SOPHISMS OF FREE-TRADE AND POPULAR POLITICAL ECONOMY EXAMINED. CHAPTER I. "Political economy is a science." THE fallacy seems to lie in using the present tense, instead of the future tense. Political economy will be a science. The political economy of Munn, and Gee, in 1750, was very different from the political economy of M'Culloch and Mill in 1850. But it was not more different, than the political economy of M'Culloch and Mill now is, from what will be the political economy of 1950. If by a science be meant a collection of truths ascertained by experiment, and on which all well-informed men are agreed, then political economy is manifestly not yet a science. If by a science be meant a subject on which some little has gradually become known, but the great body B of solid knowledge yet remains to be discovered by experience and observation, then indeed, in this lower sense, political economy is a science. But if political economy claim to be a science at all, she must abate much of her pretensions, much of her dogmatism, descend to a lower rank, and adopt a more modest and inquiring tone. She must learn to tolerate doubt, to endure contradiction. If she aspire to learn in the book of experience, she must expect as she turns over the leaves to meet with problems wholly unexpected, and ultimate solutions at variance with all preconceived notions. She must make up her mind to see theory after theory, supported by great names and confidently propounded, yet after all rebuked and exposed by experiment. She must remember that there are twenty wrong courses of public policy to one right one, and that all the erroneous ones are often tried, before the right one can be demonstrated by experience to be right. A slow, painful, humiliating road to knowledge,but the only true one. Other paths may lead to conjecture or opinion more or less plausible; this alone to certain and demonstrable knowledge. But what we want is, not to conjecture but to know; in the forcible language of the father of experimental philosophy, "haud belle et probabiliter opinari, sed certo et ostensive scire." What experimental science is there in which the whole truth was discovered at once, or in the course of a few years? Much less are we to suppose that we have been favoured with sudden and preternatural illumination on a subject so complex and difficult as political economy. If we would form a just estimate of our modern English notions on this matter, we must look backwards, look around us, and look forward; or we shall resemble the rustic, whose history and geography are circumscribed by his own life in his own parish. We must look backward into times past. may When modern political economists are spoken of as if nobody knew any thing before them, and as if nobody will discover any thing of moment after them, we be sure that we hear the language of empiricism, not of science. "Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona.' There are many writers before Adam Smith, of whom posterity will form an estimate more favourable than is now entertained. Bacon, Montesquieu, Fenelon, Petty, Swift and Voltaire, will not hereafter be less esteemed, because they did not use the parade of scientific terms, and were not embarrassed by modern and doubtful theories. The need of a political economy, very different from the inert and barren system now in fashion, is but too apparent to any one who looks around him. Modern society presents to the serious observer, as the consequences of past and present systems of political economy, practical results by no means flattering. The |