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adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

The meaning of the laissez-faire clause in classical economics was in effect: "Let capitalistic interests alone in deciding for themselves what laws shall be on the statute-books." We have had a period of excessive liberty of capital to exercise the predominant influence in making the laws that affected its activities. We are coming into an era in which non-capitalistic interests are demanding their share of hearing upon the same class of laws. There can be little doubt that, whatever he might have thought about specific traits and details of this modern development, if he had lived to see it, Adam Smith would have pronounced it in principle a tendency in the direction of more just social balance.

IV

THE ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY OF

CAPITAL

Before continuing the argument, we should take our bearings by means of certain plain waymarks, viz.:

First: The divisions of our subject-matter correspond with those in The Wealth of Nations. Second: Those divisions were necessarily arbitrary.

Third: It was impossible for Adam Smith to exclude consideration of capital from Book I of The Wealth of Nations, although the subject of the book was primarily labor.

Fourth It was impossible for Adam Smith to exclude consideration of labor from Book II, although the subject of the book was primarily capital.

Fifth In following Smith's analysis of the relations of labor to economic phenomena in general, we encounter at every step relations of both to wider moral phenomena.

Sixth: We shall have a like experience in following his analysis of the relations of capital to the economic process.

Seventh: This situation illustrates a wide

generalization, which is at the same time a sociological axiom; viz.: None of the activities of men occur in isolation from one another; they form an interlocking process; they are therefore factors at last in the whole system of moral cause and effect which presents the problems of sociology.

Eighth : The consideration of economic activities from the sociological point of view is not therefore a matter of choice, if we admit the obligation to learn the whole truth about economic facts. The more-than-economic in the relations is just as real an element in economic activities as the simply-economic.

Ninth: In brief, the economic question is: To what extent is it possible to discover relations of cause and effect so far as they terminate in wealth?

Tenth: The corresponding sociological question is: To what extent is it possible to discover relations of cause and effect so far as they terminate in persons?

Eleventh Since wealth can have no meaning to our minds outside of relations to persons, it follows that all formulas of wealth have the logical rank of partial products, or trial divisors, incidental to ultimate calculation of formulas of persons.

Twelfth Consequently, when an economic inquiry is started, the only alternatives are, first, to arrest the process of inquiry arbitrarily with the partial products or trial divisors reached by economic analysis; or, second, to press the inquiry as far as it can be carried into the whole moral situation which sociological methods try to formulate.

Our argument, therefore, continues to indicate the necessary relationships between Smith's economic analysis and further analysis of causes and effects throughout the whole range of human interests.

The second book of The Wealth of Nations, entitled "Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock," opens with a paragraph as anachronistic, yet essentially as true, as for instance Raphael's "School of Athens."

In

order to indicate the substance of Smith's views on this subject, we quote the opening paragraph and summarize the remainder of the introduction:

In that rude state of society in which there is no division of labour, in which exchanges are seldom made, and in which every man provides everything for himself, it is not necessary that any stock should be accumulated or stored up before hand, in order to carry on the business of the society. Every man endeavours to supply by

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his own industry his own occasional wants as they occur. When he is hungry, he goes to the forest to hunt; when his coat is worn out, he clothes himself with the skin of the first animal he kills; and when his hut begins to go to ruin, he repairs it as well as he can, with the trees and the turf that are nearest it.

....

But when the division of labour has once been thoroughly introduced, the produce of a man's own labour can supply but a very small part of his occasional wants. The far greater part of them are supplied by . . purchase. . . . . But this purchase cannot be made till such time as the produce of his own labour has not only been completed but sold. A stock of goods of different kinds, therefore, must be stored up somewhere sufficient to maintain him. . . . . As the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of the case, be previous to the division of labour, so labour can be more and more subdivided in proportion only as stock is previously more and more accumulated. . . . . As the division of labour advances, therefore, in order to give constant employment to an equal number of workmen, an equal stock of provisions, and a greater stock of materials and tools than what would have been necessary in a ruder state of things, must be accumulated before hand. But the number of workmen in every branch of business generally increases with the division of labour in that branch, or rather it is the increase of their number which enables them to class and subdivide themselves in this manner.

As the accumulation of stock is previously necessary for carrying on this great improvement in the productive powers of labour, so that accumulation naturally leads to this improvement. The person who employs his stock in maintaining labour, necessarily wishes to em

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