Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/572

556 it is perilous not to know, but he recognizes that this is the essential fact of the laissez-faire view. He says: "What, then, remains of the laissez-faire doctrine? Nothing but this: that it is useless, and may be dangerous, to control natural forces until their character is at first well understood." "Nothing but this"! And is the thorough understanding of social forces in their complicated actions and reactions really so trivial a thing? We have been wont to consider sociology—the true social science inductively based and deductively verified as dependent for its establishment upon all other sciences—as the most intricate and difficult of all, as but just fairly reached in the progress of the human intellect, and as requiring the highest range of intelligence for its successful investigation; and, if so, then by insisting that the recognition and understanding of social laws is an indispensable prerequisite to safe and effective social action, the believers in laissez faire put the highest premium upon intelligence, both as an instrument of the establishment of truth and a means of general education.

Again, and in another aspect, laissez faire implies, and by its nature provides for the best mental development. Its advocates insist that, in dealing with social subjects, there should be more reliance upon individual action, more personal responsibility, more spontaneous co-operation, and larger demands upon private enterprise. But this view obviously makes intelligence the controlling factor in social life, for successful self-direction is only possible with increasing knowledge, keener discrimination, and greater mental activity on the part of the actors. Not only is the highest pressure thus put upon individuals, but the conditions are favorable for what is most needed—self-improvement. There is no such thing as corporate intelligence, it is ever an individual thing. Whatever view we take of the nature of mind, it is essentially a personal attribute. If we hold it to be a special divine gift, it is still a gift to the individual primarily for individual uses. If we hold that mind has been naturally evolved, its development has come through individual experiences as a preparation for the care of individual interests. On any view mind is a personal endowment, its aptitudes a personal inheritance, its unfolding a result of personal exertion, and its exercise a matter of personal responsibility. The system, therefore, which calls for greater self-reliance and more independent self-direction, must not only assign a prerogative value to the social function of mind, but it adopts the only possible means of attaining its highest advantages. If it be said that the idea of sufficient general intelligence for social guidance is a chimera, that only shows that the laissez-faire view overestimates what mind can be made to do. Can it be for a moment maintained that the opposite school, which favors corporate and wholesale social regulation, the tendency of which is to paralyze the incentives to personal effort, places a higher estimate upon "mind as a social factor" than that which insists that citizens should rely more upon themselves and not shirk their individual duties? And what less is this higher trust in state compulsion as against voluntary action than a virtual abdication of the function of intelligence in the control of social activities? Working by deputy is assuredly not the best way of securing intelligent action. Is it too much to say that the system of coercive regulation flourishes best in ignorance? Ignorant constituencies clamor for endless legislative intermeddling, and equally ignorant representatives give them what they want. Notwithstanding all Mr. Ward says about the ascendency of laissez-faire ideas, do they control the public policy, or are they not limited to a few teachers who are generally disparaged as mere speculative doctrinaires? Are the members