TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F.-—PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 579 
Section F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 
PRESIDENT OF THE Section.—Professor W. J. Asnizy, M.A., M.Com. 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 1. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Ir I attempt what has been more than once undertaken by my predecessors in 
this Chair—a survey of the past history and present position of political economy 
in this country—there are circumstances, obvious to all, which render the task 
to-day far easier than before. The passage of time brings many advantages, the 
advantage, above all, of perspective. We are able to look back and make out the 
relative magnitude of things; we can see how the objects in the field of vision 
group themselves together; and the influences which are dubious when they 
surround us are no longer questionable when we can stand away from them and 
discern their beginnings and their endings. And thus it is that we can now say— 
and expect general acquiescence —what twenty years ago would have called forth 
loud protest, and would, indeed, have been premature ; and that is, that the first 
phase of economics as a systematic study in this country is now well over; that 
the orthodox economics of the middle of the nineteenth century has for some time 
been quite dead. We shall differ, unquestionably, as to its value, both as an 
intellectual construction and as an instrument of social and political change ; we 
shall differ, perhaps, as to the relation to it of that present-day teaching which 
some will deem a natural outgrowth from the old, others its very antithesis. But 
about the fact of its departure we shall all be agreed. No economist of an 
reputation in this country, or in America, or in Germany, when left to himself, 
lays stress now on the propositions which Ricardo and his school emphasised ; nor 
does he draw the same conclusions as to practical policy. At most he may seek 
with natural piety to show how certain famous sentences, properly interpreted, 
may still be regarded as containing an element of truth. Every new text-book 
that appears makes the disappearance of the old orthodoxy the more evident ; 
indeed, it is the very consciousness that the old has passed away which is bringin 
the present flood of new text-books upon us. And hence the position of the first 
phase of English economics as a system of thought has passed in large measure 
out of the sphere of the controversial; we can criticise it objectively and dis- 
passionately ; it has become a closed chapter in intellectual history. 
It is the additional good fortune of those who would seek to disentangle the 
outlines of that chapter that the materials for that, as well as for preceding 
chapters, are now ready to their hands in a whole series of recent publications. 
Among those to whom we are especially indebted gratitude compels me to mention 
the names of Professor Oncken, Professor Hasbach, Dr. Cannan, Professor Foxwell, 
and M. Halévy. But there is one writer upon the so-called ‘classical’ economics 
whose recent masterly treatise has been peculiarly welcome; I refer to the late 
Sir Leslie Stephen’s ‘ English Utilitarians,’ And for this reason in particular, 
that Leslie Stephen was neither an historical, nor a reactionary, nor a socialist 
critic of Jaisser-faire, His sympathies were with the older economists rather 
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