Table of Contents
During the three years now elapsed since the publication of "War and Other Essays," it has become increasingly clear to the publishers and to the editor of that collection that their original enterprise should be followed up by another volume or two. There remain a number of Professor Sumner's shorter productions which have never been printed or which have been published in obscure, scattered, or inaccessible places.
I feel this need of extending our enterprise the more strongly because I believe that a great deal of Sumner's writing has not grown old, and is not destined to grow old. It has been impressed upon me, as I have become more familiar with his essays of twenty and thirty years ago, that the issues which he treated, as he treated them, are always and everywhere with us. They are not of one time or one place. They are always with us because they are part of what Sumner so often calls "life here on earth." It was given to him to seize upon social issues in their essential and vital bearings; the blade of his insight never stuck in the husk of a matter.
Now it has seemed to me, in my own experience with Sumner, and in my teaching, that such an attitude toward the questions of societal life is, for the young at least, the one best adapted to open—wrench open, if you will—the gates of the mind and introduce the impulse to independent thinking. I do not mean at all that this result is to be attained by an unresisting acceptance of the forcefully expressed opinions of a compelling reasoner; in fact, I believe that, in the case of Sumner, many a man has been goaded to think things out for himself for very rage at the conclusive manner in which Sumner used to dispose of some of his pet or traditional notions. Sometimes such a man came to agree with Sumner; again he believed that he had won the right not to assent—but in either case there had come to him an awakening in the matter of his own mental powers and life. This is why so many men who have eventually come to dissent from Sumner's positions, yet look back upon him as an intellectual awakener. The difficult thing about getting a vision in the large is in the attainment of an elevated plane of thought; if someone can lift you to it, you will find room enough there to range away from the exact spot upon which you were originally set down. It is the "lift" which is crucial—and that it is which only the strong and positive man, who has wrought himself up beyond the pull of the trivial and traditional, can give.
I lay a good deal of stress upon these considerations because they are the ones which have led me to continue the task of editor. I see no reason for collections of essays as such; the work of most of us, as it seems to me, must die with us, or before us—it would even be a disservice to galvanize it into a momentary resurrection. But I feel that this is not so with Sumner's work, and so I think it a privilege to assist in making it more readily available in more permanent form.
But this leads me to add that, although I hold the views I have tried to express, I have yet excluded, at least for the present, Sumner's treatment of certain issues which seem to me more technical and local. I have therefore included little on the topics of protectionism and sound money, and on other subjects of a more strictly economic order—although I believe that a number of Sumner's essays of this type deserve re-publication, and should get it, for the sake of his method of presentation and the breadth of his perspective rather than for the sake of adding to technical economic controversy in any possible way.
The following essays are here printed, so far as I have been able to discover, for the first time: The Teacher's Unconscious Success; The Scientific Attitude of Mind; Earth Hunger; Economics and Politics; Purposes and Consequences; Rights; Equality. We have been able to date all of these except the last three. There is no direct evidence as to the time when these were written, but it is safe to say that they come out of the period between 1900 and 1906. The manuscript of these three seems to form part of the studies which preceded "Folkways" and may have been designed originally to form part of that volume.
Although "Earth Hunger" is the title essay, it has seemed fitting to introduce this volume with Professor Sumner's brief autobiographical sketch, and by two essays which, if not strictly autobiographical, yet reveal certain salient characteristics of the man and of his attitude toward his work.
A. G. KELLER
New Haven, Conn.,
September 17, 1913
Autobiography [1903]
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
I was born at Paterson, N. J., October 30, 1840. My father, Thomas Sumner, was born at Walton-le-Dale, Lancashire, England, May 6, 1808. He came to the United States in 1836. My mother was Sarah Graham. She was born in Oldham, England, in 1819, and was brought to the United States by her parents in 1825. She died when I was eight years old. This is about all I know of my ancestry. My father told me that he had seen his own great-grandfather, who was a weaver in Lancashire. They were all artisans and members of the wages class. It is safe to say that I am the first of them who ever learned Latin and algebra. My grandfather had a good trade, which was ruined by machinery. On account of this family disaster, my father was in every respect a self-educated man, and was obliged to come to America. His principles and habits of life were the best possible. His knowledge was wide, and his judgment excellent. He belonged to the class of men, of whom Caleb Garth in Middlemarch is the type. In early life I accepted, from books and other people, some views and opinions which differed from his. At the present time, in regard to those matters, I hold with him and not with the others.
In the year after I was born my father went prospecting through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. He came back convinced that, if a man would live as poorly and educate his children as badly in the East as he would have to in the West, he could do as well in the East. He moved to New England, lived in New Haven a year or two, and settled in Hartford about 1845. I was educated in the public schools of that city. I was clerk in a store for two years, but went back to school to prepare for college.
After graduating I went at once to Europe. I passed the winter of 1863–64 in Geneva, Switzerland, studying French and Hebrew. In April, 1864, I went to Göttingen, where I studied ancient languages and history. In April, 1866, I went to Oxford, where I studied Anglican theology. In that year I was elected tutor at Yale and entered upon the duties in September.
I was ordained Deacon in the Protestant Episcopal Church at Trinity Church, New Haven, December 27, 1867. I resigned the tutorship in March, 1869, to become assistant to the Rector of Calvary Church, New York City. From September, 1870, to September, 1872, I was Rector of the Church of the Redeemer, at Morristown, N.J.
In June, 1872, I was elected Professor of Political and Social Science in Yale College. My life has been spent since that time in trying to fulfill the duties of that position. From 1873 to 1876 I was an alderman of the city of New Haven. In 1876 I was one of the "visiting statesmen," who were sent to New Orleans to try to find out what kind of a presidential election they had in Louisiana in that year. This is the whole of my experience in politics. I found out that I was likely to do more harm in politics than almost any other kind of man, because I did not know the rules of the game and did not want to learn them. Therefore, the adepts at it could play with me in more senses than one. My experience, however, has been very valuable to me. It has enabled me to gauge the value of the talk we hear about "civics" and "citizenship". I turned back to the studies connected with my college position, and have devoted myself entirely to them. Those studies have expanded so rapidly and greatly that I have been compelled during the whole thirty-two years to narrow the range of my work more and more. I have renounced one branch
