disclose the operating force; to shake off the incidental circumstances of its concrete envelope, take out the principle, and formulate it for use by others in subsequent explanations. The great Scotch "doctrinaire" was at once the most practical man of his time.
Curiously enough, while Adam Smith approached political economy from the side of abstract and metaphysical studies, his "homely sagacity" led him constantly to practical results; but, although Ricardo was a rich banker and a successful man of business, who had early retired with a competence, he it was who, above all others, went farthest in attempting to formulate the principles he had arrived at from facts in a form which should state abstractly the general truths independent of the changing conditions in which these principles worked. So that in Ricardo we have a man of business intuitions of the most practical kind, but one who early showed a fondness for mathematics and logical studies. Knowing only too well the myriad shapes in which facts arise before us, he was urged forward by a desire to express truth in a form as succinct and universal as possible. This tendency, taken in connection with unusual terseness and no great literary skill in exposition, has deceived people into thinking that his conclusions were all deduced by an a priori process (because of his dry and peculiar method of stating them); while, as a matter of fact, he was a hardheaded man of affairs, living at a time when the Bank of England restriction act and the duties on corn led him to try to find out the fundamental principles which were governing the value of money and the price of corn. The results of these practical investigations were seen in the doctrines of the "Bullion Report," and the economic doctrines of "Rent" and "International Trade." In this way, the work of the Scotch Professor of Logic, who had a great deal of practical insight, was supplemented by the study of a successful man of affairs who had a strong passion for concise and abstract statement of economic principles. We can not properly say of the man who was introduced to the details of the money market at fourteen, was in business on his own account at twenty-one, and was a wealthy man at twenty-five, that he was a doctrinaire wholly given over to abstract speculations.
John Stuart Mill illustrates what we have said in a different way. To him the fascination of abstract reasoning was so great, and the bent of his mind so strongly metaphysical, that this part of the economist's equipment preponderated in his make-up; his attention to the facts of practical life was not excessive. And this exposes the real weakness of his book. Perhaps no other systematic writer ever gained such a success by perspicuous treatment, and a certain geometrical symmetry in the connection of parts with a whole, as did Mr. Mill in his "Principles of Political Economy," and this quality has greatly added to the value of his work. But, while the abstract character of many of his chapters excites admiration for a power of sustained
