360 S A Y S A Y hausen), chemicals (Stassfurt), and starch. Beer is also brewed extensively in Prussian Saxony, where the annual consumption per head (107 quarts) is considerably in excess of the average for the kingdom. Trade is much facilitated by the great waterway of the Elbe, as well as by a very complete system of railways. The chief articles are wool, grain, sugar, salt, lignite, and the principal manufactured products named above. The population of the province of Saxony in 1880 was 2,312,007, including 2,154,663 Protestants, 145,518 Roman Catholics, and 6700 Jews ; in 1885, according to provisional census returns, the population was 2,427,968. The great bulk of the inhabitants are of unmixed German stock, but many of those in the east part of the province have Wen dish blood 111 their veins. The province belongs to the more thickly populated parts of Germany, the aver- age being 237 persons to the square mile, and the ratio of the urban population to the rural is about as 4 to 54. The occupation census of 1882 gives the following percentages for the ditlfivnt classes of the population : agricultural, 3678; industrial, 35 '18 ; trade, 8 '15; domestic servants and day labourers, 870; official and professional, 5*12. Prussian Saxony is divided into the three government districts of Magdeburg, Merseburg, and Erfurt. Magdeburg is the most important town and the headquarters of an army corps, but the provincial chambers meet at Merseburg. The province sends twenty members to the reichstag and thirty-eight to the Prussian house of representatives. The religious control of the district is in the hands of a consistory at Magdeburg ; the Koman Catholics belong to the diocese of Paderborn. The university of Halle holds a high rank among German seats of learning, and the other educa- tional requirements of the province are adequately provided for. The illiterate recruits of this province in 1883-4 numbered only 13 out of a total of 7868, equivalent to 0'17 per cent. The prin- cipal towns are Magdeburg (about 150,000 inhabitants, including Neustadtand Buckau), Halle (81,869), Erfurt (58,307), Halberstadt (34,048), Nordhausen, Miihlhausen, and Aschersleben. The history of the present Prussian province of Saxony as such dates only from 1815, and is, of course, merely of local interest. The previous history of its constituent parts, of considerable more interest and importance, must be sought for under the various headings that will suggest themselves, such as SAXONY (supra), PRUSSIA, MAGDEBURG, ERFUKT, &c. It is, however, worth noting that the province comprises the Altmark or old North Mark that formed the kernel of the Prussian state (see PRUSSIA, vol. xx. p. 2), and also the old bishoprics on the Elbe and Saale, from which as a centre the Christianization of Germany mainly spread. And the leading position of this part of Germany in promoting the Reformation should also be remembered. SAY, JEAN BAPTISTE (1767-1832), an eminent French political economist, was born at Lyons 5th January 17G7. His father, Jean Etienne Say, was of a Protestant family which had originally belonged to Nimes, but had removed to Geneva for some time in consequence of the revocation of the edict of Nantes. Young Say was intended to follow a commercial career, and was accordingly sent, with his brother Horace, to England, and lived first at Croy- don, in the house of a merchant, to whom he acted as clerk, and afterwards at London, where he was in the service of another employer. When, on the death of the latter, he returned to France, he was employed in the office of a life assurance company directed by Claviere, afterwards known in politics. It was Claviere who called his attention to the Wealth of Nations, and the study of that work revealed to him his vocation. His first literary attempt was a pamphlet on the liberty of the press, pub- lished in 1789. He worked under the celebrated Mira- beau on the Courrier de Provence. In 1792 he took part as a volunteer in the campaign of Champagne; in 1793 he assumed, in conformity with the Revolutionary fashion, the pre-name of Atticus, and became secretary to Claviere, then finance minister. He married in 1793 Mile. Deloche, daughter of a former avocat au conseil ; the young pair were greatly straitened in means in consequence of the depreciation of the assignats. From 1794 to 1800 Say edited a periodical entitled La Decade philosophique, lit- teraire, et politique, in which he expounded the doctrines of Adam Smith. He had by this time established his reputation as a publicist, and, when the consular govern- ment was established in the year VIII (1799), he was selected as one of the hundred members of the tribunate, and resigned, in consequence, the direction of the Decade. He published in 1800 Olbie, ou Essai sur les moyens de reformer les moeurs d'une nation. In 1803 appeared his principal work, the Traite d' JZconomie Politique. In 1804, having shown his unwill- ingness to sacrifice his convictions for the purpose of furthering the designs of Napoleon, he was removed from the office of tribune, being at the same time nominated to a lucrative post, which, however, he thought it his duty to resign. He then turned to industrial pursuits, and, having made himself acquainted with the processes of the cotton manufacture, founded at Auchy, in the Pas de Calais, a spinning-mill which employed four or five hundred persons, principally women and children. He devoted his leisure hours to the improvement of his economic treatise, which had for some time been out of print, but which the censorship did not permit him to republish; and in 1814 he availed himself (to use his own words) of the sort of liberty arising from the entrance of the allied powers into France to bring out a second edition of the work, dedicated to the emperor Alexander, who had professed himself his pupil. In the same year the French Government sent him to study the economic condition of Great Britain. The results of his observations during his journey through England and Scotland appeared in a tract De VAngleterre et des Anglais ; and his conversations with distinguished men in those countries contributed, he tells us, to give greater correctness to the exposition of prin- ciples in the third edition of the Traite, which appeared in 1817. A chair of industrial economy was founded for him in 1819 at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, in which he lectured with ability and success. In 1831 he was made professor of political economy at the College de France. He published in 1828-30 his Cours Complet d'Economie Politique pratique, which is in the main an expansion of the Traite, with practical applications. In his later years he became subject to attacks of nervous apoplexy, which increasingly reduced his strength. He lost his wife, to whom he was fondly attached, in January 1830 ; and from that time his health constantly declined. When the revolution of that year broke out, he was named a member of the council- general of the department of the Seine, but found it necessary to resign that position. He died at Paris 16th November 1832, leaving behind him a well-earned reputation for private worth and polit- ical integrity. Say was essentially a propagandist, not an originator. His great service to mankind lies in the fact that he disseminated throughout Europe by means of the French language, and popularized by his clear and easy style, the economic doctrines of Adam Smith. It is true that his French panegyrists (and he is not himself free from censure on this score) are unjust in their estimate of Smith as an expositor ; they give false or exaggerated ideas of his obscurity, his prolixity, and his want of method ; and they accordingly extol too highly the merits of Say. Those merits are, however, real and considerable ; his writings were without doubt very effective in diffusing throughout Continental Europe a taste for economic inquiry and a knowledge of its principal results. On the side of the philosophy of science Say is weak ; his observations on that subject are usually commonplace or superficial. Thus he accepts the shallow dictum of Condillac that toute science se riduit d une langue bienfaite. He recognizes political economy and statistics as alike sciences, and represents the distinction between them as having never been made before him, though he quotes what Smith had said of political arithmetic. Whilst always deserving the praise of honesty, sincerity, and independence, he is very inferior to his great predecessor in breadth of view on moral and political questions. In his general conception of human affairs there is a tendency to regard too exclusively the material side of things, which made him pre-eminently the economist of the French liberal bourgeoisie ; thus Storch justly censures the levity with which he doubts the necessity of a public religious cultus, suggesting that enlightened nations might dispense with it " as the Pacific islanders do. He is inspired with the dislike and jealousy of Governments so often felt and expressed by thinkers formed in the social atmosphere of the last century. Soldiers are for him not merely
