The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty/Volume 1/Introduction/PettysEcWrit

by William Petty

 

PETTY'S ECONOMIC WRITINGS.

Those who hitherto have discussed Petty as a writer on economic subjects have confined themselves pretty closely to summary and criticism of his theories. The writings are now before the reader, who may summarize and criticize as his purpose demands or his taste suggests. It remains for the editor to account, if he can, for the writings as they are.

A man of force makes his way in this world through no impalpable ether. The medium through which he moves is dense, and deflects his course now this way, now that, according to the form and temper of the surface that he presents to the buffeting of affairs. His intellectual orbit cannot be precisely calculated even with a knowledge of the initial direction and velocity of his mind and of the attraction which draws its flight towards a fixed centre. But every man not wholly erratic is at once impelled by his circumstances and restrained by his training. Postulate these, and you may discover in his actual course some trace of the mean orbit which calculation would predict.

The inspiration of Petty's writings is not far to seek. Written before the days of formal treatises on political economy, they are neither the systematized abstractions of a metaphysician condescending to every-day affairs, nor the less systematic but no less abstract arguments of a man of affairs with an undisciplined bent toward speculative thinking. Least of all are they the eclectic treatise of a professional economist laborously dovetailing the ideas of his predecessors one into another. Indeed it is doubtful whether Petty had any acquaintance worth mentioning with such economic writings as existed in his day. In his earlier years, to be sure, he had been a man of the library as well as of the laboratory; but experience taught him to value the education of life above that of books, and in his writings he uses authorities seldom and not well. To Aubrey he declared that he had read little since his twenty-fifth year, and was of Hobbes's mind, that had he read much, as some men have, he had not known as much as he did^[1]. His writings then are not conscious elaborations of some economic system, more or less clearly conceived. Each of them, on the contrary, was prompted by some circumstance of the times, and addresses itself, in fact if not in form, to some question of the day. The "Treatise of Taxes" the most systematic of them all, grows out of the changes in the revenue which the Restoration occasioned. The "Verbum Sapienti" is due to the costliness of the first Dutch war, the "Quantulumcunque" is the recoinage projects of Halifax. The moral of the "Political Arithmetick," implicit but clearly implied, is that Charles II. may, if he will, make himself independent of the bribes of Louis XIV. "The doctrines of this essay offended France^[2]." The "Essays in Political Arithmetick" instruct James, wavering on the verge of an independent policy, that London is more considerable than the two best cities of the French monarchy^[3]. The unedited "Treatise of Ireland" plainly avows its political purpose. Even the "Political Anatomy" though suggested by Chamberlayne's enclyclopaedic "State of England^[4]" is seen, upon briefest examination, to be crowded with such discussions of current questions as nowhere occur in its prototype. Nevertheless they are all marked, in part because of his method of investigation, by certain common and characteristic features.

The form of Petty's discussions is as directly traceable to his training as is the contents of them to his circumstances. Such a title as "Political Anatomy" is reminiscent of his early studies, but the education which vitally affected his writing was rather that of converse with his scientific friends than that afforded by the instruction of his formal teachers. I shall try, therefore, to account in part for Petty's economic writings by taking up first the intellectual influences which gave them their characteristic form, and afterwards the circumstances, within the limits prescribed by that form, which suggested their content.

Petty has been represented, not without reason, as the disciple of Hobbes^[5]. We have seen that he studied with Hobbes at Paris, and we know that all through Hobbes's quarrels their friendship remained unbroken^[6]. Petty's high opinion of the author of the treatise "De Cive" is indicated by the inclusion of that work in the list of books which he wished his sons to read,—and the list is not a long one^[7]. In his economic writings too there are traces of Hobbes's influence, but it is—if the distinction be admissible—upon Petty as a politician rather than upon Petty as an economist that his influence was chiefly exerted. It appears most strikingly in the assumption that the government is justified in doing anything by which the national wealth can be increased. Again and again Petty advocates sweeping public measures which take no account whatever of the rights and sensibilities of the citizen. He is quite ready to suggest that the majority of the Irish and Scotch be transplanted to England whether they consent or not^[8]. In this general sense he is certainly of the political school of Hobbes rather than of Harrington^[9].

