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 subsistenceas 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 buman 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,t 66 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 te, 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."

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. A prominent 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.

Such is the result in

healthy and natural

his nature to the standard of the Economists. respect to the principle of population, the 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.

MANUAL

OF

POLITICAL ECONOMY.

wwwwww

CHAPTER I.

THE LAW OF ENDLESS CIRCULATION IN MATTER AND FORCE.

THE first and most imperious of human wants is Food. The functions of our nature are susceptible of a threefold classification, as Vegetative, Animal, and Spiritual; or, as it has been expressed, man includes Plant, Beast, and Angel. The vital or organic functions, which are common to vegetable and animal life, are continuous. They know no intermission. The plant is always assimilating the inorganic elements of the soil and the air, which contribute to its growth, and repair its constant waste. In man, too, the process of nutrition and decay is unceasing: once suspended it is never resumed, for its suspension is DEATH, and man becomes inorganic, resolving himself into the dust whereof he was made. The animal functions, on the contrary, experience periodical interruptions; their activity is suspended in regular intervals of sleep.

Another distinction between the vegetative, or organic, and the animal functions, consists in the independence of the first, and the dependence of the other upon the will. The animal sensibility is accompanied by a perception in the mind, as in seeing, hearing, tasting; animal contractility is excited by its volition, communicated to the voluntary muscles by the nerves; while organic sensibility is attended by no perception, and is followed by contraction totally

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LAW OF ENDLESS CIRCULATION IN MATTER AND FORCE. 23

independent of the will. The chyle stimulates the lacteals without our knowledge, and is propelled by them without our aid. The heart beats, the blood circulates, the lungs inhale air, without waiting for a command; all the simply vital processes go on in man as in the mushroom, by their own impelling laws.

Functions which are thus ever-active, which have no natural intermission, and are neither originated nor controlled by the will, must obviously be supplied with the material for their action, before man can devote productive labour to the satisfaction of any want of less intensity. The more they require, the less can be given elsewhere. The less time, either the individual or society finds it necessary to devote to this object, the more will remain available for the gratification of other wants. The latter may employ, however, much of time or labour that may remain unemployed for the primary necessity; for it is the characteristic of man, in his higher natu?, that his desires are illimitable, always propagated in widening circles, of larger extent as the ring made by a stone cast in the water creates another beyond it. The animal nature has no such quality, because its functions are carried on in a mechanical way, by the promptings of instinct, which is neither progressive nor improveable. It can find out no new pleasure; for all pleasure resulting from the activity of functions, where these are actuated by an unvarying force, their activity has a fixed limit, and the capacity for pleasure is equally constant. The round of its wants is small and unchanging; once satisfied, the stimulus to action is gone, and the animal nature reposes contented. Its constitution is adapted to a stationary condition, which it never seeks to improve. The foxes that Nimrod hunted had the same fleetness and cunning, and no less greed for poultry, or other vulpine luxuries, than those trapped by David Crockett. Crockett, on the other hand, desired a thousand things, to the wish for which, Ulysses, after all his wanderings and sightseeing, was a perfect stranger; and the men of the year 1900 will have as many new motives for exertion, as they will have comforts and conveniences of which we have no conception.

The laws which govern the production of Food are therefore at the basis of Political Economy, and upon these it must be built. To trace them in that large generality which the progress of physical