Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/402

Rh POLITICAL ECONOMY well pointed out that Bastiat s theoretic soundness was injuriously affected by his habit of studying doctrines with a direct view to lead to dangerous consequences. His constant aim is, as he him self expressed it, to &quot;break the weapons&quot; of antisocial reasoners &quot;in their hands,&quot; and this preoccupation interferes with the. single- minded effort towards the attainment of scientific truth. The creation or adoption of his theory of value was inspired by the wish to meet the socialistic critrcism of property in land ; for the exigencies of this controversy it was desirable to be able to show that nothing is ever paid for except personal effort. His view of rent was, therefore, so to speak, foreordained, though it may have been suggested, as indeed the editor of his posthumous fragments admits, by the writings of Carey. He held, with the American writer, that rent is purely the reward of the pains and expenditure of the landlord or his predecessors in the process of converting the natural soil into afarm by clearing, draining, fencing, and the other species of permanent improvements. 1 He thus gets rid of the (so- called) Ricardian doctrine, which was accepted by the socialists, and by them used for the purpose of assailing the institution of landed property, or, at least, of supporting a claim of compensation to the community for the appropriation of the land by the concession of the &quot;right to&quot; labour.&quot; As Cairnes has said, &quot;what Bastiat did was this : having been at infinite pains to exclude gratuitous gifts of nature from the possible elements of value, and pointedly identified [rather, associated] the phenomenon with human effort as its exclusive source, he designates human effort by the term service, and then employs this term to admit as sources of value those very gratuitous natural gifts the exclusion of which in this capacity constituted the essence of his doctrine.&quot; The justice of this criticism will be apparent to any one Avho considers the way in which Bastiat treats the question of the value of a diamond. That what is paid for in most cases of human dealings is effort no one can dispute. But it is surely a rcductio ad absurdum of his theory of value, regarded as a doctrine of universal application, to repre sent the price of a diamond which has been accidentally found as remuneration for the effort of the finder in appropriating and transmitting it. And, with respect to land, whilst a large part of rent, in the popular sense, must be explained as interest on capital, it is plain that the native powers of the soil are capable of appro priation, and that then a price can be demanded and will be paid for their use. Bastiat is weak on the philosophical side; he is filled with the ideas of theological teleology, and is led by these ideas to form a priori opinions of what existing facts and laws must necessarily be. And the jus naturse, which, like metaphysical ideas generally, has its root in theology, is as much a postulate with him as with the physiocrats. Thus, in his essay on Free Trade, he says : &quot; Exchange is a natural right like property. Every citizen who has created or acquired a product ought to have the option of either applying it immediately to his own use or ceding it to whosoever on the surface of the globe consents to give him in exchange the object of his desires.&quot; Something of the same sort had been said by Turgot ; and in his time this way of regarding things was excusable, and even pro visionally useful ; but in the middle of the 19th century it was time that it should be seen through and abandoned. Bastiat had a real enthusiasm for a science which he thought destined to render great services to mankind, and he seems to have believed intensely the doctrines which gave a special colour to his teaching. If his optimistic exaggerations favoured the propertied classes, they certainly were not prompted by self-interest or servility. But they are exaggerations ; and, amidst the modern conflicts of capital and labour, his perpetual assertion of social har monies is the cry of peace, peace, where there is no peace. The freedom of industry, which he treated as a sort of panacea, has undoubtedly brought with it great benefits ; but a sufficient experience has shown that it is inadequate to solve the social problem. How can the advocates of economic revolution be met by assuring them that every- 1 M. Leroy-Beaulieu has recently maintained (Essai sur la Reparti tion des Richesses, 2d ed., 1882) that this, though not strictly, is approximately true that economic forms a very small part of actual rent. thing in the natural economy is harmonious that, in fact, all they seek for already exists? A certain degree of spontaneous harmony does indeed exist, for society could not continue without it, but it is imperfect and precarious ; the question is, How can we give to it the maximum of completeness and stability ? Augustin Cournot (1801-1877) appears to have been Com the first (the German, H. H. Gossen, praised by Jevons, wrote in 1854) who, with a competent knowledge of both subjects, endeavoured to apply mathematics to the treat ment of economic questions. His treo,tise entitledjRecherches sur les Principes Mathematiques de la TJieorie des Richesses was published in 1838. He mentions in it only one previous enterprise of the same kind (though there had in fact been others) that, namely, of Nicolas Francois Canard, whose book, published in 1802, was crowned by the Institute, though &quot;its principles were radically false as well as erroneously applied.&quot; Notwithstanding Cournot s just reputation as a writer on mathematics, the Recherches made little impression. The truth seems to be that his results are in some cases of little importance, in others of questionable correctness, and that, in the abstractions to which he has recourse in order to facilitate his calculations, an essential part of the real conditions of the problem is sometimes omitted. His pages abound in symbols repre senting unknown functions, the form of the function being left to be ascertained by observation of facts, which he does not regard as a part of his task, or only some known properties of the undetermined function being used as bases for deduction. Jevons includes in his list of works in which a mathematical treatment of economics is adopted a second treatise which Cournot published in 1863, with the title Principes de la Theorie des Richesses. But in reality, in the Avork so named, which is written with great ability, and contains much forcible reasoning in opposition to the exaggerations of economic optimists, the mathe matical method is abandoned, and there is not an algebrai cal formula in the book. The author admits that the public has always shown a repugnance to the use of mathematical symbols in economic discussion, and, though he thinks they might be of service in facilitating exposi tion, fixing the ideas, and suggesting further developments, he acknowledges that a grave danger attends their use. The danger, according to him, consists in the probability that an undue value may be attached to the abstract hypotheses from which the investigator sets out, and which enable him to construct his formulae. And his practical conclusion is that mathematical processes should be employed only with great precaution, or even not employed at all if the public judgment is against them, for &quot; this judgment,&quot; he says, &quot; has its secret reasons, almost always more sure than those which determine the opinions of individuals.&quot; It is an obvious consideration that the acceptance of unsound or one-sided abstract principles as the premises of argument does not depend on the use of mathematical forms, though it is possible that the employ ment of the latter may by association produce an illusion in favour of the certainty of those premises. But the great objection to the use of mathematics in economic reasoning is that it is necessarily sterile. If we examine the attempts which have been made to employ it, we shall find that the fundamental conceptions on which the deduc tions are made to rest are vague, indeed metaphysical, in their character. Units of animal or moral satisfaction, of utility, and the like are as foreign to positive science as a unit of dormitive faculty would be ; and a unit of value, unless we understand by value the quantity of one com modity exchangeable under given conditions for another, is an equally indefinite idea. Mathematics can indeed formulate ratios of exchange when they have once been