ways of living for the well-to-do and the ill-to-do produces a smooth-sloping outward uniformity in costume and furniture and ornament, which, whenever possible, sacrifices reality to appearances.

The demand for food and fuel is original; but most of the wants that drive the industrial machine are inspired by example. If these imitations were haphazard, there would be nothing more to say. But are they not lawabiding? The desire for parasols, billiard-tables, and bath-rooms descends in a series of cascades from the social superior to the social inferior. And we can distinguish a society in which each class imitates the class just above it from one in which the decay of reverence permits the humblest grades to ape, as well as they can, the topmost grade, and so produces the sweeping uniformities of democracy. Nor will other inquiries prove fruitless. How are wants transplanted from age to age and from folk to folk? What is the rôle of an aristocracy in the propagation of wants? What is the relation of city to country, of the smaller cities to the large ones? If the eight-hour day comes, what are the influences that will determine how the workingman shall dispose of his margin of leisure? What is the influence of education in the spread of wants?

As the time and energy of labor is directly related to the number and intensity of wants, we might expect each man's economic effort to depend immediately on his utility scale. But this is not the case. Societies themselves get a characteristic adjustment between work and wants, and this consensus overrides the individual calculus. It is natural that a younger son, like Seattle or Portland, should begin the day earlier and work harder than New Haven or Springfield. But what, save the might of usage and the contagion of example, can explain why the Western business man, even when he has made a fortune, goes on working till he drops? Moreover, the same society

changes its calculus from age to age. The England of Arthur Young was slower-pulsed than the England of to-day. And in America, since 1825, we appear to have been fevered with a gigantic, continent-conquering ambition which has made repose almost a lost art.

The economist, if challenged to differentiate economics from the science of society, might point out that his science deals with simple and well-known individual quantities and phenomena, manifesting themselves in the social theatre on a vast scale. Volumes of demand, or products, or sales, or imports, or deposits, or investments, are mere aggregates of individual acts. And, if it be objected that the socio-economic fact-the market, bank, clearing-house, or factory -differs from the individual fact underlying it, he might retort that an accident is an individual fact, but if it happens often you get an emergency hospital; that a fire is an isolated occurrence, but if there are many fires you get an engine company.

So far the economist is right. But how about cases where the social fact is not the mere footing up of the column of private facts? To-day's demand for a stock may be composed of unrelated individual preferences; but to-morrow there is a flurry, and nine-tenths of the desires to get or dispose of that stock may be due to the apparent desire of other people to get or dispose of it. A run on a bank has quite a different composition from the total withdrawals on an ordinary day. A Tacoma boom has a much more complex structure than the real estate market in Cohoes. The analysis of a Klondike rush reveals more factors and problems than the dissection of the westward drift of our population. Comparing the value of an African mining stock with the value of cattle or shirts, it will be apparent that the individual estimates underlying the former have been much more compounded and recompounded than those on which the latter is based.

In other cases we have to do with persistent currents of

To the authority

imitation rather than transient waves. of tradition must we ascribe the exceptional esteem in which landed property continues to be held in England, the Jewish predilection for the occupation of trade and finance, the British willingness to take speculative risks, the Scotch regard for the "mony mickles" that “make a muckle," or the American farmer's obstinate adherence to the isolated homestead. Now the laws of cross-imitation and of up-and-down imitation are revealed only to him who studies the most various social phenomena. Tulip manias and Black Fridays and Denver booms and South Sea bubbles and Kaffir circuses must be referred to a series of phenomena ranging from mobs and revivals to political landslides. What is the nucleus of such a movement? What are the stages of its growth? How can it be stopped? What social conditions favor it? How does progress affect it? For light on these questions the economist must cross the frontier.

I have cited enough illustrations to show that the economist is sometimes led to push his inquiries over into an adjoining tract of knowledge that covers human action, and yet is not jurisprudence or ethics or political science. This adjacent science that busies itself with imitation and custom and tradition and conventionality; that seeks the origin, meaning, and authority of the standards and ideals shaping individual action; that traces the connection between the constitution of a society and the opportunities and ambitions of its members; that inquires into the causes and the consequences of the spontaneous sentimental groupings of men; and that deals with the development of the social mind and the means and extent of its ascendency over the desires and valuations of individual minds, this science is Sociology.

The empire of the Czar is bounded on its western. frontier by the clearly defined and well-explored territories of highly organized governments like Austria and Ger

many. On its eastern side, until recently at least, it melted vaguely into the little-known lands disputed among the khanates of Central Asia. Economics likewise is bounded for the most part by regions that have been well defined and thoroughly explored by highly organized sciences. But on one side it is embarrassed by an uncertain and disputed frontier with a little-known territory, subject to the contradictory and unreasonable claims of rival chieftains. Sociology is its Central Asia.

EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross.

THE PRECONCEPTIONS OF ECONOMIC

SCIENCE.
II.

ADAM SMITH'S animistic bent asserts itself more plainly and more effectually in the general trend and aim of his discussion than in the details of theory. "Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is, in fact, so far as it has one single purpose, a vindication of the unconscious law present in the separate actions of men when these actions are directed by a certain strong personal motive."* Both in the Theory of the Moral Sentiments and in the Wealth of Nations there are many passages that testify to his abiding conviction that there is a wholesome trend in the natural course of things, and the characteristically optimistic tone in which he speaks for natural liberty is but an expression of this conviction. An extreme resort to this animistic ground occurs in his plea for freedom of investment.†

In the proposition that men are "led by an invisible hand," Smith does not fall back on a meddling Providence who is to set human affairs straight when they are in danger of going askew. He conceives the Creator to be very continent in the matter of interference with the natural course of things. The Creator has established

* Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy, pp. 177, 178.

"Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society. ... By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. ii.