482 FALLACIES. 



Other widely cllffused, or lying deeper under the surface, and which is 

 exactly contrary to the former. Take, for instance, the vulgar notion, 

 so plausible at the first glance, of the encouragement given to industry 

 hy lavish expenditure. A, who spends his whole income, and even 

 his capital, in expensive living, is supposed to give gi'eat employment to 

 labor. B, who lives upon a small portion, and invests the remainder in 

 the funds, is thought to give little or no employment. For everybody 

 sees the gains which are made by A's tradesmen, servants, and others, 

 while his money is spending. B's savings, on the contrary, pass into the 

 hands of the person whose stock he purchased, who with it pays a debt 

 he owed to some banker, who lends it again to some merchant or manu- 

 facturer ; and the capital, being laid out in hiring spinners and weavers, 

 or carriers and the crews of merchant vessels, not only gives immediate 

 employment to as much industry at once as A employs during the whole 

 of his career, but coming back with increase by the sale of the goods 

 which have been manufactured or imported, form a fund for the em- 

 ployment of the same and perhaps a greater quantity of labor in per- 

 petuity. But the careless observer does not see, and therefore does 

 not consider, what becomes of B's money ; he does see what is done 

 with A's : he observes the amount of industry which A's profusion 

 feeds ; he observes not the far greater quantity which it prevents from 

 being fed : and thence the prejvidice, universal to the time of Adam 

 Smith, and even yet only exploded among persons more than com- 

 monly instructed, that prodigality encourages industry, and parsimony 

 is a discouragement to it. 



The common argument against free-trade is a fallacy of the same 

 nature. The purchaser of British silk encourages British industry ; 

 the purchaser of Lyons silk encourages only French ; the former con- 

 duct is patriotism, the latter ought to be interdicted by law. The 

 circumstance is overlooked, that the purchaser of any foreign com- 

 modity of necessity causes, directly or indirectly, the export of an 

 equivalent value of some English article (beyond what would other- 

 wise be exported), either to the same, foreign country or to some 

 other : which fact, although from the complication of the circumstances 

 it cannot always be verified by specific observation, no observation can 

 possibly be brought to contradict, while the evidence of reasoning upon 

 which it rests is absolutely irrefragable. The fallacy is, therefore, the 

 same as in the preceding case, that of seeing a part only of the phe- 

 nomena, and imagining that part to be the whole ; and may be ranked 

 among Fallacies of Non-observation. 



§ 5. To complete the examination of the second of our five classes, 

 we have now to speak of Mal-observation ; in which the eiTor does 

 not lie in the fact that something is unseen, but that something seen is 

 seen wrong. 



Perception being infallible evidence of whatever is really perceived, 

 the error now under consideration can be committed no otherwise 

 than by mistaking for perception what is in fact inference. We have 

 formerly shown how intimately the two are blended in almost every- 

 thing which is called observation, and still more in every Description.* 

 What is actually on any occasion perceived by our senses being so 



* Supra, p. 383. 



