6. Wealth

We have seen that in every commodity that is adapted to satisfy our wants and desires, there are two things to be considered and distinguished: what nature does, and what man does—what is gratuitous, and what is onerous—the gift of God and the service of man—utility and value. In the same commodity the one may be immense, and the other imperceptible. The former remaining invariable, the latter may be indefinitely diminished; and is diminished, in fact, as often as an ingenious process or invention enables us to obtain the same result with less effort.

One of the greatest difficulties, one of the most fertile sources of misunderstanding, controversy, and error, here presents itself to us at the very threshold of the science.

What is wealth?

Are we rich in proportion to the utilities we have at our disposal—that is, in proportion to the wants and desires we have the means of satisfying? “A man is rich or poor,” says Adam Smith, “according as he possesses a greater or smaller amount of useful commodities which minister to his enjoyments.”

Are we rich in proportion to the values we possess—that is to say, the services we can command? “Wealth,” says J.B. Say, “is in proportion to Value. It is great if the sum of the value of which it is composed is great—it is small if the value be small.”

The casual employ the word Wealth in two senses. Sometimes we hear them say—“The abundance of water is Wealth to such a country.” In this case, they are thinking only of Utility. But when one wishes to reckon up his own wealth, he makes what is called an Inventory, in which only commercial Value is taken into account.

With deference to the savants, I believe that the casual are right for once. Wealth is either actual or relative. In the first point of view, we judge of it by our satisfactions. Mankind becomes richer in proportion as men acquire a greater amount of ease or material prosperity, whatever be the commodities by which it is procured. But do you wish to know what proportional share each man has in the general prosperity; in other words, his relative wealth? This is simply a relation, which value alone reveals, because value is itself a relation.

Our science has to do with the general welfare and prosperity of men, with the proportion that exists between their Efforts and their Satisfactions—a proportion the progressive participation of gratuitous utility in the business of production modifies advantageously. You cannot, then, exclude this element from the idea of Wealth. In a scientific point of view, actual or effective wealth is not the sum of values, but the aggregate of the utilities, gratuitous and onerous, that are attached to these values. As regards satisfactions—that is to say, as regards actual results of wealth, we are as much enriched by the value annihilated by progress as by that which still subsists.

In the ordinary transactions of life, we cease to take utility into account, in proportion as that utility becomes gratuitous by the lowering of value. Why? because what is gratuitous is common, and what is common alters in no respect each man’s share or proportion of actual or effective wealth. We do not exchange what is common to all; and as in our everyday transactions we only require to be made acquainted with the proportion that value establishes, we take no account of anything else.

This subject gave rise to a controversy between Ricardo and J.B. Say. Ricardo gave to the word Wealth the sense of Utility—Say, that of Value. The exclusive triumph of one of these champions was impossible, since the word admits of both senses, according as we regard wealth as actual or relative.

But it is necessary to remark, and the more so on account of the great authority of Say in these matters, that if we confound wealth (in the sense of actual or effective prosperity) with value; above all, if we affirm that the one is proportional to the other, we shall be apt to give the science a wrong direction. The works of second-rate Economists, and those of the Socialists, show this but too clearly. To set out by concealing from view precisely that which forms the fairest patrimony of the human race, is an unfortunate beginning. It leads us to consider as annihilated that portion of wealth which progress renders common to all, and exposes us to the danger of falling into petitio principii, and studying Political Economy backwards—the end, the design, which it is our object to attain, being perpetually confounded with the obstacle that impedes our efforts.

In truth, but for the existence of obstacles, there could be no such thing as Value, which is the sign, the symptom, the witness, the proof of our native weakness. It reminds us incessantly of the decree that went forth in the beginning—“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” With reference to Omnipotence, the words Effort, Service, and consequently Value, have no meaning. As regards ourselves, we live in an atmosphere of utilities, of which utilities the greater part are gratuitous, but there are others that we can acquire only by an onerous title. Obstacles are interposed between these utilities and the wants to which they minister. We are condemned either to forgo the Utility, or vanquish these obstacles by Efforts. Sweat must drop from the brow before bread can be eaten, whether the toil be undergone by ourselves or by others for our benefit.

The greater the amount of value we find existing in a country, the greater evidence we have that obstacles have been surmounted, but the greater evidence we also have that there are obstacles to surmount. Are we to go so far as to say that these obstacles constitute Wealth because, apart from them, Value would have no existence?

