extreme, and much that passed for brilliant philosophizing fifty or even thirty years ago is now regarded as little better than obsolete sophistry. Two of the latest works that have fallen into our hands—Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe's "Individualism; a System of Politics," and Prof. Thorold Rogers's "Economic Interpretation of History"—illustrate this very strongly."Practical men," says the former, "have long since ceased to attach any importance to the slipshod twaddle of those who pose as the theorists of the art of wealth-producing." The latter, referring, as it would seem, particularly to Mill, says: "The political economist of the later school has thoroughly carried out in his own person the economical law which he sees to be at the bottom of all industrial progress—that of obtaining the largest possible result at the least possible cost of labor. He has, therefore, rarely been at the trouble of verifying his conclusions by the evidence of facts. He has, therefore, constantly exalted into the domain of natural law what is, after all, and at the best, a very dubious tendency, and may be a perfectly baseless hypothesis. His conclusions have been rejected by workmen and flouted by statesmen."
We quote these passages not as fully indorsing them, but simply as showing to what extent the authority of a school that once was dominant is to-day called in question, if not discredited. At the same time, we fully believe that, before political economy can be a science in any satisfactory sense of the term, it has to be reconstructed and rewritten in the light of careful inductions from vast collections of facts. The basis of the "orthodox" economy was too narrow, while its method was too deductive and dogmatic. Mr. Mill was a man of a mind at once acute and candid; but he had not received the education that fitted him for the vast task which he assumed of reviewing the whole field of economics and enlarging its boundaries.
In his youth he was overdrilled by a stern and remorselessly logical father. His attention was largely turned to classical, historical, and mathematical studies. In the region of natural science he never acquired any real competency. His tendency was, therefore, rather to read theories into facts than to make facts point the way to theories. His mind was extremely hospitable to new ideas, and his sympathies were quick and warm; upon the whole, few truer or better men have ever lived; but he had only a kind of literary acquaintance with economic facts, and it is not surprising that much of the reasoning in which he indulged is now seen to have been concerned rather with fanciful abstractions than with real things.
The political economy of the future will be of comparatively slow growth, but it will deal with men as creatures of flesh and blood; not as automata moved by a few ticketed wires. The materials for the rising science are being laboriously gathered by many earnest investigators, who are fully alive to the errors of their predecessors, and who mean, therefore, to let the facts as much as possible speak for themselves. To the new political economy many independent lines of inquiry will contribute. The biologist, the moralist, the statesman, the lawyer, will all bring their stores of carefully assorted data; and, when these have been further arranged and correlated by minds of competent scope and grasp, we shall begin to see the outlines of a much more comprehensive theory of economics than any that has heretofore been given to the world. In a word, science will undertake to organize a region that in the past has been too much given over to a priori speculation, with its natural accompaniment of presumptuous dogmatism. In future our concern will be not with the opinions of individual writers, but with their demonstrations; mere hypotheses will carry no more weight in
