Category: Economists

An earlier post mentioned the late 19th century economics textbook writer, Arthur Latham Perry, whose writings in the United States were rated by leading publishers in third/fourth place (behind Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill) in 1876. This post provides some biographical information, links to most editions of his three textbooks and two prefaces that describe his personal intellectual development as an economist. 

More about the economics professor Arthur Latham Perry:

Joseph Dorfman. Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 3 1865-1918. New York: 1949. pp. 56-63.

Stephen Meardon. A Tale of Two Tariff Commissions and One Dubious “Globalization Backlash”. Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department Working Paper 476 (November 2002), pp. 14-19.

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Perry, Arthur Latham (1830-1905)
By Patrick J. McCurdy (Class of 2002)

Arthur Latham Perry, Williams Class of 1852, was born on February 27, 1830 and died on July 9, 1905. He was raised in poverty in New Hampshire but was able to attend Williams College, where he was one of the founders and charter members of the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity.

After graduating, he taught in Washington for a year but returned immediately when offered a position at Williams as professor of history and political economy. He taught these subjects from 1854 to 1891. While at the college he also taught German language and literature 1854-1868. As a professor of Political Economy, 1859-1899, he wrote many textbooks and monographs and was considered a leading expert in the field of free trade.

For several years he toured the country during his summer holidays, giving lectures on the principle of free trade for The American Free Trade League. He also wrote important history books on Williamstown and Williams College, Origins of Williamstown (1894) and Williamstown and Williams College (1898).

In 1891 Professor Perry retired and acted as a consultant to the governors of Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut. It was for his great devotion to Williams College that the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house was named in honor of him.

Perry married Mary Brown Smedley, whose ancestors were some of the first settlers of Williamstown and famous leaders of the Revolutionary War.  With her he had five sons and one daughter: Bliss, Arthur, Walter, Carroll, Lewis and Grace.  Papers for years to come would describe the brothers as a member of an old and distinguished Williamstown family.”

Source: Williams College. Special Collections Website: Perry, Arthur Latham (1830-1905) webpage.

Image Source: Arthur Latham Perry. Miscellanies. Williamstown, Mass.: Published by the Author, 1902).

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Arthur Latham Perry
Links to Editions of his Three Text-books in Political Economy

Perry, Arthur Latham. Elements of Political Economy (New York: Charles Scribner and Company). 1^st ed. (1866); 2^nd ed. (1867); 4^th ed. (1868); 5^th ed. (1869) ; 6^th ed. (1871); 7^th ed. (1872); 10^th ed. (1873); 11^th ed. (1874); 13^th ed. (1875); 14^th ed. (1877);  15?^th ed. (1878);
Title shortened to Political Economy: 18th ed. (1883); 19^th ed. (1887); 20^th ed. (1888); 21^st ed. (1892); 22^nd ed. (1895).

Perry, Arthur Latham. An Introduction to Political Economy (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Company). 1^st ed. (1877); 2^nd ed. (1880).

Perry, Arthur Latham. Principles of Political Economy. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). 1^st ed. (1891);

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Arthur Latham Perry, LL.D.
Orrin Sage Professor of History and Political Economy in Williams College

PREFACE
14^th edition (1877) of Elements of Political Economy

THE good reception given to my book in its previous editions by many practical teachers, as well as by the general public, has prompted me to subject it to another thorough revision, by verifying former statements of fact and introducing many new ones to bring the book abreast of the present time, and by enlarging the discussion of principles at some points and curtailing it at others in the interest of symmetry and completeness; and prompts me also to write, even at this late day, a preface to the book, since I have grounds for believing that some of its friends may be pleased to learn of the circumstances under which it was originally written.

I had taught Political Economy in this Institution [Williams College] for ten or twelve years without ever forming any purpose to try my hand at a treatise on the subject. I had used for my teachers and guides the English writers, particularly Smith, Ricardo, Senior, and Mill; and had familiarized myself also with the American writers, particularly Carey, Wayland, Bowen, and Bascom. Almost from the outset of my studies, however, and increasingly as the years went by, I felt a dissatisfaction with what seemed to me to be the lack of scientific generality common to nearly all these writers. I could see no solid reason why economical discussions should be confined to tangible commodities, and not include as well personal services rendered for pay, and also credits of all kinds. I discussed this point repeatedly with Professor Bascom, at that time my colleague, and my mind had almost reached the conclusion in which it has now rested for many years, when my late friend Amasa Walker, who was even then a political economist of reputation, although he had not yet published his “Science of Wealth,” recommended to me Bastiat’s “Harmonies of Political Economy.” I had scarcely read a dozen pages in that remarkable book, when, closing it, and giving myself to an hour’s reflection, the field of Political Economy, in all its outlines and landmarks, lay before my mind just as it does to-day. I do not know how much I brought to this result, and how much towards it was derived from Bastiat. I only know that from that hour Political Economy has been to me a new science; and that I experienced then and thereafter a sense of having found something, and the cognate sense of having something of my own to say. This was in 1863.