We may suppose two countries. One of them possesses the means of enjoyment to a greater extent than the other with a less amount of Value, because it is favored by nature, and it has fewer obstacles to overcome. Which is the richer?

Or, to put a stronger case, let us suppose the same people at different periods of their history. The obstacles to be overcome are the same at both periods. But, nowadays, they surmount these obstacles with so much greater facility; they execute, for instance, the work of transport, of tillage, of manufactures, at so much less an expense of effort that values are considerably reduced. There are two courses, then, that a people in such a situation may take— they may content themselves with the same amount of enjoyments as formerly—progress in that case, resolving itself simply into the attainment of additional leisure; and, in such circumstances, should we be authorized to say that the Wealth of the society had retrograded because it is possessed of a smaller amount of value? Or, they may devote the efforts that progress and improvement have rendered disposable to the increase and extension of their enjoyments; but should we be warranted to conclude that, because the amount of values had remained stationary, the wealth of the society had remained stationary also? It is to this result, however, that we tend if we confound the two things, Riches and Value.

Political Economists may here find themselves in a dilemma. Are we to measure wealth by Satisfactions realized, or by Values created?

Were no obstacles interposed between utilities and desires, there would be neither efforts, nor services, nor Values in our case, any more than in that of God and nature. In such circumstances, were wealth estimated by the satisfactions realized, mankind, like nature, would be in possession of infinite riches; but, if estimated by the values created, they would be deprived of wealth altogether. An economist who adopted the first view might pronounce us infinitely rich—another, who adopted the second view, might pronounce us infinitely poor.

The infinite, it is true, is in no respect an attribute of humanity. But mankind direct their exertions to certain ends; they make efforts, they have tendencies, they gravitate toward progressive Wealth or progressive Poverty. Now, how could Economists make themselves mutually intelligible if this successive diminution of effort in relation to result, of labor to be undergone or to be remunerated; in a word, of value, were considered by some of them as a progress toward Wealth, and by others as a descent toward Poverty?

If the difficulty, indeed, concerned only Economists, we might say, let them settle the matter among themselves. But legislators and governments have every day to introduce measures that exercise a serious influence on human affairs; and in what condition should we be if these measures were taken in the absence of that light that enables us to distinguish Riches from Poverty?

I affirm that the theory that defines Wealth as Value is only the glorification of Obstacles. Its syllogism is this: “Wealth is in proportion to Value, value to efforts, efforts to obstacles; ergo, wealth is in proportion to obstacles.” I affirm also that, by reason of the division of labor, which includes the case of every one who exercises a trade or profession, the illusion thus created is very difficult to be got rid of. We all of us see that the Services we render are called forth by some obstacle, some want, some suffering—those of the physician by disease, those of the agricultural laborer by hunger, those of the manufacturer of clothing by cold, those of the carrier by distance, those of the advocate by injustice, those of the soldier by danger to his country. There is not, in fact, a single obstacle, the disappearance of which does not prove very inopportune and very troublesome to somebody, or which does not even appear fatal in a public point of view, because it seems to dry up a source of employment, of services, of values, of wealth. Very few Economists have been able to preserve themselves entirely from this illusion; and if the science shall ever succeed in dispelling it, its practical mission will have been fulfilled. For I venture to make a third affirmation—namely, that our official practice is saturated with this theory, and that when governments believe it to be their duty to favor certain classes, certain professions, or certain manufactures, they have no other mode of accomplishing their objective than by setting up Obstacles, in order to give to particular branches of industry additional development, in order to enlarge artificially the circle of services to which the community is forced to have recourse—and thus to increase Value, falsely assumed as synonymous with Wealth.

And, in fact, it is quite true that such legislation is useful to the classes that are favored by it—they exult in it—congratulate each other upon it—and what is the consequence? Why this, that the same favors are successively accorded to all other classes.

What more natural than to confound Utility with Value, and Value with Riches! The Science has never encountered a snare she has less suspected. For what has happened? At every step of progress the reasoning has been this: “The obstacle is diminished, then effort is lessened, then value is lessened, then utility is lessened, then wealth is lessened—then we are the most unfortunate people in the world to have taken it into our heads to invent and exchange, to have five fingers in place of three, and two hands in place of one; and then it is necessary to engage government, which is in possession of force, to take order with this abuse.”

