Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/715

Rh merely political liberty—in the liberty of men masters of themselves and already the partakers of a far higher life than that of the self-pampering sons and daughters of luxury. The more we reflect upon it, the more we are impressed with the amount of good which might be done in the world, independently of any and all legislation, simply by the substitution of higher aims for the lower ones which now rule so largely all classes of society. How many pass their lives in a miserable attempt to imitate the bad taste and generally foolish proceedings of the class next above them in point of means! If to-day Shoddy is king, it is simply because men and women are silly enough to make him so; not because there is anything in our laws to authorize or constitute his royalty. We can dethrone him whenever we like, without passing even the smallest municipal by-law, by simply resolving to throw off the yoke of false pretense, and live our lives in a simple, honest, and reasonable manner, studying what is excellent and not what is fashionable, the things that make for in ward peace and outward dignity, rather than those which make for outward show and inward unrest.

It is truly the folly of mankind that is chiefly responsible for the evils which have called socialist agitation into existence; and it is doubtless a deep-lying instinct that such is the case which causes society as a whole to look coldly upon proposed socialistic remedies. It is desirable that discussion of this subject should be as free as possible, and our belief is that the more the subject is discussed the more clearly it will appear that a higher individualism is the key to the solution of our social problems. What the world wants is an extension of those liberties which a man can create for himself, rather than of the privileges and protections which are created by statute. The highest service, therefore, which any one can render to society is to awaken men in general to those possibilities of life which simple individual initiative and determination can realize; for thus, more than in any other way, would the unjust power of capital be broken, and the way be opened for the healthiest and happiest development of the social organism.

of the leading writers of fiction of the present day has, in a quite recent work, attempted to set forth the miserable results of the pretentious modes of life and, above all, the pretentious systems of education which, according to his view, are characteristic of the time. The scene of his story is laid in England in the year of the Queen's Jubilee (1887), and the local color, as the expression is, is strongly English; nevertheless, there is much in the descriptions given and the lessons drawn which is capable of application far beyond the limits of the society the novelist had in view. He introduces us to a young woman who is overstraining all the resources of a very indifferent constitution in a desperate struggle to prepare for the matriculation examination of the London University, but whose mind is meantime in even a more feeble condition than her body, her judgment in practical matters wholly unexercised, her temper and disposition a compound of vanity, jealousy, and spite. We read of another who, having passed through an expensive course at schools reputed to be of a very superior grade, had emerged with an equipment of undigested knowledge which simply developed in her a morbid self-consciousness and a futile ambition to shine in some higher sphere than