Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/398

Rh 382 POLITICAL ECONOMY the question of the changes which may be expected in the amount ami jiartition of the fund out of which abstinence and labour are remunerated. He here enunciates the principle (which had been, however, stated before him by Kicardo and Senior) that the increased productiveness of industry will not affect either profit or wages unless it cheapen the commodities which the labourer consumes. These latter being mostly commodities of which raw produce is the only or principal element, their cost of production, notwithstanding improvements in knowledge and art, will increase unless the numbers of the labouring class be steadily kept in check ; and hence the possibility of elevating the condition of the labourer is confined within very narrow limits, if he continues to be a labourer only. The condition of any substantial and permanent improvement in his lot is that he should cease to be a mere labourer that profits should be brought to reinforce the wages fund, which has a tendency to decline relatively to the general capital of a country. And hence Cairnes abandoning the purely theoretic attitude which he else where represents as the only proper one for the economist recom mends the system of so-called co-operation (that is, in fact, the aboli tion of the large capitalist) as offering to the working classes &quot;the sole means of escape from a harsh and hopeless destiny,&quot; and puts aside rather contemptuously the opposition of the positivists to this solution, which yet many besides the positivists, as, for example, Leslie and F. A. Walker, regard as chimerical. The third part is devoted mainly to an exposition of Ricardo s doctrine of the conditions of international trade and Mill s theory of international values. The former Cairnes modifies by introducing his idea of the partial influence of reciprocal demand, as distinguished from cost of production, on the regulation of domestic prices, and founds on this rectification an interesting account of the connexion between the wages prevailing in a country and the character and course of its external trade. He emends Mill s statement, which represented the produce of a country as exchanging for that of other countries at such values &quot; as are required in order that the whole of her exports may exactly pay for the whole of her imports &quot; by sub stituting for the latter phrase the condition that each country should by means of her exports discharge all her foreign liabilities in other words, by introducing the consideration of the balance of debts. This idea was not new ; it had been indicated by J. L. Foster as early as 1804, and was touched on by Mill himself ; but he expounds it well ; and it is important as clearing away common misconceptions, and sometimes removing groundless alarms. Pass ing to the question of free trade, he disposes of some often-repeated protectionist arguments, and in particular refutes the American allegation of the inability of the highly-paid labour of that country to compete with the &quot;pauper labour&quot; of Europe. He is not so successful in meeting the &quot;political argument,&quot; founded on the admitted importance for civilization of developing diversified na tional industries ; and he meets only by one of the highly ques tionable commonplaces of the doctrinaire economists Mill s pro position that protection may foster nascent industries really adapted to a country till they have struck root and are able to endure the stress of foreign competition. We have dwelt at some length on this work of Cairnes, not only because it presents the latest forms of several accepted economic doctrines, but also because it is, and, we believe, will remain, the last important product of the old English school. The author at the outset expresses the hope that it will strengthen, and add consistence to, the scientific fabric &quot; built up by the labours of Adam Smith, Malthas, Ricardo, and Mill.&quot; Whilst recognizing with him the great merits of Smith, and the real abilities and services of his three successors here named, we cannot entertain the same opinion as Cairnes respecting the permanence of the fabric they constructed. We hold that a new edifice is required, incorporating indeed many of the materials of the old, but planned on different ideas and in some respects with a view to different ends above all, resting on different philosophic foundations, and having relation in ts whole design to the more comprehensive structure of which it will form but one department, namely, the general science of society. We have already had occasion to refer to Cairnes s Essays in Poli tical Economy, 1873. His Slave Power (1862) was the most valuable work which appeared on the subject of the great American conflict. France. All the later European schools presuppose in part adopting, in part criticizing the work of the English economists from Smith 1 to Ricardo and the Epigoni. The 1 The first French translation of the Wealth of Nations, by Blavet, appeared in the Journal de I Agriculture, du Commerce, des Finances, Arts, 1779-80 ; new editions of it were published in 1781, 1788, and 1800 ; it was also printed at Amsterdam in 1784. Smith himself recommended it in his third edition of the original as excellent. 1 1790 appeared the translation by Roucher, with notes by Condorcet, that by Count Germain Gamier, executed during his xile in England, which is now considered the standard version, and .s been reproduced, with notes by Say, Sismondi, Blanqui, &c., in the Colkctwn des Principavx Economises. German school has had in a greater degree than any other a movement of its own, following, at least in its more recent period, an original method, and tending to special and characteristic conclusions. The French school, on the other hand, if we omit the socialists, who do not here come under consideration, has in the main reproduced the doctrines of the leading English thinkers, stopping short, however, in general of the extremes of Kicardo and his dis ciples. In the field of exposition the French are unrivalled ; and in political economy they have produced a series of more or less remarkable systematic treatises, text books, and com- pendiums, at the head of which stands the celebrated work of J. B. Say. Bat the number of seminal minds which have appeared in French economic literature of writers who have contributed important truths, introduced improve ments of method, or presented the phenomena under new lights has not been large. Sismondi, Uunoyer, and Bastiat will deserve our attention, as being the most important of those who occupy independent positions (whether permanently tenable or not), if we pass over for the present the great philosophical renovation of Auguste Comte, which comprehended actually or potentially all the branches of sociological inquiry. Before estimating the labours of Bastiat, we shall find it desirable to examine the views of Carey, the most renowned of American economists, with which the latest teachings of the ingeni ous and eloquent Frenchman are, up to a certain point, in remarkable agreement. Cournot, too, must find a place among the French writers of this period, as the chief representative of the conception of a mathematical method in political economy. Of Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832) Ricardo says &quot; He Say. was the first, or among the first, of Continental writers who justly appreciated and applied the principles of Smith, and has done more than all other Continental writers taken together to recommend that enlightened and beneficial system to the nations of Europe.&quot; The Wealth of Nations in the original language was placed in Say s hands by Claviere, afterwards minister, then director of the assurance society of which Say was a clerk ; and the book made a powerful impression on him. Long after, when Dupont de Nemours complained of his injustice to the physiocrats, and claimed him as, through Smith, a spiritual grandson of Quesnay and nephew of Turgot, he replied that he had learned to read in the writings of the mercantile school, had learned to think in those of Quesnay and his followers, but that it was in Smith that he had learned to seek the causes and the effects of social phenomena in the nature of things, and to arrive at this last by a scrupulous analysis. His Traite d Economic Politique (1803) was essentially founded on Smith s work, but he aimed at arranging the materials in a more logical and instructive order. He has the French art of easy and lucid exposition, though his facility sometimes degenerates into superficiality ; and hence his book became popular, both directly and through translations obtained a wide circulation, and diffused rapidly through the civilized world the doctrines of the master. Say s knowledge of common life, says Roscher, was equal to Smith s ; but he falls far below him in living insight into larger political phenomena, and he carefully eschews historical and philosophical explanations. He is sometimes strangely shallow, as when he says that &quot; the best tax is that smallest in amount.&quot; He appears not to have much claim to the position of an original thinker in political economy. Ricardo, indeed, speaks of him as having &quot; enriched the science by several discussions, original, accurate, and profound.&quot; What he had specially in view in using these words was what is, perhaps rather pretentiously, called Say s theorie des debouches, with his connected disproof of the possibility of a universal glut.