to the third volume of his history of Brazil, mentions having consulted it; though we do not find it quoted till the middle of the volume.

The history of Dr. Funes does not descend to the late revolutions. These form the subject merely of the appendix to the third volume, of which we have just given the title, and which, in the report of our commissioners, is brought down as low as the battle of Maipu, April 1817. It appears from this sketch that Dr. Funes has himself been one of the revolutionary leaders. He informs us that he was of a junta, which assembled at Cordova in the beginning of the revolution, and which, under the instigation of Liniers, resisted its progress, as a criminal enterprise against the state. The Dean opposed their views, but unsuccessfully. He justly congratulates himself on his greater success, after the party of Liniers was overthrown and himself and his associates made prisoners, in delaying for a time their sacrifice to the popular cause This forbearance, however, was thought indiscreet by the government, and it was found expedient to put them to death.

The blockade of the capital, by the Royal Marine from Monte Video, the intrigues of the European Spaniards ever on the alert, in fine, opinions in favour of Liniers whispered among our troops, the companions of his dangers and of his glory, compelled the government to choose between the death of these conspirators and the ruin of dawning liberty. Placed in this dilemma, from a sense of duty, it did violence to its feelings, and confirmed the sentence, excepting in the part, which related to the bishop Orellana. Thus died prematurely men, who, in other times, might have been useful citizens."

In 1810, Dr. Funes was sent as a deputy by the city of Cordova to the capital, and mentions it as one of the causes of the discontents and dissensions, prevailing among the friends of liberty at that time, that those, who with himself, at the invitation of the junta at Buenos-Ayres, had been elected deputies by the provinces, had not been admitted to a share in the government. The brother of our author, Don Antonio Funes, has acted a still more distinguished part in the political events of the day. In 1816 he was made governor of Cordova at a time, when that province was in the most disordered state. He had already sacrified to the cause most of his

• President's message and documents, p. 49.

property, consisting of estates in Peru, which had been confiscated by the royalists, and two promising sons in the flower of their youth, who had fallen in the patriot armies. Having been nominated by the national congress to fill the important post of governor of Cordova, he discovered either the stern fidelity of a Roman, or the fierce exasperation of civil warfare. The city of Cordova was then occupied by Bulnes, the son-in-law of Antonio Funes. Bulnes having been defeated by the latter, with the aid of the reinforcements marched by colonel Sayos from Tucuman, the unrelenting father-in-law, instead of satisfying himself with the rout and flight of his son, caused him to be pursued, taken, and surrendered to the tribunals. The cause of Bulnes,* says his uncle the doctor, was subjected to the legal forms, by order of the congress.' These legal forms are those gentle ceremonies, which the Roman father ratified toward his son with the I, lictor, colliga manus.' It is the recurrence of these dreadful scenes in the whole course of the South American contest, which are the worst omens for its

success.

Dr. Funes appears to have approached the undertaking of a general history of these provinces after diligent prepar ation in the study of the previous works in the same department. We extract the following passage from the preface for the sake of the literary notices which it contains.

No one versed in the history of these provinces can be ignorant that Herrera, Diego of Cordova, Antonio Calancha, Juan Melendez, Alonso de Zamora, Fathers Alonso de Ulloa, Francisco Colin, Simon Vasconcelos and Manuel Rodriguez, as well as the historians in the collection of Barica, either relate, some more concisely than others, certain events in these provinces or confine themselves exclusively to the incidents of the conquest, The Argentina Manuscript of Ruiz Diaz is equally limited to this period. After them, the history of these provinces was treated with greater diligence by the Jesuits Juan Pastor, Nicolas Zecho, Pedro Cano, Pedro Lesana, Pedro Lozano, Guevara, Sanchez Labrador and Charlevoix. The works of Charlevoix and that of Zecho, although circulated in print, besides that the former is in French and the latter in Latin, and that they both treat only incidentally the civil events connected with the history of their missionary establishments, were equally of course unable to come down to our days. The other works, excepting these two, being left unpublished, are either not at all or very rarely to be met with.' Prologo II.

It was our design to have given something like an analysis of this history, and to have presented our readers with an abstract of three very interesting chapters, in the second volume, relating the history of the insurrection in Peru, in the last century under Tupac-Amaru, a descendant of the Incas. But we have been obliged to cut our article short, to make way for other topics, which, seemed to us of more moment; and we take leave of the subject of South America for the present, with the design of reverting to it frequently in our future numbers.

ART. XXIV.-Thoughts on Political economy, in two parts, by Daniel Raymond, Counsellor at law. Baltimore, Fielding Lucas, jr. 1820. 8vo, pp. 470.

