A memoir of Henry C. Carey.

'^. « "o "^o -r-"-" ^ • . . . *f> /' " "■ ^5^ • - *» sV^ .*^--. ''Mir /% . 'f'.^^'i ^^^ o_ ^^-^ ^,^ ^♦^^ -^ '^yi^^ /'X ^^&*'' ^^^% '° .<}> .t.,, <& f.-^'' o«, "<?. ••' cy ^-* 'S A MEMOIR HENKY C. CAREY. Bead before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, January 5, 1880. WILLIAM ELDER PHILADELPHIA: THE AMEEICAN IKON AND STEEL ASSOCIATION, No. 265 South Fourth Street. 1880. Printed by ALLEN, LANE & SCOTT, No. 233 South Fifth Street, Philndelphia. EDITOR'S PREFACE. On Monday evening, January 5th, Dr. William Elder, an old Philadelphian, but now a resident of Washington City, delivered at the hall of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, a memoir of Henry C. Carey. In his lifetime Mr. Carey had committed to his old friend. Dr. Elder, a memoran- dum of the leading incidents in his life, including his numerous contributions to economic literature and the circumstances which led to theii- preparation. This information Mr. Carey desired Dr. Elder to embody in a paper to be given to the public after Mr. Carey's death, together with such analysis of his life- work in the field of political economy as Dr. Elder, from his perfect familiarity with that work, might feel prompted to make. The event which took place at the hall of the Historical Society on Monday evening last fully justified the wisdom of Mr. Carey's selection of a critic and biographer. The hall was crowded with one of the most refined and scholarly audiences ever gathered in Philadelphia, and the address with which Dr. Elder for almost two hours en- tertained it was a most eloquent, appreciative, exhaustive, and learned tribute to the memory of his old friend. That no more fitting selection of a memo- rialist could have been made is the general opinion of the many friends of Mr. Carey who heard the address. Some of its passages were of classic grace and elegance. The memoir is published herewith. Among the distinguished gentlemen who were present were General Eobert Patterson, the Chairman of the meeting ; Provost Stills, of the University of Pennsylvania; Hon. John Welsh, ex-Minister to the Court of St. James; Hon. Geo. H. Boker, ex-Minister to Eussia ; Hon. John Scott, ex-United States Sena- tor from Pennsylvania ; Hon. William D. Kelley, the Father of the National House of Kepresentatives ; John Wm. Wallace, the President of the Histor- ical Society ; Frederick Fraley, the President of the National Board of Trade ; Hon. Edward McPherson, editor of The Press; Col. Clayton McMichael, editor of The North American; William V. McKean, editor of the Public Ledger; J. L. Eingwalt, editor of the Baihuay World; Joseph E. Chandler, the Nestor of the Philadelphia press ; Judge William S. Peirce ; William and John Sellers ; Hon. Thomas Cochran ; Morton McMichael, Jr. ; Walter Mc- Michael; Thompson Westcott, the historian; Professor Daniel W. Howard, of the Central High School ; Hon. James H. Campbell ; Hon. Charles Gib- bons; Henry Carey Baird; Joseph Wharton; Thomas S. Harrison; A. Haller Gross; John Jordan, Jr.; Chas. S. Ogden ; Abraham Barker; Cyrus Elder; Charles H. Cramp ; George Plummer Smith ; George L. Buzby, Secretary of the Philadelphia Board of Trade ; William J. Mullen, the philanthropist ; James L. Claghorn, Abraham Hart, and Thomas E. Worrall. Many ladies were, present. (3) A MEMOIR should be a brief biography ; and a biography of a protagonist or revolutionist in science involves whatever of the past in its history confronted him — how he found and how he left the field of his labor ; and the memorialist should have an adequate grasp of these conditions and results of the labors deserving record. Blackstone says, " There are three points to be considered in the construction of all remedial statutes — the old law, the mischief, and the remedy." Under an analogous requirement I can not present the irruption of such a reformer as Mr. Carey into the domain of the study which he cultivated with revolutionary efiect without giving a pertinent sketch of its condition when he entered upon it, and, at least, an outline of the changes efiected by his labors. The state of the so-called science of political economy, as he found it, is exceedingly difficult of description, and, for any other purpose or to any greater extent than to estimate the task which he had before him, is now scarcely worth examining. We have the judgment of the most capable critics that no two of its leading authorities agreed about anything in the scope, treatment, or issues of its subject-matters. A sufficiently accurate classification divides them into a set which held it to be an a priori, or deductive, science ; while another set, including almost as many varieties as individuals, insisted that it falls within the inductive system of rea- soning, both as to data and ruling principles : the first suspending it upon logical abstractions; the second crowd of cultivators en- deavoring to build it up from the facts of observation and experi- ment, after the Baconian method of treating purely physical phe- nomena. John Stuart Mill may be taken to represent the former, saying, " It is essentially an abstract science, and its method is the a priori. It reasons, and must necessarily reason, upon assumptions, not from facts" — a conception, by the way, which has this advantage and this only, that the system must have this character if it be a science in any proper or philosophical sense of the word, for otherwise it can not have a single directory principle uniform, permanent, and universal. The great body of system-builders with whom we are most fa- miliar belong, in a half-and-half sort of way, to this class, if they must be classed, for they are so utterly incongruous that they better (5) MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. answer Chief Justice Gibson's idea of "a segregated association, neither a corporation nor a quasi corporation, but the reproductive organ of a perpetual succession ; " or to Lindley Murray's name for a negative affirmation, which he styles a "disjunctive conjunction" — their prelections, in fact, amounting to a general and special wran- gle of contradictions, deserving the descriptive title of the last chap- ter of Dr. Johnson's Rcmelas : " Conclusion, in which nothing is