Does not a street of equal length render more service in Paris than in a remote village? Is not a mile of railway of more use in the Department of the Seine than in the Department of the Landes? Is not a London merchant content with smaller profits [p114] on account of the greater amount of business which he transacts? In everything we shall discover two sets of exchange agencies at work, which although identical in kind, act very differently, according as they operate in a densely or a thinly peopled locality.
The density of population not only enables us to reap more advantage from the machinery of exchange, it permits us to improve that machinery, and increase its power. Where the population is condensed, these improvements are advantageous, because they save us more efforts than they exact; but where the population is scattered and thin-spread, they exact more efforts than they save.
On leaving the metropolis for a time, and going to reside in a small provincial town, one is astonished to find that in many instances the most ordinary services can only be obtained at great expense, and with time and difficulty.
It is not the material part of the commercial mechanism only which is turned to account and improved by the single circumstance of the density of population, but the moral part also. When men are massed together, they have more facility in dividing their employments, in uniting their powers, and in combining to found churches and schools, to provide for their common security, to establish banks and insurance companies, in a word, to procure themselves all the common enjoyments with a much smaller proportion of efforts.
We shall revert to these considerations when we come to enter on the subject of Population. At present we shall make only this remark:—
Exchange enables men to turn their faculties to better account, to economize capital, to obtain more assistance from the gratuitous agencies of nature, to increase the proportion of gratuitous to onerous utility, to diminish, consequently, the ratio of efforts to results, and to leave at their disposal a part of their forces, so that they may withdraw a greater and greater portion of them from the business of providing for their primary and more imperious wants, and devote them to procuring enjoyments of a higher and higher order.
If Exchange saves efforts, it also exacts them. It extends, and spreads, and increases, up to the point at which the effort it exacts becomes equal to the effort which it saves, and it stops there until, by the improvement of the commercial apparatus, or by the circumstance exclusively of the condensation of population, and bringing men together in masses, it again returns to the conditions which are essential to its onward and ascending march. [p115] Whence it follows that laws which limit or hamper Exchanges are always either hurtful or superfluous.
Governments which persuade themselves that nothing good can be done but through their instrumentality, refuse to acknowledge this harmonic law.
Exchange develops itself NATURALLY until it becomes more onerous than useful, and at that point it NATURALLY stops.
In consequence, we find governments everywhere busying themselves in favouring or restraining trade.