It needs but the most superficial knowledge of history to realize that the material or economic condition of the civilized nations has through many centuries been improving, and at no period so rapidly as during the Nineteenth century. During the decline and dismemberment of the Roman empire, and for three centuries after its fall, there was undoubtedly a general economic deterioration, reaching its lowest depths in the Eighth and Ninth centuries. But when the feudal system became established and comparatively settled, the first signs of recuperation began to appear. They were faint indeed, and were confined to a few localities. They might be regarded as the premonitions rather than the reality of improvement; valuable more for what they promised than for what they actually effected. The recuperation was at first exceedingly slow, and it requires close scrutiny and comparison to see that the condition of men and of society was better in the Tenth century than in the Ninth, and better in the Eleventh than in the Tenth. But after the Eleventh the signs of real improvement were plain enough. From that time onward not only was the progress continuous, but it is certain that in each century it was more rapid than in the one which preceded it, until we come to the Nineteenth, in which the advancement has been so rapid that we seem to be separated by a great gulf from all anterior time, and to be living in a new world.
We are accustomed to attribute this progress to the continuous improvement in the arts, whereby man's power to command the resources of nature and to convert the forces and materials of the earth to his uses is greatly multiplied. That this is the proximate means is obvious. But back of it is the slowly acquired and cumulative knowledge of nature and her laws which renders such arts possible to us. Still further behind is the slow growth of mental habits, logical processes, methods of thinking and reasoning, which are necessary to the acquisition of such knowledge, and which we term scientific philosophy. So that, after all, this wonderful material progress is but a phase of the growth of human philosophy, of ideas, of mental culture. So, too, is the political and moral progress of the world. In truth, all phases of our civilization, whether social or individual, whether moral or material, whether economic or political, are interwoven so closely and are so interdependent that we can not separate them except ideally. Every phase of it implies the others. Yet they all reflect certain central ideas, and these ideas are the moving forces of the whole.
In turning our attention to the subject of economic history, it is obvious that in an hour's discourse only a few thoughts can be offered, and these must be of a general rather than of a specific character; and it has seemed to me that the most suggestive thoughts would relate to the growth of economic ideas rather than to economic incidents, though incidents must be referred to for purposes of illustration. I know of no study more interesting than the research into the condition of peoples of past ages, to learn how they lived, what was the scope and interest of their daily life, what kind of food did they eat, what sort of clothing did they wear, how were they housed, and what was the degree of bodily comfort or discomfort which they enjoyed or suffered. Above all, it is interesting to inquire what were their thoughts and opinions on each or any class of subjects. These questions engage the attention and labor of present historical writers far more than the older ones. In fact, it is only in comparatively recent years that historians have given such questions much thought. Such information as we possess has not been handed down to us in any one book written by a contemporary writer, giving a systematic, fairly complete and detailed account of such matters in a single volume. It is gathered in numberless fragments from numberless sources, and pieced together by comparison. Much of it is inferential, though the inferences seem to be well sustained. Not merely histories, but poetry, dramas, treatises on all subjects, laws, church canons, inscriptions, books of controversy, and finally old letters abound in materials of this fragmentary sort, which, when collated and carefully compared, throw much light upon the condition and customs of past generations. This information, however, is much fuller and more circumstantial with respect to the condition of the higher classes than of the lower, as might be expected, for their doings and their relations to the world around them were more conspicuous, and they alone as individuals performed the leading parts in the dramas of history. Yet I fancy the condition of the lowest and poorest classes has been much the same in all ages of the past, and there is little to tell that we do not know already. But the point on which positive information is most needed is a somewhat precise and definite knowledge of what proportion of the peoples in the various ages were absolutely destitute and dependent upon charity or rapine in order to keep soul and body together; what proportion were self-supporting, what proportion were well-to-do or rich. Though absolute figures are scanty, we still know that the farther we recede into the past the greater was the proportion of destitution and misery, and the smaller the proportion of those who enjoyed a comfortable living. We also know that in all classes the scale of living becomes lower the farther back we go, until we reach the dark ages, when even feudal lords and princes lived in a manner that we should consider insufferable, when a middle class hardly existed, and when the vast mass of the peoples lived in a way compared with which the living of the Mexican palado is sumptuous.
