On Landed Property.

According to most of the philosophers who cultivate the social sciences, political economy is a new science, whose origin does not extend farther back than from fifty to sixty years. From this epoch they tell us we are to date the discovery of the theory of the creation and distribution of wealth, and they promise that when this theory shall have been adopted by statesmen, when it shall have become a light to legislation and administration, then human society, guided by this light, will be seen to make a rapid progress in power and happiness. Riches, say they, the source of all material well-being to men, will multiply; then will disappear indigence and its most frightful consequences, contagious maladies arising from bad nourishment, from excessive labour, from being crowded together in unhealthy habitations, from cold and want of clothes: ignorance too will be subdued, that necessary consequence in the labouring class of the constant toil which exhausts the body, and leaves no freedom for the mind: the different ranks of society will be reconciled to each other, because so much happiness end intelligence will be obtained for all as will secure internal peace and the stability of governments. Still more, the passions producing ill-will will be extinguished, and the most formidable temptations removed, and thus the progress of virtue and morality in the human race will be powerfully served. It required promises thus brilliant of the regeneration and happiness of all men, to prevent our being astonished at hearing the importance of riches preached in the name of philosophy, and the ardent pursuit of them celebrated as public spirit. Unhappily, these same fifty or sixty years which have been devoted to the development of this new system of political economy, have brought the most alarming disturbance into the relations and conditions of the members of society. The collective wealth of those nations which the economists considered as the most advanced, has in fact increased, and sometimes in a very rapid proportion, but, at the same time, the number of rich men has diminished rather than increased, the intermediate ranks have disappeared, small proprietors, small farmers in the country, small artisans, small manufacturers, small shopkeepers in the towns, have not been able to compete with those who direct vast undertakings. There is no longer room in society for any but the great capitalist and the man who lives on wages; and that formerly almost imperceptible class of men who have absolutely no property, has increased in an alarming manner. In fact, all working men, all those who, by the labour of their hands, create the wealth which is spread throughout society, have ceased to have any direct right or interest in the different works which flourish through their means. They are bound to them only by daily wages, by a contract which they and their masters renew every week. Ignorant of those commercial interests which they serve, of the wants of the distant markets for which they work, they are engaged or dismissed in consequence of mercantile revolutions which they can neither calculate nor foresee; they are the victims of all the reverses, of all the mistakes, of all the extravagance of their employers; their own prudence and good conduct are no longer a security to thém: their condition is become precarious and dependent, and it is no longer in their own keeping. At the same time, they have been led into a state of continual warfare, either among themselves or with their masters, to fix the rate of wages; want is continually pressing on them, they underbid one another in the price of their labour, the competition ruins them, and forces them to be content with what is absolutely necessary for daily subsistence. If a momentary prosperity, an extraordinary demand for that kind of work to which they are suited, lifts them to-day from this pressure of want, it always threatens them for the morrow. The life of the workman has no longer a future.

All the moral consequences of increased indigence have followed this development of social wealth, which has only augmented the inequality of its distribution. In those places where the eye is most struck with the opulence of some, in England especially, and next in the large capitals of the continent, the number of crimes, against property particularly, has increased in an alarming manner; the number of illegitimate births and foundlings attest the depravation of morals, and the relaxation of family ties; the increasing consumption of spirits reveals that secret intoxication, less noisy than that which used formerly to fill the public houses, but more grievous, more brutalizing, more fatal to health, and henceforth common alike to women as to men. In short, in manufactories, and especially in those of England, the struggle among the poor always offering the most work for the lowest possible wages, has obliged them to devote their children from their earliest age to labour in the production of more and more of that wealth, out of which they are allowed wages scarcely sufficient for life. The latest inquiries on the factory bill have shown that children of eight or ten years of age work commonly twelve or fourteen hours a day; that at sixteen or eighteen, they are often made to work long hours, that is to say, twenty hours a day for two days together, then a night of repose: that the work-rooms are at an offensive temperature; the air filled with mephitic exhalations, and often loaded with deleterious particles of cotton, wool, or metals; that the children, sometimes standing, sometimes creeping among the wheels of the machines, are soon affected by a swelling or weakness of the bones. Then they stoop, their limbs become deformed, and they can no longer walk without pain. To keep children attentive and awake, who can take no interest in their work, recourse must be had to blows, and it has been proved in a court of justice, that death ensued in a few hours to a miserable child who, to keep him awake, had been. in the usual way, but with too much violence, struck on the head. Meanwhile, disease and infirmity seize from their childhood on these feeble labourers; they grow with them, and carry them off, old men at twenty, or if they languish longer, it is to remain in manhood only a charge on public charity, for they have no longer strength to gain their livelihood. Who, then, has had the right to take from all these beings, who have known nothing of life but its sufferings, that portion of happiness which a God of goodness has destined for every creature, as the condition of its creation; who shall restore it to them? Who had the right to deprive them of the joys of childhood, of free exercise and repose, of the sun and air, all necessary to the development of their bodies; of the sight of nature, of hope, of gratitude, of all the affections more necessary still for the health of the soul? Who had the right to make this sacrifice of children, more dreadful even than that which crimsoned the altars of Moloch? For intelligsnce and virtue, those sparks of the Divinity, are here exringushed before the body.

