2 INTRODUCTION 



We have, instead, hyphenated economics, showing plainly their extrac- 

 tion from political, philosophical, or other outlands, just as we have 

 only hyphenated Americans, owning more or less remotely the ties of 

 some European mother-land. To apply the term "orthodox econo- 

 mists" to ourselves (or to our enemies) is but a harmless pleasantry, 

 so long as American specific productivity, German socialism, and 

 Austrian marginal utility contest the field with English classicism 

 and neo-mercantirist and neo-canonist doctrines crop out at every 

 unguarded point. To retain the title political economy is frankly to 

 admit a mixed descent, and join the hyphenated company of social- 

 economics or the newer entrepreneur-economics. 



If, then, the "general economics" which is to be "applied to the 

 particular business of farming" prove in fact to be any one of a num- 

 ber of different doctrines, evolved from dissimilar philosophies of 

 wealth, the question becomes pertinent whether they fit with equal 

 ease into the rural setting, or whether certain of them have been 

 elaborated from essentially non-agricultural data, and are applicable 

 primarily to industrial and urban conditions; whether certain other 

 of these economies adapt themselves peculiarly to a rural environment; 

 and whether, perchance, a close inductive study of the business of 

 farming might not serve to give a special direction to economic 

 thought, a particularized body of economic doctrine in short, an 

 agricultural economics which shall be more than a mere application 

 of industrial economics to agriculture. 



It is quite evident that the first economic ideas that were excogi- 

 tated by men of the early day before economic theories were differen- 

 tiated from the general mass of domestic, political, or religious 

 opinions were derived primarily from agricultural data, since agricul- 

 ture was so preponderantly the form of all economic activity. It is 

 equally true, however, that the problems of value of product and cost 

 of production took on but the haziest outlines until the development 

 of commercial relations made clear the fundamental facts of exchange- 

 value, and thus gave new emphasis to the relation between income, 

 costs, and profit. The economic problem of agriculture (as something 

 different from its merely technological problem) did not take shape 

 until husbandry found itself overtaken by, and made part of, a differ- 

 entiated commercial-industrial regime. 



The mere fact that economics began with an "agricultural system " 

 or was, as it styled itself, an Economic rurale, does not mean thai it 

 derived from rural data a set of answers to the questions which we 



