HENRY CHARLES CAREY. 421 



of any of the great questions of government. The sympathetic writer 

 of his memoir, Dr. William Elder, declares that Mr. Carey in his 

 chief work consciously failed to devise a system of political govern- 

 ment by the application of his established principles. "His last chap- 

 ter, the fiftieth of that work, is a virtual and, as I happen to know, 

 a conscious surrender of the attempt." 



Of what have been supposed to be ^Ir. Carey's greatest direct contri- 

 butions to science, then, it is not probable that much will be found to 

 hold a permanent place. This result of a life devoted to investigation 

 is no doubt due in part to an ardor of temperament which caused him 

 to tolerate with dilhculty the impartial processes of science, and even 

 made it hard for liim to comprehend the logical methods of opponents 

 and the real position of questions in dispute. It is also due in part to 

 his burning interest in the practical questions of his time. He saw 

 these questions on their economic side, not merely as phenomena 

 illustrating the studies of his closet, but as touching the very life of 

 his nation, and he bent all his powers to the discussion of them for the 

 practical purpose of effecting their settlement. Of the enormous mass 

 of his pamphlets and of his minor contributions to the press a large 

 part is strictly controversial, and the habit of mind thus formed is 

 felt everywhere in his larger works of the last thirty years. Of the 

 questions of the day none concerned him so deeply as that of a pro- 

 tective tariff. Originally a believer in free trade, in sympathy with a 

 local current of thought now almost forgotten, and a firm believer in 

 the natural harmony resulting from economic laws, he arrived at the 

 opinion that to secure this harmony from disturbance and to arrive at 

 final freedom of trade, the co-ordinating power of government must be 

 used in the form of high custom duties for the protection of domestic 

 manufactures. From this time (not far from 1845) he was a zealous 

 and even passionate advocate of protection. No observed fact, no 

 meditated theory was for him without its bearing on this controversy ; 

 and upon reading his chief work it is impossible to doubt that this 

 absorbing interest in one question destroyed his scientific equilibrium, 

 or indeed to see how it could well be otherwise. 



But the disappearance of Mr. Carey's supposed contributions to 

 scientific theory will leave science still largely indebted to him for 

 such services as few men are qualified to render. Political economy 

 has no doubt shown a dangerous tendency to settle into intellectual 

 routine and stagnation. It was Mr. Carey's distinction that, by the 

 freedom of his own speculations and the power with which they were 

 supported, he compelled a revision of much of the ground, that he 



