It is perhaps impossible, and, at any rate, it would not be of much use, to present a complete and methodical catalogue of human wants. Nearly all those which are of real importance are comprised in the following enumeration:—

Respiration (I retain here that want, as marking the boundary where the transmission of labour or exchange of services begins)—Food—Clothing—Lodging—Preservation or re-establishment of Health—Locomotion—Security—Instruction—Diversion—Sense of the beautiful.

Wants exist. This is a fact. It would be puerile to inquire whether we should have been better without wants, and why God has made us subject to them.

It is certain that man suffers, and even dies, when he cannot satisfy the wants which belong to his organization. It is certain that he suffers, and may even die, when in satisfying certain of his wants he indulges to excess.

We cannot satisfy the greater part of our wants without pain or trouble, which may be considered as suffering. The same may be said of the act by which, exercising a noble control over our appetites, we impose on ourselves a privation.

Thus, suffering is inevitable, and there remains to us only a choice of evils. Nothing comes more home to us than suffering, and hence personal interest—the sentiment which is branded now-a-days with the names of egotism and individualism—is indestructible. Nature has placed sensibility at the extremity of our nerves, and at all the avenues to the heart and mind, as an advanced guard, to give us notice when our satisfactions are either defective or in excess. Pain has, then, a purpose, a mission. We are asked frequently, whether the existence of evil can be reconciled with the infinite goodness of the Creator—a formidable [p076] problem that philosophy will always discuss, and never probably be able to solve. As far as Political Economy is concerned, we must take man as he is, inasmuch as it is not given to imagination to figure to itself—far less can the reason conceive—a sentient and mortal being exempt from pain. We should try in vain to comprehend sensibility without pain, or man without sensibility.

In our days, certain sentimentalist schools reject as false all social science which does not go the length of establishing a system by means of which suffering may be banished from the world. They pass a severe judgment on Political Economy because it admits, what it is impossible to deny, the existence of suffering. They go farther—they make Political Economy responsible for it. It is as if they were to attribute the frailty of our organs to the physiologist who makes them the object of his study.

Undoubtedly we may acquire a temporary popularity, attract the regards of suffering classes, and irritate them against the natural order of society, by telling them that we have in our head a plan of artificial social arrangement which excludes pain in every form. We may even pretend to appropriate God’s secret, and to interpret His presumed will, by banishing evil from the world. And there will not be wanting those who will treat as impious a science which exposes such pretensions, and who will accuse it of overlooking or denying the foresight of the Author of things.

These schools, at the same time, give us a frightful picture of the actual state of society, not perceiving that if it be impious to foresee suffering in the future, it is equally so to expose its existence in the past or in the present. For the infinite admits of no limits; and if a single human being has since the creation experienced suffering, that fact would entitle us to admit, without impiety, that suffering has entered into the plan of Providence.

Surely it is more philosophical and more manly to acknowledge at once great natural facts which not only exist, but apart from which we can form no just or adequate conception of human nature.

Man, then, is subject to suffering, and consequently society is also subject to it.

Suffering discharges a function in the individual, and consequently in society.

An accurate investigation of the social laws discloses to us that the mission of suffering is gradually to destroy its own causes, to circumscribe suffering itself within narrower limits, and finally to assure the preponderance of the Good and the Fair, by enabling us to purchase or merit that preponderance. [p077]

The nomenclature we have proposed places material wants in the foreground.

The times in which we live force me to put the reader on his guard against a species of sentimental affectation which is now much in vogue.

There are people who hold very cheap what they disdainfully term material wants, material satisfactions: they will say, as Belise says to Chrysale,

“Le corps, cette guenille, est-il d’une importance,
D’un prix À mÉriter seulement qu’on y pense?”

And although, in general, pretty well off themselves, they will blame me for having indicated as one of our most pressing wants, that of food, for example.

I acknowledge undoubtedly that moral advancement is a higher thing than physical sustenance. But are we so stuffed with declamatory affectation that we can no longer venture to say, that before we can set about moral culture, we must have the means of living. Let us guard ourselves against these puerilities, which obstruct science. In wishing to pass for philanthropical we cease to be truthful; for it is contrary both to reason and to fact to represent moral development, self-respect, the cultivation of refined sentiments, as preceding the requirements of simple preservation. This sort of prudery is quite modern. Rousseau, that enthusiastic panegyrist of the State of Nature, steered clear of it; and a man endued with exquisite delicacy, of a tenderness of heart full of unction, a spiritualist even to quietism, and, towards himself, a stoic—I mean FÉnÉlon—has said that, “After all, solidity of mind consists in the desire to be exactly instructed as to how those things are managed which lie at the foundation of human life—all great affairs turn upon that.”

Without pretending, then, to classify our wants in a rigorously exact order, we may say, that man cannot direct his efforts to the satisfaction of moral wants of the highest and most elevated kind until after he has provided for those which concern his preservation and sustenance. Whence, without going farther, we may conclude that every legislative measure which tells against the material well-being of communities injures the moral life of nations,—a harmony which I commend, in passing, to the attention of the reader.

And since the occasion presents itself, I will here mark another.

