T. The answer to that question, which happens to be a dozen questions in one, should be made in the drift of thought of the questioner. Let me try whether I can find your aim; first, negatively: It is not Theology, though it is concerned with the providential government which overrules the earthly fortunes of men. It is not Jurisprudence, though it does in its inquiries involve provisions for the peace and good order of society. It is not Politics, or the science of civil legislation, though it must be considered and have place in political constitutions and in their administration.

Affirmatively: Political Economy is primarily occupied with the laws, natural and social, which govern in the production and distribution of wealth in material things, with a constant outlook to the general welfare of society, so far as that welfare depends upon the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of physical life.

P. You said that my question is in fact a dozen questions in How can that be?

one.

T. There are so many disputes among the authorities about the range of the system, its proper subjects, the kind of data and

of reasoning on which it should be based, or which it legitimately employs, that you would be in danger of getting a dozen different answers, and might, in the confusion of definitions, fail to clearly understand any one of them, One party, following J. Stuart Mill, holds that Political Economy is a deductive science, drawn from assumptions, or first principles; another, after the school of Ricardo, that it is an inductive science, built upon elementary facts; another, among whom are August Comte, Stephen Colwell, Daniel Webster, and Napoleon Bonaparte, denies its pretension to be a science in any proper sense of the word, holding that at least it is only a system or assemblage of truths, which have no central or overruling law or principle. And when you come to hear them in the definition of the terms of art which they all alike use, you find them equivocal, contradictory, and uncertain in the inferences deduced from them.

D. I thought that the principles of the science were so far certain and settled as to be sure directories in study, and even in legislative policy. Did not Adam Smith, the father of the science, give it exactitude and completeness? Did not J. B. Say give it a symmetrical exposition and happy elucidation? Does not John Stuart Mill follow in substantial accordance with the text of the great leader? And can it be possible that the generally prevalent faith is without any sort of Scripture authority?

T. All these authorities, and all other of the principal followers of Smith, agree that he did not attempt or intend the revelation of a Koran of economic faith. J. B. Say, the interpreter of The Wealth of Nations, who gave it the shape in which it has been used, says of it: "The work can only be considered as an immethodical assemblage of the soundest principles of political economy; an irregular mass of curious and original speculations, and of known demonstrated truths." J. R. McCulloch, who wrote a commentary upon the work as close as that usually given to the Bible, contradicts his author in at least a hundred particulars. J. S. Mill says, "The work is in many parts obsolete, and in all imperfect." In fact, a sufficient acquaintance with the history of Smith's school shows that his followers have completely overlaid him, and left nothing of him but a name to live. Moreover, they have agreed upon no substitute or amended system. Daniel Web

ster said of Smith and his followers, "If I were to pick out with one hand all the mere truisms, and with the other all the doubtful propositions, little would be left." And Napoleon Bonaparte, who forbade the publication of J. B. Say's exposition of the Smith system, shortly declared that "if an empire were made of adamant, the political economists would grind it to powder."

Now, while I would free you from looking to the authorities of our college text-books, and relieve you from mustering in squads of partisans, I do not intend to foster the conceit of free and independent thought while I invite it to do its own work, because I think that it is not all which a man swallows that makes him fat, but only that which he assimilates and incorporates, and makes his own. Tacit assent is not confirmation, and one's knowledge is just what he himself knows.

D. Those opinions of yours seem to me to dispose of the study of political economy at the outset of the race, and spares its doctrinal run.

