10 OCTOBER 1868, Page 2

The Times, as the Pall Mall Gazette remarks, is sometimes

very silly at this time of the year, but we have seldom read an article at once so pompous and so silly as its diatribe yesterday against Professor Fawcett's address on " Economy " at Birmingham. Professor Fawcett remarks, what every one knows, that, in the main, political economy is a deductive science. It starts from the principle that every man knows his owdinterest best, and, if let alone, will pursue it, and it follows that principle out into all its ramifications. Mr. Fawcett further remarked that the Factory Acts, passed in restraint of children's labour, are, apparently, a breach of this principle, and so of course they are. And as such they were bitterly opposed by all the original school of economists, including Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. But the Times is superbly contemptuous of this notion that there is any deductive science of economy as contrasted with the facts it affects. It might as well assert that there are no abstract laws of motion, as contrasted with the actual motions of bodies- on the earth. But the truth is that the Times is in such a silly fury with Mr. Fawcett only for his assertion later in the address that strikes, under proper circumstances, are quite as legitimate on the part of labourers as is the withdrawal of capital on the part of capitalists. "We are told a thousand times," says the Times, in a white passion, "that a man has a right to strike.' But a man has not a right to play the fool and the madman. He has not a right to ruin himself, his wife, and children He has not a right to be ungrateful to an old master and a kind employer," &c., Sze. No, surely not ; but surely quite as much as "to play the fool and the madman" like this in a highly influential journal.