TAREY's PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.
MIKE the Essay on the Rate of Wages by the same writer, this "volume may probably be adapted to the country of its birth— America, but it is quite unfitted for England. Mr. CARRY has neither a clear perception nor a disciplined mind; and though he has read a good many books, we do not perceive that he has a knowledge of his subject sufficient to justify his attempting to lay down its principles, and controvert some of the views of nearly all the modern political economists. Nor are his deficiencies as a scientific expounder redeemed by any literary skill. He is tedious, diffuse, and given to endless repetition. In a volume of between three and four hundred pages, it would be hard indeed if something could not be picked out of it ; and the reader will find a few truths put by means of illustrations in a clearer light. But occasional points are the utmost that any one can flint in this volume, where the new is (Wuhan!, and the true is old, To follow Mr. CAREY through all his errors, would be a Deed. less task, because neither the subject nor its treatment are of a nature to carry the book into the hands of persons incapable of detecting its errors. We may observe, however, as an exampled his fitness for the task he has undertaken, that he confounds abstract or hypothetical rent—being the produce of soils of dif. ferent fertility—with actual rent, in which situation, capital, fixed or invested in the soil, fertility, and several other elements, go to make up the whole. We cannot affirm that this distinction was always sufficiently enforced by Ric Aim) and his followers, or that their exposition of actual rent might not have been done in a more clear and popular manner : but it was done clearly enough to he understood by attention ; and Mr. CAREY s own account of rent is certainly not superior to theirs, be their misapprehensions what they may.
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