certainly the most amusing, comprehensive, and accurate view of the elements of physiological and systematic botany that we know. Its style is lively, and often eloquent; and we are convinced that, if it were translated into our language, it would obtain from the public a flattering reception.

ART. IV. Essai sur l'Administration de l'Agriculture, &c.; i. e. An Essay on the Management of Agriculture, Commerce, Manufactures, and Provisions: followed by a History of the Cir-> cumstances which have conduced to the great Advances made by the Arts from 1793 to 1815. By CL. ANTHELM Costaz, one of the Secretaries of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry. 8vo. pp. 420. Paris. 1818. Imported. by Treuttel and Würtz, London. Price 10s.

THE

HE celebrated reply of an old French merchant to the inquiry of the minister Colbert,-"How he could best promote the interests of commerce?". "Let us alone"-ought: to have struck so sagacious a man with a suspicion that the interference of government in matters of trade, however well meant, is very likely to be mischievous. Colbert, before he attained the lofty station which he filled with such honour to his own name and such advantage to his country, had himself been connected with a commercial house at Lyons, and probably had imbibed certain prejudices in favour of the superior advantages which trade and commerce, compared with agriculture, impart to a nation. In the éloge which M. COSTAZ passes on the memory of this great man, he compliments him, among other things, on his attention to the interests of agriculture; although it is well known that, embracing all the prejudices of the mercantile system, (a system, says Adam Smith, in its very nature and essence, of restraint and regu lation,) he was not only disposed like other European ministers to encourage more the industry of the towns than that of the country, but, in order to support the former, was willing even to depress and keep down the latter. To render provisions cheap to the inhabitants of towns, and thus encourage manufactures and foreign commerce, he prohibited altogether the exportation of corn; excluding the inhabitants of the country from every foreign market for the produce of their industry; and this too at a time when the provincial laws of France imposed the most vexatious and absurd restraints on the transportation of corn from one province to another. * Sully, on the other hand, was hostile to the multiplication of

* Wealth of Nations, Vol. iii. p. 3.

manufactures, particularly those of luxury, as having a tendency, he thought, to enervate the population by too easy and sedentary a life. After Colbert's time, a re-action took place in the sentiments of thinking people respecting this part of political economy; and, attributing the general depression of agriculture, which was experienced in every part of the country, to the preference which that minister had bestowed on manufactures, the French philosophers adopted another and an opposite theory: namely, that agriculture was the sole exclusive source of the revenue and wealth of every country. M. Costaz, who is not unacquainted with our English writers on the subject of political economy, (Steuart, Adam Smith, Lauderdale, and probably Malthus,) is right when he says that Sully started from erroneous premises in assuming that workshops are peopled by depopulating the country; and that, for every additional workman introduced into a manufactory, à labourer is withdrawn from the fields. He had not considered, and probably at that time of day no one had considered, that men multiply in proportion to their means of subsistence.'

Without entering into those details which place this remark in the list of demonstrated truths, it is obvious that a greater abundance of the means of subsistence encourages those individuals to marry whom the fear of not being able to provide for their offspring would have deterred from forming such a connection; and that men are thus produced who would never have received life, or who would have died in their infancy from the want of food. A manufactory which is successfully established in any town furnishes the means of subsistence to all whom it employs; and those means are new, and as it were created. As long as it prospers, they are accessible to a great many individuals: but there is always an excess of population in towns, seeking employment, and which this new species of industry does not withdraw from the plough. Supposing, however, that each individual employed had been taken from the country, the space which that individual left would very soon be filled up. He was engaged in an useful occupation, to which were attached wages adequate for his subsistence; these wages being now unclaimed, sooner or later some one will offer himself for the vacant employment as the only means of obtaining the wages. But again: the workmen employed in a manufactory must subsist on the products of agriculture; there will be an increased demand, therefore, for those products, and an augnrentation of the capital which maintains agricultural labour; so that, far from diminishing, it actually tends to the increase of that particular portion of population. Sully, therefore, in opposing the establishment of the silk manufactories, was influenced by inconsistent principles; for, while he was apprehensive of a diminution of labourers, he was actually endeavouring to prevent the adop

tion of one of those measures which are the best calculated to in. crease them.'

Even in these enlightened times, a prodigious quantity of false reasoning prevails, with practical mischief flowing from it, on the subject of commercial regulations; and the interests of one set of merchants, manufacturers, &c. is played off against another, which latter seeks indemnity from a third, and so on, to the general detriment of society. British manufacturers sometimes complain that they cannot compete with those on the Continent, where, labour being cheap, the manufactured commodity can be afforded at a lower price: the consequence is a prohibition against the importation of French silks, laces, cambrics, &c. &c., to the injury of the general consumer, whom we compel to pay more for an article by twenty or thirty per cent. perhaps than it would cost abroad; and this is done in order to encourage some home-manufacture which is employing an unprofitable capital. Unnatural and forced prices being thus fixed on most articles of consumption, the farmer turns about, and complains that the unlimited importation of foreign corn reduces so low the price of the commodity in which he deals that it does not repay him the cost of its growth. He is accordingly propped up-at the expence of the consumer, likewise, by a corn-bill. The case is just the same on the Continent; where the superiority of British machinery, and the superabundance of British capital, have enabled us to counterbalance the disadvantage of the high price of manual labour resulting from the increased artificial price of corn and all articles of consumption at home; and when, in consequence, we have been enabled to send our manufactured goods on the Continent, a similar outcry has been raised against the inundation in Germany, Flanders, and other places, of British manufactured commodities. Ghent has now and then made an auto da fé, a jolly bon-fire of them, for the gratification of its sapient citizens; and the good people of Germany have called out loudly for heavy prohibitory duties, in order to encourage such of their manufacturers also as are employing an unprofitable capital! Thus the wheel goes round. We all complain of the taxes imposed on us, and yet voluntarily ask for others to increase the burden. It seems to be overlooked that in all these cases there must be a reciprocal interchange of commodities; that if French, or German, or Italian, or Spanish, or Dutch goods are imported into Great Britain, a corresponding and proportionate value of British goods must be exported into France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Holland, in order to pay for them; that the more we receive the more we send out Hh 4

