VI. De la liberté de l'industrie manufacturière.

CHAP. 16: VI. On the liberty of the manufacturing industry.§ 1. Two things essentially distinguish manufacturing from transport, from commerce: the first is that its agents are distributed differently; the second, that they do not act in the same manner. On the one hand, while the agents of transport are wandering, those of manufacturing work at a fixed post; and, on the other hand, while carriers add to the value of things by displacing them, without otherwise changing anything in them, manufacturers increase their value, without so to speak displacing them, but by making them undergo innumerable modifications in themselves. The property of the manufacturing industry is to agglomerate its agents in cities and factories; and, by thus concentrating their forces, to employ them, not to transport things, but to transform them, to make them change, not their location, but their shape or intrinsic manner of being, to appropriate them in a million ways to our needs, by varying them in a million ways in their external form by mechanical means, or in their intimate texture by physical or chemical means.

This is what the manufacturing industry is. What characterizes it is this manner of ordering and putting its agents to work; it is in this that its nature consists, and by acting thus that it contributes to production.

§ 2. The services that it can render to all orders of labors and to all classes of laborers, by these alternately chemical and mechanical transformations that it makes things undergo, are infinite.

We have seen, in the preceding chapter, that the transport industry contributed to the free action of all the arts by bringing to them, from a multitude of diverse points, a multitude of objects without which no action would be possible for them. The manufacturing industry also has its way of seconding them all: it is this industry that takes charge of constructing the workshops where they work, of fashioning the innumerable instruments they use, of composing, in good part at least, the no less numerous ingredients they employ.

On the other hand, we have seen that, at the same time as commerce conveys to each worker the scattered objects that are indispensable to him for the exercise of his profession, it also brings him other objects that he needs for his own maintenance. The manufacturing industry does no less for the satisfaction of the personal needs of the workers. While it creates the plants, the buildings, the machines, the ingredients, which are to serve them in executing their labors, we see emerge from its hands a multitude of habitations, furniture, clothing, and foodstuffs, which will serve them to conserve and maintain themselves. Like all orders of labors, it fulfills the double office of providing to all classes of workers means of action and means of enjoyment, products for themselves at the same time as objects for their art.

Such are the effects of the manufacturing industry; they are, on the one hand, so evident, and, on the other, so multiplied, that it seems to be at once impossible and superfluous to describe them. Who is not struck by the extent of the goods it creates? and, on the other hand, who would undertake to enumerate the metamorphoses it operates? Who could say what it furnishes to all the arts of constructions, workshops, motors, machines, tools, chemical compositions and preparations of every kind; and on the other hand, who could say what it delivers to those who exercise them, that is to say, to all the members of society, of dwelling houses, utensils, furnishings, adornments, and in general of objects proper for conserving, embellishing, and perfecting themselves?

Its influence, moreover, does not stop at these immediate effects. While it works directly to modify things, it indirectly produces a revolution in the men who exercise it: it pushes them, in the sole interest of its labors, to acquire a multitude of knowledges and good habits which they cannot do without to execute them well; and, although it is in no way its object to educate them, it contributes infinitely to their culture.

There is more; it is that, at the same time as it demands that they become instructed, it furnishes them with the means: it gives them wealth, in effect; with wealth, leisure; and with leisure, the desire and all the means to become enlightened, the desire and all the means to ennoble and perfect their existence.

These two indirect effects that the manufacturing industry has on men, it has in common with the other industries that work directly on things; but it also has its particular manner of acting indirectly on them, and one has already understood that this industry, by gathering and, so to speak, consigning its agents in cities and factories, must influence them otherwise than tillage on laborers by disseminating and isolating them in the countryside, or transport on carriers by making them perpetually travel.

We have seen that commerce, by making its agents travel, could produce considerable effects on them: how does manufacturing tend to modify its own by uniting them in great number and permanently in the confined places where it executes its functions?

At first glance, it would seem that this particular situation in which it places them must be favorable neither to their health, nor to their morals, nor to their civil habits.

First, it appears difficult that this extreme proximity in which it obliges them to keep themselves, and this sedentary life that it imposes on them; that the lack of exercise on the one hand, and on the other the often vitiated air of the workshops and the often deleterious emanations of the materials on which one works there, do not have for their effect to enervate their bodies and to harm the maintenance of their physical forces.

By the very fact that this situation seems to tend to diminish their forces, one would say that it must also deliver them more to the empire of the imagination and the senses; it seems that, in this perpetual contact in which they live, their passions must be more keenly excited, that they must be more inclined to intemperance, to drunkenness, to lust, to luxury, and to fall more frequently into lapses in regimen and conduct.

Finally, this same situation, which exposes them more to contracting certain vices, seems also to have to excite them more to resort to violence to enrich themselves. One might believe that their gathering in more or less great number in little-extended spaces must have for its effect to dispose them to injustice, and perhaps one must attribute only to the extreme ease they have of understanding one another and of leaguing together, that multitude of exclusive pretensions that they have been seen to form in all times. The agents of agricultural industry, whom the nature of their art keeps much more separated from one another, are far from having manifested the same spirit of monopoly and usurpation. It is above all the agents of the manufacturing industry who have given the example of this sort of excess; and as the men who manufacture are not of a worse kind than those who till, it seems that so remarkable a difference in conduct can be reasonably explained only by the difference in situations. This appears all the more probable as when landowners have found themselves in the same situation as the people of the factories, they have rarely failed to conduct themselves in the same fashion. It is thus that one has seen legislative assemblies, formed in majority of landowners, profit from their gathering and from the powers with which they were invested to prohibit the importation of agricultural commodities, and to manifest for monopoly as much ardor as artisans gathered in the cities had ever been able to show.

I agree that it is in the nature of the manufacturing industry to begin by producing all the effects that have just been indicated. However, one should not judge by these first effects of its ulterior influence. If, in the bosom of a very compact population, as that of manufacturing cities ordinarily is, sickness, vice, and injustice are more contagious, enlightenment is also more contagious there, one acquires experience there more rapidly, one is sooner instructed there of the good or bad consequences of a certain manner of being or acting, and this is an advantage that more than compensates for the inconveniences of which we have just spoken.

If manufacturing places its agents in a situation little favorable to the maintenance of their forces, it excites them all the more, for that very reason, to obviate the inconveniences of this situation, and you will see that in effect the population of the cities will begin long before that of the countryside to adopt those habits of cleanliness and order and to make those regulations of police and public health which have for their object and for their effect to keep in good condition the places one inhabits.

If the same industry places its agents in a situation where their passions are more excited, it must for that very reason make them understand sooner the danger one runs in yielding to them, the necessity there is to be on one's guard against them; and one will see again that in effect the places where the population is most compact are those where morals are most quickly regulated. It is known that the extreme agglomeration of individuals is not always what tends most to corrupt them. The population is ordinarily denser in very industrious and very active cities than in those where one works little; yet the former are certainly not those where morals are the worst. The population is more crowded in the districts of Paris specially assigned to the laboring classes than in those inhabited by rich and little-occupied people; yet the latter do not appear to be, at least in a certain respect, those where habits are the most moral: recent research on the population of Paris has given this result, little honorable for idle wealth, that there are more illegitimate births, and especially more abandoned natural children, in the arrondissements it inhabits than in those occupied by laborious mediocrity, although the population in the latter is incomparably more gathered together [^425] .

Finally, if the manufacturing industry, by putting all its agents more in contact, by making them rival one another more closely, excites them more keenly to harm one another and furnishes them more with the means, I observe that it must make them experience sooner all the inconveniences of unjust pretensions, that consequently it must sooner lead them to the point of feeling the need to respect one another mutually; and one will see in effect that the cities are again the places where men bend most quickly to the yoke of good civil habits. If, as I observed just now, the extreme agglomeration of individuals is not the circumstance most proper to relax their morals, neither is it the most proper to make them persevere in injustice. It may well be that the prohibitive regime was born in the cities; but certainly it will be worn out there sooner than in the countryside. I believe the entrepreneurs of manufactures are less far than the possessors of land from understanding that unjust prohibitions are contrary to their true prosperity. It is to be remarked that the project of abolishing the prohibitions established for the profit of the factories had preceded, in England, under the ministry of Mr. Huskisson, that of reducing the monopolies granted to agriculture. Several other facts that I could cite likewise make it known that the system of free competition has made more progress in the minds of manufacturers than in that of cultivators.

In sum, it appears impossible that the places where intelligence has the most subject and means to be exercised, the places most favorable to experience, are not also the most favorable to our progress. If, in the bosom of cities and factories, if, in the places where the population is very gathered together, the infirmities of the body and the soul are more subject to spread, it seems that good health, good qualities, the vivifying qualities must also be quicker to communicate there. All things considered, it is an extremely favorable circumstance for our culture to find ourselves gathered in great number on certain points; and the manufacturing industry, that of all perhaps which brings us closest together, must be considered, for that very reason, as one of the most proper to hasten our development.

§ 3. If there are few orders of labors that fulfill, in the social economy, a more considerable role than manufacturing, a role more extended, more varied, more influential, more fecund in useful results, there is none, it seems, to which all the general means on which the power of labor is founded apply better. This is industry par excellence; the only one that one believes is sufficiently designated by simply calling it industry; that in which art and all the qualities it demands are manifested to the highest degree; that in which so universal a use is made of the chemical and mechanical forces of nature that all the arts it embraces have been designated by the names of chemical and mechanical arts; that also in which the most ingenious and most learned uses are made of these forces; that, consequently, in which one has the most need to know the laws they observe, in which one sees best what the talents of application and execution can do, in which physical motors are of an easier application, in which machines fulfill more varied functions, in which labor appears to lend itself best to those divisions and subdivisions that render its execution more rapid and more correct, in which it seems easiest to make great capitals valuable, in which it is most common to work, as they say, in a factory; that, in a word, on which economists reason by preference when they wish to expound the influence of any of the general means of labor, because in effect it appears to be that of all in which the influence of all these means is best perceived.

Let us examine first how and to what point those of these means that consist in the personal faculties of the workers apply to it, and, above all, let us see what strength it draws from that ensemble of faculties that I bring together under the name of genius for business.

Two causes would seem to render this order of faculties, so necessary in all labors, more indispensable still in manufacturing than in the other industries. The first is that competition appears to be more lively, more active there, that profits are more disputed there, less considerable, more chancy, and that, for that very reason, it is more essential to show oneself a skilled speculator and administrator [^426] .—The second is that a large part of the needs to which this industry undertakes to provide are extremely subject to variation, and that these variations can become a great cause of error in enterprises.

Doubtless there is indeed here a stock of products on which the tastes of the public remain fairly constantly the same; but around those, there exists a multitude of others on which these same tastes experience perpetual changes. A very large part of what pertains to the clothing of individuals, to the decoration and furnishing of habitations is subject to the empire of fashion, and like it subject to vary. There is fashion in the interior and exterior arrangement of houses, in the form of a multitude of furniture and utensils, in the material, the color, the design of most of the fabrics that serve to clothe us, in the cut of clothes, in the fashioning of jewels and adornments; and the producers of these innumerable objects are obliged, on pain of experiencing the gravest damages, to know how fashion wants them and to furnish them to it such as it demands.

It is not, however, that they must obey it servilely. If it is true that they are obliged to consult its caprices, it is also true that they contribute to their birth. While following it, they could, to a certain point, guide it; and there would be a certain manner of guiding it that could have on taste, on morals, on needs, on consumption, on wealth, and consequently on the development of the powers of manufacturing a most salutary influence [^427] .

