The Forgotten Man, and Other Essays

by William Graham Sumner

DISCIPLINE

It occurs very frequently to a person connected as a teacher with a great seat of learning to meet persons who, having completed a course of study and having spent a few years in active life, are led to make certain reflections upon their academical career. There is a great uniformity in the comments which are thus made, so far as I have heard them, and they enforce upon me certain convictions. I observe that an academical life is led in a community which is to a certain extent closed, isolated, and peculiar. It has a code of its own as well for work as for morals. It forms a peculiar standpoint, and life, as viewed from it, takes on peculiar forms and peculiar colors. It is scarcely necessary to add that the views of life thus obtained are distorted and incorrect.

I should not expect much success if I should undertake to correct those views by description in words. It is only in life itself, that is, by experience, that men correct their errors. They insist on making experience for themselves. They delude themselves with hopes that they are peculiar in their persons and characters, or that their circumstances are peculiar, and so that in some way or other they can perpetrate the old faults and yet escape the old penalties. It is only when life is spent that these delusions are dispelled and then the power and the opportunity to put the acquired wisdom to practice is gone by. Thus the old continually warn and preach and the young continually disregard and suffer.

Although I could not expect better fortune than others if I should thus preach, yet there are some things which, as I have often been led to think, young men in your situation might be brought to understand with great practical advantage, and which, if you did understand them, and act upon them, would save you from the deepest self-reproach and regret which I so often hear older men express; and the present occasion seems a better one than I can otherwise obtain, for presenting those things. I allude to some wider explanations of the meaning and purpose of academical pursuits. I do not mean theories of education about which people dispute, but I mean the purposes which any true education has in view, and the responsibilities it brings with it. It surely is not advisable that men of your age should pursue your education as a mere matter of routine, learning prescribed lessons, performing enforced tasks, resisting, unintelligent, and uninterested. Such an experience on your part would not constitute any true education. It would not involve any development of capability in you. It could only render you dull, fond of shirking, slovenly in your work, and superficial in your attainments. Unless I am greatly mistaken, some counteraction to such a low and unworthy conception of academical life may be secured by showing its relation to real life, and attaching things pursued here to practical and enduring benefits. I have known men to get those benefits without knowing it; and I believe that you would get them better if you got them intelligently, and that you would appreciate them better if you got them consciously.

In the first place, it will be profitable to look at one or two notions in regard to the purpose of education which do not seem to be sound. One is that it is the purpose of education to give special technical skill or dexterity and to fit a man to get a living. We may admit at once that the object of study is to get useful knowledge. It was, indeed, the error of some old systems of academical pursuits that they gave only a special dexterity and that too in such a direction as the making of Greek and Latin verses, which is a mere accomplishment and not a very good one at that. It must be ranged with dancing and fencing; it is not as high as drawing, painting, or music. There is, moreover, a domain in which special technical training is proper. It is the domain of the industrial school, for giving a certain theoretical knowledge of persons who will be engaged for life in the mechanic arts. With this limitation, however, we have at once given to us the bounds which preclude this notion from covering the true conception of an academic career. It does not simply provide technical training for a higher class of arts which require longer preparation. You know that this conception is widely held through our American community, and that it is laid down with great dogmatic severity by persons who sometimes, unfortunately, are in a position to turn their opinions into law. It is one of the great obstacles against which all efforts for higher education amongst us have to contend.

I pass on, however, to another opinion just now much more fashionable and held by people who are, at any rate, much more elegant than the supporters of the view just mentioned, that is, the opinion that what we expect from education is “culture.” Culture is a word which offers us an illustration of the degeneracy of language. If I may define culture, I have no objection to admitting that it is the purpose of education to produce it; but since the word came into fashion, it has been stolen by the dilettanti and made to stand for their own favorite forms and amounts of attainments. Mr. Arnold, the great apostle, if not the discoverer, of culture, tried to analyze it and he found it to consist of sweetness and light. To my mind, that is like saying that coffee is milk and sugar. The stuff of culture is all left out of it. So, in the practice of those who accept this notion, culture comes to represent only an external smoothness and roundness of outline without regard to intrinsic qualities.

We have got so far now as to begin to distinguish different kinds of culture. There is chromo culture, of which we heard much a little while ago, and there is bouffe culture, which is only just invented. If I were in the way of it, I should like to add another class, which might be called sapolio culture, because it consists in putting a high polish on plated ware. There seems great danger lest this kind may come to be the sort aimed at by those who regard culture as the end of education.

A truer idea of culture is that which regards it as equivalent to training, or the result of training, which brings into intelligent activity all the best powers of mind and body. Such a culture is not to be attained by writing essays about it, or by forming ever so clear a literary statement or mental conception of what it is. It is not to be won by wishing for it, or aping the external manifestations of it. We men can get it only by industrious and close application of the powers we want to develop. We are not sure of getting it by reading any number of books. It requires continual application of literary acquisitions to practice and it requires a continual correction of mental conceptions by observation of things as they are. For the sake of distinguishing sharply between the true idea of culture and the false, I have thought it better to call the true culture discipline, a word which perhaps brings out its essential character somewhat better.

Here let me call your attention to one very broad generalization on human life which men continually lose sight of, and of which culture is an illustration. The great and heroic things which strike our imagination are never attainable by direct efforts. This is true of wisdom, glory, fame, virtue, culture, public good, or any other of the great ends which men seek to attain. We cannot reach any of these things by direct effort. They come as the refined result, in a secondary and remote way, of thousands of acts which have another and closer end in view. If a man aims at wisdom directly, he will be very sure to make an affectation of it. He will attain only to a ridiculous profundity in commonplaces. Wisdom is the result of great knowledge, experience, and observation, after they have all been sifted and refined down into sober caution, trained judgment, skill in adjusting means to ends.

In like manner, one who aims at glory or fame directly will win only that wretched caricature which we call notoriety. Glory and fame, so far as they are desirable things, are remote results which come of themselves at the end of long and repeated and able exertions.

The same holds true of the public good or the “cause,” or whatever else we ought to call that end which fires the zeal of philanthropists and martyrs. When this is pursued directly as an immediate good, there arise extravagances, fanaticisms, and aberrations of all kinds. Strong actions and reactions take place in social life, but not orderly growth and gain. The first impression no doubt is that of noble zeal and self-sacrifice, but this is not the sort of work by which society gains. The progress of society is nothing but the slow and far remote result of steady, laborious, painstaking growth of individuals. The man who makes the most of himself and does his best in his sphere is doing far more for the public good than the philanthropist who runs about with a scheme which would set the world straight if only everybody would adopt it.

This view cuts down a great deal of the heroism which fills such a large part of our poetry, but it brings us, I think, several very encouraging reflections. The first is that one does not need to be a hero to be of some importance in the world. Heroes are gone by. We want now a good supply of efficient workaday men, to stand each in his place and do good work. The second reflection to which we are led is that we do not need to be straining our eyes continually to the horizon to see where we are coming out, or, in other words, we do not need to trouble ourselves with grand theories and purposes. The determination to do just what lies next before us is enough. The great results will all come of themselves and take care of themselves. We may spare ourselves all grand emotions and heroics, because the more simply and directly we take the business of life, the better will be the result. The third inference which seems to be worth mentioning is that we come to understand the value of trifles.

All that I have said here about wisdom, fame, glory, “public good,” as ends to be aimed at, holds good also of culture. It becomes a sham and affectation when we make it an immediate end, and comes in its true form only as a remote and refined result of long labor and discipline.

Before I speak of it, however, in its direct relation to education, let me introduce one other observation on the doctrine I have stated that we cannot aim at the great results directly. That is this: the motive to all immediate efforts is either self-interest or the desire to gratify one’s tastes and natural tendencies. I say that all the grand results which make up what we call social progress are the results of millions of efforts on the part of millions of people, and that the motive to each effort in the heart of the man who made it was the gratification of a need or a tendency of his nature. I know that some may consider this a selfish doctrine, eliminating all self-sacrifice and martyr or missionary spirit, but to me it is a pleasure to observe that we are not at war with ourselves, and that the intelligent pursuit of our best good as individuals is the surest means to the good of society. Moreover, do you imagine that if you set out to make the most of yourself in any position in which you are placed, that you will have no chance for self-sacrifice, and no opportunity of martyrdom offered you? Do you think that a man who employs thoroughly all the means he possesses to make his one unit of humanity as perfect as possible, can do so without at every moment giving and receiving with the other units about him? Do you think that he can go on far without finding himself stopped by the question whether his comrades are going in the same direction or not? Will he not certainly find himself forced to stand against a tide which is flowing in the other direction? It will certainly be so. The real martyrs have always been the men who were forced to go one way while the rest of the community in which they lived were going another, and they were swept down by the tide. I promise you that if you pursue what is good for yourself, you need not take care for the good of society; I warn you that if you pursue what is good, you will find yourself limited by the stupidity, ignorance, and folly of the society in which you live; and I promise you also that if you hold on your way through the crowd or try to make them go with you, you will have ample experience of self-sacrifice and as much martyrdom as you care for.

Now, if I have not led you too deep into social philosophy, let us turn again to culture. We find that culture comes from thought, study, observation, literary and scientific activity, and we find that men practice these for gain, for professional success, for immediate pleasure, or to gratify their tastes. The great motive of interest provides the energy and this culture is but a secondary result. It is a significant fact to observe that when the motive of interest is removed, culture becomes flaccid and falls into dilletantism.

I think that we have gained a standpoint now from which we can study undergraduate life and make observations on it which have even scientific value. During an undergraduate career, the motive of interest in each successive step is wanting. There is no immediate object of pleasure or gain in the lesson to be learned next. Only exceptionally is it true that the learning of the lesson will gratify a taste or fill a desire. The university honors are only artificial means of arousing the same great motive, which is in the social body what gravitation is in physics. The penalties which are here to be dreaded are but imitations of life’s penalties. I think that many who have undertaken to give advice and rebuke and warning to young men in a state of pupilage have failed because they have not fully analyzed or correctly grasped this fact, that the academical world is a little community by itself in which the great natural forces which bind older men to sobriety and wisdom act only imperfectly. Life is far less interesting when the successive steps are taken under compulsion or for a good which is remote and only known by hearsay, than it is when every step is taken for an immediate profit. I doubt very much whether the hope of culture or self-sacrificing zeal for the public good would make older men toil in lawyer’s offices and counting-houses, unless there were such immediate rewards as wealth and professional success. In real life it is true that men must do very many things which are disagreeable and which they do not want to do, but there too the disagreeable things are made easier to bear. The troubles of academical life seem to be arbitrary troubles, inflicted by device of foolish or malicious men. Troubles of that kind always rouse men to anger and rankle in their hearts. But there is no railing against those ills of life which are inherent in the constitution of things. A man who rails at those is laughed at. So the man just emancipated from academical life finds himself freed from conventional rules but subjected to penalties for idleness and extravagance and folly infinitely heavier than any he has been accustomed to, and inflicted without warning or mercy or respite. On the other hand, he finds that life presents opportunities and attractions for him to work, where work has a zest about it which comes from contact with living things. His academical weapons and armor are stiff and awkward at first and he may very probably come to despise them, but longer experience will show that his education, if it was good, gave him rather the power to use any weapons than special skill in the use of particular ones. Special technical skill always tends to routine. Although it is an advantage in itself, it may under circumstances become a limitation. The only true conception of a “liberal” education is that it gives a broad discipline to the whole man, which uses routine without being conquered by it and can change its direction and application when occasion requires.

This brings me then to speak of the real scope and advantage of a disciplinary education. A man who has enjoyed such an education has simply had his natural powers developed and reduced to rule, and he has gained for himself an intelligent control of them. Before an academical audience it is not necessary for me to stop to clear away the popular notions about untutored powers and self-made men. It is enough to say that the “self-made” man is, by the definition, the first bungling essay of a bad workman. An undeveloped human mind is simply a bundle of possibilities. It may come to much or little. If it is highly trained by years of patient exercise, judiciously imposed, it becomes capable of strict and methodical action. It may be turned to any one of a hundred tasks which offer themselves to us men here on earth. It may have gained this discipline in one particular science or another, and it may have special technical acquaintance with one more than another. Such will almost surely be the case, but there is not a more mistaken, one-sided, and mischievous controversy than that about the science which should be made the basis of education. Every science has, for disciplinary purposes, its advantages and its limitations. The man who is trained on chemistry will become a strict analyst and will break up heterogeneous compounds of all kinds, but he will be likely also to rest content with this destructive work and to leave the positive work of construction or synthesis to others. The man who is trained on history will be quick to discern continuity of force or law under different phases, but he will be content with broad phases and heterogeneous combinations such as history offers, and will not be a strict analyst. The man who is trained on mathematics will have great power of grasping purely conceptional relations, or abstract ideas, which are, however, most sharply defined; but he will be likely to fasten upon a subordinate factor in some other kind of problem, especially if that factor admits of more complete abstraction than any of the others. The man who is trained on the science of language approaches the continuity and development of history with a guiding thread in his hand, and his comparisons, furnishing stepping-stones now on the right and now on the left, lead him on in a course where induction and deduction go so close together that they can hardly be separated; but the study of language again always threatens to degenerate into a cram of grammatical niceties and a fastidiousness about expression, under which the contents are forgotten. Now, in individual affairs, family, social, and political affairs, all these powers of mind find occasion for exercise. They are needed in business, in professions, in technical pursuits; and the man best fitted for the demands of life would be the man whose powers of mind of all these diverse orders and kinds had all been harmoniously developed. How shallow then is the idea that education is meant to give or can give a mass of monopolized information, and how important it is that the student should understand what he may expect and what he may not expect from his education. As your education goes on, you ought to gain in your power of observation. Natural incidents, political occurrences, social events, ought to present to you new illustrations of general principles with which your studies have made you familiar. You ought to gain in power to analyze and compare, so that all the fallacies which consist in presenting things as like, which are not like, should not be able to befog your reason. You ought to become able to recognize and test a generalization, and to distinguish between true generalizations and dogmas on the one hand, or commonplaces on another, or whimsical speculations on another. You ought to know when you are dealing with a true law which you may follow to the uttermost; when you have only a general truth; when you have an hypothetical theory; when you have a possible conjecture; and when you have only an ingenious assumption. These are most important distinctions on either side. Some people are affected by a notion, fashionable just now, that it belongs to culture never to go too far. Mr. Brook, in “Middlemarch,” you remember, is a type of that culture. He believed in things up to a certain point and was always afraid of going too far. We have a good many aspirants after culture nowadays whose capital consists in a superficial literary tradition and the same kind of terror of going too far. They would put a saving clause in the multiplication table, and make reservations in the rule of three. On the other hand, we have those who can never express anything to which they are inclined to assent without gushing. A simple opinion must be set forth in a torrent fit to enforce a great scientific truth. One is just as much the sign of an imperfect training as the other, and you meet with both, as my description shows, in persons who pride themselves on their culture. I will not deny that they are cultivated; I only say that they are not well disciplined, that is, not well educated.

Your education, if it is disciplinary, ought also to teach you the value of clear thinking, that is, of exact definitions, clear propositions, well-considered opinions. What a flood of loose rhetoric, distorted fact, and unclear thinking is poured out upon us whenever a difficult question falls into popular discussion! You cannot find that people who assume to take part in the discussion have a clear definition in their minds of even what they conceive the main terms in the discussion to mean. They do not seem able to make a proposition which will bear handling so as to see what it is, and whether it is true or not. They cannot analyze even such facts as they have collected, and hence cannot draw inferences which are sound. It needs but little discussion of any great political or social question to show instances of this, and to show the immense importance of having in the community men of trained and disciplined intellects, who can think with some clearness and resist plain confusion of terms and thought. For instance, I saw the other day a long argument on an important public topic which turned upon the assertion and belief on the part of the writer that a mathematical ratio and a subjective opinion were things of the same nature and value. Perhaps, when he was at school, his father thought there was no use in studying algebra and geometry. It would not make so much difference if he would not now meddle with things for which he did not prepare himself, but it is this kind of person who is the pest of every science, traversing it with his whims and speculations; and perhaps I feel the more strongly the importance of this point because the political, economic, and social sciences suffer from the want of high discipline more than any others.