concluded." But, it may be replied, Adam Smith was the father and founder of political economy, and his disciples must surely have and hold the orthodox faith. Let us see : J. R. McCulloch esteemed Smith's Wealth of Nations worthy of comment nearly as close as that given to the Bible, yet he objects in his notes to nearly one hundred im- portant errors in the text of his author. J. B. Say, who methodized this Koran of the faith once delivered to the disciples and gave it its general acceptation, declares that it is " an irregular mass of curi- ous and original speculations and known demonstrated truths." J. S. Mill says, "The Wealth of NatioJis is in many parts obsolete and in all imperfect." Stef)hen Colwell thinks J. B. Say far better en- titled to claim the paternity of the system, and H. C. Carey, still feeling great veneration for his earliest tutor, nevertheless contra- dicts him almost as often as he is obliged to cite the leading dog- mas of his system, but generally approves its ruling spirit and the rebukes he finds provided in it for the departures of its professed followers. Of course people who have opinions to maintain and propagate must have some standard authority for reference on arti- cles of their creed, else how can they be orthodox ? Adam Smith, according to Say's version or conversion, answers this purpose well enougli ; but it is not fair to the founder of the school to hold him responsible for the big debating society which professes to follow him. Say, Ricardo, j\Iill, Ba.stiat, and a great batch of college pro- fessors and literary drudges have overlaid and left him only a name to live. I must be allowed to shelter my audacity of disbelief in these authorities by confronting them with their peers, their bettei's, and not uiil'requcntly with themselves, for this is necessary even to a bird's-eye view of Mr. Carey's field or forest of labor when he entered upon its cultivation. J. B. Say, the real "head and front of the offense," in his Com- plete Course of Political Economy, published in 1828, corrects himself, and goes back upon his followers, thus: "The object of political MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. economy seems heretofore to have been restricted to the knowledge of the laws which govern the production, distribution, and consump- tion of wealth, and it is so that I considered it in my treatise pub- lished in 1803 ; yet it can be seen in that same work that the science pertains to everything in society" — a view, however, which his dis- ciples never had of "that same work." Instead, they have reduced his whole system to a very limited set of expository and operative maxims, to wit : Buy in the cheapest market — Let supply and de- mand regulate prices — There can be no over-production — Every man is the best judge and manager of his own industrial interests — Let international trade be free, and domestic industry take care of itself — Obey these laws, these rules, and prosperity will follow, be- cause unlimited competition in production and trade is the provi- dential harmonizer of all conflicting interests. J. R. McCulloch holds political economy to be a science of values. Here the statistician is paramount. He is the huckster's oracle, and seems to think that figures teach all their meaning and can not lie. Archbishop Whately proposed to call it Catallactics, or the sci- ence of exchanges. (The feeling of the pocket.) J. S. Mill says, "Political economy concerns itself only with such phenomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth." (The stomach, without bowels or heart.) These, and such as these, definitions did not escape without pro- test. Destutt De Tracy said, the basis of political economy is in man. Man should be the aim, and things should be regarded only as his ministers. (Some humanity here.) Storch thought that the system, to be alive, ought to have a soul. (Something of religion added.) Joseph Droz held that riches are not an aim but a means. He asks sarcastically, " What, is wealth everything and man nothing?" adding that, " Some economists speak as if they believed men were made for products, not products for men." (Philanthropy invoked.) Stephen Colwell, who could not divorce goodness from truth, or truth from goodness, would substitute well-being for wealth in the definition of a true and worthy economic policy. Mr. Carey's opinion and feeling of its proper range and aim can not be given in a line or two of definition. But it is in place to add here that, as lately as March 25, 1856, he says in a newspaper notice of Mr. Colwell's preliminary essay to List's Political Econo- my : " The reader can scarcely rise from the perusal without having MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. arrived at an agreement with List that the science remains yet to be created." A host of eminently capable judges, and among them Daniel Webster and Napoleon Bonaparte, might be added to show the in- extricable confusion and contradiction among the reigning authori- ties in this so-called science when Mr. Carey entered upon his labor in this department of study. The confusion among the prevalent theorists concerning the prov- ince and method of cultivating their field of research was matched by an equal uncertainty in the meaning of the terms of art em- ployed by the writers in vogue. Archbishop Whately, himself an author and thoroughly read in the literature of political economy, gives a conspicuous place to this branch of authorship in his chap- ter upon Ambiguous Terms. {Elements of Logic, A. D. 1826.) Beginning with Adam Smith, he goes through a list of the authori- ties, embracing Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Say, Mill, McCulloch, Torrens, and others known to English readers. In this conglomera- tion he exposes as many difierences in the definition and use of the terms of art which they all alike employ as there are names in the catalogue. He remarks generally of the medley that " the terms of art in political economy are only seven — value, wealth, labor, cap- ital, rent, wages, and profits ; yet they are seldom carefully defined by the writers who use them. Hardly one of them has any settled or invariable meaning, and their ambiguities are perpetually over- looked." He further adds, " A few