Page:Sir William Petty - A Study in English Economic Literature - 1894.djvu/91

92 on the high seas to take prizes from those with whom we are at war. Would not the commercial value of the prizes be greater than the proceeds of legitimate trade? He argues with great complacency on the possibility of transporting the whole population of Ireland into England. He would erect his whole educational reform on a ground which must have been subversive of all family life. The members of all the professions, and the official class, were to be recruited from children educated in asylums and schools under the care of the state. In his fearless consistency in carrying out an enlightened sensualistic principle to its extreme, he can be compared with the great Italian political writer of the sixteenth century. Outside of moral questions he shows a certain narrowness of mind. The origin of this defect is to be sought for in the facts of his own life. He was a successful man, and from the road by which he had himself attained wealth he could not allow any divergence. To the claim of culture his training had not inclined him to be sympathetic. Masson, in his "Life of Milton," has remarked on the great difference between the educational reforms of Petty and Milton. Both men were alike dissatisfied with the prevalent methods of education; both approved of radical reforms. But the line that Petty followed in his proposals is far less broad and humanizing than that of the poet. He boasted that he had read almost nothing since he was twenty-five years old. He had few books himself, and in a letter to Boyle he discourages the habit of excessive reading, and questions its value. In the preface to the "Anatomy of Ireland" he laments, as Bacon has done in the