The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Advertisement By the Editor.
• Plan of Lectures On Political Economy, For Winter 1800-1801.
• Outlines of Moral Philosophy. Part Third. [political Science.]
• Part III. *: of Man Considered As the Member of a Political Body. †
• Chapter I.: Of the History of Political Society.
• Chapter II.: Of the General Principles of Legislation and Government.
• Lectures On Political Economy.
• Errata.
• Introduction. of the Objects and Province of Political Economy. *
• [chapter I.]: [of the Title and Comprehension of the Science, In Its Most Extensive Meaning.]
• Chapter II. *: [of the Contents and Distribution of Political Economy Proper,—or of Part First.]
• [ Population. ]
• [ National Wealth. ]
• [ the Poor:—their Maintenance. ]
• [ Education.—prevention, Reformation, Correction of Crime. ]
• [chapter III.]: [preliminary Distinction of Positive Laws Into Two Classes; and the Relation of These to Political Economy Proper,—or to Part First.]
• Part First.—: of Political Economy Proper.
• [book First.]: [of Population.]
• [chapter I.]: Of Population Considered As an Article of the Natural History of Man.
• [chapter II.]: [of Population Considered As an Article of Political Economy.]
• [sect. I.—: Of Population As Affected By the Political Institutions Which Regulate the Sexual Connexion.]
• [sect. II.—: Of Population As Affected By the State of Manners Relative to the Connexion Between the Sexes.]
• [sect. III.—: Dependence of Population On the Means of Subsistence Enjoyed By the People.]
• [ Appendix. —: of the Means Which Have Been Employed to Ascertain the State of Population In Particular Instances. ]
• [book Second.]: [of National Wealth.]
• [chapter I. * ]: [of Productive and Unproductive Labour.]
• [sect. I.—: On the Circumstances Which Render Labour More Effective.]
• Chapter II.: [of Money, the Circulating Medium.]
• [sect. I.—: Of the Origin and Use of Money.]
• [sect. II.—: Of Real and Nominal Prices.]
• [sect. III.—: On the Effects of Plenty Or Scarcity of the Precious Metals Upon Prices.]
• Sect. IV.—: Of Money As the Standard of Value.
• [sect. V.—: Of Interest.]
• Appendices to Books First and Second.
• Appendix I.—: To B. I. Ch. II. § 3.
• Quotation On Population From Pinto.
• Appendix II.—: To B. II. Ch. II.
• Notes On the [ Parliamentary ] Bullion Report. ( Sent By Mr. Stewart to Lord Lauderdale, In February, March, and April, 1811.)

[SECT. III.—

DEPENDENCE OF POPULATION ON THE MEANS OF SUBSISTENCE ENJOYED BY THE PEOPLE.]

These remarks naturally lead me to consider how far the population of a country depends on the means of subsistence which the people enjoy.

[Subsect. I.—

Dependence of Marriage and Population on the Notion held in regard to the Competent Support of a Family.]

That a country cannot be peopled beyond its resources, is almost an identical proposition; and, on the other hand, it is no less certain, that population (wherever things are left to their own course) will advance till checked by this limit. The natural inducements to marriage are so strong, that no encouragement on the part of the politician is required, provided the circumstances of the society are such as to present to all orders of men a reasonable prospect of their being able to rear and educate a family, according to the ideas of competency which they have formed to themselves. It appears to me to be necessary to modify in this way the general proposition, which is commonly stated in too unlimited terms; for, in order to engage a man to marry, he must not only have a prospect of being able to provide to his children the necessaries of life, but he must have a prospect of being able to rear his family, without lowering that rank to which he has been accustomed; or retrenching any of those articles of luxury which, by habit, he has been accustomed to consider as essential to his comfort. It is possible, therefore, that of two countries which afford the means of subsistence in equal abundance, the one may be much more populous than the other, in consequence of the more moderate ideas of a competency which the generality of the people entertain.

Of this last remark, no proof more satisfactory can be produced than what is furnished by a comparative view of the state of population in England and in Ireland. Without entering into any nice computations of the number of inhabitants in either country, we may venture to assert, that, in the latter, the population is incomparably greater in proportion to its extent than in the former,—due allowance being made for the defects under which it labours, of police, of commerce, and of both agricultural and manufacturing industry.—The numbers in England and Wales are very variously estimated by different writers, according to their political prejudices; by Dr. Price, (in 1777, [Essay, &c.]) at less than five millions; by Mr. George Chalmers, (in his Political Estimate, [about 1791,]) at more than eight millions. The former is of opinion that the population of the kingdom has suffered a great diminution since the Revolution in 1688: the latter asserts, that during this period it has received an augmentation of a million and a half.—With respect to our sister island, notwithstanding the powerful obstacles which retard its progress, all accounts agree in admitting a great increase of inhabitants since the end of the last century. In 1657, the number was computed by Sir William Petty to be 850,000; and in 1672, to be 1,100,000.1 In 1688, it has been estimated at 1,200,000. At present different opinions have been adopted concerning its actual population, but all of them admit, that the augmentation has been remarkably rapid. Mr. Young states it in the year 1779 as under three millions, according to the common belief then entertained by those with whom he conversed in the course of his agricultural tour.2 Mr. Howlett, from documents transmitted to him in 1786, by Mr. Beresford, then first Commissioner of the Irish Revenues, states it as amounting at least to two millions and a-half; and concludes that since the time of the Revolution it has nearly doubled.3 Mr. Chalmers computes it, in 1791, at no less than 4,193,158, asserting that, during the last hundred years, Ireland has done much more than trebled its inhabitants.4 From the Report of the Secret Committee of the Irish Parliament, published last summer, (1798,) Dr. Emmet appears to have stated the actual population of that country at “five millions, whereas, at the time of the Revolution, it did not exceed a million and a half.” [Addition:]—Lord Castlereagh, in his speech, (February 5, 1800,) “on delivering to the House of Commons of Ireland the Lord-Lieutenant’s message on the subject of a union with Great Britain,” estimates the population of Ireland from 3,500,000 to 4,000,000. This he mentions as the common computation at present; and as he may be presumed, from his official situation, to have availed himself on such an occasion, of all the most authentic sources of information, I should be disposed amidst so great a diversity of statements, to adopt his numbers in preference to any of the others.

This very extraordinary increase in the population of Ireland, (admitted by writers of the most opposite political views,) is to be ascribed almost entirely to the peculiar habits of the lower orders, in consequence of which they find it so much easier than the English peasantry, to satisfy their wants in the two great articles of habitation and food. Something, undoubtedly, must be placed to the account of the comparative advantages they enjoy, in being free from the oppression of the English Poor Laws, and the consequent Laws of Settlement;1 and also to the account of their common food, (potatoes,) which experience has shown to go much farther to the support of animal life than wheat, or any of the other sorts of grain employed for food in this part of the world that can be raised on the same extent of surface.2 But that the circumstances I mention are by far the most important, may be inferred from the following statements, for which we are indebted to a very intelligent observer, (Mr. Young,) who made an agricultural tour in Ireland, in the years 1776, 1777, and 1778.

“In England, where the poor are, in many respects, in such a superior state, a couple will not marry unless they can get a house to build, which, take the kingdom through, will cost from twenty-five to sixty pounds; half the life, and all the vigour and youth of a man and woman, are passed before they can save such a sum; and when they have got it, so burthensome are poor to a parish, that it is twenty to one if they get permission to erect their cottage. But in Ireland, the cabin is not an object of a moment’s consideration; to possess a cow and a pig is an earlier aim; the cabin begins with a hovel that is erected with two days’ labour, and the young couple pass not their days in celibacy for want of a nest to produce their young in. If it comes to a matter of calculation, it will then be but as four pounds to thirty.” . . . . “Of their food (potatoes) there is one circumstance which must ever recommend it, they have a belly-full, and that, let me add, is more than the superfluities of an Englishman leave to his family. Let any person examine minutely into the receipt and expenditure of an English cottage, and he will find that tea, sugar, and strong liquors can come only from pinched bellies. I will not assert that potatoes are a better food than bread and cheese, but I have no doubt of a belly-full of the one being much better than half-a-belly-full of the other, still less have I, that the milk of an Irishman is incomparably better than the small-beer, gin, or tea of the Englishman, and this even for the father, how much better must it be for the poor infants? Milk to them is nourishment, is health, is life.

“If any one doubts the comparative plenty which attends the board of a poor native of England and Ireland, let him attend to their meals. The sparingness with which our labourer eats his bread and cheese is well known: mark the Irishman’s potato bowl placed on the floor, the whole family upon their hams round it, devouring a quantity almost incredible, the beggar seating himself to it with a hearty welcome, the pig taking his share as readily as the wife, the cocks, hens, turkeys, geese, the cur, the cat, and perhaps the cow,—and all partaking of the same dish. No man can have been often a witness of it, without being convinced of the plenty, and I will add, the cheerfulness that attends it.”*

The same author adds in another passage:—“Marriage is certainly more general in Ireland than in England: I scarce ever found an unmarried farmer or cottar; but it is seen more in other classes, which with us do not marry at all; such as servants: the generality of footmen and of women servants in gentlemen’s families, are married, a circumstance we very rarely see in England. Another point of importance is their children not being burthensome. In all the inquiries I made into the state of the poor, I found their happiness and ease generally relative to the number of their children, and nothing considered as such a misfortune as having none. Whenever this is the fact, or the general idea, it must necessarily have a considerable effect in promoting early marriages, and consequently population.”*

It is not, however, by preventing marriages that the poverty of the lower orders chiefly obstructs population. The attachments of sex, and the fond hopes of domestic bliss which a youthful imagination inspires, are motives too powerful to be always regulated by the suggestions of prudence; and in the humbler walks of life, where vanity and ambition have little influence, they are sufficient to blind the judgment to all considerations of futurity. In such circumstances the indigence of the parents, while it renders the conjugal union a source of constant anxiety and despondence to themselves, is attended with consequences equally fatal to the community. “The tender plant,” as Mr. Smith has observed, “is produced, but in so cold a soil, and so severe a climate, soon withers and dies. It is not uncommon in the Highlands of Scotland, for a mother who has borne twenty children, not to have two alive. Several officers,” he continues, “of great experience, have assured me, that so far from recruiting their regiments, they have never been able to supply it with drums and fifes from all the soldiers’ children that were born in it. A greater number of fine children, however, is seldom seen anywhere than about a barrack of soldiers. Very few of them it seems, arrive at the age of thirteen or fourteen. In some places, one-half the children die before they are four years of age, in many places before they are seven, and in almost all places before they are nine or ten. This great mortality, however, will everywhere be found chiefly among the common people. Though their marriages are generally more fruitful than those of people of fashion, a smaller proportion of their children arrive at maturity.”1

These observations will be found more peculiarly applicable to the very lowest order of the people. Those who have literally nothing, and who are beggars by profession, are very seldom unwilling to burden themselves with the cares of a family. Not to mention that a numerous offspring is rather an assistance to them in carrying on their trade, their ordinary habits gradually inspire them with a greater degree of confidence in looking forward to the future, than is felt by men who exist, but who are barely able to exist by their own industry. That beggary which appears to the bulk of mankind the most dreadful of all calamities they have already experienced; and by this experience they have learned what philosophy in vain attempts to teach others, to make the important distinction between the evils of reality and those of the imagination. Thoughtless of the future, they enjoy the little which the present moment affords them, and trust for to-morrow to that kind Providence which has hitherto supplied all their necessities.

What I have here remarked with regard to common beggars, is applicable also to those who have actually experienced the evils of want, and to whose imaginations the idea of beggary is become familiar. If this order of men contribute little towards the population of the State, it is not from their remaining in a state of celibacy, but from the little care they take in rearing and educating their children. The effects of an unequal distribution of property in discouraging marriage, are chiefly confined to the middling ranks of a people, who in consequence of those ideas which we imbibe in our earliest infancy, (particularly in the monarchies of modern Europe,) are led to form notions of a competency disproportionate to the state in which they are born, and to consider it as the great object of human life, to rise above the rank which they inherit from their forefathers.

From the observations already made, it appears that population does not depend solely on the fertility of the soil, and the industry of the inhabitants; but on these circumstances, combined with the habits and ideas which are generally prevalent concerning the necessaries and accommodations of life. Nor is this all. Much depends on the particular kind of food on which the great body of the people is accustomed to subsist. In the savage state, while men trust entirely to the fortunes of the chase, we find tribes consisting of a few hundreds, spread over regions equal in extent to the largest kingdoms in Europe. From this state to that of pasturage, the transition was of immense consequence in the progress towards improvement; but the last step is of all the most important, when human industry comes to be chiefly directed to the cultivation of the soil, with a view to the rearing of grains and of other esculent vegetables. In this form a given extent of land may be rendered incomparably more productive for the use of man, than in any other in which it can be employed; and it is fortunate, (at least in so far as population is concerned,) when the habits of a people dispose them to prefer that species of sustenance, which is so strongly recommended to them by the economy of nature; more especially when the kind of vegetable which is used for daily bread possesses the advantages which are experienced from potatoes in Ireland, and from rice in some eastern countries.

It is universally allowed that a rice-field produces a much greater quantity of food than the most fertile corn-field; and accordingly, in those countries where it is the common vegetable food of the people, the population is represented as immense. This is remarkably the case in Hindostan, where the natives are prohibited by the laws of their religion to eat the flesh of animals. There the population is great, notwithstanding all the disadvantages that the country labours under, in respect of government;—disadvantages of a peculiar description, as they unite all that is oppressive in a despotism, with all the instability and vicissitude which are commonly connected with popular constitutions.

The food produced by a field of potatoes is much superior to what is produced by a field of wheat, and (according to Mr. Smith) is not inferior in quantity (although not perhaps equal in nutritious power) to that produced by a field of rice. “Should this root,” he observes, “ever become, in any part of Europe, like rice in some rice-countries, the common and favourite vegetable food of the people, so as to occupy the same proportion of the lands in tillage which wheat and other sorts of grain for human food do at present, the same quantity of cultivated land would not only maintain a much greater number of people, but the labourers being generally fed with potatoes, a greater surplus would remain after replacing all the stock, and maintaining all the labour employed in cultivation. A greater share of this surplus too would belong to the landlord. Population would increase, and rents would rise much beyond what they are at present.”*

“It is difficult,” the same author adds, “to preserve potatoes through the year, and impossible to store them like corn, for two or three years together. The fear of not being able to sell them before they rot, discourages their cultivation, and is perhaps the chief obstacle to their ever becoming in any great country, like bread, the principal vegetable food of all the different ranks of the people.”†

It has been remarked by some late writers, that “in England, notwithstanding the produce of the soil has been in our times considerably increased by the enclosure of wastes, and the adoption, in many places, of a more successful husbandry, yet we do not observe a corresponding addition to the number of inhabitants;” and this has been ascribed “to the more general consumption of animal food. Many ranks of people, whose ordinary diet was, in the last century, prepared almost entirely from milk, roots, or vegetables, now require every day a considerable portion of the flesh of animals: and hence a great part of the richest lands of the country are converted into pasturage. Much also of the bread-corn, which went directly to the nourishment of human bodies, now only contributes to it, by fattening the flesh of sheep and oxen.1 The mass and volume of provisions are hereby diminished; and what is gained in the melioration of the soil, is lost in the quality of the produce.” “This consideration,” says Mr. Paley, “may satisfy us, that tillage, as an object of national care and encouragement, is universally preferable to pasturage; because the kind of provision which it yields, goes much farther in supplying the essential wants of human life.” “Indeed, pasturage,” he adds, “seems to be the art of a nation, either imperfectly civilized, as are many of the tribes which subsist by it in the internal parts of Asia, or of a nation like Spain, declining from its summit by luxury and inactivity.”2

It cannot be denied that there is some foundation for these remarks, but they are certainly expressed in too unqualified a manner. Whatever a people principally consume as the means of their subsistence, must necessarily be the great object of the husbandman in his culture. Thus, in France, where bread is said to form nineteen parts in twenty of their food, corn, and especially wheat, is the only great object of their cultivation. In England, on the contrary, the quantity of meat, and of the produce of the dairy consumed by all ranks, is immense. Hence, to our farmer, cattle is an object no less important than corn; and, accordingly, vast quantities are kept in proportion to what we find in France. It would be rash, however, to draw any inference from this fact in favour of French husbandry as compared with English. It leads, in truth, to a conclusion directly opposite, in the opinion of a very competent judge, Mr. A. Young, who has paid more attention than any other individual to the agriculture of both countries.

“Let us consider,” says Mr. Young, “on what principles the farmers of England and of France must necessarily manage their lands. In England, they keep such parts of their lands in meadow and pasture as are by the nature of the soil so adapted; and throw their arable land into such courses of crops, that several are introduced, which are either summer or winter food for cattle.” Upon this system, for the details of which I must refer to Mr. Young’s work, a considerable part of the whole farm, and a large portion of what is arable, are employed for cattle; the quantity of dung raised is, of course, very great, which being spread, as it usually is, on the arable fields, insures great returns; so much better than if such stocks of cattle were not kept, that I question if three acres are not quite as productive as five would be. “Nay,” says Mr. Young, “I have in this point no doubt but the barley and wheat in a farm thrown into a proper course, with a due proportion besides of meadow, yield a greater value than the corn in general would if one year was fallow, and the three following ones were wheat and barley;—of such importance is this system of manuring.”*

In the French system of husbandry, (which Mr. Young has likewise described particularly,) much the greatest part of the farm is arable;—the meadow and pasture being very trifling, except in spots that cannot otherwise be applied, and near great towns. Thus very little cattle can be kept except for tillage; in very many farms no other. Here we find manuring cut off at once, almost completely, and consequently the crops must be poor. Besides this, one-half or one-third of the land is fallow, at a mere barren expense; a system, which we know from the experience of our own open fields, is miserable, and not to be compared for profit to those in which crops for cattle are made the preparation for corn.

“Wheat being in France the great object, all the expense of the farmer is applied to its production. A year’s fallow is given, and what little dung they raise is all spread on it. This produces a middling, perhaps a good crop; and when the farmer reaps his wheat, he often finds himself out of pocket, and has to depend for his profit on a poor crop of spring corn. Thus the little demand for meat, and the produce of the dairy, obliges him to confine his views to corn alone. The consequence is, he pursues a bad course of crops; he raises no manure, his produce is small, and his profit comparatively nothing.

“It must surely be evident to every one, that there is a great advantage to the English farmer, from corn and cattle being in equal demand, since he is thereby enabled to apply all his lands to those productions only to which they are best adapted; while, at the same time, the one is constantly the means of increasing the produce of the other.

“To suppose, therefore,” continues the same writer, “that we should be more populous, if we lived as much on bread as the French, is an idea that seems doubtful. It is a strange position at best, that bad husbandry should add to our population; and yet this is a necessary consequence of the proposition in question; for if the demand for meat is changed to an increased one for wheat, the farmers must change their good course to the bad one of the French, by abandoning those crops which form the best preparation for corn.

“In so far as population is concerned, the question comes to this, Whether a tract of land, applied to yielding bread, will yield more than if applied to bread and meat?” Mr. Young endeavours to show, that in the latter form it is far more productive than in the former. For the details of his argument, in support of this opinion, I must refer to his book, contenting myself with stating his general result; that “where tillage and pasturage are properly combined, so as to have the farms from one-third to half of meadow or pasture; and the other two-thirds or half thrown into a proper course for the winter support of the cattle, such a farm will be found to feed more men than if it is all ploughed up, and as much wheat as is possible raised upon the French system.”1

Of the justness of Mr. Young’s reasonings, in so far as they involve a knowledge of agricultural practices, I am not a competent judge. But one general conclusion may be safely deduced from them; that in this part of the world, if the use of animal food were abandoned, after the use of some Eastern nations, the plan would at least in part defeat itself. In those climates where water alone renders the soil perpetually fertile in producing vegetable food, such habits are not disagreeable to the physical circumstances of the inhabitants, and an immense population is almost a necessary consequence. But here the physical economy of nature points out a mixture of animal and of vegetable food; the fertility of the soil failing when it is kept constantly in tillage, and cattle supplying that species of manure which is most effectual in adding to its produce.

After all, it is far from being impossible that the luxury of this country may have carried the demand for animal food beyond its due proportion.1 . . . . .

But whatever opinion may be formed on this point, it is evidently a matter which no law should attempt to regulate; and the same observation may be applied to the complaints which have been founded on the cultivation of hops, and madder, and other crops which do not afford food for man. In all such cases the husbandman is the best judge of his own interest; and when he increases his private wealth, he employs the most effectual means in his power for advancing that measure of population which is useful to his country.

I cannot help remarking also in this place, (although the observation is not connected immediately with our present subject,) the inconsistency of the remonstrances which some avowed friends to agriculture have made against the waste of animal and vegetable food occasioned by modern cookery. The French economists expressly brand this species of luxury by calling it—“an inversion of the natural and essential order of national expenses, which increases the mass of unproductive expenses to the prejudice of those conducing to production.” The true encouragement to agriculture, (as will afterwards appear,) is the extension of the market for the commodities it furnishes; and the effect is the same to the farmer, whether the market is opened by the necessities of the industrious orders, or by the extravagance of the opulent.

One political benefit, too, it must not be forgotten, arises from the waste of food in years of plenty, (however blameable this waste may frequently be on the part of individuals,) that by increasing the demand for the productions of the earth, it operates like a freedom of exportation, in securing a regular surplus to meet the occasional pressure of a scarcity.

It is with peculiar pleasure I add, that in such an emergency there is now every reason to hope that additional resources may be derived from the prosecution of such experiments as Count Rumford has lately begun with so much credit to himself, on the subject of Nutrition.

The reasonings which have been already offered, are sufficient to shew in general, how intimately the state of population in a country is connected with the state of its agriculture, and that the most effectual measure a lawgiver can employ for advancing the former, is to give every possible encouragement to the latter. I do not speak here of such direct rewards to the husbandmen as were held out by the legislators of antiquity, and which probably would not produce much effect in the present state of society. I have in view merely the care which the statesman should take to secure to the husbandman the complete and exclusive enjoyment of the fruits of his own industry; the only effectual and universal excitement in this or any other employment to human labour. All therefore that the laws can do, is to secure this right to the occupier of the ground; so that the full and entire advantage of every improvement go to the benefit of the improver; that every man may work for himself and not for another; and that no one share in the profit who does not contribute to the production.1 These are advantages which, in former times, the husbandman enjoyed nowhere, and which, in many parts of Europe, he still enjoys in a very imperfect degree.

In order to illustrate this general and fundamental principle, it is necessary for me to take a pretty wide compass, and to treat at some length of Agriculture and Manufactures, considered in their relation to Population.

[Subsect. II.—

Of Agriculture and Manufactures, considered in relation to Population.]

[i.—

And first, of Population in connexion with Agriculture.]

The various circumstances which conspired to discourage Agriculture in the ancient state of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the gradual steps by which the lower orders raised themselves from a servile condition to that comparative independence in which we now see them, have been very fully and ingeniously illustrated by Mr. Smith.*

[1. Kinds of Farm Tenure.]—In all the countries of Europe, during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, slaves seem to have formed the most numerous part of the community. In France, about the time of the commencement of the third race of kings, all the ground was cultivated by slaves, and the towns were chiefly filled by people of the same description. It appears, from Doomsday Book, that the case was nearly the same in England at the time of the Conquest.

Among the causes which favoured, in the first instance, the rise of the lower orders, Lord Kames† lays particular stress on the extensive estates into which land property was divided; and which forced the proprietors, for their own interest, to encourage, by a more liberal policy, the industry of those cultivators whom they could not (as on a small farm) place under the immediate inspection of an overseer. This soon suggested the idea of making the bondman a colonus partiarius, by communicating to him a proportion of the product, in place of wages. The proprietor furnished him with the seed, cattle, and instruments of husbandry; and the tenant became bound to pay a certain proportion of the fruits. Tenants of this description are called in French, Métayers; and we are told by M. Turgot, in a book published in 1766,‡ that at the period when he wrote, five parts out of six of the whole kingdom of France were thus cultivated. In Picardy, Normandy, the environs of Paris, and the greater part of the provinces of the north of France, the ground was cultivated by farmers who employed their own stock, paying a certain rent to the landlord. In the south, the land was almost universally laboured by métayers. The same author adds, that “the different effects of the two modes of cultivation were such as to strike the most careless observer.” And that this must have been the case, no person can doubt who has attended to the consequences produced by tithes in the other part of our island.

“It is evident,” says Mr. Smith, “that it never could be the interest of a colonus partiarius to lay out in the farther improvement of the land, any part of the stock which he might save from his own share of the produce; because the proprietor who laid out nothing was to get one half of whatever was produced. In France, accordingly, it was a common complaint, that the métayers took every opportunity of employing their master’s cattle rather in carriage than in cultivation; because in the one case they got the whole profit to themselves, in the other, they shared them with their landlord.”*

To this species of tenantry succeeded, though by very slow degrees, farmers properly so called, who traded upon their own stock, and paid a fixed rent for the land they possessed. By this means the tenant came to be excited to yet greater industry, by having the whole benefit of it to himself; and the advantages experienced from this, naturally led the way to the last step of the progress, which was giving the tenant a lease for a certain term of years, and thereby encouraging him to undertake still more extensive and costly plans of improvement. It was long, however, before this progress was completed in any country of Europe; and in many parts of it much remains to be done at this day. Even in England, till the reign of Henry VII., a farmer could be legally outed of his lease before the expiration of his term, by the fictitious action of a common recovery; and it was not till the period now mentioned, that the lessee was protected against these contingencies, and his interest rendered secure and permanent. This security in the condition of the English farmers, together with some other circumstances peculiarly favourable to the yeomanry of that country, have (in the opinion of Mr. Smith* ) contributed more to the present grandeur of England than all her boasted regulations of commerce taken together. When we reflect on these circumstances, it cannot fail to excite our surprise, that in a country so distinguished for liberality, and where the happy consequences resulting from an equitable system of laws have been so long experienced, there should still be found, among the English proprietors of land, so large a proportion of individuals, who either grant no leases, or grant them under such restrictions as defeat, in a great measure, the beneficial purposes for which they are calculated. This is the more wonderful, as the practice seems formerly to have been different; and that, even at present, the prevailing system is loudly condemned by all those whose opinions might be expected to possess any authority. It is reprobated unanimously by the respectable writers who have drawn up the county surveys for the Board of Agriculture; all of whom concur in ascribing to leases whatever improvements have been made by the farmers of England.

In the history of this part of rural economy among our southern neighbours, several stages are remarked by one of these writers. “The first,” he observes, “was probably leases for lives, formerly it should seem very general, and still far from being uncommon. The second step seems to have been a transition into the opposite extreme of no leases at all, by far the most general tenure by which lands are rented at present. The third originated in an attempt to remedy the evils of the second, by granting leases (at first) for three years, and afterwards for five, seven, nine, eleven, and sometimes for fourteen years, loaded, however, with restrictions upon the management and culture of the lands. The fourth and last, is leases founded on more just and enlightened principles, extending to such a term as to give complete encouragement to the industry of the husbandman, by affording him a prospect of recovering before his removal all his advances with a competent profit. From a rough calculation, founded on an examination of the different surveys, it has been inferred, that if we divide England and Wales into five parts, probably two-fifths are farmed by tenants at will,—that is, by tenants whose security is only from year to year; one-fifth by tenants for life; one-fifth by the owners themselves; and probably much less than the remaining fifth by tenants for a term of years. Of this last portion it should seem, besides, that there is hardly one-fifth (that is one-twenty-fifth of the whole) farmed in lease for twenty-one years; the rest being let from three to fourteen. Calculations of this sort, it is hardly necessary for me to observe, cannot fail, in the present state of our information, to be wide of the truth; but the data on which they proceed are sufficiently accurate, to evince the extent of the evil which led me to introduce these observations. It may be worth while to add, that the counties in which a refusal of leases appears to be most general, (and in some of them it is almost universal,) are Cumberland, York, Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Rutland, North Wales, Salop, Worcester, Northampton, Cambridge, Berks, and Bedford. In a number of other counties, the same mischievous system prevails, though in an inferior degree, particularly in Westmoreland, Cheshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Monmouthshire, Kent, Essex, and probably several others.”1

The fact is so curious, that I could not help mentioning it as an interesting subject of examination; but I am too imperfectly acquainted with the state of the other part of the island, to attempt any explanation of the circumstances which have occasioned it; nor do any of the surveys which I have looked into afford much satisfaction with respect to it.

In Scotland, where we fall short, in so many important articles of national improvement, of our southern neighbours, the ideas of our landed proprietors at present are certainly much more favourable to the progress of Agriculture, in so far as it depends on the security of the farmer’s tenure, than those of the same order in England. Leases are now general in every part of this country; extending commonly to nineteen or twenty-one years. Formerly leases for three nineteen years were frequent; and instances of them are still to be met with in several of the counties. Leases for such long terms are recommended by several of the surveyors, particularly in those counties which have not kept pace with the others in point of cultivation. They have certainly been attended with great advantages in many instances. It is observed in the Survey of the County of Fife, that “many entailed estates there, and indeed throughout Scotland, were tied down not to grant leases longer than nineteen years; but the proprietors considering that this had proved, in many cases, a bar to improvement, applied to Parliament, and were authorized to grant a lease of thirty-one years, upon certain conditions of improvement, which, it is believed, has proved, in general, to be for the benefit of the proprietors, the tenant, and the country at large: that other proprietors who were not restricted by entails, have sometimes granted leases of nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty-one, thirty-eight years; and that leases of twenty-five, thirty-one, or two nineteen years, are commonly granted, where heavy advances, in the way of building, inclosing, or draining, are to be made by the tenant.”

When I reflect on these facts, (combined with some others that will fall under our consideration afterwards, more especially our exemption from poor-rates and tithes,) I can scarcely bring myself to acquiesce in an assertion of Mr. Smith’s, when applied at least to the two parts of the United Kingdom during the last forty years, that “Scotland is not only much poorer than England, but that the steps by which it advances to a better condition seem to be much slower and more tardy.”*

It is observed by Mr. Smith, that “the law which secures the longest leases against successors of every kind is peculiar to Great Britain.”† It was introduced into Scotland so early as 1449, by a law of James II., (a proof that the state of the peasants was then considerably improved;) but its beneficial influence has been much obstructed by the restrictions with respect to the duration of leases which entails generally impose.

In other parts of Europe tenants are secured against heirs and purchasers only for a short period. In France, for example, this period was limited to nine years from the commencement of the lease, till it was extended to twenty-seven, under the administration of M. Turgot. In Spain and Italy (according to Arthur Young) the sale of an estate vacates the lease.1

[2. Farm Burthens.]—Besides paying the rent, the farmers were anciently understood to be bound to perform a number of services to the landlord, not specified in the lease, but regulated by custom, and of consequence arbitrary and vexatious. They were also bound to many public services; such as making and repairing high roads, and providing horses, carriages, and provisions for the King’s troops when they passed through the country. This last service was exacted in England, in consequence of what was called the Royal prerogative of purveyance and pre-emption,—a prerogative which was understood “to give the Crown a right of buying up provisions and other necessaries, by the intervention of the King’s purveyors, for the use of his royal household, at an appraised valuation, in preference to all others, and even without consent of the owner; and also of forcibly impressing the carriages and horses of the subjects to do the King’s business on the public roads, in the conveyance of timber, baggage, and the like, however inconvenient to the proprietor, on paying him a settled price.”2 The oppressions to which it gave rise in the golden days (as they have been termed) of Queen Elizabeth, may be judged of from a passage in Lord Bacon’s Speech touching Purveyors; a passage which, though somewhat long, deserves to be quoted, as exhibiting a lively and authentic picture of the obstacles which then existed to agricultural industry. He says, speaking of the abuses of the Purveyors:—

“These do naturally divide themselves into three sorts: The first, they take in kind that they ought not to take; the second, they take in quantity a far greater proportion than cometh to your Majesty’s use; the third, they take in an unlawful manner, in a manner expressly prohibited by divers laws.

In the first of these, I am a little to alter their name; for, instead of takers they become taxers; instead of taking provision for your Majesty’s service, they tax your people ad redimendam vexationem; imposing upon them, and extorting from them, divers sums of money, sometimes in gross, sometimes in the nature of stipends annually paid, ne noceant, to be freed and eased of their oppression. Again, they take trees, which by law they cannot do; timber trees, which are the beauty, countenance, and shelter of men’s houses; that men have long spared from their own purse and profit; that men esteem, for their use and delight, above ten times their value; that are a loss which men cannot repair or recover. These do they take, to the defacing and spoiling of your subjects’ mansions and dwellings, except they may be compounded with to their own appetites. And if a gentleman be too hard for them while he is at home, they will watch their time when there is but a bailiff or servant remaining, and put the axe to the root of the tree, ere ever the master can stop it. Again, they use a strange and most unjust exaction in causing the subject to pay poundage of their own debts, due from your Majesty unto them; so as a poor man when he has had his hay or his wood, or his poultry, which perchance he was full loth to part with, and had for the provision of his own family and not to put to sale, taken from him, and that not at a just price, but under the value, and cometh to receive his money, he shall have after the rate of twelvepence in the pound abated for poundage of his due payment upon so hard conditions. Nay, farther, they are grown to that extremity, as is affirmed, though scarce credible, that they will take double poundage, once when the debenture is made, and again the second time when the money is paid.

“For the second point, most gracious Sovereign, touching the quantity which they take, far above that which is answered to your Majesty’s use . . . it is affirmed to me by divers gentlemen of good report and experience in these causes, as a matter which I may safely avouch before your Majesty . . . that there is no pound profit which redoundeth unto your Majesty in this course, but induceth and begetteth three pound damage upon your subjects, beside the discontentment. And to the end they make their spoil more securely, what do they? Whereas divers statutes do strictly provide, that whatsoever they take shall be registered and attested, to the end, that by making a collation of that which is taken from the country, and that which is answered above, their deceits might appear; they, to the end to obscure their deceits, utterly omit the observation of this, which the law prescribeth.

“And, therefore, to descend, if it may please your Majesty, to the third sort of abuse, which is of the unlawful manner of taking, whereof this omission is a branch, it is so manifold, as it rather asketh an enumeration of some of the particulars than a prosecution of all. For their price:—by law, they ought to take as they can agree with the subject; by abuse, they take at an imposed and enforced price; by law, they ought to make but one apprizement by the neighbours in the country; by abuse, they make a second apprizement at the Court Gate; and when the subjects’ cattle come up many miles, lean and out of plight, by reason of their great travel, then they prize them anew at an abated price. By law, they ought to take between sun and sun; by abuse, they take by twilight and in the night-time,—a time well chosen for malefactors. By law, they ought not to take in the highways, (a place by her Majesty’s high prerogative protected, and by statute by special words excepted;) by abuse, they take in the ways,” &c. &c.*

This branch of the King’s prerogative and revenue was resigned by Charles II. at the Restoration. The oppressions similar to it which existed on the Continent have been likewise much moderated in later times. In Sweden they were abolished entirely by Gustavus Adolphus. They affected (as appears from what has been said) both landlords and tenants, but must have fallen more peculiarly hard on the latter.

The public taxes to which the farmers were subjected in these ancient times, were as oppressive as the services. Such, for example, was the taille in France. It was a tax upon the supposed profits of the farmer, estimated by the stock on his farm, and which (of consequence) prevented effectually whatever stock accumulated upon the land from being employed in its improvement. The ancient tenths and fifteenths in England seem, so far as they affected the land, to have been taxes of the same nature with the taille.

The ancient policy of Europe was farther unfavourable to the improvement of land. 1. By the prohibition of the exportation of corn; 2. By the restraints laid upon inland commerce; by the absurd laws against engrossers, regrators, and forestallers; and by the privileges of fairs and markets. For a complete illustration of these particulars, I must refer to Mr. Smith.*

In all the successive changes which have taken place in the system of rural economics over Europe, the landholder has uniformly found his advantage in communicating to the occupier of the ground, a greater and greater degree of security in his possession; and the public prosperity has kept pace with this good administration of the landholder’s private estate.1 Various suggestions for still farther improvements in this liberal and enlightened policy have been offered by different writers; but the consideration of these is foreign to our present object. One thing, however, is certain and indisputable:—that the actual cultivators of the soil are eminently entitled to the protection and encouragement of the Legislator; not only on account of the essential importance of this occupation to national prosperity, but because, with all the liberty and security which law can give, they must necessarily improve under great disadvantages. “The farmer,” as Mr. Smith observes, “compared with the proprietor, is as a merchant who trades with borrowed money, compared with one who trades with his own. . . . The station of a farmer besides, is, from the nature of things, inferior to that of a proprietor; and is even regarded, in modern Europe, as inferior to that of a great merchant or master manufacturer. . . . After all the encouragement, therefore, which agriculture has received from the policy of later times, little stock is likely to go from any other profession to the improvement of land in the way of farming.”* Nor is this all. The nature of his profession precludes him from commanding at a reasonable price, like other artists, the rude materials on which his industry is to be employed. “He is confined in his inquiry and choice to that narrow district of country with which he is acquainted, and even to the small number of farms that may happen to fall vacant about the same time with his own: And in this narrow district a monopoly is established against him in the hands of a few landholders. In this respect, therefore, his situation is much inferior to that of the artist, who can go to a cheap market wherever it is found, and can bring his rude materials from a great distance to his home; while the cultivator,” as an ingenious writer observes, “must carry his home to his rude materials when he has been so fortunate as to find them.”

Among the actual discouragements to Agriculture still existing in Great Britain, none appears to claim the attention of the Legislature so strongly as that tax upon industry which is imposed by tithes in England.1 The nature and extent of this grievance cannot be better stated than in the words of Mr. Archdeacon Paley, whose sentiments upon this subject, considering his professional rank, do great honour to his liberality. “A claimant,” says he, “here enters into the produce, who contributed no assistance whatever to the production. When years, perhaps, of care and toil, have matured an improvement; when the husbandman sees new crops ripening to his skill and industry, the moment he is ready to put his sickle to the grain, he finds himself compelled to divide his harvest with a stranger. Tithes are a tax not only upon industry, but upon that industry which feeds mankind; and upon that species of exertion, which it is the aim of all wise laws to cherish and promote; and to uphold and excite which, composes the main benefit that the community receives from the whole system of trade, and the success of commerce. And together with the more general inconveniency that attends the exaction of tithes, there is this additional evil, (in the mode at least according to which they are collected at present,) that they operate as a bounty upon pasturage. The burden of the tax falls with its chief, if not with its whole weight, upon tillage; that is to say, upon that precise mode of cultivation which it is the business of the State to relieve and remunerate in preference to every other.”*

Of the extent to which this grievance is actually felt in many instances, some very striking examples are given in the View of the Agriculture of Middlesex, lately published by Mr. Middleton. They would appear indeed scarcely credible to an inhabitant of this part of the island, were it not for the sanction which the Board of Agriculture gave to the general accuracy of the author’s information, by presenting him with the first gold medal which they bestowed on any literary performance, as a mark of their approbation.

“In many parishes of this county,” he observes, “the tithes are taken in kind; and, which is nearly the same, in others they are annually valued and compounded for. In several parishes a reasonable composition is taken; in some it has been very little advanced during the last twenty years; happily there are farms which pay a modus, and others that are entirely tithe free.

“I met with an instance, near Longford, of a farmer having, with great pains, and by an expensive culture, raised large crops. He offered a guinea an acre (which was exactly the rent he paid) as a composition for the tithe of his wheat; but it was refused, and taken in kind.

“A late rector of Kensington, after a lawsuit in the Court of Exchequer, obtained a decree that pine apples and other fruits which are raised at the expense of hot-houses, should yield their tithe in kind. I have not heard how many hot-houses were pulled down on that occasion; but a very exorbitant composition was demanded and received from the inhabitants in lieu of actual payment.

“A gentleman was at the expense of making a hop plantation at Denbys, in Surrey. The vicar refused to compound on any reasonable terms, and insisted on taking the tithes in kind, and also on having them picked. A suit in the Court of Exchequer was litigated, and the decree going against the improver, he grubbed up his hops, sowed grass seeds, and made a pasture of the lands. Thus was a produce of upwards of thirty pounds reduced to three.

“A few instances equally oppressive with these have happened in every county of England; and the necessary consequence is, that they have put a stop to many expensive but promising improvements. Every matter of this kind becomes a subject of general conversation among farmers, and of course discourages similar attempts. In short, an Act of Parliament, to prohibit the improvement of land by any considerable expenditure, would not more effectually do it than the tithe laws.

“Within the narrow limits of my own knowledge,” the same writer adds, “several premeditated bills of inclosure have been given up, rather than the land should be subjected to yield tithes in kind, after the great expense of the Act, the survey, the making of new roads, the building of bridges, the fencing and erecting of new buildings, and cultivating the land should be incurred.”

To the same purpose it is observed, in the Report of the County of Kent, (the author of which has the reputation of great practical skill in agriculture,) that “nothing can be devised that would so much set improvements afloat, as a commutation for tithe.”1

[3. Size of Farms.]—In the foregoing general conclusions concerning the protection and encouragement due by government to the immediate cultivators of the land, all the writers on population are unanimously agreed. There are, however, some other questions of a much more complicated nature, (relating to the same branch of rural economics,) on which there still subsists a wide diversity of opinion among our most respectable politicians. Such is the question which has given rise to so much discussion of late concerning the comparative effects on population produced by great or by small farms. It is proper for me in a general review of this sort, to take some notice of a controversy which has been carried on with so much warmth; and which (although from its nature incapable of being ever adjusted on any fixed general principles) has given occasion, not only to much ingenious argument, but to many important observations.

One of the first writers who distinguished himself by his zeal against the engrossment of farms in England, was Mr. Kent, in his Hints to the Gentlemen of Landed Property. “Those,” says he, “who contribute towards the destruction of small farms, can have very little reflection. If they have, their feelings are not to be envied. Where this has been the practice, we see a number of families reduced to poverty and misery, the poor-rates much increased, the small articles of provision greatly diminished in quantity and number, and consequently augmented in price.” . . . “There are thousands of parishes, which, since little farms have been swallowed up in greater, do not support so many cows as they did by fifty or sixty in a parish; and the inhabitants have decreased in proportion.” . . . “Every speculative Englishman,” he remarks in another passage, “who travels through the Austrian Netherlands, is astonished at the great population of that country, and at the sight of the markets, which are plentiful beyond description. Upon inquiring into the internal state and regulations of the country, he finds that there are no large farms; no class of men who pass under the character of gentlemen farmers, acquiring large fortunes merely by superintending the business of farming; but that the whole country is divided into much smaller portions than land is with us, and occupied by a set of laborious people, who in general work for themselves, and live very much on a footing of equality.” He concludes his observations on this subject, with expressing his anxious wishes, that “the destructive practice of engrossing farms may be carried no farther; the stab already given by it to plenty and population having greatly affected the population of this country.”

