F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 173 
doubt could be expeditiously disposed of by a piece of abstract argument, 
showing that, even in the improbable contingency that ‘a few thousand 
workmen’ lost their jobs through free imports, no harm would be done. 
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For since imports must be paid for by exports, an amount of work must be 
called for to create them, ‘equivalent’ to that dispensed with. And this 
doctrine is asserted in its starkest form. There is no suggestion that the 
_ gain will be to the men already in those other trades which will now have 
larger exports, so that the nation would not suffer as a whole ; or that the 
labourers now left idle will ultimately get absorbed. No; nobody is going 
to suffer, even for a short time. ‘Suppose that, under a system of free 
trade, we imported a considerable portion of silks and linens now wholly 
manufactured at home. . . . It is obvious that such of our artificers as had 
previously been engaged in our silk and linen manufactures, and were thrown 
ne a . en 
out of these employments, could immediately obtain employment in the 
manufacture of the products which must be exported as equivalents for 
the foreign silks and linens.’ * 
It was not for another half-century that an English economist who 
could get the ear of the public began seriously to consider how far the 
transferability of labour and the transferability of capital—which he justly 
described as ‘ the postulates of’ the then current ‘ Political Economy ’— 
were in fact true.*° Anyone who looks at his Hconomie Studies ** will 
as 
a 
- = ee es a ret a aes 
_ observe that Bagehot gives much more attention to capital than to labour ; 
and that, as to labour, he occupies most of his space in demonstrating that 
_ in earlier times and to-day in primitive countries labour is not transferable. 
But, for such a country as England is now, he thinks ‘no assumption can 
be better founded.’ Labour does not flow so quickly from pursuit to 
pursuit as capital does: ‘ but still it moves very quickly.’ There are, he 
erants, even at present in England, many limitations to mobility. “ There 
is a “friction,” but still it is only a “‘ friction’ ; its resisting power is mostly 
defeated, and at a first view need not be regarded.’ 
Like so much else in actual industrial life the question of the extent of 
the mobility of labour has been subjected to very little quantitative in- 
vestigation. But all who have come into close contact with the industrial 
population of the older countries will agree with me in feeling that ‘friction’ 
84 In the edition of 1843 (p. 151) for immediately is substituted in future. But it 
is still the discharged artificers themselves who find the equivalent occupation. 
85 Senior, as long before as 1835, had pointed out, with remarkable insight, that 
the mobility of labour was being lessened rather than increased by the industrial 
revolution. ‘The difficulty with which labour is transferred from one occupation to 
another is the principal evil of a high state of civilisation. It exists in proportion to the 
division of labour.’ As to capital, he anticipated recent writers by pointing out that 
“those costly instruments which form the principal part of fixed capital can scarcely 
ever be applied to any but their original purposes. They are employed, therefore, 
in the same way, long after they have ceased to afford average profit on the expense 
of their construction, because a still greater loss would be incurred by attempting to 
use them in a different manner.’—Political Economy (in the series Encyclopedia 
Metropolitana), reprint of 1854, p. 217. 
The disregard by subsequent writers of what one might suppose suggestive observa- 
tions is curious when contrasted with the readiness with which Senior’s Abstinence 
view of Interest and his sharpening of the Wage Fund idea were accepted. It was, 
perhaps, due to the failure of Senior to make any large theoretic use of the observations. 
And ideas which can be fitted into a prevalent general body of thought are more likely 
to be assimilated than disturbing ones. 
6 1880, p. 21, seq. 