It has been thought that these frightful evils might be remedied by generous efforts after popular instruction, by extending to all classes the benefit of education; but these efforts, praiseworthy, no doubt, are often ill-directed, and always powerless. It is doing little to teach the children of the people to read and write, if they have not the energy to wish for knowledge, nor the wisdom to choose, nor above all, the leisure to reflect on it and to profit by it; it is doing little to instruct them in trades, to give them some general ideas of the laws of nature, for it is only making them into mere productive machines, and increasing their power in that contest in which they are all engaged, to underbid one another in the price they receive for their labour. It is even doing little to teach them some of the doctrines of religion, and some of its precepts; to speak to them of a God of goodness, of a love which unites all created beings, of the duties which the desire to approach the Deity and to form ourselves on His image impose on us, if, at the same time, we place under their eyes nothing but sufferings and acts of harshness, if their fathers and their employers, the first representatives of God upon earth whom they learn to know, never appear to them but as covetous and threatening, vigilant to deprive them of all their pleasures, pitiless for the sufferings which undermine their health. The education of life lays hold on them, and it is more powerful than that of their teachers; it destroys in them all veneration, all affection, all gratitude: it breaks the spring of their souls, and leaves them nothing but sensuality and selfishness. The father and mother who have sold their child, who see it perish before their eyes, the young men without hope, the old men without retrospections, have to make themselves insensible to their woes. They seek in the senses a moment of pleasure which the intellect and the heart refuse them; they strive by licentiousness and drunkenness to relieve themselves for some moments from the intolerable weight of a life of effort and privation.

What an account to render to the Deity by those who require only animated machines to produce wealth! What an account of so many intelligent souls created for virtue, whom these men have by their love of wealth driven into inevitable degradation! And if we dare not fix our eyes on this essential aspect of human destiny, what account may not the nation require from these men, of the citizens that have been entrusted to them? Every nation must before all things be strong, that she may defend her independence, but she will not find strength in ricketty, decrepit, degraded creatures, who cannot live in the open air, whose courage has never been exercised, who have not had time to develop thought or feeling, who love nothing, respect nothing, and have only their indigence to defend. Every nation has need of internal peace, of confidence, of love among fellow-citizens; but how shall this peace be maintained, if the production of wealth is based on an opposition of interests in each against all; if the master of any business seeks to undersell others, that he may get their customers; if he seeks to reduce the wages of his work-people, or to replace them by machines to save their wages; if workman contends with workman, and offers his labour at a lower rate, in order to supplant him? A universal contest has been established among all classes, and in every class; every one is forced to contend for the enjoyments of existence, for its necessaries, for life itself. Surely there is room to admire human nature, when even in such an order of things, there is still found in every class, among the poor especially, so much charity, so much sympathy. But the peace, the security of society, how their safeguards have been taken away! And if society is free, if men are told that for the well-being of all, not for the few only, is society organized, what a strange forgetfulness of its object is shown, when the health, the pleasures, the hopes, the security, the intellect, even the immortal life of the greatest part of its members, are sacrificed to the production of wealth? It is the people, the sovereign people, who are thus despoiled of all that gives value, not to sovereignty only, but to life itself. Shall we say, “Et poropter vitam,”; or better still, “Et propter lucrum lucrandi perdere causas?”;

In England, the country which has advanced more rapidly than any other in the pursuit of this new science, which has outstripped all others in the creation of wealth, which exists only to produce, and maintains herself only by supplanting all others in every kind of production, the disproportion between the opulence of some, and the wretchedness of the greater number, the no less rapid than alarming increase of those who have nothing, and who hope for nothing, the precarious condition to which all those have been reduced who perform the labour of the community, the suffering of children, the destruction of their intellects, or of their lives, the rending of all sympathies among the poor who depend on parish relief, of all ties of blood, of all social duties, the spirit of revolt against oppressive laws, against humiliating distinctions, against even the existence of property, all these have reached a heiglit to make us tremble for the whole order of society. The alarm this inspires is so much the more deep, inasmuch as if offended humanity finds avengers, they will be neither sufficiently enlightened, nor sufficiently virtuous to become afterwards legislators and benefactors. But if all England seem now to be labouring with the fire of a subterraneous volcano, other countries too, who have adopted the same system, who at a distance have followed in her steps, feel the first tremblings of the convulsive state at which she is arrived. These symptoms are the more frequent and the more alarming, the more the first aspect of these countries is prosperous, the more rapidly their collective wealth is on the increase, the more the activity of all is excited, the nearer, in short, their governments have approached to what are called good principles in political economy. The combinations of workmen, now more frequent, are a sufficiently clear manifestation of the sufferings and unsettled state of the poorer classes, ruined by competition; they strive to unite, to drive off the wretchedness which threatens them; but they either fail by their weakness, or lose themselves by their excesses; warning France, however, that it is time to be on her guard against them.

