The indefatigable Harry Elmer Barnes, in the introduction to The History and Prospects of the Social Sciences,1 a manifesto parallel to Merriam’s New Aspects of Politics, quoted with approval a noted ‘Educator’, the President of Northwestern University:

But the most fruitful researches during the twentieth century will probably be conducted not in the natural sciences but in the social sciences. . . . All our human relations will be improved as rapidly as we make progress in the social sciences, and I am convinced that our universities will make a great contribution here as they did in the discovery of truth in the natural sciences during the nineteenth century.