VII.7. Of Population Made Superfluous by the Invention of Machines

It is not only a disproportionate increase of population that can cause national suffering by breaking the equilibrium between the supply of and the demand for labour. This demand may also decrease while population remains stationary. Consumption may be checked, revenue squandered, capital destroyed, and the same number of hands that was formerly occupied may no longer find sufficient employment. Population at once follows the upheavals of the capital on which it must live. Since day labourers are more eager to receive even the smallest wage than merchants are to employ their money, they submit to ever harsher conditions as demand or capital diminishes, and they end by contenting themselves with a pay so wretched that it is barely enough to keep them alive. No enjoyment is attached any longer to the existence of this unhappy class. Hunger and suffering stifle all moral affections in it; when one must struggle every hour to live, all the passions are concentrated in egoism; each forgets the pain of others in his own; the feelings of nature are blunted; a constant, stubborn, uniform labour brutalises every faculty. One is ashamed for the human species to see to what a point of degradation it can descend, to what a life lower than that of the animals it can voluntarily submit; and in spite of all the benefits of the social order, in spite of the advantages man has drawn from the arts, one is sometimes tempted to curse the division of labour and the invention of manufactures when one sees to what they have reduced beings who were created our fellow men.

The misery of the savage hunter, who so often dies of hunger, does not equal that of the thousands of families that a manufactory sometimes turns away; for the former at least retains all the energy and all the intelligence he has put to the test all his life. When he dies for want of game, he succumbs to a necessity that nature herself presents to him, and to which he has known from the beginning that he must submit, as to sickness or old age. But the artisan dismissed from his workshop with his wife and children has lost in advance the strength of his soul and of his body. He is still surrounded by opulence; at every step he still sees before his eyes the food he needs; and if the rich man refuses him a labour by which the worker offers, to the very last moment, to buy bread, it is men he accuses and not nature.

Even when no one actually dies of hunger, even when charitable relief is eagerly given to every needy family, discouragement and suffering produce their cruel effects on the poor. The diseases of the soul pass to the body; epidemics multiply; newborn children perish within a few months; and the suppression of work causes more havoc than the cruellest war. Besides, fatal habits, either of begging or of idleness, take root in the population; another course is given to trade and another direction to fashion; and even after mortality has thinned the ranks of the workers, those who remain are no longer in a position to stand up to foreign competition.

The causes of a decrease in the demand for labour often belong to politics proper rather than to political economy. There is perhaps none more effective than the loss or diminution of liberty. When a nation begins to alienate this precious good, each citizen feels less sure of his fortune or of the fruits of his labour, and each loses something of the activity of his soul and of his spirit of industry. The virtues that accompany labour, sobriety, constancy and thrift, give way to the vices of idleness, intemperance, heedlessness of the future and dissipation. Commerce, industry and activity are regarded with contempt in a state where the people is nothing, while all distinctions and all honours are reserved for a noble leisure. Favour, intrigue, flattery and all the arts of courtiers, which debase the soul, lead there to fortunes far more rapid than strength of character, bold and enterprising activity, and the speculative spirit. Intriguers multiply there every day, and they look with contempt on those who follow the only honourable road to fortune, the one on which one advances only by one’s merit or one’s labour.

There is, however, one cause of depopulation that falls most strictly within the province of political economy. The progress of the arts, the progress of industry, and consequently the very progress of wealth and prosperity, lead to the discovery of economical methods of producing all the fruits of labour by employing a smaller number of workers. Animals replace men in almost every detail of agriculture, and machines replace men in almost every operation of manufactures. So long as a nation finds within its reach a market vast enough for all its products to be assured of a prompt and advantageous sale, each of these discoveries is a benefit, because instead of diminishing the number of workers it increases the mass of labour and of its products. A nation that happens to have the lead in discoveries succeeds for a long time in extending its market in proportion to the number of hands that each new invention sets free. It employs them at once in an increase of the products that its discovery enables it to supply at a lower price. But a time comes at last when the whole civilised world forms only one market, and when no new customers can be gained in a new nation. The demand of the universal market is then a precise quantity, which the various industrious nations dispute among themselves. If one supplies more, it is to the detriment of another. Total sales can be increased only through the progress of universal comfort, or because conveniences formerly reserved for the rich are brought within reach of the poor.

