Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/689

Rh S E N S E N 663 observances. Every canton, every village in independent Sene- gambia is governed either by a chief (" king ") or by an " almamy " elected by a group of villagers. Senegambia is divided into French Senegambia (with the terri- tories placed tinder French protection), English Senegambia, Portu- guese Senegambia, and independent Senegambia, comprising the native states not under the protection of a European power. French Senegambia is called the colony of SENEGAL (q.v.). English Senegambia comprises the establishments of the GAMBIA (q.v.) and the islands of Los. Portuguese Senegambia consisted till quite recently of Bissagos Archipelago and the " factories " of Zighinchor on the Casamance, Cacheo and Farim on the Rio Cacheo, and Geba on the Geba. By an arrangement effected in 1886 Portugal ceded Zighinchor to France in exchange for Massabe on the Loango coast. Germany, which seemed at one time disposed to place various territories of Dubreka, Koba, and Kabitai under its protection, has formally abandoned the plan. The independent states are not very numerous, but for the most part they are more extensive than the protected countries. They were quite recently Jolof, lying be- tween the Senegal and the Gambia in one direction and between the Faleme and the ocean in the other ; Bure in the Mandingo region, a territory abounding in gold ; Guidimakha in Gangara, on the right bank of the Senegal. There still remain among the more important Kaarta, the country of Segu, and Futa-Jallon. Several lines of English, French, and German packets call at the Senegambian ports, and small steamers ascend the navigable por- tions of the rivers. A railway unites St Louis and Dakar, and another line is being constructed from Kayes to Bafulabe (on the upper Senegal), with a projected extension to Bammako. There is telegraphic communication between Dakar and St Louis, and a second line puts all the ports of the upper Niger and the left bank of the Senegal into connexion with St Louis, which has touch of Europe by means of a submarine cable passing by way of the Canary Islands to Cadiz. The foreign trade of Senegambia consists in the exportation of gums, ground-nuts, sesame, oil, india-rubber, birds' feathers, hides, wax, and ivory, coffee from the Rio Nunez, and rice from the Casamance, and the importation of iron, alcoholic liquors, firearms, ammunition, coral, beads, tobacco, preserved foods, and blue calico (guinee). (D. K*.) SENIOR, NASSAU WILLIAM (1790-1864), English political economist, was born at Compton, Berks, on 26th September 1790, the eldest son of the Rev. J. R. Senior, vicar of Durnford, Wilts. He was educated at Eton and if agdalen College, Oxford ; at the university he was a private pupil of Richard Whately, afterwards archbishop of Dublin, with whom he remained connected by ties of lifelong friendship. He took the degree of B.A. in 1811, was called to the bar in 1819, and in 1836, during the chancellorship of Lord Cottenham, was appointed a master in chancery. On the foundation of the professorship of political economy at Oxford in 1825, Senior was elected to fill the chair, which he occupied till 1830, and again from 1847 to 1852. In 1830 he was requested by Lord Melbourne to inquire into the state of combinations and strikes, to report on the state of the law, and to suggest improvements in it. He was a member of the Poor Law Inquiry Commission of 1832, and of the Handloom Weavers Commission of 1837; the report of the latter, published in 1841, was drawn up by him, and he embodied in it the substance of the report he had prepared some years before on combinations and strikes. He was also one of the commissioners appointed in 1861 to inquire into popular education in England. In the later years of his life, during his visits to foreign countries, he studied with much care the political and social phenomena they exhibited. Several volumes of his journals have been pub- lished, which contain much interesting matter on these topics, though the author probably rated too highly the value of this sort of social study. Senior was for many years a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh, Quarterly, London, and North British Reviews, dealing in their pages with literary as well as with economic and political sub- jects. He died at Kensington on 4th June 1864. His writings on economic theory consisted of an article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, afterwards separately published as An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836, 3d ed. 1854), and his lectures delivered at Oxford. Of the latter the following were printed An Introductory Lecture (1827, 3d ed. 1831) ; Two Lec- tures on Population, with a correspondence between the author ami Malthus (1831) ; Three Lectures on the Transmission of the Precious Metals from Country to Country, and the Mercantile Theory of Wealth (1828) ; Three Lectures on the Cost of obtaining Money and on some Effects of Private and Government Paper Money (1830) ; Three Lectures on Wages and on the Effects of Absenteeism, Machin- ery, and War, with a Preface on the Causes and Remedies of the Present Disturbances (1830, 2d ed. 1831) ; A