I ought not to pass without mention here the mischief which is done in every science by its undisciplined advocates who, while admitted to its inner circle, distract its progress and throw it into confusion by neglect of strict principles, by incorrect analyses or classifications, or by flinching in the face of fallacies. They render the ranks unsteady and delay the march, and the reason is because they have never had rigorous discipline either before or since they enlisted.

If your education is disciplinary, it ought also to teach you how to organize. I add this point especially because I esteem it important and it is rarely noticed. It is really a high grade of discipline which enables men to organize voluntarily. If men begin to study and think, they move away from tradition and authority. The first effect is to break up and dissolve their inherited and traditional opinions as to religion, politics, and society. This is a necessary process of transition from formal and traditional dogma to intelligent conviction. It applies to all the notions of religion, as has often been noticed, but it applies none the less to politics and to one’s notions of life. The commonplaces of patriotism, the watchwords of parties and tradition, the glib and well-worn phrases and terms have to be analyzed again, and under the process much of their dignity and sanctity evaporates. So too one’s views of life, of the meaning of social phenomena, and of the general rules for men to pursue with each other, undergo a recasting. Now during this process, men diverge and break up. They do not agree. They differ by less and more, and also by the various recombinations of the factors which they make. Pride, vanity, and self-seeking come in to increase this divergence, it being regarded as a sign of independence of thought.

It is not too much to say that so long as this divergence exists, it is a sign of a low and imperfect development of science. If pride and vanity intermingle, they show that discipline has not yet done its perfect work. It is only on a higher stage of culture or discipline that self is so overborne in zeal for the scientific good that opinions converge and organization becomes possible. But you are well aware that without organization we men can accomplish very little. It is not the freedom of the barbarian who would rather live alone than undergo the inevitable coercion of the neighborhood of others that we want. We want only free and voluntary coördination, but it belongs to discipline itself to teach us that we must have coördination in order to attain to any high form of good.

I have now tried to show you the scope, advantages, and needs of a disciplinary education. I have one remark more to make in this connection. A man with a well-disciplined mind possesses a tool which he can use for any purpose which he needs to serve. I do not consider it an important question by the study of what sciences he shall get this discipline, for, if he gets it, the acquisition of information in any new department of learning will be easy for him, and he will be strong, alert, and well equipped for any exigency of life.

Before quitting the subject, I desire to point out its relation to one other matter, that is, to morals, or manners. It is a common opinion that the higher man attains, the freer he becomes. A moment’s reflection will show that this is not true—but rather quite the contrary. The rowdy has far less restraints to consider than the gentleman. “Noblesse oblige” was perverted in its application, perhaps, before the Revolution, but it contains a sound principle and a great truth. The higher you go in social attainments, the greater will be the restraints upon you. The gait, the voice, the manner, the rough independence, of one order of men is unbecoming in another. Education above all brings this responsibility. Discipline in manners and morals does not belong to the specific matter of education, but it follows of itself on true education. The educated man must work by himself without any overseer over him. He finds his compulsion in himself and it holds him to his task longer and closer than any external compulsion.

This responsibility to self we call honor, and it is one of the highest fruits of discipline when discipline, having wrought through intellect, has reached character. Honor falls under the rule which I mentioned early in this lecture. You cannot reach it because you want it. You cannot reach it by direct effort. It cannot be taught to you as a literary theory. True honor can only grow in men by the long practice of conduct which is good and noble under motives which are pure. We laugh at the artificial honor of the Middle Ages and despise that of the dueling code, but let us not throw away the kernel with the shell. Honor is a tribunal within one’s self whose code is simply the best truth one knows. There are no advocates, no witnesses, and no technicalities. To feel one’s self condemned by that tribunal is to feel at discord with one’s self and to sustain a wound which rankles longer and stings more deeply than any wound in the body. It is the highest achievement of educational discipline to produce this sense of honor in minds of young men, which gives them a guide in the midst of temptation and at a time when all codes and standards seem to be matter of opinion. I have said some things about lack of discipline in thought and discussion, but that is nothing compared with the lack of discipline in conduct which you see in a man who has never known what honor is, whose whole moral constitution is so formless and flabby that it can perform none of its functions, and who is continually seeking some special plea, or sophistry, or deceptive device for paying homage to the right while he does the wrong. Education ought to act against all this and in favor of a high code of honor, not simply the education of schools and academies, but that together with the education of home and family. Our great educational institutions ought to have an atmosphere of their own and impose traditions of their own, for the power which controls in the academic community is not the voice of authority but the voice of academic public opinion. That might root out falsehood and violence and meanness of every kind, which no penalties of those in authority could ever reach; and I submit that such a public opinion would be becoming in a body of young men of good home advantages and the best educational opportunities the country affords. Call it high training, or culture, or discipline, or high breeding, or what you will, it is only the sense of what we owe to ourselves, and it is greater and greater according to our opportunities.

---

THE COÖPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH
Note by the Editor

Among Professor Sumner’s papers there turned up a curiosity which I do not like to pass over altogether, although it is more appropriate, perhaps, to the purposes of the biographer. Apparently Sumner amused himself, along in the seventies or early eighties, in figuring to himself the state of the world under a socialistic régime of the sort which he was always ridiculing and opposing. He did this by imagining the contents of a socialist newspaper, the New Era, of the date July 4, 1950, consisting of editorials, news notes, public announcements, criminal cases, and even a book review. The whole caricatures in high colors the phenomena attending such a régime in its period of exuberance. “The following,” he writes, “is a complete and verbatim copy of a [New York City] newspaper of the date given. It is printed on a small quarter sheet of coarse paper. The printing is so bad that it is hard to read, and the typographical errors, all of which have been corrected, are inexcusable.”

The motto of the paper is: “Let the Rich Pay! Let the Poor Enjoy!” The responsible editor is Lasalle Smith, and the proprietors Marx Jones, Chairman of the New York City Board of Ethical Control, Cabet Johnson, Chairman of the Board of Arbitration for Wages and Prices, Babœuf Brown, Chairman of the Board of Control for Rents and Loans, and Rousseau Peters, President of the Coöperative Bank. A notice warns readers that “This paper is published strictly under the coöperative rules established by the Typographical Union in our office and under the direction of the council of the same. The Committee of Grievances gives its assent and approval to each number before it is published. All subscriptions are payable monthly in advance to the Treasurer of the Typographical Union. The Typographical Union, being a member of the organized Coöperative Commonwealth, has police powers for the collection of all sums due to it.”

* * * * *

A special notice reads as follows:

We send copies of this edition of our paper to a large number of persons who have not hitherto coöperated in our enterprise but whom we have enrolled until they signify their refusal. We call especial attention to the names and standing in the Coöperative Commonwealth of the proprietors of this journal. We believe that many of those whom we now invite to coöperate, and who have been under suspicion of being monopolists, capitalists, recalcitrants, and reactionists, will see that they cannot better establish their credit for civism than by accepting our invitation.

* * * * *

The following extracts are from the editorials:

Our reports of the Ethical Tribunal show that our noble Board of Ethical Control needs to guard diligently our interests. Another pestilent preacher has been condemned to the chain gang. At least we make sure that our streets will be cleaned, a task which no coöperators could be asked to perform, since all the ancient lawyers, professors, and preachers are now condemned to this business. The stubbornness and incorrigibility of these classes towards the Commonwealth is astonishing.

The Board of Ethical Control announce as the result of the plébiscite which was taken on April 1 last, that, by a vote of 5319 to 782, the Commonwealth voted to retain the present Board of Ethical Control for ten years, instead of reëlecting them annually as heretofore. This is as it should be. Why disturb the tranquillity of our happy state by constant elections when our affairs are entrusted to such competent hands?

The agents of the Board of Ethical Control reported 213 persons found dead in the streets at the dawn of day, 174 bearing marks of violence; the rest, not having coöperators’ tickets, were ancient monopolists who had apparently perished of want. The Grand Coöperator said that he should submit to the Board of Ethical Control the question whether it is edifying to continue these reports.

* * * * *

There follow extracts from the inaugural of G. P. M. C.[60] Lasalle Brown, which begin with the sentiment:

Of old ye were enslaved by those who said: Work! Save! Study! We emancipate you by saying: Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy!

The first right of everyone born on this earth is the right to enjoy. The Coöperative Commonwealth assures this right to all its members.

We have not abolished private property. We only hold that every man is considered to have devoted his property to public use. We have not abolished landlords, capitalists, employers, or captains of industry. We retain and use them. Such members of a society are useful and necessary if only they be held firmly in check and forced to contribute to the public good.

We need “history” and “statistics” to batter down all the old system, but we should be the dupes of our own processes if we used them against ourselves. All sensible coöperators should know that history and statistics are far greater swindles than science.

There are dangers in the Coöperative Commonwealth which demand vigilance. There is danger of jealousy and division amongst coöperators. Harmony is essential to the Coöperative Commonwealth and we must have it at any price.

Some say that our Commonwealth is weak. It is the strongest state that ever existed. No one before our time ever knew the power of a “mob,” as it used to be called. At a tap of the bell, every coöperator is at hand. Our only danger is factious division of this power. Let every coöperator have rewards for harmony and penalties for faction—strict, sure, and heavy!

There is danger from science. The evolution heresy is a worse foe to coöperation than the old Christian dogma. Stamp it out!

There is danger from the virus of the old anarchism—worst of all because it is often enough like the truth to deceive the elect. It means liberty and individualism. Stamp it out!

* * * * *

Under the heading “Domestic News” occurs the following:

The Commissioners of Emigration have detected several persons striving to leave the city for Long Island, carrying gold with them. It is well known that many rich persons, animated by selfishness and disregarding their duties as trustees of their wealth for the public, have escaped to the wilds of Long Island beyond the Commune of Brooklyn, carrying with them all the gold which they could obtain. Hence the Commissioners of Emigration have arranged to patrol the East River by the Commonwealth galleys and have limited the ferry transits to the Fulton ferry between 8 and 9 A.M. and 5 and 6 P.M. Any persons found carrying away gold will be sent to the galleys and the gold confiscated. Gold is needed to buy supplies for the Commonwealth.

No dispatches from Philadelphia have been received for a fortnight. A steamboat of 100 tons burden is cruising in the Hudson River, taking toll of all goods in transit across the river. Reports disagree as to the character of the persons on this boat. By some it is asserted to be manned by coöperators who, being poor, are putting into effect ethical claims against material goods. By others it is said to be manned by a gang of monopolist scoundrels and vagabonds, who, driven to desperation by the boycott and plan of campaign, seek this means to perpetuate their existence. It behooves the Board of Ethical Control to learn which of these reports is correct before taking action.

A report comes from the West that the Indians have seized Illinois, killing the whites and taking possession of the improvements. They have imbibed the ancient capitalistic notions and are impervious to ethical and coöperative doctrines. They are rapidly increasing in numbers, strange as it may seem, for we have read in ancient books that they were dying out a century ago. It is suggested that they now increase because they are conquering, and that they will go on doing so until they exterminate all whites from the continent. In the absence of private mails, we humbly suggest that our Board of Ethical Control should communicate with similar boards of the communes to the westward.

* * * * *

Under the heading “Industrial”:

The Board of Equalization of Production have set the amounts of various commodities which may be produced during the coming fall season. Those whom it concerns are to call at the office of the Board at once, pay the fees, and obtain their instructions. The penalty of over-production is fixed at 100 coöperative units per unit of product, half to the informer.

The Board of Arbitration for Contracts will sit daily at their office in Coöperative Hall from 10 to 12 A.M. to approve of contracts. The fee is 1000 coöperative units from each party. Notice is called to the ordinance of the Board of Ethical Control: “If two or more persons make a contract without the presence and approval of the Board of Arbitration or otherwise than in conformity with the regulations of said Board, they may be fined according to the circumstances of the case.”

The Coöperative Railroad Commission, having found a mechanic to repair the locomotive, announce that they will recommence regular weekly trips to Yonkers on next Monday. A train will start at 9 A.M., or as soon thereafter as convenient. Accommodation for twenty-five passengers. Passports may be obtained until noon on Saturday. They must be viséd by the Railroad Commission and by the Coöperative Guardians of Public Morals at their office in the Coöperative Workhouse not later than two o’clock on the same time. The fare to Yonkers will be 10,000 coöperative units. On account of the inter-county commerce law, all freight and passengers will be trans-shipped at Yonkers. To prevent vexatious inquiries, the Commission hereby announce that they are not informed whether or when trains will be dispatched to points beyond.

Since the Commonwealth was founded, as our readers know, coöperators have refused to work in coal mines. No great harm has come of this since the factories and machinery have been abolished and railroads and steamers have almost gone out of use. Some coal, however, is a convenience, and our readers will see with pleasure that delinquents in considerable numbers are being sent to these mines under an agreement with our Board of Ethical Control with the similar authority of the Lehigh Commune in the ancient state of Pennsylvania.

We are informed that a number of ancient capitalists and monopolists, being in a starving condition, recently applied to the Board of the said Commune for leave to go into an abandoned coal mine and work it for their own support.

A week ago yesterday, Coöperative Association 2391, A. P. D., bricklayers, 7824, M. X. H., plasterers, 4823 N. K. J., hodcarriers, F. L. M. 8296, joiners, met to consider the state of the building trades. On account of the decrease in the population, by which great numbers of houses are vacant, building has ceased for years past and these once great associations have dwindled down. The Board of Ethical Control has caused public buildings to be constructed in order to give them work and has ordered landlords to make repairs to the same end. The conference on Friday, a week ago, was to consider further measures of relief. It was decided that no vacant house ought to be allowed to stand. Some maintained that no repairs ought to be allowed at all, in order that new houses might become necessary, but others thought that this would take away what little work is now obtained. G. C. Marx Rogers, former professor of political economy, made a speech in which he proposed that all houses now vacant and all ruins now standing which give shelter to unregistered vagabonds and boycotted persons should be destroyed; also that a committee be appointed to inspect all existing dwellings, mark those which are out of repair and unfit for coöperative residences, and that these latter should then be razed to the ground. This would cause an immediate demand for new houses. This proposition was unanimously adopted.

On Wednesday last the coöperative associations aforesaid met to hear the report of the committee. Twelve hundred and forty-seven houses had been noted so far as unfit for residences. The joint associations passed a decree against said houses, as a beginning, and ordered the committee of the whole to proceed to execute it.

They marched in a body to Bleecker Street, the northernmost limit of the ruined houses and demolished them entirely. They then moved southerly, destroying all vacant houses. Gradually, a number of persons gathered to look on. The agents of Ethical Supervision kept this crowd at a distance and secured the joint Coöperative Associations full independence in the execution of their decree.

In East Canal Street, Nonconformist Jonathan Merritt, lessee of a block of tenements, tried to dissuade or prevent the destruction of his buildings. He was roughly handled, his skull split open and his arm broken by the coöperators. The agents of Ethical Supervision took him in on a charge of disturbing the public peace.

When it came to the destruction of occupied buildings, the tenants objected. By the ordinance of the Board of Lodgings and Rents, each had been allotted to his domicile and was, of course, bound to keep it until allowed to change. It was also feared that no lodgings could be found. The Board of Lodgings and Rents immediately convened and issued new allotments of domicile. Suspects, nonconformists, recalcitrants, and reactionists were sent to lodge in the ancient churches and the coöperators were assigned to their tenements.

