DINNER IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR JOHN BATES CLARK 363 
new points of view that they have engaged the attention of succeeding 
generations of students in the universities of this country and of other 
lands. Critics of the negative sort have searched for defects, have found 
fAaws, have blamed him because he did not solve all the other problems 
besides those that he did elucidate. But I have been a critic only in the 
positive and friendly sense, gathering nuggets of wisdom from his rich 
mine of ideas. 
Controversial matters should not engage our attention tonight; but if I 
might select from Professor Clark’s contributions some candidates for the 
Hall of Fame of Economic Theory, I should name, first, his part in the 
reconstruction of the capital concept, the lessons of which are not yet fully 
appreciated. It is still influencing the reconstruction and reformation of 
economic thought. I should name, second, his universal law of economic 
variation, with its unifying effect upon the whole conception of economic 
theory. Then, if among various others I were to name a third, it probably 
would be his contribution to the theory of monopoly. That was a pioneer 
work, a work done at a time when, as many of you well remember, all men 
were groping. We know more of that subject today, and this is due 
largely to his leadership. 
I have, however, mainly to speak tonight as the representative of the 
great guild of American economists. Here is not a field for controversy; 
here enter no disputes. I would refer only to those things on which the 
economists of America can unite without a dissenting voice. First we 
would honor the guest of this evening as a model of the newer and better 
standards of economic criticism. Anyone who knows even a little of the 
history of economic thought, must realize that some time in the last 
decades of the nineteenth century there appeared a finer spirit of economic 
analysis. In large part the economic literature of earlier periods was 
partisan in its concern with practical affairs, and motivated by pecuniary 
objects. Then, from among a little group of men, well represented by the 
Austrian school, there began to come essays of a finer, abstract, disinter- 
ested type of pure economics. It was purer in its intellectual quality and 
purer in the ethical sense, purer in the sense of being the search for truth 
for truth’s sake. Bohm-Bawerk is a good representative; Wieser is a 
somewhat better representative; but the peer of them all is Clark. To 
him we owe most in America for that better approach that now is made 
toward a finer, scientific spirit in this most difficult of all fields where 
thought is so easily colored with human interest, with selfishness and 
with prejudice. 
We that are members of the American Economic Association honor Pro- 
fessor Clark as our one outstanding personality of international reputation 
in the theoretical field. It is a paradox to European scholars that we 
should have produced such a man. They expect and they accept from 
America her manifold achievements in the practical field; but that here, 
out of practical America, there should have come an abstract theorist, 
rivalling and surpassing the best they could produce in the last three 
quarters of a century, is still a puzzle, a real mystery to them. The work 
of Professor Clark has gained an assured place in the world of economic