between public and private education, and an estimate of their relative advantages; these, and a vast number of other subjects, respecting the structure and development of society, such as the feudal system, slavery, emancipation of serfs, origin of standing armies and of mercenary troops, effects produced by tithes, laws of primogeniture, sumptuary laws, international treaties concerning trade, rise of European banks, national debts, influence of dramatic representations over opinions, colonies, poor-laws--all topics of a miscellaneous character, and many of them diverging from each other--all are fused into one great system, and irradiated by the splendor of one great genius. Into that dense and disorderly mass, did Adam Smith introduce symmetry, method, and law.” In fact, it is a book of digressions--digressions characterized by more order and method, but by little more compunction, than the wondrous digressions of Tristram Shandy. It is interesting to note that even this vast miscellany of thought, the “Wealth of Nations,” systematized though it be, was not meant to stand alone as the exposition of a complete system; it was only a supplement to the “Theory of Moral Sentiments;” and the two together constituted only chapters in that vast book of thought which their author would have written. Adam Smith would have grouped all things that concern either the individual or the social life of man under the several greater principles of motive and action observable in human conduct. His method throughout is, therefore, necessarily abstract and deductive. In the “Wealth of Nations,” he ignores the operation of love, of benevolence, of sympathy, and of charity in filling life with kindly influences, and concentrates his attention exclusively upon the operation of self-interest and expediency; because he had reckoned with the altruistic motives in the “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” and he would not confuse his view of the economic life of man by again forcing these in where selfishness was unquestionably the predominant force. “The philosopher,” he held, “is the man of speculation, whose trade is not to do anything, but to observe everything;” and certainly he satisfied his own definition. He does observe everything; and he stores his volumes full with the sagest practical maxims, fit to have fallen from the lips of the shrewdest of those Glasgow merchants in whose society he learned so much that might test the uses of his theories. But it is noticeable that none of the carefully noted facts of experience which play so prominent a part on the stage of his argument speaks of any other principle than the simple and single one which is the pivot of that part of his philosophy with which he is at the moment dealing. In the “Wealth of Nations” every apparent induction leads to self-interest, and to self-interest alone. In Mr. Buckle’s phrase, his facts are subsequent to his argument; they are not used for demonstration, but for illustration.