'IT should suffice each of us to know that, if we have laboured with purity of purpose in any good cause, we must have contributed to its success; that the degree in which we have contributed is a matter of infinitely small concern; and, still more, that the consciousness of having so contributed, however obscurely and unnoticed, should be our sufficient if our sole reward. Let us cherish this faith: it is a duty.' W. R. Greg. INTRODUCTION. THE following papers are the outcome of an engagement, made last winter, to deliver lectures at Edinburgh and Hull on the condition and prospects of trade. The most laborious investigator cannot fully exhaust a subject so difficult and important. Pursuing the inquiry amid many interruptions, but I hope in a spirit of unswerving fairness, I have been led step by step from the main question to various collateral topics, and from on source of information to another. The studies in which I have thus been engaged have been a formidable addition to other more urgent and indeed unavoidable duties. I am obliged to desist from the further prosecution of my task, and I present the result of my inquiry to the considerate examination of the commercial world, with all the imperfections of which I am so deeply conscious. Not now for the first time I have had under consideration the expediency of retiring from Parliament, with the view of devoting an undivided attention to the elucidation of industrial problems, and the improvement of the relations between capital and labour. The reward of labour, and the profit upon investments, are questions which cannot be settled by legislation. As a member of Parliament, I have felt it my duty to devote myself to the maritime interests of the country; and I find it impossible to follow up simultaneously the twofold and widely divergent specialities of political economy and naval administration. My experience is doubtless shared by the majority of members of the House of Commons. Many subjects are brought under our review, and we are all more or less overtaken and outstripped by the rapid march of events. While the multitude of idlers is probably greater than in any former generation, those who have any work to do live at a too high pressure in this age of inventions for abridging processes, shortening distances, and economising time. If our literature is condensed into articles in periodicals, the number of topics to which our attention is invited is proportionately multiplied. The overtasked toiler in the nineteenth century may look back with envy to the repose and the contemplative existence of the patriarchal time. Man's life was spacious in the early world: It paused like some slow ship with sails unfurled, As in the domain of politics, and as with investigations in the sphere of the physical sciences, so it is with politico-economic questions; we are encumbered by the rapid accumulation of facts. It becomes more 1 George Eliot, 'The Legend of Jubal.' |