Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/519

Rh optimistic doctrine that the best possible world will be made by leaving every one at liberty to do the best he can for himself. . ..

"It is a foolish fatalism to assume that everything which occurs naturally must occur necessarily, or that nothing new can become natural. Every historical occurrence is at once natural and necessary, in the sense of being necessarily due to causes naturally operating on existing minds under existing conditions. But men act under the influence of felt desires, and the unforeseen results of their action are sometimes inconsistent with the ends intentionally aimed at; and this discovery itself is a natural motive for a change of action. The malign influence exercised in the middle of the present century, by the accepted doctrines of political economy, lay exactly in the encouragement they gave to the delusion that all natural tendencies were unalterable, even by experience revealing new evils consequent on their operation.

"We agree with Mencius that there is no difference between killing a man with a sword, and letting him die because we do not know how to regulate the struggle for existence ; and there is no general disposition to repudiate 'the everlasting obligations which are due by man to man.' The problem has reached the intellectual stage, and we need men of science to show how the felt obligations may be met almost more than moral teaching to rouse the sense of duty. . . . On the face of it, it does not appear to be a more complicated problem to apply the principles of righteousness to the ramifications of trade and industry than to apply the principles of pure mathematics to the construction of the Forth Bridge. All that is needed is that our moralists should acquaint themselves as fully and precisely with the facts of industry and commerce as our mathematicians do with the properties of matter. The processes of the operative, the manufacturer, the warehouseman, the carrier, the merchant, and the retailer must be put under the microscope, and every detail of them examined under the dry light of disinterested science, when much that is unfit to face the pencil of the recorders will at once shrink out of existence. . . . Human needs, human instincts, and human perceptions do not alter in their nature, and the dislocations of intricate social adjustments, which follow from the natural course of historic development, will not prove beyond the skill of social surgery to reduce, if the need is recognized for encyclopædic wisdom in the professors of the healing art.

"To combine progress and stability, it is necessary, not to prevent all change of status on the part of individuals, but to establish laws and