Political Economy [1]
succeed in excluding pain from the world, we must also exclude virtue; if we could banish want, we must also banish industry. Hence it is not the equality of ranks, but happiness in all ranks, which the legislator ought to have in view. It is not from the division of property that he will procure this happiness, but from labour and the reward of labour. It is by maintaining the activity and hopes of the mind; by securing to the poor man as well as to the rich, a regular subsistence and the sweets of life, in the performance of his task. The title given by Adam Smith to his immortal work, on the science we are now engaged with, 'The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' forms at the same the most precise definition of that science. It presents a much more exact idea than the term political economy, afterwards adopted. The latter designation, at least, requires to be understood according to the modern acceptation of the word economy, not according to its etymology. In its present sense economy denotes the preservative, administrative, and the management of property; and it is because we use the somewhat tautological phrase domestic economy for the management of a private fortune, that we have come to use the phrase political economy for the management of the national fortune. From the time when men first entered into social union, they must have occupied themselves with the common interests originating in their wealth. From the beginning of societies, a portion of the public wealth was set apart to provide for the public wants. The levying and management of this national revenue, which no longer pertained to each, became an essential part in the science of statesmen. It is what we call finance. Private fortunes, on the other hand, made the interests of each citizen more complex; being exposed to the attacks of cupidity and fraud, their wealth required to be defended by the public authority, according to the fundamental article of the social contract, which had combined the strength of individuals to protect each with power of all. The rights over property, the divisions of it, the means of transmitting it, became one of the most important branches of civil jurisprudence; and the application of justice to the distribution of national property, formed an essential function of the legislator. But no inquiry concerning the nature and causes of national wealth had occupied the speculations of our ancestors. They had not ascended to the principles of political economy, in order to deduce from that source their systems of finance and civil jurisprudence, which ought, however, to be nothing more than corollaries from those principles. They had abandoned the development of public wealth to the result of individual efforts, without examining their nature; and thus property had accumulated silently, in each society, by the labour of each artisan to procure his own subsistence, and afterwards his own comforts - before the manner of acquiring and preserving it became an object of scientific speculation. The philosophers of antiquity were engaged in proving to their disciples, that riches are useless for happiness; not in pointing out to governments the laws by which the increase of those riches may be favoured or retarded. The attention of thinking men was at length directed to national wealth by the requisitions of states, and the poverty of the people. An important change which occurred in the general politics of Europe, during the sixteenth century, almost every where overturned public liberty; oppressed the smaller states; destroyed the privileges of the towns and provinces; and conferred the right to dispose of national fortunes on a small number of sovereigns, absolutely unacquainted with the industry by which wealth is accumulated or preserved. Before the reign of Charles V, one half of Europe, lying under the feudal system, had no liberty or knowledge, and no finance. But the other half, which had already reached a high degree of prosperity, which was daily increasing its agricultural riches, its manufactories,