The same argument has been much insisted on by Dr. Price, who expresses great apprehensions that the evil will go on increasing; “the custom of engrossing farms easing landlords of the trouble attending the necessities of little tenants and the repairs of cottages.” “A great farmer,” he observes farther, by having it more in his power to speculate and command the markets, and by drawing to himself the profits which would have supported several farmers, is capable, with less culture, of paying a higher rent.” “But it is indeed,” says he, “creating private benefit on public calamity; and for the sake of a temporary advantage, giving up the nation to depopulation and distress.”1

In confirmation of this conclusion, he quotes some observations from a Memoir on the State of Population in the Pays de Vaud, by M. Muret, Secretary to the Economical Society at Vevay. This paper was published in 1766, and contains an enumeration of the principal causes which, in the judgment of the writer, obstruct population in that part of Switzerland. Among these, he insists particularly on engrossing farms; remarking in support of his opinion, that “a large tract of land in the hands of one man, does not yield so great a return as when in the hands of several, and does not employ so many people.” In proof of this, he mentions two parishes in the Pays de Vaud, one of which (once a little village) having been bought by some rich man, was sunk into a single demesne; and the other (once a single demesne) having fallen into the hands of some peasants, was become a little village.2

So prevalent were these ideas in France at the beginning of the Revolution, that many of the Cahiers demanded a law to limit the size of farms, and to prevent their union. This request is to be found even in the Cahier of Paris.1

On the other hand, the advantages of large farms are maintained:—by Arthur Young in his Political Arithmetic, (published in 1774); in his various Tours through England;2 in his Travels through France in 1787-88-89; and in the Annals of Agriculture:3 —by Mr. Howlett in different political publications, particularly in an Essay, (published in 1788,) On the Insufficiency of the Causes to which the Increase of our Poor and of the Poor-Rates have been commonly ascribed:—by the authors of the French Encyclopédie, (Tom. vii.):—by the Marquis de Mirabeau, in his Ami des Hommes:—by M. Herrenschwand, in his Discourses Sur l’Economie Politique, and Sur la Division des Terres:—and by many other authors at home and abroad.4

Mr. Smith, too, has laid it down as a general proposition, though without entering at all into the argument, that “in every country, after small proprietors, rich and great farmers are the principal improvers.”5 In another part of his work too, speaking of the great rise in the price both of hogs and poultry in Great Britain, he observes that “it has been frequently imputed to the diminution of cottagers, and other small occupiers of land; an event,” he adds, “which has, in every part of Europe, been the immediate forerunner of improvement and better cultivation.”6

Considerable additional light has been lately thrown on this subject in the County Reports drawn up for the consideration of the Board of Agriculture. The arguments on both sides of the question will be found there very fully detailed; more particularly in favour of large farms, for which, with a very few exceptions, all the authors of the surveys are zealous advocates. Some of the reasonings in the papers, as well as in other publications of a similar nature, might perhaps have been spared, if the writers had explained with a little more precision the ideas they annexed to the words large and small as employed in this controversy; words which are not only indefinite in their signification, in consequence of the want of a given standard of comparison; but which must necessarily vary in their import, in different parts of the country, according to local circumstances. The advocates for small farms (for example) sometimes include under that denomination, farms from 150 to 200 acres, (which are far above the highest average of small farms in Great Britain,) contrasting these with farms of 1500 or 2000 acres, which are so very far above the highest average of large farms, that they should be considered as exceptions.1

Many of these writers, too, seem to have proceeded on the supposition, that the principles on which the size of farms ought to be settled, are of a much more universal application than they will be found to admit of in reality. A few of them, however, have been completely aware of this consideration, remarking that the size of farms must necessarily be regulated by a variety of local peculiarities, such as soil, situation, modes of husbandry, and the extent of capital possessed by the class of farmers; and that, admitting the general maxim,—The best size of farm is that which affords the greatest proportional produce, for the least proportional expense, the application of this maxim will be found to lead to widely different conclusions, in different districts.2

In general, it should seem, that in proportion as Agriculture advances, the size of farms should be reduced; or rather, that farms should divide themselves in proportion as the task of superintendence became more difficult. In the meantime, much praise is due to the authors who have exerted so much industry and ingenuity, in attempting to enlighten landlords and tenants with respect both to their own interests and those of the community. It is in this way alone, that any good can result from such speculations; for I take for granted, that, in the present state of Political Science, all idea of legislative interference in adjusting the terms on which farms are to be let or hired, is entirely out of the question.

With respect to the supposed tendency of small farms to promote population, I shall only remark before leaving this article, that it must not be judged of merely from the numbers which are subsisted on the spot. The idea that “the mode of culture which employs most hands, is most favourable to the population of the State,” is justly reprobated by the author of L’Ami des Hommes [the elder Mirabeau] as a vulgar prejudice. “The surplus of produce carried to market,” he observes, “is no less beneficial in this respect by feeding towns, than if eaten on the fields that produced it. The more, therefore, that the industry and riches of the farmer enable him to economize the labour of men, the greater is the surplus which remains for the subsistence of others.”1 To suppose, as some authors have done, that small farms add to the numbers of a people, while, at the same time, it is granted, that they neither yield an adequate produce nor rent, amounts very nearly to a contradiction in terms.

What can be so adverse to population as the high price of the necessaries of life? And what circumstance can contribute more infallibly to augment this price, than to increase unnecessarily, by the multiplication of servants, labourers, and cattle, the expense of bringing the produce of the land to market? Granting that in this way some small farmers may be converted into labourers, and some labourers thrown out of employment, the same cause which gives rise to large farms, (I mean the demand for workmen and the increased consumption produced by flourishing manufactures,) will furnish employment to these labourers elsewhere, while the part of the produce which they formerly consumed on the spot, will be sold in the market at a price lower than the farmer could otherwise have afforded, contributing in a manner more advantageous to the general interest of the community, to the maintenance of a number of individuals equal to that of the labourers displaced.

It is thus that, in such a state of society as that in which we live, great farms not only supply, by an increased produce, the means of subsistence to an increasing population, but by economizing the expense of agricultural operations, have a tendency to keep down the price of provisions to those who are engaged in other kinds of industry.

It must not, however, be admitted as a universal fact, that the consolidation of farms has the effect of diminishing population on the spot; for although this is its natural and acknowledged effect, (the state of cultivation being supposed to remain the same,) the result will be directly opposite, if the capital of the great farmer, by extending the scale of his improvements, should enlarge the field of agricultural industry, in a greater proportion than that in which it economizes the mode of its employment. Nor is this reasoning merely hypothetical. In the agricultural reports, many instances occur of three or four small farms, after being thrown into one, having not only raised greater produce and paid a higher rent, but having added to the population maintained on the surface, by increasing the quantity of work, and of consequence, the demand for labourers.1 Mr. Howlett affirms that this happens in nine cases out of ten.2

Even, however, where the case is otherwise, it remains to be considered, of what description the population is which small farms promote; and whether the real strength of a State is increased by multiplying mouths, without providing a proportional produce to feed them. Nor must it be forgotten that the same want of economy which on small farms multiplies unnecessary labourers, multiplies unnecessary horses, and thereby occasions a most ruinous waste of national produce. “I have found from a close inspection,” says Mr. Young, speaking of the division of a country into small farms, “that the number of horses in such a country is treble and quadruple the number found on large farms. There was a farm in this parish (at present my property) of only sixteen acres of land, and yet the man kept two horses; no wonder he failed, notwithstanding the most intense industry. There is another remaining of twenty-eight acres, on which there are three horses kept. A contiguous one of three hundred and fifty has only ten upon it. Those who are advocates for little farms, in order that pigs and poultry may be plentiful, forget the swarms of horses that eat up what would feed myriads of pigs and chickens. I know,” he adds, “little farmers that keep two horses, yet have not one cow.”1

That the engrossment of farms has been a real grievance to many individuals is beyond all dispute; but the case is the same with every alteration in the policy of a State which obliges numbers to seek out a new employment. The same objection lies against every new mechanical contrivance for shortening labour, and even against the expediency of a peace at the close of a long and expensive war. In uniting small farms into larger ones, without any regard to the future provision of former possessors, much inhumanity, it is probable, has been displayed by particular proprietors; but in judging of the policy of such innovations in the habits of a country, it is absolutely necessary to abstract from the individual hardships that may fall under our notice, and to fix our attention on those general principles which influence the national prosperity.

It may be proper to add, before leaving this article, that in a considerable number of the Surveys very liberal ideas are suggested, with respect to certain appendages which ought to be connected with large farms, particularly an establishment for married servants or cottagers. Some striking instances are mentioned of the happy effects they have produced in different districts in lowering the poor-rates, and in promoting the industry and good order of the labourers.

[4. Enclosures.]—Nearly connected with this question concerning large and small farms, is another which has also given occasion to much controversy in England during the last thirty years; the question concerning the advantages or disadvantages of Enclosures, considered in respect of their influence on population. On this subject, as well as on the former, it would lead me into details inconsistent with my general plan, if I were to attempt a particular discussion of the argument; and, indeed, I have introduced both into these lectures, not so much with the view of supporting any opinion concerning them, as in order to give some arrangement to your private studies in examining this branch of Political Economy, and to point out the principal authors from whom you may derive assistance in the prosecution of the inquiry. By following this plan, (which, as I hinted in my first lecture, I intend to do in various other parts of the course,) I am sensible that I must necessarily deprive my speculations of the systematic form affected by those writers, who bring every particular question (however complicated by existing institutions or by local peculiarities) to the test of a few abstract principles; but I flatter myself that this inconvenience will be in some measure compensated by the variety of matter which I shall be able to suggest for your future consideration. In truth, it is chiefly by thus marking out the field of inquiry, and by exhibiting such an outline of its principal parts, as may direct the attention of the student to a methodical survey of the whole, that academical lectures seem to me to possess much utility, when the subject treated of is so extensive and various as that which I comprehend under the title of Political Economy. At any rate, it is all that I would be understood to attempt at present, in mentioning such topics as those which are now under our review.

Dr. Price, who has distinguished himself so much by his zeal against Great Farms, has taken up the argument against Enclosures with no less warmth. “How astonishing is it,” he observes, “that our Parliament should choose to promote depopulation, by passing every year, bills almost without number for new enclosures!”

In order to prevent misapprehensions of his meaning, he adds, that he “has here in view enclosures of open fields and lands already improved. It is acknowledged,” he says, “by even the writers in defence of enclosures, that these diminish tillage, increase the monopolies of farms, raise the prices of provisions, and produce depopulation. Such enclosures, therefore, however gainful they may be at present to a few individuals, are undoubtedly pernicious. On the contrary, enclosures of waste lands and commons would be useful, if divided into small allotments, and given up to be occupied at moderate rents by the poor. But, if besides lessening the produce of fine wool, they bear hard on the poor by depriving them of a part of their subsistence, and only go towards increasing farms already too large, the advantages attending them may not much exceed the disadvantages.”*

The argument on the other side of the question may be found in two pamphlets by Mr. Howlett, vicar of Great Dunmow, Essex. The one is entitled, “An Enquiry into the influence which Enclosures have had upon the Population of this Kingdom,” (1786.) The other, “Enclosures a cause of improved Agriculture, of plenty and cheapness of Provisions, of Population, and of Wealth, both private and national,” (1787.)

This writer, who has certainly treated of the subject with considerable ability and much candour, confesses after a review of the opposite representations and reasonings that have been laid before the public, that enclosures, according to particular circumstances, are attended with great advantages and great disadvantages, with respect to population, so that (although probability seems strongly on the favourable side) it does not appear merely from a theoretical view of the controversy, altogether indisputable, which of the two is prevalent in the vast number of enclosures which have taken place in this kingdom during the last twenty or thirty years. In order, therefore, to bring the question to the test of experience, he procured a list of the Enclosure Bills from the Journals of the House of Commons, (amounting to very near a thousand, between the years 1750 and 1781,) and applied to the clergy of the enclosed parishes for the annual register of baptisms. In this inquiry he omitted the counties of Nottingham, York, and Lancaster, because Dr. Price himself acknowledges these to be increased greatly. The result of the very extensive information he collected, was decidedly in favour of the enclosed parishes, and seems to amount to little short of demonstration of the beneficial influence of enclosures on the general population of the kingdom.

The prejudice against Enclosures is of a very early date in England, and has been sanctioned by the opinions of some very eminent writers; among others, by Lord Bacon, who expresses himself thus, in his History of Henry the Seventh.* “Enclosures at that time, (1489,) began to be more frequent, whereby arable land, which could not be manured without people and families, was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen. . . . This bred a decay of people. . . . In remedying this inconvenience, the King’s wisdom and the Parliament’s was admirable. Enclosures they would not forbid, . . . and tillage they would not compel; . . . but they took a course to take away depopulating enclosures and depopulating pasturage, . . . by consequence. The ordinance was, ‘that all houses of husbandry, with twenty acres of ground to them, should be kept up for ever, together with a competent proportion of land to be occupied with them,’ and in nowise to be severed from them. . . . By this means, the houses being kept up, did, of necessity, enforce a dweller; and the proportion of land for occupation being also kept up, did, of necessity, enforce that dweller not to be a beggar or cottager,” &c. “The statute here mentioned was renewed in Henry Eighth’s time. and every person who converted tillage into pasture subjected to a forfeiture of half the land, till the offence was removed.”1

Mr. Hume, who, in his History of England, has interspersed his narrative with many of the most important principles of Political Economy, dissents widely from Lord Bacon, in the judgment he pronounces on this part of Henry Seventh’s policy. “The law enacted against Enclosures,” he observes, “and for the keeping up of farm-houses, scarcely deserves the high praises bestowed on it by Lord Bacon. If husbandmen understand agriculture, and have a ready vent for their commodities, we need not dread a diminution of the people employed in the country. All methods of supporting populousness, except by the interest of the proprietor, are violent and ineffectual. During a century and a half after this period, there was a frequent renewal of laws and edicts against depopulation, whence we may infer that none of them were ever executed. The natural course of improvement at last provided a remedy.”*

Another very curious document of the sentiments of former times on this subject, exists in a pamphlet first published in 1581, entitled “A Compendium, or Brief Examination of certain ordinary Complaints of divers of our Countrymen in these our Days.” The initials of the author’s name are W. S.; from which circumstance, strengthened by some vague tradition, and probably also by the dramatic form of the work, it was long and very generally ascribed to William Shakespeare. But it appears from Wood’s Fasti, and Farmer’s book On the Learning of Shakespeare, that the real author was a person of the name of Stafford. The arguments both for and against Enclosures, are certainly stated in it with uncommon spirit and force, and anticipate the principal ones which have been brought forward in the course of the late discussions concerning them. The speakers in the dialogue are “a Merchant, a Knight, a Husbandman, a Capper, and a Doctor of Divinity.”

I have dwelt longer on this article than I should have thought necessary on a question of so very local a nature, because it has formed one of the most conspicuous objects of internal policy under the present reign. During that of King William, not a single act was passed for enclosing wastes or dividing commons; and in the two succeeding reigns, only twenty-five in whole. In the reign of George II., (which lasted thirty-three years,) they amounted to a hundred and eighty-two; whereas they are said, during the first fourteen sessions of the present reign, to have exceeded seven hundred. “In this manner,” says Mr. Chalmers, “was more useful territory added to the Empire, at the expense of individuals, than had been gained by all the wars since the Revolution. In acquiring distant dominions, through conquest, the State is enfeebled by the charge of their establishments in peace, and by the still more enormous debts incurred in war for their defence. In gaining additional lands by reclaiming the wild, improving the barren, and appropriating the common, the limits of our island are virtually extended, and a solid foundation is laid, in the additional produce of the soil, for the multiplication of the people.”1

Impressed with these ideas, a variety of writers have for many years contended for the expediency of a General Enclosure Bill; and a bill for that purpose actually passed the House of Commons in the session of Parliament 1799, but was thrown out by the Lords. The Lord Chancellor, [Loughborough,] in his speech on the 3d of July last, (1800,)* when certain resolutions of the Commons concerning bills of enclosure were under consideration, stated that the Bill of 1799 had been rejected, because it was loosely and vaguely drawn, and expressed his doubts of the possibility of framing any general law which should not be liable to material objections. “If a canon could be devised, comprising all such provisions as by experience have been found necessary in most bills of enclosure, it would certainly have its use, but this he feared would be impracticable; and, (as in the case of the general Highway Act, which had not in the least tended to shorten private highway bills,) so a general canon of enclosure law might not in the least have the effect of shortening future private bills of enclosure.” The Duke of Bedford expressed himself nearly to the same purpose; avowing himself friendly to a system of general enclosure, but disapproving of the attempt to effect it by a general bill. Of the beneficial tendency of enclosures with respect to population, no doubt appears to have been suggested in the course of the debate. On the contrary, it was universally admitted that the population of the kingdom had of late years considerably increased; that the means of supplying that population had not increased in proportion; and that every measure which facilitated a general system of enclosure, was in a high degree wise and salutary in our present circumstances. The Chancellor alone doubted “whether any regulations adopted by the Legislature, could serve to promote the cultivation of waste lands and commons. He rather believed that enclosures in general must depend upon the spirit, the activity, and the ability of private individuals, who feel it their interest to set about enclosing, and apply to Parliament for bills of enclosure.”

About one point, however, there can be no controversy, that if the multiplication of enclosures be a desirable object, it is the duty of the Legislature to remove as much as possible those obstacles to them which are created by the heavy expenses attending enclosure bills at present. The expense occasioned by fees to the officers of the two Houses, amounts to £209 per parish, however many there may be in an act; but this is, in many instances, trifling, in comparison of what is expended in paying solicitors and witnesses in London. Hence the impossibility of coming to Parliament for small enclosures; and the discouragements which oppose themselves even to more extensive projects of improvement.1

The expediency of reducing this expense as much as possible, is placed in a strong light by an acknowledged fact, on which has frequently been founded a plausible but very fallacious argument against the policy of enclosures in general. The great profit which speculations of this sort afford to individuals (it is well known) is derived from soils which are adapted to the purposes of the grazier. “Upon dry land well adapted to corn, the advantage is far inferior. The consequence is, that immense tracts of this last sort of land remain open and waste; while the heavy, rich, deep soils that have been constantly yielding wheat under a low rent, are enclosed and converted into grazing land at double or treble the rents they formerly paid.” “Such soils,” says Mr. Young, “will bear any expense; and these have been thus taken from corn, which is the food of the poor, and thrown to bullocks to feed the rich.”

It is acknowledged, however, by this writer, that these considerations afford no argument against the general encouragement of enclosures by the Legislature. The evil of which he complains is irremediable by legislative authority, being the natural consequence of the present circumstances of the country; and, so far from being diminished, it is increased by the existing impediments to enclosures,—impediments which, while insufficient to prevent enclosures where they are injurious to Agriculture, throw a bar in the way of improvement, in the case of those dry and poorer wastes, which might be converted into corn-fields for the benefit of the people.1

[5. Size of Properties.]—In the observations hitherto made on the relation between Population and Agriculture, I have had in view chiefly the effects produced on the latter, by the condition of those who cultivate farms which do not belong to them in property. It appeared to me to be the most natural arrangement, to begin with the consideration of this order of men, as it is chiefly by them that Agriculture is carried on in this part of the world. I now proceed to make a few remarks on the same subject, considered in its connexion with the actual proprietors of the land.

That the division and subdivision of landed property promote population in an eminent degree, is admitted as an indisputable maxim by political writers of all descriptions. “Only revive,” says Mr. Suessmilch, “the laws of Licinius, forbidding any Roman to hold more than seven jugera of land; or that of Romulus, which limited every Roman to two jugera, and you will soon convert a barren desert into a busy and crowded hive.” Ample illustrations of this proposition may be found in Dr. Wallace’s Dissertations on the Numbers of Mankind, and in the Political Tracts of Dr. Price.

I shall have occasion to shew, in another part of this course, how much this equality in the distribution of landed property was favoured by all the ancient systems of legislation. I shall confine myself at present to the example of the Romans.

For about two hundred and fifty years after the foundation of Rome, during the monarchy, the whole land was divided into equal portions of two jugera,—that is, a little more than an English acre, and a little less than one Scotch; and each citizen had one of these portions assigned to him. Soon after the expulsion of the kings the quantity was increased, and inequalities of fortune arose; yet for about another two hundred and fifty years, the general size of a Roman farm was only seven jugera, or somewhat less than four and a half English acres. In the progress of luxury and avarice, however, so great an alteration took place in the manners of the people, that in the year of Rome 375, (under the tribuneship of Licinius Stolo,) a law was found necessary to limit estates to five hundred jugera, or about three hundred and twelve English acres. When the Roman Consuls and Dictators had only so small a portion of land which they laboured with the help of their slaves, and often with their own hands; it is easy to conceive with what frugality and simplicity they must have lived; how completely the ornamental arts must have been excluded; and how easy it must have been to support a family. In the family of such a Dictator or Consul, Dr. Wallace reckons the husband and wife, two or three children, and a slave or two; (which last allowance is probably under the truth, as slaves were very numerous.) A Roman family, therefore, which had not above seven jugera, or four and one-third English acres, to maintain them, might consist of seven persons or more, and had less than an acre, often perhaps not more than half an acre, for each individual: whereas, (according to Templeman’s calculation,) the eight millions of inhabitants of England have very near thirty-two millions of acres to support them, or four acres per head.

In consequence of the influence of these laws, and the system of manners which they encouraged, the agriculture of the Romans appears to have been carried to a singular degree of perfection; and the effects continued for a long course of years after the causes had ceased to operate. Depending entirely on agriculture for the means of life, trained to it from generation to generation, cultivating every corner and inch of their little fields, the old Romans were not only distinguished above all other people for simplicity of manners, but set an example of economy, accuracy, and minute attention in the cultivation of land, which has never been equalled in this part of the world. It is observed by the author of one of the Reports presented to the Board of Agriculture, that the Garden System of Agriculture, which continued to be general for near five hundred years, probably laid the foundation of all that excellence to which Roman husbandry was afterwards carried; that the rural industry, practices, and ideas handed down from former times, long preserved their existence; and that the more extensive farms which afterwards took place, were cultivated with as religious and minute a care as the little allotments in earlier ages.1

In the pictures which have been transmitted to us of the old Roman manners, uniting in so wonderful a degree the simplicity and moderation of rural life, with all that is heroic and splendid in human character, there is undoubtedly something which is peculiarly interesting to the imagination. “Gaudente terra,” as Pliny* expresses it, “laureato vomere et triumphali aratore.” Nor is it surprising that they should be so often mentioned by way of contrast, to what the poet calls “The sober, gainful arts of modern days.” The following stanza forms part of a beautiful Ode which he has addressed on this subject to the country gentlemen of England.

• “Have ye not heard of Lacedæmon’s fame?
• Of Attic chiefs in Freedom’s war divine?
• Of Rome’s dread generals? The Valerian name?
• The Fabian sons? The Scipios? matchless line!
• Your lot was theirs. The farmer and the swain
• Met his lov’d patron’s summons from the plain.
• The legions gathered; the bright eagles flew;
• Barbarian monarchs in the triumph mourn’d;
• The conqu’rors to their household gods return’d,
• And fed Calabrian flocks, and steer’d the Sabine plough.”*

When we indulge such ideas, we are extremely apt to forget the essential differences between the circumstances of mankind in ancient and in modern times. Granting the fact, that when a family has just land enough for its subsistence, that portion will be well cultivated, what deductions can be drawn from it applicable to the present policy of Europe? Of what use in a modern kingdom would be a whole province thus divided, except for the mere purpose of breeding men? A province of such farmers would consume nothing but the produce of their lands; they could neither possess the desire nor the ability to purchase manufactures; and they could pay no taxes without an oppression that would reduce them to misery. The case was widely different in the early times of the Roman Republic, for then the more abundant such population was, the more easily could the State levy that tax which consisted in personal service.1 Hence an important distinction between the practice of agriculture as a direct means of subsistence, and as a trade bearing a relation to the other trades and occupations which enter into the general system of Political Economy. The former was exemplified in Rome, and in various other ancient republics. The latter is exemplified in Modern Europe, where it is the object of the farmer, by raising a surplus produce for the market, not only to provide a fund for the payment of taxes, but to acquire the means of purchasing from the artisan and manufacturer, whatever accommodations his habits may lead him to consider as contributing to his comfort. This distinction is much insisted on by Sir James Steuart in the Fourteenth Chapter of his First Book, [of The Principles of Political Œconomy.]

It is justly observed by the same writer, that “those passages of Roman authors which mention the frugality of that people, and the small extent of their possessions, cannot be rightly understood without the knowledge of many circumstances relative to the manners of those times. For if you understand such a distribution of lands to have extended over all the Roman territory, the number of the citizens would have exceeded what they appear to have been by the census, and even surpass all belief. But farther, I may be allowed to ask, Whether or not it be supposed that these frugal Romans laboured this small portion of lands with their own hands, and consumed the produce of it? If I am answered in the affirmative, (which is necessary to prove the advantages of agriculture’s being exercised by all the classes of a people,) then I ask, From whence were the inhabitants of Rome and other cities supposed to come, who fed the armies when in the field? If these were fed by foreign grain imported, or plundered from their neighbours, where was the advantage of this subdivision of lands, and of this extensive agriculture which could not feed the inhabitants of the State? If it be said, that notwithstanding this frugal distribution of property among the citizens, there was still found surplus enough to supply both Rome and the armies, will it not then follow, that there was no necessity for employing all the people in agriculture, since the labour of a part might have sufficed?”*

I shall have occasion afterwards to take notice of some of the difficulties started in the foregoing passage, when I come to consider (in another part of the course) the immense importations of corn which, from the earliest times, were understood to be necessary for the subsistence of Rome. At present I shall only remark, (as I already hinted,) that whatever may be supposed to be the merits or defects of the agricultural policy of the Romans, considered in relation to the national objects which they had in view, this policy is manifestly inapplicable to the present state of society in Europe. Mr. Hume, after acknowledging its tendency to promote that population which the exigencies of their state required, and even admitting that this population was partly to be ascribed to the want of commerce, (the small number of artisans who depended on the labour of the farmers leaving a greater share for the maintenance of the soldiers,) proposes the following question: “Whether sovereigns might not now return with advantage to the maxims of ancient policy?” His answer is, “That it appears to be almost impossible; and that, because ancient policy was violent, and contrary to the more natural and usual course of things.”* It were to be wished, that Mr. Hume had explained a little more fully the idea suggested in the last clause of this sentence, but I presume his meaning was, that ancient policy aimed too much at modifying, by the force of positive institutions, the order of society, according to some preconceived notion of expediency, without trusting sufficiently to those principles of the human constitution, which, wherever they are allowed free scope, not only conduct mankind to happiness, but lay the foundation of a progressive improvement in their condition and in their character. The advantages which modern policy possesses over the ancient, (as I have elsewhere observed), arises principally from its conformity, in some of the most important articles of Political Economy, to an order of things recommended by nature; and it would not be difficult to show, that where it remains imperfect, its errors may be traced to the restraints it imposes on the natural course of human affairs.

The policy of the Romans, in the instance now under our consideration, “was,” to use Mr. Hume’s language, “violent and contrary to the natural course of things,” inasmuch as it attempted, by the force of Agrarian Laws, to prevent that inequality in the distribution of landed property, which is plainly a part of the order of nature, and which (as I shall afterwards endeavour to shew) is intimately connected with the progressive improvement of the human species. Among them, it was the great object of State to keep up and to multiply the breed of soldiers; a narrow and oppressive scheme of Government, undoubtedly, when compared with that enlightened and generous system, which estimates national felicity, not merely by the register of births, but by the degree in which it distributes among all orders of the people, (together with the comforts connected with their animal existence,) all the gratifications of which man is susceptible as an intelligent and a moral being.

Conformable to this agricultural and military policy of the Romans, were the ideas imbibed by their youth from early infancy, and inculcated in the writings of all their most esteemed authors. From the most ancient period of their history descended that maxim which always continued to have a wonderful influence on their manners, that no employment was honourable but the plough and the sword; and hence, as both Pliny and Columella inform us, an enrolment into any of the Four City Tribes (“sub umbra Civitatis intra mœnia desides cunctari”) was understood not to accord well with the spirit which became a Roman.*

In later times, an affectation of more effeminate habits seems to have gained ground even among their military characters, from the natural effects of a city life, and to have been regarded with some degree of jealousy and indignation by those who adhered to the occupation and sentiments of their ancestors. We are told by Valerius Maximus, that when Scipio Nasica (then a young man) was standing candidate for the office of Curule Ædile, this affectation defeated his hopes of attaining that dignity. “As he was passing,” it is said, “where the tribes both of the city and country were assembled, (practising, it should seem, the same attentions which are usual among modern candidates for popular favour,) while he was squeezing the hand of a labouring man whom he knew, he could not forbear jesting with him on its hardness and callousness—“Joci gratia; interrogavit eum—Num manibus solitus esset ambulare?” “This jest,” the writer adds, “cost him dear; for it was repeated immediately from one to another, and all the tribes offended with the contumeliosa urbanitas which it discovered, unanimously rejected a candidate whom the effeminacy of Rome had rendered so supercilious and petulant.”1

While these ideas concerning the dignity exclusively attached to the professions of agriculture and of war maintained their influence, the mercantile and lucrative arts were entirely abandoned to aliens, slaves, and freedmen; and for a succession of ages not a citizen was found to practise them. In the time of Cicero other notions had begun to prevail, and these arts had risen considerably in the public estimation; and yet, what a contrast does the following passage present to the ideas now fostered by those establishments which have accomplished in the most effectual manner, and, in a far greater degree, than any of the ancient constitutions, all the most essential purposes of the political union!

“Concerning the arts, and the means of acquiring wealth, which are to be accounted liberal, and which, mean, the following are the sentiments usually entertained. In the first place, those professions are discreditable which are odious to mankind, such as the business of tax-gatherers and usurers. The arts of all hirelings, too, are illiberal and mean, who are paid for their labour and not for their skill. The wages they receive are the badges of servitude. They also are to be considered as dishonourably employed, who buy from merchants what they immediately retail. For they gain nothing unless they lie extravagantly, and, consequently, owe their profit to the basest of all the vices. All mechanics are occupied in mean employments; nor is it possible that anything liberal can be connected with a workshop. Least of all ought the arts to be esteemed which minister to pleasure, such as the arts of fishmongers, butchers, cooks, and confectioners. To these may be added, if you please, perfumers, dancers, and the whole tribe of such as administer to gaming.

“But those arts which require a superior degree of skill, and from which arise a higher degree of utility, as medicine, architecture, instruction in liberal arts, are employments honourable to those with whose rank they correspond. As to commerce, it is mean, if it be inconsiderable; but if it be great and abundant, if it bring largely from every country, and without deceit supply an extensive market, it is an occupation not much to be censured, (non admodum vituperanda;) nay, if the persons who follow it could be satiated, or rather be content with their profits, not making long voyages, but returning speedily to their farms and landed estates, they would deserve to be rather commended. But after all, among the various pursuits from which gain is derived, there is none which surpasses agriculture; none more profitable; none more delightful; none more worthy of a man who loves independence.”1

I have quoted this passage as an additional illustration of the absurdity of drawing parallels between the condition of the ancient Romans and our own; and of imagining that the agricultural policy of the former is applicable to that state of society in which we live, I shall only add farther on the subject at present, that the commerce with which the Romans were acquainted, was essentially different, both in its nature and effects, from that which has changed the face of human affairs in Modern Europe. It was a saying of Manius Curius Dentatus, (and repeated by Cicero in the person of Cato,) that he thought it more glorious to conquer those who possessed gold, than to possess it himself.2 The natural effect, however, of this spirit of conquest, (notwithstanding the disinterested views with which it was long connected in the case of many illustrious individuals,) was to bring immense sums of money into the city. Satisfactory proofs of this are produced by Dr. Wallace, (even in the early ages of the Republic,) from the high prices which were paid for things merely ornamental, at a time when all the ancient simplicity of manners remained, and the necessaries of life were to be purchased for a trifle. Towards the end of the Commonwealth, and afterwards under Augustus, riches and luxury increased to an extent unknown in the annals of the world. Julius Cæsar’s debts, before he had been in any office, were, according to some, £2,018,229; according to others, £807,291. Crassus was his surety for £160,812. Mark Anthony owed on the Ides of March, £322,916 sterling, and paid it before the Calends of April. The expenses of these Romans were on a scale proportioned to their estates and debts, and far exceeded the most extravagant ideas of modern times. Much curious information concerning them may be found in Dr. Arbuthnot’s Treatise on Coins, and in Wallace’s Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind. As this wealth was not acquired by commerce, it had no tendency to encourage a commercial spirit, excepting in so far as ministered to luxury. On the contrary, we find that commerce was dreaded on account of the obvious effect which it had to drain their riches; for as they had no commodity of their own to give in exchange for the luxuries which they imported at so immense a price from distant provinces, they must have paid for everything in silver and gold. “Hence it was, that the emperors forbid the people to send gold to the barbarians; which law appears (by the way) to have been in force before, from Cicero’s Oration for L. Flaccus: ‘Exportari Aurum non oportere, cum sæpe antea Senatus, tum, me Consule, gravissime judicavit.’ ”1

The fatal consequences of this influx of wealth, and of the excessive luxury which attended it, (particularly after the conquest of Asia,) are sufficiently known. Juvenal has painted them strongly in a single line.

• “Sævior armis
• Luxuria incubuit; victumque ulciscitur orbem.”*

The same remarks which have been now made with respect to Rome, are applicable, with some slight limitations, to most of the ancient republics. In States formed upon such a model, and in ages when commerce and manufactures were yet in their infancy, a sudden influx of riches from abroad was justly dreaded as an evil alarming to the morals, to the industry, and to the freedom of a people. How different in its tendency is that wealth which, in a commercial country, is the gradual result of national industry! If we survey the countries around us, we uniformly find, that the most wealthy states are those where the people are the most laborious, and where they enjoy the greatest degree of liberty. Nay, it was the general diffusion of wealth among the lower orders of men which first gave birth to the spirit of independence in Modern Europe, and which has produced, under some of its governments, and more especially under our own, a more equal diffusion of freedom and of happiness, than took place under the most celebrated constitutions of antiquity.

I may perhaps appear to have insisted longer than was necessary, on institutions and manners so strikingly contrasted with those which exist at present. But it seemed to me to be of consequence to take the earliest opportunity which my subject afforded, of obviating some of the prepossessions which the study of the classics is apt to inspire in favour of agrarian regulations, to the prejudice of that more comprehensive and enlightened policy, which, giving full scope in all directions to human industry, allows agriculture and commerce to act and re-act on each other, in multiplying the comforts of human life, in developing all the capacities that belong to our nature, and in diffusing as widely as the imperfection of human institutions will permit, the blessings of knowledge and civilisation among all classes of the community.

Independently of the violent operation of Agrarian Laws, some authors have expressed their doubts, whether in some of the countries of Modern Europe, the subdivision of landed property has not been, in certain combinations of circumstances, carried to a pernicious excess, by the operation of natural causes. The following passage from Mr. Young’s Agricultural Survey of France,* (in the years 1787-89), will shew, that this doubt rests on something more than mere hypothesis. It is proper for me to premise, that, according to his computation, the number of little farms in that kingdom belonging in property to the actual cultivators, was at that time so great as to occupy one-third of the whole territory.

“Before I travelled,” says he, “I conceived that small farms in property were susceptible of good cultivation; and that the occupier of such having no rent to pay might be sufficiently at his ease to work improvements, and carry on a vigorous husbandry; but what I have seen in France has greatly lessened my good opinion of them. In Flanders I saw excellent husbandry on properties of thirty to one hundred acres; but we seldom find here such small patches of property as are common in other provinces. In Alsace, and on the Garonne, that is, on soils of such exuberant fertility as to demand no exertions, some small properties also are well cultivated. In Bearn I passed through a region of little farmers, whose appearance, neatness, and ease, charmed me; it was what property alone could on a small scale effect: but these were by no means contemptibly small; they were, as I judged by the distance from house to house, from forty to eighty acres. Except these, and a very few other instances, I saw nothing on small properties except a most unremitting industry.” . . . “The circumstance which in France produces so immense a number of small farms in property, is the division which takes place after the death of the proprietor, commonly amongst all the children, but in some districts among the sons only. Forty or fifty acres in property are not incapable of good husbandry; but when divided, twenty acres must be ill cultivated; again divided, they become farms of ten acres, of five, of two, and even one; and I have even seen some of half, and even of a quarter of a rood, with a family as much attached to it as if it were an hundred acres. The population flowing from this division is, in some cases, great, but it is the multiplication of wretchedness. Couples marry and procreate, on the idea, not the reality, of a maintenance; they increase beyond the demand of towns and manufactures; and the consequence is distress, and numbers dying of diseases, arising from insufficient nourishment. Hence, therefore, small properties much divided, prove the greatest source of misery that can be conceived; and this has operated to such an extent in France, that” (in the opinion of Mr. Young) “a law undoubtedly ought to have been past, to render all division below a certain number of acres illegal.”*

“If the industry of towns and manufactures were active enough to demand the surplus of all this population as fast as it arose, the advantages of the system would be clear. . . . It is idle to state in its favour the example of America, where an immensity of fertile land lies open to every one who will accept of it; and where population is valuable to an unexampled degree, as we see in the price of their labour. But what comparison between such a country and France, where the competition for employment is so great, (arising from too great a populousness,) that the price of labour is seventy-six per cent. below that of England, though the prices of provisions are as high in the former country as in the latter.”†

These remarks of Mr. Young are chiefly levelled at some modern theories of Political Economy, according to which a country is flourishing in proportion to the equal distribution of the people over the territory; and “the greatest possible division of landed property is the best.” That these maxims ought to be received with great restrictions appears obvious from this, that “on the supposition such a system were allowed time to operate, a nation would necessarily arrive at the limit beyond which the earth, cultivate it as you please, will feed no more mouths; yet those simple manners which instigate to marriage still continue. What, then, is the consequence, but the most dreadful misery imaginable! You soon would exceed the populousness of China, where the putrid carcases of domestic animals, and every species of vermin, are sought with avidity to sustain the lives of wretches who were born only to be starved.”‡

Some of the foregoing remarks from Young have been suggested to him by the following passage in Sir James Steuart’s Political Œconomy.

“I would recommend in countries where this minute subdivision of lands has taken place, that for the future none under a certain extent or value should be suffered to be divided among the children, but ordered to be sold, and the price divided among them, and that the same regulation should be observed upon the death of such proprietors where lands are not sufficient to produce three times the physical-necessary of the labourers. This would engage a people to exercise agriculture as a trade, and to give over that trifling husbandry which produces no surplus, and which involves so many poor people in the oppression of land-taxes. . . . The principle,” he adds, “is so evident, that I never found any one who did not immediately agree to the justness of my observation; although in imposing land-taxes I have nowhere found it attended to.”*

I have quoted these passages, because I am always much more anxious to suggest a variety of ideas for your examination, than to establish any particular system. I confess, for my own part, I have no doubt that, in so far as Agriculture and Population alone are concerned, their interests would be most effectually promoted by a perfectly free commerce of land. The evil complained of in France, plainly arose from the artificial value set on landed property, in consequence of prevailing institutions and habits. In a commercial country where there were no perpetuities, and no regard paid to primogeniture, the attachment to land would be nearly proportioned to its intrinsic value, and the natural course of things would bring small estates into the market, upon the death of every proprietor who left a numerous family. Nay more, this free commerce of land would put an end to that monopoly-price which it everywhere bears, and which, by diverting small capitals from such purchases, contributes perhaps more than any other cause to depress agriculture below the level of the commercial arts. In such a state of things, a law similar to that proposed by Sir James Steuart, would probably be found unnecessary; although I am far from asserting that in a country circumstanced as France then was, it might not have contributed to keep population more on a level with the means of subsistence.

The opinion, however, that we form on this point, is of little consequence, as the evils resulting from too minute a division of land must necessarily be confined to very unusual combinations of circumstances. Those which arise from the opposite extreme of an accumulation of this species of property in the hands of a small number of individuals, is a political disorder much more deeply rooted in our prevailing ideas and institutions, and affecting far more extensively and powerfully the general interests of society.

On this particular branch of our subject, which is perhaps the most important of all, I do not mean to enlarge at present, partly because it will again fall under consideration in the farther prosecution of my general plan; but chiefly because the effects of Entails and of the Law of Primogeniture, in checking the progress of agriculture, have been illustrated very fully by Mr. Smith. The remarks which this author has made on the circumstances from which these institutions naturally arose during the disorders and violence of the feudal times, are more especially deserving of attention, as they throw much light on the origin of that state of society, and system of manners, with which we are connected.

[ii.—

Second, of Population (and Agriculture) considered in connexion with Manufactures.]

Having treated, at some length, [from p. 113,] of the relation between Population and Agriculture, in so far as it depends on the condition of the actual cultivators of the soil, and on the distribution of landed property, I proceed now to make some observations on the same subject, considered in connexion with the influence of manufactures.

“The proper and only right encouragement for agriculture,” says Sir James Steuart, “is a moderate and gradual increase of demand for the productions of the earth; this works a natural and beneficial increase of inhabitants, and this demand must come from cities.”* The author would, I think, have expressed his idea more unexceptionably, if he had contented himself with saying, that “the demand must come from manufactures;” as the language he employs prejudges a much controverted question concerning the most beneficial form in which manufactures may be established, whether when collected into cities, or when scattered over a territory. In other respects, the observation is unquestionably just, and may be regarded as a fundamental principle in this inquiry. In truth, if we except the essential duty of protecting and maintaining the rights of the husbandman, the excitement of a spirit of manufacturing industry is the most effectual measure by which a statesman has it in his power, in the actual circumstances at least, of this part of the world, to influence the agriculture of his country. The seeming exceptions which may occur to this remark, (such as that of Switzerland, where, according to Mr. Hume, “we find at once the most skilful husbandmen and the most bungling tradesmen in Europe,”)† do not in the least invalidate the general observation, as the effect, in all such instances, may be easily traced to some very peculiar and anomalous combinations of circumstances. And, at any rate, “Is it just reasoning,” says Mr. Hume, “because agriculture may, in some cases, flourish without trade or manufactures, to conclude, that, in any great extent of country, or for any great tract of time, it would subsist alone?” “The most natural way, surely, of encouraging agriculture, is, first, to excite other kinds of industry, and thereby afford the labourer a ready market for his commodities, and a return of such goods as may contribute to his pleasure and enjoyment. This method,” he adds, “is infallible and universal.”‡

A few very slight remarks in illustration of this proposition will be sufficient for my present purpose.

Let us suppose then, a nation which practises no art but husbandry, and which subsists entirely on the rude produce of the soil. In such a situation, it is evident there would be no motive for the cultivator to increase his skill or industry beyond what is necessary for the bare support of himself and his family; for men will not labour merely from the patriotic view of increasing their numbers. The only thing that can quicken human industry, is the wants of men, real or imaginary; and these wants can be created only by the introduction of manufactures.

On a superficial view of the subject, it may perhaps appear that manufactures are rather the effects than the causes of that multiplicity of wants to which they are subservient; and that this has actually been the history of many of them, cannot be disputed. In general, however, it will be found, that refinements in the arts are more owing to the temptations held out by the industry and invention of the artists, than to the increased demand for the novelities they furnish, arising from the natural progress of luxury among their employers.

This has been well illustrated by the feelings which most persons must have experienced, in some degree, on visiting any of those shops which minister to the extravagance of a great city. Everything we see appears either necessary, or at least highly convenient; and we begin to wonder how we could have been so long without that which we never thought of before, and of which it is possible, after we are possessed of it, that we may never think again.1

A trifling anecdote mentioned by Dr. Franklin in one of his Letters, places the whole of this natural process in a stronger light than I can possibly do by any general observations. It exhibits at once the effects of imitation and fancy in creating a taste for superfluities, and the effect of this taste in stimulating human industry.

