French War and English Trade—English Currency—Bullion Committee—Restriction not the only Cause of High Prices—Ricardo on Currency—Tooke on Prices—Say on Gluts—English Trade from 1824—High and Low Wages—Some Fallacies of Malthus.
The discussion on General Gluts was simply a phase of the discussions on Value; and the prominence of such discussions in the political economy of sixty years ago was largely due to the peculiar effects on trade and prices of a twenty years’ war with France. The theories of economists were becoming most abstract precisely at the time when the justest generalizations were most severely tested by abnormal conditions. Even if the Industrial Revolution heralded by the Wealth of Nations had been allowed a free course, the new conditions of manufacture would have raised new economical questions; and they could not have failed to turn, to some extent, on the subject of value, which Adam Smith had by no means exhausted. But there was no free course. War was declared against England by France in 1793. In the same year Pitt was forced to offer English merchants a loan of public money, to cure a financial crisis. Then followed, under the long Tory supremacy, heavy taxes, repressive laws, and something more nearly approaching a war of classes than anything known in England before or since.
The effects of the first ten years of the French war (1793 to 1802) were to all appearance rather good than bad. Britain itself, unlike the other belligerent countries, was always intact, and the labours of British manufacturers could go on as if nothing unusual was happening on the Continent. Our command of the sea, to say nothing of the conquest of new countries, gave us trade which others lost, and made amends for the annulment of the French treaty of commerce, and the loss of the Dutch trade. In 1806 the situation became less pleasant. The Berlin and Milan decrees excluding us from almost every country in Europe, the retaliatory Orders in Council and consequent alienation of America did real damage to English commerce. The very expectations they caused of a probable scarcity of particular goods sent up prices; and, with the real scarcity, contributed to an acute disturbance of trade, which lasted about five years for the Continent and three years more for America (1807–12, 1807–15). New markets were opened to us in South America; and the pent-up commercial enterprise of our countrymen vented itself in that direction, with wild disregard of the needs of consumers in that quarter.[640] The same happened, with more reason, in 1814 and 1815. When peace was restored, it was thought that the whole Continent must be eager to have our goods, after being so long without them; and we sent them lavishly everywhere without waiting for orders. Unhappily the rest of Europe was exhausted by the war, which had lessened their production; and such products as they could offer us in exchange for our manufactures we seldom took without taxing. The very food that we most wanted from them we were careful to keep out till the last moment.[641] Anything more unlike the “simple system of natural liberty” could not be conceived; and the result certainly seemed to be an over-production on our part;—it was at any rate a reign of low prices and deep commercial depression. This was not all. Since 1797 we had had a paper currency of uncertain value. In that year the Bank of England, whose department of issue was not then separated from its department of banking, gave advances to Government, in return for which it was relieved of immediate obligation to pay gold to the holders of its notes. As long as the issues were moderate, the notes kept their value; but this was a time when economical substitutes for the currency, cheques and bills and County notes, were lessening the proportion of the Bank’s notes to the total transactions of trade; and the Bank’s power of calculating the public need without the natural safety-valve of convertibility became more and more fallible; the circulation soon contained superfluous paper, which dragged down the whole currency. In these circumstances, discussions on currency gained an interest they could never have had in the abstract; and they led to measures of the most practical and permanent usefulness. Ricardo’s tract The High Price of Gold Bullion a Proof of the Depreciation of Bank-Notes (1809) prepared the way for the Bullion Committee of the House of Commons (1810), and through them for our own Bank Charter Act (1844). Malthus played a more quiet part. His chief writings on the subject of the currency were two magazine articles, one in the Edinburgh Review of February 1811,[642] and another in the Quarterly Review of April 1823.
