the great Tartar Exodus. Oubacha, meantime, and his people, were gradually recovering from the effects of their misery, and repairing their losses. Peace and prosperity, under the gentle rule of a fatherly lord paramount, redawned upon the tribes: their household lares, after so harsh a translation to distant climates, found again a happy reinstatement in what had in fact been their primitive abodes: they found themselves settled in quiet sylvan scenes, rich in all the luxuries of life, and endowed with the perfect loveliness of Arcadian beauty. But from the hills of this favoured land, and even from the level grounds as they approached its western border, they still look out upon that fearful wilderness which once beheld a nation in agony the utter extirpation of nearly half a million from amongst its numbers, and, for the remainder, a storm of misery so fierce, that in the end (as happened also at Athens during the Peloponnesian War, from a different form of misery) very many lost their memory; all records of their past life were wiped out as with a sponge-utterly erased and cancelled: and many others lost their reason; some in a gentle form of pensive melancholy, some in a more restless form of feverish delirium and nervous agitation, and others in the fixed forms of tempestuous mania, raving frenzy, or moping idiocy. Two great commemorative monuments arose in after years to mark the depth and. permanence of the awe-the sacred and reverential grief with which all persons looked back upon the dread calamities attached to the year of the tiger-all who had either personally shared in those calamities, and had themselves drunk from that cup of sorrow, or who had effectually been made witnesses to their results, and associated with their relief; two great monuments; one embodied in the religious solemnity, enjoined by the Dalai Lama, called

in the Tartar language a Romanang—that is, a national commemoration, with music the most rich and solemn, of all the souls who departed to the rest of Paradise from the afflictions of the Desert: this took place about six years after the arrival in China. Secondly, another more durable and more commensurate to the scale of the calamity and to the grandeur of this national Exodus, in the mighty columns of granite and brass, erected by the Emperor Kien Long, near the banks of the Ily: these columns stand upon the very margin of the steppes; and they bear a short but emphatic inscription* to the following effect:

By the Will of God,

Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts,
Which from this Point begin and stretch away
Pathless, treeless, waterless,

For thousands of miles-and along the margins of many mighty Nations,
Rested from their labours and from great afflictions
Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall,

And by the favour of KIEN LONG, God's Lieutenant upon Earth,
The ancient Children of the Wilderness-the Torgote Tartars-
Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar,

Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial Empire in the year 1616,

But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow,
Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd.

Hallowed be the spot for ever,

and

Hallowed be the day-September 8, 1771!

Amen.

* This inscription has been slightly altered in one or two phrases, and particularly in adapting to the Christian era the Emperor's expressions for the year of the original Exodus from China and the retrogressive Exodus from Russia. With respect to the designation adopted for the Russian Emperor, either it is built upon some confusion between him and the Byzantine Cæsars, as though the former, being of the same religion with the latter (and occupying in part the same longitudes, though in different latitudes), might be considered as his modern successor; or else it refers simply to the Greek form of Christianity professed by the Russian Emperor and Church.

DIALOGUES OF THREE TEMPLARS

ON POLITICAL ECONOMY,

CHIEFLY IN RELATION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MR RICARDO.

Original Advertisement, in April, 1824.

I HAVE resolved to fling my analysis of Mr Ricardo's system into the form of Dialogues. A few words will suffice to determine the principles of criticism which can fairly be applied to such a form of composition on such a subject. It cannot reasonably be expected that dialogues on Political Economy should pretend to the appropriate beauty of dialogues as dialogues-by throwing any dramatic interest into the parts sustained by the different speakers, or any characteristic distinctions into their style. Elegance of this sort, if my time had allowed of it, or I had been otherwise capable of producing it, would have been here misplaced. Not that I would say even of Political Economy, in the words commonly applied to such subjects, that "Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta doceri:" for all things have their peculiar beauty and sources of ornament-determined by their ultimate ends, and by the process of the mind in pursuing them. Here, as in the processes of nature and in mathematical demonstrations, the appropriate elegance is derived from the simplicity of the means employed, as expressed in the "Lex Parcimonia" ("Frustra fit per plura, quod fieri fas erat per pauciora"), and other maxims of that sort. This simplicity, however, must be looked for in the order and relation of the thoughts, and in the steps through which they are trained to lead into each other, rather than in any anxious conciseness as to words; which, on the contrary, I have rather sought to avoid in the earlier Dialogues, in order that I might keep those distinctions longer before the reader from which all the rest were to

N

be derived. For he, who has fully mastered the doctrine of Value, is already a good political economist. Now, if any man should object that in the following Dialogues I have uniformly given the victory to myself, he will make a pleasant logical blunder: for the true logic of the case is this, Not that it is myself to whom I give the victory; but that he to whom I give the victory (let me call him by what name I will) is of necessity myself; since I cannot be supposed to have put triumphant arguments into any speaker's mouth, unless they had previously convinced my own understanding. Finally, let me entreat the reader not to be impatient under the disproportionate length (as he may fancy it) of the opening discussions on Value: even for its own sake, the subject is a matter of curious speculation; but in relation to Political Economy it is all in all; for most of the errors (and, what is much worse than errors, most of the perplexities) prevailing in this science take their rise from this source. Mr Ricardo is the first writer who has thrown light on the subject; and even he, in the last edition of his book, still found it a "difficult" one (see the Advertisement to the Third Edition). What a Ricardo has found difficult, cannot be adequately discussed in few words; but, if the reader will once thoroughly master this part of the science, all the rest will cost him hardly any effort at all.

INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE.

(SPEAKERS THROUGHOUT THE DIALOGUES ARE PHÆDRUS,
PHILEBUS, AND X. Y. z.)

Phædrus. This, Philebus, is my friend X. Y. Z., whom I have long wished to introduce to you; he has some business which calls him into this quarter of the town for the next fortnight; and during that time he has promised to dine with me; and we are to discuss together the modern doctrines of Political Economy; most of which, he tells me, are due to Mr Ricardo. Or rather, I should say, that I am to become his pupil; for I pretend to no regular knowledge of Political Economy, having picked up what little I

possess in a desultory way amongst the writers of the old school; and, out of that little, X. obligingly tells me that three-fourths are rotten. I am glad, therefore, that you are in town at this time, and can come and help me to contradict him. Meantime X. has some right to play the tutor amongst us; for he has been a regular student of the science: another of his merits is that he is a Templar as well as ourselves, and a good deal senior to either of us. Philebus. And for which of his merits is it that you would have me contradict him?

Phad. Oh, no matter for his merits, which doubtless are past all computation, but generally as a point of hospitality. For I am of the same opinion as M, a very able friend of mine in Liverpool, who looks upon it as criminal to concede anything a man says in the process of a disputation: the nefarious habit of assenting (as he justly says) being the pest of conversation, by causing it to stagnate. On this account he often calls aside the talking men of the party before dinner, and conjures them with a pathetic earnestness not to agree with him in anything he may advance during the evening; and at his own table, when it has happened that strangers were present who indulged too much in the habit of politely assenting to anything which seemed to demand no particular opposition, I have seen him suddenly pause with the air of the worst-used man in the world, and exclaim, "Good heavens! is there to be no end to this? Am I never to be contradicted? I suppose matters will soon come to that pass that my nearest relations will be perfidiously agreeing with me; the very wife of my bosom will refuse to contradict me; and I shall not have a friend left on whom I can depend for the consolations of opposition."

Phil. Well, Phædrus, if X. Y. Z. is so much devoted as