*40 



POLITICAL ECONOMY. 



Political of its precious metals. He next proceeds to survey the 

 Kconomy. different classes of men, all of whom, occupied in gain- 

 " ~V~'' i n g money and causing wealth to circulate, even when 

 acquiring it for themselves, are not, according to him, 

 occupied with any thing besides exchange. He en- 

 deavours to distinguish the classes possessed of a creative 

 power ; it is amongst them that wealth must originate, 

 all the transactions of commerce appearing to be no- 

 thing else but the transmission of that wealth from 

 hand to hand. 



The merchant who carries the productions of both 

 hemispheres from one continent to the other, and on 

 returning to the ports of his own country, obtains, at 

 the sale of his cargo, a sum double of that with which 

 he began his voyage, does not, after all, appear in the 

 eyes of Quesnay, to have performed any thing but an 

 exchange. If, in the colonies, he has sold the manu- 

 factures of Europe at a higher price than they cost him, 

 the reason is, they were in fact worth more. Together 

 with their prime cost, he must also be reimbursed for 

 the value of his time, his cares, his subsistence, and that 

 of his sailors and agents during the voyage. He has a 

 like reimbursement to claim on the cotton or sugar 

 which he brings back to Europe. If, at the end of his 

 voyage, any profit remains, it is the fruit of his econo- 

 my and good management. The wages, allowed him 

 by consumers for the trouble he has undergone, are 

 greater than the sum he had expended. It is the na- 

 ture of wages, however, to be entirely expended by 

 him who earns them ; and had this merchant done so, 

 he would have added nothing to the national wealth, 

 by the labour of his whole life ; because the produce 

 which he brings back does nothing more than exactly 

 replace the value of the produce given for it, added to 

 his own wages, and the wages of all that were engaged 

 .with him in the business. 



Agreeably to this reasoning, the French philosopher 

 gave to transport trade the name of economical trade, 

 which it still retains. This species of commerce, he 

 asserts, is not destined to provide for the wants of the 

 nation that engages in it, but merely to serve the 

 convenience of two foreign nations. The carrying na- 

 tion acquires from it no other profit than wages, and 

 cannot grow rich except by the saving which economy 

 enables it to make on them. 



Quesnay, next adverting to manufactures, con- 

 siders them an exchange, just the same as commerce; 

 but instead of having in view two present values, their 

 primitive contract is, in his opinion, an exchange of 

 the present against the future. The merchandise pro- 

 duced by the labour of the artisan is but the equiva- 

 lent of his accumulated wages. During his labour, he 

 had consumed the fruits of the earth, and the work pro- 

 duced by him is nothing but their value. 



The economist at length directs his attention to agri- 

 culture. The labourer appears to him to be in the 

 same condition as the merchant and the artisan. Like 

 the latter, he makes with the earth an exchange of the 

 present against the future. The crops produced by 

 him represent the accumulated value of his labour; 

 they pay his hire, to which he has the same right as 

 the artisan to his wages, or the merchant to his profit. 

 But when this hire has been deducted, there remains a 

 net revenue, which was not to be found in manufac- 

 tures and commerce ; it is what the labourer pays the 

 proprietor for the use of his land. This revenue, 

 Quesnay thinks, is of a nature quite different from any 

 other. It is not wages ; it is not the result of an 

 exchange ; it is the price of the earth's spontaneous la- 



3 



bour, the fruit of nature's beneficence; arid since it Political 

 alone does not represent pre-existent wealth, it alone Economy, 

 must be the source of every kind of wealth. Tracing 

 the value of all other commodities, under all its trans- 

 formations, Quesnay still discovers its first origin in 

 the fruits of the earth. The labours of the husband- 

 man, of the artisan, of the merchant, consume those 

 fruits in the shape of wages, and produce them under 

 new forms. The proprietor alone receives them at their 

 source from the hands of nature herself, and by means 

 of them, is enabled to pay the wages of all his coun- 

 trymen, who labour only for him. 



This ingenious system totally supplanted that of the 

 merchants. The economists denied the existence of 

 that commercial balance to which their antagonists at- 

 tached so much importance ; they asserted the impossi- 

 bility of that accumulation of gold and silver which 

 the others expected from it; throughout the nation, 

 they could see only proprietors of land, the sole dis- 

 pensers of the national fortune; productive workmen, 

 or labourers producing the revenue of the former ; and 

 a hired class, in which they ranked merchants also 

 denying to them, as to the artisans, the faculty of pro- 

 ducing any thing. 



The plans, which these two sects recommended to 

 governments, differed not less than their principles. 

 While the mercantilists wished authority to interfere 

 in every thing, the economists incessantly repeated,, 

 laissezjaire ct laissez passer, (let every man do as he 

 pleases, and every thing take its course;) for as the 

 public interest consists in the union of all individual 

 interests, individual interest will guide each man more 

 surely to the public interest than any government can 

 do. 



An excessive ferment was excited in France by 

 the system of the economists. The government of that 

 nation allowed the people to talk about public affairs, 

 but not to understand them. The discussion of Ques- 

 nay 's theory was sufficiently unshackled ; but none of 

 the facts or documents in the hands of the administra- 

 tion were presented to the public eye. In the system 

 of the French economists, it is easy to discern the ef- 

 fects produced by this mixture of ingenious theory and 

 involuntary ignorance. It seduced the people, because 

 they were now for the first time occupied with their 

 own public affairs. But, during these discussions, a 

 free nation, possessed of the right to examine its own 

 public affairs, was producing a system not less ingeni- 

 ous, and much better supported by fact and observa- 

 tion ; a system which, after a short struggle, at length 

 cast its predecessors into the shade ; for truth always 

 triumphs, in the end, over dreams however brilliant. 



Adam Smith, author of this third system, which re>- 

 presents labour as the sole origin of wealth, and econo- 

 my as the sole means of accumulating it, has, in one 

 sense, carried the science of political economy to per- 

 fection at a single step. Experience, no doubt, has 

 disclosed new truths to us ; the experience of late yearSj 

 in particular, has forced us to make sad discoveries ; 

 but, in completing the system of Smith, that expe- 

 rience has also confirmed it. Of the various succeed- 

 ing authors, no one has sought any other theory. Some 

 have applied what he advanced to the administra- 

 tion of different countries ; others have confirmed it by 

 new experiments and new observations ; some have 

 expanded it by developments, which flow from the 

 principles laid down by him ; some have even here arid 

 there detected errors in his work ; but it has been by 

 following out the truths which he taught, and rectify- 



