Alack! and alas! oh! master, mine, This horrible deed was done, It was he who took your wife away, And your two best hounds, I grieve to say, This news stung the Marshall through marrow and bone, His sword, as it leapt from the sheath, With a thunder of curses the hall resounds, In a whirlwind of passion on his courser he bounds, By the dew-drop of morning, from harebell and spray The fugitives' course he has traced; "Now speed thee, now speed thee, my gallant steed, As the landscape swiftly behind him flies, "Be this thy last race won, And the rest of thy life shall glide away The courser stretched himself and flew, His rider's feet swept from the heath, Of his hoofs and the clouds of his breath. Now the Marshall sees before him where, A heron's plume, dancing, flies, His hounds have sprung, their lord to greet Stay, robber, stay, and if you can Look on this man, Whom you have insulted so, May perdition in her fiery jaws receive you, The Baron of Stein was valiant too, No arm was stronger and truer, He turned his head, and he turned his steed, The Baron of Stein his falchion drew, And both of them flew From their saddles with clinking sound; And as on the earth they stamped, there arose A cloud of dust around. Fiercely they fought, as tigers would, "Till drops of blood On their armour stood like dew; Yet neither, although they have cut for an hour, Then when they both felt great distress, Lord Marshall, so please you that we should here A little while rest, you need not fear, A truce shall be ratified." The Marshall too, happy to rest awhile, lowered And in listening attitude stood : "Lord Marshall, if things could be settled by treaty, We are hacking as if at a joint on the table, To conquer, how light is the prize! To the woman we should the dispute refer, Well pleased the Marshall appeared to be- (Thus he thought to himself) she will chuse ; "Oh my life on her faith! she would never leave me," Said he tenderly, "She but loves me too well I'll engage." Ye constant men, take this warning I give, And do not the innocent maxim believe, The lady upon her palfrey sat, And joy lit up every feature ; Not a moment before her did they stand, Oh! fye! how could she so deceive, Her lover alone with his wonder! The Marshall of Holm stood fixed to the place, As if he was struck by thunder. Weary and pale on the ground at last Between his own two hounds; His faithful companions, who loved him more And licked off the blood from his wounds. " Roused from the trance in which he lay, And felt his strength again His grief dissolved in tears away, And he fondly embraced his hounds, as if they The feeling that they, at least, were true, And homeward to ride inclined him; But scarce in the stirrup his foot did he place, And see where the Baron of Stein doth come, And himself all breathless and heated. Lord Marshall," he cries, "yet a little while stay, For I have a word or two more to say Our treaty is not yet completed. The lady, my skill has won to be mine, For the hounds that came with us last night; Then drew not his sword that Marshall bold- Addressing the Baron, he stood: "Lord Baron, if things could be settled by treaty- We are hacking as if at a joint on the table; To conquer, how light is the prize! To the hounds we should the dispute refer ; The Baron of Stein did the sarcasm blink, That the hounds would follow his beck: He chirrupped and coaxed with voice and with hand, Of leather to slip round each neck. Though he coaxed, and he whistled, and dropt on his knee The hounds he was forced to resign: The bread that he spread on the ground was in vain, C. POLITICAL ECONOMY. TO THE EDITOR OF THE DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE. SIR-I have noticed, with much pleasure, the appearance of Mr. Longfield's work upon Political Economy, which, coming as it does from an individual of well known and high acquirements, and occupying the chair which private liberality has lately endowed in our University, is likely to attract a considerable portion of attention in this country, and is well calculated to remove the apathy and the prejudices which have hitherto existed in reference to this science, among those classes of our countrymen to whom a knowledge of its principles is of paramount national importance, as bearing upon the execution of their duties in the many public capacities, which all men of a certain standing in society are so often called upon to fill. As this book is, however, professedly merely the forerunner and foundation of a future and more extended system of political economy, and is avowedly published for the purpose of making known the learned author's views, on those subjects wherein he differs from preceding writers, in order to render his subsequent lectures more generally intelligible ; and as some of those views appear to me to be rather hastily and unadvisedly adopted, I have thought it might produce some advantage to draw the attention of Mr. Longfield and the public to some considerations on one or two of the subjects treated of in his publication, on which I think it probable he will ultimately see reason to change the opinions which he at present holds. In doing so, I shall endeavour to confine myself to fair, candid, and amicable discussion, assuring the learned author, that my strictures are dictated, not by any paltry spirit of cavil or hyper-criticism, but from a deep sense of the great importance of the subject, and the injurious results which experience has shewn invariably follow from the promulgation VOL. IV. and general adoption of erroneous notions, on the subjects treated of in this science-subjects which may be truly said to involve the future happiness and prosperity, or misery and misfortune, of our common country. Your review of this work, in your last number, deprives me of the opportunity of enlarging on those portions of it with the