LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Deceived JAN 10 1893 ^Accessions No. GQZ-d . Class No. HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY HANDBOOK OP SOCIAL ECONOMY; OR, THE WORKER'S ABC. BY EDMOND ABOUT. {TRANSLATED FROM THE LAST FRENCH EDITION.'] NEW YORK : D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 549 AND 651 BROADWAY. 1873. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGB I. MAN'S WANTS 1 II. USEFUL THINGS 18 III. PRODUCTION 31 IV. PARASITES . . . . . . . 62 V. EXCHANGE . . . . . . . . . . 89 VI. LIBERTY 124 VII. MONEY . . . . 158 VIII. WAGES . . . . . . . . . . 211 IX. SAVINGS AND CAPITAL . . . . . . 223 X. STRIKES 239 XI. CO-OPERATION . . . . . . . . 249 XII. ASSURANCE AND SOME OTHER DESIRABLE NOVELTIES . 271 INTRODUCTION. A FEW years ago, M. Edmond About privately discussed, in a correspondence with Parisian workmen, several problems which personally interested them. They desired to ascertain whether, by associating to- gether or otherwise, they could not materially better their condition. They avowed themselves ignorant of the doctrines of political economy generally cur- rent and accepted among educated and thinking men. Two sets of opinions had invariably been pre- sented for the acceptance of these working men; the one set giving them no hope of rising from a condition of comparative servitude to a state of independence, and inculcating contentment with their lot as an absolute duty ; the other set being wholly revolutionary and subversive, upholding an appeal to force as the only sure means for at- INTRODUCTION. taming to comfort and opulence. Not being satis- fied with, remaining as they were, nor prepared to have recourse to violence, they professed themselves desirous of being instructed as to the real state of the case, and ready to hear both sides. One. of their number, who wrote on behalf of the others, asked M. About : "Is there no science of Social Economy ? Why have we never been taught it ? Are you versed in it ? Can you teach it to us ? We do not ask for a formal treatise, but a few hours of familiar talk about Wealth, Capital, Income, Labour, Wages, Pro- duction, Consumption, Co-operation, Taxation, Money ; in fact, about the words which are dinned into our ears, sometimes to dishearten, sometimes to dupe us, but are never defined x and freed from all uncer- tainty." M. About consented to undertake the task. While engaged upon it, he thought that a simple elementary work might prove useful to others besides working men. " Whether agriculturists, tradesmen, manufacturers, landlords, fund-holders, artists, and men of letters, we all produce Social Economy, as M. Jourdain made prose, without knowing it. Unfortunately, we do not always make it of good quality." It appeared to M. About that, though elaborate and valuable works abounded, there were few works simply written and easily comprehended by every INTRODUCTION. ix reader, and that the result was prejudicial to the general diffusion of sound economic principles. Even the catechism of Jean-Baptiste Say, though a mas- terpiece of exposition, was addressed to a class of readers differing from that which now exists. A work which should prove acceptable to the more nu- merous reading public of the present day ought to be composed in a light and popular style. The ne- cessity for such a work he states in the following sentences : " No one is considered to be ignorant of the civil and penal laws which control us, and in reality no one is unacquainted with their broad out- lines. Why should the large majority of such a nation as ours be still ignorant of economic laws, of these eternal and immutable laws which inevitably proceed from Nature herself? Why should the first innovator who comes to sap the foundations of society with paradoxes and sophisms take us always, or nearly always, unawares ? Why are Capital and Labour, two allies bound together by Nature, eternally in opposition, not to say at war ? Why do the wor- thiest men in the world reciprocally charge each other with dreadful crimes, the one crying that they are being stripped of what they possess, the others protesting that what they had not has been taken away from them ? Why do the rich, or certain rich men, foolishly despise those who toil ? Un- INTRODUCTION. happy men, your fortune is nothing but consolidated labour. Why do the poor generally hate the rich ? They do not know that they would be a hundred times poorer, that is, labouring more and earning less, if they were only surrounded by poor. "Why should fraud and distrust, arrogance and revolt, absurd demands and unjust refusals, prevail in the domain of industry and commerce, where a good understanding would be so easy ? " To these queries JV1. About replies that common ignorance of what is best alike for the individual and the com- munity is the real source of mischief. His small volume will, he hopes, aid in dispelling this ignor- ance, just as the smallest light in a dark cave puts to flight the noxious creatures which revel and flourish in darkness. The foregoing is M. About's own account, in an abridged form, of the origin and aim of the pre- sent work. His aptitude for writing it is beyond all question. He is largely endowed with the peculiarly French gift of rendering the most abstruse topics clear to the meanest understanding, and of making entertaining reading out of the driest and most un- promising materials. Among clever and cultivated Frenchmen he is pre-eminent for his skill as a popu- larizer of hard facts. One of his novels, Maltre Pierre, is but an essay, in disguise, on the best way INTRODUCTION. xi of reclaiming that uncultivated district in the South of France called the Landes. Another, the Fellah, is an exposition of the labour question in Egypt. Even Madelon, which has the appearance of being the mere picture of vicious life, is designed to uphold the advantages of co-operative agriculture. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that M. About could make Euclid as interesting as the most fascinating novel, and the multiplication table as amusing as a fairy tale. He succeeds best where he has no personal views to propagate. His greatest failures have been his political opinions and previsions. So marked have been some of his blunders that there is danger of underrating his real powers. In this work there are some sentences and paragraphs which show that, when he wrote it, he was wholly unconscious of the inherent weakness of the deposed Imperial dynasty. !Nor did he foresee, any more than many wiser men, that the year 1848 was not the end of the social revolt. He little thought, when penning the following, that a few years afterwards Paris would be under the rule of the Commune : " Socialism, which can be discussed to-day without heat, delivered its last stroke before our eyes in June, 1848. It is not only conquered, but is disarmed, owing to the progress of enlightenment and the better state of the public mind. Among OPTHS^IS 'ntflTTERSITV' INTRODUCTION. those who toil and suffer in French society, a thou- sand men cannot be found who are so ignorant of their own interest as to seek alleviation in disorder and violence. The problem of universal well-being is not yet solved, I admit, but it is sensibly put, and that is a great point." (pp. 137, 138.) As a set- off may be quoted a remark which experience has amply confirmed : " The members of the wages-class see or consider that they are on the eve of an econo- mic movement comparable to the great rising of the volunteers in 1792, and each hopes that he has got his marshal's baton in his pocket." This rising took place without taking the exact form or direction which these men may have anticipated. It ended in the leaders, who had risen to high nominal rank, having either to save their lives by flight, or else to suffer life-long imprisonment or death. One of the most notable and useful chapters in this work is the one on " Liberty." The character and effects of the Protective system are depicted forcibly and correctly. With the irony in which he is proficient, and the neatness of phrase in which he has no living superior, M. About sets forth how, under the pretext of increasing the wealth of French citizens and of advancing the greateiess of France, successive governments kept the people in a state of tutelage, maintaining the passport system, prohibit- INTRODUCTION. ing a baker to bake bread, a butcher to sell meat, 'a printer to exercise bis calling, without permission from the authorities and without their constant supervision. The delusion of the Protective system is not, as M. About alleges, wholly due to the teach- ing or tyranny of monarchs. He has lived to learn, that, in this matter,, a Republic can be as short- sighted as a Monarchy. But at the time he wrote he might have witnessed the greatest and most genuine of modern Republics deliberately pursuing a course of policy as erroneous in an economic sense as any ever enunciated by the least far-seeing of European statesmen and enforced by the most ig- norant of European kings. The following piece of argumentation applies to citizens in the United States as well as to French citizens : " ' Protect me ! ' says the agriculturist. ' I have had a good grain harvest ; my neighbours, less fortunate, have barely doubled their seed. Before a month is over prices will rise, if the information in my newspaper be ac- curate. I hope to get thirty francs the hectolitre, and empty my granary under the best conditions in the world. I shall do this unless, through culpable weakness, the door is open to foreign grain ! America threatens us, Egypt holds plenty suspended over our heads like the sword of Damocles ; Odessa, infamous Odessa, thinks to glut us with her produce. Help ! xiv INTRODUCTION. Let the door be shut ! Or, if you permit the import- ation of foreign grain, have the humanity to tax it heavily, in order that the cost of purchasing on the spot, the transport, and the import duty should raise the price to thirty francs the hectolitre ! If every- thing goes on as I should wish, I count upon pro- ceeding to Switzerland, and bringing back four pairs of oxen.' " ' Protect me ! ' says the grazier. ' Shut the door upon foreign cattle, if you wish me to earn a liveli- hood. We are promised a rise in the price of meat, and I count upon it ; but the admission of Italian, Swiss, German, Belgian, and English cattle would create plenty for everybody and be my ruin. Protect me by prohibiting or by taxing all the products which come into competition with me. Let grain enter ; I do not grow any, and I like to buy bread cheaply. Permit the entry, free of duty, of the com- bustibles with which I warm myself, the glass out of which I drink, the -furniture which I use, the stuffs with which I clothe myself, and all manufactured products in general. Oh, visible providence of citizens, arrange so that I shall not have any competition to fear as producer, but that in what I consume I may enjoy all the benefits of competition/ " ' Protect me ! ' says the manufacturer. ' Cause all the products which compete with mine to be seized at INTRODUCTION. xv the frontier; or, if you suffer them to enter, load them with a duty which will render them unsaleable. The interest of the country enjoins upon you to serve my personal interest. Do you not take pity upon the national industry doubly menaced by superior quali- ties and lower prices ? My foreign comrades may reduce me to destitution by inundating France with good merchandise at cheap rates. As a citizen I fear no one in Europe ; as a manufacturer I am afraid of everybody. The feeblest foreigner is stronger than I. Strive then that I may preserve the monopoly of my products ; but be generous as regards all that which I buy but do not sell. Allow grain to enter, in order that my workmen, being fed for next to nothing, may be satisfied with low wages. Allow the raw materials I employ to enter, and the machines which assist my labour/ " ' Do nothing of the kind/ exclaims the machine- maker. ' If the foreigner should come and compete with me, there will be nothing for it but to shut up shop. Stop, or tax, the products which resemble mine ; content yourself with opening the door to the metals I use, and you will usefully protect the national in- dustry as far as I am concerned." " ' Hold, there ! ' replies the iron-master. ' If foreign iron be admitted, I must put out my furnaces. Leave me the monopoly of my industry ; only allow INTRODUCTION. me to import freely the minerals and combustibles which, are my instruments of labour/ " * No, a hundred times no ! ' reply the share- holders in mines and coalpits, and the proprietors of forests. ' Is our industry less worthy of protection than the others ? ISTow we shall be ruined if foreign- ers are permitted to introduce plenty and low prices amongst us.' " Deafened by such a concert, it is not surprising that statesmen should have been induced to tax all imported articles, or nearly all." (pp. 148151.) Instead of entering upon a minute criticism of the economic doctrines propounded by M. About, I may state generally that they are sound in the main, and are borrowed from the leading authorities. .Some- times he pushes the views of these authorities beyond a point at which the principal English and French economists have stopped short. For example, it is not customary to rank medical men among producers. Yet M. About does so, and on grounds which are very plausible, if not scientifically accurate. The reasoning in this case is similar to that employed in others of an analogous kind. The passage itself is a good illustration of M. About's characteristic in- genuity : "Do you grant that among the things useful to man, the most useful is man himself ? Do you accept the calculations of the economists who INTRODUCTION. xvii say that, commencing at his twenty- seventh year, the individual reimburses the advances made by society ? Do you think, like J. B. Say and all who reason, that the problem is not how to beget children, but how to rear them to man's estate ? " You ought then to acknowledge that the medical art, by organizing a struggle against the destructive causes which threaten us from our birth, produces an incalculable amount of utility on earth. Our life, according to Bichat's definition, is the aggregate of the forces contending in us against death. Every hour, Nature claims the elements of which our body is composed ; our existence is but a militant loan, in- cessantly continued and renewed: it would be im- possible to rate too highly the fine medical industry which protects the human being against a universal conspiring host. "Among the men of your acquaintance, are there many whom science has not once rescued from death ? Starting from that point, say whether the doctor of medicine is a more paltry producer than the cabinet- maker or the stone-cutter ? " Jean Jacques Rousseau, and all those who have made mouths water in celebrating the state of Na- ture, are detestable jesters. For man, the state of Nature is a state of filth, of privation, of innumer- able maladies, and premature death. "We still know xviii INTRODUCTION. a certain number of tribes who live in a state of Nature. In their case the average duration of life, in the most genial climates, is from twelve to thir- teen years. Among the civilized nations of Europe, thirty years is the average. Without leaving our own country, we can recognize a sensible^ difference between the life and health of a badly cared for peasant and of the citizen who dwells close to Dr Robin and Dr INelaton. "Having said that, I incline to think you will not decline to inscribe the Doctor in the first rank on the list of producers." (pp. 38, 39.) To many persons the purely social side of this work will be its strongest recommendation. While enunciating the leading truths of economic scienca, M. About loses no opportunity of giving them a per- sonal application. His special aim is to bridge over, if possible, the gulf which separates the rich and the poor, or rather, to demonstrate that the gulf is more of a figment than a fact. He insists upon the inter- dependence of mankind, and denies that progress is possible unless the poor help the rich, and the rich benefit the poor. In proof of this the following passage may be cited : " As for you, rich men, you would do the most foolish thing in the world, if you should dream of perpetuating the poverty and ignor- ance of others. Are you unaware that poverty and INTRODUCTION. xix ignorance condemn the healthiest and most robust individual to a sort of quasi- sterility ? That the more one knows, the more one is able to produce ? That good intentions being equal, an educated work- ing man renders ten times more services than an ignorant one ? That tools, namely, the beginning of riches, often increase the quantity of useful labour tenfold and a hundredfold ? That actual, contem- porary labour, with which you cannot dispense, will cost you so much the less the more it is offered, will be the more offered the more easy it is, and will be all the easier the better it is enlightened or equipped ? I add, merely that it may be borne in mind, a con- sideration which has its value, namely, that the security of your persons and property will constantly increase in proportion to the degree of public well- being and education. Will you now deny that self- interest, rightly understood, impels you to instruct and enrich those who are destitute ? " Hence the poor man ought to wish for the opu- lence of the rich, and do so in his own interest. " The rich ought to wish the poor to be well off, and do so out of pure selfishness. "And social economy ascends to such a height that it merges into universal morality. For man's reason is indivisible, and there are no truths which cannot be reconciled with each other. What would happen if INTRODUCTION. the poor, out of calculation, were to apply themselves to enrich the rich ? If the rich, out of a wise selfish- ness, were to apply themselves to enrich the poor ? Who would be the gainer in such an event ? Every- bod}~. "The area we inhabit is limited, but the production of useful things is unlimited. Oh ! how fine would be the victories and how vast the conquests if, in- stead of fighting against each other, we were to unite all our efforts against blind and stupid no- thingness ! " (pp. 122, 123.) It would be easy to go through the several chapters, pointing out noteworthy remarks and ex- tracting interesting passages. Enough, however, has been said to show the character of this work, and to induce those whose curiosity has been excited to read it and judge for themselves. Many things in it are instructive as exhibiting the course pursued in France relative to economic problems, some of which have been dealt with and settled, others being still among the puzzles of the hour. The work itself is a new and most readable sermon on the text, " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." The conclusion arrived at may be expressed in the words of the Koran : " Man hath nothing to expect save from the fruit of his labour." W. F. BAE. HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. CHAPTER I. LIFE would have been a sad gift to us had we received nothing besides. The new-born man is undoubtedly the most forlorn and feeble, and, for the longest time, help- less, of all the animals which multiply on the earth. To abandon a little child in a lonely place, or to break its head against a tree, is the same thing. Nature has so formed us that, in order to exist, we require shelter, clothes, food, and a thousand things which she does not provide, and with which we cannot supply ourselves. During several years our fellows lodge, clothe, and feed us ; society gives us credit. We live but as debtors till the age when we can more or lees adequately shift for ourselve-s. A time comes when 2 HANDBOOK OF ASOCIAL ECONOMY. a young man nearly earns his keep, and lives with a comrade, after the fashion of shopmen and appren- tices. At length, towards our twenty-seventh year, if the economists are to be credited, we begin to earn more than our cost, and to repay the advances made to us by society. Children and I know many men who are children in this respect suppose that society owes them something. Have you never heard the famous maxim " To each one according to his needs >} ? As for me, I thought it admirable in 1848. I was then twenty years old, and, to put it concisely, was as ignorant of life as a good school-boy. I had done nothing but themes and exercises, which are cer- tainly of no use to the community, and I innocently considered myself a creditor. I did not understand that a youth like myself, having a good appetite, was disentitled to claim his share in the delicious products of the earth. "Was not the earth itself in some sort my patrimony ? It seemed to me the height of injustice that, out of the billion of human beings spread over a given surface, another should have confiscated and cultivated the ^lice which per- tained to me ; because, forsooth, had not I the right to live ? Therefore, I had a natural and acquired right to all the necessaries of life. Spare your scoffing if I admit that it took several MAN'S WANTS. years to disabuse me of my illusions concerning the true notion of right. Man is a divine creature, because he is the final product of the creation, because Nature has formed nothing more intelligent and more capable of im- provement than he. Each of us enters at birth into the heritage of a sovereignty which renders his person inviolable. In principle, if not in fact, we are all equal, because we all share the same august character. We are all free-born in this sense, that no one has a title to subject another to his will by force. Right signifies neither more nor less than the inviolability of the human species. If the planet we inhabit were a terrestrial para- dise, granted to all who are or may be born in order that they may enjoy themselves without toil, the deed of gift would confer on all of us an equal right to everything which is necessary, useful, or agreeable. We should share among ourselves the enjoyment of the common inheritance, whilst making a few sacri- fices in favour of our successors. Press the hypothesis of a terrestrial paradise to its conclusion, and you will see the human race living on the earth like flies in a dining-room. Generations continuously succeed each other throughout a series of years without these fortunate insects having perfected anything around or belonging to them. UHI7BESIT7 4 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. What constitutes the greatness and glory of our species is the difficulty of living where we are cast. At our birth we are dowered with needs more com- plex than those of all other animals whatever, and the earth obstinately withholds that which would satisfy them. The earth yields nothing save to labour; if we desire shelter, clothing, and food, we must forcibly obtain them, and extract them from the earth's bosom. Everything which is of use to man is the prize of man's exertions. Now, labour is the exercise of our faculties, and practice makes perfect. Hence the necessity of im- proving the state of things inevitably existing around us leads to our own improvement. In proportion as man becomes perfect new needs arise, and these give birth to new efforts, and thereby he is constantly made to surpass himself ; such is the history of the progress of humanity. Much has been said, during the past two or three years, about a fine fellow living as a savage in the forests of the Yar. As a monomaniac he is interest- ing, and his endeavours to diminish his wants merit the attention they have received. But this worthy semi-idiot takes civilization against the grain. To consume little without producing anything is not to rise above humanity, but to sink to the level of beasts. This poor wretch may indeed confine him- MAN'S WANTS. self to what is strictly necessary ; lie robs us, for lie will die insolvent, and will in no wise repay society the sacrifices it has made for him. It is excellently said by Say that the most civilized man is he who produces and who consumes the most. Compare the Hindoo sluggard, who works a quarter of an hour in order to procure a handful of rice, and who lives upon this for a whole day, with the Eng- lish workman, who consumes butcher's meat, vege- tables, beer, cloth, gas, coal, and metallic substances, and produces in proportion. Which of the two makes the larger addition to the capital of the human race ? If you wish to form a notion of the requirements which civilization has engendered, and the resources it has placed at your disposal, suppose all these re- sources to fail you simultaneously, and that, with all your wants, you were cast upon a desert island. Imagine a man of thirty-five years of age, in the fulness of his strength, robust, trained, clever, and educated ; indeed, whatever you please, yet alone and forlorn on a shore whereon no other man had set foot. How many days would you give him to live ? Two centuries ago this problem was stated in very different terms, and in such a way as to simplify its solution, by the illustrious English novelist, Daniel Defoe. The island on which Robinson Crusoe is cast HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. appears to be formed expressly for him ; ferocious beasts are not introduced, and the climate is amelior- ated beforehand. His ship, which he strips at his leisure, furnishes him with provisions, clothing, shoes, tools, arms, munition, and even domestic animals. These constitute the materials of European civilization ; they are a superabundant capital, the accumulated la- bour of more than sixty centuries placed within the reach of a single shipwrecked mariner. This pseudo- pauper has even luxuries, books, money, and what not. By the accident which cuts him off from society, he becomes the casual heir of one hundred millions of persons. Still, you must allow that you are disquieted about him. You cannot consider the matter without saying to yourself that the wants of a civilized man are far more numerous, more complex, and varied than the cargo of any ship whatever can supply. What if the man were really left to his own re- sources ? "What if the ship were absent ? Imagine as rich an isle as you can, one with ten metres of vegetable mould spread over the surface of the soil, and all the trees that earth spontaneously yields. Fish swarm in the waters, the air is peopled with birds, every description of game abounds in the woods. But neither game nor fish court death ; arms, nets, instruments are required to capture them. Moreover, the natural products of the soil are usually MAN'S WANTS. insipid, and sometimes poisonous. Besides, man can- not live on raw food, and there is no fire. Fire! that is a trifle for the Parisian who has lucifer matches in his pocket, and who meets lighted cigars all along the street. Yet merely lose your way in the wood of Yincennes, be overtaken by night, suffer cold, and try to make fire as the savages do by rub- bing two pieces of wood together. Exhaustion will come more quickly than. a spark. The construction of the rudest shelter, were it but a simple hut formed of intertwined branches, implies an axe, a knife, an implement of iron or stone keen enough to split wood. Alas ! the first piece of iron seems far to seek when we picture ourselves in a state of Nature. How many generations have toiled to attain this goal ! In Paris we can purchase a knife for a sou, a box of matches for a sou, and a roll of bread for a sou, and we forget that the first dis- coverer of fire, the first sower of corn, the first black- smith, were ranked as gods. Clothing is so common among civilized persons, we are so much accustomed to see those around us clad, that it almost requires an effort of imagination to picture a body stark naked. Take a schoolboy and ask him to draw a man ; he will begin with the hat. To us, perfect nakedness is represented by tattered garments, worn-out shees, a dirty and bat- 8 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. tered hat ; we do not figure to ourselves the human body exposed directly, without any defence, to the inclemencies of heat and cold, to the wind and the rain, to the rugged and stony ground. Civilized man, whether he be rich or poor, does not strip off his clothes save when he takes a bath or goes to bed. The bed itself is a covering, softer, pleasanter, and more comfortable than the others. All the French do not possess spring mattresses and linen sheets, yet it is possible to number those who have not a bed of some sort in which to lay themselves down at night. When we wish to convey the notion of a wretched bed we speak of a hard and filthy truckle-bed, with- out dreaming that this truckle-bed would be the ideal of comfort to the naked beings who sleep on the bare ground. What conclusion follows from this ? It is that the simplest and the most primitive form of existence is exceedingly complex. The merest trifle, that which costs next to nothing because it superabounds in a civilized land, is the product of incalculable efforts. The shipwrecked sailor of whom we have just spoken, would wear his fingers to the bone before he could quarry and prepare one of the paving- stones on which you walk, exclaiming " Oh, how wretchedly this street is paved ! " I shall suppose" the shipwrecked sailor, at the MAN'S WANTS. close of the first day of exploration and toil, exhausted, his hunger imperfectly satisfied with fruit and wild roots, reclining under the branches he has broken off, on a bed of dried, pointed, and penetrating