not expressly set forth in the most ancient sealaws, owing perhaps to the then infrequency of joint-stock adventures at sea, it came at length to be so fully and clearly adopted in the laws of Rhodes as to commend itself in its integrity to the founders of the Roman civil law, and afterwards, with occasional modifications of no very great importance, by all commercial countries, from the date of the Pandects down to the present time. The chapter of the digest De Lege Rhodia de Jactu (xiv. 2) gives full details. The following is the illustrative example it contains: "Wherefore, if two men should each of them own a hundred parts in the cargo, and Caius, the owner of the goods thrown overboard, shall own two hundred, Caius, on a loss of the cargo, should receive fifty from each of them: losing his other hundred by shipwreck, because he had just as large a share in the wares lost as they together had in the wares preserved. Hence, as the share of Caius, which represented two hundred, was in excess of the share of each of them which represented one hundred each, in the same proportion after the disaster, the share of Caius, representing one hundred, will be in excess of the share of each representing fifty, just as both before and after the disaster the share of Caius exceeded by a half the share of each of the others. On the other hand, if

Caius should throw overboard wares to the value of fifty, but each of the other men shall have kept his own, estimated at one hundred each, Caius shall suffer a loss of ten, but these other two shall contribute double each, namely twenty; so that just as his fifty answered to the one hundred of each of his partners, in like manner his forty may answer to the eighty apiece that each of them retains."

It would certainly have conduced to clearness if this example had set out that the total

BABBAGE, CHARLES, born near Teignmouth 1792, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating (without honours) 1814. In 1816 he was made fellow of the Royal Society. He was also an active member of the Astronomical Society. Feeling the defects of the Royal Society as then organised, he helped to found the British Association (1831), the statistical section of which (1833) was due to him, as well as the Statistical Society (1834). Between 1822 and 1843 his time and money were almost wholly devoted to the building of his two great calculating engines, one of which (partially complete) is preserved in the South Kensington Museum. In 1828 he was chosen Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He wrote not only on mathematical subjects, but on geology, the diving bell, lighthouses, metal-planing, life insurance, infant mortality, taxation, and last (but to economists not least), on machinery and manufactures. His last

cargo was made up of 400 parts, and that the loss of Caius's goods, 200 parts, entailed an average contribution of one-half on each of the adventurers' shares. Similarly, in the second case, the total value of the cargo was 250, and the loss of Caius's goods, worth fifty, entailed an average contribution of one-fifth on each of their shares in the total value. F. H.

AWARD. The decision of the arbitrators or of the umpire to whom parties, wishing to avoid recurrence to a legal tribunal, have referred their dispute. A submission to arbitration may be made a rule of court on the application of either party, and if this has been done, the award may be enforced with the court's assistance; otherwise the only means of compelling the party, against whom the award has been given, to satisfy its directions, is to bring an action and to obtain judgment on the basis of the award (see ARBITRATION).

E. S.

AZUNI, DOMENICO ALBERTO, born at Sassari (Sardinia) in 1760, died 1827 at Cagliari in Sardinia. A famous commercial lawyer and president of the Court of Appeal of Genoa, he became a member of the French corps legislatif, and was appointed by Napoleon I.

one of the members of the commission which

drew up the Code de Commerce. He was the principal author of the Livre deuxième du Commerce maritime. Maritime commerce, is also the subject of his principal works which are written in French, or in French and Italian.

Sistema universale dei principii del diritto marittimo dell' Europa; the French edition has the title Droit maritime de l'Europe;-Essai la Sardaigne;-Sull'origine della bussola; Dizionsur l'histoire géographique, politique et morale de ario di giurisprudenza mercantile ;— Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des marins navigateurs de Marseille.

M. P.

public efforts were to repress the barrel-organ, an unhappy application of mechanical invention to the fine arts. He gave the world a retrospect of his own career in Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864). He died in 1871.

