"SPURIOUS POLITICAL ECONOMY."
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPEOTATOR.1
SIR,—In a review, under the above title, of a collection of essays of mine (in one of which the political economy of the Spectator is criticized), you justify the application of the polite term " spurious " to the political economy of my volume by such assertions as the following :—" There is positive blundering in the easy way with which all agricultural labourers in England are spoken of as in the same condition, whereas the differences in the class are manifold."
Now, the volume actually contains an essay on political economy and the rate of wages, of which the principal object is to prove that there are great differences in the condition of the labourer in different parts of England, and that the alleged "equality of wages" was a fiction. But it is obvious that the purely agricul- tural counties afford better evidence of the effects of the rural system than those in which mines and manufactures play a principal part.
Again, you pronounce, with respect to the description of the industry of Westphalia and the Ruhr basin in this volume, "Mr. Leslie is one of those writers who have only to hear of a successful manufacturing establishment abroad to rush to the conclusion that England is undone." My descrip- tions were not founded on mere hearsay, and it is the reviewer who has "rushed to the conclusion." I spoke of "a formidable competition before England" in the future, but did not rush to the conclusion that England was undone. It would hardly be fair to say of a writer who had intimated some months ago that there was danger of a formidable war before Germany, that he had rushed to the conclusion that Germany was undone. Moreover, the dangers before England to which I particularly referred, -lay not in "the existence of a successful manufacturing establishment abroad," but in our laws and land system at home.
Permit me just to add that be my political economy " spurious " or rational, I not only make no claim to what has been vaunted as "orthodoxy," but am unable to think highly of the intellectual calibre of persons (unless they be either very young or very old)
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