facturing or mercantile speculation, and thus employ productive laborers; or I may become the manager of a theatre, and thus take into my service a number of unproductive hands. And this last scheme may be just as profitable, or even more so than the other.

On the other hand, I may use the whole of my fortune, or too great a part of it, as a stock reserved for immediate consumption; and, if I do so, I shall most certainly go to ruin, whether I spend it in the employment of productive or unproductive hands. In such a case it will not be the direction, but the amount of my expenditure, that will bring me to beggary.

But it may go far to demonstrate the absurdity of upholding the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, if we can show that one of those whom Dr. Smith most unequivocally sets down among his unproductive laborers, can be transferred without any change in his occupation from the service of the spendthrift to that of the capitalist; for we shall thus prove, first, that he has become a productive laborer, as Dr. Smith tells us, that "that part of the annual produce of the land and labor of any country which replaces a capital, never is immediately employed to maintain any but productive hands." It pays the

wages, he

says, of productive labor only. Now, let us suppose, that a musical amateur has so impoverished himself by maintaining a full band of performers for his own entertainment, that he finds himself almost ruined by his extravagance; but that rather than give up this his favorite amusement, he resolves, with the wreck of his fortune, to set up an opera, and offers to retain in his professional capacity still, those per

formers who had hitherto ministered to his private enjoyment. And, we may suppose, still farther that they accept of his terms, and that matters go on so well, that he recruits his fortune by the profits of this speculation. There does not seem any thing very improbable in all this, the difficulty is to reconcile it with Dr. Smith's chapter.

These men are now supported by capital, and therefore are productive laborers; but they are musicians, and therefore are unproductive laborers. Again; they ruined their employer, and therefore a man may grow poor by employing unproductive laborers, but they have also again enriched their employer;-and therefore a man may accumulate capital by employing unproductive laborers.

There does not seem then to be any real distinction between productive and unproductive labor; and even supposing that there is, there seems to be no good reason for Dr. Smith's idea of a necessary connexion between the employment of unproductive labor and expenditure, or between that of productive labor and the accumulation of stock.

Dr. Smith seems to have gone on with the popular idea, that wealth consists only in material commodities, without much consideration; and the wonder is, not that in one or two instances his acute understanding has been misled, but that in by far the greater number he has so successfully succeeded in clearing away the mists of popular prejudice and error.

Even with regard to the definition of wealth, it seems to have been our author's own opinion, had he kept by it, that it was not confined to material objects. Had Dr. Smith but remembered

his own aphorism, that "every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life;" and had he, by his usual train of reasoning, generalized this proposition, by applying to the whole community what may be said of every one of its members, we should in all probability never have heard of productive or unproductive labor.

Every one must admire the acuteness and talent displayed in this Essay. More than common discernment was necessary to catch the author of the wealth of nations tripping; but still greater talent was required to detect the fallacy and expose the mistaken reasonings by which it was supported. A discovery, when made often, appears very simple and easy; but the mind which makes that discovery, and the process which leads to it, belong not to the common order, and may be far removed from vulgar apprehension.

Among his papers which were written about this time, are several fragments, on subjects of great importance; and while I feel deep regret that they are imperfect, I cannot throw aside even the fragments of such a mind. The first on Written Language, in which his object appears to have been to prove that it is of divine origin. This is a view of the subject not peculiar indeed to him, but still not usually adopted by philosophers, and philologists; though I confess it has long appeared to me the only tenable hypotheses. The employment of hieroglyphics, and the use of them to record facts of a certain kind, are easily accounted for; but the discovery of alphabetic writing is a

very different matter. The extraordinary simplicity of alphabetic characters, and their still more extraordinary power, render it improbable that they should be the discovery of chance, or the invention of a barbarous people: while the impossibility of arriving at any great degree of civilization or scientific advancement without them, supposes that the discovery must have preceded. If reason and language are the gifts of God, it is not going too far to say, that both are imperfect and very limited in their operation without the use of a written language. In order to preserve and authenticate a Divine revelation, a fixed medium of that revelation seems absolutely necessary; and, perhaps, it would not be difficult to suggest reasons amounting to a high probability, that when the law was given to Moses, the first knowledge of alphabetic writing, and the first specimen of it were then communicated. But this is not the place to pursue such an inquiry.

ON WRITTEN LANGUAGE.

The acknowledged priority of spoken to written language, appears to us a very decisive argument for the divine origin of the latter.

Among those who hold that language is a mere human invention, there have been two opinions,some maintaining that substantives, or the names of external objects would be the words first invented, and others holding that verbs or words expressive of the mutual relations of objects, must have existed anterior to these, as an individual would not think of naming an object, until he had

been in some way or other affected by its properties. On either of these hypotheses, it seems to us very obvious, that it would occur much more readily to the mind of a savage to represent his ideas by forms than by sounds. If he wished to particularize any object that was near, he would point to it; and if he wished to express the relation between any two objects, he would, in all probability, point first to the one, and then to the other; or, if the objects were moveable, he might express the same idea by bringing them into actual contact.

Were these objects removed from his view, so that he could no longer express his idea by pointing to them, the most natural resource that could occur to him, would be to produce, if possible, a resemblance to the objects, and now to point to these, as he had formerly done to the objects themselves.

As there are comparatively few objects that utter sound, and as the sounds cannot be distinctly imitated by human voice; and, as on the other hand, all external objects have a form which can in general be easily represented, it would probably occur to him, that to delineate the absent objects would be the best method of representing them. If he wished to express some relation existing between two objects, he would express the idea as before, by representing the symbols of two objects in a state of contact.

Thus, had man been the inventor of language, we should have expected that at first men would have expressed their ideas by written symbols, accompanied by gestures, and now and then perhaps by the utterance of such articulate sounds, as evidently resembled the idea they intended to