A GREAT ECONOMIST

IF economics are indeed " the gloomy science," then life is a gloomy thing. For the life of modern man is more and more dominated by his economic activities.

To those who are depressed by this materialist tendency of our age we recommend this book of memorials to the great Cambridge economist, Alfred Marshall. The book consists of three parts : the first is a series of reminiscences by old pupils of Marshall's, such as Mr. Keynes, Professor Pigou and Professor Edgeworth. Of these by far the most important is Mr. Keynes' essay ; it is, in fact, a short biography of Marshall's life, which stretched from 1842 • to 1924. The story of this long life can be recommended to anyone who doubts either the importance or the nobility of the study of economics.

Marshall's- was a life of pure social service. He came to economics, Mr. Keynes tells us, by way first of metaphysics and then of ethics. We are given a delightful picture of Marshall as a young man walking over the Alps with a copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in his pocket, pausing to digest it amidst the boulders of Alpine glaciers. But his

typically nineteenth century practical intelligence soon came to the conclusion that we should never know very much about metaphysics,"and so he turned his attention to ethics. But again his practical common sense told him that an ethical

system was of little use to a starving man. Therefore, he felt, the economic problem must be solved before man could turn his attention to higher things. Economics were to him .the

study of how man could learn to control his material environ- ment, and so free himself from the material. He realized acutely that the material problem, the urgent pressure of physical needs, cannot be shirked, cannot be avoided, if we are to entertain any real hopes of human advancement. As early as 1883 we find him saying : "The study of the causes of poverty is the study of the causes of the degradation of a large part of mankind." He felt the irony of mechanical progress without a corresPonding benefit to the mass of the population as acutely as Carlyle himself :—

" As invention after invention has been made, hope after hope has been formed that poverty and extreme hard work would pass away--but hope after hope has been disappointed. The yarn that in old times it would have taken a man 10 years to spin is now spun in a day by the machines which • one man can manage, and yet there are people who have no clothing but rags. Each pound of coal that goes into the furnace of a steam engine does as much work as the weary muscles'of a man in a day ; and yet even in England and in other Western countries there are workers whose physical toil is so hard that they have no strength left for the higher life of man. This state of things must appal every person 'e ho thinks ; and from time immemorial protests have been raised against a state of society in which such things can be. There are two great questions which we cannot think too much about. The first is, Is it necessary that, While there is so much wealth, there should be somuchwant ? The second fP, Is ith'ele not a crest fund bf "cOnielentioutsnesS anctungelf

ishness latent in the breasts of men, both rich and poor, which could be called but if the problems of life were set before them in the right way, and which would cause misery and poverty rapidly to diminish ? "

It was this very sense of the paramount importance of economic problems which made him steadfastly refuse to

rest content with anything short of scientific accuracy in their study. For only so, he knew, can we hope to win freedom from the curse of poverty, overwork and degradation. Indeed, he carried his distrust of hastiness, his fear of being

premature, to extravagant lengths. Some of his most inv. portant economic discoveries, such as his work on the monetary theory, were not published in book form till—incredible as it may seem—literally fifty years after he had made them. And during all that time he had talked of them, and even lectured about them, so that when finally they appeared almost all their originality and freshness had been lost. Thus Marshall's reputation as a giant of economic thought can never stand out with the same clarity as that of, say, Mill or Ricardo. And yet who will presume to say that his work is of less value than theirs ? For if Marshall has left comparatively few specific theories or discoveries which can be labelled as his own, this was not for want of an intellect equal to that of any

other economist of the last century. But he had certain qualities of character, certain " &Tants des quails" which hedged in and blurred his superior intelligence. This is how Mr. Keynes expresses it :— " Alfred Marshall belonged to the tribe of sages and pastors ; yet, like them also, endowed with a double nature, he was a scientist too. As a preacher and pastor of men he was not particularly superior to other similar natures. As a scientist he was, within his own field, the greatest in the world for a hundred years. Never- theless it was to the first side of his nature that he himself preferred to give the preeminence. This self should be master, he thought ; the second self, servant. The second self sought knowledge for its own sake ; the first self subordinated abstract aims to the need for practical advancement. The piercing eyes and ranging wings of an eagle were often called back to earth to do the bidding of a moraliser. This double nature was the clue to Marshall's mingled strength and weakness ; to his own conflicting purposes and waste of strength ; to the two views which could always be taken about him ; to the sympathies and antipathies he inspired.

Although " the biddings of a moraliser " may have pre. vented Marshall from ever having quite taken his place in public estimation as the great man that he was, yet they were unable to spoil what was perhaps an achievement even more important than the enunciation of economic truths. And that achievement was to build up the Science of Economics itself. As Professor Pigou puts it

" The dominant contribution which Marshall made to science was not in the work that he himself accomplished withhis instrument of thought, great and important though that was, but in what he did to build up and strengthen and enormously improve the

Marshall himself said that " Economics is not a body of concrete truth, but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth." Mr. Keynes adds :-

instrument itself."

"This engine, as we employ it to-day, is largely Marshall s creation. He put it in the hands of his pupils long before he offered it to the world. The building of this engine was the essential achievement of Marshall's peculiar genius. Yet he hankered greatly after the concrete truth ' which he had disclaimed and for the discovery of which he was not specially qualified.

Marshall was the smith who forges the sword, not the hero who wields it—the lame Vulcan, not the thundering Zeus. But, in a sense, the artificer of what Professor Pigou calls " the armament of knowledge " is the rarest and most valuable

servant of the community.' By his work in the formation of the Cambridge School of Economics he has given a brilliant set of pupils to the world. It is for them to complete his work by raising economics fully to the level of an exact science. , When that has been achieved, and when the public at large has been induced to realize that it has been achieved, a great leap forward on the road to economic freedom will have been made. We must not indeed suppose that it will put an end to political differences—that the Socialist will immediately lie down with the Capitalist. It is rather that we shall be Socialists or Individualists according to our temperament and general concept of what is a desirable form of society, and not according to differences of economic opinion. That we are already in a position to look forward to such a state of economic enlightenment is very largely the work of Alfred Margiall: