The strongest instinct of man is that which leads to the increase of population. The European Economists, since Adam Smith, have very generally believed, that the laws of matter were such as to make the repression of this instinct essential to the prosperity of communities. Their system presents a controlling law of humanity as conflicting with the immutable laws of brute matter. It is impossible for them, upon this basis, to construct a science which contemplates the human faculties as acting freely in accordance with their own laws;* and to contemplate them as acting under partial and uncertain restraints, is to clog the problem with an insurmountable difficulty. If the difficulty is purely supposititious we can proceed with good hope, regarding man as he is, and trusting that we may safely infer the uniformities of the future from the uniformities of the past. Man, as God made him, we may study and understand; while from the compound, part man and part monk, in indefinite proportions, we should shrink in despair.

We are to regard man then as the lord, not the slave of Nature, but no arbitrary lord-as acting in accordance with fixed laws of his own being, all of which exercise their due force, and none of which are suspended, any more than the law of gravitation, as securing freedom for that harmonious exercise of all his faculties, in which happiness consists, by means of the intelligence which enables him to apprehend the inevitable necessity that the physical laws must operate, and teaches him how to avoid opposing the irresistible, and how to make it work for him.

"He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,

And all are slaves beside."

If we undertook to deduce the laws of human nature from their manifestations in the action of a single individual, it would end in failure, because no two individuals, to say nothing of original diversities of constitution, are surrounded by the same circumstances. What concerns us, however, in Political Economy, is the conduct of men associated in communities a conduct springing not from

"In reading certain Economists, one might be led to think that the products of industry were not made for man, but that man was made for the products."-Droz.

individual will or peculiarities, but from those which characterize the greater part of their members. It has been found by experience that irregularities, taken in sufficient masses, tend to become regular, and susceptible of strict ascertainment and calculation. Nothing is more uncertain, for example, than the period which an individual of a given age will live. Few things, however, are more certain than that, of one hundred thousand new-born infants indiscriminately taken in England and Wales, about fifteen thousand die in the first year, about five thousand more in the second; that something more than a quarter of the whole number will have perished before the expiration of the fifth year, and about one-half only will survive their fortieth year. Upon data obtained from the registration of births and deaths upon a large scale, mathematicians are enabled to construct tables of mortality, which give the probable number of years that any considerable number of persons of a given age will live, in the aggregate, with such precision as to afford a safe basis for the operations of Life Insurance Companies. Nor is this regularity confined to phenomena, which, like death, are so far independent of the human will as to be certain to happen at some time. Quetelet, the eminent statistician of Belgium, affirms that in that country, as he has ascertained from the examination of its registered statistics for twenty years, there is less variation in phenomena directly dependent upon the human will, which we are apt to regard as the most capricious of disturbing elements, than in those of mortality. The Belgian people, he observes, pays its annual tribute to marriage with more regularity than it does to death; though it consults its inclinations in the one case more, and in the other less than in almost any other. Not only does the total number of marriages, as well in towns as in the country, follow a constant mathematical law, but the same regularity is observed in the numbers which indicate the marriages between bachelors and maids, bachelors and widows, widowers and maids, and widowers with widows.* So, in respect to the ages at which marriage is contracted, there is an astonishing uniformity in the annual returns. In regard to suicides, the statistics of France for a period of twelve years

*Du Systeme Social, page 67.

exhibit a similar uniformity. Their number varies very little from year to year, but they are regularly less in December than in any other month; the number increases regularly in every month (except February, which has three days less than the others,) up to June, when it attains its maximum, and then diminishes regularly till it reaches the minimum in December. It is observed that the number of suicides corresponds in its rise and fall precisely with the lengthening and shortening of the day, and that very few suicides are committed in the night.* There is also a sad regularity in the statistics of crime, in ordinary years, when no special cause can be detected as influencing its frequency, together with a regular increase attending any unusual difficulty in procuring subsistence as from a rise in the price of provisions, caused by a deficiency in the harvest and a steady improvement with the general march of prosperity.

