208 HISTORY OF ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS 



such a genius as Watt, and in more recent times by Gauss and Weber, 

 Werner Siemens, and Edison. And it is equally unnecessary to 

 prove the proposition that their influence upon mankind would 

 have been reduced to nothing had they been born, instead of in 

 a modern civilized country, in the interior of Africa or in Turkey, or 

 several centuries earlier. 



It is therefore not always safe to infer from the study of earlier 

 conditions and events what effect the same cause would exercise 

 in our own time. The conformity of events to law, which in and for 

 itself cannot be contradicted, is not binding for us where we cannot 

 trace it. It is, indeed, of the utmost importance to make clear 

 that in political, social, and economic life such conformity to law 

 can be observed only to an extremely limited extent, but that chance 

 in particular events and the influence of the individual play every- 

 where the dominant role in development. 



But when we survey the limited range of human knowledge, we 

 shall not regard it as the task of historical and economic science every- 

 where to search for laws. We must satisfy ourselves with tracing 

 regularities of sequence and with discovering, and as far as possible 

 isolating from the infinite mass of cooperating factors, those which 

 are of the first importance. 



My chief object is, however, to explain clearly the attitude of 

 economic history toward political economy. But first its relation 

 to statistics must be at least briefly indicated. 



The old saying of Schlozer in Gottingen, that "history is con- 

 tinuous statistics, statistics is stationary history," is to-day no 

 longer applicable. Yet strange to say, it has recently been emphat- 

 ically restated by Karl Menger. Although I grant at the outset that 

 statistics is now well established as an independent branch of study, 

 with a large field of investigation in the statistics of population and in 

 moral statistics, a field exclusively its own where it applies its own 

 method, it remains, nevertheless, only a method which, precisely 

 like the historical method, has been and still is used in almost all 

 sciences and especially in economic history. It must, therefore, 

 be most emphatically denied that the present alone is its field of 

 investigation. It is a systematic, numerical observation of masses, 

 which seeks to elicit group characteristics, and this observation of 

 masses can naturally be applied to the past as well as to the present. 

 Indeed, as is well known, this is often done in order to discover the 

 process of development by a comparison of different periods. When 

 history proceeds in this manner it utilizes both methods, the his- 

 torical and the statistical. The one method does not exclude the other; 

 on the contrary the two are combined. Only statistics, because of 

 its recent origin, possesses very few older data, and is therefore in the 

 main confined to the present which constantly offers an enormous 



