OAREY'S PA8 , P1 razsnrsT, AND POTHER: MR. CAREY is an American

political economist with a high Transatlantic reputation, which in our opinion is tb, some degree factitious. He seems too ambitions to condense and systematize existing knowledge, while he is devoid of the assemblage of faculties and of the well-balanced mind necessary to discover scientific principles. He wants comprehen- sion to see the whole, and judgment to allow for the operation of 'the different parts. Although he has devoted himself to science, and as many think a dry science, his mind is essentially rhetorical rather than philosophical, and more adapted to urge a question than to argue it. His turn is towards facts; which he can present clearly- and ingeniously in statistical tables, or group effectively in large masses. Although his particular accuracy may be open to challenge, the.se facts often suggest new views or matter for further consideration and may not unfrequently contain an important truth, but so partially presented, that the truth itself is apt to be lost sight of, or possibly to appear repugnant, front the exaggeration with which it is put forth, or the swaggering provincial manner and the narrow self-Sufficiency of the promulgator. The larger object of The Past, the Present, and the Future, is to take a compendious survey of the history of mankind, in order to show- how wrong and wretched everything has been and is, save in the United States of America ; though even there one star differs from another in brightness,—the more perfect developments, political, industrial, and so- cial, existing East and North of New York, but Rhode Island being the model of the model republic. This survey is made in fifteen chapters, on a variety of subjects, but reducible to questions connected with lades try, currency, or social and governmental conditions, especially in regard to Great Britain and her dependencies. The particular topics are set forth as follows in the advertisement of the contents.

1. Man and Land. 9. Man and his Family. 2. Man and Food. 10. Concentration and Centralization.

3. Wealth. 11. Colonization.

4. Wealth and Land. 12. Ireland.

5. Man and his Standard of Value. 13. India.

6. Man and his Fellow Man. 14. Annexation.

7. Man. 15. Civilization. B. Man and his Helpmate. A very important object in Mr. Carey's work, since the whole of his views are based upon it, is to overturn the theories of Ricardo on Rent and Malthus on Population. This object is more or less present where- ver the title of the chapter indicates economical discussion ; but it is most elaborately argued in the first two chapters, on Man and Land—Man and Food. Mr. Carey commences by disputing the facts on which the respective theories of Ricardo and Malthus are founded. Taking an ex- tensive but summary view of the history of cultivation throughout a great part of the world, especially America and Great Britain, he denies that the fertile soils are first cultivated. In fact, he says, it cannot be. In all wild countries, the best soils are either bottom lands on the bads of streams requiring draining to cultivate them or even to live upon them in safety, or they are heavily timbered ; and in either case far be yond the means of the earlier cultivator to clear or drain. He, in his isolated poverty, is compelled to resort to the thin soils of the uplands, which drain themselves, and where heavy timber has not depth to grow ; for although the return to his labour is small, yet he can live by culti- vating the high thin soils, while he would starve before he had prepared the better land for cultivation. As population and wealth increase, and implements improve, cultivation extends downwards to the better lands, which are gradually cleared and drained. Improved systems of agricul- ture follow increased wealth, not merely by the use of better implements and the rotation of crops, but by the modification of the natural soils, through mixing, as with lime, Fr.c., in addition to the application of what is more popularly meant by manure. In like manner he maintains, that so far from additional applications of capital yielding a continually diminish- ing return, the reverse is the case. To show this, he takes another his- torical review of cultivation • comparing the miserable return to a new settler or a semibarbarian Who has the.choice of land before him, with the large yield upon the best-cultivated farms of Great Britain. He also denies that the landlord increases his income with the increase of popu- lation at the expense of profits and wages. The landlord's proportion of the produce, in an advanced and wealthy state of society, is less than when, daring the middle ages, (or in Russia now,) he extorted what he pleased from miserable serfa : but his actual amount of the produce, his income is very much greater ; as Mr. Carey shows by statistics of the landlord's rent, and the probable wages and incomes of the agriculturists of England at different periods. From another historical survey he denies that the inherent virtue of the soil forms any part of Ricardo's rent. In fact, there is no such thing as a natural fertility of the soil, available to man, till he has developed it by the application of capital and labour ; and these have to be applied pretty much in proportion to its goodness. So far from the landlord getting anything out of nature in the way Mr. Ricardo assumes, Mr. Carey maintains that the, whole rent of a country is a very insufficient

return for what has been expended on the land.

