writers to regard them as having only approached the true law of the increase of capital. In fact, they saw the very same phenomena which Lord Overstone so happily generalized into cycles of excitement and depression, though from an opposite side; but between the standing point of the practical banker and that of the more abstract speculators there long intervened a tangled wilderness, which without the discussions and information of the last few years must have remained impassable.

The foundations of a true monetary science, however, have been really laid by the writings, and especially the later writings, of Mr. Tooke, which render him, in my view, the second father of English political economy. Clear and pure in diction, they yet do not possess that ant propositions; their intimate dependence on each other; the fewness of his illustrations; and the mathematical cast he has given to his reasoning, render it sometimes a little difficult for readers, unaccustomed to such investigations, readily to follow him. But we can venture to affirm, that those who will give to his works the attention of which they are so worthy, will find them to be as logical and conclusive as they are profound and important."

"The history of Mr. Ricardo,' to use the words of Mr. Mill, holds out a bright and inspiring example. Mr. Ricardo had everything to do for himself; and he did everything. Let not the generous youth, whose aspirations are higher than his circumstances, despair of attaining either the highest intellectual excellence, or the highest influence on the welfare of his species, when he recollects in what circumstances Mr. Ricardo opened, and in what he closed, his memorable life. He had his fortune to make, his mind to form; he had even his education to commence and conduct. In a field of the most intense competition, he realized a large fortune, with the universal esteem and affection of those who could best judge of the honour and purity of his acts. Amid this scene of active exertion and practical detail, he cultivated and he acquired habits of intense, and patient, and comprehensive thinking; such as have been rarely equalled, and never excelled.'”

inexpressible charm of style which must ever make the "Wealth of Nations" the favourite hand-book of the economical student; but they evince, throughout, that love of truth which gladly submits to the teaching of every fact, and that habitual dwelling of the mind. upon realities rather than upon abstractions, which distinguished Adam Smith, and which renders even the mistakes of such men full of instruction. Mr. Tooke's pursuits as a merchant were peculiarly favourable to observation. The nice balance of the perceptive and philosophical faculties in his mind-the former in their action always preceding and supplying materials for the cautious inductions of the latter-caused his opportunities to be turned to the most profitable account. The "History of Prices" was literally "hived up," during each of many studious and observing years, until at length the ripe product of the whole was deposited in his pamphlet of 1844. Some of his earlier views Mr. Tooke has abandoned, and the position which he maintained against Mr. Blake I conceive must also be abandoned; but the value of his luminous exposition of the actual movement of commerce and prices, and of the effects of varying seasons and mercantile miscalculations, during the last half century, will remain substantially unaffected by those corrections, whilst his conception of the aggregate of income as that which determines prices on the side of the consumer, and his view of the amount of the currency as the effect of prices, must be immovable pillars in the

building up of a science of money. One pure and polished block of marble is presented to the hand of the architect by Mr. Bailey's theory of value, though that lucid writer did not succeed in extricating the whole of the truth from the errors of his opponents. A more important contribution is furnished by Mr. Senior in his lectures on the precious metals. From the character of his mind, and, perhaps in no slight degree from his Oxford training, Mr. Senior has been more successful than any predecessor in dealing with the language of political economy. His definition of profit as the "remuneration of abstinence" was of itself an immense advance towards the clearing up of all the relations between capital and labour. It sweeps away at one stroke a mass of absurdities which were deduced naturally enough from the forced and inaccurate abstractions of Ricardo. Wine has no longer to toil as it mellows in the cask, and windmills cease to earn wages. Production is not bought by one sacrifice, but by two, neither of which is by any analysis resolvable into the other. Those sacrifices are labour and abstinence. The separation and habitual antagonism of these two forces is the ground law of political economy. Unhappily, but, as man exists, inevitably, it is also the ground law of modern society.

A mass of information of the most important kind is contained in Mr. Thornton's well-known work on Paper Credit. Other valuable contributions to mone

tary science are furnished by the evidence given before the various Parliamentary Committees on currency and banking, especially those of 1810, 1819, 1832, and 1841. The witnesses who keep to the facts of their own observation are, of course, the best. Of those who also help to explain those facts, I must express my own obligations to Mr. Horsley Palmer, whose expositions of the working of the Bank of England are always excellent; and to Mr. Gilbart, probably the most qualified of the numerous observers, who surveyed the operations of the money market from a side opposed to that of Mr. Palmer, and yet distinct both from that of Mr. Tooke, and that of Lord Overstone. Mr. Gilbart, whose various works on banking are of essential value to the student, was, I believe, the first to show, and he did show incontestably, that the country bank-note circulation rose and fell according to a regular law, dependent on the habitual course of agricultural transactions. I may also say that single sentences from men like Mr. Lewis Loyd, Mr. Rothschild, Mr. Gurney, and, before the bullion committee, Mr. Richardson, who were all their lives immersed in money operations, sometimes contain more useful matter than volumes of abstract disquisition. Of greater importance are the various returns contained in the appendices to the reports, and especially the returns of the weekly balance-sheets of the Bank of England. The latter lay bare, as it were, the very beatings of the heart of the whole monetary system of England during the period which elapsed from 1832 to 1847.

Mr. Fullarton's work on the Regulation of Currencies has probably a greater charm for the general reader than any other that exists on the subject. Agreeing with Mr. Tooke in his main principles, and correcting him, as I think, on some points, especially with respect to the influence of what is called "cheap money" in promoting speculation, he has also, by many perfectly original developments and illustrations, for example the operation of hoards in the countries of Asia, and the analysis of the causes of drains of gold, greatly extended the amount of our knowledge.

In what may be called the organized statistics of the subject, great praise is due to the paper of Mr. Danson on the Bank of England, in the "Journal of the Statistical Society," and to the still more original and important contribution of Mr. Newmarch relative to Bills of Exchange, which could only have been produced by the vast and conscientious labour of a man conversant with both the science and the practice of banking. Of the greater statistical works it is scarcely necessary to say that the student of the science of commerce and money requires at every turn the "Commercial Dictionary" of Mr. M'Culloch, and the "Progress of the Nation," by Mr. Porter. Mr. James Wilson's various papers in the Economist newspaper have also been to me of very great value.

The student who attempts to explore this labyrinth finds the air as he enters thick with the dust of innumerable pamphlets-good, bad, and indifferent. The writings of practical bankers are always worth reading,