Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/69

Rh we have grounds for inferring that, along with the progress to a regulative organization higher than the present, there will be a change of the kind indicated in the conception of honor. It will become a matter of wonder that there should ever have existed those who thought it admirable to enjoy without working, at the expense of others who worked without enjoying.

But the temporarily adapted mental state of the ruling and employing classes keeps out, more or less effectually, thoughts and feelings of these kinds. Habituated from childhood to the forms of subordination at present existing—regarding these as parts of a natural and permanent order—finding satisfaction in supremacy, and conveniences in the possession of authority; the regulators of all kinds remain unconscious that this system, made necessary as it is by the defects of existing human nature, brings round penalties on themselves as well as on those subordinate to them, and that its pervading theory of life is as mistaken as it is ignoble.

Enough has been said to show that from the class-bias arise further obstacles to right thinking in sociology. As a part of some general division of a community, and again as a part of some special subdivision, the citizen acquires adapted feelings and ideas which inevitably influence his conclusions about public affairs. They affect alike his conceptions of the past, his interpretations of the present, his anticipations of the future.

Members of the regulated classes, kept in relations more or less antagonistic with the classes regulating them, are thereby hindered from seeing the need for, and benefits of, this organization which seems the cause of their grievances; they are at the same time hindered from seeing the need for, and benefits of, the harsher forms of industrial regulation that existed during past times; and they are also hindered from seeing that the improved industrial organizations of the future can come only through improvements in their own natures. On the other hand, members of the regulating classes, while partially blinded to the facts that the defects of the working-classes are the defects of natures like their own placed under different conditions, and that the existing system is defensible, not for its convenience to them-selves, but as being the best now practicable for the community at large, are also partially blinded to the vices of past social arrangements, and to the badness of those who in past social systems used class-power less mercifully than it is used now; while they have difficulty in seeing that the present social order, like past social orders, is but transitory, and that the regulating classes of the future may have, with diminished power, increased happiness.

Unfortunately for the Social Science, the class-bias, like the bias of patriotism, is in a degree needful for social preservation. It is like in this, too, that escape from its influence is often only effected by an