TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 953 



absence of prejudice, tlie endeavour to see cause and effect, reason and consequence, 

 as they really are. 



Our prudent philanthropists have this endeavour after a dry light in common 

 with the older economists. But, even so, the latter seem to live in a different 

 world ; their thoughts ai'e not our thoughts. How is this ? 



It is partly because we live in a world that has been much altered since they 

 left it. This is a phenomenon we can observe in our own half of the centuiy. At 

 the end of their half of it, John Mill, who was almost one of them, spoke of 

 Ricardo and the rest as ' old ; ' ' and now John Mill is old to ourselves. Nay, we say 

 to ourselves in reading Jevons or Bagehot that a good deal has happened since they 

 wrote ; and if, instead of taking up the books of men who died in their prime, or 

 before it, we read the early works of men who outlived their reputation or lived 

 oblivious to the world's changes, and wrote in 1890 as if they were still in 1850, 

 we understand that an economist does not need to have died in order to have 

 become antiquated. To a growing man his own thoughts of twenty years ago 

 seem already old, hut they are the thoughts out of which the later have sprung, 

 and they are not outgrown in the sense of cut away and discarded. Neither can 

 we cut away and discard the thoughts of the older economists, which we may 

 think, perhaps rightly, that we have outgrown. Ours are but the newest branches 

 of their tree of knowledge. Our thoughts are not their thoughts, but our thoughts 

 have grown out of their thoughts. If we had lived for 100 years and been as good 

 men as they the whole time, we should have begun with their thoughts and ended 

 with our own, and we should not have felt the last to be alien to the first ; and, 

 even as it is, the growth has been continuous, though it be loss easy here to dis- 

 cover all the stages than it is in the case of a single mind in a single man. 



It is true that a great deal more than mere kpse of time creates a feeling of 

 separation and distance. If the writings, even of a great author, happen to come 

 immediately before years of rapid changes, the intervention of the changes— say 

 the French Revolution or the introduction of railways — cuts us off from our author 

 more effectually than if the years between us and him had been the long, slow, and 

 blissful years of unbroken political and intellectual peace. We find it harder to 

 judge whether our want of sj'mpathy with him is due to our bias or his, and how 

 much of it is due to the changes in the world he lived in which make it not quite 

 the same world as ours. 



Then the imperfection of all human records cannot fail to make the judgment 

 of the past somewhat more fallible than of the present. Presumably a man puts 

 his best thoughts into his books ; but he does not always tell us there how he 

 arrived at them, and unless he is a living author he cannot be cross-examined. 

 We are often unable to see what led him to start where he did and stop where he 

 did, or what terminus he was keeping in view. In the case of an old book we often 

 find it hard to know how much was, in its day, taken for granted by every writer 

 as an article of ordinary faith and common-sense. What Hooker says of the Bible 

 applies to all writing whatever, even if it is comparatively near our own day ; we 

 must make allowance for all that was assumed as the usual mental furniture of 

 writers and readers at the time of writing. Investigation, owing to the shortness 

 of human life, cannot extend with equal thoroughness to all subjects at once, even 

 of one class ; and we need to know what were the subjects which our writers had 

 tacitly agreed to let alone. This is precisely where the older economists perplex 

 us a little. Many of their articles of common-sense have come nowadays to be 

 regarded as prejudices. They seemed, for example, to count it ])art of the nature of 

 things that one large section of society should lie at the merfv of iinnther : it hardly 

 struck them as a surprising phenomenon demanding iui[uiry. Tlie philosophical 

 maxim that men should never be means to an end, but .should always be ends in 

 themselves, has more credit now than it hnd a cenrurv agii : nnd the assumption of 

 the older economists that men are and raii>t be ins'rumenrs iu each dther's hands 

 gives to ordinary people the notion thatthe.se economists hereof like passions with 

 the politicians who supposed all men to be merely piecns in their game. The old 

 economists were quite aware of the instinctive dislike of every man to be the tool 



' Pol. E:on. iv., vi., § 2, p. 30S (1S48). Cf. Aiitohiogra;plnj, p. 230. 



