[696] “It is a good thing to have a number of inferior places in society to which families that conduct themselves badly are liable to fall, and from which they can rise only by dint of good behaviour. Want is just such a hell.” (Dunoyer, La Liberté du Travail, p. 409.)
[697] See the discussion of the political doctrine of the Physiocrats, pp. 33 et seq.
[698] Editions of the same work appeared between 1825 and 1830; but the volume was much smaller and had a different title. Dunoyer will again engage our attention towards the end of this chapter. Cf. Villey, L’Œuvre économique de Dunoyer (Paris, 1899).
[699] Henry Charles Carey was born at Philadelphia in 1793, and died in 1879. Up to the age of forty-two he followed the profession of a publisher, retiring in 1835 to devote himself to economic studies. The three volumes of his Principles of Political Economy were issued in 1837, 1838, and 1840 respectively. In 1848 appeared The Past, the Present, and the Future, which contains his theory of rent. In 1850 his Harmony of Interests, Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial, was published, and in 1858-59 his Principles of Social Science.
These dates possess some importance. At the time of the publication of the Harmonies in 1850 Carey wrote a letter to the Journal des Économistes accusing Bastiat of plagiarism. Bastiat, who was already on the point of death, wrote to the same paper to defend himself. He admitted that he had read Carey’s first book, and excuses himself for not making any reference to it on the ground that Carey had said so many uncomplimentary things about the French that he hesitated to recommend his work. Several foreign economists have since made the assertion that Bastiat merely copied Carey, but this is a gross exaggeration. Coincidence is a common feature in literary and scientific history. We have quite a recent instance in the simultaneous appearance of the utility theory in England and France.
[700] Frédéric Bastiat, born in 1801 near Bayonne, belonged to a family of fairly wealthy merchants, and he himself became in turn a merchant, a farmer in the Landes district, a justice of the peace, a councillor, and finally a deputy in the Constituent Assembly of 1848. He made little impression in the Assembly; but he scarcely had time to become known there before his health gave way. He died at Rome in 1850, at the age of forty-nine.
Brief as was Bastiat’s life, his literary career was shorter still. It lasted just six years. His first article appeared in the Journal des Économistes in 1844. His one book, appropriately called Les Harmonies économiques, written in 1849, remains a fragment. In the meantime he published his Petits Pamphlets and his Sophismes, which were aimed at Protection and socialism. He was very anxious to organise a French Free Trade League on the lines of that which won such triumphs in England under the guidance of Cobden, but he did not succeed.
His life was that of the publicist rather than the scholar. He was not a bookworm, although he had read Say before he was nineteen, and Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac soon afterwards. He was very enthusiastic about the merits of Franklin’s works, and Franklin’s influence upon his writings, even upon his personal appearance and behaviour, is very marked. “With his long hair, his small cap, his long frock-coat, and his large umbrella, he seemed for all the world like a rustic on a visit to town.” (Molinari in the Journal des Économistes, February 1851.)
These biographical details should not be lost sight of, especially by those who accuse him of lacking scientific culture and of being more of a journalist than an economist.
Despite the fact that he has been severely judged by foreign economists, he is still very popular in France. His wit is a little coarse, his irony somewhat blunt, and his discourses are perhaps too superficial, but his moderation, his good sense, and his lucidity leave an indelible impression on the mind. And we are by no means certain that the Harmonies and the Pamphlets are not still the best books that a young student of political economy can possibly read. Moreover, we shall find by and by that the purely scientific part of his work is by no means negligible.