This example may show us the general rule: Whenever a discovery, economizing labour, brings within the reach of a poorer class what was previously confined to the rich, it extends the market; and whilst benefiting undertakers, and poor consumers, it does no harm to workmen. But when the discovery cannot increase the number of consumers, though it serves them at a cheaper rate, either because they are already all furnished, or because the thing produced can never be useful to them, however low it may fall, - the discovery becomes a human calamity; because it is advantageous but to a certain manufacturer, and that only at the expense of his brethren; or it benefits a single nation, and that only at the expense of others. This national benefit, if purchased at the expense of wretchedness and famine to foreign artisans, would not in itself be much worth coveting; it is, besides, very far from being certain. From the progress of communication between different states, from the skill of manufacturers, a discovery in one country is imitated in every other before the former has gained any great profit from it.
It will doubtless be said, that whoever introduces a saving in any article of his consumption, preserving still the same revenue, will consume what he saves from the fall of price in such and such an article, by a new expenditure, for which he will put in requisition a new labour. But there never will be any proportion between this new demand and the labour suspended on account of it.
On one hand, consumers make use of goods a little finer, a little prettier, at the same price. The clothes with which the poor workman is dressed, are a little superior in quality, are really worth a little more than those which covered his father, at the expense of the same part of his wages. But himself does not perceive this advantage. Decency, which according to this station, he is obliged to consult, leaves him no choice; he must dress like his equals, without finding more enjoyment; he makes no saving in this article, he cannot apply it to any other expense.
On the other hand, the price of goods is not always established in direct proportion to the labour they require, but in a very complicated proportion subsisting between this annual labour, the circulating capital, and a primary, unrenewed labour, consumed in building the manufactory, constructing the machinery with expensive and often foreign materials. Hence, even when a hundred workmen are dismissed, that the work may be done with one by means of machinery,the goods are not reduced to the hundredth part of their price. The stocking-frame economizes work nearly in this proportion, yet it scarcely produces stockings ten per cent. cheaper than those made with the needle. Notwithstanding the invention of large mills for spinning wool, silk, cotton, women continue to be employed in spinning with the wheel, or even with the distaff; a certain proof that the saving does not exceed ten per cent. The same observation may be extended to all improved manufactures: they have never diminished the price of their produce, except in arithmetical progression, while they have suspended workmanship in geometrical progression.
Let us compare this saving in workmanship with the saving in price, according to the most simple calculation on the commonest manufacture. A hundred thousand women, who knit with the needle each a hundred pair of stockings annually, produce ten million pairs; which, at 5s. a-piece, would sell at 2,500,000 l.: the raw material is worth a fifth of this. There remains 2,000,000 to distribute among 100,000 workmen, or 20 l. a-head.
