A SCIENCE OF COMMERCE 9 



attention to the concrete facts of industrial and commercial 

 life. In commercial teaching the abstract political economy 

 hitherto current in England should certainly find a place — but 

 reduced to its narrowest limits and in its simplest terms ; 

 not as a great matter in itself, but rather as one of the 

 means of mental discipline, and as furnishing suggestive points 

 of view for the further examination of economic conditions. 

 That place having been given to it, the main lines of work 

 appropriate to a commercial faculty will be found in two 

 directions. The first and most obvious is the descriptive 

 survey of the actual forms of economic activity. Our faculties 

 of commerce must aim at giving an exposition of the really 

 large facts of all the great industries of England and its rivals, as 

 well as of typical smaller trades, and of the marked tendencies in 

 their historical development. I am well aware of the criticism 

 such an assertion will provoke. It will be said that, even when 

 courses of instruction of this kind have been created, they will 

 be " merely narrative," merely " informational." That there is 

 a real danger here, I readily recognise. But, to begin with, 

 information is among the things our future business men most 

 require. They ought to know far more than they do of what 

 is going on in the world ; at present many of them are so 

 limited in their outlook that it would be an undeserved com- 

 pliment to call them even " insular." And in the next place, it 

 should be the distinguishing note of a " descriptive economics " 

 worthy of a university that it is so bent on selecting the larger 

 features of the phenomena and relating them to one another 

 as to suggest all the time the idea of causation. After all, the 

 ultimate purpose of our economics is to know the economic 

 world. The prevailing method hitherto in England has been 

 to pursue certain abstract lines of argument as to cause and 

 effect, and then occasionally to look out into the noise and 

 turmoil of real life and find there bits of concrete illustration. 

 The method I urge — not as the only desirable one, but as the 

 one peculiarly appropriate to commercial training — is the exact 

 opposite : it is that of simple observation of actual life, with 

 recourse, whenever it seems useful, to abstract explanation. 



But there is another direction in which, in my judgment, 

 the current economics require to be supplemented for the 

 purposes we have in view ; and with this we come to the 

 very heart of the matter. What is absolutely requisite and 



