Mill à Napier, 10 sept 1819 (Bain, p

6. Stuart Mill. Awlobiography, p. 27 ; et lettre de Ricardo à -J.-B. Say, 18 août 1815 (ap. Lettres de J.-B, Say, pp. 95-96).

7. Bowring, vol. X, p. 498; et ce qui suit : I was often téle à tête with

Ricardo. He would borrow a sixpenny book instead of buying it. There was an épanchement between us. We used to walk together in Hyde Park, and he reported to me what passed in the House of Commons. He had several times intended to quote the Fragment; but his courage failed him, as he told me... Considering our intercourse, it was natural he should give me a copy of his book (on Rent) — the devil a bit!

8. Ricardo, Principles, Preface, p. 1. — Lauderdale dans l'introduction de son Inquiry de 1804 (édit. de 1819, p. 3) conserve l’ancienne définition: Public Economy, which professes to teach the means of increasing the wealth of the State, and of applying it to the most useful purposes — (et p. 115) : Political Economy, the science which professes to display and to teach the means of increasing the wealth of a state.

9. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 6 : Of the influences which determined Ricardo to adopt the method of purely abstract reasoning, the intellectual ascendency obtained over him by James Mill was one of the strongest. The method of deduction and abstract analysis was that of the whole schools of thinkers, to whom he was so closely related, — Bentham, Mill, Austin ; and it is significant that Sir H. Maine, who has applied the historical method with so much perseverance to the legal theories of Bentham and Austin, should have turned aside more than once to criticise Ricardo from the same point of view.

10. An Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, section II, Part. IT, note (Essays, ed. Green, vol. II, pp. 100-101).

11. Quesnay. Le Droit Naturel, chap. 1, de l'inégalité du droit naturel des hommes. — Burke (Thoughts and Details on Scarcity ;: Works, vol. I, pp. 356-357), voit dans l'harmonie des intérêts économiques un ordre providentiel : « We, the people, ought to be made sensible, that it is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the Divine displeasure, to remove any calamity under which we suffer, or which bangs over us ». Mais Burke avait étudié les Physiocrates.

12. L'Ordre Naturel et Essentiel des Sociétés politiques, chap. xvur.

13. Sur la formation et la distribution des richesses, V, XXII.

14. Progr. de l’'Esp. Humain, 9 époque. — Cf. 8 époque : cette science nouvelle a été portée par Stewart, par Smith, et surtout par les économistes français, du moins pour la précision et la pureté des principes, à un degré qu'on ne pouvaitespérer d'atteindre si promptement après une si longue indifférence. — C'est également l'opinion de Buchanan, en 1814, dans son édition d'Adam Smith, que la France, à la différence de l’Angleterre, possède une école d’économistes : v. vol. IV : Observations on. Dr. Smith's… Wealth of Nations, p. IT : In France the subject was more studied ; and on many important questions, the doctrines of the French writers are in the highest degree liberal and enlightened. They were undoub-

btedly the first to perceive that human laws, in order to be useful, must necessarily conform to those more general laws, on which society is founded; and that the true object of the legislator is to uphold the social system as itis already constituted, in place of interfering to regulate or to alter the natural course of things according to his own limited notions of expediency. — Mais, à côté d’autres erreurs : It may be also remarked of the French authors, that however consistently they maintain the doctrine of the freedom of trade, they seem to deduce it from the principles rather of abstract right, than of general expediency. In this strain, Turgot remarks, in a letter to Dr. Price (Œuvres, t. IX, p. 383), in which he blames the newly established government of America for regulating trade, for authorising exclusive corporations, and for prohibiting the exportation of certain commodities, « que la loi de la liberté entière de tout commerce est un corollaire du droit de propriété ». It was to justice rather than to policy, that they looked for the perfection of civil society : and they generally reason in reference to this principle.

15. Germain Garnier, Abrégé élémentaire des principes de l’économie politique, an IV (1796), p. 3.