The first treats of The Depreciation of Paper Currency, and is a review of pamphlets by the leading advocates and assailants of the principles of the Bullion Committee’s Report. The Committee had inquired into three subjects: the high price of gold bullion, the state of the currency, and the state of the foreign Exchanges. As to the first, they found that, while an ounce of standard gold was converted at the Mint into £3 17s. 10½d. (which sum was therefore the Mint price of gold bullion), the said ounce could not in the years 1806–8 be bought by the Mint for less than £4 in bank-notes, or in 1809 for less than £4 10s. The market price had risen to that extent above the Mint price, of gold bullion. As to the second, they found that guineas had gone out of circulation, and were practically replaced by small notes between £1 and £5. Finally, as to the third, they found that from the end of 1808 the Exchanges had become more and more unfavourable to England, till in 1809–10 they were with Hamburg nine, with Amsterdam seven, with Paris more than fourteen per cent. below par. After examination of witnesses and consideration of their evidence, the Committee resolved “that there is at present an excess in the paper circulation of this country, of which the most unequivocal symptom is the very high price of bullion, and next to that the low state of the Continental Exchanges; that this excess is to be ascribed to the want of a sufficient check and control in the issues of paper from the Bank of England, and originally to the suspension of cash payments, which removed the natural and true control.” The effects had been very serious, especially on the wages of common country labour (Report, p. 73); and the Committee recommend a speedy return to the principle of cash payments, whether the nation be at peace or war, though caution demands that this take place gradually, in the space of two years. It took place, not in two years, but in more than ten, namely on 1st May 1821,[643] Parliament not agreeing to the change till 1819.[644] Cobbett’s venture (to be broiled on a gridiron when the Bank paid in gold) seemed a perfectly safe one.
Both Malthus and Ricardo agreed with the Report of the Bullion Committee. Ricardo indeed is in a sense the father of it. Malthus (in the Edin. Review) speaks strongly of the bad policy and injustice of continuing the suspension, and he does not spare the Bank of England and its mischievous monopoly,[645] or the “practical men” and their narrow views.[646] Yet he finds fault with Ricardo here as elsewhere for making his statements too absolute. Malthus’ fault is in the contrary direction; he qualifies too much.[647] He thinks that Ricardo has gone too far in attributing all the movements of the Exchanges to excessive or defective currency; a purely commercial excess of imports over exports might, he thinks, cause the same effects, and even in the high price of bullion it was the commercial difficulty that began what the depreciation of currency continued. Ricardo, who replies in a long appendix,[648] answers, in substance, that in any and every case money goes from where it is cheaper to where it is dearer, and therefore from where the currency has lost value to where it has gained it. But this hardly meets the contention of Malthus, that the efficient cause, though it affects the currency, is not in all cases the currency itself, and in the case of an unequal balance of trade, however temporary, the cause of the exportation of the money is rather the superfluity of the goods in the foreign country than the deficiency of the money there;—it would be otherwise when the first cause was in the currency itself. The rest of the article contains little that is new to readers of the Political Economy, and the reference to a possible over-production is chiefly valuable as a sign of the authorship, and as showing that the views of the author were becoming fixed. The personal acquaintance of Malthus with Ricardo dates probably from the appearance of this article;[649] and they continued to discuss and correspond, in perfect friendship, till the death of Ricardo in Sept. 1823.[650]
His friendship with the Edinburgh Reviewers remained unbroken; and, when he wrote in the Quarterly Review, it was the Review not the writer that had changed. On finance, indeed, the Quarterly Review had been saved from unsoundness by Canning’s influence,[651] and an article on Tooke’s Prices need have no politics.
There can be little doubt that Thomas Tooke[652] was right in holding the difference between the Mint price and the market price of gold bullion to be the full measure of the effect of this depreciation upon prices, the rest of the increase being due to great demand with small supply, being as a rule much exaggerated and in its worst forms purely local. He pointed out that there was, as a matter of fact, no coincidence between the Bank’s contraction or extension of its issues and the fall or rise of prices in the market outside. Prices rose, for example, in 1795 and 1796, when the Bank’s circulation had been not extended but contracted to meet the commercial crisis; and in 1798, when the Bank’s issues were larger, prices actually fell to what they had been in 1793. Moreover, when some prices went up, others went down. When the prices of provisions went up in 1799 and 1800, the prices of colonial wares went down. The ruling cause (Tooke argues) was not the issue of many or few bank-notes, but scarcity and plenty, especially the plenty of a good harvest and the scarcity of a bad one. Wages in the same way fluctuated rather by the harvests than by the currency, but not by either so much as by the changes in general trade; it would not be true to say that the high or low prices produced high or low wages, but what produced the one produced the other. The recoil of the speculation that followed the Peace brought down both together; there was a glut not only of goods but of hands; and there were the discarded men of the army to swell the numbers of the unemployed. The Luddite outbreaks against machines, as taking work away from the hands, had made a notable beginning in 1812 during the war; in 1816, the year after the Peace, they began again with greater violence. The discussions of Say and Malthus on Over-production, and the reasonings in Ricardo (1817) and James Mill (1821) on Wages and the Wages Fund, are as truly commentaries on these events as the Letter of Cobbett to the Luddites[653] or the volumes of Tooke on Prices.
