Outline of M. Bastiat's System.

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ment of society, is for ever increasing. One of the last things that he learns is the duty of allowing his fellow-creatures to grow morally, as well as physically, in freedom. There may be a perfect organization of society ordained, therefore, though man be ignorant of it; and the evil he suffers is rather an index to his own fault than a proof of defect in the natural organization of society. A full faith in such a natural system distinguishes the writings of the French from the writings of the English economists. The latter slowly adopt it with many doubts and many reservations, and even when admitting it still think that in many particulars the work of nature is insufficient or incomplete, and can by their skill be improved.

The element of society, to give a brief outline of M. Bastiat's principal doctrines, is the individual endowed with free-will; he has therefore to choose; he may choose erroneously, and, choosing erroneously, he may suffer. Ignorance is his point of departure, and infinite unknown routes proceed therefrom, of which all but one lead to error. Error engenders suffering which falls on the erring, and hence responsibility. Or it affects the innocent and brings into notice the marvellous reactive machinery of union. Tracing effects to their causes by suffering we are directed into the paths of truth and virtue. Suffering, the existence of which we are all sensible of, is a guide to progress and improvement.

For man, isolation is death, and if he cannot live out of society, the social state is his natural state. In fact, he is born a member of society, and as the life of the individual is created and provided for, so is the life of society which is only a number of individuals. Isolated man is the most helpless of animals; in society he is powerful. M. Bastiat shows, as Smith had shown before, that each individual of the most humble class in a single day consumes or uses commodities which he could not produce in ten centuries. Each member of society absorbs a million times as much as he could produce if isolated, and at the same time one despoils not another. Each one pays by his services for what he receives from another. The social mechanism which brings about these results, and has continually brought them about, increasing all the advantages of society with the increase of population, must be extremely ingenious.

When we examine the matter closely we find, which is still more extraordinary, that society to-day pays for services rendered long ago and at distant places. A youth; for example, may be fed, clothed, and educated by the proceeds of services that his father rendered in his younger days to the Chinese; and when we trace the vast number of transactions which intervened between services distant in time and place, and their present liquidation, we

find that every person concerned in bringing it about has been paid for his labour; that property or rights have successively passed from hand to hand-sometimes divided into fractions, sometimes agglomerated into masses, till the services rendered in China are liquidated by the education and board received by the student in Paris. We must shut our eyes not to see that society can only complete such complicated relations in which civil and penal laws bear a very little part by means of machinery wonderfully ingenious.

In truth, M. Bastiat does but extend to the whole society those natural laws which are always in operation to supply our great metropolis with its daily bread. It really is wonderful,' says Archbishop Whately, after giving a minute description of the work, to consider with what ease and regularity this 'important end is accomplished day after day, and year after year, through the sagacity and vigilance of private interest.' 'In 'this instance there are the same marks of benevolent design we are accustomed to admire in the anatomical structure of the body. 'I know not whether it does not even still more excite our admiration of the beneficent wisdom of Providence to contemplate'not corporeal particles, but natural free agents, co-operating in 'systems not less manifestly indicating design, though no design ' of theirs.'* These effects, however, are our own every-day actions, and they are so familiar, that even in doing them they excite little attention, as phenomena, till some strange and abnormal condition arises. It requires, as Rousseau said, much philosophy to observe what we see every day. France, however, is in an abnormal condition-a prey to disorder and disasters. Unless the social problem be solved, society is threatened by a formidable voice with death.' From no reforms can proposed relief come, and no logical refuge is found from the terrible evils, except in an order of Nature distinct from all the schemes that have ever yet been tried. The social problem is only to be solved, according to Bastiat, by the two ideas of natural harmonic laws and artificial disturbing causes.' Political economy is in his hands, as at first, the science of the natural organization of society, as contra-distinguished from constitutions or political contrivances. Wealth, for us the sum of the science, is for him the satisfaction of wants, and the means of permitting and promoting the development of society.

We do not approve of all M. Bastiat's distinctions. It is obviously erroneous to say that there are two means of providing for our wants-nature and labour-or, as Mr. J. S. Mill, has it,

Begins in Wants, ends in Gratifications.

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'there are two requisites of production-labour and appropriate natural objects; for man and labour are equally parts of nature. The whole perceptible universe is nature. If the term be restricted to the material world it is equally inaccurate, for without it life is not conceivable. From first to last the powers of nature We can are around man, and all he does is in and with them. have no wealth, we can do nothing, we cannot live without nature; but all her services are purchased exclusively by labour. It is, as Smith says, the sole purchase-money of all wealth. Nature demands nothing more than our exertions to shower on us all the wealth we possess; but she gives us nothing without exertion. All is the result exclusively of labour. M. Bastiat's otherwise beautiful simplicity should have led him to reject the complication noticed, and adopt the English conclusion, including in the term labour all the exertions of the mind as well as of the hands, which, in truth, are only the servants of the will. Justly and properly he says, that all value which men exchange one with another, is the result of labour exclusively.

