Year: 1867
Type: book
Abstract: The Government of India has been an Opium Merchant for years, with great advantage to the revenues of the State ; it is still a Tea Merchant with very great prospective benefit to its sub- jects both European and Native, and to the commercial interests of both England and India ; and would that, in the latter sense, the Government of India were also a Cotton Merchant, is a sentiment that I am sure will be heartily echoed by every one tvho feels for the lamentable circumstances of the starving Operatives of the manufacturing districts of England, and who takes any real interest in the welfare of India.A historian tells us that an Emperor once set fire to his Capital and sung an ode while the flames reduced it to ashes.It is not true.Nor have we here a parallel.Yet, I honestly confess, that the melancholy reflection such an idea gives rise to, involuntarily occurs to me when I observe people in the middle of the nineteenth century, while grim Famine is stalking outside their doors, with nothing more practical to propose, than a discussion on the abstract principles of political economy, which have nothing whatever to do with the question !*When a very much greater quantity of any commodity is thrown on a market, than the buyers in that market require, or will readily carry off, as * This is precisely what the Bengal Board of Revenue did when a million of people were perishing for want in Orissa last year : January, 1867.intelligence to enable each to know what is best for his own interests, must be premised.Neither the one nor the other can be predicted of Indian traders generally.Nor would I be understood to restrict the circumstances under which conclusions drawn from premises so based, will be true, to these cases only.The laws and conditions by which proposi- tions in Economic Science are determined, must be recognized, accepted, and acted on by both parties in their dealings, or they will be, in a great measure, if not wholly, inoperative.And this must be ob- vious : for, to take a case in point, suppose our friend Smith, in full prescience, himself, of the remedies which the principles of his science suggest for the indisposition or malady under which his trade may be suffering-, quietly to recline in his easy chair, in the confident assurance that his distant relative Jones, who alone possesses the means of relief, will, for his own advantage, at once hurry to his assistance and, from ignorance of Smith's deplorable circumstances, or failing to see that his interest lies in relieving his sufferings, or from any cause whatever, Jones does not do so, Smith's trade will, in ordinary course, languish, and ultimately die.But leaving* this unfortunate victim of sound principles in the slough in which he has been involved by his own folly, let us attempt some diagnosis of the disease of his trade.It is not very long ago since the elder Smith, Adam Smith, to g-ather air, then leaped from his stand, and in an instant dropped into the lake,' all have similarly come to grief.And such no doubt, to the end of time, will be the fate of all, who by a misapplication of the abstract principles of Political Economy to the pur- poses of purely speculative reasoning-, attempt to solve questions, essentially practical in their nature, and inseparably bound up with the social condition, and progress of the human race.CHAPTER II.
Source: Williams and Norgate eBooks
Author: William Nassau Lees
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W580686892