PREFACE.

Students of Political Economy are more often the old than the young; and more largely those who have already given much time and thought to its mastery, than those to whom the effort is new. I am satisfied that what both classes desire is an extended but convenient repository of accessible facts, avoiding dogma and abstraction, but allowing human experience and history to convey their own lesson. In the work of teaching Political Economy to young men, I found their perceptions generally keener than their text-books were adapted to satisfy. Still more, in responding to the innumerable inquiries made of an economic. daily journalist, I have discovered that the people could not find in the books of current discussion of economic theories any answers whatever to the practical questions on which they sought light. Or if the questions were answered it was easy to perceive that the answer in many cases was false, partial, or obscure. Instead of the book being above the student or the inquiring public, it was either below, or irrelevant to both. I have therefore assumed in preparing this book that society contains no fact or feature which its reader will not fully comprehend if the story be told clearly and simply. I have tried to do only this. I trust my work may prove acceptable to the students of Political Economy in this and other lands, in the degree in which it fairly reflects the opinions of statesmen, the wisdom of nations, the views of practical men and men of affairs-for these get nearest to the truth of things.

The fundamental view of economics which may be said to inspire and give structure to the book, is that to be true or useful economic science must be no longer destructive but constructive. It must study to explain how things actually are, before plunging into the question whether they are as they ought to be. In doing this it must make appreciative exposition precede criticism. The history of the battle must first be given before the generals who led in it are court-martialled and shot. Political Economy has thus far been conducted in a way that makes it a

body of fault-finding and carping, by men innocent of any connection with government and but slightly acquainted with business, as to the effect of that legislation whose responsibilities they have never borne, upon that industry toward which they maintain a parasitic rather than a controlling relation.

However political economists may seek to dodge it by their definitions, Political Economy is a criticism upon statesmanship, so long as it continues to be any thing. They may say it is a "science of sales" only, and that there is nothing of a political nature about it; that it has been wrongly named; that it should be called Catallactics, or Plutology, or the like. But to this the statesmen may reply: "Why, then, do you bore us with it? We have no time to do more than acquaint ourselves with those sciences and arts which have a bearing upon government. You say yours has not. If your science is that of selling and exchanging, go on with your didactical exposition of swapping and trading. It has no more to do with us than a treatise on weaving or spinning."

In fact the men who define Political Economy as a "science of sales" mean thereby that it is a science which teaches that the right of individuals to make sales is superior to the right of government to affect in any manner by legislation the nature or quality of the sales they shall make. They show this palpably by filling their volumes and speeches with complaints that government is interfering with sales. Not a line of Perry, Mill, or Sumner is free from this complaint. Hence their definition of Political Economy is annulled by the quality of the thing they put forth as being Political Economy. That is a critique on the relation of government to sales. If it were scientific in its quality, it would not be a science of sales, but a science of the relations which government sustains to sales. This restores the name "Political" to their "Economy." This restoration they can not escape except by letting government entirely alone. When the teachers of the "sales" school begin by saying "it is none of our business as economists whether the government interferes with trade or industry or not; our sole duty is to teach the principles on which trade and industry will proceed after government shall have adopted such interferences as it thinks proper, and the methods by which the industrial mass will adapt itself to the action of the government"; then, and not till then, will they have the right to reduce the terms of their definition to those of a science of sales only, with which government has nothing to do.

The true logic of Laissez Faire will only be reached when that Political Economy, which consists in teaching that government and sales have nothing to do with each other, shall manifest at least its sincerity, by conceding in advance that the expounders of sales have no opinion whatever concerning the functions of government. But so long as, under pretence of teaching a science of sales only, they in fact purport to convert their teaching into a complaint against all action of government that interferes with sales, lessening them in one direction and promoting them in another, they are bound to begin by an exposition of government itself; for peradventure the right of the individual to sell may by possibility be subordinate, as a fact in social science, to the right of governments to regulate sales. It may even appear that much of the economic value of the individual's right to sell may depend on the fidelity with which government shall govern his sales.

But supposing the contrary to be true, the sales school can not teach it to be so without teaching the functions of government, and the instant they do this they cease to be a "sales" school. Political Economy passes from a science of sales into a science of the relation between government and sales.

