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and the power both to obey and to command in proper place. To diffuse and maintain a general spirit of high patriotism through the people in the times that are coming, requires, however, more than mere military measures and reforms. The system which General Scharnhorst introduced into Prussia would have had little success, if unaccompanied by the measures by which Stein and Hardenberg elevated the condition of the great body of the people, and bound their affection to their country.

Great Britain ought, in like manner, to be able to say to every class of her citizens, Spartam sortitus es, hanc orna. To the measures necessary to that end, no less than to military reforms, the maxim of General Trochu applies: 'C'est la paix, utilisée comme il convient, qui fait des bonnes armées.' Great Britain. has at this moment only too many citizens who in war would be a formidable enemy within her gates.

X.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ADAM SMITH.

(Fortnightly Review, November 1, 1870.)

'POLITICAL ECONOMY belongs to no nation; it is of no country. It is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulation, the distribution, and the consumption of wealth. It will assert itself whether you wish it or not. It is founded on the attributes of the human mind, and no power can change it.'* In these words-accompanying an admission that the Irish Land Bill, which he nevertheless defended on other grounds, 'offended against the principles of political economy '—Mr. Lowe gave expression last session to the conception of one school of the followers of Adam Smith that Political Economy is, not what Adam Smith called his own treatise, 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,' but a final answer to the inquiry—a body of necessary and universal truth, founded on invariable laws of nature, and deduced from the constitution of the human mind.

I venture to maintain, to the contrary, that Political Economy is not a body of natural laws in the true sense, or of universal and immutable truths, but an assemblage of speculations and doctrines which are the result of a particular history, coloured even by the history and character of its chief writers; that, so far from being of no country, and unchangeable from age to age, it has varied much in different ages and countries, and even with different expositors in the same age and country; that, in fact, its expositors, since the time of Adam Smith, are substantially divisible into two schools, following opposite methods; and that the method of one of them, of which the fundamental

Speech on the Irish Land Bill, April 4th, 1870.

conception is, that their political economy is an ascertained body of laws of nature, is an offshoot of the ancient fiction of a Code of Nature, and a natural order of things, in a form given to that fiction in modern times, by theology on one hand, and a revolt against the tyranny of the folly and inequality of such human codes as the world had known on the other.

No branch of philosophical doctrine, indeed, can be fairly investigated or apprehended apart from its history. All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics, would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas. And the history of Political Economy, at any rate, is not lost. It would not be difficult to trace the connection between every extant treatise prior to the Wealth of Nations, and conditions of thought at the epoch at which it appeared. But there is the less occasion, for the purpose of these pages, or of ascertaining the origin and foundation of the economic doctrines of our own day, to go behind the epoch of Adam Smith, that he has himself traced the systems of political economy antecedent to his own to a particular course of history, to 'the different progress of opulence in different ages and nations,' and the private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men.' What he did not see was, that his own system, in its turn, was the product of a particular history; that what he regarded as the system of nature was a descendant of the System of Nature as conceived by the ancients, in a form fashioned by the ideas and circumstances of his own time, and coloured by his own disposition and course of life. Still less could he see how, after his time, the progress of opulence' would govern the interpretation of his doctrines, or how the system he promulgated as the system of liberty, justice, and divine benevolence, would be moulded into a system of selfishness by the private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men.'

'The Wealth of Nations,' says Mr. Buckle, 'is entirely deductive. Smith generalises the laws of wealth, not from the phenomena of wealth, but from the phenomena of selfishness. He makes men naturally selfish; he represents them as them as pursuing

wealth for sordid objects, and for the narrowest personal pleasures.'* This description is not misapplied to a political economy of later days, which has guided Mr. Buckle's interpretation of the system of Adam Smith; but with respect to that system itself, it involves two fundamental misconceptions. Selfishness was not the fundamental principle of Adam Smith's theory; and his method, though combining throughout a vein of unsound à priori speculation, was in a large measure inductive. The investigation which establishes this will be found also to exhibit the connection between his economic system and the chief problems pressing for solution in his time; the methods which the philosophy of the age provided for their solution; and the history and phenomena of the economic world in which he lived, and from which his ideas, his inductions, and his verifications were drawn.

One consideration to be carried in mind in the interpretation of the Wealth of Nations, is that its author's system of philosophy ought to be studied as a whole; his economic system was part of a complete system of social, or, as he called it, moral philosophy. Mr. Buckle, who on other points has much misconceived the Wealth of Nations, properly says of it, and the Theory of Moral Sentiments,' that the two must be taken together and considered as one, both forming parts of the scheme embraced in his course of moral philosophy at Glasgow-a course which, it is important to observe, began with Natural Theology, and included, along with Ethics and Political Economy, the Philosophy of Law. Again, as his social philosophy should be considered as a whole, so the whole should be considered in connection with the philosophical systems or methods of investigation of his time. Two essentially opposite systems of reasoning respecting the fundamental laws of human society were before the world at that epoch, which may be respectively designated as the theory of a Code of Nature, and the inductive system of Montesquieu-the former speculating à priori about 'Nature,' and seeking to develop from a particular hypothesis the 'Natural' order of things; the latter investigating in history and the phenomena of the actual world the different states of

*6 'History of Civilization in England,' i. 228; ii. 449.

society and their antecedents or causes-or, in short, the real, as contrasted with an ideal, order of things. The peculiarity of Adam Smith's philosophy is, that it combines these two opposite methods, and hence it is that we have two systems of political economy claiming descent from him-one, of which Mr. Ricardo was the founder, reasoning entirely from hypothetical laws or principles of nature, and discarding induction not only for the ascertainment of its premises, but even for the verification of its deductive conclusions; the other of which Malthus in the generation after Adam Smith, and Mr. Mill in our own, may be taken as the representatives-combining, like Adam Smith himself, the à priori and the inductive methods, reasoning sometimes, it is true, from pure hypotheses, but also from experience, and shrinking from no corrections which the test of experience may require in deductions. Of the two schools, distinguished by their methods, the first finds in assumptions respecting the nature of man, and the course of conduct it prompts, a complete 'natural' organization of the economic world, and aims at the discovery of 'natural prices,' 'natural wages,' and 'natural profits.'

An examination of Adam Smith's philosophy enables us to trace to its foundation the theory upon which the school in question has built its whole superstructure. We shall see that the original foundation is in fact no other than that theory of Nature which, descending through Roman jural philosophy from the speculations of Greece, taught that there is a simple Code of Nature which human institutions have disturbed, though its principles are distinctly visible through them, and a beneficial and harmonious natural order of things which appears wherever Nature is left to itself. In the last century this theory assumed a variety of forms and disguises, all of them, however, involving one fundamental fallacy of reasoning à priori from assumptions obtained, not by the interrogation but by the anticipation of nature; what is assumed as Nature being at bottom a mere conjecture respecting its constitution and arrangements. The political philosophy flowing from this ideal source presents to us sometimes an assumed state of nature or of society in its natural simplicity; sometimes an assumed

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