by Karl Marx

*Neue Rheinische Zeitung.* No. 116, October 14, 1848

Monsieur Thiers publishes in the *Constitutionnel* a pamphlet on “Property”. We shall examine this classically written triviality in greater detail as soon as the complete publication is available. Monsieur Thiers has suddenly broken it off. For the moment it is sufficient to note that the “great” Belgian papers, the *Observateur* and the *Indépendance*, are enthusiastic about Monsieur Thiers’ piece. Today we shall briefly examine the speech on mortgage bonds delivered by Monsieur Thiers in the French National Assembly on October 10, a speech which, according to the Belgian *Indépendance*, has dealt paper money the “death-blow”. But Monsieur Thiers is also, as the *Indépendance* says, an orator who handles political questions, financial questions, social questions, with equal superiority.

This speech interests us only because it displays the tactics of the knights of the old conditions, a tactics they rightly counterpose to the Don Quixotes of the new.

Ask for a partial reform of industrial and commercial conditions, like Monsieur Turck, whom Thiers is replying to, and they hold up against you the interlinking and interaction of the entire organisation. Demand the overthrow of the entire organisation and you are destructive, revolutionary, unscrupulous, utopian, and overlook the partial reforms. The result is therefore: let everything remain as it is.

Monsieur Turck, for example, wants to make it easier for the peasants to realise the value of their landed property by means of official mortgage banks. He wants to put their property into circulation without its having to pass through the hands of the usurer. In France, namely, as in all countries where parcelling prevails, the rule of the feudal lords has been transformed into the rule of the capitalists, and the feudal obligations of the peasants have been converted into bourgeois mortgage obligations.

What is Monsieur Thiers’ first reply?

If you want to help the peasants through public credit institutions, you harm the small trader. You cannot help the one without damaging the other.

Then we must transform the entire credit system?

By no means! That is a utopia. So Monsieur Turck is dismissed.

The small trader for whom Monsieur Thiers shows such tender concern is the great Bank of France.

The competition of paper notes for 2 milliards of mortgages would ruin its monopoly and its dividends and perhaps something more. Behind Monsieur Thiers’ argument, then, there lurks in the background — Rothschild.

Let us come to another argument of Monsieur Thiers. The proposal for mortgages, says Monsieur Thiers, does not really concern agriculture itself at all.

That landed property is only put into circulation under aggravating circumstances, that it is realised only with difficulty, that capital, so to speak, flees from it — all this, remarks Monsieur Thiers, lies in its “nature”. It yields only a small profit.

But on the other hand, Monsieur Thiers cannot deny that it lies in the “nature” of modern industrial organisation that all industries, therefore also agriculture, can only flourish if their products and their instruments can be easily realised, exchanged, mobilised.

In the case of land this is not the case. Hence the conclusion would be: within the existing civilised conditions agriculture cannot flourish.

One must therefore change the existing conditions, and a small, even if inconsistent, start towards such a change is the proposal of Monsieur Turck. By no means! exclaims Thiers. “Nature”, i.e., present social relations, condemns agriculture to its present condition. Present social relations are “nature”, i.e., immutable. The assertion of their immutability is of course the most striking proof against any proposal for change. If “monarchy” is nature, every republican attempt is a rebellion against nature.

According to Monsieur Thiers it is also obvious that landed property always yields by nature the same small profits, whether the state advances capital to the landowner at 3 per cent or the usurer at 10 per cent. It is simply “nature”.

But by identifying industrial profit with the rent yielded by agriculture, Monsieur Thiers simply puts forward an assertion that contradicts present social relations, that which he calls “nature”.

While industrial profit in general is constantly falling, ground rent, i.e., the value of land, is constantly rising. Monsieur Thiers would therefore have to explain the phenomenon that the peasant is nevertheless constantly becoming impoverished. He naturally does not enter into this sphere.

What is further of truly remarkable superficiality is what Thiers says about the difference between French and English agriculture.

The whole difference, Thiers informs us, consists in the land tax. We pay very high land tax, the English none at all. Apart from the inaccuracy of the latter assertion, Monsieur Thiers certainly knows that in England the poor rate and a mass of other taxes that do not exist in France fall on agriculture.

Monsieur Thiers’ argument is applied in the reverse sense by English advocates of small-scale agriculture. Do you know, they say, why English corn is more expensive than French corn? Because we pay ground rent, and high ground rent, which the French do not, since on average they are not tenants but small proprietors. Hence long live small property!

All the shameless triviality of Thiers is required to dissolve the English concentration of the instrument of labour, the land — by which the application of machinery and the division of labour on a large scale to agriculture is made possible — the interaction between English industry and English trade on the one hand, and agriculture on the other, all these many-branched relations, into the single meaningless phrase, the English pay no land tax.

To Monsieur Thiers’ view that the present mortgage system in France is a matter of indifference for agriculture, we counterpose the view of the greatest French agronomic chemist. Dombasle has proved in detail that if the present mortgage system develops further in France in accordance with “nature”, French agriculture will become an impossibility.

What impudent flatness is needed, anyway, to assert that the relations of landed property are a matter of indifference to agriculture, in other words, that the social relations within which production takes place are a matter of indifference to production?

It hardly needs any further explanation, moreover, that Monsieur Thiers, who wants to preserve the credit of the big capitalists, must not give any credit to the little ones. The credit of the big capitalists is precisely the creditlessness of the little ones. We certainly do not deny that it is impossible to help the small man within the present system by any financial sleight of hand. But Thiers had to assert this, since he regards the present world as the best of all possible worlds.

With regard to this part of Thiers’ speech, therefore, we have only one further remark to make. While he speaks against the mobilisation of landed property and, on the other hand, praises English conditions, he forgets that agriculture in England possesses the advantage in the highest degree that it is carried on on a factory scale and that ground rent, i.e., landed property, is a mobile, transferable exchange paper like any other. Factory-scale agriculture, i.e., the running of agriculture in the manner of large-scale industry, itself requires mobilisation, commercially easy exchangeability of landed property.

The second part of Monsieur Thiers’ speech consists of attacks on paper money in general. He calls the issue of paper money outright forgery. He tells us the great truth that if an excessively large quantity of means of circulation, i.e., money, is thrown onto the market, the money itself is depreciated, so that both private individuals and the state are defrauded. This is especially the case with mortgage banks.

All these are discoveries to be found in the worst catechisms of political economy.

Let us make a distinction. It is clear that we do not increase production, i.e., real wealth, by arbitrarily increasing the money, be it paper or metallic currency. In a card game we do not double our tricks by doubling the counters.

On the other hand it is equally clear that if production is hampered in its development by a lack of counters, of means of exchange, of money, every increase in the means of exchange, every reduction in the difficulty of obtaining means of exchange, is at the same time an increase in production. Bills of exchange, banks, etc., owe their origin to this production requirement. In this way agriculture can be promoted by mortgage banks.

But what Monsieur Thiers is really fighting for is not metallic currency against paper money. He has himself played too much on the exchange to be caught in the prejudices of the old mercantilists. What he is combating is the regulation of credit by society represented in the state, as against the regulation of credit by monopoly. The beginning of a regulation of credit in the general social interest was precisely Turck’s proposal for a general mortgage bank whose notes would have a legal rate of exchange, however little this proposal signifies in its isolation.