V. Application de ces moyens de liberté aux diverses industries, et d'abord aux industries qui agiss

CHAP. 15: V. Application of these means of liberty to the diverse industries, and first to the industries that act on things.—On the liberty of the industry that confines itself to executing simple displacements of things, or of the industry improperly called commercial.

§ 1. The principles analyzed in the preceding chapter apply indistinctly to all the arts that society embraces; to those that are exercised upon men as to those that work upon things; to teaching as to manufacturing; to politics, to the fine arts as to tillage. There is not one in which it is possible to succeed without the talents that relate to the genius for business; without the knowledge that pertains to the art; without good personal morality; without good relational morality. There is not one that does not require, independently of a certain capital of industry and good habits, another capital in real objects, in buildings, in commodities, in materials, in utensils. The power and liberty of all depend equally on a certain ensemble of utilities fixed in things and of faculties developed in persons.

In truth, these elements of power do not apply in the same manner to all the arts. One easily senses that in application they must be modified according to the particular nature of the art to which one relates them. Every industry demands certain knowledge; but all industries do not require the same kind of instruction. For all, individual and social virtues are needed; but all do not require precisely the same virtues. They do not all employ the same tools and the same materials, although they all need machines and materials.

One also understands very well that these means do not apply to all the arts with the same latitude: all do not appear equally susceptible of being exercised scientifically; all do not proceed with the same degree of precision and rectitude; all do not lend themselves with the same facility to a good division of labor; it is not, in all, equally easy to replace the labor of man with that of machines; it is not possible, in all, to bring to bear the same sum of means: it happens that in some, the power of the entrepreneur is naturally more limited than in some others.

But, in the end, however unequally the principles on which the liberty of labor, considered in a general manner, is founded may apply to each industry taken in particular, it is no less true that no industry can be free except according to these principles, and that one can say of each what I have said of all, to wit: that one exercises it with all the more power and facility as one better unites the notions, the habits, the materials, the instruments necessary for its exercise. This is what the remainder of this work will, I hope, clearly show. I will speak first of the arts that strive to appropriate external objects to the needs of man.

§ 2. If I begin with these, it is because they are the foundation of all the others. I am sorry for the lofty minds who like to consider man only by his noblest faculties; but, above all, one must exist. Before being a moral, enlightened, polished, distinguished man, one must be. Before being able to think of living nobly, one must live. Moral life, at least in this world, has its foundations in the maintenance of organic life; and the most lively and most refined intelligence is obliged, on pain of failing, to begin by providing for the needs of its envelope. These are truths that it is not possible to mistake, whatever pain one may have in admitting them to oneself.

Here, moreover, is something that must be understood, and which may reconcile the pure minds who profess to despise all that pertains to animal life with the arts whose object is to maintain it: it is that the true means of arriving at an elevated existence is to begin by making for oneself, through labor, a comfortable existence. The industries that occupy themselves with appropriating things to our needs, at the same time as they lead us to fortune, are a path to the intellectual and moral acquisitions most fit to honor humanity. This is a truth that I stated several years ago in the first part of this work [^382], and which has since found able interpreters elsewhere.

“Where no wealth is amassed,” says an English economist, “man, constantly occupied with the care of providing for the most urgent needs of the body, can give no time to the culture of his intelligence. His views, his sentiments are narrow, personal, illiberal. For the circle of his ideas to enlarge, for his morals to become gentle and liberal, a certain ease must permit him to occupy himself with something other than the care of feeding himself. He can become civilized only by becoming rich. Without the leisure and the resources that wealth procures for him, one would not see him devote himself to those elegant studies that purify taste, that extend and ennoble thoughts, that place our species higher on the scale of beings. The degree of civilization or of barbarism in which a nation finds itself often depends on the state of its wealth. To speak truly, a miserable people is never civilized; an opulent nation, never barbarous. No indigent nation is known to have distinguished itself in the sciences and the fine arts. Commerce flourished in Greece in the age of Pericles and Phidias; it prospered in Italy in that of Raphael and Petrarch. It is under the influence of wealth that Venice rises from the bosom of the waters; that Holland frees itself from its marshes; that both become the seat of the arts, of literature, and of science. We have seen, in the British Isles, the number and superiority of scholars, men of letters, poets, artists, be constantly proportioned to the progress of social wealth, that is to say, to the means of rewarding and honoring their labors [^383] .”

I can add that there is no reason to consider the arts that act on things as inferior to those that are occupied directly with the education of the species. It is the conservation, the happiness, the dignity of the species that is equally at issue for all of them. To appropriate the external world to the needs of man has nothing less useful, nor less noble than to shape man himself. How many fashionings, moreover, must man not receive to become capable of acting on nature with intelligence and with force? There is room here for the development of all his faculties; and even if one did not make his perfection the proper and direct object of his existence; even if one wished to fix his gaze and all his thoughts upon the earth, and to assign to his life no other goal than to accommodate this lower world to his needs, he could still neglect none of the knowledge, none of the virtues that he cultivates.

Finally, man occupied himself with things before turning his activity back upon himself. The industries that act on external nature are the first that he exercised, and this is another reason for them to be the first to hold our attention.

§ 5. Among these industries, there are some that act on things only to displace them, that give them no other fashioning than to bring them closer to the persons who demand them, that appropriate them to our needs only by putting them within our reach. They have been given, quite wrongly as we shall see a little further down, the name of commercial industries.

There are others whose task is more complicated, which modify things in themselves, which make them undergo the most varied transformations; but which, to operate these transformations, like the former to effect their transports, employ only chemical or mechanical forces. They have been named manufacturing industries.

Finally, there are others that operate metamorphoses of a higher order, that create a multitude of vegetable and animal productions; but which employ for this effect, independently of the chemical and mechanical forces that the former use, an agent of a particular nature called life. These last have been named agricultural industries.

I will occupy myself first with those that act on things only to displace them, to put them in the hands of the workers. I will then speak of those that transform them. I will treat last of all those that, to operate their transformations, need the help of life. I will thus arrive quite naturally at the second division of the arts that enter into the social economy, that is to say, at those that act on the human race, that raise it, train it, shape it, and that, for this, also need the help of life, not of vegetative life, but of animal life, and not only of animal life, but also of intellectual life and of moral life, of life considered in its most elevated modes of action.

If, unlike most economists, who begin with agricultural industry and end with commercial industry, I begin on the contrary with commerce and arrive at agriculture only in the third place, it is because the object of commerce is infinitely simpler than that of agriculture, and because, moreover, it is by commercial operations, that is to say, by transports, by simple displacements of things, that production seems to have begun.

I believe that man operated displacements before transformations. It seems natural to me to suppose, for example, that before creating objects proper for his nourishment, he must have thought of taking possession of those that nature had formed. There was fruit on the tree, fish in the water, game in the warren. But these products lacked one fashioning to be proper for his use: that of being put within his reach. He stopped the bird in its flight and the roe deer in its course, he extracted the fish from the sea, he made the fruit fall from the tree; and these products which were without value, which did not exist for him where they were found, he created in a way by only making them change place, by making them arrive in his hand. It seems therefore that the industry to which one gives the name of commercial, began to act before any other.

This industry is moreover that whose object is the simplest and most circumscribed. While manufacturing and even agriculture make things undergo the most varied modifications, commerce never makes them undergo but one, which is to change their place. It transports them from one time to another, from one country to another, from times of abundance to times of scarcity, from countries where they are common to places where they are rare: it is ceaselessly occupied with distributing them with reflection and discernment in time and in space. It makes them pass from the interior to the exterior; from the exterior to the interior; from the places where they are manufactured, into the warehouses where they are sold in large lots; from the warehouses where they are sold wholesale, into the shops where they are distributed retail. But, in its most limited movements, as in its most distant expeditions, it never does anything but displace them; and, from the action of the retailer, who confines himself to taking his merchandise from the shelves of his shop to place it in the hand of the buyer, to that of the shipowner who has gone to seek this merchandise in America, in the Indies, in China, there is never anything executed but one single thing, transports. The action of the shipowner and that of the retailer are absolutely of the same nature; both work to bring the merchandise closer to the buyer: the shipowner began the operation; other agents of commerce continued it down to the retailer; the latter finishes it.

Thus, while this industry seems to have begun first, it also happens to be that whose object is the least complicated, and this is a new reason for it to occupy us before any other: the true logical order is to go from the simple to the complex.

In indicating the motives that determine me to speak first of commerce, I have just made known in what this industry consists, and what is properly its nature. I have nothing left to say in this respect. I have only, before finishing this paragraph, a few remarks to make on the name that has been given to it.

I would be very embarrassed to say why the industry that displaces, that transports, that thus distributes in the world the things necessary for the satisfaction of all needs and for the execution of all labors, has been qualified as commercial. It is evident that one could not give it the name of commerce without doing violence to this word, without diverting it from its true meaning. In effect, the natural and etymological meaning of the word commerce, COMMERCIUM, a word formed from cum and merx, is exchange. To carry on commerce is to exchange; it is, instead of seizing a thing, to obtain it by means of another, cum merce. Evidently, there is no reason to apply this word to the industrious act, to the productive fact of the man who executes transports.Count de Verri, and, after him, M. Say, were surely right to observe that, among the number of persons who sell and who buy, there is a whole class, and a very numerous class, which executes transports, and which thus contributes to production in a very direct manner. They could have given the name of transport industry to this action of transporting, as the name of manufacturing industry is given to the action of transforming. They could also have said carriage, as one says tillage. But certainly these writers were wrong to apply the name of commerce to the art of transport. There is no more reason to call the industry of the people who transport things by this name, than to give this name to the industry of the people who fashion them. We all make exchanges in society, we are all merchants of something, we are all men of commerce; but to carry on commerce is properly a trade for no one. There are men who till, others who manufacture, others who transport, others who teach, who preach, who paint, who sing, who declaim: these are so many particular arts. To carry on commerce, to exchange, to obtain with what one makes a part of what others make, is an act common to all classes of workers.

I am therefore very vexed that the name of commerce has been applied to the art of transport, to carriage, to the transport industry. But in the end, since they have managed to give this word a vigorous enough twist to make it signify the art of conveying, of transporting, one should at least know how to consecrate it to this usage, and not say, after that, that commerce consists in buying in one place to resell in another, in buying wholesale to resell retail, in buying to resell[^384]; for, quite visibly, the art of transporting no more consists in buying to resell, than the art of manufacturing or tilling consists in selling and buying. I know well that the man of commerce, that is to say the peddler, the carrier, the shipowner, begin by buying, and end by reselling; but what industry does not do as much? The manufacturer buys merchandise in one form to resell it in another, just as the man of commerce buys it in one place to resell it in another place: yet can one say that the art of the manufacturer consists in buying to resell? no: the art of the manufacturer consists in operating transformations, as the art of the man of commerce consists in executing transports: it is by transporting that commerce produces: that, as an art, is what characterizes it; and not the action of buying, selling, exchanging.

