Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/379

Rh POLITICAL ECONOMY 363 knowledge of Adam Smith, he insists on unlimited freedom of trade, calls for the abolition of the mediieval institutions which impeded production and national wellbeing, and condemns the colonial system then followed by England, Spain, and Holland. He pro phesies, as Raynal and Genovesi had done before him, that all America would one day be independent, a prediction which probably helped to elicit Benjamin Franklin s tribute of admiration for his work. Rather a propagator than a discoverer, he sometimes adopted from others erroneous opinions, as, for example, when he approves the impot unique of the physiocrats. On the whole, how ever, he represents the most advanced political and social tenden cies of his age ; whilst strongly contrasted with Beccaria in tem perament and style, he was a worthy labourer in the same cause of national and universal progress. Ludovico Ricci (1742-1799) was author of an able report Hulla riforma degli istituti pii della citta di Modena (1787). He treated the subject of poor relief and charitable institutions in so general a way that the work possesses a universal and permanent interest. He dwells on the evils of indiscriminate relief as tending to increase the misery it seeks to remove, and as lowering the moral character of a population. He exposes especially the abuses connected with lying-in and foundling hospitals. There is much in him which is akin to the views of Malthus ; like him he is opposed to any state provision for the destitute, who ought, he thinks, to be left to voluntary private beneficence. Ferdinando Paoletti (1717-1801) was an excellent and public-spirited priest, who did much for the diffusion of intelligence amongst the agricultural population of Tuscany, and for the lightening of the taxes which pressed upon them. He corre sponded with Mirabeau (&quot;Friend of Men&quot;), and appears to have accepted the physiocratic doctrines, at least in their general sub stance. He was author of Pcnsicri soprn Fagricoltura (1769), and of / veri mezzi di render f dice la socictd (1772) ; in the latter he advocates the freedom of the corn trade. The tract 11 Colbcrtismo (1791) by Count Francesco Mengotti is a vigorous protest against the extreme policy of prohibition and protection, which may still be read with interest. Mengotti also wrote (1791) a treatise Del commcrcio de llomani, directed mainly against the exaggerations of Huet in his Histoirc du commerce ct dc la navigation des ancient* (1716), and useful as marking the broad difference between the ancient and modern civilizations. Here lastly may be mentioned another Italian thinker who, eminently original and even eccentric, cannot easily be classed among his contemporaries, though some Continental writers of our own century have exhibited similar modes of thought. This was Giarnmaria Ortes (1713-1790). He is opposed to the liberalist tendencies of his time, but docs not espouse the doctrines of the mercantile system, rejecting the theory of the balance of trade and demanding commercial freedom. It is in the Middle Ages that he finds his social and economic type. He advocates the maintenance of church property, is averse to the ascendency of the money power, and has the medueval dislike for interest on loans. He entertains the singular idea that the wealth of communities is always and everywhere in a fixed ratio to their population, the latter being determined by the former. Poverty, therefore, necessarily waits on wealth, and the rich, in becoming so, only gain what the poor lose. Those who are interested in the improvement of the condi tion of the people labour in vain, so long as they direct their efforts to the increase of the sum of the national wealth, which it is beyond their power to alter, instead of to the distribution of that wealth, which it is possible to modify. The true remedy for poverty lies in mitigating the gain-pursuing propensities in the rich and in men of business. Ortes studied in a separate work the subject of population ; he formulates its increase as &quot;geometrical,&quot; but recognizes that, as a limit is set to such increase amongst the lower animals by mutual destruction, so is it in the human species by &quot;reason&quot; the &quot; prudential restraint&quot; of which Malthus after wards made so much. He regards the institution of celibacy as no less necessary and advantageous than that of marriage. He enunciates what has since been known as the &quot; law of diminishing returns to agricultural industry.