It is not the result of mere chance that the greatest economists have been both historians and philosophers. We need only mention Adam Smith, Turgot, Malthus, Sismondi, Droz, Rossi and LÉon Faucher. It is too frequently forgotten that the father of modern Political Economy, Adam Smith, looked upon the science as only one part of the course of moral philosophy which he taught at Glasgow, and which embraced four divisions:

1. Universal theology.—The existence and attributes of God; principles or faculties of the human mind, the basis of religion.

2. Ethics.—Theory of the moral sentiments.

3. Moral principles relating to justice.—In this, as we learn from one of Adam Smith's pupils in a sketch preserved by David Stewart, he followed a plan which seems to have been suggested to him by Montesquieu. He endeavored to trace the successive advances of jurisprudence from the most barbarous times to the most polished. He carefully showed how the arts which minister to subsistence, and to the accumulation of property, act on laws and governments, and are productive of advances and changes in them analogous to those they experience themselves.

In the first part of his course, as we learn from the same authority, he examined the various political regulations not founded on the principle of justice but in expediency, the object of which is to increase the wealth, the power and the prosperity of the state. From this point of view, he considered the political institutions relating to commerce, finance, the ecclesiastical and military establishments. His lectures on the different subjects constitute the substance of the work he afterwards published on the wealth of nations. A pupil of Hutcheson, Adam Smith always applied the experimental method, “which, instead of losing itself in magnificent and hazardous [pg 028] speculations, attaches itself to certain and universal facts discovered to us by our own consciousness, by language, literature, history and society.”26 Before taking the professorship of philosophy, Adam Smith had taught belleslettres and rhetoric in Edinburgh, in 1748. He had written a work on the origin and formation of languages; and it was because he had profoundly studied the moral sciences that it was given to him to inaugurate a new science and to become a great economist. Mr. Cousin has laid great stress on Adam Smith's taste and talent for history. “Whatever the subject he treats, he turns his eyes backward over the road traversed before himself, and he illuminates every object on his path by the aid of the torch which reflection has placed in his hand. Thus, in Political Economy, his principles not only prepare the future but renew the past, and discover the reason, heretofore unknown, of ancient facts which history had gathered together without understanding them. It is not saying enough to remark that Adam Smith possessed a great variety of historical information; we must add that he possessed the real historical spirit.” Thanks to this eminent faculty of his, the Glasgow philosopher acquired great influence over minds. In 1810, when the French empire had reached the zenith of its greatness, Marwitz wrote: “There is a monarch as powerful as Napoleon: Adam Smith.” We need not recall Turgot's historical researches.

Malthus' chief title to distinction, his work on Population, is as much a historical work as a politico-economical one; and it is not sufficiently known that he was professor of history and Political Economy in the college of the East India Company at Aylesbury.

We need say no more on this subject. The works of the other writers whom we have mentioned are too well known to permit any one to think that they excluded history and moral science from the study of Political Economy. Hence [pg 029] the school which has risen up in Germany,27 and which is endeavoring to do for Political Economy what Savigny, Eichhorn, Schrader, Mommsen, Rudorff, and so many other illustrious scholars have done for jurisprudence, cannot be rightly accused of rashness. It has done nothing but unfurl the noble banner borne by the most venerated masters of the science.