All such speculations are foreign to mere practice, and never enter even into the explanations and reasonings of the merely practical man.However complicated the social system of which any person engaged in the acquisition of wealth makes a part, he has no difficulty in tracing the manner in which that portion of it which he possesses has been acquired, nor in explaining how it forms to him a certain amount of what he calls capital.But in giving this explanation, it will be observed that for the elements of his statements, he has always recourse to the existence and continuance of certain circumstances and regular trains of events in the general system of human society.What the things may be which give origin and regular succession to these events is a speculation lying out of his road, and on which he probably never enters.Though, therefore, he can easily tell how he got that which constitutes his wealth, and how to him it comes to be wealth, he will yet probably confess that he is unable to say what constitutes wealth in general, from whence it is derived, or what are the exact laws regulating its increase or diminution.These are questions of which the solution is very clearly shown to be of great difficulty from the mass of discordant opinions concerning them.(2)Adam Smith, in this and in other instances, by transferring, without hesitation, terms made use of to mark and explain the affairs of common life to denote the great phenomena which the affairs of societies present, falls, as it seems to me, into two errors.In the first place, he in a great measure misses that which is the real object at which his inquiry aims, the investigation of the true nature and causes of national wealth, and shows, by holding out sometimes one notion of it and sometimes another, according to the different lights in which at different times the subject presents itself to him, that he has no very definite ideas concerning it.
In the second place, he naturally, and in very many instances, falls into the error of taking, what in truth are the results of general laws governing the course of this class of events for the laws themselves, and so of elevating effects into causes.His procedure is not very dissimilar to what that of a philosopher would have been, who, desiring to investigate the nature of wind, should have assumed it as already known, not as an event, but as a thing, and should have conceived it his business merely to connect and arrange the various phenomena in relation to it, with which practice had previously made mankind familiar.Such a system could not have failed to have embodied great radical defects, for it would have been built on principles fundamentally erroneous.
His followers, by the use they make of definitions, appear to me rather to have introduced new evils, than to have applied a remedy to those already existing.Definitions give us the mastery of words, not of things, (3) and therefore by taking them as they have done, for principles of investigation, not auxiliaries to it, their labors have generally issued in adducing arguments instead of collecting and arranging facts, the former being the proper fruit of an attention to words, the latter of an inquiry into the nature of things.
I conceive that the fallacies of the particular doctrines I oppose may be most effectually exposed, by tracing out the true nature of that wealth, the manner of the augmentation and diminution of which, forms the subject of controversy.That we can neither assume this as a thing already known, nor hope, by any mere intellectual effort, to comprehend it in an ingenious definition.That when it is really discovered, it must be, as has happened in other things, that disputes concerning its manner of existence, its increase and decrease will terminate, or instead of hinging on plausible arguments, may be settled by a reference to ascertainable facts.It is, therefore, such an investigation, that I propose partially to attempt;and it is chiefly on the results of it, that I mean to rest my demonstration of the reality of those errors, my conviction of the existence of which, has been my motive for engaging in the present undertaking.
By entering on such an investigation immediately, however, the subject would be brought before the reader under an aspect so different from that in which it is viewed in the Wealth of Nations, and subsequent works following in the same train of thought, that I should not have an opportunity of directly meeting some of the arguments there advanced.For this reason I shall first endeavor to show, that even proceeding on similar principles to those adopted in the Wealth of Nations itself, there exist great and insuperable objections to the doctrines in question.This forms the subject of the First Book.In the Second, I enter on the analysis of the nature of wealth and the laws governing its increase and diminution.The Third is devoted to a practical application to the doctrines in question, of the principles established.
