418 HENRY CHARLES CAREY. 



ing strength through the whole of his literary life, while the rapid 

 industrial expansion which marks the century gave a new and power- 

 ful stimulus to inquiry as to the forces which govern the development 

 and well-being of nations. Our countryman announced a series of 

 discoveries in social science, and in political economy the leading divis- 

 ion of that science ; the announcement was so made as to command 

 universal attention, and the value of the declared discoveries became a 

 question of debate among students of economic theory. In Germany 

 especially, the question whether Mr. Carey has made a scientific revo- 

 lution has been discussed in several published essays by Duhring, 

 Held, Lange, and Wirth. The same question has attracted attention 

 both in France and in Italy, and it is perhaps only in England that it 

 has been treated with indifference. 



Mr. Carey himself has stated the order in which his discoveries 

 were made, in the introduction to his Principles of Social Science, 

 his most important work. The point of departure was a new theory 

 of value, which he defined as the measure of the resistance to be 

 overcome in obtaining things required for use, or the measure of the 

 power of nature over man. In simpler terms, value is measured by 

 the cost of reproduction. The value of every article thus declines 

 as the arts advance, while the general command of commodities con- 

 stantly increases. This causes a constant fall in the value of accumu- 

 lated capital as compared with the results of present labor, from which 

 is inferred a tendency towards harmony rather than divergence of in- 

 terests between capitalist and laborer. This theory, which at first seems 

 easily reconciled with the real import of the ordinary theory of cost 

 of production, Mr. Carey a:pplied to every case in which value could 

 be predicated, — to commodities, services, and land alike. Indeed, in 

 passages which seem not wholly metaphorical, it is applied to man 

 himself. In the case of land and its products, the theory led natu- 

 rally to the position that their value is due solely to the cost of repro- 

 ducing the like, monopoly of possession having no agency, and every 

 gift of nature being in itself gratuitous and without value. This 

 theory appears in Mr. Carey's " Principles of Political Economy," pub- 

 lished in 1837-40, and is found in slightly different terms in Bastiat's 

 " Harmonies Economiques," printed in 1850, where it was made to do 

 effective and welcome service as a defence of property, and especially 

 of property in land, against the attacks of the socialists of Proud- 

 hon's school. The question as to Bastiat's unacknowledged indebted- 

 ness to Mr. Carey was discussed, but hardly settled, in a series of letters 

 in the "Journal des Economistes " for 1851. Of these letters that 