only have been noticed of the ambiguities which attach to the terms which have been selected, and these terms have been fixed upon, not as the most ambiguous, but as the most important in political nomenclature." Did these system-builders, any better than the architects of the tower of Babel, understand each other, or does anybody else under- stand them? When one of them calls for brick another under- stands mortar ; the plumb-line of a third means trowel to a fourth ; one set of them insists that the scaffolding is the building — these hang the edifice, a priori, upon the roof, while the other party lay its foundation, a posteriori, upon the hard-pan of facts, but make no provision for the covering-in of the structure ; they leave the parti- tions at cross-purposes, in a labyrinth of incongruities, with the stairways always falling short of connecting the stories. What a job the innocent student must have had in his endeavor to disentangle all this trumpery of theory ! I think I hear him say in the style of his later phrase of exclamation, " My heavens ! what MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. does all this mean ? wliat is it wortli ? what is its use ? " He found that words were the staple of the teachings ; words that admit of a variety of constructions, turned loose upon the world to make their way, somehow, everyhow, and anyhow. Now let us look at some of Mr. Carey's definitions or tools of thought, which he employs in his doctrinal deliverances — not all : ,that would be to write a complete catechism of the subject. It would be of itself a comprehensive treatise upon the thousand and one topics which he has handled. Distinctive Definitions of Mr. Carey's System. Social science treats of man in his efibrts for the maintenance and improvement of his condition, and may be defined to be the science of the laws which govern man in his eflTorts to secure for himself the highest individuality, and the greatest power of association with his fellow men. Political economy treats of the measures required for so co-ordinat- ing the movements of society as to enable the laws of social science to take effect. (Here the theory and art are distinguished.) Wealth consists in the power to command the services of nature. (This happily accords with the meaning of the words weal, well- being, welfare.) Value is measured by the resistance to be overcome in obtaining the service of things required for human use. It is the cost of re- production. As the value of commodities declines, the worth of man advances. In advancing communities the cost of reproduction con- stantly diminishes, and in the ratio of such advancement. Utility expresses and measures the service yielded by nature. It does not necessarily imply or include cost or value. Instances — air, sunshine, social intercourse. The sum of all utilities is wealth. Substitution. — Power over nature grows with the substitution of improved instrumentalities : from the use of the pack-saddle to the railroad-car ; from the canoe to the steamer ; from the poorer to the richer soils ; from animal to vegetable products ; from the vegetable to the mineral kingdom — at every stage substituting the cheap and abundant for the costly and scarce, as this progress is exhibited in the steady advancement from the condition of savagism up to the highest attained civilization. Land. — Its value is ruled by the laws of all commodities. It is a machine in its nature, operation, and uses. Its value is wholly due 10 MEMOIR OF HENEY C. CAEEY. to labor. Its alleged "original and indestructible powers" make no part of its exchange value. The wealth of a people is indicated by the predominance of real estate value over that of personal prop- erty. The improvement of fixed property marks the sovereignty actually attained, and shows the growth of mind, of social order, and of improvement of labor. Land and labor, or raw materials and labor, rise in exchange value as they are more productive, and in an inverse proportion to the price of their finished products. In progressive communities labor and land are the only things which rise in value, whilst their products as constantly decline in price — labor being understood to embrace all physical and mental effort employed in overcoming na- ture's resistance. Commerce, distinctively, is the exchange of things, services, and ideas, by and between the original parties, or hy men with each other, with the least possible intervention of intermediaries. Trade. — The word should be limited to those exchanges or deal- ings in commodities which are carried on by intermediaries or middlemen — exchanges made for other persons. It is an instrument of commerce. Trade should be allowed only so far as it must be. Time and space are the things to be abated, or overcome, in legiti- mate commerce. (A sound policy of international business relations can be built upon this distinction ; holding steadily in view the diverse consequences. It would put an end to industrial domination and the reciprocal slavery among civilized peoples who are alike capable of industrial independence. Political economy is not a the- ory of market values, but it is, or ought to be, a system or theory of the productive power of a people.) Capital, in ordinary business language, means an accumulation of values employed in further production. In the economical sense it embraces land, ships, wagons, plows, machinery, clothing, food, money, and all tangible subjects of property; and, besides these, ideas and credit, which are, as much and even more than material substances, necessary and efficient in the production of new values. Capital is the instrument by which men acquire the power to direct the forces of nature in their service. Capital, in advancing commu- nities, grows more rapidly than population. Labor, skilled and unskilled, is properly capital. (If tools are capital, why not hands ? and it might be properly included in the definition ; but it is usually treated rather as an associate than as a component of capital. It is a fellow-agent in production, and as co-workers they are by neces- MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 11 sity married together, for better for worse ; logically, they are one bone and one flesh.) Productive and