Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/653

AN INTRODUCTORY LECTUR]? ON POLITICAL ECONOMY 631 its presence escapes attention. There occurs the difficulty of perceiving all the data which should be taken into account in our reasoning. For, as it has been said in a well-known essay by John Stuart Mill one of those who have rendered it super- fluous at the present clay to discourse at length upon the method of political economy 'Against the danger of overlooki?g some- thing, neither strength of understanding nor intellectual culti- vation can be more than a very imperfect protection.' As an instance in which eminent theorists may have omitted a relevant circumstance may be taken the question whether it is possible for trade unionists by standing out for a higher than the market rate of wages to benefit themselves permanently without injuring other workmen. The negative answer which has some- times been given omits the consideration that an increase of wages tends to increased efficiency, and increased efficiency to increase of the produce to be distributed among all the parties. There are those who attach much weight to this consideration. How much weight should be assigned to it is a .question of a sort which often battles the theorist:to determine the quantity, after you have assigned the quality or direction. of an agency. The possibility that diminished hours of work will not cause a proportional diminution of work done may be instanced both as a material consideration which has often been left vat of account by serious reasoners in old times; and one of which it is. not easy to determine the force, as well as the direction. Against 'the danger of overlooking something,' no remedy can be prescribed except to cultivate open-mincledness and can- dour, and above all sympathy, the absence of which has aggravated the most serious mistakes which have been committed in political economy. I refer particularly to errors relating to the remunera- tion of the wage-earning classes. Slips accidentally committed by the great theorists through carelessness or the passion for simplicity would probably have been far less serious, if those who interpreted political economy in the press and in parliament and applied it in the conduct of their business, had entered more fully into the life and conditions, views and wants of the wage- earners. A generous caution would have softened the harsh tenets that the introduction of machinery could not ever be detrimental to workmen, that the Factory Acts were a mischievous inter- ference with the liberty of the labour-market, that workmen could not possibly benefit themselves by union. I would dwell longer on this all-important topic--the conducivehess of good-feeling to wisdom if I were able to convey a feeling by a discourse. I can