The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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74.6 LAISSEZ FAIRE material wealth might be produced, but not to discuss the uses to which it should be applied ; he was prepared to show on what principles it was distributed among the various individuals who formed the nation, and to leave the question of consumption to each personally. But philanthropic senti- ment and religious enthusiasm were not content to leave the matter there, and public opinion was gradually roused to demand that practical statesmen and their expert advisers should look farther ahead. Under the influence of these fader eo larger views, John Stuart Mill gave a new turn to economic John study. He was not satisfied with discussing mere material Soars progress. He could contemplate a stationary state with calmness; he could not but dwell with bitterness on the great misery which accompanied increasing wealth; and he tried to formulate an ideal of human welfare in his chapter On the Probable Futurity of the Working Classes’. In this way he succeeded in indicating an end towards which the new material resources might be directed, and thus restored to Economics that practical side, which it had been in danger of losing since the time of Ricardo. It is important that we should have a method for isolating economic phenomena and analysing them as accurately as may be, and this Ricardo has given us; but it is also desirable that we should be able to turn our knowledge to account,—to see some end at which it is worth while to aim, and to choose the means which will conduce towards it; this we can do better, not merely in- tuitively and by haphazard, but on reasoned grounds, since the attempt was first made by Mill. The change was not only noticeable in the economic literature of the day, it comes out clearly in the work of the Legislature. Under the guidance of the laissez faire school Parliament had been inclined to hold its hand altogether, lest its action should only work mischief. The dominant party were satisfied, in accordance with the views of experts, to provide the conditions which tended to the most rapid material progress, in the expectation that if they sought this first, all other things would be added thereto, gradually and indirectly. From the time of the Peace of 1815 onwards, however, and more obviously in the Reformed Parliament, became dis satisfied with the mere con- stderation of means \ Principles of Political Economy, Bk. Iv. c. 7.

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