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to his hearth-stone, and the dog, whose fidelity to his person seems like the emanation from a higher nature. As the different offshoots of the race descended to the lower tracts that the receding waters gave up to culture, and as each little tribe waxed in numbers, it has taken on a higher social organization, with a vast increase in the command of the individual members over the elements of physical comfort, a vast accession to their realized property, and to their power to elaborate yet more from the materials and the forces which nature gives without stint to those who know how to ask her. With diminished toil for the satisfaction of the pressing material wants, and diminished fear of inability to meet them in the future, man has acquired leisure for the cultivation of his intellect, and increased freedom to indulge the social affections, which lift him out of the domain of selfishness, soften and refine his nature, and make it capable of all moral improvement. Physical, intellectual, and moral progress, inseparably interdependent, is the historical fact characteristic of our species, and union in societies, its observed condition.

To investigate the laws which explain man's attainment, through association, of enlarged power over matter in all its forms, and the development of his intellectual and moral faculties, in virtue of that power, is the object of Political Economy.

Those things and events are said to be the subjects of law, between which there is a regular and uniform mode of succession, the nature of which may be expressed in one or more general propositions; so that when we observe the things or events which stand in the relation of antecedent, we are enabled to predict those which will be consequent. The collection and methodical arrangement of those laws, make the science of the subject to which they relate.

In the infancy of the race, as of the individual, every appearance and succession of appearances is regarded as accidental, or is attributed to the direct interposition of mythological powers, whose qualities are so vaguely conceived, as to make the idea of an event's depending upon their action scarcely one remove from that of its being absolutely fortuitous, and irreducible to order or rule. Every accession to knowledge diminishes the catalogue of things thus regarded as outside the pale, within which certain effects are confi

dently anticipated to result from given causes, and arranges them in relations with each other, no longer imagined as fluctuating, but distinctly seen to be constant and invariable. Knowledge gives power, because when a law is once perceived and understood man can conform to it, for the purpose of producing an effect he desires, by arranging the ascertained causes in that method of grouping which the law dictates, instead of wasting his energies and missing his object, in blind endeavours to obtain it in a way other than that which the Lord of Nature has appointed. What a world of barren experiments was saved, for example, when the law of definite proportions was added to chemistry, and men became aware that as oxygen combines with other elements in quantities measured by 8, and its multiples, 16, 24, &c., every attempt to effect a combination in other proportions must end in failure. "Man," says a great philosopher, "commands Nature only by obeying her laws;" laws which undergo no revision, and contain no saving clauses for the benefit of ignorance, or the exemption of favourites.

Is it possible to construct a science of Political Economy? In other words, are there laws grounded in the constitution of things and of man, fixed and invariable successions of effects determined by the causes which precede them,-regulating the progress of men in association with each other, in extending their dominion over matter and their concurrent improvement in intellect and morals?— and are these laws discoverable? What and how many of them have been discovered, is a different question. What is unquestionable, is, that there are professors of what is styled a science of Political Economy, teaching in the schools and through the press a body of precepts, tending more or less to the object we have assigned as that of its investigations. On the other hand, it is denied that there is yet such a science, by some even who concede there will be one at some future time. A writer,* who has brought the acumen of the legal profession, as well as great general ability and sound feeling, to the exposure of fallacies in the existing system of the English Economists, while confidently trusting that "a science of Political Economy will yet dawn that shall perform as well as promise

* Mr. Serjeant Byles: Sophisms of Free Trade, page 3, eighth edition.

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science that will rain the riches of Nature in the laps of the starving poor-" speaks of its present state in his own country as follows: "The need of a Political Economy very different from the inert and barren system now in fashion, is but too apparent to any one who looks around him. Modern society presents to the serious observer, as the consequence of past and present systems of Political Economy, practical results by no means flattering. The immense progress of physical science has multiplied a thousand-fold the means of producing wealth. There is

in the overflowing and exhaustless bounty of Nature, not only enough, but a superfluity for every one of the children of men. Yet, some mysterious and invisible, but impassable barrier, impedes its distribution, and shuts out the masses from the promised land. Portentous and gigantic social evils, present and approaching, mock the wisdom of the wise.

"Political Economists, look at England's boundless wealth and hopeless poverty! At Ireland's starving myriads! At her dearest children escaping for their lives, like Lot from the cities of the plain! At the periodical alternations of manufacturing prosperity and manufacturing depression and starvation! At the expanse of untilled lands spread abroad amidst a starving, idle, and congested population! At your own differences and disagreements about rent, population, currency, wages, profits! At the theories opposed to yours not only in fashion and in power, in France, Germany, Russia, and America, but supported by the most original thinkers and greatest writers. Some of these writers have been unjust to you. They affirm that instead of a science, solid and practical, you are but the authors of a literature, obscure, presumptuous, and which would be dangerous, were it not eminently tedious."

