492
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
of what I get, and of what each of us ought to get. The fourth division is “ Consumption,” which has been wisely defined as “ the end of all production.”
Now, I argue that, inasmuch as it has always been conceded that women shall look after the distribution and consumption of the private economy, why may she not at least look into the national economy? She only broadens and extends her interests in doing so. Having served a long term in the administration of family economics, I take that fact to be presumptive evidence that women are natural born political economists. The very least they can do is not to push the subject away from them as too difficult, too dry to be annoyed with. On the contrary, it includes topics of vital importance to every woman in the land. The social and economic life of a nation very materially affects women. Social laws, customs and conditions decidedly influence the home life of every girl and woman; they control all things a woman holds most dear. Hence a studyof, and an interest in, the civilization in which she lives should be neglected by none.
In this comparatively new field of work I have found that certain ideas invariably pop up on all sides for argument and discussion. People naturally enough look about them with searching gaze when women undertake anything unusual. Women themselves often say to me that they have never heard of any women political economists in history. It is true that they have not read of any such, that is, as we understand the term political economist. In regard to the economic life of the past, the annals of history are, indeed, wellnigh vacant. The pages of history are heroic with the deeds of warriors, heavy with the smoke of battle, brilliant with marching and counter-marching armies, glittering with the rise and tarnished with the fall of many dynasties.
This department of sociology certainly does have more to do with ourselves than many other branches of knowledge. Therefore, we feel there must have been causes that account for the small role which political economy has played in the drama of history. There were such causes, as we shall see, if we take the trouble to seek them.
At the outset -we discover that one influence felt by the historians has been “ the knowledge that dramatic incidents make more impressions on the minds of readers than dissertations upon the more hidden forces that operate just as effectively in the national organism. Dramatic incidents make more impression on the minds of the historians themselves.” “ Certain epochs excite and certain lives impress the dramatic sense. Both furnish a wide scope in which the genius of the author can exhibit itself. Yet there are causes more potent still which have confined the historic muse ever within sight of the nodding plumes of knights and within the hearing of the ‘ clash of resounding arms.’ ”
These more influential reasons lie in the fact that two conditions must be fulfilled before historians can to any extent write of the economics of their days. The first requisition, says one author, certainly is that social phenomena must be exhibited on a sufficiently extended scale to supply adequate matter for observation; consequently for the recording of such observations, and after social phenomena are provided, historians or writers must be trained for their tasks. Dr. Ingram believes, as he says, “ Sociology requires to use for its purpose theorems which belong to the domain of physics and biology, and which sociology must borrow from its professors. On the logical side the methods which sociology has to employ—deductional, observational, comparative—must have been previously shaped in the cultivation of mathematics, in the study of the inorganic world, or of organisms less complex than the social organism.”
We must never forget that scientists base their theories on the fact that society is an organic whole, and each individual is a member of the same. Hence it is plain that, although some laws or tendencies were undoubtedly forced on men’s attention in every age, yet it is also plain that really scientific sociblogy, including political economy, must be the product of a very advanced stage of intellectual development.
Accepting these reasons for the silence of historians in regard to economics, we are not so much inclined to blame them for their seeming shortcomings.