Though Babbage himself has done comparatively little for economic theory, he has certainly aided it indirectly, by his full and faithful descriptions of some of the most characteristic phenomena of modern industry. If he is content to take most of his economical doctrines at second hand, he at least holds them intelligently, and states them with a vigour of his own, dwelling chiefly on the aspect which strikes him most. Political economy, he says, proceeds on the assumption of certain principles which are no more than general,- not compelling universal obedience like the principles of mathematical science, but no less than general, being much more frequently obeyed than violated. Such is, e.g., the principle that

men are governed by their imagined interest, and that each individual is the best judge of this for himself. The proper method of economic (as of other) inquiries is "to divide the subject into as many different questions as it will admit of, and then to examine each separately, or in other words, to suppose that each single cause successively varies, whilst all the others remain constant." It is hopeless for those who cannot master the separate questions in their simplicity to make a successful investigation of their united action (Exposition of 1851, pp. 1-4). Babbage has a clear view of the distinction between economics and the exact sciences, and, though a mathematician and a contemporary of COURNOT, WHEWELL, and Tozer, he makes no attempt to treat political economy by mathematical methods. He lays down with great clearness the distinction of fine arts from industrial arts, a technical distinction that involves an economical one. He makes it plain that economical inquiries must deal mainly with industrial arts. In the fine arts, "each example is an individual, the production of individual taste, and executed by individual hands," and therefore costly. In the industrial, "each example is but one of a multitude generated according to the same law, by tools or machines, and moved with unerring precision by the application of physical force," and therefore cheap (Exposition of 1851, pp. 48, 49). The social and economical effects of cheapness are brought out by Babbage with useful reiteration in support of free trade, and more especially in connection with the invention and application of tools and machinery. In fact, his chief direct contribution to theoretical economics has been his clear analysis of the DIVISION OF LABOUR (q.v.), and of the economical function of Machinery in the modern industrial system. regard to division of labour, the merits of his discussion of the subject are generally admitted.

In

He pointed out that the advantages mentioned by Adam SMITH in the Wealth of Nations (bk. i. ch. i.), would not explain the cheapness of manufactured articles, unless, to that author's list we add the following (Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, ch. xviii. p. 137). "That the master manufacturer, by dividing the work into different processes, each requiring different degrees of skill and force, can purchase exactly that precise quantity of both which is necessary for each process,whereas, if the whole work were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most laborious, of the operations into which the art is divided." In other words, advantage must be taken of the several individual capabilities of the workmen, intellectual and physical, and the work must be so organised that workmen be only called upon to do that which they can do best

of all. In the statement of this principle he has, as he allows, been anticipated by GIOJA, the Italian economist (Nuovo Prospetto delle Scienze Economiche, vol. i. ch. iv., Milan, 1815); but he was led to it independently by his own observation of the actual working of English and foreign factories. Without this organisation of labour (he says), full advantage cannot be taken of tools and machines, however ingenious. The nature of machinery, as distinguished from mere tools, is thus described: 'When each process has been reduced to the use of some simple tool, the union of all these tools, actuated by one moving power, constitutes a machine" (Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p. 136; cp. Marx, Kapital I. xiii. 389 note). The examples show that Babbage conceived, as MARX has done after him, that so long as the moving power is simply the human muscles, we have to do, not with a machine, but only with a tool. It is on subjects like these, at once of technical and of economical importance, that Babbage is at his best. In his views on taxation and currency, he accepts substantially the ordinary doctrines of the dominant school of economists. His criticisms of the defects in the exhibition of 1851 remind us in many places of COBDEN's views (e.g. in England, Ireland, and America) on the blessings of cheap goods and large advertising. But in his Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), Babbage not only showed the range and accuracy of his own personal observation and inquiry, but displayed a better comprehension of the econ omical bearings of the factory system of production than any previous economical writer. The book is a storehouse of illustrations from actual business; the writer never draws on his imagination for an example when his memory and his note-book will serve him. On the other hand, his book is not like BECKMANN'S History of Inventions, a mere collection and narrative of facts, without an interpretation of them by economical principles, nor is it, like Ure's Philosophy of Manufactures, a mere eulogy of the factory system of his own day. Though he lays, perhaps, undue stress on the capitalist, and his gains by the economy of materials and labour, he sees the need of improved industrial arrangements for the workmen, co-operative stores, and industrial profit-sharing, and is in favour of the abolition of the truck system, and all unfair restrictions on workmen's liberty of combination (Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, ch. xxi. p. 177, ch. xxviii. p. 253). He is no blind worshipper of Mammon; and he sneers at the vulgar notion that no calling is respectable which does not produce wealth. It is in the public interest rather than their own that he wishes scientific men to have a larger material reward than niggardly governments were then granting (Exposition of 1851, p. 147, etc.)

