Life of Sir William Petty 1623 - 1687/Chapter VII
CHAPTER VII
POLITICAL ARITHMETIC
From Aubrey's friendly pen we get a sketch of Sir William at about this period of his life. 'He is a proper handsome man, the antiquarian writes; 'measures six foot high, good head of brown hair, moderately turning up—vide his picture as Dr. of Physick. His eyes are a kind of goose grey, but very short sighted, and as to aspect, beautiful, and promise sweetness of nature; and they do not deceive, for he is a marvellous good natured person, and εὺσπλαγχνος[1]. Eyebrows thick, dark and straight (horizontal). His head is very large, μακροκεφαλος[2]. He was in his youth slender; but, since these twenty years and more past, he grew very plump, so that now (1680) he is abdomine tardus. This last March 1679-80 I persuaded him to sit for his picture to Mr. Logan the graver, whom I forthwith went for myselfe; and he drewe it just before his going into Ireland, and 'tis very like him.[3]
But about 1659, he had a picture in miniature drawne by his friend and mine, Mr. Samuel Cowper (prince of limners of his age), one of the likest that ever he drew. He is a person of admirable inventive head and practicall parts.'
It has been seen that in the letter to Lord Anglesea, written in 1672, Sir William described himself as directing these gifts to the preparation of a work on 'Political Arithmetick,' in the intervals of the lawsuits with the farmers of the revenue, which in a list of his writings are grimly set down in one particular year of specially evil memory, 1667, as the sole proofs of authorship he could produce.[4] Already at a very early period of his career he had given attention to the collection and examination of statistics, and had earned thereby the goodwill and support of Captain Graunt. Graunt was by occupation a clothier, but, like many others, had taken to soldiering during the Civil War, and was a captain and major of the City train bands. His good sense and probity caused him to be elected to the Common Council, and to be frequently named arbitrator in trade disputes. He had for some time been collecting materials for his 'Observations on the Bills of Mortality of the City of London,' which appeared in 1661, and is the first work of the kind published in the English language. It was generally believed at the time that Graunt had received material assistance from Petty, and that he was to be regarded as the literary patron rather than as the real author. Bishop Burnet and Evelyn were both of this opinion,[5] which the numerous parallelisms between the 'Bills' and Sir William's own work, the 'Treatise on Taxes,' go far to support, different though the two books are in style and in some of the views expressed. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand why Sir William in this particular case should have sheltered himself under the name of a friend, instead of publishing the book anonymously, as he did several of his works. Whatever the explanation may be, a reasonable view probably is that it was a true instance of joint authorship. That Sir William had some hand in it can hardly be doubted, owing to the frequent mention of Ireland, which is so characteristic of all his works, and the wealth of medical illustration, which Graunt could hardly have supplied himself. This little book—it occupies barely 100 pages—was the first serious attempt to classify vital statistics and define the limits of a science respecting them.[6] It met with an extraordinary success, and at the Restoration the King ordered Graunt's name to be enrolled amongst the members of the Royal Society, adding that, if there were any more such tradesmen in his City of London, he desired they also should be enrolled immediately. In France Colbert is believed to have been encouraged by it to provide for the first regular register of births and deaths.[7]
Towards the end of his career, Sir William wrote some 'Observations on the Dublin Bills of Mortality'[8] in imitation of those which Graunt had published many years before. The publisher protested against the brevity of the manuscript sent him, which in size hardly exceeded a pamphlet. At his request Sir William added a postscript, but wrote at the same time: 'Whereas you complain that these observations make no sufficient bulk, I could assure you that I wish the bulk of all books were less.'[9] 'The observations upon the London Bills of Mortality,' the book opens by saying, 'have been a new light to the world, and the like observations upon those of Dublin may serve as snuffers to make the same candle burn clearer,'[10] The collection of statistics naturally led Petty and Graunt to attempt to deduce some general laws from them, and thus the whole field of public economy, or, as Sir William Petty generally termed it, 'political arithmetick,' was opened up to their investigations.[11]
Observation, it has been said, is the one eye of political economy, and comparison the other.[12] Sir William was one of the first to grasp the fact, and was singularly successful in seeing through both eyes if, at least, he is to be judged by the knowledge of the times—in such a case the only legitimate standard of comparison. Political economy, in the modern acceptation of that term, may be seen just beginning to struggle into a bare existence as a separate branch of science in the pages of the writers of the earlier part of the seventeenth century. Economics, in the sense in which they were understood by the authors of antiquity, were concerned with those practical questions only which affected the finances of the State. In the Middle Ages even such limited inquiries could hardly find a natural place in a society which, outside the limits of the towns, was almost entirely based on the idea of personal service. Meanwhile political philosophy had chiefly busied itself with speculations whether man by nature was or was not a social being, but little or no connection was established between these speculations and the sphere of economics.[13]
When at length, after the long political and religious struggles of the sixteenth century, States in their modern form had arisen, and the trading and commercial classes of society became a political factor in every country, the inquiries of the old economics as to what taxes a Government might properly raise naturally revived, and political philosophy lived again in the works of Bodin and Grotius. But the two sisters still stood apart, and political economy cannot be said to have existed till Hobbes proclaimed the doctrine that political philosophy was concerned with certain general questions, on which 'the nutrition and pro-creation of a commonwealth'[14] depended in practice, as well as with the questions on the border-land of metaphysics and moral philosophy. Scattered up and down the pages of both the 'Leviathan' and the 'De Cive' are discussions which not only touch on a number of social questions, but contain occasional attempts to define terms, such as value and price, and to analyse the origin of wealth,[15] as well as the usual practical considerations as to the taxes which ought to be imposed as a matter of immediate convenience to the law-giver and the State, or are right from a purely ethical point of view. The 'Oceana' of Harrington, published in 1658, further proclaimed the opinion that the distribution of property determines the nature of government, and that the political philosopher is therefore concerned with the distribution of property.
Petty, as already seen, had been the pupil of Hobbes and the ally of Harrington in his club; and it was to Harrington that the popular belief attributed the original idea of the settlement of Ireland in which Petty had just played so conspicuous a part. Thus all the influences most likely to affect him, those of his own pursuits and of his social surroundings, combined to attract him to the examination of those questions which the final break-up of the old order of things founded on the ideas of the feudal system, and the rising influence of the trading and commercial classes, imperatively indicated as requiring an answer on something better than a merely empirical basis. As Petty possessed the mathematical faculty in a marked degree, his natural impulse was to attempt to apply mathematical methods and arguments drawn from figures to the elucidation of economic questions; though whether he was the inventor of the term 'political arithmetick' may be doubted: it was probably already a current term. Thus in his hands political economy was to be mainly an inductive science.
'By political arithmetick,' says Sir William Davenant, 'we mean the art of reasoning by figures upon things relating to government. The art itself is undoubtedly very ancient, but the application of it to the particular objects of trade and revenue is what Sir William Petty first began.... He first gave it that name, and brought it into rules and methods. At the time,' Davenant proceeds, 'the very foundation of the art, viz. reliable statistics, and more especially a competent knowledge of the numbers of the people, was wanting.' Sir William, therefore, in all his inquiries 'had to take the figures of the customs, excise, and hearth money as his guides, and to reason from them, trying to compute the number of the people from the consumption of the nation as evidenced by the receipts;' to 'guess at our strength and wealth by the general stock employed in trade;' and to compute the population by the returns of the number of houses paying the tax.[16] But even these data were very imperfect; for example, the farmers of the excise were never obliged to render a real account of their receipts prior to 1674, nor was there any correct return of the gross produce of the hearth money prior to 1679.
The study of the bills of mortality of the City of London, which comprised 134 parishes in Middlesex and Surrey, probably furnished him with his most valuable data; but it is obvious that the difficulties with which he had to contend from the insufficiency of his materials could not fail greatly to impede the accuracy of his conclusions; and Davenant goes on to regret that the 'excellent wit' and 'skilful hand' of the author had not survived till a later date, when the fuller information which had accumulated under the variety of taxes that had been lately levied in the kingdom would have been at his command for purposes of comparison.[17]
Of the method of these calculations, admittedly founded on insufficient data, his views in regard to the amount of the population of London may be given as an example. He starts from the number of houses prior to the Plague and Fire, which appear by the register to have been 105,315; he then estimates that one-tenth of the houses held two families, the remaining nine-tenths only one; he takes the average number of persons to a family at ten in the wealthier, five in the poorer, eight in the middle class. He then checks his calculation in two ways: by multiplying the annual death rate by thirty, and by taking the number of deaths in the Great Plague—estimated at one-fifth of the total population; and then calculates the natural rate of increase subsequently. The three methods produce results approximating to the same result: the first, 695,076; the second, 690,360; the third, 653,000.[18] His calculation of the stock of Ireland he bases on the area of the pasture land of the country, 'supposing them to be competently well stocked,' and he 'guesses' that one-third of the small occupiers have one horse, and 'supposes' that 16,000 wealthier families have 40,000, and so on. He is of opinion that, because the export of Irish butter and cattle in 1664 had increased one-third since 1641, the population had increased one-third since the latter date also.[19] He calculates that the population doubles itself in 40 years, and that the present population of London being about 670,000, the population of the 133 parishes would in 1840 be 10,718,880, almost equal to the population of the whole of the rest of the country, a result which he thinks impossible; and he anticipates that the highest point in population will be reached about 1800, and that afterwards there will be a falling-off.[20] Such calculations are manifestly hazardous, and based on very imperfect premises; but they were the best of which the existing materials admitted. Nor was anyone better aware of their defective character than the author himself. 'Curious dissections,' he says, 'cannot be made without variety of proper instruments, whereas I have had only a common knife and a clout, instead of the many more helps which such a work requires;'[21] and his works contain constant and oft-repeated pleas for the collection of more accurate information, and for the intervention of the State, especially in regard to a correct enumeration of the people, statistics of trade, and a register of lands and houses: until then everything will be 'by hit rather than by wit, and all calculations merely conjectural.'[22]
Of Sir William's contributions to the infant science five have achieved a permanent reputation: the 'Treatise on Taxes and Contributions,' published in 1662; the 'Discourse on Political Arithmetick,' written in 1671, but not published till 1691; and a tract entitled 'Quantulumcumque concerning Money,' dealing with questions of currency, and written in 1682; a tract entitled 'Verbum Sapienti,' written in the last year of the first Dutch war, in 1665; and the 'Political Anatomy of Ireland,' published anonymously in 1672. To these may be added the two series of detached Essays on political arithmetic written at various times between 1671 and 1687. All these works are essentially practical in character, and have for their primary object the introduction of improvements in government and administration. They are largely inductive in method; a certain number of facts being as a rule first noted, and then followed by an attempt to found some general proposition upon them, and to apply that proposition to the circumstances of the time, by the selection of apposite illustrations, showing either the advantage of adopting it or the injury of neglecting it in practice. On the other hand, there are frequent instances of purely deductive reasoning; e.g., the whole speculation on the par of land and labour, to be noticed further on, is a piece of purely deductive reasoning from hypothetical premises.[23]
The influence of Hobbes on the early development of Sir William Petty's mind has already been traced. The 'Treatise on Taxes' shows the maintenance of that influence. The great problem of government, which in a confused manner all the statesmen of Europe in the seventeenth century were engaged in trying to solve, lay chiefly in the question what the shape should be in which the final transition was to take place from the still surviving mediæval forms of civil administration to others more suited to the needs of the time. On one side were the evils of the confusion caused by a mass of ancient local customs and exclusive privileges, with maladministration and weakness at head-quarters. On the other lay the dangers of extreme centralisation, and, as in France, of the consequent loss of civil and political liberty. The taxes to be raised, the methods of raising them, the mode of collection, and their receipt when collected, were all equally cumbrous and antiquated. They required not so much remodelling, as to be placed on an entirely new footing. The finances of every Crown in Europe still bore the character of the budget of a feudal superior, and were struggling to get free from the restraints of that system—if system it could be called.[24] In all these matters centralisation was as much the necessity of those times, in order that the State should live, as a decentralisation is the need of the present day. Different minds, according as they were constituted, saw—some the dangers of the existing disorder, others the perils of change, more clearly. Ministers like Strafford and Richelieu only recognised in ancient customs the shield of innumerable abuses, and a fixed obstacle to the material development of their country at home and to a consistent foreign policy abroad. In England the privileges of the aristocracy and corporate towns fortunately found defenders capable of comprehending that, in order to survive, they must prove themselves something more than the bulwarks of a dead past, and that a reformed and properly organised central administration was necessary for the benefit of the nation as a whole.
