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originated by Mill, but appeared in its most uncompromising and fallacious forms in the works of his predecessors, MacCulloch and Senior. It is, in fact, a corollary to the doctrines of an average rate of profit and an average rate of wages. If profits could not be higher, nor wages lower in one employment or place than in another, there would really be such a mobility of capital and such a connexion between the funds out of which wages are everywhere paid, that it would not be very inaccurate to speak of them as forming a general fund on which the price of labour depends; though even in that case the combination of labourers might produce a higher general rate of wages and a lower general rate of profit than competition had done. What neither Mr. Mill nor Mr. Thornton seems to us sufficiently to bring out, is that the main power of trades unions to raise wages in particular cases has arisen from the actual inequalities of both profits and wages. Where extraordinary gains have been made in a business, the labourers have been enabled by concerted action to extort a share which competition would not have assigned to them; and again, where wages have been abnormally low, they have been able in like manner to compel a rise. The dissertation on the land question, and the papers on land reform in this volume, show that Mr. Mill, like most people of all political parties when they were written, underrated the strength of the forces on the side of the existing land systems: and the same remark is applicable to some passages in a review of Sir H. Maine's Village Communities, which deserves particular notice for the generous interest and admiration which it shows that Mr. Mill felt for works of genius and learning, even when allied to far more conservative tendencies than his The essay on Bishop Berkeley's works, besides its great intrinsic merits as a piece of psychological criticism, is remarkable likewise for the sympathy it evinces with genius allied to religious opinions widely opposed to Mr. Mill's.

own.

The volume contains, besides other instructive essays, a review of Grote's Aristotle by one to whom few will deny the highest claim to be listened to as a critic on such a subject, and to whom many will assign a place beside Bacon among the most illustrious successors of the original founder of logic.

XVI.

PROFESSOR CAIRNE S.*

1

(The Academy, July 17, 1875.)

PROFESSOR CAIRNES has been laid to rest with extraordinary honour. No other author's death in our time, save Mr. Mill's, has called forth so strong and general an expression of feeling; and Mr. Mill had been a leader of a philosophical school for a generation, and for several years a distinguished and active member of Parliament, while Mr. Cairnes had resided in England only for a few years, during the greater number of which he was the victim of a cruel malady which secluded him from the world and deprived him latterly even of the use of his pen. It is but thirteen years since Professor Cairnes, then holding a chair of Political Economy in Ireland, and known only to a few of the more studious economists in England, suddenly attained a wide celebrity by the publication, at the most critical moment in the American civil war, of The Slave Power; one of the most masterly essays in the literature of political controversy, and, even now that American slavery is extinct, one of the most instructive and interesting treatises which students either of politics or of economics can find in the English language. The progress of economic science, and the changes in the views of economists, of which there are indications all over Europe, may disturb some of the conclusions of Mr. Cairnes's other works, but The Slave Power will ever defy criticism; and no serious answer was attempted to be made to it, even when the war was at its height, and when the Southern States had the sympathy and support of some of the

* This article appeared as an obituary notice immediately after the death of Mr. Cairnes.

most powerful organs of the English press.

The practical

object for which The Slave Power was published has been triumphantly accomplished, but it had also a philosophical purpose which gives it a permanent value as an economic classic, for its subject was originally selected by Mr. Cairnes for a course of lectures 'to show that the course of history is largely determined by economic causes.' The skill and ability with which this purpose was carried into effect will, we believe, make future economists regret more and more as their science advances that Mr. Cairnes did not in his subsequent works develop another side of the relation between history and political economy, namely, the connexion between the whole social history of a country and its economic condition as one of the phases of the entire movement, and not as the result of a single principle or desire.

Before the publication of The Slave Power, two essays in Fraser's Magazine, 'towards the Solution of the Gold Question,' had attracted the attention of economists in this country, especially Mr. Mill, to Mr. Cairnes's remarkable talent for deductive reasoning and exposition in economics. We think for our own part, and we have reason to believe that such was subsequently Mr. Mill's view, that in his practical conclusion Mr. Cairnes took insufficient account of the influence on prices of the acquisition by France, Germany, and other continental countries of the power of production and communication by steam, contemporaneously with the diffusion of the new gold; but those who dissent from the proposition that prices have risen more since the discovery of the new gold mines in England than in any continental country, will nevertheless find nothing to dispute in the principles which Mr. Cairnes applied with consummate skill to the solution of the problem. The causes which have raised prices on the continent so greatly above their former low level are causes of the same order with those whose operation Mr. Cairnes discussed in relation to England.

Although an invalid, impeded in every physical movement by the malady from which he suffered, Mr. Cairnes took an active, though sometimes an unseen, part in the discussion of all the chief political controversies in this country during the

last ten years, especially the Irish land question and Irish University education; and to him more than to any other single person it is due that University education in Ireland is not now under the control of an Ultramontane hierarchy, and that some of the chief subjects of historical and philosophical study have not been banished from the University of Dublin and the Queen's Colleges.

Last year, although then no longer able to write with his own hand, Mr. Cairnes published his Leading Principles of Political Economy newly Expounded, a work which ought to be regarded, even by those who dissent most from some of its principles, as an important contribution to economic science. To state with the greatest possible clearness and force the reasons for espousing one side of a scientific controversy, is to render one of the best services to those who seek to know all that can be said on both sides. And if any position which Mr. Cairnes takes up is unsuccessfully maintained, the student may feel assured that if literary and dialectical skill could have defended it, it would be impregnable. The second edition of Mr. Cairnes's Logical Method of Political Economy, which has recently been published, and which we hope on a future occasion to review, ought in like manner to be welcomed by those economists who incline to the inductive or historical method, not only for the intellectual interest which the reasoning of a powerful mind must always excite, but also as a masterly exposition of the deductive method, and a complete presentation of all that can be said for it or got out it.

We have no words to express our admiration of the heroic fortitude and public spirit without which no amount of intellectual power would have enabled Mr. Cairnes, under sufferings of the most prostrating kind, to maintain so high a place in the philosophical and political history of his time as that which is assigned to him by universal consent. His moral as well as his intellectual qualities won for him the reputation which has now become historical.

XVII.

MR. BAGEHOT.*

(The Academy, March 31, 1877.)

MR. WALTER BAGEHOT, the eminent editor, author, and political economist, died on Saturday last, at the same early age as the late Professor Cairnes, having reached only his fifty-second year. He was educated at University College, and graduated with distinction in the University of London, in which he was lately examiner in Political Economy. He was known to the public chiefly as editor of the Economist, and by his books and essays; but he was also a partner in a bank, and was thus one of four remarkable men of letters in this century who have also been English bankers-Samuel Rogers, the poet; Grote, the historian; and Sir John Lubbock, making the other three. As editor of the Economist, Mr. Bagehot was the successor of its founder, the late Right Honourable James Wilson, whose sonin-law he was. He conducted that journal with consummate ability, and raised it to the first rank, both as a financial and as a political authority. He might, doubtless, have augmented his fortune by lending adroit support from time to time to particular financial and commercial speculations, but no line of the Economist ever showed the smallest favour of that kind, and it did honour to the English press under his management, alike by its absolute integrity and impartiality, and by its intellectual calibre.

As a political economist Mr. Bagehot belonged to the older deductive school, but his recent essays in the Fortnightly Review mark an epoch in the history of English political

* This article appeared as an obituary notice.

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