Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/540

534 years, when we have passed beyond the arbitrary limits they accepted and imposed, that it has been possible to enter on new fields of research. Carl Bücher has brought out the importance of the relations which subsist between economics and anthropology, and Thorold Rogers proved himself a vigorous pioneer in the interpretation of history. In this fashion the whole range of the phenomena of economic life, in its earlier as well as in its later forms, is being brought within the sphere of scientific treatment as exhibiting various stages of growth. The men of the classical period of economics, who devoted themselves to the study of new countries, were not in a position to deal with the subject properly, and their writings seem singularly lacking in grasp. Times have changed since their day, both politically and economically. Lord Brougham wrote at a date when responsible government was undreamed of; he pleaded for the benevolent treatment of dependencies, and his language is wholly inapplicable to the great self-governing nations, which have been formed partly under English influence and partly through English neglect. But none the less is his writing, and that of some other enthusiasts for the development of the colonies, of abiding value as a monumental warning against a sort of pseudo-philosophic habit of mind. There is an underlying assumption that the one type of colony he had in mind was the only one worth taking into account; he was really thinking of a particular case, but he allowed himself to write of it in general terms, and thus to give an air of philosophical detachment to his remarks, In the year 1803 there were many circumstances that gave prominence to questions connected with the West Indies; the agitation in regard to the slave trade was one, the trade rivalry between the French and Spanish and English islands was another. Brougham was thinking of the West Indies; all that he said of the dependence of these little islands on the mother country for defence, of the necessity of the colonists relying on English help to repel prospective invasions and annexation by France or Spain, was true enough; it might well lie at the basis of the economic relations between the planters and the government in England, but it has no bearing on the actual conditions of the great continental countries which are still called colonies, and which are at least under no anxiety as to their ability to repulse a foreign invader.

The greatest of all Brougham's contemporaries who wrote on the art of colonization was not exempt from a similar defect; he professed to write in general terms. Few names are more deserving of honor