Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/95

Rh The economists of the Revolution era also looked below the funds from which contributions were paid, and tried to analyze the causes which might keep the funds amply supplied; they were ready to look at the factors which go to the production of national prosperity—factors which facilitated the cultivation of land, and which worked up the manufactured goods which we exported to other lands. Locke laid stress upon the productive cause of value; while Gregory King and others insisted that labour depended for its effect on the fund which employed it, and studied the condition of various ranks of society with special reference to their ability to save capital. Capital, too, was able to utilize and send to market the results obtained through the productive power of nature; and thus attention was not exclusively given to the funds from which taxes were defrayed, but also to the factors by which these funds were brought into being and maintained.

When economists thus examined the factors which produced national prosperity it became possible for them to compare the working of these factors in various countries even though these countries presented many differences. The English method of taxation from the land was repugnant to French subjects, who had, however, no strong objection to an excise which the English freeholders hated as the worst of tyrannies. Differences of national temperament rendered it difficult to compare the fiscal policy of the two Governments or to discuss the relative advantages of either method; but after all the source, from which revenue was ultimately derived in both cases, was the material wealth of the subjects. In both cases labour, capital, and land were the factors which went to produce it, though they might contribute in different proportions to the prosperity of different lands; and hence the respective advantages and disadvantages of two or more countries could be discussed and compared.

2. During the first sixty years of the eighteenth century the financial condition and the fiscal possibilities of England were still the chief topics to which economic writers addressed themselves, and not without reason. Although there had been as we see now, a remarkable growth in many directions there were not a few causes for grave anxiety about the time of the Seven Years' War. The growth of the National Debt and the impossibility of finding new sources of taxation alarmed more than one statesman, and there were not a few economists