Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/419

Rh and possible economy of effort through organization of organizations.

In the second place, let us encourage legislation that shall prescribe the lines within which corporate action must recognize public interest. I admit that this is only another way of saying: Let us face the necessity of evolving superior citizens in order that there may be superior legislators. In other words let public opinion register itself in authoritative public standards as rapidly as the social consciousness becomes intelligent. Let there be careful study of the developing needs and opportunities of society, and let the results of study declare themselves in developing legal principles of social self-control. I am not now referring to any particular measures, but to the principle that legislation which creates corporations without corresponding regulation is as anomalous and socially dangerous as a regime of domestic relations ruled solely by the instinct of propagation, without responsibilty for the training of children.

The laissez faire doctrine is today as fast in the limbo of political impotence as is the Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The high priests of this doctrine—Herbert Spencer in England, and Professor Sumner in this country—never meant what they have been supposed to teach. They have not said "legislatures should do nothing," but "legislatures should not do the wrong thing, and they will do the wrong thing till men put more brains and fairness and knowledge of affairs into legislation." It would be as rational to set about improving the type of human beings by attempting to breed the nervous system out of our bodies, as to calculate upon social progress without development of the coordinating agency of legislation. So long as there is society there must be social volition correlating parts of society to the whole. Corporate hands are wont to act as though they would say, "I am the body!" There will be no more important and complicated legislative tasks in the epoch on which we have entered, than those which are already upon us in the necessity of reducing these usurping organs to normal vicarious agency within the social body.