John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

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APPENDIX.
its foundation in conformity with their scheme. This sort of thing has
done infinite mischief to the progress of economic science ;
and one of Mill s
great merits is that both by example and by precept he steadily discounten
anced it. His anxiety to affiliate his own speculations to those of his
predecessors is a marked feature in all his philosophical works, and illus
trates at once the modesty and comprehensiveness of his mind.
It is quite true that Mill, as an economist, was largely indebted to"
Kicardo, and he has so fully and frequently acknowledged the debt that
there is some danger of rating the obligation too highly. As he himself
used to put it, Ricardo supplied the back -bone of the science ; but it is not
less certain that the limbs, the joints, the muscular developments all that
renders political economy a complete and organized body of knowledge
have been the work of Mill. In Ricardo s great work the fundamental
doctrines of production, distribution, and exchange, have been laid down,
but for the most part in mere outline, so much so that superficial students
are in general wholly unable to connect his statement of principles with the
facts, as we rind them, of industrial life. Hence, we have innumerable
"
"
refutations of Ricardo almost invariably refutations of the writers own
misconceptions. In Mill s exposition the connexion between principles"*
and facts becomes clear and intelligible. The conditions and modes of
action are exhibited by which human wants and desires the motive powers
of industry come to issue in the actual phenomena of wealth ; and Poli
tical Economy becomes a system of doctrines susceptible of direct applica
tion to human affairs. As an example, I may refer to Mill s development
of Ricardo s doctrine of foreign trade. In Ricardo s pages the fundamental
principles of that department of exchange are indeed laid down with a
have little relation to
master s hand ; but, for the majority of readers, they
the actual commerce of the world. Turn to Mill, and all becomes clear.
Principles of the most abstract kind are translated into concrete language,"
and brought to explain familiar facts, and this result is achieved, not simply
or chiefly by virtue of mere lucidity of exposition, but through the discovery
and exhibition of modifying conditions and links in the chain of causes
overlooked by Ricardo. It was in his Essays on Unsettled Questions in
Political Economy that his views upon this subject were first given to thej
world a work of which M. Cherbuliez of Geneva, speaks as
"
un travail
le plus important et le plus original dont la science eranomique se soil
enrichie depuis une vingtaine d annees ".
On some points, however, and these points of supreme importance, the
contributions of Mill to economic science are very much more than develop
mentseven though we understand that term in its largest sense of any
previous writer. No one can have studied political economy in the works
of its earlier cultivators without being struck with the dreariness of the