redound only to the glory of the present generation. He is speaking of the North American Indians. "The same contempt of death and torture prevails among all the savage nations. There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not in this respect possess a magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire on mankind, than when she subjected this nation of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished." (Vol. II. p. 37.)

How well has he painted the man of system, and how many features of this portrait have we recognised in Mr. Bentham, and others of our day!" He is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely, in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion beside that which the hand impresses upon them; but that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of action of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If these two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all

times in the highest degree of disorder."-"For a man to insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all at once, and in spite of all opposition, anything which his own idea of policy and law may seem to require, must often be the highest degree of arrogance. It is to erect his own judgment into the supreme standard of right and wrong. It is to fancy himself the only wise and worthy man in the commonwealth, that his fellow creatures should accommodate themselves to him, and not he to them." (Vol. II. p. 110.)

There are scattered through this and Dr. Smith's other work abundant indications of the scorn in which he held faction and the spirit it engenders; but I am far from being averse to cite passages which may be supposed to reflect on my own policy and conduct, while a minister or a party chief, or to confine my quotations to those opinions with which I might be supposed more to agree. The following passage must be fairly admitted to contain much truth, though not stated in terms sufficiently measured:-" The leaders of the discontented party seldom fail to hold out some plausible plan of reformation, which they predict will not only remove the inconveniences, and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent in all time coming any return of the like inconveniences and distresses. They often propose on this account to remodel the constitution, and to alter in some of its most essential parts that system of government under which the subjects of a great empire have enjoyed perhaps peace, security, and even glory, during the course of several centuries together. The great body of the party are commonly intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system of which they have no experience, but which has been presented to them in all the most dazzling colours in which the eloquence of their leaders could display it. The leaders themselves, though they may originally have meant nothing but their own aggrandisement, become many

of them in time the dupes of their own sophistry, and are as eager for this great reformation as the weakest and foolishest of their followers. Even though the leaders should have preserved their own heads, as indeed they commonly do, free from this fanaticism, yet they dare not always disappoint the expectations of their followers, but are often obliged, though contrary to their principles and their conscience, to act as if they were under the common delusion." No one can doubt the truth of the conclusion to which his account of reforming schemes leads him; it is proved by constant experience, which also shows, though he leaves this out of his view, that they who refuse all reform often are the cause of excessive and perilous innovation:-"The violence of the party refusing all palliations, all temperaments, all reasonable accommodations, by requiring too much, frequently obtains nothing; and those inconveniences and distresses which with a little moderation might in a great measure have been removed and relieved, are left altogether without the hope of remedy." (Vol. II. p. 107.)

Such is the Theory of Moral Sentiments.' The great reputation, however, of Dr. Smith, and especially his European reputation, is founded upon the Wealth of Nations.' We have seen how the principles of a more sound, liberal, and rational policy in all that regards commerce and finance, had been gradually taking the place of the old and narrow views upon which all countries regulated their economical systems, and we have found the improvement begun as early as the seventeenth century. Towards the end of that, and in the earlier part of the following, the alarms of the different states which form the great European Commonwealth were so much excited by the ambition of Louis. XIV., that the only subject which either interested statesmen or speculative inquirers related to questions of military and foreign policy. But the regency of a most able prince and wise ruler, profligate though his

private life might be, succeeded that splendid and mischievous reign, and the greatest, indeed the only, error of the Duke of Orleans, his confidence in a clever and unprincipled projector, however hurtful to his country for the moment, yet produced no permanent mischief, while it rather tended to encourage speculations connected with money and trade and taxation. Accordingly, both in France and Italy, those subjects occupied the attention of learned men during the first half of the eighteenth century, and we have seen how great a progress was made between 1720 and 1770 in establishing the sound principles of which a considerable portion had been anticipated nearly a hundred years before. In England, Mr. Hume had contributed more largely to the science than all the other inquirers who handled these important subjects. In France the Economists had reduced them to a system, though they mingled them with important errors, and enveloped them in a style exceedingly repulsive, and not well calculated to instruct even the few readers whom it suffered the importance of the subject matter to attract. But it remained to give a more ample exposition of the whole subject; to explain and to illustrate all the fundamental principles, many of which had been left either assumed or ill defined, and certainly not clearly laid down nor exhibited in their connexion with the other parts of the inquiry; to purge the theory of the new errors which had replaced those exploded; to expound the doctrines in a more catholic and less sectarian spirit than the followers of Quesnay displayed, and in a less detached and occasional manner than necessarily prevailed in the Essays of Hume, though from his admirably generalizing mind no series of separate discourses ever moulded themselves more readily into a system. This service of inestimable value Dr. Smith's great work rendered to science; and it likewise contained many speculations, and many deductions of fact upon the details of economical inquiry, never

before exhibited by any of his predecessors. It had also the merit of a most clear and simple style, with a copiousness of illustration, whether from facts or from imagination, attained by no other writer but Mr. Hume, unsurpassed even by him, and which might well be expected from the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments.'

ANALYTICAL VIEW OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

I. Labour is the source of all human enjoyment; it may be even reckoned the source of all possession, because not even the property in severalty of the soil can be obtained, without some exertion to acquire and secure the possession; while labour is also required to obtain possession of its minerals, or of the produce which grows uncultivated, or the animals which are reared wild. All wealth, therefore, all objects of necessary use, of convenience, of enjoyment, are either created or fashioned, or in some way obtained, by human labour. The first inquiry then, which presents itself, relates to the powers of labour; the next to the distribution of its produce. These two subjects are treated in the first book of the Wealth of Nations,' in eleven chapters, to which is added a kind of appendix, called by the author a 'Digression, upon Money Prices,' or as he terms it, "the variations in the value of silver, and the variations in the real prices of commodities." The unskilful and even illogical aspect of this division is manifest; for under the head of labour, are comprehended the subjects of profit and rent as well as wages. But subject to this objection against the arrangement, and to the still more material objection which may be urged against one portion of the doctrine, the first book is of very great value, and unfolds at length the fundamental principles of economical science.

i. The first sub-division relating to the powers of