quirer, who finds much to supply and much to refute in them, is certain also of possessing that power of communicating his knowledge which has rendered their authors immortal, it must always be a question whether a commentary will not serve his purpose better than a dissertation.

We are sure, at all events, that it will often serve infinitely better the interest of the public. There are limits, no doubt, to the profitable admiration and imitation of great models; but the sin of the present age certainly does not lie in exceeding them. There was a period when the highest ambition of every philosophical student was to add one more name to the enormous muster-roll of commentators on Aristotle. This pedantic fancy of the middle ages has long been a favourite subject of derision with modern wits; and, undoubtedly, much acuteness and intellect were hopelessly lost in the prosecution of that favourite task of centuries. But this arose less from the method which these commentators pursued, than from the unfortunate principle on which they proceeded. Instead of criticising their authority, they treated him as infallible; and this on all the subjects of which he had treated-on physics, of which his knowledge was necessarily small; on metaphysics, where his meaning was unintelligible. But on those topics which the great philosopher of Greece had mastered, and where he had communicated his knowledge successfully, it is doubtful, at least, whether this system of commentary, such as it was, has not been serviceable rather than injurious to the progress of the human understanding. Take, for instance, the Aristotelian logic; considered, not with any reference to those higher pretensions which its admirers advanced for it, but merely as a compendious art of reasoning—a technical mode of arranging arguments and detecting fallacies. Can it be doubted that the faithful preservation of this system, until it became part and parcel of the reasoning process to which the mind was trained throughout the European commonwealth of learning, has been of greater service to education than if each successive commentator had done, as with less reverence for established authority he would, strained his faculties to invent an art of logic of his own; and left the enquirer to choose between a multitude of ingenious and extraordinary systems.

The practical usefulness of Dr Smith's work is undoubtedly no longer what it was. The principles which he advocated with such force of reasoning and illustration, have, to a grent extent, passed into axioms in political science; and form the general basis of commercial legislation in Europe. Nothing more strongly shows the advance of those principles than the mode in which the application of them to any particular subject-matter

is still resisted, by those who have an interest in opposing it. Instead of condemning them in the lump, as heretofore, the antifree-trade reasoner is now almost always employed in discovering ingenious reasons for making this or that species of industry an exception to the common rule. And although it is often complained, with justice, that economical science has had, as yet, very imperfect results, because the advance of governments towards liberal systems of external trade is so precarious and interrupted; yet we are apt to forget how great a mass of far more oppressive restrictions on domestic commerce and the rights of industry have been removed, in almost every part of Europe, since the appearance of Dr Smith's Essay;-a great work, of which no one has so much right as he to enjoy the honour. But his very success has proved an obstacle to the continuance of his popularity. Much of his reasoning is no longer needed, and the greater part of his illustrations antiquated; while, on other parts of his subject, he has been superseded as an authority by newer writers. Yet, since Dr Smith, we have had no popular writer on political economy. Mr Ricardo investigated the fundamental truths of the science with singular profoundness; his theories, while they have led many followers astray, have nevertheless penetrated thoroughly into all subsequent lucubrations on the subject; and he may be regarded, more justly than any other, as the real founder of the school which at present exists in England. But he is not read, nor expected to be read, except by the few who master him for the sake of the subject: his dry and abstract disquisitions have no attraction whatever for the general reader. Mr Malthus, in his first great work, became popular, not merely from the bold truths which he announced, but from the interesting nature of many of the subjects collectively treated in it. His later works, in which his original doctrines are modified by the results of experience, and his errors corrected, wanting all extrinsic aids to popularity, are hardly known at all out of a small circle of students. Besides these, we have had many acute and able writers; abundance of ingenious essayists, each contributing something to our general stock of truth, and exposing some preceding error; but for the most part so conflicting in principle, so dry in style, so devoid of all outward attraction, as to have made absolutely no impression whatever; except the indirect and circuitous one which a good thought, however unfavourably launched, is pretty sure to produce in time, when it finds at last an appropriate vehicle. Speaking, therefore, with a view to literary popularity only, the science is now far more unfavourably circumstanced than when the great work of Smith was new. It was then (as far as

England was concerned,) the only text-book on the subject; it was full of inaccuracies; not free from fundamental errors; loose and vague both in style and ideas: but it had the great requisites of popularity; it was soon in every hand, its truths made rapid way, and the science which it inculcated was favourably received through the general admiration for the work itself. Now, the writers in vogue among scientific readers are as unknown in ordinary circulation as authors on algebra and mechanics. The common style of treating the subject is cold, harsh, repulsive. Smith is no longer read, because he is known to be an unfaithful guide in many particulars; his successors are not read, because, however faithful they may be, the bulk of mankind will not, and cannot read them; and the result is not only a dislike for the subject, when brought before the general reader at all, but a sort of vague suspicion that speculations so distasteful are altogether unfounded and trivial. How far the result might have been apparent, if the one good book had been preserved and carefully adapted to subsequent exigencies—if Smith had been treated as the Aristotle of the science of wealth -it might be curious to conjecture.

