HAMILTON, ROBERT, LL.D.,
a mathematician and political economist, was born in June, 1743. He was
the eighth son of Gavin Hamilton, [Gavin Hamilton, executed an ingenious
and accurate model of Edinburgh, which cost him some years’ labour, and
was exhibited in a room in the Royal Infirmary in 1753 and 1754; after
his death it was neglected and broken up for firewood. It represents a
scheme for an access to the High Street, by a sloping road from the West
Church; precisely the idea subsequently acted upon in the improvement of
the city.] a bookseller and publisher in Edinburgh, whose father was at
one time professor of divinity in, and afterwards principal of, the
university of Edinburgh. In the life of a retired and unobtrusive
student, who has hardly ever left his books to engage even in the little
warfares of literary controversy, there is seldom much to attract the
attention of the ordinary reader; but where perusing the annals of one
of the most feverish periods of the history of the world, posterity may
show a wish to know something about the man who discovered the fallacy
of the celebrated sinking fund, and checked a nation in the career of
extravagance, by displaying to it, in characters not to be mistaken, the
unpalliated truth of its situation. Holding this in mind, we will be
excused for giving to the world some minutae of this remarkable man,
whom neither the events of his life in general, nor his connexion with
the literary history of the age, would have rendered an object of much
biographical interest.
Like many men who have
signalized themselves for the originality or abstractness of their
views, Hamilton in his early years suffered much from constitutional
debility, an affliction from which his many after years were signally
exempt, till his last illness, his only complaint being a frequent
recurrence of lumbago, which gave him a characteristic stoop in walking.
He is described as having shown, in the progress of his education, an
appetite for almost every description of knowledge, and to have added to
the species of information for which he has been celebrated, a minute
acquaintance with classical and general philosophical subjects: a
respected friend, long belonging to the circle of Hamilton’s literary
acquaintance, has described his mind as having less quickness in sudden
apprehension of his subject, than power in grappling with all its
bearings, and comprehending it thoroughly after it had been sometime
submitted to his comprehension; it was exactly of that steady, strong,
and trustworthy order, on which teachers of sense and zeal love to
bestow their labour. He was, in consequence, a general favourite with
his instructors, and more especially with the celebrated Matthew
Stewart, professor of mathematics in Edinburgh, who looked on the
progress and prospects of his future scholar with pride and friendly
satisfaction.
The partiality of Mr
Hamilton for a literary life he was compelled to yield to circumstances,
which rendered it expedient that he should spend some time in the
banking establishment of Messrs William Hogg & Son, as a preparatory
introduction to a commercial or banking profession; a method of spending
his time, less to be regretted than it might have been in the case of
most other literary men, as, if it did not give him the first
introduction to the species of speculation in which he afterwards
indulged, it must have early provided him with that practical
information on the general money system of the country, which his works
so strikingly exhibit. Soon after this, Mr Hamilton began to form the
literary acquaintance of young men of his own standing and pursuits,
some of whom gathered themselves into that knot of confidential literary
communication, which afterwards expanded into a nursery of orators,
statesmen, and philosophers, of the highest grade, now well known by the
name of the Speculative Society. The manner in which the young political
economist became acquainted with lord Kaimes, has something in it of the
simplicity of that literary free masonry, which generally forms a chain
of friendly intercourse between the celebrated men of any particular
period, and those who are just rising to replace them in the regard and
admiration of the world. His lordship’s attention having been attracted
by the views on one of his own works, expressed in a criticism which had
been anonymously supplied by Mr Hamilton, to one of the periodicals of
the day—he conveyed through the same paper a wish that the author of the
critique, if already known, might become better known to him, and if a
stranger, would communicate to him the pleasure of his acquaintance. The
diffident critic was with difficulty prevailed on to accept the
flattering offer; the elegant judge expressed considerable surprise at
the youth of the writer, when compared with the justness and profundity
of his views, and communicated to him by a general invitation to his
house, the advantages of an intercourse with his refined and gifted
circle of visitors.