But if the manufacturer, by the character he gives to his products, can influence the nature of needs, the nature of needs must in its turn exercise an immense influence on the character of his products: if he can guide fashion while following it, in guiding it he is obliged to follow it; it does not adopt everything blindly; he could not make it pass at his will from one extreme to another; despite its apparent caprices, it obeys in its march certain laws, and there is, here as everywhere, an art of transitions whose rules one does not infringe with impunity. Besides, fashion, it is not he alone who makes it; it is the result of a multitude of influences that often dominate his own, and there are many cases where he succeeds in making it vary only by going in the direction in which morals, events, and even political revolutions push it.The manufacturer, even when he is enlightened enough to aim to give the public judicious tastes, to reform extravagant and ruinous fashions, is thus obliged to know the tastes, the fashions that reign, and, up to a certain point, to conform to them, to observe their tendency, to watch their movements, and this, not only in the places where he works, but everywhere his products must reach. Now, one feels how many precautions he needs to speculate with any security on a basis so vague, so extensive, so mobile, and, despite all possible precautions, how easy it is for him to make false speculations. One can well imagine that, in this innumerable variety of fabrics, furniture, fittings, adornments, and objects of every kind that will emerge from his workshops, not everything will be received with the same favor. Alongside products that will obtain the vogue, there will be others that will succeed only halfway, others that will not succeed at all; it will be with the creations of his industry as with that of all the others; and just as there are books at the bookseller's that everyone buys and others that no one reads, so there will be at the cloth merchant's fabrics that will have no turnover among several others that will move off the shelves with extreme speed.

If it is easy for the manufacturer to be mistaken about the nature of needs, it is even easier for him to be mistaken about their extent. I do not know if their extent is as subject to variation as their nature, but it is certainly more difficult to determine. What is the quantity of a certain product that manufacturing should make? That depends on circumstances that have nothing fixed and definite; it depends on the number of persons who need it [^428] ; supposing that it responds to a universal need, that still depends on the price at which it can be made and the number of persons who, at that price, will have the means to buy it. It is this number of buyers that is difficult, almost impossible for him to know, and yet which it would be indispensable for him to know; for it can ruin its agents by making too much of a good thing just as well as by making bad ones. One sees, therefore, how much it needs to seek to discover, at least in an approximate manner, the extent of its market.

I know well that in general one acts as if this were something absolutely impossible to know: that one proceeds as if at random; that each regulates his activity not on the extent of the needs, which he does not know, but on that of the capital at his disposal. Thus one need not ask if one is mistaken, and if the sum of products often exceeds the number and means of the buyers. One can judge by this difficulty in selling, by this market glut, such a frequent and real subject of complaint for all industries, and more particularly for the manufacturing industry. Nothing, assuredly, attests better than this almost permanent fact of market congestion to the little care that each class of producers takes to inform itself of the extent of the outlets that all the others present to it, and the sad consequences that can result from its neglect or its powerlessness on this point [^429] .

If there are so many manufactured products that have trouble finding a place, or that are placed only slowly and at a loss, it is much less because one neglects to study the nature of the needs than because one does not take enough care to proportion oneself to their extent. If, for example, we have seen in Paris in recent years so many building contractors do bad business, it is not that this multitude of new lodgings they created was not a thing with a good turnover, but that the number they constructed far exceeded that of the persons who could purchase their enjoyment. I read in the Statistical Research of the Prefect of the Seine that, from the beginning of 1822 to the end of 1824, the number of doors and windows in Paris rose from nine hundred and twenty thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight to nine hundred and eighty-five thousand, one hundred and seventy-seven, that it increased by about sixty-five thousand; that is to say, in the course of these three years, the number of lodgings must have been increased by about a fifteenth, while, on the other hand, I see in the same documents and in the Yearbook of the Bureau of Longitudes that, during the same period, the population of the city increased by only about twelve thousand inhabitants, that it barely grew by a sixtieth, [^430] whence it would follow that the manufacturing industry multiplied lodgings, during these three years, in a proportion four times nearly as considerable as that by which the population grew [^431] . I cite only this fact, because it is the only one on which I have at this moment somewhat precise data. But if, in a place like Paris, where one has so many means of being enlightened and where one ought to be so well-versed in business, a class of entrepreneurs could proportion itself so poorly to the true extent of the market, one feels that elsewhere and in many other fabrications the spirit of enterprise must not have been much wiser. This, moreover, is well enough established by a fact that contains them all, by the fact of which I have already spoken, and which I recall again, of those periodic gluts to which the manufacturing markets are subject.

One sees, therefore, to what point it matters for every manufacturer to study the nature and extent of the needs that the branch of industry he exercises is charged with providing for. And still it would be nothing for him, in a way, to know that the thing he makes responds to true needs, and to know approximately the quantity that can be sold on the markets he frequents, if he did not at the same time seek to inform himself of the number and means of the manufacturers who compete with him in supplying these markets. One of the things that every manufacturer most needs to study is, relative to the art he exercises, the industrial map of the country where he is established, the number of establishments that this art possesses there, their importance, their means, the places where they send their products, and the price at which they can deliver them, upon arrival at their destination.

An entrepreneur of my acquaintance, very experienced both as a man of business and as an engineer, in a locality and in circumstances known to him, had to solve this problem:

“Can we profitably undertake to manufacture twenty thousand quintals of soda? With the competition from the manufacturers of Marseille, will we find a market for them? How far can we transport them advantageously? On which markets will it be possible for us to present ourselves? What will our cost price be, all expenses paid, upon arrival at this place, and then that one, and then that one still? How, on these diverse markets, will it withstand the competition of the producers against whom we have to struggle, etc.?”

And this entrepreneur had succeeded, map in hand, in determining with very satisfactory precision the places where the product could be carried, the quantities that it would be possible to sell there, and finally in recognizing whether or not there was reason to undertake the projected product.

In general, it is singularly difficult, it must be admitted, to know with any exactitude, on the one hand, the nature and extent of the needs, and on the other, the number and means of the manufacturers who work to satisfy them. But there are two things that an entrepreneur can know, and which, when they are carefully verified, can suffice to a certain point to enlighten his decisions and to direct him in his enterprises: the average price at which is sold, in a certain extent of country, the product he would intend to make, and the price at which he himself is capable of creating it there. He does not know what his competitors make of it; he knows no better what it costs them; but he can know what they sell it for on average, and, if he knows his situation and the resources of his art well, he can also succeed in determining quite approximately the price at which it will be possible for him to deliver it. Now, if it is sufficiently demonstrated to him that he can make it in good quality below the market price, it is clear that he can undertake it: he need not fear exposing his fortune, since he believes himself sure of producing at a price that must give him buyers, and on the other hand he could not morally incur any blame since he will only supplant his competitors by making better use of his forces and by serving society better.

However, the difficulty, reduced to these terms, is still very grave; and one must not believe that it is an easy thing to draw up in advance the account of an enterprise, and to determine with any certainty the lowest price at which, in a given situation, it will be possible to obtain a product. Besides, there are many cases where the question is not so simple, and where it would not suffice, to decide wisely, to know that one can create this product below the market price. One must also know if the established producers do not, for their part, have the means to introduce significant improvements in their prices. Even when one believes oneself assured of retaining a part of one's advantages, one must know if there is a considerable enough consumption of the product one wishes to create and if one can count on a sufficiently extensive turnover to recoup one's advances with profit. There remain, besides, all the cases where one wishes to undertake something new, and where one must necessarily know how to anticipate the tastes of society for this new creation. In short, the judgment of enterprises is surrounded in manufacturing by the same difficulties as everywhere else, and, as I said at first, these difficulties are complicated there by those that can be added by greater competition, a more developed industry, more active and more formidable rivalries, and continual variations in the public's tastes for a considerable portion of the products to be created. Not only, therefore, does one need there, as in all orders of labors, the kind of talent necessary to speculate skillfully, to judge soundly in advance of the goodness of enterprises, but it seems that this kind of talent must be infinitely more exercised there.

The same causes appear to render the talents of the administrator equally more indispensable there. The greater and more animated the competition, the more one strives to do well, and the less one should neglect so powerful a means of success. One can, at a pinch, in little-advanced industries, and where one has to struggle only against unskilled workers, permit oneself in the conduct of enterprises a bit of softness and letting-things-go; but in the arts where the powers of labor have been pushed very far, and where one makes only small profits, one is obliged, on pain of ruin, to neglect nothing. One must not lose sight for an instant that all that one does, all that one spends, is so much advanced to production, that every advance is placed at interest and at compound interest, that all faults are paid for, that false calculations, distractions, losses of time, that all losses in a word come to burden the product undertaken and diminish the expected profit; that thus one cannot apply to the administration of one's business cares too enlightened, too severe, too assiduous. Besides, administrative talents seem more called for in the manufacturing industry because of the very nature of this industry. The great factories are the work establishments where are ordinarily gathered the greatest number of workers, and where, if one is not careful, it is easiest to lose manpower; where the workers are most crowded, and where consequently disorder has the least trouble introducing itself; where one has gathered a greater apparatus of machines, and where for that very reason more things are exposed to deteriorating for lack of care; where a more continuous and more considerable consumption of raw materials and provisions of various sorts is made, and where, in this respect also, leakage and waste are easiest; where one has the most purchases to make, and where it is easiest to lose on purchases if they are not made with intelligence, etc. Manufactures therefore appear to be the kind of enterprises where the need for order, discipline, surveillance, enlightened economy must be most felt, and where consequently administrative talents seem most necessary. M. Chaptal does not hesitate to consider these talents as more proper than those of the artist to make these sorts of establishments prosper, and numerous experiences seem to prove that they are in effect more indispensable to them. Nothing is less rare than to see excellent enterprises perish in the hands of the most distinguished artists, and almost ruined enterprises recover under the hand of skilled administrators who, deprived of industrial knowledge, have only the merit of knowing how to make a judicious use of that of others. It is above all in the factories, according to the accounts of well-informed persons, that these administrative talents, which contribute so powerfully to the success of all enterprises, shine on the other side of the strait; and it appears that in effect nothing is comparable to the simplicity of the principles according to which the vastest establishments are set up there; to the discipline, order, silence, and cleanliness that reign there, and to the application that the workers appear to bring to their labor [^432] .

Finally, the same causes that appear to demand of the entrepreneur in the manufacturing industry that he show himself a more skilled speculator and administrator, seem to require likewise that he be more capable of keeping accounts with intelligence and regularity. If it is true that there is no order of labors where competition is greater and the powers of labor more developed, it follows that there is none where it is less permissible to remain stationary, where one has more need to perfect one's processes, where one is more obliged to make trials, to attempt new things, and, at the same time, that there is none where it is more necessary to know what one is doing. Therefore, there is none where one can less dispense with knowing how to keep regular accounts. A manufacturer who did not keep accounts, or who kept his accounts badly, would not know what he was doing. He would be subject to becoming passionate about ruinous enterprises and to neglecting lucrative ones. Sometimes ill-founded anxieties would discourage him and paralyze his forces when he needed to act, and could do so with security. At other times a blind confidence would give him an untimely activity that would turn even more to his prejudice. He would never know if he was gaining or losing, or at least what he was losing or what he was gaining. He would end up seeing, in gross, whether such an enterprise is or is not fruitful; but, before he had acquired this knowledge, years would have passed during which perhaps he would have worked laboriously to impoverish himself, or would have failed to make profits that would have been easy for him, if, from the origin, he had rendered himself an exact account of the expense and the product of each thing.

