Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/301

Rh today is due, in large measure, to suspicion that men are falling more and more into the position of toilers for other men who are evading the law of reciprocal service. Dissatisfaction is fed by belief that many occupations, needful in themselves, are becoming less and less a social benefaction and more and more a means of levying tribute over and above the value of the service. Successful and arrogant individualism seems to defy the law of mutualism that must reign in right society.

If it were our duty to believe that the thing which now is must always be, it would be treason to describe desirable things not yet achieved. If, before pointing out possibilities of improvement, it were necessary to know the whole process by which the actual may be changed into the rational, hope would be forever dumb. If approach to completer justice in future society involved resort to ameliorative injustice in present society, we might well distrust prophecies of progress.

It is both weak and wrong to refuse recognition of a principle on the ground that we cannot forsee the method of its application. Right thought and right feeling make right action easier. The most dismal and impotent pessimism is the hopelessness that dares not admit the need of change. Adoption of the principles just cited into commanding rank in our standards of social action will assure steady approach to more worthy conditions. The details of progressive adjustment must come from experiments, just as in the case of improvements in printing presses or in dynamos.