ART. II.- Principles of Political Economy. Part the ThirdOf the Causes which Retard the Increase in the Numbers of Mankind. Part the Fourth-Of the Causes which Retard Improvement in the Political Condition of Mankind. By HENRY CAREY, Author of an Essay on the rate of Wages. Philadelphia: 1840. Lea and Blanchard. London: John Miller. 8vo. pp. 270.

IN a former number of our Review, the merits and defects of Mr. Carey, as a politico-economical writer, were fully canvassed. Parts three and four of the same work, which now demand notice, as they have little changed our views on either point, will consequently need a less detailed examination, and leave us more free to carry out some important speculations Mr. Carey has left imperfect. Mr. Carey stands certainly among the most devoted and voluminous of American writers upon political economy; and we are pleased to see that his recent work has received the compliment, or the confidence, whichever it may be, of a simultaneous publication at home and abroad. The general bearing of his reasonings on political economy, is sufficiently evinced in his two standing mottoes:

"All discord, harmony not understood."-Pope.

"God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.". Ecclesiastes.

-that freedom is the only fountain of national wealth, and that man's natural desires are the spring head of that fountain, while all human laws, beyond those which give security, serve but to impede the free current, damming up its course, or changing its natural channel: thus we interpret his mottoes; and this, we are happy to say, is the safe and demonstrative theory of political economy maintained by him. Nor is this his only merit. From universal freedom in industry, he deduces universal peace among producers, as its natural accompaniment, tracing all wars to the ignorance or ambition of rulers; a "game," therefore, which, when their people are contented, and can choose, "kings," he thinks, "will no longer be permitted to play at." Instead, therefore,

of finding in war, as Malthus and his followers have done, one of the great necessary preventive checks ordained by providence against over population in a country, our author sees in it, and rightly it seems to us, one of the most operative causes of national poverty and want of food; arguing on this point, and conclusively as we think, that if war were a remedy against that disease, then we should find the body politic better for its operation, and those nations consequently suffering least from want of food, by whom war was resorted to habitually and most frequently-that if, therefore, as a matter of fact, we find the reverse to be the case, and those nations the worst off for food where war comes oftenest to thin the population, and peace, on the other hand, the never failing attendant of abundance, then, in such case, we are justified in doubting, or rather in denying, a theory which thus runs in the very face of the facts it comes to solve. Mr. Carey is therefore of" the peace party," and so are we, and so we think, too, is political economy-not only the persuasive teacher to all nations that will hear her, but the prolific mother also to all who will admit her into their councils of "peace and plenty" to the great family of man. Had we nothing but the proverbial junction of the very terms "peace" and "plenty," it would be sufficient, we should think, in the absence of all reasoning, to put down any theory that should venture to disunite them, inasmuch as it must be regarded as the expression of the common experience of mankind. Nor do the moral merits of Mr. Carey's reasonings stop here-he approaches still nearer to the very fountain of moral truth, when he proceeds to lay down his rule, by the adoption of which these blessings are to be secured by the nations of the earth. "The whole science of political economy," says he, "may be reduced to a single line

"DO UNTO OTHERS AS YE would they SHOULD DO UNTO YOU."

From the above abstract of Mr. Carey's final principles, it is obvious that we can have no quarrel with them; on the contrary, we deem them to be not only sound and useful truths, but we hold farther, that all writers maintaining them must have a beneficial influence on the popular mind of our country. Still, this is obviously not sufficient to constitute the sound scientific teacher. In him we demand and have a right to look for something farther. Political economy is not

merely, if at all, a science of ENDS. These must be in accordance with man's moral and higher nature; therefore, it may well admit a question whether political economy be not itself taught those ends, and receive, instead of being itself the teacher of them-that they are in fact the truths it sets out from, and not those which by its own deductions it reaches unto. Now, viewed in this light, political economy would appear to be not a governing science, teaching men their duty, and the ends after which society must labor, but a purely ministerial science, simply pointing out the way how, amidst the complications of human interests, society is to reach most safely and surely, ends already foreseen and predetermined. That, therefore, it is not the supreme legislative power of society determining the law, as herein exhibited, but merely the judicial that applies it, or the executive that carries it out-that it is, in short, the science of wealth and not the science of virtue. The national march of these two may indeed be equal, as in free course perhaps it is; and it is all important to demonstrate such tendency; still, however, they advance under different banners, and are held to a separate allegiance. For ourselves, at least, we are not willing to learn morals from political economy, or to extract duty out of prudence; and therefore, we must have the countersign, before we can fully trust the teacher who identifies too closely national wealth with national well-being. Though godliness has the promise of the world that now is, as well as that which is to come, still we cannot but hold him suspect, until at least we have examined his premises, who reverses the order of this proposition, and takes as the proof of godliness the possession of the world that now is. This caution, however, we direct not specifically against our author, though we admit that his principles are somewhat open to it, but we speak generally as against the spirit of the utilitarian age in which we live, and the obvious tendency of our own democratic institutions to run into such dangerous amalgamations.