The invention of the stocking frame, by means of which one man does as much work as a hundred did formerly, was a blessing for humanity only because at the same time the progress of civilisation, of population and of wealth increased the number of consumers. New countries adopted European customs, and this kind of footwear, formerly reserved for the rich, came down to the poorest classes. For the poor man, for the artisan, it was more economical than the gaiters it led him to give up. The poor man used the part of his revenue he formerly spent on gaiters to buy stockings. But if today a new discovery made it possible to do with a single stocking frame what was done ten years ago with a hundred, that discovery would be a national misfortune; for the number of consumers can no longer increase, or hardly at all, and it would then be the number of producers that diminished.

As a general rule, whenever the demand for consumption exceeds the population’s means of producing, every new discovery in mechanics or in the arts is a blessing for society, because it provides the means of satisfying existing needs. Whenever, on the contrary, production fully suffices for consumption, every such discovery, in our present organisation, becomes a calamity, since it adds nothing to the enjoyments of consumers except satisfying them more cheaply, while it suppresses the very life of the producers. It would be odious to weigh the advantage of cheapness against that of existence; but besides, the former is wholly illusory for all expenditure governed by vanity. Since what is sought there is only distinction, no one enjoys the fact that, by getting finer and handsomer clothes for the same price, he has nevertheless remained in the same proportion to everyone else. It must be well remembered that in political economy demand must be understood to mean only what is accompanied by the offer of a sufficient compensation for the thing demanded. It often happens, however, that there is in society a considerable demand, with a corresponding offer, for a thing whose need is felt, although the offer made is not enough to pay for all the labour the thing requires. When this demand and this offer bring about an invention that makes it possible to satisfy them, the invention is still a great advantage for society, although it causes temporary suffering to those who worked at a higher price for a smaller number of buyers.

When, between the eighth and the tenth centuries, the commerce of the Arabs brought the art of making paper from China to the West, if the same Arabs had brought the art of printing from the same country, which seems so natural that one is almost astonished it did not happen, printing, carried to Europe at a time when there was no zeal for study and no demand for books, would have plunged Europe into a barbarism still deeper, if that were possible, than the one in which it lay; for it would have done away altogether with the race of copyists. These men then preserved the feeble remains of the love of letters. They lived by copying missals and a few religious books; for this they were obliged to undertake some studies, which gave them a taste for other and higher studies. After copying many books of devotion, they also copied a few classics, so as to supply the demand of the infinitely small number of men in the whole of Europe who were able to read them. The printer, with two compositors and two pressmen far less lettered than the copyists, would have done what a thousand copyists could do. A printing house would therefore have supplied all the religious books, and perhaps a few merchants’ bills as well; but by starving all the copyists it would have left none to serve the small number of scholars who asked for something else, and who could not by themselves, with so restricted a demand, keep a trade going. More than one province could be found in Italy and Spain where printing has had no other effect. In the tenth century it would no more have taught people to read than the art of making paper taught them to write.

Fortunately for letters, fortunately for us, and fortunately too for the race of medieval copyists, printing was discovered only in a century when the ardour for letters had made universal progress. Everyone wanted books, though few people were able to buy them; the friends of letters set aside a considerable revenue to procure themselves literary enjoyments, though this revenue was still not enough to pay for the immense labour of the copyists. An admirable invention enabled those who replaced the copyists to produce in the same time two hundred and fifty times as much work as they, at the very moment when that work was demanded by a new public, disposing of a new revenue. The number of printers in Europe is greater than that of the copyists in the tenth century. This number of printers has often been put forward as proof of the effect of machines in increasing demand as well as production; but effect must not be confused with cause.