“The skipper of a shallop, employed between Cape May and Philadelphia, had done us some small service, for which he refused to be paid. My wife understanding that he had a daughter, sent her a present of a new-fashioned cap. Three years after, this skipper being at my house with an old farmer of Cape May, his passenger, he mentioned the cap, and how much his daughter had been pleased with it. ‘But,’ said he, ‘it proved a dear cap to our congregation.’ ‘How so?’ ‘When my daughter appeared with it at meeting, it was so much admired, that all the girls resolved to get such caps from Philadelphia; and my wife and I computed that the whole could not have cost less than a hundred pounds.’ ‘True,’ said the farmer, ‘but you do not tell all the story. I think the cap was nevertheless an advantage to us; for it was the first thing that put our girls upon knitting worsted mittens for sale at Philadelphia, that they might have wherewithal to buy caps and ribbons there; and you know that that industry has continued, and is likely to continue and increase to a much greater value, and answer better purposes.’ ”

In this simple narrative, we have a lively picture, in the first place, of the origin of artificial wants; and, secondly, of their influence in encouraging that labour which multiplies the necessaries and accommodations of life. The same process is exhibited every day before our eyes in a thousand instances; but in the new world, the political mechanism is less complicated, and its principle more obvious, while at the same time the rapidity with which the progress of improvement advances, magnifies the scale of observation. Nor must it be forgotten, that it is in consequence of the very peculiar circumstances in which mankind have there begun their career, that philosophers have been found whose attention was alive to such familiar incidents, and who were qualified to perceive the beautiful lights which they throw on the infancy of polished society.

While manufactures stimulate, in this manner, the industry of the husbandman, by multiplying his wants, they create, at the same time, a market for the rude produce of the earth, and communicating to him a portion of the commercial spirit, animate and enlighten his labours by the same motives to which the other lucrative arts owe their progress.

Hence it appears, that, in a civilized country, the importance of a great proportion of the people is to be estimated, not from the intrinsic value of what they produce, but from its subserviency to increase the industry of others. A hat, or a riband, or even a watch, may not in itself be very useful to a peasant, but if they lead him to increase his skill and his industry in order to be able to purchase them, and furnish employment to the artists who are to consume his surplus produce, an important advantage is gained. In this view manufacturers, are useful members of the community, no less than husbandmen; and it may with truth be affirmed, that the artist who, in the centre of a populous town, is employed in polishing a button or a watch-chain, contributes to advance the agriculture of the state, as really, though not so immediately, as if with his own hands he threw the seed into the ground.

According to this view of the subject, it would appear that the great use of manufacturers in a State, is to set the husbandmen at work: and hence arises a most important distinction of labourers, into those who are immediately productive, and those who are instrumentally productive;—a distinction to which I shall have occasion to recur afterwards.

1. To prevent misapprehensions of what has been now stated, it is necessary to recollect, in the first place, that in these observations I confine my attention entirely to the policy of nations which exclude the institution of Slavery. If we appeal to the history of the ancient commonwealths, striking exceptions will immediately present themselves to our conclusions. But, as I have already repeatedly hinted, their systems of political economy were founded on principles, and had a reference to circumstances so essentially different from ours, that the consideration of the one can be of little use in illustrating the other, excepting in the way of contrast.

“In ancient times,” says Sir James Steuart, “men were forced to labour the ground because they were slaves to others. In modern times, the operation is more complex; and as a modern statesman cannot make slaves of his subjects, he must engage them to become slaves to their own passions and desires. This is the only method to make them labour the ground; and provided this be accomplished, by whatever means it is brought about, mankind will increase.”*

2. It must be remembered, also, that in the greater part of my reasonings, I have in view the actual state of society in this part of Europe; that state of society I mean which resulted from the dissolution of the feudal system, and which (though on the whole more favourable to human improvement than any that ever existed before in the history of mankind) has been influenced by some powerful causes operating in a manner by no means agreeable to the general analogy of human affairs. Mr. Smith has shewn that, “according to the natural course of things, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is first directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and last of all, to foreign commerce. This order of things is so very natural, that in every society that had any territory, it has always perhaps been in some degree observed. Some of their lands must have been cultivated before any considerable towns could be established, and some sort of coarse industry of the manufacturing kind must have been carried on in these towns, before they could well think of employing themselves in foreign commerce.

“But though this natural order of things must have taken place in some degree in every such society, it has, in all the modern States of Europe, been in many respects entirely inverted. The foreign commerce of some of their cities has introduced all their finer manufactures, or such as were fit for distant sale; and manufacture and foreign commerce together, have given birth to the principal improvements of agriculture.”† In what way things were forced into this unnatural and retrograde order by the manners and customs introduced by the feudal governments, Mr. Smith has explained with great ingenuity in the Third Book of his Wealth of Nations.

The case is very different in the States of America, the wealth of which is founded entirely on agriculture, and where (as one of their own writers [Franklin?] expresses it) “the industry of man, in its first movements, attaches itself to the bosom of our common parent, as the infant hangs upon the breast of its mother.”1 In that quarter of the globe, besides, there are other circumstances which discriminate the condition of the inhabitants so essentially from that of European nations, that in speculations no parallel ought to be attempted between them. It is sufficient to mention the extreme cheapness of uncultivated land, and the extraordinary profits which may be made by the employment, either of a great or of a small capital in its improvement.

I thought it of particular consequence to state this last circumstance, because it has been frequently overlooked by very respectable political writers. Impressed strongly (it is probable) with the beauty and excellence of that order which (according to Mr. Smith) would everywhere have regulated the course of improvement, if it had not been disturbed by human institutions, they have indulged themselves in general unqualified maxims, the truth of which is obvious and striking wherever this order has been realized, but which are unfortunately not applicable, without many limitations, to that state of things in which we are more peculiarly interested. “Agriculture,” says the anonymous author of a late Essay on Taxation of Income, “as the first and most important object with all nations of territory, should be carried to the greatest possible perfection, before any considerable encouragement is given to manfactures. It ought, indeed, to be considered as the life and soul of all manufactures, which will everywhere prosper and flourish, nearly in proportion as the agriculture of the country is more or less in a state of perfection.”2

“Is there any profession or business,” says Mr. A. Young, “which ought to be advanced to the height it is capable of, before others are encouraged which draw off the working hands from the former?” . . . . “The answer,” he adds, “is clear, precise, and determinate. Agriculture, that greatest of all manufactures, ought to flourish to the full cultivation of the land, before what we commonly call ‘manufactures’ take place as articles of trade and commerce. And after cultivation is at its height, those manufactures ought first to be encouraged which work upon materials of our own growth; and last of all, those which employ foreign materials.”1

In this passage, Mr. Young has described exactly what Mr. Smith calls the natural progress of opulence in a country. This progress, however, it has been already observed, has been in a great measure inverted in Modern Europe; and the causes which have produced this effect are beyond the control of any statesman. If we wish our speculations, therefore, to be practically useful, we must attend to the actual circumstances of the case; applying our reasonings (if I may borrow the homely language of a very old English writer) “to the Common Wealth as it is, not as a philosopher may frame it by discourse, imitating herein, not a breaker of horses, whose part it is to perfect the horse in all his natural actions, but a good rider, who must strive to use him to the best advantage, such as he finds him.”

The encouragement indeed which some modern statesmen have given to manufactures, has been founded on very partial and erroneous views, and has contributed powerfully to counteract that effect on agricultural improvement, which they are naturally calculated to produce, wherever their operation is not thwarted by injudicious systems of policy. Much, too, remains to be done in most countries to forward the progress of husbandry, by removing those obstacles which were thrown in its way during the ignorance and barbarism of former times, and which, however consecrated in the estimation of our ancestors by ancient prejudices, are widely at variance with the just and liberal ideas of the present age.

I have already hinted, that although manufactures and commerce have a more powerful tendency than any other cause whatever to quicken Agriculture, it is nevertheless possible, by an injudicious policy, to encourage the former at the expense of the latter. It has been supposed by the most intelligent French writers, that this was the radical error in the administration of the celebrated Colbert; and the effects which it produced are represented as of the most ruinous nature. The subject is interesting, as it is intimately connected with the history of what has been since called the Economical or Agricultural System of Political Economy.

“Colbert,” says M. de Boulainvilliers, “to whom Lewis confided the care of augmenting his power by an augmentation of commerce, raised his edifice before he had laid the foundation. He saw the grandeur of the monarchy through the medium of manufactures, instead of viewing these in their due subserviency to the productions of the soil. He fixed his attention too much upon the Arts, and too little upon Agriculture; always fabricating, but never creating. His genius embraced every part of the detail, but was incapable of rising to the comprehensive views of a legislator. The minister was lost in the manufacturer. In spite of his high reputation, (a reputation acquired by all who make great changes in a government,) he projected none of those masterly designs” (those coups d’état) “which decide the fortune of a nation. He moved on in a beaten track without ever venturing to strike out a path of his own.”*

The substance of various other censures bestowed by the French political writers on the administration of Colbert, is collected into one view in the following passage of [the Rev.] Mr. Harte’s Essays on Husbandry, [1764.] My principal reason for transcribing it is, that the author (who was himself a practical farmer) had an opportunity in the course of his travels, of examining the agriculture of France with much accuracy; and, therefore, his judgment on this point possesses a weight which does not belong to the assertions of common observers.

“Colbert rather depressed than promoted the interests of his country, when he conceived a project of enriching it by establishing a vast number of manufactures; flattering himself, at the same time, that by making the productions of his manufactures subservient to luxury and falsely refined elegance, he should multiply the wealth of his own nation by supplying and feeding the extravagance and vanity of other nations; but some part of the folly happened to stick where it took its rise, and became infectious at home; which shews that luxury is an unfortunate fashion in any country, though at the same time it prescribes the mode to foreigners, and induces them to purchase such merely ornamental elegancies as are the workmanship of our own artists. Under the idea of hoarding up great quantities of provisions for the support of his work-folks, (and that principally by obstructing the free vent and exportation of corn,) this minister had the applause of the poor, who naturally favour every scheme, real or imaginary, that promises to lower the price of bread; for their understandings can rarely see deeply into the truth of things, any more than the advantage of a nation in general, or of themselves upon the whole. In like manner the historians and poets loaded the Prime Minister with panegyrics, as the true father of the people, and made no ceremony to depreciate the wiser conduct of Sully. But, alas! it never truly appeared that trade and commerce, even in their most flourishing state, enriched a kingdom like the solid revenues that proceed from a right and effectual cultivation of the earth. Thus, though the French nation was intoxicated with the hopes of immense riches, and though they supplied all Europe with silks and embroideries and expensive trifles, yet the fund of real wealth was deficient at bottom; famine made its appearance frequently and almost periodically. The proprietors of landed estates (for they with others at first ran into the universal notion of admiring the project) thought themselves very happy, after a considerable tract of time, to advance their rents a sixth part, though money bore one-third a greater value than before; imposts and taxes were increased immoderately; and a considerable part of the lands (not being found, or at least not believed to answer the expenses of cultivation) was overlooked and neglected by little and little, and at length degenerated into waste and desolated tracts of country. All which may suffice to shew, that the cultivation of the earth ought not to be superseded by a passion for commerce.”*

The great features of Colbert’s policy are still more strongly and distinctly marked in the following slight outline of Mr. Smith.

“Accustomed by the habits of his education to regulate the different departments of public offices, and to establish the necessary checks and controls for confining each to its proper sphere, Colbert endeavoured to regulate the industry and commerce of a great country upon the same model; and instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice, he bestowed upon certain branches of industry extraordinary privileges, while he laid others under as extraordinary restraints. He was not only disposed, like other European ministers, to encourage more the industry of the towns than that of the country, but in order to support the industry of the towns, he was willing even to depress and keep down that of the country. In order to render provisions cheap to the inhabitants of the towns, and thereby to encourage manufactures and foreign commerce, he prohibited altogether the exportation of corn, and thus excluded the inhabitants of the country from every foreign market, for by far the most important part of the produce of their industry. This prohibition, joined to the restraints imposed by the ancient provincial laws of France, upon the transportation of corn from one province to another, and to the arbitrary and degrading taxes which are levied upon the cultivators in almost all the provinces, discouraged and kept down the agriculture of that country very much below the state to which it would naturally have risen in so very fertile a soil, and so very happy a climate. This state of discouragement and depression was felt more or less in every different part of the country, and many different inquiries were set on foot concerning the causes of it. One of those causes appeared to be the preference given by the institutions of Colbert to the industry of the towns above that of the country;”† or, in other words, to Manufactures in preference to Agriculture.

The result of these speculations in France, was the Economical system of M. Quesnai, of which I shall have occasion to treat afterwards, and which Mr. Smith accuses of a fundamental error, the reverse of that which misled Colbert, but equally wide of the truth;—the error of undervaluing that species of industry to which Colbert had in a great measure confined his encouragement.

It is not necessary for me at present to inquire how far Mr. Smith’s censure, in this instance, is well founded. I confess, for my own part, that he appears to me to have carried it too far, and that I think his criticisms apply rather to the language which the Economists have used, than to the substance of their doctrine when fully unfolded. One indisputable conclusion, at least, results from the facts which they have stated, that however powerfully manufactures may tend to stimulate agriculture under the influence of wise and equal laws, it is possible, not only for the former to flourish without a correspondent progress in the latter, but that the comparative encouragement which they receive from Government may be so great, as to withdraw from the other its natural share of capital and of industry.

It will appear afterwards, that the advantages of manufactures in encouraging agricultural industry, are explicitly acknowledged, and indeed strongly stated, by all the Economical writers; and therefore, their opinions must not be confounded with those maintained by Mr. Arthur Young, in his Agricultural Survey of France,* where he asserts that “there is something in manufactures pestiferous to agriculture.” It is remarkable, indeed, of this author, (to whose industry and activity the public unquestionably lies under great obligations,) that notwithstanding the asperity with which he generally speaks, particularly in his later works, of the Economists, he has carried that part of their system which Mr. Smith considers as the most paradoxical of the whole, far beyond the limits assigned to it by their principles. As the illustrations, however, which Mr. Young has collected, are interesting and valuable, I shall (agreeably to my general plan) select some of the most striking facts which he has mentioned in support of his argument; although my knowledge of local circumstances is much too imperfect to enable me to remove completely the objections which they may suggest to some of the foregoing reasonings.

“The greatest fabrics of France are the cottons and woollens of Normandy, the woollens of Picardy and Champagne, the linens of Brittany, and the silks and hardware of the Lyonnais. Now, if manufactures be the true encouragement of agriculture, the vicinity of these great fabrics ought to be the best cultivated districts in the kingdom, whereas the fact is very strikingly the reverse. Considering the fertility of the soil, which is great, Picardy and Normandy are among the worst cultivated countries I have seen. The immense fabrics of Abbeville and Amiens have not caused the enclosure of a single field, or the banishment of fallows from a single acre. Go from Elbœuf to Rouen, if you would view a desert; and the Pays de Caux, possessing one of the richest soils in the world, with manufactures in every hut and cottage, presents one continued scene of weeds, filth, and beggary; a soil so villanously managed, that if it were not naturally of an inexhaustible fertility, it would long ago have been utterly ruined. The agriculture of Champagne is miserable, even to a proverb: I saw there great and flourishing manufactures, and cultivation in ruins around them. In Brittany, which affords but one spectacle, that of a dreary, desolate waste, you find yourself in the midst of one of the greatest linen manufactures in Europe, and throwing your eye around the country, can scarcely believe the inhabitants are fed by agriculture; if they subsisted by the chase of wild animals, their country might be as well cultivated. From hence across the kingdom to Lyons, all the world knows the immense fabrics found there; and yet we are told by a very competent judge, M. Roland de la Platiêre, ‘de toutes les provinces de France le Lyonnais est le plus misérable.’ What I saw of it gave me little reason to question the assertion. The remark of another French writer makes the experiment double. ‘L’Artois est un des provinces les plus riches du Royaume.—C’est une vérité incontestable . . . elle ne possède point de manufactures.’—I will not presume to assert that the agriculture of these districts is bad, because they abound with manufactures, though I believe it to be very much the case in the Pays de Caux; I merely state the facts. The fabrics are the greatest in the kingdom, and certainly the agriculture is among the worst.”*

In farther confirmation of the same view of the subject, Mr. Young refers to some facts stated in his Tour through Ireland many years ago,† with respect to the effects of the vast linen manufacture which spreads all over the north of that kingdom. “There,” says he, “I found the same spectacle that Brittany offers; husbandry so miserably, so contemptibly bad, that I have shewn by calculation the whole province converted into a sheep-walk, and feeding but two sheep per acre, would yield, in wool only, a greater value than the whole amount of the linen fabric; a circumstance I attribute entirely to the manufacture spreading into the country, instead of being confined to towns. ‘Wherever the linen manufacture spreads, there tillage is bad,’ said that attentive observer, the Lord Chief Baron Forster. The Earl of Tyrone has an estate in the county of Derry, amidst manufactures, and another in that of Waterford, where there are none; and he assured me that if the Derry land were in Waterford, or absolutely freed from fabrics, he should clear full one-third more money from it. If we pass into England, we shall find something similar, though not in an equal degree; the manufacturing parts of the kingdom being among the worst cultivated. You must not go for agriculture to Yorkshire, Lancashire, Warwickshire, or Gloucestershire, which are full of fabrics, but to Kent, where there is not the trace of a fabric; to Berkshire, Hertfordshire, and Suffolk, where there are scarcely any: Norwich affords an exception, being the only manufacture in the kingdom in a thoroughly well-cultivated district, which must very much be attributed to the fabric being kept remarkably within the city, and spreading (spinning excepted) not much into the country; a circumstance that deserves attention, as it confirms strongly the preceding observations. But the two counties of Kent and Lancaster are expressly to the purpose, because they form a double experiment: Lancaster is the most manufacturing province in England, and amongst the worst cultivated; Kent has not the shadow of a manufacture, and is perhaps the best cultivated.

“Italy will furnish instances yet more to the purpose than any yet cited. The richest and most flourishing countries in Europe, in proportion to their extent, are probably Piedmont and the Milanese. All the signs of prosperity are there met with; populousness well employed and well supported, a great export without, a thriving consumption within, magnificent roads, numerous and wealthy towns, circulation active, interest of money low, and the price of labour high. In a word, you can name no circumstance that shall prove Manchester, Birmingham, Rouen, and Lyons to be in a prosperous state, that is not found diffused throughout the whole of these countries. To what is all this prosperity to be ascribed? Certainly not to manufactures, because they possess hardly the trace of a fabric. There are a few of no consideration at Milan, and there are in Piedmont the silk-mills, to give the first hand to that product, but on the whole to an amount so very trifling, that both countries must be considered as without fabrics. They are equally without commerce, being excluded from the sea; and though there is a navigable river that passes through both these territories, yet no use is made of it, for there are five sovereigns between Piedmont and its mouth, all of whom lay duties on the transit of every sort of merchandise. As these two countries do not owe their riches to manufactures or commerce, so undoubtedly they are not indebted for them to any peculiar felicity in their governments. Both are despotisms; and the despot of Milan makes that country a beast of burden to Germany; the revenues are remitted to Vienna, and the clothes, even for the troops, paid by Milan, come from Germany. The origin and the support of all the wealth of these countries are to be found in agriculture alone, which is carried to such perfection, as to prove that it is equal to the sole support of a modern and most flourishing society, to keep that society in a state of great wealth, and to enable the governments to be, in proportion to their extent, doubly more powerful than either France or England. Piedmont supports a regal court, and pays 30,000 men. The same extent of country, or number of people, effect the half of this in any other dominion of Europe. But are these territories really without manufactures? No; nor is any country in the world: it is not possible to find a people totally exempt from them. The present inquiry demands no such exemption: it is only necessary to shew that the manufactures found in the Milanese and Piedmont, are such as arise absolutely in consequence of agriculture; that it is agriculture which supports and nourishes them; and that on the contrary these manufactures are so far from doing anything politically for agriculture, that they occasion the exposing of it to restrictions and monopolies; for the governments in these countries have been bitten by the same madness of commerce that has infected other kingdoms; and have attempted by such means to raise these trifling fabrics into foreign export. Happily they have never been able to do it; for there is reason to imagine, that success would have suggested other restrictions unfavourable to the great foundation of all their prosperity. Thus the instances produced are expressly to the purpose, as they exhibit two opulent States, supported by agriculture alone, and possessing no other manufactures or commerce than what every country must possess that enjoys a flourishing cultivation; for it is not to be expected that such great results are to be found attending common exertions only. On the contrary, those that have converted part of those noble territories into a garden, have been great and exemplary.”*

These facts are certainly highly deserving of attention, and I have no doubt that, if they were accurately examined, they would throw much new and important light on this subject. It is indeed only by thus bringing fairly into view the apparent exceptions that occur to our general principles, that we can either hope to limit them with the necessary precision, when they have been stated in too unqualified terms, or can be enabled to exhibit in full force the important truths they may involve.

It seems to have been with the design of bringing this very subject under public discussion, that the Abbé Raynal, about ten years ago, [c. 1790,] remitted a sum of money to the Royal Society of Agriculture at Paris, as a prize for the best Dissertation on the following question:—“Whether does a flourishing Agriculture tend more to promote the prosperity of Manufactures, or the growth of Manufactures to promote the prosperity of Agriculture?” Of the Essays which appeared on this occasion, I have never heard any account.

A few very slight general remarks is all that I propose to offer at present on Mr. Young’s statement. To examine it in detail, would lead me into a field of boundless extent, and would require a knowledge of local circumstances, not to be acquired but by personal observation. Of the inconclusiveness, however, of a beadroll of facts so loosely stated, a judgment may be formed by directing our attention to one of those instances on which Young lays the greatest stress, the flourishing state of agriculture in the county of Kent, in which he asserts there is not a shadow of a manufacture. How far this assertion is well founded, may be judged of from the statements of a very accurate and intelligent writer, whose observations were published more than twenty years before those of Mr. Young,—I mean Campbell [?] in his Agriculture of Kent. After remarking that “in respect of plenty, Kent is another Canaan, fruitful in all good things, and in which there are fewer forests and waste lands than in most other counties,” he continues in the same tenor, through passages to which I shall only refer.1

I have no doubt that Young’s other instances, if carefully examined, would be found equally irrelevant to the question now under consideration, but I must not prosecute this view of the subject any farther. My principal reason for referring to it was to point it out as an object of curiosity, and to show that the question concerning the reciprocal effects of agriculture and of manufactures, is still far from being exhausted.

That Mr. Young’s facts do not warrant the general conclusion, that “there is something pestiferous to agriculture in the neighbourhood of a manufacture,” we may venture to assert with confidence. They prove, indeed, in a striking manner, the miserable effects produced in France, by the discouragements under which agriculture has laboured in that country and that manufactures of themselves can do little where the rights of the husbandman are not only insecure, but systematically violated. Nay, farther, they prove that in such a state of things the encouragement which is given to the industry of towns may withdraw from agriculture some part of the capital which it would otherwise have employed even in its actual state of depression. Wherever this is the case, the effect may be expected to be most conspicuous in the neighbourhood of extensive manufactures; and, in fact, (as Mr. Young has hinted,) something of the same kind, though in a very inferior degree, has been remarked in England. Where large manufactures are established, yielding much more tempting profits than can be obtained by agriculture, the wages given to workmen will naturally attract the labourers from the surrounding districts, and its money capital will have a tendency to follow the same direction. Landholders and farmers will both be induced either to form mercantile connexions themselves, or to establish their sons in trade; and in this manner, notwithstanding the curious and refined husbandry exhibited on the small properties of a few individuals enriched by commerce, agriculture in general will languish, from the failure of the funds destined by the natural course of things for its support and encouragement.1

It does not, however, follow from all this, either that manufactures are unfavourable in their general tendency, or that they have, even in France, prevented agriculture from advancing so rapidly as it would have done, if they had not existed in that kingdom. They may have intercepted part of the industry and capital which would otherwise have gone to the improvement of land, without counterbalancing by this inconvenience their salutary effects on the agricultural industry of the whole territory.

It has been shewn by Mr. Smith, that “the greatest and most important branch of the commerce of every nation is, that which is carried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of the country. The inhabitants of the town draw from the country the rude produce which constitutes both the materials of their work, and the fund of their subsistence; and they pay for this rude produce, by sending back to the inhabitants of the country a certain portion of it manufactured and prepared for immediate use. The trade which is carried on between these two different sets of people, consists ultimately in a certain quantity of rude produce exchanged for a certain quantity of manufactured produce. The dearer the latter, therefore, the cheaper the former; and whatever tends in any country to raise the price of manufactured produce, tends to lower that of the rude produce of the land, and thereby to discourage agriculture. The smaller the quantity of manufactured produce which any given quantity of rude produce is capable of purchasing, the smaller the rude value of that given quantity of rude produce, the smaller, of consequence, is the encouragement which either the landlord has to increase its quantity by improving, or the farmer by cultivating his land.” It has been shewn also, that “whatever tends in any country to diminish the number of artificers and manufacturers, tends to diminish the home market, the most important of all markets for the rude produce of the land, and thereby to discourage agriculture still farther.”1 That the only possible way to make a manufacture thrive, is to procure a ready vent for the goods it furnishes, was never once disputed; and why should we doubt that the same maxim applies to agriculture, which Young himself has repeatedly and justly called “the most important ofall manufactures;” and which (as he has remarked after Sir James Steuart, in numberless parts of his works, [see above, pp. 141, 142]) is to be considered in Modern Europe not merely as a means of subsistence for the cultivators, but as one of the trades which enter into the general system of Political Economy?

On this point, indeed, we may fairly quote one part of Mr. Young’s works against another. “The manufactures of the single city of Norwich (he observes in a book published in 1780) amount to as much as the whole linen export of Ireland, but it is very far from being the whole exported produce of the county of Norfolk. On the contrary, this county, besides feeding its capital, besides feeding Yarmouth and Lynn, two of the greatest ports in England, and a variety of other towns, exports, I believe, more corn than any other county in the kingdom; and whoever is acquainted with the supply of the London markets, knows that there are thousands of black cattle fattened every year on Norfolk turnips, and sent to Smithfield. What a spectacle is this! The most productive agriculture in the world, in the way of exportation, around one of the greatest manufactures in Europe. It is thus that manufactures become the best friends to agriculture, that they animate the farmer’s industry by giving him ready markets, until he is able not only to supply them fully, but pushes his exertions with such effect, that he finds a surplus in his hands to convert into gold in the national balance, by rendering foreigners tributary for their bread. Examine all the other fabrics in the kingdom, you see them prodigious markets for the surrounding lands; you see those lands doubling, trebling, quadrupling their rents, while the farmers increase daily in wealth. Thus you see manufactures rearing up agriculture, and agriculture supporting manufactures. You see a reaction which gives a reciprocal animation to human labour: Great national prosperity is the effect. Wealth pours in from the fabrics, which, spreading like a fertilizing stream over all the surrounding lands, renders them, comparatively speaking, so many gardens, the most pleasing spectacles of successful industry.”*

I cannot help adding to these extracts from Mr. Young, that I do not know of any author in our language whose writings abound more with inconsistencies and contradictions. This is more particularly remarkable in the general principles relating to Political Economy which he has interwoven with his different Agricultural Tours.

In the passages now under consideration, the inconsistency of his conclusions arises, in part, from his confounding together (in the extract which I quoted from his account of France) two questions which are essentially different. The one is the general question concerning the influence of manufactures on agriculture; the other is the question concerning the comparative effects of manufactures when confined to towns, and when spread over the country.

The confusion which runs through Mr. Young’s later speculations on this subject, is the more remarkable, that in his Tours through Ireland, [1776, &c.] he has been at pains to distinguish these two questions, enlarging on the beneficial influence of manufactures in the one case, and on their ruinous effects in the other. I before remarked, (if I am not mistaken,) that this work bears fewer marks of haste and negligence, than most of his other publications.

“In the north of Ireland you behold a whole province peopled by weavers; it is they who cultivate, or rather beggar the soil, as well as work the looms. Agriculture is there in ruins; it is cut up by the root, extirpated, annihilated; the whole region is the disgrace of the kingdom. No other part of Ireland can exhibit the soil in such a state of poverty and desolation.

“But the cause of all these evils, which are absolutely exceptions to everything else on the face of the globe, is easily found;—a most prosperous manufacture, so contrived as to be the destruction of agriculture, is certainly a spectacle for which we must go to Ireland. It is owing to the fabric spreading over all the country, instead of being confined to towns. This in a certain degree is found in some manufactures in England, but never to the exclusion of farmers; whereas, literally speaking, there is not a farmer in a hundred miles of the linen country in Ireland. The lands are infinitely subdivided; no weaver thinks of supporting himself by his loom; he has always a patch of potatoes, of oats, or of flax, and grass or weeds for a cow; so that his time is divided between his loom and his farm. The land is sown with successive crops of oats, until it does not produce the seed again, and then left to become grass as it may, in which state it is under weeds and rubbish for four or five years. As land thus managed will not yield rent, they depend for that on their web. If linen sells indifferently, they pay their rents indifferently; and if it sells badly, they do not pay them at all: rents in general being worse paid there than in any other part of Ireland.

“But if instead of the manufacture having so diffused itself as absolutely to banish farmers, it had been confined to towns, the very contrary effect would have taken place, and all those vast advantages to agriculture would have followed, which flourishing manufactures in other countries occasion. The towns would have been large and numerous, and would have proved such ample markets to all the adjacent country, that it could not have failed to become well cultivated, and to let at double the present rent. The manfacturers would have been confined to their own business, and the farmers to theirs; and both trades would have flourished the better for this arrangement.”1

If this reasoning of Mr. Young’s be just, it will go far to account for the very extraordinary facts I quoted on his authority, with respect to the state of manufacturing and of agricultural industry in France; for he tells us that the poor all over that kingdom abound with domestic manufactures. The culture of hemp or flax, in particular, for home uses, prevails (according to him) universally: And in so far as this is the case, no advocate for manufactures, however sanguine, could possibly expect from them any beneficial effects on husbandry. If every family in the country have a patch of flax or hemp for its own supply of all the articles manufactured from these materials, the exchanges between the country and the town are in the same proportion diminished; and if a similar practice were extended to every other article, the circulation would stop completely. The farmer would have nothing to buy, and would soon have nothing to sell. “A countryman thus living on his own little property, industriously employed with his family in manufacturing for all their own wants, exhibits, it must be owned, a pleasing spectacle of simple and sober manners, but of manners perfectly inconsistent with the prosperity of a great society in the actual circumstances of Modern Europe.”1

Various other particulars, in Mr. Young’s statement, which have a very paradoxical aspect at first view, would probably appear in a different light, if we were acquainted with all the circumstances. Thus, in the Pays de Caux, (the country, to wit, from Havre to Rouen,) upon which he has laid particular stress, the difficulty is completely explained by some facts mentioned by Young himself, on a different occasion. “The soil,” we are informed, “is among the finest in France. The number of small properties, and consequently population, is very great, which is the reason for the price and rental of land through this country being vastly out of proportion to the products. Landlords also divide their farms according to the demand, as the rise of rent tempts it; but they often find themselves depending for the rent of their land on the prosperity of a fabric. Had the Pays de Caux been a miserably poor, rocky, or barren territory, the result would have been beneficial, for the fabric would have covered such a district with cultivation.”†

Mr. Young informs us further, that the farmers in the Pays de Caux are not only manufacturers, but have an inclination also for trade. The large ones engage in commercial speculations at Havre, particularly in the cotton trade, and some even in that of the West Indies. “This,” he adds, “is a most pernicious circumstance; the improvement of their cultivation being never the object or result of their growing rich, but merely the engaging more largely in trade or manufacture. If they get a share in an American adventure, no matter whether docks and thistles cover their fields.”* Such facts are abundantly curious; but it is surely unfair to state merely the general result, without any specification of the peculiarities of the case, in order to invalidate the important doctrine of the influence of manufactures on the improvement of a country.

I shall take this opportunity of remarking, (as a more convenient one may not occur afterwards,) that Mr. Young’s assertions, with respect to the pernicious effects of domestic manufactures, (an opinion, by the way, in which he has persevered more uniformly than in most of his other general principles,) are stated in too unqualified a form. Dr. Crumpe, in an Essay which gained the prize from the Irish Academy, expresses strong doubts (founded on some observations communicated to him by Dr. Burrowes) whether Mr. Young’s description of the farming manufacturers in Ulster is not highly exaggerated. And at any rate, the circumstances of that people are too peculiar, in many other respects, to authorize us to draw from them any general conclusions. The same remark may be applied to this opinion, in so far as it rests on the state of agriculture in France.

It is certainly true in general, that the two employments of a farmer and a manufacturer will be carried on to greater perfection when divided, than when united in one person. “A country weaver,” as Mr. Smith observes, “who cultivates a small farm, must lose a good deal of time in passing from his loom to his field, and from the field to the loom. A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another; and this renders him almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions.”†

Although, however, it follows from this, that a domestic manufacture must always be a most unprofitable employment for an individual who depends chiefly for his subsistence on the produce of a farm, the converse of the proposition seems to require some limitations. A man, indeed, who exercises a trade which occupies him from day to day, must, of necessity, be disqualified for the management of such agricultural concerns as require a constant and undivided attention. But it does not appear equally evident, how the improvement of the country should be injured by his possessing a few acres as an employment for his hours of recreation; nor does it seem likely, on the other hand, that his professional skill and industry will be more impaired by his occasional labour in the fields, than by those habits of intemperate dissipation in which all workmen who have no variety of pursuit are prone to indulge.

The manufacture of our national broad-cloth, affords a contrast to some of the examples mentioned by Young. “This manufacture,” as is remarked by a late writer On Taxation of Income,* “is almost everywhere carried on by unconnected workmen, who employ all the hours which they devote to relaxation and amusement, in the care of their garden and other small portions of ground which they happen to possess, to which they and their families become commonly so much attached, that they have been known to remain in them (small as their properties commonly are) for many generations. Nor does the possession of this variety make them worse tradesmen; on the contrary, this class of manufacturers are everywhere noted for their industry, and the article which they furnish, which has long been considered as the staple commodity of our country, is the best and most perfect of its kind that can anywhere be met with.”†

The advantages to health and to morals attending manufactures of this description, when compared with the effects of manufacturing towns, are so great that some political writers have gone so far as to assert, that it is only when spread over the face of a country they can be considered as a public benefit. Mirabeau, [the son,] in his book On the Prussian Monarchy, maintains this opinion, and lays it down as a general proposition, “That great manufactures belonging to individuals who hire workmen by the day, can never form an object worthy of the attention of Government.”1

In stating these considerations I would not be understood to deny the truth of Young’s reasonings in favour of manufacturing towns compared with scattered manufactures; for I am sensible that much may be alleged in support of his system. But he has unquestionably carried it too far, by keeping completely out of view the arguments which favour the opposite conclusion. The fact is, that in all human establishments we may expect to find a mixture of good and of evil; and the only question is, which of the two preponderates? It is sufficient for me in the case of this incidental question, to have suggested some doubts in opposition to Mr. Young’s unqualified assertions. The prosecution of the discussion would lead me too far aside from my principal subject.2

It is not, however, only by the peculiarity in the manufacturing establishments of France, which has occasioned this digression, that Mr. Young has complicated the general question concerning the influence of Manufactures on Agriculture. Much depends on the species of manufactures that are established in a country; and in this respect the choice of Colbert seems to have been guided by narrow and erroneous principles. The manufactures which he encouraged were chiefly those which minister to luxury and to elegance; the demand for which depending to so great a degree on fashion and caprice cannot be so constant and steady as for articles which are subservient to the real wants and necessities of mankind. It has been observed in our own country, that the manufacturers of Norwich, who deal in fine crapes and other delicate stuffs, are laid idle three times for once that the Yorkshire manufacturer, who deals chiefly in low-priced serviceable cloths, experiences a similar misfortune.3 The disturbances which have so often been occasioned by the silk-weavers of Spitalfields, and which have exceeded any that have taken place among the other classes of our manufacturers, have been ascribed partly to the same circumstance. This error, however, has been long perceived and corrected in France; and, under the old government, a variety of the most useful manufactures were advancing rapidly to perfection.

The Manufactures that, in addition to their other advantages, draw from the farmer the materials on which they depend, and thereby present a new stimulus to Agriculture, possess undoubtedly great advantages over those that work up materials imported from abroad. Some remarks on this subject that deserve attention, blended with other speculations of less consequence, may be found in Dr. Anderson’s Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry in Scotland.

I have been led into these observations (which have extended to a much greater length than I expected) by the passage quoted from Mr. Young’s Account of France, in which he has plainly lost sight of some important general principles, to the truth of which he has, on other occasions, borne ample testimony. If I should be thought, in stating them, to have sometimes forgotten the general title under which they were introduced, I have only to remark, by way of apology, (in the words of Sir James Steuart,) “that the complicated mechanism of society in modern times, (so different from the simplicity of ancient manners,) has rendered almost every disorder in the political body an obstacle to that useful population that constitutes national strength.”* This, it is evident, holds more particularly true of every disorder which affects agricultural industry.

Before concluding my observations on Agriculture and Manufactures considered in their relation to population, I cannot help remarking once more, the extravagance of general declamations in favour of Agriculture when accompanied with invectives against those employments from which the farmer derives his market. It is very justly observed by Mr. Smith, that those systems which, in order to promote Agriculture, would impose restraints upon manufacturing and foreign trade, act contrary to the very end which they propose, and indirectly discourage that very species of industry which they mean to promote. They are so far more inconsistent than even the system which would encourage manufactures and foreign trade in preference to Agriculture; inasmuch as the latter, while it turns a certain portion of the capital of the society from supporting a more advantageous, to support a less advantageous species of industry, really accomplish their favourite object. Those agricultural systems, on the contrary, in their ultimate tendency, discourage that very species of industry which it is their professed aim to animate.*

Mr. Smith (as I already hinted) accuses the French Economists of this very inconsistency, of proposing to advance agriculture by depressing manufactures.† I am doubtful if in this charge he has treated them with his usual candour; but the remarks he has made on this alleged imperfection of their system, are just and profound, and are strictly applicable to the reasonings of Mr. Young, and of various other later writers.

If, indeed, by depressing manufactures be understood the abolition of all those institutions which have hitherto given the industry of towns an advantage over that of the country, so as to allow the industry and capital of the society to follow as much as possible its natural course, without receiving any particular determination on the part of Government; it must be owned that the Economists are, in this sense, advocates for agriculture in preference to manufactures. But this is equally the tendency of Mr. Smith’s own system, which seems to me, so far as the present question is concerned, to differ from that which he criticises only in its phraseology; according to both systems, the perfection of policy consists in abolishing all regulations which tend either to preference or to restraint; and in allowing every man to bring both his industry and his capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men, so long as he confines himself within the limits of justice.

After all, in the present circumstances of Europe, allowances ought to be made for the zeal with which some writers have taken up the argument in favour of Agriculture, when we consider the discouragements under which it has so long laboured, and which still contribute so powerfully to retard its progress. Nothing indeed could be so absurd as to think of advancing it, by depressing that species of industry to which it owes its chief improvements; but still it must be owned, that it stands in need, in a very peculiar degree, not only of the protection, but of the fostering care of Government. Mr. Smith has himself, in another part of his work, made some observations which tend strongly to confirm this conclusion. “With all the liberty and security which law can give, the occupiers of land must always improve under great disadvantages. The farmer, compared with the proprietor, is as a merchant who trades with borrowed money, compared with one who trades with his own. The stock of both may improve, but that of the one, with only equal good conduct, must always improve more slowly than that of the other, on account of the large share of the profit which is consumed by the interest of the loan. The lands cultivated by the farmer must, in the same manner, with only equal good conduct, be improved more slowly than those cultivated by the proprietor, on account of the large share of the produce which is consumed in the rent, and which, had the farmer been proprietor, he might have employed in the further improvement of the land. The station of a farmer besides, is, from the nature of things, inferior to that of a proprietor. Through the greater part of Europe, the yeomanry are regarded as an inferior rank of people, even to the better sort of tradesmen and mechanics, and in all parts of Europe to the great merchants and master manufacturers. It can seldom happen, therefore, that a man of any considerable stock should quit the superior to place himself in an inferior station; and therefore, even in the present state of Europe, little stock is likely to go from any other profession to the improvement of land in the way of farming. More does perhaps in Great Britain than in any other country, though even there the great stocks which are in some places employed in farming, have generally been acquired by farming, the trade, perhaps, in which of all others stock is commonly acquired most slowly.”*

Nor is this all. The education and habits of a husbandman, his solitary life and stationary residence, naturally attach him to the practices with which he is familiar, and prevent, in this order of men, the possibility of a mutual communication of lights analogous to what exists all over the commercial world, among tradesmen and artists of every description.1

Hence the duty of Government to give every possible assistance to Agriculture by promoting the circulation of useful knowledge; and the duty of those who fill the higher stations in society, to instruct and animate their inferiors by the influence of example. In the various departments of Trade, individuals may be safely left to themselves, and are most likely to advance both the public interests and their own, when they exercise freely their private judgment concerning the most effectual means of bettering their fortune. But experience shows that this maxim does not apply in its full extent to the cultivators of the soil, whose situation precludes them, in a great measure, from all information but what is supplied by the narrow circle of their professional employments. The general progress of improvement, therefore, in this most important of all arts, is likely to be extremely slow, where it does not engage the superintending care of Government, and is not aided by the enlightened example of landed proprietors; and it is pleasing to reflect on the attention which begins to be paid to it, in our own country, as a national object. The rapid progress which the more refined systems of modern husbandry have made in some districts, in consequence of the exertions of a few leading individuals, is a satisfactory proof, that however difficult it may be to struggle with ignorance and prejudice, these obstacles are by no means insurmountable.

Justice, too, and humanity, as well as sound policy, plead strongly in favour of a class of men, who, while they are employed in laying the only solid foundation of national greatness, are necessarily, in the present circumstances of the world, left behind by those who follow the commercial arts. Nor ought we to forget what is due to the simple and interesting virtues which seem, in every age, to be attached to this primitive occupation of man; and on which, in a far greater degree than on the arithmetical numbers of a people, the prosperity and the resources of a country essentially depend. They are beautifully described in the following fragment of Old Cato:—

“Majores nostri. . . . virum bonum cum laudabant, ita laudabant:—‘bonum Agricolam, bonumque Colonum.’ Amplissime laudari existimabatur, qui ita laudabatur. Mercatorem autem, strenuum studiosumque rei quærendæ existimo; verum (ut supra dixi) periculosum et calamitosum. At ex agricolis, et viri fortissimi et milites strenuissimi gignuntur; maximeque pius quæstus stabilissimusque consequitur, minimeque invidiosus. Minime quoque male cogitantes sunt, qui in eo studio occupati sunt.”*

In some of my last lectures, I have enlarged, at considerable length, on the essential importance of Manufactures as a stimulus to Agriculture, in the present circumstances of Modern Europe: and I have also touched slightly on the incidental disadvantages attending them, when established on erroneous principles. The subject, I am sensible, is far from being exhausted; and, indeed, the new views of it which open upon us at every step of our progress, are so various, that I find it extremely difficult to proceed with steadiness towards those general conclusions which I wish to establish. Some of these views, I flatter myself, I may be able to prosecute hereafter, when I shall have leisure to survey more comprehensively, the whole field of inquiry. At present, the multiplicity of other articles to which I am anxious to direct your attention, compared with the limited extent of the course, obliges me to hasten to speculations of a different nature.