"The whole land rental ofEngland and Wales is about thirty millions; which, at thirty-five years' purchase represents a capital of seven hundred and fifty millions. The wages of labourers and mechanics average about 501. per annum. The landed property of England and Wales thus represents the labour of fifteen millions of men for one year, or that of half a million of men for thirty years. Let us now suppose the island reduced to the state in which it was found by Cesar; covered with impenetrable woods, (the timber of which is of no value because of its superabundance,) abounding in marshes and swamps, and heaths and sandy wastes; and then estimate the quantity of labour that would be re- quired to place it in its present position, with its lands cleared, levelled; enclosed, and drained; with its turnpikes and railroads, its churches, school-houses, ()oi- lers, court-houses, and market-houses; its furnaces, forges, coal, iron, and copper mines- and the thousands and tens of thousands of other improvements required to bring into activity those powers for the use of which rent is paid; and it will be found that it would require the labour of treble the number of men for cen- turies, even although provided with all the machinery of modem times—the best axe and the best plough, the steam-engine and the railroad car. "The same thing may now be exhibited on a smaller scale. A part of South Lancashire, the forest and chase of Roseendale, embracing an area of twenty- four square miles, contained eighty souls at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- tury; and the rental in the time of James I., little more than two centuries since, amounted to 1221.13s. 8d. It. has now a population of eighty-one thousand, and the annual rental is 50,0001., equivalent, at twenty-five years' purchase,to 1,250,0001. We have never seen this laud, bat we have no hesitation in saying thit if it were now given to Baron Rothschild in the state in which it existed in the days of James, with a bounty equal to its value, on condition of doing with the timber the same that has been done with that which then stood there, he binding himself to give to the property the same advantages as those for which rent is now paid, his private fortune would be expended in addition to the bounty long before the work was completed. The amount received as rent is profit upon capital, and is interest upon the amount expended, minus the difference between the power of Rossendale to yield a return to labour, and that of the newer soils that can now be brought into activity by the application of the same labour that has been there employed. Such, likewise, is the ease with the rents of London sad Paris, New York and New Orleans. With all their advantages of situation, their selling prices represent but a small portion of what it would cost to repro- duce them, were their sites again reduced to a state of nature. The power of man over mere brute wealth thus grows with every increase in the ratio of wealth to population. "There is not throughout the United States a county, township, town, or city, that would sell for cost; or one whose rents are equal to the interest upon the labour and capital expended."

The readers of the Spectator need not be told that we think Ricardo always too abstract, and that his rent, practically, either never exists at all, or in such rare cases as to come to the same thing. All theories of taxing Ricardo's rent as a thing given by nature fall to the ground, because we ne- ver can tell what part is a return to capital, what is owing to site, or social improvements towards which the landlord contributes his share, or what (if any) to the inherent fertility of the soil. The great feature of Ricardo's view is the law of a decreasing return to industry, deducible from the theory; and which we suspect is analogous in nations to the physical law of death. Improvements and other circumstances may retard this decreas- ing return, but, whether we look to the past or the present, growing num- bers seem to induce a competition which continually diminishes the share of each man's labour, tending to accumulate wealth in few hands from the smallness of percentage profits, and to reduce the condition of the mass of Population by reducing their wages and crowding them into cities. Con- nected with this, either as concomitants or causes, are an increasing cor- ruption of sentiment if not of morals, and an effeminacy of body. This Can be traced universally throughout the ancient world, under the old regime of France, and generally throughout Europe before the French Revolution; the effects of which convulsion were almost analo- tl We know not whence this estimate is taken, for Mr. Carey seldom quotes his au- thorities; but, though sufficient for the purpose in view, it does not seem to be correct, or grounded on any authority. The rental of landed property In England and Wales, assessed to the poor-rate for 1841, is given in the Statistical Companion as 32,6,55,137i. ; tel the rackrent Is rarely If ever taken as the assessment for the poor-rate—sometimes tt Is less than the real rent by a third or a fourth. The annual value of land assessed to the Income-tax, In 11342-43, is in the same book given as 40,i67,0881.; from which land owned by persons with less than 1501. a year was excluded—that is when the owners took the trouble cf getting It discharged from assessment. Thirty therefore, is evidently much too low ; on the other hand, five-and-thirty years' pur- chase is clearly too high an average: but the error does not affect the main argument.]

gous to a barbarian invasion. Bad laws, bad institutions, and the corruptions which flow from them, may aggravate these evils ;

neither history nor science, neither facts nor reasoning, as yet prove that they can be averted by good. Certainly America, with her boundless field of industry still unoccupied, her best lands, according to Mr. Carey, still uncultivated even in the oldest States, and her limited existence of less than seventy years, cannot settle the question. If she could, we question whether Mr. Carey is the man to do it ; from his deficiency in patient acumen, his dogmatic conceit, and his want of large and allowing perception. In the passage just quoted, for example, he mingles con- traries. The only fair calculation of the cost of rent is the outlay upon the soil, or upon such improvements as directly profit it, and to which the landlord contributes his share. Churches, colleges, and so forth, have no business to figure in an estimate of the cost of producing rent.