Since the inexorable necessities of material life are an obstacle to moral and intellectual culture, it follows that we ought to find more virtue among wealthy than among poor nations and classes. [p078] Good Heaven! what have I just said, and with what clamour shall I be assailed! But the truth is, it is a perfect mania of our times to attribute all disinterestedness, all self-sacrifice, all which constitutes the greatness and moral beauty of man, to the poorer classes, and this mania has of late been still more developed by a revolution, which, bringing these classes to the surface of society, has not failed to surround them with a crowd of flatterers.

I don’t deny that wealth, opulence, especially where it is very unequally spread, tends to develop certain special vices.

But is it possible to admit as a general proposition that virtue is the privilege of poverty, and vice the unhappy and unfailing companion of ease? This would be to affirm that moral and intellectual improvement, which is only compatible with a certain amount of leisure and comfort, is detrimental to intelligence and morality.

I appeal to the candour of the suffering classes themselves. To what horrible dissonances would such a paradox conduct us!

We must then conclude, that human nature has the frightful alternative presented to it, either to remain eternally wretched, or advance gradually on the road to vice and immorality. Then all the forces which conduct us to wealth—such as activity, economy, skill, honesty—are the seeds of vice; while those which tie us to poverty—improvidence, idleness, dissipation, carelessness—are the precious germs of virtue. Could we conceive in the moral world a dissonance more discouraging? Or, were it really so, who would dare to address or counsel the people? You complain of your sufferings (we must say to them), and you are impatient to see an end of these sufferings. You groan at finding yourselves under the yoke of the most imperious material wants, and you sigh for the hour of your deliverance, for you desire leisure to make your voice heard in the political world and to protect your interests. You know not what you desire, or how fatal success would prove to you. Ease, competence, riches, develop only vice. Guard, then, religiously your poverty and your virtue.

The flatterers of the people, then, fall into a manifest contradiction when they point to the region of opulence as an impure sink of egotism and vice, and, at the same time, urge them on—and frequently in their eagerness by the most illegitimate means—to a region which they deem so unfortunate.

Such discordances are never encountered in the natural order of society. It is impossible to suppose that all men should aspire to competence, that the natural way to attain it should be by the exercise of the strictest virtue, and that they should reach it [p079] nevertheless only to be caught in the snares of vice. Such declamations are calculated only to light up and keep alive the hatred of classes. If true, they place human nature in a dilemma between poverty and immorality. If untrue, they make falsehood the minister of disorder, and set to loggerheads classes who should mutually love and assist each other.

Factitious inequality—inequality generated by law, by disturbing the natural order of development of the different classes of society—is, for all, a prolific source of irritation, jealousy, and crime. This is the reason why it is necessary to satisfy ourselves whether this natural order leads to the progressive amelioration and progressive equalization of all classes; and we should be arrested in this inquiry by what lawyers term a fin de non-recevoir, a peremptory exception, if this double material progress implied necessarily a double moral degradation.

Upon the subject of human wants I have to make an important observation,—and one which, in Political Economy, may even be regarded as fundamental,—it is, that wants are not a fixed immutable quantity. They are not in their nature stationary, but progressive.

We remark this characteristic even in our strictly physical wants; but it becomes more apparent as we rise to those desires and intellectual tastes which distinguish man from the inferior animals.

It would seem that if there be anything in which men should resemble each other, it is in the want of food, for, unless in exceptional cases, men’s stomachs are very much alike.

And yet aliments which are recherchÉs at one period become vulgar at another, and the regimen which suits a Lazzarone would subject a Dutchman to torture. Thus the want which is the most immediate, the grossest of all, and consequently the most uniform of all, still varies according to age, sex, temperament, climate, custom.

The same may be said of all our other wants. Scarcely has a man found shelter than he desires to be lodged, scarcely is he clothed than he wishes to be decorated, scarcely has he satisfied his bodily cravings than study, science, art, open to his desires an unlimited field.

It is a phenomenon well worthy of remark, how quickly, by continuous satisfaction, what was at first only a vague desire becomes a taste, and what was only a taste is transformed into a want, and even a want of the most imperious kind.

Look at that rude artizan. Accustomed to poor fare, plain [p080] clothing, indifferent lodging, he imagines he would be the happiest of men, and would have no farther desires, if he could but reach the step of the ladder immediately above him. He is astonished that those who have already reached it should still torment themselves as they do. At length comes the modest fortune he has dreamt of, and then he is happy, very happy—for a few days.

For soon he becomes familiar with his new situation, and by degrees he ceases to feel his fancied happiness. With indifference he puts on the fine clothing after which he sighed. He has got into a new circle, he associates with other companions, he drinks of another cup, he aspires to mount another step, and if he ever turns his reflections at all upon himself, he feels that if his fortune has changed, his soul remains the same, and is still an inexhaustible spring of new desires.

It would seem that nature has attached this singular power to habit, in order that it should be in us what a rochet-wheel is in mechanics, and that humanity, urged on continually to higher and higher regions, should not be able to rest content, whatever degree of civilisation it attains to.

The sense of dignity, the feeling of self-respect, acts with perhaps still more force in the same direction. The stoic philosophy has frequently blamed men for desiring rather to appear than to be. But, taking a broader view of things, is it certain that to appear is not for man one of the modes of being?

