ILLUSTRATIONS

JOHN STUART MILL (Portrait)

Photogravure from a steel engraving

DESCENT OF THE HOLY GHOST.

Fac-simile Illumination of the Fifteenth Century

HERMES

Photo-engraving from the original bronze statue

TITLE PAGE BY HOLBEIN

Fac-simile example of Printing in the Sixteenth Century

EARLY VENETIAN PRINTING

Fac-simile of a title-page printed at Venice in 1523

PRINCIPLES

OF

POLITICAL ECONOMY

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

N every department of human affairs, Practice long precedes Science: systematic inquiry into the modes of action of

IN

the powers of nature, is the tardy product of a long course of efforts to use those powers for practical ends. The conception, accordingly, of Political Economy as a branch of science, is extremely modern; but the subject with which its inquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind, and, in some, a most unduly engrossing one.

That subject is Wealth. Writers on Political Economy profess to teach, or to investigate, the nature of Wealth, and the laws of its production and distribution: including, directly or remotely, the operation of all the causes by which the condition of mankind, or of any society of human beings, in respect to this universal object of human desire, is made prosperous or the reverse. Not that any treatise on Political Economy can discuss or even enumerate all these causes; but it undertakes to set forth as much as is known of the laws and principles according to which they operate.

Everyone has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth. The inquiries which relate to it are in no danger of being confounded with those relating to any other of the great human interests. All know that it is one thing to be rich, another thing to be enlightened, brave, or humane; that the questions how a nation is made wealthy, and how it is made free, or virtuous, or eminent in literature, in the fine arts, in arms, or in polity, are totally distinct in