its employment, it frequently occasions a mutiny and disorder alarming to government, and embarrassing even to the deliberations of the legislature. How great, therefore, would," as he thought, "be the disorder and confusion which must necessarily be occasioned by a sudden and entire stop in the employment of so great a proportion of our principal manufacturers !"*

Great as were the dangers even then so evident as resulting from an unnatural increase in the proportion of the population engaged in the works of trade and transportation, the people of England had at that time but entered upon the effort to reduce the world at large under the system which so long previously had existed in the colonies. The interdiction of the emigration of artisans was then but ten years old; and the British power was then but beginning to be established in Hindostan. The fifth year following the publication of the work of Dr. Smith witnessed the prohibition of the export of silk and woollen machinery; and before the close of the century the policy had been perfected by the extension of the prohibition to all other descriptions of machinery, as well as to artisans by whom it might be made, and to colliers.

§ 2. From 1750, when corn had been 21s. 3d. per quarter, to 1790, the population had increased about forty per cent., or from six, to eight and a half millions; but the supply of food had grown at a rate still more rapid the production of the later years of the period having been at least one-half greater than that of the previous ones. The price, nevertheless, had more than doubled, as has been already shown; and thus had the farmer profited by his emancipation from the necessity for seeking a market in distant countries. Corn was then higher at home than abroad, as a consequence of which there had arisen a commerce of importation, for the prevention of which, and for thus securing themselves against the cheapening of the raw materials of life, the agricultural interest procured, in 1791, the passage of a law limiting the price at which it might be imported.

During all this period the tendency had been towards an increase in the proportion of the population engaged in consuming food, whether as artisans, soldiers, traders, or transporters. The system denounced by Dr. Smith was being, as the reader has seen,

* Wealth of Nations, book 4, chap. vii.

from year to year, more fully carried out. For almost half a century, India had been devastated by contending French and Eng、 lish armies, engaged in extending the dominion of trade at the expense of commerce. Trade had stirred up dissensions between the mother country and her American colonies, and had thus produced the war of 1776. The class living by appropriation, trade, and transportation, had increased in numbers and in power, but it was reserved for the war of 1793-a war largely due to the thirst for "ships, colonies, and commerce" to see it attain to full dimensions. The demand for men and money for warlike purposes then limited the power to apply labor, or capital, to the improvement of the land, and greatly diminished the demand for the services of the laborer. Consumers increasing in number, while producers remained stationary, the price of food advanced, while that of labor fell-the effects of which were speedily seen in the rapid growth of the almshouse population.

Pauperism prevailed to an extent that before had been unknown; and then it was that Mr. Malthus furnished the world with the "Principles of Population," by help of which, as he told his readers, they might understand' the causes of "that poverty and misery observable among the lower classes of people in every nation;" and of "the repeated failures in the efforts of the higher classes to relieve them." Dr. Smith had seen that the policy based upon cheap labor and cheap raw materials was itself the work of those "higher classes;" and upon them he had urged the abandonment of a system that, as he saw, looked to the enslavement of the people, and the weakening of the community. Mr. Malthus, on the contrary, found the cause of slavery in a great law of God, by means of which he relieved those "classes" from all responsibility for "that poverty and misery" which they had so unsuccessfully labored to "relieve"; and thus enabled them to close their purses, and even their hearts, against the commonest dictates of charity, by the reflection that if they should in any manner "stand between the error and its consequences"— if they should in any manner "intercept the penalty" affixed to the procreation of their species by those who had not already accumulated the means of support and education for their children which penalty is poverty, wretchedness, and death-they would

"perpetuate the sin," and become themselves participants in crime! In these two sentences may be found the real differences between the political economy of Adam Smith and that modern one since so generally received. The former looks to the exten sion of commerce-to the development of mind—and to the aug mentation of the powers, and of the freedom of man; the latter to the extension of the dominion of trade-to the limitation of the mass of mankind to the works of cultivation and transportation— and to the ultimate enslavement of man by nature, and by his fellow-man.