unproductive labor. — The theorists, who find wealth and capital only in the things that are marketable by weight, measure, or number, or other physical properties, are much troubled with what they take to be a specific and import- ant difference between productive and unproductive labor ; but, if wealth be, as it is here defined, man's power over nature, there is nothing in the debate, no benefit in the discussion, and no utility in its issue, even if it could find one. Whatever power may be exerted over matter, in form or place, is production, and, therefore, is pro- ductive labor. The agriculturist is no more a producer than the miner, the transporter, or the manufacturer. The greater part of the agriculturist's products owe all their serviceableness to the labor which changes their form and place. A very small portion of them is available for use until they are greatly altered by what the phys- iocrats are pleased to call the unproductive industries. Mr. Carey yields nothing to the landlordism that founds its pre-eminence of claims upon the " indestructible powers of land," or upon its exclu- sive proc^wciive^ess. Tracing all values to labor, he denies all these fanciful but mischievous differences of property rights and rank. Mr. Carey has not neglected any topic or title that finds a place in the discussions of theory, and he has defined them all with great exactitude. The close student of his books will find in them a per- sistent, pertinent, central drift toward, and constituting, a summary of his doctrines. The subjects, consumption, distribution, wages, profit, interest, rent, and the like, are sharply treated ; but there is no room for the presentment here. There are, however, many points or features of his system which demand such notice as can not be made practicable within the brevities of a memoir. I can not here and now present the great range of propositions deserving special consid- eration, nor can they be arrayed in consecutive order under the limitations of this paper ; but they are not inconsequent in them- selves. They all rise logically and consistently from the general principles which run through and inform the body of his specula- tions. Their alterative and corrective action upon the theories prevailing when he encountered the accepted authorities I must endeavor to exhibit as best I can. Instances : Money. — David Hume taught that the greater or less quantity of money in use is of no consequence, since the prices of commodities are always proportioned to the quantity of this medium of exchange. 12 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. Adam Smith says, " Money makes a small part of the capital of a nation, and always the most unprofitable part of it." J. S. Mill speaks to the same purpose, and nearly in the same words, except that he does not allow money any place in his definition of capital. Bastiat echoes these authors, for he is original in nothing, good or bad. Mr. Carey, on the contrary, treats money of every kind in use as the great " iostrument of association," and not in any condi- tions— in any age or country — the exact equivalent of commodity values, or serving only as counters or symbols, or, in the language of Smith, " dead capital ;" but, eminently and more than any other industrial agent, a producer of values. Mill allows himself to say, " Money, as money, satisfies no want, answers no purpose." This i& true among wild beasts, but not quite true among wild men. He might as well have said, you can not eat a guinea or make an over- coat of ten-pound notes. An author can not utter a nothingness in the pomp and pretension of a logical formula without serious dam- age to the inferences he draws from it. The man who treats the money in use as a mere dead multiplier, adder, or subtracter of prices will go only the farther into error the more he thinks about it. He is just capable of defining capital, as Mill does, to be only that portion of material things which is employed in further production. A schoolmaster is quite sure that a half dollar will buy as much wheat at half price as a dollar will when money is twice as plenty, but a thinker will not infer from such an instance that a half is, for all purposes, equal to a whole. For the place that money holds, and for its functions in commerce and in produc- tion, I must refer to Mr. Carey's own pages for explication. Currency applies, in common use, to all acceptable kinds of the circulating medium. The words money and currency are used re- spectively to distinguish the substances of which they consist, paper being sometimes the representative and often the substitute for coin ; but all these kinds are alike currency, for the reason that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other in use, though they be not identical in substance. There are, besides coins and circulating notes, many forms of credit that are money within the range of their proper use, serving all the purposes of an ex- change medium, and each better than any other in the sphere of its greater convenience. Mr. Carey's treatment of this subject au- thorizes the foregoing conclusions as being fairly drawn, I think, from his published opinions. He insists upon making our national currency non-exportable, in MEMOIR OP HENRY C. CAREY, 13 order to escape the disturbances produced by the action of other countries, if we adopt gold, for instance, in common with them, as the standard in domestic exchanges. It does not follow from his doctrine of value that our coined money should be bi-metallic, and that silver, without regard to the cost of its production, may be forced into equivalence with gold at any fixed proportion in weight. His object is to make our currency independent of foreign standards. He says, " With a sound national system, let foreigners take our gold for whatever balance of trade they can impose upon us, having no use among ourselves for any coin money except what we can retain under a wholesome foreign commerce." " What we most need to-day," he further says, " is the establishment of that monetary independence which results from maintaining absolute command over the machinery of exchange used within our borders, leaving to the gold dollar the performance of its duty of arranging for the settlement of