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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,
for the sake of clearness and simplicity, many important phases of
social life, is traversed in outline; and a few brief practical applications
are made to special topics. 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. The third term is devoted to a
discussion of the periodical commercial panics and crises of the nineteenth
transportation and industrial organization that have taken place
throughout the world in recent years.
Text-Books.—Walker's Political Economy, (Advanced Course); 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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