[1.—

On the Employment of Children in Factory Work: its Advantages and Disadvantages.]

I cannot, however, bring to a close the discussions in which we have been last engaged, without taking notice of a new form in which manufacturing labour has lately appeared in this country,—I allude to those establishments which, by employing crowds of children separated from the inspection of their parents, appear to threaten (at least on a superficial view of the subject) the most fatal consequences to the health and to the morals, as well as to the numbers, of the rising generation. The following statement of the fact, as it is exemplified on a very great scale, in Lancashire and some of the neighbouring counties, I borrow from Dr. Aikin’s Description of the Country round Manchester.

“In the cotton mills, children of very tender age are employed; many of them collected from the workhouses of London and Westminster, and transported in crowds, as apprentices to masters resident many hundred miles distant, where they serve, unknown, unprotected, and forgotten by those to whose care Nature or the laws had consigned them. These children are usually too long confined at work, in close rooms, often during the whole night; the air they breathe, from the oil, &c., employed in the machinery, and other circumstances, is injurious; little regard is paid to their cleanliness; and frequent changes from a warm to a cold atmosphere are predisposing causes to sickness and debility, and particularly to the epidemic fever which so generally is to be met with in these factories. It is also much to be questioned, if society does not receive detriment from the manner in which children are thus employed during their early years. They are not generally strong for labour, or capable of pursuing any other branch of business when the term of their apprenticeship expires. The females are wholly uninstructed in sewing, knitting, and other domestic affairs, requisite to make them notable and frugal wives and mothers. This is a great misfortune to them and to the public, as is sadly proved by a comparison of the families of labourers in husbandry, and those of manufacturers in general. In the former, we meet with neatness, cleanliness, and comfort; in the latter, with filth, rags, and poverty, although their wages may be nearly double to those of the husbandman. It must be added, that the want of early religious instruction and example, and the numerous and indiscriminate association in these buildings, are very unfavourable to their future conduct in life.”

These facts seem abundantly to justify the quære of a late humane and liberal writer, (Sir Frederick Morton Eden,) “Whether any manufacture, which, in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages and workhouses should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be employed by turns during the greater part of the night, and robbed of that rest which, though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that numbers of both sexes of different ages and dispositions, should be collected together in such a manner, that the contagion of example cannot but lead to profligacy and debauchery, will add to the sum of national felicity?”*

The subject, undoubtedly, even when viewed in the most favourable light, is far from being pleasing; nor is it possible for any views of remote expediency to reconcile the mind to commercial projects, which are not only injurious to the morals of the community, but which require a sacrifice of the happiness attached by nature, to the gaiety, the freedom, and the innocent activity of childhood. As most political subjects, however, may be considered under different aspects, and as it is more useful to attempt the melioration of unavoidable evils than to indulge ourselves in declamations against what it is beyond our power to remedy, it may be worth while to employ a few moments in examining, first, Whether the misery and profligacy described by Dr. Aikin be necessarily connected with these establishments, in the extent which he has stated; and, secondly, Whether they may not have their use in palliating some other disorders of a still more alarming nature, in a commercial and luxurious society, such as that in which they have arisen.

In answer to the first of these inquiries, it gives me great pleasure to mention the following particulars, which evince, in a very striking manner, how much may be effected by the active zeal of private humanity when wisely and systematically directed to its object, in alleviating those evils which, as they seem to originate in causes intimately connected with national wealth and prosperity, it is scarcely possible for the Legislator to remedy. The particulars I am to state relate to the Cotton Manufactory in the neighbourhood of Lanark, lately the property of Mr. Dale at Glasgow.*

The supply of workers for this establishment comes either from the native inhabitants of the place; from families who have been collected about the works from the neighbouring parishes, and more distant parts of the country; or, lastly, from Edinburgh and Glasgow, both of which towns constantly afford great numbers of destitute children.

The period during which they are engaged varies according to the circumstances of their situation. Those who receive weekly wages (the greater part of whom live with their parents) are commonly engaged for four years; while such as are sent from the workhouse in Edinburgh, or who are otherwise without friends to take the charge of them, are bound four, five, six, or seven years, according to their age; their service continuing until they have completed their fifteenth year. Children of this last description receive, instead of wages, their maintenance and education.

The hours of labour are eleven and a half each day, from six in the morning till seven at night, with half an hour of intermission at nine o’clock for breakfast, and a whole hour at two for dinner.

Seven is the hour for supper; in half an hour after which the children go to school, where they continue till nine o’clock. In 1796, (after which period I cannot speak on the subject with the same accuracy,) the schools were attended by five hundred and seven scholars; in instructing whom in reading, writing, and the principles of arithmetic, besides the common branches of education appropriated to females, sixteen teachers, with two occasional assistants, were employed. Besides these night schools, there were two day schools for children too young for work; all of them unattended with any expense to the scholars. The utmost attention was paid, at all times, to the purity of their morals, and to their religious instruction.

Of the attention given to cleanliness, diet, and everything else connected with health, the following statement of the number of children in the boarding-house at different periods, compared with the annual deaths, affords the most satisfactory evidence. The greatest part of the workers, it is to be observed, are lodged with their parents, who reside either in the village, in the immediate neighbourhood, or in the town of Lanark, one mile distant; and, therefore, this statement is to be understood as applying to those who receive their maintenance instead of wages, and who are all lodged together in one house. This number, in 1796, amounted to 396 boys and girls.

With respect to their aptitude for other employments and the general state of their bodily strength, when their size disqualifies them for this species of labour, we are assured by Mr. Dale, in a printed letter addressed to Mr. Bailey of Hope, near Manchester, that “the workers, when too big for spinning, are as stout and robust as others of the same age. The male part of them are fit for any trades; a great many, since the commencement of the war, have gone into the army and navy, and others are occasionally going away as apprentices to smiths or joiners, but especially to weavers; for which last trade, from the expertness they acquire in handling yarn, they are particularly well fitted, and of course are taken as apprentices on better terms. The females very generally leave the mills and go to private family service, when about sixteen years of age. “Were they disposed to continue at the mills,” Mr. Dale adds, “these afford abundant employment for them, as well as for many more young men than ever remain at them.”

I shall only observe farther, before concluding this article, that if it were possible to restrain the unjustifiable practice of ransacking cottages and dissolving family connexions, by carrying away children to a distance from their homes; and if such establishments as have been now under review were confined to the orphan and destitute, supplied in such abundance by our great cities, their evil consequences would be much diminished; and they might even be considered as a salutary provision for some political disorders inseparably connected with our present system of manners. It will appear, in another part of the course, that the poverty and beggary which has prevailed so much in these last ages among the lower orders, arose necessarily from that important change which has gradually taken place in this part of Europe; the decrease of villainage, and the dependence of the body of the people on their own industry. This evil, therefore, is necessarily connected (although I am far from thinking that it is so to the extent in which it exists) with the manufactures and commerce to which this nation owes so much of its prosperity. In such a state of society, the number of destitute children cannot fail to be great; and it is increased to a wonderful degree by the licentious morals so prevalent in all our towns, but more especially in the capital. The condition of the unfortunate objects of manufacturing speculation cannot, therefore, be fairly compared with that of the young who enjoy the inestimable advantages of parental care and tenderness, but with what their own situation would probably have been if they had not found such an asylum.

From some facts, indeed, that have been very strongly stated in the other part of the island, it would appear that the protecting interference of the Legislature is loudly called for, in the case of parish children transported, as is often the case, from workhouses in the metropolis, to factories in distant counties. A late writer of most respectable character, [the Rev.] Mr. Gisborne,* assures us, that he has known, from indisputable authority, cruel punishments inflicted on such as have found the means of representing the hardships they suffered, in order to deter them and their companions from similar attempts;—an abuse which cannot be checked while magistrates have no power of entering the workshops of manufacturers for the purpose of inquiring into the treatment of the children whom they employ. Government, certainly, can never be better occupied than in measures, which, by promoting the comforts, the health, and the morals of those whom Providence has deprived of their natural guardians, re-establish, in some measure, those ties which the unfortunate accidents of life have broken, and give vigour to the first principles on which the political fabric depends.

[2.—

On Machinery as a Substitute for Labour: its Advantages and Disadvantages.]

To the same branch of our subject belongs another question, which has not only occasioned much discussion among speculative politicians, but has given rise to frequent insurrections among the labouring classes of the people. The question concerning the tendency of mechanical contrivances for superseding or for abridging labour, to increase or to diminish the population of a country, in consequence of their tendency to increase or to diminish the quantity of employment to those whose subsistence depends on their own industry.

On this question I must confine myself, at present, to a few imperfect hints. I shall begin with stating the opinion of Montesquieu, whose sentiments coincide with those of some other very distinguished writers of the same country.

“Where there is an Agrarian Law,” he observes, “and the lands are equally divided, the country may be well peopled though there are but few arts; because every citizen receives from the cultivation of his land whatever is necessary for his subsistence; and all the citizens together consume all the fruits of the earth. Thus it was in some of the ancient republics.

“In our present situation, in which lands are so unequally distributed, they produce much more than those who cultivate them can consume; and consequently, if the arts should be neglected, and nothing attended to but Agriculture, the country could not be peopled. Those who cultivate, having corn to spare, nothing would engage them to work the following year. The fruits of the earth would not be consumed by the indolent, for these would have nothing with which they could purchase them. It is necessary then that the Arts should be established, in order that the produce of the land may be consumed by the labourer and the artificer. In a word, it is now proper that many should cultivate much more than is necessary for their own use. For this purpose they must have a desire of enjoying superfluities, and these they can receive only from the artificer.

“Those machines which are designed to abridge art are not always useful. If a piece of workmanship is of a moderate price, such as is equally agreeable to the maker and buyer, those machines which render the manufacture more simple, or in other words, diminish the number of workmen, would be pernicious. And if water-mills were not everywhere established, I should not have believed them so useful as is pretended, because they have deprived an infinite multitude of their employment, a vast number of persons of the use of water, and the greater part of the land of its fertility.”1

I recollect few passages in the writings of this very eminent author in which he appears to me to have reasoned in so loose and slovenly a manner. The chapter which I have now quoted is entitled, “Of the Number of Inhabitants with relation to the Arts.” From the scope of the argument in the first part of it, we are naturally led to expect that the author is pointing at a distinction formerly illustrated, between that state of society in which Agriculture was practised as a means of subsistence, and the state of society in Modern Europe, in which it is practiced as a trade, with a view of shewing the disadvantages of machines in the former case, and their utility in the latter. Of this speculation, however, he makes no use whatever in the concluding paragraph; but, on the contrary, seems to call in question the expediency of water-mills even at present.—“If water-mills were not everywhere established, I should not have believed them so useful as is pretended, because they have deprived an infinite number of hands of their employment, a vast number of persons of the use of water, and a great part of the land of its fertility.” Of these three considerations, the last two, it is evident, are perfectly inapplicable to the general question, as they would only prove, even if they were admitted as just, the inferiority of water-mills to wind-mills. I shall confine myself, therefore, to the first; the tendency of such contrivances to diminish the quantity of employment in a manufacturing and commercial country.

Before entering on the argument, it may not be a disagreeable relief to the attention, in the midst of these discussions, to quote a very beautiful Greek epigram, occasioned by the invention here objected to by Montesquieu, and which has frequently struck me as bearing a strong resemblance to the general strain of Dr. Darwin’s Imagery in the Botanic Garden. The ancients, (it may be proper to premise,) during many ages, knew nothing but hand-mills;* and in Greece the labour of turning them was committed to the women. The case would appear to have been the same among the Egyptians, from the following passage of Scripture:—“All the first-born of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon the throne, even to the first-born of the maid-servant that is behind the mill.”1 I shall quote the Epigram, (which is ascribed to Antipater,) in an elegant Latin version by Boivin.†

• “Stertite jam famulæ; cesset mola; brachia cessent:
• Stertite, dum gallus provocat ore diem.
• Alma Ceres liquidas operi succedere vestro
• Naiadas, et manuum jussit obire vicem.
• Scandit Nympha rotam celeri pede; vertitur axis,
• Versatur celeri turbine rapta mola.
• Rursum ævi veteris fruimur bona. Dat sua nobis
• Munera non ullo parta labore Ceres.”

I have alluded to this Epigram, not merely as an object of curiosity, but as it exhibits a picture of a state of society which, when contrasted with that of the more polished nations in modern Europe, affords of itself, without any comment, a strong general presumption against Montesquieu’s conclusion. How have mankind been enabled to emerge from barbarism to civilisation, but by the introduction and the progressive improvement of machinery? It is by these that all human arts are carried on, and that the condition of the citizen is distinguished from that of the savage; a fact so striking and so important in the history of human affairs, that Franklin has somewhere fixed on it as the best foundation for a definition of Man. And, undoubtedly, if all such definitions were not absurd, that of being a tool-making animal, or engineer, which he has humorously substituted instead of some of those proposed by the philosophers of antiquity, must be allowed to possess considerable merit, inasmuch as it turns upon one of the most essential characteristics by which our species is discriminated from the brutes. How intimately it is connected with the progress of mankind, more especially in the advanced stages of their improvement, will appear more fully hereafter. In the meantime, the experience of the past is sufficiently decisive on the subject, to discourage all attempts to fetter human ingenuity and invention. The simplest machines and implements, without which we now should be at a loss how to subsist, were new in their day; and, in many instances, the invention of them undoubtedly diminished, perhaps annihilated, the demand for some species of labour which was before in request. In what situation would the world now be had these inventions been proscribed, out of tenderness to the old workmen; and who will venture to pronounce, that human life has yet attained to its highest degree of refinement?1

It is hardly possible to introduce suddenly the smallest innovation into the Political Economy of a State, let it be ever so reasonable, nay, ever so profitable, without incurring some inconveniences. But temporary inconveniences furnish no objection to solid improvements. Those which may arise from the sudden introduction of a machine cannot possibly be of long continuance. The workmen will, in all probability, be soon able to turn their industry into some other channel; and they are certainly entitled to every assistance the public can give them, when they are thus forced to change their professional habits. “An advantageous and honourable peace,” as Sir James Steuart well remarks, “at the end of a long and destructive war, is attended with the same inconvenience as the invention of a machine. A number of soldiers are disbanded, and become burdensome to the public; but the evil is of short duration, and bears no proportion to the extensive and solid advantages of which peace is productive.”2 At the end of the war before last, more than a hundred thousand soldiers and sailors were all at once thrown out of employment,—a number equal to what is employed in the greatest manufactories; and yet (according to Mr. Smith* ) no sensible inconvenience happened to the country. Many of the seamen probably betook themselves to the merchant service, while the rest, with the soldiers, (adverse as the habits of both are to manufacturing industry,) were very soon absorbed in the great mass of the people.

In what I have hitherto said, I have taken for granted, that the invention of a machine must necessarily diminish the quantity of employment in that particular branch of industry which it is its object to facilitate; and that it is necessary, upon such an occasion, for those who are deprived of their former mode of subsistence, to betake themselves to some other trade or manufacture, in which the demand for labourers still continues. But this is by no means a necessary consequence of such inventions; for it is far from being impossible, that by lowering the price of commodities, and improving their quality, they may increase the demand for work in a greater proportion than that in which they diminish the number of hands by which it is carried on. By lowering the price, they may open new markets abroad, or place the commodities within the reach of a lower class of people at home; or, on the other hand, by improving the fabric, they may bring them into request, both at home and abroad, among the higher orders; and, in this manner, a larger quantity wrought in a more compendious manner, may employ as many hands as a less quantity in a way more laborious. In fact, this can scarcely fail to be the consequence, inasmuch as the demand for labour has no other limit than the extent of consumption; and in the present state of the world, consumption may be fairly said to have no limit which may not be extended by a reduction of price. When such an effect has once taken place, its operation increases and extends beyond calculation; for the increased demand for the commodities produced by the assistance of the machine, increases the demand for all the various materials and all the various trades which are subservient to the manufacture, and which furnish perhaps employment to an immense number of hands without admitting of a mechanical abridgment.

It may be worth while to add, that the same state of society which multiplies these compendious processes in the old and established trades, is continually multiplying the number of pursuits and occupations, and enlarging our prospect of that boundless field which will never be exhausted by human industry.

Another consideration, too, which adds much force to the foregoing reasonings, may be deduced from the effect of mechanical abridgment of labour, in disengaging corresponding quantities of the manufacturing capital of the country. In proportion as this happens, the funds destined for the maintenance of labour receive a virtual augmentation; and, in a nation such as ours, cannot fail to find immediate employment either in extending the scale of old establishments, or in striking out new channels of industry. In truth, all that has been alleged by Turgot, Smith, and Bentham, in proof of the astonishing effects produced by the accumulation of capital, may be fairly urged in favour of those machines which render a given quantity of capital more productive.

These observations, however, relate only to the eventual or possible advantages of machines in increasing employment, and, by no means, do justice to the present argument. Their infinite importance, or rather, indeed, their absolute necessity to maintain the national prosperity of a commercial country like Great Britain, will appear from the following considerations.

“The Russians,” we are told,* “had no other way of making planks, till near the end of the last century, but by hewing or chipping away a whole tree to the necessary thickness; notwithstanding which, they could afford to sell them cheaper than their neighbours. Suppose that two Russians could, in this manner, finish a plank in a day, and that in the same time two common sawyers could cut out twenty, it follows that the Russians must work for one-twentieth part of the sawyers’ wages. If a sawyer in Sweden can get tenpence a day, the Russian must be paid with a halfpenny.” . . . .

“In Sweden,” Postlethwayt adds, “there are a kind of mills turned by water, and so contrived as to take in large trees on the upper side of the stream, and deliver them out on the lower, sawed into planks in a few minutes.” One of these mills will make at least five hundred planks, whilst the Russian could make a single one by hewing; and consequently, with the attendance of a single person, it performs the work of a thousand men labouring with the axe.

It is only by such contrivances, combined with that division of labour which is intimately connected with them, that nations, among whom the wages of labour are comparatively high, can maintain the competition in foreign markets; and to what an extraordinary extent the productive powers of industry may thus be multiplied, the commercial history of our own island affords a proof hitherto unequalled among mankind.

In a country where, by increase of money, by a load of taxes, and by various other causes, the price of labour has risen higher than among its commercial competitors, its trade must necessarily go to decay, unless this circumstance is counteracted by others of an opposite tendency. So strongly does this remark apply to our own case, that many of our manufacturing towns must long ago have given up all thoughts of foreign commerce, if they had not been constantly struggling against the advancing price of manual labour, by those astonishing combinations of mechanical ingenuity which nothing but necessity can account for. It is a fortunate arrangement in human affairs, that the same circumstances which create the evil should thus furnish the remedy. When demands from abroad slacken, and foreign rivals, in consequence of the cheapness of labour, are on the point of securing the prize, the pressure of necessity awakens invention; and by the seasonable introduction of a new machine, re-establishes the manufacture, lowered in its price or improved in its quality. The competition, in truth, among commercial nations at present, is not merely a competition of industry, but of ingenuity and skill; and it is likely to become so in a greater and greater degree, as the progress of Science and of Art advances. It is this inexhaustible fund of mechanical invention, in which we have now left all our competitors far behind, aided by the division of labour arising from mercantile opulence, and protected by civil liberty, which is the great foundation of our commercial prosperity.

The foregoing observations, while they appear to me to go far to justify the general principle on which mechanical abridgments of labour proceed, suggest, at the same time, if I am not mistaken, an additional confirmation of some reasonings formerly stated in vindication of the consolidation of farms. [P. 124, seq.]

It was long ago observed by Mr. Jenyns,* (and, indeed, the remark must have occurred to every person who has bestowed a moment’s consideration on the subject,) “That although no tax is immediately laid, in Great Britain, on corn, it is taxed as effectually as if a duty by the bushel had been primarily laid upon it; inasmuch as out of its price, all the innumerable taxes drawn from the farmer on windows, soap, candles, malt, hops, leather, salt, and a thousand others, must be repaid.” . . . “The price of corn, therefore,” he concludes, “must necessarily be advanced.”1 Since the time he wrote, how astonishingly have taxes increased and multiplied on the farmer’s articles of consumption; and yet the price of corn has not, certainly, risen in the same proportion. Indeed, under all this weight of taxation, its price, at an average, appears to have fallen in the course of the present century.

To what cause can we ascribe this very important fact, but to the accumulation of agricultural capital in the hands of those men who are accused of consolidating farms? and who, in consequence of the circumstances which have been already explained, are enabled to bring their grain to the market at a reduced expense. The advantages which manufacturers derive from the division of labour, and from the use of machinery, cannot be attained, but in a very inconsiderable degree, by the husbandman; and hence the inestimable value of every arrangement which, by economizing his operations, prevents the price of the necessaries of life from keeping pace with the growing weight of taxation. These circumstances, it must be confessed, render agriculture less profitable than formerly to small farmers, and they have, perhaps, a tendency unfavourable to the agricultural population of the country. But although this must be allowed to be an evil, it is not to be compared in magnitude with a dependence on foreign nations for the means of subsistence. From the increasing importations of grain, for a good many years past, there is but too much reason to apprehend that the remedy is not altogether adequate to the disorder; but the efficacy of the remedy, to a certain extent, is unquestionable; and if it had not operated very powerfully indeed, the mischief would long before now have been incalculable in its consequences. Could we suppose it possible that, by an increase of taxes, wheat might be imported at a less expense than that at which it can be raised, on how precarious a foundation would the grandeur of this empire rest!

It affords some consolation, under the impression of these gloomy ideas, to reflect, that the discouragements to agriculture, and the checks to agricultural population, are consequences, not of the natural progression of things, but of those accidental causes which have produced our public burdens; and that, therefore, if we could indulge the prospect of a short respite from the calamities of war, a reduction of taxes might gradually operate in placing agriculture more upon a level with the other branches of national industry.

[Subsect. III.—

Is the Density of Population in Proportion to the Extent of Country, a certain Index of National Prosperity?]

In the course of the foregoing Lectures, I have repeatedly intimated my dissent from a very common opinion, that the number of a people compared with the extent of their territory, furnishes the most unequivocal of all the tests that can be appealed to, in our inquiries concerning national prosperity. That in order to ascertain in how far a country is flourishing, nothing more is necessary than to examine this proportion, is by many writers assumed as a fundamental maxim; and yet the slightest consideration may satisfy us, that it is the industrious alone who constitute the strength of a nation, and that a population composed of the idle and the indigent is to be dreaded as one of the greatest of political evils.*

(Interpolation from Notes.)—One of the first writers who seems to have become aware of this important truth, was Sir James Steuart, who clearly pointed out the essential differences between a population of industrious citizens, and a population of idle men and of beggars.* The same distinction was taken about the same time by several French writers, and from them was adopted by Mr. Arthur Young. In his Survey of the Agriculture of France, he states it explicitly as his opinion, that the population of that country was too great, in consequence of the excessive subdivision of land in many districts, and that the prosperity of the nation would be greatly enhanced if the inhabitants could be reduced by five or six millions at least. He founds particularly on the remarks made in an excellent Report on Beggary, drawn up by M. de la Rochefoucauld Liancourt.†

In some other countries of Europe, we find population forced beyond its natural limit, by expedients expressly and avowedly intended for this purpose. Such was the policy which induced the Spanish Government to establish a colony of Germans in the Sierra Morena, though every province in Spain swarmed with vagrants, who owed their support to the hierarchy and monasteries. Of this attempt and its ill success, a very interesting account is given by Mr. Townsend.‡ The failure of the whole project might indeed have been anticipated. Where a country has already a greater population than the State can govern well, public evils are not to be remedied by the introduction of new settlers. A cure for these must be found nearer home, in a melioration of the government and of the condition and circumstances of the people.

The policy adopted in some nations, of increasing population by holding out inducements to marriage, has been suggested by the same views as the expedient of inviting foreign settlers. No maxim can be more certain than this,—that marriages will take place in every instance where they ought to do so. There is no example of a country furnishing regular employment to industry where these are not entered into. The policy, therefore, is at best useless; but it can scarcely fail to be hurtful. In Spain such an expedient was tried by Charles IV., who extended the privileges of nobility to married men for a certain number of years, and to the father of six children, for life; whilst, on the contrary, those nobles who continued bachelors after twenty-five years of age, were deprived of all the immunities of their order. This edict was without effect; and it was in vain that attempts were made to enforce it.—(End of interpolation from Notes.)

In all such cases as have now been under consideration, where the numbers of a people have increased steadily for a length of time, without a proportional increase in the means of subsistence, alarming consequences may be apprehended to follow sooner or later: and although this might be the ultimate result of the most perfect model of human policy, (were it possible to realize it,) at least in so great a degree as ought to lower the pride of philosophical speculation, yet if it appear that the same evil may be produced without adding, in the meantime, to the sum of national happiness, the political arrangements in which it originates cannot be too anxiously avoided as sources of an unmixed accumulation of mischiefs. In China, where population has been forced by a variety of unnatural expedients, by the permission which parents have to expose their children, by the singularly abstemious habits of the people, and by the indiscriminate use they are led to make of everything through which life can be supported,—the fatal effects of a policy, artificially contrived to extend the multiplication of the race beyond its just limits, are seen in all their magnitude. In such circumstances, any deficiency in the ordinary produce, arising from an unfavourable season, cannot fail to be followed by the horrors of famine. The miseries which have so often been experienced from this in Hindostan are, in like manner, the obvious consequences of a population pushed to its utmost possible limit, relatively to the means of subsistence. The ordinary habits of frugality to which the people are accustomed, leave no superfluities to be retrenched in a year of scarcity.

The conclusion to which these considerations lead is manifest,—that the only equitable and beneficial means which can be employed for the advancement of population, suppose a corresponding increase in the funds necessary to support it; and that every project to encourage it in any other way, can only add to the number of human creatures born to poverty, to vice, and to wretchedness. To consider population merely in the narrow commercial view, of producing men who are to be subservient to the fortunes of the opulent, and who, by their increasing numbers, are to lower the reward of labour, and to favour the competition of our manufacturers in foreign markets, is a policy not only inexpedient, but unjust and inhuman, and dictated by the same spirit which has led men, in so many other instances, to overlook, in the eagerness of mercantile speculation, the rights, the feelings, and the morals of those who are doomed to be the instruments of their avarice.

This general principle furnishes an infallible criterion for adjusting the relative claims of Agriculture and of Manufactures to the attention of the statesman. The powerful stimulus which manufactures give to agriculture has been already illustrated; and in so far as this operates without any check from adventitious causes, their tendency is wholly beneficial, inasmuch as they at once multiply the numbers of the people and provide the additional food by which they are to be supported. It must however be remembered, that although this is a natural effect, it is not the necessary effect of manufactures, and that it is possible for them to advance population in a far greater degree than that in which they add to the produce of the earth. It has been shewn, that in the actual history of modern Europe, the spirit of the prevailing systems of legislation has obstructed, in a variety of ways, the natural and salutary operation of manufacturing upon agricultural industry, more particularly by the encouragement which they have given to the labour of towns in preference to that of the country; and wherever this has been the case, although the lower orders may have multiplied, and may even, in consequence of collateral circumstances, have increased the sum of their enjoyments, yet a large proportion of them must have been deprived of their full share of those progressive advantages which Nature, if not thwarted by human policy, would not fail to distribute, with an equitable hand, among all her industrious children.

The legal provision which is made for the poor in the other part of the island, although originating in motives which reflect the highest honour on the benevolence of our countrymen, is obviously liable to this objection, that while it tends to increase population by encouraging marriage, it has no tendency to provide additional food for the people. Nor is this all: the population it increases is chiefly that of idle consumers; and, therefore, it not only diminishes the quantity of provisions which the labour of the industrious man can command, but abridges his share of the comforts of life, to feed those who are a burden on the community. The evils occasioned by all such expedients cannot fail to be progressive; for whatever depresses the condition of the labouring classes must eventually multiply the objects of charity.1 But of this subject I shall have occasion to treat afterwards.

The agricultural improvements of which this country is susceptible, present immense resources both for meliorating the state of the lower orders, and for adding to the numbers of the most valuable part of its inhabitants. That its produce might be easily doubled, or even trebled, has been affirmed by very competent judges;2 but without aiming at arithmetical precision on this point, it may be confidently asserted, that the present population of our island is far short of what the territory, if properly cultivated, would be able to maintain. It is not merely the commons and the waste lands, (the extent of which in Great Britain has been computed3 to amount to twenty-two millions of acres,—that is, to more than one-fourth of the whole kingdom;) it is not merely these, which open a field for future exertions in husbandry; but, if we except a few districts where the soil is naturally rich, and which have been long in a state of high cultivation, scarcely a farm is to be found, of which the occupier will not readily grant, that the produce might be greatly augmented. Nor is there the smallest reason to doubt, in a country so eminently distinguished by enterprising and enlightened industry, and which enjoys so many advantages over neighbouring states, that the natural course of events, aided by such laws as now unite the suffrages of politicians of all descriptions, would advance both its agriculture and population with a rapidity equal to our most sanguine wishes, if the circumstances of Europe should ever enable us to enjoy, undisturbed, for a course of years, the blessings of peace.

In order to damp the exertions inspired by such prospects, it has been frequently urged, that supposing them to be attended with complete success, and a similar spirit to animate the legislators of other countries, the globe would, at no very distant period, be overstocked with inhabitants, and would be rendered a scene of incalculable misery. An idea of this kind serves as the ground-work of a late very ingenious and candid Essay, “On the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society;”* —an Essay distinguished by originality of thought, and which (among some general speculations, more plausible, perhaps, than solid) contains a variety of acute and just reflections of a practical nature. A remarkable passage, too, of a similar tendency, forms the conclusion of Pinto’s Treatise, On Circulation and Credit.† Nor has this calamitous consequence of the natural course of events been altogether overlooked by the romantic authors of some late political theories. It was plainly perceived in its full force by Godwin, when he had recourse (in order to solve the difficulty) to the most paradoxical of all his hypotheses, that in consequence of the intellectual and moral improvement of man, the passion between the sexes will be gradually extinguished, and that, while the period of human life will, in the case of individuals, be indefinitely prolonged, the species will cease to propagate.* The same difficulty led Dr. Wallace, fifty years ago, to conclude much more philosophically, “that the existence of perfect governments (even though they were consistent with the human passions and appetites) is physically inconsistent with the circumstances of mankind upon the earth.”1 —(Interpolation from Notes.)—“How happy,” he also says, “would be the consequences of such an excellent government! Every discouragement to marriage would be effectually removed. Wise regulations would be established to gratify the natural passion of love, in an easy and agreeable manner. No false maxims which corrupt the taste in this grand concern would be in vogue, nor any temptation from interest to mislead the choice. Poverty being effectually banished, and every one upon an equal footing, the numerous impediments arising from an inequality of rank, estates, or other circumstances, would be wholly removed. In this situation, according to the original blessing and command, mankind would be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it.” . . . “How long the earth, with the best culture of which it is capable from human genius and industry, might be able to nourish its perpetually increasing inhabitants, is as impossible as it is unnecessary to be determined. It is not probable that it could have supported them during so long a period as since the creation of Adam. But whatever may be supposed of the length of this period, of necessity it must be granted, that the earth could not nourish them for ever, unless either its fertility could be continually augmented, or by some secret in nature, like what certain enthusiasts have expected from the philosopher’s stone, some wise adept in the occult sciences should invent a method of supporting mankind quite different from any thing known at present. Nay, though some extraordinary method of supporting them might possibly be found out, yet if there was no bound to the increase of mankind, which would be the case under a perfect government, there would not even be sufficient room for containing their bodies upon the surface of the earth.” . . . “It would be impossible, therefore, to support the great numbers of men who would be raised up under a perfect government; the earth would be overstocked at last, and the greatest admirers of such fanciful schemes must foresee the fatal period when they would come to an end.” . . . “During all the preceding ages, while there was room for increase, mankind must have been happy; the earth must have been a paradise in the literal sense, as the greatest part of it must have been turned into delightful and fruitful gardens. But when the dreadful time should at last come, when our globe, by the most diligent culture, could not produce what was sufficient to nourish its numerous inhabitants, what happy expedient could then be found out to remedy so great an evil?”*

In one very important respect, indeed, Dr. Wallace has misapprehended the subject, in supposing that the evils of an overgrown population were placed at a great and almost immeasurable distance, and that they could not be realized till the whole world was cultivated like a garden. In opposition to this idea, Mr. Malthus has shown, and I think with demonstrative evidence, that the evils in question would be imminent and immediate; and that in every period of the progress to the time when the whole earth should be cultivated like a garden, the distress for want of food would be constantly pressing on all mankind, supposing them all on a footing of equality. Though the produce of the earth might be increasing every year, the population would advance much faster, and the redundance must be reduced by the return of periodical disease, or the constant action of misery.

The following curious Apologue from Mr. Townsend’s Dissertation on the Poor Laws, [1780,]* as it so well illustrates the relation of human society to population, I shall present without any comment.

“Navigators relate, that in the South Seas there is an island, which, from the first discoverer, is called Juan Fernandes. In this sequestered spot, John Fernando placed a colony of goats, consisting of one male, attended by his female. This happy couple finding pasture in abundance, could readily obey the first commandment, to increase and multiply; till in process of time they had replenished their little island.1 In advancing to this period they were strangers to misery and want, and seemed to glory in their multitude; but from this unhappy moment they began to suffer hunger: yet, continuing for a time to increase their numbers, had they been endued with reason, they must have apprehended the extremity of famine. In this situation the weakest first gave way, and plenty was again restored. Thus they fluctuated between happiness and misery, and either suffered want or rejoiced in abundance, according as their numbers were diminished or increased; never at a stay, yet nearly balancing at all times their quantity of food. This relation of equipoise was from time to time disturbed, either by epidemical diseases or by the arrival of some vessel in distress. On such occasions their numbers were considerably reduced; but to compensate this alarm, and to comfort them for the loss of their companions, the survivors never failed immediately to find a return of plenty. They were no longer in fear of famine; they ceased to regard each other with an evil eye; all had abundance, all were contented, all were happy. Thus, what might have been considered as misfortunes, proved a source of comfort; and, to them at least, “partial evil” was “universal good.”

“When the Spaniards found that the English privateers resorted to this island for provisions, they resolved on the total extirpation of the goats; and for this purpose they put on shore a greyhound dog and bitch.1 These in their turn increased and multiplied, in proportion to the quantity of food they met with; but in consequence, as the Spaniards had foreseen, the breed of goats diminished. Had they been totally destroyed, the dogs likewise must have perished. But as many of the goats retired to the craggy rocks, where the dogs could never follow them, descending only for short intervals to feed with fear and circumspection in the valleys, few of these, besides the careless and the rash, became a prey; and none but the most watchful, strong, and active of the dogs could get a sufficiency of food. Thus a new kind of balance was established. The weakest of both species were among the first to pay the debt of nature; the most active and vigorous preserved their lives.—It is the quantity of food which regulates the numbers of the human species,” &c.—But to return:

The reasonings of Mr. Malthus, therefore, in so far as they relate to the Utopian plans of Wallace, Condorcet, and Godwin, are perfectly conclusive, and strike at the root of all such theories. But they do not seem to justify those gloomy inferences which many persons are disposed to draw from them concerning the established order of nature. And the very ingenious and liberal author has assured us explicitly, that he did not mean, when he stated these considerations to the public, to insinuate any argument against the expediency of meliorating, to the utmost of our power, the real imperfections of our existing institutions. In one point only, I am disposed to differ from Mr. Malthus. He seems to me to lay by far too little stress on the efficacy of those arrangements which nature herself has established for the remedy of the evils in question, and to trust too little to that vis medicatrix naturæ, which is not less susceptible of an application to the political than to the natural world. But these remarks I shall have occasion to illustrate more fully when I come to treat of the Economical system.—(End of interpolation from Notes.)

I shall not enter into the argument at present, although I am fully persuaded that the subject is still unexhausted, and that if prosecuted with a dispassionate love of truth, it would open an interesting and not unpleasing field of speculation. It is sufficient for my purpose to observe, that whatever opinion we may form concerning it, no solid reason can be suggested, which ought to have any practical effect in diminishing our zeal to advance, to the utmost of our power, the prosperity of that society with which we are connected. For, although the greater that prosperity, the sooner must population arrive at that ultimate limit where it ceases to be a blessing, yet it belongs not to us, in the contemplation of a remote contingency, to supply what appears to our limited faculties an imperfection in the arrangements of Providence, by neglecting those duties to which we are called in the present moment. The field which yet remains to employ the labours of ourselves and our children, is sufficiently ample to animate the exertions of the most sanguine beneficence; and it is a miserable misapplication of the time and talents which are now in our possession, to waste them in fruitless anticipations of the condition of remote ages, while so much may be done to lighten the pressure of actual evils. The article of Political Economy to which I have now been directing your attention, illustrates, with peculiar force, the truth of these remarks, when we compare, in the first place, the actual population of the globe with the prolific powers of the sexes, and still more when, in the second, we reflect on the importance of that sublime function entrusted to the legislator, of being able eventually to bestow not only existence but happiness on millions who would never otherwise have seen the light.

(Interpolation from Notes.)—These general principles coincide, in most essential respects, with the system of the Economists and of Quesnai; one of whose fundamental maxims is, that the statesman should fix his attention rather on the increase of national wealth than on the increase of population, that is, aim at the advance of population only through the medium of agriculture, and consider manufactures and commerce as useful only in so far as they tend to augment the territorial produce by the stimulus of an extended market.

This view of the subject may perhaps enable us to clear up an inconsistency formerly referred to, (p. 65,) which occurs in the work of the very ingenious author of the Ami des Hommes. The change of opinion which this author acknowledges, may easily be accounted for by the varying point of view in which he considers his subject. The two opinions, when stated with proper limitations, will both be found agreeable to truth. That population is the consequence of riches, is a maxim which, I believe, holds true without any exception, and no illustration of it can be more striking than what is afforded by the progress of population in America. On the other hand, when we cast our eyes on what has happened in modern Europe, we find riches to be the consequence of an increasing population.

It is to this last state of society that it is necessary for us to confine our attention, if we wish our speculations to be practically useful; I mean, to that state of society where there are no laws favouring the division of landed property, as in the ancient republics, or an open field for agricultural enterprise, as in the New World; but where a great accumulation of land in the hands of a few proprietors is the necessary consequence of existing institutions, while, at the same time, the lower orders are left dependent on the free and voluntary exertions of their own industry. The question is not how a speculative politician should regulate the course of human affairs; but in what manner, subject to existing conditions, the peace of society may be effectually maintained, and the greatest amount of happiness secured. But how this is to be accomplished, independently of Manufactures and Commerce, I confess myself unable to form even an idea. The writers who, in their zeal for agriculture, have been led to declaim against manufactures and commerce, placing to their account all the evils which result from the mutual jealousy of nations, seem to have entirely lost sight, not only of the causes which have brought agriculture to its present state, but of the operation of commerce and manufactures in applying a cure to the anarchy which prevailed for ages after the abolition of villanage.

The existence of many poor was in reality the necessary effect of breaking down this institution established by the feudal system. By that revolution, all those who had formerly been serfs to the proprietors of land, were left to depend on their own industry for subsistence, instead of receiving, directly or indirectly, maintenance from their feudal lord. Hence, in the progress of human affairs, it could not but ensue that a great number became indigent. Not many years ago the condition of the poor in Scotland, in consequence of scarcity, was undoubtedly distressing; but how limited and transitory was the suffering at that time, compared with what was here chronically prevalent towards the end of the seventeenth century? This contrast may be seen from the statement made by Mr. Fletcher of Saltoun, in a Discourse addressed to the Scottish Parliament in 1698.* He estimated the number of beggars then in Scotland at no fewer than 200,000. The only remedy he, a Republican by principle, could suggest, was to restore the ancient state of villanage, and to make slaves of all those who were unable to provide for their own subsistence.

In England, although from various causes the career of improvement began at an earlier period, a similar progress of order and regular police accompanied the advancement of national industry; and it is not a little remarkable how completely the licentiousness and insubordination of the lower classes bid defiance to the authority of the wisest and most vigorous princes, till a gradual extension of the field of employment insensibly converted the multitude to better habits. During the sixteenth century, the police of England does not appear to have been better than that of Scotland at the end of the seventeenth. In proof of this I may refer to Harrison’s account of the state of England in the reigns of Henry VIII. and of Queen Elizabeth, [in his Historical Description.] The most satisfactory proof that I know of the disorderly condition of England, is a statement preserved in Strype’s Annals, drawn up in 1596, by a justice of peace in Somersetshire.

Against such a state of anarchy there are only two remedies. The one is a return to the institution of Villanage of the feudal ages, or to the Agrarian policy of the Roman Commonwealth; the other is the operation of Manufactures and Commerce, which have already accomplished such wonders in this part of the world, and not yet occasioned any general inconvenience which may not be traced to the caprice of that policy diverting them from their natural channels, or to those accidents, perhaps inseparable from the lot of humanity, which occasionally disturb those pacific relations on which the prosperity of nations depends. The facts, accordingly, which I have borrowed from Mr. Fletcher, led him not unnaturally to regret the emancipation of the lower orders, and to recommend strongly the revival of such a policy as subsisted in the ancient republics. The same ideas have plainly warped the speculations of Dr. Wallace.* The disorders which appeared to this author so formidable as to require the violent and cruel laws of antiquity, must be admitted by those who were not affected by the same classical prepossessions, to afford a strong confirmation of what has been already urged in favour of the remedy which the natural course of things in modern Europe has provided for the gradual extirpation of these evils. All that it is necessary for the statesman to remember, is—that the care of population belongs exclusively to nature, and that it is his peculiar business, by securing employment to all ranks of the people, and by directing all the various kinds of industrious speculation, to bestow due encouragement on that art which alone can render an increasing population the source of an increasing fund for its own subsistence.—(End of interpolation from Notes.)

[Appendix.—

Of the means which have been employed to ascertain the state of population in particular instances.]

In entering on this article, it may be proper to remark in general, that it is obviously one of those where mathematical accuracy cannot possibly be attained. Even supposing an actual numeration to be made of all the inhabitants of a country, the result would not be consistent with truth, unless the observations were carried on in all the different parts of it at the same time; nor would this result, however correctly it might state the fact at the moment when it was ascertained, afford anything more than a single measurement of an object, which, from its nature, is always varying, less or more, in its dimensions. Such a method, however, of ascertaining the number of a people is unquestionably susceptible of a greater degree of precision than any other, although, in most cases where it has been attempted, numerous errors have been committed in the execution; partly from the want of method in those to whom the details have been entrusted; and partly from the prejudices which dispose the more ignorant classes of the community to distrust the views of Government in proposing such a measure.

In by far the greater number of instances, inquiries concerning Population have been conducted on a plan much more indirect, and affording a still less accurate approximation to the truth. In order to shorten the labour necessarily attending an operation of so great a magnitude, certain facts have been fixed upon which are supposed to have a constant relation to the whole number of the people, and from these (by an application of general rules founded on experience) this number has been inferred or computed. Such, for example, is the number of Houses, the quantity of Consumption; and, above all, the state of Births, Deaths, and Marriages.

