TUESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 4, 1944 THE BATTALION PAGE 5

First Intramural Matches Rained OutIntramurals started yesterday

afternoon with tennis matches be­tween G Battery and E Company and between B and F Company. No softball games were played be­cause none of the organizations on the campus can play on Monday afternoon according to the entry cards turned in. Softball games will be played every day except Monday at 4:15.

Playing in what started out to be a slight mist yesterday after­noon, Atlas and Mayben of B Com­pany held Wallace and Olschner of F Company to a game count of five to five when heavy rain forced Lou Huber, Intramural Manager, to call the match. The match will be played again and should prove to be a very interesting one if it is anything like the games played yesterday. Also scheduled to play were G Battery and E Company. Failure of E Company to send a team out gave the match to G Battery by a forfeit.

Scheduled for this afternoon are three softball games and two ten­nis matches. In softball A Co. plays G Batt., 2nd Co. of the band plays G Co., and 1st Co. of the band plays F Co. In tennis,' E Co. is scheduled to play G' Co., and B Co. is scheduled to play F Batt. The games and matches will begin promptly at 4:15. On Wednesday there will be four softball games and one tennis match. Thursday and Friday there will be one soft- ball game and two tennis matches each afternoon.

Tomorrow night after mess sev­eral companies are planning on playing practice games in basket­ball and softball. These games should prove interesting in that they will be the continuance of a series of grudge games being played in the new area.

The schedules of each organiza­tion games were sent out yester­day afternoon and the Athletic Of­ficers have them now. They will be

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Economist Break With Mercantilism As 18th Cent. Closes

By Dr. F. B. ClarkAt no other time in human his­

tory was as much attention paid to the matter of how best to or­ganize society as was paid in Eu­rope during the closing years of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. It was during that period of intellectual ferment that the science of economics was born. In so many words the science of economics had its inception with the philosophical break with mer­cantilism. It would, therefore, be a serious oversight to proceed with an examination of the new order without paying attention to some extent to the clash of intellects responsible for its advent.

It all came as a sort of natural consequence of forces set in mo­tion by the discovery and settle­ment of the new world—especially the Spanish in South America. There still remain evidences from Panama southward of that ro­mantic period. The stream of gold that flowed from Peru and else­where in South America through Panama into Spain presented a baffling question to those nations which did not have access to gold mines. Because of her access to the newly discovered sources of gold, Spain became the richest na­tion in the world, and the envy es­pecially of other European nations. Impressed and overwhelmed by the inordinate wealth of Spain—trace­able of course to her access to gold mines—persons in those other na­tions could only wonder whether a nation might not become wealthy anyhow. The undaunted answer was yes.

The philosophical basis of mer­cantilism came as a development from the affirmative answer given

posted as soon as possible and the teams scheduled for coming sports should start organizing now and get in some practice before their first intramural game.

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to that question. The titles given to the books written explanatory of the mercantile system tell well enough the nature of the reasoning of those persons who made the af- f i r m a t i v e answer. “England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade” is typical.

It is not correct to think of the mercantilists as a school of econ­omists. Neither is it correct to think of the books written setting forth the principles of mercantil­ism as disquisitions developed in defense of that sort of thing. The treatises were commonplace sum­maries of things taken for granted by those persons who tried to an­swer the question as to what con­stituted the wealth of a nation. And, don’t fool yourself, the states­men of the time took the matter seriously. It was not a mere pass­ing fancy of a few. Mercantilism pervaded the life of those nations. It was as vigorously believed in by persons responsible for governmen­tal policies as its modern counter­parts. As a consequence the na­tions were as closely locked in armed conflict as they are today. No group of self-respecting people are going to allow themselves to have their interests subordinated to those of another without a fight.

