The study of sociology

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THE

STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY

BY

HERBERT SPENCER

AUTHOR OF
A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY, DESCRIPTIVE SOCIOLOGY, ETC.

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1806

COPYRIGHT, 1873,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

PKEFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

IT is desirable that the present volume, the origin of
which is explained in the author's preface, should be accom
panied by a brief statement in relation to Mr. Spencer's
other works upon sociological science. The " Principles of
Sociology " was projected by Mr. Spencer as a part of his
philosophical system, the publication of which was com
menced in 1860. Five volumes of that system have ap
peared, viz. : " First Principles," in one volume ; the
" Principles of Biology," in two volumes ; and the " Prin
ciples of Psychology," in two volumes. " First Principles "
develops the general method of the philosophy to be carried
out in the subsequent works. In the two succeeding parts
that method is applied to the interpretation of the phenom
ena of Life and Mind, the whole course of exposition being
preparatory to the " Principles of Sociology," in three vol
umes, which are next in order. Upon this work Mr. Spen
cer has now entered, and it will be published in quarterly
parts, by subscription, in the same form that was adopted
with the previous divisions of the work.

Several years since Mr. Spencer foresaw a difficulty that
would arise in working out the principles of social science
from a lack of the data or facts necessary as a basis of rea
soning upon the subject ; and he saw that, before the philos
ophy could be elaborated, these facts must be systematically
and exhaustively collected. How early and how clearly Mr.
Spencer perceived the nature, diversity, and extent of the

IV

TEE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

facts upon which a true social science must rest is well,
shown in the following passage from a review article pub
lished in 1859,1 before he had commenced his great under
taking :

" That which constitutes history, properly so called, is in great part
omitted from works on this subject. Only of late years have historians
commenced giving us, in any considerable quantity, the truly valuable
information. As in past ages the king was every thing and the people
nothing, so, in past histories, the doings of the king fill the entire pict
ure, to which the national life forms but an obscure background.
While only now, when the welfare of nations rather than of rulers is
becoming the dominant idea, are historians beginning to occupy them
selves with the phenomena of social progress. The thing it really con
cerns us to know is, the natural history of society. We want all facts
which help us to understand how a nation has grown and organized
itself. Among these, let us of course have an account of its govern
ment ; with as little as may be of gossip about the men who officered
it, and as much as possible about the structure, principles, methods,
prejudices, corruptions, etc., which it exhibited ; and let this account
include not only the nature and actions of the central government, but
also those of local governments, down to their minutest ramifications.
Let us of course also have a parallel description of the ecclesiastical
government — its organization, its conduct, its power, its relations to the
state ; and, accompanying this, the ceremonial, creed, and religious ideas
— not only those nominally believed, but those really believed and acted
upon. Let us at the same time be informed of the control exercised by
class over class, as displayed in social observances — in titles, saluta
tions, and forms of address. Let us know, too, what were all the other
customs which regulated the popular life out-of-doors and in-doors>
including those concerning the relations of the sexes, and the relations
of parents to children. The superstitions, also, from the more impor
tant myths down to the charms in common use, should be indicated.
Next should come a delineation of the industrial system : showing to
what extent the division of labor was carried ; how trades were regu
lated, whether by caste, guilds, or otherwise; what was the connection
between employers and employed ; what were the agencies for dis
tributing commodities ; what were the means of communication ; what
was the circulating medium. Accompanying all which should be given
an account of the industrial arts technically considered : stating the

1 " What Knowledge is of most Worth ? " — ( Westminster Iteview).

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. v

processes in use, and the quality of the products. Further, the intel
lectual condition of the nation in its various grades should be de
picted ; not only with respect to the kind and amount of education,
but with respect to the progress made in science, and the prevailing
manner of thinking. The degree of aesthetic culture, as displayed in
architecture, sculpture, painting, dress, music, poetry, and fiction,
should be described. Nor should there be omitted a sketch of the
daily lives of the people — their food, their homes, and their amuse
ments. And, lastly, to connect the whole, should be exhibited the
morals, theoretical and practical, of all classes, as indicated in their
laws, habits, proverbs, deeds. These facts, given with as much brevity
as consists with clearness and accuracy, should be so grouped and ar
ranged that they may be comprehended in their ensemble, and con
templated as mutually-dependent parts of one great whole. The aim
should be so to present them that men may readily trace the consensus
subsisting among them, with the view of learning what social phenom
ena coexist with what others. And then the corresponding delinea
tions of succeeding ages should be so managed as to show how each be
lief, institution, custom, and arrangement, was modified, and how the
consensus of preceding structures and functions was developed into
the consensus of succeeding ones. Such alone is the kind of informa
tion, respecting past times, which can be of service to the citizen for
the regulation of his conduct. The only history that is of practical
value is, what may be called Descriptive Sociology. And the highest
office which the historian can discharge is that of so narrating the
lives of nations as to furnish materials for a Comparative Sociology,
and for the subsequent determination of the ultimate laws to which
social phenomena conform."

Such were the character and scope of the facts which re
quired to be collected concerning all forms and grades of
human societies before any thing like a valid social science
could be constructed. A descriptive Sociology, furnishing
comprehensive data, must precede the establishment of prin
ciples, and so Mr. Spencer began the collection of his mate
rials five years ago. He first devised a system of tables
suited to present all orders of social facts displayed by any
community — facts of structure, function, and development,
in such a manner that they can be compared with each other
at a glance — each table being a kind of chart of the social

vi THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

condition of the community to which it is devoted. His ob
ject was at first solely to facilitate his own work, but it soon
appeared that the results would be of great general impor
tance, and Mr. Spencer decided to execute the undertaking
with a view to publication. The communities of mankind
were divided into three great groups : 1. Uncivilized Socie
ties ; 2. Civilized Societies, Extinct or Decayed ; 3. Civilized
Societies, Eecent or still Flourishing. Having arranged his
plan, Mr. Spencer engaged three educated gentlemen to de
vote themselves to the systematic collection of the various
orders of facts pertaining to these three groups of societies.
In each case, the tables are filled in with the facts under
their appropriate heads, while extracts are separately given
from the authorities consulted. The description of the Un
civilized Societies, by Prof. David Duncan, embracing sev
enty tables, is substantially completed. Of the second divi
sion, in charge of Dr. Richard Scheppig, the first installment,
including the four ancient American civilizations, is nearly
finished. The third division, dealing with civilized socie
ties, under charge of Mr. James Collier, of St. Andrew's and
Edinburgh Universities, is well advanced, and the first part,
treating of the English civilization, or the Sociological His
tory of England, is now published. It covers seven con
secutive tables, and the verifying extracts occupy seventy
pages folio.

This series of works, which will be published as they are
completed, will form a regular Cyclopaedia of Descriptive
Sociology, and, as the facts are given independently of the
ory, they will have value for all students of social phenom
ena. Of the execution and influence of this work, the Brit
ish Quarterly Review well observes : " No words are needed
to indicate the immense labor here bestowed, or the great
sociological benefit which such a mass of tabulated matter
done under such competent direction will confer. The
work will constitute an epoch in the science of comparative
sociology."

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. vii

It will be understood that these works do not form a
part of Mr. Spencer's Philosophical System, but a separate
preparation for the third division of it. Mr. Spencer will
use his extensive materials in establishing the inductions of
the science which will be presented in the successive parts
of the " Principles of Sociology."

E. L. Y.

PREFACE.

THIS little work has been written at the instigation of
my American friend, Professor Youmans. When, some
two years ago, he was in England making arrangements
for that International Scientific Series which he origi
nated and succeeded in organizing, he urged me to
contribute to it a volume on the Study of Sociology.
Feeling that the general undertaking in which I am
engaged, is extensive enough to demand all my energies,
I continued for a long time to resist ; and I finally yielded
only to the modified proposal that I should furnish the
ideas and materials, and leave the embodiment of them to
some fit collaborates. As might have been expected, it
was difficult to find one in all respects suitable; and,
eventually, I undertook the task myself.

After thus committing myself, it occurred to me as de
sirable that, instead of writing the volume simply for the
International Scientific Series, I should prepare it for pre
vious issue in a serial form, both here and in the United
States. In pursuance of this idea, arrangements were
made with the Contemporary Review to publish the suc
cessive chapters ; and in America they have been simul
taneously published in the Popular Science Monthly.
Beginning in May, 1872, this publication by instalments

x THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

has, with two brief intervals, since continued, and will be
completed on the 1st October next : the issue of this
volume being delayed until after that date.

Since commencing the work, I have not regretted that I
was led to undertake it. Various considerations which
seemed needful by way of introduction to the Principles
of Sociology, presently to be written, and which yet could
not be conveniently included in it, have found, in this
preliminary volume, a fit place. Much illustrative mate
rial also, partly accumulated during past years and lying
unused, I have thus gained an occasion for turning to
account. Further, the opportunity has been afforded me
of commenting on special topics which the Principles of
Sociology could not properly recognize ; and of comment
ing on them in a style inadmissible in a purely-philo
sophical treatise — a style adapted, however, as I hope, to
create such interest in the subject as may excite to
serious pursuit of it.

In preparing the successive chapters for final publica
tion, I have, besides carefully revising them, here and
there enforced the argument by a further illustration.
Not much, however, has been done in this way : the
only additions of moment being contained in the Appen
dix. One of these, pursuing in another direction the
argument concerning academic discipline, will be found
among the notes to Chapter IX. ; and another, illus
trative of the irrelation between intellectual culture
and moral feeling, will be found in the notes to Chap
ter XV.

LONDON, July, 1873.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I.— OUR NEED OF IT 1

II. — Is THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 22

<1II. — NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE 43

IV.— DIFFICULTIES OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE .... 65

V. — OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES 68

VI.— SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL . . . .103

VII.— SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL . . . .133

VIII. — THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS 161

IX.— THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM J85

X.— THE CLASS-BIAS . .219

XL— THE POLITICAL BIAS 239

XII.— THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS 260

XIII.— DISCIPLINE 286

XIV.— PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY 298

XV. — PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY 324

XVI.— CONCLUSION . . . ; 350

POSTSCRIPT 369

NOTES . . 387

THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.

OUR NEED OF IT.

OVER liis pipe in the village ale-house, the labourer says
very positively what Parliament should do about the "foot
and mouth disease." At the farmer's market-table, his master
makes the glasses jingle as, with his fist, he emphasizes the as
sertion that he did not get half enough compensation for his
slaughtered beasts during the cattle-plague. These are not
hesitating opinions. On a matter affecting the agricultural
interest, statements are still as dogmatic as they were during
the Anti-Corn-Law agitation, when, in every rural circle, you
heard that the nation would be ruined if the lightly-taxed for
eigner was allowed to compete in our markets with the heav
ily-taxed Englishman : a proposition held to be so self-evident
that dissent from it implied either stupidity or knavery.

Now, as then, may be daily heard among other classes,
opinions just as decided and just as unwarranted. By men
called educated, the old plea for extravagant expenditure, that
u it is good for trade," is still continually urged with full be
lief in its sufficiency. Scarcely any decrease is observable in
the fallacy that whatever gives employment is beneficial : no
regard being had to the value for ulterior purposes of that
which the labour produces : no question being asked what
would have resulted had the capital which paid for the labour
taken some other channel and paid for some other labour.
Neither criticism nor explanation appreciably modifies these
beliefs. When there is again an opening for them they are
expressed with undiminished confidence. Along with delu
sions of this kind go whole families of others. People who
2 1

2 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

think that the relations between expenditure and production
are so simple, naturally assume simplicity in other relations
among social phenomena. Is there distress somewhere ?
They suppose nothing more is required than to subscribe
money for relieving it. On the one hand, they never trace
the reactive effects which charitable donations work on bank
accounts, on the surplus-capital bankers have to lend, on the
productive activity which the capital now abstracted would
have set up, on the number of labourers who would have re
ceived wages and who now go without wrages — they do not
perceive that certain necessaries of life have been withheld
from one man who would have exchanged useful work for
them, and given to another who perhaps persistently evades
working. Nor, on the other hand, do they look beyond the
immediate mitigation of misery. They deliberately shut their
eyes to the fact that as fast as they increase the provision for
those who live without labour, so fast do they increase the
number of those who live without labour ; and that with an
ever-increasing distribution of alms, there comes an ever-in
creasing outcry for more alms. Similarly throughout all their
political thinking. Proximate causes and proximate results
are alone contemplated. There is scarcely any consciousness
that the original causes are often numerous and widely differ
ent from the apparent cause ; and that beyond each immedi
ate result there will be multitudinous remote results, most of
them quite incalculable.

Minds in which the conceptions of social actions are thus
rudimentary, are also minds ready to harbour wild hopes of
benefits to be achieved by administrative agencies. In each
such mind there seems to be the unexpressed postulate that
every evil in a society admits of cure ; and that the cure lies
within the reach of law. " Why is not there a better inspec
tion of the mercantile marine ? " asked a correspondent of the
Times the other day : apparently forgetting that within the
preceding twelve months the power he invoked had lost two
of its own vessels, and barely saved a third. " Ugly buildings
are eyesores, and should not be allowed," urges one who is
anxious for esthetic culture. Meanwhile, from the agent
which is to foster good taste, there have come monuments and
public buildings of which the less said the better; and its

OUR NEED OP IT. 3

chosen design for the Law-Courts meets with almost universal
condemnation. " Why did those in authority allow such de
fective sanitary arrangements ? " was everywhere asked, after
the fevers at Lord Londesborough's ; and this question you
heard repeated, regardless of the fact that sanitary arrange
ments having such results in this and other cases, were them
selves the outcome of appointed sanitary administrations —
regardless of the fact that the authorized system had itself
been the means of introducing foul gases into houses.1 "The
State should purchase the railways," is confidently asserted by
those who, every morning, read of chaos at the Admiralty, or
cross-purposes in the dockyards, or wretched army-organiza
tion, or diplomatic bungling that endangers peace, or frustration
of justice by technicalities and costs and delays, — all without
having their confidence in officialism shaken. " Building Acts
should insure better ventilation in small houses," says one who
either never knew or has forgotten that, after Messrs. Reid and
Barry had spent £200,000 in failing to ventilate the Houses of
Parliament, the First Commissioner of Works proposed that,
" the House should get some competent engineer, above sus
picion of partiality, to let them see what ought to be done." 2
And similarly there are continually cropping out in the press,
and at meetings, and in conversations, such notions as that the
State might provide " cheap capital " by some financial sleight
of hand ; that " there ought to be bread-overseers appointed by
Government : " 3 that " it is the duty of Government to provide
a suitable national asylum for the reception of all illegitimate
children." 4 And here it is doubtless thought by some, as it is
in France by M. de Lagevenais, that Government, by supply
ing good music, should exclude the bad, such as that of Offen
bach.6 We smile on reading of that French princess, cele
brated for her innocent wonder that people should starve
when there was so simple a remedy. But why should we
smile ? A great part of the current political thought evinces
notions of practicability not much more rational.

That connexions among social phenomena should be so
little understood, need not surprise us if we note the ideas
which prevail respecting the connexions among much simpler
phenomena. Minds left ignorant of physical causation, are

4 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

unlikely to appreciate clearly, if at all, that causation so much
more subtle and complex, which runs through the actions of
incorporated men. In almost every house, servants and those
who employ them, alike believe that a poker leaned up in
front of the bars, or across them, makes the fire burn ; and
you will be told, very positively, that experience proves the
eificacy of the device — the experience being that the poker has
been repeatedly so placed and the fire has repeatedly burned ;
and no comparisons having been made with cases in which
the poker was absent, and all other conditions as before. In
the same circles the old prejudice against sitting down thirteen
to dinner still survives: there actually exists among ladies
who have been at finishing schools of the highest character,
and among some gentlemen who pass as intelligent, the con
viction that adding or subtracting one from a number of
people who eat together, will affect the fates of some among
them. And this state of mind is again displayed at the card-
table, by the opinion that So-and-so is always lucky or un
lucky — that influences are at work which, 011 the average,
determine more good cards to one person than to another.
Clearly, those in whom the consciousness of causation in these
simple cases is so vague, may be expected to have the wildest
notions of social causation. Whoever even entertains the
supposition that a poker put across the fire can make it burn,
proves himself to have neither a qualitative nor a quantitative
idea of physical causation ; and if, during his life, his experi
ences of material objects and actions have failed to give him
an idea so accessible and so simple, it is not likely that they
have given him ideas of the qualitative and quantitative rela
tions of cause and effect holding throughout society. Hence,
there is nothing to exclude irrational interpretations and dis-
proportioned hopes. Where other superstitions flourish, polit
ical superstitions will take root. A consciousness in which
there lives the idea that spilling salt will be followed by some
evil, obviously allied as it is to the consciousness of the savage,
filled with beliefs in omens and charms, gives a home to other
beliefs like those of the savage. It may not have faith in the
potency of medicine-bags and idols, and may even wonder
how any being can reverence a thing shaped with his own
hands ; and yet it readily entertains subtler forms of the same

OUR NEED OF IT. 5

feelings. For, in those whose modes of thought we have been
contemplating, there is a tacit supposition that a government
moulded by themselves, has some efficiency beyond that natu
rally possessed by a certain group of citizens subsidized by the
rest of the citizens. True, if you ask them, they may not de
liberately assert that a legislative and administrative appa
ratus can exert power, either mental or material, beyond the
power proceeding from the nation itself. They are compelled
to admit, when cross-examined, that the energies moving a
governmental machine are energies which would cease were
citizens to cease working and furnishing the supplies. But,
nevertheless, their projects imply an unexpressed belief in
some store of force that is not measured by taxes. When
there arises the question — Why does not Government do this
for us ? there is not the accompanying thought — Why does
not Government put its hands in our pockets, and, with the
proceeds, pay officials to do this, instead of leaving us to do it
ourselves ; but the accompanying thought is — Why does not
Government, out of its inexhaustible resources, yield us this
benefit ?

Such modes of political thinking, then, naturally go along
with such conceptions of physical phenomena as are current.
Just as the perpetual-motion schemer hopes, by a cunning
arrangement of parts, to get from one end of his machine
more energy than he puts in at the other ; so the ordinary po
litical schemer is convinced that out of a legislative apparatus,
properly devised and worked with due dexterity, may be had
beneficial State-action without any detrimental reaction. He
expects to get out of a stupid people the effects of intelligence,
and to evolve from inferior citizens superior conduct.

But while the prevalence of crude political opinions among
those whose conceptions about simple matters are so crude,
might be anticipated, it is surprising that the class disciplined
by scientific culture should bring to the interpretation of
social phenomena, methods but little in advance of those used
by others. Now that the transformation and equivalence of
forces is seen by men of science to hold not only throughout
all inorganic actions, but throughout all organic actions ; now
that even mental changes are recognized as the correlatives of

6 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

cerebral changes, which also conform to this principle ; and
now, that there must he admitted the corollary, that all ac
tions going 011 in a society are measured by certain antecedent
energies, which disappear in effecting them, while they them
selves become actual or potential energies from which subse
quent questions arise ; it is strange that there should not have
arisen the consciousness that these highest phenomena are to
be studied as lower phenomena have been studied — not, of
course, after the same physical methods, but in conformity
with the same principles. And yet scientific men rarely dis
play such a consciousness.

A mathematician who had agreed or disagreed with the
view of Professor Tait respecting the value of Quaternions for
pursuing researches in Physics, would listen with raised eye
brows were one without mathematical culture to express a
decided opinion on the matter. Or, if the subject discussed
was the doctrine of Helmholtz, that hypothetical beings oc
cupying space of two dimensions, might be so conditioned that
the axioms of our geometry would prove untrue, the mathe
matician would marvel if an affirmation or a negation came
from a man who knew no more of the properties of space than
is to be gained by daily converse with things around, and no
more of the principles of reasoning than the course of business
taught him. And yet, were we to take members of the Mathe
matical Society, who, having severally devoted themselves
to the laws of quantitative relations, know that, simple as
these are intrinsically, a life's study is required for the full
comprehension of them — were we to ask each of these his
opinion on some point of social policy, the readiness with
which he answered would seem to imply that in these cases,
where the factors of the phenomena are so numerous and so
much involved, a general survey of men and things gives data
for trustworthy judgments.

Or, to contrast more fully the mode of reaching a conclu
sion which the man of science uses in his own department,
with that which he regards as satisfactory in the department
of politics, let us take a case from a concrete science : say, the
qiiestion— What are the solar spots, and what constitution of
the Sun is implied by them ? Of tentative answers to

this question there is first Wilson's, adopted by Sir William

OUR NEED OF IT. 7

Herschel, that the visible surface of the Sun is a luminous en
velope, within which there are cloudy envelopes covering a
dark central body ; and that when, by some disturbance, the
luminous envelope is broken through, portions of the cloudy
envelope and of the dark central body, become visible as the
penumbra and umbra respectively. This hypothesis, at one
time received with favour mainly because it seemed to permit
that teleological interpretation which required that the Sun
should be habitable, accounted tolerably well for certain of
the appearances — more especially the appearance of concavity
which the spots have when near the limb of the Sun. But
though Sir John Herscliel supported his father's hypothesis,
pointing out that cyclonic action would account for local dis
persions of the photosphere, there has of late years become
more and more manifest the fatal objection that the genesis of
light and heat remained unexplained, and that no supposition
of auroral discharges did more than remove the difficulty a
step back ; since, unless light and heat could be perpetually
generated out of nothing, there must be a store of force per
petually being expended in producing them. A counter-hy
pothesis, following naturally from the hypothesis of nebular
origin, is that the mass of the Sun must be incandescent ; that
its incandescence has been produced, and is maintained, by
progressing aggregation of its once widely-diffused matter ;
and that surrounding its molten surface there is an atmos
phere of metallic gases continually rising, condensing to form
the visible photosphere, and thence precipitating. What, in
this case, are the solar spots ? Kirchhoff, proceeding upon the
hypothesis just indicated, which had been set forth before he
made his discoveries by the aid of the spectroscope, contended
that the solar spots are simply clouds, formed of these con
densed metallic gases, so large as to be relatively opaque ; and
he endeavoured to account for their changing forms as the
Sun's rotation carries them away, in correspondence with this
view. But the appearances as known to astronomers, are quite
irreconcilable with the belief that the spots are simply drift
ing clouds. Do these appearances, then, conform to the sup
position of M. Faye, that the photosphere encloses matter
which is wholly gaseous and non-luminous ; and that the
spots are produced when occasional up-rushes from the in-

8 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

terior burst through the photosphere ? This supposition, while
it may be held to account for certain traits of the spots, and to
be justified by the observed fact that there are up-rushes of
gas, presents difficulties not readily disposed of. It does not
explain the manifest rotation of many spots ; nor, indeed, does
it seem really to account for that darkness which constitutes
them spots ; since a non-luminous gaseous nucleus would be
permeable by light from the remoter side of the photosphere,
and hence holes through the near side of the photosphere
would not look dark. There is, however, another hypothesis
which more nearly reconciles the facts. Assuming the incan
descent molten surface, the ascending metallic gases, and the
formation of a photosphere at that outer limit where the gases
condense ; accepting the suggestion of Sir John Herschel, so
amply supported by evidence, that zones north and south of
the Sun's equator are subject to violent cyclones; this hy
pothesis is, that if a cyclone occurs within the atmosphere of
metallic gases between the molten surface and the photo
sphere, its vortex will become a region of rarefaction, of re
frigeration, and therefore of precipitation. There will be
formed in it a dense cloud extending far down towards the
body of the Sun, and obstructing the greater part of the light
radiating from below. Here we have an adequate cause for
the formation of an opaque vaporous mass — a cause which
also accounts for the frequently observed vortical motion ; for
the greater blackness of the central part of the umbra ; for the
formation of a penumbra by the drawing-in of the adjacent
photosphere ; for the elongation of the luminous masses form
ing the photosphere, and the turning of their longer axes
towards the centre of the spot ; and for the occasional drift
ing of them over the spot towards its centre. Still, there is
the difficulty that vortical motion is by no means always ob
servable ; and it remains to be considered whether its non-
visibility in many cases is reconcilable with the hypothesis.
At present none of the interpretations can be regarded as
established. See, then, the rigour of the inquiry. Here

are sundry suppositions which the man of science severally
tests by observations and necessary inferences. In this, as in
other cases, he rejects such as unquestionably disagree with
unquestionable truths. Continually excluding untenable hy-

OUR NEED OF IT. 9

potheses, he waits to decide among the more tenable ones
until further evidence discloses further congruities or incon
gruities. Checking every statement of fact and every conclu
sion drawn, he keeps his judgment suspended until no anom
aly remains unexplained. Not only is he thus careful to shut
out all possible error from inadequacy in the number and
variety of data, but he is careful to shut out all possible error
caused by idiosyncrasy in himself. Though not perhaps in
astronomical observations such as those above implied, yet in
all astronomical observations where the element of time is
important, he makes allowance for the intervals occupied by
his nervous actions. To fix the exact moment at which a cer
tain change occurred, his perception of it has to be corrected
for the "personal equation." As the speed of the nervous dis
charge varies, according to the constitution, from thirty to
ninety metres per second, and is somewhat greater in summer
than in winter ; and as between seeing a change and register
ing it with the finger, there is an interval which is thus ap
preciably different in different persons ; the particular amount
of this error in the particular observer has to be taken into
account.

Suppose now that to a man of science, thus careful in test
ing all possible hypotheses and excluding all possible sources
of error, we put a sociological question — say, whether some
proposed institution will be beneficial. An answer, and often
a very decided one, is forthcoming at once. It is not thought
needful, proceeding by deliberate induction, to ascertain what
has happened in each nation where an identical institution, or
an institution of allied kind, has been established. It is not
thought needful to look back in our own history to see whether
kindred agencies have done what they were expected to do. It
is not thought needful to ask the more general question — how
far institutions at large, among all nations and in all times,
have justified the theories of those who set them up. Nor is
it thought needful to infer from analogous cases, what is likely
to happen if the proposed appliance is not set up— to ascertain,
inductively, whether in its absence some equivalent appliance
will arise. And still less is it thought needful to inquire what
will be the indirect actions and reactions of the proposed or
ganization — how far it will retard other social agencies, and

10 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

how far it will prevent the spontaneous growth of agencies
having like ends. I do not mean that none of these questions
are recognized as questions to be asked ; but I mean that no
attempts are made after a scientific manner to get together
materials for answering them. True, some data have been
gathered from newspapers, periodicals, foreign correspondence,
books of travel ; and there have been read sundry histories,
which, besides copious accounts of royal misdemeanours, con
tain minute details of every military campaign, and careful
disentariglings of diplomatic trickeries. And on information
thus acquired a confident opinion is based. Most remarkable
of all, however, is the fact that no allowance is made for the
personal equation. In political observations and judgments,
the qualities of the individual, natural and acquired, are by
far the most important factors. The bias of education, the
bias of class-relationships, the bias of nationality, the political
bias, the theological bias— these, added to the constitutional
sympathies and antipathies, have much more influence in de
termining beliefs on social questions than has the small
amount of evidence collected. Yet, though in his search after
a physical truth, the man of science allows for minute errors
of perception due to his own nature, he makes no allowance
for the enormous errors which his own nature variously mod
ified and distorted by his conditions of life, is sure to intro
duce into his perceptions of political truth. Here, where cor
rection for the personal equation is all-essential, it does not
occur to him that there is any personal equation to be
allowed for.

This immense incongruity between the attitude in which
the most disciplined minds approach other orders of natural
phenomena, and the attitude in which they approach the phe
nomena presented by societies, will be best illustrated by a
series of antitheses thus : —

The material media through which we see things, always
more or less falsify the facts : making, for example, the appar
ent direction of a star slightly different from its real direction,
and sometimes, as when a fish is seen in the water, the appar
ent place is so far from the real place, that great misconcep
tion results unless large allowance is made for refraction ; but

OUR NEED OF IT. H

sociological observations are not thus falsified: through the
daily press light comes without any bending of its rays, and
in studying past ages it is easy to make allowance for the re
fraction due to the historic medium. The motions of
gases, though they conform to mechanical laws which are
well understood, are nevertheless so involved, that the art of
controlling currents of air in a house is not yet mastered ; but
the waves and currents of feeling running through a society,
and the consequent directions and amounts of social activities,
may be readily known beforehand. Though molecules of
inorganic substances are very simple, yet prolonged study is
required to understand their modes of behaviour to one
another, and even the most instructed frequently meet with
interactions of them producing consequences they never antic
ipated ; but where the interacting bodies are not molecules but
living beings of highly-complex natures, it is easy to foresee
all results which will arise. Physical phenomena are
so connected that between seeming probability and actual
truth, there is apt to be a wide difference, even where but two
bodies are acting : instance the natural supposition that dur
ing our northern summer the Earth is nearer to the Sun than
during the winter, which is just the reverse of the fact ; but
among sociological phenomena, where the bodies are so multi
tudinous, and the forces by which they act on one another so
many, and so multiform, and so variable, the probability and
the actuality will of course correspond. Matter often be
haves paradoxically, as when two cold liquids added together
become boiling hot, or as when the mixing of two clear liquids
produces an opaque mud, or as when water immersed in sul
phurous acid freezes on a hot iron plate ; but what we dis
tinguish as Mind, especially when massed together in the way
which causes social action, evolves no' paradoxical results —
always such results come from it as seem likely to come.

The acceptance of contradictions like these, tacitly implied
in the beliefs of the scientifically cultivated, is the more re
markable when we consider how abundant are the proofs that
human nature is difficult to manipulate ; that methods appar
ently the most rational disappoint expectation ; and that the
best results frequently arise from courses which common sense
thinks unpractical. Even individual human nature shows us

12 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

these startling anomalies. A man of leisure is the man natu
rally fixed upon if something has to be done ; but your man of
leisure cannot find time, and the man most likely to do what
is wanted, is the man who is already busy. That the boy who
studies longest will learn most, and that a man will become
wise in proportion as he reads much, are propositions which
look true but are quite untrue ; as teachers are now-a-days
finding out in the one case, and as Hobbes long ago found out
in the other. How obvious it appears that when minds go de
ranged, there is no remedy but replacing the weak internal
control by a strong external control. Yet the " non-restraint
system " has had far more success than the system of strait-
' waistcoats. Dr. Batty Tuke, a physician of much experience
in treating the insane, has lately testified that the desire to es
cape is great when locks and keys are used, but almost disap
pears when they are disused : the policy of unlocked doors
has had 95 per cent, of success arid 5 per cent, of failure." And
in further evidence of the mischief often done by measures
supposed to be curative, here is Dr. Maudsley, also an author
ity on such questions, speaking of "asylum-made lunatics."
Again, is it not clear that the repression of crime wrill be
effectual in proportion as the punishment is severe ? Yet the
great amelioration in our penal code, initiated by Romilly, has
not been followed by increased criminality but by decreased
criminality ; and the testimonies of those who have had most
experience — Maconochie in Norfolk Island, Dickson in West
ern Australia, Obermier in Germany, Montesinos in Spain —
unite to show that in proportion as the criminal is left to suffer
no other penalty than that of maintaining himself under such
restraints only as are needful for social safety, the reformation
is great : exceeding, indeed, all anticipation. French school
masters, never questioning the belief that boys can be made to
behave well only by rigid discipline and spies to aid in carry
ing it out, are astonished on visiting England to find IIOAV
much better boys behave when they are less governed : nay
more — among English boys themselves, Dr. Arnold has shown
that more trust is followed by improved conduct. Similarly
with the anomalies of incorporated human nature. We habit
ually assume that only by legal restraints are men to be kept
from aggressing on their neighbours ; and yet there are facts

OUR NEED OF IT. 13

which should lead us to qualify our assumption. So-called
debts of honour, for the non-payment of which there is no
legal penalty, are held more sacred than debts that can be
legally enforced; and on the Stock-Exchange, where only
pencil memoranda in the respective note-books of two brokers
guarantee the sale and purchase of many thousands, contracts
are safer than those which, in the outside world, are formally
registered in signed and sealed parchments.

Multitudes of cases might be accumulated showing how,
in other directions, men's thoughts and feelings produce kinds
of conduct which, a priori, would be judged very improbable.
And if, going beyond our own society and our own time, we
observe what has happened among other races, and among the
earlier generations of our own race, we meet, at every step,
workings-out of human nature utterly unlike those which we
assume when making political forecasts. Who, generalizing
the experiences of his daily life, would suppose that men, to
please their gods, would swing for hours from hooks drawn
through the muscles of their backs, or let their nails grow
through the palms of their clenched hands, or roll over and
over hundreds of miles to visit a shrine ? Who would have
thought it possible that a public sentiment and a private feel
ing might be as in China, where a criminal can buy a substi
tute to be executed in his stead : the substitute's family having
the money ? Or, to take historical cases more nearly concern
ing ourselves — Who foresaw that the beliefs in purgatory and
priestly intercession would cause one-half of England to lapse
into the hands of the Church ? or who foresaw that a defect
in the law of mortmain would lead to bequests of large estates
consecrated as graveyards ? Who could have imagined that
robber-kings and bandit-barons, with vassals to match, would,
generation after generation, have traversed all Europe through
hardships and dangers to risk their lives in getting possession
of the reputed burial place of one whose injunction was to
turn the left cheek when the right was smitten ? Or who,
again, would have anticipated that when, in Jerusalem, this
same teacher disclaimed political aims, and repudiated political
instrumentalities, the professed successors of his disciples
would by and by become rulers dominating over all the kings
of Europe ? Such a result could be as little foreseen as it

14 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

could be foreseen that an instrument of torture used by the
Jews would give the ground-plans to Christian temples
throughout Europe ; and as little as it could be foreseen that
the process of this torture, recounted in Christian narratives,
might come to be mistaken for a Christian institution, as it
was by the Malay chief who, being expostulated with for cru
cifying some rebels, replied that he was following " the Eng
lish practice," which he read in "their sacred books." 7

Look where we will at the genesis of social phenomena, we
shall similarly find that while the particular ends contem
plated and arranged for have commonly not been more than
temporarily attained if attained at all, the changes actually
brought about have arisen from causes of which the very ex
istence was unknown.

How, indeed, can any man, and how more especially can
any man of scientific culture, think that special results of
special political acts can be calculated, when he contemplates
the incalculable complexity of the influences under which each
individual, and a fortiori each society, develops, lives, and
decays ? The multiplicity of the factors is illustrated even
in the material composition of a man's body. Every one who
watches closely the course of things, must have observed that
at a single meal he may take in bread made from Russian
wheat, beef from Scotland, potatoes from the midland coun
ties, sugar from the Mauritius, salt from Cheshire, pepper.from
Jamaica, curry-powder from India, wine from France or Ger
many, currants from Greece, oranges from Spain, as well as
various spices and condiments from other places ; and if he
considers whence came the draught of water he swallows,
tracing it back from the reservoir through the stream and the
brook and the rill, to the separate rain-drops which fell wide
apart, and these again to the eddying vapours which had been
mingling and parting in endless ways as they drifted over the
Atlantic, he sees that this single mouthful of water contains
molecules which, a little time ago, were dispersed over hun
dreds of square miles of ocean swell. Similarly tracing back
the history of each solid he has eaten, he finds that his body is
made up of elements which have lately come from all parts
of the Earth's surface.

OUR NEED OF IT. 15

And what thus holds of the substance of the body, holds
no less of the influences, physical and moral, which modify
its actions. You break your tooth with a small pebble among
the currants, because the industrial organization, in Zante is so
imperfect. A derangement of your digestion goes back for its
cause to the bungling management in a vineyard on the
Rhine several years ago ; or to the dishonesty of the mer
chants at Cette, where imitation wines are produced. Because
there happened a squabble between a consul and a king in
Abyssinia, an increased income-tax obliges you to abridge your
autumn holiday ; or because slave-owners in North America
try to extend the u peculiar institution " further west, there re
sults here a party dissension which perhaps entails on you loss
of friends. If from these remote causes you turn to causes at
home, you find that your doings are controlled by a plexus of
influences too involved to be traced beyond its first meshes.
Your hours of business are pre-determined by the general hab
its of the community, which have been slowly established no
one knows how. Your meals have to be taken at intervals
which do not suit your health ; but under existing social ar
rangements you must submit. Such intercourse with friends
as you can get, is at hours and under regulations which
everybody adopts, but for which nobody is responsible ;
and you have to yield to a ceremonial which substitutes
trouble for pleasure. Your opinions, political and religious,
are ready moulded for you ; and unless your individual
ity is very decided, your social surroundings will prove too
strong for it. Nay, even such an insignificant event as
the coming-of-age of grouse affects your goings and comings
throughout life. For has not the dissolution of Parliament
direct reference to the 12th of August ? and does not the dis
solution end the London season ? and does not the London
season determine the times for business and relaxation, and so
affect the making of arrangements throughout the year ? If
from co-existing influences we turn to influences that have
been working through past time, the same general truth be
comes still more conspicuous. Ask how it happens that men
in England do not work every seventh day, and you have to
seek through thousands of past years to find the initial cause.
Ask why in England, and still more in Scotland, there is not

16 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

only a cessation from work, which the creed interdicts, but
also a cessation from amusement, which it does not interdict ;
and for an explanation you must go back to successive waves
of ascetic fanaticism in generations long dead. And what
thus holds of religious ideas and usages, holds of all others,
political and social. Even the industrial activities are often
permanently turned out of their normal directions by social
states that passed away many ages ago : .witness what has hap
pened throughout the East, or in Italy, where towns and vil
lages are still perched on hills and eminences chosen for de
fensive purposes in turbulent times, and where the lives of the
inhabitants are now made laborious by having daily to carry
themselves and all the necessaries of life from a low level to a
high level.

The extreme complexity of social actions, and the tran
scendent difficulty which hence arises of counting on special
results, will be still better seen if we enumerate the factors
which determine one simple phenomenon, as the price of a
commodity, — say, cotton. A manufacturer of calicoes has to
decide whether he will increase his stock of raw material at
its current price. Before doing this, he must ascertain, as well
as he can, the following data : — Whether the stocks of calico
in the hands of manufacturers and wholesalers at home, are
large or small ; whether by recent prices retailers have been
led to lay in stocks or not ; whether the colonial and foreign
markets are glutted or otherwise ; and what is now, and is
likely to be, the production of calico by foreign manufacturers.
Having formed some idea of the probable demand for calico,
he has to ask what other manufacturers have done, and are
doing, as buyers of cotton — whether they have been waiting
for the price to fall, or have been buying in anticipation of a
rise. From cotton-brokers' circulars he has to judge what is
the state of speculation at Liverpool — whether the stocks there
are large or small, and whether many or few cargoes >are on
their way. The stocks and prices at New Orleans, and at other
cotton-ports throughout the world, have also to be taken^note
of; and then there come questions respecting forthcoming
crops in the Southern States, in India, in Egypt, and else
where. Here are sufficiently-numerous factors, but these are
by no means all. The consumption of calico, and therefore

OUR NEED OF IT. 17

the consumption of cotton, and therefore the price of cotton,
depends in part on the supplies and prices of other textile fab
rics. If, as happened during the American Civil War, calico
rises in price because its raw material becomes scarce, linen
comes into more general use, and so a further rise in price is
checked. Woollen fabrics, also, may to some extent compete.
And, besides the competition caused by relative prices, there is
the competition caused by fashion, which may or may not pres
ently change. Surely the factors are now all enumerated ? By
no means. There is the estimation of mercantile opinion. The
views of buyers and sellers respecting future prices, never more
than approximations to the truth, often diverge from it very
widely. Waves of opinion, now in excess now in defect of the
fact, rise and fall daily, and larger ones weekly and monthly,
tending, every now and then, to run into mania or panic ; for it
is among men of business as among other men, that they stand
hesitating until some one sets the example, and then rush all one
way, like a flock of sheep after a leader. These characteristics
in human nature, leading to these perturbations, the far-seeing
buyer takes into account — judging how far existing influences
have made opinion deviate from the truth, and how far im
pending influences are likely to do it. Nor has he got to the
end of the matter even when he has considered all these
things. He has still to ask what are the general mercantile
conditions of the country, and what the imm_ediate future of
the money market will be ; since the course of speculation in
every commodity must be affected by the rate of discount.
See, then, the enormous complication of causes which deter
mine so simple a thing as the rise or fall of a farthing per
pound in cotton some months hence !

If the genesis of social phenomena is so involved in cases
like this, where the effect produced has no concrete persistence
but very soon dissipates, judge what it must be where there is
produced something which continues thereafter to be an in
creasing agency, capable of self -propagation. Not only has
a society as a whole a power of growth and development, but
each institution set up in it has the like — draws to itself units
of the society and nutriment for them, and tends ever to mul
tiply and ramify. Indeed, the instinct of self-preservation in
each institution soon becomes dominant over everything else ;
3

18 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

and maintains it when it performs some quite other function
than that intended, or no function at all. See, for instance,
what has come of the " Society of Jesus," Loyola set up ; or
see what grew out of the company of traders who got a foot
ing on the coast of Hiiidostaii.

To such considerations as these, set down to show the in
consistency of those who think that prevision of social phenom
ena is possible without much study, though much study is
needed for prevision of other phenomena, it will doubtless be
replied that time does not allow of systematic inquiry. From
the scientific, as from the unscientific, there w;ill come the plea
that, in his capacity of citizen, each man has to act — must
vote, and must decide before he votes — must conclude to the
best of his ability on such information as he has.

In this plea there is some truth, mingled with a good deal
more that looks like truth. It is a product of that " must-do-
something1' impulse which is the origin of much mischief,
individual and social. An amiable anxiety to undo or neutral
ize an evil, often prompts to rash courses, as you may see in
the hurry with which one who has fallen is snatched up by
those at hand ; just as though there were danger in letting
him lie, which there is not, and no danger in incautiously
raising him, which there is. Always you find among people
in proportion as they are ignorant, a belief in specifics, and a
great confidence in pressing the adoption of them. Has some
one a pain in the side, or in the chest, or in the bowels ? Then,
before any careful inquiry as to its probable cause, there comes
an urgent recommendation of a never-failing remedy, joined
probably with the remark that if it does no good it can do no
harm. There still prevails in the average mind a large amount
of the fetishistic conception clearly shown by a butler to some
friends of mine, who, having been found to drain the half-
emptied medicine-bottles, explained that he thought it a pity
good physic should be wasted, and that wTIiat benefited his
master would benefit him. But as fast as crude conceptions
of diseases and remedial measures grow up into Pathology and
Therapeutics, we find increasing caution, along with increas
ing proof that evil is often done instead of good. This con
trast is traceable not only as we pass from popular ignorance

OUR NEED OF IT. 19

to professional knowledge, but as we pass from the smaller
professional knowledge of early times to the greater pro
fessional knowledge of our own. The question with the mod
ern physician is not as with the ancient— shall the treatment
be blood-letting ? shall cathartics, or shall diaphoretics be
given ? or shall mercurials be administered ? But there rises
the previous question — shall there be any treatment beyond
a wholesome regimen ? And even among existing physicians
it happens that in proportion as the judgment is most culti
vated, there is the least yielding to the " must-do-something "
impulse.

Is it not possible, then — is it not even probable, that this
supposed necessity for immediate action, which is put in as an
excuse for drawing quick conclusions from few data, is the con
comitant of deficient knowledge ? Is it not probable that as in
Biology so in Sociology, the accumulation of more facts, the
more critical comparison of them, and the drawing of con
clusions on scientific methods, will be accompanied by in
creasing doubt about the benefits to be secured, and increasing
fear of the mischiefs which may be worked ? Is it not prob
able that what in the individual organism is improperly,
though conveniently, called the vis medicatrix natures, may
be found to have its analogue in the social organism ? and
will there not very likely come along with the recognition of
this, the consciousness that in both cases the one thing need
ful is to maintain the conditions under which the natural
actions have fair play ? Such a consciousness, to be antici
pated from increased knowledge, will diminish the force of
this plea for prompt decision after little inquiry ; since it will
check this tendency to think of a remedial measure as one
that may do good and cannot do harm. Nay more, the study
of Sociology, scientifically carried on by tracing back proxi
mate causes to remote ones, and tracing down primary effects
to secondary and tertiary effects which multiply as they dif
fuse, will dissipate the current illusion that social evils
admit of radical cures. Given an average defect of nature
among the units of a society, and no skilful manipulation of
them will prevent that defect from producing its equivalent of
bad results. It is possible to change the form of these bad
results ; it is possible to change the places at which they are

20 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

manifested ; but it is not possible to get rid of them. The
belief that faulty character can so organize itself socially, as to
get out of itself a conduct which is not proportionately faulty,
is an utterly-baseless belief. You may alter the incidence of
the mischief, but the amount of it must inevitably be borne
somewhere. Very generally it is simply thrust out of one
form into another ; as when, in Austria, improvident marriages
being prevented, there come more numerous illegitimate chil
dren ; or as when, to mitigate the misery of foundlings, hos
pitals are provided for them, and there is an increase in the
number of infants abandoned ; or as when, to insure the sta
bility of houses, a Building Act prescribes a structure which,
making small houses unremunerative, prevents due multipli
cation of them, and so causes overcrowding ; or as when a
Lodging-House Act forbids this overcrowding, and vagrants
have to sleep under the Adelphi-arches, or in the Parks, or
even, for warmth's sake, 011 the dung-heaps in mews. Where
the evil does not, as in cases like these, reappear in another
place or form, it is necessarily felt in the shape of a diffused
privation. For suppose that by some official instrumentality
you actually suppress an evil, instead of thrusting it from one
spot into another — suppose you thus successfully deal with a
number of such evils by a number of such instrumentalities;
do you think these evils have disappeared absolutely ? To
see that they have not, you have but to ask — Whence comes
the official apparatus ? What defrays the cost of working it ?
Who supplies the necessaries of life to its members through all
their gradations of rank ? There is no other source but the
labour of peasants and artisans. When, as in France, the ad
ministrative agencies occupy some 600,000 men, who are taken
from industrial pursuits, and, with their families, supported in
more than average comfort, it becomes clear enough that
heavy extra work is entailed on the producing classes. The
already-tired labourer has to toil an additional hour ; his
wife has to help in the fields as well as to suckle her in
fant ; his children are still more scantily fed than they
would otherwise be ; and beyond a decreased share of re
turns from increased labour, there is a diminished time and
energy for such small enjoyments as the life, pitiable at the
best, permits. How, then, can it be supposed that the evils

OUR NEED OP IT. 21

have been extinguished or escaped ? The repressive action
has had its corresponding- reaction ; and instead of inteiiser
miseries here and there, or now and then, you have got a
misery that is constant and universal.

When it is thus seen that the evils are not removed, but at
best only re-distributed, and that the question in any case is
whether re-distribution, even if practicable, is desirable ; it
will be seen that the " must-do-something " plea is quite in
sufficient. There is ample reason to believe that in proportion
as scientific men carry into this most-involved class of phe
nomena, the methods they have successfully adopted with
other classes, they will perceive that, even less in this class
than in other classes, are conclusions to be drawn and action
to be taken without prolonged and critical investigation.

Still there will recur the same plea under other forms. " Po
litical conduct must be matter of compromise." " We must
adapt our measures to immediate exigencies, and cannot be
deterred by remote considerations." " The data for forming
scientific judgments are not to be had : most of them are un
recorded, and those which are recorded are difficult to find as
well as doubtful when found." "Life is too short, and the
demands upon our energies too great, to permit any such elab
orate study as seems required. We must, therefore, guide our
selves by common sense as best we may."

And then, behind the more scientifically-minded who give
this answer, there are those who hold, tacitly or overtly, that
guidance of the kind indicated is not possible, even after any
amount of inquiry. They do not believe in any ascertainable
order among social phenomena— there is no such thing as a
social science. This proposition we will discuss in the next
chapter.

CHAPTER II.

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE ?

ALMOST every autumn may be heard the remark that a
hard winter is coming-, for that the hips and haws are abun
dant : the implied belief being that God, intending to send
much frost and snow, has provided a large store of food for
the birds. Intei'pretations of this kind, tacit or avowed, pre
vail widely. Not many weeks since, one who had received
the usual amount of culture said in my hearing, that the
swarm of lady-birds which overspread the country some sum
mers ago, had been providentially designed to save the crop
of hops from the destroying aphides. Of course this theory of
the divine government, here applied to occurrences bearing
but indirectly, if at all, on human welfare, is applied with still
greater confidence to occurrences that directly affect us, indi
vidually and socially. It is a theory carried out with logical
consistency by the Methodist who, before going on a journey
or removing to another house, opens his Bible, and in the first
passage his eye rests upon, finds an intimation of approval or
disapproval from heaven. And in its political applications it
yields such appropriate beliefs as that the welfare of England
in comparison with Continental States, has been a reward for
better observance of the Sunday, or that an invasion of chol
era was consequent on the omission of Dei gratia from an
issue of coins.

The interpretation of historical events in general after this
same method, accompanies such interpretations of ordinary
passing events ; and, indeed, outlives them. Those to whom
the natural genesis of simpler phenomena has been made
manifest by increasing knowledge, still believe in the super
natural genesis of phenomena that are very much involved,

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 23

and cannot have their causes readily traced. The form of
mind which, in an official despatch, prompts the statement
that " it has pleased Almighty G-od to vouchsafe to the British
arms the most successful issue to the extensive combinations
rendered necessary for the purpose of effecting1 the passage of
the Chenaub," 1 is a form of mind which, in the records of the
past, everywhere sees interpositions of the Deity to bring about
results that appear to the interpreter the most desirable. Thus,
for example, Mr. Schomberg writes : —

" It seemed good to the All-beneficent Disposer of human events,
to overrule every obstacle ; and through His instrument, William of
Normandy, to expurgate the evils of the land ; and to resuscitate its
dying powers." *
And elsewhere : —

"The time had now arrived when the Almighty Governor, after
having severely punished the whole nation, was intending to raise its
drooping head — to give a more rapid impulse to its prosperity, and to
cause it to stand forth more prominently as an EXEMPLAR STATE. For
this end, He raised up an individual eminently fitted for the intended
work" [Henry VII.J.3

And again : —

" As if to mark this epoch of history with greater distinctness, it
Was closed by the death of George III., the GREAT and the GOOD, who
had been raised up as the grand instrument of its accomplishment."4

The late catastrophes on the Continent are similarly ex
plained by a French writer who, like the English writer just
quoted, professes to have looked behind the veil of things ;
and who tells us what have been the intentions of God in
chastising his chosen people, the French. For it is to be ob
served in passing that, just as the evangelicals among our
selves think we are divinely blessed because we have preserved
the purity of the faith, so it is obvious to the author of La
Main de VHomme et le Doigt de Dieu, as to other Frenchmen,
that France is hereafter still to be, as it has hitherto been, the
leader of the world. This writer, in chapters entitled " Causes
providentielles de nos malheurs," " Les Prussiens et les fleaux
de Dieu," and " Justification de la Providence," carries out his
interpretations in ways we need not here follow, and then
closes his " Epilogue " with these sentences : —

24 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

" La Revolution moderee, habile, sagace, machiavoliqne, diabolique-
ment sage, a ete vaincue et confondue par la justice divine dans la
personne et dans le gouvernement de Napoleon III.

" La Revolution exaltee, bouillonnante, etourdie, a ete vaincue et
confondue par la justice divine dans les personnes et dans les gouverne-
ments successifs de Gambetta et de Felix Pyat et compagnie.

" La sagesse humaine, applaudie et trioinphante, personnifiee dans
M. Thiers, ne tardera pas a etre vaincue et confondue par cette
meme Revolution deux fois humiliee, mais toujours renaissante et
agressive."

" Ce n'est pas une prophetic : c'est la prevision de la philosophic et
de la foi chretiennes.

" Alors ce sera vraiment le tour du Tres-Haut ; car il faut que
Dieu et son Pils regneut par son Evangile et par son Eglise.

" Ames frangaises et chretiennes, priez, travaillez, souffrez et ayez
confiance! nous somines pres de la fin. C'est quand tout semblera
perdu que tout sera vraiment sauvc.

" Si la France avait su profiter des desastres subis, Dieu lui eut
rendu ses premieres favours. Elle s'obstine dans 1'erreur et le vice.
Croyons que Dieu la sauvera malgre elle, en la regenerant toutefois
par 1'eau et par le feu. C'est quand Fimpuissance humaine apparait
qu'eclate la sagesse divine. Mais quelles tribulations! quelles an-
goisses! Ileureux ceux qui survivront et jouiront du triomphe de
Dieu et de son Eglise sainte, catholique, apostolique et romaine." 5

Conceptions of this kind are not limited to historians
whose names have dropped out of remembrance, and to men
who, while the drama of contemporary revolution is going
on, play the part of a Greek chorus, telling the world of spec
tators what has been the divine purpose arid what are the di
vine intentions ; but we have lately had a Professor of History
setting forth conceptions essentially identical in nature. Here
are his words : —

" And now, gentlemen, was this vast campaign [of Teutons against
Romans] fought without a general ? If Trafalgar could not be won
without the mind of a Nelson, or Waterloo without the mind of a
Wellington, was there no one mind to lead those innumerable armies
on whose success depended the future of the whole human race ? Did
no one marshal them in that impregnable convex front, from the
Euxine to the North Sea? No one guide them to the two great
strategic centres of the Black Forest and Trieste? No one cause
them, blind barbarians without maps or science, to follow those rules
of war without which victory in a protracted struggle is impossible ;

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 25

and by the pressure of the Huns behind, force on their flagging myri
ads to an enterprise which their simplicity fancied at first beyond the
powers of mortal men ? Believe it who will : but I cannot. I may be
told that they gravitated into their places, as stones and mud do
Be it so. They obeyed natural laws of course, as all things do on
earth, when they obeyed the laws of war : those, too, are natural laws,
explicable on simple mathematical principles. But while 1 believe
that not a stone or a handful of mud gravitates into its place without
the will of God ; that it was ordained, ages since, into what particular
spot each grain of gold should be washed down from an Australian
quartz reef, that a certain man might find it at a certain moment and
crisis of his life ;— if I be superstitious enough (as, thank God, I am)
to hold that creed, shall I not believe that, though this great war had
no general upon earth, it may have had a general in heaven 1 and
that, in spite of all their sins, the hosts of our forefathers were the
hosts of God." 6

It does not concern us here to seek a reconciliation of the
incongruous ideas bracketed together in this paragraph — to
ask how the results of gravitation, which acts with such uni
formity that under given conditions its effect is calculable
with certainty, can at the same time be regarded as the results
of will, which we class apart because, as known by our expe
rience, it is comparatively irregular ; or to ask how, if the
course of human affairs is divinely pre-determined just as
material changes are, any distinction is to be drawn between
that prevision of material changes which constitutes physical
science and historical prevision : the reader may be left to
evolve the obvious conclusion that either the current idea of
physical causation has to be abandoned, or the current idea of
will has to be abandoned. All which I need call attention to
as indicating the general character of such interpretations, is
the remarkable title of the chapter containing this passage —
" The Strategy of Providence."

In common with some others, I have often wondered how
the Universe looks to those who use such names for its Cause
as " The Master Builder," or " The Great Artificer ; " and who
seem to think that the Cause of the Universe is made more
marvellous by comparing its operations to those of a skilled
mechanic. But really the expression, "Strategy of Provi
dence," reveals a conception of this Cause which is in some
respects more puzzling. Such a title as " The Great Artificer,"

20 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

while suggesting simply the process of shaping a pre-existing
material, and leaving the question whence this material came
untouched, may at any rate be said not to negative the assump
tion that the material is created by "The Great Artificer"
who shapes it. The phrase, " Strategy of Providence," how
ever, necessarily implies difficulties to be overcome. The
Divine Strategist must have a skilful antagonist to make
strategy possible. So that we are inevitably introduced to the
conception of a Cause of the Universe continually impeded
by some independent cause which has to be out-gencralled.
It is not every one who would thank God for a belief, the im
plication of which is that God is obliged to overcome opposi
tion by subtle devices.

The disguises which piety puts on are, indeed, not unfre-
quently suggestive of that which some would describe by a
quite opposite name. To study the Universe as it is manifested
to us; to ascertain by patient observation the order of the
manifestations; to discover that the manifestations are con
nected with one another after a regular way in Time and
Space ; and, after repeated failures, to give up as futile the
attempt to understand the Power manifested ; is condemned
as irreligious. And meanwhile the character of religious is
claimed by those who figure to themselves a Creator moved
by motives like their own ; who conceive themselves as dis
covering his designs ; and who even speak of him as though
he laid plans to outwit the Devil !

This, however, by the way. The foregoing extracts and
comments are intended to indicate the mental attitude of
those for whom there can be no such thing as Sociology, prop
erly so called. That mode of conceiving human affairs which
is implied alike by the " D. V." of a missionary-meeting placard
and by the phrases of Emperor William's late despatches,
where thanks to God come next to enumerations of the thou
sands slain, is one to which the idea of a Social Science is
entirely alien, and indeed repugnant.

An allied class, equally unprepared to interpret sociologi
cal phenomena scientifically, is the class which sees in the
course of civilization little else than a record of remarkable
persons and their doings. One who is conspicuous as the ex-

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 27

ponent of this view writes : — "As I take it, universal history,
the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at
bottom the history of the great men who have worked here."
And this, not perhaps distinctly formulated, but everywhere
implied, is the belief in which nearly all are brought up. Let
us glance at the genesis of it.

Round their camp-fire assembled savages tell the events of
the day's chase ; and he among them who has done some feat
of skill or agility is duly lauded. On a return from the war
path, the sagacity of the chief and the strength or courage of
this or that warrior, are the all-absorbing themes. When the
day, or the immediate past, affords no remarkable deed, the
topic is the achievement of some noted leader lately dead, or
some traditional founder of the tribe: accompanied, it may
be, with a dance dramatically representing those victories
which the chant recites. Such narratives, concerning, as they
do, the prosperity and indeed the very existence of the tribe,
are of the intensest interest ; and in them we have the com
mon root of music, of the drama, of poetry, of biography, of
history, and of literature in general. Savage life furnishes
little else worthy of note ; and the chronicles of tribes contain
scarcely anything more to be remembered. Early his

toric races show us the same thing. The Egyptian frescoes
and the wall-sculptures of the Assyrians, represent the deeds
of leading men ; and inscriptions such as that on the Moabite
stone, tell of nothing more than royal achievements : only by
implication do these records, pictorial, hieroglyphic, or written,
convey anything else. And similarly from the Greek epics,
thougli we gather incidentally that there were towns, and
war-vessels, and war-chariots, and sailors, and soldiers to be
led and slain, yet the direct intention is to set forth the
triumphs of Achilles, the prowess of Ajax, the wisdom of
Ulysses, and the like. The lessons given to every civilized
child tacitly imply, like the traditions of the uncivilized and
semi-civilized, that throughout the past of the human race,
the doings of conspicuous persons have been the only things
worthy of remembrance. How Abraham girded up his loins
and gat him to this place or that ; how Samuel conveyed
divine injunctions which Saul disobeyed ; how David re
counted his adventures as a shepherd, and was reproached for

28 TOE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

his misdeeds as a king — these, and personalities akin to these,
are the facts about which the juvenile reader of the Bible is
interested and respecting which he is catechized : such indica
tions of Jewish institutions as have unavoidably got into the
narrative, being regarded neither by him nor by his teacher
as of moment. So too, when, with hands behind him, he
stands to say his lesson out of Pinnock, we see that the things
set down for him to learn, are — when and by whom Eng
land was invaded, what rulers opposed the invasions and how
they were killed, what Alfred did and what Canute said, who
fought at Agincourt and who conquered at Flodden, which
king abdicated and which usurped, &c. ; and if by some
chance it comes out that there were serfs in those days, that
barons were local rulers, some vassals of others, that subordi
nation of them to a central power took place gradually, these
are facts treated as relatively unimportant. Nay, the like

happens when the boy passes into the hands of his classical
master, at home or elsewhere. " Arms and the man " form
the end of the story as they form its beginning. After the
mythology, which of course is all-essential, come the achieve
ments of rulers and soldiers from Agamemnon down to
Cyesar : what knowledge is gained of social organization, man
ners, ideas, morals, being little more than the biographical
statements involve. And the value of the knowledge is so
ranked that while it would be a disgrace to be wrong about
the amours of Zeus, and while inability to name the com
mander at Marathon would be discreditable, it is excusable to
know nothing of the social condition that preceded Lycurgus
or of the origin and functions of the Areopagus.

Thus the great-man-theory of History finds everywhere a
ready-prepared conception — is, indeed, but the definite expres
sion of that which is latent in the thoughts of the savage,
tacitly asserted in all early traditions, and taught to every
child by multitudinous illustrations. The glad acceptance it
meets with has sundry more special causes. There is,

first, this universal love of personalities, which, active in the
aboriginal man, dominates still — a love seen in the urchin
who asks you to tell him a story, meaning, thereby, some
body's adventures ; a love gratified in adults by police-reports,
court-news, divorce-cases, accounts of accidents and lists of

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 29

births, marriages, and deaths ; a love displayed even by con
versations in the streets, where fragments of dialogue, heard
in passing, show that mostly between men, and always be
tween women, the personal pronouns recur every instant. If
you want roughly to estimate any one's mental calibre, you
cannot do it better than by observing a ratio of generalities to
personalities in his talk — how far simple truths about indi
viduals are replaced by truths abstracted from numerous
experiences of men and things. And when you have
thus measured many, you find but a scattered few likely
to take anything more than a biographical view of human
affairs. In the second place, this great-man-theory com

mends itself as promising instruction along with amusement.
Being already fond of hearing about people's sayings and
doings, it is pleasant news that, to understand the course of
civilization, you have only to read diligently the lives of dis
tinguished men. What can be a more acceptable doctrine than
that while you are satisfying an instinct not very remotely
allied to that of the village gossip— while you are receiving
through print instead of orally, remarkable facts concerning
notable persons, you are gaining that knowledge which will
make clear to you why things have happened thus or thus in
the world, and will prepare you for forming a right opinion on
each question coming before you as a citizen. And then,

in the third place, the interpretation of things thus given is so
beautifully simple — seems so easy to comprehend. Providing
you are content with conceptions that are out of focus, as
most people's conceptions are, the solutions it yields appear
quite satisfactory. Just as that theory of the Solar System which
supposes the planets to have been launched into their orbits
by the hand of the Almighty, looks feasible so long as you do
not insist on knowing exactly what is meant by the hand of
the Almighty ; and just as the special creation of plants and
animals seems a tenable hypothesis until you try and picture
to yourself definitely the process by which one of them is
brought into existence ; so the genesis of societies by the
actions of great men, may be comfortably believed so long as,
resting in general notions, you do not ask for particulars.

