affairs. As an
example, I may refer to Mill's development of Ricardo's doctrine of
foreign trade. In Ricardo's pages, the fundamental principles of that
department of exchange are indeed laid down with a master's hand; but
for the majority of readers they have little relation to the actual
commerce of the world. Turn to Mill, and all becomes clear. Principles
of the most abstract kind are translated into concrete language, and
brought to explain familiar facts; and this result is achieved, not
simply or chiefly by virtue of mere lucidity of exposition, but
through the discovery and exhibition of modifying conditions and links
in the chain of causes overlooked by Ricardo. It was in his "Essays on
Unsettled Questions in Political Economy" that his views upon this
subject were first given to the world,--a work of which M. Cherbuliez
of Geneva speaks as "un travail le plus important et le plus original
dont la science economique se soit enrichie depuis une vingtaine
d'annees."

On some points, however, and these points of supreme importance, the
contributions of Mill to economic science are very much more than
developments--even though we understand that term in its largest
sense--of any previous writer. No one can have studied political
economy in the works of its earlier cultivators without being struck
with the dreariness of the outlook which, in the main, it discloses
for the human race. It seems to have been Ricardo's deliberate
opinion, that a substantial improvement in the condition of the mass
of mankind was impossible. He considered it as the normal state of
things that wages should be at the _minimum_ requisite to support the
laborer in physical health and strength, and to enable him to bring up
a family large enough to supply the wants of the labor-market. A
temporary improvement indeed, as the consequence of expanding commerce
and growing capital, he saw that there might be; but he held that the
force of the principle of population was always powerful enough so to
augment the supply of labor as to bring wages ever again down to the
_minimum_ point. So completely had this belief become a fixed idea in
Ricardo's mind, that he confidently drew from it the consequence, that
in no case could taxation fall on the laborer, since--living, as a
normal state of things, on the lowest possible stipend adequate to
maintain him and his family--he would inevitably, he argued, transfer
the burden to his employer; and a tax nom