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The Source of Our Country’s Weakness

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The Source of Our Country’s Weakness

 

Stockholm, Printed by Director Lars Salvius, 1765.

Imprimatur Niclas von Oelreich.

 

Human beings are by nature so constituted that they need the help of others and must therefore gather together in larger or smaller societies, but as soon as that happens, the society is promptly beset by enemies, both external and internal. History also shows that nowhere near as many societies have been overthrown by external enemies as by internal ones who have concealed themselves in the garb of fellow citizens. Yet it is a curious fact that most states keep a watchful eye on those who are outside that society but often leave those within it well armed, since we ought to know that human beings are similar wherever they are and are always more easily able to do harm under the cloak of patriotism than in the guise of an enemy, and under cover of a spurious faithfulness than in open hostility.

Free nations have indeed eventually realized this, though rarely with due attentiveness until they have felt the arrow in their breast and grown faint, their heart mortally wounded and liberty on the verge of destruction.

It was lamentable to see the Plebeian Tribunes1 in Rome lie slain in their blood,2 honourable men surrounded by ruffians, and the dart in his child’s breast3 being a father’s only means to protect its innocence. But it was too late to curb a licentiousness that had initially been left unchecked. The abuse of the laws regarding redistribution of land placed such large properties in the hands of certain people that they could at once put all of liberty at stake, at which point it was bound to be lost. After that, it hardly mattered to whom these events were attributed.

It was thus no longer a mystery among the Romans that extensive amounts of property in private hands constituted a danger to liberty, but no one was any longer able to strike a blow against self-interest unless he wished to receive two in return.

Every free state that fails to pay careful and studious attention to this internal enemy is as certain to collapse, even without war, pestilence and years of bad harvests, as is a clock bound to stop when the mainspring has broken, no matter how often one sets the pendulum in motion. One can see from this how it is possible for the greatest national profit in trade and commerce, if it is concentrated in a few hands, to be far more harmful to the country than if it loses an entire province as a result of war. As desirable as it is for a nation to preserve its liberty, so too must it pay equal attention to the wealth that accumulates in certain places. The community at large may have no right to the property of private individuals when it has been legally acquired, but on the other hand it also contributes to the ruin of the country if it does not promptly open those dams that have gathered wealth together in a few places and impoverished the rest.

The closer a nation has remained to nature, the wealthier and more populous has it become, the more evenly is its wealth distributed and the more felicitous is its government. Likewise, the more anyone has interfered with commerce and industries, the worse and the more wretched is the state.

China,4 the wealthiest country in the whole world, provides incontrovertible proof of this. There, towns have no privileges, and there is no difference between urban and rural industries, so that the entire country is like a town and all the towns are like the most attractive countryside. There are no tollgates or custom-houses there, so that Crown and subjects alike have sufficient wealth. There is never any difference between non-staple and staple towns, so that business runs smoothly and briskly; there the crafts are free and the workers therefore inexhaustibly diligent, and jacks of all trades go into voluntary exile without being legally obliged to do so. There is no commodity ordinance or prohibition against ships that do not carry their own commodities; instead, they are eager for anyone to take the trouble to distribute their products; and for that reason they are in control of commerce, and the prices of their own commodities increase all the more. There are no coins there, but everything is exchanged commodity for commodity; metals are weighed out according to their intrinsic quality, so that there is no monetary standard or financial system over which many Europeans have racked their brains, although they have plenty of gold and silver. Imagine if Sweden had been allowed to enjoy such freedom for the past 400 years; it would then be, if not a China, at least a Holland, a Switzerland, an England, or the like. Where would then all the disputes about urban privileges and rural trade be? Where would the many customs regulations and burdensome tollgates then be, or the expensive matters of staple towns, guild regulations, commodity ordinances and retorsion acts, monetary regulations, finances, exchange rates, and a hundred other things? Where then would all the lawsuits be that these have brought about? Where all the prosecutors who have initiated them, all the lawyers who have pursued them, all the judges who have presided over them, and, finally, all the salaries, food and paper that all of these have consumed in the process, all of it a drain on the economy?

Holland is, next to China, the state that has freed its commerce and crafts the most, and after that England, and for that very reason they are the most stable societies in Europe. Yet they have left nature nowhere near as unchanged as have the Chinese, and I therefore believe that the latter are right when they say that other nations are blind, the Dutch and the English seeing only with one eye but they themselves with two, for the matter speaks for itself.

