This résumé gives but a very imperfect idea of the vast complexities and difficulties involved in tracing the growth of revenues—an evolution which the Physiocrats followed with the enthusiasm of children. They imagined that it was all very real.[44] The rediscovery of their millions intoxicated them, but, like many of the mathematical economists of to-day, they forgot that at the end of their calculations they only had what they had assumed at the beginning. It is very evident that the table proves nothing as to the essential point in their system, namely, whether there really exist a productive and a sterile class.[45]
The most interesting thing in the Physiocratic scheme of distribution is not the particular demonstration which they gave of it, but the emphasis which they laid upon the fact of the circulation of wealth taking place in accordance with certain laws, and the way in which the revenue of each class was determined by this circulation.
The singular position which the proprietors hold in this tripartite division of society is one of the most curious features of the system.
Anyone examining the table in a non-Physiocratic fashion, but simply viewing it in the modern spirit, must at once feel surprised and disappointed to find that the class which enjoys two-fifths of the national revenue does nothing in return for it. We should not have been surprised if such glaring parasitism had given to the work of the Physiocrats a distinctly socialistic tone. But they were quite impervious to all such ideas. They never appreciated the weakness of the landowners’ position, and they always treated them with the greatest reverence. The epithet “sterile” is applied, not to them, but to manufacturers and artisans! Property is the foundation-stone of the “natural order.” The proprietors have been entrusted with the task of supplying the staff of life, and are endued with a kind of priestly sacredness. It is from their hands that all of us receive the elements of nutrition. It is a “divine” institution—the word is there.[46] Such idolatry needs some explanation.
One might have expected—even from their own point of view—that the premier position would have been given to the class which they termed productive, i.e. to the cultivators of the soil, who were mostly farmers and métayers. The land was not of their making, it is true. They had simply received it from the proprietors. This latter class takes precedence because God has willed that it should be the first dispenser of all wealth.[47]
There is no need to insist on this strange aberration which led them to look for the creator of the land and its products, not amid the cultivators of the soil, but among the idlers.[48] Such was the logical conclusion of their argument. We must also remember that the Physiocrats failed to realise the inherent dignity of all true labour simply because it was not the creator of wealth. This applied both to the agricultural labourer and the industrial worker, and though the former alone was considered productive it was because he was working in co-operation with nature. It was nature that produced the wealth and not the worker.
Something must also be attributed to their environment. Knowing only feudal society, with its economic and political activities governed and directed by idle proprietors, they suffered from an illusion as to the necessity for landed property similar to that which led Aristotle to defend the institution of slavery.[49]
Although they failed to foresee the criticisms that would be levelled against the institution of private property, they were very assiduous—especially the Abbé Baudeau—in seeking an explanation of its origin and a justification of its existence. The reasons which they advanced are more worthy of quotation than almost any argument that has since been employed by conservative economists.
The most solid argument, in their opinion—at least the one that was most frequently used—is that these proprietors are either the men who cleared and drained the land or else their rightful descendants. They have incurred or they are incurring expenditure in clearing the land, enclosing it and building upon it—what the Physiocrats call the avances foncières.[50] They never get their revenues through some one else as the manufacturers do, and they are anything but parasites. Their portion is optimo jure, in virtue of a right prior and superior even to that of the cultivators, for although the cultivators help to make the product, the proprietors help to make the land. The three social classes of the Physiocratic scheme may be likened to three persons who get their water from the same well. It is drawn from the well by members of the productive class in bucketfuls, which are passed on to the proprietors, but the latter class gives nothing in return for it, for the well is of their making. At a respectable distance comes the sterile class, obliged to buy water in exchange for its labour.[51]
The Physiocrats failed to notice the contradiction involved in this. If the revenue which the proprietor draws represents the remuneration for his outlay and the return for his expenditure it is no longer a gift of nature, and the net product vanishes, for, by definition, it represented what was left of the gross product after paying all initial expenses—the excess over cost of production. If we accept this explanation of the facts there is no longer any surplus to dispose of. It is as capitalists pure and simple and not as the representatives of God that proprietors obtain their rents.