But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that
our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we

30 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not
stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the
great man, we go back a step and ask whence comes the great
man, we find that the theory breaks down completely. The
question has two conceivable answers : his origin is super
natural, or it is natural. Is his origin supernatural ? Then
he is a deputy -god, and we have Theocracy once removed — or,
rather, not removed at all ; for we must then agree with Mr.
Schomberg, quoted above, that "the determination of Caesar
to invade Britain " was divinely inspired, and that from him,
down to "George III. the GREAT and the GOOD," the succes
sive rulers were appointed to carry out successive designs. Is
this an unacceptable solution ? Then the origin of the great
man is natural ; and immediately this is recognized he must
be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave
him birth, as a product of its antecedents. Along with the
whole generation of which he forms a minute part — along
with its institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its
multitudinous arts and appliances, he is a resultant of an
enormous aggregate of forces that have been co-operating for
ages. True, if you please to ignore all that common observa
tion, verified by physiology, teaches — if you assume that two
European parents may produce a Negro child, or that from
woolly-haired prognathous Papuans may come a fair, straight-
haired infant of Caucasian type — you may assume that the
advent of the great man can occur anywhere and under any
conditions. If, disregarding those accumulated results of ex
perience which current proverbs and the generalizations of
psychologists alike express, you suppose that a Newton might
be born in a Hottentot family, that a Milton might spring up
among the Aiidamanese, that a Howard or a Clarkson might
have Fiji parents, then you may proceed with facility to ex
plain social progress as caused by the actions of the great
man. But if all biological science, enforcing all popular
belief, convinces you that by no possibility will an Aristotle
come from a father and mother with facial angles of fifty
degrees, and that out of a tribe of cannibals, whose chorus in
preparation for a feast of human flesh is a kind of rhythmical
roaring, there is not the remotest chance of a Beethoven aris
ing ; then you must admit that the genesis of the great man

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE! 31

depends on the long series of complex influences which has
produced the race in which he appears, and the social state
into which that race has slowly grown. If it be a fact that
the great man may modify his nation in. its structure and
actions, it is also a fact that there must have been those ante
cedent modifications constituting national progress before he
could be evolved. Before he can re-make his society, his
society must make him. So that all those changes of which
he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the
generations he descended from. If there is to be anything
like a real explanation of these changes, it must be sought in
that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they
have arisen.

Even were we to grant the absurd supposition that the
genesis of the great man does not depend on the antecedents
furnished by the society he is born in, there would still be the
quite-sufficient facts that he is powerless in the absence of the
material and mental accumulations which his society inherits
from the past, and that he is powerless in the absence of the
co-existing population, character, intelligence, and social ar
rangements. Given a Shakspeare, and what dramas could
he have written without the multitudinous traditions of civil
ized life — without the various experiences which, descending
to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without
the language which a hundred generations had developed and
enriched by use ? Suppose a Watt, with all his inventive
power, living in a tribe ignorant of iron, or in a tribe that
could get only as much iron as a fire blown by hand-bellows
will smelt ; or suppose him born among ourselves before
lathes existed ; what chance would there have been of the
steam-engine ? Imagine a Laplace unaided by that slowly-
developed system of Mathematics which we trace back to its
beginnings among the Egyptians ; how far would he have got
with the Mecanique Celeste 1 Nay, the like questions may be
put and have like answers, even if we limit ourselves to those
classes of great men on whose doings hero-worshippers more
particularly dwell — the rulers and generals. Xenophon could
not have achieved his celebrated feat had his Ten Thousand
been feeble, or cowardly, or insubordinate. Caesar would
never have made his conquests without disciplined troops, in-

32 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

heriting their prestige and tactics and organization from the
Romans who lived before them. And, to take a recent in
stance, the strategical genius of Moltke would have triumphed
in no great campaigns had there not been a nation of some
forty millions to supply soldiers, and had not those soldiers
been men of strong bodies, sturdy characters, obedient na
tures, and capable of carrying out orders intelligently.

Were any one to marvel over the potency of a grain of det
onating powder, which explodes a cannon, propels the shell,
and sinks a vessel hit — were he to enlarge on the transcendent
virtues of this detonating powder, not mentioning the ignited
charge, the shell, the camion, and all that enormous aggre
gate of appliances by which these have severally been pro
duced, detonating powder included ; we should not regard his
interpretation as very rational. But it would fairly compare
in rationality with this interpretation of social phenomena
which, dwelling on the important changes the great man
works, ignores that vast pre-existing supply of latent power he
unlocks, and that immeasurable accumulation of antecedents
to which both he and this power are due.

Recognizing what truth there is in the great-man-theory,
wTe may say that, if limited to early societies, the histories of
which are little else than endeavours to destroy or subju
gate one another, it approximately expresses the fact in rep
resenting the capable leader as all-important ; though even
here it leaves out of sight too much the number and the
quality of his followers. But its immense error lies in
the assumption that what was once true is true for ever ;
and that a relation of ruler and ruled which was possible
and good at one time is possible and good for all time.
Just as fast as this predatory activity of early tribes dimin
ishes, just as fast as larger aggregates are formed by con
quest or otherwise, just as fast as war ceases to be the busi
ness of the whole male population, so fast do societies begin
to develop, to show traces of structures and functions not
before possible, to acquire increasing complexity along with
increasing size, to give origin to new institutions, new activi
ties, new ideas, sentiments, and habits ; all of which unob
trusively make their appearance without the thought of any
king or legislator. And if you wish to understand these

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 33

phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it though you
should read yourself blind over the biographies of all the
great rulers on record, down to Frederick the Greedy and
Napoleon the Treacherous.

In addition to that passive denial of a Social Science im
plied by these two allied doctrines, one or other of which is
held by nine men out of ten, there comes from some an active
denial of it — either entire or partial. Reasons are given for
the belief that no such thing is possible. The invalidity of
these reasons can be shown only after the essential nature of
Social Science, overlooked by those who give them, has been
pointed out ; and to point this out here would be to forestal
the argument. Some minor criticisms may, however, fitly
precede the major criticism. Let us consider first the positions
taken up by Mr. Froude : —

" When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralized by
what is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free
to a man to choose what he will do or not, do, there is no adequate
science of him. If there is a science of him, there is no free choice,
and the praise or blame with which we regard one another are im
pertinent and out of place." '

" It is in this marvellous power in men to do wrong . . . that
the impossibility stands of forming scientific calculations of what men
will do "before the fact, or scientific explanations of what they have
done after the fact." 8

" Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this
and that individual by a doctrine of averages. . . . Unfortunately
the average of one generation need not be the average of the next :
. . . no two generations are alike." 9

" There [in history] the phenomena never repeat themselves. There
we are dependent wholly on the record of things said to have hap
pened once, but which never happen or can happen a second time.
There no experiment is possible ; we can watch for no recurring fact
to test the worth of our conjectures." 10

Here Mr. Froude changes the venue, and joins issue on the
old battle-ground of free will versus necessity : declaring a
Social Science to be incompatible with free will. The first
extract implies, not simply that individual volition is incal
culable — that " there is no adequate science of " man (no Sci
ence of Psychology) ; but it also asserts, by implication, that
4

34 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

there are no causal relations among his states of mind : the
volition by which " natural causes are liable to be set aside,"
being1 put in antithesis to natural, must be supernatural.
Hence we are, in fact, carried back to that primitive form of
interpretation contemplated at the outset. A further com

ment is, that because volitions of some kinds cannot be fore
seen, Mr. Froude argues as though no volitions can be fore
seen : ignoring the fact that the simple volitions determining
ordinary conduct, are so regular that prevision having a high
degree of probability is easy. If, in crossing a street, a man
sees a carriage coming upon him, you may safely assert that,
in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, be
will try to get out of the way. If, being pressed to catch a
train, he knows that by one route it is a mile to the station
and by another two miles, you may conclude with consider
able confidence that he will take the one-mile route; and
should he be aware that losing the train will lose him a for
tune, it is pretty certain that, if he has but ten minutes to do
the mile in, he will either run or call a cab. If he can buy
next door a commodity of daily consumption better and
cheaper than at the other end of the town, we may affirm
that, if he does not buy next door, some special relation be
tween him and the remoter shop-keeper furnishes a strong
reason for taking a worse commodity at greater cost of money
and trouble. And though, if he has an estate to dispose of, it
is within the limits of possibility that he will sell it to A for
£1,000, though B has offered £2,000 for it ; yet the unusual
motives leading to such an act need scarcely be taken into
account as qualifying the generalization that a man will sell
to the highest bidder. Now, since the predominant activities
of citizens are determined by motives of this degree of regu
larity, there must be resulting social phenomena that have
corresponding degrees of regularity — greater degrees, indeed,
since in them the effects of exceptional motives become lost in
the effects of the aggregate of ordinary motives. Another

comment may be added. Mr. Froude exaggerates the antith
esis he draws by using a conception of science which is too
narrow : he speaks as though there were no science but exact
science. Scientific previsions, both qualitative and quantita
tive, have various degrees of definiteness ; and because among

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE! 35

certain classes of phenomena the previsions are approximate
only, it is not, therefore, to be said that there is no science of
those phenomena : if there is some prevision, there is some sci
ence. Take, for example, Meteorology. The Derby has been
run in a snow-storm, and you may occasionally want a fire in
July ; but such anomalies do not prevent us from being per
fectly certain that the coming summer will be warmer than
the past winter. Our south-westerly gales in the autumn may
come early or may come late, may be violent or moderate, at
one time or at intervals ; but that there will be an excess of
wind from the south-west at that part of the year we may be
sure. The like holds with the relations of rain and dry weather
to the quantity of water in the air and the weight of the at
mospheric column : though exactly-true predictions cannot be
made, approximately-true ones can. So that, even were there
not among social phenomena more definite relations than
these (arid the all-important ones are far more definite), there
would still be a Social Science. Once more, Mr. Froude con

tends that the facts presented in history do not furnish subject-
matter for science, because they '* never repeat themselves,"—
because u we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth
of our conjectures." I will not meet this assertion by the
counter-assertion often made, that historic phenomena do re
peat themselves ; but, admitting that Mr. Froude here touches
on one of the great difficulties of the Social Science (that social
phenomena are in so considerable a degree different in each
case from what they were in preceding cases), I still find a
sufficient reply. For in no concrete science is there absolute
repetition ; and in some concrete sciences the repetition is no
more specific than in Sociology. Even in the most exact of
them, Astronomy, the combinations are never the same twice
over; the repetitions are but approximate. And on turning
to Geology, we find that, though the processes of denudation,
deposition, upheaval, subsidence, have been ever going on in
conformity with laws more or less clearly generalized, the
effects have been always new in their proportions and ar
rangements ; though not so completely new as to forbid com
parisons, consequent deductions, and approximate previsions
based on them.

Were there no such replies as these to Mr. Froude's rea-

36 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

sons, there would still be the reply furnished by his own inter
pretations of history ; which make it clear that his denial must
be understood as but a qualified one. Against his pixrfessed
theory may be set his actual practice, which, as it seems to
me, tacitly asserts that explanations of some social phenomena
in terms of cause and effect are possible, if not explanations
of all social phenomena. Thus, respecting the Vagrancy Act
of 1547, which made a slave of a confirmed vagrant, Mr.
Froude says : — " In the condition of things which was now
commencing .... neither this nor any other penal act
against idleness could be practically enforced." " That is to
say, the operation of an agency brought into play was neu
tralized by the operation of natural causes coexisting. Again,
respecting the enclosure of commons and amalgamation of
farms, &c., Mr. Froude writes : — " Under the late reign these
tendencies had, with great difficulty, been held partially in
check, but on the death of Henry they acquired new force and
activity." ia Or, in other words, certain social forces previ
ously antagonized by certain other forces, produced their nat-'
ural effects when the antagonism ceased. Yet again, Mr.
Froude explains that, " unhappily, two causes [debased cur
rency and an alteration of the farming system] were operating
to produce the rise of prices." I3 And throughout Mr. Froude's
History of England there are, I need scarcely say, other cases
in which he ascribes social changes to causes rooted in human
nature. Moreover, in his lecture on The Science of History,
there is a distinct enunciation of "one lesson of History;"
namely, that " the moral law is written on the tablets of eter
nity Justice and truth alone endure and live. In
justice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes
at last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways."
And elsewhere he says that " the miseries and horrors which
are now destroying the Chinese Empire are the direct and or
ganic results of the moral profligacy of its inhabitants." "
Each of these statements tacitly asserts that certain social rela
tions, and actions of certain kinds, are inevitably beneficial,
and others inevitably detrimental — an historic induction fur
nishing a basis for positive deduction. So that we must not
interpret Mr. Froude too literally when he alleges the " impos
sibility of forming scientific calculations of what men will

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 37

do before the fact, or scientific explanations of what they have
done after the fact."

Another writer who denies the possibility of a Social
Science, or who, at any rate, admits it only as a science which
lias its relations of phenomena so traversed by providential
influences that it does not come within the proper definition
of a science, is Canon Kingsley. In his address on The Limits
of Exact Science as applied to History, he says : —

" You say that as the laws of matter are inevitable, so probably are
the laws of human life? Be it so: but in what sense are the laws of
matter inevitable? Potentially or actually? Even in the seemingly
most uniform and universal law, where do we find the inevitable or
the irresistible? Is there not in nature a perpetual competition of
law against law, force against force, producing the most endless and
unexpected variety of results? Cannot each law be interfered with at
any moment by some other law, so that the first law, though it may
struggle for the mastery, shall be for an indefinite time utterly de
feated? The law of gravity is immutable enough : but do all stones
veritably fall to the ground ? Certainly not, if I choose to catch one,
and keep it in my hand. It remains there by laws: and the law of
gravity is there, too, making it feel heavy in rny hand : but it has not
fallen to the ground, and will not, till I let it. So much for the inev
itable action of the laws of gravity, as of others. Potentially, it is
immutable ; but actually, it can be conquered by other laws." 15
This passage, severely criticized, if I remember rightly, when
the address was originally published, it would be scarcely fair
to quote were it not that Canon Kingsley has repeated it at a
later date in his work, The Roman and the Teuton. The
'very unusual renderings of scientific ideas which it contains,
need here be only enumerated. Mr. Kingsley differs pro
foundly from philosopher's and men of science, in regarding a
law as itself a power or force, and so in thinking of one law
as " conquered by other laws ; " whereas the accepted concep
tion of law is that of an established order, to which the mani
festations of a power or force conform. He enunciates, too, a
quite-exceptional view of gravitation. As conceived by as
tronomers and physicists, gravitation is a universal and ever-
acting force, which portions of matter exercise on one another
when at sensible distances ; arid the law of this force is that it
varies directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the
distance. Mr. Kingsley's view, is that the law of gravitation

38 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

is "defeated" if a stone is prevented from falling to the
ground— that the law "struggles" (not the force), and that be
cause it no longer produces motion, the " inevitable action of
the laws of gravity '' (not of gravity) is suspended : the truth
being that neither the force nor its law is in the slightest de
gree modified. Further, the theory of natural processes which
Mr. Kingsley has arrived at, seems to be that when two or
more forces (or laws, if he prefers it) come into play, there is
a partial or complete suspension of one by another. Whereas
the doctrine held by men of science is, that the forces are all
in full operation, and tl\e effect is their resultant ; so that, for
example, when a shot is fired horizontally from a cannon, the
force impressed on it produces in a given time just the same
amount of horizontal motion as though gravity were absent,
while gravity produces in that same time a fall just equal to
that which it would have produced had the shot been dropped
from the mouth of the cannon. Of course, holding these pe
culiar views of causation as displayed among simple physical
phenomena, Canon Kingsley is consistent in denying histori
cal sequence; and in saying that "as long as man has the
mysterious power of breaking the laws of his own being, such
a sequence not only cannot be discovered, but it cannot exist." "
At the same time it is manifest that until he comes to some
agreement with men of science respecting conceptions of
forces, of their laws, and of the modes in which phenomena
produced by compositions of forces are interpretable in terms
of compound laws, no discussion of the question at issue can
be carried on with profit.

Without waiting for such an agreement, however, which is
probably somewhat remote. Canon Kingsley's argument may
be met by putting side by side with it some of his own conclu
sions set forth elsewhere. In an edition of Alton Locke pub
lished since the delivery of the address above quoted from,
there is a new preface containing, among others, the following
passages : —

" The progress towards institutions more and more popular may be
slow, but it is sure. Whenever any class has conceived the hope of
being fairly represented, it is certain to fulfil its own hopes, unless it
employs, or provokes, violence impossible in England. The thing
will be.11 . . . "If any young gentlemen look forward ....

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 39

to a Conservative reaction of any other kind than this .... to
even the least stoppage of what the world calls progress — which I
should define as the putting in practice the results of inductive science ;
— then do they, like King Picrochole in Rabelais, look for a kingdom
which shall be restored to them at the coming of the Cocqcigrues." l8
And in a preface addressed to workingmen, contained in an
earlier edition, he says : —

" If you are better off than you were in 1848, you owe it principally
to those laws of political economy (as they are called), which I call the
brute natural accidents of supply and demand," &c.19
Which passages offer explanations of changes now gone by
as having been wrought out by natural forces in conformity
with natural laws, and also predictions of changes which
natural forces at present in action will work out That is to
say, by the help of generalized experiences there is an inter
pretation of past phenomena and a prevision of future phe
nomena. There is an implicit recognition of that Social Sci
ence which is explicitly denied.

A reply to these criticisms may be imagined. In looking
for whatever reconciliation is possible between these positions
which seem so incongruous, we must suppose the intended
assertion to be, that only general interpretations and previs
ions can be made, not those which are special. Bearing in
mind Mr. Froude's occasional explanations of historical phe
nomena as naturally caused, we must conclude that he be
lieves certain classes of sociological facts (as the politico-eco
nomical) to be scientifically explicable, while other classes are
not : though, if this be his view, it is not clear how, if the re
sults of men's wills, separate or aggregated, are incalculable,
politico-economical actions can be dealt with scientifically;
since, equally with other social actions, they are determined
by aggregated wills. Similarly, Canon Kingsley, recognizing
no less distinctly economical laws, and enunciating also cer
tain laws of progress — nay, even warning his hearers against
the belief that he denies the applicability of the inductive
method to social phenomena, — must be assumed to think that
the applicability of the inductive method is here but partial.
Citing the title of his address and some of its sentences, he
may say they imply simply that there are limits to the expla
nation of social facts in precise ways; though this position

40 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

does not seem really reconcilable with the doctrine that social
laws are liable to be at any time overruled, providentially or
otherwise. But, merely hinting these collateral criticisms,
this reply is to be met by the demurrer that it is beside the
question. If the sole thing- meant is that sociological previs
ions can be approximate only — if the thing denied is the pos
sibility of reducing Sociology to the form of an exact science ;
then the rejoinder is that the thing denied is a thing which no
one has affirmed. Only a moiety of science is exact science —
only phenomena of certain orders have had their relations
expressed quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Of the re
maining orders there are some produced by factors so numer
ous and so hard to measure, that to develop our knowledge of
their relations into the quantitative form will be extremely
difficult, if not impossible. But these orders of phenomena
are not therefore excluded from the conception of Science. In
Geology, in Biology, in Psychology, most of the previsions are
qualitative only ; and where they are quantitative their quan-
titativeness, never quite definite, is mostly very indefinite.
Nevertheless we unhesitatingly class these previsions as scien
tific. It is thus with Sociology. The phenomena it presents,
involved in a higher degree than all others, are less than all
other, capable of precise treatment : such of them as can be
generalized, can be generalized only within wide limits of
variation as to time and amount ; and there remains much
that cannot be generalized. But so far as there can be gener
alization, and so far as there can be interpretation based on it,
so far there can be science. Whoever expresses political opin
ions — whoever asserts that such or such public arrangements
will be beneficial or detrimental, tacitly expresses belief in a
Social Science ; for he asserts, by implication, that there is a
natural sequence among social actions, and that as the sequence
is natural results may be foreseen.

Reduced to a more concrete form, the case may be put
thus : — Mr. Froude and Canon Kingsley both believe to a con
siderable extent in the efficiency of legislation — probably to a
greater extent than it is believed in by some of those who
assert the existence of a Social Science. To believe in the
efficiency of legislation is to believe that certain prospective
penalties or rewards will act as deterrents or incentives— will

IS THERE A SOCIAL SCIENCE? 41

modify individual conduct, and therefore modify social ac
tion. Though it may be impossible to say that a given law
will produce a foreseen effect on a particular person, yet no
doubt is felt that it will produce a foreseen effect on the mass
of persons. Though Mr. Froude, when arguing against Mr.
Buckle, says that he " would deliver himself from the eccen
tricities of this and that individual by a doctrine of averages,"
but that " unfortunately, the average of one generation need
not be the average of the next ; " yet Mr. Froude himself so
far believes in the doctrine of averages as to hold that legis
lative interdicts, with threats of death or imprisonment be
hind them, will restrain the great majority of men in ways
which can be predicted. While he contends that the results
of individual will are incalculable, yet, by approving certain
laws and condemning others, he tacitly affirms that the results
of the aggregate of wills are calculable. And if this be as
serted of the aggregate of wills as affected by legislation, it
must be asserted of the aggregate of wills as affected by social
influences at large. If it be held that the desire to avoid
punishment will so act on the average of men as to produce an
average foreseen result ; then it must also be held that on the
average of men, the desire to get the greatest return for la
bour, the desire to rise into a higher rank of life, the desire to
gain applause, and so forth, will each of them poduce a certain
average result. And to hold this is to hold that there can be
prevision of social phenomena, and therefore Social Science.

In brief, then, the alternative positions are these. On the
one hand, if there is no natural causation throughout the ac
tions of incorporated humanity, government and legislation
are absurd. Acts of Parliament may, as well as not, be made
to depend on the drawing of lots or the tossing of a coin ; or,
rather, there may as well be none at all : social sequences
having no ascertainable order, no effect can be counted upon
— everything is chaotic. On the other hand, if there is natu
ral causation, then the combination of forces by which every
combination of effects is produced, produces that combination
of effects in conformity with the laws of the forces. And if
so, it behoves us to use all diligence in ascertaining what the
forces are, what are their laws, and what are the ways in
which they co-operate.

42 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

Such further elucidation as is possible will be gained by
discussing- the question to which we now address ourselves —
the Nature of the Social Science. Along with a definite idea
of this, will come a perception that the denial of a Social Sci
ence has arisen from the confusing of two essentially-different
classes of phenomena which societies present — the one class,
almost ignored by historians, constituting the subject-matter
of Social Science, and the other class, almost exclusively occu
pying them, admitting of scientific co-ordination in a very
small degree, if at all.

CHAPTER III.

NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE.

OUT of bricks, well burnt, hard, and sharp-angled, lying1 in
heaps by his side, the bricklayer builds, even without mortar,
a wall of some height that has considerable stability. With
bricks made of bad materials, irregularly burnt, warped,
cracked, and many of them broken, he cannot build a dry
wall of the same height and stability. The dockyard-labourer,
piling cannon-shot, is totally unable to make these spherical
masses stand at all as the bricks stand. There are, indeed,
certain definite shapes into which they may be piled — that of a
tetrahedron, or that of a pyramid having a square base, or that
of an elongated wedge allied to the pyramid. In any of these
forms they may be put together symmetrically and stably ;
but not in forms with vertical sides or highly-inclined sides.
Once more, if, instead of equal spherical shot, the masses to be
piled are boulders, partially but irregularly rounded, and of
various sizes, no definite stable form is possible. A loose heap,
indefinite in its surface and angles, is all the labourer can
make of them. Putting which several facts together, and ask
ing what is the most general truth they imply, we see it to be
this — that the character of the aggregate is determined by the
characters of the units.

If we pass from units of these visible, tangible kinds, to the
units contemplated by chemists and physicists as making up
masses of matter, the same truth meets us. Each so-called
element, each combination of elements, each re-combination
of the compounds, has a form of crystallization. Though its
crystals differ in their sizes, and are liable to be modified by
truncations of angles and apices, as well as by partial merg-
ings into one another, yet the type of structure, as shown by

44: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

cleavage, is constant : particular kinds of molecules severally
have particular shapes into which they settle themselves as
they aggregate. And though in some cases it happens that a
suhstance, simple or compound, has two or even more forms
of aggregation, yet the recognized interpretation is, that these
different forms are the forms assumed by molecules made dif
ferent in their structures by allotropic or isomeric changes.
So constant is the relation between the nature of any mole
cules and their mode of crystallizing, that, given two kinds of
molecules which are known, from their chemical actions, to
be closely allied in their natures, and it is inferred with cer
tainty that their crystals will be closely allied. In brief, it
may be unhesitatingly affirmed, as an outcome of physics and
chemistry, that throughout all phenomena presented by dead
matter, the natures of the units necessitate certain traits in the
aggregates.

This truth is again exemplified by aggregates of living
matter. In the substance of each species of plant or animal,
there is a proclivity towards the structure which that plant or
animal presents — a proclivity conclusively proved *in cases
where the conditions to the maintenance of life are sufficient
ly simple, and wrhere the tissue has not assumed a structure
too finished to permit re-arrangement. The perpetually-cited
case of the polype, each part of which, when it is cut into
several, presently puts on the polype-shape, and gains struc
tures and powers like those of the original whole, illustrates
this truth among animals. Among plants it is well exempli
fied by the Begonias. Here a complete plant grows from a
fragment of a leaf stuck in the ground; and, in Begonia
pliyllomaniaca, complete plants grow even out of scales that
fall from the leaves and the stem — a fact showing, like the
fact which the polype furnishes, that the units everywhere
present, have for their type of aggregation the type of the
organism they belong to ; and reminding us of the universal
fact that the units composing every germ, animal or vegetal,
have a proclivity towards the parental type of aggregation.

Thus, given the natures of the units, and the nature of the
aggregate they form is pre-determined. I say the nature,
meaning, of course, the essential traits, and not including the
incidental. By the characters of the units are necessitated

NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 45

certain limits within which the characters of the aggregate
must fall. The circumstances attending1 aggregation greatly
modify the results ; but the truth here to be recognized is,
that these circumstances, in some cases perhaps preventing
aggregation altogether, in other cases impeding it, in other
cases facilitating it more or less, can never give to the aggre
gate, characters that do not consist with the characters of the
units. No favouring conditions will give the labourer power
to pile cannon-shot into a vertical wall ; no favouring con
ditions will make it possible for common salt, which crys
tallizes on the regular system, to crystallize, like sulphate of
soda, on the oblique prismatic system ; no favouring con
ditions will enable the fragment of a polype to take on the
structure of a mollusk.

Among such social aggregates as inferior creatures fall
into, more or less definitely, the same truth holds. Whether
they live in a mere assemblage, or whether they live in
something like an organized union with division of labour
among its members, as happens in many cases, is unquestion
ably determined by the properties of the units. Given the
structures and consequent instincts of the individuals as we
find them, and the community they form will inevitably
present certain traits ; and no community having such traits
can be formed out of individuals having other structures
and instincts.

Those who have been brought up in the belief that there is
one law for the rest of the Universe and another law for man
kind, will doubtless be astonished by the proposal to include
aggregates of men in this generalization. And yet that the
properties of the units determine the properties of the whole
they make up, evidently holds of societies as of other things.
A general survey of tribes and nations, past and present,
shows clearly enough that it is so ; and a brief considera
tion of the conditions shows, with no less clearness, that it
must be so.

Ignoring for the moment the special traits of races and in
dividuals, observe the traits common to members of the spe
cies at large ; and consider how these must affect their rela
tions when associated.

46 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

They have all needs for food, and have corresponding
desires. To all of them exertion is a physiological expense ;
must bring a certain return of nutriment, if it is not to be
detrimental ; and is accompanied by repugnance when pushed
to excess, or even before reaching it. They are all of them
liable to bodily injury, without accompanying pain, from va
rious extreme physical actions ; and they are liable to emo
tional pains, of positive and negative kinds, from one an
other's actions. As says Shylock, insisting on that human
nature which Jews have in common with Christians —

" Hath not a Jew eyes ? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions ? fed with the same food, hurt with the
same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is ?
If you prick us, do we not bleed ? if you tickle us, do we not laugh I
if you poison us, do we not die I and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge ? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."

Conspicuous, however, as is this possession of certain fun
damental qualities by all individuals, there is no adequate
recognition of the truth that from these individual qualities
must result certain qualities in an assemblage of individuals ;
that in proportion as the individuals forming one assemblage
are like in their qualities to the individuals forming another
assemblage, the two assemblages will have likenesses ; and
that the assemblages will differ in their characters in propor
tion as the component individuals of the one differ from those
of the other. Yet when this, which is almost a truism, has
been admitted, it cannot be denied that in every community
there is a group of phenomena growing naturally out of the
phenomena presented by its members — a set of properties in
the aggregate determined by the sets of properties in the
units ; arid that the relations of the two sets form the subject-
matter of a science. It needs but to ask what would happen
if men avoided one another, as various inferior creatures do,
to see that the very possibility of a society depends on a cer
tain emotional property in the individual. It needs but to
ask what would happen if each man liked best the men who
gave him most pain, to perceive that social relations, suppos
ing them to be possible, would be utterly unlike the social
relations resulting from the greater liking which men indi-

NATURE OP THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 4.7

vidually have for others who give them pleasure. It needs
but to ask what would happen if, instead of ordinarily prefer
ring the easiest ways of achieving their ends, men preferred
to achieve their ends in the most troublesome ways, to infer
that then, a society, if one could exist, would be a widely-dif
ferent society from any we know. And if, as these extreme
cases show us, cardinal traits in societies are determined by
cardinal traits in men, it cannot be questioned that less-marked
traits in societies are determined by less-marked traits in men ;
and that there must everywhere be a consensus between the
special structures and actions of the one and the special struc
tures and actions of the other.

Setting out, then, with this general principle, that the
properties of the units determine the properties of the aggre
gate, we conclude that there must be a Social Science express
ing the relations between the two, with as much definiteness
as the natures of the phenomena permit. Beginning with
types of men who form but small and incoherent social ag
gregates, such a science has to show in what ways the indi
vidual qualities, intellectual and emotional, negative further
aggregation. It has to explain how slight modifications of
individual nature, arising under modified conditions of life,
make somewhat larger aggregates possible. It has to trace
out, in aggregates of some size, the genesis of the social rela
tions, regulative and operative, into which the members fall.
It has to exhibit the stronger and more prolonged social influ
ences which,' by further modifying the characters of the units,
facilitate further aggregation with consequent further com
plexity of social structure. Among societies of all orders and
sizes, from the smallest and rudest up to the largest and most
civilized, it has to ascertain what traits there are in common,
determined by the common traits of human beings ; what
less-general traits, distinguishing certain groups of societies,
result from traits distinguishing certain races of men ; and
what peculiarities in each society are traceable to the pecul
iarities of its members. In every case it has for its subject-
matter the growth, development, structure, and functions of
the social aggregate, as brought about by the mutual actions
of individuals whose natures are partly like those of all men,
partly like those of kindred races, partly distinctive.

48 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

These phenomena of social evolution have, of course, to be
explained with due reference to the conditions each society is
exposed to — the conditions furnished by its locality and by its
relations to neighbouring societies. Noting this merely to
prevent possible misapprehensions, the fact which here con
cerns us, is, not that the Social Science exhibits these or those
special truths, but that, given men having certain properties,
and an aggregate of such men must have certain derivative
properties which form the subject-matter of a science.

" But were we not told some pages back, that in societies,
causes and effects are related in ways so involved that previs
ion is often impossible ? Were we not warned against rashly
taking measures for achieving this or that desideratum, re
gardless of the proofs, so abundantly supplied by the past,
that agencies set in action habitually work out results never
foreseen ? And were not instances given of all-important
changes that were due to influences from which no one would
have anticipated them ? If so, how can there be a Social Sci
ence ? If Louis Napoleon could not have expected that the
war he began to prevent the consolidation of Germany, would
be the very means of consolidating it ; if to M. Thiers, five-
and-twenty years ago, it would have seemed a dream exceed
ing all ordinary dreams in absurdity, that he would be fired at
from his own .fortifications ; how in the name of wonder is it
possible to formulate social phenomena in anything approach
ing scientific order ? "

The difficulty thus put in as strong a form as I can find for
it. is that which, clearly or vaguely, rises in the minds of most
to whom Sociology is proposed as a subject to be studied after
scientific methods, with the expectation of reaching results
having scientific certainty. Before giving to the question its
special answer, let me give it a general answer.

The science of Mechanics has reached a development higher
than has been reached by any but the purely-abstract sciences.
Though we may not call it perfect, yet the great accuracy of
the predictions which its ascertained principles enable astron
omers to make, shows how near to perfection it has come ; and
the achievements of the skilful artillery-officer prove that in
their applications to terrestrial motions these principles yield

NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 49

previsions of considerable exactness. But now, taking Me
chanics as the type of a highly-developed science, let us note
what it enables us to predict, and what it does not enable
us to predict, respecting some concrete phenomenon. Say
that there is a mine to be exploded. Ask what will hap
pen to the fragments of matter sent into the air. Then
observe how much we can infer from established dynamical
laws. By that common observation which precedes the more
exact observations of science, we are taught that all the frag
ments, having risen to heights more or less various, will fall ;
that they will reach the ground at scattered places within a
circumscribed area, and at somewhat different times. Science
enables us to say more than this. From those same principles
whence are inferable the path of a planet or a projectile, it de
duces the truth that each fragment will describe a curve ; that
all the curves, though individually different, will be specifi
cally alike ; that (ignoring deviations caused by atmospheric
resistance) they will severally be portions of ellipses so eccen
tric as to be indistinguishable from parabolas — such parts of
them, at least, as are described after the rush of gases ceases
further to accelerate the fragments. But while the principles
of Mechanics help us to these certainties, we cannot learn
from them anything more definite respecting the courses that
will be taken by particular fragments. Whether, of the mass
overlying the powder to be exploded, the part on the left will
be propelled upwards in one fragment or several ? whether
this piece will be shot higher than that ? whether any, and if
so, which, of the projected masses will be stopped in their
courses by adjacent objects they strike ? — are questions it can
not answer. Not that there will be any want of conformity
to law in these results ; but that the data on which predic
tions of them are to be based, cannot be obtained.

Observe, then, that respecting a concrete phenomenon of
some complexity, the most exact science enables us to make
predictions that are mainly general, or only partially special.
Seeing that this is so, even where the causes and effects are
not greatly involved, and where the science of them is well
developed, much more may we expect it to be so among the
most involved causes and effects, the science of which is but
rudimentary. This contrast between the generalities that ad-

50 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

mit of prevision and the specialties that do not admit of pre
vision, will be still more clearly seen on passing from this
preliminary illustration to an illustration in which the anal
ogy, is closer.

What can we say about the future of this newly-born child ?
Will it die of some disorder during infancy ? Will it survive
awhile, and be carried off by scarlet fever or whooping-cough ?
Will it have measles or small-pox, and succumb to one or the
other ? None of these questions can be answered. Will it
some day fall down-stairs, or be run over, or set fire to its
clothes ; and be killed or maimed by one or other of these ac
cidents ? These questions also have no answers. None can
tell whether in boyhood there may come epilepsy, or St.
Vitus's dance, or other formidable affection. Looking at the
child now in the nurse's arms, none can foresee with certainty
that it will be stupid or intelligent, tractable or perverse.
Equally beyond possibility of prediction are those events
which, if it survives, will occur to it in maturity — partly
caused by its own nature, and partly by surrounding condi
tions. Whether there will come the success due to skill and
perseverance; whether the circumstances will be such as to
give these scope or not ; whether accidents will thwart or
favour efforts ; are wholly-unanswerable inquiries. That is to
say, the facts we ordinarily class as biographical, do not ad
mit of prevision.

If from quite special facts we turn to facts somewhat less
special which the life of this infant will present, we find,
among those that are gitasz-biographical, a certain degree of
prevision possible. Though the unfolding of the faculties is
variable within limits, going on here precociously and there
with unusual slowness, yet there is such order in the unfold
ing as enables us to say that the child will not be a mathema
tician or a dramatist at three years old, will not be a psycholo
gist by the time he is ten, will not reach extended political
conceptions while his voice is still unbroken. Moreover, of
the emotional nature we may make certain predictions of a
kindred order. Whether he will marry or not, no one can
say ; but it is possible to say, if not with certainty still with
much probability, that after a certain age an inclination to

NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 51

marry will arise ; and though none can tell whether he will
have children, yet that, if he has, some amount of the paternal
feeling will be manifested, may be concluded as very likely.

But now if, looking at the entire assemblage of facts that
will 'be presented during the life of this infant as it becomes
mature, decays and dies, we pass over the biographical and
guasi-biographical, as admitting of either 110 prevision or but
imperfect prevision ; we find remaining classes of facts that
may be asserted beforehand : some with a high degree of
probability, and some with certainty — some with great defi-
niteness and some within moderate limits of variation. I re
fer to the facts of growth, development, structure, and func
tion.

Along with that love of personalities which exalts every
thing inconstant in human life into a matter of interest, there
goes the habit of regarding whatever is constant in human
life as a matter of no interest ; and so, when contemplating
the future of the infant, there is a tacit ignoring of all the
vital phenomena it will exhibit — phenomena that are alike
kiiowable and important to be known. The anatomy and
physiology of Man, comprehending under these names not
only the structures and functions of the adult, but the pro
gressive establishment of these structures and functions dur
ing individual evolution, form the subject-matter of what
every one recognizes as a science. Though there is imperfect
exactness in the generalized coexistences and sequences mak
ing up this science ; though general truths respecting struc
tures are met by occasional exceptions in the way of malfor
mations ; though anomalies of function also occur to negative
absolute prediction ; though there are considerable variations
of the limits within which growth and structure may range,
and considerable differences between the rates of functions
and between the times at which functions are established ; yet
no one doubts that the biological phenomena presented by the
human body, may be organized into a knowledge having the
definiteness which constitutes it scientific, in the understood
sense of that word.

If, now, any one, insisting on the incalculableness of a
child's future, biographically considered, asserted that the
child, therefore, presented no subject-matter for science, ignor-

52 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

ing altogether what we will for the moment call its anthro
pology (though the meaning now given to the word scarcely
permits this use of it), he would fall into a conspicuous error
— an error in this case made conspicuous because we are able
daily to observe the difference between an account of the
living body, and an account of its conduct and the events
that occur to it.

The reader doubtless anticipates the analogy. What Biog
raphy is to Anthropology, History is to Sociology — History, I
mean, as commonly conceived. The kind of relation which
the sayings and doings that make up the ordinary account of
a man's life, bear to an account of his bodily and mental evo
lution, structural and functional, is like the kind of relation
borne by that narrative of a nation's actions and fortunes its
historian gives us, to a description of its institutions, regula
tive and operative, and the ways in which their structures and
functions have gradually established themselves. And if it is
an error to say that there is no Science of Man, because the
events of a man's life cannot be foreseen, it is equally an error
to say that there is no Science of Society, because there can be
no prevision of the occurrences which make up ordinary
history.

Of course, I do not say that the parallel between an indi
vidual organism and a social organism is so close, that the
distinction to be clearly drawn in the one case may be drawn
with like clearness in the other. The structures and func
tions of the social organism are obviously far less specific, far
more modifiable, far more dependent on conditions that are
variable and never twice alike. All I mean is that, as in the
one case so in the other, there lie underneath the phenomena
of conduct, not forming subject-matter for science, certain
vital phenomena, which do form subject-matter for science.
Just as in the man there are structures and functions which
make possible the doings his biographer tells of, so in the na
tion there are structures and functions which make possible
the doings its historian tells of ; and in both cases it is with
these structures and functions, in their origin, development,
and decline, that science is concerned.

To make better the parallel, and further to explain the

NATURE OP THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 53

nature of the Social Science, we must say that the morphology
and physiology of Society, instead of corresponding to the
morphology and physiology of Man, correspond rather to
morphology and physiology in general1. Social organisms,
like individual organisms, are to be arranged into classes and
sub-classes — not, indeed, into classes and sub-classes having
anything like the same definiteness or the same constancy,
but nevertheless having likenesses and differences which jus
tify the putting of them into major groups most-markedly
contrasted, and, within these, arranging them in minor groups
less-markedly contrasted. And just as Biology discovers cer
tain general traits of development, structure, and function,
holding throughout all organisms, others holding throughout
certain great groups, others throughout certain sub-groups
these contain ; so Sociology has to recognize truths of social
development, structure, and function, that are some of them
universal, some of them general, some of them special.

For, recalling the conclusion previously reached, it is
manifest that in so far as human beings, considered as social
units, have properties in common, the social aggregates they
form will have properties in common ; that likenesses of nature
holding throughout certain of the human races, will originate
likenesses of nature in the nations arising out of them ; and
that such peculiar traits as are possessed by the highest varieties
of men, must result in distinctive characters possessed in com
mon by the communities into which they organize themselves.
So that whether we look at the matter in the abstract or in
the concrete, we reach the same conclusion. We need but to
glance, on the one hand, at the varieties of uncivilized men
and the structures of their tribes, and, on the other hand, at
the varieties of civilized men and the structures of their na
tions, to see inference verified by fact. And thus recognizing,
both a priori and a posteriori, these relations between the
phenomena of individual human nature and the phenomena
of incorporated human nature, we cannot fail to see that the
phenomena of incorporated human nature form the subject-
matter of a science.

And now to make more definite the conception of a Social
Science thus shadowed forth in a general way, let me set down

54 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

a few truths of the kind indicated. Some that I propose to
name are very familiar ; and others I add, not because of their
interest or importance, but because they are easy of exposi
tion. The aim is simply to convey a clear idea of the nature
of sociological truths.

Take, first, the general fact that along with social aggrega
tion there always goes some kind of organization. In the
very lowest stages, where the assemblages are very small and
very incoherent, there is no established subordination — no
centre of control. Chieftainships of settled kinds come only
along with larger and more coherent aggregates. The evolu
tion of a governmental structure having some strength and
permanence, is the condition under which alone any con
siderable growth of a society can take place. A differentiation
of the originally-homogeneous mass of units into a co-ordinat
ing part and a co-ordinated part, is the indispensable initial
step.

Along with evolution of societies in size there goes evolu
tion of their co-ordinating centres ; which, having become
permanent, presently become more or less complex. In small
tribes, chieftainship, generally wanting in stability, is quite
simple ; but as tribes become larger by growth, or by reduc
tion of other tribes to subjection, the co-ordinating apparatus
begins to develop by the addition of subordinate governing
agencies.

Simple and familiar as are these facts, we are not, therefore,
to overlook their significance. That men rise into the state of
social aggregation only on condition that they lapse into rela
tions of inequality in respect of power, and are made to co
operate as a whole only by the agency of a structure securing
obedience, is none the less a fact in science because it is a trite
fact. This is a primary common trait in social aggregates de
rived from a common trait in their units. It is a truth in
Sociology, comparable to the biological truth that the first
step in the production of any living organism, high or low,
is a certain differentiation whereby a peripheral portion be
comes distinguished from a central portion. And such excep
tions to this biological truth as we find in those minute
non-nucleated portions of protoplasm that are the very lowest
living things, are paralleled by those exceptions to the so-

NATURE OP THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 55

ciological truth, seen in the small incoherent assemblages
formed by the very lowest types of men.

The differentiation of the regulating part and the regulated
part, is, in small primitive societies, not only imperfectly estab
lished but vague. The chief does not at first become unlike
his fellow-savages in his functions, otherwise than by exercis
ing greater sway. He hunts, makes his weapons, works, and
manages his private affairs, in just the same ways as the rest ;
while in war he differs from other warriors only by his pre
dominant influence, not by ceasing to be a private soldier.
And along with this slight separation from the rest of the
tribe in military functions and industrial functions, there is
only a slight separation politically : judicial action is but very
feebly represented by exercise of his personal authority in
keeping order.

At a higher stage, the power of the chief being well estab
lished, he no longer supports himself. Still he remains un
distinguished industrially from other members of the domi
nant class, which has grown up while chieftainship has been
getting settled ; for he simply gets productive work done by
deputy, as they do. Nor is a further extension of his power
accompanied by complete separation of the political from the
industrial functions ; for he habitually remains a regulator of
production, and in many cases a regulator of trade, presiding
over acts of exchange. Of his several controlling activities,
this last is, however, the one which he first ceases personally
to carry on. Industry early shows a tendency towards self-
control, apart from the control which the chief exercises more
and more as political and military head. The primary social
differentiation which we have noted between the regulative
part and the operative part, is presently followed by a distinc
tion, which eventually becomes very marked, between the
internal arrangements of the two parts : the operative part
slowly developing within itself agencies by which processes
of production, distribution, and exchange are co-ordinated,
wThile co-ordination of the non-operative part continues on its
original footing.

Along with a development which renders conspicuous the
separation of the operative and regulative structures, there
goes a development within the regulative structures them-

56 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

selves. The chief, at first uniting the characters of king,
judge, captain, and often priest, has his functions more and
more specialized as the evolution of the society in size and
complexity advances. Though remaining supreme judge, he
does most of his judging by deputy ; though remaining nomi
nally head of his army, the actual leading of it falls more and
more into the hands of subordinate officers ; though still
retaining ecclesiastical supremacy, his priestly functions
practically almost cease ; though in theory the maker and
administrator of the law, the actual making and administra
tion lapse more and more into other hands. So that, stating
the facts broadly, out of the original co-ordinating agent
having undivided functions, there eventually develop several
co-ordinating agencies which divide these functions among
them.

Each of these agencies, too, follows the same law. Origi
nally simple, it step by step subdivides into many parts, and
becomes an organization, administrative, judicial, ecclesiasti
cal, or military, having graduated classes within itself, and a
more or less distinct form of government within itself.

I will not complicate this statement by doing more than
recognizing the variations that occur in cases where supreme
power does not lapse into the hands of one man (which,
however, in early stages of social evolution is an unstable
modification). And I must explain that the above general
statements are to be taken with the qualification that differ
ences of detail are passed over to gain brevity and clearness.
Add to which that it is beside the purpose of the argument
to carry the description beyond these first stages. But duly
bearing in mind that without here elaborating a Science of
Sociology, nothing more than a rude outline of cardinal facts
can be given, enough has been said to show that in the de
velopment of social structures, there may be recognized cer
tain most-general facts, certain less-general facts, and certain
facts successively more special ; just as there may be recog
nized general and special facts of evolution in individual
organisms.

To extend, as well as to make clearer, this conception of
the Social Science, let me here set down a question which
comes within its sphere. What is the relation in a society

NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 57

between structure and growth ? Up to what point is structure
necessary to growth ? after what point does it retard growth ?
at what point does it arrest growth ?

There exists in the individual organism a duplex relation
between growth and structure which it is difficult adequately
to express. Excluding the cases of a few low organisms liv
ing under special conditions, we may 'properly say that great
growth is not possible without high structure. The whole
animal kingdom, throughout its invertebrate and vertebrate
types, may be cited in evidence. On the other hand, among
the superior organisms, and especially among those leading
active lives, there is a marked tendency for completion of
structure to go along with arrest of growth. While an ani
mal of elevated type is growing rapidly, its organs continue
imperfectly developed — the bones remain partially cartilagi
nous, the muscles are soft, the brain lacks definiteness ; and
the details of structure throughout all parts are finished only
after growth has ceased. Why these relations are as we find
them, it is not difficult to see. That a young animal may
grow, it must digest, circulate blood, breathe, excrete wraste
products, and so forth ; to do which it must have tolerably-
complete viscera, vascular system, &c. That it may eventually
become able to get its own food, it has to develop gradually
the needful appliances and aptitudes ; to which end it must be
gin with limbs, and senses, and nervous system, that have
considerable degrees of efficiency. But along with every
increment of growth achieved by the help of these partially-
developed structures, there has to go an alteration of the
structures themselves. If they were rightly adjusted to the
preceding smaller size, they are wrongly adjusted to the suc
ceeding greater size. Hence they must be re-moulded — un
built and re-built. Manifestly, therefore, in proportion as the
previous building has been complete, there arises a great ob
stacle in the shape of un-building and re-building. The
bones show us how this difficulty is met. In the thigh-bone
of a boy, for instance, there exists between the head and
the cylindrical part of the bone, a place where the original
cartilaginous state continues ; and where, by the addition of
new cartilage in which new osseous matter is deposited, the
shaft of the bone is lengthened: the like going on in an

58 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

answering place at the other end of the shaft. Complete
ossification at these two places occurs only when the bone has
ceased to increase in length ; and, on considering what would
have happened had the bone been ossified from end to end
before its lengthening was complete, it will be seen how great
an obstacle to growth is thus escaped. What holds here,
holds throughout the organism : though structure up to a cer
tain point is requisite for growth, structure beyond that point
impedes growth. How necessary is this relation we shall

equally perceive in a more complex case— say, the growth of
an entire limb. There is a certain size and proportion of
parts, which a limb ordinarily has in relation to the rest of
the body. Throw upon that limb extra function, and within
moderate limits it will increase in strength and bulk. If the
extra function begins early in life, the limb may be raised
considerably above its usual size ; but if the extra function
begins after maturity, the deviation is less : in neither case,
however, being great. If we consider how increase of the
limb is effected, we shall see why this is so. More active
function brings a greater local supply of blood; and, for a
time, new tissue is formed in excess of waste. But the local
supply of blood is limited by the sizes of the arteries which
bring it ; and though, up to a certain point, increase of flow
is gained by temporary dilatation of them, yet beyond that
point increase can be gained only by un-building and re
building the arteries. Such alterations of arteries slowly
take place — less slowly with the smaller peripheral ones,
more slowly with the larger ones out of which these branch ;
since these have to be altered all the way back to their
points of divergence from the great central blood vessels.
In like manner, the channels for carrying off waste products
must be re-modelled, both locally and centrally. The nerve-
trunks, too, and also the centres from which they come, must
be adjusted to the greater demands upon them. Nay, more ;
with a given visceral system, a large extra quantity of blood
cannot be permanently given to one part of the body, with
out decreasing the quantities given to other parts ; and, there
fore, structural changes have to be made by which the
drafting-off of blood to these other parts is diminished.
Hence the great resistance to increase in the size of a limb

NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 59

beyond a certain moderate limit. Such increase cannot be
effected without un-building and re-building not only the
parts that directly minister to the limb, but, eventually, all
the remoter parts. So that the bringing of structures into
perfect fitness for certain requirements, immensely hinders
the adaptation of them to other requirements — re-ad justments
become difficult in proportion as adjustments are made com
plete.

How far does this law hold in the social organism ? To
what extent does it happen here, too, that the multiplying and
elaborating of institutions, and the perfecting of arrangements
for gaining immediate ends, raise impediments to the develop
ment of better institutions and to the future gaining of higher
ends ? Socially, as well as individually, organization is indis
pensable to growth : beyond a certain point there cannot be
further growth without further organization. Yet there is not
a little reason for suspecting that beyond this point organiza
tion is indirectly repressive — increases the obstacles to those
re-adjustments required for larger growth and more perfect
structure. Doubtless the aggregate we call a society is much
more plastic than an individual living aggregate to which it
is here compared — its type is far less fixed. Nevertheless, there
is evidence that its type tends continually to become fixed, and
that each addition to its structures is a step towards the fixa
tion. A few instances will show how this is true alike of the
material structures a society develops and of its institutions,
political or other.

Cases, insignificant, perhaps, but quite to the point, are
furnished by our appliances for locomotion. Not to dwell on
the minor ones within cities, which, however, show us that
existing arrangements are impediments to better arrangements,
let us pass to railways. Observe how the inconveniently-nar
row gauge (which, taken from that of stage-coach wheels, was
itself inherited from an antecedent system of locomotion), has
become an insuperable obstacle to a better gauge. Observe,
also, how the type of carriage, which was derived from the
body of a stage-coach (some of the early first-class carriages
bearing the words "trio, juncta in imo"), having become
established, it is immensely difficult now to introduce the
more convenient type later established in America; where

60 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

they profited by our experience, but were not hampered by
our adopted plans. The enormous capital invested in our
stock of carriages cannot be sacrificed. Gradually to intro
duce carriages of the American type, by running them along
with those of our own type, would be very difficult, because
of our many partings and joinings of trains. And thus we
are obliged to go 011 with a type that is inferior.

Take, again, our system of drainage. Urged on as it was
some thirty years ago as a panacea for sundry sanitary evils,
and spread as it has been by force of law through all our great
towns, this system cannot now be replaced by a better system
without extreme difficulty. Though, by necessitating decom
position where oxygen cannot get, and so generating chemical
compounds that are unstable and poisonous, it has in many
cases produced the very diseases it was to have prevented ;
though, by delivering the morbid products from fever-patients,
&c., into a branching tube which, communicating with all
houses, effectually conveys to them infecting gases that are
kept out only so long as stink-traps are in good order ; yet it
has become almost out of the question now to adopt those
methods by which the excreta of towns may be got rid of at
once innocuously and usefully. Nay, worse — one part of our
sanitary administration having insisted on a sewage-system
by which Oxford, Beading, Maidenhead, Windsor, &c., pollute
the water London has to drink, another part of our sanitary
administration makes loud protests against the impurity of the
water, which it charges with causing disease (not remarking,
however, that law-enforced arrangements have produced the
impurity). And now there must be a re-organization, that will
be immensely impeded by the existing premature organization,
before we can have either pure air or pure water.

Our mercantile arrangements, again, furnish abundant illus
trations teaching the same lesson. In each trade there is an
established course of business ; and however obvious may be
some better course, the difficulties of altering the settled routine
are, if not insurmountable, still very considerable. Take, for
instance, the commerce of literature. In days when a letter
cost a shilling and no book-post existed, there grew up an or
ganization of wholesalers and retailers to convey books from
publishers to readers : a profit being reached by each distribut-

NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. Cl

ing- agent, primary and secondary. Now that a book may be
ordered for a half -penny and sent for a few pence, the old sys
tem of distribution might be replaced by one that would di
minish the cost of transfer, and lower the prices of books. But
the interests of distributors practically negative the change.
An advertised proposal to supply a book direct by post at a
reduced rate, offends the trade ; and by ignoring the book they
check its sale more than its sale is otherwise furthered. And
so an old organization, once very serviceable, now stands iu
the way of a better organization. The commerce of liter

ature furnishes another illustration. At a time when the
reading public was small and books were dear, there grew up
circulating libraries, enabling people to read books without
buying them. At first few, local, and unorganized, these cir
culating libraries have greatly multiplied, and have become
organized throughout the kingdom : the result being that the
demand for library-circulation is in many cases the chief de
mand. This arrangement being one which makes few copies
supply many readers, the price per copy must be high, to ob
tain an adequate return on the edition. And now reading
people in^ general, having been brought up to the habit of get
ting books through libraries, usually do not think of buying
the books themselves — would still get most of them through
libraries even were they considerably cheapened. We are,
therefore, except with works of very popular authors, pre
vented by the existing system of book-distribution in England
from adopting the American system — a system which, not ad
justing itself to few libraries but to many private purchasers,
issues large editions at low prices.

Instances of another class are supplied by our educational
institutions. Richly endowed, strengthened by their prestige,
and by the bias given to those they have brought up, our col
leges, public schools, and other kindred schools early founded,
useful as they once were, have long been enormous impedi
ments to a higher education. By subsidizing the old, they
have starved the new. Even now they are retarding a culture
better in matter and manner ; both by occupying the field,
and by partially incapacitating those who pass through them
for seeing what a better culture is. Evidence of a kindred

kind is offered by the educational organization developed for

C2 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

dealing with the masses. The struggle going on between
Secularism and Deiiominationalism in teaching, might alone
show to any one who looks for the wider meanings of facts,
that a structure which has ramified throughout a society, ac
quired an army of salaried officials looking for personal wel
fare and promotion, backed by classes, ecclesiastical and polit
ical, whose ideas and interests they further, is a structure
which, if not unalterable, is difficult to alter in proportion as
it is highly developed.

These few examples, which might be supported by others
from the military organization, the ecclesiastical organization,
the legal organization, will make comprehensible the analogy
I have indicated ; while they make clearer the nature- of the
Social Science, by bringing into view one of its questions.
That with social organisms, as with individual organisms,
structure up to a certain point is needful for growth is obvious.
That in the one case, as in the other, continued growth implies
un-building and re-building of structure, which therefore be
comes in so far an impediment, seems also obvious. Whether
it is true in the one case, as in the other, that completion of
structure involves arrest of growth, and fixes the society to
the type it has then reached, is a question to be considered.
Without saying anything more by way of answer, it is, I
think, manifest enough that this is one belonging to an order
of questions entirely overlooked by those who contemplate
societies from the ordinary historical point of view ; and one
pertaining to that Social Science which they say does not
exist.

Are there any who utter the cui bono criticism ? Proba
bly not a few. I think I hear from some whose mental atti
tude is familiar to me, the doubt whether it is worth while to
ask what happens among savage tribes ; in what way chiefs
and medicine-men arise ; how the industrial functions become
separated from the political ; what are the original relations
of the regulative classes to one another ; how far the social
structure is determined by the emotional natures of individ
uals, how far by their ideas, how far by their environment.
Busied as men of this stamp are with what they call " prac
tical legislation " (by which they seemingly mean legislation

NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. (53

that recognises proximate causes and effects while ignoring
remote ones), they doubt whether conclusions of the kind
Social Science proposes to draw, are good for much when
drawn.

Something may, however, be said in defence of this study
which they thus estimate. Of course, it is not to be put on
the same level with those historical studies so deeply interest
ing to them. The supreme value of knowledge respecting the
genealogies of kings, and the fates- of dynasties, and the quar
rels of courts, is beyond question. Whether or not the plot
for the murder of Amy Robsart was contrived by Leicester
himself, with Queen Elizabeth as an accomplice ; and whether
or not the account of the G-owrie Conspiracy, as given by
King James, was true ; are obviously doubts to be decided
before there can be formed any rational conclusions respect
ing the development of our political institutions. That Fried-
rich I. of Prussia quarrelled with his stepmother, suspected
her of trying to poison him, fled to his aunt, and when he suc
ceeded to the Electorate, intrigued and bribed to obtain his
kingship ; that half-aii-hour after his death his son Friedrich
Wilhelm gave his courtiers notice to quit, commenced forth
with to economize his revenues, made it his great object to
recruit and drill his army, and presently began to hate and
bully his son — these, and facts like these about all royal fam
ilies in all ages, are facts without which civilization would
obviously be incomprehensible. Nor can one dispense with
full knowledge of events like those of Napoleon's wars — his
Italian conquests and exactions, and perfidious treatment of
Venice ; his expedition to Egypt, successes and massacres
there, failure at Acre, and eventual retreat ; his various cam
paigns in Germany, Spain, Russia, &c., including accounts
of his strategy, tactics, victories, defeats, slaughters ; for how,
in the absence of such information, is it possible to judge what
institutions should be advocated, and what legislative changes
should be opposed ?

Still, after due attention has been, paid to these indispensa
ble matters, a little time might, perhaps, with advantage be
devoted to the natural history of societies. Some guidance
for political conduct would possibly be reached by asking —
What is the normal course of social evolution, and how will

64 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

it be effected by this or that policy ? It may turn out that
legislative action of 110 kind can be taken that is not either in
agreement with, or at variance with, the processes of national
growth and development as naturally going on ; and that its
desirableness is to be judged by this ultimate standard rather
than by proximate standards. Without claiming too much,
we may at any rate expect that, if there does exist an order
among those structural and functional changes which socie
ties pass through, knowledge of that order can scarcely fail
to affect our judgments as to what is progressive and what
retrograde — what is desirable, what is practicable, what is
Utopian.

To those who think such an inquiry worthy to be pursued,
will be addressed the chapters that are to follow. There are
sundry considerations important to be dwelt upon, before
commencing Sociology. To a clear idea of the nature of the
science have to be added clear ideas of the conditions to suc
cessful study of it. These will henceforth occupy us.

CHAPTER IV.

DIFFICULTIES OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE.

FROM the intrinsic natures of its facts, from our own na
tures as observers of its facts, and from the peculiar relation
in which we stand towards the facts to he observed, there arise
impediments in the way of Sociology greater than those in
the way of any other science.

The phenomena to be generalized are not of a directly-per
ceptible kind — cannot be noted by telescope and clock, like
those of Astronomy; cannot be measured by dynamometer
and thermometer, like those of Physics ; cannot be elucidated
by scales and test-papers, like those of Chemistry ; are not to
be got at by scalpel and microscope, like the less obvious bio
logical phenomena ; nor are to be recognized by introspection,
like the phenomena Psychology deals with. They have sev
erally to be established by putting together many details, no
one of which is simple, and which are dispersed, both in Space
and Time, in ways that make them difficult of access. Hence
the reason why even cardinal truths in Sociology, such as the
division of labour, remain long unrecognized. That in ad
vanced societies men follow different occupations, was indeed
a generalization easy to make ; but that this form of social
arrangement had neither been specially created, nor enacted
by a king, but had grown up without forethought of any one,
was a conclusion which could be reached only after many
transactions of many kinds between men had been noted, re
membered, and accounted for, and only after comparisons
had been made between these transactions and those taking
place between men in simpler societies and in earlier times.
And when it is remembered that the data for the inference
that labour becomes specialized, are far more accessible than
G 65

QQ THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

the data for most other sociological inferences, it will be seen
how greatly the advance of Sociology is hindered by the na
ture of its subject-matter.

The characters of men as observers, add to this first diffi
culty a second that is perhaps equally great. Necessarily men
take with them into sociological inquiries, the modes of obser
vation, and reasoning which they have been accustomed to in
other inquiries — those of them, at least, who make any inqui
ries worthy to be so called. Passing over the great majority
of the educated, and limiting ourselves to the very few who
consciously collect data, compare them, and deliberately draw
conclusions ; we may see that even these have to struggle with
the difficulty that the habits of thought generated by converse
with relatively-simple phenomena, partially unfit them for
converse with these highly-complex phenomena. Faculty of
every kind tends always to adjust itself to its work. Special
adjustment to one kind of work involves more or less non-
adjustment to other kinds. And hence, intellects disciplined
in dealing with less-involved classes of facts, cannot success
fully deal with this most-involved class of facts without par
tially unlearning the methods they have learnt. From the
emotional nature, too, there arise great obstacles. Scarcely
any one can contemplate social arrangements and actions
with the unconcern felt when contemplating arrangements
and actions of other kinds. For correct observation and cor
rect drawing of inferences, there needs the calmness that is
ready to recognize or to infer one truth as readily as another.
But it is next to impossible thus to deal with the truths of
Sociology. In the search for them, each is moved by feel
ings, more or less strong, which make him eager to find this
evidence, oblivious of that which is at variance with it, reluc
tant to draw any conclusion but that already drawn. And
though perhaps one in ten among those who think, is con
scious that his judgment is being warped by prejudice, yet
even in him the warp is not adequately allowed for. Doubt
less in nearly every field of inquiry emotion is a perturbing
intruder: mostly there is some preconception, and some
amour propre that resists disproof of it. But a peculiarity of
Sociology is, that the emotions with which its facts and con
clusions are regarded, have unusual strength. The personal

DIFFICULTIES OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 67

interests are directly affected ; or there is gratification or offence
to sentiments that have grown out of them ; or else other sen
timents which have relation to the existing form of society,
are excited, agreeably or disagreeably.

And here we are introduced to the third kind of difficulty —
that caused by the position occupied, in respect to the phenom
ena to be generalized. In no other case has the inquirer to
investigate the properties of an aggregate in which he is him
self included. His relation towards the facts he here studies,
we may figure to ourselves by comparing it to the relation be
tween a single cell forming part of a living body, and the
facts which that living body presents as a whole. Speaking
generally, the citizen's life is made possible only by due per
formance of his function in the place he fills ; and he cannot
wholly free himself from the beliefs and sentiments generated
by the vital connexions hence arising between himself and
his society. Here, then, is a difficulty to which no other
science presents anything analogous. To cut himself off in
thought from all his relationships of race, and country, and
citizenship — to get rid of all those interests, prejudices, likings,
superstitions, generated in him by the life of his own society
and his own time — to look on all the changes societies have
undergone and are undergoing, without reference to national
ity, or creed, or personal welfare ; is what the average man
cannot do at all, and what the exceptional man can do very
imperfectly.

