Certainty the stimulus to industry—Effects of insecurity—Instances of unprofitable labour—Former notions of commerce—National and class prejudices, and their remedy.

Two of the most terrific famines that are recorded in the history of the world occurred in Egypt—a country where there is greater production, with less labour, than is probably exhibited in any other region. The principal labourer in Egypt is the river Nile, whose periodical overflowings impart fertility to the thirsty soil, and produce in a few weeks that abundance which the labour of the husbandman might not hope to command if employed during the whole year. But the Nile is a workman that cannot be controlled and directed, even by capital, the great controller and director of all work. The influences of heat, and light, and air, are pretty equal in the same places. Where the climate is most genial, the cultivators have least labour to perform in winning the earth; where it is least genial, the cultivators have most labour. The increased labour balances the small natural productiveness. But the inundation of a great river cannot be depended upon like the light and heat of the sun. For two seasons the Nile refused to rise, and labour was not prepared to compensate for this refusal; the ground refused to produce; the people were starved.

We mention these famines of Egypt to show that certainty is the most encouraging stimulus to every operation of human industry. We know that production as invariably follows a right direction of labour, as day succeeds to night. We believe that it will be dark to-night and light again to-morrow, because we know the general laws which govern light and darkness, and because our experience shows us that those laws are constant and uniform. We know that if we plough, and manure, and sow the ground, a crop will come in due time, varying indeed in quantity according to the season, but still so constant upon an average of years, that we are justified in applying large accumulations and considerable labour to the production of this crop. It is this certainty that we have such a command of the productive powers of nature as will abundantly compensate us for the incessant labour of directing those forces, which has during a long course of industry heaped up our manifold accumulations, and which enables production annually to go forward to an extent which even half a century ago would have been thought impossible. The long succession of labour, which has covered this country with wealth, has been applied to the encouragement of the productive forces of nature, and the restraint of the destroying. No one can doubt that, the instant the labour of man ceases to direct those productive natural forces, the destroying forces immediately come into action. Take the most familiar instance—a cottage whose neat thatch was never broken, whose latticed windows were always entire, whose whitewashed walls were ever clean, round whose porch the honeysuckle was trained in regulated luxuriance, whose garden bore nothing but what the owner planted. Remove that owner. Shut up the cottage for a year, and leave the garden to itself. The thatched roof is torn off by the wind and devoured by mice, the windows are driven in by storms, the walls are soaked through with damp and are crumbling to ruin, the honeysuckle obstructs the entrance which it once adorned, the garden is covered with weeds which years of after-labour will have difficulty to destroy:—

Apply this principle upon a large scale. Let the productive energy of a country be suspended through some great cause which prevents its labour continuing in a profitable direction. Let it be overrun by a conqueror, or plundered by domestic tyranny of any kind, so that capital ceases to work with security. The fields suddenly become infertile, the towns lose their inhabitants, the roads grow to be impassable, the canals are choked up, the rivers break down their banks, the sea itself swallows up the land. Shakspere, a great political reasoner as well as a great poet, has described such effects in that part of 'Henry V.' when the Duke of Burgundy exhorts the rival kings to peace:—

We have heard it said that Tenterden steeple was the cause of Goodwin Sands. The meaning of the saying is, that the capital which was appropriated to keep out the sea from that part of the Kentish coast was diverted to the building of Tenterden steeple; and there being no funds to keep out the sea, it washed over the land.[14] The Goodwin Sands remain to show that man must carry on a perpetual contest to keep in subjection the forces of nature, which, as is said of fire, one of the forces, are good servants but bad masters. But these examples show, also, that in the social state our control of the physical forces of nature depends upon the right control of our own moral forces. There was injustice, doubtless, in misappropriating the funds which restrained the sea from devouring the land. Till men know that they shall work with justice on every side, they work feebly and unprofitably. England did not begin to accumulate largely and rapidly till the rights both of the poor man and the rich were to a certain degree established—till industry was free and property secure. Our great dramatic poet has described this security as the best characteristic of the reign of Queen Elizabeth:—