The first person who led the way in this department of political science was Sir William Petty; and it was by him that the phrase Political Arithmetic was introduced. The idea which he annexed to the term may be judged of from the explanation he gives of it in the title of one of his books: “Political Arithmetic; or, A Discourse concerning the Extent of Land, People, Buildings, Husbandry, Manufacture, Commerce, Fishery, Artisans, Seamen, Soldiers, Public Revenues, Interest, Taxes, Superlucration, Registries, Banks, Valuation of Men, Increasing of Seamen, of Militias, Harbours, Situation, Shipping, Power at Sea, &c., as the same relates to every Country in general, but more particularly to the territories of his Majesty of Great Britain, and his neighbours of Holland, Zealand, and France.” This book was presented in manuscript to King Charles II., but was not printed till the year 1690. Lord Shelborne, the author’s son, in his dedication of it, observes, “that it was styled by his father Political Arithmetic, inasmuch as things of Government, and of no less concern and extent, than the glory of the Prince, and the happiness and greatness of the People, are by the ordinary rules of arithmetic, brought into a sort of demonstration. He was allowed by all,” it is added, “to be the inventor of this method of instruction, where the perplexed and intricate ways of the world are explained by a very mean part of science.” On the same subject, Sir William Petty himself writes as follows:—“The method I take is not very usual; for, instead of giving only comparative and superlative words and intellectual argument, I have taken the course (as a specimen of the Political Arithmetic I have aimed at) to express myself in terms of number, weight, or measure, to use only argument of sense, and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature; leaving those that depend on the mutable minds, opinions, appetites, and passions of particular men to the consideration of others. . . . . Now, the observations or positions expressed by number, weight, and measure, upon which I bottom the ensuing discourses, are either true, or not apparently false; and which, if they are not already true, certain, and evident, yet may be made so by the sovereign power, (nam id certum est quod certum reddi potest;) and if they are false, not so false as to destroy the argument they are brought for, but at worst are sufficient as suppositions, to show the way to that knowledge I aim at. . . . Which, if it shall be judged material and worthy of a better discussion, I hope all ingenious and candid persons will rectify the errors and imperfections which may probably be found in any of the positions on which my ratiocinations are grounded. Nor would it misbecome authority itself, to clear those matters which private endeavours cannot reach to.”1

I have quoted these passages at greater length than I should otherwise have thought necessary, in order to show, with how little reason the German writers value themselves as the authors of that science to which they have given the name of Statistics. “It is now about forty years ago,” says Zimmermann in his Political Survey of Europe, “that a branch of political knowledge, which has for its object the actual and relative power of the several modern states, the power arising from their natural advantages, the industry and civilisation of their inhabitants, and the wisdom of their governments, has been formed, chiefly by German writers, into a separate science. It used formerly to be improperly connected with geography; and it was but superficially treated amidst the topographical and descriptive details of the larger geographical works. By the more convenient form it has received, and by its growing importance, this science, distinguished by the new-coined name of Statistics, is become a favourite study in Germany.”1 The Baron de Hertzberg informs us, in one of his Academical Discourses, that since the middle of the present century it has been gradually supplanting among his countrymen, what used formerly to be the principal object of attention, in the German system of academical education, the system of Natural Jurisprudence.

With respect to Sir William Petty, however, whatever his merits were in opening this new field of political research, it must be owned, that in the execution of the plan, he did little more than set an example to his successors. His object was to compute the number of the people from the trade and consumption of the nation, and from the number of houses in the kingdom. For the former branch of information he trusted to the accounts of the Excise and the Customs, and for the latter to the gross produce of the hearth-money. But on none of these articles did he possess the means of ascertaining the truth; and, accordingly, his computations often proceed on erroneous or uncertain data. His most valuable reasonings are founded on the bills of mortality and the registers of births, which he appears to have studied with great care, with a view to the population both of this and of other countries. A spirit of theory, however, runs through all his speculations, calculated to flatter the wishes and prejudices of government; and hence his anxiety to overrate the resources of England, and to undervalue those of our neighbours. It is thus only we can account for such assertions as the following:1 —“That France exceeded Great Britain very little in point of territory; that our numbers approach near to those of the French, and, in point of strength, are as efficient; that France was under a natural and perpetual incapacity of being powerful at sea; and that it had not above fifteen thousand seamen to manage its trade, out of which not above ten thousand could be spared for a fleet of war.”

“Every good Englishman,” says Postlethwayt, “does undoubtedly wish all this had been true; but we have since had manifest proofs that this great genius was mistaken in all these assertions, for which reason we have ground to suspect, he rather made his court than spoke his mind.”

Researches similar to those which Sir William Petty had recommended and exemplified, were afterwards prosecuted (about the end of last century) by Mr. Gregory King, whose results are to this day much valued for their accuracy; and by Dr. Davenant, “the best,” (according to Dr. Price,) “while not venal, of all political writers.”2

The greatest step, however, that has ever been made in this branch of science, by any one individual, was undoubtedly by the original and inventive genius of Dr. Halley, whose observations (of which I shall afterwards have occasion to take notice) have not only contributed much to correct the ideas of political writers on the subject now under our consideration, but have led the way to all the improvements which have since been made in the doctrine of annuities,—a doctrine which forms the basis of an immense branch of commercial speculation in this country, and which proceeds on one of the most refined general principles that have yet been applied successfully to human affairs, the possibility of counteracting the inconveniences resulting from the precarious duration of life in the case of individuals, by the uniformity of those general laws by which those events that appear the most accidental on a superficial view, are found to be regulated in the order of nature.

Among the different methods which have been employed for estimating the state of population, one of the most simple is founded on the supposed proportion between the number of houses and that of the inhabitants. In order, however, to employ this method with advantage, in particular instances, much attention is necessary to the circumstances of the case.

The proportion between the number of houses and that of their inhabitants must vary widely, it is evident, according to the opulence or poverty of the people; according to their habits of living; according to their residence in towns or in the country; according to the size of towns, their commercial or dissipated manners, and many other accidents.

The calculations of Gregory King on this subject are founded on an examination of the hearth-books, and of the assessments on marriages, births, and burials, and (in the opinion of Dr. Davenant) “are more to be relied on than anything of the same kind that had ever been attempted.”

According to these calculations,—

Upon the whole, (making allowance for divided houses, occupied by different families, for uninhabited houses, &c.,) he was led to conclude, that in England and Wales the people answer to four and a half per house and four per family.1

Subsequent inquirers have enumerated the houses and the inhabitants of various villages, towns, and cities, instead of relying on the defective returns of tax-gatherers; and from their researches it appears, that King’s estimates of the number of dwellers which he allowed to every house, and to every family, were considerably under the truth.

From a table published by Dr. Price in his Treatise on Annuities, containing the results of actual surveys of the number of inhabitants, houses, and families in many different places, that ingenious writer was led to conclude, “That six to a house was probably too large an allowance for London, and that five to a house was certainly an allowance sufficiently large for England in general.”1 The same Table (although not quite so complete) is inserted in Morgan’s Doctrine of Annuities and Assurances. Mr. Howlett, [Examination, &c.] from a still more extensive series of observations, insists for five and two-fifths, which, in the opinion of Mr. Chalmers, we may reasonably conclude to be the smallest number which dwells in every house, on an average of the whole kingdom.2 M. Moheau, in his Researches concerning the Population of France, (published in 1778,) allows only five inhabitants to a house, on a general average of the population, both in towns and in the country.

Another principle from which conclusions have sometimes been deduced on the subject of population, is the quantity of consumption in the article of food. Supposing the mean consumption of individuals in bread-corn to be known, and also the annual produce of the national territory, with the imports and the exports, the population of the State would of consequence be determined; or, vice versa, the mean consumption might be ascertained on converting the hypothesis. The quantity of wheat, in like manner, imported into a town during a year, compared with the mean annual consumption of an individual, would determine the population of the town, and, in the opinion of a very competent judge, M. Paucton, would afford one of the nearest approximations to the truth that can be obtained in an inquiry of this nature.3

The state of manners, however, (it must be remembered,) in the country where he wrote, rendered researches of this sort much more practicable than in others where the habits of living are different. Bread is, in France, a universal article of consumption among all classes of the people; to a very great proportion of individuals the only means of subsistence, and to the whole nation a most important part of diet. Even in France, however, the rate of consumption must vary greatly according to circumstances; according to the temperature of the climate (for example) which differs considerably in the northern and in the southern provinces, and according to the species of grain which the province produces. The results, besides, must vary in towns where flour is manufactured into various forms by the arts of cookery, and in villages where it is all converted into bread; in districts where wine and animal food are within reach of the lower orders, compared with others which are destitute of these resources; and in numberless other cases which may be easily imagined. The consumption, too, of individuals in the same family is extremely unequal; diversified as these individuals are by age, by sex, or by habits of indolence, or of bodily exertion. In founding calculations accordingly on data of this description, it is necessary, not only to make allowances for all the varieties of local peculiarities, but in examining any particular city or district, to conduct our observations on so great a scale that circumstances may fully compensate each other, and enable us to ascertain, within as narrow limits as possible, the mean consumption which falls to the share of individuals.1

It would be perfectly superfluous to enter into any particular statement of the French calculations on this subject, more especially as their results vary very considerably. In one conclusion indeed, they are pretty generally agreed, that the consumption of the people in wheat (one with another) may be rated at three setiers a year. This is the opinion of the author of the Essai sur les Monnoies, [M. Dupré,] printed at Paris in 1746; and most of the later writers on Political Arithmetic have adopted his determinations. The setier is equal to something more than four Winchester bushels; and three setiers will be found rather to exceed one quarter, four bushels, three pecks, London measure.1 This conclusion agrees very nearly with the result of the most accurate researches that have been made in England, with respect to the consumption of the labouring classes; and is strongly confirmed by a remark which the ingenious author of the Corn Tracts deduces from an extensive induction, “that the quantity of corn consumed by those who derive their means of subsistence from the work of their hands, has been in all times, and in all places, nearly the same, varying only according as the quantity of other food was more or less.”2

Although, however, facts of this sort may have their use in comparing together the population of such cities as London and Paris, they can lead to no conclusion concerning the general population of an extensive country, without a knowledge of particulars, which it would be as difficult to ascertain as to accomplish an actual census of the people. In the year 1784, when M. Necker published his work On the Administration of the Finances, he there asserts, that the quantity of consumption in wheat over France was still unascertained; and he adds, that “the most accurate idea of it is to be formed from the state of population.” Some of his conclusions, indeed, he founds on the consumption of salt, which, next to grain, was, in France, the most universal article of domestic expenditure. To this inquiry concerning the relation between consumption and population a greater degree of attention has been paid in France than in any other country. Some interesting facts with respect to it may be found in Moheau’s Researches on Population, and in a useful work, entitled Métrologie, [by M. Paucton;] but it has, of late years, been treated with far greater accuracy than before by two celebrated writers, Lavoisier and Lagrange. Their calculations, with some others of a similar description, have been collected into a small pamphlet by Roederer. The Essay, by Lavoisier, is more particularly valuable, and cannot fail to excite in those who read it, the deepest regret that the author should have fallen a victim to the ferocity of his countrymen, at a moment when he was beginning to divert his profound and original genius from those physical pursuits which have immortalized his name, to speculations still more immediately connected with the happiness of society. The slight sketch which he published a short time before his death, of his intended labours, is sufficient to show what light he was qualified to throw on some of the most important questions of Political Economy.

The plan which he has sketched for ascertaining with a precision hitherto unattempted, from time to time, the agricultural produce of France in all its different branches, the state of its commerce, and the state of its population, if it were actually carried into execution, would exhibit (as he has observed) in a few pages, the most important results of that science;—“or rather,” he adds, “Political Economy would, on that supposition, cease to be a science. Such statements would form an accurate Thermometer of public prosperity, and would afford a palpable standard for estimating the expediency or inexpediency of existing institutions.”

With respect to the quantities of the several sorts of grain consumed annually in England, there is a very valuable collection of facts and observations in the supplement to an accurate and useful work, entitled “Tracts on the Corn Trade and Corn Laws,” first published in 1758, and reprinted, with additions, in 1766. [See p. 219.]

From these speculations, which afford but a feeble and uncertain light where questions concerning national population are under discussion, I proceed to another source of information, from which far more authentic and accurate documents may be derived. The registers which are kept in most civilized countries (with greater or less degrees of exactness) of Births, Deaths, and Marriages.

In my Lectures on Moral Philosophy, I have founded several important arguments on the uniformity which takes place in events depending on contingent circumstances; on the wonderful balance (for instance) which is everywhere preserved between the two sexes, and the proportion which the number of births and of deaths bears to the whole inhabitants of a country.* I may add, as another illustration of the same remark, the proportion which marriages bear to the number of a people who possess the means of subsistence in abundance, and whose manners have not been corrupted by luxury.

Some general rules relative to these proportions are collected in a book which I have repeatedly quoted, (entitled Métrologie,) but I learn from one of the Baron de Hertzberg’s Academical Discourses, that the subject has been much more fully discussed by a German writer (Mr. Suessmilch) in a work entitled, “The Divine Order in the Population and in the Revolutions of the Human Race.”

“In this work,” says the author from whom I borrow my information, [Hertzberg,] “Mr. Suessmilch has collected together, with as much judgment as erudition, almost everything which can be said upon the subject of population, giving the justest rules and the most accurate modes of calculation, for estimating the population of nations; shewing the best means of advancing population, and of removing the obstacles to it; illustrating the favourable tendency, in this respect, of the Christian religion, and demonstrating that Providence has established an admirable order for the continuance of the human race, by a certain proportion of births, of deaths, and of marriages, which is nearly equal throughout the world.” I do not know that this book has been yet translated into our language, nor am I at all acquainted with its merits, except from the account given of it by the Baron de Hertzberg, Dr. Price, and some French writers, who all unite in bearing testimony to the industry, the accuracy, and the ingenuity of the author.

The regular proportions which have now been mentioned, can only obtain, or at least can only be observed, in a district where there are no settlers or emigrants. Thus, “in France,” Necker informs us, “that the number of births is in proportion to that of the inhabitants as one to twenty-three and twenty-four; in the districts which are not favoured by nature, nor by moral circumstances, this proportion is as one to twenty-five, twenty-five and a half, and twenty-six in the greater part of France; lastly, each birth corresponds with twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and even thirty inhabitants in cities, proportionably to their extent and their trade. They even exceed this proportion in the metropolis.” He adds, indeed, that “the difference arising from settlers and emigrants, and many other causes, acquires a kind of uniformity, when collectively considered, and in the immense extent of such a kingdom as France.”*

The number which Necker fixes on, (in his work on the French Finances,) is twenty-five and three-fourths, by which he multiplies the births, in order to form an estimate of the population of that kingdom. The multiplier fixed on by Moheau for the same purpose is twenty-five and a half. The grounds on which he proceeds in making this choice are particularly stated in the Treatise already referred to.

The results of these writers receive considerable confirmation from the observations made in other countries. In Sweden, the number of inhabitants was found, by an actual survey, to be, in 1763, 2,446,394. The average of annual births for nine years ending in 1763, was 90,240, or a twenty-seventh part and a tenth of the inhabitants. These facts are stated on the authority of M. Wargentin, whose memoir is published in the fifteenth volume of the Collection Académique, printed at Paris in 1772.1 In the kingdom of Naples, (where there is a survey made every year, and published in the Court Calendar,) the number of inhabitants was in 1777, 4,311,503. In the same kingdom, the average of annual births for five years ending in 1777, was 166,808, or a twenty-fifth part and four-fifths of the inhabitants.

From a great number of very accurate documents relative to the Prussian dominions, Mr. Suessmilch (as we are informed by the same Baron de Hertzberg) was led to reckon one birth for every twenty-six living persons. The coincidence of these different results, on the whole, is not a little remarkable, when the nature of the subject is considered.

Of the three tests of population which I mentioned in entering upon this article, (Births, Deaths, and Marriages,) the first is that which is chiefly to be relied on. The last depends so much on the state of manners, that in the present circumstances of society in Europe, it can scarcely be assumed as a principle of reasoning.

[In regard to the second,] the Bills of Mortality are often appealed to in speculations of this kind; and they are certainly applicable (as will hereafter appear) to most important purposes. When considered, however, as a direct measure of population, they are obviously much more uncertain than the register of Births, the waste of life being influenced by a variety of accidental causes; such as epidemical disorders, healthful or sickly seasons, which do not affect the constant and regular supplies which nature secures to the human race. If, in order to compensate these irregularities, we extend our observations over a greater number of years, the data we assume become less and less applicable to the circumstances which determine the present population. It is not therefore surprising, that the results of calculations upon this head should vary more widely than on the former.1

Under the present division of our subject, it may not be improper to mention, that, according to Dr. Halley, the number of persons in a country able to bear arms may be computed at a little more than one-fourth of the whole inhabitants, more accurately at nine thirty-fourths of the whole.2 Of this class he reckons all males betwixt eighteen and fifty-six, preferring these numbers to the limits of sixteen and sixty, which other authors have fixed on; because, “at the former age,” he observes, “men are generally too weak to bear the fatigues of war, and at the latter too infirm, notwithstanding particular instances to the contrary.” As great use has been made of this rule by later writers, I think it of importance to add, that it is not only confirmed by modern observations, but by two passages (quoted by Dr. Wallace) from Cæsar and Strabo, who may be justly ranked among the most authentic authors of antiquity.

“The first of these relates, that after he had conquered the Helvetii, who had abandoned their country to seek new habitations, and in this view had carried their wives and children along with them, he found in their camp, rolls of all who had undertaken this expedition, distinguishing such as could bear arms, and the old men, women, and children separately.

“In the rolls the number stood thus,—

“And of the whole number, those who could bear arms were 92,000, which is the fourth part, and agrees perfectly with Halley’s computation.

“The same rule is confirmed by a passage in Strabo.

“When Augustus Cæsar rooted out the nation of the Salassii, who dwelt upon the Alps, he sold 36,000 persons for slaves, of whom 8,000 were able to bear arms. And though by Halley’s rule there ought to have been a few above 9000, this inconsiderable difference may be reasonably accounted for, by the number whom we may presume to have been killed before they were subdued.”*

I shall conclude this article with a slight outline of the principles on which calculations concerning Population are founded on Bills of Mortality, combined with Registers of Births.

It is evident, that in so far as population depends on mere procreation, it is regulated by two circumstances.—1°,) By the number of births; and 2°,) By the expectation of a child just born. The one circumstance determines the rate at which population receives its fresh supplies; the other determines the number of co-existent individuals. It may not perhaps be superfluous to add, that by the expectation of life, is to be understood the number of years which mankind, taken one with another, enjoy, either from birth or any age proposed; the excess in the life of those who survive it being exactly equal to the deficiency in the life of those who do not reach it.

The manner in which the probabilities of life are ascertained is equally simple and ingenious.

Supposing the number of inhabitants in a city or country to be nearly equal for a course of years, and the number of settlers and of emigrants to be either inconsiderable in respect of the whole, or to balance each other, it would be manifestly an easy matter to find the probabilities of life from an exact register of the deaths, specifying the respective ages of the dead.

As the population of the place in question is supposed to remain nearly constant, the whole number of births must be equal to the whole number of deaths. If the births and deaths, therefore, of the infants who die in the first year be subtracted, both the remainders will be equal, or the numbers who live to the end of the first year will be equal to the number of persons dying annually above the age of one. For the same reason, the number of persons who live to ten, or any other age, is equal to the number of annual deaths above that age; therefore, if we add the numbers in the bills of mortality from any age upwards, the sum is the number of those born in one year who attain that age; and thus a table may be composed, exhibiting the rate of mortality at every age, and consequently the probability of living to any age proposed.

1 It is convenient to reduce these tables to the proportion of one thousand persons, and to mark both the number alive at the end of each year, and the number that die during the year. Such tables, accordingly, consist of three columns; the first exhibiting the years of life in their natural order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, &c., continued to the utmost probable extent of life; the second exhibiting the numbers alive at the end of each year, (the number at the end of the first year being stated at 1000;) the third exhibiting the number of annual deaths. Hence the probability, that a person whose age is given shall reach any age proposed, may be found by mere inspection; that is, by comparing the numbers alive at these two periods of life. According to the practice of mathematicians, in similar cases, it is expressed by a fraction, the numerator of which is the number in life at the age proposed, and its denominator the number in life at the age given. In the doctrine of chances, it is to be observed, certainty is represented by one, and any degree of probability by a fraction; the denominator expressing the number of possible cases, and the numerator the number of cases in which the proposed event is found by experience to succeed.

The first table of this kind was constructed by Dr. Halley, whose thoughts appear to have been turned towards the subject by the obvious defects in the deductions drawn by Sir. William Petty from the bills of mortality in London and Dublin. In these bills he remarks three imperfections:—“First, the number of the people is wanting; secondly, the ages of the people dying is not mentioned; lastly, both London and Dublin, by reason of the great and casual accession of strangers, (as appears in both from the great excess of the funerals above the births,) are rendered unfit to be employed as standards for the purpose, which requires, if it were possible, that the people should not at all be changed, but die where they were born, without any adventitious increase from abroad, or decay by migration elsewhere.”

“This defect,” continues Dr. Halley, “seems in a great measure to be rectified by the curious tables of the bills of mortality at the city of Breslau, wherein both the ages and sexes of all that die were monthly delivered, and compared with the number of the births, for five years, viz., 1687, 1688, 1689, 1690, 1691, the statement appearing to be made with all the exactness and sincerity possible.”*

As this city (the capital of Silesia) has acquired a considerable degree of celebrity among writers on Political Arithmetic, in consequence of the important conclusions deduced from its bills of mortality by Dr. Halley, it may be worth while to observe, that it is situated on the western bank of the river Oder, near the confines of Germany and Poland, and very near the latitude of London. It is at a great distance from the sea, and as much a mediterranean place as can be desired, so that the confluence of strangers is but small; and the manufacture of linen, which is the chief, if not the only merchandise of the place, gives employment to the poor people of the town as well as of the adjacent country. “For these reasons,” says Dr. Halley, “the people of this city seem most proper for a standard, and the rather, for that the births do a small matter exceed the funerals. The only thing wanting is the number of the whole people, which, in some measure, I have endeavoured to supply, by the comparison of the mortality of the people of all ages, which I have from the said bills traced out with all the accuracy possible.”†

Dr. Halley’s tables, constructed from these Silesian observations, have been found to correspond nearly with the bills of mortality of some manufacturing towns in England. Others in a still more correct form have been composed from the London Bills by Mr. Simpson; and of late, many important suggestions, tending to farther improvement in the practical application of them, have been offered by Dr. Price.

In order to understand the use of these tables, in calculations concerning population, it is necessary to consider, first, that if all the births happened on the first day of the year, and all the deaths on the last, the sum of the table of probabilities would be equal to the whole number of inhabitants. This is obvious; since the table of probabilities, as directly inferred from the bills of mortality, (that is, without being reduced to the proportion of 1000 persons, in the manner already mentioned,) consists of the number of inhabitants alive at birth, and at the end of the first, second, and following years. On the other hand, if all the births happened on the last day of the year, and the deaths on the first day, the number of inhabitants would be less than on the former supposition by the whole number born in one year. As the truth, therefore, lies in the middle, between these two suppositions, (the births and deaths neither happening all at the beginning, nor all at the end of the year, but occurring equally during the whole course of it,) the true number constantly alive together will be the arithmetical mean between the hypothetical results, and, consequently, may be found by subtracting half the sum of the annual births from the sum of the table of probabilities.

What has been hitherto said proceeds on the supposition, that the place whose bills of mortality are given supports itself by procreation only, unaided by recruits of settlers, and undiminished by the migrations of natives.

This is seldom or never the case with great cities, where, as the burials always exceed the births, the population would necessarily decline if they were not constantly supplied with recruits from the country. The age at which these recruits generally settle may be inferred from the bills of mortality. In these circumstances, in order to find the true number of the inhabitants, from bills of mortality containing an account of the ages at which all die, it is necessary that the proportion of the annual births to the annual settlers should be known, and also the period of life at which the latter remove. The following considerations will convey a general idea of the principles which afford, in such cases, an approximation to the truth.

In London, the burials are about one-fourth more than the births; and the bills of mortality from the age of ten to twenty, correspond nearly with others; but after twenty, the proportion of burials compared with those under twenty, is twice as great as in other places. This is occasioned by the number of strangers who resort to the capital about that age, whose deaths, as well as those of the natives, are inserted in the bills; and although no register of births were kept, we might infer from that sudden increase in the number of burials above twenty, that the population of London was supported by strangers who flocked to it about that age. In order to reduce the London bills to a useful form, we must divide the deaths above twenty into two parts, distinguishing those of the natives and settlers; and the burials under twenty, (which includes few settlers,) being completed by such a proportion of the burials above twenty as arise from the natives only, may be safely used for forming tables of probabilities.

Without this correction, the number of inhabitants would be overrated, the tables giving the probabilities of life, and consequently the expectation of life, too high in all ages under twenty. The true probabilities and expectations may be calculated from the corrected tables, and the true number of inhabitants is found, by multiplying the number of births by the expectation of life at birth, and the number of settlers by the expectation at the age of settlement.

An objection indeed obviously occurs to this correction, that it proceeds on a supposition (not strictly true) that all the settlers in London resort to it at the age of twenty. As this is not the case, the correction instead of being made at once, should be introduced at different ages, in proportion to the numbers that settle at each age. But the bills, when corrected as above, come pretty near the truth; and in inquiries of this sort, mathematical precision is out of the question.

The country is so favourable to population, that though many of the inhabitants remove to cities and foreign countries, the number of inhabitants remains undiminished. In this case, the bills of mortality give the probabilities of life and number of inhabitants too low. In order to calculate the true probabilities, the bills must be corrected, by adding the deaths of the emigrants, supposing them to waste at the same rate as the natives. To calculate the number of inhabitants, we multiply the number of births by the expectation of life at birth, computed from the true probabilities, and subtract from the product the number of emigrants, multiplied by their expectation of life at the time of their removal.

* In some countries, there is a rapid increase of the number of inhabitants from the stock of natives. In this case the bills will also give the probabilities of life too low; for the first effect of the increase is to enlarge the number of children beyond the due proportion of adults, and consequently enlarge the number of burials in the first stage of life.

Some cities, on the contrary, increase rapidly by reason of a resort of strangers, though the numbers be not maintained from the original stock. In this case, the bills must give the probabilities of life much too high, and much too low about that period of life when the strangers in general settle, and somewhat but not so much too low in the latter stages of life, providing the place has been in that situation for a course of years.

On the same principles, we might trace the effects of a decrease in the number of inhabitants, whether occasioned by a defect in the births, by extraordinary mortality, by migrations, or by a combination of these causes.

It appears, from the comparison of tables, that the duration of life is greatest in the country, shorter in towns, and still shorter in great cities. This may be accounted for from the circumstance of great numbers being crowded in a small compass, by which the air is rendered unwholesome, and infectious diseases more prevalent; the sedentary employments and want of exercise in the open air, and especially from the luxury and excess which prevails in cities. The difference is greatest in infancy, and very considerable in the first years of manhood, and becomes gradually less in the more advanced stages of life. In old age, the waste of life is as slow, or perhaps slower, in cities than in other places; the reason of which probably is, that all persons of weak constitutions are cut off in earlier years, and none but those who possess an uncommon share of natural vigour ever reach that period. It is also observed, that the lives of women, especially after the middle period of life, waste more slowly than those of men. “In general,” Dr. Price observes, “there seems reason to think that in towns (allowing for particular advantages of situation, trade, police, cleanliness, and openness, which some towns may have) the excess of the burials above the births, and the proportion of inhabitants dying annually, are more or less as the towns are greater or smaller. In London itself, about 160 years ago, when it was scarcely a fourth of its present bulk, the births were much nearer to the burials than they are now. But in country parishes and villages, the births almost always exceed the burials; and I believe it never happens, except in very particular situations, that more than a fortieth part of the inhabitants die annually. In the four provinces of New England, there is a very rapid increase of inhabitants; but notwithstanding this, at Boston, the capital, the inhabitants would decrease, were there no supply from the country; the burials from 1731 to 1762, having all along exceeded the births. So remarkably do towns, in consequence of their unfavourableness to health, and the luxury which generally prevails in them, check the increase of countries.”*

For a full illustration of these particulars, I must refer to Dr. Price, who has treated it with great ability and accuracy.

Some of Dr. Price’s statements with respect to the progressive unhealthiness of London, have been disputed upon very plausible grounds by Mr. Wales.†

Having treated, at considerable length, of the general principles which influence population, I shall now take leave of the subject, after stating a few remarks more peculiarly applicable to our own country, and some other miscellaneous particulars which I could not easily refer to any of the foregoing heads, or which escaped my attention when considering the articles with which they are connected.

Before entering into any details concerning the population of particular countries, it may not be improper to premise the statement of M. Paucton, with respect to the total population of the globe. It proceeds, as may be supposed, on very vague data; but it derives some authority from the general accuracy of the author, and from the near coincidence between his result and that of Dr. Wallace.

The number is probably below the truth, as the writer certainly underrates the population of this part of the globe, in various instances. The population of China, too, is stated by him only at two hundred millions; although (from later accounts to be mentioned afterwards,) it appears to amount to three hundred and thirty-three millions.

It is not a little curious, that this population of China exceeds considerably that of the whole earth, according to Sir William Petty’s estimate, which supposes the number of mankind now existing, not to exceed three hundred and twenty millions. Even according to Paucton and Dr. Wallace, the Chinese form, in point of numbers, one-third of the human race. But this subject I shall have occasion to resume in another lecture.

The question concerning the actual population of Great Britain, and its progress and decline since the period of the Revolution, has been at different times very keenly agitated by political writers, whose opinions on the point in dispute have been, in general, not a little biassed by their favourable or unfavourable sentiments of the system of policy pursued by our Government in the course of the present century. During the war in 1756, the controversy was carried on by Dr. Brackenridge on the one side, and by Mr. Forster on the other; the former contending for an increase, the latter for a decrease in the number of the people. The American war revived the contest in a form still more interesting to the public; some writers of distinguished abilities having espoused opposite sides of the argument, resting their conclusions not merely on the details of Political Arithmetic, but on those general principles which regulate the multiplication of the species. A few years before the commencement of hostilities, Dr. Price had opened the discussion in his Observations on Reversionary Payments, published in 1769; but he afterwards entered into it much more fully in an Appendix to Mr. Morgan’s Essay On Annuities, in which he attempted to prove, by a comparison of the number of houses in 1690 and 1777, a gradual decline in the population of England and Wales. At Lady-day 1690, the number of houses in England and Wales was (according to the Hearth-books, as examined by Dr. Davenant) one million three hundred and nineteen thousand two hundred and fifteen. In 1777, the total of houses charged, chargeable, and excused, (according to the returns of the surveyors of the house and window-duties,) was only nine hundred and fifty-two thousand seven hundred and thirty-four.* The population of England and Wales, therefore, Dr. Price concluded, must have decreased since the Revolution near a quarter;† —an effect which appeared to him to result naturally and necessarily from a variety of causes which have been operating during that period. Among these he insists chiefly on the following:—

1. “The increase of our Army and Navy, and the constant supply of men necessary to keep them up.

2. “A devouring Capital, too large for the body that supports it.

3. “Three long and destructive Continental Wars, in which we have been involved during the present century.1

4. “The migrations to our settlements abroad, particularly to the East and West Indies.

5. “Engrossing of Farms.

6. “Inclosing of Commons and Waste Grounds.

7. “The high price of Provisions.

8. “The increase of Luxury, and of our Public Debts and Taxes.”*

In support of the same opinion, several other considerations are suggested by Price, particularly the decrease of burials in the London bills of mortality, and the decrease in the hereditary and temporary excise.

One of the earliest opponents of Dr. Price was Mr. Arthur Young, whose arguments in proof of an increased population, rest chiefly on the progressive improvements of the country in Agriculture, in Manufactures, and in Commerce. He was soon followed by Mr. Eden, (now Lord Auckland,) whose observations on Dr. Price’s statements may be found in a collection of [Four] Letters to Lord Carlisle, published in 1779. They relate chiefly to Price’s reasoning, founded on his comparative view of the number of houses at the Revolution, and at present.

The most formidable of Dr. Price’s antagonists, however, were indisputably Mr. Wales and Mr. Howlett. The former (who had previously distinguished himself as a practical mathematician and astronomer in the course of his voyage with Captain Cook) published his Inquiry in 1781. In reply to Price’s fundamental argument founded on the comparison of houses at different periods, he shews,—1°· That the returns of houses to the tax-office are far from being always precise; 2°· From actual enumeration of a great variety of places taken indiscriminately, he proves a progressive population during the period in question. The present number of inhabitants (for example) in thirty-eight parishes in different parts of England, (according to the register of births and burials in these parishes,) was found to be to the number which was in the same thirty-eight parishes at the Revolution, as eight to three nearly. The present number of inhabitants in one hundred and forty-two parishes, taken in the same manner as in the former instance, is to the number which were in the same parishes between the years 1740 and 1750, as ten to seven nearly. Many other facts leading to a similar conclusion are stated by the same writer, and certainly form a mass of evidence of great importance in determining the general question.

“In every instance,” says Mr. Wales, “the places have been taken indiscriminately, that is, just as I could procure them, and I have omitted no place which I could procure; it may, therefore, be concluded, that they represent justly the state of the kingdom in general, and this argument cannot be overturned but by producing a greater number of parishes which tend to prove the contrary, or an equal number of facts of a more certain nature.”1

Mr. Howlett’s Examination of Price’s Essay followed immediately after, [1781.] It was written without any communication with Mr. Wales, and corroborates strongly his reasonings and statements. Both writers adopt the same mode of investigation, appealing to the testimony of parochial registers, in a variety of places, at distinct periods; and as their researches were, in general, directed to different quarters, each of them has furnished a separate contribution of facts leading to the same conclusion.

It is impossible for me, in this place, to enter into so extensive and complicated an argument, as that which relates to the present population of Great Britain. One consideration, however, mentioned by Mr. Howlett in a pamphlet2 published two years ago,* deserves notice on account of the stress laid on it by so very intelligent a writer, and I shall accordingly state the fact particularly, although I am far from thinking it so decisive as he conceives it to be. It is founded on the flourishing and increasing state of our hop plantations.

The annual average number of bags of hops, two hundred-weight two quarters to the bag, grown in this kingdom during four successive periods of twenty-one years each, has been nearly as follows:—

In the opinion of Mr. Howlett, a great increase of population can alone account for this great increase in the growth of hops. Fifty years ago, the majority of our peasants brewed each of them a cask or two of good ale every year. Now a very small proportion of them, from a deficiency of wages, are able to purchase either hops or malt. Our tradesmen, our farmers, and in general all of the middle classes, drink more wine and spirits than they formerly did, and, of course, a less quantity of beer; and yet, notwithstanding these deficiencies, the total consumption of hops is amazingly increased. What is the plain inference, but that the number of our inhabitants must have augmented with a correspondent rapidity? For can it be imagined that the increased exportation of ale, beer, and porter, great as it has been, can have equalled the increased produce? especially when it is remembered that the exportation of any article of home-production is comparatively nothing to that applied to domestic use. This is strikingly exemplified by the trifling exports of cloth and of leather from our manufactures of wool, of skins, and of hides, in proportion to what they afford for the home market.

Besides, however, the increased population of the country, various other obvious causes might be mentioned which must have contributed greatly to increase the consumption of hops in the home market; and, therefore, the fact, although extremely worthy of examination, affords very little additional light with respect to the question at issue. But I must not dwell any longer on the details of this controversy.

The arguments founded on the general state of the country as affecting the acknowledged causes of population, are of a much more interesting nature; and it is here that Dr. Price appears to the greatest disadvantage. In the investigation and analysis of facts, his experience and skill in Political Arithmetic have given him, in various instances, a superiority over his opponents, but when he attempts to reason from general economical principles, his views are often confined and erroneous. It is but justice to him, however, to add, (what has not been always attended to by those who have combated his reasonings,) that, after a long and minute investigation of the subject, he requested “it might be remembered, that his opinion in this instance was by no means a clear and decided conviction;” and that he candidly allowed “there was a probability that in continuing to support his former arguments, he might be influenced too much by a desire to maintain an assertion once delivered.”1

In reflecting on the general causes which have an immediate influence on population, our attention is led in the first instance to the quantity of employment which the country affords. “The demand for men,” says Mr. Smith, “like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men, quickening it when it goes on too slowly, and stopping it when it advances too fast. It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries of the world; in North America, in Europe, and in China, which renders it rapidly progressive in the first, slow and gradual in the second, and altogether stationary in the last.”* It may be laid down, therefore, as a first principle on this subject, that population will keep pace with employment; that where hands are wanted, hands will be found; that an increasing demand for agricultural labour will multiply the number of those who cultivate the earth, and an increasing demand for manufactures will swell our towns and cities.

The progress which agriculture, and manufactures, and foreign commerce, have made during the course of the present century, is well known, more particularly the two last, which have increased with a rapidity of which history does not furnish a parallel instance. The progress, however, even of agriculture, must have been very great, as we may infer from an acknowledged fact, that “during the course of the last century, taking one year with another, grain was dearer in both parts of the United Kingdom than during the present.”* At least on an average of the sixty years which terminated the last century, it was dearer than during the first sixty years of the present.1 To whatever cause the effect be ascribed, whether to the bounty on exportation as some have supposed, or (according to the opinion of others) to collateral circumstances wholly unconnected with this regulation, it is a fact that from nearly the commencement of the present century, our exports of grain continually increased, and our imports as constantly diminished till about 1750, when the former exceeded the latter by an annual average of about 800,000 quarters. Since that time, indeed, a striking reverse has taken place; our imports constantly gaining on our exports, till at length the balance of importation against us has amounted to an enormous value. Of this last circumstance I shall have occasion to take notice afterwards. In the meantime, I would only remark the evidence we have in proof of the progress of agriculture during the first half of this century; and, accordingly, even those writers who have expressed the greatest alarm about its late decline, acknowledge its prosperous state till about the year 1750. This is repeatedly and strongly asserted by Mr. Dirom in his Inquiry into the Corn Laws; and Dr. Price himself admits, that from the Revolution till the period now mentioned, tillage seems to have been increasing over the kingdom.2

It is, however, unquestionably since that period that agriculture has advanced with the greatest rapidity. Of this, presumptive evidence is afforded by the rise of rents both in England and Scotland. In the latter part of the island the fact is sufficiently known; and in the former, Mr. Howlett asserts, that in most places they have been increased one-fourth, in many one-third, in some one-half; and that in the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns, they have been trebled and quadrupled. In the meantime, rates, taxes, and the expenses of farming and of living have been increasing so fast, that a diminution of rents must necessarily have followed, had not their effects been counteracted and greatly overbalanced by a more spirited, and more extended, and a more skilful cultivation.1

A still more palpable proof, if possible, of a general spirit of agricultural improvement during the period in question, may be derived from some facts mentioned in the First Report from the Committee on Waste Lands. In the reign of Queen Anne, it appears that there were only two bills of enclosures; in that of George I. sixteen; in that of George II. two hundred and twenty-six; whereas, during the present reign, there have been one thousand five hundred and thirty-two. The increase in the extent of land, or number of acres enclosed, has been vastly greater than the increased number of enclosures. The number of acres enclosed in the former periods of sixty years, was only 33,676; but in the latter of only thirty-six years, there have been 2,770,521; that is, there has been an absolute increase of more than eighty to one in the total quantity; and the medium annual increase above one hundred and fifty to one. The enclosure of almost 3,000,000 of acres whether of wastes and commons, or of open fields under prior cultivation and management, must have occasioned great expense to the proprietors of the land, and this expense they must necessarily have redeemed by an increase of rent. Accordingly the increased rent of the enclosures, even of common fields, under previous but imperfect culture, is stated to have been seldom less than one-fourth, sometimes one-third, and not unfrequently one-half; while the advanced rents of wastes and commons have been from the merest trifle to 15s. or 20s. an acre. In order to pay these increased rents, the tenants must necessarily, from an improved and extended cultivation, have raised a produce of value equivalent to three, four, or even five times the increased rent; and that they have actually done so, is evident from their increased opulence and prosperity.

I am abundantly sensible that doubts may be entertained how far the demand for agricultural labour increases in the same proportion with the general improvement of the country; and whether the prevalence of large farms, and the increase of pasturage occasioned by the progress of luxury, may not operate in the opposite direction. But granting this to be the case, (which, however, is far from being admitted by some of the more sanguine advocates for our increased population,) it can scarcely be doubted, that the demand for agricultural labour has increased on the whole. Something, indeed, more than mere conjecture may be offered in proof of this. By inquiries made in the different counties of England in 1770, by Mr. A. Young, and by calculations founded by him on data, (which Mr. Chalmers considers as sufficiently accurate,) he was led to conclude, that the persons engaged in farming alone amounted to two millions eight hundred thousand; besides a vast number of people who are as much maintained by agriculture as the ploughman that tills the soil. Whereas in an account which Gregory King has left of the number of all the ranks of the people, from the highest to the lowest, the two orders at the bottom of his scale, including labourers and out-servants, cottagers, paupers, and vagrants are estimated only at two millions six hundred thousand.1

Calculations of this sort, however, must necessarily be extremely vague; nor is it material to the present argument what judgment we pronounce on their accuracy. It is one great advantage (as I have repeatedly observed) of our modern systems of Political Economy, that they have converted agriculture into a trade, clearing the country of superfluous hands, and providing employment for those who would otherwise have added to the number of idle consumers. The great question is, What is the state of our population on the whole? And, therefore, even if we should suppose a diminution in the numbers who derive their subsistence immediately from husbandry, it remains to be considered, whether this may not be far overbalanced by the increased population which it supports at a distance. On this point there can scarcely be a diversity of opinion, after the statements given by Mr. Chalmers of the progress of our manufactures, commerce, and navigation during the present century,—a progress which necessarily implies an increasing demand for labourers in these various departments of national industry.

The woollen manufacture of Yorkshire alone, appears from documents mentioned by Mr. Chalmers to be, in the present day, of equal extent with the woollen manufactures of England at the Revolution. Since that era, too, we may be said to have gained the manufactures of silks, of linen, of cotton, of paper, of iron, of glass, of the potteries, besides many others.

Of the increased demand for labour occasioned by our extended commerce, some interesting proofs are to be found in Mr. Chalmers’s Estimate, to which I must beg leave to refer for more particular information on the subject.

The public works, too, and private enterprises which have been carried into execution during the last fifty years, such as high-roads, navigable rivers, canals, bridges, harbours, &c., while they furnish the most unequivocal proofs of general prosperity, must have added greatly to the amount of national employment, not only by the labour to which they necessarily gave occasion, but by their effect in extending that commercial intercourse from which they derived their origin.