This Political Economy a rebours—this Political Economy read backwards—is the staple of many of our journals, and the life of legislative assemblies. It has misled the candid and philanthropic Sismondi, and we find it very logically set forth in the work of Mr. de Saint-Chamans.

“There are two kinds of national wealth,” he tells us. “If we have regard only to useful products with reference to their quantity, their abundance, we have to do with a species of wealth that procures enjoyments to society, and that I shall denominate the Wealth of enjoyment.

“If we regard products with reference to their exchangeable value, or simply with reference to their value, we have to do with a species of Wealth that procures values to society, and that I call the Wealth of value.

“It is this last species of Wealth that forms the special subject of Political Economy, and it is with it, above all, that governments have to do.”

This being so, how are Economists and Statesmen to proceed? The first are to point out the means of increasing this species of riches, this wealth of value; the second to set about adopting these means.

But this kind of wealth bears proportion to efforts, and efforts bear proportion to obstacles. Political Economy, then, is to teach, and Government to contrive, how to multiply obstacles. Mr. de Saint-Chamans does not flinch in the least from this consequence.

Does exchange facilitate our acquiring more of the wealth of enjoyment with less of the wealth of value? We must, then, counteract this tendency of exchange.¹

Is there any portion of gratuitous Utility we can replace by onerous Utility; for example, by prohibiting the use of a tool or a machine? We must not fail to do so; for it is very evident, he says, that if machinery augments the wealth of enjoyment, it diminishes the wealth of value. “Let us bless the obstacles that the dearness and scarcity of fuel in this country has opposed to the multiplication of steam-engines.”²

Has nature favored us in any particular respect? It is our misfortune; for, by that means, we are deprived of the opportunity of exerting ourselves. “I avow that I could desire to see manufactured by manual labor, forced exertion, and the sweat of the brow, things that are now produced without trouble and spontaneously.”³

What a misfortune, then, is it for us that we are not obliged to manufacture the water we drink! It would have been a fine opportunity of producing the wealth of value. Happily we take our revenge upon wine. “Discover the secret of drawing wine from springs in the earth as abundantly as you draw water, and you will soon see that this fine order of things will ruin a fourth part of France.”⁴

According to the ideas this Economist sets forth with such naivete, there are many methods, and very simple methods too, of obliging men to create what he terms the wealth of value.

The first is to deprive them of what they have. “If taxation lays hold of money where it is plentiful, to distribute it where it is scarce, it is useful, and far from being a loss, it is a gain, to the state.”⁵

The second is to dissipate what you take. “Luxury and prodigality, which are so hurtful to individual fortunes, benefit public wealth. You teach me a fine moral lesson, it may be said—I have no such pretension—my business is with Political Economy, and not with morals. You seek the means of rendering nations richer, and I preach up luxury.”⁶

A more prompt method still is to destroy the wealth you take from the taxpayer by good sweeping wars. “If you grant me that the expenditure of prodigals is as productive as any other, and that the expenditure of governments is equally productive, . . . you will no longer be astonished at the wealth of England after so expensive a war.”⁷

But, as tending to promote the creation of this Wealth of value, all these means—taxes, luxury, wars—must hide their diminished heads before an expedient infinitely more efficacious—namely, conflagration.

“To build is a great source of wealth, because it supplies revenues to proprietors, who furnish the materials, to workmen, and to various classes of artisans and artists. Melon cites Sir William Petty, who regards as a national profit the labor employed in rebuilding the streets of London after the great fire that consumed two-thirds of the city, and he estimates it (the profit!) at a million sterling per annum (in money of 1666) during four years, and this without the least injury having been done to other branches of trade. Without regarding this pecuniary estimate of profit as quite accurate,” adds Mr. de Saint-Chamans, “it is certain at least that this event had no detrimental effect upon the wealth of England at that period. . . . The result stated by Sir W. Petty is not impossible, seeing that the necessity of rebuilding London must have created a large amount of new revenues.”⁸

All Economists, who set out by confounding wealth with value, must infallibly arrive at the same conclusions, if they are logical; but they are not logical; for on the road of absurdity men of any common sense always sooner or later stop short. Mr. de Saint-Chamans seems himself to recede a little before the consequences of his principle when it lands him in a eulogium on conflagration. We see that he hesitates, and contents himself with a negative panegyric. He should have carried out his principle to its logical conclusions, and told us outright what he so clearly indicates.

