clusions is perhaps less readily realized in political economy than in any other science. That its vocabulary is drawn from the language of popular discourse, and is therefore peculiarly liable to equivocal use and consequent vitiation of the whole process of reasoning, unless strictly guarded, has not only been an abundant source of misconception and error among economists themselves, but causes those who are unfamiliar with the subject to think that they have mastered its terms long before they can fairly claim any such mastery. The conceptions with which political economy deals are also subjects of every-day contemplation, on which every one must needs reason more or less, and as to the bearing of which in their broad scientific relations self-deception is peculiarly easy. The senator who calmly announced a couple of years ago that he had given his leisure for an entire fortnight to the currency question, and had thus been enabled to sound its depths, presented, after all, only an egregious type of the difficulty with which in this subject one acquires the knowledge that he knows nothing. This does not spring from any peculiar obscurity to be found in the subject itself, but from the fact that in dealing with it the mind is apt to begin with the tendency to misapprehension to which we have referred, which must first be overcome; just as the Copernican theory had to make its way against the supposed ability of every man to determine its falsity by the seeming evidence of his own eyes. And while this is not a peculiarity of the study of political economy in our own country or our own language, but everywhere impedes its progress, it is easy to see that, among a people who are predisposed to neglect, or to examine only superficially, whatever does not offer directly practical results, a science which under the most favorable circumstances is subject to such embarrassment, must lend itself with especial readiness to the prevailing disposition. Americans are disposed to neglect the higher mathematics as unpractical; but they do not imagine that they understand the subject. Political economy they are disposed to neglect for the same reason, and all the more because they flatter themselves that they already have it at command.

The failure of the American mind to aid in the development of political economy is not then necessarily the result of any

lack of original adaptation, but a natural effect of our environment. And we must observe that while material conditions have thus led to the neglect of the science, they have also led our people, scholars as well as others, into some serious misconceptions as to the direct bearing of economic laws. From our holding the position, unique among the great powers, of a people developing a rich and virgin territory, the conclusion often seems to be drawn that if the operation of such laws be not actually suspended in the United States, they can at any rate be disregarded with comparative safety. Few men outside of Congress or off the political stump will maintain the absurdity that for a new country like ours there is a different set of such laws from those which obtain in the Old World; but there is an unquestionably great amount of mischief done by the knowledge that the lusty growth of the nation will repair the injuries caused by economic blunders. Whatever follies our statesmen commit, the bounty of nature and the rapid increase of numbers incident to this stage of our growth soon cure the evil; its traces are soon overgrown, and we seem to ourselves to have suffered nothing. "Are we not richer and our States more populous than ever?" it is asked; "how then can we be said to have lost?" And it is not surprising that the sense of risk to be incurred by the mistakes of ignorance should be weakened, when it is found by experience that few such mistakes can bring our national expansion to an actual stop. "Where the concerns of a nation are conducted in a deep, strong, favorable current of the national energies and impulses," writes a critic in this Review of the last generation, "progress may be made, notwithstanding the mismanagement of the sails, oars, and rudder. This is precisely and pre-eminently the case in the United States, where the spontaneous, productive, onward energies are in greater activity than in any other country." The idea thus frankly avowed, that the management of our resources is of little account, so long as we find ourselves sweeping along with the current of growth, has been for years the habitual consolation of our public men, if not an article of their faith. That it easily leads to indifference as to the monitions of economic law is sufficiently obvious.