Have then these new philosophers really taught us political economy; that is, according to the primitive sense of the words of Greek origin, the true rule or domestic law of the city, or I' am énagement of society ; when, whilst showing us how wealth may be created, they have forgotten to show also how it ought to be distributed for the well-being of all? Have they really thought of this house, οιχια, for which they pretend to make laws; of that commonwealth, πολιτεια, which they would teach us to govern? They have forgotten in both, independence, happiness, and virtue; they have fixed their regards only on the theory of the creation of wealth, a science with quite different limitations, and which Aristotle, by a very appropriate name, has named chresmatistic. But the Greeks, if we may judge by what remains to us of the legislation of their republics, were acquainted with a more elevated political economy: they did not forget the advantages of an increase of wealth; they only desired that it should secure the material happiness of all; and this happiness was subordinate in their eyes to the moral happiness and perfection of all.

The existence of civilization, the safety of the human race in this our ancient Europe, are closely bound to the triumph of this true political economy, both in public opinion and in legislation; to the development of that science which has for its object man, and not wealth, which asks how this wealth can he employed for the happiness and virtue of all, not how it can be indefinitely increased.

But to return to this high moral science, it will be necessary to combat at the same time the prejudices of the vulgar and those of philosophers, the illusions which language has created and sanctioned, and the difficulties which the subject itself presents, the most abstract, perhaps, the most difficult to seize with precision, of any of the social sciences.

To endeavour to understand what there is yet to be done, to enable us to form some clear and simple ideas on the economy of the social state, we will fix on that condition among men which the new science has caused to deviate least from its former organization, that of cultivators; we will look at the chresmatistic mode of considering it. We will afterwards ask, what true political economy ought to do for it, and though this be of all questions the most simple and the most clear in either form of this science, yet we shall soon see how different is their object, how opposite the advice which they give, and in treating of agriculture, we shall have occasion to set before us all the dimculties of the social state, which are aggravated by making wealth the sole object of consideration, and which can only be removed by fixing our attention on men and not on things.

In the eyes of the chresmatistics, agriculture is a manufacture of rural products. They consider it then like every other manufacture “as a balance of the expenses of production against the products obtained, in which the exchange is so much the more advantageous, as less is given to obtain more. It advances in prosperity whenever more advantage is obtained for the same expense, or the same advantage for less expense.”— (Say, Course Complet d'Economie Politique, T. Ime, p. 24.)

Thus, according to M. Say,—and his doctrine agrees with that of all the English school,—the prosperity of agriculture must be estimated by its nett product: it gains either by producing more, or by costing less; either by selling more produce, or at a higher price, so as to get more from the consumer; either by affording less employment, or by paying less wages for the same labour, thus saving what is laid out on the labourer's wages. The proprietors of the county of Sutherland did no more than conform to these principles when, after having discovered that land in that count), of Scotland only paid a shilling an acre nett produce, they reckoned for nothing the subsistence which it furnished to many thousand agricultural families. They drove out all these families, destroyed their houses, and put an end to tillage to make sheep-walks: as there was thenceforth nothing to be laid out on the land, its natural produce alone returned them ls. 6d. per acre, and they have gained 50 per cent. by what has been done. Among the thousands of labourers thus driven from their ancient homes, some have become fishermen on the shores of the county of Sutherland, some have gone to America, some have travelled into the towns of Scotland to beg for work, or to perish there from want. (Lord Stafford's Improvements, by James Loch, 1820.) Such is one example among thousands of the increased prosperity in agriculture of the chresmatistics.

The English economists, Ricardo and Malthus, have engaged in a very abstract discussion on the origin of rent. According to the one, it is a premium on monopoly; according to the other, it is the hiring out of the land for cultivation ; neither they nor Macculloch, nor their disciples, have deduced any conclusion applicable to the condition of the man who cultivates it. Say, after having remarked that, by the nature of agaricultural labour, there are strict limits to the extent of cultivation of land, or to the quantity of capital that can be employed upon it, renounces, with an expression of regret, any ulterior inquiries respecting landed property, since the progress of political economy, as he understands it, can contribute so little to its development.

Those legislators who occupy themselves about men and not about things, who calculate the mass of happiness to which a nation can attain, not the mass of wealth which it can produce, those who alone deserve to have the name of economists appropriated to them, ascribe a very different degree of importance to agriculture. They see that no employment is more intimately connected with the happiness of men, or acts more directly on the mass of citizens. As consumers, all without exception have need of it, for without land there is no food: as labourers, the greatest number live by it; especially if we comprise, as is usually done, hunters, fishermen, shepherds, and all those who collect the spontaneous fruits of the earth, in the class of agriculturists; the cultivation of the ground employs commonly four-fifths of a nation; as proprietors lastly, the whole soil of the country belongs to them, and they have sometimes arrogated to themselves the right of dismissing the nation from her own abode. Let us consider these three classes, or if you will, these three aspects of society.

