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standing on its own foundations, with as high standards of scientific accuracy as the physical or the biological sciences. It was Marshall who finally saw to it that never again will a Mrs. Trimmer, a Mrs. Marcet, or a Miss Martineau earn a goodly reputation by throwing economic principles into the form of a catechism or of simple tales, by aid of which any intelligent governess might make clear to the children nestling around her where lies economic truth.” 1 But-much more than this-after his time Economics could never be again one of a number of subjects which a Moral Philosopher would take in his stride, one Moral Science out of several, as Mill, Jevons, and Sidgwick took it. He was the first to take up this professional, scientific attitude to the subject, as something above and outside current controversy, as far from politics as physiology from the general practitioner.

As time went on, Political Economy came to occupy, in Part II of the Moral Sciences Tripos, a position nearer to Marshall's ideal. But he was not satisfied until, in 1903, his victory was complete by the establishment of a separate School and Tripos in Economics and associated branches of Political Science.2

Thus in a formal sense Marshall was Founder of the Cambridge School of Economics. Far more so was he its Founder in those informal relations with many generations of pupils, which played so great a part in his life's work and in determining the course of their lives' work.

To his colleagues Marshall might sometimes seem tiresome and obstinate; to the outside world he might appear pontifical or unpractical; but to his pupils he was, and remained, a true sage and master, outside criticism, one who was their father in the spirit and who gave them such inspiration and comfort as they drew from no other source. Those eccentricities and individual ways, which might stand between him and the world, became, for them, part of what they loved. They built up sagas round him (of which Professor Fay is, perhaps, the chief repository), and were not content unless he were, without concession, his own unique self. The youth are not satisfied, unless their Socrates is a little odd.

It is difficult to describe on paper the effect he produced or

1 From his article "The Old Generation of Economists and the New," Quarterly Journal of Economics, Jan. 1897.

Sidgwick had been finally converted to the idea in 1900, shortly before his death. Marshall's ideals of economic education are set forth in his "Plea for the Creation of a Curriculum in Economics" and his " Introduction to the Tripos in Economics. . . ."

his way of doing it. The pupil would come away with an extraordinary feeling that he was embarked on the most interesting and important voyage in the world. He would walk back along the Madingley Road, labouring under more books, which had been taken from the shelves for him as the interview went on, than he could well carry, convinced that here was a subject worthy of his life's study. Marshall's double nature, coming out informally and spontaneously, filled the pupil seated by him with a double illumination. The young man was presented with a standard of intellectual integrity, and with it a disinterestedness of purpose, which satisfied him intellectually and morally at the same time. The subject itself had seemed to grow under the hands of master and pupil, as they had talked. There were endless possibilities, not out of reach. "Everything was friendly and informal," Mr. Sanger has written of these occasions (Nation, July 19, 1924), "there was no pretence that economic science was a settled affair-like grammar or algebra-which had to be learnt, not criticised; it was treated as a subject in the course of development. When once Alfred Marshall gave a copy of his famous book to a pupil, inscribed To, in the hope that in due course he will render this treatise obsolete,' this was not a piece of mock modesty, but an insistence on his belief that economics was a growing science, that as yet nothing was to be considered as final."

It must not be supposed that Marshall was undiscriminating towards his pupils. He was highly critical and even sharptongued. He managed to be encouraging, whilst at the same time very much the reverse of flattering. Pupils, in after life, would send him their books with much trepidation as to what he would say or think. The following anecdote of his insight and quick observation when lecturing is told by Dr. Clapham: "You have two very interesting men from your College at my lecture," he said to a College Tutor. "When I come to a very stiff bit, A. B. says to himself, 'This is too hard for me: I won't try to grasp it.' C. D. tries to grasp it but fails,"-Marshall's voice running off on to a high note and his face breaking up into his smile. It was an exact estimate of the two men's intelligences and tempers.

It is through his pupils, even more than his writings, that Marshall is the father of Economic Science as it exists in England to-day. So long ago as 1888, Professor Foxwell was able to write "Half the economic chairs in the United Kingdom are occupied by his pupils, and the share taken by them in general

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economic instruction in England is even larger than this." 1 To-day through pupils and the pupils of pupils his dominion is almost complete. More than most men he could, when the time came for him to go away, repeat his Nunc Dimittis, on a comparison of his achievement with the aim he had set himself in the concluding sentence of his Inaugural Lecture in 1885: "It will be my most cherished ambition, my highest endeavour, to do what with my poor ability and my limited strength I may, to increase the numbers of those whom Cambridge, the great mother of strong men,2 sends out into the world with cool heads but warm hearts, willing to give some at least of their best powers to grappling with the social suffering around them; resolved not to rest content till they have done what in them lies to discover how far it is possible to open up to all the material means of a refined and noble life."

IX

Marshall retired from the Chair of Political Economy at Cambridge in 1908, aged sixty-six. He belonged to the period of small salaries and no pensions. Nevertheless he had managed out of his professorial stipend (of £700, including his fellowship), which he never augmented either by examining or by journalism,3 to maintain at his own expense a small lending library for undergraduates, to found a triennial Essay Prize of the value of £60 4 for the encouragement of original research, and privately to pay stipends of £100 a year to one, or sometimes two, young lecturers for whom the University made no provision and who could not have remained otherwise on the teaching staff of the School of Economics. At the same time, with the aid of receipts from the sales of his books,5 he had saved just sufficient to make retirement financially possible. As it turned out, the receipts from his books became, after the publication of Industry and Trade, so con

1 "The Economic Movement in England," Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. II. p. 92.

* It must be recorded, in the interests of impartiality, that Dr. Jowett took strong exception to this phrase.

3 All his many services to the State were, of course, entirely unpaid.

* In 1913 he transferred to the University a sufficient capital sum to provide an equivalent income in perpetuity.

' He always insisted on charging a lower price for his books than was usual for works of a similar size and character. He was a reckless proof-corrector, and he kept matter in type for years before publication. Some portions of Industry and Trade, which he had by him in proof for fifteen years before publication, are said to constitute & record." He never regarded books as income-producing objects, except by accident.

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