Several essays not of an economic order have been included because they have come to my knowledge within the last few years and have seemed to me to call for preservation. It is almost impossible to fix the dates of such manuscript essays, for I have not been able in all cases to secure information from persons who might be able to identify times and occasions. And there remain a good number of articles and manuscripts, published or unpublished, which can receive no more than mention, with a word of characterization, in the bibliography.
Some mention ought to be made here of a large body of hand-written manuscript left by Sumner and representing the work of several years--1899 to 1905 or thereabouts--upon a systematic treatise on “The Science of Society.” Printed as it was left, partially and unevenly completed and with many small and some wide hiatuses, this manuscript would make several substantial volumes. It is a monument of industry, involving, as it did, the collection over many years of thousands of notes and memoranda, and the extraction from the same, by a sort of _tour de force_, of generalizations intended to be set forth, with the support of copious evidence, in the form of a survey of the evolution and life of human society. These manuscripts, as left, represent no more than a preliminary survey of a wide field, together with more elaborately worked out chartings of sections of that field. The author planned to re-write the whole in the light of “Folkways.” The continuation, modification, and completion of this enterprise, in something approaching the form contemplated by its author, must needs be, if at all possible, a long task.
As one surveys, through these volumes of essays, the various phases of scholarly and literary activity of their author, and then recalls the teaching, both extensive and intensive, done by him with such unremitting devotion to what he regarded as his first duty--and when one thinks, yet again, of his labors in connection with college and university administration, with the Connecticut State Board of Education, and in other lines--it is hard to understand where one man got the time, with all his ability and energy, to accomplish all this. In the presence of evidence of such incessant and unswerving industry, scarcely interrupted by the ill-health that overtook Sumner at about the age of fifty, an ordinary person feels a sense of oppression and of bewilderment, and is almost willing to subscribe to the old, hopeless tradition that “there were giants in those days.”