carrying on certain branches of industry to the exclusion of others are thus, in fact, established in direct violation of the property of every one else. They prevent them from using their natural capacities or powers in what they might have considered the best manner; and as every man not a slave is justly held to be the best, and, indeed, only judge of what is advantageous for himself, the most obvious principles of justice, and the right of property, are both subverted when he is excluded from any employment. In like manner, this right is violated whenever any regulation is made to force an individual to employ his labour or capital in a particular way.'*

. In this passage we find the ideas of the Physiocrats borrowed rather than mastered. At least, Mr. M'Culloch has not always remembered them. All his recommendations for restricting banking, adopted with such glee by Lord Overstone and others, and so favourable to the Bank monopoly, are directly at variance with the language of this paragraph, and are, as he says, 'direct violations of the right of property.' Our prevalent doctrines as to capital have had a sinister influence over the minds of our thinkers, and have made our free-trade deductions less complete than those of the Physiocrats. To leave all services perfectly free is more extensive than leaving the employment of capital free; though if the employment of labour depend exclusively on capital, they may be considered identical. But it does not, and they are not identical. Basing freedom of trade on capital confines it to a class; it is excellent as far as it has been carried, but it is by our deductions narrowly limited. Credit ensuring future services is quite as necessary to production as capital, the representation of past services, and credit is restricted, regulated, and monopolized by the Government, supported by Mr. M'Culloch, as if it were not a part of the natural system of society. The result is great disorders, particularly in banking, by means of which the restrictions operate.

Mr. J. S. Mill agrees with the Physiocrats so far as the production of wealth is concerned. He says:

"The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them. Whatever mankind produce must be produced in the modes and under the conditions imposed by the constitution of external things, and by the inherent properties of their own bodily and mental structure.' It is not so,' he goes on, 'with the distribution of wealth; that is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like. They can place them at the disposal of whomsoever they please, or on whatever terms. Further in the social state, in every

*Principles of Political Economy, Part I. chap. 2.

state except total solitude, any disposal whatever of them can only take place by the general consent of society. Even what a person has produced by his individual toil, unaided by any one, he cannot keep unless it is the will of society that he should. Not only can society take it from him, but individuals could, and would, take it from him, if society only remained passive, if it did not either interfere en masse, or employ and pay people for the purpose of interfering to prevent him from being disturbed in the possession. The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society. The rules by which it is determined are what the opinion and feelings of the community make them, and are very different in different ages and countries, and might be still more different if mankind so chose."

Mr. Mill differs therefore more than Mr. M'Culloch from the Physiocrats as to distribution. He adopts Paley's view, and makes the distribution of wealth depend altogether on the law of the land, or the will of society. The power of a community in respect to every individual composing it cannot indeed be resisted, but it does not follow that in creating society of individuals, each of whom is strictly defined, and whose consciousness never is that of another, the Almighty has not laid down in the wants and faculties of each and all, laws for the distribution of wealth, partaking quite as much of the character of physical truths as the laws which regulate production. Mr. Mill says it does follow, and that when the agent has acted and produced wealth those laws cease, and the arbitrary will of individuals, others than the producers, becomes the ordinary and accredited means of disposing of the produce, leaving it in the possession of the producer or giving it to somebody else. That such arbitrary power is exercised cannot be denied ; it is the essence of injustice, the source of terrible evils in all ages. It is wrongful appropriation, whether done by the will of the community or the will of powerful individuals, and the evils which ensue teach us that the natural laws which determine distribution, though we may not yet have discovered them, are quite as important, and partake as much of the character of physical truths, as the natural laws which regulate production. Man is at liberty to violate both; he never violates either without causing pain and suffering. If Mr. Mill's doctrine be correct, the natural science of the distribution of wealth has no foundation, and the Communists and Socialists are right in demanding for the great multitude that a different distribution from that which at present prevails shall be decreed and enforced. We must do Mr. Mill the justice to add, that he says-though this only makes the statement already quoted more extraordinary

Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill, Book II., cap. 1, sec. 1.

The opinions and feelings of mankind doubtless are not a matter of chance. They are consequences of the fundamental laws of human nature, and of the constitution of the planet which we inhabit, modified by local or special peculiarities.' The consequences of the rules according to which wealth may be distributed are as little arbitrary, and have as much the character of physical laws, as the laws of production. Human beings can control their own acts, but not the consequences of their acts, even on their own minds. Society can subject the distribution of wealth to whatever rules it thinks best; but what practical results shall follow from the operation of these rules, society cannot choose, but must be content to learn.**

Mr. Mill differs as much from himself as from the Physiocrats. He recognises natural laws determining production, and determining the consequences of distribution, though he makes 'human institutions,' or the artificially organized action of society, necessary to carry the natural laws into execution. M. Bastiat goes boldly and heartily with the Physiocrats; he says, and the passages already referred to show the use he has made of his principle in combating socialism:—

'Society, persons, and property existed anterior to the law; and confining myself to my special subject, I say it is not because there are laws that there is property, but because there is property there are laws.' 'I understand by property, the right of the labourer to the value which he creates by his toil.'+ Since the individual who feels a want or a desire is also the person to exert himself to gratify it, the gratification ought to be his.'‡

He recognises this natural right as determining all distribution. The importance of such a right no man denies. It is next to the right of life, and according to M. Bastiat and the Physiocrats, grows directly from it and the natural laws by which life is sustained. Every individual receives life and means of sustaining it from his Creator. Is this natural foundation sufficient to bear all the complicated relations of property in the most developed society? Is the natural right of property sufficient, with perfect freedom of exchange, to determine and secure at all times, and in all conditions of society, the share of each member to the production which is the result of the combined labour of present and past generations? We shall not undertake to answer this question, but could not do otherwise— as it lies at the basis of distribution in every system of political economy-than bring under notice the difference between our own and French writers.

