Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/286

274 Modern commerce properly begins with the rise of the Italian commercial cities, and thence onward it moves steadily if slowly. Its theory is the mercantile system. Nations only grow rich by despoiling each other, and money is alone riches. This theory, once universal, has not even yet disappeared. It has survived the clearest demonstrations of its falsity, and influences to-day much of the speculation and legislation upon economical matters. The first important school to combat it, and to lead the way to a true theory of wealth, was that of the Economists, which arose in France just after the disastrous failure of Law's scheme. Quesnay was one of its founders and most distinguished representatives. It found prepared for it a soil in which it readily took root and flourished. Law's failure had produced an entire revulsion in French sentiment. "People," says M. Blanqui, "had for some time deemed money to be wealth in an especial sense; . . . there were henceforth no true riches but land." The Economists came preaching this doctrine. To them agriculture was the only productive occupation. "Manufacturers, traders, workmen, were all paid clerks of agriculture, which was the sovereign creator and dispenser of all wealth." Landed proprietors were rightly preëminent over all other classes. They reaped all wealth; they should, therefore, pay all taxes. Hence the Economists would have but one tax—that upon land. And the same reasoning led them to entire freedom of trade. Able men rallied to the support of the new views, and there gradually grew up a body of statesmen imbued with them, one of whom, Turgot, was to attempt to carry their formulas into practice.

The Economists were mistaken. They failed to see that wealth can be created by labor; they were blinded by their doctrine of the importance of land, but they have rendered great service. "Their books are forgotten; but their doctrines have germinated like a good seed, and the precepts which they taught have made the circuit of the world, freed the industrial arts, restored agriculture, and prepared the way for commercial liberty." It was reserved for Adam Smith to see clearly what the Economists saw dimly, to correct their errors by a true analysis of the phenomena of wealth, and to place economics on an enduring foundation. He restored to labor the position of a creator of wealth denied it by the Economists, and he first pointed out clearly the results of the division of labor. He placed commercial liberty upon an impregnable basis, and showed how private interest freed from restrictions works for the best welfare of the individual and society. Great as was his genius, "Adam Smith did not, however, have the honor of creating political economy at a single stroke"; but he laid the foundation upon which his successors securely built. The Economists had given to land too prominent a place; he gave it to labor. This his followers corrected: they adjusted the parts, recognized the place of capital, and developed the science symmetrically. But they all failed to recognize sufficiently the welfare of the worker. They all regarded him too exclusively in the light of an economic machine for the production of wealth. This error the economists of the French school have corrected. They have insisted that the value of increase of wealth is to be unceasingly judged by what it brings to the workers, and they withhold their admiration if the thing it brings be not good: "We are to-day obliged to seek a regulator, and to put a curb on those gigantic instruments of production which feed and which starve men, which clothe and which despoil them, which relieve and which crush them. The question is no longer, as in the time of Smith, exclusively that of accelerating production: the latter must henceforth be governed and restricted within wise limits. The question is no longer of absolute wealth, but of relative wealth; humanity demands that masses of men who will not profit thereby be no longer sacrificed to the progress of public opulence. Thus decree the eternal laws of justice and morality, too long disregarded in the social distribution of the profits and the labors; and we will no longer consent to give the name of wealth save to the sum of the national product equitably distributed between all the producers. Such is the French school of political economy to which we profess to belong, and its ideas will make the circuit of the world."

The above will, perhaps, give some idea of the general spirit and drift of M.