He wrote with feeling on this last subject because he was himself above everything an inventor. This is not the place to discuss the merits of his calculating engines, or the justice of his complaints against the successive governments with which he contended in his twenty years' endeavour to build his engines (see Appendix to Exposition of 1851). But we may note that his design in the invention of them was simply to convert into physical mechanism what had already become a mechanical process psychologically (Mach. and Manuf., ch. xix. p. 157), and this is one of the brightest aspects of the work of a modern inventor. In the abstract, Babbage was far from magnifying an inventor's office. "The man who aspires to fortune or fame by new discoveries must," he says (Mach. and Manuf., ch. xxv. p. 212), "be content to examine with care the knowledge of his contemporaries, or to exhaust his efforts in inventing again what he will most probably find has been better executed before; the power of making new mechanical combinations is a possession common to a multitude of minds, and by no means requires talents of a high order." It results, he believes, from the principle of the division of labour, which should be applied not only to industrial, but to mental labour, and has a great career still before it in the latter field. Under happier auspices, Babbage would no doubt have led the way in person still further than he did, in the directions thus indicated.

Those of his works which are directly and indirectly of most economical importance are the following:-On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 1832, third edition, 1833.-Thoughts on the Principles of Taxation with reference to a Property Tax and its Exceptions [exemptions from it] 1848; second edition, 1851; third edition, 1852. An Italian translation of the first edition, with notes, was published in 1851 at Turin.-Observations on the Decline of Science in England, 1830 [largely an attack on the Royal Society].A Comparative View of the different Institutions for the Assurance of Life, 1826.-Essay on the General Principles which regulate the Application of Machinery (from Encyclop. Metropolitana, 1829). "Letter to T. P. Courtenay on the Proportion of Births of the two sexes amongst Legitimate and Illegitimate Children" (Brewster's Edinr. Journal of Science, vol. ii. p. 85, 1829).— "On the Principles of Tools for Turning and Planing Metals" (In Holtzapffel's Turning and Mechanical Manipulation, vol. ii. 1846).-The Exposition of 1851, or Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England, 1851.-Statistics of the Clearing House, reprinted from Transactions of the Statistical Society, 1856.-Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 1864.

J. B.

BABEUF, FRANÇOIS NOËL, called Caius Gracchus, born at Saint Quentin 1764, died at Vendôme, 24th February 1797. Left to his own resources at the age of sixteen, his youth was stormy, and his whole life wild and irregular. From the commencement of the Revolution he

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wrote in the journal Le correspondant Picard, articles so violent in tone that he was brought to trial. His acquittal, 14th July 1790, did little to calm him. Appointed administrator of the Département of the Somme, he soon had to be dismissed from that office. This was the time at which he took the name of Caius Gracchus, posing as a Tribun du peuple. He gave the same name to a journal, which he had previously carried on under the sub-title of Défenseur de la liberté de la presse. All this took place shortly after the fall of Robespierre from power. This for a time had his approval;

but he soon returned to his earlier views and appealed to those violent passions which, as a demagogue, he knew how to rouse. He gathered round him, under the name of the Secte des Egaux, all the old Montagnards who were dissatisfied with the régime of the Thermidorians. The object of this sect, which drew its inspiration from some of the sentimental ideas of J. J. ROUSSEAU, was to destroy inequality of condition, with the object of attaining the general good. Sylvain Maréchal, author of a Dictionnaire des Athées, BUONARROTI, who claimed to be descended from Michael Angelo, with Amand and Antonelle, who did not, it is true, remain associated long, and some others, formed the staff which recognised Babeuf as their chief. Working with feverish activity, they gathered round them a considerable number of adherents. The place

where their club met was the Pantheon. At first orderly, their meetings became tumultuous and threatening and were prolonged far into the night. Attending armed, they prepared to resist by force the dissolution of the club which the authorities had determined on. General Bonaparte, acting with much tact, contrived to close the meetings of the club, but the members formed themselves forthwith into a secret society, and gradually, by winning over soldiers and police, became a formidable body, numbering nearly 17,000 able-bodied and armed men, without including the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, which were at their back. dressing themselves to the masses, they published a manifesto written by Sylvain Maréchal in his most inflammatory style-"We desire," said they, "real equality or death. This is what we want. And we will have real equality, no matter what it costs. Woe to those who come between us and our wishes. Woe to him who resists a desire so resolutely insisted on.

Ad

If it is needful, let all civilisation perish, provided that we obtain real equality. The common good, or the community of goods. No further private property in land; the land belongs to no private person. We claim, we require the enjoyment of the fruits of the land for all; the fruits belong to the whole world," etc.

Instructions in great detail as to the methods of raising insurrectionary movements were added.

