Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 422, December 1850

LAING'S OBSERVATIONS ON EUROPE

It is not the least merit of Mr Laing's writings that they embrace much matter within a manageable compass. The objects claiming our attention are multiplying so fast upon us – the path of the inquirer is strewn with so many important topics, that he who would keep pace with the march of knowledge, must be content to throw aside all but what is really useful for the journey. The volume before us, forming a sequel to the Notes of a Traveller published by Mr Laing in 1842, fulfils this condition, and comprises within the limits of a moderate octavo a vast variety of subjects, social and political, domestic and foreign – population, the division of land, emigration, militia, university education, Continental railroads, taxes, theatres, fresco-painting, and a multitude of other topics. Among so many subjects, there are of course some on which we are unable to concur in the opinions expressed by the author; and some of his views we can hardly reconcile with the acute good sense that characterises most of his observations. But even on matters where we are forced to differ from him, his remarks are always instructive, original, and suggestive; and he generally presents both sides of a disputed question with remarkable impartiality, leaving the reader to form the conclusion for himself.

There is one circumstance which, in our opinion, greatly enhances the value of Mr Laing's observations on the social condition of our own and other countries. The very worst of all travellers is a political economist – that is, a dogmatist in the science. Whether his Magnus Apollo be Smith, or Say, or Ricardo, he sees all things through the spectacles of his favourite theories. Any inquiries he makes are directed, not to elicit the truth, but to support his pre-formed opinions; and, of course, no one who goes forth on this errand ever fails of finding what he seeks. And thus it happens that a Cobden may traverse Europe from end to end; and at the very time when the thunderclouds of social convulsion were about to burst in the most awful storm that has ever shaken civilised nations, he not only discerns no symptom of the impending hurricane, but beholds nothing but the smiling prospect of contented industry – the budding spring-time of universal peace and reciprocity. But, on the other hand, the observer who is either unacquainted with the doctrines of political economy, or who affects to consider them only as objects of speculative curiosity, is, in the opposite way, just as unfit as the pedant in the science to form correct and comprehensive views of the social condition of foreign states. He wants the proper rule to direct his observations, and can hardly attain any but confused and superficial ideas of the meaning of what he sees around him. He alone is qualified to observe wisely, and to write instructively, about the institutions and customs of other nations, who, having worked out for himself the leading principles of the science, and ascertained their true limits, possesses at the same time sufficient common sense and independence of judgment to apply them. Mr Laing seems to us to be gifted in an eminent degree with these requisites for making good practical use of his theoretical knowledge of political economy. He appears to be fully aware of the vast amount of dangerous error that has resulted from a blind and indiscriminate application of the same abstract laws to all cases, without fully ascertaining their true character, or making allowance for those disturbing causes which often render the law wholly irrelevant. Political economy, like other sciences, has its two parts – the theory and the application; and it too often happens that a man who is well read in the first is totally incapable of giving an opinion on the second, and infinitely the more difficult branch. The platform orator or newspaper writer thinks that if he can but refer to an abstract formula borrowed from Ricardo or M'Culloch, it is sufficient to settle any question of social interests that may come before him – not considering that these formula and maxims are abstract: and that their applicability to the affairs of everyday life may be affected by so many causes that it is scarcely possible to find any actual example to which they can be applied rigorously, and to their full extent. And hence the nonsense that is talked and written, under the name of political economy; hence the absurdities that are enacted under the idea, that nations can be governed by the square and plummet of its rules.

"The truth has been missed," says Mr Jones, in the preface to his work on the Distribution of Wealth, "not because a steady and comprehensive study of the story and condition of mankind would not yield truth, but because those who have been most prominent in circulating error have really turned aside from the task of going through such an examination at all; have confined the observations on which they have founded their reasonings to the small portion of the earth's surface by which they were immediately surrounded; and have then proceeded at once to erect a superstructure of doctrines and opinions, either wholly false, or, if partially true, as limited in their application as the field from which the materials for them were collected."

Mr Laing supplies us27 with an apt illustration of the fallacious use that is very commonly made of general laws, by neglecting to attend to the special circumstances of each case. It has been laid down as a maxim by economists, that a government should not attempt to direct, restrict, or interfere with the employment of capital and industry; but that every man should be left free to use the portion of them he possesses, how, where, and when he pleases. Now this maxim may be true enough in the abstract, and where there are no conditions to limit its application; but it is not equally true in all political states, nor in the same state at different times. The social condition of Great Britain, at the present day, may admit its application more fully than that of most other nations. But we have only to cross the German Ocean to find a circumstance easily overlooked – namely, that of climate, which upsets its relevancy altogether.

