Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/401

Rh POLITICAL ECONOMY 385 of persons, and which became, with the increased demand for food, a larger and larger value in the hands of its possessors. To this value, however, as not being the result of labour, the owner had no rightful claim ; he could not justly demand a payment for what was done by the &quot;original and indestructible powers of the soil.&quot; Hut Carey held that land, as we are concerned with it in industrial life, is really an instrument of production which has been formed .is such by man, and that its value is due to the labour expended mi it in the past, though measured, riot by the sum of that labour, but by the labour necessary under existing conditions to bring new land to the same stage of productiveness. He studies the occupa tion and reclamation of land with peculiar advantage as an American, for whom the traditions of first settlement are living and fresh, and before whose eyes the process is indeed still going on. The difficulties of adapting a primitive soil to the work of yielding organic products for man s use can be lightly estimated only by an inhabitant of a country long under cultivation. It is, in Carey s view, the overcoming of these difficulties by arduous and continued effort that entitles the first occupier of land to his property in the soil. Its present value forms a very small propor tion of the cost expended on it, because it represents only what would be required, with the science and appliances of our time, to bring the land from its primitive into its present state. Property in land is therefore only a form of invested capital a quantity of labour or the fruits of labour permanently incorporated with the soil ; for which, like any other capitalist, the owner is compensated by a shars of the produce. He is not rewarded for what is done by the powers of nature, and society is in no sense defrauded by his sole possession. The so-called Ricardian theory of rent is a speculative fancy, contradicted by all experience. Cultivation does not in fact, as that theory supposes, begin with the best, and move downwards to the poorer soils in the order of their inferiority. 1 The light and dry higher lands are first cultivated ; and only when population has become dense and capital has accumulated, are the low-lying lands, with their greater fertility, but also with their morasses, inundations, and miasmas, attacked and brought into occupation. Rent, regarded as a proportion of the produce, sinks, like all interest on capital, in process of time, but, as an absolute amount, increases. The share of the labourer increases, both as a proportion and an absolute amount. And thus the interests of these different social classes are in harmony. But, Carey proceeds to say, in order that this harmonious progress may be realized, what is taken from the land must be given back to it. All the articles derived from it are really separ ated parts of it, which must be restored on pain of its exhaustion. Hence the producer and the consumer must be close to each other; the products must not be exported to a foreign country in exchange for its manufactures, and thus go to enrich as manure a foreign soil. In immediate exchange value the landowner may gain by such exportation, but the productive powers of the land will suffer. And thus Carey, who had set out as an earnest advocate of free trade, arrives at the doctrine of protection: the &quot;co-ordinating power&quot; in society must intervene to prevent private advantage from working public mischief. 2 He attributes his conversion on this question to his observation of the effects of liberal and protec tive tariffs respectively on American prosperity. This observation, he says, threw him back on theory, and led him to see that the intervention referred to might be necessary to remove (as he phrases it) the obstacles to the progress of younger communities created by the action of older and wealthier nations. But it seems probable that the influence of List s writings, added to his own deep-rooted and hereditary jealousy and dislike of English predominance, had something to do with his change of attitude. The practical conclusion at which he thus arrived, though it is by no means in contradiction to the doctrine of the existence of natural economic laws, accords but ill with his optimistic scheme; and another economist, accepting his fundamental ideas, applied himself to remove the foreign accretion, as he regarded it, and to preach the theory of spontaneous social harmonies in relation with the practice of free trade as its legitimate outcome. Btiat. Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), though not a profound thinker, was a brilliant and popular writer on economic questions. Though he always had an inclination for such studies, he was first impelled to the active propagation of his views by his earnest sympathy with the English 1 It is, however, a mistake to suppose that the assumption of this historical order of descent is essential to the theory in question. 2 This argument seems scarcely met by Prof. F. A. Walker, Political Economy, 50-52. But perhaps he i.s right in thinking that Carey exag gerates the importance of the considerations on which it is founded. Mill and Leslie remark that the transportation of agricultural pro ducts from the western to the Atlantic States has the same eifect as their export to Europe, so far as this so-called &quot;land-butchery&quot; is concerned; besides, some manures are obtainable from abroad. anti-corn-law agitation. Naturally of an ardent tempera ment, he threw himself with zeal into the free-trade con troversy, through which he hoped to influence French economic policy, and published in 1845 a history of the struggle under the title of Cohden et la Lif/ue. In 1845-48 appeared his Sophismes Bconomiques (Eng. trans, by P. J. Stirling, 1873), in which he exhibited his best qualities of mind. Though Cairnes goes too far in compar ing this work with the Lettres Provinciates, it is certainly marked by much liveliness, point, and vigour. But to expose the absurdities of the ordinary protectionism was no difficult task ; it is only in such a form as the doctrine assumed in the hands of List, as a purely provisional and preparatory scheme, that it deserves and demands con sideration. After the revolution of 1848, which for a time put an end to the free-trade movement in France, the efforts of Bastiat were directed against the socialists. Besides several minor pieces possessing the same sort of merit as the Sophismes, he produced, with a view to this con troversy, his most ambitious as well as characteristic work, the Harmonies JZconomiques (Eng. trans, by P. J. Stirling, 1860). Only the first volume was published; it appeared in 1850, and its author died in the same year. Since then the notes and sketches which he had prepared as materials towards the production of the second volume have been given to the public in the collected edition of his writings (by Paillottet, with Life by Fontenay, 7 vols.), and we can thus gather what would have been the spirit and substance of the later portions of the book. It will always be historically interesting as the last incarnation of thorough-going economic optimism. This optimism, recurring to its first origin, sets out from theo logical considerations, and Bastiat is commended by his English translator for treating political economy &quot; in con nexion with final causes.&quot; The spirit of the work is to represent &quot;all principles, all motives, all springs of action, all interests, as co-operating towards a grand final result which humanity will never reach, but to which it will always increasingly tend, namely, the indefinite approxima tion of all classes towards a level, which steadily rises, in other words, the equalization of individuals in the general amelioration.&quot; What claimed to be novel and peculiar in his scheme was principally his theory of value. Insisting on the idea that value does not denote anything inherent in the objects to which it is attributed, he endeavoured to show that it never signifies anything but the ratio of two &quot; services.&quot; This view he develops with great variety and felicity of illustration. Only the mutual services of human beings, according to him, possess value and can claim a retribution ; the assistance given by nature to the work of production is always purely gratuitous, and never en ters into price. Economic progress, a&amp;gt;s, for example, the improvement and larger use of machinery, tends perpetu ally to transfer more and more of the elements of utility from the domain of property, and therefore of value, into that of community, or of universal and unpurchased enjoyment. It will be observed that this theory is sub stantially identical with Carey s, which had been earlier propounded ; and the latter author in so many words alleges it to have been taken from him without acknow ledgment. It has not perhaps been sufficiently attended to that very similar views are found in Dunoyer, of whose work Bastiat spoke as exercising a powerful influence on &quot; the restoration of the science,&quot; and whom Fontenay, the biographer of Bastiat, tells us he recognized as one of his masters, Charles Comte being the other. The mode which has just been explained of conceiving industrial action and industrial progress is interesting and instructive so far as it is really applicable, but it was unduly generalized. Cairnes has XIX. -- 49