Cæteris paribus, there are larger profits in those trades which are attended with danger than in those which are not so; in those which require a lengthened apprenticeship, and expensive training long unremunerated—which imply the patient exercise of certain domestic virtues—than in those where mere muscular exertion is sufficient; in professions which demand a cultivated mind and refined taste, than in trades which require mere brute force. Is not all this just? Now, Competition establishes necessarily these distinctions—and society has no need of the assistance of Fourier or Louis Blanc in the matter.
Of all these circumstances, that which operates in the greatest number of cases is the inequality of instruction. Now here, as everywhere else, we find Competition exerting its twofold action, levelling classes, and elevating society.
If we suppose society to be composed of two layers or strata, placed one above another, in one of which the intelligent principle prevails, and in the other the principle of brute force; and if we study the natural relations of these two layers, we shall easily discover a force of attraction in the one, and a force of aspiration in the other, which co-operate towards their fusion. The very inequality [p308] of profits breathes into the inferior ranks an inextinguishable ardour to mount to the region of ease and leisure; and this ardour is seconded by the superior knowledge which distinguishes the higher classes. The methods of teaching are improved; books fall in price; instruction is acquired in less time, and at a smaller cost; science, formerly monopolized by a class or a caste, and veiled in a dead language, or sealed up in hieroglyphics, is written and printed in the vulgar tongue; it pervades the atmosphere, if I may use the expression, and is breathed as freely as the air of heaven.
Nor is this all. At the same time that an education more universal and more equal brings the two classes of society into closer approximation, some very important economic phenomena, which are connected with the great law of Competition, come to aid and accelerate their fusion. The progress of the mechanical arts diminishes continually the proportion of manual labour. The division of labour, by simplifying and separating each of the operations which concur in a productive result, brings within the reach of all, branches of industry which could formerly be engaged in only by a few. Moreover, a great many employments which required at the outset much knowledge and varied acquirements, fall, by the mere lapse of time, into routine, and come within the sphere of action of classes generally the least instructed, as has happened in the case of agriculture. Agricultural processes, which in ancient times procured to their discoverers the honours of an apotheosis, are now inherited and almost monopolized by the rudest of men; and to such a degree, that this important branch of human industry is, so to speak, entirely withdrawn from the well-educated classes.
From the preceding observations it is possible that a false conclusion may be drawn. It may be said—“We perceive, indeed, that Competition lowers remuneration in all countries, in all departments of industry, in all ranks, and levels, by reducing, it; but in that case the wages of unskilled labour, of physical exertion, must become the type, the standard, of all remuneration.”
I must have been misunderstood, if you have not perceived that Competition, which labours to bring down all excessive remuneration towards an average more and more uniform, raises necessarily this average. I grant that it pinches men in their capacity of producers, but in so doing it ameliorates the condition of the human race in the only way in which it can reasonably be elevated, namely, by an increase of material prosperity, ease, leisure, moral and intellectual improvement, in a word, by enlarging consumption. [p309]
Will it be said that, in point of fact, mankind have not made the progress that this theory seems to imply?
I answer, in the first place, that in modern society Competition is far from occupying the sphere of its natural action. Our laws run counter to it, at least in as great a degree as they favour its action; and when it is asked whether the inequality of conditions is owing to its presence or its absence, it is sufficient to look at the men who make the greatest figure among us, and dazzle us by the display of their scandalous wealth, in order to assure ourselves that inequality, so far as it is artificial and unjust, has for foundation conquests, monopolies, restrictions, privileged offices, functions, and places, ministerial trafficking, public borrowing,—all things with which Competition has nothing to do.
Moreover, I believe we have overlooked the real progress which mankind have made since the very recent epoch to which we must assign the partial enfranchisement of labour. It has been justly said that much philosophy is needed in order to discern facts which are continually passing before us. We are not astonished at what an honest and laborious family of the working class daily consumes, because habit has made us familiar with this strange phenomenon. If, however, we compare the comfortable circumstances in which such a family finds itself, with the condition in which it would be placed under a social order which excluded Competition—if statisticians, armed with an instrument of sufficient precision, could measure, as with a dynamometer, the relation of a working man’s labour to his enjoyments at two different periods, we should acknowledge that liberty, restrained as it still is, has accomplished in his favour a prodigy which its very permanency hinders us from remarking. The contingent of human efforts which, in relation to a given result, has been annihilated, is truly incalculable. Time was when the artisan’s day’s labour would not have sufficed to procure him the most trumpery almanac. At the present day, for a halfpenny, or the fiftieth part of his day’s wages, he can obtain a gazette containing the matter of a volume. The same might be said of clothing, locomotion, carriage, lighting, and a multitude of other satisfactions. To what is this result owing? To this, that an enormous proportion of human labour, which had formerly to be paid for, has been handed over to be performed by the gratuitous forces of nature. It is a value annihilated, and to be no longer recompensed. Under the action of Competition, it has been replaced by common and gratuitous utility. And it is worthy of remark, that when, in consequence of progress, the price of any commodity comes to fall, [p310] the labour saved to the poor purchaser in obtaining it is always proportionally greater than the labour saved to the rich purchaser. That is demonstrable.
In fine, this constantly increasing current of utilities which labour pours into all the veins of the body politic, and which Competition distributes, is not all summed up in an accession of wealth. It is absorbed, in great part, by the stream of advancing numbers. It resolves itself into an increase of population, according to laws which have an intimate affinity with the subject which now engages us, and which will be explained in another chapter.