Of all our Economists, Mr. de Sismondi has succumbed to the difficulty now under consideration in the manner most to be regretted. Like Mr. de Saint-Chamans, he set out with the idea that value forms an element of wealth; and like him, he has built upon this datum a Political Economy a rebours, denouncing everything that tends to diminish value. Sismondi, like Saint-Chamans, exalts obstacles, proscribes machinery, anathematizes exchange, competition, and liberty, extols luxury and taxation, and arrives at length at this conclusion, that the more we possess the poorer we become.

From beginning to end of his work, however, Mr. de Sismondi seems to have a lurking consciousness that he is mistaken, and that a dark veil may have interposed itself between his mind and the truth. He does not venture, like Mr. de Saint-Chamans, to announce roughly and bluntly the consequences of his principle— he hesitates, and is troubled. He asks himself sometimes if it is possible that all men from the beginning of the world have been in error, and on the road to self-destruction, in seeking to diminish the proportion that Effort bears to Satisfaction—that is to say, value. At once the friend and the enemy of liberty, he fears it, since the abundance that depreciates value leads to universal poverty, and yet he knows not how to set about the destruction of this fatal liberty. He thus arrives at the confines of socialism and artificial organization, and insinuates that government and science should regulate and control everything. Then he sees the danger of the advice he is giving, retracts it, and ends by falling into despair, exclaiming—“Liberty leads to the abyss of poverty—Constraint is as impossible as it is useless—there is no escape.” In truth and reality, there is none, if Value be Riches; in other words, if the obstacle to prosperity be prosperity itself—that is to say, if Evil be Good.

The latest writer, as far as I know, who has stirred this question is Mr. Proudhon. It made the fortune of his book, Des Contradictions Economiques. Never was there a finer opportunity of seizing a paradox by the forelock, and snapping his fingers at science. Never was there a fairer occasion of asking—“Do you see in the increase of value a good or an evil? Quidquid dixeris argumentabor.” Just think what a treat!⁹

“I call upon any earnest Economist to explain to me, otherwise than by varying and repeating the question, why value diminishes in proportion as production increases, and vice versa. . . . In technical phrase, value in use and value in exchange, although necessary to each other, are in inverse ratio to each other. . . . Value in use and value in exchange remain, then, fatally enchained, although in their own nature they tend to exclude each other.”

“For this contradiction, which is inherent in the notion of value, no cause can be assigned, nor is any explanation of it possible. . . . From the data, that man has need of a great variety of commodities, and that he must provide them by his labor, the necessary conclusion is that there exists an antagonism between value in use and value in exchange, and from this antagonism a contradiction arises at the very threshold of Political Economy. No amount of intelligence, no agency divine or human can make it otherwise. In place, then, of beating about for a useless explanation, let us content ourselves with pointing out clearly the necessity of the contradiction.”

We know that the grand discovery of Mr. Proudhon is, that everything is at once true and false, good and bad, legitimate and illegitimate, that there exists no principle that is not self-contradictory, and that contradiction lurks not only in erroneous theories, but in the very essence of things—“it is the pure expression of necessity, the peculiar law of existence,” etc.; so that it is inevitable, and would be incurable, rationally, but for progression, and, practically, but for the Banque du Peuple. Nature is a contradiction, liberty a contradiction, competition a contradiction, property a contradiction—value, credit, monopoly, community, all contradictions. When Mr. Proudhon achieved this wonderful discovery his heart must have leaped for joy; for since contradiction is everywhere and in everything, he can never want something to gainsay, which for him is the supreme good. He said to me one day, “I should rather like to go to heaven, but I fear that everybody there will be of one mind, and I should find nobody to argue with.”

We must confess that the subject of Value gave him an excellent opportunity of indulging his taste. But, with great deference to him, the contradictions and paradoxes to which the word value has given rise are to be found in the false theories that have been constructed, and not at all, as he would have us believe, in the nature of things.

Theorists have set out, in the first instance, by confounding Value with Utility—that is to say, evil with good; for utility is the desired result, and value springs from the obstacle that is interposed between the desire and the result. This was their first error, and when they perceived the consequences of it, they thought to obviate the difficulty by imagining a distinction between value in use and value in exchange—an unwieldy tautology, that had the great fault of attaching the same word—Value—to two opposite phenomena.

But if, putting aside these subtleties, we adhere strictly to facts, what do we perceive? Nothing, assuredly, but what is quite natural and consistent.

