Page:Indian Journal of Economics Volume 2.djvu/94

82 his fields and live stock, to his home with its small garden and fruit trees, to his fellow villagers and to his tradition of folk culture, artistic, poetic and religious. How would this simple thought-world of his be developed as an economic system, assuming him to become educated enough to construct this without losing his present efficiency or abandoning his ideals?

3. Suppose now that besides the peasant's eldest son, who succeeds him in his holding, he has others. The second son becomes a manufacturer, the third a money-lender, the fourth a state official, the fifth a lawyer, the sixth a soldier, and the seventh an artist. Granting that political economists have dealt, more or less exhaustively, with the first named five of these, you are asked to outline a corresponding economic treatment for the soldier and for the artist, indicating the previous literature on these subjects, if any. How do you explain these omissions, if not on the hypothesis of question 1?

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4. Economists have been increasingly introducing mathematical conceptions and graphic treatments, and with advantage, but why not correspondingly the conceptions of physics? Were not the Physiocrats struggling towards these? Jevons in his enquiries as to coal resources and solar crises, and now also endeavours like that of the American Commission on Resources, are evidences that the subject has once and again come up; but do we not need a realistic study of society in terms of the conservation of economic energies? If so, give an outline of this, with indication of the changes which such economy would produce upon current conceptions, e.g. of money-making, and of empires.