Political Economy [42]
at which we are arrived, no labour can be accomplished without a capital to set it in motion; but this capital, though almost constantly represented by money, is yet quite a different thing. An increase of the national capital is the most powerful encouragement to labour; but an increase in the circulating medium has not of necessity the same effect. Capitals co-operate powerfully in the annual reproduction of wealth, giving rise to an annual revenue; but money continues barren, and gives rise to no revenue. Indeed, the competition between those capitals, which are offered to accomplish the annual labour of the nation, forms the basis for the interest of money; but the greater or less abundance of the circulating medium, has no influence in the fixing of this interest. Painful experience has shown all the inhabitants of Europe what a dearth was, and a period of general penury among a civilized people. At these mournful epochs, every one has heard it a hundred times observed, that it was not corn or food which was wanting, but money. Indeed, vast magazines of corn have often remained full till the next harvest; those provisions, if proportionably shared among the people, would have almost always been sufficient for their support; but the poor, having no money to offer, were not able to buy them; they could not, in exchange for their labour, obtain money, or at least enough of it, to subsist. Money was wanting, natural wealth superabundant. What phenomenon could appear more proper to confirm the universal prejudice which looks for wealth in money, not in consumable capital? But the money, which is wanting in a time of scarcity, is the wage offered to the workman to make him labour. the wage, by means of which, he would have purchased a subsistence. The workmen never labour, except when some of those who have accumulated capitals, or in other words, the fruit of preceding labours, can profit from those capitals, by furnishing, on one hand, the raw material, on the other, a subsistence for the artisan. Labour cannot be carried on so as to produce any material fruit, any fruit capable of becoming wealth, without raw materials on which to operate; the workman cannot labour without food to support him; and, therefore, every kind of labour is impossible without a capital previously existing in objects of consumption, to furnish his materials and his wages; and, if the workman himself lay out these advances, it is because he combines for this little object, the two characters of capitalist and artisan. As the workman requires a capitalist, so the capitalist requires workmen; because his capital will be unproductive if it continue idle; and the revenue which he expects and has to live upon springs from the labour which he causes to be executed. Hence, whenever he is occupied in a productive enterprise, he employs all his capital in causing labour, and leaves no part of it in idleness. If he is a cloth-maker, and has devoted ten thousand pounds to his manufacture, he does not stop till his ten thousand pounds are done, and he no longer has new sums to employ in the operation. If it be then asked why he stops, he will answer, like the workman, that money is wanting, that money does not circulate. It is not, however, money which is then wanting any more than in the former case; it is consumption, or the consumer's revenue. On commencing his manufacture, the capitalist studied to adjust it to the demand; and he reckoned that as soon as his cloths should be ready, they would be purchased by consumers, whose money, the sign of their revenue, would replace his capital, and become the sign of subsistence to new workmen, to whom he would pay new wages. It is not money which the consumer is in want of, but revenue. Some have had inferior harvests this year; some have gained a smaller interest on their capitals, a smaller share on the annual re-production of the fruits of industry; others, who have no income but what arises from their labour, have not found employment; or else the whole three classes are not poorer than they