In contrast to that, Sweden has believed that financial and commercial secrets, exclusive privileges, bounties, constraints, and a variety of prohibitions would bring us prosperity. We have now struggled with all this for a long time and have finally come to the point that, without pestilence and war, we have become underpopulated; without commercial liberties, the commissioning agents of foreigners; without bad harvests, hungry; and with the greatest of mines, destitute of coin.

I beg to be allowed to lay before the reader, with the most sincere conviction, one fundamental reason for this misfortune of ours.

On 10 November 1724 a prohibition was secured against foreigners importing anything but the products of their own country, which was declared on 28 February 1726 to mean that neither were foreign ships permitted to carry freight between Swedish towns nor could Swedish subjects who were engaged in commerce import anything on a foreign ship apart from the products of the country from which it came, on pain of confiscation of both ship and commodities.

The manner in which this Commodity Ordinance was secured and the extent to which it was done in a legal fashion ought not to be hidden from any Swede. During the Diet of 1723 the Royal Boards of Chancery, of Mining and of Trade submitted a report to the most Reverend Estates of the Realm on 10 April of that year in which they recommended the promulgation of the Commodity Ordinance by the Estates. The matter was discussed by the Joint Committee on Trade and was thoroughly examined, in particular by the members of the Estate of Burghers, and communicated to the other respective Estates in the form of a memorial dated 10 May, in which the impossibility of carrying out this proposal was presented to the Estates of the Realm, with irrefutable reasons, together with the unfortunate consequences that would inevitably result from such a statute. In consequence of this, the Estates of the Realm indicated to His Royal Majesty by a communication of 27 July that “as the Kingdom is not yet provided with as many ships and vessels as are required for the full operation of commerce, the Estates of the Realm therefore regard it as inadvisable that such a prohibition (namely, against the importation of foreign commodities on the ships of other nations) be introduced at this time but would rely for that on the ability and enterprise of the subjects themselves”. On the 31st of that month, His Royal Majesty conveyed this to the Board of Trade with the explicit warning “to ensure in advance, in order to avoid further accountability, that there rather be a surplus than a shortage of the requisite Swedish ships, so that no dearness of commodities might be caused if the Board, in reporting to His Royal Majesty on the number and draught of Swedish ships, were to be over-hasty”.

Be attentive, dear Reader, and you will now be furnished with the key to the promulgation of the Commodity Ordinance. It was of course the Royal Boards that urged the Estates on in this matter; but the Estate of Burghers protested against it (apart from the members from Stockholm, who, be it noted, agreed with the Boards), and as they were not able to entangle commerce in this net straight away, the matter was submitted to the decision of His Royal Majesty, which appeared to recognize the nature of the game when he prohibited the Board of Trade, under the threat of being held to account, from being over-hasty. What happened? The said Board, despite all that, submitted its report the following year, asserting the adequacy of the number of our ships, although the Estates a year earlier had regarded them as insufficient to export one-third of our commodities and to import what we require, whereupon the Ordinance was promulgated without further delay.

Had the Estate of Burghers not correctly figured out its purpose? Take the trouble to read its whole report, which is attached below,5 as it is well worth the effort. But who could fear anything when the matter was placed, with a warning of that kind, in such eminent and impeccable hands? The delegates from the towns were indeed aware that it would restrict commerce to a few individuals and that it would lead to speculations in particular in the prices of salt and grain, but it was of no use: vana sine viribus ira.6 The case was greatly embellished. It was said: we ought to obtain salt directly from the producers and boost our shipping companies and shipyards.

The consequences were as consistent with the statute as they were deplorable for our national interest, for:

1 the Dutch and the English were immediately excluded from maritime trade with Sweden unless they were prepared to use sand and stones as ballast. The result of that was

2 that the Dutch and the English were obliged to sell their commodities more dearly in order to cover their freight by the dearness, as they were prevented from recuperating it by the bulk carried; for the salt that was previously used as ballast no longer formed part of their cargoes; as a consequence of which

3 the Dutch through their Retorsion Act of 1725 excluded all Swedish ships from the lucrative carrying trade to their colonies, something which other naval powers would have been equally entitled to do with reference to the Swedish Commodity Ordinance.

