Sismondi defended his point of view against his three critics in two articles reprinted at the end of the second edition of the Nouveaux Principes.
[384] “The accumulation of wealth in abstracto is not the aim of government, but the participation by all its citizens in the pleasures of life which the wealth represents. Wealth and population in the abstract are no indication of a country’s prosperity: they must in some way be related to one another before being employed as the basis of comparison.” (Nouveaux Principes, vol i, p. 9.)
[385] Nouveaux Principes, vol. ii, p. 250. Elsewhere he adds: “Should the Government ever propose to further the interests of one class at the expense of another that class should certainly be the workers.” (Ibid., vol. i, p. 372.)
[386] Cours complet, vol. ii, p. 551.
[387] Nouveaux Principes, vol. i, p. 333.
[388] Ibid., p. 336.
[389] Nouveaux Principes, vol. i, pp. 220-221.
[390] The unanimity is not quite absolute, however. Ricardo in the third edition of his Principles added a chapter on machinery in which he admitted that he was mistaken in the belief that machines after a short period always proved favourable to the interests of the workers. He recognised that the worker might suffer, for though the machine increases the net product of industry it frequently diminishes the total product. He seemed to think that this might happen frequently, but in reality it is quite exceptional.
[391] We may here recall the celebrated winch argument. Suppose, says Sismondi, that England succeeded in tilling her fields and doing all the work of her towns by means of steam power, so that her total products and revenue remain the same as they are to-day, though her population is only equal to that of the republic of Geneva. Is she to be regarded as being richer and more prosperous? Ricardo would reply in the affirmative. Wealth is everything, men nothing. Really, then, a single king, dwelling alone on the island, by merely turning a winch might conceivably automatically perform all the work done in England to-day. One can only reply to this argument by saying that long before arriving at this state the community itself would have devised some machinery for distributing the product between all its members. To suppose that a portion of the population dies of hunger through want of employment while the other part continues to manufacture the same quantity of goods as before is sufficiently contradictory. But at bottom, disregarding the paradoxical form given it by Sismondi, the question set by him is insoluble. What is the best equilibrium between production and population? Are we to prefer a population rapidly increasing in numbers, but making no advance in wealth, to a population which is stationary or even decreasing, but rapidly advancing in wealth? Everyone is free to choose for himself. Science gives us no criterion.
[392] “We have said elsewhere, but think it essential to repeat it, that it is not the perfection of machinery that is the real calamity, but the unjust distribution of the goods produced. The more we are able to increase the quantity of goods produced with a given quantity of labour, the more ought we to increase our comforts or our leisure. Were the worker his own master, after accomplishing in two hours with a machine a task which formerly took him twelve he would then desist from toil, unless he had some new need or were able to make use of a larger amount of products. It is our present organisation and the workman’s servitude that has forced him to work not less but more hours, at the same wage, and this despite the fact that machinery has increased his productive powers.” (Nouveaux Principes, vol. ii, p. 318.) In this passage we have Sismondi’s real opinion on the subject of machinery most clearly expressed.