The gist of the preceding criticism is the insufficiency and falseness of the system of the English Economists, considered rather as an art, giving directions for the practical conduct of men and States, than as a science. It is true, that what inculcates error in practice. cannot be deemed sound in theory. But that is not error which is necessary and unavoidable. It is the office of science to instruct us what is the operation of the laws by which things, in the department of which it treats, are governed; it is to discover, not to invent. An American disciple of the modern English Economists says:"It is natural, and if natural, proper - though we may not see the that poverty and want, and disease and misery should be the next-door neighbours of wealth and unbounded prosperity." This is unanswerable, if true. If such a state of things be natural, that is to say, the result of immutable laws of Nature, then the Economists who have established the fact stand justified, and may claim that their system, however incomplete, is a science, so far as it goes. No man could deny the scientific character of a system of Mechanics based upon the law of gravitation, though that law should

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cause every one who ascended a ladder to tumble and break his neck. Every fresh instance would serve to confirm the law. So of the system which Mr. Byles rejects from the list of sciences, if it accounts for the facts he deplores, and connects them in a chain of causation with unquestionable truths in the moral nature of man, and the physical nature of his body and the world about him, it has proved its title to the appellation he refuses to it. It would not, perhaps, be Political Economy such as we have described it. It would be, as it has been called, "the Dismal Science," instead of a science of Progress and Hope — but a science, nevertheless.

Mr. Byles unquestionably believes that the gross inequality in the distribution of property, of which England presents the most glaring examples, is not the result of natural laws, but that their tendency is to redress such inequalities, if suffered to act without impediment. The system of which he speaks is obnoxious to his strictures, because it presents as laws of Nature, which it claims to have discovered, certain hypotheses which conduct necessarily to the existing state of things. It substitutes for the actual laws, fictions, more or less plausible, of its own devising. Concurring with him in this belief, we should be obliged to concede that the failure of the many eminent writers who have devoted themselves to this subject, to construct a science of Political Economy, creates a presumption that the time is not yet ripe for it, were it not that their principal errors are fancied corrections of what they deem erroneous in the principles taught by Adam Smith.

This great writer, whom the modern Economists, notwithstanding their aberrations from doctrines which he deemed fundamental and firmly established, still claim as the leader, to whom they profess a general adherence, though less scientific, perhaps, in form, was more correct in substance than his European successors. If not always as acute in analysis, or solicitous to devise a general formula for the expression of a number of truths dependent upon a single principle, he was clear in the perception of facts, and not so fettered by any spirit of system, as to prevent his being candid in their statement. This is not the place for criticism, nor yet for a statement of results, but it will appear frequently in the sequel, that the laws at which we arrive, and in respect to which we differ with the modern

Economists of England and the continental writers who have followed them, agree with the conclusions of Adam Smith, and, though deduced through a different process, conduct to the same end.

It is doubtless true, that greater difficulty may be anticipated in forming a science of Political Economy, than in subjects of a less complex character. It involves the relations between man, endowed with reason and will-combined in associations where the reason and will of one conflict with those of another—and the world of physical nature, wherein what of instinct and will exist are subordinate to human dominion. The objects whose relations we have to examine are heterogeneous, and in one of them there is the apparent source of perplexity, that will, by its very nature, rejects law which is founded on the notion of a necessary succession of events. The objects man and the natural world- have each its own distinct system of laws, both operating at one and the same time, co-operating in full force; neither superseding the other, for this would be opposed to the distinctive idea of a law, but producing results by their combined action. This consideration may suggest the method of inquiry most calculated to be successful. It is well understood, as a rule of physical science, that in order to determine the joint action of two forces, we must first discover what would be the independent action of each, considered separately. It is obviously politic to begin with that which is most simple, and in respect to which the greatest amount of accurate knowledge has been attained, because the successions of change in its condition have been ascertained to have an absolute uniformity of relation to the preceding conditions; in other words, to be subject to invariable laws. This would lead us to study first the general laws of the material world, in those aspects which concern man's power of acquisition. Such are the laws of animal and vegetable growth and decay, of the formation of soils and their adaptation to human abode and culture. Here, at least, we tread on firm ground, and can pursue our way with the aid of certain and clear light. If we find the laws of matter are such as to create no necessary obstacle to the free operation of all the faculties with which human nature is endowed, one great stumbling-block to future progress will have been removed.

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