which entertains a positive jealousy of the action of the State. The actual reforms which the Socialists of the Chair have hitherto promoted have been in the main copied from our own English legislation--our Factory Acts, our legalization of Trade Unions, our Savings Banks, our registration of Friendly Societies, our sanitary legislation, etc., etc.--measures which have been passed, with the concurrence of men of opposite shades of opinion, out of no social theory but from a plain regard to the obvious necessities of the hour. So that we have been simply Socialists of the Chair for a generation without knowing it, doing from a happy political instinct the works which they deduce out of an elaborate theory of economic politics. Part of their theory, however, is, that in practical questions they are not to go by theory, and the consequence is that while they sometimes lay down general principles in which communism might steal a shelter, they control these principles so much in their application by considerations of expediency, that the measures they end in proposing differ little from such as commend themselves to the common sense and public spirit of middle-class Englishmen. Their general theory had been taught in Germany for twenty years before it was forced into importance by the policy it suggested and the controversies it excited in connection with the socialist movement which began in 1863. Wilhelm Roscher, the lately deceased professor of economics in Leipzig, first propounded the historical method in his "Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über die Staatswirthschaft nach geschichtlicher Methode," published in 1843, though it deserves to be noticed that in this work he spoke of the historical method as being the ordinary inductive method of scientific economists, and distinguished it from the idealistic method proceeding by deduction from preconceived ideas, which he said was the method of the socialists. He had no thought as yet of representing his method as diverging from that of his predecessors, even in detail, much less as being essentially different in principle. Then the late Bruno Hildebrand, professor of political science at Jena, in his work on the "National Economy of the Present and the Future," published in 1847, proclaimed the historical method as the harbinger and instrument of a new era in the science, but he speaks of it only as a restoration of the method of diligent observation which Adam Smith practised, but which his disciples deserted for pure abstractions. In 1853, a more elaborate defence and exposition of the historical method appeared in a work on "Political Economy from the Standpoint of the Historical Method," by Carl G. A. Knies, professor of national economics at Heidelberg. But it was never dreamt that the ideas broached in these works had spread beyond the few solitary thinkers who issued them. The Free Traders were still seen ruling everything in the high places of the land in the name of political