Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/541

Rh than that of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and there is something very extraordinary in the contrast between the strong practical sense which distinguished him as a man of action, and the doctrinnaire spirit which pervades his writings. He fell into the error which characterized the classical school when they dealt with practical problems, and generalized from the special conditions of his own day. There was, to Wakefield's mind, one, and one only, method of successful colonization; all others were to be condemned in so far as they departed from the true system which he had devised. Wakefield, too, was the victim of unconscious assumptions; the type of colony he had in mind was a white man's country, in which raw produce might be obtained for export. He showed under what conditions Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand might be most successfully developed; but his scheme is certainly unsuited to tropical regions, and it need not necessarily be preferable to the alternative of developing a community on the lines of subsistence farming. On this point at least we can make a very definite comparison: Virginia, Carolina and Georgia have all been colonies which raised such commodities as tobacco and rice and cotton for export; they started more rapidly than the New England colonies, where the settlers were engaged in subsistence farming; but as we look at these states at the present time, we can hardly say that the type of community to which Wakefield devoted exclusive attention is that which has given rise to the most healthy and vigorous economic life.

Even Adam Smith, in writing of the growth of societies, fell into a similar error; he passed out of the region of actual life, where he showed himself such a master, and attempted to discourse in a pseudophilosophical strain on the manner in which countries ought to have developed, but never had. He allowed himself to elaborate an account of a supposed natural progress of opulence, which might have occurred in an isolated state. There is scope for a pretty play of fancy and much elegant writing in such a theme, but no attempt was made to show that isolated states ever do develop, so long as they remain isolated. Much may be said for the view that the chief stimulus to development is supplied by contact with communities on a different plane of economic conditions. In the history of England there are long periods of apparent stagnation and decline, and occasional epochs of rapid advance; but, whether in the days of the Danes or the Norman kings, of the Edwards or the Georges, the opening up of new trading relations has been the impetus to internal development. Economic experts are not even yet acquainted with philosophical principles as to the manner in which communities ought to develop, and therefore we are not