1. Minart discusses the “Guillaumin network” in Gérard Minart, Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912), pour un gouvernement à bon marché dans un milieu libre (Paris: Institut Charles Coquelin, 2012), p. 56.  ↩

2. On Guillaumin, see Lucette Levan-Lemesle, "Guillaumin, Éditeur d'Économie politique 1801–1864," Revue d'économie politique, 96e année, No. 2, 1985, pp. 134–149. On the Political Economy Society, see Breton, Yves. "The Société d'économie politique of Paris (1842–1914)." In The Spread of Political Economy and the Professionalisation of Economists: Economic Societies in Europe, America and Japan in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Massimo M. Augello and Marco E. L. Guidi. London: Routledge, 2001. On the JDE, see Lutfalla, Michel. "Aux origines du libéralisme économique en France: Le 'Journal des économistes.'" Revue d'histoire économique et sociale, 50, no. 4, 1972, pp. 494–517.  ↩

3. He describes his welcome dinner to Félix Coudroy in Letter 37 to Félix Coudroy, Paris, May 1845, in CW1, pp. 59–61.  ↩

4. Bastiat, T.27 Cobden et la Ligue, ou l'agitation anglaise pour la liberté du commerce (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). The book consisted of Bastiat’s translations and summaries of League speeches and articles from the British press, along with his lengthy introduction, pp. i-xcvi.  ↩

5. T.166 “The Physiology of Plunder” (late 1847), ES2 1, CW3, pp. 113–30.  ↩

6. See, "Bastiat's Policy on Tariffs" in Further Aspects of Bastiat's Thought, in CW3, p. 455.  ↩

7. A full list of the articles Bastiat published in the JDE can be found here (to come).  ↩

8. Bastiat, Sophismes économiques. Première série. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846) and Sophismes économiques. Deuxième série. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848). He also wrote enough for a Third Series which were not published as a separate volume in his lifetime. All three can be found in CW3 final draft version. FEE ed. of Series I and II only  ↩

9. T.28 "Situation économique de la Grande-Bretagne. Réformes financières. Agitation pour la liberté commerciale" (The Economic Situation of Great Britain: Financial Reforms and Agitation for Commercial Freedom), JDE, Juin 1845, T. XI, 233–265. This was adapted from his introduction to his book Cobden and the League, pp. vii ff.  ↩

10. T.31 "De l’avenir du commerce des vins entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne" (On the Future of the Wine Trade between France and England), Journal des Économistes, Aug. 1845 in CW6 (forthcoming).  ↩

11. T.91 "De l’influence du régime protecteur sur l’agriculture" (On the Impact of the Protectionist Regime on Agriculture), Journal des Économistes, Décembre 1846 in CW6 (forthcoming).  ↩

12. See David M. Hart, "Bastiat’s Rhetoric of Liberty: Satire and the 'Sting of Ridicule'," in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lviii-lxiv.  ↩

13. See, "The Format of the Economic Sophisms," in the Introduction to CW3, pp. li-lii; and "Bastiat and Conversations about Liberty" in Further Aspects of Bastiat's Thought, in CW3, pp. 470–73.  ↩

14. "The Sophism Bastiat never wrote: The Sophism of the Ricochet Effect" in Further Aspects of Bastiat's Thought, in CW3, pp. 457–61.  ↩

15. T.33 ES1 7 "Pétition des fabricants de chandelles, etc." (Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, etc.), Journal des Économistes, October 1845, T. 12, p. 204–07 in CW3, pp. 49–53. FEE ed.  ↩

16. T.38 ES1 17 "Un chemin de fer négatif" (A Negative Railway) (c. 1845) in CW3, pp. 81–83. FEE ed.  ↩

17. T.166 ES210 "Le percepteur" (The Tax Collector) (c. 1847), in CW3, pp. 179–87. FEE ed.  ↩

18. T.102 ES211 "L’utopiste (The Utopian), Libre-Échange, 17 January 1847 in CW3, pp. 187–98. FEE ed.  ↩

19. T.181 ES3 18 "Le maire d’Énios" (The Mayor of Énios), Libre-Échange, 6 February 1848, in CW3, pp. 355–65.  ↩

20. T.96 ES3 16 "Midi à quatorze heures" (Making a Mountain out of a Mole Hill) (c. 1847) in CW3, pp. 343–50.  ↩

21. See "Bastiat’s Invention of 'Crusoe Economics'," in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lxiv-lxvii.  ↩

22. Murray N. Rothbard, “6. A Crusoe Social Philosophy,” in The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), p. 29–34; and Rothbard, Man, Economy and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, with Power and Market: Government and the Economy. Second Edition. Scholar’s Edition (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), especially Chapter 2. “Direct Exchange”.  ↩

23. The first year of the journal was republished in book form by Guillaumin: Le Libre-Échange. Journal de l’Association pour la liberté des échanges. 1er année. 1846–1847. (Paris: Guillaumin and Chaix, 1847).  ↩

24. T.62 (1846.05.10) “Declaration of Principles of the Free Trade Association” (Déclaration de principes (Association pour la liberté des échanges)) 10 May, 1846; reprinted in LE 25 Apr. 1847, no. 22, p. 169; along with the Association’s new programme. [OC2.1, pp. 1–4.][CW6]  ↩

25. These free trade editorials and articles will appear in CW6 (forthcoming).  ↩

26. T.129 ES3 6 "Peuple et Bourgeoisie" (The People and the Bourgeoisie), Libre-Échange, 22 May 1847, in CW3, pp. 281–87.  ↩

27. T.23 (1845.01.15) “Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to a Job ” (Un économiste à M. de Lamartine. A l’occasion de son écrit intitulé: Du Droit au travail ), JDE , February 1845, T. 10, no. 39, pp. 209–223. [OC1.9, pp. 406–28][CW4 forthcoming]  ↩

28. T.81 "De la population," (On Population), JDE, 15 Octobre 1846, T. XV, pp. 217–234, in CW4 (forthcoming). A revised version of this article appeared as chapter 16 of the second, expanded edition of Economic Harmonies (1851) which was published after his death. FEE ed.  ↩

29. T.149 (Sept. 1847) “Draft Preface for the Harmonies” (Projet de préface pour les Harmonies) in CW1, pp. 316–20. (/titles/2393#lf1573–01_label_689).  ↩

Letter 32. Mugron, 24 Nov. 1844. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 32. Mugron, 24 Nov. 1844. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 106-9) [CW1, pp. 50-53].

Text

Steeped in the schools of your Adam Smith and our J. B. Say, I was beginning to believe that this doctrine that was so simple and clear had no chance of becoming popular, at least for a long time, since, over here, it is completely [51] stifled by the specious fallacies57 that you refuted so well and which are disseminated by the Fourierist, communist, and other sects with which our country is for the moment infatuated, and also by the disastrous alliance of the party newspapers with those newspapers paid for by committees of manufacturers.

It was in this state of total discouragement in which these sad circumstances had cast me that, as I happened to have taken out a subscription to the Globe and Traveller,58 I learned both of the existence of the League and the struggle between free trade and monopoly in England. As I am an enthusiastic admirer of your powerful and very moral association and in particular of the man who appears to give it such forceful and wise direction in the face of countless difficulties, I have been unable to contemplate this sight without wanting to do something for the noble cause of the liberation of work and commerce. Your honorable secretary, Mr. Hickin, was good enough to send me the issue of the League, dated January 1844, together with a number of documents relating to the campaign.

Equipped with these documents, I have tried to draw public attention to your proceedings, on which French newspapers have maintained a calculated and systematic silence. I have written articles in the newspapers of Bayonne and Bordeaux, two towns naturally positioned to become the cradle of the movement. In addition, recently I had published in Le Journal des économistes (issue no. 35, Paris, October 1844) an article which I recommend to you. What has been the result? Newspapers in Paris, on which our laws confer the monopoly of opinion, have considered discussion to be more dangerous than silence. They have therefore created silence around me, totally sure that these arrangements would reduce me to impotence.

In Bordeaux, I have tried to organize an association for trade liberalization, but I have failed because, although there are a few souls who instinctively would like freedom to a certain extent, there are none who understand it in principle.

What is more, an association functions only through publicity, and it needs money. I am not rich enough to endow it on my own, and asking for money would have created the insurmountable obstacle of suspicion.

I have thought of founding in Paris a daily newspaper based on these two concepts, free trade and the elimination of a partisan spirit. Here again, I [52] have encountered money and other problems, which I will not go into. I will regret it for the rest of my life, because I am convinced that a newspaper like this, which fills a public need, would have a chance of success. (I have not given up on this.)

Lastly, I wanted to know whether I had any chance of being elected a deputy, and I have become certain that my fellow citizens would give me their vote, since I almost achieved a majority at the last elections. However, personal considerations prevent me from aspiring to this position, which I might have used to the advantage of our cause.

Obliged to limit my action, I began to translate your sessions59 in Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Next May, I will submit this translation for publication. I expect it to have a good effect.

• 1. It will be necessary for France to become acquainted with the existence of the spirited campaign in England against monopolies.
• 2. It will be necessary for people to stop thinking that freedom is just a trap set by England for other nations.
• 3. The arguments in favor of free trade would perhaps have more effect if they were in the lively, varied, and popular form of your speeches rather than in the methodical works of economists.60
• 4. Your tactic that is so well directed downward to the people and upward to Parliament will teach us to act in the same way and inform us on the benefit we may gain from constitutional institutions.
• 5. This publication will be a forceful blow to the two major plagues of our time, the partisan spirit and national hatreds.
• 6. France will see that in England there are two entirely conflicting opinions and that, consequently, it is absurd and contradictory to envelop the whole of England in the same hatred.

In order for this work to be complete, I would have liked to obtain a few documents on the origin and beginnings of the League. A short history of this association would be a suitable preface to the translation of your speeches.61 I have asked Mr. Hickin for these documents, but doubtless he has been too [53] busy to reply to me. My documents go back only to January 1843; I would at least need the debate in Parliament on the 1842 tariff and in particular the speech in which Mr. Peel proclaimed the economic truth in the form that has become so popular, “We must be allowed to buy in the cheapest market, etc.”

I would also like you to tell me which of your speeches, either at meetings or in Parliament, you think most appropriate to translate. Lastly, I would like my book to contain one or two free-trade discussions in the House of Commons and ask that you would be good enough to tell me which ones.

I would be most honored to receive a letter from the man of our time for whom I have the keenest and most sincere admiration.

Letter 33. Mugron, 24 Nov. 1844. To Horace Say↩

Source

Letter 33. Mugron, 24 Nov. 1844. To Horace Say (OC7, pp. 377-80) [CW1, pp. 53-55].

Text

Please allow me to express to you the feeling of deep satisfaction I had on reading your kind letter of the 19th of this month. Without the sentiments contained in this most valued letter, how would we, men of solitude who are deprived of the useful warnings received through contact with the rest of the world, know whether or not we are in the group of dreamers, all too common in the country, who have allowed themselves to be obsessed by a single idea? Do not tell me, sir, that your approval can merely have limited value in my eyes. Since France and humanity lost your illustrious father, whom I also venerate as my intellectual father, what sentiments can be more precious to me than yours, especially when your own writings and the expressions of confidence which the population of Paris have heaped on you give such authority to your judgments?

Among the authors of your father’s school whom death has respected, there is one above all whose agreement is of inestimable value to me, although I would not have dared to solicit it. I refer to M. Charles Dunoyer. His first two articles in Le Censeur européen (“On the Equilibrium Between Nations”),62 together with those by M. Comte which precede them,63 settled [54] the direction of my thought and even my political actions a long time ago.64 Since then the economist school65 appears to have given way before the host of socialist sects which seek to achieve the universal good, not in the laws of human nature but in artificial organizations which are the products of their imagination. This is a disastrous mistake, which M. Dunoyer has been campaigning against for a long time with a perseverance that can almost be called prophetic. I therefore could not prevent the rise of a feeling almost of pride when I learned from your letter that M. Dunoyer has approved of the spirit of the text you have had the goodness to include in your esteemed collection.

You are kind enough, sir, to encourage me to send you a further text. I am now devoting the little time I have at my disposal to a work of patience, the usefulness of which I consider to be unquestionable, even though it consists only of simple translations. In England there is a major movement in support of free trade. This movement has been kept carefully hidden by our newspapers and where, from time to time, they are obliged to mention it, it is to distort its nature and influence. I would like to put documents relating to it before the French public and show that on the other side of the Channel there is a party with many members that is powerful, honest, judicious, ready to become the national party, and ready to direct the policy of England, and it is to this party that we should extend a hand of friendship. The public would then be capable of judging whether it is reasonable to envelop the whole of England in the wild hatred that the press is trying to whip up with such obstinacy and success.

I am expecting other benefits from this publication. Readers will find in it an attack on the very root of the partisan spirit, the undermining of the basis of national hatred, the theory of markets set out not methodically but using forms that are popular and striking, and finally, they will see in action the energy, the demonstration tactics which now mean that in England, when genuine abuse is attacked, it is possible to forecast the day it will be [55] abolished, just as our military engineers forecast the time at which besiegers will seize a citadel.

I am planning to come to Paris in April next to supervise the printing of this publication,66 and if I had any hesitations in doing this your kind offer and the desire to make your acquaintance and those of the distinguished men whom you meet would be enough to persuade me.

Your colleague, M. Dupérier, was also good enough to write to me about my article. “It is good in theory,” he said; and I am tempted to reply to him by your esteemed father’s quip, “My God, what is no good in practice is good for nothing.” M. Dupérier and I follow very different paths in politics. My esteem for him is all the higher for his frankness and the frankness of his letter. These days, there are very few candidates who tell their opponents what they think.

I forgot to say that if the time and my health permit, following your encouraging invitation I will send another article to Le Journal des économistes.67

I would be grateful, sir, if you would convey to MM Dussard, Fix, and Blanqui my thanks for their kindness and assure them that I wholeheartedly support their noble and useful work.

P.S. I am taking the liberty of sending you a text published in 1842 relating to the elections written by one of my friends, M. Félix Coudroy. You will see that the doctrines of MM Say, Comte, and Dunoyer have generated some green shoots in places on the arid soil of the Landes. I thought you would be pleased to learn that the sacred fire is not quite extinguished. As long as there is still a spark, we should not lose hope.

Letter 216 to Félix Coudroy (1845)↩

Source

Letter 216: Letter to Félix Coudroy (1845). This letter was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and was inserted in a footnote to T.9 "Reflections on the Question of Dueling" (11 February 1838) which was a review in the local newspaper La Chalosse of Coudroy's pamphlet on dueling. Paillottet states it was written sometime in 1845. [OC7, p. 10] [CW1, p. 309].

Editor's Introduction

This short letter to his boyhood friend and neighbour in Mugron Félix Coudroy 47 tells us something about Bastiat's method of writing, namely that he preferred the simplicity and directness of his first drafts. It also shows us that he was aware of a new work by one of the leading members of the circle of economists in Paris, Charles Dunoyer, 48 whose three-volume magnum opus De la liberté du travail had been published in early 1845. Dunoyer was the President of the Political Economy Society which would host a welcome dinner for Bastiat in Paris in May 1845. Coudroy and Bastiat belonged to a discussion group in Mugron called "The Academy" which would meet regularly to discuss new books and current events and where they no doubt discussed Dunoyer's book soon after it appeared. Bastiat would write but not publish a review of Dunoyer's book in March 1845 which can be found below T.20 "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working" (March, 1845). Coudroy would later that year write a long review of Bastiat's first book on Cobden and the League for the JDE. 49

Text

My dear Félix,

Because of the difficulty of reading, I cannot properly judge the style, but my sincere conviction (you know that here I set aside the usual modesty) is that our styles have different qualities and faults. I believe that the qualities of yours are such that, when it is used, it shows genuine talent; I mean to say a style that is lively and animated with general ideas and glimpses that are luminous. Always make copies on small sheets; if one needs to be changed, it will not cause much trouble. When you are copying you will perhaps be able to add polish, but, for my part, I note that the first draft is always faster and more accessible to today's readers who scarcely go into anything in depth.

Do you not have an opinion of M. Dunoyer?

Letter 34. Mugron, 7 March 1845. To M. Ch. Dunoyer↩

Source

Letter 34. Mugron, 7 March 1845. To M. Ch. Dunoyer, membre de l'Institut (OC7, pp. 371-72) [CW1, pp. 55-56].

Text

Of all the testimonials I might have hoped to receive, that which I have just received from you is certainly the most precious. Even allowing for kindness [56] in the very flattering references to me on the first page of your book,69 I cannot help being certain that I have your vote, knowing how much you are in the habit of matching your utterances to your thought.

When I was very young, sir, a happy chance made me pick up Le Censeur européen and I owe the direction of my studies and outlook to this circumstance. In the time that has elapsed since this period, I am unable to distinguish what is the fruit of my own meditations from what I owe to your writings, so completely do they appear to have been assimilated. But if all that you had done were to reveal to me in society and its virtues (its views, ideas, prejudices, and external circumstances) the true elements of the good it enjoys and the evils it endures, if all you had taught me were to see in governments and their forms only the results of the physical and moral state of society itself, it would be none the less proper, whatever additional knowledge I had managed to acquire since then, to give you and your colleagues the credit for its direction and principle. It is enough to say to you, sir, that nothing could give me more genuine satisfaction than the reception you have given to the two articles I sent to Le Journal des économistes and the sensitive way in which you were kind enough to express it.70 I will be devoting serious study to your book and gleaning much enjoyment from following the development of the fundamental distinction to which I have just referred.

Letter 35. Mugron, 7 March 1845. To M. Al. de Lamartine↩

Source

Letter 35. Mugron, 7 March 1845. To M. Al. de Lamartine. (OC7, pp. 373-74) [CW1, pp. 56-57].

Text

Absence has prevented me from expressing to you earlier the deep gratitude I felt at the reception you deigned to give to the letter I took the liberty of addressing to you through Le Journal des économistes. The letter you have [57] been good enough to write to me is very precious to me and I will always keep it, not only because of the inimitable charm which pervades it but also and above all as an example of your kind readiness to encourage the first attempts of a novice who has not been afraid to point out in your admirable writings a few proposals which he considers to be errors that have escaped your genius.

Perhaps I have gone too far in asking you for that analytical rigor, that accuracy in dissection which explores the field of discovery but which cannot enlarge it. All human faculties have their mission; it is up to a genius to lift himself up to view new horizons and point them out to the crowd. At first these horizons are vague, and reality and illusion are confused in them; the role of analysts is then to come and measure, weigh, and distinguish them. This is how Columbus revealed a new world. Do we find out whether he had taken all the measurements and traced all the contours? Is it even important that he thought he had landed in Cathay? Others have come after, patient workers who have corrected and added to the work. Their names remain unknown while that of Columbus has resounded down the centuries. But, sir, is not a genius the king of the future rather than of the present? Can he claim immediate and practical influence? Do his powerful leaps forward into unknown regions have much in common with the activities of men of the present time or those of businessmen? This is a doubt that I am putting to you; your future will answer it.

You are good enough to acknowledge, sir, that I have traveled through the domain of liberty and you are urging me to rise to meet equality and still further to meet fraternity. How can I help but try, when the request is yours, to take new steps in this noble direction? Doubtless, I will not attain the heights to which you soar, since the habits of my mind no longer allow me to use the wings of imagination. But I will endeavor at least to direct the torch of analysis to a few corners of the huge subject you are suggesting that I study.

Permit me to end by saying, sir, that a few incidental disagreements do not prevent me from being the most sincere and fervent of your admirers, as I hope one day to be the most fervent of your disciples.

Letter 36. Mugron, 8 Apr. 1845. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 36. Mugron, 8 Apr. 1845. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 109-10) [CW1, p. 58].

Text [59]

Letter 37. Paris, May 1845. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 37. Paris, May 1845. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 50-52) [CW1, pp. 59-61].

Text

My dear Félix, I am sure that you are waiting to hear from me. I, too, have a lot to tell you but I must be brief. Although at the end of each day it transpires that I have done nothing, I am always busy. In Paris, the way things are, until you are in the swing of things you need half a day to put fifteen minutes to good use.

I was given a good welcome by M. Guillaumin, who is the first economist I have seen. He told me that he would give a dinner, followed by a reception, to put me in contact with the men of our school; as a result I have not gone to see any of these people. This dinner was held yesterday. I was on the right of the host, clear proof that the dinner was in my honor, and Dunoyer was on his left. Next to Mme Guillaumin were MM Passy and Say. MM Dussard and Reybaud were also there. Béranger had been invited but he had other engagements. In the evening a crowd of other economists arrived: MM Renouard, Daire, Monjean, Garnier, etc., etc. Between you and me, my friend, I can tell you that I felt a keen satisfaction. There were none of these people who had not read, reread, and perfectly understood my three articles. I could write for a thousand years in La Chalosse, La Sentinelle, or Le Mémorial73 without finding a genuine reader, except for you. Here, one is read, studied, and understood. I am sure of this since all or nearly all of them went into the greatest detail, which shows that politeness was not the only reason for this welcome; the only one I found a little cold was M. X. To tell you of the kindnesses I was covered with and the hope that appeared to be based on my cooperation is to make you understand that I was ashamed of my role. My friend, I am perfectly convinced today that, although our isolation has prevented us from equipping our minds sufficiently, it has, at least when it comes to particular questions, given them a strength and accuracy which many more educated and gifted men perhaps do not possess.

What gave me the most pleasure, because it proved that I have really been read with care, is that the last article, entitled “Sophism,”74 was ranked above the others. This is the one in fact in which the principles are examined in the greatest depth, and I was expecting it not to have been tackled. Dunoyer [60] asked me to write an article on his work, to be included in the Débats.75 He was kind enough to say that he thought me eminently suited to making his work appreciated. Alas! I can already see that I will not be able to maintain the far too lofty status which these kind men have accorded me.

After dinner, we discussed dueling. I gave a brief summary of your brochure. Tomorrow we are having another corporate dinner at Véfour; I will take it there and, as it is not long, I hope it will be read. If you could rewrite it, or at least modify it, I believe it might be included in the journal, but the rules prevent it from being quoted verbatim. Incidentally, Le Journal des économistes is not as lowly rated as I feared. It has five or six hundred subscribers and is gaining authority every day.

Repeating the conversation to you would carry me too far. What a world, my friend, and it can well be said “You live only in Paris and just vegetate elsewhere!” In spite of this, I already hanker after our walks and intimate conversations. I lack paper; farewell, dear Félix. Your friend.

P.S. I was mistaken. A dinner, even if it is with economists, is not an opportune occasion for reading a brochure. I gave yours to M. Dunoyer and will not know what he thinks for a few days. You will find in the 27 March issue of Le Moniteur, which should be in the library in my room, the indictment of dueling by Dupin.76 Perhaps that will give you an opportunity to lengthen your brochure. I spent this evening with Y. He gave me the most cordial welcome and we discussed everything, even religion. I thought he was weak on this subject, since he respects it without believing in it.

It was only today that I went to pay my respects to M. Lamartine. I did not enter, as he was leaving for Argenteuil, but with his usual courtesy, he sent me a message to say that he wanted us to talk without constraint and gave me an appointment for tomorrow. How well will I do?

During our dinner, or more accurately after it, a major question was bandied about: “on intellectual property.” A Belgian, M. Jobard, expressed new ideas which will astonish you. I am longing to discuss all this with you. The fact is, in spite of my successes of the moment, I feel that I am no longer [61] disposed to be entertained in this manner. This is water off a duck’s back, and all things considered, life in the provinces might be made more pleasant than it is here if one just had a taste for studying and the arts.

Farewell, my dear Félix, until later. Write to me from time to time and keep busy on your work on dueling. Since the court has reverted to its strange legal posture, it is worth doing.

Letter 38. Paris, 23 May 1845. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 38. Paris, 23 May 1845. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 52-54) [CW1, pp. 61-62].

Text

You are expecting a lot of details, my dear Félix, but you are going to be disappointed. Since my last letter, which I sent via Bordeaux and for which I have not yet received a receipt, we have been having weather that is discouraging me from making visits. I spend my mornings wasting time on mere trifles, shopping, and essential business and the evenings regretting this. My letter will therefore be rather arid though I hope you will be pleased with it because of the letter from Dunoyer that I enclose. You will see that he liked your piece on dueling. I have just left him and he repeated to me verbally what he has written in his letter. He praised the essence and style of your brochure and said that it was based on solid work that was on the right track. He expressed his regret that he could not discuss it further and his desire to come to my house to discuss the subject in greater detail. Tomorrow I will send it to M. Say, who is a really nice man because of his gentleness and grace, combined with very firm principles. He is the anchor of the economists’ party. Without him, without his conciliating spirit, the group would soon be dispersed. Many of my colleagues are employed by newspapers which pay them much better than Le Journal des économistes. Others have political affairs to maintain. In a word, the whole thing is an accidental meeting of well-meaning men who like each other even though their opinions differ on many points; there is no firm, organized, and homogeneous party. For my part, if I had the time to remain here and the fortune to hold receptions at home, I would try to found a sort of League. But when you are only passing through, it is useless to embark on such a grand enterprise.

Anyway, I have arrived too soon; my translation is being printed only slowly.77 If I had been able to hand out a few copies, they might perhaps have opened a few doors to me.

[62]

I have not seen M. de Lamartine; he is away from Paris and I do not know when he will return.

Another nice man is M. Reybaud. The proof of his remarkably vigorous intellect is that he became an economist by studying the nineteenth-century reformers. He agreed with them when he began his work, but his good sense has triumphed.

I am trying to find out whether M. Guizot has written to you. It is to be feared that his many activities prevent him from reading your brochure. If he were just a man of letters, he would certainly reply to you, but he is a minister and member of the government. In any case, if anything arrives from that quarter, do let me know.

I have been somewhat occupied with public affairs, I mean departmental ones. It would take too long to tell you about it. But I believe that the Adour, that is to say, the lower Adour, from Hourquet to the Gave, will obtain 1.5 million francs. Chance put me in a position to give this a helping hand: it will always be an advantage if the steamboats reach Pontonx. As for the stretch between Mugron and Hourquet, one is dying to know what was responsible for its exclusion, but what can we do? There is just one thing that the general public does not want to become involved in, and that is public affairs.

I do not know whether I will write to my aunt today. In any case tell her that we are all well here. Farewell, my dear Félix; remember me to your sister.

Letter 39. Paris, 5 June 1845. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 39. Paris, 5 June 1845. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 54-57) [CW1, pp. 62-65].

Text

My dear Félix, an opportunity has arisen for Bordeaux and I do not want to let it go without a few words of reply to your letter. Forgive me if I am too brief. I am ashamed to call myself busy since the days pass without my making use of them. This is something that can be explained only here. In any case, we will soon be able to talk about everything we find so interesting and that interests scarcely anyone but us.

You have not acknowledged receiving the letter from Dunoyer; I think that you received it only after the departure of Calon. You have seen his opinion of your brochure, and I am longing to hear that of M. Guizot—if he gives it to you—since people assure you that the sole occupation of men in power is to retain it. I have not yet sent it to M. Say, as he is in the country [63] and I will not see him until Friday. He is a charming man and the one I prefer; I am due to dine with him at Dunoyer’s and on the 10th at Véfour at the economists’ banquet. We should be tossing around the question of inviting the government (always the government!) to set up chairs of political economy. I have been made responsible for preparing a few ideas on this, and this is a subject which would please me, but I will limit myself to mulling over my opinion since, there as elsewhere, there are egos and placemen who have to be handled with kid gloves. As for an association which would please me a great deal more, I will wait for my translation78 to be published before speaking about it, since the translation may prepare people’s minds for it. However, for an association, an agreed principle is needed, and I am very much afraid that it is lacking. I have never seen so much fear of absolute conviction, as though we should not be leaving our opponents the task of moderating our progress as necessary.

In Mugron, I will explain to you the reasons which prevent the journal from being modified. Besides, the Paris press is now based on advertising and, from the financial point of view, is established on bases of such a kind that nothing new is possible. This being so, it is only the association and the sacrifices that it alone can make that can get us out of this blind alley. I am coming to things that are personal to me and speak of them to you openly as to a bosom friend, with no false modesty. I believe that a lack of incomprehension is a characteristic which we have in common and I do not fear that you will find me too presumptuous.

My book will have thirty sheets,79 and twenty have been printed. I hope that it will all be ready at the end of the month. I have changed nothing or very little of the introduction I read to you. About half will appear in the next issue of Le Journal des économistes.80 Ignorance of affairs in England is such, even here, that this work should, I think, have an effect on studious people. I will tell you frankly what effect it has.

Each day I acquire proof that the previous articles have had some effect. The publisher has received several requests for subscription giving reasons, among which is a letter from Nevers that said “Two articles in Le Moniteur industriel have reached us which seek to refute an article in Le Journal des économistes entitled ‘Sophisms.’ All we know of this article are the quotations [64] in Le Moniteur but they were enough to give us a high opinion of it. Would you please send it to us and give us a subscription?” Two subscriptions were requested from Bordeaux. But what gave me the most pleasure was a conversation I had with M. Raoul Duval, a counselor at the court of Rheims, a town that is essentially protectionist. He assured me that the article on tariffs had been read aloud and that at each instant the manufacturers said, “That is true, that is very true, that is what is going to happen to us, there is no answer to this.” This scene, my dear Félix, signposts the route I should be following. If I could, I would now examine the real situation of our protected industries in the light of principles and go into the field of facts. M. Guillaumin wants me to review a dozen more sophisms to gather them together and, at his expense, to make them into a low-cost brochure that might reach a wide audience.

It needs to be you, my dear Félix, for me to recount these things which, as it happens, leave me as cold as if they concerned a third party. I was already set on my articles and your judgment was enough of a guarantee for me; I was only too happy that there were still other readers as I had given up hope of this.

I will tell you that I have almost decided to go to shake hands with Cobden, Fox, and Thompson; a personal acquaintance with these men may be useful to us. I have some hope that they will give me some documents, but in any case I will make a stock of a few good works, including speeches by Fox and Thompson on subjects other than free trade. If I stayed in Paris I would feel the need to devote myself to this specialty, and this would be indeed enough for my frail shoulders. But, in our gentle retreat, that would not be enough for us. Anyway, economics appears much finer when it is embraced in its totality. It is this harmonious whole that I would like to be able to master one day. You should indeed take the time to set out some of its traits.

If my small treatise, Economic Sophisms, is a success, we might follow it with another entitled Social Harmonies.81 It would be of great use because it would satisfy the tendency of our epoch to look for organizations and artificial harmonies by showing it the beauty, order, and progressive principle in natural and providential harmonies.

I will take some works from here. My trip will at least serve to provide us with some fodder and knowledge of something of the spirit of the century.

[65]

Farewell, my dear Félix. I have not written to my aunt today; please tell her that I have received her letter with much pleasure after being so long without one.

Letter 40. Paris, 16 June 1845. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 40. Paris, 16 June 1845. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 57-59) [CW1, pp. 65-66].

Text

My dear Félix, I have to tell you that my League has been printed.82 They are now working on the introduction and it cannot take longer than a week. It therefore appears that at the end of the month I will be free to go to London and that on 15 July I will have the pleasure of greeting you. Tomorrow, I dine at Dunoyer’s with all of our group, Dussard, Reybaud, Fix, Rossi, and Say. I will seal my letter only after this, in case I have some news to tell you. On Sunday, an approach was made to me and perhaps this will be discussed tomorrow. There is so much for and against that I could never take a decision without you. It is to be the manager of Le Journal des économistes. From the financial point of view, it is a wretchedly low salary, a hundred louis per year, including editing. However, you will easily understand how close this position is to my inclinations. First of all, this journal, well managed, could have a great influence on the Chamber, and by extension the press. If the economist in situ establishes a reputation for superiority in his specialty, it would be impossible for him not to be feared to some extent by the protectionists and reformers, in a word, ignorant people of all sorts. Through the spoken word I will never get very far because I lack confidence, memory, and presence of mind, but my pen is sufficiently skilled in dialectics to put to shame certain of our statesmen.

Secondly, if I am managing the journal, my management will end up being exclusive since I will be surrounded by lazy people, and, to the extent that the shareholders allow, I will succeed in giving it the homogeneity that it lacks.

I will be in natural and necessary contact with all the eminent men, at least in the spheres of political economy and financial and customs affairs, and finally, I will be in their eyes the spokesperson of a public opinion that is conscientious and enlightened. I think that a role of this sort may be extended indefinitely, depending on the level of the person holding it.

As for the work, it is not of the type, like daily journalism, that would [66] distract me from continuing my studies. Lastly (and this is only a distant prospect), if the manager of the journal is equal to his task, he might profitably join the ranks of candidates for a chair of political economy that falls vacant.

These are the points in favor. But it would mean leaving Mugron. I would have to leave the people I love and allow my aunt to progress in solitude into old age. I would need to lead a strict life here and see passions unfurl without sharing them. I would unceasingly witness the spectacle of ambition being satisfied without allowing this sentiment to approach my heart, since our entire strength lies in our principles and in the confidence we are able to inspire. In this respect, this is not what I fear. Simple habits are far from terrifying me.

Letter 41. Paris, 18 June 1845. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 41. Paris, 18 June 1845. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 59-60) [CW1, pp. 66-67].

Text

I left Dunoyer’s this morning at one o’clock. The guests were those I mentioned, plus M. de Tracy.84 Political economy was scarcely touched upon; these people dabble in it as amateurs. However, during dinner free trade was discussed a little. M. X said that the English were putting on an act. I did not think it appropriate to challenge this term, but I was very tempted to ask him if he believed in the principle of freedom or not. For in the end, if he believed in it, why did he not want the English to believe in it too? Because it is in their interest? I remembered your argument: if people formed a temperance society, should we denigrate it on the grounds that it is in people’s interest to be temperate? If I write a sophism on this subject, I will slip this refutation into it. After dinner, I was drawn into a game of whist: a wasted evening. The entire editorial staff of the journal was there: Wolowski, Villermé, Blaise, Monjean, etc., etc. . . . another disappointment, I fear. Z—— is crazy about agriculture, and about protectionism. Truly, I am getting a close view of things and feel that I might do good and pay my debt to the human race.

Let us return to the journal. No one asked me for a definite commitment; now I will wait. I am discussing it with my aunt; I need to see what she thinks. She would certainly let me follow my inclination if she saw a financial future in it and, humanly speaking, she would be right; she cannot [67] comprehend the extent of the position I could be taking. If she speaks to you about it, let me know the effect that my letter has. For my part, I will tell you about the effect my League will produce. Will anyone read it? I doubt it. We are snowed under with reading matter here. If I told you that, except for Dunoyer and Say, none of my colleagues has read Comte! You already know that —— has not read Malthus. At dinner, Tracy said that the extreme poverty in Ireland85 proved Malthus’s doctrine wrong! I have heard it said to someone that there was some good in the Treatise on Legislation86 and above all in the Treatise on Property.87 Poor Comte! Say told me his sad story; persecution and his probity killed him.

You will, of course, not breathe a word on what I have told you about the management of the journal. You will appreciate that this news would cause an unfortunate stir.

I think that I have told you that the publisher of the League is also going to publish the Sophisms. This will be a small, low-cost book, but the title is not attractive. I am looking for another; please help me. The small book by Mathieu de Dombasle was entitled “A Shaft of Common Sense,” etc.

As I cannot cover all the sophisms in one small volume, if it sells well, I will write another.88 It would be a good thing if, for your part, you dealt with a few. I would alternate them with mine and that would enable you at least to make the acquaintance of my colleagues and you could then, if you wanted, have yourself published at no cost, which is not a simple matter.

Farewell, my dear Félix; write to me.

Letter 42. Paris, 3 Jul. 1845 (11pm). To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 42. Paris, 3 Jul. 1845 (11pm). To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 60-62) [CW1, pp. 67-69].

Text

. . . Like you, my dear Félix, I envisage the future with terror. Leaving my aunt, separating myself from those I love, leaving you alone in Mugron, without your friend, without books, is dreadful. And for my own part, I do not know whether solitary work, meditated on at leisure and discussed with you, [68] would not be better. On the other hand, it is certain that there is a position here to be attained, the only one for which I have an ambition and the only one which suits me and for which I am suitable. It is now certain that I can have the manager’s position at the journal and I do not doubt that I will be given six francs per subscription. There are five hundred subscribers, which makes three thousand francs. This is absolutely nothing, financially speaking, but we need to believe that strong management stamped on the journal will increase its membership and if we achieved a figure of one thousand, I would be satisfied. Then there is the prospect of a course of lectures; I do not know whether I told you that at our last dinner, we decided that an approach would be made to the government to found chairs of political economy89 at the university. MM Guizot, Salvandy, and Duchâtel expressed approval of this project. M. Guizot said: “I am so well disposed to this that it was I who founded the chair that M. Chevalier occupies. Obviously, we are going down the wrong road and it is essential to disseminate healthy economic doctrines. However the major difficulty is to choose the right people.” At this reply, MM Say, Dussard, Daire, and a few others assured me that, if they were consulted, they would designate me. M. Dunoyer would certainly be in favor of me. I have found out that the minister of finance was impressed with my introduction and he himself asked me for a copy of the work. I would thus have a good chance, if not of being called to the university, at least if Blanqui, Rossi, or Chevalier were nominated, of replacing one of these men at the Collège de France or the Conservatoire.90 One way or another, I would be launched with an assured existence, and that is all I need.

But having to leave Mugron! Having to leave my aunt! What about my chest! What about the limited circle of my acquaintances! In sum, the long chapter of objections . . . Oh, why am I not ten years younger and in good health! Moreover, you will understand that this prospect is still distant but that the management of the journal would put a great deal of opportunity on my side. Therefore, instead of producing two sophisms, selected from those that are popular and anecdotal, in the next issue, I sense an opportunity to develop my ideas, and I am going to devote tomorrow to rewriting two or [69] three of the most important. This is why I cannot write to you at length as I would like and am forced to speak about myself instead of replying to your affectionate letters.

M. Say wants to entrust to me all his father’s papers; there are some curious things in them. What is more, it is an expression of confidence that touches me. Hippolyte Comte, the son of Charles, will also be letting me go through the notes of our favorite author, who is totally unknown right here. . . . But I do not want to fail in what I owe to the men who are showering me with proofs of their friendship.

You see, dear Félix, that there are so many reasons for and against; I really must decide soon. Oh! I really need your advice, and above all for you to tell me what my poor aunt thinks.

Although I scarcely answer your letters, I nevertheless must tell you that the work of Simon is very rare and extremely expensive. There are only four copies, of which two are in the public libraries. Bossuet had the entire edition destroyed.

Farewell, my dear Félix; excuse the haste with which I write.

Letter 43. London, Jul. 1845. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 43. London, Jul. 1845. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 62-65) [CW1, pp. 69-71].

Text

My dear Félix, I arrived here yesterday evening. Knowing how much you are interested in our cause and in the role that chance has given me, I will tell you everything that happens, especially since I have no time to take notes and, this being so, my letters will be useful later in reminding me of my memories so that I can give you more details face to face.

After I settled in at the hotel (at ten shillings a day), I started to write six letters to Cobden, Bright, Fox, Thompson, Wilson, and the secretary who sends me the League. Then I wrote six dedications in six of my books and went to bed. This morning, I took my six copies to the League’s office with the request that they be given to the people concerned. Someone told me that Cobden was leaving the same day for Manchester and that probably I would find him in the throes of making his preparations (preparations for an Englishman consist in swallowing a steak and stuffing two shirts into a bag). I ran to Cobden’s; I did in fact meet him and we chatted for two hours. He understands French well and speaks it a little and anyway I understand his English. I described to him the state of opinion in France, the effect I expect this book to have, etc., etc. He told me how sorry he was to be leaving [70] London and I saw that he was on the point of canceling his trip. He then told me, “The League is like a Masonic lodge, except for the fact that everything is public. Here is a house that we have rented to receive our friends during the Bazaar. It is now empty, so you must move in.” I demurred, to which he replied, “This may not be convenient to you, but it is useful for the cause since Messrs. Bright, Moore, and other members of the League spend their evenings there and you must always be in their midst.” However, because it was subsequently decided that I would go to join him in Manchester the day after tomorrow, I did not think it necessary to move for two days. He then took me to the Reform Club, a magnificent establishment, and left me in the library while he took a bath. After this, he wrote two letters to Bright and Moore and I accompanied him to the station. In the evening, I went to see Bright, still at the same hotel, although these people do not live there; his welcome was not quite as cordial. I noticed that he did not approve of my including Cobden’s name in the title of my book. In addition, he appeared surprised that I had translated nothing by M. Villiers. His own contribution in the book is small, although he deserves greater recognition as he has the gift of an attractive eloquence. However, all this was sorted out during the conversation. As I was obliged to speak slowly to make myself understood and was discussing subjects with which I was familiar with men of exactly the same mind, I was certainly in the most favorable of circumstances. He took me to Parliament, where I have remained up to now, since they were discussing a question which included education and religion. I left at eleven o’clock and then started to write to you. Tomorrow I have an appointment with him, and the day after tomorrow I am going to see Manchester and meet my friend Cobden again. He is to arrange my accommodation and leave me in the hands of Mr. Ashworth, the rich manufacturer who put across such a good argument to demonstrate to farmers that the export of manufactured objects implied the export of the things included in them and that, consequently, restrictions on trade would hit them in the face. This brusque departure, I fear, will prevent me from seeing Fox and Thompson before my return, as well as Mill and Senior, for whom I have letters.

This is a short account of my first day. I will thus enter Manchester and Liverpool in circumstances which few Frenchmen could hope to enjoy. I will be there on a Sunday. Cobden will take me to the Quakers and the Wesleyans. We will at last know something, and as for factories, nothing will be hidden from me. What is more, all the operations of the League will [71] be unveiled to me. There was a vague suggestion of a second edition of my book on a wider scale. We will see.

Let us not forget Paris. Before leaving, I spent an hour with Hippolyte, the son of Charles Comte, who showed me all of his father’s papers. There are two or three courses of lectures given in Geneva, London, and Paris, all of which doubtless supplied material for the Treatise on Legislation, but what a gold mine to open up!

Farewell, I must leave you. I still have three letters to write to Paris and it is already tomorrow, since it is past midnight.

Letter 44. London, 8 Jul. 1845. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 44. London, 8 Jul. 1845. To Richard Cobden (OC1, 110-11) [CW1, p. 71].

Text [72]

Letter 45. Paris, 29 Jul. 1845. To M. Paulton↩

Source

Letter 45. Paris, 29 Jul. 1845. To M. Paulton. (OC7, pp. 374-77) [CW1, pp. 72-73].

Text

My dear sir, as I told you, I am sending you four copies of my translation which I ask you to forward to the editors of the Times, the Morning Chronicle, etc., etc. I would consider myself happy if the English press gave a favorable welcome to a work I consider useful. This would compensate me for the indifference with which it has been received in France. All those to whom I have given it continue to show surprise at the serious facts revealed in it, but no one is buying it, and this is not surprising since no one knows the subject with which it deals. Our newspapers, moreover, appear to have decided to bury the question under a veil of silence. It will cost me dear to have attempted to open my country’s eyes, but what is worse is not having succeeded.92

When I arrived here, I found a letter from Sir Robert Peel. As he wrote it before having read the book, he did not have to give his opinion on it. He also avoided quoting its title (Cobden and the League). If that is through diplomacy, the latter must be a deep-seated habit of your prime minister for him to use it on such an insignificant occasion. This is a copy of his note.

Sir Robert Peel presents his compliments to M. Bastiat, and is most obliged to M. Bastiat’s attention in transmitting for the acceptance of Sir Robert Peel a copy of his recent publication. Sir Robert hopes to be enabled to profit by it, when he shall have leisure from the present severe pressure of parliamentary business.93

This letter is unsigned. I would be curious to know if it is written in Sir Robert’s own handwriting.

I found other letters, including two of not inconsiderable importance. One was from M. Passy,94 a peer of France and an ex-minister of trade. He gives his unalloyed approval of the principles contained alike in the introduction and in your work.

The other letter is from M. de Langsdorf, our chargé d’affaires in the Grand Duchy of Baden. He tells me that he has read the book with enthusiasm [73] and learned for the first time what is happening in England. At the moment, there is a meeting in Karlsruhe of officers from all of the Zollverein95 who are determined to plug the tiniest loophole through which foreign trade might come to infiltrate the great national market. What he tells me about this supports Mr. Cobden’s idea of having the history of the League translated into German, together with a selection of your speeches. Could not England, which has had the Bible translated into three or four hundred languages, also have this excellent course of practical political economy translated at least into German and Spanish?96 I know the reasons which prevent you from seeking to act on the foreign scene at present. But simple translations would prepare people’s minds without your being liable to accusations of making propaganda.

If, later, the League is able to acquire a few copies of my translation without difficulty, I think this is the most useful purpose to which it might be put. This would be to take the same number of towns in order of their commercial importance and send a copy to each, addressed to the literary circle or chamber of commerce.

I will not attempt, sir, to convey to you all my gratitude for the fraternal welcome I received in your midst. I want only to have the opportunity of demonstrating it by my acts, and it would make me happy to meet members of the League in France. I have already paid two visits to Mr. Taylor without being able to meet him.

I forgot to tell you that, since the letter from M. de Langsdorf is confidential and comes from a man in the public eye, it must be clearly understood that his name cannot be quoted in any journal.97

I assure you, my dear sir, of my sincere friendship. Please remember me to all our comrades in work and hope.

Letter 46. Mugron, 2 Oct. 1845. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 46. Mugron, 2 Oct. 1845. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 111-15) [CW1, pp. 74-76].

