P L I T I C A L E C N O M Y 377 be less open to criticism, couched in a more accurate ter minology, modified in subordinate particulars, or applied to the solution of the practical questions of their day. James Mill s Elements (1821) deserves special notice, as exhibiting the system of Ricardo with a thorough-going rigour, a compactness of presentation, and a skill in the disposition of materials, which give to it in some degree the character of a work of art. The a priori political economy is here reduced to its simplest expression. J. K. M Culloch (1779-1864), author of a number of laborious statis tical and other compilations, criticized current economic legislation in the Edinburgh Review from the point of view of the Ricardian doctrine, taking up substantially the same theoretic position as was occupied at a somewhat later period by the Manchester school. He is altogether without originality, and never exhibits any philo sophic elevation or breadth. His confident dogmatism is often repellent; he admitted in his later years that lie had been too fond of novel opinions, and defended them with more heat and perti nacity than they deserved. It is noticeable that, though often spoken of in his own time both by those who agreed with his views, and those, like Sismondi, who differed from them, as one of the lights of the reigning school, his name is now tacitly dropped in the writings of the members of that school. Whatever may have been his partial usefulness in vindicating the policy of free trade, it is at least plain that for the needs of our social future he has nothing to offer. Nassau William Senior (1790-1864), who was professor of political economy in the university of Oxford, published, besides a number of separate lectures, a treatise on the science, which first appeared as an article in the Encyclopedia Mctropolitana. He is a writer of a high order of merit. He made considerable contributions to the elucidation of economic principles, specially studying exactness in nomenclature and strict accuracy in deduction. His explanations on cost of production and the way in which it affects price, on rent, on the difference between rate of wages and price of labour, on the relation between profit and wages (with special reference to Ricardo s theorem on this subject, which he corrects by the substi tution of proportional for absolute amount), and on the dis tribution of the precious metals between different countries are particularly valuable. His new term "abstinence," invented to express the conduct for which interest is the remuneration, was useful, though not quite appropriate, because negative in meaning. It is on the question of wages that Senior is least satisfactory. He makes the average rate in a country (which, we must maintain, is not a real quantity, though the rate in a given employment and neighbourhood is) to be expressed by the fraction of which the numerator is the amount of the wages fund (an unascertainable and indeed, except as actual total of wages paid, imaginary sum) and the denominator the number of the working population ; and from this he proceeds to draw the most important and far-reaching consequences, though the equation on which he founds his inferences conveys at most only an arithmetical fact, which would be true of every case of a division amongst individuals, and contains no economic element whatever. The phrase " wages fund" originated in some expressions of Adam Smith used only for the purpose of illustration, and never intended to be rigorously interpreted ; and we shall see that the doctrine has been repudiated by several members of what is regarded as the orthodox school of political economy. As regards method, Senior makes the science a purely deductive one, in which there is no room for any other "facts" than the four fundamental propositions from which he undertakes to deduce all economic truth. And he does not regard himself as arriving at hypothetic conclusions ; his postulates and his inferences are alike conceived as corresponding to actual phenomena. Colonel Robert Torrens (1780-1864) was a prolific writer, partly on economic theory, but principally on its applications to financial and com mercial policy. Almost the whole of the programme which was carried out in legislation by Sir Robert Peel had been laid down in principle in the writings of Torrens. He gave substantially the same theory of foreign trade which was afterwards stated by J. S. Mill in one of his Essays on Unsettled Questions. He was an early and earnest advocate of the repeal of the corn laws, but was not in favour of a general system of absolute free trade, maintain ing that it is expedient to impose retaliatory duties to countervail similar duties imposed by foreign countries, and that a lowering of import duties on the productions of countries retaining their hostile tariffs would occasion an abstraction of the preciois metals, and a decline in prices, profits, and wages. His principal writings of a general character were The Economist [i.e., Physiocrat] refuted, 1808; Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821; Essay on the External Corn-trade (eulogized by Ricardo), 1827; The Budget, a Series of Letters on Financial, Commercial, and Colonial Policy, 1841-3. