1891 ] 171 [nair(L 



to profit bj r it, as in all of his earlier books and papers he advocated the 

 doctrine of laissez nous faire, never having publicly declared his adhesion 

 to protection until the publication of "The Past, the Present, and the 

 Future" (1848). Nevertheless, in each of his early books will be found 

 the germs of those vital and far-reaching principles which he so grandly 

 developed in his "Principles of Social Science," his progress from 1835 

 to 1860, and even to 1875, having been steadily onward. By the benefi- 

 cent practical working of the tariff of 1842, he was, in 1844, induced by 

 the logic of events to range himself on the side of protection as a necessary 

 national policy. But it was not until 1847 that he was able to reconcile it 

 to economic theory. 



In 1847, when he had outlined his law of the occupation of the earth, 

 which has completely overthrown the basis upon which rested Ricardo's 

 theory of rent, he readily emerged from the last vestiges of a belief in so 

 absurd a theory applied to an artificial society as laissez nous faire. Lying 

 in bed one morning, picturing to himself the settlers on the sides of the 

 hills, moving clown into the valleys and approaching each other, as wealth, 

 power and civilization grew, he realized the vital importance of bringing 

 the consumer to the side of the producer, and, as he said to me, "I jumped 

 out of bed, and, dressing myself, was a protectionist from that hour." 



The fact is Carey, not having studied German until 1856, List's "Na- 

 tional System of Political Economy," published in Germany in 1841, was 

 to him a sealed book until 1851, when a French translation by Richelot 

 appeared in Paris. Carey's copy of this book in the Library of the Uni- 

 versity of Pennsylvania, with his pencil marks in it, showing passages 

 which he considered striking, clearly proves that he made but little use 

 of it. 



But the question of Carey's position as a social philosopher is not to be 

 determined by whether or not he picked out from some other investigator 

 one idea here or another there, but by his philosophy as a whole. His 

 great merit does not consist in the fact that he has demonstrated that asso- 

 ciation and combination with his fellow-men is the greatest need of man, 

 or that in the utilization of labor power — the most perishable of all com- 

 modities — is to be found the measure of the growth of a people in wealth, 

 power and civilization ; or that money, the instrument of association, by 

 giving utility to billions of millions of minutes, which without it would be 

 wasted, acts as a great saving fund for labor ; or that a necessary condition 

 of advance in civilization is that man passes from the use of poor tools, in- 

 cluding poor lands, to the use of good tools, including good lands ; or that 

 value is the measure of the power of nature over man, and is to be found 

 in the cost of reproduction, while utility is the measure of man's power 

 over nature ; or that, with the development of this last-named power, dis- 

 tribution takes place under a law by virtue of which to labor goes a large 

 proportion of a larger yield — freedom thus growing with the growth of 

 wealth and civilization. 



It is not by reason of the clear demonstration of any one of these great 



PROC. A]tfER. PHILOS- SOC. XXIX. 136. W. PRINTED JAN. 6, 1892. 