When, by exertion, order, and economy, a family rises by degrees towards those social regions where tastes become nicer and more delicate, relations more polished, sentiments more refined, intelligence more cultivated, who can describe the acute suffering which accompanies a forced return to their former low estate? The body does not alone suffer. The sad reverse interferes with habits which have become as it were a second nature; it clashes with the sense of dignity, and all the feelings of the soul. It is by no means uncommon in such a case to see the victim sink all at once into degrading sottishness, or perish in despair. It is with the social medium as with the atmosphere. The mountaineer, accustomed to the pure air of his native hills, pines and moulders away in the narrow streets of our cities.

But I hear some one exclaim, Economist, you stumble already. You have just told us that your science is in accord with morals, and here you are justifying luxury and effeminacy. Philosopher, I say in my turn, lay aside these fine clothes, which were not those of primitive man, break your furniture, burn your books, dine on raw flesh, and I shall then reply to your objection. It is too much [p081] to quarrel with this power of habit, of which you are yourself the living example.

We may find fault with this disposition which Nature has given to our organs; but our censure will not make it the less universal. We find it existing among all nations, ancient and modern, savage and civilized, at the antipodes as at home. We cannot explain civilisation without it; and when a disposition of the human heart is thus proved to be universal and indestructible, social science cannot put it aside, or refuse to take it into account.

This objection will be made by publicists who pride themselves on being the disciples of Rousseau; but Rousseau has never denied the existence of the phenomenon. He establishes undeniably the indefinite elasticity of human wants, and the power of habit, and admits even the part which I assign to them in preventing the human race from retrograding; only, that which I admire is what he deplores, and he does so consistently. Rousseau fancied there was a time when men had neither rights, nor duties, nor relations, nor affections, nor language; and it was then, according to him, that they were happy and perfect. He was bound, therefore, to abhor the social machinery which is constantly removing mankind from ideal perfection. Those, on the contrary, who are of opinion that perfection is not at the beginning, but at the end, of the human evolution, will admire the spring and motive of action which I place in the foreground. But as to the existence and play of the spring itself we are at one.

“Men of leisure,” he says, “employed themselves in procuring all sorts of conveniences and accommodations unknown to their forefathers, and that was the first yoke which, without intending it, they imposed upon themselves, and the prime source of the inconveniences which they prepared for their descendants. For, not only did they thus continue to emasculate both mind and body, but these luxuries having by habit lost all their relish, and degenerated into true wants, their being deprived of them caused more pain than the possession of them had given pleasure: they were unhappy at losing what they had no enjoyment in possessing.”

Rousseau was convinced that God, nature, and humanity were wrong. That is still the opinion of many; but it is not mine.

After all, God forbid that I should desire to set myself against the noblest attribute, the most beautiful virtue of man, self-control, command over his passions, moderation in his desires, contempt of show. I don’t say that he is to make himself a slave to this or that factitious want. I say that wants (taking a broad and general [p082] view of them as resulting from man’s mental and bodily constitution), combined with the power of habit, and the sense of dignity, are indefinitely expansible, because they spring from an inexhaustible source—namely, desire. Who should blame a rich man for being sober, for despising finery, for avoiding pomp and effeminacy? But are there not more elevated desires to which he may yield? Has the desire for instruction, for instance, any limits? To render service to his country, to encourage the arts, to disseminate useful ideas, to succour the distressed,—is there anything in these incompatible with the right use of riches?

For the rest, whatever philosophers may think of it, human wants do not constitute a fixed immutable quantity. That is a certain, a universal fact, liable to no exception. The wants of the fourteenth century, whether with reference to food, or lodging, or instruction, were not at all the wants of ours, and we may safely predict that ours will not be the wants of our descendants.

The same observation applies to all the elements of Political Economy—Wealth, Labour, Value, Services, etc.,—all participate in the extreme versatility of the principal subject, Man. Political Economy has not, like geometry or physics, the advantage of dealing with objects which can be weighed or measured. This is one of its difficulties to begin with, and it is a perpetual source of errors throughout; for when the human mind applies itself to a certain order of phenomena, it is naturally on the outlook for a criterion, a common measure, to which everything can be referred, in order to give to that particular branch of knowledge the character of an exact science. Thus we observe some authors seeking for fixity in value, others in money, others in corn, others in labour, that is to say, in things which are themselves all liable to fluctuation.

Many errors in Political Economy proceed from authors thus regarding human wants as a fixed determinate quantity; and it is for this reason that I have deemed it my duty to enlarge on this subject. At the risk of anticipating, it is worth while to notice briefly this mode of reasoning. Economists take generally the enjoyments which satisfy men of the present day, and they assume that human nature admits of no other. Hence, if the bounty of nature, or the power of machinery, or habits of temperance and moderation, succeed in rendering disposable for a time a portion of human labour, this progress disquiets them, they consider it as a disaster, and they retreat behind absurd but specious formulas, such as these: Production is superabundant,—we suffer from plethora,—the power of producing outruns the power of consuming, etc. [p083]

It is not possible to discover a solution of the question of machinery, or that of external competition, or that of luxury, if we persist in considering our wants as a fixed invariable quantity, and do not take into account their indefinite expansibility.

