In contrast with the poets, but mingling with them in forecast, were two writers on Trade, who saw the future through facts and figures, or what one of them called “political arithmetic,” even discerning colonial independence in the distance. These were Sir Josiah Child, born 1630 and died 1699, and Dr. Charles Davenant, born 1656 and died 1714. Child is mentioned by De Foe as “originally a tradesman”; others speak of him as “a Southwalk brewer”; and McCulloch calls him “one of the most extensive, and, judging from his work, best-informed, merchants of his time.”[279] He rose to wealth and consideration, founding a family which intermarried with the nobility. His son was known as Lord Castlemaine, Earl Tylney, of Ireland. Davenant was eldest son of “rare Sir William,” the author of “Gondibert,” and, like his eminent father, a dramatist. He was also member of Parliament, and wrote much on commercial questions; but here he was less famous than Child, whose “New Discourse of Trade,” so far as it concerned the interest of money, first appeared in 1668, and since then has been often reprinted and much quoted. There was an enlarged edition in 1694. That now before me appeared in 1698, and in the same year Davenant published his kindred “Discourses on the Public Revenues and on the Trade of England,” among which is one “on the Plantation Trade.” The two authors treated especially the Colonies, and in similar spirit. * * * * * The work of Child was brought to more recent notice by the voluminous plodder, George Chalmers, particularly in his writings on the Colonies and American Independence,[280] and then again by the elder Disraeli, in his “Curiosities of Literature,” who places a prophecy attributed to him in his chapter on “Prediction.” After referring to Harrington, “who ventured to predict an event, not by other similar events, but by a theoretical principle which he had formed,” and to a like error in De Foe, Disraeli quotes Chalmers:-- “Child, foreseeing from experience that men’s conduct must finally be decided [directed] by their principles, foretold the colonial revolt. De Foe, allowing his prejudices to obscure his sagacity, reprobated that suggestion, because he deemed interest a more strenuous prompter than enthusiasm.” The pleasant hunter of curiosities then says:-- “The predictions of Harrington and De Foe are precisely such as we might expect from a petty calculator,--a political economist, who can see nothing farther than immediate results; but the true philosophical predictor was Child, who had read _the past_.”[281] Disraeli was more curious than accurate. His excuse is, that he followed another writer.[282] The prediction attributed to Child belongs to Davenant.