grasses, which he has torn up one by one. He goes to sleep, if indeed a civilized man can enjoy true slumber amidst innumerable dangers. Security is a benefit upon which you lay no store because it is so common. However, he falls asleep, and dreams this dream : Two young and healthy beings are reposing in a wooden bed furnished with mattresses and a coverlet, not to speak of two pillows and two linen sheets, in a small and well-closed chamber. An infant sleeps in its cradle alongside of them. This family is protected from intrusion, first by an excellent wrought-iron lock, then by a porter living at the foot of the stair- case, lastly by a policeman, who traverses the street from night to morning. No rain, wind, noxious animals, nor savage creatures can enter this humble yet happy dwelling. . All the necessaries of existence are to be found there, if not in abundance, still in sufficient quantity, for the remains of a meal are on the polished walnut table a lump of bread, a piece of beef or veal on a plate, a portion of the vegetables in season, a jug half-filled with fresh and clear water, and wine, that support and solace of man, at the bottom of a bottle. Four straw-coloured and var- io HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. nished wooden chairs, a night-table, and a walnut chest of drawers with marble top, complete the fur- niture of the room. The drawers, which are fastened with locks, contain a heap of things for which the shipwrecked sailor would give many years of his life ; light and warm woollen garments, a small supply of bleached and well- sewn linen, needles and thread, buttons and pins, forming a real treasure for a man who has retained all the needs of civilization, while losing at one swoop all its benefits. Superfluities are added to necessaries; a candle, matches, a book, a silver watch, are on the night-table. The walls are hung with paper, and ornamented with four framed prints. Some very modest luxuries, in truth, yet such as a castaway could not produce after labouring for ten years, adorn the black marble chimney- piece. Were the shipwrecked sailor an ex-millionnaire, he could not help feeling envious at this sight. These persons, then, are earthly sovereigns ? They have laid the universe under contribution in order to lodge, nourish, and clothe themselves ? An architect has traced the plan of the dwelling they inhabit, a quarryman has disembowelled the earth in order to procure the stones; a tile-maker has extracted, dried, moulded, and baked each of the tiles which shelter them ; a woodman has felled trees MAN'S WANTS. ii in tlie forest, which a waggoner has transported, they have been squared and arranged by a carpenter so as to form a roof for them. A plasterer has prepared the lime which covers their four walls. A joiner has planed their floor, their door, and their window. A painter has coated the woodwork with several layers of colour prepared by a chemist. A glass-blower has moulded their window-panes, which a glazier has cut with a diamond brought from Brazil by a crew of sailors. What a number of miracles wrought on be- half of a single household ! How many people have traversed the seas for the profit of these persons ! The coffee, whereof there are dregs at the bottom of their cups, comes from Java, their sugar from the Antilles, their pepper from the Spice Islands, the small clove which flavours the soup has been taxed by the Iman of Muscat, on the east coast of Arabia. The stock-breeder, the butcher, the labourer, the miller, the baker, the vine-dresser, the salt-maker, the oil-man, the vinegar-maker, the weaver, the spinner, the dyer, the mercer, the blacksmith, the tailor, and a hundred other members of the com- munity, have worked for these three persons. Had I ten thousand slaves at my command they would not procure for me one-half of the useful things which abound in this garret. I should have to work twenty-four hours daily during ten years in order to 12 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. fabricate a single nail in these shoes, and should fail in the endeavour. Intelligent reader, these happy ones of the earth who have bread upon their table and nails in their shoes, need no introduction to you from me. You have recognized them, and who knows if you have not recognized yourself in them. They form a small household of Parisian workpeople. The husband earns five francs, and the wife one franc fifty centimes, a-day. Yet the master of this lowly dwelling is unaware that he is envied by the shipwrecked sailor, and by many besides; for instance, by the Russian porter who sleeps in a barrel before his master's palace, or the poor Roman reaper who swallows dust and sweats like a dog from the rising of the sun unto its going down. He would be greatly surprised were he told that he is better lodged, better fed, better clad, and vastly more civilized than certain knights of the Middle Ages, and even than all the kings of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He too dreams, but of what ? About the dangers from which he is free ? No. About the privations from which mankind suffered formerly, to which semi-barbarous tribes are now exposed? No. He dreams about the affluence of his master, an import- ant manufacturer, who has built a mansion on the MAN'S WANTS. 13 Boulevard Haussmann, and has just purchased a country seat. Is not his master happy ? In the course of two hours he does his day's work, whilst the workman must labour for ten hours. He goes and comes, drives whither he pleases in the park, to the races, to the opera. Should the fancy strike him, he takes the express train, and sees a hundred leagues of country in a few hours. He has an elegant wife, with white hands ; he bestows upon her all that is costliest in the world. He has mas- terpieces of panting in his room, a library filled with the rarest editions of the best works. " As for me, I read as much as I can ; yet what is to be done when one is occupied ten hours daily ? I cannot choose my reading ; I must select what- ever is cheapest ; and it is notorious what horrid trash cheap literature is. Five or six times a year I go to the theatre ; but the workman cannot make choice of the plays he sees. Instinctively I delight in what is striking and splendid, but my position does not permit of my liking being gratified. What avails it to visit a museum on a Sunday, when the crowd is dense, and there is neither explanation nor commentary? What are the concerts organized among ourselves, between friends, in our choral societies ? What is the dusty and plastered Nature 14 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. of the suburbs, which, alone we behold in the spring ? I love my little wife, and am grieved to see her reduced to work like me. Something tells me that the master of a household should be able by him- self to provide for the wants of his family. Thus it is in the case of my master and of rich people : when will it be thus in our case ? It vexes me also to see my wife wretchedly dressed ; I am annoyed not to be able to give her more than the fag-end of each day of toil, the scraps of my life, the fragments of my time ; my heart tells me that one loves far otherwise and far better when one istiot enslaved by the requirements of existence. I idolize my little boy, and my blood boils at the thought that, barring a miracle, he will be a workman like myself. I shall send him to the grammar school, but the higher schools are as inaccessible to him as the Lord's Prayer is to donkeys. Cannot a scheme be devised to change all this? What is the use of inventors ? "Where is progress ? I would even resign myself to struggle all my life, if I had but the hope of leaving this little fellow less of a day- labourer than we are." But do you think that the master, who is no day-labourer the master, -who does not receive wages, but pays them the great manufacturer, the man rolling in luxury, is in want of nothing ? He MAN'S WANTS. 15. has enough, wherewith to satisfy the ambition of a hundred Parisian workmen, to save the lives of ten thousand shipwrecked sailors dying from cold and hunger; yet his wants have altered with his con- dition/ You imagine, perhaps, that he awakes in the night to congratulate himself upon his possessions ? Not so : if he awake, it is rather to think about the good things he lacks. Man is so constituted that, stage after stage, he regards as a fresh starting-point the place which he has reached. We take the advantages for granted which we have gained by chance or exertion, and we hasten to think about others. The head of a manufactory is no more sensible of the pleasure of riding in a carriage, than you or I of the pleasure of wearing shoes. Assuredly, he is not to be pitied whose day's work is done in two hours. Yet in the long run these two hours of daily labour become fatiguing to him, the more so because business anxieties occupy him during the intervals. He is harassed by the uncertainty which is the lot of fortunes invested in industrial pursuits ; he longs for the moment when he can render himself safe by exchanging this com- plicated, absorbing, and exhausting method of work 16 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. for another much simpler, equally potent, and self- acting. The desire is accomplished : the manufacturer has become a fund-holder. Out of every twenty-four hours of the day he can henceforth claim twenty-four as wholly his own. You suppose that all his wants are satisfied ; yes, all his former wants are satisfied, but others immediately arise. This happy man per- ceives the contrast between the amount of his fortune and the extent of his education, and he is sorrowful. On leaving business, he has entered a society wherein nearly every man is better trained, more refined, more polished than he. Among those who are emancipated from personal struggles for existence, merit determines precedence. That he possesses merit is proved by his having made his fortune ; but no sooner is this done than the rich man is called upon to show merit of another kind. Since he has had leisure to look over his library, he has daily found his mind lacking in many things. Since frequenting the rooms where conversation is carried on, he has observed that the persons with whom he associates know more and converse better than himself. Since he has been able to spend every summer in the country, he has learned that the country is an unknown world to him. Since he has been in a position to take part in public life, as others MAN'S WANTS. 17 do, lie has found that much must be acquired if he would escape ridicule. In short, this rich man has become poorer than ever, because the material wants which no longer disquiet him, are succeeded by a legion of mental and moral wants as imperious and despotic as the former, and far less easily satis- fied. For him, too, there are hours of discourage- ment, and more than once he exclaims, as he casts his book aside, "Oh that I were certain my son would be less idiotic than myself ! " The endless series of our wants growing the one out of the other with constantly increasing vigour, compels us ever to move on from point to point to- wards a goal which humanity can never reach. For on the day when there is nothing to be perfected in or' around us, we shall have ceased to be men, and shall have become gods. "We must admit, without being cast down, that the earthly pilgrimage is a journey after the unattain- able, in which there is neither halting nor repose. Yet, as we proceed, we see springing up under our feet that mass of useful arts which constitutes hu- manity's patrimony. CHAPTER II. USEFUL THINGS. UTILITY does not require to be defined. Never- theless, an explanation of it may be profitable. Many years have elapsed since man appeared on the earth. Geologists affirm that, before our ap- pearance, this little globe moved round the sun for thousands and thousands of ages. During that period the soil, the sea, and the air were of no benefit to anybody, because no one existed here below. A multitude of plants and animals was created before the germs of the first men were formed: these plants and animals, whatever properties and powers they might have had, were entirely useless, because utility, as we understand it, means the service which a thing might render to man ; therefore, there was nothing useful prior to man's advent in the world. Man is born, and all beings at once take rank in USEFUL THINGS. 19 relation to him. The wild beast, rushing to de- vour him, enters into the first category of noxious things ; the poisonous plant reveals to him its bane- ful properties ; the thorns which prick his limbs, the insects which "prey on his body, are noxious to him in degrees varying according to the amount of pain which he suffers or dreads. The timid animals that flee before him, the plant which neither injures nor nourishes him, the hidden mineral lying in unseen veins under his feet, are all either unimportant or useless. The useful is that which makes man's life more easy or more agreeable. But we have agreed, in the hypothesis of the shipwrecked sailor, that Nature by herself supplies us with very few useful things. Ex- cepting the soil which- sustains us, the air we breathe, the water we drink, there is nothing which, to my mind, is due to her. Our first resources, or, more properly speaking, all the gifts of humanity, are the conquests of labour. Man can neither create nor destroy an atom of. matter, yet he can assimilate and identify himself 'with whatever suits him ; he can turn aside what- ever menaces him ; above all, he can adapt for his use and employ for his profit that which was origin- ally valueless or even dangerous. By means of labour he impresses the stamp of utility upon all he 20 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. touches, and thus little by little annexes, as it were, the entire earth. Utility proceeds from and returns to man. If we do not create things themselves, we create their use- fulness. But that costs something. Nothing is got for nothing. We are not Nature's spoiled children. After man was created he appears to have been told, "I leave you to yourself. Whatever you produce is your own." Do you wish to see by some examples how man does his part and becomes the producer of utility ? If, on leaving home an hour hence, you meet a lion at the bottom of the stair, should you hesitate for an instant in regarding it as a noxious animal ? Is not this true ? However, thanks to the strenuous exertions of several generations, lions, driven from Europe, have now no abode save Africa. The distance which separates you from them enables you to think of them with indifference. When an agile, a brave, and skilful man suc- ceeds at the risk of his life in accomplishing the trifling task of lodging a ball between a lion's eyes, the animal is no longer noxious, nor even indifferent and useless. Its skin is worth a hundred francs ; it will make a rug. Suppose that, instead of shooting the brute, a USEFUL THINGS. 21 prudent hunter by means of greater strategy should entrap and imprison it in an iron cage and bring it to Marseilles ! The lion disembarked at the dock would fetch many thousand francs. If, by means of still more skilful and longer-con- tinued labour, a lion-tamer, like Batty, subdues the dread monster, the lion would fetch thirty thousand francs at least. Nature creates a devouring animal : human skill converts it into a bread-winner. The whole race of domesticated animals in man's service, yielding him eggs, milk, wool, and even flesh, was wild at first, that is to say, was so far separated from, as to be of no use to him. By his skill he not only tamed these animals, but, as it were, he has modified and re- modelled them .after a pattern supplied by himself. Man fashions at will draught horses and racers, oxen for the plough and oxen for the table, sheep which furnish wool and sheep which furnish tallow, fowls which lay eggs and fowls which are fitted for the spit, fat pigs and lean pigs : from one breed of dogs, man has produced the greyhound and the bull- dog, the setter and the harrier, the pointer and the lap-dog. When you go to an exhibition of any sort of live animals, remember that art has as great and Nature as little a share in it as in an exhibition of pictures. 22 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. Apply the same method of reasoning to all agricultural, arboricultural, and horticultural ex- hibitions. Neither our gardens, our fields, nor our woods are masterpieces of Nature, as is ignorantly said ; they are masterpieces of human industry. All double flowers, without exception, are man's work. Pluck a wild rose from a hedgerow, and then go and see a collection of Yerdier's roses : you will learn how much Nature has bestowed, and what man has made of it. All the pulpy and juicy edible fruits are man's work. Man went as ftflr as Asia, and even farther, in quest of the coarse products which resemble our peaches, our cherries, our pears, as much as the wild rose resembles the " Palace of Crystal," or the " Remembrance of Malmaison," rose. Each of our vegetables represents not only distant voyages, but also centuries of skilled labour and assiduous elaboration. It was not Nature that gave the potato to the poor of our land. Human industry went in quest of it to America, and has cultivated, modified, amelior- ated, varied, and brought it step by step to. its present state, accomplishing the result in less than a century. Yet to this century of culture must be added the prior labour bestowed on the plant by the natives of America. "When the products of a distant country USEFUL THINGS. 23 are brought to us we are prone to believe that Nature alone has done everything. But when the Spaniards discovered America, it had been cultivated from time immemorial Hence man had turned Nature to his advantage there, as well as in Europe and elsewhere. Wheat, such as we see it, is not a gift of Nature. It grows spontaneously in Upper Egypt, yet there it yields but a poor and miserable seed, unfitted for making bread. Many ages and a prodigious expenditure of labour were required in order to develop, swell, and perfect the seeds of this -useful food for man. Have you ever been told that wheat is distinguished from other cereals by its containing a notable proportion, sometimes a quarter, of ni- trogenous substances ? This valuable gluten repre- sents the blood and flesh of thousands of generations that perished in the culture of wheat. "While labour supplied the most precious of its useful properties to this grain of which each of us consumes three hectolitres yearly, pharmacy altered the use of fifty vegetable poisons, and converted them to the profit of our species. Not merely does man add a portion of utility to that which possesses none naturally, but he turns bad into good. During how many ages did the electric fluid hold a place among the number of curses ! We knew it only by the dreaded effects of lightning. 24 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. Franklin discovered the lightning-conductor, and conferred on everybody the means of neutralizing this great curse. A force, eminently mischievous, becomes indifferent to the man who is prudent and wise. Security during a storm is henceforth the price of easy and inexpensive labour. But does man halt in so fine a path? No. Hardly has he conquered this hostile power than he undertakes to domesticate it. Lightning, snatched from old Jupiter's hands by Franklin, becomes an instrument of progress. . "YVe employ it to transmit our thoughts, to reproduce our works of art, to gild our utensils, and we shall soon make it perform a thousand other services. Before the lapse of half a century we shall see electricity rendered more and more docile, furnishing us with movement, light, and heat, at pleasure. "Will you now study with me how human labour, incessantly multiplied, infinitely increases the useful- ness of all our things ? An invisible, disregarded iron mine renders no service to the men who tread upon it. On the day the geologist, by the travail of his mind, divines this source of useful things beneath our feet, the soil which conceals it gains to some ex- tent an increased value. When laborious boring has proved the existence USEFUL THINGS. 25 of the mineral, expectation is converted into cer- tainty, and the value of the land is farther increased. The result of employing labour to work the mine is to bring to the surface some tons of reddish stones containing iron. This matter is not really more useful than the pebbles in the neighbouring stream ; yet it is more valuable, because it is known that things more profitable to man can be extracted from it by labour. The mineral is treated, and the crude metal, which is of greater value, is obtained. The crude metal is refined, and iron is got, which is better. The iron is treated, and, by cementation, it is con- verted into steel. The steel is wrought, and a thousand things directly useful to. man are produced. The utility of these last products increases in a direct ratio to the amount of labour which men have expended. An anvil weighing a thousand pounds is less useful than a thousand wrought files ; it costs less labour. A thousand pounds' weight of files cost less labour than a thousand pounds' weight of watch- springs ; they contain in themselves a smaller sum of utility. You can easily understand that if the anvil made in a day contained as much utility and was of as great value as a ton of watch-springs, which it took several months to make, everybody would prefer to forge anvils, and no one would weary himself in flattening watch-springs. 26 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. Neither a decree, nor a decision, nor a political law has arranged matters in this wise ; Nature her- self has done it. It is necessary, indispensable, inevitable, that labour should constantly augment the utility of things, and that men should buy them at the price of greater efforts on learning that they are more use- ful. Not only is the existence of utility merely relative to man, but it continually varies with our natural or artificial wants. A stove is useless at Senegal ; an ice-making machine is useless at Spitzbergen. In a locksmith's eyes, pincers are objects of first necessity ; a duchess has no use for them. On the other hand, a little bonnet, which does not cover her head, is more useful to her than sixty pairs of pincers, for she requires it to drive in her carriage' in the Park, and she pays for it accordingly. The agreeable and the useful are perpetually confounded in an advanced state of civilization : I have explained why, in showing that our wants increase with our resources. Time and distance augment or diminish the utility of our goods. A thing in your hand is of more use to you than if it were ten leagues off. . At the distance of ten leagues it is more useful than if it were in America. The greater the distance, the USEFUL THINGS. 27 greater is the labour required to enjoy it ; you must either pay the cost of carriage or go for it yourself. This fatigue and this outlay are equivalent to the labour that must be expended, for instance, in order to convert iron into steel. A thousand francs in Paris are worth more to a Parisian than a thousand francs in Brussels : a thousand francs in Brussels are worth more than if they were in New York. In like manner a thousand francs which are given you to-day are evidently of greater use than a thousand francs which will be given to you ten years hence. A thousand francs obtainable in ten years are more useful and are worth more than a thousand francs of which the possession is postponed for fifty years. The return may indeed be safe and certainly guaran- teed : the question is utility as regards yourself, and you are not sure of living long enough to enjoy a benefit so long deferred. The utility clearest to all eyes is that residing in material things. Man understands without any effort that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and that it is still more useful when leaving the spit. It is needless to tell you that first the sportsman and then the cook have added a " surplus value to the bird. If I put before you a ton of pig- iron, worth fifty francs, and then a ton of fine 28 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. needles, worth, ninety thousand, you will instantly see the enormous supplement of utility which the work of men has added to the metal. But there are other benefits of which the utility is not as directly visible to our eyes, though it be at least as great. An impalpable, invisible, imponder- able idea is often more useful than a mountain of be.nefi.ts clear to the naked eye. Man is a thinking body ; his hands have done much to render the earth habitable, but his brain has done a hundred times more. Suppose that a great manufacturer had converted a thousand million pounds of iron into steel. Would he have performed as much usefulness in his life as the discoverer of cementation, as he who has put it within the reach of all men to convert iron into steel? He who should transport a mountain ten miles would produce less utility than the discoverer of the lever. For by teaching us a simple law of mechanics we have been put in a position to trans- port a hundred mountains, if we please, with less outlay and effort. An economy is thus rendered possible which will profit all men who have been and may be born. If Pascal had said to the men of his day, " I am rich, I possess a hundred miles of pasturage around Montevideo, and a thousand vessels on the Atlantic ; USEFUL THINGS. 29 I have caused half-a-million of horses to be trans- ported hither, which I present to you, and which will work for you till their deaths," Pascal would have been less useful to the human race than on the day when, in his study, he invented the wheel- barrow. Studious men, by a series of discoveries, super- induced the one upon the other, have given to us all the machines which abridge and facilitate labour. England alone possesses a hundred millions of horse-power which work for the profit of thirty mil- lions of men. The history of civilization may be summarized in nine words : the more one knows, the more one can perform. In proportion as science and reasoning simplify production, the quantity of benefits produced tends to increase without augmentation of expense ; work done helps the work to be done. The tools of the human race are nothing else than a collection of ideas. All levers are worn out in the long run, and all wheel-barrows also ; steam- engines are not everlasting, but the idea remains, and enables us indefinitely to replace the material which perishes. It follows from this that the first of useful things for man, is man himself. 3 30 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. You are of the greater use to yourself the more you are instructed, rendered better, and, so to speak, more perfect. The development of your personal faculties also enables you to be more useful to others, and to obtain from them greater services through reciprocity. CHAPTER III. PRODUCTION. THE following axiom is one which cannot be repeated to you too often or too loudly : " No man, were he to unite the strength of Hercules to the genius of Newton, can either create or annihilate a grain of matter." I insist on this point because we are all inclined to exaggerate our power and consider ourselves gods. Each time that we happen to invent a roasting-jack or to level a mole-hill, we are puffed up with pride, and we say to ourselves, according to the case, " I have created, or I have annihilated." Let us be modest and declare in good faith that man's greatest efforts only end in producing an ab- straction, utility. It is not my intention to lead you through the fogs of metaphysics ; hence I proceed at once to ex- amples and facts. The fisherman who dredges a hundred oysters 32 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. at the bottom of the sea has not created a single oyster. However, if he had remained in bed, in place of embarking at daybreak, the hundred oysters would be in relation to us as if they were non- existent. They would have continued absolutely useless ; it is the fisherman who, by his labour, gives them a new character, appreciable by all men, which is called utility. He has not then created the oysters, but, in his eyes as in ours, by creating their utility he has done what is equivalent. In this respect he is a producer. If all the oysters dredged during the year were consumed on the spot at the seaside, the inhabitant of Paris would concern himself very slightly about their production. ' Oysters, in his eyes, would be use- less things, so long as they were not put within reach for his enjoyment. Thus the carrier who takes charge of them at Granville in order to bring them to Paris, adds to them a fresh quantity of utility, creates a new utility relatively to the Parisian consumer. In this sense, he is a producer like the fisherman who has hauled his dredge along the bot- tom of the sea. The one has given himself trouble to bring to the surface what was at the bottom, the other has toiled to bring to the south what was at the north. The oyster woman comes next, and, taking her knife, she adds to the fisherman's and PRODUCTION. 