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Writing: The Causes of Emigration

The Causes of Emigration, § 12

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§ 12

The produce of the land is no less encumbered in various ways. I do not have the time to deal with lesser obstacles. One of the chief ones in this connection I hold to be the lack of serviceable communications between the rural regions.

If the people who are exhausted and die because of onerous transport work and long military campaigns were to be urged, each in their own locality, to labour on the opening up of river and land routes, what a blessed benefit would that not be to agriculture?

I really ought not to say any more about this, since the caring attention of the honourable Estates of the Realm has so recently and seriously been extended to this part of our general economy, if one thing did not still concern me in this regard, namely that a larger part of the funds allocated for this blessed project is absorbed by salaries for the senior officials than for the labourers, whereby the work costs the Crown much but benefits the country less. Could the civil establishment not be substantially reduced in this case by appointing fewer officials for such a peaceful purpose?

In many localities, agriculture is also seriously hampered by restrictions on the trade in grain and provisions, so that the countryman is not allowed to sell the produce of his land and labour where the profit is greatest. That includes the regulations concerning prescribed trading areas and prohibitions on the export of grain and provisions.

Mr Montesquieu presents this entertainingly in the form of an African legend regarding the two reasons for the decline of their former agriculture.1 The second measure, he says, was intended to prevent famine in the country, for which purpose the export abroad of all foodstuffs was prohibited. One province was not even allowed to move them to another one without special permits, which must necessarily give rise to monopolies. In that way the stock and produce of the country went to waste during good years, and as all incentives for the countryman ceased, both arable farming and meadowing were neglected and the good years were followed by hard years which still prevail.

The excise duties2 are also a considerable burden on agricultural production, as others have clearly shown. If one adds up all the days of labour of which the inhabitants throughout the country are annually deprived because of them; if as many individuals as constitute the excise service in Sweden and are now engaged in superfluous work are regarded as working unproductively year on year, or that almost 300 days have been squandered in each; if the many thousand daler that are now spent every year on their salaries are added to that and if, moreover, the many barrels of gold that the excise contractors by that means collect from the trades are included; if the many trades and workshops that could be carried on by their employees are now reckoned as lost; and if, finally, the ill will that is provoked between the Crown and the subjects by the excise duties is laid on top of that and all this is gathered in one scale of the balance and in the other the advantages of those who by the abolition of the excise duties might lose a goldmine, as well as the complaints of some indolent officials about their loss of employment, it should not be difficult for a people that boasts of its liberty to conclude which of these should outweigh the other.

The yield of the land is no less diminished by the heavy or even unbearable taxes that are a necessary consequence of the enlargement of the civil establishments.

Had the internal strength of the kingdom increased at the same rate as the number of its public officials in recent years, it would be terrifying to our neighbours. But if we examine this closely, we observe that half the former number of Sweden’s inhabitants is now governed by twice as many senior officials as before, or, what amounts to the same thing, every productive citizen now has to feed four times as many consumers as his forefathers.

I shall pass over entirely all the previous increases in the size of the Swedish bureaucracy. In recent years we have acquired as many officials as we now have time to enumerate. The number of appeal courts has been doubled; jurisdictions have been divided; ombudsmen, public prosecutors, secretaries, deputies, notaries, amanuenses, assistants, etc. etc. have increased in almost all departments and other government bodies, and in addition to these a number of quite new ones have been established, such as the Banking, Law, Statistical, Education, Health, Economic Affairs, Survey and other Commissions and Diet Committees.

The amount of business is blamed for this. That may be so. Promises are made that it will be reduced thereby, but only time will tell whether that is the case. No one should believe, however, that people in our time, generally speaking, work too hard, although there may indeed still be some hard-working officials among the rest. For I have not noticed the absence of honourable participants from our festivities any more than in the old days, although they have become far more extensive and more numerous than formerly. Plays, dances, banquets, ceremonies, concerts, promenades are still attended by respectable people. One also sees worn-out card tables in aristocratic milieux, and taverns and coffee houses are busy and not frequented only by the mob.

I am therefore inclined to think that there is no lack of recreations in our day or of time to devote to them. I would at least maintain that the people as a whole are in no way responsible for this increase in official business, either in the legal or the public finance sector. Can anyone say that our countrymen are by nature more quarrelsome or unmanageable than before? Or have the Crown rents now increased so abnormally that they cannot be collected and are therefore accounted for by the ordinary tax collectors? Our currency is neither confusing to count nor difficult to transport.

  1. Mr Montesquieu presents this entertainingly . . .of their former agriculture.: Chydenius refers rather often to Montesquieu in his writings published in 1765–6, although it is possible that he had not read Persian Letters or The Spirit of the Laws in original. Instead, he seems to have based his views on Montesquieu mainly on second-hand sources. However, Chydenius was probably familiar with Montesquieu’s theory that the world’s population had once been ten times as large as it was in modern times. In his texts, Chydenius frequently mentions that the population of Sweden had once been much larger.
  2. Between 1622 and 1810, anybody who wished to bring his wares to the town for sale had to pay a customs duty known as landtullen or lilla tullen.

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