nce of a given relation between supply and demand, other than
the instinctive, or (directly) natural, one.

Similarly, vulgar political economy asserts for a "law" that wages are
determined by competition.

Now I pay my servants exactly what wages I think necessary to make them
comfortable. The sum is not determined at all by competition; but
sometimes by my notions of their comfort and deserving, and sometimes by
theirs. If I were to become penniless to-morrow, several of them would
certainly still serve me for nothing.

In both the real and supposed cases the so-called "law" of vulgar
political economy is absolutely set at defiance. But I cannot set the
law of gravitation at defiance, nor determine that in my house I will
not allow ice to melt, when the temperature is above thirty-two degrees.
A true law outside of my house, will remain a true one inside of it. It
is not, therefore, a law of Nature that wages are determined by
competition. Still less is it a law of State, or we should not now be
disputing about it publicly, to the loss of many millions of pounds to
the country. The fact which vulgar economists have been weak enough to
imagine a law, is only that, for the last twenty years a number of very
senseless persons have attempted to determine wages in that manner; and
have, in a measure, succeeded in occasionally doing so.

Both in definition of the elements of wealth, and in statement of the
laws which govern its distribution, modern political economy has been
thus absolutely incompetent, or absolutely false. And the following
treatise is not, as it has been asserted with dull pertinacity, an
endeavour to put sentiment in the place of science; but it contains the
exposure of what insolently pretended to be a science; and the
definition, hitherto unassailed--and I do not fear to assert,
unassailable--of the material elements with which political economy has
to deal, and the moral principles in which it consists; being not itself
a science, but "a system of conduct founded on the sciences, and
impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture." Which is
only to say, that industry, frugality, and discretion, the three
foundations of economy, are moral qualities, and cannot be attained
without moral discipline: a flat truism, the reader may think, thus
stated, yet a truism which is denied both vociferously, and in all
endeavour, by the entire populace of Europe; who are at present hopeful
of obtain