M. Bastiat says, 'Our organization is such that we are bound to labour one for the other under the penalty of death.' He is *Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill, Book II., cap. 1, sec. 1. + Propriété et Loi. + Harmonies Economiques.

Present Condition of France.

71

right. Man, quite isolated, except those cases recently mentioned as occurring in Hindostan, of castaway infants nourished by wolves, is unknown. Of all living creatures man has the most wants,' and his faculties are susceptible of the greatest development.' 'Division of labour is the union of power.' 'Nature has endowed us with many varied faculties, physical, 'moral, and intellectual. The combinations of these in co-opera'tion are inexhaustible.' Separately they are like the wheels and pins and levers of a great machine, which lie inert, and which put together by some great mechanician move a Leviathan, or lift a river from its deep bed in the mine. Isolated man cannot maintain his existence; united with his fellows, nothing on the surface of the globe, nothing but the globe itself, seems beyond his power. Social organization,' says Bastiat, as it actually exists with perfect freedom of exchange, is the most beautiful and most vast of all associations, very differently wonderful from the dreams of the socialists, for it is consistent by its admirable machinery with individual independence.' Society, with its varied arts all working into one another, is very different too from those communities organized under 'captains of industry,' which some distinguished writers, and amiable but not wise philanthropists amongst ourselves, have recommended as remedies for temporary evils.

France herself unfortunately offers to our contemplation a terrible contrast to the condition which her philosophers say is the result of the natural organization of society. Sharing fully in all the knowledge and civilization of Europe, possessing within herself all the natural elements of prosperity, her population, from her faulty practical economy, is probably declining in numbers and deteriorating in physical strength. Agriculture is very slowly improved owing to a deficiency of labourers and of capital. The bulk of the people, instead of becoming more and more wealthy, and living more and more at their ease, are steeped in poverty, and seem likely to decay from misery. In 1850, M. Blanqui wrote in his 'Report to the Academy of Sciences on the State of the Rural Population of France :

'Unless we had seen we could not believe how scanty are the clothing, the furniture, and the food of the inhabitants of the country. There are whole cantons in which clothing descends from father to son; the household utensils consist of only a few wooden spoons, and the whole furniture is nothing but a rickety table or a dresser; and in which hundreds of thousands of persons have never known the luxur of sheets, nor ever worn shoes, and millions have drunk nothing but water and very rarely or never have eaten meat or white bread.'*

* Quoted by M. de Laveleye.

Since 1850 there has been further deterioration. In 1856 and 1855 the harvests were bad, and the people suffered even more than in 1850 from a scarcity of food. In many places the land no longer yields a sufficiency to skilless husbandry to feed the people and contribute to the taxes, and they flock to Paris to share the wealth collected from them by the Government. In spite of the teaching of the Economists, confirmed by the misery of the ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed multitude, the government of France pursues even more vigorously than ever the ruinous imperial system of regulating, which is restricting, every part of society. The mental confusion arising from the people being taught to expect every good from the action of the State, has been well but incidentally described by M. Bastiat, in the little pamphlet bearing the title of l'Etat.

'The perplexed State, like the unhappy Figaro, does not know which way to turn nor whom to attend to. The hundred thousand voices of the press and the Tribune require it to organize industry; at least five hundred plans are suggested for this purpose; to extirpate selfishness, to repress the insolence and tyranny of capital, to make experiments on manures and eggs, to cover the land with a network of railway, to irrigate the plains and plant forests on the hills, to establish harmonic farms and model workshops, to colonize Algeria, to provide food for children and succour for the aged, to disperse the crowded inhabitants of the town over the country, to equalize profits in all business, to lend money without interest, to liberate Italy, Poland, and Hungary, to improve the breed of riding-horses, to encourage art and educate musicians and dancers, to prohibit foreign trade and form a mercantile marine, to discover truth and make men reasonable, to develope, aggrandize, strengthen, spiritualize, and sanctify the national mind.' At the same time its resources are to be cut off. The taxes on salt, on postage, on trades, on judicial proceedings, are all to be abolished.'

The numerous demands were at once absurd and contradictory; but the Government was changed two or three times because it could not realize the popular delusions. The usurpation of supreme power by Louis Napoleon establishing an iron military rule, was welcomed as a relief from such intolerable confusion; as if it had become a necessity to continue in force the ruinous cause of all this physical and moral evil. The Imperial Government, in fact, consists of a vast array of servants and dependents, who in one compact, united, disciplined body, with all the pertinacity and cunning of the Jesuits, maintain the system by which they live, and by which they escape from the misery suffered by the great multitude. The Emperor is the creature of this system, and cannot change it; he wished to abolish passports and was unable;