I am willing therefore, though with regret, to consent to leave the name of commercial to the industry that should have been called transport, that is to say, to the industry that takes charge of carrying, of conveying, wherever there is need, the things necessary for the life and activity of men. But I give warning that, from this moment on, I no longer understand by commerce anything but the art of transport, and that it will be no more a question here of purchases or sales, than it will be in the chapters where I will treat of manufacturing, of agriculture, of teaching or of any other order of professions whatsoever. I will wait, to occupy myself with the action of selling, buying, exchanging, until I have spoken of the arts that produce the things destined for exchange, that is to say, until I have spoken of all the classes of professions that enter into the social economy; since there is not one that does not make some product with which it presents itself on the market.

§ 4. The commercial industry, I have said, is that whose object is the simplest. One should not conclude from this that its role is the least important.

Without the intervention of commerce no labor would be possible; for no worker naturally possesses at hand all the things he needs to act. It is indispensable that the transport industry begin by gathering around him, from the most diverse and sometimes most distant points, all that he requires for the execution of his labors, of materials, machines, commodities, currencies. It is also indispensable that this industry renew his provisions as he consumes them. The necessity of commerce is a forced consequence of the distance of things from one another, and of the obligation in which all sedentary professions find themselves to gather on a single point, in order to be able to work, things ordinarily disseminated in a multitude of diverse places[^385].

Without the intervention of commerce no worker could live, even if it were possible for him to exercise his art; for, as each worker ordinarily creates only one kind of product, and consumes a multitude of kinds, it is clear that each would remain deprived of all those he lacks, if the art of transport, by bringing them closer to him, did not offer him the means to exchange them against those he creates. The necessity of the commercial industry is therefore again a forced consequence of the separation of trades, and of the necessity of bringing closer to each worker what a multitude of other workers produce.

Commerce begins by seconding all industries by bringing closer to them all that their labor demands; and it then completes the products of each by putting these products within the reach of whoever needs them. It leads to the market the products of each worker, and brings back to him all the things that the maintenance of his house and that of his factory require. It is equally indispensable for the creation and for the sale of all products.

There is another way to feel the importance of the commercial industry: it is to consider all the value it can give to things and to men by displacing them appropriately.

What are the best things worth, where they are in extreme abundance, and how much price do they not acquire in passing from the places where they superabound into those where scarcity is felt? What are the things most susceptible of becoming useful worth, far from the arts capable of taking advantage of their properties, and how much does commerce not add to their price by bringing them closer to the arts that can render their properties useful? How much does it not increase their value as it makes them arrive under the hand of new workers who all give them some new fashioning? Who knows how much the art of transport has entered into the creation of the riches that exist in a country, in a single place of commerce, in the hands of a single individual?

The same remarks are to be made about what commerce can give of value to men. What are the most useful talents worth where the men who possess them are infinitely too numerous? How much does commerce not add to the value of these talents by transporting the men who possess them from the places where they superabound into those where they are lacking? What is the art in which he excels worth to the most distinguished artist, far from the circumstances where it would be possible for him to take advantage of it? How much does commerce not add to the value of his faculties by making him arrive on a stage more favorable to their exercise? Who could say what the art of transport adds to the value of all the faculties of every kind in a country by the manner in which it distributes the men in whom these faculties reside?

M. Say observes that the commercial industry can be applied only to material objects[^386]. I understand very well that one cannot transport talents, knowledge, separated from the men whose property they are. But, just as one transports the utilities fixed in things by transporting the things in which these utilities exist, so one can make ideas, talents, travel by making the men who possess them travel. Commerce thus applies itself to the faculties that art has developed in men, as to the utilities it has realized in things, and it adds equally to the value of the ones and the others by the manner in which it distributes in the world the men and the things in which labor has fixed them.

There is even this remarkable fact that commerce can add more to the value of men by displacing them, by making them travel, than it adds thereby to the value of things. It is not enough, in effect, to subject a thing to transport for it to be changed, for it to have received new fashionings, whereas man, whose senses are constantly open to the impression of external objects, is modified in a way by the sole fact that he travels. It would be very difficult to say all that the commercial industry has done for the education of men by displacing them, by carrying them from one country to another, by making them communicate with one another.

Montesquieu observes that commerce has procured the knowledge of the morals of all peoples, that they have been compared with one another, and that great benefits have resulted from it[^387].

Robertson attributes in part the renaissance of letters and of civilization in Europe to the powerful means of instruction that the crusades offered to its inhabitants by displacing them, by making them traverse countries better cultivated, more civilized than their own.

“It was impossible,” he observes, “for the crusaders to traverse so many countries, to see laws and customs so diverse without acquiring new instruction and knowledge. Their views expanded; their prejudices weakened; new ideas germinated in their heads; they saw on a thousand occasions how coarse their morals were in comparison with those of the polished Orientals; and these impressions were too strong to be erased from their memory when they returned to their native land... It is to these bizarre expeditions, the effect of superstition and folly, that we owe the first rays of light that began to dissipate the shadows of ignorance and barbarism[^388].”

“Traveling seems to me a profitable exercitation,” says Montaigne. “The soul has therein a continual exercitation to remark upon things unknown and new, and I know of no better school, as I have often said, for shaping life than to propose to it incessantly the diversity of so many other lives, fancies, and usages, and to make it taste such a perpetual variety of the forms of our nature... It is well said,” he adds further on, speaking again of travels, “that an honest man is a 'mixed' man[^389].”

He means, doubtless, a man who has mixed a great deal with others.

Now, the property of the commercial industry is to mix men a great deal, to move them a great deal, and by putting them continually in contact with new objects and new faces, to offer them means of instruction that are lacking to sedentary professions. The men whom commerce makes travel see alternately active populations and lazy populations; they see some that are lavish and some that are economical, some that are careful and some that are negligent; they can remark in the material state of the places these populations inhabit, the different effects of these different morals. Wherever activity and economy reign, they perceive well-being; they constantly find misery in the places inhabited by pomp and idleness, and they thus receive from facts the most proper moral lessons to make a useful and durable impression on their minds.

They have no fewer occasions to observe the effects of good public habits than those of good private habits. They visit in turn well-policed peoples and badly-policed peoples; peoples among whom justice reigns, and other peoples among whom violence dominates. They are all the more excited to observe this part of their morals as they are personally affected by it. They find, among some, security and facility for the exercise of their industry; among others, dangers and hindrances of every kind; and the experience they thus continually have of the effect of good and bad civil habits is surely one of the things most made to demonstrate to them the utility and to inspire in them the passion for justice.

I would have a great deal to do if I wished to describe with any extent the effects of the transport industry, and to indicate in how many ways it can increase the value and favor the progress of men and things by the displacements it makes them undergo. I hope that the little I have said will suffice to make the importance of its role understood. Sufficiently enlightened now on its nature and its influence, let us hasten to arrive at its means, and let us see how the general principles developed in the preceding chapter apply here. Let us examine rapidly what strength it can draw from the faculties of men and from the disposition of things; from the talent for business, from the knowledge relative to the art, from moral habits on one side, and on the other, from the state of the places where it works and from the possession of all the material objects necessary for its action.

§ 5. It seems that I should have little to say here to make the importance of the genius for business felt. The commercial industry, in effect, is that of all in which one would seem to understand the necessity of this means the best. This goes so far that, in practice, the word commerce is almost synonymous with business; that to undertake to supply a market with certain merchandise, to undertake a commerce and to do business are almost one and the same thing; that one says of a man of commerce that he is in business, whereas one barely says it of a manufacturer, one says it even less of a farmer, and one does not say it at all of many other industrious men; that, finally, one habitually confounds commercial speculations with commerce itself, although the talent for speculating is but one of the general means on which the power of all industry is founded, and this means is no more necessary to the art that takes charge of transporting things than to those that undertake to transform them. Despite all this, however, it is far from the case that the talent for business always presides over the enterprises of the commercial industry. A few examples will make known at once how necessary this means would be here, and how often it is neglected.

I have said that the first need of all industry, before undertaking to produce, is to study the nature and extent of the needs that are felt, and to take into mature consideration the state of demand. Consequently, commerce, which produces things in a country by transporting them there, cannot dispense with examining, before transporting them there, whether the demand for them is made there, and to what point they are demanded there. One cannot doubt that the painful crises that industry has experienced in these last times have come, in good part, from the little care that men of commerce have taken to use this precaution, in appearance so simple. The arts that transform things have surely made many false speculations; but that whose function is to spread them in the world has perhaps not put much more prudence and skill into its enterprises, and I do not know if, by the manner in which it has directed its operations, it has not contributed as much as the others to the common sufferings.

“Leith, and several other manufacturing cities of England,” observed a writer of that country a few years ago, “have not yet recovered from the bankruptcies that followed the shipments of merchandise with which they had glutted the markets of the continent in 1814 and 1815. But the first shipments that took place when we were first admitted to trade directly with Brazil, Buenos Aires, and Caracas were perhaps more ruinous still. The practical men then gave themselves over without any reserve to the spirit of speculation. A very intelligent traveler, M. Mawe, who resided at that time in Rio de Janeiro, informs us that, in the space of a few weeks, Manchester sent more merchandise than Brazil had consumed in the course of the twenty preceding years. There was such a quantity of it, that it was impossible to find in the city warehouses vast enough to house it, and the most precious articles were displayed on the shore. What was especially curious was the manner in which these clever people had composed their shipments. Elegant porcelain and crystal services were offered to populations who had never drunk from anything but a horn or coconuts. An immense quantity of tools had also been sent which had at one of their ends a hammer, and at the other a small axe, as if the inhabitants had nothing else to do but to break all the stones they might encounter, and to extract from them the gold and diamonds that were supposed to be found there. One of these speculators, still more shrewd, had sent a cargo of skates for the use of the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro, who have never seen ice, and to whom it is even very difficult to make it understood that water can be frozen[^390].”I need not say that these facts particularly indict the commercial industry. I do not know if the English manufacturers were wrong to create the objects in question in the examples I have just cited; but most assuredly British commerce, in directing them as has just been said, had made a vicious distribution of them. It is clear, for example, that in some of the shipments it had made to Brazil, it had taken no account of the nature of that country's needs; that in others, it had no better considered the extent of these needs; that in all, it had very poorly studied the state of demand. We also know what the consequences of these expeditions were. For years on end, the shipped goods remained locked up in the warehouses of the consignment merchants to whom they had been sent, although the shippers consented to lose the costs of freight charges, commission, customs, and insurance, and had given the order to sell at prices lower than those of the European markets; and at the moment I am printing these lines (August 1829), the glut in Brazil is only just beginning to diminish [^391] .

I could cite many other examples of the false speculations in which English commerce has engaged in recent times. One of the most famous is that of the enormous shipments of funds that the capitalists of that country made to the new States of South America. Never, observes the writer I cited a moment ago, had the greed of Great Britain's speculators more completely led them astray. Taking the newly recognized States for so many Eldorados, and not doubting that capital entrusted to the governments of such countries must rapidly increase, they successively sent them up to the sum of 31,570,000 pounds sterling, over 789 million francs. But the English guineas, instead of growing and multiplying in America, melted away, so to speak; the securities sent were soon found to be reduced by more than sixty percent; the bonds of Peru's creditors, for example, fell from 85 to 22 1/2; and there was a moment, so just an idea had been formed of that country's resources and of the loans it could reasonably make, there was, I say, a moment when the money merchants who had sent the 789 million to America were losing over 480 million of it [^392] .

