Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/13

 CHAPTER XXIV

Economists

CONOMICS as a science is due to the analysis of the modern economic organization which was beginning to take shape in Great Britain at the time of Adam Smith and in France at the time of the Physiocrats. In the United States the economic transition occurred much later. There, as in Europe, the formulation of systematic thought was preceded by a series of unsystematic discussions and by a groping after true principles. These discussions were the outgrowth of dissatisfaction with existing conditions and centred about definite practical problems. More-over, in almost all cases, the discussion took the form of a pamphlet literature which, in not a few instances, developed into a wordy warfare. In the pre-Revolutionary period in America there were only a few economic topics that attracted any attention. These were agriculture, trade, taxation, and currency, of which the most important, as well as the most contentious, was the last.

As in every primitive society, the currency problem involved the means of payment, public and private, and always loomed large in popular interest. Since it was almost impossible, for well-known reasons, to retain in the colonies an adequate circulation of coin, the gap was filled by the issue of paper money. Banking and currency problems therefore early engrossed the attention of colonial thinkers.

The first, and the only, economic pamphlets of the seventeenth century that have been preserved are Severals Relating to the Fund (1682), A Discussion and Explanation of the Bank of Credit (1687), and Some Considerations^on the Bills of Credit now passing in New England (1691). These were anonymous