, 
 that is, there are persons ready to buy, at the market value, 
 a greater quantity than is offered for sale. Competition 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 inclinations, of purchasers 
 to the full amount. At what point, then, will the rise be 
 arrested ? At the point, whatever 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 demand 
 beyond the supply, let us suppose a supply exceeding the 
 
 * "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 without any chance of relief by importation, the price might rise five, six, 
 or even tenfold." Tooke's History of Prices, vol. i. pp. 13 5.
 
 DEMAND AXD SUPPLY. 551 
 
 demand. The competition will now be on the side of the 
 sellers : the extra quantity can only find a market by calling 
 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 equality, 
 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 require 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 experience shows, only a small 
 part of the extra supply caused by an abundant harvest ;* and 
 the fall is practically arrested only when the farmers with- 
 draw 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 demand, 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 matter : 
 the proper mathematical analogy is that of an equation. 
 Demand and supply, the quantity demanded and the quan- 
 tity 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 in- 
 creases, the value rises ; if the demand diminishes, 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 
 
 * See Tooke, and the Report of the Agricultural Committee of 1821.
 
 552 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 5. 
 
 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, 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 
 commodities not susceptible of being multiplied at pleasure. 
 Such commodities, no doubt, are exceptions. There is another 
 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 excep- 
 tional case. In the first place, it will be found to be of great 
 assistance in rendering the more common case intelligible. 
 And in the next place, the principle of the exception stretches 
 wider, and embraces more cases, than might at first be sup- 
 posed. 
 
 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 1834 ; tobacco in France, opium in British India, at 
 present. The price of a monopolized commodity is com- 
 monly supposed to be arbitrary ; depending on the will of 
 the monopolist, 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 mono- 
 polist 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 sea- 
 sons, to destroy a portion of the crop. Had they persisted 
 in selling all that they produced, they must have forced a
 
 DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 553 
 
 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 opinion by destroying the surplus. Even on Lake 
 Superior, 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 
 monopoly 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 
 purposes. 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;
 
 531 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 5. 
 
 and a'so houses. The supply of such things might be nt 
 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 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 production ; the diminu- 
 tion 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 inter- 
 val 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 hove 
 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 Inter- 
 national 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 com- 
 modities which can be increased in quantity indefinitely and 
 at pleasure ; and shall have determined by what law, other 
 than that of Demand and Supply, the permanent 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 suscep- 
 tible of unlimited multiplication or not, there is a minimum 
 value which is the essential condition of its being perma- 
 nently 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 Production, 
 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 on. Persons whose capital is already embarked, and 
 cannot be easily extricated, will persevere for a considerable 
 time without profit, and have been known to persevere even 
 at a loss, in hope of better times. But they will not do. so 
 indefinitely, or when there is nothing to indicate that times 
 are likely to improve. No new capital will be invested in an 
 employment, unless there be an expectation 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, toge- 
 ther with the ordinary profit, may therefore be called the 
 necessary price, or value, of all things made by labour and 
 capital. Nobody willingly produces in the prospect of loss.
 
 556 BOOK III. CHAPTER III. 1. 
 
 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 Value, . the minimum with which the producers 
 will be content, is also, if competition is free and active, the 
 maximum which they can expect. If the value of a commo- 
 dity 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 sup- 
 ply of the article, reduces its value. This is not a mere sup- 
 position or surmise, but a fact familiar to those conversant 
 with commercial operations. Whenever a new line of busi- 
 ness 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 extra profit, but gene- 
 rally 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 busi- 
 ness is thriving, increase their produce by availing themselves 
 more largely of their credit, while those who are not making 
 the ordinary profit, restrict their operations, and (in manufac 
 turing 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 
 repaid the cost of production with the ordinary profit ; in 
 other words, such as will give to all producers the same rate 
 
 * Supra, p. 504.
 
 COST OF PRODUCTION. 557 
 
 of profit on their outlay. But in order that the profit may 
 be equal where the outlay, that is, the cost of production, 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 21 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 Ricardo 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 gravi- 
 tating ; 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 perma- 
 nently higher than another. Each place is alternately ele- 
 vated 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 production, 
 is the variation that would otherwise take place in the supply 
 of the commodity. The supply would be increased if the 
 thing continued to sell above the ratio of its cost of produc-
 
 558 BOOK III. CHAPTER III. 2. 
 
 tion, 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 increased. 
 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 erroneous notion 
 that value depends on the proportion between 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 cannot fall through a diminu- 
 tion of the cost of production, unless the supply is perma- 
 nently 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 alteration of supply ; and when 
 there is, the alteration, if permanent, is not the cause, but the 
 consequence of the alteration 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 neces- 
 sity 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 neces- 
 sarily. " 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 handker- 
 chiefs having fallen to half-price, he will buy, perhaps, in three- 
 
 * Logic of Political Economy ; pp. 230 1.
 