Another enterprise of English commerce worthy of figuring alongside the one I have just described is that which it undertook on cottons in 1825. The idea had spread that the last cotton harvest would be insufficient for the needs of the year. Thereupon everyone hastened to place orders. Twice as many were made as the year before. These extraordinary demands immediately brought about a rise. The upward impulse once given, new buyers presented themselves; prices continued to rise; they became almost double those of the previous year; what had sold for ten in 1824, was bought for eighteen in 1825; what had sold for seven and a quarter was paid thirteen and a half; when finally it came to be perceived that the commodity believed to be scarce had been produced in superabundant quantity. Immediately a downward movement declared itself; what had risen from ten to eighteen fell back to seven; what had risen from seven and a quarter to thirteen and a half fell to five; and the merchants who, on the supposition of a shortage that did not exist, had brought in quantities double those of the previous year, experienced or caused their sellers to experience a loss of 62,500,000 francs [^393] .

I could cite other facts, for examples of this kind abound; but that is enough, and perhaps more than is needed, for what I am trying to make felt. If in a country that is the classic land of commerce one can undertake enterprises like those I have just cited; if the merchants of that country are capable of sending skates to Brazil, or crystal and porcelain services to half-savage populations, or nearly 800 million in silver to barely established governments in countries where everything is yet to be created, or in a single go enough to amply purge for fifty years all the inhabitants of a numerous colony [^394] , one can judge of what blunders the commercial industry is still capable, and one feels how right I am to present the talent for speculating as one of the faculties this industry can least do without. Let us therefore fully recognize that the most necessary thing for a merchant is to know the needs he undertakes to provide for: all that I have said of this first part of the talent for business finds its full and entire application here.

I add that after having carefully informed himself of the needs, he must examine with the same attention whether these needs are not already satisfied, and whether it is in his power to satisfy them better. The thing he would like to bring to a country is among those that sell there; but is this thing not already produced there by local industry or by merchants who are less distant, more diligent, or more skilled than he? If other industrious men already create it or transport it there, what is its cost? At what price is he able to deliver it there? What will be his costs of purchase, packing, customs, insurance, road carriage, freight charges, commission? Does he have some way of doing better than the others, and of making himself useful, with profit for himself, to the country he undertakes to supply? These are questions he must indispensably resolve, and the greater the competition, the more he will need to apply exactitude and rigor in his solutions. It is therefore necessary that he be as capable of appreciating the state of supply as the state of demand, and this second faculty of the man of business is equally one of those he cannot do without.

Such is the nature of commercial enterprises that it seems the management of these sorts of affairs must not require as much administrative talent as that of many others, and for example, as the conduct of a large factory, a considerable farm, a vast educational establishment, etc. This is because the entrepreneur of a commerce has under his orders only a very small part of the agents who contribute to the execution of his enterprises, whereas most other entrepreneurs are obliged to gather all their agents around them, and to preside over the entire operation. Who are the agents of a merchant? They are, independently of the small number of clerks and laborers he has near him, the road carriage commissioners and the shipowners he entrusts with the transport of his merchandise; they are the carters who direct the wagons; they are the captains who command the vessels and the sailors who perform the maneuvers; they are the consignment merchants to whom the goods are sent. Are all these agents of commercial production under his orders? No: the only task he truly directs is that which is done near him, and the same can be said of that done by the road carriage commissioner, the shipowner, the ship's captain: each of these agents has his separate management, and the task of each is surely simpler than that, for example, of a manufacturer, who may have several hundred workers to direct around him and considerable equipment to maintain or renew. However, despite these differences, which may indeed make the conduct of a factory or a vast agricultural operation more difficult than that of a house of road carriage, commission, banking, wholesale or retail, or that of a ship, a boat, a wagon, it is not doubtful that, in the simplest of these enterprises, there are men to direct, works to supervise, expenses to make, equipment to conserve, and that for all this a certain talent for administration is absolutely necessary [^395] .

Finally, although regular accounting is no more indispensable here than in any other industry, the necessity of such accounting in any commercial enterprise has been so well felt that it has become the object of a legal requirement, and every merchant is obliged to keep at once a journal in which he records, day by day, all the operations of his commerce, all that he pays, all that he receives, for whatever reason it may be, in which he even states monthly the expenses of his household, and a second book, in which he copies every year the complete inventory of his movable and immovable effects, and of all his assets and liabilities. Furthermore, a skilled merchant, who wants to see clearly what he is doing, is not content with these books, the only ones whose regular keeping is ordered of him, and he takes great care to open particular accounts for all his somewhat considerable operations, to debit each of these operations with all that it costs, to credit it with all that it brings in, and thus to provide himself with the means of recognizing which one procures profits, which one yields a loss, and consequently those he can continue with advantage and those he must abandon.

Thus, one finds here the application of all the faculties that constitute the genius for business. We shall see that it is the same for the diverse kinds of capacity that pertain to the art.

§ 6. In the commercial industry, no more than in any other, is it enough to know what it is fitting to undertake: one must also be in a state to execute it. The first thing, doubtless, is to know well what one can usefully bring into a country, and what one can bring back from it with advantage; but one must in addition be in a state to effect these transports, to effect them in a sure, convenient, rapid, and inexpensive manner. Now, this is an art, and an immense art, an art that contains many others. To become capable of carrying each thing from the places whence one could draw it, to wherever the demand for it could be made, it was necessary to know the respective position of all points of the globe, and to learn to navigate from each of these points toward all the others; it was necessary to know how to create ways to travel, and to invent the machines most proper for the transport of burdens. These are so many arts, and arts that demand, to be well exercised, what all arts demand, that is to say, practical knowledge, theoretical notions, talents for application and execution.

There was a time when one was capable neither of navigating, nor of creating ways, nor of constructing vehicles. All communications were difficult and limited. At sea, one could not lose sight of the coasts without running the risk of getting lost. It was, in the ages that have been qualified as heroic, a great and perilous enterprise to pass from the coasts of Asia Minor to those of Italy, or merely to the Ionian islands; and such voyages long appeared extraordinary enough for great poets to later make them the subject of their epics. On land, at an epoch infinitely closer to us, it was not rare to be ignorant of the existence of considerable places from which one was but little distant. Paris and its environs, toward the end of the tenth century, were a foreign and unknown region for the monks of Cluny in Burgundy, who were not a hundred leagues from it, and the abbot of this convent refused Count Bouchard, who had founded a monastery at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, to send monks there, because, he said, of the dangers and fatigues that could not fail to result from so great and so arduous a journey. Two centuries later, the monks of Ferrières and of Saint-Martin de Tournay, separated by a much smaller space, were mutually ignorant of the existence of the towns they inhabited, and having needed to communicate with each other, they were long in search of one another, and only by chance succeeded in finding each other. One was still more ignorant of the situation of distant places. There exists a map from the Middle Ages where Jerusalem is found in the very middle of the earth, and Alexandria as near to the holy city as Nazareth [^396] .

One feels that at epochs when the world was so poorly known, the means of traversing it must not have been well perfected. During the course of the Middle Ages, one traveled hardly at all except by caravans, and most transports were executed only on the backs of men and mules. While on land there was only peddling, there was only coastal shipping by sea. Great navigation, the great geographical discoveries, began only toward the end of the fifteenth century. The multiplication and improvement of roads, the opening of canals, are things more recent still. The first canal of any importance executed in Europe, the Briare canal, was not begun until 1605; that of Languedoc not until sixty-two years later. Of the thousand leagues of canals that England possesses, not an inch existed before 1755. Although the progress of certain vehicles preceded the exploration of certain routes, although the improvement of ships preceded and prepared that of navigation, it is nevertheless only toward the middle of the fourteenth century that naval constructions began to become better. The improvement of carriages is of a date still closer to us. The first coaches are from the beginning of the fifteenth century; the first public coach services, the first coaches by land and water, from the end of the sixteenth. Steam navigation is but of today or yesterday; it is only just being born [^397] .

Little by little, however, the land and the sea have been traversed, explored, recognized; the respective position of the diverse countries and their principal cities has become better known; one has learned to navigate better from one point to another; one has applied oneself to multiplying and perfecting the routes destined to put all points of any importance in communication; one has likewise striven to seek the instruments most proper for traversing these routes, for making an object arrive from one point to another; and in the course of the last three or four centuries, the art of transport has followed the movement of all the others and has been perfected like them.

I observe only that, in this art as in all, the first and principal progresses were made in an empirical manner; that is to say, one advanced by groping, by experimenting, by conducting oneself, not by general views, but by particular observations proper to each case, not by the settled principles of science, but by those ill-discerned reasons, by those inspirations of instinct which are the habitual guides of still uncultivated man. It is thus that, for a long time, to navigate, one vaguely consulted the wind, the sun, the stars, more than one geometrically measured the size of the angle made with the meridian by the line traversed. It is thus that, to construct roads, carts, ships, one took less counsel from physics and mathematics than from the indications furnished by experience in the presence of the difficulties one had to surmount. One sought empirically what was the form most proper to render a road solid and viable, what was the cut that made a ship more stable and a better sailer, how a carriage wanted to be placed on its wheels to move with ease, in what manner the wheels themselves should be formed, etc.; and I add that one exercised the art as one had found it, that is to say, one navigated on land and sea, one constructed the routes and the vehicles, and one used them in a purely empirical manner.

I go further, and I say that it is still thus that it would be reasonable to begin; that is to say, to become a good sailor, for example, it would be much better to go straight aboard a ship, to see the maneuvers done, to take part in them, and to set to navigating under the direction of a skilled pilot, than to begin by going to take what is called a course in navigation at the naval school of Angoulême, and to learn there, in genere demonstrativo, how one maneuvers a ship and how one navigates at sea, saving for later instruction in the art to which one will have to apply one's science. It is also thus that, to direct the construction of a road, it would perhaps be better to have the combined experience of a pioneer and a postilion than to emerge freshly minted from the école Polytechnique and that of Ponts-et-Chaussées.“Analytical methods,” observes a judicious writer, “are applicable to road carriage as to any other mechanical operation; but this art is complicated by so many minute data impossible to subject to calculation, that analysis separate from practice will never give 235.but deceptive lights. The role of analysis must be to coordinate and explain direct experiences, repeated on various occasions by different people and in different localities, such as the artillery makes in its schools before adopting the improvements that are most certain in appearance: the engineer and the scholar must be put in contact with the simple carter, with the postilion; and if this course is ever taken, one will be surprised to find in this class of coarse men the most sensible and often the most delicate remarks on what is the perpetual object of his observations, and one could even say of his sensations, taking into account the kind of magnetic rapport that exists between the horse and the man accustomed to leading it [^398] .”

Thus, for the construction and direction of vessels, for the construction of canals and roads, for that of carriages and boats, the practical knowledge of the craft is, there can be no doubt, the first thing necessary.

However, one can no more doubt that practice can receive here the most powerful aid from theory. On the one hand, the sciences can shed as much light on the construction of ways and machines proper for transport as on any other sort of construction; and on the other hand, they have reduced the art of directing oneself, outside of any traced path, to simple and infallible principles: the sciences have made it possible to determine with mathematical precision the form of the planet we inhabit, and the respective position of all the known points of its surface; by them it has been possible to link the most distant places by the most direct routes; by them the navigator, in the middle of the seas, can always say the path he follows, the point of the Ocean where he is, and go to touch, without mistaking it, a goal he does not know and from which he is separated by several thousand leagues; thanks to their aid, finally, there is no longer a place whose true position cannot be determined, and the Ocean, which was like an impenetrable barrier between the various continents, is now the link that unites them all.