A man, we shall suppose, works exclusively for himself. If he acquires skill, if his force and intelligence are developed, if nature becomes more liberal, or if he learns how to make nature co-operate better in his work, he obtains more wealth with less trouble. Where is the contradiction, and what is there in this to excite so much wonder?

Well, then, in place of remaining an isolated being, suppose this man to have relations with his fellow-men. They exchange; and I repeat my observation—in proportion as they acquire skill, experience, power, and intelligence—in proportion as nature (become more liberal or brought more into subjection) lends them more efficacious co-operation, they obtain more wealth with less trouble; they have at their disposal a greater amount of gratuitous utility; in their transactions they transfer to one another a greater sum of useful results in proportion to a given amount of labor. Where, then, is the contradiction?

If, indeed, following the example of Adam Smith and his successors, you commit the error of applying the same denomination— value—both to the results obtained and to the exertion made; in that case, an antinomy or contradiction will show itself. But be assured that that contradiction is not at all in the facts, but in your own erroneous explanation of those facts.

Mr. Proudhon ought, then, to have shaped his proposition thus: It being granted that man has need of a great variety of products, that he can only obtain them by his labor, and that he has the precious gift of educating and improving himself, nothing in the world is more natural than the sustained increase of results in relation to efforts; and there is nothing at all contradictory in a given value serving as the vehicle of a greater amount of realized utility.

Let me repeat, once more, that for man Utility is the fair side of the medal and Value the reverse. Utility has relation only to our Satisfactions, Value only with our Pains. Utility realizes our enjoyments, and is proportioned to them; Value attests our native weakness, springs from obstacles, and is proportioned to those Obstacles.

In virtue of the law of human perfectibility, gratuitous utility tends more and more to take the place of onerous utility, expressed by the word value. Such is the phenomenon, and it presents assuredly nothing contradictory.

But the question recurs—Should the word Wealth comprehend these two kinds of utility united, or only the last? If we could form, once and for all, two classes of utilities, putting on the one side all those that are gratuitous, and on the other all those that are onerous, we should form, at the same time, two classes of Wealth, which we should denominate, with Mr. Say, Natural Wealth and Social Wealth; or else, with Mr. de Saint-Chamans, the Wealth of Enjoyment and the Wealth of Value; after which, as these authors propose, we should have nothing more to do with the first of these classes.

“Things which are accessible to all,” says Mr. Say, “and which every one may enjoy at pleasure, without being forced to acquire them, and without the fear of exhausting them, such as air, water, the light of the sun, etc., are the gratuitous gifts of nature, and may be denominated Natural Wealth. As these can be neither produced nor distributed, nor consumed by us, they come not within the domain of Political Economy.”

“The things which this science has to do with are things which we possess, and which have a recognized value. These we denominate Social Wealth, because they exist only among men united in society.”

“It is the Wealth of Value,” says Mr. de Saint-Chamans, “which forms the special subject of Political Economy, and whenever in this work I mention Wealth without being more specific, I mean that description of it.”

Nearly all Economists have taken the same view.

“The most striking distinction,” says Storch, “which presents itself in the outset, is, that there are certain kinds of value which are capable of appropriation, and other kinds which are not so.¹⁰ The first alone are the subject of Political Economy, for the analysis of the others would furnish no result worthy of the attention of the statesman.”

For my own part, I think that that portion of utility which, in the progress of society, ceases to be onerous and to possess value, but which does not on that account cease to be utility, and is about to fall into the domain of the common and gratuitous, is precisely that which should constantly attract the attention of the statesman and of the Economist. If it do not, in place of penetrating and comprehending the great results that affect and elevate the human race, the science will be left to deal with what is quite contingent and flexible—with what has a tendency to diminish, if not to disappear—with a relation merely; in a word, with Value. Without being aware of it, Economists are thus led to consider only labor, obstacles, and the interest of the producer; and, what is worse, they are led to confound the interest of the producer with the interest of the public—that is to say, to mistake evil for good, and, under the guidance of the Sismondis and Saint-Chamans, to land at length in the Utopia of the socialists, or the Systeme des Contradictions of Proudhon.

