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action which alone lead to correct and beneficial results. But it is the duty of this chair to measure national needs by a knowledge of the national status, not by public sensations, and I affirm that the questions on which our national future to-day depends are questions of political economy, questions of labor and capital, of finance and taxation. The fruits of the Civil War did not cease when the armies disbanded. It left us with financial and industrial legacies whose fruits, as every student of political economy and social science knows, are slow in ripening; and they contain seeds of future and still more disastrous crops. No man can estimate these long following results. No man can tell what social, moral, and political transformations they may produce. There is no field of activity which now calls so urgently for the activity of honest and conscientious men as the enlightenment of the American public on the nature and inevitable results of the financial and industrial errors to which they are committed. I do not indeed expect that this continent is to become a wilderness again. I would not exaggerate. I know that a people can and will drag on a slow existence under the most unfavorable social, political, and industrial circumstances, and I know that the resources of this continent are such that we may waste and squander recklessly without feeling those bitter consequences whose healing function it is, in the moral order, to warn and convince us of mistakes. But the duty of the economist is not simply to learn how to avoid waste of what has been won but to learn the laws by which there may be no falling short of the utmost that might be attained; and the duty of the social scientist is to teach that moral and social deterioration follows inevitably upon economical mistakes, whether, looking to our general ratio of physical comfort, it