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Section F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 



PSESIDENT OF THE SECTIOIf — ProfeSSOr J. SHIELD NiCHOLSON, M.A. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



The Reaction in favour of the Classical Political Economy. 



It may naturally be expected in the address which, as President of this Section, I 

 have the honour to deliver that some attempt should be made at originality, or at 

 any rate at novelty. Accordingly, I hope that I shall fall in with the traditions 

 of my office by defending a series of paradoxes and by running counter to a variety of 

 popular opinions. I will only premise that however paradoxical I may appear, 

 and however much I may seem to strain at singularity, I shall speak always to the 

 best of my ability with the utmost good faith, and I shall endeavour to give only 

 the results of my most deliberate convictions. 



The central paradox which I propose to defend — the root of the whole series — is 

 that the so-called orthodox, or classical, political economy, so far from being dead, 

 is in full vigour, and that there is every siga of a marked reaction in favour of its 

 principles and methods. The singularity of my position may be indicated by a 

 word and a phrase. The word is Saturn, the phrase ' we are all socialists now.' I 

 shall try to show that the traditional English political economy has neither been 

 banished to Saturn nor stifled by socialism, and that in fact it is stronger than ever. 

 This renewed vigour is no doubt largely due to the attacks made upon it on all 

 sides in increasing force for the last twenty years. The dogmatic slumber induced 

 by popular approval has been rudely shattered, and although some of the more 

 timid followers of the orthodox camp thought they had been killed when they 

 were only frightened and awakened, the central positions are more secure than 

 before. 



Consider, in the first place, the question of scientific method and the closely 

 allied question of the relation of political economy to allied sciences. The method 

 practically adopted by Adam Smith and Ricardo, and reduced to scientific form 

 by Mill and Cairnes, and quite recently and still more etfectively by Dr. Keynes, 

 must still be regarded as fundamental. It has survived and been strengthened by 

 two distinct attacks. In the first place, the extreme advocates of the historical 

 method attempted to reduce political economy to a branch of history and statistics. 

 They were concerned to pile up facts and add up figures, and they seemed to think 

 that no guiding principles were necessary. But compilations of this kind are, properly 

 speaking, not even history, still less are they political economy. History does not 

 consist simply in collecting facts ; the facts must be grouped, arranged, and connected 

 in an orderly manner. A room-full of old newspapers is not history, though it may 

 contain much material for history. There was really nothing new in this extreme 

 form of the historical method. It was a reversion to a primitive type. The plan 

 had been adopted by chroniclers time out of mind ; they embedded facts, signs, 



