A like difficulty arises in the effort to compare our life with the life of the middle ages, in which the church ruled, or with any unlike form of social economy. The past being by far the more obscure of the two, and the more difficult of apprehension, is incapable of throwing the degree of light on the present, that one might easily be brought to assume. People living in an industrial age can very imperfectly apprehend why any body should ever have done the amount of fighting necessary to make a military age, or should have esteemed athletic sports so highly as to have measured epochs of time by olympiads, or should have made reverence for the dead, rather than the comfort of the living, the root-idea of their architecture, as in Egypt.

We are not greatly helped in the effort to understand our own period by the examples of those who would have found it as impossible to do our work as we would to-day find it to do theirs. The remote, whether in time or space, can only in a limited way instruct the near. The general, whether in war, philosophy or economy, can only remain general by receiving constant aid from the special. Norule requires to be more frequently applied in dealing with new exigencies in business or in finance than that "circumstances alter cases," that new wine can not be put into old bottles, or as Hans Breitman pleasantly puts it,

"The mill can not grind with the water that is past."

Lord Beaconsfield on a memorable occasion parried the thrust that his policy at a former period differed from his present by replying, "many things have happened since then." The changes in social conditions forbid that the economics of the present or the future can travel on all-fours with that of the past; yet still the unity of man makes the past the only lamp by which the future may be foreknown. But the law of the economic value of past events, or of events made distant by the unlikeness to ourselves of those among whom they occur, is like the law of attraction in physics—it is directly as the magnitude of the event and inversely as the square of its distance from us.

It may be said generally that the more competent individuals become to provide for themselves the less is the obligation of others to provide for them, and hence moral obligations contract as economic competency is diffused. In the middle ages each social class owed the other much. The lord owed his tenants protection and support. The tenant owed his lord obedience as well as rent. Perhaps obedience was his rent. Now landlords and tenants owe no such duties. Then the church owed the tray

NAMES OF DISPRAISE.

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eler a couch and a meal. Now it owes him only a free seat if he wishes to hear a sermon. Then very little of what society enjoyed came by purchase. Most of it came by the performance of some moral obligation. Now but little of what society enjoys comes without being paid for. The former state was the more despotic but also the more affectionate; the latter is more free but also more mercenary. The former had more duties; the latter more rights.

This progress has been carried so far that one economist* writes on "What the social classes owe to each other," with the result as the conclusion that they owe nothing, and that human happiness is achieved in the degree that they claim nothing at the hands of others. This is extending the laissez faire doctrine in a new form, viz., "Not merely should the state let the social classes alone, but the social classes should let each other alone." Human nature rebels against this utter excision of moral obligations from social economy. It also rebels against the opposite theory that the state should be every body's guardian in all things. Somewhere between these two extremes the state draws a compromise. Where it should be drawn is a question which some will always continue to argue from the moral, others from the economic standpoint.

Society as an organism has health at sometimes and disease at others, and health in some parts and disease in others; with this peculiarity that "in the diseases of the body politic the physicians and nurses are themselves parts of the diseased organism.”

In consequence of this diseased condition, the instant social questions are discussed from the moral standpoint, each faction finds no terms of moral eulogy sufficiently glowing for its own principles, and no terms of dispraise severe enough for those of its adversary. All facts, events and doctrines thus come to have their two sets of names-those by which they are known to their friends and those by which they are known to their enemies.

As the traveler in India found that the gods of any one province would be enrolled among the devils of the next province he visited, so the student of economics will discover that names of moral praise or dispraise serve only to indicate the quality of the spectacles through which the writer observes. It may be said generally that the only objection to the discussion of economical questions from the ethical standpoint is that the disputants burn

Prof Sumner: "What the Social Classes owe to each other."

with more indignation than instruction, and shed more heat than light.

In

A very general drift of modern thought in favor of determining social questions by a wide survey of facts is shown by the increased care and means used each year to collect statistics. the United States, the federal government and the states are yearly increasing the extent of their inquiries. Bureaus of statistics as to labor, production, the fertility of plants and animals, commerce, transportation, education, etc., are in order. Cities and boards of trade, congressional committees and the press, concur in feeding the appetite for wider and sounder generalizations and truer judgments concerning social phenomena. They confirm the saying of Roederer, "Politics is a field which has been traversed thus far only in a balloon it is time to put foot on solid ground."

