The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States/Section VIII
SECTION VIII.
THE CAUSE OF THE SCARCITY OF THE NECESSARIES OF LIFE.
Before I enter on the causes of the scarcity of the necessaries of life in general, I shall premise a few words relating particularly to the great scarcity that lately prevailed, for two or three seasons, in a great part of Europe. Many people were of opinion, that the real scarcity of provisions was not proportionable to the high price they bore, but that this was occasioned by artificial causes, and several were assigned of that kind. The wealth of great farmers, and the assistance of bankers given to lesser ones, have, in some people's opinions, enabled both to keep their corn, and such other things as their farms produce, from market; and by these means to raise the price of them. Jobbers, regraters, and millers, are charged with occasioning the same effect. Not to observe that such people are not new, and have subsisted a long time without such an effect, to all these supposed causes, and such as these, one common and short answer may be given: That as the price was near four times the usual one, the poor could not, with their earnings, buy more than a third or fourth part of what they used to buy when it was lower; consequently they must consume less. Therefore, if the quantity of corn in the country was not small in proportion to this diminished consumption, there would be, towards harvest, a great deal of corn remaining in the hands of the farmers, which the farmers would, if they considered their own interest, then bring to market in greater quantities than they had done before; for they must suppose that, after harvest, the price would fall, and, consequently, that they should be great losers. But, if they had brought it to market in abundance at the latter end of the summer, the price must have fallen; or, if they had not brought it to market in that manner, there must have been a great deal of old corn in their hands after the harvest; which, if you suppose them to have been so unwise as to suffer, still this must have appeared since. Whatever doubt, therefore, there might have been in the beginning of the summer,[1] with respect to the cause of the high price, there can be none now; time having, on this occasion, as in most others, discovered the truth, that the dearness was owing to real scarcity.
What, then, is the cause of this great evil so often recurring; and in every season, when the corn crops are not abundant, so afflicting to the great majority of the people of almost all civilised states?
The scarcity or abundance of the produce of the earth are the effects of causes both physical and moral.
The physical cause of the production of the necessaries of life is the property of the earth to produce them, or, in other words, the natural fertility of the soil.The effects of this power of the earth, though uniformly acting, or disposed to act, are increased or diminished by two causes, to wit, the greater or less quantity of the labour of man bestowed on it, and the favourableness or unfavourableness of seasons.
The quantity of man's labour applied being much the same one year as another, we might suppose that the quantity of the produce of the land would be uniform, and differing but little in different years.
The difference in the quantity of the produce of the necessaries of life in one year, from that of other years, must depend on the difference of seasons.
But whether or not the general produce, i. e. that of a number of years taken together, of the necessaries of life, be proportioned to the number of people inhabiting a country, depends on the quantity of land they occupy, and on the number of hands employed in cultivating it.
That the quantity of land inhabited by a people is too little, I believe does not happen in any instance; but that too few hands are employed, in almost all instances, in civilised countries.
The natural or spontaneous produce of the soil, or the produce of the soil unassisted, however fertile, will not be sufficient for the sustenance of nearly the number of people that inhabit any civilised part of the world. In those parts of America which are not inhabited by Europeans, the spontaneous produce of the earth, with very little assistance from cultivation, is sufficient for the whole support of the inhabitants; but then these are very few in number, in comparison to the extent of the country they occupy. To support great numbers, the land must be cultivated; and the quantity of the produce of it will be, the degree of fertility of it being given, as the number of hands or the quantity of labour bestowed on it. If reduced to a state of pasture, it will produce more food for man than if covered with trees, or in the state of a forest. Again, this produce will be inferior to that of arable lands; and this again to that of land managed as in a garden. In these different modes of cultivation, namely, pasture, agriculture, and horticulture, the produce rises in quantity in the order in which they are here set down, or as the number of hands employed. This, therefore, being the case, it is obvious, that to produce plenty it requires, besides fertile land and good seasons, the employing a sufficient number of hands on the land. It will be shown hereafter, that not only in years of scanty crops, but that in all years, the produce of the land is insufficient for the inhabitants, in all, or nearly all, the civilised countries; and that, therefore, when a scarce year happens, they experience great distress. We have now, I think, ascertained the real cause of scarcity, to wit, that a sufficient number of hands are not employed on the land. We are next to inquire, what is the cause of this want of hands in agriculture? This cause must be of a moral nature.
