plexity of present conditions, their apparently hard and fast
character, is an almost insuperable obstacle to gaining insight into
their nature. Recourse to the primitive may furnish the fundamental
elements of the present situation in immensely simplified form. It is
like unraveling a cloth so complex and so close to the eyes that its
scheme cannot be seen, until the larger coarser features of the
pattern appear. We cannot simplify the present situations by deliberate
experiment, but resort to primitive life presents us with the sort of
results we should desire from an experiment. Social relationships and
modes of organized action are reduced to their lowest terms. When this
social aim is overlooked, however, the study of primitive life becomes
simply a rehearsing of sensational and exciting features of savagery.
Primitive history suggests industrial history. For one of the chief
reasons for going to more primitive conditions to resolve the present
into more easily perceived factors is that we may realize how the
fundamental problems of procuring subsistence, shelter, and protection
have been met; and by seeing how these were solved in the earlier days
of the human race, form some conception of the long road which has had
to be traveled, and of the successive inventions by which the race has
been brought forward in culture. We do not need to go into disputes
regarding the economic interpretation of history to realize that the
industrial history of mankind gives insight into two important phases of
social life in a way which no other phase of history can possibly do.
It presents us with knowledge of the successive inventions by which
theoretical science has been applied to the control of nature in the
interests of security and prosperity of social life. It thus reveals the
successive causes of social progress. Its other service is to put
before us the things that fundamentally concern all men in common--the
occupations and values connected with getting a living. Economic history
deals with the activities, the career, and fortunes of the common man as
does no other branch of history. The one thing every individual must do
is to live; the one thing that society must do is to secure from each
individual his fair contribution to the general well being and see to it
that a just return is made to him.

Economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more
liberalizing than political history. It deals not with the ris