Nations. It demonstrates beyond a doubt that we described it in a way that he would have accepted, if the present meaning of the phrase had been explained to him, when we called it a purely technological inquiry which had its methodological place as a subordinate division in his whole social philosophy.

Having observed that the proportion of products to the number of persons among whom they must be divided tells the story of better or worse supply of necessaries and conveniences,6 Smith adds that in general this proportion must be regulated in every nation by two different cir

cumstances:

First, by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labor is applied;

Second, by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labor and those who are not so employed.

This word "useful," or its synonym "productive," is very innocent in the early stages of economic argument. Smith probably had little premonition of the Pandora's box of theoretic evils that it contained. We need not hesitate to

P. I.

Cf. J. S. Mill, Political Economy, Book I, Chap. II, and especially Chap. III, Sec. 1, on distinction between "productive" and "non-productive" labor. Also Mill's essay on the same subject.

accept it here just as he meant it. In a word, it is a very simple proposition that, other things being equal, that nation will have the most products to consume which contains the largest proportion of people who make themselves "useful" in producing consumable products. He did not mean to imply that this was the only way of being "useful" in a larger sense.

Smith further observes in this connection that the abundance or scantiness of material goods seems to depend more on the former condition than on the latter, and his reason for thinking so is contained in the contrast between the savage tribe, in which each individual is compelled by the rigors of life to employ himself directly or indirectly in food-getting, yet poverty is universal, and the civilized nation, in which many live in comparative idleness, while wealth is relatively abundant.

The first book of The Wealth of Nations is devoted to analysis of the above fact; viz., to search for the causes of this improvement in the productive powers of labor, "and the order, according to which its produce is naturally [sic] distributed among the different ranks and conditions of men in the society."

With something of Casca's jealousy, we might stop to inquire: What should be in this "natur

ally"? It is a word which, of course, takes us back to the Physiocrats, and it presently lends itself to all the illusions of liberty in the classical conceptions of free competition; but that will also come later. Whether Smith was right or not in his assumptions of the particular natural processes underneath the visible social processes, he was attempting in this first book to carry out an inquiry that was as purely technological, as distinguished from moral, as an inquiry by bacteriologists into the differences, and the reasons for the differences, between the water of a mountainstream and that of a millpond.

Economic theory later became involved in moral assumptions, analogous with questions about the title to property in the stream or the millpond. We shall see, not only that those assumptions begged fundamental questions in sociology, but that theoretical and practical economists of the classical school even tabooed the discussion of those assumptions. The prohibition was almost as rigid as the exclusion of the subject of slavery from debate in Congress for the last decade before the Civil War. Thus the classical economics, in defiance of all logic, forgot its strictly technological character, and assumed the function of an arbiter of morals. This central fact in British economic history makes it neces

sary for everyone who is concerned with current moral questions to be thoroughly familiar with the disturbing influences which the classical economics exerted upon investigation of moral questions.

was

At this point I merely repeat that economic theory, as represented by Adam Smith, strictly amenable to the logical demands of moral theory in the large. Our present task is to make this initial fact perfectly plain by analyzing the technological character of Smith's work. With this analysis as a background it will be possible to make clear the unconscious slipping of classical economic theory from the necessary moral moorings.

In the second book Smith treats "of the nature of capital stock, of the manner in which it is gradually accumulated, and of the different quantities of labor which it puts into motion, according to the different ways in which it is employed."8

The reasons for considering this subject are, in Smith's own words, that "the number of useful and productive laborers is everywhere in proportion to the quantity of capital stock which is employed in setting them to work, and to the particular way in which it is so employed." 9

Again, this inquiry, in the form proposed by Smith, is as strictly technological as the question

whether a lock canal will in the end furnish the best and cheapest transportation through the Isthmus of Panama. No one would today be unable to see that the latter question belongs in a class entirely apart, and with an entirely different rank in the moral scale, from the question whether the United States government had dealt justly with the former sovereigns of Panama, or the questions that will arise later about justice in the rules to be made for use of the canal by foreign nations. We should never think of confusing these engineering questions, or of supposing that the men who plan the construction of the canal are the authorities who should be allowed to dictate the international law code which should govern the use of the canal. Yet something very like these impossible alternatives has been the implicit claim of classical economics. So far as the sociologists are related to the economists at all, it is not in questioning their competence to take care of their own problems, any more than the international lawyers would claim competence to solve the proper problems of the engineers. The con-tention of the sociologists with reference to the economists is that the function of the latter is more nearly analogous with that of the engineer than with that of the legislator, while the sociologist has a brief for the other interests, over and