In general it has been laid down as a principle in chresmatisties, that it is sufficient to attend to the consumer, and that whatever detriment the producer may experience, society ought to congratulate itself, if it procures everything cheaper. But the economist who does not abstract man to consider only wealth, will say, on the contrary, that the producer ought to be considered first of all. Labour is, in fact, the creator of all the benefits which man enjoys, the source of all his income. Daily labour is the income of the poor; the fruits of accumulated labour give an income to the rich. The division between them is not always equitable, but if the balance must lean, it is desirable it should be in favour of the poor; that is the interest of the greatex number; it is at the same time the interest of the weak; the more amply labour is remunerated, so much the more are the necessaries and comforts of life secured to the great majority of the nation. The most desirable state, therefore, is that which secures the greatest advantage to the producers; for by this means the largest share of income, or the largest share of material happiness is distributed among the greatest number of citizens. When the chreamatistics affirm, that each one being a consumer, the interest of the consumer is the interest of all, they deceive us by an abstraction. All things are, in fact, offered to all; but for the immense majority of products, the actual purchasers are very few. In the consumption of the working man, more especially in that of the field-labourer, the only object of primary importance is food; of the income afforded him by his labour, he exchanges a very small part with all other arts, while with nature he exchanges almost the whole of it; manger, eating, represents all hie expenses; he eats to labour, and to produce food for others. The progress of manufactures may offer him clothing at a cheaper rate, but this is no advantage to the labourer, if his wages diminish in exactiy the same proportion. If he is the buyer of his own produce, its low price is a symptom of a general reduction of income, from which he suffers with others. Even for the highest ranks of society, cheapness is an advantage more illusory than real. After the first wants of life have been satisfied, the expenses of luxury are calculated in almost every case to afford relative rather than positive enjoyment. What the rich man seeks in his dress, in his furniture, in his equipages, is the elegance which will strike the eyes of the public; it is to impress the idea of his wealth and of his good taste; it is to appear rather than to be; it is, in short, the distinctive mark of the condition to which he belongs. But before the perfection which art has given to the production of manufactures, there was just the same difference as now between what cost an ounce of silver, and what cost only a penny. The rich man choosing among less perfect productions, might show as much elegance and good taste; rank was as much distinguished by dress, or rather far more so; each rank appropriated to dress precisely the same proportion of its income which it does now. It is very difficult to discover how the cheapness of silks has added to the happiness of those who buy them.

The rule adopted by the chresmatistics, to think only of the consumer, and to look upon his interest as the national interest, comes much nearer the truth, it must be allowed, as regards rural productions. All members of society are, in fact, consumers of these productions; and, as food, the poorer a man is, takes a larger proportion of his income, the cheapness of these productions is more important to the poor than to the rich. But whenever the remuneration of labour is given to the poor in commodities, the price of these commodities becomes a matter of indifference to him. Now this mode of remuneration is the most just one, for there is a proportion between the goodness and quantity of food, and muscular strength, which does not vary with the price of food. In order that a workman may give all his strength to his work, he will require always the same quantity of corn; in towns it would add to his health and security if he were fed by his master, or received for part of his wages the same quantity of corn annually, for the chances of the market always go against the poorest. This payment in kind is almost the universal basis of remuneration in the country; the husbandman is almost always fed by the produce he has raised, except the day-labourers, whose number hitherto has been very small. The interest of the day-labourer is then opposed to that of the producer: all others, masters as well as husbandmen, have a common interest in good prices. Now it is dangerous for society, whenever the interests of different classes clash, whenever the poor man has to struggle against the producer. There is safety, on the contrary, whenever the poor and the rich are united in a common interest.

In spite of the chresmatistic role, to regard only the consumer, in spite or the popular clamour for cheap bread, the cultivators of the soil form so considerable a part of every nation, that in England and France they have succeeded in obtaining from the legislature an attempt to secure for them good prices. We are far from approving all that has been done for this purpose, far from advising that an interest so universal as that of the consumers should be forgotten; but we must rank still higher the common interest of society, which demands that the agricultural producer should be amply remunerated; that he who raises the fruits of the earth should retain a sufficient share of them; without this we cannot reckon either on the regularity of production, or on stability of price, or on being independent of foreigners in time of war; and this perfect certainty of subslstence is of more importance than low prices to the consumer himself.

The chresmatistic school has considered the condition of the labourers, who raise the products of the soil, only as a means of arriving at an end, the creation of agricultural wealth. With us, on the contrary, the happiness of these men is the main object of the science, for they form the great majority of the nation. The legislator's aim, then, ought to be to preserve for them as large a part of the wealth which they produce as is consistent with the continuation of their labour; to settle in the country the greatest possible number of persons, for with an equal income the poor man will there enjoy more health and happiness than in a town; to develop their intellect as much as coarse bodily labour will allow; lastly, and above all things, to cultivate and strengthen their morality. To do this, he will feel that he must give stability to the way of life of the husbandman, favour all those contracts which give him a permanent interest in the soil, discourage all those which make his condition precarious, and which leave him uncertain as to the morrow, for morality is intimately united with memory and with hope; it is nourished by duration; it becomes nothing to him who considers only the present moment. This ample remuneration, this participation of the greater number in field-labour, this stability in the condition of the rural population, will appear to him much more important than a rapid creation of wealth; he will attach, perhaps, still more importance to not multiplying motives to strife and rivalry in the most numerous class in the nation. He will regard as the system of cultivation most favourable to the comfort and happiness of all, that which will unite most closely the interests of the landowners and of the cultivators, not that which adds most to the income of the former.

