340 THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT bk. vi

of the distribution of the product resulting from theemployment of a given quantity of resources, theclassical theory has made a contribution to economicthinking which cannot be impugned. It is impossibleto think clearly on the subject without this theory asa part of one’s apparatus of thought. I must not besupposed to question this in calling attention to theirneglect of what was valuable in their predecessors.Nevertheless, as a contribution to statecraft, which isconcerned with the economic system as whole and withsecuring the optimum employment of the system’sentire resources, the methods of the early pioneers ofeconomic thinking in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies may have attained to fragments of practicalwisdom which the unrealistic abstractions of Ricardo firstforgot and then obliterated. There was wisdom in theirintense preoccupation with keeping down the rateof interest by means of usury laws (to which wewill return later in this chapter), by maintaining thedomestic stock of money and by discouraging rises inthe wage-unit; and in their readiness in the last resortto restore the stock of money by devaluation, if it hadbecome plainly deficient through an unavoidable foreigndrain, a rise in the wage-unit 1 , or any other cause.

hi

The early pioneers of economic thinking may havehit upon their maxims of practical wisdom without hav-ing had much cognisance of the underlying theoreticalgrounds. Let us, therefore, examine briefly the reasonsthey gave as well as what they recommended. This is

1 Experience since the age of Solon at least, and probably, if we hadthe statistics, for many centuries before that, indicates what a knowledgeof human nature would lead us to expect, namely, that there is a steadytendency for the wage-unit to rise over long periods of time and that it canbe reduced only amidst the decay and dissolution of economic society.Thus, apart altogether from progress and increasing population, a graduallyincreasing stock of money has proved imperative.