Unlike this adventurous manufacturer, he who keeps regular accounts always knows positively what he is doing. He is subject to experiencing neither false terrors nor foolish confidence. He knows the whole and the detail of his operations. He can see at each instant the advances he has made to each, and what it has already brought him. Two additions at the end of the year suffice for him to know exactly what each has given him of profit or loss. He has the means of knowing if the loss came from the nature of the enterprise or from the vices of management, or from the imperfection of the processes. He knows consequently if he must abandon the operation, or if he can continue it by trying to diminish the expense. Little by little he is led to recognize what is the kind of fabrication to which it best suits him to devote himself, what are the most economical modes of execution, and he thus succeeds in making at once the surest and most advantageous use of his forces.

Thus all the faculties of which the genius for business is composed find exercise here, and are all the more indispensable as competitors are more numerous, successes more contested, and affairs more difficult. Let us see how the faculties that pertain to the art apply here.

§ 4. That the manufacturer, like all other classes of workers, began by groping, by empiricism; that he acted on isolated, incomplete observations, and without having any knowledge of the general laws that governed the forces he was using, is a thing so certain that it would be entirely superfluous to stop to demonstrate it.

[^428]: supposing that it responds to a universal need, that still depends on the price at which it can be made and the number of persons who, at that price, will have the means to buy it. [^429]: Nothing, assuredly, attests better than this almost permanent fact of market congestion to the little care that each class of producers takes to inform itself of the extent of the outlets that all the others present to it, and the sad consequences that can result from its neglect or its powerlessness on this point. [^430]: whence it would follow that the manufacturing industry multiplied lodgings, during these three years, in a proportion four times nearly as considerable as that by which the population grew [^431]: I cite only this fact, because it is the only one on which I have at this moment somewhat precise data. [^432]: It is above all in the factories, according to the accounts of well-informed persons, that these administrative talents, which contribute so powerfully to the success of all enterprises, shine on the other side of the strait; and it appears that in effect nothing is comparable to the simplicity of the principles according to which the vastest establishments are set up there; to the discipline, order, silence, and cleanliness that reign there, and to the application that the workers appear to bring to their labor.I cannot agree with the economists who believe that art was born of science and that the first processes of industry were but applications of discoveries made beforehand by scholars. It is only very recently that the manufacturing routine has consented to be enlightened by the theory of learned men, just as it is only recently that scientific pride has consented to descend from the height of its speculations to stoop to the study of facts, which are the worker's only guide in practice. Science and industry each went their own way, without taking heed of one another; science making its theories without much concern for the observation of phenomena, and industry observing phenomena without taking the time to trace them back to the general principles of which they were but corollaries and which would have served as their explanation and link. It is therefore hardly possible to admit that industry issued from the sciences; and even if one possessed all the scientific theories of the ancients, it is by no means certain that one would find in them the explanation for the processes of their arts that have been lost. Nothing proves, in effect, that the processes of ancient art were applications of ancient science. It is, on the contrary, quite probable that art had found its processes without the help of science, just as science its theories without the help of industrial experiments; and, unlike M. Say, who attributes the decline of ancient industry, during the barbarism of the Middle Ages, to the abandonment of scientific studies [^433], I would believe that it must be attributed above all to the abandonment into which the arts themselves had fallen.

Doubtless the first artisans did not act without motives. The arts, even in their first and coarsest sketches, must have been guided by some reason, they must have observed that such a fact could have such a result, that things happened in a certain way in certain circumstances. But I say that they were guided by experiences and not by theories, by particular observations and not by the knowledge of the general laws that govern the forces they were using.

And not only did they proceed thus, but they were able to go very far by advancing in this manner, and it is probable that a very considerable portion of their progress was made without any intervention of theory. That scientific knowledge is destined to exercise and even that it has already exercised a great influence on the processes of manufacturing, this cannot be doubted. However, it is difficult not to find some exaggeration in what is often said of the services it has already rendered.

M. Chaptal, in his book on French Industry, presents, as so many applications of the science of mechanics to manufacturing, many inventions of new machines or improvements of old machines made by men who, for the most part, very probably, were little or not at all versed in the theory of this science [^434].

"I was expressing my astonishment to a learned English engineer," a professor at the Conservatory once observed, "at the rapidity of the progress England had made in mechanics. Far from glorifying in it, he answered me: this progress is much less due to the theoretical knowledge of scholars than to the practical skill of the workers, who always succeed better than elevated minds in overcoming difficulties [^435]."

Arkwright, the author of the spinning machine, one of the most ingenious and powerful to have been invented in fifty years, the barber Arkwright had no scientific instruction, and judged only by groping, by trying, by experimenting, on the effect that each of the pieces of his admirable machine would produce.

Newcomen and Cawley, two mechanics who contributed appreciably to the progress of the steam engine, and the first who sought and succeeded in drawing useful effects from it, were, one a hardware dealer, the other a blacksmith, and neither could pass for a scholar [^436].

Watt himself, the illustrious Watt, when he began to make that series of perfections to the steam engine which have made it so powerful a motor, must not have possessed much scientific knowledge. Born to poor parents, he had been able to study only until the age of sixteen in one of those elementary and free schools that exist in Scotland under the name of Grammar school, and it is not probable that he had acquired a very high instruction there. He had then been placed in apprenticeship with a maker of scales, then with a maker of mathematical instruments; and when, in 1764, he was charged by the University of Glasgow, which had named him curator of its collection of models, with repairing a Newcomen machine, it was simply in the capacity of a craftsman.

Thus the two most admirable instruments, perhaps, that human industry possesses, the spinning machine and the fire-engine, could be, the first invented by a man absolutely deprived of scientific instruction, and the second much perfected by men little or not at all versed in theory [^437]. After that, one must understand that there are few machines that could not have been discovered by proceeding in an empirical manner.

The same method has led to the knowledge of a multitude of chemical processes. I could remark here, for example, that one of the latest, most beautiful, and most useful discoveries of modern chemistry, that which teaches us that copper can be prevented from oxidizing by putting it in contact with a certain quantity of iron or zinc, was known for a long time to the peasants of my province, who made it I know not when or how; but much earlier, however, than the invention of the voltaic pile. It is customary in my province, which is a wine-growing country, to receive in copper vessels the wine drawn from the vats to be placed in casks; and it frequently happens that it is left to sojourn there for a long time without any unfortunate result; one is content, to prevent accidents, to place a few pieces of iron at the bottom of these vessels. No one could say the reason for the result obtained by proceeding thus; one knows only by experience that when there is iron at the bottom of a cauldron filled with wine, one need not fear that verdigris will form in it. It is, as one sees, an application of Davy's idea. This application differs from that which he himself made of his discovery to the sheathing of vessels; but it is founded on the same principles; and it happens that uninstructed peasants had arrived, a long time ago, at a result that science has obtained only by one of its latest and most fortunate efforts.

Besides, one must not be surprised that the simple artisan, proceeding empirically, arrives at numerous discoveries. Always placed in the presence of facts, always occupied with the difficulties he needs to overcome, always acting, always experimenting, it is impossible that his trials, even though they are often badly directed, should remain completely sterile, and that from his practice there should not result, in the long run, a rather extensive and varied instruction. I repeat that the greatest part of the processes of the arts were found in this manner, and that, to become capable of exercising them and of advancing them, the best course to follow is to learn them first as they are practiced, and to make their processes perfectly familiar.

At the same time, however, it must be admitted that all these processes are but a collection of recipes as long as one does not know the reason for the results they produce, and that the man most well-versed in the practice of an art could draw only incomplete, small, imperfect effects from the chemical or mechanical forces he habitually uses, as long as he has not discovered the general laws that preside over their action. That the knowledge of these laws is eminently proper to clarify his view, to extend it, to elevate it, to strengthen it; that it sheds upon his art the most vivid and useful light; that it reveals to him many things of which he had no inkling; that, by teaching him the reason for what he does, it must render him infinitely more capable of doing well, is an incontestable thing, and one that is universally felt.

One would need to be at once fully instructed in the theory of the sciences and the processes of the arts, and to know their history perfectly, to be able to show, not what the sciences are capable of doing for manufacturing: the most learned and the most skilled are ignorant of this; but to be able to simply recount what they have already done, and what are the perfections of practice that are really due to notions of theory. M. Chaptal, in his book on French Industry, attempts to show this for the progress that manufacturing has made in France since the beginning of the revolution, and severe judges find that he succeeds in it only very incompletely. It appears that one can reproach him with having overshot the mark on one side, and with having remained far short of it on the other; with having given credit to the sciences for many perfections that art found without them, and on the other hand, with having made only a very insufficient description of the progress for which manufacturing industry is really indebted to them.

For my part, who possess neither the theoretical instruction nor the technical knowledge of the author of the book I have just cited, I can only prudently abstain from broaching this matter. I feel that the very small number of exact things I could say on it would only weaken the idea that learned men have of the real services that the sciences have rendered to manufacturing.

I will confine myself to remarking that, by the very nature of things, the sciences must have received in this industry applications infinitely more varied than in carriage, where it is never a question of anything but burdens to move, transports to effect, and applications infinitely more certain than in agriculture, given that the laws of mechanics are much better known than those of life, and that we can make a more enlightened use of the forces of nature in purely manufacturing transformations than in the creation of vegetable or animal products.

I add that at a time when the sciences can intervene here with more extent and certainty, one can less dispense with their assistance than elsewhere, and that at the point to which manufacturing industry has been pushed, in a great number of directions, by a very great number of skilled entrepreneurs, the manufacturer who would wish to stick to routine, who would not seek to know the reason for his processes, who would employ certain forces without taking the trouble to study the laws according to which they act, would experience an immense disadvantage, and would infallibly be crushed by his more instructed competitors.

The more the intervention of the sciences in the labors of manufacturing is necessary and susceptible of operating with extent, the more the talent for applications is called upon to play a considerable role here. This needs no proof. I have only two remarks to make.

The first is that one can apply the science one has learned only to the art whose processes one knows. What, in effect, is at issue in any application of science to art? To substitute for vicious processes better processes that science indicates. And how to operate this substitution, if one does not know the processes that are to be replaced or perfected? How even to have the idea of better processes, if one does not know the processes that exist? Visibly, scientific instruction can serve only those who know the craft: they alone are capable of fitting theory suitably to practice. It is not a matter of training workers on one side and scholars to direct them on the other. One must instruct the people who work, that is all. When one opens the intelligence of him who already had a certain skill, the talent for taking advantage of this new resource comes to him quite naturally from that which he already possessed.

My second remark is that, if one must be a practitioner to be able to make good applications of theory to practice, one must equally be a speculator and a man of business. Let us consider, in effect, that it is less a matter of working learnedly than of working in a useful manner. The most skilled manufacturer, in a given situation, is not precisely he who works by the most perfected, most correct, most learned methods: it is, since in the end it is a matter of producing, he who makes the most productive use of his forces in result. To speak truly, there is no absolutely preferable method. The best is the best in the circumstance in which one finds oneself, and that one, it is the talent for speculating, for calculating, that teaches one to choose. This talent, so necessary for forming an enterprise, is equally indispensable for modifying it, for judging whether there is inconvenience or advantage in making the application of some new process, some new discovery.—Let us pass from application to execution.

