SCOPE AND METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 63 



equipped with intimate knowledge of the achieved, are busy mar- 

 shaling and classifying facts, searching for and formulating uni- 

 formities, testing hypotheses, and demonstrating laws. 



If we return now to the domain of economic science and to the 

 scene of economic study, the contrast is fairly startling. We find 

 a body of capable and devoted workers, and a definite and inviting 

 subject-matter. But here, to any appreciable degree, the parallel- 

 ism stops. There is in collecting and classifying related data, no 

 tentative selection of economic uniformities, no verification of 

 hypotheses by reference and experiment. As agninst the chemical 

 investigator in his laboratory, deliberately and systematically gather- 

 ing a particular group of facts, and formally submitting the sequences 

 which they suggest to comparison and test, with a reasonably well- 

 established hypothesis as the ultimate endeavor, we have a corps 

 of student apprentices busy upon historical and institutional mono- 

 graphs, a group of younger scientists absorbed in academic duties, 

 and a body of sages engrossed in doctrinal discussion. A single 

 category has rarely been used to include two things less identical 

 than the term " scientific " in reference to chemical and economic 

 study, respectively. If the one be, the other is not. It is a differ- 

 ence in kind, not in degree of which the contrasted terms " deduct- 

 ive " and " inductive," " experimental " and " a priori " suggest 

 the consequence, not the cause. Some further interpretation of 

 this remarkable distinction is demanded. 



A score of years have elapsed since the coincidence, roughly 

 speaking, of economic investigators and economic issues effected a 

 renaissance of economic study in the United States, synchronized, 

 let us say, by the organization of the American Economic Associa- 

 tion in 1885. Within that period every important university of 

 the country has found it necessary to provide more or less abundant 

 opportunities for economic instruction, increasing numbers of 

 capable students have gathered for training in economic investi- 

 gation, and economic science in the United States has come to be 

 studied with a vigor and an activity unequaled in any European 

 country and unsurpassed in the case of any of the natural sciences 

 in this. But the method of investigation has been narrow. On the 

 one hand we have permitted the Comptian influence and the " ex- 

 treme Historismus " of the German school to justify economic 

 microscopies; and on the other hand, dismayed by the vast area, 

 the extensive activities, and the scattered data subject to economic 

 inquiry, and poorly equipped both on the score of requisite resources 

 and opportunities, we have deliberately refrained from attempting 

 comprehensive induction. 



In consequence, economic investigation in the United States, 

 although pursued with unexampled activity, has been in the last 