 COST OF PRODUCTION. 559 
 
 fold quantity; but he does not buy more steam-engines be- 
 cause the price is lowered. His demand for steam-engines is 
 almost always predetermined by the circumstances of his situa- 
 tion. 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 wine ? Or 
 the tools of shipwrights find an enlarged market whilst ship- 
 building was stationary ? . . . . Offer to a town of 8000 inha- 
 bitants 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 dimi- 
 nution upon the mere price to a purchaser will tempt into 
 the market any man whose habits and propensities had not 
 already 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 an article not susceptible of any consi- 
 derable extension of its market, would enable the esta- 
 blished 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 com- 
 modity. The value would rise ; and that, probably, imme- 
 diately. Would the supply be diminished ? Only if the 
 increase of value diminished the demand. Whether this
 
 560 BOOK III. CHAPTER III. 2. 
 
 | 
 
 effect followed, would soon appear, and if it did, the value 
 would recede somewhat, from excess of supply, until the pro- 
 duction was reduced, and would then rise again. There are 
 many articles for which it requires a very considerable rise of 
 price, materially to reduce the demand ; in particular, articles 
 of necessity, 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 quantity 
 by them, since, those who pay more for food not having so 
 much to expend otherwise, the production of other things con- 
 tracts 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 disturbance 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 supply, the equation 
 between them, still holds good : if a value different from
 
 COST OF PRODUCTION. 561 
 
 the natural value be necessary to 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 competi- 
 tion, cannot long continue 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, demand and supply 
 only determine the perturbations of value, during a period 
 which cannot exceed the length of time necessary for altering 
 the supply. While thus ruling the oscillations 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 disturbing influences were not conti- 
 nually 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 pro- 
 duction, or, in the expression we have used, when things are 
 at their Natural Value. 
 
 VOL. i. o o
 
 CHAPTER 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, we 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 pro- 
 duce 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 labourers, but has 
 likewise provided them with tools, materials, 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 sub- 
 servient, depends on cost of production, which again is 
 resolvable into labour. The cost of production of broadcloth 
 does not wholly consist in the wages of weavers ; which alone 
 are directly paid by the cloth manufacturer. It consists also 
 of the wages of spinners and woolcombers, 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 brickmakers, which he has reimbursed in the contract 
 price of erecting his factory. It partly consists of the wages 
 of machine-makers, iron-founders, and miners. And to these 
 must be added the wages of the carriers who transported 
 any of the means and appliances of the production to the 
 
 * Supra, pp. 37 9.
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 563 
 
 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, com- 
 paratively with other things, depends on the total quantity 
 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 dealer 
 and of many others, whom it is unnecessary further to par- 
 ticularize. 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 which 
 will follow. If fewer men were required to cultivate the 
 
 * Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ch. i. sect. 3. 
 
 o o 2
 
 564- BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 2. 
 
 raw cotton, or if fewer sailors were employed in navigating, 
 or shipwrights in constructing, the ship in which it was con- 
 veyed to us ; if fewer hands were employed in raising the 
 buildings and machinery, or if these, when raised, were ren- 
 dered 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 pro- 
 duction, and would therefore exchange for a smaller quantity 
 of those things in which no such abridgement 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 itself, 
 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 employed 
 as bleachers, spinners, and weavers, persons immediately neces- 
 sary 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 to all those other com- 
 modities, 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 produce 
 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 labour, 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 
 affects 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 contra- 
 diction in terms : the high value of some things is synony- 
 mous 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 dis- 
 tinctly the idea of values, we see that high or low wages can 
 have nothing to do with them ; but that high wages make 
 high prices, 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 purpose, rise at all. This 
 surely is a sufficient reductio ad absurdum, and shows the 
 amazing folly of the propositions which may and do become, 
 and long remain, accredited doctrines of popular political 
 economy. It must be remembered 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 increase in the same degree all his 
 expenses. There is no mode in which capitalists can com-
 
 566 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 3. 
 
 pensate themselves for a high cost of labour, through any 
 action on values or prices. It cannot be prevented from 
 taking its effect on low profits. If the labourers really get 
 more, that is, get the produce of more labour, a smaller per- 
 centage must remain for profit. From this Law of Distri- 
 bution, resting as it does on a law of arithmetic, there is no 
 escape. The mechanism of Exchange and Price may hide it 
 from us, but is quite powerless to alter it. 
 
 3. Although, however, general wages, whether high or 
 low, do not affect values, yet if wages are higher in one em- 
 ployment than another, or if they rise and fall permanently 
 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 labour. Things, 
 for example, which are made by skilled labour, exchange for 
 the produce of a much greater quantity of unskilled labour ; 
 for no reason but because the labour is more highly paid. 
 If, thro-ugh the extension of education, the labourers com- 
 petent to skilled employments were so increased in number 
 as to diminish 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 pro- 
 duced 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 sup- 
 posed 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
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 567 
 
 the competition of the labouring people generally could be 
 brought practically to bear on each particular employment. 
 It follows from this that wages in different employments do 
 not rise or fall simultaneously, but are, for short and some- 
 times even for long periods, nearly independent of one 
 another. All such disparities evidently alter the relative 
 costs of production of different commodities, and will there- 
 fore 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 warrants, or 
 than accords with their own meaning. Wages do enter into 
 value. The relative wages of the labour necessary for pro- 
 ducing 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 simul- 
 taneously 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 exception 
 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 
 improvement 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 Kicardo 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 gene- 
 rally in one or a few commodities at a time, but the variations
 
 568 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 4. 
 
 of wages (except passing fluctuations) are usually general, and 
 have no considerable effect on value. 
 
 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 another 
 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 for abstinence is Profit. And 
 profit, we have also seen, is not exclusively the surplus 
 remaining to the capitalist after he has been compensated for 
 his outlay, but forms, in most cases, no unimportant part 
 of the outlay itself. The flax-spinner, part of whose expenses 
 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, together 
 Avith those of the spinner himself, were again advanced by the 
 weaver, in the price of his material, linen yarn : and along 
 with them the profits of a fresh set of machine-makers, 
 and of the miners and iron-workers who supplied them with 
 their metallic material. All these advances form part of the 
 cost of production of linen. Profits, therefore, 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 production 
 of all things, they cannot affect the value of any. It is only
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 569 
 
 by entering in a greater degree into the cost of production of 
 some things than of others, that they can have any influence 
 on value. 
 