The revival and prosperity of the building trades is now assured.

* * * * *

Under the heading “Misdemeanors”:

Of all forms of incivism, the most reprehensible is hoarding gold. All good coöperators who know of cases of this criminal selfishness are bound to report it at the Bureau of Ethical Supervision under penalty of incivism on the one hand and a reward of ten per cent of the sum on the other. All gold must be exchanged at the bank of G. C. Cabet Rogers for coöperative units.

An audacious lampoon has been printed at some secret press, the authors of which must be discovered at all cost. It is a blasphemous parody of the Coöperative Catechism. The Commission of Ethical Inquiry has directed all its powerful machinery to detect the authors of this outrage. Let every coöperator appoint himself a detective to help. Search every house in your neighborhood! Trust nobody! Every person found in possession of a copy of this pamphlet will be summarily removed from the Commonwealth.

The supply of potatoes which forms the staple food of the mass of our population is obtained from the northern part of the commune, in what was formerly Westchester County. The great fields there are tilled by the delinquents under taxes and fines, incorrigible monopolists, survival capitalists and others under judicial sentence, under the direction of the Board of Ethical Control. The convicts work from sunrise to sunset, in order to mark the distinction between them and honorable coöperators, who work but five hours per day. The product of the fields on its way to the town is subjected to toll by the free coöperative associations of the suburbs. Hence it always threatens to be inadequate. Good coöperators cannot better serve the Commonwealth than by ferreting out violators of the ordinances and other persons guilty of incivism.

Karl Marx Jones, agent of the Board of Equalization of Distribution, has disappeared. It is thought that he has gone towards Boston. He reported to the Board, it will be remembered, two weeks ago, a case of hoarding of gold. He was sent to collect it and was made custodian of it. It has disappeared. The Board count upon the aid of communes to the eastward to recover the gold, but not very confidently. He left all his coöperative units behind him.

* * * * *

Ordinances of the Committee of Inquiry appears as follows:

Boycotts are declared against Robert Dorr, for saying that the Coöperative Commonwealth is only a scheme to let a few exploit all the rest; Matthew Brown, for saying that it is all a woman’s honor is worth to appear on the street of the Coöperative Commonwealth, even thickly veiled, for she runs the risk of attracting the attention of someone against whom no one can defend her; James Rowe, for refusing to aid the agents of the society in taking from her home without public scandal a woman charged with incivism; John White, for hiding gold coin; William Peck, for saying that Grand Coöperator Lasalle Brown secured the boycott of Elihu Snow to get his property away from him; Edward Grant, for saying that the Coöperative Commonwealth is only slavery in disguise and the treatment of persons convicted of incivism is slavery without disguise; Peter Moon, for saying that the Plan of Campaign is only a scheme to allow a man’s debtors to rob him of a small fraction of their debts if they will let some of the Grand Coöperators rob him of all the remainder.

* * * * *

A considerable number of minor offences are tried before Grand Coöperator Rodbertus Pease, Member of the Board of Ethical Control:

George Wood, aged sixty, was arraigned for carrying a pistol at night, not being a member of any coöperative club and therefore not entitled so to do. He declared that the streets were unsafe at night and that he never went out after dark if he could help it, but that he was compelled to go for a doctor for his sick grandchild and took the pistol for security. He was met by two coöperators who asked him to contribute to the Aged Coöperators’ Retreat. On his declaring that he had nothing, they searched him and found the pistol. They then demanded his coöperator’s ticket. As he had none, they took him to the Bureau of Ethical Supervision, where he was detained until morning. The two complainants appeared against him. They declared that they were poor men. On examination it appeared that he was an incorrigible adherent of the ancient monopolism. He was fined 10,000 coöperative units, half to the informers. He began to lament at this, saying that he was very poor—poorer than the complainants; but the Grand Coöperator declared that no man could be a poor man who was not a coöperator.

The Emigration Commissioners whose sole duty is to prevent any immigrants from coming into our commune put at the bar Fritz Meyer, charged with immigrating. He pretended to be a sailor on the Ferdinand Lasalle, but did not return on board of her before she sailed. In defence he pleaded that he was left by accident. He was condemned to serve on the yacht of the Board of Ethical Control at the pleasure of said Board.

Ulysses Perkins and others, some of whom were coöperators and some not, complained that their neighborhood was annoyed by the Coöperative Brotherhood who hold their evening festivals at Coöperative Hall. They declared that there was shouting and singing and that windows were broken in spite of the heavy shutters. Their complaint was dismissed as an attempt to oppress organized labor, and the coöperators amongst them were especially reprimanded. The Grand Coöperator remarked that the prejudice against beer which was manifested in ancient prohibitory and license laws was not respected by the ethical judgment of our time.

On Monday last, several persons appeared to complain that the roads outside of the city are infested by robbers. They were detained and the Board of Ethical Control sent out delegates to inquire. They reported yesterday, when the complainants were brought before the tribunal to hear their report. They denied that there was any robbery, since robbery means undue exaction of rent or of work for wages. The word was used by the complainants in the ancient capitalistic sense. The delegates found many coöperators enjoying holiday in the fields and by the wayside. Some of them were playful and resented the exclusive manner of passers-by who did not engage in sport. They asked for treats, and they had appointed a committee to solicit funds for their games. Some bands of banished monopolists were reported to be infesting the woods, living by chance or by tilling some small fields which have not been allotted to them, and plotting against the Commonwealth. The Grand Coöperator said that such persons would be promptly dealt with and dispatched a force of guardians of Ethical Order against them. The complainants were discharged with a reprimand for misrepresenting the innocent enjoyment of the coöperators in the suburb.

William Johnson, employer, was arraigned for contumacy. The Board of Arbitration ordered him to pay 1000 coöperative units per day of six hours. He closed his works. The Grand Coöperator ordered a second charge for malicious lockout and fined him 10,000 coöperative units per day until he should reopen his works.

Eliza Marcy, cook, actress, 26, was charged with defamation of Emily Wilson, coöperative seamstress. The accused presented a certificate of patronage from G. M. C. Brissot Robinson and was discharged from custody, a rescript of the charge being transmitted to G. M. C. Robinson for such action as he should deem proper.

Maria Waters, arraigned for working at type-setting below man’s rates, pleaded poverty and distress as an excuse. She is the daughter of an ancient monopolist from whom she inherited $100,000 before the abolition of inheritance. She had therefore been denied admittance to any coöperative society. She was fined 1000 coöperative units and sent to the Ethical Workhouse to work it out.

Patrick Boyle, coöperative bricklayer, for mending his own table, he not being a member of the furniture-makers’ union, was arraigned as a scab and sentenced to forfeit his coöperative ticket, be graded as a non-conformist, and pay 1000 coöperative units fine. Being unable to pay, he was put under G. M. C. Scroggs to work it out.

* * * * *

Under “Benefits and Amusements”:

In addition to the three regular Labor Days of July, the 10th, 20th, and 30th, the Board of Ethical Control has decreed an extra one on the 18th, with full wages. Commonwealth galleys will be ready to convey coöperators and their families to Blackwell’s Island, where the dancing and dining rooms in the ancient prisons of despotism will be arranged for their entertainment. There will be a free circus at 3 P.M. and a free variety entertainment in the evening. The two latter have been provided by the liberality of G. P. M. C. Lasalle Brown.

Rents remitted for June and all arrears before January 1.

All coöperators in good standing are entitled to pensions of 100 coöperative units per week, with rations of coöperative bread and beer.

The agents of the Board of Equalization of Distribution will begin next Monday the distribution of July pensions to all coöperators in good and regular standing. The agents will call at the residences of coöperators. There has been some delay which has occasioned just murmurs. It has been due to delinquencies of tax-payers, amongst whom not a little old capitalistic virus remains.

Masked Ball on every Sunday evening in the ancient Trinity Church. Coöperative Enjoyment Association. Admission 100 c. u. All persons must wear coöperative medals displayed.

* * * * *

“Foreign News” reports the following débâcle:

It will be remembered that about three years ago the last remnant of English landlords was exiled to Guiana. The Commune of London granted them a ship, of which an immense number blocked the Thames, not having occupation, and they were allowed to navigate it if they could. Their children were taken away from them, to be educated in the principles of coöperation. From this mistaken complaisance a series of evil consequences have flowed.

Some of the exiles have had yachting experience and most of them, being trained in the ancient athletic sports, were able to navigate the ship. Instead of obeying the law, they sailed to Gibraltar and captured the ancient fortress. There they obtained arms and cannons, of which they put a number on board their ship and returned to London. Their first step was to seize the Columbus, a fine steamer of 1000 tons burden, one of the newest and in best repair of those lying in the river. They then filled her bunkers with coal and wood which they took by force from the Commonwealth barges in the river. They next seized the arsenals at Greenwich and Norwich, carried off a great number of repeating rifles and ammunition, and destroyed all the rest. The coöperators of London, being taken unawares and being prepared only to cope with the city monopolists, who had been disarmed, were unable to interfere.

The pirates moored their vessel opposite the city and sent a message of the G. P. M. C. by a captured coöperator that they would bombard the city if their children were not all delivered to them. A hundred of them landed with repeating rifles and revolvers and marched to the coöperative factories, where they set free all who chose to join them. In short, they departed after securing their children, a vast quantity of tools and machinery, arms, supplies, and ammunition. A large number of flunkies and snobs joined them, sufficient to man one or two other vessels.

It now appears that they have taken possession of the Island of Sicily and made it a base of concentration for a grand political reaction. They have proclaimed as far as possible that their island is a refuge for landlords, monopolists, and capitalists, and the roads of Europe are crowded with vagabonds seeking to reach this nest of pirates. The pirate state is growing. It is a republic like one of our ancient states. It has an army of 5000 men who boast that with the arms which they possess they can march from one end of Europe to another. They control the Mediterranean and all its coasts. They have served notice on the communal commonwealths of the Continent that they will avenge any coercion exercised against any persons who seek to join them, and six months ago they sent a force of 6000 men to Lyons to set free a band of aristocrats who were imprisoned there and were threatened with the guillotine.

It is said that there are no artisans now who are able to manufacture repeating rifles like those which these robbers possess, except amongst themselves—they having hired mechanics to recover the art. Even the guns yet remaining on the Continent cannot be used because the art of making the ammunition is lost. It was a great mistake to let these pestilent scoundrels loose. Their state threatens the whole coöperative movement. Its existence has greatly strengthened the collectivists among coöperators, for it is said that the big empires must be restored (on coöperative principles) to cope with them.

* * * * *

“Personal Items” record the following:

G. P. M. C. Lasalle Brown last evening gave a grand ball and house-warming in his new house on Fifth Avenue. By demolishing and removing the unsightly ruined houses in the neighborhood, a beautiful park and garden have been added to this fine tenement. It was illuminated last evening by thousands of lamps and torches carried by the convicts who are under discipline in the household of the G. P. M. C. The guests were members of the Board of Ethical Control and their families, some of whom, remembering their own antecedents, observed with interest amongst the convicts sons and daughters of ancient monopolists, and in some cases white-haired survivals from the age of bankers, railroad kings, and merchant princes. Such are the revenges of history!

One hundred new carriages for the Board of Ethical Control have just arrived. They are of the most superb workmanship and cost $5000 in gold each. They belong, of course, to the Commonwealth and can only be used under permission of the Board of Ethical Control. They have been put, one each, under the care of separate members of the Board, as no private individual is allowed to violate equality by owning a carriage. We noticed with pleasure yesterday the families of Grand Coöperators in these carriages in the park.

Non-conformists and others like them outside the pale of the Commonwealth have, of late years, when they found their position disagreeable, adopted the plan of attaching themselves voluntarily as retainers or vassals to coöperators, especially to the leading members of the Board of Ethical Control. In this way they secure some of the advantages of coöperation. In order to show their position and relationship, they wear special tokens or marks. The clients of the newly inaugurated G. P. M. C. have just been put into uniform or livery. They attended him in a body on his recent visit to his country seat at Riverdale, where they did guard duty. Added to his personal bodyguard of coöperators and friends, they made an imposing body. This country-seat, by the way, has just been surrounded by a high stone wall.

* * * * *

There occurs an obituary of one of the community’s leading lights:

G. C. Brissot Cunningham died at 01 Fifth Avenue on Wednesday last. He was born May 16, 1905 and was educated for a lawyer. In 1930, putting himself in the foremost rank of the coöperative movement and identifying himself with the most radical section, he was admitted to the bar. By the abolition of inheritance, he found himself, on the death of his father in the following year, thrown entirely on his own resources. He then passed through some years of obscurity and great poverty, which taught him to feel for the poor.

Allying himself with the noble band which supported our present G. P. M. C., he helped to bring about the foundation of the coöperation in 1940 and was elected member of the Board of Ethical Control. In the Board he filled many of the most important and responsible positions on the several committees and was regularly reëlected. He devoted himself to securing the Commonwealth, flinching from no measure to establish it. He believed thoroughly in the motto “Enjoy.” After he became a member of the Board of Ethical Control, the former mansion of the ——s on Fifth Avenue was allotted to him and furnished from the Commonwealth storehouse of forfeited property. He there kept up a munificent hospitality on the most altruistic principles. He neither cared to know whence his income came nor whither it went. In the spirit of a true coöperator, whatever belonged to the Commonwealth was his and whatever was his was free to any coöperator. His popularity with the masses was shown yesterday when they turned out in a body for his funeral. The non-coöperators who had felt his scourge were naturally absent. A few of them who could not conceal their joy at his death were summarily corrected by the coöperators. By his death at the early age of forty-five, our Commonwealth has lost a valuable supporter.

[According to the ordinance adopted by the Board of Ethical Control, February 10, 1945, since he died a member of the Board, his family will have a pension of $15,000 per annum in gold for twenty-five years and the use of his house for the same time. The Board will fill the vacancy next week.—Editor of this paper.]

* * * * *

The Text-book of Coöperation, ordained by the Board of Ethical Control for schools, is reviewed as follows:

This book is an authoritative exposition of the Coöperative Commonwealth in the commune form. It is to supersede all other books except the primer, writing-book, and elementary arithmetic. We have done with all the ancient rubbish. All the books which have not been destroyed are under the control of the Board of Ethical Control. Especially we are now rid of all pernicious trash about history, law, and political economy. The present book contains all that a good coöperator needs to know. Its tone is strictly ethical. By separating all children of incorrigibles and survivals from their parents and educating them on this book, we may soon hope to bring all capitalistic tradition to an end.

It is plainly proved here that the first right of every man and woman is the right to capital. This right is valid up to the time when he or she gets capital, when it becomes ethically subject to the similar right of someone else, who has no capital as yet, to have some. This principle carried out is the guarantee of justice and equality and is the fundamental principle of the Coöperative Commonwealth in the middle of the twentieth century.

The text-book describes the organization of our Commonwealth, with the duties of coöperators, and gives a list of the ordinances of the Board of Control.

There are now 1000 members of the Board of Ethical Control and 10,000 agents in their employ, chosen by lot monthly from all coöperators. The Board is divided into ten Boards of 100 each for various branches of duty. The members receive no salary but are remunerated by fees. They enjoy no privileges or rights in the Commonwealth, but have the duty of regulating all coöperative affairs according to their conscientious convictions of justice. The ten chairmen of Boards form an exclusive commission which decrees boycotts and plans of campaign. There are no laws or lawyers in the system and no courts or juries of the ancient type, now happily almost forgotten. There are no police, no detectives, no army, no militia, and no prisons. The ancient prison at Sing Sing, which is now within the limits of this commune, is turned into a Coöperators’ Retreat. Under this happy régime no coöperator can do wrong. Our only culprits are recalcitrants, suspects, incorrigibles, survivals, and other would-be perpetuators of the old régime of monoply and capitalistic extortion. Such persons are compelled to expiate their selfishness and incivism by hard labor, but they are taken for this purpose into the households or factories of the members of the Board of Ethical Control, where they are subject to ethical discipline and produce those things which are essential to the community and which the Board of Ethical Control contracts to provide. The employments are such as free coöperators consider disagreeable, unhealthy, or degrading.