4 Foreigners were thereby prevented from visiting our ports in the same numbers as before, as they were not allowed to bring with them an assortment of commodities in demand in Sweden aside from the products of their own country. At the Diet of 1723 the Estates found the number of Swedish ships to be inadequate for such a system, as may be observed from His Royal Majesty’s letter to the Board of Trade of 31 July that year and the royal letter of 17 August 1725. This unexpected change of policy inflicted a damaging blow to our commerce, owing to our cold climate and the difficulties of our export trade. Because our winter lasts for six or seven months, we are unable to make more than one voyage to Holland in the summer with our own vessels, which must then by that single run support the crew for a whole year; but the Dutch are able to use their ships during the remaining time in other waters and earn an income almost continually and therefore sail here at lower freight charges than we ourselves can. The reduced number of exporters and the disadvantages of the climate itself therefore naturally increased the freight costs, expensive freight made the commodities dearer, the dearness of the commodities reduced sales, and reduced sales diminished production itself, or, in other words, our products decreased and import prices rose.

5 The lesser staple towns, which lacked commodities that they could export to Spain and Portugal, now had to request all their salt from the few exporters that are to be found in some larger towns. They had to pay for it at a rate at which the salt could cover its freight by itself and thus rather dearly, where they had previously obtained it from the Dutch for half or a quarter of the freight charge and consequently at a more favourable price.

6 When both exports and imports were thus concentrated in a few hands, it was not only the natural dearness that then began to afflict our nation but also the obvious monopolies that were associated with that. Salt was our most indispensable foreign commodity; but the price of it rose so much that pitiful complaints were ever afterwards heard during each Diet concerning both its scarcity and dearness, which neither King nor Estates were able to remedy. Specific evidence of that is the petition of the rural population of the Finnish archipelago during the Diet of 1731 for liberty for foreigners, when they came to collect Finnish commodities, to arrive there with a ballast of salt, which was rejected by the Royal Resolution on the General Grievances of the Rural Population of 28 June, § 45. During the following Diet in 1734 the dearness increased and the people submitted a bitter complaint, which His Royal Majesty in § 51 of the Royal Resolution on the General Grievances of the Rural Population of 17 December that year promised to remedy most assiduously, in part by abundant supply and in part also by other appropriate measures, although that was in fact quite impossible, as§ 56 of the Royal Resolution on the General Grievances of the Towns of 12 December had rejected its import. During the Diet of 1739 the same complaint was submitted by Swedish towns, as may be seen from the Royal Resolution on the General Grievances of the Towns of 12 April.

During the Diet of 1741 the entire rural population was compelled to complain, and His Majesty regarded the matter as resolved by his letter of 1 October, addressed to the Governor of Stockholm and the county governors, regarding the submission of inventories of salt received and other matters, so that the Royal Resolution on the General Grievances of the Rural Population of 1 September, § 14, declares that salt would thenceforward be available both in sufficient quantity and at a fair price. In this context it is also worth noting that although His Royal Majesty promised, in the above-mentioned letter of 1 October, that if the matter were still not resolved thereby, the same measures would be taken with regard to the salt trade as had previously been applied to the grain trade, namely, to exclude it from the terms of the Commodity Ordinance, that move was obstructed, despite the continual increase in dearness and complaints, no doubt through pressure from the monopolists. On 29 May 1742 an order was issued to deposit one-eighth of all salt cargoes in bonded warehouses; despite that, however, the price of the commodity rose, for it was controlled by a few individuals, and the distress became so great that His Royal Majesty, in §§ 55 and 56 of his Resolution on the General Grievances of the Rural Population of 10 September 1743, had to concede that the rural population had fallen into a destitute condition (and could therefore not be helped without some infringement of the Commodity Ordinance) and that the dearness had subsequently increased unnaturally, which must be regarded as all the more incontrovertible evidence of the pernicious monopolies that prevailed in the salt trade as the exchange rate had by then not yet markedly lowered the value of our daler and thus conflated the apparent and the real dearness. During each Diet since then, the King and the Estates have acted to assist commerce, among other things by establishing a Salt Office and a fixed price for salt, but to so little effect that the most Reverend Estate of Nobility during the last Diet, in its Extract of Proceedings for 24 April 1762, conveyed its deep dismay to the other respective Estates “that the more distant regions have been unable even for banknotes, and scarcely indeed for cash, to obtain a few mark of salt, and that the shortage has increased at the very time when the Estates have long endeavoured to avert it and those at home have eagerly awaited forceful action from the Estates of the Realm on this matter”. It was indeed pitiful that the most Reverend Estates of the Realm had to conclude such a long meeting of the Diet without being able to remedy this matter, for salt, which was worth 30 daler a barrel in the summer of 1762, was sold the following winter at 50 daler kmt even in the city of Stockholm, providing evidence that the words neither of contracts nor of statutes are powerful enough to curb self-interest when it in any way enjoys the protection of the laws.

