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,