Note 693 — Chapter V

While the politicians of his own time despised his views, the politicians of our time seem inclined to overrate them. Lord Brougham, for instance, in his Life of Hume, says, of his political economy, ‘Mr. Hume is, beyond all doubt, the author of the modern doctrines which now rule the world of science.’ Brougham's Works, Glasgow, 1856, vol. ii. p. 176. But so far from this being the case, the science of political economy has, since the time of Hume, received such additions, that if that illustrious philosopher were to rise from the dead, he would hardly be able to recognize it. To him, many of its largest and most fundamental principles were entirely unknown. Hume knew nothing of the causes which govern the accumulation of wealth, and compel that accumulation to proceed with different speed in different states of society; a fruitful and important study almost entirely neglected until entered upon by Rae. Neither did Hume know anything of the law of the ratio between population and wages; nor of the ratio between wages and profits. He even supposes (Philosophical Works, vol. iii. p. 299, Edinburgh, 1826) that it is possible for the labouring classes by combination ‘to heighten their wages;’ and again (p. 319) that the richer a nation is, and the more trade it has, the easier it will be for a poor country to undersell its manufactures, because the poor nation enjoys the advantage of a ‘low price of labour.’ Elsewhere, he asserts that coin can be depreciated without raising prices, and that a country, by taxing a foreign commodity, could increase its own population. ‘Were all our money, for instance, recoined, and a penny's worth of silver taken from every shilling, the new shilling would probably purchase every thing that could have been bought by the old; the prices of every thing would thereby be insensibly diminished; foreign trade enlivened; and domestic industry, by the circulation of a great number of pounds and shillings, would receive some increase and encouragement.’ Philosophical Works, vol. iii. p. 324. ‘A tax on German linen encourages home manufactures, and thereby multiplies our people and industry.’ p. 365. These are cardinal errors, which go to the very root of political economy; and when we fairly estimate what has been done by Malthus and Ricardo, it will be evident that Hume's doctrines do not ‘rule the world of science.’ This is no disparagement of Hume, who, on the contrary, effected wonderful things, considering the then state of knowledge. The mistake is, in imagining that such a rapidly advancing science as political economy can be governed by doctrines propounded more than a century ago.