With regard to the trade in grain and provisions, on the other hand, the Commodity Ordinance had an equally deplorable effect, and it would soon have caused the death of many a Swede had His Royal Majesty not, from a fatherly concern for his subjects, felt obliged, in the case of grain, to suspend it on 12 February 1741 until the end of June, a liberty that was prolonged on 14 April to the end of August but extended on 10 June, on the recommendation of the Secret Committee, to the end of that year and then successively, owing to the need to import these commodities, until the following June, from there to the end of the year, further to July 1743, and finally to January 1747.

His Royal Majesty’s statement on this matter on 11 June 1746, in his warning against unreasonable increases in the price of grain, is noteworthy, namely that “the cost of grain and flour has, on arrival in Stockholm, been quite excessively increased, so that their prices, to the great oppression of the suffering poor, have risen to almost twice as much as they cost the previous winter in Finland, from where they came; whereby the poor were given cause to groan and complain”. The merchants were warned to lower their prices, or else His Royal Majesty promised to resort to such expedients as would certainly suffice to restrain an injurious self-interest and release his loyal subjects from an arbitrary constraint in this trade.

Whatever measures His Royal Majesty may have taken for that purpose, it is clear that they were inadequate to remedy either the constraint or the dearness. For, the following year the Estates of the Realm presented yet another general complaint concerning them and therefore directed their concern in the Resolutions of the Diet of 14 December 1747, § 10, towards the improvement of agriculture, by which little could be achieved, however, as manufactories, established at all costs in a country devastated by war and pestilence, had drawn some thousands of people away from farming and increased the number of mouths to be fed in the towns. Moreover, the Commodity Ordinance had turned a large portion of the farmhands into sailors on the new vessels and others into carpenters at home to supply the shipping companies with more vessels and, most damaging of all, had held back the fisheries and the provision trade by the shortage and dearness of salt. Should anyone take the trouble to consider the other foreign goods required by our country, he will soon discover how many difficulties the observance of the Commodity Ordinance has imposed on us with regard to them as well. I do not have the time to deal with that on this occasion. I merely wish to say this: is it more advantageous for the country to collect commodities in great quantities from Lübeck and Danzig, where the Dutch have their emporia, than to allow the latter to bring them straight here? Which will more assuredly bring in contraband, foreign ships or our own mariners, who have friends everywhere and know all the byways intimately? During which era has Swedish commerce flourished more? During that of Gustavus Vasa,7 when a skeppund of pig iron was exchanged in Lübeck for a few barrels of carrots? Or in our own time, when a skeppund of finished bar iron is exchanged for a lispund of coffee beans in Danzig and Lübeck?

But let us also see what effect this has had on our exports. What happened to the iron trade, Sweden’s most important gold mine? When the Commodity Ordinance was promulgated, iron was worth 9 or 10 riksdaler per skeppund in England, but immediately afterwards it dropped during the first three years to 8 and then to 6 or 7 riksdaler per skeppund, which lasted for about 20 years. Our other exports have had to suffer the same fate proportionately. But what is the cause of that?

It is so obvious that it can be understood by the most simple-minded person, yet at the same time so contrary to the nation’s outlook, indeed I would almost venture to say that of the whole of Europe, that I cannot expect assent except from those who come fresh to the subject and from intellects unclouded by preconceived ideas and self-interest.

I rest my argument on two axioms concerning commerce. The first is that the more buyers turn up in a market, the higher the price that the seller receives for his commodity, and vice versa. The other is that a commodity never costs as much when I am compelled to offer it for sale as when the buyer is obliged to search for it.

