Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/313

 wages of a girl's father have something to do with them, too, and the wages of her great grandfather for the matter of that. So the dividends on which live the delicate and charming ladies she beholds alighting from their motor cars every morning in the shopping district may have something to do with them, though she is as unconscious and as innocent of the relation as they, as ignorant as all of us are. Rents have something to do with them, and so do taxes.

But after the whole economic system has been re-*adjusted and perfected and equalized, after we have the minimum wage, and the single tax, and industrial democracy, and every man gets what he produces, and economic pressure has been as scientifically adjusted as the atmospheres in a submarine torpedo boat, there is always the great law of the contrariety of things to be reckoned with, according to which the more carefully planned the event, the less it resembles the original conception. The human vision is so weak, and the great circle of life so prodigious! The solution will come, if it ever comes at all, by slow, patient, laborious, drudging study, far from the midnight session of the legislature, far from the ear and the pencil of the eager reporter, far from the platform of the sweating revivalist, far from the head office of the police. Our fondly perused pornography might expose the whole of the underworld to the light of day, the general assembly might enact successive revisions of the revised statutes for a hundred years, we might develop the most superb police organization in all history,