onceded by the best informed. They come, however, recommended to us,
not merely by the powerful arguments and copious facts by which they are
supported, but by the peculiar turn of mind, and varied qualifications,
of the author by whom they are supported. We have long been of opinion,
that it is the separation of political economy from history which is the
chief cause of the numerous errors into which, since the days of Adam
Smith, its professors have been betrayed, and the general discredit into
which the science itself has fallen with a large portion of the thinking
men in the community. This effect has taken place, as it was very natural
it should in the infancy of a science, from the habit into which
philosophers and men of abstract thought were led, of reasoning on human
affairs as if they were the movement of inanimate bodies, and considering
only their own arguments, not the illustration of their truth or falsehood
which experience has afforded. This habit is peculiarly conspicuous in the
advocates of free-trade, the reciprocity system, and Mr Malthus's
doctrines on pauperism and the poor-laws; they rest on abstract arguments,
and are perfectly indifferent to the refutation of their principles which
every day's experience is affording. Probably the whole present generation
of political economists must go to their graves before this general error
is eradicated from the human mind. It is an error, however, of the most
fatal kind, and which, while it is persevered in, must render political
economy one of the greatest of the many curses, which the eating of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge has let loose upon mankind. It is like a
system of medicine, formed, as such systems are in every age, not on
experience or observation, but on the theories of certain physicians on
the structure of the human body, and the proper way of developing its
various functions.

Many a patient in every age has been killed, before the absurdity of such
theories has been put down by the experience and common-sense of mankind.
And many a nation, in Sismondi's opinion, will perish, before the nostrums
of its state physicians have been expelled from the general opinion of
man.

It is his profound and varied historical information, which has given
Sismondi his deep distrust of nearly all the conclusions of modern
political economy, and inspired him with the gloomy presentiments with
which he is filled, in regard to the tendency of society unde