Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/498

 473 L E S L E S liis labours than anything he has left to us. But the MS. of this treatise, after much pains had already been spent on it, was unaccountably lost at Nancy in 1872 ; and, though he hoped to be able speedily to i - eproduce the missing portion and finish the work, it is feared that but a small part of it, if any, has been left in a state fit for publication. What the nature of it would have been may be gathered from an essay on the &quot; History and Future of Profit&quot; in the Fortnightly Review for November 1881, which is believed to have been in substance an extract from it. That he was able to do so much may well be a subject of wonder when it is known that his labours had long been impeded by a painful and depressing malady, from which he suffered severely at intervals, whilst he never felt secure from its recurring attacks. To this disease he in the end succumbed at Belfast, whither he had gone to discharge his professorial duties, on the 27th of January 1882, in the fifty-fifth year of his age. Leslie s work may be distributed under two heads, that of applied political economy, and that of discussion on the philosophical method of the science. The Land Systems belonged principally to the former division. The author perceived the great and growing importance for the social welfare of both Ireland and England of what is called &quot;the land question,&quot; and treated it in this volume at once with breadth of view and with a rich variety of illustrative detail. His general purpose was to show that the territorial systems of both countries were so encumbered with elements of feudal origin as to be altogether unfitted to serve the purposes of a modern industrial society. The policy he recommended is summed up in the following list of requirements, &quot;a simple jurisprudence relating to land, a law of equal intestate succession, a prohibition of entail, a legal security for tenants improvements, an open registration of title and transfer, and a considerable number of peasant properties.&quot; The volume is full of practical good sense, and exhibits a thorough knowledge of home and foreign agricultural economy ; and in the handling of the subject is everywhere shown the special power which its author possessed of making what he wrote interesting as well as instructive. The way in which sagacious observation and shrewd comment are constantly intermingled in the discussion not seldom reminds us of Adam Smith, whose manner was more con genial to Leslie than the abstract and arid style of Ricanlo. But what, more than anything else, marks him as an original thinker, and gives him a place apart among contemporary econo mists, is his exposition and defence of the historical method in political economy. Both at home and abroad there has for some time existed a profound and growing dissatisfaction with the method and many of the doctrines of the hitherto dominant school, which, it is alleged, under a &quot;fictitious completeness, symmetry, and exact ness &quot; disguises a real hollowness and discordance with fact. It is urged that the attempt to deduce the economic phenomena of a society from the so-called universal principle of &quot;the desire of wealth.&quot; is illusory, and that they cannot be fruitfully studied apart from the general social conditions and historic development of which they are the outcome. Of this movement of thought Leslie was the principal representative, if not the originator, in England. There is no doubt, for he has himself placed it on record, that the lirst influence which impelled him in the direction of the historical method was that of Sir Henry Maine, by whose personal teaching of jurisprudence, as well as by the example of his writings, he was led &quot;to look at the present economic structure and state of society as the result of a long evolution.&quot; The study of those German economists who represent similar tendencies doubtless confirmed him in the new line of thought on which he had entered, though he does not seem to have been further indebted to any of them except, perhaps, in some small degree to Roscher. And the writings of Comte, whose &quot;prodigious genius,&quot; as exhibited in the Philosophic Positive, he admired and proclaimed, though he did not accept his system as a whole, must have powerfully co-operated to form in him the habit of regarding economic science as only a single branch of sociology, which should always be kept in close relation to the others. The earliest writing in which Leslie s revolt against the so-called &quot; orthodox school &quot; distinctly appears is his Essay on Wages, which was first published in 1868, and was reproduced as an appendix to the volume on Land Tenures. In this, after exposing the inanity of the theory of the wage-fund, and showing the utter want of agree ment between its results and the observed phenomena, he concludes by declaring that &quot;political economy must be content to take rank as an inductive, instead of a purely deductive science,&quot; and that, by this change of character, &quot;it will gain in utility, interest, and real truth far more than a full compensation for the forfeiture of a fictitious title to mathematical exactness and certainty.&quot; But it is in the essays collected in the volume of 1879 that his attitude in relation to the question of method is most decisively marked. In one of these, on &quot;the political economy of Adam Smith,&quot; he exhibits in a very interesting way the co-existence in the WcaWi of Nations of historical-inductive investigation in the manner of Montesquieu with a jyriori speculation founded on theologico- metaphysical bases, and points out the error of ignoring the former element, which is the really characteristic feature of Smith s social philosophy, and places him in strong contrast with his soi-disant followers of the school of Eicardo. The essay, however, which con tains the most brilliant polemic against the &quot;orthodox&quot; school, as well as the most luminous account and the most powerful vindica tion of the new direction, was that of which we have above spoken as having first appeared in Hcrmathentt. It may be recommended as supplying the best extant presentation of one of the two con tending views of economic method. On this essay mainly rests the claim of Leslie to be regarded as the founder and first head of the English historical school of political economy. How far his opinions on the philosophical constitution of the science are destined to pre vail must for the present remain doubtful. Those who share his views on that subject regard the work he did, notwithstanding its unsystematic character, as in reality the most important done by any recent English economist. But even the warmest partisans of the older school are ready to acknowledge that he has done excel lent service by insisting on a kind of inquiry, heretofore too much neglected, which is of the highest interest and value, in whatever relation it may be supposed to stand to the establishment of eco nomic truth. The members of both groups alike recognize his great learning, his patient and conscientious habits of investigation, and the large social spirit in which he treated the problems of his science. (J. K. I. ) LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM (1729-1781), was born at Kamenz, in Upper Lusatia, Saxony, on the 22d of January 1729. He was descended from Clemens Lessing, a Saxon clergyman, whose name is found attached to an ecclesiastical document of 1580. Lessing s father, Johann Gottfried, born in 1693, was the son of Theophilus Lessing, the burgomaster of Kamenz, who died at the age of eighty- nine, when Lessing was between six and seven years old. At the time of Lessing s birth his father was one of the clergymen of Kamenz, where, a few years afterwards, he became pastor primarius, or head pastor. He was a man of high character, rather irascible, but earnest in the fulfilment of his pastoral duties, and universally beloved for his kindness to the poor. Throughout life he continued the studies in theology and church history which he had successfully begun at the university of Wittenberg, and he made some reputation as an original writer and as a translator of Tillotson. Of the Frau Fastorin we do not know much except that she was a faithful and affectionate wife and mother. They had twelve children, of whom Lessing was the second who survived infancy. He seems to have been an exceedingly happy child, healthy and playful, and already remarkable for his fondness for read ing. After attending the Latin school of Kamenz, he was sent in 1741 to the great school of St Afra at Meissen, where he was maintained free of charge. Here he made such rapid progress in classical and mathematical study that, towards the end of his career as a pupil, he was described by the rector as &quot; a steed that needed double fodder.&quot; Work which was oppressive to others, added the rector, was to Lessing &quot;as light as a feather.&quot; He had the reputation of being one of the most sarcastic, but at the same time one of the most loyal and generous, boys in the school. In 1746 he left St Afra s and went to the university of Leipsic, nominally for the purpose of studying theology. To theology, however, he did not give the slightest attention. Under Professors Christ and Ernesti he continued his classical studies, and he also attended the philosophical disputations presided over by his friend Kastner, a young professor of mathematics. For some time Lessing was shy and retired amid his new surround ings, but being of an eminently social disposition he soon became tired of this kind of life, and began to form friends among his fellow-students, and strove to acquire the manners of a free and polished man of the world. His