The Committee of Inquiry into Incivism is a committee of the Board of Ethical Control and has the high and important duty of watching over coöperative duties. Its number and members are unknown, lest they should be objects of malice. Its sessions and procedure are secret. It employs 100 agents but has a right to command the services at any time of all coöperators. Complaints of incivism may be lodged night or day by any coöperator in the lion’s mouth in the court of the Coöperative Hall (ancient United States postoffice).

The Committee proceeds against persons guilty of incivism by boycotts chiefly. This measure puts the culprit outside the pale of the Commonwealth which he has maligned or in which he has refused to take his share. Such persons become vagabonds, and disappear or perish.

The chapter on coöperative religion is in the form of a catechism and is to be thoroughly learned by heart by all pupils. It inculcates the doctrines of our social creed by which each one is bound to serve the health, wealth, and happiness of every other. Those who have the means of material enjoyment shall put them at the disposition and use of those who have them not. It impresses above all the great duty of civism, or conformity to coöperative organization and obedience to the Board of Ethical Control.

There is complete equality and no distinction of class in the Coöperative Commonwealth. Every man, woman, and child is eligible to the Board of Ethical Control. The only distinction is of merit and service to the Commonwealth. In this the members of the Board of Ethical Control stand first. There is no second. Outside of the Coöperative Committee are, in order of demerit and detestation, probationers (coöperators who have forfeited their coöperative tickets for fault but who may be restored to membership), survivals (employers, capitalists, landlords, usurers, subject to the Commonwealth and continuing the ancient functions of such persons), nonconformists (stubborn persons who refuse to conform to the new order), recalcitrants (any of the former who have been subject to discipline five times), incorrigibles (after twenty cases of discipline), suspects (so decreed if charged but not convicted of incivism), reactionists (once coöperators but convicted of disorganization) and convicts (under boycott or plan of campaign). Every person must be registered and have always on his person a brass medal hung by a chain about his neck, bearing his designation and number, with the letters designating his group, domicile, also district, ward, and arrondissement. This constitutes his social designation. These medals are given out by the Board of Ethical Supervision. The fee is 1000 coöperative units, repeated each time that the person is re-classified and a new medal issued.

* * * * *

Advertisements are included, as, for example:

John Moon, licensed to sell pistols and ammunition. A few revolvers newly imported from the commune of Hartford at great difficulty and expense. Bliss Bldg.

Henry Black, pistols and bowie-knives. Sales strictly within the ordinances. Every purchaser required to show coöperator’s ticket, and sales registered. 268 Felicity Boulevard.

Elias Israel, pawn broker, loans at 10% per month on coöperative private property only. Sales of forfeited goods every Sunday. 618 Joy Avenue.

* * * * *

The editor has no compunction about publishing these extracts, though it may be objected that they can be at most of historical or personal interest. Perhaps, in the light of the antics of the Bolsheviki, even such a parody as the foregoing may seem less wide of the potentialities of the socialistic system. In any case, if modern socialism has renounced some of the wild dreams of its past, that is largely owing to the criticism and ridicule poured upon them by vigorous opponents of the Sumner type. Says a prominent American, writing to the editor subsequently to the publication of one of the foregoing volumes of this series: “I have for many years publicly and privately urged socialists to read—really read—Sumner—as the most doughty and competent foe with whom they have to reckon.”

---

THE FORGOTTEN MAN
[1883]

I propose in this lecture to discuss one of the most subtile and widespread social fallacies. It consists in the impression made on the mind for the time being by a particular fact, or by the interests of a particular group of persons, to which attention is directed while other facts or the interests of other persons are entirely left out of account. I shall give a number of instances and illustrations of this in a moment, and I cannot expect you to understand what is meant from an abstract statement until these illustrations are before you, but just by way of a general illustration I will put one or two cases.

Whenever a pestilence like yellow fever breaks out in any city, our attention is especially attracted towards it, and our sympathies are excited for the sufferers. If contributions are called for, we readily respond. Yet the number of persons who die prematurely from consumption every year greatly exceeds the deaths from yellow fever or any similar disease when it occurs, and the suffering entailed by consumption is very much greater. The suffering from consumption, however, never constitutes a public question or a subject of social discussion. If an inundation takes place anywhere, constituting a public calamity (and an inundation takes place somewhere in the civilized world nearly every year), public attention is attracted and public appeals are made, but the losses by great inundations must be insignificant compared with the losses by runaway horses, which, taken separately, scarcely obtain mention in a local newspaper. In hard times insolvent debtors are a large class. They constitute an interest and are able to attract public attention, so that social philosophers discuss their troubles and legislatures plan measures of relief. Insolvent debtors, however, are an insignificant body compared with the victims of commonplace misfortune, or accident, who are isolated, scattered, ungrouped and ungeneralized, and so are never made the object of discussion or relief. In seasons of ordinary prosperity, persons who become insolvent have to get out of their troubles as they can. They have no hope of relief from the legislature. The number of insolvents during a series of years of general prosperity, and their losses, greatly exceed the number and losses during a special period of distress.

These illustrations bring out only one side of my subject, and that only partially. It is when we come to the proposed measures of relief for the evils which have caught public attention that we reach the real subject which deserves our attention. As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X. As for A and B, who get a law to make themselves do for X what they are willing to do for him, we have nothing to say except that they might better have done it without any law, but what I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him.

No doubt one great reason for the phenomenon which I bring to your attention is the passion for reflection and generalization which marks our period. Since the printing press has come into such wide use, we have all been encouraged to philosophize about things in a way which was unknown to our ancestors. They lived their lives out in positive contact with actual cases as they arose. They had little of this analysis, introspection, reflection and speculation which have passed into a habit and almost into a disease with us. Of all things which tempt to generalization and to philosophizing, social topics stand foremost. Each one of us gets some experience of social forces. Each one has some chance for observation of social phenomena. There is certainly no domain in which generalization is easier. There is nothing about which people dogmatize more freely. Even men of scientific training in some department in which they would not tolerate dogmatism at all will not hesitate to dogmatize in the most reckless manner about social topics. The truth is, however, that science, as yet, has won less control of social phenomena than of any other class of phenomena. The most complex and difficult subject which we now have to study is the constitution of human society, the forces which operate in it, and the laws by which they act, and we know less about these things than about any others which demand our attention. In such a state of things, over-hasty generalization is sure to be extremely mischievous. You cannot take up a magazine or newspaper without being struck by the feverish interest with which social topics and problems are discussed, and if you were a student of social science, you would find in almost all these discussions evidence, not only that the essential preparation for the discussion is wanting, but that the disputants do not even know that there is any preparation to be gained. Consequently we are bewildered by contradictory dogmatizing. We find in all these discussions only the application of pet notions and the clashing of contradictory “views.” Remedies are confidently proposed for which there is no guarantee offered except that the person who prescribes the remedy says that he is sure it will work. We hear constantly of “reform,” and the reformers turn out to be people who do not like things as they are and wish that they could be made nicer. We hear a great many exhortations to make progress from people who do not know in what direction they want to go. Consequently social reform is the most barren and tiresome subject of discussion amongst us, except æsthetics.

I suppose that the first chemists seemed to be very hard-hearted and unpoetical persons when they scouted the glorious dream of the alchemists that there must be some process for turning base metals into gold. I suppose that the men who first said, in plain, cold assertion, there is no fountain of eternal youth, seemed to be the most cruel and cold-hearted adversaries of human happiness. I know that the economists who say that if we could transmute lead into gold, it would certainly do us no good and might do great harm, are still regarded as unworthy of belief. Do not the money articles of the newspapers yet ring with the doctrine that we are getting rich when we give cotton and wheat for gold rather than when we give cotton and wheat for iron?

Let us put down now the cold, hard fact and look at it just as it is. There is no device whatever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue. We are yet in the empirical stage as regards all our social devices. We have done something in science and art in the domain of production, transportation and exchange. But when you come to the laws of the social order, we know very little about them. Our laws and institutions by which we attempt to regulate our lives under the laws of nature which control society are merely a series of haphazard experiments. We come into collision with the laws and are not intelligent enough to understand wherein we are mistaken and how to correct our errors. We persist in our experiments instead of patiently setting about the study of the laws and facts in order to see where we are wrong. Traditions and formulæ have a dominion over us in legislation and social customs which we seem unable to break or even to modify.

For my present purpose I ask your attention for a few moments to the notion of liberty, because the Forgotten Man would no longer be forgotten where there was true liberty. You will say that you know what liberty is. There is no term of more common or prouder use. None is more current, as if it were quite beyond the need of definition. Even as I write, however, I find in a leading review a new definition of civil liberty. Civil liberty the writer declares to be “the result of the restraint exercised by the sovereign people on the more powerful individuals and classes of the community, preventing them from availing themselves of the excess of their power to the detriment of the other classes.” You notice here the use of the words “sovereign people” to designate a class of the population, not the nation as a political and civil whole. Wherever “people” is used in such a sense, there is always fallacy. Furthermore, you will recognize in this definition a very superficial and fallacious construction of English constitutional history. The writer goes on to elaborate that construction and he comes out at last with the conclusion that “a government by the people can, in no case, become a paternal government, since its law-makers are its mandataries and servants carrying out its will, and not its fathers or its masters.” This, then, is the point at which he desires to arrive, and he has followed a familiar device in setting up a definition to start with which would produce the desired deduction at the end.

In the definition the word “people” was used for a class or section of the population. It is now asserted that if that section rules, there can be no paternal, that is, undue, government. That doctrine, however, is the very opposite of liberty and contains the most vicious error possible in politics. The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature. They are not confined to classes or to nations or particular ages of the world. They present themselves in the palace, in the parliament, in the academy, in the church, in the workshop, and in the hovel. They appear in autocracies, theocracies, aristocracies, democracies, and ochlocracies all alike. They change their masks somewhat from age to age and from one form of society to another. All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. It is true that, until this time, the proletariat, the mass of mankind, have rarely had the power and they have not made such a record as kings and nobles and priests have made of the abuses they would perpetrate against their fellow-men when they could and dared. But what folly it is to think that vice and passion are limited by classes, that liberty consists only in taking power away from nobles and priests and giving it to artisans and peasants and that these latter will never abuse it! They will abuse it just as all others have done unless they are put under checks and guarantees, and there can be no civil liberty anywhere unless rights are guaranteed against all abuses, as well from proletarians as from generals, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics.

Now what has been amiss in all the old arrangements? The evils of the old military and aristocratic governments was that some men enjoyed the fruits of other men’s labor; that some persons’ lives, rights, interests and happiness were sacrificed to other persons’ cupidity and lust. What have our ancestors been striving for, under the name of civil liberty, for the last five hundred years? They have been striving to bring it about that each man and woman might live out his or her life according to his or her own notions of happiness and up to the measure of his or her own virtue and wisdom. How have they sought to accomplish this? They have sought to accomplish it by setting aside all arbitrary personal or class elements and introducing the reign of law and the supremacy of constitutional institutions like the jury, the habeas corpus, the independent judiciary, the separation of church and state, and the ballot. Note right here one point which will be important and valuable when I come more especially to the case of the Forgotten Man: whenever you talk of liberty, you must have two men in mind. The sphere of rights of one of these men trenches upon that of the other, and whenever you establish liberty for the one, you repress the other. Whenever absolute sovereigns are subjected to constitutional restraints, you always hear them remonstrate that their liberty is curtailed. So it is, in the sense that their power of determining what shall be done in the state is limited below what it was before and the similar power of other organs in the state is widened. Whenever the privileges of an aristocracy are curtailed, there is heard a similar complaint. The truth is that the line of limit or demarcation between classes as regards civil power has been moved and what has been taken from one class is given to another.

We may now, then, advance a step in our conception of civil liberty. It is the status in which we find the true adjustment of rights between classes and individuals. Historically, the conception of civil liberty has been constantly changing. The notion of rights changes from one generation to another and the conception of civil liberty changes with it. If we try to formulate a true definition of civil liberty as an ideal thing towards which the development of political institutions is all the time tending, it would be this: Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.

This definition of liberty or civil liberty, you see, deals only with concrete and actual relations of the civil order. There is some sort of a poetical and metaphysical notion of liberty afloat in men’s minds which some people dream about but which nobody can define. In popular language it means that a man may do as he has a mind to. When people get this notion of liberty into their heads and combine with it the notion that they live in a free country and ought to have liberty, they sometimes make strange demands upon the state. If liberty means to be able to do as you have a mind to, there is no such thing in this world. Can the Czar of Russia do as he has a mind to? Can the Pope do as he has a mind to? Can the President of the United States do as he has a mind to? Can Rothschild do as he has a mind to? Could a Humboldt or a Faraday do as he had a mind to? Could a Shakespeare or a Raphael do as he had a mind to? Can a tramp do as he has a mind to? Where is the man, whatever his station, possessions, or talents, who can get any such liberty? There is none. There is a doctrine floating about in our literature that we are born to the inheritance of certain rights. That is another glorious dream, for it would mean that there was something in this world which we got for nothing. But what is the truth? We are born into no right whatever but what has an equivalent and corresponding duty right alongside of it. There is no such thing on this earth as something for nothing. Whatever we inherit of wealth, knowledge, or institutions from the past has been paid for by the labor and sacrifice of preceding generations; and the fact that these gains are carried on, that the race lives and that the race can, at least within some cycle, accumulate its gains, is one of the facts on which civilization rests. The law of the conservation of energy is not simply a law of physics; it is a law of the whole moral universe, and the order and truth of all things conceivable by man depends upon it. If there were any such liberty as that of doing as you have a mind to, the human race would be condemned to everlasting anarchy and war as these erratic wills crossed and clashed against each other. True liberty lies in the equilibrium of rights and duties, producing peace, order, and harmony. As I have defined it, it means that a man’s right to take power and wealth out of the social product is measured by the energy and wisdom which he has contributed to the social effort.

Now if I have set this idea before you with any distinctness and success, you see that civil liberty consists of a set of civil institutions and laws which are arranged to act as impersonally as possible. It does not consist in majority rule or in universal suffrage or in elective systems at all. These are devices which are good or better just in the degree in which they secure liberty. The institutions of civil liberty leave each man to run his career in life in his own way, only guaranteeing to him that whatever he does in the way of industry, economy, prudence, sound judgment, etc., shall redound to his own welfare and shall not be diverted to some one else’s benefit. Of course it is a necessary corollary that each man shall also bear the penalty of his own vices and his own mistakes. If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.