balances throughout the world." As I understand him, his publications upon this subject, made in the last year of his life, have their true explanation in the principles here quoted from his earlier works, and all that he has written in support of the greenback currency and the remonetiza- tion of silver has this bearing and aim, and no other. It is something for such a man as Carey to concur so closely as he does with Bishop Berkeley, who, 150 years ago, said that "the money of a country ought to be non-exportable — that the trade with foreign countries should be barter of commodities for commodities." Berkeley goes still further, and in the description of a legitimate national currency anticipates with wonderful exactness our United States and national bank notes. Our author's doctrine in respect to banks of issue may be inferred from his ideas on money and currency. He says : " The trade in money equals the trade in all other commodities combined, because it really represents them all." (Clearly he here includes all the forms of money of account — all credit money — because coin and circulating notes, together, do not cover even a considerable frac- tion of the current exchanges.) On the subject of governmental interference in the management of the banking system, he holds the following language : " Careful examination of the systems of Great Britain, France, and the several States of the American Union, shows that steadiness and freedom march hand in hand together ; that regulation and restriction tend to promote accumulations in the hands of bankers to be used for their 14 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. own profit ; that to the use of their deposits and not to the circulat- ing note is due the cause of all the monetary crises of the country; and that in the adoption of a system which would cause increase of the banking capital, and not to restrictions of the inofiensive bank note, are we to look for any improvement in the future." (This doctrine was published in 1835, reproduced in his Principles of Polit- ical Economy in 1837, and maintained to the latest of his published opinions.) Upon the unlimited liability of shareholders for the debts of these institutions, as early as 1848 an article of Mr. Carey's, in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, was copied and commended by John Stuart Mill. This article opposed all responsibility of shareholders beyond the amount invested. The recent failure of the Glasgow Bank, with the widespread ruin of innocent parties, is an ample verification. The argument by the author rests mainly upon the equity of the proposition, but derives not a little aid from the fact that such unlimited liability prevents solid and prudent men from running its risks, and leaves the management to persons who will venture anything in a lottery of chances. Mr. Carey found fault with our national banking system for holding the shareholders lia- ble individually for all debts of the banks to an amount equal to, and in addition to, their investments. He very probably had some influence upon the introduction in England of the limited liability adopted recently in the policy of British corporations. Rent — Ricardo, in 1817, published his theory, which fell ac- ceptably into the " dismal science " of political economy, of which Malthus, McCulloch, and J. S. Mill were the chief apostles : this their theory is an a priori philosophy of despair, based upon an arithmetic of ruin — an irreligion of science — a denial of all that is wise and beneficent in Providence, and of all hope for humanity. Eicardo taught that cultivation begins, when land is first open to occupation, and population is scarce, with the richest soils, and thence of necessity proceeds, with the growth of numbers, steadily to poorer and still poorer, until at last all proportion must cease, and famine and death relieve the overburdened earth ; the end be- ing only postponed, as assassination is said to temper despotism, by a graduated massacre, in the forms of war, pestilence, and famine, which anticipate by performing the catastrophe in detail ; that is, if people did not die prematurely in series adjusted to the overruling law they would have to perish at last in the lump. The calculation of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, showing that under the MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 15 natural law of population, unrelieved by his preventive and correct- ive checks upon increase, the inhabitants of the earth would in a very few centuries stand as thick as herrings in a barrel from the surface of the globe to the moon ; and threescore and ten, which now limits the individual, would exterminate the whole race. These "corrective checks" he prescribes as remedies for the mistake of the Creator of men, under and subject to the unfit capabilities of the planet to which he has consigned them ! Malthus died so lately as 1824. McCulloch, who died unrepentant in 1863, follows Ricardo and adopts Malthus, in these words : " From the operation of fixed and permanent causes, the increasing sterility of the soil is sure, in the long run, to overmatch the improvements that occur in agricul- ture and machinery." And, last and worst of all, John Stuart Mill, claimed to be the philosopher of philanthropy, in his chapter on " the law of increase of production from land," published in the year of grace 1865, reproduces these horrors in all their hideous- ness — the over-population theory of Malthus, and the ever-declin- ing productiveness of land of Ricardo and McCulloch ; and he assumes them with such simple confidence in their truth as dis- penses with any attempt at their demonstration! By the way, these four forlorn philosophers were all British born and to the manner bred, which helps to show that a dot of an island which a tea-cup would cover on an ordinary-sized map of the civilized world, and which has no remedy for its own home system but the banish- ment of the paupers which it makes, yet undertakes to think for all the nations of the earth in matters economical, and to guide and govern the policy of all outsiders, is quite too narrow to afford a fulcrum for such a lever of Archimedes. Mr. Carey met this atrocious theory in 1848 with a demonstration