Section V.: Of the Independence accruing to the Moderns from the Advancement of Industry.

The maxims of political economy are immutable; ere yet observed or discovered, they were operating in the way above described; the same cause regularly producing the same effect; the wealth of Tyre and of Amsterdam originated in a common source. It is society that has been subject to change, in the progressive advancement of industry.

The ancients were not nearly so far behind the moderns in agriculture, as in the mechanical arts. Wherefore, since agricultural products are alone essential to the multiplication of mankind, the unoccupied surplus of human labour was larger than in modern days. Those, who happened to have little or no land, unable to subsist upon the product of their own industry, unprovided with capital, and too proud to engage in those subordinate employments, which were commonly filled by slaves, had no resource but to borrow, without a prospect of the ability to repay, and were continually demanding that equal division of property, which was utterly impracticable. With a view to stifle their discontents, the leading men of the state were obliged to engage them in warlike enterprises, and, in the intervals of peace, to subsist them on the spoils of the enemy, or on their own private means. This was the grand source of the civil disorder and discord, which continually distracted the states of antiquity; of the frequency of their wars, of the corruption of their suffrages, and of the connexion of patron and client, which backed the ambition of a Marius and a Sylla, a Pompey and a Cæsar, an Antony and an Octavius, and which finally reduced the whole Roman people to the condition of servile attendants upon the court of a Caligula, a Heliogabalus, or some monster of equal enormity, whose grand condition of empire was the subsistence of the objects of his atrocious tyranny.

The industrious cities of Tyre, Corinth, and Carthage, were somewhat differently circumstanced; but they could not permanently resist the hostility of poorer and more warlike nations, impelled by the prospect of plunder. Industry and civilization were the continual prey of barbarism and penury; and Rome herself at length yielded to the attack of Gothic and Vandalic conquerors.

Thus re-plunged into a state of barbarism, the condition of Europe, during the middle ages, was but a revival of the earliest scenes of Grecian and Italian history, in an aggravated form. Each baron or great landholder, was surrounded by a circle of vassals or clients on his domain, ready to follow him in civil broils or foreign warfare.

I should trench upon the province of the historian, were I to attempt the delineation of the various causes that have aided the progress of industry since that period; but I may be allowed merely to note, by the way, the great change that has been effected, and the consequence of that change. Industry has become a means of subsistence to the bulk of the population, independent of the caprice of the large proprietors, and without being to them a constant source of alarm: it is nursed and supported by the capital accumulated by its own exertions. The relation of client and vassal has ceased to exist; and the poorest individual is his own master, and dependent upon his personal faculties alone. Nations can support themselves upon their internal resources; and governments derive from their subjects those supplies, which they were wont to dispense as a matter of favour.

The increasing prosperity of manufacture and commerce has raised them in the scale of estimation. The object of war is changed, from the spoliation and destruction of the sources of wealth, to their quiet and exclusive possession. For the last two centuries, where war has not been made to gratify the childish vanity of a nation or a monarch, the bone of contention has always been, either colonial sovereignty, or commercial monopoly. Instead of a contest of hungry barbarians against their wealthy and industrious neighbours, it has been one between civilized nations on either side; wherein the victor has shown the greatest anxiety to preserve the resources of the conquered territory. The invasion of Greece by the Turks, in the fifteenth century, appears to have been the final effort of pure barbarism arrayed against civilization. The present preponderance of industry and civilized habits amongst the general mass of mankind seems to exclude all probability of a recurrence of such calamitous events. Indeed, the improvement of military science takes away all fear of the result of such a conflict.

There is yet one step more to be made; and that can only be rendered practicable by the wider diffusion of the principles of political economy. They will some day have taught mankind that the sacrifice of their lives, in a contest for the acquisition or retention of colonial dominion or commercial monopoly, is a vain pursuit of a costly and delusive good; that external products, even those of the colonial dependencies of a nation, are only procurable with the products of domestic growth: that internal production is, therefore, the proper object of solicitude, and is best to be promoted by political tranquility, moderate and equal laws, and facility of intercourse. The fate of nations will thenceforth hang no longer upon the precarious tenure of political pre-eminence, but upon the relative degree of information and intelligence. Public functionaries will grow more and more dependent upon the productive classes, to whom they must look for supplies; the people, retaining the right of taxation in their own hands, will always be well governed; and the struggles of power against the current of improvement will end in its own subversion; for it will vainly strive against the dispensations of nature.