October, 1842. ORIGINAL PAPERS. ART. 1. Commercial History of France.-Necker and his Administration-by FRANCIS WHARTON, Esq. of Pennsylvania, II. Commerce of Cuba, Page 301 319 III. Proportion of Persons to the Population engaged in seven principal employments in the United States-by JESSE CHICKERING, M. D., of Massachusetts, IV. Protection to Home Interests-the true Political Economy of the United States-by a CORRESPONDENT, V. Morals of Trade-by J. N. BELLOWS, Esq., VI. Preferences by Insolvents-by a LOOKER ON, of South Carolina, Embracing Remarks on the Finance, Trade and Commerce of the Country, illustrated by a variety of Statistical Tables, Tarid of Brazil-Note from Don Louis Henrique Ferriar D'Aguiar, - 367 388 COMMERCIAL STATISTICS. Sketch of the Annual Statement of the Commerce and Navigation of the United Annual Statement of the Commerce and Navigation of New-Orleans for 1842, - 390 Commerce, Navigation, and Revenues of Rio de Janeiro, from a series of years to 1841, Ewbank's Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and other Machines for Burnett's History of the Reformation of the Church of England, Frost's Book of the Navy.-Young's Introduction to the Science of Government, 395 Dunlop's History of Fiction, HUNT'S MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE. OCTOBER, 1842. ART. I. THE COMMERCIAL HISTORY OF FRANCE. III. NECKER AND HIS ADMINISTRATION. THE history of nations as commercial associations, has not yet become sufficiently extended to make room for a full deduction of those great fundamental truths on which the system of trade is based. Economists have supported their theories by the supposition of axioms and the illustration of analogies; statesmen have based their schemes on temporal policy or local convenience: but the truths which the theorist has often laid down, the measures which the statesman has often effected, have as yet been unable to obtain the sanction which a rule must possess which is drawn from an accurate observation of the whole phenomena which accompany it. The details of the commercial system of the civilized world are as yet too imperfect to allow of their safe generalization. Of the trading nations of antiquity, there are none whose history as a commercial people has come down to us; and of the two chief republics of the middle ages, Venice and Holland, we know but little else than that when their le was unshackled by the restrictions of the municipal authorities, their wealth was great and their immunities splendid; that when the fetters of a protective or a retaliatory tariff were placed around their limbs, both their wealth and their immunities vanished. The great trading nations of our own era have not yet completed their cycle; the vicissitudes of heat and cold, of frost and fire, they have not yet fully experienced; and the material which we gather from their history must be partial and imperfect. The time is still to come when the whole revolution shall be complete, and when by the experience of seed-time and harvest, of decay and renewal, we can exhibit those cardinal laws which govern the universe, in the complication of its intestine machinery, as well as in the simplicity of its su perficial structure. It may be a great while before the observations of the political astronomer will be complete enough to enable him to detect the code that regulates that great economy to which his attention is directed. Centuries may pass before the more obvious circles of the system are mapped down, and even then how infinite, how grand in their operations, and yet how exquisite in their detail, will be the courses of those inferior orbs which day after day will burst on his astonished vision! That there are certain vast physical laws which regulate men when grouped in masses, as they do men when separated in individuals-which prescribe the birth and watch over the infancy and guide the manhood of nations, as they do those of the men who compose them-the man who observes the surprising minuteness with which the harmony of the universe is preserved, can have little occasion to doubt. The silent but resistless influence of gravitation bears with proportional power on the mountain and on the sand that trickles down its flank. That supreme all-regulating power which adjusts the equilibrium of the atmosphere so delicately that it can buoy up the wings of the hugest eagle, while it feeds the lungs of the weakest child, can be with equal justice supposed to govern with similar precision the influences which act upon those momentous systems in which mankind have been, since their origin, divided. The material phenomena by which our eye may be assisted, are still but scanty and partial; but feeble as they are, they join in and are reconcilable with the supposition, that the same severity of law which adjusts the fate of man when in isolation, must determine the destiny of men when grouped into nations. We have travelled from our path in illustrating a position with which we set out, in opening the series of papers on the commercial history of France, of which the present is a number. That the body corporate is surrounded by the same atmosphere of order as the substances which it contains, is a proposition which ought to require no illustration; and yet in the operations of government and in the details of trade, there can scarcely be found a man who acknowledges a supervision so efficient, or who, if he acknowledge it, will submit to be guided by its dictates. Principles in the political world, true as the justice from which they take their origin, have been disregarded whenever the spur of temporary advantage presses on the flanks of the ruler. Truths in the commercial world, speaking in a voice to which no man can be deaf, saying that the dealings between community and community should be as fair and unshackled as the dealings between merchant and merchant, have been neglected whenever the thunder of local interest is heard. Men forget that prosperity can only be secured by the adherence to those grand principles of justice on which the welfare of the world is based. It was for the purpose of illustrating by the history of one nation, at least, the existence of a truth both so powerful and so forgotten, that the present series of papers was commenced. The condition of France under the various aspects of the feudal system, of the Bourbon dynasty, of the revolutionary tumults, and the imperial supremacy, affords a study to the political economist of the most inexhausti ble richness. Never in the history of a single people has each note in the gamut been so rapidly struck, as in the short period that covered the despotism of the last Bourbons, the excesses of the revolutionary interregnum, the dictatorship of Napoleon, and the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe. In one generation we witness the king so supreme, that by a single line a massacre was ordered which destroyed, on the ground of religious difference alone, more of his subjects than were brought to the block in the whole of the bloody revolution that followed. In the next generation we witness the utter prostration of vital energy in the people as a mass; we find that their wealth has been sucked from