The attempt to trace Hobbes's influence in Petty's attitude towards the relation of church and state does not seem altogether successful. In harmony with his general views, Petty agrees with Hobbes that the state may suppress dissent. Beyond this initial proposition they part company. The political theory of "The Leviathan" tolerates no division of sovereignty. Dissenters from the church by law established are political offenders who must be reduced to conformity because their dissent impairs the sovereignty of the government. Petty's reason why dissent may be suppressed is quite different from this. He thinks that "the Magistrate may punish false Believers, if he believes he shall offend God in forbearing it,... for the same reasons that men give for Liberty of Conscience and universal tolleration^[10]." In other words a man vested with magisterial powers is morally justified in using them as his conscience dictates. But Petty himself is far from thinking it either necessary or expedient to use such powers to secure uniformity of worship. On the contrary he warmly commends the heterodox, though with curious reservations lest by going too far he give offence^[11], and he regards dissent as not only harmless but inevitable. Thus upon a calculation of the number of sermons annually preached in England, he remarks that "It were a Miracle, if a Million of Sermons Composed by so many Men, and of so many Minds and Methods, should produce Uniformity upon the discomposed understandings of about 8 Millions of Hearers^[12]," and suggests that misbelievers, provided they keep the public peace^[13], may wisely be indulged by the magistrate, upon payment of "well proportioned, tolerable pecuniary mulcts, such as every conscientious Nonconformist would gladly pay, and Hypocrites by refusing, discover themselves to be such^[14]." For "no man can believe what himself pleases and to force men to say they believe what they do not, is vain, absurd, and without honour to God." Besides "where most indeavours have been used to help Uniformity, there Heterodoxy hath most abounded^[15]." The best policy therefore is for the government to pluck with moderation the geese who persist in their unauthorized beliefs^[16].

Upon Petty as an economist the influence of Hobbes was far outweighed by that of Bacon. There was of course no personal connection here. When the founder of the New Philosophy was dying at Highgate, the future political arithmetician was a weaver's brat in Hampshire. But the youth became, as he grew to manhood, an eager member of that group of experimental investigators, working in the spirit of the "Novum Organum," who began the systematic pursuit of scientific knowledge in England^[17]. At the close of a century distinguished above its predecessors not so much by the spirit of research as by the passion for accuracy in the determination of results, it is easy to find food for indulgent merriment in their crude apparatus. Not less amusing are their experiments with "a toad set in the middle of a circle of powder made with unicorne's horne," whose supposed charm it refused to recognize, incontinently hopping out of the circle again and again; or Sir Kenelm Digby's recommendation of "calcined powder of todes reverbrated applyed in bagges upon the stomach of a pestiferate body"—a pungent treatment of pestiferous bodies, whose obsolescence with the gradual mollification of social usages some will be found to regret. But the mere willingness to put the conduct of the toad to the test and to abide by the result argues confidence in the usefulness of experiment, and by implication in the uniformity of nature. It points the way to that precise knowledge of the world which alone can afford a firm foundation for invention and thus lead to the rule of man. It exhibits the Baconian rather than the Spinozistic sense of the maxim Knowledge is Power. It explains why the "Novum Organum" treats "De interpretatione naturæ sive de regno hominis." With the spirit of this philosophy Petty was strongly imbued^[18]. In a session of the Royal Society when some one chanced to use the words "considerably bigger," "Sir William Petty cautioned, that no word might be used but what marks either number, weight, or measure^[19]." The caution may serve to indicate the nature of Bacon's influence over him. It was an influence exerted primarily upon Petty 's method, and only indirectly, through his method, upon the substance of his economic speculations.