Notwithstanding his undoubted leaning to the monarchical element of the Constitution, Hobbes is not to be identified with the vulgar adherents of mere personal absolutism. The enemy he combated was the notion of any shape of imperium in imperio, whether lay or ecclesiastical, which could stand in the way of the legitimate development of the State. Following up the ideas which Bodin was the first to enunciate clearly, he defended the cause of a strong and powerful administration on determinate lines, able to assert itself against privilege within and foreign attack and intrigue without. He may be regarded as the founder of the doctrine of the ultimate sovereignty of the State, and therefore, however little he may have intended or foreseen it, of the sovereignty of Parliament as the final depositary of the power of the State in England. More indirectly, he was the father of the school of political thought which came on the Continent to be known as that of doctrinaire or authoritative liberalism, as distinct from democracy pure and simple, which has always had a tendency to break up into local anarchy. What Hobbes laid down in theory, Petty sought to apply in practice. The 'Treatise on Taxes' is continually occupied with the wide sphere of the proper powers of the State; with the benefits which an enlightened administration can confer on all its subjects both by removing the disabilities which shackle and impair their energies, and also by the positive development of the resources of the country through a thorough reform of the system of taxation; and by the activity of the State being extended into many as yet neglected directions, including that of education, including naval and commercial knowledge. Petty's own connection with Ireland tended to develop the natural tendencies of his mind. He evidently saw in it, like Cromwell, 'a clean paper' for experiments in government which in England might be impossible owing to the accumulated weight of historical prejudice and the power of vested interests,[25] especially as his own estimate of the capacities of the native population, if given a fair opportunity, was high. It was this order of ideas which made him the natural enemy of the great Irish nobles of the Rebellion, and also of the existence of separate Parliaments and of all ecclesiastical privileges. Improved communications both in England and Ireland, and between them, was one of the principal weapons he relied on to attain his objects. He wished 'every year to make 50 miles of new navigable river in the most advantageous places,' and that 'there might not be a step of bad way upon all the great nine roads to London,'[26] and then it would cease to be said that 'the English in Ireland growing poor and discontented degenerate into Irish; and, vice versâ, Irish growing into wealth and favour would reconcile to the English.'[27]
The 'Treatise on Taxes' was immediately occasioned by the changes discussed after the Restoration in the laws relating to the revenue, both in the method of assessing the older taxes, and by the imposition of new burdens in lieu of the feudal duties on land then finally abolished: changes marking the transition from the system of direct to that of the indirect taxation which existed almost unimpaired till the days of Sir Robert Peel. A new 'Book of Rates,' or table of duties, with a revised code of customs law, was adopted under the name of 'the Great Statute;' an excise on wines and liquors was granted to the Crown, in lieu of the abolished feudal duties; and 'hearth money,' an unpopular tax copied from a French original, was imposed on all houses, except cottages, according to the number of stoves or grates. 'There is much clamour against the chimney money,' says Pepys in June, 1662. A few years later, in order to meet the expenses of the first Dutch war and the costs of the expected struggle with France, the poll tax, together with the old Tudor subsidies and the Commonwealth monthly assessments, were revived, to serve as a rude method of making all sources of property contribute to the revenue. At the same time the import and export of a long list of 'ennumerated' articles was absolutely prohibited, and the Act of Navigation, which practically limited trade with England to goods carried in English bottoms—an inheritance from the Cromwellian period—was renewed, with a few modifications.[28] At a date slightly later than the appearance of the treatise, viz., in 1668, 1670 and 1676, the duties on brandies and wines were raised, in order to protect the home manufacturer, and to retaliate on France for the prohibition of the import into that country of many articles the produce of England.[29] These statutes mark the beginning of the long war of tariffs, which became accentuated after the Revolution of 1688, and continued till the middle of the present century.
In France a new tariff, from the adoption of which an epoch in the commercial history of Europe is to be dated, had been promulgated at the advice of Colbert, and the question debated in England was whether the main principles on which that tariff was founded were sound and to be imitated, or the reverse. Political leanings influenced personal judgments as much, perhaps, as any abstract views on the relative advantages and disadvantages of different systems of taxation, according as the sympathies of individuals favoured either the French or the Dutch alliance. The object of Colbert's tariff was by means of reduced duties on raw materials to encourage the manufacture and export of French goods, and to discourage the import of foreign manufactured articles by the imposition of heavy duties on their entry. The export of French corn was at the same time prohibited, under the mistaken idea that food would be thereby cheapened, and French manufactures be stimulated by increasing the purchasing power of money. The actual result was to reduce the production of French corn to the amount required for home consumption, without materially lowering the price. Underlying the whole of this complicated scheme was the idea that France would be more enriched by disposing of the surplus of her manufactured goods abroad for money, than through becoming 'tributary,' as the phrase went, to foreign countries, and sending abroad, in exchange for foreign manufactured goods, the agricultural produce of her soil, which, according to the views of the supporters of the system, ought to be consumed at home. Another and a sounder part of the system was the improvement of the means of internal communication by road and by water, the abolition of monopolies and exemptions, and the removal of the artificial barriers—so far as popular prejudice permitted—by which the unwisdom of man had aggravated the difficulties created by nature.
The mercantile portion of Colbert's policy reposed partly on the error that value—in other words, wealth—consisted in the precious metals coming into a country as the result of foreign trade, and that to increase the former was to add to the latter; partly in the idea that the profit on the export of home manufactures, fostered by protective duties and stimulated by bounties, was greater than that gained by the export of the agricultural products—the corn and wine and wool—which Colbert's predecessor, Sully, had recognised as the sources of the wealth and prosperity of France. These premises once conceded, the soundness of the system followed as a matter of course. It was the policy of a nation of landowners which had been seized with a desire to become at all hazards a nation of manufacturers and merchants.
Of an exactly opposite character was the example of Holland, whose prosperity it was the desire of France to destroy. That country, as observed by Adam Smith in the following century, had approached the nearest to the character of a free port of all European countries.[30] Holland still held the greater part of the carrying trade of the world. Colbert hoped to crush it by hostile duties; Louvois and his royal master by open war. The Dutch tariff imposed no protective duties at all, and the State gathered the necessary revenue from the home consumer by a wide-reaching system of indirect taxation on commodities. It was the policy of a nation of merchants and bankers who understood the interests of their class.
'Holland,' to use the words of a recent author, 'was intrinsically a poor country. But, notwithstanding, in nearly all commodities Holland gave the price, and it did so because her towns had a good market, to which all the world resorted. The Dutch were manufacturers; in some articles the successful manufacturing rivals of England; but their principal source of wealth, of that wealth, abundance of good products, on which alone the capacity for any other industry can be based, was to be traced to trade and the policy of free trade.'[31]
Such were the two rival systems of the Continent, between which, in the latter half of the last century, England was being called upon to choose in the settlement of her future financial and commercial system. Sir William, in his early days, had travelled in Holland. He had evidently even then been attracted by the example of Dutch trade and finance, and as early as 1644 he had written a tract called the 'Frugalities of Holland,' which, however, was lost at sea.[32] In the 'Treatise on Taxes,' with an eye still fixed in the same direction, he begins by pointing out that the only legitimate public charges of a State are, its defence by land and sea so as to secure peace at home and abroad and honourable vindication from injury by foreign nations; the maintenance of the chief of the State in becoming splendour, and of the administration, in all its branches, in a state of efficiency; 'the pastorage of souls by salaried ministers of religion;' the charge of schools and universities, the endowment of which, in his opinion, ought to be a concern of the State, and the distribution of whose emoluments ought not to be 'according to the fond conceits of parents and friends,' and of which one of the principal aims should be the discovery of Nature in all its operations; 'the maintenance of orphans, the aged, and the impotent,' for, in his opinion, 'the poor can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work, when we think it is just to limit the wages of the poor;' and the improvement of roads, navigable rivers, bridges, harbours, and the means of communication, and the development of mines and collieries.[33]
He then considers the causes which increase and aggravate the public charges and render them unpopular. These he analyses under six heads: (1) The distrust of the people in the honesty of the administration which collects and spends the taxes; (2) their compulsory payment in money and the want of a proper banking system; (3) obscurities and doubts concerning the right of imposing; (4) scarcity of money and confusion of coins; (5) the fewness of the people; (6) the absence of accurate statistics and of proper valuation lists. To these he adds the fear of wars, aggressive, defensive, and civil: the first of which he traces to mistaken notions of national greatness; the second to want of adequate preparation, 'wherefore to be always in a position of war at home, is the cheapest way to keep off war from abroad;' and the third largely to the persecution of the heterodox in religion. In connection with these 'aggravations' he proposes a large redistribution of the revenues of the Church, and suggests a return to a celibate clergy, and the abolition of the mass of unnecessary officials, lawyers, doctors, and professional men, who make unnecessary business or fatten in idleness at the expense of the taxpayer. 'If registers,' he says, 'were kept of all men's estates in lands, and of all the conveyances and engagements upon them; and withall, if publick loan banks, lombards, or banks of credit upon deposited money, plate, jewels, cloth, wool, silk, leather, linen, metals and other durable commodities were erected,' he cannot but 'apprehend how there could be above one tenth part of the law suits and writings, as now there are.'[34] He desires that the State should find work for the unemployed. 'The permitting of any to beg,' he says, 'is a more chargeable way of maintaining them whom the law of nature will not suffer to starve, when food may possibly be had.'[35] He contemplates a large system of public works, especially in connection with his favourite object, the improved communications by road of the different parts of the country. The 'supernumeraries' of the State, as he terms them, should 'neither be starved, nor hanged, nor given away.' That they will either beg, or starve, or steal, is certain, and there are grave objections to each and all of these three courses. It would even be better 'to let them build a useless pyramid on Salisbury plain, or bring the stones at Stonehenge to Tower hill,' than leave them in absolute idleness.[36]
He then passes to the discussion of taxation, or, in other words, what the public charges ought to be in a well-regulated State, and suggests that one-twenty-fifth part of the value of land and labour is the share, or 'excisum,' which ought to be sufficient for public uses. In the tract entitled 'Verbum Sapienti,' published during the Dutch war—when the burden of taxation had become intolerable, and was doubly odious from the want of success attending the operations at sea—he puts the monthly charge on landed estate of the taxes at 70,000l. a month, or 840,000l. a year; and hints at the probability of this charge rising to 250,000l. a month. He calculates that it amounts to one-third of the annual value; but that, if the charge were laid in a just proportion and on a proper basis, the charge would only be one-tenth. He considered, for example, that the City of London paid about half the proper contribution, 'because the housing of London belonged to the Church, the companies, or gentlemen, and is taxed by the citizens, their tenants.'