Yet there are those who are ever contending that the tendencies of the present day are to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. History gives us a very different state of facts. It teaches us that in the progress of the last ten centuries, and especially in the present one now expiring, the material condition of the civilized world has enormously improved; that the rich indeed have grown richer, but that the poor have become better off in still greater proportion; that absolute poverty and dependence upon charity has become incomparably less, and is in general still decreasing; that the great masses of the communities have become self-supporting, and that the scales of living among all classes have been immensely raised, and in the largest proportion among the poor.
We are accustomed, as I have said, to attribute this growth of material wealth to the development of the useful arts, and this in turn is a result of increased scientific knowledge, which is in a general sense an evolution of mind and ideas. It is to these ideas, and their long, slow evolution through thousands of years, that I would ask your attention, although time will allow us only a hasty glance at them.
Looking back to antiquity, the great economic fact which looms up before us in ancient Rome was its gigantic system of slavery. It inherited it from time immemorial, from periods far older than the earliest twilight of history. It had never been nor heard of otherwise Nor was it peculiar to Rome. It was universal among the Greeks and Persians, the Phoenicians and Egyptians, the Germans and Gauls, the Carthagenians and Iberians. The idea of it was ingrained among all races of antiquity. They could not even conceive of the absence of it, and they never questioned either the right or the expediency of it. Generous and kindly men, indeed, often pitied the hard lot of the slave, but it no more suggested to them the idea of a general emancipation than an overworked horse or mule suggests to us the idea of turning all of them loose and giving them the suffrage and postoffices. Plato, in the Republic, where he sets forth his conceptions of a perfect society in the form of extreme communism of property, relegates the manual labor to slaves. Aristotle, whose philosophy was as materialistic as Plato's was idealistic, while repudiating any such socialism as Plato conceived, held the same general opinion on the subject of slavery. To him it was in the due course of nature, and inevitable. Along with these ingrained ideas was another, which pervaded the ancient minds and bears an intimate relation to it. Manual labor they looked upon as degrading, unbecoming a freeman, and the proper occupation of slaves and menials. And as a matter of fact, a large part of the artisan labor was by slaves. The great patricians of Rome owned thousands of them, and among them were blacksmiths and carpenters, masons and bricklayers, potters, saddlers, shoemakers, tailors, weavers, dyers, and millers. Their products, too, were sold in open market in competition with those of free artisans. The result was that the condition of the free laborer was most miserable. Except that he had his liberty, his condition was worse than that of the domestic or house servants, whom the master was constrained by custom to dress and feed well, out of regard for his own dignity. In general, the poverty of the free laborer, and the hardship of his struggle for existence, was such that he often preferred to become a proletarius, even when not driven to it. Thus, there was no great middle class of industrious, energetic men, supporting themselves in comfort and leading lives of honorable industry, and recognized as the bone and sinew of the land and the main support of the state. We can not wonder, then, that in the times of the republic Rome was an almost constant scene of turbulence and riot; that under the empire it took an army of Pretorians to preserve even a faint outward semblance of order; that its streets swarmed with vagabonds, loafers, sharpers, and pluguglies; that its long streets of six-story tenement houses were densely packed with vice and vermin, filth and wretchedness, and exhibited phases of life as horrible as a Chinese opium-joint.
