348 FRANCIS AMASA WALKER. 



ment, in order to secure the improved service and economy of a trained 

 force of moderate size, constantly employed. Upon an office thus organ- 

 ized could be laid, at the regular intervals, the duty of collecting and 

 preparing the returns of population and of agriculture for the decennial 

 census required by the Constitution, and perhaps for an intermediate 

 fifth year enumeration, and also in the intervals the systematic prose- 

 cution of other statistical investigations, to be charged upon the office 

 from time to time as occasion might require. 



General Walker's appointment as Professor in the Sheffield Scientific 

 School, in 1872, carried him beyond the boundary of statistics into the 

 general field of political economy. His training for this extended range 

 of work, although obtained by a less systematic process than is now 

 usual, had begun early, and as opportunity offered was carried on effect- 

 ively. In one of his prefaces, he remarks that he began writing for the 

 press upon money in 1858, probably having in mind a series of letters to 

 the National Era of "Washington, beginning soon after the crisis of 1857, 

 and continued for some months, noticeable for sharply defined views on the 

 subjects of banking and currency, and also as to the merits of Mr. Henry 

 C. Carey as an economist. In 1865, before going to Williston Seminary, 

 he lectured upon political economy for a short time at Amherst in his 

 father's absence, and in 1866 his father recognized with pride his important 

 assistance in finishing the " Science of Wealth." From the close of the 

 war, he is otherwise known to have been a keen student of economics, al- 

 though a student under such limitations and so hampered by pressing occu- 

 pations as to make it difficult for him to do equal justice to all parts of his 

 outfit. It was perhaps from this cause, in part, that his earliest important 

 publications as an economist were two treatises on widely separated topics, 

 '• The Wages Question " and " Money." 



The earlier of these two books, "The Wages Question" (1876), in- 

 stantly attracted the attention both of economists and of the general pub- 

 lic by its lively and strong discussion of the central topic of the day, then 

 more commonly treated either as a matter of dry theor^^, or as a problem to 

 be settled by sentiment. Following Longe and Thornton, the author made 

 an unsparing attack upon the wages fund theory, and, arguing that wages 

 are paid from the product of labor and not from accumulated capital, 

 he set forth with great vigor the influences which affect the competition 

 between laborer and employer in the division of this product. Gen- 

 eral Walker's earliest public statement of his now familiar opinions touch- 

 ing the wages fund, and the payment of wages from the product, was 

 made, it is believed, in an address delivered before the literary societies 