It must not be forgotten that to produce the fruits of the earth, on which all must subsist, hard and prolonged manual labour is required. This labour can only be executed by men who give up the comforts and elegancies of life. The Saint Simonians, and all those who wish to regenerate society by the co-operation system, fall into a great absurdity, when they wish to give by turns to the same men the enjoyment of luxury, and the often rude, sometimes disgusting labours of poverty. He who has been required in the morning to spread manure on the common field, will care little for a ride in a carriage at noon, or for an evening ball in velvet and lace. But the chresmatisties fall into an absurdity of much the same kind, when they say, “The more you produce, the more enjoyment will there be for all.” In effect, they reduce the working class to the strictest necessaries; at the same time they cause all the intermediate ranks to disappear; they accumulate in the hands of some landowners, of some manufacturers, of some merchants, colossal wealth; then they multiply without measure those productions of industry which are only suited to those who can live at ease. Where is the use of offering to the nation more sources of enjoyment, if you are to destroy those who are to benefit by them? It is then the happiness and ease compatible with manual labour which should be secured to the husbandman; in his house, in his clothes, in his tools, he should have everything which contributes to health and comfort, but nothing which pretends to elegance, or which nourishes delicacy. He must have them first of all for himself that he may be happy; for other producers, that he may be a profitable consumer; for the revenue, that he may contribute to it without being straitened; for the whole of society, that he may labour. No one ever thought of raising all cultivators above their station at once, but some of them have often been so raised, and this is the system which is favoured by the chresmatistics. They wish to see rich farmers directing a large farm, and contributing to its productions only by the employment of their capital and their skill. They do not work with their hands, but they regulate the cultivation, they inspect and urge on the labourers; they buy, they sell, they keep accounts; they correspond with merchants and manufacturers. At Rome, in fact, they are called mercanti di tenute; in England, gentlemen-farmers; but in raising their condition they lower that of their companions in labour. By reserving to themselves the exercise of will, choice, intelligence, they refuse it to their work-people and servants; they ask from them only the employment of their muscular strength; they lower them as much as they can to the rank of machines. It is always a grievous thing to put in competition the interest of those who have intelligence and wealth, with that of those who have only their hands: the first, to secure to themselves profits, stability, a safe futurity, drive the second into a state continually becoming more precarious, and, according to the times and according to the measure of their power, they reduce them to slavery, to seffage, to the condition of day-labourers or servants. The time will come, at last, when they will endeavour through economy to make them disappear altogether.

Agriculture is composed of a series of labours, varying every day, not equally urgent, or equally important, but which require, with a great development of physical strength, constant application, intelligence, and a certain interest in the success of the undertaking. In manufactures, the work is generally the same from the beginning to the end of the year; therefore it is found more profitable to reduce it to a manual operation, always the same: habit makes it more easy, whilst intelligence and good-will become of less value. They may so easily be dispensed with, that a machine takes the place of a man, and a man is only a machine. This degradation of the human species is a great national misfortune, for which no increase of wealth can compensate; but in agriculture it is also a loss of money. The farmer who gives up the intelligence of his labourer, and his interest in bis work, makes a bad calculation; for this intelligence and this desire to succeed should direct every stroke of the pruning knife, and almost every stroke of the spade. Thus, for the soil to be cultivated with intelligence and good-will, the labour should be performed by the same person who lays out money on it, and gains a profit. No cultivator, other things being equal, can be compared to a labouring proprietor, who adds to the most direct interest the recollections of experience, and the hope of the future; a tenant with a lease of 99 years, bail emphytéotique, has almost the same advantages, for he is insured a perpetuity; then comes the métayer; although he has only half the produce, he has as much interest as the proprietor in its abundance, and in the success of his labour. The working farmer has not less interest than the proprietor in the first years of his lease, but his interest changes in the later ones, and then it is that he sacrifices the future to the present, et taille les vignes en ruine .

The serf does as ill as he can his task-work, corvée, on the estate of his lord, but he labours with good-will and intelligence on his own. The farm-servant, hired by the year, has no real interest in his work, but through sympathy with his master, he yet endeavours to succeed; the day-labourer, hired by the week, has no interest, he brings neither intelligence nor good-will to his work. The slave has only an interest in hatred and revenge; he rejoices when the labour which has made him suffer so much, brings no advantage to his master. Thus, the more a system of cultivation raises the condition of the cultivator, the more ease and independence it gives him, and the more will he combine that intelligence and good-will with his work, which will secure its success.

The farmer, who is the head of a family, knowing there are dead seasons in the year, days of rain and snow, when nothing can be done in the fields, reserves for these times any work which is not so urgent, and which hardly repays the labour: that is to say, which might be done by more economical means, were it not most economical of all to do it in times which would otherwise be lost. He has an interest in common with the nation, and in common with the whole of society, in the perfecting of machines, and in all that increases the productive power of man; but he knows very well that were the machine to do the work which he does, in his otherwise wasted hours, it would bring no profit to him, nor yet to society. For example; if a machine to thrash corn, leaves him and his servants and children without work, during the bad days of winter, he knows very well that the use of this machine will be a loss, and not a profit to him; and his interest in this respect is identified with that of agriculture and of society. But if the farming capitalist has his labour done in a press of work, by day-labourers engaged by the week, without caring what will become of them in the winter; if, at the same time he performs by a machine the labour which would fill up the dead season, he really gains by this machine only what he robs from the public charity, on which he throws the charge of keeping his labourers. To make a true calculation of what society gains by any mechanical invention, there must be deducted from it the loss experienced by all the working men who had been dismissed by it, till they have found an employment as advantageous as the one they had before. If we calculate the productive power of the community, the unemployed time of these men is so much to be deducted from what is produced by the machine. If we calculate our income, the wages they have lost should be balanced against the profit made by this fixed capital.

