FIRST ECONOMIST

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 June 1938, Page 9

FIRST ECONOMIST

RICHARD CANTILLON’S WORK. There was a fire in Albermarle Street, London, on Tuesday, May 14, 1734. It is believed that a cook was deliberately- responsible in order to hide a darker deed, for report has it that he had previously murdered Richard Cantillon, his master. Richard, coming from a Kerry family, was born somewhere about the end of the 17th century. He was certainly not an old man when he was robbed and murdered, and he was perhaps better known in Paris than in London, for in the French capital he had been the chief means of floating paper currency, and had made a fortune by doing it. He had also married one of the richest women in the city. But the astonishing thing about Richard Cantillon is his one book, an Essay on Commerce. It is declared to be the first treatise on the modern science of economics, and those who have examined it most carefully and critically are loudest in their praise. It was at least 100 years in advance of the thought of the age, and in many ways nearly 200. A garbled English edition sold at five shillings a copy is worthless, and gives no idea whatever of the masterly workmanship and fine .style of the original French edition, which runs to twice as many pages. The book gives an analysis of trade, coinage, bullion, banking, foreign exchange, and the principles of economy as Richard Cantillon —with no similar work to draw upon —understood these things. It covers in a consise and effective manner the whole field of economy, with the exception of taxation, and it has in its pages the germs of many of the leading principles of this science. One critic of the book says that the subject of foreign exchange has never been more accurately or illuminatingly treated. This work, the first really valuable contribution towards modern economic problems, came from the hands of a man who remains a shadow, and of whom we know next to nothing except that he was murdered by his cook.