BY THE SAME AUTHOR. POLITICAL ECONOMY SELECTIONS. (SCOTT LIBRARY VOLUME, 1/- NET.) "An excellent little book. The explanation given of the relative costs of products of labour in two countries is alone sufficient to make the book worth reading.”—Investors' Review. 66 'Specially welcome in view of present fiscal discussions deserves a wide popularity."-Educational Times. "Especially needful just now.”—Yorkshire Daily Post. "Read this excellent book."—Financial Standard. "Very useful as a text-book."-The Newsagent. "Must prove invaluable, and calls for every commendation."Cassell's Press Agency. "A thoroughly able and useful little book."-Week's Survey. "The subject has been handled by a man who understands it."--The South Australian Register. [ALL RIGHTS PROTECTED IN EUROPE, AMERICA, London and Felling-on-Tyne THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD. KE 39978 Е HAP 6AX2 19 "England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind-yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, and the willingest our earth ever had; these men are here, the work they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us; and behold some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, 'Touch it not, ye masterworkers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit."-THOMAS CARLYLE (Past and Present). PREFACE. IT is hoped that one of the effects of this treatise. will be to recall political economy from Saturn and effectually sever from any future connection with it the epithet "dismal." If this be achieved, it is only fair to say that it will have been achieved through a strict adherence to the methods of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, the Mills, Cairnes-to the methods, in short, of what has been called the orthodox school or classical political economy. It is fair and almost necessary for me to say this, because at the very outset-in defining wealth and circumscribing the limits of the science-I find myself in disagreement with these great masters. The cleavage continues to the end, too, and is revealed mainly in the analysis of value here given; in the analysis of wages and profits, of which political economy has hitherto been able to satisfactorily explain only how the rates have been fixed, without any reference to what may meanwhile |