converted Europe into one vast military camp. His whole tirade is entirely misdirected. There was commercial ignorance enough, no doubt. Compared with the present, his was a barbarous age; but the progress which has since been made has not been the work of kings or princes, or of owners of the soil, but of the wider scope and influence of principles or causes then at work, though sadly hampered and thwarted by that ambition, ignorance, and selfishness which have gradually yielded to a higher and better law. Smith saw no hope of a better state of things, because he wholly ignored the moral elements the sense of duty-as chief factors in civilization. The foundations upon which he erected the superstructure of his Wealth of Nations" are the selfish instincts of the race. With such premises, it was inevitable that he should make a disastrous failure. He is the legitimate founder of the school which assumes to treat man by the same methods that it would a lump of earth, or the laws of gravity or motion, — which assumes that as gravity or attraction is in ratio to quantity, so man's nature is affected in the same way; so much attraction, so much compliance, with whom, as with Buckle, civilization is the necessary product or evolution of given quantities of moisture and heat! 66 "Country gentlemen and farmers," Smith continues, "are, to their great honor, of all people the least subject to the wretched spirit of monopoly. . . . They have no secrets, such as those of the greater part of manufacturers; but are generally rather fond of communicating to their neighbors, and of extending, as far as possible, any new practice which they have found to be advantageous.... Country gentlemen and farmers, dispersed in different parts of the country, cannot so easily combine as merchants and manufacturers, who being collected into towns, and accustomed to that exclusive corporation spirit which prevails in them, naturally endeavor to obtain against all their countrymen the same exclusive privilege which they generally possess against the inhabitants of their respective towns. They accordingly seem to have been the original inventors of these restraints upon the importation of foreign goods, which secure to them the monopoly of the home market. It was, probably, in imitation of them, and to put themselves upon a level with those who, they found, were disposed to oppress them, that the country gentlemen and farmers of Great Britain so far forgot the generosity which is natural to their station, as to demand the exclusive privilege of supplying their countrymen with corn and butcher's meat. They did not, perhaps, take time to consider how much less their interest could be affected by freedom of trade, than that of the people whose advantage they followed." 1 1 Wealth of Nations, Book iv. Chap. ii. Country gentlemen and farmers are undoubtedly a very worthy class, and much to be envied. If one possess a better variety of turnips or pigs or horses than his neighbor, he will be very likely to share his good fortunes with him. But that they are by nature opposed to the wretched spirit of monopoly, and fell from their gracious state through the instructions of merchants, who plied them with arguments and reasons which they could not understand, much less refute, and made good their instructions by imposing prohibitory duties upon corn and butcher's meat, could never have occurred to the imagination of any one but Smith; for it is difficult to conceive any other person so ignorant, not only of history but of human nature, who could, where he was not interested, assert that which is exactly opposed to the fact. The market of the merchant is the world; and to assume that he would deliberately adopt a policy destructive to his own welfare, is to assert that the motive of self-interest- the very motive which Smith assumes to be the ruling principle of all action - has no place in the human mind. He might not have intended to state an untruth: the difficulty with him was that he lacked the power of distinguishing between the true and the false. By nature, Smith was wholly unfitted to conduct a scientific discussion of any kind. He was a dreamer, not a reasoner. He evolved, to use a cant phrase, his systems from his own consciousness. He knew nothing of affairs, and could learn nothing from others. In his antipathy to merchants, or in a freak of passion, he lost sight of his principles altogether. "He was," says Dugald Stewart, in his memoir, " certainly not fitted for the general commerce of the world or the active business of life. The comprehensive speculations with which he had been occupied from his youth, and the variety of materials which his own invention continually supplied to his thoughts, rendered him habitually inattentive to familiar objects and to common occurrences, and he frequently exhibited instances of absence which have scarcely been surpassed by the fancy of La Bruyère. Even in company he was apt to be engrossed with his studies, and appeared at times, by the motion of his lips, as well as by his looks and gestures, to be in the fervor of composition. . . . He was peculiarly ill-qualified to take care of his own estate, for the proper management of which he was indebted to the attention and care of kind hearted relations." It is not strange that a person so wholly wanting in practical sense should be equally wanting in the perception of principles, in method, and in originality. He borrowed his ideas of money very largely from Law; following him, like Hume, where he was wrong, and rejecting him where he was right. In urging the advantages of freedom of trade, he was fully anticipated by Hume, "whose political discourses," says Stewart, "were of greater use to him than any other works which had appeared prior to his lectures." Had neither of them lived, the whole question of Free-Trade and Protection would have been precisely where it is to-day. As already shown, the opinions held upon this subject do not result from argument or statement, but from the conditions in which individuals or communities find themselves placed. Whoever feels that he can undersell every one else, welcomes competition, is a Free-Trader; he who is conscious that he cannot, fears competition, is a Protectionist. There can be