Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/395

Rh POLITICAL ECONOMY 379 sumption on production, the most interesting results arrived at are the propositions (1) that absenteeism is a local, not a national, evil, and (2) that, whilst there cannot be permanent excess of production, there may be a temporary excess, not only of any one article, but of commodities generally, this last, however, not arising from over-production, but from a want of commercial con fidence. The third essay relates to the use of the words &quot; productive &quot; and &quot; unproductive &quot; as applied to labour, to consumption, and to expenditure. The fourth deals with profits and interest, especially explaining and so justifying Ricardo s theorem that &quot; profits depend on wages, rising as wages fall and falling as wages rise.&quot; What Ricardo meant was that profits depend on the cost of wages estimated in labour. Hence improvements in the production of articles habitually consumed by the labourer may increase profits without diminishing the real remuneration of the labourer. The last essay is on the definition and method of political economy, a subject afterwards more maturely treated in the author s System of Logic. In 1848 Mill published his Principles of Political Economy, with some of their Applications to Social Philo sophy. This title, though, as we shall see, open to criti cism, indicated on the part of the author a less narrow and formal conception of the field of the science than had been common amongst his predecessors. He aimed, in fact, at producing a work which might replace in ordinary use the Wealth of Nations, which in his opinion was &quot; in many parts obsolete and in all imperfect.&quot; Adam Smith had invariably associated the general principles of the subject with their applications, and in treating those applications had perpetually appealed to other and often far larger considerations than pure political economy affords. And in the same spirit Mill desired, whilst incor porating all the results arrived at in the special science by Smith s successors, to exhibit purely economic phenomena in relation to the most advanced conceptions of his own time in the general philosophy of society, as Smith had done in reference to the philosophy of his century. This design he certainly failed to realize. His book is very far indeed from being a &quot; modern Adam Smith.&quot; It is an admirably lucid and even elegant exposition of the Ricardian economics, the Malthusian theory being of course incorporated with these, but, notwithstanding the introduction of many minor novelties, it is, in its scientific substance, little or nothing more. When Cliffe Leslie says that Mill so qualified and amended the doctrines of Ricardo that the latter could scarcely have recognized them, he certainly goes a great deal too far; Senior really did more in that direction. Mill s effort is usually to vindicate his master where others have censured him, and to palliate his admitted laxities cf expression. Already his profound esteem for Ricardo s services to economics had been manifest in his Essays, where he says of him, with some injustice to Smith, that, &quot; having a science to create,&quot; he could not &quot;occupy himself with more than the leading principles,&quot; and adds that &quot; no one who has thoroughly entered into his discoveries&quot; will find any difficulty in working out &quot;even the minutice of the science.&quot; James Mill, too, had been essentially an ex pounder of Ricardo ; and the son, whilst greatly superior to his father in the attractiveness of his expository style, is, in regard to his economic doctrine, substantially at the same point of view. It is in their general philosophical conceptions and their views of social aims and ideals that the elder and younger Mill occupy quite different positions in the line of progress. The latter could not, for example, in his adult period have put forward as a theory of government the shallow sophistries which the plain good sense of Macaulay sufficed to expose in the writings of the former; and he had a nobleness of feeling which, in relation to the higher social questions, raised him far above the ordinary coarse utilitarianism of the Benthamites. The larger and more philosophic spirit in which Mill dealt with social subjects was undoubtedly in great measure due to the influence of Comte, to whom, as Mr Bain justly says, he was under greater obligations than he himself was disposed to admit. Had he more completely undergone that influence, ve are sometimes tempted to think he might have wrought the reform in economics which still remains to be achieved, emancipating the science from the a priori system, and founding a genuine theory of indus trial life on observation in the broadest sense. But probably the time was not ripe for such a construction, and it is possible that Mill s native intellectual defects might have made him unfit for the task, for, as Roscher has said, &quot; em historischer Kopf war er nicht.&quot; However this might have been, the effects of his early training, in which positive were largely alloyed with metaphysical elements, sufficed in fact to prevent his attaining a perfectly normal mental attitude. He never altogether overcame the vicious direction which he had received from the teaching of his father, and the influence of the Benthamite group in which he was brought up. Hence it was that, according to the striking expression of Roscher, his whole view of life was &quot;zu wenig aus Einem Gusse.&quot; The incongruous mixture of the narrow dogmas of his youthful period with the larger ideas of a later stage gave a waver ing and indeterminate character to his entire philosophy. He is, on every side, eminently &quot;un-final&quot;; he represents tendencies to new forms of opinion, and opens new vistas in various directions, but founds scarcely anything, and remains indeed, so far as his own position is concerned, not merely incomplete but incoherent. It is, however, precisely this dubious position which seems to us to give a special interest to his career, by fitting him in a peculiar degree to prepare and facilitate transitions. What he himself thought to be &quot; the chief merit of his treatise &quot; was the marked distinction drawn between the theory of production and that of distribution, the laws of the former being based on unalterable natural facts, whilst the course of distribution is modified from time to time by the changing ordinances of society. This distinction, we may remark, must not be too absolutely stated, for the organization of production changes with social growth, and, as Lauderdale long ago showed, the nature of the distribution in a community reacts on production. But there is a substantial truth in the distinction, and the recognition of it tends to concentrate attention on the question How can we improve the existing distribution of wealth&quot;? The study of this problem led Mill, as he advanced in years, further and further in the direction of socialism ; and, whilst to the end of his life his book con tinued to deduce the Ricardian doctrines from the principle of enlightened selfishness, he was looking forward to an order of things in which synergy should be founded on sympathy. The gradual modification of his views in relation to the economic constitution of society is set forth in his Auto biography. In his earlier days, he tells us, he &quot; had seen little further than the old school &quot; (note this significant title) &quot; of political economy into the possibilities of funda mental improvement in social arrangements. Private pro perty, as now understood, and inheritance appeared the dernier mot of legislation.&quot; The notion of proceeding to any radical redress of the injustice &quot; involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty &quot; he had then reckoned chimerical. But now his views were such as would &quot; class him decidedly under the