Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/13

 chapters from "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other." It has been found impracticable in later reprintings of Vol. I to replace those chapters with the more complete essay; and we have therefore decided to reproduce the latter, despite the certain degree of repetition involved, rather than leave it out of the series. In view of the fact that Sumner has been more widely known, perhaps, as the creator and advocate of the "Forgotten Man," than as the author of any other of his works, we entitle this volume "The Forgotten Man and Other Essays."

Several essays not of an economic order have been included because they have come to my knowledge within the last few years and have seemed to me to call for preservation. It is almost impossible to fix the dates of such manuscript essays, for I have not been able in all cases to secure information from persons who might be able to identify times and occasions. And there remain a good number of articles and manuscripts, published or unpublished, which can receive no more than mention, with a word of characterization, in the bibliography.

Some mention ought to be made here of a large body of hand-written manuscript left by Sumner and representing the work of several years — 1899 to 1905 or thereabouts — upon a systematic treatise on "The Science of Society." Printed as it was left, partially and unevenly completed and with many small and some wide hiatuses, this manuscript would make several substantial volumes. It is a monument of industry, involving, as it did, the collection over many years of thousands of notes and memoranda, and the extraction from the same, by a sort of tour de force, of generalizations intended to be set forth, with the support of copious evidence, in the form of a survey of the evolution and life of human society. These manuscripts, as left, represent no more than a preliminary survey of a wide field, together with more elaborately worked out