Harmonies of Political Economy / Translated from the Third French Edition, with a Notice of the Life and Writings of the Author

by Frédéric Bastiat

As regards the soil, observe, this man would be placed in exactly the same situation which mankind at large occupied at the beginning. Now I fear not to be contradicted when I assert that this man would not produce a hectolitre of corn in two years: Ratio 15 to 600.

And now we can measure the progress which has been made. As regards corn—and despite his being obliged to pay rent for his land, interest for his capital, and hire for his tools—or rather because he pays them—a labourer now obtains with 15 days’ work what he would formerly have had difficulty in procuring with 600 days’ work. The value of corn, then, measured by unskilled labour, has fallen from 600 to 15, or from 40 to 1. A hectolitre of corn has for man the same utility it had the day after the deluge—it contains the same quantity of alimentary substance—it satisfies the same want, and in the same degree. It constitutes an equal amount of real wealth—it does not constitute an equal amount of relative wealth. Its production has been transferred in a great measure to the charge of nature. It is obtained with less human effort. It renders less service in passing from hand to hand, it has less value. In a word, it has become gratuitous—not absolutely, but in the proportion of 40 to 1.

And not only has it become gratuitous—it has become common to the same extent. For it is not to the profit of the person who produces the corn that 39-40ths of the effort have been annihilated, but to the advantage of the consumer, whatever be the kind of labour to which he devotes himself.

Clothing.—We have here again the same phenomenon. A common day-labourer enters one of the warehouses at the Marais,[54] and there obtains clothing corresponding to twenty days of his labour, which we suppose to be unskilled. Were he to attempt to make [p231] this clothing himself, his whole life would be insufficient. Had he desired to obtain the same clothing in the time of Henri Quatre, it would have cost him three or four hundred days’ work. What then has become of this difference in the value of these stuffs in relation to the quantity of unskilled labour? It has been annihilated, because the gratuitous forces of nature now perform a great portion of the work, and it has been annihilated to the advantage of mankind at large.

For we must not fail to remark here, that every man owes his neighbour a service equivalent to what he has received from him. If, then, the art of the weaver had made no progress, if weaving were not executed in part by gratuitous forces, the weaver would still be occupied two or three hundred days in fabricating these stuffs, and our workman would require to give him two or three hundred days’ work in order to obtain the clothing he wants. And since the weaver cannot succeed, with all his wish to do so in obtaining two or three hundred days’ labour in recompense for the intervention of gratuitous forces, and for the progress achieved, we are warranted in saving that this progress has been effected to the advantage of the purchaser or consumer, and that it is a gain to society at large.

Conveyance.—Prior to all progress, when the human race, like our day-labourer, was obliged to make use of primitive and unskilled labour, if a man had desired to have a load of a hundredweight transported from Paris to Bayonne, he would have had only this alternative, either to take the load on his own shoulders, and perform the work himself, travelling over hill and dale, which would have required a year’s labour, or else to ask some one to perform this rough piece of work for him; and as, by hypothesis, the person who undertook this work would have to employ the same means and the same time, he would undoubtedly demand a remuneration equal to a year’s labour. At that period, then, the value of unskilled labour being one, that of transport was 300 for the weight of a cwt. and a distance of 200 leagues.

But things are changed now. In fact there is no workman in Paris who cannot obtain the same result by the sacrifice of two days’ labour. The alternative indeed is still the same. He must either do the work himself, or get others to do it for him by remunerating them. If our day-labourer perform it himself, it will still cost him a year of fatigue; but if he applies to men who make it their business, he will find twenty carriers to do what he wants for three or four francs, that is to say, for the equivalent of two days’ unskilled labour. Thus the value of such labour being [p232] represented by one, that of transport, which was represented by 300, is now reduced to two.

In what way has this astonishing revolution been brought about? Ages have been required to accomplish it. Animals have been trained, mountains have been pierced, valleys have been filled up, bridges have been thrown across rivers, sledges and afterwards wheeled carriages have been invented, obstacles, which give rise to labour, services, value, have been removed; in short, we have succeeded in accomplishing, with labour equal to two, what our remote ancestors would have effected only by labour equal to 300. This progress has been realized by men who had no thought but for their own interests. And yet, who profits by it now? Our poor day-labourer, and with him society at large.

Let no one say that this is not Community. I say that it is Community in the strictest sense of the word. At the outset the satisfaction in question was, in the estimation of all, the equivalent of 300 days’ unskilled labour, or a proportionally smaller amount of skilled labour. Now 298 parts of this labour out of 300 are performed by nature, and mankind are exonerated to a corresponding extent. Now, evidently all men are in exactly the same situation as regards the obstacles which have been removed, the distance which has been wiped out, the fatigue which has been obviated, the value which has been annihilated, since all obtain the result without having to pay for it. What they pay for is the human effort which remains still to be made, as compared with and measured by two days’ work of an unskilled labourer. In other words, the man who has not himself effected this improvement, and who has only muscular force to offer in exchange, has still to give two days’ labour to secure the satisfaction he wishes to obtain. All other men can obtain it with a smaller sacrifice of labour. The Paris lawyer, earning 30,000 francs a year, can obtain it for a twenty-fifth part of a day’s labour, etc.,—by which we see that all men are equal as regards the value annihilated, and that the inequality is restrained within the limits of the portion of value which survives the change, that is, within the domain of Property.

Economical science labours under a disadvantage in being obliged to have recourse to hypothetical cases. The reader is taught to believe that the phenomena which we wish to describe are to be discovered only in special cases, adduced for the sake of illustration. But it is evident that what we have said of corn, clothing, and means of transport, is true of everything else. When an author generalizes, it is for the reader to particularize; and [p233] when the former devotes himself to cold and forbidding analysis, the latter may at least indulge in the pleasures of synthesis.