The difficulties of the Social Science, thus indicated in
vague outline, have now to be described and illustrated in
detail.

CHAPTER V.

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES.

ALONG with much that has of late years been done towards
changing primitive history into myth, and along with much
that has been done toward changing once-unquestioned esti
mates of persons living in past ages, much has been said about
the untrustworthiness of historical evidence. Hence there
will be ready acceptance of the statement that one of the im
pediments to sociological generalization, is the uncertainty of
our data. We find this uncertainty not alone in early stories,
such as those about the Amazons, their practices, the particu
lar battles with them, &c. ; which are recorded and sculptui'ed
as circumstantially as they might be were the persons and
events historic. We find it even in accounts of a well-known
people like the New-Zealanders, who "by some . . . are said
to be intelligent, cruel, and brave; by others weak, kindly,
and cowardly." * And on remembering that between these
extremes we have to deal with an enormous accumulation of
conflicting statements, we cannot but feel that the task of se
lecting valid evidence is in this case a more arduous one than
in any other case. Passing over remote illustrations, let us
take an immediate one.

Last year advertisements announced the "Two-headed
Nightingale," and the walls of London were placarded with a
figure in which one pair of shoulders were shown to bear
two heads looking the same way (I do not refer to the later
placards, which partially differed from the earlier). To some,
this descriptive name and answering diagram seemed suffi
ciently exact ; for in my hearing a lady, who had been to see
this compound being, referred to the placards and handbills
as giving a good representation. If we suppose this lady to

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 69

have repeated in a letter that which I heard her say, and if we
ask what would appear the character of the evidence to one
who, some fifty years hence, had before him the advertise
ment, the representation, and the letter, we shall see that the
alleged fact would be thought by him incontestable. Only if,
after weary search through all the papers and periodicals of the
time, he happened to come upon a certain number of the Lan
cet, would he discover that this combination was not that of two
heads on one body, but that of two individuals united back to
back, with heads facing opposite ways, and severally complete
in all respects, except where the parts were so fused as to form
a double pelvis, containing certain pelvic viscera common to
the two. Seeing, then, that about facts so simple and so easily
verifiable, where no obvious motive for misrepresentations ex
ists, we cannot count on true representations, how shall we
count on true representations of social facts, which, being so
diffused and so complex, are so difficult to observe, and in re
spect to which the perceptions are so much perverted by inter
ests, and prepossessions, and party-feelings ?

In exemplifying this difficulty, I will limit myself to cases
supplied by the life of our own time : leaving it to be inferred
that if, in a comparatively calm and critical age, sociological
evidence is vitiated by various influences, much more must
there have been vitiation of such evidence in the past, when
passions ran higher and credulity was greater.

Those who have lately -become conscious of certain facts
are apt to suppose those facts have lately arisen. After a
changed state of mind has made us observant of occurrences
we were before indifferent to, there often results the belief
that such occurrences are more common than they were. It
happens so even with accidents and diseases. Having lamed
himself, a man is surprised to find how many lame people
there are ; and, becoming dyspeptic, he discovers that dyspep
sia is much more frequent than he supposed when he was
young. For a kindred reason he is prone to think that serv
ants do not behave nearly so well as they did during his boy
hood : not remembering that in Shakespeare's days the service
obtainable was similarly reprobated in comparison writh " the
constant service of the antique world." In like manner, now

70 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

that he has sons to establish in life, he fancies that the diffi
culty of getting places is much greater than it used to be.

As witnesses to social phenomena, men thus impressed by
facts which did not before impress them, became perverters of
evidence. Things they have suddenly recognized, they mis
take for things that have suddenly come into existence ; and
so are led to regard as a growing evil or good, that which is
very likely a diminishing evil or good. Take an example
or two.

In generations not long passed away, sobriety was the ex
ception rather than the rule: a man who had never been
drunk was a rarity. Condiments were used to create thirst ;
glasses were so shaped that they would not stand, but must be
held till emptied ; and a man's worth was in part measured
by the number of bottles he could take in. After a reaction
had already diminished the evil among the upper and middle
ranks, there came an open recognition of the evil ; resulting
in Temperance Societies, which did their share towards fur
ther diminishing it. Then came the Teetotal Societies, more
thorough-going in their views and more energetic in their
acts, which have been making the evil still less. Such has
been the effect of these causes, that for a long time past among
the upper classes, the drinking which was once creditable has
been thought a disgrace ; while among the lower classes it
has greatly decreased, and come to be generally reprobated.
Those, however, who, carrying on the agitations against it,
have had their eyes more and more widely opened to the vice,
assert or imply in their speeches and petitions that the vice is
not only great but growing. Having in the course of a gen
eration much mitigated it by their voluntary efforts, they
now make themselves believe, and make others believe, that
it is too gigantic to be dealt with otherwise than by repressive
enactments — Maine-Laws and Permissive-Prohibitory Bills.
And, if we are to be guided by a Select Committee which has
just reported, fines and imprisonments for drunkenness must
be made far more severe than now, and reformatories must be
established in which inebriates shall be dealt with much as
criminals are dealt with.

Take, again, the case of education. Go back far enough,
and you find nobles not only incapable of reading and writ-

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 71

ing, but treating these accomplishments with contempt. Go
back not quite so far, and you find, along with a slight en
couragement by authority of such learning as referred to
Theology, a positive discouragement of all other learning ; a
joined with the belief that only for the clergy is learning of
any kind proper. Go back a much smaller distance, and you
find in the highest classes inability to spell tolerably, joined
with more or less of the feeling that good spelling was a
pedantry improper for ladies — a feeling akin to that named
by Shakespeare as shown by those who counted it " a mean
ness to write fair." Down even to quite modern times, well-
to-do farmers and others of their rank were by no means all
of them able to read and write. Education, spreading thus
slowly during so many centuries, has during the last century
spread with comparative rapidity. Since Raikes commenced
Sunday-schools in 1771 ; since Lancaster, the Quaker, in 1796
set up the first of the schools that afterwards went by his
name ; since 1811, when the Church had to cease its opposi
tion and become a competitor in educating poor children ; the
strides have been enormous. A degree of ignorance which
had continued the rule during so many centuries, was made,
in the course of half a century, the exception. And then in
1834, after this unobtrusive but speedy diffusion of knowl
edge, there came along with a growing consciousness of the
still-remaining deficiency, the system of State-subsidies ;
which, beginning with £20,000, grew, in less than thirty years,
to more than a million. Yet now, after this vast progress at
an ever-increasing rate, there has come the outcry that the
nation is perishing for lack of knowledge. Any one not
knowing the past, and judging from the statements of those
who have been urging on educational organizations, would
suppose that strenuous efforts are imperative to save the
people from some gulf of demoralization and crime into which
ignorance is sweeping them.

How testimonies respecting objective facts are thus per
verted by the subjective states of the witnesses, and how we
have to be ever on our guard against this cause of vitiation in
sociological evidence, may indeed be inferred from the illu
sions that daily mislead men in their comparisons of past with
present. Returning after many years to the place of his boy-

72 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

hood, and finding how insignificant are the buildings he re
membered as so imposing, every one discovers that in this
case it was not that the past was so grand, but that his im
pressibility was so great and his power of criticism so small
He does not perceive, however, that the like holds generally ;
and that the apparant decline in various things is really due
to the widening of his experiences and the growth of a judg
ment no longer so easily satisfied. Hence the mass of wit
nesses may be under the impression that there is going on a
change just the reverse of that which is really going on ; as
we see, for example, in the notion current in every age, that
the size and strength of the race have been decreasing, when,
as proved by bones, by mummies, by armour, and by the ex
periences of travellers in contact with aboriginal races, they
have been on the average increasing.

Most testimony, then, on which we have to form ideas of
sociological states, past and present, has to be discounted to
meet this cause of error ; and the rate of discount has to be
varied according to the epoch, and the subject, and the witness.

Beyond this vitiation of sociological evidence by general
subjective states of the witnesses, thei'e are vitiations due to
more special subjective states. Of these, the first to be noted
are of the class which foregone conclusions produce.

Extreme cases are furnished by fanatical agitators, such as
members of the Anti-Tobacco Society ; in the account of whose
late meeting we read that " statistics of heart-disease, of insan
ity, of paralysis, and the diminished bulk and stature of the
population of both sexes proved, according to the Report, that
these diseases were attributable to the use of tobacco." But
without making much of instances so glaring as this, we may
find abundant proof that evidence is in most cases uncon
sciously distorted by the pet theories of those who give it.

Early in the history of our sanitary legislation, a leading
officer of health, wishing to show the need for those measures
he advocated, drew a comparison between the rate of mortality
in some salubrious village (in Cumberland, I think it was)
and the rate of mortality in London ; and then, pointing out
the marked difference, alleged that this difference was due to
"preventible causes" — to causes, that is, which good sanitary

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 73

administration would exclude. Ignoring the fact that the
carbonic acid exhaled by nearly three millions of people and
by their fires, caused in the one case a vitiation of the air
which in the other case did not exist — ignoring the fact that
most city-occupations are of necessity indoor, and many of
them sedentary, while the occupations of village life are out-
of-door and active — ignoring the fact that in many of the Lon
doners the activities are cerebral in a degree beyond that to
which the constitution of the race is adapted, while in the vil
lagers the activities are bodily, in a degree appropriate to the
constitution of the race ; he set down the whole difference in
the death-rate to causes of the kind which laws and officials
might get rid of.

A still more marked example of this effect of a cherished
hypothesis in vitiating evidence, was once unconsciously
yielded to me by another enthusiast for sanitary regulation.
Producing his papers, he pointed out the great contrast be
tween the number of deaths per annum in the small town
near London where he lived, and the number of deaths per
annum in a low district of London — Bermondsey, or Lam
beth, or some region on the Surrey side. On this great con
trast he triumphantly dilated, as proving how much could be
done by good drainage, ventilation, &c. On the one hand,
he passed over the fact that his suburban place was, in large
measure, inhabited by a picked population — people of means,
well fed and clothed, able to secure all appliances for comfort,
leading regular lives, free from over- work and anxiety. On
the other hand, he passed over the fact that this low region of
London was, by virtue of its lowness, one out of which all
citizens pecuniarily able to take care of themselves escaped if
they could, and into which were thrust great numbers whose
poverty excluded them from better regions — the ill-fed, the
drunken, the dissolute, and others on the highway to death.
Though, in the first case, the healthiness of the locality obvi
ously drew to it an excess of persons otherwise likely to live
long ; and though, in the second case, the unhealthiness of the
locality made it one in which an excess of those not likely to
live long were left to dwell, or hid themselves to die ; yet the
whole difference was put down to direct effects of pure air and
impure air respectively.

74 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

Statements proceeding from witnesses whose judgments
are thus warped — statements republished by careless sub
editors, and readily accepted by the uncritical who believe all
they see in print, diffuse erroneous prepossessions ; which,
again, tend to justify themselves by drawing the attention
to confirmatory facts and away from facts that are adverse.
Throughout all past time vitiations of evidence by influences
of this nature have been going on in degrees varying with
each people and each age ; and hence arises an additional ob
stacle to the obtainment of fit data.

Yet another, and perhaps stronger, distorting influence ex
isting in the medium through which facts reach us, results
from the self-seeking, pecuniary or other, of those who testify.
We require constantly to bear in mind that personal interests
effect most of the statements on which sociological conclusions
are based, and on which legislation proceeds.

Everyone knows this to be so where the evidence concerns
mercantile affairs. That railway -enterprise, at first prompted
by pressing needs for communication, presently came to be
prompted by speculators, professional and financial ; and that
the estimates of cost, of traffic, of profits, &c., set forth in pros-
pectiises were grossly misleading ; many readers have been
taught by bitter experience. That the gains secured by
schemers who float companies have fostered an organized sys
tem which has made falsification of data a business, and
which, in the case of bubble Insurance Companies, has been
worked so methodically that it has become the function of a
journal to expose the frauds continually repeated, are also
familiar facts : reminding us how, in these directions, it is
needful to look very sceptically on the allegations put before
us. But there is not so distinct a consciousness that in other
than business-enterprises, self-seeking is an active cause of mis
representation.

Like the getting-up of companies, the getting-up of agita
tions and of societies is, to a considerable extent, a means of
advancement. As in the United States politics has become a
profession, into which a man enters to get an income, so here
there has grown up, though happily to a smaller extent, a pro
fessional philanthropy, pursued with a view to position, or to

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 75

profit, or to both. Much as the young clergyman in want of
a benefice, feeling1 deeply the spiritual destitution of a suburb
that has grown beyond churches, busies himself in raising
funds to build a church, and probably does not, during his
canvass, understate the evils to be remedied ; so every here
and there an educated man with plenty of leisure and small
income, greatly impressed with some social evil to be remedied
or benefit to be achieved, makes himself the nucleus to an in
stitution, or the spur to a movement. And since his success
depends mainly on the strength of the case he makes out, it is
not to be expected that the evils to be dealt with will be faintly
pictured, or that he will insist very strongly upon facts adverse
to his plan. As I can personally testify, there are those who,
having been active in getting up schemes for alleged beneficial
public ends, consider themselves aggrieved when not after
wards appointed salaried officials. The recent exposure of the
" Free Dormitory Association," which, as stated at a meeting
of the Charity-Organization Society, was but one of a class,
shows what this process may end in. And the vitiation of
evidence is an inevitable concomitant. One whom I have
known during his thirty years' experience of Leagues, Alli
ances, Unions, &c., for various purposes, writes: — "Like re
ligious bodies, they [Associations] form creeds, and every ad
herent is expected to cry up the shibboleth of his party. . . .
All facts are distorted to the aid of their own views, and such
as cannot be distorted are suppressed." " In every association
with which I have had any connection, this fraud has been
practised."

The like holds in political agitations. Unfortunately,
agencies established to get remedies for crying evils, are
liable to become agencies maintained and worked in a con
siderable degree, and sometimes chiefly, for the benefit of
those who reap incomes from them. An amusing instance
of this was furnished, not many years ago, to a Member of
Parliament who took an active part in advocating a certain
radical measure which had for some years been making way,
and which then seemed not unlikely to be carried. Being a
member of the Association that had pushed forward this
measure, he happened to step into its offices just before a
debate which was expected to end in a majority for the bill,

Y6 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

and he found the secretary and his subs in a state of conster
nation at the prospect of their success : feeling, as they ob
viously did, that their occupation was in danger.

Clearly, then, where personal interests come into play, there
must be, even in men intending to be truthful, a great readiness
to see the facts which it is convenient to see, and such reluc
tance to see opposite facts as will prevent much activity in seek
ing for them. Hence, a large discount has mostly to be made
from the evidence furnished by institutions and societies in
justification of the policies they pursue or advocate. And since
much of the evidence respecting both past and present social
phenomena comes to us through agencies calculated thus to
pervert it, there is here a further impediment to clear vision of
facts.

That the reader may fully appreciate the difficulties which
these distorting influences, when combined, put in the way of
getting good materials for generalization, let him contemplate
a case.

All who are acquainted with such matters know that up to
some ten years since, it was habitually asserted by lecturers
when addressing students, and by writers in medical journals,
that in our day, syphilis is a far less serious evil than it was in
days gone by. Until quite recently this was a commonplace
statement, called in question by no one in the profession. But
just as, while a decrease of drunkenness has been going on,
Temperance-fanatics have raised an increasing outcry for
strenuous measures to put down drunkenness; so, while ve
nereal disease has been diminishing in frequency and severity,
certain instrumentalities and agencies have created a belief
that rigorous measures are required to check its progress.
This incongruity would by itself be a sufficient proof of the
extent to which, on the one side or the other, evidence must
have been vitiated. What, then, shall we say of the incon
gruity on finding that the first of these statements has recently
been repeated by many of the highest medical authorities, as
one verified by their experience ? Here are some of their tes
timonies.

The Chairman of the late Government Commission for
inquiring into the treatment and prevention of syphilis, Mr.

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 77

Skey, Consulting Surgeon to St. Bartholomew's Hospital,
gave evidence before a House of Lords' Committee. Refer
ring to an article expressing the views of the Association for
promoting the extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts, he
said it was —

" largely overcharged," and " coloured too highly." " The disease is
by no means so common or universal, I may say, as is represented in
that article, . . . and I have had an opportunity since I had the
summons to appear here to-day of communicating with several lead
ing members in the profession at the College of Surgeons, and we are
all of the same opinion, that the evil is not so large by any means as it
is represented by the association."

Mr. John Simon, F.E.S., for thirty-five years a hospital
surgeon, and now Medical Officer to the Privy Council, writes
in his official capacity —

" I have not the least disposition to deny that venereal affections
constitute a real and great evil for the community ; though I suspect
that very exaggerated opinions are current as to their diffusion and
malignity."

By the late Prof. Syme it was asserted that —

" It is now fully ascertained that the poison of the present day
(true syphilis) does not give rise to the dreadful consequences which
have been mentioned, when treated without mercury. . . . None
of the serious effects that used to be so much dreaded ever appear, and
even the trivial ones just noticed comparatively seldom present them
selves. We must, therefore, conclude either that the virulence of the
poison is worn out, or that the effects formerly attributed to it de
pended on treatment." 3

The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review,
which stands far higher than any other medical journal, and
is friendly to the Acts as applied to military and naval sta
tions, writes thus : —

" The majority of those who have undergone the disease, thus far
[including secondary manifestations] live as long as they could other
wise have expected to live, and die of diseases with which syphilis has
no more to do than the man in the moon." 4 . . . " Surely 455
persons suffering from true syphilis in one form or another, in a poor
population of a million and a half [less than 1 in 3000] . . . can
not be held to be a proportion so large as to call for exceptional action
on the part of any Government." 5

Mr. Holmes Coote, F.RC.S., Surgeon and Lecturer on Sur
gery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, says —

78 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

" It is a lamentable truth that the troubles which respectable hard
working married women of the working class undergo are more trying
to the health, and detrimental to the looks, than any of the irregu
larities of the harlot's career."

Again, it is stated by Mr. Byrne, Surgeon to the Dublin
Lock Hospital, that '* there is not nearly so much syphilis as
there used to be ; " and, after describing some of the serious
results that were once common, he adds : — " You will not see
such a case for years — a fact that no medical man can have
failed to remark." Mr. W. Burns Thompson, F.R.C.S., for
ten years head of the Edinburgh Dispensary, testifies as.
follows : —

" 1 have had good opportunities of knowing the prevailing dis
eases, and I can only say that the representations given by the advo
cates of these Acts are to me perfectly unintelligible ; they seem to
me to be gross exaggerations."

Mr. Surgeon-Major Wyatt, of the Coldstream Guards,
when examined by the Lords' Committee, stated that he
quite concurred with Mr. Skey. Answering question 700, he
said : —

" The class of syphilitic diseases which we see are of a very mild
character ; and, in fact, none of the ravages which used formerly to
be committed on the appearance and aspect of the men are now to be
seen. ... It is an undoubted fact that in this country and in
France the character of the disease is much diminished in intensity.—
Question 708: I understand you to say, that in your opinion the
venereal disease has generally, independent of the Act, become more
mitigated, and of a milder type ? Ansiver : Yes ; that is the experi
ence of all surgeons, both civil and military."

Dr. Druitt, President of the Association of the Medical
Officers of Health for London, affirmed at one of its meet
ings —

" that, speaking from thirty-nine years' experience, he was in a posi
tion to say that cases of syphilis in London were rare among the
middle and better classes, and soon got over."

Even Mr. Acton, a specialist to whom more than to any
other man the Acts are due, admitted before the Lords' Com
mittee that "the disease is milder than it was formerly."

And then, most important of all, is the testimony of Mr.
Jonathan Hutchinson, who is recognized as the highest au
thority on inherited syphilis, and to whose discoveries, indeed,

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. Y9

the identifications of syphilitic taint are mainly due. Though
thus under a natural bias rather to over-estimate than under
estimate the amount of inherited syphilis, Mr. Hutchinson,
while editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote : —

" Although there is an impression to the contrary, yet recent dis
coveries and more accurate investigations, so far from extending the
domain of syphilis as a cause of chronic disease, have decidedly tended
to limit it .... although we have admitted as positively syphilitic
certain maladies of a definite kind not formerly recognized, we have

excluded a far larger number which were once under suspicion

We can identify now the subject of severe hereditary taint by his teeth
and physiognomy ; but those who believe most firmly in the value of
these signs, believe also that they are not displayed by one in five thou
sand of our population.*

Like testimony is given by continental surgeons, among
whom it was long ago said by Ambrose Pare, that the disease
"is evidently becoming milder every day;" and by Auzias
Turenne, that " it is on the wane all over Europe." Astruc
and Diday concur in this statement. And the latest authority
on syphilis, Lancereaux, whose work is so highly valued that
it has been translated by the Sydenham Society, asserts
that :—

" In these cases, which are far from being rare, syphilis is but an
abortive disease ; slight and benignant, it does not leave behind any
troublesome trace of its passage. It is impossible to lay too much
stress upon this point. At the present day especially, when syphilis
still inspires exaggerated fears, it should be known that this disease
becomes dissipated completely in a great number of cases after the ces
sation of the cutaneous eruptions, and perhaps sometimes even with
the primary lesion." '

It will, perhaps, be remarked that these testimonies of med
ical men who, by their generally high position, or their length
ened experience, or their special experience, are so well quali
fied to judge, are selected testimonies ; and against them will
be set the testimonies of Sir James Paget, Sir W. Jenner, and
Mr. Prescott Hewett, who regard the evil as a very grave one.
Possibly there will be quoted in reply an authoritative State-
document, which, referring to the views of the three gentle
men just named as having " the emphatic concurrence of nu
merous practitioners," says that they "are hardly answered by
a few isolated opinions that the evil has been exaggerated " — a

80 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

somewhat inadequate description of the above-quoted testi
monies, considering not only the general weight of the names,
but also the weight of sundry of them as those of specialists.
To gather accurately the consensus of medical opinion would
be impracticable without polling the whole body of physicians
and surgeons ; but we have a means of judging which view
most truly meets with " the emphatic concurrence of numer
ous practitioners " : that, namely, of taking a local group of
medical men. Out of fifty-eight physicians and surgeons re
siding in Nottingham and its suburbs, fifty-four have put their
signatures to a public statement that syphilis is " very much
diminished in frequency, and so much milder in form that we
can scarcely recognize it as the disease described by our fore
fathers." And among these are the medical men occupying
nearly all the ollicial medical positions in the town — Senior
Physician to the General Hospital, Honorary Surgeon ditto,
Surgeons to the Jail, to the General Dispensary, to the Free
Hospital, to the Union Hospital, to the Lock Hospital (four in
number), Medical Officers to the Board of Health, to the
Union, to the County Asylum, &c., &c. Even while I write
there comes to me kindred evidence in the shape of a letter
published in the British Medical Journal for 20th July, 1872,
by Dr. Carter, Honorary Physician to the Liverpool Southern
Hospital, who states that, after several debates at the Liver
pool Medical Institution, " a form of petition strongly condem
natory of the Acts was written out by myself, and .... in
a few days one hundred and eight signatures [of medical men]
were obtained." Meanwhile, he adds, "earnest efforts were
being made by a number of gentlemen to procure medical sig
natures to the petition in favour of the Acts known as the
'London Memorial,' — efforts which resulted in twenty-nine
signatures only."

Yet notwithstanding this testimony, great in quantity and
much of it of the highest quality, it has been possible so to
present the evidence as to produce in the public mind, and in
the Legislature, the impression that peremptory measures for
dealing with a spreading pest are indispensable. As lately
writes a Member of Parliament, — " We were assured, on what
appeared unexceptionable testimony, that a terrible constitu
tional disease was undermining the health and vigour of the

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. §1

nation, and especially destroying innocent women and chil
dren."

And then note the startling circumstance that while so
erroneous a conception of the facts may be spread abroad,
there may, by the consequent alarm, be produced a blindness
to facts of the most unquestionable kind, established by the
ever-accumulating1 experiences of successive generations. Un
til quite recently, our forms of judicial procedure embodied
the principle that some overt injury must be committed before
legal instrumentalities can be brought into play ; and con
formity to this principle was in past times gradually brought
about by efforts to avoid the terrific evils that otherwise arose.
As a Professor of Jurisprudence reminds us, "the object of
the whole complicated system of checks and guards provided
by English law, and secured by a long train of constitutional
conflicts, has been to prevent an innocent man being even mo
mentarily treated as a thief, a murderer, or other criminal, on
the mere alleged or real suspicion of a policeman." Yet now,
in the state of groundless fright that has been g'ot up, " the
concern hitherto exhibited by the Legislature for the personal
liberty of the meanest citizen has been needlessly and reck
lessly lost sight of." 8 It is an a priori inference from human
nature that irresponsible power is sure, on the average of cases,
to be grossly abused. The histories of all nations, through all
times, teem with proofs that irresponsible power has been
grossly abused. The growth of representative governments is
the growth of arrangements made to prevent the gross abuse
of irresponsible power. Each of our political struggles, end
ing in a further development of free institutions, has been
made to put an end to some particular gross abuse of irrespon
sible power. Yet the facts thrust upon us by our daily expe
riences of men, verifying the experiences of the whole human
race throughout the past, are now tacitly denied; and it is
tacitly asserted that irresponsible power will not be grossly
abused. And all because of a manufactured panic about a de
creasing disease, which kills not one-fifteenth of the number
killed by scarlet fever, and which takes ten years to destroy as
many as diarrhoea destroys in one year.

See, then, what we have to guard against in collecting so
ciological data — even data concerning the present, and, still
7

82 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

more, data concerning the past. For testimonies that come
down to us respecting bygone social states, political, religious,
judicial, physical, moral, &c., and respecting the actions of
particular causes on those social states, have been liable to
perversions not simply as great, but greater ; since while the
regard for truth was less, there was more readiness to accept
unproved statements.

Even where deliberate measures are taken to obtain valid
evidence on any political or social question raised, by sum
moning witnesses of all classes and interests, there is difficulty
in getting at the truth ; because the circumstances of the in
quiry tend of themselves to bring into sight some kinds of
evidence, and to keep out of sight other kinds. In illustra
tion may be quoted the following statement of Lord Lincoln
on making his motion concerning the enclosures of com
mons :—

" This I know, that in nineteen cases out of twenty, committees
sitting in this House on private bills neglected the rights of the poor.
I do not say that they wilfully neglected those rights — far from it ;
but this I affirm, that they were neglected in consequence of the com
mittees being permitted to remain in ignorance of the rights of the
poor man, because by reason of his very poverty he is unable to come
up to London to fee counsel, to procure witnesses, and to urge his
claims before a committee of this House." — Hansard. 1 May, 1845. 9

Many influences of a different order, but similarly tending
to exclude particular classes of facts pertinent to an inquiry,
come into play. Given a question at issue, and it will very
probably happen that witnesses on the one side may, by evi
dence of a certain nature, endanger a system 011 which they
depend for the whole or for part of their livelihood ; and by
evidence of an opposite nature may preserve it. By one kind
of testimony they may offend their superiors and risk their
promotion : doing the reverse by another kind. Moreover,
witnesses not thus directly interested are liable to be indirectly
swayed by the thought that to name certain facts they know
will bring on them the ill-will of important persons in their
locality — a serious consideration in a provincial town. And
while such influences strongly tend to bring out evidence, say
in support of some established organization, there may very

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 83

possibly, and, indeed, very probably, be no organized adverse
interest with abundant resources which busies itself to bring
out a contrary class of facts — no occupation in danger, no pro
motion to be had, no applause to be gained, no odium to be
escaped. The reverse may happen : there may be positive sac
rifices serious in amount to be made before such contrary class
of facts can be brought to light. And thus it may result that,
perfectly open and fair as the inquiry seems, the circumstances
will insure a one-sided representation.

A familiar optical illusion well illustrates the nature of
these illusions which often deceive sociological inquirers.
When standing by a lake-side in the moonlight, you see
stretching over the rippled surface towards the moon, a bar of
light which, as shown by its nearer part, consists of flashes
from the sides of separate wavelets. You walk, and the bar
of light seems to go with you. There are, even among the
educated classes, many who suppose that this bar of light has
an objective existence, and who believe that it really moves as
the observer moves — occasionally, indeed, as I can testify, ex
pressing surprise at the fact. But, apart from the observer
there exists no such bar of light ; nor when the observer moves
is there any movement of this line of glittering wavelets. All
over the dark part of the surface the undulations are just as
bright with moonlight as those he sees ; but the light reflected
from them does not reach his eyes. Thus, though there steems to
be a lighting of some wavelets and not of the rest, and though,
as the observer moves, other wavelets seem to become lighted
that were not lighted before, yet both these are utterly false
seemings. The simple fact is, that his position in relation to
certain wavelets brings into view their reflections of the
moon's light, while it keeps out of view the like reflections
from all other wavelets.

Sociological evidence is largely vitiated by illusions thus
caused. Habitually the relations of observers to the facts are
such as make visible the special, and exceptional, and sensa
tional, and leave invisible the common-place and uninterest
ing, which form the great body of the facts. And this, which
is a general cause of deceptive appearances, is variously aided
by those more special causes above indicated ; which conspire
to make the media through which the facts are seen,

84 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

transparent in respect of some and opaque in respect of
others.

Again, very serious perversions of evidence result from
the unconscious confounding1 of observation with inference.
Every where, a fertile source of error is the putting down as
something perceived what is really a conclusion drawn from
something perceived ; and this is a more than usually fertile
source of error in Sociology. Here is an instance.

A few years ago Dr. Stark published the results of com
parisons he had made between the rates of mortality among
the married and among the celibate : showing, as it seemed,
the greater healthfulness of married life. Some criticisms
made on his argument did not seriously shake it ; and he has
been since referred to as having conclusively proved the
alleged relation. More recently I have seen quoted from the
Medical Press and Circular, the following summary of re
sults supposed to tell the same tale : —

" M. Bertillon has made a communication on this subject (' The
Influence of Marriage ') to the Brussels Academy of Medicine, which
has been published in the Revue Scientifique. From 25 to 30 years of
age the mortality per 1000 in France amounts to G-2 in married men,
10-2 in bachelors, and 21-8 in widows. In Brussels the mortality of
married women is 9 per 1000, girls the same, and widows as high as
16'9. Iii Belgium from 7 per 1000 among married men, the number
rises to 8*5 in bachelors, and 24'6 in widows. The proportion is the
same in Holland. From 8'2 in married men, it rises to 11-7 in bache
lors, and 16-9 in widowers, or 12'8 among married women, 8'5 in spin
sters, and 13-8 in widows. The result of all the calculations is that
from 25 to 30 years of age the mortality per 1000 is 4 in married men,
10'4 in bachelors, and 22 in widows. This beneficial influence of mar
riage is manifested at all ages, being always more strongly marked in
men than in women."

I will not dwell on the fallacy of the above conclusions as re
ferring to the relative mortality of widows — a fallacy suffi
ciently obvious to any one who thinks awhile. I will confine
myself to the less-conspicuous fallacy in the comparison be
tween the mortalities of married and celibate, fallen into by
M. Bertillon as well as by Dr. Stark. Clearly as their figures
seem to furnish proof of some direct causal relation between

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 85

marriage and longevity, they really furnish no proof what
ever. There may be such a relation ; but the evidence assigned
forms no warrant for inferring it.

We have but to consider the circumstances which in many
cases determine marriage, and those which in other cases pre
vent marriage, to see that the connexion which the figures
apparently imply is not .the real connexion. Where attach
ments exist what most frequently decides the question for or
against marriage ? The possession of adequate means. Though
some improvidently marry without means, yet it is undeniable
that in many instances marriage is delayed by the man, or for
bidden by the parents, or not assented to by the woman, until
there is reasonable evidence of ability to meet the responsi
bilities. Now of men whose marriages depend on getting the
needful incomes, which are the most likely to get the needful
incomes ? The best, physically and mentally — the strong,
the intellectually capable, the morally well-balanced. Often
bodily vigour achieves a success, and therefore a revenue,
which bodily weakness, unable to bear the stress of competi
tion, cannot achieve. Often superior intelligence brings pro
motion and increase of salary, while stupidity lags behind in
ill-paid posts. Often caution, self-control, and a far-seeing
sacrifice of present to future, secure remunerative offices that
are never given to the impulsive or the reckless. But what
are the effects of bodily vigour, of intelligence, of prudence,
on longevity ; when compared with the effects of feebleness,
of stupidity, of deficient self-control ? Obviously, the first
further the maintenance of life, and the second tend towards
premature death. That is, the qualities which, on the average
of cases, give a man an advantage in gaining the means of
marrying, are the qualities which make him likely to be a
long-liver ; and conversely.

There is even a more direct relation of the same general
nature. In all creatures of high type, it is only when indi
vidual growth and development are nearly complete, that the
production of new individuals becomes possible; and the
power of producing and bringing up new individuals, is
measured by the amount of vital power in excess of that need
ful for self-maintenance. The reproductive instincts, and all
their accompanying emotions, become dominant when the de-

86 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

mands for individual evolution are diminishing, and there is
arising1 a surplus of energy which makes possible the rearing
of oii'spring as well as the preservation of self ; and, speaking
generally, these instincts and emotions are strong in propor
tion as this surplus vital energy is great. But to have a large
surplus of vital energy implies a good organization — an or
ganization likely to last long. So that, in fact, the superiority
of physique which is accompanied by strength of the instincts
and emotions causing marriage, is a superiority of physique
also conducive to longevity.

One further influence tells in the same direction. Mar
riage is not altogether determined by the desires of men ; it is
determined in part by the preferences of women. Other
things equal, women are attracted towards men of power —
physical, emotional, intellectual ; and obviously their freedom
of choice leads them in many cases to refuse inferior samples
of men : especially the malformed, the diseased, and those
who are ill-developed, physically and mentally. So that, in
so far as marriage is determined by female selection, the aver
age result on men is that while the best easily get wives, a
certain proportion of the worst are left without wives. This
influence, therefore, joins in bringing into the ranks of married
men those most likely to be long-lived, and keeping in bache
lorhood those least likely to be long-lived.

In three ways, then, does that superiority of organization
which conduces to long life, also conduce to marriage. It is
normally accompanied by a predominance of the instincts
and emotions prompting marriage ; there goes along with it
that power which can secure the means of making marriage
practicable ; and it increases the probability of success in
courtship. The figures given afford no proof that marriage
and longevity are cause and consequence; but they simply
verify the inference which might be drawn a priori, that
marriage and longevity are concomitant results of the same
cause.

This striking instance of the way in which inference
may be mistaken for fact, will serve as a warning against an
other of the dangers that await us in dealing with sociological
data. Statistics having shown that married men live longer
than single men, it seems an irresistible implication that

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 87

married life is healthier than single life. And yet we see that
the implication is not at all irresistible : though such a con
nexion may exist, it is not demonstrated by the evidence as
signed. Judge, then, how difficult it must be, among social
phenomena that have more entangled dependencies, to dis
tinguish between the seeming relations and the real relations.

Once more, we are liable to be led away by superficial,
trivial facts, from the deep-seated and really-important facts
they indicate. Always the details of social life, the interest
ing events, the curious things which serve for gossip, will, if
we allow them, hide from us the vital connexions and the
vital actions underneath. Every social phenomenon results
from an immense aggregate of general and special causes ;
and we may either take the phenomenon itself as intrinsically
momentous, or may take it along with other phenomena, as
indicating some inconspicuous truth of real significance. Let
us contrast the two courses.

Some months ago a correspondent of the Times, writing
from Calcutta, said : —

" The Calcutta University examinations of any year would supply
curious material for reflection on the value of our educational sys
tems. The prose test in the entrance examination this year includes
Ivanhoe. Here are a few of the answers which I have picked up.
The spelling is bad, but that I have not cared to give : —

"Question: — 'Dapper man?' (Answer 1.) 'Man of superfluous
knowledge.' (A. 2.) 'Mad.' (Q.) ' Democrat ?' (A.I.) 'Petticoat
Government.' (A. 2.) ' Witchcraft.' (A. 3.) ' Half-turning of the
horse.' (Q.) 'Babylonish jargon ?' (A. 1.) 'A vessel made at Baby
lon.' (A. 2.) ' A kind of drink made at Jerusalem.' (A. 3.) ' A kind
of coat worn by Babylonians.' (Q.) 'Lay brother?' (A. 1.) 'A
bishop.' (A. 2.) ' A step-brother.' (A. 3.) ' A scholar of the same
godfather.' (Q.) 'Sumpter mule?' (A.) 'A stubborn Jew.' (Q.)
' Bilious-looking fellow ? ' (A. 1.) ' A man of strict character.' (A. 2.)
' A person having a nose like the bill of an eagle.' (Q.) ' Cloister ? '
(A.) ' A kind of shell.' (Q.) 'Tavern politicians?' (A.I.) 'Politi
cians in charge of the alehouse.' (A. 2.) ' Mere vulgars.' (A. 3.)
' Managers of the priestly church.' (Q.) ' A pair of cast-off galli
gaskins ? ' (A.) ' Two gallons of wine.'

The fact here drawn attention to as significant, is, that these
Hindu youths, during their matriculation examination, be-

83 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

trayed so much ignorance of the meaning of words arid ex
pressions contained in an English work they had read. And
the intended implication appears to be that they were proved
unfit to begin their college careers. If, now, instead of accept
ing that which is presented to us, we look a little below it,
that which may strike us is the amazing folly of an examiner
who proposes to test the fitness of youths for commencing
their higher education, by seeing how much they know of the
technical terms, cant-phrases, slang, and even extinct slang,
talked by the people of another nation. Instead of the unfit-
ness of the boys, which is pointed out to us, we may see rather
the unfitness of those concerned in educating them.

If, again, not dwelling 011 the particular fact underlying
the one offered to our notice, we consider it along with others
of the same class, our attention is arrested by the general fact
that examiners, and especially those appointed under recent
systems of administration, habitually put questions of which
a large proportion are utterly inappropriate. As I learn from
his son, one of our judges not long since found himself un
able to answer an examination-paper that had been laid before
law-students. A well-known Greek scholar, editor of a Greek
play, who was appointed examiner, found that the examina
tion-paper set by his predecessor was too ditlicult for him.
Mr. Froude, in his inaugural address at St. Andrews, describ
ing a paper set by an examiner in English history, said, " I
could myself have answered two questions out "of a dozen."
And I learn from Mr. G. H. Lewes that he could not give re
plies to the questions on English literature which the Civil
Service examiners had put to his son. Joining which testi
monies with kindred ones coming from students and pro
fessors on all sides, we find the really-noteworthy thing to be
that examiners, instead of setting questions fit for students, set
questions which make manifest their own extensive learning.
Especially if they are young, and have reputations to make or
to justify, they seize the occasion for displaying their erudi
tion, regardless of the interests of those they examine.

If we look through this more significant and general fact
for the still deeper fact it grows out of, there arises before us
the question — Who examines the examiners ? How happens
it that men competent in their special knowledge, but so in-

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 89

competent in their general judgment, should occupy the places
they do? This prevailing faultiiiess of the examiners shows
conclusively that the administration is faulty at its centre.
Somewhere or other, the power of ultimate decision is exer
cised by those who are unfit to exercise it. If the examiners
of the examiners were set to fill up an examination-paper
which had for its subject the right conduct of examinations,
and the proper qualifications for examiners, there would come
out very unsatisfactory answers.

Having seen through the small details and the wider facts
down to these deeper facts, we may, on contemplating them,
perceive that these, too, are not the deepest or most significant.
It becomes clear that those having supreme authority suppose,
as men in general do, that the sole essential thing for a
teacher or examiner is complete knowledge of that which he
has to teach, or respecting which he has to examine. Whereas
a co-essential thing is a knowledge of Psychology- and espe
cially that part of Psychology which deals with the evolution
of the faculties. Unless, either by special study or by daily
observation and quick insight, he has gained an approximately-
true conception of how minds perceive, and reflect, and gen
eralize, and by what processes their ideas grow from concrete
to abstract, and from simple to complex, no one is competent
to give lessons that will effectually teach, or to ask ques
tions which will effectually measure the efficiency of teach
ing. Further, it becomes manifest that, in common with
the public, those in authority assume that the goodness of
education is to be tested by the quantity of knowledge ac
quired. Whereas it is to be much more truly tested by the
capacity for using knowledge — by the extent to which the
knowledge gained has been turned into faculty, so as to be
available both for the purposes of life and for the purposes of
independent investigation. Though there is a growing con
sciousness that a mass of unorganized information is, after all,
of little value, and that there is more value in less informa
tion well-organized, yet the significant truth is that this con
sciousness has not got itself officially embodied ; and that our
educational administration is working, and will long continue
to work, in pursuance of a crude and out-worn belief.

As here, then, so in other cases meeting us in the present

90 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

and all through the past, we have to contend with the diffi
culty that the greater part of the evidence supplied to us as of
chief interest and importance, is of value only for what it in
dicates. We have to resist the temptation to dwell on those
trivialities which make up nine-tenths of our records and his
tories ; and which are worthy of attention solely because of
the things they indirectly imply or the things tacitly asserted
along with them.

Beyond those vitiations of evidence due to random obser
vations, to the subjective states of the observers, to their en
thusiasms, or preposessions, or self-interests — beyond those
arising from the general tendency to set down as a fact ob
served what is really an inference from an observation, and
also those arising from the general tendency to admit the dis
section by which small surface results are traced to large in
terior causes ; there come those vitiations of evidence conse
quent on its distribution in Space. Of whatever class, political,
moral, religious, commercial, &c., may be the phenomena we
have to consider, a society presents them in so diffused and
multitudinous a way, and under such various relations to us,
that the conceptions we can frame are at best extremely inade
quate.

Consider how impossible it is truly to conceive so rela
tively-simple a thing as the territory which a society covers.
Even by the aid of maps, geographical and geological, slowly
elaborated by multitudes of surveyors — even by the aid of de
scriptions of towns, counties, mountainous and rural districts
— even by the aid of such personal examinations as we have
made here and there in journeys during life ; we can reach
nothing approaching to a true idea of the actual surface —
arable, grass-covered, wooded ; flat, undulating, rocky ; drained
by rills, brooks, and slow rivers ; sprinkled with cottages,
farms, villas, cities. Imagination simply rambles hither and
thither, and fails utterly to frame an adequate thought of the
whole. How then shall we frame an adequate thought of a
diffused moral feeling, of an intellectual state, of a commer
cial activity, pervading this territory ; unaided by maps, and
aided only by the careless statements of careless observers ?
Eespecting most of the phenomena, as displayed by a nation

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 91

at large, only dim apprehensions are possible ; and how un
trustworthy they are, is shown by every parliamentary de
bate, by every day's newspapers, and by every evening's con
versations ; which severally disclose quite conflicting estimates.

See how various are the statements made respecting any
nation in its character and actions by each traveller visiting
it. There is a story, apt if not true, of a Frenchman who,
having been three weeks here, proposed to write a book on
England; who, after three months, found that he was not
quite ready ; and who, after three years, concluded that he
knew nothing about it. And every one who looks back and
compares his early impressions respecting states of things in
his own society with the Impressions he now has, will see how
erroneous were the beliefs once so decided, and how probable
it is that even his revised beliefs are but partially true. On
remembering how wrong he was in his pre-conceptions of the
people and the life in some unvisited part of the kingdom — on
remembering how different from those he had imagined, were
the characters he actually found in certain alien classes and
along with certain alien creeds ; he will see how greatly this
wide diffusion of social facts impedes true appreciation of
them.

Moreover, there are illusions consequent on what we may
call moral perspective, which we do not habitually correct in
thought, as we correct in perception the illusions of physical
perspective. A small object close to, occupies a larger visual
area than a mountain afar off ; but here our well-organized ex
periences enable us instantly to rectify a false inference sug
gested by the subtended angles. No such prompt rectification
for the perspective is made in sociological observations. A
small event next door, producing a larger impression than a
great event in another country, is over-estimated. Conclu
sions prematurely drawn from social experiences daily occur
ring around us, are difficult to displace by clear proofs that
elsewhere wider social experiences point to opposite conclu
sions.

A further great difficulty to which we are thus introduced
is, that the comparisons by which alone we can finally estab
lish relations of cause and effect among social phenomena, can
rarely be made between cases in all respects fit for comparison.

92 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

Every society differs specifically, if not generically, from every
other. Hence it is a peculiarity of the Social Science that
parallels drawn between different societies, do not afford
grounds for decided conclusions — will not, for instance, show
us with certainty, what is an essential phenomenon in a given
society and what is a non-essential one. Biology deals with
numerous individuals of a species, and with many species of a
genus, and by comparing them can see what traits are specifi
cally constant and what generically constant ; and the like
holds more or less with the other concrete sciences. But com
parisons between societies, among which we may almost say
that each individual is a species by itself, yield much less defi
nite results : the necessary characters are not thus readily dis
tinguishable from the accidental characters.

So that even supposing we have perfectly- valid data for our
sociological generalizations, there still lies before us the diffi
culty that these data are, in many cases, so multitudinous and
diffused that we cannot adequately consolidate them into true
conceptions ; the additional difficulty that the moral perspec
tive under which they are presented, can scarcely ever be so
allowed for as to secure true ideas of proportions ; and the fur
ther difficulty that comparisons of our vague and incorrect
conceptions concerning one society with our kindred concep
tions concerning another society, have always to be taken with
the qualification that the comparisons are only partially justi
fiable, because the compared things are only partially alike in
their other traits.

An objective difficulty, even greater still, which the Social
Science presents, arises from the distribution of its facts in
Time. Those who look on a society as either supernaturally
created or created by Acts of Parliament, and who conse
quently consider successive stages of its existence as having
no necessary dependence on one another, will not be deterred
from drawing political conclusions from passing facts, by a
consciousness of the slow genesis of social phenomena. But
those who have risen to the belief that societies are evolved in
structure and function, as in growth, will be made to hesitate
on contemplating the long unfolding through which early
causes work out late results.

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 93

Even true appreciation of the successive facts which an
individual life presents, is generally hindered by inability to
grasp the gradual processes by which ultimate effects are pro
duced ; as we may see in the foolish mother who, yielding to
her perverse child, gains the immediate benefit of peace, and
cannot foresee the evil of chronic dissension which her policy
will hereafter bring about. And in the life of a nation, which,
if of high type, lasts at least a hundred individual lives, cor
rect estimation of results is still more hindered by this im
mense duration of the actions through which antecedents
bring their consequents. In judging of political good and
evil, the average legislator thinks much after the manner of
the mother dealing with the spoiled child : if a course is pro
ductive of immediate benefit, that is considered sufficient jus
tification. Quite recently an inquiry has been made into the
results of an administration which had been in action some
five years only, with the tacit assumption that supposing the
results were proved good, the administration would be justified.

And yet to those who look into the records of the past not
to revel in narratives of battles or to gloat over court-scandals,
but to find how institutions and laws have arisen and how
they have worked, there is no truth more obvious than that
generation after generation must pass before the outcome of
an action that has been set up can be seen. Take the example
furnished us by our Poor Laws. When villeinage had passed
away and serfs were no longer maintained by their owners —
when, in the absence of any one to control and take care of
serfs, there arose an increasing class of mendicants and " stur
dy rogues, preferring robbery to labour " — when, in Richard
the Second's time, authority over such was given ^to justices
and sheriffs, out of which there presently grew the binding of
servants, labourers, and beggars, to their respective localities
- — when, to meet the case of beggars, " impotent to serve," the
people of the districts in which they were found, were made
in some measure responsible for them (so re-introducing in a
more general form the feudal arrangement of attachment to
the soil, and reciprocal claim on the soil) ; it was not sus
pected that the foundations were laid for a system which
would, in after times, bring about a demoralization threaten- ~
ing general ruin. When, in subsequent centuries, to meet

94. THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

the evils of again-increasing vagrancy which punishment
failed to repress, these measures, re-enacted with modifica
tions, ended in making the people of each parish chargeable
with the maintenance of their poor, while it re-established the
severest penalties on vagabondage, even to death without
benefit of clergy, no one ever anticipated that while the penal
elements of this legislation would by and by become so modi
fied as to have little practical effect in checking idleness, the
accompanying arrangements would eventually take such
forms as immensely to encourage idleness. Neither legisla
tors nor others foresaw that in 230 years the poor's-rate, hav
ing grown to seven millions, would become a public spoil of
which we read that —

" The ignorant believed it an inexhaustible fund which belonged
to them. To obtain their share the brutal bullied the administrators,
the profligate exhibited their bastards which must be fed, the idle
folded their arms and waited till they got it ; ignorant boys and girls
married upon it ; poachers, thieves, and prostitutes, extorted it by in
timidation ; country justices lavished it for popularity, and guardians
for convenience. . . . Better men sank down among the worse :
the rate-paying cottager, after a vain struggle, went to the pay-table
to seek relief; the modest girl might starve while her bolder neighbour
received Is. Qd. per week for every illegitimate child."
As sequences of the law of Elizabeth, no one imagined that,
in rural districts, farmers, becoming chief administrators,
would pay part of their men's wages out of the rates (so tax
ing the rest of the ratepayers for the cultivation of their
fields) ; and that this abnormal relation of master and man
would entail bad cultivation. No one imagined that, to escape
poor's-rates, landlords would avoid building cottages, and
would even clear cottages away : so causing over-crowding,
with consequent evils, bodily and mental. No one imagined
that workhouses, so called, would become places for idling in ;
and places where married couples would display their " elec
tive affinities " time after time.10 Yet these, and detrimental
results which it would take pages to enumerate, culminating
in that general result most detrimental of all — helping the
worthless to multiply at the expense of the worthy — finally
came out of measures taken out ages ago merely to mitigate
certain immediate evils.

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 95

Is it not obvious, then, that only in the course of those
long periods required to mould national characters and habits
and sentiments, will the truly-important results of a public
policy show themselves ? Let us consider the question a
little further.

In a society living1, growing, changing, every new factor
becomes a permanent force ; modifying more or less the direc
tion of movement determined by the aggregate of forces.
Never simple and direct, but, by the co-operation of so many
causes, made irregular, involved, and always rhythmical, the
course of social change cannot be judged of in its general
direction by inspecting any small portion of it. Each action
will inevitably be followed, after a while, by some direct or
indirect reaction, and this again by a re-action ; and until the
successive effects have shown themselves, no one can say how
the total motion will be modified. You must compare posi
tions at great distances from one another in time, before you
can tell rightly whither things are tending. Even so simple
a thing as a curve of single curvature cannot have its nature
perceived unless there is a considerable length of it. See here
these five points close together. The curve passing through
them may be a circle, an ellipse, a parabola, an hyperbola.
Let the points be further apart, and it becomes possible to
form some opinion of the nature of the curve — it is obviously
not a circle. Let them, or some of them, be more remote still,
and it may be seen that if not an infinite curve it must be a
highly eccentric ellipse. And when the points are at relative
ly great distances, the mathematician can say with certainty
what conic section alone will pass through them all. Surely,
then, in such complex and slowly-evolving movements as
those of a nation's life, all the smaller and greater rhythms of
which fall within certain general directions, it is impossible
that such general directions can be traced by looking at stages
that are close together — it is impossible that the effect wrought
on any general direction by some additional force, can be truly
computed from observations extending over but a few years,
or but a few generations.

For, in the case of these most-involved of all movements,
there is the difficulty, paralleled in no other movements (being
only approached in those of individual evolution), that each

96 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

new factor, besides modifying in an immediate way the course
of a movement, modifies it also in a remote way, by changing
the amounts and directions of all other factors. A fresh influ
ence brought into play on a society, not only affects its mem
bers directly in their acts, but also indirectly in their charac
ters. Continuing to work on their characters generation after
generation, and altering by inheritance the feelings which
they bring into social life at large, this influence alters the in
tensities and bearings of all other influences throughout the
society. By slowly initiating modifications of nature, it brings
into play forces of many kinds, incalculable in their strengths
and tendencies, that act without regard to the original influ
ence, and may cause quite opposite effects.

Fully to exhibit this objective difficulty, and to show more
clearly still how important it is to take as data for sociological
conclusions, not the brief sequences, but the sequences that
extend over centuries or are traceable throughout civilization,
let us draw a lesson from a trait which all regulative agencies
in all nations have displayed.

The original meaning of human sacrifices, otherwise toler
ably clear, becomes quite clear on finding that where canni
balism is still rampant, and where the largest consumers of
human flesh are the chiefs, these chiefs, undergoing apotheosis
when they die, are believed thereafter to feed on the souls of
the departed — the souls being regarded as duplicates equally
material with the bodies they belong to. And should any
doubt remain, it must be dissipated by the accounts we have
of the ancient Mexicans, whose priests, when war had not
lately furnished a victim, complained to the king that the god
was hungry ; and who, when a victim was sacrificed, offered
his heart to the idol (bathing its lips with his blood, and even
putting portions of the heart into his mouth) and then cooked
and ate the rest of the body themselves. Here the fact to
which attention is drawn, and which various civilizations
show us, is that the sacrificing of prisoners or others, once a
general usage among cannibal ancestry, continues as an eccle
siastical usage long after having died out in the ordinary life
of a society. Two facts, closely allied with this fact, have like
general implications. Cutting implements of stone remain in

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 97

use for sacrificial purposes when implements of bronze, and
even of iron, are used for all other purposes : the Hebrews are
commanded in Deuteronomy to build altars of stone without
using iron tools; the high priest of Jupiter at Rome was
shaved with a bronze knife. Further, the primitive method
of obtaining fire by the friction of pieces of wood, survives in
religious ceremonies ages after its abandonment in the house
hold ; and even now, among the Hindus, the flame for the
altar is kindled by the "fire drill." These are striking in
stances of the pertinacity with which the oldest part of the
regulative organization maintains its original traits in the
teeth of influences that modify things around it.

The like holds in respect of the language, spoken and
written, which it employs. Among the Egyptians the most
ancient form of hieroglyphics was retained for sacred records,
when more developed forms were adopted for other purposes.
The continued use of Hebrew for religious services among the
Jews, and the continued use of Latin for the Roman Catholic
service, show us how strong this tendency is, apart from the
particular creed. Among ourselves, too, a less dominant
ecclesiasticism exhibits a kindred trait. The English of the
Bible is of an older style than the English of the date at
which the translation was made ; and in the church service
various words retain obsolete meanings, and others are pro
nounced in obsolete ways. Even the typography, with its illu
minated letters of the rubric, shows traces of the same ten
dency; while Puseyites and ritualists, aiming to reinforce
ecclesiasticism, betray a decided leaning towards archaic print,
as well as archaic ornaments. In the aesthetic direction, in
deed, their movement has brought back the most primitive
type of sculpture for monumental purposes ; as may be seen
in Canterbury Cathedral, where, in two new monuments to
ecclesiastics, one being Archbishop Sumner, the robed figures
recline on their backs, with hands joined, after the manner of
the mailed knights on early tombs — presenting complete sym
metry of attitude, which is a distinctive trait of barbaric art,
as shown by every child's drawing of a man and every idol
carved by a savage.

A conscious as well as an unconscious adhesion to the old
in usage and doctrine is shown. Not only among Roman

98 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

Out-holies but among many Protestants, to ascertain what the
Fathers said, is to ascertain what should be believed. In the
pending controversy about tho Athanasian Creed, we see how
much authority attaches to an antique document. Tho an
tagonism between Convocation and tho lay members of the
Church— the one as a body wishing to retain the cursing
clauses and the other to exclude them — further shows that
ollicial Protestantism adheres to antiquity much more than
non-official Protestantism : a contrast equally displayed .not
long since between the opinions of the lay part and the clerical
part of the Protestant Irish Church.

Throughout political organizations the like tendency,
though less dominant, is very strong. The gradual establish
ment of law by the consolidation of custom, is tho formation
of something fixed in tho midst of things that are changing ;
and, regarded under its most general aspect as the agency
which maintains a permanent order, it is in the very nature
of ;i State-organization to be relatively rigid. Tho way in
which primitive principles and practices, no longer fully in
force among individuals ruled, survive in tho actions of ruling
agents, is curiously illustrated by the long retention between
nobles of a right of feud after it had been disallowed between
eiti/ens. Chief vassals, too, retained this power to secure jus
tice for themselves after smaller vassals lost it : not only was
a right of war with one another recognized, but also a right of
defence against the king. And we see that even now, in the
dealings between Governments, armed force to remedy in
juries is still employed, as it originally was between all indi
viduals. As bearing in the same direction, it is significant
that the right of trial by battle, which was a regulated form
of the aboriginal system under which men administered jus
tice in their own cases, survived among the ruling classes
when no longer legal among inferior classes. Even on behalf
of religious communities judicial duels were fought. Here
the thing it concerns us to note is that tho system of fighting
in person and lighting by deputy, when no longer otherwise
lawful, was retained, actually or formally, in various parts of
the regulative organization. Up to the reign of ( leorge 111.,
trial by battle could bo claimed as an alternative of trial In
jury. Duels continued till quite recently between members of

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 99

the ruling classes, and especially between officers; and even
now in Continental armies duelling is not only recognized as
proper, but is, in some cases, imperative. And then, showing
most strikingly how these oldest usages survive longest, in
connexion with the oldest part of the governing organization,
we have had in the coronation ceremony, up to modern times,
a champion in armour uttering by herald a challenge to all
comers 011 behalf of the monarch.

If, from the agencies by which law is enforced, we pass to
legal forms, language, documents, &c., the like tendency is
everywhere conspicuous. Parchment is retained for law-
deeds though paper has replaced it for other purposes. The
form of writing is an old form. Latin and Norman-French
terms are still in use for legal purposes, though not otherwise
in use; and even old English words, such as "seize," retain in
Law, meanings which they have lost in current speech. In
the execution of documents, too, the same truth is illustrated;
for the seal, which was originally the signature, continues,
though the written signature now practically replaces it —
n'ay, we retain a symbol of the symbol, as may be seen in
every share transfer, where there is a pa per- wafer to repre
sent the seal. Even still more antique usages survive in
legal transactions ; as in the form extant in Scotland of
handing over a portion of rock when an estate is sold,
which evidently answers to the ceremony among the an
cient nations of sending earth and water as a sign of yielding
territory.

From the working of State-departments, too, many kin
dred illustrations might be given. Even under the peremp
tory requirements of national safety, the Hint-lock for muskets
was but tardily replaced by the percussion-lock ; and the rifle
had been commonly in use for sporting purposes' generations
before it came into more than sparing use for military pur
poses. Book-keeping by double entry had long been perma
nently established in the mercantile world before it superseded
book-keeping by single entry in Government offices : its adop
tion dating back only to 1834, when a still more antique sys
tem of keeping accounts by notches cut on sticks, was put an
c,n(\ to by the conflagration that resulted from the burning of
UK; Exchequer-tallies.

100 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

The like holds with apparel, in general and in detail.
Cocked hats are yet to be seen on the heads of officers. An
extinct form of dress still holds its ground as the Court-dress ;
and the sword once habitually worn by gentlemen has be
come the dress-sword worn only on State-occasions. Every
where officialism has its established uniforms, which may be
traced back to old fashions that have disappeared from ordi
nary life. Some of these antique articles of costume we see sur
mounting the heads of judges; others there are which still
hang round the necks of the clergy ; and others which linger
on the legs of bishops.

Thus, from the use of a flint-knife by the Jews for the reli
gious ceremony of circumcision, down to the pronunciation of
the terminal syllable of the prseterite in our Church-service,
down to the oyez shouted in a law-court to secure attention,
down to the retention of epaulets for officers, and down to the
Norman-French words in which the royal assent is given, this
persistence is everywhere traceable. And when we find this
persistence displayed through all ages in all departments of
the regulative organization, — when we see it to be the natural
accompaniment of the function of that organization, which is
essentially restraining— when we estimate the future action of
the organization in any case, by observing the general sweep
of its curve throughout long periods of the past ; we shall see
how misleading may be the conclusions drawn from recent
facts taken by themselves. Where the regulative organization
is anywhere made to undertake additional functions, we shall
not form sanguine anticipations on the strength of immediate
results of the desired kind ; but we shall suspect that after the
phase of early activity has passed by, the plasticity of the new
structure will rapidly diminish, the characteristic tendency
towards rigidity will show itself, and in place of expansive
effect there will come a restrictive effect.

The reader will now understand more clearly the meaning
of the assertion that true conceptions of sociological changes
are to be reached only by contemplating their slow genesis
through centuries, and that basing inferences on results shown
in short periods, is as illusory as would be judging of the
Earth's curvature by observing whether we are walking up or
down hill. After recognizing which truth he will perceive

OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 1Q1

how great is another of the obstacles in the way of the Social
Science.

" But does not all this prove too much ? If it is so difficult
to get sociological evidence that is not vitiated by the sub
jective states of the witnesses, by their prejudices, enthusi
asms, interests, &c. — if where there is impartial examination,
the conditions to the inquiry are of themselves so apt to falsify
the result — if there is so general a proneiiess to assert as facts
observed what were really inferences from observations, and
so great a tendency also to be blinded by exterior trivialities
to interior essentials — if even where accurate data are accessi
ble, their multitudiiiousiiess and diffusion in Space make it
impracticable clearly to grasp them as wholes, while their un
folding in Time is so slow that antecedents and consequents
cannot be mentally represented in their true relations ; is it
not manifestly impossible that a Social Science can be
framed ? "

It must be admitted that the array of objective difficulties
thus brought together is formidable ; and were it the aim of
the Social Science to draw quite special and definite conclu
sions, which must depend for their truth upon exact data ac
curately co-ordinated, it would obviously have to be abandoned.
But there are certain classes of general facts which remain
after all errors in detail, however produced, have been allowed
for. Whatever conflicts there may be among accounts of
events that occurred during feudal ages, comparison of them
brings out the incontestable truth that there was a Feudal
System. By their implications, chronicles and laws indicate
the traits of this system ; and on piitting side by side narra
tives and documents written, not to tell us about the Feudal
System but for quite other purposes, we get tolerably clear
ideas of these traits in their essentials — ideas made clearer still
on collating the evidence furnished by different contemporary
societies. Similarly throughout. By making due use not so
much of that which past and present witnesses intend to tell
us, as of that which they tell us by implication, it is possible
to collect data for inductions respecting social structures and
functions in their origin and development : the obstacles
which arise in the disentangling of such data in the case of

102 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

any particular society, being mostly surmountable by the help
of the comparative method.

Nevertheless, the difficulties above enumerated must be
ever present to us. Throughout, we have to depend on testi
mony ; and in every case we have to beware of the many
modes in which evidence may be vitiated — have to estimate
its worth when it has been discounted in various ways ; and
have to take care that our conclusions do not depend on any
particular class of facts gathered from any particular place or
time.

CHAPTER VI.

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES — INTELLECTUAL.

