Analysis of the Arithmetical Formula of the Tableau Économique

When agriculture prospers, all the other arts flourish with it; but when cultivation is abandoned, for whatever cause, all the other labours, on land as on sea, are extinguished at the same time. — Socrates, in Xenophon.

The nation is reduced to three classes of citizens: the productive class, the class of proprietors, and the sterile class.

The productive class is the class which, by the cultivation of the territory, brings the annual wealth of the nation into being again; which makes the advances for the expenses of the labours of agriculture; and which pays the revenues of the proprietors of the land every year. Under this class are included all the labours and all the expenditure that take place in it up to the sale of the produce at first hand: it is by this sale that the value of the annual reproduction of the nation’s wealth is known.

The class of proprietors comprises the sovereign, the owners of the land, and the tithe-owners. This class subsists on the revenue or net product of cultivation, which is paid to it every year by the productive class, after the latter has deducted, from the reproduction it brings into being every year, the wealth needed to reimburse itself for its annual advances and to maintain its working wealth.

The sterile class is made up of all the citizens occupied in services and labours other than those of agriculture, and whose expenses are paid by the productive class and by the class of proprietors, who themselves draw their revenues from the productive class.

To follow and calculate clearly the relations of these different classes with one another, one must settle on some particular case; for a positive calculation cannot be founded on mere abstractions.

Let us suppose, then, a great kingdom whose territory, brought to its highest degree of agriculture, would yield every year a reproduction to the value of five milliards; and where the permanent state of this value would be established on the constant prices current among trading nations, in the case where there is constantly a free competition in trade and an entire security of the property of the working wealth of agriculture.

The Tableau économique comprises the three classes and their annual wealth, and describes their trade in the form that follows.

Of these three milliards, received by the productive class for three milliards’ worth of produce that it has sold, it owes two milliards to the proprietors for the current year of the revenue, and it spends one milliard in purchases of works taken from the sterile class. This last class keeps that sum for the replacement of its advances, which were spent in the first place with the productive class in purchases of the raw materials that it has used in its works. Thus its advances produce nothing; it spends them, they are returned to it, and they remain always in reserve from year to year.

The raw materials and the labour on the works bring the sales of the sterile class to two milliards, of which one milliard is spent on the subsistence of the agents who compose this class; and it is seen that there is nothing here but consumption or annihilation of produce, and no reproduction; for this class subsists only on the successive payment of the remuneration due to its labour, which is inseparable from an expenditure laid out on subsistence, that is, on expenditure of pure consumption, without regeneration of what is annihilated by this sterile expenditure, which is taken entirely from the annual reproduction of the territory. The other milliard is reserved for the replacement of its advances, which in the following year will again be laid out with the productive class in purchases of raw materials for the works that the sterile class manufactures.

Thus the three milliards that the productive class has received for the sales it has made to the proprietors of the revenue and to the sterile class are employed by the productive class in the payment of the revenue of the current year, of two milliards, and in purchases of one milliard’s worth of works, which it pays to the sterile class.

The course of this trade between the different classes, and its essential conditions, are not hypothetical. Whoever will reflect will see that they are faithfully copied from nature; but the data that have been used, and the reader has been warned of this, apply only to the case in question here.

The various states of prosperity or decline of an agricultural nation present a multitude of other cases, and consequently of other data, each of which is the foundation of a particular calculation that is strictly proper to it.

Those from which we have started fix, according to the most constant rule in the natural order, at five milliards the total reproduction that the productive class brings into being every year with two milliards of annual advances, on a territory such as the one we have described. On this hypothesis the annual advances reproduce two hundred and fifty per cent. The revenue of the proprietors may then be equal to the annual advances. But these data have conditions sine quibus non: they suppose that freedom of trade keeps up the sale of produce at a good price, for example the price of wheat at 18 livres the setier; they suppose, besides, that the cultivator has to pay, directly or indirectly, no other charges than the revenue, of which a part, for example two-sevenths, must form the revenue of the sovereign. On these data, out of a total revenue of two milliards, the sovereign’s share would be 572 millions; that of the proprietors would be four-sevenths, or one milliard 144 millions; that of the tithe-owners one-seventh, or 286 millions, the tax included. There is no way of laying the tax that could furnish so great a public revenue without causing any decline in the annual reproduction of the nation’s wealth.

The proprietors, the sovereign and the whole nation have a great interest in the tax being laid entirely on the revenue of the land, immediately; for every other form of taxation would be contrary to the natural order, because it would be prejudicial to the reproduction and to the tax, and the tax would fall back upon the tax itself. Everything here below is subject to the laws of nature: men are endowed with the intelligence necessary to know and observe them; but the multiplicity of objects demands great combinations, which form the substance of a very extensive science of evident truths, the study of which is indispensable if mistakes in practice are to be avoided.

Of the five milliards of total reproduction, the proprietors of the revenue and the sterile class have bought three milliards’ worth for their consumption; thus there still remain to the productive class two milliards’ worth of produce. This class has bought, besides, one milliard’s worth of works from the sterile class, which gives it an annual fund of three milliards, which is consumed by the various agents occupied in the different labours of this class, who are paid by the annual advances of cultivation, and in the various daily repairs of the fund of the establishment, which are paid for by the interest of which we shall now speak.

Thus the annual expenditure of the productive class is three milliards, namely two milliards of produce, which it keeps for its own consumption, and one milliard of works, which it has bought from the sterile class.

