La Rochefoucauld, Mandeville and Helvetius never met with a more determined or energetic adversary. Nowhere have the sweet and amiable virtues, such as ingenuous condescension, indulgent humanity, and the respectable and severe virtues, such as disinterestedness and self-control which subject our movements to the requirements of the dignity of our nature, been better understood or interpreted. Adam Smith is the philosopher of sympathy.(46) His theory triumphs over the cowardly and shameful egotism which concentrates the moral life of the individual in himself, and separates it from the life of the human race of the _outré_ stoicism which refuses the aid of sentiment to reason.(47) According to him, the law of private morals is sympathy; the law of natural jurisprudence, justice; the law of the production of wealth, free labor. But while he defended this principle with energy, he did not become guilty of a real recantation by worshiping the idol he had just overthrown. He would have been culpable of the strangest of all contradictions if he had made the vice which he had just lacerated the very pivot of another part of his teaching. We regret that this essay, which has already very much exceeded the limits we assigned it in the beginning, will not permit us to reproduce here Knies’ beautiful demonstration, in which he so learnedly and eloquently vindicates Adam Smith from this strange imputation, thereby placing Political Economy on its true basis, the basis of morals, by removing in a decisive way, all pretext of error and all means of subterfuge. This part is one of the best features in his most excellent work on “Political Economy, from the historical Point of View.” We shall return to this matter. XIII.