Text

Whatever the charm, my dear sir, that your letters have just brought to me in my solitude, I would not allow myself to provoke them by such frequent obtrusiveness. However, an unforeseen circumstance has made it a duty for me to write to you.

I have met a young man in Paris circles who seemed to me to be full of heart and talent, whose name is Fonteyraud, the editor of La Revue britannique. He has written to me to offer to continue my work by inserting a follow-up of the operations of the League in the collection he is editing.98 With this in mind, he wants to go to England to see your fine organization for himself and has asked me for letters of introduction to you and MM Bright and Wilson.99 The object he has in view is too useful for me not to be quick to agree and I hope that, for your part, you would be willing to satisfy M. Fonteyraud’s elevated curiosity.

However, in a second letter, he tells me that he has yet another aim which, according to him, would require effective, in other words, financial support from the League. I have been swift to tell M. Fonteyraud that I could not speak to you about a project about which I knew very little. I made it clear to him, moreover, that, according to me, any action carried out on public opinion in France that appeared to be directed and financed by England would be counterproductive since it would strengthen the deep-rooted prejudices that many adroit men have vested interests in exploiting. If therefore M. Fonteyraud makes his journey, would you, together with Messrs. Bright and Wilson, assess his projects for yourselves and consider me to be totally outside the undertaking he is considering? I hasten to leave this subject to reply to your affectionate letter of 23 September.

I am sorry to hear that your health is suffering from your immense workload, both private and public. Certainly, it could not be undermined for a finer cause; each of your pains will remind you of noble actions, but that would be small consolation and I would not dare to voice it to other than you, since to understand it one would need to have your self-sacrifice and devotion to the public good. But at last your work is reaching its target, you do not lack workers around you, and I hope that you will at last seek strength in repose.

[75]

Since my last letter, a movement of which I had given up hope has started in the French press. All the Paris newspapers and very many provincial newspapers have reported on the demonstration against the Corn Laws, to mark my book. It is true that they have not understood its full implications, but at last public opinion has been woken up. This was the essential point, the one I was hoping for with my whole heart and it is a question now of not allowing it to fall back into indifference, and if there is anything I can do about it, that will not happen.

Your letter arrived the day after we had an election. It was a courtier who was elected.100 I was not even a candidate. The electors are imbued with the idea that their votes are a precious gift, an important and personal service. This being so, they expect their vote to be personally solicited. They do not wish to understand that a parliamentary mandate is their own affair, that they will suffer the consequences of trust that is well or badly placed and consequently it is up to them to give it with discernment, without waiting for it to be solicited or wrested from them. For my part, I had taken the decision to stay in my corner and, as I expected, I was left there. Probably, in a year, we will have general elections in France. I doubt whether in the intervening period the electors will have come round to more appropriate ideas. However, a considerable number of them appear to have decided to support me. My efforts in favor of our wine-producing industry will give me an effective name of which I can make use. For this reason, I am pleased to see that you were willing to second the views I set out in the letter that the League has quoted.101 If you could arrange for this journal to support the principle of ad valorem rights to be applied to wine, this would give my candidature a solid and honorable base. In fact, in my circumstances, being a deputy is a heavy charge, but the hope of contributing to the formation of a nucleus of free traders within our parliament comes before all personal considerations. When I think that, in our two chambers, there is not a single man who dares to acknowledge the principle of free trade, who understands its full significance, or who is capable of supporting it against the sophisms of monopoly, I must admit that, in the depths of my heart, I want to win the empty seat I see in our legislative body, although I do not want to do anything that would increasingly distort the dominant ideas relating to elections. Let us try to be worthy of their confidence and not to gain it by surprise.

Thank you for the judicious advice you have given me by indicating the [76] procedure for disseminating economic doctrines you think would be best suited to the situation in our country. Yes, you are right, I can see that here light has to be diffused from top to bottom. Instructing the masses is an impossible task, because they have neither the civic right, the habit, nor the liking for grand rallies and public discussion. This is one more reason for me to aim to gain contact with the most enlightened and influential classes through becoming a deputy.

I am very pleased to hear that you have good news from the United States.102 I was not expecting this. America is lucky to speak the same language as the League. It will not be possible for its monopolists to withhold your arguments and work from the knowledge of the general public. I would like you to tell me, when you have the opportunity to write to me, which American journal is the most faithful representative of the economist school.103 The circumstances of this country are analogous with ours and the free-trade movement in the United States could not fail to produce a good and strong impression in France if it were widely known. To save time, would you please take out a one-year subscription for me and ask M. Fonteyraud to reimburse you? It would be easier for me to reimburse him than to send it to you.

I accept with great pleasure your offer to exchange one of your letters for two of mine. I consider that you are sacrificing here again the fallacy of reciprocity, since I will certainly be the winner and you will not receive equal value. In view of how busy you are, I would have been ready to undertake to write to you three times. If ever I become a deputy, we will renew the bases of our contract.

Letter 47. Mugron, 24 Oct. 1845. To M. Potonié↩

Source

Letter 47. Mugron, 24 Oct. 1845. To M. Potonié (JCPD), [CW1, pp. 76-79].

Text

Letter 48. Mugron, 13 Dec. 1845. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 48. Mugron, 13 Dec. 1845. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 115-18) [CW1, pp. 79-81].

Text

My dear sir, I am greatly in your debt, since you were willing, in the midst of your noble and arduous work, to relax the agreement which I had gratefully accepted of “one letter for two,” but I unfortunately have only too many excuses to invoke and while all your time is so usefully devoted to the public good, mine has been absorbed by the greatest and most personal grief that I might suffer on this earth.106

I was delaying writing to you to have news of M. Fonteyraud. I needed to know in what terms I should thank you for your welcoming him on my recommendation. I had total peace of mind in this, as I had heard indirectly that he was delighted with his trip and enthusiastic about the members of the League. I am pleased to learn that the members of the League were no less pleased with him. Although I did not know him very well, I considered that he had it in him to be his own recommendation. Doubtless, he has not had the opportunity to write to me yet.

On this subject, you have returned to my visit to you and the excuses you express to me leave me quite embarrassed. Except for the first two days when, for unforeseen reasons, I found myself alone in Manchester and when my morale was undoubtedly afflicted by the sad influence of your strange weather (an influence whose expression I allowed to emerge in the unfortunate note to which you refer), with the exception of these two days, as I have said, I was overwhelmed by the care and kindnesses expressed by you and your friends, Messrs. John and Thomas Bright, Paulton, Wilson, [80] Smith,107 Ashworth, Evans, and many more, and I would be truly ungrateful if, because there was an election in Cambridge during these two days, I remembered only this moment of spleen108 and forgot those which you imbued with goodwill and charm. You can be sure, my dear sir, that our dinner in Chorley and your eminently instructive meeting with Mr. Dyer at Mr. Thomas Bright’s have left indelible memories in my mind and heart. You want me to make another visit. That is not entirely impossible and this is how it might be arranged. It is probable that the big question will be settled this summer, and, like a valiant fighter, you will need to take a little rest and bind your wounds. Since words have been your principal arms, their means of expression in you will have suffered the most, and you have made reference to your state of health in your last letter. It so happens that in the Pyrenees over here there are marvelous springs to cure exhausted chests and larynxes. So come and spend a season as part of the family in the Pyrenees. I promise you either to come to collect you or to accompany you back, at your choice. This trip will not be detrimental to the cause. You will see our wine-producing population and will gain an idea of the spirit that animates it or rather that does not animate it. When we pass through Paris, I will introduce you to all our comrades in political economy and rational philanthropy. I like to think that this trip would leave its beneficial traces in your health and memories, and also in shifting French attitudes about freeing up trade. Bordeaux is also a town which it would interest you to see. People’s minds there are quick and enthusiastic; just a spark will set them ablaze, and this might well come from your words.

Thank you, my dear sir, for the offer you made me regarding my translation. Permit me, however, not to accept it. It is a personal sacrifice which you wish to add to so many others and I must not agree to it.

I feel that the title of my book does not allow you to claim any influence on the part of the League. This being so, let us allow my poor volume to live or die by itself. However, I cannot be sorry that, in France, I attached your name to the history of this great movement. In doing this, I may have upset your worthy colleagues a little and this involuntary injustice gives me some cause for remorse. But truly, to arouse and catch attention here, it is necessary for a doctrine to be incarnated in an individual personality and for a great movement to be represented and summarized in an individual [81] name. Without the great figure of O’Connell, the Irish unrest would have taken place unnoticed in our newspapers. And look what has happened. The French press now uses your name to designate the orthodox principle in political economy. It is an ellipsis, a shorthand method of speaking. It is true that this principle is still the subject of much dispute, and even sarcasm. But it will grow and commensurately your name will grow with it. The human mind is made like this. It needs flags, banners, incarnations, and individual names, and in France more than elsewhere. Who knows whether your destiny will not arouse in our country the emulation of some man of genius?

I have no need to tell you with what interest and anxiety I follow the development of your campaign. I regret that Sir Robert Peel has let himself be overtaken. His personal superiority and position make him able to provide services to the cause that are more immediately achievable, perhaps, than those it can expect from Russell, and I fear that the arrival of a Whig government will result in the reassembly of a formidable aristocratic opposition which will prepare new conflicts for you.

You are good enough to ask me what I do in my solitude. Alas, dear sir, I am embarrassed to have to reply with this shameful word, Nothing. The pen tires me and speech even more so, to the extent that if a few useful thoughts ferment in my head I have no longer any means of revealing them externally. I sometimes think of our unfortunate André Chénier. When he was on the scaffold, he turned to the people and said, striking himself on the forehead, “It is a pity, I had something there.” And I too think that “I have something there.” But who is whispering this thought to me? Is it the consciousness of a genuine truth? Is it fatuous pride? For which idiotic hack today does not think he also “has something there”?

Farewell, my dear sir; permit me to shake your hand most affectionately across the distance that separates us.

P.S. I have frequent contact with Madrid and it would be easy for me to send a copy of my translation there.

Letter 49. Mugron, 20 Dec. 1845. To Alcide Fonteyraud↩

Source

Letter 49. Mugron, 20 Dec. 1845. To Alcide Fonteyraud (OC1, pp. 194-97) [CW1, pp. 81-84].

Text

Letter 50. Mugron, 13 Jan. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 50. Mugron, 13 Jan. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 118-21) [CW1, pp. 84-86].

Text

My dear sir, what gratitude do I not owe you for having been good enough to think of me in the midst of such pressing occupations, ones so conducive to absorbing your interest so compellingly? You wrote to me on the 23rd, the very day of that astonishing meeting in Manchester, which certainly has no precedent in history. May the people of Lancashire be honored! It is not only free trade that the world will owe them, but also the enlightened, moral, and devoted art of campaigning. Humanity will at last recognize the instrument of all reform. At the same time I received your letter, the issue of the Manchester Guardian with an article on this session arrived. As I had seen the report of your first meeting in Manchester a few days previously in Le Courrier français, I thought that public opinion had now been awakened in France, and I did not think it necessary to translate the report of your proceedings. I am now annoyed that I did not do so, since I see that this major event has not produced an impression commensurate with its importance here.

How I congratulate you a thousandfold, my dear sir, for having refused an official position in the Whig cabinet.110 This is not to say that you would not be very capable and worthy of power. It is not even that you could not render considerable service. But in the century in which we are, we are so imbued with the idea that whoever appears to devote himself to the public good is in fact working for his own benefit. There is so little understanding of devotion to a principle that no one can believe in disinterestedness, and you will certainly do more good through this example of selflessness and the moral effect it will have on people’s minds than you would have been able to [85] do on the ministerial bench. I would have liked to embrace you, my dear sir, when you taught me, through this conduct, that your heart is equal to your intelligence. Your noble actions will not go unrewarded; you are in a country in which public probity is not discouraged through ridicule.

Since we are talking about devotion, this will lead me on to the other part of your good letter. You advise me to go to Paris. I, myself, feel that at this decisive moment I should be at my post. My own interest as well as that of the cause requires this. For the last two months, our newspapers have been serving up a pile of nonsense on the League, which they would not be able to do if I were in Paris, as I would not let one of these escape without battling with it. On the other hand, since I am better informed than many others on the influence of your movement, I would acquire a certain authority in the eyes of the public. I can see all this, but I languish in a village in the département of the Landes. Why? I think I have mentioned this in one of my letters. I have an honorable and uneventful, although modest situation here.111 In Paris, I could earn my living only by my pen, something I do not criticize in others but to which I have an inexpressible aversion. I therefore have to live and die in my corner, like Prometheus on his rock.

Perhaps you will have some idea of the mental suffering I am experiencing when I tell you that we tried to organize a League in Paris. This attempt has failed and was bound to fail. The proposal was put forward during a dinner with twenty people at which two ex-ministers were present. You can imagine how much success that was likely to have! Among the guests, one wanted ½ freedom, another ¼ freedom, yet another ⅛ freedom, and perhaps three of four were ready to request freedom in principle. Just try to make a united and fervent association out of that! If I had been in Paris, a mistake like that would never have been made. I have made too close a study of what constitutes the strength and success of your organization. A vital League cannot spring up from a group of men gathered together randomly. As I wrote to M. Fonteyraud, let us be ten, five, or even two if necessary, but let us raise the flag of absolute freedom and absolute principle, and let us wait for those with the same faith to join us. If chance had caused me to be born with a more consistent fortune, with an income of ten to twelve thousand francs, there would have been a League in France right now, doubtless more than somewhat weak but bearing within it the two mightiest principles of truth and dedication.

On your recommendation, I have offered my services to M. Buloz. If he [86] had made me responsible for an article to be included in La Revue des deux mondes, I would have continued the absorbing story of the League up to the end of the ministerial crisis. But he did not even send me a reply. I very much fear that these newspaper editors see the most important events only as an opportunity to satisfy the curiosity of their subscribers, ready to shout, depending on the event, “Long live the king, long live the League!”

The Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux has just raised the banner of free trade. Unfortunately, it has taken a text, Customs Union between France and Belgium, that is in my view too restricted. I will send them a letter in which I will endeavor to show them that they would have much more power if they espoused the cause of the principle and not that of a special application to this or that treaty. It is the fallacy of reciprocity which paralyzes the efforts of this chamber. Treaties smile on it because it sees the possible stipulation of reciprocal benefits, reciprocal concessions, and even reciprocal sacrifices. Under this liberal veneer, the disastrous thought still lies hidden that imports are an evil in themselves and should be tolerated only when foreigners have been persuaded to tolerate our exports in their turn. As a model to be followed, I would enclose with my letter a copy of the famous deliberation of the Chamber of Commerce of Manchester on 13th and 20th December 1838.112 Why does the Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux not take the generous initiative in France that the Chamber of Commerce of Manchester took in England?

As I know how extensive your commitments are, I scarcely dare to ask you to write to me. Nevertheless, please remember from time to time that your letters are the most effective balm for soothing the boredom of my solitude and the torments arising from my feeling of uselessness.

Letter 51. Mugron, 9 Feb. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 51. Mugron, 9 Feb. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 122-24) [CW1, pp. 86-88].

Text

My dear sir, when you receive this letter you will be in the line of fire113 of the discussion. I hope, however, that you will find a moment for our country, France, for in spite of the interesting things you tell me about the state of [87] affairs in your country, I will not discuss them. I would have nothing to say about them and would waste precious time in expressing feelings of admiration and happiness of which you have no doubt. Let us therefore discuss France. But before we do, I want to put an end to the English question. I have seen nothing in your Peel’s measure that relates to wine. This is certainly a major fault in terms of political economy and public policy. A final vestige of the policy of reciprocal treaties is to be found in this omission, as well as that in the case of timber. This is a stain on Sir Robert Peel’s project, and it will detract hugely from the moral effect of the whole, precisely on the classes, in France and in the north, who were the most disposed to accept this elevated teaching. This omission and the sentence “We shall beat all other nations” are fuel for the game of prejudice; they will feast on them for a long time. They will see in them the secret and Machiavellian ideas of perfidious Albion. Please, put forward an amendment. However great the absolutism of Sir Robert Peel, he could not resist your arguments.

I have now returned to France (from which I have scarcely departed). The more I reflect, the more I have reason to congratulate myself on one thing that at first caused me some anxiety. It is having included your name in the title of my book. Your name has now become popular in my country, and with your name, so has your cause. I am snowed under with letters. I am asked for details, newspapers open their columns to me, and the Institut de France has elected me a corresponding member with MM Guizot and Duchâtel voting for me. I am not blind enough to attribute this success to myself; I owe it to the relevance of the case and to the fact that the right time has come, and I appreciate it, not for my own sake but as a means of being useful. You will be surprised that all of this has not persuaded me to take up residence in Paris. This is the reason. Bordeaux is preparing a major demonstration, too large in my opinion, as it will include a great many people who think they are free traders and who are no more free traders than Mr. Knatchbull. I consider that my role at this time is to put to good use my knowledge of the methods of the League, and to ensure that our association is based on solid foundations. Perhaps you will be sent the issue of Le Mémorial bordelais in which I have included a series of articles on this subject.114 I insist and will continue to insist to the end that our League, like yours, be devoted to an absolute principle and if I do not succeed in doing this I will abandon it.

[88]

This is what I am afraid of. In demanding a wise freedom and moderate protection, we are sure to gain a great deal of sympathy in Bordeaux and that will please the founders. But where will all this lead? To the Tower of Babel. It is the actual principle of protection that I wish to breach. Until this business is settled, I will not go to Paris. I have been told that a meeting of forty to fifty traders will be taking place in Bordeaux. It is there that the bases for a league will be established, on which I have been invited to give my opinion. Do you remember that we have searched in vain for your rule in the Anti-Bread Tax Circular? How I regret now that we were not able to find it! If Mr. Paulton could spend an hour looking for it, the time would not be wasted, for I fear that our League might adopt shaky founding principles. After this session, there will be a grand meeting at the Exchange to raise a League fund. The mayor of Bordeaux has taken up his position at the head of the movement.

I have heard about the address you received from the Société d’économie politique115 but I have not read it. I hope it is worthy of you and our cause!

I beg your pardon for talking at such length about France, but you will understand that the weak cries it utters are almost as interesting to me as the virile accents of Sir Robert.

Once the business in Bordeaux is settled, I will go to Paris. The hope that you will visit has made my decision for me.

I will draw up a plan for the distribution of fifty copies of my translation.

Letter 52. Bordeaux, Feb. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 52. Bordeaux, Feb. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 124-26) [CW1, pp. 88-90].

Text

My dear sir, you will doubtless be interested to learn that a demonstration is taking place in Bordeaux in favor of free trade. The association has now been constituted. The mayor of Bordeaux has been appointed its president. Before long, the subscription list will be opened and we hope that this will produce about a hundred thousand francs. This is a fine result. I dare not hold out a great deal of hope and fear that our somewhat timid beginnings may raise obstacles for us later. We did not dare set out the principle boldly. We limit ourselves to saying that the association demands the abolition of [89] protectionist dues as quickly as possible. In this way, the question of gradual progress has been retained and your total and immediate could not be passed. In view of people’s lack of intellectual development in this respect, it would have been useless to insist, and it is to be hoped that the association, whose aim is to enlighten others, will have the effect of enlightening itself.

When this matter has been settled, I am determined to go to Paris. I have received several letters, which give me to understand that the huge sector of industry entitled “Articles of Paris”116 is ready to start a movement. I thought that my duty lay in setting aside any personal reasons I had for staying in my corner. I assure you that I am making a sacrifice to the cause whose merit lies in its lack of visibility.

In the last month, my book117 has had an extraordinary success in Bordeaux. The prophetic tone with which I announced the reform has given me a reputation that I scarcely merit, since all I have had to do is be the echo of the League. I am taking advantage of it nevertheless, for advertising purposes. When I am in Paris, I will take advice to see whether it would not be appropriate to produce a second edition in a low-cost format. I am sure that the association in Bordeaux will come to my aid if need be. You would spare me a great deal of work if you would suggest two speeches by MM Bright, Villiers, and others after consulting them. This would avoid my having to reread the three volumes of the League. I need these men to indicate the speeches in which they dealt with the question from the highest and most general point of view, and where they refuted the most universally held fallacies, especially reciprocity. I will add comments, statistical information, and portraits. Lastly, I also need you to indicate a few parliamentary sessions, especially the stormiest ones, in which free traders were attacked the most relentlessly. A work like this, sold for three francs,118 will do more than ten treatises on economics. You cannot imagine the good that the first edition did in Bordeaux.

I cannot help deploring the fact that your prime minister let slip the opportunity of arousing astonishment in Europe. If, instead of saying, “I need new subsidies to increase our army and navy forces,” he had said, “Since we are adopting the principle of free trade, there can no longer be any question [90] of outlets and colonies. We will give up Oregon119 and even perhaps Canada. Our disputes with the United States will disappear and I am proposing that we reduce our army and navy.” If he had said this, the effect would have been as great a difference between this speech and the treatises on economics, which we are still reduced to producing, as between the sun and treatises on light. Europe would have been converted within a year and England would have won on three fronts. I will not list them as I am overcome by tiredness.

Letter 53. Bordeaux, 19 Feb. 1846. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 53. Bordeaux, 19 Feb. 1846. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 65-66) [CW1, pp. 90-91].

Text

My dear Félix, I had promised to write to you about the events in Bordeaux. I have been so interrupted by visits, meetings, and other annoying incidents that the time for postal collections always arrives before I have been able to honor my promise; what is more, there is not much to tell you. Things are happening very slowly. We floundered about a great deal while settling the first stages of a constitution. Finally a makeshift version emerged from the discussion, and today it is being offered for the approval of seventy to eighty founding members. The final board will be installed with the mayor120 at its head as president, and in two or three days a grand meeting will take place to open the subscription list. It is thought that Bordeaux will raise one hundred thousand francs.121 I am longing to see it. You understand that it is only from today, when the board has been installed, that attention can be paid to a plan, since it is the board that should take this initiative. What will the plan be like? I do not know.

As for my personal contribution, it is limited to being present at the sessions, writing a few articles for newspapers,122 paying and receiving visits, and dealing with economic objections of all kinds. It has been made very clear to me that the level of education in this matter is not sufficient to keep the institution going and I would be leaving with no hope if I did not count on the institution itself to enlighten its own members.

[91]

Here I found my poor Cobden all the fashion. A month ago, there were only two copies, the one I gave Eugène123 and the copy at the bookseller’s; today, it is to be found everywhere. I would be embarrassed, my dear Félix, to tell you what an opinion has been formed of the author. Some suppose that I am a first-rate scholar, and others that I have spent my life in England studying its institutions and history. In short, I am very embarrassed at my position, since I know full well the difference between what is true and what is exaggerated in this current view. I do not know whether you will see today’s Mémorial124 (the 18th); you will understand that I would not have used this tone if I had not had a clear view of what I could achieve.

It has almost been decided that, when this organization is fully on its feet, I will go to Paris to try to rally Parisian industry, which I know is well disposed toward us. If this is successful, I foresee one difficulty, and that is to persuade the people in Bordeaux to send their money to Paris. It is certain, however, that Paris is the center from which everything must radiate, since, on the basis of the same expenditure, the Paris press has ten times more influence than the provincial press.

When you write to me (as soon as possible, please) tell me about your personal situation.

Letter 54. Bayonne, 4 March 1846. To Victor Calmètes↩

Source

Letter 54. Bayonne, 4 March 1846. To Victor Calmètes (OC1, pp. 13-14) [CW1, pp. 91-92].

Text

My good, long-standing friend, your letter warmed my heart, and reading it, it seemed to me that there were twenty-five years fewer hanging around my neck. I was drawn back to those happy days when our being arm in arm reflected our cordial relationship. Twenty-five years! Alas! The weight of them has quickly made itself felt again.

. . . . . . .

I think that in itself, my appointment as a corresponding member of the Institute125 is of little importance, and I greatly fear that many mediocre people have been able to adorn themselves with this title. However, the particular circumstances leading to my nomination do not allow me to refuse your friendly congratulations. I had published only one book, and in this [92] book only the preface was my work. Once I had returned to my solitude, this preface worked in my favor, unknown to me, since the same letter, which informed me of my appointment, announced my candidature. Never in my life had I thought of this honor.

This book is entitled Cobden and the League. I am sending it to you with this letter, which spares me from having to tell you about it. In 1842 and 1843, I endeavored to attract attention to the subject it covers. I sent articles to La Presse, Le Mémorial bordelais, and other newspapers. They were refused. I saw that my cause had been utterly destroyed by a conspiracy of silence and I had no other solution but to produce a book. This is how I came to be an author without knowing it. Now I have embarked on a career and I sincerely regret it; although I have always liked political economy, it is at a cost to myself to give it all my attention, which I like to allow to roam freely over all the subjects of human knowledge. What is more, in this economic science, just one question sweeps me along and will be absorbing me: the freedom of international relations; for perhaps you have seen that I have been assigned a role in the association that has just been formed in Bordeaux. Such is our century; you cannot become involved without being strangled in the bonds of specialization.

. . . I forgot to tell you about the elections. The electors in my region are thinking about me but we are snubbing one another. I claim that their choice is their affair and not mine, and that consequently I have nothing to ask them for. They absolutely insist that I should go and canvas their votes, doubtless in order to gain some right over my time and services, with personal aims. You can see that we do not agree and therefore I will not be nominated.

Letter 55. Paris, 16 March 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 55. Paris, 16 March 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 126-27) [CW1, pp. 92-93].

Text

My dear sir, I have waited a few days to reply to your fine and instructive letter. It is not because I did not have a great deal to tell you, but I had no time; even today, I am writing only to let you know that I am arriving in Paris. If I had had any hesitation in coming, the hope you give me of seeing you there soon would have been enough to persuade me.

Bordeaux is really in a state of uproar. It has been fashionable to be associated [93] with this work and I have found it impossible to follow my plan, which was to limit the association to the converted. I was overwhelmed by the furia francese. I can see that this will be a significant obstacle in the future, since already, when we wanted to petition the chambers to establish our claims, deep divisions came to the fore. In spite of this, we read and study, and that is a great deal. I am counting on the uproar itself to enlighten those who are creating it. Their aim is to educate others, and they will end by educating themselves.

As I arrived yesterday evening, I cannot give you any news in this letter. I would prefer a thousandfold to form a core of deeply persuaded men than generate a noisy demonstration like that in Bordeaux. I know that people are already talking about moderation, gradual reforms, and experiments. If I can, I will advise those people to form an association among themselves on these lines and leave us to form another in the domain of the abstract and absolute principle of no protection,126 as I am deeply convinced that ours will absorb theirs.

Letter 56. Paris, 22 March 1846. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 56. Paris, 22 March 1846. To Félix Coudroy [CW1, pp. 93-95].

Text

My dear Félix, I hope that you will not delay giving me your news. God willing, an arrangement has been found: I scarcely hope for it and want it desperately. Once you are free from this painful preoccupation, you will be free to devote your time to useful things, for example, your article in Le Mémorial,127 which I have had the time to read only quickly, but which I will reread tomorrow at my uncle’s. It is extremely lively and provides excellent and vivid arguments. On Monday, I will read it to the assembly, which will be quite numerous. When I am slightly better settled, I will tell you the name of the newspaper in Paris to which you should send it; at that stage, however, you should, as far as possible, refrain from mentioning wine. I have just mentioned that we were having an assembly on Monday. Its aim is to set up the board of the association. We have the duc d’Harcourt as president, and he accepted with a resolution which I liked. The other members will be MM Say, Blanqui, and Dunoyer. However, Dunoyer does not much like being in the spotlight, and I will be proposing in his place [94] M. Anisson-Duperron, a peer of France, whom I found compelling in that he is firm on the basic idea. As treasurer, we will have the baron d’Eichthal, a rich banker. Finally, a secretary, who obviously will be called upon to bear the brunt of the work, will join the management. No doubt you can foresee that these functions will fall on my shoulders. As always, I am hesitating. It will be hard work binding myself to such an arduous and assiduous task. On the other hand, I think I can be useful by devoting myself entirely to this business. Between now and Monday I must make an irrevocable decision. Besides, I hope that we will not lack subscribers. Peers, deputies, bankers, and men of letters will flock to us in sufficient numbers, and even a few major manufacturers. It seems clear that there has been a significant change in public opinion and success is perhaps not as far off as we first supposed.

Here, people very much want me to be nominated as a deputy; you cannot imagine how much credit I received for the quasi-prophecy contained in my introduction.128 It confuses and embarrasses me, as I am certain that I do not match up to my reputation, but I have very little hope with regard to becoming a deputy, since the events in Bordeaux and Paris have very little echo in Saint-Sever. And, incidentally, this would perhaps be a further reason for keeping me at a distance. Dear old Chalosse129 does not appear to understand the importance of the enterprise to which I have devoted my efforts; if this were not the case, it is probable that it would want to join in by increasing my influence in its own interest. I do not bear it any grudge; I love it and will serve it to the end, however indifferent it is.

Today, I made my entry into the Institut,130 where they discussed the question of education. University professors, led by Cousin, monopolized the discussion. I am very sorry I have left my work on the subject in Mugron, as I can see that no one considers it from our point of view.

Try from time to time to write articles to maintain the sacred flame in Bordeaux. Later we can doubtless make them into a collection to be distributed in large numbers. In my next letter to my aunt, I will add a note to tell you what they thought of your last article in the Assembly.

I am expecting our friend, Daguerre, in order to be introduced to M. de Lamenais, whom I hope to convert to free trade. M. de Lamartine has announced [95] his membership, as has our good Béranger. We will be bringing in M. Berryer as well, as soon as the association is sufficiently strongly established not to be diverted by political passions. The same is true for Arago; you see that the leading minds of our time will be on our side. I have been assured that M. de Broglie will agree to be president. I must admit that I go in some fear of the diplomatic approach, which is bound to be his habit. His presence will doubtless have a prodigious effect from the start, but we must look to the future and not be dazzled by transitory brilliance.

Letter 57. Paris, 25 March 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 57. Paris, 25 March 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 127-30) [CW1, pp. 95-97].

Text

My dear sir, as soon as I received your letter, I handed over your reply to the address from our Société d’économie politique to M. Dunoyer. I have just translated it, and it appeared to contain nothing that might have unfortunate consequences if it were published. The only thing is that we do not have any clear idea on where we should publish this precious document. Le Journal des économistes will not be published until about 20 April. This is rather late. A significant number of newspapers are committed to the monopoly, many others to anglophobia, and many others again are worthless. An approach will be made to Le Journal des débats. I will tell you the result in a postscript. Certainly, there is nothing but pure, noble, true, and cosmopolitan sentiments in your letter, as in your heart. But our nation is so susceptible to, and also so imbued with, the idea that free trade is good for you but not for us, and that you adopted it in part through Machiavellianism and to inveigle us down this path; these ideas, as I say, are so prevalent and popular that I do not know whether the publication of your address will not be inopportune at the time we are forming an association. People will not fail to say that we are the dupes of perfidious Albion. Men who know that if two and two are four in England they do not make three in France laugh at these prejudices. However, I think it prudent to dissipate rather than confront them. This is why I will be submitting the question of publication to a few enlightened men whom I am meeting this evening and I will let you know tomorrow the result of this consultation.

I stressed the words in part for this reason: our principal point of support for the campaign is the commercial class, the traders. They earn their living by trade and they want as much of it as possible. They are also used to [96] conducting business. Under this twin heading, they are our best auxiliaries. However, they support monopoly in one respect, the maritime aspect, protection for the national fleet, in a word, what is known as the surtax.131

However, it so happens that our shipowners are all taken with the idea that, in his financial plan, Sir Robert Peel has not amended your Navigation Act and that he has left the full force of protection on this; I leave you to imagine the consequences they are drawing from this. I seem to remember that Huskisson amended your Navigation Act. I have your tariff, and I do not see anywhere that goods carried by foreign ships are subject to differential taxes. I would like to be sure of this question, and if you do not have time to enlighten me, could you not ask Mr. Paulton or Mr. James Wilson to write a fairly detailed letter to me on this subject?

I will now tell you a little about our association. I am beginning to be a little discouraged by the difficulties, even physical ones, of doing anything in Paris. Distances are huge, you waste a lot of time in the streets, and in the ten days I have been here I have put only two hours to good use. I would decide to abandon the enterprise if I did not see some elements of usefulness. Peers, deputies, bankers, men of letters, all of whose names are well known throughout France, have agreed to join our society, but they do not want to take the first step. Even supposing we succeeded in bringing them together, I do not think we would be able to count on a very active contribution from people who are so busy, so carried away by the whirlwind of business and pleasure. But the sole mention of their names would have a considerable effect in France and would make it easier for similar and more practical associations to be founded in Marseilles, Lyons, Le Havre,132 and Nantes. This is why I am resolved to waste two months here. What is more, the Paris society would have the advantage of giving a little courage to free-trade deputies, who, rejected by public opinion up to now, have not dared to admit their principles.

I have incidentally not lost sight of what you told me one day, that the movement, which was constructed from the bottom up in England, should be constructed from the top down in France, and for this reason I am delighted to see such major figures join us as Harcourt, Anisson-Dupéron, Pavée de Vandœuvre, and perhaps de Broglie among the peers; Eichthal, [97] Vernes, Ganneron, and perhaps Rothschild among the bankers; and Lamartine, Lamenais, and Béranger among the men of letters. I am certainly far from believing that all these illustrious people have fixed opinions. It is instinct rather than a clear vision of the truth that guides them, but the very fact of their adhesion will commit them to our cause and oblige them to examine it. This is why I hold the cause dear, since without it I would prefer a wholly homogeneous association of a dozen followers who are free from commitments and unbound by the considerations that a name in politics imposes.

What factors sometimes make events great! Certainly if an opulent financier became devoted to the cause, or what would amount to the same thing, if a man who was profoundly persuaded and devoted had a huge fortune, the movement would quickly make progress. Today, for example, I know twenty prominent people who are watching each other, hesitating, and restrained only by the fear of tarnishing the brilliance of their name. If, instead of running from one to the other, on foot, mud spattered on my back, to meet one or two a day only and to obtain only evasive or dilatory replies, I could gather them round my table, in a sumptuous dining room, what difficulties would be overcome! Believe me, it is neither my spirit nor my heart that is failing. But I feel that this superb Babylon is not my place and I must make haste to return to my solitude and limit my contribution to a few articles in newspapers and some writing. Is it not strange that I should have reached the age at which hair goes gray, be a witness of the progress of luxury and repeat like the Greek philosopher,133 “How many things there are that I do not need!” and that I should feel overwhelmed by ambition at my age? Ambition! I dare to say that this ambition is pure, and if my poverty makes me suffer, it is because it is an invincible obstacle to the progress of the cause.

Forgive me, my dear sir, for these outpourings from my heart. I am talking about myself when I should be discussing only public affairs with you.

Farewell; I remain always your affectionate and devoted servant.

Letter 58. Paris, 2 Apr. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 58. Paris, 2 Apr. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 130-31) [CW1, pp. 97-98].

Text

My dear sir, as I told you, your reply to the address of the Société d’économie politique will appear in the next issue of Le Journal des économistes. [98] 134 I hope it will produce a good effect. However, in view of the extreme susceptibility of our fellow citizens, it was deemed appropriate not to publish it in the daily press and to wait until our Paris association was on a firmer footing.

What we lack above all is a mouthpiece, a special journal, like the League. You will tell me that this must be a product of the association. However, I firmly believe that, to a certain extent, it is the association that will be the product of the journal; we do not have the means of communication and no accredited journal can provide us with one.

For this reason, I have thought about creating a weekly journal entitled Libre échange. I received the estimate for it yesterday evening. It can be established for an expenditure of 40,000 francs for the first year and receipts, based on one thousand subscribers at 10 francs, would only be 10,000 francs; a loss of 30,000 francs.

Bordeaux will, I hope, agree to bear part of this. But I must envisage covering the total cost. I thought of you. I cannot ask England for an open or secret subsidy as this would result in more disadvantages than benefits. But could you not obtain for us one thousand subscriptions at half a guinea? This would mean receipts of 500 pounds sterling or 12,500 francs, or 10,000 francs net once postage charges have been deducted. I think that London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh would be enough to take these thousand copies in genuine subscriptions, which your agents would facilitate. There would then be no subsidy, but faithful encouragement, which could be acknowledged openly.

When I see the timidity of our so-called free traders and how little they understand the necessity of adopting hard and fast principles, I consider it essential—as I will not hide from you—to take the initiative of starting this journal and managing it, for if, instead of preceding the association, it follows it, and is obliged to take on its spirit instead of creating it, I fear that the enterprise will be still-born.

Please reply as soon as you can and give me your frank advice.

Letter 59. Paris, 11 Apr. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 59. Paris, 11 Apr. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 131-33) [CW1, p. 99].

Text

My dear sir, I hasten to tell you that your reply to the address of the economists will appear in this month’s journal, which will be published between the 15th and 20th. The translation is a little weak, as the person to whom it was mainly addressed thought it more appropriate to soften a few expressions in order to humor the susceptibility of our general public. This susceptibility is genuine, and what is more, it is cleverly manipulated. Just recently, while reading a few proofs in a printing works, I came across a book in which we were positively accused of having been bribed by England or rather by the League. As I knew the author, I persuaded him to withdraw this absurd allegation, but it made me realize the increasing danger of having any financial link with your society. I find it impossible to see anything reprehensible in the few subscriptions you may take in our writings in order to distribute them in Europe, and yet from now on I will refrain from calling on your sympathy and, independently of the reasons you give me, this is enough to make me resolve to conform to the national prejudice in this regard.

Although the movement in Bordeaux was rather impressive, I fear that it will create a great many obstacles precisely for that reason. No one dares do anything in Paris, for fear of not doing as much as Bordeaux. Right from the beginning, I predicted that an association, unnoticed at first but made up of men that were totally united and persuaded, would have a better chance than a grand demonstration. Finally, we have to act using the elements we have to hand, and one of the benefits of the association, if ever it spreads, will be to train135 the members themselves. They certainly need it. They cannot perceive the distinction between revenue-raising duties and protectionist duties. That means that they do not understand the very principle of the association, the only thing that can give it strength, cohesion, and longevity. I have developed this thesis in today’s issue of Le Courrier français, and will continue to do so.

Whatever happens, there has been incontrovertible progress in this country. Six months ago, no newspaper would support us. Today, we have five in Paris, three in Bordeaux, two in Marseilles, one in Le Havre, and two in Bayonne. I hope that a dozen peers and as many deputies will join our League and draw from it, if not enlightenment, at least courage.

Letter 60. Paris, 18 Apr. 1846. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 60. Paris, 18 Apr. 1846. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 68-70) [CW1, pp. 100-1].

Text

My dear Félix, I am totally deprived of your letters and it is true that I myself have been very negligent. You cannot believe that I have no time, but this is nevertheless true; when you are living as though so to speak “camping in Paris,” the availability of time is so bad that you end up doing nothing.

I will not tell you very much about myself. I have so many people to see that I see no one; this may seem paradoxical but it is true. I have been only once to Dunoyer’s, once to Comte’s, once to Mignet’s, and so on. I am able to have contact with the newspapers; La Patrie, Le Courrier français, Le Siècle, and Le National have opened their columns to me. I have not been able to sign up with the Débats.136 M. Michel Chevalier has offered to include my articles in it, but I want to have entry to their actual offices to avoid cuts and changes.

The association is moving forward at the speed of a tortoise; I will not have my position settled until Sunday week, when there will be a meeting. Here are the names of some of the members: Harcourt, Pavée de Vandœuvre, Admiral Grivel, Anisson-Duperron, Vincens de Saint-Laurent, peers.

Lamartine, Lafarelle, Bussières, Lherbette, de Corcelle, and a few other deputies.

Michel Chevalier, Blanqui, Wolowski, Léon Faucher, and other economists. D’Eichthal, Cheuvreux, Say, and other merchant bankers.

The difficulty is to gather together these figures who are borne along in the political whirlwind. Behind them, there are young people who are more fervent and who must be contained at least provisionally, so as not to lose the advantage of having the support of these well-known and popular names.

In the meantime, we have had a meeting of the traders and manufacturers in Paris. Our aim was to prepare them; I was very ill prepared myself and I had not devoted more than one hour to thinking about what I would have to say. I drew up a very simple plan in which I could not go wrong and was happy to find that this method was not beyond my powers. By starting very simply and in a conversational tone, without seeking to be either witty or eloquent, but only to be clear and convincing, I was able to talk for half an hour without either fatigue or shyness. Others were more brilliant. We will [101] be having another, larger meeting in a week’s time and then I will try to enthuse the Latin Quarter.

I have seen the minister of finance137 in the last few days. He approved of all I am doing and asks for nothing more than to see public opinion molded.

Farewell; time is running short and I am even afraid that I am late.

Letter 61. Paris, 3 May 1846. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 61. Paris, 3 May 1846. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 70-71) [CW1, pp. 101-2].

Text

My dear Félix, I have learned that there is an opportunity to send this letter and, although I am not at my best (as I have been holding my pen for seven hours), I do not want to let it pass without giving you my news.

I mentioned a meeting tomorrow to you and this is its subject. The addition of famous figures has buried our modest association. These people wanted to start everything again ab ovo138 and we therefore have to construct a program and draw up a manifesto, and this I have been working on all day. But there are four others who are doing the same thing. Whether we want to choose or combine, I can see a long, fruitless discussion ahead, because there are many men of letters, many theorists, and then there is the matter of ego. I would therefore not be surprised if it were referred to yet another commission where the same difficulties will arise, since everyone except me will defend his work and will come to be judged by the Assembly. This is a pity. The manifesto will be followed by the statutes, an organization that complies with these, and subscriptions, and it is only after all this that I will be confirmed. Sometimes I feel the urge to give up, but when I think of the beneficial effect that the simple manifesto with its forty signatures will produce, I cannot summon up the courage to do so. Perhaps when the manifesto has been issued, I will go to Mugron to wait for my summons, since the thought of spending months on end coping with simple formalities without doing anything useful appalls me. Besides, the electoral battle may require my presence. M. Dupérier sent me a message to say that he had formally withdrawn, and even added that he had burned his boats and written to all his friends that he had abandoned his candidature. Since this is so, if other candidates do not come forward, I may find myself confronting M. de [102] Larnac alone, and this combat does not worry me because it will be a conflict of doctrines and opinion. What amazes me is not to receive any letters from Saint-Sever. It appears that Dupérier’s communication ought to have attracted a few overtures to me. If you hear anything, please let me know.

Letter 62. Paris, 4 May 1846. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 62. Paris, 4 May 1846. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, p. 71) [CW1, p. 102].

Text

Letter 63. Paris, 24 May 1846. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 63. Paris, 24 May 1846. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 72-73) [CW1, pp. 101-2].

Text

My dear Félix, I have run around so much this morning that I cannot hold my pen properly and my writing is all trembling. What you have told me concerning the usefulness of my presence in Mugron is a constant preoccupation. But, my friend, I am almost certain that, if I left Paris, our association would collapse, and we would have to start all over again. You will make up your own mind about this; this is the position we are in: I think I told you that a commission had been appointed with full powers, but just when we were about to issue our manifesto, several of the commissioners wanted us to obtain prior authorization.139 A request was made for this and the minister agreed, but the days go by and nothing seems to come. In the meantime, the manifesto is in our files. It was certainly a mistake to request authorization; [103] we should have limited ourselves to a simple declaration. Our faint-hearted commissioners thought they were being accommodating to the minister but I think they caused him embarrassment since, especially with the elections coming shortly, he will be afraid of upsetting the manufacturers.

Nevertheless, M. Guizot has declared that he will give the authorization, M. de Broglie has made it understood that he would come over to us immediately afterward and this is why I am still being patient, but if there is any more delay I will complain loudly at the risk of demolishing everything, so as to start on another course and with other people.

You see how difficult it is to leave the field at this time. It is not that I do not want to, for, my dear Félix, Paris and I are not made for one another. There is too much to say on this subject, so we will leave it for another day.

Your article in Le Mémorial140 was excellent. Few people have read it, as it arrived only at the end of our meetings for the reason which I have told you, but I have sent it to Dunoyer and Say as well as to a few others, and everyone thought it was sufficiently lively and clear to absorb the reader and oblige him to agree. The “I will no longer be involved” could not fail to please Dunoyer a great deal; unfortunately the current view is leaning to an appalling degree in the other direction: “Involve the state in everything.” We will shortly produce a second edition of my Sophisms.141 We could include this article and a few others in this, if you write them. I can certainly tell you that this small book is destined to be circulated widely. In America, they are offering to distribute it widely, and the English and Italian newspapers have translated it almost in its entirety.142 But what annoys me a little is to see that the three or four pleasantries that I have slipped into this volume have been highly successful while the serious part has been widely overlooked. For this reason, you also should try a few buffa.143

I must end here. I have just learned that an opportunity has occurred with regard to Bordeaux and I want to take advantage of it.

Letter 64. Paris, 25 May 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 64. Paris, 25 May 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 133-34) [CW1, pp. 104-5].

Text

It is quite a few days since I last wrote to you, dear Mr. Cobden, but finally I could not have found a more appropriate opportunity to atone for my negligence, since I am pleased to introduce to you the mayor of Bordeaux, the worthy and jovial president of our association, M. Duffour-Dubergié. I do not think I need add anything to assure him of the most cordial welcome on your part. Knowing the close union which binds all the members of the League, I am even dispensing with the duty of writing to Messrs. Bright, Paulton, etc., as I am sure that, on your recommendation, M. Duffour will be admitted to your circle as a member of this great confraternity which has arisen in support of the freedom and union of peoples. And who is more worthy of your friendship than he? He it was who, through the authority of his position, his wealth, and his character, carried Bordeaux along and caused the little that has occurred in Paris to happen. He has not procrastinated and hesitated like our diplomats in the capital. His resolution has been sufficiently prompt and forceful for our government itself not to have the time to hinder the movement, even supposing it had the intention of doing so.