Talent for workmanship is needed in all orders of labors; but it is needed in manufacturing perhaps more than in agriculture and carriage, and the products of manufacturing industry are in general those in which the merit of execution is most manifest.

This industry is that of all in which it appears most difficult to raise skilled workers, and, at the same time, that of all whose successes and power appear to depend most on the merit of the workers.

I have already cited, after M. Clément, the words of an English engineer who recognized that England was more indebted to its workers than to its scholars for the progress it has made in mechanics.

Such is the importance of workmanship here, that the development of the other means is closely linked to the progress of this one, and that there are epochs when certain inventions would be in a way impossible, for the sole reason that one would not find workers skilled enough to execute them. M. Arago, in his notice on steam engines, does not believe that the Spaniard Blasco de Garay invented, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, anything similar to the current steam engine, for this good reason, among others, that the simplest of today's steam engines requires in its construction a precision of workmanship far superior to anything that could have been obtained in the sixteenth century [^438].

The talent of workmanship is of such great consequence in manufacturing, that there are a multitude of localities where, amidst circumstances otherwise most favorable, it would be impossible, due to the difficulty of procuring workers, to establish certain factories.

This talent is of such consequence that England, which allowed its laborers to emigrate, had forbidden emigration to its artisans, and that, until recent times, English laws have punished, and morals, in agreement with the laws, qualified as criminal and a traitor the artisan who carried his talent to a foreign country [^439].

This talent is of such consequence that, in the inquiry that was made, a few years ago, by order of the English parliament, into the state of our industry, one of the things that was most applied to determining was the point we had reached with regard to workmanship.

This talent is of such consequence that one of the things that seems to give the English the most hope of long preserving their industrial preponderance is the idea that they have much better workers than we; and such is, in effect, the difference that there can be, in this respect, between the men of one country and those of another, that, if one is to rely on the inquiry of which I spoke just now, one would commonly consent in France, in the manufacturing regions, to give a good English worker double what one pays a good French worker; that one pays 10 fr. for the day of a good English blacksmith, while one pays only 4 fr. for that of a good French blacksmith; that manufacturers find profit in having English workers by paying them much more considerable wages; that an English machine builder, thanks to the perfection of his tools, and especially to his greater skill, works with two or three times more celerity, etc. [^440].

One sees how practical knowledge of the craft, theoretical notions, and the talents of application and execution act here and to what point they are necessary. Let us see the influence that good moral habits exercise on it.

§ 5. I spoke above (§ 2) of the reproach made against the manufacturing industry of acting in a vexatious manner on the morals of its agents. Whatever may be the influence of this industry on morals, there is at least one thing that is not doubtful, which is that good moral habits are indispensable to its successes. The more it gathers its agents, the more it exposes them to contracting certain vices, and the more, by that very fact, it renders certain virtues necessary to them. It is thus that one seems to have more need of cleanliness in factories than on farms, in cities than in the countryside. It is thus that, in cities, the continual mixing of the sexes and the facility of certain pleasures, perhaps render more necessary the precautions and habits favorable to continence. It is thus that activity, economy, simplicity of tastes seem more imperiously required in the circumscribed places where manufacturing accumulates its agents, than in the extended spaces where agriculture disseminates its own, for the sole reason that, in the former, laziness is more favored, that one has more occasions for holidays, more subjects for dissipation, that one is more excited to luxury, to foolish expenses, etc.

[^433]: Complete Course on Political Economy, vol. I, p. 195. [^434]: On French Industry, vol. I, p. 104 and following. [^435]: On French Industry, by M. Chaptal, vol. I, p. 106. [^436]: Notice on Steam Engines, by M. Arago, p. 28. [^437]: Complete Course on Political Economy, by M. Say, vol. I, p. 216. [^438]: Notice on Steam Engines, p. 11. [^439]: Edinburgh Review, no. 80, p. 306. [^440]: Inquiry into the State of French Industry, by Mr. Bowring.One finds in the inquiry made in England into the state of our industry some proofs of what certain moral habits can do for the power of manufacturing. One could infer from this document, for example, that the lack of activity and application of our workers is one of the causes that prevent us from withstanding the competition of our neighbors. The commission of inquiry questions the deponents on what makes English workers obtain in our factories wages a third and a half higher than ours. One replies that we do not like to give ourselves too much trouble, that we want to mix industry with pleasure; the other, that our workers are distracted, nonchalant, that their heart isn't in the work, that they do less work in twelve hours than a good English worker does in eight [^441]. I do not examine the truth of these general accusations, made on the occasion of a few particular facts. It is not doubtful that a certain exaggeration is mixed in. However, it remains true that our manufacturers generally give higher wages to English workers than to those of the country, and they must indeed work more or better, since one consents to pay them more. It would not, therefore, be entirely without reason that the inquiry would place the lack of application of our workers among the causes that prevent us from struggling successfully against the competition of Great Britain.

Another cause that the same document assigns to our inferiority is the little care and cleanliness with which we sometimes keep our workshops and our machines.

“What, then,” the committee asks a foreman who had spent two years in one of the most considerable and best-equipped manufactories of Alsace, “what, then, was the cause that prevented you from making as good spun cotton as in England? The lack of care, first of all, replies the witness: the machines were not kept as clean; they were not as well regulated; an equally even, uniform heat was not maintained in the workshops [^442].

There are other similar depositions in the inquiry. I do not know to what point they are true; but it remains that in our best spinning mills one has still only been able to spin up to no. 150, corresponding to the English 200, whereas in England they spin up to no. 300 [^443]. Now, such a notable difference must be due to some causes, and it is quite possible that the lack of care is one of these causes. It would not, therefore, be without reason that the inquiry would place it among those that give the English the advantage over us here.

Although our neighbors ordinarily judge us with a haughtiness that does not encourage one to do them justice, I make no difficulty in citing the things in which they appear to have surpassed us. The vexatious sentiments of a people must not prevent us from profiting from the useful examples we can draw from them. Let us take from the English the good applications they have made of our inventions and of theirs; let us adopt their best machines, imitate them in the judicious arrangement of their workshops, in the remarkable order and cleanliness that reign there, and let us leave them the disdainful arrogance with which they too often please themselves in speaking of other nations: that is not what makes them formidable competitors for us.

If the lack of zeal, application, and care deprives manufacturing of much strength, the lack of prudence does it scarcely less harm. A manufacturer who ruins himself does not cause it damage only because he destroys a part of its means, but also because he is a bad example. Dissipators are perhaps less harmful to it than overly adventurous speculators. Both attack its resources; but the latter have the particular fault of discrediting it. Only a small number of imprudent and unfortunate trials are needed to decry a new industry which, wisely practiced, could have become very productive, and usefully attracted many hands and much capital to it. Thus the greatest enemies of the useful arts are not so much perhaps those who spend their fortune on festivities, on pleasures, as those who dissipate it in ill-conceived and ill-conducted enterprises, where, while pretending to encourage industry, they teach the industrious only the secret of ruining themselves. A great Russian lord, known for the liberality of his sentiments, asked one of our chemists to teach him how to distill potatoes; he ardently desired, he said, to excite by his example the inhabitants of his lands to devote themselves to this kind of fabrication: for the rest, he declared that he wished to make no profit from it, and that he would even consent to lose a great deal on it.

“God forbid,” replied the learned man, “that I should teach you an art in which you would consent to suffer losses; it is a poor service to industry to make such a use of one's means; the only enterprises whose example is favorable to it are those that are lucrative, and to form such ones, one must bring to them an attention and a prudence that one hardly takes the trouble to apply when one has neither the need, nor the desire to obtain profits.”

As much as prudence can add to the powers of the manufacturing industry, so this industry draws strength from the taste for simplicity. It is an effect of this taste to direct its activity principally toward the production of objects of common use, and thus to place it on the path in which it can acquire the most power. The objects that everyone needs are, by their nature, those for which the demand is the most extensive, the most certain, the least variable; those that best allow for the use of expeditious and economical means of fabrication; those in which the slightest savings yield the most considerable profits: they are therefore those in which the manufacturing industry can acquire and deploy the most strength, those where it obtains the most liberty of action.

One of the causes that have most retarded the progress of this industry among us is that perhaps it has not been sufficiently dominated in its labors by the simplicity of tastes and morals; it is that, in all times, it has preferred to work for the court rather than for the people. We have been making silk fabrics for over two centuries, and we have only known how to make files for thirty years. Until recent times, we have drawn from foreign factories a multitude of objects of primary necessity. It is true that, since the revolution, our industry has taken a much better tendency; but it is far from having entirely abandoned its old direction: it still applies itself by preference to the production of luxury objects. While Paris, according to the statistical research published by M. le Préfet de la Seine, exports, on average, for more than 2 million in jewelry and goldsmithing, for nearly 3 million in fashion goods, it exports barely 173,000 fr. worth of printed cotton cloths, 119,000 fr. worth of machines and mechanics, 65,000 fr. worth of worked iron, 26,000 fr. worth of cutlery [^444]. There still reigns, with regard to character, a marked contrast between French and English industries: the one excels above all in jewelry, goldsmithing, gilded and chased bronzes, alabasters, crystals, porcelains, rich silks, fine draperies; the other in the fabrication of iron, steel, cotton, wool, in the production of all objects of very extensive use; the first is still particularly applied to satisfying the needs of the elevated classes; the second works by preference for the masses.

The difference in these directions is not to the advantage of that of the two industries which makes it a point of honor to work for the elevated classes. This tendency has retarded the development of its most important branches of production; and what powers it has made it acquire, what profits it obtains in the fabrication of luxury objects, is nothing in comparison to what its rival can do and what it gains in the production of things of universal and daily use. England, with a population that is not half that of France, annually fabricates twice as many woolens, three times more cottons, six times more iron or cast iron [^445]. A London brewer, M. Perkins, alone sells for nearly as much in beer as the three hundred and seventy-six butchers of Paris annually buy in meat at the markets of Sceaux and Poissy: while our butchers, according to the official statistics I have already cited, buy only 45 million worth of meat [^446], the brewer of whom I speak sells 40 million worth of beer. Add to this that our superiority in the production of luxury things in no way compensates for our inferiority in the mass of necessary productions. The product of our luxury factories is of no importance next to the quantity of useful products made, even in France, and especially next to the quantity made on the other side of the Channel. What all the aristocracies of Europe and the world can buy from us in luxury objects is barely equivalent to what England sells, each year, in common merchandise to some small country that supplies itself from her with objects of primary necessity. One thus sees how much the taste for simplicity, by turning the activity of manufacturing toward the production of useful things, can extend its labors and contribute to procuring power for it.

It must be added that this taste is no less favorable to its liberty by the influence it exercises on the quality of the products than by that which it has on the mass of productions. The manufacturer whose industry has for its principal object to satisfy the needs of luxury, ordinarily neglects in what he makes the essential thing in order to occupy himself with what must please the eyes, with what is destined to flatter vanity. In a fabric, he thinks of the fineness rather than the goodness of the weave, of the brilliance of the colors rather than their solidity; he executes with care the ornaments of a clock and leaves its mechanism imperfect; he polishes, he finishes the entire ostensible part of a piece of furniture, and gives only a coarse fashioning to the part that must serve and which is not seen: he properly considers in things only what is destined to make an effect.

