omy_
which has had a greater influence on opinion than all the rest, that on
'the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes,' is entirely due to her;
in the first draft of the book, that chapter did not exist. She pointed
out the need of such a chapter, and the extreme imperfection of the book
without it; she was the cause of my writing it; and the more general
part of the chapter, the statement and discussion of the two opposite
theories respecting the proper condition of the labouring classes, was
wholly an exposition of her thoughts, often in words taken from her own
lips. The purely scientific part of the _Political Economy_ I did not
learn from her; but it was chiefly her influence that gave to the book
that general tone by which it is distinguished from all previous
expositions of Political Economy that had any pretension to being
scientific, and which has made it so useful in conciliating minds which
those previous expositions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in
making the proper distinction between the laws of the Production of
Wealth--which are laws of nature, dependent on the properties of
objects--and the modes of its Distribution, which, subject to certain
conditions, depend on human will. The commom run of political economists
confuse these together, under the designation of economic laws, which
they deem incapable of being defeated or modified by human effort;
ascribing the same necessity to things dependent on the unchangeable
conditions of our earthly existence, and to those which, being but the
necessary consequences of particular social arrangements, are merely
co-extensive with these; given certain institutions and customs, wages,
profits, and rent will be determined by certain causes; but this class
of political economists drop the indispensable presupposition, and argue
that these causes must, by an inherent necessity, against which no human
means can avail, determine the shares which fall, in the division of the
produce, to labourers, capitalists, and landlords. The _Principles of
Political Economy_ yielded to none of its predecessors in aiming at the
scientific appreciation of the action of these causes, under the
conditions which they presuppose; but it set the example of not treating
those conditions as final. The economic generalizations which depend not
on necessaties of nature but on those combined with the existing
arrangements of society, it deals with only as provisional, and as
lia