Apprehending that Political Economy must needs teach the functions of government concerning industry it next follows that the economist must no longer be a member of a mere sect of antigovernment critics. Political Economy can not attain its true dignity, as a scientific expositor of the relations of government to industry, so long as the statesmen of the world monopolize the ability to see things as they are, and to do things in a way that is practicable, while the economists indulge in the mere imaginative occupation of theorizing in the subjunctive mood as to how they might, could, would, or should be. It is time that the economists of every country had ceased to be a sect antagonizing the statesmen; especially is it time that the economists of America, France, and Germany had ceased, in antagonizing the statesmen of their own country, to fall into a species of disloyal alliance with the statesmen of countries whose economic interests may not be in harmony, in certain important and vital respects, with their own.

A second fundamental idea of this book is that nations are collective persons, having each its individuality and its career to pursue, in a certain logical continuity with those antecedents which have brought it where it is, and hence that any given economic expedient, to be understood, must be studied in the

light of the antecedent career of the nation adopting it. An import duty of $1.25 per pound, or say 1200 per cent., on cigars, or an enactment prohibiting the domestic cultivation of tobacco-both of which exist in England, and are deemed wise, by wise men— would not even address themselves to the discretion of an American for calm consideration. The duty would here be too preposterous to be proposed, and the enactment could not be passed at all by virtue of any power with which our national government is clothed by the written constitution. It is as impossible of adoption in America as Herod's decree for the slaughter of the Innocents would be of imitation by one of our Collectors of Internal Revenue. Hence to assume that in a college class room the enactment of a duty of 5s. sterling on cigars, or the prohibition of the cultivation of tobacco, can be discussed on the cosmopolitan plane, without recognizing nations as distinct integral persons, having each its career determined largely by its peculiar antecedents, is to incapacitate ourselves wholly for the intelligent apprehension of the subject. The revenue legislation of England is no better adapted to any such cosmopolitan tests than that of any other country. Its tobacco taxes, its exemption of land and capital from direct taxation, its policy of aggression among the barbarian races in behalf of its manufactures and its export trade, are all as impossible in our national economy as its conquest of India, its nobility, or its church establishment. Hence, to take a simple act of legislation concerning one point, a duty on wool for instance, and discuss it as if were the same thing in one country as in another, is not to discuss it at all. Countries must be studied like careers, as continuous and consecutive wholes, and to this end a little must be known of the organization and structure of each before we seek to pass upon its conduct. If it have fins it will not climb. If it have claws it may not swim. It will obey the inner law of its constitution, be its career long or brief.

Hence, in this work, the prominence given in the chapter on the State to the quality and, so far as might be, the true inwardness of political institutions, is in harmony with the first fundamental view above taken, that Political Economy is an exposition of the economic aspects of statesmanship. But a state is a mechanism, and no two mechanisms are alike. Each engineer masters only his own engine. The others would explode under him. I have endeavored to lay bare chiefly and fairly, in discussing the workings of the English and American constitutions, those features in both which their own most fair-minded states

men, either on the one hand admire, or on the other deplore. For the people of either country, so long content with using such political machinery as they found themselves provided with to promote their material interests, may at any moment find a lull in their activities, in which to overhaul and seek even to mend their political machinery. Ancestor-worship forms but a small part of the intellectual equipment of the people of either country if they come to believe that they can improve the political mechanism in its actual workings. It has been deemed fitting, therefore, to make clear the unity between the national mechanism, which is after all only the embodied people, and the same people when viewed in their industrial aspects as producers and consumers. It is not merely that the Political State and Industrial State are companions on the same road, but the Political State is shown to be the apparel of which the Industrial Life of the people is the

wearer.

To some it may seem that certain policies, pursued by the governing powers both in Great Britain and America, are treated with an acerbity that throws the book out of tune with the statesmanship of both countries. In America, the drifting away from the intent of the framers of the Constitution, in respect to the mode of selecting the President, and the increasingly autocratic tendencies of the Presidential office, may be deemed to have been so treated. In discussing economic features of the British Empire, the chief points of criticism are the very unequal degree in which the various populations composing it have found it possible to secure the friendly regard of Parliament, and the consequent voluntary abandonment of the farmers to unequal competition with those of other countries, after certain classes of the manufacturers, through four centuries of protection, had ceased to need its further continuance. The judicious reader will discover, and the adverse concede, that among the truer and higher statesmen of the country whose legislative or administrative action may be thus criticised, some, of note, have preceded me in the utterance substantially of the views here enunciated.

It is believed that the fullness of the indexes and the simplicity of the order and arrangement adopted, combined with its ample presentation, in the text, of the facts essential to guide a judgment on most economic issues, and in the notes, of the views of nearly all economists, may make it convenient as a book of reference to that very large number of persons who, if amply supplied with facts, find it not difficult to arrive at their own conclusions.