But if human wants are indefinite, progressive, capable of increase, like desire, which is their never failing source, we must admit, under pain of introducing discordance and contradiction into the economical laws of society, that nature has placed in man and around him indefinite and progressive means of satisfaction;—equilibrium between the means and the end being the primary condition of all harmony. This is what we shall now examine.

I said at the outset of this work that the object of Political Economy is man, considered with reference to his wants, and his means of satisfying these wants.

We must then begin with the study of man and his organization.

But we have also seen that he is not a solitary being. If his wants and his satisfactions are, from the very nature of sensibility, inseparable from his being, the same thing cannot be said of his efforts, which spring from the active principle. The latter are susceptible of transmission. In a word, men work for one another.

Now a very strange thing takes place.

If we take a general, or, if I may be allowed the expression, abstract view, of man, his wants, his efforts, his satisfactions, his constitution, his inclinations, his tendencies, we fall into a train of observation which appears free from doubt and self-evident,—so much so, that the writer finds a difficulty in submitting to the public judgment truths so vulgar and so palpable. He is afraid of provoking ridicule; and thinks, not without reason, that the impatient reader will throw away his book, exclaiming, “I shall not waste time on such trivialities.”

And yet these truths which, when presented to us in an abstract shape, we regard as so incontrovertible that we can scarce summon patience to listen to them, are considered only as ridiculous errors and absurd theories the moment they are applied to man in his social state. Regarding man as an isolated being, who ever took it into his head to say, “Production is superabundant—the power of consumption cannot keep pace with the power of production—luxury and factitious tastes are the source of wealth—the invention of machinery annihilates labour,” and other apophthegms of the same sort,—which, nevertheless, when applied to mankind in the aggregate, we receive as axioms so well established that they are actually made the basis of our commercial and industrial legislation? Exchange produces in this respect an illusion of which [p084] even men of penetration and solid judgment find it impossible to disabuse themselves, and I affirm that Political Economy will have attained its design, and fulfilled its mission, when it shall have conclusively demonstrated this:—that what is true of an individual man is true of society at large. Man in an isolated state is at once producer and consumer, inventor and projector, capitalist and workman. All the economic phenomena are accomplished in his person—he is, as it were, society in miniature. In like manner, humanity, viewed in the aggregate, may be regarded as a great, collective, complex individual, to whom you may apply exactly the same truths as to man in a state of isolation.

I have felt it necessary to make this remark, which I hope will be justified in the sequel, before continuing what I had to say upon man. I should have been afraid, otherwise, that the reader might reject, as superfluous, the following developments, which in fact are nothing else than veritable truisms.

I have just spoken of the wants of man, and after presenting an approximate enumeration of them, I observed that they were not of a stationary, but of a progressive nature; and this holds true, whether we consider these wants each singly, or all together, in their physical, intellectual, and moral order. How could it be otherwise? There are wants the satisfaction of which is exacted by our organization under pain of death, and up to a certain point we may represent these as fixed quantities, although that is not rigorously exact, for however little we may desire to neglect an essential element—namely, the force of habit—however little we may condescend to subject ourselves to honest self-examination, we shall be forced to allow that wants, even of the plainest and most homely kind (the desire for food, for example), undergo, under the influence of habit, undoubted transformations. The man who declaims against this observation as materialist and epicurean, would think himself very unfortunate, if, taking him at his word, we should reduce him to the black broth of the Spartans, or the scanty pittance of an anchorite. At all events, when wants of this kind have been satisfied in an assured and permanent way, there are others which take their rise in the most expansible of our faculties, desire. Can we conceive a time when man can no longer form even reasonable desires? Let us not forget that a desire which might be unreasonable in a former state of civilisation—at a time when all the human faculties were absorbed in providing for low material wants—ceases to be so when improvement opens to these faculties a more extended field. A desire to travel at the rate of thirty miles an hour would have been unreasonable [p085] two centuries ago—it is not so at the present day. To pretend that the wants and desires of man are fixed and stationary quantities, is to mistake the nature of the human soul, to deny facts, and to render civilisation inexplicable.

It would still be inexplicable if, side by side with the indefinite development of wants, there had not been placed, as possible, the indefinite development of the means of providing for these wants. How could the expansible nature of our wants have contributed to the realization of progress, if, at a certain point, our faculties could advance no farther, and should encounter an impassable barrier?

Our wants being indefinite, the presumption is that the means of satisfying these wants should be indefinite also, unless we are to suppose Nature, Providence, or the Power which presides over our destinies, to have fallen into a cruel and shocking contradiction.

I say indefinite, not infinite, for nothing connected with man is infinite. It is precisely because our faculties go on developing themselves ad infinitum, that they have no assignable limits, although they may have absolute limits. There are many points above the present range of humanity, which we may never succeed in attaining, and yet for all that, the time may never come when we shall cease to approach nearer them.22

I don’t at all mean to say that desire, and the means of satisfying desire, march in parallel lines and with equal rapidity. The former runs—the latter limps after it.

