Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/446

 424 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL behind, with long prefaces and appendices, is not visible in this instance; the author acknowledges his debts briefly and indirectly (see pp. 162 to 170, cf. 94, &c.). On this side of the North Sea at least, we see how good it is for a man to spell out his lesson for himself, even if, through the shortness of life, he will perhaps fail to carry his subject farther than his predecessors and will perhaps find out at the end that they have thought his best thoughts before him. To have familiar facts stated in unfamiliar language may be an advantage, when the writer is evidently making them clear to his own mind in his own vay. before us. In the book reasonings; but And this advantage is present in the book before us the terminology is more novel than the the two are so far in harmony that the former is philosophical, and the latter are abstract. No one is so abstract as the practical man, when he once plunges into theory, and in the present case the abstract elements of economy are all (or almost all) that our author recognizes as permanent principles. He begins (see Preface) by warning us against the tendency to mistake an accident of history for an eternal truth and against the contrary tendency to assert the eternal truth without due regard to the modifying accidents of history. For example, there is an objec- tive and there is a subjective capital. The economical essence of the notion of capital is unchangeable and omnipresent; it is surplus pro- duct devoted to future production (p. 36, &c.). In its degenerate or corrupted form it is ' Subjective Capital,' which arises through the system of private property and through the existence of capitalists, employers, and wage earners as separate classes, and is simply the means of getting profits. ' We can only have a correct view of the function of past products if we strip from the notion of Capital the element of Property and thereby reach a clear conception of an Objective Capital.' (Preface p. VII.) Here it may be remarked that, if we must needs have philosophical terms in economic discussions, they ought to be used v:it stricter analogy to their use in philosophy itself. ' Objective' and  bjective ' apply aptly enough to the case of insurance, where ' ob- c:ively' there is a loss,' subjectively' the insured is no loser (p. 55 But a body of social institutions which (by our author's own cc:unt) can completely dominate and distort the primary economical rctions of men to goods cannot without incongruity be set down as 'subjective.' Apart from the terminology, the distinction is sutantially that of Rodbertus, Wagner, and others between an eco- and a historical category, and is akin to that of John Mill boy, ween the laws that partake of the nature of physical facts and the that are of human institution only. In detail, our author il? stress on the distinction of necessaries from luxuries. The pro- quction that ministers to the former is quantitative, to the latter, q.:ditative. The former, in short, is measurable by statistics, the fluctuates beyond accurate calculation (p. 5). The contrast becomes the more marked as civilization advances; and its results are