Cairnes at the commencement of his public life, if so quiet and unobtrusive a life can be regarded as having ever been a public one. The first lecture was on "The Character, Objects, and Limits of Political Economy;" the second, on "The Mental and Physical Premises of Political Economy, and the Logical Character of the Doctrines thence Deduced;" the third, on "The Logical Method of Political Economy;" the fourth, on "The Solution of an Economic Problem, and the Degree of Perfection of which it is Susceptible;" the fifth, on "The Malthusian Doctrine of Population;" the sixth, on "The Theory of Rent."
Mr. Cairnes differed from all his predecessors in finally and completely discarding the old notion that political economy is a cut-and-dried science, — a system for laying down, in certain departments, the laws of human action from which men may, or may not, legitimately depart, but from which they cannot depart with the sanction of political economy. He sought, throughout his working years, to bring the principles of political economy to bear upon all the great political and social questions of the day, or, perhaps we should rather say, to see whether and how far economic principles could be brought to bear upon them. Mr. Mill showed how broad could be the sympathies and how deep the philanthropy of a rigid political economist; Mr. Cairnes how, not the dominion, but the influence of political economy could be wisely extended into the region of human sympathies and the methods of philanthropy. Regarded from this point of view, there was remarkable consistency in all Mr. Cairnes's work as a teacher and writer. Seventeen or eighteen years ago the Australian gold discoveries gave new and very practical importance to the question as to the effect of an increased supply of the metal used as a standard of value upon the market value of all other commodities; and he contributed to Fraser a series of articles, based, we believe, upon lectures previously given in Dublin, in which the question was exhaustively and philosophically treated. His views, ridiculed and controverted by many critics, were at once adopted by the men most competent to gauge them, and subsequent events have proved their entire correctness. Much more general attention was excited, however, by a work that grew out of the last course of lectures delivered by him in i86l to the Dublin students. "The Slave Power: its Character, Career, and Probable Designs," was published in the spring of 1862, and soon ran into a second edition, to be quickly re-issued in the United States, and to be at once singled out, from the mass of ephemeral literature provoked by the American civil war, as a solid and most masterly exposition of the problems therein involved. It was based on the assumption, not then much recognized, that, not the question of tariffs or anything else, but, as he said, "slavery is at the bottom of this quarrel, and that on its determination depends whether the power which derives its strength from slavery shall be set up with enlarged resources and increased prestige, or be now once for all effectually broken." But the great value of the work was in the close and overwhelming arguments by which slavery was shown to be an uneconomical institution, not only in the conventional but yet more in the scientific sense of the term; to involve excessive and deplorable waste of the materials of production as well as to be utterly indefensible in a moral aspect. Here Mr. Cairnes was able to give most important application to his special view as to the functions of political economy. He brought slavery within the range of science, and, subjecting it to a new standard, weighed it carefully, and conclusively proved it to be altogether wanting.
Before "The Slave Power" was published, his five years' tenure of the Whately professorship had come to an end; but he had immediately afterwards been appointed professor of political economy and jurisprudence at Queen's College, Galway. While there, the direct work attached to his office was more onerous and responsible than at Dublin. But the indirect work that devolved upon him was more tedious and more important. He had long ago, perhaps under Whately's guidance, arrived at strong convictions on the question of Irish education, and he laboured with unflagging energy as the defender and promoter of the system of united and unsectarian education in accordance with which the Queen's University had been established. The "Thouglus on University Reform," lately republished in his volume of "Political Essays," and the other pamphlets, essays, and letters, that issued from his pen at this time, very clearly and boldly set forth his opinions on the subject.
He found time for other work as well. It may not seem a great undertaking to prepare a lecture for a Young Men's Christian Association: but the lecture
