We see here that the mere calculation of profit and loss, such as it might figure in a debtor and creditor account, would justify the extreme advocate of free-trade. But there are, surely, other considerations which may properly rank a little higher than such a tradesman's balance of profit and loss; we are surely allowed to follow our inquiries a little further, and ask who is enriched, and how? and what branch of industry is promoted, and what destroyed or curtailed? It is not our object here to contend against what is called the factory system – we accept it with its evil and its good; we are not calling for measures directly hostile to it; but we certainly should exclaim against the sacrifice of a branch of household, stable, permanent industry, to be compensated by an increase in this already enormous system of factory labour, which, together with much good, brings with it so dreadfully precarious a condition of thousands and tens of thousands of men. The political economist has proved that free-trade is the condition under which the industry of man, so far as the amount of its products is concerned, can be exercised with the greatest advantage: he has established this principle; it is an important one, and we thank him for its lucid exposition; but he shall be no legislator of ours until he has learned to submit his principle to wise exceptions, until he has learned to estimate the first necessity of steady and well-remunerated employment to the labourer, until he is prepared, in short, to give their due weight to other considerations besides that of multiplying the gross products of human industry.
We have been viewing the question of free-trade from the position of an opulent manufacturing people – from the position of England, in short – and we see that there may be ground even here for exception. But the case is much stronger, and the claim for exception still plainer, which might be made out by a less opulent nation, desirous of fostering its own rising manufactures. These wisely refuse a reciprocity of free-trade measures. Even on the mere ground of the increase of national wealth, and without considering the advantage derived from a variety of employments, and a due admixture of a manufacturing population, they are fully justified in their protective policy. The economist will tell them that they deprive themselves of the opportunity of purchasing cheaper and better goods than they can produce. We admit that, for a season, they must forego an advantage of this description; but at the end of a few years how will the account stand? If the protective duty has fostered a home manufactory that would not otherwise have existed, (and this is an assumption which the political economist himself is compelled to admit,) then is there in that country a new industry – then amongst that people is there more labour and less idleness, and therefore more of the fruits of labour. It has created for itself what it otherwise would have had to purchase with its corn and oil.
The political economists love an extreme case. In order to test the universality of the principle of free-trade, we give them the following: – There is a little island somewhere in the Pacific, and it grows corn, and grapes, and the cotton plant. Two or three great ships come annually to this island, bringing a store of Manchester goods, and taking away a portion of the corn and the wine. But the wise men of the island meet and say, Let us learn to make our own cotton into stuff for raiment; so shall we have clothes without parting with our corn and wine. Would the people of the island be very foolish if they consented to wear, for a time, a much coarser raiment, in order that they might practise this new industry, and thus provide themselves with raiment, and keep their provender? We suppose that the same unequal distribution of property is found in our island as in the rest of the world – that there are rich and poor. Now, when a people exchanges its articles of food for articles of clothing, it rarely, if ever, parts with what, to the whole of the people, is a superfluous quantity of food. Those who own large portions of the land have a superfluity of produce, which they exchange for other articles either at home or abroad; but probably no people ever grew a greater quantity of corn, or other grain for food, than it could very willingly have consumed itself, could we conceive it distributed amongst all who had mouths to consume, and half-filled stomachs to stow it away in. Judge, therefore, whether our little island would not, in a few years, be much better off for refusing the visit of the great ships, and setting to work to weave its own cotton into garments. The political economists always talk of so much labour diverted from one employment to another; they seem to have forgotten that there is such a thing as so much idleness converted into so much labour.
In the work of John Stuart Mill, to which we have now to call the attention of our readers, the science of political economy has received its latest and most complete exposition. Nor, as the title itself will inform us, is the work limited to a formal enunciation of abstract principles, (as was the case with the brief compendium of Mr Mill, senior,) but it proceeds to apply those principles to the discussion of some of the most vital and momentous questions with which public opinion is at present occupied. There are things in these volumes, as may easily be conceived, in which we do not concur – views are supported, on some subjects, to which we have been long and notoriously opposed; but there is, in the exposition of its tenets, so accurate a statement, so severe and lucid a reasoning, and, withal, so genuine and manly an interest in the great cause of humanity, that we cannot hesitate a moment in awarding to it a high rank amongst the sterling literature of our country. This magazine has never been slow – it has been second to none – in its hearty recognition of great talent and ability, from whatever quarter of the political horizon these have made their appearance. We were amongst the first to give notice to all whom it concerned of the addition to the students' shelf of the profound and elaborate work, The System of Logic, by the same author. The present is a work of more general interest, yet it has the same severe character. In this, as in his logic, the author has sacrificed nothing deemed by him essential to his task, to the desire of being popular, or the fear of being pronounced dry– the word of most complete condemnation in the present day. Dry, however, no person who takes an interest in the actual condition and prospects of society, can possibly find the greater portion of this work. For, as we have already intimated, that which honourably distinguishes it from other professed treatises of political economy is the perpetual, earnest, never-forgotten interest, which accompanies the writer throughout, in the great questions at present mooted with respect to the social condition of man. Mr Mill very wisely refused to limit himself to the mere abstract principles of his science; he descends from them, sometimes as from a vantage ground, into the discussions which most concern and agitate the public mind at the present day; and, if his conclusions are not always, or even generally, such as we can wholly coincide with, there is so penetrating an intelligence in his remarks, and so grave and serious a philanthropy pervading his book, that it would be impossible for the most complete opponent of the work not to rise a gainer from its perusal. From what else can we gain, if not from intercourse with a keen, and full, and sincere mind, whether we have to struggle with it, or to acquiesce in its guidance? There are passages in this work, didactic as its style generally is, which have had on us all the effect of the most thrilling eloquence, from the fine admixture of severe reasoning and earnestness of feeling.
For instance – to give at once an idea of the more elevated tone this utilitarian science has assumed in the work of Mr Mill – it is no little novelty to hear a political economist speak in the following manner of the mere elements of national wealth. The author has been discoursing on that stationary state to which all opulent nations are supposed to tend, wherein, by the diminution of profits, there is little means and no temptation to further accumulation of capital: —
"I cannot," he says, "regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally