ute ruler
of all their actions. Under the influence of this desire, it shows
mankind accumulating wealth, and employing that wealth in the production
of other wealth; sanctioning by mutual agreement the institution of
property; establishing laws to prevent individuals from encroaching upon
the property of others by force or fraud; adopting various contrivances
for increasing the productiveness of their labour; settling the division
of the produce by agreement, under the influence of competition
(competition itself being governed by certain laws, which laws are
therefore the ultimate regulators of the division of the produce); and
employing certain expedients (as money, credit, &c.) to facilitate the
distribution. All these operations, though many of them are really the
result of a plurality of motives, are considered by Political Economy as
flowing solely from the desire of wealth. The science then proceeds to
investigate the laws which govern these several operations, under the
supposition that man is a being who is determined, by the necessity of
his nature, to prefer a greater portion of wealth to a smaller in all
cases, without any other exception than that constituted by the two
counter-motives already specified. Not that any political economist was
ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted,
but because this is the mode in which science must necessarily proceed.
When an effect depends upon a concurrence of causes, those causes must
be studied one at a time, and their laws separately investigated, if we
wish, through the causes, to obtain the power of either predicting or
controlling the effect; since the law of the effect is compounded of the
laws of all the causes which determine it. The law of the centripetal
and that of the tangential force must have been known before the motions
of the earth and planets could be explained, or many of them predicted.
The same is the case with the conduct of man in society. In order to
judge how he will act under the variety of desires and aversions which
are concurrently operating upon him, we must know how he would act under
the exclusive influence of each one in particular. There is, perhaps, no
action of a man's life in which he is neither under the immediate nor
under the remote influence of any impulse but the mere desire of wealth.
With respect to those parts of human conduct of which wealth is not even
the principal object, to these Political Eco