Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/223

Rh The object of the social reformer should be, not only to accomplish the renovation of society, but to do it in the quickest possible time in which it can be so accomplished that the changes effected shall be permanent, and the trend of social evolution shall surely be directed toward the ideal end of individual enlightenment and liberation and social integration. These ends can be surely accomplished by the method of evolution; they are as surely retarded and indefinitely postponed by the methods of anarchical violence and artificial compulsion. The individualism fostered and aimed at by the evolutionary method should be sharply distinguished from that destructive anarchism which aims at the sudden and forceful abolishment of existing institutions.

Here, too, biology offers us a wise suggestion. Galton's law of "reversion toward mediocrity" shows that those biological changes which are suddenly effected by artificial selection and forcible deviation from the main trend of natural evolutionary tendency are not permanent. They endure only so long as the organisms are kept under the direct and active influence of the artificial conditions which produced them. The moment they are left to the unrestrained operation of purely natural forces, they speedily revert to their original status. This must be the case in sociological evolution also, whenever social and institutional conditions are artificially forced, in advance of the intellectual culture and functional development of the masses of the people.

The history of our own time is full of instructive examples illustrative of this sociological law: of innumerable co-operative experiments, ideal communities, and the like, that have arisen, obedient to philanthropic impulse, enjoyed a brief, precarious existence, and died for want of sustenance; of artificial commercial situations, the product of legislative interference with the natural laws of trade, which induce at first a feverish appearance of prosperity, followed by great fluctuations in values, and finally by panic and financial collapse. As artificial conditions thus established are always liable to be suddenly modified or annulled by variations in popular sentiment, the progress of discovery and invention, changes in governmental administration and administrative policy, the influx of foreign elements into the population of a given locality, and a thousand and one other causes, temporarily or permanently operating, it should manifestly be the purpose of the wise social reformer to build along the great lines of natural evolutionary tendency, and thus to make use of those elemental forces, social, moral, and biological, which will insure stability and permanent prosperity for the results of his efforts.

He will thus aim to encourage voluntary co-operation instead of an enforced regulation of society by means of legislative