Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/117

Rh altered. Most of the members of the body social in civilized, and especially in Christian countries, would be assigned in that case to Class A—though every one knows that in reality this class is a very small one indeed. Class B would be scarcely changed in number, because, while members of that class are ready to maintain that the views on which their conduct depends are, in their opinion, sound and just, these views are not such as the members of other classes are anxious to simulate. They are not popular views, like the self-sacrificing ones which so many pretend to hold, but by no means really act upon.

It is tolerably obvious that the well-being of society as a whole requires that Classes D and E shall not be unduly large, compared with the whole number of the community. Whatever tends to diminish their number, and especially the number of Class E, must tend to increase the well-being—that is, the happiness—of the social body. Class C, which always constitutes the main body, merges by insensible gradations into Class D, and Class D into Class E. Comparatively slight changes, influences relatively unimportant, suffice to transfer large numbers from the indifferent Class C to the self-seeking Class D, and similarly slight changes may suffice to transfer many from the simply self-seeking Class D to the noxious Class E. The lines of distinction between the first three classes are more marked. Members of the first class are more apt, at present, to pass into the third class than into the second, though little it should seem is needed to make these (the self-forgetting, enemy-loving members of the community) pass into the section combining due care of self with anxious desire to increase the happiness and well-being of the social body. That any members of the second class should pass either into the first, whence most of them came, or into the third, whose indifference to the welfare of others is unpleasing to them, or into the fourth, whose selfishness is abhorrent to them, is unlikely; for which reason this class should logically have occupied the first place, seeing that the class we have set first really merges both into the second and into the third, which should, therefore, be set on different sides of it. We had a reason, however, which many will understand, for not depriving Class A of the position it holds theoretically, though practically the class has no such standing, and is especially contemnedcondemned [sic] by Class C, the noisiest in pretending to accept its principles.

Since, then, the welfare of the body social depends mainly on the relative smallness of Classes D and E, the selfish and the noxious, it follows that an important, if not the chief, duty to society, for all who really and reasoningly desire the well-being and progress of the community, is so to regulate their conduct as to cause these classes to become relatively smaller and smaller. Conduct which can be shown to encourage the development of these classes, to make selfish ways pleasanter, and noxious ways safer, is injurious to the body social, and