BY RUFUS W. GRISWOLD.
Henry C. Carey has been recognized through continental Europe as one of the master thinkers of our generation. It is time for him to be known in his own country. In Political Economy he has applied the methods of the Positive Philosophy, and his works exhibit the chief advances the science has made since Adam Smith published his "Wealth of Nations." They are text-books in the colleges even of Sweden and Norway, while at the University in the street next to that in which the author has his residence, books are adopted composed of ideas from empirical and nearly obsolete systems: Say and Ricardo are regarded as expositors of the last and ultimate discoveries. Let us see if this law respecting prophets cannot be changed; or if not changed, confirmed, by an exception in the case of our philosopher.
Mr. Carey was born in Philadelphia, in December, 1793. His father was the late eminent Matthew Carey, memories of whose virtues preserve about his name a thousand delightful associations. Matthew Carey was a political economist also. He wrote much, and he wrote effectively, because he taught that which was in accordance with the feelings and interests of his readers; but he was of the old school, dead now, with its professors. He disliked abstract ideas or principles, and did not trouble himself much with their investigation. The consequence was, that he made no addition to politico-economical knowledge, and left nothing by which he should be remembered except the fact that he was a consistent and ardent friend of Protection.
Ricardo left his doctrine of Rents; Malthus his principle of Population; their books are little read now, and they themselves would have been long since forgotten, but that they taught what had been taught by no others. Of the hundreds of their countrymen who have since written, scarcely one has furnished a new idea; or if such an idea can be found in the books of any one, it will not bear investigation. Many have collected facts, that are useful, and all of them have talked and written about their facts and theories; but only as empirics. One man contended on one side and another on another, and there was no standard by which to judge them. Ricardo and Malthus gave laws that would not fit the facts, and the facts were altered and suppressed to suit the laws.[22] McCulloch taught that transportation and exchange were more advantageous than production,[23] and Cobden that it was better to go to colonies in which rich lands were to be had cheap, than to stay at home where landlords charged high rents for the poor ones that were necessarily cultivated: and therefore that imported food would be cheaper than that which was grown at home. The result has proved that he was wrong. Food is now obtained with more difficulty than before; emigration is necessary, and the late decision in Parliament shows that Protection will be restored: as the ministry could command only the mean majority of 21.
A few years hence McCulloch will be remembered only as the compiler of a few indifferent books of reference, and Cobden as the author of much ill to the people of England. Many of these men have ideas that are sound; but they know nothing of the principles of the science they undertake to teach; and so they are continually making blunders. Of all the French writers of the first forty years of this century, only one, Jean Baptiste Say, has lived to the middle of it, and his work is only a mass of error in an imposing form.
This may be called sweeping criticism; but time will prove that it is just. We need principles, as the astronomers did before Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, gave them the laws which govern the movements of the universe. Others observed facts and wrote treatises, but only these names have lived. Ricardo and Malthus furnished what they believed to be the great natural laws in regard to land and the sources of its value; the relation of the laborer and the capitalist; and of population. Their names are still familiar, but their theories are shattered by the assaults of critics; they will be forgotten, and their places will be occupied by those of the great author of whose works we propose to write. Ricardo and Malthus will be to Carey as Ptolemy to Copernicus.
From 1803, a period of almost fifty years, since Ricardo published his doctrine of Rent, there has not been even an attempt, except Carey's, to add any thing to political economy. Senior, Whateley, and a thousand others, have been disputing about words, while as many others have been attacking Malthus and Ricardo; but no one has attempted to discover laws, to take the place of those which were assailed. Of the supporters of these writers, every one has been compelled to admit that their laws did not cover the facts, and to interpolate accommodating passages. John Stuart Mill, in his recent work, has done this even more largely than his predecessors, and so furnished additional proof that their laws were not laws, but mere anarchy. Ricardo had to leave a place of escape for difficult facts[24] and his successors have since found themselves obliged to open so many new ones, that his laws are now like sieves.
The period was propitious for a discoverer. The opinion of D'Alembert that the steps of Civilization were to be taken in the middle of each century, was to be confirmed by a new illustration.
Mr. Carey's father was a practical man; all his children were trained to affairs; thus they became observers. The students of books are rarely creators in science. Truth is most likely to be evolved in the school of experience. From the age of seven years until he was twenty-one, Mr. Carey was in his father's bookstore. From 1821 to 1838, he was a partner in the important publishing house of Carey, Lea & Carey, and Carey & Lea; but in this period he passed one season abroad, we believe immediately after his marriage with a sister of Leslie the painter. The determination of his mind was already fixed, when his retirement from business enabled him to devote his faculties entirely to the science with which his name will for ever be associated.
Mr. Carey's first book—An Essay on the Rate of Wages—was published in 1836, and was soon after expanded into The Principles of Political Economy, which appeared in three octavo volumes in 1837—1840.