Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 355, May 1845. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
and indelible crisis of distinction between the philosophy of general happiness and the means by which national wealth may be augmented. The first he calls "Economie Politique," or "Les Sciences Sociales;" the last "Chrematistique," or the art of accumulating riches in a state.4 It is in the conversion of political economy, or the science of making men happy, which of course can only be done by rendering them orderly, moral, and religious, into Chrematistique, or the mere pursuit of the means by which we may augment the sum of national riches, that the unobserved source of by far the greatest social evils of the present day is to be found. These evils are greater than either the slavery of the Romans or the bondage of serfs in modern times; for they have induced the ruinous effects of both these degrading systems, without the alleviating and counteracting advantages with which either was attended. And the way in which this effect flows from the social doctrines of modern times, is this.
An augmentation of production is generally considered as an addition to national wealth; and it is on this ground that all nations, under the guidance of the Chrematists, are making such strenuous efforts to increase their agricultural and manufactured produce. Such an augmentation, however, says Sismondi, is not only by no means in every case an addition to national wealth, but it is often a useless and pernicious addition to national suffering. If the supply of any article exceeds what can be consumed in the early and simple ages of society, or disposed of to advantage in the later, it is not only no advantage, but a positive loss. What avails it that the yards of cotton cloth manufactured, or the quarters of wheat raised, are increased in a country from 50,000,000 to 100,000,000, if, in consequence of the increased supply, the price is lowered one-half? The producers get their trouble for their pains – they gain nothing – the consumers get more than they require – great part of the superfluity is wasted or sent abroad at a ruinous loss. Augmentation of production, therefore, is not in every case a sign of increased national wealth; it is the maintenance of a due proportion between production and consumption which is the real desideratum, and forms the only real basis of lasting national opulence.
According to the Chrematists, the wealth of a nation, as of an individual producer, is to be measured by the excess of the value of production over its cost. This, says Sismondi, is the most fatal of all errors, and the grand source of the misery of the working classes, and instability of society, in all the manufacturing states of Europe. It is true, the wealth of a master-manufacturer is to be measured by the excess of the price he obtains for his produce over the cost of its production; but a master-manufacturer is not a nation. A nation consists not only of masters but of workmen; not only of consumers but producers. The latter class is by far the most numerous, the most important, the most likely to increase. If they are reduced to misery in consequence of the reduction of their wages by the introduction of machinery, the employment of juvenile or female labour, the immigration of foreign labourers, or any other cause, it is a poor compensation to say, that the profits of their employers have been greatly augmented at their expense. If the excess of the value of production above its cost, were either the measure, or even an important element in national wealth, Ireland, where the wages of field labour are 6d. a-day, and Poland, where they are 3d., should be the richest nations in the world, whereas they are notoriously the poorest. The real measure of national wealth is to be found, not in the excess of production above the consumption employed in it, but in the means of comfortable livelihood which their industry affords to the whole classes of the community; and that is only to be attained where wealth is very generally distributed.
The mere increase of national wealth is far from being, in every instance, an addition either to national strength, national security, or national happiness. On the contrary, it is often the greatest possible diminution to the whole three. It is not the increase of wealth, but its distribution, which is the great thing to be desired. It is on that that the welfare and happiness of society depend. When wealth, whether in capital or revenue, runs into a few hands – when landed property accumulates in the persons of a knot of territorial magnates, and commerce centres in the warehouse of a limited number of merchant princes, and manufactures in the workshop of a small body of colossal companies or individual master-employers, it is absolutely certain that the great bulk of the people will be in a state of degradation and distress. The reason is, that these huge fortunes have been made by diminishing the cost of production – that is, the wages of labour – to such an extent, as to have enormously and unjustly increased the profits of the stock employed in conducting it. Society, in such circumstances, is in the unstable equilibrium: it rests on the colossal wealth, territorial or commercial, of a few; but it has no hold on the affections or interests of the great majority of the community. It is liable to be overturned by the first shock of adverse fortune. Any serious external disaster, any considerable internal suffering, may at once overturn the whole fabric of society, and expose the wealth of the magnates only as a tempting plunder to the cupidity and recklessness of the destitute classes of society. "There is as much true philosophy as poetry," says Sismondi, "in the well-known lines of Goldsmith —
'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay!
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade —
A breath may make them as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroy'd, can never be supplied.'"
The Chrematists always represent an increase of national wealth as necessarily flowing from an augmentation of the riches of the individuals who compose it. But this is the greatest possible mistake. Great part of the riches obtained by individuals in a state, so far from being an addition to the national wealth, is an abstraction from it. The reason is, that it is made at the expense of others in the same community; it is a transference of riches from one hand to another, not an addition to their total amount. Every one sees that the gains of the gamester, the opera-dancer, the lawyer, are of this description; what they take is taken from others in the same community. But the magnitude of the gains of merchants and manufacturers blinds the world to the real nature of their profits, which, in great part at least, are made at the expense of others in the state. If the importing merchant makes extravagant gains, he indeed is enriched; but how is he enriched? In part, at least, he is so, by impoverishing such of his countrymen as purchase his goods at the exorbitant price which constitute his profits. If the exporting merchant or manufacturer drives a gainful trade, it is in part, without doubt, derived from the industry of foreign nations to whom the export goods are sold; but it is too often earned at the expense also of the workmen he employs, who have been compelled by competition, or destitution, to sell their labour to him at a rate barely sufficient for the support of existence. We are not to flatter ourselves that the nation is becoming rich, because the exporters of Irish grain, Paisley shawls, or Manchester cotton goods, are making fortunes, when the labourers they employ are earning from sixpence to eightpence a-day only. On the contrary, the magnitude of the gains of the former is too often only a measure of the destitution and degradation of the latter.
It is usually considered that it is a sufficient answer to this to observe, that if riches are thus, from the direction which national industry has taken, drawn to a distressing extent from one class of the community to concentrate them in another, a corresponding benefit is conferred upon other classes, by the increased expenditure which takes place on the part of those, in whose hands the wealth has accumulated. There can be no doubt that a certain compensation does take place in this way; and it is the existence of that compensation, which alone renders society tolerable under such circumstances. But the benefit accruing is no adequate set-off, if society be viewed as a whole, to the evil incurred. If two millions of Irish labourers are working at sixpence a-day each, and two millions more of human beings, in the Emerald Isle, are in a state of destitution, it is a poor compensation for such a dreadful state of things to observe, that some hundred Irish noblemen, or absentee proprietors, are spending ten or twenty thousand a-year each amidst the luxuries of London, Paris, or Naples; and that they sometimes extract five or six guineas an acre from their starving tenants. If weavers in Renfrewshire, and cotton operatives in Lancashire, are making cotton cloths at eightpence a-day of wages, we are not to be deluded into the belief that society is prosperous, because every year six or eight cotton lords buy estates for a hundred thousand pounds
From χρημα – "money, riches."