Science Quote by Joseph Hume

Worse there cannot be is a rhetorical trapdoor: Joseph Hume starts by slamming the door on complacency, then immediately pivots to a conditional hope that feels earned rather than sentimental. The sentence is long, workmanlike, almost procedural, and that is the point. He isn’t trying to inspire the crowd; he’s trying to discipline it into a single policy logic: unemployment is not a moral failing, not a temporary blip, but a structural problem that requires mobilizing capital and skill toward exports.

The subtext is a rebuke to the cozy politics of domestic tinkering. Hume frames exports as the only lever that counts, a deliberately narrowing claim. By insisting that only export growth can generate employment, he sidelines other remedies (poor relief, protectionism, make-work schemes) as comforting illusions. Even the phrase flatter ourselves carries a faint scorn: the public wants to be reassured; Hume says reassurance without trade performance is vanity.

Context matters. Hume lived through the upheavals of industrialization, post-Napoleonic economic strain, and the recurring spectacle of underemployment in a rapidly changing economy. Though tagged here as a scientist, he writes like a hard-nosed political economist of the period: faith in productive capacity, suspicion of inertia, and a conviction that national prosperity is earned in competitive markets, not legislated into existence.

What makes the line work is its austere causality. No grand theory, just a chain: energy + capital + skill -> exports -> jobs. It’s technocratic, yes, but also moral: a demand that the country stop flattering itself and start producing.