Services, as we have seen, are exchanged for services, and the great desideratum is the equivalence of the services thus exchanged.
The best chance, it would seem, of arriving at this equivalence, is that it should be produced under the influence of Liberty, and that every man should be allowed to judge for himself. [p447]
We know that men may be mistaken; but we know also that they have the power given them of rectifying their mistakes; and the longer, as it appears to us, that error is persisted in, the nearer we approximate to its rectification.
Everything which restrains liberty would seem to disturb the equivalence of services, and everything which disturbs the equivalence of services engenders inequality in an exaggerated degree, endowing some with unmerited opulence, entailing on others poverty equally unmerited, together with the destruction of national wealth, and an attendant train of evils, heartburnings, disturbances, convulsions, and revolutions.
We shall not go the length of saying that Liberty—or the equivalence of services—produces absolute equality; for we believe in nothing absolute in what concerns man. But we think that Liberty tends to make men approximate towards a common level, which is movable and always rising.
We think also that the inequality which may still remain under a free régime is either the result of accidental circumstances, or the chastisement of faults and vices, or the compensation of other advantages set opposite to those of wealth; and, consequently, that this inequality ought not to introduce among men any feeling of irritation.
In a word, we believe that Liberty is Harmony. . . . .
But in order to discover whether this harmony exists in reality, or only in our own imagination, whether it be in us a perception or only an aspiration, we must subject free transactions to the test of scientific inquiry; we must study facts, with their relations and consequences.
This is what we have endeavoured to do.
We have seen that although countless obstacles are interposed between the wants of man and his satisfactions, so that in a state of isolation he could not exist—yet by the union of forces, the separation of occupations, in a word, by exchange, his faculties are developed to such an extent as to enable him gradually to overcome the first obstacles, to encounter the second and overcome them also, and so on in a progression as much more rapid as exchange is rendered more easy by the increasing density of population.