The prompt and adventurous nature of desire, compared with the slowness of our faculties, shews us very clearly that in every stage of civilisation, at every step of our progress, suffering to a certain extent is, and ever must be, the lot of man. But it shews us likewise that this suffering has a mission, for desire could no longer be an incentive to our faculties if it followed, in place of preceding, their exercise. Let us not, however, accuse nature of cruelty in the construction of this mechanism, for we cannot fail to remark that desire is never transformed into want, strictly so called, that is, into painful desire, until it has been made such by habit; in other words, until the means of satisfying the desire have been found and placed irrevocably within our reach.23 [p086]

We have now to examine the question,—What means have we of providing for our wants?

It seems evident to me that there are two—namely, Nature and Labour, the gifts of God, and the fruits of our efforts—or, if you will, the application of our faculties to the things which Nature has placed at our service.

No school that I know of has attributed the satisfaction of our wants to Nature alone. Such an assertion is clearly contradicted by experience, and we need not learn Political Economy to perceive that the intervention of our faculties is necessary.

But there are schools who have attributed this privilege to Labour alone. Their axiom is, “All wealth comes from labour—labour is wealth.”

I cannot help anticipating, so far as to remark, that these formulas, taken literally, have led to monstrous errors of doctrine, and, consequently, to deplorable legislative blunders. I shall return to this subject. I confine myself here to establishing, as a fact, that Nature and Labour co-operate for the satisfaction of our wants and desires.

Let us examine the facts.

The first want which we have placed at the head of our list is that of breathing. As regards respiration, we have already shown that nature in general is at the whole cost, and that human labour intervenes only in certain exceptional cases, as where it becomes necessary to purify the atmosphere.

Another want is that of quenching our thirst, and it is more or less satisfied by Nature, in as far as she furnishes us with water, more or less pure, abundant, and within reach; and Labour concurs in as far as it becomes necessary to bring water from a greater distance, to filter it, or to obviate its scarcity by constructing wells and cisterns.

The liberality of Nature towards us in regard to food is by no means uniform; for who will maintain, that the labour to be furnished is the same when the land is fertile, or when it is sterile, when the forest abounds with game, the river with fish, or in the opposite cases?

As regards lighting, human labour has certainly less to do when the night is short than when it is long.

I dare not lay it down as an absolute rule, but it appears to me that in proportion as we rise in the scale of wants, the co-operation of Nature is lessened, and leaves us more room for the exercise of our faculties. The painter, the sculptor, and the author even, are forced to avail themselves of materials and instruments which Nature alone [p087] furnishes, but from their own genius is derived all that makes the charm, the merit, the utility, and the value of their works. To learn is a want which the well-directed exercise of our faculties almost alone can satisfy. Yet here Nature assists, by presenting to us in divers degrees objects of observation and comparison. With an equal amount of application, may not botany, geology, or natural history, make everywhere equal progress?

It would be superfluous to cite other examples. We have already shown undeniably that Nature gives us the means of satisfaction, in placing at our disposal things possessed of higher or lower degrees of utility (I use the word in its etymological sense, as indicating the property of serving, of being useful). In many cases, in almost every case, labour must contribute, to a certain extent, in rendering this utility complete; and we can easily comprehend that the part which labour has to perform is greater or less in proportion as Nature had previously advanced the operation in a less or greater degree.

We may then lay down these two formulas:

1. Utility is communicated sometimes by Nature alone, sometimes by Labour alone, but almost always by the co-operation of both.

2. To bring anything to its highest degree of UTILITY, the action of Labour is in an inverse ratio to the action of Nature.

From these two propositions, combined with what I have said of the indefinite expansibility of our wants, I may be permitted to deduce a conclusion, the importance of which will be demonstrated in the sequel. Suppose two men, having no connexion with each other, to be unequally situated in this respect, that Nature had been liberal to the one, and niggardly to the other; the first would evidently obtain a given amount of satisfaction at a less expense of labour. Would it follow that the part of his forces thus left disposable, if I may use the expression, would be abandoned to inaction? and that this man, on account of the liberality of Nature, would be reduced to compulsory idleness? Not at all. It would follow that he could, if he wished it, dispose of these forces to enlarge the circle of his enjoyments; that with an equal amount of labour he could procure two satisfactions in place of one; in a word, that his progress would become more easy.

I may be mistaken, but it appears to me that no science, not even geometry, is founded on truths more unassailable. Were any one to prove to me that all these truths were so many errors, I should not only lose confidence in them, but all faith in evidence itself; for what reasoning could one employ which should better deserve the acquiescence of our judgment than the evidence thus [p088] overturned? The moment an axiom is discovered which shall contradict this other axiom—that a straight line is the shortest road from one point to another—that instant the human mind has no other refuge, if it be a refuge, than absolute scepticism.

I positively feel ashamed thus to insist upon first principles which are so plain as to seem puerile. And yet we must confess that, amid the complications of human transactions, such simple truths have been overlooked; and in order to justify myself for detaining the reader so long upon what the English call truisms, I shall notice here a singular error by which excellent minds have allowed themselves to be misled. Setting aside, neglecting entirely, the co-operation of Nature in relation to the satisfaction of our wants, they have laid down the absolute principle that all wealth comes from labour. On this foundation they have reared the following erroneous syllogism:

“All wealth comes from labour:

“Wealth, then, is in proportion to labour.