Recognising, then, the necessity of labour, M. Bastiat states that the want of food, the want of clothing, the want of shelter, &c., are the parents of exertions, and by exertions the wants are satisfied. By appetites, passions, and desires, life is preserved and continued, and labour is the means by which this great end is attained. As physiology is the science of the functions by which appetites, passions, and desires, conduce to the preservation and continuance of life, so political economy is the science of labour, or the means by which the desires, &c., are gratified. The gratification is its be-all and end-all; this accomplished, life nourished and continued, to guide it is the province of morality and religion, including government as dependent on morality; and with these the science of labour is only concerned, as they cross its natural path, and lessen gratification and lessen life. The great doctrine of perfect free-trade rests finally on the fact, that every interference of government with labour in the end lessens gratification, and lessens the sum of life.

Self-interest, the impulse to all exertions, can by no means be transferred from one being to another; hence a distinct notion The individual is at once formed of the right of property.

conscious of a want or a desire is by that induced to make exertion, and in him centres the gratification, or all reason for making the exertion would cease. The gratification belongs to him by nature, and to deprive him of it by force is to separate wants and exertions from their natural consequences. Violence of this kind, carried out fully, putting an end to property, would stop labour, and extinguish society. It would divorce action from

its ordained consequences, and destroy individual responsibility, which by wants, exertions, and gratification being linked together in the same being, is plainly comprehended to be the law of Nature.

In the French system, the motive for the exertion is personal gratification, which experience has taught us is susceptible of indefinite extension. It therefore opens the view to indefinite improvement, and seems more reasonable than the motive assigned for exertion in the English system-'the wish to augment our fortunes, and rise in the world, a wish that comes 'with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the 'grave.' This maxim, expressed alike by Dr. Smith and Mr. M'Culloch, is perfectly applicable to the condition of a welleducated young Scotchman, setting out to seek his fortune in India, or aspiring to a place in the Treasury, and a seat in Parliament; or to an English youth, fresh from college, with great acquirements, a respectable reputation, small means, and a conviction that, by tongue or pen, he can become a peer. But fortunes cannot be indefinitely augmented, and a speedy limit is found, even in monarchies or empires, to 'rising in the world." The English maxim does not accord with the unlimited and indefinite improvement which seems to be the destined lot of man in society. Moreover, it would exclude from the science the ryots of Hindostan, the rice and tea-growers of China, the larger part of the peasantry and labourers of Europe, Asia, and Africa, who either from disposition or necessity never have a wish to rise out of their terribly depressed condition. It implies the continuance for ever of castes and ranks, which the maxim shows to be prevalent in Europe; while the more general principle of the French system-a more complete expression of man's nature -implies ultimately, at least, universal equality, with a continual

elevation for all.

The wants and the desires, as well as the gratification, not being material-for though manifested, by the instrumentality of the body, they exist only in consciousness, and can neither be seen nor felt-what must we say of labour, the connecting link between wants and gratifications? The result of life, and the means of supporting it, though it manifest itself by the action of the muscles, the sweat of the brow, and the production of valuable material objects, labour is not itself material. Such being the characteristic of labour, we have one denomination for the whole-life or mind. All the phenomena belong equally to consciousness. Knowledge and skill are avowedly mental, and labour becomes increasingly productive, as they are enlarged. The science deals only with the phenomena of life. It begins in

Exchange of Services.

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desire, it is carried on by exertion, and it ends in gratification. As knowledge and skill dominate over appetite and desire, while they instruct labour, and make it powerful as the means of gratification, we see in man's constitution, as a member of society, the means of perpetual progress.

M. Bastiat illustrates doctrines, of which we have given a meagre outline, in a variety of modes. In his chapter on Echange, he shows that an improvement in carrying on commerce is equivalent to an approximation of two sites of trade lessening the labour or cost of exchange, which is as necessary to production as division of labour-and the principle, he says, (of labour being lessened as men approximate to each other, and knowledge and skill increase) is the solution of the problem of population. Malthus has neglected this element, and where he sees only discord, it brings to light only harmony."

M. Bastiat reiterates again and again, after Dupont de Nemours, that the want, the effort, and the satisfaction, are all naturally in one and the same being. The wants of children, which at first appear an exception, are not so, for in the first instance they are essentially parts of the mother, and as they become independent, naturally acquire the power of satisfying their own wants. This union, the general rule of nature and the source of all property, seems an admirable contrivance, however blindly we may see it and however imperfectly we may carry it into effect or ignorantly thwart it, to keep the increase of the means of subsistence in continual harmony with the progress of population.

Wants, efforts, and satisfaction, being all the phenomena, and the wants and the satisfaction not being transmissible from one individual to another, only the material results of labour are exchanged. On this point M. Bastiat and the English economists agree. But carrying on his analysis, and censuring them for adhering closely to the material results, he concludes, that the real portion of life exchanged, which is all that man can possibly care for, is the effort. Services, by the medium of com

* The doctrine of Malthus also finds an opponent or corrector in Mr. Carey, a well-known American writer. He arrives at his conclusion from a somewhat fanciful theory, as to the order in which land, in relation to its fertility, has been occupied. Its real justification, however, is the increase of population which has accompanied the occupation of land, and which, carrying with it an increase of knowledge and skill, as was first brought under notice here in a work entitled Popular Political Economy, continually makes actual production increase faster than population. Men are at once more numerous and better provided now than formerly. When our favourite theories are questioned in France and America, and by some amongst ourselves, it is no longer justifiable to assume that they are unassailable. We must, on the contrary, look to the foundation on which they rest, lest they tumble to the ground and overwhelm our systems or perhaps our

reason.