first to know, that the imperial lord and sovereign ruler of our faculties, the Reason; the same which, when employed about the affairs of life, leads to prudential and economical results, and employed in affairs of courage and the heart, to the conclusions and practice of honor and courtesy; this same faculty, employed on the experience offered it by imagination and understanding, produces from them philosophic or universal ideas-as of a soul, a first cause, &c., &c. In this process the Reason first considers things as they move and live, and are freely actuated and appear, as the Imagination takes them from nature. It then considers their abstract relations in the Understanding. That is, by negatives, lines, limits, necessities, measures, divisions, contrasts, concurrences, causes, and all the unities and diversities. Out of these two, the scientific and the imaginative, Reason constructs its philosophy, or idea of the universe. And now says Reason to itself, I know, that as in my inferior kingdom of intelligence, whenever there are two faculties, there is a third superior one, which unites and forces them to harmonize, in short as I myself am able to harmonize science and imagination, and passion, and prudence, and affection, and make out of them all a harmonious and rational world, there must be behind all the phenomena, and laws, and necessities, and forces, of nature, animate and inanimate, a harmonizing and perfectly universal power, standing in such relation to the universe, as I stand in my little kingdom of mind. And as I judged that things intrinsic-things in nature, must be judged by the images of these, which I see in my perception and intelligence,-so must this universal, harmonizing, ruling, and creating power-this Infinite, this Omnipotent "Deity," (for that is the name I give it,) be imaged as resembling myself I have no other means of imaging it, and I am as well justified in thinking it a Personality, a Personal God, as in thinking that things and events in nature resemble the images in my perception, by which I know them; or their laws, the laws in my intellect by which I judge them; or their beauty, the beauty in my imagination by which I attribute beauty to them." So doth Reason meditate on the world, and so VOL. IV. NO. VI. NEW SERIES. doth she establish her Faith in a Personality as the author of it, and her reasonings are based on the same certainty which enables the left foot to follow the right, to wit, the certainty that the mind is in harmony with the universe, and can form within itself a true representation of the Unseen. Yet it is perhaps necessary in this connection to pay respect to logic in its narrowest sense, so far as to make a brief de-* fence of the method of the argument-a method peculiar to philosophy, and by which modern science has made all its discoveries-we mean the method of analogy. The judgment operates by three distinct modes or faculties-as first, by syllogism; of which the principle is the determination of a species under its genus, &c.: second, by arguing from cause-and-effect-as that the same cause shall always produce the same effect; and lastly by analogies-as when we say, that the same order or system of things, discovers the same principle controlling them-a species of reasoning which has a double certainty and value, from its embracing the principle both of the syllogism and that of cause. Yet the miserable logic of the last century, warns us in a very affectedly wise style against the danger of too free a use of the argument of analogy. When one sees the greatest absurdities stilted along upon syllogistic and cause-and-effect argument-one's fear of too free use of analogy is very much abated. Not staying here to develope the entire system of the logic of analogy, we need only advert to the fact that every successful scientific or psychological speculation will be found to rest upon it, and if any peculiarity of method can be attributed to modern logic, as distinguished from the syllogistic of the scholastics, and the cause-and-effect of the mechanical deists, it is the analogic of the moderns, preeminent, as including and subordinating the others. Of this method and its abuses, we may take another opportunity to treat at large. The conclusions of all analogical philosophy may be summed up in a paragraph, that spirit is before matter in the order of being; that phenomena in perception, and laws and principles in intellect are true analogues of certain realities in universal nature; that as there is a particular life of 41 the individual, this is only a spark from the universal life of the world; and as there is a rational soul of the individual, this is only a spark from the Universal Person, the I AM that the world is both appearance and substance, but that substance can be perceived only by appearance, and known only through intellect.