If there are scientific knowledges, and there are many, that can second the action of carriage, it goes without saying that the talents for application and execution must find here matter to be exercised. To what end, in effect, would this knowledge serve without the talent to apply it, and how would applications be possible without the art of implementation? I must only observe that here as everywhere, the true means of rendering applications easy and numerous would be to attach the study of theory as much as possible to practice; to give science to the practitioner, rather than to train scholars for practice; and, for example, to bring the scientific instruction of sailors, of shipbuilders, closer, rather than to destine scholars for the navy or for nautical constructions. There is no comparison between the advantage that people who have begun by breaking themselves in on the processes of the art can draw from science and that which can be drawn from it by men who have thought of the art only after having finished their scientific education.

Thus, all the faculties relative to execution, like all those that relate to the conception and conduct of enterprises, are here incontestable means of strength and liberty.

§ 7. One must say of good moral habits what I say of the talent for business and the means that pertain to the art. Just as the agents of commerce extend their powers by perfecting their speculative and industrial faculties, so they increase their liberty by perfecting their personal habits and their relational morality.

Not only are the virtues of the merchant a part of his means, but they are the essential part. How, in effect, could he acquire the others without these, and of what use would they be to him? Of what use, for example, would know-how be to him without the will to do, without activity? Of what use would intelligence and activity be to him without prudence?

Prudence, which it is so necessary to use in the practice of all industries, is perhaps in commerce more indispensable still than in any other. It is, in effect, easier in this one than in any other, to engage in bad speculations. The enterprise of a new crop, of a new fabrication ordinarily requires the prior gathering of new means; there is always some preparatory operation to be done, during which reflection has time to act; whereas a commercial speculation can be consumed by a simple act, by a purchase or even by an order to buy, and, the order dispatched, the purchase made, there is no more time to think better of it and to take a better resolution. It therefore appears more necessary still in commerce than in the other industries to distrust a first idea, to be on one's guard against the seductions of the spirit of enterprise, and I am, it seems to me, right to say that it is, of all, that which requires the most prudence and composure.

Perhaps also it is that which requires the most care and cleanliness; at least it is that in which these good habits seem to have to be exercised on a vaster field. The cleanliness of the manufacturer can, at a pinch, be confined to the interior of his workshop, whereas it is not enough for the merchant to keep his warehouses and his shops well; it would be important for him to extend his care to the public way which is also part of his workshop, and which is its most essential part. The other industries doubtless cannot be indifferent to the good maintenance of streets, roads, canals; but it is palpable that none is more interested than commerce in seeing the commercial ways in good condition. It is above all to merchants and men of commerce that the cleanliness and good maintenance of the public way recommend themselves as a great means of liberty.

What care and cleanliness can do, as we shall see, for the power of agriculture and manufacturing, they can do for that of commerce. In this art, as in the others, the effect of these moral habits is to prevent, by small precautions, considerable losses and expenses, to keep men ready, to conserve in things the power to render, at each instant, all the service for which they were made. It is to their careful spirit, to their love of cleanliness, almost as much as to their industry and their wealth, that the English owe the fine state of their roads, their horses, their carriages, all their means of communication and transport, and consequently the great powers of their commercial industry. They do not wait, to repair a road, for it to have had time to degrade appreciably; they take care to close the ruts as they form; they make even the slightest unevenness disappear from the surface. It is by a spirit of cleanliness, more than by fear of fines, that they abstain, in their cities, from soiling the public way. Even if they had, like us, a police that permitted them to deposit refuse of every kind in the streets, it is doubtful that they would wish to use this faculty. They give no less care to the maintenance of their means of transport than to that of their commercial ways. The ships, the boats, the horses, the harnesses, the carriages, whether private or public, are of the most meticulous cleanliness. This taste is manifest even in the carts they employ for the transport of fertilizers, in rural exploitations: these carts, carefully painted, have, like carriages, says one of our engineers, iron axles, perfectly turned copper boxes, and in these boxes a reservoir for the oil that softens their friction [^399] .

As much as the good moral habit we designate by the name of cleanliness can usefully influence the liberty of commerce, so this industry finds means of development and power in the taste for simplicity. It is easy to perceive that commerce opens a vaster field to its activity by turning toward the transport of things of general use than by restricting itself to that of expensive things. A merchant who brings things useful to everyone, and within the reach of all fortunes, is sure to find more buyers and to do more business than he who brings only things that are little needed and of a very high price. A greater trade is done in calicos than in cashmeres; fewer values arrive from Brazil in precious stones than arrive in cotton and ox hides. The Spanish, when they began to draw gold and silver from America, did not open a branch of business for commerce nearly as important as the Dutch did later when they bethought themselves merely of bringing from China the little dry leaf to which we give the name of tea. Commerce in effect transports to Europe more than 300 million in tea per year [^400] , whereas, according to the author of The Wealth of Nations, the quantity of precious metals that Europe annually imports from America does not amount to more than 6 million sterling, or about 150 million of our money [^401] . One can judge, by this single fact, how much the taste for simplicity, by turning commerce toward the search for and transport of things of common use, opens for it a vaster career than does the taste for pomp by giving another direction to its activity.

Another moral quality quite essential to the merchant is the esteem of his art, the enlightened sentiment of its utility, the just appreciation of the good he effects. Commerce is perhaps of all professions that which has suffered the most from prejudices contrary to industry. There was attached, if I am not mistaken, in the old ideas, less disfavor to the exercise of agriculture, and even of manufacturing, than to that of commerce. One could, at a pinch, without derogation, cultivate one's field, run one's mill and sell its products, but not carry merchandise from one place to another, but not trade. The families engaged in so vexatious an industry left it as soon as they could. The nobles who had engaged in commerce had themselves relieved of the state of degradation into which they believed they had fallen.

If one wished to judge, by a few isolated facts, of our current morals, one might believe that these follies are not yet entirely worn out. One remembers having seen, a few years ago, an inhabitant of Saint-Chaumont imagine that he had lost his nobility because his father and his grandfather had exercised with honor a useful profession, the profession of merchants; and the ministry, recognizing that in effect the thing could be imputed to him as derogation, granted him, upon his request, letters of rehabilitation, letters of relief, to use the barbarous jargon in use at the Commission of the Seal. Fortunately this insult to the good sense and morality of the country received, at the same time, a brilliant reparation. While a noble was being rehabilitated who had lapsed because he had engaged in commerce, an attempt was made to aggregate to the nobility a distinguished industrialist, who had always been a merchant: the title of baron was sent to M. Ternaux. It was almost to warn him that he must abdicate his profession, on pain of derogation. The honorable merchant thought that the true derogation would be to let himself be made a baron: he preserved for labor its dignity, and did not accept a title which, in the thought of those who delivered letters of relief, seemed to imply contempt for the useful arts. This act of M. Ternaux seems to me worthy of being recalled: it is, in my opinion, one of the fine and good actions that have been done in the last fifteen years, and one of the most characteristic. In placing the consideration that labor gives above that which titles give, M. Ternaux expressed the dominant thought of his time. Few people today would think of asking if a Montmorency can engage in commerce; or else, like Chamfort, almost everyone would answer: Why not? if this Montmorency has the requisite qualities, if he possesses the intellectual and moral faculties that are necessary to exercise this profession as it likes to be exercised. One could multiply letters of nobility and those of relief in vain, one would succeed only with difficulty in falsifying our sense of the sources of consideration and the true titles to esteem. There are always here and there a few commoners who derogate, but there are perhaps still more titled people who ennoble themselves: for one industrialist who becomes a baron, twenty barons become men of industry; one could cite a multitude of former great lords who are interested in manufacturing or commercial enterprises. The true shame today is to be good-for-nothing; but no one blushes to do something useful. Everyone, on the contrary, honors labor, and this esteem in which each holds every naturally good and estimable profession is surely one of the private virtues most favorable to commercial industry as to every kind of industry.

These remarks on the strength that commerce draws from the good private habits of its agents could be greatly extended. It would be easy to show what courage, moderation, economy, and several other virtues whose effects I do not detail here, can do for it. But it is less a matter of knowing how each of these virtues contributes to the extension of its powers than of showing that they are all essential elements of its power; and the little I have said will, I hope, make this truth sufficiently understood. Let us see the influence that good social habits exercise on liberty.

§ 8. The more relational morality is perfected, the more one is an enemy of injustice, and disposed at once to abstain from it and to repel it, and the freer commerce must be. This is self-evident.

Thus, for example, commerce is all the freer as one knows better how to defend oneself from any unjust pretension over the commercial ways, as one guards more against degrading them, as one encroaches less upon them, as each keeps better to his place there, etc.

It is customary in Paris to make the public way, in a way, one's private dump: dead animals are thrown there; corrupt waters are spread there; the sweepings of one's apartment and the scraps from one's kitchen are deposited there; the dust from one's carpets is shaken there; the gutters of one's roofs are directed onto passersby; it is made, as it were, the receptacle for everything one has at home that is inconvenient or foul: is it necessary to say that this lack of respect of the inhabitants for the streets of their city harms the liberty of traversing them; that the more each degrades and soils them, the less practicable they are for everyone?

If one fears little to soil them, one fears still less to usurp them. Each invades, for private uses, the narrow space they offer to general circulation: the grocer roasts his coffee there; the wine merchant deposits his barrels there; the carter parks his carriages there; one has his wood sawn there; another packs his merchandise there; countless peddlers establish their market there; most shop merchants vie to advance their displays the furthest; passage, air, light, are equally intercepted there: I do not believe I exaggerate in saying that a tenth of the public way is habitually taken from circulation by all these private usurpations: circulation is therefore a tenth less free than it would be without these encroachments [^402] .

It is perhaps still more encumbered by the lack of equity with which the space is shared. Each claims to have at his disposal the entire width of the street: horsemen and carriages want to go on the sides as in the middle; people on foot, in the middle as on the sides. Everyone thus runs pell-mell; and this confusion, which does not fail to greatly hinder the circulation of carriages and horsemen, renders the walking of pedestrians excessively arduous and even dangerous. According to surveys made in the statistical research published by M. le préfet de la Seine, one can put at fifteen persons, on average, the number of individuals annually crushed by carriages in the streets of Paris. Two very simple rules could bring a little order to the confusion that reigns there: the first would be that a sharing of the street be made between people on foot and people with equipages; that the latter pass in the middle and the pedestrians on the sides; the second, that every person keep to his right upon meeting another. This is the order observed in England, and it contributes infinitely there to the liberty of circulation. It is true that English streets lend themselves to it infinitely better than ours; but, the less our streets are suitably arranged for walking, the more order would be necessary to circulate there without too much encumbrance.We see how greatly justice in the use of commercial ways can contribute to the liberty of commerce. However, it would not be enough to abstain from any encroachment upon these ways, if one did not at the same time know how to defend oneself from the desire to monopolize the means of transport, or the goods to be transported, or the countries to be supplied with these goods. To what end, in effect, would it serve for the roads to be free if a few men wished to seize all the means of traversing them; or even if they left the use of these means free, if they wished to seize all the transports to be made upon them; or finally, if they permitted transports to be executed upon them if, dividing the world among themselves, they claimed to arrogate the exclusive right of each supplying a part of it.

