496 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



presumed, that the conduct of mankind in the pursuit of 

 wealth is under the collateral influence of any other of the 

 properties of our nature, than the desire of obtaining the 

 greatest quantity of wealth with the least labour and self- 

 denial, the conclusions of political economy will so far fail of 

 being applicable to the explanation or prediction of real events, 

 until they are modified by a correct allowance for the degree of 

 influence exercised by the other cause."* 



Extensive and important practical guidance may be derived, 

 in any given state of society, from general propositions such 

 as those above indicated ; even though the modifying influence 

 of the miscellaneous causes which the theory does not take 

 into account, as well as the effect of the general social 

 changes in progress, be provisionally overlooked. And though 

 it has been a very common error of political economists to 

 draw conclusions from the elements of one state of society, 

 and apply them to other states in which many of the 

 elements are not the same ; it is even then not difficult, by 

 tracing back the demonstrations, and introducing the new 

 premises in their proper places, to make the same general 

 course of argument which served for the one case, serve for 

 the others too. 



For example, it has been greatly the custom of English 

 political economists to discuss the laws of the distribution of 

 the produce of industry, on a supposition which is scarcely 

 realized anywhere out of England and Scotland, namely, 

 that the produce is " shared among three classes, altogether dis- 

 tinct from one another, labourers, capitalists, and landlords ; 

 and that all these are free agents, permitted in law and in fact 

 to set upon their labour, their capital, and their land, whatever 

 price they are able to get for it. The conclusions of the science, 

 being all adapted to a society thus constituted, require to be 

 revised whenever they are applied to any other. They are 

 inapplicable where the only capitalists are the landlords, and 

 the labourers are their property, as in slave countries. They 

 are inapplicable where the almost universal landlord is the 



* Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, pp. 137-140. 