Even when demand is not as pronounced as that for books was at the time of the invention of printing, whenever a discovery, by saving labour, brings within reach of a poorer class what was formerly reserved for the rich, it extends the market; and while it benefits the poor consumers and the entrepreneurs, it does no harm to the workers. But when the discovery cannot increase the number of consumers, even though it serves them more cheaply, either because they are all already supplied, or because the thing produced can never be for their use at whatever price it may fall to, then the discovery, made for the profit of the master of the workshop and not of his workers, merely creates a monopoly and becomes a calamity for the human race; for it is advantageous to a particular manufacturer only at the expense of his fellow manufacturers, or it benefits one nation only at the expense of other nations. This national profit, which would be obtained only by making foreign artisans suffer misery and famine, would in itself be hardly worth pursuing; but besides, it is not very secure. Given the progress made in communications between peoples and in the knowledge of masters of workshops, a discovery in one country is already imitated in all the others before the first has been able to draw any great profit from it.

It has been answered that a man who makes a saving on one article of his consumption, while keeping the same revenue, devotes what he saves through the fall in the price of this or that article to a new expenditure, for which he will call upon new labour. But there will never be any proportion between this new demand and the labour that will have been suspended on its account.

On the one hand, consumers make use of goods a little finer and a little prettier for the same price. The cloth in which the poor worker is dressed is a little better in quality, and is really worth a little more, than that in which his father dressed, though his father spent the same portion of his revenue on clothing. But he himself does not notice this advantage. It is in some sort a social obligation to dress like one’s equals; the man who in this respect merely follows universal custom finds no enjoyment in it. He makes no saving on this article that he could devote to another expenditure.

On the other hand, the price of every commodity is not fixed in direct proportion to the labour it requires, but in a proportion made up of this annual labour; of a primitive labour, which is not renewed, for building the manufactory and constructing the machines with costly and often foreign materials; and finally of the circulating capital. So even when a hundred workers are dismissed in order to do the work with only one by means of a machine, the commodity is not reduced to a hundredth of its price. The stocking frame saves labour in roughly that proportion, and yet it produces stockings barely ten per cent cheaper than those made with the needle. Despite the invention of the great mills for spinning silk, cotton and wool, women spinners at the wheel, and even at the distaff, are still employed: certain proof that the saving made by using water and fire to drive these machines in place of men does not exceed ten per cent either. The same observation may be repeated in every improved manufacture. They have never reduced the price of their products except in an arithmetical proportion, while they have suspended labour in a geometrical proportion.

Let us compare this saving of labour with the saving on the purchase price, by the simplest calculation and in the best-known manufacture; and let us suppose, for greater clarity, that one worker with the stocking frame does exactly the work that a hundred did formerly. If he does not, the defenders of machines would like him to, and the reasoning will be no less conclusive. A hundred thousand women, each knitting a hundred pairs of stockings a year with the needle, produced ten million pairs, which at 5 francs a pair sold for 50,000,000 francs. The raw material was worth a fifth; there remained 40,000,000 to be distributed among a hundred thousand workers, or 400 francs a head.

The same work is done today on the frame by a thousand workers, and comes out ten per cent cheaper: at 4 francs 50 centimes that makes 45 million. Consumers therefore make a saving of 5 million. If they spent it entirely on labour they could keep alive 12,500 of the workers who have been dismissed, and only seven-eighths of them would remain on the streets; but that is not what happens. The consumer accustomed to paying five francs for his pair of stockings goes on paying the same price, and, thanks to the progress of the art, merely wears somewhat finer stockings. This advance in his luxury keeps alive a tenth more stocking makers, or a hundred more; add another hundred workers employed every year in repairing the machines or building new ones, and you will have twelve hundred workers in all, living on the sum that used to keep a hundred thousand.