Subsequently I learned much from Bastiat. It is a pleasure to acknowledge, in the amplest manner, one’s indebtedness to such a quickening writer as he is; and whoever will compare carefully with his book the following chapters on Value and Land, will see how much I have profited by his discussions; and he will also see that I have made an independent, not a servile, use of them. I dare to hope that the relations of utility to value are even more clearly and ultimately put than he has put them. Not to have availed myself of the truths which he has actually established would be as unjust to science, as not also to have endeavored, in the chapters on Exchange and Foreign Trade to execute the commission which he left to his readers in these words:

“I hope yet to find at least one among them who will be able to demonstrate rigorously this proposition: the good of each tends to the good of all, as the good of all tends to the good of each ; and who will, moreover, be able to impress this truth upon men’s minds by rendering the proof of it simple, lucid, and irrefragable.”
[Sterling’s Translation of the Harmonies, page 92.]

Under the impression that I could now say something about Political Economy that the public might be willing to hear, I wrote over my initials a series of articles for the “Springfield Republican,” which attracted attention, and brought me letters alike from friends and from entire strangers, – notably from the late Sidney Homer of Boston, whose name I shall always hold in grateful remembrance for this and other reasons, – urging me to continue to write on this subject, and suggesting that a formal treatise might be acceptable to the public. Thus solicited and encouraged, – Mr. Bowles kindly adding his voice to the rest, — I ventured with diffidence upon the composition of this book. It was not at all the primary purpose to prepare a text-book for the use of college students. I thought, indeed, that I might use the book with my own classes; but the general public was in my eye throughout. The supposed needs of merchants’ clerks and farmers’ sons, for example, influenced the matter and form much more than those of people intellectually further advanced. Indeed, there was, for this reason, in the first edition, a familiarity of phrase and illustration which justly elicited criticism, and which has since been gradually eliminated. While the original design, to be intelligible to all classes of readers, may doubtless have betrayed me at times into too familiar a style, it has continued, nevertheless, to control the form of every new and every altered paragraph.

That which is original in my book is perhaps rather to be sought for in the book as a whole than in the specific parts of it. The entire plan is different from that of any book published prior to 1865. I attempted a self-consistent and symmetrical development of the one idea of Value in each of the three forms in which it manifests itself. That the outline at least is complete, is confirmed by the fact that I have found no occasion since for any other chapters than the sixteen originally sketched. I dropped entirely the long-maintained distinctions between the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth. So far as I know, I was the first to drop the technical use of the term Wealth, – a term that has always proved an invincible foe to every one trying to wrestle with it scientifically: even Bastiat, athlete as he was, was floored in this encounter. I believe that new light has been thrown on the value of land, on the delicate relations between money as a medium and money as a measure, on the whole line of objections to free trade, and on the nature of property as related to every form of taxation. The historical chapters of the book cost me very great labor. In sketching the history of American tariffs, I had not before me the tracks of even a solitary pioneer. The same remark applies in the same degree to the chapter on Currency in the United States, – a subject that has since been worthily developed into a volume by my friend Professor Sumner of Yale College. In the opening chapter on the History of the Science, I was aided somewhat by the Introductory Discourse prefixed by Mr. McCulloch to his edition of Adam Smith, and also somewhat by the article “Political in the New American Cyclopedia; but all the quotations from the classical writers, as well as those from Locke, Hume, and Bastiat, were made at first hand.

Two or three editions of the present treatise had been issued before I had seen any of the books of Henry Dunning Macleod, and to the numerous points of our independent coincidence have been added, in my later editions, many points of information in matters of fact, and some distinctions in matters of science, for which I wish here to express in general my obligations to him. Mr. Macleod, in the first volume of his “Principles of Economical Philosophy.” has done me the great honor to associate my name with Condillac, Whately, Bastiat, and Chevalier, — the heads of the third great school in Political Economy. His own name is more worthy than mine, and more likely than mine, to stand permanently in that distinguished list.

The most recent writers, whom I have consulted, and to whom I feel under obligations, – and every writer who is both competent and earnest puts his readers under obligations of some sort, — are ,Governor Musgrave of South Australia, Professors Price and Jevons of England, and General Walker of New Haven; the points of the latter in respect to the so called wages-fund have led me to modify my previous views on that subject.

