Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/496

THE REHABILITATION OF RICARDO

In the development of the mental sciences exegesis has frequently played an important part. A change of doctrine has been justified, or supported, or commended for general acceptance, by a new interpretation of an authoritative text. Sir Henry Maine has explained the nature of this process in the history of Roman Law:—

The authors of the new jurisprudence during the whole progress of its formation professed the most sedulous respect for the letter of the Code. They were merely explaining it, deciphering it, bringing out its full meaning; but then, in the result, by piecing texts together, by adjusting the law to states of fact which actually presented themselves, and by speculating on its possible application to others which might occur, by introducing principles of interpretation derived from the exegesis of other written documents... they educed a vast variety of canons which had never been dreamt of by the compilers of the Twelve Tables, and which were in truth rarely or never to be found there.^[1]

We are all of us able to supply examples for ourselves of a similar procedure in theology.

There are not wanting indications that something of the same kind is now taking place in English Political Economy with reference to Ricardo. It is a comparatively recent and an almost exclusively English phenomenon. To say nothing of the historical economists, the re-creator of abstract economics in England, Stanley Jevons, did not hesitate twelve years ago to describe Ricardo as an 'able but wrong-headed man,' who had 'shunted the car of economic science on to a wrong line';^[2] while, within the last few months, the spokesman of the new Austrian abstract school has declared, without any words of qualification, that

1. Ancient Law, p. 34.
2. Preface to 2nd ed. of his Theory, p. lvii.