1148 REPORT—1885. 
of his despised employment. But it does not follow that there are no cases in 
which this disadvantage has to be faced as the least of two evils. 
Thirdly, the economist does not assume that his economic man is always buying 
in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market, and never rendering services to 
his fellow-creatures on any other terms. He does not lay down that the economic 
distribution which it is his business to analyse will not be supplemented to an 
indefinite extent by a distribution prompted by other motives :—indeed, it should 
be noted that the ordinary economic man is always understood to be busily pro- 
viding for a wife and children; so that his dominant motive to industry is rather 
domestic interest than self-interest, strictly so-called. And it has never been 
supposed that outside his private business—or even in connection with itif occasion 
arises—a man will not spend labour and money for public objects, and give freely 
gratuitous services to friends, benefactors, and persons in special need or distress. 
The political economists, it is true, have often felt called upon to criticise the 
proceedings of philanthropists; but those who have assumed in enunciating these 
criticisms a grave air of giving the results of abstruse scientific reasoning are partly 
to blame, I think, for having drawn on political economy a kind of odium which 
ought to have been thrown on the broader back of plain common sense. We may 
say, indeed, with special force of a great part of economic science what Huxley 
has said of science generally—that it is only ‘ organised common sense.’ But it 
needs little organisation to show that the motives to industry and thrift are 
impaired by the indiscriminate relief of the idle and improvident; that you help 
men best by encouraging them to help themselves, by widening the opportunities 
for the display of energetic activity and enterprise, and diffusing the knowledge 
that will save it from being wasted, rather than by diminishing the inducements 
that stimulate it. To apprehend the truth of propositions like these, a man need 
not even have read a shilling handbook ; and yet these commonplaces constitute the 
greater part of the ‘hard-hearted economist’s’ criticism of sentimental philanthropy. 
If, indeed, the economist has gone on to say that therefore no efforts ought to 
be made to relieve distress, and raise those who have temporarily stumbled in the 
struggle for existence, or if he has prophesied failure to all larger attempts on the 
part of philanthropists to improve the condition of the classes at the base of the 
industrial pyramid—if, I say, an individual economist has here and there been 
found lecturing and prognosticating in this sweeping manner, he has only exemplified 
the common human tendency to dogmatise beyond the limits of his knowledge ; and 
I trust the blame will not be laid on the science whose exacter methods he has 
deserted or misapplied. 
The important question of method, then, at issue between the English economists 
and their German critics is not whether the play of the ordinary motives of self- 
interest ought to be limited and supplemented by the operation of other motives ; 
but whether these other motives actually do, or can reasonably be expected to, 
operate in such a way as to destroy the general applicability of the method of 
economic analysis which assumes that each party to any free exchange will prefer 
his own interest to that of the other party. And in speaking of the German 
historical school as antagonists on this question, I ought to say that I refer only to 
what I may call their more aggressive left wing. With the more moderate claims 
of the historical method as set forth by the distinguished leader of the school, 
William Roscher, the English economists who maintain the tradition of Adam 
Smith and Ricardo have no sort of quarrel; and Roscher expressly disclaims any 
quarrel with them. He has sought, as he says, ‘ gratefully to avail himself’ of the 
results of Ricardian analysis, and we can no less gratefully profit by the abundant 
historical researches that he has led and stimulated. It is no doubt true that our 
older economists often had an insufficient appreciation of the historical variations 
in economic conditions; and, in particular, did not adequately recognise the greater 
extent to which competition was limited or repressed by law or custom in states 
of society economically less advanced than our own. But for a generation there 
has been no serious dispute about this; nor has there ever been any fundamental 
disagreement between Ricardians and Roscherians as to the right method of 
studying the history of economic facts. The most deductive English economist has 
