American political economist and educationist, president of Yale University, born in New Haven, CT, on the 23rd of April 1856. He was the son of James Hadley, the philologist, from whom, as from his mother—whose brother, Alexander Catlin Twining (1801–1884), was an astronomer and authority on constitutional law—he inherited unusual mathematical ability. He graduated at Yale in 1876 as valedictorian, having taken prizes in English, classics and astronomy; studied political science at Yale (1876–1877) and at Berlin (1878–1879); was a tutor at Yale in 1879–1883, instructor in political science in 1883–1886, professor of political science in 1886–1891, professor of political economy in 1891–1899, and dean of the Graduate School in 1892–1895; and in 1899 became president of Yale University—the first layman to hold that office. He was commissioner of the Connecticut bureau of labour statistics in 1885–1887. As an economist he first became widely known through his investigation of the railway question and his study of railway rates, which antedated the popular excitement as to rebates. His Railroad Transportation, its History and Laws (1885) became a standard work, and appeared in Russian (1886) and French (1887); he testified as an expert on transportation before the Senate committee which drew up the Interstate Commerce Law; and wrote on railways and transportation for the Ninth and Tenth Editions (of which he was one of the editors) of the Encyclopædia Britannica, for Lalor’s Cyclopædia of Political Science, Political Economy, and Political History of the United States (3 vols., 1881–1884), for The American Railway (1888), and for The Railroad Gazette in 1884–1891, and for other periodicals. His idea of the broad scope of economic science, especially of the place of ethics in relation to political economy and business, is expressed in his writings and public addresses. In 1907–1908 he was Theodore Roosevelt professor of American History and Institutions in the university of Berlin. American economist and educationist, was elected a director of the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway in 1913. In 1914 he lectured at the university of Oxford on “institutions of the United States.” In 1915 he evoked considerable discussion in America by declaring that young men who looked forward to a political career should have private means so as to avoid pecuniary temptations. In 1915 he endorsed college military camps and favoured counting military training for a degree. In 1920 he resigned as president of Yale University. The same year he was elected a director of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé railway.
Among his other publications are the following: Economics: an Account of the Relations between Private Property and Public Welfare (1896); The Education of the American Citizen (1901); The Relations between Freedom and Responsibility in the Evolution of Democratic Government (1903, in Yale Lectures on the Responsibilities of Citizenship); Baccalaureate Addresses (1907); and Standards of Public Morality (1907), being the Kennedy Lectures for 1906.
