Mr Laing supplies us[27] with an apt illustration of the fallacious use that is very commonly made of general laws, by neglecting to attend to the special circumstances of each case. It has been laid down as a maxim by economists, that a government should not attempt to direct, restrict, or interfere with the employment of capital and industry; but that every man should be left free to use the portion of them he possesses, how, where, and when he pleases. Now this maxim may be true enough in the abstract, and where there are no conditions to limit its application; but it is not equally true in all political states, nor in the same state at different times. The social condition of Great Britain, at the present day, may admit its application more fully than that of most other nations. But we have only to cross the German Ocean to find a circumstance easily overlooked--namely, that of climate, which upsets its relevancy altogether. A still more striking exemplification of the same fallacy presents itself too obviously, in the opening of the corn trade in our own country. "There should be no artificial restrictions on the food of the people"--that is the abstract axiom on which our legislators grounded the abolition of all customs on imported grain. Does any one question the truth of it as a general axiom? Certainly not: and if we were setting out on a new social system--if the field on which we had to work was a _tabula rasa_, and we were free in all other respects, as well as this, to devise a scheme of government for a nascent community--that maxim would no doubt be kept in view in the construction of our code. But we have to legislate for a state of society in which everything else is artificial--in which restrictions meet us wherever we turn. Our task is not to rear a new edifice, in the plan of which we could give free scope to our taste and skill; but to repair, and if possible improve, an ancient fabric, the work of many different ages, and abounding in all manner of quaint angles and irregularities. We have to deal with the case of a country burdened with an enormous weight of general and local taxation, arbitrarily and unequally distributed,--where the employment of the people, and the application of their capital and industry, is founded on the faith of old laws and a settled commercial principle,--above all, a country where the business of exchange has to be conducted through the most anomalous medium--the medium of a _fettered currency_. One and all of these peculiarities in our condition are so many limitations of the general maxim; and the attempt to carry it out in its full extent, in defiance of these limitations, can only end in confusion and disappointment. Political economy is a safe guide in the hands of a practical legislator, only when he has fully apprehended the truth that there is not one of its principles, from beginning to end, that may not be limited by the special condition of each individual state; and