Louis XV., in thought, similar to that which took place in England, in manners, after the Restoration. Independent thinkers began to examine the title-deeds of royal authority. The question of the rights of man was for the first time mooted in the salons of the great, and the forerunner of this reaction was Voltaire. Think of the position of France, then the foremost country of the world, when that great mocker and destroyer appeared upon the stage. France was then governed alternately by priests and harlots; the most shameful abuses and excesses did not even wear the cloak of hypocrisy to hide their ugliness from the public eye. Virtue was not only sneered at, but laughed at. The peasantry were oppressed in every conceivable form. Government, as then carried out, was a system (to use Voltaire's definition in his Dictionnaire Philosophique) by means of which as much money as possible was extorted from one class, to be squandered by another, in demoralizing the very class from which it was taken. Nothing was sacred. Religion, as we understand the word, was almost unknown. The blindest bigotry joined hands with the rankest infidelity. Society was almost in a state of disintegration. The ruins of all that was holy were strewn about, and served as the mere footballs and toys of the pampered children of luxury. Never have the blighting effects of centralization of power been better illustrated. Voltaire was the petted child of fortune. He was taken by the hand by the great, and became the lion of the salons. His biting, withering sarcasm, his skill at repartee, his constant and steady flow of wit, made him the welcome visitor in the palaces of kings and prelates, and gave him his opportunity to tear the masks from the faces, and the tinsel from the backs, of his hosts-and thus show the enormities which they but served to hide. Voltaire was heartless and venal, but he was the impersonification of intelligence. No fraud could impose upon him, and truth and falsehood were sharply and clearly defined in his own mind. His writings opened to the outside world an interior view of the condition of the nobility of Europe. He spared none, he exposed everything.

Voltaire's influence cannot be over-estimated.

Montes

quieu, D'Alembert, Baron d'Holbach, Condillac, Diderot, and Helvetius wrote for thinkers, but Voltaire's derisive laugh was understood by the great body of the people. To the last, however, he never lost his hold upon the affections of the great mass of the nobility. Though he attacked their power, though he undermined their tenures, they considered all he did in that direction but the sport of an erratic genius, and pardoned all his labors for the rights of man, in consideration of his shameless poem La Pucelle d'Orleans and his novel Candide. Then followed the period of the Physiocrates and French Encyclopedists. The Encyclopedists were a set of fearless thinkers, who stopped at nothing between premises and conclusions. It is charged against them that in pulling down the old structure of society, they at the same time destroyed many things that are holy and true. But those who make such a charge forget, that the holy and the true can never by the action of man be destroyed. The forms in which for the time being they may be embodied may be demolished, but the essence they contained will survive so long as man with his ever-present, constant aspirations for the sublime, the beautiful, and the true, holds a place upon earth.

.

When Adam Smith began his work, The Wealth of Nations, which forms the framework of what is called political economy at the present day, several important elements of political economy had already been ably investigated and elucidated. The questions relating to international commerce had been almost exhausted by Quesnay and Mercier de la Rivière. The former more especially deserves to hold a high rank as an economist. He it was who laid the foundation for the disproving of the Mercantile Theory upon which at that time the world was governed, by proving that money did not constitute the wealth of a nation. Quesnay and the writers who followed him claimed that all wealth was derived from the earth, that agricultural labor was the only productive employment, and that all persons who were devoted to other occupations simply consumed wealth and did not produce any. Though this theory has since been essentially modified, it nevertheless marked a great progress in the development of

politico-economical ideas, and directed attention to the true sources of wealth. Up to the time when Quesnay wrote, it had never entered the minds of any class of thinkers that there were natural laws which governed and controlled the action of man in a social state. To him and his followers we owe the phrases of laissez faire and laissez passer. These phrases do not mean, as some persons vainly suppose, a counsel to wait upon Providence, and that we should simply fold our arms, and let things come to pass as they will; but they are a protest against the constant tendency on the part of philosophers and governments to devise systems for the government of the moral and industrial world, and artificially enforce them upon the people, in the vain idea of thus adding to their wealth and happiness. This philosophy, on the contrary, says to all these schemers, "You have believed until now that the industrial world was a body without mind, into which you must inspire the breath of life; that it was a sort of clay awaiting some Prometheus to quicken it into vitality. You have believed that the world would be one of chance or chaos if the regulating hand of some government would not order all things to be done or forbidden. Undeceive yourselves; under this seeming incongruity and disorder there are admirable natural laws which preserve the harmony of all things. Instead of devising your artificial combinations and quack panaceas, study these laws carefully, and as much as possible conform to them; do not interfere when you are ignorant of these principles, but laissez faire and laissez passer the manifestations of the laws of the Creator."