The expenses of the State he puts at one million, including war expenses. To meet this he estimated the 'ordinary' or ancient Revenue of the Crown as follows:
| £ | |
| Crown Lands | 70,000 |
| Post Office | 20,000 |
| Coinage and pre-emption of tin | 12,000 |
| Forests | 4,000 |
| Courts of Justice | 6,000 |
| First-fruits | 18,000 |
| 130,000 | |
| And the Customs at 2 per cent | 170,000 |
| 300,000 |
The above amounts do not include the duties on 'wares, wine, licenses, butlerage, excise, chimney money, the land tax, the poll tax, and the monthly assessment,' levied in order to make up the balance. These taxes he proposed to levy in the proportion of three-eighths on land and houses and the value of stock-in-trade, and five-eighths on consumption, believing that this distribution of burdens represented the true proportion of the value of the former to that of wages, and that it was fair to distribute taxes in proportion. The sum of 375,000l. he proposed to place on land and on stock-in-trade; and 625,000l. on the people by a poll tax of 6d. a head, and an 'excise of 19d., or one eighty-fourth of the value of consumptions.'[37]
He insists in this tract, and at still greater length in the 'Treatise on Taxes' and the 'Political Arithmetick,' on the necessity of a reasonable basis for the 'subsidies' and 'assessments,' instead of leaving the matter to be scrambled over by the local authorities of each county. This had ever been the case with the 'subsidy' system, partially reformed though it had been under the Commonwealth 'assessments,' which the Restoration Government adopted with some modifications. The inequalities still, indeed, existed of the state of things, when without more ado 'he that had a cup of wine to his oysters, was hoisted into the Queen's subsidy book.'[38] Sir William, as a remedy, propounded a regular survey and a real valuation of land, in order to get a basis for a land and house tax, which should be fixed at one-sixth of the total rent: 'about the proportion that the Adventurers and soldiers in Ireland retribute to the King in quit rents.'[39]
A land tax—and the argument he points out applies to tithes also—can only exist as a consequence of the value of the land, and is not a cause of the price of land, and therefore does not raise prices; 'for hereby is collected a proportion of all the corn, cattle, fish, fowl, fruit, wool, honey, wax, oyl, hemp, and flour of the nation, as a result of the lands, art, labour, and stock which produced them....
Whosoever buys land in Ireland is not more concerned with the quit rents, wherewith they are charged, than if the acres were so much the fewer; or than men are who buy land out of which they know tythes are to be paid.'[40] The burden of a new land tax would therefore fall on those who paid it in the first instance, after which it would remain an excisum or 'part cut out' of the land—the property of the State, laid aside for public uses.
He next passes to the discussion of customs and excise duties, and kindred topics. Tin and wool were, at this time, the staple of the English export trade, for England, it is to be remembered, was not then a manufacturing country to any very large extent. The trade in wool was a practical monopoly. In consequence, Parliament had constantly been able to exact an export duty of 100 per cent, on the sack of ordinary raw wool without checking the demand or impoverishing the husbandman, the burden falling on the consumer, who had no other market to fly to. The manufacture of wool was still in its infancy. Holland was the great seat of textile industries, and it had been proposed in influential quarters—under the influence of the example of France—to try to crush the manufacturers of Holland, by prohibiting the export of English wool thither and the import of the Dutch manufactured article, so as to compel the wool to be manufactured into cloth at home.[41]
With the extreme prohibitory school Sir William hardly condescends to argue seriously. He examines the whole question of prohibition by the light of the examples of the prohibition of the export of money. This he shows is practically impossible, probably alluding to the experience acquired from the East India trade. The revenue officers, he says, had always been bribed, and the result was that the price of the articles bought with the money had thereby been raised to the consumer. If, however, a particular branch of trade will not bear this charge, then he points out it is lost altogether, to the injury of the nation and the prohibition of so much foreign trade; with this difference, that the discretion of what branch of trade shall be curtailed is left to the merchants. If a merchant, wishing to bring in Spanish wine and coffee berries, found that he must pay 40,000l. abroad in money to complete the transaction, and was prohibited from sending that amount abroad, he would curtail his business in one article or the other, according to his own convenience; while at least, under a direct sumptuary law on particular commodities, the State, and not a private individual, has the responsibility of choice as to the goods which are to be allowed to enter. The prohibition of the export of money, he also points out, diminishes the selling power of the English merchant by depriving him of an article, money, which he could bargain with like any other: in this following the arguments of Mun and others, who had pleaded for a remission of the rate against the export of specie to the East, and urged that the sale of Indian imports would bring in an amount of the precious metals far larger than the silver exported to purchase them. As to wool, of which, as already stated, it was proposed to prohibit the export, in order to destroy the Dutch trade in the manufactured article, he points out that the prohibition 'would perhaps do twice as much harm as the loss of the trade.' It would have as an effect that the English producer would raise the price of his article by diminishing the supply, of which there were 'such gluts upon our hands.' Why, he asks, did not the English producer of wool turn his pasture into arable, thereby obviating the necessity of importing such large quantities of corn from abroad, and stop money going abroad to pay for that corn, thereby giving employment to many, instead of 'one man by the way of grazing, tilling as it were many thousand of acres of land by himself and his dog?'[42]
'Suppose,' he goes on, 'our Hollanders outdo us by more art, were it not better to draw over a number of their choice workmen, or send our most ingenious men thither to learn; in which, if they succeeded, it is most manifest that this were the more natural way, than to keep that infinite clatter about resisting of nature, stopping up the winds and seas, etc. If we can make victuals much cheaper here than in Holland, take away burthensome, frivolous and antiquated impositions and offices; I conceive even this were better than to persuade water to rise of itself above its natural spring. We must consider in general that as wise physicians tamper not exceedingly with their patients, rather observing and complying with the motions of nature than contradicting it with vehement administrations of their own; so in politicks and economics the same must be used.
'Naturam expellas furcâ, tamen usque recurret.'
Passing to the prohibition of imports from abroad, 'why,' he asked, 'should we forbid the use of any foreign commodity, which our own hands and country cannot produce, when we can employ our spare hands and lands upon such exportable commodities as will purchase the same and more.'[43] 'For if we should think it hard to give good necessary cloth for debauching wines, yet if we cannot dispose of our wine to others, 'twere better to give it for wine or worse, than to cease making it; nay better to burn a thousand men's labours for a time, than to let those thousand men by non-employment lose their faculty of labouring.'[44]
He thus indicated that labour is the true foundation of wealth and value, and that to increase the facilities for employment and the yield of labour is the genuine method of increasing wealth, and that gold and silver are only one of many forms of it. 'If a man,' he argued, 'can bring to London an ounce of silver out of the earth in Peru, in the same time that he can produce a bushel of corn, then one is the natural price of the other; now if by reason of new and more easy mines a man can get two ounces of silver as easily as formerly he did one, then corn will be as cheap at ten shillings the bushel, as it was before at five shillings cæteris paribus.'[45]
'But a further, though collateral question,' he proceeds, 'may be, how much English money this corn or rent is worth; I answer,' he says, 'so much as the money which another single man can save within the same time, over and above his expence, if he employed himself wholly to produce and make it; viz. Let another man go travel into a country where is silver, there dig it, refine it, bring it to the same place where the other man planted his corn; coin it, etc.—the same person, all the while of his working for silver, gathering also food for his necessary livelihood, and procuring himself covering, etc.—I say, the silver of the one must be esteemed of equal value with the corn of the other: the one being perhaps twenty ounces and the other twenty bushels. From whence it follows that the price of a bushel of this corn to be an ounce of silver.'[46]
Successful trade he saw was a matter of exchange, and that the wealth of a country did not consist, as was then generally supposed, in the value of the exports exceeding that of the imports and the exporter gaining the difference in hard coin: but the value of the trade of any particular country was, on the contrary, to be ascertained—by adding the values—so far as they could be ascertained, of the imports and exports together, not forgetting to take into account the value of the payments made for freight and seamen's wages and the value of cash payments received from abroad.[47]
But while thus understanding the great central truths of commercial economy, he did not push them to their logical result or always hold clearly to his own principles. Thus he says in the 'Treatise on Taxes' that, 'as for the prohibition of importations, it need not be until they much exceed our exportations.' Again, wishing apparently to make some concessions to his adversaries, after exposing the absurdity of prohibitions, he acknowledges that nevertheless 'if the Hollanders' advantages in making cloth be but small and few in comparison of ours, that is if they have but a little the better of us, then that prohibition to export wool may sufficiently turn the scale.' The 'measures of customs' which, developing this idea, he describes and classifies in the 'Treatise on Taxes' seem to give a carefully-thought-out view of a system of trade by which the home producer might be secured to a certain extent, without the volume of trade being seriously checked. A closer analysis would probably have led him to see that this was logically inconsistent with a condemnation of attempts to regulate the tides and to persuade water to rise above the natural spring.[48] Again, in the 'Political Arithmetick' he seems to miss the full application of his own doctrines as to the origin of value, and maintains the advantage of foreign trade because it produces 'not only wealth at large, but more particularly abundance of silver, gold and jewels, which are not perishable articles, but are wealth at all times and all places, whereas abundance of wine, corn, fowls, flesh, etc., are riches but hic et nunc; so as the raising of such commodities, and the following of such trade, which does store the country with gold, silver, jewels, etc., is profitable before others;' and his analysis of the influence of supply and demand on value, to be noticed further on, is partly vitiated by the recognition of an inherent value in some articles as such, which he thinks must be wealth at all times and places.[49]
To acknowledge these shortcomings is only to acknowledge that Sir William Petty, though far in advance of his time, had not shaken himself entirely free from the influences of the errors which the mercantile system had accepted from the purely prohibitory system, viz., that wealth consists of the precious metals, and that a system of revenue and trade is to be deemed good or bad, according as it can be shown to promote the influx of those metals into a country or not. There is always a temptation to believe, when certain general conceptions seem present to the mind of an author, that the logical basis of those conceptions must have been present also; but this is an error which the student of economic history has to avoid.
Progress in economic science in the seventeenth century was gradual and tentative, and Petty's grasp of logical method does not require to be exaggerated in order to make him take a high place in the ranks of the founders of the science. It was no mean achievement for any writer in the seventeenth century to have discerned the great theoretic truth on which free trade depends; to have clearly realised that the highest wisdom did not consist in closing the ports or in prohibiting exports; to have been willing to welcome the arrival of foreign wealth, even if money had in the first instance to go abroad to fetch it; and, finally, to go as far as to allow that it was far better to consent even to the importation of perishable goods than to prohibit trade altogether—even though what is said on all these subjects may occasionally appear slightly inconsistent with something that has gone before, or may occasionally be a little uncertain in sound, or not be pushed to the full logical consequence of the premises, or be accompanied by too many apparent concessions to adversaries.