In the field of his peculiar interests Petty sought the same quantitative precision which he demanded of his scientific colleagues. Now in economic investigation, as writers on the method of political economy never weary of iterating, the experimental method is in general precluded by the nature of the materials. The far seeing minister of an autocratic Czar may sometimes make industrial experiments on a gigantic scale and even isolate them from the disturbing influences of parliaments and newspapers, but he is not at all likely to utilize them for purposes of economic speculation. A favoured economist like Von Thünen—with whose aims Petty's thought exhibits much affinity though he lacks Von Thünen's conspicuous patience—may make similar experiments upon a small scale. Most of us, however, must get on as best we may without any economic laboratory whatever. In this respect Petty was no exception. Experiment being impossible, he substituted what he called Political Arithmetick, a beginning of what is now called statistics. It was by no happy chance that he turned to this new device. He had a perfectly clear conception of the end which he desired to reach and of the means by which he proposed to reach it. "The Method I take," he says, "is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetick I have longed aimed at) to express my self in terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Consideration of others: Really professing my self as unable to speak satisfactorily upon those Grounds (if they may be call'd Grounds), as to foretel the cast of a Dye; to play well at Tennis, Billiards or Bowles, (without long practice,) by virtue of the most elaborate Conceptions that ever have been written De Projectilibus & Missilibus, or of the Angles of Incidence and Reflection^[20]"

He even anticipated the modern conclusion that statistical investigation, applied to wisely selected circumstances, affords perhaps the best substitute for experimentation that is open to an economist. In this sense he says, in the preface to the "Political Anatomy of Ireland," "As Students in Medicine, practice their inquiries upon cheap and common Animals, and such whose actions they are best acquainted with, and where there is the least confusion and perplexure of Parts; I have chosen Ireland as such a Political Animal, who is scarce Twenty years old; where the Intrigue of State is not very complicate, and with which I have been conversant from an Embrion; and in which, if I have done amiss, the fault may be easily mended by another^[21]." The obvious meaning is, not that he literally experimented upon Ireland himself, but that he examined by the best available means, the effects of such experiments as had been made there. The means turns out to be the use of political arithmetick, and that he considers the best means because it gives precise results. As we shall see, Petty's results were, at times, less accurate than precise, for his statistical materials were frequently inadequate and his employment of such as he had was sometimes injudicious. But the root of the matter was in him. The application of an appropriate method "not yet very usual" to a field of knowledge in which it was altogether new, justifies him in associating himself with the most eminent followers of the new philosophy, and even distinguishes him among his colleagues. It was by no misapprehension of his true significance that Narcissus Luttrell wrote in his diary simply, "Sir William Petty of the Royal Society is dead^[22]."

