The Works of Walter Bagehot Author:Richard Holt Hutton, Walter Bagehot, Forrest Morgan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BAGEHOT AS AN ECONOMIST, BY ROBERT GIFFEN. The publication of these "Economic Studies," the incomplete fragments of a book on English political economy whi... more »ch Bagehot was engaged upon at the time of his death, suggests to me the task, I had almost said the duty, of endeavoring to estimate the position which he held as an economist and the service he has rendered to economic science. Readers of the present book will see at once the reason of this in Mr. Button's statement in the preface, that during the last years of Bagehot's life I "had a better knowledge of his economic mind than any other person." I should not like to claim for myself so much as this statement implies. Bagehot was not given to egotistical gossip about himself, or what he had done or meant to do ; he left his works as they were completed to speak for themselves. To some extent I can only appreciate his finished work as it is open to all the world to appreciate it. But it was my happy fortune in the last nine years of his life, when his writing was mainly on economic subjects, to be intimately associated with him in the conduct of the Economist newspaper. During this period, accordingly, I had not only to discuss topics of political economy with him, especially the topics of banking and the money market, incessantly, but I had to know his mind so thoroughly on all leading subjects of the day as to be able to write in accordance with his views when he was himself at a distance. It will be my own fault, therefore, if I have not something to contribute towards a knowledge of his work; while the ability to do so constitutes a corresponding obligation, considering how important that work was: although, as I have said, I can pretend to little explicit knowledge, beyond what can be derived from the writings themsel...« less