How complete our disregard of economic law has been, and

how little we owe our brilliant advance in wealth and power to the wisdom with which we have used our fortunate position, may easily be seen. The manner in which the currency, the life-blood of industrial circulation, has from the first been left practically to shift for itself has already been noticed. As a consequence there is no evil incident to a vicious currency, from the inability to procure the means of exchange for daily transactions on the one hand, to the wildest abuse of depreciated paper on the other, to which our body politic has not been subjected. And that the vigor of youth has enabled it to survive such disorders and even to recover its thriving condition has only seemed to give fresh encouragement to rash experiments on its endurance. In the matter of protection to manufactures neither protectionist nor free-trader would be willing to take the responsibility for the general result; for in fact neither has been able to secure adherence to his system. Six radical changes of our customs tariff, six reversals of policy, have occurred in the last sixty years. The present tariff, dating from 1861, already approaches the extreme of longevity, and, if we may judge from the past, must soon follow its predecessors, each of whom once appeared as strong and as firmly established as itself. In these successive revolutions we have seen industries artificially excited to a premature and unhealthy activity, and we have seen them laid waste by the withdrawal of the stimulus. Who can measure the misdirected labor, the destroyed capital, to repair which we have fallen back after each change of tariff upon those natural resources which no folly of management could exhaust! If we turn from the tariff to our internal taxation, where the adoption of sound principles has rarely been embarrassed by sectional or political considerations, the state of things is still more extraordinary. Down to the year 1861 the United States appear to have learned nothing as to taxation. Their burdens were generally too light to cause serious uneasiness, except in some cities, and the average legislature is tolerably well steeled against the complaints of city interests. Since the year 1861 the rapid increase of taxes in every form has attracted the attention of our people, but they are not yet sensible that their methods of taxation are antiquated and the machinery ineffi

cient, that their systems lead to extraordinary inequalities, and often rest upon theories which fail of being ridiculous only because of their flagrant injustice. Ingenuity in preventing the escape of any taxable person or thing has been carried to a high point; the art of adjusting the burden so that it may be most casily borne has never been studied by any State legislature or by Congress. That our people have been able to endure this neglect of one of the first duties of good government, is due solely to the abundance of their resources, which for the present are able to withstand the effects of such waste by taxation as, in a country with lower profits, would be a serious check upon industry. Here, again, we rely for impunity on the rude health of youth. And as a final illustration of our easygoing defiance of sound principle, we may cite the continuance of slavery as the industrial system of the Southern States, until its unexpected destruction by war. Nothing can be more certain than that slavery was an economic blunder of the first magnitude. It notoriously stunted the social development of the communities where it existed, checked all tendency to diversification of employments by discouraging all pursuits except those least advanced, and craved for its successful working constant transfer of its exhausting cultivation to fresh soil. Leaving out of view its moral aspect, there can be no doubt that slavery, economically considered, was the most efficient system yet seen for simply taking the cream from productive powers, which under wise management are of unlimited duration. What this perseverance in a wasteful use of our resources has cost us, directly and indirectly, may be partly seen by comparing the splendid natural advantages of the Southern States with their present impoverished condition.

It may doubtless be said that we are not the only people who in the past century have committed errors of this kind and on a great scale. But we are the only people who with a light heart have trusted to the energy of growth to insure us against the effects of present mistake, and have therefore steadily neglected to cultivate one of the most important branches of the science of government. As a consequence, we find ourselves to-day absolutely incapable of following out, for example, such a firm and judicious course of management

as that by which France is re-establishing her finances on a solid basis, after a calamity in which all but the name of the French nation seemed to have disappeared. Not forced like others to count closely with our resources, we have in effect forgotten how to count with them at all, and are every day confessing our inability to deal with a practical problem, which has been promptly answered by others far less favored, either in material or in political conditions, than ourselves. That under such circumstances we should have added nothing to the world's knowledge of political economy is not surprising. The surroundings have not been incompatible with the prosecution of such a study, but they have not been such as to promote it. For that purpose something more is needed than the mere presence of great resources and of rapidly increasing wealth. The profound significance of the investigation as bearing upon the right use of resources must be realized, as it has not been among us, before we can expect that it will be pursued with much effect. Elsewhere this lesson has been impressed upon statesmen and scholars by the sternness of nature or the approach to the limits of her bounty, or by the necessity of dealing with the consequences of generations of misrule. But it is a lesson no more easily learned by a nation in the full luxuriance and strength of its early growth, than is that of obedience to the laws of physical health in the first flush of youth.

As the result of our failure to reckon closely with forces which will finally assert their presence, we find ourselves, at the close of our first century, falling manifestly short of the development to which our exuberant vitality might easily have carried us. In every case it was with seeming impunity that we offended against the laws of our well-being; but as the consequence of the whole, our statisticians are now accounting for missing millions of population, and for the slackening of the growth of wealth. The youth to which we owe our power of ready recovery from the effects of all transgressions is also passing away, and it is with a sort of angry surprise that our people note their increasing sensitiveness to the penalties with which economic error is visited. This leads us to the remark, in conclusion, that most of the conditions to which we have ascribed