33 carrier's product a new kind of utility without which you would never have known the taste of oysters. Merely try to open her merchandise , yourself, and then dare to say that the honest woman has pro- duced nothing ! All logical labour is productive ; all workers are producers. The fisherman would be a great fool if, as I have often heard it said, he reasoned thus : " The carrier and the oysterwoman are but parasites. They live on my labour ; they work for their benefit a product which I have created." No, my friend, you have created nil ! You have brought near to the consumer a product which was far from him. Another has brought it a little nearer to us ; an- other has placed it on our table and beneath our fork: all those who have laboured to render your merchandise more useful, are producers by the same title as yourself. The peasant says, " I have produced an hundred quarters of wheat," and at first sight it appears as if he had gathered this harvest from nothing. He has in reality merely re-united existing elements in the form most useful to man, but which were useless, unfitted for consumption, being dispersed in the air, in the water, in the earth, in the dunghill. He has indeed created the utility contained in the wheat, for this wheat would not have existed as wheat if the 34 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL -ECONOMY. good man had not tilled, sown, harrowed, hoed, reaped, and thrashed. But the miller who has pro- duced flour and the baker who produces bread are not parasites of the labourer; they are makers of utility, like himself. The stock-breeder makes oxen in this sense, that he arranges for their birth, watches over their crossing, and supplies them with food. But he has not created an atom of their bodies ; he has done no more than superintend the natural phe- nomenon which transforms five hundred kilogrammes of good green fodder into a kilogramme of meat. He has produced an incontestable sum of utility, that I avow. But the slaughterer who kills the ox and cuts it in quarters ; the salesman who retails it in small portions and saves you from buying a whole ox in order to make soup, produce as clear utility as the stock-raiser himself. To transform a useless thing into a useful one is to produce. To transform a useful thing into a more useful one is to produce. To transport is to produce. To divide is also to produce. Of these four propositions, the two first do not require to be demonstrated. Every one is of opinion that the hunter, the fisher, the miner, the agricul- turist carry on industries which are essentially pro- ductive. No one disputes the title of producer to the miller, the baker, the draper, the tailor, the PRODUCTION. 35 mason, the blacksmith, and those who perform the first, the second, and even the hundredth operation on raw materials. Half a minute's reflection will enable you to under- stand that the carrying industry is as productive as any other. Suppose that you are called upon to choose between two loaves of sugar equal in weight, in colour, in savour, but of which the one is ready for you in the grocer's opposite, and the other remains in charge in a Marseilles warehouse. You would not hesitate to choose that which is within reach, and you would think it ridiculous if I asked you why. Why ? Because it has a quality the other wants : it is near, the other is distant ; it is within reach of your hand, the other is out of sight. This single fact en- genders such an increase of utility that you would much prefer giving up a good piece of the one to going in quest of the other. Now, if it is evident that distance makes things lose a notable portion of their utility, you will admit that they are rendered more useful in being brought nearer to you, and that to transport is to produce. Thus commerce and industry perform a single and similar function despite their different tools and pro- cesses. To transport tea from its native China, or to extract lead from its native mineral, is to proceed to the same end by different roads. 36 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. Next summer, ice may perhaps be scarce in Paris. Certain persons may manufacture it for you by means of ingenious apparatus; certain merchants may go and procure it for you in Norway. If you had the choice between a kilo of natural ice brought by commerce and a kilo of artificial ice produced by industry, you would take the one or the other in- differently. Industry and commerce would have created for you an identical utility by different means. The water you use for all the requirements of life cannot be created by any man; yet industry and commerce are equally capable of supplying you with it. Whether a powerful company causes it to ascend to you through pipes prepared for the purpose, whether a humble porter from Auvergne carries it to you for four francs the thousand litres, that have cost him twenty sous, the utility will be the same to you. The wholesale and retail dealer equally bring within your reach a natural thing which abounds in the river, but which, under no pretext, would ascend of itself to your floor. Must, then, this parasitical water-carrier, who obtains four hundred per cent, from his merchandise, be included among producers ? Yes, in truth, and not he only, but all those who retail the goods which we cannot buy wholesale. PRODUCTION. It is too evident that, if I possessed a garden near to Monceaux park ; if I required fifty tnousand hec- tolitres of water yearly to irrigate a hectare of turf, I should not act so ludicrously as to pay for it two sous the load. In such a case, a stock is procured wholesale. Wine is bought wholesale, and at the wholesale price, if one has a cellar in which to store it, and if one can pay for a whole barrel. In like manner, the head of an academy who must provide meals for two or three hundred youths, buys a lot of fish at the market and several sheep when sold by auction. But what would become of the artizan, the small trades- man, the unmarried workman, if, at the close of the day's work, he could not make soup without buying an ox, drink a glass of wine without buying a double hectolitre, drink a cup of coffee without paying for a sackful ? Retailers, who all carry on the same kind of commerce as the water-carrier, yet without earning four hundred per cent, as he does, render us an im- mense service. They produce a special form of utility, consisting in putting thirty grammes of coffee within reach of the housewife, who could not pay for fifty kilos, in furnishing him with a chop who could not buy a whole sheep. So much the better for you if you are rich enough and finely enough housed to be able to dispense with 38 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. retailers of all kinds ! But for the large majority of men, in the* existing state of the world, they produce the most indispensable of all utilities. It is in this sense that I said above : to divide is to produce. Yet the list of producers is not exhausted, it re- mains for me to establish the following propositions. To cure is to produce. To teach is to produce. To please is to produce. To assure is to produce. After that, I do not despair of proving to you, in oppo- sition to all the declamations of envy, that to lend is to produce. Do you grant that among the things useful to man, the most useful is man himself? Do you accept the calculations of the economists who say that, com- mencing at his twenty-seventh year, the individual reimburses the advances made by society ? Do you think, like J. B. Say and all who reason, that the problem is not how to beget children, but how to rear them to man's estate ? You ought then to acknowledge that the medical art, by organizing a struggle against the destructive causes which threaten us from our birth, produces an incalculable amount of utility on earth. Our life, according to Bichat's definition, is the aggregate of the forces contending in us against death. Every hour, Nature claims the elements of which our body is composed ; our existence is but a militant loan, in- PRODUCTION. 39 cessantly continued and renewed : it would be im- possible to rate too highly the fine medical industry which protects the human being against a universal conspiring host. Among the men of your acquaintance, are there many whom science has not once rescued from death? Starting from that point, say whether the doctor of medicine is a more paltry producer than the cabinet-maker or the stone-cutter ? Jean Jacques Rousseau, and all those who have made mouths water in celebrating the state of Na- ture, are detestable jesters. For man, the state of Nature is a state of filth, of privation, of innumer- able maladies, and premature death. We still know a certain number of tribes who live in a state of Nature. In their case the average duration of life, in the most genial climates, is from twelve to thir- teen years. Among the civilized nations of Europe, thirty years is the average. Without leaving our own country, we can recognize a sensible difference between the life and health of a badly cared for peasant and of the citizen who dwells close to Dr Robin and Dr Nelaton. Having said that, I incline to think you will not decline to inscribe the Doctor in the first rank on the list of producers. If you accord this honour to the men who heal, 40 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. you cannot refuse it to the persons who instruct us. I have already said, the more we know the more we can perform. To turn out instructed men is to turn out useful men, and is not he who endows us with the means to be useful, useful- in advance of ourselves ? The following, which I read in a treatise of practical morality, does not fall within my province to judge : " He who plants a tree before he dies has not lived in vain. This is one of the wise sayings of India. The tree will yield fruit, or at the least will afford shade, to those who will be born to-morrow, famished and naked. He who has planted a tree has done well; he who cuts it down and saws it into planks has done well ; he who puts the planks together to make a bench has done well; he who, sitting upon the bench,' has taken a child on his knee and taught it to read, has done better than all the others. The first three have added something to the common capital of humanity ; the last has added something to humanity itself. He has made a man. more enlightened, that is to say, better." * Remember also that the fund of civilization is composed of intangible tools, that is to say, ideas. All the levers existing to-day may be put into the melting-pot; all the drays and wheel-barrows may * Le Progres. PRODUCTION. 41 be cast into the fire ; all the steam-engines may be taken to pieces ; all the telegraphs taken down : science, which is the soul of all these useful ma- chines, will survive their destruction, and will re- place them in a few days. Thus head-work, as it is vulgarly called, is at least as productive as the work of the arms. Draw a comparison between a good stout farrier, who shoes twenty-five horses in a day, and a small old shrivelled mathematician who puts figures and formulas on paper, and you will see that the larger producer is not he who hits hard. That is not all. Sciences and arts produce a moral utility, foreign and superior to their prac- tical applications. Works, of which the effect is to correct our errors, to strengthen our reason, to elevate our spirit, to improve our mind, are as pro- ductive in their way as those that tend to lower the price of meat or of bread. The astronomer, the philosopher, the poet, the painter, the musician, the sculptor, do not labour to satisfy the primitive wants of man, yet they satisfy wants as pressing, in the case of the civilized man, as hunger and thirst. In the case of the child of Nature, natural wants are all in all, but we are no longer children of Nature. There is a vast deal of superfluity in our strictest necessaries. We require shoes, shirts, and pocket- 42 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. handkerchiefs; it is not Nature, but civilization, and a very refined civilization, which forces these necessaries upon us. We stand in need of certitude, of poetry, of music, of painting, of comedy, of a thousand things with which the men who preceded us have dispensed, and with which the great majority of the human species still dispenses in our time. The Parisian who has toiled all day sometimes feels a craving for amusement. In that case, the authors and comedians who amuse him, render him a real service ; they quiet his mind, they relax his nerves, they render him more capable of working on the morrow. Pleasure is a useful thing, and he who gives us pleasure is a producer like any other. "When bread costs twenty- five centimes the kilo- gramme and admission to the Exhibition of the Fine Arts costs a franc, you may see more than a thou- sand persons give four kilogrammes of bread daily for a promenade of some hours among pictures and statues. On leaving the place, they have consumed with their eyes four kilogrammes of bread. Do they regret this ? No ; for they breakfasted before coming, they are certain to dine in the evening ; the requirement of nourishment is less pressing, at a given moment, than the taste for painting. The visitor who passes through the turn-table of the Exhibition implicitly avows, by giving his twenty PRODUCTION. 43 sous, that lie thinks it more useful to look at tlie productions of contemporary artists for an hour than to eat four kilogrammes of bread. AVhen Madame Patti goes and sings in a financier's drawing-room for two thousand francs, she produces, on opening her mouth, a rapid and fleeting utility, but which is none the less valued at two thousand francs by the master of the house, who can reckon. The young and brilliant songstress really produces, in three-quarters of an hour, the equivalent of forty tons of cast metal at fifty francs the thousand kilos. The financier who pays this price for some vibrations of air is not unaware that he could get more work out of forty thousand kilos of cast metal. If he prefer an article which will be consumed as soon as produced, it is because he counts on getting a special form of utility from it ; the pleasure of his guests, a reputation for good taste and splendour, four lines in the newspapers. These advantages, which a gardener of Croissy would not barter for a basket of carrots, are worth two thousand francs in the financier's opinion. At one time we have seen stalls in the Italian Theatre let for sixteen francs the night, exactly when the hectolitre of wheat fell to sixteen francs. The spectator from the orchestra consumed with his ears the equivalent of a hectolitre of wheat in the 44 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. course of two or three hours, to wit, the amount of bread an ordinary man consumes in four months. Why does he make such a sacrifice without grudg- ing? Because the special utility produced by the composer, the manager of the theatre, and the per- formers, satisfies the requirements of his dilettante- ism, as a hectolitre of wheat does the hunger of a peasant. Most economists have a tendency to scorn what is agreeable and deny to it any sort of utility. They forget that utility is always relative to the present wants of man, and not of all men in general, but of a certain man in particular. A roll is more useful than a cigar to the famished unfortunate ; a cigar is infinitely more useful than a roll to the stock-broker who rises from the dinner-table. J. B. Say, who was a most sensible man, but who lived during a rather limited epoch, too readily lessened the utility of pleasant things. He does not admit that the lamps lit in a drawing-room produce the same amount of utility as the lamps lit in a workshop. He insists upon the inutility of lackeys ; in general, he is severe upon what he calls the pro- ductions of luxury and superfluities ; he believes that nine out of ten fortunes are made by dealing in articles of first necessity. The truth is, that the lighting of a drawing- PRODUCTION. 45 room produces a utility of another kind than the lighting of a workshop, but which is absolutely equal in the eyes of the master of the house. If you burn five francs' worth of oil and ten francs' worth of candles on the evening that you entertain your friends, you do not expect that the value of the product consumed will be reproduced under another form in another exchangeable product ; yet you pay the same sum, and with as great heartiness, as the manufacturer who furnishes his workmen with light. This is because the pleasure produced by this lighting is equivalent for you, at the time, to any other utility which could be produced by it. A lackey does less work than a locksmith. To cross one's arms behind a carriage, or to cross one's legs seated in an entrance-hall, that, I admit, is foolish labour whereof the products will never enrich the human race. But does it follow that the lackey is useless to the master who pays him wages ? If he did not produce the satisfaction of an artificial and even a ridiculous want, would any one keep lackeys ? The master has estimated the product and the cost which a lackey might add to his establishment. The master can reckon ; possibly he has worked during forty years of his life, in order to obtain the right of stupidly playing the great man. Nothing prevents my supposing that he has not been a master lock- 46 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. smith. The day he engages a lackey he knows well that this fellow will not supply the same kind of service as a journeyman locksmith, but he hopes to get something else from him. He says to the lackey, "My man, I have an income of three hundred thousand francs, and the custom which governs very rich Frenchmen condemns me to surround myself with some well-clad idlers. This is a want which has come along with my fortune. Will you help me to satisfy it ? Will you undertake not to work in my service ? You might employ your time in lock- making ; I shall buy it from you, I shall pay you for all the locks you might have made had you not been in my service. Not only will you do no work yourself, but I shall work for you, or at least I shall maintain you on the accumulated labour of my life, so greatly do I rate the service you render in giving to my entrance-hall a pseudo air of the Faubourg St Germain ! " In proportion as a people grows civilized and wealthy, its artificial wants become more numerous and pressing, superfluity becomes more necessary to it, and the number of customers for objects of luxury increases. And the production of objects of luxury, from the time of their finding a large enough outlet, returns enormous profits ; more is to be made out of PRODUCTION. 47 the fancies of a single rich, man than out of the hunger and thirst of forty poor persons. It is right to rank with producers all those who, by their industry, avert destruction in assuring the conservation of benefits produced. To assure is to produce. You know the proverb, One bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Proverbs are not to be de- spised ; they nearly always express in the clearest manner a common- sense truth. A fireproof building is worth more, other things being equal, than a building exposed to all the risks of fire. Capital shut up in the cellars of the Bank of France is worth more than the same capital exposed without a protector amid the mountains of Calabria. An undisputed heritage has greater value than if it were in litigation. Cargo delivered in port represents a larger sum than when upon the deep, exposed to all the chances of the sea. If you enter a club at two in the morning, with fifty thousand francs in your pocket, your fifty thousand francs are more entirely yours, and conse- quently are worth more to you, in the streets where the policeman is on duty, than in the plain of Mont- 48 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. rouge, where the police are only conspicuous by their absence. All benefits without exception, human life in- cluded, have more value under the reign of law than under the reign of despotism and violence. His- tory makes us acquainted with times and countries where men set but an insignificant store upon their possessions, and poured out their blood like water, so greatly had the despotism of a Tiberius depre- ciated everything. A hectare of land is worth more in the poorest canton of France than in the most fertile paradise of Abyssinia, because property is as powerfully secured among us as it is feebly secured in that kingdom of Africa. Among the most civilized nations of Europe, it is easy to prove that a rumour of war, though de- void of foundation, depreciates all the products of labour. Why ? Because war, in addition to making ruins everywhere, puts in doubt the things most certainly acquired ; there are no abiding properties except in time of peace. This is why all the men, whose occupation con- sists in assuring the products of our labour from destruction, are helpers in general production. The advocate who defends your rights, the legislator who defines them, the magistrate who consecrates them, the policeman who avenges them, are producers by PRODUCTION. 49 the same title as the labourer and city workman. To catch a wolf that devours a sheep nightly is to add thirty sheep monthly to your sheepfold. The soldiers who protect our frontiers against invasion are not parasites, although they live by your labour and mine. The pay we give them is a premium against invasion. "We make a bargain with them in which they risk more than we do, for we never sacrifice more than a portion of our incomes, and they frequently offer up their lives. I do not speak here of Assurances, properly so called, because I intend treating them separately. Their object is not to hinder the destruction of pro- ducts, but to replace them in proportion as they are destroyed. It remains for me to prove a last proposition, which true economists admit as an incontestable axiom, but which the paradoxical school has denied as well as it could for nearly twenty years. Not- withstanding all that has been said or preached to you on this head, I hope to demonstrate to you with ease that to lend is to produce. Suppose that a skilled workman or a clever fore- man, as may be more or less easily met with in all trades, invents a new process, simpler and more economical than any other. His fortune is made, should he find the means for working his discovery. 50 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. Let a hundred thousand francs be given him to establish a factory, and he will be a millionnaire be- fore ten years are over. But meantime he is poor ; he has not even the hundred francs required to take out a patent. One of two things must happen ; either he will not get credit, and his invention will be lost to others as well as to himself, or a capital- ist will advance the hundred francs he needs. In this case, has the lender aided or not to form the for- tune that will be made? Yes, for it will be en- gendered from the marriage of capital to an idea; yes, for the million would have eternally remained in limbo, if no one had made the first advance. Carry the question into commerce, into agri- culture, or wherever you please. A humble clerk in a district feels himself capable of succeeding in a great venture. But to-day he requires money, much money, in order to establish a trustworthy house ; the poor fellow has nothing except his salary and his paltry . savings. The younger he is, the poorer he is. If no one advances him the necessary capital, he will vegetate in the service of another to the end of his days. The worthy man who intrusts him with a hundred thousand francs, is he or is he not the author of his fortune ? Yes, as far as the half is concerned, for if it be correct to say that the hundred thousand francs would not be increased ten- PRODUCTION. 51 fold without the labour of the young merchant, it is equally certain that this well-endowed young man would never have produced a million by his personal efforts without the assistance of the lender. Observe now one of Grignon's pupils who, from his school days, has exhibited the aptitudes of a dis- tinguished agriculturist. What does he lack in order to employ his talent in a way useful to others and to himself, and to make a small fortune in agri- culture? Two indispensable conditions : 1. A lender who will intrust him with a piece of land to cul- tivate ; 2. A second lender who will advance him the capital required to carry on his farm. If no one lends him anything, or if he be lent but one of the two instruments, whether it be the land without the means for tilling it, whether it be the means with- out the land, all his laudable inclination and his talent will be paralyzed for ever. Is this clear ? Would you entirely side with this farmer if, after twenty years of assiduous and successful labour, he said, " I alone have produced the harvests of these twenty years. During twenty years I have sweated from morning till evening on this farm ; the landlord has done nothing, he has not even come to encourage us with an inspection. My money-lender has paid as little heed ; the one and the other amuse themselves 52 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. in the city whilst I work myself to death, for them. In virtue of the work which I have done unassisted, whilst the others folded their arms, the returns of this farm ought to belong wholly to me." Being disinterested in this matter, will your good sense allow you to sanction such an argument ? Certainly not ; you would say to the farmer, " You deceive yourself. Those who have given you the means to produce are producers under another title, but to the same extent as yourself. The first had the power of letting his land lie fallow, since property, in legal phrase, means the right to use or abuse. The second was free to squander foolishly all his capital in eighteen months, as is done by so many fashionable young men ; or to leave his money in a chest, and take therefrom the sum needed for his daily require- ments. No one would have been able to compel them to act more wisely, for the right of property, as we shall presently explain, is absolute. Thus the capitalist and the landed proprietor have contributed, without leaving their abodes, to the production of your harvests. They have found this answer their purposes, I admit, but you have done so also ; and on both sides this was just. They did not lend you their land and their money to serve you, but to serve themselves ; and you have not laboured to pay them rent, but to gain as much as possible. All PRODUCTION. 53 producers produce in virtue of the same principle, that is, personal interest properly understood. The baker does not knead dough in order to feed other men, but to earn his own bread and eat when he is hungry. The mason does not build in order to lodge his neighbour, but to pay his rent." Yet if to lend is synonymous with to produce, one may thus be at once a producer and idle ? Yes. Should you hesitate to take my word for it, here is a personal argument which, I hope, may appear to you unanswerable. You have produced actively since becoming a man up to your sixtieth year. During these forty years, instead of altogether consuming the fruits of your labour, you have saved a portion, and in this way created a small capital for your old age. How long will your life last ? You do not know, nor do I. When a man has reached sixty, no one can tell where he will stop. Your savings amount to twenty thousand francs, which appears very good indeed, when it is remembered that you accumulated them centime by centime out of very limited salaries or profits. The simple tastes which you have had the sense to preserve will permit you to live on a thousand francs yearly ; thus you may, by putting your money into a drawer, provide for your modest existence during twenty years. What if you live to 4 54 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. a hundred, as lias occurred ? Then you must die of hunger, or be shut up in a hospital, there to end your last twenty years, wretchedly. On the other hand, you have children. They work like you, they earn their living by your ex- ample, yet you would not object to transmit to them your small capital. You even think that the money belongs to them in some measure. Why ? For two reasons. Firstly, in giving life to them, you have contracted a moral engagement to render their lives as easy as possible, as far as lies in your power. Next, your children have contributed, to a certain extent, in producing your savings. The happiness of being a father, the consciousness of new duties, the desire to see your family prospering, have doubled your energy ; you have laboured with greater spirit than if you had been alone in the world. Upwards of a hundred times the thought of your children has shielded you from a piece of useless or harmful expense ; you have stopped short on the threshold of the public-house or the cafe when thinking about your little ones. Hence you would be gratified to find a combination which should assure the repose of your old age for an indefinite period without disinheriting those who are dear to you. Under these circumstances a borrower arrives, and says, "Sir, I can do for you what you PRODUCTION. 