It is true that one cause, and that a most powerful one, of the popularity which his great work so rapidly acquired, has ceased to exercise the same influence as heretofore-namely, its accordance with the spirit of the time at which he wrote. He was in truth one of the most active and efficient instruments in doing the great work of that age; the work, namely, of destruction;of clearing away the encumbrances of ancient systems of which the vitality was gone, and the ponderous and inanimate remains encumbered the earth. In every shape of society, there is an appointed end towards which almost all the intricate tendencies of social thought and action are converging, although there are but few whose vision is clear enough to perceive it;-still fewer to whom it is given to see yet farther, and to speculate on what lies beyond that temporary end, the novus seclorum ordo which is to succeed. So in Burke's age of sophisters and calculators -the eighteenth century-there were not many who clearly perceived the end towards which the united efforts of sovereign and people, philosophers and politicians, were then so unanimously leading the abolition, namely, of feudality, and the severing of the thousand ancient ties by which the frame of society that had grown up under the reign of feudality was connected; fewer still, or none, who could obtain any distinct prospect of that reconstructed commonwealth, founded on new principles, under which our post-revolutionary generation lives. Adam Smith was none of these. He had few deep or far-sighted

views of social philosophy. What he saw, he saw clearly and described well; but his knowledge was limited to an acute observation of the present, and an extensive rather than profound acquaintance with the past. He approved and heartily entered into the projects of reform which were afloat in his own day; he communicated the impulse of reform to innumerable minds, but there his vocation ended. How much of the work in which his contemporaries had engaged was destined to be permanent, and how much was to perish along with other dreams of human selfwill and ambition, it did not lie within his province to calculate. His was an age in which the favourite exercise of the under-, standing, and the most popular mode of treating all political subjects, was to bring customs and institutions to the test of immediate practical expediency; as contradistinguished from that more remote and comprehensive expediency which men often loosely call by the name of principle. Imperfect as that narrower test may be, we must divest ourselves of modern experience and of modern prejudices; and place ourselves again in the position of those whose mental development took place in the first half of the eighteenth century; in order to perceive how important and necessary to the well-being of society its application had become. When the spirit of feudalism had disappeared, the body long lingered behind, and the form yet longer. Society throughout Western Europe was harassed and cramped by restrictions for which the reasons had ceased to exist. The nobility were no longer the exclusive defenders of countries, the wielders of political power above the sovereign; yet they retained their rigour of caste, their anti-social principles, their power of oppressing those below them, and impeding the motion of the machine of government which they could no longer control. The citizens in the middle ages had found their strength in union, and had won exclusive privileges for their own protection, from the favour or fear of their sovereigns. The danger had ceased; but the privileges were maintained more zealously than ever, and had degenerated into mere commercial monopolies. In like manner, the association and correspondence of members of the learned classes, had been of essential service in the infancy of modern learning; they were now comparatively of little utility, and individual liberty was the great requisite for its progress; its bonds of union had become chains; societies, academies, and universities, more numerous and powerful than ever, wove round it a complication of minute and vexatious fetters. Pedantry and love of form had become the presiding deities of society. The great practical object of life, to do well and quickly what must be done, seemed utterly lost sight of in the desire to do it according to rule

and precedent. In the etiquette of courts and the usages of the world, in arts and in learning, in external commerce and internal industry, in religion, law, medicine, war-in brief, all the occupations and interests of life-a wearisome, oppressive, and endless formality was weighing down all mental activity; and, were it not for the spirit at work beneath the surface, Europe might have been in danger of degenerating into a commonwealth of Chinas. Even England, notwithstanding her free constitution, and France, notwithstanding the untameable energy and volatility of her people, felt in no slight degree the benumbing influence of the times; but, in the rest of Europe, its leaden reign was almost unbroken.

When once a few of the more adventurous had begun to raise the question, what was the use of these things—what particular object was sought or attained by each of those restrictive institutions with which all polity was encumbered-it is no wonder that it was soon re-echoed from a thousand different points; and that the roused spirit of enquiry engendered a rapid and sweeping spirit of destruction. Still less is it matter of surprise, that the prevalent scepticism extended from form to substance ;—that from criticising the trappings of a court, men proceeded to question the utility of courts themselves-from the privileges of nobility, to its existence-from the show and ceremony of religion, to its reality. The traders in wit and sagacity eagerly sought so easy an opportunity of parading those qualities. The multitude rejoiced in having the absurdities of all established institutions exposed, because they felt the oppression of some, and were easily induced to regard them all as a connected mass of deceit and injustice. And (which was the most ominous circumstance of all) kings became the foster-fathers, and queens the nursing-mothers of the new social philosophy, because its attacks were mainly directed against those relics of olden times which afforded the greatest impediments to the exercise of their arbitrary will. Nobility and clergy, corporations and trades, all independent bodies, were obstacles in their way. Whether or no they were useless or mischievous to those below, to those above they were stumblingblocks of offence. Then the great discovery was made, not only that the forms of established reverence were unnecessary to support authority, but that authority could reign far more compendiously and directly without them. Frederic II., the real hero of that age, who by his genius had abolished for ever the pedantry of war, pointed out also to monarchs the mode of reigning without encumbrance, by breaking down whatever authority was left to all intermediate bodies between himself and his people. Catharine II. was the other great utilitarian sovereign of the time;