Now with these definitions and general conceptions in mind, let us turn to the special class of facts to which, as I said at the outset, I invite your attention. We see that under a régime of liberty and equality before the law, we get the highest possible development of independence, self-reliance, individual energy, and enterprise, but we get these high social virtues at the expense of the old sentimental ties which used to unite baron and retainer, master and servant, sage and disciple, comrade and comrade. We are agreed that the son shall not be disgraced even by the crime of the father, much less by the crime of a more distant relative. It is a humane and rational view of things that each life shall stand for itself alone and not be weighted by the faults of another, but it is useless to deny that this view of things is possible only in a society where the ties of kinship have lost nearly all the intensity of poetry and romance which once characterized them. The ties of sentiment and sympathy also have faded out. We have come, under the régime of liberty and equality before the law, to a form of society which is based not on status, but on free contract. Now a society based on status is one in which classes, ranks, interests, industries, guilds, associations, etc., hold men in permanent relations to each other. Custom and prescription create, under status, ties, the strength of which lies in sentiment. Feeble remains of this may be seen in some of our academical societies to-day, and it is unquestionably a great privilege and advantage for any man in our society to win an experience of the sentiments which belong to a strong and close association, just because the chances for such experience are nowadays very rare. In a society based on free contract, men come together as free and independent parties to an agreement which is of mutual advantage. The relation is rational, even rationalistic. It is not poetical. It does not exist from use and custom, but for reasons given, and it does not endure by prescription but ceases when the reason for it ceases. There is no sentiment in it at all. The fact is that, under the régime of liberty and equality before the law, there is no place for sentiment in trade or politics as public interests. Sentiment is thrown back into private life, into personal relations, and if ever it comes into a public discussion of an impersonal and general public question it always produces mischief.

Now you know that “the poor and the weak” are continually put forward as objects of public interest and public obligation. In the appeals which are made, the terms “the poor” and “the weak” are used as if they were terms of exact definition. Except the pauper, that is to say, the man who cannot earn his living or pay his way, there is no possible definition of a poor man. Except a man who is incapacitated by vice or by physical infirmity, there is no definition of a weak man. The paupers and the physically incapacitated are an inevitable charge on society. About them no more need be said. But the weak who constantly arouse the pity of humanitarians and philanthropists are the shiftless, the imprudent, the negligent, the impractical, and the inefficient, or they are the idle, the intemperate, the extravagant, and the vicious. Now the troubles of these persons are constantly forced upon public attention, as if they and their interests deserved especial consideration, and a great portion of all organized and unorganized effort for the common welfare consists in attempts to relieve these classes of people. I do not wish to be understood now as saying that nothing ought to be done for these people by those who are stronger and wiser. That is not my point. What I want to do is to point out the thing which is overlooked and the error which is made in all these charitable efforts. The notion is accepted as if it were not open to any question that if you help the inefficient and vicious you may gain something for society or you may not, but that you lose nothing. This is a complete mistake. Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else. I would spend any conceivable amount of zeal and eloquence if I possessed it to try to make people grasp this idea. Capital is force. If it goes one way it cannot go another. If you give a loaf to a pauper you cannot give the same loaf to a laborer. Now this other man who would have got it but for the charitable sentiment which bestowed it on a worthless member of society is the Forgotten Man. The philanthropists and humanitarians have their minds all full of the wretched and miserable whose case appeals to compassion, attacks the sympathies, takes possession of the imagination, and excites the emotions. They push on towards the quickest and easiest remedies and they forget the real victim.

Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, ready to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfill it, with respect on both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer. But we stand with our backs to the independent and productive laborer all the time. We do not remember him because he makes no clamor; but I appeal to you whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all, and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing. In these last years I have read hundreds of articles and heard scores of sermons and speeches which were really glorifications of the good-for-nothing, as if these were the charge of society, recommended by right reason to its care and protection. We are addressed all the time as if those who are respectable were to blame because some are not so, and as if there were an obligation on the part of those who have done their duty towards those who have not done their duty. Every man is bound to take care of himself and his family and to do his share in the work of society. It is totally false that one who has done so is bound to bear the care and charge of those who are wretched because they have not done so. The silly popular notion is that the beggars live at the expense of the rich, but the truth is that those who eat and produce not, live at the expense of those who labor and produce. The next time that you are tempted to subscribe a dollar to a charity, I do not tell you not to do it, because after you have fairly considered the matter, you may think it right to do it, but I do ask you to stop and remember the Forgotten Man and understand that if you put your dollar in the savings bank it will go to swell the capital of the country which is available for division amongst those who, while they earn it, will reproduce it with increase.

Let us now go on to another class of cases. There are a great many schemes brought forward for “improving the condition of the working classes.” I have shown already that a free man cannot take a favor. One who takes a favor or submits to patronage demeans himself. He falls under obligation. He cannot be free and he cannot assert a station of equality with the man who confers the favor on him. The only exception is where there are exceptional bonds of affection or friendship, that is, where the sentimental relation supersedes the free relation. Therefore, in a country which is a free democracy, all propositions to do something for the working classes have an air of patronage and superiority which is impertinent and out of place. No one can do anything for anybody else unless he has a surplus of energy to dispose of after taking care of himself. In the United States, the working classes, technically so called, are the strongest classes. It is they who have a surplus to dispose of if anybody has. Why should anybody else offer to take care of them or to serve them? They can get whatever they think worth having and, at any rate, if they are free men in a free state, it is ignominious and unbecoming to introduce fashions of patronage and favoritism here. A man who, by superior education and experience of business, is in a position to advise a struggling man of the wages class, is certainly held to do so and will, I believe, always be willing and glad to do so; but this sort of activity lies in the range of private and personal relations.

I now, however, desire to direct attention to the public, general, and impersonal schemes, and I point out the fact that, if you undertake to lift anybody, you must have a fulcrum or point of resistance. All the elevation you give to one must be gained by an equivalent depression on some one else. The question of gain to society depends upon the balance of the account, as regards the position of the persons who undergo the respective operations. But nearly all the schemes for “improving the condition of the working man” involve an elevation of some working men at the expense of other working men. When you expend capital or labor to elevate some persons who come within the sphere of your influence, you interfere in the conditions of competition. The advantage of some is won by an equivalent loss of others. The difference is not brought about by the energy and effort of the persons themselves. If it were, there would be nothing to be said about it, for we constantly see people surpass others in the rivalry of life and carry off the prizes which the others must do without. In the cases I am discussing, the difference is brought about by an interference which must be partial, arbitrary, accidental, controlled by favoritism and personal preference. I do not say, in this case, either, that we ought to do no work of this kind. On the contrary, I believe that the arguments for it quite outweigh, in many cases, the arguments against it. What I desire, again, is to bring out the forgotten element which we always need to remember in order to make a wise decision as to any scheme of this kind. I want to call to mind the Forgotten Man, because, in this case also, if we recall him and go to look for him, we shall find him patiently and perseveringly, manfully and independently struggling against adverse circumstances without complaining or begging. If, then, we are led to heed the groaning and complaining of others and to take measures for helping these others, we shall, before we know it, push down this man who is trying to help himself.

Let us take another class of cases. So far we have said nothing about the abuse of legislation. We all seem to be under the delusion that the rich pay the taxes. Taxes are not thrown upon the consumers with any such directness and completeness as is sometimes assumed; but that, in ordinary states of the market, taxes on houses fall, for the most part, on the tenants and that taxes on commodities fall, for the most part, on the consumers, is beyond question. Now the state and municipality go to great expense to support policemen and sheriffs and judicial officers, to protect people against themselves, that is, against the results of their own folly, vice, and recklessness. Who pays for it? Undoubtedly the people who have not been guilty of folly, vice, or recklessness. Out of nothing comes nothing. We cannot collect taxes from people who produce nothing and save nothing. The people who have something to tax must be those who have produced and saved.

When you see a drunkard in the gutter, you are disgusted, but you pity him. When a policeman comes and picks him up you are satisfied. You say that “society” has interfered to save the drunkard from perishing. Society is a fine word, and it saves us the trouble of thinking to say that society acts. The truth is that the policeman is paid by somebody, and when we talk about society we forget who it is that pays. It is the Forgotten Man again. It is the industrious workman going home from a hard day’s work, whom you pass without noticing, who is mulcted of a percentage of his day’s earnings to hire a policeman to save the drunkard from himself. All the public expenditure to prevent vice has the same effect. Vice is its own curse. If we let nature alone, she cures vice by the most frightful penalties. It may shock you to hear me say it, but when you get over the shock, it will do you good to think of it: a drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be. Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line. Gambling and less mentionable vices all cure themselves by the ruin and dissolution of their victims. Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty. “Ward off,” I say, and that is the usual way of looking at it; but is the penalty really annihilated? By no means. It is turned into police and court expenses and spread over those who have resisted vice. It is the Forgotten Man again who has been subjected to the penalty while our minds were full of the drunkards, spendthrifts, gamblers, and other victims of dissipation. Who is, then, the Forgotten Man? He is the clean, quiet, virtuous, domestic citizen, who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle. Yet who is there in the society of a civilized state who deserves to be remembered and considered by the legislator and statesman before this man?

Another class of cases is closely connected with this last. There is an apparently invincible prejudice in people’s minds in favor of state regulation. All experience is against state regulation and in favor of liberty. The freer the civil institutions are, the more weak or mischievous state regulation is. The Prussian bureaucracy can do a score of things for the citizen which no governmental organ in the United States can do; and, conversely, if we want to be taken care of as Prussians and Frenchmen are, we must give up something of our personal liberty.

Now we have a great many well-intentioned people among us who believe that they are serving their country when they discuss plans for regulating the relations of employer and employee, or the sanitary regulations of dwellings, or the construction of factories, or the way to behave on Sunday, or what people ought not to eat or drink or smoke. All this is harmless enough and well enough as a basis of mutual encouragement and missionary enterprise, but it is almost always made a basis of legislation. The reformers want to get a majority, that is, to get the power of the state and so to make other people do what the reformers think it right and wise to do. A and B agree to spend Sunday in a certain way. They get a law passed to make C pass it in their way. They determine to be teetotallers and they get a law passed to make C be a teetotaller for the sake of D who is likely to drink too much. Factory acts for women and children are right because women and children are not on an equal footing with men and cannot, therefore, make contracts properly. Adult men, in a free state, must be left to make their own contracts and defend themselves. It will not do to say that some men are weak and unable to make contracts any better than women. Our civil institutions assume that all men are equal in political capacity and all are given equal measure of political power and right, which is not the case with women and children. If, then, we measure political rights by one theory and social responsibilities by another, we produce an immoral and vicious relation. A and B, however, get factory acts and other acts passed regulating the relation of employers and employee and set armies of commissioners and inspectors traveling about to see to things, instead of using their efforts, if any are needed, to lead the free men to make their own conditions as to what kind of factory buildings they will work in, how many hours they will work, what they will do on Sunday and so on. The consequence is that men lose the true education in freedom which is needed to support free institutions. They are taught to rely on government officers and inspectors. The whole system of government inspectors is corrupting to free institutions. In England, the liberals used always to regard state regulation with suspicion, but since they have come to power, they plainly believe that state regulation is a good thing—if they regulate—because, of course, they want to bring about good things. In this country each party takes turns, according as it is in or out, in supporting or denouncing the non-interference theory.

Now, if we have state regulation, what is always forgotten is this: Who pays for it? Who is the victim of it? There always is a victim. The workmen who do not defend themselves have to pay for the inspectors who defend them. The whole system of social regulation by boards, commissioners, and inspectors consists in relieving negligent people of the consequences of their negligence and so leaving them to continue negligent without correction. That system also turns away from the agencies which are close, direct, and germane to the purpose, and seeks others. Now, if you relieve negligent people of the consequences of their negligence, you can only throw those consequences on the people who have not been negligent. If you turn away from the agencies which are direct and cognate to the purpose, you can only employ other agencies. Here, then, you have your Forgotten Man again. The man who has been careful and prudent and who wants to go on and reap his advantages for himself and his children is arrested just at that point, and he is told that he must go and take care of some negligent employees in a factory or on a railroad who have not provided precautions for themselves or have not forced their employers to provide precautions, or negligent tenants who have not taken care of their own sanitary arrangements, or negligent householders who have not provided against fire, or negligent parents who have not sent their children to school. If the Forgotten Man does not go, he must hire an inspector to go. No doubt it is often worth his while to go or send, rather than leave the thing undone, on account of his remoter interest; but what I want to show is that all this is unjust to the Forgotten Man, and that the reformers and philosophers miss the point entirely when they preach that it is his duty to do all this work. Let them preach to the negligent to learn to take care of themselves. Whenever A and B put their heads together and decide what A, B and C must do for D, there is never any pressure on A and B. They consent to it and like it. There is rarely any pressure on D because he does not like it and contrives to evade it. The pressure all comes on C. Now, who is C? He is always the man who, if let alone, would make a reasonable use of his liberty without abusing it. He would not constitute any social problem at all and would not need any regulation. He is the Forgotten Man again, and as soon as he is brought from his obscurity you see that he is just that one amongst us who is what we all ought to be.

Let us look at another case. I read again and again arguments to prove that criminals have claims and rights against society. Not long ago, I read an account of an expensive establishment for the reformation of criminals, and I am told that we ought to reform criminals, not merely punish them vindictively. When I was a young man, I read a great many novels by Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, and other Frenchmen of the school of ’48, in which the badness of a bad man is represented, not as his fault, but as the fault of society. Now, as society consists of the bad men plus the good men, and as the object of this declaration was to show that the badness of the bad men was not the fault of the bad men, it remains that the badness of the bad men must be the fault of the good men. No doubt, it is far more consoling to the bad men than even to their friends to reach the point of this demonstration.

Let us ask, now, for a moment, what is the sense of punishment, since a good many people seem to be quite in a muddle about it. Every man in society is bound in nature and reason to contribute to the strength and welfare of society. He ought to work, to be peaceful, honest, just, and virtuous. A criminal is a man who, instead of working with and for society, turns his efforts against the common welfare in some way or other. He disturbs order, violates harmony, invades the security and happiness of others, wastes and destroys capital. If he is put to death, it is on the ground that he has forfeited all right to existence in society by the magnitude of his offenses against its welfare. If he is imprisoned, it is simply a judgment of society upon him that he is so mischievous to the society that he must be segregated from it. His punishment is a warning to him to reform himself, just exactly like the penalties inflicted by God and nature on vice. A man who has committed crime is, therefore, a burden on society and an injury to it. He is a destructive and not a productive force and everybody is worse off for his existence than if he did not exist. Whence, then, does he obtain a right to be taught or reformed at the public expense? The whole question of what to do with him is one of expediency, and it embraces the whole range of possible policies from that of execution to that of education and reformation, but when the expediency of reformatory attempts is discussed we always forget the labor and expense and who must pay. All that the state does for the criminal, beyond forcing him to earn his living, is done at the expense of the industrious member of society who never costs the state anything for correction and discipline. If a man who has gone astray can be reclaimed in any way, no one would hinder such a work, but people whose minds are full of sympathy and interest for criminals and who desire to adopt some systematic plans of reformatory efforts are only, once more, trampling on the Forgotten Man.

Let us look at another case. If there is a public office to be filled, of course a great number of persons come forward as candidates for it. Many of these persons are urged as candidates on the ground that they are badly off, or that they cannot support themselves, or that they want to earn a living while educating themselves, or that they have female relatives dependent on them, or for some other reason of a similar kind. In other cases, candidates are presented and urged on the ground of their kinship to somebody, or on account of service, it may be meritorious service, in some other line than that of the duty to be performed. Men are proposed for clerkships on the ground of service in the army twenty years ago, or for custom-house inspectors on the ground of public services in the organization of political parties. If public positions are granted on these grounds of sentiment or favoritism, the abuse is to be condemned on the ground of the harm done to the public interest; but I now desire to point out another thing which is constantly forgotten. If you give a position to A, you cannot give it to B. If A is an object of sentiment or favoritism and not a person fit and competent to fulfill the duty, who is B? He is somebody who has nothing but merit on his side, somebody who has no powerful friends, no political influence, some quiet, unobtrusive individual who has known no other way to secure the chances of life than simply to deserve them. Here we have the Forgotten Man again, and once again we find him worthy of all respect and consideration, but passed by in favor of the noisy, pushing, and incompetent. Who ever remembers that if you give a place to a man who is unfit for it you are keeping out of it somebody, somewhere, who is fit for it?