IF you watch the management of a child by a mother of
small capacity, you may be struck by the inability she betrays
to imagine the child's thoughts and feelings. Full of energy
which he must expend in some way, and eager to see every
thing, her little boy is every moment provoking her by his
restlessness. The occasion is perhaps a railway journey. Now
he strives to look out of the window ; and now, when forbid
den to do that, climbs on the seats, or meddles with the small
luggage. " Sit still," " Get down, I tell you," " Why can't you
be quiet ? " are the commands and expostulations she utters
from minute to minute — partly, no doubt, to prevent the dis
comfort of fellow-passengers. But, as you will see at times
when no such motive comes into play, she endeavours to re
press these childish activities mainly out of regard for what
she thinks propriety, and does it without any adequate recog
nition of the penalties she inflicts. Though she herself lived
through this phase of extreme curiosity — this early time when
almost every object passed has the charm of novelty, and when
the overflowing energies generate a painful irritation if pent
up ; yet now she cannot believe how keen is the desire for see
ing which she balks, and how difficult is the maintenance of
that quietude on which she insists. Conceiving her child's
consciousness in terms of her own consciousness, and feeling
how easy it is to sit still and not look out of the window, she
ascribes his behaviour to mere perversity.

I recall this and kindred cases to the reader's mind, for the
purpose of exemplifying a necessity and a difficulty. The ne
cessity is that in dealing with other beings and interpreting
their actions, we must represent their thoughts and feelings in

104 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

terms of our own. The difficulty is that iu so representing
them we can never be more than partially right, and are fre
quently very wrong. The conception which any one frames
of another's mind, is inevitably more or less after the pattern
of his own mind — is automorphic ; and in proportion as the
mind of which he has to frame a conception dift'ers from his
own, his automorphic interpretation is likely to be wide of the
truth.

That measuring other person's actions by the standards our
own thoughts and feelings furnish, often causes misconstruc
tion, is a remark familiar even to the vulgar. But while
among members of the same society, having natures nearly
akin, it is seen that automorphic explanations are often er
roneous, it is not seen with due clearness how much more
erroneous such explanations commonly are, when the actions
are those of men of another race, to whom the kinship in na
ture is comparatively remote. We do, indeed, perceive this,
if the interpretations are not our own ; and if both the inter
preters and the interpreted are mentally alien to us. When,
as in early English literature, we find Greek history conceived
in terms of feudal institutions, and the heroes of antiquity
spoken of as princesses, knights, and squires, it becomes clear
that the ideas concerning ancient civilization must have been
utterly wrong. When we find Virgil named in religious
stories of the middle ages as one among the prophets who vis
ited the cradle of Christ — when an illustrated psalter gives
scenes from the life of Christ in which there repeatedly figures
a castle with a portcullis — when even the crucifixion is de
scribed by Langland in the language of chivalry, so that the
man who pierced Christ's side with a spear is considered as a
knight who disgraced his knighthood * — when we read of the
Crusaders calling themselves " vassals of Christ ; " we need
no further proof that by carrying their own sentiments and
ideas to the interpretation of social arrangements and transac
tions among the Jews, our ancestors were led into absurd mis
conceptions. But we do not recognize the fact that in virtue
of the same tendency, we are ever framing conceptions which,
if not so grotesquely untrue, are yet very wide of the truth.
How difficult it is to imagine mental states remote from our
own so correctly that we can understand how they issue in

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 105

individual actions, and consequently in social actions, an
instance will make manifest.

The feeling of vague wonder with which he received his
first lessons in the Greek mythology, will most likely be
dimly remembered by every reader. If not in words, still
inarticulately, there passed through him the thought that
faith in such stories was unaccountable. When, afterwards,
he read in books of travels details of the amazing superstitions
of savages, there was joined with a sense of the absurdity of
these superstitions, much astonishment at their acceptance by
any human beings, however ignorant or stupid. Such beliefs
as that the people of a neighbouring tribe had descended from
ducks, that rain fell when certain deities began to spit on the
Earth, that the island lived upon had been pulled up from the
bottom of the ocean by one of their gods, whose hook got fast
when he was fishing — these, and countless beliefs equally
laughable, seemed to imply an irrationality near to insanity.
He interpreted them automorphically — carrying with him not
simply his own faculties developed to a stage of complexity
considerably beyond that reached by the faculties of the sav
age, but also the modes of thinking in which he was brought
up, and the stock of information he had acquired. Probably
it has never since occurred to him to do otherwise. Even if
he now attempts to see things from the savage's point of view,
he most likely fails entirely ; and if he succeeds at all, it is
but partially. Yet only by seeing things as the savage sees
them can his ideas be understood, his behaviour accounted
for, and the resulting social phenomena explained. These
apparently-strange superstitions are quite natural — quite ra
tional, in a certain sense, in their respective times and places.
The laws of intellectual action are the same for civilized and
uncivilized. The difference between civilized and uncivilized
is in complexity of faculty and in amount of knowledge ac
cumulated and generalized. Given, reflective powers devel
oped only to that lower degree in which they are possessed by
the aboriginal man — given, his small stock of ideas, collected
in a narrow area of space, and not added to by records extend
ing through time — given, his impulsive nature incapable of
patient inquiry ; and these seemingly-monstrous stories of his
become in reality the most feasible explanations he can find of

106 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

surrounding things. Yet even after concluding that this
must be so, it is not easy to think from the savage's stand
point, clearly enough to follow the effects of his ideas on his
acts, through all the relations of life, social and other.

A parallel difficulty stands in the way of rightly conceiv
ing character remote from our own, so as to see how it issues
in conduct. We may best recognize our inability in this re
spect, by observing the converse inability of other races to
understand our characters, and the acts they prompt.

"Wonderful are the works of Allah! Behold! That Frank is
trudging about when he can, if he pleases, sit still I " J
In like manner Captain Speke tells us, —

" If I walked up and down the same place to stretch my legs, they
[Somali] formed councils of war on my motives, considering I must
have some secret designs upon their country, or 1 would not do it, as
no man in his senses could be guilty of working his legs unneces
sarily." 3

But while, by instances like these, we are shown that our
characters are in a large measure incomprehensible by races
remote in nature from us, the correlative fact that we cannot
rightly conceive their sentiments and motives is one perpetu
ally overlooked in our sociological interpretations. Feeling,
for instance, how natural it is to take an easier course in place
of a more laborious course, and to adopt new methods that
are proved to be better methods, we are puzzled on finding the
Chinese stick to their dim paper-lamps, though they admire
our bright argand-lamps, which they do not use if given to
them ; or on finding that the Hindus prefer their rough primi
tive tools, after seeing how our improved tools do more work
with less effort. And on descending to races yet more remote
in civilization, we still oftener discover ourselves wrong when
we suppose that under given conditions they will act as we
should act.

Here, then, is a subjective difficulty of a serious kind. To
understand any fact in social evolution, we have to see it as
resulting from the joint actions of individuals having certain
natures. We cannot so understand it without understanding
their natures; and this, even by care and effort, we are
able to do but very imperfectly. Our interpretations must

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 107

be automorphic ; and yet automorphism perpetually mis
leads us.

One would hardly suppose, a priori, that untruthfulness
would habitually co-exist with credulity. Rather our infer
ence might be that, because of the tendency above enlarged
upon, people most given to making false statements must be
people most inclined to suspect statements made by others.
Yet, somewhat anomalously, as it seems, habitual veracity
generally goes with inclination to doubt evidence ; and ex
treme untrustworthiness of assertion often has for its con
comitant, readiness to accept the greatest improbabilities on the
slenderest testimony. If you compare savage with civilized,
or compare the successive stages of civilization with one an
other, you find untruthfulness and credulity decreasing to
gether ; until you reach the modern man of science, who is at
once exact in his statements and critical respecting evidence.
The converse relation to that seen in the man of science, is
even now startlingly presented in the East, where greediness
in swallowing fictions goes along with superfluous telling of
falsehoods. An Egyptian prides himself in a clever lie,
uttered perhaps without motive ; and a dyer will even ascribe
the failure in fixing one of his colours to the not having been
successful in a deception. Yet so great is the readiness to be
lieve improbabilities, that Mr. St. John, in his Two Years'
Residence in a Levantine Family, narrates how, when the
" Arabian Nights' Entertainments " was being read aloud, and
when he hinted that the stories must not be accepted as true,
there arose a strong protest against such scepticism : the ques
tion being asked, — " Why should a man sit down and write so
many lies ? " *

I point out this union of seemingly-inconsistent traits, not
because of the direct bearing it has on the argument, but be
cause of its indirect bearing. For I have here to dwell on the
misleading effects of certain mental states which similarly
appears unlikely to co-exist, and which yet do habitually co
exist. I refer to the belief which, even while I write, I find
repeated in the leading journal, that " the deeper a student of
history goes, the more does he find man the same in all time ; "
and to the opposite belief embodied in current politics, that

108 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

human nature may be readily altered. These two beliefs,
•which ought to cancel one another but do not, originate two
classes of errors in sociological speculation ; and nothing like
correct conclusions in Sociology can be drawn until they have
been rejected and replaced by a belief which reconciles them
— the belief that human nature is indefinitely modifiable, but
that 110 modification of it can be brought about rapidly. We
will glance at the errors to which each of these beliefs leads.

While it was held that the stars are fixed and that the hills
are everlasting, there was a certain coiigruity in the notion
that man continues unchanged from age to age ; but now
when we know that all stars arc in motion, and that there are
no such things as everlasting hills — now when we find all
things throughout the Universe to be in a ceaseless flux, it is
time for this crude conception of human nature to disappear
out of our social conceptions ; or rather — it is time for its dis
appearance to be followed by that of the many narrow notions
respecting the past and the future of society, which have
grown out of it, and which linger notwithstanding the loss of
their root. For, avowedly by some and tacitly by others, it
continues to be thought that the human heart is as " desper
ately wicked " as it ever was, and that the state of society
hereafter will be very much like the state of society now. If,
when the evidence has been piled mass upon mass, there comes
a reluctant admission that aboriginal man, of troglodyte or
kindred habits, differed somewhat from man as he was dur
ing feudal times, and that the customs and sentiments and
beliefs he had in feudal times, imply a character appreciably
unlike that which he has now — if, joined with this, there is a
recognition of the truth that along with these changes in man
there have gone still more conspicuous changes in society;
there is, nevertheless, an ignoring of the implication that
hereafter man and society will continue to change, until they
have diverged as widely from their existing types as their'ex-
istiiig tvpes have diverged from those of the earliest recorded
ages. It is true that among the more cultured the probability,
or even the certainty, that such transformations will go on,
may be granted ; but the granting is but nominal — the adtais-
sion does not become a factor in the conclusions drawn. The
first discussion on a political or social topic, reveals the tacit

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 109

assumption that, in times to come, society will have a struc
ture substantially like its existing structure. If, for instance,
the question of domestic service is raised, it mostly happens
that its bearings are considered wholly in reference to those
social arrangements which exist around us : only a few pro
ceed on the supposition that these arrangements are probably
but transitory. It is so throughout. Be the subject industrial
organization, or class-relations, or rule by fashion, the thought
which practically moulds the conclusions, if not the thought
theoretically professed, is, that whatever changes they may
undergo, our institutions will not cease to be recognizably the
same. Even those who have, as they think, deliberately freed
themselves from this perverting tendency — even M. Comte and
his disciples, believing in an entire transformation of society,
nevertheless betray an incomplete emancipation ; for the ideal
society expected by them, is one under regulation by a hier
archy essentially akin to hierarchies such as mankind have
known. So that everywhere sociological thinking is more or
less impeded by the difficulty of bearing in mind that the
social states towards which our race is being carried, are prob
ably as little conceivable by us as our present social state was
conceivable by a Norse pirate and his followers.

Note, now, the opposite difficulty, which appears to be sur
mountable by scarcely any of our parties, political or philan
thropic, — the difficulty of understanding that human nature,
though indefinitely modifiable, can be modified but very
slowly ; and that all laws and institutions and appliances
which count on getting from it, within a short time, much
better results than present ones, will inevitably fail. If we
glance over the programmes of societies, and sects, and schools
of all kinds, from Rousseau's disciples in the French Con
vention up to the members of the United Kingdom Alliance,
from the adherents of the Ultramontane propaganda up to
the enthusiastic advocates of an education exclusively secular,
we find in them one common trait. They are all pervaded
by the conviction, now definitely expressed and now taken as
a self-evident truth, that there needs but this kind of in
struction or that kind of discipline, this mode of repression or
that system of culture, to bring society into a very much
better state. Here we read that " it is necessary completely

HO THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

to re-fashion the people whom one wishes to make free " : the
implication being1 that a re-fashioning is practicable. There
it is taken as undeniable that when you have taught children
what they ought to do to be good citizens, they will become
good citizens. Elsewhere it is held to be a truth beyond
question, that if by law temptations to drink are removed
from men, they will not only cease to drink, but thereafter
cease to commit crimes. And yet the delusiveness of all such
hopes is obvious enough to any one not blinded by a hypoth
esis, or carried away by an enthusiasm. The fact, often
pointed out to temperance-fanatics, that some of the soberest
nations in Europe yield a proportion of crime higher than
our own, might suffice to show them that England would
not be suddenly moralized if they carried their proposed re
strictions into effect. The superstition that good behaviour is
to be forthwith produced by lessons learnt out of school-
books, which was long ago statistically disproved,8 would,
but for preconceptions, be utterly dissipated by observing to
what a slight extent knowledge affects conduct — by observing
that the dishonesty implied in the adulterations of tradesmen
and manufacturers, in fraudulent bankruptcies, in bubble-
companies, in " cooking " of railway accounts and financial
prospectuses, differs only in form, and not in amount, from
the dishonesty of the uneducated — by observing how amaz
ingly little the teachings given to medical students affect
their lives, and how even the most experienced medical men
have their prudence scarcely at all increased by their infor
mation. Similarly, the Utopian ideas which come out afresh
along with every new political scheme, from the " paper-con
stitutions " of the Abbe Sieves down to the lately-published
programme of M. Louis Blanc, and from agitations for vote-
by-ballot up to those which have a Eepublic for their aim,
might, but for this tacit belief we are contemplating, be
extinguished by the facts perpetually and startlingly thrust
on our attention. Again and again for three generations has
France been showing to the world how impossible it is essen
tially to change the type of a social structure by any re
arrangement wrought out through a revolution. However
great the transformation may for a time seem, the original
thing re-appears in disguise. Out of the nominally-free

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL, m

government set up a new despotism arises, differing from the
old by having a new shibboleth and new men to utter it;
but identical with the old in the determination to put down
opposition and in the means used to this end. Liberty, wThen
obtained, is forthwith surrendered to an avowed autocrat ; or,
as we have seen within this year, is allowed to lapse into the
hands of one who claims the reality of autocracy without its
title. Nay, the change is, in fact, even less ; for the regulative
organization which ramifies throughout French society, con
tinues unaltered by these changes at the governmental centre.
The bureaucratic system persists equally under Imperialist,
Constitutional, and Republican arrangements. As the Due
d'Audiffret-Pasquier pointed out, "Empires fall, Ministries
pass away, but Bureaux remain." The aggregate of forces
and tendencies embodied, not only in the structural arrange
ments holding the nation together, but in the ideas and
sentiments of its units, is so powerful, that the excision of
a part, even though it be the government, is quickly fol
lowed by the substitution of a like part. It needs but to
recall the truth exemplified some chapters back, that the
properties of the aggregate are determined by the properties
of its units, to see at once that so long as the characters of
citizens remain substantially unchanged, there can be no sub
stantial change in the political organization which has slowly
been evolved by them.

This double difficulty of thought, with the double set of
delusions fallen into by those who do not surmount it, is,
indeed, naturally associated with the once-universal, and still-
general, belief that societies arise by manufacture, instead of
arising, as they do, by evolution. Recognize the truth that
incorporated masses of men grow, and acquire their structural
characters through modification upon modification, and there
are excluded these antithetical errors that humanity remains
the same and that humanity is readily alterable ; and along
with exclusion of these errors comes admission of the infer
ence, that the changes which have brought social arrange
ments to a form so different from past forms, will in future
carry them on to forms as different from those now existing.
Once become habituated to the thought of a continuous
unfolding of the whole and of each part, and these misleading

112 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

ideas disappear. Take a word and observe how, while chang
ing1, it gives origin in course of time to a family of words,
each changing member of which similarly has progeny ; take
a custom, as that of giving eggs at Easter, which has now
developed in Paris into the fashion of making expensive
presents of every imaginable kind inclosed in imitation-eggs,
becoming at length large enough to contain a brougham, and
which entails so great a tax that people go abroad to evade it;
take a law, once quite simple and made to meet a special case,
and see how it eventually, by successive additions and
changes, grows up into a complex group of laws, as, out of
two laws of William the Conqueror came our whole legal
system regulating land-tenure ; * take a social appliance, as the
Press, and see how from the news-letter, originally private
and written, and then assuming the shape of a printed fly-leaf
to a written private letter, there has slowly evolved this vast
assemblage of journals and periodicals, daily, weekly, general,
and local, that have, individually and as an aggregate, grown
in size while growing in heterogeneity ; do this, and do the
like with all other established institutions, agencies, products,
and there will come naturally the conviction that now, too,
there are various germs of things which will in the future
develop in ways no one imagines, and take shares in pro
found transformations of society and of its members : trans
formations that are hopeless as immediate results, but certain
as ultimate results.

Try to fit a hand with five fingers into a glove with four.
Your difficulty aptly parallels the difficulty of putting a com
plex conception into a mind not having a proportionately-com
plex faculty. As fast as the several terms and relations which
make up a thought become many and varied, there must be
brought into play many and varied parts of the intellectual
structure, before the thought can be comprehended : and if
some of these parts are wanting, only fragments of the thought
can be taken in. Consider an instance.

What is meant by the ratio of A to B, may be explained to
a boy by drawing a short line A and a long line B, telling him
that A is said to bear a small ratio to B; and then, after
lengthening the line A, telling him that A is now said to bear

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. H3

a larger ratio to B. But suppose I have to explain what is
meant by saying that the ratio of A to B, equals the ratio of
C to D. Instead of two different quantities and one relation,
there are now four different quantities and three relations.
To understand the proposition, the boy has to think of A and
B and their difference, and, without losing his intellectual grasp
of these, he has to think of C and D and their difference, and,
without losing his intellectual grasp of these, he has to think
of the two differences as each having a like relation to its pair
of quantities. Thus the number of terms and relations to be
kept before the mind, is such as to imply the co-operation of
many more agents of thought ; any of which being absent,
the proposition cannot be understood : the boy must be older
before he will understand it, and, if uncultured, will probably
never understand it at all. Let us pass on to a conception of
still greater complexity — say that the ratio of A to B varies as
the ratio of C to D. Far more numerous things have now to
be represented in consciousness with approximate simulta
neity. A and B have to be thought of as not constant in their
lengths, but as one or both of them changing in their lengths ;
so that their difference is indefinitely variable. Similarly
with C and D. And then the variability of the ratio in each
case being duly conceived in terms of lines that lengthen and
shorten, the thing to be understood is, that whatever differ
ence any change brings about between A and B, the relation
it bears to one or other of them, is always like that which the
difference simultaneously arising between C and D bears to
one or other of them. The greater multiplicity of ideas re
quired for mentally framing this proposition, evidently puts
it further beyond the reach of faculties not developed by ap
propriate culture, or not capable of being so developed. And
as the type of proposition becomes still more involved, as it
does when two such groups of dependent variables are com
pared and conclusions drawn, it begins to require a grasp that
is easy only to the disciplined mathematician.

One who does not possess that complexity of faculty which,
as we here see, is requisite for grasping a complex conception,
may, in cases like these, become conscious of his incapacity ;
not from perceiving what he lacks, but from perceiving that
another person achieves results which he cannot achieve.
9

114: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

But where no such thing as the verifying of exact predictions
comes in to prove to one of inferior faculty that his faculty
is inferior, he is usually unaware of the inferiority. To im
agine a higher mode of consciousness, is in some degree to
have it; so that until he has it in some degree, he cannot
really conceive of its existence. An illustration or two will
make this clear.

Take a child on your knee, and, turning over with him
some engravings of landscapes, note what he observes. " I
see a man in a boat," says he, pointing. " Look at the cows
coming down the hill." " And there is a little boy playing
with a dog." These and other such remarks, mostly about the
living objects in each scene, are all you get from him. Never
by any chance does he utter a word respecting the scene as a
whole. There is an absolute unconsciousness of anything to
be pleased with in the combination of wood and water and
mountain. And while the child is entirely without this com
plex aesthetic consciousness, you see that he has not the re
motest idea that such a consciousness exists in others but is
wanting in himself. Note now a case in which a kin

dred defect is betrayed by an adult. You have, perhaps, in
the course of your life, had some musical culture ; and can
recall the stages through which you have passed. In early
days a symphony was a mystery; and you were somewhat
puzzled to find others applauding it. An unfolding of musical
faculty, that went on slowly through succeeding years, brought
some appreciation ; and now these complex musical combina
tions which once gave you little or no pleasure, give you more
pleasure than any others. Eemembering all this, you suspect
that your indifference to certain still more involved musical
combinations may arise from incapacity in you, and not from
faults in them. See, on the other hand, what happens with
one who has undergone no such series of changes — say, an old
naval officer, whose life at sea kept him out of the way of con
certs and operas. You hear him occasionally confess, or
rather boast, how much he enjoys the bagpipes. While the
last cadences of a sonata which a young lady has just played,
are still in your ears, he goes up to her and asks whether she
can play " Polly, put the kettle on," or " Johnny comes march
ing home." And then, when concerts are talked about at

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. H5

table, he seizes the occasion for expressing his dislike of clas
sical music, and scarcely conceals his contempt for those who
go to hear it. On contemplating his mental state, you see
that along with absence of the ability to grasp complex mu
sical combinations, there goes no consciousness of the absence
— there is no suspicion that such complex combinations exist,
and that other persons have faculties for appreciating them.

And now for the application of this general truth to our
subject. The conceptions with which sociological science is
concerned, are complex beyond all others. In the absence of
faculty having a corresponding complexity, they cannot be
grasped. Here, however, as in other cases, the absence of an
adequately-complex faculty is not accompanied by any con
sciousness of incapacity. Rather do we find that deficiency
in the required kind of mental grasp, is accompanied by ex
treme confidence of judgment on sociological questions, and a
ridicule of those who, after long discipline, begin to perceive
what there is to be understood, and how difficult is the right
understanding of it. A simple illustration of this will prepare
the way for more-involved illustrations.

A few months ago the Times gave us an account of the last
achievement in automatic printing — the " Walter-Press," by
which its own immense edition is thrown off in a few hours
every morning. Suppose a reader of the description, adequately
familiar with mechanical details, follows what he reads step
by step with full comprehension : perhaps making his ideas
more definite by going to see the apparatus at work and ques
tioning the attendants. Now he goes away thinking he un
derstands all about it. Possibly, under its aspect as a feat in
mechanical engineering, he does so. Possibly, also, under
its biographical aspect, as implying in Mr. Walter and those
who co-operated with him certain traits, moral and intellec
tual, he does so. But under its sociological aspect he prob
ably has no notion of its meaning ; and does not even suspect
that it has a sociological aspect. Yet if he begins to look into
the genesis of the thing, he will find that he is but 011 the
threshold of the full explanation. On asking not what is

its proximate but what is its remote origin, he finds, in the
first place, that this automatic printing-machine is lineally
descended from other automatic printing-machines, which

116 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

have undergone successive developments— each pre-supposing
others that went before : without cylinder printing-machines
long previously used and improved, there would have been
no "Walter-Press." He inquires a step further, and discovers
that this last improvement became possible only by the help
of papier-mache stereotyping, which, first employed for mak
ing flat plates, afforded the possibility of making cylindrical
plates. And tracing this back, he finds that plaster-of-paris
stereotyping came before it, and that there was another pro
cess before that. Again, he learns that this highest form of
automatic printing, like the many less-developed forms pre
ceding it, depended for its practicability on the introduction
of rollers for distributing ink, instead of the hand-implements
used by " printer 's-devils " fifty years ago ; which rollers, again,
could never have been made fit for their present purposes,
without the discovery of that curious elastic compound out of
which they are cast. And then, on tracing the more remote
antecedents, he finds an ancestry of hand printing-presses,
which, through generations, had been successively im
proved. Now, perhaps, he thinks he understands the ap
paratus, considered as a sociological fact. Far from it. Its
multitudinous parts, which will work together only when
highly finished and exactly adjusted, came from machine-
shops ; where there are varieties of complicated, highly-fin
ished engines for turning cylinders, cutting out wheels, plan
ing bars, and so forth ; and on the pre-existence of these the
existence of this printing-machine depended. If he inquires
into the history of these complex automatic tools, he finds they
have severally been, in the slow course of mechanical progress,
brought to their present perfection by the help of preceding
complex automatic tools of various kinds, that co-operated to
make their component parts — each larger, or more accurate,
lathe or planing-machine having been made possible by pre
existing lathes and planing-machines, inferior in size or exact
ness. And so if he traces back the whole contents of the
machine-shop, with its many different instruments, he comes
in course of time to the blacksmith's hammer and anvil ; and
even, eventually, to still ruder appliances. The explana
tion is now completed, he thinks. Not at all. No such pro
cess as that which the " Walter-Press " shows us, was possible

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. H?

until there had been invented, and slowly perfected, a paper-
machine capable of making- miles of paper without break.
Thus there is the genesis of the paper-machine involved, and
that of the multitudinous appliances and devices which pre
ceded it, and are at present implied by it. Have we now
got to the end of the matter ? No ; we have just glanced at
one group of the antecedents. All this development of me
chanical appliances — this growth of the iron-manufacture, this
extensive use of machinery made from iron, this production
of so many machines for making machines — has had for one
of its causes the abundance of the raw materials, coal and
iron ; has had for another of its causes the insular position
which has favoured peace and the increase of industrial ac
tivity. There have been moral causes at work too. Without
that readiness to sacrifice present ease to future benefit, which
is implied by enterprise, there would never have arisen the
machine in question, — nay, there would never have arisen the
multitudinous improved instruments and processes that have
made it possible. And beyond the moral traits which enter
prise pre-supposes, there are those pre-supposed by efficient
co-operation. Without mechanical engineers who fulfilled
their contracts tolerably well, by executing work accurately,
neither this machine itself nor the machines that made it, could
have been produced ; and without artizans having consider
able conscientiousness, no master could insure accurate work.
Try to get such products out of an inferior race, and you will
find defective character an insuperable obstacle. So, too, will
you find defective intelligence an insuperable obstacle. The
skilled artizan is not an accidental product, either morally or
intellectually. The intelligence needed for making a new
thing is not everywhere to be found ; nor is there every
where to be found the accuracy of perception and nicety of
execution without which no complex machine can be so made
that it will act. Exactness of finish in machines has devel
oped pari passu with exactness of perception in artizans. In
spect some mechanical appliance made a century ago, and
you may see that, even had all other requisite conditions been
fulfilled, want of the requisite skill in workmen would have
been a fatal obstacle to the production of an engine requiring
so many delicate adjustments. So that there are implied in

118 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

this mechanical achievement, not only our slowly-generated
industrial state, with its innumerable products and processes,
but also the slowly-moulded moral and intellectual natures of
masters and workmen. Has nothing now been forgotten ?

Yes, we have left out a whole division of all-important social
phenomena — those which we group as the progress of knowl
edge. Along with the many other developments that have
been necessary antecedents to this machine, there has been
the development of Science. The growing and improving
arts of all kinds, have been helped up, step after step, by those
generalized experiences, becoming ever wider, more complete,
more exact, which make up what we call Mathematics, Phys
ics, Chemistry, &c. Without a considerably-developed Ge
ometry, there could never have been the machines for mak
ing machines ; still less this machine that has proceeded from
them. Without a developed Physics, there would have been
no steam-engine to move these various automatic appliances,
primary and secondary ; nor would the many implied metal-
lurgic processes have beeri brought to the needful perfection.
And in the absence of a developed Chemistry, many other
requirements, direct and indirect, could not have been ade
quately fulfilled. So that, in fact, this organization of knowl
edge which began with civilization, had to reach something
like its present stage before such a machine could come into
existence ; supposing all other pre-requisites to be satis
fied. Surely we have now got to the end of the history.
Not quite : there yet remains an essential factor. No one
goes on year after year spending thousands of pounds and
much time, and persevering through disappointment and
anxiety, without a strong motive : the " Walter-Press " was
not a mere tour de force. Why, then, was it produced ? To
meet an immense demand with great promptness — to print,
with one machine, 16,000 copies per hour. Whence arises this
demand ? From an extensive reading public, brought in the
course of generations to have a keen morning-appetite for
news of all kinds — merchants who need to know the latest
prices at home and the latest telegrams from abroad ; politi
cians who must learn the result of last night's division, be
informed of the new diplomatic move, and read the speeches
at a meeting ; sporting men who look for the odds and the

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. H9

result of yesterday's race ; ladies who want to see the births,
marriages, and deaths. And on asking the origin of these
many desires to be satisfied, they prove to be concomitants of
our social state in general — its trading, political, philanthropic,
and other activities ; for in societies where these are not domi
nant, the demand for news of various kinds rises to no such
intensity. See, then, how enormously involved is the gen

esis of this machine, as a sociological phenomenon. A whole
encyclopaedia of mechanical inventions — some dating from
the earliest times — go to the explanation of it. Thousands of
years of discipline, by which the impulsive improvident na
ture of the savage has been evolved into a comparatively self-
controlling nature, capable of sacrificing present ease to future
good, are pre-supposed. There is pre-supposed the equally-
long discipline by which the inventive faculty, almost wholly
absent in the savage, has been evolved ; and by which accu
racy, not even conceived by the savage, has been cultivated.
And there is further pre-supposed the slow political and social
progress, at once cause and consequence of these other
changes, that has brought us to a state in which such a ma
chine finds a function to fulfil.

The complexity of a sociological fact, and the difficulty of
adequately grasping it, will now perhaps be more apparent.
For as in this case there has been a genesis, so has there been
in every other case, be it of institution, arrangement, custom,
belief, &c. ; but while in this case the genesis is comparatively
easy to trace, because of the comparatively-concrete character
of process and product, it is in other cases difficult to trace, be
cause the factors are mostly not of sensible kinds. And yet
only when the genesis has been traced— only when the ante
cedents of all orders have been observed in their co-operation,
generation after generation, through past social states — is there
reached that interpretation of a fact which makes it a part of
sociological science, properly understood. If, for instance, the
true meaning of such phenomena as those presented by trade-
combinations is to be seen, it is needful to go back to those
remote Old-English periods when analogous causes produced
analogous results. As Brentano points out —

"The workmen formed their Trade- Unions against the aggressions
of the then rising manufacturing lords, as in earlier times the old

120 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

freemen formed their Frith-Gilds against the tyranny of medieval
magnates, and the free handicraftsmen their Craft-Gilds against the
aggressions of the Old-burghers." 7

Then, having studied the successive forms of such organiza
tions in relation to the successive industrial states, there have
to be observed the ways in which they are severally related to
other phenomena of their respective times — the political in
stitutions, the class- distinctions, the family-arrangements, the
modes of distribution and degrees of intercourse between
localities, the amounts of knowledge, the religious beliefs, the
morals, the sentiments, the customs, the ideas. Considered as
parts of a nation, having structures that form parts of its struc
ture, and actions that modify and are modified by its actions,
these trade-societies can have their full meanings perceived,
only when they are studied in their serial genesis through
many centuries, and their changes considered in relation to
simultaneous changes throughout the social organism. And
even then there remains the deeper inquiry — How does it hap
pen that in nations of certain types no analogous institutions
exist, and that in nations of other types the analogous institu
tions have taken forms more or less different ?

That phenomena so involved cannot be seen as they truly
are, even by the highest intelligence at present existing, is
tolerably manifest. And it is manifest also that a Science of
Society is likely for a long time hence to be recognized by but
few ; since, not only is there in most cases an absence of
faculty complex enough to grasp its complex phenomena, but
there is mostly an absolute unconsciousness that there are any
such complex phenomena to be grasped.

To the want of due complexity of conceptive faculty, has
to be added, as a further difficulty, the want of due plasticity
of conceptive faculty. The general ideas of nearly all men
have been framed out of experiences gathered within com
paratively-narrow areas ; and general ideas so framed are far
too rigid readily to admit the multitudinous and varied com
binations of facts which Sociology presents. The child of Puri
tanic parents, brought up in the belief that Sabbath-breaking
brings after it all kinds of transgressions, and having had
pointed out, in the village or small town that formed his

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 121

world, various instances of this connection, is somewhat per
plexed in after-years, when acquaintance with more of his
countrymen has shown him exemplary lives joined with non-
observance of the Sunday. When during continental travel
he finds that the best people of foreign societies neglect in
junctions which he once thought essential to right conduct,
he still further widens his originally small and stiff concep
tion. Now the process thus exemplified in the change of a
single superficial belief, has to be gone through with numer
ous beliefs of deeper kinds, before there can be reached the
flexibility of thought required for dealing properly with socio
logical phenomena. Not in one direction, but in most direc
tions, we have to learn that those connexions of social facts
which we commonly regard as natural and even necessary,
are not necessary, and often have 110 particular naturalness.
On contemplating past social states, we are continually re
minded that many arrangements, and practices, and convic
tions, that seem matters of course, are very modern ; and that
others which we now regard as impossible were quite possible
a few centuries ago. Still more on studying societies alien in
race as well as in stage of civilization, we perpetually meet
with things contrary to everything we should have thought
probable, and even such as we should have scarcely hit upon
in trying to conceive the most unlikely things.

Take in illustration the varieties of domestic relations.
That monogamy is not the only kind of marriage, we are
early taught by our Bible-lessons. But though the conception
of polygamy is thus made somewhat familiar, it does not
occur to us that polyandry is also a possible arrangement ;
and we are surprised on first learning that it exists, and was
once extremely general. When we contemplate these marital
institutions unlike our own, we cannot at first imagine that
they are practised with a sense of propriety like that with
which we practise ours. Yet Livingstone narrates that in a
tribe bordering one of the Central African lakes, the women
were quite disgusted on hearing that in England a man has
only one wife. This is a feeling by no means peculiar to
them.

" An intelligent Kandyan chief with whom Mr. Bailey visited these
Veddahs was ' perfectly scandalised at the utter barbarism of living

122 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

with only one wife, and never parting until separated by death.' It
•was, he said, 'just like the wanderoos ' (monkeys)." 8
Again, one would suppose that, as a matter of course, mo
nogamy, polygamy, and polyandry, in its several varieties, ex
hausted the possible forms of marriage. An utterly-unex
pected form is furnished us by one of the Arabian tribes.
Marriage, among them, is for so many days in the week —
commonly for four days in the week, which is said to be " the
custom in the best families : " the wife during the off-days be
ing regarded as an independent woman who may do what she
pleases. We are a little surprised, too, on reading that by
some of the Hill-tribes of India, unfaithfulness on the part of
the husband is held to be a grave offence, but unfaithfulness
on the part of the wife a trivial one. We assume, as self-evi
dent, that good usage of a wife by a husband, implies, among
other things, absence of violence ; and hence it seems scarcely
imaginable that in some places the opposite criterion holds.
Yet it does so among the Tartars.

" A nursemaid of mine left me to be married, and some short time
after she went to the Natchalnick of the place to make a complaint
against her husband. Me inquired into the matter, when she coolly
told him her husband did not love her. He asked how she knew he
did not love her; ' Because,' she replied, 'he never whipped her.'"9
A statement which might be rejected as incredible were it
not for the analogous fact that, among the South-African
races, a white master who does not thrash his men, is ridi
culed and reproached by them as not worthy to be called a
master. Among domestic customs, again, who, if he had been
set to imagine all possible anomalies, would have hit upon
that which is found among the Basques, and has existed
among other races — the custom that on the birth of a child
the husband goes to bed and receives the congratulations of
friends, while his wife returns to her household work ? Or
who, among the results of having a son born, would dream of
that which occurs among some Polynesian races, where the
father is forthwith dispossessed of his property, and becomes
simply a guardian of it on behalf of the infant ? The varieties
of filial relations and of accompanying sentiments, continually
show us things equally strange, and at first sight equally unac
countable. No one would imagine that it might anywhere be

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 123

thought a duty on the part of children to bury their parents
alive. Yet it is so thought among the Fijians ; of whom we
read also that the parents thus put out of the way, go to their
graves with smiling faces. Scarcely less incredible does it
seem that a man's affection should be regarded as more fitly
shown towards the children of others than towards his own
children. Yet the Hindus of Malabar supply an example.

Among the Nairs " every man looks upon his sister's children as his
heirs, . . . and he would be considered as an unnatural monster
were he to show such signs of grief at the death of a child which . . .
he might suppose to be his own, as he did at the death of a child of his
sister." 10

" The philoprogenitiveness of philosophical Europe is a strange
idea, as well as term, to the Nair of Malabar, who learns with his
earliest mind that his uncle is a nearer relation to him than his father,
and consequently loves his nephew much more than his son." n

When, in the domestic relations, we meet with such varie
ties of law, of custom, of sentiment, of belief, thus indicated
by a few examples which might be indefinitely multiplied, it
may be imagined how multitudinous are the seeming incon
gruities among the social relations at large. To be made con
scious of these, however, it is not needful to study uncivilized
tribes, or alien races partially civilized. If we look back to
the earlier stages of European societies, we find abundant
proofs that social phenomena do not necessarily hang together
in ways such as our daily experiences show us. Religious
conceptions may be taken in illustration.

The grossness of these among civilized nations as they at
present exist, might, indeed, prepare us for their still greater
grossness during old times. When, close to Boulogne, one
passes a crucifix, at the foot of which lies a heap of moulder
ing crosses, each made of two bits of lath nailed together, de
posited by passers-by in the expectation of Divine favour to
be so gained, one cannot but have a sense of strangeness on
glancing at the adjacent railway, and on calling to mind the
achievements of the French in science. Still more may one
marvel on finding, as in Spain, a bull-fight got up in the in
terest of the Church — the proceeds being devoted to a " Holy
House of Mercy ! " And yet great as seem the incongruities
between religious beliefs and social states now displayed,

124 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

more astonishing1 incongruities are disclosed on going far
back. Consider the conceptions implied by sundry mystery-
plays ; and remember that they were outgrowths from a the
ory of the Divine government, which men were afterwards
burnt for rejecting. Payments of wages to actors are entered
thus : —

" Imprimis, to God, ij'-
Item, to Cayphas, iij'- iiij*

Item, to one of the knights, ij«-
Item, to the devyll and to Judas, xviij<*-

" We have frequently such entries as : ' Item, payd for the spret (spirit)"
God's cote, ij'- ' We learn from these entries that God's coat was of
leather, painted and gilt, and that he had a wig of false hair, also
gilt,"12

" Even the Virgin's conception is made a subject of ribaldry ; and
in the Coventry collection we have a mystery, the play, on the subject of
her pretended trial. It opens with the appearance of the somnour, who
reads a long list of offences that appear in his book ; then come two
' detractors ' who repeat certain scandalous stories relating to Joseph
and Mary, upon the strength of which they are summoned to appear
before the ecclesiastical court. They are accordingly put upon their
trial, and we have a broad picture of the proceedings in such a case,"
&c.13

Again, on looking into the illuminated missals of old times,
there is revealed a mode of conceiving Christian doctrine
which it is difficult to imagine as current in a civilized, or
even semi-civilized, society : instance the ideas implied by a
highly-finished figure of Christ, from whose wounded side a
stream of wafers spouts on to a salver held by a priest. Or
take a devotional book of later date — a printed psalter pro
fusely illustrated with woodcuts representing incidents in the
life of Christ. Page after page exhibits ways in which his
sacrifice is utilized after a perfectly-material manner. Here
are .shown vines growing out of his wounds, and the grapes
these vines bear are being devoured by bishops and abbesses.
Here the cross is fixed on a large barrel, into which his blood
falls in torrents, and out of which there issue jets on to groups
of ecclesiastics. And here, his body being represented in a
horizontal position, there rise from the wounds in his hands
and feet fountains of blood, which priests and nuns are col-

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 125

lecting in buckets and jars. Nay, even more astonishing- is
the mental state implied by one of the woodcuts, which tries
to aid the devotional reader in conceiving the Trinity, by repr
resenting three persons standing in one pair of boots ! "
Quite in harmony with these astoundingly-gross conceptions
are the conceptions implied by the popular literature. The
theological ideas that grew up in times when Papal authority
was supreme, and before the sale of indulgences had been pro
tested against, may be judged from a story contained in the
Folk-lore collected by the Brothers Grimm, called " The Tailor
in Heaven." Here is an abridged translation that has been
made for me : —

" God, having one day gone out with the saints and the apostles for
a walk, left Peter at the door of heaven with strict orders to admit no
one. Soon after a tailor came and pleaded to be let in. But Peter
said that God had forbidden any one to be admitted ; besides, the tailor
was a bad character, and ' cabbaged ' the cloth he used. The tailor
said the pieces he had taken were small, and had fallen into his basket ;
and he was willing to make himself useful— he would carry the babies,
and wash or mend the clothes. Peter at last let him in, but made him
sit clown in a corner, behind the door. Taking advantage of Peter's
going outside for a minute or two. the tailor left his seat and looked
about him. He soon came to a place where there were many stools,
and a chair of massive gold and a golden footstool, which were God's.
Climbing up on the chair, he could see all that was happening on the
earth ; and he saw an old woman, who was washing clothes in a stream,
making away with some of the linen. In his anger, he took up the
footstool and threw it at her. As he could not get it back, he thought
it best to return to his place behind the door, where he sat down, put
ting on an air of innocence. God now re-entered, without observing
the tailor. Finding his footstool gone, he asked Peter what had be
come of it — had he let anyone in ? The apostle at first evaded the
question, but confessed that he had let in one — only, however, a poor
limping tailor. The tailor was then called, and asked what he had
done with the footstool. When he had told, God said to him : — ' O
you knave, if I judged like you, how long do you think you would
have escaped ? For long ago I should not have had a chair or even a
poker left in the place, but should have hurled everything at the sin
ners.' " 1B

These examples, out of multitudes that might be given,
show the wide limits of variation within which social phe-

126 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

nomena range. When we bear in mind that, along1 with the
ological ideas that now seem little above those of savages,
there went (in England) a political constitution having out
lines like the present, an established body of laws, a regular
taxation, an emancipated working-class, an industrial system
of considerable complexity, with the general intelligence and
mutual trust implied by social co-operations so extensive and
involved, we see that there are possibilities of combination far
more numerous than we are apt to suppose. There is proved
to us the need for greatly enlarging those stock-notions which
are so firmly established in us by daily observations of sur
rounding arrangements and occurrences.

We might, indeed, even if limited to the evidence which
our own society at the present time supplies, greatly inci-ease
the plasticity of our conceptions, did we contemplate the facts
as they really are. Could we nationally, as well as individu
ally, " see ourselves as others see us," we might find at home
seeming contradictions, sufficient to show us that what we
think necessarily-connected traits are by no means necessarily
connected. We might learn from our own institutions, and
books, and journals, and debates, that while there are certain
constant relations among social phenomena, they are not the
relations commonly supposed to be constant ; and that when,
from some conspicuous characteristic we infer certain other
characteristics, we may be quite wrong. To aid ourselves in
perceiving this, let us, varying a somewhat trite mode of rep
resentation, ' consider what might be said of us by an inde
pendent observer living in the far future— supposing his state
ments translated into our cumbrous language.

" Though the diagrams used for teaching make every child
aware that many thousands of years ago the Earth's orbit
began to recede from its limit of greatest excentricity ; and
though all are familiar with the consequent fact that the
glacial period, which has so long made a large part of the north
ern hemisphere uninhabitable, has passed its climax ; yet it is
not universally known that in some regions, the retreat of gla
ciers has lately made accessible, tracts long covered. Amid
moraines and under vast accumulations of detritus, have been
found here ruins, there semi-fossilized skeletons, and in some

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 12?

places even records, which, by a marvellous concurrence of
favourable conditions, have been so preserved that parts of
them remain legible. Just as fossil cephalopods, turned up by
our automatic quarry ing-engines, are sometimes so perfect that
drawings of them are made with the sepia taken from their
own ink-bags ; so here, by a happy chance, there have come
down to us, from a long-extinct race of men, those actual
secretions of their daily life, which furnish colouring matter
for a picture of them. By great perseverance our explorers
have discovered the key to their imperfectly-developed lan
guage ; and in course of years have been able to put together
facts yielding us faint ideas of the strange peoples who lived
in the northern hemisphere during the last pre-glacial period.
"A report just issued refers to a time called by these .peo
ples the middle of the nineteenth century of their era ; and it
concerns a nation of considerable interest to us — the English.
Though until now no traces of this ancient nation were known
to exist, yet there survived the names of certain great men it
produced — one a poet whose range of imagination and depth
of insight are said to have exceeded those of all who went
before him ; the other, a man of science, of whom, profound
as we may suppose in many ways, we know definitely this,
that to all nations then living, and that have since lived, he
taught how this Universe is balanced. What kind of people
the English were, and what kind of civilization they had,
have thus always been questions exciting curiosity. The
facts disclosed by this report, are scarcely like those antici
pated. Search was first made for traces of these great
men, who, it was supposed, would be conspicuously com
memorated. Little was found, however. It did, indeed, ap
pear that the last of them, who revealed to mankind the
constitution of the heavens had received a name of honour
like that which they gave to a successful trader who pre
sented an address to their monarch ; and besides a tree planted
in his memory, a small statue to their great poet had been put
up in one of their temples, where, however, it was almost lost
among the many and large monuments to their fighting
chiefs. Not that commemorative structures of magnitude
were never erected by the English. Our explorers discovered
traces of a gigantic one, in which, apparently, persons of dis-

128 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

tinction and deputies from all nations were made to take part
in honouring some being — man he can scarcely have been.
For it is difficult to conceive that any man could have had a
worth transcendent enough to draw from them such extreme
homage, when they thought so little of those by whom their
name as a race has been saved from oblivion. Their dis

tribution of monumental honours was, indeed, in all respects
remarkable. To a physician named Jenner, who, by a mode
of mitigating the ravages of a horrible disease, was said to
have rescued many thousands from death, they erected a
memorial statue in one of their chief public places. After
some years, however, repenting them of giving to this statue
so conspicuous a position, they banished it to a far corner of
one of their suburban gardens, frequented chiefly by children
and nursemaids ; and in its place, they erected a statue to a
great leader of their fighters — one Napier, who had helped
them to conquer and keep down certain weaker races. The
reporter does not tell us whether this last had been instru
mental in destroying as many lives as the first had saved ;
but he remarks — ' I could not cease wondering at this strange
substitution among a people who professed a religion of
peace.' This does not seem to have been an act out of har
mony with their usual acts : quite the contrary. The records
show that to keep up the remembrance of a great victory
gained over a neighbouring nation, they held for many years
an annual banquet, much in the spirit of the commemorative
scalp-dances of still more barbarous peoples ; and there was
never wanting a priest to ask on the banquet, a blessing from
one they named the God of love. In some respects, indeed,
their code of conduct seems not to have advanced beyond, but
to have gone back from, the code of a still more ancient peo
ple from whom their creed was derived. One of the laws of
this ancient people was. k an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth ; ' but sundry laws of the English, especially those con
cerning acts that interfei-ed with some so-called sports of their
ruling classes, inflicted penalties which imply that their prin
ciple had become ' a leg for an eye, and an arm for a tooth.'
The relations of their creed to the creed of this ancient people,
are, indeed, difficult to understand. They had at one time
cruelly persecuted this ancient people — Jews they were called

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 129

— because that particular modification of the Jewish religion
which they, the English, nominally adopted, was one which
the Jews would not adopt. And yet, marvellous to relate,
while they tortured the Jews for not agreeing with them,
they substantially agreed with the Jews. Not only, as above
instanced, in the law of retaliation did they outdo the Jews,
instead of obeying the quite-opposite principle of the teacher
they worshipped as divine, but they obeyed the Jewish law,
and disobeyed this divine teacher, in other ways — as in the
rigid observance of every seventh day, which he had deliber
ately discountenanced. Though they were angry with those
who did not nominally believe in Christianity (which was the
name of their religion), yet they ridiculed those who really
believed in it ; for some few people among them, nicknamed
Quakers, who aimed to carry out Christian precepts instead of
Jewish precepts, they made butts for their jokes. Nay, more ;
their substantial adhesion to the creed they professedly re
pudiated, was clearly demonstrated by this, that in each of
their temples they fixed up in some conspicuous place, the ten
commandments of the Jewish religion, while they rarely, if
ever, fixed up the two Christian commandments given instead
of them. ' And yet,' says the reporter, after dilating on these
strange facts, ' though the English were greatly given to mis
sionary enterprises of all kinds, and though I sought diligently
among the records of these, I could find no trace of a society
for converting the English people from Judaism to Chris
tianity.' This mention of their missionary enterprises
introduces other remarkable anomalies. Being anxious to
get adherents to this creed which they adopted in name but
not in fact, they sent out men to various parts of the world to
propagate it — one part, among others, being that subjugated
territory above named. There the English missionaries taught
the gentle precepts of their faith ; and there the officers em
ployed by their government exemplified these precepts : one
of the exemplifications being that, to put down a riotous sect,
they took fifty out of sixty-six who had surrendered, and,
without any trial, blew them from the guns, as they called it
— tied them to the mouths of cannon and shattered their
bodies to pieces. And then, curiously enough, having thus
taught and thus exemplified their religion, they expressed
10

130 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

great surprise at the fact that the only converts their mis
sionaries could obtain among- these people, were hypocrites
and men of characters so bad that no one would employ them.

" Nevertheless, these semi-civilized English had their good
points. Odd as must have been the delusion which made
them send out missionaries to inferior races, who were always
ill used by their sailors and settlers, and eventually extirpated,
yet on finding that they spent annually a million of their
money in missionary and allied enterprises, we cannot but
see some generosity of motive in them. Their country was
clotted over with hospitals and almshouses, and institutions
for taking care of the diseased and indigent ; and their towns
were overrun with philanthropic societies, which, without
saying anything about the wisdom of their policy, clearly
implied good feeling. They expended in the legal- relief of
their poor as much as, and at one time more than, a tenth
of the revenue raised for all national purposes. One of their
remarkable deeds was, that to get rid of a barbarous institu
tion of those times, called slavery, under which, in their
colonies, certain men held complete possession of others, their
goods, their bodies, and practically even their lives, they paid
down twenty millions of their money. And a not less strik
ing proof of sympathy was that, during a war between two
neighbouring nations, they contributed large sums, and sent
out many men and women, to help in taking care of the
wounded and assisting the ruined.

" The facts brought to light by these explorations are thus
extremely instructive. Now that, after tens of thousands of
years of discipline, the lives of men in society have become
harmonious — now that character and conditions have little by
little grown into adjustment, we are apt to suppose that con-
gruity of institutions, conduct, sentiments, and beliefs, is nec
essary. We think it almost impossible that, in the same so
ciety, there should be daily practised principles of quite
opposite kinds ; and it seems to us scarcely credible that men
should have, or profess to have, beliefs with which their acts
are absolutely irreconcilable. Only that extremely-rare dis
order, insanity, could explain the conduct of one who, know
ing that fire burns, nevertheless thrusts his hand into the
flame ; and to insanity also we should ascribe the behaviour

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 131

of one who, professing1 to think a certain course morally right,
pursued the opposite course. Yet the revelations yielded by
these ancient remains, show us that societies could hold to
gether notwithstanding what we should think a chaos of con
duct and of opinion. Nay more, they show us that it was pos
sible for men to profess one thing1 and do another, without
betraying a consciousness of inconsistency. One piece of evi
dence is curiously to the point. Among their multitudinous
agencies for - beneficent purposes, the English had a 'Naval
and Military Bible Society ' — a society for distributing copies
of their sacred book among their professional fighters on sea
and land ; and this society was subscribed to, and chiefly man
aged by, leaders among these fighters. It is, indeed, suggested
by the reporter, that for these classes of men they had an ex
purgated edition of their sacred book, from which the injunc
tions to ' return good for evil,' and to ' turn the cheek to the
smiter,' were omitted. It may have been so ; but, even if so,
we have a remarkable instance of the extent to which convic
tion and conduct may be diametrically opposed, without any
apparent perception that they are opposed. We habitually
assume that a distinctive trait of humanity is rational, and
that rationality involves consistency ; yet here we find an ex
tinct race (unquestionably human and regarding itself as ra
tional) in which the inconsistency of conduct and professed
belief was as great as can well be imagined. Thus we are
warned against supposing that what now seems to us natural
was always natural. We have our eyes opened to an error
which has been getting confirmed among us for these thou
sands of years, that social phenomena and the phenomena of
human nature necessarily hang- together in the ways we see
around us."

Before summing up what has been said under the title of
" Subjective difficulties — Intellectual," I may remark that this
group of difficulties is separated from the group of " Objective
Difficulties," dealt with in the last chapter, rather for the sake
of convenience than because the division can be strictly main
tained. In contemplating obstacles to interpretation — phe
nomena being on the one side and intelligence on the other —
we may, as we please, ascribe failure either to the inadequacy

132 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

of the intelligence or to the involved nature of the phenomena.
An obstacle is subjective or objective according to our point of
view. But the obstacles above set forth arise in so direct a way
from conspicuous defects of human intelligence, that they may,
more appropriately than the preceding ones, be classed as sub
jective.

So regarding them, then, we have to beware, in the first place,
of this tendency to automorphic interpretation ; or rather, hav
ing no alternative but to conceive the natures of other men in
terms furnished by our own feelings and ideas, we have to be
ware of the mistakes likely hence to arise — discounting our con
clusions as well as we can. Further, we must be on our guard
against the two opposite prevailing errors respecting Man, and
against the sociological errors flowing from them : we have to
get rid of the two beliefs that human nature is unchangeable, and
that it is easily changed ; and we have, instead, to become famil
iar with the conception of a human nature that is changed in the
slow succession of generations by social discipline. Another ob
stacle not to be completely surmounted by any, and to be partial
ly surmounted by but few, is that resulting from the want of
intellectual faculty complex enough to grasp the extremely-
complex phenomena which Sociology deals with. There can be
no complete conception of a sociological fact, considered as a
component of Social Science, unless there are present to thought
all its essential factors; and the power of keeping them in
mind with due clearness, as well as in their proper propor
tions and combinations, has yet to be reached. Then beyond
this difficulty, only to be in a measure overcome, there is the
further difficulty, not however by any means so great, of en
larging the conceptive capacity; so that it may admit the
widely-divergent and extremely-various combinations of social
phenomena. That rigidity of conception produced in us by ex
periences of our own social life in our own time, has to be ex
changed for a plasticity that can receive with ease, and accept
as natural, the countless combinations of social phenomena
utterly unlike, and sometimes exactly opposite to, those we
are familiar with. Without such a plasticity there can be no
proper understanding of co-existing social states allied to our
own, still less of past social states, or social states of alien civ
ilized races and races in early stages of development.

CHAPTER VII.

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES — EMOTIONAL.

THAT passion perverts judgment, is an observation suffi
ciently trite ; but the more general observation of which it
should form part, that emotion of every kind and degree dis
turbs the intellectual balance, is not trite, and even where
recognized, is not duly taken into account. Stated in full, the
truth is that no propositions, save those which are absolutely
indifferent to us, immediately and remotely, can be contem
plated without likings and repugnances affecting the opinions
we form about them. There are two modes in which pur con
clusions are thus falsified. Excited feelings make us wrongly
estimate probability ; and they also make us wrongly estimate
importance. Some cases will show this.

All who are old enough, remember the murder committed
by Miiller on the North London Eailway some % years ago.
Most persons, too, will remember that for some time after
wards there was universally displayed, a dislike to travelling
by railway in company with a single other passenger — sup
posing him to be unknown. Though, up to the date of the
murder in question, countless journeys had been made by two
strangers together in the same compartment without evil
being suffered by either — though, after the death of Mr.
Briggs, the probabilities were immense against the occurrence
of a similar fate to another person similarly placed ; yet there
was habitually aroused a fear that would have been appro
priate only had the danger been considerable. The amount
of feeling excited was quite incommensurate with the risk.
While the chance was a million to one against evil, the antic
ipation of evil was as strong as though the chance had been a
thousand to one or a hundred to one. The emotion of dread

133

134 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

destroyed the balance of judgment, and a rational estimate of
likelihood became impossible ; or rather, a rational estimate
of likelihood if formed was wholly inoperative on conduct.

Another instance was thrust on my attention during1 the
small-pox epidemic, which a while since so unaccountably
spread, after twenty years of compulsory vaccination. A lady
living in London, sharing in the general trepidation, was ex
pressing her fears to me. I asked her whether, if she lived in
a town of twenty thousand inhabitants and heard of one per
son dying of small-pox in the course of a week, she would be
much alarmed. Naturally she answered, no ; and her fears
were somewhat calmed when I pointed out that, taking the
whole population of London, and the number of deaths per
week from small-pox, this was about the rate of mortality at
that time caused by it. Yet in other minds, as in her mind,
panic had produced an entire incapacity for forming a ra
tional estimate of the peril. Nay, indeed, so perturbing was
the emotion, that an unusual amount of danger to life was
imagined at a time when the danger to life was smaller than
usual. For the returns showed that the mortality from all
causes was rather below the average than above it. While
the evidence proved that the risk of death was less than com
mon, this wave of feeling which spread through society pro
duced an irresistible conviction that it was uncommonly great.

These examples show in a clear way, what is less clearly
shown of examples hourly occurring, that the associated ideas
constituting a judgment, are much affected in their relations „
to one another by the co-existing emotion. Two ideas will
cohere feebly or strongly, according as the correlative nervous
states involve a feeble or a strong discharge along the lines of
nervous connexion ; and hence a large wave of feeling, imply
ing as it does a voluminous discharge in all directions, ren
ders such two ideas more coherent. This is so even when the
feeling is not relevant to the ideas, as is shown by the vivid
recollections of trivialities seen on occasions of great excite
ment ; and it is still more so when the feeling is relevant —
that is, when the proposition formed by the ideas is itself the
cause of excitement. Much of the emotion tends, in such case,
to discharge itself through the channels connecting the ele
ments of the proposition ; and predicate follows subject with

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. . 135

a persistence out of all proportion to that which is justified by
experience.

We see this with emotions of all orders. How greatly ma
ternal affection falsifies a mother's opinion of her child, every
one observes. How those in love fancy superiorities where
none are visible to unconcerned spectators, and remain blind
to defects that are conspicuous to all others, is matter of com
mon remark. Note, too, how, in the holder of a lottery-ticket,
hope generates a belief utterly at variance with probability as
numerically estimated; or how an excited inventor confi
dently expects a success which calm judges see to be impossi
ble. That " the wish is father to the thought," here so obvi
ously true, is true more or less in nearly all cases where there
is a wish. And in other cases, as where horror is aroused by
the fancy of something supernatural, we see that in the ab
sence of wish to believe, there may yet arise belief if violent
emotion goes along with the ideas that are joined together.

Though there is some recognition of the fact that men's
judgments on social questions are distorted by their emotions,
the recognition is extremely inadequate. Political passion,
class-hatred, and feelings of great intensity, are alone admitted
to be large factors in determining opinions. But, as above
implied, we have to take account of emotions of many kinds
and of all degrees, down to slight likes and dislikes. For, if
we look closely into our own beliefs on public affairs, as well
as into the beliefs of those around us, we find them to be
caused much more by aggregates of feelings than by examina
tions of evidence. No one, even if he tries, succeeds in pre
venting the slow growth of sympathies with, or antipathies
to, certain institutions, customs, ideas, &c. ; and if he watches
himself, he will perceive that unavoidably each new question
coming before him, is considered in relation to the mass of
convictions which have been gradually moulded into agree
ment with his sympathies and antipathies.

When the reader has admitted, as he must if he is candid
with himself, that his opinion on any political act or proposal
is commonly formed in advance of direct evidence, and that
he rarely takes the trouble to inquire whether direct evidence
justifies it ; he will see how great are those difficulties in the

136 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

way of sociological science, which arise from the various emo
tions excited by the matters it deals with. Let us note, first,
the effects of some emotions of a general kind, which we are
apt to overlook.

The state of mind called impatience is one of these. If a
man swears at some inanimate thing which he cannot adjust
as he wishes, or if, in wintry weather, slipping down and
hurting himself, he vents his anger by damning gravitation ;
his folly is manifest enough to spectators, and to himself also
when his irritation has died away. But in the political
sphere it is otherwise. A man may here, in spirit if not in
word, damn a law of nature without being himself aware, and
without making others aware, of his absurdity.

The state of feeling often betrayed towards Political Econ
omy exemplifies this. An impatience accompanying the
vague consciousness that certain cherished convictions or pet
schemes are at variance with politico-economical truths, shows
itself in contemptuous words applied to these truths. Know
ing that his theory of government and plans for social refor
mation are discountenanced by it, Mr. Carlyle manifests his
annoyance by calling Political Economy u the dismal science."
And among others than his adherents, there are many belong
ing to all parties, retrograde and progressive, who display re
pugnance to this body of doctrine with which their favourite
theories do not agree. Yet a little thought might show them
that their feeling is much of the same kind as would be scorn
vented by a perpetual-motion schemer against the principles
of Mechanics.

To see that these generalizations which they think of as
cold and hard, and acceptable only by the unsympathetic, are
nothing but statements of certain modes of action arising out
of human nature, which are no less beneficent than necessary,
they need only suppose for a moment that human nature had
opposite tendencies. Imagine that, instead of preferring to
buy things at low prices, men habitually preferred to give
high prices for them ; and imagine that, conversely, sellers
rejoiced in getting low prices instead of high ones. Is it not
obvious that production and distribution and exchange, as
suming them possible under such conditions, would go on in

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 137

ways entirely different from their present ways ? If men
went for each commodity to a place where it was difficult of
production, instead of going to a place where it could be pro
duced easily; and if instead of transferring articles of con
sumption from one part of a kingdom to another along the
shortest routes, they habitually chose roundabout routes, so
that the cost in labour and time might be the greatest ; is it
not clear that, could industrial and commercial arrangements
of any kinds exist, they would be so unlike the present ar
rangements as to be inconceivable by us ? And if this is un
deniable, is it not equally undeniable that the processes of
production, distribution, and exchange, as they now go on,
are processes determined by certain fundamental traits in
human nature ; and that Political Economy is nothing more
than a statement of the laws of these processes as inevitably
resulting from such traits ?

That the generalizations of political economists are not all
true, and that some, which are true in the main, need qualifi
cation, is very likely. But to admit this, is not in the least to
admit that there are no true generalizations of this order to be
made. Those who see, or fancy they see, flaws in politico-
economical conclusions, and thereupon sneer at Political
Economy, remind me of the theologians who lately rejoiced
so much over the discovery of an error in the estimation of
the Sun's distance ; and thought the occasion so admirable a
one for ridiculing men of science. It is characteristic of theo
logians to find a solace in whatever shows human imperfec
tion ; and in this case they were elated because astronomers
discovered that, while their delineation of the Solar System
remained exactly right in all its proportions, the absolute
dimensions assigned were too great by about one-thirtieth.
In one respect, however, the comparison fails ; for though the
theologians taunted the astronomers, they did not venture to
include Astronomy within the scope of their contempt — did
not do as those to whom they are here compared, who show
contempt, not for political economists only, but for Political
Economy itself.

Were they calm, these opponents of the political economists
would see that as, out of certain physical properties of things
there inevitably arise certain modes of action, which, as gen-

138 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

eralized, constitute physical science ; so out of the properties
of men., intellectual and emotional, there inevitably arise cer
tain laws of social processes, including, among1 others, those
through which mutual aid in satisfying wants is made pos
sible. They would see that, but for these processes, the laws
of which Political Economy seeks to generalize, men would
have continued in the lowest stage of barbarism to the present
hour. They would see that instead of jeering at the science
and those who pursue it, their course should be to show in
what respects the generalizations thus far made are untrue,
and how they may be so expressed as to correspond to the
truth more nearly.

