Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/642

 civilizations have been destroyed. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link, and our glorious statue with its head of gold and its shoulders of brass has as yet but feet of clay!

Political economy alone can give the answer. And, if you trace out, in the way I have tried to outline, the laws of the production and exchange of wealth, you will see the causes of social weakness and disease in enactments which selfishness has imposed on ignorance, and in maladjustments entirely within our own control.

And you will see the remedies. Not in wild dreams of red destruction nor weak projects for putting men in leading-strings to a brainless abstraction called the state, but in simple measures sanctioned by justice. You will see in light the great remedy, in freedom the great solvent. You will see that the true law of social life is the law of love, the law of liberty, the law of each for all and all for each; that the golden rule of morals is also the golden rule of the science of wealth; that the highest expressions of religious truth include the widest generalizations of political economy.

There will grow on you, as no moralizing could teach, a deepening realization of the brotherhood of man; there will come to you a firmer and firmer conviction of the fatherhood of God. If you have ever thoughtlessly accepted that worse than atheistic theory that want and wretchedness and brutalizing toil are ordered by the Creator, or, revolting from this idea, if you have ever felt that the only thing apparent in the ordering of the world was a blind and merciless fate careless of man's aspirations and heedless of his sufferings, these thoughts will pass from you as you see how much of all that is bad and all that is perplexing in our social conditions grows simply from our ignorance of law—as you come to realize how much better and happier men might make the life of man.

 

RECENT visit to Professor Henry A. Ward's "Natural Science Establishment" at Rochester, New York, led the writer to some reflections on the comparative value of a knowledge of natural history. In the prevailing systems of education, the subject is totally disregarded, or receives but trifling consideration. The classical languages and history, on the other hand, have always been taught, and are yet considered by the greater portion of the cultivated people as essential to a complete education, while the sciences have been treated as only of secondary importance. The information possessed by a country boy, gained by intelligent observation, of the birds or plants 