Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/60

50. In our time a large proportion of the public and private funds, distributed among the poor, is spent in actually diminishing their industry, frugality, and self reliance. Yet the evil of indiscriminate alms giving is diminishing under the influence of sounder knowledge of social laws, and genuine charity is more and more directed by careful study of the means by which wealth may be spent for the distinct benefit of society. Such examples as these show clearly the imperfection and untrustworthiness of traditional, or what is called intuitive morality, in deciding on questions of right and wrong, and the necessity of appealing in all cases to the best attainable information of social science to decide what actions are really for or against the general good, and are therefore to be classed as virtuous or vicious.

Moreover, it is not too much to say that the comparatively small advance which moral science has made, since barbaric ages, has been due to the repugnance of moralists to admit, in human action, the regular causality which is the admitted principle of other parts of the action of the universe. The idea of the influence of arbitrary will in the individual man has checked and opposed the calculations which now display the paramount action of society as an organized whole. One point in M. Quetelet's doctrine of society requires a mention for its practical bearing on morals. There has seemed to some to be an immoral tendency in his principle that virtuous and vicious acts are products, not merely of the individual who does them, but of the society in which they take place, as though the tendency of this view were to weaken individual responsibility, and to discourage individual effort. Yet, when properly understood, this principle offers a more strong and definite impulse to the effort of society for good and against evil, than the theory which refers the individual's action more exclusively to himself. M. Quetelet's inference from the regular production of a certain amount of crime year by year, from a society in a certain condition, is embodied in his maxim that society prepares the crime and the criminal executes it. This should be read with a comment of the author's. "If," he says, "I were to take up the pavement before my house, should I be astonished to hear in the morning that people had fallen and hurt themselves, and could I lay the blame on the sufferers, inasmuch as they were free to go there or elsewhere?" Thus every member of society who offers a facility to the commission of crime, or does not endeavor to hinder its commission, is, in a degree, responsible for it. It is absurd to suppose that the crimes in great cities are attributable altogether to the free agency of the poor wretches who are transported or hung for them. The nation which can and does not prevent the existence of a criminal class is responsible collectively for the evil done by this class. This we can see plainly enough, although the exact distribution of the responsibility among the different members of society may be impossible to determine. Such a theory, of course,