Page:Sir William Petty - A Study in English Economic Literature - 1894.djvu/96

467] pointed out for a minute analysis of facts, he stands unique. His contemporaries, as a rule, worked in a popular way. They never looked at economic phenomena as a whole. They did not try to penetrate beneath the surface of what they saw. Petty apprehended his subject in a different spirit. He believed that his investigations ought to be guided by a rigorous method. Notwithstanding the occasional character of his works, they show evidences of systematic care in their production. His "Treatise on Taxes" is a much more ambitious attempt to grasp the science of finance, than can be found in any work of his contemporaries in England. The "Anatomy of Ireland" must also be praised for its breadth of conception, although, as he worked it out, there is too much of the political pamphleteer and of ex parte argument in its pages.

In Petty there are two elements strongly marked. He shows himself in many ways distinctly under the limitations of his own age. To the prejudice and feeling of his contemporaries, he concedes a great deal. As a politician he is distinctly connected with the age of the Restoration. But there is throughout his writings a more permanent element; an element in which the systematic school of political economy is foreshadowed, both in its method, and in its point of view. In his application of statistical data, in his desire to widen the realm of knowledge by principles of research approved in the sciences, he is the father of English economic science. In his attempt to mark out the road by which the whole field of economic phenomena was to be approached, in his laying down what method was to be followed in analysing economic facts, even in some of the