THE STUDY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 603 



tariff, may accept all your professors choose to tell him about the com- 

 position of the sun or the evolution of species, but, no matter how 

 clearly you demonstrate the wasteful inutility of hampering commerce, 

 he will not be convinced. And so, to the man who expects to make 

 money out of a railroad-subsidy, you will in vain try to prove that 

 such devices to change the natural direction of labor and capital must 

 cause more loss than gain. What, then, must be the opposition which 

 inevitably meets a science that deals with tariffs and subsidies, with 

 banking interests and bonded debts, with trades-unions and combina- 

 tions of capital, with taxes and licenses and land-tenures ! It is not 

 ignorance alone that offers opposition, but ignorance backed by inter- 

 est, and made fierce by passions. 



Now, while the interests thus aroused furnish the incentive, the 

 complexity of the phenomena with which political economy deals 

 makes it comparatively easy to palm off on the unreasoning all sorts of 

 absurdities as political economy. And, when all kinds of diverse opin- 

 ions are thus promulgated under that name, it is but natural that the 

 great number of people who depend on others to save themselves the 

 trouble of thinking should look upon political economy as a field 

 wherein any one may find what he pleases. But what is far worse 

 than any amount of pretentious quackery is, that the science even as 

 taught by the masters is in large measure disjointed and indeterminate. 

 As laid down in the best text-books, political economy is like a shapely 

 statue but half hewn from the rock — like a landscape, part of which 

 stands out clear and distinct, but over the rest of which the mists still 

 roll. This is a subject into which, in a lecture like this, I can not 

 enter ; but, that it is so, you may see for yourselves in the failure of 

 political economy to give any clear and consistent answer to most im- 

 portant practical questions — such as the industrial depressions which 

 are so marked a feature of modern times, and in confusions of thought 

 which will be obvious to you if you carefully examine even the best 

 treatises. Strength and subtilty have been wasted in intellectual hair- 

 splitting and super-refinements, in verbal discussions and disputes, 

 while the great high-roads have remained unexplored. And thus has 

 been given to a simple and attractive science an air of repellent ab- 

 struseness and uncertainty. 



And springing, as it seems to me, from the same fundamental cause, 

 there has arisen an idea of political economy which has arrayed against 

 it the feelings and prejudices of those who have most to gain by its 

 cultivation. The name of political economy has been constantly in- 

 voked against every effort of the working classes to increase their 

 wages or decrease their hours of labor. The impious doctrine always 

 preached by oppressors to oppressed — the blasphemous dogma that 

 the Creator has condemned one portion of his creatures to lives of toil 

 and want, while he has intended another portion to enjoy " all the 

 fruits of the earth and the fullness thereof " — has been preached to 