In the middle ages, the state of labor presents different aspects. In place of the slave, we find the serf or vilein. The serf had some rights, the slave had none. The serf could marry and have legitimate children, the slave could not. The serf could have personal property, the slave could not. On the other hand, the exactions of his lord were at first severe, and though they seldom took all, they often took the greater part of what he had or might produce. In process of time, the rights of the serf grew larger, and the rights of his lord over him grew less, and in passage of centuries serfdom slowly died out. It would be interesting, if time permitted, to go over the incidents of this transformation, and study the changes of ideas which led to it. But it appears so clearly, and the facts are so well described in Hallom's History of the Middle Ages, that a reference to that work must suffice. Yet there was one agency to which brief reference may be made. It was the rise of the free cities of France and Germany, whose importance has been made so clear and conspicuous by Guizot. It was in the early free cities that manual labor became honorable, and at the same time secured some degree of protection from robbery and immunity from the competition of the slave. The laborer now could support himself, and hold up his head as a man entitled to respect. He could cultivate thrift and accumulate something, and life could offer him something to strive for. Here is the real beginning of modern civilization as distinct from the ancient.
Let us now glance at another economic order of facts in the Roman commonwealth, the tenure of lands. Here the conspicuous feature is the great number of large landed estates owned by rich patricians and operated principally by slave labor. They were scattered all over the empire, though more numerous in some provinces than in others. Not all the agricultural land was in the latifundia, as these great estates were called, nor probably was even the greater portion of it, for there were great numbers of small farms and homesteads as well. But the general tendency usually was for land to drift into the great estates, especially during the first two centuries of the empire. There had never been a time when the latifundia did not exist. They often broke up, but new ones took their places. The ownership of land was as absolute with the Romans as it is with us in fee simple, and the original theory of the Roman law was that every citizen should be a land owner, though the theory stood in strong contrast with the facts. It was, however, the spirit of the law to encourage in every possible way the acquisition of small farms by the lower classes of citizens, and under the republic many vigorous attempts were made to do so. The agrarian laws were for that special purpose, and though they produced for a time some relief, they were fruitless in the end. In a few years the great estates had swallowed the little ones, and the laws were disregarded, and became obsolete.
It may be permitted to diverge here a moment to say that the modern conventional meaning of the word agrarian is very different from its meaning among the Romans. It is usually supposed to imply legislation or agitation adverse to private property in land. Not so among the Romans; for, however lax their observance of law might be in other respects, no laws were enforced with more rigor, certainty, and justice than those which guaranteed property rights in land. But agrarian lands were not private property at all, but public property, and their titles vested distinctly in the state. If the state granted them away, they ceased to be agrarian, and it often did so to newly created citizens and to discharged veterans of the army. Whenever new territory was conquered, large tracts—never less than a tenth, and often much more—were taken by the state and appropriated as public land, and as the spoil of war. It thus came under the agrarian laws. It then granted permits to settle upon these lands, but still retained the title, so that the occupants were virtually tenants at will, and were required to pay a tithe of their produce to the state as the price of tenancy. No person could be granted more than 500 jugera (330 acres). The right of the state to resume these lands and dismiss its tenants at any time was unquestioned by the Roman jurists. But long tenancy naturally begets in the mind of the occupant a feeling equivalent to that of ownership, and that he has a natural right to it. The latifundia had encroached upon the agrarian lands and occupied thousands of acres of them; the people clamored for their resumption, and sometimes secured it. The celebrated Licinian and Sempronian laws embodied resumptions of this character and a redistribution, but they never touched the private property owned and held under a clear title, whether in large estates or in small ones. This view of ancient agrarian legislation was ferreted out in the early part of the present century by the great German jurist Heyne and the Danish historian Niebuhr.
The state of the latifundia was often a source of the gravest anxiety to intelligent, patriotic Romans of all classes. Juvenal thunders against them in his satires, Seneca and Quintilian sound frequent notes of warning, and the saying, “Latifundia perdiderunt Romam” (the great estates have been the ruin of Rome), was often repeated. But remedy was impossible. No earthly power could break them up without destroying all that was left of Roman power and greatness, and breaking society not merely into fragments, but even into dust and molecules. For at that time there was nothing which could be put in the place of them. They existed by forces incomparably more potent than imperial power or decrees of the senate.