in

in return; and that the more free and unincumbered the intercourse is among all nations, the more beneficial it is to the consumers; that is to say, to the mass of people in all nations. * Every country possesses certain natural or adventitious advantages in particular branches of industry; and it is absurd to destroy or impede those advantages by diverting the employment of capital and labour into less profitable channels, and to aggravate rather than remedy the mischief of favouring one class by favouring some other, both at the expence of the community.

France, within the last twenty-five years, having made great progress in arts and manufactures, it is the object of M. COSTAZ in the work before us to direct the attention of his countrymen to the measures which have led to a result so favourable to the prosperity of the kingdom; and really the principal cause seems to have been the liberation of domestic trade generally from much of that cumbrous political machinery, which had so long and so absurdly been employed for its protection. He goes back to a very early period of French history; noticing the regulations which at various times have been introduced for the encouragement of trade and manufactures, down to the commencement of the Revolu, tion in 1789, under the government of Councils, Bureaus, Intendants, General-Inspectors, Sub-Inspectors, &c. &c.: much of which complicated system was introduced by Colbert. As we might expect, these regulations often clashed with each other; and, from the multiplication of conflicting enactments, it was no very difficult matter for crafty individuals to evade those of which the operation was inconvenient to themselves: while, at the same time, by a malicious dexterity, they enforced others to harass and oppress some rival, whose rising prosperity it was an object to destroy. M. COSTAZ asserts that thirty octavo volumes would not contain the old ordinances which were in existence for the regulation of human industry.

As in England we have our companies, corporations, guilds, &c., so likewise in France, in the earlier periods of the

6

* On reading the tariffs established between different countries, and looking at the extent of the list of prohibited articles, we are tempted,' says M. COSTAZ, to suspect that these regulations were dictated by a belief that people could always sell without ever buying! To be convinced of the absurdity of this opinion, it is sufficient to reflect that, if commercial advantages were all in favour of one particular country, the ruin of those with which that country was connected must inevitably follow, and thus the very elements of its commerce with them would be destroyed.' (P. 213.)

monarchy

monarchy especially, similar charters, privileges, and immunities, were granted for the protection of particular trades. In feudal times, there as here, the power of the seigneurs, had in a great degree superseded that of the crown, and was often exerted to the oppression of the people; so that it became desirable, therefore, for the latter to unite with their, sovereign for the purpose of checking this power of the. nobility. Various establishments of Louis le Gros, of Saint Louis, and of the successors of those princes, insensibly contributed to undermine that once overwhelming authority; till, under the ministry of Cardinal Richelieu, it was almost annihilated. This was an important if not a direct object of the early incorporations. When the executive power is feeble, an insulated individual may often be oppressed with impunity: but, when a common interest unites men into masses, such an attempt would first be defeated and next avenged.

In later times, a different object led to the appointment of vexatious offices under the most frivolous pretences. We must grant that we have seen the King's Bug-destroyer, and the Queen's Rat-catcher, announce themselves in large gold letters in this metropolis; and it therefore may not be very decent to laugh at the ridiculous offices of contrôleurs-visiteurs de beurre frais, essayeurs de beurre salé, conseillers contrôleurs du Roi aux empilements de bois, &c., &c. which, with many others, were created under Louis XIV. for the purpose of obtaining, as the price of these greasy honours, a miserable pittance for the cravings of a hungry and exhausted treasury.

M. COSTAZ truly remarks that the inutility or even the injuriousness of an institution now is no evidence that it was not once beneficial and even necessary; and, if trade required protection in stormy times against the exactions or plunder of powerful seigneurs, it was most effectually obtained by the union of individuals having a common interest; that is to say, by Companies. In course of time, however, these Companies, feeling the strength and consequence which they derive from union, are very apt to "turn the tables," and end by inflicting on others still greater evils than those which they had originally incorporated themselves to avoid. Some curious instances of such evils are here recorded: but the history of our own trading Companies is pregnant with similar facts; and, when a man's own house is made of glass, the old proverb says, it is not wise for him to throw stones.

If (says the present author) the tables of population furnish any criterion to estimate the state of agriculture at different periods, they will prove that in France this science has been much improved since the year 1789. According to M. Necker, that

kingdom,