I need not further exemplify the perturbing influence of
impatience in sociological inquiry. Along with irrational
hope so conspicuously shown by every party having a new
project for the furtherance of human welfare, there habitually
goes this irrational irritation in presence of stern truths which
negative sanguine anticipations. Be it some way of remedy
ing the evils of competition, some scheme for rendering the
pressure of population less severe, some method of organiz
ing a government so as to secure complete equity, some plan
for reforming men by teaching, by restriction, by punish
ment ; anything like calm consideration of probabilities as
estimated from experience, is excluded by this eagerness for
an immediate result ; and instead of submission to the neces
sities of things, there comes vexation, felt if not expressed,
against them, or against those who point them out, or against
both.

That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments
impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly
enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
Especially can we see it when these others belong to an alien
society. France, during and since the late war, has furnished
us almost daily with illustrations. The fact that while the
struggle was going on, any foreigner in Paris was liable to be
seized as a Prussian, and that, if charged with being a Prus
sian, he was forthwith treated as one, sufficiently proves that
hate makes rational estimation of evidence impossible. The
marvellous distortions which this passion produces were

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 139

abundantly exemplified during the reign of the Commune ;
and yet again after the Commune was subdued. The " pre
ternatural suspicion," as Mr. Carlyle called it, which charac
terized conduct during the first revolution, characterized con
duct during the late catastrophe. And it is displayed still.
The sayings and doings of French political parties, alike in
the Assembly, in the press, and in private societies, show that
mutual hate causes mutual misinterpretations, fosters false in
ferences, and utterly vitiates sociological ideas.

While, however, it is manifest to us that among our neigh
bours, strong sympathies and antipathies make men's views
unreasonable, we do not perceive that among ourselves sym
pathies and antipathies distort judgments in degrees, not per
haps so extreme, but still in very great degrees. Instead of
French opinion on French affairs, let us take English opinion
on French affairs — not affairs of recent date, but affairs of the
past. And instead of a case showing how these feelings fal
sify the estimates of evidence, let us take a case showing how
they falsify the estimates of the relative gravities of evils, and
the 'relative degrees of blame worthiness of actions.

Feudalism had decayed : its benefits had died out and only
its evils had survived. While the dominant classes no longer
performed their functions, they continued their exactions and
maintained their privileges. Seignorial power was exercised
solely for private benefit, and at every step met the unprivi
leged with vexatious claims and restrictions. The peasant
was called from his heavily-burdened bit of land to work
gratis for a neighbouring noble, who gave him no protection
in return. He had to bear uncomplainingly the devouring of
his crops by this man's game ; to hand him a toll before he
could cross the river ; to buy from him the liberty to sell at
market — nay, such portion of grain as he reserved for his own
use he could eat only after paying for the grinding of it at his
seigneur's mill, and for having it baked at his bakehouse. And
then, added to the seignorial exactions, came the exactions of
the Church, still more mercilessly enforced. Town-life

was shackled as much as country-life. Manufacturers were
hampered by almost incredible restrictions. Government de
cided on the persons to be employed, the articles to be made,
the materials to be used, the processes to be followed, and the

140 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

qualities of the products. State-officers broke the looms and
burnt the goods that were not made according to law. Im
provements were illegal and inventors were fined.1 " Taxa
tion was imposed exclusively on the industrious classes, and
in such a manner as to be an actual penalty on produc
tion."* The currency had been debased to one seventy-
third of its original value. " No redress was obtainable for
any injury to property or person when inflicted by people
of rank or court influence." 3 And the ruling power was upheld
by "spies, false- witnesses, and pretended plots." Along

with these local tyrannies and universal abuses and exasperat
ing obstacles to living almost beyond belief, there had gone
on at the governing centre maladministration, corruption, ex
travagance : treasures were spent in building vast palaces, and
enormous armies were sacrificed in inexcusable wars. Pro
fuse expenditure, demanding more than could be got from
crippled industry, had caused a chronic deficit. New taxes
on the poor workers brought in no money, but only clamour
and discontent ; and to tax the rich idlers proved to be imprac
ticable : the proposal that the clergy and noblesse should no
longer be exempt from burdens such as were borne by tbe
people, brought from these classes " a shriek of indignation
and astonishment." Arid then, to make more conspicuous the
worthlessness of the governing agencies of all orders, there was
the corrupt life led by the Court, from the King downwards —
France lying " with a harlot's foot on its neck." Passing

over the various phases of the break-up which ended this intoler
able state — phases throughout which the dominant classes, good-
for-nothing and unrepentant, strove to recover their power, and,
enlisting foreign rulers, brought upon France invading armies
— we come presently to a time when, mad with anger and fear,
the people revenged themselves on such of their past tor
mentors as remained among them. Leagued, as many of
these were, with those of their order who were levying war
against liberated France — leagued, as many others were sup
posed to be, with these enemies to the Republic at home and
abroad — incorrigible as they proved themselves by their plot-
tings and treacheries; there at length came down on them
the September massacres and the Reign of Terror, during
which nearly ten thousand of those implicated, or supposed to

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIOXAL. 14J

be implicated, were killed or formally executed. The Nemesis
was sufficiently fearful. Lamentable sufferings and death
fell on innocent as well as guilty. Hate and despair com
bined to arouse an undistinguishing cruelty, and, in some of
the leading actors, a cold-blooded ferocity. Nevertheless, rec
ognizing all this — recognizing also the truth that those who
wreaked this vengeance were intrinsically no better than
those on whom it was wreaked — we must admit that the
bloodshed had its excuse. The panic of a people threatened
with re-imposition of dreadful shackles, was not to be won
dered at. That the expected return of a time like that in
which gaunt figures and haggard faces about the towns and
the country, indicated the social disorganization, should excite
men to a blind fury, was not unnatural. If they became
frantic at the thought that there was coming back a state
under which there might again be a slaying of hundreds of
thousands of men in battles fought to gratify the spite of a
King's concubine, we need not be greatly astonished. And some
of the horror expressed at the fate of the ten thousand victims,
might fitly be reserved for the abominations which caused it.

From this partially-excusable bloodshed, over which men
shudder excessively, let us turn now to the immeasurably-
greater bloodshed, having no excuse, over which they do not
shudder at all. Out of the sanguinary chaos of the Revolu
tion, there presently rose a soldier whose immense ability,
joined with his absolute unscrupulousness, made him now
general, now consul, now autocrat. He was untruthful in an
extreme degree : lying in his despatches day by day, never
writing a page without bad faith,4 nay, even giving to others
lessons in telling falsehoods.6 He professed friendship while
plotting to betray ; and quite early in his career made the
wolf-and-lamb fable his guide. He got antagonists into his
power by promises of clemency, and then executed them. To
strike terror, he descended to barbarities like those of the
bloodthirsty conquerors of old, of whom his career reminds
us : as in Egypt, when, to avenge fifty of his soldiers, he be
headed 2,000 fellahs, throwing their headless corpses into the
Nile ; or as at Jaffa, when 2,500 of the garrison who finally
surrendered, were, at his order, deliberately massacred. Even
his own officers, not over-scrupulous, as we may suppose, were

142 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

shocked by his brutality — sometimes refusing to execute his
sanguinary decrees. Indeed, the instincts of the savage were
scarcely at all qualified in him by what we call moral senti
ments ; as we see in his proposal to burn " two or three of the
larger communes " in La Vendee ; as we see in his wish to
introduce bull-fights into France, and to revive the combats
of the Roman arena; as we see in the cold-blooded sacrifice of
his own soldiers, when he ordered a useless outpost attack
merely that his mistress might witness an engagement ! That
such a man should have prompted the individual killing of
leading antagonists, and set prices on their heads, as in the
cases of Mourad-Bey and Count Frotte, and that to remove
the Due d'Enghien he should have committed a crime like in
its character to that of one who hires a bravo, but unlike by
entailing on him no danger, was quite natural. It was natu
ral, too, that in addition to countless treacheries and breaches
of faith in his dealings with foreign powers, such a man
should play the traitor to his own nation, by stamping out its
newly-gained free institutions, and substituting his own mili
tary despotism. Such being the nature of the man, and
such being a few illustrations of his cruelty and unscrupu-
lousness, contemplate now his greater crimes and their mo
tives. Year after year he went on sacrificing by tens of thou
sands and hundreds of thousands the French people and the
people of Europe at large, to gratify his lust of power and his
hatred of opponents. To feed his insatiable ambition, and to
crush those who resisted his efforts after universal dominion,
he went on seizing the young men of France, forming army
after army, that were destroyed in destroying like armies
raised by neighbouring nations. In the Russian campaign
alone, out of 552,000 men in Napoleon's army left dead or
prisoners, but few returned home ; while the Russian force of
more than 200.000 was reduced to 30,000 or 40,000 : implying a
total sacrifice of considerably more than half-a-million lives.
And when the mortality on both sides by death in battle, by
wounds, and by disease, throughout the Napoleonic campaigns
is summed up, it exceeds at the lowest computation two mill
ions.* And all this slaughter, all this suffering, all this dev
astation, was gone through because one man had a restless
desire to be despot over all men.

SUBJECTIVE DIFFIC ULTIES— EMOTIONAL.

143

What has been thought and felt in England about the
two sets of events above contrasted, and about the actors in
them ? The bloodshed of the Revolution has been spoken of
with words of horror ; and for those who wrought it there has
been unqualified hate. About the enormously-greater blood
shed which these wrars of the Consulate and the Empire en
tailed, little or no horror is expressed ; while the feeling
towards the modern Attila who was guilty of this bloodshed,
is shown by decorating rooms with portraits and busts of
him. See the beliefs which these respective feelings imply :—
Over ten thousand deaths Two million deaths call for
we may fitly shudder and la- no shuddering or lamenta-
ment. tion.

As the two millions, inno
cent of offence, were taken by
force from classes already op
pressed and impoverished, the
slaughter of them need excite
no pity.

There is nothing heart
rending in the sufferings of
the two millions who died for
no crimes of their own or

As the ten thousand were
slain because of the tyrannies,
cruelties, and treacheries, com
mitted by them or their class,
their deaths are very pitiable.

The sufferings of the ten
thousand and of their rela
tives, who expiated their own
misdeeds and the misdeeds of
their class, may fitly form sub
jects for heart-rending stories
and pathetic pictures.

their class ; nor is there any
thing pathetic in the fates of
the families throughout Eu
rope, from which the two mill
ions were taken.

That one vile man's lust of
power was gratified through
the deaths of the two millions,
greatly palliates the sacrifice
of them.

That despair and the in
dignation of a betrayed peo
ple, brought about this slaugh
ter of ten thousand, makes the
atrocity without palliation.

These are the antithetical propositions tacitly implied in
the opinions that have been current in England about the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Only by ac
ceptance of such propositions can these opinions be defended.
Such have been the emotions of men that, until quite recently,
it has been the habit to speak with detestation of the one set
of events, and to speak of the other set of events in words be-

144 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

traying admiration. Nay, even now these feelings are but
partially qualified. "While the names of the leading actors in
the Reign of Terror are names of execration, we speak of
Napoleon as "the Great," and Englishmen worship him by
visiting his tomb and taking oft' their hats !

How, then, with such perverting emotions, is it possible
to take rational views of sociological facts ? Forming, as
men do, such astoundingly-false conceptions of the relative
amounts of evils and the relative characters of motives, how
can they judge truly among institutions and actions, past or
present ? Clearly, minds thus swayed by disproportionate
hates and admirations, cannot frame those balanced conclu
sions respecting social phenomena which alone constitute
Social Science.

The sentiment which thus vents itself in horror at bad
deeds for which there was much excuse, while to deeds incom
parably more dreadful and without excuse, it gives applause
very slightly qualified with blame, is a sentiment which,
among other effects, marvellously perverts men's political
conceptions. This awe of power, by the help of which social
subordination has been, and still is, chiefly maintained— this
feeling which delights to contemplate the imposing, be it in
military successes, or be it in the grand pageantries, the sound
ing titles, and the sumptuous modes of living that imply su
preme authority— this feeling which is offended by outbreaks
of insubordination and acts or words of the kind called dis
loyal ; is a feeling that inevitably generates delusions respect
ing governments, their capacities, their achievements. It
transfigures them and all their belongings ; as does every strong
emotion the objects towards which it is drawn out. Just as
maternal love, idealizing offspring, sees perfections but not
defects, and believes in the future good behaviour of a worth
less son, notwithstanding countless broken promises of amend
ment ; so this power-worship idealizes the State, as embodied
either in a despot, or in king, lords, and commons, or in a re
publican assembly, and continually hopes in spite of continual
disappointments.

How awe of power sways men's political beliefs, will be
perceived on observing how it sways their religious beliefs.

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 145

We shall best see this by taking an instance supplied by a
people whose religious ideas are extremely crude. Here is an
abstract of a description given by Captain Burton : —

" A pot of oil with a lighted wick was placed every night by the
half-bred Portuguese Indians, before the painted doll, the patron saint
of the boat in which we sailed from Goa. One evening, as the weather
appeared likely to be squally, we observed that the usual compliment
was not offered to the patron, and had the curiosity to inquire why.
'Why?' vociferated the tindal [captain], indignantly, 'if that chap
can't keep the sky clear, he shall have neither oil nor wick from me,
d— n him ! ' ' But I should have supposed that in the hour of danger
you would have paid him more than usual attention ? ' ' The fact is,
Sahib, I have found out that the fellow is not worth his salt : the last
time we had an infernal squall with him on board, and if he does not
keep this one off, I'll just throw him overboard, and take to Santa
Caterina ; hang me if I don't — the brother-in-law ! ' " [brother-in-law,
a common term of insult].7

By us it is scarcely imaginable that men should thus be
have to their gods and demi-gods — should pray to them,
should insult and sometimes whip them for not answering
their prayers, and then should presently pray to them
again. Let us pause before we laugh. Though in the sphere
of religion our conduct does not betray such a contradiction,
yet a contradiction essentially similar is betrayed by our
conduct in the political sphere. Perpetual disappointment
does not here cure us of perpetual expectation. Conceiving
the State-agency as though it were something more than a
cluster of men (a few clever, many ordinary, and some de
cidedly stupid), we ascribe to it marvellous powers of doing
multitudinous things which men otherwise clustered are un
able to do. We petition it to procure for us in some way
which we do not doubt it can find, benefits of all orders ; and
pray it with unfaltering faith to secure us from every fresh
evil. Time after time our hopes are balked. The good is not
obtained, or something bad comes along with it ; the evil is
not cured, or some other evil as great or greater is produced.
Our journals, daily and weekly, general and local, perpetually
find failures to dilate upon : now blaming, and now ridiculing,
first this department and then that. And yet, though the rec
tification of blunders, administrative and legislative, is a main
part of public business — though the time of the Legislature is
11

14:6 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

chiefly occupied in amending and again amending, until, after
the many mischiefs implied by these needs for amendments,
there often comes at last repeal ; yet from day to day increas
ing numbers of wishes are expressed for legal repressions and
State-management. This emotion which is excited by the
forms of governmental power, and makes governmental power
possible, is the root of a faith that springs up afresh however
often cut down. To see how little the perennial confidence
it generates is diminished by perennial disappointment, we
need but remind ourselves of a few State-performances in the
chief State-departments.

On the second page of the first chapter, by way of illustrat
ing Admiralty -mismanagement, brief reference was made to
three avoidable catastrophes which had happened to vessels
of war within the twelvemonth. Their frequency is further
shown by the fact that before the next chapter was published,
two others had occurred : the Lord Clyde ran aground in the
Mediterranean, and the Royal Alfred was seven hours on the
Bahama reef. And then, more recently still, we have had the
collision of the Northumberland and Hercules at Funchal,
and the sinking of a vessel at Woolwich by letting a 35-ton
gun fall from the slings on to her bottom. That the au

thorities of the Navy commit errors which the merchant
service avoids, has been repeatedly shown of late, as in times
past. It was shown by the disclosure respecting the corrosion
of the Glutton's plates, which proved that the Admiralty had
not adopted the efficient protective methods long used by pri
vate shipowners. It was shown when the loss of the Ariadne's
sailors made us aware that a twenty-six gun frigate had not
as many boats for saving life as are prescribed for a passenger-
ship of 400 tons ; and that for lowering her boats there was 011
board neither Kynaston's apparatus nor the much better ap
paratus of Clifford, which experience in the merchant service
has thoroughly tested. It was shown by the non-adoption of
Silver's governor for marine steam-engines ; long used in pri
vate steam-ships to save machinery from breakage, but only
now being introduced into the Navy after machinery has been
broken. On going back a little, this relative inefficiency

of administration is still more strikingly shown : — instance the
fact that during the Chinese expedition of 1841, a mortality at

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 147

the rate of three or four per day in a crew of three hundred,
arose from drinking muddy water from the paddy-fields,
though, either by boiling it or by filtering it through charcoal,
much of this mortality might have been prevented ; instance
the fact that, within the memory of living officers (I have it
from the mouth of one who had the experience), vessels of
war leaving Deptford, filled their casks with Thames-water
taken at ebb-tide, which water, during its subsequent period of
putrefaction, had to be filtered through handkerchiefs before
drinking, and then swallowed while holding the nose ; or in
stance the accumulation of abominable abuses and malversa
tions and tyrannies which produced the mutiny at Spit-
head. But, perhaps, as all such illustrations, the most
striking is that which the treatment of scurvy furnishes. It
was in 1593 that sour juices were first recommended by Al-
bertus ; and in the same year Sir R. Hawkins cured his crew
of scurvy by lemon-juice. In 1COO Commodore Lancaster,
who took out the first squadron of the East India Company's
ships, kept the crew of his own ship in perfect health by
lemon-juice, while the crews of the three accompanying ships
were so disabled that he had to send his men on board to set
their sails. In 1636 this remedy was again recommended in
medical works on scurvy. Admiral Wagner, commanding
our fleet in the Baltic in 1726, once more showed it to be a
specific. In 1757 Dr. Liiid, the physician to the naval hospital
at Haslar, collected and published in an elaborate work, these
and many other proofs of its efficacy. Nevertheless, scurvy
continued to carry off thousands of our sailors. In. 1780,
2,400 in the Channel Fleet were affected by it ; and in 1795 the
safety of the Channel Fleet was endangered by it. At length,
in that year, the Admiralty ordered a regular supply of lemon-
juice to the navy. Thus two centuries after the remedy was
known, and forty years after a chief medical officer of the
Government had given conclusive evidence of its worth, the
Admiralty, forced thereto by an exacerbation of the evil, first
moved in the matter. And what had been the effect of this
amazing perversity of officialism ? The mortality from
scurvy during this long period had exceeded the mortality
by battles, wrecks, and all casualties of sea-life put together ! 8
How, through military administration there has all along

148 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

run, and still runs, a kindred stupidity and obstructiveness,
pages of examples might be accumulated to show. The de
bates pending1 the abolition of the purchase-system furnish
many; the accounts of life at Aldershot and of autumn
manoeuvres furnish many ; and many might be added in the
shape of protests like those made against martinet riding-
regulations, which entail ruptures on the soldiers, and against
" our ridiculous drill-book," as independent officers are now
agreeing to call it. Even limiting ourselves to sanitary
administration in the army, the flies of our journals and the
reports of our commissions would yield multitudinous in
stances of scarcely-credible bungling — as in bad barrack-
arrangements, of which we heard so much a few years ago ;
as in an absurd style of dress, such as that which led to the
wholesale cutting-down of the Twelfth Cameronians when
they arrived in China in 1841 ; as in the carelessness which
lately caused the immense mortality by cholera among the
18th Hussars at Secunderabad, where, spite of medical pro
tests repeated ever since 1818, soldiers have continued to be
lodged in barracks that had " throughout India an infamous
notoriety." 9 Or, not further to multiply instances, take the
long-continued ignoring of ipecacuanha as a specific for
dysentery, which causes so much mortality in our Indian
Service : —

" It is a singular fact, that the introducers of the ipecacuanha into
European practice, the Brazilian traveller Marcgrav, and the phy
sician Piso (in 1648), explicitly stated that the powder is a specific
cure for dysentery, in doses of a drachm and upwards ; but that
this information appears never to have been acted upon till 1813,
when Surgeon G. Playfair, of the East Indian Company's service,
wrote testifying to its use in these doses. Again, in 1831, a number
of reports of medical officers were published by the Madras Medical
Board, stowing its great effects in hourly doses of five grains, till
frequently 100 grains were given in a short period ; testimony which,
notwithstanding its weight, was doomed to be similarly overlooked,
till quite recently, when it has been again brought directly under the
notice of the Indian Government, which is making very vigorous
efforts to introduce the culture of the plant into suitable districts of
India." 10

So that, notwithstanding the gravity of the evil, and the
pressing need for this remedy from time to time thrust on the

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 149

attention of the Indian authorities, nearly sixty years passed
before the requisite steps were taken.11

That the State, which fails to secure the health of men,
even in its own employ, should fail to secure the health of
beasts, might perhaps be taken as self-evident ; though possi
bly some, comparing the money laid out on stables with the
money laid out on cottages, might doubt the corollary. Be
this as it may, however, the recent history of cattle-diseases
and of legislation to prevent cattle-diseases, yields the same
lessons as are yielded above. Since 1848 there have been
seven Acts of Parliament bearing the general titles of Con
tagious Diseases (Animals) Acts. Measures to "stamp out,"
as the phrase goes, this or that disease, have been called for as
imperative. Measures have been passed, and then, expecta
tion not having been fulfilled, amended measures have been
passed, and then re-amended measures ; so that of late no
session has gone by without a bill to cure evils which pre
vious bills tried to cure, but did not. Notwithstanding the
keen interest felt by the ruling classes in the success of these
measures, they have succeeded so ill, that the "foot-and-
mouth disease " has not been " stamped out," has not even
been kept in check, but during the past year has spread
alarmingly in various parts of the kingdom. Continually the
Times has had blaming letters, and reports of local meetings
called to condemn the existing laws and to insist on better.
From all quarters there have come accounts of ineffective
regulations and incapable officials — of policemen who do the
work of veterinary surgeons — of machinery described by Mr.
Fleming, veterinary surgeon of the Royal Engineers, as
" clumsy, disjointed, and inefficient.'1 "

Is it alleged that the goodness of State-agency cannot be
judged by measures so recent, the administration of wThich is
at present imperfect ? If so, let us look at that form of State-
agency which is of most ancient date, and has had the longest
time for perfecting its adjustments — let us take the Law in
general, and its administration in general. Needs there do
more than name these to remind the reader of the amazing
inefficiency, confusion, doubtfulness, delay, which, proverbial
from early times, continue still ? Of penal statutes alone,
which are assumed to be known by every citizen, 14,408 had

150 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

been enacted from the time of Edward III. down to 1844.
As was said by Lord Cranworth in the House of Peers, 16th
February, 1853, the judges were supposed to be acquainted
with all these laws, but, in fact, no human mind could
master them, and ignorance had ceased to be a disgrace.18
To this has to be added the accumulation of civil laws,
similarly multitudinous, involved, unclassified, and to this
again the enormous mass of "case law," filling over 1200
volumes and rapidly increasing, before there can be formed
an idea of the chaos. Consider next, how there has

come this chaos; out of which not even the highest legal
functionaries, much less the lower functionaries, much less
the ordinary citizens, can educe definite conclusions. Session
after session the confusion has been worse confounded by
the passing of separate Acts, and successive amendments of
Acts, Avhich are left unconnected with the multitudinous
kindred Acts and amendments that lie scattered through the
accumulated records of centuries. Suppose a trader should
make, day by day, separate memoranda of his transactions
with A, B, C, and the rest of his debtors and creditors. Sup
pose he should stick these on a file, one after another as they
were made, never even putting them in order, much less
entering them in his ledger. Suppose he should thus go on
throughout his life, and that, to learn the state of his account
with A, B, or C, his clerks had to search through this enor
mous confused file of memoranda : being helped only by
their memories and by certain private note-books which pre
ceding clerks had made for their own guidance, and left
behind them. What would be the state of the business ?
What chance would A, B, and C have of being rightly dealt
with ? Yet this, which, as a method of conducting private
business, is almost too ludicrous for fiction, is in public
business nothing more than grave fact. And the result of
the method is exactly the one to be anticipated. Counsel's
opinions differing, authorities contradicting one another,
judges at issue, courts in collision. The conflict extends all
through the system from top to bottom. Every day's law-
reports remind us that each decision given is so uncertain
that the probability of appeal depends chiefly on the courage
or pecuniary ability of the beaten litigant — not on the nature

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 151

of the decision : and if the appeal is made, a reversal of the
decision is looked for as by no means unlikely. And

then, on contemplating the ultimate effect, we find it to be —
the multiplication of aggressions. Were the law clear, were
verdicts certain to be in conformity with it, and did asking
for its protection entail no chance of great loss or of ruin, very
many of the causes that come before our courts would never
be heard of, for the reason that the wrongs they disclose
would not be committed ; nor would there be committed
those yet more numerous wrongs to which the bad are
prompted by the belief that the persons wronged will not
dare to seek redress. Here, where State-agency has had
centuries upon centuries in which to develop its appliances
and show its efficiency, it is so inefficient that citizens dread
employing it, lest instead of getting succour in their distress
they should bring on themselves new sufferings. And then
— startling comment on the system, if we could but see it ! —
there spring up private voluntary combinations for doing the
business which the State should do, but fails to do. Here
in London there is now proposed a Tribunal of Commerce,
for administering justice among traders, on the pattern of that
which in Paris settles eighteen thousand cases a year, at an
average cost of fifteen shillings each !

Even after finding the State perform so ill this vital func
tion, one might have expected that it would perform well such
a simple function as the keeping of documents. Yet, in the
custody of the national records, there has been a carelessness
such as " no merchant of ordinary prudence " would show in
respect to his account-books. One portion of these records
was for a long time kept in the White Tower, close to. some
tons of gunpowder ; and another portion was placed near a
steam-engine in daily use. Some records were deposited in a
temporary shed at the end of Westminster Hall, and thence,
in 1830, were removed to other sheds in the King's Mews,
Charing Cross, where, in 1836, their state is thus described by
the Eeport of a Select Committee : —

" In these sheds 4,136 cubic feet of national records were deposited
in the most neglected condition. Besides the accumulated dust of
centuries, all, when these operations commenced (the investigation into
the state of the Records), were found to be very damp. Some were in

152 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

a state of inseparable adhesion to the stone walls. There were nu
merous fragments which had only just escaped entire consumption by
vermin, and many were in the last stage of putrefaction. Decay and
damp had rendered a large quantity so fragile as hardly to admit of
being touched ; others, particularly those in the form of rolls, were so
coagulated together that they could not be uncoiled. Six or seven
perfect skeletons of rats were found imbedded, and bones of these
vermin were generally distributed throughout the mass."

Thus if we array in order the facts which are daily brought
to light, but unhappily drop out of men's memories as fast as
others are added, we find a like history throughout. Now the
complaint is of the crumbling walls of the Houses of Parlia
ment, which, built of stone chosen by a commission, never
theless begin to decay in parts first built before other parts
are completed. Now the scandal is about a new fort at Sea-
ford, based on the shingle so close to the sea that a storm
washes a great part of it away. Now there comes the account
of a million and a half spent in building the Alderney har
bour, which, being found worse than useless, threatens to en
tail further cost for its destruction. And then there is an as
tounding disclosure about financial irregularities in the Post-
office and Telegraph departments — a disclosure showing that,
in 1870-1, two-thirds of a million having been spent by offi
cials without authority, and the offence having been condoned
by Parliament, there again occurs, in 1871-2, a like unwar
ranted expenditure of four-fifths of a million — a disclosure
showing that while the Audit-department disputes a charge
of sixpence for porterage in a small bill, it lets millions slip
through its fingers without check.14 Scarcely a journal can
be taken up that has not some blunder referred to in a debate,
or brought to light by a Report, or pointed out in a letter, or
commented on in a leader. Do I need an illustration ? I take
up the Times of this morning (November 13) and read that
the new bankruptcy law, substituted for the bankruptcy laws
which failed miserably, is administered in rooms so crowded
and noisy that due care and thought on the part of officials is
scarcely possible, and, further, that as one part of the court
sits in the City and another part in Lincoln's Inn, solicitors
have often to be in both places at the same time. Do I need
more illustrations ? They come in abundance between the

' SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 153

day on which the foregoing sentence was written and the day
(November 20) on which I revise it. Within this short time
mismanagement has been shown in a treatment of the police
that has created a mutiny among them ; in a treatment of
government copying-clerks that causes them publicly to com
plain of broken promises ; in a treatment of postmen that
calls from them disrespectful behaviour towards their supe
riors : all at the same time that there is going on the contro
versy about Park-rules, which have been so issued as to evade
constitutional principles, and so administered as to bring the
law into contempt. Yet as fast as there come proofs of

mal-administration there come demands that administration
shall be extended. Here, in the very same copy of the Times,
are two authorities, Mr. Reed and Sir W. Fairbairn, speaking
at different meetings, both condemning the enormous bun
gling and consequent loss of life that goes on under the exist
ing Government-supervision of vessels, and both insisting on
" legislation " and " proper inspection " as the remedies.18 Just
as, in societies made restive by despotism, the proposed remedy
for the evils and dangers brought about is always more despot
ism ; just as, along with the failing power of a decaying Papacy,
there goes, as the only fit cure, a re-assertion of Papal infalli
bility, with emphatic obbligato from a Council ; so, to set right
the misdoings of State-agency, the proposal always is more
State-agency. When, after long continuance of coal-mine in
spection, coal-mine explosions keep recurring, the cry is for
more coal-mine inspection. When railway accidents multiply,
notwithstanding the oversight of officials appointed by law
to see that railways are safe, the unhesitating demand is for
more such officials. Though, as Lord Salisbury lately re
marked of governing bodies deputed by the State, " they begin
by being enthusiastic and extravagant, and they are very apt
to end in being wooden " — though, through the press and by
private conversation, men are perpetually reminded that
when it has ceased to wield the new broom, each deputy gov
erning power tends to become either a king-stork that does
mischief, or a king-log that does nothing ; yet more deputy
governing powers are asked for with unwavering faith.
While the unwisdom of officialism is daily illustrated, the
argument for each proposed new department sets out with the

154 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

postulate that officials will act wisely. After endless com
ments on the confusion and apathy and delay of Government
offices, other Government offices are advocated. After cease
less ridicule of red-tape, the petition is for more red-tape.
Daily we castigate the political idol with a hundred pens, and
daily pray to it with a thousand tongues.

The emotion which thus destroys the balance of judgment,
lies deep in the natures of men as they have been and still are.
This root out of which there grow hopes that are no sooner
blighted than kindred hopes grow up in their places, is a root
reaching down to the lowest stages in civilization. The con
quering chief, feared, marvelled at, for his strength or sagac
ity — distinguished from others by a quality thought of as
supernatural (when the antithesis of this with natural be
comes thinkable), ever excites a disproportionate faith and ex
pectation. Having done or seen things beyond the power or
insight of inferiors, there is no knowing what other things he
may not do or see. After death his deeds become magnified
by tradition ; and his successor, inheriting his authority, exe
cuting his commands, and keeping up secret communication
with him, acquires either thus, or by his own superiority, or
by both, a like credit for powers that transcend the ordinary
human powers. So there accumulates an awe of the ruler,
with its correlative faith. On tracing the genealogy of the
governing agent, thus beginning as god, and descendant of
the gods, and having titles and a worship in common with
the gods, we see there clings to it, through all its successive
metamorphoses, more or less of this same ascribed character,
exciting this same sentiment. " Divinely descended " be
comes presently " divinely appointed," " the Lord's anointed,"
"ruler by divine right," "king by the grace of God," &c.
And then as fast as declining monarchical power brings with
it decreasing belief in the supernaturalness of the monarch
(which, however, long lingers in faint forms, as instance the
supposed cure of king's evil), the growing powers of the bodies
that assume his functions bring to them a share of the still-
surviving sentiment. The " divinity that doth hedge a king "
becomes, in considerable measure, the divinity that doth
hedge a parliament. The superstitious reverence once felt

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 155

towards the one, is transferred, in a modified form, to the
other ; taking with it a tacit belief in an ability to achieve
any end that may be wished, and a tacit belief in an authority
to which 110 limits may be set.

This sentiment, inherited and cultivated in men from
childhood upwards, sways their convictions in spite of them.
It generates an irrational confidence in all the paraphernalia
and appliances and forms of State-action. In the very aspect
of a law-deed, written in an archaic hand 011 dingy parch
ment, there is something which raises a conception of validity
not raised by ordinary writing on paper. Around a Govern-
meiit-stamp there is a certain glamour which makes us feel as
though the piece of paper bearing it was more than a mere
mass of dry pulp with some indented marks. To any legal
form of words there seems to attach an authority greater than
that which would be felt were the language free from legal
involutions and legal technicalities. And so is it with all the
symbols of authority, from royal pageants downwards. That
the judge's wig gives to his decisions a weight and sacrediiess
they would not have were he bare-headed, is a fact familiar to
every one. And when we descend to the lowest agents of the
executive organization, we find the same thing. A man in
blue coat and white-metal buttons, which carry with them the
thought of State-authority, is habitually regarded by citizens
as having a trustworthiness beyond that of a man who wears
no such uniform ; and this confidence survives all disproofs.
Obviously, then, if men's judgments are thus ridiculously
swayed, notwithstanding better knowledge, by the mere sym
bols of State-power, still more must they be so swayed by
State-power itself, as exercised in ways that leave greater scope
for the imagination. If awe and faith are irresistibly called
out towards things which perception and reason tell us posi
tively should not call them out, still more will awe and faith
be called out towards those State-actions and influences 011
which perception and reason can less easily be brought to bear.
If the beliefs prompted by this feeling of reverence survive
even where they are flatly contradicted by common sense, still
more will they survive where common sense cannot flatly
contradict them.

How deeply rooted is this sentiment excited in men by em-

156 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

bodied supremacy, will be seen on noting1 how it sways in
common all orders of politicians, from the old-world Tory to
the Eed Republican. Contrasted as the extreme parties are in
the types of Government they approve, and in the theories
they hold respecting1 the source of governmental authority,
they are alike in their unquestioning1 belief in governmental
authority, and in showing .almost unlimited faith in the
ability of a Government to achieve any desired end. Though
the form of the agency towards which the sentiment of loyalty
is directed, is much changed, yet there is little change in the
sentiment itself, or in the general conceptions it creates. The
notion of the divine right of a person, has given place to the
notion of the divine right of a representative assembly. While
it is held to be a self-evident falsity that the single will of a
despot can justly override the wills of a people, it is held to be
a self-evident truth that the wills of one-half of a people plus
some small fraction, may with perfect justice override the
wills of the other half minus this small fraction — may over
ride them in respect of any matter whatever. Unlimited
authority of a majority has been substituted for unlimited
authority of an individual. So unquestioning is the belief in
this unlimited authority of a majority, that even the tacit sug
gestion of a doubt produces astonishment. True, if of one
who holds that power deputed by the people is subject to no
restrictions, you ask whether, if the majority decided that no
person should be allowed to live beyond sixty, the decision
might be legitimately executed, he would possibly hesitate.
Or if you asked him whether the majority, being Catholic,
might rightly require of the Protestant minority that they
should either embrace Catholicism or leave the country, he
would, influenced by the ideas of religious liberty in which he
has been brought up, probably say no. But though his an
swers to sundry such questions disclose the fact that State-
authority, even when uttering the national will, is not be
lieved by him to be absolutely supreme ; his latent conviction
that there are limits to it, lies so remote in the obscure back
ground of his consciousness as to be practically non-existent.
In all he says about what a Legislature should do, or forbid,
or require, he tacitly assumes that any regulation may be en
acted, and when enacted must be obeyed. And then, along

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 157

with this authority not to be gainsaid, he believes in a capacity
not to be doubted. Whatever the governing body decides to
do, can be done, is the postulate which lies hidden in the
schemes of the most revolutionary reformers. Analyze the
programme of the Communalists, observe what is hoped for
by the adherents of the Social and Democratic Republic, or
study the ideas of legislative action which our own Trades-
Unionists entertain, and you find the implied belief to be that
a Government, organized after an approved pattern, will be
able to remedy all the evils complained of and to secure each
proposed benefit.

Thus, the emotion excited by embodied power is one which
sways, and indeed mainly determines, the beliefs, not only of
those classed as the most subordinate, but even of those classed
as the most insubordinate. It has a deeper origin than any
political creed ; and it more or less distorts the conceptions of
all parties respecting governmental action.

This sentiment of loyalty, making it almost impossible to
study the natures and actions of governing agencies with per
fect calmness, greatly hinders sociological science, and must
long continue to hinder it. For the sentiment is all-essential.
Throughout the past, societies have been mainly held together
by it. It is still an indispensable aid to social cohesion and
the maintenance of order. And it will be long before
social discipline has so far modified human character, that
reverence for law, as rooted in the moral order of things,
will serve in place of reverence for the power which en
forces law.

Accounts of existing uncivilized races, as well as histories
of the civilized races, show us a posteriori, what we might
infer with certainty a priori, that in proportion as the mem
bers of a society are aggressive in their natures, they can be
held together only by a proportionately-strong feeling of un
reasoning reverence for a ruler. Some of the lowest types of
men, who show but little of this feeling, show scarcely any
social cohesion, and make no progress — instance the Austra
lians. Where appreciable social development has taken place,
we find subordination to chiefs ; and, as the society enlarges,
to a king. If we need an illustration that where there is great

158 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

savageness, social union can be maintained only by great
loyalty, we have it among those ferocious cannibals, the Fi-
jians. Here, where the barbarism is so extreme that a late
king- registered by a row of many hundred stones the number
of human victims he had devoured, the loyalty is so extreme
that a man stands unbound to be knocked on the head if the
king wills it : himself saying that the king's will must be
done. And if, with this case in mind, we glance back over
the past, and note the fealty that went along with brutality in
feudal ages; or if, at the present time, we observe bow the
least advanced European nations show a superstitious awe of
the ruler which in the more advanced has become conven
tional respect ; we shall perceive that decrease of the feeling
goes on, and can normally go on, only as fast as the fitness of
men for social co-operation increases. Manifestly, throughout
all past time, assemblages of men in whom the aggressive
selfishness of the predatory nature existed without this feeling
which induces obedience to a controlling power, dissolved
and disappeared : leaving the world to be peopled by men
who had the required emotional balance. And it is mani
fest that even in a civilized society, if the sentiment of sub
ordination becomes enfeebled without self-control gaining
in strength proportionately, there arises a danger of social
dissolution : a truth of which France supplies an illustra
tion.

Hence, as above said, the conceptions of sociological phe
nomena, or, at least, of those all-important ones relating to
governmental structures and actions, must now, arid for a long
time to come, be rendered more or less untrue by this perturb
ing emotion. Here, in the concrete, may be recognized the
truth before stated in the abstract, that the individual citizen,
imbedded in the social organism as one of its units, moulded
by its influences, and aiding reciprocally to re-mould it, fur
thering its life while enabled by it to live, cannot so emanci
pate himself as to see things around him in their real relations.
Unless the mass of citizens have sentiments and beliefs in
something like harmony with the social organization in which
they are incorporated, this organization cannot continue. The
sentiments proper to each type of society inevitably sway the
sociological conclusions of its units. And among other senti-

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— EMOTIONAL. 159

monts, this awe of embodied power takes a large share in doing
this.

How large a share it takes, we shall see 011 contemplating
the astonishingly-perverted estimates of rulers it has produced,
and the resulting perversions of history. Recall the titles of
adoration given to emperors and kings ; the ascription to them
of capacities, beauties, powers, virtues, transcending those of
mankind in general ; the fulsome flatteries used when com
mending them to God in prayers professing to utter the truth.
Now, side by side with these, put records of their deeds through
out all past times in all nations ; notice how these records are
blackened with crimes of all orders ; and then dwell awhile
on the contrast. Is it not manifest that the conceptions of
State-actions that went along with these profoundly-untrue
conceptions of rulers, must also have been profoundly untrue ?
Take, as a single example, King James, who, as described by
Mr. Bisset in agreement with other historians, was " in every
relation of life in which he is viewed . . . equally an object
of aversion or contempt;" but to whom, nevertheless, the
English translation of the Bible is dedicated in sentences be
ginning—" Great and manifold were the blessings, most dread
sovereign, which Almighty God, the Father of all mercies,
bestowed upon us the people of England, when first He sent
Your Majesty's Royal Person to rule and reign over us," &c.,
&c. Think of such a dedication of such a book to such a man ;
and then ask if, along with a sentiment thus expressing itself,
there could go anything like balanced judgments of political
transactions.

Does there need an illustration of the extent to which bal
anced judgments of political transactions are made impossible
by this sentiment during times when it is strong ? We have
one in the warped conceptions formed respecting Charles I.
and Cromwell, and respecting the changes with which their
names are identified. Now that many generations have gone
by, and it begins to be seen that Charles was not worthy to be
prayed for as a martyr, while Cromwell deserved treatment
quite unlike .that of exhuming his body and insulting it ; it
begins to be seen also, how utterly wrong have been the inter
pretations of the events these two rulers took part in, and how

160 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

entirely men's sentiments of loyalty have incapacitated them
for understanding those events under their sociological aspects.
Naming this as an instance of the more special perverting
effects of this sentiment, we have here chiefly to note its more
general perverting effects. From the beginning it has tended
ever to keep in the foreground of consciousness, the governing
agent as causing social phenomena ; and so has kept in the
background of consciousness all other causes of social phe
nomena — or rather, the one has so completely occupied con
sciousness as to exclude the other. If we remember that his
tory has been full of the doings of kings, but that only in
quite recent times have the phenomena of industrial organi
zation, conspicuous as they are, attracted any attention, — if
we remember that while all eyes and all thoughts have been
turned to the actions of rulers, no eyes and no thoughts have,
until modern days, been turned to those vital processes of
spontaneous co-operation by which national life, and growth,
and progress, have been carried on ; we shall not fail to see
how profound have been the resulting errors in men's conclu
sions about social affairs. And seeing this, we shall infer that
the emotion excited in men by embodied political power must
now, and for a long time to come, be a great obstacle to the
formation of true sociological conceptions : tending, as it must
ever do, to exaggerate the importance of the political factor in
comparison with other factors.

Under the title of "Subjective Difficulties — Emotional," I
have here entered upon an extensive field, the greater part of
which remains to be explored. The effects of impatience, the
effects of that all-glorifying admiration felt for military suc
cess, the effects of that sentiment which makes men submit to
authority by keeping up a superstitious awe of the agent exer
cising it, are but a few among the effects which the emotions
produce on sociological beliefs. Various other effects have
now to be described and illustrated. I propose to deal with
them in chapters on — the Educational Bias, the Bias of Patri
otism, the Class-Bias, the Political Bias, and the Theological
Bias.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS.

IT would clear up our ideas about many things, if we dis
tinctly recognized the truth that we have two religions.
Primitive humanity has but one. The humanity of the re
mote future will have but one. The two are opposed ; and we
who live midway in the course of civilization have to believe
in both.

These two religions are adapted to two conflicting sets of
social requirements. The one set is supreme at the beginning •;
the other set will be supreme at the end ; and a compromise
has to be maintained between them during the progress from
beginning to end. On the one hand, there must be social self-
preservation in face of external enemies. On the other hand,
there must be co-operation among fellow-citizens, which can
exist only in proportion as fair dealing of man with man cre
ates mutual trust. Unless the one necessity is met, the society
disappears by extinction, or by absorption into some conquer
ing society. Unless the other necessity is met, there cannot
be that division of labour, exchange of services, consequent
industrial progress and increase of numbers, by which a society
is made strong enough to survive. In adjustment to these two
conflicting requirements, there grow up two conflicting codes
of duty ; which severally acquire supernatural sanctions. And
thus we get the two coexisting religions — the religion of enmity
and the religion of amity.

Of course, I do not mean that these are both called religions.
Here I am not speaking of names ; I am speaking simply of
things. Nowadays, men do not pay the same verbal homage
to the code which enmity dictates that they do to the code
which amity dictates — the last occupies the place of honour.
12 161

1G2 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

But the real homage is paid in large measure, if not in the
larger measure, to the code dictated by enmity. The religion
of enmity nearly all men actually believe. The religion of
amity most of them merely believe they believe. In some dis
cussion, say, about international affairs, remind them of cer
tain precepts contained in the creed they profess, and the most
you get is a tepid assent. Now let the conversation turn on
the " tunding " at Winchester, or on the treatment of Indian
mutineers, or on the Jamaica business ; and you find that
while the precepts tepidly assented to were but nominally be
lieved, quite opposite precepts are believed undoubtingly and
defended with fervour.

Curiously enough, to maintain these antagonist religions,
which in our transitional state are both requisite, we have
adopted from two different races two different cults. From
the books of the Jewish New Testament we take our religion
of amity. Greek and Latin epics and histories serve as gos
pels for our religion of enmity. In the education of our
youth we devote a small portion of time to the one, and a
large portion of time to the other. And, as though to make
the compromise effectual, these two cults are carried on in the
same places by the same teachers. At our Public Schools, as
also at many other schools, the same men are priests of both
religions. The nobility of self-sacrifice, set forth in Scripture-
lessons and dwelt on in sermons, is made conspicuous every
seventh day ; while during the other six days, the nobility of
sacrificing others is exhibited in glowing words. The sacred
duty of blood-revenge, which, as existing savages show us,
constitutes the religion of enmity in its primitive form —
which, as shown us in ancient literature, is enforced by divine
sanction, or rather by divine command, as well as by the opin
ion of men — is the duty which, during the six days, is deeply
stamped on natures quite ready to receive it ; and then some
thing is done towards obliterating the stamp, when, on the
seventh day, vengeance is interdicted.

A priori, it might be thought impossible that men should
continue through life holding two doctrines which are mutu
ally destructive. But their ability to compromise between
conflicting beliefs is very remarkable — remarkable, at least, if
we suppose them to put their conflicting beliefs side by side ;

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. 163

not so remarkable if we recognize the fact that they do not
put them side by side. A late distinguished physicist, whose
science and religion seemed to his friends irreconcilable, re
tained both for the reason that he deliberately refused to com
pare the propositions of the one with those of the other. To
speak in metaphor — when he entered his oratory he shut the
door of his laboratory ; and when he entered his laboratory
he shut the door of his oratory. It is because they habitually
do something similar, that men live so contentedly under this
logically-indefensible compromise between their two creeds.
As the intelligent child, propounding to his seniors puzzling
theological questions, and meeting many rebuffs, eventually
ceases to think about difficulties of which he can get no solu
tions ; so, a little later, the contradictions between the -things
taught to him in school and in church, at first startling and
inexplicable, become by-and-by familiar, and no longer attract
his attention. Thus while growing up he acquires, in com
mon with all around him, the habit of using first one and
then the other of his creeds as the occasion demands ; and at
maturity the habit has become completely established. Now
he enlarges on the need for maintaining the national honour,
and thinks it mean to arbitrate about an aggression instead of
avenging it by war ; and now, calling his servants together,
he reads a prayer in which he asks God that our trespasses
may be forgiven as we forgive trespasses against us. That
which he prays for as a virtue on Sunday, he scorns as a vice
on Monday.

The religion of amity and the religion of enmity, with the
emotions they respectively enlist, are important factors in so
ciological conclusions ; and rational sociological conclusions
can be produced only when both sets of factors come into
play. We have to look at each cluster of social facts as a
phase in a continuous metamorphosis. We have to look at
the conflicting religious beliefs and feelings included in this
cluster of facts as elements in this phase. We have to do
more. We have to consider as transitional, also, the conflict
ing religious beliefs and feelings in which we are brought up,
and which distort our views not only of passing phenomena
in our own society, but also of phenomena in other societies
and in other times ; and the aberrations they cause in our in-

1G4 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

fere rices have to be sought for and rectified. Of these two
religions taught us, we must constantly remember that during
civilization the religion of enmity is slowly losing strength,
while the religion of amity is slowly gaining strength. We
must bear in mind that at each stage a certain ratio between
them has to be maintained. We must infer that the existing
ratio is only a temporary one ; and that the resulting bias to
this or that conviction respecting social affairs is temporary.
And if we are to reach those unbiassed convictions which form
parts of the Social Science, we can do it only by allowing for
this temporary bias.

To see how greatly our opposite religions respectively per
vert sociological beliefs, and how needful it is that the opposite
perversions they cause should be corrected, we must here con
template the extremes to which men are carried, now by the
one and now by the other.

As from antagonist physical forces, as from antagonist
emotions in each man, so from the antagonist social tenden
cies men's emotions create, there always results, not a medium
state, but a rhythm between opposite states. The one force or
tendency is not continuously counterbalanced by the other
force or tendency ; but now the one greatly predominates, and
presently by reaction there comes a predominance of the
other. That which we are shown by variations in the prices
of stocks, shares, or commodities, occurring daily, weekly,
and in longer intervals— that which we see in the alternations
of manias and panics, caused by irrational hopes and absurd
fears — that which diagrams of these variations express by the
ascents and descents of a line, now to a great height and now
to an equivalent depth, we discover in all social phenomena,
moral and religious included. It is exhibited on a large scale
and on a small scale — by rhythms extending over centuries
and by rhythms of short periods. And we see it not only in
waves of conflicting feelings and opinions that pass through
societies as wholes, but also in the opposite excesses gone to
by individuals and sects in the same society at the same time.
There is nowhere a balanced judgment and a balanced action,
but always a cancelling of one another by contrary errors :
" men pair off in insane parties," as Emerson puts it. Some-

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. lf,5

thing1 like rationality is finally obtained as a product of mu
tually-destructive irrationalities. As for example, in the
treatment of our criminals, there alternate, or co-exist, an un
reasoning severity and an unreasoning lenity. Now we pun
ish in a spirit of vengeance ; now we pamper with a maudlin
sympathy. At 110 time is there a due adjustment of penalty
to transgression such as the course of nature shows us — an in
flicting of neither more nor less evil than the reaction which
the action causes.

In the conflict between our two religions we see this gen
eral law on a great scale. The religion of unqualified altru
ism arose to correct by an opposite excess the religion of un
qualified egoism. Against the doctrine of entire selfishness
it set the doctrine of entire self-sacrifice. In place of the
aboriginal creed not requiring you to love your fellow-man at
all, but insisting only that certain of your fellow-men you
shall hate even to the death, there came a creed directing that
you shall in no case do anything prompted by hate of your
fellow-man, but shall love him as yourself. Nineteen cen
turies have since wrought some compromise between these
opposite creeds. It has never been rational, however, but only
empirical — mainly, indeed, unconscious compromise. There
is not yet a distinct recognition of what truth each extreme
stands for, and a perception that the two truths must be co
ordinated ; but there is little more than a partial rectifying
of excesses one way by excesses the other way. By these per
sons purely-egoistic lives are led. By those, altruism is car
ried to the extent of bringing on ill health and premature
death. Even on comparing the acts of the same individual,
we find, not an habitual balance between the two tendencies,
but now an effort to inflict great evil on some foreign ag
gressor or some malefactor at home, and now a dispropor-
tioned sacrifice on behalf of one often quite unworthy of it.
That altruism is right, but that egoism is also right, and that
there requires a continual compromise between the two, is a
conclusion which but few consciously formulate and still
fewer avow.

Yet the untenability of the doctrine of self-sacrifice in its
extreme form is conspicuous enough ; and is tacitly admitted
by all in their ordinary inferences and daily actions. Work,

166 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

enterprise, invention, improvement, as they have gone on from
the beginning1 and are going on now, arise out of the principle
that among citizens severally having unsatisfied wants, each
cares more to satisfy his own wants than to satisfy the wants of
others. The fact that industrial activities grow from this root,
being recognized, the inevitable implication is that unquali
fied altruism would dissolve all existing social organizations :
leaving the onus of proof that absolutely-alien social organi
zations would act. That they would not act becomes clear on
supposing the opposite principle in force. Were A to be care
less of himself, and to care only for the welfare of B, C, and
D, while each of these, paying no attention to his own needs,
busied himself in supplying the needs of the others ; this
roundabout process, besides being troublesome, would very ill
meet the requirements of each, unless each could have his
neighbour's consciousness. After observing this, we must in
fer that a certain predominance of egoism over altruism is
beneficial ; and that in fact no other arrangement would an
swer. Do but ask what would happen if, of A, B, C, D, &c.,
each declined to have a gratification in his anxiety that some
one else should have it, and that the someone else similarly
persisted in refusing it out of sympathy with his fellows — do
but contemplate the resulting confusion and cross-purposes
and loss of gratification to all, and you will see that pure al
truism would bring things to a deadlock just as much as pure
egoism. In truth nobody ever dreams of acting out the altru
istic theory in all the relations of life. The Quaker who pro
poses to accept literally, and to practise, the precepts of Chris
tianity, carries on his business on egoistic principles just as
much as his neighbours. Though, nominally, he holds that
he is to take no thought for the morrow, his thought for the
morrow betrays as distinct an egoism as that of men in gen
eral ; and he is conscious that to take as much thought for the
morrows of others, would be ruinous to him and eventually
mischievous to all.

While, however, no one is entirely altruistic — while no
one really believes an entirely altruistic life to be practicable,
there continues the tacit assertion that conduct ought to be
entirely altruistic. It does not seem to be suspected that pure
altruism is actually wrong. Brought up, as each is, in the

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. IfiY

nominal acceptance of a creed which wholly subordinates
egoism to altruism, and gives sundry precepts that are abso
lutely altruistic, each citizen, while ignoring these in his busi
ness, and tacitly denying them in various opinions he utters,
daily gives to them lip-homage, and supposes that acceptance
of them is required of him though he finds it impossible. Feel
ing that he cannot call them in question without calling in
question his religion as a whole, he pretends to others and to
himself that he believes them — believes things which in his
innermost consciousness he knows he does not believe. He
professes to think that entire self-sacrifice must be right,
though dimly conscious that it would be fatal.

If he had the courage to think out clearly what he vaguely
discerns, he would discover that self-sacrifice passing a certain
limit entails evil on all — evil on those for whom sacrifice is
made as well as on those who make it. While a continual
giving-up of pleasures and continual submission to pains is
physically injurious, so that its final outcome is debility, dis
ease, and abridgment of life; the continual acceptance of
benefits at the expense of a fellow-being is morally injurious.
Just as much as unselfishness is cultivated by the one, selfish
ness is cultivated by the other. If to surrender a gratification
to another is noble, readiness to accept the gratification so sur
rendered is ignoble ; and if repetition of the one kind of act is
elevating, repetition of the other kind of act is degrading. So
that though up to a certain point altruistic action blesses giver
and receiver, beyond that point it curses giver and receiver —
physically deteriorates the one and morally deteriorates the
other. Everyone can remember cases where greediness for
pleasures, reluctance to take trouble, and utter disregard of
those around, have been perpetually increased by unmeasured
and ever-ready kindnesses ; while the unwise benefactor has
shown by languid movements and pale face the debility con
sequent on disregard of self : the outcome of the policy being
destruction of the worthy in making worse the unworthy.

The absurdity of unqualified altruism becomes, indeed,
glaring on remembering that it can be extensively practised
only if in the same society there coexist one moiety altruistic
and one moiety egoistic. Only those who are intensely selfish
will allow their fellows habitually to behave to them with

168 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

extreme unselfishness. If all are duly regardful of others,
there are none to accept the sacrifices which others are ready
to make. If a high degree of sympathy characterizes all, no
one can be so unsympathetic as to let another receive positive
or negative injury that he may benefit. So that pure altru
ism in a society implies a nature which makes pure altruism
impossible, from the absence of those towards whom it may
be exercised !

Equally untenable does the doctrine show itself when
looked at from another point of view. If life and its gratifi
cations are valuable in another, they are equally valuable
in self. There is no total increase of happiness if only as
much is gained by one as is lost by another ; and if, as con
tinually happens, the gain is not equal to the loss — if the re
cipient, already inferior, is further demoralized by habitual
acceptance of sacrifices, and so made less capable of happiness
(which he inevitably is), the total amount of happiness is di
minished : benefactor and beneficiary are both losers.

The maintenance of the individuality is thus demonstrably
a duty. The assertion of personal claims is essential ; both as
a means to self-happiness, which is a unit in the general hap
piness, and as a means to furthering the general happiness al
truistically. Resistance to aggression is not simply justifiable
but imperative. Non-resistance is at variance with altruism
and egoism alike. The extreme Christian theory, which 110
one acts upon, which no one really believes, but which most
tacitly profess and a few avowedly profess, is as logically in
defensible as it is impracticable.

The religion of amity, then, taken by itself, is incomplete
— it needs supplementing. The doctrines it inculcates and
the sentiments it fosters, arising by reactions against opposite
doctrines and sentiments, run into extremes the other way.

Let us now turn to these opposite doctrines and sentiments,
inculcated and fostered by the religion of enmity, and note
the excesses to which they run.

Worthy of highest admiration is the " Tasmanian devil,"
which, fighting to the last gasp, snarls with its dying breath.
Admirable, too, though less admirable, is our own bull-dog — a
creature said sometimes to retain its hold even when a limb is

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. 169

cut off. To be admired also for their " pluck," perhaps nearly
in as great a degree, are some of the carnivora, as the lion and
the tiger ; since when driven to bay they fight against great
odds. Nor should we forget the game-cock, supplying as it
does a word of eulogy to the mob of roughs who witness the
hanging of a murderer, and who half condone his crime if he
" dies game." Below these animals come mankind ; some of
whom, indeed, as the American Indians, bear tortures without
groaning. And then, considerably lower, must be placed the
civilized man ; who, fighting up to a certain point, and bear
ing considerable injury, ordinarily yields when further fight
ing is useless.

Is the reader startled by this classification ? Why should
he be ? It is but a literal application of that standard of worth
tacitly assumed by most, and by some deliberately avowed.
Obviously it is the standard of worth believed in by M. Gam-
betta, who, after bloodshed carried to the extent of prostrating
France, lately reproached the French Assembly by saying —
" You preferred peace to honour ; you gave five milliards and
two provinces." And there are not a few among ourselves
who so thoroughly agree in M. Gambetta's feeling, that this
utterance of his has gone far to redeem him in their estima
tion. If the reader needs encouragement to side with such,
plenty more may be found for him. The Staffordshire collier,
enjoying the fighting of dogs when the fighting of men is not
to be witnessed, would doubtless take the same view. In the
slums of Whitechapel and St. Giles's, among leaders of " the
fancy," it is an unhesitating belief that pluck and endurance
are the highest of attributes ; and probably most readers of
Bell's Life in London would concur in this belief. More
over, if he wants further sympathy to support him, he may
find entire races ready to give it ; especially that noble race of
cannibals, the Fijians, among whom bravery is so highly
honoured that, on their return from battle, the triumphant
warriors are met by the women, who place themselves at
their unrestricted disposal. So that whoever inclines to adopt
this measure of superiority will find many to side with him —
that is, if he likes his company.

Seriously, is it not amazing that civilized men should espe
cially pride themselves on a quality in which they are ex-

170 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

eecded br inferior varieties of their own race, and still more
eivvevied by inferior ••»"mfi^* f Instead of regarding' a man
as manly in proportion as he po<ssesses moral attributes dis
tinctively human, -we regard him as manly in proportion as
he shows an attribute possessed in greater degrees by beings
from whom we derive our words of contempt It was lately
remarked by Mr. Greg that we take our point of honour from
the prbe-rin^r : but we do worse, — we take our point of honour
from beasts. Nay. we take it from a beast inferior to those
we are familiar with : for the ~ Tasnianian devil," in structure
and intelligence, stands on a much lower level of brutality
than our lions and bull-dogs.

That resistance to aggression is to be applauded, and that
the courage implied by resistance is to be valued and admired,
may be fully admitted while denying that courage is to be
regarded as the supreme virtue. A large endowment of it is
essential to a complete nature ; bat so are large endowments of
other things which we do not therefore make oar measures of
worth, A good body, well grown, well proportioned, and of
such quality in its tissues as to be enduring, should brimr. as it
does brn: i. its share of admiration. Admirable, too* in their
wavs, are gvxxl stomach and lungs, as well as a vigorous vas
cular system -. for without these the power of self-preservation
and die power of preserving others will fall short. To be a
fine animal is. indeed, essential to many kinds of achieve-
-

_ -

_ , - '-•;-.

•••'-. :c
ng1 from in
aement ; or

' . : -

- j

as it is called.

men, that heart-

eaowek to show

THE EDCCAT10XAL BIAS, 171

circumstances of peril. But while we are thus taught that in
admiring courage, we are admiring physical superiorities and
those superiorities of mental faculty which give fitness for
dealing with emergencies, we are also taught that unless we
rank as supreme the bodily powers and those powers which
directly conduce to self-preservation, we cannot say that cour
age is the highest attribute, and that the degree of it should
be our standard of honour.

That an over-estimate of courage is appropriate to cm-
phase of civilization may be very true. It is beyond doubt
that during the struggle for existence among nations, it is
needful that men should admire extremely the quality with
out which there can be no success in the struggle. While.
among neighbouring nations, we have one in which all the
males are trained for war — while the sentiment of this nation
is such that students slash one another's faces in duels about
trifles, and are admired for their scars, especially by women —
while the military ascendancy it tolerates is such that, for ill-
usage by soldiers, ordinary citizens have no adequate redress —
while the government is such that though the monarch as
head of the Church condemns duelling as irreligious, and as
head of the Law forbids it as a crime, yet as head of the Army
he insists on it to the extent of expelling officers who will
not fight duels — while. I say. we have a neighbouring nation
thus characterized, something of a kindred character in appli
ances, sentiments, and beliefs, has to be maintained among'
ourselves. When we find another neighbouring nation be
lieving that no motive is so high as the love of glory, and no
glory so great as that gained by successful war— when we
perceive the military spirit so pervading this nation that it
loves to clothe its children in ^«a.si-military ^n **«•««* — when.
we find one of its historians writing that the French army is
the great civilizer. and one of its generals lately saying that
the army is the soul of France — when we see that the vital
energies of this nation run mainly to teeth and claws, and
that it quickly grows new sets of teeth and claws in place of
those pulled out : it is needful that we. too. should keep our
teeth and claws in order, and should maintain ideas and feel
ings adapted to the effectual use of them. There is no gain
saying the truth that while the predatory instincts continue

172 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

prompting nations to rob one another, destructive agencies
must be met by antagonist destructive agencies ; and that this
may be done, honour must be given to the men who act as
destructive agents, and there must be an exaggerated estimate
of the attributes which make them efficient.