Please, therefore, welcome M. Duffour as the true founder of the association in France. Others will seek and maybe gain the glory for this one day. This is quite normal, but, for my part, I will always give the credit to our president in Bordeaux.

In the midst of the uproar and excitement which must be surrounding your affairs, perhaps you sometimes wonder how our small league in Paris is getting on. Alas, it is in a period of the doldrums, which is very annoying for me. As French law requires associations to be authorized, several of our most prominent members stipulated that this formality should precede the release of any information outside. We therefore submitted our request, and since then we are dependent on the goodwill of the ministers. They have indeed promised authorization, but they have not issued it. Our colleague, M. Anisson-Dupéron, is devoting to this matter a zeal for which he should be praised. He combines the vigor of a young man with the maturity of a peer of France. Thanks to him, I hope we will succeed. If the minister stubbornly refuses to authorize us, our association will be dissolved. All the faint-hearted will leave, but there will always remain a certain number of members with greater resolve and we will constitute an organization on different [105] lines. Who knows whether in the long run this sorting out will not be an advantage to us?

I must admit that I will regret having to abandon fine, well-known names. These are needed in France, since our laws and customs prevent us from doing anything with and through the people. We can scarcely act with just the enlightened classes and, since this is so, men who have acquired a reputation are excellent auxiliaries. But, as a last resort, it is better to do without them than not to do anything at all.

It would appear that the protectionists are preparing a desperate defense in England. If you have a moment, I would be grateful if you would give me your views on the outcome of the struggle. M. Duffour will witness this great conflict. I envy him his good fortune.

Letter 65. Mugron, 25 June 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 65. Mugron, 25 June 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 134-36) [CW1, pp. 105-6].

Text

It is not for you to apologize, my dear sir, but for me, for you are making great and noble use of your time while I, who am wasting mine, ought not to have waited so long without writing to you. You are at the end of your work. The hour of triumph has sounded for you. You can give yourself the testimonial that you have left a deep imprint of your passage on this earth and humanity will bless your name. You have led your huge campaign with the vigor, comprehensiveness, prudence, and moderation that will be an eternal example for all future reformers and, I say this most sincerely, the perfection you have brought to the art of campaigning will be a greater benefit for the human race than the specific purpose of your efforts, however great that is. You have taught the world that genuine strength lies in public opinion and shown it how to put this strength to work. I take it upon myself, my dear Cobden, to award you the palm of immortality and anoint your forehead with the mark of a great man.

As for me, you will see from the date of my letter that I have deserted the battlefield, not because of discouragement but temporary disgust. It must be said; the task in France is more specialized and less likely to make inroads in public sympathy. The material and moral obstacles are also huge. We have neither the railways nor the penny postage.144 We are not accustomed to subscriptions; [106] French minds are impatient with all hierarchy. We are capable of discussing the details of a regulation or the formalities of a meeting for a year. Lastly, our greatest misfortune is that we have no genuine economists. I have not met two who are capable of supporting the cause and its doctrine in a comprehensive and correct fashion, and we see the most gross errors and concessions infiltrating the speeches and writings of those known here as free traders. Communism and Fourierism absorb all the young minds, and we will have a host of outer ramparts to destroy before being able to attack the heart of the fortress.

If I turn my gaze on myself, I can feel tears of blood coming to my eyes. My health does not allow me to work assiduously and . . . but what use are complaints and regrets!

The September Laws145 which oppose us are not greatly to be feared. On the contrary, the government is doing us a favor by placing us in this posture. It offers us the means of stiffening the public fiber a little and melting the ice of public indifference. If it wanted to counter the rise of our ideas, it could not have gone about it in a worse way.

You make no mention of your health. I hope it is a little stronger. I would be very sorry if you came to Paris and I did not have the pleasure of doing you the honors there. It is doubtless an instinct for contrast that incites you to go to Cairo, contraria contrariis curantur.146 You wish to escape the fog, liberty, and unrest in Britain by seeking refuge under the sun, despotism, and political inertia of Egypt. Oh that I might, in seven years’ time, go to seek rest from the same weariness in the same place!

You are thus going to dissolve the League! What an instructive and imposing prospect! What is the abdication of Scylla compared with such an act of selflessness? This is the time for me to rewrite and complete my History of the League. But will I have the time? The flow of affairs takes up all my waking hours. I also need to produce a second edition of my Sophisms and I would very much like to write a small book entitled Economic Harmonies. It will make a pair with the other; the first demolishes and the second would build.

Letter 66. Bordeaux, 21 Jul. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 66. Bordeaux, 21 Jul. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 136-38) [CW1, pp. 107-8].

Text

My dear and excellent friend, your letter found me here in Bordeaux, where I have come to attend a meeting following the return of our president, M. Duffour-Dubergié. This meeting will take place in a few hours’ time; I am to speak at it and this is exercising my mind to such an extent that you must excuse the confusion and incoherence of this letter. Nevertheless, I do not want to put off writing to you since you have asked me to reply by return.

I do not need to tell you how pleased I was to learn of the conclusion of your great and glorious enterprise. The keystone has fallen, and the entire monopoly structure will crumble, including the colonial system, which is linked to the protectionist system. This above all is what will have a strong influence on public opinion in Europe and dissolve the truly disastrous and profound prejudices in this country.

When I entitled my book Cobden and the League, no one had told me that you were the soul of this powerful organization and that you had communicated to it all the qualities of your mind and heart. I am proud that I sensed this and that I foresaw, if not anticipated, public opinion throughout England. For the love of man, please do not reject the acknowledgment the country wishes to give you. Allow the people to express their gratitude freely and nobly. England is honoring you and is honoring herself even more through this great act of justice. Be sure that she is investing the hundred thousand pounds sterling at a high rate of interest, since as long as she knows how to reward its faithful servants well she will be well served.147 She will never lack great men. Here in France, we also have fine minds and noble hearts, but their potential remains unrealized because the country has not yet learned this important but oh, so simple lesson: honor what is honorable and despise what is despicable. The gift they are preparing for you is the glorious culmination of the most glorious enterprise that the world has ever seen. Leave these great examples to reach future generations in their entirety.

[108]

I will be going to Paris at the beginning of August. It is not likely that I will be arriving there as a deputy. The same cause is still forcing me to wait for this mandate to be imposed on me, and in France, this wait can be long. But, like you, I think that the work I have to do is outside the legislative perimeter.

I have just left the meeting, at which I did not speak.148 But, with reference to election as a deputy, an extraordinary thing has happened to me. I will tell you about it in Paris. Oh, my friend, there are countries in which you have to have a truly great spirit to concern yourself with the public good, so great an effort is deployed to discourage you!

Letter 67. Bordeaux, 22 Jul. 1846. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 67. Bordeaux, 22 Jul. 1846. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 73-74) [CW1, pp. 108-9].

Text

My dear Félix, I wrote to you the day before yesterday and would not be surprised if my letter went astray, since for the last month I have been going from one misunderstanding to another. I would need a ream of paper to tell you all that has happened to me. They are not pleasant things but they do have the advantage of letting me make great strides in acquiring knowledge of the human heart. Alas! Perhaps it would be better to retain the few illusions we should have at our age.

First of all, I have found out that the delay in sending out my brochure is the result of intrigue. My letter to M. Duchâtel149 offended him, but it forced out of him the authorization that so many highly placed figures were pursuing for the last three months. And do you think the association in Bordeaux was grateful? Not at all. There has been a complete change of opinion against me here, and I have been branded a radical; my brochure was the final straw. M. Duchâtel has written to the prefect, the prefect summoned the manager of Le Mémorial150 and hauled him over the coals, and the manager has atoned for his fault by delaying my brochure. In spite of this, right now, the four hundred copies should have reached you.151

As for what is happening with regard to the elections, it would take too [109] long and I will tell you when we meet. The result is that I will not be supported anywhere, except perhaps in Nérac.152 However, I see this as a mere show of opposition and not as a serious candidature, unless the unexpected happens on election day.

Yesterday we had a meeting of the association in Bordeaux. The way I was begged to speak made me beg to refuse.

I presume that right now all the electors of Saint-Sever have received my brochure. This is all I have to offer them with my devotion to duty. Distributing it must be giving you much work. If there are four of you, however, the task will be lighter. I hope to have returned to Mugron by the 28th or 29th, just in time to vote.

Farewell, my dear Félix, I will not seal this letter until this evening, in case I have anything to add.

P.S. I have just had an important interview, which I will tell you about. But the result is that Bordeaux will not be supporting me; they want an economist who is right in the center. The minister has recommended Blanqui.

Letter 68. Paris, 23 Sept. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 68. Paris, 23 Sept. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 138-39) [CW1, pp. 109-10].

Text

Although I have not a great deal to tell you, my dear friend, I do not want to let any more time go by without writing to you.

We are still in the same situation, with a great deal of trouble bringing an organization to birth. I hope, nevertheless, that next month will be more productive. First of all, we will have a headquarters. That is a good start; it is the embodiment153 of the League. Next, several leading men154 are returning from the country, among whom is the excellent M. Anisson, whom I have been missing.

In the meantime, we are preparing for a second meeting on the 29th. This is perhaps a little dangerous, since a fiasco in France tends to be deadly. I am offering to speak at it and I will reread your lesson on eloquence several times between now and then. Could I obtain this from a better source? I assure you that I will have at least two precious, although negative, qualities [110] in the absence of others, simplicity and brevity. I will not try to make people laugh or cry, but to elucidate a difficult point of economic science.

There is one point on which I do not agree with you, that is, on public speaking. I think it is the most powerful instrument of propagation. Is it nothing to have several thousand listeners who understand you much better than if they were reading you? Afterward, the next day, everyone wants to know what you said and the truth goes on its way.

You know that Marseilles has issued its pronunciamento; the people there are already richer than we. I hope they will help us, at least in founding the journal.

Brussels has just formed its association. And what is surprising, the association has just published the first issue of its journal. Alas! The Belgians probably do not have a law on stamps and another on surety.155

I am impatient to know whether you have visited our marvelous Pyrenees. The mayor of Bordeaux wrote to tell me that my desolate Landes appeared to you to be the land of lizards and salamanders.156 And yet deep affection can transform this frightful desert into an earthly paradise! But I hope that our Pyrenees will have reconciled you to the south of France. What a shame that all the provinces that surround Pau, the Juranson, the Béarn, the Tursan, the Armagnac, and the Chalosse cannot carry out trade that would be so natural with England!157

Let us return to the subject of associations. One is being formed of protectionists. This is the best thing that could have happened to us, as we really need a stimulus. It is said that another is being formed in favor of free trade in raw materials and the protection of factories. That one, at least, does not pretend to be based on a principle and take account of justice. It thus considers itself to be eminently practical. It is clear that it cannot stand alone and that it will be absorbed by us.

Letter 69. Paris, 29 Sept. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 69. Paris, 29 Sept. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 140-42) [CW1, pp. 111-13].

Text

My dear friend, I have been to visit M. de Loménie,158 who has come to my lodgings though we still have not met. But I am meeting him tomorrow and will make available to him all my documents and those of Fonteyraud. In addition, I will offer him my cooperation, either for translating or, if need be, giving his article a veneer of economic orthodoxy. I have at the forefront of my memory the passage from your closing speech in which you make an excursion into the future and from there open up to your listeners a horizon that is wider and finer than that offered to you from the Pic du Midi. This speech will be translated and sent to M. de Loménie. He might well also use your excerpt on emigration, which is really eloquent. In short, let me have some information on it. The only thing is that I have to tell you that very little is said here about this gallery of famous men. I am assured that this type of work is a speculation on the amour propre of those who aspire to celebrity. But perhaps this insinuation arises from the jealousies of authors and publishers, irritabile genus,159 the vainest species of men I know after fencing masters.

I have just received your nice letter. Has it reached me in time? I have incorporated the text you indicate quite naturally in my speech. How could I not have thought of asking for your advice? This doubtless is because I have a head full of arguments and felt that I was rich. But I thought only of the subject and you have made me think of the audience. I now understand that a good speech must be supplied to us by the audience rather than by its subject. Running through mine in my head, I think that it is not too philosophical and that it combines economic science, appropriateness, and parables in proper proportion.160 I will send it to you and you will let me know your view of it for my edification. You will understand, my dear Cobden, that any tact would do me a disservice. I have as much amour propre as the next man and no one fears ridicule more than I, but that is precisely why I want good advice and good criticism. One of your remarks might spare me a thousand in the future that is opening out before me and carrying me along. A great many things will be decided tonight.

[112]

I am expected in Le Havre. Oh! What a burden is an exaggerated reputation! There, I will have to discuss the shipping interest. I remember that you had good things to say on this subject in Liverpool or in Hull. I will do some research, but if you have any good ideas relating to Le Havre, please let me have them for charity’s sake or rather, through me, bestow this charity on the fearful shipowners who are counting on the small number of trading operations to increase the number of transport facilities. What blindness! What a distortion of human intelligence!

• And I am astonished when I think of this,
• To what depths the human spirit can sink.

I will not post my letter until tomorrow, so that I can tell you about an event that I am sure will interest you as much as if it were personal.

I was forgetting to tell you that your previous letter arrived too late. I had already booked two separate apartments, one for the association and the other for me, but in the same house. We have to accept our fate with the motto that consoles Spanish people in all circumstances: no hay remedio!161 As for my health, do not worry, it is better. I believe that Providence will give me enough to see me through. I am becoming superstitious; is it not good to be this way just a little?

But here my letter is arriving at the square yard. It will pay heavy duties. This would probably not happen if the post office adopted the ad valorem duty. I am leaving some space for tomorrow.

Midnight.

The session162 has just ended. Anisson chaired it. The audience was larger than the previous time. We had five speeches including two from professors who thought they were giving classes. Very much more than I, they thought about their subject more than their audience. M. Say had a great success; he spoke with warmth and was roundly applauded. I am pleased about that, since how can one fail to like this excellent man? M—— made three excellent speeches in one. His only fault was length. I was the fifth to speak, with the disadvantage of having a harassed audience. Notwithstanding this, I had as much success as I wished. What was funny is that the only emotion I felt was in my calves. I now understand Racine’s line:

[113]

The 30th.

I have seen only one newspaper, Le Commerce. This is what it says: “Mr. Bastiat succeeded in having his economic parables accepted through an unpretentious delivery that was accompanied by a thoroughly southern eloquence.” This scant praise is enough for me and I want no more, since God preserve me from arousing envy in my colleagues!

Letter 70. Paris, 1 Oct. 1846. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 70. Paris, 1 Oct. 1846. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 74-76) [CW1, pp. 113-14].

Text

My dear Félix, I have had no news of you and consequently do not know how you are progressing in your court case. May you be close to a solution and success! Give me news of your good sister; were the baths at Biarritz beneficial for her? I am sorry you were not able to accompany her; I think Mugron must be becoming sadder and more monotonous for you with each passing day.

People in Bordeaux have written to tell me that several of our articles are being reprinted as a brochure. This is why I am in no hurry to produce a second volume of Sophisms; this would be duplication. Just writing my correspondence takes me as much time as I can devote to writing. My friend, I am not only part of the association, I am the association in its entirety, not because I lack enthusiastic and devoted colleagues when it comes to speaking and writing. As for organizing and administering this vast machine, however, I am on my own, and how long will this last? On the 15th of this month, I am taking possession of my place of work. I will then have staff. Until then, I cannot undertake any intellectual work.

I am sending you an issue of the journal that reports on our public session yesterday. I made my debut on the Paris stage in extremely unfavorable circumstances. There was a large audience and for the first time there were women in the public gallery. It had been arranged that five speakers would be heard and that each would speak for half an hour. This already made the session last for two and a half hours. I was to speak last; of my four predecessors, two were faithful to the rules and two others spoke for more than an hour; they were professors. I therefore stood up in front of an audience harangued by three hours of economics and in a hurry to leave. I myself was very tired by such an extended wait. I stood up with the terrible foreboding [114] that my head would let me down. I had prepared my speech carefully but without writing it down. You can imagine how terrified I was. How was it that I did not have a moment of hesitation or feel any worry or emotion, except in my legs? I cannot explain it. I owe it all to the modest tone with which I started. After warning the audience that they should expect no eloquence, I felt perfectly at ease and I must have succeeded since the newspapers report only this speech. This is a great test I have passed. I tell you all this frankly, as you can see, persuaded that you will be delighted both for me and the cause. My dear Félix, I am sure that we will triumph. In a short time, my fellow countrymen may trade their wines for anything they want. The Chalosse will come back to life. This is the thought that sustains me. I will not have been totally without use to my country.

I presume that I will be going to Le Havre in two or three months to organize a committee. The prefect in Rouen has warned M. Anisson “that he should take care to come at night if he does not wish to be stoned.”

I am assured that yesterday evening there was a large protectionist meeting in Rouen. If I had known this, I would have gone incognito. I would congratulate myself if these people did as we do; that would goad us on. And incidentally it is a safety valve; as long as they defend themselves through legal channels, there will be no fear of collision.

Farewell, my dear Félix. Write to me from time to time; put your solitude to good use and do something worthwhile. I very much regret not being able to undertake anything for true glory. If you think of a good way of doing so, let me know of it. I am assured that parables and jokes have greater success and more effect than the best treatises.

Letter 71. Paris, 22 Oct. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 71. Paris, 22 Oct. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 142-44) [CW1, pp. 114-16].

Text

My dear friend, I was beginning to worry about your silence. At last I have received your letter dated . . . and I am delighted to learn that you and Mrs. Cobden are enjoying being in Spain. What will happen when you see Andalusia! As far as I was able to see, in Seville and Cadiz there was an air of equality in the manners between classes which was balm to the soul. I am enchanted to learn that there are good free traders beyond the Pyrenees. Perhaps they will put us to shame. Dear friend, I think we have in common that we are free of personal jealousy. But do you have national jealousy? For my part, I scarcely feel any. I would like my country to give a good example, [115] but failing that, I would prefer even more that it receive good example rather than wait a century to take the lead. And yet . . . I cannot refrain from uttering a philosophical thought. Nations take great pride in having a great musician, a good painter, or a skillful captain, as though that added something to their own merit. It is said that “the French invent, the English encourage.” For heaven’s sake! Would you not agree that invention is a personal fact and encouragement a national fact? Bentham said of science, “What propagates it is more valuable than what advances it.” I say the same of virtues.

But whither am I wandering? To the view that it matters little whether progress reaches us from the dusk or the dawn, provided that it comes.

Your speech will appear in two Paris newspapers. It was not I who translated it. I noted that you were able to give advice to more places than just Paris. Moreover, you did this with perfect propriety and I very much approve of your having told the Castilians that it is not necessary to kill people in order to teach them how to live.

Here we are moving slowly but we are moving. Our most recent meeting was good and the public is clamoring for another. I went to Le Havre. An association has been formed there but it did not think it necessary to adopt our title. I fear that these people have not understood the importance of rallying round a single principle. They are demanding trade reform and a reduction in consumption taxes. How much there would be to say! Trade reform! They did not dare utter the word freedom, because of shipping. A reduction in taxes! Into what topics of discussion will this draw them?

On the subject of shipping, I inserted an article in the Le Havre journal, which had a good local effect.163 M. Anisson thinks that it is at the expense of the principle. I do not think so, but it pains me to disagree with the most enthusiastic and enlightened of my colleagues. I would very much like you to be close to us to be able to settle this disagreement. But truly, a debate by letter would take too long.

I do not know whether it is to my shame or glory but I have read nothing about the marriage.164 Our journal, the Courrier,165 has been speaking [116] of nothing else for the last two months. I have told it that it would do just as well to print under its title “Journal of a Spanish Coterie.” It has lost its subscribers and is blaming it on Libre échange.166 What a shame! I really am homesick for my Landes. There, I imagined human turpitude, but it is much sadder to see it.

Farewell, my brother in arms, take care of your health and that of Mrs. Cobden, to whom I send my best regards. Be careful of the Spanish climate, which is very treacherous and destroys the lungs without appearing to affect them.

Letter 72. Paris, 22 Nov. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 72. Paris, 22 Nov. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 144-46) [CW1, pp. 116-18].

Text

My dear friend, I thank you for having made it possible for me to follow you in your travels in the newspapers of Madrid, Seville, and Cadiz. The expressions of friendship that you receive everywhere reach our fine cause, through you.167 It makes me happy to see that people’s tributes are finally reaching the right target instead of being diverted, as is customary, toward the actions that, for whatever reason, inflict the most obvious evils on the poor human race. At the same time I am very glad to learn that you are enjoying good health and that Mrs. Cobden has not suffered from such a long journey.

I share your opinion on Spain and the Spanish. However, are you not cherishing a few illusions on the degree of prosperity enjoyed by this country? I know that everyone always talks about its fertility, but the absence of rivers, canals, roads, and trees creates obstacles whose significance you should appreciate. By isolating people, they obstruct both moral and social development and the accumulation of wealth. Spain needs someone to invent a means of enabling trains to cross the mountains.

Because I have little time and scarcely enough to keep up with correspondence with my family, I will go straight to the question of free trade in France. At present we are overwhelmed. The protectionists are campaigning in depth and in the English style. Newspapers, contributions, calls to the workers, and threats to the government are all being used. When I say [117] English style, I mean that they are using a great deal of energy and a true understanding of campaigning.

In this respect, our provinces in the north are much further advanced than our départements in the south. In addition, a more pressing interest is goading them on. In twenty-four hours they have founded a journal, while we . . . would you believe that we still do not know whether Bordeaux is willing to help us or not? Marseilles and Le Havre are isolating themselves and their only reason for this is that they do not think we are practical enough, as though we had something other to do than destroy a public error. But I was expecting all this and even worse.

I have not been able to escape the need to take on the physical work myself. Lack of money on the one hand and the commitments of my colleagues on the other leave me with no alternative but to abandon everything or drink deep from this chalice. I have seen in the protectionist journal and in democratic broadsheets the strangest fallacies168 without having the time to refute them, and it is even impossible for me to gather together the material for a second volume of Sophisms, although I have them in sufficient number. The only thing is that they are all of the buffa169 type, and I would like to intersperse them with a few seria.170 As for another, more complete edition of Cobden and the League, I am not even thinking about it.

What a difference it would make, my dear friend, if I could go from town to town speaking and writing!

Be that as it may, public opinion has been awoken and I entertain hope.

It has almost been decided that we will be publishing our first issue in the first few days of December, without knowing how we will be able to continue. However, should not good causes be able to rely on Providence? I will send you a copy as often as I can contact you in your wanderings. I also hope that you will be able to gain us subscribers abroad. We have worked out that at twelve francs we need five thousand subscribers to cover our costs. We would then be able to do without Marseilles and Le Havre. In spite of the fact that we have to be very circumspect with regard to foreigners, and especially the English, I do not think there will be any disadvantages in your fellow countrymen helping us to increase the circulation of our journal in those countries in which French is widely spoken.

[118]

I have just received a letter from Bordeaux. It gives me hope that we will receive help. The mayor is working on this with good heart.

Another piece of good fortune has just happened to me. The workers have committed me to going to meet them and reach an agreement with them. If I won them over, they would carry along the democratic party. I will devote all my efforts to this.

Letter 73. Paris, 25 Nov. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 73. Paris, 25 Nov. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 147-48) [CW1, pp. 118-19].

Text

My dear friend, yesterday evening we held our third public session. The Montesquieu Hall was full and many people could not enter, which is, in Paris, the most favorable circumstance for attracting people. New classes of people appeared in the audience. I had sent tickets to workers and students at the law school. The public was admirable and, although the speakers sometimes forgot the rule of wisdom and prudence which was of course in their own interest too, stop talking! the audience listened with religious attention where they were not carried away with enthusiasm. Our speakers were MM Faucher, who commented with great emphasis and pertinence on an official letter from the protectionists to the council of ministers; Peupin, a worker, who would have been a perfect model of verve and simplicity if he had kept to his subject, from which he was rather too eager to wander; and Ortolan, who gave an eloquent speech and considered the question from a totally new point of view. This speech roused the audience and stiffened the French fiber. Lastly, Blanqui, who was as energetic as he was witty. Our worthy president opened the session with a few graceful words imbued with the fine tone that our nominal aristocracy still retains. I will send you all of this.

Speaking in public has an irresistible attraction for French people. It is therefore probable that we will be overwhelmed with requests and, as for me, I have decided to wait to be asked to speak. This makes it possible that I will have a long wait; be that as it may, it will not bother me to be ready if need be. Therefore, if you have any new ideas or a thought that, when developed, might serve as a text for a good speech, please let me have them. If my health cannot cope with the amount of internal work that has fallen upon me, I will request a holiday and take advantage of it to go to Lyons, Marseilles, Nîmes, etc. Therefore, please send me anything that you consider would be relevant for these various towns. You might write these thoughts [119] down on scraps of paper as they come to mind, and enclose them in your letters. I will mix the drink using the flavorings you have given me.

In particular, I would like to examine in depth the question of wages, that is to say, the influence that freedom and protectionism have on them. It would be no trouble at all for me to deal with this major question in economic terms, and if I had to write a book on this, I would perhaps produce a satisfactory result. But what I lack is one of the clear, striking reasons that are ready to be put before the workers themselves and which, in order to be understood, do not need all the previous notions of value, currency, capital, competition, etc.

Farewell, my dear friend, write to me in Barcelona. I think I am slightly feverish and have subjected myself to doing nothing today. This is why I am stopping, assuring you once more of my friendship.

Letter 74. Paris, 20 Dec. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 74. Paris, 20 Dec. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 148-50) [CW1, pp. 119-21].

Text

My dear friend, I had lost track of you for a while and am glad to know that you are in France, in the most delightful country on earth, if it had common sense. Ah! My friend, I was expecting our opponents to exploit blind popular passions against us, including the hatred of foreigners. But I did not think that they would succeed so well. They have once more bribed the press and the word is out to treat us as traitors and agents of Pitt171 and Coburg. Would you believe that, in my own region, this calumny has made inroads? I have had letters from Mugron to say that people dare to speak of me only within the family, so fiercely has public opinion been aroused against our enterprise. On the 29th of this month, I am due to speak in the Montesquieu Hall172 and I plan to refer to this delicate subject and develop the idea that “the English oligarchy has borne down hard upon the world, and it is this that explains the universal distrust with which anything that is done across the Channel is met. But there is a country on which it has borne down harder upon than on any other and that is England itself. This is why there is in England a class that stands up to the oligarchy and is gradually stripping it of its dangerous privileges. This is the class that has in succession achieved Catholic emancipation, electoral reform, the abolition of slavery, [120] and free trade, and that is on the point of achieving the liberation of the colonies. It is therefore working in our direction, and it is absurd to envelop it in the same hatred that we should be reserving for the domineering classes in all countries.”

That is the text. I think I will be able to dress it up sufficiently to have it accepted.173

How much I would have to tell you, my dear friend, but I do not have enough time. I am sending you the first four issues of our journal. I have marked what I have written. I was constrained, under pain of having the enterprise fail, to mention my name and now I can no longer accept the responsibility for everything that is said in it. This is going to lead to a crisis, because I need to be able to produce the journal in the way I want or else someone else must give it his signature.

Of all the sacrifices I have made to the cause, this is the greatest. Carrying on the fight in my own way was more suited to my character, sometimes writing serious and lengthy articles and at others going to Lyons or Marseilles, in short being guided by my native sensibility. Here I am, on the contrary, chained to daily polemics. However, in our country, that is the scope of usefulness.

You have no need of an introduction to M. Rossi; your reputation will open all doors to you. However, since you want one, I will send you a letter from M. Chevalier or from someone else.

Now, I believe that our efforts should be directed to the distribution of our journal, Le Libre échange. Rest assured that, as soon as we are free of the inevitable tensions accompanying a launch, this journal will be produced with a good spirit and may give considerable service, provided that it is read. Devote yourself, therefore, during your travels, to finding subscribers to it and ensure that the borders of Italy are not closed to it. Underline that it does not attack any political institution or religious belief. Italy is the country which provided the most subscribers to Le Journal des économistes. It should provide even more to Libre échange, which will appear every week and cost only twelve francs. That is not all. I think you ought to write to London or Manchester, because, after all, the cry174 against England does not prevent us from finding subscribers there. Subscriptions are a matter of life and death for us. My dear Cobden, after having directed the movement in [121] England from such a height, please do not disdain the humble mission of a subscription broker.

I am truly ashamed to send you this letter written in fits and starts and not really knowing what I am saying. I will find the time to write to you in more relaxed fashion, either tonight or tomorrow night.

Letter 75. Paris, 25 Dec. 1846. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 75. Paris, 25 Dec. 1846. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 151-52) [CW1, pp. 121-22].

Text

My dear friend, I communicated your letter to Léon Faucher. He says that “you do not know France.” For my part, I am convinced that we can succeed only by awakening a sentiment of justice and that we would not even be able to mention the word justice if we accepted the shadow of protection. We have tried it, and the only time we wanted to make overtures to a town, it laughed in our faces. It is this conviction and the certitude I have that it is not sufficiently shared that principally committed me to accepting the management of the journal. Not that it is a very real management; there is an editorial committee, which has full authority, but I hope nevertheless to give some clear color to the spirit of this broadsheet. What a sacrifice, my friend, to accept the job of a journalist and put my name at the foot of a medley! But I am not writing to you to air my complaints.

Marseilles does not appear, any more than Bordeaux, to understand the need to concentrate the action in Paris. This is weakening us. Our opponents have not made this mistake, and although their association is harboring the countless germs of division, they are containing these germs through their skill and self-sacrifice. If you have the opportunity of seeing the leaders in Marseilles, please explain the situation to them clearly.

The cry175 against England is stifling us. Formidable prejudices have been aroused against us. If this hatred for perfidious Albion were just a fashion, I would wait patiently for it to blow over. However, it has deep roots in people’s hearts. It is universal, and as I have told you, I think that in my village people no longer dare to talk of me outside the family. What is more, this blind passion serves protected interests and political parties so well that they exploit it in the most shameless fashion. As an isolated writer, I might refute them energetically, but, as a member of an association, I must act with more prudence.

[122]

Besides, it must be said that events do not favor us. On the very day that Sir Robert Peel accomplished free trade, he asked for a credit of twenty-five million for the army, as though to proclaim his lack of faith in his work and as though to throw our best arguments back in our faces. Since then, the policy of your government has always been imbued with a spirit of teasing which irritates the French people and makes it forget what might remain to it of impartiality. Ah! If I had been prime minister of England, on the occasion of Krakow176 I would have said, “The 1815 treaties have been broken. France is free! England fought the principle of the French Revolution up to Waterloo. Now it has another policy, that of nonintervention to its full extent. Let France recover its rights, like England in eternal neutrality.” And fitting action to words, I would have dismissed half of the army and three-quarters of the sailors. But I am not the prime minister.

Letter 76. Paris, 10 Jan. 1847. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 76. Paris, 10 Jan. 1847. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 152-54) [CW1, pp. 122-24].

Text

My dear friend, I received your two letters written in Marseilles almost at the same time. I agree with your merely passing through this town, as God alone knows how a longer visit would have been interpreted. My friend, the obstacle that will be constructed against us by national prejudices is much more serious and will last for longer than you appear to believe. If the monopolists had whipped up anglophobia for the needs of the cause, this strategic maneuver could easily be countered. In any case, France would have discovered the trap in a very short time. But they are exploiting a sentiment that already existed, which has deep roots in people’s hearts, and—shall I tell you?—although mistaken and exaggerated, can be explained and justified. There is no doubt that the English oligarchy has borne down painfully upon Europe, and that its pendulum policy of sometimes supporting the despots in the north to repress freedom in the south and sometimes whipping up liberalism in the south to contain the despotism in the north, must have generated an inevitable reaction everywhere. You will tell me that you should never confuse peoples with their governments. That is fine for thinkers. But [123] nations judge each other by the external action they carry out against each other. And then, I must admit, this distinction is a bit subtle. Peoples stand by their governments to a certain extent and let them act even if they do not actively help them. The constant policy of the British oligarchy has been to involve the nation in its intrigues and enterprises in order to generate in it a hostile feeling against the human race and thus keep it in a state of dependence. Now this general hostility is coming to the surface; it is a just punishment for past sins and it will survive long after these same sins disappear.

Thus the national sentiment of which the monopolists are making use is very real. In addition, it serves the parties admirably. The democrats, the republicans, and the opposition on the left all exploit it as best they can, some for making the king unpopular, others for overthrowing M. Guizot. You will agree that the monopolists have discovered in this a very dangerous power.

To outwit this maneuver, I had the idea of beginning by acknowledging the Machiavellianism and invasive policy of the British oligarchy and then saying, “Who has suffered more than the English people themselves?” revealing the sentiment of opposition that it has encountered in England from time immemorial and showing this sentiment resisting the war against American independence in 1773 [sic] and the war against the French Revolution in 1791. This sentiment was then repressed but not stifled; it still lives, it is growing and has become public opinion. This is what extracted Catholic emancipation, the extension of electoral suffrage, and the abolition of slavery from the oligarchy, and more recently, the destruction of monopolies. It will also extract the liberation of trade with the colonies. And on this subject, I will show that the liberation of trade will lead to political liberation. Therefore, invasive politics will have ceased to exist, since we do not give up invasions that have been achieved to run after new forms of invasion.

Following this, through translations of writings by you, Fox, and Thompson, I will show that the League is the mouthpiece and outward expression of the sentiment which harmonizes with that in Europe, etc., etc.; you can guess the rest. But I will need time and strength and I have neither. As I cannot write, this will be the text for the end of my next speech in the Montesquieu Hall. For the rest, I will not say anything I do not think.

How lucky you are to be under Italian skies! When will I also see the fields, the sea, and the mountains! O rus! Quando ego te aspiciam!177 And above all, when will I be in the midst of those who love me! You, yourself, [124] have made sacrifices, but they were done in order to build the foundation of civilization. In all conscience, my friend, is the same selflessness expected of someone who can bring only a grain of sand to the monument? However, I needed to think of this before; now the sword has been drawn from its scabbard. It will never return. The monopoly or your friend will go to Père Lachaise178 before it does.

Letter 77. Paris, 11 March 1847. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 77. Paris, 11 March 1847. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 76-78) [CW1, pp. 124-25].

Text

My dear Félix, your letter arrived just in time to remove the anxiety caused by your one of the previous day. However, I had the premonition that you would give me better news and my confidence was precisely based on my aunt’s somnolence, which caused you to worry, for on two occasions I was able to ascertain that it is rather a good sign where she is concerned. However, the constitution of our physical bodies is so strange that I was not very reassured by it. I was therefore waiting impatiently for your letter and unfortunately fate decreed that it was delayed for several hours today because of snow. I have it at last and am at peace. What a torment for us it is, my dear Félix, when uncertain circumstances combine with the state of uncertainty of our minds. Abandoning my poor aunt at this time when she is ill and without a relative at her side! That thought is frightful. On the other hand all the threads of our enterprise are in my hands: the journal,179 correspondence, and the accounts, and can I leave the whole structure to collapse? There was a committee meeting in which I spoke of my need to absent myself and was given to understand to what extent I was committed. However, a friend has offered to do the journal in my absence. This is a great help, but how many other obstacles remain! In the end, my aunt is feeling better. This will be a lesson to me and I will arrange to be able to take at least a few days, if I need to. For your part, my dear Félix, please keep me fully up to date.

Your white cottage beckons me. I admire and congratulate you for situating your castles in the air, where only you can attain them. Two adjoining sharecropping farms; a proper combination of fields, vineyards, pastures; a few cows; two patriarchal families of sharecroppers; two servants, who do [125] not cost much in the country; proximity to the presbytery; and above all, your good sister and your books. There is really enough there to vary, fill, and sweeten your autumn days. Perhaps one day I also will have a cottage close to yours. Poor Félix! You think that I am pursuing fame. If it were my destiny, as you say, it would escape me here, where I am doing nothing worthwhile. I can feel a new dissertation on economic science in my head and it will never emerge! Farewell, it is perhaps already too late for the post.

Letter 78. Paris, 20 March 1847. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 78. Paris, 20 March 1847. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 155-57) [CW1, pp. 125-26].

Text

My dear friend, I was filled with anxiety and even surprised not to receive news of you. I asked myself, “Has the free-trade atmosphere in Italy made him forget our protectionist region?” I thought every day of writing to you, but where would I find you, where should I address my letters? At last, I have received yours of the 7th. After my pleasure at hearing that both you and Mrs. Cobden were in good health, I have another cause for satisfaction, that of knowing Italy to be so far advanced in the right doctrine. Thus, my poor France, so far in advance of other nations in many respects, is being left behind in political economy. My national pride should be suffering, but I will whisper low in your ear, my friend, that I have little patriotism of this sort and if my country is not the one shining the light, I at least want it to shine in other skies. Amica patria, sed magis amica veritas,180 and I say to peace, the happiness of mankind, and the brotherhood of nations, in the words of Lamartine to enthusiasm:

I am writing to you, my dear Cobden, two hours before my departure for Mugron, to which the serious illness of the old aunt, who has been like a mother to me since I had the misfortune in childhood of losing mine, is summoning me urgently. How will our journal fare during my absence? I do not know and yet my name will remain affixed to it! It is truly a difficult enterprise, as you cannot make the slightest mention of passing events without the risk of upsetting the political susceptibilities of one or another colleague. This assiduous care to avoid anything that might annoy the political parties (since all are represented in our association) deprives us of three-quarters [126] of our strength. What immense good our journal might do if it contrasted the inanity and danger of current policy with the grandeur and security of free-trade policies! Before the journal was founded, I had a plan to publish a small book each month in the same mold as the Sophisms, in which I would have free rein. I really think it would have been more useful than the journal itself.

Our campaigning is not very active. We still need a man of action. When will he appear? I do not know. I should be that man, I am propelled forward by the unanimous confidence of my colleagues, but I cannot.181 My character is not suited to this and all the advice in the world cannot turn a reed into an oak. In the end, when the question will preoccupy people’s minds, I very much hope a Wilson will appear.

I am sending you the five or six latest issues of Le Libre échange. It is not very widely distributed, but I have been assured that it was not without some influence on a few of our leading men.182

It appears that this year our government will not dare to put forward a customs law that introduces significant changes into the current legislation. This is discouraging a few of our friends. As for me, I do not even want the current amendments. Down with the laws that precede the advance of public opinion! And I want not so much free trade itself as the spirit of free trade for my country. Free trade means a little more wealth; the spirit of free trade is a reform of the mind itself, that is to say, the source of all reform.

You tell me about Naples, Rome, Sardinia, and the Piedmont. But you say nothing about Tuscany. However, this region must be very curious to see. If you come across any good book on the state of this region, please try to send it to me. I would not be displeased to have a few of the oldest Italian economists, for example, Nicolò Donato, in my humble library. I think that, if fame were not somewhat capricious, Turgot and Adam Smith, while continuing to be acknowledged as great men, would lose their reputation as inventors.

Letter 79. Paris, 20 Apr. 1847. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 79. Paris, 20 Apr. 1847. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 157-59) [CW1, pp. 126-29].

Text

My dear friend, your letter of the 7th, written from Rome, found me at my post. I spent three weeks with a sick relative. I hoped that this journey [127] would also restore me to health, but this has not been so. Influenza has degenerated into a stubborn cold and I am currently spitting blood.183 What astonishes and frightens me is to see how far a few drops of blood expelled from the lungs can weaken our poor bodily system, especially the head. I find it impossible to work and very probably I will be asking the council for a further leave of absence. I will take advantage of this to go to Lyons and Marseilles, to strengthen the links with our various associations, which are not as closely in agreement as I would wish.

I have no need to tell you how much I share your views on the political results of free trade. We are being accused within the democratic and socialist party of being devoted to the cult of material interests and of bringing everything down to questions of wealth. I must admit that when it concerns the masses I do not share this stoic disdain for wealth. This word does not mean having a few écus more; it means bread for those who are hungry, clothing for those who are cold, education, independence, and dignity. But after all, if the sole result of free trade were to increase public wealth I would not spend any more time on it than on any other matter relating to agriculture or industry. What I see above all in our campaigning is the opportunity to confront a few prejudices and to have a few just ideas penetrate the consciousness of the general public. This is an indirect benefit that outweighs the direct benefits of free trade a hundredfold, and if we are experiencing so many obstacles in spreading our economic argument, I believe that providence has put these obstacles in our path precisely so that the indirect benefits can be felt. If freedom were to be proclaimed tomorrow, the general public would remain in its present rut with regard to other considerations, but initially I am obliged to deal with these ancillary ideas with extreme caution so as not to upset our own colleagues. For this reason, I am concentrating my efforts on clarifying the economic problem. This will be the starting point for more advanced views. I only hope that God will allow me three or four years of strength and life! Sometimes I tell myself that if I worked alone and for my own account, I would not have to take such precautions and my career would have been more useful.

During the three weeks I was away, a few disagreements broke out within [128] our associations. These concerned the difficult shade of meaning between revenue-raising duties and protectionist duties.184 A few of our colleagues have resigned, and it so happens that these are the most industrious. They wanted to set aside the question of raising revenue, even with respect to wheat. The majority wanted total exemption for subsistence products and raw materials. This is an initial cause of dissent. There is another relating to our finances, which are far from being adequate. This is the reason why I want to travel to the Midi, but I will not leave without warning you.

I knew about the Naples reform; M. Bursotti was good enough to send me some documents on this. I gave them to Garnier, my colleague, who has doubtless lost them since he has not returned them to me. If you have the opportunity to see M. Bursotti again, please convey my good wishes and regards to him. This also applies to MM Pettiti, Scialoja, etc.

You mention the state of our newspapers, but you probably do not know the extent and depth of the problem. The art of writing is so debased that a gang of young twenty-year-olds is dictating to the entire world through the press before they have themselves studied or learned anything. But this is not the worst. The leaders are all linked to politicians and any matter becomes a ministerial question in their hands. If only God allowed the problem to stop there! There is also venality, which knows no bounds. Prejudice, errors, and calumny are priced at so much a line. One person has sold himself to the Russians, another to protectionism, a third to the university, and yet another to the banks, etc. And we call ourselves civilized! I truly believe that at the very most we have a foothold in the path of civilization.

Will you allow me, my dear friend, to acknowledge with some reservations the accuracy of this axiom, “Trade is the exchange of the superfluous for the essential”? When two men, in order to carry out more work in the same time, agree to share the work, can it be said that one of the two or even neither of the two is making a superfluous contribution? Is the poor devil who works twelve hours a day to earn his bread making a superfluous contribution? Trade, in which I believe, is no more than the separation of occupations or the division of labor.

It would be desirable for the pope185 to make his views on economics [129] known, even though he cannot carry them out. This would encourage part of the clergy in France, who are not very informed about our cause but who are not opposed to it either, to support us.

Letter 80. Paris, 5 July 1847. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 80. Paris, 5 July 1847. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 159-62) [CW1, pp. 129-31].

Text

My very dear friend, the details you tell me about Italy and the state of knowledge on economics in that country were of great interest to me. I received the precious collection186 which you were good enough to send me. Alas! When will I have the time to look at them? At least I will have them available for all my friends so that, one way or another, your generous intentions will not be fruitless.

You are good enough to ask after my health. I have an almost constant cold, and if this is the case in July, what will it be like in December? But what worries me the most is the state of my brain. I do not know what has happened to the ideas which it used to produce in such abundance in the past. Now I am running after them and I cannot catch them. This worries me. I feel, dear friend, that I ought to have remained outside the association and retained the freedom to go at my own pace, to write and speak when I wished and how I wished. Instead of this, I am bound by the most indissoluble bonds by my home circumstances, the journal, finance, administration, etc., etc., and the worst of it is that this is irremediable, given that all my colleagues are otherwise occupied and can barely give their minds to our affairs during the rare meetings we have.

My friend, the ignorance and indifference in this country with regard to political economy are well beyond anything I could have imagined. This is not a reason for becoming discouraged; on the contrary, it is a reason for us to sense the usefulness and even urgency of our efforts. But I have now understood one thing, which is that free trade is a goal that is too far ahead of us. It will be fortunate if we manage to remove a few obstacles from the path to it. The greatest of these obstacles is not the protectionist party but socialism, with its many ramifications.187 If monopolists were the only adversaries, [130] they would not be able to handle the debate. However, socialism comes to their rescue. It accepts free trade in principle but postpones its implementation until the time when the world is organized in accordance with the design of Fourier or some other inventor of social order. And what is amazing is that, in order to prove that free trade would be harmful before that, they take up all the arguments put forward by monopolists, the balance of trade, the export of specie, the superiority of England, etc., etc.

This being so, you will answer that confronting the monopolists is to combat the socialists. No. Socialists have a theory of the oppressive nature of capital, which they use to explain the inequality of the condition and all the suffering of the poverty-stricken classes. They call upon the passions, sentiments, and even the best instincts of men. They attract young people, highlight the evil, and claim to have its remedy. This remedy consists of an artificial social order of their invention which will make all men equal and happy without their needing any enlightenment or virtue. Provided always that all socialists were in agreement on this social order, we might hope to shoot it down in people’s minds. But you will understand that, in this realm of ideas, and as soon as it is a question of molding a social order, each person forges his own design and each morning we are assailed by new inventions. We therefore have to combat a hydra which grows ten heads as soon as we cut off one.

