ECONOMIC SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 37 



physical science without a message. Political economy was losing 

 caste among the metaphysical sciences without acquiring the sought- 

 for status among the empirical sciences. It was neither stimulating 

 philosophy nor good observation. Is it then surprising that Cairnes 

 should have complained that political economy had " ceased to be 

 a subject of fruitful speculation " with the educated public, or that 

 Bagehot should have found that " it lies rather dead in the public 

 mind " and " no longer matches with the most living ideas of 

 people"? 



It is hardly necessary to add that all this is said with no thought 

 of disparaging the services of Cairnes's school to economic science. 

 His is deservedly an honored position in the history of the science and 

 it may well be that the phase which it has seemed fit to connect with 

 his name was an unavoidable phase in the development of the science. 

 Indeed, there is good reason for thinking that it was. But, at best 

 the constitution that Cairnes proposed to give to economics could in 

 no sense become definitive, if the experience of other sciences that 

 had passed through a. somewhat similar phase could be taken as sug- 

 gestive of what might be expected to occur in economics. Econom- 

 ics, after the middle of the century, was threatening to become a 

 closed circle, and to come to a full stop. Such a condition could not, 

 however, long endure in a subject of such vital concern. A reaction 

 in some form was inevitable. What is matter for surprise in review- 

 ing the history of the past fifty years is that the reaction, in a form 

 competent to deliver the science and give it a modern constitution, 

 should have been so long in coming, and that so many of the econo- 

 mists of the generation that followed Mill and Cairnes should have 

 found themselves able and content to pursue their work in the spirit 

 of the old ideals or of other ideals which, though new, were not 

 much more to the purpose when seen in the light of those require- 

 ments which the admittedly progressive sciences of this period had, 

 in a sense, made authoritative. Earnest efforts to regenerate 

 economics and to recover for it something of its lost prestige have 

 surely not been wanting. But the record, if the truth is told, is not 

 one of big achievement or even of measurable progress when we con- 

 sider the startling advances that have been taking place in other 

 fields. 



Looking first at the work of the economists of the last generation, 

 mainly English and American, who have set themselves the special 

 task of formulating economic theory, it will hold true, with some 

 exceptions, that their work has been mainly work of repair and exten- 

 sion, rather than of fresh construction. They are the legitimate 

 heirs of the classical tradition, the classical school of to-day. 

 Magnify as we will the differences that separate these later theorists 

 from their classical predecessors, the differences are differences of 



