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, br 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

reason

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 bode 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.

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 indiscrim nately 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.