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ECONOMICS.
In its value both as a mental discipline to the student, and as a subject
of practical interest to the citizen, it is difficult to over-estimate
the importance of this science.
As a mental discipline the study of Economics combines to a certain
extent the advantages of linguistic, mathematical and historical training.
One of the most serious difficulties of the subject is the fact that
many of its technical terms are also used in loose popular significations;
and a close study of Economics teaches a man to be very careful
in the exact and discriminating use of words. The rigid reasoning, too,
by which economic laws are deductively derived from a few simple and
fundamental facts in human and physical nature is as relentlessly logical
as that by which the properties of triangles or circles are deduced
from the axioms of Geometry. And, finally, the historical investigation
of economic phenomena with a view to the verification, modification
or refutation of the laws deductively ascertained, or to the inductive
discovery of other laws, is attended with the advantages of other
historical study, as above set forth, and sheds a flood of light upon
many questions in social, political, or even religious history.
B. A. COURSE.
Like Mathematics, Economics is treated as Pure and Applied. In
the first term of the session the whole field of Pure or Deductive Economics,
an abstract science which deliberately and properly ignores,
social life, is traversed in outline; and a few brief practical applications
are made to special topics. In this term, too, the principles
of Public Finance are studied. In the second term a thorough
deductive, as well as inductive and historical, investigation of the
principles of Money and Credit is undertaken; while a few lectures are
devoted to the consideration of protective tariffs. A third term is
devoted to a discussion of the periodical commercial panics and crises
of the nineteenth century, and to the history of the vast changes in
production, transportation and industrial organization that have taken
place throughout the world in recent years.
Text-Books.—Laughlin's Elements of Political Economy; Plehn's Introduction
to Public Finance; Horace White's Money and Banking; selected
pamphlets from the Sound Currency series published by the N. Y. Reform
Club, viz: Nipher's The Appreciation of Gold, Warner's The Currency Famine
of 1893, Watkins's Cotton and the Currency, White's Coin's Financial
Fool, and the Report of the Monetary Commission of the Indianapolis Convention
of 1897; Philpott's Tariff Chats; Porter Sherman's Tariff Primer;
Hyndman's Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century; Wells's Recent
Economic Changes.
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