The data of statistics do not now, nor did they ever present themselves spontaneously for scientific elaboration. In order therefore that legal provision should be made, and that money should be forthcoming, for their ascertainment, it was first necessary that the value of possible statistical deductions from accurate data should be demonstrated by the intelligent use of those sparse materials which lay ready to the student's hand. It is in this sense that we must judge the essays of Graunt and Petty, which pioneered the way of modern statistics, and so judged they will be found worthy of high praise. Graunt's book has the advantage of priority^[23] and the greater advantage of dealing with a body of statistical data sufficiently extended and complete to warrant some confidence in deductions properly made from it. Petty 's materials, on the other hand, were highly defective. A few scattering bills from Paris and Dublin, haphazard returns from various tax offices, a guess here or there as to the area of a city^[24]—the list is soon exhausted. Petty realized the incompleteness of his data, and repeatedly urged the institution of regular statistical returns^[25]. He drew up a pattern for an improved bill of mortality for Dublin^[26]. He even tried to secure the establishment of an Irish statistical office under his own management^[27]. But it is not clear that anything of importance resulted from his efforts in this direction. Meanwhile he made shift with such tools as came to hand—"a commin Knife and a Clout," as he says "instead of the many more helps which such a Work requires^[28]." When he could not ascertain directly the number, weight or measure of some phenomenon in which he was interested, he reckoned out what he desired to know upon the basis of what he already knew. In other words he pursued the method of political arithmetic as distinguished from statistics. Statistics demands enumeration. The validity of its inferences depends upon the theory of probabilities as expressed in the Law of Large Numbers. Therefore it adds, it does not multiply. Political arithmetic, as exemplified by Petty, multiplies freely; and the value of its results varies according to the nature of the terms multiplied. For example, in the absence of a census Petty had to calculate the population of London, of England, and of Ireland. His calculations for London^[29] are based upon the number of burials and upon the number of houses, facts which at least bear some relation to the number of people. The burials he multiplies by thirty, an arbitrary figure for which he pleads Graunt's authority^[30]; the houses he multiplies, now by six^[31], and now by eight^[32] as suits his purpose. The sources of probable error are obvious. The population of England, he further estimates at eleven times that of London because London pays one eleventh of the assessment. The chance of error is thus raised to the second degree. Nevertheless the calculation is not altogether unreasonable, and Petty asserts that the results "do pretty well agree" with the accounts of the hearth money, the poll money, and the bishops' numbering of the communicants^[33]—figures which he neglects to give. To see from what refractory materials he can extract a result when hard pushed, we must turn to his discussion of the Irish rebellion of 1641. He finds that above one-third more "superfluous oxen and sheep, butter and beef" was exported from that kingdom in 1664 than before the rebellion, "which shows there were ⅓ more people in 1641 than in 1664^[34]." Unfortunately the use of rash calculations grew upon Petty, and, as was to be expected, he gives widely varying estimates of the same things^[35]. It must be added that he is frequently inaccurate in his use of authorities^[36] and careless in his calculations^[37] and upon at least one occasion he is open to suspicion of sophisticating his figures^[38].

Petty's economic writings thus exhibit both the strength and the weakness of his characteristic method. When his terms of number, weight and measure result from an actual enumeration they are generally of value, for he has a considerable capacity of segregating the really significant factors of an economic problem. But the difficulties in the way of enumeration were great, and in his eagerness for results he often resorted to calculations which were nothing more than guesses. When he stopped to think, he was well enough aware of their conjectural character. "I hope," he writes to Aubrey, "that no man takes what I say about the living and dyeing of men for a mathematical demonstration^[39] ." But in the ardour of argument he was himself more than once mislead into fancying that his conclusions were accurate because their form was definite. His mistake is not without its modern analogies. Mathematical presentations of industrial facts, both symbolic and graphic, have by their definiteness, encouraged many an investigator in the false conceit that he now knew what he sought, whereas he had at most but a neat name for what he sought to know. Nevertheless the substitution of symbols for Petty's "terms of number" is an improvement in this, that calculations made in symbols must be consciously translated into the terms of actual life before any practical use—or misuse—can be made of them, whereas calculations in figures of number, weight and measure are already concrete and appear to tell something intelligible even to a common man. Had Petty calculated the advantages of his "perpetual settlement of Ireland with a natural improvement of England and Ireland by transplanting a million of people out of Ireland into England" in the form of curves and triangles, that astounding proposition might have passed for something highly scientific.

It would be quite possible to take up the various economic topics discussed by Petty according to modern conceptions of them, and to do so would afford a ready-made standard for judging his economic notions. But it would also involve the risk of asking what he thought about problems concerning which it never occurred to him to think at all. No possible answer to such a question can be correct, for the question itself is irrational. Accordingly I leave to those who have a taste for mosaic work and are not yet satisfied with the amount on hand, the task of determining in what details Petty anticipated Smith or Ricardo or Böhm-Bawerk. It will be enough for the present purpose to indicate a few of the chief economic questions which engaged his attention and to attempt to understand why he attacked them and how he solved them.

