OF SOCIAL INTERCOURSE. POLITICAL ECONOMY FOR THE MILLION. BY WILLIAM B. CHORLEY. is the land, so also is the sea surrounding the shore, most XEN: De Vectigal: PREFACE UNTIL very recently, Political Economy was deemed a science so abstruse as to be wholly beyond the understandings of common people. Those deeper thinkers, who made the subject a study, differed on many essential points so widely amongst themselves that learners were repelled in uncertainty and disgust, and proclaimed the whole matter to be a strife of words and abstractions, of no utility and without any fixed purpose. When the Professors were invited to prove their loud assertions of the important bearing of this science on all the relations of common life, by some practical application of its abstract principles to concerns generally understood and of every-day interest, the attempt, unhappily, often only strengthened these unfavourable conclusions. They were not agreed amongst themselves even as to the meaning of the terms in which they delivered their oracles; and when the reader tried to form his own opinion upon their conflicting assertions, he found himself stopped on the threshold of the school by hearing languages spoken which he could not at all understand. The words used were English, such as he could well comprehend elsewhere; but the precise sense there given to them, and upon which the whole value of the utterance rested, seldom corresponded with the ideas annexed to those words in common discourse. A new language had to be learned; and the identity of the terms employed with those to which long use had attached a different signification, perplexed rather than aided the inquirer. And when, after much difficulty, the decision pronounced upon some question of importance came to be understood, it seldom applied closely enough to the matter in doubt to be of any practical utility. This evil is increased by the removal of all restrictions upon commerce having rendered obsolete much of the reasoning applicable only to the old times of protection. The whole subject, therefore, requires to be re-written, and brought down to the state of things at the present day. - Something has been done of late towards removing these objections; but it appears to us that there is yet needed a manual,-to use the excellent title of Lord St. Leonards, "A Handy Book," of Social Intercourse. None of the treatises undertaking to supply this want seem to us to enable the general reader easily to obtain the required knowledge. We shall here attempt to remove this deficiency, and to bring Political Economy from the closets of the learned to the farms and factories, the shops and warehouses, of our busy land; for the truths it teaches closely |