From the appearance of the “Wealth of Nations,” Political Economy has excited a constantly increasing interest. All the events, fortunate and unfortunate, which have occurred in Europe during that extraordinary period, have tended both to increase its actual importance, and to occasion that importance to be better estimated. The art to which it is principally applicable is the great art of government, and particularly that branch of government which consists in the raising and employment of public money. Not a tax can be imposed or applied without materially affecting the fortunes of those by whom it is paid, of those among whom it is expended, and of third persons, many of whom, perhaps, are unaware of its existence. To ascertain the character and the extent of these effects, even as to any existing tax, without the aid of the general principles supplied by Political Economy, is scarcely practicable: to foretell or even to conjecture, with probability, the effects of an untried tax, without such aid, is impossible. A government ignorant of the nature of wealth, or of the laws which regulate its production and distribution, resembles a surgeon who has not studied anatomy, or a judge unacquainted with law. But, under the old system of Continental Europe, many things concurred to diminish the attention which the evil consequences of this ignorance might have been expected to attract. Each monarchy was considered the patrimony of its king, and its public revenue a portion of his income. All that he could get he spent or gave away; part of it went in wars for his honour, part was wasted in building and pageantry, and part was distributed among his courtiers. Public debts were few and small, and were the debts, not of the nation, but of the crown. The interest was not an additional burden on the people, but a deduction from the gratifications of the prince, and was reduced from time to time, either by depreciating the currency, or by the simple expedient of a refusal to pay. No right was recognised in the public to inquire into the amount of the royal revenue, the sources from which it was derived, or the purposes to which it was applied. These were the private affairs of the sovereign, which it was not decent or even safe to canvass. All this was changed at once by the French Revolution. It was proclaimed in France, and admitted, or scarcely denied, on the rest of the Continent, that governments are made for nations, not nations for governments; and that the public revenue is the revenue, not of the government, but of the nation,--not a property, but a trust,--not a rent or a tribute, but the purchase-money of the labour necessary to prevent foreign and domestic violence and fraud, paid over to the government merely as an administrator, unlawfully employed if applied to any other purpose, and unlawfully demanded if more than necessary for that purpose.