TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 951 



Inadequate expansion, of Britisli resources. The one tangible effect of the warning 

 Las been a somewhat speedier reduction of the National Debt.' The lessened 

 growth of population makes that reduction less marked, but it gives ns at least a 

 slightlj' better prospect of moderating our own inroads on our coal and iron, while 

 the United States, our principal rivals, will soon need all the warnings that our 

 national candour has so freely bestowed on ourselves. It is not a year (Dec. 14, 

 1897) since Mr. Leonard Courtney directed the thoughts of the Statistical Society 

 to the prophecies of Jevons. He considered them to have been fully justified by 

 the events of the last thirty years. Even so, he did not recommend any great 

 self-denying ordinance, any curtailment of consumption on a great scale for the 

 sake of future generations. We may by-and-by come to hold that the stationary 

 state is better than the progressive ; but every generation believes that for itself 

 the progressive is the better, and we may be sure every generation will use its 

 materials when they are there. It will probably be long before we are all con- 

 vinced that a State Coal Department is as needful here as a Department of Woods 

 find Forests in India. Nothing but the logic of compulsion will persuade large 

 bodies of men to suffer the hardships of a scarcity ; they are very unlikely to 

 deny themselves, when the rewards of the sacrifice are not for them, it may be 

 not for theirs, not quite certain, and quite certainly remote. 



Seventy years before Jevons first wrote on the scarcity of coal, Edmund 

 Burke wrote on a scarcity which, at least till the present year, may have seemed 

 to us past and not future — a scarcity of corn. We have been reminded in the 

 earlier months of this year (1898) that such a scarcity is not entirely laid behind 

 us yet, and we may aptly, in Bristol in 1898, call to memory Burke's ' Thoughts 

 and Details on Scarcity, originally presented to the Right Honourable William 

 Pitt in the month of November, 1795,' near the close of Burke's life." Burke repre- 

 sented Bristol for si.x years (1774-80), suffered for Bristol because of America, 

 and suffered at Bristol because of Ireland. In this pamphlet Burke boldly stated 

 a new economic policy, or at least an economic policy which gained quite a new 

 importance when announced, as it was, by a statesman of the first rank addressing 

 another of as nearly equal rank as a man of great talent can be to a man of genius. 

 It is rare for economists to exercise a direct influence on politics. In our own 

 time we have witnessed this phenomenon, perhaps, only in Holland and in Austria. 

 In our own country few of our economists (Jevons being one of the few) have 

 had even as much power over the House of Commons as Bagehot over the Money 

 Market. But Burke, in this pamphlet, was economist and statesman in one. 



The result is curious. Neither Adam Smith, nor Malthus, nor Ricardo ever 

 set down so roundly what is sometimes called the dogmatism of the older 

 economists as Burke has set it down in this pamphlet. Burke was a great part 

 of the political life of his time, and, like Gladstone and Bismarck, he remained so 

 even when he seemed to have quitted the field of action. The popular idea of the 

 dogmatism of the older economists may have been shaped to a large extent by the 

 words of those of their followers who were statesmen, and of these Burke was 

 the chief. 



Burke is writing against the proposal to regulate wages by law and adapt them 

 to the price of food. He opposes all interference with farmers and corn-dealers. 

 He is against public granaries. He rises finely above prejudice when, after 

 saying that the poor ai-e only poor because they are numerous, he adds that 

 the rich are dependent on them, rather than they on the rich. ' The rich,' he 

 says, 'are trustees for those who labour, and the hoards of the rich are the 

 banking-houses of the poor.' We agree less when he goes on to tell us that, 

 since 'labour is a commodity, an article of trade,' the interest of the buyer and the 

 seller thereof is, as in other contracts, one and the same so soon as the contract is 

 concluded, every contract being necessarily a compromise in which both parties 

 sacrifice and both gain. Thus the interest of the farmer and the labourer is not 

 only one by the special nature of the case ; it is one and the same by the laws of 



• See Letters and JournaU of Jevons, 1886, p. 224, &;c. 



* Reprinted by the Charity Organisation Society, July, 1893. 



