the centre of Canadian forests, and all men else in the centre of Hindostan.

But, before I part from Greta Hall and its distinguished master, one word let me say, to protect myself from the imputation of sharing in some peculiar opinions of Southey, with respect to political economy, which have been but too familiar to the world, and some opinions of the world, hardly less familiar, with respect to Southey himself and his accomplishments. Probably, with respect to the first, before this paper will be made public, I shall have sufficiently vindicated my own opinions in these matters by a distinct treatinent of some great questions which lie at the base of all sound political economy; above all, the radical question of value, upon which no man has ever seen the full truth except Mr. Ricardo; and, unfortunately, he had but little of the polemic1 skill which is required to meet the errors of his opponents. For it is noticeable that the most conspicuous of those opponents, viz. Mr. Malthus, though too much, I fear, actuated by a spirit of jealousy, and therefore likely enough to have scattered sophistry and disingenuous quibbling over the subject, had no need whatever of any further confusion for darkening and perplexing his themes than what inevitably belonged to his own most chaotic understanding. He and Say, the Frenchman, were both plagued by understandings of the same quality-having a clear vision in shallow waters, and this misleading them into the belief that they saw with equal clearness through the remote and the obscure; whereas, universally, their acuteness is like that of Hobbes—the gift of shallowness, and the result of not being subtle or profound enough to apprehend the true locus of the difficulty; and the barriers, which to

1 "Polemic skill" :-The word polemic is falsely interpreted by the majority of mere English readers. Having seldom seen it used except in a case of theological controversy, they fancy that it has some original and etymological appropriation to such a use; whereas it expresses, with regard to all subjects, without restriction, the functions of the debater as opposed to those of the original orator; the functions of him who meets error and unravels confusion or misrepresentation, opposed to those of him who lays down the abstract truth: truth absolute and without relation to the modes of viewing it. As well might the word Radical be limited to a political use as Polemic to controversial divinity.

them limit the view, and give to it, together with the contraction, all the distinctness and definite outline of limitation, are, in nine cases out of ten, the product of their own defective and aberrating vision, and not real barriers at all.

Meantime, until I write fully and deliberately upon this subject, I shall observe, simply, that all "the Lake Poets," as they are called, were not only in error, but most presumptuously in error, upon these subjects. They were ignorant of every principle belonging to every question alike in political economy, and they were obstinately bent upon learning nothing; they were all alike too proud to acknowledge that any man knew better than they, unless it were upon some purely professional subject, or some art remote from all intellectual bearings, such as conferred no honour in its possession. Wordsworth was the least tainted with error upon political economy; and that because he rarely applied his thoughts to any question of that nature, and, in fact, despised every study of a moral or political aspect, unless it drew its materials from such revelations of truth as could be won from the prima philosophia of human nature approached with the poet's eye. Coleridge was the one whom Nature and his own multifarious studies had the best qualified for thinking justly on a theme such as this; but he also was shut out from the possibility of knowledge by presumption, and the habit of despising all the analytic studies of his own day-a habit for which he certainly had some warrant in the peculiar feebleness of all that has offered itself for philosophy in modern England. In particular, the religious discussions of the age, which touch inevitably at every point upon the profounder philosophy of man and his constitution, had laid bare the weakness of his own age to Coleridge's eye; and, because all was hollow and trivial in this direction, he chose to think that it was so in every other. And hence he has laid himself open to the just scoffs of persons far inferior to himself. In a foot-note in some late number of the Westminster Review, it is most truly asserted (not in these words, but to this effect) that Coleridge's "Table Talk" exhibits a superannuation of error fit only for two centuries before. And what gave peculiar point to this display of ignorance was, that Coleridge did not, like Wordsworth, dismiss poli

tical economy from his notice disdainfully, as a puerile tissue of truisms, or of falsehoods not less obvious, but actually addressed himself to the subject; fancied he had made discoveries in the science; and even promised us a systematic work on its whole compass.

To give a sample of this new and reformed political economy, it cannot well be necessary to trouble the reader with more than one chimera culled from those which Mr. Coleridge first brought forward in his early model of "The Friend." He there propounds, as an original hypothesis of his own, that taxation never burthens a people, or, as a mere possibility, can burthen a people simply by its amount. And why? Surely it draws from the purse of him who pays the quota a sum which it may be very difficult or even ruinous for him to pay, were it no more important in a public point of view than as so much deducted from his own unproductive expenditure, and which may happen to have even a national importance if it should chance to be deducted from the funds destined to productive industry. What is Mr. Coleridge's answer to these little objections? Why, thus: the latter case he evades entirely, apparently not adverting to it as a case in any respect distinguished from the other; and this other how is that answered ? Doubtless, says Mr. Coleridge, it may be inconvenient to John or Samuel that a sum of money, otherwise disposable for their own separate uses, should be abstracted for the purchase of bayonets, or grape-shot; but with this the public, the commonwealth, have nothing to do, any more than with the losses at a gaming-table, where A's loss is B's gain-the total funds of the nation remaining exactly the same. It is, in fact, nothing but the accidental distribution of the funds which is affected -possibly for the worse (no other " worse," however, is contemplated than shifting it into hands less deserving), but, also, by possibility, for the better; and the better and the worse may be well supposed, in the long run, to balance each other. And that this is Mr. Coleridge's meaning cannot be doubted, upon looking into his illustrative image in support of it he says that money raised by Government in the shape of taxes is like moisture exhaled from the earth-doubtless, for the moment injurious to the crops, but re

