Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/335

 SOCIAL POLICY TOWARD DEPENDENTS 323

action by a community. It is known and has its reasons in rela- tion to the rational order of society. It can be taught and learned, for it is taught and learned. Hence it is a subject of science and has won proper recognition as a topic in this Scientific Congress. This technique is learned originally as other scientific conclusions are reached by systematic observation of social phenomena, by induction from facts, by performing experiments with methods under varied conditions, by inventing working hypotheses and putting them to the test of reality.

We are students of causes in a rational system of life; only we are trying to discover forces and conditions which will bring about a desired result, and we are not merely trying to explain a fact completed. We set before us not merely an effect to be accounted for, but a state of society and of persons which we desire and will to produce, on the ground that we represent it to ourselves as desirable. We are mentally adjusting a system of means to good ends, and not merely looking for the process by which what actually exists once came to be. One of these pro- cesses is just as truly scientific as the other, although the difficulty of prevision and provision is greater than that of explaining the past.

III.

ELEMENTS IN A SOCIAL POLICY RELATING TO THE DEPENDENT

GROUP.

I. We need to distinguish as sharply as possible, both in social thought and action, the members of this group from those who belong to the Industrial Group. Perhaps one of the most disastrous forms of mental confusion is that of confounding these two groups and so treating them alike. The dependents have long been played off against the wage-earners, and are even now fre- quently used to lower the standard of living of the competent so as to reduce many of the self-supporting to beggary, shame, and demoralization, with a long train of vicious consequences through heredity for the future race. The typical historical example here is the national degradation which threatened the English people before the reform of the poor law about 1834, when poor relief