And it was to the limited body of doctrine bound up with this regime that the orthodox economy attempted to give the semblance of a pure science, by postulating it as made up of a world of 'economic men ' energizing freely in a perfectly fluid medium of laissez-faire, free competition, and free contract.

But it was a semblance only; for, as we shall presently see, some of the essential factors being entirely left out of the problem, the presence of the rest only served to lend a false air of security to conclusions based on maimed and incomplete premises. The truth is there does not exist as yet in the orthodox Schools any pure science of Political Economy at all; there are at best only descriptions of a number of games of political economy, as it were, in which, as in games at cards, the different factors have different values according to the particular phase of industry on which the game is being played; land, labour, and capital having one scale of value in a regime of slavery or serfdom, another in the guild or metayer system, a third in modern Industrialism, a fourth in Socialism, and so on. And bound up with these, again, are various policies, as of Free Trade or Protection, of stimulating the population or repressing it, of entailing the land or of freeing it, of enlarging the size of holdings or restricting them, of lengthening the working day or shortening it, and the like.

And yet, pervading all these, there must be somewhere a pure science of Political Economy, if we could but dig it or distil it out, a science which even if it contained as few principles as could be written on your thumb nail, would nevertheless dispose of all the complexities and contradictions of the subject; in the same way as the law of gravitation does of the irregular movements of the heavenly bodies, or as the mathematico-physical laws of strains and pressure determine the solidity and safety of bridges and other engineering constructions in which they are involved. And the test by which we should know that we had found this pure science of Political Economy would be, that it would explain and interpret not merely the particular stage of Modern Capitalism, but every other stage in the development of Industry as well, whether past or future; that it would afford us a touchstone by which we could clearly separate in any complex piece of industrial policy those effects that are purely economic in character from those that are due to extraneous powers and forces, whether political, legal, or social; and that instead of running counter to the methods and expedients of practical business men everywhere, it would be found to be everywhere in harmony with them.

But as I have stated that the orthodox Economists, owing to their neglect or suppression of certain factors essential to the problem, have neither definitively formulated nor implicitly embodied this inner core of pure science in their teachings, it would seem incumbent on me to open the series of demonstrations in this volume by a direct attempt to supply this desideratum, as the necessary basis and preliminary of all that is to follow; and this course, accordingly, I propose to pursue. But before doing so, 1 feel I ought to apologise for the somewhat dogmatic confidence with which I have disparaged the results achieved by the orthodox Political Economy, in the face of its unbroken tradition and evolution, and of the illustrious names that have contributed to it, and in so many ways adorned it. And yet when I reflect that of all the accredited specialisms it is the only one which having entered on its career with the highest hopes and credentials, even to the point of having reversed or modified the legislation of the foremost nations in the world,, is now, in the main principles at least of its teaching, contemptuously rejected by the thoughtful general public as a species of perpetual-motion scheming, useless or Utopian, I feel that no other course is open to me.

My excuse for this temerity will, I trust, be found in my making the course of the demonstration so clear and connected, that any flaws or fallacies either in the whole or in the parts will be at once apparent; and so no ultimate injustice will be done either to the orthodox Economy itself, or to the many distinguished men who have been and still are identified with its teachings.