See Senior’s Theory of Monopoly, by Richard Ely (American Economic Association, 1899).
[749] This confusion between rent and the income of inherited wealth does little honour to Senior, for the two facts belong to entirely different categories. Rent is a purely economic phenomenon, resulting from the necessary conditions of exchange. It owes nothing to social organisation, not even to the institution of private property. Inheritance, on the other hand, is a purely juridical phenomenon, the product of civil law. Even if inheritance were abolished it would make no difference to the existence and growth of rent, whether obtained from the soil or from some other source; whereas under the hypothetical régime of perfectly free competition, although rent would no longer be known, inheritance, together with all its privileges, might still continue to exist. Senior evidently understands by the term “rent” any kind of income that is not obtained by personal effort. But this is clearly a perversion of the original meaning.
[750] Rau’s treatise on political economy belongs to the years 1826-37, and von Thünen’s Der Isolirte Staat appeared in 1826.
[751] Pellegrino Rossi, who became a naturalised Frenchman in 1833, was an Italian by birth. He succeeded Say as professor at the Collège de France. He afterwards became Lecturer on Constitutional Law, and his name is commemorated in one of the annual prizes. He eventually entered the diplomatic service, and was attached to the Papal See during the pontificate of Pius IX. He was assassinated at Rome in 1848.
[752] John Stuart Mill, born in 1806, was the son of James Mill the economist of whom we have already spoken. The system of education which his father planned for him can only be described as extraordinary. Practised on anyone else it would have been fatal. At the age of ten he was already well versed in universal history and in the literatures of Greece and Rome. At thirteen he had a fair grasp of science and philosophy, and had written a history of Rome. By the time he was fourteen he knew all the political economy that there was to know then. In 1829, then a young man of twenty-three, he published his first essays on political economy. In 1843 appeared his well-known System of Logic, which immediately established his fame. In 1848 he issued the admirable Principles of Political Economy. Mill was in the service of the East India Company up to the time when it lost its charter in 1858. From 1865 to 1868 he was a member of the House of Commons. After the death of his wife, who collaborated with him in the production of several of his works, especially Liberty (1859), being unwilling to quit the spot where she lay buried, he spent the last years of his life, except those taken up by his Parliamentary work, at Avignon. His autobiography contains a precious account of his life and of his gradual conversion to socialistic views.
[753] Principles, Book II, chap. 1, § 3.
[754] Ibid., Book IV, chap. 7, § 7.
[755] Dupont de Nemours, writing very much in the spirit of the Classical school, had already given an excellent definition of natural law. “By natural law we are to understand those essential conditions that regulate all things in accordance with the design laid down by the Author of Nature. They are the ‘essential conditions’ to which men must submit if they would obtain all the benefits which the natural order offers them.” (Introduction to Quesnay’s works, p. 21.)
[756] Adam Smith, let us remember, also wrote a book on the Theory of Moral Sentiments (see Book I, chap. 2), and Stuart Mill writes as follows: “In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by and to love your neighbour as yourself constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.” (Utilitarianism, chap. 2.)
[757] This is how Mill views it: “It is only in a very imperfect state of the world’s arrangements that anyone can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own.” (Utilitarianism, chap. 2.) But it is scarcely necessary to add, seeing that the two propositions are necessarily complementary, that one of the best ways of securing happiness is to sacrifice one’s self in the cause of others. All that is required is a little patience. “Education and opinion will so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his happiness and the good of the whole.” Interpreted in this way, individualism is closely akin even to the most transcendent form of solidarity.