&quot; He was careless as to the diffu sion of his writings ; and hence they remained almost unknown till they were included in the Custodi collection of Italian eco nomists, when they attracted much attention by the combined sagacity and waywardness which marked their author s intellectual character. Spain. The same breath, of a new era which was in the air elsewhere in Europe made itself felt also in Spain. In the earlier part of the 18th century Geronimo Ustariz had written his Teorica y Practica del Gomercio y Marina (1724 ; pub lished, 1740 ; Eng. transl. by John Kippax, 1751 ; French by Forbonnais, 1753), in which he carries mercantile principles to their utmost extreme. The reforming spirit of the latter half of the century was best represented in that country by Pedro Rodriguez, count of Cam- pomanes (1723-1802). He pursued with ardour the same studies and in some degree the same policy as his illustrious contemporary Turgot, without, however, having arrived at so advanced a point of view. He was author of llcspucsta fiscal sobre abolir la tasa y cstablccer el comercio de granos (1764), Discurso sobre cl fomcnto de industria popolar (1774), and Discurso sobrc la cducacion de los artesanos y su fomcnto (1775). By means of these writings, justly eulogized by Robertson, as well as by his personal efforts as minister, he sought to establish the freedom of the corn trade, to remove the hindrances to industry arising from medieval survivals, to give a large development to manufactures, and to liberate agri culture from the odious burdens to which it was subject. He saw that, notwithstanding the enlightened administration of Charles III., Spain .still suffered from the evil results of the blind confidence reposed by her people in her gold mines, and enforced the lesson that the real sources of the wealth and power of his country must be sought, not in America, but in her own industry. In both Italy and Spain, as is well observed by Comte, the impulse towards social change took principally the direction of economic reform, because, the pressure exercised by Governments prevented so large a measure of free speculation in the fields of philosophy and general politics as was possible in France. In Italy, it may be added, the traditions of the great industrial past of the northern cities of that country also tended to fix attention chiefly on the economic side of public policy and legislation. Germany. We have seen that in Italy and England political economy had its beginnings in the study of practical questions relating chiefly to money or to foreign commerce. In Germany it arose (as Eoscher has shown) out of the so-called cameralistic sciences. From the end of the Middle Ages there existed in most German countries a council, known as the Kammer (Lat. camera), which was occupied with the management of the public domain and the guardianship of regal rights. The emperor Maximilian found this institution existing in Burgundy, and estab lished, in imitation of it, aulic councils at Innsbruck and Vienna in 1498 and 1501. Not only finance and taxation, but questions also of economic police, came to be intrusted to these bodies. A special preparation became necessary for their members, and chairs of cameralistic science were founded in universities for the teaching of the appropriate body of doctrine. One side of the instruction thus given borrowed its materials from the sciences of external nature, dealing, as it did, with forestry, mining, general technology, and the like; the other related to the conditions of national prosperity as depending on human relations and institu tions; and out of the latter German political economy was at first developed. In no country had mercantilist views a stronger hold than in Germany, though in none, in the period we are now considering, did the system of the balance of trade receive a less extensive parc- tical application. All the leading German economists of the 17th century Bornitz, Besold, Klock, Becher, Horneck, Seckendorf, and Schroder stand on the common basis of the mercantile doctrine. And the same may be said of the writers of the first half of the 18th century in general, and notably of Justi (d. 1771), who was the Justi. author of the first systematic German treatise on political economy, a work which, from its currency as a text book, had much effect on the formation of opinion. Only in Zincke (1692-1769) do we find Zincke. occasional expressions of a circle of ideas at variance with the dominant system, and pointing in the direction of industrial freedom. But these writers, except from the national point of view, are unimportant, not having exercised any influence on the general movement of European thought. The principles of the physiocratic system met with a certain Karl amount of favour in Germany. Karl Friedrich, margrave of Baden, Friedrich wrote for the use of his sons an Abrege dcs principes d 1 Economic of Baden. Politique, 1772, which is in harmony with the doctrines of that system. It possesses, however, little scientific value. Schlettwein (1731-1802) and Mauvillon (1743-1794) were followers of the same school. Theodor Schmalz (1764-1831), who is commonly named Schmalz. as &quot;the last of the physiocrats,&quot; may be here mentioned, though somewhat out of the historic order. He compares Colbertism with the Ptolemaic system, physiocratism with the Copernican. Adam Smith he represents as the Tycho Brahe of political economy, a man of eminent powers, who could not resist the force of truth in the physiocrats, but partly could not divest himself of rooted pre judices, and partly was ambitious of the fame of a discoverer and a reconciler of divergent systems. Though Smith was now &quot;the