322 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



appearance of mere egoism ; and egoism, if spec- 

 ulatively justifiable, is repugnant to the popu- 

 lar consciousness. Most of the socialistic antag- 

 onism to ordinary political economy is due to the 

 belief that it is at root egoistic, and has regard to 

 the wealth of individuals at the expense of the 

 well-being of the community. 



But there are more weighty objections. Mr. 

 Bagehot pointed out ' that there have seldom been 

 circumstances in the past history of the world 

 when the conditions which are tacitly assumed 

 by Ricardo have been present. The free play of 

 competing interests, the free flow of capital to 

 different channels and of labor to different em- 

 ployments, have had no place in the industrial 

 condition of the great mass of mankind ; for com- 

 petition has rarely superseded the determination 

 of the ratio of exchange by custom. 



If the science, thus treated, is inapplicable to 

 semi-civilized human beings, it is certainly defec- 

 tive as a representation of English industry to- 

 day. Even in this country, the free action of 

 competitive individualism is very considerably 

 modified by other influences besides the remnants 

 of feudal feeling. The presence of trades-union- 

 ism and its curious effects in modifying the char- 

 acter of competing groups is a case in point : not 

 less marked are the interferences with the free- 

 dom of judgment of capitalists caused by the fac- 

 tory acts and similar legislation. 



To these charges we may add one more : the 

 teaching of the school of Ricardo is psychologi- 

 cally incorrect. The increase of pleasure and in- 

 crease of pain may possibly be the motive of all 

 human effort, but the forms under which it mani- 

 fests itself are most diverse. The self-interest of 

 the non-unionists is qualitatively different from 

 that of the man who merges his own individual 

 interest in that of his society ; we cannot regard 

 them as merely quantitatively distinct. Still more, 

 the self-interest of the man who spends his days 

 in incessant toil is different in kind from that of 

 the man who undergoes the privation of supply- 

 ing his neighbor with the means of working. 

 One man's estimate of pleasure and pain leads 

 him to marry and settle down now, and remain a 

 laborer all his days ; another prefers to wait and 

 save for years, and to rise to a better position 

 eventually ; but we cannot say that the man who 

 rises in the world has a greater regard to pleas- 

 ure and pain than the other : he is influenced by 

 a different kind of enjoyment, and a different 

 kind of privation ; the motives which load to la- 

 boring or to saving capital are different in kind, 

 1 Fortnightly Review, 1876. 



not merely in degree. If, as Mill contended, azi- 

 omala media are needed for utilitarian ethics, 

 they are equally necessary for utilitarian political 

 economy. We cannot exhibit economical phe- 

 nomena as the effects of different manifestations 

 of one force which is applied with different de- 

 grees of intensity, but must regard them as due 

 to the interaction of many forces which are quali- 

 tatively, not merely quantitatively, distinct. This 

 attempt at unreal simplification appears to me to 

 be the fundamental error which has given the 

 science an immoral guise while limiting its scope. 

 The distorted treatment has made political econ- 

 omy an inadequate science, even for our own day, 

 rather than one which explains that development 

 of industry which has accompanied the developing 

 powers of man. 



(c.) This attempt to review the methods of 

 treatment that have proved unsatisfactory may 

 have already pointed out the direction in which 

 we must apply ourselves if we would discover a 

 better. Economists have too long considered 

 human beings as tending to act from one impulse, 

 and have taken for granted that the external phe- 

 nomena of wealth are due to this one invariable 

 motive; they have thus been contented with ex- 

 amining the laws which may be observed among 

 these external phenomena. But it may be a 

 question whether the science has not been con- 

 fined too exclusively to things outside us. In 

 undergraduate days, one was sometimes struck 

 with the wide difference between this and the 

 other subjects which were grouped as moral sci- 

 ences : it had indeed to do with human beings, 

 but the whole character of the study was diverse, 

 and there was a certain relief in turning from the 

 hopeless bewilderment of various analyses of con- 

 science to the absolute clearness of Ricardo's 

 " Principles of Taxation." It may be doubted, 

 however, whether this clearness is not attained 

 by removing the difficulties before entering on 

 the discussion. With the view of simplifying 

 the problems, a pyschological assumption is made 

 — more often tacitly than not — and a large num- 

 ber of lucid deductions are drawn. Might it not 

 be better if Economy made less pretense to pre- 

 cision, and attended more carefully to the diverse 

 activities of human nature? Political economy 

 has been a science of things, and discoursed of 

 intrinsic value ; it has been a science of mechan- 

 ism, and explained the interaction of competing 

 interests ; may we not treat it as a moral science 

 which considers the resources of human nature for 

 the satisfying of human wants ? Political econ- 

 omy has to do with such of the resources — the 



