Excerpt from Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States, Vol. 1: Abdication-Duty In no country in the world is the necessity of the study of political science and political economy greater than in the United States, in which every citizen is, directly or indirectly - through the medium of his vote - a legislator; and yet, in no great country, perhaps, has the study of politics as a science been so utterly neglected. Our experience as a people during the last decade has demonstrated how very important it is to lay before the great body of readers reliable works to which they may refer, when occasion requires, for the principles by which all great national questions are solved. The people of the United States for the past ten years, to go no farther back in their history, have been, so to speak, one great debating club, discussing such questions as the resumption of specie payments, contraction of the currency, inflation of the currency, money, paper money, the nature and cure of commercial depressions, the demonetization of silver, banks, savings banks, bi-metallism, the relations of capital and labor, the right of employment, socialism, communism, strikes, railroad policy, civil service, civil service reform, etc., etc. The thinking portion of the people have eagerly devoured whatever they could find on these topics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.