clearly the foundations of the political edifice. If they begin to fail us, the problem of replacing them involves vast moral and social difficulties which lay beyond his peculiar province. They will give work for future generations.
The value of his clear insight into fact remains, and I have only to remark, in conclusion, how well it served him in one other inquiry. Bagehot called himself the last of the old economists. He had a strong sympathy with Ricardo, as with all the leaders of the old-fashioned do-nothing Liberalism. And yet he showed most effectually one of their weaknesses. His Lombard Street owes its power to his imaginative vivacity. Instead of the abstract 'economic man'—an embodied formula—he sees the real concrete banker, full of hopes and fires and passions, and shows how they impel him in actual counting-houses. So his discussion of the 'Postulates of Political Economy' is an exposition of the errors which arise when we apply mere abstract formulæ, unless we carefully translate them in terms of the facts instead of forcing the facts into the formulæ. When a dull man of business talks of the currency question, says Bagehot, he puts 'bills' and 'bullion' into a sentence, and does not care what comes between
