346 THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT bk. vi

themselves and impoverish us. Yet had I rather advanceour wares in price, as they advance theirs, as we now do;though some be losers thereby, and yet not so many as shouldbe the other way.” On this point he had the unqualifiedapproval of his editor several decades later (1581). In the17th century, this attitude recurred again without any funda-mental change in significance. Thus, Malynes believed thisunfortunate position to be the result of what he dreaded aboveall things, i.e. a foreign under-valuation of the English exchange.... The same conception then recurred continually.In his Verbum Sapienti (written 1665, published 1691), Pettybelieved that the violent efforts to increase the quantity ofmoney could only cease “when we have certainly more moneythan any of our Neighbour States (though never so little),both in Arithmetical and Geometrical proportion”. Duringthe period between the writing and the publication of thiswork, Coke declared, “If our Treasure were more than ourNeighbouring Nations, I did not care whether we had onefifth part of the Treasure we now have” (1675). 1

(3) The mercantilists were the originals of “thefear of goods” and the scarcity of money as causes ofunemployment which the classicals were to denouncetwo centuries later as an absurdity:

One of the earliest instances of the application of theunemployment argument as a reason for the prohibition ofimports is to be found in Florence in the year 1426. . . . TheEnglish legislation on the matter goes back to at least 1455....An almost contemporary French decree of 1466, forming thebasis of the silk industry of Lyons, later to become so famous,was less interesting in so far as it was not actually directedagainst foreign goods. But it, too, mentioned the possibilityof giving work to tens of thousands of unemployed men andwomen. It is seen how very much this argument was in theair at the time. . . .

The first great discussion of this matter, as of nearly allsocial and economic problems, occurred in England in themiddle of the 16th century or rather earlier, during the reignsof Henry VIII and Edward VI. In this connection wecannot but mention a series of writings, written apparently atthe latest in the 1530’s, two of which at any rate are believed1 Heckscher, op. cit. vol. ii. p. 235.