William Graham Sumner, LL. D.
Professor Sumner is a New Jersey man, born at Paterson. He inherited from his father, Thomas Sumner, who came to this country from England in 1836, several important qualities which those who know the son will recognize. Thomas Sumner, we are told, was a man of the strictest integrity, of indefatigable industry, of sturdy common sense and possessing the courage of his convictions. Two of Professor Sumner's early teachers in Hartford, one of them Mr. S. M. Capron, in the classical department, had also great influence upon his character. He was graduated from Yale College in 1863. In the summer of that year, he went abroad, studied French and Hebrew in Geneva, after which he spent two years at the University of Göttingen, in the study of ancient languages, history, especially church history, and biblical science. Here, he tells us, he was "taught rigorous and pitiless methods of investigation and deduction. Their analysis was their strong point. Their negative attitude toward the poetic element, their indifference to sentiment, even religious sentiment, was a fault, seeing that they studied the Bible as a religious book and not for philology and history only; but their method of study was nobly scientific, and was worthy to rank, both for its results and its discipline, with the best of the natural science methods."
Mr. Sumner went to Oxford in 1866, with the intention and desire of reading English literature on the same subjects which he had pursued at Göttingen. "I expected," he says, "to find it rich and independent. I found that it consisted of second-hand adaptation of what I had just been studying."
Returning to this country, while tutor in Yale College, in 1866, Mr. Sumner published a translation of Lange's "Commentary on Second Kings". In 1867, he was ordained deacon in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and two years later, he received full ordination in New York and became assistant to Rev. Dr. Washburn at Calvary Church, New York, under whom he was made editor of a broad church paper. In September, 1870, he became rector of the Church of the Redeemer at Morristown, N. J., from which event he claims our attention as an author.
With regard to the course of his young ministry in this parish he says; "When I came to write sermons, I found to what a degree my interest lay in topics of social science and political economy. There was then no public interest in the currency and only a little in the tariff. I thought that these were matters of the most urgent importance, which threatened all the interests, moral, social and economic, of the nation, and I was young enough to believe that they would all be settled in the next four or five years. It was not possible to preach about them, but I got so near to it that I was detected sometimes, as, for instance, when a New Jersey banker came to me, as I came down from the pulpit, and said: 'There was a great deal of political economy in that sermon.'"
In September, 1872, Mr. Sumner accepted the chair of Political and Social Science at Yale College, in which he has so highly distinguished himself. Of this he says: "I had always been very fond of teaching and knew that the best work I could ever do in the world would be in that profession; also that I ought to be in an academical career. I had seen two or three cases of men who, in that career, would have achieved distinguished usefulness, but who were wasted in the parish and pulpit".
In 1884, Prof. Sumner received the degree of LL. D. from the University of Tennessee. A distinguished American economist well acquainted with Prof. Sumner's work has given to a writer from whom we quote, the following estimate of his method and of his position and influence as a public teacher: "For exact and comprehensive knowledge Prof. Sumner is entitled to take the first place in the ranks of American economists; and as a teacher he has no superior. His leading mental characteristic he has himself well stated in describing the characteristics of his former teachers at Göttingen; namely, as 'bent on seeking a clear and comprehensive conception of the matter "or truth" under study, without regard to any consequences whatever,' and further, when in his own mind Prof. Sumner is fully satisfied as to what the truth is, he has no hesitation in boldly declaring it, on every fitting occasion, without regard to consequences. If the theory is a 'spade', he calls it a spade, and not an implement of husbandry."
Professor Sumner has published, besides Lange's "Commentary on the Second Book of Kings", the "History of American Currency"; "Lectures on the History of Protection in the United States"; "Life of Andrew Jackson", in the American Statesmen Series; "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other"; "Economic Problems"; "Essays on Political and Social Science"; "Protectionism"; "Alexander Hamilton", in the Makers of America Series, (1890); "The Financier (Robert Morris) and the Finances of the American Revolution", (1891); besides a large number of magazine articles on the same line of subjects.