Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/57

Rh is possible, it has not as yet been satisfactorily rendered. But assuming the most dreaded answer to be the true one, we may still work on just the same, content to know that the greater legacy of betterment we leave them, the longer our children will be able to put off their hard fate. And besides, even in this day, we, too, find ourselves crowded out of work, or out of the market, by our needy fellow-beings, and thus hindered in trying to make our living.

But in other ways our fellow-beings hinder and shorten our sustenance. They rob us on the highway, break and plunder our inclosures, steal our purses. These are the simpler and ruder ways. They defraud us in a thousand ways. They embezzle and default. They organize gigantic schemes of plunder. And all these things necessitate laws, and governments to make and execute them, which cost immense sums of money. The Government of the United States alone costs nearly or quite as much as the annual savings of the people; though from this must be deducted the school, post-office, and other similar expenses, which would have to be paid privately if they were not paid publicly. Still, allowing one half for these purposes, the cost of government alone, to say nothing of the quarrels and crime which make it necessary, would, if saved, constitute a third of our annual savings.

But not only do (1) the existence in excess, and (2) the consciously perverse conduct of our fellow-beings hinder us in making a living; even when they do their best, the (3) awkwardness of those to whom we must delegate work which we can not do, costs us dearly every day. They bungle and blunder and delay us in an unlistable variety of ways. Our awkwardness works them the same hindrance. In this branch of the subject it would be tedious to enumerate, but fruitful to sit and think.

On the whole it is hard to say whether in our sustenance of the full measure of the life of our day we suffer most from the existence, or from the wickedness, or from the awkwardness of the other human beings who are trying to sustain life in the same planet, and have the same right to it as we.

Fortunately, they also help us, marvelously help us, and it remains to study how they help us. A more or less minute study of the ways in which our fellow-beings help us in making a living or achieving a sustenance, constitutes the main body of the science of political economy. Before entering on that study, it is well enough to inquire what we wish the result of their help to be. It needs not to be said that we are to help them as truly and if possible as fully as they do us. Keeping this tacitly in mind, what kind of a sustenance do we wish them to help us get? We think at once of two features which must characterize it: 1. We want it ample. 2. We want it easy.

In other words, we want as plenty as possible, and with as little work as possible. It is not merely plenty to eat and wear that we want, but in every other respect an ample living. Our tastes differ,