Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 396 October 1848

POLITICAL ECONOMY, BY J. S. MILL. 4

In the old feud between the man of experience and the man of theory, it sometimes happens that the former obtains a triumph by the mere activity of the latter. Cases have been known where the theorist, in the clarifying and perfecting his own theory, has argued himself round to those very truths which his empirical antagonist had held to with a firm though less reasoning faith. He stood to his post; the stream of knowledge seemed to be flowing past him, and those who floated on it laughed at his stationary figure as they left him behind. Nevertheless he stood still; and by-and-by this meandering stream, with the busy crew that navigated it, after many a turn and many a curve, have returned to the very spot where he had made his obstinate halt.

This has been illustrated, and we venture to say will be illustrated still further, in the progress of the science of political economy. The man of experience has been taunted for his obstinacy and blindness in adhering to something which he called common sense and matter of fact; and behold! the scientific economist, in the course of his own theorising, is returning to those very positions from which he has been endeavouring to drive his opponent. The present work of Mr J. S. Mill, the latest and most complete exposition of the most advanced doctrines of the political economists, manifests, on more than one occasion, this retrograde progress, – demolishing, on the ground of still more scientific principles – the value of which time, however, must test – those arguments by which his scientific predecessors had attempted to mislead the man of experience or of empirical knowledge.

When, moreover, we consider, that the errors of the political economist are not allowed to remain mere errors of theory, but are pushed forward into practice, thrust immediately into the vital interests of the community, we must admit that never was the man of experience and common sense more fully justified in holding back and looking long before he yielded assent to his new teachers. Stranger paradoxes were never broached than some that have lived their day in this science; and paradoxes as they were, they claimed immediately their share of influence in our legislative measures. A learned professor, a luminary of the science, demonstrated that absenteeism could have nothing whatever to do with the poverty of Ireland. So the Greek sophist demonstrated that Achilles could never catch the tortoise. But the Greek was the more reasonable of the two: he required of no one to stake his fortune on the issue of the race. The professor of political economy not only teaches his sophism – he would have us back his tortoise.

Although it has been our irksome task to oppose the application to practice of half-formed theories, ill made up, and most dangerously incomplete, yet we surely need not say that we take a genuine interest in the approximation to a sound and trustworthy state of the science of political economy. That, notwithstanding its obliquities, the new science has rendered a substantial service to mankind, and is calculated, when thoroughly understood, to render still greater service – that it embraces topics of the widest and most permanent interest, and that intellects of the highest order have been worthily occupied in their investigation – this, let no strain of observation in which from time to time we have indulged, be thought to deny or controvert. To explain the complicate machinery of a modern commercial state, is assuredly one of the most useful tasks, and by no means the most easy, to which a reflective mind could address itself. When Adam Smith, leaving the arena of metaphysical inquiry, in which he had honourably distinguished himself, turned his analytic powers to the examination of the common-place yet intricate affairs of that commercial community in which he lived, he acted in the same enlightened spirit which led Bacon to demand of philosophy, that she should leave listening to the echoes of the school-room, and walk abroad into nature, amongst things and realities. The author of The Wealth of Nations, like him of the Novum Organum, struck out a new path of wisely utilitarian thinking. If the one led philosophy into the real world of nature and her daily phenomena, the other conducted her into a world still more novel to her footsteps – the world of commerce, of buying and selling, of manufacture and exchange. It may, indeed, be said of both these men, that in their leading and most valuable tenets, they were but announcing the claims of common sense; and that, in doing this, they had from time to time, and in utterances more or less distinct, been anticipated by others. But the cause of common sense is, after all, the very last which obtains a fair and potent advocacy; and the philosophy of one age is always destined, if it be true, to become the common sense of succeeding ages; and it detracts very little from the merit of an eminent writer who has been the means of impressing any great truth upon the minds of men, either at home or abroad, that others had obtained a view of it also, and given to it an imperfect and less effective enunciation. Let due honour, therefore, be paid to our countryman Adam Smith, the founder, on this side of the Channel at least, of the science of political economy – honour to him who turned a most keen intellect, sharpened by those metaphysical studies for which his fragmentary Essays, as well as and still more than his Theory of Moral Sentiments, prove him to have been eminently qualified – turned it from these captivating subtleties to inquiries into the causes, actually in operation, of the prosperity of a commercial people. He left these regions of mazy labyrinthine thought, which, if not as beautiful as the enchanted gardens in which Tasso imprisoned his knight, are, to a certain order of spirits, quite as ensnaring, to look into the mystery of bills of exchange, of systems of banking, customs, and the currency. Be it admitted at once, and ungrudgingly, that Adam Smith and some of his successors have done a substantial service in assisting to explain the machinery of society – the organisation, so to speak, of a commercial body. Until this is done, and done thoroughly, no proposed measure of legislation, and no course of conduct voluntarily adopted by the people, can be seen in all its bearings; the true causes of the most immediate and pressing evils can never be certainly known, and, of course, the efficient remedies can never be applied. Our main quarrel – though we have many – with the political economists is on this ground – that, having constructed a theory explanatory of the wealth of nations, they have wished to enforce this upon our legislature, as if it had embraced all the causes which conspire to the wellbeing of nations; as if wealth and wellbeing were synonymous. Having determined the state of things best fitted to procure, in general, the greatest aggregate amount of riches, they have proceeded to deal with a people as if it were a corporate body, whose sole object was to increase the total amount of its possessions. They have overlooked the equally vital questions concerning the distribution of these possessions, and of the various employments of mankind. Full of their leading idea, and accustomed to abstractions and generalities, they forget the individual, and appear to treat their subject as if the aggregate wealth of a community were to be enjoyed in some aggregate manner, and a sum-total of possessions would represent the comforts and enjoyments of its several members. To know what measures tend to increase the national wealth is undoubtedly of great importance, but it is not all; the theory of riches, or of commerce, is not the theory of society.

