MORAL EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 299 



use words of modern speech. Later, Political Economy 

 a science of pure reasoning demonstrated principles for 

 a long time hidden from men's eyes, yet inherent in industry 

 and commerce, which brought about results of immense 

 magnitude and variety : the principle, for instance, that 

 trade suffers from restriction free trade and the partial 

 disappearance of evil interference,, monopolies, exorbitant 

 and prohibitive duties followed accordingly; next, the 

 principle that not precious metals, but labour^ is the basis 

 of value; next, the principle that capital and therefore 

 its accumulation is a necessity for the expansion and 

 remuneration of labour; the principle, too, that labour in 

 its turn is a necessity to the fructification of capital the 

 co-operation of both conducing to the increase of national 

 wealth. Concurrently, a new factor, due to the progress 

 of trade, had been created, viz., Credit* an increment of 

 capital artificial, but nevertheless effective, since it permits 

 a vast number of extensive transactions and long enterprises 

 which ready capital could not possibly cover. Now credit 

 has had two consequences -one moral, the other political. 

 It has been a great moralising agent in all communities 

 by the importance it attaches to character, and therefore 

 by the influence it exercises over it. Second, it has become 

 a guarantee or pledge of peace. Political Economy and 

 the working out of its principles tend to universal peace 

 "each nation having an interest in the prosperity of those 

 with which it trades, and the richest and most solvent 

 being its best market"! War is in consequence deprecated 

 as a folly, a sort of national suicide ; warlike habits are 

 weakened and tend to disappear. Political economy will 

 ultimately destroy militarism and the last vestiges of 

 despotism, both of them remnants of the age of violence. 

 It also tends to bring a closer and closer union of the 

 different classes of society, the capitalist and workman 

 alike being tied to the same undertaking. It goes further 



* The Bill of Exchange dates from the Middle Ages. Banks date 

 from the XVI Ith century ; the Bank of Amsterdam, the earliest, was 

 founded in 1609. 



t See Lecky's Rationalism. 



