Full text: Economic essays

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APPENDIX 
after man among us, of excellence and capacity and character, closes the 
door behind him for the last time with very poor appreciation of the 
affection in which he is held by great companies of those who have lived 
and labored with him. What a satisfaction to a man crossing what Pro- 
fessor Burgess calls the frontier of the eighties, to be told to his face by a 
representative company of scholars and university men such as this, of 
their affection for his person, of their appreciation for his service, of their 
esteem for his scholarship. 
The practical man always seems to me like the miner. He goes down 
cach morning into his pit with such illumination as comes from the little 
lamp which is fixed on the peak of his cap, and he goes about his daily 
work with intelligence, with success, with industry, but without the remotest 
appreciation of what it is all about. He has no notion of how coal came 
to be where it is, or what is going to happen to the daily life and occupa- 
tion of man when there is no more coal and some substitute for it has to 
be found. He has no suspicion of the intricacies of trade and commerce 
and finance that are built upon and grow out of the daily work of his 
hands and the hands of those placed like himself. He plays his part in 
isolated unconsciousness of the meaning of it all. It is the poet and the 
philosopher who understand what it is all about. It is the poet with his 
occasional lightning flash of genius who illumines our task ; it is the 
ohilosopher who, by grasp upon it, by vision, by insight and power of 
interpretation, tells us what it all means. - - 
This friend of ours is a philosopher, one of the not too many philosophic 
heads among our scholars who in this day of high specialization are, many 
of them, working with great industry and capacity on tasks, the meaning 
and interpretation of which they know not. Professor Clark has been a 
life-long philosopher, an interpreter. He has seen deep down into the root 
of principle; he has developed principle; he has applied and interpreted 
principle. He has made his place and his fame permanent, not by any 
patient and industrious accumulation and reclassification of facts, but by 
an insight which puts facts in their framework, in their proportion. He has 
led those of us who can follow his illuminating pen to understand the 
significance of economic life, of economic organization and of the economic 
process. This is what gives him his distinction and makes him in a sense 
the leader and founder of a school. - 
All over this land there are glad and grateful men of distinction, power 
and accomplishment, who are proud to call themselves men who have passed 
through his lecture room in years gone by. He is a captain of the mind 
who has recruited and trained and organized an army of believers in the 
mind and what the mind is and can do. 
It is my fortune, happy fortune, to be intimately associated with him as 
friend and colleague for more than thirty years and to have seen him in 
another relationship where he had opportunity to reveal his power to a 
very wide audience. When the Carnegie Endowment for International 
Peace was organized by Mr. Carnegie seventeen years ago, a plan of 
organization was devised which put the work to be done into three classes 
or categories or divisions. One was to deal with intercourse and education.
	        
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