The economic method which Petty chiefly pursued, taken in combination with the limited extent of his materials, of necessity confined him to the discussion of a few out of the many questions that must have thronged upon his active mind. In no other field of economic interest were so many figures available as in that of taxation, and the fiscal changes of the Restoration, chancing to come just at the time when he first had leisure to return to his studies, gave to his economic inquiries a direction from which he never wholly departed. The only topic neither an outgrowth of his fiscal discussions nor otherwise dictated by his arithmetical method upon which he wrote at length was that of coinage. And it is noteworthy that his little excursions into this relatively foreign field are marked by as great perspicuity and good sense as distinguish his more arithmetical writings. The "Quantulumcunque," indeed, shows Petty very nearly at his best.

As an economic writer then, Petty is essentially a cameralist rather than a mercantilist. Unlike Robinson and Mun and Child, he had little connection with foreign trade^[40]; nevertheless he was too much infected by prevalent mercantile views to see the advantages of unrestricted commerce as clearly as North was able to do. Accordingly while he leans, on the whole, towards a policy of commercial freedom, and is quite clear and consistent in opposing all restraints upon the export of coin or bullion, he seems at times to evade the discussion of the free trade problem—e.g. he does not mention the Act of Navigation—and his utterances on the preferability of treasure to other forms of wealth, on the balance of trade, and on the policy of restriction generally are contradictory, not to say vacillating. On almost all questions of public revenue and public expenditure, on the contrary, his opinions are well developed, clear and consistent. The great changes in the fiscal system which were made by the Convention Parliament gave rise to no other discussion at all comparable with his "Treatise of Taxes and Contributions^[41];" and it is scarcely too much to say that English economic literature before Hume can show no tract of such range and force, characterized by such wealth of suggestion and such power of analysis, as is Petty's masterpiece. It contains the germ of nearly every theory which he afterwards elaborated. Even his method of political arithmetic is exemplified in the calculations of its second chapter^[42]. The calculations are, to be sure, both slight and unsatisfactory; but rather from lack of trustworthy data than from any failure on Petty's part to appreciate the importance of such devices. On the contrary he demands for economic purposes a thorough survey of lands and their produce ^[43], and of money, wages and population, for "until this be done trade will be too conjectural a work for any man to employ his thoughts about^[44]." Before the publication of the "Treatise" he was indeed acquainted with Graunt's "Observations^[45]," but the suggestions of that book had not had as yet sufficient time to exert their full influence upon him. Consequently the number of the people, which becomes in the "Verbum Sapienti" (1664) a key to the national wealth, and thus affords a basis for the distribution of taxation much more satisfactory than expenditure^[46], is used in the "Treatise" but incidentally to a minor question of retrenchment^[47].

To the problem of national wealth Petty never tires of applying the methods of his political arithmetic. The "Verbum Sapienti" shows both the reason that led him to attack the problem and the method which he employed for its solution. The introduction explains that taxation is unequal, "which disproportion is the true and proper grievance of taxes^[48]." To the end that the public charge be laid proportionally it is necessary that the total effects of the nation be ascertained. In the first chapter, accordingly, Petty estimates separately the value of the lands, the houses, the shipping, the cattle, the money and the miscellaneous goods of the country, unblushingly confirming one guess by showing its satisfying conformity to another. Now-a-days more abundant and more accurate figures are available upon which to base guesses, but the methods of modern calculations of national wealth are, so far, not essentially different from his^[49]. The second chapter, however, adds to the calculation of the first an element of national wealth which seldom figures in modern tables headed £ s. d. This element is "the value of the people," which it was his consistent practice to include in all his estimates. Fewness of people he thought was real poverty^[50]. Hands were the father as lands were the mother of wealth^[51], and neither of the pair might be omitted from a stock-taking of the public household. The suggestion that people are wealth was probably much older than Petty^[52], and his originality would consist rather in the application to it of his political arithmetic than in the invention of the notion. Now in order to add hands to lands he must reduce them to a common denominator. The necessity and the difficulty of thus making "a par and equation between lands and labour" must have been brought home to him by his experience as surveyor and commissioner of allotments, charged with rewarding soldiers on the one hand and loaners of money on the other by proper assignment of the forfeited lands in Ireland^[53], and it is not merely for theoretical purposes that he regards this task as "the most important consideration in political oeconomies^[54]." The common denominator chosen being money, it is necessary to determine the money value of the people. But the people in question are neither bought nor sold^[55], and so he resorts to a calculation. Assuming the expenditure of the people of England to be forty million pounds per annum, he finds that their income from property is sufficient to meet only fifteen millions of it. The source of the remaining twenty-five millions of income is worth as much as the fee of land that would rent for that sum, "for although the individiums of mankind be reckoned at about eight years purchase, the species of them is worth as many as land, being in its nature as perpetual for ought we know^[56]." The figures to which Petty applies this formula are conjectural, even capricious, but the formula itself is essentially sound, and the ingenious calculation shows that he had a firm grasp upon the problem of capitalization. The various components of the national wealth being thus ascertained, Petty proceeds to use them as a basis for distributing taxation. He holds that, the ratio formalis of riches lying rather in proportion than in quantity, men would be no poorer than now they are should each lose half his estate^[57]. Accordingly he proposes various taxes^[58] intended to place upon the possessors of each source of income such a proportion of the aggregate burden as the capitalized amounts of their respective incomes may bear to the national wealth which he has calculated.