The merchants in our larger staple towns realized quite clearly that the English and the Dutch were obstructing their designs in the major ports of the country: they undersold them in the salt trade or obliged them to offer their fellow citizens bargains; they coveted our iron and other exports and engaged in competitive bidding with our own merchants, so that it was not possible to establish monopolies among us. They realized equally well, on the one hand, that neither the Portuguese nor the Spaniards, lacking such exportable commodities as were allowed to be imported into Sweden, ever sailed here, in relation to which the Commodity Ordinance was needed, and, on the other hand, that neither the Dutch nor the English found it profitable to send a significant number of ships here, as they were not allowed to bring salt as ballast or to carry an assortment of various kinds of general cargo.

Our Stockholm merchants saw that not only the non-staple towns and the entire countryside but also the smaller staple towns would have to come to terms with them regarding all their requirements from abroad, as they themselves had no commodities to ship that were in demand in the salt-exporting ports and the foreigners were prevented from helping them out. What happened? The Commodity Ordinance was promulgated; the buyers of our export products were reduced to a few; the prices of our most important exports were therefore bound to decline in value, until most of the ironworking estates fell into the hands of those very exporters, so that even our citizens had to buy the iron from them, and that at a steep enough price.

As few foreigners were able to enter the country, our exporters themselves had to export most of our iron, and for the little that the foreigners were able to take, they were obliged to pay all the less as their voyages here in ballast cost them dearly. When the Commodity Ordinance made it unprofitable for the English and the Dutch to come and get the iron, we were at the same time prevented from charging them a fair price for it unless it was agreed in advance, for we then had to offer it for sale and sell it below cost rather than risk a new and expensive voyage without being certain of a better reception somewhere else; we were thus rendered quite incapable of conducting a steady overseas trade in our iron. This statute is also the basic reason why iron is stored in special weighing-houses in the staple towns and why the Ironmasters’ Association8 has been established at such great expense for that purpose.

What else? Who has benefited from all this? The common response is: our shipping companies and merchants and along with them the entire country. Even if I were to admit that it has increased the number of Swedish ships, it has been shown above that this has been achieved, in an underpopulated country, at the expense of the general public and has knocked the feet from under agriculture. But when we consider the weak state into which Swedish shipping fell during the most recent 20-year war and from which it by itself began to recover during our first and consequently most innocent period of peace, it remains uncertain whether the Commodity Ordinance may reasonably be regarded as having played a part in that. We are astonished to see in the report of the Royal Board of Trade of 22 May 1697 to King Charles XII9 concerning the state of commercial affairs at that time that the merchant fleet had grown considerably in 12 to 14 years, so that Stockholm alone had 79 larger or fully equipped ships10 and 150 semi-exempt ones,11 229 in all, which were employed in overseas navigation. The shipping companies earned 500,000 riksdaler annually from overseas freight alone, and there were more than 4,000 seamen on the merchant vessels. The customs revenue grew over ten years to a level that exceeded that of the preceding ten years by 19 tunnor guld, and the maritime customs from Livonia, Estonia and Ingria grew during the same period to 11 tunnor guld reckoned in riksdaler. Would we be able to say any more about our shipping companies over an equivalent period? The Royal Resolution on the General Grievances of the Towns in 1734, § 5, does indeed state that the number of Swedish ships in the Baltic ports had increased; but the same could not be said to have happened in the Mediterranean. And what was most certain was the fact that we were entirely excluded from the lucrative carrying trade to the Dutch colonies by the Retorsion Act of 1725. As far as our merchants are concerned, however, it may be conceded that they have gained by this, at least at first glance, but at whose expense is a more sensitive question. Not at that of the foreigners, for while some of our exports have to be sold below cost, others have to remain in the weighing-houses in our own staple towns, at our expense, owing to the lack of buyers. The salt that we were to obtain directly from the producers under this system cost so much in freight, owing to the fact that the ships, being unable to carry an assortment of other more profitable commodities, had to sail with salt alone, that it became almost twice as expensive as that which we could buy from the Dutch, who used it as ballast. We find further objective evidence for that in the remarkable difference between the prices of salt in Stockholm and Gothenburg, which ranges from 25 to 50 per cent, so that the latter town sometimes finds it preferable to obtain it from Stockholm rather than from Spain, and that chiefly due to the lack of profitable export commodities to carry to the salt-exporting ports. Nonetheless, the exporters did well out of this. They were few, and fully engaged in marketing our commodities and ordering foreign ones from abroad. They were thus in a position to set the prices of each at a level that best suited their interests. But the country and the general public have gained no benefit from all this.