 For example, we have seen that there are causes which 
 necessitate a permanently higher rate of profit in certain 
 employments 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 unpleasantness, 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 perma- 
 nent, are represented in the relative values of the commo- 
 dities. 
 
 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 
 between 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 illus- 
 trated 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
 
 570 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 5. 
 
 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 doth 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 
 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 labour, 
 profits enter more largely into their cost of production. 
 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 to be 1000/. 
 A is made wholly by immediate labour, the whole 1000Z. 
 being expended directly in wages. B is made by means 
 of labour which costs 5001. and a machine which cost 500L, 
 and the machine is worn out by one year's use. The two 
 commodities will be exactly of the same value ; which, if com- 
 puted in money, and if profits are 20 per cent per annum, 
 will be 12001. But of this 12001, in the case of A, only 
 2001., 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
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 571 
 
 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 capital 
 which consists of machinery or buildings, has precisely the 
 same effect as a greater amount of it. As we just supposed 
 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 
 unnecessary that the manufacturer should ever be repaid the 
 5001. which he gave for the machine, since he has always the 
 machine itself, worth 5001. ; but he must be paid, as before, 
 a profit on it. The commodity B, therefore, which in the 
 case previously supposed was sold for 12001. of which sum 
 10001. were to replace the capital and 2001. were profit, can 
 now be sold for 7001., being 5001. to replace wages, and 200L 
 profit on the entire capital. Profit, therefore, enters into the 
 value of B in the ratio of 2001. out of 700Z., being two- 
 sevenths of the whole, or 28%- per cent, while in the case of 
 A, as before, it enters only in the ratio of one-sixth, or 16f 
 per cent. The case is of course purely ideal, since no machi- 
 nery 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 5001. loses one-fifth of its value by 
 each year's use, 1001. must be added to the return to make up 
 this loss, and the price of the commodity will be 800Z. Profit 
 therefore will enter into it in the ratio of 2001. to 8001., or 
 one-fourth, which is still a much higher proportion than one- 
 sixth, or 2001. in 1200L, 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 commodities
 
 572 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 5. 
 
 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 permanently remunerated. We have already illustrated 
 this by the example of wine : we shall now further exem- 
 plify it by the case of commodities made by machinery. 
 Suppose, 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 5QOL, 
 let us suppose C, made by 5001. worth of immediate labour 
 with the aid of a machine which has been produced by an- 
 other 5001. worth of immediate labour : the machine requiring 
 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 1000Z. 
 worth of direct labour ; C, only 5001. worth, which however 
 is made up to 1000L 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 5001, and profits being 20 per cent, the 
 natural price of the machine is 600L : making an additional 
 100Z. 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 commodity A 
 as sold for 12001., C cannot be permanently sold for less than 
 1320Z. 
 
 A second consequence is, that every rise or fall of general 
 profits will have an effect on values. Not indeed by raising 
 or lowering them generally, (which, as we have so often said, 
 is a contradiction and an impossibility) : but by altering the 
 proportion in which the values of things are affected by the 
 unequal lengths of time for which profit is due. When two 
 things, though made by equal labour, are of unequal value 
 because the one is called upon to yield profit for a greater num-
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 573 
 
 ber 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 eommodities 
 A and C, which, though made by equal quantities of labour, 
 were sold for 12001. and 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 there- 
 fore lowers in natural value 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 ma- 
 chinery 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 rela- 
 tively to them. This truth is sometimes expressed in a 
 phraseology more plausible than sound, by saying that a rise 
 of wages raises the value of things made by labour, in com- 
 parison 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 ; especially as this last ex- 
 pression is extremely ambiguous, suggesting the idea of an 
 increase of the labourer's real remuneration, rather than of 
 what is alone to the purpose here, namely, the cost of labour 
 to its employer.
 
 574 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 6. 
 
 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 tax on 
 malt is as much a part of the cost of production of that 
 article as the wages of the labourers. The expenses which 
 the law imposes, as well as those which the nature of things 
 imposes, must be reimbursed with the ordinary profit 
 from the value of the produce, or the things will not continue 
 to be produced. But the influence of taxation on value is 
 subject to the same conditions as the influence of wages and 
 of profits. It is not general taxation, but differential taxa- 
 tion, that produces the effect. If all productions were taxed 
 so as to take an equal percentage from all profits, relative 
 values would be in no way disturbed. If only a few com- 
 modities 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 employments would 
 ultimately, if not immediately, be abandoned. But general 
 taxation, when equally imposed, and not disturbing the 
 relations of different productions to one another, cannot 
 produce any effect on values. 
 
 We have thus far supposed that all the means and appli- 
 ances which enter into the cost of production of commodities, 
 are things whose own value depends on their cost of pro- 
 duction. 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 struc- 
 tures ; the quarries from which the stone was originally cut
 
 ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF COST OF PRODUCTION. 575 
 
 being exhausted, or their locality forgotten.* A material of 
 such a nature, if in much demand, must be at a scarcity value ; 
 and this value enters into the cost of production, and conse- 
 quently into the value, of the finished article. The time seems 
 to be approaching when the more valuable furs will come under 
 the influence of a scarcity value of the material. Hitherto the 
 diminishing number of the animals which produce them, in 
 the wildernesses of Siberia, and on the coasts of the Esquimaux 
 Sea, has operated on the value only through the greater 
 labour 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 appropriation, 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 them ; the use of the fall 
 of water will have a scarcity value, sufficient 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 benefit 
 from its ownership is by an annual equivalent, paid by the 
 person who uses it, from the proceeds of its use. This 
 
 * Some of these quarries, I believe, have been rediscovered, and are again 
 worked.
 
