FREE EXCHANGE

PAPERS ON POLITICAL AND ECONOMICAL SUBJECTS
INCLUDING CHAPTERS ON THE

LAW OF VALUE

AND

UNEARNED INCREMENT

BY THE LATE

RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR LOUIS MALLET, C.B.

EDITED BY BERNARD MALLET

"It, as an economist and a Liberal, I did not believe that the free operation of
natural economic laws tended to raise the condition of the masses and to bring about a
less unequal distribution of wealth, I should take very little interest in political economy
or in public affairs."—From a Letter

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.

1891

✓

COLLEGE

HARVARD

MAR 7 1929

LIBRARY

Clapfend

29

(The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.)

I HAVE been led to think that the publication of this
volume, which contains all (except some letters to the
newspapers) that the late Sir Louis Mallet wrote for
the public, as well as some important but hitherto
unprinted work, would be welcomed by many besides
his personal and official friends, from the fact that
in it is to be found the sum and substance of the
teaching of the most original school of politics which
this country and century have produced-the school
founded by Richard Cobden.

Many who are familiar only with the usual travesty
of Cobden's opinions may be surprised to find that the
policy inaugurated by that statesman was a carefully
thought out scheme, embracing every department of
the national life. It was, moreover, a policy of which
the guiding principles were so much in harmony
with modern social conditions in England, and with
economical laws founded upon the most durable of
human instincts, that so far from being, as we are
constantly assured, already obsolete, it has to a large
extent been accepted by common consent.

Those, on the other hand, who understand and

appreciate Cobden's work, will perhaps be interested in a statement by one of his most distinguished and devoted followers of the ideas which animated the leaders of the party a statement in many ways more complete and comprehensive than is to be gathered from anything hitherto published.

Before endeavouring to point out the consistency and development of my father's opinions, as shown in the various papers included in this volume, I may be allowed to quote the judgment of one of his friends as to how far he represented Cobden's own ideas.

"You are not only a Cobdenite pur sang, but, unless I am much mistaken, you have realized more perfectly and completely than Cobden did himself the higher and more ideal side of the Cobdenic creed. I have searched in vain through Cobden's writings for much that I have heard you quote as established Cobdenic doctrine, and I account for my failure by a fact which I believe to be universally true about all the faiths, great and small, that have shaken mankind, viz. that the disciple is in many ways above his master. . . . It is easy to see how this happens in cases like that before us. You were filled with a great enthusiasm and a personal admiration and love for Cobden. You were constantly with him at one of the most important periods of his life, and must have over and over again discussed the great questions on which your own mind had long been working, and respecting which your own faith has since become definitively fixed. There must have been the keenest sympathy between you, and the intercourse must have been as great a delight to him as it was to you. . . In such intercourse it is absurd to assign to the disciple a passive part. What the disciple afterwards gives out as the faith of the master is really a joint product of their two minds, and their two individualities."