Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/664

648 are adverse. Throughout all past time vitiation of evidence by influences of this nature has been going on to a degree varying with each people and each age; and hence arises an additional obstacle to the obtainment of fit data.

Yet another, and perhaps stronger, distorting influence existing in the medium through which facts reach us, results from the self-seeking, pecuniary or other, of those who testify. We require constantly to bear in mind that personal interests affect most of the statements on which sociological conclusions are based, and on which legislation proceeds.

Every one knows this to be so where the evidence concerns mercantile affairs. That railway enterprise, at first prompted by pressing needs for communication, presently came to be prompted by speculators, professional and financial; and that the estimates of cost, of traffic, of profits, etc., set forth in prospectuses, were grossly misleading; many readers have been taught by bitter experience. That the gains secured by schemers who float companies have fostered an organized system which has made the falsification of evidence a business, and which, in the case of bubble insurance companies, has been worked so methodically that it has become the function of a journal to expose the frauds continually repeated, are also familiar facts; reminding us how in these directions it is needful to look very skeptically on the allegations put before us. But there is not so distinct a consciousness that in other than business enterprises, self-seeking is an active cause of misrepresentation.

Like the getting up of companies, the getting up of agitations and of societies has become, to a considerable extent, a means of advancement. As in the United States politics has become a profession, into which a man enters to get an income, so here there has grown up, though happily to a smaller extent, a professional philanthropy, pursued with a view either to position, or to profit, or to both. Much as the young clergyman in want of a benefice, feeling deeply the spiritual destitution of a suburb that has grown beyond churches, busies himself in raising funds to build a church, and probably does not, during his canvass, understate the evils to be remedied; so every here and there an educated man with plenty of leisure and small income, greatly impressed with some social evil to be remedied or benefit to be achieved, becomes the nucleus to an institution, or the spur to a movement. And since his success depends mainly on the strength of the case he makes out, it is not to be expected that the evils to be dealt with will be faintly pictured, or that he will insist very strongly upon facts adverse to his plan. As I can personally testify, there are those who, having been active in getting up schemes for alleged beneficial public ends, consider themselves aggrieved when not afterward appointed salaried officials. The recent exposure of the "Free Dormitory Association," which, as stated at a meeting of the