As political economy arose with a metaphysician, and has been prosecuted by men of the same abstract turn of mind, it very soon aspired to the philosophical character of a science. It laid down its laws. But it has not always been seen that the harmonious and systematic form it has been able to assume was owing to an arbitrary division of social topics, which in their nature, and in their operation on human welfare, are inextricably combined. They laid down laws, which could only be considered such by obstinately refusing to look beyond a certain number of isolated facts; and they persisted in governing mankind according to laws obtained by this imperfect generalisation.

With regard to the main doctrine of the political economists, that of free-trade – their advocacy of unfettered industry, whether working for the home or foreign market – one sees plainly that there is a truth here. Looking at the matter abstractedly from other considerations, what doctrine could be more reasonable or more benign than that which instructs the separate communities of mankind to throw aside all commercial jealousies, all unnecessary heartburnings – to throw down their barriers, their custom-houses, their preventive stations – to let the commerce and industry of the world be free, so that the peace of the world, as well as the wealth of nations, would be secured and advanced? What better doctrine could be taught than this? Did not Fénélon, mildest and best of archbishops, reasoning from the dictates of his own Christian conscience, arrive at the same conclusion as the philosophical economist? What better, we repeat, could be taught than a doctrine which tends to make all nations as one people, and the most wealthy people possible? But hold a while. Take the microscope, and deign to look somewhat closer at the little interests of the many little men that constitute a nation. Condescend to inquire, before you change the currents of wealth and industry, (though to increase both,) into what hands the wealth is to flow, and what the class of labourers you diminish or multiply. Industry free! Good. But is the capitalist to be permitted, at all times, to gather round him and his machinery what multitudes of workmen he pleases – workmen who are to breed up families dependent for their subsistence on the success of some gigantic and hazardous enterprise? Is he to be allowed, under all circumstances, to do this, and give the state no guarantee for the lives of these men and women and children, but what it obtains from his perhaps too sanguine calculations of his own profit and loss? Is it any consolation that he bankrupts himself in ruining others, and adding immensely to a pauper population? Commerce free! Good. It will increase your imports, and multiply by an advantageous exchange the products of your industry. But what if your measure to promote this freedom of commerce foster a mode of industry at home essentially of a precarious nature, and attended with fearful political and social dangers, at the expense of other modes of industry of a more permanent, stable, peaceful character – must nothing still be heard of but free commerce? Must the utmost amount of products, at all hazard, be obtained, whatever the mode of industry that earn it, or the fate of those called into existence by the overgrown manufacture you encourage? Is it no matter how won, or who enjoys? Is the only question that the wealth be there? What if England, by carrying out, without pause or exception, the doctrine of free-trade, should aggravate the most alarming symptoms of her present social condition – must this law of the political economist be still, with unmitigated strictness, urged upon her? She pleads for exception, for delay; but the political economist will not see the grounds of her plea – will not recognise her reasons for exception: full of his partial science, which has been made to occupy too large a portion of his field of vision, he cannot see them.

