George B. Dixwell
George Basil Dixwell (1814-1885) was born on December 12, 1814, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of John Dixwell, a Doctor, who received his M.D. from Harvard in 1796. The Dixwell family were esteemed for their intellectual culture and personal worth. The younger Dixwell received an early education from Boston Public Latin School. Like his father before him, George Dixwell would be admitted to Harvard in 1830. He was apparently a very gifted scholar who excelled in all subject areas, but after graduating around 1834, Dixwell decided to enter into a career as a merchant. He would join his older brother in an expedition to India where they established a mercantile house. Over the next thirty years, Dixwell continued his career as a merchant, and undertook operations in both India and China, where he became fluent in Hindi and Mandarin, which aided his commercial activities in the region.
Dixwell ceased his commercial operations and returned to the United States in 1873, at the age of fifty-eight. After receiving a sizable inheritance from his parents and being free from his business affairs, Dixwell turned his attention to the study of science, philosophy, and most importantly, political economy. Although he never produced a major treatise on economics, his articles, many of which were republished in pamphlet format, accorded him a strong reputation within Protectionist ranks. Described as “a demolisher of false systems, an exposer of fallacies, [and] an eradicator of errors,” Dixwell’s essays represented a series of sharp offensives against competing economic doctrines. With the above in mind, Dixwell’s approach to political economy differed from that of most other economists within the American Protectionist School. Whereas other American Protectionists tended to adopt an inductive approach, Dixwell, being immersed in the study of logic, utilized the deductive method. Through the use of logical reasoning, Dixwell focused his attention on exposing the fallacies of competing economic doctrines. Among his critical essays are The Premises of Free Trade Examined (1881), a Review of Bastiat’s Sophisms of Protection (1881), “Progress and Poverty”: A Review of the Doctrines of Henry George (1882), a Review of Perry (1882), and a Review of Professor Sumner’s Speech (1882). Speaking a few days before his death, Dixwell, it is said, told his friend and fellow protectionist, John L. Hayes, that “for the last seven years of my life, waking or sleeping, I have thought and dreamed of nothing else [other than political economy].” On April 10, 1885, George Dixwell died of pneumonia, at the age of seventy.