The population theory of Malthus stands or falls with the theory of Ricardo. The produce of land—food and raw materials—governs all in- dustrial returns; and if those returns at any time begin to diminish in reference to the capital employed to procure them, there must come a time when population will increase faster than food. To point with Sad- ler and others of his school to the waste lands and unoccupied regions of the world, is nothing to the purpose. We are speaking of what has been and is found practicable to the mass of men. The possible, that cannot be done, is unfit to form a scientific theory. Of what use are the fertile soils of the Tropics or South America, till the Caucasian race can labour under a Tropidal sun ?

There are, however, good points both in " Man and Land" and "Man and Food," worthy of consideration for themselves without regard to the conclusion into which the author presses them. Such are the following remarks on war as a means of keeping down the numbers of mankind. Mr. Carey is summarily tracing the progress of society.

" Each chief now covets the power of taxing, or collecting rents from the still- jects of his neighbour. War ensues. Each seeks plunder, and calls it ' glory ': each invades the domain of the other, and each endeavours to weaken his oppo- nent by murdering his rent-payers, burning their houses and wasting their little farms, while manifesting the utmost courtesy to the chief himself. The tenants fly to the hills for safety, being there more distant from the invaders. Rank weeds grow up in the rich lands thus abandoned, and the drains fill up. At the end of a year or two peace is made, and the work of clearing is again to be com- menced: .population and wealth have, however, diminished; and the means of re- commencing the work have again So be created. Meanwhile, the best lands are covered with shrubs, and the best meadows are under water. With continued peace, the work, however, advances; and after a few years, population and wealth and cultivation attain the same height as before. New wars ensue, for the de- termination of the question which of the two chiefs shall collect all the so-called rent. After great waste of life and property, one of them is killed, and the other falls his heir-' having thus acquired both glory and plunder. He now wants a title by which to be distinguished from those by whom he is surrounded: he is a little king. Similar operations are performed elsewhere; and kings become numerous. By degrees, population extends itself, and each little king covets the dominions of his neighbours. Wars ensue, on a somewhat lamer scale, and al- ways with the same results. The people invariably fly to the hills for safety. As invariably, the best lands are abandoned. Food becomes scarce, and famine and pestilence sweep off those whose flight had saved them from the swords of the in. vaster. Small kings become greater ones, surrounded by lesser chiefs who glorify themselves in the number of their murders and in the amount of plunder they have acquired. Counts, viscounts, earls, marquises, and dukes, now make their appearance on the stage; heirs of the power and of the rights of the robber chiefs of early days. Population and wealth go backward; and the love of title grows with the growth of barbarism. Wars are now made on a larger scale, and greater 'glory' is acquired. In the midst of distant and highly fertile lands, occupied by a numerous population, are rich cities and towns, offering. a copious harvest of plunder. The citizens, unused to arms, may be robbed with impunity; always an important consideration to those with whom the pursuit of 'glory' is a trade: pro- vinces are laid waste, and the population is exterminated, or, if a few escape, they fly to the hills and mountains, there to perish of famine. Peace follows, after years of destruction; but the rich lands are overgrown; the spades and axes the cattle and the sheep are gone, the houses are destroyed; their owners have ceased to exist; and a long period of abstinence from the work of desolation is required to regain the .point from which cultivation had been driven by men intent upon the gratification of their own selfish desires, at the cost of the welfare and happi- ness of the people over whose destinies they have unhappily ruled. Population grows slowly, and wealth but little more rapidly; for almost ceaseless wars have impaired the disposition and the respect for honest labour, while the necessity for beginning once more the work of cultivation on the poor soils adds to the distaste for work while it limits the power of employing labourers. Swords or muskets are held to be more honourable implements than spades and pickaxes. The habit of union for any honest purpose is almost extinct; while thousands are ready at any moment to join in expeditions in search of plunder. War thus feeds itself by producing poverty, depopulation, and the abandonment of the most fertile soils; while peace also feeds itself by increasing the number of men and the habit of union, because of the constantly increasing power to draw supplies of food from the surface already occupied, as the almost boundless powers ot the earth are de-

