The division of labor and the perfecting of machinery, which should realize for the great working family of the human race the conquest of a certain amount of leisure to the advantage of its dignity, have produced at many points nothing but degradation and misery.....When A.Smith wrote, liberty had not yet come with its embarrassments and its abuses, and the Glasgow professor foresaw only its blessings...Smith would have written like M.
de Sismondi, if he had been a witness of the sad condition of Ireland and the manufacturing districts of England in the times in which we live.
Now then, litterateurs, statesmen, daily publicists, believers and half-
believers, all you who have taken upon yourselves the mission of indoctrinating men, do you hear these words which one would take for a translation from Jeremiah? Will you tell us at last to what end you pretend to be conducting civilization? What advice do you offer to society, to the country, in alarm?
But to whom do I speak? Ministers, journalists, sextons, and pedants!
Do such people trouble themselves about the problems of social economy?
Have they ever heard of competition?
A citizen of Lyons, a soul hardened to mercantile war, travelled in Tuscany.He observes that from five to six hundred thousand straw hats are made annually in that country, the aggregate value of which amounts to four or five millions of francs.This industry is almost the sole support of the people of the little State."How is it," he says to himself, "that so easily conducted a branch of agriculture and manufactures has not been transported into Provence and Languedoc, where the climate is the same as in Tuscany?" But, thereupon observes an economist, if the industry of the peasants of Tuscany is taken from them, how will they contrive to live?
The manufacture of black silks had become for Florence a specialty the secret of which she guarded preciously.
A shrewd Lyons manufacturer, the tourist notices with satisfaction, has come to set up an establishment in Florence, and has finally got possession of the peculiar processes of dyeing and weaving.Probably this discovery will diminish Florentine exportation.-- A Journey in Italy, by M.FULCHIRON.
Formerly the breeding of the silk-worm was abandoned to the peasants of Tuscany; whom it aided to live.
Agricultural societies have been formed; they have represented that the silk- worm, in the peasant's sleeping-room, did not get sufficient ventilation or sufficient steadiness of temperature, or as good care as it would have if the laborers who breed them made it their sole business.
Consequently rich, intelligent, and generous citizens have built, amid the applause of the public, what are called bigattieres (from bigatti, silk-worm).-- M.DE SISMONDI.
And then, you ask, will these breeders of silk-worms, these manufacturers of silks and hats, lose their work? Precisely: it will even be proved to them that it is for their interest that they should, since they will be able to buy the same products for less than it costs them to manufacture them.Such is competition.
Competition, with its homicidal instinct, takes away the bread of a whole class of laborers, and sees in it only an improvement, a saving;
it steals a secret in a cowardly manner, and glories in it as a discovery;
it changes the natural zones of production to the detriment of an entire people, and pretends to have done nothing but utilize the advantages of its climate.Competition overturns all notions of equity and justice; it increases the real cost of production by needlessly multiplying the capital invested, causes by turns the dearness of products and their depreciation, corrupts the public conscience by putting chance in the place of right, and maintains terror and distrust everywhere.
But what! Without this atrocious characteristic, competition would lose its happiest effects; without the arbitrary element in exchange and the panics of the market, labor would not continually build factory against factory, and, not being maintained in such good working order, production would realize none of its marvels.After having caused evil to arise from the very utility of its principle, competition again finds a way to extract good from evil; destruction engenders utility, equilibrium is realized by agitation, and it may be said of competition, as Samson said of the lion which he had slain: De comedente cibus exiit, et de forti dulcedo.
Is there anything, in all the spheres of human knowledge, more surprising than political economy?
Let us take care, nevertheless, not to yield to an impulse of irony, which would be on our part only unjust invective.It is characteristic of economic science to find its certainty in its contradictions, and the whole error of the economists consists in not having understood this.Nothing poorer than their criticism, nothing more saddening than their mental confusion, as soon as they touch this question of competition: one would say that they were witnesses forced by torture to confess what their conscience would like to conceal.The reader will take it kindly if I put before his eyes the arguments for laissez-passer, introducing him, so to speak, into the presence of a secret meeting of economists.
M.Dunoyer opens the discussion.
