Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/787

Rh down in unscrupulous sharpness with lacking moral sense, society would be in a condition of more stable equilibrium. No radical alteration in social order will be possible until human nature has slowly been prepared for it by a corresponding alteration. Social reconstruction must be preceded by a reconstruction of man's nature. Has modern society, then, nothing to answer for? Can it calmly point to the inexorable laws of evolution as responsible for social wrongs? Assuredly not. Society must be held in a measure responsible for the crippling environment of so many of its members. The labor that is treated as a pure commodity, to be purchased in the lowest market, will be apt to sink to that level. The manufacturer sees in the excessive division of labor a way to quick profits; hence even pins must be made, from head to point, by different artisans. This plan may produce sharp pins, but it makes dull men, whose children will probably be duller yet.

Trades-unions and labor organizations sin more in this respect, however, than the greediest capitalists. The leaders by sternly repressing all efforts of the men to better their condition, by checking all ambition to become skillful, by stopping apprentices from learning trades, and by striving to produce a general level of remuneration, are reducing laborers to the condition of slaves.

Modern industrial civilization is adapted to make the sharp sharper and the dull duller, which is only another way of saying concentration of wealth and diffusion of poverty. Society should strive to atone for its fearful inequalities, not by division and almsgiving, but by strengthening the weak for more successful effort. It must aid the poor and unfortunate by giving them a chance to help themselves. Giving to charities is esteemed generous; it is a truer generosity for the keen man of affairs not to ruinously undersell his less acute neighbor and thus perhaps force him to depend on charity. Above all, no social relief that is not based upon essential causes can be permanently successful. Social reformation that is not in harmony with the underlying laws of Nature will always be a failure. It must follow in the lines indicated by a logical study of the sciences of biology, physiology, and even of pathology. Social law must conform to natural law. All artificial adjustments only complicate existing troubles in leaving untouched the real causes of these troubles. If several men are in a boat that capsizes, all will struggle to reach the shore, but the man who can not swim will sink, although all the legislatures of the world forbid death by drowning. He sinks in obedience to a natural law, attraction of gravitation, the operation of which, to his destruction, he is not expert enough to avoid in an unaccustomed environment. If society will prevent such accidents, it must do it in the natural way of strengthening its members and teaching them how to swim, plainly showing the possible consequences of such a neglect, and not by issuing fiats against misfortune. This is the natural as