really goes to get the experience of the best observers of all countries with which to correct himself against false and narrow inferences drawn from his own limited experience.
In order to show how far this analysis is based on experience, some appeal to the history of the work of the most successful economists will give results of an interesting and instructive kind. Adam Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and Cairnes combined in a high degree the two almost opposite kinds of powers needed for their success; and these men have contributed the most to the progress of our knowledge of economic principles. It would be hard to name an author who has wielded a greater influence by his writings than Adam Smith by his "Wealth of Nations" (1776). His work was a great and admitted success, as tried by any tests, whether of popularity or permanent influence on men's minds. But on his tombstone will be found inscribed the name of an extensive ethical work ("The Theory of Moral Sentiments") as an equal claim to distinction with the "Wealth of Nations." What is worth noting is that the great writer was a Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow, and had planned an extensive course of lectures in which political economy formed but one part; and we find that by training, by aptitude, by study, he was a skillful master of logic; he had the power to separate the temporary and unimportant from facts, and educe an abstraction of the truth unweighted by the accidents of the form in which he found it; and knew how to secure a firm grasp upon principles apart from their illustrations, which gave him later a scientific and systematic control over his subject, and enabled him to weld it into a compact and cohering whole. It was this power which made it possible for him to lay the foundations of a science of political economy. It widened his views, and made it easy for him to see the essentials of any concrete phenomena. In short, he possessed in a remarkable degree the first of the two requisites for successful economic work. But, then, to an almost equal extent, he honestly reverenced industrial and commercial facts; he studied them eagerly, and made his book an extensive collection of data on many special subjects. Everywhere one meets with the analysis and study of particular industrial phenomena; and in them the keen, observing Scotchman, with a subtile, economic instinct, saw the operation of laws where the ordinary man of affairs saw only a crowd of familiar and monotonous details of business. The practical nature of his work is so well known that it seems unnecessary to call further attention to this side of his make-up. So well is this understood, that the late Cliffe-Leslie claimed for Adam Smith that his method of working was solely inductive, that is, starting from facts alone. It was, therefore, without question, his philosophic and logical faculty, united with a true and correct instinct for facts and the laws working in them, which lay at the bottom of Adam Smith's world-wide success in his "Wealth of Nations." He had the power to see the universal in the concrete; to
