[Letter] Dec.2,1888,Smith College [to F.H. Giddings]

Dec. 2, 1888, Smith College.

Dear Friend,
             I hasten to
say, in reply to that part
of your letter that
refers to the question of
diverse uses of land that
I will accept no such
sacrifice on your part as
the plan you propose involves.
You shall not suppress a
line of what you would have
written. Rather than have
you do that I would register
a pledge not to touch
the subject at all myself,
and so put you in the
position of depriving the
world of that whole gain(!)
That should bring you to
terms. I still do not
think you had the same
ideas that I had. If it
should prove that we were
alike in some things,
but had made independent
work in others we could
do this: make a
little treatise on these
particular points in
common and explain the situation in
the preface. We could say we had
independently discovered certain things at
the same time - certain other things
only one of us had struck, certain others
still the other had unearthed and we
thought it best to make a composite of the
whole. I insist that you work out the
subject at your own pleasure as though I were
not in the field. I will do the same. We
can then arrange about the publication. One
reason for this is that I have been drawn
off from the land question this Fall -
that is from the part I had in mind to
at once work up, by work on Wages and
Interest. I have agreed to read before the
Economic Association a paper on 'The
Possibility of a Scientific Law of Wages'. I
tried to make it fit the larger book that I
have had in mind to write on the entire
subject of Capital. I think what I have will fill
a niche in that discussion. What shall I
say about this study?
 I am in the condition
in which I cannot form
a judgment of it, yet
I cannot for my life see
why I have not outlined a
formula for determining
the entire distribution of
the social product between
(1) interest in the generic, (2)
Wages in the generic and (3)
pure profit. It seems to me
that I see how each is
actually determined in amount.
Stuart Wood's paper in
Quarterly [Journal] of Econ. interested
me greatly. At first I
thought he had tried to do
something and fallen short of
it. Later I saw that he did
not try to show in this paper
what makes wages high or
low. He is preparing to
do that in another paper. It
is this second part that I
have all along been working
at. If you have had time to
see S. Wood's paper I should
value your judgment of its
novelty and soundness. In so
far as its claims extend I
do not see why it is not sound.
If it is as valuable as it seems to me
I should like to give him a good tribute
in my own paper. My studies do not cover
his field though I think his second paper
will try to do the thing I have been working on.
My studies consist in an amplification of the
principle of marginal valuation as applied to
wages and interest. I think I see where the true
margin lies as I never did so fully before.
Of all this more by and by. I wish I had you
within talking distance. How I would swoop down
on you in your quiet evenings. Dennison is an
excellent fellow but his mind is not
analytical enough for this kind of economic
study - is it?
 The news about the English
visitors was indeed interesting. It would have
been a pleasure to have met Mr.[Sidney] Webb.
Let us go over there some time and
call on a lot of them. Measles all over
without great suffering except in case of our
oldest boy. He had a hard time. Regards
from my wife and me for Mrs. Giddings.

                    Yours Very Truly,
                          J. B. Clark