Volume V Part 6 (2/2)
Certainly no authority on earth. It is a matter of convention, dictated by the reciprocal conveniences of the parties, and indeed by their reciprocal necessities.--But if the farmer is excessively avaricious?--Why, so much the better: the more he desires to increase his gains, the more interested is he in the good condition of those upon whose labor his gains must princ.i.p.ally depend.
I shall be told by the zealots of the sect of regulation, that this may be true, and may be safely committed to the convention of the farmer and the laborer, when the latter is in the prime of his youth, and at the time of his health and vigor, and in ordinary times of abundance. But in calamitous seasons, under accidental illness, in declining life, and with the pressure of a numerous offspring, the future nourishers of the community, but the present drains and blood-suckers of those who produce them, what is to be done? When a man cannot live and maintain his family by the natural hire of his labor, ought it not to be raised by authority?
On this head I must be allowed to submit what my opinions have ever been, and somewhat at large.
And, first, I premise that labor is, as I have already intimated, a commodity, and, as such, an article of trade. If I am right in this notion, then labor must be subject to all the laws and principles of trade, and not to regulations foreign to them, and that may be totally inconsistent with those principles and those laws. When any commodity is carried to market, it is not the necessity of the vendor, but the necessity of the purchaser, that raises the price. The extreme want of the seller has rather (by the nature of things with which we shall in vain contend) the direct contrary operation. If the goods at market are beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise. The impossibility of the subsistence of a man who carries his labor to a market is totally beside the question, in this way of viewing it. The only question is, What is it worth to the buyer?
But if authority comes in and forces the buyer to a price, what is this in the case (say) of a farmer who buys the labor of ten or twelve laboring men, and three or four handicrafts,--what is it but to make an arbitrary division of his property among them?
The whole of his gains (I say it with the most certain conviction) never do amount anything like in value to what he pays to his laborers and artificers; so that a very small advance upon what _one_ man pays to _many_ may absorb the whole of what he possesses, and amount to an actual part.i.tion of all his substance among them. A perfect equality will, indeed, be produced,--that is to say, equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and, on the part of the part.i.tioners, a woful, helpless, and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all compulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above; they never raise what is below; and they depress high and low together beneath the level of what was originally the lowest.
If a commodity is raised by authority above what it will yield with a profit to the buyer, that commodity will be the less dealt in. If a second blundering interposition be used to correct the blunder of the first and an attempt is made to force the purchase of the commodity, (of labor, for instance,) the one of these two things must happen: either that the forced buyer is ruined, or the price of the product of the labor in that proportion is raised. Then the wheel turns round, and the evil complained of falls with aggravated weight on the complainant. The price of corn, which is the result of the expense of all the operations of husbandry taken together, and for some time continued, will rise on the laborer, considered as a consumer. The very best will be, that he remains where he was. But if the price of the corn should not compensate the price of labor, what is far more to be feared, the most serious evil, the very destruction of agriculture itself, is to be apprehended.
Nothing is such an enemy to accuracy of judgment as a coa.r.s.e discrimination, a want of such cla.s.sification and distribution as the subject admits of. Increase the rate of wages to the laborer, say the regulators,--as if labor was but one thing, and of one value. But this very broad, generic term, _labor_, admits, at least, of two or three specific descriptions: and these will suffice, at least, to let gentlemen discern a little the necessity of proceeding with caution in their coercive guidance of those whose existence depends upon the observance of still nicer distinctions and subdivisions than commonly they resort to in forming their judgments on this very enlarged part of economy.
The laborers in husbandry may be divided,--First, Into those who are able to perform the full work of a man,--that is, what can be done by a person from twenty-one years of age to fifty. I know no husbandry work (mowing hardly excepted) that is not equally within the power of all persons within those ages, the more advanced fully compensating by knack and habit what they lose in activity. Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man's labor and that of another, from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am quite sure, from my best observation, that any given five men will, in their total, afford a proportion of labor equal to any other five within the periods of life I have stated: that is, that among such five men there will be one possessing all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and the other three middling, and approximating to the first and the last. So that, in so small a platoon as that of even five, you will find the full complement of all that five men _can_ earn. Taking five and five throughout the kingdom, they are equal: therefore an error with regard to the equalization of their wages by those who employ five, as farmers do at the very least, cannot be considerable.
