killing them; conquered the natural law which makes raw meat
wholesome, by cooking it; conquered the natural law which made weeds grow
at his hut door, by rooting them up, and planting corn instead; and won
his first spurs in the great battle of man against nature, proving
thereby that he was a man, and not an ape? What but this?--'Nature is
strong, but I am stronger. I know her worth, but I know my own. I trust
her and her laws, but my trusty servant she shall be, and not my tyrant;
and if she interfere with my ideal, even with my personal comfort, then
Nature and I will fight it out to the last gasp, and Heaven defend the
right!'

In forgetting this, in my humble opinion, lay the error of the early, or
laissez faire School of Political Economy. It was too much inclined to
say to men: 'You are the puppets of certain natural laws. Your own
freewill and choice, if they really exist, exist merely as a dangerous
disease. All you can do is to submit to the laws, and drift
whithersoever they may carry you, for good or evil.' But not less
certainly was the same blame to be attached to the French Socialist
School. It, though based on a revolt from the Philosophie du neant,
philosophie de la misere, as it used to term the laissez faire School,
yet retained the worst fallacy of its foe, namely, that man was the
creature of circumstances; and denied him just as much as its antagonist
the possession of freewill, or at least the right to use freewill on any
large scale.

The laissez faire School was certainly the more logical of the two. With
them, if man was the creature of circumstances, those circumstances were
at least defined for him by external laws which he had not created: while
the Socialists, with Fourier at their head (as it has always seemed to
me), fell into the extraordinary paradox of supposing that though man was
the creature of circumstances, he was to become happy by creating the
very circumstances which were afterwards to create him. But both of them
erred, surely, in ignoring that self-arbitrating power of man, by which
he can, for good or for evil, rebel against and conquer circumstance.

I am not, surely, overstepping my province as Professor of History, in
alluding to this subject. Just notions of Political Economy are
absolutely necessary to just notions of History; and I should wish those
young gentlemen who may attend my Lectures, to go first, were it
possible, to my more learned brother, the