SECTION Gr. 
ECONOMIC SCIENCE. 
1. — A PLEA EOE, THE STUDY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS VITAL 
PROCESSES IN THE LIFE OF COMMUNITIES. 
By Sir SAMUEL W. GRIFFITH , G.C.M.G., 31. A., Chief Justice of Queensland. 
It has often been complained that modern scientific methods have 
not been sufficiently applied in the study of political economy, but 
that the subject has been treated too much as if it were a branch of 
ethics or metaphysics capable of complete development by deductive 
argument from abstract propositions assumed a priori, instead of being 
regarded as a science which should be founded on careful and minute 
study of the actual phenomena of social life. Whether it be an 
actual objective fact, or only a pretty conceit, that a nation or 
community is a real and distinct entity, with physical and mental 
attributes of its own — the individual member bearing to the whole a 
material relation analogous to that of a cell to an animal — there is no 
doubt that there are many striking points of resemblance between an 
individual and a body politic. A community may grow, enjoy robust 
health, become stationary, decay and perish. One portion may 
apparently be in the enjoyment of health while another portion 
suffers from defective nutrition or its energies are paralysed. For 
the most part the vital processes of a community — that is, the 
processes by which the means of maintaining bodily life are provided, 
distributed, and assimilated— are, like the vital processes of the 
individual, performed automatically and unconsciously. It is true 
that if you pay attention you can notice that you are breathing, and 
that your heart is beating. It is true that you can increase or 
diminish the frequency of the action of your heart or lungs, but as a 
rule the process is as automatic as that of digestion or circulation. 
So in the body politic, although every separate act in the vital pro- 
cesses is performed by an intelligent being, and may be done 
differently if he chooses, yet the general movement is, to a great 
extent, automatic and unconscious. 
A physician called in to treat a case of disease in the individual 
begins by diagnosis, and endeavours to discover the seat of the cause 
of the disorder. But before the practice of anatomy and the 
discovery of the circulation of the blood the reasoning of the physician 
was to a great extent a priori. The health of communities — the 
wealth of nations — depends upon obedience to the laws of health as 
much as that of individuals. The science of political economy should 
be to communities what the science of medicine is to individuals. The 
statesman should be the medicus reipublicce , knowing the laws of 
national health, and capable of diagnosing the causes of disorder and 
of prescribing the appropriate remedy. But this capacity can only, I 
think, be attained by the patient application of the same scientific 
