Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/429

Rh kind, and dependent upon the advance of other sciences. But the foundations of the old political economy were well laid; the method was broad, valid, and as productive of important results as research in any other field. The correctness of the procedures has been attested by the discoveries of economic laws, worked out, if not into their final forms, at least into such clearness and certainty as to give them value for practical guidance. Granting that there is much need for revision, amendment, enlargement, what is this but the common condition of all progressive knowledge? To speak of the "decline and fall" of the English school of political economy savors of exaggeration, and seems no more proper than to speak of the decline and fall of any other branch of science when its errors are discovered, and it passes to a new stage of its development.

Dr. Ely, as we have seen, charges that the whole spirit of the old school is negative. "It was powerful to tear down, but it did not even make an attempt to build up." Yet in the department of science what can we mean by "building up" if it be not the organization and analysis of facts, the derivation of principles, and the establishment of a connected body of truths as accurate and verifiable as the nature of the phenomena and the condition of knowledge will admit. Is not this in the highest sense constructive work, and, making allowance for the necessary imperfections of the earlier stages of inquiry, it can not be intelligently denied that the English school of economists have established a body of positive truths which can never be subverted, although they may be much further unfolded. We think, indeed, that Dr. Ely's accusation against the English school may be turned with far greater propriety against the German school, which has made no discoveries, constructed no system, worked out no generalizations, and whose main stock in trade appears to consist in its attempts to demolish what the English economists have built up.

"We gather from Dr. Ely's argument that a very confusing and also a most mischievous error pervades the teachings of the new school—it does not discriminate between science and art, between economical principles and laws and the art of practical politics. The investigation of phenomena, the establishment of their relations, and the derivation of principles, is a sufficiently large subject to occupy distinctive attention, and science proper ceases when this important work is done. The results gained will be valuable in application, but this is a separate field of effort. Law-making may be helped by science, but to rank it as itself a part of economic science confuses important distinctions. That the German school should favor paternalism in government, and legislative interference with the business life of the people, should magnify the state, belittle individualism, and question the doctrine of natural human rights, is what we are prepared to expect, but when all this is put forward as political economy, and a warrant for the installation of a "new school" to replace a fallen system, the case seems somewhat strained. It is not so easy to take leave of the older idea of legitimate science in this field of thought. And yet the tendency of government to encroach upon the liberty of citizens, and regulate the private affairs of industry and business, although as old as political tyranny, is now coolly put forth as the discovery of a great master of political economy. Dr. Ely says that "Adolph Wagner, the Coryphasus of German economists," has discovered "the law of increasing functions of government"—"has shown how government has taken upon itself function after function, and how the operations of government trench more and more upon the domain of private industry." If the reader will here refer to what is said upon page 302 of this "Monthly," he will get further light upon the new school claim of what it considers a discovery in the progress of political economy.

Dr. Ely objects to the English school, not only that it is deficient in facts and data, indulges too much in theory and neglects history, but also that it is narrow and ignores the wide range of social phenomena with which it is connected; and he refers to Professor Ingham's address, in which it is maintained that political economy must in future be considered from the point of view of social science, or as a branch of the more comprehensive subject of sociology. But, granting that the old system is more