Every man, as the Psalmist says, to his own poison, or poisons, as the
case may be. One of mine, following hard after theology, is political
economy. What! Political economy, that dismal science? Well, why not?
Its dismalness is largely a delusion, due to the fact that its chief
ornaments, at least in our own day, are university professors. The
professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special
and unmatchable talent for dullness; his central aim is not to expose
the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity—in
brief, to stagger sophomores and other professors. The notion that
German is a gnarled and unintelligible language arises out of the
circumstance that it is so much written by professors. It took a rebel
member of the clan, swinging to the antipodes in his unearthly treason,
to prove its explicitness, its resiliency, it downright beauty.
But Nietzsches are few, and so German remains soggy, and political
economy continues to be swathed in dullness. As I say, however, that
dullness is only superficial. There is no more engrossing book in the
English language than Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”; surely the
eighteenth century produced nothing that can be read with greater ease
to-day. Nor is there any inherent reason why even the most technical
divisions of its subject should have gathered cobwebs with the passing
of the years. Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns
ninetenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has
just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay
by as many gaudy, preposterous theories. As for foreign exchange, it is
almost as romantic as young love, and quite as resistent to formulæ.
Do the professors make an autopsy of it? Then read the occasional
treatises of some professor of it who is not a professor, say, Garet
Garrett or John Moody.
Unluckily, Garretts and Moodys are almost as rare as Nietzsches,
and so the amateur of such things must be content to wrestle with
the professors, seeking the violet of human interest beneath the
avalanche of their graceless parts of speech. A hard business, I
daresay, to one not practiced, and to its hardness there is added
the disquiet of a doubt. That doubt does not concern itself with the
doctrine preached, at least not directly. There may be in it nothing
intrinsically dubious; on the contrary, it may appear as sound as the
binomial theorem, as well supported as the dogma of infant damnation.
But all the time a troubling question keeps afloat in the air, and
that is briefly this: What would happen to the learned professors if
they took the other side? In other words, to what extent is political
economy, as professors expound and practice it, a free science, in
the sense that mathematics and physiology are free sciences? At what
place, if any, is speculation pulled up by a rule that beyond lies
treason, anarchy and disaster? These questions, I hope I need not add,
are not inspired by any heterodoxy in my own black heart. I am, in
many fields, a flouter of the accepted revelation and hence immoral,
but the field of economics is not one of them. Here, indeed, I know
of no man who is more orthodox than I am. I believe that the present
organization of society, as bad as it is, is better than any other
that has ever been proposed. I reject all the sure cures in current
agitation, from government ownership to the single tax. I am in favor
of free competition in all human enterprises, and to the utmost limit.
I admire successful scoundrels, and shrink from Socialists as I
shrink from Methodists. But all the same, the aforesaid doubt pursues
me when I plow through the solemn disproofs and expositions of the
learned professors of economics, and that doubt will not down. It is
not logical or evidential, but purely psychological. And what it is
grounded on is an unshakable belief that no man’s opinion is worth a
hoot, however well supported and maintained, so long as he is not
absolutely free, if the spirit moves him, to support and maintain
the exactly contrary opinion. In brief, human reason is a weak and
paltry thing so long as it is not wholly free reason. The fact lies in
its very nature, and is revealed by its entire history. A man may be
perfectly honest in a contention, and he may be astute and persuasive
in maintaining it, but the moment the slightest compulsion to maintain
it is laid upon him, the moment the slightest external reward goes with
his partisanship or the slightest penalty with its abandonment, then
there appears a defect in his ratiocination that is more deep-seated
than any error in fact and more destructive than any conscious and
deliberate bias. He may seek the truth and the truth only, and bring up
his highest talents and diligence to the business, but always there is
a specter behind his chair, a warning in his ear. Always it is safer
and more hygienic for him to think one way than to think another way,
and in that bald fact there is excuse enough to hold his whole chain of
syllogisms in suspicion. He may be earnest, he may be honest, but he is
not free, and if he is not free, he is not anything.
Well, are the reverend professors of economics free? With the highest
respect, I presume to question it. Their colleagues of archeology may
be reasonably called free, and their colleagues of bacteriology,
and those of Latin grammar and sidereal astronomy, and those of many
another science and mystery, but when one comes to the faculty of
political economy one finds that freedom as plainly conditioned, though
perhaps not as openly, as in the faculty of theology. And for a plain
reason. Political economy, so to speak, hits the employers of the
professors where they live. It deals, not with ideas that affect those
employers only occasionally or only indirectly or only as ideas, but
with ideas that have an imminent and continuous influence upon their
personal welfare and security, and that affect profoundly the very
foundations of that social and economic structure upon which their
whole existence is based. It is, in brief, the science of the ways and
means whereby they have come to such estate, and maintain themselves
in such estate, that they are able to hire and boss professors. It
is the boat in which they sail down perilous waters—and they must
needs yell, or be more or less than human, when it is rocked. Now
and then that yell duly resounds in the groves of learning. One
remembers, for example, the trial, condemnation and execution of Prof.
Dr. Scott Nearing at the University of Pennsylvania, a seminary that
is highly typical, both in its staff and in its control. Nearing, I
have no doubt, was wrong in his notions—honestly, perhaps, but still
wrong. In so far as I heard them stated at the time, they seemed
to me to be hollow and of no validity. He has since discharged them
from the chautauquan stump, and at the usual hinds. They have been
chiefly accepted and celebrated by men I regard as asses. But Nearing
was not thrown out of the University of Pennsylvania, angrily and
ignominiously, because he was honestly wrong, or because his errors
made him incompetent to prepare sophomores for their examinations; he
was thrown out because his efforts to get at the truth disturbed the
security and equanimity of the rich ignoranti who happened to control
the university, and because the academic slaves and satellites of
these shopmen were restive under his competition for the attention of
the student-body. In three words, he was thrown out because he was
not safe and sane and orthodox. Had his aberration gone in the other
direction, had he defended child labor as ardently as he denounced it
and denounced the minimum wage as ardently as he defended it, then he
would have been quite as secure in his post, for all his cavorting in
the newspapers, as Chancellor Day was at Syracuse.