§3. The mercantile system, so much reprobated by Dr. Smith, had for its object the cheapening of all the raw material of manufacture — wool, cotton, food, and labor. Thus far it had, as he saw, been productive of most injurious effects-having increased the dependence on machinery of trade and transportation-having produced a belief that the more widely men were separated from each other, and the greater the distance to be travelled over, the greater was the benefit to be derived from commerce-having fostered the warlike tendencies of the people having caused an improper division of the population — and having tended greatly to promote the creation of large fortunes at the expense of those who had labor alone to sell. Such, as he told his countrymen, were the necessary consequences of the system; but it needed a further experience of twenty years for proving that such was certainly the case, and for giving occasion to the extraordinary discovery that although the demand for labor had become more steady as population had increased, and as men had more and more, from the days of the Plantagenets to those of George III., acquired wealth, and with its acquisition had obtained increased facility of combination; now, having in the last half century acquired an extraordinary increase of power-having began to utilize the great deposits of coal, and of iron and copper ores-having learned to command the wonderful force of steam-having learned to apply it to the conversion of wool into cloth-having obtained a great increase of wealth-having greatly facilitated the development of the latent faculties of man, and the latent powers of the earth and having thus produced a vast increase in the move* Edinburgh Review, October, 1849: article, Unsound Social Philosophy.

ment of society — the demand for labor must become more unsteady, and pauperism must increase, in virtue of a great natural law, by which it had been provided that the more efficient the machinery of cultivation, the less must be the return to the labor employed in developing the resources of the earth.

This was a remarkable discovery, certainly; but, happily, it was a discovery of a fact that never had existed, and never can exist. The treasures of nature are boundless in extent; and they wait only for man to claim them. Unfortunately, however, the theory was precisely the one that was needed for the prevention of the adoption of any of the remedial measures proposed by Adam Smith. Proving, as it professed to do, that pauperism existed in obedience to the laws of God-that the natural rate of wages was just so much as," and no more than, was necessary to enable the laborers, one with another, to subsist and perpetuate their race, without increase or diminution" - that inequality of condition existed in obedience to divine laws powerful had therefore only rights to exercise, and not duties to perform it proved, too, that they could safely and conscientiously "eat, drink, and make merry," though surrounded by poverty, wretchedness, disease, and death solacing themselves with the reflection that the poor had their fate in their own hands, and that if they failed to exercise the "moral restraint" which should lead to abstinence from that regular association of the sexes which causes reproduction of the species, the fault was their own, and upon them must justly fall the penalty of transgression.

that the rich and

§ 4. The system which looked exclusively to foreign trade was, therefore, not only maintained in full, but with each successive year was more extensively carried out. From the days of Mr. Malthus to our own, the temple of Janus has rarely, even if ever, been closed, in testimony of the existence of peace throughout the British empire. The war in which Britain was then engaged was followed by one with this country, since the close of which there have been wars for the annexation of Scinde and Affghanistan-for the conquest of Ava and the Punjab-for the maintenance of the opium trade for the extension of power in South Africa for the development of new avenues for trade throughout the Turkish

Empire and others all looking to the one great object of cheapening the raw products of the earth, and thereby cheapening the labors of the men by whom the earth was being tilled.

For the accomplishment of that object, as the reader has seen, the union with Ireland was perfected, and her manufactures were annihilated. For its accomplishment, the people of India were required to receive the cotton goods of England free of duty, while deprived of the power to purchase more efficient machinery from abroad, and taxed to an unheard-of extent for the use of that which they already possessed. For its accomplishment, Gibraltar has been maintained as a smuggling depôt for Spain; while Heligoland, the Ionian Islands, and numerous other colonies, have been used for smuggling goods into Germany, the United States, and other countries - the smuggler being now regarded as "the great reformer of the age. For its accomplishment, it has been required that there should be combinations among masters for keeping down the price of labor—for limiting the hours in which machinery should be run, with a view to preventing the rise of raw materials—and for discouraging the growth of manufactures in other countries. That all of these are acts of war, and that they are properly so to be regarded, will be seen on a perusal of the following extract from an official document recently published by order of the House of Commons:

*

"The laboring classes generally, in the manufacturing districts of this country, and especially in the iron and coal districts, are very little aware of the extent to which they are often indebted for their being employed at all to the immense losses which their employers voluntarily incur in bad times, in order to destroy foreign competition, and to gain and keep possession of foreign markets. Authentic instances are well known of employers having in such times carried on their works at a loss amounting in the aggregate to three or four hundred thousand pounds in the course of three or four years. If the efforts of those who encourage the combinations to restrict the amount of labor and to produce strikes were to be successful for any length of time, the great accumulations of capital could no longer be made which enable a few of the most wealthy capitalists to overwhelm all foreign

* Report of the Commissioner appointed to Examine into the State of the Population of the Mining Districts. ̃ ̄1854.