I can not conclude this preface without expressing my sense of indebtedness to the successive classes of intelligent young men, to whom I have presented, and with whom I have discussed, now for almost a quarter of a century, the facts and principles of this fascinating science. It seems to me as if every possible objection to the leading points in this book has been raised, at one time or another, in my own lecture-room. Sometimes I have been convicted of error in minor points, and many times been fortified in the truth, through an attempt to remove objections started thus by students. Nearly every one of the objections to free exchange answered in the chapter on Foreign Trade was broached in this way; and I deem it of the greatest advantage to any political economist, — an advantage to which Adam Smith himself was much indebted, – to have the opportunity to test views and theories over and over again in the presence of fresh and bright minds. It has not infrequently happened in my experience that new light has been thrown out upon a subject by a young man just grasping the thought for the first time.

A. L. P.

Williams College,
July 4, 1876.

Source: Arthur Latham Perry. Elements of Political Economy, 14^th edition (1877), pp. v-xi.

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Arthur Latham Perry, LL.D.
Orrin Sage Professor of History and Political Economy in Williams College

PREFACE.
Principles of Political Economy (1891)

It is now exactly twenty-five years since was published my first book upon the large topics at present in hand. It was but as a bow drawn at a venture, and was very properly entitled “Elements of Political Economy.” At that time I had been teaching for about a dozen years in this Institution the closely cognate subjects of History and Political Economy; cognate indeed, since Hermann Lotze, a distinguished German philosopher of our day, makes prominent among its only five most general phases, the “industrial” element in all human history; and since Goldwin Smith, an able English scholar, resolves the elements of human progress, and thus of universal history, into only three, namely, “the moral, the intellectual, and the productive.”

During these studious and observant years of teaching, I had slowly come to a settled conviction that I could say something of my own and something of consequence about Political Economy, especially at two points ; and these two proved in the sequel to be more radical and transforming points than was even thought of at the first. For one thing, I had satisfied myself, that the word “Wealth,” as at once a strangely indefinite and grossly misleading term, was worse than useless in the nomenclature of the Science, and would have to be utterly dislodged from it, before a scientific content and defensible form could by any possibility be given to what had long been called in all the modern languages the “Science of Wealth.” Accordingly, so far as has appeared in the long interval of time since 1865, these “Elements” were the very first attempt to undertake an orderly construction of Economics from beginning to end without once using or having occasion to use the obnoxious word. A scientific substitute for it was of course required, which, with the help of Bastiat, himself however still clinging to the technical term “Richesse,” was discerned and appropriated in the word “Value” ; a good word indeed, that can be simply and perfectly defined in a scientific sense of its own; and, what is more important still, that precisely covers in that sense all the three sorts of things which are ever bought and sold, the three only Valuables in short, namely, material Commodities, personal Services, commercial Credits. It is of course involved in this simple-looking but far-reaching change from “Wealth” to “Value,” that Economics become at once and throughout a science of Persons buying and selling, and no longer as before a science of Things howsoever manipulated for and in their market.

For another thing, before beginning to write out the first word of that book, I believed myself to have made sure, by repeated and multiform inductions, of this deepest truth in the whole Science, which was a little after embodied (I hope I may even say embalmed) in a phrase taking its proper place in the book itself, — A market for Products is products in Market. The fundamental thus tersely expressed may be formulated more at length in this way: One cannot Sell without at the same instant and in the same act Buying, nor Buy anything without simultaneously Selling something else; because in Buying one pays for what he buys, which is Selling, and in Selling one must take pay for what is sold, which is Buying. As these universal actions among men are always voluntary, there must be also an universal motive leading up to them; this motive on the part of both parties to each and every Sale can be no other than the mutual satisfaction derivable to both; the inference, accordingly, is easy and invincible, that governmental restrictions on Sales, or prohibitions of them, must lessen the satisfactions and retard the progress of mankind.

Organizing strictly all the matter of my book along these two lines of Personality and Reciprocity, notwithstanding much in it that was crude and more that was redundant and something that was ill-reasoned and unsound, the book made on account of this original mode of treatment an immediate impression upon the public, particularly upon teachers and pupils; new streaks of light could not but be cast from these new points of view, upon such topics especially as Land and Money and Foreign Trade; and nothing is likely ever to rob the author of the satisfaction, which he is willing to share with the public, of having contributed something of importance both in substance and in feature to the permanent upbuilding of that Science, which comes closer, it may be, to the homes and happiness and progress of the People, than any other science. And let it be said in passing, that there is one consideration well-fitted to stimulate and to reward each patient and competent scientific inquirer, no matter what that science may be in which he labors, namely, this: Any just generalization, made and fortified inductively, is put thereby beyond hazard of essential change for all time; for this best of reasons, that God has constructed the World and Men on everlasting lines of Order.

