ECONOMIC SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 33 



Labor falls from being the cause of value to being merely its measure. 

 Value being taken as the earmark of wealth, the Ricardian economics 

 becomes a theory of acquisition, attention being given to the money- 

 making propensities rather than to productive activity. The dis- 

 tinction between industry and business, between making things and 

 " making money," is obscured and neglected. Archbishop Whately 

 designated the essential interest of the utilitarian economics when 

 he proposed the name " Catallactics " the science of exchanges. 



But however considerable the changes thus wrought in the theo- 

 retical structure of the science, the adoption of the utilitarian con- 

 ception did not destroy or seriously damage the belief in a meliora- 

 tive trend in events. The fact of diminishing productiveness and 

 the law of population made it far from easy for the Ricardians to 

 contemplate the " natural advance of society " with the unmixed 

 satisfaction of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. But utilitarian- 

 ism, with its " greatest good of the greatest number" and " every 

 one to count as one," saved the day for the system of natural liberty. 

 Since society is the sum of its individual men, and the collective 

 interest is the sum total of individual interests, it follows for utili- 

 tarian economics that each individual, in pursuing his own private 

 interest, is also furthering the social good in the most effective fashion. 

 And consequently the natural laws of the science under its utili- 

 tarian organization, though they have lost something of their former 

 coloring and unimpeachable authority, are still uttered in a sense 

 that usually implies approval, even though in a greater degree than 

 before they are expressed in the dry and conventional language of 

 science. Competition makes for the happiness of the greatest num- 

 ber. Therefore, the natural laws of political economy, which are 

 the laws of competition, carry with them the suggestions of precepts. 



So long as utilitarianism maintained its position unimpaired, 

 economic science had a clear and easy course to follow, that is, 

 until about the middle of the nineteenth century. During that time 

 it advanced to a commanding position among the social sciences, 

 because it was, of all of them, the most competent to. turn the 

 utilitarian expedient of thought to effective account in explaining 

 the motions of men and society. Its deliverances, frequently uttered 

 in a spirit of dogmatism, were accepted almost unquestioned. Its 

 standing with the public has never been better. There were differ- 

 ences among the Ricardians on questions of theoretical detail, but 

 nothing touching the spiritual stability of the system they had 

 devised. New departures in economics were taken or proposed by 

 Sismondi in France, List in Germany, and Richard Jones in England. 

 But highly valued as the work of these innovators has been by later 

 economists, it made little impression upon the development of the 

 science at the time. The authority of the classical political economy 



