unhelpful, because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspected
assumptions upon which it rested. The facts were ignored that trade
is a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life, that
property is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value is
capable of impersonal treatment only in the case of the most
generalised requirements. Wealth was measured by the standards of
exchange. Society was regarded as a practically unlimited number of
avaricious adult units incapable of any other subordinate groupings
than business partnerships, and the sources of competition were
assumed to be inexhaustible. Upon such quicksands rose an edifice
that aped the securities of material science, developed a technical
jargon and professed the discovery of "laws." Our liberation from
these false presumptions through the rhetoric of Carlyle and Ruskin
and the activities of the Socialists, is more apparent than real.
The old edifice oppresses us still, repaired and altered by
indifferent builders, underpinned in places, and with a slight
change of name. "Political Economy" has been painted out, and
instead we read "Economics--under entirely new management." Modern
Economics differs mainly from old Political Economy in having
produced no Adam Smith. The old "Political Economy" made certain
generalisations, and they were mostly wrong; new Economics evades
generalisations, and seems to lack the intellectual power to make
them. The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog
which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning
inconvenience to passers-by. Its most typical exponents display a
disposition to disavow generalisations altogether, to claim
consideration as "experts," and to make immediate political
application of that conceded claim. Now Newton, Darwin, Dalton,
Davy, Joule, and Adam Smith did not affect this "expert"
hankey-pankey, becoming enough in a hairdresser or a fashionable