PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 581 
sides of the new manufacturing middle class ; to the spirit of enterprise which no 
longer felt the need of the protective legislation of the past; and to the narrow 
self-satisfaction which found in the law of population a release from the sense of 
social obligation. The term ‘ manufacturing economists,’ applied to the Ricardian 
group by a pamphleteer of the period, was eminently apposite; and as the 
manufacturing interest coalesced with the fragments of the old Whig connection, 
and formed the modern Liberal party, the new political economy furnished a 
platform on which both these wings could unite, and which saved them from the 
necessity of falling back for a policy on the more thorough-going democratic 
doctrines of un-‘ philosophical’ or pre-‘ philosophical’ Radicals and Chartists. 
That ‘ they overrated the political economists’ is one of the chief reasons assigned 
by Dr. Arnold in 1840 for the difficulty he felt in working with the Liberal party ; 
and it must be remembered that, in thus being taken over into practical politics 
political economy lost altogether the hypothetical character which its more 
cautious exponents attributed to it; its conclusions were no longer remembered 
to require ‘ verification ’; ‘ other considerations besides the purely economic’ were 
left to the other side to point out ; and economic principles were regarded as rules 
directly and immediately applicable to existing circumstances. 
It is not, however, any particular explanation of the very general acceptance 
of the Ricardian creed as early as 1832, but the bare fact of that acceptance that 
I wish to lay stress upon. Indications of it abound. Consider, for instance, the 
almost complete neglect which all contemporary economic writers suffered—and 
there were not a few—who diverged from the now codified teaching. We can under- 
stand this with writers like Thompson and Hodgskin, from whom Marx seems sub- 
sequently to have derived the claim for the labourer to ‘ the whole product’ of 
industry. This was adoctrine for the manual workers, and their time had not yet 
come. But, as Professor Seligman has recently pointed out, there was also more 
than one writer of the period who anticipated what has quite recently become, for 
the time, the current teaching of most English-speaking economists. The marginal 
conception of value which this generation owes to Jevons and Menger was clearly 
enough expounded by Longfield in 1833, but it passed unregarded, As I am not 
myself altogether convinced that the notion really carries us any great distance, 
for reasons to which I shall return, I do not particularly blame his contemporaries. 
But it is evident that their inattention was due, not to dissatisfaction with what 
men like Longfield offered them, but to satisfaction with the apparently sufficient 
formule they had already mastered. 
A further indication of the victory of the Ricardian school may be found in 
the promulgation of what may fairly be called the orthodox doctrine of economic 
method, The essay of the younger Mill ‘On the Definition of Political Economy, 
and on the Method of Investigation proper to it * was drafted and completed in these 
very years of triumph—between 1829 and 1833. The proper method, according to 
John Mill, was the @ priori one, ‘the only method by which truth can possibly be 
attained in any department of the social science” Though he then avoided the 
term ‘deductive,’ and continued to the end to use ‘inductive and ‘ deductive ’ 
in a fashion of his own, ‘ deductive’ is the fairest brief description of what he had 
in his mind, and he finally fell back upon the word in his ‘ Logic.’ In the treatise 
of Cairnes on the subject, which may be regarded as an expansion and popularisa- 
tion of Mill’s essay one-and-twenty years later, it is clearly laid down that as 
‘the economist starts with a knowledge of ultimate causes’ the preliminary work 
of induction to reach premisses is reduced to a minimum, and the economist must 
‘regard deduction as his principal resource.’ 
It cannot be necessary to examine the correctness of this opinion, for the simple 
reason that it is no longer entertained in all its primitive rigour and vigour by 
English-speaking economists, and it is held by few indeed of those of other 
countries. Professor Edgeworth, in reviewing some years ago the book of the 
Dutch economist Pierson, remarked that ‘it is refreshing to find in these 
days a first-rate economist who has the courage to say that deduction is the 
only effective method’; and Pierson’s singularity sufficiently indicates the 
present state of opinion. It would, indeed, be misleading to imply that all 