The lesser branches of trade were neglected, for the exporters had their hands full with the sale of iron, copper and brass sheeting, brass wire, iron and timber; thus, the other manufactures were bound to decline and die away. Owing to the small number and almost cartel-like character of the buyers, not only were the non-staple towns subjected to greater hardship, but even the lesser staple towns, which did not themselves have enough export commodities, were deprived of their foreign trade, as the English and the Dutch were prevented from visiting them. Previously, not only could more native men but also foreign ones draw bills of exchange, and the remitter could search out the best price, so that it was not feasible to let the exchange rate rise freely; but when the constraints on trade concentrated everything in a few hands, it resembled an autocratic rule, the like of which in exercising financial tyranny the world has never seen. The shortage of salt and grain brought workshops to a standstill, taxed the farmer to the very bones; hampered the fisheries and provision trade; raised the prices of all our manufactured goods; impoverished the Crown and private individuals who were forced to buy them; and made the products (short of providing large bounties, which became a new way of draining the resources, first of the Crown and then of the workers) unsaleable to foreigners. In a word, it has drowned the country in misery.

But is this not an exaggeration? Whoever attentively and impartially observes the fortunes of commerce throughout the world will soon discover that the freer commerce has been in a nation, the more commodities, the more workers and the greater industriousness there are, and vice versa; and that such causes must of necessity produce such an effect.

We see the whole of our present fate represented in miniature at the time of Gustavus Vasa. In 1527 he banned the Lübeckers from sailing to most of our ports, with the intention of improving the commerce of the realm, and thus took the first step towards establishing the remarkable difference, otherwise unknown among all trading nations, between staple and non-staple towns. The non-staple towns then lost the lively trade in all kinds of commodities that they had previously conducted in their own harbours; some of the producers then had to become seamen, as a consequence of which the quantity of commodities diminished; then prices were bound to drop, for the commodities had to pass through the hands of the merchants in the staple towns to the foreigners, and the recently revived weaker branches of trade were bound to wither away completely. Nothing was then more inevitable than that the country would soon lose out in the balance of trade with the foreigners, which was the very evil that was to be prevented by this. When the quantity of export commodities diminished, the deficit had to be made good with money, so that the silver currency began to flow out. The King together with the Council of the Realm and the Estates expressed serious complaints about that in the Resolutions of the Diet in Örebro on 24 January 1540, clause 6. “It is likewise also a severe and intolerable injury to the whole country that almost all the merchants in this kingdom have now, be it noted, for many years (and not, therefore, since time immemorial) dealt most unwarrantably with the coinage of the Crown, which almost all of them have carried out of the kingdom and to Denmark, the German towns, Riga, Reval,12 Danzig, Lübeck, and elsewhere.” – – His Majesty then strictly prohibited anyone from that day forward, on pain of the loss of life, estates and property, from doing so, although it was impossible to prevent it in a nation involved in overseas commerce that was losing out in the balance of trade as long as the constraint lasted, though it would have ceased of itself had the trade been left free.

Trade cannot bear the slightest constraint without being harmed by it. The same thing happened to us more than 400 years ago that Montesquieu describes as the cause of the decline of agriculture in Africa,13 namely that the grain, which was previously available for sale in abundance, was banned from being exported in 1303, which impeded agriculture and prepared the way for the famine that afflicted the kingdom 12 years later.14 The same question has long been debated in France, though now at last decided by a victory for liberty.15

The English were forced to import grain until they allowed and encouraged the export of it. As long as foreigners were themselves allowed to visit Skåne to buy oxen, they were paid for incomparably well in solid riksdaler. Now we ourselves hazard them at sea and transport them to foreign countries but have to be satisfied with much less; for the seller cannot without loss to himself sail with them from one port to another and even less return home with them. The English have banned all exports of wool; but were that to be strictly obeyed, and if the so-called smugglers were not driven by their own avarice to avert the fate that thereby threatens, that alone would be capable of ruining their expensive sheep farms.