England, by a series of well-known mechanical inventions, extended in a surprising manner her manufacture of cotton, and with it her foreign commerce in this article. It is unnecessary to repeat figures that we have given before, or which may be found in any statistical tables. Enough that her operations here have been on a quite gigantic scale. Recollect that this is the channel into which must run the industry and capital which your measures of free-trade may drive from their old accustomed course. Look for a moment at the nature of this species of industry, and ask whether it would be wise to foster and augment it at the expense of other more ordinary and less precarious modes of earning a subsistence. An enormous population is brought together, educated, so far as their industrial habits are concerned, in no independent labour, but taught merely to perform a part in the great machinery of a cotton-mill, themselves a part of that machinery, and trusting, they and their families, for their necessary bread, to the successful sale of the great stock of goods, the annual amount of which they are annually increasing. Although the home market may absorb the greatest portion of these goods, yet the foreign market takes so considerable a share, that any derangement of the external commerce throws a large number of this densely-congregated multitude out of employment. Is there nothing peculiarly hazardous in this condition of things? Granted that nothing can, or ought to be done to restrain the enterprising capitalist from speculating too freely with the lives of men, is it a state of things to be aggravated? Now, at this juncture comes the apostle of free-trade, and demands (for illustration's sake) that French boots and shoes be admitted duty-free. He employs the well-known, and, to its own legitimate extent, unanswerable argument of the political economist. He tells us that, by so doing, we shall purchase better and cheaper boots and shoes, and sell more of our cotton; that, in short, by manufacturing more cotton goods, in which we marvellously excel, we shall procure better boots and shoes than by the old process of making them ourselves. We are evidently the gainers. Let us see the gain. The gentleman pays something less for his shoes, and is somewhat more luxuriously shod. The owner of the cotton-mill, too, finds that trade is looking up. To balance this, we have so many shoemakers driven from their employment – the very steady one of making shoes for their own countrymen – and added to the number of men working at cotton-mills for the foreign market, – a mode of industry which we know, by painful experience, to be precarious in the extreme. We describe the superfluous shoemaker as going over directly to the artisans of the factory: we say nothing of the miseries of the middle passage; though in truth this transition is accomplished with pain and difficulty, and after much struggle, and is rather done in the second generation than the first, it being rather the children of the shoemaker that are added to the population of the factory than the shoemaker himself.

We see here that the mere calculation of profit and loss, such as it might figure in a debtor and creditor account, would justify the extreme advocate of free-trade. But there are, surely, other considerations which may properly rank a little higher than such a tradesman's balance of profit and loss; we are surely allowed to follow our inquiries a little further, and ask who is enriched, and how? and what branch of industry is promoted, and what destroyed or curtailed? It is not our object here to contend against what is called the factory system – we accept it with its evil and its good; we are not calling for measures directly hostile to it; but we certainly should exclaim against the sacrifice of a branch of household, stable, permanent industry, to be compensated by an increase in this already enormous system of factory labour, which, together with much good, brings with it so dreadfully precarious a condition of thousands and tens of thousands of men. The political economist has proved that free-trade is the condition under which the industry of man, so far as the amount of its products is concerned, can be exercised with the greatest advantage: he has established this principle; it is an important one, and we thank him for its lucid exposition; but he shall be no legislator of ours until he has learned to submit his principle to wise exceptions, until he has learned to estimate the first necessity of steady and well-remunerated employment to the labourer, until he is prepared, in short, to give their due weight to other considerations besides that of multiplying the gross products of human industry.

We have been viewing the question of free-trade from the position of an opulent manufacturing people – from the position of England, in short – and we see that there may be ground even here for exception. But the case is much stronger, and the claim for exception still plainer, which might be made out by a less opulent nation, desirous of fostering its own rising manufactures. These wisely refuse a reciprocity of free-trade measures. Even on the mere ground of the increase of national wealth, and without considering the advantage derived from a variety of employments, and a due admixture of a manufacturing population, they are fully justified in their protective policy. The economist will tell them that they deprive themselves of the opportunity of purchasing cheaper and better goods than they can produce. We admit that, for a season, they must forego an advantage of this description; but at the end of a few years how will the account stand? If the protective duty has fostered a home manufactory that would not otherwise have existed, (and this is an assumption which the political economist himself is compelled to admit,) then is there in that country a new industry – then amongst that people is there more labour and less idleness, and therefore more of the fruits of labour. It has created for itself what it otherwise would have had to purchase with its corn and oil.