By observing such facts we may be led to conclude, that such indeterminate causes as arbitrary individual volition produce next to no effect in modifying social phenomena - they occasion individual oscillations, on one side and the other, of a common mid-point, which neutralize each other, and leave the combined action of society what it would be if no such partial perturbations existed. The progress of intelligence, subordinating passion to reason, obviously tends to substitute certainty for doubt in regard to the conduct of communities, to make the private will and the social will correspond, and to reconcile the highest degree of individual freedom with the highest degree of mutual aid and mutual dependence—aid from each other and from Nature, won by conscious and cheerful obedience to the laws of human nature and physical nature.

The considerations we have presented may suffice to indicate the reasons why we have treated Political Economy as having a wider object than that usually assigned to it. "Political Economy," says Mr. Mill,+ "concerns itself only with such of the phenomena of the social state, as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth.

* Annuaire de l'Economie Politique, 1851, page 200.

Mill's Logic, p. 566, Harpers' edition, quoting from an article written by him in the London and Westminster Review, October, 1836.

It makes entire abstraction of every other human passion and motive, except those which may be regarded as perpetually antagonizing principles to the desire of wealth: namely, aversion to labour and desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences. * * * Political Economy considers mankind as occupied solely in acquiring and consuming wealth, and aims at showing what is the course of action into which mankind, living in a state of society, would be impelled, if that motive, except in the degree in which it is checked by the two counter-motives above adverted to, were absolute ruler of all their actions." Mr. Mill concedes that in this mode of pursuing inquiry we arrive only at an approximation, which must be "corrected by making proper allowance for the effects of any impulses of a different description, which can be shown to interfere with the result in any particular case;" and he adverts to the principle of population, as an important correction, "interpolated into the expositions of Political Economy itself; the strictness of purely scientific arrangement being thereby somewhat departed from, for the sake of practical utility."

*

A pro

The idea to which Mr. Mill has given distinct expression in the preceding passage, is that which has silently controlled nearly all the Economical authors since Adam Smith. Our countryman, Mr. Carey, was the first systematic writer on the subject to protest against it, and to vindicate a wider range for the science. minent objection to the method indicated by Mr. Mill, is, that it proceeds upon an hypothesis admitted to be false-it ignores known qualities of man, and, therefore, if it deduces laws from human experience, it is the experience of a different kind of being from that which it conceives as its subject. If, on the contrary, it infers the laws of action governing its ideal man from à priori reasoning, every conclusion is vitiated with more or less of error, and a new science is necessary to suggest the requisite corrections.

The practical tendency, however, of investigations conducted in this spirit, is to make men lose sight of the necessity of correction, or to apply it, not in conforming hypothetical conclusions to the actual nature of man, but in endeavours to persuade man to conform

* Carey's Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1, Introduction.

his nature to the standard of the Economists. Such is the result in respect to the principle of population, the healthy and natural operation of which, within the limits of morality, is set down as the cause of the great social evils, and men counselled to seek their remedy in abstaining from matrimony and discouraging it in others. Other examples of the same kind will suggest themselves in the sequel.

The definition proposed by Mr. McCulloch, "the Science of Values," and that offered by Archbishop Wheatley, "Catallactics, or the Science of Exchange," are equally narrow. The first, moreover, is liable to the objection, that the material prosperity of nations is dependent, not upon value, but upon the quantity of commodities which are produced and distributed among their people. Adam Smith, in entitling his great work "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," and in the manner in which he treated the subject, exhibited a much more just conception of the scope of the science, of which he was laying the foundation. If we attribute to the word "wealth" the signification it once bore, of "weal, well-being," this title will differ little from our statement of the object of Political Economy. If the outline of its leading principles we are about to sketch be correct, it will appear that the greatest wealth of nations, in its common acceptation, is only consistent with such a distribution of it, as enables their people, of all classes, to cultivate the higher powers and affections of humanity; that such a distribution is effected by the regular operation of natural laws, and only prevented by attempts to control them, dictated by ignorance and injustice.