Second Memoir on Pauperism, Post 4

These unforeseen misfortunes begin for the worker in commercial crises.

One can definitely attribute commercial crises to two causes:
When the number of workers rises without the level of production also rising, salaries decrease and there is a crisis.
When the number of workers stays the same, but the level of production must decrease, many workers become useless and there is a crisis.

We have seen that France is much less exposed than other industrial nations to crises of the first kind because here, the agricultural class is never exposed as immediately and as violently as is the industrial class.

The agricultural class is also less exposed than many other many other manufacturing populations to crises of the second kind because France depends less on foreigners.  I will explain.

When the industry of a nation depends on the whims and needs of foreign countries, located far away, and nearly unknown, one can conceive that these whims and needs change according to causes that one cannot foresee, an industrial revolution is always to be feared.  When, on the contrary, the only or the principal consumers of the products of a country is found within that country, its needs and tastes will not vary in such a sudden and unforeseen way that the producer cannot discover the coming change far in advance, and this change will happen gradually; there is a disturbance in trade, but rarely a crisis.

The world is evidently progressing towards a point where all nations will be equally civilized, or in other words, similar enough to one another so that they can produce within themselves the majority of articles that are agreeable and necessary.  Commerical crises will then become more rare and less cruel.  But that time is still far away; in the present, there are still enough inequality among the knowledge, power, and industry of the different peoples, for some of them to undertake the production, for most of the other peoples, of articles that they need.  These peoples, entrepreneurs of human industry, easily amass immense fortunes, but they are unceasingly menaced by great danger.  Such is the position of England.  The commercial situation of France is simultaneously less brilliant and more certain.  France only exports the [?] of her products; the rest flows to the interior.  For us, the amount consumed continues to rise, but the new consumers are, in general, French.

In France, commercial crises can neither be so frequent, nor so general, nor so cruel as in England.  But one cannot entirely eliminate the possibility of crisis, because there is no known way to balance, exactly and permanently, even within one nation, the number of workers and jobs or the levels of consumption and production.