government of the State.  There is as yet no question of economic laws in the sense of historical and descriptive laws; and political economy, not yet existing in the form of a science, is not more than a branch of that great tree which is called ethics, or the art of living well.’[1] ’The doctrine of the canon law,’ says Sir William Ashley, ’differed from modern economics in being an art rather than a science.  It was a body of rules and prescriptions as to conduct, rather than of conclusions as to fact.  All art indeed in this sense rests on science; but the science on which the canonist doctrine rested was theology.  Theology, or rather that branch of it which we may call Christian ethics, laid down certain principles of right and wrong in the economic sphere; and it was the work of the canonists to apply them to specific transactions and to pronounce judgment as to their permissibility.’[2] The conception of economic laws, in the modern sense, was quite foreign to the mediaeval treatment of the subject.  It was only in the middle of the fourteenth century that anything approaching a scientific examination of the phenomena of economic life appeared, and that was only in relation to a particular subject, namely, the doctrine of money.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Rambaud, Histoire des Doctrines Economiques, p. 39.  ’It is evident that a household is a mean between the individual and the city or Kingdom, since just as the individual is part of the household, so is the household part of the city or Kingdom, and therefore, just as prudence commonly so called which governs the individual is distinct from political prudence, so must domestic prudence (oeconomica) be distinct from both.  Riches are related to domestic prudence, not as its last end, but as its instrument.  On the other hand, the end of political prudence is a good life in general as regards the conduct of the household.  In Ethics i. the philosopher speaks of riches as the end of political prudence, by way of example, and in accordance with the opinion of many.’  Aquinas, Summa II. ii. 50. 3, and see Sent.  III. xxxiii. 3 and 4.  ’Practica quidem scientia est, quae recte vivendi modum ac disciplinae formam secundum virtutum institutionem disponit.  Et haec dividitur in tres, scilicet:  primo ethicam, id est moralem; et secundo oeconomicam, id est dispensativam; et tertio politicam, id est civilem’ (Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum, VII. i. 2).]

[Footnote 2:  Op. cit., vol. i. part. ii. p. 379.]

[Footnote 3:  Rambaud, op. cit., p. 83; Ingram, op. cit., p. 36.  So marked was the contrast between the mediaeval and modern conceptions of economics that the appearance of this one treatise has been said by one high authority to have been the signal of the dawn of the Renaissance (Espinas, Histoire des Doctrines Economiques, p. 110).]