The unfortunate thing is that this method is powerfully attractive to the young. They are shown suffering and through this their hearts are initially touched. Then they are told that anything can be cured through the use of a few artificial schemes, and in this way their imagination is brought into the campaign. How difficult it is for them subsequently to listen to you when you come forward to disillusion them by setting out the beautiful but severe laws of social economics and say to them: “To eradicate evil from this world (and just that part of evil over which human action has some power), the procedure takes longer; vice and ignorance have to be eradicated first.”

Being struck by the danger in the path along which the young were rushing headlong, I took the initiative of asking young people to listen to me. I gathered together students from the schools of law and medicine, i.e., the [131] young men who, in a few years’ time, will be governing the world, or France at least. They listened to me with goodwill and friendliness but, as you will readily understand, without understanding me very well. No matter; since the experiment has been started I will continue it to the end. You know that I am still considering the plan of a small work entitled Economic Harmonies. This is the positive point of view, whereas the Sophisms are negative. To prepare the ground, I distributed the Sophisms to these young people. Each one received a copy. I hope that this will unblock their minds a little, and at the end of the holidays I plan to set out the harmonies methodically.

You will now understand, my friend, what store I set by my health! Oh, may God allow me at least one year more of strength!188 May He allow me to set out to my young fellow citizens what I consider to be the true social theory in the following twelve chapters: “Needs,” “Production,” “Property,” “Competition,” “Population,” “Liberty,” “Equality,” “Responsibility,” “Solidarity,” “Fraternity,” “Unity,” and “The Role of Public Opinion,” and I will place my life in His hands without regret, indeed with joy.189

Farewell, my friend. Please thank Mrs. Cobden for her good wishes; I send you both every good wish for your happiness.

Letter 81. Paris, Aug. 1847. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 81. Paris, Aug. 1847. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, p. 78) [CW1, pp. 131-32].

Text

Letter 82. Mugron, Monday, Oct. 1847. To Horace Say↩

Source

Letter 82. Mugron, Monday, Oct. 1847. To Horace Say (OC7, p. 380) [CW1, p. 132].

Text

. . . Our country is in great need of instruction in economics. Ignorance in this respect is so great that I am in great fear for the future. I fear that governments will one day bitterly repent having hidden their light under a bushel. The experience I have just gained from this journey has shown me that our books and newspapers are not enough to spread our ideas. Apart from the fact that they have very few subscribers, most of these subscribers do not read them. I have seen Le Journal des économistes still as untouched in the bookstores as the day it was published by our good friend Guillaumin, and Libre échange piled on counters still encircled by its band. Is this not discouraging? I think that oral teaching must come to the aid of written teaching. Among those who attend a session, there are always a few who conceive a desire to study the question. Committees should be organized in towns and lecturers should then be sent around constantly. But how many of these do we have who are able to devote themselves to this work? For my part, I would do it willingly if I were given a completely free hand. I am tempted to try the experiment in Bordeaux. Without this, we can do but little. . . .

Letter 83. Paris, 15 Oct. 1847. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 83. Paris, 15 Oct. 1847. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 162-66) [CW1, pp. 132-35].

Text

My dear friend, I learned of your return to London in this morning’s journals with a great deal of pleasure. I have not had any news of you for so long! I hope that you will not neglect to write to me as soon as you are rested a little from your fatigue and that you will tell me about the reactions you have had to our program in northern Europe.

Here progress is very slow, where there is any progress at all. The crisis over subsistence products and the financial crisis have managed to put our doctrines in the shade. It appears that Providence is accumulating problems [133] at the start of our work and is taking pleasure in making it more difficult. Perhaps it is part of the divine plan to make success dearly bought and to allow no objection to remain unheard, in order that freedom should become part of our laws only after it has become firmly embedded in public opinion. With this in mind, I will not view the delays, difficulties, obstacles, and trials as misfortunes for our cause. By prolonging the struggle, these will enable us to clarify not only the principal issue but also a great many ancillary matters which are equally as important. Success in legislation is receding, but public opinion is maturing. I would therefore not complain if we were equal to our task. We are, however, very weak. Our militant members have been reduced to four or five stalwarts, almost all of whom are very busy in other spheres. I myself lack practical education; my type of approach, which is to examine principles, makes me unfit to debate events when they accumulate, as I should. What is more, I lose intellectual strength when my physical strength fails. If I could negotiate with nature and exchange ten years of sickly life for two years of vigor and health, the bargain would be quickly struck.

We are also encountering major obstacles from your side of the Channel. My dear Cobden, I must speak frankly to you. In adopting free trade, England has not adopted the policies which logically result from it. Will it do so? I do not doubt this, but when? That is the question. The position that you and your friends will be adopting in Parliament will have an immense influence on our undertaking. If you repudiate your diplomatic policy with energy and if you manage to reduce the size of your naval forces we will be strong. If not, what sort of figure will we cut in the eyes of the public? When we forecast that free trade will lead English policy down the path of justice, peace, economy, and colonial independence, will France be bound to take our word for it? There is an inveterate distrust of England here, which I would go so far as to call a feeling of hostility, which is as old as the very names French and English. Well then, this feeling is excusable. Its mistake is to disapprove globally of all your parties and fellow citizens. But should not nations judge each other by their external acts? It is often said that nations should not be confused with their governments. This adage is both true and false, and I dare say that it is false with regard to those peoples who have constitutional means of influencing public opinion. Bear in mind that France is not educated in economics. Whenever the French read history, therefore, and when they note the succession of invasions by England, when they study the diplomatic means which led to these invasions, when they see a centuries-old system followed assiduously whether the Whigs or the [134] Tories are at the helm of state, and when they read in your newspapers that England currently has thirty-four thousand sailors on warships, how do you expect them to trust in the strength of a principle, which incidentally they do not understand, to bring about a change in your policy? Something else is needed, namely deeds. Restore free trade to your colonies, repeal your Navigation Act,190 and above all disband your naval forces and retain only those that are essential for your security, and in so doing reduce your overheads and debts and relieve your population, cease to threaten other peoples and the freedom of the seas, and then, you may be sure, France will pay attention.

My dear Cobden, in a speech I gave in Lyons, I dared to forecast that this legislature, which has seven years more to run, would bring your political and economic systems into harmony. “Before seven years are up,” I said, “England will have reduced its army and navy by half.” Do not make me tell a lie.191 I met only with incredulity. I am being blamed for being a prophet; I am taken for a fanatic with short-term views who fails to understand British wiles. I, for my part, have confidence in two forces, the force of truth and the force of your true interests.

I do not have a detailed knowledge of what is happening in Athens and Madrid. What I can tell you is that Palmerston and Bulwer inspire universal mistrust. You will answer that if Mr. Bulwer is scheming in Madrid, M. Glucksberg192 is doing the same. So be it. But if the former is acting against the interests of France as the latter is doing against the interests of England, there is nevertheless this difference, that England boasts that it knows where its interests lie. We are still imbued with our old ideas. Is it surprising that our actions reflect this? You, on the other hand, who have shed these ideas, should now reject the acts that go with them. Repudiate Palmerston and Bulwer. Nothing would do more to place us, free traders, in an excellent position in the public’s eyes. What is more, I would like you to tell me the position you intend to take on this matter in Parliament. I will start to influence public opinion here.

[135]

I must admit, my dear friend, that, although I am against any form of charlatanism, if you have a majority and are in a position to bring in a new policy in accordance with the principles of free trade, I would like you to do this with some pomp and ceremony. If you reduce your navy, I would like you to link this measure specifically to free trade and proclaim loudly that England had gone down the wrong path and that, because her current purpose is diametrically opposed to that it has pursued up to now, its means need to be the opposite as well.

I will not talk to you about wine. I see that your financial situation does not allow you to pursue major tax reform. However, is it too much to ask for a moderation in the dues which will not be harmful to your revenues? I would like it to be you personally who puts forward this proposal, and I will tell you why some other time. I have room only to assure you of my friendship.

Letter 84. Paris, 9 Nov. 1847. To Richard Cobden↩

Source

Letter 84. Paris, 9 Nov. 1847. To Richard Cobden (OC1, pp. 166-68) [CW1, pp. 135-36].

Text

My dear Cobden, I read with great interest your account of your journey and I hope to gain as much pleasure as instruction from the articles you plan to send to Le Journal des économistes.193 M. Say has already written to you about this. He is always eager to seize an opportunity to enhance this compilation which he founded and supports. Your letters are a welcome advantage to him. I urge you most sincerely to devote part of your available time to this. The cause we serve is not bounded by the borders of a nation. It is universal and will find its solution only in its acceptance by all peoples. For this reason, you can do nothing more useful than to increase the reputation and circulation of Le Journal des économistes. I am not totally satisfied with this review; I am now sorry that I did not take over its management. Philosophical argument of this sort would have suited me better than daily polemics.

The difficulties surrounding us are increasing; we do not have only vested interests against us. Public ignorance is now becoming manifest in all its sorry extent. What is more, the parties need to destroy us. Following a series [136] of circumstances which would take too long to recount here, they are all against us. All have the same goal, tyranny. They differ only on the question of knowing in whose hands the despotism will be placed. This is why the thing they fear most is a spirit of true freedom. I assure you, my dear Cobden, that, if I were twenty years younger and in good health, I would take common sense as my armor and truth for my lance, and I would be sure to win. Alas, however, the spirit cannot do anything without the body, in spite of its noble origin.

What grieves me above all, I who am so devoted to the democratic sentiment in all its universality, is to see French democracy in the vanguard of opposition to free trade. This echoes warlike ideas, an exaggerated sense of national honor and passions which seem to grow green again at each revolution; 1830 has manured194 them. You tell me that we let ourselves fall too easily into the trap set by the protectionists and that we ought to have ignored their anglophobic arguments. I think you are mistaken. Doubtless it is useful to eradicate protection, but it is even more useful to eradicate national hatred. I know my country; she has a lively attitude in which truth and falsehood are mixed. France sees an England that is capable of crushing all the world’s navies and moreover knows that it is directed by an unscrupulous oligarchy. This fact is blocking its vision and prevents France from understanding free trade. I would go even further and say that even were she to understand it, she would want none of it for its purely economic benefits. What we need to show France above all is that free trade would cause the military dangers she fears to disappear. For my part I would prefer to fight on for a few years more and overcome national prejudice as well as economic ones. I am not worried that the protectionists have selected this field of battle. My intention is to publish in our journal the debates held in Parliament and in particular the speeches by free traders.

The 15th.

My friend, I will not hide from you that I am terrified by the vacuum that is forming around us. Our opponents are full of daring and ardor. Our friends, on the other hand, are becoming discouraged and losing interest. What good is it to be right a thousandfold if we cannot make ourselves heard? The protectionists’ tactics, greatly supported by the newspapers, are to let us be right all on our own.

Letter 85. Paris, 5 Jan. 1848. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 85. Paris, 5 Jan. 1848. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 78-79) [CW1, p. 137].

Text

My dear Félix, while writing to Domenger, I am taking advantage of the opportunity just to wish you a better year than the previous ones.

I am ashamed to publish the second volume of my Sophisms; it is just a ragbag of what has already been printed in journals. A third volume will be needed to lift me up; I have material in rough form for it.195

However, I would much more like to publish the course I am giving to young students in the schools.196 Unfortunately, I have the time only to jot a few notes down on paper. This infuriates me, since I can tell you, and you know this already, that we see political economy from a slightly new angle. Something tells me that it can be simplified and more closely linked to politics and moral values.

Farewell; I must leave you as I am reduced to counting each minute.

Letter 86. Paris, 17 Jan. 1848. To Madame Schwabe↩

Source

Letter 86. Paris, 17 Jan. 1848. To Madame Schwabe (OC7, p. 420) [CW1, p. 137].

Text

I am very pleased to learn that Mr. Schwabe has had a pleasant journey and that he found the situation in England improving.

Thank you for having thought of sending me Punch. Perhaps I will find something in it for Le Libre échange, after which I will pass it on to M. Anisson or will bring it back to you myself.

I enclose five copies of the last issue of Le Libre échange. I wrote the first article on armaments in the hope that it may have some influence in England. I am very pleased to learn therefore that you will be ensuring that it gets there.

Letter 87. Paris, 24 Jan. 1848. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 87. Paris, 24 Jan. 1848. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, p. 79) [CW1, p. 138].

Text

I can write you a few words only as I am suffering from the same illness I had in Mugron and which, among other disagreeable characteristics, has deprived me of all my strength. It is impossible for me to think, let alone write.

My friend, I would have liked to discuss our campaign with you but I am not capable of this. I am not at all happy with our journal; it is weak and anemic like anything that comes out of an association. I am going to ask for total power, but alas, I will not be given health with power.

I am not receiving Le Mémorial197 (from Bordeaux), and consequently I have not seen your article “Anglophobia.”198 I am sorry about this. I might perhaps have drawn a few ideas from it, or we might have reprinted it.

Letter 88. Paris, 27 Jan. 1848. To Madame Schwabe↩

Source

Letter 88. Paris, 27 Jan. 1848. To Madame Schwabe (OC7, pp. 420-21) [CW1, p. 138].

Text

Please receive the homage of a small volume which I have just had published. It is not a weighty work; it just contains some of the trifles that have already appeared in journals. I have been assured that this superficial format is useful in its way, and this is what has decided me to continue down this path which is not at all to my taste.199

Letter 89. Paris, 13 Feb. 1848. To Félix Coudroy↩

Source

Letter 89. Paris, 13 Feb. 1848. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 79-80) [CW1, pp. 138-39].

Text

My dear Félix, I have had no news of you and do not know how your trial is going. I presume that the decree has not been issued, since you would have told me if it had. Please God that the court is properly inspired! The more I think about this matter, the more I think that the judges cannot make conjectures against common law; if this is in doubt, the eternal law of justice (and even the Code) should take precedence.

Politics are stifling our program somewhat. Besides, there is a very flagrant [139] conspiracy of silence which began with our journal.200 If I could have foreseen this, I would not have founded it. Reasons of health have obliged me to give up the management of this broadsheet. It must be added that I did not take pleasure in my involvement in view of the small number of our readers, and the divergence of political opinions of our colleagues did not allow me to stamp a sufficiently democratic management style on the journal; the finest aspects of the question had to be kept in the dark.

If there had been a greater number of subscribers, I would have been able to make this broadsheet my own property, but the state of public opinion stands in the way of this, and in addition my health is an invincible obstacle. Now I will be able to work with a little more latitude.

I am continuing to give my course to law students. My audience is not very numerous but its members come regularly and take notes; the grain is falling on fertile ground. I would have liked to have been able to write up this course, but I will probably leave only confused notes.

Farewell, my dear Félix. Write to me, tell me how your affairs and health are doing; it is not out of the question that I will come and see you before too long. Please remember me with affection to your good sister.

Letter 90. Paris, 16 Feb. 1848. To Madame Schwabe↩

Source

Letter 90. Paris, 16 Feb. 1848. To Madame Schwabe (OC7, p. 421) [CW1, p. 139].

Text

I am very grateful for all the kindnesses you shower on me. I have received your excellent syrups which have succeeded in curing me. I therefore hope to go to a concert this evening, but rather late as I am dining with M. de Lamartine, and you will understand what it costs to abandon the music of his words even for that of Chopin. However, as the concert starts late, I will tear myself away from the charming conversation of our great poet.

Endnotes to the Letters

T.21 (1845.??) "Other Questions submitted to the General Councils of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce, in 1845"↩

Source

T.21 (1845.??) "Other Questions submitted to the General Councils of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce, in 1845" (D'autres questions soumises aux conseils généraux de l'agriculture, des manufactures et du commerce, en 1845). No publishing information given. [OC7.5, pp. 20-29.] [CW6]

Text

(insert HTML of file here)

T.22 (1845.??) "The Elections. A Dialog between a deep-thinking Supporter and a Countryman"↩

Source

T.22 (1845.??) "The Elections. A Dialog between a deep-thinking Supporter and a Countryman" (Les élections. Dialogue entre un profond Publiciste et un Campagnard). No date given, but mentions King and Chamber of Peers so pre-Feb. 1848; calls this a "sophism" so possibly 1845 when he began writing sophisms in earnest. [OC7.68, pp. 280-88.] [CW1.2.3.2, p. 404-9.]

Text

T.23 "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to a Job" (Feb. 1845, JDE)↩

[CW4 draft 16 June, 2017] Source

T.23 (1845.01.15) "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to a Job " (Un économiste à M. de Lamartine. A l'occasion de son écrit intitulé: Du Droit au travail ), JDE , February 1845, T. 10, no. 39, pp. 209-223. [OC1.9, pp. 406-28] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

The Economists sometimes didn't know what to make of Alphonse Lamartine (1790-1869), 297 the Romantic poet from the lower ranks of the French aristocracy who had burst onto the literary scene in 1820 with his collection of poems Méditations poétiques , who later turned into a reformist, liberal politician during the July Monarchy with his call for the separation of church and state, his support for freedom of the press, the expansion of the voting franchise, and the abolition of the death penalty and of slavery, and his opposition to the building of new fortifications around Paris in the early 1840s. 298 However, they also opposed his advocacy of state regulation of the railways, government regulation of workers' wages and working conditions, and his sometimes lukewarm support for free trade. Bastiat's younger friend and colleague, Gustave de Molinari, was typical of many of the Parisian economists in his enthusiasm for Lamartine's work and their hopes for his support in future political battles for liberal reforms. Molinari wrote his very first book, a"political biography" of Lamartine, shortly after arriving in Paris. 299

Lamartine could have been crucial to advancing the the economists's cause when the February Revolution broke out and Lamartine thrust his way forward to take charge of the new Provisional Government if it weren't for his toleration and perhaps open support for state funded welfare programs such as "the right to work" (or right to a job) which were anathema to the economists. His sympathy for the idea made it possible for Louis Blanc to set up the National Workshops in the Luxembourg Palace in the first week of the revolution, and to extend the program to the point where it nearly bankrupted the French state, forcing the Assembly to cancel it in June, thus leading to the June Days rioting in protest and the killing and arrest of thousands of people. Bastiat became one of the National Workshops' harshest and most persistent critiques throughout the first half of 1848 from his position as Vice-President of the Assembly's Finance Committee. The origins of this opposition by Bastiat lay in this essay which he wrote in January 1845 to combat an article Lamartine had written the month before.

In spite of the harsh things Bastiat had to say to Lamartine in this essay, they later became good friends, sometimes sharing the stage at the large public meetings organised by the French Free Trade Association during the campaign of 1846-47. 300 They had become close enough for Lamartine to indicate to Bastiat that he might offer him a job in the Provisional Government which came to power on 24 February 1848:

There followed what has been called with reason the rush for positions. Several of my friends were very influential, including M. de Lamartine, who had written to me a few days before, "If ever the storm carries me to power, you will help me to achieve the triumph of our ideas." 301

Bastiat turned it down, apparently finding the jockeying for power distasteful and believing he could be more influential in the Finance Committee of the Chamber. As he related to his friend Félix Coudroy "As for me, I will set foot in the town hall only as an interested spectator; I will gaze on the greasy pole but not climb it. Poor people! How much disillusionment is in store for them!" 302 What frustrated Bastiat was the fact that Lamartine could support free trade on one hand but also find sympathy for the socialist criticism of wage labour on the other. Part of the purpose of this letter was to point this contradiction out to Lamartine.

Lamartine by 1844 had come under the influence of socialist ideas which were being actively promoted in France. Beginning in the late 1830s socialists like Proudhon, 303 Victor Considerant, 304 and Louis Blanc, 305 had increased their criticism of key aspects of the free market such as the right to own private property, the legitimacy of charging interest and rent, making profits on economic activity, and the organisation of work by means of wage labour. The most influential works were by the Fourier socialist Victor Prosper Considerant (1808-93) with the Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail (A Theory of the Right to Property and the Right to Work) (1839) 306 and the journalist and historian Louis Blanc (1811-82) in L'Organisation du travail (The Organisation of Labour) (1839), 307 both of which were reprinted many times throughout the 1840s and during the Revolution. They argued that wage labour exploited the workers by not paying them the full value of their labour and by making them redundant in hard economic times. To counter this, they argued that workers should be guaranteed their jobs by the state, which should also employ unemployed workers in economic down turns, and by creating new forms of labour organisation in which workers were not paid by wages set by employers at market rates but by sharing amongst all workers the fruits of their labours. The slogans which the socialists popularised were "le droit au travail" (the right to work, or the right to a job) and the "organisation of work" in worker controlled "social" or "national workshops."

Lamartine was a liberal in that he didn't believe the state should interfere in the "la liberté des transactions entre le capital et le salaire" (freedom of transactions between capital and labour) or in free trade, but he was an interventionist when it came to the state looking after the welfare of workers. He thought that "le plus essentiel et le plus beau de ses titres, le titre de Providence du peuple" (the most essential and most beautiful of (the state's) functions was that of the Providential (supporter) of the people) and that from time to time "doit agir avec sa tutelle active et bienfaisante en ce qui touche le travail et le salaire des masses" (it must use its active and charitable tutelage in matters which concern the labour and wages of the masses). He denounced the policy of laissez-faire very strongly as the "axiome brutal du système anglais, toutes les fois du moins que le laissez faire et laissez passer veut dire laissez souffrir et laissez mourir " (the brutal principle of the English system, (where) at all times it means nothing less than "let people suffer" and "let people die."). 308

The Economists, on the other hand, defended the idea of "le droit du travail" which is a distinction which turns on French grammar. They distinguished between two different types of "rights" and "liberties" which is clearer in the original French. They distinguished between "le droit de faire quelque chose" (the right to do something) and "le droit à quelque chose" (the right to have something). In the case of "travail" (work or labour) the socialists advocated "le droit au travail" (the right of a worker to a job, especially one guaranteed by the government) whereas the Economists advocated "le droit du travail" or "la liberté du travail" (the right or the freedom of working, or of anybody to engage in work of some kind). The key difference in French is between the use of a noun (le travail) and a verb (travailler). 309

The economists began to counter the socialists' critique in the mid-1840s with a series of works such as Michel Chevalier's long critique of Blanc in the Journal des Debats in August 1844 310 and then the large three volume work by Charles Dunoyer De la liberté du travail (March 1845). 311 What took them by surprise was Lamartine joining the socialists with his article in favour of "the right to work" which he published in his magazine Le Bien Public (The Public Good) in December 1844 on "The Right to Work and the Organisation of Labour" 312 just before the appearance of Dunoyer's book (completed in January 1845 and published probably in March).

Bastiat dons the "economists' hat" to formally reply to Lamartine on behalf of the Journal des Économistes , which is rather odd as he had only recently emerged from the obscurity of Les Landes and had published his first article in JDE only the previous October. 313 He had not yet gone to Paris to be welcomed by the Political Economy Society - that was to come in May 1845. Yet the task fell to Bastiat to take on Lamartine, which suggests how rapidly his star was rising among the ranks of the economists at this time. He provided a similar service in October 1846 with another letter to Lamartine, this time opposing his call for greater regulation of the grain trade during the shortages and high prices caused by the poor harvests in 1846-47. 314 Both of Lamartine's articles dismayed the economists, as is clear from Bastiat's comments in this article. It would not be going to far to say that they felt betrayed by someone they thought was their colleague and political ally in the struggle against both the Monarchy and the socialists. In fact, Bastiat in his second letter to Lamartine in October 1846 calls him "our favorite poet" but demotes him to the past tense as a result of his current views. Bastiat points out how liberal Lamartine was on other matters and how his support for the socialists on this issue contradicts his other positions on things like free trade and reducing the size of government by strictly limiting its power. He also points out that there are two distinct schools of political economy: the one supported by the economists in the Guillaumin network, the liberal or laissez-faire school which is based upon individual liberty and the natural laws which govern all economic activity. The other is the school of arbitrary or despotic government which is based upon coercion by the state and is supported by the socialists and other interventionists who believe that the natural laws of the economy can be ignored by those who wish to create new and "artificial" organisations within society to achieve their social goals. 315 Bastiat not only criticises Lamartine's views because he thinks they are wrong, but also because he thinks he has used his great moral authority as a poet and political reformer to mislead the younger generation who hang on his every word, perhaps as he himself had done when he first read Lamartine's poetry in the 1820s:

I am sorry to have to say this frankly, Sir, but I believe that you have done a disastrous thing and one likely to misdirect the first steps of a young generation full of confidence in the authority of your words, when, dispensing criticism and praise indiscriminately, you violently attacked the most conscientious and in a practical sense Christian school, that has ever come onto the scene of the moral sciences… 316

Another criticism of the socialists which was taken up by Lamartine was their accusation that the economists were "heartless" Malthusians in their contempt for the suffering of the poor. Bastiat himself had began as a strict Malthusian, 317 like the other economists, and we see his first forays in exploring the economic impact of population growth on the well-being of ordinary people in a memorandum he wrote while serving on the General Council of Les Landes on the shifting burden of the land tax on different economic groups earlier that year, 318 and then again in 1846 with another memorandum "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (May, 1846) 319 and two articles in the JDE on "Thoughts on Share Cropping" (Feb., 1846) and "On Population" (Oct. 1846). 320 The criticisms of the socialists made Bastiat think more deeply about this problem during 1844-46 as these writings show, so that by the time the chapter on population appeared in the posthumous edition of Economic Harmonies (1851) he had radically rethought the problem of population growth. 321 His conclusion was that Malthus and the Malthusians had made several mistakes: they badly underestimated the productive power of a deregulated market economy and international free trade to supply the food needed by ordinary people at prices they could afford, or what he called, borrowing a phrase from Lamartine in fact, "la vie à bon marché" (life at affordable or low prices); they also underestimated the ability of ordinary people, as rational actors, to plan the timing and the size of their families; 322 they did not understand that the higher density of population made possible by urban living lowered the costs of making profitable trades with others and deepened the division of labour which increased productivity; and finally, he had an early notion of human capital which meant that individuals should be be seen as valuable resources in their own right who were able to provide "services" to others and not as a net drain on the economy. Thus this article is an indicator of his changing thoughts on this important topic.

It is also worth noting that in the course of his critique of Lamartine Bastiat refers to several theoretical issues, many for the first time in his writing, which were to become very important to him later on. This suggest that he had been thinking about them for some time and this letter was his first opportunity to bring his scattered thoughts into a more coherent whole. Or perhaps, it might even have been a way to show off, as it were, in front of an audience of other economists his deep knowledge of and innovative thinking about economic theory. These key concepts include the following:

1. society as a mechanism "(un mécanique sociale) with its own internal "driving force" (moteur) which did not require an external "mechanic" to make it operate effectively and justly. Here is his first use of the expression which is discussed in more detail in "Natural and Artificial Organisatons" (Jan. 1848). 323
2. the distinction between "la charité volontaire" (voluntary charity) and "la charité légale ou forcée" (coerced or government charity).
3. a couple of very early uses of the idea of harmony, namely "l'harmonie du monde social" (the harmony of the social world) and the idea that a voluntary activity like charity is an "élément harmonique dans le jeu des lois sociales" (harmonious element in the interplay of social laws). According to Bastiat, a providentially guided "harmony" of interests existed in society in the absence of coercion which meant that there is no inherent reason why the diverse needs and interests of individuals, whether consumers or producers, should be in conflict with each if they have their property rights and liberty respected under the rule of law, and if they are free to trade voluntarily with one another (or not as the case may be). 324
4. his first pairing of the concepts of "l'harmonie" (harmony) and its opposite "dissonance" (disharmony).
5. related to this, is his first use of the idea of "les forces perturbatrices" (disturbing forces) which upset the harmony of the free market. He includes among them war, government regulations, privileges, subsidies, and tariffs. This idea would become very important in his treatise Economic Harmonies to which he planned to devote a chapter but which was never completed. 325
6. his first use of the idea of the self-correcting mechanisms of the free market, or what he called "les forces réparatrices" (repairing or restorative forces) whereby the market attempts to restore equilibrium after it has been upset by "les forces perturbatrices" (disturbing forces).
7. the first use of the term "organisation artificielle" (artificial organisation) which would become important in his later critique of socialism and would have, along with its opposite "Natural Organisation", a chapter devoted to it at the beginning of Economic Harmonies.
8. an early use of the idea of the indefinite "perfectibility of man."
9. the idea of labour and capital being "déplacé" (displaced or distorted) by government interventions in the economy thus causing harm until a new equilibrium can be established.

What is missing from this impressive list is his notion of exchange being the mutual exchange of "service pour service" (one service for another service). 326 He did however discuss it briefly in another piece written at the same time as this one, his unpublished review of Charles Dunoyer's book De la Liberté du travail (On the Freedom of Working) (March, 1845). 327 Thus we can conclude that most of Bastiat's key ideas were floating around in his head by early 1845 before he went to Paris to engage more fully with the main group of political economists.

Bastiat concludes with a very impassioned plea to Lamartine to model himself on Richard Cobden who in 1845 was in the final year of his campaign to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws in Britain (the first bill was passed by the House in January 1846 and came into effect in June that year). Bastiat thought the free trade movement in France would be unbeatable if it could harness Lamartine's great rhetorical skills to the wagon of free trade instead of giving his weight and moral authority to the champions of "a regulated society and big government." He explored these ideas about the strategies needed by a French free trade movement and the role to be played by charismatic speakers to mobilise public opinion at greater length in the introduction he wrote to his first published book, Cobden and the League , which appeared a few months after he wrote this essay on Lamartine. 328 It would turn out that the French free trade movement never could find "its Richard Cobden" although both Bastiat himself and Lamartine were regular speakers at the large public meetings organised by the Association during 1846 and 1847. 329

Text: Letter to Lamartine

Mugron, Les Landes.

January 1845.

SIR,

After having made you the target of criticism on all sides, the prodigious talent with which nature has endowed you, a talent that enhances a reputation without blemish, has now marked you out as the hope of all the various schools of thought. Your half-concealed opinions left each school hoping to enlist you to its cause. Catholicism, neo-Christianity, the supporters of Liberty, and even the modern oddities that go under the names of Saint-Simonism, 330 Fourierism 331 or Communism counted on you and placed their hopes in you. There is that system which can be summarized by the words coerced concentration /bringing together , the other one is expressed by the words, free competition; there is that theory which seeks to impose an artificial organization on production, on human capacities and on capital, and the other theory that sees no better organization of society's powers than the one to which they naturally gravitate : in a word, every school wishes to have you as an aid and would accept you as its leader.

For there is none of these for which you would not have been the most powerful spokesman. What does an idea that carries within itself the element of triumph that is truth, need? To be known, understood and popularized, and for this, it needs striking forms of speech and brilliant formulae whose novel clarity will revive in every heart the innate feeling for what is true and just that a magnanimous Providence has planted there. This is why those who toil, men of vigilance and learning, would entrust to your word the work of years and centuries, scientific investigations or the corrections born of experiment, in a word, the entire intellectual corpus of their schools so that you might broadcast it to the world. By that happy combination of strength of thought and vividness of image, of which you alone have the secret, by the unparalleled gift granted solely to you, the ability to infuse logic with poetry and poetry with logic, you would have made truth shine out in the scholar's study and the artist's studio and, in drawing rooms and boudoirs, in palaces and thatched cottages. You would have carved a pathway for truth to university chairs and the political rostrum alike.

How many times have I too, Sir, turned my gaze toward you because of my sincere intellectual conviction and the unshakeable faith in my heart! How many times have I not examined the words that fell from your lips or the articles that flowed from your pen to see whether they did not at last unveil the secret of your views or unlock your shadowy and mysterious symbolism! For since I understood or at least sincerely considered that I understood the workings of social life, I said to myself, "This light is of no use as long as it is under a bushel, and it will be revealed only by the powerful voice of a man who is capable of blending the dialectic of the metaphysician, the experience of the Statesman, the eloquence of the tribune, the ardent charity of the Christian, and the delightful accents of the poet."

You have at last given your views. But alas! The expectations of the schools of economics have been dashed. You acknowledge only two of them and you declare that you belong to neither. Such is the rock on which genius founders. It disdains the well-trodden paths and the treasure of knowledge gathered over centuries. It seeks its treasure within itself and wishes to carve out its own path. 332

As you say, there are two schools of political economy. Allow me to describe them so that an assessment may be made of the bitter criticism that, through an inexplicable contradiction, you direct at the one whose principles you ultimately accept and the fulsome praise you give, through a no less inexplicable contradiction, to the one whose vain and subversive theories you reject.

The first of these schools proceeds in a scientific manner. It notes, examines, groups, and classifies the facts and phenomena, it seeks to find their relationships of cause and effect and, from all its observations it deduces the general and providential laws according to which men prosper or perish. It considers that the action of science, qua science, on the human race is limited to setting out and making known these laws , so that each person may know the reward attached to his compliance in their regard and the punishments that follow their violation. 333 It refers back to the human heart for the rest, in the full knowledge that it persistently aspires to the reward and inevitably avoids the punishments, and since this twin motivation, a desire for good things and a horror of bad ones, is the most powerful force for bringing people under the sway of social laws, this school rejects as a curse the intervention of arbitrary forces that tend to alter the just and natural distribution of pleasure and pain. This gives rise to the famous principle " Laissez faire, laissez passer ", 334 against which you show such indignation, and which is just a wretched circumlocution for the word freedom which you have inscribed on your banner as constituting the very principle of your doctrine.

The other school, or rather the other method, which has given rise to and will continue to give rise to countless sects, proceeds through imagination . In its eyes, society is not a subject for observation but matter on which experiments may be carried out. It is not a living body whose organs have to be examined but inert matter that legislators subject to artificial arrangement. This school does not assume that the social body is governed by providential laws; it asserts that it can impose on society laws of its own invention. Plato's Republic , Thomas More's Utopia , 335 Harrington's Oceana , 336 Fénélon's Salente 337 , the protectionist régime, Saint-Simonism, Fourierism, Owenism 338 and a thousand other strange concoctions 339 that have on occasion been set up to the great misfortune of the human race and almost always in dreamlike fashion, served up as if to frightened children: these are just a few of the countless manifestations of this school.

The analytical method should ineluctably lead to unity of doctrine, for there is no reason for the same facts not to appear in the same light to all observers. This is why, except for a few slight differences that revised observations are constantly causing to disappear, it has rallied to an identical faith such men as Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Jefferson, Bentham, Senior, Cobden, Thompson, Huskisson, Peel, Desttut de Tracy, Say, Comte, Dunoyer, Droz 340 and a host of other illustrious men whose lives were spent not in constructing in their heads an imaginary society populated with imaginary people of their own invention, 341 but in studying men and things and the way they interact in order to recognize and formulate the laws to which God was pleased to subject society.

The method of fanciful invention was bound to lead to intellectual anarchy, because you can bet an infinite number to one that an infinite number of dreamers would not have the same dream. Thus we see that, in order to be at ease in their imaginary world, one has banished property, another inheritance, this one here the family and that one there freedom. Here we find some who take no account of the laws governing population, and there others who set aside the principle of human solidarity, for it was necessary to conjure up chimerical beings in order to achieve a chimerical society.

Thus, the first observes the natural order of things and its conclusion is freedom . 342 The second creates an artificial form of society and its point of departure is coercion . For this reason and for reasons of brevity, I will call the first the economist or liberal school and the other the arbitrary or despotic government school .

Let us see now what judgment you bring to bear on these two doctrines: 343

In political economy there are two schools, an English and materialistic school (this is the liberal school that you are describing in these lines) that treats people as inert quantities, that speaks in figures for fear that an emotion or a thought might slip into its theorizing, that reduces industrial society to a type of stony-faced arithmetic, a heartless mechanism in which humanity is just a silent partner and in which workers are just cogs to be worn down and dispensed with at the lowest price possible, in which everything ends up as a profit or loss at the bottom of a column of figures, with no consideration of the fact that these quantities are men, that these cogs are minds, and these figures have lives, morality, sweat, bodies, and souls, and make up millions of beings like us who have been created by God with the same destiny. This is the school that reigns in France since the import of English economic science. This is the one that has been written and spouted and has governed up to now, with a few major exceptions. This is the one which has forbidden alms and criminalised begging without providing for beggars, criticized the hospitals, condemned the hospices, made fun of charities, made an outlaw of poverty, cursed over-population, forbidden marriages, advised childlessness, shut the centers for abandoned children and which, subjecting everything mercilessly and heartlessly to competition, that very providence of selfishness, has said to the proletariat: 'Get to work.' 'But we cannot find work.' 'Well, then, die! If you cannot earn anything, you have no right to live; society is a well-organized business. …

There is another school that has arisen in France in the last few years from the sufferings of the proletariat, the selfishness of manufacturers, the hard-heartedness of capitalists, the upheaval of the present times, the memories of the Convention 344 , the fellow-feeling of philanthropy, and the anticipated dreams of an age of perfect idealism. This is the one that, prophesying the coming of the industrial Christ to the masses (Fourier), calls them to the religion of association, that substitutes the principle of association through work for all the other principles, instincts and sentiments that God has kneaded into human nature, that believes that it has found the means of organizing labor without turning upside down the free relationships between producers and consumers, of assaulting capital without eliminating it, of regulating wages and distributing them at will with the infallibility and infinite justice of God. This school, which counts among its masters and followers so many men of enlightenment and faith, carries two major treasures within it: a governing principle, association, and a virtue, the charitableness of the masses. However, it seems to push its principles to excess and to fantasize its virtue. Fourierism has thus far been the sublime exaggeration of hope. We do not belong to either of these schools. We believe them both to be in error. One lacks soul and the other lacks only moderation in its passion for good. The difference we see between them is the difference between cruelty and illusion, and to solve the problem of wages we take from one the light of calculation and the other the warmth of charity.

I will not stop to point out the vague and erroneous expressions and the bold assertions that pepper this passage in which it appears that your pen mastered you more than you mastered your pen. Where have you witnessed economists treating people like inert objects , when in truth they see the harmony of the social world precisely in the freedom of their action? 345 Where have you witnessed the predominance of this school in France when it does not have a single voice, at least one that is acknowledged, in the government or Parliament? What is this disdain for figures, calculations, or arithmetic as if the figures are used for anything other than to record results and as if good and harm can be assessed in any other way than through the results which are observed? What scientific value is it possible to find in your indignation against the hard-heartedness of capitalists, the selfishness of manufacturers as such, as though industrial services and capital, any more than wages, could escape the laws of supply and demand that govern them in order to subject themselves to the laws of sentiment and philanthropy?

However, I feel the need to protest with all my strength against the odious insinuations you rain on the heads of all these illustrious scholars, whose venerable names I listed above. No, posterity will not ratify your judgment. It will not agree with you that the abyss that separates cruelty and simple illusion , also divides Smith and Fourier as well as Say and Enfantin. 346 It will not agree that Fourier's only mistake was to push " a great principle to excess and to fantasize virtue ." It will not see in the promiscuity of the sexes a sublime exaggeration of hope . It will not believe that social science owes Fourierism the following three great innovations in belief : "a belief in the infinite progress of the human race, in the principle of association, and in the charitableness of the masses", because the perfectibility of man, a consequence of the principles regulating his intelligence, was recognized a long time before Fourier, because association is as ancient as the family, and because the charitableness of the masses, however you want to consider it, whether from the theoretical or practical point of view, in the case either of individuals or society, has been formally promulgated by Christianity and implemented everywhere, at least to some extent. But posterity will be astonished that you assign such an elevated place and shower so much fulsome praise on a school that at the same time you sully with these eloquent words: it is a monastery in which "a mother is merely a pregnant woman, a father a beggetter of children, and the child a product of the two sexes." 347

But what are you blaming economists for? Could it be for the sometimes arid forms with which they have clad their ideas? This is literary criticism. In this case you would have to acknowledge the services they have rendered to economic science and limit yourself to accusing them of being cold writers. 348 In this regard as well it might be answered that while the severe and accurate language of science has the disadvantage of not hastening its propagation enough, the warm and image-laden language of poets, when transported into the didactic field, has the much greater disadvantage of often misleading the reader after having misled the writer. It is not the form that you are attacking, however, it is the thought and even the intention.

As for the thought, how can it be accused? It may well be erroneous; it cannot be criticized since it can be summed up thus: " There is more harmony in the divine laws than in any human arrangements . " You are free to say like Alphonse 349 that "These laws would be better if I had been called upon to take part in God's counsels." But no, you do not use such impious language. You leave such blasphemy to Utopians. For your part, you take hold of the very doctrine with which you endeavor to sully its exponents and in your entire article, except for a few exceptional views that I will discuss shortly, the great principle of freedom dominates, which implies that you recognize the harmony of divine laws, since it would be puerile to espouse freedom not because it is the true condition for social order and happiness but through a platonic love of freedom itself, setting aside the results which by its very nature it produces.

As for the intention, what perversity can we detect in the deliberate intention of those who choose simply to say:

"The equilibrium of social forces is established spontaneously; do not touch it!"

To reach your conclusion as to the actual intentions of economists, one would have to prove three things:

1. That the free play of social and providential forces is disastrous for the human race;

1. That it is possible to paralyze their action by substituting arbitrary forces for them;

1. That economists reject the latter, fully aware of their alleged superiority to the former.

In the absence of these three proofs, your attacks, if you intended them to include the intentions of the writers of whom I have been speaking, would neither be justified nor justifiable.

But I will never believe that you, whose honor and uprightness are beyond question, would wish to incriminate even the morality of illustrious scholars whose careers preceded yours, who have bequeathed you their doctrines, and whom the human race has absolved in advance through the veneration and respect with which it clothes their memory.

Besides, are there, in what you are pleased to call the English School, as though a science that limits itself to describing the facts and their sequence can be from one country rather than another, as though there could be Russian geometry, Dutch mechanics, Spanish anatomy, and French or English economics, are there, I ask, men in this school who, like the trade prohibitionists , have proclaimed their doctrines in order to mislead people's minds and take advantage of the common error so deliberately and knowingly disseminated? 350 No, you do not quote a single one. It is arguable that no philosophical sect has shown such dignity, moderation, and devotion to the public good and if you think about it you would understand that that is how it must be.

In the 18th century, when astronomy had not yet reached the stage it has now, a a kind of aberration in the movements of the planets was noted. It was noted that some moved closer to each other while others moved away from the center of movement, and the hasty conclusion was reached that the latter were steadily moving into the glacial depths of space while the former were going to be engulfed in the incandescent matter of the sun. Laplace 351 came along and subjected the alleged aberrations to calculation; he demonstrated that when the planets left their orbit, the force pulling them back increased because of this very distancing: "Through the total power of a mathematical formula," said Mr. Arago, 352 "the foundations of the physical world have been strengthened." 353 Do you think that the person who discovered and measured this beautiful harmony would willingly have agreed to misrepresent these admirable laws of gravity for personal interest?

Political economy also has its Laplaces. They have observed that, when social disturbances appear, there also exist providential forces that bring everything back into equilibrium. They have discovered that these restorative forces are proportional to the disturbing forces because the one gives rise to the other. In delighted admiration for this harmony in the moral world, they have conceived a passion for the divine work and they, more than other people, reject everything that might disrupt it. For this reason, as far as I know, there has never been an instance when the attraction of private interest has come to rival in their hearts this eternal object of their admiration and love. This surprised Bonaparte. He was little accustomed to resistance of this nature and honored them with the title Naive Fools because they refused to support his mission to rule in an arbitrary manner, considering it incompatible with the great social laws that they had discovered and proclaimed. 354 They bear this glorious title to this day and none of them can be seen to be active in government affairs because they would only do so if they were able to act according to their own principles.

I am sorry to have to say this frankly, Sir, but I believe that you have done a disastrous thing and one likely to misdirect the first steps of a young generation full of confidence in the authority of your words, when, dispensing criticism and praise indiscriminately, you violently attacked the most conscientious and in a practical sense Christian school, that has ever come onto the scene of the moral sciences, reserving your enthusiasm, sympathy and, pardon me for saying this, your "flirtatious" remarks for the other schools which are not, in your own words, anything other than a negation of freedom, order, property, family, love, domestic affections, and all the sentiments ingrained by God in human nature .

And what makes this unjust evaluation of men totally inexplicable is that, as I have said, you adopt the principles of the economists, free trade, and free competition, this godsend of selfishness .

There is no other way of organizing work, you say, "than freedom for it. There is no other way of distributing wages than through work itself being rewarded for what it does and achieving its own justice, something which your arbitrary systems will not allow. Free will with respect to work for the producer, for the consumer, for wages and workers, is as sacred as free will with respect to conscience in man. When you touch freedom of labor, you kill progress; when you touch freedom of conscience you kill morality. The best governments are those that do not touch them. 355

And elsewhere: "We know of no other possible organization of labour in a free country than the freedom that earns its own reward through competition , ability and morality." 356

It is not enough to say that these words are in line with the ideas of the economists; they embrace and summarize their entire doctrine. They imply that you have full knowledge and clarity of perspective on this great law of competition, 357 which carries within itself the general remedy for the inevitable harm that it may produce in particular cases.

And yet how can we believe that your view embraces all the facts and social forces that result from the principle of freedom when we see you rejecting the key notion of the responsibility of intelligent and free agents? 358

For when you speak of the two major schools, the one of freedom and the other of coercion , you say, "I am borrowing from one the enlightenment of its calculations and from the other the warmth of its charity." To speak accurately, you ought to say: "I am borrowing from one the principle of freedom and from the other that of irresponsibility ."

In fact, the result of the passages I have just quoted is that you have taken from the economists not just calculations but a guiding principle, namely, " Freedom is the best social organization ."

But this is on one condition alone, that the law of responsibility produces its full, total, and natural effect. If human law intervenes and distorts the consequences of actions so that they do not affect those for whom they were intended, not only is freedom no longer a good organization, but it also does not exist.

It is therefore a grave contradiction to say that you are borrowing freedom here and coercion there in order to fashion a monstrous or rather an impossible blend.

