issue of all alike are in the one direction of trade, in the meaning and rank which they assign to it.

Diametrically opposed to these are such as Storch, a Russian author, and one of the highest rank that the continent of Europe has produced. He says, "Until now, (1815,) political economy has been regarded as the science of the wealth of nations; I have attempted to embrace their prosperity, as equally essential to the objects of the science." Sismondi, an Italian by birth, but a citizen of Geneva, taught that the physical well-being of man, so far as it can be the work of government or society, is the object of political economy; and satirizing the system of Smith and Say, asks: "Is wealth then every thing, and is man absolutely nothing?"

Count Rossi, another Italian, and refugee in early life, and in 1833 the successor of J. B. Say in the chair of Political Economy in Paris, quotes Say's surrender of the doctrine of that treatise which we have in translation in all our libraries, and agrees with his reformed opinion. The recantation is in these words: "The object of political economy seems hitherto to have been confined to a knowledge of the laws which regulate the production, consumption, and distribution of riches, but it may be seen in this work" (his latest, entitled "A complete course of Political Economy") "that this science pertains to every thing in society; that it embraces the entire social system." Is it any wonder that Rossi should say, "in a general review of their writings, it would be difficult to find any two men eminent in the science, who agree as to its nature and limits," when he finds Say himself thus going back upon the whole school of his own disciples!

Joseph Droz, who published in 1829, and who won, even from J. R. McCulloch, the praise of being one of the best elementary writers in the French language, says: "Political Economy is a science the object of which is to render comfort as general as possible." He adds, severely: "The study may dry up narrow minds and reduce their vision on earth to goods and sales and profits, but we must not take riches for an end; they are a means. Some economists speak as if they believed men were made for products, not products for men!"

But we have authorities of our own, home-bred philosophers, who are not mere annotators or cobblers of dislocated and mislocated systems, but men of the time and place, and to the

manner born. As something the earlier in date, we claim the naturalized Professor List, who lived many years, studied and published in the United States; though his work was more effective in Germany, that Germany which shows the fruits of his philosophy in the wonderful things it has achieved within the last five years, and for which it was prepared by the economic policy which he founded in Prussia and the States of the Zollverein more than a quarter of a century before. List, in short, sharp, business style, conforming to the whole drift of his mind, says: "Political Economy is not a science of values; it is a science of the productive power of a people."

We claim List for America, because when he came here he left his books behind him, believing, as he says, that they would only lead him astray. He declares, moreover, that "the best book of political economy in that new country is the volume of life." Here in the space of a few years he saw the transitions from savage life, through all the intermediate stages, up to the most complex and the most advanced states of society. The out-cropping strata of the ages lay before him in contemporaneous display; and from the facts of personal observation he drew all that he cared to teach as a system.

But we have at least two others, qualified by birth and breeding, under the conditions required, to give us an American economy. These are Mr. Colwell and Mr. Carey, whose works, like Lord Bacon's, are so strangely new that their general acceptance may be postponed, but will certainly survive them.

Mr. Colwell defines Political Economy: "The science of human well-being, as it relates to the production and distribution of wealth," and this apprehension rules all his doctrines in principle and tone.

Mr. Carey's system, in generalities and particulars alike, makes man the centre, and his development into constantly higher and better conditions the proper aim of all science and practice relating to him, and especially the proper object of social science and political economy. He inquires of all principles and policies what they propose, and what they can accomplish for the welfare of the human race; and judges their truth and work by this supreme test. He regards "Social Science as treating of the laws which govern man in his efforts toward the maintenance and improvement of his condition, and Political Economy as

concerned with the measures required to enable those laws to take effect.

Alexander Hamilton cannot be classed with the authors of formal treatises in this department of science, but he is entitled to a distinguished position in the rank of both elementary and practical expositors of its principles; just as Shakspeare is not in the list of technical metaphysicians or moralists, though in a most effective way he compasses all that they endeavor to teach. Apprehending some surprise that any thing of advantage is claimed for the birthplace of a speciality of science, I take leave to suggest that, while the abstract sciences are universal, unconditional, and invariable, systems of business affairs, of policies, variant according to national conditions, will be born and bred to the manner of the respective communities. This is what List means by entitling his work "A National system of Political Economy," and we think the idea good against the cosmopolitans of the science. This point, if well taken, allows us to say, further, that the system of principles and policy growing out of the best conditions of things will not only be best adapted to its native territory, but be entitled to the place of a standard for those communities which afford a less favorable origin and inspiration to their system-makers.

