Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/396

Rh POLITICAL ECONOMY general designation of socialist &quot; ; he had come to believe that the whole contemporary framework of economic life was merely temporary and provisional, and that a time would come when &quot; the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, would be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice.&quot; &quot; The social problem of the future&quot; he considered to be &quot;how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action,&quot; which was often compromised in socialistic schemes, &quot; with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation in all the benefits of combined labour.&quot; | These ideas were scarcely indicated in the first edition of the Political Economy, rather more clearly and fully in the second, and quite unequivocally in the third, the French Revolution of 18-48 having, as he says, made the public more open to the reception of novelties in opinion. Whilst thus looking forward to a new economic order, he yet thinks its advent very remote, and believes that the inducements of private interest will in the meantime be indispensable. On the spiritual side he maintains a similar attitude of expectancy. He anticipates the ulti mate disappearance of theism, and the substitution of a purely human religion, but believes that the existing doctrine will long be necessary as a stimulus and a control. He thus saps existing foundations without providing any thing to take their place, and maintains the necessity of conserving for indefinite periods what he has radically discredited. Nay, even whilst sowing the seeds of change in the direction of a socialistic organization of society, he favours present or proximate arrangements which would urge the industrial world towards other issues. The system of peasant proprietorship of land is distinctly indi vidualistic in its whole tendency ; yet he extravagantly praises it in the earlier part of his book, only receding from that laudation when he comes to the chapter on the future of the labouring classes. And the system of so- called cooperation in production which he so warmly com mended in the later editions of his work, and led some of his followers to preach as the one thing needful, would inevitably strengthen the principle of personal property, and, whilst professing at most to substitute the competition of associations for that of individuals, would by no means exclude the latter. The elevation of the working classes he bound up too exclusively with the Malthusian ethics, on which he laid (juite an extravagant stress, though, as Mr Bain has observed, it is not easy to make out his exact views, any more than his father s, on this subject. We have no reason to think that he ever changed his opinion as to the necessity of a restriction on population ; yet that element seems foreign to the socialistic idea to which he increas- ingly leaned. It is at least difficult to see how, apart from individual responsibility for the support of a family, what Malthus called moral restraint could be enforced. This difficulty is indeed the fatal flaw which, in Malthus s own opinion, vitiated the scheme of Godwin. Mill s openness to new ideas and his enthusiasm for improvement cannot be too much admired. But there appears to have been combined with these fine traits in his mental constitution a certain want of practical sense, a failure to recognize and acquiesce in the necessary con ditions of human life, and a craving for &quot; better bread j than can be made of wheat.&quot; He entertained strangely exaggerated, or rather perverted, notions of the &quot;sub- jection,&quot; the capacities, and the rights of women. He encourages a spirit of revolt on the part of working men ! against their perpetual condemnation, as a class, to the lot of living by wages, without giving satisfactory proof that this state of things is capable of change, and without showing that such a lot, duly regulated by law and morality, is inconsistent with their real happiness. He also insists on the &quot;independence&quot; of the working class which according to him farct da se in such a way as to obscure, if not to controvert, the truths that superior rank and wealth are naturally invested with social power, and are bound in duty to exercise it for the benefit of the community at large, and especially of its less favoured members. And he attaches a quite undue importance to mechanical and, indeed, illusory expedients, such as the limitation of the power of bequest and the confiscation of the &quot;unearned increment&quot; of rent. With respect to economic method also, he shifted his position ; yet to the end occupied uncertain ground. In the fifth of his early essays he asserted that the method a priori is the only mode of investigation in the social sciences, and that the method a posteriori &quot;is altogether inefficacious in those sciences, as a means of arriving at any considerable body of valuable truth.&quot; When he wrote his Logic, he had learned from Comte that the a posteriori method in the form which he chose to call &quot; inverse deduction&quot; was the only mode of arriving at truth in general sociology ; and his admission of this at once renders the essay obsolete. But, unwilling to relinquish the a priori method of his youth, he tries to establish a distinction of two sorts of economic inquiry, one of which, though not the other, can be handled by that method. Sometimes he speaks of political economy as a department &quot; carved out of the general body of the science of society &quot; ; whilst on the other hand the title of his systematic work implies a doubt whether political economy is a part of &quot; social philosophy &quot; at all, and not rather a study pre paratory and auxiliary to it. Thus, on the logical as well as the dogmatic side, he halts between two opinions. Notwithstanding his misgivings and even disclaimers, he yet remained, as to method, a member of the old school, and never passed into the new or &quot; historical &quot; school, to which the future belongs. The question of economic method was also taken up by Cairnes. the ablest of his disciples, John Elliott Cairnes (1824- 75), who devoted a volume to the subject (Logical Method of Political Economy, 1857; 2d ed., 1875). Prof. Walker has lately spoken of the method advocated by Cairnes as different from that put forward by Mill, and has even represented the former as similar to, if not identical with, that of the German historical school. But this is certainly an error. Cairnes, notwithstanding some apparent vacillation of view and certain conces sions more formal than real, maintains the utmost rigour of the deductive method ; he distinctly affirms that in political economy there is no room for induction at all, &quot; the economist starting with a knowledge of ultimate causes,&quot; and being thus, &quot;at the outset of his enterprise, at the position which the physicist only attains after ages of laborious research.&quot; He does not, indeed, seem to be advanced beyond the point of view of Senior, who professed to deduce all economic truth from four elementary pro positions. Whilst Mill in his Logic represents verification as an essential part of the process of demonstration of economic laws, Cairnes holds that, as they &quot; are not asser tions respecting the character or sequence of phenomena &quot; (though what else can a scientific law be 1 ?), &quot;they can neither be established nor refuted by statistical or docu mentary evidence.&quot; A proposition which affirms nothing respecting phenomena cannot be controlled by being con fronted with phenomena. Notwithstanding the unques tionable ability of his book, it appears to mark, in some respects, a retrogression in methodology, and can for the future possess only an historical interest. Regarded in that light, the labours of Mill and