of its falsity that has scarcely a parallel in the history of science, physical or moral. By an elaborate survey of the settlement and progressive cultivation of the United States, Mexico, the West In- dies, South America, Great Britain, France, Italy, Greece, India, and the Pacific Islands, and, carrying the inquiry down into element- ary particulars, and testing the law inferred from the more general phenomena, by applying it to the progress of occupation and culti- vation of individual farms within the reach of present observation, he established the fact, historically, that men invariably commence their improvements upon the uplands and thinner and lighter lands, and thence descend toward the deeper and richer molds of the val- leys and water- courses, as population and wealth, or abundance of 16 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. labor and excellence of machinery, qualify them for clearing and draining the low lands. In further corroboration of the law inferred from these facts, and in proof that men do not choose to encounter more than their match in pioneer enterprise, he cites the fact that the richest lands iu Eu- rope and Asia have been abandoned just as the prosperity of the people has declined, being compelled by their increasing poverty to escape from the rank fertility of the soil, now no longer under their control, and take refuge in the poorer lands, which are better graded to their enfeebled means of control and culture. Moreover, it is the swamps and savannas of the continents that hold the treasured riches of the neighboring hills in reserve for human subsistence until the force of wealth and numbers shall be able to disinfect and subdue them ; just as the mountains are the storehouses of supplies of the precious and useful metals, awaiting the times and conditions of surrender. This doctrine of the occupation of land corresponds exactly to the fact that men everywhere begin with the poorest agencies and machinery, in tools,- roads, commerce, and trade, and proceed up- ward and onward with their advance in numbers and wealth through the better toward the best. So down goes the boasted theory of rent with all its mischievous consequences in speculative science. This one achievement of our author would have been enough to establish his claim to originality. Mr. Col well says of it : " Mr. Carey has effectually refuted the more popular European theories of rent. That is a real service to science." This theory of rent has inferences not less beneficent than beautiful. They may be traced into — The law of Distribution of the proceeds of industrial production, which follows like a doxology to a hymn of praise. He meets the problem of the distribution of wealth with the general proposition that there is a law of relation between the quantity of capital and the quality of the labor employed — a law connecting every increase and every diminution of the former with a corresponding improvement or deterioration of the latter ; or, in other words, which have an ulterior significance of great importance, marrying the active and passive agents of production together " for better for worse." This fundamental law he resolves into the following propositions, which are either proved by their simplest statement, or are capable of easy verification : MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 17 1st. Labor gains increased productiveness in the proportion that capital contributes to its efficiency. 2d. Every improvement in the efficiency of labor, so gained by the aid of capital, is so much increased facility of accumulation. 3d. The increased power of accumulating capital lessens the value in labor of that already existing, bringing it more easily within the purchasing power of present labor; because no com- modity can command the value of more labor than is required to produce a similar thing, or a perfect substitute, at the time of the exchange. Just here it is to be noted that no existing doctrine of political economy recognized among its students meets the requirements of the subsisting dispute between labor and capital. None of its au- thors attempts to ascertain a ratio of distribution of the results to the unlike contributors to the work of conversion of materials into forms of use. Curiously enough, even Mr. Carey's law of distribu- tion must be classed among final causes or those ends to which the providential policy of human agencies tends, but with which the in- ductive method will not concern itself, however frequently it is com- pelled to resort to it in the dark corners of research. If the system has not a maxim or a directory rule or even attempt to interfere in the settlement of the respective claims of labor and capital upon logical principles — if it can do nothing to compose the great disturb- ance which threatens the rights, the property, and the peace of soci- ety, it must content itself to dwell in abstractions until it becomes fit to enter into actual service, and until then forego the name of science, occupy itself with expediencies, and worry its way as best it can among contingencies. The British Parliament may settle by authority the question of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, but it is evidently not a match for the problems of wages, pauperism, popular education, currency, or international trade, with a crowd of other things of urgent practical importance. The authorities, looking for a law of distribution among skilled and unskilled laborers, superintendents, inventors, and capitalists, have usually dropped down upon the rule of lawlessness, happily expressed in the phrase Laissez faire, laissez passer, which means, in curbstone English, " Let her rip." They talk vaguely about " supply and demand " as a regulator ; or, audaciously, as Bastiat does when he ventures to say that "Competition is democratic in its essence; the most progressive, the most equalizing, and the most communistic of all the provisions to which Providence has confided the direction 18 MEMOIR OF HENET C. CAREY. of human progress." So, so ! the everlasting riot of a divinely au- thorized cut-throat strife between capital and labor, and between laborers and capitalists among themselves, and against each other, is declared to be the providential