n view of human nature, and they made
these views the basis of their speculations on government." But to-day
"nearly all students of politics analyze institutions and avoid the
analysis of man." Whoever has read the typical book on politics by a
professor or a reformer will agree, I think, when he adds: "One feels
that many of the more systematic books on politics by American University
professors are useless, just because the writers dealt with abstract men,
formed on assumptions of which they were unaware and which they have
never tested either by experience or by study."

An extreme example could be made of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of
Columbia University. In the space of six months he wrote an impassioned
defense of "constitutional government," beginning with the question, "Why
is it that in the United States the words politics and politician have
associations that are chiefly of evil omen," and then, to make irony
complete, proceeded at the New York State Republican Convention to do the
jobbery of Boss Barnes. What is there left but to gasp and wonder whether
the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life?
What insight into reality can a man possess who is capable of discussing
politics and ignoring politicians? What kind of naivete was it that led
this educator into asking such a question?

President Butler is, I grant, a caricature of the typical professor. Yet
what shall we say of the annual harvest of treatises on "labor problems"
which make no analysis of the mental condition of laboring men; of the
treatises on marriage and prostitution which gloss over the sexual life
of the individual? "In the other sciences which deal with human affairs,"
writes Mr. Wallas, referring to pedagogy and criminology, "this division
between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does
it is not found."

I have in my hands a text-book of six hundred pages which is used in the
largest universities as a groundwork of political economy. This
remarkable sentence strikes the eye: "The motives to business activity
are too familiar to require analysis." But some sense that perhaps the
"economic man" is not a self-evident creature seems to have touched our
author. So we are treated to these sapient remarks: "To avoid this
criticism we will begin with a characterization of the typical business
man to be found to-day in the United States and other countries in the
same stage of industrial