T. You are right, if the whole question in our proposed inquiry were which of the contestants is entitled to the stakes in the issue of a strife of speculation; but, please to understand me, that while political economy is not and cannot be a science, as astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, and music; and yet it may be, or in the end may become, a system, explanatory and directory in the conduct of societary and business affairs; and as such is as worthy of study as any of the abstract, the universal, and the invariable, which is justly entitled to the distinctive name of science. Is not remedial medicine as worthy of study; and are not its discoveries and instruction as important to health as if the frame and constitution of man were a piece of clockwork, and as obedient in all its movements and aberrations to mathematical rules? Consider, sir, the business of political economy is to deal with, redress, and direct the condition and conduct of communities, in conformity with the forces which rule their affairs; and we are even more immediately concerned with the laws at work in it than with the absolute and unchangeable movements of the stars in their courses, whose opera

*Webster's judgment of the popular authors was delivered in 1830, before the publications of our American writers, Carey, List, and Colwell. It applied equally to Adam Smith, Ricardo, Say, Malthus, and McCulloch.

tions we cannot control by any knowledge of them that we can obtain. The disorders of the social system are capable of remedy, and are the subjects of our agency. Wait a little, and you will see that some useful thinking may be done among the proper topics of political economy without exaggerating its province and jurisdiction.

D. It seems to me that quackery rests exclusively upon experience, which is liable to all sorts of misinterpretation; while principles, rightfully, direct practice, and, I thought, science is the only safe guide of opinion.

T. Quackery and empiricism! Do you recollect that the Baconian philosophy, otherwise called the inductive system, rests upon observation and experiment, and that it builds all its generalizations, which it calls laws, upon facts as they happen to be understood, arranged, or clustered in kinds, and upon the general or governing principles more or less correctly educed? The inductive system of reasoning, which has conquered the physical world, so far as it has gone in its triumphs, is simply and purely empiricism. A law or principle, according to the inductive system, is nothing but a general fact pervading the series or group under investigation, and is true only when all the facts of the group are known and justly valued. The facts of social operation. are exceedingly complex and difficult of estimation. The principle of liberty intervenes, and makes them inconstant. There can, therefore, be no science of their phenomena. Yet, to think is to theorize; and, within the strict limits of social phenomena, we may reason safely. Observing the proper limit of speculation, principles, restrained to their subjects, may be ascertained. So let us try to understand economic agencies as they severally work in the life and history of men and societies. What do we need to know except their forces in action? This is all the knowledge that science has acquired of the lever, the screw, and the compound pulley. The use and the government of these machines, not the power, in its essence, are within our comprehension.

P. You mean, I suppose, to consider the actual matters and things which enter into the life of individuals and communities; and, to let general principles or deductions take care of themselves, after the cautious way that scientists treat what they call

empirical LAWS, waiting for all the facts which shall afford a sure generalization.

T. Not exactly that, and nothing more than observation and experiment afford of phenomena; but all that we can know by experience, and, along with that, all the light which assured final causes reflect upon processes that have an obvious tendency in the designs of Providence.

D. Now you are mixing up morals and religion, creed and prophecy, with the certainties of fact, whose explanation, according to the inductive philosophy, should be found in themselves. Is this logical? Is not the investigation of every branch of human knowledge distinct, and must it not be restrained within its special province? Can speculative faith and assumed design be safely mixed in the search for the truths of science?

T. Preaching and practice, heaven and earth, morals and trade, are sometimes, and only too often, separated, and all the worse for the divorce in opinion and conduct. If man has a compound nature, and various and even conflicting impulses, can he be understood, and the interactive phenomena in harmonious results bet explained by any one simple, single, and disintegrated department of his functions? If morals effectively mix themselves with merchandise; if genius, which draws the known from the unknown. by the a priori route of reasoning, is efficient even in mechanics, can you strip the body of business of its soul and spirit, separate the mortal from his immortality, and divorce his drift of daily life from his destiny, his self from the relations which ever modify the interests and actions of that self, and thus make of his animal, moral, and social appetencies, each a distinct and independent piece of machinery? If man were only an inorganic clod of earth, you might investigate him in a chemical laboratory; but in that complexity of his constitution, which makes him a universe in miniature, he must be studied in the assemblage of his functions, in order to understand him in his social relations.

D. Would you let the fatalism of Mahometanism, the fantastic and blind servility to nature of Paganism, or even the speculative faith of Christianity, solve the problems of our earthly existence, and direct conduct in the world of terrestrial affairs?

T. No; keep the several branches of inquiry to their obviously