Professor of Political Economy,
and get from him not merely exact habits of thought, but a knowledge
which I cannot give, and yet which they ought to possess. For to take
the very lowest ground, the first fact of history is, Bouche va toujours;
whatever men have or have not done, they have always eaten, or tried to
eat; and the laws which regulate the supply of the first necessaries of
life are, after all, the first which should be learnt, and the last which
should be ignored.

The more modern school, however, of Political Economy while giving due
weight to circumstance, has refused to acknowledge it as the force which
ought to determine all human life; and our greatest living political
economist has, in his Essay on Liberty, put in a plea unequalled since
the Areopagitica of Milton, for the self-determining power of the
individual, and for his right to use that power.

But my business is not with rights, so much as with facts; and as a fact,
surely, one may say, that this inventive reason of man has been, in all
ages, interfering with any thing like an inevitable sequence or orderly
progress of humanity. Some of those writers, indeed, who are most
anxious to discover an exact order, are most loud in their complaints
that it has been interfered with by over-legislation; and rejoice that
mankind is returning to a healthier frame of mind, and leaving nature
alone to her own work in her own way. I do not altogether agree with
their complaints; but of that I hope to speak in subsequent lectures.
Meanwhile, I must ask, if (as is said) most good legislation now-a-days
consists in repealing old laws which ought never to have been passed; if
(as is said) the great fault of our forefathers was that they were
continually setting things wrong, by intermeddling in matters political,
economic, religious, which should have been let alone, to develop
themselves in their own way, what becomes of the inevitable laws, and the
continuous progress, of the human mind?

Look again at the disturbing power, not merely of the general reason of
the many, but of the genius of the few. I am not sure, but that the one
fact, that genius is occasionally present in the world, is not enough to
prevent our ever discovering any regular sequence in human progress, past
or future.

Let me explain myself. In addition to the infinite variety of individual
characters continually born (in itself a cause of perpetual disturbance),
man alone of all spec