And then, is not this line of demarcation you attempt to draw between the two descriptions of utility chimerical, arbitrary, and impossible? How can you thus disjoin the cooperation of nature and that of man when they combine and get mixed up everywhere, much more when the one tends constantly to replace the other, which is precisely what constitutes progress? If economic science, so dry in some respects, in other aspects elevates and fascinates the mind, it is just because it describes the laws of this association between man and nature—it is because it shows gratuitous utility substituting itself more and more for onerous utility, enjoyments bearing a greater and greater proportion to labor and fatigue, obstacles constantly lessening, and, along with them, value; the perpetual mistakes and miscalculations of producers more than compensated by the increasing prosperity of consumers; natural wealth, gratuitous and common, coming more and more to take the place of wealth that is personal and appropriated. What! are we to exclude from Political Economy what constitutes its religious Harmony?

Air, light, water, are gratuitous, you say. True, and if we enjoyed them under their primitive form, without making them co-operate in any of our works, we might exclude them from Political Economy just as we exclude from it the possible and probable utility of comets. But observe the progress of man. At first he is able to make air, light, water, and other natural agents co-operate very imperfectly. His satisfactions were purchased by laborious personal efforts, they exacted a large amount of labor, and they were transferred to others as important services; in a word, they were possessed of great value. By degrees, this water, this air, this light, gravitation, elasticity, heat, electricity, vegetable life, have abandoned this state of relative inactivity. They mingle more and more with our industry. They are substituted for human labor. They do for us gratuitously what labor does only for an onerous consideration.

They annihilate value without diminishing our enjoyments. To speak in common language, what cost us a hundred francs, costs us only ten—what required ten days’ labor now demands only one. The whole value thus annihilated has passed from the domain of Property to that of Community. A considerable proportion of human efforts has been set free, and placed at our disposal for other enterprises; so that with equal labor, equal services, equal value, mankind has enlarged prodigiously the circle of enjoyments; and yet you tell me that I must eliminate and banish from the science this utility, which is gratuitous and common, which alone explains progress, as well upward as forward, if I may so speak, as well in wealth and prosperity as in freedom and equality!

We may, then, legitimately attach to the word Wealth two meanings.

Effective Wealth, real, and realizing satisfactions, or the aggregate of utilities that human labor, aided by the co-operation of natural agents, places within the reach of Society.

Relative Wealth—that is to say, the proportional share of each in the general Riches, a share that is determined by Value.

This Economic Harmony, then, may be thus stated:

By labor the action of man is combined with the action of nature.

Utility results from that co-operation.

Each man receives a share of the general utility proportioned to the value he has created—that is to say, to the services he has rendered; in other words, to the utility he has himself produced.

ADDENDUM

Morality of Wealth. We have just been engaged in studying wealth from an Economical point of view; it may not perhaps be useless to say something here of its Moral effects.

In all ages, wealth, from a moral point of view, has been the subject of controversy. Certain philosophers and certain religionists have commanded us to despise it; others have greatly prided themselves on the golden mean, aurea mediocritas. Few, if any, have admitted as moral an ardent longing after the goods of fortune.

Which are right? Which are wrong? It does not belong to Political Economy to treat of individual morality. I shall make only one remark: I am always inclined to think that in matters that lie within the domain of everyday practice, theorists, savants, philosophers, are much less likely to be right than this universal practice itself when we include in the meaning of the word practice not only the actions of the generality of men, but their sentiments and ideas.

Now, what does universal practice demonstrate in this case? It shows us all men endeavoring to emerge from their original state of poverty—all preferring the sensation of satisfaction to the sensation of want, riches to poverty; all, I should say, or almost all, without excepting even those who declaim against wealth.

The desire for wealth is ardent, incessant, universal, irrepressible. In almost every part of the globe, it has triumphed over our natural aversion to toil. Whatever may be said to the contrary, it displays a character of avidity still baser among savage than among civilized nations. All our navigators who left Europe in the eighteenth century imbued with the fashionable ideas of Rousseau and expecting to find the men of nature at the antipodes disinterested, generous, hospitable, were struck with the devouring rapacity of these primitive barbarians. Our military men can tell us, in our own day, what we are to think of the boasted disinterestedness of the Arab tribes.

On the other hand, the opinions of all men, even of those who do not act up to their opinions, concur in honoring disinterestedness, generosity, self-control, and in branding that ill-regulated, inordinate love of wealth that causes men not to shrink from any means of obtaining it. The same public opinion surrounds with esteem the man who, in whatever rank of life, devotes his honest and persevering labor to ameliorating the lot and elevating the condition of his family. It is from this combination of facts, ideas, and sentiments, it would seem to me, that we must form our judgment on wealth in connection with individual morality.

