We do not put the idea of prenatal education forward as being a new theory. What can be effected at the time of conception and during the prenatal period was known to the patriarchs, for Jacob produced speckled and ring-streaked animals at will. We believe that many mothers are acquainted with the power they possess in this direction, but how few make any use of that knowledge for the benefit of their offspring.

Tendencies towards evil doubtless exist in all, but the mother has tremendous power to counteract, and even, perhaps extinguish these tendencies, by seeing that during the three-quarters of a year that passes before her child's birth only the best and purest ideas are in her mind. There is then every chance of the offspring being itself possessed of a tendency towards what is moral, and have an innate detestation of all that is immoral. How careful mothers should be of the books they read, the thoughts they think, and the company they keep, during motherhood. There is very little doubt that during the prenatal period the mother has power to inculcate into the mind of

her child what she likes, and she may thus make it whatever she may desire it to become in after life. When mothers act up to the extent of the power they possess it will then become true in the fullest degree that "she who rocks the cradle rules the world.”

Of course while this power can be used by mothers for the production of the highest possible good, it can be as easily used for the production of evil. Thus it is no matter for wonder that criminal parents produce criminal children. That an increase in immorality in one generation is productive of a still further increase in the next, follows as a matter of course.

Postnatal education has little effect in reducing immorality. Decrease of vicious tendencies can only be accomplished by preventing criminals from breeding, and by the leaven of morality being spread by mothers realizing and acting upon the fact that their power over the disposition of their children is exercised with the greatest effect if used while they are yet unborn. ARTHUR SMITH.

Westbury Station, N. Y.

E

VER SINCE commerce, money, merchants' capital, interest, profit, made their appearance in human society, there have been thinkers, who tried to treat of these matters in a scientific way. The first traces of a scientific conception of economic problems, which are known to us by fragments of literature on the subject, are found among the thinkers of ancient Greece, several hundred years before the Christian era.

in the

These men were not brought up Mosaic conception, that Adam and Eve

were thrown out of a paradise and compelled to work for a living, after they had made a very natural mistake. Nor were they brought up in the modern conception, that capitalists have always existed and will always exist. In fact, they knew that capitalists were a very recent, and by no means welcome addition to the national life. And they were much inclined to regard these newcomers as nuisance rather than a benefit to society. In their day, the efforts made by legislators like Solon to protect the property

of the mass of citizens against the greed of merchants and mercantile aristocrats were still vividly remembered. That the private property of a plutocratic minority should be held sacred, and the private property of the vast mass of laboring citizens left at the mercy of a plutocratic minority, did not seem quite as natural to the public men of Greece as it does to the senators and congressmen of the United States of Rockefeller. On the other hand, the vast body of laborers in Greece were slaves. Their labor-power was not a "free" marketable commodity. The value of their labor time could not be measured in terms of commerce. Moreover, production was mainly for direct use, and commerce did not reach as deeply into the productive sphere as it did later under different systems of economy.

Under these circumstances, the Grecian economists show neither the exalted reverence of modern partisan economists for the private property of capitalists, nor do they appreciate the vital importance of human labor in the problems of political economy. They deal more with effects than with causes, and puzzle their brains with schemes rather than historical processes. Nevertheless, they make very objective observations and utter many profound ideas, which the partisan economists of modern ruling classes might read with much profit.

Plato, for instance, understood the vital significance of social division of labor for the constitution of the Grecian city. Aristotle realized that commodities have a use-value and an exchange-value. He recognized that money as a medium of circulation performs different functions than money as capital. He even analyzed money as a measure of value and correctly stated that the value of money must be determined by the same means as that of all other commodities. He was of the opinion that money as a mere medium of circulation owed its existence to agreement or law, that it had no intrinsic value of its own, and that its use

fulness as coin was merely an attribute of its function in the circulation. It was evident to him that the exchange-value of commodities was at the bottom of their prices. And since commodities compare their exchange-values only through their prices, he made them measurable through money, although he held that the value of the different objects measured by money was really incommensurable. But for all practical purposes he thought that money could be used as a measure of what was in fact not measurable. He was looking for a common unit of measurement. But the basis of Grecian society, slave labor, prevented him very naturally from finding in average social labor time the common measure of all exchange-values.

The Grecian economists did the best they could under the historical circumstances in which they lived. So long as the social conditions did not offer them the materials necessary for a scientific solution of economic problems, the Grecian thinkers could not well be expected to arrive at a scientific solution.

