What solemn humbug this modern political economy is! What is there true of
the little that is true in their dogmatic books, which is not a simple
deduction from the moral and religious _credenda_ and _agenda_ of any good
man, and with which we were not all previously acquainted, and upon which
every man of common sense instinctively acted? I know none. But what they
truly state, they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and
causes; and hence they have sometimes done more mischief by their half-
ignorant and half-sophistical reasonings about, and deductions from, well-
founded positions, than they could have done by the promulgation of
positive error. This particularly applies to their famous ratios of
increase between man and the means of his subsistence. Political economy,
at the highest, can never be a pure science. You may demonstrate that
certain properties inhere in the arch, which yet no bridge-builder _can_
ever reduce into brick and mortar; but an abstract conclusion in a matter
of political economy, the premisses of which neither exist now, nor ever
will exist within the range of the wildest imagination, is not a truth, but
a chimera--a practical falsehood. For there are no theorems in political
economy--but problems only. Certain things being actually so and so; the
question is, _how_ to _do_ so and so with them. Political _philosophy_,
indeed, points to ulterior ends, but even those ends are all practical; and
if you desert the conditions of reality, or of common probability, you may
show forth your eloquence or your fancy, but the utmost you can produce
will be a Utopia or Oceana.
You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the
market from 8_d_. to 6_d_. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your
country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized
thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one
class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it,
after all. Is not its real price enhanced to every Christian and patriot a
hundred-fold?
* * * * *
_All_ is an endless fleeting abstraction; _the whole_ is a reality.
_March_ 31. 1833.