The general farm of public coach services alone had, before M. Turgot, the power to establish coaches by land and water on most of the great roads and navigable rivers: thenceforth, what use would it have been, in order to form such enterprises, for these commercial ways to be excellent, and for nothing to prevent coming and going upon them?

The same company claimed to have the exclusive right to transport travelers, bales, merchandise, packages, gold and silver bullion, etc. Alongside such a pretension, what would it have mattered, in order to effect these transports, that the roads were free, and that everyone could establish carriages upon them?

Other associations alone enjoyed, for a long time, the right of trading with India, China, and other distant countries: in the presence of a similar privilege, what use would it have been, in order to trade with these countries, for the seas to be open to everyone, for everyone to be able to launch ships upon them, and for all sorts of objects to be transported on these ships?

Commerce, to be free, therefore demands that one abstain from any unjust enterprise, not only upon its ways, but upon all parts of its domain. Whether merchants wish to monopolize the market, the goods, the carriages, or the ways, the liberty of commerce will be equally destroyed; it will be destroyed all the more as the monopoly is concentrated in fewer hands, and as it extends to more things; and it will be so not only because the monopolists will materially prevent everyone from acting, but also because they will have taken from themselves all interest in doing well, all motive for emulation, consequently all impetus, and soon all capacity.

It is known that privileged merchants are no more skilled in the exercise of their industry than are privileged manufacturers. The old farm of public coach services, which permitted no one to establish carriages, was itself so incapable of establishing good ones, that its coaches required ten days to make the journey to Lyon, which is now made in less than three, and three days to make that to Rouen, which is now made in twelve hours [^403]. The famous English company to which the commerce of India belongs conducts this commerce with so little success, despite its privilege, or rather because of its privilege, that according to M. Say, who on this matter draws his information from the best economists of England and from the company's own accounts, it runs at an annual loss of more than ten million, and is obliged to borrow to pay the dividend of its shareholders [^404]. I could cite twenty other examples of the incapacity of privileged merchants. Monopoly produces in commerce absolutely the same effects as in the other industries. By removing all competition, it dispenses with all effort; it dampens the activity of those it favors, at the same time as it does violence to those it despoils; and thus it doubly destroys liberty.

However, for commerce to be free, it would not suffice for its agents to abstain, with regard to one another, from any spirit of monopoly; it is also necessary that the other industries not wish to impose hindrances upon it. Now, it is far less hindered by the unjust pretensions of its own agents than by those of the other industries.

It is to be remarked that commerce is infinitely more liberal toward the other arts than they are toward it. By its nature, commerce is inclined to wish that all industries achieve the greatest possible development, feeling full well that the more work they do, the more transports it will have to effect; that the more they multiply their products, the more it will be able to multiply its journeys; that the more they vary their productions, the easier it will be for it to place each thing in the presence of another against which it can be exchanged. It must therefore naturally desire that nothing limit their growth, that their movements not be hindered by any fetter.

They are far from manifesting the same sentiments toward it. There is no producer, on the contrary, who does not claim to regulate its movements according to his avarice: "Do not import iron," the ironmasters tell it; "do not bring in wheat, wool, livestock," cry the farmers; "beware," the manufacturers say in their turn, "of bringing the products of foreign manufactories to our market; do not do violence to our laziness, our incompetence; we are lost if we cannot sell our products at a monopoly price, if you are going to impose upon us the obligation to struggle in skill and activity against the industry from without."

These complaints against commerce, these efforts that most producers make in all countries to prevent it from importing this or exporting that, force us to examine briefly whether the liberty of this industry is naturally incompatible with that of the others; whether the other industries can properly develop within each country only by restricting the movements of the commercial industry, and by forbidding it a certain number of imports or exports. Here, it seems to me, is what could be most plausibly alleged to resolve this question in an affirmative manner.

It is unfortunate for a people, one might say, to have its factories or its granaries far from it, to draw from without the products it consumes: this obliges it to transport costs that would be spared if it made these products itself; in case of war, this exposes it to being suddenly deprived of indispensable objects, which it will only manage to replace with difficulty. It is therefore desirable that everything that can naturally be produced in each country be produced there, that every industry that has a chance of prospering there establish itself there. Now, in many cases, this would not be possible without the help of prohibitions. The laws that preside over the development of the species have not permitted the arts to be born everywhere at the same time: manufacturing industry was born in Flanders and in Italy before developing in England; it was born in England earlier than in France. Our cashmeres still cost 25 fr. at the time when the English sold theirs for 12; our percales and our calicos cost us, poorly made, 7 or 8 fr. per ell, when the English sold theirs for 3 fr. If, in this state of affairs, we had freely allowed English cashmeres and calicos to enter, the fabrication of these products could never have been sustained in France, where it nevertheless has the greatest means of success. For a new industry to be able to establish itself in a country, it must therefore first be protected by customs duties against the competition of more advanced countries.

This argumentation in favor of prohibitions would have a grave defect: it would be to prove far too much. If it were true that every new industry must be protected against the competition of more advanced countries, it would not be enough to guarantee it against competition from without, it would also be necessary to defend it against that from within; for, within as without, there can be countries more advanced than those where a new industry is currently being established. It would be necessary to set up barriers, not only between kingdoms, but between provinces; not only between provinces, but between cities. It would be necessary, for example, to protect one of our cities where cotton manufacturing was beginning to be established, not only against the competition of English manufacturers, but against that of the manufacturers of Rouen or Mulhouse, which could also crush it. No one, however, within the country, will claim that backward cities need to be defended against advanced cities; no one will deny that silk manufacturing can be established elsewhere than in Lyon without the support of monopoly. Why then could an industry already established abroad not be naturalized in France without the help of prohibitions? What would prevent spinners from Manchester from bringing their industry to Paris, as manufacturers from Lyon go to establish themselves in London?

As long as it costs less to transport a thing into a country than to manufacture it there, it is good that it be transported there. As soon as manufacturing can produce it there more cheaply than commerce can, it does not need the help of prohibitions to establish itself.

Prohibitions have these two equally disastrous effects: they give birth in a country to industries that could not sustain themselves there on their own, and they retard the development of those that could best be established there.

There are some industries that would have in France every element of success, and which are found to be greatly retarded there, precisely because of what has been done for them. I have cited examples elsewhere [^405]. The aim was to free our manufacturers from all formidable competition; they have had to struggle only among themselves; they have found a sufficient outlet without taking too much trouble, and consequently their art has remained imperfect. In vain, for thirty years, has one excited them, encouraged them, given them premiums, distributed prizes to them, all that has done nothing: by delivering them from foreign competition, one has taken from them the only stimulant capable of pulling them from their apathy. It is only by the contrary process that one could have given some impetus to many fabrications, which are infinitely less advanced than they ought to be.

I am persuaded, for example, that if there is a way to teach our cotton spinners to spin fine thread, as our potters to make good earthenware, it would be to threaten them with the competition of the English.

I do not say that prohibitions should be lifted abruptly; but I say that the greatest service that could be rendered to industry, the best thing that could be imagined to activate it, would be to announce that at the end of a certain time, such and such support for laziness, such and such privilege for mediocrity, will be withdrawn, and that it will be necessary, under penalty of death, to be in a state to withstand the regime of competition.

There are enough examples of what the fear of a dangerous rival can do to stimulate activity. In 1823, the manufacturers of Lyon denied the possibility of manufacturing more cheaply than they do. Around that time, expatriated workers warned them of what was happening in England, and of the considerable development that silk manufacturing had taken on there. The alarm was sounded in the city, and the same manufacturers, who had until then denied the possibility of savings, soon recognized that a saving of 50 or 60 percent could be made on the costs of weaving alone.

It is by the fear of competition that the British government, under the ministry of Mr. Canning, sought to spur on the industry of its subjects, and to render it more skilled and more active. Instead of establishing new prohibitions, it began to lift the old ones; and it was precisely the weakest industries that it subjected first to the fortifying regime of liberty; it was from the silk manufacturers, the least advanced of all, the least capable of struggling against us, that it first withdrew the fatal support of monopoly.

Once again, if there is some way to animate, to fortify in a country the industries that languish there and that could prosper there [^406], it is to place them in the necessity of preparing themselves for the regime of competition, it is to gradually permit commerce to have the products of foreign countries compete with their products. Far, therefore, from the liberty of commerce being contrary to that of the other industries, one can say that it is indispensable to them, that it is their most active stimulant, and that they only become all that they can be when commerce can continually force them to struggle in power against their rivals from within and from without.

Moreover, whatever may be the influence that the liberty of the commercial industry would exercise on that of the other industries, it remains no less true, as I said before indulging in this digression, that the liberty of commerce is incompatible with the pretension of the other industries to lay down the law to it, and that, to be free, it demands at once that its own agents renounce monopolizing it, and those of the other industries renounce restricting it.

I add, in finishing this paragraph, that it is not enough that one abstain from these excesses as an individual, and that it is also necessary to know how to guard against them as a public. It is quite true that they all presuppose bad individual dispositions; but they are not all committed by individuals. It is not individually that manufacturers and farmers impose restrictions on commerce. It is not individually that certain merchants monopolize the commerce of certain countries, or that of certain goods, or the use of certain means of transport, or the navigation of certain rivers.

In the commercial industry, as in the others, the excesses that men commit in isolation are always a small matter in comparison with those in which they engage collectively. For a few furtive encroachments that isolated merchants permit themselves, political bodies will openly engage in the most vast usurpations. Each people of Europe, for example, will undertake to lay its hand on some portion of Asia, Africa, or America, and will forbid the rest of the world to trade with the regions it has invaded. Alongside individuals who will try to encroach upon some road, some watercourse, one will see national bodies try to usurp entire seas. The Ottomans, astride the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, will not want to leave free passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Danes, placed on the Sound, will claim to forbid all communication between the Ocean and the Baltic. The English, in their popular songs, will insolently call themselves the masters of the sea, and often they will conduct themselves as if, in effect, nature had made the Ocean the particular property of the British Isles.

If such is the violence of political bodies toward one another, one can well imagine that they will not conduct themselves with more justice toward individuals. Society, the public person, will seize, in some countries, the navigation of rivers: it will not permit navigation along their length except by paying it tribute; it will reserve for itself the exclusive right to navigate across them, and to establish ferries for water crossings. It will also reserve the right to maintain posting-houses on the roads; it alone will be able to carry letters, newspapers; it will want to know all the movements of commercial agents; it will forbid them to circulate without passports, to sojourn without residence permits; they will not be able to open markets, hold fairs, meet in an Exchange except with its authorization; it will not permit them to take certain goods except to certain markets; it will have, for certain commodities, warehouses, where they will be violently constrained to deposit them while waiting to find a way to dispose of them; it will be, finally, in complicity with it and with its support that farmers and manufacturers will impose all sorts of hindrances on merchants. In short, the greatest violences done to the commercial industry will be done to it politically, socially.

