CHAPTER XVII.

OF VITAL CHANGES IN THE FORMS OF MATTER- -CONTINUED.

1. Constant alliance between war and trade, as exhibited in the history of France. Poverty and dishonesty of its sovereigns.

2. Uniform tendency of its policy, prior to the days of Colbert, towards giving to trade the mastery over commerce. Tendency of his measures, that of increasing the rapidity of the societary movement.

3. Warlike policy of Louis XIV., and consequent necessity for abandonment of Colbert's system. Expulsion of the Huguenots, and annihilation of manufactures. Consequent unproductiveness of agriculture, and wretchedness of the people.

24. Colbert's policy maintained by Turgot. Abandoned by the negotiators of the Eden Treaty. Consequent annihilation of commerce. Poverty of the people leads to revolution. Colbert's system re-established. Extraordinary growth in the quantity and value of the products of French agriculture.

5. Changes in the distribution of labor's products resulting from increase in the power of association and combination, and in the quantity of commodities produced. Great increase in the value of land, resulting from diminution of the tax of transportation. 6. France a country of "contrasts"-its social system tending towards decentralization, while its political one tends, more and more, towards centralization. Colbert's policy in strict accordance with the doctrines of Adam Smith. Causes of poverty among the French people.

§ 1. Or all the European communities, there is none in which war and trade have been in more close and constant alliance than has been the case in FRANCE; or in which the effects of that alliance in preventing the development of the treasures of the earth, have been more fully manifested. Abroad, from the days of Charlemagne to those of Waterloo, she has constantly been engaged in arresting the societary motion among her neighbors, wasting in the effort the powers, physical and mental, of her own population. At home, her people have been deprived of the right to determine for whom, or at what wages, they would labor, while liable to be taxed at the pleasure of the sovereign. Always poor, her rulers have with one hand farmed to others the privilege of taxing their subjects; while with the other, they have granted in exchange for money, exemptions from contribution. At one time they have sold titles carrying with them such exemptions; at another, they have annulled all such grants. Henry IV. made such sales in 1593, recalled them without repayment in 1598, and resold them in 1606. Louis XIII. continued to sell them until 1638; then, in 1640, annulled the grants of all the previous thirty years. Louis XIV. resold, in 1661, privileges that had been annulled in 1640, and three years later reannulled all those which had been granted since 1634.

Still worse than this has been their conduct in reference to the important question of the currency. Philip the Fair changed the weight of the coin more than a hundred times during his reign, and as often as thirteen times in a single year. His successors followed his example, buying gold and silver at low prices and selling them at high ones; and thus affording proof of the fact that dishonesty and meanness are the almost inseparable companions of arbitrary power.

Under John (1356), interior custom-houses were established, at which were collected, on all merchandise passing from province to province, the same duties as upon similar commodities coming from distant countries, peculiar privileges being at the same time granted to foreign traders engaged in exchanging their wares against the rude products of the soil. Commerce being thus sacrificed at the shrine of trade there prevailed throughout the kingdom, during several centuries, the most entire ignorance of the simplest mechanic arts; while in the Netherlands and Germany, Italy and Spain, art and science were making rapid progress.

Directly the reverse was then the policy of England. While John was extending the dominion of trade, Edward III. was inviting Flemish artisans into England and thus enlarging domestic commerce, while limiting the powers of the foreigners by whom English products had been till then monopolized. The same difference exhibits itself in the measures of their successors, and as a consequence the records of the House of Valois close, in 1589, with a state of society in which the laborer was enslaved, and brute force constituted the only law; while the contemporary English history presents to us a community advancing steadily towards freedom-one that was even then preparing to give to the world the Hampdens and the Pyms, the Winthrops and the Williamses, the men who at home set limits to the power of the crown, and those who abroad laid the foundation of the great republic of modern times. In the one, we find the States-general declining steadily in its influence; whereas in the other we mark a gradual growth in the power of Parliament to control the affairs of state.*

§ 2. The example of the sovereign was followed in every

*The last assembly of the States-General, prior to that which, in 1789, ushered in the Revolution, was in 1605, when the popular branch of the English Parliament was rapidly acquiring the power so strongly manifested in the reign of Charles I.

quarter of the kingdom; offices were bought and sold; local taxes were innumerable; and manufacturers surrounded themselves with regulations looking to the prevention of domestic competition for the purchase of raw materials, or for the sale of manufactures. Commerce having almost perished, the nation presented to view little more than two great classes, one of which lived and labored in wretchedness even when its members failed to perish of famine and pestilence, while the other revelled in barbaric luxury. In no part of Europe was the magnificence of the few so great, or the misery of the many so complete; and at no period was the contrast more perfect than when, in 1661, Colbert was called to the financial management of the kingdom.

