CHAPTER V.

ON PRODUCTION.

WHILE it is impossible to make discussions in Political Economy amusing, it is also impossible intelligently to conduct them without constantly coming to conclusions which are most cheering. We shall find a gratifying law underlying the operations of production, which demonstrates that God designed man to be a producer, and to produce under conditions of constantly increasing advantage. The world with its forces, and man with his motives, are so admirably constructed, that these conditions of increasing advantage cannot fail, under freedom, to redound to the benefit of the masses of We will first determine what production is, and then the cheering law that underlies it.

men.

Every man who puts forth an effort to satisfy the desire of another, with the expectation of a return, is, in the language of Political Economy, a Producer. To produce is to render a service for an equivalent. A Product is a service rendered. The hod-carrier is as much a producer as the man who makes the bricks. Unluckily, Adam Smith, who is sometimes called the father of this science, used these terms in a restricted sense, and thereby almost unfitted them to do their proper work. He confined production to the occasioning of changes in material

objects. He gifted with the title of producer the farmer, the mechanic, the miner, the hunter, and fisherman, because they bring to the market a material commodity; and refused the honor of the term to those who render simple services, however essential. This is wrong. It proceeds from an inadequate analysis of value. That which is produced, that with which we have to do, is not matter but value. He who creates value is the producer. But we have seen that value is not an attribute of matter, but of services exchanged. The service may be employed upon matter, may be embodied in it, but what is really sold is not the matter, but the service; and services are all the time being sold, as those of the singer, the teacher, the clergyman, which have no connection whatever with matter. These services have purchasing-power, these persons create value, and therefore, they are producers. Certainly, in an inventory of all values, a large portion would be found connected with material objects, but by no means the whole. Our language must be broad enough to cover all the cases. Therefore, Production is the rendering of any service for which something is demanded in return.

Now, then, as to the beneficent law that underlies it. Production is effort. But efforts are irksome. Is there, then, no way to lessen efforts, to make them less onerous, and, at the same time, more productive? Yes, thank God, there is! We may bring to our aid the gratuitous help of Nature! The world is full of powers which we may employ to facilitate our work. For example, at first people ground their grain by hand; and it was a weary, weary task to sit cramped at the mill all day, and turn, and turn,

and turn.1 The effort was great, and the result was small. At length it occurred to somebody that the weight of water would turn a wheel, and that the wheel might turn the mill-stones. Once thought of, the water-wheel was soon an actual fact. Instead of human strength, Nature works now, and what is better, works for nothing! Man's service is still needed, he feeds the hopper, tends the bags, but he does not ache so bad! Nor is this all. One day's labor is now vastly more productive. More grain is ground, bread comes easier to the poor, and the wheel which free water turns blesses its millions with a cheapened product!

Let us take another illustration. The old handloom was the only means antiquity knew of for procuring clothing. The shuttle was thrown by human muscle. Every thread cost a throw. This work was mostly done by women. The word wife comes from the word to weave. The wife, then, was primarily the weaver. While the slave woman sat on the ground, and turned the handle of the mill to grind the grain, the wife was exalted to the dignity of the loom, and worked away at the monotonous task, thread by thread, thread by thread. Doubtless the hand-loom was a great improvement on the earlier processes, and was itself gradually improved as the centuries went by, each improvement being the substitution either of a gratuitous force of Nature for an irksome human effort, or an easier process of art for a more laborious one. Every step of improvement was a lessening of obstacles with reference to a given satisfaction. All the way up to

1 Exod. xi. 5; Isa. xlvii. 2.

our present admirable machinery—the power-loom, which weaves, as if by magic, while a child can tend it- every step has marked a lessening of efforts relatively to utilities. The utility, the satisfaction, the yard of cloth, has cost less and less of human effort, not only to the producer, but, through exchange, to everybody. Accidental causes in this country have interrupted this progress for a little, at least in the case of cottons, but it will go on again in the good time coming. And this progress, thus briefly illustrated in the two cases of flour and cloth, has been going on, and is constantly going on, in all directions; more strikingly, perhaps, in the production of material commodities, in which the powers of Nature may be indefinitely applied by machinery, but at the same time there are no services of any kind which are not facilitated in some degree by the progress of knowledge and experience; and the benefits of this increasing advantage come home, through exchanges, to everybody; and, consequently, the satisfactions of all bear a larger and larger proportion to their efforts.

This, then, is the underlying and benevolent law of production, that God has placed freely at men's disposal such materials and forces in Nature, that, availing themselves skilfully of these, onerous efforts bear a less and less proportion to realized utilities. Men have a strong motive to substitute, whenever they can, force for muscle, machinery for labor. The farmer who used to cut every spire of grass with a hand-swung scythe, then rake it up with a handdrawn rake, and then pitch it into the loft with a handfork, now mows and rakes and pitches with a

machine. And it is a beautiful consequence of this law, that all improvements in machinery, all inventions, all substitution of Nature's forces for human labor, soon become the common property of mankind. Patent rights speedily expire by their own limitation, secret processes are sure to become known, and the competition of the different men who, under a system of freedom, will be sure to use these gratuitous helps, will compel each of them to sell their product at a rate graduated only by the actual human service rendered; so that, the liberal gifts of Nature, though seemingly monopolized at first by ingenious men, are not long intercepted in their descent towards the masses of mankind. An invention of great merit even at first does not benefit the patentee alone; as a patentee, his interest leads him to lower the price of his product, to bring it within the reach of a wider circle of consumers; and so soon as the patent has expired, the benefit has at once a wider reach. The steam-engine, for example, has long been common property. There are, indeed, certain features of the more perfect engines still restricted in their manufacture by the rights of individuals, and this will always be so while invention continues busy, but the perpetual tendency in all inventions is from individual property towards a common right. And it is here in place to remark, that the application of machinery to all departments of production, and the introduction of improved processes of every name, can hardly in the first instance be prejudicial to any, and are sure ultimately to be beneficial to all.

What is the effect on values of these processes now made easier in all directions? Clearly, since