Doubtless, the whole of society will not take an effective part in these excesses; but they will be committed in its name, by its true or false representatives; and although several of its members condemn them, as long as the reason of the great number is not shocked enough by them to put an end to them, as long as the majority consents to tolerate them, one can, with reason, say that they are in keeping with its spirit or its morals, and consider them as its work. It is not enough, therefore, for them to cease, that each abstain from them as an individual, it is necessary that, politically, one no longer consent to commit them, or to suffer them to be committed. This condition, which is the most difficult, is also the most necessary, and what commerce demands above all, to be free, is that society abstain from fettering its movements; it is that, with regard to it, society forbid itself and forbid the powers charged with acting for it all the excesses that it would repress in individuals.

Thus the liberty of the commercial industry is tied to the progress of relational morality as to the progress of individual habits, as to the progress of knowledge relative to the art, as to the progress of the genius for business, and it is all the greater as, in their application to commerce, all these faculties have acquired more development. We shall see that the same industry profits from the powers that man draws from things, no less than from those he possesses in himself.

§ 9. I have said that every art, in order to act, needs a location, a theater, a workshop, and that its action was all the stronger and freer as this workshop was better appropriated for its object, as it was better situated, better constructed, better arranged, better provided with the necessary instruments. It is not difficult to recognize that this applies to commerce as to any other art.The workshops of commerce are the seas, gulfs, bays, roadsteads, ports, basins, rivers, canals, bridges, roads, streets, warehouses, stores, and shops. These are, in effect, the places where it executes its function, the one that characterizes it, the action of displacing, of transporting, of bringing things closer to whoever needs them. Is it necessary to say that the liberty of its movements depends to the highest degree on these things and on what has been done to appropriate them for its action?

It would be as impossible to carry on commerce without ways as to exercise a trade without a workbench. It is, on the contrary, all the easier to trade, the more ways there are open to commerce. The more roads, canals, and navigable rivers exist in a country, the more commercial liberty there is in that country. The more means of communication have been created between that country and others, the more bridges have been thrown over rivers, the more roads have been made through mountains, the more the seas that separate them have been traversed, explored, recognized; the more, in a word, open and well-trodden ways exist in each country and between all countries, the more commercial liberty there is everywhere.

It has been calculated that England, on a territory whose extent is scarcely a third of that of France, possessed forty-six thousand leagues of ordinary roads, five hundred leagues of iron roads, and nearly a thousand leagues of canals; and, comparing this development of commercial ways to that of the ways of the same nature that France possesses on an expanse of land three times as considerable, it has been calculated that this latter country had, proportionally, three hundred times fewer iron roads, twenty times fewer canals, and eleven times fewer ordinary roads [^407]. Supposing these estimations to be exact, France, with regard to the extent of its commercial ways, would thus have, on the one hand, only the eleventh, on another, only the twentieth, and on another, only the three-hundredth part of the commercial liberty of England.

But the liberty of commerce is not only in proportion to the extent of the workshop, it is also in proportion to its nature. One conceives, in effect, that to operate transports, it is not a matter of indifference to have at one's disposal a road or a canal, the sea or the land.

Commerce is more powerful, for example, on an iron road than on an ordinary road: it can there pull heavier burdens with less force; it can there more easily entrust the direction of its vehicles to inanimate power sources, etc.

Commerce is also more powerful on a canal than on most rivers. Rivers, which Pascal calls roads that advance and carry one where one wants to go [^408], can just as well be called roads that recede and move away from the point one wants to reach: that depends on the direction in which one wants to go. If they push one toward the goal when one is heading toward their mouth, they move one away from it when one wants to navigate against the current. Besides, even when one abandons oneself to their slope, they do not lead directly to the goal; they make long detours which one is obliged to follow; one must go fast or slow, according as they are dormant or rushing; and these roads, which move, move only as they please, and rarely as would please those they carry. Finally, their utility is subject to frequent intermittences, and circulation on them is ordinarily very difficult, and sometimes even impossible for a portion of the year.

One cannot reproach canals with the same inconveniences. These roads are not those that move, but those on which one can best move. If they do not help to go in one direction, they do not prevent going in the inverse direction. They partly bypass the detours of rivers, and shorten their course appreciably. They are not subject to swelling excessively, or to diminishing to the point of being unusable. They offer, in all seasons, a sufficient quantity of water, and a perfectly tranquil water, on which boats glide equally well in both directions; finally, they do not go only to the bottom of valleys like rivers: one can lead them onto high hills, make them cross mountains through tunnels, rivers and valleys on aqueducts, and, by their means, link together rivers that had no communication except by the sea.

Finally, commerce has more power and liberty on the sea than on any other kind of commercial way. The sea, considered as a workshop of commerce, certainly has its inconveniences; but these inconveniences, however grave they may be, are redeemed by such advantages that they in no way destroy its superiority. The sea, like rivers, presents at once a support and a motor that cost nothing; but it has this advantage over running waters that the same wind can make ships move in a multitude of different directions, whereas the current of rivers carries boats in only one direction. Besides, it carries such immense burdens that even when one can navigate on it only by tacking, no other way can be compared to it.

Does one wish to judge to what point the liberty of transports depends on the nature of the workshop on which one operates them? One has only to consider how it varies according to the nature of the ways on which one wishes to operate them. On a footpath a man can have a horse carry only three or four quintals; on a carriage road, he can have it pull from fifteen to twenty; on an iron road, he will have it pull nearly two hundred; on a canal, more than six hundred; on a river, the same man will transport several thousand; and on the sea several tens of thousands without the use of any motor of his own. Finally, the average price of transports, per ton and per league, will be infinitely less on the sea than on a canal, and on a canal infinitely less than on an ordinary land road [^409].

It is therefore certain that, if the commercial liberty of a country depends greatly on the extent of its ways, it depends no less on their nature. England can trade more freely than we, not only because it has more ways, but also because it has more of the good kind, because it has above all more of those that are economical. Observe, in effect, that while the extent of its ordinary roads, compared to that of ours, is only in the proportion of eleven to one, that of its canals is in the proportion of twenty to one, and that of its iron roads in the proportion of three hundred to one. Observe above all that the sea, the most powerful of ways, embraces it almost entirely; that the numerous and deep indentations of its coasts, that the gentle slope of several of its rivers, permit the waters of the sea to penetrate, in many places, far into the country, and that it has them at its disposal, in a way, even toward the middle of the country.

In truth, from the fact that certain ways are naturally more powerful than others, it does not follow that these are the ones one must seek to obtain everywhere, and, for example, that one must bring the sea to Paris, whatever it may cost. The best ways in general are not the best in a given circumstance. There are places where the most economical course is to use river navigation, others where it is better to open canals, others where roads with ruts would be preferable: that depends absolutely on the localities; it is impossible to decide anything in this regard in a general manner. But from the fact that the same ways cannot be established everywhere, it does not follow either that certain ways are not naturally more powerful than others, and it remains constant that the liberty of commerce depends essentially on the nature of the ways that can be employed. But we must consider this subject from a new angle.

The liberty of commerce is not only in proportion to the nature of the commercial ways, it is also in proportion to their form, in proportion to what has been done to appropriate them for its action.

England has modified by very great works the shores of the sea that surrounds it: it has lit with numerous lighthouses, placed at the most essential spots, the most dangerous points of its littoral; on an extent of a thousand leagues of coast, it has dug more than a hundred seaports; in the most important of these ports, in London, in Hull, in Liverpool, in Bristol, it has opened spacious basins for ships where they are moored in tranquil water, where they find themselves sheltered from depredations and can be loaded and unloaded with facility and economy, etc. France is far from having subjected its coasts to such important modifications, it has not lit them with as many fires; it has not protected with as many moles and jetties the shelters they present; it has not constructed as many ports there; it has not dug in these ports as many basins, nor raised on the banks of these basins sheds and warehouses as vast and as convenient. Is it not evident that this difference in the works that the two countries have executed on their maritime coasts must create a great one in the liberty they have to use the sea?

Our neighbors are guided in the construction of their canals by other principles than we are: they make them narrow, we make them wide; they construct them with simplicity, we construct them with luxury; they make large ones and small ones to proportion them everywhere to the needs of circulation, we have as yet made them of only one sort; they put the small and the large in such a relation that the same boats can, by coupling or by moving in isolation, be employed without loss on all of them, we have made them large without making them uniform, and the boats that serve on some can only rarely be used on others... Is it necessary to say that the mode of construction adopted on the other side of the strait is more favorable than ours to the liberty of transports? The English employ to prolong their canals, to multiply them, what we spend to make them too wide; what we give to pomp, they use to overcome the difficulties of the terrain; and it is thus that they have been able to link by hydraulic ways points between which a system as costly as ours would not have permitted them to establish any. Constructing their canals with more economy, navigation on them can be less expensive; making them narrower, they employ boats of a smaller dimension; and as smaller boats have less trouble finding their cargo, circulation, by that alone, can be more active; finally, the relation existing between the locks of the large and small canals, a relation that permits going on all of them with the same barges, is another circumstance favorable to economy and celerity.

If we compare our roads to those of England, we will see even better to what point the liberty of commerce depends on the form of the commercial ways.

Our roads are great avenues, generally straight, forty-five to sixty feet wide, paved or metalled in the middle, but on a line so narrow that two carriages sometimes have trouble passing each other. This line, which is the best part of the road, frequently lacks solidity and evenness: when metalled, it is filled with ruts; when paved, it is hard and jolting; it has besides the defect of being too elevated above the verges, and often carriages cannot, on pain of overturning, get onto it or off it without great precaution. The verges are worse still: ordinarily formed of clay, and crossed by the rain that runs from the middle of the road into the ditches, they present, according to the season, only a mass of dust or mud. Almost always, the way is terminated, on both sides, by a row of trees, which in general are all the taller and more bushy as the soil where they are planted is richer and more humid, and as the road has more need of being aired. On descents and ascents, the gradient has been poorly managed, and nothing is more ordinary than to be obliged to lock the wheels to go down and to walk one's horses going up. Finally, the road is given over entirely to horsemen and carriages; and pedestrians, on a width of sixty feet, do not have a small place of their own, and are obliged, to protect themselves from the dust or the mud, from the horses and the carriages, to go, on both sides of the road, to seek a passage in the fields.

English roads are less straight than ours, but perhaps they are less monotonous. They are also less horizontal; but the ascents and descents on them are, it is said, gentler. They are above all less wide; but, with a much lesser width, they offer, in reality, a more spacious way for circulation. They are in effect viable across their entire width: instead of being divided longitudinally into three parts on which all classes of travelers are confounded, and of which none is completely practicable, they are divided into only two sections, a sidewalk for people on foot, and a roadway for horsemen and carriages, which are both fully appropriated for their destination. The sidewalk is elevated above the road and protected by posts; the road, in its entire length, is perfectly even and solid; the foundations, the trench, the profile, are disposed in such a way as to ensure the prompt drainage of water; besides, the entire way, instead of being planted with trees, is ordinarily bordered only by low and well-trimmed hedges, which allow the air to circulate freely and permit the wind to sweep or dry them according to the season; posts planted at each fork in the road indicate, in legible characters, the place to which that fork leads, and the distance that separates one from it; milestones indicate the space covered and that which remains to be covered; pedestrians, on the sidewalk reserved for them, find seats from distance to distance... One has visibly taken care to omit nothing that could make the road more completely suited to its object.