It may be needful, therefore, that our boys should be accus
tomed to harsh treatment, giving and receiving brutal punish
ments without too nice a consideration of their justice. It
may be that as the Spartans and as the North- American In
dians, in preparation for warfare, subjected their young men
to tortures, so should we ; and thus, perhaps, the " education
of a gentleman " may properly include giving and receiving
" hacking " of the shins at foot-ball : boot-toes being purposely
made heavy that they may inflict greater damage. So, too, it
may be well that boys should all in turn be subject to the
tender mercies of elder boys ; with whose thrashings and kick-
ings the masters decline to interfere, even though they are
sometimes carried to the extent of maiming for life. Possibly,
also, it is fit that each boy should be disciplined in submission
to any tyrant who may be set over him, by finding that appeal
brings additional evils. That each should be made callous,
morally as well as physically, by the bearing of frequent
wrongs, and should be made yet more callous when, coming
into power, he inflicts punishments as whim or spite prompts,
may also be desirable. Nor, perhaps, can we wholly regret
that confusion of moral ideas which results when breaches of
conventional rules bring penalties as severe as are brought by
acts morally wrong. For war does not consist with keen sen
sitiveness, physical or moral. Reluctance to inflict injury,
and reluctance to risk injury, would equally render it impos
sible. Scruples of conscience respecting the rectitude of their
cause would paralyze officers and soldiers. So that a certain
brutalization has to be maintained during our passing phase
of civilization. It may be, indeed, that "the Public School
spirit," which, as truly said, is carried into our public life, is
not the most desirable for a free country. It may be that
early subjection to despotism and early exercise of uncon
trolled power, are not the best possible preparations for legis
lators. It may be that those who, on the magistrate's bench,
have to maintain right against might, could be better trained

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. 173

than by submission to violence and subsequent exercise of
violence. And it may be that some other discipline than that
of the stick, would be desirable for men who officer the press
and guide public opinion on questions of equity. But, doubt
less, while national antagonisms continue strong and national
defence a necessity, there is a fitness in this semi-military dis
cipline, with pains and bruises to uphold it. And a duly-
adapted code of honour has the like defence.

Here, however, if we are to free ourselves from transitory
sentiments and ideas, so as to be capable of framing scientific
conceptions, we must ask what warrant there is for this exal
tation of the destructive activities and of the qualities implied
by them ? We must ask how it is possible for men rightly to
pride themselves on attributes possessed in higher degrees by
creatures so much lower ? We must consider whether, in the
absence of a religious justification, there is any ethical justifi
cation for the idea that the most noble traits are such as can
not be displayed without the infliction of pain and death.
When we do this, -we are obliged to admit that the religion of
enmity in its unqualified form, is as indefensible as the re
ligion of amity in its unqualified form. Each proves itself to
be one of those insane extremes out of which there comes a
sane mean by union with its opposite. The two religions
stand respectively for the claims of self and the claims of
others. The first religion holds it glorious to resist aggres
sion, and, while risking death in doing this, to inflict death
on enemies. The second religion teaches that the glory is in
not resisting aggression, and in yielding to enemies while not
asserting the claims of self. A civilized humanity will render
either glory just as impossible of achievement as its opposite.
A diminishing egoism and an increasing altruism, must make
each of these diverse kinds of honour unattainable. For such
an advance implies a cessation of those aggressions which
make possible the nobility of resistance ; while it implies a
refusal to accept those sacrifices without which there cannot
be the nobility of self-sacrifice. The two extremes must can
cel ; leaving a moral code and a standard of honour free
from irrational excesses. Along with a latent self-assertion,
there will go a readiness to yield to others, kept in check by
the refusal of others to accept more than their due.

174: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

And now, having noted the perversions of thought and
sentiment fostered by the religion of amity and the religion of
enmity, under which we are educated in so chaotic a fashion,
let us go on to note the ways in which these affect sociological
conceptions. Certain important truths apt to be shut out from
the minds of the few wrho are unduly swayed by the religion
of amity, may first be set down.

One of the facts difficult to reconcile with current theories
of the Universe, is that high organizations throughout the
animal kingdom habitually serve to aid destruction or to aid
escape from destruction. If we hold to the ancient view, we
must say that high organization has been deliberately devised
for such purposes. If we accept the modern view, we must
say that high organization has been evolved by the exercise
of destructive activities during immeasurable periods of the
past. Here we choose the latter alternative. To the never-
ceasiiig efforts to catch and eat, and the never-ceasing en
deavours to avoid being caught and eaten, is to be ascribed
the development of the various senses and the various motor
organs directed by them. The bird of prey with the keenest
vision, has, other things equal, survived when members of its
species that did not see so far, died from want of food ; and by
such survivals, keenness of vision has been made greater in
course of generations. The fleetest members of a herbivorous
herd, escaping when the slower fell victims to a carnivore,
left posterity ; among which, again, those with the most per
fectly-adapted limbs survived : the carnivores themselves
being at the same time similarly disciplined and their speed in
creased. So, too, with intelligence. Sagacity that detected a
danger which stupidity did not perceive, lived and propagated ;
and the cunning which hit upon a new deception, and so se
cured prey not otherwise to be caught, left posterity where a
smaller endowment of cunning failed. This mutual perfect
ing of pursuer and pursued, acting upon their entire organiza
tions, has been going on throughout all time ; and human beings
have been subject to it just as much as other beings. Warfare
among men, like warfare among animals, has had a large share
in raising their organizations to a higher stage. The following
are some of the various ways in which it has worked.

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. 175

In the first place, it has had the effect of continually ex
tirpating races which, for some reason or other, were least
fitted to cope with the conditions of existence they were sub
ject to. The killing-off of relatively-feeble tribes, or tribes
relatively wanting in endurance, or courage, or sagacity, or
power of co-operation, must have tended ever to maintain,
and occasionally to increase, the amounts of life-preserving
powers possessed by men.

Beyond this average advance caused by destruction of the
least-developed races and the least-developed individuals,
there has been an average advance caused by inheritance of
those further developments due to functional activity. Re
member the skill of the Indian in following a trail, and re
member that under kindred stimuli many of his perceptions
and feelings and bodily powers have been habitually taxed to
the uttermost, and it becomes clear that the struggle for ex
istence between neighbouring tribes has had an important
effect in cultivating faculties of various kinds. Just as, to
take an illustration from among ourselves, the skill of the
police cultivates cunning among burglars, which, again, lead
ing to further precautions generates further devices to evade
them ; so, by the unceasing antagonisms between human so
cieties, small and large, there has been a mutual culture of an
adapted intelligence, a mutual culture of certain traits of char
acter not to be undervalued, and a mutual culture of bodily
powers.

A large effect, too, has been produced upon the develop
ment of the arts. In responding to the imperative demands
of war, industry made important advances and gained much
of its skill. Indeed, it may be questioned whether, in the
absence of that exercise of manipulative faculty which the
making of weapons originally gave, there would ever have
been produced the tools required for developed industry. If
we go back to the Stone- Age, we see that implements of the
chase and implements of war are those showing most labour
and dexterity. If we take still-existing human races which
were without metals when we found them, we see in their skil
fully-wrought stone clubs, as well as in their large war-
canoes, that the needs of defence and attack were the chief
stimuli to the cultivation of arts afterwards available for

176 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

productive purposes. Passing over intermediate stages, we
may note in comparatively-recent stages the same rela
tion. Observe a coat of mail, or one of the more highly-
finished suits of armour— compare it with articles of iron
and steel of the same date ; and there is evidence that these
desires to kill enemies and escape being killed, more ex
treme than any other, have had great effects on those
arts of working in metal to which most other arts owe
their progress. The like relation is shown us in the uses
made of gunpowder. At first a destructive agent, it has . be
come an agent of immense service in quarrying, mining,
railway-making, &c.

A no less important benefit bequeathed by war, has been
the formation of large societies. By force alone were small
nomadic hordes welded into large tribes ; by force alone were
large tribes welded into small nations ; by force alone have
small nations been welded into large nations. While the
fighting of societies usually maintains separateness, or by
conquest produces only temporary unions, it produces, from
time to time, permanent unions; and as fast as there are
formed permanent unions of small into large, and then of
large into still larger, industrial progress is furthered in three
ways. Hostilities, instead of being perpetual, are broken by
intervals of peace. When they occur, hostilities do not so
profoundly derange the industrial activities. And there arises
the possibility of carrying out the division of labour much
more effectually. War, in short, in the slow course of things,
brings about a social aggregation which furthers that indus
trial state at variance with war; and yet nothing but war
could binrig about this social aggregation. These truths,'

that without war large aggregates of men cannot be formed,
and that without large aggregates of men there cannot be a
developed industrial state, are illustrated in all places and
times. Among existing uncivilized and semi-civilized races,
we everywhere find that union of small societies by a con
quering society is a step in civilization. The records of peo
ples now extinct show us this with equal clearness. On look
ing back into our own history, and into the histories of
neighbouring nations, we similarly see that only by coercion
were the smaller feudal governments so subordinated as to

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. 177

secure internal peace. And even lately, the long-desired con
solidation of Germany, if not directly effected by " blood and
iron," as Bismarck said it must be, has been indirectly effected
by them. The furtherance of industrial development by

aggregation is no less manifest. If we compare a small so
ciety with a large one, we get clear proof that those processes
of co-operation by which social life is made possible, assume
high forms only when the numbers of the co-operating citi
zens are great. Ask of what use a cloth-factory, supposing
they could have one, would be to the members of a small
tribe, and it becomes manifest that, producing as it would in
a single day a year's supply of cloth, the vast cost of making
it and keeping it in order could never be compensated by the
advantage gained. Ask what would happen were a shop like
Shoolbred's, supplying all textile products, set up in a village,
and you see that the absence of a sufficiently-extensive dis
tributing function would negative its continuance. Ask what
sphere a bank would have had in the Old English period, when
nearly all people grew their own food and spun their own
wool, and it is at once seen that the various appliances for
facilitating exchange can grow up only when a community
becomes so large that the amount of exchange to be facilitated
is great. Hence, unquestionably, that integration of societies
effected by war, has been a needful preliminary to industrial
development, and consequently to developments of other kinds
— Science, the Fine Arts, &c.

Industrial habits too, and habits of subordination to social
requirements, are indirectly brought about by the same cause.
The truth that the power of working continuously, wanting
in the aboriginal man, could be established only by that per
sistent coercion to which conquered and enslaved tribes are
subject, has become trite. An allied truth is, that only by a
discipline of submission, first to an owner, then to a personal
governor, presently to government less personal, then to the
embodied law proceeding from government, could there even
tually be reached submission to that code of moral law by
which the civilized man is more and more restrained in his
dealings with his fellows.

Such being some of the important truths usually ignored
by men too exclusively influenced by the religion of amity,
13

178 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

]et us now glance at the no less important truths to which men
are blinded by the religion of enmity.

Though, during barbarism and the earlier stages of civiliza
tion, war has the effect of exterminating the weaker societies,
and of weeding out the weaker members of the stronger so
cieties, and thus in both ways furthering the development of
those valuable powers, bodily and mental, which war brings
into play ; yet during the later stages of civilization, the sec
ond of these actions is reversed. So long as all adult males
have to bear arms, the average result is that those of most
strength and quickness survive, while the feebler and slower
are slain ; but when the industrial development has become
such that only some of the adult males are drafted into the
army, the tendency is to pick out and expose to slaughter the
best-grown and healthiest : leaving behind the physically-in
ferior to propagate the race. The fact that among ourselves,
though the number of soldiers raised is not relatively large,
many recruits are rejected by the examining surgeons, shows
that the process inevitably works towards deterioration.
Where, as in France, conscriptions have gone on taking away
the finest men, generation after generation, the needful lower
ing of the standard proves how disastrous is the effect on
those animal qualities of a race which form a necessary basis
for all higher qualities. If the depletion is indirect also — if
there is such an overdraw on the energies of the industrial
population that a large share of heavy labour is thrown on
the women, whose systems are taxed simultaneously by hard
work and child-bearing, a further cause of physical degen
eracy comes into play : France again supplying an example.
War, therefore, after a certain stage of progress, instead of
furthering bodily development and the development of cer
tain mental powers, becomes a cause of retrogression.

In like manner, though war, by bringing about social con
solidations, indirectly favours industrial progress and all its
civilizing consequences, yet the direct elfect of war on indus
trial progress is repressive. It is repressive as necessitating
the abstraction of men and materials that would otherwise go
to industrial growth ; it is repressive as deranging the com
plex inter-dependencies among the many productive and dis-

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. 179

tributive agencies ; it is repressive as drafting off much ad
ministrative and constructive ability, which would else have
gone to improve the industrial arts and the industrial organi
zation. And if we contrast the absolutely military Spartans
with the partially-military Athenians, in their respective atti
tudes towards culture of every kind, or call to mind the con
tempt shown for the pursuit of knowledge in purely-military
times like those of feudalism ; we cannot fail to see that per
sistent war is at variance not only with industrial develop
ment, but also with the higher intellectual developments that
aid industry and are aided by it.

So, too, with the effects wrought on the moral nature.
While war, by the discipline it gives soldiers, directly culti
vates the habit of subordination, and does the like indirectly
by establishing strong and permanent governments ; and
while in so far it cultivates attributes that are not only tem
porarily essential, but are steps towards attributes that are
permanently essential ; yet it does this at the cost of main
taining, and sometimes increasing, detrimental attributes —
attributes intrinsically anti-social. The aggressions which
selfishness prompts (aggressions which, in a society, have to
be restrained by some power that is strong in proportion as
the selfishness is intense) can diminish only as fast as selfish
ness is held in check by sympathy ; and perpetual warlike
activities repress sympathy : nay, they do worse — they culti
vate aggressiveness to the extent of making it a pleasure to
inflict injury. The citizen made callous by the killing and
wounding of enemies, inevitably brings his callousness home
with him. Fellow-feeling, habitually trampled down in mili
tary conflicts, cannot at the same time be active in the rela
tions of civil life. In proportion as giving pain to others is
made a habit during war, it will remain a habit during peace :
inevitably producing in the behaviour of citizens to one
another, antagonisms, crimes of violence, and multitudinous
aggressions of minor kinds, tending towards a disorder that
calls for coercive government. Nothing like a high type of
social life is possible without a type of human character in
which the promptings of egoism are duly restrained by regard
for others. The necessities of war imply absolute self-regard,
and absolute disregard of certain others. Inevitably, there-

180 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

fore, the civilizing discipline of social life is antagonized by
the uncivilizing discipline of the life war involves. So that
beyond the direct mortality and miseries entailed by war, it
entails other mortality and miseries by maintaining anti-social
sentiments in citizens.

Taking the most general view of the matter, we may say
that only when the sacred duty of blood-revenge, constituting
the religion of the savage, decreases in sacredness, does there
come a possibility of emei'gence from the deepest barbarism.
Only as fast as retaliation, which for a murder on one side in
flicts a murder or murders oil the other, becomes less impera
tive, is it possible for larger aggregates of men to hold together
and civilization to commence. And so, too, out of lower
stages of civilization higher ones can emerge, only as there
diminishes this pursuit of international revenge and re-re
venge, which the code we inherit from the savage insists
upon. Such advantages, bodily and mental, as the race derives
from the discipline of war, are exceeded by the disadvantages,
bodily and mental, but especially mental, which result aiter a
certain stage of progress is reached. Severe and bloody as
the process is, the killing-off of inferior races and inferior
individuals, leaves a balance of benefit to mankind during
phases of progress in which the moral development is low,
and there are no quick sympathies to be continually seared
by the infliction of pain and death. But as there arise higher
societies, implying individual characters fitted for closer co
operation, the destructive activities exercised by such higher
societies have injurious re-active effects on the moral natures
of their members— injurious effects which outweigh the bene
fits resulting from extirpation of inferior races. After this
stage has been reached, the purifying process, continuing still
an important one, remains to be carried on by industrial war —
by a competition of societies during which the best, physically,
emotionally, and intellectually, spread most, and leave the
least capable to disappear gradually, from failing to leave a
sufficiently-numerous posterity.

Those educated in the religion of enmity — those who dur
ing boyhood, when the instincts of the savage are dominant,
have revelled in the congenial ideas and sentiments which
classic poems and histories yield so abundantly, and have be

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. 181

come confirmed in the belief that war is virtuous and peace
ignoble, are naturally blind to truths of this kind. Rather
should we say, perhaps, that they have never turned their
eyes in search of such truths. And their bias is so strong that
nothing more than a nominal recognition of such truths is
possible to them ; if even this. What perverted conceptions
of social phenomena this bias produces, may be seen in the
following passage from Gibbon :—

" It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should dis
cover in the public felicity the causes of decay and corruption. The
long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, had introduced
a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire."
In which sentences there is involved the general proposition
that in proportion as men are long held together in that mu
tual dependence which social co-operation implies, they will
become less fit for mutual dependence and co-operation. — the
society will tend towards dissolution. While in proportion as
they are habituated to antagonism and to destructive activities,
they will become better adapted to activities requiring union
and agreement.

Thus the two opposite codes in which we are educated, and
the sentiments enlisted on behalf of their respective precepts,
inevitably produce misinterpretations of social phenomena.
Instead of acting together, now this and now the other sways
the beliefs; and instead of consistent, balanced conclusions,
there results a jumble of contradictory conclusions.

It is time, not only with a view to right thinking in Social
Science, but with a view to right acting in daily life, that this
acceptance in the unqualified forms of two creeds which con
tradict one another completely, should come to an end. Is it
not a folly to go on pretending to ourselves and others that
we believe certain perpetually-repeated maxims of entire self-
sacrifice, which we daily deny by our business activities, by
the steps we take to protect our persons and property, by the
approval we express of resistance against aggression ? Is it
not a dishonesty to repeat in tones of reverence, maxims
which we not only refuse to act out but dimly see would be
mischievous if acted out ? Everyone must admit that the
relation between parent and child is one in which altruism is

182 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

pushed as far as is practicable. Yet even here there needs a
predominant egoism. The mother can suckle her infant only
on condition that she has habitually gratified her appetite in
due degree. And there is a point beyond which sacrifice of
herself is fatal to her infant. The bread-winner, too, on whom
both depend — is it not undeniable that wife and child can be
altruistically treated by their protector, only on condition that
he is duly egoistic in his transactions with his fellow citizens ?
If the dictate — live for self, is wrong in one way, the opposite
dictate — " live for others," is wrong in another way. The ra
tional dictate is — live for self and others. And if we all do
actually believe this, as our conduct conclusively proves, is it
not better for us distinctly to say so, rather than continue
enunciating principles which we do not and cannot practise :
thus bringing moral teaching itself into discredit ?

On the other hand, it is time that a ferocious egoism, which
remains unaffected by this irrational altruism, professed but
not believed, should be practically modified by a rational al
truism. This sacred duty of blood-revenge, insisted on by the
still-vigorous religion of enmity, needs qualifying actually
and not verbally. Instead of senselessly reiterating in cate
chisms and church services the duty of doing good to those
that hate us, while an undoubting belief in the duty of retalia
tion is implied by our parliamentary debates, the articles in
our journals, and the conversations over our tables, it would
be wiser and more manly to consider how far the first should
go in mitigation of the last. Is it stupidity or is it moral
cowardice which leads men to continue professing a creed that
makes self-sacrifice a cardinal principle, while they urge the
sacrificing of others, even to the death, when they trespass
against us ? Is it blindness, or is it an insane inconsistency,
which makes them regard as most admirable the bearing of
evil for the benefit of others, while they lavish admiration on
those who, out of revenge, inflict great evils in return for
small ones suffered ? Surely our barbarian code of right
needs revision, and our barbarian standard of honour should
be somewhat changed. Let us deliberately recognize what
good they represent and what mixture of bad there is with it.
Courage is worthy of respect when displayed in the mainte
nance of legitimate claims and in the repelling of aggressions,

THE EDUCATIONAL BIAS. 183

bodily or other. Courage is worthy of yet higher respect
when danger is faced in defence of claims common to self and
others, as in resistance to invasion. Courage is worthy of
the highest respect when risk to life or linih is dared in de
fence of others ; and becomes grand when those others have
110 claims of relationship, and still more when they have no
claims of race. But though a bravery which is altruistic
in its motive is a trait we cannot too highly applaud, and
though a bravery which is legitimately egoistic in its motive
is praiseworthy, the bravery that is prompted by aggressive
egoism is not praiseworthy. The admiration accorded to the
" pluck v of one who fights in a base cause is a vicious ad
miration, demoralizing to those who feel it. Like the physi
cal powers, courage, which is a concomitant of these, is to be
regarded as a servant of the higher emotions — very valuable,
indispensable even, in its place ; and to be honoured when dis
charging its function in subordination to these higher emo
tions. But otherwise not more to be honoured than the like
attribute as seen in brutes.

Quite enough has been said to show that there must be a
compromise between the opposite standards of conduct on
which the religions of amity and enmity respectively insist,
before there can be scientific conceptions of social phenomena.
Even on passing affairs, such as the proceedings of philan
thropic bodies and the dealings of nation with nation, there
cannot be rational judgments without a balance between the
self -asserting emotions and the emotions which put a limit to
self-assertion, with an adjustment of the corresponding beliefs.
Still less can there be rational judgments of past social evolu
tion, or of social evolution in the future, if the opposing actions
which these opposing creeds sanction, are not both continuously
recognized as essential. No mere impulsive recognition, now
of the purely-egoistic doctrine and now of the purely-altruistic
one, will suffice. The curve described by a planet cannot be
understood by thinking at one moment of the centripetal force
and at another moment of the tangential force ; but the two
must be kept before consciousness as acting simultaneously.
And similarly, to understand social progress in the vast sweep
of its course, there must be ever present to the mind, the
egoistic and the altruistic forces as co-operative factors equally

184 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

indispensable, and neither of them to be ignored or repro
bated.

The criticism likely to be passed on this chapter, that
" The Educational Bias " is far too comprehensive a title for
it, is quite justifiable. There are in truth few, if any, of the
several kinds of bias, that are not largely, or in some meas
ure, caused by education — using this word in an extended
ssene. As, however, all of them could not be dealt with in
one chapter, it seemed best to select these two opposite forms
of bias which are directly traceable to teachings of opposite
dogmas, and fosterings of opposite sentiments, during early
life. Merely recognizing the fact that education has much
to do with the other kinds of bias, we may now most con
veniently deal with these each under its specific title.

CHAPTER IX.

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM.

" OUR country, right or wrong1," is a sentiment not unfre-
quently expressed on the other side of the Atlantic ; and, if
I remember rightly, an equivalent sentiment was some years
ago uttered in our own House of Commons, by one who
rejoices, or at least who once rejoiced, in the title of philo
sophical Radical.

Whoever entertains such a sentiment has not that equi
librium of feeling required for dealing scientifically with
social phenomena. To see how things stand, apart from
personal and national interests, is essential before there can
be reached those balanced judgments respecting the course
of human affairs in general, which constitute Sociology. To
be convinced of this, it needs but to take a case remote from
our own. Ask how the members of an aboriginal tribe re
gard that tide of civilization which sweeps them away. Ask
what the North-American Indians said about the spread of
the white man over their territories, or what the ancient
Britons thought of the invasions which dispossessed them of
England ; and it becomes clear that events which, looked at
from an un-national point of view, were steps towards a
higher life, seemed from a national point of view entirely
evil. Admitting the truth so easily perceived in these cases,
we must admit that only in proportion as we emancipate
ourselves from the bias of patriotism, and consider our own
society as one among many, having their histories and their
futures, and some of them, perhaps, having better claims than
we have to the inheritance of the Earth — only in proportion
as we do this, shall we recognize those sociological truths

185

186 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

which have nothing to do with particular nations or par
ticular races.

So to emancipate ourselves is extremely difficult. It is
with patriotism as we lately saw it to be with the sentiment
causing political subordination : the very existence of a so
ciety implies predominance of it. The two sentiments join
in producing that social cohesion without which there cannot
be co-operation and organization. A nationality is made
possible only by the feeling which the units have for the
whole they form. Indeed, we may say that the feeling has
been gradually increased by the continual destroying of types
of men whose attachments to their societies were relatively
small ; and who are therefore incapable of making adequate
sacrifices on behalf of their societies. Here, again, we are
reminded that the citizen, by his incorporation in a body
politic, is in a great degree coerced into such sentiments and
beliefs as further its preservation : unless this is the average
result the body politic will not be preserved. Hence another
obstacle in the way of Social Science. We have to allow
for the aberrations of judgment caused by the sentiment of
patriotism.

Patriotism is nationally that which egoism is individually
—has, in fact, the same root ; and along with kindred benefits
brings kindred evils. Estimation of one's society is a reflex
of self-estimation ; and assertion of one's society's claims is
an indirect assertion of one's own claims as a part of it. The
pride a citizen feels in a national achievement, is the pride in
belonging to a nation capable of that achievement : the be
longing to such a nation having the tacit implication that
in himself there exists the superiority of nature displayed.
And the anger aroused in him by an aggression on his nation,
is an anger against something which threatens to injure him
also, by injuring his nation.

As, lately, we saw that a duly- ad justed egoism is essential ;
so now, we may see that a duly-adjusted patriotism is essen
tial. Self-regard in excess produces twTo classes of evils : by
prompting undue assertion of personal claims it breeds aggres
sion and antagonism; and by creating undue estimation of
personal powers it excites futile efforts that end in catastro-

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 187

plies. Deficient self-regard produces two opposite classes of
evils : by not asserting personal claims, it invites aggression,
so fostering selfishness in others ; and by not adequately
valuing personal powers it causes a falling short of attain
able benefits. Similarly with patriotism. From too much,
there result national aggressiveness and national vanity.
Along with too little, there goes an insufficient tendency to
maintain national claims, leading to trespasses by other
nations; and there goes an undervaluing of national capa
cities and institutions, which is discouraging to effort and
progress.

The effects of patriotic feeling which here concern us, are
those it works on belief rather than those it works on conduct.
As disproportionate egoism, by distorting a man's conceptions
of self and of others, vitiates his conclusions respecting hu
man nature and human actions ; so, disproportionate patriot
ism, by distorting his conceptions of his own society and of
other societies, vitiates his conclusions respecting the natures
and actions of societies. And from the opposite extremes
there result opposite distortions; which, however, are com
paratively infrequent and much less detrimental.

Here we come upon one of the many ways in which the
corporate conscience proves itself less developed than the
individual conscience. For while excess of egoism is every
where regarded as a fault, excess of patriotism is nowhere
regarded as a fault. A man who recognizes his own errors of
conduct and his own .deficiencies of faculty, shows a trait of
character considered praiseworthy ; but to admit that our
doings toward other nations have been wrong is reprobated
as unpatriotic. Defending the acts of another people with
whom we have a difference seems to most citizens something
like treason ; and they use offensive comparisons concerning
birds and their nests, by way of condemning those who as
cribe misconduct to our own people rather than to the people
with whom we are at variance. Not only do they exhibit
the unchecked sway of this reflex egoism which constitutes
patriotism — not only are they unconscious that there is any
thing blameworthy in giving the rein to this feeling ; but
they think the blameworthiiiess is in those who restrain it,
and try to see what may be said 011 both sides. Judge, then,

188 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

how seriously the patriotic bias, thus perverting our judg
ments about international actions, necessarily perverts our
judgments about the characters of other societies, and so
vitiates sociological conclusions.

We have to guard ourselves against this bias. To this end
let us take some examples of the errors attributable to it.

What mistaken estimates of other races may result from
over-estimation of one's own race, will be most vividly shown
by a case in which we are ourselves valued at a very low rate
by a race we hold to be far inferior. Here is such a case
supplied by a tribe of negroes : —

" They amused themselves by remarking on the sly, ' The white
man is an old ape.' The African will say of the European, ' He looks
like folks,' [men], and the answer will often be, ' No, he don't.' . . .
Whilst the Caucasian doubts the humanity of the Ilamite, the latter
repays the compliment in kind." '

Does anyone think this instance so far out of the ordinary
track of error as to have 110 instruction for us ? To see the
contrary he has but to look at the caricatures of Frenchmen
that were common a generation ago, or to remember the pop
ular statement then current respecting the relative strengths
of French and English. Such reminders will convince him
that the reflex self-esteem we call patriotism, has had, among
ourselves, perverting effects sufficiently striking. And even
now there are kindred opinions which the facts, when exam
ined, do not bear out : instance the opinion respecting personal
beauty. That the bias thus causing misjudgments in cases
where it is checked by direct perception, causes greater mis-
judgments where direct perception cannot check it, needs no
proof. How great are the mistakes it generates, all histories
of international struggles show us, both by the contradictory
estimates the two sides form of their repective leaders and by
the contradictory estimates the two sides form of their deeds.
Take an example : —

"Of the character in which Wallace first became formidable, the
accounts of literature are distractingly conflicting. With the chroni
clers of his own country, who write after the War of Independence, he
is raised to the highest pinnacle of magnanimity and heroism. To
the p]nglish contemporary chroniclers he is a pestilent ruffian ; a dis-

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 189

turber of the peace of society ; an outrager of all laws and social
duties ; finally, a robber — the head of one of many bands of robbers
and marauders then infesting Scotland." 2

That, along with such opposite distortions of belief about
conspicuous persons, there go opposite distortions of belief
'about the conduct of the peoples they belong to, the accounts
of every war demonstrate. Like the one-sidedness shown
within our own society by the remembrance among' Protes
tants of Roman Catholic cruelties only, and by the remem
brance among1 Roman Catholics of Protestant cruelties only,
is the one-sidedness shown in the traditions preserved by each
nation concerning the barbarities of nations it has fought
with. As in old times the Normans, vindictive themselves,
were shocked at the vindictiveness of the English when driven
to bay ; so in recent times the French have enlarged on the
atrocities committed by Spanish guerillas, and the Russians
on the atrocities the Circassians perpetrated. In this conflict
between the views of those who commit savage acts, and the
views of those on whom they are committed, we clearly per
ceive the bias of patriotism where both sides are aliens ; but
we fail to perceive it where we are ourselves concerned as
actors. Every one old enough remembers the reprobation
vented here when the French in Algiers dealt so cruelly with
Arabs who refused to submit — lighting fires at the mouths of
caves in which they had taken refuge ; but we do not see a
like barbarity in deeds of our own in India, such as the ex
ecuting a group of rebel sepoys by fusillade, and then setting
fire to the heap of them because they were not all dead,8 or in
the wholesale shootings and burnings of houses, after the sup
pression of the Jamaica insurrection. Listen to what is said
about such deeds in our own colonies, and you find that habit
ually they are held to have been justified by the necessities of
the case. Listen to what is said about such deeds when other
nations are guilty of them, and you find the same persons in
dignantly declare that no alleged necessities could form a jus
tification. Nay, the bias produces perversions of judgment
even more extreme. Feelings and deeds we laud as virtuous
when they are not in antagonism with our own interests and
power, we think vicious feelings and deeds when our own in
terests and power are endangered by them. Equally in the

190 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

mythical story of Tell and in any account not mythical, we
read with glowing1 admiration of the successful rising of an
oppressed race ; but admiration is changed into indignation if
the race is one held down by ourselves. We can see nothing
save crime in the endeavour of the Hindus to throw off our
yoke ; and we recognize no excuse for the efforts of the Irish •
to establish their independent nationality. We entirely ig
nore the fact that the motives are in all such cases the same,
and are to be judged apart from results.

A bias which thus vitiates even the perceptions of physical
appearances, which immensely distorts the beliefs about con
spicuous antagonists and their deeds, which leads us to repro
bate when others commit them, severities and cruelties we
applaud when committed by our own agents, and which
makes us regard acts of intrinsically the same kind as wrong
or right according as they are or are not directed against our
selves, is a bias which inevitably perverts our sociological
ideas. The institutions of a despised people cannot be judged
with fairness ; and if, as often happens, the contempt is un
warranted, or but partially warranted, such value as their
institutions have will certainly be under-estimated. When
antagonism has bred hatred towards another nation, and has
consequently bred a desire to justify the hatred by ascribing
hateful characters to members of that nation, it inevitably
happens that the political arrangements under which they
live, the religion they profess, and the habits peculiar to
them, become associated in thought with these hateful char
acters — become themselves hateful, and cannot therefore have
their natures studied with the calmness required by science.

An example will make this clear. The reflex egoism we
name patriotism, causing among other things a high valua
tion of the religious creed nationally professed, makes us
overrate the effects this creed has produced, and makes us
underrate the effects produced by other creeds and by influ
ences of other orders. The notions respecting savage and
civilized races, in which we are brought up, show this.

The word savage, originally meaning wild or uncultivated,
has come to mean cruel and blood-thirsty, because of the rep
resentations habitually made that wild or uncultivated tribes

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 191

of men are cruel and blood-thirsty. And ferocity being- now
always thought of as a constant attribute of uncivilized races,
which are also distinguished by not having our religion, it is
tacitly assumed that the absence of our religion is the cause
of this ferocity. But if, struggling successfully against the
bias of patriotism, we correct the evidence w^hich that bias
has garbled, we find ourselves obliged to modify this assump
tion.

When, for instance, we read Cook's account of the Tahi-
tians, as first visited by him, we are surprised to meet with
some traits among them, higher than those of their civilized
visitors. Though pilfering was committed by them, it was
not so serious as that of which the sailors were guilty in steal
ing the iron bolts out of their own ship to pay the native
women. And when, after Cook had enacted a penalty for
theft, the natives complained of one of his own crew — wrhen
this sailor, convicted of the offence he w^as charged with, was
condemned to be whipped, the natives tried to get him off,
and failing to do this, shed tears on seeing preparations for
the punishment. If, again, we compare critically the accounts
of Cook's death, we see clearly that the Sandwich Islanders
behaved amicably until they had been ill-used, and had rea
son to fear further ill-usage. The experiences of many other
travellers similarly show us that friendly conduct on the part
of uncivilized races when first visited, is very general ; and
that their subsequent unfriendly conduct, when it occurs, is
nothing but retaliation for injuries received from the civilized.
Such a fact as that the natives of Queen Charlotte's Island did
not attack Captain Carteret's party till after they had received
just cause of offence,4 may be taken as typical of the histories
of transactions between wild races and cultivated races.
When we inquire into the case of the missionary Williams,
"the Martyr of Erromanga," we discover that his murder, di
lated upon as proving the wickedness of unreclaimed natures,
was a revenge for injuries previously suffered from wicked
Europeans. Read a few testimonies about the relative be
haviours of civilized and uncivilized :—

"After we had killed a man at the Marquesas, grievously wounded
one at Easter Island, hooked a third with a boat-hook at Tonga-tabu,
wounded one at Namocka, another at Mallicollo, and killed another at

192 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

Tanna ; the several inhabitants behaved in a civil and harmless man
ner to us, though they might have taken ample revenge by cutting off
our straggling parties." 5

" Excepting at Cafta, where I was for a time supposed to come
with hostile intent, I was treated inhospitably by no one during all my
travels, excepting by Europeans, who had nothing against me but my
apparent poverty." 6

" In February, 1812, the people of Winnebah [Gold Coast] seized
their commandant, Mr. Meredith," and so maltreated him that he
died. The town and fort were destroyed by the English. " For many
years afterwards, English vessels passing Winnebah were in the habit
of pouring a broadside into the town, to inspire the natives with an
idea of the severe vengeance which would be exacted for the spilling
of European blood." *

Or, instead of these separate testimonies, take the opinion of
one who collected many testimonies. Referring to the kind
treatment experienced by Enciso from the natives of Car
tagena (on the coast of New Granada), who a few years before
had been cruelly treated by the Spaniards, Washington Irving
says : —

" When we recall the bloody and indiscriminate vengeance wreaked
upon this people by Ojida and his followers for their justifiable resist
ance of invasion, and compare it with their placable and considerate
spirit when an opportunity for revenge presented itself, we confess we
feel a momentary doubt whether the arbitrary appellation of savage is
always applied to the right party." 8

The reasonableness of this doubt will scarcely be ques
tioned, after reading of the diabolical cruelties committed by
the invading Europeans in America ; as, for Instance, in St.
Domingo, where the French made the natives kneel in rows
along the edge of a deep trench and shot them batch after
batch, until the trench was full, or, as an easier method, tied
numbers of them together, took them out to sea, and tumbled
them overboard ; and where the Spaniards treated so horribly
the enslaved natives, that these killed themselves wholesale :
the various modes of suicide being shown in Spanish draw
ings.

Does the Englishman say that these, and hosts of like
demoniacal misdeeds, are the misdeeds of other civilized races
in other times ; and that they are attributable to that corrupted
religion which he repudiates ? If so, he may be reminded

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 193

that sundry of the above facts are facts against ourselves. He
may be reminded, too, that the purer religion he professes has
not prevented a kindred treatment of the North American In
dians by our own race. And he may be put to the blush by
accounts of barbarities going on in our own colonies at the
present time. Without detailing these, however, it will suf
fice to recall the most recent notorious case — that of the kid
nappings and murders in the South Seas. Here we find re
peated the typical transactions : — betrayals of many natives
and merciless sacrifices of their lives ; eventual retaliation by
the natives to a small extent ; a consequent charge against the
natives of atrocious murder ; and finally, a massacre of them,
innocent and guilty together.

See, then, how the bias of patriotism indirectly produces
erroneous views of the effects of an institution. Blinded by na
tional self-love to the badness of our conduct towards inferior
races, while remembering what there is of good in our con
duct; forgetting how well these inferior races have usually
behaved to us, and remembering only their misbehaviour,
which we refrain from tracing to its cause in our own trans
gressions ; we over-value our own natures as compared with
theirs. And then, looking at the two as respectively Christian
and Heathen, we over-rate the good done by Christian institu
tions (which has doubtless been great), and we under-rate the
advance that has been made without them. We do this ha
bitually in other cases. As, for instance, when we ignore evi
dence furnished by the history of Buddhism ; respecting the
founder of which Canon Liddon lately told his hearers that
" it might be impossible for honest Christians to think over
the career of this heathen Prince without some keen feelings
of humiliation and shame." 9 And ignoring all such evidence,
we get one-sided impressions. Thus our sociological concep
tions are distorted— do not correspond with the facts ; that is,
are unscientific.

To illustrate some among the many effects wrought by the
bias of patriotism in other nations, and to show how mischiev
ous are the beliefs it fosters, I may here cite evidence fur
nished by France and by Germany.

Contemplate that undue self-estimation which the French
14

194 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

have shown us. Observe what has resulted from that exceed
ing faith in French power which the writings of M. Thiers did
so much to maintain and increase. When we remember how,
by causing under-valuation of other nations, it led to a disre
gard of their ideas and an ignorance of their doings — when we
remember how, in the late war, the French, confident of vic
tory, had maps of G-erman territory but not of their own, and
suffered catastrophes from this and other kinds of unprepared-
ness ; we see what fatal evils this reflex self-esteem may pro
duce when in excess. So, too, on studying the way in
which it has influenced French thought in other directions.
On reading the assertion, " La chimie est une science fran-
$aise," with which Wurtz commences his Histoire des Doc
trines Chimiques, one cannot but see that the feeling which
prompted such an assertion must vitiate the comparisons made
between things in France and things elsewhere. Looking at
Crimean battle-pieces, in which French soldiers are shown to
have achieved everything — looking at a picture like Ingres'
" Crowning of Homer," and noting French poets conspicuous
in the foreground, while the figure of Shakspeare in one
corner is half in and half out of the picture — reading the
names of great men of all nations inscribed on the string
course running round the Palais de V Industrie, and finding
many unfamiliar French names, while (strange oversight, as
we must suppose) the name of Newton is conspicuous by its
absence ; we see exemplified a national sentiment which, gen
erating the belief that things not French deserve little atten
tion, acts injuriously on French thought and French progress.
From Victor Hugo's magniloquent description of France as
the " Saviour of Nations," down to the declamations of those
who urged that were Paris destroyed the light of civilization
w^ould be extinguished, we see throughout, the conviction that
France is the teacher, and by implication needs not to be a
learner. The diffusion of French ideas is an essential thing
for other nations ; while the absorption of ideas from other
nations is not an essential thing for France : the truth being,
rather, that French ideas, more than most other ideas, stand
in need of foreign influence to qualify the undue definiteiiess
and dogmatic character they habitually display. That
such a tone of feeling, and the mode of thinking appropriate

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 195

to it, should vitiate sociological speculation, is a matter of
course. If there needs proof, we have a conspicuous one in the
writing's of M. Conite ; where excessive self -estimation under
its direct form, and under that reilex form constituting patriot
ism, has led to astounding sociological misconceptions. If we
contemplate that scheme of Positivist reorganization and feder
ation in which France was, of course, to be the leader — if we
note the fact that M. Comte expected the transformation he so
rigorously formulated to take place during the life of his own
generation ; and if, then, we remember what has since hap
pened, and consider what are the probabilities of the future,
we shall not fail to see that great perversions are produced by
this bias in the conceptions of social phenomena.

How national self-esteem, exalted by success in war, warps
opinions about public affairs, is again shown of late in Ger
many. As a German professor writes to me : — " there is, alas,
no want of signs " that the " happy contrast to French self-
sufficiency " which Germany heretofore displayed, is disap
pearing "since the glory of the late victories." The German
liberals, he says, " overflow with talk of Germanism, German
unity, the German nation, the German empire, the German
army and the German navy, the German church, and German

science They ridicule Frenchmen, and what animates

them is, after all, the French spirit translated into Ger
man." To illustrate the injurious reaction on German
thought, and on the estimates of foreign nations and their do
ings, he describes a discussion with an esteemed German profes
sor of philosophy, against whom he was contending that the
psychical and ethical sciences would gain in progress and influ
ence by international communion, like that among the physico-
mathematical sciences. He " to my astonishment declared that
even if such an union were possible, he did not think it desir
able, as it would interfere too much with the peculiarity of Ger
man thought Second to Germany," he said, " it was Italy,

wrhich, in the immediate future, was most likely to promote

philosophy It appeared that what made him prefer the

Italians .... was nothing else than his having observed that
in Italy they were acquainted with every philosophical treatise
published in Germany, however unimportant." And thus,
adds my correspondent, "the finest German characteristics

196 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

are disappearing- in an exaggerated Teutonomania." One

more truth his comments on German feeling disclose. An in
direct antagonism exists between the sentiment of nationality
and the sentiment of individuality ; the result of which is that
exaltation of the one involves depression of the other, and a
decreased regard for the institutions it originates. Speaking
of the "so-called National Liberals," he says: — "A friend of
mine was lately present at a discussion, in the course of which

a professor of philosophy, of the University of , was very

eloquently, and witli perfect seriousness, contending that only
one thing is now wanted to complete our German institutions
— a national costume. Other people, who, no doubt, are fully
aware of the ridiculousness of such things, are nevertheless
guilty of an equally absurd and even more-intolerable en
croachment on individual liberty ; since, by proposing to es
tablish a national church, they aim at constraining the adher
ents of the various religious bodies into a spiritual uniform.
Indeed, I should hardly have thought it possible that a Ger
man government could encourage such monstrous proposi
tions, if they had not been expounded to me at the Ministry
of Public Worship."

Saying no more about patriotism and its perverting effects
on sociological judgments, which are, indeed, so conspicuous
all through history as scarcely to need pointing out, let me
devote the remaining space to the perverting effects of the
opposite feeling — anti-patriotism. Though the distortions of
opinion hence resulting are less serious, still they have to be
guarded against.

In England the bias of anti-patriotism does not diminish in
a marked way the admiration we have for our political insti
tutions ; biit only here and there prompts the wish for a strong
government, to secure the envied benefits ascribed to strong
governments abroad. Nor does it appreciably modify the gen
eral attachment to our religious institutions ; but only in a
few who dislike independence, shows itself in advocacy of an
authoritative ecclesiastical system, fitted to remedy what they
lament as a chaos of religious beliefs. In other directions,
however, it is displayed so frequently and conspicuously as to
affect public opinion in an injurious way. In respect to the

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 197

higher orders of intellectual achievement, under-valuation of
ourselves has become a fashion ; and the errors it fosters react
detrimentally on the estimates we make of our social regime,
and on our sociological beliefs in general.

What is the origin of this undue self -depreciation ? In
some cases no doubt it results from disgust at the jaunty self-
satisfaction caused by the bias of patriotism when excessive.
In other cases it grows out of affectation : to speak slightingly
of what is English seems to imply a wide knowledge of what
is foreign, and brings a reputation for culture. In the remain
ing cases it is due to ignorance. Passing over such of these
self -depreciatory estimates of our powers and achievements as
have partial justifications, I will limit myself to one which
has no justification. Among the classes here indicated, it is
the custom to speak disrespectfully of the part we play in dis
covery and invention. There is an assertion occasionally to be
met with in public journals, that the French invent and we
improve. Not long since it was confessed by the Attorney -
General that the English are not a scientific nation. Recently
the Times, commenting 011 a speech in which Mr. Gladstone
had been disparaging our nation and its men, said : — " There is
truth, however, in the assertion that we are backward in ap
preciating and pursuing abstract knowledge."10 Such state
ments exhibit the bias of anti-patriotism creating a belief that is
wholly indefensible. As we shall presently see, they are flatly
contradicted by facts ; and they can be accounted for only by
supposing that those who make them have had a culture ex
clusively literary,

A convenient way of dealing with this bias of anti-patri
otism will be to take an individual example of it. More than
any other, Mr. Matthew Arnold has of late made himself an
exponent of the feeling. His motive cannot be too highly
respected; and for much that he has said in rebuke of the
vainglorious, entire approval may rightly be felt. Many
grave defects in our social state, many absurdities in our
modes of action, many errors in our estimates of ourselves,
are to be pointed out and dwelt upon ; and great good is done
by a writer who efficiently executes the task of making us feel
our shortcomings. In his condemnation of the ascetic view
of life which still prevails here, one may entirely agree. That

198 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

undue valuation of material prosperity common with us, is a
fault justly insisted on by him. And the overweening confi
dence so often shown in a divine favour gained by our greater
national piety, is also an attitude of mind to be reprobated.
But by reaction Mr. Arnold is, I think, carried too far in the
direction of anti-patriotism ; and weakens the effect of his
criticism by generating a re-action. Let us glance at some of
his views.

The mode of procedure generally followed by Mr. Arnold,
is not that of judicially balancing the evidence, but that of
meeting the expression of self-satisfied patriotism by some few
facts calculated to cause dissatisfaction : not considering what
is their quantitative value. To reprove a piece of national
self-laudation uttered by Mr. Roebuck, he comments on the
murder of an illegitimate child by its mother, reported in the
same paper. Now this would be effective if infanticide were
peculiar to England, or if he could show a larger proportion
of infanticide here than elsewhere ; but his criticism is at once
cancelled on calling to mind the developed system of baby-
farming round Paris, and the extensive getting-rid of infants
to which it is instrumental. By following Mr. Arnold's method,
it would be easy to dispose of his conclusions. Suppose,

for instance, that I were to set down the many murders com
mitted in England by foreigners within our own memories,
including those by Courvoisier, by Mrs. Manning, by Barthe-
lemi near Fitzroy Square, by a Frenchman in Foley Place
(about 1854-7), that by Muller, that by Kohl in the Essex
marshes, that by Lani in a brothel near the Haymarket, that
by Marguerite Diblanc, the tragedy of the two young Ger
mans (Mai' and Nagel) at Chelsea, ending with the recent one
in Great Coram Street — suppose I were to compare the ratio
between this number of murderers and the number of for
eigners in England, with the answering ratio among our own
people ; and suppose I were to take this as a test of the Conti
nental culture Mr. Arnold so much admires. Probably he
would not think the test quite relevant ; and yet it would be
quite as relevant as that he uses — perhaps somewhat more
relevant. Suppose, again, that by way of criticism on

German administration, I were to dwell on the catastrophe

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 199

at Berlin, where, during the celebration of victory, fourteen
sightseers were killed and some hundreds injured ; or suppose
I were to judge it by the disclosures of the leading Berlin phy
sician, Virchow, who shows that one out of every thi'ee chil
dren born in Berlin dies the first year, and whose statistics
prove the general mortality to be increasing so rapidly that
while " in 1854 the death-rate was 1000, in 1851-63 it rose to
1164, and in 1864-8 to 1817 " "—suppose, I say, that I took
these facts as proof of failure in the social system Mr. Arnold
would have us copy. Possibly he would not be much shaken ;
though it seems to me that this evidence would be more to the
point than a case of infanticide among ourselves. Fur

ther, suppose I were to test French administration by the sta
tistics of mortality in the Crimea, as given at the late meeting
of the French Association for the Advancement of Science,
by M. Le Fort, who pointed out that —

" Dans ces six mois d'hiver 1855-1856, alors qu'il n'y a plus guere
d'hostilites, alors que les Anglais ont seulement en six mois 165
blesses, et les Francais 323, 1'armee anglaise, grace aux precautions
prises, n'a que peu de malades et ne perd que 606 homines ; 1'armee
francaise voit eclater au milieu d'elle le typhus, qu'on eut pu eviter, et
perd par les maladies seules 21,190 hommes ; "

and who further, respecting the relative mortalities from
operations, said that —

" En Crimee, les armees anglaise et francaise se trouvent exposees
aux memes besoins, aux memes vicissitudes atmospheriques, et cepen-
dant quelle difference dans la mortalite des operes. Les Anglais per-
dent 24 pour 100 de leurs amputes du bras, nous en perdons plus du
double, 55 sur 100 ; il en est de meme pour I'amputation de la jambe :
35 centre 71 pour 100."

— suppose. I say, that I were thus to deal with the notion that
"they manage these things better in France." Mr. Arnold
would, very likely, not abandon his belief. And yet this con
trast would certainly be as damaging as the fact about the
girl Wragg, to which he more than once refers so emphati
cally. Surely it is manifest enough that by selecting the evi
dence, any society may be relatively blackened and any other
society relatively whitened.

From Mr. Arnold's method let us turn to some of his spe
cific statements ; taking first the statement that the English

200 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

are deficient in ideas. He says : — " There is the world of ideas,
and there is the world of practice ; the French are often for
suppressing the one, and the English the other." ia Admitting
the success of the English in action, Mr. Arnold thinks that it
goes along with want of faith in speculative conclusions.
But by putting ideas and practice in this antithesis, he im
plies his acceptance of the notion that effectual practice does
not depend on superiority of ideas. This is an erroneous no
tion. Methods that answer are preceded by thoughts that are
true. A successful enterprise presupposes an imagination of
all the factors, and conditions, and results— an imagination
which differs from one leading to an unsuccessful enterprise
in this, that what will happen is clearly and completely fore
seen, instead of being foreseen vaguely and incompletely:
there is greater ideality. Every scheme is an idea: every
scheme more or less new, implies an idea more or less orig
inal : every scheme proceeded with, implies an idea vivid
enough to prompt action ; and every scheme which succeeds,
implies an idea so accurate and exhaustive that the results
correspond with it. When an English company accommo
dates Amsterdam with water (an element the Dutch are very
familiar with, and in the management of which they, cen
turies ago, gave us lessons) must we not say that by leaving
us to supply their chief city they show a want of confidence
in results ideally seen ? Is it replied that the Dutch are not
an imaginative people ? Then take the Italians. How hap
pens it that such a pressing need as the draining of Naples,
has never suggested to Italian rulers or Italian people the tak
ing of measures to achieve it ; and how happens it that the
idea of draining Naples, instead of emanating from French or
Germans, supposed by Mr. Arnold to have more faith in ideas,
emanates from a company of Englishmen, who are now pro
posing to do the "work without cost to the municipality.11 Or
what shall we infer as to relative faith in ideas, on learning
that even within their respective territories the French and
Germans wait for us to undertake new things for them ?
When we find that Toulouse and Bordeaux were lighted with
gas by an English company, must we not infer lack of ideas
in the people of those places ? When we find that a body of
Englishmen, the Rhone Hydraulic Company, seeing that at

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. •_- ..]

Bellegarde there are rapids having a fall of forty feet, made a
tunnel carrying a fourth of the river, and so got 10,000 horse
power, which they are selling to manufacturers ; and when
we ask why this source of wealth was not utilized by the
French themselves ; must we not say that it was because the
idea did not occur to them, or because it was not vivid and
definite enough to prompt the enterprise ? And when, on
going north, we discover that not only in Belgium and Hol
land are the chief towns, Brussels, Antwerp, Lille, Ghent,
Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Haarlem, &c., lighted by our Con
tinental Gas Association, but that this combination of Eng
lishmen lights many towns in Germany also — Hanover. Aix-
la-Chapelle, Stolberg. Cologne. Frankfort Vienna, nay. that
even the head-quarters of geist, Berlin itself, had to wait for
light until this CoTupauy supplied it. must we not say that
more faith in ideas was shown by English than by Germans ?
Germans have plenty of energy, are not without desire to
make money, and knew that gas was used in England ; and
if neither they nor their Governments undertook the work,
we must infer that the benefits and means were inadequately
conceived. English enterprises have often been led by ideas
that looked wholly unpractical : as when the first English
steamer astonished the people of Coblentz. in 1S17. by making
its appearance there, so initiating the Rhine steam-navigation ;
or as when the first English steamer started across the Atlan
tic. Instead of our practice being unideal. the ideas which
guide it sometimes verge on the romantic. Fishing up a cable
from the bottom of an ocean three miles deep, was an idea
seemingly more fitted for The Arabian Xights than for actual
life : and yet success proved how truly those who conducted
the operation had put together their ideas in correspondence
with the facts — the true test of vivid imagination.

To show the groundlessness of the notion that new ideas
are not evolved and appreciated as much in England as else
where, I am tempted here to enumerate our modern inven
tions of all orders: from those directly aiming at material
results, such as Trevethick's first locomotive, up to the calculat
ing-machines of Babbage and the logic-machine of Jevons,
quite remote from practice in their objects. But merely assert
ing that those who go through the list will find that neither

202 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

in number nor in importance do they yield to those of any
nation during- the same period, I refrain from details. Partly
I do this because the space required for specifying them would
be too great ; and partly because inventions, mostly having
immediate bearings on practice, would perhaps not be thought
by Mr. Arnold to prove fertility of idea : though, considering
that each machine is a theory before it becomes a working
reality, this would be a position difficult to defend. To avoid
all possible objection, I will limit myself to scientific dis
covery, from which the element of practice is excluded ; and
to meet the impression that scientific discovery in recent days
has not maintained its former pace, I will name only our
achievements since 1800.

Taking first the Abstract Sciences, let us ask what has been
done in Logic. We have the brief but pregnant statement of
inductive methods by Sir John Herschel, leading to the defi
nite systematization of them by Mr. Mill ; and we have, in
the work of Professor Bain, elaborately-illustrated applica
tions of logical methods to science and to the business of life.
Deductive Logic, too, has been developed by a further concep
tion. The doctrine of the quantification of the predicate, set
forth in 1827 by Mr. George Bentham, and again set forth
under a numerical form by Professor De Morgan, is a doctrine
supplementary to that of Aristotle ; and the recognition of it
has made it easier than before to see that Deductive Logic is
a science of the relations implied by the inclusions, exclusions,
and overlappings of classes.14 Even were this all, the instal
ment of progress would be large for a single generation. But
it is by no means all. In the work by Professor Boole, Inves
tigation of the Laivs of Thought, the application to Logic of
methods like those of Mathematics, constitutes another step
far greater in originality and in importance than any taken
since Aristotle. So that, strangely enough, the assertion
quoted above, that " we are backward in appreciating and pur
suing abstract knowledge," and this complaint of Mr. Arnold
that our life is wanting in ideas, come at a time when we have
lately done more to advance the most abstract and purely-
ideal science, than has been done anywhere else, or during
any past period !

In the other division of Abstract Science — Mathematics, a

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 203

recent revival of activity has brought results sufficiently
striking. Though, during a long period, the bias of patriot
ism and undue reverence for that form of the higher calculus
which Newton initiated, greatly retarded us ; yet since the re
commencement of progress, some five-and-twenty years ago,
Englishmen have again come to the front. Sir W. R. Hamil
ton's method of Quaternions is a new instrument of research ;
and whether or not as valuable as some think, undoubtedly
adds a large region to the world of known mathematical
truth. And then, more important still, there are the achieve
ments of Cayley and Sylvester in the creation and develop
ment of the higher algebra. From competent and unbiassed
judges I learn that the Theory of Invariants, and the methods
of investigation which have grown out of it, constitute a step
in mathematical progress larger than any made since the Dif
ferential Calculus. Thus, without enumerating the minor
achievements of others, there is ample proof that abstract
science, of this order also, is nourishing among us in great
vigour.

Nor, on passing to the Abstract-Concrete Sciences, do we
find better ground for this belief entertained by Mr. Arnold and
others. Though Huyghens conceived of light as constituted
of undulations, yet he was wrong in conceiving the undula
tions as allied in form to those of sound ; and it remained for
Dr. Young to establish the true theory. Respecting the prin
ciple of interference of the rays of light propounded by
Young, Sir John Herschel says, — " regarded as a physical law
[it] has hardly its equal for beauty, simplicity, and extent of
application, in the whole circle of science ; " and of Young's
all-important discovery that the luminiferous undulations are
transverse not longitudinal, he says that it showed " a sagac
ity which would have done honour to Newton himself." Just
naming the discovery of the law of expansion of gases by
Dalton, the laws of radiation by Leslie, the theory of dew by
Wells, the discrimination by Wollaston of quantity and inten
sity in electricity, and the disclosure of electrolysis by Nicholson
and Carlisle (all of them cardinal discoveries) and passing
over minor contributions to physical science, we come to the
great contributions of Faraday — magneto-electricity, the quan
titative law of electrolysis, the magnetization of light, and dia-

204 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

magnetism : not mentioning others of much significance.
Next there is the great truth which men still living have
finally established — the correlation and equivalence of the
physical forces. In the establishment of this truth English
men have had a large share — some think the larger share.
Remembering that in England the conception of heat as a
mode of motion dates from Bacon, by whom it was expressed
with an insight that is marvellous considering the knowledge
of his time — remembering, too, that " Locke stated a similar
view with singular felicity ; " we come, among Englishmen
of the present century, first to Davy, whose experiments and
arguments so conclusively supported those of Eumford ; then
to the view of Roget and the postulate on which Faraday
habitually reasoned, that all force arises only as other force is
expended ; then to the essay of Grove, in which the origin of
the various forms of force out of one another was abundantly
exemplified ; and finally to the investigations by which Joule
established the quantitative relations between heat and mo
tion. Without dwelling on the important deductions from
this great truth made by Sir W. Thomson, Rankine, Tyndall,
and others, I will merely draw attention to its highly-abstract
nature as again showing the baselessness of the above-quoted
notion.

Equally conclusive is the evidence wrhen we pass to Chem
istry. The cardinal value of the step made by Dalton in 1808,
when the apergu of Higgins was reduced by him to a scien
tific form, will be seen on glancing into Wurtz' Introduction
to Chemical Philosophy, and observing how the atomic
theory underlies all subsequent chemical discovery. Nor, in
more recent days, has the development of this theory fallen
unduly into foreign hands. Prof. Williamson, by reconciling
the theory of radicals with the theory of types, and by intro
ducing the hypothesis of condensed molecular types, has taken
a leading part in founding the modern views of chemical com
binations. We come next to the cardinal conception of atom
icity. In 1851, Prof. Frankland initiated the classification of
the elements by their atomicities : his important interpretation
being now avowedly accepted in Germany by those who orig
inally disputed it ; as by Kolbe in his Moden der Modernen
Chemie. On turning from the more general chemical truths

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 205

to the more special chemical truths, a like history meets us.
Davy's discovery of the metallic bases of the alkalies and
earths, revolutionized chemists' ideas. Passing over many
other achievements in special chemistry, I may single out for
their significance, the discoveries of Andrews, Tait, and espe
cially of Brodie, respecting the constitution of ozone as an
allotropic form of oxygen ; and may join with these Brodie's
discoveries respecting the allotropic forms of carbon, as throw
ing so much light on allotropy at large. And then we come
to the all-important discoveries, general and special, of the
late Prof. Graham. The truths he established respecting the
hydration of compounds, the transpiration and the diffusion
of liquids, the transpiration and the diffusion of gases, the dial
ysis of liquids and the dialysis of gases, and the occlusion of
gases by metals, are all of them cardinal truths. And even
of still greater value is his luminous generalization respecting
the crystalloid and colloid states of matter — a generalization
which, besides throwing light on many other phenomena, has
given us an insight into organic processes previously incom
prehensible. These results, reached by his beautifully-coher
ent series of researches extending over forty years, constitute
a new revelation of the properties of matter.

Neither is it true that in advancing the Concrete Sciences
we have failed to do our share. Take the first in order — As
tronomy. Though, for the long period during which our
mathematicians were behind, Planetary Astronomy progressed
but little in England, and the development of the Newtonian
theory was left chiefly to other nations, yet of late there has
been no want of activity. When I have named the inverse prob
lem of perturbations and the discovery of Neptune, the honour
of which we share with the French, I have called to mind an
achievement sufficiently remarkable. To Sidereal Astronomy
we have made great contributions. Though the conception
of Wright, of Durham, respecting stellar distribution was here
so little attended to that when afterwards enunciated by Kant
(who knew Wright's views) arid by Sir W. Herschel, it was
credited to them ; yet since Sir W. Herschel's time the re
searches in Sidereal Astronomy by Sir John Herschel and
others, have done much to further this division of the science.
Quite recently the discoveries made by Mr. Huggins respect-

20G THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

ing the velocities with which certain stars are approaching us
and others receding, have opened a new field of inquiry ; and
the inferences reached by Mr. Proctor respecting groupings of
stars and the " drifting " of star-groups, now found to harmo
nize with the results otherwise reached by Mr. Huggins, go
far to help us in conceiving the constitution of our galaxy.
Nor must we forget how much has been done towards explain
ing the physical constitutions of the heavenly bodies, as well
as their motions : the natures of nebula;, and the processes going
on in Sun and stars, have been greatly elucidated by Huggins,
Lockyer, and others.

In Geology, the progress made here, and especially the
progress in geological theory, is certainly not less — good judges
say much greater — than has been made elsewhere. Just
noting that English Geology goes back to Ray, whose notions
were far more philosophical than those set forth long after
wards by Werner, we come to Hutton, with whom in fact ra
tional Geology commences. For the untenable Neptunist hy
pothesis, asserting a once-universal aqueous action unlike the
present, Hutton substituted an aqueous action, marine and
fluviatile, continuously operating as we now see it, antago
nized by a periodic igneous action. He recognized denudation
as producing mountains and valleys ; he denied so-called
primitive rocks ; he asserted metamorphism ; he taught the
meaning of unconformity. Since his day rapid advances in
the same direction had been made. William Smith, by estab
lishing the order of superposition of strata throughout Eng
land, prepared the way for positive generalization; and by
showing that contained fossils are safer tests of correspondence
among strata than mineral characters, laid the basis for subse
quent classifications. The better data thus obtained, theory
quickly turned to account. In his Principles of Geology,
Lyell elaborately worked out the uiiiformitarian doctrine — the
doctrine that the Earth's crust has been brought to its present
complex structure by the continuous operation of forces like
those we see still at work. More recently, Prof. Ramsay's
theory of lake-formation by glaciers has helped in the inter
pretation ; and by him, as well as by Prof. Huxley, much has
been done towards elucidating past distributions of continents
and oceans. Let me name, too, Mallet's Theory of Earth-

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 207

quakes— the only scientific explanation of them yet given.
And there must be added another fact of moment. Criticism
has done far more here than abroad, towards overthrowing the
crude hypothesis of universal " systems " of strata, which suc
ceeded the still cruder hypothesis of universal strata, enun
ciated by Werner.