Adam Smith, though continuing the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, considerably extended the domain of political economy by classifying all laborers who are engaged in the production of a useful commodity as productive, and all others as unproductive. To him we are indebted not only for the fundamental axiom that labor is the source and origin of wealth, but he also completely demonstrated the fallacies of protection, and illustrated the advantages of free trade. His maxims in regard to taxation have become classical. His dissertations upon colonial government and the relations

which should exist between mother country and colonies, though never fully recognized until a very recent period, and then only recognized through the force and logical acumen of Goldwin Smith, showed him to be one of those pioneer thinkers who are far in advance of their age. A long period elapsed between the publication of the Wealth of Nations and the appearance of any profound original work upon the subject of political economy. Ricardo followed the footsteps of Adam Smith in almost everything except in the theories of Value and Rent; in which particulars he remodelled the doctrines of Smith. He explained that the rent of land consisted in the difference between the least productive land in a community, and that which is most productive-a theory since disproved by Carey and Bastiat, as to the greater part of the world, yet one which holds strictly true as to England.

The Rev. T. B. Malthus made the next step in the progressive advance of Political Economy. His work on Population is a dissertation dismal enough in some cf its aspects, yet a valuable guide to many important truths of political economy; more especially those truths which are related to the social questions of the moral, intellectual, and physical status of the lower classes. His theory of population is that mankind has a tendency to increase in a greater ratio than its means of subsistence. He admits that this tendency is constantly counteracted, yet he foreshadows a time in the distant future, when the whole habitable part of the globe may be so densely populated, that every additional individual shall consume proportionately more than he can produce. At the time when Malthus wrote, the mechanical arts were yet in their infancy. When the present century began its history, the steam engine, the railroad, and the magnetic telegraph had not yet begun their immeasurably beneficial missions of usefulness. The power of production has become hundred-fold since then. The impetus given to all branches of human industry, by the increased facilities of intercommunication, have made famines impossible, and great dearths improbable. The supply of the wants of any community no longer depends upon its own power of producing any special article of consumption. The cry of dis

tress is heard at a distant quarter of the globe, and speculation at once supplies the want; even in the time of Malthus great progress had already been made. The difference between the present industrial status of the world and that of some centuries ago, can only be properly estimated when we take into - consideration that during 600 years of the mediaval history of France, there were 300 years of distress and famine. That while certain districts in that country enjoyed a superabundance of the necessaries of life, in certain other districts the people were starving for the want of them. Not only this progress, but also the great increase of wealth since Malthus published his dismal view of the future of mankind, and the ameliorated condition of the lower classes, have created a doubt as to the correctness of the Malthusian law; yet the great merits of Malthus will incontestably ever be, that he is the first economist who drew attention to the fact, that the moral and intellectual status of the working classes mainly depends upon their physical well-being.

Jean Baptist Say is the next in order and importance of the thinkers on politico-economical subjects. His Traité d'Economie Politique is an admirable resumé of the subject up to the period when he wrote, and he extended the domain of political economy by clearer definitions, by more analytical examinations, and more happy illustrations of the truths of the science, than had theretofore been rendered. Contemporaneous with Say, is Charles Comte, a thinker whom the world has persistently ignored, but who stands on the threshold of that new system of philosophy of man now called Social Science.

Charles Comte has written two works, Traité de Législation, and Traité de la Proprieté, both of them works of imperishable worth and lasting value. It is a matter of no small surprise that these works have never been translated into English. His work, Traité de Législation, brought upon him the animadversion of the government, and his Traité de la Proprieté almost caused his expatriation. He lived in England when he concluded his last volume of the last-mentioned work, and while there cultivated the acquaintanceship of