mind that is flexible and adaptable enough to meet new emergencies and to learn from new experiences. No single mind can save us either in the war, or in the period of reconstruction after it. No policy can get itself adopted in this country which does not have a solid backing from public opinion. We can be led; we cannot be pushed or driven. But to be well led we need the wisdom to choose our leaders well, and to follow them with understanding. In short, if ever there was a time for reading and thinking, for getting wisdom by hook or crook, it is this year of our Lord, 1918. This is no time for any university to close up shop, or to run on half time-nor for anyone who is genuinely occupied there to feel that the occupation is frivolous or untimely. This, then, is my message. If your country calls you into more direct service at the front, count yourself lucky and make the most of it. I shall applaud you and envy you. If not, then make your mind and body ready against the opportunity which is sure to come. Above all, take your place in that great open deliberative council of thinking men and women, to which every question must in the end be referred. Realize that you are a young American at the dawn of a new epoch, with all the great human issues at stake; realize this and resolve that since history is in the making you will help to make it. CARLETON H. PARKER: FRATER, AVE ATQUE VALE HERBERT ELLSWORTH CORY* "Wandering through many countries and over many seas I while take these offerings, which by the custom of our fathers There have very recently emerged in America a few men who might most appropriately be called the new frontiersmen. These men have the same simplicity, the same wanderspirit, and the same ruggedness that we so justly admire in the best of our older adventurers. But since the geographical frontier-line of America has become at least temporarily fixed on Pacific coasts the new frontiersmen have sought the Hesperides in a new class-consciousness or rather inter-class-consciousness. They have migrated not necessarily from their native states but away from many of the superstitions which bound them. The elusive and evermoving frontier-line is now economic rather than geographical. But "economic" is perhaps a vague and dangerous adjective because of its narrower connotations. These men have not migrated from one economic class into * This article was written by Professor Cory at the request of the editor of the Chronicle, who thought it fitting that a memorial should appear in this periodical written by one qualified to speak of the life and work of Professor Parker, because of close personal friendship and agreement upon many of the vital economic issues of the day. another. They have merely emancipated themselves from the idols and taboos of the class in which they were born and reared, though with no intention of spurning anything that is really noble in these old associations. On vital questions the new frontiersmen take no pallidly non-partisan view. But they choose their sides. Carleton H. Parker was one of these new frontiersmen. He defied his foes and he defied his friends. He aroused their anger and he aroused their love. He was not too proud to confess his ignorance in a day when so many men and women deepen the perils of civilization by assuming that oracular attitude which stills momentarily even their own murmuring fears. He read consumedly but with increasing profit the books of the bolder men who today seek light, as Descartes sought light three hundred years ago as a pioneer of a great reconstructive movement, by accomplishing first of all a complete spiritual house cleaning. Professor Parker moved with tireless energy among the huts of lumberjacks, in the depths of mines, in city labor councils, in the withering heat of the hop fields at harvest time, in the most intense class battles in California, in Arizona, in Washington. He won the paternal interest of a number of brave American scientists who from different parts of the country have sounded their warnings during the last ten years to a population profoundly cursed with the "optimistic squint." In a word he recognized, what all thoughtful men today must recognize, that the chief hope for the salvation of western civilization lies in some sort of alliance between the labor movement and the newly oriented sciences which deal with the behavior of men, their modes of organization, their inherited unit-characters, and their institutional habits. For this alliance, in the interests of his country in its great crisis, Carleton Parker worked and worked until, worn out by incessant exertion in a storm center of labor difficulties, he died untimely, consecrating a precious life to American solidarity. There are those whom we may here term naturalists in the sense that although they recognize the life of reason as the supreme ideal they recognize also the potency of nonrational factors, but nothing daunted thereat they seek to come more and more to a control of these by a careful description of them and by a logical mediation of them when they conflict and when they are perverse. Carleton Parker was a naturalist. He believed that the orthodox economists had impoverished their science by a neglect of most of the original motives of human life, by isolating the so-called instincts of self-assertion and acquisition, and by using these as the sole characteristic of an allegorical phantasm labelled "the economic man" whose self-seeking would operate more or less mechanically in competition with the self-seeking of other puppets to carry us all gradually, willy-nilly, into the millennium. There can be no doubt but that Carleton Parker was unjust to orthodox economics, that in moments of too great exuberance he took delight in exhuming, drawing, quartering, and hanging a dead belief, a belief, moreover, hardly to be found in the simplicity which he imputed to it even in the narrowest of the abstractionistic and overdeductive "classical economists." What Professor Parker tended to do was to merge the less guarded statements of the more inert and timid of our contemporary economists with the crass generalizations of business men into a system which never really subsisted qua system. But even if there has never been quite such a system, there has been and still is a pervasive influence, difficult to define but not so difficult to describe, chameleonlike in economic thought, against which he justly rose in revolt. Until we complete our orientation and classification of the sciences of man it will be impossible to formulate a satisfactory theory of values in economics and it will be impossible to settle upon its proper portion of the intellectual labor. The open-minded economist is forced today to take the best account he can of the biological sciences (particularly of heredity and of animal behavior), of ethnology, of psychology, of philosophy (particularly those branches of philosophy which today dub themselves "the problem of consciousness," the logic of science," and "the study of values"). This great duty Carleton Parker recognized and set himself with courage and enthusiasm to fulfil. He was not, of course, among the very first. From America we may for purposes of comparison and contrast mention Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons and his careful investigations of labor and law, Robert Franklin Hoxie and his tireless sifting and correlations of the facts of trade union structures and functions. But we must be content here to emphasize the unique character of Professor Parker's contributions. He made substantial progress in standardizing the various conflicting inventories of human instincts (not unmindful of the dangers of lapsing back into a "faculties psychology") and he sketched briefly but very suggestively the specifically economic significance of these instincts. And, above all, he had thrown the searchlight of psychopathology on economic phenomena in a way which, despite the disputes among psychopathologists themselves, will assuredly prove the beginning of a very important contribution to the social sciences.1 Only those of us who knew something of his manuscripts and who sat under him week after week in his courses can appreciate how rapidly and broadly his mastery was coming when he gave his life to democracy. But his own published writings are a very considerable means to knowledge for those who were not fortunate enough to know him. He held: All human activity is untiringly actuated by the demand for realization of the instinct wants. If an artificially limited field of human endeavor be called economic life, all of its so-called motives hark directly back to the human instincts for their origin. There are, in truth, no economic motives as such. The motives of economic life are the same as those of the life of art, of vanity and ostentation, of war and crime, of sex. Economic life is merely the life in which instinct gratification is alleged to take on a rational pecuniary habit form. Man is not less a father with a 1 See "Motives in Economic Life," The American Economic Review, vol. VIII, Supplement, pp. 212-231, March, 1918. |