Among these, the system of inland navigation, now extended to every corner of the kingdom, is, in a more peculiar degree, characteristical of the opulence, the spirit, and the enlarged views which distinguish the commercial interest of this country. “The town of Manchester,” says Dr. Aikin,* “when the plans now under execution are finished, will probably enjoy more various water communications than the most commercial town of the low countries has ever done. And instead of cutting them through level tracts, so as only to make a wider ditch, its coals are situated in mountainous districts, where the sole method of avoiding the difficulties of steep ascent and descent has been to perforate hills, and to navigate for miles within the bowels of the earth. At the beginning of this century, it was thought a most audacious task to make a high-road practicable for carriages over the hills and moors which separate Yorkshire from Lancashire; and now they are pierced through by three navigable canals.” . . . “Nothing but highly flourishing manufactures can repay the vast expense of these undertakings; and there is some reason for thinking, that in the other part of the United Kingdom, the spirit which still prompts to their unbounded extension, originates in that passion for bold and precarious adventure, which scorns to be limited by reasonable calculations of profit.”1

The effects, however, of these artificial navigations, which join the Eastern and Western Seas, and connect almost every manufacturing town in England with the capital, together with that of our multiplied highways, must be incalculably great on the internal commerce of the country. It is this branch of our trade which, in point of extent, is the most important of any, and which, at the same time, rests on the most solid foundation; the best customers of Britain (according to an old observation) being the people of Britain.2

As I cannot, at present, prosecute this discussion any farther, I shall only state the results of the opposite calculations which it has suggested. According to Dr. Price, the number of inhabitants in England and Wales must be short of five millions. His calculation proceeds on the number of houses as collected from the Returns of the surveyors of the house and window-duties. From these it appears that the number of houses in England and Wales in 1777, was 952,734. Supposing it, however, to amount to a million, and reckoning five persons to a house, which (according to Price’s observation) is a high allowance for England in general, this gives only five millions for the whole number of people in England and Wales. The inhabitants of Scotland, Price supposes to be more than a fifth part of Britain.

On the other hand, it is contended by Mr. Chalmers in the edition of his Estimate published in 1794, from data which he has particularly stated, that the present population of England and Wales exceeds eight millions; and that since the Revolution there has been an augmentation of a million and a half.1* Mr. Howlett, in a pamphlet published in 1797, states the augmentation at a little less than two millions.2 According to some later writers, even Mr. Howlett’s computations fall greatly short of the truth. In a pamphlet (for example) published a few months ago (1800) by Arthur Young, entitled “The Question of Scarcity plainly stated,” I find the following passage:—

“Some years ago, I calculated that England and Wales contained ten millions of souls. This was the result of comparing the population as estimated by Dr. Price, from the houses returned to the tax-office, with the errors discovered in these lists by actual enumeration; and it ought farther to be observed, that the indefatigable researches of Sir John Call, Bart., in every county of the kingdom, have proved fully to his satisfaction, that the people have increased one-third in ten years,—that is, from 1787 to 1797.”

If this very astonishing fact should be admitted, the people of England and Wales (as Mr. Young remarks) cannot be short of twelve millions.

I confess, for my own part, I have no great faith in the accuracy of any of these results; and my scepticism on the subject is not a little increased by observing at the end of Mr. Middleton’s View of the Agriculture of Middlesex, (published 1798,) a letter from Mr. Howlett, (a very able writer on Population, and formerly extremely dogmatical in his assertions,) a frank avowal of the exaggerations into which he had inadvertently been led in the course of his controversy with Dr. Price.

“In my Examination,” he observes, “of Dr. Price’s Essay, I made the population of the kingdom to be between eight and nine millions. This estimate was formed upon principles so extremely unfounded, which I did not then know, but very soon discovered, as rendered the final result utterly erroneous. From a more minute and accurate investigation of the subject, about fourteen or fifteen years, (which I intended to publish, but did not, and I believe never shall,) I am nearly confident our population did not then amount to seven millions and a half, and that at present it does not exceed eight millions. It is somewhat extraordinary that the fallacy which misled me, neither the public nor the keen penetrating eyes of Dr. Price, ever saw. The Doctor, indeed, pointed out an apprehension which he supposed me to be under; but that was entirely groundless.”

The difference in these statements will appear the less wonderful when we consider the difficulty which has been experienced in arriving at anything like certainty with respect to the population of London. The inquiry has of late years occupied the industry of a number of writers of acknowledged abilities, and yet their results vary from each other by more than 400,000.

Dr. Price published very plausible reasons in support of the opinion, that about one in twenty and three-fourths died annually in London between the years 1758 and 1769. And, taking the interments at 29,000, it produced him the number 601,750, as the amount of the whole population within the bills of mortality.

Mr. Wales, in 1771, states them at 625,131. Dr. Fordyce within these few years states them at 1,000,000; and still more lately, Mr. Colquhoun asserts that the inhabitants of the Metropolis amount to 1,200,000.

Mr. Howlett, in a pamphlet published about 1782, computed the number of inhabitants within the bills of mortality at between eight and nine hundred thousand. In his late letter, however, addressed to Mr. Middleton, he confesses that the data on which the reasonings and deductions, which appear in his pamphlet in answer to Dr. Price, were founded, are too vague and precarious to be safely depended on, and that he has long been inclined to think that the number of inhabitants within the bills have never yet amounted to 700,000.

Mr. Middleton, from a calculation founded on some suggestions of Mr. Howlett’s, computes “the total present population within the bills to be 628,484.”1

During the last hundred years, Mr. Chalmers thinks that Ireland has done more than treble its inhabitants. And although this computation may perhaps be somewhat exaggerated, yet the data on which he proceeds sufficiently demonstrate a great progressive population, and afford a strong collateral argument against the reasonings of those who are of opinion that the population of England has been decreasing during the same period. According to some late statements, Mr. Chalmers’s estimate falls short of the truth. From the Report of the Secret Committee of the Irish Parliament, published in 1798, Dr. Emmet appears to have stated the actual population of Ireland “at five millions,” whereas, “at the time of the Revolution, it did not much exceed a million and a half.” (The same gentleman is said to have acknowledged that this symptom of national prosperity had grown out of the connexion of Ireland with Great Britain.)2

The progressive population of Scotland, from the year 1755, is demonstrated by very authentic documents. In the year 1743, Dr. Webster, an eminent clergyman of this city, and distinguished for his accuracy and skill as a political arithmetician, established a general correspondence over the country, both with clergy and laity, one object of which was to procure lists, either of individuals, or of persons above a certain age, in the different parishes of Scotland. When the lists contained only those above a certain age, he calculated the amount of the whole inhabitants, by the proportion which they might be supposed to bear to the number of souls, according to the most approved tables, compared with the fact in many parts of Scotland, where the ministers, at his desire, not only numbered their parishioners, but distinguished their respective ages. This inquiry was completed in 1755, at which period Dr. Webster computed the number of souls in this part of the United Kingdom at 1,265,380.1

From the statistical accounts published by Sir John Sinclair, it appears, that a very great augmentation has taken place since that period, although, perhaps, not so immense a one as that gentleman at one period apprehended.

In the Statistical Table of Scotland, lately drawn up by Mr. Robertson of Granton, (from the Agricultural Surveys, the Statistical Accounts, and whatever other sources of information on the subject the public is as yet possessed of,) the population of Scotland is stated at 1,227,892. As the principal documents, however, on which he proceeds have been collected during a period of six years, (from 1792 to 1798,) his result, when applied to the population of the country at the present moment, must be understood with a certain degree of latitude. According to these computations, the increase of population from 1755 to 1798 would appear to be 262,512.2

A remarkable illustration of the natural bias even of enlightened minds in favour of times past, is mentioned by Sir John Sinclair, in one of his publications relative to this subject. “I have found the clergy,” says he, “in guessing the population in 1755, exceed in every instance the number stated by Dr. Webster, and that they have almost uniformly fallen short of the truth, if they made a rough guess of the number of their parishioners at the time, before undertaking the trouble of an actual enumeration.”

I mentioned in a former part of this Lecture, a very curious fact with respect to the state of our corn trade since about the year 1750, [see p. 238,] of which, however, I made no use in the course of my subsequent reasonings. It has, indeed, been often appealed to, by one set of writers, as a palpable proof of an increased population, while others have concluded from it, that the agriculture of the country is going fast to ruin. The truth is, that when considered abstractedly from other circumstances, it neither justifies the former inference nor the latter, as the effect is manifestly influenced by a great variety of causes combined together. It may be proper, however, now to state it more particularly.

“From a representation drawn up in the year 1790 by the Lords of the Committee of his Majesty’s Council for Trade, ‘upon the present State of the Laws for regulating the Importation and the Exportation of Corn,’ it appears, that this kingdom which, in former times, used to produce more corn than was necessary for the consumption of the inhabitants, has of late years been under the necessity of depending on foreign countries for a part of its supply.” In proof of this their lordships state, “that while, upon an average of nineteen years, from 1746 to 1765, the nett returns to the nation from the grain exported is supposed to have been no less than £651,000 per annum, so great is the subsequent change of circumstances, that on an average of eighteen years, from 1770 to 1788, it appears that this country paid to foreign nations no less than £291,000 per annum to supply its inhabitants.” I am not in possession of the latest information on the subject; but from a statement some years posterior to the former, it appears that the annual value of imported corn has amounted to about a million sterling.1

In one of the printed reports of the Chamber of Commerce at Glasgow, this change in the circumstances of the corn trade is placed solely to the account of a rapidly increasing population; while a late very respectable writer, Mr. Dirom of Muiresk, ascribes it to the alterations in our old Corn Laws, which began to take place about 1750. “In consequence of these alterations,” he observes, “our agriculture, which gradually advanced, from the commencement of the present century, out of the lowest state of depression, till it arrived, between the years 1730 and 1750, at the highest degree of prosperity, has ever since been rapidly declining.” He adds, that “the principal increase of our population in the course of this century was prior to 1750, and that 137,256 persons were employed in the cultivation of our lands, between the years 1741 and 1750, more than between the years 1773 and 1784.*

This work of Mr. Dirom, which was published a few years ago, [1796,] with some additional tracts by Mr. Mackie of Ormiston, gave occasion to a pamphlet by Mr. Howlett, entitled, Dispersion of the Gloomy Apprehensions, of late repeatedly suggested from the Decline of our Corn Trade; [1798.] The great object of the author is to show, that various other causes have been operating to produce the necessity of an importation, and which are fully adequate to the effect, without supposing the agriculture of the kingdom to be in a state of decline. I shall touch slightly on the most important of these, referring to Mr. Howlett’s Essay for the particular results of his calculations.

1. The first of these is, the increased consumption arising from the vast increase of our population. The reality of the cause is here assumed as sufficiently established by other proofs; and supposing it to amount (as Mr. Howlett does) to two millions and a half within the compass of the last forty or fifty years, it certainly goes a considerable way to remove the difficulty.

2. Immense numbers now consume the finest wheat, whose ancestors were confined to oats and barley.

In a book formerly referred to, entitled Corn Tracts,† (published about fifty years ago,) the author, after estimating the actual population of England and Wales at six millions, computes the number of persons who used wheaten bread to be 3,750,000. The increase since that period must have been very great, from its gradual introduction among the labouring classes in various parts of the kingdom, where it was formerly, in a great measure, unknown. In the northern counties of England it was scarcely an article of food; at present its consumption must be considerable, from the vast augmentation of manufactures and of opulence.

The following fact I mention on the authority of Sir F. M. Eden, whose information with respect to the North of England seems to be more particularly correct. “About fifty years ago, so little was the quantity of wheat used in the county of Cumberland, that it was only a rich family that used a peck of wheat in the course of a year, and that was at Christmas. An old labourer of eighty-five, remarks, that when he was a boy he was at Carlisle market with his father, and wishing to indulge himself with a penny loaf made of wheat-flour, he searched for it for some time, but could not procure a piece of wheaten bread at any shop in that city.”1

Of the increased consumption of wheat in some parts of Scotland, a very striking proof occurs in the Agricultural Survey of Mid-Lothian. “About the year 1735, (we are told,) the total annual consumption of wheat did not much exceed 25,000 bolls; whereas, at present it amounts to about 144,540, a quantity nearly six times greater than was consumed only sixty years ago.”

The same writer informs us, that “the whole country fifty years ago did not sow above a thousand acres of wheat, and about the year 1727, not above five hundred, but that there are now seven or eight thousand;” he adds, that “the total consumption of the country is estimated to be three times its produce.”

3. Another consideration on which Mr. Howlett lays great stress, is the increased consumption of the fruits of the earth occasioned by the immense multiplication of oxen, sheep, hogs, and above all of horses.

The multiplication of this last species of animal is beyond all accurate calculation, in consequence of the increased demand occasioned, not only by the ostentation and luxury of the great, but by carriers’ waggons, post-chaises, mail, stage, and hackney coaches.

The increase of these several denominations, Mr. Mackie estimates at 400,000; and he allows three acres of fertile land for the maintenance of each horse, which allowance requires 1,200,000 acres for the support of the whole number. Mr. Howlett thinks this allowance much too little for those descriptions of horses which have been chiefly multiplied. It is certainly much under the common computation. Mr. Kent states the quantity of land of the common medium quality as necessary for the support of a horse at seven acres; and Mr. Howlett thinks this statement not extravagant, if confined to horses destined for continual and vigorous exertion. Mr. Townsend, in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws, observes, that a horse to be fully fed, requires five tons of hay, and from thirteen to three-and-twenty quarters of oats, per annum, according to his work. Some farmers, he says, allow the former, and the latter is given by the great carriers on the public roads, which would bring the computation to about eight acres each for horses used in husbandry; whichever of these estimates we adopt, the consumption by horses must be enormous. Allowing five acres for the average of the horses which enter into Mr. Mackie’s computation, these additional animals will require the produce of 2,000,000 of acres, which might otherwise have been applied to the cultivation of wheat.

When these different causes are combined, they go far to justify Mr. Howlett’s conclusion, that the balance against us in the article of importation, is so far from being wonderful by its magnitude, that it is truly astonishing it should not be much greater. It certainly leads to no inference to the disadvantage of our national prosperity, and indeed the progress of our agriculture, and in a far greater degree that of our trade and manufactures, is a fact for which we almost appeal to the evidence of the senses.

In what I have hitherto said upon this subject, although I have in general leaned to the side of Dr. Price’s opponents, I have avoided as much as possible to express a decided opinion. That an increase, however, has taken place in the number of inhabitants in this Island since the end of last century, I confess appears to me to be established by a mass of evidence direct and presumptive, which is almost irresistible. At the same time I do not, with the greater part of these writers, consider this increased population as an unequivocal proof, that the sum of our national happiness has increased exactly in the same proportion. On the contrary, a variety of considerations conspire to render it doubtful, whether the comforts of the labouring poor are now greater than they were a century ago.

That the comforts of the labouring poor depend upon the increase of the funds destined for the maintenance of labour, and that they will be exactly in proportion to the rapidity of this increase, may be assumed as fundamental, and almost as self-evident propositions. The demand for labour which such increase would occasion, by creating a competition in the market, must necessarily raise the value of labour; and till the additional hands required were reared, the increased funds would be distributed to the same number of persons as before the increase, and therefore every labourer would live comparatively at his ease. It does not, however, follow from this, (as Mr. Smith has concluded,* ) that every increase in the revenue or stock of a society, may be considered as an increase of those funds. Such surplus stock or revenue will, indeed, be always considered by the individual possessing it, as an additional fund from which he may maintain more labour; but it will not be a real and effectual fund for the maintenance of an additional number of labourers, unless a great part of this increase of the stock or revenue of the society be convertible into a proportional quantity of provisions; and it will not be so convertible where the increase has arisen merely from the produce of labour, and not from the produce of land. The fact is, Mr. Smith seems to have confounded together two things which are essentially different; the number of hands which the stock of the society can employ, and the number which the territory can maintain.

Supposing a nation, for a course of years, to add what it saved from its yearly revenue to its manufacturing capital solely, and not to its capital employed on land, it is evident it might grow richer (according to the common use of language) without a power of supporting a greater number of labourers, and, therefore, without an increase in the real funds for the maintenance of labour. There would, notwithstanding, be a demand for labour, from the power which each manufacturer would possess of extending his old stock in trade, or of setting up new undertakings. This demand would, of course, raise the price of labour; but if the yearly stock of provisions in the country was not increasing, this rise would soon turn out to be merely nominal, as the price of provisions must inevitably rise with it. Nothing can be plainer than this, that any general rise in the price of labour, the stock of provisions remaining the same, can only be a nominal rise, as it must very shortly be followed by a proportional rise in the necessaries of life.

Something of this kind appears to have taken place, in this island, during the course of the present century, in consequence of a system of policy which has considered manufactures and commerce as ultimate objects, instead of regarding them in their due subserviency to agricultural improvement. The exchangeable value in the market of Europe of the annual produce of our land and labour has increased greatly; but the increase has been chiefly in the produce of labour, and not in the produce of land; and, therefore, though the wealth of the nation (according to Smith’s definition of it) has been advancing rapidly, the effectual funds for the maintenance of labour have been increasing much more slowly, as I shall have occasion to show more fully when I come to consider the state of the poor.*

These considerations suggest a doubt whether Mr. Smith’s definition of national wealth (according to which it consists in the annual produce of its land and labour) be equally just with that of the French Economists, who measure it by the rude produce; excluding completely from this definition, the results of manufacturing industry. But this inquiry properly belongs to the second branch of the course.

[BOOK SECOND.]

[OF NATIONAL WEALTH.]

[CHAPTER I.* ]

[OF PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR.]

(Interpolation from Notes.)—In the occasional use which I have hitherto made of the phrase National Wealth, I have employed these words in that general and popular sense in which they are commonly understood. But in analyzing the first principles of Political Economy, it is proper to ascertain, with as much accuracy as possible, the precise meaning of this expression; for which purpose I shall introduce this Second Part of the Course with an examination of the different definitions of the phrase National Wealth, which have been proposed by different writers, and with a comparative view of their advantages and disadvantages. The prosecution of this subject will lead me to an illustration of some of the characteristic peculiarities of language and doctrine by which Mr. Smith’s system is distinguished from that of the French Economists. In considering, in the former part of my course, the effects of agriculture and the appropriation of land on general improvement, I have endeavoured to illustrate their tendency to excite a commercial spirit, and their connexion with the origin of most of the useful arts. It would furnish a curious subject of speculation to examine this beautiful progress in detail, studying the mechanism of civilized society in that grand outline which Nature has sketched, and for the execution of which she has provided in the constitution of man, when combined with his physical circumstances.

It is evident that, in the profession of Agriculture itself, abstracting from the other arts to which it gives occasion, the foundation is laid for many exchanges which had no existence in the former stages of society; such, for instance, as the exchanges which arise from the difference of soil and exposure which distinguish different districts of the same country. The proprietors of each of these districts have their peculiar advantages, which would invite them to a friendly intercourse, by uniting them by the ties of their common interest. Experience would soon teach each individual to what kind of produce his land is best adapted, and would suggest the expediency of turning it to that kind of produce, in hopes of procuring, by an exchange with his neighbours, those articles of which he stood in need. The exchange, therefore, of the productions of one district for those of another, results necessarily from the physical situation of the husbandman, and will advance with the increasing multiplicity of his wants and desires.

The exchange of productions for labour is necessarily occasioned by the long and difficult preparation which most of the fruits of the earth require, in order to be fit for the use of man, and by the impossibility of the husbandman performing this task himself, without a ruinous waste of time and distraction of attention. The same motives, accordingly, which have established the exchange of commodities between the cultivators of different kinds of soil, introduces an exchange between the cultivators and a new order of men in the social system,—men who are induced by inclination, or compelled by circumstances, to betake themselves to the occupation of preparing for use those productions which the cultivator supplies in a rude form. By this means, the success of each party is obtained by the simplicity of his pursuits. The husbandman draws from his field the greatest quantity it can produce, procuring to himself, by an exchange of his surplus, the means of gratifying all his other wants, with far greater facility than he could by his own labour. Thus the shoemaker secures to himself a portion of the harvest; and every workman labours for the wants of the others, all of whom, in their turn, labour for him.

In this circulation of labour, it cannot fail to occur, that the husbandman possesses a distinguished pre-eminence over the other classes of the community, as observed by Turgot.* On this essential distinction between these two kinds of labour, the system of Political Economy proposed by Quesnai and his followers in a great measure hinges; and the distinction seems to me, under some slight limitations and corrections, to be not only just and important, but to hold a conspicuous rank among the fundamental principles of the science. I shall endeavour to illustrate it as fully and clearly as I can, and to vindicate it from some of the objections to which it is supposed to be liable. This appears the more necessary, as, though I agree with some of Mr. Smith’s criticisms, I think he has not in this instance placed the doctrine of the Economists in a just point of view.

According to Mr. Smith, the wealth of a country is in proportion to the exchangeable value of the annual produce of its Land and Labour, comprehending, evidently, under the word labour, both manufacturing and agricultural industry. To this position I do not mean to object at present, nor am I disposed to limit in all conceivable cases the application of the phrase National Wealth to agricultural produce. It would be manifestly an abuse of language to deny that the Dutch are a wealthy people, because the means of their subsistence are entirely derived from abroad, or because the same system of policy would be impracticable in a different country. In consequence of these circumstances, their wealth, undoubtedly, is much less independent than that of an agricultural country; and it is evident that their example is totally inapplicable to the general condition of mankind. But as long as they continue to possess a complete command of the productions of other regions, the wealth of Holland differs from that of other countries only as the wealth of the monied capitalist differs from that of the cultivator of the ground. The difference, indeed, in a national point of view, will be found to be great and essential; but as far as appears hitherto, it would be improper to cavil at Mr. Smith’s expression, when it is possible by any restriction to reconcile it to a just way of thinking.

Of these two sources of national wealth, Land and Labour, the latter is by far the most considerable, or rather, in comparison with it, the former is of trifling moment. For although the difference between one country and another, in respect of natural advantages, be not inconsiderable, it requires the exertion of human skill and industry to render these subservient to the condition of man, as Locke has observed.*

In so far as the wealth of a country arises from manufactures or commerce, the argument is still clearer and more indisputable. Indeed, as Mr. Hume [in his Essay on Commerce] has remarked, trade, artisanship, and manufactures, are nothing more than the public storehouses of labour.

Since, therefore, the great source of national wealth is human industry, the opulence of every society must be regulated by the two following circumstances: first, by the proportion which the number of those employed in useful labour bears to those who are not so employed; and, secondly, by the skill, dexterity, and economy by which this labour is applied. It is justly observed by Mr. Smith, that it seems to depend more on the latter than the former.†

These considerations naturally suggest the inquiry to what causes this difference in the effective powers of labour is owing. I have substituted this word effective, instead of the term productive, employed by Mr. Smith, for a reason which will afterwards appear. On examination, it appears to be chiefly owing to the division of labour, the effects of which Mr. Smith has very beautifully and happily illustrated. One of the instances which he mentions, places the subject in a peculiarly striking point of view.

“To take an example,” he says, “from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business, (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade,) nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it, (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion,) could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head, requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.”*

Before, however, I proceed to follow Mr. Smith through his very ingenious speculations on the subject, it appears to me that some attention is due to the previous question concerning the relative importance of the different modes in which labour may be employed, more particularly concerning the relative importance of Agricultural and Manufacturing industry. This inquiry will lead to a comparison of the different sources of national wealth and revenue.

The remarks of Mr. Smith on this subject are not introduced in his system till he has finished not only the exposition of his elementary principles, but the discussion of various interesting and complicated questions connected with the science. But I must confess, it appears to me that it would greatly improve the arrangement of his work, and add to the precision of our ideas on the subject, if he had begun first with fixing his ideas, and defining his language with respect to the different employments of labour. Such, at any rate, is rendered necessary by the general plan which I have formed for these lectures, as the questions to which I am now to attend, are the link which is to connect our speculations concerning National Wealth with what has already been advanced on the subject of Population.

In illustrating the distinction made by the Economists between Productive and Unproductive Labour, I shall intersperse, as I proceed, a few strictures on such of Mr. Smith’s criticisms on their doctrines as do not seem to me to be well founded. Those which I shall hazard on the system of the Economists I shall reserve for another lecture. In the sketch, therefore, which I am now to offer, I wish to be considered, in a great measure, only the expounder of a system proposed by others, without acquiescing implicitly in its details, excepting in those instances where I shall have occasion to mention my own opinion. The statements I am to give, will express, to the best of my judgment, the meaning of the authors by whom the phrase, productive and unproductive labour, was first introduced. But I have thought it advisable, for the sake of perspicuity, to aim rather at a faithful exposition of their general doctrines, than to give any full transcript of their writings. How far I have succeeded in simplifying the subject, I am not a competent judge; but I am particularly aware, after all that I have done in freeing it of the prolixity and technical phraseology of its authors, that my speculations with regard to it must necessarily appear, at first, to be expanded beyond what the importance of the subject can well justify. Those, however, who reflect on the advantages which, in some other parts of human knowledge, have been derived from a scientific arrangement of known truths unfolded in a natural order, and the substitution of appropriate and definite terms, instead of the looseness of common language, will not be apt to form conclusions to the prejudice of the very ingenious theory from which they are borrowed.

As the existence of the human race, even when limited to the necessaries of life, supposes a constant consumption of food, it supposes also some fund from which this expense is to be defrayed.

The fund which supplies this annual expense to any individual or community, constitutes a stock or revenue essential to their preservation, and without which all other possessions are useless. When this fund is once secured, the objects of their desires are multiplied, and a more ample revenue provided, if that is possible, the extent of revenue being everywhere measured by the possession of those articles of subsistence or accommodation which either furnish the means of gratifying those desires, or enable the possessor to command the labour of others. It is further obvious, that everything we are possessed of comes originally from the earth, including under that term the two great divisions of our globe into land and sea; and that its productions, variously modified, must supply all the wants of man, and furnish the means of defraying all his expenses.

The Labour of man can be employed to increase this fund only in two ways; by adding to the quantity of those productions, or by making such alterations on their form as may render them either more useful in themselves, or more valuable in exchange. The first of these is the object of Agriculture, the second of Manufactures.

In whatever manner the industry of man is employed, the produce of his labour is necessarily burdened by the consumption of the labourer. In estimating, therefore, the productive power of any species of industry, before inquiring whether it adds to the quantity, utility, or exchangeable value of the possessions of the society, the first question that presents itself is, Whether it supplies the means of defraying the necessary consumption by which it is maintained? In this respect, the preeminence of Agriculture is evidently conspicuous; the fund employed not only continuing without any diminution, but being more than replaced by the additional produce which it can draw from the earth. In consequence of the production of this surplus, the general revenue is augmented, and can defray expenses to which it was not equal before. Therefore, the epithet productive is most justly applied to that labour and expense by which it is raised. With respect to Manufacturing labour, the case is different; for though by the operations of the manufacturer the materials of his trade become much more useful, it does not follow that he thereby increases the national revenue. This revenue is the fund of national consumption; and it is not increased by any operation which does not supply the means of a greater consumption. That the work of the artificer yields no such supply is manifest. He adds nothing to the materials of his labour but the value of his own subsistence; and only changes the form of the materials so as to adapt them to the purposes of life. In this respect, therefore, the labour of the artificer, however useful, does not add to the general revenue in the same sense with the labour of the husbandman.

It is probable, however, that those writers who contend that the labour of the artificer is really productive, mean only, that it increases the exchangeable value of the productions of the earth. It is in this sense plainly that Mr. Smith employs the term, when speaking of the probable effects of foreign commerce in increasing the productive powers of manufacturing industry. I shall, therefore, consider how far the proposition is true, when taken with this limitation.

The exchangeable value of everything manufactured by human industry depends on two circumstances; the price of the original raw material, and that of the labour which has been employed on it. The price of this labour arises altogether from the expense occasioned by the necessary consumption of the labourer; and this expense is all the exchangeable value which the artificer can add to the raw materials, the competition of others restraining him from demanding more. Therefore, whatever value he adds to these materials, he destroys as much of the other funds of the society, and leaves the whole of the exchangeable revenue no greater than it otherwise would have been. For the illustration of these reasonings, no example can be more in point than that mentioned by Mr. Smith in the manufacture of lace.—“The person,” he says, “who works the lace of a pair of fine ruffles, for example, will sometimes raise the value of perhaps a pennyworth of flax to thirty pounds sterling. But though at first sight he appears thereby to multiply the value of a part of the rude produce about seven thousand and two hundred times, he in reality adds nothing to the value of the whole annual amount of the rude produce. The working of that lace cost him perhaps two years’ labour. The thirty pounds which he gets for it when it is finished, is no more than the repayment of the subsistence which he advances to himself during the two years that he is employed about it. The value which, by every day’s, month’s, or year’s labour, he adds to the flax, does no more than replace the value of his own consumption during that day, month, or year. At no moment of time, therefore, does he add anything to the value of the whole annual amount of the rude produce of the land; the portion of that produce which he is continually consuming being always equal to the value which he is continually producing.”*

It is agreeably to these principles of the Economists that Dr. Franklin, in one of his political fragments, considers manufactures as “subsistence metamorphosed.”*

In opposition to the reasonings already stated against the productive powers of manufacturing industry, Mr. Smith argues thus:—“It seems, upon every supposition, improper to say, that the labour of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, does not increase the real revenue of the society. Though we should suppose, for example, as it seems to be supposed in this system, that the value of the daily, monthly, and yearly consumption of this class was exactly equal to that of its daily, monthly, and yearly production; yet it would not from thence follow that its labour added nothing to the real revenue, to the real value of the annual produce of the land and labour of the society. An artificer, for example, who, in the first six months after harvest, executes ten pounds’ worth of work, though he should in the same time consume ten pounds’ worth of corn and other necessaries, yet really adds the value of ten pounds to the annual produce of the land and labour of the society. While he has been consuming a half-yearly revenue of ten pounds’ worth of corn and other necessaries, he has produced an equal value of work capable of purchasing, either to himself or to some other person, an equal half-yearly revenue. The value, therefore, of what has been consumed and produced during these six months is equal, not to ten, but to twenty pounds. It is possible, indeed, that no more than ten pounds’ worth of this value may ever have existed at any one moment of time. But if the ten pounds’ worth of corn and other necessaries which were consumed by the artificer, had been consumed by a soldier or by a menial servant, the value of that part of the annual produce which existed at the end of the six months, would have been ten pounds less than it actually is, in consequence of the labour of the artificer. Though the value of what the artificer produces, therefore, should not at any one moment of time be supposed greater than the value he consumes, yet at every moment of time the actually existing value of goods in the market is, in consequence of what he produces, greater than it otherwise would be.”*

If I understand completely the face of this argument, it means only, that the values of what had been consumed are equal to twenty pounds. But the question is, Whether the nation has been benefited? The ten pounds’ value of corn consumed cannot be again employed in any expense, and therefore cannot be said to constitute any addition to the revenue of the nation, which is only another expression for the quantity of expense which the nation is able to defray. Mr. Smith contends farther, that the labour of artificers produces a value equal to its expense, and continues the capital which employs it,—in this respect differing essentially from that of menial servants, which produces no revenue. This, however, I cannot help thinking is a fallacy to which this profound writer has been led, by the use of money as a medium of exchange. The artificer sells the produce of his labour, and, on a superficial view, appears to replace his capital as effectually as the farmer by reaping his crop; and, in truth, they are perfectly similar, as far as the individual is concerned; but they are very different in their relation to the community in general. The corn which the farmer produces is the free gift of nature, and costs nothing to the society; the manufacturer only changes the form of his commodity, converting what formerly was useless to purposes of general accommodation. When he does so, however, he derives the means of his subsistence from the general stock. He is not supported immediately by the produce of his own labour; and if he were cut off from all communication with others, he could do nothing to renew the capital by which he is to be maintained. His work is of no absolute value to himself, and is only the means of procuring subsistence from others, who exchange their superfluities for the gratification of their secondary wants. The capital of the artificer, therefore, is replaced by some other person, who thereby spends some part of his revenue. Suppose, for instance, I reap a crop of corn, of which, after deducting all expenses, there remain twenty bushels, which I exchange for a quantity of lace. These twenty bushels are very little more than equal to the consumption of the lace manufacturer while employed in the production of his article. His subsistence, therefore, is supplied, not by his labour, but by the produce I have drawn from the ground. He has lived during that time at my expense, as much as if I had advanced to him the wages of his labour. In fact, the capital which employs him is not the lace which he has made, but the twenty bushels of corn which I have paid him for it; and, therefore, it does not follow, that because his advances have been repaid, his labour replaces the capital which has been employed. The question is, Whether it replaces the capital I have employed, and pays the expenses I have incurred in raising these twenty bushels? This it certainly does not do. The expense, indeed, which I have laid out has procured me something, more or less useful, which I consider as an equivalent. But if the lace be an equivalent, so also is the labour of menial servants. The lace wears as the servant perishes; neither the one nor the other leaves anything behind; and if they differ somewhat in the length of their duration, the difference is only in degree, and not the consequence of any essential distinction between them. Suppose, now, the same quantity of corn had been applied to sow and reap a field; in this case the corn expended would not only be replaced, but there would be a clear addition to the revenue not only of the individual, but also of the community. In both cases, the expense laid out is replaced; but in this instance, it reproduces a surplus in addition to its value.

The difference now stated between these two kinds of expenses is essential and sufficiently great to authorize the distinction between them which has now been insisted on. This distinction, it must always be carefully remembered, has no reference whatever to the utility of the different employments now mentioned. The labour of a soldier, for instance, is perfectly unproductive; yet the defence of a State is an object of no less importance than the encouragement of commerce and manufactures; and, like manufactures, the labour of the soldier is useful, in some cases even necessary. But still there is an essential distinction between labour which is merely useful, and that which is also productive.

According to Mr. Smith, the true characteristic of productive labour is, that it fixes itself on some vendible commodity, the sale of which replaces the capital employed in it; whereas unproductive labour consists in services which perish almost in the time of performance. This distinction of Mr. Smith’s appears to rest on an accidental and very unimportant circumstance, according as the subsistence of the workman is advanced by his employer, or is repaid through the medium of some third person, who has advanced his wages. If his wages are advanced by an employer, his labour necessarily consists in personal services; and it is a matter of indifference what these services are if they equally accommodate his employer. If, on the other hand, his wages are to be repaid by another, no person will be induced to do so unless that expense is replaced by some commodity which may be useful. This circumstance, therefore, is sufficient, in many cases, to determine whether labour, according to Mr. Smith’s doctrine, shall be held productive or unproductive. A distinction resting on a circumstance so very slight, cannot surely be of very great moment in a system of political economy.

From what has been already said, it appears, that the process of manufactures can only be viewed in the light of a salary paid by the proprietors of land to those who are willing to employ their labour for their accommodation, and that the wages of artificers are a mere transference of wealth. Here, then, say the Economists, is the whole society divided, by a necessity founded on the nature of things, into two classes, both of them reciprocally useful to each other; one of which, by its labour, forms, or rather draws from the earth, riches continually new, which supply the whole society with the means of subsistence, and the materials for all their wants; while the other is employed in giving to the rude materials such preparations and forms as render them of a greater exchangeable value. He sells his labour to the former, and receives in return his subsistence. The first may be called productive, the second stipendiary.

We have hitherto proceeded on the supposition, that the wages of the workman are merely sufficient for his subsistence, a result which must hold in most cases, as the amount of wages is necessarily limited by the number of those who work for a livelihood. This supposition, however, I apprehend, is not necessary for establishing the general conclusion. If, in consequence of any particular circumstances, the labourer should receive wages greater than his consumption, this would in no respect add to the revenue of the society. If, for instance, one half of the labourers of a country should be carried off by a plague, the price of their labour would be doubled. But though, in such a case, it may appear, on a superficial view, that the manufacturer adds to the value of his work a greater quantity than he consumes, yet it is plain, that nothing is added to the productions of the earth, either in quantity or value, so as to enable the society to supply a greater portion of subsistence to its inhabitants. It is the exchangeable value of commodities only that is increased. The difference is, that the proprietor of land is obliged to consider the same quantity of subsistence as an equivalent for a smaller quantity of labour. Labour gets a greater share of the revenue; but the revenue is in no way altered. Any saving a manufacturer makes from his wages is so much taken out of the hands of another person, and can no more be said to increase the funds of the society, than the gains made at a gaming table.

The same observations apply, with equal force, to the profits of merchants and master manufacturers. It is easy to conceive a State in which there should be no such persons, in which the proprietors of the land should superintend the labourers employed in manufactures, and transport the goods to the market from the place where they are produced. The trouble and waste which would attend such a mode of proceeding induce them to give a higher price for the goods to those who will undertake this branch of business, and make the necessary advances. This increase, evidently, is a salary, and the gains of the merchant are but a transference, not a production of riches. The same thing may be said of every species of industry, the object of which is to modify the productions of the earth, without increasing their quantity. They all agree in this circumstance, that they make no increase to the general revenue, though in the highest degree useful, and many of them absolutely necessary. They effect the important purpose of distributing the national riches; but they are totally unproductive. They add nothing to the revenue, but, on the contrary, draw the means of their support from those who are in possession of the fruits of the earth. These fruits, therefore, according to the Economists, are the only riches of a nation; and the labour which produces them is the only productive labour, and the only source of revenue.

Among those writers, however, who dispute the doctrines of the Economists, there are some who acknowledge the unproductive nature of manufacturing labour and expense, when considered in relation to the world in general; while they deny that the doctrine is applicable to the case of a particular country pursuing a separate interest of its own. As the inhabitants of a town, by applying to manufactures, find means to appropriate a part of the productions of the earth raised by the cultivators of the ground, so may a nation procure a part of the subsistence of other nations. Thus, manufactures and foreign trade add all the fund of subsistence which is drawn from abroad. In answer to these objections, the Economists state the following reasonings, on which I shall have occasion afterwards to offer some criticisms. If the trade of two nations consists in the exchange of production for production, whether rude or manufactured, it is evident that the exchanges must be equal, each giving as much as it receives. The only species of commerce, say they, in which a nation can be said to add to the national fund, is the exchange of productions on the one side for labour on the other. In such a case, manufacturing industry may be considered as productive to the nation which, by its superior ingenuity, thus lays its neighbours under contribution. If a landed nation supplies the rude materials and the subsistence of the labourers, to a manufacturing country, and brings back the manufactured article, these artificers certainly carry on a trade which is productive, and the expense of the one country is an addition to the revenue of the other. The artificers of the commercial nation are, in fact, those of the agricultural country. They have the same relation to it as if they had lived in it; and the only difference is, that their place of residence is at a distance from the market. The manufacturers settled in the agricultural country itself, would be on a level in the market with the commercial nation, even though they should add to their profits a sum equal to the whole expense of carriage. The necessary consequence is, that they would undersell the commercial nation; and nothing could prevent such manufactures from rising in the country itself, except the most essential defects in their system of Political Economy; and it is owing to such defects alone, they tell us, that a merely manufacturing country can exist at all; and the establishment of a more liberal system would necessarily raise up a competition which it could not withstand. In an age, therefore, add the Economists, when the minds of men begin to be enlightened, this is a most precarious resource; and a nation which relies on it entirely, sees in the improvement of its neighbours the presages of its own decline. Nor is this all. It is but a very few articles that can bear the expense of a long carriage; and these are not objects of a general consumption. This, therefore, may support a very small state; but it necessarily forms a very trifling object to a great agricultural nation. We may therefore conclude, that the labour of the agriculturist is the only productive labour, and that the rude produce of the soil is the only revenue of a nation,—the only fund out of which all its expenses must be defrayed.

In entering on the discussions which I now have in view, with respect to the Economical system, it seemed proper for me to begin with a general outline of its fundamental principles, delineated as faithfully as possible, after the ideas of its original authors. Something of this kind seemed to be necessary, in order to correct those misapprehensions of its nature which have prevailed to a considerable degree, in consequence of the account of it given by Mr. Smith. I now proceed to consider, at some length, those points in which the doctrines of Quesnai and his followers appear to me to differ from those stated by Mr. Smith in the Wealth of Nations, endeavouring, as far as I can, to separate real diversities of opinion from mere disputes about words, and to combine what appears to be valuable in both, without adopting implicitly the opinions of either.—(End of interpolation from Notes.)

[Specially on the System of the Economists.]—I made some observations at our last meeting, on the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, according to the doctrine of the Economists, with a view chiefly to a vindication of their language on this subject, against the criticisms of Mr. Smith. Of the particulars in which this part of his system differs from theirs, some of those which appear at first view the most striking, will be found to resolve ultimately into a question concerning the propriety of certain technical modes of speaking which they introduced; and in so far, the dispute may be considered as amounting merely to a verbal controversy. It must, however, be remembered, that in inquiries of so difficult a nature, the choice of phrases is by no means a matter of indifference; particularly when a want of coincidence between their technical and their ordinary acceptations may have a tendency to mislead our reasonings. In the present instance, this is remarkably the case; for the epithets productive and unproductive, as they are commonly employed, being as precise and significant as any which the language furnishes, can scarcely fail to have some effect on the estimate we form of the comparative importance of the two kinds of labour to which we are accustomed habitually to appropriate them. The truth is, that the influence of these epithets may be distinctly traced in various instances, on the conclusions of Quesnai, on the one hand, and of Mr. Smith on the other;—I mean the influence of the popular meaning of these epithets, as contradistinguished from the technical acceptations in which they have thought proper respectively to define them. The difference of opinion, however, between Smith and Quesnai concerning productive and unproductive labour, does not turn entirely on the meaning of words. It turns also in part on a fact which they have apprehended very differently, and which it is of great consequence to view in its proper light. I shall make no apology therefore for offering here, (even at the risk of appearing somewhat prolix and tedious,) a few additional illustrations and proofs of the remarks which I have already stated on this fundamental article of Political Economy.

It will contribute to render some of the following reasonings more clear and satisfactory, if it is distinctly remembered, that in the first part of the argument we abstract entirely from the effects of foreign commerce, and confine our attention to those which result from the operations of the different descriptions of labour in a separate and independent society. The fact is, that in a great agricultural country like Great Britain, and still more in a territory like France, where the importation of necessaries cannot possibly bear any great proportion to the consumption of the inhabitants, the conclusions I have in view will hold, in every essential respect, even although the operations of foreign commerce be admitted into the supposition. But it may obviate some difficulties and objections which might otherwise present themselves, to begin with stating the argument in its simplest form.

That Mr. Smith’s opinion with respect to the fact on which the Economists lay the principal stress was the same with theirs, appears (among various other acknowledgments in different parts of his Wealth of Nations) from the following passage in the fifth chapter of the Second Book, entitled, “Of the different Employments of Capital.”

“In agriculture, nature labours along with man; and though her labour cost no expense, its produce has its value, as well as that of the most expensive workman. The most important operations of agriculture seem intended, not so much to increase, though they do that too, as to direct the fertility of nature towards the production of the plants most profitable to man. A field overgrown with briars may frequently produce as great a quantity of vegetables as the best cultivated vine-yard or corn-field. Planting and tillage frequently regulate more than they animate the active fertility of nature; and, after all their labour, a great part of the work remains to be done by her. The labourers, and labouring cattle, therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner’s profits, but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer, and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of nature, the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. . . . It is the work of nature that remains after deducting or compensating everything which can be regarded as the work of man.”*

These observations, although by no means unexceptionable, in so far as they relate to manufacturing industry, not only coincide in the main with the opinions of the Economists, but express in strong and explicit terms one of the fundamental principles on which their system rests. It is a principle, indeed, so perfectly obvious and indisputable, that it is almost as painful to peruse their prolix elucidations of it, as the reasonings of those who have had the appearance of disputing its solidity: I say the appearance of disputing its solidity; for I know of no writer who has directly called in question the principle itself, whatever diversity of judgment may exist about the remoter consequences to which it necessarily leads, or the form of words in which it ought to be expressed.

