506 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



During the nineteenth century experimental science asked the same 

 question of natural law; established the power of human thought; 

 forged the tools with which the work must be done; and bent immu- 

 table nature to the service of man through applied science. Thus 

 knowledge, government and natural phenomena have been turned to 

 human service. The twentieth century voices a demand that eco- 

 nomics undergo the same process of transformation from a science 

 which serves laws, to a science which serves society. 



The claim of economics for conversion to social service is a double 

 one. On the one hand, science has demonstrated that all so-called laws 

 may be employed to serve men, or else, if their influence is harmful, 

 counteracted and offset. Gravitation has ceased to be an enemy; the 

 lightning holds few terrors ; the waterfall is harnessed ; the plague 

 stayed ; the desert blooms ; time and space have lost their vastness ; men 

 have triumphed everywhere through the mastery of human thought. 

 Whatever laws economics may depend upon are no more changeless 

 than these overwhelmed laws of nature. 



On the other hand, men have learned that the laws of economics 

 differ from the laws of natural science in that the whole subject matter 

 of economics is man made — the product of human activity. The laws 

 of physics and chemistry are laws of a universe, which man had no part 

 in creating. Economics, however, is the result of a man's creative 

 energy, for man has made the economic world. Interest, wages, com- 

 petition, monopoly, capital and private property are all the products of 

 his ingenuity. The concept of law presupposes a law giver. Who gave 

 the laws of the universe? We answer, God. Who made the laws of 

 political economy? Man, because he constructed the economic system 

 to which alone the laws of economics apply. 



We are no more subject to the laws of economics than our ancestors 

 were subject to the law of military tactics; than we are subject to the 

 laws of education; or than our descendants will be subject to the laws 

 of the sanitary science which we are creating. There are formulas of 

 thought called " laws " in all sciences, but Napoleon overthrew and 

 remade the laws of military tactics ; Eroebel restated the laws of educa- 

 tion; and Pasteur created the science of sanitation. There is an eco- 

 nomic law giver — man, who can unmake or remake that which he has 

 made. 



The laws of economics are in truth mere incidents in social evolu- 

 tion. Queen Elizabeth and her successors granted trade monopolies to 

 favorites. The eighteenth-century economists enunciated the laws of 

 competition and equal freedom as the great law of economics — the cure- 

 all for economic woes, and lo, the Standard Oil Company, employing 

 the law of competition as its most fearful weapon, has created a mon- 

 opoly as complete as any ever granted by an absolute monarch. If we 