With reference to these concessions, a special set of considerations have to be borne in mind. The early authors on political economy, not only in France, but in England also, wrote with a constant fear before their eyes of the dangerous consequences of speaking too freely. Their publications were frequently anonymous, and even posthumous: the safest course of all. The liberty of unlicensed printing was not yet secured; and the ill-will of those in authority was easily incurred by the expression of views in advance of the times. The only thoroughly free trade pamphlet of the century, 'The Discourses,' published in 1691 by Sir Dudley North, is believed to have been suppressed. It certainly entirely disappeared from circulation. Parliament had just before proclaimed trade with France 'a nuisance,' and North's pamphlet was like a winter rose. The author of the 'Détail de la France,' Boisguillebert, was not saved by his high position from ending his days in exile and poverty; and death alone preserved Marshal Vauban from a similar punishment for publishing the strong condemnation of existing abuses and the sweeping proposals of reform contained in the 'Dîme Royale.' This class of considerations should be present to the mind of the reader of Sir William Petty's economic works, when he finds arguments adduced in favour of some of the restrictions of the mercantile system, and observations almost immediately afterwards interpolated—and with curious frequency—absolutely fatal to the whole system, thus proving either that the acute mind of the author was doubtful of the accuracy of part of his own reasoning, or thought it prudent to dispel error by covert insinuation of the truth, rather than by an open attack on the front of the hostile position, and to leave some loophole to his antagonists, and some means of retreat to himself. Unlike his brother physician and economist in the following century, Quesnay, with whom a comparison suggests itself, his mind was essentially practical. He would probably have preferred the relaxation of the fetters of Irish trade, even of a partial character, to any amount of proclamations of abstract economic truth. Quesnay, sheltered by the silence and security of a royal palace, elaborated a deductive system, and pushed it, with the pitiless logic characteristic of his countrymen, to the most extreme conclusions, and then left it there to blossom or to wither as might happen. Sir William Petty wrote in order to influence the political conduct of the men amongst whom he lived and moved; he expressed himself 'in terms of number, weight, and measure;' he used only 'arguments of sense, and such as rested on visible foundations.'[50] He had to battle with principalities and powers; to be closeted with politicians ignorant of the very elements of commercial policy, but able at any moment to silence him; and to persuade kings more open to flattery than to argument,
qui sciret regibus uti
Fastidiret olus,
is the maxim which, with almost cynical frankness, he placed at the head of one of his essays on Political Arithmetick;[51] and at no time would he probably have thought it worth his while to press for more than there was an actual chance of obtaining, or to injure his own case by indiscreet advocacy. 'Men of great office in England,' he said, 'are so mutable and slippery, as that they spend their whole time and thought in securing themselves, and dare not employ others than creatures and confederates under themselves.'[52] 'Through the whole course of Sir William Petty's writings,' says Davenant, 'it may be plainly seen by any observing man, that he was to advance a proposition not quite right in itself, but very grateful to those who governed.'[53] The particular instance, however, which Davenant selects to illustrate this proposition is singularly ill-chosen. He argues that the opinion advanced in the 'Political Arithmetick,' and to be noticed further on, that England had nothing to fear from French competition, was put forward by Petty to ingratiate himself with Charles II., whose French sympathies were notorious. But the exact opposite is the case, for that work was not allowed to see the light during the reign of that king and his successor, 'because the doctrines offended France,'[54] and were in substance a plea that there was no necessity for England to join France in her crusade against Holland and Dutch trade, but that the true policy for England lay not in trying to crush the manufactures of Holland, but in becoming rich by following the example of the commercial policy of the Dutch Government. Sir William Petty no more advocated a policy hostile to French than to Dutch trade, and would gladly have seen a good understanding between the two nations. For that reason probably he was stigmatised by Davenant as being necessarily a supporter of the French policy of Charles II., on the assumption that everybody must be on one side or the other, and either wish to ruin France or destroy Holland, in order thereby to enrich England. If, however, Davenant had noticed the scattered observations in which Sir William Petty sometimes seems suddenly to recoil from the natural conclusions of his own premises, or to shelter himself behind an ambiguous plea of want of responsibility or of insufficient knowledge, he would not have been so wide of the mark in his criticisms. Some instances of this have already been given in regard to commercial policy. Others may be noticed in such passages as those in which, in the 'Treatise on Navigation,' he suddenly asks if, after all, it might not perhaps really be better, instead of employing seamen in trade, to employ them under letters of marque against the enemies of England; or in which, in the 'Treatise on Taxes,' after observing that wiser physicians observe and comply with the motions of nature, and that the analogy might perhaps be applied to the customs duties, and yet that a prohibition to export under certain circumstances might be legitimate—he then immediately protects himself with the observation 'that he knows that he is himself neither merchant nor statesman;'[55] and, after noticing that it may be an impediment to the prosperity of the country 'that the power of making war and raising money for carrying it on is not in the same hands,' he quickly adds that he leaves this question to those 'who may more properly meddle with fundamental laws,' which, he says, he never ventures to do himself;[56] and if he ventures 'to discourse' of the customs, he only takes leave to do so as 'an idle philosopher,' and warns his readers that, whatever they be, they must certainly be paid.[57]
That the Nonconformists increase is stated in the Preface to the 'Political Arithmetick,' with a great appearance of profound respect, amongst the signs alleged to be apparent of national decadence.[58] But it is then covertly shown, by the example of Holland, that Dissenters are for the most part thinking, patient, and sober men, and 'such as believe that labour and industry is their duty towards God'—'how erroneous soever their opinions be;' and that 'the case of the primitive Christians, as it is represented in the Acts of the Apostles, looks like that of the present Dissenters'—'externally, I mean,' he immediately adds; and that trade is most vigorously carried on in every State and government 'by the heterodox part of the same, and such as profess opinions different from what are publicly established,' of which he proceeds to give numerous instances; and that absolute religious freedom is therefore presumably desirable, only licentious actings, as in Holland, being restrained by force. The reader is at length left in amused perplexity to wonder what has become of the observation in the Preface. Elsewhere he points out the economic objections—which are universally true—against the prohibition of the sale of land to foreigners, because such sale would furnish the country with what it then most wanted, a circulating capital for trade; and then prudently adds that he can only suppose that 'the laws denying strangers to purchase' were made when 'the publick state of things was far different from what they now are.'[59] But in what way they were different he does not even try to point out, and ends the sentence evidently with his tongue in his cheek.
His silence on the general policy of the Navigation Act may be traced to the same causes. No approval of the policy of this Act is to be found in the 'Treatise,' and no open disapproval, and yet the question must have constantly been present to his mind, and indeed prominently so. The interest which he took in the Irish branch of the subject has been related. The General Navigation Act had only just been passed when the 'Treatise on Taxes' appeared. That celebrated measure decreed that no goods of the growth, production, or manufacture of any country in Europe should be imported into Great Britain except in British ships, or in such ships as were the property of the people of the country in which the goods were produced, or from which they could only be, or most usually were, exported. The object of the Act was to destroy the Dutch carrying trade and promote the growth of a British mercantile marine, in other words, of 'shipping;' and as Sir William considered shipping the principal origin of the wealth of the Dutch, the aim of the Act, cæteris paribus, might have been supposed to be likely to command his approval for that reason. Husbandmen, seamen, soldiers, artisans and merchants, he had written, 'are the very pillars of any commonwealth; all the other great professions do rise out of the infirmities and miscarriages of these; now the seaman is three of these four. For every seaman of industry and ingenuity is not only a navigator but a merchant, and also a soldier; not because he hath often occasion to fight and handle arms; but because he is familiarised with hardship and hazards, extending to life and limbs, for training and duelling is a small part of soldiery in respect of this last mentioned qualification; the one being quickly and presently learned, the other not without many years most painful experience: wherefore to have the occasion of abounding in seamen is a vast conveniency.'[60] His acute mind, guided by the study of the Irish question, had no doubt realised that the inevitable rise of freights, consequent on the cessation of the Dutch carrying trade to English ports, must seriously injure the home producer, and that to diminish the number of buyers in English ports was also to diminish the number of sellers. Shipping, therefore, unless naturally developed, would be of little permanent use to the country. But he probably thought that he had done his part, and gained unpopularity enough in influential quarters, by his opposition to the Irish Acts. Certain it is that he passed by the general subject of the Navigation Acts in a silence which, under the circumstances, is eloquent.
An anecdote related by Aubrey might perhaps be cited in support of the view that he approved the encouragement of native shipping by legislative enactments of a distinctly protective character. The Privy Council in Ireland, Aubrey relates, had a notable plan to prohibit the importation of coal from England, and for consuming turf, by which the poor, it was averred, were to be greatly benefited, and a small revenge perhaps be taken for the prohibition of the import of Irish cattle into England. Said Sir William: 'If you will make an order to hinder the bringing in of coals by foreign vessels, and bring it in vessels of your own, I approve of it very well; but for your supposition of the cheapness of turf, 'tis true, 'tis cheap on the place, but consider carriage; consider the yards that must contain such a quantity for the respective houses; these yards must be rented, what will be the charge? And they found on enquiry that all things considered, turf would be much dearer to the consumer than coal.'[61] But this story does not prove much. Taken for what it is worth, it does not go beyond an approval of the limitation by law of the coasting trade between England and Ireland to vessels of native origin, a limitation which has not been held inconsistent with the application of free trade doctrines even in modern times, long after the repeal of the Acts of Navigation.[62]
Passing to the consideration of the question of the practical means of raising the revenue, Sir William discusses in the 'Treatise on Taxes' the whole question of the customs duties, which at the beginning of the reign of Charles II. consisted of a uniform 2 per cent. duty on the value of all exports and imports. He points out that a tax on exports may at any moment raise the price of commodities above the limit which foreign commerce may be able to afford to pay, and that the smuggler will then have his opportunity for evading the law. He then urges that export duties, if any, should be levied on articles which cannot easily evade the law, such as horses, for they 'cannot be disguised, put up in bags nor casks, nor shipped without noise and the help of many hands.'[63] He next dwells on the inconvenience of customs duties on imports, for analogous reasons. They are a payment before consumption, and raise prices altogether beyond the amount which they yield to the State. He also dwells on the expense of collection, and the evasions of duty by the bribery and corruption of the customs officers. He finally suggests the abolition of customs duties, calling them 'unseasonable and preposterous,'[64] and the levy in their place of a tonnage duty; and that these duties should be treated as a maritime insurance on the part of the State, which would be a return to their true original function, like those of the Dutch, which were intended merely to keep an account of their foreign trade.[65] Nevertheless, he admits that 'all things ready and ripe for consumption may be made somewhat dearer than the same things made at home,' only trade is not to be destroyed or seriously hampered; so that here again his opposition to 'customs' is to be traced more to the practical objections which his keen eye had noticed, than to an abstract opinion in favour of absolutely unrestricted intercourse and open ports.