Petty's interest in the amount of the national wealth thus sprang from his discussion of taxation, and it is clear that traces of its origin hang about it to the end. But he soon came to employ the notion for another purpose also; that is, as a means of comparing England with her commercial rivals, Holland and France. In 1664, Petty had made a "Collection of the Frugalities of Holland^[59]," and he repeatedly commended various Dutch practices for adoption in England^[60]. Nevertheless, he seems to have considered the current estimate of the Dutch somewhat exaggerated^[61], and the conviction apparently grew upon him that it was rather with France than Holland that Englishmen must reckon^[62]. In the "Treatise of Taxes" (1662), the Dutch system is held up as a model for English imitation, while no French taxes are mentioned except the gabelle^[63], of which he disapproves. In the "Political Arithmetick" (1676) Holland still occupies the first place, but it serves merely as a stalking-horse to disguise the main argument regarding the potential superiority of England to France. In the "Five Essays" (1687) the Netherlands are openly relegated to second place. In making these international comparisons Petty realizes that national wealth is something different from the revenue of the exchequer^[64], and is of independent importance to the commonweal. Nevertheless he is unable to divest himself entirely of the cameralistic notions out of which his discussion arose, and always lays especial weight upon the distinctively fiscal importance of lands and goods and people.

Income^[65] being with Petty the starting point for estimating wealth, he feels the necessity of explaining those sorts of income—rent and interest— which do not result evidently from current labour. Now the fundamental question arising alike in a theory of rent and in a theory of interest is this: why does the right to receive a definite annual payment throughout an infinite succession of years command in the market only a finite sum? As applied to rent, this is the question of the number of "years purchase," and Petty, who frequently employs that common phrase, also discusses the problem^[66]. But this was aside from his main purpose, and he neither dwelt on the suggestion nor applied it to money. He recognized that the value of the fee depended^[67] upon the rent which the land would yield, and was therefore interested rather in ascertaining as a factor in his studies of national wealth and its growth, why a specific piece of land bears a certain rent and neither more nor less, than in determining the capital value of that rent. The answer is given in a remarkable passage in the "Treatise of Taxes^[68]," and is elaborated in the "Political Anatomy of Ireland^[69]." The corn rent of agricultural lands, he says, is determined by the excess of their produce over the expenses of their cultivation, paid in corn, and the money value of this excess will be measured by the amount of silver which a miner, working for the same time as the cultivator of the corn land, will have left, after meeting his expenses with a part of the silver which he secures. The labour theory of value thus adopted was probably suggested by Hobbes^[70]. But to the question why there should be any surplus of value above costs either in corn-farming or mining he has an answer of his own. This answer differs from that now become familiar. The notion of diminishing returns, forcing recourse to fields of inferior natural and indestructible powers in order to supply the market and thus giving rise to a differential rent, did not occur to him. On the contrary he probably thought that with proper cultivation, the profitable fertility of land could be indefinitely increased^[71]. But he suggested in the "Treatise^[72]," and asserted in the "Political Arithmetick^[73]" that the amount of rent per acre is determined by the density of the population dependent for food upon the land, and varies inversely as the said density. In other words the rent of land is attributed to its situation^[74] rather than to its technical fertility. The formula has a similar arithmetical neatness to that of the formula commonly called Ricardian, and it comes, on the whole, perhaps quite as near to measuring the commercial facts^[75]. This praise, if praise it be, is not deemed unduly high.