Shakspere derived his image from the Bible, where a state of security is frequently indicated by direct allusion to a man sitting under the shade of his own fig-tree or his own vine. In the days of Elizabeth, as compared with previous eras, there was safety, and a man might

We have gone on constantly improving these blessings. But let any circumstances again arise which may be powerful enough to destroy, or even molest, the freedom of industry and the security of property, and we should work once more without certainty. The elements of prosperity would not be constant and uniform. We should work with the apprehension that some hurricane of tyranny, no matter from what power, would arise, which would sweep away accumulation. When that hurricane did not rise, we might have comparative abundance, like the people of Egypt during the inundation of the Nile. We then should have an inundation of tranquillity. But if the tranquillity were not present—if lawless violence stood in the place of justice and security—we should be like the people of Egypt when the Nile did not overflow. We should suffer the extremity of misery; and that possible extremity would produce an average misery, even if tranquillity did return, because security had not returned. We should, if this state of things long abided, by degrees go back to the condition of Colchester in the fourteenth century, and thence to the universal marsh of two thousand years ago. The place where London stands would be, as it once was, a wilderness for howling wolves. The few that produced would again produce laboriously and painfully, without skill and without division of labour, because without accumulation; and it would probably take another thousand years, if men again saw the absolute need of security, to re-create what security has accumulated for our present use.

From the moment that the industry of this country began to work with security, and capital and labour applied themselves in union—perhaps not a perfect union, but still in union—to the great business of production, they worked with less and less expenditure of unprofitable labour. They continued to labour more and more profitably, as they laboured with knowledge. The labour of all rude nations, and of all uncultivated individuals, is labour with ignorance. Peter the wild boy, whom we have already mentioned, could never be made to perceive the right direction of labour, because he could not trace it through its circuitous courses for the production of utility. He would work under control, but, if left to himself, he would not work profitably. Having been trusted to fill a cart with manure, he laboured with diligence till the work was accomplished; but no one being at hand to direct him, he set to work as diligently to unload the cart again. He thought, as too many think even now, that the good was in the labour, and not in the results of the labour. The same ignorance exhibits itself in the unprofitable labour and unprofitable application of capital, even of persons far removed beyond the half-idiocy of Peter the wild boy. In the thirteenth century many of the provinces of France were overrun with rats, and the people, instead of vigorously hunting the rats, were persuaded to carry on a process against them in the ecclesiastical courts; and there, after the cause of the injured people and the injuring rats was solemnly debated, the rats were declared cursed and excommunicated if they did not retire in six days. The historian does not add that the rats obeyed the injunction; and doubtless the farmers were less prepared to resort to the profitable labour of chasing them to death when they had paid the ecclesiastics for the unprofitable labour of their excommunication. There is a curious instance of unprofitable labour given in a book on the Coal Trade of Scotland, written as recently as 1812. The people of Edinburgh had a passion for buying their coals in immense lumps, and, to gratify this passion, the greatest care was taken not to break the coals in any of the operations of conveying them from the pit to the cellar of the consumer. A wall of coals was first built within the pit, another wall under the pit's mouth, another wall when they were raised from the pit, another wall in the waggon which conveyed them to the port where they were shipped, another wall in the hold of the ship, another wall in the cart which conveyed them to the consumer, and another wall in the consumer's cellar; and the result of these seven different buildings-up and takings-down was, that after the consumer had paid thirty per cent. more for these square masses of coal than for coal shovelled together in large and small pieces, his servant had daily to break the large coals to bits to enable him to make any use of them. It seems extraordinary that such waste of labour and capital should have existed amongst a highly acute and refined community within the last forty years. They, perhaps, thought they were making good for trade, and therefore submitted to the evil; while the Glasgow people, on the contrary, by saving thirty per cent. in their coals, had that thirty per cent. to bestow upon new enterprises of industry, and for new encouragements to labour.