“But labour is in an inverse ratio to the liberality of Nature:

“Ergo, wealth is inversely as the liberality of Nature.”

Right or wrong, many economical laws owe their origin to this singular reasoning. Such laws cannot be otherwise than subversive of every sound principle in relation to the development and distribution of wealth; and this it is which justifies me in preparing beforehand, by the explanation of truths very trivial in appearance, for the refutation of the deplorable errors and prejudices under which society is now labouring.

Let us analyze the co-operation of Nature of which I have spoken. Nature places two things at our disposal—materials and forces.

Most of the material objects which contribute to the satisfaction of our wants and desires are brought into the state of utility which renders them fit for our use only by the intervention of labour, by the application of the human faculties. But the elements, the atoms, if you will, of which these objects are composed, are the gifts, I will add the gratuitous gifts, of Nature. This observation is of the very highest importance, and will, I believe, throw a new light upon the theory of wealth.

The reader will have the goodness to bear in mind that I am inquiring at present in a general way into the moral and physical constitution of man, his wants, his faculties, his relations with Nature—apart from the consideration of Exchange, which I shall enter upon in the next chapter. We shall then see in what respect, and in what manner, social transactions modify the phenomena. [p089]

It is very evident, that if man in an isolated state must, so to speak, purchase the greater part of his satisfactions by an exertion, by an effort, it is rigorously exact to say that prior to the intervention of any such exertion, any such effort, the materials which he finds at his disposal are the gratuitous gifts of Nature. After the first effort on his part, however slight it may be, they cease to be gratuitous; and if the language of Political Economy had been always exact, it would have been to material objects in this state, and before human labour had been bestowed upon them, that the term raw materials (matiÈres premiÈres) would have been exclusively applied.

I repeat that this gratuitous quality of the gifts of Nature, anterior to the intervention of labour, is of the very highest importance. I said in my second chapter that Political Economy was the theory of value; I add now, and by anticipation, that things begin to possess value only when it is given to them by labour. I intend to demonstrate afterwards that everything which is gratuitous for man in an isolated state is gratuitous for man in his social condition, and that the gratuitous gifts of Nature, whatever be their UTILITY, have no value. I say that a man who receives a benefit from Nature, directly and without any effort on his part, cannot be considered as rendering himself an onerous service, and, consequently, that he cannot render to another any service with reference to things which are common to all. Now, where there are no services rendered and received there is no value.

All that I have said of materials is equally applicable to the forces which Nature places at our disposal. Gravitation, the elasticity of air, the power of the winds, the laws of equilibrium, vegetable life, animal life, are so many forces which we learn to turn to account. The pains and intelligence which we bestow in this way always admit of remuneration, for we are not bound to devote our efforts to the advantage of others gratuitously. But these natural forces, in themselves, and apart from all intellectual or bodily exertion, are gratuitous gifts of Providence, and in this respect they remain destitute of value through all the complications of human transactions. This is the leading idea of the present work.

This observation would be of little importance, I allow, if the co-operation of Nature were constantly uniform, if each man, at all times, in all places, in all circumstances, received from Nature equal and invariable assistance. In that case, science would be justified in not taking into account an element which, remaining always and everywhere the same, would affect the services [p090] exchanged in equal proportions on both sides. As in geometry we eliminate portions of lines common to two figures which we compare with each other, we might neglect a co-operation which is invariably present, and content ourselves with saying, as we have done hitherto, “There is such a thing as natural wealth—Political Economy acknowledges it, and has no more concern with it.”

But this is not the true state of the matter. The irresistible tendency of the human mind, stimulated by self-interest and assisted by a series of discoveries, is to substitute natural and gratuitous co-operation for human and onerous concurrence; so that a given utility, although remaining the same as far as the result and the satisfactions which it procures us are concerned, represents a smaller and smaller amount of labour. In fact, it is impossible not to perceive the immense influence of this marvellous phenomenon on our notion of value. For what is the result of it? This, that in every product the gratuitous element tends to take the place of the onerous; that utility, being the result of two collaborations, of which one is remunerated and the other is not, Value, which has relation only to the first of these united forces, is diminished, and makes room for a utility which is identically the same, and this in proportion as we succeed in constraining Nature to a more efficacious co-operation. So that we may say that mankind have as many more satisfactions, as much more wealth, as they have less value. Now, the majority of authors having employed these three terms, utility, wealth, value, as synonymous, the result has been a theory which is not only not true, but the reverse of true. I believe sincerely that a more exact description of this combination of natural forces and human forces in the business of production, in other words, a juster definition of Value, would put an end to inextricable theoretical confusion, and would reconcile schools which are now divergent; and if I am now anticipating somewhat in entering on this subject here, my justification with the reader is the necessity of explaining in the outset certain ideas of which otherwise he would have difficulty in perceiving the importance.

Returning from this digression, I resume what I had to say upon man considered exclusively in an economical point of view.