 576 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 6. 
 
 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 Production ? 
 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 is no 
 denying that they stamp a general principle more 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 manufactory 
 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 permanently 
 exchange. But there is still a third kind of commodities 
 to be considered : those which have, not one, but several 
 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, partaking 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 
 agriculture, the state of the art being given, doubling the 
 labour does not double the produce ; that if an increased 
 quantity of produce is required, the additional supply is 
 obtained at a greater cost than the first. Where a hun- 
 dred quarters of corn are all that is at present required 
 from the lands of a given village, if the growth of popula- 
 tion made it necessary to raise a hundred more, either by 
 breaking up worse land now uncultivated, or by a more 
 elaborate cultivation of the land already under the plough, 
 the additional hundred, or some part of them at least, 
 
 VOL. I. F P
 
 578 BOOK III. CHAPTER V. 1. 
 
 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 20s. 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 neces- 
 sary to feed it. We must suppose that there is no access to 
 any foreign supply. By the hypothesis, no more than a hun- 
 dred quarters can be produced in the district, 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 increasing 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 25s. 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 demand, 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 produced. At that price, however, 
 society can go on for some time longer ; could go on per- 
 haps for ever, if population did not increase. The price, 
 having attained that point, will not again permanently recede 
 (though it may fall temporarily from accidental abundance) ; 
 nor will it advance further so long as society can obtain the
 
 RENT IX ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 579 
 
 supply it requires without a second increase of the cost of 
 production. 
 
 I have made use of Price in this reasoning, as a con- 
 venient 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 annum 
 are still produced at a cost only proportional to 20s. 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, which 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 pro- 
 duced 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 cor- 
 responding 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 costless 
 to the grower. The value, therefore, of an article (meaning 
 its natural, which is the same with its average value) is deter- 
 
 V p 2
 
 580 BOOK III. CHAPTER V. 2. 
 
 mined by the cost of that portion of the supply which is pro- 
 duced and brought to market at the greatest 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 favour- 
 able circumstances, selling as they must do at the same value, 
 obtain a value more than proportioned to their cost of pro- 
 duction. Their value is not, correctly speaking, a scarcity 
 value, for it is determined by the circumstances of the pro- 
 duction 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 par- 
 ticularly considering, the advantage depends on the pos- 
 session 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 Kent, investigated in the concluding chapter 
 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
 
 RENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 581 
 
 agricultural capital 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 always 
 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 reserved 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 for 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 cultivated 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. 
 
 Kent, 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 occu- 
 pied, that to produce any additional quantity would require 
 more labour than the produce would feed: and if we suppose 
 this to be the condition of the whole world, or of a country
 
 582 BOOK III. CHAPTER V. 2. 
 
 debarred from foreign supply, then, if population continued 
 increasing, both the land and its produce would 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 infinite 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 productiveness over that of the best land which 
 it is not yet profitable to cultivate ; that is, it must be about 
 equal to the excess above the worst land which it is profitable 
 to cultivate. The land or the capital most unfavourably cir- 
 cumstanced 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 portions. 
 
 Rent, in short, merely equalizes the profits of different 
 farming capitals, by enabling the landlord to appropriate all 
 extra gains occasioned by superiority of natural advantages. 
 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
 
 RENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 583 
 
 increased by restrictive laws, is no burthen on the consumer : 
 it does not raise the price of corn, and is no otherwise a detri- 
 ment 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 metal, coals, precious stones, &c., are obtained 
 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 fertile 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 outlay as great as that 
 required to grow the same amount on worse land. But it 
 is not so with mines ; at least, not universally. There are, 
 perhaps, cases in which it is impossible to extract from a 
 particular vein, in a given time, more than a certain quantity 
 of ore, because there is only a limited surface of the vein 
 exposed, on which more than a certain number of labourers 
 cannot be simultaneously employed. 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 combina- 
 tions of owners, to keep up a monopoly price by limiting 
 the production. Whatever be the causes, it is a fact that 
 mines of different degrees of richness are in operation, and
 
 584 BOOK III. CHAPTER V. 3. 
 
 since the value of the produce must he proportional to the 
 cost of production at the worst mine (fertility and situation 
 taken together), it is more than proportional to that of the 
 hest. 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 heing comparatively few, their qualities do not 
 graduate gently into one another, as the qualities of land do ; 
 and the demand may he such as to keep the value of the pro- 
 duce considerably above the cost of production at the worst 
 mine now worked, without being sufficient to bring into ope- 
 ration 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 r and likewise oyster-beds or other particular 
 fishing grounds on coasts. We may take salmon fisheries as 
 an example of the whole class. Some rivers are far more pro- 
 ductive in salmon than others. None, however, without being 
 exhausted, can supply more than a very limited demand. The 
 demand of a country like England can only he supplied by 
 taking salmon from many different rivers of unequal productive- 
 ness, and the value must be sufficient to repay the cost of ob- 
 taining 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 in- 
 ferior 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
 
 RENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 585 
 
 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 consequently 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 corresponding to their lower cost 
 of production, the fall of value will be permanent, nnd 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 themselves, 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 qualities and the value of the commodity 
 will be a mine or fishery of better quality than that by which 
 they were previously regulated. 
 
