Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3textit{THE "PINE-TREE" COINAGE. Coin was now coming in freely by the trade with the West Indies...

William Graham Sumner is the "forgotten man" of American intellectual history. Too often dismissed or only superficially understood, his interpretations are now attracting closer scrutiny and appreciation...

The title of this 1883 classic of laissez-faire economics and sociology is ironic: the social classes do not, the author concludes, owe each other anything. Demolishing the theory of group obligation and fully embracing the concepts of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism, Sumner rages against the notion that the educated and wealthy have any obligation to the poor and uneducated, declares that the men should simply pull themselves out of poverty, deems taxes an obscenity and universal suffrage "immoral and vicious," dismisses the idea of "natural rights," and decries anything other than "every man for himself...

William Graham Sumner was an influential professor of sociology and politics at Yale College and president of the American Sociological Association from 1908 to 1909, and it was in this early classic textbook of sociology, first published in 1906, that he coined the term folkways, to denote the habits and customs of a society...