no doubt that liberal sentiments are gaining ground in trade, as in all other questions; but in Free-Trade and Protection, in the sense in which these words are ordinarily used, there will always remain the positive and negative poles. When the ignorance of Smith upon the subject upon which he wrote, his want of scientific method, the groundlessness of his assumptions and conclusions, especially in reference to money, are considered, the influence he has exerted over succeeding generations is well fitted to excite astonishment. It is to be remembered, however, that mankind always demand some positive and authoritative statement of belief or faith, and of the nature and significance of the problems or phenomena by which they are surrounded, and necessarily accept that which appears most reasonable, although it may have no foundation whatever. Of this the Ptolemaic system of astronomy is a striking example. Nothing could be more true to sense, or untrue to the fact. There was nothing to violate the ordinary sense of mankind in the teachings of Aristotle. If he could not see their unreasonableness, much less could those who followed, none of whom, for ages, possessed any thing like his intellectual acuteness. Galen's system of medicine gained possession of the public mind, and became a despotism which lasted more than fifteen hundred years, only for the reason that it was stated more authoritatively, and with greater show of learning, than any other. By it he assumed to meet every possible condition of body as well as mind; to be as universal in medicine as Aristotle assumed to be in the far broader field, the world. The truth or falsehood of what either proposed had nothing to do with its acceptance. In the moral as well as the material world, that which appears most reasonable to what may be termed the natural sense of mankind is untrue. As the instincts are never to be implicitly trusted, but are always to be referred and subjected to a sense of duty, no matter with what struggle or at what cost, so, in the material world, phenomena are always to be referred to a law which may wholly contradict the conclusion of the senses. That which is dearest to the human heart, as well as to untutored observation, is always to be put under the foot of duty and reason. Nothing is to be taken on trust; every thing is to be referred to an inexorable law, in other words, selfsacrifice, self-denial, is the condition of all scientific as well as of moral progress. Of all this the Greeks and Romans had no conception. To them the very foundation of the sciences was wholly wanting. - The systems of Aristotle and Galen, by absorbing the attention and satisfying the reason of mankind, effectually blocked the way to all progress in the discovery of truth. With them, in their respective departments, the age of invention, of originality, came to an end. That which followed was one of imitation, of comment, of refinement in error, by means of which the race itself became reduced to a condition of mental imbecility. In the same way Smith, for a hundred years, has been the great obstacle to all progress in the subjects upon which he wrote. As his teachings upon money were almost universally accepted, all that subsequent writers have done has been to develop and push his doctrines to their extremest terms. In them was wholly lost whatever of freshness or strength their master possessed. The crowning mistake of all, however, was in assuming that what they erected with so much labor and pains deserved even the name of a science. They have wholly mistaken the foundations upon which that of Political Economy is to be erected. If such a science be possible, it must be based upon the moral, rather that the intellectual nature of man. With adequate moral, the highest material conditions follow as a necessary result. Smith failed in his attempt, as all must fail who ignore the moral or the sentimental side of man's nature. This is but another name for the ideal which far transcends all human effort. Hence the insupportable weariness of his works. It is in the unattainable that lies the great charm of life, the great incentive to exertion. The goal reached, the wished-for one is still in the distance, and is still for ever to remain so. Smith and his school placed all good within the reach of human effort. They gave nothing, in assuming to give all. The first writer following Smith upon the subject of money, deserving attention, was Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who delivered, in the early part of the present century, an elaborate course of lectures upon the subject of Political Economy. Stewart was an ardent admirer of Smith, and assumed to reduce to precise and logical terms what his great master only more generally outlined. With Smith, he held "that division of labor, whereever it existed to any considerable extent, presupposed the establishment of some common medium of exchange. Without this previous arrangement, it would be impossible for an individual to devote himself exclusively to a particular species. of employment. . . . In process of time, among all civilized nations, gold, silver, and copper have supplanted all other commodities, as the great instruments of commerce." Smith, however, held that the value of these metals depended largely upon their beauty, utility in the arts, and scarcity; that such qualities, among others still more important, fitted them to serve as money. To this, however, Stewart strongly demurred. "I certainly agree with Mr. Smith," he says, "excepting where he states that the intrinsic value of gold and silver was the quality which fitted them for their employment as coin. It appears to me that this intrinsic value, which I shall allow to gold and silver to its fullest extent, ought to be regarded in the theory of money as merely accidental circumstances, from which it is proper to abstract with all possible care, as tending only to embarrass our conceptions; for the same reason that, in studying the theory of mechanics, we abstract from the effect of friction, the rigidity of the ropes, and the weight of materials of which the machines are composed. . . . When gold is converted into coin, its possessor never thinks of any thing but its exchangeable value, or supposes |