Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/798

778 the limitations just mentioned, we are entitled to do what we please with our own, and this also seems to be in accord with the principles of justice, of which, indeed, the law of equal freedom is the embodiment. But does this cover the whole extent of our obligation? Every right has for its correlative a duty to be performed. Are all such duties included in the limitations upon rights that have been mentioned? Has society no just claims upon its members other than those of mutual forbearance? Clearly not, for rights are not the measure of duties. The latter occupy a much larger field of life, and, although their consideration is chiefly confined to ethics proper, yet in the study of economics a clearer recognition of social duties and an insistance upon their needfulness as factors in securing the greatest economic return for efforts expended will tend to put the science upon a surer foundation. Take, for instance, the great question of laissez-faire. As Prof. Sidgwick says: "We can not determine what government ought to do without considering what private persons may be expected to do; and what they may be expected to do will, to some extent at least, depend on what it is thought to be their duty to do; and, more generally, it was before observed that in the performance even of the ordinary industrial functions with which economic science is primarily concerned, men are not merely influenced by the motive of self-interest, as economists have sometimes assumed, but also extensively by moral considerations."

We have here reached also an explanation of the residuum of existing sentiment in regard to the distribution of wealth. The duties which its creation imposes upon all the men who produce it are not distinctly realized by the mass of mankind. On the contrary, individuals and classes are more often concerned with their own rights and the duties of others. Dissatisfaction naturally follows, as we are sure to find fault with others for the nonperformance of duty, while forgetting that our own neglect must produce the same dissatisfaction elsewhere. This applies as well to the laborer as the employer or capitalist. All owe it to society that they shall exercise their economic functions in such a manner as to enhance the social well-being. For, "it should not be forgotten here that, at least in the higher stages of the economy of nations, scarcely any work or saving is possible without the co-operation of society. And society must be conceived not only as the sum total of the now living individuals that compose it, but in its entire past, present, and future, and also as being led and borne onward by eternal ideas and wants."

This is not the only economic service which society renders to