Lecture on the Produc- tion of Wealth (1847) ; and Four Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (1852). Several of his lectures were translated into French by M. Arrivabene under the title oiPrincipcs Fondamentaux d' Economic Politique (1835). Senior also wrote on administrative and social questions A Letter to Lord Howick on a Legal Provision for the Irish Poor, Commutation of Tithes, and a Provision for the Irish Roman Catholic Clergy (1831, 3d ed. 1832, with a preface containing suggestions as to the measures to be adopted in the " present emergency ") ; Statement of the Provision for the Poor and of the Condition of the Labouring Classes in a considerable portion of America and Europe, being the Preface to the Foreign Communi- cations in the Appendix to the Poor Law Report (1835) ; On National Properly, and on the Prospects of the Present Administration and of their Successors (anon. ; 1835) ; Letters on the Factory Act, as it afects the Cotton Manufacture (1837) ; Suggestions on Popular Edu- cation (1861) ; American Slavery (in part a reprint from the Edin- burgh Review; 1862) ; An Address on Education delivered to the Social Science Association (1863). His contributions to the reviews were collected in volumes entitled Essays on Fiction (1864) ; Bio- graphical Sketches (1865, chiefly of noted lawyers) ; and Historical and Philosophical Essays (1865). In 1859 appeared his Journal kept in Turkey and Greece in the Autumn of 1857 and the Beginning of 1858; and the following were edited after his death by his daughter Journals, Conversations, and Essays relating to Ireland (1868) ; Journals kept in France and Italy from 1848 to 1852, with a Sketch of the Revolution of 1848 (1871) ; Conversations with Thiers, Guizot, and other Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire (1878) ; Conversations with Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire, from 1860 to 1863 (1880) ; Conversations and Journals in Egypt and Malta (1882) ; also in 1872 Correspondence and Conver- sations with Alexis de Tocqueville from 1834 to 1859. Senior's literary criticisms do not seem to have ever won the favour of the public ; they are, indeed, somewhat formal and academic in spirit. The author, while he had both good sense and right feeling, appears to have wanted the deeper insight, the geniality, and the catholic tastes which are necessary to make a critic of a high order, especially in the field he chose, that, namely, of imaginative literature. His tracts on practical politics, though the theses they supported were sometimes questionable, were ably written and are still worth reading, but cannot be said to be of much permanent interest. But his name will continue to hold an honourable, though secondary, place in the history of political economy. Senior regards political economy as a purely deductive science, all the truths of which are inferences from four elementary propositions. It is, in his opinion, wrongly supposed by J. S. Mill and others to be a hypothetic science, founded, that is to say, on postulates not corresponding with social realities. The premises from which it sets out are, according to him, not assumptions but facts. It concerns itself, however, with wealth only, and can therefore give no practical counsel as to political action : it can only suggest considerations which the politician should keep in view as elements in the study of the questions with which he has to deal. The con- ception of economics as altogether deductive is certainly erroneous, and puts the science from the outset on a false path. But de- duction has a real, though limited, sphere within it. Hence, though the chief difficulties of the subject are not of a logical kind, yet accurate nomenclature, strict definition, and rigorous reasoning are of great importance. To these Senior has given special atten- tion, and, notwithstanding occasional pedantries, with very useful results. He has in several instances improved the forms in which accepted doctrines were habitually stated. He has also done ex- cellent service by pointing out the arbitrary novelties and frequent inconsistencies of terminology which deface Ricardo's principal work, as, for example, his use of "value" in the sense of "cost of production," and of " high " and " low " wages in the sense of a certain proportion of the product as distinguished from an absolute amount, and his peculiar employment of the epithets "fixed" and "circulating" as applied to capital. He shows, too, that in numerous instances the premises assumed by Ricardo are false. Thus he cites the assertions that rent depends on the difference of fertility of the different portions of land in cultivation ; that the labourer always receives precisely the necessaries, or what custom leads him to consider the necessaries, of life ; that, as wealth and population advance, agricultural labour becomes less and less pro- portionately productive ; and that therefore the share of the pro- duce taken by the landlord and the labourer must constantly in- crease, whilst that taken by the capitalist must constantly diminish ; and he denies the truth of all these propositions. Besides adopting some terms, such as that of "natural agents," from Say, Senior