During the centuries following the dissolution of Grecian society, the conditions were even less favorable for the development of a science of sociology. Intellectually, the Roman civilization never rose to the intensity and perfection of the Grecian. The mental conceptions of the feudal era, which relieved the disintegrating Roman, fell completely into the toils of a mode of thought, which turned its eyes inward rather than outward and tried to arrive at objective truths, not by an inductive method of research, collecting and classifying experimental facts and making logical deductions from them, but by juggling with introspective speculations and shutting out as much of the actual reality as possible.

It was only in astronomy, and its auxiliary mathematics, that exact methods of observation and reasoning enforced themselves. And these sciences did not extend their influence into the sphere of social relations.

Wherever we meet with any thought touching upon social matters during the medieval period, we find that it is either confined to denunciations of the natural results following from private-ownership of land and means of production, with its attending class-rule, or to dreamy utopias, passionate revolts, despairing outeries. The oppressed classes lived under conditions, which prevented them from developing any consciously organized social movements of such character as would enable them to understand the course of historical evolution and adapt themselves to it as auxiliaries. They generally worked against the prevailing tendencies of social development, not with them. Their revolutions were either short, spasmodic outbreaks, or sentimental and resigned theoretical crusades on the field of abstract ethics.

In short, the requirements for the elaboration of scientific social theories did not exist in ancient and medieval societies. Even the best educated brains of those days were dominated by speculative conceptions, and naturally so. Besides, education was a privilege of the select. Whenever any particularly bright mind showed itself among the oppressed classes, it was generally taken in hand by the ruling classes and educated to serve the interests of caste. If such a man remained loyal to his class, he was killed by the rulers. And such loyal leaders of working-class revolutions were necessarily as much dominated by speculative fancies as the educated men of the ruling classes, for the conceptions of the ruling classes are the prevailing and dominating ones so long as their rule is assured by social conditions.

The first modern attempts to introduce scientific methods into political economy were due to the efforts of the rising merchant towns of Central and Western Europe, from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, to overcome the money monopolies of the ruling princes and great financiers. While these efforts were really a struggle of one kind of monopoly

against another, their theoretical reflection assumed the guise of a defense of natural laws against feudal laws.

The laws of mercantile economy were defended as "natural" laws against the "unnatural" laws of feudal privilege, for the former were declared to be the expression of "free" competition, while the feudal rights were assailed as artificial gifts of class privilege. This is the historical genesis of the distinction between natural and artificial monopolies, of which some modern would-be economists make so much in their frantic endeavors to defend the little exploiter against the inroads of the large exploiter, and which they proclaim as the theoretical basis of “natural' remedies against industrial and financial trusts.

Out of these first theoretical skirmishes between feudal power and merchants' needs arose the theoretical controversies of the mercantilists against the monetary system that was their mother. In these controversies, the superficial notion arising in the brains of the merchants out of the surface indications of commercial processes were pitted against the superstitious speculations of the champions of feudal privileges, who believed in the immanent mysterious power of money as the sole source of social wealth. And since money was as much the idol of the merchants as of the feudal powers, the entire controversy raged about the peculiar forms and functions of money as a medium of circulation, as a measure of value, as a standard of price, as a hoard, as a means of payment, as interest-bearing capital and merchants' capital.

The monetary privileges of princes and a few great financiers stood in the way of the merchants. The requirements of extending commerce demanded imperiously a greater flexibility of a circulation medium. This led as early as the twelfth century to the establishment of deposit banks in the Italian merchant towns, and in proportion as the center of commerce was gradually shifted northward and westward in the course of the follow

ing centuries, the same institutions appeared among the Dutch and the Hansa towns of Germany.

These deposit banks, in their turn, acquired a monopoly of money, and out of the struggles against the bank monopolies arose the credit system, which was in due time to exceed enormously the scope of the precious metals in the circulation of commodities.

This entire controversy about money, dragging its tiresome length through several centuries, was at first naturally confined to the sphere of circulation. It did not touch the sphere of production, because all the essential interests of the contending parties centered around the control of the medium of circulation. That the value of money itself was not due to any immanent powers of this medium of circulation, but rested in the last analysis upon the productive forces of society, was a concepton that did not recommend itself at the outset to the parties most concerned in this controversy. And so the whole theoretical discussion, from the historical point-ofview, began on a lower level than the speculations of the early Grecian economists. The reason for this state of things is easily found in the historical conditions leading up to these controversies. I need not dwell on this point here. With the further development of the merchant class into a class of industrial capitalists, the sphere of production gradually asserted its influence over the sphere of circulation, and this found expression also in the theoretical discussions. Already in the transition years from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century political economy began to assume its modern aspect and delve into problems of value. In the persons of William Petty, the founder of modern political economy, we come face to face with the passage from mercantilist to classic economist theories. He did not only reassert, in a more perfect form, Aristotle's theory of money and of the value of commodities in general, but he

even declared definitely, that " equal labor" was the common measure of all commodities. But owing to the incompleteness of his theoretical material, and to the undeveloped condition of the working proletariat, he remained in doubt about the practical means, by which this common measure could be made serviceable.