Setting aside this point, however, we proceed with the argument that brings us into a more definite and scientific collision with our author. We have already said or indicated, that in the scientific teacher of this science we must have something besides right premises and unquestioned conclusions; and that is, a sound logic uniting them together. Now, in this element of the teacher, Mr. Carey's strength does not, we think, lie. His mind is evidently not a thoroughly discip

lined one; he has not habituated himself to that rigid analysis of thought, and corresponding precision of language, which is essential to all analytic science, and which alone can give either conclusiveness to the reasonings of the teacher, or a trustful confidence to the mind of the reader and the scholar. On the contrary, we find his reasonings always vague, often inconclusive, and sometimes even, we cannot but think, in singular contradiction to the very data from which he sets out. Among the strange "non sequiturs" with which he persists in this, as in the preceding parts of his work, to puzzle the understanding of his readers, may be taken as an instance, his repeated specific assertion: that national poverty and scantiness of food are necessarily connected with the cultivation of the higher or better soils, while riches and plenty of food arise from bringing into cultivation the inferior or poorer soils. We would refer to pages 97, 103, and 251, as first meeting our eye on opening the volume, in illustration of this his habitual mode of coupling together these incongruous propositionsincongruous we say, for surely he does not mean to imply that in the early stages of society men get less food from the soil BECAUSE they confine their labor to the superior soils; or that they get greater returns from land in its more advanced periods BECAUSE the soils they then bring in are inferior. He does not surely mean this, for this were evidently absurd; and yet, under the terms of his argument, such is necessarily the meaning forced upon his reader, and that not only by the false emphasis he studiously puts on this comparatively inoperative cause of a difference of yield, but still more by the false position in which he places it-reversing, in fact, the Dr. and Cr. side of the account of returns from soil. The correct statement would surely be, that "notwithstanding" the superior soils alone cultivated in the early periods of society, and "notwithstanding" the inferior soils to which they are forced in later periods, "yet" that the actual returns to labor were increased, arising from other causes, more than counterbalancing those brought into operation. On this point, however, we cannot but think the error goes beyond language, and that some lurking prejudice against "superior" soils lies still at the bottom of this false logic, making our author so vindictive, we may say, against them. A second perusal of the work has, in truth, solved this doubt in our minds, and exhibited the primitive source of this strange prejudice. Mr. McCulloch, it seems, in his Principles of

Political Economy, (and with him agree Mill, Ricardo, Senior, and others,) had asserted, that the simple fact of inferior lands, which necessarily require a greater outlay of capital and labor to make them yield the same supply as those that are superior, being invariably taken into cultivation in the progress of society, "demonstrates (what is otherwise indeed sufficiently obvious) that in despite of improvements, the difficulty of adding to the supplies of food is progressively augmented as society advances and population becomes denser." Upon this Mr. Carey argues rather illogically as follows:

"This argument is based upon the SUPPOSITION that the return to labor decreases as resort is had to inferior soils, which is certainly not the case, as we have shown, we trust, to the satisfaction of the reader. The theory of population rests chiefly upon this theory of rent, and if the latter cannot be established, the former is left almost without support. With the extension of cultivation over inferior or more distant soils there is a daily increase in the return to labor," etc. p. 68.

In this passage, the italics are our own, and intended to illustrate, not only our general objection as above stated, of loose and inconsequential reasoning, but the source also of this special error. In the first place, the argument of his adversaries, as quoted by himself, is not, as he asserts, based upon the supposition that the return to labor decreases with resort to inferior soils; this proposition, on the contrary, is the conclusion which they draw from the FACT of difference of soil. Whether right or wrong in their judgment, a question into which we do not now enter, it is clear that this argument is not to be set aside without a more exact analysis than Mr. Carey here gives it. Again, he asserts, which is the main object of our quotation, the mutual dependance of the theories of rent and population on each other; and as we think herein lies the HINGING error of his whole system, we shall endeavor somewhat at large to disentangle this question from the snarl into which it has run, through want, as it seems to us, of sufficient analytic precision on the part of our author, as well as those he opposes, since both admit a necessary connexion between the two theories of rent and population.

That error exists somewhere in their mutual process of reasoning, is in the first place evident, through their own conflicting demonstrations; nor only so, but each party has brought its own opinion to the reductio ad absurdum, as we