As a greater profit he thought could be gained by manufacture than by husbandry, and by merchandise than by manufacture, he argued that the great object of English policy should be to promote shipping—which was the mother of trade, and therefore of manufactures and of inventions—and to raise revenue by taxing the manufactured article, and not the raw import. He therefore considered an excise to be the justest of all taxes for the purposes of revenue, as being light to those who 'please to be content with material necessaries, and being also self-adjusting;'[66] only it should not be farmed, but properly collected by paid and responsible officers; also the articles taxed must as a rule be few, and not be raw material: to do the opposite, he says, 'is the same ill-husbandry as to make fall of young saplings instead of dotards and pollards.'[67] He points out that excise may be what he calls 'accumulative,' i.e., that within one article you really may be taxing many things together, and, in order to avoid this, whatever articles are taxed should be so as near the point of consumption as possible. 'Some,' he goes on, 'proposed beer to be the only exciseable commodity, supposing that in the proportion that men drink, they make all other expences; which certainly will not hold, especially if strong beer pay quintuple unto, (as now) or any more excise than the small: for poor carpenters, smiths, felt-makers, etc., drinking twice as much strong beer as gentlemen do of small, must consequently pay ten times as much excise. Moreover, upon the artisans beer is accumulated, only a little bread and cheese, leathern clothes, neck beef, and inwards twice a week, stale fish, old pease without butter, etc. Whereas on the other, beside drink, is accumulated as many other things as nature and art can produce.'[68]
'The very perfect idea,' he says, 'of making a levy upon consumptions, is to rate every particular necessary just when it is ripe for consumption: that is to say not to rate corn until it be bread; nor wool until it be cloth, or rather until it be a very garment; so as the value of wool, clothing and tayloring, even to the thread and needles, might be comprehended; but this being perhaps too laborious to be performed, we ought to enumerate a catalogue of commodities both native and artificial, such whereof accompts may most easily be taken, and can bear the office marks either on themselves or what contains them; being withal such as are to be as near consumption as possible; and then we are to compute what further labour or charge is to be bestowed on each of them before consumption, that so an allowance may be given accordingly.'[69]
He proposed to levy an excise on flax in Ireland, on linen goods in England, and on herrings in Scotland:[70] the above articles being all, in his opinion, those in which the home producer had a practical monopoly, and which therefore would bear taxation most easily. He would have allowed these duties under certain circumstances, especially in Ireland, where ready money was not easily to be obtained, to be paid in kind, and he would also have allowed taxes in England to be paid in corn in the years of an abundant harvest, and the corn to be stored in Government granaries, to meet the difficulties which so often arose from the absence of a proper circulating medium, until that difficulty was provided for by the establishment of a bank and the reform of the circulation.[71] The hearth money he thought the best form of 'accumulative excise,' it being easy to tell the number of hearths, 'which remove not as heads or polls do; moreover, 'tis more easy to pay a small tax than to alter or abrogate hearths, even though they are useless or supernumerary; nor is it possible to cover them, because most of the neighbours know them, nor in new buildings will any man who gives forty shillings for making a chimney be without it for two.' He considered the house tax to be a species of excise, or tax on the consumption and use of an article, a house, and to be the easiest and clearest and fittest to ground a certain revenue upon.[72]
The poll tax had, in his opinion, the advantage of being easily collected; but the great objection to it was that it was very unequal, and fell severely on the poorest class, while the attempts which had recently been made at introducing distinctions between different classes of persons in order to obviate these evils had only ended in such a mass of 'confusion, arbitraries, irregularities and hotch pot of qualifications,' that nobody knew where he stood.[73] It is evident that he gradually came to the conclusion that a just poll or capitation tax was an impossibility, and that, if it was desired to tax proportionally the income of the mass of the people, it could only be done, as in Holland, by taxing their expense, through an excise or tax on commodities; though, as already pointed out, the articles taxed were to be few and the tax light.
The risk of relying too much on this species of taxation had not been fully realised by the political economists of the seventeenth century, who were mainly familiar with the evils of a clumsy system of direct taxation. Sir William Petty was indeed fully aware that there were taxes the incidence of which was not on the person who paid them in the first instance; but he did not sufficiently realise the dangers arising from the fatal facility with which the system could be extended. It was left to Adam Smith to point out, with unanswerable force, that such taxes, especially when levied upon necessaries, were calculated to diminish the reward of labour, and therefore either raised wages in proportion or reduced employment, and that their ultimate burden was either on the land in the shape of diminished rent, or on the capitalist in reduced profits; and that, by their complicating and disturbing effects on trade and employment, they diminished the volume of trade and took far more out of the pockets of the taxpayers than they brought into the coffers of the State. By the time of Adam Smith, Holland itself could be pointed at as an example to be shunned rather than to be followed, for taxes on commodities levied with a fatal facility to meet the needs of a war policy had reached such a point that they seriously injured the manufactures of the country.[74]
In the 'Treatise on Taxes' an examination of the possibility of finding a standard or 'par' of value which can be stated in terms follows the discussion of the origin of value. The precious metals, especially silver, Petty points out, are principally adapted and used as a standard or measure of value, owing to their durability and universally recognised value; but even their value, he points out, may vary, according to the supply and other circumstances, and for that reason, not being altogether satisfied with them as standards, he desires to find a universal 'par,' not only for commodities, but for gold and silver as well: an inquiry which may be called the North-West Passage of political economy. 'All things,' he says, 'ought to be valued by two natural denominations, "land and labour:" that is, we ought to say a ship or garment is worth such a measure of land, with such another measure of labour; forasmuch as both ships and garments were the creatures of lands and men's labours thereupon. This being true, we should be glad to find out a natural par between land and labour, so as we might express the value of either of them alone, as well or better than by both, and reduce one into the other as easily and certainly as we reduce pence into pounds.'[75] He does not, however, attempt a further development of the idea, although there is another reference to the subject in the 'Political Anatomy of Ireland,' where he describes it as the most important subject 'in political economics.' In this passage he assumes that there is a certain equality of the cost of production 'in the easiest gotten food of the respective countries of the world,' and that the cost of transporting it from one country to another will be about equal. He apparently alludes to the coarser and healthier forms of diet: oatmeal, rice, &c, which are of general distribution. He next supposes two acres of pasture land enclosed, and a weaned calf put out to graze there. In twelve months' time the calf will have become one hundred heavier, he thinks, in eatable flesh. Then one hundredweight of such flesh is the 'value or year's rent' of the land. He next supposes the labour of a man, for a similar period of twelve months, to make this same land yield sixty days' food of the same or any other kind. Then the overplus of days' food is the wages of the man, both being expressed by the number of days' food; and in this case land and labour will stand as five to six, the unit being the ordinary day's food of an adult man. This par, he declares, seems to promise to be as regular and constant as the value of pure silver; but he fails to show how it could be adapted in practice to the purposes of trade by any instrument of exchange, and the chapter in the 'Political Anatomy ' in which this disquisition occurs concludes, instead, with a fanciful sketch, how the par of land and labour just described could be extended to art and opinion, eloquence, and other matters: inquiries which, he ends by acknowledging, 'are perhaps not very pertinent to the matter in hand.'[76]
The want of a proper circulating medium, both in quality and in quantity, was one of the great difficulties of the financiers of the reign of Charles II., and, as already stated, the confusion of coins is set down in the 'Treatise on Taxes' amongst the principal causes which unnecessarily increase and aggravate the public charges.[77] A chapter is devoted to the arguments against raising, depressing, and embasing the coinage, in which the arguments now universally accepted are clearly stated. They hardly now need a place in a formal treatise on public economy, but at the time were still deemed doubtful and hazardous. Sir William also expressed himself as in favour of a single metallic standard, in a passage devoted to a further discussion of these topics in the 'Political Anatomy of Ireland.'[78] In the same treatise he points out, with reference to the trade of Ireland, that the increasing the cash of the nation 'is not of that consequence that many guess it to be,' but that the amount of money in the country should not exceed the amount necessary as a medium of exchange, 'for in most places, especially Ireland, nay England itself, the money of the whole nation is but about a tenth part of the expense of one year, viz. Ireland is thought to have about 400,000l. in cash, and to spend about four millions per annum. Wherefore it is very ill husbandry to double the cash of the nation by destroying half its wealth; or to increase the cash otherwise than by increasing the wealth, simul et semel;'[79] 'for money,' he observes elsewhere, 'is but the fat of the body politick, whereof too much doth as often hinder its agility, as too little makes it sick.'[80]
'Laws made against usury, against raising of money, and against exportation of gold and silver, and many others concerning Trade,' were all in his opinion equally 'frivolous and pernicious, forasmuch as such matters will be governed by the laws of nature and nations only;' and, following out the same order of ideas, he points out that the rate of interest depends upon the accumulation of money and the amount of it in a country at any given time, and that therefore money, like everything else, has a legitimate price according to the amount of it, and the relative difficulty of procuring it at any particular time or particular place: a truth which had been obscured by a mistaken interpretation of Scriptural texts in the Middle Ages. What the Jewish law forbade was usury as between Jews, not loans to foreigners. It was a moral precept to be observed as between members of the same society. But the early Christian doctrine, based on the text, 'Lend, hoping for nothing again,' adopted and enlarged the Jewish view till what was termed 'usury' became the most frightful of moral offences in the eye of the Church, and was forbidden by the Canon Law, as contrary both to the law of nature and to authority. It was to be regarded as worse than theft; even what was termed mental usury—the intention of the lender to accept something from the borrower without formally binding the latter—was a mortal sin. It was only by a refined and ingenious adaptation of this traditional doctrine to the needs and facts of economic life, as time went on, that any progress at all was possible.[81] But the general result was that business passed largely into the hands of the Jews at high rates of interest, and that the Church itself had to connive at pious evasions of its own principles by means of monts de piété and similar devices; and that after the Reformation trade and commerce found a more natural home in the countries which had shaken themselves free from the meshes of the Canon Law, than in those which still held by the ancient faiths.[82]
Exchange, or local usury, Sir William points out, arises simply when one man furnishes another with money at some distant place, and engages under peculiar penalties to pay him there and at a certain day, or at some convenient time. 'The questions arising,' he proceeds, 'are what are the natural standards of usury and exchange? As for usury the least that can be, is the rent of so much land as the money lent will buy, when the security is undoubted; but when the security is casual, then a kind of insurance must be interwoven with the simple natural interest, which may advance the usury very conscionably, unto any height below the principal itself. Now if things are so in England, that really there is no such security, but that all are more or less hazardous, troublesome or chargeable to make, I see no reason for endeavouring to limit usury upon time any more than that upon place.' But he seems to have conceived the possibility of a state of such absolute security that no 'damnum emergens' could exist, and any interest on a loan would consequently be unfair beyond the standard of interest on money fixed by the rent of land. The laws against usury, he maliciously suggests, probably arose because those who made such laws 'were rather borrowers than lenders'—a suggestion which soon received a striking illustration in the closing of the Exchequer at the time of the Cabal, and the suspension of the payment of interest on the royal loans. With a sound financial policy and commercial stability, he thought that the rate of interest could be reduced to 4 per cent. without any law.[83]
Of State lotteries—another favourite device of needy monarchs—he maliciously observes that they are a tax upon 'self-conceited fools,' and 'that as the world abounds with this kind of fools, it is not fit that every man that will, may cheat every man that would be cheated. It had consequently een ordained,' he adds, 'that State lotteries should be a royal monopoly.'[84]
Sir William attributed the increase of rent to the increase of population; and considering the increase of population a certain sign of the prosperity of the country, he looked forward to increasing population and increasing rents. The fears of the consequences of a too rapid growth of population, which at a later period weighed so heavily on the minds of Malthus and his successors, and in France made Baboeuf declare that a free use of the guillotine was perhaps the only method of escaping them, did not oppress him. One thousand acres which can support one thousand men he thinks are better than ten thousand acres which do the same thing;[85] and he says he would prefer to see the Commonwealth passing laws 'to beget a luxury in the 950,000 plebeians of Ireland, rather than making sumptuary laws directed against the expenditure of the 150,000 optimates, as the latter would only injure the plebeians, while the former would promote their splendour, arts and industries.'[86]
In the 'Treatise on Taxes' a long digression occurs, towards the commencement of the work, on rent, the nature of which he acknowledges to be 'mysterious.' He treats it and so far correctly, as a species of profit, arrived at after all the expenses of cultivation have been paid; but he makes no distinction between the profit on capital and the true economic rent of land. 'As great need of money,' he says, 'heightened exchange, so doth great need of corn raise the price of that likewise, and consequently of the rent of land that bears corn and lastly of the land itself.... Hence it comes to pass that land intrinsically alike near populous places, such as where the perimeter of the area that feeds them is great, will not only yield more rent for these reasons, but also more years purchase than in remote places, by reason of the pleasure and honour extraordinary of having lands there.'[87]