I will make myself better understood by going into some detail.

You criticise the liberal school for being cruel and right away you borrow from the arbitrary or despotic school "the warmth of its charity." That is the general approach, and here is its application.

You accuse the economists of forbidding marriage and counseling childlessness and opposing this, you want the State to adopt orphaned children or those who are too numerous .

You accuse the economists of forbidding and making fun of alms and opposing this, you want the State to intervene to help the masses in their poverty.

You accuse the economists of saying to the proletariat, " Work or die " and on the other hand you want society to proclaim the right to a job and the right to a living .

Let us examine these three antitheses, whose number I could have increased; this will be enough to determine whether it is possible to gather doctrines from opposing schools and achieve a sold alliance between them in this way.

I have no wish to burden the terrain of principles on which I am determined to stand with detailed discussion. However, I will make one preliminary remark. It was said a long time ago that the surest but certainly the least fair way of combating one's opponent is to attribute to him outrageous sentiments, false ideas, and words he has never said. I believe you are incapable of intentionally having recourse to such trick but, either because the words used have led to this effect or because of the demands of brevity, it is certain that you attribute to the economists words that were never theirs.

Never have they advised infertility 359 or forbidden marriage ; this criticism could have been more aptly made, and you in fact do make it, to Fourierism . While the economists have not condemned but rather merely deplored over -population, this very word " over " that you use justifies them.

What they have said on this serious subject is:

Man is a free being, who is responsible and intelligent. Since he is free, he uses his will to direct his actions; because he is responsible, he receives the reward or punishment for his actions, depending on whether they conform or not to the laws governing his being. Because he is intelligent his will, and consequently his actions, are constantly progressing, either in the light of his foresight or through the inevitable lessons of experience. It is a fact that people, like all living beings, are able to increase their numbers beyond their current means of subsistence. It is another fact that when the equilibrium is broken between the numbers of people and the resources that sustain life, there is malaise and suffering in society. Therefore, there is no alternative; plans have to be made to maintain the equilibrium or people have to suffer in order for it to be re-established. We conclude that it is desirable for the population as a whole not to grow too fast, and in order to do this that the individuals that make it up should not enter into marriage until they have the likelihood of being able to maintain a family. And as people are free, and as we do not recognize coercive or restrictive legislation in this regard, we call upon their reason, their feelings, and their common sense. The words we make them listen to are not in the slightest utopian or abstract. We tell them, with the wisdom of centuries and sense so common that is practically instinctive, that rashly or prematurely taking on a family that one does not yet have the means to bring up would be to bring unhappy people into the world and to make oneself unhappy. We add: If these individual rash actions become too widespread, society has more children than it can feed and it suffers , for the human race is not subject only to the law of responsibility , but also to that of solidarity , and this is the reason why economists are anxious to set out all the fateful consequences of a reckless increase in the human population, so that public opinion can bring its all-powerful action to bear on it, for they sincerely believe that in the face of this terrible phenomenon society faces nothing other than the alternative of foresight or suffering.

But you, Sir, you provide it with an expedient. You do not think that it has to plan ahead in order not to suffer and you do not want it to suffer for not having thought ahead. You say, " Let the State adopt children that are too numerous ."

This is certainly what will soon be decreed. But with what, if you please, will it bring them up? Doubtless with food, clothes, and products taken from the mass of the people in the form of taxes, for, as far as I know, the State has no resources of its own, none that is that do not stem from national production. 360 Thus the great rule of responsibility will be eluded. Those who, following their personal views perhaps, but in perfect accord with the public interest, in accordance with the rules of prudence, honesty, and reason, have refrained from, or postponed the moment of surrounding themselves with, a family, will be coerced into feeding the children of those who have given in to their brute instincts. But will the harm at least be cured? On the contrary, it will constantly get worse, for at the same time that no reliance can be placed on foresight, which will no longer have a rational dimension, the suffering itself, which continues to have an effect, will no longer act as a punishment, a brake, a lesson, or a stabilizing force. It will lose its attachment to morality, the latter now having nothing left that will explain or justify it. This is when people, without blaspheming, will be able to say to the author of all things: "What is the point of evil on earth, since it has no final purpose?"

The same remarks can be made about charity. First of all, economic science has never forbidden nor made fun of alms. Science does not make fun of or forbid anything; it observes, deduces, and demonstrates.

Next, political economy distinguishes between voluntary charity and state or compulsory charity. The first, for the very reason that it is voluntary , relates to the principles of freedom and is included as an element of harmony 361 in the interplay of social laws; the other, because it is compulsory , belongs to the schools of thought that have adopted the doctrine of coercion and inflict inevitable harm on the social body. Poverty is deserved or undeserved, and only free and spontaneous charity can make this essential distinction. If poverty receives help, even in the case of a degraded soul who has caused his own downfall, that help will be distributed parsimoniously in exactly the measure required, so that the punishment is not too severe, and yet the help does not encourage abject and contemptible sentiments that in the general interest ought not to be encouraged by inappropriate kindnesses. For unmerited and hidden misfortune, charity reserves liberal gifts and the discretion, the shelter, and the consideration to which misfortune is entitled in the name of human dignity.

However, state charity that is coerced, organized, and decreed as a debt on the part of the donor and a positive credit on the part of the receiver, does not nor can it make a distinction like this. Allow me to invoke the authority of a writer too little known and too little consulted on these matters:

Charles Comte states that:

There are several types of vice, whose principal effect is to produce poverty for the person who has adopted them. An institution whose object is to shelter people of every kind from poverty, without distinguishing the causes that have produced it, thereby encourages all the vices that lead to poverty. The courts cannot fine those people guilty of laziness, intemperance, improvidence or other vices of this sort, but nature, which has ordained rules of work, temperance, moderation and careful management for the human race, has taken it upon itself to inflict on the guilty the punishments they deserve . To reduce these punishments to nothing by giving the right to be given help to those who deserve such punishment is to leave in place all the attractions of vice. What is more, it is to allow the harm such vice produces to affect those to whom vice is alien, as well as weakening or destroying the only punishments able to repress it. 362

In this way, governmental charity, aside from the fact that it violates the principles of freedom and property, once again overturns the laws of responsibility, and by establishing a sort of community of entitlements 363 between the prosperous and poor classes it removes from prosperity the character of reward and from poverty the character of punishment stamped on them by the nature of things.

You want the State to intervene to help the masses in their poverty. But with what? With capital. And where will it obtain this? From taxes; it will have a budget for the poor . Therefore, by withdrawing this capital from general circulation, it would merely give back to the masses in the form of alms what they would have received in the form of wages!

Finally, you proclaim the right of the proletariat to a job, to a wage, and to food. And who has ever contested to anyone the right to work and consequently to a fair level of remuneration? Can this right ever be denied in a free society? However, by confronting us with what is a terrible hypothetical case, you are saying, "What if society has insufficient work for all its members, and what if its capital is not enough to give an occupation to all?" In truth, does not this extreme supposition imply that the population has exceeded its means of subsistence? In this case, I can clearly see the procedures that freedom tends to use to re-establish equilibrium; I see earnings and profits decrease, that is to say, I see each person's share of the community's wealth decrease; I see the inducements to marriage weaken, births diminish, and perhaps mortality increase until the proper level has been re-established. I see that these are harms and sufferings, and I both see and deplore them. 364 But what I do not see is that society can avoid these harms by proclaiming a right to work [i.e. to a job] , by decreeing that the State will take from an inadequate capital stock the means of providing employment for those who lack it, for I consider this filling one glass by emptying another. It is to act like that simple man who, wishing to fill a cask, drew from underneath what he put in from above or like a doctor who, to give strength to a sick man, injected into his right arm the blood he had taken from the left.

In my view, in the extreme theoretical case in which we are obliged to reason, such expedients are not only ineffective, but essentially harmful. Not only does the State move capital from one place to another, it withholds part of the capital it gathers and undermines the activities of the capital it does not commandeer. What is more, the new distribution of wages is less fair than the one presided over by freedom, and unlike the latter it is not proportional to the just rights of ability and morality. Finally, far from decreasing social suffering, on the contrary it increases it. These expedients do nothing to re-establish the equilibrium that has been upset between the number of people and their means of existing. Very far from doing so, they increasingly tend to upset this equilibrium.

But if we think that society can be put into a situation in which all it has is a choice of harms, if we think that in this case freedom brings it the most effective and least painful remedies, be warned that we also believe that it acts above all as a means of prevention. Before restoring the equilibrium between people and the food supply, it acts to prevent this equilibrium from being disrupted, because it allows all the reasons for men to be moral, active, temperate and far-sighted to retain their influence. We do not deny that what follows the forgetting of the virtues is suffering, but wishing that this were not so is to want an ignorant and debased people to benefit to the same extent from well-being and happiness as a moral and enlightened one.

It is so true that freedom prevents the harm for which you seek a remedy in the right to a job that you yourself acknowledge that this right does not need to be applied to those industries that enjoy total freedom: "Let us set aside", you say, "shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coopers, locksmiths, masons, carpenters, joiners, etc. The fate of these people is not in the balance." 365 However the fate of factory workers would not be in the balance either if manufacturing had a natural life, always had its feet on firm ground, expanded only according to need, and did not rely on the artificial and variable prices resulting from protection , one of the fruits of the theory of arbitrary government.

You proclaim the right to a job , you raise it to a principle , but at the same time you show little faith in this principle. See within what narrow limits you in fact circumscribe its action. This right to work can be invoked only in rare instances, in extreme cases, only where life is at stake (propter vitam) 366 and on condition that its application will never create deadly competition from the State against the work of free industries and voluntarily agreed rates of pay.

Reduced to these terms, the measures you announce are within the domaine of state regulation 367 rather than social economy. 368 I consider that I can confirm, on behalf of the economists, that they have no serious objections to the intervention of the State in rare or extreme cases in which, without undermining free industries or changing the rates of voluntarily agreed wages it is possible to come to the aid, propter vitam , to save the lives of workers who are temporarily and abruptly displaced as a result of unexpected crises in production. 369 But, I ask you, to achieve these exceptional measures, was it necessary to rake over all the theories of the schools most in opposition to each other? Was it necessary to raise banner against banner, principle against principle, and trumpet into the ears of the masses those deceiving words: the right to a job or the right to a living ? I say to you in your own words: "These ideas are as resonant as this because all they contain is wind and tempest." 370

Sir, I do not think that Heaven has ever given men more precious gifts than those lavished on you. There is enough warmth in your soul and enough power in your genius for the century to be subject to your influence and, at the sound of your voice, take one more step along the path of civilization. But to do this, you ought not to take bits here and there from the schools that most oppose each other and from principles that cancel each other out. Your prodigious talent is a powerful lever but this lever is powerless if it does not have a principle as its fulcrum. In the past you stood up before the opposition with a sincere heart and eloquent voice. What result did you achieve? None, because you did not make any appeal to a principle . Oh! If only you were a strong supporter of freedom! If only you portrayed it bringing progress to the social world through the action of its two mutually sustaining laws, responsibility and solidarity! If only you rallied people's minds to this truth: "In political economy there is a great deal to be learnt and little to be done!" 371 People would then understand that freedom carries within itself the solution to all the major social problems that trouble our time and "that it provides justice for people that arbitrary governments do not provide." 372 How is it that you have found such fertile truths only to abandon them immediately afterwards? Do you not see that the rational and practical consequence of this doctrine is the reduction in the size of government ? 373 Take courage, then, and follow this shining path! Take no heed of the worthless popularity you are promised elsewhere. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot work to reduce the scope of power and demand that it leaves "both labour and conscience" alone, while on the other hand requiring it to "engage on a lavish scale in education, establish colonies, adopt children that are too numerous and intervene on behalf of the masses and their poverty." If you entrust these varied and sensitive tasks to it, you will make it grow inordinately. You will entrust it with a mission that is not its own. You will substitute its scheming for the economy of social laws. You will transform it into a "Providential agency that not only sees but foresees." You will enable it to impose and redistribute huge taxes. You will make it the object of all forms of ambition, hope, disappointment, and intrigue. You will elevate its executives inordinately and transform the nation into state employees; in a word you are on the path of an bastard, incomplete and illogical form of Fourierism.

These are not the doctrines that you ought to be promulgating in France. Reject their misleading attractions. Adhere to the severe but true principle, the only one that is true, Freedom. Allow your wide-ranging intellect to embrace its laws, its actions, its associated phenomena, the factors that disrupt it, and the restorative forces which it has within itself. 374 Inscribe the words " free society, small government " on your banner, 375 ideas that are deeply interrelated. This banner will perhaps be rejected by the parties, but the nation will embrace it rapturously. But eradicate from it the slightest trace of the motto, " coerced society, big government ". Exceptional measures, applicable in rare circumstances and extreme cases and whose use is in the end highly debatable cannot outweigh the value and authority of a principle for long in your mind. Such a principle is for all time, for everywhere, for all climates and every circumstance. Proclaim freedom, therefore: freedom to work, freedom to trade, and freedom to do business, 376 for this country and all others, for this and every age. If you do this, I dare to promise you if not popularity today at least popularity and the blessings of the centuries to come. A great man has taken on this role in England. 377 There is not a single day in the year nor hour in the day during which the great laws of the social mechanism 378 are not set out before the gaze of the masses. He has gathered around him a travelling university and a group of preachers for the 19 th century, 379 whose life-giving words penetrate every strata of society and are bringing to the surface a powerful, enlightened, peace-loving but indomitable public opinion which will preside shortly over the destiny of Great Britain. For do you know what is happening? More than fifty thousand English people 380 will be given electoral rights by the end of the month to balance the influence of the advocates of arbitrary government power and counteract the efforts of the prohibitionists, false philanthropists, and the aristocracy. Freedom! That is the principle that is going to reign on our doorstep and one man, Mr. Cobden, will have been the instrument of this great and peaceful revolution. Oh! If only you could have a destiny like this, one for which you are so worthy!

T.317 "Introduction and Post Script to Economic Sophisms" (March 1845, JDE)↩

[CW4 draft 16 June, 2017] Source

T.317 (1845.03) "Introduction and Postscript to Economic Sophisms," JDE , April 1845, T. 11, no. 41, pp. 1, 16. Dated Mugron March, 1845. Written only for JDE article. A new expanded Introduction and Conclusion were written for the book ES1 in November, 1845. Not in OC. Not in CW3.

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat wrote this brief Introduction to the first three "economic sophisms" which were published in the Journal des Économistes in April 1845. They were the first of eleven published during 1845 which were later collected, along with eleven other pieces, into his second book Economic Sophisms (First Series) which was published in January 1846. 381 It was very tentative and even apologetic in nature and this requires some explanation given his later high reputation among the Parisian economists. 382

Bastiat came to the attention of the Paris-based political economists when he sent them an unsolicited article on French and English tariff policy at the end of July which he had been working on over the summer of 1844. 383 After a delay of several months (Molinari later revealed that the editor Hippolyte Dussard had ignored it and left it in the in-tray because Bastiat was an unknown person from the provinces with no letter of introduction) 384 it was eventually published in the October issue of the Journal des Économistes . He had also been translating material published by the Anti-Corn Law League and transcripts of their public speeches which the Guillaumin firm would publish in June 1845. 385 This book, Cobden and the League , contained a very long introduction written by Bastiat which was a combination of a history of the free trade movement in Britain and a work of strategy showing how their ideas and methods might be adapted to France. 386 In it he also presented a radical critique of the landed "oligarchy" (his term) which ruled Britain and which had obvious implications for the domination of French politics by the alliance of large landowners and manufacturers which emerged during the 1820s and who were able to maintain a high tariff wall around the French economy for the next several decades.

Bastiat's work caused quite a stir among the political economists who invited him to Paris to meet them and attend a dinner in his honour hosted by the Political Economy Society on 10 May, 1845. 387 In fact, he ended up staying in Paris for three months (May through July) before moving there permanently in March 1846 to work full-time for the national branch of the French Free Trade Association which he helped establish. In March 1845, before he arrived in Paris, he had begun work on a new project to popularise free market economic ideas and debunk protectionist ones, which would become his most famous book Economic Sophisms . The Journal des Économistes agreed to publish these clever and witty pieces under the title of "Economic Sophisms" beginning with three in the April issue, another two in the July issue, and another six in the October issue. 388 This short "Introduction" appeared at the beginning of the first collection in April and has never been reprinted since. Bastiat also tells us in a letter written at this time that he was not happy with the title "Economic Sophisms" and was looking for an alternative. 389 Clearly he did not find a better title and this is how they have come down to us today.

The Introduction is an interesting piece because it shows his hesitation and uncertainty about entering the fray as a "full member" of the economics fraternity which had gathered around the Guillaumin publishing firm since its founding in 1837. He almost apologizes for publishing in their august journal a series of lighter pieces aimed at a less well-informed readership, people who did not read the heavy theoretical tomes or the collections of economic data normally published by Guillaumin. He defends himself by saying that he wanted to reach a younger audience who had not yet been corrupted by protectionist prejudices, something he would mention in a letter to Richard Cobden on 5 July 1847 390 and again in his introduction "To the Youth of France" which preceded the first volume of his treatise on Economic Harmonies (January 1850). 391

Bastiat need not have worried about how he would be received by the Parisian economists as they began to shower him with accolades and job offers as soon as he arrived in May. His correspondence from Paris to his close friend Félix Coudroy back in Mugron during these three months reveal some interesting things. Firstly, that the economists had read all his articles and were willing to discuss economic matters with him as an equal. He expressed relief to Félix that in spite of their geographical and intellectual isolation in Mugron he had held his own in conversations with them. 392

Secondly, that his articles on "Economic Sophisms" and other economic topics were so highly regarded by the editors of the Journal des Économistes that they were given top billing in the issues in which they appeared, pushing the work by other more established economists down the table of contents. 393 This happened in April, June, July, and December 1845, and again in February, April, October, and December 1846. His articles on "Economic Sophisms" also proved popular with readers and there was a spike in subscriptions for the journal after they appeared in print. 394

Thirdly, that the economists were having negotiations with the government about setting up chairs in political economy in the government funded University and Colleges and that they had asked him, given his obvious writing skills, to write a proposal supporting this which they could submit to the government. A faction within the economists, the businessman Horace Say, the editor of the Journal des Économistes (1843-45) Hippolyte Dussard (who had originally ignored his essay on tariffs), the editor of the vast Collection des Principaux Économistes project Eugène Daire, 395 and the president of the Political Economy Society Charles Dunoyer were actively backing Bastiat for one of these Chairs should they become available. 396 In the meantime, there was also talk of getting Bastiat some money to give a course of lectures in one of the private colleges, something which did not happen until the fall of 1847 in the School of Law. 397 Not surprisingly the textbook he used for his lectures was the first edition of the Economic Sophisms .

Fourthly, that he was offered the position of editor of the main journal of the Paris economists, the Journal des Économistes , which had 500-600 subscribers at that time. This was a remarkable thing to offer someone who had just come to their attention ten months before and shows the very high regard they had for him as an economist and a writer. In a long letter to Félix 398 he lists all the positive aspects of such a position: it would enable him to have an impact on the Chamber of Deputies and other organs of the press when it came to economic matters; he would be able to put his own more radical and consistent free market stamp on the editorial policy of the journal which he thought was run by a group of "well-meaning men;" 399 since the journal's readership also included businessmen, financiers, and reform-minded bureaucrats in the customs service, he hoped he would eventually be seen as their "spokesperson" on free trade issues; and since the position would not take up all of his time he would still have time to research and publish his own material which would improve his chances of getting one of the new Chairs of political economy. 400 In spite of these positives things, he ultimately declined the offer for two reasons. Firstly, the salary of 100 louis (fr, 2,000) per annum was a "wretchedly low salary" 401 and secondly, he had his heart set on creating a French Free Trade Association modeled on Cobden's Anti-Corn Law League. This had been the purpose behind his book on Cobden and the League which was about to appear in print (June 1845), especially the Introduction in which he laid out a coherent strategy for doing just this. It was too soon in his view to give up that dream.

Fifthly, the sons of two of the biggest names in the French classical liberal movement of the early nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) and Charles Comte (1782-1837), approached Bastiat with offers to make use of or even look after their fathers' personal papers. 402 Both J.B. Say and Comte had profoundly influenced Bastiat's thinking and he mentions them many times in his writings. 403 Perhaps this is why Horace Say and Hippolyte Comte both felt they could trust such a sympathetic person like Bastiat, whose way of thinking about economics as part of a much broader liberal social theory, was very much like their fathers' and much less like the more orthodox political economists who made up the Political Economy Society.

And finally, to top off a remarkable first year in Paris, Bastiat was elected a "corresponding" (or junior) member of the 4th section (Économie politique et Statistique) of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on 24 January, 1846. 404 He was elected with 20 votes (out of a possible 21) by the other full members of the Academy after Dunoyer had promoted Bastiat's candidature by presenting copies of his two books which had appeared since his arrival in Paris: his book on Cobden and the League (June 1845) and the first series of the Economic Harmonies (January 1846). Bastiat was very proud of this position and included it as part of his credentials on the cover of the books and pamphlets he published subsequently.

So it is the light of this unexpected, rapid, and rather fulsome reception of Bastiat into the circle of the Parisian economists that we should read his touchingly tentative "Introduction" to what would become his most popular and well-known work of economics. Perhaps the reservations he expressed in March 1845 were unwarranted.

Text

If there are still some readers who are willing to pay serious and close attention to works of pure theory concerning the most important economic questions, I have to think that they are to be found particularly among the subscribers to this journal. It is they who have given me the courage, after much hesitation, to publish here a refutation of the main sophisms upon which the prohibitionist or protectionist régime is based. I don't have the foolish presumption to destroy in a few pages the entrenched prejudices which so many good works have scarcely been able weaken, but I hope to instill at least some doubt, especially among those young minds which have not yet become clogged with preconceived ideas. I offer them no ready made solutions but merely some key ideas which they will be able to take up in the future. Even if one cannot force the reader to reach a given end, it is still quite something to put them on the right path. …

P.S. The discussion which has just taken place in the Chamber of Deputies on the subject of the customs legislation 405 provides ample food for thought for this survey of economic sophisms . I ask your permission to continue it in a future article. 406

T.20 "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working" (March, 1845)↩

[CW4 draft 16 June, 2017] Source

T.20 (1845.03) "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working " (Sur l'ouvrage de M. Dunoyer, De la Liberté du travail ). Unpublished draft, possibly written in May after Bastiat met Dunoyer for the first time at his welcome dinner and Dunoyer asked him to write an article on it for the Journal des débats . Bastiat never finished it. [OC1.10, pp. 428-33.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Charles Dunoyer (1786-1862) and his colleague Charles Comte (1782–1837) 407 had a profound and lasting impact on Bastiat's thinking as he reveals in several letters. 408 Dunoyer's latest book De la liberté du travail (On the Liberty of Working) (1845) had been published in February 1845 and we know from a letter Bastiat wrote to Dunoyer on March 7, 1845 that he had received a copy of it in Mugron. 409 This undated draft may well have been written at this time. In his letter, Bastiat thanks Dunoyer for his kind words 410 about his own work as he had written two pieces for the Journal des Économistes in late 1844 and early 1845, and had a book on Cobden and the League about to be published by Guillaumin in June. 411 His essay criticising Lamartine's work on the same topic as Dunoyer's book would have caught Dunoyer's attention. The two men met for the first time at Bastiat's welcome dinner in Paris in May 1845 412 and in his letter to Félix Coudroy relating what happened at the dinner, Bastiat with some excitement tells him that Dunoyer had asked him to write an article on his book for the prestigious Journal des débats because he thought that Bastiat was "éminemment propre à faire apprécier son travail" (eminently qualified to evaluate his work). It is probably with this task in mind that Bastiat wrote this draft. However, Bastiat was still somewhat in awe of the Parisian political economists and was uncertain about his own talents as an economist and never finished the article. Dunoyer's book was however reviewed in the Journal des débats by the economist Michel Chevalier. 413

Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte were two of the leading liberal social theorists of the Restoration and July Monarchy. Bastiat acknowledged their importance to his own intellectual development in this unpublished book review of Dunoyer's book and in his essay on Mignet's eulogy of Comte given to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death in 1847. 414 After successfully collaborating on one of the key liberal journals of the Restoration period, Le Censeur (1814-15) and its sequel Le Censeur européen (1817-19), both men turned to writing detailed examinations of the social, legal, and economic institutions and ideas which made liberty possible. Comte focused on law and property in the Traité de législation (Treatise on Legislation) (1826) and the Traité de la propriété (Treatise on Property) (1834); 415 while Dunoyer focussed on the historical and economic evolution which society had gone through to get to its current state of emergent industrialism, in a series of books beginning in 1825 and culminating in De la liberté du travail (1845) which is the object of Bastiat's attention in this short review. 416

In the Preface written in January 1845 Dunoyer noted the long gestation period of his ideas, which went back even further than the 20 years quoted by Bastiat in his opening lines. Dunoyer says he began thinking about the deeper social and intellectual reasons behind the existence of authoritarian government even as he was fighting against its current manifestation in the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1815. He came to the conclusion that his and Comte's efforts to change the face of authoritarian government would not be successful unless the underlying reasons why people demanded or tolerated authoritarian governments had been addressed. This began a long and difficult research program lasting nearly 30 years in which he wanted to expand the domain of political economy away from an exclusive focus on the creation and distribution of wealth, which was its inheritance from Adam Smith and J.B. Say, into a new dimension of "social economy." 417

Dunoyer also wanted to shift attention away from an exclusive concern about the form of government, whether monarchical or republican, authoritarian or democratic, to a deeper sociological and intellectual understanding of why societies and economies took the forms they did. He believed that violence on a political or societal level could only be explained (and thus ultimately eliminated) only when it was understood why individuals engaged in violence on an inter-personal level. As he asks at one point: 418

Les excès reprochés au pouvoir, disais-je, sont le fait de la population, de la population considérée dans sa vie publique, dans son activité collective. Mais n'y a-t-il d'oppressions dans un pays que celles que la population y exerce politiquement? Les violences que se font les individus dans leurs rapports mutuels ne sont-elles pas des oppressions aussi, et des oppressions absolument de la même nature et tenant a la même cause, c'est-a-dire a l'imperfection de leurs facultés , au mauvais emploi qu'ils en font les uns à l'égard des autres et à l'état peu avancé de leur morale de relation? Il ne leur suffirait donc pas, pour être libres, de se bien conduire collectivement, politiquement? Il faudrait donc encore que, dans leurs rapports privés, ils sussent mieux régler l'emploi de leurs forces? [vol. 1, p. 3]

I would say that the much criticised excesses of power are done by the people, by the people viewed in their public life, in their collective activity. But are the acts of oppression in a country only those which the people exercise politically? Aren't the violent acts done by the people in their relations with each other also acts of oppression, acts which are of the exact same nature and which stem from the exact same cause, that is to say from the imperfect exercise of their abilities (faculties), the bad use that they make of one ability with respect to the others, and to the poorly developed state of their moral beliefs concerning their mutual relations? Therefore, it would not be sufficient for them, in order to become free, to conduct themselves well collectively and politically. Wouldn't it also be necessary that, in their private relationships with each other, they would have to know how to better control the use of their power (strength)?

Dunoyer had a quite different theory of liberty than many of his fellow liberals like Bastiat in that he did not define liberty as the absence of coercion but the ability of individuals to use their powers to achieve the goals they have set themselves. The following statement must have unsettled Bastiat a little, as his view of liberty was very firmly grounded in the theory of natural rights: 419

Ce que j'appelle liberté, dans ce livre, c'est ce pouvoir que l'homme acquiert d'user de ses forces plus facilement à mesure qu'il s'affranchit des obstacles qui en gênaient originairement l'exercice. Je dis qu'il est d'autant plus libre qu'il est plus délivré des causes qui l'empêchaient de s'en servir, qu'il a plus éloigné de lui ces causes, qu'il a plus agrandi et désobstrué la sphère de son action.

What I call liberty in this book is the ability that man has acquired to use his powers more easily as he frees himself from the obstacles which ordinarily hinder him. I say that he is free to the extent that he has removed the causes of what was preventing him from making use of them (forces), to the extent that he has been able to keep these causes at bay, to the extent that he has increased his sphere of action and cleared away any obstacles within it.

Perhaps as a result of his frustrations resulting from the failure of the liberals to develop a coherent and effective theory of limited government in the restoration period, Dunoyer had given up the attempt to derive liberty from first principles. He dismisses this as the work of "dogmatic philosophers who only speak about rights and duties." 420 He, on the other hand, wanted to focus instead on "how it happens that men are free, under what conditions can they be free, what combination of knowledge and sound moral habits make it possible for men to carry out private industry, how do they raise themselves up to the point where they can engage in political activity?"

This shift from a moral defence of liberty to a sociological and historical study of how free societies in fact emerged, or were on the cusp of emerging, was later regretted by Bastiat and Molinari when they came to debating socialists during the 1848 Revolution. Both noted that political economy needed to be defended on moral, scientific, and political grounds and by not doing so, writers like Dunoyer had opened up the liberals to damaging criticism from the left and the right. However, the extraordinary historical and sociological detail drawn upon by Dunoyer and the way he blended this with economic analysis, may have inspired Bastiat to plan the writing of his own History of Plunder which would follow the completion of his treatise on economics, the Economic Harmonies .

In a footnote Dunoyer recalls how the first part of his project was published as L'Industrie et la morale considérées dans leurs rapports avec la liberté in 1825 and an enlarged sequel as Nouveau traité d'économie sociale in 1830. Unfortunately, the latter volume did not receive the attention it deserved because the outbreak of revolution in July of that year distracted potential readers and a fire in the bookshop destroyed nearly all the copies except for a handful of review copies. The full and complete version did not see the light of day until early 1845. It quickly became one of the most important books in the arsenal of the political economy movement just as Bastiat was taking up residence in Paris.

It should be noted that in this essay Bastiat uses for the first time the term "harmonique" (harmony) which would become so central to his thinking later. He uses it while criticising socialists for not seeing that " a marvelous, harmonious, and progressive order (can) result from the to and fro of social groups and the free action and reaction of human interests." There is also his first use of another key concept, namely that exchange is the exchange of one service for another ("service pour service") in his statement that "from the economic point of view, society is an exchange of services that are paid for." Thus, in this essay and his "Letter to Lamartine" (January 1845) many of his original economic insights appear for the first time in print. 421

On the Book by M. Dunoyer, On The Liberty of Working

"I had the idea for this book twenty years ago", says Mr. Dunoyer. 422 Certainly, during this twenty year period, there was not one year in which this major work might have been published for the people with more relevance; and I venture to believe that it is destined to bring science back to its proper path. A disastrous theoretical system seems to have taken a dangerous hold over people's minds. A figment of the imagination, welcomed by lazy minds and disseminated by fashion, encouraging praiseworthy but ill thought-out sentiments of philanthropy in some and attracting others by its misleading promise of prompt and easily-obtained enjoyment, this theory has taken hold like some epidemic. It is breathed in with the air and caught by contact with the world; even science no longer has the fortitude to resist it. Science bows before it, salutes it, smiles at it, flatters it and yet it knows that this system could not stand up for one minute to the severe and impartial examination of reason. This system is known as Socialism . It consists in rejecting any providential designs in the governance of the moral world; in supposing that a marvelous, harmonious, 423 and progressive order cannot result from the to and fro of social groups and the free action and reaction of human interests; and in dreaming up artificial forms of organization that need only the consent of the human race to come into force. Will we all become Moravian Brethren ? 424 Will we lock ourselves away in a phalanstery? 425 Will we abolish only heredity, or will we also rid ourselves of property and the family? We have not made up our minds on this and, for the moment, there is only one thing whose exclusion has been unanimously decided upon, and that is freedom.

Away with freedom!

Down with freedom! 426

Everyone agrees on this point. All that is left for the billion people that live on our planet is to make the choice, from the thousand plans that have seen the light of day, of the one to which they would prefer to be subjected unless, however, there is a better one among those that hatch each morning. It is true that this choice presents a few difficulties, for the Socialists are far from all having the same social projects , even though they have taken the same name. Here is Mr. Jobard 427 who thinks that the notion of property does not extend far enough. He wants to extend it to the most fleeting literary or artistic thoughts. Then we have Saint-Simon 428 , who does not accept even material property. Between them we have Mr. Blanc 429 , who duly recognizes property of the goods produced by work (except for the sharing of his invention), while castigating as impious and sacrilegious anyone who draws the slightest profit from a book, painting or musical score - happily submitting himself to current practice until his theory triumphs.

Amidst the countless births of these Social Plans , begot from the over-heated imaginations of our modern would-be Teachers of Nations , reason finds indescribable solace at feeling itself being brought back by Mr. Dunoyer's book to an examination of, yes, another Social Plan , but one created by Providence itself; at seeing the development of the fine harmonies it has inscribed in the heart of man, in his organization and in the laws of his intellectual and moral nature. People can say forever that there is no poetry in experimental science; this is not true, for it would be the same as saying that there is no poetry in the work of God.

Do people think that Cuvier's geological discoveries 430 do not lead us to admire the glimpse they permit us of the Creator's designs and most ingenious inventions, just because they were due to laborious and patient observation, or because they agreed with factual realities?

The obligatory point of departure of modern reformers 431 (whether they acknowledge this or not) is that society is deteriorating under the influence of natural laws and that these laws tend increasingly to introduce poverty and inequality in men; for this reason, with what mournful pictures do they not darken the initial pages of their books! To accept the principle of perfectibility would be to create in advance a blunt rebuttal of their claim to remake the world. If they acknowledged that in the laws of Responsibility and Solidarity there is a force that overwhelmingly tends to make men improve and become equal, why would they rise up against these laws, they who profess to aspire precisely to this result? Their task would be limited to studying them, discovering their harmony, making them known and pointing out and combating the obstacles they still encounter in the errors in men's minds, the vices in their hearts, popular prejudices, and the abuses of power and authority.

The best thing with which to confront the Socialists is therefore a simple description of these laws. This is what Mr. Dunoyer does. But after all, since people often differ over things only because they do not agree on the meaning of words, Mr. Dunoyer begins by defining what he understands by freedom . 432

Freedom is the power to act . Therefore each obstacle that is overcome, each restriction that is overthrown, each morsel of experience gained, each piece of learning that lights up the intellect, each virtue that increases confidence, friendship and strengthen the social bonds is one more freedom conquered in the world, for there is nothing in all these things that is not a power to act , a peaceful power and one that is beneficial and civilizing.

Mr. Dunoyer's first volume is devoted to solving the following question of fact: Has the world made progress under the sway of the law of freedom, or has it not? He then studies in turn the various social states through which it has been man's destiny to pass, the state of the nations that hunt, keep flocks, farm, or carry out industry and to which correspond the states of cannibalism, slavery, servitude, and monopoly. He shows the human race rising up toward well-being and morality as it becomes more free ; he proves that at each phase of its existence the harms that it has endured have been caused by the obstacles that it encountered in its ignorance, errors and vices. He identifies the principle that has enabled it to overcome them and, finally turning toward the future the torch that has shown him the past, he sees society making unceasing progress without having to be subjected to forms of organization that have recently been invented, on the sole condition that it wages unceasing combat against both the fetters that still encumber human production and the ignorance that obstructs men's minds and what remains of lack of foresight, injustice, and evil passions in their habits.

In this way, the author gives short shrift to the old sophism, unworthy of science and recently brought back from the most barbarous of ages, which consists in shoring up error by drawing on isolated and unfortunately only too numerous facts which serve to induce a regression of the human race. Faithful to his method, he works out the progress made, attributes it to its genuine sources and shows that, by developing these and destroying, rather than resurrecting obstacles, extending, and not restricting the principles of responsibility, strengthening, not weakening the resilience of solidarity, and by educating, improving, and liberating ourselves, we will move on toward fresh progress.

Once he has studied the human race through its various stages, Mr. Dunoyer considers it in the light of its various functions.

At this point, he needed to set out systematically the names of these functions. We have no hesitation in saying that those used by the author are more rational, more methodical, and above all more comprehensive than those traditionally used by economic science. 433

If you divide production either into agriculture, manufacturing and commerce or, like Mr. de Tracy, 434 you reduce it to two sectors, production that transforms and production that transports , it is clear that you are leaving outside the scope of economic science, a host of social functions, in particular all those that are carried out between people. From the economic point of view, society is an exchange of services 435 that are paid for and in this respect, lawyers, doctors, soldiers, magistrates, teachers, priests, and civil servants are just as much a part of economic science as traders and farmers. 436

We all work for one another, we all exchange services with each other, and economics is incomplete if it does not include all forms of service and all forms of work.

We therefore believe that political economy owes Mr. Dunoyer a debt for establishing a classification that, without exceeding its natural limits, has the merit of opening new horizons and new fields for research, especially those of an intellectual and moral order, and wresting it from the materialistic confinement in which greater minds do not care to languish for any length of time.

Therefore, when Mr. Dunoyer, after having sought to identify the social states that have been most favorable to the human race, examines the conditions under which each function develops with most power and freedom, one senses that a moral principle has come to assume its proper place in economic science. He shows that intellectual forces and individual virtue or virtuous relationships with others are no less essential to the success of our projects than the forces of industry. The choice of time and place, knowledge of the market, order, foresight, a mind that follows through, probity, and saving, all contribute as genuinely to the swift accumulation, fair distribution, and judicious consumption of wealth as capital, skill and human activity.

We would not be so bold as to say that in the huge tapestry traced by the author there have not crept in a few comments on detail that might be contested or still less that he has exhausted his boundless subject. However, his method is a good one, the limits to the science well established, and the dominant principles clearly defined. In this huge field there is room for many workers, and if we were to express our thoughts in full, we think this area of study is one where both those meticulous minds who have an unshakeable attachment to the imperatives of logic which are required in that part of political economy which is accessible to rigorous demonstrations, and those ardent spirits whose idolatry of beauty and goodness draws them instead to the realms of utopia and fantasy, will be able to come up against each other.

T.24 (1845.04.15) "Economic Sophisms: Abundance and Scarcity" (JDE, April 1845)↩

Source

T.24 (1845.04.15) "Abundance and Scarcity" (Abondance, disette), Journal des Économistes, April 1845, T. 11, no. 41, p. 1-8; also ES1.1 [OC4.1.1, pp. 5-14.] [CW3 - ES1.1]

Text

T.25 (1845.04.15) "Economic Sophisms: Obstacle and Cause" (JDE, April 1845)↩

Source

T.25 (1845.04.15) "Obstacle and Cause" (Obstacle, cause), Journal des Économistes, April 1845, T. 11, no. 41, p. 8-10; also ES1.2. [OC4.1.2, pp. 15-18.] [CW3 - ES1.2]

Text

T.26 (1845.04.15) "Economic Sophisms: Effort and Result" (JDE, April 1845)↩

Source

T.26 (1845.04.15) "Effort and Result" (Effort, résultat), Journal des Économistes, April 1845, T. 11,no. 41, p. 10-16; also ES1.3. [OC4.1.3, pp. 19-27.] [CW3 - ES1.3]

Text

T.27 (1845.06) "Introduction" to Cobden and the League (Guillaumin, 1845)↩

Source

T.27 (1845.06) Cobden et la ligue, ou l'Agitation anglaise pour la liberté du commerce (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845) (Cobden and the League, or the English Movement for Free Trade). FB's first book was reviewed in the July 1845 edition of JDE, T. 11, no. 44, p. 446 so it was probably published in June. It consists of a lengthy "Introduction" by Bastiat, which we include in the [CW6], and his lengthy summaries and translations of meetings, newspaper accounts, and other material produced by the Anti-Corn Law League (which we do not include). FB's "Introduction" to Cobden et la Ligue (1845), pp. i-xcvi. [OC3, pp. 1-80.] [CW6]

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T.28 (1845.06.15) "The Economic Situation of Great Britain: Financial Reforms and Agitation for Commercial Freedom" (JDE, June 1845)↩

Source

T.28 (1845.06.15) "The Economic Situation of Great Britain: Financial Reforms and Agitation for Commercial Freedom" (Situation économique de la Grande-Bretagne. Réformes financières. Agitation pour la liberté commerciale), Journal des Économistes, June 1845, T. XI, no. 43, pp. 233-265. This article is an extract from Bastiat's introduction to T.27 Cobden and the League, pp. vii ff. [DMH]

Text

(Extract of T.27 - see above for details)

T.29 (1845.07.15) "Equalizing the Conditions of Production" (JDE, July 1845)↩

Source

T.29 (1845.07.15) "Equalizing the Conditions of Production" (Égaliser les conditions de production), Journal des Économistes, July 1845, T. 11, no. 44, p. 345-56; also ES1.4. [OC4.1.4, pp. 27-45.] [CW3 - ES1.4]

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T.30 (1845.07.15) "Our Products are weighed down with Taxes" (JDE, July 1845)↩

Source

T.30 (1845.07.15) "Our Products are weighed down with Taxes" (Nos produits sont grevés de taxes), Journal des Économistes, July 1845, T. 11, no. 44, p. 356-60; also ES1.5. [OC4.1.5, pp. 46-52.] [CW3 - ES1.5]

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T.31 (1845.08.15) "On the Future of the Wine Trade between France and England" (JDE, Aug., 1845)↩

Source

T.31 (1845.08.15) "On the Future of the Wine Trade between France and England" (De l'avenir du commerce des vins entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne), Journal des Économistes, Aug. 1845, T. 12, no. 45, pp. 72-74. [OC1, pp. 387-92.] [CW6]

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T.32 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): VI. The Balance of Trade" (JDE, Oct., 1845)↩

Source

T.32 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): VI. The Balance of Trade" (Balance du commerce), Journal des Économistes, Oct. 1845, T. 12, no. 47, p. 201-04; also ES1.6. [OC4, pp. 52-57.] [CW3 - ES1.6]

Text

T.33 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): VII. Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, etc." (JDE, Oct., 1845)↩

Source

T.33 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): VII. Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, etc." (Pétition des fabricants de chandelles, etc.), Journal des Économistes, Oct. 1845, T. 12,no. 47, p. 204-07; also ES1.7. [OC4, pp. 57-62.] [CW3 - ES1.7]

Text

T.34 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): VIII. Differential Duties" (JDE, Oct., 1845)↩

Source

T.34 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): VIII. Differential Duties" (Droits différentiels), Journal des Économistes, Oct. 1845, T. 12, no. 47, p. 207-08; also ES1.8. [OC4, pp. 62-63.] [CW3 - ES1.8]

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T.35 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): IX. An immense Discovery!!!" (JDE, Oct., 1845)↩

Source

T.35 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): IX. An immense Discovery!!!" (Immense découverte!!!), Journal des Économistes, Oct. 1845, T. 12, no. 47, p. 208-11; also ES1.9. [OC4, pp. 63-67.] [CW3 - ES1.9]

Text

T.36 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): X. Reciprocity" (JDE, Oct., 1845)↩

Source

T.36 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): X. Reciprocity" (Réciprocité), Journal des Économistes, Oct. 1845, T. 12, no. 47, p. 211; also ES1.10. [OC4, pp. 67-70.] [CW3 - ES1.10]

Text

T.37 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): X. Nominal Prices" (JDE, Oct., 1845)↩

Source

T.37 (1845.10.15) "Economic Sophisms (cont.): X. Nominal Prices" (Prix absolus), Journal des Économistes, Oct. 1845, T. 12,no. 47, p. 213-15. This chapter was originally numbered XII in the JDE but became chapter XI in the book version of Economic Sophisms and incorporated chapter XI. "Stulta et Puera", from the JDE version p. 211-12; also ES1.11. [ OC4, pp. 70-74.] [CW3 - ES1.11]

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T.38 (1845.11) Economic Sophisms. First Series (Guillaumin, 1846)↩

Source

T.38 (1845.11) (ES1) Sophismes économiques. Première série (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846) (Economic Sophisms. First Series): Comprising articles published in the Journal des économistes, April, July, Oct. 1845 and other material. Conclusion is dated "Mugron, 2 Nov., 1845". Published in Paris, by Guillaumin, in Jan. 1846. The following chapters were not published previously (see below for details). [OC4, pp. 1-126.] [CW3 - ES1]

• 1845.12 ES1 [Author's Introduction] [OC4.1.0, pp. 1-5]
• 1845.12 ES1.12 "La protection élève-t-elle le taux des salaires?" (Does Protection increase the Rate of Pay?) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 74-79]
• 1845.12 ES1.13 "Théorie, Pratique" (Theory and Practice) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 79-86]
• 1845.12 ES1.14 "Conflit de principes" (A Conflict of Principles) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 86-90]
• 1845.12 ES1.15 "Encore la réciprocité" (More Reciprocity) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 90-92]
• 1845.12 ES1.16 "Les fleuves obstrués plaidant pour les prohibitionistes" (Blocked Rivers pleading in favor of the Prohibitionists) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 92-93]
• 1845.12 ES1.17 "Un chemin de fer négatif" (A Negative Railway] [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 93-94]
• 1845.12 ES1.18 "Il n'y a pas de principes absolus" (There are no Absolute Principles) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 94-97]
• 1845.12 ES1.19 "Indépendance nationale" (National Independence) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 97-99]
• 1845.12 ES1.20 "Travail humain, travail national" (Human Labor and Domestic Labor) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 100-05]
• 1845.12 ES1 21 "Matières premières" (Raw Materials) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 105-15]
• 1845.12 ES1 22 "Métaphores" (Metaphors) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 115-19]
• 1845.11 ES1 "Conclusion" (Conclusion) [signed "Mugron, 2 Nov., 1845"] [OC4, pp. 119-26]

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Conclusion (final draft)↩

Publishing history

• Original title, place and date of publication: "Conclusion" (Conclusion) [dated "Mugron, 2 November, 1845"] [1st published in book].
• Published as book or pamphlet: ES1 1st French edition 1846.
• Location in Paillottet's edition: Oeuvres complètes (1st ed. 1854-55), Vol. 4: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I. (1854), 5th ed., pp. 119-26.
• Previous translation: 1st English ed. 1846, 1st American ed. 1848, FEE ed. 1964. See "Note on the Publishing History."

