The Principles of Political Economy; With a Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Science

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: shows the nature and extent of the benefits of which they will be productive; if they are not, he shows in what respect they are defective, and to what extent their operation will be injurious, But he does this without inquiring -into the constitution of the government by which these measures have been adopted. The circumstance of their having emanated from the privy council of an arbitrary monarch, or the representative assembly of a free state, though in other respects of supreme importance, cannot affect the immutable principles by which the economist is to form his opinion upon them. Besides being confounded with Politics, Political Economy has sometimes being confounded with Statistics; but they are still more easily separated and distinguished. The object of the statistician is to describe the condition of a particular country at a particular period; while the object of the political economist is to discover the causes which have brought it into that condition, and the means by which its wealth and riches may be indefinitely increased. He is to the statistician what the physical astronomer is to the mere observer. He takes the facts furnished by the researches of the statistician, and after comparing them with those furnished by historians and travellers, he applies himself to discover their relation. By a patient induction?by carefully observing the circumstances attending the operation of particular principles, he discovers the effects of which they are really productive, and how far they are liable to be modified by the operation of other principles. It is thus that the relation between rent and profit- between profit and wages, and the various general laws which regulate and connect the apparently conflicting, but really harmonious interests of every different orde...