Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/312

 290 THE ECON)MIC JOURN..L the same would fall considerably and come to Nothing.' Law was not likely to let his schemes be discredited in this way, at the outset, if he could avoid it. Cantilion plaintively informed Garvan (Paris, 21st June, 1730), 'I find that if I had continued here from the beginning of Hughes's Partnership (which you know the Minister of the Scheme made Dangerous for me to do) I never should have had any of these Law Suits.' His answers to Lady Carington's Exchequer bill  assert that he sold off all his French actions before he gave up the bank, and never bought any more. He advised his friends the plantiffs to do likewise, though it was not safe to give such advice at that time in France. The signature to these answers, is interesting as, perhaps, his only autograph relic. Here we must leave Cantillon's life. As the year 1730 is mentioned in his Essai, 2 he must have written that book between 1730 and 1734. There is reason to think that the original English version was in the hands of Philip Cantilion when he brought out The Analysis of Trade in 1759. This Philip, eldest son of James Cantilion, Esq., of Limerick, carried on a banker's business for some time with David Cantilion, at Warnford Court, Throgmorton- street London. He was director of the Royal Exchange Assurance in 1738; s and traded as an insurance agent after his bankruptcy in 1742. A cousin of Richard Cantilion he intervened in his affairs, on behalf of his widow and orphan, in 1734, and obtained possession of numerous papers, some of which he pro- bably retained. His edition of Richard's treatise, owing to his own inferior substitutions and additions, was too mmqual to wm respect. The French Essai, however, followed the manuscript so closely as to reproduce even the references to the missing sup- plement. This statistical compilation must have been a highly original and interesting work of some elaboration, as we gather from the Essai and from contemporary repute. So much might have been inferred from the very fact that its translation was postponed; for the purely statistical portions would require merely to be transcribed. Mirabeau states  that he had the manuscript of the Essai in his possession for sixteen years. Any inkling of  8 Geo. I. M. 992, Carington and Herbert v. Cantilion and others. 2 p. 864. 3 See Kent's Londo Directory for that year. 4 Letter to J. J. Rousseau. Levallois: Rousseau ses .4mis et ses Ennemis, Paris, 1865, ii. 365-7.