The 'Political Arithmetick,' from which some quotations have already been made, consists of three parts. The first two consist of a number of short essays on the 'Vital and other Statistics of London, Dublin, Paris, Rome, Rouen, and other great Cities, and of the United Provinces of Holland,' and were published in 1682 and 1687. The scope of the first essay was to be 'concerning the value and increase of people and colonies'—such is the exordium—and was intended to precede another essay concerning the growth of the city of London. Only a sort of syllabus of it remains, the fourteen heads of which well illustrate the many-sided character of the mind of the writer, which at one moment is seen grappling with the hardest statistics, and then flying off into speculative inquiries of an abstruse character in the domain of theology. He proposes to examine 'how many live on their lands; how many on personal estate; how many on professions; how many pay poll tax, and how much; how to plant colonies; the relative value of land in colonies and at home; with calculations in how many years England will be fully peopled.' These, and kindred topics, form the first ten heads of inquiry; from which the reader is suddenly transported by an abrupt transition into an appendix 'concerning the number of wild fowl and of sea fish at the end of every thousand years since Noah's flood,' and an inquiry as to what may be 'the meaning of glorified bodies, in case the place of the blessed shall be without the convex of the orb of the fixed stars;'[88] just as the essay on population concludes with a grotesque statistical argument to prove that there would be room in Ireland alone to bury all the dead bodies up to the day of judgment, which professes to be written 'to assist a worthy divine, writing against some scepticks, who would have baffled our belief in the resurrection, by saying that the whole globe of the earth could not furnish matter enough for all the bodies that must rise at the last day.'[89]
Sir Robert Southwell also had views of his own about the Deluge, and he sent them to his friend for consideration; but Sir William professed to be unwilling to meddle with such dangerous matters, notwithstanding his wish to oblige, for even his friendship with Southwell could be limited, though it required Noah's flood to do it. 'I thank you for your theory of the Deluge,' he cautiously replied, 'but do candidly say that I do know not what to say on that point, but take it to be a Scripture mystery, which to explain is to destroy;'[90] so he confined his attention to tracing the economic effects of that event on remote ages. Southwell appears to have revenged himself by declining to enter on the topics suggested. 'I am angry,' Sir William writes to him, 'you did not speak a word neither of Reason nor of Ridicule upon the paper for the Multiplication of Mankind; as if that desideratum were frivolous; which I take to be equal to all the projects which have been these many years for the advantage of the world. Pray send it back, with an affidavit on the back of it, that you have not shewn it to any fortunate fop nor taken any Copy of it.'[91]
Sir Robert Southwell was at length persuaded to present his objections to Sir William's scheme. In Sir William's answer is to be found all that remains of his opinions on the subject. 'I reply in these following positions, viz.: 1. It is for the glory of God and the advancement of mankind that the world should be fully and speedily peopled, and that objections against the same may be deferred till a thousand years hence.2. That the more people there are in any country the greater is the value of each of them.3. There is no need of careing how to provide for children, as long as there be three acres of and for every head, which I call sufficient peopling.4. To say that other nations may use the same expedient as well as wee, is an objection to all proposals for the good of mankind. I like your having shewn the paper to Mr. Pepys, for he is no fopp, tho' fortunate.'[92] The first of these positions is quaintly elucidated in another letter. 'To honor God,' he says, 'is really (and not in specious words only) to acknowledge his power, Wisdome, etc. Wee cannot say that the whole earth and the fixed stars too were made for the use of man; but till we see the earth peopled (as perhaps three-fourths is not) we may doubt it; and not knowing to what other use it was designed, may stumble into the error of its having been made by chance, and not by the designe of an Infinite Wisdome—I should rather say of the greatest Wisdome—wherefore the sooner the stumbling block is removed the better. I add that hee who shall give the reason and use of what lyes in the 8,000 miles space between the two poles of the earth, and of the use of the fixed stars to man, shall honor God more than by singing the "Te Deum" every day.2nd, I say that, as in great cittyes and cohabitations of men, arts and sciences are better cultivated than in deserts, so I say that if there were as many men on earth as it could bear, the works and wonders of God's Providence would be the sooner discovered, and God the sooner honoured really and heartily.3rd, I say that Gods first and greatest command to man and beast was to increase and multiply, and to replenish the earth. Why therefore should this duty be put off? ... I should add to my last head: it being probable that the world will not be destroyed, nor the day of Judgement come, till the whole earth be peopled. If we pray that God would hasten the number of his elect, and if the Blisse of the Blessed cannot be perfect till the soul and Body are united, then we must wish the speedy peopling of the world.'[93]
While insisting on the advantages of an increased population, Petty had, however, not failed to grasp the fact that, in order that an increase of population may not be injurious, there must be a corresponding increase in the efficiency of labour and in wealth. The internal prosperity of the country and the best means of promoting the material improvement of the people are, therefore, constantly present to his mind in the discussions of the subject of population. Thus, for example, his plan for the transplantation to England of a large portion of the population of Ireland, was entirely based on the belief that the population would be increased and the standard of comfort raised by the accession of a large body of productive labourers.[94]
In connection with this discussion he made a remarkable forecast of the growth westwards of the City of London. 'If great cities,' he says, 'are naturally apt to remove their seats, I ask which way? I say in the case of London, it must be westward, because the winds blowing near three fourths of the year from the west, the dwellings of the west end are so much the more free from the fumes steams and stinks of the whole easterly pyle; which, where seacole is burnt, is a great matter. Now if it follow from hence, that the palaces of the greatest men will remove westward, it will also naturally follow, that the dwellings of others who depend upon them will creep after them. This we see in London, where the noblemens ancient houses are now become halls for companies, or turned into tenements, and all the palaces are gotten westward; insomuch that I do not doubt but that five hundred years hence, the King's palace will be near Chelsea, and the old building of Whitehall converted to uses more answerable to their quality. For to build a new royal palace upon the same ground will be too great a confinement, in respect of gardens and other magnificencies, and withal a disaccommodation in the time of the work; but it rather seems to me, that the next palace will be built from the whole present contignation of houses, at such a distance as the whole palace of Westminster was from the city of London, when the archers began to bend their bows just without Ludgate, and when all the space between the Thames, Fleet Street, and Holborn, was as Finsbury-fields are now.' But this digression, he acknowledges, may prove a mere impertinence, since it was not unlikely that, long before the time arrived at which all this could happen, they 'might all be transplanted from hence into America, and these countries be overrun with Turks, and made waste, as the seats of the famous Eastern Empires at this day are.'[95] He was writing in the days of Mahomet IV., and the hard-won victory of Montecuculli at Saint Gothard, which saved Europe, took place in 1664, only two years after the appearance of the 'Treatise on Taxes.'
The second series of the Essays was largely devoted to a discussion of the calculations of the Parisian statistician, M. Auzout, and was published in the two languages, French and English, in parallel columns. Like the 'Treatise on Taxes,' these Essays and the Discourse contain many points of interest outside the immediate subjects with which they deal. The author addresses himself, for example, to the question of wages, and examines whether a high or a low rate of wages, in the then economic constitution of society, tended to increase production. His own observations of the habits of the clothworkers in England and of the Irish peasantry compelled him, however reluctantly, to the opinion that the general standard of living was as yet too low to make high daily wages of any advantage to the labourer, because of their tendency at once to reduce their hours and be content with wages just sufficient to support existence at a very low level of material civilisation. 'It was observed,' he says, 'by clothiers and others who employ great numbers of poor people, that when corn is extremely plentiful that the labour of the poor is proportionately dear and scarce to be had at all, so licentious are they who labour only to eat, or rather to drink.' It was the same in Ireland, especially since the introduction of that 'breadlike root, the potato. A day of two hours labour was there sufficient to make men to live after their present fashion, and the cheapness of food was the excuse for the people to live in a condition little above that of animals.'[96] He argues that an equilibrium between production and consumption is necessary, and that without an increase of demand, which the State itself in his opinion may wisely stimulate and direct into proper channels by taxation, no improvement or increase of wealth was possible; and that it was the absence of this feeling of the need of the higher wants of civilisation which constituted one of the chief causes of the poverty of the population of that island. 'There are in Ireland,' he says, '160,000 nasty cabbens, in which neither butter nor cheese, nor linen, yarn, nor worsted can be made to the best advantage, chiefly by reason of the soot and smoaks annoying the same, as also for the narrowness and nastiness of the place, which cannot be kept clean nor safe from beasts and vermin, nor from damps and musty benches, of which all the eggs laid or kept in those cabbens do partake. Wherefore to the advancement of trade, the reformation of these cabbens is necessary.'[97]
Other passages show that he attached the greatest importance in theory to the division of labour, which he had already himself applied so successfully in practice during the survey. 'Cloth,' he says, 'must be cheaper made, when one cards, another spins, another weaves, another draws, another dresses, another presses, and packs, than when all the operations above mentioned are clumsily performed by the same hand;'[98] and he argues that the division of labour, applied to the shipbuilding trade, is one of the reasons of the superiority of Holland at sea to France, because it enables the Dutch to build the exact sort of ship required for the circumstances of each particular branch of trade and navigation, and to charge less for freight and maritime insurance.[99] 'The gain,' he argues, with reference to the trade of London, 'which is made by manufacture will be greater as the manufacture itself is greater and better. For in so vast a city manufactures will beget one another, and each manufacture will be divided into as many parts as possible, whereby the work of each artizan will be simple and easie; as for example in the making of a watch, if one man shall make the wheels, another the spring, another shall engrave the Dial plate, and another shall make the case, then the watch will be better and cheaper than if the whole work be put upon any one man. And we also see that in towns and in the streets of a great town, where all the inhabitants are almost of one trade, the commodity peculiar in those places is made better and cheaper than elsewhere.'[100] He distinguishes between productive and unproductive labour, contrasting two classes of men: the first who produce material objects, or things of real use and value, or, in other words, which increase 'the gold, silver and jewels of the country by trade and arms;' the other who 'do nothing at all but eat, drink, sing, play and dance,' to whom he maliciously adds 'such as study the metaphysicks or other needless speculation.'[101] The Essays also show that he understood, at least partially, the principles underlying the laws of supply and demand in their effect on value. Distinguishing between what he terms 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' value in a dialogue on the price of diamonds, 'I will first take notice,' he says, '1. that the dearness and cheapness of diamonds depends upon two causes; the one intrinsic which lies within the stone itself, and the other extrinsic and contingent, such as are the prohibitions to seek for them in countries from whence they come.2. When merchants can lay out their money in India to more profit upon other commodities, and therefore do not bring them.3. When they are brought, upon fear of wars, to be a subsistence for exiled and obnoxious persons.4. They are dear near the marriage of some great person when great numbers of persons are to put themselves in splendid appearance. For any of these causes, if they be very strong upon any part of the world, they operate on the whole. For if the price of diamonds should rise in Persia, it shall also perceptibly in England, for the great merchants all the world over do know one another, do correspond, and are partners in most of the considerable pieces, and do use great confederacy and intrigue in buying and selling them.'[102]
Amongst other subjects discussed in the 'Treatise on Taxes' is that of penalties considered as a source of revenue, and the discussion leads him to the consideration of religious toleration from the point of view of the political economist and the statesman. The Sovereign, he argues, by punishing the heterodox with death, mutilations, and imprisonments, thereby injures the Crown and his own revenue; and if heresies existed, it was perhaps because the pastors had neglected their own duties, and they ought themselves to be punished accordingly. The true use of the Clergy 'is rather to be patterns of holiness, than to teach men varieties of opinion de rebus divinis,'[103] and their excessive wealth should be curtailed as being injurious to religion; 'unless,' he sarcastically says, it is to be denied 'that there were golden priests when the chalices were of wood, and but wooden priests when the chalices were of gold.' In the 'Treatise on Taxes[104]' he says 'that many have heretofore followed even Christ himself but for the loaves he gave them.'[105] He constantly had floating before his vision the idea of a broad and comprehensive Church, founded on ethical precepts rather than on any definite theological dogma or creed; the Church of God rather than the Church of England, or of any strictly sacerdotal body. To disbelieve indeed in the immortality of the soul rendered man, in his opinion, a beast; and persons holding such views should, he thought, be under civil and political disabilities. With this exception, the only reasonable penalties he considered to be fines for actual breaches of the peace, even if committed in the name of religion. Such fines he defended 'as being the fittest way of checking the wantonness of men in this particular; forasmuch as that course savours of no bitterness at all; but rather argues a desire to indulge; provided such indulgence may consist with the indemnity of the State; for no heterodox believer will desire to be tolerated longer than he keeps the public peace.'[106] The system was that which Hobbes had laid down in theory, and Sully had applied in practice in France.