order of human business affairs, that theorists may not be required to find a remedy for the dis- order. Organized communities settle the questions involved in copartner- ship, as such questions are settled in poor-houses and penitentiaries, by making arbitrary provision for the prime necessities of life, but repressing all aspiration and ambition by denying their incentives. Co-operative industrials may determine shares in products by some conventiqnal arrangement, but no rule of apportionment of interests has ever been produced for the solution of the grand problem of equitable distribution in the contributory work of money, heads, hearts, and hands. Population, or the Law Governing the Increase of the Numbers of Mankind. — In the discussion of this subject our author adopts the doctrine of Herbert Spencer's dissertation given in the Westminster Review for April, 1852, with important addi- tional proofs and an extended application, making of it an over- whelming refutation of Malthus, Mill, Dr. Chalmers, and the un- reflecting notions of common observers, who are prone to think their superficial experiences the only test of truth ; not reflecting that the supposed disproportion in the provision for human subsist- ence to the assumed normal rate of propagation is a direct impeach- ment of providential arrangements and adjustments, which occur nowhere else in creation. It is remarkable that the school of theo- rists which Mr. Carey everywhere opposes, as well on the question of population as on all the fundamentals of their philosophizings, oc- cupy themselves with the indorsement and decoration of the com- mon errors of the ignorant and the unthinking, and so give a sort of scientific sanction and sanctity to opinions which a true philoso- phy would correct. The perfectly successful solution of this great problem, whicli underlies the whole edifice of political economy, alike of the false and the true, may be found in his Social Scienee, vol. ii., pp. 265-306. Emigration. — In 1859, after the publication of his Principles of Social Science, he fell upon a new and complementary view of the law and history of colonization, perfectly harmonizing with and rounding up his doctrine of the occupation of the earth. He an- nounced this discovery in a brief letter in the Boston Transcript MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 19 (November 26, 1859). In substance it contradicts the idea that men are individually cosmopolitan, but, on the contrary, are gov- erned in their migrations by a distributive impulse which provides for the settlement and occupation of all the habitable portions of the globe, showing historically that the emigration of peoples is ruled by climatic laws, and follows the isothermal lines of their several nativities. A demonstration, in facts and figures, was pub- lished in Forney's Fress (December 22, 1859). For ease of refer- ence, I may be permitted to refer to Questions of the Day, by Will- iam Elder, page 331. Bishop Berkeley, in his oft-repeated line, " Westward (not north- ward nor southward) the course of empire takes its way," states the general fact, but he did not know the governing law, or advert to its providential purpose. New as the speculation or theory was, it passed into instant acceptance with public speakers and journalists, and has already fitted itself into common opinion by its ready ex- planation of well-known facts, as familiarly as an old acquaintance. This subject does not occur in any of his standard publications — it occurred to him after they were issued. Elementary Harmonies. — The closely interlinked questions of population, occupation of land, colonization, theory of rent, progress- ive substitution and improvement of the supplies of human life, with the overruling law of the distribution of wealth among the several classes engaged in the world's work — in all these foundation facts of a true theory of the social system Mr. Carey finds unity of interests and harmony of tendencies and of ultimate issues where the school which he opposes alleged a necessary antagonism between capital and labor, and between nature's policy and man's necessities. In his revelation of the laws of man and his terrestrial conditions there is no curse brooding over every scene of prosperity ; no plagues of war, pestilence, and famine in leash, ready to spring upon the prey at its boundary point of better fortunes. Instead, we have a sun- burst of light and warmth, dispersing the darkness of a mole-eyed philosophy, which, like Job sitting in the ashes, scraping his sores with a potsherd and railing invectives against Providence, " dark- ens counsel by words without knowledge." If any one asks, did he, like Enoch, walk with God, or, like Abra- ham, was he the friend of God, I must answer that I am not a heart-searcher or rein-trier of the living or the dead, but his works everywhere justify the ways of God to man, and are all alive with love and service to his fellow-men. 20 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY, Unity of Law. — In October, 1872, (the 79th year of his age,) he published the last of his works in volume form — an octavo of 440 pages. He styles the book The Unity of Law, as Exhibited in the Relations of Physical, Social, Mental, and Moral Science, with the motto, "Variety is unity in perfection." He evidently intended this treatise to be a summary of the general results of his life's labors. All that can be said of the centripetal drift of this work is that the striking analogies and obvious coherency of the thousand and one established propositions of his studies and discoveries, natur- ally enough, betrayed him into the persuasion that they met with one consent in a supreme governing principle, which, at least, prom- ised a complete organism, a body corporate of demonstrated truths, constituting a science of its subjects. But economic phenomena re- sult from a multitude of diverse laws, and nothing is gained in their study by clustering them into one central conception except the manifested harmony of their relations. It is obvious that science arises out of principles uniform, universal, and eternal, and therefore can not pervade the expediencies which disorder com- pels. Absolute law must give way to the contingencies which