All nations have been welded together not by peaceful and equitable means but by violent and inequitable means, and I do not believe that nations could ever have been formed in any other way. To dissolve unions because they were inequitably formed, I hold, now that they have been formed, to be a mistake, a retrograde step. Were it possible to go back upon the past and undo all the bad things that have been done, society would forthwith dissolve.— Herbert Spencer. Nationality merely as nationality is a small motive power in history, but nationality considered as exemplified or expressed in customs, language, affinities, even in names, expresses a number of mighty influences equivalent to all that move as main springs the internal life of nations, and affect in a great degree their external history also, their relations to other nations, their development in arts and literature as well as politics, their propensity to or repulsion from ideas of political things and all that forms the historical interest of their national life.—Stubbs. The characters of nations frequently change, and what we call national character is usually only the policy of the governing class, forced upon it by circumstances, or the manner of living which climate, geographical position and other external causes have made necessary for the inhabitants of a country.-W. R. Inge. CHAPTER VIII. JOHN STUART MILL AND ECONOMICS. WH HETHER men of action or men of thought have the more profoundly influenced human history it would be very hard to determine. When one studies the life of a great architect of government like Charlemagne, or of an immense personal force like Napoleon, the achievements related seem so vast, their effects so deep and far-reaching, that to compare them with writers of books, quiet thinkers, studious resolvers of problems, would appear to be futile. Some such image as a great storm uprooting oaks and rending masonry, in comparison with a gentle wind scarcely strong enough to rustle loose leaves, might suggest itself. But the question is not settled by a figure of speech. Very often we find men of action immediately impelled by men of thought, and frequently where the influence is not directly evident it is not difficult to trace. Charlemagne, for all his personal grossness, read much in Saint Augustine's book, de Civitate Dei, and believed that in founding an Empire and linking it up even if loosely-with the Papacy he was in some degree realising the saint's conception. Cromwell translated Puritanism into statecraft. Roússeau had as much to do with the American Declaration of Independence as had Jefferson, and much more than Washington. In Heine's long poem, "Deutschland," he represents himself as being accompanied always-at his writing desk, in his walks abroad-by a ghost, armed with an axe. When the poet calls upon the spectre which haunts him thus to explain itself, it confesses that it is the Deed that follows from his Thought.1 1 Ich bin dein Liktor, and ich geh' Richtbeile hinter dir-ich bin If John Stuart Mill had ever so far relapsed from pure rationalism as to suppose that he was accompanied by a ghost which executed his "Gedanken," it would not have been armed with such a sharp, heavy weapon as was Heine's. It would have been a very stiff but a very gentle ghost, insistent to the last extremity of courtesy, but open to conviction on all things spectral and solid. It would also have been extremely busy, for no man in the world of thought in his time was so industrious as was Mill. There are two reasons why it seems appropriate to make a review of economic thought hinge upon him. One is that his Principles of Political Economy has probably been more widely read than any other economic work in English, except Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Later criticism, and the advance of the science at the hands of earnest students during seventy years, have destroyed much that he built. But there was a time when his authority ranked so high as. to make him somewhat of an economic pontiff. The second reason is that he stands between Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who were pioneers, and the later schools, which, while rejecting many of the conclusions of their famous predecessors, have profited greatly from their work. Our aim is to form some estimate of the working of economic thought on modern history, and Mill, for this purpose, is a central influence. Adam Smith produced the first great treatise on political economy, and his Wealth of Nations, though published in 1776, and superseded by more searching analysis in every topic with which he dealt, is still a classic which no student can afford to neglect. All later writers have been influenced by it, and, by reason of the vigorous style in which it is written, its perfect lucidity and its wealth of historical knowledge, it is likely to hold a place as a living work for many years to come. Ricardo's book on the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) is as hard to read as Adam Smith's work is agreeable. But it was based upon a much wider practical knowledge of business and finance than books of the kind have usually been. Nothing could be wider of the mark than an attack upon Ricardo for being a "mere theorist," or an "abstract economist." He was trained for business by his father, a Jewish stockbroker of Dutch birth and Portuguese origin, who had settled in London. He entered his father's office when he was |