Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/414

Rh 398 POLITICAL ECONOMY other &quot; society at this day is the outcome of the entire movement which has evolved the political constitution, the structure of the family, the forms of religion, the learned professions,- the arts and sciences, the state of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.&quot; To understand existing economic relations we must trace their historical evolution ; and &quot; the philosophical method of political economy must be one which expounds that evolution.&quot; This essay was the most distinct challenge ever addressed to the ideas of the old school on method, and, though its conclusions have been protested against, the arguments on which they are founded have never been answered. With respect to the dogmatic generalizations of the &quot; orthodox &quot; economics, Leslie thought some of them were false, and all of them required careful limitation. Early in his career he had shown the hollowness of the wage- fund theory, though he was not the first to repudiate it. 1 The doctrine of an average rate of wages and an average rate of profits he rejected except under the restrictions stated by Adam Smith, which imply a &quot; small and stationary world of trade.&quot; He thought the glib assump tion of an average rate of wages, as w r ell as of a wage- fund, had done much harm &quot; by hiding the real rates of wages, the real causes which govern them, and the real sources from w 7 hich wages proceed.&quot; The facts, which he laboriously collected, he found to be everywhere against the theory. In every country there is really &quot; a great number of rates ; and the real problem is, What are the causes which produce these different rates ?&quot; As to profits, he denies that there are any means of knowing the gains and prospects of all the investments of capital, and declares it to be a mere fiction that any capitalist surveys the whole field. Bagehot, as we saw, gave up the doctrine of a national level of wages and profits except in the peculiar case of an industrial society of the contemporary English type ; Leslie denies it even for such a society. With this doctrine, that of cost of production as determin ing price collapses, and the principle emerges that it is not cost of production, but demand and supply, on which domestic, no less than international, values depend, though this formula will require much interpretation before it can be used safely and with advantage. Thus Leslie extends to the whole of the national industry the partial negation of the older dogma introduced by Cairnes through the idea of non-competing groups. He does not, of course, dispute the real operation of cost of production on price in the limited area within which rates of profit and wages are determinate and known ; but he maintains that its action on the large scale is too remote and uncertain to justify our treating it as regulator of price. Now, if this be so, the entire edifice which Ilicardo reared on the basis of the identity of cost of production and price, with its apparent but unreal simplicity, symmetry, and completeness, disappears; and the ground is cleared for the new structure which must take its place. Leslie pre dicts that, if political economy, under that name, does not bend itself to the task of rearing such a structure, the office will speedily be taken out of its hands by sociology. Leslie was a successful student of several special economic subjects of agricultural economy, of taxation, of the distribution of the precious metals and the history of prices, and, as has been indicated, of the movements of wages. But it is in relation to the method and funda mental doctrines of the science that he did the most 1 That service was due to F. D. Longe (Refutation of the Wage- Fund Theory of Modern Political Economy, 1866). Leslie s treat ment of the subject was contained in an article of Frasers Magazine for July 1868, reprinted as an appendix to his Land-Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England, and Continental Countries, 18/0. important, because the most opportune and needful work. And, though his course was closed too early for the interests of knowledge, and much of what he produced was merely occasional and fragmentary, his services will be found to have been greater than those of many who have left behind them more systematic, elaborate, and pretentious writings. One of the most original of recent English writers on Jevons. political economy was W. Stanley Jevons (1835-1882). The combination which he presented of a predilection and aptitude for exact statistical inquiry with sagacity and ingenuity in the interpretation of the results was such as might remind us of Petty. He tended strongly to bring economics into close relation with physical science. He made a marked impression on the public mind by his attempt to take stock of our resources in the article of coal. His idea of a relation between the recurrences of commercial crises and the period of the sun-spots gave evidence of a fertile and bold scientific imagination, though he cannot be said to have succeeded in establishing such a relation. He was author of an excellent treatise on Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875), and of various essays on currency and finance, which have been collected since his death, and contain vigorous discussions on subjects of this nature, as on bimetallism (with a de cided tendency in favour of the single gold standard), and several valuable suggestions, as with respect to the most perfect system of currency, domestic and international, and in particular the extension of the paper currency in England to smaller amounts. He proposed in other writings (collected in Methods of Social Reform, 1883) a variety of measures, only partly economic in their character, directed especially to the elevation of the working classes, one of the most important being in relation to the conditions of the labour of married women in factories. This was one of several instances in which he repudiated the laissez faire principle, which indeed, in his book on The State in Relation to Labour (1882), he refuted in the clearest and most con vincing way, without changing the position he had always maintained as an advocate of free trade. Towards the end of his career, which was prematurely terminated, he was j more and more throwing off &quot; the incubus of metaphysical ideas and expressions&quot; which still impeded the recognition i or confused the appreciation of social facts. He was, in his own words, ever more distinctly coming to the conclusion &quot;that the only hope of attaining a true system of economics is to fling aside, once and for ever, the mazy and prepos terous assumptions of the Bicardian school.&quot; With respect to method, though he declares it to be his aim to &quot;investi gate inductively the intricate phenomena of trade and industry,&quot; his views had not perhaps assumed a definitive shape. The editor of some of his remains declines to under take the determination of his exact position with respect to the historical school. The fullest indications we possess on that subject are to be found in a lecture of 1876, On the Future of Political Economy. He saw the importance and necessity in economics of historical investigation, a line of study which he himself was led by native bent to prose cute in some directions. But he scarcely apprehended the full meaning of what is called the historical method, which he erroneously contrasted with the &quot;theoretical,&quot; and apparently supposed to be concerned with verifying and illustrating certain abstract doctrines resting on in dependent bases. Hence, whilst he declared himself in favour of &quot; thorough reform and reconstruction,&quot; he sought to preserve the a priori mode of proceeding alongside of, and concurrently with, the historical. Political economy, in fact, he thought was breaking up and falling into several, probably into many, different branches of inquiry, prominent amongst which would be the &quot;theory&quot; as it