dis- turb its normal operation. The suitable is the available, in the spheres of being that have liberty in their movements, until liberty resolves itself into order. What are called general principles in the theory of human nature are only hudders or cap -sheaves in the harvest-gatherings of inquiry. They cover a multitude of distinct truths. A vice running through the philosophizings of the mass of mod- ern inquirers by the inductive system flows from the fact that they are all the while endeavoring to apply the method of the orderly universe — the obedient material, whose laws are constant and in- variable—to departments of mixed material and moral subjects, of which the inductive system is utterly incapable, being in its nature and powers limited to the category of dead matter and its mechan- ics. Lord Bacon was under the strongest temptation to exaggerate the method and laws of study with which his great name is uni- versally associated, but he took care to warn the world of his disci- ples that " the experimental or inductive system of reasoning and research must be bounded by religion, else it will be subject to deceit and delusion," an opinion well warranted and a caution well authorized by the world's experience in politics, jurisprudence, metaphysics, and all the social philosophies that have by turns MEMOIR OP HENRY C. CAREY. 21 been tried upon human societies. Most particularly unfortunate have been the long list of recluse toilers who have attempted to apply the principles of the abstract to the unsettled concrete in the affairs of nations, the speculations of the logician to the prob- lems of the statesman, which have always resulted in hybridity '•nth its consequent infertility. J. B. Say, the methodizer of Adam Smith, j&nding and feeling the unfitness of his general principles / for the management of particular interests, failed — that is, avoided the treatment of one of the grand divisions of his subject, which he calls "public economy or that of a nation," as distinguished from his other branch, " international, or political, economy." Mr. Carey seems sometimes to think that political economy tends to eventuate in a science self-supporting and logically competent to the solution of all the problems which stand staring and wondering at the history and hopes of man in society ; but whoever will study his great work, The Principles of Social Science, will discover that he consciously failed to devise a system of political government from the totality of the special principles which he had so successfully established. His last chapter, the fiftieth of that work, is a virtual and, as I happen to know, it was a conscious surrender of the attempt. It is made up of aphorisms which have no tendency to settle the logical form of civil government. The unity or universality of law did not helj) him to resolve the questions of representative govern- ment ; the right or duty of government in the matter of popular education, its limits and kinds ; the descent of property ; the right and limits of governmental jurisdiction in relation to capital and labor, or any of the functions assumed by monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. All this for the simple reason that civil government is in itself incapable of a scientific order, but is, and must be, guided and authorized by established custom and prevailing necessity, and is only a system at best, so far as it is even that — a system of expedi- encies which must adapt the highest perspective right to the variant conditions of society ; that is, it must do the best it can through a series of blundering compromises between the absolute right and the presently practicable, until the available shall issue in the true — until such order in the afiairs of men in society shall be inaugur- ated as will take care of itself and need no remedial intervention of political government. But, notwithstanding the frequent recur- rence of the " unity" or " oneness of law" in his books and in their indexes, spoken of as pervading alike the moral, social, and phys- ical worlds, an unfavorable construction of these phrases is checked 22 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. by his own explicit definition and limitation of the idea in applica- tion. It will be found in the volume specially devoted to its development, at page 124, where he says : " The unity of which we speak, as in all other instances in which the idea is used among men, is not identity or sameness, but the harmony of correspond- ence— unity by relation, fitness, or co-operation, efiected by such continuity of character and force of all substances through all spheres of being, and all adaptations of use, as alone can constitute a universe of the atoms and individualities which it embraces — of that one entire system ' whose body nature is, and God the soul.' " Our author's works upon detached topics, and published only in pamphlet form, deserve more attention in a memoir than to be merely inventoried by their titles, but we can give them here only the briefest statement of their purport. He was constant in his resistance to the repeated attempts to saddle the country with ax\. international copyright law. In like manner, and on similar grounds of principle and policy, he was resolute in resistance and untiring in labor against the persistent endeavor of the Free Traders at home and abroad to establish what they called reciprocity of trade with Canada, which was successful at the earliest agitation of the project in Congress. The experience of the effects of the act which established it fully justified his hostility to the enactment, and fulfilled his predictions of the mischievous one-sidedness of its provisions. It was abrogated in 1866 for the very reasons which he urged against its adoption. A protracted controversy with the Camden and Amboy Railroad monopoly had a triumphant result in a great abatement of the abuses complained of For instruction of permanent use in the settlement of the questions of public policy involved in these discussions, the inquirer must be referred to the list of his minor publications given in the appendix to this paper. Their perusal, besides the value of their teachings, will serve to show that he was ever a watchful and zealous lab