In 1766, Mr Hamilton,
then only twenty-three years of age, was prevailed on by his friends to
offer himself as a candidate for the mathematical chair of
Marischal college in Aberdeen, then vacant by the death of Mr Stewart,
and though unsuccessful, the appointment being in favour of Mr Trail, he
left behind him a very high sense of his abilities in the minds of the
judges of the competition, one of whom, in a letter to Dr Gregory,
states, that "he discovered a remarkable genius for mathematics, and a
justness of apprehension and perspicuity, that is rarely to be met
with."—"He is," continues the same individual, "an excellent
demonstrator; always planned out his demonstration with judgment, and
apprised his audience where the stress lay, so that he brought it to a
conclusion in a most perspicuous manner, and in such a way that no
person of common understanding could raise it." After this unsuccessful
attempt to acquire a situation more congenial to his pursuits, Mr
Hamilton became a partner in the conducting of a paper mill, which had
been established by his father—a concern which, in 1769, he relinquished
to the care of a manager, on his appointment to the rectorship of the
academy at Perth. In 1771 he married Miss Anne Mitchell of Ladath, whom
he had the misfortune of losing seven years afterwards. In 1779, the
chair of natural philosophy in Marischal college, in the gift of the
crown, was presented to Dr Hamilton. From this chair Dr Copland,—a
gentleman whose high scientific knowledge and private worth rendered
him, to all who had the means of knowing his attainments, (of which he
has unfortunately left behind him no specimen,) as highly respected for
his knowledge of natural philosophy and history, as his colleague was
for that of the studies he more particularly followed,—had been removed
to the mathematical chair in the same university. The natural
inclination and studies of each led him to prefer the situation of the
other to his own, and after teaching the natural philosophy class for
one year, Dr Hamilton effected an exchange with his colleague,
satisfactory to both. He was not, however, formally presented to the
mathematical chair till several years afterwards.
In short time previously
to the period of his life we are now discussing, Dr Hamilton had
commenced the series of useful works which have so deservedly raised his
name. In 1777, appeared the practical work, so well known by the name of
"Hamilton’s Merchandise;"—he published in 1790, a short essay on Peace
and War, full of those benevolent doctrines, which even a civilized age
so seldom opposes to the progress of licensed destruction. In 1796, Dr
Hamilton published his Arithmetic, a work which has been frequently
reprinted,—and in 1800, another work of a similar elementary
description, called "Heads of a Course of Mathematics," intended for the
use of his own students: but the great work so generally attached to his
name, did not appear till he had passed his seventieth year. The
"Inquiry concerning the Rise and Progress, the Redemption and Present
State of the National Debt of Great Britain," was published at Edinburgh
in 1813—it created in every quarter, except that which might have best
profited by the warning voice, a sudden consciousness of the folly of
the system under which the national income was in many respects
conducted, but it was not till his discoveries had made their silent
progress through the medium of public opinion, that they began gradually
to affect the measures of the government. The principal part of this
inquiry is devoted to the consideration of the measures which have at
different periods been adopted for attempting the reduction of the
national debt.
The earliest attempt at a
sinking fund was made in the year 1716, under the auspices of Sir Robert
Walpole, a measure of which that acute minister may not improbably have
seen the inutility, as in the year 1733, he applied five millions of the
then sinking fund to the public exigencies; the principal always
nominally existed, although it was not maintained with constant
regularity and zeal, until the year 1786, when the celebrated sinking
fund of Mr Pitt was formed, by the disposal of part of the income of the
nation to commissioners for the redemption of the debt, a measure which
was modified in 1792, by the assignment of one per cent annually, on the
nominal capital of each loan contracted during the war, as a sinking
fund appropriated for the redemption of the particular loan to which it
was attached. It underwent several other modifications, particularly in
1802 and 1807. The great prophet and propounder of this system, the
celebrated Dr Price, unfolded his views on the subject, in his treatise
"Of Reversionary Annuities," published in 1771. It is a general opinion,
that an application to studies strictly numerical, will abstract the
mind from the prejudice and enthusiasm of theory. Dr Price has proved
the fallacy of such a principle, by supporting his tables of
calculations, with all the virulence and impatience of a vindicator of
the authenticity of Ossian’s Poems, or of the honour of queen Mary. Dr
Price has given as a glowing example of his theory, the often repeated
instance of the state of a penny set aside and allowed to accumulate
from the time of Christ:—if allowed to remain at compound interest, it
will accumulate to, we forget exactly how many million globes of gold,
each the size of our own earth—if it accumulate at simple interest, the
golden vision shrinks to the compass of a few shillings—and if not put
out at interest at all, it will continue throughout all ages the pitiful
penny it was at the commencement. The application of the principle to an
easy and cheap method of liquidating the national debt, was so obvious
to Dr Price, that he treated the comparative coldness with which his
advice was received, as a man who considered that his neighbours are
deficient in comprehending the first rules of arithmetic; and it
certainly is a singular instance of the indolence of the national mind,
and the readiness with which government grasped at any illusive theory,
which showed a healing alternative to the extravagance of its measures,
that no one appeared to propose the converse of the simile, and to
remind the visionary financier, that in applying it to national
borrowing, the borrower, by allowing one of the pennies he has borrowed
to accumulate in his favour at compound interest, is in just the same
situation as if he had deducted the penny from the sum he borrowed, and
thus prevented the penny and its compound interest from accumulating
against him.