"Those who hinder us shall be exterminated; ... shall all alike be put to death: Those who oppose us or gather forces against us; strangers, of whatever nation they may be, who are found in the streets; all the presidents, secretaries, and officers of the royalist (sic) conspiracy of Vendémiaire, who may also dare to show themselves." If the lives of men were to be treated thus, one may guess what fate was reserved for their property. But, after massacres and spoliations, what was to come of it all? The public authorities were to organise employment; there was to be only one source of employment, the state, with subdivisions devised to meet the wants, somewhat rudimentary, of the community. Every one was to have a right to lodging, clothes, washing, warming, and lighting, to food, médiocre mais frugale, to medical attendance. This is much what Louis BLANC, who appears to have sought his inspiration among the decrees of the République des Egaux, enunciated in more methodical and sober language. 'Every one is to work as he is able, and to consume according to his wants."

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The secret was well kept; it was only a few hours before the moment fixed for the explosion of the conspiracy (May 1796) that a captain, named Grisel, revealed it to the directory. Decisive steps were taken at once; a vigorous watch was kept, while the public authorities seized the leaders and their papers.

Babeuf and Darthé, condemned to death the 23d of February 1797, stabbed themselves before the tribunal. Life still lingering on, they were guillotined the next day. Buonarroti and Sylvain Maréchal, condemned to exile (deportation), died, the first in 1837, the second in 1803.

It may be added that Babeuf seems to have had rather a disordered brain than an absolutely criminal disposition. He died with courage, leaving his wife a written paper declaring his conviction that he had always been a "perfectly virtuous man."

See BLANC, J. J. L.; BRISSOT DE WARVILLE; COMMUNISM; PROUDHON. A. c. f. BACK-BOND (Scots law term). A declaration by one apparently an absolute owner that he is only a trustee or mortgagee.

BACKWARDATION. When a seller of stock for the account" (v. AccoUNT) on the stock exchange finds that he has not previously obtained the stock which he sold, he asks the dealer to whom he sold to allow him to prolong his bargain until the next settlement. If the security in question be unusually scarce, the buyer finds himself in a position to charge the seller for the accommodation, and the rate or fine which he imposes upon the person unable to deliver his stock or shares, according to the contract, is called a Backwardation. This fine, being paid again and again from settlement to settlement, at varying and sometimes very high rates, is the main source of profit in a CORNER (q.v.)

BACON, FRANCIS (VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS). Born 1560-61, died 1626. At the time when Bacon lived, economic questions had not taken any separate place among the studies to which a statesman gave special attention; but Bacon's mind, ingenious, fertile in resource, keen in research as it was, did not neglect the examination of those questions of policy which require economic treatment. Mr. Spedding (Bacon's Works, ed. Spedding, vol. iii. p. 515) considers that Bacon was "little before his age in his views with regard to usury, trade, etc." (See Essay xxxiv., "Of Riches"). By the time, however, when the essay on "Plantations" was written, COLONIES, as Mr. Reynolds observes, had been successfully founded. Bacon's remark, "Let there be freedom from custom till the plantation be of strength, and not only freedom from custom, but freedom to carry their commodities where they may make their best of them, except there be some special cause of caution," and those on the treatment and government of colonies generally, show perhaps his best judgments on these matters. Most of Bacon's writings deal with other subjects, but the reference to colonial possessions in his speech when lord chancellor on the election of Serjeant Richardson as Speaker (1620), describing this country's portion "in the New World, by the plantation of Virginia and the Summer Islands. . . Sometimes a grain of mustard seed proves a great tree, who can tell?" (Bacon's Works, ed. Spedding, vol. xiv. p. 175), may also be quoted in this connection. The essay "Of the true greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,' and the history of Henry VII., though these deal principally with politics, show that Bacon had taken the study of these branches of economics also " among his portion."

The editions of Bacon's Works are many. That edited by Spedding, Ellis, etc. (14 vols., London, 1857-74), and those of the Essays (London, 1881) and the Advancement of Learning by W. Aldis Wright, and of the Essays by S. H. Reynolds (both these Clarendon Press), may be specially mentioned. Mr. Reynolds remarks, and truly, that in Bacon's "views about trade he takes the mercantile theory as his guide."

