Time & Perspective Quote by Joseph Hume

Starvation, in Hume's framing, is a rounding error waiting to be corrected by better trade figures. The line is chilling because it dresses hunger in the tidy arithmetic of political economy: three-quarters fed now, entirely fed once exports rise. That tidy progression is the point. It smuggles a moral crisis into a ledger, inviting Parliament to treat bodies like balance-sheet entries and public welfare like an output of industrial throughput.

The specific intent is persuasion through apparent pragmatism. Hume is arguing for policies that boost manufactured exports (lower tariffs, freer trade, expanded markets) by promising a concrete, almost mechanical payoff: more production equals fuller stomachs. It's a utilitarian appeal pitched to legislators who respond to measurable outcomes, not sentimental pleading. The phrase "improvement in the export of our manufactures" is carefully bloodless; it shifts attention from the messy causes of poverty (wages, enclosure, the Poor Laws, urban crowding) to a single lever the state can pull.

Subtext: England's working poor are treated as fuel for the industrial machine, and their hunger becomes a problem of insufficient commercial velocity. "Only three-quarters fed" implies a norm of acceptable deprivation; the scandal isn't that people are hungry, but that the nation isn't extracting maximum productivity from its manufacturing sector. It also suggests a kind of technocratic optimism typical of early 19th-century reformers: social suffering can be engineered away, if we get the economics right.

Context matters: Britain in this period is industrializing fast, exporting more, and still experiencing deep insecurity and periodic food crises. Hume's sentence captures the era's faith that markets can double as morality - and exposes how easily that faith can anesthetize compassion.