4.To reward certain industries and pay for certain products, a society is needed which corresponds in size with the rarity of talents, the costliness of the products, and the variety of the arts and sciences.If, for example, a society of fifty farmers can support a schoolmaster, it requires one hundred for a shoemaker, one hundred and fifty for a blacksmith, two hundred for a tailor, &c.If the number of farmers rises to one thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, &c., as fast as their number increases, that of the functionaries which are earliest required must increase in the same proportion; so that the highest functions become possible only in the most powerful societies.That is the peculiar feature of capacities; the character of genius, the seal of its glory, cannot arise and develop itself, except in the bosom of a great nation.But this physiological condition, necessary to the existence of genius, adds nothing to its social rights: far from that,--the delay in its appearance proves that, in economical and civil affairs, the loftiest intelligence must submit to the equality of possessions;an equality which is anterior to it, and of which it constitutes the crown.
How many citizens are needed to support a professor of philosophy?--Thirty-five millions.How many for an economist?--Two billions.And for a literary man, who is neither a savant, nor an artist, nor a philosopher, nor an economist, and who writes newspaper novels?--None.
This is severe on our pride, but it is an inexorable truth.And here psychology comes to the aid of social economy, giving us to understand that talent and material recompense have no common measure; that, in this respect, the condition of all producers is equal: consequently, that all comparison between them, and all distinction in fortunes, is impossible.
_ _In fact, every work coming from the hands of man--compared with the raw material of which it is composed--is beyond price.
In this respect, the distance is as great between a pair of wooden shoes and the trunk of a walnut-tree, as between a statue by Scopas and a block of marble.The genius of the simplest mechanic exerts as much influence over the materials which he uses, as does the mind of a Newton over the inert spheres whose distances, volumes, and revolutions he calculates.You ask for talent and genius a corresponding degree of honor and reward.
Fix for me the value of a wood-cutter's talent, and I will fix that of Homer.If any thing can reward intelligence, it is intelligence itself.That is what happens, when various classes of producers pay to each other a reciprocal tribute of admiration and praise.But if they contemplate an exchange of products with a view to satisfying mutual needs, this exchange must be effected in accordance with a system of economy which is indifferent to considerations of talent and genius, and whose laws are deduced, not from vague and meaningless admiration, but from a just balance between DEBIT and CREDIT; in short, from commercial accounts.
Now, that no one may imagine that the liberty of buying and selling is the sole basis of the equality of wages, and that society's sole protection against superiority of talent lies in a certain force of inertia which has nothing in common with right, I shall proceed to explain why all capacities are entitled to the same reward, and why a corresponding difference in wages would be an injustice.I shall prove that the obligation to stoop to the social level is inherent in talent; and on this very superiority of genius I will found the equality of fortunes.I have just given the negative argument in favor of rewarding all capacities alike; I will now give the direct and positive argument.
Listen, first, to the economist: it is always pleasant to see how he reasons, and how he understands justice.Without him, moreover, without his amusing blunders and his wonderful arguments, we should learn nothing.Equality, so odious to the economist, owes every thing to political economy.
"When the parents of a physician have expended on his education forty thousand francs, this sum may be regarded as so much capital invested in his head.It is therefore permissible to consider it as yielding an annual income of four thousand francs.If the physician earns thirty thousand, there remains an income of twenty-six thousand francs due to the personal talents given him by Nature.This natural capital, then, if we assume ten per cent.as the rate of interest, amounts to two hundred and sixty thousand francs; and the capital given him by his parents, in defraying the expenses of his education, to forty thousand francs.The union of these two kinds of capital constitutes his fortune."--Say: Complete Course, &c.
Say divides the fortune of the physician into two parts: one is composed of the capital which went to pay for his education, the other represents his personal talents.This division is just; it is in conformity with the nature of things; it is universally admitted; it serves as the major premise of that grand argument which establishes the inequality of capacities.I accept this premise without qualification; let us look at the consequences.