In this last respect Mr. Smith’s system differs widely; and accordingly, in the sentence which immediately follows the sentence just quoted, he speaks of agricultural and manufacturing labour as being both productive, though not in an equal degree. “No equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction as in agriculture. In them nature does nothing, man does all; and the reproduction must always be in proportion to the strength of the agents that occasion it. The capital employed in agriculture, therefore, not only puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than any equal quantity employed in manufactures, but in proportion too to the quantity of productive labour which it employs, it adds a much greater value to the annual produce of the land and labour of the country; to the wealth and revenue of its inhabitants. Of all the ways in which a capital can be employed, it is by far the most advantageous to the society.”*

In Mr. Smith’s account of the Economical system, he has entered into a particular statement of the reasons which induce him to reject, as improper and inaccurate, the application which it makes of the epithet unproductive to manufacturing industry. He regards this indeed as the capital error of its authors. “Their capital error,” he observes, “seems to be in considering the class of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, as altogether unproductive and barren.” In confirmation of this remark he reasons as follows:—

“It is acknowledged of this class, that it reproduces annually the value of its own annual consumption, and continues, at least, the existence of the stock or capital which maintains and employs it. But upon this account alone the denomination of barren or unproductive should seem to be very improperly applied to it. We should not call a marriage barren or unproductive, though it produced only a son and a daughter to replace the father and mother, and though it did not increase the number of the human species, but only continued it as it was before.”

“Farmers and country labourers, indeed, over and above the stock which maintains or employs them, reproduce annually a neat produce, a free rent to the landlord. As a marriage which affords three children is certainly more productive than one which affords only two, so the labour of farmers and country labourers is certainly more productive than that of merchants, artificers, and manufacturers. The superior produce of the one class, however, does not render the other barren or unproductive.”†

According to this statement of Mr. Smith, his objection to the doctrine of the Economists turns entirely on a philological question, Whether the epithets barren and unproductive could in strict propriety be applied to anything which merely continues or replaces what existed before, without yielding any increase; whether, for example, the labour of the husbandman could be said to be barren, on the supposition that his harvest was barely sufficient to restore to him the seed which he sowed in the spring? That his labour, in such a case, might be said to be productive, in a particular sense of that word, cannot, I apprehend, be disputed; but surely not in the sense in which it is commonly applied in the operations of agriculture.

The example of a marriage, referred to by Mr. Smith, is not altogether a fair one, for when applied to this connexion, the word barren has a specific and appropriate meaning, implying a complete negation of the power to procreate. A marriage which produces a single child, could no more be said to be barren, than one which produced two; and therefore, if we were to argue from this case to that of manufacturing industry, it would follow, that the latter might with propriety be called productive, even although it did not reproduce annually the value of its own annual consumption.

This, however, as I already said, is but a dispute about words, although, even according to this statement, I must confess, the advantage seems to me to be on the side of the Economists. It may at the same time be fairly questioned, whether Mr. Smith has not gone too far, when he has stated it as a fact acknowledged by all parties, that “the class of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, reproduces annually the value of its own annual consumption, and continues the existence of the stock or capital which maintains and employs it.” For, so far as I am able to perceive, this proposition applies only to the wealth of the individual, but not in the least to that species of wealth about which the present argument is alone concerned, the wealth of the nation. This consideration, however, I shall reserve for future discussion; and in the meantime shall admit as correct, the account which Mr. Smith has given of the doctrine of his antagonists.

In the farther prosecution of the same subject, Mr. Smith has attempted to convict these writers, not only of an abuse of language, but of an inattention to a most important distinction in point of fact, in the classification they have proposed of the different kinds of labour.

“It seems,” he observes, “to be altogether improper to consider artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, in the same light as menial servants: the labour of menial servants does not continue the existence of the fund which maintains and employs them. Their maintenance and employment is altogether at the expense of their masters, and the work which they perform is not of a nature to repay that expense. That work consists in services which perish generally in the very instant of their performance, and does not fix or realize itself in any vendible commodity which can replace the value of their wages and maintenance. The labour, on the contrary, of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, naturally does fix and realize itself in some such vendible commodity. It is upon this account,” Mr. Smith adds, “that I have classed artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, among the productive labourers, and menial servants among the barren and unproductive.”*

Before I proceed to make any remarks on this passage, it is necessary for me to observe, in justice to the Economists, that although they rank artificers and manufacturers, as well as menial servants, in the class of sterile labourers, they do not confound these different descriptions of men together, or view them in the same light. On the contrary, a particular illustration of the stations which they occupy respectively in the social system, and of their comparative importance as members of it, may be found in various works published by these writers; among others, in a valuable book published by the Marquis de Mirabeau in 1763, entitled Philosophie Rurale. The sterile class is there divided into the Classe Stérile Industrieuse, the Classe Stérile Soudoyée, and the Classe Oisive. The Classe Stérile Soudoyée is farther subdivided into different orders of men, the nature and effects of whose functions are illustrated by the author with much ingenuity.—P. 55.

In reply to the reasonings last quoted from Mr. Smith, in proof of the essential distinction between the labour of artificers and that of menial servants, the following observation is stated by the anonymous author of a pamphlet printed a few years ago, under the title of The Essential Principles of the Wealth of Nations illustrated, in opposition to some False Doctrines of Dr. Adam Smith and others.”1

“The labour of artificers and manufacturers differs from that of menial servants in this, that the former yields an equivalent for expenditure, the latter no equivalent. Still, however, they are both with the greatest propriety termed unproductive, though the one be much more so than the other.” To explain this difference, the author has recourse to an illustration or comparison:—“It will be allowed,” says he, “that a field which returns only the seed sown into it is a barren field. But some ground, such as the sea-beach, may possess no vegetative power at all, and may not even return the seeds sown into it, consequently, would be much more barren than the other. The labour of menial servants is aptly compared to this completely sterile ground. But will the greater sterility of one spot entitle ground to be called productive, that actually only returns the seed, but gives no increase. This difference is only a greater or less degree of a minus, but will never give a plus.”2

This answer to Mr. Smith does not seem to me to be at all satisfactory, nor even to proceed on an accurate conception of the circumstances of the case. Perhaps the following considerations may be of some use in removing the obscurity in which the subject has been involved by these contradictory statements.

In order to remove, as much as possible, in the examination of this question, those biasses which the mind is apt to receive from accidental associations founded on familiar phrases or examples, it may not be improper to remark, that the labour ofa menial servant is employed by Mr. Smith, as well as by the Economists, to represent a great variety of other kinds of labour, which he considers as equally unproductive, although he differs from them in the principles on which his classification is made. “The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society,” he observes, “is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be produced. The Sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers. They are the servants of the public, and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of the people. Their service (how honourable, how useful, how necessary so ever) produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured. The protection, security, and defence of the commonwealth, the effect of their labour this year, will not purchase its protection, security, and defence for the year to come. In the same class must be ranked some, both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions, churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds, players, buffoons, musicians, opera singers, opera dancers, &c. The labour of the meanest of these has a certain value, regulated by the very same principles which regulate that of every other sort of labour, and that of the noblest and most useful, produces nothing which could afterwards purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour. Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of the production.”*

I thought it of importance to state this fully, because in consequence of the constant reference which is made to the case of menial servants, the labour of artificers and manufacturers seems, on a superficial view, to be degraded in the economical system below its just level; while, on the other hand, the mind more easily reconciles itself to the superiority ascribed by Mr. Smith to manufacturing industry over menial services, than it would do if the reader were always to recollect, that, according to his arrangement, menial services are classed along with the labours of the most useful and honourable orders in society.

Mr. Smith himself has, if I am not mistaken, been more than once misled by this very circumstance; as when he remarks, for example, in order to contrast the more strongly what he calls productive with what he calls unproductive labour, that “a man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers, but he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.”* An inference by the way from which no inference can be drawn applicable to Mr. Smith’s purpose; for when a man ruins himself by the multitude of his menials, it is not owing to the nature of the labour in which they are employed, but to the excess of their number above the reasonable demand which he has for their services; and a master manufacturer might ruin himself exactly in the same way, if he were to engage more workmen than the extent of his trade called for, or enabled him to support.1

In another passage, too, he observes of the Economical system, that “as men are naturally fond of paradoxes, and of appearing to understand what surpasses the comprehension of ordinary men, the paradox it maintains concerning the unproductive nature of manufacturing labour, has not perhaps contributed a little to increase the number of its admirers.”† Now, I confess, for my own part, that to affirm of manufacturing labour, that the epithet productive cannot be applied to it in the same sense in which it is applied to agriculture, so far from having the air of a paradox, strikes me as bordering upon a self-evident proposition; nor can I easily conceive how this most profound and ingenious writer could consider such a proposition as more repugnant to the common apprehensions of mankind, than a distinction which represents the productive power of agriculture and of manufactures as differing only in degree; while it classifies the labour of the Sovereign, of the officers of the army and navy, of churchmen, lawyers, and men of letters, with those of musicians, opera singers, and buffoons. To this last classification I do not in the least object; although I am much mistaken if it has not, at first view, somewhat of a paradoxical appearance to persons unaccustomed to the technical arrangements of speculative politicians. I only differ from Mr. Smith in this, that I think the labours of all the various kinds of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, should have been included in his enumeration; and I am not without hopes, that the observations I have now quoted from him may tend to reconcile the mind more easily to the doctrine he combats; inasmuch as it appears to be so clearly acknowledged on both sides, that the question concerning the productiveness or unproductiveness of any species of labour is altogether unconnected with any consideration of its dignity, or of its utility, or even of its necessity to the existence of the social order. The Abbé Baudeau, in his Exposition of the Economical Table, places this in a very strong light, when he observes, that “even the plough-wright, although he makes the instrument with which the husbandman carries on his operations, is no more to be considered (according to the definition of that system) as a productive labourer, than a lace-maker or an embroiderer.”1

In the reply formerly quoted [p. 275] to Mr. Smith’s reasonings, the labours of artificers and manufacturers are compared to what the labour of the husbandman would be, if he were only to reap the same measure he had sown; the labour of menial servants is compared to that of a man who should sow his seed on the sea-beach, or on a rock without any return whatever. “The labour of artificers and manufacturers,” it is said, “differs from that of menial servants in this, that the former yields an equivalent for expenditure, the latter yields no equivalent.” This view of the matter (as I formerly hinted) does not seem to me to be just; and I think the author has been led into it, partly by the representation which Mr. Smith has given of this doctrine of the Economists; and partly by the imperfect and indistinct manner in which it is stated in their own writings.

“It is acknowledged,” says Mr. Smith, “that the class of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, reproduces annually the value of its own annual consumption, and continues, at least, the existence of the stock or capital which maintains and employs it; differing in this respect essentially from that of menial servants, who produce no value to repay the expense of their maintenance.”*

I observed, in my last Lecture, [p. 263,] that there seems to be a fallacy in this distinction, and that its plausibility arises from the use of money as a medium of exchange, which keeps the real similarity of the two cases a little out of view. The artificer sells the produce of his industry, and at first sight appears to replace his capital as effectually as the former by reaping his crop. In truth, the effects are the same in both instances, so far as the individual is concerned; but they are very different when considered in relation to the community. The corn which the husbandman reaps is a free gift of nature, and costs nothing to the rest of the society. The manufacturer changes the form of his materials, converting, in many cases, what was formerly useless, to purposes of general commerce and accommodation. While he does so, however, he derives the means of his subsistence from the general stock. He is not supported immediately by the produce of his labour; and if he were cut off from communication with others, could do nothing to renew the capital by which he is maintained. His work is of no absolute value to himself; and it is only the means of procuring the subsistence from others who exchange their superfluities for the gratification of their secondary wants. The capital, therefore, which the artificer has consumed, is replaced by some other person who thereby spends part of his revenue. Hence it appears, that if the labour of a menial servant may be aptly compared to that of a man sowing grain on a rock, or on the sea-coast, the very same comparison will apply to the labour of an artificer or manufacturer. The truth is, that in both cases the simile holds in so far as the productiveness of labour is alone concerned; but that in both cases it fails upon the whole, and precisely from the same reason,—inasmuch as it has the appearance of implying an analogy between an operation expressive of folly or insanity, and two kinds of industry which, though equally barren, are essentially subservient to the comfort of human life.

According to Mr. Smith, the true characteristic of productive labour is, that it fixes itself in some vendible commodity, the sale of which replaces its expense; whereas unproductive labour consists in services which perish almost at the instant of performance.

In this distinction of Mr. Smith’s, there are two different considerations involved. First, the vendibility, if I may be allowed the word; and, secondly, the durability of the fruits of productive labour. Productive labour, he observes, fixes itself in some vendible commodity, the sale of which replaces its expense; whereas unproductive labour consists in services which perish almost at the instant of performance. From the manner in which the observation is stated, Mr. Smith seems to have considered these two circumstances as coinciding; or, in other words, he seems to have considered the want of vendibility in the fruits of unproductive labour, as a consequence of their want of durability. If this was not his meaning, it is manifest that the two clauses of the sentence are not accurately contrasted; the perishable nature of menial services being stated in direct opposition to the vendibility of the commodities furnished by productive industry.

In order, however, to do all justice to the definition in question, I shall consider separately the two circumstances which have just been mentioned, as the distinguishing tests or characteristics of productive and of unproductive labour.

With respect to the first, that “productive labour fixes itself in some vendible commodity, the sale of which replaces its expenses;” it is obvious that it depends in many cases on the accidental manner in which the subsistence of the workman is advanced; whether by the person who ultimately consumes or enjoys the fruits of his labour, or by a third person, who is to re-imburse himself by the sale of what the labourer has manufactured. If the wages are advanced by the person who is to enjoy the fruit of the labourer’s industry, the labour consists in personal service, never fixing itself in a commodity which is to become an object of commerce, or to repay its expense by a sale. In this case I presume it will be readily granted to be a matter of indifference what these services are, provided they contribute equally to the accommodation of the employer. The labour of a housemaid, for example, when employed (according to the old practice of this country) in spinning flax for her master’s convenience, could not be supposed to differ essentially in its nature from her services in making the beds, or in sweeping the apartments. If her labour, in the former way, save him from an expenditure which he must otherwise have incurred to procure the same accommodation, her services in the latter way have an effect precisely similar, by relieving him from the personal execution of a task which would otherwise have interfered with more profitable or more agreeable engagements.

If, on the other hand, we suppose that the wages of the workman are to be repaid by the sale of the commodity he has manufactured, the fact is in all essential respects the same. The end is accomplished in a way more circuitous, and with a different effect to the income of the person who thus replaces his capital; but that these circumstances cannot alter the nature of the labourer’s employment, when considered in relation to the community of which he is a member, might almost be assumed as a self-evident proposition; inasmuch as the expense of his maintenance must, in some way or other, be derived ultimately from the general fund or revenue.

In the second place, Mr. Smith observes of unproductive labour, that “it consists in services which perish almost at the instant of performance.” If this characteristic of unproductive labour be considered as coinciding with the other; that is, if the perishable nature of these services be supposed to render them unproductive only by preventing their fruits from ever becoming the objects of commerce, the same remarks which have been made on the former characteristic, are exactly applicable to the latter: and that this was Mr. Smith’s meaning cannot, I apprehend, be reasonably doubted; because, on the supposition that the unproductiveness of menial, or any other services, were a consequence of the perishable nature of their effects, the absurd conclusion would follow, that the productiveness of labour is proportioned to the durability of the object it fabricates; and that it admits of all possible degrees according to the quality of the materials upon which it is employed.

From what has been already said, it would appear that the price of manufactures is to be considered in no other light than as a salary paid by the proprietor of land to those who are willing to employ their labour in his service. The wages of artificers are mere transferences of riches; and the result of their industry, not the production or the continuation of a part of national stock, but the means of procuring a portion of the produce of the soil.

The indistinct manner in which some of the economical writers have explained this article of their system, has contributed to occasion these misapprehensions with respect to the nature of manufacturing industry. From the particular stress they lay on the general principle, that “the consumption of manufacturers and artificers is equal to the (exchangeable) value of what they produce,” it has been assumed by their opponents, and among others by Mr. Smith, as an admitted truth, that this class by reproducing annually the value of its own consumption, continues the existence of the stock or capital which maintains and employs it. And, indeed, this idea seems frequently to be implied in their reasonings. It is, however, obvious, with respect to this favourite principle of the Economists, concerning the exchangeable value added to commodities by manufacturing industry, that although it is of great importance in the argument, concerning the effects of manufactures when combined with foreign commerce, it has no immediate connexion with that part of their theory which asserts the unproductive nature of this species of labour in an independent and insulated society. To say that “the labour employed on land is productive, because (over and above completely paying the labourer and the farmer) the produce affords a clear rent to the landlord; and that the labour employed in a piece of lace is unproductive, because it merely replaces the provision that the workmen has consumed, is to rest this important distinction on a fact very different from that on which it really hinges.”1 Supposing the value of the wrought lace to be such, as that besides paying in the most complete manner the workmen and his employer, it would afford a clear rent to a third person, the reasonings which have been already stated against the productive power of manufacturing industry would still remain in full force.

This I endeavoured to shew as clearly as I was able at our last meeting; and I have now only to add, that the converse of the proposition is no less certain; that as a capital employed in manufacturing speculations may often be highly productive to the individual, while it must be ever unproductive to the community, so a capital employed in agriculture may be highly productive to the community, while the individual accomplishes his own ruin.

In considering the effects of manufactures as combined with foreign commerce, the Economists have expressed themselves in terms much more liable to objection, (as I shall endeavour afterwards to shew,) although even on this head their reasonings may suggest conclusions of great practical importance to the rulers of nations. As I must not, however, at present prosecute this subject any farther, I shall confine my attention to the obvious fact, (which cannot be better stated than in the words of Mr. Smith,) “that by means of trade and manufactures, a greater quantity of subsistence can be annually imported into a particular country, than what its own lands in the actual state of cultivation could afford. The inhabitants of a town, though they frequently possess no lands of their own, yet draw to themselves by their industry such a quantity of the rude produce of the lands of other people, as supplies them not only with the materials for their work, but with the fund of their subsistence. What a town always is with regard to the country in its neighbourhood, one independent state or country may frequently be with regard to other independent states and countries. It is thus that Holland draws a part of its subsistence from other countries; live cattle from Holstein and Jutland, and corn from almost all the different countries of Europe.”*

With this observation of Mr. Smith I perfectly agree, and I think it calls our attention to a principle too much overlooked or slurred over by most of the Economists, in the statement of their theory. On the other hand, I agree with the general doctrines of this sect so far, as to feel it incumbent on me to remark, that in a great agricultural country such as ours, too much stress ought not to be laid on the passage which has now been quoted, as a ground for abating the efforts of our statesmen, to advance to the utmost possible extent our independent agricultural resources. The example of Holland itself which Mr. Smith has quoted, (the happiest undoubtedly for his purpose which the world affords,) is the best illustration of this that can be mentioned. It forms, in truth, one of those extreme cases in human affairs, (cases from which it is always dangerous to apply our inferences to the general condition of mankind,) of which I formerly took notice, when contrasting the policy of this singular district with that of the Empire of China. The grain raised in Holland is said to be scarcely sufficient to maintain the labourers employed on the dykes; and yet it is mentioned by St. Pierre as a subject of doubt, whether there is not more Polish corn in its granaries, than that country retains for the subsistence of its own inhabitants.† How totally inapplicable to the general state of the world must those speculations be, which are founded on the policy of a people so peculiarly circumstanced! Of the absurdity of applying them to our own country, no stronger proof can be adduced than what I shall have occasion to state more particularly afterwards, that, notwithstanding the advantages it derives from its insular form, and the extent of its inland navigation, the greatest importation of grain which ever took place in one year, previous to the late years of scarcity, did not exceed a thirtieth part of our annual consumption; and that even in the course of the year 1801, notwithstanding the enormous expense of £15,000,000, it did not exceed an eighteenth part of that quantity.1

In a great agricultural territory, not enjoying the same easy intercourse with other parts of the world, the comparison must fail to a proportionally greater degree; and, in general, as different countries approach more nearly to this last description, Mr. Smith’s remarks become inapplicable to the physical condition of their inhabitants.

Still, however, it must be granted, that manufacturing industry (though invariably the same in its nature when considered in relation to the whole world) may be justly said to be productive in its effects to the nation, which, by superior ingenuity or industry, thus lays its neighbours under contribution; however precarious and liable to interruption so circuitous a channel of revenue must always be, when compared with that resulting from the productive labour which depends on ourselves. In justice, at the same time, to a former part of my argument, I must take the liberty to add, that while I grant that in the case which has been just stated, the epithet productive may be justly applied to the industry of manufacturers and artificers, this affords no reason for distinguishing them from those other classes of labourers who are considered as unproductive in Mr. Smith’s argument. A celebrated University which should attract a concourse of students from other countries, the public spectacles of a great capital, where the “declamations of the actor, the tune of the musician, and the grimace of the buffoon,” contribute to swell the crowd of opulent and prodigal foreigners; the exertions of those who carry their talents and enterprise to the splendid markets which ambition opens to them in every quarter of the globe, and who afterwards return to enjoy their acquisitions in their native land; are all productive in the same sense with the manufacturers of a trading nation. They introduce into the country a fund which would not otherwise have existed in it, and which may be eventually productive, either by supplying the means of importing rude produce from abroad, or by adding to the number of productive labourers at home.

A still closer resemblance may be remarked between the labour of manufacturers and that of authors, abstracting altogether from the effect of foreign intercourse, and adopting Mr. Smith’s own definition of productive labour. What inestimable and what extensive utility, not only to his own country, but to the whole human race, did his genius and information communicate to the blank paper, to which was intrusted the original copy of the Wealth of Nations! Or, laying aside all considerations of this kind, and viewing merely in a commercial light the exchangeable value of his labour, in what respects did the productiveness of this labour to the author differ from that of the workman who spends a year in fabricating a pennyworth of flax into a costly piece of lace? In the one case as well as in the other, is not labour fixed and realized in a vendible commodity?

In one particular respect, I do not think that Mr. Smith has done complete justice to manufacturers and artists. “They reproduce,” he says, “annually the value of their own annual consumption, continuing at least the existence of the stock or capital which maintains them.”* And that their labour has this effect, in as far as they themselves, or the individual who advances their wages are concerned, I have already acknowledged. But, if this is to be considered as a test of productiveness, the argument might be pushed much farther, by examining the effects of experience and habit in rendering the workman’s skill and dexterity, no less than the articles he fabricates vendible commodities, which he may carry to a profitable market. In this case, the labour he employs, during his years of apprenticeship, does a great deal more than replace to the individual the expense of its maintenance. It even affords him a nett produce, analogous, in some respects, to that which the husbandman enjoys.

If this view of the subject be admitted, the parallel between manufacturers and those who devote themselves to labour purely intellectual, will be found still to hold without any disadvantage to the latter. The harangue, indeed, of the orator, the declamation of the actor, and the tune of the musician, (to borrow Mr. Smith’s own instances,) “may perish in the very instant of the production.”* The labour is coexistent with the effects. But although this may be the case with the particular exertions of all their labours, the observation will not apply to the labour directed to the acquisition of the talents which are thus displayed; and which by converting these talents into a source of revenue to the possessors, has fixed and realized itself into a vendible and durable commodity. When the labour is at all successful, the sale not only replaces to the employer the expense incurred during the tedious process of preparation, it generally does a great deal more; and in no case is it necessarily subjected to any such limitation. I cannot help taking this opportunity to add, that the labour which is employed in the cultivation of the understanding approaches more nearly, (in the harvest which it yields,) than anything else which can be specified, to the labour of the husbandman; and the creative powers of human industry are, in both instances, founded on the combination of its effects with that bounty of nature, which, in the moral not less than the material world, rewards in due season with its plentiful increase the toils of the spring.

To this analogy, Lord Bacon had manifestly a reference when, in his usual figurative style, he bestowed on education the significant title of “the Georgics of the Mind.”1 Intimating to legislators this important truth, that of all the means they have in their power to employ, to increase the sum of public happiness, none can so amply and so infallibly reward their benevolent exertions, as the encouragement which is afforded to Agriculture, and the attention which is bestowed on the Instruction of the people. In both instances the legislator exerts a power which is literally productive or creative, compelling, in the one case, the unprofitable desert to pour forth its latent riches; and, in the other, vivifying the dormant seeds of genius and virtue, and redeeming from the neglected waste of human intellect a new and unexpected accession to the common inheritance of mankind.

A few additional observations on the fundamental principles of the Economical System still remain, which I shall reserve (with some critical remarks on the improprieties of its phraseology, and on certain errors into which its authors appear to have been led by mistaken views of philanthropy) to be the subject of another lecture.

My two last Lectures were employed in examining Mr. Smith’s criticisms on the doctrine of the Economists, concerning productive and unproductive labour. The subject, after all I have stated, is, I am sensible, very far from being exhausted; and when I recollect the different lights in which it has been viewed by so many eminent men, it is impossible for me not to feel a certain degree of hesitation about the strictures which I have occasionally hazarded on their conclusions. The truth is, that on this, as on most other occasions, I should wish to be understood as aiming rather to suggest matter for future consideration, than to support any particular system; and I am never more anxious that this should be kept in view, than when I happen to dissent from the deliberate and decided opinions of Mr. Smith. On the other hand, if authority is to be allowed any weight in such inquiries, it will be readily acknowledged that the most careful examination is due to every part of a theory recommended by such names as those of Quesnai, Morellet, and Turgot; and of which the fundamental principles (at the distance of forty years from its original publication) were adopted, after mature deliberation and long discussion, by the late celebrated Lavoisier; a philosopher equally distinguished by the correctness of his judgment, and the extent and accuracy of his political information.

That the writings of the authors by whom the system was first explained; those of Quesnai (in particular,) of Turgot, and of the Marquis de Mirabeau, will amply repay the labour of a very diligent perusal to all who turn their attention to these studies, I can venture to pronounce with confidence: and it is only after examining the different parts of the system in their relation to each other and to the whole, that a correct judgment can be formed of their scope and of their importance. In this view, I am somewhat afraid, that by dwelling so long on a detached and preliminary article, I may have created a prejudice against a doctrine, about which I was anxious to excite your curiosity, more especially as it is a doctrine to which the following remark of Lord Bacon applies with peculiar force: “Theoriarum vires in apta et se mutuo sustinente partium harmonia, et quadam in orbem demonstratione consistunt; ideoque per partes traditæ, infirmæ sunt.”*

I am sensible that this acknowledgment forms but an awkward introduction to a farther prosecution of the same subject; but having already said so much, I am unwilling to leave it without stating a few considerations, which appear to myself to throw some light on the circumstances which have produced this diversity of opinion on a question apparently of so simple a nature.

Among the objections which naturally present themselves against the Economical system, one of the most obvious is founded on the restricted sense in which it employs the phrases productive labour and national revenue. The latter of these Mr. Smith charges the Economists with supposing to consist altogether in the quantity of subsistence which the industry of the people can procure. This statement, however, is not accurate. It would be nearer the truth to say, that they suppose it to consist in the rude produce;1 for although by far the greater part of this is destined for the subsistence of man, it is not on that account that the epithet productive is applied to the labour employed in raising it; but because this labour, in consequence of being associated with the genial powers of nature, augments the national stock, by an accession or creation which would not otherwise have existed. According to this idea, the labour which is employed in raising hemp or flax, is no less productive than that which brings wheat or barley to market; and the former articles, as well as the latter, are to be considered as forming part of the national revenue.

In offering this explanation, I would not be understood to vindicate the language employed by the Economists, but only to shew, that there is a solid foundation for the distinction which they have endeavoured to establish between the nature and effects of agricultural and of manufacturing labour. That the epithets productive and unproductive were not very happily chosen to express this distinction, appears sufficiently from the criticisms which have been made on them by different writers, as being at variance with the common apprehensions and common modes of speaking among mankind. But if, on the one hand, it be granted to be an abuse of words to bestow the epithet unproductive, on any species of labour which contributes essentially to the happiness of society, and to exclude from the national revenue the result of those arts which multiply so wonderfully the accommodations of human life; it must, in my opinion, be admitted, on the other hand, that an objection still stronger applies to the language introduced by Mr. Smith, according to which we are led to rank the most honourable and useful members of the community among its unproductive labourers: “the sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him; the whole army and navy; churchmen, lawyers, physicians, and men of letters of every denomination;”* while the national revenue is measured exclusively by the exchangeable value of those vendible commodities which compose the annual produce of the land and labour of the country. Perhaps a mode of expression on this subject might be devised, less exceptionable than either of those which have been now under our review; marking, on the one hand, with precision the essential distinction which the Economists are so anxious to establish; and avoiding on the other, that paradoxical appearance which a proposition is apt to assume, when the meaning of the technical terms in which it is stated does not coincide exactly with their ordinary acceptations in popular discourse. The history of modern chemistry affords a sufficient proof, how much the progress of knowledge depends on the logical propriety of the terms employed in our reasonings. The Economical system seems to me to have been partly suggested by the same general views which gave rise to the new nomenclature; and in this respect it reflects the highest credit on the ingenuity and sagacity of its authors. Considered as a first attempt, it is much more wonderful that it should have been carried so skilfully and plausibly into execution, as to divide the opinions of the best judges in Europe to the present day, than that some faults should have occurred in the details of so vast and complicated an undertaking. A few of them, I suspect strongly, will be found to vitiate that very part of it which I have been attempting to illustrate; and, if I do not deceive myself, they might be completely corrected, by slight alterations in certain technical terms which confound together things which ought to be distinguished. From this confusion arises entirely whatever obscurity appears at present to involve the subject; and various difficulties connected with the details of the system may be traced to a similar cause. These imperfections it is certainly of consequence to remove; for in the same proportion in which a technical vocabulary, founded on the principles of a sound logic, facilitates the discovery of truth, it must have a tendency, wherever it violates these principles, to add to the difficulty of detecting error, by the systematical form in which it is exhibited.

I cannot help taking this opportunity of adding, that a scientific language appropriated to Political Economy (if successfully executed) would be still more useful than in Chemistry; because the subjects of our reasonings entering more constantly and familiarly into popular discussion, give rise to a far greater number of absurd associations to perplex the ordinary vocabulary. The task, however, is proportionally more arduous, inasmuch as it is necessary to unite, along with precision, a certain deference for the usual modes of expression. In chemistry, the novelty of the phenomena reconciles us to the use of whatever technical terms our instructors find necessary to employ; but in Political Economy, which is, more or less, a subject of daily speculation to all classes of men, an appropriate vocabulary is apt to convey the idea of pedantry or of affected mystery; and, in truth, this circumstance will be found, more than anything else, to have revolted the public taste at the speculations of Quesnai. How far it may be possible to combine that precision of language which he had in view, with a diction more simple and more familiar to the ear, is a question upon which I cannot at present hazard an opinion.

In the view which has been given of the Economical system concerning productive and unproductive labour, I have endeavoured to vindicate it against Mr. Smith’s very ingenious criticisms; not because I think it unexceptionable, but because these criticisms, if I am not much mistaken, have betrayed that profound writer into an indistinctness of language which has obscured his reasonings in some instances, and misled his conclusions in others: and, indeed, one of my chief objects in dwelling so long as I have done on a controversial discussion of this kind, was to direct your attention to a careful and scrupulous examination of those parts of the Wealth of Nations where the phrases productive labour and productive expenses appear to have any connexion with the argument.

For my own part, so far from considering it as the fault of Quesnai’s phraseology, that it confines our attention too much to the labour and expenses employed in producing the means of subsistence, I think its chief indistinctness arises from the tendency which its language has to confound, in our apprehensions, that part of the rude produce which furnishes the means of subsistence, and that part of it which is subservient to the arts of accommodation. If the Economists had actually restricted the phrase National Revenue (according to Mr. Smith’s supposition) to the means of subsistence alone, their language, although liable to censure on account of its obvious inconsistency with their fundamental and very important doctrine concerning the peculiar characteristics of agricultural labour and expenses, would have possessed, in some respects, an advantage over the mode of expression adopted in their theory. I shall mention one instance of this which will both illustrate the meaning of the remark, and confirm its truth.

Of the two different parts of rude produce which have now been distinguished, it is manifest, that although they agree in the circumstance of rewarding the labourer with a free gift derived from the bounty of nature, they differ in one very essential particular, that while the agricultural labour employed in providing the means of subsistence, renders the cultivator independent of all the other classes of the community, the agricultural labour employed in ministering to the arts of accommodation or of ornament, possesses only an exchangeable value, agree in this respect with the labour employed in manufactures. The Economists were evidently led to confound these together under the same epithet, by the application which they were to make of this part of their theory, to their favourite object of a territorial tax; but it is of consequence to keep the distinction steadily in view, in order to direct the attention of the statesman to that species of revenue which can alone afford a solid basis for a useful population, and through the medium of which the encouragement to population should, in a great agricultural country, be exclusively directed.

Would it not obviate, in some degree, these different objections, (after stating in as unexceptionable language as could be devised, the radical distinction which the Economists express by the words productive and unproductive,) to subdivide what they call productive labour into two kinds,—that which affords the means of subsistence, and that which supplies the arts of accommodation with their rude materials, marking each by some appropriate and convenient epithet? Such a subdivision, while attended with the practical advantage just alluded to, would keep in view the principle on which the radical distinction really hinges, and would prevent those misapprehensions of its import which are apt to arise, partly from the associations established by ordinary speech between the ideas of productive and of useful, and partly from the bias which we naturally have to consider the means of subsistence as the only objects of agriculture. The illustrations of some of the Economical writers are extremely apt to encourage those misapprehensions, as they frequently blend with the argument in proof of that peculiarity in agricultural labour which I have been endeavouring to explain, a variety of other considerations which have no connexion with this particular conclusion: such, for example, as the independence of the husbandman, when compared with that of the other members of the social system; or the impossibility, in a great agricultural country, of importing to any considerable amount the necessaries of life. That both of these considerations are of the highest importance, when National Revenue is considered in reference to Population, I flatter myself I have sufficiently shewn when contrasting the policy of China with that of Holland, [p. 284.] And it was on this account chiefly, that I was led to object to Mr. Smith’s definition of productive labour and of national riches, as tending by their latitude to keep out of view the peculiar characteristics of that species of revenue, to the increase of which alone the attention of the statesman may be, at all times, with safety directed, as necessarily implying a correspondent increase in the abundance and comforts enjoyed by the people. In the Economical system, on the other hand, the practical inconvenience of the indistinctness in question, is comparatively trifling, as the objects of agriculture and the means of subsistence are expressions which, in an extensive territory, must always coincide pretty nearly in their meaning. In studying, however, this system, it will contribute greatly to the precision of our ideas, to draw the line distinctly between these two different parts of the rude produce, so as to keep constantly in our recollection that the epithet productive or creative is not less applicable to what is to furnish the manufacturer with the materials of his web, than to that which is to furnish him with articles of the first necessity.

The indistinctness which, in this instance, I have ventured to ascribe to some of the Economical writers, may be perceived, if I am not mistaken, even in M. Turgot’s excellent Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches. It arose, indeed, not unnaturally, from the two different objects which these writers had principally in view. The first was the encouragement of agriculture, as the source of national subsistence; the second, the establishment of a territorial tax to be levied on the nett produce. As the arguments in favour of the latter apply equally to all the operations of husbandry, it was of consequence to establish, in the clearest manner, the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, upon which this speculation turns entirely. While engaged, however, in the illustration of this point, they have often been led by their agricultural enthusiasm, to embarrass their reasonings with a statement of some of the other characteristics or advantages of agricultural industry, altogether foreign to the purpose, and thereby to confirm their readers still more in the apprehension, that the word productive, as employed in the Economical system, has somehow or other a reference to the utility, or necessity, or independence of the occupation in which the husbandman is employed.

Having mentioned the subject of the territorial tax, it may be of some use to add, that, according to the principles of the Economists, all taxes fall ultimately on that part of the annual reproduction of the ground which remains after defraying all the expenses incurred to obtain it. They further hold, that the only just principle on which a tax can be imposed, is by proportioning the burden to the surplus, which, in the language of the Economists, is called the nett produce. In the last place they assert, that the only possible way to carry this principle into effect, is to levy the tax directly on that fund, which, by its nature, is inevitably destined to pay it in the end.

“It is with taxes,” says one of these writers, “as with the operation of blood-letting on the human body. Puncture its various members in a hundred different places, and you only torment the patient, without obtaining the quantity which he ought to lose. Fix on a single vein, and the slightest incision will at once accomplish your purpose.” The Economists flatter themselves with being the first who discovered that vein in the political body, by opening which the State may obtain what it desires with the least possible inconvenience to its subjects. This vein is the nett produce of the land, to which (according to them) all the operations of the legislator, in the way of taxation, should be directly and immediately applied.

The advantages which the Economists ascribe to such a tax, are, 1st, its equality, (the only fund which pays taxes ultimately being assessed with perfect exactness); 2d, its certainty, (nothing being left to arbitrary imposition); 3d, the economy with which it might be levied, (hardly anything being taken out of the subject’s pocket but what is to go into the public treasury.) The circumstance, however, on which they dwell chiefly, is the accurate scale it would afford for exhibiting the proportion between public burdens and the national revenue; and for marking the limit beyond which they cannot be carried without injury to cultivation, and a decline of national prosperity,—points, which it is difficult, or rather impossible to ascertain, amidst the infinite complications of the established system.

With a view to demonstrate their fundamental principle, that all taxes fall ultimately on the nett produce, the Economists have been led to analyze the complicated mechanism of civilized society, and to examine in what manner the funds which the rude produce of the soil supplies is distributed among the different classes or order of the nations. The result of the investigation is, that from the nature of the distribution, the tax, in whatever manner imposed, must be paid, in the last result, out of this fund; and that it is beyond the power of the financier to contrive a tax which shall ultimately fall on any other.

It is with a view to the establishment of this important conclusion, that the Economists have been at so much pains to mark the respective characteristics of productive and unproductive labour and expense; and hence the stress they have been induced to lay on a distinction which must be acknowledged to have at first sight, somewhat of the appearance of idle and scholastic refinement. It was partly in order to obviate this impression, that I was led to introduce the subject of the territorial tax; but my chief object in this short digression was to reflect some additional light on the distinction which suggested it, by pointing out the result to which that distinction is subservient. As I have very little doubt that the Economists were, in this instance, conducted to their definitions by an analytical process, directly the reverse of that order which they have followed in their publications, I was induced to think that a general conception of the conclusion which they had in view might be of some use in ascertaining the import of those technical expressions, in the interpretation of which there might be any ground for hesitation or controversy.

If this view of the question had occurred to Mr. Smith, it could not have failed to suggest a correction of one of his statements concerning the Economical system which I formerly objected to, [p. 290]; that it limits the epithet productive to that labour alone which is directed to the increase of the means of subsistence; and that it considers these articles of first necessity as the sole constituents of national revenue.

In what I have now said, I would not be understood to insinuate any opinion with respect to the theory of the territorial tax. The discussion belongs properly to the article of Taxation,—a branch of Political Economy of which (as I hinted in my first lecture) I propose to delay the consideration till some future occasion. In the meantime, it may gratify the curiosity of such of my hearers as may wish to examine the theory of the territorial tax, to observe that, although it was by Quesnai and his followers that the first attempt was made to demonstrate it rigorously from first principles, to unfold its manifold supposed advantages, and to suggest the means of carrying it gradually into execution, the original idea was borrowed from this island. I do not know if it occurs in any writer prior to Locke; but the following passage from his Considerations on the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money, (published in 1691,) is abundantly explicit.

“When a nation is running into decay and ruin, the merchant and monied man, do what you can, will be sure to starve last. Observe it where you will, the decays that come upon and bring to ruin any country, do constantly fall first upon the land; and though the country gentleman be not very forward to think so, yet this is, nevertheless, an undoubted truth, that he is more concerned in trade, and ought to take a greater care that it be well managed than even the merchant himself. For he will certainly find, when a decay of trade has carried away one part of our money out of the kingdom, and the other is kept in the merchants and tradesman’s hands, that no laws he can make, nor any little art of shifting property amongst ourselves, will bring it back to him again; but his rents will fall, and his income every day lessen, till general industry and frugality, joined to a well-ordered trade, shall restore to the kingdom the riches it had formerly.—This, by the way, if well considered, might let us see that taxes, however contrived, and out of whose hand soever immediately taken, do, in a country when their great fund is in land, for the most part terminate upon land. . . . A tax laid upon land seems hard to the landholder, because it is so much money going visibly out of his pocket; and, therefore, as an ease to himself, the landlord is always forward to lay it upon commodities. But if he will thoroughly consider it, and examine the effects, he will find he buys this seeming ease at a very dear rate. And although he pays not this tax immediately out of his own purse, yet his purse will find it by a greater want of money there at the end of the year than that comes to, with the lessening of his rents to boot, which is a settled and lasting evil that will stick upon him beyond the present payment.”

After a long argument in support of this opinion, (for which I must refer to the Essay already mentioned,) Mr. Locke concludes thus:—“It is in vain in a country whose great fund is land, to hope to lay the public charge of the government on anything else. There at last it will terminate. The merchant, do what you can, will not bear it, the labourer cannot, and therefore the landholders must. And, whether it were not better for him to have it laid directly, where it will at last settle, than to let it come to him by the sinking of his rents, which when they are once fallen, every one knows are not easily raised again, let him consider.”

A still more elaborate argument in favour of the same projects, may be found in a pamphlet, published in 1734, by Jacob Vanderlint,* an author whose merits have been in general strangely overlooked by our modern writers on Political Economy. For my own part, I was entirely unacquainted with them till his Essay was put into my hands a few years ago by Lord Lauderdale. Of Vanderlint’s history, either as a man or an author, I know nothing; but he seems, from his own account, not to have enjoyed the advantage of a liberal education. “I am sorry,” he observes in his preface, “that I am not in all respects equal to this most important undertaking; yet I doubt not, that I have sufficiently made out what I have undertaken, and though not with the accuracy of a scholar, yet with that perspicuity and evidence which may be expected from an ordinary tradesman.” A few sentences, extracted from this performance, will sufficiently shew its coincidence, both in doctrine and in language, with the works of the Economists.

“If all taxes were taken off goods, and levied on lands and houses only, the gentlemen would have more nett rent left out of their estates than they have now, when the taxes are almost wholly levied on goods.”

“That the land gives all we have, would be self-evident, if we did not import many goods which are the produce of other nations. But this makes no alteration in the case, since the quantity of foreign goods which we import cannot continually be of greater value than the goods we export; because this in the end must exhaust our cash, and so put an end to that excess. Therefore, the goods we import stand only instead of those we export; and, consequently, the land gives not only all we have of our own produce, but virtually all we receive from other nations.”

After these observations, which the author illustrates with considerable ingenuity, he proceeds to shew, “that the land must pay all taxes, in what manner soever they may be levied; a proposition,” he remarks, “which might perhaps be assumed as virtually implied in a self-evident truth, that what gives all must pay all.” For the satisfaction, however, of the reader, Vanderlint here enters into a particular explanation of the process by which he conceived the effect to be accomplished; and although some of his reasonings on this point are liable to obvious objections, they must be allowed (more especially when we consider at what period he wrote, and what disadvantages, as an author, he laboured under) to bear the strongest marks of originality and refinement of thought. The investigation is much too long to admit of an abstract in this Lecture.