IT would have been no derogation from the merit of this work, had it appeared before the public with humbler pretensions. It condemns the systems and reasonings of the most eminent writers on the same subject, in language by no means courteous, lays claim to complete originality, and takes pains to express an utter contempt for all modern critics. The science of political economy is so little an object of popular attention, and has really made so much progress unobserved by the community, that the student, on first engaging in it, is apt to be astonished at the result of his inquiries, and to fancy that what is so new to him must be new to others. But in this as in other pursuits, the boast of superior wisdom does not arise from an excess of knowledge so often as from a want of it. It is also quite natural for a young author to try to quiet or conceal his fears of the critics, by shutting his eyes and turning his back upon them, like the ostrich hiding his head, and thinking he has escaped the hunters. Nothing can be more indiscreet than this; since it betrays the terror which it is designed to conceal, and night tempt a wanton or illnatured reviewer to sport with his dreaded authority, and make game of his victim. We have no such intention. The question is not what this writer thinks of critics, but what he thinks on political economy, and to this topic we shall confine our remarks.

No one can doubt the importance of using all terms of science in a known and definite sense, but it is too much to New Series, No. 6.

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conclude with this writer that an author does,not understand the meaning of a word, because he does not, or even because he cannot formally define it. Many useful treatises have been written on the preservation of health and the prolongation of life, without defining life or health; and though the definition of man has been a desideratum among philosophers from the time of Plato to the present, speculations on our physical, moral or intellectual nature are not therefore more obscure or ambiguous. It is a much more common source of uncertainty and confusion, and one not sufficiently guarded against in the work before us, to use the same word in different He who employs a new term, or an old term with a new meaning, ought indeed to define it; but it is far more important that he should always give it the same signification; for if it denote one thing in the premises of an argument and another in the conclusion, this is false reasoning, and proves nothing. We shall first call the attention of our readers to this author's definition of National Wealth.

senses.

'If we would have correct and clear notions of national wealth, we must be careful to keep in mind the distinct notion of a nation itself, and not confound it with the individuals or any portion of individuals of which that nation is composed; a thing that is often done by the best writers on political economy. It is indeed the prevailing error of every writer on the subject that I have read. While they profess to treat of national interests, they depart from the subject and treat of individual interests, or of the interests of some constituent part of the nation, which causes ambiguity and want of precision. A nation, it is true, is an artificial being or a legal entity, composed of millions of natural beings, still it possesses all the properties and attributes of a being, which are as distinct and strongly marked as the properties and attributes of any natural being, and these must be constantly borne in mind, if we would reason correctly on the interests or rights of this being. A nation is a unity, and possesses all the properties of unity. It possesses a unity of rights, a unity of interests, and a unity of possessions; and he who professes to treat of the interests of this unity, but departs from them and treats of the interests of some constituent part of it, will just as certainly arrive at a wrong conclusion, as the arithmetician would, who in performing an algebraic computation should leave out one term of the equation. The interests of a nation and the interests of individuals composing that nation may be, it is true, and often are in unison. They may be identical, but they are not necessarily so; so far is this from

being the case, that they are often directly opposite. So national and individual wealth may be the same, but they are not necessarily so. It will be shewn hereafter that individual wealth is often national poverty, and I think I shall be able to show conclusively that the word wealth, as applied to individuals, never can with propriety be applied to a nation.' pp. 26-28.

If the author would imply that writers on political economy generally consider a nation to consist of a part of the individuals composing it, or the interest of any particular class to be always identified with that of the nation, he misunderstands them. Few have committed so gross an error. They uniformly admit a nation to be a unity, one body, but an aggregate body, consisting of all its members; so that if any one be impoverished, and neither the government nor any individual be at the same time benefitted or enriched, the nation on the whole is a loser. If, however, he intends to assert, as we suppose him to do, that all the individuals constituting a nation are not the nation, and the interests of all not the national interests, it must be admitted that he differs from most writers on this subject in his use of the term. A nation, considered as entirely distinct from the whole mass of individuals who compose it, must be, as he asserts, only an artificial being, a mere legal entity, differing from its citizens as a corporate body does from its members. To us at least the word conveys no third intelligible meaning, and we presume this to be the meaning of the author, for he elsewhere says, that in reality a nation is a corporation,' and ranks among political corporations nations as contra-distinguished from the individuals of whom they are composed.' p. 425.

In this sense the property of the nation is the property which it holds as a corporation to the exclusion of individuals, such as its public lands, the money in its treasury, its fleets and arsenals, and may undoubtedly be increased by taxes, which shall oppress and impoverish all the people. The national interests in this sense may often appear hostile to those of all the citizens. We have two objections to this definition. One, that to increase the property of the nation thus understood is the object not of political economy in genral, but of the single department of finance; the other, that the author himself commonly uses the term and reasons from it in a different sense. Thus, he assumes throughout, that the interests of all individuals ought to yield to those of the