Quite the contrary, the manufacturer who is guided by simple tastes, in the useful products he fabricates, takes care above all of the thing that must serve: in a chronometer, for example, he applies himself particularly to executing well the chronometric part; in a musical instrument, that which must ensure the good quality of the sounds; and so on for the rest. He does not disdain ornaments; but he uses them with reserve, and he never sacrifices to them the very substance of his subject. For him, the first quality of things is that they be fit for the purpose for which they are made; he applies himself above all to giving them this property, and the efforts he makes in this intelligent direction soon make him acquire an industrial capacity far superior to that of the manufacturer who, in his productions, aims particularly at effect. Moreover, he thus gives his products extremely precious qualities; and the same virtue which, by turning him toward the production of simple things, assures him of vast outlets, tends also to facilitate the sale of his merchandise by leading him to give them the qualities most proper to make them sought after [^447].

It is a small thing to impart a good direction to the labors of the factories; the simplicity of tastes excites one to bring to consumption an economy, perhaps more favorable still to the progress of manufacturing. The less a people spends for the satisfaction of its needs, the more it has left for the advancement of its labors. All that it takes from its pleasures, it can employ to multiply, to vary, to perfect its manufactures. Saving is favorable to all kinds of fabrication, even to that of expensive things, of which it naturally seems the enemy. It has the double effect of multiplying the number of fortunes capable of attaining certain costly objects, and of permitting industry to bring these objects down to the level of a greater number of fortunes. It does not precisely forbid the enjoyment of things of price; it advises postponing it until one can easily afford it. A people that wants first to consume expensive things ends by not even being able to procure those of primary necessity. A people, on the contrary, that knows first how to reduce itself to things of necessity will gradually become rich enough to be able to make a great consumption of expensive things. Many people, before the revolution, wore silk coats but had no shirts: since the revolution, we have thought it reasonable to begin by providing ourselves with shirts, and perhaps we will end by wearing silk coats. One speaks of the sumptuousness of oriental nations; one must speak of that of economical and laborious peoples: only they truly succeed in deploying great magnificence. Compare the cities of Asia to our cities of Europe: our houses are better than the palaces of those countries: there are more useful, convenient, agreeable, elegant things in the dwelling of a rich private individual of London or Paris than in the palace of the Shah of Persia. It is simple tastes, in the midst of a laborious life, that have increased wealth in a neighboring country to the point of making universal there the use of floor carpets, which, everywhere else, are still a veritable object of luxury. Far, therefore, from the taste for simplicity and that for saving which is its consequence being opposed to the fabrication of things of price, it is visible that by contributing greatly to multiplying the number of great fortunes, they end by making all fabrications possible and easy.

It must be said, however, that the taste for simple things would be still more favorable to the progress of the arts by entirely forbidding the use of certain products than by limiting itself to deferring their enjoyment. A people that consumes things of price only when it amply possesses the means to buy them can doubtless arrive at a great industrial power; but that one can become much more powerful still, which knows how to forbid itself, at whatever degree of fortune it reaches, the use of things destined solely to satisfy ostentation or an excessive sensuality. The more an industrious nation conserves, as it rises, simple and severe tastes, the greater its industrial powers become. The ostentatious and sensual manufacturer loses, amidst physical pleasures, the taste for intellectual enjoyments; he loses interest in his art; he makes fewer efforts to improve it. He who remains simple while becoming rich, on the contrary, long conserves the energy of his faculties; he seeks the increase of his happiness in an ever more extended and more elevated use of his forces; he employs in perfecting useful fabrications what the other consecrates to false pleasures; and while the latter corrupts the masses by his example and impoverishes them by his profusions, the former, by his example, teaches them not to create artificial needs for themselves, while by his labors he makes the satisfaction of real needs easier for them each day.

This is how activity, care, cleanliness, prudence, economy, simplicity of tastes, add to the powers of the manufacturing industry. I could, if I wished to exhaust the catalogue of private virtues, show that there is not one of these virtues that does not contribute in some way to giving it more strength and liberty of action; but the extent of my subject imposes on me the obligation to restrict myself, and I leave to the reader the task of pursuing these applications. I believe, moreover, to have said enough to make this work easy for him. Let us now pass to relational morals, and let us see how the habits of this order act on the industry with which I am occupied.§ 6. It would be difficult to say how many unjust enterprises the agents of manufacturing have undertaken against one another. Their universal tendency was for a long time to exclude one another from the domain of industry. A small number of individuals, in each trade, seized upon the work, and brazenly denied the rest of mankind the right to engage in it. The masses were unceremoniously reduced to the role of unskilled laborer. It was only with much time, effort, patience, and expense that a few workers acquired the right to work for themselves, and to become industrial entrepreneurs. The aggregations of monopolizers were ceaselessly occupied, among themselves in limiting one another, and outside their circle in preventing the establishment of any new trade. No one, outside their ranks, could make either the thing with which they were occupied, or something approaching it, nor anything that had with that thing some appearance of analogy [^448]. It was only with extreme difficulty that a new industry managed to be tolerated. Our manufactories of cotton goods, of printed cloths, and a host of others that today are the honor and wealth of the country, each found in its turn, in the existing industries, an obstinate resistance to their establishment. The monopolizers showed themselves no less enemies of new processes than of new products: one had to beware of doing better than one's neighbor; the thing would not have been suffered: every trade had its rules of fabrication that no one could infringe, just as every science had its theories from which no one could deviate. Finally, one was no more permitted to employ new tools than to follow new methods: he who had only a bad instrument did not want a better one to be invented; he who had only his arms did not want any to be invented at all. The worker broke the machines; the master opposed their perfection. For how long did the owners of tilt-hammers not protest against the use of rolling mills? For how long did the needle-knitters not struggle against the invasion of stocking frames? One can reduce to these terms the morality that the artisans, in their mutual relations, strove to put into practice: no one shall make the thing with which I am occupied; no one shall fabricate a new product capable of causing mine to be neglected; if I do not have the sole right to do everything, at least no one shall be able to work better than I; no one shall follow better processes; no one shall employ better machines, etc.

If such was the morality of individuals, that of society was even less in conformity with justice. However enterprising one might be as a private man, there were many things that in that capacity one would not have dared to permit oneself; but there was nothing one did not believe permissible as soon as one acted in the name of society and as a trustee of its power. The most flagrant enterprises became simple matters as soon as they were done politically. Society exercised the most unlimited and arbitrary jurisdiction over manufacturing; it disposed without scruple of all the faculties of manufacturers: it decided who could work, what thing could be made, what materials should be employed, what processes must be followed, what forms would be given to the products, etc. [^449]. It was not enough to do well, to do better, one had to do according to the rules. It was not a question of consulting the taste of consumers, but of conforming to the will of the law. Legions of inspectors, commissioners, controllers, jurors, and guards were charged with enforcing them; looms were broken, products that did not conform were burned; improvements were punished; inventors were fined. The fabrication of objects destined for domestic consumption and that of products destined for foreign commerce were subjected to different rules. An artisan was not master to choose the place of his establishment nor to work in every season, nor to work for everyone. There exists a decree of March 30, 1700, which limits to eighteen cities the number of places where stockings could be made on a frame; an order of June 18, 1723, enjoins the manufacturers of Rouen to suspend their labors from July 1st to September 15th, in order to facilitate those of the harvest; Louis XIV, when he wished to undertake the colonnade of the Louvre, forbade private individuals from employing workers without his permission under penalty of a 10,000 livre fine, and forbade workers from working for private individuals, under penalty, for the first offense, of prison, and for the second, of the galleys [^450]. One thinks one is dreaming when one sees what enterprises the agents of manufacturing undertook against one another, and especially society or its proxies against all. There is no branch of industry that has been more tormented, more violated, and where violence has engendered more hindrances.

There is therefore none where one can better see to what point justice is necessary for liberty. It is above all to the manufacturing industry and to all that has been seen to arise in its bosom of iniquitous pretensions, or to all that it has suffered of vexatious regulations, that we owe our knowing a little of the regime that industry in general demands. It is in this order of labors that one must have felt the soonest and the most keenly what is odious and tyrannical in the constraints imposed on labor. It is there also that one must have understood the soonest what foolishness and vanity there is in the pretension of teaching workers what they have to do. The more this pretension entailed unfortunate consequences, the more it incited embarrassments, the more it occasioned losses, the more, naturally, one must have been excited to examine its effects. There were complaints against the regulatory regime from the beginning of the seventeenth century [^451]. This regime, greatly aggravated later, under the administration of Colbert, then began to become the object of sharper and especially more frequently renewed claims. One was not long in feeling all the disadvantage of a fabrication subject to invariable rules, a uniform fabrication, without proportion to the diversity of tastes and that of faculties. The manufacturers, losing their outlets abroad through the impossibility of varying and perfecting their products, saw themselves obliged to solicit new modifications to the regulations every day, and authority, lost on a path that was not its own, was occupied, for a century, in this false situation, only with advancing, retreating, changing its mind, and giving perpetual denials to its supposed wisdom. Toward the middle of the last century, philosophy and political economy began to contest its right to subject labor to regulations. It was denied that these rules could be useful; there was no difficulty in proving that they were often absurd and ridiculous, and such were the advances that these ideas had already made when Turgot arrived at the ministry, that this statesman believed he could propose to Louis XIV, and succeeded in obtaining from him, the abolition of the guilds and the enfranchisement of industry. Finally this reform, which could have no effect at that time (in 1776), was realized fifteen years later by the revolution, and it was found to be sufficiently consolidated, under the empire, to maintain itself, in large part, against the retrograde spirit of that government. Today the idea that industry must be free of hindrances, at least within each country, is very generally received; and as manufacturers are the class of workers among whom the regulatory regime has been most tried, one must suppose that it is also that which has the most enlightenment on the fatal effects of this regime and whose morality, relative to the liberty of labor, is the most advanced.

However, one should not infer from these remarks that in this regard the spirit of the manufacturing population is, at present, exempt from all error and all injustice. There is one thing that one is beginning to understand well: it is that there is no organ in the social body whose function is to teach all the others how they must function. Not only do manufacturers no longer ask authority to impose rules on their art; but they would probably not tolerate it wanting to meddle again in teaching them what it does not know and in giving them lessons in technology [^452]. On the other hand, I am willing to believe that one would have difficulty finding manufacturers bold enough to dare solicit the re-establishment of the masterships. But if one no longer sees in each trade a small number of monopolizers insolently demanding that they be erected into a body of masters, one still sees in every country manufacturers of all classes demanding that competition from without be forcefully warded off and that they be assured the monopoly of domestic consumption. Each class in particular agrees, as much as one likes, on the justice and utility there would be in having foreign manufacturers compete with domestic ones for all the products it does not make; but as for the particular product it manufactures, justice and utility demand that it have the exclusive right to provide it to the country. Then, if the masters no longer claim to forbid the workers from setting up shop without their permission, they still have, to a certain point, the pretension of remaining arbiters of the price of workmanship: they frequently conspire to fix it, and do not want the workers to form coalitions to raise it or maintain it at a certain rate. There is a certain country where, not long ago, they added to this injustice that of opposing the emigration of workers, and where, masters of carrying their talents and their capital wherever they pleased, they demanded that the workers remain attached to the glebe of national industry [^453]. The workers, for their part, do not always put more justice into their pretensions. It is still rather in their disposition to prevent the masters from introducing machines proper for saving labor, to oppose their taking workers from wherever they could find them, to drag by main force into their coalitions those of their comrades who would like to remain neutral. It is evident that neither the morality of the masters with regard to the workers, nor that of the workers with regard to the masters, nor that of the masters with regard to society, are yet very exempt from injustice.

