The National System of Political Economy by Friedrich List Joseph Shield Nicholson

Author:Friedrich List , Joseph Shield Nicholson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Longmans, Green
Published: 1916-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

one in every large manufacturing country that manufactures themselves are a chief cause of the augmentation of population, of the stock of cattle, and of means of transport, Stc. ? And would it be logical and just to co-ordinate these effects of manufiEictures with their cause—in fact, to put these results of manufactures at the head as main causes, and to put the manufactures themselves as an indirect (consequently, almost as a secondary^ cause behind the former ? And what else can have induced so deeply investigating a genius as Adam Smith to make use of an argument so perverted and so little in accordance with the actual nature of things, than a desire to put especially into the shade manufactures, and their influence on the prosperity and the power of the nation, and on the augmentation of the rent and the value of the land ? And from what other motive can this have taken place than a wish to avoid explanations whose results would speak too loudly in favour of the system of protection ? The school has been especially unfortunate since the time of Adam Smith in its investigations as to the nature of rent. Ricardo, and afiter him Mill, M'Culloch, and others, are of opinion that rent is paid on account of the natural productive fertility inherent in the land itself. Ricardo has based a whole system on this notion. If he had made an excursion to Canada, he would have been able to make observations there in every valley, on every hill, which would have convinced him that his theoiy is based on sand. As he, however, only took into account the circumstances of England, he fell into the erroneous idea that these English fields and meadows for whose pretended natural productive capability such handsome rents are now paid, have at all times been the same fields and meadows. The original natural productive capability of land is evidently so unimportant, and affords to the person using it so small an excess of products, that the rent derivable from it alone is not worth mentioning. All Canada in its original state (inhabited merely by hunters) would yield in meat and skins scarcely enough income to pay the salary of a single Oxonian professor of political economy. The natural productive capability of the soil in Malta consists of rocks, which would scarcely have yielded a rent at any time. If we follow up with the mind's eye the course of the civilisation of whole nations, and of their conversion from the condition of hunters to the pastoral condition, and from this to that of agriculturists, &c., we may easily convince ourselves that the rent everywhere was originally nil, and that it rose everywhere with the progress of civilisation, of population, and with the increase of mental and material capital. By comparing the mere agricultural nation with the agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial nation, it will be seen that in the latter twenty times more people live on rents than

MANUFACTURINQ POWER—AGRICULTURAL INTEREST 207

in the former.

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