The price of the ten million pairs of stockings produced is no longer made up, as before, four-fifths of labour. It can be broken down only by conjecture, and we attach no importance to this hypothetical calculation. Ten million will still pay for the raw material; thirty million will pay the interest and profits of the fixed capital employed in the frames and in the buildings where they stand; two million will serve each year to repair and renew the machines; two million will go to the profit of the circulating capital, which must always be larger when the undertaking is carried on on a large scale; and the remaining million will pay the workers’ wages. Thus the revenue that arises from the manufacture will be diminished rather than increased.

The same calculation applies to all improved manufactures, for the manufacturer, in adopting a new machine and dismissing his workers, never troubles to find out whether he will make a profit equal to the reduction in labour, but only whether he will be able to sell a little more cheaply than his rivals. All the workers in England would be turned out on the streets if the manufacturers could use steam engines in their place with a saving of five per cent.

Moreover, the improvement of machines and the saving of human labour contribute directly to reducing the number of national consumers; for all the workers who are ruined were consumers. In the countryside, the introduction of the system of large farms has caused the disappearance from Great Britain of the class of peasant farmers, who worked themselves and yet enjoyed an honest sufficiency. The population has been considerably diminished; but its consumption has been reduced still more than its numbers. The day labourers who do all the work of the fields, limited to the barest necessities, give nothing like the encouragement to the industry of the towns that the rich peasants used to give it.

An analogous change has taken place in the population of the towns. Discoveries in the mechanical arts always have as their remote result the concentration of industry in the hands of a smaller number of richer merchants. They teach how to do with a costly machine, that is, with a great capital, what was formerly done with a great deal of labour. They make economy possible through management on a large scale, the division of operations, and the shared use, by a great number of men at once, of light, heating and all the forces of nature. And so the small merchants and the small manufacturers disappear, and one great entrepreneur replaces hundreds of them, who all together were perhaps not as rich as he. All together, nevertheless, they were better consumers than he. His costly luxury gives far less encouragement to industry than the honest sufficiency of the hundred households he has replaced.

So long as ever new demands made the manufactures prosper, the number of workers was seen to increase too, despite the increase in the powers of labour; and those who had been turned out of the countryside still found a place in the manufacturing towns, whose population went on growing. But when at last the market of the universe was found to be sufficiently supplied, and new reductions in the number of workers followed; when day labourers were turned out of the countryside, spinners out of the cotton mills and weavers out of the linen manufactories; when every day a new machine replaces several families, while no new demand offers them occupation and a livelihood, distress has been carried to its height, and people have begun to regret the progress of a civilisation which, by gathering a greater number of individuals on the same piece of land, has only multiplied misery for them; whereas in the wilderness, at least, misery can reach only a small number of victims.

The moment has come at last to ask where we want to go. According to the latest censuses, agriculture in England occupies 770,199 families. In proportion not only to the extent of the land but to the richness of its produce, this is infinitely less than in any other part of Europe. Should a reward be offered to the man who found the means of doing the same work with 70,000 families, or to the one who did it with 7,000?

In England commerce and manufactures occupy 959,632 families, and this number is enough to supply with all manufactured goods not only England but half of Europe and half the civilised inhabitants of America. England is a great manufactory which, to keep itself going, is obliged to sell to almost the whole known world. Should a reward be offered to the man who found the means of having the same work done by 90,000 families, or of having it done by 9,000? If England succeeded in having all the work of its fields and all that of its towns done by steam engines, and in counting no more inhabitants than the republic of Geneva, while keeping the same product and the same revenue as it has today, ought it to be regarded as richer and more prosperous?

Well, this reward is constantly offered, by the competition of all the manufacturers and of all the farmers, to whoever will teach them how to do without men. This reward is likewise offered on the Continent by all the states that think themselves obliged to follow England in its manufacturing career. Governments have seconded the zeal of the manufacturers in this respect with all their power, and political writers, far from pointing out the dangers of this competition, have made it their business to urge the nations on to it.