 Land is used for other purposes than agriculture, especially 
 for residence ; and when so used, yields a rent, determined 
 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 convenience 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.
 
 536 BOOK III. CHAPTER V. 4. 
 
 4. Cases of extra profit analogous to rent, are more 
 frequent in the transactions of industry than is sometimes 
 supposed. Take the case, for example, of a patent, or exclu- 
 sive privilege for the use of a process by which cost of pro- 
 duction is lessened. If the value of the product continues 
 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 producing a part, will regulate 
 the value of the whole ; and the patentee will be enabled to 
 keep up his rent to a full equivalent 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 under- 
 selling 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 gradually retire, or restrict their operations, or enter into 
 arrangements 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 before 
 the invention was made, and the benefit of the improvement 
 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 his 
 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 himself
 
 RENT IN ITS RELATION TO VALUE. 587 
 
 because he is able to bring bis commodity to market at 
 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 universal 
 elements in production, while rent maybe 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 person 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 production 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 permanent con- 
 dition of any of the great rent-yielding commodities : unless 
 through their approaching exhaustion, if they are mineral 
 products (coal for example), or through an increase of popu- 
 lation, continuing after a further increase of production 
 becomes impossible : a contingency, which the almost inevi- 
 table progress of human culture and improvement in the long 
 interval which has first to elapse, forbids us to consider as 
 probable.
 
 CHiPTER VI. 
 
 SUMMARY OF THE THEORY OF VALUE. 
 
 1 . WE have now attained a favourable point for look- 
 ing 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, so 
 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 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
 
 SUMMARY OF THE THEORY OF VALUE. 589 
 
 scarcity value, are those of which the supply cannot be in- 
 creased 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. Monopoly 
 cannot give a value to anything except through a limitation 
 of the supply. 
 
 VII. Every commodity of which the supply can be inde- 
 finitely increased by labour and capital, exchanges for other 
 things proportionally to the cost necessary for producing 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. Eent is not an element in the cost of production of 
 the commodity which yields it ; except in the cases (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 employed to 
 produce. 
 
 X. Omitting the occasional elements ; things which admit 
 of indefinite increase, naturally and permanently exchange 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 
 on what wages are in themselves. High wages do not make 
 high values, nor low wages low values. The comparative
 
 590 BOOK III. CHAPTER VI. 1. 
 
 amount of wages depends partly on the comparative quan- 
 tities of labour required, and partly on tbe comparative 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 compa- 
 rative 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. 
 
 XIV. If one of two things commands, on the average, 
 a greater value than the other, the cause must be that it 
 requires for its production either a greater 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 
 labour, must he 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 of 
 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 quantity 
 and quality of the labour required for their production. 
 
 XVII. But every fall of profits lowers, in some degree, 
 the cost value of things made with much or durable
 
 SUMMARY OF THE THEORY OF VALUE. 591 
 
 machinery, and raises that of things made by hand ; and every 
 rise of profits does the reverse. 
 
 2. Such is the general theory of Exchange Value. 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 afl'ord 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 maintenance 
 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 re- 
 mainder 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 forth 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 must 
 obtain in exchange for the whole of his surplus produce. 
 But inasmuch as this surplus is not a fixed quantity, but may 
 be either greater or less according to the degree of his in- 
 dustry, 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 be 
 extremely cheap. This also is a rare case, though some 
 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 industrious 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 circumstances,
 
 SUMMARY OF THE THEORY OP VALUE. 593 
 
 unless modified, as in many cases it is, by the competition 
 of producers who are not peasants, or by the prices of foreign 
 markets. 
 
 3. Another anomalous case is that of slave-grown pro- 
 duce : whicli 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 different employ- 
 ments, 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 to uj ours tellement 
 epuiser un sujet, qu'on ne laisse rien a faire au lecteur. II 
 ne s'agit pas de faire lire, mais de faire penser."* 
 
 * Esprit dea Lois, liv. xi. adfinem. 
 
 VOL. I. Q Q
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Q Q 2
 
 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 cor- 
 rectness 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 produced 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 inheritances." As such 
 representations ought not to be without 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 1'Agriculture en France, d'apres les Documents officiels. Par M. L. 
 Mounier, avec des Remarques par M. Kubichon. Paris, 1846. 
 f For December 1846.
 
 598 APPENDIX. 
 
 Substance (with omissions and corrections) of three articles 
 in the Morning Chronicle of llth, 13th, and 10th January, 
 1847, in reply to MM. Mounier and Kuhichon and to the 
 Quarterly Review, on the Subdivision of Landed Property 
 in France. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE reviewer makes an extraordinary slip at the threshold of his 
 subject, in estimating the extent to which the morcellement has 
 actually 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 shillings, 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 proprietors! 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 documents he has quoted, and might have 
 guessed if he had not known, that the forty shillings at which the 
 land is rated in the collectors' books are not the gross produce of 
 the little estate, but its net produce ; the surplus beyond the ex- 
 penses 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 there- 
 fore much exceed a reasonable rent. A writer who can mistake 
 this for the whole income of a peasant cultivating 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
 