It is indubitable that on such ways, circulation must be easier than on ours. Although infinitely better constructed, it is possible, as they absorb much less land, that they have cost less to establish, and that one pays less for their enjoyment [^410]. One travels on them with less confusion, with more safety, with less fatigue. Carriages there go everywhere at a horse's trot; the mail coach travels there with a rapidity almost double that which it can deploy on our roads. In truth, this greater speed is due in part to the superiority of the horses and carriages; but the good condition of the horses comes in part from that of the roads, and the perfection of the carriages is also linked to that of the roads, which permits them to be constructed with a lightness and a delicacy that it would be difficult to give them on ways less firm and less even.

The streets of our cities offer new proofs of the truth I am expounding. If we have roads that are much too wide, we have, by way of compensation, streets that are infinitely too narrow. Our great post roads, which are sometimes twenty meters wide in the middle of the most deserted countryside, end, in our most populous cities, in streets that are not twenty feet wide; and, as ill luck would have it, our streets, which do not always lack width at the entrance to cities, narrow toward the center where everything converges, and become narrower as they would have more need to widen. One would think that malice had been put into it, and that the aim was to do things precisely the reverse of common sense [^411].

[^407]: Revue encyclopédique, vol. XXXVIII, p. 556. [^408]: Pensées, part I, art. 10, no. 19. [^409]: See, on this subject, an article by M. le baron Dupin, in the Revue encyclopédique, vol. XXXVIII, p. 556. [^410]: M. le baron Dupin, in the article I have just cited, estimates the square mile of land that roads absorb in England at 1,500 fr., and that which they absorb in France at 1,800 fr. [^411]: See, on the streets of Paris, an article by M. le baron Dupin, in the Revue encyclopédique, vol. XXXIX, p. 119.This sort of inconsistency is, it is said, less pronounced in England. If the roads there are not very wide, the streets are more spacious, and are better suited to the needs of circulation. This is not their only advantage; at the same time as they are wider, they are also better arranged: they possess sidewalks, which ours lack; they do not have the carriage gates, the gutters, the sewers, that ours have. Now, these differences all contribute to making circulation there freer. One does not see in London, for example, those inextricable jams that the narrowness of the public way makes so frequent in the streets of Paris; one does not see all classes of passersby go pell-mell in the middle of the street, and continually obstruct one another. The progress of people walking along the houses is not ceaselessly interrupted by that of horses and carriages leaving or entering them. These people are not exposed to receiving on their heads all the rain collected by the roofs. This rain does not form, in the middle of the streets, rivers that can only be crossed on planks, and one does not run the risk of being carried away by these rivers into hideous sewers, which, from distance to distance, infect and obstruct the public way. People coming and going of every kind can circulate there with infinitely more facility, rapidity, and safety than in Paris.

I would not finish if I wished to show in detail to what point the liberty of commerce depends on the form of the commercial ways. Often a single happy modification suffices to render them much more proper for their object. The sea, in the ports of England, has been rendered more available by the sole fact that the walls of the quays have been given a concave form that permits ships to approach them very closely. Simple buoys, indicating the good channels, suffice to render the navigation of certain rivers much easier. An invention whose sole effect would be to accelerate the operation of the locks could greatly improve the navigation of canals. Our roads, and especially our streets, would be rendered more viable by any amendment that tended only to make circulation there less confused, etc.

But the liberty of commerce depends not only on the extent, the nature, the form, of the commercial ways: it also depends on the manner in which they are distributed. It is not enough for it that they exist; they must exist where its interest demands them, they must be directed according to its needs, the best and most numerous must be found between the places that have the most reason to correspond. Of what use to it would be roads, however magnificent they might be, if they only linked places of no interest to it, if they only established communications between the castles of great lords, between the palaces of kings and their mistresses. Their utility depends not so much on the merit of their forms as on that of their placement.

France, under the empire, had thirty roads commercially more important than that of the Simplon, although, from the point of view of art, it had none so remarkable. It has several canals more frequented and more productive than that of Languedoc, although that one is indubitably the most beautiful it possesses. But, for commercial ways to be distributed as the interest of commerce demands, it must not be the ambition, the vain glory, or the particular interest of a few powerful men that decides their direction. Nor must they be opened based on a calculation made à priori of their utility, and before being warned by the needs of commerce of the points between which it is essential that they be established. How, for example, could they not be badly distributed in a country where, as among us, one would decree, in a single stroke, and before knowing what direction commercial activity will take, the construction of nearly nine hundred leagues of canals? Is it not evident that, on such an expanse of ways, there must necessarily be some that are badly situated and of little use [^412] .

Although our neighbors have not shown extreme wisdom in the establishment of their system of canalization, this is nevertheless not at all how they proceeded: they had not decreed all their canals in advance; they had not pretended to lay down the law for commerce, and to trace for it from on high the path it should take. Instead of prescribing its march, they were often content to follow it; they waited more or less for its indications; they opened its routes only one after the other, as the need was felt, and it is thus that they succeeded in creating in their country the best ensemble of commercial ways, and, all things considered, the best distributed that there probably is in any country in the world. In this system, which is composed of five kinds of ways, the ordinary roads are reserved for rapid communications; canals replace them, for the most part, for the transport of heavy and bulky objects; iron roads perform the same office where it has not been possible to establish canals. These three kinds of ways unite all the mines and all the agricultural establishments to all the centers of manufacturing and to all the principal towns of internal and maritime commerce. The mountain chain that divides England, in the direction of north to south, is crossed by twenty-one lines of artificial navigation, which put the western coast in communication with the eastern, and through it with the entire continent of Europe; the eastern coast with the western, and through it with the entire continent of America. The best and most numerous ways are found grouped around the most industrially active cities, around Manchester and Birmingham, London and Bristol, Hull and Liverpool. The single city of Birmingham possesses, within a radius of eight leagues, a development of eighty-seven leagues of canals, with a very superior quantity of roads, and several rivers. Finally, these ways, leading from all parts to the sea, communicate by one hundred and five ports with all the islands and all the continents of the globe. Can one doubt that this beautiful distribution of England's commercial ways is one of their principal merits, and that commerce profits from it as much as from their other qualities?

One sees in how many ways the ways of commerce contribute to its power. They contribute to it by their extent, their variety, the goodness of their distribution, the perfection of their forms. I repeat that there is no industry whose liberty appears to depend as much on the state of its workshops. It is perhaps there that its principal element of strength lies, as that of manufacturing appears to be in machines. : Machines do not have to execute in commerce functions as varied as in the other industries, notably as in manufactures: their role is confined solely to moving burdens. But this role is immense, and the liberty of the commercial industry also depends greatly on the perfection of the motors and machines it employs.

It is thus, for example, that commerce becomes freer as the animals proper for transport are improved. The English, by the sole fact that they have better horses than we, have more commercial liberty: the English mail coach travels, on average, seven miles an hour, while ours travels only five.

It is also thus that commerce becomes freer when one succeeds in economically replacing animate motors with physical motors. How much the substitution of wind for oarsmen increased its powers! Sails were for it like powerful wings by means of which it could move the most colossal masses with rapidity [^413] .

The steam engine promises to do still more for its liberty. The application of this motor to ships is beginning a revolution in navigation at least as important as that which was operated there by the invention of sails. "Distances are shortened," observes an eloquent author [^414] ; "there are no more currents, monsoons, contrary winds, ports closed in certain seasons of the year;" and this poetic phrase is but the precise expression of real facts.

"Thanks to steamboats," adds another writer, "Lisbon is no more than five or six days from London; no more is needed for the English traveler who finds himself in the depths of the Swiss valleys to return to his homeland, if he entrusts himself to the packet-boat that descends the course of the Rhine. The waves of the Baltic, raised by the tempest, likewise yield to the omnipotence of steam, and open before the ships it pulls upon that stormy sea. The traveler who has left London can be back there at the end of six weeks, after having spent eight days in Petersburg and as many in Moscow [^415] ."

The same motor applied to carriages is preparing a revolution in the system of internal communications even more astonishing than the one it is in the process of effecting in navigation. It appears destined to make, sooner or later, ordinary roads and steam carriages the most general means of land communication. Already a skilled English mechanic, M. Gurney, has succeeded in constructing a stagecoach that can be set in motion by steam, on roads of every kind, without the costly apparatus of iron grooves; and such appear to be the simplicity of this vehicle, the security it presents, the ease with which it is driven, the rapidity of its movement, the facility one has in slowing or accelerating it, and finally the little damage it causes to the roads, that it would be difficult, were it not for the mass of private interests threatened by its establishment, for it not to soon take, in England, where coal is at a very low price, the place of those that exist. By this application of steam to carriages, one could go on ordinary roads with a speed of one to twelve miles an hour, at the will of the driver, and with an economy in expense even greater than that which would be made on time [^416] .

One sees, by these few facts, to what point commerce can increase its power by perfecting its motors.

It equally depends on it to extend its powers by perfecting its vehicles, even when the ways and motors remain in the same state.

It appears that our horses and our roads are no better today than they were fifty years ago; yet communications are infinitely more rapid and more economical: one goes, for example, from Paris to Lyon in sixty-six hours, and for the average price of 72 fr.; whereas in the middle of the last century, one could make this journey only in ten days, and for the sum of 50 fr., increased by the road expenses during the ten days the journey lasted. One goes to Rouen for 15 fr., in twelve hours, whereas it cost the same sum, and one could only go there in three days. One has on one side three times, and on the other five times more power [^417] .

Now, how was this surplus of liberty procured? Principally by improving the form of the carriages; by making them gentler, more convenient, smoother-rolling. What commerce can obtain of power, merely by modifying its vehicles, is very considerable. One knows to what point communications have been recently perfected and increased in Paris by the system of carriages called Omnibus [^418] . A barely perceptible difference in the instruments employed for transport sometimes suffices to make a great one in the degree of liberty they procure. The Dutch, according to the remark of M. Say, long owed the superiority of their navy, and consequently the prosperity of all their affairs, to a circumstance that seems scarcely worthy of attention, to the better quality of their rigging [^419] . It is another observation of M. Say that the movement of carriages, before the new manner of suspending them was discovered, had been greatly softened by the simple invention of that spiral spring that had been imagined to be placed between their suspension straps. If one were to make no other amendment to our carts than to remove a part of that enormous hub, which projects a foot on each side, one would surely render a great service to commerce. It is evident, in fact, that the streets of our cities and the pavement of our roads would thereby alone acquire more width, and that carriages could pass each other there with more ease.

I will limit myself to these remarks on the instruments of commerce. One sees that if its power grows with the industrial and moral faculties of its agents, it is no less increased by the perfection of the places on which it works, and by that of the utensils it employs. It remains for me to say a few words on the influence of all these things considered together, and on the developments that commerce undergoes as all its means are perfected and as the capital of society in general increases.

§ 10. What the progress of social capital can do for the liberty of the transport industry is not susceptible of any estimation. The more the resources of society increase, the more the movements of commerce multiply; the more journeys one has to make, the more merchandise one has to send to market and to have come from it. The task of commerce becoming greater, its labors are better divided, its speculations extend further, the administration of commercial enterprises becomes more regular and simplified. At the same time, as all the means of communication and transport are perfected, all communications become more economical and more active: there are at once more ways, more carriages, more carriers, more things and people transported.