First of all, we must acknowledge that the motive that urges us to the acquisition of riches is of providential creation—natural, and consequently moral. It has its source in that original and general destitution that would be our lot in everything if it did not create in us the desire to free ourselves from it. We must acknowledge, in the second place, that the efforts men make to emerge from the primitive destitution, provided they keep within the limits of justice, are estimable and respectable, seeing that they are universally esteemed and respected. No one, moreover, will deny that labor is in itself of a moral nature. This is expressed in the common proverb we find in all countries: Idleness is the parent of vice. And we should fall into a glaring contradiction were we to say, on the one hand, that labor is indispensable to the morality of men, and on the other, that men are immoral when they seek to realize wealth by their labor.

We must acknowledge, in the third place, that the desire for wealth becomes immoral when it goes the length of inducing us to depart from the rules of justice, and that avarice becomes more unpopular in proportion to the wealth of those who addict themselves to that passion.

Such is the judgment pronounced, not by certain philosophers or sects, but by the generality of men; and I adopt it.

I must guard myself, however, by adding that this judgment may be different at the present day from what it was in ancient times, without involving a contradiction.

The Essenians and Stoics lived in a state of society where wealth was always the reward of oppression, of pillage, and of violence. Not only was it deemed immoral in itself, but, in consequence of the immoral means employed in its acquisition, it revealed the immorality of those who possessed it. A reaction, even an exaggerated reaction, against riches and rich men was to be expected. Modern philosophers who declaim against wealth without taking into account this difference in the means of acquiring wealth, believe themselves Senecas, while they are only parrots, repeating what they do not understand.

But the question Political Economy proposes is this: Is wealth for mankind a moral good or a moral evil? Does the progressive development of wealth imply, in a moral point of view, improvement or decadence?

The reader anticipates my answer, and will understand that I must say a few words on the subject of individual morality in order to avoid the contradiction, or rather of the impossibility, that would be implied in asserting that what is individual immorality is general morality.

Without having recourse to statistics, or the records of our prisons, we must handle a problem that may be enunciated in these terms:

Is man degraded by exercising more power over nature—by constraining nature to serve him—by obtaining additional leisure—by freeing himself from the more urging and pressing wants of his makeup—by being enabled to rouse from sleep and inactivity his intellectual and moral faculties—faculties that assuredly have not been given him to remain in eternal lethargy?

Is man degraded by being removed from a state the most inorganic, so to speak, and raised to a state of the highest spiritualism it is possible for him to reach?

To enunciate the problem in this form is to resolve it.

I willingly grant that when wealth is acquired by means that are immoral, it has an immoral influence, as among the Romans.

I also allow that when it is developed in a very unequal manner, creating a great gulf between classes, it has an immoral influence, and gives rise to revolutionary passions.

But does the same thing hold when wealth is the fruit of honest industry and free transactions, and is uniformly distributed over all classes? That would be a doctrine impossible to maintain.

Socialist works, nevertheless, are crammed with declamations against the rich.

I really cannot comprehend how these schools, so opposite in other respects, but so unanimous in this, should not perceive the contradiction into which they fall.

On the one hand, wealth, according to the leaders of these schools, has a deleterious and demoralizing action, which debases the soul, hardens the heart, and leaves behind only a taste for depraved enjoyments. The rich have all manner of vices. The poor have all manner of virtues—they are just, sensible, disinterested, generous—such is the favorite theme of these authors.

On the other hand, all the efforts of the Socialists’ imagination, all the systems they invent, all the laws they wish to impose upon us, tend, if we are to believe them, to convert poverty into riches. Morality of wealth proved by this maxim; the profit of one is the profit of another.

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¹Nouvel essai sur la Richesse des Nations, p. 438.

²Ibid., p. 263.

³Nouvel essai sur la Richesse des Nations, p. 456.

⁴Ibid., p. 456.

⁵Ibid., p. 161.

⁶Ibid., p. 168.

⁷Ibid.

⁸Nouvel essai sur la Richesse des Nations, p. 63.

⁹“Do you take the side of Competition, you are wrong—do you argue against Competition, you are still wrong; which means that you are always right.”—P.J. Proudhon, Contradictions Economiques, p. 182.

¹⁰Always this perpetual and lamentable confusion between Value and Utility! I can show you many utilities that are not appropriated, but I defy you to show me in the whole world a single value that has not a proprietor.