Malthus has adroitly used the work of Tooke to support his own economical positions. In a review in the Quarterly for April 1823[654] (pages 214 seq.) he tries to show that Mr. Tooke’s conclusions as to the high and low prices of the past thirty years prove the following general statements:—First, that values and therefore prices depend on the supply compared with the demand, and are only affected by the labour required to produce goods (i. e. by what Ricardo counts the main cause of value) so far as this labour is the main condition of their supply; second, that the supply and demand are chiefly affected by the seasons, and, of the other causes, war may limit the supply but can hardly cause a demand; third, that when demand outruns supply trade is brisk, when supply outruns demand trade is dull; and that, finally, a long-continued deficiency or a long-continued excess of this kind brings with it a fall or a rise in the value of the precious metals.[655] Malthus, however, goes further than Tooke with the Bullion Committee. Though on the bullion question the opposing parties, Bosanquet and Ricardo, seemed to him to be devoted to a preconceived theory,[656] the Report itself was “more free from this error of preconception than any work that had appeared on the subject;”[657] and he agreed with it that there had been a greater rise of prices and of wages at the end of the period of restriction, than could be explained by the bad seasons, and demand for men, and the difference between paper and gold. He is old-fashioned enough to think that even with convertibility there might be over-issue and depreciation, and speculation on a basis of paper. His reasoning on this point is hardly sound. It depends on a misapplication of the axiom that, in the case of necessaries, a very small deficiency in the supply will cause a very great increase in the price,—e. g. that wheat may rise from 100 to 200 per cent. when the deficiency of the crops is not more than 15 or 30.[658] The profits of English farmers between 1793 and 1815 must therefore have been enormous; and Malthus, though he loves agriculture above manufacture, has taken account of these high gains of individuals in judging the cause of the Agricultural Interest against the public.[659] But in connection with currency he actually speaks as if those gains were a public advantage; be does not see they were a mere transference of public wealth, not an addition to it. The farmer, he says, is obviously “able to set in motion a much greater quantity of industry than before,” at least till wages have risen. “The specific funds destined for the maintenance of labour, though diminished in quantity, are by this happy provision of nature increased in their efficiency;” labourers get more employment, and there is “a burst of prosperity to the producing classes.”[660]
This is a near approach to a worse fallacy than the Wages Fund. The archaic reasoning is the more unhappy, because the reasoner proceeds to use it in a good cause. Jean Baptiste Say[661] had taught that all increased or diminished demand depended on increased or diminished supply, and argued thence, with James Mill and Ricardo, the impossibility of general or rather universal gluts. Goods[662] being always meant to be exchanged with goods, one-half will furnish a market for the other half; and thus, as production (which gives the means of buying) is the sole source of demand (so far as demand is effective), an excess in the supply of one article merely proves a deficiency in the supply of another, and is improperly called over-production. Indeed, whereas consumption takes an article away from the market, production brings one into it, and thereby increases, pro tanto, the demand by increasing the means of buying. James Mill’s neat demonstration of this doctrine[663] would be quite conclusive if we, first of all, defined demand and supply so as to include each other, and, second, supposed general to mean universal. The reply of Malthus himself is that goods are not always exchanged for goods, but frequently, perhaps most frequently, for labour. Say rejoins that he for his part used a term (“products”) which includes both goods and services, and that the latter are always the real object of an exchange.[664] Malthus makes a better point when he accuses his opponents of treating goods as if they were mathematical symbols, instead of objects of human consumption owing their whole character to human wants.[665] But his case could be made convincing even on his opponents’ premises. Division of labour, all admitted, is limited by the extent of the market;[666] allow that the most satisfactory cure for the limitation is to widen the market, not to lessen the division of the labour—still, given the limitation of the market, the extension of the division of the labour will cause an over-production. All that Malthus maintained was that this might happen in a great many cases as well as in a few; Say went as near as he dared to the assertion that it could not happen at all.
