Yet in all of these societies, it is the _government_ that is in financial difficulties, not the societies themselves. To put the matter negatively, our revolutions did not occur in societies economically backward, nor in societies undergoing widespread economic misery or depression. You will not find in these societies of the old regime anything like unusually widespread economic want. In a specific instance, of course, the standard against which want or depression is measured must be the standard of living more or less acceptable to a given group at a given time. What satisfied an English peasant in 1640 would be misery and want for an Iowa farmer of 1938. It is possible that certain groups in a society may be in unusual want even though statistically that abstraction “society as a whole” is enjoying an increasing--and almost equally abstract--“national income.” Nevertheless, when national income is rapidly increasing, someone does get the benefit. We must look more carefully at our four societies in this respect.
France in 1789 was a very striking example of a rich society with an impoverished government. The eighteenth century had begun to collect statistics about itself, and though these would not satisfy a modern economist they enable us to be very certain about the increasing prosperity of eighteenth-century France. Any series of indices--foreign trade, population growth, building, manufactures, agricultural production--will show a general upward trend all through the eighteenth century. Here are a few examples: wastelands all over France were being brought under the plow and in the _élection_ of Melun alone in two years from 1783 to 1785 uncultivated land was reduced from 14,500 to 10,000 arpents; Rouen in 1787 produced annually cotton cloth worth fifty millions of _livres_, having at least doubled its production in a generation; French trade with North Africa (the Barbary Coast) increased from about 1,000,000 _livres_ in 1740 to 6,216,000 _livres_ in 1788; the total French foreign trade had in 1787 increased nearly 100,000,000 _livres_ in the dozen years since the death of Louis XV in 1774.
Even in our imperfect statistics we can distinguish short-term cyclical variations, and it seems clear that in some respects, notably in the wheat harvest, 1788-89 was a bad year. It was, however, by no means a deep trough year like 1932 for this country. If business men in eighteenth-century France had kept charts and made graphs, the lines would have mounted with gratifying consistency through most of the period preceding the French revolution. Now this prosperity was certainly most unevenly shared. The people who got the lion’s share of it seem to have been the merchants, bankers, business men, lawyers, peasants who ran their own farms as businesses; the middle class, as we have come to call it. It was precisely these prosperous people who in the 1780’s were loudest against the government, most reluctant to save it by paying taxes.
In America, of course, with an empty continent available for the distressed, general economic conditions in the eighteenth century show increasing wealth and population, with economic distress a purely relative matter. There can be no talk of starvation, of grinding poverty in the New England of the Stamp Act. Even the minor fluctuations of the business cycle fail to coincide with the revolution, and the early years of the 1770’s were distinctly years of prosperity. There were economic stresses and strains in colonial America, as we shall soon see, but no class ground down with poverty.
Nor is it easy to argue that early Stuart England was less prosperous than late Tudor England had been. There is rather evidence that, especially in the years of personal government which preceded the Long Parliament, England was notably prosperous. Ramsay Muir writes that “England had never known a more steady or more widely diffused prosperity and the burden of taxation was less than in any other country. The coming revolution was certainly not due to economic distress.” Even in the Russia of 1917, apart from the shocking breakdown of the machinery of government under war-strain, the productive capacity of society as a whole was certainly greater than at any other time in Russian history; and to take again the long view, the economic graphs had all been mounting for Russia as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the progress in trade and production since the abortive revolution of 1905 had been notable.
Our revolutions, then, clearly were not born in societies economically retrograde; on the contrary, they took place in societies economically progressive. This does not, of course, mean that no groups within these societies cherished grievances mainly economic in character. Two main foci for economic motives of discontent seem to stand out. First, and much the less important, is the actual misery of certain groups in a given society. No doubt in all our societies, even in America, there was a sort of submarginal group of poor people whose release from certain forms of restraint is a very important feature of revolution itself. But in studying the preliminary signs of revolution, these people are not very important. French republican historians have long insisted on the importance of the bad harvest of 1788, the cold winter of 1788-89, and the consequent sufferings of the poor. Bread was relatively dear in that spring when the Estates-General first assembled. There was apparently a tightening up of business conditions in America in 1774-75, but certainly nothing like widespread distress or unemployment. The local sufferings of Boston, considerable under the Port Bill, were really a part of the revolution itself, and not a sign. The winter of 1916-17 was certainly a bad one in Russia, with food rationing in all the cities.
The important thing to note, however, is that French and Russian history are filled with famines, plagues, bad harvests, sometimes local, sometimes national in sweep, many of which were accompanied by sporadic rioting, but in each case only one by revolution. In neither the English nor the American revolution do we find even this degree of localized want or famine. Clearly, then, the economic distress of the under-privileged, though it may well accompany a revolutionary situation, is not one of the symptoms we need dwell upon. This the subtler Marxists themselves recognize, and Trotsky has written: “In reality, the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.”
Of much greater importance is the existence among a group, or groups, of a feeling that prevailing conditions limit or hinder their economic activity. We are especially aware of this element in our American revolution, and Professor A. M. Schlesinger has shown how the prosperous merchants, their immediate interests damaged by the new imperial policy of the British government, led an agitation against the legislation of 1764 and 1765 and helped stir up a discontent among the less well-to-do which these merchants later found a bit embarrassing. No doubt, too, that many of the firm spots in the very uneven and wavering policy of the British government--the Stamp Act and subsequent disorders, the announced intention of enforcing the Navigation Act, and so on--did have momentary ill effects on business, did throw men out of work. The currency question was of course mismanaged in a day when common sense did not very effectively supplement ignorance of economic processes. The colonies were always lacking in specie, and business enterprise suffered from this lack. Paper money, to which recourse was inevitable, was also an inevitable source of further quarrels between governors and governed.
The working of economic motives to revolt among possessing classes normally inclined to support existing institutions is especially clear among the aristocrats of tidewater Virginia. Largely dependent on a single crop, tobacco, used to a high standard of living, increasingly indebted to London bankers, many of the planters hoped to recoup their fortunes in the western lands they regarded as clearly belonging to Virginia. George Washington’s own involvements in western land speculations make one of the favorite topics of the debunkers. By the Quebec Act of 1774, however, the British government took the trans-Allegheny lands north of the Ohio from Virginia and other claimant colonies, and incorporated them with Canada. This act gave a grievance to others besides the planter-speculator. The closing of this frontier was also an offense to a class perhaps normally more inclined to revolt--the restless woodsmen and fur traders, and the only slightly less restless small pioneer farmers who had already occupied the Appalachian valleys, and were ready to pour over into the Kentucky and Ohio country. The Quebec Act in itself does not, of course, explain the American revolution; but taken with a long series of other acts, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Act, the Molasses Act, it accounts for the feeling so evident among active and ambitious groups in America that British rule was an unnecessary and incalculable restraint, an obstacle to their full success in life.