instructed persons, and
laid down in the commencement of most of the professed treatises on the
subject, is to the following effect:--That Political Economy informs us
of the laws which regulate the production, distribution, and consumption
of wealth. To this definition is frequently appended a familiar
illustration. Political Economy, it is said, is to the state, what
domestic economy is to the family.

This definition is free from the fault which we pointed out in the
former one. It distinctly takes notice that Political Economy is a
science and not an art; that it is conversant with laws of nature,
not with maxims of conduct, and teaches us how things take place of
themselves, not in what manner it is advisable for us to shape them,
in order to attain some particular end.

But though the definition is, with regard to this particular point,
unobjectionable, so much can scarcely be said for the accompanying
illustration; which rather sends back the mind to the current loose
notion of Political Economy already disposed of. Political Economy is
really, and is stated in the definition to be, a science: but domestic
economy, so far as it is capable of being reduced to principles, is an
art. It consists of rules, or maxims of prudence, for keeping the family
regularly supplied with what its wants require, and securing, with any
given amount of means, the greatest possible quantity of physical
comfort and enjoyment. Undoubtedly the beneficial _result_, the great
practical _application_ of Political Economy, would be to accomplish
for a nation something like what the most perfect domestic economy
accomplishes for a single household: but supposing this purpose
realised, there would be the same difference between the rules by which
it might be effected, and Political Economy, which there is between the
art of gunnery and the theory of projectiles, or between the rules of
mathematical land-surveying and the science of trigonometry.

The definition, though not liable to the same objection as the
illustration which is annexed to it, is itself far from unexceptionable.
To neither of them, considered as standing at the head of a treatise,
have we much to object. At a very early stage in the study of the
science, anything more accurate would be useless, and therefore
pedantic. In a merely initiatory definition, scientific precision is not
required: the object is, to insinuate into the learner's mind, it is
scarcely material by wha