In interest Petty recognizes two elements, a compensation for risk^[76], and a payment for the inconvenience which a man admits against himself in giving out his money so that he may not demand it back until a certain time, whatever his own necessities shall be in the mean time^[77]. The amount of this last payment, upon any specific sum—in modern language the rate of interest per cent.—cannot be less than the rent of so much land as that sum would buy^[78]. Exchange he explains as "local usury" meaning, apparently, a compensation for the costs of moving money, of which costs risk is the largest.

A theory of wages was not demanded by Petty's method of calculating national wealth. For that purpose he could take them as a given fact, or rather as a fact inferable from the labourer's expenditures, and as he had no conception of the problem of distribution in the modern sense and was interested rather in the aggregate number of labourers than in their individual differences, he contents himself with a passing suggestion that wages generally are the result of, and equal to, the increase which a man can effect by his labour in the spontaneous productivity of the soil^[79]. The only other distributive suggestion regarding wages is the remark, wholly incidental, that when wages of husbandmen rise rents of land must consequently fall^[80].

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1. Aubrey, ii. 144.
2. Cf. pp. 240, 237—238.
3. Pp. 503, 524.
4. See Pp. 122—123.
5. Dr Bevan supports this view with energy, Petty, 87—92, and it is also held by Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, Life of Petty, 16, 186, 188, 236.
6. Aubrey, i. 365—368.
7. Fitzmaurice, 302—304. The De Cive is not, as Dr Bevan asserts "the only English book mentioned." The instructions for Henry, the younger son, direct him to read "The English Chronicle" and "Bacon's Collections."
8. Pp. 285—290, 302, 563 ff.
9. Cf. p. 23, note.
10. P. 70.
11. Pp. 71, 72, 262, 263. On the other hand his attitude towards clerics of all sorts is uniformly contemptuous, pp. 72, 73, 79, 158, 199, 218, 223, 263, etc.
12. Pp. 472—473.
13. P. 70.
14. P. 22.
15. P. 263.
16. For his own part, Petty regarded the non-essentials of religion with indifference. But there is a note of sincerity very characteristic of the man in the confession of faith with which he closed his will: "As for religion, I dye in the profession of that faith, and in the practice of such worship, as I find established by the Law of my country, not being able to believe what I myself please, nor to worship God better than by doing as I would be done unto, and observing the Laws of my country, and expressing my love and honour to Almighty God by such signes and tokens as are understood to be such by the people with whom I live, God knowing my heart even without any at all."
17. On Petty's connection with the Royal Society, see pp. xxi—xxiii. For evidence, if any be required, that the founding of the Society was due to the impulse given by Bacon to the study of experimental science, and that the more eminent men among its earliest members were deeply imbued with the spirit of his teachings, see Novum Organum, edited by Fowler, 111—116.
18. In his writings Petty twice invokes Bacon's authority, once in the Political Anatomy, 129, post, and once in the Advice to Hartlib, Harl. Misc. vi. 14, where he refers to the Advancement of Learning to justify his proposed History of Trades. If we consider him the author of the epistles dedictory of Graunt's Observations, as seems not unreasonable, he is to be credited with a third appeal to Bacon, p. 322, post.