The system of internal intercourse then existing greatly resembled that of Germany at the opening of the present century, custom-houses on the borders of the provinces obstructing the passage of men and things throughout the State. These Colbert transferred, as far as was then possible, to the frontiers, thus establishing freedom of circulation throughout the kingdom. He next sought to improve the means of transportation; and the canals of Orleans, Briare, and Languedoc, still attest the importance of his efforts. Further, desiring to re-establish the various industries that had so nearly perished during previous centuries, he imposed heavy duties on foreign manufactures, while exerting himself to naturalize both the raw materials of manufacture and the skill required for their conversion into finished products. Throughout the reign of Louis XIV. political centralization tended constantly to increase, but the system of his great minister looked to social and commercial decentralization; and to his measures it is largely due that agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, have made the extraordinary progress since exhibited. *

§ 3. Repeating, however, the error of the early English Parliaments, Colbert prohibited the export of raw produce. He sought to aid the agricultural interest by bringing the artisan nearer to the farmer, and thus relieving the land from the tax of transportation; but by interdicting the farmer from going with his products to the distant market he established

* "Louis XIV might with truth and justice say that, in giving him Colbert, God had done much for the prosperity and glory of his reign. France might add, that she owes to his wise counsels the wonderful development of her industry."-Thierry.

a monopoly in favor of the domestic artisan. Time and further experience would have corrected this had peace been maintained, but such proved not to be the case. Scarcely had his system begun to operate when his master commenced the movement against the Protestants, which terminated, in 1685, in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Two millions of the most intellectual, best instructed, and essentially manufacturing part of the people were, by that act, exposed to persecutions of every kind, resulting in the death of half a million of persons; while at least an equal number, escaping into England, Holland, and Germany, carried with them their skill and intelligence, as well as the secrets of their various manufactures. When we add, that Louis was incessantly engaged in wars demanding enormous sacrifices, and closing invariably with treaties requiring the abandonment of the protection to manufactures which Colbert had established,* it is no matter of surprise that at his death the condition of the people should have been miserable to a degree of which we can scarcely now form an idea; nor, that the reign of his successor should have been marked by an almost total absence of commerce, and a universal depression of the agricultural interest, consequent on the almost entire annihilation of the manufacturing one..

§ 4. A century after Colbert we find Turgot, animated by the same views, laboring to free land and labor from the monopolies that still retarded the growth of commerce. The period during which he occupied the post of ComptrollerGeneral of the Finances exhibits a constant series of edicts looking to the abolition of exclusive privileges, and the emancipation of labor from the control of corporations that stood between the producer and the consumer. His administration endured but three years; and with its close disappeared all hope of a peaceful solution of the financial difficulties of the government, or of the peaceful removal of the burdens under which the people had so long suffered. Theoretically, Turgot was opposed to the idea of granting protection to the farmer in the effort to bring the consumer to his side; but he never interfered with the protective system he had found established. His incapable successors, however, negotiated, in

* Nimeguen, in 1679; Ryswick, 1697; and Utrecht in 1713; all of which contained provisions setting aside Colbert's tariff of 1667; and one of which went so far as to limit the power of the king to grant protection to his subjects.

1786, a treaty with England under which the towns and cities of France were so flooded with English merchandise that before the lapse of even the second year the varied industry that had been so carefully built up had almost ceased to exist. Workmen were discharged, agriculture suffered, and commerce perished. The distress was universal, paralyzing the government, and forcing it into the initial measure of the Revolution-the calling together of the Notables in 1788.

All that Turgot had vainly claimed in behalf of the people was now taken by them; the privileges of corporations were swept away, the property of the nobility and the church confiscated, and peer and peasant declared equal before the law. Commerce was in a great measure freed from the restrictions by which its course had been impeded; the right to labor ceased to be a privilege; the soil became the subject of purchase and sale; and the laborer could bestow his labor on a piece of land, confident that the benefit would accrue to himself and to his heirs. These decentralizing measures, however, were accompanied with the highly centralizing ones of the abolition of local governments, the annihilation of ancient boundaries, and the division of the country into departments, all tending to diminish that feeling of local pride which so much contributes to the activity of social life. Provision

was thus made for the future diminution of social centralization, but political centralization was at once and largely increased; and hence it is, that France has not yet been able to obtain a stable government.

Such,

Amid this war of elements the system of Colbert, so far as it had established direct intercourse between producers and consumers, stood unharmed, the retrograde step of those who had negotiated the treaty of '86 having speedily been retraced, and protection re-established. The war that followed, producing a necessity for looking homeward for supplies of cloth and iron, tended in the same direction. too, was the tendency of the Continental system of Napoleon; and therefore was it that the return of peace found the people and the government prepared to act together in carrying out, and even strengthening, the measures of resistance to trading centralization begun, a century and a half before, by the illustrious minister of Louis XIV. How far these measures have tended to the advancement of agriculture is seen in the fact that during a period of twenty-seven years, from 1813 to 1840, the annual average increase in the money value of the products of the farm was no less than 20,000,000 of dollars,