On the whole question he has but one remark of
any value, and that he misapplies; namely, that the study of the
conditions of national wealth as a detached subject is unphilosophical,
because, all the different aspects of social phaenomena acting and
reacting on one another, they cannot be rightly understood apart: which
by no means proves that the material and industrial phaenomena of
society are not, even by themselves, susceptible of useful
generalizations, but only that these generalizations must necessarily be
relative to a given form of civilization and a given stage of social
advancement. This, we apprehend, is what no political economist would
deny. None of them pretend that the laws of wages, profits, values,
prices, and the like, set down in their treatises, would be strictly
true, or many of them true at all, in the savage state (for example), or
in a community composed of masters and slaves. But they do think, with
good reason, that whoever understands the political economy of a country
with the complicated and manifold civilization of the nations of Europe,
can deduce without difficulty the political economy of any other state
of society, with the particular circumstances of which he is equally
well acquainted.
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