" THE WHEEL OF WEALTH."
[To THZ EDITOR OF THE "8770TATOZ...1 SIR,—I should feel obliged if, with your usual courtesy, you would permit me to correct some misrepresentations of my book, " The Wheel of Wealth," made by your reviewer in the Spectator of February 2nd. (1) Your reviewer represents me, quite truly, as saying that "Free-trade is best for all the world, though it is not so for the separate nations" ; but by suppressing my qualification of this proposition, and my reasons: for making it, he makes it appear that I have fallen into a logical absurdity. Now the qualification which stands in the very forefront of my argument is that Free-trade would be best for the world as a whole, provided the world formed a single political unity, and further, that as all tariff barriers are, as such, impediments to trade, Free-trade is also the best for the internal trade between the separate divisions of each political unity, as, for example, between the separate States of the American' Union ; while as regards foreign trade, on the other hand, I argue that Free-trade will not be best for a nation forming a separate political unit, except for those nations which have a world supremacy in some one or more of the great instru- ments of production. But your reviewer, suppressing these express provisos, charges me with "shrinking from the logical eonsequence of [my] premiss," and asks why, if Protection is bad and Free-trade good for the separate divisions of a State, they should not be bad or good respectively for the State itself, thus ignoring the whole drift of my argument, which was constructed for the very purpose of explaining this seeming logical inconsistency. (2) Your reviewer next proceeds to misquote me, and makes me say what is sheer nonsense,—viz., that the symbol of a revolving wheel is "transferable from the mathematics of a mechanical wheel of wealth and the science of Political Economy"; whereas what I do say (p. 34) is that it is "transferable from the mathematics of a mechanical wheel to the wheel of wealth and the science of Political Economy." He then goes on to tjuote me as saying that mathematical formulae are only of use in political economy after we have discovered the laws of the science independently, and insinuates that I have myself used the mathematical symbol of a wheel on which to construct my own system, whereas in point of fact I expressly identified the two in principle only after I had worked out the laws of the science independently, merely using the symbol of the wheel for the purpose of making my exposition clearer to the reader. (8) Your reviewer still further misrepresents me when he says that what I demand for the country is an aristocratic Socialism, which is more fatal, be thinks, to liberty than a democratic one ; Whereas what I do argue for is an aristocratic individualism on the basis of a democratic
Previous page
