Thus, political economy must have had its problem, its enigma, out of the
attempts to solve which it had its rise. This problem is nothing else but
the question '_Why do we not become richer in proportion to our increasing
capacity of producing wealth?_' To this question a satisfactory answer can
no more be given to-day than could be given three centuries ago--at the
time, that is, when the problem first arose in view, not of a previously
existing phenomenon to which the human mind had then had its attention
drawn for the first time, but of a phenomenon which was then making its
first appearance.

With unimportant and transient exceptions (which, it may be incidentally
remarked, are easily explicable from what follows) antiquity and the Middle
Ages had no political economy. This was not because the men of those times
were not sharp-sighted enough to discover the sources of wealth, but
because to them there was nothing enigmatical about those sources of
wealth. The nations became richer the more progress they made in the art of
producing; and this was so self-evident and clear that, very rightly, no
one thought it necessary to waste words about it. It was not until the end
of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries of our era,
therefore scarcely three hundred years ago, that political economy as a
distinct science arose.

It is impossible for the unprejudiced eye to escape seeing what the first
political economists sought for--what the problem was with which they
busied themselves. They stood face to face with the enigmatical fact that
increasing capacity of production is not necessarily accompanied or
followed by an increase of wealth; and they sought to explain this fact.
Why this remarkable fact then first made its appearance will be clearly
seen from what follows; it is unquestionable _that_ it then appeared, for