Emeritus Professor of Political Economy in University College, London. London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1873. [The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved.] PREFACE. THE following Essays have appeared in various periodicals at intervals in the course of the last fourteen years. They consist in part of attempts to apply the principles of economic science, as that science has been understood by the ablest writers in this country and in France, to the solution of actual problems, of which those presented by the Californian and Australian gold discoveries, and by the state of land tenure in Ireland, are the most important. So much of the volume may not improperly be described as Essays in Applied Political Economy. The remaining Essays deal mostly with topics of a theoretical kind; onePolitical Economy and Laissez-faire- is expository of the character of economic science, and twothose on Comte and Bastiat-are critical and to some extent controversial. To two of the Essays relating to the Gold Question I have appended |