at first sight that we should despise their persons, and yet reward their talents with the most profuse liberality. While we do the one, however, we must of necessity do the other. Should the public opinion or prejudice ever alter with regard to such occupations, their pecuniary recompense would quickly diminish. More people would apply to them, and the competition would quickly reduce the price of their labour. Such talents, though far from being common, are by no means so rare as is imagined. Many people possess them in great perfection who disdain to make this use of them, and many more are capable of acquiring them if anything could be made honourably by them.

"The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities is an ancient evil remarked by the philosophers and moralists of all ages. Their absurd presumption in their own good fortune has been less taken notice of; it is, however, if possible, still more universal. There is no man living who, when in tolerable health and spirits, has not some share of it. The chance of gain is by every man more or less over-valued, and the chance of loss is by most men under-valued, and by scarce any man, who is in tolerable health and spirits, valued more than it is worth."

We now come to a part of the book where the author not only states principles, but attacks institutions. He considered-and the history of Europe during the present century has proved him to be right-that certain municipal organizations and industrial codes, which were accounted of great importance in his day, were exercising a pernicious

influence. The first of these institutions with which he deals is one that has become almost entirely obsolete since he wrote, mainly owing to the success of his teaching. We associate Smith's name chiefly with his attack upon the doctrines of Protection ; we ought equally to associate it with that attack upon the exclusive trade privileges of the corporations and guilds, which, in his day, restrained competition at every turn. To become free of the trade of such a body, it was necessary to have served a long apprenticeship as one of a limited number of apprentices. By the 5th of Elizabeth, the Statute of Apprentices, it was enacted that no person should for the future exercise any trade, craft, or mystery at that time exercised in England, unless he had previously served to it an apprenticeship of seven years at least ; and what before had been the byelaw of many particular corporations, became in England the general and public law of all trades carried on in market towns. This statute has been repealed since Smith wrote, but in his time it was in full force. Its principle he exposes and denounces. He shows the futility and evil of long apprenticeships, and the bad consequences that attended the monopolies of corporations and guilds, in language which has become classical. The effect of their bye-laws and regulations he declares to be, simply to enable their members to raise their prices without the fear of being undersold, either by the free competition of their fellow-countrymen, or by foreigners. The enhanced price he finds is everywhere paid by the landlords, farmers, and labourers of the country.

The next point of attack is that policy which occasions

competition in some employments beyond what it would naturally be. His illustration of this is the establishment of foundations for the education and maintenance of the clergy. "Very few of them are educated at their own expense. The long, tedious, and expensive education, therefore, of those who are, will not always procure them a suitable reward, the Church being crowded with people who, in order to get employment, are willing to accept of a much smaller recompense than what such an education would otherwise have entitled them to; and in this way the competition of the poor takes away the reward of the rich." "Whenever the law has attempted to regulate the wages of workmen, it has always been rather to lower them than to raise them. But the law has upon many occasions attempted to raise the wages of curates, and, for the dignity of the Church, to oblige the rectors of parishes to give them more than the wretched maintenance which they themselves might be willing to accept of. And in both cases the law seems to have been equally ineffectual, and has never either been able to raise the wages of curates, or to sink those of labourers to the degree that was intended, because it has never been able to hinder either the one from being willing to accept of less than the legal allowance, on account of the indigence of their situation and the multitude of their competitors, or the other from receiving more, on account of the contrary competition of those who expected to derive either profit or pleasure from employing them." The following passage is of interest as showing the circumstances of the times :

"The unprosperous race of men, commonly called men of letters, are pretty much in the situation which lawyers and physicians probably would be in upon the foregoing supposition. In every part of Europe the greater part of them have been educated for the Church, but have been hindered by different reasons from entering into Holy Orders. They have generally, therefore, been educated at the public expense, and their numbers are everywhere so great as commonly to reduce the price of their labours to a very paltry recompense."

Bad as he finds the policy of the then corporation laws to be, its badness is, in his opinion, equalled, if not excelled, by the policy of the then poor laws. The obstruction to the free circulation of labour, and consequently of capital, from one employment to another, consisted here in the difficulty which a poor man found in obtaining a settlement, or even in being allowed to exercise his industry in any parish but that to which he belonged. He enters in detail into the history of the poor law, quoting largely from Burn's treatise on the subject. It is difficult to conceive anything more instructive, to the student of politics, than the study of this chapter in the light of the changes in the law which its teaching succeeded in bringing about.

The first book concludes with a lengthy statement of the theory of rent, a theory which, as propounded by Adam Smith, has been the subject of much hostile criticism at the hands of Ricardo and others. Rent, according to Smith, is to be regarded as the price paid for the use of land, and is naturally the highest which

the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land. In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This is evidently the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more. the price paid for the land, is a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take, but to what the farmer can afford to give. "Rent," continues Smith, "enters into the composition of the price of commodities in a different way from wages and profit. High or low wages or profit are the causes of high or low price; high or low rent is the effect of it. It is because high or low wages or profit must be paid in order to bring a particular commodity to market that its price is high or low. But it is because its price is high or low, a great deal more, or very little more, or no more than what is sufficient to pay these wages and profit, that it affords a high rent, or a low rent, or no rent at all." The first criticism to be made on this statement is that rent does not enter at all into price. Whether or not we accept Ricardo's theory of rent as a satisfactory explanation of the origin of rent-the theory that rent is the price paid, not for the mere use of the land, but for the extra fertility of the soil, which causes people

The rent of land, considered as