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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 76

Economic Fatalism

[unclear: Economic Fatalism]

for that reason accumulated in fewer hands? To say that would be to neglect the great extension of Joint Stock Company and to ignore the lesson of the Liberator crash.1 But the important thing to recognize is not so much that the tendencies in any given society may be too various to be comprehended in any one formula, as that the tendencies themselves may be altered by human wills. I am inclined to think that we have got into a way of spelling tendency with too big a T, and man with too small an M. If four or five really accomplished swindlers were to decamp with four or five big municipal balances, I suspect that the tendency towards the municipal extension of industry might receive a check from which it would take half a century to recover.2 If one great statesman with the pushing power of Mr. Rhodes and the intelligence of Mr. Balfour were to set to work to read the Report of the Gold and Silver Commission of 1888, and then were to preach Professor Marshall's gospel of symmetallism to the bankers of England (and the congregation would be a small one), they would soon enough persuade the British public of the merits of a scientific international currency. Bagehot told us long ago that the English people was a deferential people. That is one of the little national tendencies which favour the Hero and the Swindler, who are both of them important and incalculable forces in economics and politics, as a recent laborious but uninspired work upon France sufficiently testifies. In any case the cause gains nothing by its fatalistic appendages. Let us travel not whither an assumed historical tendency, but rather, as Plato says, "whithersoever, the argument may lead."

Herbert A. L. Fisher.