Let us take another case. A trades-union is an association of journeymen in a certain trade which has for one of its chief objects to raise wages in that trade. This object can be accomplished only by drawing more capital into the trade, or by lessening the supply of labor in it. To do the latter, the trades-unions limit the number of apprentices who may be admitted to the trade. In discussing this device, people generally fix their minds on the beneficiaries of this arrangement. It is desired by everybody that wages should be as high as they can be under the conditions of industry. Our minds are directed by the facts of the case to the men who are in the trade already and are seeking their own advantage. Sometimes people go on to notice the effects of trades-unionism on the employers, but although employers are constantly vexed by it, it is seen that they soon count it into the risks of their business and settle down to it philosophically. Sometimes people go further then and see that, if the employer adds the trades-union and strike risk to the other risks, he submits to it because he has passed it along upon the public and that the public wealth is diminished by trades-unionism, which is undoubtedly the case. I do not remember, however, that I have ever seen in print any analysis and observation of trades-unionism which takes into account its effect in another direction. The effect on employers or on the public would not raise wages. The public pays more for houses and goods, but that does not raise wages. The surplus paid by the public is pure loss, because it is only paid to cover an extra business risk of the employer. If their trades-unions raise wages, how do they do it? They do it by lessening the supply of labor in the trade, and this they do by limiting the number of apprentices. All that is won, therefore, for those in the trade, is won at the expense of those persons in the same class in life who want to get into the trade but are forbidden. Like every other monopoly, this one secures advantages for those who are in only at a greater loss to those who are kept out. Who, then, are those who are kept out and who are always forgotten in all the discussions? They are the Forgotten Men again; and what kind of men are they? They are those young men who want to earn their living by the trade in question. Since they select it, it is fair to suppose that they are fit for it, would succeed at it, and would benefit society by practicing it; but they are arbitrarily excluded from it and are perhaps pushed down into the class of unskilled laborers. When people talk of the success of a trades-union in raising wages, they forget these persons who have really, in a sense, paid the increase.

Let me now turn your attention to another class of cases. I have shown how, in time past, the history of states has been a history of selfishness, cupidity, and robbery, and I have affirmed that now and always the problems of government are how to deal with these same vices of human nature. People are always prone to believe that there is something metaphysical and sentimental about civil affairs, but there is not. Civil institutions are constructed to protect, either directly or indirectly, the property of men and the honor of women against the vices and passions of human nature. In our day and country, the problem presents new phases, but it is there just the same as it ever was, and the problem is only the more difficult for us because of its new phase which prevents us from recognizing it. In fact, our people are raving and struggling against it in a kind of blind way, not yet having come to recognize it. More than half of their blows, at present, are misdirected and fail of their object, but they will be aimed better by and by. There is a great deal of clamor about watering stocks and the power of combined capital, which is not very intelligent or well-directed. The evil and abuse which people are groping after in all these denunciations is jobbery.

By jobbery I mean the constantly apparent effort to win wealth, not by honest and independent production, but by some sort of a scheme for extorting other people’s product from them. A large part of our legislation consists in making a job for somebody. Public buildings are jobs, not always, but in most cases. The buildings are not needed at all or are costly far beyond what is useful or even decently luxurious. Internal improvements are jobs. They are carried out, not because they are needed in themselves, but because they will serve the turn of some private interest, often incidentally that of the very legislators who pass the appropriations for them. A man who wants a farm, instead of going out where there is plenty of land available for it, goes down under the Mississippi River to make a farm, and then wants his fellow-citizens to be taxed to dyke the river so as to keep it off his farm. The Californian hydraulic miners have washed the gold out of the hillsides and have washed the dirt down into the valleys to the ruin of the rivers and the farms. They want the federal government to remove this dirt at the national expense. The silver miners, finding that their product is losing value in the market, get the government to go into the market as a great buyer in the hope of sustaining the price. The national government is called upon to buy or hire unsalable ships; to dig canals which will not pay; to educate illiterates in the states which have not done their duty at the expense of the states which have done their duty as to education; to buy up telegraphs which no longer pay; and to provide the capital for enterprises of which private individuals are to win the profits. We are called upon to squander twenty millions on swamps and creeks; from twenty to sixty-six millions on the Mississippi River; one hundred millions in pensions—and there is now a demand for another hundred million beyond that. This is the great plan of all living on each other. The pensions in England used to be given to aristocrats who had political power, in order to corrupt them. Here the pensions are given to the great democratic mass who have the political power, in order to corrupt them. We have one hundred thousand federal office-holders and I do not know how many state and municipal office-holders. Of course public officers are necessary and it is an economical organization of society to set apart some of its members for civil functions, but if the number of persons drawn from production and supported by the producers while engaged in civil functions is in undue proportion to the total population, there is economic loss. If public offices are treated as spoils or benefices or sinecures, then they are jobs and only constitute part of the pillage.

The biggest job of all is a protective tariff. This device consists in delivering every man over to be plundered by his neighbor and in teaching him to believe that it is a good thing for him and his country because he may take his turn at plundering the rest. Mr. Kelley said that if the internal revenue taxes on whisky and tobacco, which are paid to the United States government, were not taken off, there would be a rebellion. Just then it was discovered that Sumatra tobacco was being imported, and the Connecticut tobacco men hastened to Congress to get a tax laid on it for their advantage. So it appears that if a tax is laid on tobacco, to be paid to the United States, there will be a rebellion, but if a tax is laid on it to be paid to the farmers of the Connecticut Valley, there will be no rebellion at all. The tobacco farmers having been taxed for protected manufactures are now to be taken into the system, and the workmen in the factories are to be taxed on their tobacco to protect the farmers. So the system is rendered more complete and comprehensive.

On every hand you find this jobbery. The government is to give every man a pension, and every man an office, and every man a tax to raise the price of his product, and to clean out every man’s creek for him, and to buy all his unsalable property, and to provide him with plenty of currency to pay his debts, and to educate his children, and to give him the use of a library and a park and a museum and a gallery of pictures. On every side the doors of waste and extravagance stand open; and spend, squander, plunder, and grab are the watchwords. We grumble some about it and talk about the greed of corporations and the power of capital and the wickedness of stock gambling. Yet we elect the legislators who do all this work. Of course, we should never think of blaming ourselves for electing men to represent and govern us, who, if I may use a slang expression, give us away. What man ever blamed himself for his misfortune? We groan about monopolies and talk about more laws to prevent the wrongs done by chartered corporations. Who made the charters? Our representatives. Who elected such representatives? We did. How can we get bad law-makers to make a law which shall prevent bad law-makers from making a bad law? That is, really, what we are trying to do. If we are a free, self-governing people, all our misfortunes come right home to ourselves and we can blame nobody else. Is any one astonished to find that men are greedy, whether they are incorporated or not? Is it a revelation to find that we need, in our civil affairs, to devise guarantees against selfishness, rapacity, and fraud? I have ventured to affirm that government has never had to deal with anything else.

Now, I have said that this jobbery means waste, plunder, and loss, and I defined it at the outset as the system of making a chance to extort part of his product from somebody else. Now comes the question: Who pays for it all? The system of plundering each other soon destroys all that it deals with. It produces nothing. Wealth comes only from production, and all that the wrangling grabbers, loafers, and jobbers get to deal with comes from somebody’s toil and sacrifice. Who, then, is he who provides it all? Go and find him and you will have once more before you the Forgotten Man. You will find him hard at work because he has a great many to support. Nature has done a great deal for him in giving him a fertile soil and an excellent climate and he wonders why it is that, after all, his scale of comfort is so moderate. He has to get out of the soil enough to pay all his taxes, and that means the cost of all the jobs and the fund for all the plunder. The Forgotten Man is delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the church and the school, reading his newspaper, and cheering for the politician of his admiration, but he is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide.

Such is the Forgotten Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays—yes, above all, he pays. He does not want an office; his name never gets into the newspaper except when he gets married or dies. He keeps production going on. He contributes to the strength of parties. He is flattered before election. He is strongly patriotic. He is wanted, whenever, in his little circle, there is work to be done or counsel to be given. He may grumble some occasionally to his wife and family, but he does not frequent the grocery or talk politics at the tavern. Consequently, he is forgotten. He is a commonplace man. He gives no trouble. He excites no admiration. He is not in any way a hero (like a popular orator); or a problem (like tramps and outcasts); nor notorious (like criminals); nor an object of sentiment (like the poor and weak); nor a burden (like paupers and loafers); nor an object out of which social capital may be made (like the beneficiaries of church and state charities); nor an object for charitable aid and protection (like animals treated with cruelty); nor the object of a job (like the ignorant and illiterate); nor one over whom sentimental economists and statesmen can parade their fine sentiments (like inefficient workmen and shiftless artisans). Therefore, he is forgotten. All the burdens fall on him, or on her, for it is time to remember that the Forgotten Man is not seldom a woman.

When you go to Willimantic, they will show you with great pride the splendid thread mills there. I am told that there are sewing-women who can earn only fifty cents in twelve hours, and provide the thread. In the cost of every spool of thread more than one cent is tax. It is paid, not to get the thread, for you could get the thread without it. It is paid to get the Willimantic linen company which is not worth having and which is, in fact, a nuisance, because it makes thread harder to get than it would be if there were no such concern. If a woman earns fifty cents in twelve hours, she earns a spool of thread as nearly as may be in an hour, and if she uses a spool of thread per day, she works a quarter of an hour per day to support the Willimantic linen company, which in 1882 paid 95 per cent dividend to its stockholders. If you go and look at the mill, it will captivate your imagination until you remember all the women in all the garrets, and all the artisans’ and laborers’ wives and children who are spending their hours of labor, not to get goods which they need, but to pay for the industrial system which only stands in their way and makes it harder for them to get the goods.

It is plain enough that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the very life and substance of society. They are the ones who ought to be first and always remembered. They are always forgotten by sentimentalists, philanthropists, reformers, enthusiasts, and every description of speculator in sociology, political economy, or political science. If a student of any of these sciences ever comes to understand the position of the Forgotten Man and to appreciate his true value, you will find such student an uncompromising advocate of the strictest scientific thinking on all social topics, and a cold and hard-hearted skeptic towards all artificial schemes of social amelioration. If it is desired to bring about social improvements, bring us a scheme for relieving the Forgotten Man of some of his burdens. He is our productive force which we are wasting. Let us stop wasting his force. Then we shall have a clean and simple gain for the whole society. The Forgotten Man is weighted down with the cost and burden of the schemes for making everybody happy, with the cost of public beneficence, with the support of all the loafers, with the loss of all the economic quackery, with the cost of all the jobs. Let us remember him a little while. Let us take some of the burdens off him. Let us turn our pity on him instead of on the good-for-nothing. It will be only justice to him, and society will greatly gain by it. Why should we not also have the satisfaction of thinking and caring for a little while about the clean, honest, industrious, independent, self-supporting men and women who have not inherited much to make life luxurious for them, but who are doing what they can to get on in the world without begging from anybody, especially since all they want is to be let alone, with good friendship and honest respect. Certainly the philanthropists and sentimentalists have kept our attention for a long time on the nasty, shiftless, criminal, whining, crawling, and good-for-nothing people, as if they alone deserved our attention.

The Forgotten Man is never a pauper. He almost always has a little capital because it belongs to the character of the man to save something. He never has more than a little. He is, therefore, poor in the popular sense, although in the correct sense he is not so. I have said already that if you learn to look for the Forgotten Man and to care for him, you will be very skeptical toward all philanthropic and humanitarian schemes. It is clear now that the interest of the Forgotten Man and the interest of “the poor,” “the weak,” and the other petted classes are in antagonism. In fact, the warning to you to look for the Forgotten Man comes the minute that the orator or writer begins to talk about the poor man. That minute the Forgotten Man is in danger of a new assault, and if you intend to meddle in the matter at all, then is the minute for you to look about for him and to give him your aid. Hence, if you care for the Forgotten Man, you will be sure to be charged with not caring for the poor. Whatever you do for any of the petted classes wastes capital. If you do anything for the Forgotten Man, you must secure him his earnings and savings, that is, you legislate for the security of capital and for its free employment; you must oppose paper money, wildcat banking and usury laws and you must maintain the inviolability of contracts. Hence you must be prepared to be told that you favor the capitalist class, the enemy of the poor man.

What the Forgotten Man really wants is true liberty. Most of his wrongs and woes come from the fact that there are yet mixed together in our institutions the old mediæval theories of protection and personal dependence and the modern theories of independence and individual liberty. The consequence is that the people who are clever enough to get into positions of control, measure their own rights by the paternal theory and their own duties by the theory of independent liberty. It follows that the Forgotten Man, who is hard at work at home, has to pay both ways. His rights are measured by the theory of liberty, that is, he has only such as he can conquer. His duties are measured by the paternal theory, that is, he must discharge all which are laid upon him, as is always the fortune of parents. People talk about the paternal theory of government as if it were a very simple thing. Analyze it, however, and you see that in every paternal relation there must be two parties, a parent and a child, and when you speak metaphorically, it makes all the difference in the world who is parent and who is child. Now, since we, the people, are the state, whenever there is any work to be done or expense to be paid, and since the petted classes and the criminals and the jobbers cost and do not pay, it is they who are in the position of the child, and it is the Forgotten Man who is the parent. What the Forgotten Man needs, therefore, is that we come to a clearer understanding of liberty and to a more complete realization of it. Every step which we win in liberty will set the Forgotten Man free from some of his burdens and allow him to use his powers for himself and for the commonwealth.

---

BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The following bibliography is as nearly exhaustive as we have been able to make it. There are doubtless other articles which have not come under our notice; and there are certainly a number of contributions to the press, signed and unsigned, to which we have no clue. The distribution of those which we have found will indicate the task of any one who should aim at exhaustiveness.

It has seemed best to us to include the titles of certain unpublished writings, especially where these are to be made accessible to students by the deposit of the manuscripts with the Yale University Library (under Sumner Estate). Sumner had a way of writing something out very carefully, perhaps as a lecture, and then laying it away with apparently no thought of publishing it; a number of such manuscripts have been printed for the first time in this series of volumes. There are also a few of Sumner’s printed utterances which we possessed in the form of clippings, but could not locate; the titles of such have been included as accessible at the Yale Library.

There is a good deal of Sumner’s writing in the reports of the Connecticut State Board of Education. We have been informed that his services to that Board, extending over twenty years, included much committee work and many carefully written reports. As these are of a somewhat special nature, we refer simply to the documents of the Board.

It is the intention of the publishers to make of the volumes now in print under uniform style a set of four, to be numbered in the order of their appearance. For the sake of brevity, then, War and Other Essays is referred to below as Vol. I; Earth Hunger and Other Essays, as Vol. II; The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, as Vol. III; and The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, as Vol. IV.

There are in these volumes a few numbers not written by Sumner, but about him, such as the Memorial Addresses in Vol. III.

