WALKER, FRANCIS AMASA (184o-1897), American soldier and economist, was born in Boston, Mass., on July 2, 1840. His father, Amasa Walker (1799-1875), was also a distinguished economist whose principal work, The Science of Wealth, attained great popularity as a textbook. Francis Walker graduated at Amherst college in 186o, studied law and fought in the Northern army during the whole of the Civil War, being a prisoner in the famous Libby prison, Richmond. After the war he became editorial writer on the Springfield, Mass., Republican, and in 1869 was made chief of the Government bureau of statistics. He was superintendent of the ninth and tenth censuses (those of 1870 and 188o), and (1871-72) commissioner of Indian affairs. From 1873 to his death his work was educational, first as professor (1873 81) of political economy in the Sheffield scientific school at Yale, and then as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech nology, Boston. In other fields he promoted common-school edu
cation (especially in manual training), the Boston park system, and the work of the public library, and took an active part in the discussion of monetary, economic, statistical and other public questions. As an author he wrote on governmental treatment of the Indians, The Wages Question (1876), Money (1878), Land and its Rent (1883), General Political Economy (1883-84), and various other works. As an economist, from the time of the appearance of his book on the subject, he so effectively combated the old theory of the "wage-fund" as to lead to its abandonment or material modification by American students; while in his writ ings on finance, from 1878 to the end of his life, he advocated international bimetallism. He died in Boston Jan. 5, 1897.
See James Phinney Munroe, A Life of Francis Amasa Walker (1923).