* We need not name these universal species, lives, laws, and powers in nature, of which the ideas in our Reason are the true images or representatives we need not name them angels, devils, good spirits, bad spirits, &c., as Swedenborg has done, unless it suits our style or our fancy to do this. By individualizing them, we impair our ideas of them; and then begins something very like polytheism. The philosophical works of Coleridge may be considered, together, as a series of treatises, sentences, aphorisms, and arguments, arranged with very little order, looking to the developement of the philosophical idea of reason, by profound analogies. as Paley, Hume, and D'Alembert. The imaginative bias, on the contrary, may be best seen in Cudworth, Taylor the Platonist, and poetico-philosophic minds generally. This latter order give an undue predominance to the imaginative, and neglect the verification and correction of their theories by an application to facts. With the few minds who have shown an equal mastery of the powers, both of analysis and of imagination, it is necessary to rank Coleridge among the English, and Kant among the Germans. These minds, modelled by nature to a comprehensive and universal shape, easily understood the writings of Plato and Bacon, in whom this double character is most remarkable, and, either by freely receiving the ideas of those writers, and of others still more venerable, or by originating the same in themselves, they have re-created philosophy for the moderns. Yet it will be impossible for us to understand these men, or their philosophy, until we in some measure understand the aims which actuated them. They regarded knowledge as, in its highest sense, identical with power. The knowledge of a nation they believed to be the fountain of its great The German mind, above all others, discovers an aptitude for analogical reasonings, as is proved by the general character of their science, and the so called symbolical character of their fiction; and Cole-ness, always remembering that the word ridge has been called a German from the same peculiarity; but before pronouncing Coleridge a German, we must prove him infected with the faults, as well as the excellencies, of the German mind. We must show him pantheistic, and devoid of the idea of a Personal Deity and a divinely constituted state, which we believe is quite impossible. On the contrary, his works overflow with the consciousness of these, and the endeavor to awaken his countrymen to a realizing of their meaning seems to have been the sole aim, if it had an aim, of his life. Philosophy has always shown two different tendencies, according as the analytic or the imaginative minds of the age have shaped it. The analytic bias may be traced to a predominance of the understanding, or faculty of limits, conditions, negations, and necessities, appearing in such writers * i. e. understanding, imagination, affection, &c. "knowledge," thus used, has a moral significance. The knowledge which they regarded, was the knowledge of knowledges, that kind which is universal and productive of new inventions and useful projects. A knowledge which is able, upon occasion, to found the constitution of a new State or to reform that of an old one; to revive the ancient purity of religion by a return to its first principles; to exalt and harmonize the manners, and render society more humane and considerate. This was the superior kind of knowledge, the true Science of humanity, of which they endeavored to express the Ideas. By, and through these Ideas, they communicated the seeds of the same to other minds. All language was considered by them as the vehicle of this kind of knowledge, and to the Faculties which gather it up in experience and give it utterance in acts and words, they gave the name of Reason, or the PERSON,-or the Image of the Person of God. J. D. W. SHORT CHAPTERS ON PUBLIC ECONOMY. IX. LARGE CAPITAL AND SMALL CAPITAL. NOTHING can be more absurd or more contrary to the facts than the proposition put forth by certain would-be statisticians, that low prices with large production is a state of things favorable to the operative or manual laborer. The smaller the capital the larger must be the return from its investment. If I have only a thousand dollars, but can make it bring me five hundred every year, I am as well off, nay, in a better condition, than if I had two thousand yielding the same sum. One thousand is easier to manage, and less liable to loss than two thousand. A farm of 100 acres, yielding $500 worth of produce per annum, is a better property than one of 200, yielding the same per annum. There is less ground to be gone over, and in every respect less care to be taken on the smaller, than the larger domain. It is extremely difficult to find an investment of capital which will yield the owner more than 10 per cent. interest, with no trouble or risk to himself. So rare indeed is the opportunity for a safe and profitable investment without risk or labor, that large capitalists are well contented with 7, and even with 4 per cent. and in England with 3 and 2 1-2 per cent. interest, when the capital is absolutely secured against loss, and gives its owner no trouble in employing it. A thrifty industrious mechanic, working at good wages, say at $1,50 a day, can support himself and a small family, and have something laid up in a Saving's Bank at the end of the year. After a few years of labor, economy and accumulation, he will find himself master of a small capital, say of $500. Let us