Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/366

350 POLITICAL ECONOMY attained by the Greeks than is reached in the writings of this great thinker. Both his gifts and his situation eminently favoured him in the treatment of these subjects. He combined in rare measure a capacity for keen observation with generalizing power, and sobriety of judgment with ardour for the public good. All that was original or significant in the political life of Hellas had run its course before his time or under his own eyes, and he had thus a large basis of varied experience on which to ground his conclu sions. Standing outside the actual movement of contemporary public life, he occupied the position of thoughtful spectator and impartial judge. He could not indeed, for reasons already stated, any more than other Greek speculators, attain a fully normal attitude in these researches. Nor could he pass beyond the sphere of what is now called statical sociology ; the idea of laws of the historical development of social phenomena he scarcely apprehended, except in some small degree in relation to the succession of political forms. But there is to be found in his writings a remarkable body of sound and valuable thoughts on the constitution and working of the social organism. The special notices of economic subjects are neither so numerous nor so detailed as we should desire. Like all the Greek thinkers, he recognizes but one doctrine of the state, under which ethics, politics proper, and economics take their place as departments, bearing to each other a very close relation, and having indeed their lines of demarcation from each other not very distinctly marked. When wealth comes under consideration, it is studied not as an end in itself, but with a view to the higher elements and ultimate aims of the collective life. The origin of society he traces, not to economic necessities, but to natural social impulses in the human constitution. The nature of the social union, when thus established, being determined by the partly spontaneous partly systematic combination of diverse activities, he respects the independence of the latter whilst seeking to effect their convergence. He therefore opposes himself to the suppression of personal freedom and initiative, and the excessive sub ordination of the individual to the state, and rejects the community of property and wives proposed by Plato for his governing class. The principle of private property he regards as deeply rooted in man, and the evils which are alleged to result from the correspond ing social ordinance he thinks ought really to be attributed either to the imperfections of our nature or to the vices of other public insti tutions. Community of goods must, in his view, tend to neglect of the common interest and to the disturbance of social harmony. Of the several classes which provide for the different wants of the society, those who are occupied directly with its material needs the immediate cultivators of the soil, the mechanics and artificers are excluded from any share in the government of the state, as being without the necessary leisure and cultivation, and apt to be debased by the nature of their occupations. In a celebrated passage he propounds a theory of slavery, in which it is based on the uni versality of the relation between command and obedience, and on the natural division by which the ruling is marked off from the subject race. He regards the slave as having no independent will, but as an "animated tool" in the hands of his master ; and in his subjection to such control, if only it be intelligent, Aristotle holds that the true wellbeing of the inferior as well as of the superior is to be found. This view, so shocking to our modern sentiment, is of course not personal to Aristotle ; it is simply the theoretic pre sentation of the facts of Greek life, in which the maintenance of a body of citizens pursuing the higher culture and devoted to the tasks of war and government was founded on the systematic degra dation of a wronged and despised class, excluded from all the higher offices of human beings and sacrificed to the maintenance of a special type of society. The methods of economic acquisition are divided by Aristotle into two, one of which has for its aim the appropriation of natural products and their application to the material uses of the household ; under this head come hunting, fishing, cattle-rearing, and agricul ture. With this "natural economy," as it may be called, is, in some sense, contrasted the other method to which Aristotle gives the name of "chrematistic," in which an active exchange of pro ducts goes on, and money comes into operation as its medium and regulator. A certain measure of this " money economy," as it may be termed in opposition to the preceding and simpler form of industrial life, is accepted by Aristotle as a necessary extension of the latter, arising out of increased activity of intercourse, and satisfying real wants. But its development on the great scale, founded on the thirst for enjoyment and the unlimited desire of gain, he condemns as unworthy and corrupting. Though his views on this subject appear to be principally based on moral grounds, there are some indications of his having entertained the erroneous opinion held by the physiocrats of the 18th century, that agricul ture alone (with the other branches of natural economy) is truly productive, whilst the other kinds of industry, which either modify the products of nature or distribute them by way of exchange, however convenient and useful they may be, make no addition to the wealth of the community. He rightly regards money as altogether" different from wealth, illustrating the difference by the story of Midas. And he seems to have seen that money, though its use rests on a social conven tion, must be composed of a inaterial possessing an independent value of its own. That his views on capital were indistinct appears from his famous argument against interest on loans, which is based on the idea that money is barren and cannot produce money. Like the other Greek social philosophers, Aristotle recommends to the care of Governments the preservation of a due proportion between the extent of the civic territory and its population, and relies on pre-nuptial continence, late marriages, and the preven tion or destruction of births for the due limitation of the number of citizens, the insufficiency of the latter being dangerous to the independence and its superabundance to the tranquillity and good order of the state. The Romans. Notwithstanding the eminently practical, realistic, and utilitarian character of the Romans, there was no energetic exercise of their powers in the economic field; they developed no large and many-sided system of pro duction and exchange. Their historic mission was military and political, and the national energies were mainly devoted to the public service at home and in the field. To agriculture, indeed, much attention was given from the earliest times, and on it was founded the existence of the hardy population which won the first steps in the march to universal dominion. But in the course of their history the cultivation of the soil by a native yeomanry gave place to the introduction on a great scale of slave labourers, acquired by their foreign conquests ; and for the small properties of the earlier period were substituted the vast estates the latifundia which, in the judgment of Pliny, were the ruin of Italy. The industrial arts and commerce (the latter, at least when not conducted on a great scale) they regarded as ignoble pursuits, unworthy of free citi zens ; and this feeling of contempt was not merely a pre judice of narrow or uninstructed minds, but was shared by Cicero (De Off. i. 42) and others among the most liberal spirits of the nation. As might be expected from the want of speculative originality among the Romans, there is little evidence of serious theoretic inquiry on economic subjects. Their ideas on these as on other social questions were for the most part borrowed from the Greek thinkers. Such traces of economic thought as do occur are to be found in (1) the philosophers, (2) the writers de re rustica, and (3) the jurists. It must, however, be admitted that many of the passages in these authors referred to by those who assert the claim of the Romans to a more pro minent place in the history of the science often contain only obvious truths or vague generalities. In the philosophers, whom Cicero, Seneca, and the elder Pliny sufficiently represent (the last indeed being rather a learned encyclopaedist or polyhistor than a philosopher), we find a. general consciousness of the decay of industry, the relaxation of morals, and the growing spirit of self-indulgence amongst their con tempo raries, who are represented as deeply tainted with the imported vices of the conquered nations. This sentiment, both in these writers and in the poetry and miscellaneous literature of their times, is accompanied by a half-factitious enthusiasm for agricul ture and an exaggerated estimate of country life and of early Roman habits, which are principally, no doubt, to be regarded as a form of protest against the evils of the present, and, from this point of view, remind us of the declamations of Rousseau in a not dissimilar age. But there is little of large or just thinking on the economic evils of the time and their proper remedies. Pliny, still further in the spirit of Rousseau, is of opinion that the introduction of gold as a medium of exchange was a thing to be deplored, and that the age of barter was preferable to that of money. He expresses views on the necessity of preventing the efflux of money similar to those of the modern mercantile school views which Cicero also, though not so clearly, appears to have entertained. Cato, Varro, and Columella concern themselves more with the technical precepts of husbandry than with the general conditions of industrial suc cess and social wellbeing. But the two last named have the great merit of having seen and proclaimed the superior value of free to slave labour, and Columella is convinced that to the use of the latter the decline of the agricultural economy of the Romans was in a great measure to be attributed. These three writers agree in the belief that it was chiefly by the revival and reform of agricul

ture that the threatening inroads of moral corruption could be