Let us for a moment turn our thoughts, for purposes of comparison, to some facts connected with land property in the present century. Whoever has visited southern France, and especially southern and middle Germany, must have been much impressed, and perhaps amazed, by the minute way in which the farm lands are divided up. As many of you have probably seen them, I will not take time to describe them. So far in many of the German states has this subdivision been carried at times, and so burdensome had it become, that the state has repeatedly been led by common consent to intervene, wipe out all the existing subdivisions, and reapportion the land as equitably as possible among the proprietors, in subdivisions of greater convenience. Laws have been passed which fixed the minimum amount of cultivated land which could be sold, in order to check the tendency to break up into absurdly small pieces. Some of these rearrangements date as far back as 1617 in Bavaria, and in the same kingdom there have been no less than five redivisions in the present century. In Prussia, Hanover, Wurtemburg, Nassau, and Baden there are, or formerly were, permanent statutory provisions for this process of “koppelwerthschaft,” by which it could be carried out in a regular, legal way, and under due forms of law.
Here we see an exactly opposite tendency to that which prevailed in Rome. What should cause such an extreme difference? Is there any principle, or group of principles, under which both can be brought? The answer in full is a complex one, and I can not enter into it at length here. It must suffice to say that it is primarily a question of the profit of farming on a large and small scale respectively. In a country where labor is free, the profit is in a large majority of cases in favor of the small farm, but when the labor is by slaves the reverse is usually the case. There is, however, another condition which is to be considered. In despotic and aristocratic countries, where there is a class raised to high rank and enjoying great privileges and dignities, great landed estates have always been deemed necessary to maintain their social rank and perpetuate it in the family through succeeding generations, and this idea may even overrule the dispersive tendency of greater profit. In conformity with this idea is the system of primogeniture and entail. In Rome, greater profit and the aggrandizement of the patrician class both conspired to form larger estates. In Germany, the greater profit was on the side of small farms, and the German bauer is just as anxious to perpetuate his estate as the German noble.
It was not the latifundia that ruined Rome. The cause lay much deeper. They were effects, and not causes; the symptoms, and not the disease. During the decline of the empire, the imperial policy by slow degrees undermined them, and at length broke up the greater part of them. But it only made a very bad matter still worse. Instead of replacing large estates with small ones, whole provinces were depopulated or turned into pastures and forest. The empire became impoverished, so that it could no longer support armies, or even strong civil government. The barbarians broke in, and soon made an end of it.
Historians have been in the habit of attributing the break-up of the Roman empire to moral and political causes, which is certainly true. And yet, if they had carried their analysis as thoroughly and masterfully along the economic line as they have along the moral, political, and social ones, they would, I fancy, have made this mighty subject still clearer.
After the dismemberment of the empire, the tenure of lands was radically changed in western Europe. In most of the ancient Germanic tribes, the social unit was the clan living as a village commune and enjoying the land as common property. When communes became knit into tribes, and tribes into nations, the communal idea underwent a corresponding change. It belonged still to the people and the nation, but the king or chief distributed it in behalf of the nation to the tribes, and the heads of tribes distributed it to their people. In each case the grant was conditioned with the requirement that military service, or equivalent produce, should be rendered in consideration of the grant. In theory, then, the land was communal still. But history presents us with only two conditions in which the communal tenure of agricultural lands is the normal tenure fitting the actual state of society. The first is found in a low order of barbarism, and the second is in a state of caste, like India; and caste is the final result of despotism run to seed. Civilization, carrying civil liberty with it, is sure to destroy the communal tenure sooner or later. The theory of feudal tenures soon became a mere legal fiction from natural causes, and as civilization slowly advanced the lands became private property, much as they were under the Romans. But though these forms of tenure have become fictions, they have left a profound impression upon modern Europe. The history of the middle ages is in a conspicuous degree the history of a number of landed aristocracies, whose destinies have been different in different countries. Those of Germany gradually became a host of petty princes or kings, whose tendency was towards the formation of numberless small principalities, each independent or highly despotic, thus weakening the bonds of national unity. The tendency, also, was towards hard, impassable lines of class distinction, separating the nobility from the people. This alone would have drifted towards caste. But such a people as the Germans, of all races, could never be dragged in that direction by any nobility, however absolute or despotic. In France, the nobility either voluntarily or by compulsion gathered around the throne of the nation. The strong, masterful policy of Richelieu cemented that union, but unhappily at the expense of the people, and at terrible cost alike to their liberties and their material welfare. Under the absolutism of the monarchy, and the unjust privileges of a landed aristocracy, France showed even a stronger tendency towards caste than Germany. But the French people could no more be dragged that way than the German, and when the tension became insupportable the bonds of society snapped everywhere, and its fabric was shaken to pieces by a social earthquake.