On the other hand, society is also far from confining itself, relative to the labors of the factories, within the limits of its duties. It is indubitable that it still arrogates to itself, relative to these labors, more powers than belong to it and than it would be in its interest to exercise. It is in complicity with it that manufacturers manage to free themselves from all foreign competition. It is with its support that they have themselves paid by the taxpayers premiums for encouragement that they should receive only from their industry. It is with its consent that they exercise over the workers a more or less vexatious police force, that they can conspire to fix the price of labor, prevent workers from conspiring for the same object, and, if they desert the workshops, forcibly recall them to work. While it favors certain fabrications more than justice and its own interest would wish, there are others whose monopoly it no less unduly assumes. It arbitrarily limits the number of persons by whom others may be exercised. It reserves the right to determine the places where others may establish their factories. There is a certain number of machines whose use it forbids without its authorization. There are also some products whose fabrication it subjects to certain rules [^454]. Doubtless all these measures are not approved by the most enlightened part of its members. But whether in general they are poorly known or whether they are still more imperfectly appreciated; whether, consequently, one has no idea of blaming them or whether one can direct against them only a blame devoid of conviction and force, it is found, in result, that their true support is in the state of the public mind with regard to them, and that one can with reason consider them as its work.

Now, with a state of the public mind that allows for such an intervention of society in the labors of the manufacturing industry, it is clear that there cannot yet be any true liberty for this industry. It is something, doubtless, that, within each country, it finds itself more or less freed from the constraint of the corporations and that of the regulations whose object was to determine its processes; but the chains it still wears within, and the restrictive laws that deprive it of all that it could draw of resources from without, continue to oppose very great obstacles to its regular and complete development.

Is it necessary to say, for example, that those of its branches whose monopoly society has usurped, at the same time that they are enclosed in its hands only by an injustice, are extremely misplaced there, and that the money its treasury raises by this means is a tax whose collection is excessively onerous?

Is it necessary to add that the small number of those it has placed back under the yoke of the corporations suffer considerably from this regime, and give less abundant, less perfect, and more expensive fruits than they would if they were left, like the others, to the free competition of all citizens?

Society harms fabrication, even by the regulations it imposes on it under the pretext of order and police. It is not by reserving the right to teach certain delicate professions, or to judge in advance the capacity of the persons who would like to exercise them, that it will succeed in preventing them from sometimes being exercised in a harmful manner: it would be much rather by pronouncing sufficient penalties against any man who, having risked without the required enlightenment to exercise a dangerous trade, had compromised by his fault the life or health of the persons who had invoked his help. It is not by reserving the right to determine the place where certain factories may be raised that it will cause these factories to be raised only where they can be established without inconvenience: it would be much better by determining what can become a legitimate subject of complaint, what can give rise to reparations, and by leaving to the persons who would believe themselves injured by a certain fact the burden of addressing the tribunals to prevent that fact from being accomplished or to have it cease if it were accomplished. I am convinced that there is not a single case where its preventive measures, always contrary to liberty, could not, in the interest of security and order, be advantageously replaced by an enlightened system of repression and reparations. The spirit that maintains these measures thus harms, without fruit, the free development of the manufacturing arts.But it is above all by maintaining an oppressive system of customs that this spirit obstructs the progress of manufacturing. It would be long to say here how it is affected by such a system. I will content myself with observing that prohibitions protect one art only by oppressing the others, and that in the end they are fatal for all. If foreign iron is kept out to favor the ironmasters, all the arts that work with iron are oppressed. If, to encourage mechanics, one repels foreign machines, all the arts that need them are oppressed. If spinning is favored, weavers are oppressed. If wool producers are protected, cloth manufacturers are oppressed. If privileges are granted to cloth manufacturers, it is the tailors who are oppressed. It is clear that one cannot raise the price of a product by prohibitions without burdening all the arts that make use of it; and as there is not a single product that does not have some prohibition in its favor, it is found that each art can sell what it makes for more only after having paid more for all that it consumes to produce. The effect of these prohibitions established for the profit of each class of products is to raise the price of all things, and, by making everything more expensive, to make everything more difficult. If there is some art that this system favors, it is the one that the nature of things does not favor in the country where one wishes to forcibly install it, and it grants support to that one only by crushing those that could do without assistance. It incites the expensive production in one form of what could be obtained cheaply in another. Furthermore, it sensibly dampens activity, for it still infinitely limits competition; and while it imparts a false direction to the manufacturer's industry, and while it makes all his labors more difficult by obliging him to pay more for everything, it does him the further disservice of favoring his natural laziness and of dispensing him from making the best possible use of his faculties. This system of prohibitions has all the inconveniences of the old system of guilds: it is the same system on a larger scale; it does not erect into corporations the spinners, weavers, and mechanics of a city, but the spinners, weavers, and mechanics of a kingdom; it grants, in each country, to each class of artisans, the monopoly of the national market; the only thing that distinguishes it is that it acts over a more extended space, and thus its effects appear less sensible; but they are still extremely prejudicial, and it is no small harm to an art to deprive it, in order to assure it the market of a country, of all the help it could draw from the rest of the world. The spirit that keeps this system alive thus still opposes grave obstacles to the full development of manufacturing.

Thus, although the mania for regulations and the rage for exclusions, discredited by the abuse made of them especially in the order of labors in question here, have lost a part of their force, these passions are still far from being entirely worn out, and the manufacturing industry is still that in which one can best observe to what point the powers of labor can be hindered in their action by bad social habits.

§ 7. After having seen how social habits, private morals, the diverse kinds of skill that pertain to the art, those of which the genius for business is formed, and in general this entire part of the powers of labor which is composed of personal faculties, influence this industry, do we wish to examine how, in its turn, this second series of means into which enter only real objects applies to it? We will discover without difficulty that the influence of these objects, like that of personal faculties, is more marked there than in commerce; and I can say in advance that there is no industry where one sees better to what point it is important to have a workshop that is well-situated, well-organized, where labor is suitably distributed, and where one has at one's disposal a good system of motors and machines.

For example, the manufacturing industry is hitherto the only one where one has begun to see how much the perfection of the workshop depends on its situation. It is not that the influence of this means is real only in this industry: it is felt in all of them. There is no art where the kind of service that workshops can render does not depend first on the degree of intelligence that has been put into the choice of their location. It is no more a matter of indifference for a road, a school, a sanatorium to be suitably situated than it is for a manufactory. But in the end, manufactories are the only branch of industry where economists have begun to see how much the success of enterprises depends on the choice of the places where one establishes oneself; and if that does not prove that the influence of this means is real only in this industry, one could at least infer from it that it is better perceived there than in the others [^455] .

It is certain that if the situation of warehouses, streets, roads, and in general all the workshops of commerce greatly influences the service they can render, the power of manufactories seems to be linked with still more evidence to the places one has chosen for their establishment. Who does not feel that the most beautiful and most learnedly organized factory, placed far from all circumstances favorable to its action, would necessarily be powerless?

Things have not been arranged in this world in such a way that every industry could be exercised indifferently everywhere. Nor have they been arranged in such a way that certain localities were exclusively proper for the exercise of all the arts. No place unites all advantages. No place, either, has been completely disinherited of everything. But certain localities are more proper for certain labors, others for others, and the interest of the species would have wished that men had always placed themselves to do things in the places that united the most circumstances favorable to their execution.

It is difficult to believe that it has always been so. Many causes must have placed obstacles in the way. The sole pretension that has been had in each country of doing everything that was done in the others, and the system of prohibitions that followed from it, must have been the cause of many arts developing outside their true place; and it is probable that in the sum of the comings and goings, the journeys and transports of every kind that the human race executes today on the surface of the globe, there is an enormous mass of wasted movement, made solely because, in the world in general, and in each country in particular, many things have not been done where they could have been most suitably.

Now that things have developed in a certain way, what has been done decides in large part what it is most useful to do, and the executed works influence to a high degree the choice of places where one ought to establish oneself to execute new ones. Who would believe it? India, where cotton is harvested, where it has been manufactured from time immemorial, where this industry had acquired a degree of perfection that it seemed impossible to attain, where labor, moreover, is at a vile price—India is no longer the country where an Indian can most suitably establish his calico factories. It would be better for him, if he has the requisite talents and an easily transportable fortune, to leave India there with its cotton plants, its workers, and all its natural advantages, and to come and establish himself in England, more than four thousand leagues from the raw material, and in a country where workers are very expensive, and then ship his manufactured cotton another four thousand leagues back to India, where he could in fact sell it more cheaply than if he had fashioned it on the spot, so ingenious and powerful are the means of action that men of another race have developed in the distant country where he would have come to establish himself.

One can judge by this single feature to what point labor has been able to alter situations, change the relative importance of localities, and modify the motives that are of a nature to influence the choice of locations.

These motives are so varied and so numerous that it is as if impossible to find localities that unite all conveniences; and that, in whatever place a manufacturer places himself, it must almost never happen that he finds, on the very site of his location, his raw materials, his motors, his workers, his outlets, etc.

Which of these things is it most suitable for him to be close to? This is a question that cannot be answered in a general manner. It would be necessary to know for what share each must enter into his costs, to what point by moving closer to one he can move away from the others, which are those that it would be most expensive to have travel. One can say that he ought to place himself at the point where he will have most at hand all the things his art requires, that he ought to choose the situation where he will have to make the fewest useless movements and can avoid the most costs. But what is this situation? It is, in each particular circumstance, what great discernment and exact calculations alone are capable of teaching him.

In general, the points in each country where it is most suitable to place oneself to exercise an art are those where this art has already made the most considerable progress; for, besides the fact that such places ordinarily possess rather marked natural advantages, they are, by the very fact of the progress that this art has made there, those where the most circumstances favorable to its exercise must be found united; those where the most works must have been executed to facilitate the arrival of raw materials and the outflow of manufactured products; those where one must find a population more broken-in to the difficulties that the art presents and to the habits it requires; those where the courage of the workers must be best sustained and their emulation most keenly excited; those where it is easiest to make progress and to profit from that which others make.

Thus one sees, in general, men who wish to do a thing draw near, as if by instinct, to the places where it is already done, and, as a result of this disposition, manufactories of the same order agglomerate, in each country, on a small number of principal points. It is thus that in England most of the cotton manufactories have concentrated in Derbyshire and Lancashire, the metalworks in Birmingham and Sheffield; thus in France ribbons are particularly manufactured in Saint-Étienne, silk fabrics in Lyon, and cloths in Elbeuf, Louviers, and Sedan. From this results, it has been observed with great justice, a great emulation due to proximity and many facilities for imitation, the source of all prosperity. Yet these advantages are far from being the only ones that result from this arrangement: everything, as I have said, must be better prepared for the exercise of an art where that art has already undergone considerable developments. It is therefore above all in these centers of action that it is suitable to establish oneself. And yet, such could be the advantages united in places distant from these hearths of activity that it could happen that one ought to choose them by preference. But calculation alone can give enlightened advice in this regard.

