Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/913

Rh discoveries and inventions have to pass through a period of incubation, as recently electric lighting and the transmission of force by electricity, and now the division and dispersion of motive force into small shops, experiments in photography of colors, etc. Numerous costly efforts are necessary in seeking advance in such matters which we see to be possible and even near, but which are still far from the practicable period. Outside of the professional and technical ranks the persons who can make these experiments are not of the class who are simply at ease. At most they can only devote insignificant and insufficient sums to them. Such persons may be set to their work and kept at it by the private aid of the really wealthy, who are not asked to risk a fraction of their capital, but only a small portion of their surplus income, after all its other applications have been provided for. Wealth is thus put in the way of fulfilling its social function of assisting progress; and much more is accomplished by it in this way than the multitude think. A similar field of usefulness is found in giving assistance to agricultural experimentation. The great English lords, according to Thorold Rogers in his Economical Interpretation of History, achieved much in this direction in the seventeenth century; and Arthur Young has cited the cases of numerous gentlemen and industrial proprietors in France who improved their opportunities of thus doing good. A large estate is a free school, a field of experiments in novelties from which the neighboring small property derives a full share of benefit. The trial of new cultivations, of selected seed, of improved implements, of methods suggested by science, is the task of the opulent large proprietor or of the rich manufacturer or merchant spending his vacation or his leisure on his country estate. So these large proprietors have a mission to perform in the choice of good breeders for reproduction or selection, and in the improvement of vegetable species.

A second social function of wealth is found in enterprises requiring patronage and remunerative philanthropy. The term "remunerative philanthropy" may have an odd sound to some persons. It is, however, true that rich men render great social services by the performance of the kind of work which we have designated thus. A portion of the revenue of the wealthy might well be devoted to enterprises of general and public utility, which would also, if well directed, produce a modest but respectable remuneration. There are a number of kinds of businesses capable of returning a small profit, but in which the chances of gain, though not absent, are too limited to attract private speculators, careful only of their personal interest, which might be undertaken by wealthy men satisfied to put out a part of their revenues for low interest. An investigation made about fifteen