55 require. The small capital you have amassed will, without difficulty, return 10 per cent, in my hands, employed in a sound undertaking. I am not certain about getting my daily bread with the instruments given me by Nature ; with twenty thousand francs I should be able to gain two thousand yearly. The half of the return is yours, as is fitting, seeing that you supply me with an indispensable instrument, a tool without which it would be hard or impossible for me to live." The offer seems a fair one, you close with it. The labour performed comes to the aid of the labour to be accomplished. A man who, without you, would only obtain employment as journeyman or labourer, becomes, by your act, master- workman or merchant. You rejoice to have provided for all your future wants without mulcting of a centime the heirs you love. Suppose, however, that, twenty years afterwards, your debtor, intoxicated with economical paradoxes, comes to you with all your receipts, and says, " You once lent me twenty thousand francs; I have re- turned you twenty thousand francs in twenty pay- ments ; now we are quits/' Your first impulse would be to shout, Stop thief! "No," you would answer, " we are not quits ; you have not returned me a centime of what I lent you. I placed at your 56 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. disposal an instrument of production ; according to our agreement, and in accordance with, equity, you have divided the profits with me ; my capital be- longs to me. You cannot touch it without being guilty of sacrilege, for these twenty thousand francs are composed of the two most honourable things in the world, labour and the privations of an honest man." I admit that all kinds of production are not equally laborious. For example, a gentleman's son, who possesses ten houses in a Paris street, works less during the day than his hundred- and- fifty or two hundred tenants. In general, the lender works less than the borrower ; sometimes, he earns as much or even more. To lease land to a labourer is assuredly less hard than to till the land. But we shall ex- plain, when treating of capital, how a man may legitimately inherit the labour of a hundred others, and how the poorest among us are themselves heirs without their knowledge. For the present, I confine myself to advancing a conclusion which has some importance. This is that a man cannot live on the earth except as a producer. If you have not found any capital in your cradle, you are condemned to procure the satisfaction of all your wants by personal production. You must make a shelter for yourself, your clothing, your food, and the rest, in one shape or another. 'A labourer PRODUCTION. 57 does not fashion Lis clothes, but he produces grain, all of which he cannot consume himself, and with the surplus he buys clothing ; a tailor does not produce grain, but he makes more garments than he uses in his lifetime, and with the surplus he buys bread. Every labourer in the world is in the same case : you may even see jewellers who never in their lives wear a jewel, yet who procure bread, wine, meat, hats, and boots, by means of polishing and cutting precious stones. The inheritors of work accomplished, or capitalists, cannot secure for themselves a fixed income without placing their capital at the disposal of others, that is to say, by serving without fatigue, but not uselessly, the producers who surround them. Interest compels them to be always lending. The house-proprietor who cannot find tenants is as pinched as a workman out of employment, and for the same reason. He must produce in order to live. You may tell me that he can sell his property and invest the money produced by it. Yes, but to lend capital or to let houses is always rendering a service, and consequently is to produce. A capitalist who would not oblige any one, and who should elect to spend a portion of his capital daily, would chiefly injure himself. Should I inherit 100,000 francs, an arrangement very moral in itself, 58 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. and accounted such by the entire human race, en- ables me to consume every year the twentieth part of my means (that is 5000 francs) without diminishing my small fortune by a sou. To arrive at this result I have but one thing to do, lend my capital to in- dustrious men who have need of it. In this way I have the certitude of enjoying an uninterrupted re- turn to my latest hour, should I live a hundred years and upwards; I am sure of transmitting to my son the patrimony which my father left to me ; I have the consciousness of being useful, without moving a hand, and of co-operating towards the production, on a large scale, of good in ike earth. Suppose that, through selfishness carried to the verge of folly, I refuse to place this money at the disposal of other men. I am no longer a pro- ducer, and henceforth I shall serve no one but my- self. Yet how bad a service! In twenty years I shall be entirely ruined, without having increased my outlay. I shall be wanting in resources at the very moment when I stand most in need of them. My children will accuse me of having annihilated the modest provision for their existence without pro- fiting anybody. Society will blame me for having foolishly destroyed the product of a labour which I did not perform. My conscience will reproach me with having deprived the human race of an instru- PRODUCTION. 59 ment of production and wealth. And I shall learn to my cost that the refusal to produce is the suicide of capital. However, there are men who squander their capital in place of lending it to workers. That is true. There are also madmen, who ascend the Arc de Triomphe and cast themselves down to the ground. Human society cannot always stop these freaks. But when a man is proved to have suicidal mania, he is confined in Charenton. I have seen a good fellow sent there who had no thought of killing himself, but who had lavished a portion of his patrimony along the Champs Elysees. The doctors said that he. was smitten with incurable prodigality, and that it was necessary to protect him against his own acts. The same rigour is not shown to the other mono- maniacs who place their capital in a box or in a hole. These persons, in order to have the pleasure of seeing and handling the precious metals from time to time, retain an instrument of labour in a state of sterility. The passion for heaping up treasure leads to the same result as prodigality. In a country where 100,000 francs, invested at five per cent., double themselves in fourteen years and seventy-five days, the miser who buries that sum in his garden acts with the same folly as the gentleman's sons when they squander 100,000 francs. Only the prodigal consumes in a 60 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. year, perhaps in six months, the 100,000 francs brought forth and acquired, whilst the hoarder takes fourteen years and seventy-five days to consume with his eyes the barren money. The result is that the prodigal has no longer the 100,000 francs he pos- sessed; the miser has but 100,000 when he ought to have had twice as much ; the one has destroyed 100,000 existing francs, the other 100,000 potential francs : the folly of these two men being finally re- presented by the same figure. But the hoarder is less hurtful than the prodigal ; if he hinder his capital from yielding a return, he at least preserves it in the condition it was received. And in order to conserve it intact amidst the cease- less necessities of life, he is obliged to provide for his wants by personal labour. With ten millions shut up in your cellar, you will die of hunger amid this treasure if you do not work in order to live. The more you determine to hold unproductive capital, the more are you forced to produce yourself. Happily, there are very few capitalists who refuse to lend. Those who prefer to squander, or bury, their means are the exceptions, and cannot in any case found a school. The miser's treasure becomes pro- ductive upon its master's death. The young mad- men who have run through their patrimony are all engaged in seeking employment, that is to say, use- PRODUCTION. 6 1 ful work. They become producers in spite of them- selves, under the penalty of dying of hunger. They then see by painful experience how difficult it is to produce the smallest thing by itself, without the aid of capital, and they bitterly reproach themselves for having destroyed one of these precious instruments. The entire logic of human existence can be formulated in five words, " produce in order to con- sume. " Our reason and sense of justice revolt at the notion of a man who should perpetually consume without producing anything. Everybody under- stands that children should consume on credit : it is right that old persons should end by consuming what they have produced in their prime ; it is perfectly proper that the worker should rest when tired, and consume a part of his surplus products. But he among us who should voluntarily live on another's labour, and share useful things without adding to them, would be a true parasite. CHAPTER IY. PARASITES. THROUGH an instinct of equity, men do homage to those who have produced more than they have consumed in their lives. Our gratitude to the great producers of all kinds is a very logical sentiment : they have increased the collective heritage of the human race. We regard with absolute indifference the multi- tude of those who have consumed the equivalent of their total production: they have lived for them- selves, without doing anything for, or against, the interests of the community. "We pity those who, despite their assiduous labour and moderate consumption, never succeed in making both ends meet and who die insolvent. Yet, whether there may have been exaggeration in their outlay or slackening in their labour, blame pursues them in the grave. This is why a good son thinks himself PARASITES. 63 bound in honour to pay his father's debts. He desires to purify the name he bears. He says, " My father has consumed more than he has produced here below ; I must extinguish the deficit he has left, and restore by my labour the balance he has dis- turbed." As for the parasites whose industry consists in consuming the products of labour, without rendering anything in return, they are the enemies of the human race. There are three classes of parasites robbers, beggars, and professional gamesters. Robbery is an operation consisting in appropri- ating, by force or cunning, the products of another's labour. It is the violation of the natural law, anterior and superior to all positive laws, which con- fers useful things on their producer. All the things actually existing on earth belong either to their authors, or to their authors' assigns. In order to obtain a portion of them, equity requires that you should give an equivalent in exchange. "Whoever appropriates a roll costing a sou, with- out giving a sou for it, does injury not to the baker alone, but to the whole human race ; he consumes another's labour without furnishing an equal amount himself. The loss is insignificant in itself amidst a society so rich as ours; but it is precisely in rich 64 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. societies that robbery is least excusable, on account of the facilities for earning a livelihood being most numerous. Where the slightest service performed to the rich by the poor, the opening of a door, the offer of a light, is recompensed by a sou and up- wards, the robbery of a sou is equivalent to an in- solent refusal to serve other people. To rob a poor man is more odious than to rob a rich man, but it is neither more nor less criminal. A prejudice, not yet uprooted from among us, con- siders him half innocent who steals five francs from a millionnaire, and three-fourths innocent should he filch a louis to the detriment of the State. The truth is, that all violations of the right of property are equally culpable. Whether rich or poor, all the men who work on the surface of the globe are wronged by any robbery whatsoever. The work- ers of Austria, and of the United States, are as much interested as ourselves in repressing robbery in France : hence extradition treaties between civilized nations. Two States might go to war without these treaties being suspended, so much superior in interest is the repression of robbery to the causes which set nations at variance. The main point is to maintain and confirm this principle of universal justice : the product belongs to the producer. Astonishment is sometimes shown at the courts PARASITES. 65 inflicting the same punishments in cases where the robberies amount to a million and to one hundred francs. Why is it that a magistrate whose con- science is so scrupulous in establishing the quality of ' a robbery, appears indifferent as to the quantity ? Because the quantity stolen, were it a million, is but a trifle compared with the moral injury which affects humanity as a whole. The robbery of a million francs, or the robbery of a sou, if unpunished by law, would depreciate all the products of labour to an equal extent. We value our goods in proportion to the security which surrounds them. If you were only half certain to possess your watch undisturbed, of which the value is one hundred francs, it would not be worth more than fifty. Laws are framed in consideration of public security. They punish do- mestic robbery with severity, in order that the man of means may know himself to be protected against the easiest of all crimes ; they make a distinction b&- tween the robber by day and the robber by night, the robber unarmed and the armed robber, the robber within doors and the robber who enters through the / window, the robber who finds a key in the lock and the robber who picks the lock or breaks it open, because general security is endangered to a greater extent by the existence of evil-doers more daring, more violent, and more experienced. 66 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOM Y. The exact amount of the goods which have passed from one hand to another is but a secondary ques- tion, if the smallest ascertained robbery diminishes the value of all existing riches till the capture of the culprit. Among the consequences following a robbery, there are two which it would not be right to omit, because they directly affect social economy : Stolen goods are goods lost. Stolen goods are corrupting. Nothing is truer and more philosophical than the old common saying, "Property wrongly acquired never profits." An honest workman cleaves to his earnings as to his eyes. They are the prize of his toil. He has risen early six days running ; he has assiduously laboured ten hours daily, sometimes longer. He has spent his breath and the sweat of his brow ; on receiving his wages he can say without exaggeration, I have taken it from my own body ; it is my flesh and blood ; I have been coining money all the week and this is what I have produced. He delays returning home to display his small gain before his wife's eyes. "While walking along, the silver coins jingle from time to time, and it gives him pleasure to hear the sound. Perhaps he may even once or twice slap his pocket to arouse the dormant money. If an evil-doer watches his path in order to dispossess PARASITES. 67 him of his money, he will meet with his match. The honest man becomes a lion in defence of his modest earnings. Do not fear about the money being well em- ployed. It will pay for the bread, meat, and soap of the household, and the school fees of the children. Something will be put aside as a provision for the rent. The surplus, if any, will go to pay for clothing; if nothing be required at the moment, the Savings' Bank is but two steps off. Excellent money ! honest money ! you render moral whoever fingers you. This man will carefully refrain from squandering you in debauchery ; he knows too well, by experience, how much it costs to obtain you. In course of time a portion of the wages is con- verted into good linen, into wearing apparel,, into plain but serviceable furniture. Another portion has transformed the children into small men, who know more than their father, and who, in consequence, will be able to select a less severe form of labour. The rest is invested in the funds or in shares. That may not amount to a large figure, but it is the be- ginning of capital, the germ of a humble fortune. If the father, or one of his sons, wishes to set up on his own account, this money will permit him to make the venture. The author of all these things regards that which 68 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. surrounds him with legitimate pride. " All that," he thinks, "is my handiwork. From my Sunday coat up to my children's education, I have paid for everything by my toil." Not an article of furniture in his narrow lodging fails to recall to him a piece of drudgery, some months of privation, long and patient saving. The wife, who has worked in concert for twenty years with this man, is still prouder than he. The children are respectful and grateful. Trained in so good a school, they work, they economize, they begin to repay the debt of their education. If a misfortune, which must be foreseen, should condemn them to inherit all this to-morrow, I pledge myself they will accept their parents' savings as a relic. I do not know whether they succeed in doubling the sum, but, assuredly, they will not go and drink it at the public-house. The successful and daring robber, who has made one hundred thousand francs at a stroke, appears to you rich at first sight. It seems that in passing from one chest to another this capital has been in no wise lessened. In fact, if the evil-doer could go to a stock-broker and take one hundred thousand francs' worth of shares or debentures, the capital would have changed hands without being diminished by a fraction. But the robber's first care is to hide a portion of PARASITES. 69 liis money ; the second, to squander the remainder. Why should he hide it ? For a hundred reasons. In the first place, because he dreads justice, lest the money found upon him should be an element in convicting him. Next, he probably has accomplices ; if he must share it with them, he will no longer have one hundred thousand francs, but fifty or twenty- five, according to their number. i - > The small portion he retains hangs heavily on his hands ; he hastens to expend it as soon as possible, firstly, to ease his mind, secondly, to get rid of it. Money has less value in his eyes than in those of an honest man, because he is not certain of retaining it, because he has not laboured to acquire it, because he thinks that he can steal more when he has ex- pended what he has. The necessity of concealment excludes him from secure, regular, and useful investments. He would not appear before a banker for anything in the world, with this sum in his hands. Fear drives him to low haunts where an entire population of inferior para- sites lies in wait to pluck him. An asylum is sold to him, secrecy is sold to him, forgetfulness in an orgie is sold to him, and this capital, which in honest hands might become a very fine instrument of labour, soon melts away and runs off in filth among the thousand slums of Paris. 70 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY, I have spoken of an exceptional, improbable rob- ber, who obtains at a stroke one hundred thousand francs of coined gold. But, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the wrong-doer's profit is less clear, less available, and less easy to realize. Since the march of enlightenment has extended the practice of economi- cal payments, hardly any one keeps sums of money in his house. If the celebrated Cartouche ventured to rise from the dead in Paris, he would scarcely find anything else to take than shares and personal articles. Registered shares are surrounded with such pre- cautions that they can never benefit an illegitimate possessor. Thus a clever rascal prefers to burn them on the spot rather than to try and sell them. The capital represented by the papers he has destroyed remains intact and does not change hands. But the security of the rightful proprietor is destroyed, and his enjoyment interrupted for a longer or shorter time. He always has his capital, but he does not possess it ; he has the right to certain returns, but he cannot deal with it till an arrangement be made ; a part of his means is, so to speak, realized by the rob- bery. Shares to bearer are more easily negotiated ; but as the loser, if he be clever, can stop them by giving notice, a robber who knows his business fights shy PARASITES 71 of such compromising goods and destroys them pro- miscuously with the registered certificates. There again a little paper only is really lost ; the capital subsists and does not change hands, but the legiti- mate proprietor is condemned to troublesome and laborious courses which embitter his possession with- out profit to any one. Among documents payable to bearer, bank notes are assuredly the most conveni- ently negotiated : inexperienced scoundrels imagine that they can dispose of them with impunity, like gold and silver, but they deceive themselves. Each note has a letter and number which give to it a kind of individuality and enable it to be recognized among a thousand. By means of a very simple precaution which is within the reach of all holders, a note may become a means of detection and lead the robber be- fore the assize court. Therefore, nothing is more sensible than the distrust which depreciates all these papers in skilful evil-doers' eyes and makes them, prefer money, furniture, merchandise. B ut f urnit ur e and merchandise lose the greatest part of their price by falling into the hands of a wrongful possessor. If the robber alters them, if he transforms a collection of medals, a piece of jewelry, into ingots, he literally annihilates all the surplus value which man's labour had added to the precious metals. A considerable amount of capital perishes yearly in this 72 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. way and is lost to the world. ., The articles resold in the state they were when stolen, are depreciated by this alone, that they become second-hand goods : the same piece of cloth which was worth one hundred francs in the manufactory, is not worth more than fifty in a shop in the Temple or at a pawnbroker's auction. Add to this waste the depreciation due to the receipt of stolen goods. The receiver being the robber's accomplice and running the same risks, logically demands to share the profits of the crime ; he does not hesitate to offer for a perfectly new piece of merchandise the quarter or the tenth of its value in the warehouse. When he has robbed the robber, he becomes his substitute, so to speak ; he feels the same dread of justice, the same scorn for an article obtained at a low price, the same eagerness to get rid of it. He seeks and finds purchasers among a public on the verge of honesty, which is demoralized by the touch of goods wrongfully acquired. The proceeds of robbery corrupt all who handle them. You may meet persons who think themselves irreproachable when paying a louis for that which is worth double or treble. If they reason a little they will understand that great bargains, carried to a cer- tain limit, render the buyer the receiver's accom- plice ; but they will not argue. They proudly dis- play their purchases and boast of having paid less PARASITES. 73 than their value for them. They consider that this perturbation of commercial and industrial laws is due to their lucky star, or is a triumph of their saga- city. Opportunity makes more thieves than is sup- posed. It is in this sense that I can say, " Stolen goods are corrupting." Beggars are not robbers, excepting when they combine the two trades, which sometimes happens. But nearly all professional beggars use fraudulent tricks in order to obtain a part of another's fortune. In appearance, the part is infinitesimal, but it is con- siderable if all the sums uselessly absorbed by mendi- city were added together. The sham wounded, the sham sick, the sham mothers who bemoan a buried child, or press a new- born cardboard babe to their breasts ; the sham work- men out of employment who have never employed their ten fingers ; the sham poor who have share cer- tificates in their desks, are so many parasites who trade on the simplicity of worthy souls. Our laws punish the man who causes a thousand persons to hand over to him a hundred thousand francs on one pretext or other. - He is liable to imprisonment of from one to five years and a fine amounting from fifty to three thousand francs. The persons injured may institute actions at law and call upon the courts to make good the sums taken out of 74 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. their pockets. It would appear monstrous to us that this wrongfully gotten fortune should be transmitted to the heirs of the swindler. But, when we read in the newspapers that a beggar on a particular bridge or at a certain church has left one hundred thousand francs in a mattress, the fact appears to us as simply curious ; we think it just and natural that the children or next of kin of this ingenious old man should divide the spoils of his dupes. Society has never thought fit to put an embargo on a particular estate and say, "This money, the product of labour, has been fraudulently diverted by a man who does not work ; we will take possession of it and divert it to help those who labour." Is mendicity ^herefore a recognized industry among civilized nations ? The enriched mendicant may reply to that, " I have taken nothing ; everything has been given me. Does money belong to those who acquire it ? Have they the right to use and abuse it ? May they apply it indifferently to useful works and in honourable and agreeable liberality? The hundred thousand francs I possess have been given to me copper by copper gratuitously. I have not had recourse to fraudulent tricks, I have not promised my benefactors to render their alms a hundredfold: I have been clothed with rags, I have sat on a stool ; the charity PARASITES. 75 of worthy souls has done the rest." " Yes, but the charity of worthy souls would not have given you so many small coppers had it not been supposed that real destitution was being alleviated. If you had only admitted you had a fortune of one thousand francs the other ninety thousand would not have been given to you. Among those who have enriched you, how many were, and are, still poorer than yourself? The rags, the stool, the outstretched hand, all the repre- sentation of poverty, constitute a fraudulent trick. You have made use of a false quality in passing yourself off as poor when you were not so." I admit, however, that mendicity would become excusable in the eyes of economists if the sham poor often left at their death a capital of one hundred thousand francs. Their falsehood, condemned by morality, would finally terminate in a useful result. "What is a copper to him who throws it into the beggar's bowl ? Next to nothing ; whether he gives or keeps it, he will be none the richer or poorer. Two millions of sou pieces spread over two mil- lions of pockets represent but a sterile, inert good ; money, thus subdivided, returns nothing for lack of cohesion. Gather together these particles and you will have a sum, a capital, an instrument of labour. He who, by an honest process, should extract two millions of sous from two millions of pockets in ;6 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. order to create a capital of one hundred thousand francs, would render society a service, like the skilful metallurgist who should gather together the 100 kilos of iron dust scattered in the streets, therewith to make a powerful lever. But pauperism ends precisely in an opposite re- sult. Saving some exceptions, beggars squander daily the product of their dismal harvest. Money cast to them by charity does not remain in their hands ; it goes straightway to the public-house and to the most disgusting debauchery. Beggars are nearly all spendthrifts, and how could they be otherwise ? Man lays store on his goods in proportion to the labour they have cost him. Those who have got money without doing anything, those who count up- on always getting it in the same way, are not prone to save, either from inclination or reason. Where- fore should they deprive themselves of anything, seeing they have an inexhaustible mine to work ? For what purpose should they form an instrument of labour, when they have resolved never to produce anything, when they know that society is always ready to toil for them ? These parasites marry, multiply, and found a stock of parasites. Their children are naturally dis- posed to imitate their father and mother ; they are not taught the nobility of labour ; from birth they PARASITES. 77 are habituated to shame. They are a sad and baneful brood, absorbing in certain countries more than a tenth of what is produced without making any return. Does begging create almsgiving, or does alms- giving give rise to begging? Each does its part. We are in a vicious circle. I have dwelt in suc- cession in the part of France where the most is given to the poor, and the part of Italy where charity lavishes its larger alms. At Quimper, as at Rome, my first care was to search by what miracle so much money spread abroad had increased distress instead of curing it. At Home, as at Quimper, the wisest and best people replied to me, "It is quite simple ; the more you water weeds the more abundant their growth." If no one had the lamentable courage to hold out a hand in the streets, no one would dream of giving a penny to the idler who had not earned it. But, if all the producers agreed to refuse the toll to those who refused to produce, all able-bodied persons would consider it a duty to earn their own livelihood and there would be no more begging. Do you wish to manufacture beggars by the hundred? Open your window and throw a franc to all those who come and sing, or grind organs before you, in the street or the court. On the morrow you will be visited by all the professional beggars ; o 78 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. before a week is over fifty persons in your district, who have not yet begged, will desire to profit by the alms, and the evil of mendicity will spread from neighbour to neighbour like an epidemic, Heaven only knowing where it will end. There are villages in Italy, and even in Prance, where children run after strangers, asking for coppers. The stranger gives a copper and thinks he acts the great man : he never fancies he is the corrupter of these childen. Among us the modern spirit is strong enough to combat and cure this vice of education ; yet I shall never forget that in 1858, in the province of Loretto, peasants left their harvest, which was splendid, to come and beg from us. I turned to one of them and asked him how he had the face to beg on the border of his own field ? He replied, " Sir, I have never missed doing so from my earliest child- hood ; and as I have always got something, I continue doing so." "But, if you are not ashamed to beg, why do you work ? " " Because the other trade does not yield enough. You may be sure that if travel- lers would give me sufficient to live upon, I would never use my ten fingers." I remember in the avenue of ISTeuilly, one even- ing, between five and six o'clock, being hampered with a newspaper I had just read, so I offered it to two masons leaving their yards. My argument, very PARASITES. 