fawned upon, and soon workers will be reduced by this to the situation of slaves: responsible men will be ashamed to take up their cause publicly, for how will they be able to introduce a few sensible ideas in the midst of such bland protestations?
But I refuse to adopt this cowardly indifference that is not justified by the affectation that triggers it!
Workers, your situation is strange! You are being robbed, as I will shortly be proving … No, I withdraw that word. Let us banish from our discourse all violent and perhaps misleading expressions, seeing that plunder, clad in the sophisms that conceal it, is carried out, we are expected to believe, against the will of the plunderer and with the consent of those being plundered. But when all is said and done, you are being robbed of the just remuneration for your work and nobody is concerned with achieving justice for you. Oh! If all that was needed to console you were noisy calls for philanthropy, impotent charity, and degrading alms, and if high-sounding words like organization, communism, and phalanstery3 were enough, you would have your fill. But
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nobody thinks of ensuring that justice, simple justice, is rendered to you. And yet, would it not be just for you, when you have been paid your meager salary following a long and hard day’s work, to be able to exchange it for as many forms of satisfaction as you can obtain voluntarily from any man anywhere in the world?
One day, perhaps, I too will speak to you about association and organization, and we will then see what you can expect from these illusions that have led you down the garden path.4
In the meantime, let us see whether people are doing you an injustice when they pass laws which determine from whom you are permitted to buy the things you need, such as bread, meat, linen, and cloth, and, as it were, at what artificial price you will have to pay for them.
Is it true that protection, which, it is admitted, makes you to pay a high price for everything and thus causes you harm, raises your rate of pay proportionally?
On what do rates of pay depend?
One of your people has said this forcefully: “When two workers pursue an employer, earnings decrease; when two employers pursue one worker, they rise.”5
Allow me, in short, to use this statement, which is more scientific but may be less clear: “Rates of pay depend on the ratio of the supply of and the demand for labor.”
Well, on what does the supply of labor depend?
On the number in the marketplace, and on this initial element, protection has no effect.
On what does the demand for labor depend?
On the national capital available. But has the law that says: “We will no longer receive such and such a product from abroad, we will manufacture
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it internally,” increased this capital? Not in the slightest. The law has withdrawn the product from one area to place it in another, but it has not increased the product by one obole. Therefore the law does not increase the demand for labor.
A factory is shown off with pride. Has it been established and maintained with capital from the moon? No, capital has had to be withdrawn either from agriculture, shipping, or the wine-producing industry. And this is why, while there are more workers in our mineshafts and in the suburbs of our manufacturing towns since protectionist duties became law, there are fewer sailors in our ports and fewer workers and wine producers in our fields and hills.
I could continue on this theme for a long time. I prefer to try to make you understand my thought with this example.
A farmer had twenty arpents of land,6 which he developed, with a capital of 10,000 francs. He divided his domain into four parts and established the following rotation: first, corn; second, wheat; third, clover; fourth, rye. He and his family needed only a small part of the grain, meat, and milk that the farm produced, and he sold the excess to purchase oil, flax, wine, etc. All of his capital was spent each year on wages and other payments owed to neighboring workers. This capital was returned through sales and even increased from one year to the next, and our farmer, knowing full well that capital produces nothing unless it is put to use, made the working class benefit from these annual surpluses which he used for fencing, land clearance, and improvements to his farm equipment and buildings. He even invested some savings with the banker in the neighboring town, who did not leave the money idle in his coffers but lent it to shipowners and entrepreneurs carrying out useful work, so that it continued to generate wages.
However, the farmer died, and his son, as soon as he had control of the inheritance, said: “It must be confessed that my father was a fool all his life. He purchased oil and thus paid tribute to Provence while our land could at a stretch grow olive trees. He bought wine, flax, and oranges and paid tribute to Brittany, the Médoc, and the islands of Hyères, while vines, jute, and orange trees could, more or less, provide a small crop on our land.7 He paid tribute to millers and weavers while our domestic servants could well weave
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our linen and grind our wheat between two stones. He ruined himself, and in addition he had foreigners earning the wages that were so easy for him to spread around him.”
Using this reasoning, our scatterbrain changed the rotation of the domain. He divided it into twenty small strips of land. On one he grew olive trees, on another mulberry trees, on a third flax, on a fourth vines, on a fifth wheat, etc., etc. He thus managed to provide his family with everything and become independent. He took nothing from general circulation and, it is true, paid nothing into it either. Was he any richer? No, for the land was not suitable for growing vines, the climate was not conducive to the prospering of olive trees, and in the end the family was less well provided with these things than at the time when his father obtained them through trade.
As for the workers, there was no more work for them than in the past. There were indeed five times as many strips to cultivate, but they were five times smaller. Oil was produced but less wheat; flax was no longer purchased, but rye was no longer sold. Besides, the farmer could not pay more than his capital in salaries, and his capital, far from increasing through the new distribution of land, decreased constantly. The majority of it was tied up in buildings and countless items of equipment that were essential for someone who wanted to do everything. As a result, the supply of labor remained the same, but the means to pay these workers declined and there was of necessity a decrease in wages.
That is a picture of what happens in a nation that isolates itself through a prohibitionist regime. It increases the number of its industries, I know, but it decreases their size; it provides itself, so to say, with a rotation of industries8 that is more complicated but not more fruitful, far from it, since the same capital and workforce have to attack the job in the face of greater natural difficulties. Fixed capital absorbs a greater portion of working capital, that is to say, a greater part of the funds intended for wages. What remains of the fund for wages may well be diversified, but that does not increase the total amount. It is like the water in a lake that people thought they had made more abundant because, having been put into many reservoirs, it touches the ground on more spots and offers a greater surface to the sun. They do not
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understand that it is precisely for this reason that it is absorbed, evaporated, and lost more quickly.
With a given amount of capital and labor, a quantity of output is created that decreases in proportion to the number of obstacles it encounters. There is no doubt that, where barriers to international trade in each country force this capital and labor to overcome greater difficulties of climate and temperature, the general result is that fewer products are created or, which comes to the same thing, fewer needs of people are satisfied. Well, workers, if there is a general decrease in the number of needs satisfied, how can your share increase? I ask you, would those who are rich, those who make the law, have arranged things so that not only would they suffer their fair share of the total reduction in the needs that can be satisfied, but that even their already reduced portion would decrease still further, they say, by everything