counsels are entitled. It gives instruction on wealth; but wealth is not the highest object, much less the one supreme end of human life. Wealth is only an instrument; its value consists in what it effects for its possessor. It provides him with satisfactions and enjoyments; the nature and quality of those enjoyments are the criterion of its worth. A far nobler and keener gratification may be had from the reading of a book, which a little wealth could have procured, than from a multitude of mere luxuries. There are better things than to be rich: there are others, by the side of which riches ought to count as nothing. Men have sacrificed their wealth and their lives rather than perform a false, dishonouring, or irreligious action, and their memory has been hallowed with enduring respect. Hence that knowledge respecting wealth which Political Economy proclaims can claim that rank only which belongs to one single department of human life. Political Economy must be regarded as making, so to speak, a report on the appropriate methods for obtaining a single limited object. It gives that report to the mind of a being who receives similar reports from other portions of his nature. It is for him, for the whole man, to judge how far he will put in practice the advice given. By the laws of his mental and moral constitution, he is not only urged but bound to erect a tribunal within himself which shall judge of the relative rights to command attached to different ends. Political Economy may be able to show that a society constructed on Communistic principles will be poorer than one founded on unrestricted individual liberty; the Communist is authorised to reply that this is a question which falls under the jurisdiction

of Political Philosophy, and that the best social condition is higher and more imperative than the best economical. Nor will anything be gained by enlarging the boundary of Political Economy, as so many writers attempt to do, and absorbing into it Political Philosophy. Political Economy, by its very nature, is not up to such a task; its range would be unmanageable, and there would always remain the fatal certainty that other objects of human life would carry greater weight and higher authority than the acquisition of wealth. The ultimate result would be that Political Economy would not receive the consideration which is its due.

So much in the way of introductory observations; let us now pass on to the teaching of Political Economy.

It speaks of Wealth. With Mr Mill, we may hold the popular idea of the nature of wealth to be sufficient for the objects of Political Economy. It is as determinate, as Mr Mill remarks, as practical purposes require. But one caution must be laid great stress on. It is inevitable that some nice questions should arise as to the limits up to which this conception of wealth may be pushed, the more especially as it is absolutely necessary to examine doctrines which scientific refiners have laid down as to what is, and what is not wealth. Let us clearly remember that whether these questions can be answered only imperfectly or not at all, it matters not; no injury will be done to the character or ability of Political Economy. If practical purposes are satisfied, all the rest is of little consequence.

Mr Mill thinks otherwise. He accepts the popular idea, but he soon starts off in keen pursuit of science.

He lays down the principle, on which he is followed by Professor Fawcett, that things for which nothing can be obtained in exchange, however useful or necessary they may be, are not wealth in the sense used in Political Economy. What warrant of fact or reasoning can be alleged for fastening on Political Economy so marvellous and so arbitrary an assertion? Useful things not wealth! what is wealth but a collection of useful things? What better description can be given of it? Yet these useful things, however much they may minister to existence, to comfort, to enjoyment, if it is found out that no one is desirous of giving something in exchange for them, are instantly dismissed out of the category of wealth. They must be placed, I presume, in a new class, specially constructed for them. They are only useful and delightful things: every one has enough of them without buying them of others; they are not wealth. But the moment they are deficient and something is offered to procure them, as by the touch of a conjuror they are converted into wealth. A great African chief, whose tribe are his slaves, and who lives in complete isolation from the rest of mankind, has no wealth, upon this definition: he has no Political Economy. His slaves get their necessaries, like his horses; he has magnificent possessions, luxuries of every kind, but no wealth. There is not a single market in his dominions. Climate-sun, air, and water-are not wealth; no one buys them. A country is none the richer for a good climate, though that climate may work wonders for it in producing saleable wealth. The bright rays of the sun raise splendid wines in France, magnificent crops of cotton in India and America—but these

wealth-making rays cannot be sold, for they can be had for nothing; they are not wealth. All other matters except climate being the same, Siberia is as rich by nature as India. The tide which carries up the barges on the Thames without cost, which saves the vast expense of railways and horses, which has created London and its gigantic riches, is not wealth at all: there is no market for its waters, they have no market price. Water, which it has cost so much to spread over your land, is precious wealth, so abundant is the crop it raises: that same water, if it would but come down as rain, instantly loses its character of wealth. One has but to ask the wine growers of the Rhine or of France, or the cultivators of rice in India, and they will tell him whether a warm sun or abundant water is or is not riches for a country. Common sense has no doubt in the matter. Political Economists prefer adding a subtle distinction; but thereby they turn away the world for whose benefit alone they exist.

But there is a side of this definition of the Economists which works out something far more mischievous yet than absurdity. When it is affirmed that what will command wealth, for which wealth will be given, is itself wealth, the foundation is laid for most grievous harm in particular departments of Political Economy. This fallacy, next to another to be mentioned later, is the most mischievous one to be found in Mr Mill's Economical writings. He speaks of “an important distinction in the meaning of the word wealth, as applied to the possessions of an individual or to those of a nation or of mankind. In the wealth of mankind nothing is included which does not answer some purpose of utility

or pleasure. To an individual anything is wealth which, though useless in itself, enables him to claim from others a portion of the stock of things useful or pleasant." On this doctrine, to have a right to a thing and to have it in actual possession is the same thing. Thus a mortgage, though only a piece of parchment, is pronounced to be wealth to its owner, to the supposed extent of a thousand pounds. It is wealth and not wealth at the same moment: for the nation, that is, in itself, it is a parchment only; for its owner it is wealth amounting to a thousand pounds. To grant a mortgage is to give a thousand sovereigns to your borrower, and also to retain as much wealth for yourself. Hence it irresistibly follows that to lend is to double wealth: once in the actual gold lent, and then secondly in the mortgage. It can be counted twice over. In taking stock of the fortunes of the borrower and lender, it figures once, as so many sovereigns or what has been bought with them; in the lender's case, the mortgage is reckoned as a thousand pounds. Under the passion for refining, Mr Mill was misled by the fact that a man may derive from a mortgage the same income as a landowner derives from his land: he remained blind to the difference that in addition to the income the landowner had in hand the property which gave the income, whilst the mortgagee has the income indeed, but only a piece of parchment besides. But in laying down definitions and first principles, such oversight may have calamitous results; they propagate errors wherever the principles are applied.

From this unhappy source, that a claim to wealth is itself wealth, Political Economy has been flooded with