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All the sophisms that I have combated up to now relate to a single matter, the protectionist system; even so, out of pity for the reader, I have left out some of the best:166 acquired rights, inconveniences, depletion of the currency, etc., etc.

But social economy is not limited to this narrow circle. Fourierist doctrine, Saint-Simonian doctrine,167 communism, mysticism, sentimentalism, bogus philanthropy, affected aspirations to illusionary equality and fraternity, questions relating to luxury, to wages, to machines, to the alleged tyranny of capital, to colonies, markets, conquests, population, association, emigration, taxes and loans: these have cluttered the field of science with a host of parasitic arguments, sophisms that call for the hoe and harrow of a diligent economist.

It is not that I do not acknowledge the flaw in this plan or rather the lack of a plan. To attack one by one so many incoherent sophisms that sometimes clash and most often are included in one another, is to condemn oneself to a disorganized and capricious struggle and to expose oneself to perpetual repetition.

How I would prefer to say quite simply what things are, without having to pay attention to a thousand aspects through which ignorance sees them! To present the laws according to which societies prosper or decline is virtually to destroy all sophisms at a stroke. When Laplace168 described what we are able to know of the movements of the heavenly bodies up to now, he dissipated without even mentioning them by name, all the astrological musings of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Hindus with greater surety than he could have done if he had refuted them directly in countless volumes. Truth is unitary; the book that provides an exposition of it is an imposing and durable edifice.

It defies greedy tyrants
bolder than the Pyramids
and more durable than brass.169

Error is multifarious and ephemeral by nature; the work that combats it does not carry within itself any principle signifying grandeur and longevity.

But if I have lacked the force and perhaps the opportunity170 to proceed in the same way as people such as Laplace and Say,171 I cannot help believing that the form I have adopted also has its modest uses.172 Above all, it seems to me to be well proportioned to the needs of the century and the fleeting moments it is able to devote to study.

A treatise doubtless has clear superiority but only on one condition, that it is to be read, reflected upon, and deepened. It addresses an elite audience only. Its mission is initially to set and then expand the circle of knowledge acquired.

The refutation of commonly held prejudices cannot have this elevated range. It aspires only to clear the way for the march of truth, to prepare men's minds, redirect the public moral sense, and destroy dangerous weapons in impure hands.

It is above all in social economy that this constant struggle and these constantly reborn battles with popular error have genuine practical use.

The sciences can be divided into two categories.

Strictly speaking, the first can be known only by scholars. These are the ones whose application occupies some specialists. Ordinary people receive the fruit of these in spite of their ignorance; although they do not know about mechanics and astronomy, they still enjoy the use of a watch, they are still transported by locomotives or steamboats given their faith in engineers or pilots. We walk in accordance with the laws of equilibrium without knowing them, just as M. Jourdain173 spoke prose without knowing it.

But there are also sciences that exercise on the public an influence only in proportion to the enlightenment of the public itself, which draw their entire effectiveness not from the accumulated knowledge in a few exceptional heads but from the knowledge disseminated among the general public. They include morals, hygiene, social economy and, in those countries in which men are their own masters, politics. It is of these sciences that Bentham might have said in particular: "What broadcasts them is more valuable than what advances them."174 What does it matter that a great man, a God even, has promulgated the moral law, as long as men, imbued with false notions, take virtues for vices and vices for virtues? What does it matter if Smith,175 Say,176 and according to M. de Saint-Chamans,177 the economists of all schools proclaim, with reference to commercial transactions that freedom is superior to coercion, if those who make the laws and for whom laws are made are convinced of the contrary?

These sciences, which have been appropriately named social, also have the particular characteristic that for the very reason that they are in common use, nobody admits to knowing nothing about them. Do we need to solve a question of chemistry or geometry? We do not pretend to be steeped in the science; we are not ashamed to call upon M. Thénard, we have no problem in opening Legendre or Bezout.178 However, in social sciences, we acknowledge scarcely any authorities. As each of us every day acts in accordance with good or bad morals, hygiene, economy, or reasonable or absurd politics, each of us feels able to find fault with, discuss, decide, and lay down the law on these matters. Are you ill? There is no old woman who will not tell you from the outset what the cause and remedy of your ailment is: "It is because your fluids are out of sort," she states, "you must be purged".179 But what are these fluids? And are there such things? This is something she does not trouble herself about. I involuntarily think of this dear old woman when I hear all the social ills being explained by these banal statements: It is the overabundance of products; it is the tyranny of capital; it is too many producers and other idiocies of which it cannot even be said verba et voces, praetereaque nihil,180 for they are just so many disastrous errors.

Two things result from what has gone before: 1. That the social sciences, more than the others, have to abound in sophisms because they are the ones in which everyone consults only his own judgment or instincts; 2. That it is in these sciences that sophism is particularly damaging because it misleads public opinion on a subject in which public opinion constitutes power and, is taken as law.

Two sorts of books are therefore needed for these sciences; those that expound them and those that propagate them, those that reveal the truth and those that combat error.

It seems to me that the inherent defect in the aesthetic form of this pamphlet, repetition, is what constitutes its principal usefulness.

In the subject I have discussed, each sophism doubtless has its own formula and range but all have a common root, which is the overlooking of men's interests as consumers. To show that this sophism is the originator of a thousand paths of error181 is to teach the general public to recognize it, understand it, and mistrust it in all circumstances.

After all, my intention is not exactly to lay the ground for deeply held convictions but to sow the seeds of doubt.

My hope is that when the reader puts the book down he will not exclaim, "I know"; please heaven, but that he might sincerely say , "I do not know!"

"I don't know, because I am beginning to fear that there might be something illusory in the alleged mild effects of scarcity." (Sophism I.)

"I am no longer so convinced of the supposed charms of obstacles to economic activity. (Sophism II.)

"The effort which produces no result seems no longer to me to be as desirable as the result which requires no effort. (Sophism III)

"It could well be that the secret of commerce, unlike that of combat (according to the definition given by the fencing instructor in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme182), does not consist in giving and not receiving. (Sophism VI.)

"I understand that a good increases in value to the degree that it has been worked upon; but in an exchange, do two goods of equal value cease to be of equal value because one comes from a plough and the other from a Jacquard loom?183 (Sophism XXI.)

"I admit that I am beginning to find it strange that mankind might be improved by fetters or enriched by taxes; and frankly I would be relieved of a great burden and I would feel pure joy if it could be demonstrated to me, as the author of the Sophisms assures me, that there is no contradiction between well being and justice, between peace and liberty, between the expansion of labor and the progress of knowledge. (Sophisms XIV and XX.)

"Thus, without claiming to be satisfied with his arguments, which I don't know if I should call reasons or paradoxes, I will explore further the works of the masters of economic science."

Let us end this monograph on sophistry with a final and important thought:

The world is not sufficiently aware of the influence that sophistry exercises on it.

If I have to say what I think, when the right of the strongest was dethroned, sophistry handed empire to the right of the most subtle, and it would be difficult to say which of these two tyrants has been the most disastrous for the human race.

Men have an immoderate love for pleasure, influence, esteem, and power, in a word, for wealth.

And at the same time, they are driven by an immense urge to procure these things for themselves at the expense of others.

But these others, who are the general public, have no less an urge to keep what they have acquired, provided that they can and they know how to.

Plunder, which plays such a major role in the affairs of the world, has thus only two things which promote it: force and fraud 184, and two things which limit it: courage and enlightenment.

Force used for plunder forms the bedrock upon which the annals of human history rest.Retracing its history would be to reproduce almost entirely the history of every nation: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Goths, the Francs, the Huns, the Turks, the Arabs, the Mongols, and the Tartars, not to mention the Spanish in America, the English in India, the French in Africa, the Russians in Asia, etc., etc.

But at least in civilized nations, the men who produce the wealth have become sufficiently numerous and strong to defend it. Is this to say that they are no longer dispossessed? Not at all; they are just as dispossessed as ever and, what is more, they mutually dispossess each other.

Only, the thing which promotes it has changed; it is no longer by force but by fraud that public wealth can be seized.

In order to steal from the public it it first necessary to deceive them. To deceive them it is necessary to persuade them that they are being robbed for their own good; it is to make them accept imaginary services and often worse in exchange for their possessions. This gives rise to sophistry. Theocratic sophistry, economic sophistry, political sophistry and financial sophistry. Therefore, ever since force has been held in check, sophistry has been not only a source of harm, it has been the very essence of harm. It must in its turn be held in check. And to do this the public must become cleverer than the clever, just as it has become stronger than the strong.

Good public, it is this last thought in mind that I am addressing this first essay to you, although the preface has been strangely transposed and the dedication is somewhat belated. 185 186

Mugron, 2 November 1845

END OF THE FIRST PART

Endnotes

166 The phrase "J'en passe, et des meilleurs" (I pass over some of the best) comes from Victror Hugo's play Hernani, or l'Honneur Castillian (1830). It is spoken by the Spanish grandee Don Ruy Gomez as he points out boastfully to Don Carlos some portraits of his illustrious ancestors. "Hernani" in Oeuvres complètes de Victor Hugo. Drame. III (Paris: Eugène Renduel, 1836), p. 127, Act III, scene VI. See he glossary entry on "Hugo."

167 See the glossary entries on "Fourier" and "Saint-Simon."

168 Pierre Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749–1827) was a French astronomer, physicist, and mathematician who greatly extended the development of mathematical astronomy and statistics. See the glossary entry on "Laplace."

169 Bastiat quotes an imitation of an ode by Horace by the French poet Pierre-Antoine LeBrun. It is found in a polyglot edition of the works of Horace published in 1834 with the verses in the original Latin with translations and "imitations" in French, Italian, Spanish, and German. In Ode XXX Horace declares that his poetry will outlast the ravages of the elements and of political tyrants. LeBrun's version of the verse: "Grace à la Muse qui m'inspire, / Il est fini ce monument / Que jamais ne pourront détruire / Le fer ni le flot écumant. / Le ciel même, armé de la foudre, / Ne saurait le réduire en poudre: / /Les siècles l'essaieraient en vain.

Il brave ces tyrans avides, / Plus hardi que les pyramides / Et plus durable que l'airain." From "Imitations en vers français. Ode XXX – Livre III," in Oeuvres complètes d'Horace, p. 229.

170 (Paillottet's note) We pointed out at the end of chapter IV [see this volume, "Equalizing the Conditions of Production," pp. 000–00] that it contains the obvious seed of doctrines developed in the Economic Harmonies. Here, the author shows his intention to write this last work at the first available opportunity.

171 It is not surprising that Bastiat would mention Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) in this context of key works which have exposed commonly held falsehoods. Like Adam Smith (1723-90) before him whose Wealth of Nations (1776) debunked the sophisms of mercantilism, Say's Treatise of Political Economy (1st edition 1803, 3rd greatly revised edition of 1817) debunked the economic sophisms which had emerged during the French Revolution and Napoleon's Empire. The latter had a profound influence on the economists of Bastiat's generation. See the glossary entries on "Adam Smith" and "J.B. Say."

172 See David Hart's Introduction on the changing "form" Bastiat adopted for his economic sophisms. Bastiat had proven himself to be an insightful and witty economic journalist but he was conflicted over what form and style was best to use in appealing to the broader public between 1846 and 1848 when the first two "Series" of the Economic Harmonies were published. He could write more serious even technical articles or he was equally capable of writing very clever and amusing satires. He was stung by a review of the 1st Series (published early 1846) which accused him of being too dry and dull in his form, so he increased the number of the more amusing and light-hearted pieces in the 2nd Series (early 1848 before the February Revolution). Then when the Revolution broke out he decided that matters had become so serious that it was now inappropriate for puns, jokes, and satire and that his critique of socialism and interventionism required much more blunt and hard-hitting language.

173 In Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman) (1670) by J. B. P. Molière (1622–1673), Act II, scene VI, the Instructor of Philosophy is instructing M. Jourdain on how to behave like a gentleman. Jourdain wants to woo a woman of higher social status than he is and wants to be able to write her a letter. When asked by the Philosopher if he wants to write verse or prose M. Jourdain gets confused because he doesn't know the difference between the two. He is told told that everyday speech is a form of prose and Jourdain is astonished that for 40 years he had been speaking prose without knowing it. Oeuvres complètes de Molière, avec les notes de tous les commentateurs. Édition publiée par L. Aimé-Martin. Tome septième (Paris: Lefèvre, 1826), pp. 138-40. See the glossary entry on "Molière."

174 The quotation comes from Bentham, Théorie des peines et des recompenses, ed. É. Dumont, chap. 3, "De la diffusion des sciences," p. 249. See the glossary entry on Bentham."

175 Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and one of the founders of modern economic thought with his work The Wealth of Nations (1776). An important French edition of the Wealth of Nations was published by Guillaumin with notes and commentary by leading French economists such as Blanqui, Garnier, Sismondi, and Say and appeared in 1843. See the glossary entry on "Smith."

176 Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) was the leading French political economist in the first third of the nineteenth century. He had the first chair in political economy at the Collège de France. Say is best known for his Traité d'économie politique (1803) and the Cours complet d'économie politique pratique (1828-33). See the glossary on "J.B.Say."

177 Auguste Saint-Chamans (1777-1860) was a deputy (1824-27) and a Councillor of State. He advocated protectionism and a mercantilist theory of the balance of trade. See the glossary entry on "Saint-Chamans."

178 Louis Jacques Thénard (1777–1857) was a chemist who became a professor at the Collège de France in 1804, discovered hydrogen peroxide, and had a significant influence on the teaching of science in 19th century France; Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833) was a mathematician who was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1783 and is best known for his work on polynomials and the least squares method; Étienne Bezout (1730-1783) was a French mathematician who was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1758 and is best known for his general theory of algebraic equations. See the glossary entries on "Thénard," "Legendre," and "Bezout."

179 One of Bastiat's cleverest sophisms ES2 IX "Theft by Subsidy" [below, pp. ???] includes a parody of Molière's parody about the primitive medical practices of the 17th century, including that of purging. In The Hypocondriac Molière creates a fictional oath of induction for new doctors in which they promise to "purge, bleed, stab" their patients to death. Bastiat does the same for tax collectors in which they pledge to "steal, plunder, filch" from all passers-by. See "Bastiat's Rhetoric of Liberty" in the Introduction, above, pp. ???

180 The Latin phrase "verba et voces, praetereaque nihil" (words and voices and nothing more) has been attributed to various authors such as Ovid and Quintilian but there is no firm evidence for their authorship. It is similiar to a line from Horace, Epistle I.i.34, which says "sunt verba et voces" (there are spells and sayings).

181 Here (circa November 1845) Bastiat argues that the "racine commune" (common root) for a thousand sophisms is to overlook men's interests as consumers." In 1847 when he wrote a brief draft of a chapter on Montaigne's essay "Le Profit d'un est dommage de l'autre" (One man's gain is another man's loss) he called this phrase the "classical example of a sophism, the root stock sophism from which comes multitudes of sophisms" (Sophisme type, sophisme souche, d'où sortent des multitudes de sophismes). See ES3 15 "One man's gain is another man's loss."

182 The "maître d'armes" (fencing instructor) instructs M. Jourdain in the two simple secrets for success in fencing: to give and not to receive thrusts of the sword and to deflect any thrust of the sword made at you away from the line of the body. See Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman), Act II, Scene III. in Oeuvres complètes de Molière, avec les notes de tous les commentateurs. Édition publiée par L. Aimé-Martin. Tome septième (Paris: Lefèvre, 1826), p. 122. See the glossary entry on "Molière."

183 Joseph Marie Charles (Jacquard) (1752-1834) was a French weaver and inventor who was a pioneer in the development of the mechanical loom which revolutionized the production of woven cloth. His contribution in 1801, the Jacquard loom, built upon the work of others and depended upon the use of punched cards with holes which controlled the pattern woven into the cloth. It was one of the earliest examples of a programmable machine.

184 Bastiat uses the word "la ruse" (fraud or trickery) which is an important part of his theory of Plunder. See the glossary entry on "Plunder."

185 Here Bastiat seems to be suggesting that the Dedication he wrote for the volume (possibly what we have called "The Author's Introduction") was written last and in some haste, and that the Conclusion was meant to have been put at the beginning of the volume and thus should have been the Preface. These remarks suggest that the volume was edited and published in some haste at the end of 1845, perhaps without Bastiat's full editorial control.

186 (Paillottet's note) This thought, which ends the first series of the Sophisms, will be taken up again and developed by the author at the start of the second series. The influence of plunder on the destiny of the human race preoccupied him greatly. After having covered this subject several times in the Sophisms and the Pamphlets (see in particular Property and Plunder and Plunder and Law) (OC, vol. 4, p. 394, "Propriété et spoliation"; and vol. 5, p. 1, "Spoliation et loi"), he planned a more ample place for it in the second part of the Harmonies, among the disturbing factors. Lastly, as the final evidence of the interest he took in it, he said on the eve of his death: "A very important task to be done for political economy is to write the history of plunder. It is a long history in which, from the outset, there appeared conquests, the migrations of peoples, invasions, and all the disastrous excesses of force in conflict with justice. Living traces of all this still remain today and cause great difficulty for the solution of the questions raised in our century. We will not reach this solution as long as we have not clearly noted in what and how injustice, when making a place for itself amongst us, has gained a foothold in our customs and our laws." ["Property and Plunder" and "Plunder and Law" also appear in The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat, in the volume titled "The Law," "The State," and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850, pp. 000–00 and pp. 000–00.]

T.39 (1845.12.15) "The English Free Trade League and the German League" (JDE, Dec., 1845)↩

Source

T.39 (1845.12.15) "The English Free Trade League and the German League" (La Ligue anglaise et la Ligue allemande. Réponse à la Presse), Journal des Économistes, Dec. 1845, T. 13, no. 49, pp. 83-85. [OC2.26, pp. 141-47.] [CW6]

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T.40 (1845.12.15) "A Question submitted to the General Councils of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce" (JDE, Dec., 1845)↩

Source

T.40 (1845.12.15) "On the Questions submitted to the General Councils of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce" (Sur les questions soumise aux conseils généraux de l'agriculture, des manufactures et du commerce), Journal des Économistes, Dec. 1845, T.13, no. 49, pp. 4-25. [OC1, pp. 392-405.] [CW6]

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T.41 (1846.??) "To M. de Larnac, Deputy of Les Landes, on Parliamentary Reform"↩

Source

T.41 (1846.??) "To M. de Larnac, Deputy of Les Landes, on Parliamentary Reform" (A M. de Larnac, député des Landes: De la réforme parlementaire). [OC1, pp. 480-506.] [CW1.2.2.3, p. 367-86.]

Text Endnotes

T.42 Economic Sophisms. Series I. Conclusion is dated "Mugron, 2 Nov., 1845". Published in Paris, by Guillaumin, in Jan. 1846.↩

Source

T.42 (1846.01) Sophismes économiques. Première série (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846) (Economic Sophisms. First Series) Published in Jan. 1846 from material written and published in 1845 (see above). [OC4, pp. 1-126.] [CW3 - ES1]

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T.43 (1846.01.15) "Theft by Subsidy" (JDE, Jan. 1846)↩

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T.43 (1846.01.15) "Theft by Subsidy" (Le vol à la prime), Journal des Économistes, Jan. 1846, T. XIII, no. 50, pp. 115-120; also ES2.9. [OC4, pp. 189-98.] [CW3 - ES2.9]

T.44 (1846.02.08) "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League" (MB, Feb. 1846)↩

Source

T.44 (1846.02.08) "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League" (Projet de ligue anti-protectionniste), Mémorial bordelais, 8 Feb. 1846. [OC7.6, pp. 30-33.] [CW6]

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T.45 (1846.02.09) "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League. Second Article" (MB, Feb. 1846)↩

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T.45 (1846.02.09) "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League. Second Article" (Projet de ligue anti-protectionniste. 2e article), Mémorial bordelais, 9 Feb. 1846. [OC7.7, pp. 34-38.] [CW6]

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T.46 (1846.02.10) "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League. Third Article" (MB, Feb. 1846)↩

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T.46 (1846.02.10) "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League. Third Article" (Projet de ligue anti-protectionniste. 3e article), Mémorial bordelais, 10 Feb. 1846. [OC7.8, pp. 38-42.] [CW6]

T.47 "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (15 Feb. 1846, JDE)↩

[CW4 draft 16 June, 2017] Source

T.47 (1846.02.15) "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (Considérations sur le métayage), JDE , T.13, no. 51, Feb. 1846, pp. 225-239. This article was not included in Paillottet's OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

After Bastiat's first article "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs" appeared in the JDE in October 1844 he wrote many more for that journal before the Revolution of February 1848 broke out, and in the process changing the direction of his life. They consisted of several kinds of material, shorter, more popular pieces which would appear in the collection Economic Sophisms , short reports on various aspects of his free trade activity including summaries of his speeches, a few book reviews, as well as 7 more substantial articles on economic matters written primarily during 1845 and 1846 before he devoted himself almost entirely to his work with the French Free Trade Association and its magazine Le Libre-Échange . Two of them, "On Competition" and "On Population," would be substantially revised and rewritten and would appear in his treatise Economic Harmonies (1850, 1851). 437 These articles were the following:

1. "The Economic Situation of Great Britain: Financial Reforms and Agitation for Commercial Freedom", JDE , (June 1845) (a shortened version of his Introduction to his book Cobden and the League , which will appear in CW6 (forthcoming)
2. "On the Future of the Wine Trade between France and England", JDE , (Aug. 1845) (CW6 forthcoming)
3. "On the Questions submitted to the General Councils of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce", JDE , (Dec. 1845) (CW6 forthcoming)
4. "Thoughts on Share Cropping", JDE , (Feb. 1846)
5. "On Competition", JDE , (May 1846) (below, pp. 000)
6. "On Population", JDE , (Oct. 1846) (below, pp. 000)
7. "On the Impact of the Protectionist Regime on Agriculture", JDE , (Dec. 1846) (CW6 forthcoming)
8. "Organisation and Liberty", JDE , (Jan. 1847) (CW6 forthcoming)

The essay on share-cropping came in the middle of this period. In it, Bastiat reflects on his activities as a landowner and farmer, his thoughts on the future of agriculture, how he unsuccessfully tried to reform the work practices of his métayeurs (sharecroppers), his preference for share-cropping over tenant farming, and an early version of his thoughts on issues which he would take up later in a different form, namely Malthusian population theory, the inherent conflict (or harmony) between labour and capital, and the nature of productive and unproductive labour, in particular landowners who rent their land to others. These latter reflections show how much his thinking would change over the coming 2 or 3 years.

There are several passages in this article which are autobiographical in nature. It is not clear exactly how much of his land he worked himself and how much was worked by sharecroppers but it seems he might have had 120-150 sharecroppers and their families working his land which totaled about 250 hectares in size altogether. In his paper "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (19 May 1846) 438 he notes that "in former times" sharecropper farms were about 2-3 hectares in size and the vines they grew were enough to feed a family as well as other workers in the area. He says this comfortable existence was destroyed by protectionism during the Napoleonic period and the Restoration when wine exports to other parts of Europe were curtailed, as well as increases in indirect taxation on wine sold within France. He states that small farms were no longer economically viable and there were mergers to create farms 5-6 hectares in size which were viable, thus displacing some families. He also describes some of the hardships they faced:

In the village in which I live, thirty sharecropper houses have been demolished, according to the land register, and more than one hundred and fifty in the district whose legal interests have been entrusted to me, 439 and, mark this well, this means as many families that have been plunged into complete destruction. Their fate is to suffer, decline, and disappear. 440

Towards the end of the essay Bastiat's shows himself to have been rather paternalistic towards his sharecroppers. It says he took great care in choosing whom he would allow to work on his land (they had to both be good farmers as well as fit into the voluntary community of sharecroppers that he was fostering), that he would advise them about when was the right time to marry and to have children (which reveals his Malthusian concern about overpopulation of workers in the countryside), and he would take care to invite them all to communal meals on festivities like New Year's Day when his table might be "surrounded by one hundred and twenty heads of farming enterprises."

Concerning land use and ownership, in the first half of the 19th century over half the population of France worked on the land in some capacity. Small-scale famers who owned their own land were known as "laboureurs" or "cultivateurs" and were the most prosperous; larger landowners, especially in the north rented their land out to farmers who were called "fermiers" and the system it gave rise to as "fermage" (land rents); the poorest farmers were concentrated in the south where sharecropping predominated. "Métayers" (sharecroppers) did not own or rent their land but were entitled to a one half share in the final product. The land owner provided the capital, such as land, seed, cattle, and ploughs. The poorest of those who worked the land were the day labourers ("journaliers") who hired out their labour on a daily or seasonal basis. Mounier estimated in 1846 that 43 million hectares of land was under cultivation in France at that time which was divided as follows: 8.47 million hectares by renters (20% of the total area), 14.5m by sharecroppers (34%), and 20m by owners (46% area). 441

A significant problem for French farmers in the 19th century was the retention of farm size which would have enabled them to remain economically viable. The change in inheritance laws during the Revolution was designed to end the old regime practice of primogeniture (passing the entire estate to the eldest son) but it over-reacted by requiring an equal division among all the children, even if the farmer wanted to leave his land to one of his children in order to continue the family business. This gradually led to the problem of "morcellement" or the division of the land into smaller and smaller plots which hampered the growth of more productive agriculture. Bastiat's solution to this problem was to encourage the spread of sharecropping using a new system of agriculture which he called "alternating cultivation" (more details below). His younger friend and colleague Gustave de Molinari thought the solution to this problem was to encourage the formation of large-scale agricultural businesses ("la manufacture agricole" - an agricultural factory) which would be more efficient than small family owned farms, just like large industrial factories were more efficient than the small workshops of artisans (le petit atelier). 442 Molinari argues that industry of all kinds became more productive by replacing the small artisan workshop with large-scale factory production, and that the same thing would happen to agriculture.

Concerning agricultural practices, during the Middle Ages the three-field system of rotation was commonly used in Europe with a winter planting of rye or wheat, followed by a spring planting of oats or barley, and a third period in which the land was left fallow. This was replaced with a more productive four-field system in the 16th century where a soil replenishing crop like legumes was substituted for the fallow period, thus boosting total output. By carefully choosing the types of crops planted the farmer could support both agriculture and livestock on the land with a cash crop, a fodder crop, a grazing crop, and then a crop to replenish the soil. Bastiat's scheme of "alternating cultivation" was a more complex and flexible variation of the four field system of rotation which he thought was better because it would use a greater selection of crops which would allow for more regional and climatic variation, the choice of crops could be made with more regard to current market prices, and by using modern double entry book-keeping the farmer would become more entrepreneurial and scientific in their management of the farm business. The previous year Bastiat would have read Charles Dunoyer's thoughts on the advantages of alternating cultivation over the older triennial rotation system in Liberté du travail (1845), in which he discusses the benefits of this kind of farming for the more profit conscious "l'entrepreneur de culture" (the entrepreneur in the farming business). 443

It was in order to encourage the acquisition of these scientific and accounting skills that two years earlier Bastiat had written a proposal to a local religious Foundation asking for their support in founding a school for the sons of sharecroppers. 444 He had come to realise over the previous 20 years that changing the behaviour of the adult sharecroppers was impossible and that he had to train the younger generation in the possibilities of new agricultural techniques. This document shows that he had been thinking about a "revolution in farming" for some time and believed that his estate was "one of the most suited to major crop rotation in the country." 445 His idea was to use his estate as an experiment to show how the transition from small-scale to large-scale farming, based upon a more scientific system of multi-crop rotation, using modern bookkeeping techniques to manage the shifting economic demand for crops and their different costs of production and rates of return. He was appealing to a religious foundation for assistance in starting a school for potential future share-croppers to work on these new farms he was planning to establish. His hope was the younger generation of farmers, if he could entice them away from traditional farming practices, might make "this major farming and social revolution in our region" possible in the span of 50 years. This proposal led to nothing as far as we can tell.

There were also moral and political reasons why Bastiat preferred the system of share-cropping over other practices like tenant farming and agricultural wage labour. Somewhat out of character with his later thinking about the "harmonious" relationships which existed between economic groups in a free market, here Bastiat thinks that there tenant farmer creates "excessive" competition which is harmful to both the individual farmers concerned and the communities in which they live, by driving rates of return to the bare minimum. In the case of agricultural wage labour he thought this would inevitably result in the creation of an agricultural "proletariat" who would be inclined to violent revolution. This leads him to the conclusion that tenant farming and wage labour should be "excluded" from farm areas (how this would be achieved he does not say), even though he admits that tenant farming produces greater output as the statistics from Flanders clearly show.

Sharecropping was to be preferred in his view because it was a more cooperative economic endeavour, a voluntary association between "capital" (the private landowner) and "labour" (the sharecropping farmer and his family) which produced a "fairer" distribution of output, even though it might be less than that of the tenant farmers. 446 This kind of free market "association" was a direct reply to the socialists' demand, voiced by Victor Considerant and Louis Blanc, that new forms of socialist association, such as social or national workshops backed by state coercion and compulsion, should be introduced. This was a view shared by one of the leading agronomists of the period, Adrien de Gasparin (1783-1862), who wrote the following year after Bastiat penned this essay about the political benefits of the métayage system:

In the principle of the sharing of output between the worker and the capitalist there is the hidden virtue which can be marvellously adapted to the weaknesses of human nature, which puts an end to jealousy and greed, and which seems to be particularly suited to the current situation. In a farming district with sharecroppers (métaires) one doesn't see this blind hatred towards property which animates the spirits of those who are engaged in renting their farms (fermage). By facing the same risks together, sharing the same fear of floods, enjoying the same benefits, weeping at the same losses, they build up a co-fraternity which prevents negative passions from taking hold. In my Memoir I consider sharecropping to be the natural transition from slavery or serfdom to a system of free agricultural production ... 447

Bastiat's "Thought on Sharecropping" also enables Bastiat to explore some ideas which he would take up later in greater detail, namely Malthusian population theory, the inherent conflict (or harmony) between labour and capital, and the nature of productive and unproductive labour, especially in the form of land rent. In this early effort, we see Bastiat taking positions which he would revise or even reject in his treatise Economic Harmonies . For example, he present arguments about the "idle landowner" which seems to contradict other statements Bastiat would make about the productiveness of all voluntary economic activity where there are mutually beneficial exchanges of "service for service." The landowner, to the extent that he makes available land, capital, seeds, etc., would also be productive in this sense. In his debate with Proudhon 448 and other socialists in 1849 Bastiat was to argue vigorously that rent paid for land and interest paid for loans were both justified and productive. Either he changed his mind between February 1846 (when this was written) and then, or he has some other understanding about what "idle landowners" were. 449 There is a hint of the latter in his remark that "landowners ... often have never seen the land that finances their opulent life at court" (below). This suggests Bastiat was referring to aristocratic landowners (propriétaires) and not farmers as such, but it is not very clear. He also believes that "there is an incurable antagonism between the three classes that tend the soil" (landowners, tenant farmers, and illiterate day laborers) which seems to contradict Bastiat's later notion that there is a "harmony of interests" between all consumers and producers when there is an absence of violence and political privilege. And finally, he seems to be a more orthodox Malthusian here than he would later become. He defends Malthus from the criticism of Proudhon, for example, but agrees that the pessimistic conclusions one could draw from his theory of the inevitable squeeze on living standards brought about by overpopulation are essentially correct - "The fact is that over-population has always and will always be the greatest scourge of the human race, because it involves all the others." In his later writings on population ("On Population", Journal des Économistes , (Oct. 1846) and Chap. 16 "On Population" Economic Harmonies (2nd ed. 1851) he would challenge this pessimism on the grounds that human beings were not like unthinking "plants" and could rationally plan their lives so as not to be determined by "the means of subsistence" (the bare minimum needed to survive), and that when left free to function as they wanted to, free markets would be able to indefinitely increase "the means of existence" (the standard of living) and thus break free from the Malthusian population trap for good.

It would seem that when he wrote this essay Bastiat was a supporter of free trade but not yet the advocate of radical, across the board laissez-faire policies he was to become later. It is likely that Bastiat became more radical as he worked full-time for the free trade movement, as he increasingly became active in opposing socialism during the Revolution, and as he rethought his ideas as he worked on his treatise on economic theory.

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In putting before the general public a plan for an agricultural establishment which could conceivably become a model for good sharecroppers, I have to admit that, like all designers of projects, I feel toward mine a sort of paternal tenderness. I think that few institutions of this kind would go together as well with the circumstances of our Département (of Les Landes) and hold promise of so many fertile seeds of well-being, education, and moral principles at so little cost.

I have previously criticized sharecropping , 450 but I am now convinced that, while my comments were fair, they were inadequate. I had seen the good that it prevented but not the good that it does or might do. Since my aim is to improve it and to eliminate its disadvantages, allow me to make a few general remarks about this method of (voluntary) association which brings together labor and capital , considerations which will oblige me to tackle some of the most important problems in social economy. 451

That set of activities through which the human race provides for its subsistence, has undergone major revolutions. First of all, people confined themselves to hunting wild animals. Later, by domesticating certain species, they were able to make use of and profit from the grasses that grew spontaneously. Much later, they subjected the land to the plough and, from the earliest times to the present day, appeared to settle on the form of farming known as the three field system of crop rotation . Finally, farming has now entered its fourth phase, that of alternating cultivation .

We can easily imagine the immense progress that each of these stages has enabled the human race to make. Huge stretches of territory were needed to provide hunting tribes with a meager existence. Pastoral tribes were able to increase in number and wealth, comparatively speaking. Similar progress must have followed the conversion of pasture into cultivated fields. 452 Finally, there is no doubt that alternating cultivation is preparing the human race for further progress which will raise it as far above its present state as the system of three year crop rotation raised it above pastoral life, or as herding raised it above its primitive existence.

When we consider how far each of these systems carries within itself the germ of the succeeding system, we are surprised at the time required for the human race to move from one to the other. Between hunting game for food consumed as it was caught and raising the tamest species of animals in one's own vicinity in order to obtain as needed their milk, meat, wool, or leather, seems to be just a step, and this step still seems to be insuperable to the American tribes. People may think that the transition between raising animals around a tent using certain naturally occurring grasses and encouraging these to grow by cultivating them, is easy, and yet it has, never been tried by the nomadic tribes of Tartary or Arabia. The key thing is that the three year system probably coincided with the first experiments in farming. In the event, people had first of all to sow wheat for themselves and oats for their stock on land that had been cleared, and when it did not take long for them to realize that successive harvests encouraged the proliferation of parasitic plants, leaving land fallow must not have taken long to be introduced and thereby complete the system of crop rotation. One might think that in terms of difficulty anyway, from this to the achievement of the same goal through the successive planting of different varieties of crops, there was just a small step to be taken and yet this progression appears to be beyond the powers of the most enlightened of nations, those whose civilization was the most advanced, in spite of the efforts of scholars and the encouragement given by those in power. 453

Be this as it may, this latest revolution is taking place, although slowly, before our eyes. In order to ascertain the part that sharecropping can play in this, it is important that we compare three year crop rotation with alternating cultivation .

In three year crop rotation , each domain is divided into two halves, one devoted to permanent pasture and meadow for stock and the other subject to the plough. Sully's epigram "pasturing and plowing and are the two nourishing breasts of the State" 454 refers to this fundamental division, an epigram in which a vague premonition of alternating cultivation has so awkwardly been seen.

Cultivated land is itself divided into three parts or three fields alternately devoted to the production of two types of cereal with one year fallow, or more accurately, one year of land clearance and preparation.

It is currently fashionable to denigrate this ancient system as being the sorry product of ignorance. Clever minds have judged it very differently;

"I do not think I will be suspected", said Mr. de Dombasle, 455 "of being too zealous an advocate of this system of farming. However, I find it impossible to deny that it appears to be perfectly suited to the circumstances of the time in which it was conceived, a time in which farming operated only on the basis of a few plants taken from the family of cereals. If you consider the extreme simplicity of this system, the harmony that existed between all the parties involved, the equal share it offered at all times of the year, the work it necessitated, and the facility with which it applied to all types of soil situated in a wide variety of climates, you will probably consider that it would have been impossible at that time to conceive a more comprehensive solution to the following problem: to find the most convenient system of farming to produce the items that were the most essential to consumption for a poor nation with little civilization and a population that, although small, was already too large to ensure its food supply with a pastoral system, a system that required the least labor and would be the easiest to implement by people lacking in education and developed finance.

Such in all probability were the givens of the problem in the circumstances that prevailed in the nations of Europe in the Middle Ages and also for a long time afterwards. Considered in this light, the three year rotation system with a fallow period and common grazing land was genuinely an admirable concept, in spite of its serious but inevitable faults." 456

The most striking characteristic of the three year system is its lack of flexibility . It is the same today as it has always been, and because of this it is eminently suited to sharecropping , because it is based upon a wealth of observations and experience which go back to the dawn of time, and which generations have passed down in the name of routine . (Routine, from rota , a wheel, which once it is turned continues to turn by itself.)

But however venerable this ancient form of farming that our fathers have passed down to us, we should not hide the fact that it has served its purpose and come to the end of its useful life. With its narrow limits and its homogeneity, it is powerless to supply modern industry with the abundance and variety of raw materials that are increasingly needed. It is even incapable of ensuring the food supply of a large population, because it excludes a great number of animal and vegetable products, and the variety of products is the best solution we have to the problem of the inconsistency of the seasons.

For this reason, I repeat, a farming revolution is now in the throes of preparation, that is to say, it is being formed in the social body, like all revolutions, at the time when it has become necessary. This revolution is the advent of alternating cultivation . 457

In the same way as lack of flexibility and homogeneity are characteristics of the three year system, flexibility and variety are the distinctive traits of alternating cultivation.

In this system, pasture, the commons, and even permanent meadows. The entire area of traditional land, each divided into a wide variety of fields, is subject to the plough. The infinite diversity of social needs revealed by the market price for food products determines the production of each of the fields that are included in the rotation system, and the head farmer has the function of maintaining within this apparent confusion the order laid down by the rules of crop rotation, the uninterrupted succession of plants that fertilize the soil and those that exhaust it, plants appropriate for animal feed and those for human consumption, with the appropriate insertion of plants that clean and prepare the soil without our resorting to fallow land, in short, never losing sight of the fact that all these crops have to be combined, so that at the end of each rotation cycle the soil is kept at least in the same condition, or preferably maintained with improved value and fertility.

This is the system of alternation. I have no need to point out here how much it encourages mankind's development and well-being through the abundance and variety of its products.

One thing that strikes me is the state of inferiority that threatens the regions that are the last to adopt the system of alternation. It is in the nature of this system not only to deliver to consumers a wide variety of food products, meat, vegetables, root vegetables, or milk products but even to provide cereals themselves at an overall price lower than the one that three year crop rotation can produce. This appears paradoxical, since the ancient system devotes two-thirds of the cultivatable land to this type of production while the new system devotes half at the most.

However, it should be noted that, in alternating cultivation, the estate which is ploughed is increased by the land that three year crop rotation gives over to permanent meadowland and pasture for stock, so that in the end, cereals do not lose any planting area.

On the other hand, in the three year system, the rent relating to the third of the estate that is uncultivated and the considerable costs of land lying fallow increase the debits in the accounts for the two following harvests, which means that it is possible for it to withstand competition from the alternating system only because this latter system is still limited to a tiny number of cantons in France.

In a word, it is doubtful whether the former system will maintain the level of fertility of the soil that the latter increases constantly.

Farming statistics published recently at the order of the administrative authorities 458 shed light on these facts with the irresistible eloquence of figures. Let us compare three departments here, one in French Flanders, the cradle of alternating cultivation, the second in Touraine, 459 where the three year system has reached the pinnacle of perfection, and finally in our own region.

	Department of the Nord	Department of the Indre-et-Loire	Department of Les Landes
Population per ten thousand square meters	18,074	4,971	3,114
Production per hectare
Wheat	20.74 hect.	12.27	8.62
Rye	18.41	15.19	8.23
Oats	39.93	10.08	0.30
Potatoes	169.20	101	27.79
Dry vegetables	22.64	10.01	11.99
Flax	579.1 kilog.	423	140
Natural meadowland/grass land	35.57 quint./met	27	17
Artificial meadowland	43.95	24	18
Number of animals
Cattle	226,338	92,529	62,228
Sheep	210,834	237,793	463,628
Horses	79,177	27,852	23,035

What is more significant than figures like these?

Let us present them in another form to make the results more telling. We will establish the real state of affairs using the Department of Les Landes as the unit of comparison.

	Landes	Indre-et-Loire	Nord
Population	1	1.59	5.80
Value of stock	1	1.30	6.44
W heat per hectare	1	1.41	2.50
Oats	1	1.22	4.85
Artificial meadowland	1	1.30	3.30
Flax	1	2.40	5.16
Potatoes	1	3.29	6.81

Thus, in the Department of the Nord, production is triple what it is in Les Landes for the two plants that are combined both in alternating and in three year cultivation, like wheat and oats. It is five-fold , in the case of plants such as clover, flax, and potatoes, plants which are unable to find a proper place in the three year system. The result of the two systems is shown in a population in the Nord that is more than five times larger than that of Les Landes and which consumes more than six times the value of butchered meat.

It is true that the class of farmers are not alone in benefiting from the surplus of production that is due to their intelligent production. As production costs decrease in relation to output, we see the rate of farm rent and consequently the price of land increasing, so that in the end it is the landowner who reaps the benefit of the superiority of Flemish farmers. This is what restores the balance between the two forms of cultivation. Without this type of moderation, it would be impossible for three-year cultivation to compete with its rival. However the power that exists in this gradual increase in the value of land in attracting to the Nord capital waiting to be invested can be readily understood.

Alternating cultivation is no less powerful in attracting capital that is not seeking capital gains but investment for revenue purposes. Through the abundance and variety of the raw materials it supplies to industry, as well as the increased consumption made possible by densely populated and wealthy regions, it offers manufacturers infinitely greater opportunities than those to be found in regions which are thinly populated, economically deprived, and limited to the production of cereals.

Thus, alternating cultivation attracts everything, population, consumption, capital, education, and industry.

But is not sharecropping an insurmountable obstacle for those countries in which this method of operation has been adopted who now wish to enter the realm of modern agriculture?

As we have already said, sharecropping goes together perfectly with the three year crop rotation system because both of them are inherently inflexible . Action that is always identical does not require a progressive agency. Doubtless a three year farming system implies a great deal of knowledge, but since its procedures are uniform, this knowledge has been readily set and condensed, so to speak, into a series of proverbial rules transmitted, especially by example, from time immemorial to the present day. A sharecropper with no education or general ideas always knows enough to do as his forebears have done, and the mass of observation that grows from century to century even allows for some advance in execution when a system that is on the whole inflexible is followed.

By contrast, the essential characteristic of alternating agriculture is flexibility, or at least diversity. Here the division into fields may vary from period to period in line with consumer needs and has to vary from canton to canton in line with the requirements of the soil. It is then his own experience and not that of his ancestors that a farmer has to consult for the rules governing his decisions.

When you assume that the alternating system based on a simple division of fields was also able, like grazing, or three year crop rotation, to become a new form of routine handed down from father to son to future generations through the sole channel of experience and custom, it is still a fact that the initial example of this cannot be provided by sharecroppers. It was not the slaves who shepherded the herds of the nomadic Tartar tribes to pasture who would have introduced them to three year crop rotation, and no more would sharecroppers, steeped in ancient experience, be the ones to take farming forward into a new phase.

Sharecroppers lack three characteristics to enable them to become the instruments of a revolution like this: knowledge, power, and will .

Alternating cultivation requires more knowledge than three year crop rotation. It involves a greater number of plant varieties, for each of which knowledge of how to prepare the soil, how to sow, grow, harvest, and store them is required. The same holds for the production of fertilizer. Animal husbandry also plays a greater part and has to involve more advanced breeds. Finally, the art of making use of animal products develops on a larger scale. Where do you think sharecroppers can gain such knowledge? In books? They cannot read and do not even speak the language the books are written in. From example? They have no other example to follow than three year crop rotation. Through their relationship with their landowners? They instinctively know that while landowners are superior to them from the point of view of scientific knowledge, they nevertheless know less than sharecroppers do from the practical point of view. Without knowing how to make this distinction, they understand and sense that scientific knowledge is not enough in practical terms.

Even if sharecroppers knew how to change their method of farming, they could not . The exploitation of an estate in line with new procedures requires a considerable increase in capital: the acquisition of more advanced agricultural machinery, a greater stock of seed, an increase in the number of draught animals, and the enlargement and improved distribution of barns and stables. Who will supply this additional capital? Whether it is the landowner or the sharecropper, this change in the ratio of their contributions to the common task is bound to bring about a corresponding change in their agreement in order to ensure a new and equitable relationship. Such accounting is all the more essential in that, without it, the cost prices of a host of products, in particular, animal products, such as meat, milk butter, cheese, wool, etc., which are nevertheless an essential and important sector of income in alternating cultivation, are impossible to estimate. In any event, bookkeeping is beyond the capabilities of all sharecroppers and the majority of landowners.

