Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/211

 Money,' dealing with questions of currency, and written in 1682; a tract entitled 'Verbum Sapienti,' written in the last year of the first Dutch war, in 1665; and the 'Political Anatomy of Ireland,' published anonymously in 1672. To these may be added the two series of detached Essays on political arithmetic written at various times between 1671 and 1687. All these works are essentially practical in character, and have for their primary object the introduction of improvements in government and administration. They are largely inductive in method; a certain number of facts being as a rule first noted, and then followed by an attempt to found some general proposition upon them, and to apply that proposition to the circumstances of the time, by the selection of apposite illustrations, showing either the advantage of adopting it or the injury of neglecting it in practice. On the other hand, there are frequent instances of purely deductive reasoning; e.g., the whole speculation on the par of land and labour, to be noticed further on, is a piece of purely deductive reasoning from hypothetical premises.

The influence of Hobbes on the early development of Sir William Petty's mind has already been traced. The 'Treatise on Taxes' shows the maintenance of that influence. The great problem of government, which in a confused manner all the statesmen of Europe in the seventeenth century were engaged in trying to solve, lay chiefly in the question what the shape should be in which the final transition was to take place from the still surviving mediæval forms of civil administration to others more suited to the needs of the time. On one side were the evils of the confusion caused by a mass of ancient local customs and exclusive privileges, with maladministration and weakness at head-quarters. On the other lay the dangers of extreme centralisation, and, as in France, of the consequent loss of civil and political liberty. The taxes to be raised, the methods of raising them, the mode of collection, and their receipt when collected, were all equally cumbrous and