A still more striking exemplification of the same fallacy presents itself too obviously, in the opening of the corn trade in our own country. "There should be no artificial restrictions on the food of the people" – that is the abstract axiom on which our legislators grounded the abolition of all customs on imported grain. Does any one question the truth of it as a general axiom? Certainly not: and if we were setting out on a new social system – if the field on which we had to work was a tabula rasa, and we were free in all other respects, as well as this, to devise a scheme of government for a nascent community – that maxim would no doubt be kept in view in the construction of our code. But we have to legislate for a state of society in which everything else is artificial – in which restrictions meet us wherever we turn. Our task is not to rear a new edifice, in the plan of which we could give free scope to our taste and skill; but to repair, and if possible improve, an ancient fabric, the work of many different ages, and abounding in all manner of quaint angles and irregularities. We have to deal with the case of a country burdened with an enormous weight of general and local taxation, arbitrarily and unequally distributed, – where the employment of the people, and the application of their capital and industry, is founded on the faith of old laws and a settled commercial principle, – above all, a country where the business of exchange has to be conducted through the most anomalous medium – the medium of a fettered currency. One and all of these peculiarities in our condition are so many limitations of the general maxim; and the attempt to carry it out in its full extent, in defiance of these limitations, can only end in confusion and disappointment. Political economy is a safe guide in the hands of a practical legislator, only when he has fully apprehended the truth that there is not one of its principles, from beginning to end, that may not be limited by the special condition of each individual state; and unless he can carry with him this master-principle, so necessary to a right use of the theory of the science, it is far better and safer for those whose interests he directs that he should be wholly ignorant of it, and should trust altogether to common-sense and experience.

There is a very manifest disposition at present, to extend the jurisdiction of political economy to all public questions – to take it for granted that, when a case has once been argued and decided according to its laws, there is no more to be said on the subject. We are apt to forget that there is in all cases an appeal to another court, where the inquiry is not as to what is most favourable to the production of exchangeable Wealth, but what most conduces to the Happiness of the people; and that, still beyond, there is the last supreme tribunal on earth of all human actions, where there is but one law – the universal law of Morality. Are these three jurisdictions identical? Or are the decrees that issue from them necessarily in harmony with each other? So, at least, we are told by those who take the strongest view of the importance of political economy. Their doctrine is, that whatever promotes one of these objects promotes the others; and that wealth, happiness, and virtue, though distinguishable in thought, are mutually and reciprocally united in the history and experience of nations. To buy cheap and sell dear is the way for a man to get rich; but the riches of individuals in the aggregate form national wealth, national wealth produces civilisation, civilisation promotes happiness and contentment, and happiness and contentment promote virtue – such is the sorites on which is founded the creed of a very large section of the present school of economists. That country in which the means of production are most developed is the soil where the higher qualities of man's nature will be found flourishing in greatest perfection. Wealth, then, is the principal thing in the guidance of private conduct, as well as in the government of nations; and with all our getting, the chief concern is to get capital. It is this disposition to submit everything to the test of productiveness that Sismondi has so aptly designated by the title of chrematism. The views of that great and philosophic writer, as to the inevitable tendencies of the doctrine, have been already fully explained in our pages.28 We allude to them now only to observe how remarkable a confirmation of his opinions is furnished by the history of the great Continental states since that review of his doctrines was written.

