Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/794

774 organization of labor in such a manner as to secure the greatest economic return. In a word, our political economy, which, has been unmoral, must be made moral, if it is to be the science which shall direct men into the proper paths for the production and distribution of wealth.

In determining the character of ethical economics, it is necessary that we should have some principle to guide us in directing its course. This has already been hinted at in the suggestion that it is by the survival of the socially fit that economic growth is furthered. Now, society is an organism made up of mutually dependent parts, and for its existence a certain social order is necessary, and all actions which militate against that order are more or less immoral, according to the degree in which they detrimentally affect it. Conduct which tends to lower social vitality we hold to be bad, that which tends to raise it we consider good; and every practical attempt at reform proceeds upon this basis. Such changes involve alterations in the social constitution, and the production of an organism whose relations to the conditions of its life will differ from that which preceded it, and our test of the morality of the change will be its utility, "in the sense in which utility means fitness for the conditions of life." Hence, our test of ethical economics is social well-being. Let us subject the working of the strongest economic force to this test.

Industrial competition does not engender a struggle for existence, but rather a struggle for subsistence, and generally a struggle for a subsistence of a particular kind. Where the standard of living is high and the wages of the workingmen correspond to it, it is obvious that, other things being equal, the laborer who is well fed and well clothed will produce more than if under-fed and scantily clothed. The human body, like the steam-engine, depends upon heat for its motive force, and food is its fuel. A certain amount of food is absolutely essential to life. A small increase renders man capable of doing a little work. If, now, we add twenty-five per cent more heat, we get much more than a quarter more work. We probably double the economic energies of man. Let us double his supply of food, give him "a liberal, generous diet, ample to supply all the waste of the tissues, and to keep the fires of the body burning briskly, generating force enough to allow the laborer to put forth great muscular exertions through long periods of time," and we reach a high degree of economic efficiency.

There is, of course, a limit to this increase of food beyond which power is not increased proportionately, and, indeed, too great an increase may do harm rather than good; but it is a general rule that raising the standard of living in one direction