For the present purpose, the people which compose a civilised nation may be divided into three sorts: the first, consisting of those who work in cultivating the land; the second, of those who are employed in trade and manufactures; the third, of those who do nothing. The first sort, it is obvious, furnishes the provisions for itself and the other two; and the whole will be furnished, either scantily or plentifully, as the first sort bears the greater or less proportion to it.[2] Notwithstanding this is sufficiently evident, and that bread can only be supplied by the husbandman, and that plenty of it can only be supplied by a sufficient number of them, yet it is trade and manufactures that are said to give bread to people, and to be what ought chiefly to be relied on for their sustenance; but this can only be true when the articles got up by them are sent to other countries, and the produce of them there laid out in the necessaries of life, and brought back for the support of those employed in getting them up. It is known that this is never the case, except in great scarcities, when it always proves very inadequate; no importation having exceeded one-sixth part of the consumption.
The manufactures, in which the great majority of the labouring hands in many nations are employed, are of various kinds: they may be divided, however, into two, viz., such as are of the grosser kind, and are of prime and general use in life; and such others as are more refined and in use only by the rich, are not of prime necessity, but may be dispensed with. It seems natural to suppose that these latter should have only such a number of hands in them as could well be spared, and that a sufficient number should be reserved to produce an abundance of such things as are more useful, and of greater necessity. This, notwithstanding, is not the fact, as appears by the frequent recurrence of great scarcity in less abundant seasons, and its prevailing, in some degree, as will be shown hereafter, in all seasons. We must, therefore, inquire into the cause that prevents the proper number of hands from being employed in raising that which is most necessary to the existence of all the people, and directs them to the production of such things as are enjoyed only by the few, and by them may be easily dispensed with. This cause, whatever it be, must be a very powerful one, since it turns things from the course to which they are naturally and strongly inclined.
The cause that can divert the labour of the people of most civilised countries from such occupations as have such an evident and direct tendency to produce for themselves the necessaries and comforts of life, and direct it to others which have not that obvious tendency, may be threefold: first, optional; second, delusive; third, compulsive.
As to the first, it has been remarked that nations, in their progress from a savage to a civilised state, have shown a great reluctance to quit the employment of their former state, namely, that of hunting, which is probably natural to man, he being of the carnivorous species of animals, and, consequently, of that of prey; and hunting is nothing but the mode or act of taking prey. The life of hunters consists in reverses either of violent exercise or total inaction, neither of which fits them for the confinement and long-continued labour of manufactures, which, therefore, they have always shown an aversion from; and it is a long time, even where they have the advantages of it before their eyes, in the practice of neighbouring Europeans, before they confine themselves to the regular and laborious occupations of agriculture. During many of the first ages, even of the most polished states, the business of agriculture was left to the slaves; the freemen enjoying their liberty in the sports of the field, or in the camp. This was the case in Sparta, where the Helots performed the business of tilling the earth. And after man had arrived, as in Rome, at a state of civilisation, in which the labour of the field was become tolerable, and held honourable, the arts and manufactures were thrown upon the slaves, and practised by them only: and it is not to be wondered at, since the works of manufactures, though so many and various in trading nations, are all of them, as has been observed before, carried on within doors, in confined rooms, shutting out the pleasant objects of nature, frequently within frames like cages, in offensive atmospheres generally rendered more nauseous by the effluvia of the subject worked on, always by that of the bodies and filthy clothes of the workmen; their postures bent, doubled, and every way distorted. Add to this, the tendency of them, so injurious and destructive to their health and lives. It seems, therefore, that it was never through choice that manufactures were entered into by any people; it must, therefore, be from one or both of the other causes, viz., delusion or compulsion.By the laws of most civilised nations, no man is compelled to work at any particular trade or manufacture; but at some trade or other, every one who has no property must work; and as the employment of the husbandman is limited to such a number as the capital of farmers enables them to employ, all above that number must betake themselves to other kinds of employments; and from circumstances attending each person, that person is determined to such or such a trade, which it is next to impossible for him to avoid. A tailor more easily brings up his son to be a tailor than he can to be a mason. A fisherman more easily makes his son a fisherman or a sailor, than of any other trade. Thus, with regard to the father, it was hardly optional; but, with regard to the son, altogether out of his power to make any choice in the matter.
