952 REroRT— 1898. 



commerce, which are ' the laws of Nature,' and therefore ' the laws of God,' and 

 Government must not interfere in the matter. But, alas ! he sees Government is- 

 too likely to interfere more and more, instead of less and less ; and, as France has 

 had its evil day, there is a time coming- for England too — its day of distress and 

 judgment. 



When we hear these words we feel that we are dealing with a man whose 

 ' thoughts ' are not ours, though his ' details ' show us how little the world has 

 changed. The thoughts, however full of exaggeration, are those of the older 

 economists ; and political economy has passed through a severe ordeal since it 

 seemed to triumph under these leaders. In 184G, in the repeal of the Corn Laws 

 and the general abandonment of Protection, it won a great political victory only 

 to suffer political eclipse ; it lost its attractiveness for statesmen. It could 

 no longer pose as the giver of plenty to a hungry people. It remained in a 

 position of respectability without power. Like a party in opposition, it was 

 probably none the wor.se for its obscurity. AVork and discipline went on more 

 steadily ; honour and emoluments are not always the best inducements to the study 

 of truth. About the fact of the eflacement there is no doubt, and as little doubt 

 that it came partly from the general impression that economists clung to obsolete 

 theories of bygone generations, such theories, for example, as were contained in 

 Burke's pamphlet. 



Ever since we gave up (if we ever held) the helief in the infallibility of the 

 older economists we have been trying to make up our minds about the value of 

 their achievements. To call these men ' classical ' is perhaps to beg the question. 

 ' Classical ' suggests that they are a model for all time, especially in manner of 

 writing, and it suggests that they rule our thought as Plato and Aristotle still 

 govern the thinking of philosophers. Perhaps the second idea has truth in it, though 

 it must not lead us to accept those economists, any more than these philosophers, 

 uncritically and with the halo of the unknown surrounding them. We are, after 

 all, nearer to the old economists than we are to Plato and Aristotle. Deference 

 to them, or even reference to them, is often set down to the illusions of antiqua- 

 rians. But the strata of human thought are as worthy of study as the strata of the 

 earth ; and if, like the geological, they contain fossils, the fossils are relics of our 

 own past life, which we should surely recover if we could. 



Some ' earnest students,' especially among our more cautious and prudent 

 philanthropists, lament that they cannot feel at home with the older economists, 

 while nevertheless they think they owe more to the older than to the new. They 

 have certainly one experience in common with the older. For the most part the 

 opponents of the older in regard to the relief of the poor made more use of senti- 

 ment than of logic. Now, when a man is trying to work out his own view 

 logically, even from imperfect premises, he is not willing to be stopped by appeals 

 to feeling ; such appeals are more likely to make him sure he is right than to sus- 

 pect he may be wrong. The emotional person may prove in the end to have had a 

 good case ; some facts that the man of intellect has missed may have heen dimly 

 present to the man of feeling. But it has been a dim presentiment ; and too often 

 the perceptions, and especially the conceptions, have been clouded by the emotion. 

 The appeals of the man of feeling are not, as in real eloquence, logic rounded off 

 with emotion, but emotion rounded oft' with an appearance of logic. Economists 

 need to entertain him with caution. Men who are trying to make their studies 

 scientific cannot put confidence in feelings ; emotion may be itself an object of 

 study, a factor to be taken into account in investigation, but it is no instru- 

 ment of study. The older economists were among the fir.st to see this, as 

 well as to recognise that the phenomena of society, more particularly of poverty 

 and wealth, ought to be studied with the thoroughness and seriousness of science. 

 Therepulsiveness of their writings for many of our philanthropists has been largely 

 due to this severe and stoical virtue. Men of strong feelings are unwilling to 

 depend on reasoning and observation, facts, figures, and arguments alone. They 

 count it all dry. In the Baconian sense, economic study can never be too dry ; 

 with all our ettbrts we can never make it dry enough, for the dryness means 



