Political Economy is not, as we have just said, a new science. It has been a distinct science only a short time. Until the eighteenth century, it was confounded with philosophy, morals, politics, law and history. But it does not follow, that, because it has grown so in importance, as to deserve a place of its own, its intimate relationship with the noble studies which had until then absorbed it should cease. There is another consequence also to be deduced from this. From the moment that Political Economy ceases to be considered a new science, it finds a long series of ancestors behind it, since it is compelled to investigate a past to which so many bonds unite it. This duty may increase its difficulties, but, at the same time, it singularly adds to the attractions of a study which, instead of presenting us only with the arid deductions of dogmatism, comes to us with all the freshness and all the color of life.

We may allow those who make Political Economy simply a piece of arithmetic to ignore these retrospective studies and their importance; for mathematics has little to do with history. But it is otherwise with the life of nations. These would discover whence they come, in order to learn whither they are tending.

They are not obeying a vain interest of curiosity, as J. B. Say supposed, when, in sketching a short history of the progress [pg 026] of Political Economy, he said: “However, every kind of history has a right to gratify curiosity.” It is a thing to be regretted, that this eminent thinker could thus ignore one of the essential elements of the science to which he rendered such great and unquestioned services. A sense for the historical was wanting in him. “The history of a science,” he writes,25 “is not like the narration of things that have happened. What would it profit us to make a collection of absurd opinions, of decried doctrines which deserved to be decried? It would be at once useless and fastidious to thus exhume them in case we perfectly knew the public economy of social bodies. It can be of little concern to us to learn what our predecessors have dreamed about this subject, and to describe the long series of mistakes in practice which have retarded man's progress in the research after truth. Error is a thing to be forgotten, not learned.” As if that which was once to be found in time is not to-day to be found in space; as if there ever was an institution that did not have its raison d' etre and had not constituted a resting place in the search after a higher truth or of a more intelligent and salutary application of an old one! There are a great many actual systems and a great many present facts which can be understood only by the help of history; and how frequently would not an acquaintance with history serve to keep us from taking for marvelous inventions the antiquated machinery of other ages, whose only advantage and only merit are that they have remained unknown. How much of the pretended daring of innovators has been old trumpery which the wisdom of the times had cast off as rubbish. Besides, as Bacon has said: “Verumtamen sÆpe necessarium est, quod non est optimum.”