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 ECONOMICS 637 elements. Many influences operating for a long period of in modern times is carried on by consciously or uncontime on the character and the envh’onment of a class go to sciously associated effort, and although it must always determine its standard of life. In a modern industrial require high qualities of judgment, capacity, and energy, community it is possible to express this standard fairly many of the difficulties which at first sight appear so accurately for the purposes of economic investigation in insuperable give way when they are attacked. In some terms of money. But it is doubtful whether the most ways also the study of highly developed organizations complete investigation would ever enable us to include all like the modern industrial state is simpler than that of the elements of the standard of life in a money estimate. earlier forms of society. The character, tastes, and capacity for management of In the earliest times for which we have abundant different individuals and groups differ so widely that equal material the economic life of England had already reached incomes do not necessarily imply identity of standard. in certain directions a high degree of complexity. Even In the investigation of past times, the incommensurate in the rural districts, manorial records reveal the existence elements of well-being are so numerous that merely money of a great variety of classes and groups of persons engaged estimates are frequently misleading. The conception of in the performance of economic functions. The lord of the standard of life involves also some estimate of the the manor with his officials and retainers, the peasantry efforts and sacrifices people are prepared to make to bound to him by ties of personal dependence and mutual obtain it j of their ideals and character j of the relative rights and obligations, constituted a little world, in which strength of the different motives which usually determine we can watch the play of motives and passions not so their conduct. But no carefully devised calculus can take dissimilar as we are sometimes led to believe from those the place of insight, observation, and experience. The of the great modern world. In many a country district economist should be a man of wide sympathies and prac- the gradations of social rank were more con- Ancient tical sagacity, in close touch with men of different grades, tinuous, the opportunities of intercourse mors and modern and, if possible, experienced in affairs. frequent, and the capacity for organization conditions It is evident that no permanent classification is possible greater than in modern times. The manorial of what is or is not of economic significance. Ho general accounts were kept with precision and detail, and we rules, applicable to all times, can be laid down are told that a skilled official could estimate to the as of subjectphenomena must be examined or utmost farthing the value of the services due from matter. what may be neglected in economic inquiry. the villein to his lord. The manor was indeed selfThe different departments of human activity sufficient and independent in the sense that it could are organically connected, and all facts relating to the furnish everything required by the majority of the inlife of a community have a near or remote economic habitants, and that over the greater part of rural England significance. For short historical periods, indeed, many production was not carried on with a view to a distant phenomena are so remotely connected with the ordinary market. But in the earliest times the manor was subbusiness of life that we may ignore them. But at any jected to external influences of great importance. Vast moment special causes may bring into the field of economic areas of the country were in fact under the single control inquiry whole departments of life which have hitherto of a territorial lord or an ecclesiastical foundation. Every been legitimately ignored. In times past, biblical exe- manor composing these great fiefs was likely to be affected gesis, religious ideals, and ecclesiastical organization, the by the policy or the character of the administration of the purely political aims of statesmen, chance combinations of feudal lord, and he, again, by the policy or the difficulties, party politics and the intrigues of diplomatists, class the strength or the weakness, of the central government. prejudice, social conventions, apparently sudden changes Foreign trade and foreign intercourse were undeveloped, of economic policy,, capricious changes of fashion—all but their influence was in historical times never entirely these causes and many others have exerted a direct and absent, while the influence of Homan law and the Christian immediate influence on the economic life of the com- Church constantly tended to modify the manorial organizamunity. In our own day we have had many illustrations tion. In the towns the division of labour had proceeded of the manner in which special circumstances may at once much further than in the rural districts, and there were in bring a,n almost unnoticed series of scientific investigations existence organized bodies, such as the Gild Merchant and into direct and vital relation with the business world. the crafts, whose functions were primarily economic. But The economist must, therefore, not only be prepared to one of the most striking characteristics of town life in the take account of the physical features of the world, the Middle Ages was the manner in which municipal and general structure and organization of the industry and industrial privileges and responsibilities were interwoven. commerce of different states, the character of their ad- In modern times the artisan, however well trained, effiministration, and other important causes of economic cient, and painstaking he may be, does not, in virtue of change. He must be in touch with the actual life of the these qualities, enjoy any municipal or political privileges. community he is studying, and cultivate “ that openness By means of his trade union, co-operative society, or club and alertness of the mind, that sensitiveness of the judg- he may gain some experience in the management of men ment, which can rapidly grasp the significance of at first and business, and in so far as the want of a sufficient sight unrelated discoveries or events.” income does not constitute an insuperable difficulty, he Some people are of opinion that the factors to be taken may share in the public life of the country. But in his account of in economic investigation are so numerous that character as artisan he enjoys no municipal or political progress on these lines is impossible. It would certainly privileges. In the Middle Ages this differentiation of the be impossible if we had to begin de novo to construct the industrial, municipal, and political life had not taken whole fabric of economic science. But, as we shall see, it place, and in order to understand the working of at first is no. more necessary to do this in the world of science sight purely economic regulations it is necessary to make than it is in the world of business or politics. There is in a close study of the functions of local government. But existence a vast store of accumulated knowledge, and few, this, after all, does not carry us very far. From the very if any, departments of economics have been left quite nature of the records in which we study the town life of unilluminated by the researches of former generations. the Middle Ages, it follows that we obtain from them only Pi ogress is the result of adaptation rather than recon- a one-sided view. No one knows what proportion of the struction. It must be remembered also that economic work industrial population was included in the organized guilds,