Political Economy [31]
more work with the same machinery, or the same number of hands. The whole progress of his fortune depends on the progress of his sale.* Among the causes which augment this sale, the first is the discovery of such an economy in labour as may enable the manufacturer to sell cheaper than his brethren, and to get possession of their custom: he will sell more, but they will sell less. The consumers will make a light saving; yet, if both are subjects of the same state, the difference in regard to the national interest will not be great. The distress of those producers, who have lost their custom, and who, probably, will lose a considerable part of their capital by selling their wares too cheap, and abandoning their former machinery, will perhaps counterbalance the profit of purchasers. As policy is wont to comprise the obligation of social duties within the circle of our countrymen, the mutual rivalship of foreign producers has more openly displayed itself. They have striven to exclude each other from the markets, where they came in competition, by selling at a cheaper rate. Every national discovery, which allows the producers of one country to sell cheaper than those of other countries, inevitably increases the former's production at the latter's expense; and the profit of this saving is shared between producers who extend their market, and consumers who provide for their wants at a smaller expense. Yet if a single manufacturer has succeeded in making this saving, which extends his market; or if the exclusive use of it is secured to him by patent, his countrymen. also manufacturers, against whom he has made this successful competition, must support all the loss of it, whilst himself and the foreign consumer share all the profit. In an age, when communication among different counties is easy, when all the sciences are applied to all the arts, discoveries are soon divined and copied, and a nation cannot long retain an advantage in manufacturing which it owes but to a secret; so that the market, extended for a moment by a fall in the price, is very soon shut up; and if the general consumption is not increased, the production is not so either. Sale is extended also, and in a more lasting manner, when the cheapness of the thing produced brings it within the reach of a new class of consumers; a very sensible diminution of the price may often produce this effect. Thus glass windows were at one time confined to palaces; they are found at the present time in the meanest huts. Consumption is in that case truly increased; each nation gains doubly by it; manufacturers have extended their labour; the poor have acquired a new enjoyment. The increase of population, and of national wealth, contributes to extend the market, in a manner still more advantageous. Yet every conceivable increase of population and of wealth, does not, of necessity, extend the market; it is only such an increase as attends the increased comforts of the most numerous class. When cultivation on the great scale has succeeded cultivation on the small, more capital is perhaps absorbed by land, and re-produced by it; more wealth than formerly may be diffused among the whole mass of agriculturists, but the consumption of one rich farmer's family, united to that of fifty families of miserable hinds, is not so valuable for the nation, as that of fifty families of peasants, no one of which was rich, but none deprived of an honest competence. So also in towns, the consumption of a manufacturer worth a million, under whose orders are employed a thousand workmen, reduced to the bare necessaries of life, is not so advantageous for the nation, as that of a hundred manufacturers far less rich, who employ each but ten workmen far less poor. It is very true, that ten thousand pounds of income, whether they belong to a single man, or to a hundred, are all equally destined for consumption, but this consumption is not of the same nature. A man, however rich, cannot employ for his use an infinitely greater number of articles than a poor man, but he employs articles infinitely