The same opinion with respect to the peculiar advantages of a territorial tax, appears to have been held by a Mr. [John] Asgill, who, about the end of the seventeenth, or the beginning of the eighteenth century, published a Treatise entitled, Several Assertions Proved, in order to create another species of Money than Gold or Silver, [1696.]

The object of the Treatise is to support the proposition of Dr. Hugh Chamberlayne for a land bank, which he laid before the English House of Commons in 1693, and before the Scotch Parliament in 1703.

I have not had an opportunity of perusing this performance, but the following very curious extract, which breathes the very spirit of Quesnai’s philosophy, has been communicated to me by Lord Lauderdale, to whose researches and speculations concerning the history and principles of the Economical system, (more particularly concerning those parts of it which have been derived from old English writers,) I am indebted for much important information.

“What we call commodities is nothing but land severed from the soil. The owners of the soil, in every country, have the sale of all the commodities of the growth of that country, and, consequently, have the power of giving credit in that country; and, therefore, whatever they will accept for their commodities is money. Man deals in nothing but in earth. The merchants are the factors of the world, to exchange one part of the earth for another. The king himself is fed by the labours of the ox; and the clothing of the army, and the victualling of the navy must all be paid for to the owner of the soil as the ultimate receiver.”

I shall only add further on this subject at present, that the argument in support of the territorial tax may be found at length in the works of the Marquis de Mirabeau,—in the Treatise of Le Trosne, On Provincial Administrations,—and in various memoirs, published by Dupont, in the collection entitled, Ephémérides d’un Citoyen. The principal writers on the other side are Necker, Sir James Steuart, Pinto, Adam Smith, the Marquis de Casaux, and the author of a Treatise entitled, Essai Analytique sur la Richesse et sur l’Impôt. This last writer has entered into a more methodical and accurate examination of the Economical system, in all its parts, than any other I know; and has certainly displayed great acuteness and ability in the course of his discussion. His publication is anonymous; but it appears from a passage in the Life of Turgot, compared with a passage in the Ephémérides, &c., to have been the work of M. Graslin, a gentleman who held an important situation in the revenue department of Nantes.

From this digression with respect to the territorial tax, I now return to the elementary principles of the Economical System, concerning the nature of National Wealth; with a view to the illustration of which principles I was led to introduce, somewhat out of place, a faint outline of the practical conclusion to which they are subservient. As the establishment of this conclusion was manifestly the primary object of the Economists, it seemed reasonable to think, that the consideration of the practical result might assist us in entering into the train of thought by which the preparatory parts of their system were suggested. And, if I do not deceive myself, this analytical view of their investigations has conducted us to a more precise conception of some of their principles and definitions than is commonly entertained.

To the criticisms which I have already offered on these principles and definitions, I have yet to add another, which is more general in its aim, and which leads to consequences affecting still more deeply the justness of the Economical system, as a theory practically applicable to the existing state of society in this part of the world.

I have observed in the Philosophy of the Human Mind,* that the leading object of the earliest and most enlightened patrons of the Economical system, seems to have been “to delineate that state of political society to which the social order may be expected to approach nearer and nearer as human nature is gradually matured by reasoning and reflection. I have observed, at the same time, that it is the height of enthusiasm and absurdity to suppose that the period is ever to arrive when this state of things will be realized in its full extent; yet many of the most zealous advocates of the Economical system have so completely lost sight of this consideration, that they have formed many of their particular conclusions, on the supposition that it was already accomplished.

(Interpolation from Notes.)—Of this remark various illustrations occur in the works of the Economists. Thus, for example, they uniformly take it for granted, as an established principle, that the revenue or fund employed in the support of manufacturers, is always equal in its exchangeable value to the commodities which they produce. That this is the ultimate tendency of things in all the employments of human industry, is unquestionably true; and it is no less certain, that it has been already realized in various branches of trade. This, for instance, is the case in all those arts which are so well understood, that one class of workmen cannot be supposed to possess any advantage over another. In the manufacture of lace, for instance, of the workmen employed in which, it approaches nearly to a mathematical truth to assert, that at no moment of time do they add anything to the value of the whole annual amount of the rude produce of the land, the portion of that produce which they are continually consuming being always equal to the value of what they have produced. Notwithstanding, however, of this circumstance, it is certainly going a great deal too far to assert, that it will ever afford any universal principle with respect to that order of things which actually exists in such countries as France or England. The high wages which are occasionally given in some new arts, compared with the poverty of those who are engaged in the manufacture of lace, to borrow the instance of which the Economists are so fond, affords a demonstrative proof that, whatever may be the ultimate tendency of a general competition in all the various branches of manufacturing industry, the fact is, at present, in numberless instances, at variance with that result. To these observations I beg leave to add, that the fact in question is totally irreconcilable with the advantages which one manufacturer possesses over another, in consequence of the expedients which his skill and capital enable him to employ for abridging or superseding manual labour, and no less inconsistent with the advantages derived from secret processes in manufactures or the arts, which are sometimes transmitted as an inheritance in the same family for a succession of generations.

A similar paralogism occurs in the reasonings of the Economists concerning the effects of manufacturing industry when combined with foreign commerce. A detailed statement of their opinion upon this point has been already given, [pp. 267, 268.] We may therefore conclude, say the Economists, that that labour alone is productive which adds to the rude produce of the ground. With regard to this reasoning, I need hardly say, that however important the lesson is which it conveys, with respect to the independence and permanent stability of agricultural wealth, when compared with that which arises from commerce and manufactures, it leads to no just inference unfavourable to the latter as long as they continue to flourish. The following passage from one of Dr. Franklin’s political tracts, by pushing these doctrines of the Economists a little too far, affords the best proof which I know of something radically defective in the system from which his arguments are borrowed.

“Where the labour and expense of producing commodities are known to both parties, bargains will generally be fair and equal. Where they are known to one party only, bargains will often be unequal, knowledge taking its advantage of ignorance.

“Thus, he that carries one thousand bushels of wheat abroad to sell, may not probably obtain so great a profit thereon, as if he had first turned the wheat into manufactures, by subsisting therewith the workmen while producing those manufactures, since there are many expediting and facilitating methods of working, not generally known; and strangers to the manufactures, though they know pretty well the expense of raising wheat, are unacquainted with those short methods of working, and thence being apt to suppose more labour employed in the manufactures than there really is, are more easily imposed on in their value, and induced to allow more for them than they are honestly worth.

“Thus the advantage of having manufactures in a country does not consist, as is commonly supposed, in their highly advancing the value of rough materials, of which they are formed; since, though sixpenny worth of flax may be worth twenty shillings, when worked into lace, yet the very cause of its being worth twenty shillings is, that, besides the flax, it has cost nineteen shillings and sixpence in subsistence to the manufacturer. But the advantage of manufactures is, that under their shape provisions may be more easily carried to a foreign market, and, by their means, our traders may more easily cheat strangers. Few, where it is not made, are judges of the value of lace. The importer may demand forty, and perhaps get thirty shillings, for that which cost him but twenty.”*

The conclusions which are drawn from these reasonings are,—that there are only three ways of increasing the riches of a state; the first is by war: this is robbery; the second is by commerce: this is cheating; and the third is by agriculture: this is the only honest way. It seems abundantly evident, that the tone of morality here assumed is much too elevated for the actual condition of the human race. Indeed, it does not appear to be very consistent with itself; for where is the injustice in the advantage which the knowledge and skill of one set of persons give them over the ignorance of others, if it be allowed to be fair and equitable in industry to avail itself of its natural superiority over idleness?

But whatever opinion we may adopt on this abstract question, there can be no doubt that such as I have now described are the actual circumstances of mankind, producing everywhere, in a greater or less degree, a competition among nations, in which each makes the most, not only of its natural advantages, but of the superiority which it enjoys in consequence of its industry, skill, and accumulated stock. Nor is it difficult to trace in the operation of the latter, the provision for that commercial fraternity among nations, the foundation of which is laid in the diversity of the productions of different countries. It is here, I apprehend, that the characteristical excellence of Mr. Smith’s work is to be found; that abstracting entirely from that ideal perfection to which it is possible that things may have a tendency, he adapts his speculations to the present state of this part of the world, and has demonstrated, with irresistible perspicuity, that even while this competition among nations continues, honesty forms the best and surest policy; and that the general prosperity of the globe, as well as the individual welfare of nations, is best consulted when each endeavours to turn its own peculiar advantages to the best account, and leaves the same liberty to others. In these particulars, the doctrines of Mr. Smith coincide entirely with those of the economical system, over which they certainly possess one important advantage, that they are deduced from a view of nations as they actually exist, and that they are susceptible of an easy application to their present circumstances.

The result of the parallel, then, which I have been so long preparing to draw between these two great systems, is, that if, on the one hand, the language of the Economists be more precise and definite, and the result of a more accurate metaphysical analysis than that of Mr. Smith, and if some of the fundamental principles of the former are of a more scientific nature, and more universal application, the doctrines inculcated in the Wealth of Nations are, on the other hand, with a very few exceptions, of greater practical utility to those who are to engage in the general business of the world, especially to those whose views have a more particular reference to the business of political life. I speak at present of his doctrines with regard to the freedom of commerce; in which, indeed, both systems agree, though I must be allowed to remark, that in one important point the Economical system is eminently deserving of praise; I mean in that part which, by explaining so fully and so beautifully the peculiar productiveness and independence of agricultural labour, cannot fail to have a powerful tendency to prevent statesmen from ever mistaking the means for the end; or, as I have expressed the same idea in the Philosophy of the Human Mind, “from ever being led astray by more limited views of temporary expediency.”* On this pre-eminence of agriculture, Mr. Smith has certainly enlarged too little, nor is his phraseology always sufficiently marked to keep it constantly in the view of the student. This is the more remarkable, as Mr. Smith seems to have been fully aware of the general tendency of the doctrines of the Economists. Thus, in one remarkable passage, after stating that the system of Quesnai forms a nearer approximation to a just system of political economy than any theory that had gone before it, he adds, “that it had a sensible effect in influencing the measures of the French Government in favour of agriculture. It has been in consequence of their representations, accordingly, that the agriculture of France has been delivered from several of the oppressions which it before laboured under. The term during which such a lease can be granted, as will be valid against every future purchaser or proprietor of the land, has been prolonged from nine to twenty-seven years. The ancient provincial restraints upon the transportation of corn from one province of the kingdom to another, have been entirely taken away, and the liberty of exporting it to all foreign countries, has been established as the common law of the kingdom in all ordinary cases.”*

There are few speculative systems which can boast of practical effects equally calculated to advance national prosperity; more especially when I add the tendency which, in this particular instance, the doctrines of the Economists had to bring into disrepute the policy of Colberton the subject of Population, which had long been acted upon in France, in recommending to statesmen to invert the order proposed by Colbert, and to encourage Population through the medium of Agriculture. It was Quesnai who first unfolded this important and fundamental truth; and it is only to be regretted, that in applying the maxim to the actual circumstances of the world, he has not always stated this doctrine with the proper limitations, too often overlooking altogether those circumstances so finely illustrated by Mr. Smith, which in this part of the world have forced into a retrograde order the natural course of things, and thus rendered all deductions drawn from that course inapplicable to the present state of things in the modern world.

Before leaving this subject, I think it proper to observe, that wherever I have mentioned the system of the Economists in terms of approbation, I would be understood to refer solely to their doctrines on the subject of Political Economy proper. “The Theory of Government which they inculcate,” as I have observed in the Philosophy of the Human Mind, “is of the most dangerous tendency, recommending in strong and unqualified terms an unmixed despotism, and reprobating all constitutional checks on the sovereign authority. Many English writers, indeed, with an almost incredible ignorance of the works which they have presumed to censure, have spoken of them, as if they encouraged political principles of a very different complexion; but the truth is, that the disciples of Quesnai (without a single exception) carried their zeal for the power of the monarch, and what they called the Unity of Legislation, to so extravagant a length, as to treat with contempt those mixed establishments which allow any share whatever of legislative influence to the representatives of the people. On the one hand, the evidence of this system appeared to its partisans so complete and irresistible, that they flattered themselves monarchs would soon see, with an intuitive conviction, the identity of their own interests with those of the nations they are called to govern; and, on the other hand, they contended that it is only under the strong and steady government of a race of hereditary princes, undistracted by the prejudices and local interests which warp the deliberations of popular assemblies, that a gradual and systematical approach can be made to the perfection of law and policy. The very first of Quesnai’s maxims states as a fundamental principle, that the sovereign authority, unrestrained by any constitutional checks or balances, should be lodged in the hands of a single person; and the same doctrine is maintained zealously by all his followers—by none of them more explicitly than by Mercier de la Rivière, whose treatise on The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies, might have been expected to attract some notice in this country, from the praise which Mr. Smith has bestowed on the perspicuity of his style, and the distinctness of his arrangement.”*

[1 ] See Young’s Ireland, p. 88 of Appendix to Vol. II.; and Chalmers’s Estimate, p. 223.

[2 ] Young, ibid.

[3 ]Essay on the Population of Ireland, (Richardson, 1786,) pp. 15, 20.

[4 ]Political Estimate, p. 222.

[1 ] Young’s Ireland, Vol. II., Appendix, p. 86.

[2 ] Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Vol. I. p. 240. Irish edit., [B. I. c. xi. First Part.]

[* ] [Tour in Ireland.]

[* ] [Ibidem.]

[1 ] [Wealth of Nations, Book I. chap. viii.]—“La Mendicité,” says the Maréchal de Vauban, [in his Dixme Royale,] “est un mal qui tue bientôt sou homme.”—Sir James Steuart, Vol. I. p. 72. [Works, Vol. I. p. 94. Political Œconomy, Book I. chap. xii.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book I. chap. xi. Part First.]

[† ] [Ibid.]

[1 ] Vol. II. pp. 361, 362.—[Works, Vol. II. p. 72, ed. 1819. Moral and Political Philosophy, Book VI. chap. xi.]

[2 ] Ibid.

[* ] [Political Arithmetic.]

[1 ]Political Arithmetic, p. 158, et seq.

[1 ] [It is doubtful, from the manuscript of these Lectures, whether what is placed in the following note, should not have constituted part of the text.]—It would be worth while to ascertain, by accurate experiments, the comparative nutritious power of a given extent of fertile land, when employed in raising animal and vegetable food. The only attempt of the kind that I have met with, (excepting some hints by A. Young,) is a letter addressed to Colonel Dirom, by Mr. William Mackie of Ormiston, in East Lothian, which is published at the end of an Inquiry into the Corn Laws and Corn Trade of Great Britain, 1796, by the late Mr. Dirom of Muiresk, in the county of Aberdeen. The result of Mr. Mackie’s computations is, that 504 acres of fertile land (the garden ground not included) will maintain, when well cultivated, 1977 people, old and young; and if the population of Great Britain amounts to 9,000,000, it would require only 2,412,746 fertile acres, well cultivated, to maintain them, when living on the same portion of vegetable food as the common people do in Scotland. The data on which Mr. Mackie proceeded were some facts ascertained by an examination of several families in his neighbourhood; from which it appeared, that about 2⅔ lbs., avoirdupois, raw potatoes, and 5⅓ oz. good oat-meal, when made into porridge, did actually maintain, for one day, in good health and condition for labour, on an average, each individual of a family, composed of two parents and three children, as long as their stock of potatoes lasted.

The same gentleman calculates, (upon data which appeared to him to be reasonable,) that the above farm of 504 acres, when employed in pasturage, will yield a produce competent only to the support of 103 individuals throughout the year; and that it would require 44,475,728 fertile acres to maintain the population of Great Britain; each individual consuming 2¼ lbs. of butcher meat per day. The same number of acres would support a population of 165,921,725 individuals of all ages, if the inhabitants lived on the same portions of vegetable food, which at present maintain the common labourers in Scotland.

“I have calculated,” says Mr. Mackie “these two extremes of the produce of land under the plough, or in pasture merely for fattening cattle, without including a dairy in either case; in order to place this object in a strong point of view, and to show the different effects which living on vegetable or animal food will have in supporting an increased population, or in rendering sustenance plentiful or scarce in a country. Hence it may be inferred, that it was to encourage and preserve the immense population of the Eastern nations, the original lawgivers of India discharged the eating of animal food, and engrafted this political maxim upon the ancient stock of superstition in the country. The abstaining from animal food, however, seems best suited to those countries situated under a burning sun, where water alone renders the soil perpetually fertile in producing vegetable food for supporting the inhabitants. In more temperate climates, the soil cannot be kept in a constant state of producing bread for man, without materially injuring its fertility; a circumstance which renders occasional pasturage indispensably necessary. The beasts of the field are also the children of nature, and the land must be allowed to afford grass for their sustenance; and man being formed to live on a mixture of animal and vegetable food, avails himself of this economy of nature to add to his enjoyment.

“From this cause, agriculture, in temperate climates, will be carried to the greatest perfection in those countries where the inhabitants add a certain proportion of animal to their vegetable food. But there is a certain proportion from which, if, in the progress of luxury, they deviate, by increasing the quantity of their animal food, they will certainly feel the want of bread-corn, which appears to be one of the principal causes that, of late years, there is an evident deficiency in the growth of corn in Britain, or rather in England, to supply the inhabitants, and that we are every year becoming more and more dependent upon foreign nations for our daily support, in place of being able as formerly to spare a large surplus quantity annually for exportation.”

In the further prosecution of the same interesting inquiry, Mr. Mackie sketches out for the same farm of 504 acres, a plan of cultivation suited more nearly to the average consumption and population of the country. From his computations founded on this plan, it appears “that a farm of 504 acres of very fertile land in a high state of cultivation, could maintain 392 people, old and young, living on a mixture of animal and vegetable food; and to maintain the inhabitants of Great Britain, computing the number at 9,000,000, and each individual to consume daily on an average the quantity of animal and vegetable food mentioned above, there would be occasion for 11,793,799 acres of very fertile land in a high state of cultivation. But if, at any time, from the increase of luxury in the nation, every inhabitant was to consume an ounce more of animal food per day, in that case it would require an additional 803,079 acres of fertile land, one half in rich pastures, and nearly the other half in turnip, to fatten and produce the necessary quantity; four-sevenths of which, or 458,900 were annually carrying luxuriant crops of corn. But even computing these crops at the low average of two quarters per acre, it would occasion an annual failure of 917,800 quarters, which will account for the difference between the most flourishing period of the corn trade, and the deficiency of latter times. Whoever, therefore, considers with attention the increased consumption of animal food in Britain within these last fifty years, and particularly since the peace of 1763, will see good cause for the growing scarcity of corn.”

I shall only add to these extracts, a remark of the same author with respect to another effect of luxury in adding to the scarcity both of animal and vegetable food, and that is the great degree of fatness which the people of England now require in their beef and mutton. “There is reason to believe that half the quantity of land would feed cattle moderately fat, that is required to put them in condition for slaughtering in England; and it is more than probable, that the great noise that has been made of late years about increasing the size of live stock, is a species of quackery which is a real loss to the nation.”

The observations which I have quoted from this intelligent writer, seem to me to be deserving of attention, although I would neither be understood to vouch for the accuracy of his results, nor to give any opinion on a subject which is so foreign to my own studies.

[In reference to this subject, I find from notes written by Mr. Bridges in a subsequent session, that Mr. Stewart farther observed,—“It ought also to be taken into account, that among other economical advantages obtained by attention to the breeds of cattle, the possibility has now been established of communicating to animals a constitutional propensity to a state of fatness; in consequence of which some become marketable at a much smaller expense than others of a more ‘lean and hungry’ habitude.”—See Marshall’s Rural Economy of the Midland Counties, &c., 1790; and Culley’s Observations on Live Stock, 1786.]

[1 ] Paley, Vol. II. p. 363.—[Works, Vol. II. p. 73, ed. 1819. Moral and Political Philosophy, Book VI. chap. xi.]

[* ]Wealth of Nations, Book III. chap. ii.; Vol. II. p. 90, seq., tenth edition, 1802.]

[† ] [Sketches of Man, B. I. sk. ii. et alibi.]

[‡ ] [De la grande et de la petite Cultare; Œuvres, Tom. IV.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book III. chap. ii.; Vol. II. pp. 91, 92, tenth edition, 1802.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book III. chap. ii.; Vol. II. p. 93, tenth edition.]

[1 ] See Robertson’s General Report.

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book I. chap. ix.; Vol. I. p. 137, tenth edition.]

[† ] [Ibid. Book III. chap. ii.; Vol. II. p. 94, tenth edition.]

[1 ]Political Arithmetic, p. 189.

[2 ] Blackstone, [Commentaries, &c.] Vol. I. p. 287.

[* ] [The Speech touching Purreyors is found in Montagu’s edition of Bacon’s Works, Vol. VI., and the passage in question at p. 7, et seq.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. v.; Vol. II. p. 304, seq, tenth edition.]

[1 ] Ogilvie’s Essay on Property.

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book III. chap. ii.; Vol. II. p. 97, tenth edition.]

[1 ] See Arthur Young’s Farmers’ Letters, p. 335, et seq.

[* ] [Moral and Political Philosophy, Book VI. chap. xi.; Works, Vol. II. p. 105, ed. London, 1819.]

[1 ] See Monthly Review for December 1799.

[1 ]On Annuities, Vol. II. pp. 274, 275.

[2 ] A large farm has, on this account, been considered by some in the light of an agricultural machine, enabling the cultivators of the soil to do that with few hands which before they did with many; resembling a stocking-loom, (for instance,) which enables the master manufacturer to turn off half his hands, and yet make more stockings than before.—Young’s Political Arithmetic, p. 294.

[1 ] Young’s France, p. 402.

[2 ] See in particular his Six Months’ Tour through the North of England, Vol. IV. pp. 192, 251, 253, 264.

[3 ] Vol. VII. p. 510.

[4 ] Of one of the works now referred to, (Herrenschwand’s Essai sur la Division des Terres,) I cannot speak from my own personal knowledge; but from what I know of his Treatise Sur l’Economie Politique, I should not be led to expect much from any of his performances. He appears to me to be an uncommonly vague and diffuse writer, although he is characterized by Mr. Young as “one of the greatest political geniuses of the present age.”—France, p. 408.

[5 ] [Wealth of Nations, Book III. chap. ii.; Vol. II. p. 98, tenth edition.]

[6 ] [Ibid. Book I. chap. xi.; Vol. I. p. 354, tenth edition.]

[1 ] Robertson’s Report, pp. 41, 42.

[2 ] Ibid. p. 48.

[1 ] Tome V. p. 43, Tome VI. p. 79, (quoted by Young in his France, p. 408.)

[1 ] Robertson’s General Report.

[2 ]Insufficiency of the Causes, &c [1788,] p. 35.

[1 ]Annals of Agriculture, No. 42, p. 516.

[* ] Price On Annuities, Vol. II. p. 292.

[* ] [There being no general divisions of this book, I must refer to Montagu’s edition of Bacon’s Works, Vol. III. p. 234.]

[1 ] Price [On Annuities,] Vol. II. p. 292.

[* ] [History of England, Chap. xxvi., anno 1509.]

[1 ]Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain during the present and four preceding Reigns. By George Chalmers, pp. 145, 146.

[* ] [This marks the year in which this part, at least, of the lecture was written.]

[1 ] Young’s Pamphlet, [On the Question of Scarcity, 1800,] p. 73.

[1 ] Pamphlet On the Scarcity, p. 74.

[1 ] Robertson’s Report, pp. 71, 72.

[* ] [Historia Naturalis, Lib. XVIII. cap. iii.]

[* ] [Akenside, Odes, XII. ix.]

[1 ] Young’s Political Arithmetic, pp. 47, 48.

[* ] [Political Œconomy, Book I. chap. xiv.; Works, Vol. I. p. 116.]

[* ] [Essays, Vol. I., Of Commerce.]

[* ] [Hist. Nat., Lib. XVIII. cap. iii.—De Re Rustica, Præf.]

[1 ] Valerius Maximus, [De Dictis, &c.] Lib. VII., cap. v. (Quoted in Postlethwayt’s Dictionary, &c.; Article Manufactures.)

[1 ] Omnium rerum, ex quibus aliquid acquiritur, nihil est agricultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius.—[De Officiis, Lib. I. cap. xlii.]

[2 ] Non enim aurum habere, præclarum sibi videri, dixit; sed iis, qui habuerunt aurum, imperare.—[De Senectute, cap. xvi.] Rollin, Arts and Sciences, I. p. 17.

[1 ] [§ 28.]—Taylor’s Elements, &c., p. 499.

[* ] [Sat. vi. 291.]

[* ] [That is, his Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789.]

[* ] [Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789, being an Agricultural Survey of the Kingdom, p. 407, seq.]

[† ] [Ibid. p. 410.]

[‡ ] [Ibid. p. 409.]

[* ] [Book V. Chap. xii.; Works, Vol. IV. p. 315.]

[* ] [Political Œconomy, Book I. chap. x.; Works, Vol. I. p. 70.]

[† ] [Essays, Vol. I. Essay, Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations.]

[‡ ] [Ibid.]

[1 ] Sir James Steuart, Vol. I. p. 178.—[Political Œconomy, Book II. chap. iii.; Works, Vol. I. p. 240.]

[* ] [Political Œconomy, Book I. chap. xxi.; Works, Vol. I. p. 204.]

[† ] [Wealth of Nations, Book III. chap. iv.]

[1 ]Memorial addressed to the Sovereigns of Europe, &c. Almon, 1780.

[2 ]Three Essays, &c. (London, 1799,) p. 116. [By Benjamin Bell, Esq.]

[1 ]Farmers’ Letters, &c., [1767,] pp. 3, 4.

[* ] [Etat de la France, &c.]

[* ] [L. l.]

[† ] [Wealth of Nations, B. IV. c. ix.; Vol. III. pp. 2, 3, tenth edition.]

[* ] [That is, his Travels in France.]

[* ] [Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789; being an Agricultural Survey of the Kingdom, p. 507, seq.]

[† ] [In 1776-1779.]

[* ] [Pp. 508-510.]

[1 ] Vol. I. pp. 386, 402, 408. But in regard to Kent, we ought also to take into account the vicinity of London, and the practice of Gavil Kind.

[1 ] Bell’s Pamphlet, p. 119. [Three Essays, &c., 1799.]

[1 ]Wealth of Nations, Vol. II. p. 286. [Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. pp. 40, 41, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Tour through Ireland, &c.]

[1 ] [Tour through Ireland, &c.] Vol. II. p. 162.

[1 ] Young, [Travels through France,] p. 504.

[† ] [Ibidem, p. 505, seq.]

[* ] [Ibidem, p. 506.]

[† ] [Wealth of Nations, Book I. chap. i.; Vol. I. pp. 13, 14, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Mr. Benjamin Bell, the eminent Surgeon of Edinburgh, in Three Essays, &c., 1799.]

[† ] [Three Essays, &c., pp. 132, 133.]

[1 ] Tome III. p. 109. Young, [Travels in France,] p. 505.

[2 ] Some important remarks on the disadvantages of cities are made by Sir James Steuart, [Political Œconomy,] Book I. chap. x.; [Works, Vol. I. p. 65, seq.]

[3 ] Anderson, On National Industry, p. 57.

[* ] [Political Œconomy, Book I. chap. xii.; Works, Vol. I. p. 91; the meaning, but not the words, identical.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. p. 41, tenth edition.]

[† ] [Ibidem, p. 3.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book III. chap. ii.; Vol. II. pp. 97, 98, tenth edition.]

[1 ] The Reports presented to the Board of Agriculture are full of complaints against the inveteracy of local prejudices and practices, and the repugnance with which farmers listen to any ideas that are new. In remote situations, such as Wales, (we are told,) the people will not adopt English improvements, because their neighbours would laugh at them; and in some districts (such as Bedfordshire) it is stated, that the art of husbandry is a century behind the nearly adjoining counties. Some very striking facts in illustration of this remark are mentioned by Harte in his Essays on Husbandry, [1764,] p. 222; Second Edition. “Nothing shows more strongly the inattention and indolence of Mankind,” &c.

[* ] [M. Cato, De Re Rustica, cap. i.]

[* ] [State of the Poor, &c. Lond. 1797.]

[* ] [The same philanthropic care of these factory children, in relation to their comforts and education, was, after Mr. Dale’s death, continued and extended by his son-in-law, Mr. Robert Owen; whose theories though we must reject, we cannot but admire the benevolence of his intentions.]

[* ] [Inquiry into the Duties of Men, &c. Lond. 1794, 1795.]

[1 ]Spirit of Laws, Book XXIII. chap. xv.

[* ] [Ass-mills (Molæ Asinariæ) were long as well known in antiquity as Hand-mills, (Molæ Manuariæ, Trusatiles.)]

[1 ] The mechanism of the machine is still more explicitly alluded to in that prohibition, where Moses forbids the Israelites “to take the upper or the nether mill-stone in pledge.”

[† ] [The author of this Epigram is Antipater of Thessalonica, not Antipater of Sidon. He flourished during the Augustan age, and was a contemporary of Vitruvius, who notices the introduction of Water-Mills as then recent. (Architectura, X. x.) The reference to Ceres in the Epigram is appropriate; that goddess being commemorated as the inventor of Corn-Mills in general. (Pliny, H. N. VII. lxvi.) The Epigram is not contained in the Planudian Anthology or Collection of Greek Epigrams, but is preserved, with many other anecdota, in the famous Palatine Codex, or Heidelberg Manuscript. From thence it was first published by Salmasius in a note on the Augustan History. (Lampridii, Heliog., cap. xxiv.) John Boivin (M. Boivin le cadet) afterwards published the original, with French and Latin versions, in his “Remarques Historiques et Critiques sur l’Anthologie manuscrite qui est à la Bibliothèque du Roy.” (Mém. de l’Acad. des Inscript., T. ii. p. 279, seq.) The manuscript there quoted was a copy derived from that of Heidelberg, through the transcript of Salmasius; of whose publication of the Epigram, in his note upon Lampridius, Boivin was, however, unaware. (Ibid. p. 316.) The original is subjoined, with an emendation of two corrupted places. The first and more obtrusive is indeed silently made by Boivin. I give the Epigram as it appears in the Mantissa Quarta, p. 426 of the third volume of De Bosch’s Anthologia; and annex the version of Grotius to compare with Boivin’s. I have not, on this occasion, looked into the collection of Brunk or of Jacobs.

• • “Ἴσχιτε χεῖϱα μυλαῖον, ἀλετϱιδες, ευδετε μαϰϱὰ,
  • Κἢν ὄϱθϱον ϰϱολίγῃ γῆϱυς ἀλεϰτϱυόνων.
  • Δηὼ γὰϱ’ Νύμφαισι χοϱῶν [l. χεϱῶν] ἐπετείλατο μόχθους.
  • Αί δὲ ϰατ’ ἀϰϱοτάτην άλλόμεναι τϱοχιὴν,
  • Ἄξονα δινεύουσιν ό δ’ ἀϰτίνεσσεν ἑλιϰταῖς
  • Στϱωφᾶται πισύϱων [l. Στϱωφᾷ τῶν πισύνων] ϰοῖλα βάϱη μυλάϰων.
  • Τιυόμιθ ἀϱχαίου βιότου πάλιν, εἰ δίχα μόχθου
  • Δαίνυσθαι Δηοῦς ἔϱγα διδασϰόμιθα.”
• • “Parcite pistrices manibus, longumque soporem
  • Carpite, mane licet gallus adesse canat.
  • Flava Ceres choreas [?] en Nymphis imperat; illæ
  • Saltantes summo molliter orbé super
  • Circumagunt axem: radil momenta sequuntur,
  • Bis duo [?] versantes concava saxa molæ.
  • Vita redit veterum, quando Cerealia nostro
  • Dona frui nobia absque labore datur.”]

[1 ] See Gisborne, [Paley’s Critic.—An Inquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher Rank and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain, resulting from their respective Stations, Professions, and Employments. Lond. 1794.]

[2 ]Political Œconomy, Book I. chap. xix.; [Works, Vol. I. p. 161.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. ii.; Vol. II. p. 204, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Postlethwayt’s Dictionary, &c.; Article, Machine.]

[* ] [Thoughts on the present High Price of Provisions: 1767.]

[1 ] See Davies, [Rev. David,] The Case of Labourers, &c., [1795,] p. 51.

[* ] [In the manuscript Lectures several blank pages are here left, and there is subjoined the following memorandum:—“See Volume marked POL.—Paley, vol. ii. p. 348; Townsend; Arthur Young; Sir James Steuart.” There is no volume in my possession marked POL; and I have endeavoured to supply the lacuna here left from the notes taken of the course in 1809 by Mr. Bridges, and by the late Mr. Bonar.]

[* ] [Political Œconomy, Book I. chap. xiv.; Works, Vol. I. p. 117, et alibi.]

[† ] [Travels in France, p. 409.]

[‡ ] [Journey through Spain in the years 1786, 1787, &c. Vol. II. p. 266, seq., first edition.]

[1 ]Essay on the Principle of Population. [In 1798, by Malthus.]

[2 ] Bell’s Pamphlet, p. 119. [According to the notes of the later Courses of Political Economy, Mr. Stewart quotes Mr. Benjamin Bell by name, and with approbation; and in Watt’s Bibliotheca there are given to him, as author,—1°· Three Essays; on Taxation of Income, &c., Edin., 1799;—2°· Essays on Agriculture, &c., Edin., 1802.]

[3 ]Essential Principles of Wealth of Nations, [1797, by Grey,] p. 130. In the Report of the Committee on Waste Lands, it is stated that there are throughout the kingdom no less than 7,800,000 acres in a perfectly uncultivated condition.—Lord Carrington’s Speech in the House of Lords, July 3, 1800.

[* ] [By Malthus. The Essay, as noticed, was originally published anonymously, in 1798. It will be seen that this speculation from the first strongly excited the attention of Mr. Stewart. See pp. 62, 64, 205, seq. If these Lectures were written in 1800, Mr. Malthus had not as yet acknowledged the publication. See p. 64.

[† ] [Pinto’s Essay on Circulation and Credit was not only published in French in Holland, but translated into English, if I recollect aright, in 1774.]

[* ] [Inquiry into Political Justice, &c., 1793, B. VIII. chap. vi.]

[1 ]Prospects of Mankind, &c. [1761, Pr. iv. p. 125.]

[The following memorandum is at this place appended:]—“Introduce here, by way of Appendix, an examination of the Essay on the Principle of Population.”

[* ] [Prospects, &c., Prs. iii. iv. pp. 104, 115-117. Dr. Robert Wallace was one of the Ministers of Edinburgh.]

[* ] [Sect. viii. p. 37, seq.—In this little work, (passim,) to say nothing of his other books, (See his Free Thoughts, chap. ix.; Journey through Spain, Vol. I. 383, seq.; II. 269, seq.; 361, seq.; III. 107, seq. Mr. Townsend, who was an Anglican clergyman, has anticipated his brother divine, Mr. Malthus, in the most important doctrines touching Population.]

[1 ] Dampier, Vol. I. part ii. p. 88.

[1 ] Ulloa, Book II. chap. iv.

[* ] [Discourses; Second Discourse concerning the Affairs of Scotland.]

[* ] [See his books; On the Numbers, and On the Prospects of Mankind.]

[1 ] Preface to Political Arithmetic.

[1 ] Sinclair’s Account of the Origin and Progress of the Board of Agriculture, (p. 34.) [Denina, in his Prusse Littéraire, vindicates, as I recollect, the invention of this branch of science to Italy and to his countryman Botero, who lived long before Petty.]

[1 ] Postlethwayt’s Dictionary; Article, Political Arithmetic.

[2 ] Price, On Annuities, Vol. II. p. 275.

[1 ] Chalmers’s Estimate, pp. 54, 56.

[1 ] Vol. I. p. 247.

[2 ]Estimate, p. 57.

[3 ]Métrologie, [1780,] p. 507.

[1 ] Moheau [Recherches], pp. 57, 58.

[1 ]Corn Tracts, [by Charles Smith, published in 1758 and 1759, and reprinted in 1804, with a life of the author, by George Chalmers, p. 190.]

[2 ] Ibidem, p. 196.

[* ] [Works, Vol. VII. pp. 108-119, 380-382; and these Lectures, supra, pp. 87-92.]

[* ] [De l’Administration des Finances.]

[1 ] Morgan, On Annuities, [1779,] p. 291.

[1 ] See Moheau, Paucton, Price, Morgan.

[2 ]Miscellanea Curiosa, Vol. I. p. 286.

[* ] [A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, 1753, second edition, 1809, p. 40, seq.]

[1 ] Price, On Annuities, Vol. I. p. 278.

[* ] [Miscellanea Curiosa, 1708, Vol. I.]

[† ] [Ibid.]

[* ] [The three following paragraphs are ambiguously deleted in the manuscript.]

[* ] [Observations, &c.]

[† ] [An Inquiry into the Present State of Population in England and Wales, and the Proportion which the present Number bears to the Number at Former Periods. London, 1781.]

[* ] [Essay appended to Morgan, On Annuities, p. 288, first edition.]

[† ] [Ibid. p. 293.]

[1 ] Dr. Price’s Essay (it must be remembered) was published in 1779.

[* ] [Ibid. p. 305.]

[1 ]Inquiry into the State of Population, published 1781.

[2 ]Dispersion of the Gloomy Apprehensions occasioned by the Present State of our Corn Trade: 1797.

[* ] [This Lecture thus apparently written in 1799.]

[1 ]Monthly Magazine for September 1796.

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, B. I. c. viii.; Vol. I. p. 122, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Ibid. p. 115.]

[1 ] Townsend, [On the Poor-Laws,] p. 10.

[2 ] [On Annuities?] Vol. II. p. 289.

[1 ]Dispersion of the Gloomy Apprehensions occasioned by the Present State of our Corn-Trade: 1797.

[1 ] Chalmers, [Estimate, &c.] p. 207.

[* ] [Description of the Country about Manchester, &c., 1795.]

[1 ] Pp. 136, 137.

[2 ] Chalmers, Estimate, p. 125.

[1 ] Chalmers, [Estimate,] p. 221.

[* ] [From this to the end of the reference to Middleton’s Report, (infra, p. 245,) added in 1800.]

[2 ]Dispersion, &c., p. 9.

[1 ] Middleton’s Report, p. 451.

[2 ] Lord Castlereagh in his speech on the Union, (1800,) estimated it from 3,500,000 to 4,000,000.—(Added Note.)

[1 ] Chalmers, Estimate, p. 224.

[2 ] The population of Edinburgh is stated in the same Table at 68,045; that of Leith at 13,241; that of Glasgow at 64,743.

[1 ] See Robertson’s Report on the Size of Farms.

[* ] [Inquiry into the Corn Laws and Corn Trade, &c.]

[† ] [By C. Smith, see p. 219.]

[1 ] [State of the Poor, &c., 1797,] Vol. I. p. 564.

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book I. chap. viii.; Vol. I. p. 131, tenth edition.]

[* ] [From the Notes taken of these Lectures in 1809, it appears there are here wanting the more recent returns of the population of Great Britain and Ireland, and likewise estimates of the population of France, Spain, Russia, United States of America, China, and Holland. But the same is shown, though less fully, by the “Plan of Lectures on Political Economy for winter 1800-1801,” which is found among Mr. Stewart’s papers. As, however, the parts deficient seem not essential to an understanding of the more authentic lectures, it has not been thought necessary to interpolate from the notes, which, at best, are comparatively old, and often hardly to be relied on for numerical details.]

[* ] [The commencement of this Book and Chapter not being extant in Mr. Stewart’s manuscript of these Lectures, the want is supplied, as far as possible, from the very copious notes of Mr. Bridges, occasionally supplemented, especially in regard to quotations, by those of Mr. Bonar. The beginning and end of this, as of similar interpolations, are carefully marked.]

[* ] [Sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses, § v.; Œuvres, Tome V.p.6.]

[* ] [Of Civil Government, Book II. chap. v. §§ 41, 43.]

[† ] [Wealth of Nations, Introduction, Vol. I. p. 2, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, B. I. chap. i.; Vol. I. p. 7, seq., tenth edition.]

[* ] [Ibid. Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. p. 9, seq., tenth edition.]

[* ] [Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth, 1769, § 5; Works, by Sparks, Vol. II. p. 374.]

[* ] [Ibid. p. 23, seq.]

[* ] [Vol. II. pp. 52, 53, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Ibid., p. 53.]

[† ] [Ibid., Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. pp. 21, 22, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Ibid. pp. 22, 23.]

[1 ] Printed for Becket, 1797. [According to Watt, the author’s name seems to have been Grey.]

[2 ] Pp. 11, 12.

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book II. chap. iii.; Vol. II. p. 3, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Ibid. p. 2.]

[1 ] See Edinburgh Review, Vol. IV. p. 355, [July, 1804. Review of Lauderdale On Public Wealth, by Brougham.]

[† ] [Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. p. 28, tenth edition.]

[1 ] P. 98.

[* ] [Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. p. 21, tenth edition.]

[1 ]Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 430. [By Malthus, 1798.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. pp. 26, 27, tenth edition.]

[† ] [This suggests an Epigram of Joseph Scaliger, written in Greek and Latin, On the Marvels of Holland, and addressed by the “Dictator” to the celebrated Janus Dousa, (1600.) The following is the Latin version:—

• “De Mirandis Bataviæ.
• “Ignorata tuæ referam miracula terræ,
• Dousa, peregrinis non liabitura fidem.
• Omnia lanitium hic lassat textrina Minervæ.
• Lanigeros tamen hinc scimus abesse greges.
• Non capiunt operas fabriles oppida vestra.
• Nulla fabris tamen hæc ligna ministrat humus.
• Horrea triticeæ rumpunt hic frugis acervi.
• Pascuus hic tamen est, non Cerealis ager.
• Hic numerosa meri stipantur dolia cellis.
• Quæ vineta colat nulla putator habet.
• Hic nulla, aut certe seges est rarissima lini.
• Linificii tamen est copia major ubi?
• Hic mediis habitatur aquis, quis credere possit?
• Et tamen hic nullæ, Dousa, bibuntur aquæ.”]

[1 ] Bell, p. 454. [See above, p. 202.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. p. 21, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Ibid. Book II. chap. iii.; Vol. II. p. 3, tenth edition.]

[1 ] [Advancement of Learning;—Of the nature of Good.] De Augment. Scient. Lib. VII. [cap. i.]

[* ] [The “Demonstratio in orbem” is to be here taken in a favourable meaning; not as reasoning in a circle, but as an exhaustive proof.]

[1 ] Malthus, [Book III. chap. viii.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book II. chap. iii.; Vol. II. p. 3, tenth edition.]

[* ] [Money answers all things, &c. Mr. Stewart also speaks of Vanderlint in his Memoir of Adam Smith, as of Asgill, &c.]

[* ] [Supra, Works, Vol. II. p. 236.]

[* ] [Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth, §§ 9.11.—Works, by Sparks, Vol. II. pp. 375, 376.]

[* ] [Above, Works, Vol. II. p. 240.]

[* ] [Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. ix.; Vol. III. p. 28, seq., tenth edition.]

[* ] [Above, Works, Vol. II. pp. 240, 241.]