DINNER IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR JOHN BATES CLARK 361 
utility,” or of Wieser’s concept of “marginal utility”; but when we realized 
what Professor Clark was driving at, we saw that he had a larger idea than 
‘hose men had and that it was destined to be regarded as more fundamental. 
There soon appeared his brilliant analysis of capital. He pointed out the 
distinction between concrete materials in which capital values are invested 
and which he called “concrete capital,” and capital proper, or “pure capital,” 
that can be turned in any direction desired. From this study Professor 
Clark went on to take up in like manner the question of distribution; and 
there, instead of simply accepting the so-called Austrian view of marginal 
value, he fixed upon a concrete phase and showed us that what counts is 
marginal productivity, the productivity, namely, of the marginal invest- 
ment, of the marginal day’s labor, of the marginal hour’s labor, in the 
productive process. On the basis of this analysis he constructed a theory 
of distribution which I think all economists who have mastered it realize 
did not previously exist. It was not a mere abstraction. It was discovery 
by a man who perceived that production is a differential process and that 
marginal changes are the ones that count. 
I shall never be able to express to Professor Clark or to anyone else my 
indebtedness to him. If I have been able to achieve something along the 
line of work that I have followed, it was to Professor Clark and one other 
man, a friend of his, to whom I have been most indebted. It was to 
Professor Clark that I owed my interest, which continues to this day, in 
economic problems and in economic theory, and it was the lamented 
Herbert B. Adams of the Johns Hopkins University, to whom I listened 
when I decided to give most of my attention to sociology. That was 
his advice. 
I wish to say in conclusion that in all of my relations with this very 
dear friend, he has always been unselfish, he has always thought of others 
hefore himself, and he has rejoiced in nothing so much as in the achieve- 
ments of those to whom he has been helpful and who have been indebted 
to him for that help. I hope that I have expressed a very deep sense of 
personal reverence, affection and gratitude to one of the great men whom 
it has been my privilege to know. 
The Chairman 
In the history of economic thought in this country there have been two 
stages. After the war with England, and when we had our earliest really 
important industrial and business crisis, the thinkers of this country for the 
first time began to turn their attention to economic topics. From 1817 on, 
the different colleges of the day devoted some attention to this new subject, 
although most of the topics that engaged public attention at that time 
related to the new-fangled institution called banks, as well as to the 
development of the money power and the little understood industrial and 
transportation development. 
Half a century later, after the great Civil War, when the gradual dis- 
appearance of our free land caused the emergence in this country for the 
first time of the problems which we had thought peculiar to the old world,