The practical results of
Dr Price’s theories were, the proposal of a plan, by which a nation
might borrow at simple interest, and accumulate at compound interest a
fund for its repayment: boldly pushing his theory to its
extremities, and maintaining that it is better to borrow at high than at
low interest, because the debt will be more speedily repaid; and as a
corollary, that a sinking fund during war is more efficient than at any
other time, and that to terminate it then, is "the madness of
giving it a mortal blow." The supposition maintained by Dr Hamilton, in
opposition to these golden visions of eternal borrowing for the purpose
of increasing national riches, did not require the aid of much rhetoric
for its support - it is, that if a person borrows money, and assigns a
part of it to accumulate at compound interest for the repayment of the
whole, he is just in the same situation as if he had deducted that part
from his loan—and hence the general scope of his argument goes to prove
the utter uselessness of a borrowed sinking fund, and the fallacy of
continuing its operation during war, or when the expenditure of the
nation overbalances the income. The absurdity of setting aside a portion
of the sum borrowed for this purpose, (and generally borrowed at more
disadvantageous terms as the loan is to any degree increased,) was
partially prevented by a suggestion of Mr Fox; but the sinking fund was
strictly a borrowed one, in as far as money was laid aside for it, while
the nation was obliged to borrow for the support of its expenditure. The
evil of the system is found by Dr Hamilton to consist, not only
in the fallacy it imposes on the public, but in its positive loss of
resources. The loans are raised at a rate more disadvantageous to the
borrower than that at which the creditor afterwards receives payment of
them, and the management of the system is expensive; if a man who is in
debt borrows merely for the purpose of paying his debt, and transacts
the business himself, he merely exposes himself to more trouble than he
would have encountered by continuing debtor to his former creditor; if
he employ an agent to transact the business, he is a loser by the amount
of fees paid to that agent. These truths Dr Hamilton is not content with
proving argumentatively—he has coupled them with a minute history of the
various financial proceedings of the country, and tables of practical
calculation, giving, on the one hand, historical information; and, on
the others showing the exact sums which the government has at different
periods misapplied.
Along with Mr Pitt’s
system of finance, he has given an account of that of lord Henry Petty,
established in 1807; a complicated scheme, the operation of which seems
not to have been perceived by its inventor, and which, had it continued
for any length of time, might have produced effects more ruinous than
those of any system which has been devised. The summary of his proofs
and discussions on the subject, as expressed in his own words, is not
very flattering to the principle which has been in general followed:
"The excess of revenue above expenditure is the only real sinking find
by which the public debt can be discharged. The increase of the revenue,
or the diminution of expense, are the only means by which a
sinking fund can be enlarged, and its operations rendered more
effectual; and all schemes for discharging the national debt, by
sinking funds, operating by compound interest, or in any other manner,
unless so far as they are founded upon this principle, are illusory."
