vide a "bow of Love" we are wholly unable | heretofore, to make it altogether a condescento divine; nor can we tell what earthly sion to scrutinize and test its merits. The connection a "scarlet thread" can have with the figure.

admirers of Mr. Willis cannot expect to so venalize others of less susceptible and, perhaps, less indulgent temperaments, as to extort universal concessions in favor of their poet's claims to the laurel wreath. It has been, all along, their good pleasure and his interest to cry up and extol these feeble offerings to the shrine of the Muses. Nobody has felt any pleasure, or taken any interest, in crying them down. But we think that this indifference has been carried quite far enough; while leniency may become culpable in view of Mr. Willis's vaulting ambition and excessive vanity, as well as of the extravagances of his admirers; and especially in view of the very serious fact that American literature, and not its counterfeit votaries, has to pay the penalty of all this hapless amiability and indifference. For nothing is more certain than that by thus clogging the avenues to eminence with swarms of rampant, vain-glorious, elbowing pretenders, the doors are effectually closed against such as may really deserve to enter. Men of real talent disdain to resort to unworthy devices, or to join in urbecoming scuffles. Their mushroom competitors, on the contrary, are none too proud to stoop to any or all species of what may now be termed Barnumania, to attain a sickly and an ephemeral notoriety, and to pick up those scanty "present gains" to which Mr. Willis so candidly alludes in the preface to his book.

We decline, for the present, to notice "Lazarus and Mary," and must here close with our excerpts from the "Sacred Poems." We trust that the admirers of Mr. Willis may pardon to candor much that has seemed bitter and harsh in the foregoing review. We have been led to undertake the task But we would not be understood as meanless from any exalted opinion of our author's ing to class Mr. Willis with that herd of merits as a poet, than with a view to set despicable and disgusting scribblers who, before the reader, fairly and undisguisedly, despite their blathering and nauseous excresthe nature and quality of that poetry which, cences, have so subsidized penny presses as in certain circles, has lifted Mr. Willis to that to crowd out, temporarily, all genuine literpedestal of favor which he so modestly ac-ary votaries, and to infect the country with knowledges in his preface. It has been perceived, doubtless, that we do not concede that unhesitating and redoubtable supremacy to which our author has so flippantly laid claim. On the contrary, we must frankly declare that we consider Mr. Willis a very ordinary and indifferent writer of poetry, and can only wonder how he became so grossly possessed as to suppose that he could conjure with a true wizard's rod, or sweep with a minstrel's grace and skill. etry, such even as it is, has been he theme of undisputed laudation,

daily emissions of noisome nonsense, alike baneful to the encouragement of merit, and to the development of national literary resources. On the contrary, we desire to say that whatever contempt we may entertain for Mr. Willis's verses, we have yet seen much from his pen in a more appropriate and dignified department, that indicated, to our humble and imperfect judg ment, talent of a very high and enviable order. But while entertaining a very high opinion of much of his prose writings, we are yet constrained to say, that our author

THE APOSTLE OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.

BY RUFUS W. GRISWOLD.

HENRY C. CAREY has been recognized | fact that he was a consistent and ardent through continental Europe as one of the friend of protection. master thinkers of our generation. It is time for him to be known in his own country. In Political Economy he has applied the methods of the Positive Philosophy, and his works exhibit the chief advances the science has made since Adam Smith published his "Wealth of Nations." They are text-books in the colleges even of Sweden and Norway, while at the University in the street next to that in which the author has his residence, books are adopted composed of ideas from empirical and nearly obsolete systems: Say and Ricardo are regarded as expositors of the last and ultimate discoveries. Let us see if this law respecting prophets cannot be changed; or if not changed, confirmed, by an exception in the case of our philosopher.

Ricardo left his doctrine of Rents; Malthus his principle of Population; their books are little read now, and they themselves would have been long since forgotten, but that they taught what had been taught by no others. Of the hundreds of their countrymen, who have since written, scarcely one has furnished a new idea; or if such an idea can be found in the books of any one, it will not bear investigation. Many have collected facts, that are useful, and all of them have talked and written about their facts and theories; but only as empirics. One man contended on one side and another on another, and there was no standard by which to judge them. Ricardo and Malthus gave laws that would not fit the facts, and the facts were altered and suppressed to suit the laws.* McCulloch taught that transportation and exchange were more advantageous than production, and Cobden that it was better to go to colonies in which rich lands were to be had cheap, than to stay at home where landlords charged high rents for the poor ones that were necessarily cultivated: and therefore