If a manufactory, to be truly proper for its object, requires to be well-situated, it no less needs to be skillfully constructed. The good organization of the workshop is another means whose influence is perhaps better noticed in manufacturing than in carriage, although economists have taken no more account of it in the first than in the second of these industries. It requires more art in manufactories, and one is more struck by the effects it produces there.

The effect of a good system of streets or roads is that one circulates there without encumbrance, and that carriage executes its functions there with ease. The effect of the judicious plan on which a factory is constructed is also that the manufacturing industry moves and functions freely there. In both industries, this effect is of the same nature; but perhaps it is more considerable in the second; and besides, as it is obtained there with more difficulty, one notices more the power of the art that produces it there.

There is, in the series of transformations that an object is made to undergo in a manufactory, a less simple order than that which is observed on a road to advance a burden. While the carriage industry has, so to speak, only to put one foot before the other, and to march forward, avoiding snags, manufacturing is first obliged to do one thing, then a second different from the first, then a third different from the second, etc. The organization of a factory is therefore more complicated than that of a road, and it is clear that infinitely more art is required to make the manufacturing industry move with ease in its workshops than to make carriage function freely on its own.

To be in a state to construct a factory suitably, one must know the nature of each of the operations that must be executed there, and especially the order according to which these operations are linked: the essential thing is that it be constructed in such a way that all the movements made there are in the order of the transformations that take place there, in such a way that one advances in manufacturing simply, promptly, without wasted effort, without useless maneuver.

A man who has very just and very elevated views on the arts, and on whom I rely as often as I can, M. Clément, in the course he gives at the Conservatory, has sometimes had occasion to remark what a well-organized workshop can do for the good and prompt dispatch of the work.

“The difference is extreme,” he observed one day, “between a factory in whose organization an enlightened foresight has presided, and one that has been made, in a way, by chance and according to the caprice of an ignorant master: I have seen a certain dye-works where the labor was four times more considerable than in another, solely because the manufactory was badly organized, and a certain bleachery where fifty wheelbarrows rolled ceaselessly to transport cloths uselessly from one place to another, while in an entirely similar manufactory one did not see a single wheelbarrow.”

If we are to believe neighbors whose judgment is rarely favorable to us, the good organization of the workshop is one of the means of power and freedom of action that we have most neglected in our manufactories. One sees in that parliamentary inquiry that I have already cited so many times, a builder of factories from Manchester declare that, with regard to arrangements and method, the manufacturing plants appeared to him very defective in France, compared to the similar establishments existing in England [^456] . If the remark were just, it would be afflicting; for it would signal in our factories the absence of one of the means most proper to contribute to the extension of their powers.

If it is important to the manufacturing industry that its workshops be well-situated, well-constructed, well-organized, it is no less essential for it that the work there be skillfully distributed. The good division of labor between the workshops and in the interior of each workshop is a third or fourth means of power whose effects are still more manifest in the manufacturing industry than in the commercial industry. The trades in the latter are less numerous: there are not as many kinds of commerce as there are kinds of manufacturing. Moreover, the labor in a commercial workshop is infinitely less divided than in a factory, and it produces there infinitely less extensive effects. Smith calculated that ten workers who, acting in isolation, would have produced only twenty pins each per day, united in a factory and suitably dividing among themselves the operations of this industry, produced forty-eight thousand, which made for each four thousand eight hundred, that is to say, two hundred and forty times more. M. Say saw a playing card factory where thirty workers who, working in isolation, would not have made two cards each per day, could, by uniting and artistically dividing the task, make fifteen thousand five hundred, which made for each more than five hundred, that is to say, two hundred and fifty times more. Certainly it would be difficult for the division of labor, in a shop, on a boat, aboard a ship, to produce comparable effects and to increase to this point the power of the workers.

Finally, if we wish to compare the effects produced here by machines to those they operate in the industry we have previously treated, we will see again that this order of means plays a greater role in manufacturing than in commerce.It is found, first, by the very nature of things, that commerce cannot employ most physical motors, for example steam, wind, watercourses, in as general and continuous a manner as the manufacturing industry. On land, it has hitherto scarcely been able to move its vehicles except with the aid of animate motors. On water, it can use the current of rivers only to descend, the wind only when it blows from the right direction, the elastic force of steam only for short navigations, whereas manufacturing can apply these forces to all sorts of manufactures and use them in an uninterrupted manner. There is no interruption in the movement that a waterfall imparts to a factory. A windmill, turning on its pivot, can use the wind from whatever direction it blows. A factory moved by steam has the same facility for renewing its supply of fuel as for making it, and it need not fear that the fire will fail it. It is evident that, by its nature, manufacturing lends itself better than carriage to the use of these diverse motors.

Moreover, it draws from these forces more extensive and especially more varied effects. It is doubtless a marvelous spectacle, that of those ships that can navigate without sails, and go directly against the wind and the tide; or that of those lines of wagons seen in England, in the vicinity of the mines, advancing on grooved roads, without any apparent motor giving them their impulse; or better still, that of this new stagecoach that Mr. Gurney has launched, without horses, on the ordinary roads, and which travels there with a security, a precision, and a rapidity superior to those of the best-harnessed and most skillfully driven post-coaches. But these applications of steam to carriage by land and water, which strike us more because they are newer, are not comparable, neither for their extent, nor for their variety, nor, in some respects, for their singularity, to those that manufacturing has made of the same force.

We are surely still very far from making as extensive a use of the power of steam in the carriage industry as in manufactures. If one cannot help but feel a keen admiration on seeing this blind agent employed to move carriages, is it less singular to see it polish steel, turn pottery, cut crystals, engrave a seal, spin, without breaking it, a thread whose fineness makes it almost imperceptible, embroider the most varied designs without the slightest confusion, lift a warship like a longboat, seize enormous trees as lightly as the most delicate thread, place them in the direction necessary for the shape they are to receive, and make them into the masts of the largest ships with the justness and precision that a skilled turner would give to a billiard cue? In any case, here is a variety of effects far superior to that which carriage draws from the same force; and I do not say the twentieth part of the uses to which manufacturing has managed to employ it.

It must be added that the effects of the power of steam are felt more in manufacturing than in carriage, perhaps also in this respect: that it has lowered the price of the products it is employed to create more, and has extended their use more. I doubt that the application of steam to navigation has diminished the freight price as much as its application to manufactures has diminished the price of many manufactured products. I doubt that the steam engine has multiplied maritime voyages as much as it has extended the fabrication and consumption of cotton fabrics, if it is possible to compare such disparate quantities.

For the rest, whatever may be the influence here of machines and that of their perfection, it does not follow, let us be very careful, that the most perfected and most powerful machines are always those that it is best to employ. One must say here of machines what I said above of methods, that none are absolutely preferable. The best, absolutely speaking, may very well not be the best in a given situation. It is clear, for example, that where a certain product can have only a limited market, one cannot think of using, to create it, powerful and costly machines whose use is economical only where one can make this product in great masses. There are localities where the wind is the best motor one can employ; in others, it is water; in others, steam. The first fire-engine applied to industry, that of Newcomen, is still in use, despite its imperfection, in a great number of places where coal is cheap, and where no profit has been found in replacing it with more modern machines. In each particular circumstance, it is for calculation to teach which motors and machines it is suitable to use; just as it is for calculation to decide the more or less learned plan on which one must set up one's factory; just as it is for calculation to make known the place where it is best to establish it. The best system of motors and machines is that which is best appropriated to the circumstances in which one finds oneself; and yet, it is not doubtful that it is fortunate to find oneself in circumstances where one can make use of the most perfected and most powerful instruments.

Thus machines, motors, buildings, the manner in which labor is divided there, the plan on which they are constructed, the places where they are situated, all that is part of the workshop and contributes to its power, all that enters into the composition of the real fund, finds, like the fund of personal faculties, application in manufacturing as in carriage, and, just like these faculties, manifests its influence there in a much more marked manner. It remains for me to show how from the simultaneous concourse of all these causes and from their progressive development result a power, a liberty, a facility of action, and a confidence in the powers of labor that are ever greater.

§ 8. What social capital, as it extends and grows in volume, can add to the powers of manufacturing is immense. One can judge by the extension that certain industries in particular take on as all their means accumulate, as a greater number of hands are applied to them, more active hands, a better-directed activity, habits more favorable to the success of enterprises, more powerful instruments, better-appropriated premises. In 1812, French industry worked up, in the entire extent of the empire, only thirty-five million kilograms of French wool: in 1827, it employed, in the eighty-six departments of present-day France, forty-two million kilograms of national wool and eight million kilograms of foreign wool. In 1814, the same industry had manufactured only one hundred and ten million kilograms of iron, and in 1825 it manufactured one hundred and sixty million kilograms. In 1819, Parisian industry had consumed only four hundred and forty-nine thousand hectoliters of coal: in 1820, this consumption rose to five hundred and thirteen thousand, and in 1821 to five hundred and sixty-three thousand hectoliters. I see in the inquiry made before the English parliament, on the state of our industry, that our cotton factories which, in the time of the empire, had never been able to employ more than fifty thousand bales of cotton, consumed in 1824, on a territory a third less extensive, two hundred thousand bales. I also see there that, from 1816 to 1823, the consumption of the same material rose, per week, in England, from seven hundred and fifty to twelve hundred tons. I find there again, that in the single city of Manchester, the number of looms rose, in three years, from two thousand to five thousand seven hundred. There is, in England, a certain county where, in less than a year, one hundred and forty new cotton spinning mills were built, all having steam engines for motors. The manufacturers of that country delivered for printing, in 1823, more than thirty-four million pounds of cotton in fabrics, six or seven times more than we manufactured in France in the course of the same year. It is not very rare to find there manufacturers who annually release into consumption three hundred thousand pieces of calico, while our strongest houses barely deliver fifty thousand pieces to consumption. Other establishments there are set up on an even vaster scale: I have already said that a single London brewer annually manufactures 40 million worth of beer. In the county of Stafford, over an area of a few square leagues, sixty-eight blast furnaces together produce nearly fourteen hundred thousands of pounds of molten iron per day. A single establishment, at Merthyr Tydfil, casts and rolls, each day, over one hundred and twenty thousands of pounds, more than a fairly large number of our forges produce in a year. Finally, the beauty of the factories, the excellence of their internal arrangement, the power of the motors and tools they employ, correspond to the grandeur of the scale on which they have been constructed [^457] .

And it would be quite in vain, in a country where there were fewer accumulated means, that industry would wish to work on so vast a frame and according to such perfect processes. I have sometimes seen writers go into ecstasies over the immense development that the means of communication have taken on in England, and naively express the desire that a similar ensemble of canals and roads be undertaken in France. The wish was more patriotic than easy to realize. These are not things that can be done by design: they are feasible only with time, as the needs of industry grow and its resources develop. Every people is naturally obliged to confine its enterprises within the limits of its means. It is impossible for a less advanced and less rich nation to work on such extensive plans, with as much power, economy, and profit, as a richer and more advanced nation. The more advances a nation has, the more leisure it has to acquire enlightenment, the more money it has to make trials, the easier it is for it to arrive at useful discoveries, the more means it has to apply them, the more extensive its consumption is, the vaster consequently its markets are, the more it can manufacture on a large scale, the more the slightest savings must give it considerable profits. The superiority of power that a greater accumulation of means gives to the manufacturing people who possess it manifests itself under a multitude of aspects.