Secondly, Those who are able to work, but not the complete task of a day-laborer. This cla.s.s is infinitely diversified, but will aptly enough fall into princ.i.p.al divisions. _Men_, from the decline, which after fifty becomes every year more sensible, to the period of debility and decrepitude, and the maladies that precede a final dissolution. _Women_, whose employment on husbandry is but occasional, and who differ more in effective labor one from another than men do, on account of gestation, nursing, and domestic management, over and above the difference they have in common with men in advancing, in stationary, and in declining life. _Children_, who proceed on the reverse order, growing from less to greater utility, but with a still greater disproportion of nutriment to labor than is found in the second of those subdivisions: as is visible to those who will give themselves the trouble of examining into the interior economy of a poor-house.
This inferior cla.s.sification is introduced to show that laws prescribing or magistrates exercising a very stiff and often inapplicable rule, or a blind and rash discretion, never can provide the just proportions between earning and salary, on the one hand, and nutriment on the other: whereas interest, habit, and the tacit convention that arise from a thousand nameless circ.u.mstances produce a _tact_ that regulates without difficulty what laws and magistrates cannot regulate at all. The first cla.s.s of labor wants nothing to equalize it; it equalizes itself. The second and third are not capable of any equalization.
But what if the rate of hire to the laborer comes far short of his necessary subsistence, and the calamity of the time is so great as to threaten actual famine? Is the poor laborer to be abandoned to the flinty heart and griping hand of base self-interest, supported by the sword of law, especially when there is reason to suppose that the very avarice of farmers themselves has concurred with the errors of government to bring famine on the land?
In that case, my opinion is this: Whenever it happens that a man can claim nothing according to the rules of commerce and the principles of justice, he pa.s.ses out of that department, and comes within the jurisdiction of mercy. In that province the magistrate has nothing at all to do; his interference is a violation of the property which it is his office to protect. Without all doubt, charity to the poor is a direct and obligatory duty upon all Christians, next in order after the payment of debts, full as strong, and by Nature made infinitely more delightful to us Pufendorf, and other casuists, do not, I think, denominate it quite properly, when they call it a duty of imperfect obligation. But the manner, mode, time, choice of objects, and proportion are left to private discretion; and perhaps for that very reason it is performed with the greater satisfaction, because the discharge of it has more the appearance of freedom,--recommending us besides very specially to the Divine favor, as the exercise of a virtue most suitable to a being sensible of its own infirmity.
The cry of the people in cities and towns, though unfortunately (from a fear of their mult.i.tude and combination) the most regarded, ought, in _fact_, to be the _least_ attended to, upon this subject: for citizens are in a state of utter ignorance of the means by which they are to be fed, and they contribute little or nothing, except in an infinitely circuitous manner, to their own maintenance. They are truly _fruges consumere nati_. They are to be heard with great respect and attention upon matters within their province,--that is, on trades and manufactures; but on anything that relates to agriculture they are to be listened to with the same _reverence_ which we pay to the dogmas of other ignorant and presumptuous men.
If any one were to tell them that they were to give in an account of all the stock in their shops,--that attempts would be made to limit their profits, or raise the price of the laboring manufacturers upon them, or recommend to government, out of a capital from the public revenues, to set up a shop of the same commodities, in order to rival them, and keep, them to reasonable dealing,--they would very soon see the impudence, injustice, and oppression of such a course. They would not be mistaken: but they are of opinion that agriculture is to be subject to other laws, and to be governed by other principles.
A greater and more ruinous mistake cannot be fallen into than that the trades of agriculture and grazing can be conducted upon any other than the common principles of commerce: namely, that the producer should be permitted, and even expected, to look to all possible profit which without fraud or violence he can make; to turn plenty or scarcity to the best advantage he can; to keep back or to bring forward his commodities at his pleasure; to account to no one for his stock or for his gain. On any other terms he is the slave of the consumer: and that he should be so is of no benefit to the consumer. No slave was ever so beneficial to the master as a freeman that deals with him on an equal footing by convention, formed on the rules and principles of contending interests and compromised advantages. The consumer, if he were suffered, would in the end always be the dupe of his own tyranny and injustice. The landed gentleman is never to forget that the farmer is his representative.
It is a perilous thing to try experiments on the farmer. The farmer's capital (except in a few persons and in a very few places) is far more feeble than commonly is imagined. The trade is a very poor trade; it is subject to great risks and losses. The capital, such as it is, is turned but once in the year; in some branches it requires three years before the money is paid: I believe never less than three in the turnip and gra.s.s-land course, which is the prevalent course on the more or less fertile sandy and gravelly loams,--and these compose the soil in the south and southeast of England, the best adapted, and perhaps the only ones that are adapted, to the turnip husbandry.
