It thus
reveals the successive causes of social progress. Its other
service is to put before us the things that fundamentally concern
all men in common -- the occupations and values connected with
getting a living. Economic history deals with the activities,
the career, and fortunes of the common man as does no other
branch of history. The one thing every individual must do is to
live; the one thing that society must do is to secure from each
individual his fair contribution to the general well being and
see to it that a just return is made to him.
Economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more
liberalizing than political history. It deals not with the rise
and fall of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the
effective liberties, through command of nature, of the common man
for whom powers and principalities exist.
Industrial history also offers a more direct avenue of approach
to the realization of the intimate connection of man's struggles,
successes, and failures with nature than does political history
-- to say nothing of the military history into which political
history so easily runs when reduced to the level of youthful
comprehension. For industrial history is essentially an account
of the way in which man has learned to utilize natural energy
from the time when men mostly exploited the muscular energies of
other men to the time when, in promise if not in actuality, the
resources of nature are so under command as to enable men to
extend a common dominion over her.
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