The question may be asked whether the study of a system of economic teaching, which, even if it ever did receive anything approaching universal assent, has long since ceased to do so, is not a waste of labour.  We can answer that question in the negative, for two reasons.  In the first place, as we said above, a proper understanding of the earlier periods of the development of a body of knowledge is indispensable for a full appreciation of the later.  Even if the canonist system were not worth studying for its own sake, it would be deserving of attention on account of the light it throws on the development of later economic doctrine.  ’However the canonist theory may contrast with or resemble modern economics, it is too important a part of the history of human thought to be disregarded,’ says Sir William Ashley.  ’As we cannot fully understand the work of Adam Smith without giving some attention to the physiocrats, nor the physiocrats without looking at the mercantilists:  so the beginnings of mercantile theory are hardly intelligible without a knowledge of the canonist doctrine towards which that theory stands in the relation partly of a continuation, partly of a protest.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  Op. cit., vol. i. pt. ii. p. 381.]

But we venture to assert that the study of canonist economics, far from being useful simply as an introduction to later theories, is of great value in furnishing us with assistance in the solution of the economic and social problems of the present day.  The last fifty years have witnessed a reaction against the scientific abstractions of the classical economists, and modern thinkers are growing more and more dissatisfied with an economic science which leaves ethics out of account.[1] Professor Sidgwick, in his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1883, devotes a separate section to ’The Art of Political Economy,’ in which he remarks that ’The principles of Political Economy are still most commonly understood even in England, and in spite of many protests to the contrary, to be practical principles—­rules of conduct, public or private.’[2] The many indications in recent literature and practice that the regulation of prices should be controlled by principles of ‘fairness’ would take too long to recite.  It is sufficient to refer to the conclusion of Devas on this point:  ’The notion of just price, worked out in detail by the theologians, and in later days rejected as absurd by the classical economists, has been rightly revived by modern economists.’[3] Not alone in the sphere of price, but in that of every other department of economics, the impossibility of treating the subject as an abstract science without regard to ethics is being rapidly abandoned.  ’The best usage of the present time,’ according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, ’is to make political economy an ethical science—­that is, to make it include a discussion of what ought to be in the economic world as well as what is.’[4]