After a discovery made in the arts has increased the productive power of man, it would no doubt be desirable to be able to prevent it from being turned against the very people it ought to serve. If it is not called forth by any new demand for labour, if it does not bring the commodity produced within reach of new consumers, it would be desirable at least that it should not replace and make useless a certain number of producers, whether national or foreign. But there is no way of putting direct obstacles in the way of the revolution it is about to cause; it would be at once useless and dangerous to try to suppress the discovery itself. If we prevented the adoption of a new machine in our workshops, our neighbours would not be so scrupulous as we; they would make war on our workers with their steam engines, their spinning machines and all their new inventions. It is a war to the death in which one is forced to defend oneself, but which it is imprudent to begin.

No spectacle is more astonishing, perhaps more frightening, than the one England presents in the midst of the opulence that at first dazzles the eye. If one is not content to judge it by the colossal fortunes of the peers of the realm, for whom half a million francs a year (£20,000 sterling) is only a middling revenue; if one estimates at its true value, and by the enjoyments it procures, the insulting luxury they display, with their sumptuous carriages, their crowds of footmen running through the streets with staves raised, their fox-hunting establishments in which twenty horses and forty hounds cost them more than a hundred thousand livres a year, one feels some indignation in comparing this prodigality with the suffering of the poor. The highways are travelled by turns by troops of beggars dismissed from the manufactories and by troops of ragged Irishmen who go from farm to farm offering to do all the work of agriculture at cut rates. Both alike beg for alms only because they are refused work; but every rank is full. The labourer of the countryside, the cottager, sees with bitterness these strangers disputing with him a work that was formerly barely enough to keep him. In the towns, in the capital, at the corner of Hyde Park, where the most sumptuous carriages follow one another with the speed of lightning, bands of ten and twenty factory workers, seated and motionless, despair in their eyes and fever wasting all their limbs, do not draw even a moment’s attention. A third of the workshops is already closed, another third must soon close too, and all the warehouses are overflowing. On every side goods are offered for sale at a discount that does not leave enough to pay half the cost of making them; and every letter from South America announces that the immense cargoes commerce had sent there can hardly be sold at a price that covers the freight. In this universal distress, when the worker is everywhere turned away, and the English nation has given up its place to the steam engine, which does all the work men used to do, rewards are still offered to the inventor of new machines that would make useless the workers who still find a livelihood. Surely, amid so much suffering, one might refrain from encouraging those who, at this moment at least, could only increase it. The abolition of the privilege granted to the inventor of new processes in the arts would perhaps not much change the progress of scientific power, as it has rather aptly been called; but it would take from the poor workers the feeling that in their distress the government too is in league against them.

We have seen elsewhere that the result of the privilege granted to an inventor is to give him the monopoly of the market against the other producers of his own country. It follows that the national consumers gain very little from the invention, that the inventor gains a great deal, that the other producers lose, and that their workers die of want. According to mercantile policy, which is far from Christian, this evil was regarded as compensated by the results of the invention in the foreign market. There the new producer gained a great deal, and the foreign consumers gained a little; but the foreign producers lost, their workers perished, and one thus got rid of a formidable competitor. Without examining this question from the moral point of view, it will be enough for us to note that the pecuniary calculation has changed. The sciences have made too much progress for an invention to remain hidden from the learned men of another country, who, once told of its existence, will set about rediscovering it. Foreigners will imitate our inventions before our own countrymen, held back by the inventor’s privilege, are able to adopt them; and so the harm we do to others will not make up for the harm we do to ourselves. That would be to sin from a disinterested taste for evil.

If, on the contrary, all inventions are immediately disclosed, immediately open to imitation by all the inventor’s rivals, zeal for such discoveries will cool, and they will no longer be regarded as an expedient by which one can take customers away from one’s competitors, but only as a means of supplying one’s own customers with all the work they ask for when that demand comes to increase.

Nothing, however, can prevent each new discovery in applied mechanics from diminishing the manufacturing population by so much. It is a danger to which that population is constantly exposed, and against which the civil order offers no safeguard. It is at least a powerful reason for wishing that in a state this population should not be numerous, and for not raising a people with the intention of making it the manufacturers and shopkeepers of the universe.