Mill, it has been said, was simply a gifted popular writer. But this is to under-estimate his ability. It is true that, unlike Ricardo, Malthus, or Say, his name is not associated with any economic law, but he opened up a wider prospect for the science which will secure him a reputation long after the demise of these so-called laws. His fame is doubly assured, for in no other work on political economy, not excepting even the Wealth of Nations, are there so many pages of fine writing, so many unforgettable formulæ which will always be repeated by everyone who has to teach the science. It is not for nought that the Principles has served as a text-book for half a century in most of the English universities.
Before examining the changes in the Classical doctrines which Mill himself effected, we must give a brief outline of those theories as they appeared in all their inflexible majesty towards the middle of the nineteenth century, during the period between the publication of the Principles and the death of John Stuart Mill, between 1848 and 1873. This was the period when the Classical Liberal school believed that its two old rivals, Protectionism and socialism, were definitely crushed. Reybaud, in his article on socialism in the Dictionnaire d’Économie politique of 1852, wrote as follows: “To speak of socialism to-day is to deliver a funeral oration.” Protection had just been vanquished in the struggle that led to the repeal of the English Corn Laws, and was to suffer a further check, alike in France and in the other countries of Europe, as a result of the treaties of 1860. The future lay with the Classics. It was little thought that 1867 would witness the publication of Kapital, that in 1872 the Congress of Eisenach would reassemble, when the treaties of 1860 would be publicly denounced.
Let us profit by its hour of glorious existence to give an exposition of the doctrines which it taught. The treatment must necessarily be very summary, seeing that we are not writing a treatise on political economy, and that our attention must be confined to writers who are definitively members of the Liberal school.
I: THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS
A belief in natural laws was always an article of faith with the Classical school. Without some such postulate it seemed to them that no collection of truths, however well attested, could ever lay claim to the title of science. But these natural laws had none of that “providential,” “finalistic,” and “normative” character so frequently dwelt upon by the Physiocrats[755] and the Optimists. They are simply natural laws like those of the physical order, and are clearly non-moral. They may prove useful or they may be harmful, and men must adapt themselves to them as best they can. To say that political economy is a “dismal science” because it shows that certain laws may have unfortunate results is as absurd as it would be to call physics a “dismal science” because lightning kills.
Far from being irreconcilable with individual liberty, these laws are among its direct results. They are the spontaneous links which bind together all free men. Freedom is always subject to conditions. Men are not free in the matter of eating or not eating, and if they would eat they must cultivate the soil. Freedom is limited not only by the actions of other human beings, but also by the laws of the physical world which surrounds us.
These laws are universal and permanent, for the elementary needs of mankind are always and everywhere the same. Economics is in quest of such permanent laws, and has no concern with the merely temporary. It is only by seeking the more general and consequently the more nearly universal laws that economics can apprehend truth or hope to become a science. It must study man, not men—the type, not the individual—the homo œconomicus stripped of every attribute except self-interest. It does not deny the existence of other qualities, but merely relegates them to the consideration of other sciences.
It now remains to see what those natural laws were.