Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/401

Rh of capitalist managers is not without justification. Social theorists need to be meek men, and should stand with head uncovered before the special gifts and services of the men of genius who are working the latter-day miracles of industry and commerce. Confessions of trespass on forbidden ground are in order, but these must be personal and auricular before any authority prepared to shrive.

It has been said that the laws of economics should be stated in the indicative and not in the imperative mode, and this is true of all purely scientific theory. The only person who can possibly decide in practical affairs is the responsible manager of the affairs concerned. When sincere fanatics vent their ravings under the titles of "sociological science," it is not to be wondered at that suspicion should extend to those who are really trying to "mount to the summit round by round." Orators with more heat than light are apt to be confounded with patient students of practicable reform.

And yet we are not ready to confess that the student of society is absolutely without a function, a mere useless parasite, or at best a phonographic reporter of the dead past. Mr. Lyman J. Gage, intimate friend of the seer, Professor Swing, said: "To cherish false ideas concerning the motives of men who are sailing with us in the same ship of national destiny is to be raw and provincial. We are of the same blood, indissolubly united in our diversified interests. . . . . By a clearer understanding of our mutual duties will we clamor less for what we consider our respective rights." Mr. Gage would not browbeat into silence men who are intently studying the same phenomena which occupy business men, only from a different point of view.

It is the duty of the scholar to place and keep before the public the supreme criterion of social conduct, the common welfare. In a boiler factory, where the din and noise drown all sounds, the cry of a child cannot be heard. So men of affairs are apt to be deafened, by the uproar of those very affairs, to the neglected and forgotten members of our common humanity. A table of statistics, interpreted and illustrated by literary skill,