470 REPORT—1905. 
on biological conceptions. Hobbes had devoted a chapter of the ‘ Leviathan’ to 
the nutrition and procreation of States;} and Sir William Petty, who had held 
the Chair of Anatomy in the University of Oxford, entitled an important 
statistical work ‘The Political Anatomy of Ireland.’ But another and less 
fruitful habit of thought existed side by side; the Mercantilists, in discussing the 
benefits of commerce, wrote much of the balance of trade; and the physical 
analogies they introduced—especially the notion of equilibrium—exerted a 
dominating influence over the form which the science took in the hands of the 
Classical Economists. These last were so much absorbed in the discussion of the 
mechanism of exchange and the mechanism of society that they failed even to 
recognise that it is essentially organic. As has been well said, ‘the Classical 
Economists belonged to the pre-Darwinian age. We differ from them in our 
whole view of life and of the ends of iife—in our whole mental method as well as 
in our possession of the practical experience of the last sixty years.’? It is only 
in recent years, when we have passed beyond the arbitrary limits they accepted 
and imposed, that it has been possible to enter on new fields of research. Carl 
Biicher * has brought out the importance of the relations which subsist between 
economics and anthropology, and Thorold Rogers proved himself a vigorous 
pioneer in the interpretation of history. In this fashion the whole range of the 
phenomena of economic life, in its earlier as well as in its later forms, is being 
brought within the sphere of scientific treatment as exhibiting various stages of 
growth. The men of the classical period of Economics, who devoted themselves to 
the study of new countries, were not in a position to deal with the subject properly, 
and their writings seem singularly lacking in grasp. Times have changed since 
their day, both politically and economically. Lord Brougham wrote at a date 
when responsible government was undreamed of; he pleaded for the benevolent 
treatment of dependencies, and his language is wholly inapplicable to the great 
self-governing nations which have been formed partly under English influence and 
partly through English neglect. But none the less is his writing, and that of 
some other enthusiasts for the development of the colonies, of abiding value as a 
monumental warning against a sort of pseudo-philosophic habit of mind. There 
is an underlying assumption that the one type of colony he had in mind was the 
only one worth taking into account; he was really thinking of a particular case, 
but he allowed himself to write of it in general terms, and thus to give an air of 
philosophical detachment to his remarks. In the year 1803 there were many 
circumstances that gave prominence to questions connected with the West Indies; 
the agitation in regard to the slave trade was one, the trade rivalry between the 
French and Spanish and English islands was another. Brougham was thinking of 
the West Indies; all that he said of the dependence of these little islands on the 
Mother Country for defence, of the necessity of the colonists relying on English 
help to repel prospective invasions and annexation by France or Spain, was true 
enough ; it might well lie at the basis of the economic relations between the 
planters and the Government in England, but it has no bearing on the actual con- 
ditions of the great continental countries which are still called colonies, and which 
are at least under no anxiety as to their ability to repulse a foreign invader. 
The greatest of all Brougham’s contemporaries who wrote on the art of 
colonisation was not exempt from a similar defect; he professed to write in 
general terms. Few names are more deserving of honour than that of Edward 
Gibbon Wakefield, and there is something very extraordinary in the contrast 
between the strong practical sense which distinguished him as a man of a:tion, 
and the doctrinaire spirit which pervades his writings. He fell into the error 
which characterised the Classical school when they dealt with practical problems, 
} Pt. ii. ch. xxiv., Camb. Univ. Press Edition, p. 175. 
3 J. L. Garvin, ‘Principles of Constructive Economies,’ in Compatriots’ Club 
Lectures i. 2. 
3 Arbeit und Rhythmus. His Industrial Evolution has been translated by 
Dr. 8. M. Wickett, and I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to the volume. 
* Lord Brougham, Zhe Colonial Policy of Kyropean Nations (1803), i. 108. 
