“On entering Paris which I had come to visit,” exclaimed Bastiat some seventy years ago, “I said to myself—­Here are a million of human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis.  Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities which must enter to-morrow through the barriers in order to preserve the inhabitants from falling a prey to the convulsions of famine, rebellion, and pillage.  And yet all sleep at this moment, and their peaceful slumbers are not disturbed for a single instant by the prospect of such a frightful catastrophe.  On the other hand, eighty departments have been laboring to-day, without concert, without any mutual understanding, for the provisioning of Paris.”

The theme may well excite wonder.  But wonder should always be watched with a wary eye; for he is apt to bring in his train a hanger-on called worship, who can do nothing but mischief here.  It is a short step from a passage like that quoted above to a glorification of the existing system of society, to a defence of all manner of indefensible things; and a cross-grained attitude towards all projects of reform.  It is a short step; but it is one which it is quite unjustifiable to take.  For the evils of our economic system are too plain to be ignored; too many people have harsh personal experience of the wastefulness of its production, the injustice of its distribution; of its sweating, its unemployment and slums.  And when the attempt is made to plaster over evils, such as these with obsequious rhetoric about the majesty of economic law, it is not surprising that the spirit of many men should revolt and that they should retort by denying the existence of order in the business world, by declaring that the spectacle which they see is one of discord, confusion and chaos.  And then we are engulfed in a controversy as stale, flat and unprofitable as that between the “theorist” and the “practical man.”

The truth is that the language of praise and obloquy is quite inappropriate.  In the first place, it may be well to note that the order of which I have spoken manifests itself not merely in those economic phenomena which are beneficial to man, but hardly less in those which work to his hurt.  Even in those alternations of good and bad trade, which spell so much unemployment and misery, there is discernible a rhythmic regularity like that of the process of the seasons, or the ebb and flow of the tide.  This is not an elegance to be admired.  Furthermore, in so far as the order comprises adjustments and tendencies which are beneficial (as, indeed, is mainly true), there is no warrant for assuming that these are either adequate to secure a prosperous community or dependent upon the social arrangements which happen to exist.  Let us, therefore, refrain from premature polemics and examine in a spirit of detachment some further aspects of the elaborate, but yet unorganized, cooperation of which so much has been already said.