Now consider the case of the professors of economics, near and far,
who have _not_ been thrown out. Who will say that the lesson of the
Nearing _débâcle_ has been lost upon them? Who will say that the
potency of the wealthy men who command our universities—or most of
them—has not stuck in their minds? And who will say that, with this
sticking remembered, their arguments against Nearing’s so-called ideas
are as worthy of confidence and respect as they would be if they were
quite free to go over to Nearing’s side without damage? Who, indeed,
will give them full credit, even when they are right, so long as they
are hamstrung, nose-ringed and tied up in gilded pens? It seems to
me that these considerations are enough to cast a glow of suspicion
over the whole of American political economy, at least in so far
as it comes from college economists. And, in the main, it has that
source, for, barring a few brilliant journalists, all our economists
of any repute are professors. Many of them are able men, and most of
them are undoubtedly honest men, as honesty goes in the world, but
over practically every one of them there stands a board of trustees
with its legs in the stock market and its eyes on the established
order, and that board is ever alert for heresy in the science of its
being, and has ready means of punishing it, and a hearty enthusiasm
for the business. Not every professor, perhaps, may be sent straight
to the block, as Nearing was, but there are plenty of pillories and
guardhouses on the way, and every last pedagogue must be well aware of
it.
Political economy, in so far as it is a science at all, was not pumped
up and embellished by any such academic clients and ticket-of-leave
men. It was put on its legs by inquirers who were not only safe
from all dousing in the campus pump, but who were also free from
the mental timorousness and conformity which go inevitably with
school-teaching—in brief, by men of the world, accustomed to its
free air, its hospitality to originality and plain speaking. Adam
Smith, true enough, was once a professor, but he threw up his chair
to go to Paris, and there he met, not more professors, but all the
current enemies of professors—the Nearings and Henry Georges and Karl
Marxes of the time. And the book that he wrote was not orthodox, but
revolutionary. Consider the others of that bulk and beam: Bentham,
Ricardo, Mill and their like. Bentham held no post at the mercy of
bankers and tripe-sellers; he was a man of independent means, a lawyer
and politician, and a heretic in general practice. It is impossible
to imagine such a man occupying a chair at Harvard or Princeton. He
had a hand in too many pies: he was too rebellious and contumacious:
he had too little respect for authority, either academic or worldly.
Moreover, his mind was too wide for a professor; he could never remain
safely in a groove; the whole field of social organization invited his
inquiries and experiments. Ricardo? Another man of easy means and great
worldly experience—by academic standards, not even educated. To-day,
I daresay, such meager diplomas as he could show would not suffice to
get him an instructor’s berth in a fresh-water seminary in Iowa. As
for Mill, he was so well grounded by his father that he knew more, at
eighteen, than any of the universities could teach him, and his life
thereafter was the exact antithesis of that of a cloistered pedagogue.
Moreover, he was a heretic in religion and probably violated the Mann
act of those days—an offense almost as heinous, in a college professor
of economics, as giving three cheers for Prince Kropotkin.
I might lengthen the list, but humanely refrain. The point is that
these early English economists were all perfectly free men, with
complete liberty to tell the truth as they saw it, regardless of
its orthodoxy or lack of orthodoxy. I do not say that the typical
American economist of to-day is not as honest, nor even that he
is not as diligent and competent, but I do say that he is not as
free—that penalties would come upon him for stating ideas that Smith
or Ricardo or Bentham or Mill, had he so desired, would have been free
to state without damage. And in that menace there is an ineradicable
criticism of the ideas that he does state, and it lingers even when
they are plausible and are accepted. In France and Germany, where the
universities and colleges are controlled by the state, the practical
effect of such pressure has been frequently demonstrated. In the former
country the violent debate over social and economic problems during
the quarter century before the war produced a long list of professors
cashiered for heterodoxy, headed by the names of Jean Jaurès and
Gustave Hervé. In Germany it needed no Nietzsche to point out the
deadening produced by this state control. Germany, in fact, got out
of it an entirely new species of economist—the state Socialist who
flirted with radicalism with one eye and kept the other upon his chair,
his salary and his pension.
The Nearing case and the rebellions of various pedagogues elsewhere
show that we in America stand within the shadow of a somewhat similar
danger. In economics, as in the other sciences, we are probably
producing men who are as good as those on view in any other country.
They are not to be surpassed for learning and originality, and there is
no reason to believe that they lack honesty and courage. But honesty
and courage, as men go in the world, are after all merely relative
values. There comes a point at which even the most honest man considers
consequences, and even the most courageous looks before he leaps. The
difficulty lies in establishing the position of that point. So long as
it is in doubt, there will remain, too, the other doubt that I have
described. I rise in meeting, I repeat, not as a radical, but as one of
the most hunkerous of the orthodox. I can imagine nothing more dubious
in fact and wobbly in logic than some of the doctrines that amateur
economists, chiefly Socialists, have set afloat in this country during
the past dozen years. I have even gone to the trouble of writing a book
against them; my convictions and instincts are all on the other side.
But I should be a great deal more comfortable in those convictions and
instincts if I were convinced that the learned professors were really
in full and absolute possession of academic freedom—if I could imagine
them taking the other tack now and then without damnation to their
jobs, their lecture dates, their book sales and their hides.