In England, the course of evolution was in strong contrast with that of the continent. There the landed nobility from an early period identified their interests with those of the people, and made common cause with them. They have never, since the days of Magna Charta, contended for any increase of privileges at the expense of the people, and have by degrees yielded ancient privileges without serious contest, when the advanced state of the people made it for the general good. They have in past centuries borne the principal burden of taxation, and never attempted to lay cruel burdens upon the backs of the people. They have always been found on the side of civil liberty. No hard and fast line separates them from the people, for their ranks are constantly replenished from the commons, and into the commons all but their eldest sons must descend. Thus the English aristocracy has always been sustained and upheld by the English people, and instead of becoming their oppressors have become their natural leaders and the embodiments of their social aspirations and ideas.
We see, then, how these ideas interweave, economic, moral, political and social, all forming that almost infinite complex which we call civilization. It is only by an imaginary process that we can unravel and study its innumerable threads.
Of capital in ancient times we may speak more briefly. As regards fixed capital, it played a far less important part, both absolutely and relatively, than in the present age, as must follow from the fact that the industrial arts were rude and primitive, machinetools unknown, and the only source of mechanical power being men or beasts. The relative importance of circulating or money capital was much greater, and the ideas of antiquity on this subject are interesting. Among all the nations of western Asia, and Asia Minor, and among the ancient Greeks, usury and interest on loans was regarded as wrong, unjust and highly iniquitous. The aversion to usury, however, was a very qualified one. The practice of it between members of the same gens or clan-family was regarded with almost universal abhorrence, and the usurer was practically outlawed or boycotted by his own people. Between members of different gentes classes or clans, its disapproval was speculative rather than practical. But between different nations, religions, and cults, it was hardly a moral question one way or the other. The idea of a common brotherhood of mankind had no existence until Jesus appeared. Among the Romans, usury was at first regarded in much the same way; but after the conquests had become extensive, Rome became heterogenous in its population, and usury came to be regarded as a necessary evil by the people, though many of the most enlightened Romans who studied Greek philosophy contracted the Greek ideas upon the subject. Usury was practiced on a large scale at Rome. The objections to it, and even abhorrence of it, were natural and inevitable. In the first place, interest was seldom less than one and a half per cent a month, and might be anything more than that. In the second place, really good security was out of the question. The machinery for handling loans was crude and cumbrous, and only the rudiments of modern banking or loan and trust existed. The business, therefore, in great part, fell into the hands of the most rapacious, cruel, and merciless class of men, who lay in wait for victims like the spider for the flies. Woe betide the poor wretch who was caught in the usurer's web. His blood was quickly sucked, and it was well if his body were not sold into slavery. Christianity denounced it from the beginning, but at first made it binding only on the clergy by exacting severe penances or excommunicating for it. It was not until the Eighth or Ninth century that the church made it binding upon the consciences of the laity by requiring them to answer for it at the confessional. In the reign of Charlemagne, the prohibition of usury became a substantive part, both of the canon law and of the civil law, which prohibited it under severe penalties, and for several following centuries these prohibitions multiplied.
