574 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



progress, be provisionally overlooked. And although 

 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 demon- 

 strations, and introducing the new premisses in their 

 proper places, to make the same general course of 

 argument which serve for the one case, serve for 

 the others too. 



For example, it has been greatly the custom of 

 English political economists to discuss the natural 

 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 distinct 

 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 when- 

 ever they are applied to any other. They are inap- 

 plicable where the only capitalists are the landlords, 

 and the labourers are their property, as in slave 

 countries. They are inapplicable where the universal 

 landlord is the state, as in India. They are inappli- 

 cable where the agricultural labourer is generally the 

 owner both of the land itself and of the capital, as in 

 France, or of the capital only, as in Ireland." But 

 although it may often be very justly objected to the exist- 

 ing race of political economists " that they attempt to 

 construct a permanent fabric out of transitory mate- 

 rials; that they take for granted the immutability of 

 arrangements of society, many of which are in their 



