mightily have its waters swoln, even, as it were, since yesterday, and then look forward and imagine; cast reason out of sight, call cause and effect a dream, and let the unbridled fancy, stimulated by an insatiable thirst for the impossible, fix an imaginary limit to the power of man, and future ages still shall smile at the narrowness of your ideas, and wonder at your feebleness of thought.

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CHAPTER XI.

Political Economy-A brief notice of the opinions of the Political Economists, exhibiting the difference, in some respects, between their views and those of the Author of the Social System, and tending also to illustrate and defend the principle of the foregoing pages.

THERE are two opposite errors into which men are liable to fall, who differ in opinion from others who have written upon the same subjects as themselves; the one is to underrate the efforts of other men, and to cut and slash about them in reviewing their writings, for the sake of the poor pleasure it affords them to do so; and the other is to disarm an antagonist, by paying obsequious deference even to what are conceived to be his errors: the cause of truth is always best promoted by avoiding both these extremes. To err is human; and little indeed is it that an ordinary individual is able to add to the aggregate stock of viously existing knowledge; yet, from the reiterated attempts of mankind to correct

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and enlighten each other, truth is perpetually making its way against every opposition. Ast the strongest adamant is wasted, in the course of years, by the constant dropping of water, so error yields - however deeply rooted, widely spread, and apparently immoveable— to the irresistible influence of truth.

The political economists are undoubtedly the men to whom every particle of merit is due for ascertaining the principles upon which the machinery of commerce is now working, and if any one, now or hereafter, shall be able to add something to what they have done, however important that addition may be, however practically useless the preceding discoveries may have been without it, still it is to the labour that has gone before that the merit is, for the most part, due.

To investigate the laws which regulate the production, exchange, and distribution of commodities, appears to have been the chief object of the political economists. To ascertain by what laws they may best be regulated is the more important business, provided that the existing laws be not unalterable.

Without professing to have expended very much labour upon the subject, which my occupations in life have never allowed me the opportunity of doing, I have, nevertheless,

made myself sufficiently acquainted with the existing theories of political economy, to satisfy myself, that an effective and practicable remedy, for the evils of the commercial society, has never yet been pointed out by any man; and, since the substance of the foregoing pages was committed to paper, I have carefully examined the last edition of Mr McCulloch's Principles, for the sake of endeavouring to discover something which might induce me to believe that I am in error. The opinion here stated, as to the practicability of emerging, as if by a miracle, from a condition of poverty and perplexity into one of affluence and ease, cannot fail to be looked upon as extravagant at first sight; but I am constrained to confess my total inability to find so much as a single sentence, in the "Principles of Political Economy," to alter my opinion, whilst, on the other hand, I have met with very many to strengthen and confirm it.

It would be needless to discuss at any length the opinions of other writers, because Mr McCulloch's work-the most important of its kind that has lately appeared-contains a statement of the best established opinions of the present day upon the subject of which it treats. Without, therefore, attempting

to give even an outline of the theory which is there advocated, a knowledge of which can be best and most easily acquired, by those who are unacquainted with it, by a perusal of the work itself, which the Edinburgh Review denominates," by much the "best manual of political economy that has "yet been presented to the world," a few extracts from it will here be given, chiefly for the purpose of exhibiting some of the differences between the existing principles of the commercial society and those of the Social System:

“The Principles of Political Economy, with "a Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the "Science. By J. R. M'CULLOCH, Esq. Pro❝fessor of Political Economy in the University "of London. Second edition, corrected "and greatly enlarged. 1830."

Page 7." The object of political economy "is to point out the means by which the industry of man may be rendered most

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productive of those necessaries, comforts, "and enjoyments, which constitute wealth; "to ascertain the circumstances most favour"able for its accumulation; the proportions “ in which it is divided among the different