See how, among us and elsewhere, the means of trading and commercial activity have grown with resources of every kind. Paris, in 1766, had only twelve road carriage establishments; it now has six times that number. From that city, at the same period, only twenty-seven coaches departed per day, containing about two hundred and seventy seats; today, three hundred carriages and three thousand travelers depart: the difference is from twenty-seven to three hundred [^420] . I read in a journey to England that the port of Leith still had only forty-seven ships in 1740: in 1752, it had sixty-eight; in 1800, one hundred and thirty-four; in 1820, two hundred and thirteen. Liverpool, which, at the beginning of the last century, had only a few fishing boats, today possesses more than eleven hundred vessels. The whole of Great Britain, which did not have a thousand, has about twenty-four thousand. The activity of commerce has increased in the same proportion as its means.: In 1760, only twelve hundred and forty-five ships had entered the port of Liverpool: in 1770, two thousand and seventy-three entered; in 1780, two thousand two hundred and seventy-one; in 1790, four thousand two hundred and thirty-three; in 1800, four thousand seven hundred and forty-six; in 1810, six thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine: the movement of the port had almost sextupled in forty years [^421] . Let one judge, by these few facts, of the influence that social capital, as it accumulates, exercises on the means of action of commerce and on its activity. One is no less struck by this influence in comparing countries than in comparing epochs. England, which possesses an infinitely more considerable capital than any other country in Europe, also has many more ports, canals, roads, carriages, ships, means of communication and transport of every kind. It also has a much more active and extensive commerce. I read, in an article in the Edinburgh Review, that of a thousand ships that entered the ports of Russia in 1818, nine hundred and eighty-one were English [^422] . "I have before my eyes a statement from which it results that, of thirteen thousand one hundred and forty-six vessels that passed the Sund strait in 1825, there were over five thousand that belonged to England alone; while the surplus had come from the ports of fifteen different States of Europe or America. While only six to eight hundred ships annually enter Le Havre, which is our most frequented port, over twenty thousand enter the port of London [^423] . While, on an equal stretch of road, taken in France and in England at the two most frequented points of the two countries, there pass, in France, in a given time, only two horsemen, five public carriages, and seven private carriages, there pass, in England, in the same time, twenty-six public carriages, one hundred and one private carriages, and fifty-two horsemen [^424] . The activity of communications is incomparably greater where a greater accumulated capital gives rise to a more considerable movement of business.

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Notes

[^382]: See INDUSTRY AND MORALITY, etc., pp. 104 to 107, and 333 et seq. [^383]: J. R. Mac Culloch, Discourse on Political Economy. [^384]: This is how M. Say defines commerce. See his Traité d'écon. polit., vol. I, ch. 9, fifth ed., and the Cours complet, vol. II, ch. 14. [^385]: Thus Paris, for its glass and crystal factories, is obliged to bring in potash from Russia, Germany, and America, soda from Marseille, sand from Fontainebleau, clay from Forges, etc.; for its beer breweries, it draws barley from Champagne, hops from the Netherlands and England; for its ink factories, commerce transports for it sulfate of iron from Picardy, gallnuts from the Levant, gum from Senegal, etc. [^386]: Cours complet d'éc. polit. pratique, vol. II, ch. 13, p. 116. [^387]: The Spirit of the Laws, book 20, ch. 1. [^388]: Introduction to the History of Charles V. [^389]: Essays, book 3, ch. 9. [^390]: Brit. Rev., vol. VII, p. 197 et seq. [^391]: See the Brit. Rev. of June 1829, vol. XXIV, p. 380. [^392]: Brit. Rev., vol. VII, p. 197 et seq. [^393]: Brit. Rev., ibid. [^394]: See above, ch. 14, p. 68, what I said of the shipment of Epsom purgative salts made to the city of Sydney in Australia. [^395]: One sees what makes the management of a commercial house simpler than that of a factory. It is solely because, in commercial production, several establishments contribute, one after the other, to a single operation, to a single shipment of goods. If M. Chaptal had made this remark, he would not have said that, in commerce, a few clerks can produce what requires several hundred workers in manufacturing (See his book on French industry, vol. II, p. 418). Commercial production, in effect, is not only the work of the small number of clerks one sees grouped around the shipping merchant; it is also the work of the commission agents, the carters, the shipowners, and the sailors who contribute to his enterprise and who work, for a given time, to bring the shipped goods to their destination. There is every reason to believe that the production of a certain value does not, ordinarily, require less labor and advances of all kinds in commerce than in manufacturing. [^396]: (1*) See the Introduction to the History of Charles V, volume of notes, note xxix. [^397]: See the Mémorial universel, under the words Canals, Navigation, Carriages, Coach services. [^398]: See, in the Rev. encyclop. of Oct. 1827, p. 36 et seq., an article by M. Baude on the construction of roads, filled with excellent reflections. [^399]: Cordier, Mém. sur l'agricult. de la Flandre française; preliminary discourse. [^400]: See the Treatise on Political Economy by M. Say, vol. I, p. 60, fifth edition. [^401]: Wealth of Nations, book I, ch. 11. [^402]: These remarks, which I published in a journal in June 1828, calling the attention of M. de Belleyme to this interesting subject, had lost, under the administration of that honorable magistrate, a part of their truth. I preserve them as a monument to the public habits on this point at the moment I printed them. [^403]: Mém. sur l'application de la Dynamique aux divers moyens de transport, read at the Academy of Sciences, June 21, 1824. Voltaire, established in Rouen at the beginning of 1723, wrote to his friend Thiriot, in Paris: "Come, my dear friend; do not give us false hopes of seeing you. You will be in Rouen in two days, etc." One sees that at this time communications with that city had already improved somewhat. [^404]: Essai histor. sur la souveraineté des Anglais dans l'Inde, extract from the Rev. encyclop. — This ten million only concerns the losses it makes in its commerce: those it makes on its administration are much more considerable. Such are, in total, the results of its commerce and its sovereignty, that, according to its own admissions and its accounts, it is in debt by nearly twelve hundred million of our currency. [^405]: See vol. I, pp. 438 to 441. [^406]: It is clear enough, without my saying so, that those which, naturally, cannot prosper there do not deserve to be supported there. [^407]: M. Charles Dupin, Commercial Forces of Great Britain. [^408]: Pensées, part one, art. 10, thought 38. [^409]: I would have liked to be able to determine here the average price of transport for each type of route; but this price depends on circumstances so numerous and so variable that it seemed impossible to me to establish anything reasonably accurate on this subject, and I am obliged to stick to the general expressions of more and less. [^410]: The total length of our roads being twelve thousand leagues and their average width about fifty feet, that is to say, fifteen to twenty feet more than would be strictly necessary, one can say that they uselessly take from agriculture a ribbon of twelve thousand leagues, fifteen to twenty feet wide, which, reduced to hectares, would not fail, as one can see, to make a rather fine farm, and to yield a rather fine income. [^411]: Yet it is nothing of the sort. If our streets are too narrow, it is because they were built in barbarous times, in cities surrounded by walls, where, for lack of space, people were obliged to pile on top of one another. The streets are too narrow for the same reason that the houses are too high: surely only the lack of space could have decided the inhabitants of Paris to arrange themselves in layers, to be packed in, so to speak, like herrings in houses of five, six, seven stories, more or less; and as for our main roads, if they are ridiculously wide, it is because they were laid out under the direction of monarchical pride and pomp; it is because they are called Routes Royales [Royal Roads], and royal roads can neither invade too much space, nor have a character too majestic, too monumental. [^412]: It was in 1821 that these nine hundred leagues of canals to be built were decreed, and for which a loan of 240 million was voted. Nine hundred leagues of canals at once! It seems there was enough there to satisfy the most enterprising administration. However, ours believed it would fall short of its duties if it limited its views to so paltry an enterprise; and, consequently, while it had the nine hundred leagues to be executed immediately voted on, it proposed plans for a supplement of about fifty-four thousand leagues to be built later. It did observe, however, that this part of its plan would 'perhaps' seem to contain 'a too great a number of navigations to be created;' but, it added, 'in the intimate conviction of the precious benefits that will be for France the necessary, incontestable consequence of a great development of internal navigation, we were obliged to propose canals on all points where commerce and industry demand the existence of these works, and where nature provides the means to establish them... We have not, however, had the pretension of indicating all possible works, and the administration will welcome all information that one might wish to transmit to it for the opening of a useful canal that might have escaped its research.' (Report of M. Becquey to the king on internal navigation, pp. 29 and 54 to 70.)—Will one believe, after that, that there were deputies who complained of the overly great specificity of the government's plans, and who accused it of not presenting projects that were general enough, vast enough? Yet that is what took place, and the Director-General of Bridges and Roads was obliged to defend himself, as best he could, by saying that he had presented the whole of a general system of canalization, and had called for submissions for projects to be executed on all points of the kingdom. (See, in the journals of the time, the session of the Chamber of Deputies of July 2, 1821.) [^413]: The author of the Mémorial univ. gives the weight of the ship the Duc de Bordeaux, under construction in the shipyards of Cherbourg: this weight, when the vessel is under sail, ballasted and armed, will be 5,200 tons: one has, in the sails, the means to make this enormous mass travel three leagues per hour with a good wind. [^414]: M. de Châteaubriand. [^415]: I borrow these remarks from M. Saulnier, the elegant translator and enlightened annotator of the Brit. Rev., who draws from his own Review the facts they state. See an excellent preface with which he has preceded his issue of Jan. 1829.—I am so indebted to the Brit. Rev., it has provided me with so many important or curious facts, that I am happy to find the occasion to address my thanks to the estimable editor of this excellent collection. [^416]: See, in the Brit. Rev., no. 30, vol. XV, p. 218 et seq., an interesting article on the steam coach of M. Gurney.—This carriage has often been mentioned in our newspapers. See notably the Courrier français, issues of June 29 and October 1, 1827. [^417]: Mém. sur l'application de la dynamique aux divers moyens de transport; already cited. [^418]: It appears that there already exist (in August 1829) several hundred of these carriages, each containing from fourteen to twenty seats, and perpetually running a shuttle service between the points of the city that are linked by the most frequented streets. The multiplication of these carriages and the success they are obtaining is new proof of what I said above, pp. 168 and 169, of the advantage one finds in working for the great number. The one of these carriages designated more specifically by the name of Omnibus gave its entrepreneurs, in the first six months of its establishment, 89 percent of their funds. See, in the Revue commerc. of January 10, 1829, the report given by the administration of this enterprise. I doubt that any carriage renter has ever drawn such an interest from his advances. One sees that it is better to work for the small purses than for the large ones, and to establish carriages at 15 centimes a ride, than coaches at 20 francs a day. [^419]: Cours complet d'écon. polit. prat., vol. II, p. 271. [^420]: Mém. sur l'applic. de la dynam. aux divers moyens de transport; already cited. [^421]: M. Ch. Dupin, Commercial Forces of Great Britain, vol. II. [^422]: Comparative Industries of France and England; Edinb. Rev., issue of Oct. 1819. [^423]: M. Dupin, Commercial Forces of Great Britain. [^424]: Edinb. Rev., no. and article already cited. — I do not know to what extent the facts advanced in this article are worthy of confidence, being the work of a distinguished mind, no doubt, but one which was dictated by a very subordinate and very poorly disguised feeling of jealousy against France.