comprehension of their nature must possess or be soon able to acquire a knowledge of the whole science. As almost every economical writer has remarked, it is in treating the simple elements that we require the most care and precaution, since the least error of conception must vitiate all our deductions. Accordingly, I have devoted the following pages to an investigation of the conditions and relations of the above-named notions."
And the opening passage of Böhm-Bawerk's own book on capital reads:—"He who possesses a capital is as a rule in a position to derive from it a continued net income, which income is known to science under the head of Rent of Capital or Interest of Capital in the broader sense of the term. This income possesses certain remarkable qualities. It arises independently of any personal activity of the capitalist,—it comes to him even though he never raised a finger to create it, and seems therefore most truly to flow from, or according to an ancient simile, to be generated by capital."
All of these great luminaries of the science seem to be ready to lay down general laws governing human society, without regard to time and place. They all seem to be oblivious of the fact that the laws which they are about to explain have no universal application and are limited to a certain form of society, far from being universal in space, and further still from being perpetual in time. Not one of them seems to have given the slightest thought to the fact that the phenomena which he was about to describe and examine were part of a certain historical situation and the result of a certain historical development. History, with its actual, real facts and relations does not exist for them. All the nations, all the ages, and all stages of human development are subject to the laws which they lay down. To one of them, and that one the great "modern" Jevons, one of the great triumvirate of the "modern" school (Jevons,—Menger,—Böhm-Bawerk), the laws of political economy are not only extra-historic but extra
