Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/63

Rh power. As regards concrete labor, he sizes it up in the magnitude of its social aspect, as the division of labor.Petty had illustrated the productive power inherent in the division of labor on a much grander scale than that was done later by Adam Smith. See his "Essay concerning the multiplication of mankind, etc.," 3rd edition, 1686, p. 35–36. He not only brings out the advantages of the division of labor on the example of the manufacture of a watch, as Adam Smith did later on that of a needle, but considers also a city and an entire country from the point of view of a large manufacturing establishment. The Spectator, of November 26, 1711, refers to this "illustration of the admirable Sir William Petty." McCulloch is, therefore, mistaken when he supposes that the Spectator confounded Petty with a writer forty years his junior. See McCulloch, "The Literature of Political Economy, a classified catalogue," London, 1845, p. 105. Petty is conscious of being the founder of a new science. His method, he says, "is not yet very usual, for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments," he has undertaken to speak "in Terms of Number, Weight or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Consideration of others." (Political Arithmetick, etc., London, 1699. Preface.) (A new edition of "The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty," edited by Chas. Henry Hull, has been published by the University Press at Cambridge, 1899. The above passage will be found in vol. I., p. 244, The further references are given to this new, more accessible edition. Translator.) His wonderful keenness shows itself e. g. in the proposal to transport "all the moveables and people of Ireland, and of the Highlands of Scotland . . . into the rest of Great Britain." Thereby much labor-time would be saved, the productivity of labor This view of the source of material wealth does not