ECONOMICS AN ACCOUNT OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN PRIVATE PROPERTY AND PUBLIC WELFARE BY ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY President of Yale University; sometime Labor Commissioner of the State HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY GIFT OF MRS. WALTER S. BARKER COPYRIGHT, 1896 BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Entered at Stationers' Hall, London Set up and electrotyped, April, 1896. Reprinted, July, 1896; Jan., 1897; Oct., 1897; The Knickerbocker Press, New York PREFACE. THIS book is an attempt to apply the methods of modern science to the problems of modern business. Within the last thirty years there have been important changes in economic theory. One school of investigators has employed the principle of natural selection to explain the development and present shape of industrial ideas and institutions. Another school has used some of the results of recent psychological study to account for the actions. of individual men in pursuing their own interests under the ideas and institutions thus developed. Both these things have combined to make the economic science of the present day very different, in its methods of analysis and powers of explanation, from that which formed the basis of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy. Meantime new problems have been developing in modern business life; most conspicuously, perhaps, in connection. with large investments of capital in factories and railroads. The time which elapses between the rendering of labor and the utilization of the products of labor is now so long that the work of the speculator has far greater importance than it did a generation ago. The size of the units of capital is so large that free competition often becomes an impossibility, and theories of economics which are based upon the existence of such competition prove blind guides in dealing with modern price movements. We have to study, far more closely than we once did, the effect of combinations upon the interests of the consumers on the one hand and the laborers on the other; to examine the |