But borrowing and lending can not be prevented in this world, though it may be restricted and reduced to very narrow limits. Civilization, as we understand it, can not go on without it. As industries in the feudal and middle ages began faintly and slowly to revive, the necessity for it became stronger and stronger, and the canons and laws were not only disregarded, but the disregard was often winked at. At length the princes of Europe began to grant special licenses and exemptions to Jews to loan money at usury, and of course the Jews soon had a monopoly of it. Meantime, ideas on the subject of usury began to undergo a slow change. The controversies and discussions of the subject which have come down to us from the middle ages were almost exclusively by theologians, for they were almost the only scholars and writers. First, it began to be urged that there were a few very exceptional cases in which usury might be just and not sinful. Gradually these cases began to multiply. Then the exceptions began to be more numerous than normal cases. But there was a reluctance on the part of controversialists to give up the idea that the principle involved in usury was unjust, sinful, and deleterious. The general notion was that the restitution of the principal was full compensation for the loan, and to demand more was plainly to demand more than had been given. And this view was as old at least as Aristotle.
At length, in the Sixteenth century, one government after another made laws expressly authorizing interest on loans, but in most cases fixing a maximum rate, and making any rate in excess of it unlawful, and working a forfeiture of the claim. And finally a series of decisions by the Holy See, in the first half of the present century, require confessors not to trouble penitents on the matter of usury per se pending the further consideration of the subject. The modern view is simple enough. Interest or legitimate usury is the difference between present and future values. One hundred dollars cash in hand and a promissory individual note for the payment of one hundred dollars in future have not the same value. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. The difference between the two values is interest. To make them equal, and to make the interchange a strictly just one, the borrower is in duty bound to allow a deduction from the money he receives or else make an addition to the amount he promises to pay.
And now let us glance for a moment at the results which have attended this change of ideas on the subject of interest or usury. Ancient usury was often employed to ruin the debtor and gain his property without giving him a full equivalent. No doubt there were many honorable and just men among usurers, but the unjust and rapacious ones were so numerous, and their cruelties so frequent, that they were regarded as types of the whole system. Modern interest, on the other hand, is an essential part of a system for benefitting the borrower and not for destroying him, to build him up and not to break him down. The typical modern usurer is the banker. His interests and those of his customers are one and the same. They are bound up together by the strongest possible tie. If they prosper he prospers, if they languish he languishes. If they are broken he is mulct. He must seek his profit by profiting them. If he would protect himself against loss, he must protect them also.
But we are only at the beginning of this theme. Interest lies at the foundation of modern credit and is one of its corner stones. Of all institutions controlling or animating the economic affairs of men, the most impressive is modern credit. Behind labor, behind capital, it is the most vital and subtle animating force.
Credit, indeed, in some of its aspects, has existed at all times among civilized peoples; but no credit system such as exists to-day. It is not my intention, however, to enter into this great subject further than to indicate that interest is an essential factor of it, without which a credit system would not exist.
I have selected the subject of usury or interest as an illustration of the change and evolution of ideas which mark the difference between old civilizations and the new. It is only an instance and example. Correlative changes have taken place in many other economic ideas, and each category presents a world of interest and instruction. The ideas which people hold concerning such farreaching subjects as the tenure of land, of the dignity and moral value as well as the economic value of labor, of the nature and functions of money, of taxation, of commerce, of fiscal policy, all these have had their changes and evolutions. Yet all of them are interdependent, and their changes have moved along slowly through the ages, seeking an adaptation to and a coördination with each other. Interwoven with them, and really an inseparable part of them, are our fundamental political and moral ideas. These, too, have had their changes and progressive development, and have been more frequently studied than the economic ideas, but not more deeply. The whole constitutes the basis of modern civilization.
