The Press.
London, England, 1858-01-23 00:00:00

THE

Nittrature.

The Elements of Political Economy. By
Henry Dunning Macleod. London: Long-

mans.
Ma. MACLEOe3 book has the great merit of
stating very clearly the relation of credit to
currency, and exposing most satisfactorily the
errors on which the Act of 1844 is founded.
But as a system of political economy it cannot
take a high place among the great works of
the present day. It is both defective and
redundant. It contracts into the smallest
possible space many of the largest questions
of that science, and it expands very unduly
the questions which the difficult art of bank-
ing has recently brought to the surface.
Moreover, Mr Macleod, though often happy
and accurate in his own modes of illustration
and statement, has the great defect of exag-
gerating the inaccuracies of expression, of
which great thinkers are so often guilty, into
blunders of conception of which there is no
reason to suppose them guilty at all ; and
while absorbed in delighted contemplation of
his own superior precision, to overstate very
inadmissibly the real extent of his opponents'
errors, and even sometimes to overlook a truth
in the looser and more practical state-
ment which his own formal theorems have
omitted to include. The book is sadly diffuse,
and somewhat ostentatiously scientific, refer-
ring to "rigid Baconian inductions" so often
and on occasion of such slight discoveries, or
improvements on the discoveries of others
that we get at last inured to expect but little'
result from the large scientific promises held
forth to us. Often, however, Mr. Macleod does
explain with great clearness and precision
what had seldom been so well explained
before, though we must say that his
assertion in the preface with regard to
banking appears to us, after a careful exami-
nation of his book, as preposterous as it is
startling:—
I have carefully read (he says) every word that ever
was said in Parliament upon it ; innumerable pamphlets ;
quantities of articles in newspapers—and I can only say
this, that not a single speaker in Parliament, not a single
witness before a parliamentary committee, not a single
pamphleteer, not a single writer of a newspaper article
showed that he had the most distant conception of the
ordinary routine business of banking.
This sort of language almost condemns itself.
It would have led us to form a much lower
notion of the book than it at all deserved.
Had it been so lonely in its theory, it must
have been either a marvel of science or a
marvel of folly, and the latter of course is
usually more likely to be combined with arro-
gance than the former. Such, however, is not
the case. The best part of the book is not
substantially new at all, and is superior to
other books only in clearness and precision of
statement. The most novel part is not true.
On the whole it makes some points clearer
than before, and from a too great idolatry of
scientific neatness it makes other points more
cloudy than before.
The two great discoveries which Mr. Mac-
leod conceives himself to have made are—
first, that the law of value is dependent en•
tirely and in all cases on the relation of
demand to supply, and quite independent of
cost of production ; and, secondly, that cur
rency (including under that term money, bank-
notes, bills of exchange, and cheques) is
simply the representation of " transferable
debt.
It would take us far beyond the limits that
our space will allow to go fully into the
grounds alleged by Mr. • Macleod for these
definitions. We believe that the first involves
real error, and that the second, though true,
when explained, involves no greater novelty
than the application of a new general term,
not perhaps specially accurate, to an old idea.
We will notice each so fur as our limits

permit.
Mr. Macleod is extremely angry with
Ricardo for asserting that " coat of produc-
tion " ultimately determines value ; nor will
he even admit Mr. John Stuart Mill's modifi-
cation of the theory; that,..while •demand and
supply always determine instantaneous values,
and even the permanent value of commodities