Mr. Carey was born in Philadelphia, in December, 1793. His father was the late eminent Matthew Carey, memories of whose virtues preserve about his name a thousand delightful associations. Matthew Carey was a political economist also. He wrote much, and he wrote effectively, because he taught that which was in accordance with the feelings and interests of his readers; but he was of the old school, dead now, with its *Thus we see by a correspondence published in professors. He disliked abstract ideas or the London papers that Mr. Horace Mayhew, auprinciples, and did not trouble himself much thor of the metropolitan "Labor and the Poor" with their investigation. The consequence articles, has ceased to write for the London Mornwas, that he made no addition to politico-ing him to suppress, in his reports on the condition ing Chronicle, the conductors of that journal wisheconomical knowledge, and left nothing by of the working classes, facts opposed to free trade. which he should be remembered except the See Carey's Past, Present and Future, p. 128.

that imported food would be cheaper than | mere anarchy. Ricardo had to leave a place of that which was grown at home. The result escape for difficult facts, and his successors has proved that he was wrong. Food is now have since found themselves obliged to open obtained with more difficulty than before; so many new ones, that his laws are now emigration is necessary, and the late decision like sieves. in Parliament shows that Protection will be restored as the ministry could command only the mean majority of 21.

:

A few years hence McCulloch will be remembered only as the compiler of a few indifferent books of reference, and Cobden as the author of much ill to the people of England. Many of these men have ideas that are sound; but they know nothing of the principles of the science they undertake to teach; and so they are continually making blunders. Of all the French writers of the first forty years of this century, only one, Jean Baptiste Say, has lived to the middle of it, and his work is only a mass of error in an imposing form.

The period was propitious for a discoverer. The opinion of D'Alembert that the steps of Civilization were to be taken in the middle of each century, was to be confirmed by a new illustration.

Mr. Carey's father was a practical man; all his children were trained to affairs; thus they became observers. The students of books are rarely creators in science. Truth is most likely to be evolved in the school of experience. From the age of seven years until he was twenty-one, Mr. Carey was in his father's book-store. From 1821 to 1838, he was a partner in the important publishing house of Carey, Lea & Carey, and Carey & Lea; but in this period he passed one season abroad, we believe immediately after his marriage with a sister of Leslie, the

was already fixed, when his retirement from business enabled him to devote his faculties entirely to the science with which his name will for ever be associated.

Mr. Carey's first book-An Essay on the Rate of Wages-was published in 1836, and was soon after expanded into The Principles of Political Economy, which appeared in three octavo volumes in 1837-1840.

This may be called sweeping criticism; but time will prove that it is just. We need principles, as the astronomers did, before Co-painter. The determination of his mind pernicus, Kepler and Newton gave them the laws which govern the movements of the universe. Others observed facts and wrote treatises, but only these names have lived. Ricardo and Malthus furnished what they believed to be the great natural laws in regard to land and the sources of its value; the relation of the laborer and the capitalist; and of population. Their names are still familiar, but their theories are shattered by the assaults of critics; they will be forgot ten, and their places will be occupied by those of the great author of whose works we propose to write. Ricardo and Malthus will be to Carey as Ptolemy to Copernicus. From 1803, a period of almost fifty years, since Ricardo published his doctrine of Rent, there has not been even an attempt, except Carey's, to add anything to political economy. Senior, Whateley, and a thousand others, have been disputing about words, while as many others have been attacking Malthus and Ricardo; but no one has attempted to discover laws, to take the place of those which were assailed. Of the supporters of these writers, every one has been compelled to admit that their laws did not cover the facts, and to interpolate accommodating passages. John Stuart Mill, in his recent work, has done this even more largely than b essors, and so furnished addi

ti

Before proceeding to give an account of this performance we will more particularly show what was, at the date of its publication, the condition of the science it was designed to illustrate. Mr. Malthus had taught that population tended to increase faster than food, and that so irresistible was this tendency, that all human efforts to restrain the number of men within the limits of subsistence were vain. It was a great "law of nature," and it was of little consequence, therefore, how fast food might be increased, since the only effect must be to stimulate population, which, in the end, was sure to outrun the means of living. The impression which this work produced has been briefly noticed in what we have written in connection with Mr. Alexander H. Everett's reply to it, printed in London and Boston in 1822. The doctrine was a convenient

*The Past, the Present and the Future, pp.

ir laws were not laws, but | 70, 71.