Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/693

Rh Bastiat suggests, in his "Harmonies Économiques," that we can not find a solution to the questions raised by the introduction of machinery and external competition while we consider want as an invariable quantity; we must admit that our needs are indefinitely expansible, and invoke luxury to afford an opportunity to put surplus labor to use. Machines, the economists of this school reason in effect, abridge labor; the more they are multiplied and perfected, the fewer hours of labor are required to obtain the same products. Thus the demand for hands is diminished, and an increasing number of workmen are put out of employment. In order to keep these men at work, new wants must be invented as fast as actual wants are satisfied by a smaller amount of effort, so that the hours that have been placed at our disposition may be utilized.

I claim that we ought to ask that the time that has been gained by the increased productiveness of machinery should be devoted, not to the creation of superfluities to satisfy factitious demands, but to the cultivation of the mind and the enjoyment of society and of the beauties of art and nature. At present the effect of machinery seems to have been not to shorten but to lengthen the hours of toil, and to extend them through the night, and to make life more intense and cause a greater expenditure of nervous force.

To satisfy our rational wants we require food, clothing, and habitation suitable to the climate and season; to these we may add the cheap accessories which the progress of industrial art has put within the reach of all. The line between a consumption that is reasonable and one that is not so may be found in every case by answering the question whether the satisfaction which the desired object will procure is worth the time and effort necessary to produce it. If it is, I am right in procuring it; but, if to get it I have to divert human labor from a more useful destination, I am wrong. I sacrifice what is necessary to what is superfluous. M. Baudrillart regards everything superfluous as a luxury. I agree rather with M. J. B. Say, who thinks it must be also dear. Thus, a Japanese fan costing a cent or two and a cheap looking-glass are superfluous; but, as it costs but little effort to get them, the satisfaction they afford is quite worth the expenditure. When the countryman drinks his wine which he would sell, perhaps, at four sous a quart, it is not extravagance. When a Crœsus drinks Johannisberger at eight dollars a bottle, the expense is relatively little for him; but he has, nevertheless, consumed the equivalent of twenty days of labor, which have been taken from the whole of the time available to humanity for the satisfaction of its essential wants, and for what advantage? Only to secure the fugitive taste of a flavor that is hardly appreciable to the finest palates. No one will hesitate to say that the time has been put to a bad use. The fact escapes the world under the complications of exchange; nevertheless, people have an intuition of it, for they often blame certain