That our contributions to Biological science have in these
later times not been unimportant, may, I think, be also main
tained. Just noting that the " natural system " of Plant-
classification, though French by development is English by
origin, since Kay made its first great division and sketched
out some of its sub-divisions ; we come, among English botan
ists, to Brown. He made a series of investigations in the mor
phology, classification, arid distribution of plants, which in
number and importance have never been equalled : the Pro-
dromus Florae Novce-Hollandice is the greatest achievement
in classification since Jussieu's Natural Orders. Brown, too,
it was who solved the mystery of plant-fertilization. Again,
there is the conception that existing plant-distribution has
been determined by past geological and physical changes — a
conception we owe to Dr. Hooker, who has given us sundry
wide interpretations in pursuance of it. In Animal-physiology
there is Sir Charles Bell's discovery respecting the sensory
and motor functions of the nerve-roots in the spinal cord ; and
this underlies multitudinous interpretations of organic phe
nomena. More recently we have had Mr. Darwin's great addi
tion to biological science. Following in the steps of his
grandfather, who had anticipated Lamarck in enunciating the
general conception of the genesis of organic forms by adap
tive modifications, but had not worked out the conception as
Lamarck did, Mr. Darwin, perceiving that both of them were
mistaken in attributing the modifications to causes which,
though some of them true, were inadequate to account for all the
effects, succeeded, by recognizing the further cause he called
Natural Selection, in raising the hypothesis from a form but
partially tenable to a quite tenable form. This view of his,
so admirably worked out, has been adopted by the great ma
jority of naturalists; and, by making the process of organic
evolution more comprehensible, it is revolutionizing biological
conceptions throughout the world. In the words of Professor

208 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

Cohn, " no book of recent times lias influenced the concep
tions of modern science like the first edition of Charles Dar
win's Origin of Species."16 Nor should we overlook the vari
ous kindred minor discoveries, partly dependent, partly in
dependent : Mr. Darwin's own respecting the dimorphism of
flowers ; Mr. Bates's beautiful interpretation of mimicry in in
sects, which led the way to many allied interpretations ; Mr.
Wallace's explanations of dimorphism and polymorphism in
Lepidoptera. Finally, Professor Huxley, besides dissipat
ing some serious biological errors of continental origin, has
made important contributions to morphology and classifica
tion.

Nor does the balance turn against us on passing to the next-
highest concrete science. After those earlier inquiries by
which Englishmen so largely advanced the Science of Mind,
and set up much of the speculation subsequently active in
France and Germany, there came a lull in English thinking ;
and during this arose the absurd notion that the English are
not a philosophical people. But the lull, ending some forty
years ago, gave place to an activity which has quickly made
up for lost time. On this point I need not rest in assertion,
but will quote foreign testimony. The first chapter of Prof.
Eibot's work, La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine be
gins thus : —

" ' Le sceptre de la psychologic, dit M. Stuart Mill, est decidement
revenu a PAngleterre.' On pourrait soutenir qu'il n'cn est janmis
sorti. Sans doute, les etudes psychologiques y sont maintenant cul-
tivees par des hommes de premier ordre qui, par la solidite de leur
methode, et ce qui est plus rare, par la precision de leurs resultats, out
fait entrer la science dans une periode nouvelle; mais c'est plutot un
redoublement qu'un renouvellement d'eclat."

Similarly, on turning to Ethics considered under its psycho
logical aspect, we find foreign testimony that English thinkers
have done most towards the elaboration of a scientific system.
In the preface to his late work, La Morale nella Filosofia
Positiva (meaning by " Positiva" simply scientific), Prof.
Barzellotti, of Florence, states that for this reason he limits
himself to an account of English speculation in this depart
ment."

And then, if, instead of Psychology and Ethics, Philosophy

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 209

at large comes in question, there is independent testimony of
kindred nature to be cited. Thus, in the first number of La
Critique Philosophique (8 Fevrier, 1872), published under
the direction of M. Renouvier, the acting editor, M. Pillon,
writes : —

" On travaille beaucoup dans le champ des idees en Angleterre. . .
" Non-seulement 1'Angleterre surpasse la France par 1'ardeur et le tra
vail, ce qui est malheureusement bien peu dire, et par Finteret des in
vestigations et des debats de ses penseurs, mais meme elle laisse loin
derriere elle 1'Allemagne en ce dernier point."

And still more recently M. Martins, in the leading French
periodical, has been referring to —

"les nouvelles idees nees dans la libre Angleterre et appelees a
transformer un jour les sciences naturelles." 17

So that while Mr. Arnold is lamenting the want of ideas in
England, it is discovered abroad that the genesis of ideas in
England is very active. While he thinks our conceptions are
commonplace, our neighbours find them new, to the extent of
being revolutionary. Oddly enough, at the very time when
he is reproaching his countrymen with lack of geist French
men are asserting that there is more geist here than anywhere
else ! Nor is there wanting testimony of kindred nature from
other nations. In the lecture above cited, Dr. Cohn, while
claiming for Germany a superiority in the number of her
earnest workers, says that " England especially has always
been, and is particularly now, rich in men whose scientific
works are remarkable for their astonishing laboriousness,
clearness, profundity, and independence of thought " — a
further recognition of the truth that instead of merely plod
ding along the old ruts, the English strike out new tracks : are
unusually imaginative.

In his essay on the " Functions of Criticism at the Present
Time," Mr. Arnold insists that the thing most needful for us
now, in all branches of knowledge, is " to see the object as in
itself it really is " ; and in Friendship's Garland, his alter
ego, Arminius, exhorts our Philistinism "to search and not
rest till it sees things more as they really are." Above, I have
done that which Mr. Arnold urges ; not by picking-up stray
facts, but by a systematic examination. Feeling sure that Mr.
Arnold has himself taken the course he advises, and is there-
15

210 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

fore familiar with all this evidence, as well as with the large
quantity which might be added, I am somewhat puzzled on
finding him draw from it a conclusion so different from that
which presents itself to me. Were any one, proceeding on the
foregoing data, to assert that since the beginning of this cen
tury, more lias been done in England to advance scientific
knowledge than has ever been done in a like interval, at any
time, in any country, I should think his inference less wide
of the truth than that which, strange to say, Mr. Arnold draws
from the same data.

And now to consider that which more immediately con
cerns us — the effect produced by the bias of anti-patriotism on
sociological speculation. Whether in Mr. Arnold, whom I
have ventured to take as a type, the leaning towards national
self-depreciation was primary and the over- valuing of foreign
institutions secondary, or whether his admiration of foreign
institutions was the cause and his tendency to depreciatory
estimates of our social state the effect, is a question which
may be left open. For present purposes it suffices to observe
that the two go together. Mr. Arnold is impatient with the
unregulated and. as he thinks, anarchic state of our society ;
and everywhere displays a longing for more administrative
and controlling agencies. " Force till right is ready," is one
of the sayings he emphatically repeats : apparently in the be
lief that there can be a sudden transition from a coercive sys
tem to a non-coercive one — ignoring the truth that there has
to bo a continually-changing compromise between force and
right, during which force decreases step by step as right in
creases step by step, and during which every step brings some
temporary evil along with its ultimate good. Thinking more
force needful for us, and lauding institutions which exercise
it, Mr. Arnold holds that even in our literature we should
benefit by being under authoritative direction. Though he
is not of opinion that an Academy would succeed here, he
casts longing glances at the French Academy, and wishes we
could have had over us an influence like that to which he
ascribes certain excellencies in French literature.

The French Academy was established, as he points out,
" to work with all the care and all the diligence possible at

THE BIAS OP PATRIOTISM. 211

giving sure rules to our "the French] language, and rendering
it pore, eloquent, and capable of treating' the arts and sci
ences." Let us consider whether it has fulfilled this in
tention, by removing the most conspicuous defects of the Ian-
Down to the present time, there is in daily use
the expression quest ce que c'est ! and even qu'est ce que
c'est que cela * If in some remote corner of England is heard
the analogous expression, — >k what is that there here ? " it is
held to imply entire absence of culture : the use of two super
fluous words proves a want of that close adjustment of lan
guage to thought which even partially-educated persons
among us have reached. How is it. then, that though in. this
French phrase there are five superfluous words (or six if we
take cela as twoX the purifying criticism of the French
Academy has not removed it from French speech — not even
from the speech of the educated ? Or why. again, has

the Academy not condemned, forbidden, and so expelled from
the language, the double negative ? If among ourselves any
one lets drop the sentence. " I didn't say nothing.'' the in
evitable inference is that he has lived with the ill-taught :
and. further, that in his mind words and ideas answer to one
another very loosely. Though in French the second negative
is by derivation positive, yet in acquiring a negative mean
ing it became alike superfluous and illogical ; and its use
should then have been interdicted, instead of being en
forced. Once more, why has not the French Academy
systematized the senders ? No one who considers language
as an instrument of thought, which is good in proportion as
its special parts are definitely adjusted to special functions,
can doubt that a meaningless use of genders is a defect. It is
undeniable that to employ marks of gender in ways always
suggesting attributes that are possessed, instead of usually
suggesting attributes that are not possessed, is an improvement.
Having an example of this improvement before them, why
did not the Academy introduce it -into French ? And
then — more significant question still — how, without the aid of
any Academy, came the genders to be systematized in Eng
lish ? Mr. Arnold, and those who. in common with him. seem
to believe only in agencies that have visible organizations,
might, perhaps, in seeking the answer to this question, lose

212 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

faith in artificial appliances and gain faith in natural pro
cesses. For as, on asking the origin of language in general,
we are reminded that all its complex, marvellously-adjusted
parts and arrangements have been evolved without the aid or
oversight of any embodied power, Academic or other; so, on
asking the origin of this particular improvement in language,
we find that it, too, arose naturally. Nay, more, it was made
possible by one of those anarchic states which Mr. Arnold so
much dislikes. Out of the conflict of Old-English dialects,
sufficiently allied to co-operate but sufficiently different to
have contradictory marks of gender, there came a disuse of
meaningless genders and a survival of the genders having
meaning — a change which an Academy, had one existed here
in those days, would doubtless have done its best to prevent ;
seeing that during the transition there must have been a dis
regard of rules and apparent corruption of speech, out of
which no benefit could have been anticipated.

Another fact respecting the French Academy is by no
means congruous with Mr. Arnold's conception of its value.
The compiling of an authoritative dictionary was a fit under
taking for it. Just recalling the well-known contrast between
its dilatory execution of this undertaking, and the active exe
cution of a kindred one by Dr. Johnson, we have more espe
cially to note the recent like contrast between the perform
ances of the Academy and the performances of M. Littre.
The Academy has long had in hand two dictionaries— the one
a second edition of its original dictionary, the other an his
torical dictionary. The first is at letter D; and the initial
number of the other, containing A — B, issued fifteen years
ago, has not yet had a successor. Meanwhile, M. Littre,
single-handed, has completed a dictionary which, besides
doing all that the two Academy-dictionaries propose to do,
does much more. With which marvellous contrast we have
to join the startling fact, that M. Littre was refused admission
to the Academy in 1863, and at length admitted in 1871 only
after violent opposition.

Even if we pass over these duties which, in pursuance of
its original purpose, the French Academy might have been
expected to perform, and limit ourselves to the duty Mr. Ar
nold especially dwells upon — the duty of keeping "the fine

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 213

quality of the French spirit unimpaired," and exercising "the
authority of a recognised master in matters of tone and taste "
(to quote his approving paraphrase of M. Kenan's definition) —
it may still, I think, be doubted whether there have been
achieved by it the benefits Mr. Arnold alleges, and whether
there have not been caused great evils. That its selection of
members has tended to encourage bad literature instead of
good, seems not improbable when we are reminded of its past
acts, as we are in the well-known letter of Paul-Louis Courier,
in which there occurs this, among other passages similarly
damaging : —

" Un due et pair honore P Academic francaise, qui ne veut point de
Boileau, refuse la Bruyere .... mais recoit tout d'abord Chape-
lain et Conrart. De nieme nous voyons a P Academic grecque le
vicomte invite, Corai repousse, lorsque Jomard y entre comme dans
un moulin." 18

Nor have its verdicts upon great works been such as to en
courage confidence : instance the fact that it condemned the
Cid of Corneille, now one of the glories of French literature.
Its critical doctrines, too, have not been beyond question.
Upholding those canons of dramatic art which so long ex
cluded the romantic drama, and maintained the feeling shown
by calling Shakspeare an " intoxicated barbarian," may pos
sibly have been more detrimental than beneficial. And when
we look, not at such select samples of French literary taste as
Mr. Arnold quotes, but at samples from the other extreme, we
may question whether the total effect has been great. If, as
Mr. Arnold thinks, France " is the country in Europe where
the people is most alive," it clearly is not alive to the teach
ings of the Academy : witness the recent revival of the Pere
Duchene; the contents of which are no -less remarkable for
their astounding obscenity then for their utter stupidity. Nay,
when we look only where we are told to look — only where the
Academy exercises its critical function on modern literature,
we find reason for scepticism. Instance the late award of the
Halphen Prize to the author of a series of poems called
L'Invasion, of which M. Patin, a most favourable critic,
says : —

" Their chief characteristic is a warmth of sentiment and a 'verve,'
which one would wish to see under more restraint, but against which

214 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

one hesitates to set up, however just might be their application under
other circumstances, the cold requirements of taste."
Thus we have the Academy pandering to the popular feeling.
The ebullitions of a patriotic sentiment which it is the misfor
tune of France to possess in too great a degree, are not checked
by the Academy but encouraged by it : even at the expense of
good taste.

And then, lastly, observe that some of the most cultivated
Frenchmen, not so wTell satisfied with institutions of the
Academy-type as Mr. Arnold seems to be, have recently estab
lished, on an English model, a French Association for the
Advancement of Science. Here are passages from their pros
pectus, published in La Revue Scientifique, 20 Janvier, 1872 ;
commencing with an account of the founding of the Royal
Institution : —

"II y avait cinquante-huit membres presents a cette reunion.
Chacun d'eux souscrivit, sans plus attendre, une action de cinquante
guinees ; c'est a pen pres treize cents francs de notre monnaie. qui en
vaudraient aujourd'hui bien pres de deux mille cinque. Le lende-
main, la Societe, [Institution] royale de Londres etait constitute.

'" On sait depuis ce qu'elle est devenue.

" Ce qu'ont fait les Anglais en 1799, d'illustres savants de notre
pays veulent le renouveler aujourd'hui pour la France.

" Eux aussi, ils ont juge, comme Rumfort au siecle dernier, que la
vieille suprematie du nom fran§ais dans tous les ordres de sciences
commencait a etre serieusement ebranlee, et risquait de s'ecrouler un
jour.

" A Dieu ne plaise qu'ils accusent 1' Academic de cette decadence !
ils en font presque tous partie eux-memes. Mais 1'Academie. qui a
conserve en Europe le prestige de son nom, s'enferme un peu plus
dans la majeste de sa grandeur. Elle ne possede ni des moyens d'ac-
tion assez puissants, ni une energie assez active pour les mettre en
osuvre. Le nerf de la guerre, 1'argent, lui manque, et plus encore
peut-etre 1'initiative intelligente et hardie. Elle s'est endormie dans
le respect de ses traditions seculaires."

A further testimony from a foreigner to the value of our
methods of aiding intellectual progress, in comparison with
continental methods, has been still more recently given by
M. Alphonse de Candolle, in his Histoire des Sciences et des
Savants. His fear for us is that we may adopt the continental

THE BIAS OF PATRIOTISM. 215

policy and abandon our own. Respecting Science in England,
he says : —

" Je ne vois qu'un seul indice de faiblesse pour 1'avenir, c'est une
disposition croissante des hommes de science a solliciter 1'appui du
gouvernement. On dirait qu'ils ne se fient plus aux forces individu-
elles, dont le resultat pourtant a ete si admirable dans leur pays." 19

Thus, curiously enough, we find another contrast parallel
to that noted already. As with English ideas so with English
systems— while depreciated at home they are eulogized abroad.
While Mr. Arnold is lauding French institutions, Frenchmen,
recognizing their shortcomings, are adopting English institu
tions. From which we may fairly infer that, great as is Mr.
Arnold's desire " to see the object as in itself it really is," he
has not in this case succeeded ; and that, endeavouring to es
cape the bias of patriotism, he has been carried too far the
other way by the bias of anti-patriotism.20

One more illustration of the effect this bias has on Mr.
Arnold calls for brief comment. Along with his over-valua
tion of foreign regulative institutions, there goes an under
valuation of institutions at home which do not exhibit the
kind of regulation he thinks desirable, and stand in the way
of authoritative control. I refer to those numerous Dissent
ing organizations characterizing this " anarchy " of ours,
which Mr. Arnold curiously makes the antithesis to '' culture."

Mr. Arnold thinks that as a nation we show undue faith in
machinery.

" Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger What

is freedom but machinery ? what is population but machinery ? what
is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is
wealth but machinery? what are religious organizations but ma
chinery ? " "

And in pursuance of this conception he regards the desire
to get Church-rates abolished and certain restrictions on mar
riage removed, as proving undue belief in machinery among
Dissenters ; while his own disbelief in machinery he considers
proved by wishing for stronger governmental restraints,25 by
lauding the supervision of an Academy, and by upholding a
Church-establishment. I must leave unconsidered the ques
tion whether an Academy, if we had one, would authorize this

216 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

use of language ; which makes it seem that voluntary religious
agency is machinery and that compulsory religious agency is
not machinery. I must pass over, too, Mr. Arnold's compari
son of Ecclesiasticism and Nonconformity in respect of the
men they have produced. Nor have I space to examine what
he says about the mental attitudes of the two. It must suffice
to say that were the occasion fit, it might be shown that his
endeavour " to see the object as in itself it really is," has not
succeeded much better in this case than in the cases above
dealt with. Here I must limit myself to a single criticism.

The trait which in Mr. Arnold's view of Nonconformity
seems to be most remarkable, is that in breadth it so little
transcends the view of the Nonconformists themselves. The
two views greatly differ in one respect — antipathy replaces
sympathy ; but the two views are not widely unlike in exten
sion. Avoiding that provincialism of thought which he says
characterizes Dissenters, I should have expected Mr. Arnold
to estimate Dissent, not under its local and temporary aspect,
but under its general aspect as a factor in all societies at all
times. Though the Nonconformists themselves think of Non
conformity as a phase of Protestantism in England, Mr.
Arnold's studies of other nations, other ages, and other creeds,
would, I should have thought, have led him to regard Non
conformity as a universal power in societies, which has in our
time and country its particular embodiment, but which is to
be understood only when contemplated in all its other em
bodiments. The thing is one in spirit and tendency, whether
shown among the Jews or the Greeks— whether in Catholic
Europe or in Protestant England. Wherever there is disa
greement with a current belief, no matter what its nature,
there is Nonconformity. The open expression of difference
and avowed opposition to that which is authoritatively estab
lished, constitutes Dissent, whether the religion be Pagan or
Christian, Monotheistic or Polytheistic. The relative atti
tudes of the dissenter and of those in power, are essentially
the same in all cases ; and in all cases lead to persecution and
vituperation. The Greeks who poisoned Socrates were moved
by just the same sentiment as the Catholics who burnt Cran-
mer, or as the Protestant Churchmen who imprisoned Bunyan
and pelted Wesley. And while the manifestations of feeling

THE BIAS OP PATRIOTISM. 217

are essentially the same, while the accompanying evils are es
sentially the same, the resulting benefits are essentially the
same. Is it not a truism that without divergence from that
which exists, whether it be in politics, religion, manners, or
anything else, there can be no progress ? And is it not an
obvious corollary that the temporary ills accompanying the
divergence, are out-balanced by the eventual good ? It is cer
tain, as Mr. Arnold holds, that subordination is essential ; but
it is also certain that insubordination is essential — essential, if
there is to be any improvement. There are two extremes in
the state of a social aggregate, as of every other aggregate,
which are fatal to evolution — rigidity and incoherence. A
medium plasticity is the healthful condition. On the one
hand, a force of established structures and habits and beliefs,
such as offers considerable resistance to change ; on the other
hand, an originality, an independence, and an opposition to
authority, energetic enough to overcome the resistance little
by little. And while the political nonconformity we call
Eadicalism has the function of thus gradually modifying one
set of institutions, the religious nonconformity we call Dis
sent has the function of thus gradually modifying another
set.

That Mr. Arnold does not take this entirely-unprovincial
view, which would lead him to look on Dissenters with less
aversion, may in part, I think, be ascribed to that over-valua
tion of foreign restraints and under- valuation of home free
dom, which his bias of anti-patriotism fosters; and serves
further to illustrate the disturbing effects of this bias on socio
logical speculation.

And now to sum up this somewhat-too-elaborate argument.
The general truth that by incorporation in his society, the
citizen is in a measure incapacitated for estimating rightly its
characters and actions in relation to those of other societies,
has been made abundantly manifest. And it has been made
manifest, also, that when he strives to emancipate himself
from these influences of race, and country, and locality, which
warp his judgment, he is apt to have his judgment warped in
the opposite way. From the perihelion of patriotism he is
carried to the aphelion of anti-patriotism ; and is almost cer-

218 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

tain to form views that are more or less excentric, instead of
circular, all-sided, balanced views.

Partial escape from this difficulty is promised by basing
our sociological conclusions chiefly on comparisons made
among other societies— excluding our own. But even then
these perverting sentiments are sure to intrude more or less ;
for we cannot contemplate the institutions of other nations
without our sympathies or antipathies being in some degree
aroused by consciousness of likeness or unlikeness to our own
institutions. Discounting our conclusions as well as we may,
to allow for the errors we are thus led into, we must leave the
entire elimination of such errors to a future in which the de
creasing antagonisms of societies will go along witli decreas
ing intensities of these sentiments.

CHAPTER X.

THE CLASS-BIAS.

MANY years ago a solicitor sitting by me at dinner, com
plained bitterly of the injury which the then lately-established
County Courts, were doing his profession. He enlarged on
the topic in a way implying that he expected me to agree with
him in therefore condemning them. So incapable was he of
going beyond the professional point of view, that what he re
garded as a grievance he thought I also ought to regard as a
grievance : oblivious of the fact that the more economical ad
ministration of justice of which his lamentation gave me
proof, was to me, not being a lawyer, matter for rejoicing.

The bias thus exemplified is a bias by which nearly all
have their opinoiis warped. Naval officers disclose their un
hesitating belief that we are in imminent danger because the
cry for more fighting ships and more sailors has not been met
to their satisfaction. The debates on the purchase-system
proved how strong was the conviction of military men that
our national safety depended on the maintenance of an army-
organization like that in which they were brought up, and had
attained their respective ranks. Clerical opposition to the
Corn-Laws showed how completely that view which Christian
ministers might have been expected to take, was shut out by
a view more congruous with their interests and alliances. In
all classes and sub-classes it is the same. Hear the murmurs
uttered when, because of the Qxieen's absence, there is less ex
penditure in entertainments and the so-called gaieties of the
season, and you perceive that London traders think the nation
suffers if the consumption of superfluities is checked. Study
the pending controversy about co-operative stores versus retail
shops, and you find the shop keeping mind possessed by the

819

220 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

idea that Society commits a wrong if it deserts shops and goes
to stores — is quite unconscious that the present distributing
system rightly exists only as a means of economically and
conveniently supplying consumers, and must yield to another
system if that should prove more economical and convenient.
Similarly with other trading bodies, general and special —
similarly with the merchants who opposed the repeal of the
Navigation Laws : similarly with the Coventry-weavers, who
like free-trade in all things save ribbons.

The class-bias, like the bias of patriotism, is a reflex ego
ism: and like it has its uses and abases. As the strong attach
ments citizens feel for their nation cause that enthusiastic co
operation by which its integrity is maintained in presence of
other nations, severally tending to spread and subjugate their
neighbours : so the esprit de corps more or less manifest in
each specialized part of the body politic, prompts measures to
preserve the integrity of that part in opposition to other parts.
all somewhat antagonistic. The egoism of individuals leads
to an egoism of the class they form : and besides the separate
efforts, generates a joint effort to get an undue share of the
aggregate proceeds of social activity. The aggressive tendency
of each class, thus produced, has to be balanced by like ag
gressive tendencies of other classes. The implied feelings do.
in short develop one another : and the respective organiza
tions in which they embody themselves develop one another.
Large classes of the community marked-off by rank, and sub
classes marked-off by special occupations, severally combine,
and severally set up organs advocating their interests : the
reason Miripifd being in all cases the same— the need for self-
defence.

Along with the good which a society derives from this self-
asserting and self -preserving action, by which each division
and sub-division keeps itself strong enough for its functions,
there goes, among other evils, this which we are considering —
the aptness to contemplate all social arrangements in their
bearings on class-interests, and the resulting inability to esti
mate rightly their effects on Society as a whole. The habit of

tkms which directly touch iU»»nlfiii : but it perverts the

THE CLASS-BIAS. 221

judgments on questions which touch class-welfare very indi
rectly, if at alL It fosters an adapted theory of social relations
of everv kind, with sentiments to fit the theory ; and a char
acteristic stamp is given to the beliefs on public matters in
general. Take an instance.

Whatever its technical ownership may be. Hyde Park is
open for the public benefit : no title to special benefit is pro
ducible by those who ride and drive. It happens, however,
that those who ride and drive make large use of it daily ; and
extensive tracts of it have been laid out for their convenience :
the tracts for equestrians having been from time to time in
creased. Of people "without carriages and horses, a few,
mostly of the kinds who lead easy lives, use Hyde Park
frequently as a promenade. Meanwhile, by the great mass of
Londoners, too busy to go so far. it is scarcely ever visited :
their share of the general benefit is scarcely appreciable.
And now what do the few who have a constant and almost
exclusive use of it, think about the occasional use of it by
the many ? They are angry when, at long intervals, even a
small portion of it, quite distant from their haunts, is occu
pied for a few hours in ways disagreeable to them — nay. even
when such temporary occupation is on a day during which
Rotten Row is nearly vacant and the drives not one-third
filled. In this, anyone unconcerned may see the influence of
the class-bias. But he will have an inadequate conception of
its distorting power unless he turns to some letters from
members of the ruling class published in the Times in No
vember last, when the question of the Park-Rules was being
agitated. One writer, signing himself " A Liberal M.P.,~ ex
pressing his disgust at certain addresses he heard, proposed,
if others would join bim, to give the offensive speakers
punishment by force of fists : and then, on a subsequent day.
another legislator, similarly moved, writes : —

~ If ' M.P.' is in earnest in his desire to get some honest men to
gether to take the law into their own hands. I can promise him a
pretty good backing from those who are not afraid to take all the
consequences. I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

- AX EX-M.P."

And thus we find class-feeling extinguishing rational politi
cal thinking so completely that, wonderful to relate, two

222 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

law-makers propose to support the law by breaking the
law !

In larger ways we have of late seen the class-bias doing
the same thing — causing contempt for those principles of con
stitutional government slowly and laboriously established,
and prompting a return to barbaric principles of govern
ment. Read the debate about the payment of Governor
Eyre's expenses, and study the division-lists, and you see
that acts which, according to the Lord Chief Justice, u have
brought reproach not only on those who were parties to them,
but on the very name of England/' can nevertheless find
numerous defenders among men whose class-positions, mili
tary, naval, official, &c., make them love power and detest
resistance. Nay more, by raising an Eyre-Testimonial Fund
and in other ways, there was shown a deliberate approval of
acts which needlessly suspended orderly government and
substituted unrestrained despotism. There was shown a de
liberate ignoring of the essential question raised, which was —
whether an executive head might, at will, set aside all those
forms of administration by which men's lives and liberties
are guarded against tyranny.

More recently, this same class-bias has been shown by the
protest made when Mr. Cowan was dismissed for executing
the Kooka rioters who had surrendered. The Indian Govern
ment, having inquired into the particulars, found that this
killing of many men without form of law and contrary to
orders, could not be defended on the plea of pressing danger ;
and finding this, it ceased to employ the officer who had
committed so astounding a deed, and removed to another
province the superior officer who had approved of the deed.
Not excessive punishment, one would say. Some might con
tend that extreme mildness was shown in thus inflicting no
greater evil than is inflicted on a labourer when he does not
execute his work properly. But now mark what is thought
by one who displays in words the bias of the governing
classes, intensified by life in India. In a letter published in
the Times of May 15, 1872, the late Sir Donald M'Leod writes
concerning this dismissal and removal : —

" All the information that reaches me tends to prove that a severe
blow has been given to all chance of vigorous or independent action

THE CLASS-BIAS. 223

in future, when emergencies may arise. The whole service appears to
have been astonished and appalled by the mode in which the officers
have been dealt with."

That we may see clearly what amazing perversions of
sentiment and idea are caused by contemplating actions from
class points of view, let us turn from this feeling of sympa
thy with Mr. Cowan, to the feeling of detestation shown by
members of the same class in England towards a man who
kills a fox that destroys his poultry. Here is a paragraph
from a recent paper : —

" Five poisoned foxes have been found in the neighbourhood of
Penzance, and there is consequently great indignation among the
western sportsmen. A reward of 20/. has been offered for informa
tion that shall lead to the conviction of the poisoner."
So that wholesale homicide, condemned alike by religion, by
equity, by law, is approved, and the mildest punishment of it
blamed ; while vulpicide, committed in defence of property,
and condemned neither by religion, nor by equity, nor by
any law save that of sportsmen, excites an anger that cries
aloud for positive penalties !

I need not further illustrate the more special distortions of
sociological belief which result from the class-bias. They may
be detected in the conversations over every table, and in the
articles appearing in every party-journal or professional pub
lication. The effects here most worthy of our attention are
the general effects — the effects produced on the minds of the
upper and lower classes. Let us observe how greatly the
prejudices generated by their respective social positions, per
vert the conceptions of employers and employed. We will
deal with the employed first.

As before shown, mere associations of ideas, especially
when joined with emotions, affect our beliefs, not simply
without reason but in spite of reason — causing us, for in
stance, to think there is something intrinsically repugnant in
a place where many painful experiences have been received,
and something intrinsically charming in a scene connected
with many past delights. The liability to such perversions of
judgment is greatest where jjersoHS are the objects with which
pleasures and pains are habitually associated. One who has

224 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

often been, even unintentionally, a cause of gratification, is
favourably judged ; and an unfavourable judgment is formed
of one who, even involuntarily, has often inflicted sufferings.
Hence, when there are social antagonisms, arises the universal
tendency to blame the individuals, and to hold them respon
sible for the system.

It is thus with the conceptions the working-classes frame
of those by whom they are immediately employed, and of
those who fill the higher social positions. Feeling keenly
what they have to bear, and tracing sundry real grievances
to men who buy their labour and men who are most influen
tial in making the laws, artizans and rustics conclude that,
considered individually and in combination, those above them
are personally bad — selfish, or tyrannical, in special degrees.
It never occurs to them that the evils they complain of result
from the average human nature of our age. And yet were it
not for the class-bias, they would see in their dealings with
one another, plenty of proofs that the injustices they suffer
are certainly not greater, and possibly less, than they would
be were the higher social functions discharged by individuals
taken from among themselves. The simple fact, notorious
enough, that working-men who save money and become mas
ters, are not more considerate than usual towards those they
employ, but often the contrary, might alone convince them
of this. On all sides there is ample evidence having kindred
meaning. Let them inquire about the life in every kitchen
where there are several servants, and they will find quarrels
about supremacy, tyrannies over juniors who are made to do
more than their proper work, throwings of blame from one to
another, and the many forms of misconduct caused by want
of right feeling ; and very often the evils growing up in one
of these small groups exceed in intensity the evils pervading
society at large. The doings in workshops, too, illustrate in
various ways the ill-treatment of artizans by one another.
Hiding the tools and spoiling the work of those who do not
conform to their unreasonable customs, prove how little indi
vidual freedom is respected among them. And still more
conspicuously is this proved by the internal governments of
their trade-combinations. Not to dwell on the occasional
killing of men among them who assert their rights to sell

THE CLASS-BIAS. 225

their labour as they please, or on the frequent acts of violence
and intimidation committed by those on strike against those
who undertake the work they have refused, it suffices to cite
the despotism exercised by trades-union officers. The daily
acts of these make it manifest that the ruling powers set up
by working-men, inflict on them grievances as great as, if
not greater than, those inflicted by the ruling powers, political
and social, which they decry. When the heads of an asso
ciation he has joined forbid a collier to work more than three
days in the week — when he is limited to a certain " get " in
that space of time — when he dares not accept from his em
ployer an increasing bonus for every extra day he works —
when, as a reason for declining, he says that he should be
made miserable by his comrades, and that even his wife
would not be spoken to ; it becomes clear that he and the
rest have made for themselves a tyranny worse than the
tyrannies complained of. Did he look at the facts apart
from class-bias, the skilful artizan, who in a given time can
do more than his fellows, but who dares not do it because
he would be "sent to Coventry" by them, and who conse
quently cannot reap the benefit of his superior powers, would
see that he is thus aggressed upon by his fellows more seri
ously than by Acts of Parliament or combinations of capital
ists. And he would further see that the sentiment of justice
in his own class is certainly not greater than in the classes he
thinks so unjust.

The feeling which thus warps working-men's conceptions,
at the same time prevents them from seeing that each of their
unions is selfishly aiming to benefit at the expense of the in
dustrial population at large. When an association of car
penters or of engineers makes rules limiting the number of
apprentices admitted, with the view of maintaining the rate
of wages paid to its members — when it thus tacitly says to
every applicant beyond the number allowed, "Go and ap
prentice yourself elsewhere;" it is indirectly saying to all
other bodies of artizans, " You may have your wages lowered
by increasing your numbers, but we will not." And when
the other bodies of artizans severally do the like, the general
result is that the incorporated workers of all orders, say to the
surplus sons of workers who want to find occupations, " We
16

226 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

will none of us let our masters employ you." Thus each
trade, in its eagerness for self-protection, is regardless of other
trades, and sacrifices numbers among the rising generation of
the artizan-class. Nor is it thus only that the interest

of each class of artizans is pursued to the detriment of the arti
zan-class in general. I do not refer to the way in which when
bricklayers strike they throw out of employment the labourers
who attend them, or to the way in which the colliers now on
strike have forced idleness on the ironworkers ; but I refer to
the way in which the course taken by any one set of opera
tives to get higher wages, is taken regardless of the fact that
an eventual rise in the price of the commodity produced, is a
disadvantage to all other operatives. The class-bias, fostering
the belief that the question in each case is entirely one between
employer and employed, between capital and labour, shuts out
the truth that the interests of all consumers are involved, and
that the immense majority of consumers belong to the work
ing-classes themselves. If the consumers are named, such of
them only are remembered as belong to the wealthier classes,
who, it is thought, can well afford to pay higher prices. Lis
ten to a passage from Mr. George Potter's paper read at the
late Leeds Congress : —

" The consumer, in fact, in so high a civilization, so arrogant a
luxuriousness, and so impatient an expectancy as characterize him in
our land and age, is ever ready to take the alarm and to pour out the
vials of his wrath upon those whom he merely suspects of taking a
course which may keep a feather out of his bed, a spice out of his
dish, or a coal out of his fire ; and, unfortunately for the chances of
fairness, the weight of his anger seldom falls upon the capitalist, but
is most certain to come crushing down upon the lowly labourer, who
has dared to stand upon his own right and independence."

From which it might be supposed that all skilled and un
skilled artizans, all farm-labourers, all other workers, with all
their wives and children, live upon air — need no food, no
clothing, no furniture, no houses, and are therefore unaffected
by enhanced prices of commodities. However fully prepared
for the distorting effects of class-bias, one would hardly have
expected effects so great. One would have thought it mani
fest even to an extreme partizan of trades-unions, that a strike
which makes coals as dear again, affects in a relatively-small

THE CLASS-BIAS. 227"

degree the thousands of rich consumers above described, and
is very keenly felt by the millions of poor consumers, to whom
in winter the outlay for coal is a serious item of expenditure.
One would have thought that a truth so obvious in this case,
would be recognized throughout — the truth that with nearly
all products of industry, the evil caused by a rise of price falls
more heavily on the vast numbers who work for wages than
on the small numbers who have moderate incomes or large

incomes.

Were not their judgments warped by the class-bias, work
ing-men might be more pervious to the truth that better forms
of industrial organization would grow up and extinguish the
forms which they regard as oppressive, were such better forms
practicable. And they might see that the impracticability of
better forms results from the imperfections of existing human
nature, moral and intellectual. If the workers in any busi
ness could so combine and govern themselves that the share
of profit coming to them as workers was greater than now,
while the interest on the capital employed was less than now ;
and if they could at the same time sell the articles produced
at lower rates than like articles produced in businesses man
aged as at present ; then, manifestly, businesses managed as
at present would go to the wall. That they do not go to
the wall — that such better industrial organizations do not
replace them, implies that the natures of working-men them
selves are not good enough ; or, at least, that there are not
many of them good enough. Happily, to some extent organ
izations of a superior type are becoming possible : here and
there they have achieved encouraging successes. But, speak
ing generally, the masses are neither sufficiently provident,
nor sufficiently conscientious, nor sufficiently intelligent.
Consider the evidence.

That they are not provident enough they show both by
wasting their higher wages when they get them, and by neg
lecting such opportunities as occur of entering into modified
forms of co-operative industry. When the Gloucester Wag
gon Company was formed, it was decided to reserve a thou
sand of its shares, of £10 each, for the workmen employed ;
and to suit them, it was arranged that the calls of a pound
each should be at intervals of three months. As many of the

228 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

men earned £2 10s. per week, in a locality where living" was
not costly, it was considered that the taking-up of shares in
this manner would be quite practicable. All the circumstances
were at the outset such as to promise that prosperity which
the company has since achieved. The chairman is no less re
markable for his skill in the conduct of large undertakings
than for that sympathy with the working-classes which led
him to adopt this course. The manager had been a working-
man ; and possessed the confidence of woi'king-men in so high
a degree, that many migrated with him from the Midland
counties when the company was formed. Further, the man
ager entered heartily into the plan — telling me himself, that
he had rejoiced over the founding of a concern in which
those employed would have an interest. His hopes, however,
and those of the chairman, were disappointed. After the
lapse of a year not one of the thousand shares was taken up ;
and they were then distributed among the proprietors. Doubt
less, there have been in other cases more encouraging results.
But this case is one added to others which show that the
proportion of working-men adequately provident is not great
enough to permit an extensive growth of better industrial
organizations.1

Again, the success of industrial organizations higher in
type, requires in the members a nicer sense of justice than is
at present general. Closer co-operation implies greater mutual
trust ; and greater mutual trust is not possible without more
respect for one another's claims. When we find that in sick-
clubs it is not uncommon for members to continue receiving
aid when they are able to work, so that spies have to be set to
check them ; while, on the other hand, those who administer
the funds often cause insolvency by embezzling them ; we
cannot avoid the inference that want of conscientiousness pre
vents the effective union of workers under no regulation but
their own. When, among skilled labourers, we find a certain
rate per hour demanded, because less " did not suffice for their
natural wants," though the unskilled labourers working under
them were receiving little more than half the rate per hour,
and were kept out of the skilled class by stringent rules, we
do not discover a moral sense so much above that shown by
employers as to promise success for industrial combinations

THE CLASS-BIAS. 229

superior to our present ones. While workmen think them
selves justified in combining- to sell their labour only on cer
tain terms, but think masters not justified in combining1 to
buy it only on certain terms, they show a conception of equity
not high enough to make practicable a form of co-operation
requiring that each shall recognize the claims of others as
fully as his own. One pervading- misconception of justice be
trayed by them would alone suffice to cause failure— the mis
conception, namely, that justice requires an equal sharing- of
benefits among producers, instead of requiring-, as it does,
equal freedom to make the best of their faculties. The gen
eral policy of trades-unionism, tending everywhere to restrain
the superior from profiting by his superiority lest the inferior
should be disadvantaged, is a policy which, acted out in any
industrial combinations, must make them incapable of com
peting with combinations based on the principle that benefit
gained shall be proportioned to faculty put forth.

Thus, as acting on the employed in general, the class-bias
obscures the truth, otherwise not easy to see, that the existing
type of industrial organization, like the existing type of polit
ical organization, is about as good as existing human nature
allows. The evils there are in it are nothing but the evils
brought round on men by their own imperfections. The rela
tion of master and workman has to be tolerated, because, for
the time being, no other will answer as well. Looked at apart
from special interests, this organization of industry we now
see around us, must be considered as one in which the cost of
regulation, though not so great as it once was, is still exces
sive. In any industrial combination there must be a regulat
ing agency. That regulating agency, whatever its nature,
must be paid for — must involve a deduction from the total
proceeds of the labour regulated. The present system is one
under which the share of- the total proceeds that goes to pay
for regulation, is considerable ; and under better systems to
be expected hereafter, there will doubtless be a decrease in the
cost of regulation. But, for the present, our comparatively-
costly system has the justification that it alone succeeds. Reg
ulation is costly because the men to be regulated are defec
tive. With decrease of their defects will come economy of reg
ulation, and consequently greater shares of profit to themselves.

230 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

Let me not be misunderstood. The foregoing criticism
does not imply that operatives have no grievances to com
plain of ; nor does it imply that ti'ade-combi nations and strikes
are without adequate justifications. It is quite possible to hold
that when, instead of devouring their captured enemies, men
made slaves of them, the change was a step in advance ; and
to hold that this slavery, though absolutely bad, was relatively
good — was the best thing practicable for the time being. It is
quite possible also to hold that when slavery gave place to a
serfdom under which certain personal rights were recognized,
the new arrangement, though in the abstract an inequitable
one, was more equitable than the old, and constituted as great
an amelioration as men's natures then permitted. It is quite
possible to hold that when, instead of serfs, there came free
men working for wages, but held as a class in extreme sub
ordination, this modified relation of employers and employed,
though bad, was as good a one as could then be established.
And so it may be held that at the present time, though the
form of industrial government entails serious evils, those
evils, much less than the evils of past times, are as small as
the average human nature allows— are not due to any special
injustice of the employing class, and can be remedied only as
fast as men in general advance. On the other hand,

while contending that the policy of trades-unions and the
actions of men on strike, manifest an injustice as great as that
shown by the employing classes, it is quite consistent to ad
mit, and even to assert, that the evil acts of trade-combina
tions are the unavoidable accompaniments of a needful self-
defence. Selfishness on the one side resisting selfishness on
the other, inevitably commits sins akin to those it complains
of — cannot effectually check harsh dealings without itself
using harsh measures. Further, it may be fully admitted
that the evils of working-class combinations, great as they are,
go along with certain benefits, and will hereafter be followed
by greater benefits — are evils involved by the transition to
better arrangements.

Here my purpose is neither to condemn nor to applaud the
ideas and actions of the employed in their dealings with em
ployers ; but simply to point out how the class-bias warps
working-men's judgments of social relations — makes it diffi-

THE CLASS-BIAS. 231

cult for working-men to see that our existing industrial sys
tem is a product of existing human nature, and can be im
proved only as fast as human nature improves.

The ruling and employing classes display an equally-strong
bias of the opposite kind. From their point of view, the be
haviour of their poorer fellow -citizens throughout these strug
gles appears uniformly blarnable. That they experience from
a strike inconvenience more or less considerable, sufficiently
proves to them that the strike must be wrong. They think
there is something intolerable in this independence which
leads to refusals to work except at higher wages or for shorter
times. That the many should be so reckless of the welfare of
the few, seems to the few a grievance not to be endured.
Though Mr. George Potter, as shown above, wrongly speaks
of the consumer as though he were always rich, instead of
being, in nine cases out of ten, poor ; yet he rightly describes
the rich consumer as indignant when operatives dare to take
a course which threatens to raise the prices of necessaries and
make luxuries more costly. This feeling, often betrayed in
private, exhibited itself in public on the occasion of the late
strike among the gas-stokers ; when there were uttered pro
posals that acts entailing so much annoyance should be put
down with a strong hand. And the same spirit was shown in
that straining of the law which brought on the men the pun
ishment for conspiracy, instead of the punishment for breach
of contract ; which was well deserved, and would have been
quite sufficient.

This mental attitude of the employing classes is daily
shown by the criticisms passed on servants. Read The Great
est Plague in Life, or listen to the complaints of every house
wife, and you see that the minds of masters and mistresses are so
much occupied with their own interests as to leave little room
for the interests of the men and maids in their service. The
very title, The Greatest Plague in Life, implies that the only
life worthy of notice is the life to which servants minister ;
and there is an entire unconsciousness that a book with the
same title, written by a servant about masters and mistresses,
might be filled with equally-severe criticisms and grievances
far more serious. The increasing independence of servants is

232 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

enlarged upon as a change greatly to be lamented. There is
no recognition of the fact that this increasing independence
implies an increasing prosperity of the classes from which
servants come ; and that this amelioration in the condition of
the many is a good far greater than the evil entailed on the few.
It is not perceived that if servants, being in great demand and
easily able to get places, will no longer submit to restrictions,
say about dress, like those of past times, the change is part of
the progress towards a social state which, if apparently not so
convenient for the small regulating classes, implies an eleva
tion of the large regulated classes.

The feeling shown by the rich in their thoughts about, and
dealings with, the poor, is, in truth, but a mitigated form of
the feeling which owners of serfs and owners of slaves dis
played. In early times bondsmen were treated as though they
existed simply for the benefit of their owners ; and down to
the present time the belief pervading the select ranks (not in
deed expressed but clearly enough implied) is, that the con
venience of the select is the first consideration, and the welfare
of the masses a secondary consideration. Just as an Old-Eng
lish thane would have been astonished if told that the only
justification for his existence as an owner of thralls, was that
the lives of his thralls were on the whole better preserved and
more comfortable than they would be did he not own them ;
so, now, it will astonish the dominant classes to assert that
their only legitimate raison d'etre is that by their instrumen
tality as regulators, the lives of the people are. on the average,
made more satisfactory than they would otherwise be. And
yet, looked at apart from class-bias, this is surely an undeniable
truth. Ethically considered, there has never been any war
rant for the subjection of the many to the few, except that it
has furthered the welfare of the many ; and at the present
time, furtherance of the welfare of the many is the only war
rant for that degree of class-subordination which continues.
The existing conception must be, in the end, entirely changed.
Just as the old theory of political government has been so
transformed that the ruling agent, instead of being owner of
the nation, has come to be regarded as servant of the nation ;
so the old theory of industrial and social government has to
underg-o a transformation which will make the regulating

THE CLASS-BIAS. 233

classes feel, while duly pursuing their own interests, that their
interests are secondary to the interests of the masses whose
labours they direct.

While the bias of rulers and masters makes it difficult for
them to conceive this, it also makes it difficult for them to con
ceive that a decline of class-power and a decrease of class-dis
tinction may be accompanied by improvement not only in the
lives of the regulated classes, but in the lives of the regulating
classes. The sentiments and ideas proper to the existing social
organization, prevent the rich from seeing that worry and
weariness and disappointment result to them indirectly from
this social system apparently so conducive to their welfare.
Yet, would they contemplate the past, they might find strong
reasons for suspecting as much. The baron of feudal days
never imagined the possibility of social arrangements that
would serve him far better than the arrangements he so
strenuously upheld ; nor did he see in the arrangements he
upheld the causes of his many sufferings and discomforts.
Had he been told that a noble might be much happier with
out a moated castle, having its keep and secret passages and
dungeons for prisoners — that he might be more secure without
drawbridge and portcullis, men-at-arms and sentinels — that he
might be in less danger having no vassals or hired mercenaries
— that he might be wealthier without possessing a single serf ;
he would have thought the statements absurd even to the ex
tent of insanity. It would have been useless to argue that the
regime seeming so advantageous to him, entailed hardships of
many kinds — perpetual feuds with his neighbours, open at
tacks, surprises, betrayals, revenges by equals, treacheries by
inferiors ; the continual carrying of arms and wearing of
armour : the perpetual quarrellings of servants and disputes
among vassals ; the coarse and unvaried food supplied by an
unprosperous agriculture ; a domestic discomfort such as no
modern servant would tolerate ; resulting in a wear and tear
that brought life to a comparatively-early close, if it was not
violently cut short in battle or by murder. Yet what the class-
bias of that time made it impossible for him to see, has become
to his modern representative conspicuous enough. The peer
of our day knows that he is better off without defensive ap
pliances and retainers and serfs than his predecessor was with

234 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

them. His country-house is more secure than was an embat
tled tower ; he is safer among his unarmed domestics than a
feudal lord was when surrounded by armed guards ; he is in
less danger going about weaponless than was the mail-clad
knight with lance arid sword. Though he has no vassals to
fight at his command, there is no suzerain who can call on
him to sacrifice his life in a quarrel not his own ; though he
can compel 110 one to labour, the labours of freemen make
him immensely more wealthy than was the ancient holder of
bondsmen ; and along with the loss of direct control over
workers, there has grown up an industrial system which sup
plies him with multitudinous conveniences and luxuries un
dreamt of by him who had workers at his mercy.

May we not, then, infer that just as the dominant classes of
ancient days were prevented by tho feelings and ideas appro
priate to the then-existing social state, from seeing how much
evil it brought on them, and how much better for them might
be a social state in which their power was much less ; so the
dominant classes of the present day are prevented from seeing
how the existing forms of class-subordination redound to their
own injury, and how much happier may be their future rep
resentatives having social positions less prominent ? Occa
sionally recognizing, though they do, certain indirect evils
attending their supremacy, they do not see that by accumula
tion these indirect evils constitute a penalty which supremacy
brings on them. Though they repeat the trite reflection that
riches fail to purchase content, they do not draw the inference
that there must be something wrong in a system which thus
deludes them. You hear it from time to time admitted that
great wealth is a heavy burden : the life of a rich peer being
described as made like the life of an attorney by the extent of
his affairs. You observe among those whose large means and
various estates enable them to multiply their appliances to
gratification, that every new appliance becomes an additional
something to be looked after, and adds to the possibilities of
vexation. Further, if you put together the open confessions
and the tacit admissions, you find that, apart from these anxie
ties and annoyances, the kind of life which riches and honours
bring is not a satisfactory life — its inside differs immensely
from its outside. In candid moments the " social treadmill "

THE CLASS-BIAS. 235

is complained of by those who nevertheless think themselves
compelled to keep up its monotonous round. As everyone
may see, fashionable life is passed, not in being happy, but in
playing1 at being happy. And yet the manifest corollary is
not drawn by those engaged in this life.

To an outsider it is obvious that the benefits obtained by
the regulative classes of our day, through the existing form of
social organization, are full of disguised evils ; and that this
undue wealth which makes possible the passing of idle lives
brings dissatisfactions in place of the satisfactions expected.
Just as in feudal times the appliances for safety were the ac
companiments to a social state that brought a more than
equivalent danger; so, now, the excess of aids to pleasure
among the rich is the accompaniment of a social state that
brings a counterbalancing displeasure. The gratifications
reached by those who make the pursuit of gratifications a
business, dwindle to a minimum ; while the trouble, and
weariness, and vexation, and jealousy, and disappointment,
rise to a maximum. That this is an inevitable result any

one may see who studies the psychology of the matter. The
pleasure-hunting life fails for the reason that it leaves large
parts of the nature unexercised : it neglects the satisfactions
gained by successful activity, and there is missing from it the
serene consciousness of services rendered to others. Egoistic
enjoyments continuously pursued, pall because the appetites
for them are satiated in times much shorter than our waking
lives give us : leaving times that are either empty or spent in
efforts to get enjoyment after desire has ceased. They pall
also from the want of that broad contrast which arises when a
moiety of life is actively occupied. These negative causes of
dissatisfaction are joined with the positive cause indicated —
the absence of that content gained by successful achievement.
One of the most massive and enduring gratifications is the
sense of personal worth, ever afresh demonstrating itself to
consciousness by effectual action ; and an idle life is balked
of its hopes partly because it lacks this. Lastly, the implied
neglect of altruistic activities, or of activities felt to be in some
way serviceable to others, brings kindred evils — a deficiency
of certain positive pleasures of a high order, not easily ex
hausted, and a further falling-back on egoistic pleasures, again

236 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

tending towards satiety. And all this, with its resulting1 wear
iness and discontent, we may trace to a social organization
under which there comes to the regulating classes a share of
produce great enough to make possible large accumulations
that support useless descendants.

The bias of the wealthy in favour of arrangements appar
ently so conducive to their comforts and pleasures, while it
shuts out the perception of these indirect penalties brought
round on them by their seeming advantages, also shuts out
the perception that there is anything mean in being a useless
consumer of things which others produce. Contrariwise,
there still survives, though much weakened, the belief that it
is honourable to do nothing but seek enjoyment, and relatively
dishonourable to pass life in supplying others with the means
to enjoyment. In this, as in other things, our temporary state
brings a temporary standard of honour appropriate to it ; and
the accompanying sentiments and ideas exclude the concep
tion of a state in which what is now thought admirable will
be thought disgraceful. Yet it needs only, as before, to

aid imagination by studying other times and other societies,
remote in nature from our own, to see at least the possibility
of this. When we contrast the feeling of the Fijians, among
whom a man has a restless ambition to be acknowledged as a
murderer, with the feeling among civilized races, who shrink
with horror from a murderer, we get undeniable proof that
men in one social state pride themselves in characters and
deeds elsewhere held in the greatest detestation. Seeing
which, we may infer that just as the Fijians, believing in the
honourableness of murder, are regarded by us with astonish
ment ; so those of our own day who pride themselves in con
suming much and producing nothing, and who care little for
the well-being of their society so long as it supplies them
good dinners, soft beds, and pleasant lounging-places, may be
regarded with astonishment by men of times to come, living
under higher social forms. Nay, we may see not merely

the possibility of such a change in sentiment, but the prob
ability. Observe, first, the feeling still extant in China, where
the honourableness of doing nothing, more strongly held than
here, makes the wealthy wear their nails so long that they
have to be tied back out of the way, and makes the ladies

THE CLASS-BIAS. 237

submit to prolonged tortures that their crushed feet may show
their incapacity for work. Next, remember that in genera
tions gone by, both here and on the Continent, the disgrace-
fulness of trade was an article of faith among the upper
classes, maintained very strenuously. Now mark how mem
bers of the landed class are going into business, and even
sons of peers becoming professional men and merchants ; and
observe among the wealthy the feeling that men of their
order have public duties to perform, and that the absolutely-
idle among them are blameworthy. Clearly, then, we have
grounds for inferring that, along with the progress to a regu
lative organization higher than the present, there will be a
change of the kind indicated in the conception of honour.
It will become a matter of wonder that there should ever
have existed those who thought it admirable to enjoy with
out working, at the expense of others who worked without
enjoying.

But the temporarily-adapted mental state of the ruling and
employing classes, keeps out, more or less effectually, thoughts
and feelings of these kinds. Habituated from childhood to
the forms of subordination at present existing — regarding
these as parts of a natural and permanent order — finding satis
faction in supremacy, and conveniences in the possession of
authority ; the regulators of all kinds remain unconscious
that this system, made necessary as it is by the defects of ex
isting human nature, brings round penalties on themselves as
well as on those subordinate to them, and that its pervading
theory of life is as mistaken as it is ignoble.

Enough has been said to show that from the class-bias arise
further obstacles to right thinking in Sociology. As a part of
some general division of his community, and again as a part
of some special sub-division, the citizen acquires adapted feel
ings and ideas which inevitably influence his conclusions
about public affairs. They affect alike his conceptions of the
past, his interpretations of the present, his anticipations of the
future.

Members of the regulated classes, kept in relations more or
less antagonistic with the classes regulating them, are thereby
hindered from seeing the need for, and the benefits of, this

238 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

organization which seems the cause of their grievances ; they
are at the same time hindered from seeing the need for, and
the benefits of, those harsher forms of industrial regulation
that existed during past times ; and they are also hindered
from seeing that the improved industrial organizations of the
future, can come only through improvements in their own
natures. On the other hand, members of the regulating
classes, while partially blinded to the facts that the defects of
the working-classes are the defects of natures like their own
placed under different conditions, and that the existing sys
tem is defensible, not for its convenience to themselves, but as
being the best now practicable for the community at large ;
are also partially blinded to the vices of past social arrange
ments, and to the badness of those who in past social systems;
used class-power less mercifully than it is used now ; while
they have difficulty in seeing that the present social order, like
past social orders, is but transitory, and that the regulating
classes of the future may have, with diminished power, in
creased happiness.

Unfortunately for the Social Science, the class-bias, like
the bias of patriotism, is, in a degree, needful for social pres
ervation. It is like in this, too, that escape from its influ
ence is often only effected by an effort that carries belief to
an opposite extreme— changing approval into a disapproval
that is entire instead of partial. Hence in the one case, as in
the other, we must infer that the resulting obstacle to well-
balanced conclusions, can become less only as social evolution
becomes greater.

CHAPTER XI.

THE POLITICAL BIAS.

EVERY day brings events that show the politician what the
events of the next day are likely to be, while they serve also
as materials for the student of Social Science. Scarcely a
journal can be read, that does not supply a fact which, be
yond the proximate implication seized by the party-tactician,
has an ultimate implication of value to the sociologist. Thus
a propos of political bias, I am, while writing, furnished by
an Irish paper with an extreme instance. Speaking of the
late Ministerial defeat, the Nation says : —

" Mr. Gladstone and his administration are hurled from power, and
the iniquitous attempt to sow broadcast the seed of irreligion and in
fidelity in Ireland has recoiled with the impact of a thunderbolt upon
its authors. The men who so long beguiled the ear of Ireland with
specious promises, who mocked us with sham reforms and insulted us
with barren concessions, who traded on the grievances of this country
only to aggravate them, and who, with smooth professions on their
lips, trampled out the last traces of liberty in the land, are to-day a
beaten and outcast party."

Which exhibition of feeling we may either consider specially,
as showing how the "Nationalists" are likely to behave in
the immediate future; or may consider more generally, as
giving us a trait of Irish nature tending to justify Mr. Froude's
harsh verdict on Irish conduct in the past ; or may consider
most generally, after the manner here appropriate, as a strik
ing example of the distortions which the political bias works
in men's judgments.

When we remember that all are thus affected more or less,
in estimating antagonists, their acts, and their views, we are
reminded what an immense obstacle political partlzanship is

24:0 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

in the way of Social Science. I do not mean simply that, as
all know, it often determines opinions about pending1 ques
tions ; as shown by cases in which a measure reprobated by
Conservatives when brought forward by Liberals, is approved
when brought forward by their own party. I refer to the far
wider effect it has on men's interpretations of the past and of
the future ; and therefore 011 their sociological conceptions in
general. The political sympathies and antipathies fostered by
the conflicts of parties, respectively upholding this or that
kind of institution, become sympathies and antipathies drawn
out towards allied institutions of other nations, extinct or sur
viving. These sympathies and antipathies inevitably cause
tendencies to accept or reject favourable or unfavorable evi
dence respecting such institutions. The well-known contrast
between the pictures which the Tory Mitford and the Radical
Grote have given of the Athenian democracy, serves as an in
stance to which many parallels may be found. In proof of
the perverting effects of the political bias, I cannot do better
than quote some sentences from Mr. Froude's lecture on '' The
Scientific Method applied to History.''

" Thucydides wrote to expose the vices of democracy ; Tacitus, the
historian of the Caesars, to exhibit the hatefulness of Imperialism." l

" Read Macaulay on the condition of the English poor before the
last century or two, and you wonder how they lived at all. Read
Cobbett, and I may even say Hallam, and you wonder how they en
dure the contrast between their past prosperity and their present
misery." 2

" An Irish Catholic prelate once told me that to his certain knowl
edge two millions of men, women, and children had died in the great
famine of 1846. I asked him if he was not including those who had
emigrated. He repeated that over and above the emigration two mill
ions had actually died ; and added, ' we might assert that every one
of these deaths lay at the door of the English Government.' I men
tioned this to a distinguished lawyer in Dublin, a Protestant. His
grey eyes lighted up. He replied : ' Did he say two millions now —
did he? Why there were not a thousand died — there were not five
hundred.' The true number, so far as can be gathered from a com
parison of the census of 1841 with the census of 1851, from the emi
gration returns, which were carefully made, and from an allowance for
the natural rate of increase, was about two hundred thousand." 3

Further insistance on this point is needless. That the ver-

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 241

diets which will be given by different party-journals upon
each ministerial act may be predicted, and that the opposite
opinions uttered by speakers and applauded by meetings con
cerning the same measure, may be foreseen if the political
bias is known ; are facts from which any one may infer that
the party politician must have his feelings greatly moderated
before he can interpret, with even approximate truth, the
events of the past, and draw correct inferences respecting the
future.

Here, instead of dilating on this truth, I will call attention
to kindred truths that are less conspicuous. Beyond those
kinds of political bias indicated by the names of political
parties, there are certain kinds of political bias transcending
party-limits. Already in the chapter on "Subjective Diffi
culties — Emotional," I have commented on the feeling which
originates them — the feeling drawn out towards the govern
ing agency. In addition to what was there said respecting
the general effects of this feeling 011 sociological inquiry,
something must be said about its special effects. And first,
let us contemplate a common fallacy in men's opinions about
human affairs, which pervades the several fallacies fostered by
the political bias.

Results are proportionate to appliances — see here the tacit
assumption underlying many errors in the conduct of life,
private and public. In private life everyone discovers the un
truth of this assumption, and yet continues to act as though
he had not discovered its untruth. Reconsider a moment,
under this fresh aspect, a familiar experience lately dwelt
upon.

"How happy I shall be," thinks the child, "when I am as
old as my big brother, and own all the many things he will
not let me have." "How happy," the big brother thinks,
" shall I be when, like my father. I have got a house of my
own and can do as I like." " How happy I shall be," thinks
the father, " when, achieving the success in prospect, I have
got a large income, a country house, carriages, horses, and a
higher social position." And yet at each stage the possession
of the much-desired aids to satisfaction does not bring all the
happiness expected, and brings many annoyances.
17

242 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

A good example of the fallacy that results are proportion
ate to appliances, is furnished by domestic service. It is an
inference naturally drawn that if one servant does so much,
two servants will do twice as much ; and so on. But when
this common-sense theory is tested by practice, the results are
quite at variance with it. Not simply does the amount of serv
ice performed fail to increase in proportion to the number of
servants, but frequently it decreases : fewer servants do more
wrork and do it better.

Take, again, the relation of books to knowledge. The nat
ural assumption is that one who has stores of information at
hand will become well-informed. And yet, very generally,
when a man begins to accumulate books he ceases to make
much use of them. The filling of his shelves with volumes
and the filling of his brain with facts, are processes apt to go
on with inverse rapidities. It is a trite remark that those who
have become distinguished for their learning, have often been
those who had great difficulties in getting books. Here, too,
the results are quite out of proportion to the appliances.

Similarly if wTe go a step further in the same direction — not
thinking of books as aids to information, but thinking of in
formation as an aid to guidance. Do we find that the quan
tity of acquirement measures the quantity of insight ? Is the
amount of cardinal truth reached to be inferred from the mass
of collected facts that serve as appliances for reaching it ? By
no means. Wisdom and information do not vary together.
Though there must be data before there can be generalization,
yet ungeneralized data acctimulated in excess, are impedi
ments to generalization. When a man's knowledge is not in
order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion
of thought. When facts are not organized into faculty, the
greater the mass of them the more will the mind stagger
along under its burden, hampered instead of helped by its
acquisitions. A student may become a very Daniel Lambert
of learning, and remain utterly useless to himself and all
others. Neither in this case, then, are results proportionate to
appliances.