As successive editions of this first book were called for, and as its many defects were brought out into the light through teaching my own classes from it year after year, occasion was taken to revise it and amend it and in large parts to rewrite it again and again; until, in 1883, and for the eighteenth edition, it was recast from bottom up for wholly new plates, and a riper title was ventured upon, — “Political Economy,” — instead of the original more tentative “Elements.” Since then have been weeded out the slight typographical and other minute errors, and the book stands now in its ultimate shape.

My excellent publishers, who have always been keenly and wisely alive to my interests as an author, suggested several times after the success of the first book was reasonably assured, that a second and smaller one should be written out, with an especial eye to the needs of high schools and academies and colleges for a text-book within moderate limits, yet soundly based and covering in full outline the whole subject. This is the origin of the “Introduction to Political Economy” first published in 1877, twelve years after the other. Its success as a text-book and as a book of reading for young people has already justified, and will doubtless continue to justify in the future, the forethought of its promoters. It has found a place in many popular libraries, and in courses of prescribed reading. Twice it has been carefully corrected and somewhat enlarged, and is now in its final form. In the preface to the later editions of the ” Introduction ” may be found the following sentence, which expresses a feeling not likely to undergo any change in the time to come: — “I have long been, and am still, ambitious that these books of mine may become the horn-books of my countrymen in the study of this fascinating Science.”

Why, then, should I have undertaken of my own motion a new and third book on Political Economy, and attempted to mark the completion of the third cycle of a dozen years each of teaching it, by offering to the public the present volume? One reason is implied in the title, “Principles of Political Economy.” There are three extended historical chapters in the earlier book, occupying more than one-quarter of its entire space, which were indeed novel, which cost me wide research and very great labor, and which have also proven useful and largely illustrative of almost every phase of Economics ; but I wanted to leave behind me one book of about the same size as that, devoted exclusively to the Principles of the Science, and using History only incidentally to illustrate in passing each topic as it came under review. For a college text-book as this is designed to become, and for a book of reading and reference for technical purposes, it seems better that all the space should be taken up by purely scientific discussion and illustration. This does not mean, however, that great pains have not been taken in every part to make this book also easily intelligible, and as readable and interesting as such careful discussions can be made.

A second reason is, to provide for myself a fresh text-book to teach from. My mind has become quite too thoroughly familiarized with the other, even down to the very words, by so long a course of instructing from it, for the best results in the class-room. Accordingly, a new plan of construction has been adopted. Instead of the fourteen chapters there, there are but seven chapters here. Not a page nor a paragraph as such has been copied from either of the preceding books. Single sentences, and sometimes several of them together, when they exactly fitted the purposes of the new context, have been incorporated here and there, in what is throughout both in form and style a new book, neither an enlargement nor an abridgment nor a recasting of any other. I anticipate great pleasure in the years immediately to come from the handling with my classes, who have always been of much assistance to me from the first in studying Political Economy, a fresh book written expressly for them and for others like-circumstanced; in which every principle is drawn from the facts of every-day life by way of induction, and also stands in vital touch with such facts (past or present) by way of illustration.

The third and only other reason needful to be mentioned here is, that in recent years the legislation of my country in the matter of cheap Money and of artificial restrictions on Trade has run so directly counter to sound Economics in their very core, that I felt it a debt due to my countrymen to use once more the best and ripest results of my life-long studies, in the most cogent and persuasive way possible within strictly scientific limits, to help them see and act for themselves in the way of escape from false counsels and impoverishing statutes. Wantonly and enormously heavy lies the hand of the national Government upon the masses of the people at present. But the People are sovereign, and not their transient agents in the government; and the signs are now cheering indeed, that they have not forgotten their native word of command, nor that government is instituted for the sole benefit of the governed and governing people, nor that the greatest good of the greatest number is the true aim and guide of Legislation. I am grateful for the proofs that appear on every hand, that former labors in these directions and under these motives have proven themselves to have been both opportune and effective; and I am sanguine almost to certainty, that this reiterated effort undertaken for the sake of my fellow-citizens as a whole, will slowly bear abundant fruit also, as towards their liberty of action as individuals, and in their harmonious co-operation together as entire classes to the end of popular comforts and universal progress.

A. L. PERRY.

Williams College,
November 25, 1890.

Source: Preface to Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons), pp. vii-xii.