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man of all motives save self-interest alone, and the result was evidently 'doctrinaire'-was not a picture of life, but a theorem of trade. Hence the most dismal of all sciences;' hence Sidney Smith's exhortation to his friend not to touch the hard, unnatural thing. The newschool economists revolt, and say they want ‘a more scientific method.' What they really want is a higher literary method. They want to take account of how a man's wife affects his trade, how his children stiffen his prudence, how his prejudices condition his enterprise, how his lack of imagination limits his market, how strongly love of home holds him back from the good wages that might be had by emigration, how despotically the opinion of his neighbors forbids his insisting upon a cash business, how his position in local society prescribes the commodities he is not to deal in; in brief, how men actually do labor, plan, and get gain. They are, therefore, portentously busy amassing particulars about the occupations, the habits, the earnings, the whole economic life of all classes and conditions of men. But these things are only the raw material of poetry and the literary art, and without the interventior of literary art must remain raw material. To make anything of them, the economist must become a literary artist and bring his discoveries home to our imaginations—make these innu

merable details of his pour in a concentrated fire upon the central citadels of men's understandings. A single step or two would then bring him within full sight of the longed for time when political economy is to dominate legislation.

It has fallen out that, by turning its thoughts toward becoming a science, politics, like political economy, has joined its literature to those books of natural science which boast a brief authority, and then make way for what is 'latest.' Unless it be of the constitution of those rare books which mark an epoch in scientific thought, a 'scientific work' may not expect to outlive the prevailing fashion in ladies' wraps. But books on politics are in the wrong company when they associate with works among which so high a rate of mortality obtains. The 'science' proper to them, as distinguished from that which is proper to the company they now affect, is a science whose very expositions are as deathless as itself. It is the science of the life of man in society. Nothing which elucidates that life ought to be reckoned foreign to its art; and no true picture of that life can ever perish out of literature. Ripe scholarship in history and jurisprudence is not more indispensable to the student of politics than are a constructive imagination and a poet's eye for the detail of human incident. The heart of his task is insight

and interpretation; no literary power that he can bring to bear upon it will be greater than he needs. Arthur Young's way of observing, Bagehot's way of writing, and Burke's way of philosophizing would make an ideal combination for the work he has to do. His materials are often of the most illusive sort, the problems which he has to solve are always of the most confounding magnitude and variety.

It is easy for him to say, for instance, that the political institutions of one country will not suit another country; but how infinitely difficult is it to answer the monosyllables How? and Why? To reply to the Why he must make out all the contrasts in the histories of the two countries. But it depends entirely upon what sort of eye he has whether those contrasts will contain for him vital causes of the effect he is seeking to expound. He may let some anecdote escape him which gleams with the very spark needed to kindle his exposition. In looking only for grave political facts he may overlook some apparently trivial outlying detail which contains the very secret he would guess. He may neglect to notice what men are most talked about by the people; whose photographs are most frequently to be seen on the walls of peasant cottages; what books are oftenest on their shelves. Intent upon intrigue and legislation, he may pass over with only a laugh some

piquant gossip about legislator or courtier without the least suspicion that it epitomizes a whole scheme of government. He may admire self-government so much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely thing when alive, and so may really never know anything valuable about it. The man who thinks the polls disagreeable and uninteresting places has no business taking up a pen to write about government. The man who despises the sheriff because he is coarse and uncouth, and who studies the sheriff's functions only from the drawing-room or the library, will realize the life of government no better than he realizes the vanity of 'good form.'

If politics were to be studied as a great department of human conduct, not to be understood by a scholar who is not also a man of the world, its literature might be made as imperishable as that of the imagination. There might then enter into it that individuality which is immortality. That personal equation which constitutes the power of all books which have aught of force in them would then rescue books on politics from the dismal category of 'treatises,' and exalt them to the patriciate of literature. The needed reaction against the still 'orthodox' methods of discoursing upon laws and constitutions, like that already set afoot against the 'orthodox' political economists,

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piquant gossip about legislator or courtier without the least suspicion that it epitomizes a whole scheme of government. He may admire self-government so much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely thing when alive, and so may really never know anything valuable about it. The man who thinks the polls disagreeable and uninteresting places has no business taking up a pen to write about government. The man who despises the sheriff because he is coarse and uncouth, and who studies the sheriff's functions only from the drawing-room or the library, will realize the life of government no better than he realizes the vanity of 'good form.'

If politics were to be studied as a great department of human conduct, not to be understood by a scholar who is not also a man of the world, its literature might be made as imperishable as that of the imagination. There might then enter into it that individuality which is immortality. That personal equation which constitutes the power of all books which have aught of force in them would then rescue books on politics from the dismal category of 'treatises,' and exalt them to the patriciate of literature. The needed reaction against the still 'orthodox' methods" of discoursing upon laws and constitutions, like that already set afoot against the 'orthodox' political economists,

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