79 logical in its way, was this : "I have got all I want from the newspaper ; it may still instruct or inform several people ; if I throw it away, it will be dirtied and lost." But one of the two passers-by gave me a salutary lesson by saying, " If I desire to read a newspaper, I shall pay for it out of my wages ; you owe me nothing." Assuredly, that honest man had never in childhood begged upon the high road run- ning through his village. In pointing out the defects of badly organized charity, our aim is not to preach an opposition go- spel, and to forbid the rich to do good. The simple point is to show that almsgiving exercised without the greatest circumspection runs exactly counter to its object. It is praiseworthy and necessary that all workers should join together to succour children, the aged, the sick, all those who cannot earn their bread by working for themselves. Doubtless the day will come when individual foresight and thrift will render hos- pitals and almshouses useless, but, till then, public benevolence and private charity have a noble task to perform. What social economy combats like a pest is the pauperism of the able-bodied men who are maintained by blind charity. The commonness of gratuitous gifts has elevated destitution into a profession ; it has ere- So HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. ated hereditary pauperism. Not only are there beg- gars at fixed places, installed at a particular part of the public highway, and who transmit their establish- ment like a stockbroker's or notary's office, but among those who are rather improperly styled shamefaced poor, there are dynasties of idlers who have gone through the occurrences of 1789 and 1793 with- out diminution of income; their fixed, invariable revenue is inscribed in the great book of public sensibility. I notify the abuse and yet I dare not say, end it. The question is very complex, for, indeed, to all good rich people, giving is a pleasure, almost a necessity. Each time we put our hands in our pockets to suc- cour a true or feigned, a merited or an unmerited un- fortunate, we become elevated in our own eyes. Social economy exclaims, " It is right to receive the equiva- lent of what we give." The heart replies, "It is sweet to give without receiving/' Reasoners and calculators are in the right when they tell us : "A million divided among 400,000 per- sons gives 2 francs 50 centimes to each. This is nearly what each one of those who are assisted would earn in a day, if he worked. To give a piece of bread to an able-bodied man, capable of earning it, is to weaken the great and holy law, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."' This is to deprive PARASITES. 81 society of the services which this man might render it by labouring. To give to those who toil, whether by buying their work above its value, whether by letting them have commodities below the price they should fetch, is to disturb the equilibrium of industry and wrong the majority of workers, by creating un- equal competition to the profit of particular persons. Those whom you oblige will be able, by this alone, to vend their products at a reduced price and thereby to kill the labour of others. In short, charitable operations crumble away, without profit to society, the instrument which might have become useful. A million daily, a milliard every three years, is given away in France, and of this amount of capital, which might be multiplied in in- dustry to the profit of all workers, not a centime re- mains. The lever falls into dust, and that is the end of it. Nothing is more exactly true than this sombre picture. Does it follow that the men who are really charitable should stand with folded arms in presence of the spectacle of distress ? No. The best among us will continue to give alms, so long as this palliative shall not be replaced by the right substitute for the evil. But, unless I deceive myself, the remedy has been discovered. In our day, in our midst, the 82 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOM Y. ingenious charity of a woman has solved the most frightful of social problems. In order to extinguish the parasitical mendicity which trades upon the rich without profit to the poor, it is sufficient to modify, in conformity with the modern spirit, the touch- ing axiom, " He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth to the Lord." How has it been altered ? By teach- ing little children another formula quite as fine and far more practical, as follows : " Who lendeth to the poor giveth to God." It does not enter into my plan to examine in detail the rules of a particular charitable institution, but I can vouch that the Society of the Prince Imperial is founded on a prin- ciple which is a complete revolution, and one of the happiest. Around you there are millions of worthy fellows who are very industrious, very intelligent, and very estimable, who have never begged, but who have more than once been reduced to great straits, because their only instruments of labour are their arms, and because manual labour of that kind yields a return which is insufficient, unequal, and precarious. Lend them with discernment that which you throw at hazard among the begging and moaning tribe of parasites. Do not lend except for a fixed period: the most meritorious will refuse this disguised form of alms. Ought the loans to be made without interest, or PARASITES. 83 on favourable rates ? For my own part I do not think so, and for the following reasons. In a country where the regular rate of interest is five per cent., 100 francs, payable on the 1st of December, 1872, will exactly represent 105 francs payable on the 1st of December, 1873. The two figures, un- equal in appearance, are equal in reality, if the time be taken into account, and there is not a mathema- tician who would challenge this proposition : 100 francs to-day are equal to 105 francs in a year. Thence it follows, that to lend 100 francs without interest for a j^ear i s equivalent to giving five francs to the borrower. To lend 100 francs at three per cent, is to give two francs to the borrower, if the average rate of interest be maintained at five per cent., during the whole year. Between friends, considerable sums are lent without taking account of interest ; but it is perfectly understood that the borrower receives a present, that he is under an obligation to the lender, and that, after having repaid the exact amount of the loan, he owes him a surplus payable in good offices. This obligation has the defect of being badly defined. Of two friends, one of whom has gratuitously obliged the other, the first is in- clined to exaggerate the importance of the service rendered ; the second very soon revolts against this kind of servitude, and a quarrel often ensues on 84 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. account of a gratuitous loan haying been offered and accepted. Between men of business, the creditor who has lent 100 francs on good security and the debtor who has returned 105 francs at the end of a year, are quits. They have reciprocally rendered services of equal value. The first has obliged the second by making over to him the use of 100 francs for a year ; the second has obliged the first by giving him five francs in excess of the 100 francs received. The gratitude due on both sides is paid off and extinguished. There is neither benefactor nor debtor, neither patron nor client. With what object has modern benevolence sub- stituted loans to labour for gifts to idleness ? It is not in order to change the form of alms, but to abolish them. The thought which inspired this generous revolution never intended retaining the poor under a skilfully disguised form of patron- age. The design is to emancipate the very persons who are helped, and to render them at once happier and more independent. In a social state, having equality as its basis, the noblest benevolence is that which permits those in want to ameliorate their own condition themselves without being indebted to any- body. This interesting work is but in its infancy ; the PARASITES. 85 period of discussion is not ended, and as the best spirits of our time unite together in the quest of improvement, I have thought it right to indicate what, according to my personal opinion, seems most advantageous and most just. It is right that the indigent, when they borrow in order to work, should pay the same rates as everybody else. They may be freed from paying interest, which may be added to the capital, but it is not fitting that a present should be made of it. Competition being the law of commerce and industry, those who are assisted ought not to have as a privilege the gratuitous use of capital ; they would thereby contend too advantageously with those who borrow an instrument of labour at five or six per cent. To society, it is important that the capital sub- scribed for the work of regeneration should gradually increase and extend its benefits year after year until pauperism shall be totally extinguished. It is advantageous to the borrower to pay in- terest on the capital lent to him. By returning his instalments he proves to others and to himself that he is not a parasite, one of those who receive without making return. This sentiment makes him grow in power and dignity, the moral spring of his mind is strengthened, and the amelioration of his whole being compensates for the economy of five per 86 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. cent, lie might make in accepting the interest as alms. He holds his head higher, he thinks with more independence, he is more of a man. Can it be said that he is absolved from all gratitude towards the generous creditors who have put a tool into his hands ? No, for a loan has been made to him, under entirely moral guarantees, at the same rate as if he had been able to offer the best security. The poor person who has only two arms is subject to the alternative of being refused all credit, or of borrow- ing on frightful terms, for the disposal of capital is the more onerous the less the chances are of repay- ment. The benevolent loan is in other respects more laborious and difficult than the free gift .; it requires a hundred times more reasoning and consideration. To find money is nothing in such a country as ours ; but to distribute it well necessitates an appeal to the highest sagacity and the greatest devotedness. Before lending a poor person one thousand francs it is requisite to weigh his morality, his intelligence, his aptitude for business. The slightest error in this diagnosis leads to the loss of the sum, and compromises the noblest experiment ever made by the genius of charity. Oh, how much simpler and easier would it be to give a sou to the first beggar you meet without caring about what he does with it ! PARASITES. 87 But if this new charity requires more labour, it will bear other fruits. The gift to idleness has been in operation for centuries ; it has only produced poverty; the loan to labour, began yesterday, has already made some men happy and independent. It remains for us to speak of the last class of para- sites professional gamesters. But, as it is impossible for a gamester to be always successful, as money got by gaming, having cost no labour, melts away quicker than any other, as it is almost unheard-of that a for- tune acquired by gaming is preserved, as all pro- fessional gamesters, with the exception of some phenomenal persons who can be cited, have ended badly, this category of unproductive men may be transferred to that of robbers or mendicants. As a pastime, play is a minor contract which is perfectly honest. Two labourers, in the evening, after a well-filled day, take away a portion of their wages and reciprocally part with it under a condition. For example, the five francs I have put on the table are yours. I give them beforehand. I put you in possession of all my rights to this piece of money if you score five points at ecarte before me. You, on your part, dispossess yourself beforehand, in my favour, of a like sum, if I score the first five points. In this there is neither production, nor consump- tion of wealth, but the displacement of some five- 88 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. franc pieces winch leave one pocket to enter another. However, I request amateur players to note two things : First. Admitting the absolute equality of the chances, the player always runs the risk of losing more than he can win. If you have ten louis in your pocket, and if you think fit to stake one of them ; in case of loss, you diminish your means by a tenth ; in case of winning, you but increase them by an eleventh. Second. Twenty francs won at play have less value than twenty francs lost, and one is deceived in saying that Peter puts into his pocket all that comes out of the pocket of Paul. Paul has lost the precious money of labour ; Peter has only won the money of chance, which makes a notable differ- ence in practice. CHAPTER Y. EXCHANGE. IF the first economic law be the obligation to pro- duce, the second is the necessity of exchanging. The workman might well manufacture products in unlimited quantity ; if he had not the means of exchanging them for others, he would be terribly destitute. A hundred thousand hectolitres of grain are a property not to be despised, but they would not hinder you from dying of cold in winter if you did not exchange a portion for clothing, for combustibles, and a dwelling. A hundred thousand steres of wood would not hinder you from dying of hunger ; one hundred thousand barrels of claret would not help the wine grower to traverse the distance which separ- ates Bordeaux from Paris ; but a few litres of good wine given in exchange for a railway ticket would transport him in a day without fatigue. A mason can build a house for himself, a tiller of 90 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. the soil can procure for himself grain, wine, tobacco, hops, meat, according to the land he culti- vates and the climate he dwells in ; a waggoner can transport himself quickly from one point to another ; a tailor can make clothes for himself. But in order that the same man should have at once lodging, liv- ing, clothing, means of transport, and all the neces- saries of life, he must incessantly exchange his products for those of other men. The workman who says with legitimate pride, " I am self-sufficing," what does he mean by these words ? Does he profess to have himself created all the pro- ducts he uses ? No ; but he boasts, and rightly too, of producing a sufficient quantity of exchangeable goods to satisfy all his wants. Strictly speaking, it is possible that an isolated indi- vidual might imperfectly provide for his most press- ing needs, during a certain time, without exchanging anything with another. Certain savages live in this way, under a benignant sky which reduces man's wants almost to nothing. They act as hunters, fishermen, builders, cooks, tailors, and shoemakers, for their personal purposes. But their aptitude in doing everything hinders them from excelling in any. They know too many trades to be able to do one well. "When they have turned their hands to everything in one day, the product of their labour does not repre- EXCHANGE. 91 sent the sum of useful things which an English or French working man would produce in an hour. Thus they rush to avail themselves of exchange, from the moment civilization comes within their reach : they hasten to offer their products in order to obtain ours, and we gain by the bargain, in selling to them our labour of one hour for their labour of a day or more. Simple good sense explains to you the superiority of civilized labour over savage labour. The first condition for producing much, speedily, and well, is to specially stick to the business one can perform the best. The best endowed apprentice commences as a pure blunderer ; in time, by application and practice, he attains to getting as much as is possible out of his arms and tools. But, if we succumbed to the foolish ambition of doing everything ourselves, life would be only a long and deplorable apprenticeship. The performance of a single thing develops sur- prising aptitudes in an individual. The carpenter, the joiner, the farrier, acquire in a few years the sureness of hand which you have doubtless admired, if you have watched them rather closely. A skilful coachman driving through the crowded streets of London or Paris, shows you what being accustomed to a particular work can add in precision to the sight, and decision to the mind. A professional accountant 9 2 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. plays with figures ; an old sergeant, acting as in- structor, juggles with his rifle ; a good schoolmaster moulds and shapes like wax the rebellious brain of forty youths ; a sailor runs along the yards amidst a gale ; a slater, a fireman, run over roofs ; a pro- fessional improvisor will dictate a hundred verses on the spur of the moment, or speak for four hours in succession. From the top to the bottom of society you see a multitude of men and even women who excel in an art or a trade, from having been specially engaged in it from infancy. Have you never admired the memory, the nimbleness, and the dexterity of restaur- ant waiters? And these valuable domestics (some still exist) who wait without embarrassment or noise at a dinner of twelve people ? All useful or agree- able talents are the fruit of special training. It is admitted that a good amount of general in- struction is the counterpoise of special training, otherwise the worker would be nothing but a machine. It is still to be desired that, in view of dull times and other accidents, every producer should add a second string to his bow : this is a precaution which cannot be recommended too strongly to the workmen who live by ministering to luxury. But the beginning of wisdom is to choose a means of earning a livelihood, to have a speciality, to concentrate all one's talents EXCHANGE. 93 and powers upon a principal end. For the individual who considers himself a jack of all trades is a savage astray amid civilization ; he lives and dies worthless. The earliest exchange was doubtless contempor- aneous with the first work, that is to say, this mechan- ism is as old as man himself. No progress in any department could be achieved here below, if each individual had been compelled to learn all the arts essential to existence. The mere fact of exchange has created an organization of labour far superior to all those which reformers (or those who are so called) have sketched in recent days. It may be here sum- marized in a few lines. The individual can count upon wanting nothing should he produce a certain amount of useful things, it matters not what. Even when he creates nothing for his personal use, he is certain of procuring what- ever is necessary and something more, provided he sup- plies a quantity of labour useful or agreeable to other men. He may then, in choosing an industry, deduct from the variety of his wants and reduce the whole problem of his existence to this question : Of what am I capable ? Among all useful products, what one am I best fitted for furnishing ? Children are disposed to believe that it is neces- sary to be a confectioner in order to have plenty of sweetmeats to eat, and that the shoemaker must be 94 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. better shod than other men. Experience does not take long to teach them that, thanks to exchange, the largest quantity of any article may be obtained by producing the largest quantity of another article, whatever it be. Producers who live and die without having con- sumed one of their products are numbered by millions. The vintagers of Clos Vougeot drink common claret, the workmen of Alfred and Humann get their clothes at the Bell- Jardiniere or even at the Temple ; the Lyons' weavers do dress their wives in silk. On the other hand, a large manufacturer of chintz has his drawing-room hung with brocatelle; a manufacturer of hardware for exportation scorns the products of his factory ; a dealer in common china eats off Sevres porcelain. The most precious products abound around the man who produces most utility ; the hum- blest fall to the lot of the man who produces the least, whatever be his department of industry. A stone- cutter does not dwell in a stone house : he is too well pleased if plaster and brick give him a tolerable shelter. As to a diamond- cutter, he might live a hundred years without the notion occurring to him of wearing his products as waistcoat buttons. In all these facts there is an apparent contradic- tion, of which ill-intentioned rhetoricians have often made use. When workmen were less enlightened and EXCHANGE. 95 less sensible than at present they were told : It is unjust that fine clothes should be worn by men who cannot sew; it is monstrous that the workwoman dressed in cotton should cut out, and stitch, silk gowns for a banker's wife. Tirades have been published about the poor diamond-cutter who has not even a diamond ring to put on his finger on Sunday. These old pieces of declamation will appear to you in their full absurdity if you recall, firstly, that all useful things properly belong to him who has pro- duced them, or his assigns ; secondly, that to get a portion of them, large or small, equal value must be given in exchange ; thirdly, that the value of labour is proportioned to the quantity of utility produced, whatever be the materials employed. Gold is fifteen and a half times more precious than silver, but the skilful chaser, who adds by his labour the value of twenty-five louis to the kilogramme of silver, will receive for it twenty-five golden louis ; whilst a turner of common articles will receive four francs ten sous in silver for having chased gold watch cases. Truffles are worth three hundred times more than potatoes, but the agriculturist who should produce ten thousand sacks of potatoes in a season would have the right to eat truffles, while the truffle-huntei who should find but three or four kilos a month would eat nothing but potatoes. WITIESITTJ 96 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. The workman is entitled to the whole surplus value which lie himself has added to things. Manu- factured products, like a black coat, a silk gown, a dia- mond ornament, do not reach the consumer till after having passed through a multitude of hands all of which, in turn, add an additional value. It is just and natural that each of the workmen should exchange the utility he has produced, for an equivalent. The agriculturist, who furnishes the first element in a black coat, is entitled to the price of the wool ; the merchant, who traverses the country to collect the wool from several farmers, is entitled to the price of his exertions ; the carman, who conveys the bales to the manufactory, is entitled to the price of his jour- ney ; each of the workmen who remove the grease, card, dye, spin, weave, press, comb the cloth, becomes, so to speak, the creditor of the merchandise, and acquires a right proportionate to the value added to it. Six hundred grammes of fine wool, worth three francs at the outset, furnish at last a black coat which, if well made, is worth as much as 125 francs. The day the consumer gives 125 francs in exchange for this coat, he pays in a lump the initial value of the raw material and all the increased values which have been successively added by a hundred workmen. The coat, when paid for, owes nothing to any one. EXCHANGE. 97 But, if one of the hundred producers who have had a hand in the work should appropriate the whole, he would wrong ninety-nine others. If the farmer were to take it and say, " This is my wool ! " or if the journeyman tailor were, to pull it away, saying, " This is my stitching ! " all the others would ex- claim, " Stop thief ! " In order that each of those who had helped to make the coat- should have the right to wear it, he would have to produce for himself an amount of useful things equal to 125 francs. It is thus that matters go on all the world over, except that the immense- majority of workmen content themselves with a cheaper and more comfortable garment than the black coat supplied by Alfred or Humann. No producer here below is fool enough to believe that, in creating the part, he acquires a right to the whole. This idea could only occur to fishers in troubled waters, personally interested in confound- ing all notions of what is right. The worthy poor persons who cut diamonds in a garret have sometimes more thousands of francs lying on their board than five-francs pieces in their drawers. Yet, one would have a bad reception were one to say, " These fine stones, to which you give so much polish, are yours." " No," they would reply, " that which is alone our property is the cutting, the polish which we add to the rough stone. When 98 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. the diamonds are intrusted to us, they already con- tain a value which other persons had added in finding them, in transporting them, in assorting them. The merchant does not owe us more than the price of the added value which we ourselves have produced. If our day's work only adds to a diamond, worth two millions, the value of five francs, only five francs are due to us." To give the equivalent of what we receive, to receive the equivalent of what we give : such is the machinery of exchange. But by what sign do we recognize that two things are equivalent ? Not much labour is re- quired to prove that a gramme of pure gold is worth another gramme of pure gold ; that each of two hectolitres of grain, yielded by the same field, is worth the other. Yet, in the infinite variety of things and of services which men interchange daily, how shall we contrive not to give either more or less than we receive, not to be either rogue or dupe ? A pin set with brilliants, a basket of potatoes, an orchestra stall at the opera, a ride in a cab, a doctor's visit, a pilot's services, the rent of a room, a pair of boots, a forest of a hundred hectares, a mason's day- wage, these things and services have no relation to each other. How do we know that EXCHANGE. 99 the one is worth one, or two, or three, or a thousand times more than the other. There is nothing absolute in value. It is but a relation between the things and services offered and demanded between men. It varies with place, time, the circumstances, wants, and tastes of the contracting parties. Two houses, identical in construction, but situated, the one in Paris, the other in Quimper, are to each other as three is to one. It is necessary to give three in Quimper to get one in Paris. At Paris even, you may see a piece of house property which, without gaining or losing a slate, was worth two in 1846, one in 1848, three in 1868. In the course of twenty years its value has diminished by one-half, and been trebled afterwards. The relation of wine to grain, in their proportionate value, varies from year to year in the same country. Suppose that two hectolitres of Montpellier wine could be generally exchanged to-day for a hectolitre of grain. A bad vintage might double the value of the wine, and make it to cost as dear as grain ; a bad harvest might produce the contrary effect, and lead to the exchange of four hectolitres of wine for one of grain. In a city built to shelter 100,000 persons, the population falls to 50,000. Houses are there more ioo HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. offered than they are required, for they are offered to 100,000 persons, and there are only 50,000 to take them. The price of the service rendered by the landlords to the tenants falls at once. But let an occasion attract a crowd of 200,000 persons for three days, and the demand for accommodation will ex- ceed the supply, and the service rendered by the landlord rises. If 20,000 Parisians are simultaneously struck with the desire to go to a theatre which only holds 1500, the value of places increases in a marvellous proportion ; but, on the day when only 50 spectators care to see the piece, the 1500 places, more offered than demanded, fetch nothing. Suppose that Europe requires each year 1,000,000 bales of cotton. On the day when, by any accident, the supply of this product falls to 500,000 bales, the value of the cotton is doubled, that is to say, twice as much wine, grain, or iron must be given in order to obtain the same quantity of cotton. By an opposite effect, if the production of cloves were increased tenfold, the consumption remaining the same, their value would fall ninety per cent. This is what occurred on the day when the Imaun of Muscat glutted Europe with this product. We put aside the value due to affection which could be only appreciated by particular persons, and EXCHANGE. 