Political Economy [34]
strength of body, or constancy in labour, which do not even require to be developed by education. But other qualities, other virtues, which appear to contribute more effectually still to the increase of riches, as well as to the happiness of society - the love of order, economy, sobriety, justice - are almost always the work of public institutions. Religion, education, government, and principles of honour, change the nature of men; and as they make good or bad citizens of them, they advance or retard their approach to the object proposed by political economy. But governments have rarely been satisfied with such advantages as the trade of their states might owe to nature, or to the progress of society. They have attempted to favour the increase of commercial wealth; and their different expedients have most frequently tended to assist the merchant in selling dear, rather than producing cheap. With the latter object, however, we have seen the exportation of raw materials prohibited, the rate of interest fixed, and laws enacted to lower the wages of labour. These three expedients had a common fault, that of sacrificing one class to another, and founding the profit of trade, not on the advantage of consumers, but on the loss of cultivators, capitalists, or workmen; so that its profits, far from being an increase of the national wealth, were a displacement of it. The raw materials on which the arts operate, are all, or nearly all, produced by agriculture or at least drawn from the ground; hence they form part of the proprietor's or the cultivator's wealth. If some advantage did not arise from exporting them, nobody would think of forbidding them to be exported. This prohibition indicates sufficiently, that the persons who produced them were better paid, or gained more by selling them to strangers; and the law restricts their market, in opposition to the principle which we have pointed out above, as the foundation of commercial interest; the principle of obtaining for each article of produce the highest possible price. From such prohibitions to export, there must result, first, a diminution in the price of the raw material, for its price is no longer kept up by free trade; secondly, a diminution in the quantity produced, because it is regulated by the interior demand; and lastly, a deterioration of its quality, for a calling which is ill rewarded, is likewise ill attended to. This, therefore, is one of the most injudicious means of favouring trade; and at the same time, it sacrifices the income of all those who contribute to produce the raw material. Whatever trade gains from them, cannot be considered as adding aught to the national revenue. To fix the interest of money, or to suppress it altogether, as some legislators have attempted, has, generally been the consequence of religious prejudices, and of mad attempts to adapt the Jewish legislation to modern Europe. The effect of these laws, so opposite to the general interest, has always been either to force contractors to envelop themselves in a secrecy which they must require payment for, and may use as a snare for the unsuspiciousness of others; or else to force capitalists to employ, in other counties, that capital which they could not lend in their own neighborhood, with the same safety and advantage. But the very end which legislators proposed was bad; a diminution in the rent of the national capital, is a national evil; it is a loss of part of the revenue. Most frequently, indeed, this evil is the sign of an advantage greatly superior to it, namely, the increase of capitals themselves; but, in forcibly producing the sign, we cannot at all forcibly produce the thing, any more than by turning round the pointers of a watch we can alter the flight of time. Attempts on the part of government to fix the rate of wages, to make workmen labour at a lower price, are ever the most impolitic and the most unjust of these partial laws. If government should propose, as an object, the advantage of any one class in the nation at the expense of the rest, this class ought