INTRODUCTION 
g 
completely with banking in a pathological state. Cliffe Leslie has 
justly remarked that the greatest scientific progress is made when 
economic disorders raise vexing questions as to their causes.! 
But first there must be some notion of the differences between 
normal and abnormal states. Before we could discuss intelli- 
gently the ills of our banking system, we had to have some con- 
ception of how a properly adjusted system functions. This our 
own experience had not yet given us, and the quickest way to 
acquire it was by digesting what the English already knew. 
For some reason little was done in this direction much before 
the turn of the quarter-century. But now there appeared among 
the “voluminous essays, . . . ‘thick as autumnal leaves,’”” which 
the currency question evoked, a significant number of works that 
centered less completely around the specific conditions that 
prompted them, and savored far more of the abstract treatment 
of universal problems, approached from a detached point of view. 
First there were Raymond’s books, then Cooper’s, Cardozo’s 
Phillips’s, and Lord’s. Raguet, McVickar, and Gallatin were be- 
ginning to write. As we turn into the eighteen-thirties the list of 
such writers lengthens. Men had taken the time to acquaint 
themselves with what had been said in England, and with the 
work of such writers as Say. With them the crude fallacies of 
Hamilton and the childish dawdlings of lesser writers disappear. 
The American discussion remained throughout, we have said, 
relatively unsophisticated. Its concepts were simpler than those 
of the English discussion; it ran in terms that the lay mind could 
more readily grasp. But it was none the less significant. In the 
analysis of the nature of bank deposits, of the dogma that the 
issue of notes against real commercial paper is self-regulative, of 
the nature of the business cycle, American writers seem to have 
reached sound conclusions before their English cousins did. 
That we should find inconsistencies in the writings of these 
early students of banking problems need not surprise us. Rather 
would their absence in such a formative period be strange. 
Problems abounded, the existence of which was not realized. 
1 T. E. C. Leslie, “Political Economy in the United States,” Fortnightly Review 
(1880), xxxiv (old series), 401.