These very diverse doctrines, along with much that is fanciful and erroneous, contain many just ideas, many original conceptions. They never succeeded in supplanting the doctrine of the founders; but they demonstrated, once for all, that the science, apparently complete, was in reality far from perfection. To the Orthodox school they flung the taunt which Hamlet cast at Horatius: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” In this way fruitful discussions were frequently raised, and the public proved sympathetic listeners. The economists who were still faithful to the Classical creed began to doubt the validity of their deductions and were forced to modify their methods and to overhaul their conclusions.
Let us now attempt to realise the importance of the part which these critics played.
CHAPTER I: SISMONDI AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CRITICAL SCHOOL
The first thirty years of the nineteenth century witnessed profound transformations in the structure of the economic world.
Economic Liberalism had everywhere become triumphant. In France the corporation era was definitely at an end by 1791. Some manufacturers, it is true, demanded its re-establishment under the First Empire; but they were disappointed, and their demands were never re-echoed. In England the last trace of the Statute of Apprentices, that shattered monument of the Parliamentary régime, was removed from the Statute Book in 1814. Nothing remained which could possibly check the advent of laissez-faire. Free competition became universal. The State renounced all rights of interference either with the organisation of production or with the relations between masters and men, save always the right of prohibiting combinations in restraint of trade, and this restriction was upheld with a view to giving free play to the law of demand and supply. In France the Penal Code of the Empire proved as tyrannous as the old régime or the Revolution; and although freedom of combination was granted in England by an Act of 1825, the defined limits were so narrow that the privilege proved quite illusory. The general opinion of the English legislator is well expressed in the report of a Commission appointed by the House of Commons in 1810, quoted by Mr. and Mrs. Webb.[363] “No interference of the legislature with the freedom of trade, or with the perfect liberty of every individual to dispose of his time and of his labour in the way and on the terms which he may judge most conducive to his own interest, can take place without violating general principles of the first importance to the prosperity and happiness of the community.” In both countries—in England as well as in France—a régime of individual contract was introduced into industry, and no legal intervention was allowed to limit this liberty—a liberty, however, which really existed only on the side of the employers.
Under this régime the new manufacturing industry, born of many inventions, was wonderfully developed. In Great Britain Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow, in France Lille, Sedan, Rouen, Elbeuf, Mulhouse, became the chosen centres of large-scale production.
Alongside of these brilliant successes we have two new phenomena which were bound to draw the attention of observers and to invite the reflection of the thoughtful. First we have the concentration in the great centres of wealth of a new and miserable class—the workers; and, secondly, we have the phenomenon of over-production.
Factory life during the earlier half of the nineteenth century has been the subject of countless treatises, and attention has frequently been drawn to the practice of employing children of all ages under circumstances that were almost always unhealthy and often cruel,[364] to the habit of prolonging the working day indefinitely, to the inadequate wages paid, to the general ignorance and coarseness of the workers, as well as to the deformities and vices which resulted under such unnatural conditions. In England, medical reports, House of Commons inquiries, and the speeches and publications of Owen aroused the indignation of the public, and in 1819 an Act of Parliament was passed limiting the hours of work of children in cotton factories. This, the first rudiment of factory legislation, was to be considerably extended during the course of the century. J. B. Say, who in 1815 was travelling in England, declared that a worker with a family, despite efforts often of an heroic character, could not gain more than three-quarters and sometimes only a half of what was needed for his upkeep.[365]
In France we must wait until 1840 to find in the great work of Dr. Villermé a complete description of the heartrending life of the workers and the martyrdom of their children. Here, for example, we learn that “in some establishments in Normandy the thong used for the punishment of children in the spinner’s trade appears as an instrument of production.”[366] Even before this, in an inquiry into the state of the cotton industry in 1828, the Mulhouse masters expressed their belief that the growing generation was gradually becoming enervated under the influence of the exhaustive toil of a day of thirteen or fifteen hours.[367] The Bulletin of the Industrial Society of Mulhouse of the same year states that in Alsace, among other places, the general working day averaged from fifteen to sixteen hours, and sometimes extended even to seventeen hours.[368] And all evidence goes to show that things were equally bad, if not worse, in other industrial towns.[369]
Crises supplied phenomena no less disquieting than the sufferings of the proletariat. In 1815 a first crisis shook the English market, throwing a number of workmen on to the street and resulting in riots and machine-breaking. It arose from an error of the English manufacturers, who during the war period had been forced to accumulate the stocks which they could not export, so that on the return of peace their supplies far exceeded the demands of the Continent. In 1818 a new commercial panic, followed by fresh riots, again paralysed the English market. In 1825 a third and more serious crisis, begot probably of the extensive credit given to the newly opened markets of South America, caused the failure of about seventy English provincial banks, bringing much ruin in its train, as well as a shock to several neighbouring countries. During the whole of the nineteenth century similar phenomena have recurred with striking regularity, involving ruin to ever-widening areas, as production on a large scale has extended its sway. No wonder some people were driven to inquire whether the economic system beneath all its superficial grandeur did not conceal some lurking flaw or whether these successive shocks were merely the ransom of industrial progress.
Poverty and economic crises were the two new facts that attracted immediate attention in those countries where economic liberty had secured its earliest triumphs; and no longer could attention be diverted from them. Henceforth they were incessantly employed by writers of the most various schools as weapons against the new régime. In many minds they gradually engendered a want of confidence in the doctrines of Adam Smith. With some philanthropic and Christian writers they provoked sentimental indignation and aroused the vehement protest of humanity against an implacable industrialism which was the source of so much misery and ruin. With others, especially with the socialists, who pushed criticism to much greater lengths, even to an examination of the institution of private property itself, they resulted in a demand for the complete overthrow of society. All critics whatsoever rejected the idea of a spontaneous harmony between private and public interests as being incompatible with the circumstances which we have just mentioned.
Among such writers no one has upheld the testimony of these facts more strongly than Sismondi.[370] All his interest in political economy, so far as theory was concerned, was summed up in the explanation of crises, so far as practice, in the amelioration of the condition of the workers. No one has sought the explanation or striven for the remedy with greater sincerity. He is thus the chief of a line of economists whose works never ceased to exercise influence throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, and who, without being socialists on the one hand or totally blind to the vices of laissez-faire on the other, sought that happy mean which permits of the correction of the abuses of liberty while retaining the principle. The first to give sentiment