The chresmatistie school has represented as an eminent progrese in agriculture, the power acquired of doing the same work with a continually decreasing number of hands; this progress has been pushed very far in England, where they have succeeded in driving more than half the nation out of the fields into the towns. The economist of men, not of wealth, cannot behold such progress without extreme sorrow. No manual labour maintains health, vigour of body, and cheerfulness, so well as agriculture; none prepares better soldiers for the defence of the country; none, by its variety, develops so much intelligence; and when the soil is cultivated by small proprietors, or métayers, none affords to those who live by the labour of their hands, so much security for the future, so little jealousy among persons in the same employment, so little seduction to vice, and so much morality. As, in our Europe at least, the territory of nations is circumscribed, all that is saved from manual labour in rural employments, sends from the fields into the towns so many families condemned to unhappiness. Even if they succeed in getting employment in a manufactory, they must give up pure air, the light of the sun, exercise, the spectacle of nature, the pleasures of the country, variety in their employments, security for the future; their situation becomes precarious and dependent; their morals get corrupted, because debauchery is the only means of getting rid of the thoughts of the present, and they rarely survive long.

Nevertheless it will not do in the country any more than in towns, for the population to exceed certain limits; for men to be reduced to underbid one another, to lower the rates of labour, to give more labour and yet to produce less, so that they cease to be fully remunerated. The chresmatistic school pretends that this is the fate which threatens countries cultivated in small portions, and alleges, as an example, the cultivation of Ireland; but the cultivation of Ireland, where there are neither small proprietors nor métayers, and where parcels of land belonging to absent proprietors are let on the highest terms to day-labourers without capital, is the most deplorable in Europe. The tithes to support the Anglican Church, and the voluntary contributions for the Catholic, the carelessness, and often the extravagance of the great proprietors, the cupidity of the middle men, of whom there are often two or three between the lord and the peasant, the cruelty of the law which makes this last responsible for the debts of the middle men; the universal competition thus established amongst the poor, has deprived this unhappy country of all peace, of all security, of all civilization. The Irish peasant cannot descend lower than he is: he is not afraid of bringing into the world children more miserable than himself; he is the most improvident of all men in his marriages.

On the contrary, in all countries where the cultivator has some security for his subsistence, some present happiness, some future hope, his prosperity itself forms the only really efficacious barrier to the excessive increase of population. Nobody willingly descends from his station, and it is rare in all countries for a son to marry till he is secure of living in some degree like his father. In countries of small farms, no peasant marries till he is secure of a farm, of a métairie, where he can take his wife, unless at least he reckons upon succeeding to that of his father. But the son, and all the sons of the day-labourer, marry as soon as they possess a spade or a pick-axe, which they know to be the only property of their father, and which they have as much strength to use as he. Society never ought to wish for a more numerous population than can live honourably, morally, and happily; and whilst labour is amply remunerated, the poor will preserve this honour, this virtue, and this happiness. If the demand for labour increases, the population will not fail to follow it; but there is danger for society if ever it goes beyond it; if children are bern before their means of living has been formed: there is danger for society from the moment that it contains a class which possesses nothing, and which, having no fear of falling lower, is not restrained from marrying by any motive of pride, prudenee, or paternal affection. The Romans were acquainted with this danger, when they gave to those who had nothing the name of proletarii. As this class constitutes in England more than three quarters of the nation, and in Ireland more than ninetenths, population has increased in those two cotmtries, with as alarming a rapidity as indigence.

