Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/470

454 the laws of which Political Economy seeks to generalize, men would have continued in the lowest stage of barbarism to the present hour; they would see that, instead of jeering at the science and those who pursue it, their course should be to show in what respects the generalizations thus far made are untrue, and how they may be so expressed as to correspond to the truth more nearly.

I need not further exemplify the perturbing influence of impatience in sociological inquiry. Along with the irrational hope so conspicuously shown by every party having a new project for the furtherance of human welfare, there habitually goes this irrational irritation in presence of stern truths which negative sanguine anticipations. Be it some way of remedying the evils of competition, some scheme for rendering the pressure of population less severe, some method of organizing a government so as to secure complete equity, some plan for reforming men by teaching, by restriction, by punishment; any thing like calm consideration of probabilities, as estimated from experience, is excluded by this eagerness for an immediate result; and, instead of submission to the necessities of things, there comes vexation, felt if not expressed, against them, or against those who point them out, or against both.

That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves. Especially can we see it when these others belong to an alien society. France, during and since the late war, has furnished us almost daily with illustrations. The fact that, while the struggle was going on, any foreigner in Paris was liable to be seized as a Prussian, and that, if charged with being a Prussian, he was forthwith treated as one, sufficiently proves that hate makes rational estimation of evidence impossible. The marvellous distortions which this passion produces were abundantly exemplified during the reign of the Commune; and yet again after the Commune was subdued. The "preternatural suspicion," as Mr. Carlyle called it, which characterized conduct during the first revolution, characterized conduct during the late catastrophe. And it is displayed still. The sayings and doings of French political parties, alike in the Assembly, in the press, and in private societies, show that mutual hate causes mutual misinterpretations, fosters false conclusions, and utterly vitiates sociological generalizations.

While, however, it is manifest to us that, among our neighbors, strong sympathies and antipathies stand in the way of reasonable views and well-balanced policy, we do not perceive that among ourselves sympathies and antipathies distort judgments in degrees, not perhaps so extreme, but still in very great degrees. Instead of French opinion on French affairs, let us take English opinion on French affairs—not affairs of recent date, but affairs of the past; and, instead of a case showing the false estimation of evidence which sympathies and