sions of industrial territory amounted in Paris alone to more than five hundred thousand francs; that the money wasted upon the suits of comparatively small corporations amounted to twenty-five thousand. "From St. Louis to Louis XIV," he says further in a striking summary of the fate that befell them, "there was not a sovereign who did not impose restrictions, taxes, and new regulations upon them; the courts overpowered them with judgment and fines without diminishing their ardor or calming their hatreds."[1] Founded to establish order and to fulfill a mission of mercy, they degenerated into engines of oppression, confusion, and degradation, giving birth, in a word, to all the evils of a society in a state of dissolution.
Such anarchy, which prevailed in England as well as in France, though in a less degree, could not be permitted to last. It would in time have wrecked society morally and industrially. Although ruinously delayed, relief came at last through the labors of thinkers, statesmen, and revolutionists, but especially through the ameliorations of the long peace that followed the
devastating and demoralizing wars of Napoleon. Adam Smith was among the first to come to the rescue. The whole of his great work was a potent protest against monopoly in all forms. He pointed out that "the exclusive privileges of corporations, statutes of apprenticeship, and those which restrain in particular employments the competition of a smaller number than would otherwise go into them" were "encroachments upon natural liberty."[2] But it was more than fifty years before the laws that he inveighed against so powerfully were finally repealed. In France also the thinkers led the way. "Let complete liberty of commerce be maintained," said Quesnay. "When the interest of the individual is exactly the same as the general interest," said Gournay, "the best thing to do is to leave every man to do as he likes."[3] Applying these principles to the corporations, Turgot proclaimed that "the right to work is the sacred and inalienable property of the poor man." Again he said, "All sound principles were violated by the accepted doctrine that it was a royal right that the prince might sell and subjects might buy."[4] But the work of industrial emancipation that he tried in vain to do—a work that might have saved his country from the horrors of the Revolution—was among the first and most beneficent achievements of that frightful convulsion. The Wealth of Nations early
- ↑ Blanqui. History of Political Economy, pp. 183, 184.
- ↑ Palgrave. Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. i, p. 430. See whole of Part II chapter x, Wealth of Nations, Rogers's edition.
- ↑ Lowell. Eve of the French Revolution, pp. 234, 235.
- ↑ Palgrave. Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. i, p. 431