These three milliards form what are called the returns of the productive class; of which two milliards constitute the annual advances, which are consumed in the direct labour of reproducing the five milliards that this class brings into being every year, so as to restore and perpetuate the expenditure that is annihilated by consumption; the other milliard is deducted by this same class from its sales for the interest on the advances of its establishment. We shall now make the necessity of this interest felt.

1st. The stock of working wealth that constitutes the original advances is subject to a daily wearing away, which demands continual repairs, indispensably necessary if this important stock is to remain in the same state and not move progressively towards a total annihilation, which would destroy cultivation, and consequently reproduction, and consequently the wealth of the State, and consequently also the population.

2nd. Cultivation is inseparable from several great accidents, which sometimes destroy the harvest almost entirely: such are frost, hail, blight, floods, the death of livestock, etc., etc. If the cultivators had no fund in reserve, it would follow that after such accidents they could not pay the proprietors and the sovereign, or that they could not meet the expenses of their cultivation in the following year. The latter case is the one that would always happen, since the sovereign and the proprietors have the authority to make themselves paid; and one sees the fatal consequences of such an annihilation of cultivation, which would soon fall back, beyond remedy, upon the proprietors, upon the sovereign, upon the tithe-owners, upon all the rest of the nation.

The interest on the advances of the cultivators’ establishment must therefore be included in their annual returns. It serves to meet these great accidents and to keep up from day to day the working wealth, which has to be repaired without ceasing.

It was remarked above (in the note on the annual advances) that the original advances were about five times as large as the annual advances: in the present hypothesis, where the annual advances are two milliards, the original advances are therefore ten milliards, and the annual interest of one milliard is only at the rate of ten per cent. If one considers the quantity of expenses that it has to meet; if one thinks of the importance of its purpose; if one reflects that without it the payment of rents and of the tax would never be assured, that the regeneration of the expenditure of society would die out, that the stock of working wealth, and consequently cultivation, would disappear, and that this devastation would annihilate the greater part of mankind and send the rest back to live in the forests, one will feel that the rate of ten per cent for the interest on the perishable advances of cultivation is very far from being too high.

We do not say that all cultivators draw every year, besides their annual advances, ten per cent for the interest on their original advances; but we say that this is one of the principal conditions of a state of prosperity; that whenever it is not so in a nation, that nation is in decline, and in a decline that progresses from year to year, so that, once its course is known, the moment of its entire destruction can be foretold by calculation.

We say, moreover, that a fund placed as advantageously for the nation as that of the advances of its cultivation ought of itself to yield net to the farmers, who join to it their labour and the use of their intelligence, an annual interest at least as large as the one paid to idle rentiers.

The total sum of this interest is spent every year, because the cultivators do not leave it idle; for in the intervals when they are not obliged to employ it in repairs, they never fail to turn it to account in extending and improving their cultivation, without which they could not meet the great accidents. That is why the interest is counted in the sum of the annual expenditure.

The total of the five milliards, divided at first between the productive class and the class of proprietors, being spent every year in a regular order that perpetually ensures the same annual reproduction, there is one milliard that is spent by the proprietors in purchases made from the productive class, and one milliard in purchases made from the sterile class. The productive class, which sells three milliards’ worth of produce to the two other classes, gives back two milliards of it in payment of the revenue, and spends one milliard in purchases that it makes from the sterile class: thus the sterile class receives two milliards, which it lays out with the productive class in purchases for the subsistence of its agents and for the raw materials of its works; and the productive class itself spends two milliards’ worth of produce every year, which completes the expenditure, or the total consumption, of the five milliards of annual reproduction.

Such is the regular order of the distribution of the expenditure of the five milliards that the productive class brings into being every year by the expenditure of two milliards of annual advances, which are included in the total expenditure of the five milliards of annual reproduction.

We shall now set before the reader’s eyes the arithmetical formula of the distribution of this expenditure.

On the right, at the head, is the sum of the advances of the productive class, which were spent in the previous year to bring forth the harvest of the present year. Below this sum is a line that separates it from the column of the sums that this class receives.

On the left are the sums that the sterile class receives.

In the middle, at the head, is the sum of the revenue, which is divided, to right and to left, between the two classes, where it is spent.

The division of expenditure is marked by dotted lines, which start from the sum of the revenue and run obliquely downward to the one class and to the other. At the end of these lines, on each side, is the sum that the proprietors of the revenue spend in purchases from each of these classes.

The reciprocal trade between the two classes is also marked by dotted lines, which run obliquely downward from the one class to the other, where the purchases are made; and at the end of each line is the sum that each of the two classes thus receives from the other, reciprocally, by the trade they carry on between them for their expenditure.

Finally, the calculation ends on each side with the total sum of the receipts of each of the two classes. And it is seen that in the given case, when the distribution of expenditure follows the order that has been described and detailed above, the receipts of the productive class, including its advances, are equal to the whole of the annual reproduction, and that cultivation, wealth and population remain in the same state, without increase or decline. A different case would give, as was said above, a different result.

If the proprietors spent more with the productive class than with the sterile class, in order to improve their lands and increase their revenues, this additional expenditure, employed in the labours of the productive class, ought to be regarded as an addition to the advances of this class.

The expenditure of the revenue is supposed here, in the state of prosperity, to be divided equally between the productive class and the sterile class, whereas the productive class carries only a third of its expenditure to the sterile class, because the cultivator’s expenses are less disposable than the proprietor’s; but the more agriculture languishes, the more one ought then to devote a part of the disposable expenditure to restoring it.