principles of which I cordially agree, and reduces me to the disagreeable, but unavoidable alternative of confining my observations to those from which I feel myself compelled to dissent. The first subject to which I shall call the attention of your readers, is that of the relations of "demand and supply," and the effects of their variation upon "price" but here I must premise, that on this point Mr. Longfield has not, to any great extent, departed from the views of former writers, all of whom, as far as I am aware, participate in the errors which I shall endeavour to point out; but he has, by carrying further a train of false reasoning, arrived at conclusions so manifestly unfounded, that it is really surprising he was not himself led to suspect some error in his premises. The supply of any commodity is stated to be "that portion of it which any one possesses and does not intend to consume;" and "the disposition to give something in exchange for it," is called the demand. The inutility and absolute inoperativeness of "a disposition to give something," afterwards makes it necessary to substitute the words "effectual demand," and the price of any article is stated to be "such a sum as is sufficient to produce an equality between the supply and the effectual demand"-meaning, by effectual demand, "such a demand" (i. e. such a disposition to give something) "as actually leads to the purchase or consumption of the article." Now, it is evident that there is here a D relation of quantity supposed, or implied, between the demand and the supply-between a desire and a commodity, two terms which are not homogeneous, and between which it is impossible that any such relation should exist. To correct these erroneous views, it is merely necessary carefully to examine and understand the true meanings of the terms, demand and supply. The supply of any commodity, then, is that quantity of it which is at any given time for sale, or applicable to the purposes of exchange. The demand for any commodity is that fund which is at any given time applicable to its purchase; and the price of any article is such a proportion of the demand for the commodity, of which the article forms a part, as the article itself is of the entire supply of that commodity. It will be immediately seen how extremely simple this explanation of the terms "supply," "demand," and "price," renders the whole of this confused and difficult subject, which has led away Mr. Longfield into a fanciful and unfounded theory respecting latent intensities of demand, in order to account for the rise and fall of prices from the influence of demand and supply, quite as absurd as Mr. Lube's algebraical formulæ noticed in the appendix. "The measure of the intensity of any person's demand for any commodity, is the amount which he would be willing and able to give for it, rather than remain without it." "The high prices to which provisions rise in times of scarcity, prove the existence of a latent intensity of demand, which is only called into action by the scarcity." And his train of reasoning ultimately leads him to the conclusion, that each individual contains" within himself a series of demands of successively increasing degrees of intensity !" To illustrate the manner in which changes of price take place, according to the idea of demand above explained, let us suppose the supply of a certain commodity, say loaves of bread, to be 10,000; and let us suppose the amount of the fund applicable to the purchase of bread, or the demand for it to be £500; then the price of one loaf, or the one-ten-thousandth part of the supply, will be one-ten-thousandth of the demand, or one shilling. Now, let to now us suppose that the supply of bread is diminished from ten thousand loaves to eight thousand, then the price of a single loaf, or one-eight-thousandth part of the supply, will be one-eight-thousandth part of the demand, or (the demand remaining the same) Is. 3d. But suppose each of the bread consumers, instead of contenting themselves with the purchase of eight loaves with the money they formerly gave for ten, are able and willing, by the transfer of the necessary fund from some other destination, continue to purchase ten at the increased price-in other words, suppose that the amount of the demand for bread is increased from £500 to £625, then the price of each loaf must be one-eight-thousandth part of £625, or 1s. 6d. Suppose again, that it is inconvenient or impossible for a certain portion of the consumers, say onehalf, to transfer any more of their funds to the purchase of bread, or, in other words, to continue their former consumption, and that they are obliged to subsist on a smaller quantity than before, but that another portion, say the other half, are still able, by a further transfer of their funds to the demand for bread, to purchase the same quantity as before, at the price of 1s. 6d. per loaf, and that they are willing to do so; the effect of this is to increase the total demand for bread from £625 to £703 2s. 6d., and the price of each loaf must be the one-eightthousandth part of that sum, or rather more than 1s. 9d. Now, the effect of this price is, that the portion of the consumers who could not increase the amount of their demand for bread, more than in the proportion of 10,000 to 12,500, or one-fourth; or whose increased demand amounted only to £312 10s., are now able to purchase but 3,555 loaves out of the 8,000 which form the supply, and the remaining 4,445 will be purchased by the other portion, who had the means of increasing their demand for bread from £250, its original amount, to £390 12s. 6d., its supposed ultimate limit. A number of curious and important results follow from the state of things here described, viz., an increased demand for a particular description of commodity, caused by a diminished supply, such increased demand being |