Oppenheim, the inventor of their nickname, laid aside his scoffing, and seconded some of their measures energetically. Indeed, their chief adversaries are now the socialists, who cannot forgive them for going one mile with them and yet refusing to go twain--for adopting their diagnosis and yet rejecting their prescription. Brentano, who is one of the most moderate, as well as one of the ablest of them, takes nearly as grave a view of the state of modern industrial society as the socialists themselves do; and he says that if the evils from which it suffers could not be removed otherwise, it would be impossible to avoid much longer a socialistic experiment. But then he maintains that they can be removed otherwise, and one of the chief motives of himself and his allies in their practical work is to put an end to socialistic agitation by curing the ills which have excited it. The key to the position of the Socialists of the Chair lies in their historical method. This method has nothing to do with the question sometimes discussed whether the proper method of political economy is the inductive or the deductive. On that question the historical school of economists are entirely agreed with the classical school. Roscher, for example, adopts Mill's description of political economy as a concrete deductive science, whose _à priori_ conclusions, based on laws of human nature, must be tested by experience, and says that an economic fact can be said to have received a scientific explanation only when its inductive and deductive explanations have met and agreed. He makes, indeed, two qualifying remarks. One is, that it ought to be remembered that even the deductive explanation is based on observation, on the self-observation of the person who offers it. This will be admitted by all. The other is, that every explanation is only provisional, and liable to be superseded in the course of the progress of knowledge, and of the historical growth of social and economic structure. This will also be admitted, and it is no peculiarity of political economy. There is no science whose conclusions are not modified by the advance of knowledge; and there are many sciences besides political economy whose phenomena change their type in lapse of time. Roscher's proviso, therefore, amounts to nothing more than a caution to economic investigators to build their explanations scrupulously on the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts, and to be specially on their guard against applying to the circumstances of one period or nation explanations and recommendations which are only just regarding another. The same disease may have different symptoms in a child from what it has in a man, and a somewhat different type at the present day from what it had some centuries ago; and it may therefore require a quite different treatment. That is a very sound principle and a very self-evident one, and it contains the whole essence of the historical method, which, so