Finally, that the sharecropper does not have an ever-growing will to innovate is something in no need of proving. We often hear agronomists, and especially the more enthusiastic ones (the so-called agronomaniacs ) 460 bewailing the disinclination and the force of inertia that they encounter in their sharecroppers with regard to their projects for improvement. What is not noted enough is the usefulness, I might even say the necessity, for such resistance. The attachment to old customs that nature has so deeply built into the hearts of this class is the sole guarantee we have against reckless innovation. Without it, changes that are accepted as soon as they are conceived would inevitably undermine the very source of food supplies. And is it not fortunate that will is lacking where, as we have shown, knowledge and power are also lacking?

These are the reasons that have led me to oppose sharecropping in the past, and what I have said above shows that I still consider it incompatible, at least in the way it is organized currently, with the introduction of advanced farming in the country.

Should it then be concluded that it is a matter of urgency that tenant farming replace it? This, it must be said, would be a hasty deduction. First of all, a country does not change its system of organization and its customs as easily as we replace a worn-out garment with a new one. In the majority of Départements, nothing has been set up to accommodate tenant farming, as regards its most advantageous aspects. The class of enterprising and enlightened men who would have, as tenant-farmers, to run the farms, does not exist in our country and the division of the land into very small holdings is not likely to attract them. The day laborers, the people who make up the basic category of agricultural labor, are not increasing in number and it is doubtful, to say the least, that their arrival in the countryside is to be desired. Finally, the practice of landowners receiving their rent in kind has created attitudes that cannot be changed without upsetting all the relationships that, properly speaking, make up the social life of a country.

So, while it might be proved that, from the farming point of view, tenant farming is better than sharecropping, it would be truly utopian to put it forward to the country as being an essential step in achieving alternating cultivation .

But if sharecropping, which is more inflexible by nature than tenant farming, is inferior to it from the technical point of view, if this inferiority becomes even more marked in these critical times in which profound change, we might even say a major revolution in farming methods, calls for the intervention of knowledge and capital, the question has also to be asked whether this inferiority also exists in other aspects, in particular in the social aspect, which is by far the more important. Sharecropping and tenant farming interact in quite different ways with the laws of population and those governing the distribution of wealth. If we concede that tenant farming creates more products, it remains to be seen whether it distributes them as fairly between all those who have contributed to them and whether it puts as powerful a brake on a disruptive increase in population, which all economists and statesmen consider to be the greatest scourge that can afflict the human race since, just in itself, it implies all the others.

It is with distaste that I raise these serious questions. Nevertheless, interest in them is so pressing, in particular for our South of France, that I am obliged to ask for a moment of your attention. Besides, how could I advocate the establishment of a school for sharecroppers after showing this form of organization in its most unfavorable light if I did not also discuss its good, useful, and beneficial aspects with regard to the populations in whose heart it has been so powerful a presence.

The income from production is shared between three sectors of people in farming regions: landowners, tenant farmers and farm laborers.

The proportions of this sharing out are clearly far from being perpetual . In proportion as an intelligently run operation succeeds in improving the soil and increasing production, landowners take advantage of the competition between farmers by raising the rent for the land each time a lease is renewed, so that the farmers benefit from the increase in wealth only temporarily, between one renewal of the lease to the next. In the end, the results of progress come to be realized only in the pockets of the idle landowner, the person who has contributed nothing to it. The situation of the tenant farmer is at a standstill, if it does not actually deteriorate, under excessive competition. 461 Doubtless it will be said that there is also competition between the holdings to be let to tenant farmers, but it is obvious that the number of these is limited, whereas the number of men capable of heading up a farm is bound to increase constantly with the growth of education and capital formation.

This inequality in the distribution of all the products resulting from successive improvements to the soil and advances in farming methods is more disadvantageous still to manual laborers.

Competition by a natural process reduces wages to the level required to support a worker. This is as true for farming as it is for manufacturing. If a well-run spinning mill succeeds in producing better results, it does not follow at all that the wages of the laborers will increase. If the improvement takes place in isolation, it benefits the entrepreneur. If it is common to all spinning mills, it benefits the consumer. As for wages, they do not change. The entrepreneur in fact does not set them in accordance with his profits but in line with the rate at which competition provides him with hands, and if the country offers them to him at one franc a day, then no matter how much his profits increase, this will not persuade him to give two francs out of the goodness of his heart.

Things happen in exactly the same way in farming regions. There is even an additional reason for the situation of manual laborers not improving along with improved farming methods. This reason is that, since all of the surplus wealth produced goes to the landowner, the tenant farmer is not in a better situation even though the farm is more productive. Saving on the costs of production is an essential imperative for him that never slackens, and the first and most important economy, as well as the most obvious, is to reduce the labor force as far as possible and to pay the cost of the labor that cannot be saved upon only at the lowest rate the competition between day laborers allows him to reach.

For wages to increase, therefore, one of two things is needed. 462 The first is that the manpower demanded should increase progressively with output or that the population of laborers should be limited so as to limit the supply of labor, thus raising its price.

But from either point of view we see that this class is put into the most unfavorable situation. In the case of the demand for labor, this tends to decrease rather than increase with the progress in farming methods, for this progress consists precisely in having work done by machines. And, as for supply , there can be no doubt that it tends constantly to increase, for it is in the nature of wage-labor that it gives rise to lack of foresight and encourages a destabilizing increase in population. This is what modern social science has both understood perfectly and shown. In all eras this fact has been vaguely felt, hence the forceful expression, the proletariat , which was applied to the class which lives off wages, long before the laws of population were subjected to the scrutiny of science.

Thus, while accepting that tenant farming was a system of farming more favorable than sharecropping to advancing agriculture and increasing wealth, one cannot deny that with regard to the distribution of products, it contains the greatest of all disadvantages. Far from calling on all classes of labourers to share products equitably, far from enabling them all to share in the benefits of farming progress so that the increase in wealth is nothing other that an increase in well-being that is fairly distributed, on the contrary, it ends up merely by enriching the wealthy and impoverishing the poor, constantly increasing the gap between these two extremes in the social scale, and thus creating that incommensurable distance that separates extreme opulence and extreme poverty.

It is not just well-being that is distributed so unequally under the law of tenant farming, but also education and influence, even though these are not the result of wealth.

A idle landowner who is totally ignorant of farming methods distances himself from the land that provides him with a living, and often has not even visited it. He lives in large towns at the center of civilization and political affairs. 463

The tenant farmer, in truth, has to cultivate his mind and keep abreast of progress in farming. All the expertise is concentrated in him. However, you should note that the positive results of his education, confiscated periodically by the landowner, leave the tenant farmer in the same situation at each renewal of his lease. He is thus enclosed in a circle he cannot break out of, and both his ideas and influence cannot extend beyond his trade .

As for the day laborer, forever reduced to a wage that allows him to live, he is little concerned with the farming methods of which he is a mindless cog. It is even to be doubted whether the sort of subtle education that comes to him externally can be held to be beneficial, since this does not arise from his position, is not likely to improve him, and perhaps will serve only to make him appreciate the horror of it all.

Actually, the whole sector is bound to be affected by the constant absence of landowners and their families in the farming areas. Freed from any personal participation in farming work, they have weakened the links attaching them to the soil as far as they can and they disappear without a backward glance to consume their incomes far away. A quarter, or perhaps a third of the products are thus lost to the region that has produced them, and the vacuum caused by this constant absenteeism is all the more irreparable because it cannot be filled in the long run by the work carried out by tenant farmers and day laborers, since, as we have seen, this work serves only to increase the part played by absenteeism .

For this reason, travelers who go through the rich or rather the fertile regions subject to tenant farming have trouble reconciling the beauty of the crops in the fields and the wealth of products with the poverty of the region: deserted chateaux, farms whose progress is seemingly barred by some inexorable law, and a jumble of hovels in which the race of day laborers swarm. There is an incurable antagonism between the three classes that tend the soil; 464 landowners who often have never seen the land that finances their opulent life at court, tenant farmers who deplore the sight of their rich harvests, a certain sign of the increase in charges that hangs over their heads, and illiterate day laborers without interest in the success of their work, without foresight, and without hope in a future which, for them, holds no seed of improvement. Such is the real situation to which these regions have been reduced by tenant farming, a system very much over extolled because it is too often considered solely from the point of view of production and the interest of the landowner.

At first sight, it appears that there is a slight difference and nothing more between tenant farming and sharecropping . To rent the land the former pays a fixed rental, while the latter hands over a charge in proportion to the products in kind. It is nevertheless certain that from these slight differences two totally separate social orders arise.

Farm leases are essentially temporal. They are renewed every twenty-one, eighteen, or sometimes nine years, and even, as in Ireland, every year. 465 If the tenant farmer becomes rich and succeeds in his business , the farm lease periodically drags him back to his initial situation.

Sharecropping leases 466 are essentially perpetual in nature, or at least their duration depends totally on the activity, the spirit of order, and probity of the sharecropper in question. Provided that he works the land well and faithfully carries out the conditions of his contract, there is no reason he should be thrown out and under no circumstances are his charges increased. There is thus a place for hope in the sharecropper's heart. He will benefit from all of his efforts and each drop of sweat that falls from his brow will be rewarded. He will be able to show off his fields with pride and confidence to his landowner and has no fear that the success of his crops will arouse the latter's greed .

Sharecropping has divided cultivatable land into portions that one family is capable of farming. In sharecropping regions, there are thus no day laborers or proletarians. Whoever puts his hand to the plough has a stake in the result. Moral qualities and intellectual advancement are not useless or perhaps disastrous baggage for anyone. Doing work with greater wisdom and perseverance does not just improve the lot of this kind of farmer in the short run and increase his landowner's fortune in the long run, but it also permanently improves the farmer's own situation and that of his family.

In sharecropping, the distribution of wealth obviously takes place more equitably. The family that supplies the capital and the one that supplies the labor share the result in proportions that, once they have been set, are immutable. Depending on the difficulties of the labor, its share is half, two-thirds, three-fifths, and often three-quarters. This is the real association 467 of capital and labor that has so long been sought by the utopians of our century. Once the share due to labor has been agreed, the farmer just has to act, increase his output, and improve his situation, and his reward will be assured indefinitely.

From the point of view of the population, the sharecropping regions appear to be in a very favorable situation.

There has been a great outcry against the doctrines of Malthus recently. 468 It might be supposed that this famous economist had imposed on the human race the laws that he has merely recorded. You might as well criticize Newton for having set out the laws of gravity, since it is by virtue of these laws that we are hurt by falling bodies or by our own falls.

The fact is that over-population has always and will always be the greatest scourge of the human race, because it involves all the others.

Another equally well-known fact is that a tendency to increase in a disorganized fashion is mainly seen in the class of people that live on wages. The foresight required to postpone marriage has little influence on these people because the damage caused by excessive competition is perceived by them only dimly, and at a future time ostensibly not much to be feared.

It is thus most favorable for a region to be organized so as to exclude wage labor . 469 In sharecropping regions, marriages are arranged principally in accordance with farming needs; they are more frequent when, for some reason, there are vacancies that hamper work and become rarer when these vacancies are filled. Here, the relationship between the extent of the estate and the number of hands, a state of affairs that is easy to observe, operates very much like foresight and does so in a more certain manner. For this reason let us see whether, if nothing occurs to create job opportunities for an excess in population, it remains stationary. Our southern Départements are proof of this.

Is this the same in tenant-farming countries? England and Ireland are there to provide us with an answer. We do not know what is growing faster on the other side of the Channel: production, population, or pauperism . Well, at first glance it seems contradictory for this triple development to occur simultaneously. A growing population can obviously be explained by a gradual increase in production and vice versa, but this increase in poverty is a phenomenon that appears to contradict the two others, for on one hand how can a surplus in products not lead to the well-being of producers, and on the other how does poverty not restrict the population? These apparent anomalies are explained by wage-labor , which factories and farming vie with one another to develop in the British Isles. Wage labour dictates that products are distributed unequally, thus explaining the simultaneous increase in wealth and poverty. It neutralizes consideration of the future with regard to marriage, thus explaining the simultaneous development of the population and pauperism.

Is this result consistent with philanthropy? Is a badly organised expansion of that part of the population which lives precariously on wage-labor, a human resource constantly changing and thrown off balance for a plethora of reasons; such as increasingly vigorous competition in the supply of labor, a steady drop in the value of wages to the point where workers, as in Ireland, are reduced to living on a few potatoes stolen from pigs' troughs, 470 the end point of the human race?

Fortunate then are the regions within which the largest and most general of all industries, the one that occupies the vast majority of workers, is based on an organization that excludes wage labor . Let us refrain from meddling with sharecropping, this association of labour and capital, which closes the door against two of the most terrible scourges of the human race: over-population and pauperism.

From a moral point of view, sharecropping offers certain further incontestable advantages. The common interest it establishes between landowners and sharecroppers, the force that impels them toward an identical goal along parallel pathways, prevents and forestalls feelings of mistrust and envy, the dull but bitter resentment that gnaws away at wage earning working class , exploding from time to time into riots, "Rebecca-ism," 471 or incendiary action, divers symptoms of the same suffering. In regions in which sharecropping predominates, doubtless there are a variety of degrees of wealth, but there is also common opportunities and prospects. Sharecroppers win or lose for the same reasons that enrich or impoverish their master. Each side has an interest in getting on well, joining forces to overcome bad days by helping each other, and devoting the surplus in good years to making improvements. Everyday relationships are established that are almost those of a family connection between the families of landowners and those of sharecroppers. Masters like to find out about the situation of their farmers; they intervene with advice in marriage projects, and accelerate or slow them down depending on the requirements of work or, what amounts to the same thing, social interest. 472 They take account of good reputation when a new worker, who wants to head up a new farm, is introduced into their estate, thus giving a better opportunity of growth and enlargement to those families with the best reputation. When sharecroppers come to offer their landowners the harvest chicken or Easter eggs, their meeting is cordial and affectionate. They have no reason to suspect each other of sinister ulterior motives and sharecroppers are able to indulge in praising the fine harvest and the fertility of the soil without having to fear either enflaming their master's greed or giving him the dreadful idea of changing the clauses of their contract. I have seen a landowner invite his sharecroppers on New Year's Day, in accordance with an ancient custom, and see his table surrounded by one hundred and twenty heads of farming enterprises. 473

I have not traveled, 474 I have not been able to compare tenant farming countries with sharecropping ones, but I think that reason is enough to show that they must offer very different prospects. In the first category, there are a few dilapidated chateaux that absenteeism has left silent and empty with farms situated at a great distance and in which education and prosperity cannot break the iron barrier imposed by the tenant farming system; villages inhabited solely by laborers, in which doubtless misery, filth, a lack of care for the future and the lack of a culture of work are the sad lot of the proletariat. This is not the cold physiognomy that sharecropping imprints on our landscapes. The division of the territory into small estates increases the number of houses, gardens, stands of trees, pastures, fields, vineyards, and woods, and makes the entire landscape attractive through its variety.

The conclusion drawn from all this is that tenant farming favors production more while sharecropping favors the distribution of wealth. One appears superior from the purely agricultural point of view while the other appears to have incontestable advantages from the social one. So if it were possible to extend a proper, sound form of education among the sharecropping class, if sharecropping could be equipped to overcome the barrier separating the three year crop rotation and alternating cultivation, I have no doubt that we would soon see regions in which this form of organization has prevailed come to equal tenant farming ones in the technical sense without exhibiting comparable signs of the triple scourge of absenteeism by landowners, of an inevitable stationary state as regards tenant farmers, and of country labourers being destined to becoming members of the proletariat .

T.48 (1846.02.18) "The Free Trade Association in Bordeaux" (MB, Feb. 1846)↩

Source

T.48 (1846.02.18) "The Free Trade Association in Bordeaux" (Association pour la liberté des échanges à Bordeaux), Mémorial bordelais, 18 Feb. 1846. [OC7.9, pp. 43-46.] [CW6]

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T.49 (1846.02.19) "Letter to the Editor of the Journal de Lille, mouth-piece of the northern interests" (MB, Feb. 1846)↩

Source

T.49 (1846.02.19) "Letter to the Editor of the Journal de Lille, mouth-piece of the northern interests" (À M. le rédacteur du Journal de Lille, organe des intérêts du nord), Mémorial bordelais, 19 Feb. 1846. [OC7.10, p. 47??.] [CW6]

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T.50 (1846.02.23) "First Speech given in Bordeaux"↩

Source

T.50 (1846.02.23) "First Speech given in Bordeaux" (Premier discours, à Bordeaux). Found among FB's papers. [OC2.42, pp. 229-38.] [CW6]

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T.51 "The Theory of Profit" (26 Feb. 1846, Mem. bord. )↩

[CW4 draft 16 June, 2017] Source

T.51 (1846.02.26) "The Theory of Profit" (Théorie du bénéfice), Mémorial bordelais, 26 February 1846. [OC7.11, p. 50-53.] [CW4] 475

Editor's Introduction

After the success of the English Anti-Corn Law League 476 in getting the protectionist Corn Laws repealed in 1846 (the first reading of the Bill passed in January and the final reading passed in June) the French free traders formed their own Free Trade Association in the port city of Bordeaux in 23 February 1846 and then in Paris with the founding of a national organisation on 1 July 1846. 477 Bastiat was made the secretary of the Advisory Board and then editor of their weekly journal Le Libre-Échange which began in November 1846 and lasted until it was closed on 16 April 1848 after 72 issues . 478 Bastiat gave his first public speech on behalf of free trade in Bordeaux on 23 February 1846 three days before this article appeared in a local paper and he quotes from that speech here. 479

The protectionists countered this move by forming their own national organisation the "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) in October 1846 to defend the interests of the protected industrialists and manufacturers. 480 It was led by Antoine Odier (1766-1853) 481 and Pierre Mimerel de Roubaix (1786-1872) 482 who merged several regional protectionist associations together in order to better organise themselves against the newly formed national French Free Trade Association. The protectionist association's journal was Le Moniteur industrial to which Bastiat refers several times during this article. 483 The Association lobbied successfully between March and July 1847 to defeat a major reform of French tariff policy which was being considered by the Chamber of Deputies.

The format of this article follows that of many of Bastiat's "economic sophisms" where he uses a dialogue between two characters with opposing points of view - here the sceptical Mayor of Bordeaux and an iron industry lobbyist who argues for taxes on iron goods imported into the city so his iron making business can enjoy guaranteed profits. The argument is that firms will not invest in starting businesses which employ French or Bordelais citizens unless they are protected from "foreign" competition and are guaranteed a return on their investment by the government. The Industrialist tries to persuade the sceptical Mayor to use the city tolls (the "octroi"), 484 which are normally used to collect taxes levied on food and other goods brought into a town to pay for public works such as streets and lighting, as a form of local "tariff" protection. This is a line of argument which Bastiat was to use again 485 in "The Mayor of Énios" (6 Feb. 1848) but with the roles reversed: the Mayor of a small town, Énios, is the one who goes to the region's Intendant to get permission to use the octroi taxes in this way. He believes that if tariffs are good for France as a whole, since they are supposed to promote national industry, why wouldn't they also be good for his town as well, in order to promote his town's local industry? The Intendant denies the Mayor permission but is forced into the amusing position of defending free trade within France but not externally - which of course was Bastiat's point in writing the story.

We also see here an early example of Bastiat's decision to avoid euphemisms and use what he called "harsh" or "brutal" language to describe the policy of protectionism. In an article he published in the Journal des Économiste s the month before, "Theft by Subsidy", 486 he responded to criticism of his First Series of Economic Sophisms which had just appeared in print that they were "too theoretical, scientific, and metaphysical." His response was to make sure that his future writings could not be accused of this again, which he did by peppering their pages with an "explosion of plain speaking." By this he meant that he would use very blunt, direct, even "brutal" language, such as "theft", "pillage," "plunder," and "parasitism," when describing the activities undertaken by the State which were accepted by most people as perfectly normal and "legal." So, in many of the essays written in 1846 and 1847 which were to end up in Second Series of the Economic Sophisms Bastiat wanted to make it perfectly clear what he thought the state was doing by regulating and taxing French citizens and to call these activities by their "real name," namely theft and plunder. Is this essay on "The Theory of Profit" he uses the word "pillage" repeatedly as part of this revised rhetorical tactic. It is also an indicator of what he was thinking concerning his planned "History of Plunder" in which he regarded the State as engaging in widespread "organised and legal plunder and pillage" of its citizens and taxpayers.

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As I was leaving the meeting hall on Monday, 487 a man came up to me and said: I listened to you carefully and you said the following, "At the end of the day, you have to know on what side truth lies. If we are wrong, let protection be taken to its limit. If we are right, let us demand freedom, etc. etc." - Well, Sir, that presumes that freedom and trade restrictions are incompatible.

"I think that this follows from the meaning of the words."

"So you have not read Le Moniteur Industriel ? It shows clearly that freedom, protection, and prohibition can be accommodated very well together according to the theory of profit ."

"What is this theory, then?"

"It is this, in short. Man wants to consume. In order to consume, he has to produce. In order to produce, he has to work, and in order to work he has to have the likelihood of making a profit , or better still, a guaranteed one."

"Very good, and what is the conclusion?"

"The conclusion is very simple; listen to Le Moniteur ! 'What measures should a nation adopt in order to produce a particular good at the highest level of production and by the shortest route possible, in order to have the maximum amount of consumption and well-being? Obviously it has to guarantee the profits for anyone who undertakes such an industry as this. It has to guarantee the profits of the producers.' "

"And how is this to be done?"

"Listen to Le Moniteur again: 'To develop production as far as possible sometimes calls for trade prohibitions, sometimes for tariff protection, and sometimes for free trade.' So you see that Le Moniteur Industriel is no more in favor of prohibition than it is for protection or for freedom."

"In other words, all industries have to gain one way or another. One that naturally yields a profit has to have liberty and competition, and one that naturally produces a loss, has the right to convert this loss into a profit through organized pillage. 488 We could say quite a lot about that. But you remind me of an event that I witnessed recently. Allow me to tell you about it."

"Go on."

"I was with the Mayor when an industry lobbyist came along and this is the conversation I overheard:

The Industrialist: "Mr. Mayor, I have discovered a reddish earth in my garden which appeared to contain iron, and I intend to set up a blast furnace in my home in the center of the town."

The Mayor : "You will ruin yourself."

The Industrialist : "Not at all, I am sure of making money out of it."

The Mayor : "How?"

The Industrialist : "Simply by making a profit."

The Mayor : "Where will the profit lie if you are forced to sell iron at the market rate of say, 12 or 15 francs, that perhaps will cost you 100 or even perhaps 1,000 francs to produce."

The Industrialist : "This is the reason I have come to see you. Give me the power to hold your town's people to ransom, not only until my losses are covered but well beyond that, and you will guarantee a profit for my industry."

The Mayor : "My authority does not extend that far."

The Industrialist : "I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayor, but do you not have a city toll?"

The Mayor : "Yes, and incidentally, I would like to base the town's income on another means of raising revenue."

The Industrialist : " Well then! Put the city toll to work for me; don't allow a single batch of iron to cross the toll booth. The people of Bordeaux will certainly be forced to buy my iron and at my price. "

The Mayor : "All the other producers will object."

The Industrialist : "Give them all the same legal favours.

The Mayor : "Very well. The outcome will be that, just as you will sell very little iron, we will also have very little bread, clothing, or anything else. It will be a regime of the least quantity ."

The Industrialist "What does it matter, if we all make a profit by pillaging each other legally and in an orderly manner?"

The Mayor : "Sir, your plan is a fine one, but the people of Bordeaux will not submit to it.

The Industrialist : "Why not? The French will submit willingly to it. I am asking from the city toll only what others are asking from the Customs Service."

The Mayor : "Well then! If the Customs Service is so obliging, go and talk to it and stop bothering me. The city toll is responsible for raising a tax and not for providing profits for manufacturers."

The Industrialist : "Mr. Mayor, just one more word. Suppose that my request had been successful twenty years ago; you would now have a blast furnace in the town center which would provide a living for at least thirty workers."

The Mayor : "Yes, and Bordeaux would perhaps be reduced to two thousand inhabitants." 489

The Industrialist : "You do understand that, if my proposal had come about, and you repealed the city toll, my thirty workers would now be without a job."

The Mayor : "And Bordeaux would be moving towards becoming once more what it is, a splendid city of one hundred thousand inhabitants."

The Industrialist, going away: ""What it is to deal with a theorist! 490 Not to understand the theory of profit ! But I will go and find the Head of the Customs Service, and my cause may not yet be lost."

T.52 (1846.03.08) "To the Editor of the Époque" (MB, March 1846)↩

Source

T.52 (1846.03.08) "To the Editor of the Époque" (Au rédacteur de l'Époque), Mémorial bordelais, 8 March 1846. [OC7.12, 53??.] [CW6]

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T.53 (1846.03.12) "Free Trade in Action" (MB, March 1846)↩

Source

T.53 (1846.03.12) "Free Trade in Action" (Le libre-échange en action), Mémorial bordelais, 12 March 1846. [OC7.13, p. 58??] [CW6]

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T.54 (1846.04.01) "What is Commerce?" (CF, Apr. 1846)↩

Source

T.54 (1846.04.01) "What is Commerce?" (Qu'est-ce que le commerce?), Le Courrier français, 1 Apr. 1846. [OC7.14, p. 63??] [CW6]

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T.55 (1846.04.06) "To the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce" (MB, Apr. 1846)↩

Source

T.55 (1846.04.06) "To the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce" (À M. le ministre de l'agriculture et du commerce), Mémorial bordelais, 6 Apr. 1846. [OC7.15, p. 66??] [CW6]

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T.56 (1846.04.11) "To the Editor of the Courrier français" (CF, Apr. 1846)↩

Source

T.56 (1846.04.11) "To the Editor of the Courrier français" (À monsieur le rédacteur du Courrier Français), Le Courrier français, 11 Apr. 1846. [OC7.16, p. 71??] [CW6]

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T.57 (1846.04.15) "To La Tribune and La Presse on the Question of the Treaty with Belgium" (JDE, Apr. 1846)↩

Source

T.57 (1846.04.15) "To La Tribune and La Presse on the Question of the Treaty with Belgium" (La Tribune et la Presse; à propos du traité belge), Journal des Économistes, T. XIV, Apr. 1846, no. 53, pp. 1-9. [OC2.16, p. 81??] [CW6]

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T.58 & T.49 "Two Articles on Postal Reform II" (April 1846, Mem. bord .)↩

[CW4 draft 16 June, 2017] Source

T. 58 (1846.04.23) "Postal Reform" (Réforme postale), Mémorial bordelais , 23 Apr. 1846. [OC7.17, pp. 78-83.] [CW4]

T.49 (1846.04.30) "Postal Reform. 2nd article" (Réforme postale. 2e article), Mémorial bordelais , 30 Apr. 1846. [OC7.18, pp. 83-91.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

For information about Bastiat's interest in postal reform, see the Editor's Introduction to "Two Articles on Postal Reform I", 3 & 6 Aug. 1844, Sentinelle des Pyrénées (above).

First Article (23 April 1846, Mem. bord .) (T2, FN)

What has become of France's energy, her audacity and initiative, which so struck the rest of the world with admiration? Have we all shrunk to the size of Lilliputians? Has the intrepid giant turned into a timid and wavering dwarf? Is our national pride content for people to say of us: "they were once the premier swordsmen in the world?" Have we decided to turn our backs on the great glory of bravely marching down the path of reforms based solidly upon truth and justice?

We might be tempted to believe this on reading the inadequate program published by the Commission of the Chamber, emphatically entitled: Postal Reform . 491

The State has seized control of the transport and delivery of letters. I do not intend to dispute its taking over this sensitive service, on the grounds of the individual's right to engage in various activities, since the State carries it out with everyone's consent.

However doesn't it follow from the fact that since, for reasons of order and security, the State has decided to deprive its citizens of the ability to send each other messages as they please, it should not ask them to pay anything over and above the service provided?

Let us take the roads. They are used in the circulation of people and goods and such a high value has been attached to them that, after devoting huge sums to constructing them, the State hands them over at no cost for citizens to use.

Can it really be maintained that the circulation of ideas, the exchange of feelings, the transmission of news and relations between father and son, brother and sister, mother and daughter, are less valuable in our eyes?

Yet not only does the State get paid for the service of delivering letters, but it also subjects this delivery to an unequal and exorbitant tax.

I accept that the Treasury needs revenue. However, it will also be agreed that relationships between parents and their children, the outpourings of friendships, or the anxieties in families ought to be the last things to be the subject of taxation .

How very odd! As a result of a double inconsistency, a fiscal character is given to the Post Office but not to the Customs Service, 492 with the result that both are diverted from their rational objective.

A citizen certainly has the right to say to the State: "You cannot, without infringing my dearest-held rights, rob me of the ability to send in any way I choose a letter on which perhaps my fortune, my life, my honor, or my peace of mind depends. All that you can in justice do is to persuade me to turn to you voluntarily , by offering me the means of correspondence that are fastest, safest, and most economical."

If the principle were laid down (I ask for your indulgence for this very unparliamentary expression) that the State should not profit from the delivery of letters, the solution to all the problems raised by postal reform would be found with the greatest ease, for I have heard only one objection to a lower and uniform rate: the Treasury would lose so many millions of francs (to lose, in administrative language, is to fail to earn).

Genuine recovery of the costs incurred and a uniform charge for delivery, 493 these are the two subjects to which I will try to call the reader's attention.

But above all, I consider that I have to pay my full respects to the postal authorities. It is said that in England, it is in the Post Office that resistance to reform is organized. In France, on the contrary, reform seems to have arisen within the postal bureaucracy itself, if it is true that the first publication in which this subject has been discussed has to be attributed to a senior civil servant in the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 494 Never have I read a work that is freer of fiscal and bureaucratic attitudes, more imbued with ideas that are elevated, generous, or philanthropic and in which from each page emanates a love of progress and the public good.

Genuine recovery of the costs incurred. — If I am to be faithful to the principle that I laid down above, I have to ascertain first of all what the charge or rather the cost of each letter ought to be.

In 1844, 108 million letters were in circulation and, with a reduced charge, it would be impossible for this not to exceed 200 million.

Expences increased to fr. 30,000,000

From which should be deducted:

Packet ships to the Levant 495 fr. 5,200,000

Revenue from seats on mail coaches fr. 2,300,000

Transfers of money fr. 1,100,000

Payments from continental offices fr. 400,000

Revenue from journals fr. 2,000,000

Total: fr. 11,000,000

Remainder attributable to letters fr. 19,000,000

Furthermore, the administrative costs have to be charged rigorously in the ratio of one third of the additional services.

It remains true that 200 million letters at 10 centimes, produce 20 million, more than cover their cost.

We should note that at this price, letters would still pay a tax of 5 centimes, or 100 percent, since they would defray the cost of transporting government letters that equal their weight for free.

In view of this latter consideration, I say openly that if we did not live in an age in which we appear to fear the good when it appears to us in a slightly absolute form and to be quite relaxed about the dose of pain which would make it acceptable to us, I would say that a simple letter should cost only 5 centimes, 496 and certainly the advantages of the reform would then be so total that we should perhaps not have any hesitation. But let us make it 10 centimes, half to pay for the cost and half to pay for the tax.

The first advantage of this reasonable pricing, I hardly need to say, would be the quite proper satisfaction given to the most refined and worthy of people's needs concerning the moral order.

The second, to increase the number of transactions and business dealings far in excess of what would be necessary to make up, through other channels, for the loss of the current net revenue from the Post Office to the Treasury.

The third, to bring the sending of letters within the reach of all. The Chamber's Commission sets the cost of letters to soldiers at 10 centimes. 497 It is forgetting one thing, which is that, out of 34 million inhabitants, there are 8 million who are also soldiers, the soldiers of industry, 498 who once they have met the basic necessities of life, have not a sou left in their pockets.

Finally, a fourth and invaluable advantage would be to return to each French citizen the right to deliver letters and not to to create arbitrarily an entire category of artificial crimes.

I am surprised that people are not struck by the serious harm that there always is in legally defining actions that are innocent in themselves and often praiseworthy as misdemeanors and crimes. And in this case, see what a series of absurd and immoral actions you are forced to engage in when you base the Post Office on the principle of raising revenue.

The duty paid on letters is fiscal and is therefore bound to exceed by far the cost of the service provide d; therefore individuals will be encouraged to compete with the State; therefore the State will deprive them of an innocent and sometimes invaluable freedom; and therefore the State will have to impose a criminal penalty.

And what a penalty! Is it possible to read Article 7 of the Commission's draft legislation without feeling overwhelming disgust? 499 An act of simple kindness punished as though it were a heinous crime! Carrying a letter liable to a fine that may reach 6,000 francs! How many crimes are there against property or even against persons which carry penalties like this?

With a charge of 10 centimes, or better, one of 5 centimes, you have no need to create crimes. The list of these is long enough already. You are able to give everyone his freedom back. People will not take the trouble of looking for unreliable opportunities to send mail when the ones they have available to them are the most economic, convenient, direct, certain, and rapid.

Since I have mentioned punishments, I want to emphasise something in the Commission's draft which I am certain will outrage public feelings.

A person is engaged in delivering a letter. In itself, this act is not a criminal act. It is not the nature of things but the law, and the law alone, which has made it so. This person can be punished by a 6,000 franc fine and what is more, by another piece of legal fiction, the punishment may fall upon a third party who is not even aware of the fact (under article 8). 500

A civil servant uses his counter-signature improperly. This is also fraud, and what is worse, fraud of the worst possible kind, as it is premeditated, calculated, and intentional. What is more, there is falsification committed by a public official in public records. There is abuse of confidence and violation of an oath of office. The fine for this is 25 francs! What should I say about article 10: 501 the authorities may come to an agreement or compromise concerning any offense against these regulations both before and following a verdict, etc. ? Statements like this carry their own commentary.

So, transactions made difficult, feelings upset, family ties loosened, business dealings hampered, freedom restricted, grossly unequal charges, fictional crimes, and arbitrary punishment: these are the inevitable consequences of the principle of revenue raising introduced into the law on postal services.

For this reason recourse has to be made to this other principle, that the Post Office ought to provide the service for which it is intended and at the lowest price possible, that is to say, one that covers its costs.

It remains for me to discuss the uniform charge for delivery, together with the means of covering the Treasury's deficit. This will be the subject of another article.

Second Article (30 April 1846, Mem. bord.)

The uniform charge of delivery for letters has so many incontestable and obvious advantages that you have to close your eyes deliberately in order not to see them.

The following objection is raised: "A uniform charge is contrary to the very principle you have stated, that of simply paying for the service received, because it is fair to pay more in proportion to the extra cost involved.

Apparent equality would be none other than actual inequality."

However, do not we all, in everyday life, write letters to destinations that are sometimes distant and sometimes quite close? Equality is based on this notion, and nothing stops an average being taken of all the distances a letter may be considered to have covered. 502

Wherever, in similar cases, a uniform charge is established for the delivery of journals or money, the correct formula must have been found, since nobody objects to it.

What is more, there comes a point at which, in practice everything has to come to a halt, even the strictest justice, and this is when such microscopic differences, such infinitely tiny and minute divisions are reached, that putting them into practice is a burden for everyone. Does the Commission's system claim to achieve mathematical equality? Are letters delivered at eight o'clock charged at a higher price than those delivered at nine? Is it governed by the ratio existing between one recipient who lives at a distance of 39 kilometers and another at 40?

Therefore when we speak of equality, what must be understood is an equality that is possible and practicable and which, for example, does not require change to be given for a centime.

And this is precisely what would happen with a system of graduated charges if account were taken of the minutely scaled, unreal conception of fairness it hides behind.

For it has been proved that the cost of transport, the cost that affects letters in different ways, alters the cost from one zone to another by a mere ½ centime. 503

But since it is in the name of equality and equity that the Commission has decided in favor of a graduated charge, let us examine its system from this point of view.

First of all, it is based on the principle that the Post Office ought to be a fiscal instrument and that, while the State exhausts its revenues in facilitating the circulation of goods, it ought to create a source of revenue for itself from the circulation of sentiment, affection, and ideas.

It follows from this that there are three elements in the delivery of a letter:

1. A tax.

2. The recovery of costs common to all letters.

3. The covering of costs that vary with distance.

It is clear that, with regard to the first two elements, the charge for all letters should be uniform and that a graduated payment can arise equitably, only in the case of the third.

It is therefore necessary to determine its size.

The general costs common to all letters, administration, inspection, monitoring, etc. come to 12 million, which we can reduce to 10 since part of these costs is absorbed by services outside the subject with which we are dealing, such as the transport of fifty thousand travelers, the transport of money, packet ships, etc. 504

Transport costs come to 17,800,000 francs, which can also be reduced to 10 million, as we have seen in the previous article, if those not related to mail are deducted, as they should be.

These costs have to be spread over:

875,000 kilograms of letters amounting to 116 million ordinary letters

1,000,000 kilograms of newspapers and printed matter, 133 million letters

1,000,000 kilograms of business documents, 133 million letters

Total 382 million letters

Or in round numbers 400 million ordinary letters.

So we have 10 million francs of fixed costs spread over 400 million letters, which gives for each 2½ centimes

10 million francs of graduated costs add to the cost price an average of 2½ centimes

Total 5 centimes

Finally, as the average cost of a letter today is 42½ centimes, it follows that the proportion of each of the three elements in this cost is as follows:

Fixed costs 2½ centimes

Graduated costs 2½

Tax 37½

Total 42 ½ centimes

If, as the partisans of the radical reform demand, the purely fiscal element is eliminated, delivery would be set at 5 centimes, the cost price. In this case, the State would have to subsidize the delivery of official correspondence.

Or, if 10 centimes were adopted, letters from individuals would still pay a tax sufficient to cover the cost of the public service.

In either case, a uniform charge is obligatory since the transport costs, the only ones that could possibly justify a graduated charge, average only ½ centime. The result is that the shortest distance costs 1¼ centimes and the longest 5 centimes.

The rate based on this principle should therefore be as follows:

	Fixed costs	Graduated costs	Total or rate charged
Zone 1 Zone 2 Zone 3 Zone 4 Zone 5	2 ½ 2 ½ 2 ½ 2 ½ 2 ½	1 ¼ 1 6/8 2 ½ 3 ¾ 5	3 ¾ 4 3/8 5 6 ¼ 7 ½

This rate is obviously unrealizable. It would be no less so if a fiscal charge were added, since it would have to be immutable, for example, 20 centimes. And in this case, we would have the monstrous rate of:

Zone 1: 23 ½ centimes;

Zone 2: 24 3/8 centimes;

Zone 3: 25 centimes, etc.

Well, what has the Commission done, in the name of equality? It has made the tax unequal, and its rate when broken down gives the following results:

	General costs	Graduated costs	Tax	Total charge proposed
Zone 1 Zone 2 Zone 3 Zone 4 Zone 5	2 ½ 2 ½ 2 ½ 2 ½ 2 ½	1 ¼ 1 3/8 2 ½ 5 ¼ 5	6 ¼ 15 5/8 25 33 ¾ 42 ½	10 20 30 40 50

Was I not right to say that the Commission's system established a tax that was as unequal as it was exorbitant, since for some people it was twice and for others ten times the cost of the service provided?

Thus serious equality exists only in uniformity. However, a uniform charge implies a nominal charge and, so to speak, one that is reduced to a practical minimum.

Twenty centimes has been bandied about. But at this rate a category of letters at 10 centimes would be needed (those that circulate within the radius of a post office), hence the requirement of sorting, assessing duty, and consequently the impossibility of ever achieving a system based upon compulsory stamping.

I have just uttered the word compulsory stamping. 505 It is possible only with a charge of 10 centimes, or better still 5 centimes, and the advantages of this are so obvious that it ought to be a matter of surprise if the objection of the loss to the Treasury prevailed, as though the Treasury were not the general public.

Let us calculate what the current work of the Post Office is and what it would be after the reform as proposed to us by the Commission. One hundred letters are posted. Each of them, in terms of distance, may come into eleven zones and, with regard to weight, nine classes, which raises the number of combinations to ninety-nine for each letter. Here we have the Post Master, consulting his table and his scales in turn for each letter, required to check 9,900 possible alternatives in a few minutes. After this, he notes the weight on one corner and the charge in the center of the address. 506

Is postage needed? He will take the money and give change, note the address in I do not know how many registers, wrap the letter in a form that states, for the third or fourth time, the name of the recipient, the place of departure, the place of arrival, the weight, the charge, and the number.

Then comes delivery. There are other interminable accounting procedures between the Post Master and the postman, the postman and the recipient, and a continuous series of inspections and more paperwork upon paperwork.

What should I say with regard to the work resulting from rejections, overcharging and undercharging, and general accounting; this masterpiece of complication, intended to ensure the compliance of postal workers at all levels,? Is this really necessary?

Is it not odd that millions are spent to save one hour by speeding up mail delivered by coaches and yet more millions are spent to have the distributors of mail waste this hour?

With compulsory stamping, all this slowness, complication, and paperwork, all these rejections, the overpayments and underpayments found, the sorting, the charges, the accounting that takes a prodigious amount of material and finance will all suddenly disappear in a trice. The Post Office and registration will sell envelopes and stamps at 5 or 10 centimes and that will be the end of it.

The objection will be made that it would be arbitrary to deprive senders of the ability to send a letter that is not stamped.

They will not be prevented from doing this. Let us remember that, under these arrangements, they are entitled to send their letters in any way they like, and therefore they cannot complain if the Post Office is determined to remain in control of the means in order to make the service as rapid and economical as possible.

Let us be frank. From a moral point of view, and the point of view of civilization, business, and personal sentiment as regards convenience, simplicity, and the speed of the service, in a word, in the interest of justice and true equality, there can be no possible objection to a uniform and moderate charge.

The loss of revenue! That is the sole and unique obstacle.

The loss of revenue! That is why a huge and unequal tax strikes at the communication of ideas, the transmission of news, anxieties of the heart, and the torment of absence! That is why our Law Codes are swollen with fictional crimes and real punishments. That is why the time gained with the speed of the mail coaches is lost in the delivery of letters. That is why the service is overloaded with intractable complications! That is why it is subject to a system of accounts based on 40 million divided into amounts of 40 centimes, each of which gives rise to at least a dozen book keeping entries! 507

But in the end, what is the amount of this loss?

Let us take it to be 20 million francs.

People will doubtless agree that this sum, left in the hands of taxpayers, would be used to buy sugar, tobacco, and salt and that this would reduce the loss to the Treasury.

They will also agree that the frequency and ease of communications, by increasing business, will have a favorable effect on all the sources of public revenue.

Moreover, the number of letters cannot fail to increase from year to year.

Finally, once the service is simplified to a such a degree, it will certainly enable considerable savings to be made.

Once all these savings have been taken into account, let us suppose there is still a loss of 10 million francs.

The question is to know whether you can use 10 million more usefully, and I am bold enough to challenge you to show me in the budget, as huge as it is, 508 an item of expenditure that is better understood.

Seriously then, at a time when you are spending 1 billion to facilitate the circulation of people and goods, are you really hesitant to sacrifice 10 million to facilitate the circulation of ideas!

Will you not ask yourself whether it is wise to overlook revenue of 10 million when it is a question of giving the general public so many inestimable advantages?

For if the number of letters merely doubles, who would be able to put a figure on the value of the business carried out, the human longings satisfied, or the anxiety dispelled by this increase in correspondence?

And is it a negligible matter to remove from your law codes illusionary crimes, arbitrary punishments, and the immoral manoeuverings between administrative caprice and the decrees of the courts?

Is it a negligible matter to hand over to a poor laborer the letter from his son for which he has waited so long, without snatching from him the profit from fifteen hours of heavy work, almost all of it for tax?

Is it a negligible matter to refrain from reducing a destitute widow to leaving the letter that will tell her whether her daughter is still alive at the post office for two weeks, so as to scrape together the 24 sous demanded (of which 22 are pure tax)?

This very day, I read in Le Moniteur that the figure for public revenue was increasing each quarter.

Why is it then that the time is never right for the most urgent reforms not to be postponed or spoiled by this eternal consideration: the loss of revenue?

Above all, do you absolutely need 10 million francs? You have one easy way of raising this sum. Return to the true nature of things by doing these two things. At the same time as you remove the fiscal nature of the postal tax, restore it to the Customs Service. Merely reduce duties on iron, coal, cattle and flax by one quarter.

The Treasury and the general public will benefit from this. Each of these reforms will facilitate the other; you will have paid homage to two principles of eternal justice and your future electoral manifestos will at least be based on something more substantial than "order with freedom" and "peace with honor", those commonplace sentiments which, if they make no commitment to anything, will not mislead anyone either.

T.60 (1846.05.02) "Commercial Liberty" (MB, May 1846)↩

Source

T.60 (1846.05.02 "Commercial Liberty" (La liberté commerciale), Mémorial bordelais, 2 May 1846. [OC7.19, 91??] [CW6]

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T.61 (1846.05.02) "First Letter to the Editor of the Journal des débats" (JDD, May 1846)↩

Source

T.61 (1846.05.02 "First Letter to the Editor of the Journal des débats" (Lettre au rédacteur du Journal des Débats. Première lettre), Journal des Débats, 2 May 1846. [OC7.20, p. 96??] [CW6]

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T.62 (1846.05.10) "Declaration of Principles of the Free Trade Association"↩

Source

T.62 (1846.05.10) "Declaration of Principles of the Free Trade Association" (Déclaration de principes (Association pour la liberté des échanges)) 10 May, 1846; reprinted in LE 25 Apr. 1847, no. 22, p. 169; along with the Association's new programme.[ OC2.1, pp. 1-4.] [CW6]

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T.63 (1846.05.14) "Second Letter to the Editor of the Journal des débats" (MB, May 1846)↩

Source

T.63 (1846.05.14 "Second Letter to the Editor of the Journal des débats" (Lettre au rédacteur du Journal des Débats. Seconde lettre), Mémorial bordelais, 14 May 1846. [OC7.21, p. 99??] [CW6]

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T.64 "On Competition" (JDE, May 1846)↩

[CW4 draft 16 June, 2017] Source

T.281 (1846.??) "Competition" (Concurrence), Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle: répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts avec la biographie de tous les hommes célèbres , ed. Ange de Saint-Priest (Paris: Au bureau de l'Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, Impr. Beaulé, Lacour, Renoud et Maulde, 1846). Tome huitième, pp. 389-400. Probably early 1846. Republished as "On Competition" in JDE, May, 1846. See T. 64. Not in OC. Revised for EH, 1st ed. chap. 10.