But it cannot be said that Dr Hamilton has looked with feeling of
anything resembling enmity on the object of his attack; he has allowed
the sinking fund all that its chief supporters now pretend to arrogate
to it, although the admission comes more in the form of palliation than
of approbation. "If the nation," he says, "impressed with a conviction
of the importance of a system established by a popular minister, has, in
order to adhere to it, adopted measures, either of frugality in
expenditure, or exertion in raising taxes, which it would not otherwise
have done, the sinking fund ought not to be considered inefficient: and
its effects may be of great importance."—"The sinking fund," says an
illustrious commentator on Dr Hamilton’s work, in the Supplement to the
Encyclopeadia Britannica, following up the same train of reasoning, "is
therefore useful as an engine of taxation;" and now that the glorious
vision of the great financial dreamer has vanished, and left nothing
behind it but the operation of the ordinary dull machinery, by which
debts are paid off through industry and economy, one can hardly suppose
that the great minister who set the engine in motion, was himself
ignorant (however much he might have chosen others to remain so) of its
real powerlessness. The discovery made by Dr Hamilton was one of those
few triumphant achievements, which, founded on the indisputable ground
of practical calculation, can never be controverted or doubted: and
although a few individuals, from a love of system, while apparently
admitting the truths demonstrated by Dr Hamilton, in attempting to
vindicate the system on separate grounds, have fallen, mutato nomine,
into the same fallacy, [Vide "A Letter to lord Grenville on the
sinking fund, by Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, Esq., M.P., London, 1828."]
the Edinburgh reviewers, Ricardo, Say, and all the eminent political
economists of the age, have supported his doctrine; while the venerable
lord Grenville—a member of the administration which devised the sinking
fund, and for some time first lord of the treasury—has, in a pamphlet
which affords a striking and noble specimen of political candour,
admitted that the treatise of Dr Hamilton opened his eyes to the fallacy
of his once favourite measure.
A year after the
publication of this great work, the laborious services of the venerable
philosopher were considered as well entitling him to leave the laborious
duties of his three mathematical classes to the care of an assistant,
who was at the same time appointed his future successor. The person
chosen was Mr John Cruickshank, a gentleman who, whether or not he
proved fruitful in the talents which distinguished his predecessor, must
be allowed to have been more successful in preserving the discipline of
his class, a task for which the absent habits of Dr Hamilton rendered
him rather unfit. In 1825, Dr Hamilton’s declining years were saddened
by the death of his second wife, a daughter of Mr Morison of Elsick,
whom he had married in 1782; and on the 14th day of July, 1829, he died
in the bosom of his family, and in that retirement which his unobtrusive
mind always courted, and which he had never for any considerable period
relinquished. Dr Hamilton left three daughters, of whom the second was
married to the late Mr Thomson of Banchory, in Kincardineshire, and the
youngest to the Rev. Robert Swan of Abercrombie, in Fife. He had no
family by his second wife. Several essays were found among Dr Hamilton’s
papers, which were published by his friends in 1830, under the title of
"The Progress of Society;" and although the majority of them contain
very deep and abstruse remarks well worthy of attention, there are
others which may, perhaps, be said to contain too many of the general
principles of which the earlier metaphysicians of Scotland were very
fond, and too little of the close and practical reasoning which
generally distinguishes their author’s mind, to be such as he might have
thought fit to have given to the world in their present state. The
commercial policy argued by Dr Hamilton in these tracts, is the system
which was first inculcated by Dr Adam Smith in 1776, and which, after
the lapse of seventy years, was embodied in the great and beneficent
free-trade measures of Sir Robert Peel, under the operation of which the
nation is developing its resources of trade and manufacture with fresh
energy, and all ranks of the community, but more especially the
working-classes, enjoy an unexampled degree of prosperity. It is to be
hoped that the successful experiment of Great Britain will encourage the
other nations, both of the old and new world, to follow so wise and
salutary an example, and reciprocate the advantages which they also have
derived from it. Dr Hamilton held a peculiar, view on the subject of a
metallic currency, believing its value to arise, not from its worth as a
commodity, but chiefly from its use as an instrument of exchange. This
opinion he maintained with great power and plausibility.