The Chinese never desire to export their commodities to Europe themselves, even if they were able to do so. How easily they can see that their goods would then soon fall in value. We regard that as folly in them, but they possess an abundance of people, commodities and money under their system, whereas the Africans, due to their restrictions, inhabit a wilderness and we with our many ships are lacking in everything. Poland, Prussia, Courland16 and Livonia17 regard it as far better to allow Dutch vessels to visit their ports and collect their grain, linen, hemp, wool, etc. than to keep them out by means of navigation acts and commercial ordinances; for now they can be persuaded to pay higher prices for the commodities than if they were available to them in their own ports, unless they wish to return with empty vessels.

But what need is there to provide further examples? Or who can be persuaded by them to believe anything other than what he has heard since childhood? It offends against the fashion and outlook of our time, just as it never enters a seaman’s head that the earth moves and the sun stands still. Regulations, ordinances, exclusive privileges, all kinds of prohibitions, even extending to manifest envy between states and citizens, are the steps by which Sweden has decided to attain the pinnacle of its fortune. What pointless complication and vain exertions! In no way would the great Master of Societies open the way for humanity to a glorious prosperity by such blind and dubious ventures. Nature itself opposes it and demonstrates that nothing but liberty and love of humanity are the appropriate building materials to endow societies with power and prestige. I am no enemy either of shipping or of manufacturing establishments, but I also see how limited all human reason is compared to the depth of wisdom that is required to make a state happy.

It is reasonable, some may think, to allow freedom of trade in a populous, flourishing and morally unspoiled nation; but among us, where none of those predicates really applies, that would be to place the overall good of the society in jeopardy. We have been frightened by that bogey for long enough. Let us see what reasons underlie this. Is it not constraint of trades and enterprise that inhibits the multiplication of our workers, chains that no populous nation in the world either bears or could bear without becoming as underpopulated as we are within half a century? What else prevents us from flourishing than that very constraint, which kills the desire for gain and helps one citizen to climb on the shoulders of another? When one person in a state is able to skim off the cream of another’s toil, he must become extravagant, and extravagance infallibly offends morality. Is there not here a clear argumentatio in circulum,18 i.e. that we must not allow free enterprise because we are underpopulated and corrupt, and that we are so because we have not had liberty? If constraints are the true source of our misfortune, we cannot be helped in any way except by liberty, and as long as that does not happen, it is vain to hope for any relief.

Dear reader! the subject is worth pondering; put aside all preconceived ideas; do not imagine liberty in one branch of industry alone, for then you will not get far before you meet with resistance and confusion; in your mind, free the state at once from all the fetters and regulations that confine it; let the example of others convince you of its feasibility, and allow yourself time to consider the matter properly; then you will soon see how free enterprise abroad and at home revives the smallest branch of trade, prevents foreigners from fleecing the country and one citizen from enriching himself at the expense of another; how security for the farmer in the possession of his land and freedom to exercise a craft and make a living as he wishes leads him imperceptibly and without legal regulation to the livelihood that brings him and the country the greatest reward: how crafts and manufactures, when free, inspire the worker to diligence and moderation, when he is not dependent on the inferior work of some badly paid journeymen and is busy getting ahead of others by industriousness and good workmanship; how all the trades combined, when free, move people to the right places, where they are most useful to themselves and the whole country: and finally how no political laws in the world have been able to correctly regulate this, which nature achieves so easily and effortlessly.

Should the gentle Reader find that I have taken truth as my guide on this subject, he will presumably not refuse to agree with me; but if, despite my best intentions, I have overstepped the mark, it behoves him to convince me of that with reasoned arguments.

