reasoning which they showed, yet it must be confessed that they are too often ill-adapted to the common apprehension. Had he possessed more knowledge and acquaintance with practical business life, been nearer to the monotony of details, his work would have been imbued with a smack of practicality which would have redeemed its abstractness, and made it vastly more useful. Moreover, he would, as in the discussion of the wages question, have adapted his principles more correctly to the truth, and gained positions less likely to be assailed after others had noted their too great symmetry and too few limitations. His early training accounts for his book as it stands, and explains his faults. Account must, however, be taken of the life Mill led as a servant in the East India Company's office, which widened his horizon, gave his mind practical employment, and furnished him with a great field of experience in men and things. This, without doubt, exercised a strong and steadying influence on his thinking, which had some of the faults of English insularity, and, taken together with his robust philanthropy, gave that practical direction to his work which, while it was inadequate, yet redeemed him from the charge of being too entirely given to abstractions. Had he had an interest in work-a-day things which equaled his fondness for metaphysics and abstract thinking, he would have succeeded even more than he did, and he made a great success. His treatment of international values is a conspicuous example of his faculty for extended reasoning, but, had he put it more as a practical man of affairs, he could have made an exposition of the principles quite as well as he did, and gained vastly in his hold upon the reader. Does it not become evident, then, that mere philosophic acumen is not sufficient in the model economist? Nor, on the other hand, is the mere man of affairs able to grasp the workings of principles in the confusion of details. These two powers must be, and always are, combined in him who accomplishes the best economic work.
The personality of Mill's great successor, Mr. Cairnes, is a very interesting one. He both knew and thought much. Members of Parliament would come to sit by his invalid's chair, in which he was confined by a painful disorder, finally ending in an untimely death, and find him more learned than they in the details and facts of certain legislation; and yet with this accumulation of practical knowledge, for which he had a peculiar aptitude, no one since Ricardo has shown so vigorous a faculty for investigation, and the power of keeping his head while in the pursuit of principles. He was not befogged by metaphysical niceties, but followed his way through the multiplicity of actual business life with as sure and certain a grasp upon the actuating causes, and with as clear and definite a view of the principles in operation, as an expert accountant when adding a column of figures. His logical and philosophic side is most admirably seen in his little volume, "The Logical Method," in which he lays down his