The political economists love an extreme case. In order to test the universality of the principle of free-trade, we give them the following: – There is a little island somewhere in the Pacific, and it grows corn, and grapes, and the cotton plant. Two or three great ships come annually to this island, bringing a store of Manchester goods, and taking away a portion of the corn and the wine. But the wise men of the island meet and say, Let us learn to make our own cotton into stuff for raiment; so shall we have clothes without parting with our corn and wine. Would the people of the island be very foolish if they consented to wear, for a time, a much coarser raiment, in order that they might practise this new industry, and thus provide themselves with raiment, and keep their provender? We suppose that the same unequal distribution of property is found in our island as in the rest of the world – that there are rich and poor. Now, when a people exchanges its articles of food for articles of clothing, it rarely, if ever, parts with what, to the whole of the people, is a superfluous quantity of food. Those who own large portions of the land have a superfluity of produce, which they exchange for other articles either at home or abroad; but probably no people ever grew a greater quantity of corn, or other grain for food, than it could very willingly have consumed itself, could we conceive it distributed amongst all who had mouths to consume, and half-filled stomachs to stow it away in. Judge, therefore, whether our little island would not, in a few years, be much better off for refusing the visit of the great ships, and setting to work to weave its own cotton into garments. The political economists always talk of so much labour diverted from one employment to another; they seem to have forgotten that there is such a thing as so much idleness converted into so much labour.

In the work of John Stuart Mill, to which we have now to call the attention of our readers, the science of political economy has received its latest and most complete exposition. Nor, as the title itself will inform us, is the work limited to a formal enunciation of abstract principles, (as was the case with the brief compendium of Mr Mill, senior,) but it proceeds to apply those principles to the discussion of some of the most vital and momentous questions with which public opinion is at present occupied. There are things in these volumes, as may easily be conceived, in which we do not concur – views are supported, on some subjects, to which we have been long and notoriously opposed; but there is, in the exposition of its tenets, so accurate a statement, so severe and lucid a reasoning, and, withal, so genuine and manly an interest in the great cause of humanity, that we cannot hesitate a moment in awarding to it a high rank amongst the sterling literature of our country. This magazine has never been slow – it has been second to none – in its hearty recognition of great talent and ability, from whatever quarter of the political horizon these have made their appearance. We were amongst the first to give notice to all whom it concerned of the addition to the students' shelf of the profound and elaborate work, The System of Logic, by the same author. The present is a work of more general interest, yet it has the same severe character. In this, as in his logic, the author has sacrificed nothing deemed by him essential to his task, to the desire of being popular, or the fear of being pronounced dry– the word of most complete condemnation in the present day. Dry, however, no person who takes an interest in the actual condition and prospects of society, can possibly find the greater portion of this work. For, as we have already intimated, that which honourably distinguishes it from other professed treatises of political economy is the perpetual, earnest, never-forgotten interest, which accompanies the writer throughout, in the great questions at present mooted with respect to the social condition of man. Mr Mill very wisely refused to limit himself to the mere abstract principles of his science; he descends from them, sometimes as from a vantage ground, into the discussions which most concern and agitate the public mind at the present day; and, if his conclusions are not always, or even generally, such as we can wholly coincide with, there is so penetrating an intelligence in his remarks, and so grave and serious a philanthropy pervading his book, that it would be impossible for the most complete opponent of the work not to rise a gainer from its perusal. From what else can we gain, if not from intercourse with a keen, and full, and sincere mind, whether we have to struggle with it, or to acquiesce in its guidance? There are passages in this work, didactic as its style generally is, which have had on us all the effect of the most thrilling eloquence, from the fine admixture of severe reasoning and earnestness of feeling.

For instance – to give at once an idea of the more elevated tone this utilitarian science has assumed in the work of Mr Mill – it is no little novelty to hear a political economist speak in the following manner of the mere elements of national wealth. The author has been discoursing on that stationary state to which all opulent nations are supposed to tend, wherein, by the diminution of profits, there is little means and no temptation to further accumulation of capital: —

"I cannot," he says, "regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists, of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or any thing but one of the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this stage of civilisation in very favourable circumstances; having apparently got rid of all social injustices and inequalities that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to insure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and no poverty; and all that these advantages do for them is, that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters. This is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in realising…