suppose that the business at which he works is one which has not as yet attracted the attention of capitalists, either as importers or manufacturers. The demand is moderate but steady and the prices good. Under these circumstances, our frugal artizan will be able to establish a small factory of his own, with his capital of $500, and can engage another man to work with him as a journeyman receiving wages. With moderate success, he will make his five hundred yield five or six hundred, aided by his own labor, besides enough to pay his journeyman. The next year he will have gained a credit, and can borrow 500 more, at 7 per cent. and with these two capitals he will employ two journeymen, pay the interest, support his family and lay up money. The success of such a management depends in the first place upon the existence of a good demand with good prices, and in the second upon the thrift and good management of the small capitalist. Let us suppose that he and his journeyman with the families of both, require altogether $1000 for their support, and that the sale of what he manufactures produces that sum, and enough more to pay the interest on the capital borrowed. Our artizan will now subsist but he will make no money-he will have no surplus, or profit, at the end of the year. Let us now suppose that a number of other artizans, observing the success of this one, combine their labor and capital and engage in the same business, one of them having credit enough somewhere, to borrow a considerable sum to be laid out in machinery. Or, let us imagine, what is quite as likely to happen, that an opulent importer has got wind of the matter; and that now, through a larger quantity being offered for sale, the price of our artizan's product suffers a depression. He will now find that to make the same profit he must sell more of his manufactures, and to do this he must employ more journeymen and borrow, or unite with a larger capital, and put his wares for sale at a lower price, besides engaging in a system of correspondence and advertisement. If he has not the ability to launch out on such a tide, he must dismiss his journeymen, sell his machinery and again live as before, by his daily wages paid him by some more able or fortunate person than himself. He takes the former course. He is bold, skillful and thrifty. He becomes a large manufacturer. By competition prices have fallen to such a pitch he must now sell ten or an hundred times as much as formerly to make the same profit. A great number of journeymen have learned the business; it has become common and its wages are less. They have fallen from $1,50 to $1 a day. But the profits of the master workman have fallen in a much larger ratio, and for that which used to bring him two dollars, he now gets perhaps only one, and of that one he has but a small share himself the profits of his manufactures not much exceeding the interest of the capital borrowed for their production. When our artizan began life he could make his borrowed capital double itself in two years. He now barely pays the interest and supports his family, and is involved in the care and responsibility of managing a large amount of other people's money. As long as other fields of industry continue open, the production of any particular manufacture will not, in the natural course of things, exceed the limit of a reasonable profit. Workmen's wages will never be ruinously low, and the prices of manufactured articles will at the same time fall to the limit of the least possible profit to the capitalists who produce them. We have now to consider the effect of the introduction of several disturbing causes into the above described natural order of events. Let us suppose that in the country where these manufactures have grown up, it was thought necessary that the revenues of the state should be collected by a duty upon imports. This duty was laid as a most convenient method of collecting the revenues of government; a method by which to avoid, in the most effectual manner, the expense, the trouble, the danger, and the odium of a direct taxation of personal and real property in the country. This method of collecting revenue was esteemed to be an equitable and a just method, and one which, more than any other, would compel the wealthier part of the people to bear their full share of the expenses of government; for as the greater part of the imports of every country have the character of luxuries, which can be dispensed with by the poor, a revenue collected chiefly upon imports would be very effectually a tax upon the rich, but which avoids entirely the odium of an excise or of a graduated tax. The whole attention of our adventurous manufacturer is now directed upon two objects first to extend the sale of his wares While there was a manufacture of these to the utmost, by forcing them into every imported articles in the country which remarket and at every sacrifice, short of ruin; ceived them, the duty advanced their price and second, to make them at the least much more than it checked their consumpwages and with the cheapest and most ra- tion, so that the importers had to pay but pid machinery. The likelihood is, that by a small proportion