Knowledge Is Power. Charles Knight
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by the rights of other men. He must accumulate stores of covering and of shelter. He must have a hut and a bed of skins, which are all accumulations, or capital. He must, further, have a stock of food, which stock, being the most essential for human wants, is called provisions, or things provided. He would require this provision against the accidents which may occur to his own health, and the obstacles of weather, which may prevent him from fishing or hunting. The lowest savages have some stores. Many of the inferior animals display an equal care to provide for the exigencies of the future. But still, all such labour is extremely limited. When a man is occupied only in providing immediately for his own wants—doing everything for himself, consuming nothing but what he produces himself—his labour must have a very narrow range. The supply of the lowest necessities of our nature can only be attended to, and these must be very ill supplied. The Moskito Indian had fish, and goats' flesh, and a rude hut, and a girdle of skins; and his power of obtaining this wealth was insured to him by the absence of other individuals who would have been his competitors for what the island spontaneously produced. Had other Indians landed in numbers on the island, and had each set about procuring everything for himself, as the active Moskito did, they would have soon approached the point of starvation; and then each would have begun to plunder from the other, unless they had found out the principle that would have given them all plenty. There wanted, then, another power to give the labour of the Indian a profitable direction, besides that of accumulation. It is a power which can only exist where man is social, as it is his nature to be;—and where the principles of civilization are in a certain degree developed. It is, indeed, the beginning and the end of all civilization. It is itself civilization, partial or complete. It is the last and the most important condition in the production of useful commodities—
3. That there shall be exchanges.
There can be no exchanges without accumulation—there can be no accumulation without labour. Exchange is that step beyond the constant labour and the partial accumulation of the lower animals, which makes man the lord of the world.
[5] It is difficult to understand how the Indian could convert the iron gun-barrel into steel, which it appears from Dampier's account that he did. Steel is produced by a scientific admixture of carbon with iron. But we assume that the statement is correct, and that a conversion, partial doubtless, of iron into steel did take place.
CHAPTER II.
Society a system of exchanges—Security of individual property the principle of exchange—Alexander Selkirk and Robinson Crusoe—Imperfect appropriation and unprofitable labour.
Society, both in its rudest form and in its most refined and complicated relations, is nothing but a system of Exchanges. An exchange is a transaction in which both the parties who make the exchange are benefited;—and, consequently, society is a state presenting an uninterrupted succession of advantages for all its members. Every time that we make a free exchange we have a greater desire for the thing which we receive than for the thing which we give;—and the person with whom we make the exchange has a greater desire for that which we offer him than for that which he offers us. When one gives his labour for wages, it is because he has a higher estimation of the wages than of the profitless ease and freedom of remaining unemployed;—and, on the contrary, the employer who purchases his labour feels that he shall be more benefited by the results of that labour than by retaining the capital which he exchanges for it. In a simple state of society, when one man exchanges a measure of wheat for the measure of wine which another man possesses, it is evident that the one has got a greater store of wheat than he desires to consume himself, and that the other, in the same way, has got a greater store of wine;—the one exchanges something to eat for something to drink, and the other something to drink for something to eat. In a refined state of society, when money represents the value of the exchanges, the exchange between the abundance beyond the wants of the possessor of one commodity and of another is just as real as the barter of wheat for wine. The only difference is, that the exchange is not so direct, although it is incomparably more rapid. But, however the system of exchange be carried on—whether the value of the things exchanged be determined by barter or by a price in money—all the exchangers are benefited, because all obtain what they want, through the store which they possess of what they do not want.
It has been well said that "Man might be defined to be an animal that makes exchanges."[6] There are other animals, indeed, such as bees and ants amongst insects, and beavers amongst quadrupeds, which to a certain extent are social; that is, they concur together in the execution of a common work for a common good: but as to their individual possessions, each labours to obtain what it desires from sources accessible to all, or plunders the stores of others. Not one insect or quadruped, however wonderful may be its approaches to rationality, has the least idea of making a formal exchange with another. The modes by which the inferior animals communicate their thoughts are probably not sufficiently determinate to allow of any such agreement. The very foundation of that agreement is a complicated principle, which man alone can understand. It is the Security of individual Property. Immediately that this principle is established, labour begins to work profitably, for it works with exchange. If the principle of appropriation were not acted upon at all, there could be no exchange, and consequently no production. The scanty bounty of nature might be scrambled for by a few miserable individuals—and the strongest would obtain the best share; but this insecurity would necessarily destroy all accumulation. Each would of course live from hand to mouth, when the means of living were constantly exposed to the violence of the more powerful. This is the state of the lowest savages, and as it is an extreme state it is a rare one—no security, no exchange, no capital, no labour, no production. Let us apply the principle to an individual case.
The poet who has attempted to describe the feelings of a man suddenly cut off from human society, in "Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk during his solitary abode in the island of Juan Fernandez," represents him as saying, "I am monarch of all I survey."[7] Alexander Selkirk was left upon the same island as the Moskito Indian; and his adventures there have formed the groundwork of the beautiful romance of "Robinson Crusoe." The meaning of the poet is, that the unsocial man had the same right over all the natural productive powers of the country in which he had taken up his abode, as we each have over light and air. He was alone; and therefore he exercised an absolute although a barren sovereignty, over the wild animals by which he was surrounded—over the land and over the water. He was, in truth, the one proprietor—the one capitalist, and the one labourer—of the whole island. His absolute property in the soil, and his perfect freedom of action, were both dependent upon one condition—that he should remain alone. If the Moskito Indian, for instance, had remained in the island, Selkirk's entire sovereignty must have been instantly at an end. Some more definite principle of appropriation must have been established, which would have given to Selkirk, as well as to the Moskito Indian, the right to appropriate distinct parts of the island each to his particular use. Selkirk, for example, might have agreed to remain on the eastern coast, while the Indian might have established himself on the western; and then the fruits, the goats, and the fish of the eastern part would have been appropriated to Selkirk, as distinctly as the clothes, the musket, the iron pot, the can, the hatchet, the knife, the mathematical instruments, and the Bible which he brought on shore.[8] If the Indian's territory had produced something which Selkirk had not, and if Selkirk's land had also something which the Indian's had not, they might have become exchangers. They would have passed into that condition naturally enough;—imperfectly perhaps, but still as easily as any barbarous people who do not cultivate the earth, but exchange her spontaneous products.
The poet goes on to make the solitary man say, "My right there is none to dispute." The condition of Alexander Selkirk was unquestionably one of absolute liberty. His rights were not measured by his duties. He had all rights and no duties. Many writers