VII.2. How Revenue Sets the Limit to Population

When we present revenue as the natural and necessary limit of population, it must not be forgotten that we have given this name to that part of wealth which, being reproduced annually over and above the advances each person has made, can also be consumed annually without the person who consumes it becoming any the poorer. Thus revenue is, for some, the product of the land after they have deducted the value of the land itself and all the costs of cultivation; for others, the product of circulating capital after they have deducted the circulating capital itself and a compensation for the assistance that fixed capital has given them; for a third group, it is this compensation due to fixed capital; for a fourth, finally, it is their power of working, when that power is in demand.

The essence of revenue, and what distinguishes it from every other part of wealth, is that it leaves no void behind it after it has been consumed in full. The landowner, if he is content with the rent of his lands; the capitalist and the merchant, if they are content with their interest and their profit; the labourer, if he is content with his wage, do not impoverish the nation by each consuming the whole of this revenue. But if the landowner lets his land deteriorate, if he destroys his forests instead of felling them in regular rotation, if he sells off his cattle without replacing them, if he prunes his vines to ruin, if he gives no manure to his fields, he eats part of his capital as revenue. The merchant, if his expenditure exceeds his profits, if he reduces his advances, or if he increases his debts without increasing his gains, also encroaches on his capital. Both of them do not merely harm themselves; the nation grows poorer with them and through them. The labourer, much nearer to poverty even when he has the full enjoyment of his revenue, can also impoverish the nation by a bad use of that revenue, if he spends it in such a way that he does not keep himself in health and fit for work. In him the reproductive power is life itself: if he wears out his life, if he loses it, he destroys a national capital, which is needed to put to use the circulating capital against which the very use of that life must be exchanged. If, on the other hand, he offers in exchange for this circulating capital not one life but several; if, instead of working by himself, he works together with several children for the wage that was meant for him alone, then the reproductive power attached to his life, that is, his revenue, falls in price through competition, even though his labour is the same. It is not enough that he should be willing to work; his labour must be in demand for his revenue to exist.

It can be seen that, in whatever way a disproportion arises between revenue and population, it is always capital, or the demand for labour, that diminishes, and it is always the working class that suffers and is deprived of its revenue. If the landowner eats up his property, if he ruins his land, he diminishes his revenue, which was to be exchanged against labour or the fruits of labour. If he borrows, he thereby procures a circulating capital that he destroys and that will no longer set labour in motion; if he sells part of his estate, it is in order to eat the capital he has been given in exchange for part of his right of property. Less capital will then remain to be exchanged against labour, and the worker will suffer next year. If, on the contrary, the landowner, losing his revenue through some accident, submits to economy and lives on what remains to him, on what the hail or the frost has spared, capital will not diminish, but it will circulate more slowly, because the consumption of the rich will not hasten to replace it. The demand for labour will slacken, and the worker will suffer this very year.

In the same way, if the merchant or the capitalist eats up his capital, since it is this capital that must pay for all the labour offered, those who offer labour will suffer from next year onward. If, on the contrary, having made losses, they do not consume this year a revenue equal to last year’s, then as consumers they will slow down circulation and the demand for labour, and those who offer to work will suffer this very year.

If the revenue of the landowners and capitalists is exactly consumed within the year, and capital is not encroached upon, so that its value and the speed of its circulation remain the same, but at the same time the workers who offer labour have increased in number, the workers will still suffer; for they will give the whole of the labour offered against this same capital, which was meant to pay for only a smaller quantity of it.

It can be seen from this account that the poor have indeed, like the rich, a revenue to which it matters to them more than to any other class of society to proportion their numbers; but that the estimate of this revenue does not depend on them, and that each of the upper classes of society can alter or destroy it without their even being warned. The great vice in the present organisation of society is that the poor man can never know what demand for labour he can count on; that his power of working is never for him a precise and assured revenue.

The progress of wealth, by gathering the workers into large workshops and subjecting their industry to the direction of great capitalists, has in this respect been singularly unfavourable to the poor. It has taken from him all possibility of calculating the demand of the market for which he works, by making him an utter stranger to the consumers who will need his work. So long as artisans scattered in small workshops expected to sell the products of their labour in the nearest town, they knew their customers themselves; they learned almost as soon as those customers did when their revenues were falling, and when, in consequence, the demand for their own labour was falling too. Times were hard; the worker who was occupied only half the week imposed privations on himself; he took good care not to marry then, or to add to his family. But as soon as immense capitals had gathered into one vast workshop no longer artisans but factory hands, these no longer knew the consumers, who perhaps live several hundred leagues away from them, and they know nothing of their straits or of the decline in their orders until the moment when their master suddenly dismisses them, perhaps just when they have married and added to their family.

