TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 469 
practical economic problems as to the development of a large and wide territory 
are presented in their simplest form. It is there that we can note most clearly . 
the lines on which modern industry and commerce develop with the full employ- 
ment of modern appliances and the minimum of control from traditional habits 
and institutions. 
There is one economic conception which is deeply ingrained in English habits, 
and which seems to me to have no corresponding hold in Amsrica—that of the 
market, Its former importance as the centre of trade in many townsis sufficiently 
vouched for by the space that it occupies, and its legal history takes us back to the 
very beginning of urban life in England. In medieval opinion a sale in open 
market, where buyers and sellers met together publicly, had all the guarantees of 
an honest transaction ; it was important both as evidence of the sale and as an 
indication that the bargain was above board and fair, since there was one price for 
allalike. Private transactions which did not come into the market—forestalling and 
such like—were viewed with suspicion ; they were supposed to be methods by which 
some wily person drove an extortionate bargain or gained at the expense of others. 
And, in modern times, organised markets, where there are facilities for public 
information, are common, not only in every locality, but in a great variety of trades. 
Commercial transactions in the United States seem to have sprung up and 
developed on rather different lines; markets are frequented in the country towns 
of Lower Canada, but there is little sign of them in the cities of the States. It 
almost seems as if commercial practice there were based on the habit of ‘ having a 
deal’ privately, and took its character from transactions outside a market rather 
than from the higgling which occurs where many buyers and sellers meet. There 
ean, at least, be little doubt that the methods of bargaining which are current in 
the States have been favourable to the building up of great organisations—both 
the industrial organisations which control all parts of some industrial process, 
and the trusts which monopolise some line of business. The lack of public 
markets, either for produce or for goods, at various stages of the process of manu- 
facture, has apparently rendered it easier to form great monopolies in America 
than it would have been in Great Britain. Indeed, it may almost be said that 
the struggle for existence among business rivals takes a different form in the two 
countries. As Professor Jenks points out, the whole terminology which is 
habitually employed to analyse the movements of prices in England is inapplicable 
to the United States. ‘The normal price of economists has been based upon 
cost of production under a system of competition among small capitalists,’ But in 
such an industry as sugar-refining, in the United States, this condition does not 
hold good. ‘There is no normal level of competitive price based on the cost of 
production.’! The whole industrial organisation takes other forms, and the 
mechanism of competition does not work in the fashion which English economists 
would assume. We have need to be doubly on our guard, since unconscious 
assumptions may not only affect our powers of observation, but may also be 
present to colour the language we use in describing unfamiliar phenomena. 
III. It is not easy to overrate the services which the Classical Kconomists 
rendered in their day to the progress of Economic Science, owing to the clearness 
cf the conceptions they applied to the limited field they studied, and to the 
accuracy they endeavoured to introduce in regard to the use of familiar languages. 
It was their misfortune, rather than their fault, that their manner of treating 
individual human nature and the mechanism of society has given some excuse for 
the popular misuse of their teaching. In the public mind, principles which had 
been legitimately put forward as convenient hypotheses for the investigation of a 
particular sphere have been transmuted into axioms of universal applicability. 
But when we turn to other subjects of economic inquiry, the limitations, and con- 
sequent defects, of the Classical school become more apparent. ‘he idea of the 
rowth of society was not easily brought within the limits of a system which 
akes so much use of terminology borrowed from physics. Some of the precursors 
of Economic Science in England had treated national life as organic, and had relied 
4 J. W. Jenks, The Trust Problem, p 141, 