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9. Relation of Economics to Ethics.-Questions of what we ought to do belong to ethics. Questions of what it is generally believed and held that we ought to do belong to morals. Questions of what it will profit men and nations in the immediate future and in a material and secular sense to do, belong to economics. And questions of what it will profit a man to do in the absolute totality of his existence, and for eternity, belong to religion. There is such a filiation between all these forms of the one idea that it is not strange that some have treated economics as a branch of ethics. They hold that the shortest road to profit is to do as we ought, or as it is generally believed and held that we ought, or as we are taught that for our eternal interests we ought. In the middle ages, as Roscher discovers, political economy was at least in one instance taught as a department of dogmatic theology.* Doubtless there is still a very large following for those who discuss questions of social economy from the ethical standpoint, i.e., who assume that it is much easier to know and do what is right, than to find out what is profitable to society in the utilitarian sense. The danger of this position becomes apparent only when economic and ethical quacks arise, very sturdily insisting that something is morally right which perhaps has never been tried, if tried would be very disastrous, and is only attractive to its proposers because their fancy runs away with their judgment.

*Roscher, Voli., p. 102, by Lalor: "Thus for instance G. Biel (ob. 1495), the "last of the schoolmen," gives us his doctrine of political economy in a work on dogmatic theology, in the chapter on penance, his starting point being the inquiry, how the economic damage caused by the sinner may be repaired."

THE TRUE METHOD.

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On the other hand economic investigations often serve to displace erroneous moral notions, very sincerely held, by showing that they involve great injury and are in fact immoral. The utilitarians hold that the ultimate standard of right is will it increase the totality of human pleasure and diminish the totality of pain." The intuitionists answer this by saying that this is a computation which nobody can make; that it resolves all morality into expediency, which it is not, and that the sure mode of increasing the totality of happiness is to follow our convictions of right as being a clearer as well as less selfish guide than our sense of present or future interest. Both considerations must blend and harmonize in any wise system of teaching.

10.-The Scientific Method.-The scientific method of investigation in political economy, as in all the other sciences, is that of observation, experiment and comparison of the widest possible array of facts, and when these results have been generalized or classified, these generalizations or deductions become economic laws. If, for instance, it be claimed to be an economic law that land should be owned by tribes, and that no private ownership of land should be allowed, the scientific economist will observe and collect all the known instances where private ownership of land has prevailed; he will then observe and collect all the known instances in which tribal ownership of land has prevailed to the exclusion of private ownership. He will then compare the relative productiveness of the two systems. If he finds that tribal ownership stands associated with savage life and low rates of production, as among the American Indians, the peasantry but not the wealthier classes of ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, the wild tribes of Siberia, Mongolia, Tartary, and the Congo River, indeed with slave life and savage life everywhere, while civilization in Egypt, Greece, Rome, modern Europe, and America stands associated with private ownership, and the more productive and intense the industry the greater the scope given to private title to land, credits, contracts, and franchises, and that not in a single instance has any people become actively productive except through private ownership, he concludes that the attack on private ownership of land is an error.

The scientific method does not object to hypothesis, or what Mr. Mill styles "a priori conclusions, based on the laws of human nature." It only objects to the substitution of these results of guessing, before "testing them by experience or comparing them with concrete phenomena" into the place of perfected economical

reasoning. The sole scientific function of hypothesis is to suggest some new line in which investigation by observation, comparison and experiment may proceed. The exercise of the scientific imagination by an observer of shrewdness and experience may be of the highest value. Franklin imagined that lightning was electricity before he tested it by his kite. Watt thought steam would move an engine, and Fulton had faith that an engine would propel a boat better than a sail. Columbus conceived that there was a new world in advance of proof, and Kepler that the line drawn from the sun to the earth, though it differs in length every day, describes always equal areas in equal times. But most excellent guesswork often proves erroneous. The guess is idle save as a suggestion toward one or the other of three modes of scientific inquiry, viz., by observation, comparison and experiment.

11. The Philosophy of Statistics.-We cannot, with Cossa, say, "Let no man trust himself to fool with statistics until he is well grounded in theory." For this is equivalent to saying, “Let no man find out facts until he first knows the reasons for them." Reason or philosophy is to facts what theory is to statistics. A sound and trained reason is only possessed by one who has made a wide and careful survey of the facts which justify the reason. So we would rather say, let no man fcol with economic theories until he is well grounded in economic facts. Statistics are historical facts presented, in blocks and masses, so as to show quantity, also in grades to show quality, with dates and periods to show momentum or force of movement, and in sequence with events to show causes.

In thus commending statistics we must warn the reader that those who have voyaged most, upon their shoreless sea, are best aware of their dangers. Statistics of themselves are blind. They have neither judgment, conscience, perception, nor intelligence. Unless the person who uses them possesses these qualities they may be made to say any thing. Hence, the adage has grown up since the advent of the Baconian, positive or statistical school, "Nothing can be so deceptive as figures-except facts." Excellent figures may be used in behalf of a bad theory, and deplorable errors may be advanced to sustain à good one. A correct theory will not, therefore, make our statistics true. When the figures are disproven it is not to be necessarily inferred that the proposition in whose behalf they were adduced is weakened.

Thus, in a document designed to indicate the magnitude of "The Drink Bill" of the American people, the annual value of