ENGLAND
Sacrificing the strict chronological order of the history of economics to deeper considerations,we have already spoken ofCairnes,describing him as the last original English writer who was an adherent of the old school pure and simple.Both inmethod and doctrine he was essentially Ricardian;though professing and really feeling profound respect for Mill,he wasdisposed to go behind him and attach himself rather to their common master.Mr.Sidgwick is doubtless right in believingthat his Leading Principles did much to shake "the unique prestige which Mill's exposition had enjoyed for nearly half ageneration,"and in this,as in some other ways,Cairnes may have been a dissolving force,and tended towards radicalchange;but,if he exercised this influence,he did so unconsciously and involuntarily.Many influences had,however,forsome time been silently sapping the foundations of the old system.The students of Comte had seen that its method was anerroneous one.The elevated moral teaching of Carlyle had disgusted the best minds with the low maxims of the Manchesterschool.Ruskin had not merely protested against the egoistic spirit of the prevalent doctrine,but had pointed to some of itsreal weaknesses as a scientific theory.(10)It began to be felt,and even its warmest partisans sometimes admitted,that it haddone all the work,mainly a destructive one,of which it was capable.Cairnes himself declared that,whilst most educatedpeople believed it doomed to sterility for the future,some energetic minds thought it likely to be a positive obstruction in theway of useful reform.Miss Martineau,who had in earlier life been a thorough Ricardian,came to think that politicaleconomy,as it had been elaborated by her contemporaries,was,strictly speaking,no science at all,and must undergo suchessential change that future generations would owe little to it beyond the establishment of the existence of general laws inone department of human affairs.(11)The instinctive repugnance of the working classes had continued,in spite of the effortsof their superiors to recommend its lessons to themefforts which were perhaps not unfrequently dictated rather by classinterest than by public spirit.All the symptoms boded impending change,but they were visible rather in general literatureand in the atmosphere of social opinion than within the economic circle.(12)But when it became known that a greatmovement had taken place,especially in Germany,on new and more hopeful lines,the English economists themselves beganto recognize the necessity of a reform and even to further its advent.The principal agencies of this kind,in marshalling theway to a renovation of the science,have been those of Bagehot,Leslie,and Jevons,the first limiting the sphere of thedominant system,while seeking to conserve it within narrower bounds;the second directly assailing it and setting up thenew method as the rival and destined successor of the old;and the third acknowledging the col.lapse of the hitherto reigningdynasty,proclaiming the necessity of an altered regime,and admitting the younger claimant as joint possessor in the future.
Thus,in England too,the dualism which exists on the Continent has been established;and there is reason to expect that heremore speedily and decisively than in France or Italy the historical school will displace its antagonist.It is certainly in Englandnext after Germany that the preaching of the new views has been most vigorously and effectively begun.
