Man can attain welfare only in proportion as his reason and his liberty not only progress in harmony, but never halt in their development.Now, as the progress of liberty, like that of reason, is indefinite, and as, moreover, these two powers are closely connected and solidary, it must be concluded that liberty is the more perfect the more closely it defines itself in conformity with the laws of reason, which are those of things, and that, if this reason were infinite, liberty itself would become infinite.
In other words, the fullness of liberty lies in the fullness of reason:
summa lex summa libertas.
These preliminaries were indispensable in order to clearly appreciate the role of machinery and to make plain the series of economic evolutions.
And just here I will remind the reader that we are not constructing a history in accordance with the order of events, but in accordance with the succession of ideas.The economic phases or categories are now contemporary, now inverted, in their manifestation; hence the extreme difficulty always felt by the economists in systematizing their ideas; hence the chaos of their works, even those most to be commended in every other respect, such as Adam Smith's, Ricardo's, and J.B.Say's.But economic theories none the less have their logical succession and their series in the mind: it is this order which we flatter ourselves that we have discovered, and which will make this work at once a philosophy and a history.
2.-- Machinery's contradiction.-- Origin of capital and wages.
From the very fact that machinery diminishes the workman's toil, it abridges and diminishes labor, the supply of which thus grows greater from day to day and the demand less.Little by little, it is true, the reduction in prices causing an increase in consumption, the proportion is restored and the laborer set at work again: but as industrial improvements steadily succeed each other and continually tend to substitute mechanical operations for the labor of man, it follows that there is a constant tendency to cut off a portion of the service and consequently to eliminate laborers from production.Now, it is with the economic order as with the spiritual order:
outside of the church there is no salvation; outside of labor there is no subsistence.Society and nature, equally pitiless, are in accord in the execution of this new decree.
"When a new machine, or, in general, any process whatever that expedites matters," says J.B.Say, "replaces any human labor already employed, some of the industrious arms, whose services are usefully supplanted, are left without work.A new machine, therefore, replaces the labor of a portion of the laborers, but does not diminish the amount of production, for, if it did, it would not be adopted; it displaces revenue.But the ultimate advantage is wholly on the side of machinery, for, if abundance of product and lessening of cost lower the venal value, the consumer -- that is, everybody -- will benefit thereby."
Say's optimism is infidelity to logic and to facts.The question here is not simply one of a small number of accidents which have happened during thirty centuries through the introduction of one, two, or three machines;
it is a question of a regular, constant, and general phenomenon.After revenue has been displaced as Say says, by one machine, it is then displaced by another, and again by another, and always by another, as long as any labor remains to be done and any exchanges remain to be effected.That is the light in which the phenomenon must be presented and considered:
but thus, it must be admitted, its aspect changes singularly.The displacement of revenue, the suppression of labor and wages, is a chronic, permanent, indelible plague, a sort of cholera which now appears wearing the features of Gutenberg, now assumes those of Arkwright; here is called Jacquard, there James Watt or Marquis de Jouffroy.After carrying on its ravages for a longer or shorter time under one form, the monster takes another, and the economists, who think that he has gone, cry out: "It was nothing!"
Tranquil and satisfied, provided they insist with all the weight of their dialectics on the positive side of the question, they close their eyes to its subversive side, notwithstanding which, when they are spoken to of poverty, they again begin their sermons upon the improvidence and drunkenness of laborers.
In 1750, -- M.Dunoyer makes the observation, and it may serve as a measure of all lucubrations of the same sort, -- "in 1750 the population of the duchy of Lancaster was 300,000 souls.In 1801, thanks to the development of spinning machines, this population was 672,000 souls.In 1831 it was 1,336,000 souls.Instead of the 40,000 workmen whom the cotton industry formerly employed, it now employs, since the invention of machinery, 1,500,000."
M.Dunoyer adds that at the time when the number of workmen employed in this industry increased in so remarkable a manner, the price of labor rose one hundred and fifty per cent.Population, then, having simply followed industrial progress, its increase has been a normal and irreproachable fact, -- what do I say? -- a happy fact, since it is cited to the honor and glory of the development of machinery.But suddenly M.Dunoyer executes an about- face: this multitude of spinning-machines soon being out of work, wages necessarily declined; the population which the machines had called forth found itself abandoned by the machines, at which M.Dunoyer declares:
Abuse of marriage is the cause of poverty.
English commerce, in obedience to the demand of the immense body of its patrons, summons workmen from all directions, and encourages marriage;