acting abundantly for their final benefit when returning in the shape of showers. So natural, so obvious, so inevitable, by the way, is this conceit (or, to speak less harshly, this hypothesis), and so equally natural, obvious, and inevitable is the illustration from the abstraction and restoration of moisture, the exhalations and rains which affect this earth of ours, like the systole and the diastole of the heart, the flux and reflux of the ocean, that precisely the same doctrine, and precisely the same exemplification of the doctrine, is to be found in a Parliamentary speech of some orator in the famous Long Parliament about the year 1642. And to my mind it was a bitter humiliation to find, about 150 years afterwards, in a shallow French work, the famous "Compte Rendu” of the French Chancellor of the Exchequer (Comptroller of the Finances) Neckar-in that work, most humiliating it was to me, on a certain day, that I found this idle Coleridgian fantasy, not merely repeated, as it had been by scores-not merely anticipated by full twenty and two years, so that these French people had been beforehand with him, and had made Coleridge, to all appearance, their plagiarist, but also (hear it, ye gods!) answered, satisfactorily refuted, by this very feeble old sentimentalist, Neckar. Yes; positively Neckar, the slipshod old system-fancier and political driveller, had been so much above falling into the shallow snare, that he had, on sound principles, exposed its specious delusions. Coleridge, the subtlest of men in his proper walk, had brought forward, as a novel hypothesis of his own, in 1810, what Neckar, the rickety old charlatan, had scarcely condescended, in a hurried foot-note, to expose as a vulgar error and the shallowest of sophisms in 1787-88. There was another enormous blunder which Coleridge was constantly authorizing, both in his writings and his conversation. Quoting a passage from Sir James Stuart, in which he speaks of a vine-dresser as adding nothing to the public wealth, unless his labour did something more than replace his own consumption—that is, unless it reproduced it together with a profit; he asks contemptuously, whether the happiness and moral dignity that

1 Reported at length in a small quarto volume, of the well known quarto size so much in use for Tracts, Pamphlets, &c., throughout the life of Milton-1608-74.

may have been exhibited in the vine-dresser's family are to pass for nothing? And then he proceeds to abuse the economists, because they take no account of such important considerations. Doubtless these are invaluable elements of social grandeur, in a total estimate of those elements. But what has political economy to do with them, a science openly professing to insulate, and to treat apart from all other constituents of national well-being, those which concern the production and circulation of wealth ?1 So far from gaining anything by enlarging its field in the way demanded by Coleridge's critic, political economy would be as idly travelling out of the limits indicated and held forth in its very name, as if logic were to teach ethics, or ethics to teach diplomacy. With respect to the Malthusian doctrine of population, it is difficult to know who was the true proprietor of the arguments urged against it sometimes by Southey, sometimes by Coleridge. Those used by Southey are chiefly to be found up and down the Quarterly Review. But a more elaborate attack was published by Hazlitt; and this must be supposed to speak the peculiar objections of Coleridge, for he was in the habit of charging Hazlitt with having pillaged his conversation, and occasionally garbled it throughout the whole of this book. One single argument there was, undoubtedly just, and it was one which others stumbled upon no less than Coleridge, exposing the fallacy of the supposed different laws

1 In fact, the exposure is as perfect in the case of an individual as in that of a nation, and more easily apprehended. Levy from an indi. vidual clothier £1000 in taxes, and afterwards return to him the whole of this sum in payment for the clothing of a regiment. Then, supposing profits to be at the rate of 15 per cent, he will have replaced £150 of his previous loss; even his gains will simply reinstate him in something that he had lost, and the remaining £850 will continue to be a dead loss; since the £850 restored to him exactly replaces, by the terms of this case, his disbursements in wages and materials; if it did more, profits would not be at 15 per cent, according to the supposition. But Government may spend more than the £1000 with this clothier; they may spend £10,000. Doubtless, and in that case, on the same supposition as to profits, he will receive £1500 as a nominal gain; and £500 will be a real gain, marked with the positive sign (+). But such a case would only prove that nine other taxpayers, to an equal amount, had been left without any reimbursement at all. Strange that so clear a case for an individual should become obscure when it regards a nation,