Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/836

 820 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

to benefit the people. In the hands of wise and humane officers, such as the present head of these great bureaus, they are certain to be productive of immense public good.

It was the great Descartes who first enunciated the truth that all questions of quality are reducible to those of quantity. This mathematical axiom finds its economic expression in the corresponding truth that all questions of principle are at bottom questions of interest. The object of all science is to create art which will assist nature in furthering progress. Art has its highest expression in machinery. Art and machinery belong to economics because they are economical. They consist in the enlistment of the forces of nature in man's service. The phys- ical forces have already been so enlisted until the power of pro- duction has become next to unlimited. This has brought about a state of things in which there is a constant tendency to what is called "overproduction." What is meant is the production of more than can, in the present state of society, be consumed. But the inability to consume is not due to incapacity for con- sumption itself, except in a few articles. It is due to the inability to obtain. The fact that there are thousands in want even of the necessaries of life that are thus overproduced shows clearly enough that there is no more produced than would be eagerly consumed if it could be obtained. The problem of the age is to put what is produced into the hands of those who desire to consume it, and to do this in harmony with economic laws, and not as a gift or charity, which violates economic laws.

While no one is wise enough at the present day to formulate a plan for securing this result, the general principle underlying the problem may even now be stated. It is this : The progress made in economic art and machinery is far in advance of that made in social art and machinery. Production is essentially an individual enterprise and comparatively simple, while distribu- tion, not in the economic but in the sociological sense, is highly complex. Production is the result of individual ingenuity applied to the physical and vital forces of nature. Distribution must be the result of collective ingenuity applied to the social