Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/27

 Modern Developments 439 retary, J. B. Felt, published a variety of historical and statis- tical works on population and finance; while the subject of vital statistics was cultivated especially by L. Shattuck and by Dr. Edward Jarvis, for thirty-one years the president of the Association. The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a marked change in economic conditions. The two fundamental facts were the industrial transition with the advent of modern capitalism, which completely transformed the East and which was fast spreading inland ; and, on the other hand, the gradual disappearance of the free lands in the West. These facts were responsible for the emergence of the labour problem in its mod- ern setting. Moreover, the rapid growth of the railway system brought that subject to the front, and the fall in prices coupled with the growing pressure of taxation attracted attention to the silver problem and the general fiscal situation. In short, the United States now reached its own as a more or less fully devel- oped modern economic community and was confronted by a multiplicity of difficult economic questions. The great strike of 1877 sounded the first note of the newer and modern cam- paign. Almost simultaneously a number of young and en- thusiastic scholars went abroad to seek on the Continent an economic training which could not be obtained at home. It was these younger men who on their return at the end of the seventies and in the early eighties founded the modern scientific study of economics in the United States. Before speaking of them, it may be well to mention a few of the more distinguished representatives of the older school who had grown up amid the former conditions. David A. Wells (1848-98) was a chemist who had sprung into prominence by a pamphlet Our Burden and Our Strength (1864), which contributed not a little to increase the confidence of the North in ultimate victory. He now addressed him- self to fiscal problems and became the special commissioner on internal revenue. Having been converted from protection- ism to free trade, he issued in rapid succession a number of important books. Among these we may mention, in addition to his official reports. The Relation of the Government to the Telegraph (1873), Robinson Crusoe's Money (1876), Practical Economics (1885), Recent Economic Changes (1890), and The