196 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK
be protected and fed, and the more complex the life into which he
is born the longer and more elaborate must be the unearned pro-
vision made for him. He must be educated, and for the higher
walks of life, expensively educated. As he begins to earn he
must find kindly fellow men willing to take the trouble to put up
patiently with his blunderings, in faith that he may presently
amount to something. He may need gifts, or loans, of capital.
Can we doubt that in the infancy of the human race those bands
survived and improved in which there were beginnings of mutual
ald, and to which nature gave bounty no less than adversity?
Can we doubt that the American people is the economic giant of
today because it found awaiting its exploitation unexampled
unearned resources, to be had for the taking?
All this is platitude, of course. But it is more. It carries the
implication that while there is an economy of a biological sort
(an ecology) which is antecedent to the scheme of relationships
and activities which we call Human Society, it is no less certain
that society is antecedent to all that we nowadays call the
economic life, the life of the otkos, of the business world, of the
nations. Some such thought as this I suppose was in the back
of my head when I wrote the first paper that I read before the
American Economic Association, namely, “The Sociological Char-
acter of Political Economy.”
The second alternative, curtly stated is: Help, or be thrown
out. The day comes when the man who has been “brought up,”
who has been sustained before he could “earn his keep” must
begin to earn and to do as he has been done by. He can no
longer be a burden. He must work, or now, in the normal course
of things, he must starve. More, he must lend a hand, he must
cooperate. It is not enough that he provide for himself. And
this, as before, is because he is not an isolated being; he is part
of a scheme of things, a society. Once a Yale student was asked
by Professor Sumner what a Robinson Crusoe would need to
begin an economic life with. The boy shot back, “Free trade,
hard money, and a stick.” Like enough. Not being a Crusoe
the normal man, whatever else he has to begin life with, must
at all costs have the appraisal of his fellows as a creature suffi-
ciently worth while to be allowed to live. In savagery, if he fails
to achieve such valuation he may be outlawed or knocked on the
head. In civilization he is an outcast from respectability,