development. _He has four traits which show
themselves more or less clearly in all of his acts._" They are first
"self-interest," but "this does not mean that he is steeped in
selfishness ..."; secondly, "the larger self," the family, union, club,
and "in times of emergency his country"; thirdly, "love of independence,"
for "his ambition is to stand on his own feet"; fourthly, "business
ethics" which "are not usually as high as the standards professed in
churches, but they are much higher than current criticisms of business
would lead one to think." Three-quarters of a page is sufficient for this
penetrating analysis of motive and is followed by the remark that "these
four characteristics of the economic man are readily explained by
reference to the evolutionary process which has brought industrial
society to its present stage of development."

If those were the generalizations of a tired business man after a heavy
dinner and a big cigar, they would still seem rather muddled and useless.
But as the basis of an economic treatise in which "laws" are announced,
"principles" laid down, reforms criticized as "impracticable," all for
the benefit of thousands of college students, it is hardly possible to
exaggerate the folly of such an exhibition. I have taken a book written
by one eminent professor and evidently approved by others, for they use
it as a text-book. It is no queer freak. I myself was supposed to read
that book pretty nearly every week for a year. With hundreds of others I
was supposed to found my economic understanding upon it. We were actually
punished for not reading that book. It was given to us as wisdom, as
modern political economy.

But what goes by the name to-day is a potpourri in which one can
distinguish descriptions of legal forms, charters and institutions;
comparative studies of governmental and social machinery; the history of
institutions, a few "principles" like the law of rent, some moral
admonitions, a good deal of class feeling, not a little timidity--but
almost no attempt to cut beneath these manifestations of social life to
the creative impulses which produce them. The Economic Man--that lazy
abstraction--is still paraded in the lecture room; the study of human
nature has not advanced beyond the gossip of old wives.

Graham Wallas touched the cause of the trouble when he pointed out that
political science to-day discusses institutions and ignores the nature of
the men who make and live un