The unprofitable applications of capital and labour which the early history of the civilization of every people has to record, and which, amongst many, have subsisted even whilst they held themselves at the height of refinement, have been fostered by the ignorance of the great, and even of the learned, as to the causes which, advancing production or retarding it, advanced or retarded their own interests, and the interests of all the community. Princes and statesmen, prelates and philosophers, were equally ignorant of

It was enough for them to consume; they thought it beneath them to observe even, much less to assist in, the direction of production. This was ignorance as gross as that of Peter the wild boy, or the excommunication of rats. It has always been the fashion of ignorant greatness to despise the mechanical arts. The pride of the Chinese mandarins was to let their nails grow as long as their fingers, to show that they never worked. Even European nobles once sought the same absurd distinction. In France, under the old monarchy, no descendant of a nobleman could embark in trade without the highest disgrace; and the principle was so generally recognised as just, that a French writer, even as recently as 1758, reproaches the sons of the English nobility for the contrary practice, and asks, with an air of triumph, how can a man be fit to serve his country in Parliament after having meddled with such paltry concerns as those of commerce? Montesquieu, a writer in most respects of enlarged views, holds that it is beneath the dignity of governments to interfere with such trumpery things as the regulation of weights and measures. Society might have well spared the interference of governments with weights and measures if they had been content to leave all commerce equally free. But, in truth, the regulation of weights and measures is almost a solitary exception to the great principle which governments ought to practise, of not interfering, or interfering little, with commerce.

Louis XIV. did not waste more capital and labour by his ruinous wars, and by his covering France with fortifications and palaces, than by the perpetual interferences of himself and his predecessors with the freedom of trade, which compelled capital and labour to work unprofitably. The naturally slow progress of profitable industry is rendered more slow by the perpetual inclination of those in authority to divert industry from its natural and profitable channels. It was therefore wisely said by a committee of merchants to Colbert, the prime minister of France in the reign of Louis XIV., when he asked them what measures government could adopt to promote the interests of commerce,—"Let us alone, permit us quietly to manage our own business." It is undeniable that the interests of all are best promoted when each is left free to attend to his own interests, under the necessary social restraints which prevent him doing a positive injury to his neighbour. It is thus that agriculture and manufactures are essentially allied in their interests; that unrestrained commerce is equally essential to the real and permanent interests of agriculture and manufactures; that capital and labour are equally united in their interests, whether applied to agriculture, manufactures, or commerce; that the producer and the consumer are equally united in their most essential interest, which is, that there should be cheap production. While these principles are not understood at all, and while they are imperfectly understood, as they still are by many classes and individuals, there must be a vast deal of unprofitable expenditure of capital, a vast deal of unprofitable labour, a vast deal of bickering and heart-burning between individuals who ought to be united, and classes who ought to be united, and nations who ought to be united; and as long as it is not felt by all that their mutual rights are understood and will be respected, there is a feeling of insecurity which more or less affects the prosperity of all. The only remedy for these evils is the extension of knowledge. Louis XV. proclaimed to the French that the English were their "vÉritables ennemis," their true enemies. When knowledge is triumphant it will be found that there are no "vÉritables ennemis," either among nations, or classes, or individuals. The prejudices by which nations, classes, and individuals are led to believe that the interest of one is opposed to the interest of another, are, nine times out of ten, as utterly absurd as the reason which a Frenchman once gave for hating the English—which was, "that they poured melted butter on their roast veal;" and this was not more ridiculous than the old denunciation of the English against the French, that "they ate frogs, and wore wooden shoes." When the world is disabused of the belief that the wealth of one nation, class, or individual must be created by the loss of another's wealth, then, and then only, will all men steadily and harmoniously apply to produce and to enjoy—to acquire prosperity and happiness—lifting themselves to the possession of good

"By Reason's light, on Resolution's wings."