The chresmatistic school, to show the creation of wealth, has pointed out how the rent, the profit, and the wages co-operate to fix the price of any thing, being the compensation for the land employed, and the capital and labour laid out on it: the analysis was well made, and these three powers did, in fact, concur in the creation of it; but it does not follow that the land, the capital, and the labour should be furnished by three different persons, nor that there is any advantage in putting these three interests in opposition to one another. On the contrary, almost all the embarrassment which society at this day experiences, proceeds from the fact, that these three interests, instead of being united, are struggling against one another. Thence it comes that the equilibrium between production and consumption is disturbed; for the capitalist does not wait till there is a demand for produce; if he cannot gain at the expense of the consumer, he hopes to do so at the expense of another capitalist, whose customers he will gain, and at the expense of the workmen, whose wages he will diminish. In agriculture, at least, this struggle between the interests which concur in production may be avoided. The soil is never better cultivated than when these three capacities are united, and when the same man is at once landowner, farmer, and labourer; social order is also sufficiently secured when the two last capacities are united, when the same man, farmer or métayer, labours on his own account, and not for a master; but the social order is in danger when the greatest part of agricultural labour is performed by day-labourers. The precarious and unhappy state of so large a proportion of the population, their secret hostility against the landowners, and the whole order of society, their want of interest in the work they perform, their proneness to premature marriages, ought to lead the legislator, by every indirect means in his power, to induce landowners and farmers to give up cultivation by day-labourers. To attain this end, the legislator has also two direct means at his disposal, taxes and public charity. He should make the taxes weigh most heavily on estates which call into existence a population whose position makes them enemies of order, and therefore brings more expense on society to maintain peace. The government, as administrator of public charity, has the charge of providing that no individual suffers misery, or dies of hunger. It must begin, if it would be just, by requiring that those, who for their own interest make the poor, should feed them; that those agriculturists alone who employ day-labourers should be called on to feed them when they have no work; these agriculturists will then soon feel that the only profitable cultivation, the only one which will answer their purpose, is that which does not create poor. The principle would be the same for the industry of towns; its application, it is true, is more difficult. It may be thought, from what we have just said of the advantages to society of peasant proprietors, that we would have all ctiltivators owners of the soil which they cultivate, and all landowners cultivators: this is not our idea; we take society as it is, with poor and rich, and we think this variety of condition most favourable to its development. The class of the rich appears to us necessary, because there are faculties of the soul and of the intellect, which cannot be developed without complete leisure, because physical activity blunts the other faculties, because continual attention to worldly interests contracts the heart, because the noblest employments of the human mind must be followed with disinterested views, and not for gain; because a nation composed of men all equally well fed, well clothed, well lodged, working only so much as is desirable for their health, but incapable of rising to the fine arts, to the highest sciences, to sublime philosophy, would seem to us to be disinherited of the finest gifts of Providence to man; she would not even be in a position to cultivate the social sciences enough to know how to manage herself, and to avoid the loss of all the advantages she enjoyed. Not that those who are destined to enlighten society are born in the class of the rich, but that this class alone can appreciate them, and have leisure to enjoy their works. The rich, according to the language of the economists, are the consumers of all intellectual produce. If there were no idle persons in the nation, whatever might be the well-being of the other classes, there would be no demand for progress in art, literature, and science, beyond that of immediate utility; and those who cultivate in a transcendental manner, if we may adopt the language of metaphysicians, all the noblest faculties of the human mind, would be deprived of the means of subsistence. We will not say that the rich are necessary to assist the miserable, for it would be better if none were miserable; yet the bond of charity binding together different conditions, is one of the beauties of social order, and one of the sources of the virtue and happiness of man; but for this to be efficaciously exercised, misery, must be rare and accidental. Where it is produced on every side, and seems incurable, charity abandons her task, and the heart becomes hardened: If it is desirable that there should be rich men in a nation, it is also desirable that some of them should be settled in the country. Above all, this will be their wish; it is natural that those who are not seduced by the pleasures of the world, will wish to enjoy part at least of those pleasures of nature which we have claimed for the poor. But landed property also gives to the rich a character which it is important to preserve in the nation; they are more intimately united with the people, they know them better, they are bound by interest and affection to the province and district which they inhabit. They are more connected with the past and the future; their property, which is transmitted from generation to generation, gives them a feeling of perpetuity which makes them conservatives, amidst the daily innovations of the other orders; they do not run the risks which lead the newly rich into foolish expense and short-lived pleasures; they are less exposed to the rivalries of gain, to resentment and hatred, because their misfortunes come to them from heaven, and not from the intrigues of men; lastly, their presence in the country tends to civilize it, to spread that refinement of manners, that taste and elegance, which to a certain extent may become general; to introduce, not indeed a profound study of the sciences, but their application; particularly, to make agriculture profit by all the discoveries of speculative inquiry. The nation may and ought to wish that there should be rich landowners scattered through every part of the country, but by no means that all the country should belong to them. She may provide, on the increase of wealth, against all the inheritances of the poor being purchased by the rich; she often does it with success. If we are to believe M. Montlosier, who, in speaking of ancient times too often contents himself with affirming, instead of proving, from the beginning of the republics of the Gauls land had its conditions and ranks, the allodial lands, (alleux) were for the rich; the feods, (tributaires) were reserved for the poor. This would have been a free institution, (Monarchies Française, t 1. p. 9). It is very probable, on the contrary, that it was during a time of oppression that the distinction between the tenure of lands, in fief de haubert and in villenage was established. This distinction had, however, an advantage: the lords left to the villains that portion of the estates which carried with it a sort of degradation. So in England, the lords retained the freehold, and left to the cultivators the copyhold; but since opinion is changed, and the tenure of copyhold does not affect the condition of the owners, all the copyholds have been bought by the rich, and there no longer remains in England any peasants, cultivators of their own soil. In Austria, where legislation sometimes protects material happiness, whilst the government energetically refuses all intellectual development, the law has secured to the peasant cultivator that his share in the property of the soil should not be diminished. The noble who buys the property of a peasant, must sell it again to a peasant, without changing its condition.

