(besides that they are not so fit for their business), hardly one in two ever lives in some places of the East Indies, which often would prove great charge as well as disappointment to them. The second is, that the large sums so often distributed among those sailors, are by this means made immediately to circulate throughout the country, from whence, by heavy excises, and other impositions, the greatest part of it is soon drawn back into the public treasure.
To convince the champions for national frugality by another argument, that what they urge is impracticable, we will suppose that I am mistaken in every thing which in Remark, l. 180, I have said in behalf of luxury, and the necessity of it to maintain trade: after that let us examine what a general frugality, if it was by art and management to be forced upon people whether they have occasion for it or not, would produce in such a nation as ours. We will grant, then, that all the people in Great Britain shall consume but four-fifths of what they do now, and so lay by one-fifth part of their income; I shall not speak of what influence this would have upon almost every trade, as well as the farmer, the grazier, and the landlord, but favourably suppose (what is yet impossible), that the same work shall be done, and consequently the same handicrafts be employed as there are now. The consequence would be, that unless money should all at once fall prodigiously in value, and every thing else, contrary to reason, grow very dear, at the five years end all the working people, and the poorest of labourers (for I would not meddle with any of the rest), would be worth in ready cash as much as they now spend in a whole year; which, by the bye, would be more money than ever the nation had at once.
Let us now, overjoyed with this increase of wealth, take a view of the condition the working people would be in, and, reasoning from experience, and what we daily observe of them, judge what their behaviour would be in such a case. Every body knows that there is a vast number of journeymen weavers, tailors, clothworkers, and twenty other handicrafts, who, if by four days labour in a week they can maintain themselves, will hardly be persuaded to work the fifth; and that there are thousands of labouring men of all sorts, who will, though they can hardly subsist, put themselves to fifty inconveniences, disoblige their masters, pinch their bellies, and run in debt to make holidays. When men show such an extraordinary proclivity to idleness and pleasure, what reason have we to think that they would ever work, unless they were obliged to it by immediate necessity? When we see an artificer that cannot be drove to his work before Tuesday, because the Monday morning he has two shillings left of his last week’s pay; why should we imagine he would go to it at all, if he had fifteen or twenty pounds in his pocket?
What would, at this rate, become of our manufactures? If the merchant would send cloth abroad, he must make it himself, for the clothier cannot get one man out of twelve that used to work for him. If what I speak of was only to befal the journeymen shoemakers, and nobody else, in less than a twelvemonth, half of us would go barefoot. The chief and most pressing use there is for money in a nation, is to pay the labour of the poor, and when there is a real scarcity of it, those who have a great many workmen to pay, will always feel it first; yet notwithstanding this great necessity of coin, it would be easier, where property was well secured, to live without money, than without poor; for who would do the work? For this reason the quantity of circulating coin in a country, ought always to be proportioned to the number of hands that are employed; and the wages of labourers to the price of provisions. From whence it is demonstrable, that whatever procures plenty, makes labourers cheap, where the poor are well managed; who as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get.
All men, as Sir William Temple observes very well, are more prone to ease and pleasure than they are to labour, when they are not prompted to it by pride and avarice, and those that get their living by their daily labour, are seldom powerfully influenced by either: so that they have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing, then, that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money; for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy.
A man would be laughed at by most people, who should maintain that too much money could undo a nation: yet this has been the fate of Spain; to this the learned Don Diego Savedra ascribes the ruin of his country. The fruits of the earth in former ages had made Spain so rich, that King Lewis XI. of France being come to the court of Toledo, was astonished at its splendour, and said, that he had never seen any thing to be compared to it, either in Europe or Asia; he that in his travels to the Holy Land had run through every province of them. In the kingdom of Castile alone (if we may believe some writers), there were for the holy war, from all parts of the world got together one hundred thousand foot, ten thousand horse, and sixty thousand carriages for baggage, which Alonso III. maintained at his own charge, and paid every day, as well soldiers as officers and princes, every one according to his rank and dignity: nay, down to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (who equipped Columbus), and some time after, Spain was a fertile country, where trade and manufactures flourished, and had a knowing industrious people to boast of. But as soon as that mighty treasure, that was obtained with more hazard and cruelty than the world until then had known, and which to come at, by the Spaniard’s own confession, had cost the lives of twenty millions of Indians; as soon, I say, as that ocean of treasure came rolling in upon them, it took away their senses, and their industry forsook them. The farmer left his plough, the mechanic his tools, the merchant his compting-house, and every body scorning to work, took his pleasure and turned gentleman. They thought they had reason to value themselves above all their neighbours, and now nothing but the conquest of the world would serve them.
The consequence of this has been, that other nations have supplied what their own sloth and pride denied them; and when every body saw, that notwithstanding all the prohibitions the government could make against the exportation of bullion, the Spaniard would part with his money, and bring it you aboard himself at the hazard of his neck, all the world endeavoured to work for Spain. Gold and silver being by this means yearly divided and shared among all the trading countries, have made all things dear, and most nations of Europe industrious, except their owners, who, ever since their mighty acquisitions, sit with their arms across, and wait every year with impatience and anxiety, the arrival of their revenues from abroad, to pay others for what they have spent already: and thus by too much money, the making of colonies and other mismanagements, of which it was the occasion, Spain is, from a fruitful and well-peopled country, with all its mighty titles and possessions, made a barren and empty thoroughfare through which gold and silver pass from America to the rest of the world; and the nation, from a rich, acute, diligent, and laborious, become a slow, idle, proud, and beggarly people: So much for Spain. The next country where money is called the product, is Portugal, and the figure which that kingdom with all its gold makes in Europe, I think is not much to be envied.
The great art then to make a nation happy, and what we call flourishing, consists in giving every body an opportunity of being employed; which to compass, let a government’s first care be to promote as great a variety of manufactures, arts, and handicrafts, as human wit can invent; and the second, to encourage agriculture and fishery in all their branches, that the whole earth may be forced to exert itself as well as man; for as the one is an infallible maxim to draw vast multitudes of people into a nation, so the other is the only method to maintain them.
It is from this policy, and not the trifling regulations of lavishness and frugality (which will ever take their own course, according to the circumstances of the people), that the greatness and felicity of nations must be expected; for let the value of gold and silver either rise or fall, the enjoyment of all societies will ever depend upon the fruits of the earth, and the labour of the people; both which joined together are a more certain, a more inexhaustible, and a more real treasure, than the gold of Brazil, or the silver of Potosi.
Line 321. No honour now, &c.
Honour, in its figurative sense, is a chimera without truth or being, an invention of moralists and politicians,