 APPENDIX. 599 
 
 land-tax at one-tenth of the revenue of the land, proprietors rated at 
 2 (or 50 francs) pay, it is to be presumed, five francs. The average 
 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 freeholders. But, it may be said, this is not the ave- 
 rage but the maximum 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 pro- 
 prietors so poor, that they pay no more than 5f. 95c." (say 6f.) " to 
 the contribution fonciere." In this case the 5f. 95c. are certainly 
 the average. Six francs of land-tax corresponds to six acres per 
 family on the average of all France, and to seven and a half on that 
 of the southern division, which contains the greatest proportion of 
 small proprietors. A still more favourable result is given by the 
 calculations of M. Lullin de Chateauvieux, a much better autho- 
 rity 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, sup- 
 pose 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 pro- 
 duce 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 re- 
 viewer makes a great ciy 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 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
 
 600 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 of properties, averaging, according to M. de Chateauvieux, eight 
 acres and a half, imply a great number of proprietors who have less. 
 But there must he 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 pro- 
 perties are included which pay so much as twenty francs land-tax, 
 corresponding 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 subdivi- 
 sion 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 
 average, only one hectare (2^ 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 continually making new acquisitions by purchase, and 
 on the whole their tendency is more to rise than to descend in the 
 scale of wealth." Eespecting the amount of debts with which the 
 peasant proprietors are encumbered, the facts are highly and unex- 
 pectedly 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 estimates, 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 dernieres 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 morceUement increasing, or 
 likely to increase ? The apologists of the French system have never 
 
 * Lavergne, Economic Rurale de la France, pp. 23 and 51. 
 t Pp. 451454.
 
 APPENDIX. 601 
 
 denied that the land in many parts of France is too minutely divided. 
 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 tending to become 
 still smaller, or not ? The reader will be surprised when he finds that, 
 with all their straining, M. Bubichon 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 inheritance," 
 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 compli- 
 cated 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 ascer- 
 tain 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 
 progressively 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, S^th p-er cent only.* This retardation 
 we must take the liberty of attributing mainly to the prudence and 
 forethought generated in the poorest class by this very subdivision 
 of property. 
 
 Instead, therefore, of trebling in a generation, the population 
 increased in that period about 20 per cent; and if the growth of 
 
 * These facts are taken from M. Passy. We may now add, in the ten years 
 from 1847 to 1856 not quite 1% 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 Economists for February 
 
 1857.
 
 602 APPENDIX. 
 
 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, 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 134 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 increase 
 of division to this circumstance, because in the ten years preceding 
 those in question, the cotes foncieres increased in number by little 
 more than 200,000; an alarming proof, according to the reviewer, 
 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 
 
 * Tn 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 and Nantes (or at least the departments containing them) had largely 
 increased in population. 
 
 f Mourner and Kubichon, vol. i. p. 110.
 
 APPENDIX. 603 
 
 were likewise alienated during the same period : and it is further 
 necessary to subtract all the additions made to the number of cotes 
 foncieres by the extension of building, and by the natural subdivision 
 of town property, during ten years. All these items must be accu- 
 rately 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. Large 
 estates may have been, and we believe were in many instances, 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 communal lands. In the other twenty-one 
 cantons the number of cotes foncieres is not yet published, but the 
 number of parcelles, or separate 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 
 incompetency 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
 
 604 APPENDIX. 
 
 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 sells 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 believe, 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 people 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 holdings 
 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 agricul- 
 ture 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 morcelle- 
 ment, 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 desig- 
 nated. This inconvenience 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
 
 APPENDIX. 605 
 
 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 land- 
 owner consists of twenty fragments in twenty different places. The 
 consequences are a subject of general and increasing complaint. 
 Great loss of time and labour ; waste of cultivable soil in boundaries 
 and paths ; the inaccessibility 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 inter- 
 mixture with those of other proprietors, must oppose to many kinds 
 of agricultural improvement. ' 
 
 For a considerable portion of this evil the French law of inhe- 
 ritance may fairly be held responsible. A certain amount of it is 
 inevitable wherever landed properties are undergoing a double 
 process 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 generally impossible to adjust the value of patches of unequal 
 fertility, vineyards, meadows, arable, &c., so as to satisfy every- 
 body, it continually 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. Eubichon and his reviewer have no 
 evidence whatever of retrogression in any. 
 
 They produce tables of the average amount of different kinds
 
 606 APPENDIX. 
 
 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 
 evidence 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 
 Louis XIY.* if not earlier. At this last proposition we cannot 
 repress our wonder. In the reign of Louis XIV., Marshal Yauban, 
 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 
 animals, 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 sta- 
 tistics comprise no returns of the rate of wages. We are quite 
 
 * It did deteriorate in the early part of the reign of Louis XIV. not because 
 the peasants taught land, but because they were compelled to sell it. "Au 
 moment," says Michelet (Le Peuple, ch. 1), "oil nos ministres Italiens, un 
 Mazarin, un Emeri, doublaient les taxes, les nobles qui remplissaient la cour 
 obtinrent aise"ment d'etre exempted, 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, metayers, 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, re'hnprime' recemment dans la Col- 
 lection des Economistes. Puisse cette histoire les avertir dans un moment ou 
 diverses influences travaillent a 1'envi pour arr^ter 1'ceuvrecapitale de la France, 
 1'acquisition de la terre par le travailleur."
 
