r the
practical application of its principles. He has fixed his eyes, not on
abstract principles, but actual nations, and traced the result, not of
theoretical views on the best regulations for society, but of such as have
actually been established, and had their tendency tested by the experience
of centuries in different ages and countries of the world. He sees with
dismay, in the state of society in modern Europe, under the combined
influence of free-trade, increasing knowledge, popular institutions, vast
wealth, and long-established civilization, a mere repetition, under
different names, of those dreadful social evils which corroded the Roman
empire, and in the end overturned the vast physical dominion of the
legions. He sees in that state of rural society which is nearly extinct in
the British islands, and fast wearing out in France, Belgium, and other
parts of Europe, where civilization is most advanced, the only solid
foundation for general happiness, the only durable bulwark of public
morality, the only permanent security for national existence. This state
of society is disappearing, and a new condition of men coming on, from
causes which seem beyond the power of human control, but the fatal effect
of which is as apparent as the sun at noonday. And thence the gloomy views
with which he is inspired on the future prospects of Europe, and his
profound hostility to the principles of political economy, from which he
considers them as having mainly arisen.

Political economy, as a science, dates its origin, by the common consent
of men, from the famous work "On the Nature and Causes of the _Wealth_ of
Nations." But a greater authority than Adam Smith has told us, that "he
that HASTENETH TO BE RICH SHALL NOT BE INNOCENT." Sismondi's doctrines on
political economy are a commentary on these words, applied to the
management of nations and the social concerns of man. It is in the fatal
thirst for wealth, and the application of all the powers of knowledge, and
all the resources of art, to _that single object_, that he sees the
all-powerful cause, both of the present degradation of so many of the
working classes, of the false direction of political philosophy, and of
the spread of social evils, which will to all appearance, in the end prove
fatal to the existence of the British empire, and of all the European
communities. But it is not any general or vague declamation on the
progress of corruption, and the growing evils of soc