Leslie, THOMAS EDWARD CLIFFE

Leslie, THOMAS EDWARD CLIFFE, political economist, was born in County Down, Ireland, in 1827, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He qualified for the bar, but in 1853 was appointed to the chair of Economics and Jurisprudence at Belfast. In that city he died on 27th January 1882. His writings, mostly fragmentary in character, were collected in two books entitled The Land Systems (1870), containing studies on the land question in Ireland, Belgium, and France, and Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy (1879), which treat principally of the gold question and economic method. Leslie was a strenuous advocate for the study of economic problems in the light of the historic method, instead of the purely analytic method of Ricardo. He introduced the works of continental economists, such as Roscher and Laveleye, to the notice of English students.