with Petty he wages a fanatical war against money which, by its interference, disturbs the natural equilibrium or harmony of exchange of commodities and, like a wanton Moloch, demands all natural wealth as sacrifice. It is true that this assault on money was called forth by certain historic conditions. Since Boisguillebert attacked[1] the blind destructive lust after gold which possessed the court of Louis XIV, his tax collectors, and his nobility; on the other hand. Petty extolled in the greed of gold the mighty impulse which spurred on the nation in her industrial development and in her conquest
- ↑ In contrast with the "black art of finance" of his time, Boisguillebert says: "La science financière n'est que la connaissance approfondie des intérêts de l'agriculture et du commerce." Le Détail de la France, 1697. Eugène Daire's edition of Economistes financiers du XVIII. siècle, Paris, 1843, vol. I., p. 241.
surprising since William Petty was not only the father of English Political Economy, but also the ancestor of Henry Petty, alias Marquis of Lansdowne, the nestor of the English Whigs. However, the Lansdowne family could hardly bring out a complete edition of Petty's works without prefacing it with his biography, and what can be said of most origines of the great Whig families holds good also in this case, viz., "the less said of them the better." The keen-witted but cynical army surgeon who was as ready to plunder in Ireland under the shield of Cromwell as to crawl before Charles II. to get the title of baron which he needed for his plunderings, is a model hardly fit for public exhibition. Besides that, Petty seeks to prove in most of his writings which he published in his lifetime, that England's prosperity reached its climax under Charles II., a heterodox view for the hereditary exploiters of the "glorious revolution."