veloped in the progress of population and wealth." •

Many other questions might in like manner be raised upon the remain- ing topics of the volume ; but, besides the space their discussion would require, they are of smaller importance as regards scientific principle. One leading vice pervades the whole. Mr. Carey always attacks every- thing from which he differs whether past or present, and not seldom in unmeasured language. The influence of circumstances, the laws of ne- cessity, the apparent intentions of nature, are nothing to him. So far as we can see at present, the history of the human race has been one of progress ; in which general conduct has been the result of circumstances over which the people of any given time could exercise little control, still less any then undiscovered systems of philosophy. Mankind has had to work its way to civilization and knowledge through evil and suffering and darkness : but Mr. Carey persists in bringing all the past to the test of an Anglo-Saxon standard, which, be it what it may, had been formed by the world struggles of four thousand years. Sometimes he goes further than this, and falls foal of everything that differs from Careyism. In addition to the fifteen chapters connected with the Past and Present, there is a resume of the whole in reference to the Future ; not with a. view to predict what will happen ex necessitate, but what will happen if Mr. Carey's panacea of cultivating the richer soils and applying continual doses of capital to land be adopted. One great obstacle to this con- summation as respects the Past has been the warlike, restless, and immoral Character of the French ; of whom Mr. Carey gives a very bad account, as husbands, fathers, members of society, and citizens of the world. Eng- land, however, has been the great bugbear—" who fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies." Her system of landed favouritism—corn-laws, laws of primogeniture, and similar things to give a fancied benefit to the landlords—have diverted the energies of her people from the cultivation of the soil to manufactures and commerce. To support these, she has aim- ed at establishing monopolies by means of laws or fiscal duties ; and Whenever these have been resisted, she has gone to war. At present, or at least till very lately, she has been trying another tack by means Of her enormous financial power, arising from her wealth, the extent of her demand for foreign commodities, and the Bank of England. She has forced her goods and her money upon the unfortunate Americans, and stimulated them to grow produee, from cotton to corn, as a means of payment. When this has gone on for a little while, a panic or a pressure has arisen at home: prices have fallen, loans have been stopped, and the disturbance of the London Money-market has spread to America. The planter cannot realize half what he hoped for his cotton ; a good season has made corn cheap in Great Britain, and the foolish people in the West, who have been pro- ducing for the British market, find their produce a drug; half the Ame- rican merchants are bankrupt through the conduct of the Britishers and the Bank of England; and the States that have been inveigled into bor- rowing our money are compelled to suspend their works before they yield a return, and are additionally injured by being held up to the World as fraudulent repudiators. An analogous course, but differing in degree and circumstances, is followed as regards India, Ireland, and Po- land. The people of' these countries are driven to cultivate their poorer sal, and to remain in the poor and barbarous condition which invariably attends such a state, in order to supply manufacturing Britain with food for her population, which they might rain for themselves by a more intense cultivation, or materials of manufacture, which would not be wanted to anything like the present extent if they applied their industry to raising food. The remedy for this is, perfect freedom—freedom of trade, freedom of industry, freedom of banking, (but with a metallic standard, as we infer,) and freedom from monopolies, privileges in fa- vour of land, and the expenses of lawyers. Mr. Carey thinks we have made a beginning in these things, under Sir Robert Peel ; but, to make assurance as regards America doubly sure, he offers an odd suggestion for an advocate of perfect freedom—to prevent the British policy and practice from stimulating young men to scatter themselves over the poorer soils and emigrate from the older States to the West, he would prevent the importation of British manufactures by means of high duties.

It will be seen at once from this outline, that Mr. Carey is a system- Monger, with the extreme and onesided ideas of his class. Still, he is a largeminded system-monger, of extensive views, and well stored with knowledge, on which he has reflected, and which he applies to a distinct purpose. His theoretical conclusions cannot be implicitly trusted, any more than his specific facts; but he puts forward many truths incident- ally in the course of his work, and stirs the mind by many suggestions upon social and economical subjects, which passing events may bring into practical importance. For, we repeat it again, the present European revolutions are less political than social. In none of the countries where disturbances have arisen was general tyranny exercised ; the most absolute power took the form of rule, and personal freedom was not interfered with, at least in a manner likely to be changed. The real cause was a vague longing for a better economical condition, as in France; or a wish for a recognition of' the rights of men—not in Tom Paine's sense, but as crea- tures of the same nature with the official class, not as mere animals to be fed and trained and ranaged by masters.