101 the exceptional value which is suddenly developed owing to circumstances. A badly-painted family portrait would be worth its weight in gold to Mr A. or Mr B., but it would not fetch two francs at a public sale. There are cases when one would give a kingdom for a horse, or a million for a glass of water. We have seen young simpletons exchange their patrimony for a lock of hair, for which a man of sense would not give anything : social economy does not concern itself with these exceptions. As a general rule, the more a thing is in demand, the greater is its value. The larger its supply, the less is it worth. And what I say of things applies to services, for things are nothing but consolidated services. Whether a workman gives up to you ten hours of labour, or whether he sells you the product he has made in ten hours, is one and the same. The economic value of all things and all services is not a mean between Peter's offer and Paul's demand, but between the general supply and the general demand. A starving man or a lunatic might exchange his watch for a morsel of bread ; it does not follow by any means that a watch and a morsel of bread are products of equal value. Normal exchange is that which competition has equalized and sanctioned. It operates as follows. We are all egotists, or, to speak more politely, 102 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. the instinct of preservation leads each of us to prefer himself to every one else. The tendency of the in- dividual in every exchange is to obtain the utmost that is possible in giving the least that is possible. Do I calumniate humanity ? Tell me, honest con- sumer, if you would hesitate a moment between the baker who should sell you his bread for ten centimes, and him who should give you the same weight and the same quality for a sou ? Tell me, honest producer, if the thought would occur to you to sweat for ten sous an hour in front of an establishment where you were offered a franc ? What man is fool enough to pay dearly for that which he can buy cheaply ? Where are the workmen to be found who are so simple as to give the preference to the smaller offer ? The place of exchange is a hall of continual adju- dication where man, whether buyer or seller, runs up his own labour, and runs down the labour of others, and does so without bad faith, for he is naturally dis- posed to exaggerate the value of all he produces or possesses, to depreciate the value of others' labour and possessions. However, it is necessary to find a reason for this and to submit to the lessons of experience. If you have a horse to sell, you may well estimate it in your own mind at one hundred thousand francs ; after all the possible purchasers have offered you EXCHANGE. 103 eight, nine, ten thousand francs at the most, you will end by admitting that its maximum value is ten thousand francs, and that you must either keep it your- self or exchange it for ten thousand francs. How- ever good an opinion you have of your talents, and though you are intimately persuaded that your labour is worth more than one hundred francs the hour, you must work for four francs a day, or fold your hands, if no one offers you higher pay. You belong to a country where the kilo of cherries is worth thirty centimes in June ; when in St Peters- burg, where all the greengrocers sell them for six roubles, where all the buyers pay six roubles, you must necessarily go without cherries, or admit that cherries in June are worth six roubles at St Peters- burg. You are accustomed to pay forty centimes the hour to your workmen. If they refuse to work for less than fifty centimes, and if you cannot find others to do the work at the old rate, you are obliged to admit that their hour is worth fifty centimes; labour must be recompensed at its value, or you must deprive yourself of their services. The machinery of exchange does not work with- out jolts ; it may even happen that an imprudent person may have his fingers caught in the gearing. But, as we all stand in need of each other, we neces- sarily end by coming to an understanding. The 104 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. producer's interest is to give his services for the price offered ; the consumer's interest is to approximate to the price asked, under the penalty, in both cases, of foregoing the profit on the exchange. Now, what is admirable in exchange is that it benefits the two contracting parties in almost equal measure. Each of the two, by giving what he has for that which he has not, makes a good bargain. It appears surprising, at first sight, that two persons can simultaneously gain the one by the other. This is, however, what occurs at every free and straightforward exchange. When a broker brings a buyer and seller together, he asks a commission from each, which both pay without question : this proves they think that they have both gained by the ex- change. In fact, whether you sell, whether you buy, you perform" an act of preference. No one constrains you to give over any of your things for the things of another. You yourself prefer to give what you have in excess, for that in which you are deficient. Even should you not have anything in excess, were you one of those unfortunates whom a pitiless necessity reduces to exchange the counterpane of their bed for a few days' bread, you still realize a profit, because you hand over an object of secondary importance for an article of primary importance. If your counterpane EXCHANGE. 105 were actually more useful than tlie bread, you would not consent to the exchange. You perform it, there- fore you acknowledge it is advantageous for you at the moment. When you enter a shop in order to procure half a kilo of candles for six grammes of a white metal, you instinctively thank the person who hands you the candles, and he thanks you in turn when you hand him your money. You are right, and the seller is so too, because you have been exchanging service for service with another man, your equal. He has given you a thing more useful for your purpose than money. If you had kept your money in your pocket, if the ex- change of one thing for another had been denied you, nothing would prevent you from breaking your nose against the furniture on returning home ; you would not be able to read the book lying on your night- table by the light of your money. In handing over his light in sticks, the retailer, that humble producer, has also done a good stroke of business. He did not acquire his merchandise for the purpose of consumption, but in order to sell it ; he owes the price of it to the wholesale dealer, whom he must pay in money on the appointed day. You have helped him to fulfil a sacred engagement, to liquidate an anterior exchange. You give him in addition a few centimes as the price of the personal service he 106 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. has rendered you. And what service ? Are you unaware of it ? Is. it nothing to have transported, preserved, divided for your use and put within reach of your hand, a useful thing which you had neither the time nor, perchance, the means of getting from, the manufactory in. quantities of a hundred kilos. If men would but reason a little, they would all be in a state of admiration and gratitude in presence of the beneficent mechanism of exchange. It permits us to obtain all the things we want, all the services which we should not be able to render to ourselves. And at what price ? Through performing useful labour, it matters not what, this being always left to our choice. Perhaps you have not inquired by what combina- tion a working locksmith, for instance, manufactures his bread, his wine, his meat, his clothes, his lodging, the education of his children, and all useful things, by strokes of file and hammer. He has not inherited a centiare of land ; he can- not plough, reap, grind, or bake, and yet he eats bread. He has never harvested grapes in his life, and he restores his strength by drinking wine. He has never reared a head of cattle, and he eats meat and he wears shoes. He cannot spin, weave, or stitch, and he has linen and clothes. Two powerful horses, which he does not feed, draw him to his work-room, EXCHANGE. 107 if at a distance, and bring him back. He has never dreamed about building a house, and is well or ill lodged. His arms are the only arms he has at his disposal, and he lives in full security : he does not fear either the evil-doers of his country or European armies of which the effective strength is from two to three millions of men. He has his judges, his police ; he has an army always ready to fight on his behalf. "What has he done to-day, from eight in the morn- ing to six in the evening, to pq^y his quota for so many things and for so many services ? He has hung up bells. Is it not wonderful ? But the finest part of the matter is that the workman in question is not in- debted to a soul ; this is because he owes nothing, at the close of the account, to those who have clothed, fed, housed, carried, and protected him. He has given an equivalent for all that he has received ; he has exchanged his services for the services of others. Doubtless, he owes a certain acknowledgment to his contemporaries whose labour simplifies and lightens his life, but his contemporaries owe him quite as much, through reciprocity. And the balance will always remain even, so long as he pays for what he buys, and produces the equivalent of what he con- sumes. We are all dependent upon each other, because io8 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. our wants are always more varied than our aptitudes. Let us lay this truth, to heart, and we shall be the more just towards each other, and compre- hend that the first exchange to be made between men is an exchange of good sentiments and of good offices. Each of us buys, sells, and re-sells, and it may be said that, in general, equity presides over all our ex- changes. But the science of economic laws is so little diffused that #o one submits to the laws of the market without slightly protesting. We make use of each other while murmuring against each other. "Were it fully demonstrated to us that our things or our services were paid for at the current rate, we should still call out " Thief ! " because we exagger- ate the value of what we give and underrate the things we receive. The earth does not revolve once round its axis without your hearing some complaints of lenders against borrowers, of borrowers against lenders, of consumers against merchants, of merchants against manufacturers, of manufacturers against workmen, of workmen against their masters. "What is consumed collectively is as fertile in misunderstanding as what is consumed privately : the public complains that its servants are too well paid, while the servants com- plain of not being paid according to merit ; in fine, EXCHANGE. 109 one half of the human race spends its life in recrimin- ations against the other half. The truth is that the lender renders a service to the borrower in making over to him the enjoyment of a useful thing, while the borrower renders an equivalent service to the lender in restoring to him, for instance, 105 francs in place of the 100 he had received. If these two kinds of benefits were not generally recognized as mutual, the lenders would long refuse to lend or the borrowers would long re- fuse to borrow. Traders render a service to con- sumers in procuring merchandise for them ; the con- sumer renders a service to the trader in paying him higher for his merchandise than he would do at the manufactory. The contractor renders a service to his workmen in assuring them the regular employ- ment of their faculties, in lending them tools which are often costly, in emancipating them from the tur- moil of a sale, in securing them against the risks of commerce. "Workmen render a service to the con- tractor in selling him for ten sous a service which he sometimes disposes of for a franc. Public servants render a service to the people in transacting their business : the people render them a service in asking them to sign a receipt monthly. If you think that your services are not recompensed at what they are worth, you have always the right i io HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. to sell them to the highest bidder. If you find that a service is sold to you too dearly, you are at liberty to beat it down, or to perform it yourself, or to dis- pense with it, if not unavoidable. Let each one procure the necessaries of life at the price he can; let us bargain as much as we please; nothing can be more just. But, in the name of Heaven, let us give up the deplorable habit of believing that we are imposed upon by those who serve us, and of treating them as inferiors. When Peter buys his sugar and his coffee from Paul, he thinks himself on that account his superior. " He is my tradesman ! " Be it so, he is your pur- veyor of Colonial wares, but you are his purveyor of gold and silver. Gold and silver are Colonial wares also. The shop is right in thinking that it keeps the factory going ; the manufacturer rightly regards the trader as being indebted to him : the contractor says that he supports his work-people ; that is true ; the work-people cry that they support the con- tractors ; that is correct. The domestic, in speaking of his master, says, " A man whom I have served for ten years." The master, in speaking of his servant, replies, " A fellow whom I have lodged, boarded, and clothed during ten years." Neither the one nor the other says what is untrue, but they do wrong in for- getting that they have received an equivalent for EXCHANGE. in their services and in treating him who has paid them as their debtor. The exchange of equal quantities cannot become a source of inequality. By rights we are all equal, that is to say, the human personality, as far as it extends, is every- where equally sacred and inviolable. "We are unequal in strength, in intelligence, in virtue, in activity, in wealth. One produces more, another . less, according to age, aptitude, determina- tion, and tools. But as exchange applies only to services which are equivalents, it cannot subordinate one producer to another. The million says to the franc : give me a sou and I will return you five centimes. In consequence of this operation, the million and the franc preserve their respective positions : the million would be an idiot if it thought itself the benefactor of the franc; the franc would be a fool if it thought itself imposed upon by the million. Thus exchange does not heighten the inequality of fortune, which is the torment of the envious. But neither has it the effect of levelling riches. It profits rich and poor in equal proportions, by permitting each to choose the most useful or the most agreeable thing. "What tends to level human conditions are the indolence and the prodigality of ii2 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. those having possessions, the labour and saving of those who wish to acquire possessions. If the dogma of human interdependence required to be proved, the mechanism of exchange would furnish a striking demonstration. Supply causes a fall in price, that is, all useful things are cheaper the more plentiful they are. Should the quantity of food, dwellings, clothing, of useful things, be doubled throughout the world, we should procure in five hours of labour what we now obtain in ten. If the total amount of useful things were reduced by one half, it would be necessary to work twenty hours for what now takes ten. This is no mere hypothesis, but a truth proved by experience. Are all men, without exception, interested in acquiring all things cheaply, that is to say, in getting the utmost possible amount of things in exchange for the smallest amount of labour ? Yes. Therefore all men have an equal interest in hindering destruc- tion, in countenancing production and saving. The destruction of anything whatsoever, directly affects its possessor and indirectly all other men. The .burning of one quarter raises the rents in a whole city ; demolish the fourth of the houses upon earth and all rents would rise one-fourth. Destroy the half of the grain harvest and bread will be twice as dear next year. Stop the production of cotton in EXCHANGE. 113 some American States and the Parisian joiners will pay more for their shirts. When a dock or a great warehouse is destroyed anywhere, at London or at Bordeaux, with the merchandise stored in it, the provision for the human race is diminished by so much, and the loss is distributed over all men. Pil- lage and robbery, we have already said, are equiva- lent to the destruction of property. This is why each of us is led by a natural impulse to put out fires, to repress crimes, to battle energetically with all the plagues which threaten the property of our fellows. This is why instinct, anterior to reasoning, saddens you at the news of a war or a shipwreck. Great epidemics, as well as wars and ship- wrecks, carry off a multitude of able-bodied persons, capable of reimbursing the human community the advances made to them. Thus, if you reason, your heart will be rent every time you are told of the destruction of men. Egotists will say, " What does the cholera matter to me, seeing it is in India? What do I care for civil war, if it is waged by Americans ? The Taepings have cut the throats of the population of a province, but I think nothing of that ; it happened in China." The following would be your reply to these unhappy persons blinded by their misunderstood interest, " Neither the distances which separate us, nor the diversities of origin, of colour, U4 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. and of civilization which distinguish us, nor even the misunderstandings which sometimes array us in arms against each other,, hinder humanity from forming a great body. The sum of useful things produced in a year on the surface of the globe con- stitutes the collective receipts of the human race; the sum of the products there consumed represents its outlay ; the total savings which are realized in a year is added to the common capital and makes hu- manity wealthier. The richer the great community of men becomes, the more useful things will the individual procure in exchange for his daily labour. Thus the simple workman who files and polishes metal in a Parisian garret is interested in the utmost possible quantity of silk being produced in China, the utmost possible quantity of wool in Australia, the utmost possible quantity of iron in Sweden, and in the small possible quantity of things being de- stroyed in these places : for the more that useful things abound here below, the better your labour and mine will be remunerated by exchange." Now, all useful things are the product of man, and of adult man. The day on which one hundred thousand adults fall in the field of battle, there are one hundred thousand producers the less, and the collective production of humanity decreases in proportion. I know that this great blank will soon be filled up EXCHANGE. 115 by fresh births, but one hundred thousand new-born babes do not replace one hundred thousand grown-up men. Twenty years will elapse before they aife good for anything, and, during these twenty years, the community of the human race to which we belong will have to support them on credit. The destruction of one hundred thousand men is thus a real loss, which is spread over the whole human race, the conqueror in this great battle not excepted. He has obtained the advantages he most desires for the time being. But quarrels are simply an accident in the life of humanity ; the most important political ques- tions have their day; the economic interest which renders all of us interdependent is eternal and un- changeable. Two nations go to war to-day, yet they prepare their samples for exchange in the great exhibition of to-morrow. I should think myself doing insult to my readers were I to insist at greater length on this point, but, unfortunately, it is not useless to demonstrate to my contemporaries two other truths equally certain. The first is, that all men, without exception, have a personal interest in instructing other men. The second is that all men, without exception, are per- sonally interested in enriching other men. I emphatically declare, in the teeth of the worth- less rich (if any remain), and of the wicked poor ii6 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. (if there be any), that human interdependence extends as far as that. Our destinies are so closely entwined by the bonds of exchange. Neither the rich nor the poor practise injustice for its own sake. But, just as each body of the state is subject to a professional malady, so is each large class of society liable to spe- cial prejudices. Now, the poor and the rich have always had courtiers who confirmed them in error instead of dragging them out of it ; who set them at loggerheads, instead of preaching peace and concord. For once that the rich hear it said, "It is your interest to en- rich and enlighten the poor," they are told twenty times in all strains, "Do not listen to those who banter on the plea of serving you. Every one for himself. You are wealthy, instructed ; thanks to God, you occupy a high position ; you soar to the extent of 200,000 francs got from the funds, above those who have nothing. For what purpose should you personally annihilate the distance w^hich makes your greatness ? I grant that it would not cost you any- thing ; that you could adorn the mind of Paul and give a pension to Peter without depriving yourself of a centime. You would no longer be what you were relatively to these fellows. They would pre- tend to, be on an equality with you; you would have EXCHANGE. 117 manufactured equals, and who then would clean your boots ? Society, when stable, rests on an in- equality of conditions. The poor are indispensable, were it only to serve the rich, and the poor are tractable only when their poverty is doubled by ignorance. When all men shall be able to read, there will no longer be a quarter of an hour's stability in the affairs of this world." The unfortunate, who, alas, are in a great ma- jority on the earth, do not require to be taught to detest the rich man's millions. Too honest to break open hie strong box, they experience a sort of agree- able tingling at the news that a scoundrel has forced it open. They will not set his house on fire, they will even go to extinguish the flames at the risk of their lives ; but if you relate to them that a certain man- sion is reduced to ashes, that a certain safe filled with gold or diamonds has disappeared in the hubbub, you will find them more ready to laugh than to cry over the occurrence. At whatever page we open history, we meet with an ignorant and suffering multi- tude which does not dread public disasters, which rather longs for them, just as the invalid, fatigued with being in bed, calls for the quack's poisons and knives, and which finds a sort of desperate consolation in dreaming about the demolition of the social edifice. 1 1 8 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. In every country, in every age, these unfortunates have had interested courtiers who told them, " De- stroy everything ; you have nothing to lose." Poor people ! You have everything to lose which other men possess around you. Your present condition is hard enough, I admit ; it would be unbearable, if some catastrophe deprived you of that which is not your own. All the abundance of things which saving has accumulated in other hands is not in your possession, for the time being, but it is at your disposal, at your service, within your reach. Does this imply that you have but to stretch forth your hand to draw upon the common treasure ? Not exactly, but it suffices to employ a rather more complicated gesture. Stir your arms, my friends, and exchange will permit you to draw upon all the treasures of the earth, upon the granaries of the farmer, upon the cellars of tho wine-grower, upon the stores of the manufacturer,* upon the coffers of the banker. Fortunate poor, indeed, you can choose out of all the riches of this world, on con- dition of furnishing an equivalent in labour. Rejoice, then, to witness around you an enor- mous accumulation of useful things, because the more of them there are the less they will cost, and thank fortune for having cast your lot in a wealthy age and country. Keturn thanks to the innumerable EXCHANGE. 119 generations of laborious and economic producers who have left so many fine and excellent things behind them. Five hundred years ago, in a century less fortunate than that in which you live, you would have had to labour four days for what now costs ten hours of toil. A thousand leagues off, in a certain country poorer than France, man has to make an effort four times greater in order to obtain less than you do. I commend this reasoning to the consideration of the working classes, that is to say, of those who, like myself, have brought no other capital into the world than their head and their arms. And, as this is a grave matter, I do not think I err in dwelling upon it for a little. Each of us, in order to live, requires to obtain two kinds of services ; firstly, real, contemporary, so to speak, simultaneous services : the baker, while kneading his dough, requires a wine-grower to harvest wine for him, a tailor to stitch his clothes, a washerwoman to wash his shirts. These diverse services are reciprocally exchanged among living persons. But human life, in a civilized country, requires services of another nature, whereof the source ascends far beyond our birth, which might be called the benefits of the dead. If you reflect for two minutes only, you will recognize that at the moment of your birth there were here below 120 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. houses built, furniture, implements, reclaimed land, wrought metals, furnishings of every kind, in a word, riches produced by labour, and that the authors of these things were nearly all dead before you were thought of. It may be said, without exaggeration, that the largest portion of existing riches is a bequest of the dead. The whole of these substantial things forms the capital of the human race. It consists of all which men have saved since the beginning of time ; in other words, of all which humanity has produced without consuming. But these bequests of the dead belong to their heirs, and the working man is not the heir of any- body. How shall he obtain a share of these riches, without which he cannot live? By exchanging a part of his actual labour for a fraction of consolidated labour. Out of the ten hours he spends in the workshop, there are six or seven which will be ex- changed, without his noticing it, for the time and labour of other working men, his contemporaries, who are toiling for him whilst he is toiling for them. The remainder is set apart to pay for the enjoyment or the possession of the durable things which existed on the earth before him ; the rent of his house, his furniture, his tools, the interest on the small sums he borrows, &c. On the other hand, the heir of the dead, landlord EXCHANGE. 121 or capitalist, performs an inverse operation : lie exchanges a part of his consolidated things for a certain quantity of actual labour. What does he do when paying his servants' wages ? He gives a portion of capital, or of old labour, for the equivalent amount of their labour. When he gives employ- ment, when he sends his housekeeper to market, when he buys a pair of horses, the act is always the same ; he exchanges, a product of olden date for more recent products with which he cannot dispense. Thus the holders of capital are absolutely in want of the working man's labour, just as the work- ing man, in order to lodge himself, to procure tools, to live, stands in need of capital. It is unfortunately certain that if capitalists were allowed to regulate the conditions of exchange by themselves, they would so contrive as to get much while giving little. Not less certain is it that if working men could arbitrarily fix the tariff of their services, they would cause themselves to be paid as dearly as possible ; but supply and demand interpose to balance these reciprocal claims. JSTow we have admitted, on the strength of experi- ence, that supply necessarily leads to a fall in prices, and that the more abundant merchandise becomes, the more of it can be procured cheaply. Thus it is evi- dent that the more capital, or consolidated property, 122 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. there is in the world, the working man will be able to get more of it cheaply, or obtain high wages, which is the same thing. Working men are interested in their handiwork being bid for by competing capitalists. It is at this price that they arrive at obtaining not only neces- saries, but superfluities, and at becoming capitalists in turn, if they are prudent, for the savings of the present form the capital of the future. Hence, instead of railing against the fortune of others, the working man ought to wish for as many rich men as possible. This must be demonstrated. As for you, rich men, you would do the most fool- ish thing in the world, if you should dream of perpet- uating the poverty and ignorance of others. Are you unaware that poverty and ignorance condemn the healthiest and most robust individual to a sort of quasi- sterility ? That the more one knows, the more one is able to produce ? That good intentions being equal, an educated working man renders ten times more services than an ignorant one? That tools, namely, the beginning of riches, often increase the quantity of useful labour tenfold and *a hundred- fold ? That actual, contemporary labour, with which you cannot dispense, will cost you so much the less the more it is offered, will be the more offered the more easy it is, and will be all the easier the 'better EXCHANGE. 