Principles of Political EconomyPerry, Arthur Latham
General
Principles of Political Economy
Perry, Arthur Latham
Economics
The penetrating reader will perceive, that the root of this whole
matter lies in the breadth and quickness of the _Markets_, in which
the commodities produced by the laborers and capitalists may be sold
against other commodities, and against Services and Credits; if the
markets of the world are free to all to buy in and to sell in, which
seemingly two things are precisely one and the same thing, then the
Demand of Capitalists for the services of laborers to create and
market salable commodities wherever these may be wanted, can
apparently never slacken on the whole; because, the desires of men
which the efforts of other men may satisfy commercially, are
indefinite in number and unlimited in degree; and, therefore, the
Wages of the skilled laborers, the commercial freedom of the nations
being presupposed, are likely to be on the whole on a steady rise
throughout the world; and the amount and excellence of the machinery
on a similar rise, since Capitalists can always under these
circumstances see their Profits looming up ahead of them,--the profits
of an endlessly diversified and marketable Production.
The chief reason at any rate, and almost the only reason in common
sight, why little England has surpassed in commercial prosperity of
every sort every other nation on the globe during the past forty
years, as evidenced by these statistics of Sir Richard Temple and
other abounding proofs on sea and land, is in the fact, that her
statesmen of the last generation came to perceive clearly, and then
helped the people to see, that a market for products is products in
market; that her traditional tariff-barriers to keep foreign goods out
kept in equally domestic goods that wanted to get out for a profit,
and so down went the tariff-barriers little by little, accursed alike
by God and Englishmen, never to be set up again around the shores of
the land of Cobden and Bright and Elliott; and to-day we read, that
the average annual Earnings per head of the entire population of the
United Kingdom, men and women and children, English and Irish and
Scotch, are $176, while the annual average Profits of Capital within
the three kingdoms is 14%.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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