A. G. K.
M. R. D.

1872.	The Books of the Kings, by K. C. W. F. Bähr. Translated, Enlarged, and Edited ... Book 2, by W. G. Sumner, in Lange, J. P., A commentary on the Holy Scripture ... New York, Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1866–1882, 26 vols., VI, 312 pp.
	The Church’s Law of the Interpretation of Scripture. Unpublished manuscript on scientific criticism of the Bible. April 3. 61 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	Memorial Day Address. Delivered at Morristown, May 30. Printed for the first time in Vol. III, pp. 347–362.
1873.	The Solidarity of the Human Race. Unpublished manuscript of an address on the influence of ideas and events in one country on conditions in other countries, delivered at the Sheffield Scientific School, January 11. 40 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	Relation of Physical to Moral Good. An address. Unpublished manuscript probably of this date, 35 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	Introductory Lecture to Courses in Political and Social Science. Printed for the first time in Vol. III, pp. 391–403.
	History of Paper Money. Paper money in China, England, Austria, Russia, and the American Colonies. Unpublished manuscript, 109 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	Socialism. Three unpublished manuscripts written between 1873 and 1880 which appear to be preliminary sketches to the essay entitled The Challenge of Facts. 38, 12, and 31 pp. respectively.
1874.	A History of American Currency, with chapters on the English Bank Restriction and Austrian Paper Money, to which is appended “The Bullion Report.” New York, H. Holt & Co., iv, 391 pp., twofold diagram.
	The Lesson of the Panic (of 1873). Unpublished manuscript advocating a return to a sound currency, 20 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	Have We Had Enough? Unpublished manuscript on the evils of paper money, written soon after the panic of 1873, 15 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	Political Economy. From 300 to 400 pp. of lecture notes for classroom use. (Sumner Estate.)
	Taxation. What it is, what its relation to other departments of political economy is, and what are the general principles by which it must be controlled. Unpublished manuscript probably of this date, 24 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
1875.	American Finance. Boston, Williams.
	The Currency Question. An address delivered about this time opposing the issue of irredeemable paper money. Unpublished manuscript, 96 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
1876.	Monetary Development. (In Woolsey, T. D., and others, First Century of the Republic. New York, Harper & Bros.)
	Politics in America, 1776–1876. North American Review, January, Vol. CXXII, Centennial number, pp. 47–87. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 285–333.
	Shall the “Hard Times” Continue? A review of the address of Professor Sumner before the New Haven Chamber of Commerce. The Woonsocket Patriot, May 19.
	Bourbonism. “Real Issues of the Day.” New York World, May 19.
	Free Pig-iron. Letter to the New York Mercantile Journal, June 3.
	For President? New Haven Palladium, September 12. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 365–379.
	Is the War Over? “Real Issues of the Day.” New York World, October 9.
	Fears of a Solid South. “Real Issues of the Day.” New York World, October 10.
	Political Status of the Southern States. Letter to the New York World, October 16.
	What Has Become of Reform? “Real Issues of the Day.” New York World, October 23.
	The Democratic Reply. To the visiting Republicans in New Orleans who refused to enter into a conference upon the subject of the counting of the election returns. New York Tribune, November 17.
	“Professor Sumner on Louisiana.” Letter to the New York World, November 21, in answer to Governor Ingersoll’s request to express his views on the political situation in that state after his visit to New Orleans.
	Impressions in New Orleans. Letter to the New York Herald, November 22.
1877.	Lectures on the History of Protection in the United States. Delivered before the International Free-trade Alliance. Reprinted from “The New Century.” Published for the International Free-trade Alliance by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 64 pp. Contents: The National Idea and the American System, Broad Principles Underlying the Tariff Controversy, The Origin of Protection in this Country, The Establishment of Protection in this Country, Vacillation of the Protective Policy in this Country.
	Republican Government. The Chicago Tribune, January 1. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 223–240.
	Protection and Pig-iron. Letter to the Courier, February 12.
	Democracy and Responsible Government. Address at Providence, R. I., June 20, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Brown University. The Providence Evening Press, June 21. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 243–286.
	Silver. Address before the Senior Class of Yale University. The New Haven Union, December 12.
	The Silver Question. What it is and how it should be dealt with. New York World, December 12.
	The Commercial Crisis of 1837. Written in 1877 or 1878. (There are indications on the manuscript that it was once printed, but efforts to find where have failed.) Published, probably for the first time, in Vol. IV, pp. 371–398.
1878.	Our Revenue System, by A. L. Earle. Preface by W. G. Sumner. New York, published for the New York Free-trade Club by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 47 pp. (Economic Monograph No. V.)
	Money and Its Laws. International Review, January and February, Vol. V, pp. 75–81.
	What is Free Trade? Chicago News, January 7.
	Silver. Address in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune, January 9.
	The Silver Question. Lecture before the Manhattan Club of New York City, January 25, on the disastrous results of remonetization. The New York World, January 26.
	A Few Plain Answers. Letter to the New Haven Register, February 28, on the tariff.
	Protection and Revenue in 1877. Lecture delivered before the New York Free-trade Club, April 18. New York, published for the New York Free-trade Club by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. (Economic Monograph No. VIII.)
	Socialism. Scribner’s Monthly, October, Vol. XVI, No. 6, pp. 887–893.
	Relation of Legislation to Currency. Unpublished manuscript written about this time dealing with the nature of money, coining, paper money, legal tender acts, the monetary experience of England and France, etc., and opposing the abuses of legislation in regard to currency. 45 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	A Concurrent Circulation of Gold and Silver. Printed for the first time in Vol. IV, pp. 183–210.
1879.	Bimetallism. Princeton Review, November, pp. 546–578.
	Amortization of Public Debts. Unpublished manuscript, chiefly historical, written about this time. 35 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	The Influence of Commercial Crises on Opinions about Economic Doctrines. An address probably of this date. Printed for the first time in Vol. IV, pp. 213–235.
	The Co-operative Commonwealth. Written in the seventies or eighties. Extracts printed for the first time in Vol. IV, pp. 441–462.
1880.	What Our Boys are Reading. Combined with “Books and Reading for the Young,” by J. H. Smart. Chas. Scribner’s Sons. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 367–377.
	The True Aim of Life. Address to the Seniors in Yale University. The New Haven Register, February 1. (Not in form for re-printing.)
	The Theory and Practice of Elections. Princeton Review, March, pp. 262–286, and July, pp. 24–41.
	Two Letters to the New York Times, April 3 and 4, giving his reasons for using Spencer’s “Study of Sociology” as a text-book.
	The Administration of Andrew Jackson. Address before the Kent Club of the Yale Law School, briefly reported in the New York Tribune, April 29. Printed in full for the first time in Vol. IV, pp. 337–367.
	The Revival of Ocean Commerce. A free-trade letter to the American Railroad Journal, September 10.
	Professor Sumner’s views respecting the tariff question. Letters to the New Haven Register, October 9, 12, and 14.
	The Financial Questions now before Us. Unpublished manuscript written about this time, 8 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
1881.	Elections and Civil Service Reform. Princeton Review, January, pp. 129–148.
	Panic without Cause. Lecture in Brothers’ Hall, New Haven, on the recent panic in Wall Street. New Haven Register, January 14.
	The Argument against Protective Taxes. Princeton Review, March, pp. 241–259.
	Shall Americans Own Ships? North American Review, June, Vol. 132, No. CCXCV, pp. 559–566. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 273–282.
	Fortunes made in Thread. Letter to the New York Times, June 5, on the peculiar protection given to the manufacturers of thread.
	Sociology. Princeton Review, November, pp. 303–323. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 167–192.
1882.	Andrew Jackson as a Public Man. What he was, what chances he had, and what he did with them. Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, vi, 402 pp. (American Statesmen Series.)
	Political Economy and Political Science. Comp. by W. G. Sumner, D. A. Wells, W. E. Foster, R. L. Dugdale, and G. H. Putnam. New York Society for Political Education. Cover title, 36 pp. Economic Tracts No. 2.
	Protective Taxes and Wages. Philadelphia Tariff Commission, 21 pp. Caption title.
	Bank Checks and Blankets. A free-trade letter to the New Haven Register, June 2.
	The “American System.” A letter to the American Free-trade League, June.
	Why should the Men of Iowa Levy Taxes on Themselves to Benefit Pennsylvania? Iowa State Leader, September 4.
	The Free Play of Economic Forces. Letter to the Nation regarding Jevons’s “State in Relation to Labor,” September 30.
	Lumber Prices. Letter to the Northwestern Lumberman, October 14.
	Professor Sumner’s speech before the Tariff Commission, reviewed by George Basil Dixwell, Cambridge, J. Wilson & Son, 43 pp.
	Professor Sumner’s “Argument against Protective Taxes,” reviewed by George Basil Dixwell, Cambridge, J. Wilson & Son, 13 pp.
	Wages. Princeton Review, November, pp. 241–262.
1883.	The Forgotten Man. The original lecture on this subject, delivered in New Haven February 8 or 9. 28 typewritten pp. Printed for the first time in Vol. IV, pp. 465–495.
	What Social Classes Owe to each Other. First appeared in Harper’s Weekly, February-May, Vol. XXVII, Nos. 1366–1376. New York, Harper & Brothers, 169 pp.
	On the Case of a Certain Man who is never Thought Of. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 247–253, from “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other,” pp. 123–133.
	The Case of the Forgotten Man Further Considered. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 257–268, from “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other,” pp. 134–152.
	Best Public Opinion. Letter to the Gazette and Free Press, January 12, in reply to T. K. Beecher.
	Let Commercial Relations Alone. Letter to W. H. Knight in the Gazette and Free Press, January 16.
	Letter to Mr. Earle of the American Free-trade League regarding a speech of Mr. Evarts’s. Printed in the New York Times, February 6.
	“Professor Sumner on Monetary Science.” Letter to the editor of Bradstreet’s in which he disagrees with the theory of H. C. Adams that money laws in economics are dependent on the nation’s sentiment as expressed in its legislative enactments. February 10.
	“Professor Sumner Replies.” Letter to the New Haven Register, February 10, referring to his remarks about the protective tax on thread in his lecture on the “Forgotten Man.”
	“Professor Sumner’s Presumption.” A defense of his letter to Mr. Earle regarding a speech of Mr. Evarts’s. New York Times, February 14.
	Willimantic Linen Mills. Letter to the New York Times, February 16, defending his position as taken against the protective tax on thread.
	Some Facts about Thread. Unpublished manuscript, 14 pp., referring to the controversy with the Willimantic Linen Co. (Sumner Estate.)
	A Theorist Answered. A free-trade letter to the New Haven Register, February 26, in reply to a letter signed “Hardpan.”
	The Gain to the Country by Protection. Letter to the New York Times, February 27.
	“Professor Sumner Instructs His Critics.” A free-trade letter to the New York Times, March 1.
	That Census Puzzle. New York Times, March 2.
	Protective Taxes and Wages. North American Review, March, Vol. 136, No. CCCXVI, pp. 270–276.
	A Course of Reading in Political Economy. Prepared for The Critic, March, 4 pp.
	The Tariff on Thread. Letter to the New York Times, March 8.
	Thread. Letter to the Boston Transcript, April 25, regarding the Willimantic Linen Co.
	Thread at Three Cents a Spool. Letter to the New York Times, April 28.
	The Willimantic Mills’ Profit. Letter to the Boston Transcript, April 30.
	Letter to the Palladium (New Haven), April 30, regarding the controversy with the Willimantic Linen Co.
	“Professor Sumner’s Views.” Letter to the New Haven Register, May 26, in answer to Mr. Barrows of the Willimantic Linen Co.
	The Philosophy of Strikes. Harper’s Weekly, September 15, Vol. XXVII, No. 1395, p. 586. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 239–246.
	Letter to the New Haven Register, October 18, regarding the development of our industries.
	“Professor Sumner’s Views Respecting the Tariff Question.” New Haven Register, October 19.
	“Mixed Up Mr. Sheldon.” Letter to the New Haven Register, October 30, showing Mr. Sheldon’s ignorance of tariff laws.
	The Science of Sociology. A Speech at the Farewell Banquet to Herbert Spencer. Delivered November 9, 1882, published in “Herbert Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on Herbert Spencer,” pp. 35–40. New York, D. Appleton & Company, 96 pp. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 401–405.
	Suggestions on Social Subjects. Passages selected from “What Social Classes owe to Each Other,” in the Popular Science Monthly, December, Vol. XXIV, pp. 160–169.
	An American Criticism of British Protectionist Theories. A criticism of Professor Sidgwick’s doctrine that protective taxes come out of the foreigner. The London Economist, December 1, Vol. XLI, No. 2,101, pp. 1397–1398.
	The Democratic Theory of Public Offices. Address before the Civil Service Reform Association, Rochester, N. Y. Reasons for reform in the manner of selecting public officers. What would be gained by the change. Printed in the Rochester newspapers of the time. (Sumner Estate.)
1884.	Problems in Political Economy. New York, 12 mo., 125 pp. H. Holt & Co.
	Our Colleges before the Country. Princeton Review, March, pp. 127–140. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 355–373.
	Sociological Fallacies. North American Review, June, Vol. 138, No. CCCXXXI, pp. 574–579. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 357–364.
	Evils of the Tariff System. North American Review, September, Vol. 139, No. CCCXXXIV, pp. 293–299.
1885.	Protectionism. The -Ism which Teaches that Waste makes Wealth. New York, H. Holt & Company, October, 12mo., 170 pp. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 9–111.
	Collected Essays in Political and Social Science. New York, H. Holt & Company, 173 pp. Contents: Bimetallism, Wages, The Argument against Protective Taxes, Sociology, Theory and Practice of Elections, Presidential Elections and Civil Service Reform, Our Colleges Before the Country.
	Our Currency for the Last Twenty-five Years. Harper’s Weekly, January 10-February 7, Vol. XXIX, Nos. 1464–1468.
	Shall Silver be Demonetized? North American Review, June, Vol. 140, No. CCCXLIII, pp. 485–489.
1886.	Regulation of Contracts. How far have modern improvements in production and transportation changed the principle that men should be left free to make their own bargains? Science, March 5, Vol. VII, No. 161, pp. 225–228.
	What Is Free Trade? In Good Cheer for April, p. 7. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 123–127.
	Can Protection Increase the Wealth of the Country? The Tax-gatherer, May 22, No. 19.
	Industrial War. Forum, September, Vol. II, pp. 1–8. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 93–102.
	Mr. Blaine on the Tariff. North American Review, October, Vol. 143, No. CCCLIX, pp. 398–405.
	What Is the “Proletariat”? The Independent, October 28. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 161–165.
	Who Win by Progress? The Independent, November 25. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 169–174.
	The New Social Issue. The Independent, December 23. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 207–212.
	Subjects for Theses and Compositions. Prepared with notes and references attached to the subjects for Senior and Junior Classes, Yale College. I. Honor Theses in Political Science. II. Subjects for Required Compositions. 9 pp. (Sumner Estate.)
	History of the United States of America, 1824–1876. Notes taken by J. C. Schwab, 1886–1887. MS 17½ × 25½ cm. Yale University Library.
	Political Economy. Notes of lectures taken by J. C. Schwab, 1886–1887. MS 17½ × 25½ cm. Yale University Library.
1887.	What Makes the Rich Richer and the Poor Poorer? Popular Science Monthly, January, Vol. XXX, pp. 289–296. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 65–77.
	Socialism. Speech before the Massachusetts Reform Club, Boston, January 8. Boston Sunday Record, January 9.
	Federal Legislation on Railroads. The Independent, January 20. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 177–182.
	Legislation by Clamor. The Independent, February 24. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 185–190.
	The Shifting of Responsibility. The Independent, March 24. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 193–198.
	Some Points in the New Social Creed. The Independent, April 21. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 207–211.
	The Indians in 1887. Forum, May, Vol. III, pp. 254–262.
	Speculative Legislation. The Independent, May 19. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 215–219.
	Unrestricted Commerce. Chautauquan, June.
	The Banquet of Life. The Independent, June 23. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 217–221.
	Some Natural Rights. The Independent, July 28. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 222–227.
	Strikes and the Industrial Organization. Popular Science News, July, Vol. XXI, No. 7, pp. 93–94. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 249–253.