If a poor man is employed by a master, and is paid by him the price of his hire, no injury is supposed to be done; on the contrary, it is thought that the finding employment for the labourer is beneficial to the individual as well as the public. But this is true only in a very limited sense. To be of service to the public, and indeed to the labourer, the product of the labour ought to be of such a kind as to be useful, and to consist of something that contributes to supply the wants of mankind. If a man, for instance, is employed in removing a heap of stones from one place to another, and from thence back again, and so repeatedly; if he is paid for so doing, where is the harm? it is said. The harm would be evident if a greater number were employed in that way; or, if the whole of the people were so for some time, we should then be destitute of the necessaries of life. Hence, notwithstanding the price of hire is paid, not only the public, but that individual labourer, is injured, by being deprived of that share of the product of his labour which, if the labour had been properly directed, would have flowed from it. Hence the delusion is evident. It will, moreover, be afterwards proved that he does not receive sufficient for his hire.
But it will be found that the principal cause which draws off the labour from the cultivation of the land, is the last mentioned, viz., compulsion.
By the unequal distribution of wealth in most civilised states, the people are divided into the two orders before mentioned, namely, the rich and the poor. In the hands of the former are lodged those things of every kind which compose what is generally called wealth. In one class of the rich all the lands are vested; in another, the cattle and the corn raised on them; in a third, the raw materials, tools, machinery, &c.; in a fourth, the goods now manufactured and stored for sale; and so on. In those, or some other class of the rich, all those things are collected, and by the laws firmly secured to them, which the poor man stands in need of, and are necessary to the support of his existence. The persons in the possession of these things hold them out to the poor labourer, saying, "If you will labour for me in such and such a way, I will give you out of those things such as you stand in need of: but unless you will do those things which I require of you, you shall have none of them." Hence there is an absolute necessity, under the penalty, the heaviest of all penalties, namely, the deprivation of such things as are necessary to his and his family's existence, for his submitting to do the things thus imposed on him to do.
And as the quantity of the necessaries of life, that are or can be consumed by the rich, are limited, and in the purchasing of which a small part only of their wealth can be expended, the surplus they are naturally inclined to lay out in procuring the conveniences, the elegancies, and luxuries of life. These are the produce of the more refined manufactures of different kinds; and for these they are inclined to give a greater price, considering their wealth would be of little use to them if it only procured the common necessaries: hence a much greater proportion of their incomes is expended on those articles; of course a greater proportion of the labouring hands are forced to apply their industry in the various fine manufactures, in which only they can get employ. By these means, hands are drawn off powerfully from agriculture and such coarse manufactures as produce the things that they themselves make use of.
From the foregoing statements, it seems, the following conclusions may be drawn:—
1st. That the scarcity which lately and frequently has prevailed, was real.
2nd. That the general cause of scarcity is, that too small a number of hands is employed in agriculture.
3rd. That the cause why so few are so employed is, that too many are thrown into the manufactures.
4th. That the cause why so many are thus forced into the manufactures is the wealth of the rich.
As it appears that it is the wealth of certain individuals that is the cause of the taking off the labourers from agriculture, by which the scarcity of the necessaries of life is occasioned, and of driving them into the manufactures, of course, it must be the cause, not only of the scarcity alleged, but also of all the hardships suffered by the manufacturers and the poor in general: it seems, therefore, to be the cause of the whole evil. This being the case, the nature and effects of wealth ought to be inquired into; which we now proceed to do.