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) popularized the doctrines of Malthus and Ricardo in her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34), a series of tales, in which there is much excellent description, but the effect of the narrative is often marred by the somewhat ponderous disquisitions here and there thrown in, usually in the form of dialogue. Other writers who ought to be named in any history of the science are Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machines and Mamifactures (1832), chiefly descriptive, but also in part theoretic; William Thomas Thornton, Overpopulation and its Remedy (1846), A Plea for Peasant Proprietors (1848), On Labour (1869; 2d ed. , 1870); Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, (1841-2; new ed., 1861); T. C. Banfield, The Organization of Industry explained (1844; 2ded.,1848); and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization, 1849. Thomas Chalmers, well known in other fields of thought, was author of The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Toivns (1821-36), and On Political Economy in Connexion with the Moral State and Moral Prospects of Society (1832); he strongly opposed any system of legal charity, and, whilst justly insisting on the primary importance of morality, industry, and thrift as conditions of popular wellbeing, carried the Malthusian doctrines to excess. Nor was Ireland without a share in the economic movement of the period. Whately, having been second Drummond professor of political economy at Oxford (in succession to Senior), founded (1832), when he went to Ireland as archbishop of Dublin, a similar professorship in Trinity College, Dublin. It was first held by Mountifort Longfield, after wards judge of the Landed Estates Court, Ireland (d. 1884). He pub lished lectures on the science generally (1834), on Poor Zzra(1834), and on Commerce and Absenteeism (1835), which were marked by independence of thought and sagacious observation. He was laudably free from many of the exaggerations of his contemporaries ; he said, in 1835, " in political economy we must not abstract too much," and protested against the assumption too often made that "men are guided in all their conduct by a prudent regard to their own interest." James A. Lawson (now Mr Justice Lawson) also published some lectures (1844) delivered from the same chair, which may still be read with interest and profit ; his discussion of the question of population is especially good ; he also asserted against Senior that the science is avide de fails, and that it must reason about the world and mankind as they really are. The most systematic and thorough-going contemporary Richard critic of the Ricardian system was Richard Jones (1790- Jones. 1855), professor at Haileybury. Jones has received scant justice at the hands of his successors. J. S. Mill, whilst using his work, gave his merits but faint recognition. Even Roscher says that he did not thoroughly understand Ricardo, without giving any proof of that assertion, whilst he is silent as to the fact that much of what has been preached by the German historical school is found dis tinctly indicated in Jones s writings. He has been some times represented as having rejected the Andersonian doctrine of rent ; but such a statement is incorrect. Attributing the doctrine to Malthus, he says that that economist " showed satisfactorily that, when land is culti vated by capitalists living on the profits of their stock, and able to move it at pleasure to other employments, the expense of tilling the worst quality of land cultivated determines the average price of raw produce, while the difference of quality on the superior lands measures the rents yielded by them." What he really denied was the application of the doctrine to all cases where rent is paid ; he pointed out in his Essay on the Distribution of Wealth andon the Sources of Taxation, 1831, that, besides "farmers rents," which, under the supposed conditions, conform to the above law, there are " peasant rents," paid every where through the most extended periods of history, and still paid over by far the largest part of the earth s surface, which are not so regulated. Peasant rents he divided under the heads of (1) serf, (2) metayer, (3) ryot, and (4) cottier rents, a classification afterwards adopted in substance by J. S. Mill ; and he showed that the contracts fixing their amount were, at least in the first three classes, determined rather by custom than by competition. Passing to the superstructure of theory erected by Ricardo on the doctrine of rent which he had so unduly extended, Jones denied most of the conclusions he had deduced, especially the following: that the increase of farmers rents is always contemporary with a decrease in the productive powers of agriculture, and comes with loss and distress in its train ; that the interests of landlords are always and necessarily opposed to the interests of the state and of every other
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