	State Interference. North American Review, August, Vol. 145, No. CCCLXIX, pp. 109–119. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 213–226.
	The Abolition of Poverty. The Independent, August 25. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 228–232.
	The State as an “Ethical Person.” The Independent, October 6. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 201–204.
	The Boon of Nature. The Independent, October 27. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 233–238.
	Civil Service Reform. Chautauquan, November, pp. 78–80.
	Is Liberty a Lost Blessing? The Independent, November 24. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 131–135.
	Advantages of Free Trade. The Christian Secretary. (Sumner Estate.)
1888.	Land Monopoly. The Independent, January 12. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 239–244.
	A Group of Natural Monopolies. The Independent, February 16. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 245–248.
	The Fall in Silver and International Competition. Rand McNally’s Banker’s Monthly, February, pp. 47–48.
	The First Steps towards a Millennium. Cosmopolitan, March, pp. 32–36. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 93–105.
	Another Chapter on Monopoly. The Independent, March 15. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 249–253.
	Trusts and Trades-unions. The Independent, April 19. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 257–262.
	The Family Monopoly. The Independent, May 10. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 254–258.
	The Family and Property. The Independent, June 14 and July 19. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 259–269.
	Tariff Reform. The Independent, August 16. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 115–120.
	The State and Monopoly. The Independent, September 13 and October 11. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 270–279.
	“A Condition not a Theory.” Free trade. Belford’s Monthly Magazine, October, Vol. I, No. 5.
	Democracy and Plutocracy. The Independent, November 15. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 283–289.
	Definitions of Democracy and Plutocracy. The Independent, December 20. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 290–295.
1889.	The Conflict of Plutocracy and Democracy. The Independent, January 10. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 296–300.
	Peasant Emancipation in Denmark. Based on a review of Stavnsbaands-løsningen og landboreformerne. Set fra nationaløkonomiens Standpunkt. Af V. Falbe Hansen, Copenhagen: Gad. 1888. The Nation, February 7, No. 1232, pp. 123–124.
	Peasants and Land Tenure in Scandinavia. Unpublished manuscript, 20 typewritten pages, written in 1889 or later, covering the period from the earliest times to the eighteenth century. (Sumner Estate.)
	Separation of State and Market. The Independent, February 14. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 306–311.
	Democracy and Modern Problems. The Independent, March 28. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 301–305.
	Social War in Democracy. The Independent, April 11. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 312–317.
	An Examination of a Noble Sentiment. The Independent, May 16. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 212–216.
	Sketch of William Graham Sumner. The Popular Science Monthly, June, Vol. XXXV, pp. 261–268. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 3–13.
	An Old “Trust.” The Independent, June 13. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 265–269.
	What is Civil Liberty? The Popular Science Monthly, July, Vol. XXXV, pp. 289–303. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 109–130.
	Who Is Free? Is It the Savage? The Independent, July 18. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 136–140.
	Who Is Free? Is It the Civilized Man? The Independent, August 15. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 140–145.
	Who Is Free? Is It the Millionaire? The Independent, September 12. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 145–150.
	Who Is Free? Is It the Tramp? The Independent, October 17. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 150–155.
	Liberty and Responsibility. The Independent, November 21. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 156–160.
	Liberty and Law. The Independent, December 26. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 161–166.
	Do We Want Industrial Peace? Forum, December, Vol. VIII, pp. 406–416. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 229–243.
	Free Trade. Unpublished manuscript of about this date. I. Definitions of Protection and Protectionism. II. The Medieval Doctrine of Commerce. III. The Sixteenth Century. IV. The Dynastic States. V. Mercantilism and the Colonial System. VI. The New Doctrine. VII. Smithianismus. VIII. Protection in the United States. IX. Nineteenth-century Protectionism. X. The Present Situation. About 64 typewritten pages. (Sumner Estate.)
	The Strikes. Unpublished manuscript written sometime in the eighties, 21 typewritten pages. A general survey of the “labor question.” (Sumner Estate.)
	A Parable. Written in the eighties. Printed for the first time in Vol. III, pp. 105–107.
	The Sphere of Academical Instruction. Address delivered at the celebration of a school anniversary. To judge “what an academy is, what it ought to do, and how it ought to do it; and to judge of its achievements by true standards.” Unpublished manuscript of the eighties, 27 pages. (Sumner Estate.)
	Integrity in Education. An address delivered in Hartford probably in the eighties. Printed for the first time in Vol. IV, pp. 409–419.
	Discipline. Probably in the eighties. Printed for the first time in Vol. IV, pp. 423–438.
	The Challenge of Facts. Written sometime in the eighties. Original title was Socialism. Printed for the first time in Vol. III, pp. 17–52.
1890.	Alexander Hamilton. (“Makers of America.”) New York, 12mo., 280 pp., Dodd, Mead & Co.
	Liberty and Discipline. The Independent, January 16. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 166–171.
	Does Labor Brutalize? The Independent, February 20. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 187–193.
	Liberty and Property. The Independent, March 27. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 171–176.
	Liberty and Opportunity. The Independent, April 24. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 176–181.
	Why I Am a Free Trader. Twentieth Century, April 24, pp. 8–10.
	Can We Get More Money? Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 3, Vol. LXX, No. 1807.
	Liberty and Labor. The Independent, May 22. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 181–187.
	Proposed Silver Legislation. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 24, Vol. LXX, No. 1810, p. 330.
	Liberty and Machinery. The Independent, June 12. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 193–198.
	The Disappointment of Liberty. The Independent, July 17. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 198–203.
	What Emancipates. The Independent, August 14. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 137–142.
	The Demand for Men. The Independent, September 11. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 111–116.
	The Significance of the Demand for Men. The Independent, October 16. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 119–123.
	What the “Social Question” Is. The Independent, November 20. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 127–133.
1891.	The Financier and the Finances of the American Revolution. New York, 2 vols., 8vo., 309 and 330 pp.
	Liberté des Échanges. Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Économie Politique, vol. 2, pp. 138–166, Guillaumin et Cie., Paris.
	Power and Progress. The Independent, January 15. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 145–150.
	Consequences of Increased Social Power. The Independent, August 13. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 153–158.
1892.	Robert Morris (“Makers of America”). New York, 12mo., 172 pp.
1893.	Proposed Classification of the Social Sciences. A chart printed for distribution to the classes in Social Science in Yale University. “Not published.”
1894.	The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over. Forum, March, Vol. XVII, pp. 92–102. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 195–210.
1895.	The Venezuela Message. Letter to the New York Times, December 18.
1896.	History of Banking in the United States. XV, 485 pp. Being Vol. I of A History of Banking in all the Leading Nations.
	“Professor Sumner on Yale.” Letter to The Yale News, January 20. Learning is more appreciated here now than thirty years ago.
	The Currency Crisis. A course of six lectures given at the house of Mr. John E. Parsons, 30 East 36th St., New York City, February 13 and 27 and March 5, 12, 19, and 26. What the lecturer said, as well as the questions and answers at the end of his lectures, was taken down in shorthand and typewritten. Mr. Herbert Parsons has the transcript in bound form, and the Yale University Library also has a copy. (Sumner Estate.)
	The Treasury as a Bank of Issue and a Silver Warehouse. The Bond Record, March, Vol. IV, No. 2, pp. 87–89.
	An Answer to Mr. Tighe’s Letter on Yale’s Venezuelan Attitude. Letter to the Yale Alumni Weekly, May 20, Vol. V, No. 30, pp. 1–2.
	The Fallacy of Territorial Extension. Forum, June, Vol. XXI, pp. 416–419. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 285–293.
	A Few Words. Short address as member of the State Board of Education at the graduating exercises of the New Haven Normal School, June 18. (Sumner Estate.)
	The Policy of Debasement. “The Battle of the Standards.” New York Journal, July 29.
	The Proposed Dual Organization of Mankind. Popular Science Monthly, August, Vol. XLIX, pp. 433–439. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 271–281.
	Prosperity Strangled by Gold. Leslie’s Weekly, August 20. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 141–145.
	Cause and Cure of Hard Times. Leslie’s Weekly, September 3. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 149–153.
	The Free-coinage Scheme Is Impracticable at Every Point. Leslie’s Weekly, September 10. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 157–162.
	Delusion of the Debtors. Leslie’s Weekly, September 17. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 165–170.
	The Crime of 1873. Leslie’s Weekly, September 24. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 173–180.
	The Single Gold Standard. Chautauquan, October, Vol. XXIV, pp. 72–77.
	Banks of Issue in the United States. Forum, October, Vol. XXII, pp. 182–191.
	Earth Hunger or the Philosophy of Land Grabbing. Printed for the first time in Vol. II, pp. 31–64.
	A Free Coinage Catechism. Reprinted from The Evening Post, The Evening Post Publishing Co., New York, 16 pp.
	Lectures on American History, Yale University, 1896–1897. Notes taken by J. C. Schwab. MS. 13 × 21 cm. Yale University Library.
	Advancing Social and Political Organization in the United States. 1896 or 1897. Printed for the first time in Vol. III, pp. 289–344.
1897.	The Teacher’s Unconscious Success. Address given at a dinner held in honor of Mr. Henry Barnard, at Jewel Hall, Hartford, January 25. Printed for the first time in Vol. II, pp. 9–13.
	Money and Currency. A course of four lectures delivered in Boston. I. The Anxiety Lest there be not Money Enough. II. How We Resumed Specie Payments in 1879. What We Did Not Do. III. The Single Gold Standard—A Beneficent and Accomplished Fact. IV. Where we now Stand and what we have to Do. Syllabus.
	Sociology. A course of six lectures given in Albany, February 27, March 6, 13, 20, 27, and April 3. Introduction. Individuality and Sociality. Property. Industrialism and Militarism. Population. Mental Reaction on Experience. Suggested Books for a Course of Reading. Syllabus.
	The Origin of the Dollar. Paper read at meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Toronto, August 19–25. (Sumner Estate.)
	Outline of a Proposed Curriculum (for Yale College). 4 pages typewritten manuscript. (Sumner Estate.)
1898.	The Spanish Dollar and the Colonial Shilling. American Historical Review, Vol. III, No. 4, pp. 607–619.
	Syllabus of six lectures given during January and February in Plainfield. N. J. I. What is a Free Man and a Free State? II. What is Democracy? III. Aggregations of Wealth and Plutocracy. IV. The Rich and the Poor. V. Woman. VI. Immigration.
	Leiter has been a Hero. Letter to The World, New York, June 15, on the Joseph Leiter deal.
	The Coin Shilling of Massachusetts Bay. Yale Review, November, Vol. VII, pp. 247–264, and February, 1899, Vol. VII, pp. 405–420.
1899.	The Conquest of the United States by Spain. A lecture before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale University, January 16. Yale Law Journal, Vol. VIII, No. 4, pp. 168–193. Boston, D. Estes & Co., 32 pp. 23 cm. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 297–334.
	The Power and Beneficence of Capital. Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Convention of The Savings Banks Association of the State of New York, held at the Rooms of the Chamber of Commerce, 32 Nassau Street, New York, May 10; pp. 77–95. J. S. Babcock, New York, printer. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 337–353.
1900.	First Fruits of Expansion. New York Evening Post, April 14, p. 13.
	The Predicament of Sociological Study. Printed for the first time in Vol. III, pp. 415–425. Original title of manuscript was “Sociology.” Written about 1900.
	Purposes and Consequences. Printed for the first time in Vol. II, pp. 67–75. Written sometime between 1900 and 1906.
	Rights. Printed for the first time in Vol. II, pp. 79–83. Written sometime between 1900 and 1906.
	Equality. Printed for the first time in Vol. II, pp. 87–89. Written sometime between 1900 and 1906.
1901.	The Anthracite Coal Industry, by Peter Roberts. Introduction by W. G. Sumner. New York, London, Macmillan Co., 261 pp. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 387–388.
	Specimens of Investment Securities for Class Room Use. New Haven, The E. P. Judd Co., 32 pp., 27 × 35½ cm. Verbatim reprints of a large number of shares, certificates, bonds, and other evidences of ownership of debt, without independent text or comment: collected for use in college instruction.
	Trusts. Journal of Commerce, June 24.
	The Predominant Issue. Burlington, Vt. Reprinted from the International Monthly, November, Vol. 2, pp. 496–509. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 337–352.
	The Yakuts. Abridged from the Russian of Sieroshevski. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 31, pp. 65–110.
1902.	Suicidal Fanaticism in Russia. The Popular Science Monthly, March, Vol. LX, pp. 442–447.
	The Concentration of Wealth: Its Economic Justification. The Independent, April-June. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 81–90.
1903.	Autobiographical Sketch of William Graham Sumner. A History of the Class of 1863, Yale College, pp. 165–167. New Haven, The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Co., 1905. Reprinted in Vol. II, pp. 3–5.
	War. Printed for the first time in Vol. I, pp. 3–40.
1904.	Reply to a Socialist (The Fallacies of Socialism). Collier’s Weekly, October 29, pp. 12–13. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 55–62.
1905.	Lynch-law, by James Elbert Cutler. Foreword by W. G. Sumner. New York, Longmans, Green, and Co., v, 287 pp. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 383–384.
	Economics and Politics. Printed for the first time in Vol. II, pp. 318–333.
	The Scientific Attitude of Mind. Address to initiates of the Sigma Xi Society, Yale University, on March 4. Printed for the first time in Vol. II, pp. 17–28.
1906.	Protectionism Twenty Years After. (Title given by editor.) Address at a dinner of the Committee on Tariff Reform of the Tariff Reform Club in the City of New York, June 2. Published by the Reform Club Committee on Tariff Reform, 42 Broadway, New York, N. Y. Series 1906, No. 4, 7 pp., August 15. Reprinted in Vol. IV, pp. 131–138.
1907.	Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Boston, Ginn & Co., v, 692 pp.
	Sociology as a College Subject. American Journal of Sociology, March, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 597–599. Reprinted in Vol. III, pp. 407–411.
1908.	Decline of Confidence. Annual Financial and Commercial Review, New York Herald, January 2.
1909.	What is Sane Tariff Reform? Annual Financial and Commercial Review, New York Herald, January 4.
	The Family and Social Change. American Journal of Sociology, March, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 577–591. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 43–61.
	Witchcraft. Forum, May, Vol. XLI, pp. 410–423. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 105–126.
	Autobiography and List of Books Published. Facsimile of letter and photograph in The Yale Courant, May, Vol. XLV, No. 7, on occasion of Sumner’s retirement.
	The Status of Women in Chaldea, Egypt, India, Judea, and Greece to the Time of Christ. Forum, August, Vol. XLII, pp. 113–136. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 65–102.
	The Mores of the Present and the Future. Yale Review, November, Vol. XVIII, pp. 233–245. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 149–164.
1910.	Religion and the Mores. American Journal of Sociology, March, Vol. 15, No. 5, pp. 577–591. Reprinted in Vol. I, pp. 129–146.
	Comment on William Graham Sumner. (Died April 12.) The Pioneer, Henry W. Farman. The Teacher, J. C. Schwab. The Inspirer, Irving Fisher. The Idealist, Clive Day. The Alan, Albert G. Keller. The Veteran, Richard T. Ely. Yale Review, May, Vol. XIX, pp. 1–12.
	Memorial Addresses. Delivered June 19, in Lampson Lyceum, Yale University, by Otto T. Bannard, Henry De Forest Baldwin, and Albert Galloway Keller. Printed in Vol. III, pp. 429–450.
POSTHUMOUS
1911.	War. Yale Review (New Series), October, Vol. I, No. 1, pp. 1–27. Printed in Vol. I, pp. 3–40.
	War and Other Essays. New Haven, Yale University Press, 381 pp.
1913.	Earth Hunger or the Philosophy of Land Grabbing. Yale Review (New Series), October, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 3–32. Printed in Vol. II, pp. 31–64.
	Earth Hunger and Other Essays. New Haven, Yale University Press, 377 pp.
1914.	The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays. New Haven, Yale University Press, 450 pp.
1918.	The Forgotten Man and Other Essays. New Haven, Yale University Press, 559 pp.