Ir has long been a prevalent notion, that Political Economy is a series of deductions from the principle of selfishness or private interest alone. The common desire of men to grow rich by the shortest and easiest methods-to obtain every gratification with the smallest sacrifice on their own part, has been supposed to be all that the political economist desires to have granted in theory, or to see regulating in practice the transactions of the world, to insure its material prosperity. A late eminent writer has described as follows the doctrine of Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations; "He every where assumes that the great moving power of all men, all interests, and all classes, in all ages and in all countries, is selfishness. He represents men as pursuing wealth for sordid objects, and for the narrowest personal pleasures. The fundamental assumption of his work is that each man follows his own interest, or what he deems to be his interest. And one of the peculiar features of his book is to show that, considering society as a whole, it nearly always happens that men, in promoting their own, will unintentionally promote the interest of others." *

But, in truth, the acquisitive and selfish propensities of mankind, their anxiety to get as much as possible of every thing they like, and to give as little as possible

* Buckle's History of Civilization, vol. ii.

in return, are in their very nature principles of aggression and injury instead of mutual benefit: the mode of acquisition to which they immediately prompt, is that of plunder or theft, and the competition which they tend to induce is that of conflict and war. Their first suggestion is not, "I will labor for you," but, "You shall labor for me;" not, "Give me this, and I will give you what will suit you better in exchange, but, "Give it to me, or else I will take it by force." The conqueror rather than the capitalist, the pirate rather than the merchant, the brigand rather than the laborer, the wolf rather than the watch dog, obey the impulses of nature. The history of the pursuit of gain is far from being the simple history of industry, with growing national prosperity; it is the history also of depredation, tyranny, and rapine. One passage in it is thus given, in the early annals of our own country: "Every rich man built his castle, and they filled the land with castles. They greatly oppressed the wretched people by making them work at their castles, and when they were finished they filled them with evil men. Then they took those whom they suspected to have any goods, seizing both men and women by night and day; and they put them in prisons for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable. . . The earth bare no corn; you might as well have tilled the sea; for

Adam Smith contended for was, that no class of men, be their motives good or bad, should be suffered, under any pretext, to encroach upon the industrial liberty of other men. The true moving power of the economic world, according to his system, is not individual selfishness, but individual energy and self-control. His fundamental principle is perfect liberty. The Wealth of Nations is, in short, an exhaustive argument for free labor and free trade, and a demonstration of the economical policy of justice and equal laws. Arguing against the law of apprenticeship, the philosopher said: "The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and to hinder him from employing his strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper for his own advantage is a plain violation of that most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the other from employing whom they think proper."

The system, therefore, which is most subversive of the doctrines of political economy, as taught by Adam Smith, is that most selfish of all possible systemsslavery. The political economist must condemn it as loudly as the moralist. It attacks the life of industry, and prevents the existence of exchange. It robs the laborer of his patrimony; it robs those who would hire him in the markets of their lawful profits; and it is a fraudulent abstraction from the general wealth of na

use of general terms, such as material wealth, ma. terial interests, and material progress. For wealth is not really or properly limited in political econ. emy to such things as satisfy the bodily or material wants of humanity. It comprehends many things, the use of which is to minister to man's intellectual and moral life, but which have, not withstanding, a price or value. Books, for example, as well as bread and meat, are wealth. Spiritual and other instructors are paid for as well as butchers and doctors, Wealth means, in fact, many different things, more or less material or immaterial, in different ages and countries. The highest kinds of wealth will be found where there is most general freedom for the development of the highest powers of humanity, and where no class have a license for the gratification of their selfish passions at the expense of any other class,

tions, the quantity and quality of which depend upon the degree of industrial liber ty secured to every individual throughout the world for the exercise of his highest powers. Of the property of the slaveholder in the industry of his slaves, the paradox, la propriété c'est le vol, is a literal truth according to political economy as well as common morality, and as regards not only the slaves, but the whole commer cial world.* A political economist lately remarked, that "the foundation of economic science is the right of private property and exchange, which is opposed to socialism, which seeks to abolish private property and exchange." The fundamental principles of the science are still more opposed to slavery, which abolishes the laborer's right of property in the fruits of his own exertion, not with his own consent, but by the violence of others. Yet slavery is a system within the legitimate range of economic inquiry, which is by no means limited, as the writer just referred to has contended, to the phenomena of an imaginary world of free exchanges, but extends to all the economic phenomena of the real world, in which wealth is produced and distributed according to very dif ferent systems. Injustice and oppression

