may seem ridiculous; but this form of attack on it arose from a perception or belief that its professors were claiming for it an _imperative_ force, while disclaiming morality, and were assuming that it was a sufficient and supreme rule for political action. Of late it has been maintained on a special ground that moral considerations cannot wholly be excluded from political economy. Dr. W. B. Hodgson, first holder of a new chair in Edinburgh as Professor of _Mercantile_ Economy, has urged that, in so far as morality or immorality in individuals affects wealth and the markets, we do not exhaust the discussion on exchanges while we neglect this consideration. Perhaps indeed no one, in discussing taxation, has omitted to consider what taxes lead to fraudulent evasion or to smuggling; but economists hitherto, with great unanimity, have resolved that, in their character of economists, they will not notice moral evils from an opium trade, or from sale of deadly weapons and ammunition, or from traffic in intoxicants; nor can one in general discover from their writings that they know vice to be wasteful, or national expenditure on needless and foolish objects undesirable. They have a right to select what topics they will treat, and what they will not treat. They have a right to say: "Such and such considerations belong to morals, not to _our_ political economy." But, on the one hand, if they are resolved that their science shall be as unmoral as engineering or navigation, they must not claim for it any decisive weight in State-politics; on the other hand, the topics which they neglect need, so much the more urgently, to be treated by others, especially since we have no professors of practical morals, and (for more reasons than one) questions of the market are not thought suitable to the pulpit.