19. Birch, iv. 193.
20. P. 244. Cf. ch. II. of the Treatise of Ireland, pp. 558—560, and Petty's praise of Graunt's Observations on p. 481. The question of their respective contributions to the developement of statistics is discussed on pp. lxvi, lxxv.
21. P. 129.
22. Brief Relation, I. 485.
23. On Petty's probable share in it, see p. lii.
24. Cf. pp. 451, 485, 490, 532.
25. E.g, on pp. 49, 51, 53, 104, 115, 129, 170, 180, 245, 270, 476, 485. Cf. also pp. 396, 397 in Graunt's Observations.
26. Pp. 485—491.
27. Fitzmaurice, 283.
28. P. 130.
29. Pp. 459—460, 528.
30. Cf. pp. 332, 393. Graunt's solution of the same problem for London is on pp. 383—386.
31. Pp. 527, 534.
32. P. 459.
33. Cf. p. 461, note, where it appears that the agreement between Petty's estimate and the bishops' survey is not strikingly close.
34. P. 149. Cf. the more elaborate calculation of the same problem on pp. 608, 609. Other striking examples may be found on pp. 175, 311, 462—469, 566—567.
35. Cf. p. 454, note.
36. Pp. 45, 145, 253, 308, 457, 459, 463, 483, 517, 518, 526, 533, 535, 536.
37. Pp. 136, 137, 146, 147, 459, 484, 536, 585, 588, 608.
38. Cf. pp. 528 and 533 with 506.
39. Aubrey MS. in Bodleian, quoted by Bevan, p. 51.
40. Unless, that is, Ireland be considered foreign to England in commercial matters. Cf. pp. 159—160.
41. The application of the Treatise of Taxes to the condition and affairs of Ireland is an obvious afterthought, intended to relieve the author from all imputation of criticising domestic matters.
42. Pp. 23—28.
43. P. 49.
44. P. 53.
45. Pp. 27, 45.
46. Cf. p. 91.
47. P. 23.
48. P. 104.
49. Cf. Giffen, Growth of Capital i. 74—91.
50. P. 34.
51. P. 68.
52. Pp. 377—378, note.
53. See pp. xvi—xix.
54. P. 181, cf. pp. 44—45. This expression, by the way, is very near to being "Political Economy;" and on p. 60 Petty speaks of "politics and oeconomicks" in quite the modern way.
55. Petty once avails himself (p. 512, where read Algier for Argier) of the price of slaves, but only to support a result arrived at by other means.
56. P. 108.
57. P. 26.
58. Pp. 111—112.
59. See Bibliography. It was lost at sea.
60. E.g,, pp. 26, 95, 261—267.
61. P. 258.
62. Cf. Temple's Works, I. 58—60, 210—222.
63. Pp. 74, 83.
64. E,g., p. 299.
65. Measured by expenditure, to which he assumes income at least equal.
66. P. 45.
67. Though in varying proportion, according as some special honour, pleasure or privilege attaches to the possession of certain lands intrinsically like others, p. 46. Cf. p. 286.
68. Pp. 42—45 and 48—49.
69. Pp. 181—182.
70. De Cive, ch. xxiv. Opera omnia, iii. 185. It was certainly adopted, without credit, by Benjamin Franklin, whose cast of mind generally was curiously like Petty's. Cf. Franklin's Works, i. 371.
71. Cf. p. 249.
72. Pp. 48—49.
73. Pp. 286—287.
74. Cf. Commons, Distribution of Wealth, 27—29.
75. Cf. R. Jones, Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, 260—268. Petty is not mentioned by Jones.
76. Pp. 48, 304.
77. P. 47.
78. P. 48. This is similar to a remark of Turgot's, whom Böhm-Bawerk pronounces "the first who tried to give a scientific explanation of natural interest on capital." Petty is, of course, open to the same criticism of reasoning in a circle which Böhm-Bawerk passes on Turgot. Capital and Interest, 61—66.
79. P. 181.
80. P. 267.