The nation has in another way an interest in the proportion between the rich and the poor. It is the power to have possession of leisure, and not of luxury, which makes the condition of the rich useful to society. It demands a refined mind, a relief from care, but not opulence. Besides, it must not be forgotten that landed property is a given quantity which cannot increase; we must inquire, then, whether this quantity is to be divided amongst a thousand, or ten thousand families. Even if we consider only the rich, the quantity of happiness which wealth affords is increased by dividing it; ten thousand families in easy circumstances present far more of it than a thousand in opulence, more than a hundred with the colossal fortunes which we see in England. Among the landowners of this country, some not being able to spend their enormous incomes, are continually buying the patrimonies of their neighbours, and end by possessing provinces; others fling themselves into extravaganee, and with incomes of £100,000 a year are straitened, in debt, anxious, and suffer, in extreme opulence, the disquietudes of poverty. It is then for their own interest, as well as for that of the nation, that the law should favour the division of fortunes, for the industry and cupidity of men always tend to re-unite them.

The class of rich landowners, of owners who are not labourers, lives without working, on the nett produce of the land; the only result of agriculture which the chresmatistics have considered. Labour applied to land, produces more than it has cost. The often debated origin of this surplus, is an idle question; its existence is a fact which is not contested. This surplus is divided between the producers and the owners of the soil: the more the first retain for themselves, the less will there remain for the others.

By the chresmatistics, the producers are considered only as ciphers; they make no more scruple of displacing and getting rid of classes of men who, they think, can be dispensed with in the production of wealth, than in displacing the unknown quantities in a problem of algebra, in order afterwards to get rid of them. We would not forget that producers are men, still more, that they form by far the majority of the nation; and in the division of the surplus of agricultural produce, we would call for the superintendence of sovereign authority. In fact, this surplus represents for the labourer all the material enjoyments of life, good food, good clothing, good lodging, and the good health which is connected with physical comfort. It represents also a mixture of repose which is necessary, in order to mingle some cheerfulness and some pleasure with his life; in order that a little time may be given to the cultivation of the affections, a little to the cultivation of the mind. The chresmatistics wish the poor man to do all the work possible; the true economists, on the contrary, make it an object to re-serve to him some leisure moments.

Since, in the struggle between the rich and the poor, it is the first who make the law, if authority does not interpose, the rich preserve for themselves all the surplus of the produce, all the enjoyment, and all the leisure. The rich class, in fact, being the most enlightened, is in a position to direct and secure itself: the nature of lauded property, invariably limited, whatever may be the demand of the producers or consumers, gives it the power of a monopoly. The small number of proprietors, and their rank in the state, allows of their meeting and acting in concert: lastly, their wealth gives them the means of waiting without inconvenience till those with whom they treat submit to the conditions which they wish to impose on them. Thus, in every country, the share assigned to the labourer is most frequently only just what is sufficient to support his existence.

Authority has, however, interposed in different ways between the landowners and the labourers; religious authority, by consecrating one day in the week to repose, to worship, and to moral enjoyments, to the development of the heart and the mind, in short, to social pleasures, has taken away from he rich one seventh part of the surplus which they would have appropriated, to bestow it on the poor. In Greece political authority, by calling the Athenian during a great part of each day to the public assembly, left him much less time to produce an income for the rich, and accustomed the whole nation to seek after the public luxury of arts, taste, and intelligence, whilst it was ill-fed and ill-clothed. It gave to the moral development of man all that we give to the trifles of fashion. Military authority, when, as among the ancients, it summoned all men to gymnastic exercise, as among us to militia service and exercises in arms, subtracts also something from the total product of labour, and from the income of the rich, to give it back to the poor in address, strength, valour, and a feeling of dignity. Educational authority, when, as in Prussia, it obliges the children of the poor to devote the first fifteen years of their lives to acquiring moral and intellectual instruction; at the same time obliges the rich to leave to the labouring poor a sufficient shore to enable them to bring up their children without exacting from them lucrative labour. Sacerdotal authority in Egypt, in India, in Europe, in the middle ages, by employing the surplus of the product of labour in creating those gigantic monuments of religion, which we admire without being able to imitate them, has also taken something from the rich to pay wages to the poor; it has given to society the luxury of monuments instead of the luxury of elegance; above all, it has preserved the Poor from their present calamity, that of competing with one another, so that the more they produce, the less their labour is in demand. The Egyptian never knew the misery of our manufacturers, for neither the pyramids nor the temples of the Thebans were sold in the market.

After having made all these deductions in favour of the poor from the share of the rich, it remains sufficiently large, as much so as is advantageous to society. Some English economists, however, require that the legislature should abstain from laying any restrictions on the lights of the rich over their property, from regulating by law, testaments or inheritances, the portions of children, or the predial services imposed for the benefit of the public, lest men should become disinclined to accumulate wealth, and should dissipate it as soon as they had acquired it. It will be time, we think, to guard against this calamity when the history of human society shall have furnished at least one example of it.

We stop, however. The corollaries to be deduced from the principles which we have only indicated, would be matter for a long work; though we have confined ourselves to the most simple and the most limited portion of political economy. The inquiry as to what must be done for the happiness of the classes who are jointly engaged in producing in the towns, is more complicated and more delicate. The true idea of political economy, however, will never have been attained until the distribution, more than the creation of wealth, has been followed up to the point where it is really most advantageous to the happiness of all.