* An American apologist for slavery invokes Political Economy on the side of the domestic institution," in the following terms: "Would it slave States of America-should go on in the career which they are now following, and (acting upon that fundamental principle of Political Economy which commands nations to develop their own resources at home, to sell where they can realize the greatest profit, and to buy where they can buy the cheapest) content themselves with their present prosperity, instead of seeking a doubtful prosperity from the destruction of the prosperity of others?" (The South Vindicated, p. 127.) Great Britain does, undoubtedly, owe her present prosperity to her obedience to that fundamental principle of Political Economy which commands nations to develop their resources at home by freeing domestic industry from every fetter. I would have been happy for the Southern States of America had they been content with a similar prosperity, instead of "seeking a doubtful advantage by the destruction of the prosperity of others."

not be better that each-Great Britain and the

Paper read before the British Association at Cambridge, by Mr, II. D. Macleod.

"The definition of Political Economy is the science of exchanges or of values. . . . The general conception of wealth is exchangeability. Hence, if Political Economy is the science of wealth, it must be the science of the exchangeable relation of quantities. ... Exchanges form the domain of economic science. The whole body of exchanges which take place within a country, and with foreign countries, constitute what the major

...

he traced the operation both of the causes which rescued Europe from barbarism and occasioned its progress in opulence, and of those which impeded the action of the natural principles of preservation and improvement. In short, his treatise included an inquiry into the cause of the poverty as well as of the wealth of nations, and an investigation of the actual constitution and career of industrial society. He showed how rural industry and progress were thwarted in the middle ages by such impediments; that, but for the happier circumstances of its towns, Europe could never have emerged from the calamities which befel it after the dissolution of the Roman Empire. The servile and insecure position of the cultivators of the soil prevented industry from achieving its first triumphs in the country according to the course of nature, which makes agriculture the primary, because the most necessary, business of mankind. "Order and good government, on the other hand, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were established in cities at a time when the occupiers of land in the country were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless condition naturally content themselves with a bare subsistence, because to acquire more might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire, not only the necessaries, but the comforts and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practiced by the occupiers of land in the country." In this manner, Adam Smith has traced the causes of the actual and, as he calls it, the "unnatural" course of industry in the slow and chequered progress of modern Europe. He investigated the phenomena of what was, happily for us, on the whole, a progressive society. Mr. Cairnes, on the contrary, has investigated those of a retrograde one. For, to begin with the laborer, the ambition of the slave is, as Bentham says, the reverse of the freeman; he seeks to descend in the scale of industry rather than to ascend. By displaying superior capacity, he would only raise the measure of his ordinary duties." Yet we are

sometimes assured that the negro slave, with this cogent reason for indolencethe more cogent the more reasonable he is-and kept, moreover, in compulsory ignorance by his master, is by nature a stupid and indolent workman. Tocqueville remarks, in his Tour in Sicily, that agriculture which had fled from the neighborhood of the owners of the Sicilian soil, flourished around the smouldering fires of Etna, because the chance of occasional ravages by the volcano did not fill the mind of the cultivator with unceasing despair. "Soon," he says, "we left the lava, and found ourselves in the midst of a kind of enchanted country, which anywhere would be striking, but in Sicily it is ravishing. Orchard succeeds orchard, surrounding cottages and pretty villages; no spot is lost; every where there is an appearance of prosperity and plenty. As I went on, I asked myself what was the cause of this great prosperity. It can not be attributed wholly to the richness of the soil, for the whole of Sicily is so fertile as to require less cultivation than most countries. . . . . The reason which finally seemed to me to be most conclusive was this: The land round Etna being liable to frightful ravages, the nobles and the monks grew disgusted with it, and the people became the proprietors." But in no age or country of Europe have the owners of the soil ever crushed the energies and intelligence of the cultivators beneath such a cruel yoke as that which the planters of the Slave States of America have laid upon their unhappy negroes;

of whose kinsmen, breathing the air of liberty, the Governor of Tobago was able to assert, "that a more industrious class does not exist in the world."* In Brazil, the children of emancipated negroes are found in every walk of civil life, often distancing their white competitors; and in the youngest colonies of Great Britain, the negro often proves as good a tradesman as the Anglo-American, and more often still a better citizen. †

*"It is a mistake," says another high author

ity, "to suppose that the African is by nature idle European. He who has witnessed, as I have, and indolent, less inclined to work than the their indefatigable and provident industry, will be disposed to overrate rather than underrate the activity of the negro and his love of labor.-The West Indies as they Were and as they Are.-Edinburgh Review, April, 1859.

The following statement, affording evidence as to the character, capacity, and enterprise of