In the work on 'Political Arithmetic,' he states the doctrine of religious toleration in the boldest and broadest terms. 'They cannot but know,' he says, 'that no man can believe what himself pleases, and to force men to say they believe what they do not, is vain, absurd and without honour to God.'[107] Dissenters, he shows, have been everywhere the principal creators of the trade and manufactures of their respective countries; even in Ireland, where, the Roman religion not being authorised, the professors thereof have a great part of the trade. 'The Hollanders were one hundred years since a poor and oppressed people, living in a country naturally cold, moist and unpleasant, and were withal persecuted for their heterodoxy in religion, and they were become the greatest trading and manufacturing people in the world.' He thought, however, that the Jews might 'well bear somewhat extraordinary; because they seldom eat and drink with Christians, hold it no disparagement to live frugally, and even sordidly among themselves, by which way alone they become able to undersell any other traders; and to elude the excise, which bears but according to mean expenses: as also other duties by dealing so much in bills of exchange, jewels, and money; and by practising of several frauds with more impunity than others, and by their being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, being become responsible almost for nothing.'[108]
With his keen eye for abuses, Sir William had observed the inequality of the distribution of the revenues of the Church, and the determination of the beneficiaries not to reform these and other evils. He had seen how frequently small parishes had large revenues, and large parishes small revenues; and, pursuing his favourite statistical methods, he had arrived at the conclusion that, by a redistribution of parochial areas and their revenues, he could not only improve the position of the parish priests on lines consonant with substantial justice, but could also economise half a million a year, which could be paid into the national exchequer. 'If anybody,' he said, 'cried sacrilege, I answer that if the same be employed to defend the Church of God against the Turk and the Pope, and the nations who adhere to them, it is not at all, or less, than to give three fourths of the same to the wives and children of the priests, which were not in being when their allowances were set forth.'[109] He enforced this argument still further by the remark that the unnecessary multiplicity of parishes led, amongst other disadvantages, to an unnecessary multiplicity of sermons. There were in England 10,000 parishes, in each of which there must be about 100 sermons a year preached. This was equal to one million sermons a year, and 'it were a strange miracle,' he said, 'if these sermons composed by so many men, and of so many minds and methods, should produce uniformity upon the discomposed understandings of above eighty millions of hearers.'[110]
The first two series of the 'Essays on Political Arithmetick' were published during the life of the author, but the third part, which is the work more generally known as 'The Political Arithmetick,' was posthumous and did not appear till 1691. The general object of the book was to show 'the weight and importance of the English Crown.' It had probably been commenced after the disaster at Chatham and the Plague and Fire, at a moment of great national despondency, but it was not completed till a far later date, when the superiority of France instead of that of Holland had become the object of national apprehension. The publication of such a book was impossible at a period when the King of England was the pensioner of Louis XIV., the sworn foe of Holland, and money was desired, not to reform the public services, but to supply the pleasures of the Court and to stifle inquiry. Nor was the free manner in which such subjects as religion were dealt with, without danger to the author. Therefore it was not till after the Revolution that the book was allowed to see the light, when it was published by the author's son, with a dedication to William III. 'What my father wrote,' so the dedication runs, 'was by him styled "Political Arithmetic" inasmuch as things of Government, and of no less concern and intent than the glory of the Prince and the happiness and greatness of the people, are by the ordinary rules of arithmetick brought into a sort of demonstration. He was allowed by all to be the inventor of this kind of instruction; where the perplexed and intricate ways of the world are explained by a very mean piece of science; and had not the doctrines of the Essay offended France, they had long since seen the light and had found followers, as well as improvements before this time, to the advantage perhaps of mankind.'
The author declares himself satisfied that England is in no deplorable condition, as some would have the world believe, notwithstanding trifling and temporary appearances to the contrary; and he undertakes to justify his belief. 'The method I take to do this,' he explains, 'is not very usual, for instead of using only comparative and superlative words, and intellectual arguments, I have taken the course (as a specimen of the political Arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in terms of number, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense, and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature: leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds, opinions, appetites and passions of particular men, to the consideration of others: really professing myself as unable to speak satisfactorily upon those grounds, (if they may be called grounds), as to foretell the cast of a dye, to play well at tennis, bowls, or billiards, (without long practice), by virtue of the most elaborate conceptions that ever have been written "de projectilibus et missilibus" or of the angles of evidence and reflection.'[111]
His special aim was to prove that the subservient policy pursued by Charles II. in his relations with France was not justified by any relative weakness on the part of England, especially if allied with Holland, and imitating her commercial policy. A small country, he argues, and few people, may by their situation, trade, and policy be equivalent in wealth and strength to a far greater people and territory; and conveniences for shipping and water carriage particularly conduce thereto. These exist in England, owing to her extended coastline and admirable natural harbours, which ought always to secure for her a marked superiority at sea.[112] He proves the great wealth of England by reference to the extreme ease with which she had been able to bear an increasing amount of taxation ever since the commencement of the century. He warns his readers against being dazzled by the splendours of the Court of Louis XIV., and taking those splendours to be a proof that the wealth of France was greater than that of England. They simply arose, he pointed out, from the King of France taking a large share of taxation out of the pockets of his people, and spending it in brilliant but unproductive expenditure at his Court and in military display. The material condition of France was, indeed, already a warning, and the growing misery of the people, crushed down by war and taxation, was a living commentary on the magnificence of Versailles. The policy of Colbert had been superseded by that of Louvois; and when, in September 1683, that great and at heart peaceful minister sank into the grave, a midnight and almost secret funeral alone protected his remains from the insults of the rabble, who, however unjustly, associated him with the distress of the country.
France, Sir William argued, by reason of perpetual obstacles interposed by nature, such as her inferior length of sea-board, could never be more powerful at sea than England and Holland combined. The people and territories of England are, he says, naturally as considerable for wealth and strength as those of France, and the impediments to her greatness arise from contingent causes which can be removed: the principal being an unwise commercial policy and the insufficient organisation of the military and naval defensive forces of the country; with the absence of religious toleration, proper means of internal communication, a sound banking system, and the other conditions which he notes as those of the wealth and prosperity of Holland. One-tenth part of the annual expenditure of the nation, he calculates, would maintain an army of 100,000 foot, 30,000 horse, and 40,000 sailors, were the revenue properly administered. He wishes to employ the surplus labour of the kingdom in some profitable manner, calculating it could earn two millions a year, but he believes that the capital and labour actually in the kingdom are sufficient 'to drive the trade of the whole commercial world.' Situation, trade, and water carriage would have been useless to the Dutch, had they not been developed by a wise policy. This policy he analyses into three heads, viz.: 1. Liberty of conscience; 2. Securing the title to lands and houses by land registries; and 3. the Dutch banking system, 'the use whereof is to increase money, or rather to make a small sum equivalent in trade to a greater.' The Dutch also knew how to make the burden of the maintenance of the poor as light as possible. The burden of military service is also reduced by them to the minimum, and the smallest number possible of the population are engaged in cow-keeping, which in his opinion is the least profitable branch of trade. Here is the example for England to follow; and the concluding pages of the essay are occupied with an appeal to the younger sons of the English landed gentry, to go into trade instead of starving at home, and to their parents to found a bank with a capital secured upon land. The Dutch, he points out, had known how to profit by their situation on the sea, and how to improve the means of water carriage at their command. Thus situation had given them shipping, and shipping had given them the command of the trade of the world. 'Do they not work the sugar of the West Indies,' he asks, 'the timber and iron of the Baltic; the hemp of Russia, the lead, tin and wool of England, the quicksilver and silk of Italy, the yarns and dyeing stuffs of Turkey?' They do so, he replies, because their shipping goes to every part of the world; 'and shipping hath given them in effect all other trade, and foreign traffick must give them as much manufacture as they can manage themselves, and as for the overplus make the rest of the world but as workmen in their shops.'[113] If the wealth of Holland sprang from a wise and enlightened policy, the principal impediments to England's greatness had their origin in defects of policy. The widely separated character of the territories belonging to the English Crown, with their different Governments and separate legislative powers, stands first; and he again advocates a union between England, Scotland, and Ireland, with a view to a uniformity of trade and customs. He dwells on the consequences which may arise from the development of the Government of New England upon lines so widely different from those of the mother country; and he points out how the whole burden of the defence of all her scattered colonies and territories falls with an unnecessary burden upon England alone. He advocates the formation of an Imperial Council of two Chambers, the first nominated by the Crown and the second by the people. He again attacks the absurdity and injustice of the commercial policy of England towards Ireland; and argues that, if the resources of England and Ireland at home were properly developed, there was room at home for the whole population which had fled to the Colonies. Finally, he mentions the evils which had arisen from farming out the revenue and relying too much on direct taxation; from the uncertainty of several material points in the theory of the Constitution and in the law, viz. the King's prerogative, the privileges of Parliament, and the obscure differences between law and equity, as also between the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions; and from the doubts which existed whether the kingdom of England had power over the kingdom of Ireland; and lastly, returning to his favourite subject, from 'the wonderful paradox that English men lawfully sent to suppress rebellions in Ireland, should after having effected the same, be, as it were, disfranchised, and lose that interest in the legislative power which they had in England, and pay customs, as foreigners, for all they spend in Ireland, whither they were sent for the honour and benefit of England.'[114] But while putting his finger on the weak points in the national armour, he does so in no desponding spirit, but in the belief that he can thereby stir the public conscience and secure their reform, if not their removal, by an appeal to the conscience and understanding of a progressive and vigorous people.
