ch. 23 NOTES ON MERCANTILISM, ETC. 353

from the bad, for he will not meddle with projects atall.” 1

It may be doubted, perhaps, whether the above isjust what Adam Smith intended by his term. Or is itthat we are hearing in Bentham (though writing inMarch 1787 from “Crichoff in White Russia”) thevoice of nineteenth-century England speaking to theeighteenth? For nothing short of the exuberance ofthe greatest age of the inducement to investment couldhave made it possible to lose sight of the theoreticalpossibility of its insufficiency.

VI

It is convenient to mention at this point the strange,unduly neglected prophet Silvio Gesell (1862—1930),whose work contains flashes of deep insight and whoonly just failed to reach down to the essence of thematter. In the post-war years his devotees bombardedme with copies of his works; yet, owing to certainpalpable defects in the argument, I entirely failed todiscover their merit. As is often the case with im-perfectly analysed intuitions, their significance onlybecame apparent after I had reached my own con-clusions in my own way. Meanwhile, like otheracademic economists, I treated his profoundly originalstrivings as being no better than those of a crank. Sincefew of the readers of this book are likely to be well ac-quainted with the significance of Gesell , I will give tohim what would be otherwise a disproportionate space.

Gesell was a successful German 2 merchant in

1 Having started to quote Bentham in this context, I must remind thereader of his finest passage: “The career of art, the great road which receivesthe footsteps of projectors, may be considered as a vast, and perhaps un-bounded, plain, bestrewed with gulphs, such as Curtius was swallowed up in.Each requires a human victim to fall into it ere it can close, but when it oncecloses, it closes to open no more, and so much of the path is safe to thosewho follow.”

2 Born near the Luxembourg frontier of a German father and a Frenchmother.

2 A