It has long been a principle, observed at some length in my own Wealth of Nations, that the produce of a nation's industry is the joint effect of its land, its labour, and its capital stock — and that the statesman who superintends these forces contributes to their direction rather less than he is commonly disposed to believe. It is therefore with characteristic attentiveness that I note the present Chancellor of the Exchequer's response to the Office for National Statistics recording a growth of three-tenths of one per cent in the domestic product during the first month of what is now styled the Iran war.
The Chancellor, seizing upon this figure with a promptness that would do credit to any merchant at a Tuesday market, has declared that now is decidedly not the time to place economic stability at hazard — by which she intimates that her own continuation in office is the principal instrument of that stability. The reasoning, while brisk, is not without a certain internal symmetry: if one tenth of a percentage point may be attributed to sound governance in ordinary times, then three tenths during active hostilities abroad must represent an administrative achievement of the first order.
I do not quarrel with the number itself. The ONS is not in the habit of confecting its quarterly estimates for the convenience of any particular minister, and a positive figure is, in the plain sense, preferable to a negative one. What I observe — and here The Theory of Moral Sentiments furnishes me a useful instrument — is the operation of what I there called the desire to be the proper object of esteem, a desire so native to our condition that even persons of genuine industry are seldom free from it. The Chancellor has looked upon 0.3 per cent and seen, reflected in it, her own face. This is a perfectly human error.
The labouring tradesman who rises at five o'clock that his household may eat does not often receive a press statement for his contribution to the aggregate figure. The farmer who planted before the first frost, the manufacturer whose operatives kept their hours through a season of uncertain freights — these persons have, in the aggregate, produced the three-tenths of a percentage point under discussion. That their exertions should be denominated a proof of ministerial indispensability is a form of accounting that no ledger I have examined would readily sustain.
A sovereign, or those who act in the sovereign's name, performs a useful office when she maintains the security of contracts, the regularity of the currency, and such public works as private interest will not undertake. That she should, in addition, claim credit for the arithmetic of her nation's industry at war is an ambition which history has seldom found it easy to correct.