mutual benefit: the mode of acquisition to which they immediately prompt, is that of plunder or theft, and the competition which they tend to induce is that of conflict and war. Their first suggestion is not, I will labour for you,' but you shall labour for me;' not, Give me this, and I will give you what will suit you better in exchange,' but, Give it to me, or else I will take it by force.' The conqueror rather than the capitalist, the pirate rather than the merchant, the brigand, rather than the labourer, the wolf rather than the watch-dog, obey the impulses of nature. The history of the pursuit of gain is far from being the simple history of industry, with growing national prosperity; it is the history also of depredation, tyranny, and rapine. One passage in it is thus given, in the early annals of our own country: Every rich man built his castle, and they filled the land with castles. They greatly oppressed the wretched people by making them work at their castles, and, when they were finished, they filled them with evil men. Then they took those whom they suspected to have any goods, seizing both men and women by night and day; and they put them in prisons for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable. . . . The earth bare no corn; you might as well have tilled the sea; for the land was all ruined by such deeds.'

But, if misery and desolation are the natural fruits of the natural instincts of mankind, how has the prosperity of Europe steadily advanced in spite of the enemy to it which nature seems to have planted in every man's breast? How has the predatory spirit been transformed into the industrial and commercial spirit? Under what conditions are individual efforts exerted, for the most part, for the general good? These are the chief problems solved in Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.' He has been careful to point out that the interests of individuals and particular orders of men, far from being always coincident with, are frequently opposed to, the interests of the public;' and he observes that all for themselves and nothing for other people, seems to have been, in every age, the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.' The effort of every man to improve his own

condition is, it is true, in Adam's Smith's philosophy, a principle of preservation in the body politic; but his aim was to demonstrate that this natural effort is operative for the good of society at large only in proportion to the just liberty secured to every member of it to employ his natural powers as he thinks proper, whether for his own advantage, or for that of others. Every infraction of, and every interference with, individual liberty, he denounced as being as economically impolitic as morally unjust. His systematic purpose was to expose the losses which a nation suffers, not only from permission of the grosser forms of violence and oppression, but from every sort of restriction whatever upon voluntary labour and enterprise. Of laws regulating agriculture and manufactures for the supposed advantage of the public, he said, 'both were evident violations of natural liberty, and therefore unjust, and they were as impolitic as they wereunjust.' That security, he added, which the laws in Great Britain give to every man, that he shall enjoy the fruits of his own labour, is alone sufficient to make any country flourish. The history of Europe, in so far as it is the history of the progress of opulence, is not, in his pages, the history of selfishness, but of improving justice; of emancipated industry, and of protection for the poor and weak. It is, accordingly, the history of strengthening restraints upon the selfish disposition of mankind to sacrifice the happiness and good of others to their advantage or immediate pleasure. The fundamental principles on which the increase of the wealth of nations rests are thus summed up, at the end of Adam Smith's Fourth Book: All systems, either of preference or restraint, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, so long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and his capital into competition with those of any man or order of men.'

The treatise on the Wealth of Nations is, therefore, not to be regarded, as it was by Mr. Buckle, as a demonstration of the public benefit of private selfishness. Adam Smith denies neither the existence nor the value of higher motives to exertion.

