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190

HISTORIC GROWTH OF MAN.

system, one that has many kinds of institutions, with a multitude of officers. If they are capable of understanding and using all these, then they will surely find no difficulty in understanding and in using the far simpler plan which we propose in harmonism, with its far less number of officers. The new social order fills a greater variety of functions, but with less than one-tenth of the social or political machinery which was required in the old.

THE GERMAN SOCIALISTS, Marx and Lasalle, had

no natural standard to measure l)-v, no light to guide them but the flickering lamp of human experience. It seemed to them, as expressed by a recent writer, "That life itself and everything that meanwhile makes life worth living, from the satisfaction of the most primary physical needs to the gratification of the most refined tastes, all that belongs to the development of mind. aswell as body, depends, first, last and always on the manner in which the production and distribution of wealth is regulated."

And so, these men thought, the whole list of problems in sociology resolve themselves into economics. "Give men universal employment, with the full products of their labor, owning all they use and produce, and free to make or unmake their own laws, then they will of themselves go on and develop the higher qualities in personal and social life; they will establish all necessary conditions of happiness."

But this thought and this hope is opposed to all human experience and to science as well. It is not true that people who have had the most wealth and the most leisure have made the best use of it, or even a good use of it. It depends immensely more upon

THE WHOLE LOAF.

whether the institutions, the social machinery, t customs and motives of society, tend in the right direction; whether these favor the higher or the lower

usesk

n

thiofandproperthas

doy. A large part, nine-tenths of all we

,   some reference to our fellow beings;

is more or less social in its character and its results.

The production and the use of wealth involves social

methods, sociall institutions. The manner in which

we use our wealth assumes quite as great importance

as its production and distribution We can make a

good or a bad use of it.

Is it a good use to waste $100,ooo,ooo a year in a

poor system of education when we could save this

with a good and a natural system ? It is not even

good economics. Is it a good use to waste billions a

year because of the bad plans of all our cities and

villages, when we could save this by adopting the

rational plan for them ? Is it good economics or good

morals to let half of our children die before they are

ten years old, before they can take an active part in

the joys and the work of life, when all physiologists tell us that we could save this wholesale slaughter of the innocents by having departments, like that of familism, for their suitable care and protection ? Already, in small communities like that at Oneida, they have proved this by many years of actual experiment. Is it wise, or even good economics, not to organize the departments of sanitation, when the greatest of medical men assure us that by these we could forever banish cholera, plague, small-pox, measles, la grippe and all the foul hosts of epidemic

curses ?

IT Is NOT WORTH WHILE to make fundamental


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