22 ON THE TRUE CLAIMS TO ATTENTION 
tainty than might be supposed. Political economy is concerned with 
the conduct of mer in reference to certain conditions of their being. 
It belongs to the superiority of man over the brutes, and to the 
powers with which he is endowed, that he does not consider merely 
the enjoyment of the moment, but looks forward endeavouring to 
provide means of future gratification, and is disposed even to submit 
to present restraint that he may be free from apprehension respecting 
the future. It follows from this that he is disposed to guard what 
he possesses or has the feeling of property, and that he is ready to 
barter a portion of what he has collected for other objects of desire 
not immediately within his own reach. The considerations that 
labour or effort of some kind is the means of obtaining whatever we 
desire, that what we obtain we regard as belonging to us, or as pro- 
perty, and that we are disposed to barter, to which may be added that 
what we have already secured makes our further exertions more 
effectual, lie at the foundation of all inquiries in political economy. 
We have to do with man as a being seeking means of happiness, and 
by the faculties he possesses led in its pursuit to labour, to appropri- 
ation, to accumulation and to barter. By reasoning on what belongs 
to our condition, and by experience, we learn the circumstances most 
favourable to the acquisition of wealth, the proportions in which it is 
naturally distributed among parties uniting in different ways for its 
production,— the natural laws regulating exchanges, and the effects of 
attempts at interfering with the natural course of things by govern- 
ments. ‘The rules at first laid down from notions of what would be 
desirable results, with imperfect observation, would be often errone- 
ous, always rude, but time would clear away one error after another, 
truths would by degrees come to be viewed in their connections, and 
gradually a body of related principles would be elicited, forming a 
science, and fitted to afford useful practical guidance as well as en- 
lightened general views of what is passing amongst our fellow men. 
Those who deny the conclusions of political economists, must either 
object to some specific principle as being a false deduction, in which 
case they have to show by fact and reasoning that it is not properly 
established, and is no part of the genuine science, or else they must 
maintain that there are no materials for constructiug a science ; that 
there is no uniformity of results in classes of cases; that there are no 
fundamental principles of human nature bearing upon the acquisition 
and distribution of wealth, and that no general results of experience 