The Essays on Rent, and
the consequent theory of the incidence of tithes, argued with a modesty
which such an author need hardly have adopted, are well worthy the
consideration of those who have turned their attention to these abstruse
subjects. The author appears to doubt the theory discovered by Dr
Anderson, and followed up by Sir Edward West, Malthus, Ricardo, and
M’Culloch, which discovers rent to be the surplus of the value of the
produce of more fruitful lands of a country, over the produce of the
most sterile soil, which the demands of the community requires to be
taken into cultivation. "What," says our author, in answer to the
assumption of Dr Anderson, "would happen if all the land in an
appropriated country were of equal fertility? It would hardly be
affirmed that, in that case, all rent would cease." To this the
following answer might be made—Were the population insufficient to
consume the whole produce of rich fertile land, (which could not long be
the case,) certainly there would be no rent. Were the consumption equal
to or beyond the produce, the rent would be regulated thus:—If foreign
corn could be introduced at a price as low as that at which it could be
raised, there would still be no rent—if, either from the state of
cultivation of other countries, or the imposition of a duty, corn could
only be imported at a price beyond that at which it can be grown, rent
would be demanded to such an extent as to raise the price of the home
produce to a par with the imported—in the former case the rent being the
natural consequence of commerce, in the latter the creature of
legislation. The principle maintained by Dr Anderson would here exactly
apply, the higher price of importing corn to that of producing it at
home, being a parallel to the higher cost of raising produce in sterile
than in fruitful soils. But this intricate subject, unsuited to the
present work, we gladly relinquish, more especially as the discussion of
our author’s ideas on this topic has fallen into other and abler hands.
In these Essays we think we can perceive here and there traits of that
simplicity and abstraction from the routine of the world, which was on
some occasions a characteristic of their author. Men who mingle
unobserved with the rest of their species, may be well versant in the
lighter and more historical portions of the philosophy of mind and
matter; but the illustrious examples of Newton, Locke, Smith, and many
others, have shown us, that the limitation of the human faculties calls
to the aid of the more abstruse branches of science, a partial, if not
total abstraction from all other subjects, for definite periods. Dr
Hamilton was remarkable for his absence; not that he mingled subjects
with each other, and mistook what he was thinking about, the error of a
weak mind, but he was frequently engaged in his mathematical studies,
when other persons were differently employed. As with other absent men,
numberless are the anecdotes which are preserved of his
abstractions—many of them doubtless unfounded, while at the same time it
must be allowed, that he frequently afforded amusement to inferior wits.
He possessed a singular diffidence of manner, which in a less remarkable
man might have been looked upon as humility. Taking advantage of this
feeling, and of his frequent abstractions, his class gave him perpetual
annoyance, and in the latter days of his tuition, the spirit of mischief
and trickery, natural when it can be followed up in classes the greater
portion of which consisted of mere boys, created scenes of perfect
anarchy and juvenile mischief. The author of this memoir recollects
distinctly his stooping shadowy figure as he glided through the rest of
his colleagues in the university, with his good-humoured small round
face, and his minute but keenly twinkling eyes, surrounded by a thousand
wrinkles, having in his manner so little of that pedagogical importance
so apt to distinguish the teachers of youth, especially in spots where
the assumption of scientific knowledge is not held in curb; by
intercourse with an extensive body of men of learning. It is not by any
means to be presumed, however, that the subject of our memoir, though
retired, and occasionally abstracted in his habits, excluded himself
from his due share in the business of the world. He led a generally
active life. He maintained a correspondence with various British
statesmen on important subjects, and with Say and Fahrenberg, the latter
of whom requested permission to translate the work on the national debt
into German. He frequently represented his college in the General
Assembly. On the bursary funds of the university, and on the decision of
a very important prize intrusted to him and his colleagues, he bestowed
much time and attention; and he gave assistance in the management of the
clergymen’s widows’ fund of Scotland, and in plans for the maintenance
of the poor of Aberdeen.
It was once proposed
among some influential inhabitants of Aberdeen, that a public
monument should be erected to the memory of this, one of the most
eminent of its citizens. Strangers have remarked, not much to the credit
of that flourishing town, that while it has produced many great men, few
have been so fortunate as to procure from its citizens any mark of
posthumous respect. We sincerely hope the project may not be deserted,
and that such a testimony of respect will yet appear, to a man on whom
the city of Aberdeen may with more propriety bestow such an honour than
on any stranger, however illustrious. |