economic investigation a beneficial direction by setting it upon a more thorough and all-sided observation of facts. But when they complain of the earlier economists being so wedded to abstractions, the fault they chiefly mean to censure is the habit of solving practical economic problems by the unconditional application of certain abstract principles. It is the "absolutism of solutions" they condemn. They think economists were used to act like doctors who had learnt the principles of medicine by rote and applied them without the least discrimination of the peculiarities of individual constitutions. With them the individual peculiarities are everything, and the principles are too much thrown into the shade. Economic phenomena, they hold, constitute only one phase of the general life of the particular nations in which they appear. They are part and parcel of a special concrete social organism. They are influenced--they are to a great extent made what they are--by the whole _ethos_ of the people they pertain to, by their national character, their state of culture, their habits, customs, laws. Economic problems are consequently always of necessity problems of the time, and can only be solved for the period that raises them. Their very nature alters under other skies and in other ages. They neither appear everywhere in the same shape, nor admit everywhere of the same answer. They must therefore be treated historically and empirically, and political economy is always an affair for the nation and never for the world. The historical school inveigh against the _cosmopolitanism_ of the current economic theories, and declare warmly in favour of _nationalism_; according to which every nation has its own political economy just as it has its own constitution and its own character. Now here they are right in what they affirm, wrong in what they deny. They are right in affirming that economic politics is national, wrong in denying that economic science is cosmopolitan. In German the word economy denotes the concrete industrial system as well as the abstract science of industrial systems, and one therefore readily falls into the error of applying to the latter what is only true of the former. There may be general principles of engineering, though every particular project can only be successfully accomplished by a close regard to its particular conditions. In claiming a cosmopolitan validity for their principles, economists do not overlook their essential relativity. On the contrary, they describe their economic laws as being in reality nothing more than tendencies, which are not even strictly true as scientific explanations, and are never for a moment contemplated as unconditional solutions for practical situations. Moreover Roscher, in defining his task as an economist, virtually takes up the cosmopolitan standpoint and virtually rejects the national. He says a political economist has to explain what is or has been, and not