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of a living society and polity for readjustment and to provide the new machinery for the transition to new order with a minimum of friction. Shelburne met the new world, the new facts and the new claims with a programme of new ideas to be realised by machinery revived from the scrap heaps of the 17th century; Windham with a programme of the old ideas and the old machinery concealed under a new coat of old paint. Shelburne forgot that in the politics of a self-governing nation pure reason is like bayonets. The statesman can alter everything with its help except human nature. Misinterpretation of human nature invariably involves misinterpretation by human nature. The confidence and co-operation of his fellow men were as indispensable for the success of Shelburne's measures as accurate diagnosis of the facts; and Shelburne's principles dispensed with confidence and regarded co-operation as the shibboleth of faction. Hence distrust of the statesman came to be held as a good reason for rejecting his principles; rejection of his principles was the justification for distrusting the man. The independence, which is a synonym for isolation, ends in impotence. Windham imprisoned his mind in the Whig Koran; for all his boasted independence he could only conceive of an England, in which the inherited supremacy of the class to which he belonged was not secured, as the negation of God, sanity and social stability. Of true intellectual and political independence, of an honest endeavour to see the life surging round the charmed enclosure of a narrow political monopoly steadily and as a whole, of power to breathe and draw a new strength from the sunlight and air outside the stately temple of Whiggism, there is no trace.

In our political history Shelburne is not typical but unique. He will be remembered as a statesman of intellectual power but of a narrow vision, and of a character that inspired invincible aversion. He failed to carry out his reforms and to maintain himself in office, because his interpretation of the problems was defective, because he had no party and refused to make one, because his record illustrated the futility of both the threadbare panaceas 'measures and not men,'' men and not measures' so copiously appealed to in his day. It was a failure of character, constructive power, and insight. He bequeathed

no memory, no tradition, no message, no programme, no ideal; and the historian is obliged to reconstruct the failure in order to explain the significance of the man.

Windham, whose charm was irresistible to his age, can never awaken the interest fostered by Shelburne's enigmatic and provocative career. Oratorical excellence and social gifts unsupported by solid achievement will not stir either the gratitude or the curiosity of posterity. He did not found a school because the school had been founded a century earlier, and outside its class-rooms he never walked. The critical and fruitful years of his life were spent in the futile task of trying to prevent the winds of the Time-spirit from blowing down ramparts and battlements whose foundations were already sapped and subsiding. He had no message of faith for his own generation; and the next, taught by Canning, Peel and Huskisson, by Grey, Russell, Brougham and Bentham, saw in his warning to flee the wrath to come only the final proof of a worn-out creed and a perished social order. After Pitt the quenched torch of the master's constructive Toryism could be relit by his disciples; the mantle of Fox fell on the younger sons of the Whig prophets who remembered to whom they owed their conviction of a national mission. But to Windham the England of the Regency and the Reform Bill owed no homage. The public figure who has made no permanent contribution to a nation's policy, laws and institutions, who has not enriched its thought with new ideas, nor even with the dreams that pass out of the gates of horn to blend with the rose and amber of a dawn that night is powerless to stay, the man whose life is summed up in unquestioning satisfaction with the present or unrepentant regret for the past, pays an inexorable penalty. And Windham has paid it.

C. GRANT ROBERTSON,

PENGE PUBLIC LIBRARY

( 406 )

Art. 5.-THE VAGARIES OF RECENT

POLITICAL

ECONOMY.

1. The Principles of Political Economy. By Henry Sidgwick. London: Macmillan, 1883.

2. Cours d'Economie Politique. Par Vilfredo Pareto. Lausanne, 1906.

3. Cours d'Économie Politique. Par C. Colson. Six vols. Paris Gunthier Villars, 1907.

4. The Common Sense of Political Economy. By Philip H. Wicksteed. London: Macmillan, 1910.

5. Wealth and Welfare. By A. C. Pigou.

Macmillan, 1912.