123 it is enlightened or equipped ? I add, merely that it may be borne in mind, a consideration which has its value, namely, that the security of your persons and property will constantly increase in proportion to the degree of public well-being and education. "Will you now deny that self-interest, rightly under- stood, impels you to instruct and enrich those who are destitute ? Hence the poor man ought to wish for the opu- lence of the rich, and do so in his own interest. The rich ought to wish the poor to be well off, and do so out of pure selfishness. And social economy ascends to such a height that it merges into universal morality. For man's reason is indivisible, and there are no truths which cannot be reconciled with each other. What would happen if the poor, out of calculation, were to apply themselves to enrich the rich ? If the rich, out of a wise selfish- ness, were to apply themselves to enrich the poor ? Who would be the gainer in such an event ? Every- body. The area we inhabit is limited, but the production of useful things is unlimited. Oh ! how fine would be the victories and how vast the conquests if, instead of fighting against each other, we were to unite all our efforts against blind and stupid no- thingness ! CHAPTER VI. LIBERTY. have seen wise economy join hands with, morality and countersign, after her, the law of inter- dependence. Yesterday she said to you, " All men are brethren/' She comes and tells you to-day, " All men are free. Free to work when and how they please, to produce, to consume, to exchange, at the price agreed upon, things and services of every kind." This follows from the very definition of law. In principle, the indi- vidual rightfully does what he pleases, provided he harms nobody. His right has no other limit than the right of another. The sole barrier which stops him is the inviolability of other men, respected and sacred by the same title as his own. It is natural, therefore, that I should select from among useful labours the one that suits my faculties the best ; that I should produce the things I prefer to LIBERTY. 125 produce, that I should consume what I like of them, and that I should exchange the surplus, when in the humour, for the things which appear to me preferable. This deduction is so logical that one is almost ashamed to put it in writing for the instruction of an enlight- ened people. But in the moral as in the physical order of things there are mines as old as the world and dis- covered only yesterday. Gold lay long dormant in the Californiaii placers before it dazzled Europe and America ; the true notion of right long slumbered in the depths of the conscience before enlighten- ing the human race. Think, moreover, that, from the beginning of ages to our day, when we dis- cuss this great question in concert, there have been slaves here below ! Slaves, that is, men who do not belong to themselves, and who are like the hands, the arms, and the feet of another head. The first time that a conqueror, through satiety or through fatigue, would neither eat nor despatch his victim, he said to him, " I grant you life on condition that you live for me. Your labour belongs to me ; all that you produce will be mine, your children included, if I should allow you to cohabit. Enter this stable for men and wait there for your companions." Think that this noble France, in which we account it an honour to be born, did not abolish slavery throughout its length and 7 126 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. breadth, till 1789 and slavery in its colonies till 1848. Recall to mind that slavery is still a flourishing institution in four out of five quarters of the globe, and is maintained in a corner of the fifth. The slave's production is arbitrarily determined by his master. It is his master who says to him, " You must cultivate this piece of land/' or, " You must work a mill/' or, "You must educate my sons." The slave's consumption is regulated by his master : " Here are your clothes for the year and your rations for the day." Of exchange, between master and slave, there is no question. The one owes nothing ; the other owes everything. Between absolute slavery and absolute liberty occurs an intermediate form, tutelage. The free population of France remained in tutelage up to 1789. If you analyze in good faith and without carping, the principle of our ancient monarchy, this is what you gather from it : the king, delegated by Heaven to the government over a great people and over a vast territory, ought to represent Providence here below by securing, if possible, the happiness of his subjects. His absolute power is but an instrument which, he employs for the profit of some millions of men ; or, to speak more correctly, of infants, since all the French are minors in relation to him. As a father does in the case of his sons, so does he prohibit his sub- LIBERTY. 127 jects from indulging in what he considers exaggerated expenses. He publishes edicts against luxury at table, in carriages, or in clothes. Sumptuary laws, designed to limit each one's consumption, succeed each other from Charlemagne up to the last days of Louis XIY. And Diderot's JUncydopcedia, the most daring monument of the French mind prior to 1789, innocently desires that these laws should be put in force. A good father warns his children against the danger of reading bad books. The king reads all books before his people, and allows only the good to be printed, or those he considers good. Paternal authority assigns a career to each of the children. The king allows certain persons to follow professions from which he excludes others. He re- serves some for himself; he decides that a particular industry shall nourish at a particular place, in certain hands, and that no one shall meddle therein without permission. Each trading body is organized under the shelter of a good and solid monopoly; trade tends to become hereditary, as in Egypt, according to the ideal set forth by Bossuet in his discourse to the great Dauphin : " The law assigns to each one his profession, which is handed down from father to son. One must neither exercise two professions nor change the profession ; one does best that which one has 128 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. seen others do, in which one has been solely trained from infancy." The noblest spirit of the old rule, even when launching into Utopian speculations, went no further than an improved tutelage. Witness Fenelon in his imaginary monarchy of Salente. He fixes the quantity of land which each family may possess ; he imposes an official plan upon all private dwellings ; he determines the clothing of all the citizens accord- ing to their rank ; he draws up the bill of fare for each meal, limits the quantity of wine which they may drink, prohibits the consumption of liquors, of perfumes, of rich embroideries, of figured stuifs, of jewellery, of effeminate music ; he regulates the fur- niture of each family, plucks up half of the vines in the country, takes all the workmen employed in articles of luxury and sends them into the fields, de- crees fines and even imprisonment against those among the poor who cultivate their land badly, establishes " magistrates to whom traders render an account of their effects, of their gains, of their expenses, and of their undertakings. They were never permitted to risk the things of others, and they could not risk more than the half of their own. In other respects commerce was entirely free." What is your opinion ? It is not without design that I have cited two books written under the eyes of the great king, by LIBERTY. 129 two royal preceptors, for the instruction of the heirs to the throne. Royalty by Divine Right thought it did well in meddling with all things ; it imitated to the extent of its humble means the Providence on high which watches over everything, down to the smallest things of the world. The sovereign acted in good faith when he conferred monopolies upon nearly every industry, when he determined the conditions of capacity, of morality, of means, without which no one could be a jeweller, cabinet-maker, or draper. Whilst a certain number of citizens were excluded from industry on account of their inferiority, others were kept away from it on account of their nobility. A gentleman could neither work with his hands, nor trade in a small way, without losing caste. The king thought then, as did nearly all the people, that idle- ness was more honourable to man than hard or grind- ing labour. The king sincerely thought he was protecting his subjects by prohibiting the exportation of a particular product and permitting the importa- tion of another. Even up to the time of Colbert numbers of interior custom-houses were maintained, and these hindered the people of one province from exchanging their products with other Frenchmen, their neighbours. It was believed that all this con- tributed to the utmost prosperity of the people. 130 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. Authorized producers did not hesitate to prefer their monopoly to the general good ; but they were neither very happy nor very free. By granting privileges, the monarchy had, so to speak, doubled its responsibility; it knew this, and acted accordingly. The sentiment of its duty led it to regulate every- thing, to supervise everything, to control all products. A piece of cloth did not leave the factory, any more than a volume the printing-press, without the stamp and guaranty of the government. Logic compelled our kings to carry such a system to its extreme consequences. A father ought not to allow his children to treat each other like negroes and obtain too great a superiority the one over the other. It was necessary, then, to intervene between the buyer and the seller, between the lender and the borrower, between the master and the workman, not only to hinder fraud, but to limit the profits of each. Hence these laws relating to the maximum which traverse our entire history, and of which some, in virtue of an ac- quired speed, have continued to our day. To cite but one of them, the legal rate of interest was about 8 per cent, up to 1602, about 6 per cent, up to 1634, from 5| up to 1665, when the king fixed it at 5. An edict reduced it to 2 per cent, in 1730, but without effect ; in 1734 it was 3-J-, and rose to 5 in the following year. But the rate of interest was not the same in all the LIBERTY. 131 provinces of the kingdom ; the parliaments some- times refused to register the edicts, and besides, the laws of supply and demand had always more au- thority than the absolute power of the king. I put on one side all the injustices of the ancient regime, the arbitrary division of imposts, the in- equality of men elevated into a principle and corrupt- ing all contracts, the labouring class utilized for the profit of a handful of idlers, the tribute levied by the rich upon the labour of the poor, the tithes, the enforced labour, the socage tenure, the ban, the field- rent, without prejudice to the reasonable tax which the citizen ought always to pay to the State. I regard in this organization only the effects of royal tutelage and the injury done to good intentions. The good will of the kings was not doubtful ; they had a direct interest in making the fortunes of their people. It was for this end that they regulated every- thing, labour, rest, culture, industry, seed-time, harvest, production, and commerce, substituting their alleged wisdom for the alleged incapacity of the citizens. Social order appeared to be founded on the principle that man, when left to himself, is incapable of acting properly. The whole people walked in leading- strings, like a big child, directed by the king, and the prudence of the rulers combined with the patience of the governed conducted us straightway to ruin. 132 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. We have all heard it stated that the Bevolution o 1789 had substituted liberty for tutelage. Who among us has not felt his heart beat at the story of the admirable night of the 4th of August ? For my part, I know of nothing finer than that hecatomb of privileges and abuses spontaneously immolated by the privileged orders themselves. But if you read history a little more closely, the revolutionary period, despite its grandeur and its glory, will appear to you as a general suspension of every liberty. It seems that the sun had appeared an instant, only to be immediately eclipsed. The account of these ten years, which Europe regards with envy, may be thus stated : devotion, patriotism, civil and military courage, unlimited ; political and economic liberties, nil. I state this without accusing anybody. Political liberty is impossible at the period of a revolution. Each one pursues his ideal of government and sees conspirators in all those who do not think exactly as he does. Hence hatred, revenge, and measures of public safety. Economic liberties are no less incompatible with uncertainty and agitation in the public mind. Dur- ing the absence of stable and unquestioned laws, each one fears not only to be enslaved, but to be robbed or starved. In all the popular movements of our great LIBERTY. 133 revolution the leaders have been governed by a political idea, true or false, while the mass of 'the people have thought to solve a problem of social econ- omy, the question of bread. Hardly had the Bastille been demolished than the people of Paris cut the throats of Foulon and Berthier. For what crime? Because bread was dear; these unfortunate men were accused of forestalling corn. On the 5th of October, Paris threw itself upon Yer- sailles and forced Louis XYI. to occupy the Tuileries : it was supposed that his presence would lower the price of bread. As plenty did not arrive the bakers were attacked, and the unfortunate Francois was hanged from a lamp-post. When the weak become strong, when the op- pressed become free, their first impulse is not to use, but to abuse, their opportunities. Unshackle the hands of a worthy man bound without legitimate reason : he will not cast away the chain, but will carefully pick it up in order to fetter the hands of him by whom he was manacled. Were he to act otherwise, he would not be a man but an angel. This is why the ignorant masses, who then formed the majority of the French people, extemporized a social economy for their use and benefit. The poor man had been actually turned to account by the privileged classes : he did not in any wise content I 3 4 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. himself with helping to suppress abuses, but he desired to turn the tables on the rich, as the conqueror turns against his foe the pieces of cannon he has captured from him. The history of revolutionary spoliations is too well known to require me to narrate it. But one does not halt on the slope of arbitrary acts : the poor man went on to despoil the poor man, wherever he felt himself the stronger. For example, the buyers said one fine morning, in the market of Etampes, " Corn has been always assessed to our loss ; to-daj^, by our own authority, we will assess it to our profit." This was robbing the farmer, who, indeed, was not rich in 1791. The Mayor of the town ventured to defend com- mercial freedom and sound political economy ; he was murdered in the market. About the same time, in Paris, the Faubourgs thought fit to assess groceries after their fashion, and all the small tradesmen were ruined in a day. But those acts of violence, though unpunished by the Legislative Assembly, had no legal character. Two years later the Convention legally organized the ruin of all commerce by the laws about forestalling and the maximum. To be a forestaller of any kind was to withdraw wares of primary importance from circulation, grain, flour, bread, wine, meat, eatables, iron, leather, cloth, stuffs. Whoever possessed a certain quantity of LIBERTY. 135 them was bound, under pain of death, to put them on sale, in retail quantities, and the authorities fixed the maximum price of everything. And one be- came a forestaller on easy terms, for the Girondin Yalaze, in his report to the Convention, denounced Louis XVI. as being a forestaller of corn, of sugar, and of coffee. Poor man ! The newspapers had reproached him with the peaches he ate during the sitting of the 8th of August. From the pomt of view of commercial freedom, forestalling is neither a crime nor a misdemeanour, but it is often a piece of folly which costs its author dear. If any Parisian were to think fit now to buy up all the disposable grain in the market with the view of re-selling it at a rise next month, the mere announcement of a deficiency would make all the agriculturists of the vicinity rush to Paris with millions of hectolitres. It is necessary that the forestaller should buy all that is offered, or renounce any profit from his speculation. And, when he had bought all the harvests of the vicinity, all the neighbouring departments would hasten to the market, and, if he did not purchase everything again, he would see grain flow in from the East and the West, from the Korth and the South, from Corsica and Algeria. And were he rich enough to obtain possession of all the national reserves, Ger- 136 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. many, Belgium, England, Spain, Italy, Egypt, and Southern Russia would discharge their products in the market-place, and the imprudent speculator for a rise would only reap a fall. Corn was dear during all the Revolution ; the whole of France suffered from scarcity, the Paris- ians excepted, who, owing to an entirely despotic privilege, were fed at the nation's expense. Bread was given to them at the price of three sous the pound, three sous in assignats ! Now, there was a time when three sous in assignats were not worth the hundredth part of a silver centime, as 2000 francs in paper represented 15 sous. The country gave more than 90 millions in silver each year, in order to procure this small gratification to the in- habitants of Paris. Everywhere else, the necessaries of life were unprocurable for money, and the people were at their wits' end what to do. The people are always in the same trouble when they make a revolution, for revolutions inevitably bring about scarcity, and search as they will, they never lay hands upon the real forestallers. Alas, the unique cause of this dearness is the revolution itself. It dries up public prosperity at the fountain-head. Cheapness can only spring from plenty. Plenty can only proceed from labour. And there is no labour where security is absent, no LIBERTY. 137 security without the regular movement of national laws and institutions. The poor citizens of Paris obtained a fee of two francs, in silver, when they attended the meetings of their sections, and the sections met together twice a week. These four francs were not only a ridiculous subsidy ; they constituted a heavy burden levied on the labour of the provinces in order to hinder labour in Paris. All the governments which succeeded have ex- hibited to us a uniform spectacle. Authority has always been seriously occupied in covering with its tutelary care the economic interests of the citizens, and an Opposition, aiming at overthrowing Authority, has always promised another system of tutelage. Existing authority has protected, or fancied that it has protected, those who have possessions ; the aspirants for power have promised their protection to those who have nothing. An old field of battle, and always barren, despite the blood with which we have sprinkled it. Socialism, which can be discussed to-day without heat, delivered its last stroke before our eyes in June, 1848. It is not only conquered, but is disarmed, owing to the progress of enlightenment and the better state of the public mind. Among those who toil and suffer in French society, a thousand men cannot be found 133 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. who are so ignorant of their own interest as to seek alleviation in disorder and violence. The problem of universal well-being is not yet solved, I admit, but it is sensibly put, and that is a great point. It is important that workmen have learned to be on their guard against the charlatans of political economy, those sellers of the philosopher's stone who promise to double our riches by arresting the labour which produces them. It is important that the attempts despotically made to organize labour have miscarried before the eyes of the crowd, and that those who have inherited nothing comprehend that their salvation can only be found in liberty. It is important that a new power, sprung from the nation, and directly interested in procuring the happiness of the greatest number, has had the sense to abandon in principle the. system of tutelage, which has given proofs of its incapacity. You poor who would become rich (and you are right), ask but one thing from Heaven, the liberty peaceably to produce and save. The workman was to be pitied under Louis XIV., but he was still more miserable under Marat, and I dare not think of what he would have underwent under the frightful tutelage of Babeuf. Proudhon has somewhere said, " Every socialistic sect, from Licurgus to M. Cabet, governs by author- LIBERTY. 139 ity." And Proudhon himself would have required an authority more sovereign still than that of Louis XI V., to impose on the French people his pleasant utopia ; the suppression of money, payment of taxes in kind, confusion of legislative and executive power, abolition of judicial power, gratuitous loans, con- fiscation of net incomes, equality of fortunes, re- establishment of guilds, &c., &c. The beginning of Proudhon's wisdom is an arbitrary definition, that is, a despotic one, of value. Yalue, in our opinion, is the relation freely settled between two things and two kinds of service. According to the polemist of Besancon, value is the price of the return. The workman makes over to the consumer the product of his day's labour, reckons his expenses, and says, " I have eaten so much, drunk so much, my day's rent is so much; the cost of raw material and the in- terest on my tools are so much ; the expenses of my family so much ; I have laid by for the future, so much ; my assurance against dull times and the accidents of life, so much. Add up the whole, and you will get the exact figure of the wage due to me/' Happily for them, the producers who are Proudhon's disciples have never attempted to rate their services in this way. Ordinary good sense told them that such a claim would have put to flight consumers and con- tractors, and constituted to their prejudice a perpetual 140 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. suspension of work. They have modestly accepted the tariffs fixed by supply and demand, that is to say, the laws flowing from the nature of things, and I maintain that they have not done badly. Shall I say that everything is for the best in our social economy ? No ; but in recent times we have initiated a pacific revolution, which will end sooner or later in the emancipation of all active forces. And the liberty of production and of exchange will lead to an abundance of things such as our centuries of tutelage have never known or even imagined. The end is still far enough off, and is separated from us by obstacles a century old ; but it may be seen, and people and power, the one following the other, are moving towards it by a common effort. For the first time during a long period, power has been the first to act properly; the nation, hesitating at first and almost surprised, marches after and doubles its pace. What imparts the greatest interest to the times in which we live, and what will do honour to them in history, is the conduct of certain statesmen who one fine morning abjured the most venerable and inveterate errors. We have seen economic truth, confined during half a century in the study of a few thinkers, fly at a single bound as far as the throne. Monarchy by Divine Hight, in its last years, had foreseen and all but adopted the great idea which we LIBERTY. 141 proclaim to-day ; but no one, not even Turgot, could establish it. A power which has no other reason for its existence than the fact that it exists, is upheld, willingly or not, on what is raised around it. Facts, rights, truths, errors, all combine to form its casual solidity ; it perceives standing ground in every- thing environing it; it dares not touch anything through fear of shaking, by a false move, one of its supports. The sole government which can bring the best accredited errors to the test, is that which cannot itself be called in question because its legitimacy is founded on universal suffrage. Nearly always, nearly everywhere, the decisions of power more or less retard public opinion. In existing circumstances, we have seen the Tuileries clock decidedly faster than the country. It is certain that several changes wrought in social economy be- fore our eyes have surprised many citizens, and for a moment disquieted certain persons as to their in- terests. This is because we have been born in the midst of a state of things which is factitious and illogical, and in many respects iniquitous. A man with good sense, without prejudices of education, without pre- conceived ideas, who arrives at the head of affairs, must be struck with this economic confusion, and note each anomaly while saying to himself, Why ? 142 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. Why chould consumers, that is, all men, be con- demned to pay dearly for a bad or mediocre product when, by crossing the frontier, they can have a better one at a low price ? Why should the producer of corn be obliged to sell his harvest at a low rate on this side of the fron- tier, when the foreigner offers him a higher price for it on the other side ? Why should the Parisian be free to open a grocer's shop, and should not have the right to become a baker, butcher, cab-driver, broker, publisher, printer, manager of public entertainments ? Is there any logical reason why certain kinds of production should be open to every one, and certain others restricted to those who are privileged ? Why should judges, who dispose of the lives, honour, and the liberty of men, gratuitously obtain that quasi- sovereign authority without giving other guarantees than those of talent and virtue, whilst ministerial officers buy for hard cash the right to exercise their industry ? Why, in a country of equality, should masters possess the right to combine to prevent a rise of wages, while workmen run the risk of heavy pun- ishment should they unite to obtain an advance in wages? Why should the old law of the maximum still LIBERTY. 143 weigh upon bread, wliile it does not weigh, upon corn ? Why should the capitalist be unable to lend his money at more than 5 or 6 per cent., while nothing hinders him from letting his house for 20 or 30 per cent. ? These are some of the questions which spontane- ously presented themselves to the good sense of our new statesmen. They have taken up several others of which the enumeration would be too long here, but which are all under consideration, and which we shall see settled sooner or later. It does not belong to me to prognosticate in what space of time or in what order, the will which rules us may take these problems in hand. To do good is not everything ; it must be done at the right time, in making allowance for public and private interests. Every monopoly is worthy of being destroyed, but when a monopoly is a source of indispensable revenue to the State, it cannot be abolished as an abuse till after it has been replaced as a return. Every privi- lege is worthy of being suppressed, but in one case the pure and simple return to ordinary law would entail the spoliation of numerous individuals ; in another, society would lose guarantees it still believes to be indispensable. "What we can affirm is, that henceforth all per- sonal, industrial, and commercial liberties are ac- corded us in principle. Some have already passed 144 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. within the domain of facts ; inquiry has been instituted respecting the others. . In a few years we have obtained the abolition of passports, that is to say, the right to come and go without control ; the liberty of baking, of acting as butchers, of printing, of publishing, and of conduct- ing dramatic entertainments ; the abolition of the monopoly which governed the Paris cabs ; the right of combination which permits working men to strug- gle with arms of courtesy, but on a par with, their masters ; the liberty of brokerage ; the termination of the maximum which regulated the sale of bread ; a radical revolution in the Customs' system. All these laws and decrees are inspired by the same idea ; it is the prudent and progressive appli- cation of a single principle. The burdensome institutions, some of which have just been abolished, others modified, and others openly shaken, were all legacies of the past. In an unsettled state of society everything might be dis- placed in a day, and more logical foundations chosen, but an entire mass of errors and abuses subsists ; for a long time the tyranny of anterior facts must be endured. On the celebrated night of the 4th of August, privileges and corrupt appointments were suppressed together. Grades in the army and magisterial functions were gratuitously distributed LIBERTY. 