Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/313

 RICHARD CANTILLON 291 Mirabeau's designs may well have prompted the owner, on recovering the Essai, to print it forthwith as it stood. How does this further information enable us to appreciate what, in the reasoned and emphatic opinion of Jevons, is'the first treatise on economics'? A writer upon commerce may be presumed to speak with weight when, as his cashier alleged of Cantilion, he draws two and a half millions out of his business in a very short time. His explanation of speculations in the exchanges, 'quite astonishing' to Jevons, we see to be the work of a master of practice. Purged of insularity by foreign residence and foreign travel, he rises above a' national system' of economics. Nor does he see in man a mere taxable animal, providentially pro- ducing wealth for the support of the Government under which he lives. His views upon the consumption of wealth fit closely and ingeniously the facts of his own time. And his constant references to land are, it is submitted, not symptoms of physio- cracy, but rather of an attempt to take land as a standard of value instead of the money which, within a short space, the writer had seen ' cried up and down,' inflated, depreciated, privi- leged, and proscribed. Wealth, runs the argument, is produced by land and labour. But, as Petty says, there is an equation between land and labour. Therefore wealth may be stated in terms of land. This proposition needs no examination here. He, however, who would cast the stone of criticism at it may be fairly asked to first compare the corresponding theory concerning labour in The Wealth of Nations, and remember that the Essai was printed twenty-one years earlier, while its author wrote his last word twenty-one years earlier still. HENRY H6(S u2