London:

6. Principles of Economics. By Dr N. G. Pierson. Translated by A. A. Wotzel. Vol. II. London: Macmillan, 1912. THE literature of Political Economy is enormous and is growing fast. The increase in quantity is evidenced by the growing lists of new books noticed in the Journals of the Royal Statistical Society and the Royal Economic Society; and there are similar journals with similar lists in all the principal countries from Japan to the United States. The quantitative progress of Political Economy is also shown by the increasing importance attached to the subject in the Universities, the old as well as the new. We still speak of Political Economy as a subject, but the name covers many subjects, and the economic department in any large university includes many instructors and attracts many students. In the University of Harvard, for example, there are no less than thirty-one courses in Economics, given by a staff of eight professors and an appropriate number of lecturers and assistants, and the 'Quarterly Journal of Economics' published by Harvard University is in the first rank of similar publications. The amount of Political Economy made in Germany is even more varied and voluminous, and the latest German Quarterly Journal of Economics (Weltwirtschaftsliches Archiv), the first number of which appeared last January, parades a list of over three hundred contributors, including many well-known names. And even these references do not give an adequate indication of the economic output in words spoken and written, for in every country, and notably in the United Kingdom, official commissions

of all kinds have examined numberless witnesses and issued lengthy reports of the evidence and the results. There are also the continued and recurrent returns of the Board of Trade (e.g. the Census of Production) and similar governmental departments, and year by year new masses of statistics and realistic descriptions are poured from official presses. Such and so great being the quantity of economic literature, it is natural to enquire if there has been a corresponding advance in the quality, or, to put a less exacting question, if there has been any real advancement of economic learning.

In certain parts of the field there will be general agreement that the harvest has not only been plenteous but of excellent quality. This is especially the case where the husbandmen have applied the historical and comparative methods in their researches. The late Frederic Seebohm's English Village Community' was literally a path-breaker; and, even if other minds take other views of the origins of the manor, his discovery of the meaning of the virgate or yard-land threw a new light on the medieval history of England. In economic history generally the progress has certainly been more than satisfactory. Similarly in the development and in the application of statistical methods there has been unquestionable progress; and if in realistic economics we sometimes cannot see the wood for the trees, a good many of the trees are very good after their kind. Metaphor apart, in nearly every section of economics there has been since the early seventies some solid work of outstanding importance: in currency, banking, labour, unemployment and pauperism, and so on through all the principal chapters of practical economics there have been notable additions and revisions.

But when we look to Political Economy considered as the fundamental science which should co-ordinate all these particular developments, the answer to the question about advancement is by no means so clear. It will readily be admitted that some critical or supplementary notes, or chapters of real value, suggested by later developments both theoretical and historical might be appended to nearly every chapter of the 'Wealth of Nations.' Take, for example, Adam Smith's well-known opinions on the limitations of the usefulness of joint-stock enterprise.

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Not only has this form of business more and more displaced other forms with increasing success, but, as is shown by the laborious and illuminating researches of Dr W. R. Scott into the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-stock Companies to 1720' (a work which deserves to rank with those of Madox and Eden), Adam Smith's historical judgment on joint-stock companies requires serious modification.

Whatever the emendations in substance or in detail, it is certain that no subsequent economist has succeeded in writing for his day and generation a work of similar range and similar power of co-ordination of principles. In the preface to his own work Mill (1848) said that the "Wealth of Nations" is in many parts obsolete and in all imperfect,' and that 'a work similar in its object and general conception to that of Adam Smith but adapted to the more extended knowledge and improved ideas of the present age, is the kind of contribution which Political Economy at present requires.' But Mill himself, instead of bringing down Adam Smith to the middle of the 19th century, endeavoured to popularise the abstractions of Ricardo, and he may be said to have headed the revolt against his own doctrines in his later treatment of labour questions and socialism. In less than a generation after the appearance of Mill's 'Principles' his work was violently attacked by Cliffe Leslie for its failure to appreciate the historical method, and by Jevons for its failure in abstract analysis. And, curiously enough, both of Mill's critics raised the cry: Back to Adam Smith. The change in attitude towards the authority of Mill found expression in the Principles of Political Economy' by Henry Sidgwick; and probably Mr A. J. Balfour's reference to the 'thin lucidity' of Mill was evoked by the opposite character of Sidgwick's work. But the work of Sidgwick, though much admired by the expert, failed to make any popular impression, partly from his over-elaboration of abstract argument and partly from his under-valuation of history. It is now thirty years since it was published; and a new generation has arisen that knows little of Sidgwick and still less of the doctrines that called forth his criticism. What Mill said of Adam Smith would be said now with more emphasis and greater justice of Mill's own work-'in many parts obsolete and in most imper

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