The village shoemaker, who is at the same time a small merchant, a manufacturer and a labourer, will not make a pair of shoes that has not been ordered from him; and if he sees that his customers can employ only one shoemaker, he will not destine three or four of his sons to follow his trade; he will see in advance that there is no room for them in the world. But if a shoe manufactory is set up in the capital, and if for several years running it orders six pairs of shoes a week from each of twenty journeymen shoemakers, these men will believe they have a trade, inferior no doubt to that of master of a shop, but at least secure, and one that gives them a fixed revenue in their labour; and in that assurance they will marry. If the head of the manufactory has then made his calculations badly, if he goes bankrupt, if he suspends his work, they and their families will perish, victims of an error that is not theirs.

The owner or the farmer of a small estate, however limited his knowledge, knows very well what quantity of corn, wine and vegetables he can sell at market; and if there is no population around him, if he is out of reach of canals and highways, he will not multiply his clearings only to find he does not know what to do with his produce, unless his family increases. If, on the other hand, he has only a limited piece of land that cannot suffice to give work to all his children, he will not seek to have many children and to marry them all. But if a big farmer or a great landowner undertakes an expensive cultivation that calls for much labour; if for several years running he employs a score of labourers in his hop gardens, his hoed crops and his vineyards, and asks for still more; then these labourers, less fortunate no doubt than the small cultivator, will nevertheless believe that they have an assured revenue in their labour. This revenue will seem to them to exist for themselves and for their children, as soon as the children are able to work; and in that assurance they will marry. If the landowner has then been mistaken in his calculations, if he finds it suits him better to cut out all these advances and content himself with pasture and with the produce the land yields him almost without labour, these labourers and their families will perish, victims of an error they did not commit.

Thus the more the poor man is deprived of all property, the more he is in danger of mistaking his revenue, and of helping to increase a population which, not corresponding to the demand for labour, will find no subsistence. This observation is old enough to have passed into language, and to have been handed down from Latin to the modern tongues. The Romans called proletarians those who had no property, as though they, more than all others, were called to have children: ad prolem generandam.

It will perhaps seem surprising that, since revenue serves as the limit of population, it should be precisely a smaller revenue that encourages a population beyond measure. But it must not be forgotten that poverty and riches are relative for each order of persons. Each person’s need is determined by habit and by the obligations that society imposes on his rank. To come down from that rank, and not to fulfil those obligations, is what each man calls suffering from poverty. A man who marries, having to provide for the well-being of several with what was formerly reserved for one alone, always puts himself in narrower circumstances; but he loses nothing of his rank, because society expects the change and does not impose the same obligations on him. From the moment, however, that his revenue would not suffice to keep him, with his wife and children, in the rank to which he is accustomed, he would feel the whole weight of need, even though a man born in the rank to which he would have to descend would regard the same situation as comfortable. Indeed, we never see the great landowner make his sons farmers, and these make theirs day labourers; we never see the merchant destine his sons to become small shopkeepers, these destine theirs to become artisans, and the artisans devote theirs to working by the day. Whenever the son of a family has only the choice between living unmarried and entering a profession decidedly inferior to his father’s, one may be sure that he will give up marriage. Despite the frequency of the upheavals that shake the national fortune, and that every day make a family rich in its condition become poor in that same condition, nothing is so rare as to find families that have voluntarily come down from one condition to another. The population of all the upper classes of society would, on the contrary, constantly tend to die out if it were not recruited from the lower classes.

But when a class has been allowed to exist whose habit is to have nothing, whose idea of wealth is simply to exist, whose idea of poverty is to die of hunger; when its subsistence has been allowed to be measured out so exactly that nothing can be cut from it; then those who live in this condition form no other wishes for the objects of their affection than those they form for themselves. If they have lived from day to day, they will be content provided their sons live from day to day; if they have never tried to know the market that calls for the employment of their labour, they will not try to calculate it for their children. The unhappy worker in those manufactories who earns only eight sous a day, and who often suffers from hunger, will not refuse himself marriage. He has been accustomed to know no future further off than the Saturday, when the week’s accounts are paid; his moral qualities and his feeling of sympathy have thus been blunted; he has too often been made to know present pain to be much alarmed at the future pain his wife and children may suffer. If his wife also earns eight sous; if his children, while they are small, entitle him to receive some help from the hospital, from public charity, or, in England, from his parish by means of the poor rate; if at six or seven years of age they already begin to earn something, then his children, far from diminishing his revenue, will seem to increase it. His family will become the more numerous the more it is a burden on society, and the nation will groan under the weight of a population out of proportion to the means of maintaining it.