It is very rare that the most prosperous farmer, counting the value of his quick and dead stock, the interest of the money he turns, together with his own wages as a bailiff or overseer, ever does make twelve or fifteen per centum by the year on his capital. I speak of the prosperous. In most of the parts of England which have fallen within my observation I have rarely known a farmer, who to his own trade has not added some other employment or traffic, that, after a course of the most unremitting parsimony and labor, (such for the greater part is theirs,) and persevering in his business for a long course of years, died worth more than paid his debts, leaving his posterity to continue in nearly the same equal conflict between industry and want, in which the last predecessor, and a long line of predecessors before him, lived and died.
Observe that I speak of the generality of farmers, who have not more than from one hundred and fifty to three or four hundred acres. There are few in this part of the country within the former or much beyond the latter extent. Unquestionably in other places there are much larger.
But I am convinced, whatever part of England be the theatre of his operations, a farmer who cultivates twelve hundred acres, which I consider as a large farm, though I know there are larger, cannot proceed with any degree of safety and effect with a smaller capital than ten thousand pounds, and that he cannot, in the ordinary course of culture, make more upon that great capital of ten thousand pounds than twelve hundred a year.
As to the weaker capitals, an easy judgment may be formed by what very small errors they may be farther attenuated, enervated, rendered unproductive, and perhaps totally destroyed.
This constant precariousness and ultimate moderate limits of a farmer's fortune, on the strongest capital, I press, not only on account of the hazardous speculations of the times, but because the excellent and most useful works of my friend, Mr. Arthur Young, tend to propagate that error (such I am very certain it is) of the largeness of a farmer's profits. It is not that his account of the produce does often greatly exceed, but he by no means makes the proper allowance for accidents and losses. I might enter into a convincing detail, if other more troublesome and more necessary details were not before me.
This proposed discretionary tax on labor militates with the recommendations of the Board of Agriculture: they recommend a general use of the drill culture. I agree with the Board, that, where the soil is not excessively heavy, or inc.u.mbered with large loose stones, (which, however, is the case with much otherwise good land,) that course is the best and most productive,--provided that the most accurate eye, the most vigilant superintendence, the most prompt activity, which has no such day as to-morrow in its calendar, the most steady foresight and predisposing order to have everybody and everything ready in its place, and prepared to take advantage of the fortunate, fugitive moment, in this coquetting climate of ours,--provided, I say, all these combine to speed the plough, I admit its superiority over the old and general methods. But under procrastinating, improvident, ordinary husbandmen, who may neglect or let slip the few opportunities of sweetening and purifying their ground with perpetually renovated toil and undissipated attention, nothing, when tried to any extent, can be worse or more dangerous: the farm may be ruined, instead of having the soil enriched and sweetened by it.
But the excellence of the method on a proper soil, and conducted by husbandmen, of whom there are few, being readily granted, how, and on what conditions, is this culture obtained? Why, by a very great increase of labor: by an augmentation of the third part, at least, of the hand-labor, to say nothing of the horses and machinery employed in ordinary tillage. Now every man must be sensible how little becoming the gravity of legislature it is to encourage a board which recommends to us, and upon very weighty reasons unquestionably, an enlargement of the capital we employ in the operations of the hand, and then to pa.s.s an act which taxes that manual labor, already at a very high rate,--thus compelling us to diminish the quant.i.ty of labor which in the vulgar course we actually employ.
What is true of the farmer is equally true of the middle-man,--whether the middle-man acts as factor, jobber, salesman, or speculator, in the markets of grain. These traders are to be left to their free course; and the more they make, and the richer they are, and the more largely they deal, the better both for the farmer and consumer, between whom they form a natural and most useful link of connection,--though by the machinations of the old evil counsellor, _Envy_, they are hated and maligned by both parties.
I hear that middle-men are accused of monopoly. Without question, the monopoly of authority is, in every instance and in every degree, an evil; but the monopoly of capital is the contrary. It is a great benefit, and a benefit particularly to the poor. A tradesman who has but a hundred pound capital, which (say) he can turn but once a year, cannot live upon a _profit_ of ten per cent, because he cannot live upon ten pounds a year; but a man of ten thousand pounds capital can live and thrive upon five per cent profit in the year, because he has five hundred pounds a year. The same proportion holds in turning it twice or thrice. These principles are plain and simple; and it is not our ignorance, so much as the levity, the envy, and the malignity of our nature, that hinders us from perceiving and yielding to them: but we are not to suffer our vices to usurp the place of our judgment.
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