Petty's work served as a basis for the entire mercantilist literature during the next century and paved the way for all subsequent analyses of value. His emphasis upon exact methods of observation in sociology by means of statistical tabulation still stands as a lasting rebuke to all modern compilers of official statistics, which seem to be especially designed for the purpose of baffling unbiased sociological research, instead of encouraging and assisting it.

Just as Petty's work represents in England the first systematic theory of mercantilism so Quesnay's work represents in France the first systematic presentation of capitalist production. Owing to the peculiar historical conditions, under which the bourgeois revolution developed and succeeded in France, the physiocratic system of Quesnay considered the capitalist farmers as the typical representatives of industrial capital. For this reason this system remained onesided and limited in its application. But it brought out at least one very essential point, namely, that it is fundamentally not a question of mere production, but of reproduction. In other words, the problem is not merely to explain what capital is, but how it maintains itself intact and increases itself.

The physiocratic character of Quesnay's system made it unintelligible to those economists, who developed the typical theory of industrial capital in England, where industrialism assumed its most typical features. Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations marks the definite repudiation of mercantilist conceptions in political economy, still gropes his way rather tentatively through the

mazes of undifferentiated and undigested thought. He falls in many respects below Quesnay's level, particularly in his analysis of the process of reproduction. But nevertheless he shows his genius by seeking a solution of economic problems above all in the sphere of production, making determined efforts to ascertain the actual relations between labor and capital, and examining the influence of the different component parts of capital on the process of reproduction. Here he is necessarily vague and falls into misleading conceptions, which became pitfalls for the next generation of economists. His greatest error in this respect was that he considered the distinction between fixed and circulating capital, which relates in fact to the different manner in which various parts of capital are circulated, as a fundamental distinction in the process of production. This error barred his way to a solution of the problem of value and surplus-value.

But in spite of this error, the most significant part of his work is the emphasis which he lays upon the problems of value and surplus-value. Already some mercantilists had recognized that the increase of capital must be due to an increase in social values. Where does this increase come from? The greater part of the mercantilists imagined that surplus-value arose from arbitrary additions to the prices of commodities. But even Petty recognized that the surplusvalue of the whole society cannot come from mere buying and selling. And Steuart declared frankly that the gains and losses of people cheating one another in buying and selling must mutually balance one another, so that the result is the same as though they had sold their commodities at normal prices. On the other hand, social laws cannot be studied by examining a few exceptions, and so it will not do to explain the origin of the surplus-value of entire classes by occasional gains, which a few individuals may realize in commercial competition.

Adam Smith reasserted the theory of

value which was developed in the germ by Petty. In the work of Smith, this theory is made the basis for his analysis of surplus-value. But since he neither perfected Petty's theory of value nor applied it consistently, he got no farther than a frank declaration that ground rent and capitalist profit are deductions from the product of productive laborers, who performed surplus-labor over and above the labor required for their own sustenance without receiving an equivalent for it. This did not enable him to discover the mechanism by which particularly the industrial capitalist class secure control of the surplus-products of laborers and realize surplus-value on them in the shape of money. Neither did he separate surplus-value as a general category from the different forms which it assumes in industrial profit, merchants' profit, interest on capital and ground

rent.

Adam Smith represents in classic political economy the transition period from manufacture to manufacture, just

as

Petty represents theoretically the transition period from mercantilism to manufacture, and Quesnay the transition from agricultural to industrial capitalism.

The next man who marks in England a new historical stage of production is David Ricardo, whose most significant work falls into the first quarter of the nineteenth century. He is the typical economist of machine production in industrial capitalism, and, therefore, the typical spokesman of bourgeois political economy in its modern form.

Ricardo based his conception of surplus-value upon the theory of value of his predecessors. He worked out the theory of labor-value more consistently than any of them and applied it to every phase of production and circulation, to labor, capital and money. He emphasized the fact that all exchange-value represents materialized labor, and consequently all surplus-value materialized surplus-labor. On this basis, Ricardo