The question of a market, again, is not a mere question of numbers but of wants. A carpet factory, for example, among a people who preferred bare floors would have no market, whatever the numbers and even the wealth of the people. Say does not do full justice to Malthus in this connection. He thinks that the author of the Essay on Population cannot consistently believe in the possibility of a great abundance of products together with a stationary number of parsimonious consumers. But Malthus had allowed that in one case, the case of food, there could be no over-production,[667] the want in that case being constant, whereas, curiously enough, Ricardo thinks that food is the one object of which there might be a glut. “If every man were to forego the use of luxuries and be intent only on accumulation, a quantity of necessaries might be produced for which there could not be any immediate consumption. Of commodities so limited in number there might undoubtedly be a universal glut, and consequently there might neither be demand for an additional quantity of such commodities nor profits on the employment of more capital. If men ceased to consume they would cease to produce. This admission does not impugn the general principle,” for there is no likelihood of such a contingency as it supposes;—there is a limit to the desire of food, but there is no limit to the desire of other good things.[668] The insatiableness of human desires is here assumed by Ricardo to be always full-grown, instead of what it is, in perhaps three-fourths of the world, an undeveloped possibility. Till we know that the possibility has become actual, we cannot take for granted that all we produce will be wanted. Malthus did not enter with sympathy or even with full intelligence into the spirit of modern trade. But he sees that large manufacture, with its complement of speculative trading, must succeed or fail precisely as it has judged rightly or judged wrongly of its markets, for it no longer, like the old English small production, waits for orders—it anticipates, woos, and coaxes them. He believes that the awakening of man’s insatiable wants will tend to secure us against both over-population and over-production, by creating a high standard of living. The taste for luxuries, whatever its positive advantages, from the educational or artistic point of view, confers at least this economical benefit.[669]
Malthus gets a similar result by applying to wages his favourite idea of the golden mean. The “funds destined to pay wages” may, he says, be increased either by high prices or by great production at low prices,—increased value without increased quantity, or increased quantity without increased value. The latter is the more secure way, but it lies on the road to “glut.” The most desirable plan is the union of the two. “There is somewhere a happy mean, where, under the actual resources of a country, both the increase of wealth and the demand for labour may be a maximum. A taste for conveniences and comforts not only tends to create a more steady demand for labour than a taste for personal services, but by cheapening manufactures and the products of foreign commerce, including many of the necessaries of the labouring classes, it actually enlarges the limits of the effectual demand for labour, and renders it for a longer time effective.”[670] If any one had urged against this, in the words of Mill, that a demand for goods is not a demand for labour, but simply gives labour a new direction, Malthus would probably have answered that the new direction was all important, because the trade begun in it might be a trade in goods more widely used, and might therefore last longer and more steadily than the old trade.
We see that in his views of this subject, expounded tediously enough, and at unnecessary length, Malthus had constant thought of the relations of production and distribution to consumption as well as to each other, for the condition of the people was always more important to him than the state of the articles concerned. But he never yielded to his feelings so far as to adopt Sismondi’s reactionary ideas on the effects of machinery on the workmen.[671] He never wrote any description of the evils of division of labour at all so strong as Adam Smith’s.[672] He goes little farther than Ricardo, who says in a well-known passage:—“The same cause which may increase the nett revenue of the country may at the same time render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the labourer,” for all the increase may possibly be devoted to fixed and not circulating capital, to machinery and buildings instead of wages.[673] Ricardo’s admission, that he was wrong in not recognizing this sooner, makes us wonder (as men were even then doing in Germany over similar confessions of their philosophers) whether his demonstrations are more accurate than ordinary reasonings. His brother economists never claimed infallibility. Adam Smith gave up his defence of Usury Laws.[674] Malthus amended his first views on population, to say nothing of the measure of value.[675] Mill gave up the Wages Fund. It was only the minor economists who proudly remained at the end where they were at the beginning. James Mill refused to follow Ricardo in allowing that food could be over-produced, and MacCulloch refused to go with him in the admission above quoted, that increase of wealth might go to fixed capital instead of wages.[676] Orthodox economy became most abstract when on the death of Ricardo in 1823 its doctrines passed into the hands of the Minor Prophets.
