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piety may, however, on the one hand, be checked, or even utterly destroyed; on the other, fostered, encouraged, and developed, by the favourable or unfavourable circumstances which surround the individual from his earliest years,-in one word, by his education. Now it is unquestionable that the direction of these circumstances, or the education of the mass of any people, is within the power, and few can doubt that it therefore forms one of the foremost of the duties,—of their government; and this not only with the view of inculcating a moral and religious disposition amongst them, but likewise of eradicating, so far as is possible, the root of all evil-ignorance, and widely disseminating the seed of all good-knowledge.

I have no intention, however, of going into a discussion of the mode and degree in which the great business of general education should be undertaken or superintended by a government. I shall content myself with remarking, as bearing upon our immediate subject, that, of the circumstances which indirectly influence the moral and religious character of a nation, none are more important than its economical condition, or the degree in which its members are enabled to command the necessaries, comforts, and enjoyments of life. A state of general misery is alike unfavourable to the development of the social virtues and the cultivation of national religion. In no quarter of the globe do we see vice so confirmed, crime so abundant, religion so grievously polluted by impiety and superstition, as in those countries where the physical wants of the people are most

D

meanly supplied; where poverty, and its attendant, recklessness, exasperate the evil passions of our nature, and smother the germs of every generous

and noble sentiment.

2. I shall pass over with equal brevity the consideration of the means possessed by a government for securing the members of the community it is placed over from personal injury. This is notoriously one of the first duties of every government, and is to be effected by laws expressly enacted for the protection of the persons of individuals, both from domestic and foreign aggression. That the laws enacted for this purpose in most countries are as yet far removed from perfection, is a matter now of general acknowledgment; but it would be foreign from our present purpose to enter upon the examination of their defects, or the means of improving them. I proceed, therefore, to the

third class of circumstances within the influence of a government, by which the happiness of every community is determined, namely—

3. The degree in which its members are individually supplied with the necessaries, comforts, and physical enjoyments of life. To promote to the utmost this supply, is, or ought to be, the one great object of all laws and institutions, civil or criminal, which relate to property in any of its shapes, which laws compose, indeed, the great mass of legislation in every state.

It is therefore evidently most essential that the members of every government and legislature,— and, under representative institutions, even the persons by whom these trustees of the general interests are chosen,-should possess as general and

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correct a knowledge as possible of the means for securing the greatest abundance and most liberal distribution of the physical enjoyments of life among the members of a society.

Now this important knowledge it is the business of Political Economy to convey.

Much obloquy has of late been thrown upon the science which assumes this name, and upon its cultivators,-obloquy not perhaps wholly unmerited on the part of some of their number, who from generalizing hastily upon insufficient facts, have arrived at conclusions so opposed to the common sense and experience of practical men, that the latter have been led to look upon the propounders of these theories as Laputan philosophers, and on the science as a mere bundle of mischievous paradoxes. The ridicule which some of these hypereconomists have justly incurred,-in some instances converted into indignation by the dogmatism with which the most mischievous fallacies were put forward and obstinately maintained by them, has been unhappily shared by the sciencewhich they professed to explain, but which, in fact, they only obscured and mystified. So prevalent are these impressions, that it has at times been doubted whether it would not be advisable to discard altogether the title of Political Economy, and pursue our inquiries into this important subject under some new and less obnoxious name.

But

such a change would be the cause, probably, of much confusion. The candour and enlightened spirit of the age must be trusted to for dispelling this unjust prejudice. The time is arrived when.

the value of the true philosophy of wealth must be recognised, and its claims to general attention made manifest, in spite of the temporary discredit it has suffered through the blunders and selfsufficiency of some pretenders to its exclusive interpretation. The science of medicine is not the less esteemed because occasionally disgraced by the St. John Longs and Van Butchells. Mankind is not the less indebted to chemistry because its early history was stained by the knavery and nonsense of the alchemists. Astronomy is not despised because its grand truths have been, in former ages, debased by the jugglery of fortune-telling and judicial astrology. Neither will Political Economy, the science which teaches how to advance to the utmost possible extent the production and general diffusion of the means of enjoyment, and so improve, as far as is practicable, the physical condition of every member of society, be deprived of the consideration which its paramount importance to mankind deserves, because empiricism may have momentarily flourished, and mischievous errors been propagated, under its name. On the contrary, it becomes, on this very account, the more necessary for all who wish to arrive at a knowledge of the truth on this important subject, and have an interest in its dissemination, (as who has not?) to apply themselves to its study. Error must, in such a matter, be more than commonly pernicious; and the more errors of the kind we believe to have been propagated, the more incumbent it is on all who have the requisite leisure to examine

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and sift the subject to the utmost, with the view of purifying it from its mischievous fallacies, and establishing its useful truths.

Nor are errors on this subject by any means confined to those who have pursued its study in their closets. On the contrary, the most pernicious fallacies and absurd paradoxes have been, and still are, generally current among those who pride themselves on being 'practical' men, and on despising theory. There are, indeed, few rasher theorists than those who habitually declaim against theory. The notions, for example, that a country is enriched by what is called a favourable balance of trade causing an influx of the precious metals; that the expenditure of taxes in employing the people compensates them for the burthen of taxation; that improvements in machinery are injurious to the labouring class; that one individual, or one country, can only gain at the expense of another; that the outlay of an absentee's income abroad, or the introduction for sale in this country of an article of foreign manufacture, abstracts an equal amount of employment from our native industry;—these, and many others that might be mentioned, are theoretical doctrines of the falsest and most injurious character, taken up by numerous persons on what they consider the authority of common sense,' but which, in truth, is merely crude induction from a very limited and imperfect experience. No governments can, indeed, act, or individuals form a judgment upon their action, except upon theories of some kind, true or false, with respect to questions within the province of Political Economy; and it would be quite contrary to general analogy to suppose that truth