There always have been and there ever will be those who are able to detect around them the signs of the approaching ruin of their country and of the dissolution of society, and also believe that they can distinctly recollect the time when things wore a more promising aspect. For minds so constituted the best medicine would perhaps be a course of the writings of the pessimist literature of previous generations, and the perusal of the unfulfilled prophecies of the authors. The desponding philosopher of the nineteenth century might find consolation from learning how Mr. Sedgwick, who was an Under-Secretary of State in 1767—a year now generally considered one in which the reputation of the country stood at a high pitch in the prosperous period which intervened between the Peace of 1763 and the commencement of the American war—declared that 'it became more evident every day that this our country is so clearly on the high road to ruin, that nothing as it seems but a miracle can save it.' Even the elements he declares were in sympathy with the gloom of the political prospect, for 'the seasons,' he observes, 'are totally changed in this country, and one of them is quite done away. We are not now to expect warm weather till the autumn, and may therefore as well dismiss the word summer from our language as being no longer of any use, in reference to our own country at least.' Nor did Mr. Sedgwick stand alone, for a congenial spirit, Mr. Waite, writing in the gloomy atmosphere of Dublin Castle, was clearly of opinion that not England only, but 'the great globe itself, as well as those who inhabit it, seems hastening to a final period,' and 'that the spirit of the Devil was gone forth over the whole British Empire, and Satan seemed to be hastening his kingdom.'[115] But Mr. Sedgwick and Mr. Waite in their turn might have found consolation in the still more sad prognostications which were current exactly a century before, when men were declaring that 'the whole kingdom grew every day poorer and poorer, and that formerly it abounded with gold, but that now there was a scarcity of gold and silver; that there was neither trade nor employment for the people; and yet that the land was under-peopled; that taxes were many and great; that Ireland and the plantations in America were a burthen; that Scotland was of no advantage; that trade was decaying; that the Dutch were outstripping us as a naval power: and that we only owed it to the clemency of the French that they did not swallow us; and that both the Church and State were in the same state of decay as the trade of the country,' with many other equally dismal comments on the condition of the nation.
To these prophets the 'Political Arithmetick,' notwithstanding the acknowledgment by the author of the existence of many dangers, was a rejoinder. There is another side to the picture, the author says. The buildings of London grow great and glorious; the American plantations employ four hundred sail of ship; shares in the East India Company are nearly double the principal money; those who can give good security may have money under the statutory interest; materials for builders—even oaken timbers—are little the dearer, some are cheaper, for the rebuilding of London; the Exchange seems as full of merchants as formerly; much land has been improved, and the price of food is so reasonable that men refuse to have it cheaper by admitting Irish cattle; no more beggars exist in the streets, nor are executed for thieves than heretofore; the number of coaches and the splendour of equipages exceeds former times; the public theatres are very magnificent. The King has a greater navy and stronger guards than before our calamities; the clergy are rich and the cathedrals in repair; and that some are poorer than others, ever was and ever will be, and that many are naturally querulous and envious is an evil as old as the world.[116]
- ↑ merciful (note from Wikisource ed.)
- ↑ great-headed (note from Wikisource ed.)
- ↑ Bodleian Letters, ii. 487. This is probably the picture which is engraved on the frontispiece of the map of Ireland, and is mentioned by Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painters. See Larcom, Down Survey, note p. 347.
- ↑ The references to Sir W. Petty's Works throughout this chapter are to the volume published at Dublin in 1769, entitled The Petty Tracts.
- ↑ Burnet, History of his own Times, i. 423; Wood's Athenæ, iv. 218; Evelyn, Diary, ii. 97; Bodleian Letters, ii. 488.
- ↑ See the dissertation by Mr. W.L. Bevan referred to in the Preface, pp. 20-22.
- ↑ See article 'Graunt,' in Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary.
- ↑ In 1683.
- ↑ Several Essays, p. 145 bis.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 131.
- ↑ The expression 'political economies' occurs in ch. ix. p. 344 of the Political Anatomy of Ireland.
- ↑ Röscher, p. 70.
- ↑ See Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy, Book II. chaps. iii. and iv.
- ↑ 'De Civitatis facilitate nutritivâ et generativâ,' Leviathan, Part II. ch. xxiv.
- ↑ See, for example, Leviathan, ch. xxv., as to 'price;' and, as to 'wealth,' the De Cive, pp. 221, 222.
- ↑ Davenant, Political Arithmetick; Works, i. 128, 129.
- ↑ Ibid. i. 128, 129.
- ↑ Several Essays, i. 'Of the Growth of the City of London,' pp. 100-110.
- ↑ Political Anatomy of Ireland, ch. iv. 312; ch. viii. p. 338; ch. ix. p. 362.
- ↑ Several Essays, 'Of the Growth of the City of London,' p. 107.
- ↑ Political Anatomy, Author's Preface, p. 289.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. v. p. 40.; Essays, p. 119.
- ↑ A list of Sir William Petty's works will be found in the Appendix, taken from a paper left by him.
- ↑ 'En 1614, une dernière Assemblée des Etats se prépare à examiner, une fois encore, le problème posé depuis des siècles. Qui va l'emporter? Sera-ce la tradition médiévale avec ses principes aristocratiques, ses engagements étroits, ses entraves apportées a l'unité? Ou bien sera-ce l'Etat moderne, conçu selon les exemples romains, avec ses exigences souvent mal justifiées, avec ses procédés arbitraires, et sa revendication incessante et souvent abusive de la maxime antique: "Salus populi suprema lex"?' Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu, par Gabriel Hanoteau, tome i. p. 352.
- ↑ Ludlow's Memoirs, i. 246.
- ↑ 'An Opinion of what is possible to be done,' 1685. Nelligan MS., British Museum.
- ↑ Political Anatomy of Ireland, ch. xiii. p. 375.
- ↑ 12 Charles II. c. 18, and the statutes 14 Charles II. c. 5, 7, 18, 32; 15 Charles II. c. 7 and 15.
- ↑ See Dowell's History of Taxation for the details, iv. 119, 162.
- ↑ Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, ii. 350. See, too, Thorold Rogers, Industrial and Commercial History, pp. 192, 420.
- ↑ Thorold Rogers, Industrial and Commercial History, p. 192.
- ↑ See list of Sir William Petty's writings in the Appendix.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. i. pp. 1-4.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. ii. p. 11.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. i. pp. 14-16.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. ii. p. 16.
- ↑ Verbum Sapienti, ch. iv. pp. 478-480.
- ↑ Lyley, Mother Bombie, act ii. sc. 5, quoted by Dowell, History of Taxation, ii. 5.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. iv. p. 24.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. xii. pp. 70-71.
- ↑ This Act was eventually passed, 14 Charles II. c. 18 and 19 (English statutes).
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. vi. p. 47. Compare Bacon's speech, Oct. 1597, in the House of Commons: 'I should be sorry to see within this Kingdom that piece of Ovid's verse prove true, "Jam seges ubi Troja fuit"—in England nought but green fields, a shepherd, and a dog (1 Parl. Hist. 890).
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. vi. p. 48. Political Anatomy of Ireland, ch. xi. p. 356. See, too, the Quantulumcunque concerning Money, Qns. 6 and 7.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. vi. pp. 48, 49.
- ↑ Ibid., ch. v. p. 38.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. iv. p. 29.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. iv. pp. 261-264.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. vi. pp. 42-44. See Progress of Political Economy, by Sir Travers Twiss, pp. 64, 89, 164.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. i. p. 224, and ch. ii. p. 235.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, Preface, p. 207.
- ↑ The quotation is from Horace, Ep. i. xvii. 15, where the full passage is: Si pranderet olus patienter, regibus uti Nollet Aristippus. Si sciret regibus uti, Fastidiret olus, qui me notat.
- ↑ 'An Opinion of what is possible to be done' (1685). Petty MSS.
- ↑ Davenant, Political Arithmetick, Works, i. 129.
- ↑ See the Dedication to William III. by Sir William Petty's son, p. 200.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. vi. p. 48.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. v. p. 268.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. vi. p. 41.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, Preface, p. 205.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. i. pp. 227-229.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. i. p. 223.
- ↑ Sir Josiah Child in 1671 states that the Act of Navigation had already seriously injured the British Eastland and Baltic trades. See Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, iv. 384.
- ↑ Bodleian Letters, ii. 490.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. vi. p. 43.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. xv. p. 85.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. vi. pp. 44, 45.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. xv. p. 87.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. vi. p. 44.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. xv. p. 86.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. xv. p. 83.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. ii. p. 243.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. iii. p. 20; Political Arithmetick, ch. ii. p. 240.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. iv. p. 26, ch. xv. p. 86.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. vii. p. 50.
- ↑ See Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, iii. 505.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. iv. p. 31.
- ↑ Political Anatomy of Ireland, ch. ix. pp. 344-346.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. ii. p. 5, ch. xiv. p. 76.
- ↑ Political Anatomy, ch. x. p. 347.
- ↑ Political Anatomy, ch. xi. pp. 356, 357.
- ↑ Verbum Sapienti, ch. v. p. 48. See, too, Quantulumcumque concerning Money, Query 27.
- ↑ See Ashley's Economic History, Book ii. ch. vi.
- ↑ An able review of the history of this question has recently appeared by Mr. Henry C. Lea in a recent number of the Yale Review, 1894. See, too, Lecky, Rise and Influence of Rationalism, ii. 280.
- ↑ 'Opinion of what is possible to be done,' 1685. Nelligan MS., British Museum. See, too, Quantulumcumque, Qu. 28-30.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. viii. p. 53.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. i. p. 219.
- ↑ Political Anatomy, ch. xi. p. 356.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. v. p. 35.
- ↑ Several Essays, pp. 98, 99.
- ↑ Several Essays, pp. 109, 120.
- ↑ March 10, 1676.
- ↑ Petty to Southwell, 1685.
- ↑ Sept. 8, 1685.
- ↑ Sept. 19, 1685.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. iv. pp. 251-254. See also the observations of Ranke, English History, iii. 586 (Oxford Edition).
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. iv. p. 28.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. ii. p. 240. Verbum Sapienti, ch. ii. s. 10, p. 478. Compare the opinions of Sir W. Temple, Works, i. pp. 60, 114; and the discussion of the history of the subject in Dr. Schultz Gävernitz's, Der Grossbetrieb (Einleitung), Leipzig, 1892, and Luio Brentano, Hours, Wages, and Production, pp. 2, 3, London, 1894, where Petty's position as one of the first to inquire into these topics is acknowledged.
- ↑ Political Anatomy, ch. ix. p. 354.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. i. p. 224.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. i. p. 225.
- ↑ Several Essays, p. 116.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. ii. pp. 235, 236.
- ↑ Sloane MS. 2903, British Museum.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. ix. The words quoted above are from the summary in the Table of Contents, p. xxxi.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. xii. p. 69.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. i. p. 3.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. x. p. 59.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. i. p. 227.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. xiii. p. 74.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. ii. p. 9.
- ↑ Several Essays, p. 115, 'Of the Growth of the City of London.' Compare, as to the abuses of the Church, Burnet, History of his Own Times, i. 338.
- ↑ 1 Political Arithmetick, Preface, p. 207.
- ↑ Compare the passage in Bacon's Essay, 'Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms,' beginning, 'To be master of the sea is an abridgment of monarchy' (Essays XXIX.).
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, ch. i. pp. 222, 223.
- ↑ Political Arithmetic, ch. v. p. 267.
- ↑ Tenth Report of the Historical MSS. Commission, 1885: Weston-Underwood Papers. Appendix, pp. 404, 407, 417, 426.
- ↑ Political Arithmetick, Preface, p. 206.