The Political Economist and the Land. 1 1 1 



haste is forced to overbuy his provisions." The substitution 

 of a professional army in the immediate pay of the monarch 

 for the old feudal machinery of national defence had, however, 

 swung the pendulum of exchange into a direction distinctly 

 opposite to the old methods of barter, and the relationship 

 between landlord and tenant was tending to become purely 

 commercial long before economists ceased to mix up their 

 definition of profits, wages, and rents with those personal 

 services required by the old feudal polity. For the first prin- 

 ciples of political economy we must indeed go back to the 

 middle ages, when the exploration of the New World made all 

 questions relating to the land subordinate to those of commer- 

 cial interest. The discoveries of Vasco de Gama and Columbus, 

 and the development of the gold and silver mines of America, 

 transferred the attention of economists from money's worth to 

 money itself. Theorists placed so exaggerated a value on 

 gold and silver that in their discussions they often used the 

 term w^ealth as though it were synonymous with the standard 

 medium of its exchange. No wonder that henceforth Euro- 

 pean statesmen based their whole policy on the best means 

 of obtaining these metals. Colbert's trade regulations became 

 the groundwork of French finance, and his preference for 

 manufactures and commerce had a most injurious effect on 

 the national agriculture. Out of such an economy arose the 

 school of mercantilists ; but it is wrong to suppose, as many 

 have done, that they initiated that system of regulations and 

 restrictions wliich was at the time hampering the whole of 

 European industry. ^ The farmer and the trader had been 

 forced into those particular grooves, which theorists from time 

 to time thought best for the community, long before the com- 

 mercial system came into being, and the mercantilists were 

 only a degree less eager for economic freedom than their suc- 

 cessors of the agricultural school. They refused to counte- 

 nance a policy which prohibited the exportation of the precious 

 metals altogether. They even recommended their exportation 

 whenever there was a reasonable prospect of some such trade 



* Principles of Economics, Marshall, vol. i. cli. iv. 