 APPENDIX. 607 
 
 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 culti- 
 vation conaisted solely of grain crops and fallows, it will be difficult 
 to make us believe that, even in the most backward parts of the 
 country, there has not been a considerable improvement from so 
 miserable 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 
 artificial grasses, from one to three millions ; under roots, from 
 100,000 to two millions ; under the more peculiar and expensive 
 crops, from 400,000 to one million. "Thanks to this better distri- 
 bution of the soil, which allows six millions more of hectares to be 
 devoted to the feeding of animals, and consequently to the produc- 
 tion 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 in- 
 creased, the total produce has more than doubled. The same thing 
 has taken place with cattle, which, receiving twice as much suste- 
 nance, 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 defended from the ravages of animals, and 
 better managed in consequence 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. Eubichon 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 
 
 * Economic Rurale de la France, pp. 52, 53.
 
 608 APPENDIX. 
 
 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 
 feature 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 Uoc, to a middleman, usually an attorney or a notary, who sub- 
 lets it in small portions on the metayer system, and is not only, as in 
 Ireland, the hardest and most grasping of landlords, but having 
 only a temporary tenure, and being no agriculturist, of course ex- 
 pends nothing in improvements. Of fifty-seven millions of acres 
 cultivated by tenants, twenty-one millions are held only 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 advan- 
 tages, of proprietary cultivation ; the only exceptions being La 
 Vendee and a few of the adjoining departments, where the large 
 proprietors ai - e resident, a primitive relationship subsists between 
 them and their tenants, and the metayers have in general, as in 
 Tuscany, a virtual 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 
 formerly, 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, com- 
 bined 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, gene-
 
 APPENDIX. 609 
 
 rally, knows but one way of getting rich ; namely, thrift. He does 
 not understand sowing 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 unparal- 
 leled 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 extravagant price which the passion 
 of the peasantry for land induces them to give, amounting often to 
 forty years' purchase. It does not answer 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 districts, 
 few speculations would be more profitable than to buy land in 
 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 
 proportional of substituting the 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 hare raised 
 upon it. The supply of butcher's meat to some of the principal 
 towns, especially Paris, is less copious than formerly. It has in- 
 creased greatly, but in a less ratio than the population. Of the fact 
 there is no doubt, since on this point there are trustworthy statis- 
 tics 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 ; 
 VOL. I. R R
 
 610 APPENDIX. 
 
 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 ; Paris 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 population 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 agree- 
 able to those theorists amongst us who confound the extension of 
 manufactures with the welfare and comfort of the working people. 
 The more candid Minister of Louis-Philippe assumes that a manu- 
 facturing population must of necessity be worse fed than other 
 classes." The reviewer is evidently no CEdipus. But he might 
 have found in another page of M. Eubichon's treatise, what the 
 Minister meant. 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 land- 
 lords, the Court and higher functionaries paid by the State, the 
 bankers, financiers, government contractors, and other monied 
 classes, with the great and small dealers and tradesmen needful for 
 supplying these opuleut 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 numerical 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 con- 
 siderably diminished. We have little doubt that this is the fact, 
 and that the great increase in the inferior kinds of animal food in- 
 troduced into Paris would prove to be for the use, not of those who
 
 APPENDIX. 611 
 
 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 butchers' 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 1 814 they were exempted from all duty. 
 In that year, however, a duty of three francs was laid on each 
 head of cattle imported;" 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 establishment. A third cause is that the trade 
 of butcher in Paris is a monopoly, the number of butchers being 
 limited, and to so small a number, that the privilege bears a high 
 pecuniary value.f This we believe to be the principal cause of the 
 high price and diminished consumption of meat in Paris. Two 
 circumstances are almost decisive in proof of this opinion. One is 
 that while the consumption per head of butcher's meat has dimi- 
 nished, that of almost every other article of food has largely in- 
 creased. The other is, that in the banlieue of Paris, which differs 
 from Paris itself in no material circumstance but that of being 
 beyond the octroi, and exempt from the butchers' monopoly, the 
 consumption per head of meat, instead of diminishing, has aug- 
 mented in a remarkable degree ; as it is affirmed to have also done 
 in all the great towns of Prance, Paris excepted.J 
 
 * M'Culloch's Geographical Dictionary, art. France. 
 
 f Now [1862] no longer true, the occupation having been thrown open. 
 
 J On the first point : " La consommation du beurre, qui e"tait repre"sente"e 
 en 1812 par une valeur de 6,935,929 francs, s'elevait en 1847 ^ 13,303,435 fr.; 
 celle de la marde, qui etait en 1812 de 4,183,532 fr. atteignait en 1847 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 consomme's s'e"levait a presque 
 7,000,000 fr.; en 1842, c'e"tait 10,000,000, fr. ; et dans les annees qui ont suivi, 
 cette valeur s'est e"levee a plus de 9,000,000 fr. C'est-a-clire que la consomma- 
 tion des principales denrees, beurre, ceufs, volaille et niaree, s'augmentait pen- 
 dant une period e de trente-cinq anne"es dans des proportions superieures a 
 1'accroissement de la population, tandis que la consommation de la viande de 
 boucherie diminuaitde 10 kilogrammes par individu, ou de 20 pour cent." 
 
