Belles-Lettres, vol. 28.]

[Footnote 3: _Geschichte zur National-Ökonomik in Deutschland_.]

[Footnote 4: _Introduction to the Study of Political Economy_.]

[Footnote 5: P. 70.]

We shall not continue the study further than the beginning of the
sixteenth century. It is true that, if we were to refer to several
sixteenth-century authors, we should be in possession of a very highly
developed and detailed mass of teaching on many points which
earlier authors left to some extent obscure. We deliberately
refrain nevertheless from doing so, because the whole nature of the
sixteenth-century literature was different from that of the fourteenth
and fifteenth; the early years of the sixteenth century witnessed the
abrogation of the central authority which was a basic condition of
the success of the mediæval system; and the same period also witnessed
'radical economic changes, reacting more and more on the scholastic
doctrines, which found fewer and fewer defenders in their original
form.'[1]

[Footnote 1: Cossa, _op. cit._, p. 151. Ashley warns us that 'we must
be careful not to interpret the writers of the fifteenth century by
the writers of the seventeenth' (_Economic History_, vol. i. pt. ii.
p. 387). These later writers sometimes contain historical accounts
of controversies in previous centuries, and are relevant on this
account.]