Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/394

Rh 378 POLITICAL ECONOMY class of society : that the diminution of the rate of profits is exclusively dependent on the returns to the capital last employed on the land ; and that wages can rise only at the expense of profits. The method followed by Jones is inductive ; his conclusions are founded on a wide observation of contemporary facts, aided by the study of history. &quot;If,&quot; he said, &quot;we wish to make ourselves acquainted with the economy and arrangements by which the different nations of the earth produce and distribute their revenues, I reallv know but of one way to attain our object, and that is, to look aiid see. We must pet comprehensive views of facts, that we may arrive at principles that are truly comprehensive. If we take a different method, if we snatch at general principles, and content ourselves with confined observations, two things will happen to us. First, what we call general principles will often be found to have no generality we shall set out with declaring propositions to be universally true which, at every step of our further progress, we shall be obliged to confess are frequently false ; and, secondly, we shall miss a great mass of useful knowledge which those who advance to principles by a comprehensive examination of facts necessarily meet with on their road. &quot; The world he professed to study was not an imaginary world, inhabited by abstract &quot; economic men,&quot;&quot; but the real world with the different forms which the owner ship and cultivation of land, and, in general, the conditions of production and distribution, assume at different times and places. His recognition of such different systems of life in communities occupying different stages in the progress of civilization led to his proposal of what he called a &quot; political economy of nations.&quot; This was a protest against the practice of taking the exceptional state of facts which exists, and is indeed only partially realized, in a small corner of our planet as representing the uniform type of human societies, and ignoring the effects of the early history and special development of each community as influencing its economic phenomena. It is sometimes attempted to elude the necessity for a wider range of study by alleging a universal tendency in the social world to assume this now exceptional shape as its normal and ultimate constitution. Even if this tendency were real (which is only partially true, for the existing order amongst ourselves cannot be regarded as entii ely definitive), it could not be admitted that the facts witnessed in our civilization and those exhibited in less advanced communities are so approximate as to be capable of being represented by the same formula. As AVhewell, in editing Jones s Remains, 1859. well observed, it is true in the physical world that &quot;all things tend to assume a form determined by the force of gravity ; the hills tend to become plains, the waterfalls to cat away their beds and disappear, the rivers to form lakes in the valleys, the glaciers to pour down in cataracts.&quot; But arc we to treat these results as achieved, because forces are in operation which may ultimately bring them about ? As Comte has said, all human questions are largely questions of time ; and the economic pheno mena which really belong to the several stages of the human movement must be studied as they are, unless we are content to fall into grievous error both in our theoretic treatment of them and in the solution of the practical problems they present. Jones is remarkable for his freedom from exaggeration and one sided statement ; thus, whilst holding Malthus in, perhaps, undue esteem, he declines to accept the proposition that an increase of the means of subsistence is necessarily followed by an increase of population ; and he maintains what is undoubtedly true, that with the growth of population, in all well-governed and prosperous states, the command over food, instead of diminishing, increases. Much of what he has left us a large part of which is unfortu nately fragmentary is akin to the later labours of Cliffe Leslie. The latter, however, had the advantage of acquaintance with the sociology of Comte, which gave him a firmer grasp of method, as well as a wider view of the general movement of society ; and, whilst the voice of Jones was but little heard amidst the general applause accorded to Ricardo in the economic world of his time, Leslie wrote when disillusion had set in, and the current was beginning to turn in England against the a priori economics. Comte somewhere speaks of the &quot; transient predilec tion &quot; for political economy which had shown itself gene rally in western Europe. This phase of feeling was speci ally noticeable in England from the third to the fifth decade of the present century. &quot;Up to the year 1818,&quot; said a writer in the Westminster Review, &quot; the science was scarcely known or talked of beyond a small circle of philo sophers ; and legislation, so far from being in conformity with its principles, was daily receding from them more and more.&quot; Mill has told us what a change took place within a few years. &quot; Political economy,&quot; he says, &quot; had asserted itself with great vigour in public affairs by the petition of the merchants of London for free trade, drawn up in 1820 by Mr Tooke and presented by Mr Alexander Baring, and by the, noble exertions of Ricardo during the few years of his parliamentary life. His writings, follow ing up the impulse given by the bullion controversy, and followed up in their turn by the expositions and com ments of my father and M Culloch (whose writings in the Edinburgh fteiieiv during those years were most valuable), had drawn general attention to the subject, making at least partial converts in the cabinet itself; and Huskisson, supported by Canning, had commenced that gradual demolition of the protective system which one of their colleagues virtually completed in 1846, though the last vestiges were only swept away by Mr Gladstone in I860.&quot; Whilst the science was thus attracting and fixing the attention of active minds, its unsettled condition was freely admitted. The differences of opinion among its professors were a frequent subject of complaint. But it was confidently expected that these discrepancies would soon disappear, and Colonel Torrens predicted that in twenty years there would scarcely &quot; exist a doubt respect ing any of its more fundamental principles.&quot; &quot;The pro sperity,&quot; says Mr Sidgwick, &quot; that followed on the aboli tion of the corn laws gave practical men a most impressive and satisfying proof of the soundness of the abstract reasoning by which the expediency of free trade had been inferred,&quot; and when, in 1848, &quot;a masterly expositor of J. S. Mi thought had published a skilful statement of the chief results of the controversies of the preceding generation,&quot; with the due &quot; explanations and qualifications &quot; of the reigning doctrines, it was for some years generally believed that political economy had &quot; emerged from the state of polemical discussion,&quot; at least on its leading doctrines, and that at length a sound construction had been erected on permanent bases. This expositor was John Stuart Mill (1806-73). He exercised, without doubt, a greater influence in the field of English economics than any other writer since Bicardo. His systematic treatise has been, either directly or through manuals founded on it, especially that of Fawcett, the source from which most of our contemporaries in these countries have derived their knowledge of the science. But there are other and deeper reasons, as we shall see, which, make him, in this as in other departments of know ledge, a specially interesting and significant figure. In 1844 he published five Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, which had been written as early as 1829 and 1830, but had, with the exception of the fifth, remained in manuscript. In these essays is contained any dogmatic contribution which he can be regarded as having made to the science. The subject of the first is the laws of interchange between nations. He shows that, when two countries trade together in two commodities, the prices of the commodities exchanged on both sides (which, as Ricardo had proved, are not deter mined by cost of production) will adjust themselves in such a way that the quantities required by each country of the article which it imports from its neighbour shall be exactly sufficient to pay for one another. This is the law which appears, with some added developments, in his systematic treatise under the name of the &quot; equa tion of international demand.&quot; The most important practical conclusion (not, however, by any means an undisputed one) at which he arrives in this essay is, that the relaxation of duties on foreign commodities, not operating as protection but maintained solely for revenue, should be made contingent on the adoption of some corresponding degree of freedom of trade with England by the nation from which the commodities are imported. In the second essay, on the influence of con-