to social problems. Nations did not live by politics but by business and material interests."
When he dogmatically declared "that nothing can permanently increase population except the encouragement and advance of production," meaning within the national territory, M. Say was seemingly unaware that production has bounds beyond which man's skill and industry cannot induce it to pass. And he lost sight altogether of the diversity of modes of social existence. He forgot the influence climates, tastes, acquired habits, religion, the opinions of an epoch, have upon cost of living, which is far from being a fixed quantity. What might be true of China would be untrue of France, and vice versâ. Were Frenchmen ready to live like Chinamen, the actual sum of production within the Gallic Republic might be made to maintain twice thirty-seven millions; nor is it likely the efforts of the additional thirty-seven millions would appreciably augment that unknown "sum" a thrifty, industrious race can now show as the upshot of various modes of well ordered energy. But Frenchmen could not be persuaded to adopt barbarian habits. Again, the practice of child murder in the swarming heathen Empire could no more be stopped by setting millions of heads and hands to work at what the great Mandarins regard as the futility of replacing canals by iron roads, than the children's parents could be in the end enriched by largely developing native manufactures already sufficient for internal needs. A production capable of ensuring either result must be, not a process which on close scrutiny appears a mere transfer of existing goods from A to B, nor the creation of what can be dispensed with, of a new luxury, a telephonic system; nor, worse still, the destruction of that which is. It must be something that will extract additional store of food from the soil, or at least, the evoking something which was not (otherwise than latent or in germ), and is essentially valuable, useful, necessary, or effects positive economy in consumption.
Keeping in mind these leading principles one can easily understand that a pauper industrious peasant landing in the New World adds £200 to American wealth, while at the same time his departure with wife and children from crowded, sterile Kerry, as things are, might, by the cessation of their drafts upon the sum of Irish products for the wherewithal to live, effectively add fully as much or more to the sum of wealth in Ireland, which they help to consume if they stay, and to which their labour can add nothing.