The word "science" has done mischief enough in political economy to deserve repudiation. At best, the term is vaguely defined, and loosely used. It is properly applied to anatomy, chemistry, astronomy, and geology, however immature, or inaccurate they may be, because their subjects are constant and orderly, and are under the rule of general and permanent laws; but there are no such conditions in the subjects of therapeutics, civil government, or political economy. These are essentially remedial and regulative; their subjects being disordered, inconsistent, and irregular, and in practice subject not to the absolute and invariable, but to the expedient in treatment. Even Mr. Carey, who does not accept this conclusion, opens the way for it by distinguishing in the range of his inquiries between what he calls social science and political economy. The broad generalities which can fairly claim to be truly scientific may be stowed away in a division for use in the Millennium, if then they shall be required either for indoctrination or practice; but it would be mischievous to allow them to interfere in the incongruities

which they must necessarily ignore and cannot regulate. Economists ought at least to postpone universality until they can achieve some tolerable agreement concerning the fundamentals of their doctrine.

A science of political economy might incarnate itself in a communism or in a despotism of production and trade, but it is alien and hostile to a republicanism of business affairs; an opinion which we think is well supported by the fact that the writers who make this claim for it are really the advocates and promoters of industrial domination for the most advanced commercial nations and hopeless subserviency for all others.

We can understand how the Esquimaux can have an invariable public law or rule of conduct in their commerce with other peoples. Their productive industry differs in nothing with which political economy is concerned from that of the polar bears and walrusses. Even somewhat nearer the borders of civilization barter in furs and fish-bones can be just as well conducted with foreigners under a science or system of trade as without one. Again, in the tropical, and in great degree in the semi-tropical, regions of the earth, there is such constancy or fixity of conditions, and such limitations of industrial productiveness, and their communities are so far removed from the class of progressive nations, that the primal laws of nature, which are capable of a scientific construction, need very little, if any, modification for the direction of their industrial and commercial relations. these kinds of communities a theory of their interests is just what a work on botany is to the vegetable world-descriptive, but not in any sense directory. It is just as far from a code of economical laws as a zoological treatise is from a system of jurisprudence for the wild beasts of the forests; or, as concerns our argument, they can have a scientific and invariable doctrine of economic affairs, for the simple but sufficient reason that they need none whatever.

To

There is yet another state of things to which a universal law of labor and trade very properly conforms-a condition of labor, force, skill, and capital, which in unrestricted play can assert supremacy and hold the monopoly of all the highest rewards of industry and enterprise. Among such a people we may look for the dogmas of universality, cosmopolitanism, and whatever secures and extends the domination of the strongest. These are

anxious to find and to propagate a science of the nature of things as they exist. Sturdily they deny the existence of original sin in the nature of the world's business affairs, refuse every thing like remedial, defensive, or corroborative treatment, and only cultivate a know-every-thing philosophy for the purpose of establishing a do-nothing policy among the sufferers by disparity of national conditions. Being well satisfied with the results of the doctrine, they give it a name with an admonition in it—the letalone system, and turn over the discontented to the law of unlimited competition, in which game they hold the winning cards. Arriving at universal supremacy, they are in need of a universal law, and so they call their policy a science-a capital device for making dupes to be turned into slaves.

But we beg that we shall not be understood as impeaching the moral motives of the school of do-nothing philosophers. They are only another instance of the nationality and conditionality of economical systems, and thus they reinforce our general objections to the scientific pretensions of any public or national economy, and warrants the resistance of national interests and instincts to the rule of any particular community, which would make itself the workshop of the world and the common carrier of all the seas.

Admitting that the tribes of men whom we call savage, and the nations who hold the supremacy in industry and commerce, get along at their best without an economical system, of any kind, which, being nothing and doing nothing, is honestly without a name in the Arctic circle and the heart of Africa, but is styled a science in Western Europe-the science of Laissez-faire -we nevertheless may, all the more, believe that those nations of the temperate climates, as yet inferior in the acts and forces of industrial production, but well provided for progress, and capable of large and beneficent relations with all races and kindreds of men, with a future before them and a destiny to achieve, have their fortunes to make or mar by their own management. Their destiny is not determined by a vertical sun in the heavens, or a continent of ice on the earth. They occupy a position that confers freedom, requires direction, and imposes responsibility. Moreover, they are specially exposed to the interested hostility of all of their own class and kindred among the older nations that are, by virtue of greater age and advancement, in the situa