Another observation, which we owe to J. B. Say, and which is almost self-evident, although too much neglected by many authors, is, that man creates neither the materials nor the forces of nature, if we take the word create in its exact signification. These materials, these forces, have an independent existence. Man can only combine them or displace them, for his own benefit or that [p091] of others. If for his own, he renders a service to himself,—if for the benefit of others, he renders service to his fellows, and has the right to exact an equivalent service. Whence it also follows that value is proportional to the service rendered, and not at all to the absolute utility of the thing. For this utility may be in great part the result of the gratuitous action of Nature, in which case the human service, the onerous service, the service to be remunerated, is of little value. This results from the axiom above established—namely, that to bring a thing to the highest degree of utility, the action of man is inversely as the action of Nature.

This observation overturns the doctrine which places value in the materiality of things. The contrary is the truth. The materiality is a quality given by Nature, and consequently gratuitous, and devoid of value, although of incontestable utility. Human action, which can never succeed in creating matter, constitutes alone the service which man in a state of isolation renders to himself, or that men in society render to each other; and it is the free appreciation of these services which is the foundation of value. Far, then, from concluding with Adam Smith that it is impossible to conceive of value otherwise than as residing in material substance, we conclude that between Matter and Value there is no possible relation.

This erroneous doctrine Smith deduced logically from his principle, that those classes alone are productive who operate on material substances. He thus prepared the way for the modern error of the socialists, who have never done representing as unproductive parasites those whom they term intermediaries between the producer and consumer—the merchant, the retail dealer, etc. Do they render services? Do they save us trouble by taking trouble for us? In that case they create value, although they do not create matter; and as no one can create matter, and we all confine our exertions to rendering reciprocal services, we pronounce with justice that all, including agriculturists and manufacturers, are intermediaries in relation one to another.

This is what I had to say at present upon the co-operation of Nature. Nature places at our disposal, in various degrees, depending on climate, seasons, and the advance of knowledge, but always gratuitously, materials and forces. Then these materials and forces are devoid of value; it would be strange if they had any. According to what rule should we estimate them? In what way could Nature be paid, remunerated, compensated? We shall see afterwards that exchange is necessary in order to determine value. We don’t purchase the goods of Nature—we gather them; and if, in order to appropriate them, a certain amount of effort is [p092] necessary, it is in this effort, not in the gifts of Nature, that the principle of value resides.

Let us now consider that action of man which we designate, in a general way, by the term labour.

The word labour, like almost all the terms of Political Economy, is very vague. Different authors use it in a sense more or less extended. Political Economy has not had, like most other sciences, Chemistry for example, the advantage of constructing her own vocabulary. Treating of subjects which have been familiar to men’s thoughts since the beginning of the world, and the constant subject of their daily talk, she has found a nomenclature ready made, and has been forced to adopt it.

The meaning of the word labour is often limited exclusively to the muscular action of man upon materials. Hence those who execute the mechanical part of production are called the working classes.

The reader will comprehend that I give to this word a more extended sense. I understand by labour the application of our faculties to the satisfaction of our wants. Wants, efforts, satisfactions, this is the circle of Political Economy. Effort may be physical, intellectual, or even moral, as we shall immediately see.

It is not necessary to demonstrate in this place that all our organs, all or nearly all our faculties, may concur, and, in point of fact, do concur, in production. Attention, sagacity, intelligence, imagination, have assuredly their part in it.

M. Dunoyer, in his excellent work, Sur la LibertÉ du Travail, has included, and with scientific exactness, our moral faculties among the elements to which we are indebted for our wealth—an idea as original and suggestive as it is just. It is destined to enlarge and ennoble the field of Political Economy.

I shall not dwell here upon that idea farther than as it may enable me to throw a faint light upon the origin of a powerful agent of production, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter—I mean Capital.

If we examine in succession the material objects which contribute to the satisfaction of our wants, we shall discover without difficulty that all or nearly all require, in order to their being brought to perfection, more time, a larger portion of our life, than a man can expend without recruiting his strength, that is to say, without satisfying his wants. This supposes that those who had made those things had previously reserved, set aside, accumulated, provisions, to enable them to subsist during the operation. [p093]

The same observation applies to satisfactions which have nothing material belonging to them.

A clergyman cannot devote himself to preaching, a professor to teaching, a magistrate to the maintenance of order, unless, by themselves, or by others, they are put in possession of means of subsistence previously created.

Let us go a little higher. Suppose a man isolated and forced to live by the chase. It is easy to comprehend that if every night he consumed the whole game which his day’s hunting had furnished, he could never set himself to any other work, to build a cottage, for example, or repair his arms or implements. All progress would be interdicted in his case.

This is not the proper place to define the nature and functions of Capital. My sole object at present is to show that certain moral virtues co-operate very directly in the amelioration of our condition, even when viewed exclusively with reference to wealth,—among other virtues, order, foresight, self-control, economy.

To foresee is one of our noblest privileges, and it is scarcely necessary to say that, in all situations of life, the man who most clearly foresees the probable consequences of his acts and determinations has the best chance of success.

To control his appetites, to govern his passions, to sacrifice the present to the future, to submit to privations for the sake of greater but more distant advantages—such are the conditions essential to the formation of capital; and capital, as we have already partially seen, is itself the essential condition of all labour that is in any degree complicated or prolonged. It is quite evident that if we suppose two men placed in identically the same position, and possessed of the same amount of intelligence and activity, that man would make the most progress who, having accumulated provisions, had placed himself in a situation to undertake protracted works, to improve his implements, and thus to make the forces of nature co-operate in the realization of his designs.