Is there, then, no way of reconciling the apparent antagonism between the development of man's industrial powers, and his higher interests as a rational and accountable being? Are we to conclude that the roads that lead to wealth, to happiness, and to virtue, are necessarily divergent? and that national advancement in any one of these paths implies a departure from the others? No; not necessarily so. Such is not the doctrine taught by Sismondi, and by those who, with him, impugn the title of political economy to be considered as the great paramount rule of social existence. All that they maintain is, that there is no necessary agreement between these three great springs of human action; that though the law of morality may, and obviously often does, concur with the maxims of happiness, and those again with the rules of political economy, there are nevertheless many questions on which we are at a loss to reconcile them. The learned Archbishop of Dublin has an elaborate argument in his Introductory Lectures, to show, on a priori grounds, that the condition most favourable to the exercise of man's productive energies must also be favourable, not only to the highest development of his intellectual faculties, but also to his advancement in moral purity. Now, we venture to think that no such argument, however ingeniously conducted, can be satisfactory, simply because IT IS a priori. Reason and experience are at variance; and no a priori deduction will help us out of the practical difficulty. We, no doubt, all naturally desire and hope – nay, believe – that at some future time, and in some way at present unknown, the perplexing contradiction will be explained. Reason affirms unhesitatingly, that the same Providence which placed so bounteous a store of the physical materials of wealth at our disposal, can never have designed that their cultivation should embitter the lives of those who labour, still less that it should endanger their moral wellbeing; and we look forward, therefore, with firm faith to a period when these paths, which to our present sight seem to lead in directions so opposite, shall all be seen to reunite and terminate in one common end. But, in the present state of our powers, that insight is yet far from being attained, and the great problem yet remains to be solved. – What do we see around us? In this country – whose physical character and the spirit of whose people seem to destine her for the very home and centre of production – are there no discordant elements in our condition? While wealth has increased among us with a rapidity unexampled in the history of the world, and the struggling energies of all men have been strained to the uttermost in the race of industry – while, under the sway of commercial Ministries, legislation has been specially, almost exclusively, directed to stimulating manufactures in every way, and removing every obstacle that could be supposed, however indirectly, to hinder their extension – can we venture to assert that the condition of the great mass of the people has improved in proportion to our riches? Are the relations of employers and the employed on so satisfactory a footing as to give no grounds for anxiety? Has the labourer, by whose toil all those vast accumulations of capital are created, enjoyed an equitable share of them? Have his means of domestic comfort increased in the same ratio as the wealth of his master? Is not the rate of his remuneration diminishing with every step in our progress? Has not crime, during the last half century, increased fully ten times as fast as the numbers of our population? Who can look at these, and a hundred other similar indications that readily suggest themselves, and say that all is well; that, as far as the experience of Britain goes, the road to national wealth has also conducted us to greater happiness and moral wellbeing? Alas! the evidence is but too convincing that, if there be any way of reconciling these ends, we at least have not yet found it. But we repeat that the contrariety between them is not a necessary or universal one. The conditions of great advancement in commerce and the industrial arts, are not all or invariably unfavourable to the innocent enjoyments of life among the labouring people, or hostile to their higher interests. It is not asserted that wealth is necessarily, or in itself, injurious; but only the means which we have hitherto discovered of acquiring it. The Archbishop imputes the converse of this doctrine to those who venture to deny the supreme importance of the objects of political economy, and then proceeds to demolish it by reducing it to absurd consequences. If, says he, it be true that the riches and civilisation of a community always lead to their moral degradation, if you really consider national wealth to be an evil, why do you not set about diminishing it; and, following out the counsels of Mandeville, burn your fleets, destroy your manufactories, and betake yourselves to a life of frugal and rustic simplicity? Such a challenge, we presume to think, has no bearing on the position we have been supporting; and it would be just as fair an argument on our side of the question, if we were to turn round and insist that his Grace should testify to the truth and consistency of the opinions he maintains by turning our churches into cotton factories, and the University of Dublin into a Mechanics' Institute. We go no further than to affirm that, in the experience of our own and the other most civilised nations of Europe, the rapid augmentation of wealth has not been attended with a corresponding increase of rational enjoyment, or of moral improvement, in the mass of the community. Further, we hold that a legislator must recognise these three objects not only as distinct, but as subordinate, one to the other: that is to say, the government of a country is not justified in fostering the interests of the capitalist in such a way as to trench upon the enjoyments of the common people, nor in promoting these to the neglect of their moral and religious instruction. He is not, for example, justified in allowing the employer to demand from his operatives the utmost amount of daily toil that he can extract from them, so as to leave them no time for bodily rest or intellectual culture. All policy that overlooks or contemns this natural subordination in the ends of human existence, must terminate in disaster and misery.

We have been partly led into these reflections through the consideration of a subject which occupies a prominent place in Mr Laing's Observations, and seems, in some respects, to illustrate —

The national advantages of small estates, as compared with the scale of properties most common in this country, have been most fully and systematically discussed by M. Passy, as well as by Mr Thornton, Mr Ramsay, and Mr Mill, among our own writers. But Mr Laing has had the credit of attracting attention to the subject by his extensive personal inquiries as to the actual results of the Continental plan, and by showing (what many English readers are slow to believe) that the "petite culture," as pursued in north and central Germany, and in Belgium, so far from being incompatible with the profitable use of the land, is, in fact, more productive than the opposite system of large holdings. These views were strongly expressed in his Notes of a Traveller; and his evidence in favour of peasant proprietorship is greatly founded on by Mr Mill, in the able defence of that system which forms part of his work on political economy. The book now before us takes a more enlarged, and in some respects a different view of the question, presenting it in all its bearings, favourable and unfavourable; and thus furnishing the inquirer with all the materials on which he is left to build his own conclusions.

One who looks at the subject for the first time, and whose beau-ideal of agricultural perfection is formed on the pattern of Norfolk or Haddington, finds some difficulty in believing that a country cut up into small "laird-ships" of from five to twenty acres, can be advantageously cultivated at all. He naturally takes it for granted that, as regards efficiency of labour and quantity of produce, the large scale must always have the advantage of the smaller; and that the spade and the flail can, in the long run, have no more chance in competition with the Tweeddale plough and Crosskill's steam thrashing-machine, than a dray-horse with Flying Dutchman. And in England, or any country similarly circumstanced, his conclusion would no doubt be perfectly correct; and yet a visit to Flanders, Holstein, or the Palatinate, will convince him that the boorish-looking owners of the patches of farms he finds there, with the clumsiest implements, and, to his eyes, most uncouth ways of working, do somehow contrive to raise crops which he, with all his costly engines, and the last new wrinkle from Baldoon or Tiptree Hall, cannot pretend to match. Their superiority as to the cereal grains is perhaps questionable; but, looking to the quantity of produce generally, no impartial observer can doubt that, after making every allowance for difference of soil and climate, a given area of land in Belgium yields more food than the same extent in England. How is this to be accounted for? Let us hear Mr Laing's explanation.

