36 ECONOMICS 



to apply them. Hence, Mill does not hesitate, in applying the 

 principles of political economy to social philosophy, to propose some 

 very substantial departures from what so many of his predecessors 

 had been disposed to regard as a sovereign, natural principle of the 

 science, the rule of laissez-faire. For Mill the "admitted func- 

 tions of government embrace a much wider field than can easily be 

 included within the ring-fence of any restrictive definition; and it is 

 hardly possible to find any ground of justification common to them 

 all, except the comprehensive one of general expediency." Liberty 

 and property cease to be "natural rights " and are treated as human 

 contrivances to be tried on their merits. To the emancipated mind 

 of Mill's day, Bastiat's Harmonies was an anachronism, a voice from 

 the past. Cairnes's impatient declaration that "political economy 

 has nothing to do with laissez-faire," shows how changed was the 

 animus of the science. 



Clearly, then, the forces of disintegration were at work in political 

 economy, and the constitution of the science, as it left Mill's hands, 

 was a different affair from what it had been in the confident days of 

 his father. When Cairnes some years later undertook to restore the 

 prestige of political economy by a guarded restatement of its leading 

 principles and an explanation of its character and methods, he believed 

 himself, no doubt, to be walking in the footsteps of the masters. 

 But the net result of his effort was to show how far political economy 

 had drifted from its traditional position. The unpretentious char- 

 acter that Cairnes assigns to economic laws was far from expressing 

 the ambition of the masters. The fact is that Cairnes, in attempting 

 to give to political economy an irreproachable character, was simply 

 sterilizing it. He set out to do for political economy what was 

 being done in the natural sciences. In the overhauling the physical 

 sciences were experiencing in Cairnes's day, an attempt was being 

 made to read metaphysics out of them; and the physical sciences 

 were in this respect serving as an example to the social sciences. 

 Whatever success the effort to relieve science of the metaphysical 

 taint may have had in the field of the former, the results of the 

 innovation in political economy are not to be accounted as highly 

 effective. Under Cairnes's dispensation political economy became 

 not so much less metaphysical as less vitally metaphysical. The 

 virile and imposing metaphysics of natural liberty simply gave way 

 to an impersonal and spiritless conception of normality, and political 

 economy becomes what it has remained for many of Cairnes's fol- 

 lowers, a perfect, hypothetical science, formulations of theory in 

 terms of tendencies, a body of so-called ultimate principles. For 

 the average reader, Cairnes took the discussion of economics out of 

 the older region of reality into an atmosphere so tenuous that it 

 could not preserve the aspect of vital interest. It was a meta- 