145 by the ruling power to those who appeared worthy of them. As for the offices which, properly speak- ing, are industries, every citizen was free to hold them. The stock-broker, the broker, the auctioneer, &c., are but middle-men between the seller and the buyer. A middle-man is but a sort of producer, like any other ; whoever wished to play the part was welcome. The strong discipline of the government of the First Empire aimed at guaranteeing the interests of every one in giving to these enfranchised workers the quality and obligations of public servants. This was the fashion of the day. But, at least, Napoleon did not pledge the future. The ruling power may create the places it deems necessary, but it implicitly re- serves to itself the right to reduce or abolish them when they appear to be useless. It accords with equity that one should proceed considerately in the path of suppression, and that one should avoid disturb- ing laborious and honourable existences. Yet sub- ject to these reservations, the State has always the authority to render to every citizen the use of a natural right confiscated to the profit of a few. Suppose that the ministerial officers were still public servants, that no new engagement had been entered into by the State, from Napoleon I. to Napoleon III. it would now suffice to suppress with a stroke 146 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. of the pen, without compensation, a gratis privilege. But on the 28th of April, 1816, the government of the Restoration, being pressed for money, con- ceived the notion of borrowing several millions from ministerial officers. It, said to them, "If you will furnish caution-money, you will be allowed to no- minate your successors, or, in other terms, to sell your offices." There was no hesitation in closing with so advantageous a bargain, and at a stroke the min- isterial officers became the proprietors of their ap- pointments. On that day the Government thought fit to borrow at three per cent., and made an excel- lent bargain. Now the caution-money of stock- brokers (to cite but one instance) then amounted to 125,000 francs ; that was fifty years ago ; during fifty years each payment of caution-money yielded to the treasury an annual profit of two per cent., or 2500 francs yearly, or 125,000 francs every half- century. And the stock-brokers' appointments, w^hich the State has pledged itself to buy up, are each worth nearly two millions in Paris. The Custom-houses which abounded on our frontier, prior to the late treaties of commerce, these formidable Custom-houses, armed with absolute pro- hibitions and tolls quasi-prohibitive, were also lega- cies of the past.- By what series of arguments did kings, the LIBERTY. 147 shepherds of the people, arrive at conclusions like the following : " At two paces from ourselves a cer- tain excellent product is manufactured, far better than all those which we make of the same sort. This is why I forbid you to use it, for my first duty is to protect your interests." Or, better still : " That fabric, made in London, is not much better than our own ; you may then make use of it without inconvenience, and I author- ize you to buy it, but it has the defect of costing twenty-five per cent, less than our products of a similar kind ; it is necessary then, in your interest, that it should pay an import duty of thirty-three per cent." Or even : " Meat is scarce and dear, the people are badly fed. This is why no one must go and procure an ox in a foreign country, in order to bring it into this kingdom, under penalty of a fine of fifty-five francs." One does not argue irrationally for the pleasure of being absurd, and there is no error which is not justified by some good intention. The Custom-house system which, thanks to Heaven, has had its day, was dignified with the fine name of the protective system. Political power, or the government, was in- stituted to provide for the collective and indi- 148 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. vidual security of citizens against external enemies and internal evil-doers ; that is its part. But princes have long, far too long, thought that they were bound to enter into the minutest details, and to cast their protection over the petty interests of our kitchen and shop. Protect national industry ! Protect national agriculture ! Protect national com- merce ! And protect also the national consumption, for all citizens are not necessarily agriculturists, manufacturers, or merchants, whilst they are all obliged to be consumers, from their birth till their death. The French do not hate being protected ; they are a people of a monarchial temperament. But they do not all interpret protection in the same way. " Protect me ! " says the agriculturist. " I have had a good grain harvest ; my neighbours, less for- tunate, have barely doubled their seed. Before a month is over prices will rise, if the information in my newspaper be accurate. I hope to get thirty francs the hectolitre, and empty my granary under the best conditions in the world. I shall do this unless, through culpable weakness, the door is opened to foreign grain ! America threatens us, Egypt holds plenty suspended over our heads like the sword of Damocles ; Odessa, infamous Odessa, thinks to glut us with her produce. Help ! Let LIBERTY. 149 the door be shut ! Or, if you permit the import- ation of foreign grain, have the humanity to tax it heavily, in order that the cost of purchasing on the spot, the transport, and the import duty should raise the price to thirty francs the hectolitre ! If every- thing goes on as I should wish, I count upon pro- ceeding to Switzerland, and bringing back four pairs of oxen." " Protect me ! " says the grazier. " Shut the door upon foreign cattle, if you wish me to earn a liveli- hood. We are promised a rise in the price of meat, and I count upon it ; but the admission of Italian, Swiss, German, Belgian, and English cattle would create plenty for everybody and be my ruin. Protect me by prohibiting or by taxing all the products which come into competition-with me. Let grain enter ; I do not grow any, and I like to buy bread cheaply. Permit the entry, free of duty, of the com- bustibles with which I warm myself, the glass out of which I drink, the furniture which I use, the stuffs with which I clothe myself, and all manufactured products in general. Oh, visible providence of citizens, arrange so that I shall not have any competition to fear as producer, but that in what I consume I may enjoy all the benefits of competition." " Protect me ! " says the manufacturer. " Cause all the products which compete with mine to be seized at 8 ISO HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. the frontier ; or, if you suffer them to enter, load them with a duty which will render them unsaleable. The interest of the country enjoins upon you to serve my personal interest. Do you. not take pity upon the national industry doubly menaced by superior quali- ties and lower prices? My foreign comrades may reduce me to destitution by inundating France with good merchandise at cheap rates. As a citizen I fear no one in Europe ; as a manufacturer I am afraid of everybody. The feeblest foreigner is stronger than I. Strive then that I may preserve the monopoly of my products; but be generous as regards all that which I buy but do not sell. Allow grain to enter, in order that my workmen, being fed for next to nothing, may be satisfied with low wages. Allow the raw materials I employ to enter, and the machines which assist my labour." " Do nothing of the kind," exclaims the machine- maker. " If the foreigner should come and compete with me, there will be nothing for it but to shut up shop. Stop, or tax, the products which resemble mine ; content yourself with opening the door to the metals I use, and you will usefully protect the national in- dustry as far as I am concerned." " Hold, there ! " replies the iron-master. " If foreign iron be admitted, I must put out my furnaces. Leave me the monopoly of my industry ; only allow LIBERTY. 151 me to import freely the minerals and combustibles which are my instruments of labour." " No, a hundred times no ! " reply the shareholders in mines and coalpits, and the proprietors of forests. "Is our industry less worthy of protection than the others ? Now we shall be ruined if foreigners are permitted to introduce plenty and low prices amongst us." Deafened by such a concert, it is not surprising that statesmen should have been induced to tax all imported articles, or nearly all. Under a tutelary government which concentrated so to speak the people's initiative and responsibility in the chief's hands, the chief thought that he did well in accord- ing to each industry the kind of protection it desired. The mass of consumers, eaten up by all these privi- leges, did not know enough to put its fingers on the mischief, and besides, it had no voice in the council. Old social economy supported the protective sys- tem by patriotic arguments. It thought that the prosperity of a people was measured by the quantity of money it possessed, that it became impoverished by purchasing, that it became enriched by selling, that the acquirer was the tributary of the merchant, and that the best governed countries were those which supplied everything from their own resources with- 152 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. out asking anything from others. Such was the doctrine of the most enlightened Frenchmen in the seventeenth century and even up to the middle of the eighteenth. Boileau congratulated Louis XI Y. upon having mulcted " our neighbours of these servile tributes which the luxury of our cities pays to their arts." * Yoltaire in the " Man of Forty Crowns " explained the poverty of France by the amount of our import- ations. " Four millions must be paid to our neigh- bours for one article, and five or six for another, in order to put into our noses a filthy powder coming from America. Coffee, tea, chocolate, cochineal, indigo, spices, cost us more than sixty millions an- nually. We see a hundred times more diamonds in the ears, on the neck, on the hands of the ladies of Paris and of our great cities than were possessed by all the ladies at the court of Henry IY., including the queen. Nearly all these superfluities have had to be paid for in hard cash." When simple utterances of this character were signed by the greatest genius in the nation, can we wonder that the king thought he was acting well in tightening the chain of Custom-houses around us ? * Nos voisins de ces tributs serviles Que payait a leurs arts le luxe de nos villes. LIBERTY. 153 Note that the protective system, which was deemed wise, was a source of revenue to the govern- ment. By performing a good action, the king did an excellent stroke of business. The pleasure was two- fold. The more he strictly protected national indus- try, the more he swelled the budget. And the Customs' duties were among those indirect contribu- tions which the economists of the day preferred to all others, because the consumer paid them, so to speak, unwittingly. Consider, moreover, that at that time the interde- pendence of the human race only existed as a dream in the brains of certain fools. A national selfishness pre- vailed, as was shown in politics by the dread of being conquered (the European equilibrium) and in econo- my by the dread of being ruined, to the profit of foreign nations. Wisdom consisted in causing the money of others to enter our country, and in shutting the door against the foreign merchandise which might come and draw away our money. To oblige French citizens to pay ten crowns for that which was worth five across the frontier, was playing the foreigner a trick. In this way the ruling power was certain that everybody would confine himself to national products, and that, should an Anglomaniac get his clothes from London or his razors from Bir- 154 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. mingham, lie would indemnify the nation by paying the duty. But the foreigner used reprisals and taxed our products as heavily as we had taxed his. The war of tariffs went on during profound peace, and the people bore the brunt, according to custom. The more our kings forced us to pay dearly for the pro- ducts of English manufacturers, the more did the kings of England make their people pay dearly for our wine and other products. Custom's patriotism rose by degrees to the exaggeration which Benjamin Con- stant called the enthusiasm for rising prices. Posterity will be greatly surprised to learn from some old tariff, or still better from the luminous dis- cussions of Michel Chevalier, that at the outset of the Second Empire a ton of steel, designed for the manu- facture of the most indispensable tools, paid 1320 francs minimum duty at the French frontier ; that bed coverlets were taxed at 220 francs the 100 kilos; that carpets paid as much as 550 francs ; that foreign marble, the sole kind a sculptor can use, was weighted with a duty of 742 francs 50 centimes for a statue two metres high. But it will learn at the same time that our states- men courageously judged, condemned, and abolished, despite the interested opposition of thousands, a pro- LIBERTY. 155 tective system which chiefly protected the decay of industry and the poverty of the people. Decay, be- cause native producers, masters of the home market, secured by exorbitant tariffs or formal prohibition against foreign competition, conducted themselves in their manufactories like feudal lords in their domains. Nothing compelled them to perfect their products, since these products had not to suffer by comparison. They were under no necessity to sell cheaply, since similar products, even were the foreigner to give them away, could not affect the consumer's choice. By protecting the manufacturer's large profits, a draught was made on the consumer's purse, and the consumer, as we have stated, was everybody. If you take the useful things, which are articles of commerce, one by one, you will see that those who produce them are infinitely less numerous than those who consume them. If it be the interest of ten persons to sell dearly, one hundred thousand persons have an equal interest in paying cheaply for them. Therefore the true protective system is that which permits the con- sumer to lay in a stock at the lowest possible rates, whether at home or abroad. Liberty can alone teach nations the industry for which they are fitted, and determine national voca- tions. 1 56 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. The individual would be a fool if lie professed to build his house, grow his provisions, make his own clothes and shoes, in order to free himself from those " servile tributes," which he pays morning and evening to the labour of others ; nations would act absurdly in wishing to produce all that they require. It is enough that they put themselves in a position to purchase what they want. Soil, climate, race, educa- tion determine the industrial or productive faculties of every country. Let us not strain our talents, let us exercise them as far as they will go, and let us not blush at taking from our neighbours, on con- dition of a return being made, that which we cannot furnish for ourselves. A certain people is admirably situated for producing meat, iron, pottery, and Dickens's novels, but Nature denies it wine, oil, silk, industrial art, and the comedies of Dumas the Younger. Let it produce in superabundance the things which cost least to its soil and its tem- perament, and let it send us its surplus in exchange for ours. Universal Exhibitions would be huge painful spectacles if their result sooner or later were not absolute freedom of commerce. We should inflict the torture of Tantalus on the consumer were we to tell him, " This is what is made at your country's door ; it only costs so much ; but you wish to buy it, LIBERTY. 157 you must pay a fine of 15 per cent." The Custom- house officers, who watch at the gates of these bazaars of the civilized world, have always produced upon us the effect of a living contradiction : Attolite portas, principeSy vestras ! Princes, open the gates, and pro- gress will make the round of the world. CHAPTER VII. MONEY. HERE is an anecdote which struck my attention when I was very little, and which made me reflect before the time. It was in the first days of January, 1840. A poor man, one of those who conceal their poverty under a black coat, was resisting the demands of a creditor with difficulty. The creditor, his neighbour, had lent him twenty francs for a month ; six months had elapsed, and he was unable to repay the twenty francs. If the borrower were poor, the lender was not rich ; urged by some pressing need, he made a scene, as it is called. A little girl of twelve being attracted by -the noise, guessed the cause of the dis- pute, entered the adjoining room and reappeared with a large illustrated book, with gilt edges. She said to the creditor, " Sir, here is a book my god- father gave me as a New Year's gift, it is worth MONEY. 159 twenty francs ; take it ; now we are quits." Her father was moved even to tears ; the neighbour felt himself mollified ; he shrugged his shoulders, took up his hat and went off. "When we were alone, the girl turned towards her father, and said to him, " Why did not he take it ? He would now have been paid." " No> my little darling." " And why not ? " " It was money which I borrowed from him, and it is money which I must return to him." " But my book is well worth twenty francs ; it is written on the cover, and my godfather gave twenty francs for it. What matters it to that man whether he receives twenty francs or a thing worth them ? " " It is of great consequence, my child, and the proof is that he would have accepted twenty francs if you had them to offer, while he has refused your book/' " Then, papa, money is worth more than other things which are worth as much as it ? How can that be ? " Her father reflected for a moment, and replied, " Every- body is not in want of illustrated books, and every- body is in want of money. If you were to go and offer your book to the butcher, the baker, the wine- merchant, the fruiterer, these worthy people would all tell you that they had opened their shops in the street to attract pieces of money. The bookseller himself, who supplied your godfather with the volume, would not take it back from ouat the same 160 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. price ; he would tell you, My business is not to pur- chase, but to sell. Suppose, on the contrary, that you had twenty francs in real money in your pocket, you might make your choice among all the things sold at twenty francs. You might ask at pleasure for fifty kilos of bread, or twenty-five litres of wine, or ten metres of stuff like your gown, or three pairs of shoes, or a book like the. one given you as a New Year's gift. Everybody would hasten to serve you, because everybody, as I have told you, is in want of money. Do you understand ? " "I understand that money has the right of making its choice." " You have hit upon it." " Oh, Horrid money ! " " Because we have not any. But if one day I gain as much by my labour as I hope, you will be astonished. at the services it can render, and 'you will say, Charming money ! " Eight or nine years after this trifling adventure, I had left college ; I had read, translated, and got by heart a certain number of classical tirades against rascally money ; I was filled with admiration, like so many others, for the laws of Lycurgus and his iron money ; it had not been forgotten to teach me that poverty is the fountain of all the virtues. However, instead of blessing fortune for compelling me to drink from this consecrated fountain, I often rebelled against the unequal division of riches : I MONEY. 161 asked by what strange privilege the silver, of which I had not a grain, should procure all the good things of the world for its possessors ? I had heard it said (as you no doubt have) that silver is nothing by itself; that it acquires all its value from an understanding ; that nations have selected it as the representative token of wealth ; that kings have arbitrarily assigned to it a particular value. Certain newspapers of 1848 had penetrated through the walls of our Lyceum ; certain diatribes led us to understand that all the holders of silver made tools of, or tyrannized over, the people who had none of it ; we saw at the horizon the light of certain Utopias which were to emanci- pate man from the vile metal, and my heart swelled with joy at the prospect of universal prosperity through the medium of paper money. In fine, I was as unversed in social economy as all the bachelors of letters of my time and as nearly all the French- men of our time. One morning the petty chances of travel caused me to stop in a canton of Finistere where silver is extracted from the earth. Picture to yourself a gloomy landscape, a desolate land, an accursed spot, where it rains five days out of six. The mine yielded silver lead ore, that-is to say lead mixed with silver. To work it, machines and buildings had been constructed at great cost; two engineers, two fore- 162 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. men, a multitude of dirty and wretched workers, lived in this moist hell, remote from everything. I de- scended with them to the bottom of their subter- ranean workshops ; I followed them, lamp in hand, along the dismal levels where the earth, badly prop- ped up, flowed down in mud upon our heads. "When we had re-ascended to the light of day, an amiable and hospitable engineer conducted us to the furnaces where the lead was extracted from the ore, thence to the laboratory where the silver was separated from the lead. A few ingots of silver, taken from the crucible, were ready to enter into circulation. Do you remember the tirade of Robinson Crusoe, when, on searching the inexhaustible ship, he laid hands upon the captain's stock of coin ? " Here you are, then, vile metal, vile metal." "Well, then, I must admit, my impression was quite different. These unfortunate ingots, which had cost my fellow-men so much trouble, struck me with a certain respect. Silver appeared to me, for the first time, as a product la- boriously torn from the earth. I passed in review all the professions which yield it to man, and I did not observe one more hard than that of these miners. I said to myself, " The fact is, that silver is more easily earned than produced : these ingots cost very dear." As I had thought aloud the engineer replied to MONEY. 163 me, " They cost so much that, most likely, we shall make none in the coming year. Even the lead, which furnishes the greater portion of our returns, barely covers the expense of working. They speak about abandoning the mine ; this is unfortunate for all these worthy folks who earn their bread from it." " Aban- don a mine which yields silver ! Is that possible ? " " Indeed, if you had a field which it did not pay to cultivate, would you persist in tilling it ? Silver, like corn, is the product of labour. The difference is that the one is reaped from the surface of the earth, and the other from its depths. The one furnishes you with bread for your soup, the other a pleasant and wholesome spoon to take it with." He mentioned to me some silver mines which had been abandoned for the same reason that fields utter- ly worn out are not cultivated. I learned with astonishment that not only in Europe, but in America, the production of silver is always costly, frequently ruinous, and that in no part of the world is the vile metal to be picked up by the first comer. I said to him, " Thus the frightful mass of silver which encum- bers the earth under every shape, coin, silver plate, silver lace, silvered articles, and the rest, has been the product of labour as repugnant, as tedious, as thankless as this here ? " " You need not doubt it. Metallur- gical processes vary a little : here we have recourse to 1 64 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. smelting, in other places amalgamation is employed ; the engineers of Freyberg are rather more skilful than those of Guanaxato, but the miner's labour is every- where equally hard, and you will not find a piece of ten sous which has not cost at least ten drops of sweat. Besides, the precious metals are not as abundant as you think on the surface of the globe. One of our most illustrious masters, M. Michel Chevalier, has calculated that all the silver extracted from the mines of the New World would make a sphere of forty metres in circumference, in other words, a ball which, placed at the foot of the Yendome Column, would conceal exactly two-thirds of its height/' " So little ? Yet a Titan could carry that on his shoulders." " Mythology/' he smilingly replied, " has omitted to tell us how many horse-power each Titan represented. But rest assured of this, that several millions of labourers have died of the task of rolling this snow-ball on to us." " Poor people ! Frightful labour ! And for whom ? For a handful of parasites and idlers." The engineer looked at me, smiled again, and said, " No man is such a fool as to throw the products of his labour to idlers and parasites. You see these ingots ; I have done my part, like all those who have helped, directly or not, in extracting them from the earth. Detach, in your mind, a morsel of about two kilo- grammes: that is my last month's salary. What MONEY. 165 shall I do with, it ? I shall give a portion to those who feed me, another to those who clothe me, another to the good woman who washes my linen, another to the servant who takes care of my house. In short, I shall exchange this silver, the price of my labour, for the labour of twenty persons. The workmen who act here under my orders will do exactly- as I do. Each will receive a fractional part of these ingots, and will divide it around him in exchange for other things. We are manufacturers, we create a product, we divide it among ourselves pro rata according to our respective co-operation ; then we employ our portion in remunerating the services which we cannot render to ourselves. In the neighbouring market-town there is a baker who heats his oven at the hour we light our lamps. He is no idler, still less a parasite, and you would be very wrong in quarrelling with him, even were all these ingots now before you to be carried into his shop. He works for us, and we work for him. Now, you may hold it for certain that all the silver in the world is distributed according to the same law, from the moment that ingots leave the mine. As soon as extracted, so soon are they divided among those who have given form to them. As soon as divided, so soon are they exchanged for things and services of all kinds." This conversation raised silver in my esteem ; it 1 66 HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. taught me to consider the vile metal as one of the most interesting products of human energy. Some years later I met (also in France) a worthy man who occupied himself in producing gold. He was an Alsatian, one of those gold seekers of the Rhine, who look for the metal in the gravel of the river. His business consisted in washing, beneath the current, some kilogrammes of sand selected from likely spots, in order to sift out the specks of gold. It was hard work, and in addition, rather thankless : rheumatism was chiefly reaped from it. & Not that the specks were rare : in each cubic metre of average gravel you will find about 40,000, but they are so light that the stream carries many from Switzerland to Strasburg, across the Lake of Con- stance, without letting them drop by the way. From 17,000 to 22,000 of these specks are required to make a gramme of gold, about the value of three francs. My gold seeker earned on an average 1 franc 75 centimes a day. He has left off work to go to field labour, at which he will get 10 sous more. Thus gold is a product which may cost more than its worth. It is the most widely diffused of all metals, after iron which colours our fields and our rocks, the blood of man, and the leaf of the beech, but it is so greatly scattered, and is reduced into such small MONEY. 167 fractions, that often the amount extracted does not pay for the labour. However, you will say, there are countries where one has but to stoop to pick it up. Australia ! Cali- fornia ! Are the riches of the New World but an empty word ? No. The New World has supplied a considerable mass of gold, seeing that all the metal extracted from its mines from the time of Columbus up to last year, would fill a chamber of seven square metres by live in height.* But this result, which may not, perhaps, appear to you very imposing, is the price of incalculable labour. You have heard it said that in that country the grains of gold carried along by the brooks and torrents weighed infinitely more than the specks of the Rhine. That is true. You have been told that on a particular day, at a particular place, a pioneer has accidentally found a nugget which was a fortune. Agreed. There is a little more adventure, a little less industry, properly so called, in the search after gol