MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
ever he offers as an excuse that such proof would not be needed “had 
not certain writers seen fit to deny it because it did not harmonize with 
their views of economics, and certain would-be reformers to ignore it 
because its recognition would interfere with the acceptance of their 
reforms.” 
Such a reformer, I suppose, he would call Wm. H. Allen of New York 
who said in a recent article in the Annals of The American Academy 
that “When John P. Rockefeller said to the world Where will never be 
enough money to do the world's uplift work,’ he started in motion 
forces and doubts and compromises that will do vastly more harm to 
the south than the hookworm.” The reason Mr. Rockefeller made such 
a statement was that be was obsessed by the law of diminishing returns 
which closes the door of hope, because as Patten indicates, hopelessness 
is inherent in a world of diminishing returns. 
Many who argue for the truth of this law quote not only men of suc- 
cess like Mr. Rockefeller, but any business man or farmer who finds him- 
self face to face with the law. The difficulty in both cases is that the 
individual is looking at production from his personal point of view, and 
not from the point of view of production as a whole. The economists, 
however, ought to see principles in the large. 
Scientific laws are much like creeds. Someone has an insight which he 
formulates, and for him and some of his successors the formulatiou 
seems to satisfy the conditions and the needs. So an economic law is 
the classification of a group of facts as someone’s insight sees them : 
but as with the creed, men may make the fatal mistake of thinking it 
an eternal truth. There was a time when belief in hellfire was an in- 
centive to morality, but now many of us succeed in getting a degree 
of morality when in the state of mind of the small son of a famous 
modern philosopher who asked his mother what hell was. She described 
it to him and at the close added, “But there are some who do not be- 
lieve this.” The boy replied, “Mamma, I am one of those.” There was 
a time when the law under discussion had a vital meaning to the race, 
but I am one of those who think that a new formulation is in place, that 
here is a case where orthodoxy does not mean clear thinking. 
The fallacy common to Seligman, Seager, Carver and the others is 
(liat of emphasising archaic conditions. Seligman, for example, was 
talking about equal “additional doses” of capital and labor; and Seager 
at the close of his definition said, “it being understood, of course, that 
no important change is made in the method of cultivation or exploita- 
tion.” Now of what earthly good is a law for such conditions? If 
there is any indisputable fact in the world it is that important changes 
are being made in the methods of cultivation and exploitation, and, 
as for equal “doses” of capital and labor, who is so simple as to think 
of adding them? The question is not that of adding another cartload 
of the old fertilizer to a wheat field, but of adding some new fertilizer, 
exactly fitted to the wants of the crop, by which it may be doubled 
in quantity. It is not a question of adding a man with a sickle, but 
of adding a man with a modern harvester; not of sowing the old seed to 
yield tenfold, but the new seed to yield an hundredfold. Capital is 
multiplying so rapidly that it worries some people, at least, to know 
what to “dose” and invention multiplies the units of labor so fast that 