"The clean state of the crops here (in Flanders) – not a weed in a mile of country, for they are all hand-weeded out of the land, and applied for fodder or manure – the careful digging of every corner which the plough cannot reach; the headlands and ditch-slopes, down to the water-edge, and even the circle round single trees close up to the stem, being all dug, and under crop of some kind – show that the stock of people, to do all this minute handwork, must be very much greater than the land employs with us. The rent-paying farmer, on a nineteen years' lease, could not afford eighteen-pence or two shillings a-day of wages for doing such work, because it never could make him any adequate return. But to the owner of the soil it is worth doing such work by his own and his family's labour at odd hours; because it is adding to the perpetual fertility and value of his own property… His piece of land to him is his savings-bank, in which the value of his labour is hoarded up, to be repaid him at a future day, and secured to his family after him."29

This is the secret of the marvellous industry that has converted even the barren sands and marshes of these districts into one continuous garden. It has been accomplished by what, for want of a better expression, we may call spontaneous, in opposition to hired labour. The labourer is himself the owner of the soil, and to one so circumstanced work assumes quite a different aspect; the spade goes deeper, the scythe takes a wider sweep, and the muscles lift a heavier burden. No agricultural chemistry is so potent as the sense of property. The incentive to his daily toil is not the dismal vision of a parish workhouse in the background, but an ever-fresh hope for the days that are before him. His fare may be hard, his clothing coarse, and indulgences rarely procurable; but his abstinence is voluntary – "et saltem pauperies abest."

There can be no doubt that a much larger proportion of the population will find employment and subsistence from the land under this system than under ours. Mr Laing illustrates this by supposing the case of an estate in Scotland of 1600 arable acres divided into eight farms of 200 acres each; and he assumes that the labour employed on each of these farms, taking one season with another, is equivalent to that of ten people all the year round – an estimate which is not far from the truth on a well-managed farm.30 Such an estate of 1600 acres will thus afford constant employment to eighty labourers.

"Now take under your eye a space of land here, in Flanders, that you judge to be about 1600 acres. Walk over it, examine it. Every foot of the land is cultivated – dug with the spade or hoe where horse and plough cannot work; and all is in crop, or in preparation for crop. In our best farmed districts there are corners and patches in every field lying waste and uncultivated, because the large rent-paying farmers cannot afford labour, superintendence, and manure, for such minute portions of land and garden-like work as the owner of a small piece of land can bestow on every corner and spot of his own property. Here the whole 1600 acres must be in garden-farms of five or six acres; and it is evident that in the amount of produce from the land, in the crops of rye, wheat, barley, rape, clover, lucern, and flax for clothing material, which are the usual crops, the 1600 acres under such garden-culture surpass the 1600 acres under large-farm cultivation, as much as a kitchen-garden surpasses in productiveness a common field. On the 1600 acres here in Flanders or Belgium, instead of the eight farmers with their eighty farm-servants, there will be from three hundred to three hundred and twenty families, or from fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred individuals, each family working its own piece of land; and with some property in cows, sheep, pigs, utensils, and other stock in proportion to their land, and with constant employment, and secure subsistence on their own little estates."31

The influence such a mode of life produces on the character of the people is a consideration of higher moment than its economical results. And on this point observation seems in general to confirm the opinion which we should naturally form beforehand. Compared with the employments of mechanics, that of the husbandman demands a much higher and more habitual exercise of the faculty of judgment. His mind is not tied down to the repetition of the same act, chipping a stone, straightening a wire, watching the whirling of a wheel, from the beginning of the year to the end, but almost each day brings a new set of thoughts with it. He cannot proceed a step without forming processes of induction from his observations, and exercising his reason as to the connection of the manifold phenomena he sees around him with their proper causes. The peasant proprietor has to task his inventive faculties too, in order to turn all his humble resources to the best advantage; and his success depends more upon his intelligent use of the limited means at his command, than upon the mere bodily energy of his labour. Of such a person it is, therefore, truly and pregnantly said by Mr Laing, that though he may not be able to read or write, he has an educated mind – a mind trained and disciplined in the school of nature. And his position favours the development of his moral powers still more than his intellectual faculties, by teaching him patience, self-restraint, thought for the future, and, above all, that humility which can scarcely fail to be felt by one who finds himself ever in contact with unseen powers and influences beyond his control.