ALTERNATIVES SEEN AS BASIC ECONOMIC FACTS 
Franklin H. Giddings 
In the early eighties a young newspaper man following his 
craft at Springfield, Massachusetts, had the good fortune to 
become acquainted with Professor John Bates Clark, then of the 
Faculty of Smith College at Northampton. Opportunity favor- 
ing, the acquaintance became intimate, and developed into a 
life-long friendship. The newspaper man was presumptuously 
writing daily editorials on the tariff, money, and labor troubles. 
Professor Clark had formulated his Philosophy of Wealth and 
was working out its implications. The younger man fell under 
the spell of it, and, encouraged by his preceptor began making 
excursions of his own in the domain of theory. At Professor 
Clark’s suggestion four articles were written, two by himself and 
two by the novice, presenting four aspects of economic distribu- 
tion under changing modern conditions. These papers, published 
first in the Political Science Quarterly, afterwards appeared in 
book form as The Modern Distributive Process. The younger 
writer from time to time made further small contributions to 
journals and to the programmes of the American Economic Asso- 
ciation, nearly all of them studies in theory. Because of that 
episode, perhaps, it is now his privilege, after many years of 
activity in another field, to contribute a few pages to this volume 
of tribute. 
Acknowledging myself to have been the party of the second 
part, I may perhaps be indulged in a further prefatory word. I 
have now and then been asked why I deserted economics for 
sociology. The answer is that I did no such nefarious thing. The 
truth is that I came near deserting sociology for economics. My 
interest in sociology had been awakened by Herbert Spencer’s 
chapters on “The Study of Sociology,” published serially in The 
Popular Science Monthly. They had convinced me that whether 
or not sociology could become an acknowledged science, it should 
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