  1. “the Plebeian Tribunes”: In 494 bc the Plebeians in the Roman Republic were given the right to elect their own officials, the Plebeian Tribunes (tribuni plebis). Originally there were two such officials but their number was later increased to ten.
  2. “. . . slain in their blood”: refers to the fate of the Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, who served as Plebeian Tribunes. Both Tiberius (elected to the office in 133 bc) and Gaius (elected ten years later, in 123 bc) pushed for a land reform programme, including redistribution of landholdings. The reforms led to conflicts, as many people feared their lands would be confiscated. The Gracchi brothers faced violent deaths and were clubbed to death or otherwise slain, together with their supporters.
  3. “the dart in his child’s breast”: refers to the story of Verginia, related in Livy’s Ab urbe condita 3.44–58. See The Causes of Emigration, § 6, note 9.
  4. Like most of his contemporaries, Chydenius was fascinated by China and believed its civilization to be far higher than the one prevailing in Europe at the time. A great inspiration here for Chydenius and others was Jean Baptiste Du Halde’s Description de la Chine (1735). Du Halde (1674–1734) was a Jesuit historian and professor at the Collège de Paris. Although he seems never to have left Paris, at least according to Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1754), Du Halde’s four-volume book compiles information collected by Jesuit missionaries in China since the middle of the seventeenth century. The Enlightenment was extremely fascinated by China, and to make comparisons with great civilizations outside Europe, especially the empires of Asia, became even more fashionable after the publication of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws in 1748. It is clear that many eighteenth-century writers idealized the conditions in China. This was something that had begun with Leibnitz in the seventeenth century, and Voltaire looked upon China as the homeland of tolerance and reason. Even in 1776, Adam Smith was still hailing China as perhaps the best-developed and most prosperous country in the world. Certainly this mighty and populous nation was ruled by an omnipotent emperor, but he was said to rule by law and constitution, allowing a great number of freedoms to ordinary people. Chydenius’s intellectual father-figure Anders Nordencrantz also referred to China as an example to follow. In his Oförgripelige tankar, om frihet i bruk af förnuft, pennor och tryck (1756) (“Indefeasible thoughts on freedom in the use of reason, pens and print”; see Anders Chydenius’s life and work/The Diet of 1765–6) he explicitly cited Du Halde in order to show how freedom of speech and printing was held in high esteem in China, even more so than in England. Chydenius in fact published a text based on information from Du Halde, Berättelse om chinesiska skrif-friheten (1766) (“Account of the Chinese Freedom to Write”), which was a translation from Danish made by Chydenius of part of an essay that had appeared in Fredrik Lütken’s Oeconomiske tanker til høiere efter-tanke (1759).
  5. The report described as being “attached below” is not published in this volume as it is not a text written by Chydenius. In the original tract it was included in the overall pagination and covered pages 22–6.
  6. “vana sine viribus ira”: a sentence often attributed to Livy, which can be translated as “an anger not supported by strength is in vain”.
  7. Gustavus Vasa (1496–1560) was king of Sweden from 1523 until his death.
  8. The Ironmasters’ Association, the so-called Järnkontoret, was inaugurated by King Frederic I in 1747 and is still in existence today. Its main task during its first hundred years was to keep up the export price of Swedish iron and steel. See Anders Chydenius’s life and work/The Diet of 1765–6
  9. Charles XII (1682–1718) was king of Sweden from 1697 until his death.
  10. “79 larger or fully equipped ships”: refers to the size of the ships and their suitability to be mounted with a certain number of cannons in wartime. In peacetime, such vessels were used as ordinary merchant ships and exempted from one-third of the customs duties on the goods they transported.
  11. “150 semi-exempt ones”: refers to smaller merchant vessels, which in wartime could be mounted with fewer cannons than the so-called fully equipped ships. In peacetime the vessels were used as ordinary merchant ships and exempted from one-sixth of the customs duties on the goods they transported.
  12. The city of Reval is today known as Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.
  13. “Montesquieu describes . . . Africa”: see The Causes of Emigration, § 12, note 1
  14. “. . . the famine . . . 12 years later”: The Great Famine of 1315–17 hit a large number of European countries, possibly including Sweden, and is explained by modern historians as a consequence of a number of wet and cold summers leading up to 1315.
  15. “a victory for liberty”: several countries in Europe, including France and Tuscany, lifted the ban on the export on grain during the 1760s and 1770s, anticipating the great reform by Turgot in 1774, liberalizing the market for grain.
  16. Courland was a historical and cultural region of present-day Latvia, situated south of the Gulf of Riga.
  17. Livonia was a historical region located along the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, today split between Estonia and Latvia.
  18. “argumentatio in circulum”: circular argument or reasoning, a logical fallacy.

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