Then, with this growing power, is born a confidence in the means of industry, which increases its strength still more. This confidence is not a sentiment that one is the master of giving to oneself. To believe in the powers of industry, one must know them; one must have tested them much; one must have tried, varied, extended, and sometimes forced their use; one must feel that the effects one has obtained from them, one ought to have obtained, and believe firmly that one is the master of obtaining them again.

Now, this assurance in the use one makes of them can be acquired only as one uses them, as one makes them familiar, and as one enlarges them by exercising them. One of the great disadvantages of little-advanced peoples is to be able to use the resources they possess only with hesitation and timidity. Even when industry serves them best, they doubt what it can do; they seem to consider the success of their enterprises less as its work than as the fruit of a happy chance; they make only sparingly the advances it requires; they leave their capital with it only trembling; they steal from it as much as they can.

It is thus that, in the country of Saint-Étienne, where several sorts of fabrication, and notably that of ribbons, have spread such great ease, the inhabitants, instead of employing their savings to rejuvenate their old factories and to create new ones, timidly place their money in land, and prefer to content themselves with a meager interest of one and a half or two percent, than to risk making new advances to industries from which they hold all that they have: so weak is the confidence they still place in them!

In little-advanced countries, capital, as an author observes,

“is timid, morose, apoplectic; it is afraid of everything; it dare not stick its nose out the window. Do you propose that it leave its coffers, the weather must be superb, and there must not be a cloud on the horizon. Do you urge it to settle in an excellent factory, on the edge of a beautiful canal, it looks at you askance, and asks for a first mortgage or a deposit of annuities of triple value: and even these are the boldest [^458] .”

Doubtless this distrust, in such countries, is at once natural and salutary; but it would be better if it were not obligatory, and if the powers of industry were sufficiently developed and known that one could have faith in it, and not fear to entrust one's savings to it. Now, this faith in its power, so proper to increase its energy, can be born only of its power itself and of the progress of all its means: it is its complement at the same time as its consequence.

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Notes

[^425]: See, in the Archives générales de médecine, Feb. 1826, an excellent report by M. Willermé to the Academy of Medicine, on a series of very curious and very instructive statistical tables, relating to the population of Paris, drawn up by M. Villot.—It also results from these tables that the causes that appear to have a sensible influence in Paris on public health and the duration of life are not the exposure of dwellings, nor the quality of the water one drinks, nor that of the winds to which one is more particularly exposed, nor the greater or lesser agglomeration of houses and population, but fortune, ease, activity, and the whole way of being that results from them. The richest districts, and, among the richest, the most occupied, are those where mortality is the lowest. [^426]: There is perhaps just as great a concourse of entrepreneurs in commercial industry as in manufacturing industry; but, as in commerce a multitude of people use the same routes, the same carriages, and in general the same means of execution, it turns out that speculation can hardly bear on anything but the choice of enterprises, and that business is thus less difficult than in manufacturing, where the struggle between entrepreneurs is established not only on the choice of enterprises to undertake, but also, and above all, on the means of execution. In commerce, the struggle for execution is established only between those who carry out the transport, between the carters, between the shipowners, and as those who transport the goods are almost never those who ship them, it follows that the task of both is simpler. [^427]: See, further on, paragraph 5, what the simplicity of tastes can add to the powers of manufacturing industry, by directing its activity toward the production of objects of very general use. [^428]: It is not necessary to observe that by persons in need, I mean here only those who have something to offer in exchange for the products their needs demand. It is clear that, for any producer, only those can count. Persons who have nothing to offer can have nothing to demand. In the eyes of the speculator, they do not have or are not supposed to have needs. [^429]: In my opinion, the explanations given for this fact do not justify the producers from the reproach addressed to them here. If one has trouble selling, it is said, it is not that certain classes produce too much, it is that others do not produce enough; it is that taxes, by raising the costs of production, make products expensive and their sale difficult; it is that the prohibitive system, by closing many outlets, places new obstacles in the way of this sale, etc. It is unfortunate for a producer, without a doubt, to see his market limited by the poverty of the populations for whom he works, by the taxes that make his products more expensive, by the commercial prohibitions that prevent him from seeking buyers far away; he must keenly desire to see these obstacles that chain his activity and circumscribe his labors disappear; but, as long as they exist, his duty is to take them into account; and when he acts as if they did not exist, when he produces more than it is possible to sell in the circumstances in which he finds himself, in the state of the world and the market, it is clear that he must attribute to himself a large part of the evils he suffers. [^430]: Supposing the population of the city to be seven hundred and thirteen thousand inhabitants, in accordance with the census of 1820. [^431]: See, for the number of houses built in Paris during the three years in question, the volume of Statistical Research, published in 1826 by M. de Chabrol, table no. 130; and, for the increase in population during the same time, the same volume, tables nos. 23, 27, 33, 37, and the Annuaire du bureau des longitudes for the years 1824, 1825, and 1826. I must observe that this only concerns the increase in population that took place by the fact of births; but even if one were to add to it that which may have resulted from a somewhat more considerable immigration, one would not find enough to justify the enormous growth that the city received during these three years, a growth that the Statistical Research evaluates at two thousand houses, or seven and one-third times the size of the Île Saint-Louis, and which became even more rapid during the year that followed. [^432]: It appears that this means, which is one of the most perfected in England, is one of the least advanced among us. M. Clément, whom I have already had occasion to cite, told his audience, at the opening of his course of 1824, that a learned English manufacturer friend of his, who had recently visited the most important of our factories, and had compared them with the greatest care, entering into the most minute details, with analogous factories in his country, had constantly arrived at this result: "Chemistry in France is exceedingly advanced; machines, and especially administration, are very far behind." [^433]: See the Cours complet d'écon. polit. prat., vol. I, pp. 193 and 194. [^434]: One sees, vol. II, p. 3, of M. Chaptal's work, that he proposes to make known the progress and the current state of the application of chemistry and mechanics to industry; and, p. 112, that he wished to limit himself to what is the immediate effect of the application of these sciences. Thus all the improvements he points out are due, according to him, to the progress of the application of chemical and mechanical theories; now, I do not doubt that, among them, there are not many that were obtained without the help of these theories. [^435]: M. Clément, opening of his course of 1823 to 1824. [^436]: M. Arago, from whom I borrow this fact, and the following particulars on Watt, says however that Newcomen possessed some education, and was in correspondence with Hooke, secretary of the Royal Society. See, in the Annuaire du bureau des longitudes of 1829, his fine notice on steam engines, p. 184, in a note. [^437]: I am not saying that Watt did not later become a very distinguished scholar; I only observe that it does not appear that he was one at the time he made his first improvements to the steam engine. [^438]: See the Almanach du bureau des longitudes for 1829, pp. 155 and 156. [^439]: This legislation was reformed only under the ministry of M. Huskisson. [^440]: Inquiry made by order of the Parliament of England to ascertain the progress of industry in France, etc. Paris 1825, pp. 5, 43, 66, 78, 168, and passim. One can see, in this document, all the importance the English attach to the skill of this latter class of workers, and in general all that superiority in terms of laborcan give the people who possess it an advantage in the market. [^441]: See pp. 279, 315, 319, and passim. [^442]: Ibid., p. 314. [^443]: Ibid., pp. 287, 301, 314. [^444]: See Rech. statist. sur Paris. Paris, 1823, tables nos. 79, 85, and 86. [^445]: The production of cast iron in England in 1824 was seven hundred thousand tons, and in France, only one hundred and twenty thousand tons. In the same year, the quantity of raw cotton imported into England was 175 million pounds, and the quantity imported into France, only 50 million pounds. M. Clément, in his course at the Conservatory at the end of 1823, estimated the quantity of cotton cloth delivered that year for printing by English factories at six times the quantity of the same fabrics that had been manufactured in France that year. [^446]: Rech. statist. sur Paris. Paris, 1821, table no. 52. It should also be noted that a small part of this meat is purchased by butchers from neighboring departments. [^447]: I could observe here that one of the best effects of simplicity of tastes, relative to the products of manufacturing industry, would be to extend the use of standardization, that is to say, the habit of executing all products of a certain kind on the same pattern, a circumstance that allows them to be made in a factory, on a large scale, by the most expeditious processes, and to be executed with infinitely more regularity, precision, and above all, economy. See, on the advantages of standardization in manufacturing, the Cours complet d'éc. pol. prat., vol. II, p. 151, and the Vues of M. Christian sur les arts industriels, cited by the author. [^448]: For example, the tailors, dealers in new clothes, accused the second-hand clothes dealers of encroaching on their domain by selling old clothes; the shoemakers contested the right of cobblers to make their own shoes and those of their children and wives; Argan, inventor of the draft lamp, was summoned before the parliament by the tinsmiths, locksmiths, and edge-tool makers, who claimed the exclusive right to make lamps, etc., etc. [^449]: See in Chaptal, vol. II, pp. 250 to 280, the detail of the regulations to which a multitude of trades were subjected. [^450]: Dulaure, Hist. de Paris, vol. IV, p. 443. [^451]: At the Estates of 1614. See Chaptal, Industrie française, vol. II, p. 323. [^452]: To each his own trade, in social life as in organic life. There is no more a profession in the social body charged with laying down rules for all the others, than there is an organ in the human body whose function is to teach the others how they must function. I would as soon see the lungs undertake to teach the stomach how it should perform its digestive functions, or the brain presume to lecture the heart on how to circulate the blood, as to see public authority undertake to lay down rules for a multitude of trades of which it has not the slightest idea. [^453]: One can see in the English inquiry into the state of our industry with what naivety honest English factory owners came to demand that the laws against the emigration of workers be enforced, and that they be made, if necessary, more severe. I refer the reader to pp. 100, 101, 171, 172, 199, 201, etc. [^454]: One may consult the decree of May 10, 1804, on gimp-making and the manufacture of silver fabrics, velvets, etc.; the order of March 24, 1801, on the use of presses, drop hammers, rolling mills, etc.; that of December 1, 1803, on the policing of the work-books that workers are obliged to have. The provisions of the Penal Code on coalitions are well known; provisions much more severe against workers than against masters, and which, moreover, have never been applied to the latter. The decrees of the Empire that limited the number of printers, bakers, and butchers are also known. [^455]: See Chaptal, de l'Industrie Française, vol. II, p. 232 et seq. - M. Say, who had not spoken of this means in his Traité d'écon. polit., repairs this omission in the Cours complet, etc., vol. II, p. 137 et seq. This is not the only point on which the author's second work justifies the observations I had taken the liberty of making on the first (Revue encyclopédique, issue of April 1827). It seems to me, however, that here the correction is incomplete, and that the choice of locations, of which M. Say speaks only as a means of success proper to manufactures, should have been considered as favorable to all industries, and placed, in his first volume, among the general means on which the power of labor is founded. [^456]: Inquiry of the English Parliament, etc., p. 303. [^457]: To avoid bristling this paragraph with notes, I have avoided putting a reference after each of the facts it contains. I will content myself with stating that I have drawn these facts partly from the Statistical Research of the Prefect of the Seine, partly from the English Inquiry into our industry, partly from notes taken from the course that M. Clément gives at the Conservatory and, for one or two facts, from the works of M. Ch. Dupin. I would not want to guarantee that all this is of absolute accuracy. It is known that statistical data are, by their nature, rather prone to be faulty. But the accuracy here is more than sufficient to establish the progressive movement that I wanted to point out. [^458]: De Laborde, Esprit d'assoc., p. 260 of the first edition.