the demands of agriculture.' A difference in local geological conditions is in like manner the proximate cause which makes the price of agricultural labour in the Walloon provinces double what it is in the Flemish; and the difference has an important bearing on the theory of wages propounded by Ricardo and McCulloch.* What is particularly striking in the case of Belgium is the extreme sharpness of the division. A few miles north of Liége, the Flemish farm labourer earns hardly half what the Walloon does in the neighbourhood of the town; yet the Fleming is usually the better labourer of the two, and in fact does all kinds of work connected with the ground, much of a navvy's work for example, better than most of his French-tongued countryman. The Walloon on the other hand can reproach him that he displays small talent for manufacture, and that he has neither the wit to learn the French language, which would much enlarge his industrial sphere, nor the enterprise to double his wages as an agricultural labourer by migration. The Flemish provinces too are at no great distance from the mines of Liége and Hainaut, and might at small cost import all the coal and iron required for manufactures on a great scale. We must therefore look beyond mines for an explanation of the low value of the Fleming's spade work. What has been said of Lombardy, 'La Lombardie n'est pas toutà-fait désespagnolisée,' is no less true of Flanders. Spanish oppression crushed its manufactures, trampled

See further on the diversities of Wages in England, the Appendix to the present Volume, entitled 'Political Economy and the Rate of Wages.'

out most of its intellectual life, and left its peasantry under the dominion of a clergy who regard ignorance as much less dangerous than knowledge, and the industrial uses of the French language as too slight an advantage to compensate for the acquisition of new ideas. It is not race then that makes the Fleming at once an ill-paid labourer and a cultivateur d'élite, or the Walloon a manufacturer, with much less genius for farming, yet earning more by it; for the Fleming was once more famous in manufactures than the Walloon; and though now the least migratory of human beings, he was the great industrial emigrant of the middle ages, as English history attests. Nor, on the other hand, can he claim a complete monopoly of the art of husbandry, for there are parts of Hainaut now, where the farming rivals that of East Flanders. If, again, the doctrine be well founded that there was no original diversity of race, we may find in both Fleming and Walloon conclusive refutation of theories which trace the different industrial development of different nations to diversities of race. These theories mistake effects for causes, treating the effects of different histories, different laws, and different physical geography on different communities as manifestations of inherent and original diversity; and they ignore altogether the yet greater diversities exhibited by the same community at different periods of its career, and by its different classes at the same period. The doctrine of race as applied to interpret social or economic characteristics, is at best, in short, a mere speculation, which it is altogether unphilosophical to draw any positive conclusions from.

APPENDIX.

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE RATE OF

WAGES.*

THE premisses of the political economist,' says Mr. Senior, whose conception of the science is that of an influential school of economists, consist of a very few general propositions, the result of observation or consciousness, and scarcely requiring proof or even formal statement; and his inferences are, if he has reasoned correctly, as certain as his premisses.' According to this view, political economy not only is purely a deductive science, but its deductions follow from premisses obtained without labour of investigation, lying on the surface of the mind or of things; and they need no verification by comparison with facts; indeed Mr. Senior especially protested against its being considered by continental economists a science avide de faits. Considering how numerous and diverse are the things comprised under the denomination of wealth, how various the passions and motives relating to them, how numerous and complicated the conditions which control their production and distribution, it does appear to us amazing that it should ever have been thought possible to construct a science of such a subject with little or no inspection of the phenomena whose laws it aims to interpret. The shortest compass within which the ultimate problem of all science can be comprised, the fewest premisses with which the investigators ought to rest satisfied as complete, Mr. Mill

* Reprinted from Fraser's Magazine, July 1868.

defines thus: What are the fewest and simplest assumptions, which being granted, the whole existing order of nature would result? or, What are the fewest general propositions from which all uniformities which exist might be deduced?'* Every great advance in the progress of science is a step, Mr. Mill adds, towards the solution of this problem; and if this be a proper definition of the general problem of scientific investigation, and political economy be a branch of it, it surely follows that its fundamental laws ought to be obtained by careful induction, that assumptions from which an unreal order of things and unreal uniformities are deduced cannot be regarded as final or adequate; and that facts, instead of being irrelevant to the economist's reasoning, are the phenomena from which he must infer his general principles, and by which he ought constantly to verify his deductions.† The main object of this article is to examine the conditions which govern the great department of the production and distribution of wealth, indicated by the word wages; but it is hoped that the investigation may not only elicit some information on that special subject, but also afford evidence of the necessity of studying every economic problem in conformity with the universal canons of the logic of science-of accepting no assumptions as finally established without proof, none as adequate from which conclusions untrue as matters of fact are found to result, and no chains of deduction from hypothetical premisses as possessing more than hypothetical truth, until verified by observation.

The theory of wages propounded by economic writers in general, though rejected by Mr. Thornton, and subjected to important practical modifications and corrections by Mr. Mill, Mr. Fawcett, and Mr. Waley, may be said to consist of two propositions. (1.) That there is a general wages fund, *System of Logic. Book iii., chaps, 4 and 13.

† Mr. Mill's definition is: Writers on political economy profess to investigate the nature of wealth, and the laws of its production and distribution, including directly or remotely the operation of all the causes by which the condition of mankind or of any society of human beings in respect to this universal object of desire is made prosperous or the reverse.'-Principles of Political Economy; Preliminary Remarks.