512 



FALLACIES. 



it may be, is not contingent on his 

 guiltiness, but threatens him equally 

 it he remains innocent, and how there- 

 fore is he deterred from guilt by the 

 apprehension of such punishment? 

 M. Cousin supposes that people will 

 be dissuaded from guilt by whatever 

 renders the condition of the guilty 

 more perilous, forgetting that the 

 condition of the innocent (also one of 

 the elements in the calculation) is, in 

 the case supposed, made perilous in 

 precisely an equal degree. This is a 

 fallacy of overlooking ; or of non- 

 observation, within the intent of our 

 classification. 



Fallacies of this description are 

 the great stumbling-block to correct 

 thinking in political economy. The 

 economical workings of society afford 

 numerous cases in which the effects 

 of a cause consist of two sets of phe- 

 nomena : the one immediate, concen- 

 trated, obvious to all eyes, and pass- 

 ing, in common apprehension, for the 

 whole effect ; ♦he other widely dif- 

 fused, or lying deeper under the sur- 

 face, and which is exactly contrary to 

 the former. Take, for instance, the 

 common notion, so plausible at the 

 first glance, of the encouragement 

 given to industry by lavish expendi- 

 ture. A, who spends his whole in- 

 come, and even his capital, in expen- 

 sive living, is supposed to give great 

 employment to labour. B, who lives 

 on 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 em- 

 ployment to at least as much industry 

 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, forms 

 a fund for the employment of the 

 same, and perhaps a greater quantity 

 of labour in perpetuity. But the ob- 

 server 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 in- 

 dustry which A's profusion feeds ; he 

 observes not the far greater quantity 

 which it prevents from being fed ; 

 and thence the prejudice, universal to 

 the time of Adam Smith, that prodi- 

 gality encourages industry, and par- 

 simony is a discouragement to it. 



The common argument against free 

 trade was a fallacy of the same na- 

 ture. The purchaser of British silk 

 encourages British industry ; the pur- 

 chaser of Lyons silk encourages only 

 French ; the former conduct is patrio- 

 tic, the latter ought to be prevented 

 by law. The circumstance is over- 

 looked that the purchaser of any 

 foreign commodity necessarily causes, 

 directly or indirectly, the export of 

 an equivalent value of some article of 

 home production (beyond what would 

 otherwise be exported) either to the 

 same foreign country or to some 

 other ; which fact, though from the 

 complication of the circumstances it 

 cannot always be verified by specific 

 observation, no observation can pos- 

 sibly be brought to contradict, while 

 the evidence of reasoning on which it 

 rests is irrefragable. The fallacy is, 

 therefore, the same as in the preced- 

 ing case, that of seeing a part only of 

 the phenomena, and imagining that 

 part to be the whole, and may be 

 ranked among Fallacies of Non-ob- 

 servation. 



§ 5. To complete the examination 

 of the second of our five classes, we 

 have now to speak of mal-observa- 

 tion, in which the error 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 



