Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/419

400 may be said that we can afford to waste or cannot. This continent has never been used economically for production in the sense above described. It has always fallen far short of the development of which it has been capable under the circumstances of any given time, if it had been used according to the best economic knowledge of that time. Perhaps this is true now more than ever.

The patriotism with which the American people submitted to the burdens of taxation and paper money, believing them to be necessary parts of the evil of the War, is deserving of the most enthusiastic admiration. It serves only to deepen the sadness with which the economist must declare the conviction that the paper money never was a necessity, never could in the nature of things be a necessity any more than it could be necessary for a physician to poison a patient in order to cure him of fever or for a man to become bankrupt to escape insolvency; and also this other conviction, not a matter of science but of history, that the necessity for taxation has been abused by the creation of a protective tariff which increases the burden which it pretends to carry. These two subjects, money and tariff, will be the subjects of my lectures during the present term. I say money because I intend to treat the subject exhaustively and to bring the paper money into its proper connection. Next term I hope to offer to the graduate students a course on finance and taxation, treating those subjects with more independence of actual circumstances, and according to the principles which science dictates.

Now as to the method which I pursue. I say nothing here of the conflicting schools, the historical and the philosophical, into which political scientists are divided. The philosophical or a priori or speculative method is perfectly legitimate. I was glad to see that Professor