The springs of industry are various. Domestic affection, public spirit, the sense of duty, inherent energy and intellectual tastes, make busy workmen, as well as personal interest. And personal interest is itself a phrase for many different motives and pursuits, deserving the name of selfishness or not according to their nature and degree; just as wealth under a single term includes many things of very different moral quality, according to their character and use. The aims of men in life may be high or low; they may seek for riches of very different kinds and for very different purposes. In a recent essay in the Revue des Deux Mondes,' the eminent economist, M. de Lavergne, maintains that political economy and religion are, though essentially distinct, related to each other as the soul and body are. Wealth, he says, means food, clothes, and houses; and religion, though it treats of higher things, does not teach that men should be left to perish of hunger and cold. Political economy has for its special end the satisfaction of the bodily wants, and religion that of the spiritual wants of man. M. de Lavergne seems to have been led astray by the economic use of general terms, such as material wealth, material interests, and material progress. For wealth is not really or properly limited in political economy to such things as satisfy the bodily or material wants of humanity. It comprehends many things, the use of which is to minister t man's intellectual and moral life, but which have, notwithstanding, a price or value. Books, for example, as well as bread and meat, are wealth. Spiritual and other instructors are paid for as well as butchers and doctors. Wealth means, in fact, many different things, more or less material or immaterial, in different ages and countries. The highest kinds of wealth will be found where there is most general freedom for the development of the highest powers of humanity, and where no class have a licence for the gratification of their selfish passions at the expense of any other class. But what Adam Smith contended for was, that no class of men, be their motives good or bad, should be suffered, under any pretext, to encroach upon the industrial liberty of other men. The true moving power of the economic world, according to his system, is not individual selfishness, but individual energy and self-control. His funda

mental principle is perfect liberty. The Wealth of Nations' is, in short, an exhaustive argument for free labour and free trade, and a demonstration of the economical policy of justice and equal laws. Arguing against the law of apprenticeship, the philosopher said: 'The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and to hinder him from employing his strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper for his own advantage is a plain violation of that most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from employing whom they think proper.'

The system, therefore, which is most subversive of the doctrines of political economy, as taught by Adam Smith, is that most selfish of all possible systems-slavery. The political economist must condemn it as loudly as the moralist. It attacks the life of industry, and prevents the existence of exchange. It robs the labourer of his patrimony; it robs those who would hire him in the market of their lawful profits; and it is a fraudulent abstraction from the general wealth of nations, the quantity and quality of which depend upon the degree of industrial liberty secured to every individual throughout the world for the exercise of his highest powers. Of the property of the slaveholder in the industry of his slaves, the paradox, 'la propriété c'est le vol,' is a literal truth according to political economy as well as common morality, and as regards not only the slaves, but the whole commercial world. Yet slavery is a system within the legitimate range of economic inquiry, which is by no means limited, as has sometimes been contended, to the phenomena of an imaginary world of free exchanges, but extends to all the economic phenomena of the real world, in which wealth is produced and distributed according to very different systems. Injustice and oppression have their natural train of economic consequences as well as liberty and equal laws, and the economist is concerned with both, as the

physician studies the laws of disease as well as health. Writers on political economy,' says the chief among them in our time, propose to investigate the nature of wealth, and the laws of its production and distribution, including, directly or remotely, the operation of all the causes by which the condition of human beings is made prosperous or the reverse.' There is not a country in Europe at this day, not excepting our own, the economic phenomena of which the principle of exchange would be sufficient to interpret. But, even if pure commercial competition now regulated, throughout the whole of Europe, the production and distribution of every article of wealth, the whole domain of history, and the breadths of Asia, Africa, and America would remain for the economist to explore, and to account on other principles for the direction and results of human industry, the use of natural resources, and the division of the produce. The economy of the Slave States of America, for example, afforded an opportunity for this inquiry, of which Mr. Cairnes availed himself in his admirable Essay on the Slave Power. In an earlier Essay, he described political economy as belonging to the class of studies which includes historical, political, and social investigations,' and defined it as 'the science which traces the phenomena of the production and distribution of wealth up to their causes in the principles of human nature, and the laws and events of the external world.'* In the later Essay, instead of deducing unreal consequences from the hypothesis of industrial liberty, he has traced the origin and consequences of the opposite order of things. Instead of the theory of wages, profit, and rent, applicable to a free society, he lays bare the structure of a society which excludes wages, for the labourer is fed and flogged like a beast of burden; in which there is no profit, according to the economist's definition, for labour is not hired, but stolen; in which there is little or no rent, for only the best soils can be cultivated, and they are constantly becoming worthless instead of growing in value; in which fear is substituted for the hope

Logical Method of Political Economy. By J. E. Cairnes, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Dublin.