BADGER. This name was formerly used to signify a small trader buying corn or victuals (fish, butter, or cheese, specially mentioned) in one place in order to sell them in another. Act 5 & 6 Edw. VI. c. 14, § 7 exempts these men from the penalties enacted against FORE

The

STALLERS and REGRATORS (q.v.), but requires them to be licensed by three justices of the peace of the county where they dwell. A subsequent act, 5 Eliz. c. 12, declares that the result of this legislation was that many persons "seeking only to live easily and to leave their honest labour" have taken up this trade, and enacts that licensees are to be householders having dwelt in the county for three years, and that the justices may require a badger to enter into recognisances not to forestall or engross. The rules as to licensing are made more stringent, and penalties assigned for a breach of them. The word is now obsolete except in certain dialects. It was used to denote the foreman of a GANG of agricultural labourers (Kebbel's Agricultural Labourer, 1870, p. 3).

[Tomlins' Law Dictionary, 1835.-Dr. Murray's New English Dictionary, s.v. 1884.] C. G. C. BAGEHOT, WALTER. Born at Langport, Somersetshire, 1826, died at Langport, 1877. Bagehot was son of the managing partner of Stuckey's Bank who sent him to be educated at University College, London. After taking successively his B.A. and M.A. degrees at London University, with the highest honours, in 1846 and 1848, he read law, and was called to the Bar; but, after a visit to Paris, where he was living at the time of the coup d'état, in 1851, he decided to enter his father's bank. His stay in Paris gave occasion to a series of very brilliant letters on the political condition of France under the prince president (as Louis Napoleon was at that time entitled), which were published in the Inquirer newspaper. They were in effect an apology for the coup d'état. After Bagehot's death they were republished in an appendix to the Studies on Literature. These letters gave the first evidence of the rise of a new critic of high genius, a critic who will take his place far above Lord Jeffrey, and Lord BROUGHAM, and Sydney Smith-though in mere humour Bagehot, humorous as he was, would hardly compare with the last-mentioned-in relation both to political literature and belles-lettres. Indeed, in belles lettres Bagehot will take rank with Matthew Arnold as one of the two most lucid as well as most discerning critics of that time. The essays which Bagehot contributed, first to the Prospective Review and then to the National Review, between 1853 and 1864, were not merely among the most brilliant, but among the most remarkable for wide intellectual survey and a detached literary judgment of any published in England during those years. In style they were remarkable equally for their gaiety, for the delicacy of their apprehensiveness, for the savoir faire of a man of the world, and for the impartiality of their personal estimates. It is difficult to say whether he wrote best on a theologian like Bishop Butler, on a sensitive poet like Hartley Coleridge, on a

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novelist like Sir Walter Scott, or on a great historian and essayist like Macaulay. Bagehot's style was buoyant, bright, and often eloquent, but there was always a certain dash of mockery in his eloquence, and a large infusion of seriousness in his mockery. In 1858 he married the eldest daughter of James WILSON, editor of the Economist, and two years afterwards succeeded his father-in-law in the editorship of that paper, retaining the post till his death in 1877. was universally regarded as one of the best financiers of his day, and was consulted by successive chancellors of the exchequer on all critical occasions.

He

The special service which Bagehot sought to render to economics may be roughly described as the reconciliation of it with history. He was not himself able to perfect this work; but he has stated the needs of the case clearly, and has pointed the way to a solution of its difficulties. "The great want of our present political economy" (he says in the preface to Universal Money, 1869) "is that some one should do for it what Sir Henry Maine has done so well for ancient law. We want some one to connect our theoretical account of the origin of things with the real origin." Simple definitions come first in the text-books; but, as in physics, the actual commencements in history and experience have been much harder and odder. Banks, for example, are now part of a refined mechanism of credit, but they were first invented to supply a verified and trustworthy money for traders (Universal Money, p. xv. seq.)

No economical writer shows clearer consciousness of the enormous difference between the present conditions of European commerce and the conditions of life and industry among our rude forefathers; or, at the present day, among barbarous nations. He had always the twofold object before him-to perfect the abstract theory of political economy as applicable to the former, and to bring home to himself and his readers the existence of the latter. An abstract DEDUCTIVE METHOD seemed to him indispensable from the very complexity of the subject; but it was to be applied only to the study of the peculiarly modern "large commerce," which he loved to contrast with the simple industry of primitive men. Epigram, however, even more than antithesis, was his strength, if sometimes his snare. He was never at a loss for words, and he had a 66 gay wisdom," absent from economical writing since Perronet THOMPSON. He can hardly be taken quite seriously when he complains that MONTESQUIEU, HUME, and Adam SMITH would have written more profoundly if the public for whom they wrote had not been so intolerant of dulness (Econ. Stud. p. 131).

Political economy, as he understands it, is not "a questionable thing of unlimited extent,