A SYSTEM

OF

POLITICAL ECONOMY.

BY

JOHN LANCELOT SHADWELL.

LONDON:

TRÜBNER AND CO., LUDGATE HILL.

MDCCCLXXVII.

[All rights reserved.]

PREFACE.

I COMMENCED studying POLITICAL ECONOMY at the time when the publication of Mr. Thornton's work on Labour had just given so rude a shock to the common belief that the science, so far as it dealt with the subjects of Value and Wages, was complete. The late Mr. J. E. Cairnes, whose lectures I had the privilege (for such I must always consider it) of attending, particularly directed the attention of his pupils to the conflict between Mr. Thornton's views and those commonly held on these subjects, and expressed his own opinion that the commonly received theory required thorough revision. His own views were afterwards given to the world in his "Leading Principles of Political Economy," published only a year before his untimely death. My attention having been by him directed to the subject, I have found reason to be dissatisfied with the common theory, with his own modification of it, and with that which Mr. Thornton would substitute in its place. I now wish to lay before the public my theories of Value and Wages, which I believed to be new when I adopted them, but in which I have since found that I have been forestalled, in the former case by Adam Smith and Mr. Cazenove, and in the latter by Mr. Jevons. I have thought that the theories would be likely to receive more attention if worked into a System of Political Economy, and I have, therefore, in the following pages, discussed most of the questions commonly dealt with in treatises on the science. Having been frequently obliged to refer to