 On the secoriM point : "En 1812, la population de la banlieue de Paris e"tait 
 
 R R 2
 
 612 APPENDIX. 
 
 But if there were not these causes, there is cause almost suffi- 
 cient in the very fact of an increased and rapidly increasing popu- 
 lation. 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 he rapidly improving indeed, 
 if an increase like this can take place in a single market without 
 compelling 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 carcases from 
 the extremity of Scotland as cheaply as they could formerly be 
 brought from Buckinghamshire ? 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 neighbourhood. 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 toAvns, 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 consum|>- 
 
 de 91,000 habitans en nombres ronds. Cette population consommait alors 
 8930 bosufs, 528 vaches, 6844 veaux et 27,558 moutons, dormant un poids 
 total de viande de 3,500,000 kilog. en nombres roiids, soit 38 kilog. et denii, 
 a peu pres, par individu et par an. Depuis 1812, la consomniation en viande et 
 la population n'ont pas cesse^ de s'accroitre dans la banlieue ; mais 1 accroisse- 
 ment n'a pas suivi les memes proportions. En 1821, la consomrnation elait de 
 5,400,000 kilog. et s'est augmentee constamment depuis ; enfin, en 1835, c'e"tait 
 8.500,000 kilog. En cette meme anne"e, la population de la banlieue etait de 
 170,000 habitans, dont la consomniation individuelle e"tait de 50 kilog. par 
 an, soit 11 kilog. et deini d'augmentation de 1812 a 1835. . . Nous devous faire 
 remarquer que dans ces chiffres de la consommation de la banlieue, nous ne 
 comprenons que la vi;mde aclietee sur les marches a bestiaux de Paris: le chiffre 
 du be'tail achete" par les bouchers extra-muros, dans les foires, dans les i'ermes et 
 sur les 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'accroiKsement prodigieux de la consommation dans la banlieue de 
 Paris, correspond a une augmentation du meme genre dans toutes les grandes 
 villes de France, Paris excepte"." 
 
 These details are extracted from an article by M. Charles Beranger, in the 
 journa 1 La RepuUique of January 1, 1851.
 
 APPENDIX. 613 
 
 tion by the country people. They have less animal food, in pro- 
 portion, 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 defi- 
 ciency 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 ia 
 well known that on the stall-feeding system there is much greater 
 preservation of manure. The question of petite culture, in rela- 
 tion 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, ccetens pavibus, 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 
 consequence, 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 
 
 * Lavergne, Essai xur t Economic Rurale de I' Angleterre, de VErosse, et de 
 rirlande, 3nte e"d. p. 16. 
 
 f See this question discussed in Book I. ch. ix. of the present work, pp. 
 1825.
 
 614 APPENDIX. 
 
 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, Bour- 
 bonnais, 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 Iwrbes of the Allier and the 
 Nievre." 
 
 It may now be left to the reader to judge if the case of our 
 adversaries has not broken down as completely on this, their 
 strongest point, as it has done on every other point of any im- 
 portance.* 
 
 We cannot close this long controversy without producing evidence 
 of the extraordinary improvement, extraordinary both in 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 influ- 
 ential politicians and publicists of France. This tract, published in 
 1841, is an examination of "the changes in the agricultural 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 privilege but that of 
 Outis in the Odyssey, to be devoured the last. Let us now see the 
 
 * The consumption of butcher's meat at Paris would seem to have conside- 
 rably increased since the first publication of this discussion. The following table 
 is extracted by M. Michel Chevalier (in the Journal des Economistes for July, 
 1856), from the elaborate work of M. Husson, entitled "Lea Consommationa 
 de Paris :" 
 
 Average annual consumption per head of animal food : 
 
 Viande de boucherie 62 kilog. 586 grammes 
 
 Pore et charcuterie 10 ,, 267 ,, 
 
 Volaille et gibier 9 ,, 841 ,, 
 
 Poisson 12 ,, 767 ., 
 
 Total ... 95 kilog. 461 grammes 
 or about 210 English pounds.
 
 APPENDIX. 615 
 
 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. Passy's pamphlet is a com- 
 parison of these returns with those collected by the French Govern- 
 ment 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 
 increased in a much greater proportion than any others : instead 
 of 17 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 has increased 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 during the second half of the period, so that the improve- 
 ment was as progressive as on M. Rubichon's theory should have 
 been the deterioration. There had been no perceptible variation in 
 the proportion between the grande and the petite culture ; nor had 
 the division of properties at all promoted the division of farms 
 On the soils where small farms are most profitable, large proper- 
 ties are rented to small tenants ; where the reverse is the case, a single 
 farmer often rents the lands of several proprietors, and this arrange- 
 ment extends itself 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 agricultural wealth of the department had increased, 
 according to his estimate, 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 
 
 * During the last two quinquennial periods, the population of this depart- 
 ment, on the showing both of the census and of the register of births and 
 deaths, has actually diminished.
 
 616 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 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. 
 
 Eesults 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. Bertin. " 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 improved with increasing rapidity. If from 1815 to 1825 the 
 improvement 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 pro- 
 duce per hectare was estimated only at 9 hectolitres ; rather more than 
 10 bushels per acre. In 1845, M. Bertin estimates it at 16, or upwards 
 of 18 bushels per acre. 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 manures 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 further, the co-heirs not dividing 
 each parcelle, but either distributing the parcelles among them, or dis- 
 posing of them by private or public 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-feeding, which, he says, is not practised in his 
 arrondissement. The increase of live stock is therefore the more 
 remarkable. It may not be useless to mention an assertion of this 
 writer, that the official publication from which M. Rubichon's data are 
 taken greatly understates the number of horned cattle in France, by 
 the accidental omission 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.
 
 APPENDIX. 617 
 
 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 substan- 
 tial, " and different for every season, which is always a sign of 
 general comfort," and " persons in rags are very rare in the arron- 
 dissement." 
 
 We cannot further extend this long discussion ; but enough has 
 been said, to enable our readers adequately to appreciate the ter- 
 rible predictions of alarmist writers respecting the consequences of the 
 Division of Landed Property in France. 
 
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