Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/325

Rh management, domestic science, etc. That these two branches are now so sharply separated as to seem unrelated is a commentary on how far we have departed from the simple conditions of the self-sufficing rural household, and how thoroughly we have divorced business from life.

Xenophon also wrote a treatise on the Revenues of Athens. While this cannot be regarded as a general treatise on public finance, it serves at least to show that he had some interest in that field, which may not inaptly be called public housekeeping. Every government, considered as a corporate body, has needs of its own apart from those of the people whom it governs. Whether it be a city, a state, or a smaller governing unit, it must solve the problems of revenue and expenditure just as a private household. Later writers applied the term economics mainly to this group of problems to which we now apply the name public finance, rather than to that group which in the diagram above are included under Private Economics. In a monarchy the providing of revenues for the king's household, and the expenditure of those revenues in the support of the household, may approximate very closely to the character of private economics, as when the chief source of revenue is the royal demesne, or to public economics when the chief source of revenue is taxation, and the king is regarded merely as a public official to be supported as other public officials are.

EARLY CONCEPTIONS OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS

In the mediæval and early modern period, the chief interest in economics had shifted from the private to the public aspects of the science, but was still centered mainly in problems of public revenue and expenditure, or, as we should now say, public finance. The chief students in this field were the finance ministers, who were charged with the office of raising revenue for the royal household and the enterprises both constructive and military of the king. It was soon apparent that the amount of royal revenue was strictly limited by the wealth of the people. If larger revenues were needed, the people must be made more prosperous in order that they might pay heavier taxes. From that time forward students gave increasing attention to the problems of national prosperity, until, at the present time,