In the last ten years of his life Malthus made no serious change in his economical views, and approached no nearer to the Ricardians. They were years when economists and political reformers had not learned to work together so harmoniously as they were to do after his death. Huskisson’s changes in commercial policy were preparing the way in high quarters for free trade. The sliding scale of corn duties introduced in 1826 pointed on the whole in the same direction. But the agitation of the humbler classes for political freedom, made solid as it was by an appreciable progress in popular education,[677] and kept within bounds of law by the influence of Cobbett,[678] went on in a way apart; and it will be remembered how Chartism stood aloof from the Anti-Corn-Law League. A man might be an advanced economist and social reformer and a reactionary in politics. In 1824, when trades unions were for the first time allowed by law and the Factory Acts were still too imperfect to give the weak a fair chance against the strong, the “natural state of things,” free development of individual and national faculties, did not exist; and Malthus, who missed them keenly, would have been much amazed to hear that his doctrines were, like Ricardo’s, a vindication of things as they are. Not only the notorious fact of his opposition to Ricardo, but his views on commercial policy are against the notion.[679] At the Peace there were many fallacies current about wages. The new Corn Law of 1815 had inaugurated the aggressive policy of the agricultural interest, who frankly endeavoured, by forms of law, to convert an occasional scarcity into a permanent one, and keep prices at 80s. a quarter. Not a few false friends of the working man recommended him to countenance the law and let his bread be made dear, for then, said they, his wages would be made high. Many manufacturers, on the other hand, were declaring the interest of the country to be low wages, and, unto that end, cheap food and a great population. Malthus was with neither. His partial approval of the new Corn Law was no doubt based on erroneous grounds; but he held no such mistaken views of wages. His opinion, if not sufficiently obvious from his general views of population, was laid down explicitly in all his writings. He says, for example: “If a country can only be rich, by running a successful race for low wages, I should be disposed to say at once ‘Perish such riches!’”[680] “It is most desirable that the labouring classes should be well paid, for a much more important reason than any that can relate to wealth, namely, the happiness of the great mass of society.”[681] Being asked, “In a national point of view, even if it were admitted that the low rate of wages was an advantage to the capitalist, do you think it fitting that labour should be kept permanently in a state bordering on distress, to avoid the injury that might accrue to the national wealth from diminishing the rate of profit?” he answered, “I should say, by no means fitting; I consider the labouring classes as forming the largest part of the nation, and therefore that their general condition is the most important of all.”[682]
He thinks, however, that the change from low to high wages might quite possibly so reduce profits as to make trade unprofitable. We might need to sacrifice something of our commercial prosperity. He cannot rise to the conception of a society in which the entire body of workmen as consumers would be a sufficient market for the same body as producers. He cannot rid himself of the idea that a body of unproductive consumers is a social necessity, to give a stimulus to production by developing the wants which the manufactures are to satisfy. It seems easy to answer that those unproductive consumers can only pay for the manufactures by means of other products, whencesoever obtained, and there seems no reason why their producers should not obtain them.[683] If the workmen themselves had the wants and supplied them by their own labour, all the results that Malthus desires would be obtained without invidious distinctions of classes, and with distinct improvement in the condition of the workmen. His aims, at least, were good. The indispensable leisure would be secured if the hours of labour were shortened, as he desired them to be. “I have always thought and felt that many among the labouring classes in this country work too hard for their health, happiness, and intellectual improvement.”[684] The general wealth therefore, if need be, must be sacrificed to the general happiness. Factory Acts that would prevent children from labouring too young or too long[685] he thoroughly approves; though such Factory Acts as would interfere with adult labour he considers an injustice to the work-people themselves, and a hopeless interference with “the principles of competition, one of the most general principles by which the business of society is carried on.”[686] The salvation of the labouring classes must come from themselves, from their own “simultaneous resolution to work fewer hours in the day.” But trades unions, as we now know them, had not then come into being; and he talks of a future improvement of the working classes in knowledge, comfort, and self-restraint,[687] with much hesitation.
We have seen that the economics of Malthus, whether in relation to the landlords, the employers, or the workmen, are by no means identical with the economics of Ricardo and his school, which have been the ruling and orthodox doctrine for the first half of the nineteenth century.
It would be neither complimentary nor true to ascribe the difference to the logic of sentiment; but it is true that the acute sensitiveness of Malthus to the evils of poverty kept constantly before him large classes of facts which Ricardo seemed willing to forget, and the path that he took, though long ago obscured and forgotten, led him in some important points away from laissez faire to doctrines of our own day, in which society acting through its Government is allowed an originative and not merely a regulative action in the matter of industry and wealth.
Resuming the thread of the essay, we shall find that the relation of society to its destitute poor is not to Malthus, as to Ricardo, a question of taxation and finance, but a problem of morals and politics, which could only be solved by a clear view of the relation of the citizen to the commonwealth.