A MONG the Economists from outside the orthodox and academic ranks who have either pointed out particular fallacies in the old system, or have added fresh considerations from a wider range of thought which in their aggregate have gone far to discredit that system altogether, I may mention the names of Comte, Carlyle, Ruskin, Marx, Henry George, Gunton, Robertson, Mallock, Hobson, and the members of the Fabian Society; and before closing this volume I feel it incumbent on me to point out, if only in the most general and discursive way, what the contributions of these men have been. But as the aim of this book is rather to make a first rough sketch of a new system of Political Economy founded on purely dynamical principles, than an encyclopaedia of the doctrines of existing schools founded on statical ones, and as I have not, in the matter of space, that 'wide sea of wax' over which the poet in 'Timon of Athens' was accustomed to disport himself, I am obliged to omit much otherwise interesting matter, and to confine my criticisms to a certain limited class of particulars, if I am to avoid blurring the unity of my own presentation just ended, by overlaying it, as it were, with a mass of heterogeneous opinions drawn from the most diverse and conflicting points of view.

And the point at which I propose to draw the line in these exclusions is where these economists follow the errors of the orthodox and academical schools which I have passed under review, inasmuch as any re-arguing of these purely statical principles would only be a waste of time, if the reader, after all we have said in deprecation of this method of approaching the great problems of the Science, still remains unconvinced.

The first great thinker, outside of the ranks of the professional Economists, who occurs to me as having protested against the entire method of the Orthodox Political Economy, is Comte, who in his controversy with Mill confined himself mainly to insisting in general terms on the great broad fact that there could be no ultimate truth in any system which had so completely cut itself off from the currents of general civilization as had the then existing system of Political Economy, with its 'economic man,' etc., as expounded in the writings of Mill; and as with this protest of Comte's I entirely agree, nothing further need be added to it here. But long before either Mill had written his book, or Comte had entered his protest against it, Carlyle, - who many years later in his ' Latter Day Pamphlets' declared that he had been compelled 'for his sins' to read 'barrowfuls of treatises ' on Political Economy, - had written his 'Sartor Resartus' and his 'Past and Present,' and had hurled his satirical gibes at it, on the ground of its immoral, inhuman, and anti-social tendencies, in the hope that this would of itself be sufficient to arrest public attention, and compel thoughtful men to reconsider their attitude to what had now begun to arrogantly claim for itself the title of a 'science.' He nicknamed it the 'Dismal Science,' and suggested that if its professors could not make anything more out of Malthus' doctrine of Population than that the working classes were, by the so-called laws of Political Economy, fated to increase in numbers to the point where they would reduce themselves to starvation, the capitalists had better at once imitate the practice of the Spartans with their helots, and shoot down their excess for the sport of it as it were, and 'to keep their hands in!' And then turning on them seriously, he wanted to know why, if their very horses were secure of a well-fed subsistence, their human workmen with their infinitely finer capabilities, who by their skill at the loom and the spinning-jenny were at that very time not only contributing to the wealth of the capitalists but to the abounding wealth of the nation itself, should not be able to earn their living on some more decently human terms than those of semi-starvation; how it was that stacks of shirts could lie piled ceiling high in warehouses in times of glut, and not be able by any known human expedient to get on to the backs of the very men who had made them, or corn get into the stomachs of the men who had sown it, and watched over it, and reaped it? And further, if by their impotent doctrine of 'laissez-faire' an excess of Population had been allowed to become the fatal barrier to any solution of the problem, why, if the nation could spend twenty millions sterling in a year to shoot the French, it could not raise the merest fraction of that sum to emigrate the superflux, and educate, regiment, and coerce the derelicts and the rest into the paths of useful labour again 1 All this he demanded time after time with indignant iteration; and indeed I must confess that were my role that of the 'moralist' instead of the 'philosopher' this is precisely what I too should want to know even down to the present hour.

For this impeachment by Carlyle of the orthodox Economy, and of the successive British ministries that embraced it, was in its issue a purely moral one; and for the first time since the decay of the Feudal System, recalled the nation in general, and the governing classes in particular, to a sense of the duties and responsibilities of society to all its members alike. But he omitted to do the one thing needful - and it is an omission which all those who assume the prophetic role would do well to ponder - he did not attempt to refute in detail, and by reasoned arguments, a single one of the orthodox economic doctrines against which in general terms he inveighed. He simply repudiated them all alike, on the moral ground that the tree must be judged by its fruits; and with the general feeling in his mind that something was wrong somewhere with their system, without precisely seeing where, called on them to put it right before he would even consent to discuss it; much in the same way as he refused to discuss a single definite doctrine of the French Revolution, or a single utilitarian doctrine of the reigning political school of Bentham. Nor did he, so far as I can remember, confront a single doctrine of the orthodox Economy with a parallel but opposite one of his own, so as to give his readers a hint of precisely where, or on what, it was that he wished them to fix their minds for the purpose of arriving at a true decision, but confined himself to gibes and general denunciations merely.