Science Quote by Joseph Hume

“Import everything we can use or sell” lands like provocation because it flips the gut-level protectionist instinct on its head. Hume’s sentence is built to sound almost insultingly obvious: if poverty is the problem, then widen the pipeline of goods. But the cunning move is that imports aren’t framed as surrender to foreign producers; they’re framed as the raw material of domestic employment. Imports become a jobs program.

The intent is practical and political. Hume, a leading voice in early 19th-century British free trade agitation, is arguing against the then-powerful idea that restricting foreign goods preserves local work. His logic: trade isn’t a zero-sum contest of national pride; it’s an exchange mechanism that forces an economy to specialize. You “pay for these imports” with goods you produce, which means the real engine of employment is not walling off the market but keeping it circulating.

The subtext is a moral claim disguised as economic arithmetic. “Unemployed hands” is deliberately tactile; it turns abstract policy into idle bodies. Poverty (pauperism) is treated less as personal failing than as a misallocation problem created by bad policy - especially tariffs and monopolistic protections that choke demand and distort prices. That’s also why the cadence matters: “clear,” “should,” “everything” - the language of inevitability, meant to shame hesitation.

Context sharpens the edge. In the decades before and around the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), “pauperism” was a live political threat: urbanization, industrial shocks, and the Poor Laws made poverty not just tragic but destabilizing. Hume’s trade argument is, at root, an anti-unrest argument: keep markets open, keep people working, keep society governable.