Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/176

164 In order to insure it, the aggregated toil of the earth's inhabitants would be left to produce from the soil all the needs of human life. Unhampered by artificial restrictions, and untaxed by waste or destruction, the wealth so produced would more than suffice for this end. Its distribution, left to the natural laws of competition and of supply and demand, would be such that the greatest energy and skill expended would bring the greatest returns; and men would obtain of the world's goods according to their deserts. The prosperity of "industrialism" in its perfection would be but another name for the millennium, when all men would toil in common brotherhood, and each take from the store of wealth produced the equivalent of the work he contributed.

A wide and all-pervading difference thus exists between these types of structure into which the social organism tends to grow, showing itself especially in the utterly unlike conditions each requires to realize prosperity. That they are at variance, and must strive to displace each other wherever they coexist, is too obvious a corollary to need verification. How this fact points to a true conception of the philosophy of commercial depression, let us now see.

A universal law of social progress, with which we are all familiar, is that established systems in thought, morals, manners, government, or any department of human activity, struggle to perpetuate themselves by a fight against all innovations. Whatever is new and progressive, or represents the requirements of an enlarging field of life, has got to gain its foothold in the face of the powerful opposition of the old and pre-established. Those more perfected and exact conceptions of Nature, which we call scientific ideas, have prevailed only after centuries of mortal strife with the inherited superstitions and imperfect generalizations of our semi-civilized forefathers. The progressive and liberal governments of our most advanced nations to-day have been established in spite of the bitter opposition of their predecessors, and are themselves fighting tooth and nail the higher forms that will succeed them. In literature and art old schools strive to deny existence to the new; and, even in the little affairs of our daily lives, we are all permitting the things that are, and "have sufficed to our fathers before us," to keep out the better things that might be.

The result of this universal war between the old forms and the new is, to the former, ultimate change or destruction; while to the latter—and here is the vital point of what we are trying to demonstrate—it is constant retardation.

Every triumph of superstitious ignorance retards the harmonious spread of science; every point gained by the political