Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/518

506 upon the prevalence among the people of a temperament, which, when undisturbed by foreign elements, inspires a theoretical and practical adoption of the homely doctrine, 'Live and let live.'

"In the communities of the West, we weed out our social failures, we throw them—or let them sink—into what we call the residuum. Our social residuum lives and propagates its species in a medium as well prepared for the growth of anti-social vices as the hay tea or chicken broth in which amateurs of microbes cultivate their disease germs. But the man of science calls cultivation successful if the virus grows milder and less fatal in each generation. His media are sterilized by the most elaborate precautions; everything in which the germs of disease delight, not merely morbid matter, dirt, decay, but even healthy atoms of animal or vegetable substance, which, having been alive, are subject to decomposition, are to be excluded, saving just such a simple minimum as may serve to keep the microbe alive and multiplying. Small wonder that under this treatment it grows less virulent, it is tamed until it becomes a harmless inoculant, and might in time lose all its power to infect. But we, instead, plant the children of our social failures in a soil where their parents' vices and defects must become intensified, and where every kind of quality and propensity injurious to the individual and to society must develop. The children of drunkards, nurtured in the lowest depths of city squalor, have their hereditary craving for alcohol stimulated by chronic hunger, exhaustion, and foul air. . . . . We pay covetousness its wages in the same coin as skill, and we visit feebleness with the same industrial penalties as crime. . . . . We ridicule the idea of making occupation hereditary, yet we acquiesce in the propagation of classes in which one generation has nothing to bequeath to the next save bad health, bad habits, and general incapacity for wholesome and serviceable living.

"We acquiesce in all this not as morally right or practically expedient, but as the natural or necessary consequence of the free play of individual enterprise in the struggle for existence. And, so far the heterogeneous society of the West can be said to guide its conduct by any creed, it is probably inspired by a kind of faith in the healing power of freedom. There is no new thing under the sun, and English Liberalism agrees with Chinese Taoism: 'There is such a thing as letting mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind.' Philosophical Anarchism is the logical outcome of the