of the duty-they sold this time he has connected himself in part- off their goods somewhat less, or at slightly nership with some large capitalist, who has reduced prices, throwing the payment of the money to employ, and who now becomes duty back upon the foreign producer. As the real owner of the establishment. To soon, however, as manufactures of the same this person the financial department is made articles and at the same prices began to It is he who stimulates production, spring up in the country, it was found newho reduces wages, who multiplies opera- cessary by the importers either to withdraw tives, and extends the business by his agents from the trade or to sell at reduced prices; into every region of the earth. this went on until the profits of importation began to be less than the profits of manufacture, which had the effect to divert capital in New England from commerce to manufactures. over. Other capitalists have meanwhile become employed in the same kind of manufacture, and by competition prices and consequently wages, are driven down to the lowest point. The very large and powerful importing interests of England and America very, soon discovered that if things went on at the rate they were going, the people of America would soon be independent of them, and they applied, in consequence, for a reduction of the tariff. It was supposed also that the effect of a high tariff on foreign manufactures, amounting, by and by, to a prohibition of them, would seriously affect the revenue; and force upon the people a new system of taxation in the shape of land taxes, excise, and duties upon agricultural and manufacturing industry at home. It was resolved to fix the tariff upon imports at that point which would produce the greatest revenue; a point which indeed extended a certain amount of protection to the home manufacturer, but which, at the X. same time, placed him in trying competition with the foreigner. The latest modification of this tariff, was its adjustment ad valorem, or, to the value, so that the lower the price the lower should be the duty; that is to say, the lower the price fixed by the foreigner upon his goods, the less should he lose by the tariff; or in case the the consumer is supposed to pay the duty, the cheaper the foreign commodity, that is to say, the nearer it approached to the character of a necessary of life, the less he should have to pay to government for the use of it. By this ad valorem system the foreigner is stimulated in the highest degree. and the home manufacturer proportionally discouraged. ENCOURAGEMENT OF MANUFACTURES THE SAME WITH THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF TRADE. It is a very general opinion entertained by both parties, that trade and commerce with foreign nations will be diminished by the increase of manufactures in the country; a greater error could scarcely enter into the mind of the economist than this. Exportation is proportioned to the ability and wealth of a country. A country can export, in the regular course of trade, only the surplus of its produce, either in the shape of coin or of commodities. This coin and these commodities are exchanged in foreign markets for other coin and commodities; the breadstuffs of New York are sold perhaps for coin in Liverpool; the same coin, converted into silver dollars, is taken to China for the purchase of teas, opium, &c. In our dealings with China it would appear as though the balance of trade was against us; because money is taken out, and merchandise is brought home; but the money which we pay in China we have received in England, and thus the balance is made even. We very cular country, is however a matter of much less importance than is frequently imagined. All that is necessary to be known to judge of our real prosperity, is whether the industry of the country is so well employed, and in such a variety of profitable ways, is to yield a fair surplus of profit for a commerce with foreign nations. Whether the industry of every man is sufficient to enable him to purchase such foreign comforts and luxuries as he may think necessary to his happiness. If a manufactory of cheap cloth in Massachusetts, can produce a surplus to sell in India or China, and the money paid therefore can be used in France for the purchase of French luxuries, silks, wines, and the like, the balance of trade is not then against us with France, nor with the world generally; we have spent our surplus for luxuries, and that is all; we are not dependent upon France for the necessaries of life; we can do without silks and wines, if need be. The commercial power of a country deoften hear it stated with a fear of alarm, pends upon two circumstances, its ability that the balance of trade is against us with to produce, and its power of commanding England, when, if all countries be taken the market; the first is given by the industry into the account, it may possibly be found and economy of its people; which, howthat the balance of trade is, on the whole, ever, cannot come into activity, hardly into in our favor. existence, until they are freed from the opWhether it be so or not with any parti-pression and the competition of foreigners. |