I shall not dwell longer on this. We have only to look around us to be convinced that all our forces, all our faculties, all our virtues, concur in furthering the advancement of man and of society.

For the same reason, there are none of our vices which are not directly or indirectly the causes of poverty. Idleness paralyzes efforts, which are the sinews of production. Ignorance and error give our efforts a false direction. Improvidence lays us open to deceptions. Indulgence in the appetites of the hour prevents the accumulation of capital. Vanity leads us to devote our efforts to factitious enjoyments, in place of such as are real. Violence and [p094] fraud provoke reprisals, oblige us to surround ourselves with troublesome precautions, and entail a great waste and destruction of power.

I shall wind up these preliminary observations on man with a remark which I have already made in relation to his wants. It is this, that the elements discussed and explained in this chapter, and which enter into and constitute economical science, are in their nature flexible and changeable. Wants, desires, materials and powers furnished by Nature, our muscular force, our organs, our intellectual faculties, our moral qualities, all vary with the individual, and change with time and place. No two men, perhaps, are entirely alike in any one of these respects, certainly not in all—nay more, no man entirely resembles himself for two hours together. What one knows another is ignorant of—what one values another despises—here nature is prodigal, there niggardly—a virtue which it is difficult to practise in one climate or latitude becomes easy in another. Economical science has not, then, like the exact sciences, the advantage of possessing a fixed measure, and absolute unconditional truths—a graduated scale, a standard, which can be employed in measuring the intensity of desires, of efforts, and of satisfactions. Were we even to devote ourselves to solitary labour, like certain animals, we should still find ourselves placed in circumstances in some degree different; and were our external circumstances alike, were the medium in which we act the same for all, we should still differ from each other in our desires, our wants, our ideas, our sagacity, our energy, our manner of estimating and appreciating things, our foresight, our activity—so that a great and inevitable inequality would manifest itself. In truth, absolute isolation, the absence of all relations among men, is only an idle fancy coined in the brain of Rousseau. But supposing that this antisocial state, called the state of nature, had ever existed, I cannot help inquiring by what chain of reasoning Rousseau and his adepts have succeeded in planting Equality there? We shall afterwards see that Equality, like Wealth, like Liberty, like Fraternity, like Unity, is the end; it is not the starting point. It rises out of the natural and regular development of societies. The tendency of human nature is not away from, but towards, Equality. This is most consoling and most true.

Having spoken of our wants, and our means of providing for them, it remains to say a word respecting our satisfactions. They are the result of the entire mechanism we have described.

It is by the greater or less amount of physical, intellectual, and moral satisfactions which mankind enjoy, that we discover whether [p095] the machine works well or ill. This is the reason why the word consommation [consumption24], adopted by our Economists would have a profound meaning if we used it in its etymological signification as synonymous with end, or completion. Unfortunately, in common, and even in scientific, language, it presents to the mind a gross and material idea, exact without doubt when applied to our physical wants, but not at all so when used with reference to those of a more elevated order. The cultivation of corn, the manufacture of woollen cloth, terminate in consumption [consommation]. But can this be said with equal propriety of the works of the artist, the songs of the poet, the studies of the lawyer, the prelections of the professor, the sermons of the clergyman? It is here that we again experience the inconvenience of that fundamental error which caused Adam Smith to circumscribe Political Economy within the limits of a material circle; and the reader will pardon me for frequently making use of the term satisfaction, as applicable to all our wants and all our desires, and as more in accordance with the larger scope which I hope to be able to give to the science.

Political Economists have been frequently reproached with confining their attention exclusively to the interests of the consumer. “You forget the producer,” we are told. But satisfaction being the end and design of all our efforts—the grand consummation or termination of the economic phenomena—is it not evident that it is there that the touchstone of progress is to be found? A man’s happiness and well-being are not measured by his efforts, but by his satisfactions, and this holds equally true of society in the aggregate. This is one of those truths which are never disputed when applied to an individual, but which are constantly disputed when applied to society at large. The phrase to which exception has been taken only means this, that Political Economy estimates the worth of what we do, not by the labour which it costs us to do it, but by the ultimate result, which resolves itself definitively into an increase or diminution of the general prosperity.

We have said, in reference to our wants and desires, that there are no two men exactly alike. The same thing may be said of our satisfactions: they are not held in equal estimation by all, which verifies the common saying, that tastes differ. Now it is by the intensity of our desires, and the variety of our tastes, that the direction of our efforts is determined. It is here that the influence of morals upon industry becomes apparent. Man, as an individual, may be the slave of tastes which are factitious, puerile, and [p096] immoral. In this case it is self-evident that, his powers being limited, he can only satisfy his depraved desires at the expense of those which are laudable and legitimate. But when society comes into play, this evident axiom is marked down as an error. We are led to believe that artificial tastes, illusory satisfactions, which we acknowledge as the source of individual poverty, are nevertheless the cause of national wealth, as opening a vent to manufactures. If it were so, we should arrive at the miserable conclusion, that the social state places man between poverty and vice. Once more, Political Economy reconciles, in the most rigorous and satisfactory manner, these apparent contradictions. [p097]