them, that the coarse but plentiful food which supports them has been snatched away and concentrated into the most costly and useless dishes for the amusement of the court palate; and we might be led to conclude, could a veil be dropped over the extraordinary convulsion that followed, that the nation. itself, in its extreme degradation, had lost all sense of liberty, all power of redress. But scarcely had the generation which witnessed the tinsel pomp of Louis XIV., or the unalloyed licentiousness of Louis XV., been swept away, before the earth's surface was rent, and the injured elements sprang forth from beneath in the wildest confusion. To enter into a detailed account of revolutions so rapid and so pervading, was out of the limits and objects of this magazine; and while we have attempted to examine, at different periods, the condition of the realm at eras the most critical, it has been our endeavor to exhibit the views which were thus unfolded in a shape which would place them in the hands of the general observer, unclogged by the weight either of excessive detail or of exuberant speculation. In the opening article of the series, the position of the French nation at the period of the accession of Louis XV. was illustrated by the history of the Mississippi scheme, and the speculations by which it was surrounded. In the next number, the condition of the realm during the remainder of the reign of Louis XV. was exhibited, and we now proceed, in conformity with the plan with which we opened, to consider the changes which took place during the reign of his successor, as far as it will be developed by a view of the life and administration of the statesman who, in that stormy period, was at once the director of the finances of the state, and the projector of the first measures of the revolution which convulsed it. To Necker, a place in a mercantile biography may not in strictness be due. Living rather as a politician than as a merchant, handling commerce more as a theorist than a man of business, better acquainted with the operations of finance among men in the mass, than with the dealings of trade among men in the detail, he rose with ambitious activity from the counting-house school to the prime minister's throne. In times of great commotion he had been drawn into action. Even perhaps had his thoughts never wandered beyond the walls of the Parisian exchange, had he resolutely determined to be a rich banker and nothing more, he would have found it hard to have resisted the temptations of the stream which would have flooded his bulwarks and undermined his determination. When popular sentiment was pouring on in one great continuous channel, when first and second and third estates combined to draw from his retirement the merchant by whom alone the finances of the realm could be disentangled, when the king sealed the general invitation with his royal mandate, it would have required a steady purchase on the shore to resist the current that was bearing so impetuously onward. Without being imbedded in the trade of the country, without having his attachments wound round its commercial moorings, it cannot be wondered that Necker yielded to the first surgings of the waters, and before they had sucked him from his home, gave himself voluntarily to their motions. In 1775, director of the royal treasury of France; in 1776, chief secretary of the finances; in 1777, prime minister; in 1782, forced into retirement, and returning with a baron's title to Switzerland; in 1789, recalled to his old seat at the head of the treasury; in 1790, after having invoked the general estates, and after having involved the king in a controversy from which no hand could rescue him but that which dropped the guillotine, being once more dismissed to seek in private life that rest which in vain he had sought in public: his career becomes embodied in the history of the French revolution, and on the support of his life and services rests in a great measure the foundation of that stupendous edifice, which for fifty years covered Europe with its shadow. Treasurer to Louis XVI. under the old economy, leader of the third estate in that which succeeded, what great and repulsive eras were thus united within a few years of a single lifetime! Necker is painted to us now as the man of middle measures, as the harlequin, who was clothed on one side in rags of darkness, and on the other in robes of light—as the daysman between the shadow of a buried monarchy and the substance of a young republic. But it should be kept in mind that Necker belonged to a middle period in the revolution, that he stood at the helm at the time of the turning of the wheel, and that as steersman, his great duty during the short time power was in his hands, was to turn the ship from the dangerous course she was pursuing, without plunging her into another of still greater danger. He was during that most critical moment of French history, the object of suspicion from both quarters. To the Bourbons he appeared as a demagogue in a court dress; to the revolutionists, as a monarchist in disguise. The very neutrality as to extreme measures which first brought him universal homage, at last brought him universal deprecation; and before the bread he had thrown on the waters returned, before the system into which he had reduced the finances of the realm had been given time to ripen, he was driven from the capital to vindicate in private that reputation which in public he had not been allowed to establish. Jaques Necker was born in 1734, or according to one of his biographers, in 1732,* in Geneva, where his father had been for some time professor of civil law. Receiving an education which would have fitted him for the position which his father held, his natural aptitude for calculations, his ambition to rise to distinction in a republic, where wealth was the chief avenue to eminence, induced him to make use of his great natural parts, and the still greater learning with which he had encrusted them, in a field in which of all others they would be most useful. To the bold or the wise speculator, the commercial dealings of the continent offered a prize very splendid. The merchants of Europe were beginning to plant their stakes and to spread their nets over that wide ocean from which so rich a booty was to be reaped. In America, and the West Indian archipelago, in China, and the Asiatic peninsula, were adventurers roving with armies of foreign and native soldiers under their command; and already at the mouth of the Ganges, of the St. Lawrence, of the Mississippi, were station houses erected, which had bribed and enslaved the princes and the people of the land. The state of Louisiana had been cut up in lots, which were painted in the royal charts as spangled with gold mines, and had been sold by French commissioners in Mr. Law's banking-house at prices the most romantic. Dupleiss had not yet surrendered the vice-royalty of the east to Clive, the French supremacy in North India remained unabated, the French forts in America were strung like beads along the thread of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, till they girdled the breast of the Ameri * Histoire Literaire de Geneve, par Jean Sonebier, III. 90. |