Bastiat,[700] both at home and abroad, has always been regarded as the very incarnation of bourgeois political economy. Proudhon, Lassalle in his famous pamphlet Bastiat Schulze-Delitzsch, Cairnes, Sidgwick, Marshall, and Böhm-Bawerk all think of him as the advocate of the existing order. None of them considers him a scientific writer. They treat his writings as a kind of amplification of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, where apologues take the place of demonstration and a much-vaunted transparency of style is simply due to absence of thought.
Bastiat deserves a juster estimate. The man who wrote that “if capital merely exists for the advantage of the capitalist I am prepared to become a socialist,” or who declared that “one important service that still requires to be done for political economy is to write the history of spoliation,” was not a mere well-to-do bourgeois. It is true that he carried the “isms” of the French school to absurd lengths. An unkind fate decreed that his contribution should mark the culminating-point of the doctrine, to be followed by the inevitable reaction. To the force of that reaction he had to bow, and his whole work was demolished.
Bastiat’s arguments against socialism are somewhat antiquated, but so are the peculiar forms of socialist organisation which he had in view when writing. This is not true of the arguments dealing with Protection. These have not been entirely useless. Though they failed to check the policy of Protection, they definitely invalidated some of its arguments. If modern Protectionists no longer speak of the “inundation of a country” or of an “invasion of foreign goods,” and if the old and celebrated argument concerning national labour is less frequently invoked as a kind of final appeal, we too often forget that all this is due to the small but admirable pamphlets written by Bastiat. Such were The Petition of the Candle-makers and The Complaint of the Left Hand against the Right. No one could more scornfully show the laughable inconsistency of tunnelling the mountains which divide countries, with a view to facilitating exchange, while at the same time setting up a customs barrier at each end; or expose the patent contradiction involved in guaranteeing a minimum revenue to the landed proprietors and capitalists by the establishment of protective rights, while refusing a minimum wage to the worker. No one has better emphasised the difficulty of justifying an import duty as compared with an ordinary tax, for a tax is levied upon the individual for the benefit of all, while a duty is levied upon all for the benefit of the few.
He has not been quite so happy in his exposition of individualism. The problem has been over-simplified: individual and international exchange have been treated as if they were on all fours. Analogies, more amusing than solid, are employed to show that the advantages of international trade are greater if a country has an unfavourable balance against it, and that international exchange benefits poor countries most.[701]
The thesis of the constructive portion of his work is as follows: “The general laws of the social world are in harmony with one another, and in every way tend to the perfection of humanity.” A priori, however, are we not confronted with rank disorder everywhere? To that he replies in his well-known apologue, “Things are not what they seem,” pointing out that we cannot always trust what we see, and that what is not seen is very often true. Apparent antagonisms on closer view often reveal harmonious elements. But man’s freedom sometimes breaks the harmony and destroys the liberty of others. Especially is this the case with spoliation, which Bastiat never attempts to justify, but denounces whenever he has the chance. But around man and within him are diverse forces which must lead him the way of the good, deviate he never so often, and which will finally and automatically re-establish the harmony. “My belief is that evil, far from being antagonistic to the good, in some mysterious way promotes it, while the good can never end in evil. In the final reckoning the good must surely triumph.”[702]
It is quite evident that this doctrine goes far beyond the conception of “natural laws,” and implies a belief in a Providential order. Bastiat never shrinks from this position. He never misses an opportunity of declaring his faith in language much clearer than that of the Physiocrats. “God,” he writes, “has placed within each individual an irresistible impulse towards the good, and a never-failing light which enables him to discern it.”[703]
Auguste Comte has delivered an eloquent protest against the vain and irrational disposition to think that only the spontaneous can be regarded as conforming to the “order” of nature. Were this the case any practical difficulty “that presented itself in the course of industrial development could only be met with a kind of solemn resignation under the express sanction of political economy.”[704]
Even as an exposition of the Providential order Bastiat’s faith is not easy to justify. It by no means agrees with the Christian teaching on the point. For we cannot forget that although Scripture teaches us that both man and nature were declared good when first created by God, it also teaches that both have been entirely perverted by man’s iniquity, and that never will they become good of their own accord, since there is no natural means of salvation.[705] Christian people are exhorted to kill the natural man within them and to foster the growth of the new man. Christianity promises a new heaven and a new earth—an infinitely more revolutionary doctrine than that of the economic Optimists. Bastiat’s God is, after all, just “Le Dieu des bonnes gens” whose praises are sung by Béranger.
What are the facts of this pre-established harmony? What are its laws, and where are they operative? They are in evidence everywhere, Bastiat thinks—in value and exchange, in the institution of private property, in competition, production and consumption, etc. We shall content ourselves with a consideration of the circumstances under which Bastiat thought it was most clearly seen.