T.64 (1846.05.15) "On Competition" (De la concurrence), JDE , May 1846, T. XIV, no. 54, pp. 106-22; also EH chap. 10. 2nd half very similar, 1st half quite different. A note states that this article was written for l'Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle (no date given). [DMH] [CW4]??

Editor's Introduction

We know that Bastiat had ambitious plans to write a treatise on economic and social theory before he came to Paris. 509 These plans firmed up at the beginning of 1846 when he began to get some recognition from his colleagues and peers with the successful publication of his second book, Economic Sophisms , in January 1846, and his appointment to the Academy of of Moral and Political Sciences on 24 January. Although he became increasingly busy setting up a Free Trade Association, first with a regional one in Bordeaux in February and then a national one in Paris in May, he also found time to begin publishing articles which would eventually be turned into chapters in the treatise Economic Harmonies (Jan. 1850). In 1846 he published two articles, one "On Competition" in the first half of the year (which would become the final chapter 10 in the first edition), and a second "On Population" in the second half of the year (which he would substantially rewrite and which would become chapter 16 in the expanded second edition which was published by his friends in July 1851 after his death).

Both articles were written for an Encyclopedia edited by Ange de Saint-Priest 510 before they were revised slightly and republished in the JDE also in 1846 (May and October). They were then revised again, this time more substantially, probably over the summer of 1849, as Bastiat was working hard getting the manuscript of volume 1 of the Economic Harmonies ready for printing in December 1849. It should be noted that this is another example of Bastiat attempting to popularize economic ideas for a broader audience. Both articles were written while he was also writing what were to become his "economic sophisms."

Bastiat would not return to working on his book until late 1847, no doubt because for much of 1846 and 1847 he was working full-time for the FFTA especially after the launch of its journal Le Libre-Échange in November 1846 which he edited and largely wrote. He would complete three more chapters during 1848 which he published in the JDE, two of which were explicitly called "Economic Harmonies: "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Jan., 1848) which would become chapter 1; "Economic Harmonies: I, II, and III. The Needs of Man" (Sept., 1848) and "Economic Harmonies IV" (Dec. 1848) which would become chapter 2 "Needs, Effort, and Satisfaction" and chapter 3 "The Needs of Man". 511

After getting distracted again by his political and journalistic duties in early 1849 he was persuaded by his friends and supporters Hortense and Casimir Cheuvreux to use an exclusive lodge in some woods outside Paris (possibly with their financial assistance) over the summer so he could work undisturbed on the project. An early biographer of Bastiat, Ronce, believes that he was able to complete the rest of volume 1 (6 chapters on Exchange, Value, Wealth, Capital, Property and Community, Landed Property) because it was already largely written "in his head" many years before. 512 After writing an impassioned plea "to the youth of France" as an introduction and a rather apologetic conclusion, the book was finally published in late December. 513 He must have secretly known at this time that he would not live to see the work completed as his health was rapidly failing.

We are including this essay here because it was substantially revised for the book and the changes he made are interesting to show how his thinking was evolving during this period. It should also be noted that this is the first part of the book he ever wrote and it appeared as the final chapter in volume 1.

Things to note in this essay include the following.

It was written to counter the growing socialist criticism of competition that it is very destructive and harmful to the interests of workers and that it should be replaced by not-for-profit, worker-run "organisations" and "associations." Bastiat countered by arguing that competition creates a "genuine community" among people and not an "artificial" and "forced" one which the socialists wanted to impose on society. He called competition a "beneficent force" since producers are forced to compete with each other to supply more useful things to consumers at lower cost, thus saving them labour, effort, and discomfort. Furthermore, the accumulation of capital, especially in form of tools, reduces the amount of hard physical labour workers have to do and replaces it with more "intelligent", educated, and productive labour which eventually results in higher wages for workers.

Bastiat provides here for the the first time the story about what things an ordinary worker has in his home or workshop which come from around the world as a result of international trade and open markets. Here he visits a member of the "industrial class" and describes what he sees. Elsewhere, he talks about a "village carpenter" and all the things others, both domestic and foreign, have provided him with to make his life easier and more comfortable. 514

He points out that every person is both a producer and a consumer at the same time, and that the forces of competition are at work in both areas. As a consumer, the worker benefits from the competition between producers to create more things and sell them at the lowest possible prices. As a producer or seller of labour, the worker is also competing with other workers to sell their labour. Any calculation of a person's total welfare has to include the positives and negatives on both sides of the competitive process. Bastiat thought the balance was definitely in the workers' favour.

One of the important additions he would make for the EH1 version of this article was a new section on what he called "les causes perturbatrices" (disturbing factors) 515 which prevent the natural harmony of the market and competition from creating as much wealth as it might in their absence. In this article here, Bastiat points out that " in modern societies, competition is far from fulfilling its natural role; our laws hinder it at least as much as they favor it" and mentions in particular "conquest, monopolies, trade restrictions, privileged positions, high government posts and influence, the trafficking in administrative deals, and loans from public funds" as examples of things which prevent the beneficent effects of competition being felt. He does not yet use the term "disturbing factors," although he had referred to it a few times since his first use in his "Letter to Lamartine" (JDE, Feb. 1845), 516 probably as he had not yet fully incorporated it into his thinking.

In the new introduction he wrote for the EH1 version he argues that the socialists falsely accuse competition of causing the harms which he believes results from these disturbing factors:

While the Socialists see Competition as the cause of all harm, it is in the violations it (competition) receives that one has to look for the disturbing factor which (harms) all the good.

In the four new pages of material he inserted he observes that:

I will now set out general laws that I believe to be harmonious, and I am confident that the reader also will begin to guess at the existence of these laws, that they act in favor of the community and consequently of equality. However, I have not denied that the action of these laws has been profoundly disrupted by disturbing factors. Therefore, if we now find some shocking example of inequality, how can we judge it without being conversant with both the regular laws of social order and the disturbing factors which distort these laws?

Bastiat's use of the term "ceteris paribus" (or "all other things being equal") 517 was not common among political economists of his period. John Stuart Mill used it as early as 1836 in "On the Definition and Method of Political Economy" and in A System of Logic (1843) but there is no evidence that Bastiat was aware of his work. 518 He first used it in a paper he wrote in 1834 on "Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service" (April 1834), 519 and began using it in earnest in 1846 and thereafter. Thus, it appears that Bastiat was an independent early adopter of the phrase and it reveals the depth and growing sophistication of his thinking about economic problems and their solution.

There is also here an early reference to a concept which Bastiat will develop much further in the article "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (January 1848) and an unfinished chapter in EH2 Chapter 22 "Le moteur social", namely "le mécanisme social" (the social mechanism) By this Bastiat meant that society was a "mechanism" (le mécanisme social) or what we might today call a "process," which had moving parts, like a watch or a clock, which consisted of "les rouages" (cogs and wheels), "les ressorts" (springs), and "les mobiles" (the movement, or driving or motive force). Bastiat described the social mechanism as "a prodigiously ingenious mechanism (which) is the subject of study of political economy." Here he mentions it but does not go into much detail except to assert that competition was the driving force of this social mechanism. 520

One of Bastiat's innovations in economic theory was to stress the importance of consumptions as "the end" or purpose of economic activity and that production was "the means" to attain that end, thus turning classical economic theory on its head. We can see several references to this new way of thinking in this essay, particularly in the passage where he states unequivocally that "the real focus of economic science" were "the laws of consumption, and what promotes it, equalizes it, and makes int moral" 521 and chastises the classical economist Pellegrino Rossi for ignoring it.

Related to this stress on consumption was Bastiat's view about the importance of leisure which increasing prosperity made possible. He will return to this question later in 1849 in two important publications, his pamphlet on Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849) and in "Letter No. 4: F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon" (26 November 1849) in his debate with Proudhon on Free Credit . 522 In Capital and Rent where he says:

And here we can glimpse one of the finest harmonies in the social world. I am referring to Leisure, not that leisure that the warlike and dominating castes organized for themselves through the plundering of the workers, but the leisure that is the legitimate and innocent fruit of past activity and saving. 523

And in a virtual hymn to the befits of leisure made possible by the accumulated wealth and general prosperity made possible by the free market, he states:

Whatever sincere admiration I have for the admirable laws of social economy, whatever period of my life I have devoted to studying this science, whatever confidence is inspired in me by its solutions, I am not one of those who believe that it embraces the entire destiny of man. Production, distribution, circulation, and the consumption of wealth are not the sum of all things for man. There is nothing in nature that does not have a final aim, and man also has to have a goal other than that of providing for his material existence. Everything tells us this. Where do the sensitivity of his feelings and the ardor of his aspirations, his ability to admire and experience enchantment come from? Whence comes his ability to find in the slightest flower a subject of contemplation, or the excitement with which his senses receive and transmit to his spirit, like bees to the hive, all the treasures of beauty and harmony that nature and art have spread around him? How shall we explain the tears that moisten his eyes when he hears about the slightest act of devotion? What is the origin of that ebb and flow of feeling which his heart fashions, much as it directs his life-blood? Where does his love of humanity and his reaching out for the infinite come from? These are the marks of a noble destiny, which is not limited by the narrow bounds of industrial production. There is a purpose to man's existence. What is it? This is not the place to raise this question. But, whatever it is, what we can say is that he cannot achieve it if, bowed under the yoke of inexorable and constant work, he has no leisure to develop his senses, his affections, his mind, his sense of the beautiful, and what is purest and most elevated in his nature; the germ of which is in all men but in a latent and inert form because of a lack of leisure in all too many of them. 524

There are several significant differences between the two versions of the essay which should be noted. The revised chapter in EH1 is 50% longer (12,000 vs. 8,000 words) than the JDE article. The original Introduction of 21 paragraphs (2,100 words) was replaced in the EH version with a new introduction of 4,000 words in which Bastiat more directly replied to the socialists' criticism, which had been amplified by the February Revolution, that competition was "anarchic" and harmed the interests of the workers. A short new section of 648 words was added with a more detailed discussion of how many people laboured to produce simple everyday objects in order to show that all labour is "cooperative labour." And finally, he added a new section of 1,895 words on the justice of the monetary return to capital, the mutually dependent relationship between the two classes of capitalists and workers, the effect of competition on wages, and the idea that there was a "centrifugal" as well as a "centripetal" force at work in competition. Socialists focussed on the centrifugal force which acted to pull things apart and ignored the centripetal force which drew things together. Bastiat believed both forces needed to be taken into account in order to understand the true impact which competition had on society.

Text

I am going to discuss 525 the effects of one of the laws to which Providence has entrusted the progress of human society, a law which has as its purpose to equalise well-being and material circumstances among the members of the great family of mankind; to bring to the realm of the community the enjoyment of goods which nature seems to have reserved for certain countries, and the conquests of which (nature) have led to the hard work of each century to increase the wealth of the generations which follow; a law rich with social harmonies, 526 huge in its general impact, but often harsh in its operation; a law misunderstood in our time, and which, more than any other, attests to the unmeasurable superiority of the designs of God over the vain and powerless associations of men.

What is this fatal power against which we have struggled in vain ever since the carefree days of our youth began to pass us by? which leaves us no time to learn what is indispensable to know? which flings us onto the tumultuous byways of the world, and which, as it frustrates our desires for the things we hope for, never stops shouting at us: "March! March! He who does not run over other people will get run over"?

My goodness! The response which rises up is immense and unanimous from all corners of the globe, from the palace and the humble cottage, from the largest farms and the sharecroppers, from the construction site and the workshop, from the department store and the corner shop, from the office and the study, from the bank and the office, from the great hall of the stock exchange and the antechambers of government : It is Competition ! Competition !

But what is this beneficent force which achieves this surprising miracle of which my eyes are the witness? I am admitted into the home of one of these men from the industrial class 527 who is annoyed by competition, and what do I see? I see that he consumes in one day what he couldn't manage to produce during the entire span of his life, even if 10,000 lives came to be added to his end-to-end. And when I try to calculate how much time, effort, capital, tools, and vehicles are needed so that his office gets the simple furnishings that I find there; so that these carpets, armchairs, curtains, porcelain china, bronze statues, and crystal ware came to be gathered in this narrow space; 528 when I consider that what is there is only one one thousandth part of what my host has obtained from the general market place of the world; 529 that nevertheless he has stolen nothing from anybody, nor robbed anything from anyone; that he has really produced the value of of these innumerable things without busying his hands with anything else but using a pen, a needle, a shuttle, or a plane; when I come to think of this apparently huge disproportion I have just mentioned between the production and consumption of an individual, that this surprising miracle is becoming a reality, to some degree or another, for the benefit of all mankind scattered across the surface of the globe, how extraordinary, how contradictory even, that this could come to be; then I am struck with astonishment at the beauty, majesty, and the power of this social mechanism which has competition as its driving force, 530 and leaving for others the ambition of inventing a more ingenious organisation , 531 I will limit mine to studying, understanding, and admiring it, and I hope, if I can, to describe what has come ready made out of the hands of eternal wisdom.

Therefore, because man has two very distinct relationships with labor, because he is in turn a producer of useful things which he does not consume, and a consumer of useful things which he does not produce, relative to him competition must be seen from two different perspectives.

From the first point of view, from the individualistic point of view, the private, inveterate, and eternal thought of all workers is the solution of this problem: " To make sure that the useful things which I bring to society are as sought after and as rare as possible. " And this is why the producer, as producer, reacts against his competitors, disapproves of them, attempts to destroy them as much as he able to, and calls to his aid the use of force, fraud, the law, sophisms, 532 tariffs, monopoly, trade protection, and restrictions.

But the social problem is this: " To make sure that, for any given work which an individual brings to the general market, they get from it a sum of useful things which tends constantly to INCREASE and be MADE MORE EQUAL ." We will see that this is the task of competition .

To begin we have to establish the fact that the utility which every object contains has been put there by the cooperation of two forces, nature and labour .

Wheat owes its utility in part to the bounty of nature, air, light, warmth, and to the nutrients which nature has made available to us. On the other hand, it needed to be worked on, sown, harrowed, and harvested. When it comes to turning this wheat into flour, nature supplies the force of gravitation which is put to work with the falling water, the hardness of the mill stone, and man contributes to the final result by supervising and regulating the action of these forces, by directing them to a given end. — This is how it is for all industry.

Of these two forces which cooperate in the production of useful things, one of them, that of nature, is free ; the other, that of labour, is alone the subject of exchange, payment, and value .

However valuable a service provided by nature might be, if the hand or genius of man is not part of it, it is free, it is devoid of value in the economic sense of the word. Human industry has never produced and never will produce anything as useful, necessary, and indispensable to us as water, air, warmth, light, and yet we enjoy them for free when our bodies receive them immediately from nature, without the intervention of any effort. But, in order to have water it is necessary to go looking for it at a great distance, it is an effort which one has to undertake oneself or pay for. 533 If we wish to separate the air we breathe into its component parts, for example hydrogen gas to fill a balloon, there is work to carry out; and here is the reason why hydrogen gas, which is only part of the air has a value , while breathable air, which is the whole, does not.

Were we to review all the objects we buy and sell we would always find that they have a composite utility: one part has been supplied by nature and that is free , the other part has been supplied by labour and that is the object of exchange, for the very simple reason that in order to enjoy a useful thing which has cost some effort to obtain, one has to undertake the effort oneself or pay back in one form or another the person who undertook the effort for you.

The desire which all men feel to improve their condition leads him to increase as much as he can the cooperation of nature in the production of utility. It is here that the field is wide open to human genius. 534 Water, wind, heat, light, gravitation, electricity, all the laws of the physical world are increasingly used to make their contribution. From this it follows that from one generation to the next a given quantity of human labour can, so to speak, serve as a vehicle for a much greater sum of the services of nature and this shows us that there is nothing about the social problem which is insoluble or contradictory, which I stated earlier in these terms: "To make sure that human consumption increases more rapidly than his labour."

Not only is progress, thus defined, possible, but it is necessary, it is inevitable, and it is a providential consequence of the perfectibility of our faculties; and we will see well-being spread rapidly among the human species, if, by another law which we will not concern ourselves with here, 535 it does not increase in number at the same rate as it capacity for production.

I needed to briefly discuss these general ideas here in order to show the social action of competition in all its power and in all its harmonies.

What is exchanged, what forms the basis of our transactions, I have said, is labour, is discomfort, is effort, such that one could, in more common language, define political economy as the theory of the services which men provide each other, like "I owe you one!" or in tit-for-tat fashion. 536

But labour is not a homogeneous quality, an absolute quantity which can be weighed or numbered, which can be measured by a chronometer or a dynamometer. 537 There is only labour which is more or less preferred in the social context in which it is carried out; more or less clever, difficult, dangerous, risky, or even enjoyable. Besides, one must not lose sight of the fact that it is only given up 538 voluntarily, that each person remains the judge of the pain which he demands in return for the pain which one gives up, as well as the circumstances which can determine whether it is demanding or easy. Thus there is no reason to be surprised that there might be a great inequality in payment for labour and, ultimately in the well-being of human beings.

Lets us now examine the principle circumstances which influence this inequality and how it tends to disappear under the action of competition.

One of the most obvious is the possibility of seizing control of one of the natural resources which I mentioned earlier. These resources are not distributed equally across the globe. In one place the soil is more fertile; in another place the heat of the sun is more intense; in such and such a place there are large deposits of coal; yet in another there are rivers full of fish.

Without competition , those who are within reach of these natural advantages would only allow other people to share in them by making them pay an excessive and permanent amount; with the result that we would pay the producer not only for his effort but for the gifts of nature. A man who lives in the tropics could say to a European, "Thanks to my hot sun, I can get a bail of cotton with an effort equal to ten, while you could do it only with an effort equal to 100 . Now, for you to sell this cotton, it is not my effort which is the measure of my demands, but yours. God did not give a climate with high temperature to you but to me. So, here is my cotton, give me in exchange for it something on which you have expended an effort equal to a hundred or there about. If not, grow the cotton yourself." But competition does not permit these intolerable kinds of markets to exist. It doesn't allow a man to be paid for an effort which he did not make, for labour which he has not done, and it tends to make common and free for all men these natural goods which appear to be the exclusive privilege of a few.

Men in the tropics have not been able to impose their claim to measure the value of their wages by the amount of my effort and not by that of their own. If their efforts are too highly paid it will not fail to encourage rivals to enter the market. Competition has entered the picture; cotton has been offered at a discount to the point where the European pays, with an effort equal to ten, what the Indian produces with an effort equal to 10. Now, when things have reached this point, when I am prepared to give for a bail of cotton only an effort equal to one tenth of that which I would have taken to produce it in France, then will I demand it, and isn't there then an exchange of labour for labour, and, as far as I am concerned as a European consumer, don't I get into the bargain , the cooperation of the tropical climate? Thus, thanks to competition , I have become, and all men have become, just like the Indians and the Americans, that is to say, participants in the generosity of nature as far as the production of cotton is concerned, and are able to get it for free . It is the same for all products imaginable. 539

There is a country, England, which has numerous coal mines. Obviously this is a considerable local advantage, especially if we assume, as I will, to keep the argument simple, that there is no coal on the continent. As long as it is not traded, the advantage to the English is to have a greater abundance of fuel than other nations, which they can get without much effort and without taking too much of their valuable time. As soon as trade appears, on the assumption that there is no competition, the exclusive possession of the mines makes it possible for them to ask for high prices and to set a high price on their efforts. As we can neither make these efforts ourselves nor go elsewhere, we will have to put up with this. English labor as applied to this type of activity will be very well paid; in other words coal will be expensive, and nature's bounty may be thought of as having been conferred on one nation rather than on the human race.

This state of affairs, however, cannot last. There is a great natural and social law which opposes it, namely competition. For the very reason that this type of work is very well paid in England, it will be much sought-after, for people are always looking for high earnings. The number of miners will increase both through addition and through the birth of children. They will offer themselves at a discount and will be content with constantly declining pay until it reaches the normal rate, the level paid generally in the country for all similar work. This means that the price of English coal will decrease in France and that a given quantity of French labor will obtain an increasingly large quantity of English coal, or rather of the English labor that is bound up in the coal. In the end, it means, and this is what I ask you to note, that the gift that nature appears to have given to England has in reality been given to the entire human race. Coal from Newcastle is generously given free of charge to all men. This does not constitute either a paradox or an exaggeration: it is generously given to them freely, like the water from a stream, on the sole condition that people take the trouble to go in search of it or that those who take this trouble on our behalf are compensated for this. When we buy coal, it is not the coal that we are paying for but the labor required to extract it and transport it. We limit ourselves to returning an equal quantity of labor that we have attached to our wine or silk. It is so true that the generosity of nature has been extended to France that the work we return is no greater than the work we would have needed to do if the deposit of coal had been in France. Competition has brought about equality between the two nations with regard to coal, except for the inevitable and slight difference that arises from distance and transport. 540

I have cited two examples. My aim was to elucidate my thoughts. But lets us not lose sight of the fact that since the law of competition applies to all the gifts that nature has unequally distributed across the globe, it is necessary to consider it as the principle of a just and natural process of equalisation; it is necessary to admire it, praise it, as the most obvious expression of the impartial concern God has for all his creatures.

I regret that space does not permit me to draw out the consequence of this theory which I have just introduced. I will limit myself to drawing your attention to one. If it is true, as it appears to me to be unquestionable, that the diverse peoples around the globe are led by competition to exchange among themselves only the labour and effort which is becoming more and more equalized or evened out; and to mutually give each other, into the bargain , the services of nature that each one of them has closest within reach; then how blind and absurd they must be when they reject by means of legislation products which embody an enormous quantity of free utility ?

Another circumstance that puts certain individuals in an exceptionally favorable situation with regard to their payment is the exclusive knowledge of the processes by which it is possible to seize control of natural resources . What we call an invention is an advance made by human genius. We have to see how these fine and peaceful conquests, which at the outset are a source of wealth for those who make them, soon become, under the influence of competition, the common and free heritage of all mankind.

The forces of nature really do belong to everybody. Gravity, for example, is a common property; it surrounds us, penetrates us, and dominates us. However, if there is just one way of making it contribute to a useful and planned result, and one man knows this way, this man is able to set a high price on his efforts or refuse to make them except for a very considerable payment. His claims in this regard will have no other limit than the point at which he demands from consumers a sacrifice that is greater than that imposed on them by the old process. For example, he may have succeeded in eliminating nine-tenths of the labor required to produce a product X . But X currently has a price that is determined by the effort required for its production using the standard method. The inventor sells X at the market price; in other words, he is paid ten times as much for his effort as his rivals are paid for theirs. This is the initial phase of invention.

Let us note first of all that this does not violate justice. It is just that the person who reveals a useful process to the world should be rewarded for this: To each according to his ability . 541

Let us also note that up to now the human race, apart from the inventor, has made only a potential gain, one in prospect so to speak, since, in order to acquire product X it is obliged to make the same sacrifices as it made in the past.

Nevertheless, the invention enters its second phase, that of imitation . It is in the nature of excessive rewards to arouse envy. The new process becomes widespread, the price of X keeps decreasing and payment for it decreases also, especially as the imitation becomes distant from the time of the invention, that is to say, as it becomes easier, less risky, and because of this, less attractive. Indeed, there is nothing in this that cannot be allowed by the most ingenious and impartial legislation. 542

Finally the invention reaches its third phase, its definitive period, that of its universal diffusion , common availability, and freedom from cost . It comes full circle when competition has brought payment to producers of X back to the general and normal rate for all similar production. At this point the nine-tenths of the efforts saved by the invention in these circumstances are a victory for the benefit of the entire human race. The utility of X is the same but the nine-tenths have been added to it by gravity, which in the past was common to all in principle and which has become common to all in this particular application. This is so true that all the consumers on the planet are allowed to purchase X for the sacrifice of one-tenth of the effort it cost in the past. The surplus has been totally eliminated by the new process.

If you are willing to consider that there is not one human invention that has not gone through this cycle, that X in this instance is an algebraic sign representing wheat, clothing, books, or ships whose production has caused an incalculable mass of effort to be eliminated by the plough, the loom, the printing press, and sails, and that this observation applies to the humblest of tools just as it does to the most complicated mechanism, to nails, wedges and levers, just as to steam engines and the electric telegraph, 543 I hope that you will understand how the following major problem is solved in the context of the human race: A huge quantity of useful things or things which can be enjoyed, that is forever growing and ever more equally distributed, comes along to reward each given quantity of human labor .

I have shown that competition serves to move both the forces of nature and the processes by which these are harnessed into the domain of common availability, and freedom from cost . All that I still have to do is to make clear that it fulfills the same function with regard to the tools we use to set these forces in motion.

It is not enough for there to be forces in nature such as heat, light, gravity, and electricity. It is not enough for the mind to conceive the means of making use of these; you also need tools to transform mere intellectual conceptions into a physical reality and supplies to keep alive the people while they are undertaking the work.

There is a third factor that favors an individual or a class of people with regard to remuneration, and that is to possess capital . He who holds the tool that is essential to the workers, the materials on which the labor is to be done, and the means of existence 544 that are to be consumed during the production, can determine his rate of remuneration. This principle is certainly fair, for capital is merely effort made previously, which has not yet been rewarded. The capitalist is doubtless in a good position to impose his will, but we should note that, even without competition, there is a limit that his demands can never exceed. This limit is the point at which his remuneration would absorb all the advantages of the service he is providing. In this case, it is not right to talk, as often happens, about the tyranny of capital , since even in the most extreme cases its presence can never be more damaging than its absence to the situation of the worker. All that capitalists can do, like the people in the tropics who have an intensity of heat that nature has denied to others or the inventor who holds the secret to an industrial process that is unknown to his fellow-men, is to say to them: "If you wish to make use of my efforts, this is my price; if you find it too high, do as you have done in the past and do without it."

However, competition intervenes among the capitalists. Tools, materials, and provisions succeed in creating useful things only if they are used. Therefore there is a fight 545 among the capitalists to find a use for their capital. The extent to which this fight forces them to reduce their extreme demands, whose limits I have just set out, thus resulting in a reduction of the price, is therefore a net profit, a gratuitous gain for consumers and therefore for the human race!

In this instance, it is clear that something which is free of cost can never be absolute; since all capital represents past efforts made, it always contains with it the principle that a payment will be made. 546

We have seen that there is an upper limit beyond which one would no longer borrow. This limit is where there is " zero service " for the borrower. Furthermore, there is a limit, well short of which one would not make loans, and this limit is where there is " zero payment" for the lender. Competition between borrowers pushes the remuneration of capital to the upper limit; competition between lenders pulls it back towards the lower limit. It fluctuates between these two points, rising when it is just and necessary when capital is scarce, dropping when it is abundant.

This subject is immense and I cannot deal with it here. 547 I will limit my remarks by stating a fact which nullifies many of the assertions which are fashionable at the moment, that civilisation tends to lower the return on capital - one pays 20% in Brazil, 10% in Algeria, 8% in Spain, 6% in Italy, 5% in Germany, 4% in France, 3% in England, and even lower in Holland. Now, everything that the passage of time does to wipe out the price of capital is a loss for the capitalists, but it is not a loss for the human race. It is a force which, like the forces of nature , like more efficient industrial processes , results in greater abundance , in equalisation , and thus raises the general level of the human race. 548

It remains for me to study the competition which occurs between labor itself, a subject which is much larger than than what I have just sketched out. It would require a whole book to follow the future of capital in all its metamorphoses, and it would require ten books perhaps to correct all the errors which the "sentimentalist" schools of thought 549 have spread during the past few years concerning the fate of the workers. The requirements of the present work in which I am publishing this sketch force me to limit myself to a few simple outlines. 550

A host of circumstances contributes to making the remuneration for labor unequal (here I am referring only to labor that is free and subject to competition). If you examine it closely, you see that this alleged inequality is almost always just and necessary, and is in fact nothing other than genuine equality.

All other things being equal, 551 moreover, there is more profit in dangerous projects than in ones that are not, in trades that require long apprenticeships, and outlays that are unproductive for long periods of time, which assumes the long-term exercise within the family of certain virtues, than in trades where physical strength is all that is needed, or in occupations that require development of the mind and give rise to refined tastes than in those that just require manual labor. Is all this not just? Well, competition of necessity establishes these distinctions; society does not need a Fourier 552 or a father-figure like Enfantin 553 to decide this.

Among these circumstances, the one that has the most general effect is inequality of education. Here, as elsewhere, we see competition exercising its twin effect of leveling classes and raising the level of society.

If you think of society as being composed of two superimposed strata, 554 in one of which the principle of the mind is foremost and in the other brute force; and if you examine the natural relationship between these two social strata, you can clearly see a force of attraction in the first and a force of aspiration in the second which contribute to their merging. The very inequality of profit generates an inextinguishable desire in the lower stratum to reach the region of well-being and leisure, and this desire is supported by the influence of the enlightenment that illuminates the upper classes. The methods of teaching are improved, the price of books is decreasing, education is acquired in less time and at less cost, science, monopolized by one class and even one caste 555 and obfuscated by a language that is dead or embedded in hieroglyphic script, 556 is now written and printed in the common tongue and penetrates, so to speak, the atmosphere and is breathed in like air.

But that is not all. At the same time as a more universal and egalitarian form of education is drawing the two social strata together, weighty economic phenomena linked to the great law of competition are accelerating their fusion. Progress in engineering is constantly reducing the part played by manual labor. The division of labor that simplifies and isolates each productive operation, makes trades originally manageable only by a few, open to all. There is more: a group of tasks that originally assumed a wide range of knowledge has, through the mere passage of centuries, become routine in the area of activity of the least educated classes; this is what has happened to farming. Agricultural processes, which in antiquity gained those who revealed them to the world the highest of honors, are now the heritage and almost completely dominated by the commonest of men, to such an extent that this very important area of human activity is, so to speak, entirely removed from the well-educated classes.

From what has gone before, one may draw a false conclusion and say: "We can clearly see that competition decreases pay in all countries, in all kinds of careers, in all ranks, and levels them downwards , but in this case it is the wages for manual labor that will become the type and standard for all wages."

I will not have been understood if people do not see that c ompetition , which works to reduce all excessive pay to an average that is increasingly uniform, is bound to raise this average. I agree that this upsets people in their capacity as producers, but this is in order to improve the general situation of the human race in the only form reasonably able to improve it, that of well-being, prosperity, leisure, and intellectual and moral advancement, in a word, from the point of view of consumption .

Will it be said that in the event the human race has not made the progress that this theory appears to imply?

My first response is that, in modern societies, competition is far from fulfilling its natural role; our laws hinder it at least as much as they favor it, 557 and when the question is put as to whether the inequality of the situation of individuals is due to its presence or absence, we have only to see which men are at the top of the pile and can dazzle us with the glamour of their scandalous wealth, to be convinced that inequality, in so far as it is artificial and unjust, is based upon conquest, monopolies, trade restrictions, privileged positions, high government posts and influence, the trafficking in administrative deals, and loans from public funds; all things that have no connection with competition.

Subsequently, I believe that people fail to realize the genuine progress that the human race has made since the very recent period when the partial emancipation of labour began to take place. It has been said, and rightly so, that a great deal of philosophizing was needed to identify the facts that are constantly being witnessed. What a respectable and hard-working family of the working class consumes does not surprise us, because habit has accustomed us to this strange phenomenon. If, however, we were to compare the well-being this family has achieved with the situation that would be its lot under a social order in which competition was excluded, if statisticians, armed with accurate instruments, were able to measure as though with a dynamometer the relationship between the work of this family and the composition of its consumption at two different periods, we would recognize that freedom, as restricted as it still is, has achieved something extraordinary for this family, something whose very duration makes it pass unnoticed. The amount of human effort needed to produce a given result has been drastically cut and is truly incalculable. 558 For a native inhabitant of Canada who needed an object which weighed a quintal (100 kg) located 300 leagues away he would have to go looking for it, perhaps at a cost to him of 6 months of hard work. Today an artisan from the Bayonne region 559 who sends to Paris an object of equal weight pays 4 francs, or the equivalent of a day's wages. Thus 179/180 of the effort needed by the Canadian native has been wiped out. This portion of the effort is no longer undertaken by anybody, and nobody has to be paid for it; it is the amount taken care of by the forces of nature, the strength of animals, industrial processes, and tools, the use of which have become common and free of charge . As a result of competition, a single day of work is enough to cover the cost of the transportation, for the present effort which is required as well as for the previous efforts embodied in the mechanical tools or animals (which we term capital ) which contribute to the end result. There is not a single one of our consumption goods to which the same remarks do not apply.

Finally, that ever-increasing flow of useful things which work generates and which is in turn distributed by competition through all the veins of the social body, is not wholly defined by well-being. Most of it is absorbed in the flood of ever more numerous generations. It results in an increase in population in accordance with laws that are closely connected with the subject under discussion and which will be set out in another article. 560

Let us stop awhile and cast a rapid glance over the ground we have just covered.

Man has needs that have no limit. He develops desires that are insatiable. To meet them he has materials and forces which are supplied to him by nature, capabilities, and tools, and all the things that labor produces. Labor is the resource that has been the most equally shared out among all; each person instinctively and inevitably seeks to join to it as much of the forces of nature, as much innate or acquired capability, and as much capital as possible, so that the result of all this co-operation is as many useful things produced as possible, or what amounts to the same, as much satisfaction achieved as possible. Thus the ever-increasing contribution made by the forces of nature, the indefinite development of knowledge, and the gradual increase in capital produce this phenomenon, strange at first sight, that a given quantity of labor supplies an ever-increasing sum of useful things and that each person may, without depriving anyone else, achieve a mass of consumption out of all proportion to what his own efforts could produce.

But this phenomenon, the result of the divine harmony that Providence has spread throughout the mechanism of society, would have turned against society itself by planting in it the seed of endless inequality, if it were not combined with another kind of harmony no less admirable, namely competition, which is one of the branches of the great law of human solidarity .

Indeed, if it were possible for an individual, a family, a classe, or a nation that found themselves within reach of certain natural advantages, which had made an important industrial discovery, or acquired the tools of production through saving, to be cut off permanently from the law of of competition, if such a thing were possible, I repeat, it is clear that this individual, this family, or nation would be in permanent possession of a monopoly of extraordinary remuneration at the expense of the human race. Where would we be if the inhabitants of the equatorial regions, freed from any competition with each other, were able, in exchange for their sugar, coffee, cotton, or spices, to demand from us, not repayment in the form of an effort equal to theirs, but an effort equal to that which we would have had to take ourselves to produce these things in our harsh climate? What incalculable distance would separate the diverse situations of people if the race of Cadmus 561 were the only one that knew how to read, if nobody was allowed to use a plow unless he could prove that he descended directly from Triptolemus, 562 if the descendents of Gutenberg 563 were the only ones allowed to print, the sons of Arkwright 564 to use a spinning jenny, or the nephews of Watt 565 to get the chimney of a locomotive smoking!

However, Providence did not will this to be so. It placed within the social machine a spring, such that nothing is more astonishing than its power, except perhaps its simplicity. Through the operation of this spring, any productive force, any superiority of industrial process in short any advantage not due to his own labor , slips through the fingers 566 of the producer, stops there in the form of exceptional reward just long enough to arouse his enthusiasm and after a while goes on to enlarge the communal and free heritage of the human race before finally issuing an ever-growing quantity of individual satisfaction constantly being shared more equally. This spring is c ompetition . We have seen its economic effects; all that remains for us to do is to cast a rapid glance over a few of its political and moral consequences. I will limit myself to indicating the most important of these.

Some superficial minds have accused competition of introducing antagonism among men. This is true and inevitable as long as men are considered only in their capacity as producers; if you take the point of view of consumption, you will see that competition itself draws individuals, families, classes, nations, and races together through the bonds of universal brotherhood.

Since goods that at first sight appear to be the privilege of the few become, through an admirable decree of divine beneficence, a heritage common to all; since the natural advantages of location, fertility, temperature, mineral wealth, and even industrial aptitude, seem just to slip through the hands of the producers, given the competition which they enter into with each other, and turn exclusively to the advantage of consumers, it follows that there is no country that does not have a stake in the progress of all the others. Every progress achieved in the East is wealth in prospect for the West. If fuel is discovered in the South, the people of the North are warmed. Great Britain can make all the progress she likes with her spinning mills; her capitalists will not reap the benefit, for the interest on their money does not increase. The benefit does not go to her workers since their earnings remain the same, but in the long run it is Russia, France, Spain - in a word the human race - which gets the same satisfactions with less effort or, which amounts to the same thing, greater satisfaction for the same effort.

I have spoken only of benefits, but I could have said as much about the harms, that afflict certain nations or regions. The very nature of competition is to make general that which was once particular. It acts precisely on the principle of insurance . If a plague ravages farmland, it is those who eat bread who suffer. If an unjust tax is levied on French vines, it results in expensive wine for drinkers the world over; thus benefits and harms of the long-lasting kind just slip through the hands of individuals, classes, and nations. Their providential destiny is to affect the entire human race in the long run and improve or worsen its situation. This being so, to envy a particular nation for the fertility of its soil, the beauty of its ports or rivers, or the warmth of its sun is to fail to recognize the advantages in which we are all destined to have our share. It is to reject the abundance 567 offered to us and to miss the toil we have been spared. This being so, national jealousies are not just perverse sentiments, they are sentiments that are absurd into the bargain. To harm others is to harm yourself. To place obstacles in the path of others, 568 whether these are customs tariffs, foreign alliances, or wars, is to obstruct your own path. Consequently, harmful passions are punished, just as generous ones are rewarded. The inevitable sanction of accurate, distributive justice appeals to one's self-interest, enlightens public opinion, and in the end proclaims and secures the upholding by people of the eternally true maxim: The useful is only one aspect of the just, liberty is the most beautiful of the social harmonies, 569 and justice is the best policy.

Christianity introduced the great principle of human brotherhood to the world. It spoke to the heart, the emotions, and the instincts that were noble. Political economy seeks to have the same principle prevail in cold reasoning and, by showing the link between cause and effect, reconciles the calculations of the most attentive self-interest with the inspiration of the most sublime morality in one reassuring agreement.

A second consequence of this doctrine is that society is a genuine community . Messrs. Owen 570 and Pierre Leroux 571 may save themselves the trouble of looking for a solution to the great problem of c ommunism ; it has already been found. It results not from their despotic schemes but from the organization that God has given to man and society. Natural forces, more efficient industrial processes, and tools of production, all these are common to man or are tending to become so. This is true for everything, except for the trouble people incur , and the labor and individual effort put in. Between men there is only one and there can be only one inequality , one that the most dyed in the wool communists acknowledge, and that is the inequality that results from the inequality of effort. These are the efforts exchanged between people for a freely negotiated price. All the utility that nature, the genius of past centuries, and human foresight have imparted to the products being exchanged is therefore available into the bargain. Reciprocal payment relates only to their respective efforts, either present effort in the form of labor or preparatory effort in the shape of capital. (This) is therefore a community in the strictest sense of the word, unless you wish to claim that each person's share in the satisfaction has to be equal, while the share of effort exerted is not. This would indeed be the most unjust and monstrous of inequalities and, I would add, the most disastrous, for it would not kill competition but merely cause its action to be inverted. People would still fight, but they would fight 572 to excel in laziness, lack of intelligence, and lack of foresight.

Finally, the doctrine that we have developed, so simple and, we are convinced, so true, forces the emergence of the great principle of human perfectibility out of the domain of oratory and into that of rigorous proof. From this internal motive, which never rests in a person's breast and which leads that person to improve his or her situation, is born the advance of technology, an advance that is nothing other than the gradual cooperation of forces, which by their very nature are unconcerned with any remuneration. Competition gives rise to the granting to the community those benefits which were originally acquired by individuals. The intensity of the effort required for any given result is constantly reduced for the benefit of the human race, which sees its range of satisfactions and leisure increase from one generation to another and the level of its physical, intellectual, and moral progress advance, and through this arrangement, so worthy of our study and eternal admiration, we clearly see the human race rising up out of its degradation.

I hope my words will not be misunderstood. I am not saying that all brotherhood, all community, and all human perfectibility are contained in competition itself. What I am saying is that it is linked and allied to these three great social social concepts, that it is part of them, that it makes them manifest, and that it is one of the most powerful agents of their sublime realization.

I have concentrated on describing the general and consequently beneficial effects of competition, for it would be sacrilege to suppose that any great law of nature could produce effects that were both harmful and permanent, but I am far from denying that its action can be accompanied by a great deal of hardship and suffering. I even consider that the theory that has just been set out, explains both these sufferings and the inevitable complaints they generate. Since the work of competition is to level out , of necessity it is bound to upset anyone who raises his proud head above this level. We can understand that each producer strives to retain the exclusive use of a resource , an industrial process, or a tool of production for as long as possible in order to keep the highest price for his work. Well, since the purpose as well as the result of competition is precisely to remove this exclusive use from individuals in order to make it common property, it is inevitable that men, insofar as they are producers, will unite in a chorus of curses against c ompetition . 573 They can become reconciled to it, only by appreciating their relationship to consumption, by thinking of themselves not as members of a clique or a privileged corporation, but as individual men.

It has to be said that political economy has not done enough to dispel this disastrous illusion, 574 which is the source of so much hatred and resentment, and so many disasters and wars. It has worn itself out, given its very unscientific orientation, analyzing the phenomena of production; even its nomenclature, as convenient as it is, is not in harmony with its subject-matter. Farming, manufacturing, or commerce are perhaps excellent headings when it is a question of describing the processes involved in these technical arts, but such description, though of vital significance in technology, is scarcely relevant in social economy, 575 and I would actually say that it is essentially dangerous in this context. When people have been classified as farmers, manufacturers, and merchants, what can you talk to them about, other than their class interests, those special interests that conflict with competition and oppose the general good? It is not for farmers that farming exists, for manufacturers that there are factories, or for merchants that exchanges take place, but in order for people to have access to the greatest possible number of products of all kinds. The laws of consumption , and what promotes it, equalizes it, and makes it moral: that is the true social and humanitarian interest; that is the real focus of economic science; that is on what it should focus its sharpest thinking. For this is where the bond between classes, nations, and races is - the principle and the explanation of human brotherhood. It is therefore with regret that we see economists devoting their powerful minds and dispensing a prodigious wealth of wisdom, in pursuit of the anatomy of production, relegating to appendices at the ends of their books a few brief commonplaces on the phenomena of consumption. What is that I am saying? Not long ago, we saw a justifiably famous professor 576 suppressing this part of economic science totally and devoting himself to the means without ever mentioning the ends , and banishing from his lectures anything relating to the consumption of wealth as belonging, so he said, to the realm of moral philosophy and not to political economy. Should we be surprised that the general public are more struck by the disadvantages of competition than its advantages, since the disadvantages affect it from the particular point of view of production , about which they are constantly being informed, and the advantages from the general point of view of consumption, about which they are never told anything?

What is more, and I repeat and do not deny it, I clearly recognize and deplore as much as others do, the pain that competition inflicts on people, but is this a reason to close one's eyes to the good it does? This good, which I believe competition to be, is indestructible like all the great laws of nature. And how consoling it is to note this fact! If competition could die, it would doubtless have succumbed to the universal resistance of all the men who have ever contributed to the creation of a product since the dawn of time, and especially to the national call to arms which all the modern reformers have promoted. But although they have been crazy enough, they have not been strong enough to do this.

And what progressive principle has there been in the world whose beneficial action has not been mixed up with a great deal of pain and misery, especially at the beginning? The great urban centers created by human beings have encouraged the flourishing of thought, but they often shield private life from the corrective of public opinion and act as a shelter to debauchery and crime. Wealth allied with leisure generates the life of the mind, but it also generates ostentation and arrogance in the great, and resentment and envy in the lowly. Printing shines enlightenment and truth on all the social stratas of society, but it also conveys painful doubt and subversive error. Political freedom has unleashed enough storms and revolutions around the planet, it has modified the simple and naïve habits of primitive nations profoundly enough for serious minds to have asked themselves the question as to whether they did not prefer peace in the shadow of despotism. And Christianity itself has scattered the great seed of love and charity on land soaked with the blood of martyrs.

How has it become part of the plans of infinite goodness and justice that the good fortune of one region or century is bought by the suffering of another region or century? What divine thought is hidden under this great and indisputable law of solidarity of which c ompetition is just one of its mysterious aspects? Human science does not know this. What it does know is that good is constantly expanding and evil constantly shrinking. From the very beginning of the social order, an order created out of conquest, where there were only masters and slaves and in which inequality of condition was extreme, competition was not able to do its work of drawing men of different ranks, fortunes, or minds closer together, without inflicting some individual hardship, the intensity of which constantly lessens as the work progresses, much like the vibrations of sound and the swings of a pendulum gradually diminish over time. To the suffering that is still inflicted, the human race learns daily to apply two powerful remedies, foresight , the fruit of experience and enlightenment, and association , which is organized foresight . 577