But as I approach the limit of my time-allowance you see that I have only reached the beginning of modern economic history. I have been following two or three roots of it deep down, geologists' fashion, into the palaeozoic strata of human history. Of that great organism, that giant sequoia of modern economics which towers so high and spreads so wide, I have said almost nothing. How could I in a few brief sentences even outline its many branches or even its general contour? And how could I in such limits describe their unfolding and growth through ten centuries? And yet history has much to tell us about it that is thrilling in its interest, solemn and awful in its instruction. If we were to make research of that progress we should find that it has not been made without manifold bitter experiences; that under the influence of false ideas it has often been checked or even turned back for a time towards barbarism again. We should learn how, under mistaken notions of economic relations of labor, oppressive laws have been passed, working new and rank injustice and entailing untold misery when the real object was to benefit all; how under mistaken notions of commerce ruinous commercial policies were adopted; how under mistaken ideas of the nature and functions of money, disastrous measures were resorted to which brought increased poverty and misery where they were expected to bring prosperity. And the most singular thing about it is that the same errors were committed over and over again in succeeding generations. As they did not foresee the results, so did they fail to attribute the results to the true causes. The next generation or two forgot the experiences of the preceding one, and like the moth flew again and again into the same candle. But in the course of time experiences began to have some effect. The world was growing both in knowledge and wisdom. Men became more and more numerous who studied these matters deeply, and by degrees worked out the causes and the true relations, and made the real nature of economic laws gradually apparent by sifting the false from the true. Not that a complete system of economic philosophy was suddenly created, but step by step and with increasing pace through the centuries.
At length the time came when the results of human experience acquired by many generations, analyzed by hundreds of the acutest and profoundest thinkers of their times, and subjected to the sharpest controversy and criticism, could be gathered together into a single or collective body of philosophy. Adam Smith's great work, The Wealth of Nations, appeared in the year 1776 and marks a great epoch in human thought. A similar attempt had been made by Quenay in France about ten years before; but Quenay's work, though arousing great interest and stimulating thought greatly at the time, proved otherwise barren, and the world has rejected his system. But Adam Smith's work grew in importance with time, and is still growing. And yet there is hardly a chapter or section in that work which the growth and knowledge of philosophy has not more or less modified. Some minor portions of it have been completely and definitively rejected. The value and importance of the work lies in the fact that it constitutes a system. It gathers together all the great factors of the economic machine and shows their mutual dependence, how they act, react upon, and condition each other, and gives us an intelligible view of the actions and functions of the economic organism as a whole.
The work was slow in sinking deeply into the convictions of men. Two generations passed before the leading philosophers had with general unanimity accepted it as the basis of the science of political economy. Its diffusion after that was much more rapid, and its doctrines soon became a part of an ordinary liberal education. They became at the same time a part of the convictions of the leading men among the ruling classes of England, and were soon made operative in the laws which affected the economic affairs of the nation.
The doctrines of political economy, however, are slow in reaching the minds of the people at large. The reasons are obvious. From the nature of the case the system is a very complex one, requiring long and earnest study to fully comprehend it and absorb its real spirit. It has always been known as the dreary science, and its special votary bears the name of Dr. Dryasdust. To the popular mind it is usually without the sympathetic attractions of the novel and drama and the sensuous or aesthetic attraction of art. Moreover, it is a field of thought adapted to mature minds and well disciplined faculties, and not to youthful ones unless they are precocious. By the time the mind and its experiences have reached sufficient maturity habitual and hereditary ideas have become settled and are hard to modify or displace. But the importance of sound economic ideas is rapidly becoming so great, and the interests which depend upon them are become so momentous, that the public welfare and the public safety demand that no effort be spared to make them a part of the intellectual equipment of the people at large.
How to cite:
"THOUGHTS ON ECONOMIC HISTORY ", Volume 001, Number 3, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online, Page 151 - 165. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publications/journals/shq/online/v001/n3/article_4.html
[Accessed Mon Dec 1 18:26:19 CST 2008]
