equally eminent meanwhile cautioning the British public against "advocating the rights of labor," lest they find themselves to have been “digging a grave for free trade;" a third cautioning French authorities against admitting the truth of the idea that the work of cultivation had commenced on the poorer soils, for the reason that "it led inevitably to protection.

Such is the politico-economical science whose foundations have now been placed in the grocer's shop and the peddler's wallet; whose every suggestion is opposed to that which common sense and common humanity teach the British people should of right be done;† whose one idea is found in the words

* Journal des Economistes, Dec. 1851, p. 297.

"Proposals for legislative interference with a view to arrest some of the most frightful evils of society are still constantly opposed not by careful analysis of their tendency, but by general assertions of Natural Law as opposed to all legislation of the kind. You cannot make men moral by Act of Parliament'-such is a common enunciation of Principle, which, like many others of the same kind, is in one sense a truism, and in every other sense a fallacy. It is true that neither wealth, nor health, nor knowledge, nor morality can be given by Act of Parliament. But it is also true that the acquisition of one and of all these can be impeded and prevented by bad laws, as well as aided and encouraged by wise and appropriate legislation.”—Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, p. 404.

When a few years since it had been shown that in the bleaching establishments of both England and Scotland men, women, and children were required to work for sixteen to twenty hours per day under such a temperature that their feet frequently became blistered by reason of the heating of the nails in the floor, and that because of the waste of life therein they had attained the name of "wasting shops :" when these things had been officially certified to, Parliament rejected a bill providing for putting them under the same restrictions as to hours of labor as had already been established for cotton mills; so doing avowedly on the ground that such measures were opposed to true political economy as well as injurious to trade.

Mr. Herbert Spencer objects most positively to all such measures for

"free trade;" whose terms are so undefined that it may safely be said of it, as has been said of metaphysics, that its language was that of one who did not understand himself, addressed to another who did not understand him; whose tendencies were well described by the elder Napoleon when he said that, carried into practical effect," they would grind to powder the most powerful empires;" whose result, thus far, has been that of giving to England an ever-rising tide of pauperism, and a rural population with, according to Edinburgh Reviewers, no future but the poorhouse; and whose professors yet claim to be disciples in the school of Adam Smith, the man who, were he now alive, would stand before the world as chief opponent of the science that has nothing but baseless "assumptions" on which to stand.*

§ 8. The following passages from an excellent article on The Method of Political Economy, in a recent British journal, are, in conclusion, here reproduced for the reader's consideration:

So far we have considered political economy only as a mental science, because economists will insist on treating the subject

protecting the poor and weak against the rich and powerful, on the ground that it is the duty of government "to see that the liberty of each man to pursue the object of his desires is unrestricted." In support of this view he cites the late Mr. Cobden, but he might equally have cited the whole slaveholding body of America, opposed, as it had been, to the adoption of any course of action tending to prevent its members from doing as they liked with their own," whether as regarded negro slaves or bales of cotton.

* The reader who may desire to see a more full examination of some of the details of the modern science will do well to consult an article on "Economic Fallacies" in the London Quarterly Review for July, 1871.

exclusively from a mental point of view. But political economy is quite as much a physical science as a mental one. Wealth is a material and tangible object, which is not to be secured by wishing for it, but by acting in strict accordance with the physical conditions of its existence. The production of the simplest commodity involves the operation of numerous laws of matter. There is a perpetual action and reaction going on of mind on matter and matter on mind. An effect which may appear as the result of one cause, may in reality be the result of a whole series of causes. To explain the effect, therefore, we must take into account, not one, but every cause that might in the remotest degree have had any influence in producing it. It so happens. that in political economy the effects are more accessible than the causes, and this points to the inductive method as the proper one for an investigation of this kind. Treated by the inductive method, political economy is a science of the highest practical value; treated a priori, it is not a science at all, but only a scientific artifice, a mere theory of human action in one particular direction, and which has not even the merit of being approximately correct.

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'Political economy has not yet even arrived at the first or preparatory period. We have not yet begun to collect and arrange our facts. Political economy is in the same state to-day that geology was before the days of Hutton and William Smith, or as the science of language was when comparative philology was unknown, and Hebrew was supposed to be the one primeval language of the human race.

"The charges brought against the science by Comte were not. altogether uncalled for. Political economy exhibits no sign of progressiveness. Instead of discoveries, of which we have had none of any consequence since Adam Smith's time, we have had endless disputation and setting up of dogmas. It was so in Comte's day, and so it is in ours. Whatever progress may have been made in other sciences during the last century, there has been none in this. The most elementary principles are still matters of dispute. The doctrine of free trade, for instance,

which is looked upon as the crowning triumph of political economy, is still very far from being universally recognized. Even in England, after twenty years' trial under most favorable circumstances, free trade has been put upon its defence. We make no progress, and from the very nature of our method of investigation, we can make none. The political economist. observes phenomena with a foregone conclusion as to their cause. His method, in fact, is the method of the savage. The phenomena of nature, the thunder, the lightning, or the earthquake, strike the savage with awe and wonder; but he only looks within himself for an explanation of these phenomena. To him, therefore, the forces of nature are only the efforts of beings like himself-great and powerful no doubt, but with good and evil propensities and subject to every human caprice. Like the political economist, he works within the vicious circle of his own feelings, and he cannot comprehend any more than the savage how he can discover the laws which regulate the phenomena which he sees around him. The savage would reduce the Divine mind to the dimensions of the human; the political economist would reduce the human mind to the dimensions of his ideal.

"Our conclusion is that the inductive method is alone applicable to the investigation of economic science, and that we shall never be able to make any solid progress so long as we continue to follow the a priori method-method which has not aided, but clogged and fettered us in the pursuit of truth, and which is utterly alien to the spirit of modern scientific inquiry."— Westminster Review, July, 1871.

That the views thus presented are correct is beyond question. Political Economy, as now taught, is in a position closely correspondent with that occupied by Astronomy before the days of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo: There, too, must it remain until its professors shall qualify themselves for furnishing answers to the simple questions-Whence comes the idea of value? Of what does value consist?

CHAPTER II.

OF SCIENCE AND ITS METHODS.

§ 1. THE first man, when he had day after day even for a single week witnessed the rising and setting of the sun, the former having invariably been accompanied by the presence of light, while the latter had as invariably been followed by its absence, had thus acquired the first rude elements of positive knowledge, or science. The cause-the sun's rising-being given, it would have been beyond his power to conceive that the effect should not follow. With further observation he learned to remark that at certain seasons of the year the luminary appeared to traverse particular portions of the heavens, that then it was always warm, and the trees put forth leaves, to be followed by fruit; whereas, at others, it appeared to occupy other portions of the heavens, the fruit then disappearing and the leaves falling, as a prelude to the winter's cold. Here was a further addition to his stock of knowledge, bringing with it foresight, and a feeling of the necessity for action. If he would live during the season of cold, he could do so only by preparing for it during the season of heat, a principle as thoroughly understood by the wandering Esquimaux of the shores of the Arctic Ocean as by the most