mas which are incapable of verification. It is not a bundle of sentiments and enthusiasms and soft-hearted wishes bound together either by religious or by irreligious prejudices. It is not a heap of statistical matter without logic. Whether you regard the social science under the form of law, politics, political economy, or social science in its narrower application, these negatives all apply. It is only under some application of scientific methods and scientific tests that, in this department as in others, any results worth our notice can be won.
Now the materials, the facts, and the phenomena of social science are presented to us under two forms: first, as a successive series, viz., in history, in which we see social forces at work and the social evolution in progress; secondly, in statistics, in which the contemporaneous phenomena are presented in groups.[1] Under this view social science has promise, at least, of issuing from its present condition and taking on a steady progress, while it also becomes evident what history ought to be and how we ought to use it.
I have thought it necessary to preface the present lecture with this bare suggestion of the standpoint from which I take up my subject. For the study of politics, some questions in political economy, and some social problems, the history of the United States has greater value than that of any other country. All the greater is the pity that its history is as yet unwritten, or all the greater is the humiliation that the only attempts in that direction which are worth mentioning have been made by foreign scholars, and are not even in the English language. In American history also, for the study of politics and finance, no period equals in interest the administration of Andrew Jackson. I propose, therefore, in the limited time I can now com-
- ↑ Statistics means here, what it ought to mean, much more than tables of figures.