Viewed in the light of modern economic theory the philosophy of the mercantile system appears somewhat strange. It is, therefore, a matter of some surprise that it has taken as long as it has to rid the world of the vicious thing. It has been said somewhere that a theory will live long after its brains have been knocked out. The very earliest of the exponents of the science of economics had little dif­ficulty in revealing the absurdities of mercantilism. The first effective thing done by economic scientists was to “knock the brains” out of mercantilism. All of the life that is left in it, therefore, has to be attributed to the remarkable abil­ity to survive of a brainless doc­trine.

The one great defect of mercan­tilism is, of course, found in the attempt to apply the concept of private wealth to public matters. The mercantilists failed to see that money functions in a different way socially from what it does in its private capacity. In its private ca­pacity money is employed, among other things, as a measure of rel­ative values. Money fails to func­tion when an attempt is made to have it measure wealth as a whole. There is in fact no measure for wealth as a whole. The increase in the amount of money which circu­lates within the limits of a nation in and of itself serves only to re­duce the per unit value of the money. Especially would that be true if the increase came as a re­sult of the excess of exports over imports. The nation would in fact be made poorer by the amount of the excess of exports. In interna­tional trade for every sale there has to be an equivalent purchase. It soon, therefore, became appar­ent to those who reflected on the subject that the mercantilist con­ception of the source of national wealth would not hold "water. Pressed to its logical conclusion a

nation whose exports remained continuously in excess of imports would in the end acquire all of the gold. Whereupon further trading would be impossible for the simple reason that other nations would not have the wherewithal with which to pay for the goods pur­chased.

If, then, the source of national wealth is not the difference be­tween exports and imports, what is it? It was in connection with at­tempts to answer that question that the science of economics was born. Tied in with the advent of the science of economics came the sponsorship of the new order—the one which has come to be known as economic freedom. Evidently if it could be shown conclusively that the intricate network of govern­mental regulations looking to a strong nation along lines conceived of by mercantilists was not accom­plishing what they were after, then, another pattern needed to be provided. The challenge here pre­sented was met, in the beginning by a group of scholars in France who are known to the modern world as the Physiocrats. They called themselves, however, les economists.

It is a matter of special interest to us that outstanding among these scholars was a man named Dupont de Nemours. The Dupont family of the state of Delaware are descendents from this illus­trious Frenchman. In fact the re­mains of their famous ancestor rest under a monument construct­ed by the Dupont family in the state of Delaware. Dupont de Ne­mours was only one of several fa­mous persons who contributed the physiocratic school of economists.

The explanation as to why the Dupont family came to this coun­try that suits me best is that they saw a chance of the realization of the new order here. They have most certainly had a big part in making it a reality. It needs to be noted, of course, that the order has taken form in many respects dif­ferently from the conception of the physiocrats. The very ingenuity of their conception of the scheme of

things makes it a matter of per­manent interest even though later economists have found it necessary to modify it considerably.

The physiocrats thought that there existed a natural order adapt­able to human beings much as there is for colonies of bees or ants. They further thought that each individual as a member of so­ciety would in and of himself find his place in that natural order if only he were allowed to do so. The meticulous regulations of the mer­cantilists served to “cramp the style” of each member of society in such a way as to make it im­possible for him to discover where he belonged in the natural order of things. In answer to the ques­tion as to what the government should do in the way of promoting social welfare someone had said, “For heaven’s sakes, let us alone!” The let alone (laisses faire) slogan was so well adapted to what the physiocrats were after that they fell for it. The laissez faire slo­gan in time captured the imagina­tion of almost everyone. Tied inas it was with the conviction that there existed a natural order for human beings which could not be attained without the absence of governmental interference, the laissez faire doctrine became pos­sibly the most dynamic slogan ever employed for purposes of political change. The mercantile system tended to melt before its impact like frost under the rays of the morning sun. Although the laissez faire doctrine had its inception with the physiocrats, it, of course, gathered content as it gained mo­mentum. Time will not allow further attention to that subject here.

In the lights of the laissez faire doctrine the physiocrats gave a new interpretation to what consti-

(See ECONOMIST, Page 7)

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