It is so, too, with discipline, and with the agencies estab
lished for discipline. Take, as an instance, the use of lan
guage. From his early days the boy whose father can afford

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 243

to give him the fashionable education, is drilled in grammar,
practised in parsing1, tested in detecting errors of speech. After
his public-school career, during which words, their meanings,
and their right applications, almost exclusively occupy him,
he passes through a University where a large, and often the
larger, part of his attention is still given to literary culture —
models of style in prose and poetry being daily before him.
So much for the preparation ; now for the performance. It is
notorious that commentators on the classics are among the
most slovenly writers of English. Readers of Punch will re
member how, years ago, the Provost and Head-Master of
Eton were made to furnish food for laughter by quotations
from a letter they had published. Recently the Head-Master
of Winchester has given us, in entire unconsciousness of its
gross defects, a sample of the English which long study of
language produces. If from these teachers, who are literally
the select of the select, we turn to men otherwise selected,
mostly out of the same highly-disciplined class — men who are
distilled into the House of Commons, and then re-distilled into
the Ministry, we are again disappointed. Just as in the last
generation, Royal Speeches drawn up by those so laboriously
trained in the right use of words, furnished for an English
grammar examples of blunders to be avoided ; so in the pres
ent generation, a work on style might fitly take from these
documents which our Government annually lays before all
the world, warning instances of confusions, and illogicalities,
and pleonasms. And then on looking at the performances of
men not thus elaborately prepared, we are still more struck by
the seeming anomaly. How great the anomaly is, we may
best see by supposing some of our undisciplined authors to
use expressions like those used by the disciplined. Imagine
the self-made Cobbett deliberately saying, as is said in the last
Royal Speech, that—

"I have kept in view the double object of an equitable regard to
existing circumstances, and of securing a general provision more
permanent in its character, and resting on a reciprocal and equal basis,
for the commercial and maritime transactions of the two countries."4
Imagine the poet who had " little Latin and less Greek," giv
ing the order that —

" No such address shall be delivered in any place where the assem-

244 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

blage of persons to hear the same may cause obstruction to the use of
any road or walk by the public." 6

— an order which occurs, along with half-a-dozen lax and su
perfluous phrases, in the eighteen lines announcing the minis
terial retreat from the Hyde-Park contest. Imagine the
ploughman Burns, like one of our scholars who has heen
chosen to direct the education of gentlemen's sons, expressing
himself in print thus —

" I should not have troubled you with this detail (which was, in
deed, needless in my former letter) if it was not that I may appear to
have laid a stress upon the dates which the boy's accident has pre
vented rne from being able to claim to do."6

Imagine Bunyan, the tinker, publishing such a sentence as
this, written by one of our bishops : —

" If the 546 gentlemen who signed the protest on the subject of
deaconesses had thought proper to object to my having formally
licensed a deaconess in the parish of Dilton's Marsh, or to what they
speak of when they say that ' recognition had been made ' (I presume
on a report of which no part or portion was adopted by resolution of
the Synod) 'as to sisters living together in a more conventual manner
and under stricter rule,' I should not have thought it necessary to do
more than receive with silent respect the expression of their opinion ;"
&c., &C.1

Or, to cite for comparison modern self-educated writers, im
agine such a sentence coming from Hugh Miller, or Alexander
Smith, or Gerald Massey, or "the Norwich weaver-boy" (W.
J. Fox), or " the Journeyman Engineer." Shall we then say
that in the case of literary culture, results are proportionate to
appliances ? or shall we not rather say that, as in other cases,
the relation is by no means so simple a one.

Nowhere, then, do we find verified this assumption which
we are so prone to make. Quantity of effect does not vary as
quantity of means. From a mechanical apparatus up to an
educational system or a social institution, the same truth
holds. Take a rustic to see a new machine, and his admiration
of it will be in proportion to the multiplicity of its parts.
Listen to the criticism of a skilled engineer, and you find that
from all this complication he infers probable failure. Not
elaboration but simplification is his aim : knowing, as he
does, that every additional wheel or lever implies inertia and

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 245

friction to be overcome, and occasional derangement to be recti
fied. It is thus everywhere. Up to a certain point appliances
are needful for results ; but beyond that point, results decrease
as appliances increase.

This undue belief in appliances, joined with the general
bias citizens inevitably have in favour of governmental agen
cies, prompts the multiplication of laws. It fosters the notion
that a society will be the better the more its actions are every
where regulated by artificial instrumentalities. And the effect
produced on sociological speculation is, that the benefits
achieved by laws are exaggerated, while the evils they entail
are overlooked.

Brought to bear on so immensely-complicated an aggregate
as a society, a law rarely, if ever, produces as much direct
effect as was expected, and invariably produces indirect effects,
many in their kinds and great in their sum, that were not ex
pected. It is so even with fundamental changes : witness tbe
two we have seen in the constitution of our House of Com
mons. Both advocates and opponents of the first Reform Bill
anticipated that the middle classes would select as representa
tives many of their own body. But both were wrong. The
class-quality of the House of Commons remained very much
what it was before. While, however, the immediate and spe
cial result looked for did not appear, there were vast remote
and general results foreseen by no one. So, too, with the re
cent change. We had eloquently-uttered warnings that dele
gates from the working-classes would swamp the House of
Commons ; and nearly everyone expected that, at any rate, a
sprinkling of working-class members would be chosen. Again
all were wrong. The conspicuous alteration looked for has
not occurred ; but, nevertheless, governmental actions have
already been much modified by the raised sense of responsi
bility. It is thus always. No prophecy is safer than that the
results anticipated from a law will be greatly exceeded in
amount by results not anticipated. Even simple physical ac
tions might suggest to us this conclusion. Let us contem
plate one.

You see that this wrought-iron plate is not quite flat: it
sticks up a little here towards the left — " cockles," as we say.

24:6 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

How shall we flatten it ? Obviously, you reply, by hitting
down on the part that is prominent. Well, here is a hammer,
and I give the plate a blow as you advise. Harder, you say.
Still no effect. Another stroke ? Well, there is one, and an
other, and another. The prominence remains, you see: the
evil is as great as ever — greater, indeed. But this is not all.
Look at the warp which the plate has got near the opposite
edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A pretty
bungle we have made of it. Instead of curing the original
defect, we have produced a second. Had we asked an artizaii
practised in " planishing," as it is called, he would have told
us that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting
down on the projecting part. He would have taught us how
to give variously-directed and specially-adjusted blows with
a hammer elsewhere : so attacking the evil not by direct but
by indirect actions. The required process is less simple than
you thought. Even a sheet of metal is not to be successfully
dealt with after those common-sense methods in which you
have so much confidence. What, then, shall we say about a
society ? " Do you think I am easier to be played on than a
pipe ? '' asks Hamlet. Is humanity more readily straightened
than an iron plate ?

Many, I doubt not. failing to recognize the truth that in
proportion as an aggregate is complex, the effects wrought by
an incident force becomes more multitudinous, confused, and
incalculable, and that therefore a society is of all kinds of ag
gregates the kind most difficult to affect in an intended way
and not in unintended ways — many such wall ask evidence of
the difficulty. Eesponse would perhaps be easier were the
evidence less abundant. It is so familiar as seemingly to
have lost its significance ; just as perpetually-repeated saluta
tions and prayers have done. The preamble to nearly every
Act of Parliament supplies it ; in the report of every commis
sion it is presented in various forms : and for anyone asking
instances, the direction might be— Hansard passim. Here I
will give but a single example which might teach certain rash
enthusiasts of our day, were they teachable. I refer to meas
ures for the suppression of drunkenness.

Not to dwell on the results of the Maine Law, which, as I
know from one whose personal experience verified current

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 247

statements, prevents the obtainment of stimulants by travel
lers in urgent need of them, but does not prevent secret drink
ing by residents— not to dwell, either, upon the rigorous
measures taken in Scotland in 1617, ''for the restraint of the
vile and detestable vice of drunkenness daily increasing," but
which evidently did not produce the hoped-for effect ; I will
limit myself to the case of the Licensing Act, 9 Geo. II., ch.
23, for arresting the sale of spirituous liquors (chiefly gin) by
prohibitory licences.

" Within a few months after it passed, Tindal tells us, the commis
sioners of excise themselves became sensible of the impossibility or
unadvisableness of carrying it rigorously into execution. * * *
Smollett, who has drawn so dark a picture of the state of things the
act was designed to put down, has painted in colours equally strong
the mischiefs which it produced :— ' The populace,' he writes, ' soon
broke through all restraint. Though no licence was obtained and no
duty paid, the liquor continued to be sold in all corners of the streets ;
informers were intimidated by the threats of the people; and the jus
tices of the peace, either from indolence or corruption, neglected to
put the law in execution.' In fact, in course of time, ' it appeared,' he
adds, ' that the consumption of gin had considerably increased every
year since those heavy duties were imposed.' "8

When, in 1743, this Act was repealed, it was shown during
the debates that —

" The quantity of gin distilled in England, which, in 1C84, when
the business was introduced into this country, had been 527,000 gal
lons, had risen to 948,000 in 1G94. to 1.375,000 in 1704, to 2,000,000 in
1714. to 3,520.000 in 1724, to 4.947.000 in 1734, and to not less than
7.100,000 in 1742. * * * ' Retailers were deterred from vending
them [spirituous liquors] by the utmost encouragement that could be
given to informers. * * * The prospect of raising money by de
tecting their [unlicensed retailers'] practices incited many to turn
information into a trade ; and the facility with which the crime was
to be proved encouraged some to gratify their malice by perjury, and
others their avarice ; so that the multitude of informations became a
public grievance, and the magistrates themselves complained that the
law was not to be executed. The perjuries of informers were now so
flagrant and common, that the people thought all informations ma
licious ; or, at least, thinking themselves oppressed by the law, they
looked upon every man that promoted its execution as their enemy ;
and therefore now began to declare war against informers, many of

248 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

whom they treated with great cruelty, and some they murdered in
the streets.' " 9

Here, then, with absence of the looked-for benefit there
went pi-eduction of unlooked-for evils, vast in amount. To
recur to our figure, the original warp, instead of being made
less by these direct blows, was made greater ; while other dis
tortions, serious in kind and degree, were created. And be
yond the encouragement of fraud, lying, malice, cruelty,
murder, contempt of law, and the other conspicuous crooked
nesses named, multitudinous minor twists of sentiment and
thought were caused or augmented. An indirect demoraliza
tion was added to a direct increase of the vice aimed at.

Joining with the prevalent fallacy that results are propor
tionate to appliances, the general political bias has the further
effect of fostering an undue faith in political forms. This
tendency to ascribe everything to a visible proximate agency,
and to forget the hidden forces without which the agency is
worthless— this tendency which makes the child gazing at a
steam-engine suppose that all is done by the combination of
parts it sees, not recognizing the fact that the engine is power
less without the steam-generating boiler, and the boiler power
less without the water and the burning fuel, is a tendency
which leads citizens to think that good government can be
had by shaping public arrangements in this way or that way.
Let us frame our state-machinery rightly, they urge, and all
will be well.

Yet this belief in the innate virtues of constitutions is as
baseless as was the belief in the natural superiorities of royal
personages. Just, as of old, loyalty to ruling men kept alive
a faith in their powers and virtues, notwithstanding perpetual
disproofs ; so, in these modern days, loyalty to constitutional
forms keeps alive this faith in their intrinsic worth, spite of re
curring demonstrations that their worth is entirely conditional.
That those forms only are efficient which have grown natural
ly out of character, and that in the absence of fit character
forms artificially obtained will be inoperative, is well shown
by the governments of trading corporations. Let us contem
plate a typical instance of this government.

The proprietors of a certain railway (I am here giving my

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 249

personal experience as one of them) were summoned to a
special meeting. The notice calling- them together stated that
the directors had agreed to lease their line to another com
pany ; that everything had been settled ; that the company
taking the lease was then in possession ; and that the pro
prietors were to be asked for their approval on the day named
in the notice. The meeting took place. The chairman gave
an account of the negotiation and of the agreement entered
into. A motion expressing approval of the agreement was
proposed and to some extent discussed— no notice whatever
being taken of the extraordinary conduct of the board.
Only when the motion was about to be put, did one pro
prietor protest against the astounding usurpation which the
transaction implied. He said that there had grown up a
wrong conception of the relation between boards of directors
and bodies of proprietors ; that directors had come to look on
themselves as supreme and proprietors as subordinate, where
as, in fact, directors were simply agents appointed to act in
the absence of their principals, the proprietors, and remained
subject to their principals ; that if, in any private business, an
absent proprietor received from his manager the news that he
had leased the business, that the person taking it was then in
possession, and that the proprietor's signature to the lease was
wanted, his prompt return would be followed by a result quite
different from that looked for — namely, a dismissal of the
manager for having exceeded his duty in a very astonishing
manner. This protest against the deliberate trampling down
of principles recognized by the constitutions of companies,
met with no response whatever — not a solitary sympathizer
joined in the protest, even in a qualified form. Not only was
the motion of approval carried, but it was carried without any
definite knowledge of the agreement itself. Nothing more
than the chairman's verbal description was vouchsafed : no
printed copies of it had been previously circulated, or were to
be had at the meeting. And yet, wonderful to relate, this
proprietary body had been already once betrayed by an agree
ment with this same leasing company ! — had been led to un
dertake the making of the line on the strength of a seeming
guarantee which proved to be no guarantee ! See, then,

the lesson. The constitution of this company, like that of

250 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

companies in general, was purely democratic. The proprietors
elected their directors, the directors their chairman ; and there
were special provisions for restraining directors and replacing
them when needful. Yet these forms of free government had
fallen into disuse. And it is thus in all cases. Save 011 occa
sions when some scandalous mismanagement, or corruption
bringing great loss, has caused a revolutionary excitement
among them, rail way -proprietors do not exercise their power's.
Retiring directors being re-elected as a matter of form, the
boai'd becomes practically a close body ; usually some one
member, often the chairman, acquires supremacy ; and so the
government lapses into something between oligarchy and
monarchy. All this, observe, happening not exceptionally but
as a rule, happens among bodies of men mostly well educated,
and many highly educated — people of means, merchants, law
yers, clergymen, &c. Ample disproof, if there needed any, of
the notion that men are to be fitted for the right exercise of
power by teaching.

And now to return. Anyone who looks through these
facts and facts akin to them for the truth they imply, may see
that forms of government arc valuable only where they are
products of national character. No cunningly -devised polit
ical arrangements will of themselves do anything. No
amount of knowledge respecting the uses of such arrange
ments will suffice. Nothing will suffice but the emotional
nature to which such arrangements are adapted — a nature
which, during social progress, has evolved the arrangements.
And wherever there is want of congruity between the nature
and the arrangements — wherever the arrangements, suddenly
established by revolution or pushed too far by reforming
change, are of a higher type than the national character de
mands, there is always a lapse proportionate to the incongru
ity. In proof I might enumerate the illustrations that lie
scattered through the modern histories of Greece, of South
America, of Mexico. Or I might dwell on the lesson (before
briefly referred to) presented us in France ; where the political
cycle shows us again and again that new Democracy is but
old Despotism differently spelt — where now, as heretofore, we
find Liberte, Egalite, Fraternitt, conspicuous on the public
buildings, and now, as heretofore, have for interpretations of

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 251

these words the extremest party-hatreds, vituperations and
actual assaults in the Assemhly, wholesale arrests of men un
friendly to those in power, forbiddings of public meetings,
and suppressions of journals ; and where now, as heretofore,
writers professing to be ardent advocates of political freedom,
rejoice in these acts which shackle and gag their antagonists.
But I will take, instead, a case more nearly allied to our own.
For less strikingly, and in other ways, but still with suffi
cient clearness, this same truth is displayed in the United
States. I do not refer only to such extreme illustrations of it
as were at one time furnished in California ; where, along
with that complete political freedom which some think the
sole requisite for social welfare, most men lived in perpetual
fear for their lives, while others prided themselves on the
notches which marked, on the hilts of their pistols, the num
bers of men they had killed. Nor will I dwell on the state of
society existing under republican forms in the West, where a
white woman is burned to death for marrying a negro, where
secret gangs murder in the night' men whose conduct they
dislike, where mobs stop trains to lynch offending persons
contained in them, where the carrying of a revolver is a
matter of course, where judges are intimidated and the execu
tion of justice often impracticable. I do but name these as
extreme instances of the way in which, under institutions that
nominally secure men from oppression, they may be intoler
ably oppressed — unable to utter their opinions and to conduct
their private lives as they please. Without going so far, we
may find in the Eastern states proof enough that the forms of
liberty and the reality of liberty are not necessarily commen
surate. A state of things under which men administer justice
in their own cases, are applauded for so doing, and mostly ac
quitted if tried, is a state of things which has, in so far, retro
graded towards a less civilized state ; for one of the cardinal
traits of political progress is the gradual disappearance of per
sonal retaliation, and the increasing supremacy of a ruling
power which settles the differences between individuals and
punishes aggressors. And in proportion as this ruling power
is enfeebled the security of individuals is lessened. How se
curity, lessened in this general way, is lessened in more special
ways, we see in the bribery of judges, in the financial frauds

252 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

by which many are robbed without possibility of remedy, in
the corruptness of New York administration, which, taxing so
heavily, does so little. And, under another aspect, we see the
like in the doings of legislative bodies — in the unfair advan
tages which some individuals gain over others by "lobbying,"
in Credit-Mobilier briberies, and the like. While the outside
form of free government remains, there has grown up within
it a reality which makes government not free. The body of
professional politicians, entering public life to get incomes,
organizing their forces and developing their tactics, have, in
fact, come to be a ruling class quite different from that which
the constitution intended to secure ; and a class having inter
ests by no means identical with public interests. This
worship of the appliances to liberty in place of liberty itself,
needs continually exposing. There is no intrinsic virtue in
votes. The possession of representatives is not itself a benefit.
These are but means to an end ; and the end is the mainte
nance of those conditions under which each citizen may carry
on his life without further hindrances from other citizens than
are involved by their equal claims — is the securing to each
citizen all such beneficial results of his activities as his activi
ties naturally bring. The worth of the means must be meas
ured by the degree in which this end is achieved. A citizen
nominally having complete means and but partially securing
the end, is less free than another who uses incomplete means
to more purpose.

But why go abroad for proofs of the truth that political
forms are of worth only in proportion as they are vitalized by
national character ? We have proofs at home. I do not
mean those furnished by past constitutional history— I do not
merely refer to those many facts showing us that the nominal
power of our representative body became an actual power
only by degrees ; and that the theoretically-independent
House of Commons took centuries to escape from regal and
aristocratic sway, and establish a practical independence. I
refer to the present time, and to actions of our representative
body in the plenitude of its power. This assembly of deputies
chosen by large constituencies, and therefore so well fitted, as
it would seem, for guarding the individual of whatever grade
against trespasses upon his individuality, nevertheless itself

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 253

authorizes new trespasses upon his individuality. A popular
government has established, without the slightest hindrance,
an official organization that treats with contempt the essential
principles of constitutional rule ; and since it has been made
still more popular, has deliberately approved and maintained
this organization. Here is a brief account of the steps leading
to these results.

On the 20th June, 1864, just before 2 o'clock in the morn
ing, there was read a first time an Act giving, in some locali
ties, certain new powers to the police. On the 27th of that
month, it was read a second time, entirely without comment —
at what hour Hansard does not show. Just before 2 o'clock
in the morning on. June 30th, there was appointed, without
remark, a Select Committee to consider this proposed Act.
On the 15th July the Report of this Committee was received.
On the 19th the Bill was re-committed, and the Report on it
received — all in silence. On the 20th July it was considered
— still in silence — as amended. And on the 21st July it was
read a third time and passed — equally in silence. Taken next
day to the House of Lords, it there, in silence no less profound,
passed through all its stages in four days (? three). This Act
not proving strong enough to meet the views of naval and
military officers (who, according to the testimony of one of
the Select Committee, were the promoters of it), was, in 1866,
"amended." At 1 o'clock in the morning on March 16th of
that year, the Act amending it was read a first time ; and it
was read a second time on the 22nd, when the Secretary of
the Admiralty, describing it as an Act to secure the better
health of soldiers and sailors, said " it was intended to renew
an Act passed in 1864, with additional powers." And now,
for the first time, there came brief adverse remarks from two
members. On April 9th there was appointed a Select Com
mittee, consisting mainly of the same members as the previous
one — predominantly state-officers of one class or other. On
the 20th, the Report of the Committee was received. On the
26th, the Bill was re-committed just before 2 o'clock in the
morning ; and on the Report there came some short com
ments, which were, however, protested against on the ground
that the Bill was not to be publicly discussed. And here ob
serve the reception given to the only direct opposition raised.

254 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

When, to qualify a clause defining1 the powers of the police, it
was proposed to add, " that the justices before whom such in
formation shall be made, shall in all cases require corrobora
tive testimony and support thereof, other than that of the
members of the police force," this qualification was negatived
without a word. Finally, this Act was approved and made
more stringent by the present House of Commons in 1809.

And now what was this Act, passed the first time ab
solutely without comment, and passed in its so-called amended
form with but the briefest comments, made under protest that
comments were interdicted ? What was this measure, so
conspicuously right that discussion of it was thought super
fluous ? It was a measure by which, in certain localities,
one-half of the people were brought under the summary
jurisdiction of magistrates, in respect of certain acts charged
against them. Further, those by whom they were to be
charged, and by whose unsupported testimony charges were
to be proved, were agents of the law, looking for promotion as
the reward of vigilance — agents placed under a permanent
temptation to make and substantiate charges. And yet more,
the substantiation of charges was made comparatively easy,
by requiring only a single local magistrate to be convinced,
by the testimony on oath of one of these agents of the law,
that a person charged was guilty of the alleged acts — acts
which, held to be thus proved, were punished by periodic
examinations of a repulsive kind and forced inclusion in a
degraded class. A House of Commons elected by large con
stituencies, many of them chiefly composed of working-men,
showed the greatest alacrity in making a law under which,
in sundry districts, the liberty of a working-man's wife or
daughter remains intact, only so long as a detective does not
give evidence which leads a magistrate to believe her a pros
titute ! And this Bill which, even had there been some
urgent need (which we have seen there was not) for dispens
ing with precautions against injustice, should, at any rate,
have been passed only after full debate and anxious criticism,
was passed with every effort to maintain secrecy, on the
pretext that decency forbade discussion of it ; while Mor-
daunt-cases and the like were being reported with a fulness
proportionate to the amount of objectionable details they

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 255

brought out! Nor is this all. Not only do the provisions
of the Act make easy the establishment of charges by men
who are placed under temptations to make them ; but these
men are guarded against penalties apt to be brought oil them
by abusing their power. A poor woman who proceeds against
one of them for making a groundless accusation ruinous to
her character, does so with this risk before her ; that if she
fails to get a verdict she has to pay the defendant's costs;
whereas a verdict in her favour does not give her costs : only
by a special order of the judge does she get costs ! And this
is the " even-handed justice " provided by a government freer
in form than any we have ever had ! 10

Let it not be supposed that in arguing thus I am implying
that forms of government are unimportant. While contend
ing that they are of value only in so far as a national charac
ter gives life to them, it is consistent also to contend that
they are essential as agencies through which that national
character may work out its effects. A boy cannot wield to
purpose an implement of size and weight fitted to the hand
of a man. A man cannot do effective work with a boy's
implement : he must have one adapted to his larger grasp
and greater strength. To each the implement is essential ;
but the results which each achieves are not to be measured
by the size or make of the implement alone, but by its adap
tation to his powers. Similarly with political instrumen
talities. It is possible to hold that a political instrumentality
is of value only in proportion as there exists a strength of
character needful for using it, and at the same time to hold
that a fit political instrumentality is indispensable. Here, as
before, results are not proportionate to appliances ; but they
are proportionate to the force for due operation of which
certain appliances are necessary.

One other still more general and more subtle kind of
political bias has to be guarded against. Beyond that excess
of faith in laws, and in political forms, which is fostered by
awe of regulative agencies, there is, even among those least
swayed by this awe, a vague faith in the immediate possi
bility of something much better than now exists — a tacit
assumption that, even with men as they are, public affairs

256 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

might be much better managed. The mental attitude of such
may be best displayed by an imaginary conversation between
one of them and a member of the Legislature.

" Why do your agents, with no warrant but a guess, mako
this surcharge on my income-tax return ; leaving me to pay
an amount that is not due and to establish a precedent for
future like payments, or else to lose valuable time in proving
their assessment excessive, and, while so doing, to expose my
affairs ? You require me to choose between two losses, direct
and indirect, for the sole reason that your assessor fancies,
or professes to fancy, that I have under-stated my income.
Why do you allow this ? Why in this case do you invert the
principle which, in cases between citizens, you hold to be an
equitable one — the principle that a claim must be proved by
him who makes it, not disproved by him against whom it is
made ? Is it in pursuance of old political usages that you
do this ? Is it to harmonize with the practice of making one
whom you had falsely accused, pay the costs of his defence,
although in suits between citizens you require the loser to
bear all the expense ? — a practice you have but lately re
linquished. Do you desire to keep up the spirit of the good
old rulers who impressed labourers and paid them what they
pleased, or the still older rulers who seized whatever they
wanted ? Would you maintain this tradition by laying hands
on as much as possible of my earnings and leaving me to get
part back if I can : expecting, indeed, that I shall submit to
the loss rather than undergo the worry, and hindrance, and
injury, needful to recover what you have wrongfully taken ?
I was brought up to regard the Government and its officers
as my protectors ; and now I find them aggressors against
whom I have to defend myself."

" What would you have ? Our agents could not bring for
ward proof that an income-tax return was less than it should
be. Either the present method must be pursued, or the tax
must be abandoned."

" I have no concern with your alternative. I have merely
to point out that between man and man you recognize no
such plea. When a plaintiff makes a claim but cannot pro
duce evidence, you do not make the defendant submit if he
fails to show that the claim is groundless. You say that if

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 257

no evidence can be given, nothing can be done. Why do you
ignore this principle when your agent makes the claim ?
Why from the fountain of equity comes there this inequity ?
Is it to maintain consistency with that system of criminal
jurisprudence under which, while professing to hold a man
innocent till proved guilty, you treat him before trial like a
convict — as you did Dr. Hessel ? Are your views really
represented by these Middlesex magistrates you have ap
pointed, who see 110 hardships to a man of culture in the
seclusion of a prison-cell, and the subjection to prison-rules,
on the mere suspicion that he has committed a murder ? "

" The magistrates held that the rules allowed them to make
no distinctions. You would not introduce class-legislation
into prison-discipline ? "

" I remember that was one of the excuses ; and I cheerfully
give credit to this endeavour to treat all classes alike. I do so
the more cheerfully because this application of the principle
of equality differs much from those which you ordinarily
make — as when, on discharging some of your well-paid of
ficials who have held sinecures, you give them large pensions,
for the reason, I suppose, that their expensive styles of living
have disabled them from saving anything ; while, when you
discharge dock-yard labourers, you do not give them compen
sation, for the reason, I suppose, that out of weekly wages it is
easy to accumulate a competence. This, however, by the way.
I am here concerned with that action of your judicial system
which makes it an aggressor on citizens, whether rich or poor,
instead of a protector. The instances I have given are but
trivial instances of its general operation. Law is still a name
of dread, as it was in past times. My legal adviser, being my
friend, strongly recommends me not to seek your aid in re
covering property fraudulently taken from me; and I per
ceive, from their remarks, that my acquaintances would pity
me as a lost man if I got into your Court of Equity. Whether
active or passive, I am in danger. Your arrangements are
such that I may be pecuniarily knocked on the head by some
one who pretends I have injured his property. I have the
alternative of letting my pocket be picked by the scamp who
makes this baseless allegation in the hope of being paid to
desist, or of meeting the allegation in Chancery, and there
18

258 TnE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

letting my pocket be picked, probably to a still greater extent,
by your agencies. Nay, when you have, as you profess, done
me justice by giving me a verdict and condemning the scamp
to pay costs, I find I may still be ruined by having to pay
my own costs if he has no means. To make your system con
gruous throughout, it only needs that, when I call him to save
me from the foot-pad, your policeman should deal me still
heavier blows than the foot-pad did, and empty my purse of
what remains in it.''

" Why so impatient ? Are we not going to reform it all ?
Was it not last session proposed to make a Court of Appellate
Jurisdiction by appointing four peers with salaries of £7000
each ? And has there not been brought forward this ses
sion, even quite early, a Government-measure for prevent
ing the conflict of Law and Equity, and for facilitating ap
peals ? "

" Thanks in advance for the improvement. When I have
failed to ruin myself by a first suit, it wrill be a consolation to
think that I can complete my ruin by a second with less delay
than heretofore. Meanwhile, instead of facilitating appeals,
which you seem to tbink of primary importance, I should be
obliged if you would diminish the occasion for appeals, by
making your laws such as it is possible for me to know, or at
any rate, such as it is possible for your judges to know ; and I
should be further obliged if you would give me easier reme
dies against aggressions, instead of remedies so costly, so de
ceptive, so dangerous, that I prefer suffering the aggressions
in silence. Daily I experience the futility of your system. I
start on a journey expecting that in conformity with the ad
vertised times, I shall just be able to reach a certain distant
town before night ; but the train being an hour late at one of
the junctions, I am defeated — am put to the cost of a night
spent on the way and lose half the next day. I paid for a
first-class seat that I might have space, comfort, and unobjec
tionable fellow-travellers; but, stopping at a town where a
fair is going on, the guard, on the plea that the third-class
carriages are full, thrusts into the compartment more persons
than there are places for, who, both by behaviour and odour,
are repulsive. Thus in two ways I am defrauded. For part
of the fraud I have no remedy ; and for the rest my remedy,

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 259

doubtful at best, is practically unavailable. Is the reply that
against the alleged breach of contract as to time, the com
pany has guarded itself, or professes to have guarded itself,
by disclaiming responsibility ? The allowing such a dis
claimer is one of your countless negligences. You do not
allow me to plead irresponsibility if I give the company bad
money, or if, having bought a ticket for the second class, I
travel in the first. On my side you regard the contract as
quite definite ; but on the other side you practically allow the
contract to remain undefined. And now see the general effects
of your carelessness. Scarcely any trains keep their times ;
and the result of chronic unpunctuality is a multiplication of
accidents with increased loss of life."

" How about laissez-faire ? I thought your notion was
that the less Government meddled with these things the
better ; and now you complain that the law does not secure
your comfort in a railway-carriage and see that you are de
livered at your journey's end in due time. I suppose you ap
proved of the proposal made in the House last session, that
companies should be compelled to give foot-warmers to sec
ond-class passengers."

" Really you amaze me. I should have thought that not
even ordinary intelligence, much less select legislative intelli
gence, would have fallen into such a confusion. I am not
blaming you for failing to secure me comfort or punctuality.
I am blaming you for failing to enforce contracts. Just as
strongly as I protest against your neglect in letting a com
pany take my money and then not give me all I paid for ; so
strongly should I protest did you dictate how much conven
ience should be given me for so much money. Surely I need
not remind you that your civil law in general proceeds on the
principle that the goodness or badness of a bargain is the
affair of those who make it, not your affair; but that it is
your duty to enforce the bargain when made. Only in pro
portion as this is done can men's lives in society be main
tained. The condition to all life, human or other, is that
effort put forth shall bring the means of repairing the parts
wasted by effort — shall bring, too, more or less of surplus. A
creature that continuously expends energy without return in
nutriment dies; and a creature is indirectly killed by any-

260 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

thing which, after energies have been expended, habitually
intercepts the return. This holds of associated human beings
as of all other beings. In a society, most citizens do not ob
tain sustenance directly by the powers they exert, but do it
indirectly : each gives the produce of his powers exerted in
his special way, in exchange for the produce of other men's
powers exerted in other ways. The condition under which
only this obtaining of sustenance to replace the matter wasted
by effort, can be carried on in society, is fulfilment of con
tract. Non-fulfilment of contract is letting energy be ex
pended in expectation of a return, and then withholding the
return. Maintenance of contract, therefore, is maintenance
of the fundamental principle of all life, under the form given
to it by social arrangements. I blame you because you do not
maintain this fundamental principle ; and, as a consequence,
allow life to be impeded and sacrificed in countless indirect
ways. You are, I admit, solicitous about my life as endan
gered by my own acts. Though you very inadequately guard
me against injuries from others, you seem particularly anx
ious that I shall not injure myself. Emulating Sir Peter
Laurie, who made himself famous by threatening to 'put
down suicide,' you do what you can to prevent me from risk
ing my limbs. Your great care of me is shown, for instance,
by enforcing a bye-law which forbids me to leave a railway-
train in motion ; and if I jump out, I find that whether I hurt
myself or not, you decide to hurt me — by a fine.11 Not only
do you thus punish me when I run the risk of punishing my
self ; but your amiable anxiety for my welfare shows itself in
taking money out of my pocket to provide me with various
conveniences— baths and wash-houses, for example, and free
access to books. Out of my pocket, did I say ? Not always.
Sometimes out of the pockets of those least able to afford it ;
as when, from poor authors who lose by their works, you de
mand gratis copies for your public libraries, that I and others
may read them for nothing — Dives robbing Lazarus that he
may give alms to the well-clad ! But these many things you
offer are things I do not ask ; and you will not effectually
provide the one thing I do ask. I do not want you to ascer
tain for me the nature of the Sun's corona, or to find a north
west passage, or to explore the bottom of the sea ; but I do

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 261

want you to insure me against aggression, by making the
punishment of aggressors, civil as well as criminal, swift, cer
tain, and not ruinous to complainants. Instead of doing this,
you persist in doing other things. Instead of securing me the
bread due to my efforts, you give me a stone — a sculptured
block from Ephesus. I am quite content to enjoy only what
I get by my own exertions, and to have only that information
and those pleasures for which I pay. I am quite content to
suffer the evils brought on me by my own defects — believing,
indeed, that for me and for all there is no other wholesome
discipline. But you fail to do what is needed. You are
careless about guaranteeing me the unhindered enjoyment
of the benefits my efforts have purchased ; and you insist on
giving me, at other people's expense, benefits my efforts
have not purchased, and on saving me from penalties I de
serve."

u You are unreasonable. We are doing our best with the
enormous mass of business brought before us : sitting on com
mittees, reading evidence and reports, debating till one or two
in the morning. Session after session we work hard at all
kinds of measures for the public welfare — devising plans for
educating the people; enacting better arrangements for the
health of towns ; making inquiries into the impurity of rivers ;
deliberating on plans to diminish drunkenness; prescribing
modes of building houses that they may not fall ; deputing
commissioners to facilitate emigration ; and so on. You can
go to no place that does not show signs of our activity. Here
are public gardens formed by our local lieutenants, the mu
nicipal bodies ; here are lighthouses we have put up to prevent
shipwrecks. Everywhere we have appointed inspectors to see
that salubrity is maintained ; everywhere there are vaccinators
to see that due precautions against small-pox are observed ;
and if, happening to be in a district where our arrangements
are in force, your desires are not well controlled, we do our
best to insure you a healthy "-

" Yes, I know what you would say. It is all of a piece
with the rest of your policy. While you fail to protect me
against others, you insist on protecting me against myself.
And your failure to do the essential thing, results from the
absorption of your time in doing non-essential things. Do

262 TEE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

you think that your beneficences make up for the injustices
you let me bear ? I do not want these sops and gratuities ;
but I do want security against trespasses, direct and indirect
— security that is real and not nominal. See the predica
ment in which I am placed. You forbid me (quite rightly
I admit) to administer justice on my own behalf ; and you
profess to administer it for me. I may not take summary
measures to resist encroachment, to reclaim my own, or to
seize that which I bargained to have for my services : you tell
me that I must demand your aid to enforce my claim. But
demanding your aid commonly brings such frightful evils
that I prefer to bear the wrong done me. So that, practically,
having forbidden me to defend myself, you fail to defend me.
By this my life is vitiated, along with the lives of citizens in
general. All transactions are impeded ; time and labour are
lost ; the prices of commodities are raised. Honest men are
defrauded, while rogues thrive. Debtors outwit their cred
itors ; bankrupts make purses by their failures and recom
mence on larger scales ; and financial frauds that ruin their
thousands go unpunished."

Thus far our impatient friend. And now see how unten
able is his position. He actually supposes that it is possible
to get government conducted on rational principles ! His
tacit assumption is that out of a community morally imper
fect and intellectually imperfect, there may in some wTay be
had legislative regulation that is not proportionately imper
fect ! He is under a delusion. Not by any kind of govern
ment, established after any method, can the thing be done. A
good and wise autocrat cannot be chosen or otherwise ob
tained by a people not good and wise. Goodness and wisdom
will not characterize the successive families of an oligarchy,
arising out of a bad and foolish people, any more than they
will characterize a line of kings. Nor wTill any system of rep
resentation, limited or universal, direct or indirect, do more
than represent the average nature of citizens. To dissipate his
notion that truly-rational government can be provided for
themselves by a people not truly rational, he needs but to
read election-speeches and observe how votes are gained by
clap-trap appeals to senseless prejudices and by fostering
hopes of impossible benefits, while votes are lost by candid

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 263

statements of stern truths and endeavours to dissipate ground
less expectations. Let him watch the process, and he will
see that when the fermenting mass of political passions and
beliefs is put into the electoral still, there distils over not the
wisdom alone but the folly also — sometimes in the larger
proportion. Nay, if he watches closely, he may suspect that
not only is the corporate conscience lower than the average
individual conscience, but the corporate intelligence too. The
minority of the wise in a constituency is liable to be wholly
submerged by the majority of the foolish : often foolishness
alone gets represented. In the representative assembly, again,
the many mediocrities practically rule the few superiorities :
the superior are obliged to express those views only which the
rest can understand, and must keep to themselves their best
and farthest-reaching thoughts as thoughts that would have
no weight. He needs but remember that abstract principles
are pooh-poohed in the House of Commons, to see at once
that while the unwisdom expresses itself abundantly, what of
highest wisdom there may be has to keep silence. And if he
asks an illustration of the way in which the intelligence of
the body of members brings out a result lower than would
the intelligence of the average member, he may see one in
those muddlings of provisions and confusions of language in
Acts of Parliament, which have lately been calling forth pro
tests from the judges.

Thus the assumption that it is possible for a nation to get,
in the shape of law, something like embodied reason, when it
is not itself pervaded by a correlative reasonableness, is im
probable a priori and disproved a posteriori. The belief
that truly-good legislation and administration can go along
with a humanity not truly good, is a chronic delusion. While
our own form of government, giving means for expressing
and enforcing claims, is the best form yet evolved for pre
venting aggressions of class upon class, and of individuals on
one another ; yet it is hopeless to expect from it, any more
than from other forms of government, a capacity and a recti
tude greater than that of the society out of which it grows.
And criticisms like the foregoing, which imply that its short
comings can be set right by expostulating with existing gov
erning agents or by appointing others, imply that subtlest

264: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

kind of political bias which is apt to remain when the stronger
kinds have been got rid of.

Second only to the class-bias, we may say that the political
bias most seriously distorts sociological conceptions. That
this is so with the bias of political party, everyone sees in
some measure, though not in full measure. It is manifest to
the Radical that the prejudice of the Tory blinds him to a
present evil or to a future good. It is manifest to the Tory
that the Radical does not see the benefit there is in that which
he wishes to destroy, and fails to recognize the mischiefs likely
to be done by the institution he would establish. But neither
imagines that the other is no less needful than himself. The
Radical, with his impracticable ideal, is unaware that his en
thusiasm will serve only to advance things a little, but not at
all as he expects ; and he will not admit that the obstructive-
iiess of the Tory is a wholesome check. The Tory, doggedly
resisting, cannot perceive that the established order is but
relatively good, and that his defence of it is simply a means of
preventing premature change ; while he fails to recognize in
the bitter antagonism and sanguine hopes of the Radical, the
agencies without which there could be no progress. Thus
neither fully understands his own function or the function of
his opponent ; and by as much as he falls short of understand
ing it, he is disabled from understanding social phenomena.

The more general kinds of political bias distort men's socio
logical conceptions in other ways, but quite as seriously. There
is this perennial delusion, common to Radical and Tory, that
legislation is omnipotent, and that things will get done because
laws are passed to do them ; there is this confidence in one or
other form of government, due to the belief that a government
once established will retain its form and work as was intended ;
there is this hope that by some means the collective wisdom
can be separated from the collective folly, and set over it in
such way as to guide things aright ; — all of them implying
that general political bias which inevitably coexists with sub
ordination to political agencies. The effect on sociological
speculation is to maintain the conception of a society as some
thing manufactured by statesmen, and to turn the mind from
the phenomena of social evolution. While the regulating

THE POLITICAL BIAS. 265

agency occupies the thoughts, scarcely any attention is given
to those astounding processes and results due to the energies
regulated. The genesis of the vast producing, exchanging,
and distributing agencies, which has gone on spontaneously,
often hindered, and at best only restrained, by governments,
is passed over with unobservant eyes. And thus, by continu
ally contemplating the power which keeps in order, and con
templating rarely, if at all, the activities kept in order, there
is produced an extremely one-sided theory of Society.

Clearly, it is with this kind of bias as it is with the kinds
of bias previously considered — the degree of it bears a certain
necessary relation to the temporary phase of progress. It can
diminish only as fast as Society advances. A well-balanced
social self-consciousness, like a well-balanced individual self-
consciousness, is the accompaniment of a high evolution.

CHAPTER XII.

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS.

" WHAT a log for hell-fire ! " exclaimed a Wahhabee, on
seeing a corpulent Hindu. This illustration, startling by its
strength of expression, which Mr. Gifford Palgrave gives * of
the belief possessing these Mahommedan fanatics, prepares us
for their general mode of thinking about God and man. Here
is a sample of it : —

'" When 'Abd-el-Lateef, a Wahhabee, was preaching one day to the
people of Iliad, he recounted the tradition according to which Mahomet
declared that his followers should divide into seventy-three sects, and
that seventy-two were destined to hell-fire, and one only to Paradise.
' And what, 0 messenger of God, are the signs of that happy sect to
which is ensured the exclusive possession of Paradise ? ' Whereto Ma
homet had replied, ' It is those who shall be in all conformable to my
self and to my companions.' ' And that,' added 'Abd-el-Lateef, low
ering his voice to the deep tone of conviction, ' that, by the mercy of
God, are we, the people of Riad.' " 2

For present purposes we are not so much concerned to ob
serve the parallelism between this conception and the concep
tions that have been, and are, current among sects of Chris
tians, as to observe the effects produced by such conceptions
on men's views of those who have alien beliefs, and on their
views of alien societies. What extreme misinterpretations of
social facts result from the theological bias, may be seen still
better in a case even more remarkable.

By Turner, by Erskiiie, and by the members of the United
States' Exploring Expedition, the characters of the Samoans
are, as compared with the characters of the uncivilized gener
ally, very favourably described. Though, in common with
savages at large, they are said to be " indolent, covetous, fickle,

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 267

and deceitful," yet they are also said to be " kind, good-hu
moured, . . . desirous of pleasing1, and very hospitable. Both
sexes show great regard and love for their children ; " and age
is much respected. " A man cannot bear to be called stingy
or disobliging." The women "are remarkably domestic and
virtuous." Infanticide after birth is unknown in Samoa.
" The treatment of the sick was . . . invariably humane and
all that could be expected." Observe, now, what is said

of their cannibal neighbours, the Fijians. They are indiffer
ent to human life ; they live in perpetual dread of one an
other ; and, according to Jackson, treachery is considered by
them an accomplishment. " Shedding of blood is to him [the
Fijian] no crime but a glory." They kill the decrepit, maimed,
and sick. While, on the one hand, infanticide covers nearer
two-thirds than one-half of the births, 011 the other hand, " one
of the first lessons taught the infant is to strike its mother : "
anger and revenge are fostered. Inferiors are killed for neg
lecting proper salutes ; slaves are buried alive with the posts
on which a king's house stands; arid ten or more men are
slaughtered on the decks of a newly-launched canoe, to bap
tize it with their blood. A chief's wives, courtiers, and aides-
de-camp, are strangled at his death — being thereby honoured.
Cannibalism is so rampant that a chief, praising his deceased
son, ended his eulogy by saying that he would " kill his own
wives if they offended him, and eat them afterwards." Vic
tims were sometimes roasted alive before being devoured ; and
Tanoa, one of their chiefs, cut off a cousin's arm, drank the
blood, cooked the arm and ate it in presence of the owner, who
was then cut to pieces. Their gods, described as having like
characters, commit like acts. They live on the souls of those
who are devoured by men, having first " roasted " them (the
"souls" being simply material duplicates). They "are proud
and revengeful, and make war, and kill and eat each other ; "
and among the names of honour given to them are " the adul
terer," "the woman-stealer," "the brain-eater," "the mur
derer." Such being the account of the Samoans, and such
the account of the Fijians, let us ask what the Fijians think
of the Samoans. " The Feegeeans looked upon the Samoans
with horror, because they had no religion, no belief in any
such deities [as the Feegeean], nor any of the sanguinary rites

268 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

which prevailed in other islands ; " — a statement quite in har
mony with that made by Jackson, who, having- behaved dis
respectfully to one of their gods, was angrily called by them
" the white infidel."

Any one may read while running the lesson conveyed ;
and, without stopping to consider much, may see its applica
tion to the beliefs and sentiments of civilized races. The fero
cious Fijian doubtless thinks that to devour a human victim
in the name of one of his cannibal gods, is a meritorious act ;
while he thinks that his Samoaii neighbour, who makes no
sacrifice to these cannibal gods, but is just and kind to his fel
lows, thereby shows that meanness goes along with his shock
ing irreligioii. Construing the facts in this way, the Fijian
can form no rational conception of Samoan society. With
vices and virtues interchanged in conformity with his creed,
the benefits of certain social arrangements, if he thinks about
them at all, must seem evils and the evils benefits.

Speaking generally, then, each system of dogmatic the
ology, with the sentiments that gather round it, becomes an
impediment in the way of Social Science. The sympathies
drawn out towards one creed and the correlative antipathies
aroused by other creeds, distort the interpretations of all the
associated facts. On these institutions and their results the
eyes are turned with a readiness to observe everything that is
good, and on those with a readiness to observe everything that
is bad. Let us glance at some of the consequent perversions
of opinion.

Already we have seen, by implication, that the theological
element of a creed, subordinating the ethical element com
pletely in early stages of civilization and very considerably in
later stages, maintains a standard of right and wrong, rela
tively good perhaps, but perhaps absolutely bad — good, that is,
as measured by the requirements of the place and time, bad
as measured by the requirements of an ideal society. And
sanctifying, as an associated theology thus does, false concep
tions of right and wrong, it falsifies the measures by which
the effects of institutions are to be estimated. Obviously, the
sociological conclusions must be vitiated if beneficial and det
rimental effects are not respectively recognized as such. An

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 269

illustration enforcing this is worth giving. Here is Mr. Pal-
grave's account of Wahhabee morality, as disclosed in answers
to his questions : —

" ' The first of the great sins is the giving divine honours to a
creature.'

" ' Of course,' I replied, ' the enormity of such a sin is beyond all
doubt. But if this be the first, there must be a second ; what is it ? '

" ' Drinking the shameful,' in English, ' smoking tobacco,' was the
unhesitating answer.

" ' And murder, and adultery, and false witness?' I suggested.

"'God is merciful and forgiving,' rejoined my friend; 'that is,
these are merely little sins.'

" ' Hence two sins alone are great, polytheism and smoking,' I con
tinued, though hai'dly able to keep countenance any longer. And
'Abd-el-Kareem, with the. most serious asseveration, replied that such
was really the case." 4

Clearly a creed which makes smoking one of the blackest
crimes, and has only mild reprobation for the worst acts com
mitted by man against man, negatives anything like Social
Science. Deeds and habits and laws not being judged by the
degrees in which they conduce to temporal welfare, the ideas
of better and worse, as applying to social arrangements, cannot
exist, and such notions as progress and retrogression are ex
cluded. But that which holds so conspicuously in this case
holds more or less in all cases. At the present time as in past
times, and in our own society as in other societies, public acts
are judged by two tests — the test of supposed divine appro
bation, and the test of conduciveness to human happiness.
Though, as civilization advances, there grows up the belief
that the second test is equivalent to the first — though, conse
quently, conduciveness to human happiness comes to be more
directly considered ; yet the test of supposed divine approba
tion, as inferred from the particular creed held, continues to
be very generally used. The wrongness of conduct is con
ceived as consisting in the implied disobedience to the sup
posed commands, and not as consisting in its intrinsic character
as causing suffering to others or to self. Inevitably the effect
on sociological thinking is, that institutions and actions are
judged more by their apparent congruity or incongruity with
the established cult, than by their tendencies to further or to
hinder well-being.

270 TEE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

This effect of the theological bias, manifest enough every
where, lias been forced on my attention by one whose mental
attitude often supplies me with matter for speculation — an old
gentleman who unites the religion of amity and the religion
of enmity in startling contrast. On the one hand, getting up
early to his devotions, going to church even at great risk to
his feeble health, always staying for the sacrament when there
is one, he displays what is ordinarily regarded as an exem
plary piety. On the other hand, his thoughts ever tend in the
direction of warfare : fights on sea and land furnish topics of
undying interest to him ; he revels in narratives of destruc
tion ; his talk is of cannon. To say that he divides his reading
between the Bible and Alison, or some kindred book, is an ex
aggeration ; but still it serves to convey an idea of his state of
feeling. Now you may hear him waxing wroth over the dis
establishment of the Irish Church, which he looks upon as an
act of sacrilege ; and now, when the conversation turns on
works of art, he names as engravings which above all others
he admires, Creur-de-Lion fighting Salndin, and Wellington
at Waterloo. Or after manifesting some kindly feeling, which,
to give him his clue, he frequently does, he will shortly pass
to some bloody encounter, the narration of which makes his
voice tremulous with delight. Marvelling though I did at
first over these incongruities of sentiment and belief, the ex
planation was reached on observing that the subordination-
element of his creed was far more dominant in his conscious
ness than the moral element. Watching the movements of
his mind made it clear that to his imagination, God was sym
bolized as a kind of transcendently -powerful sea-captain, and
made it clear that he went to church from a feeling akin to
that with which, as a middy, he went to muster. On perceiv
ing that this, which is the sentiment common to all religions,
whatever be the name or ascribed nature of the deity wor
shipped, was supreme in him, it ceased to be inexplicable that
the sentiment to which the Christian religion specially ap
peals should be so readily over-ridden. It became easier to
understand how, when the Hyde-Park riots took place, he
could wish that we had Louis Napoleon over here to shoot
down the mob, and how he could recall, with more or less of
chuckling, the deeds of press-gangs in his early days.

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 271

That the theological bias, thus producing conformity to
moral principles from motives of obedience only, and not
habitually insisting on such principles because of their in
trinsic value, obscures sociological truths, will now not be
difficult to see. The tendency is to substitute formal recog
nitions of such principles for real recognitions. So long as
they are not contravened directly enough to suggest dis
obedience, they may readily be contravened indirectly ; for
the reason that there has not been cultivated the habit of
contemplating consequences as they work out in remote
ways. Hence it happens that social arrangements essen
tially at variance with the ethics of the creed, give no offence
to those who are profoundly offended by whatever seems at
variance with its theology. Maintenance of the dogmas and
forms of the religion becomes the primary, all-essential thing ;
and the secondary thing, often sacrificed, is the securing of
those relations among men which the spirit of the religion re
quires. How conceptions of good and bad in social affairs are
thus warped, the pending controversy about the Athanasian
creed shows us. Here we have theologians who believe that
our national welfare will be endangered, if there is not in all
churches an enforced repetition of the dogmas that Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost, are each of them almighty; that yet
there are not three Almighties, but one Almighty ; that one of
the Almighties suffered on the cross and descended into hell
to pacify another of them ; and that whoever does not believe
this, " without doubt shall perish everlastingly." They say
that if the State makes its priests threaten with eternal tor
ments all who question these doctrines, things will go well ;
but if those priests who, in this threat, perceive the devil-
worship of the savage usurping the name of Christianity, are
allowed to pass it by in silence, woe to the nation ! Evidently
the theological bias leading to such a conviction entirely ex
cludes Sociology, considered as a science.

Under its special forms, as well as under its general form,
the theological bias brings errors into the estimates men make
of societies and institutions. Sectarian antipathies, growing
out of differences of doctrine, disable the members of each
religious community from fairly judging other religious com-

272 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

munities. It is always difficult, and often impossible, for the
zealot to conceive that his own religious system and his own
zeal on its behalf may have but a relative truth and a relative
value ; or to conceive that there may be relative truths and
relative values in alien beliefs and the fanaticisms which
maintain them. Though the adherent of each creed daily has
thrust on his attention the fact that adherents of other creeds
are no less confident than he is — though he can scarcely fail
sometimes to reflect that these adherents of other creeds have,
in nearly all cases, simply accepted the dogmas current in the
places and families they were born in, and that he has done
the like ; yet the special theological bias which his education
and surroundings have given him, makes it almost beyond
imagination that these other creeds may, some of them, have
justifications as good as, if not better than, his own, and that
the rest, along with certain amounts of absolute worth, may
have their special fitnesses to the people holding them.

We cannot doubt, for instance, that the feeling with which
Mr. Whalley or Mr. Newdegate regards Roman Catholicism,
must cause extreme reluctance to admit the services which
Roman Catholicism rendered to European civilization in the
past ; and must make almost impossible a patient hearing of
anyone who thinks that it renders some services now. Whether
great benefit did not arise in early times from the tendency
towards unification produced within each congeries of small
societies by a common creed authoritatively imposed ? —
whether papal power supposed to be divinely deputed, and
therefore tending to subordinate the political authorities dur
ing turbulent feudal ages, did not serve to curb warfare and
further civilization ? — whether the strong tendency shown by
early Christianity to lapse into separate local paganisms, was
not beneficially checked by an ecclesiastical system having a
single head supposed to be infallible ? — whether morals were
not improved, manners softened, slavery ameliorated, and the
condition of women raised, by the influence of the Church,
notwithstanding all its superstitions and bigotries ? — are
questions to which Dr. Camming, or other vehement op
ponent of popery, could not bring a mind open to con
viction. Similarly, from the Roman Catholic the
meaning and worth of Protestantism are hidden. To the

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 273

Ultramontane, holding that the temporal welfare no less than
the eternal salvation of men depends on submission to the
Church, it is incredible that Church-authority has but a tran
sitory value, and that the denials of authority which have
come along with accumulation of knowledge and change of
sentiment, mark steps from a lower social regime to a higher.
Naturally, the sincere Papist thinks schism a crime ; and books
that throw doubt on the established beliefs seem to him ac
cursed. Nor need we wonder when from such a one there
comes a saying like that of the Mayor of Bordeaux, so much
applauded by the Comte de Chambord, that " the Devil was
the first Protestant ; " or when, along with this, there goes a
vilification of Protestants too repulsive to be repeated. Clear
ly, with such a theological bias, fostering such ideas respect
ing Protestant morality, there must be extremely-false esti"
mates of Protestant institutions, and of all the institutions
associated with them.

In less striking ways, but still in ways sufficiently marked,
the special theological bias warps the judgments of Conform
ists and Nonconformists among ourselves. A fair estimate of
the advantages which our State-Church has yielded, is not to
be expected from the zealous dissenter : he sees only the dis
advantages. Whether voluntaryism could have done cen
turies ago all that it can do now ? — whether a State-sup
ported Protestantism was not once the best thing practicable ?
—are questions which he is unlikely to discuss without preju
dice. Contrariwise, the churchman is reluctant to be
lieve that the union of Church and State is beneficial only
during a certain phase of progress. He knows that within
the Establishment divisions are daily increasing, while volun
tary agency is doing daily a larger share of the work origi
nally undertaken by the State ; but he does not like to think
that there is a kinship between such facts and the fact that
outside the Establishment the power of Dissent is growing.
That these changes are parts of a general change by which
the political and religious agencies, which have been differ
entiating from the beginning, are being separated and special
ized, is not an acceptable idea. He is averse to the conception
that just as Protestantism at large was a rebellion against an
Ecclesiasticism which dominated over Europe, so Dissent
19

274 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

among ourselves is a rebellion against an Ecclesiasticism
which dominates over England ; and that the two are but
successive stages of the same beneficial development. That
is to say, his bias prevents him from contemplating the facts
in a way favourable to scientific interpretations of them.

Everywhere, indeed, the special theological bias accom
panying a special set of doctrines, inevitably pre-judges many
sociological questions. One who holds a creed as absolutely true,
and who by implication holds the multitudinous other creeds
to be absolutely false in so far as they differ from his own,
cannot entertain the supposition that the value of a creed is
relative. That a particular religious system is, in a general
sense, a natural part of the particular society in which it is
found, is an entirely-alien conception ; and, indeed, a repug
nant one. His system of dogmatic theology he thinks good
for all places and all times. He does not doubt that when
planted among a horde of savages, it will be duly understood
by them, duly appreciated by them, and work on them results
such as those he experiences from it. Thus prepossessed, he
passes over the proofs found everywhere, that a people is no
more capable of suddenly receiving a higher form of religion
than it is capable of suddenly receiving a higher form of gov
ernment ; and that inevitably with such religion, as with such
government, there will go on a degradation which presently
reduces it to one differing but nominally from its predecessor.
In other words, his special theological bias blinds him to an
important class of sociological truths.

The effects of the theological bias need no further elucida
tion. We will turn our attention to the distortions of judg
ment caused by the anti-theological bias. Not only the actions
of religious dogmas, but also the reactions against them, are
disturbing influences we have to beware of. Let us glance
first at an instance of that indignation against the established
creed, which all display more or less when they emancipate
themselves from it.

" A Nepaul king, Rum Bahadur, whose beautiful queen, finding
that her lovely face had been disfigured by small-pox, poisoned her
self, ' cursed his kingdom, her doctors, and the gods of Nepaul, vow
ing vengeance on all.' Having ordered the doctors to be flogged, and

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 275

the right ear and nose of each to be cut off, ' he then wreaked his
vengeance on the gods of Nepaul, and after abusing them in the most
gross way, he accused them of having obtained from him twelve
thousand goats, some hundred-weights of sweetmeats, two thousand
gallons of milk. &c., under false pretences.' . . . He then ordered
all the artillery, varying from three to twelve-pounders, to be brought
in front of the palace. ... All the guns were then loaded to the
muzzle, and down he marched to the head-quarters of the Nepaul
deities. . . . All the guns were drawn up in front of the several
deities, honouring the most sacred with the heaviest metal. When
the order to fire was given, many of the chiefs and soldiers ran away
panic-stricken, and others hesitated to obey the sacrilegious order ;
and not until several gunners had been cut down, were the guns
opened. Down came the gods and goddesses from their hitherto sacred
positions; and after six hours' heavy cannonading not a vestige of the
deities remained." B

This, which is one of the most remarkable pieces of icono-
clasm on record, exhibits in an extreme form the reactive an
tagonism usually accompanying abandonment of an old
belief — an antagonism that is high in proportion as the pre
vious submission has been profound. By stabling their horses
in cathedrals and treating the sacred places and symbols with
intentional insult, the Puritans displayed this feeling in a
marked manner ; as again did the French revolutionists by
pulling down sacristies and altar-tables, tearing mass-books
into cartridge-papers, drinking brandy out of chalices, eating
mackerel off pateiias, making mock ecclesiastical processions,
and holding drunken revels in churches. Though in our day
the breaking of bonds less rigid effected by struggles less vio
lent, is followed by a less excessive opposition and hatred ;
yet, habitually, the thro wing-off of the old form involves a
replacing of the previous sympathy by more or less of antip
athy : perversion of judgment caused by the antipathy taking
the place of that caused by the sympathy. What before was
reverenced as wholly true is now scorned as wholly false ;
and what was treasured as invaluable is now rejected as
valueless.

In some, this state of sentiment and belief continues. In
others, the reaction is in course of time followed by a re-action.
To carry out the Carlylean figure, the old clothes which had
been outgrown and were finally torn off and thrown aside

276 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

with contempt, come presently to be looked back upon with
more calmness, and with recognition of the fact that they did
good service in their time — nay, perhaps with the doubt
whether they were not thrown off too soon. This re-action
may be feeble or may be strong ; but only when it takes place
in due amount is there a possibility of balanced judgments
either on religious questions or on those questions of Social
Science into which the religious element enters.

Here we have to glance at the sociological errors caused
by the anti-theological bias among those in whom it does not
become qualified. Thinking only of what is erroneous in the
rejected creed, they ignore the truth for which it stands ; con
templating only its mischiefs they overlook its benefits ; and
doing this, they think that nothing but good would result
from its general abandonment. Let us observe the tacit as
sumptions made in drawing this conclusion.

It is assumed, in the first place, that adequate guidance for
conduct in life, private and public, could be had ; and that a
moral code, rationally elaborated by men as they now are,
would be duly operative upon them. Neither of these propo
sitions commends itself when we examine the evidence. We
have but to observe human action as it meets us at every
turn, to see that the average intelligence, incapable of guiding
conduct even in simple matters, where but a very moderate
reach of reason would suffice, must fail in apprehending with
due clearness the natural sanctions of ethical principles. The
unthinking ineptitude with which even the routine of life is
carried on by the mass of men, shows clearly that they have
nothing like the insight required for self-guidance in the ab
sence of an authoritative code of conduct. Take a day's ex
perience, and observe the lack of thought indicated from hour
to hour.

You rise in the morning, and, while dressing, take up a
phial containing a tonic, of which a little has been prescribed
for you; but after the first few drops have been counted,
succeeding drops run down the side of the phial, for the rea
son that the lip is shaped without regard to the require
ment. Yet millions of such phials are annually made by
glass-makers, and sent out by thousands of druggists: so

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 277

small being the amount of sense brought to bear on busi
ness. Now, turning to the looking-glass, you find that, if not
of the best make, it fails to preserve the attitude in which you
put it ; or, if what is called a " box " looking-glass, you see that
maintenance of its position is insured by an expensive appli
ance which would have been superfluous had a little reason
been used. Were the adjustment such that the centre of grav
ity of the glass came in the line joining the points of support
(which would be quite as easy an adjustment), the glass would
remain steady in whatever attitude you gave it. Yet, year
after year, tens of thousands of looking-glasses are made with
out regard to so simple a need. Presently you go down to
breakfast, and taking some Harvey or other sauce with your
fish, find the bottle has a defect like that which you found in
the phial : it is sticky from the drops which trickle down, and
occasionally stain the table-cloth. Here are other groups of
traders similarly so economical of thought, that they do noth
ing to rectify this obvious inconvenience. Having break
fasted, you take up the paper, and, before sitting down, wish
to put some coal on the fire. But the lump you seize with the
tongs slips out of them, and, if large, you make several at
tempts before you succeed in lifting it : all because the ends
of the tongs are smooth. Makers and venders of fire-irons go
on, generation after generation, without meeting this evil by
simply giving to these smooth ends some projecting points, or
even roughening them by a few burrs made with a chisel.
Having at length grasped the lump and put it on the fire, you
begin to read ; but before getting through the first column you
are reminded, by the changes of position which your sensa
tions prompt, that men still fail to make easy-chairs. And
yet the guiding principle is simple enough. Just that advan
tage secured by using a soft seat in place of a hard one — the
advantage, namely, of spreading over a larger area the pres
sure of the weight to be borne, and so making the pressure less
intense at any one point — is an advantage to be sought in the
form of the chair. Ease is to be gained by making the shapes
and relative inclinations of seat and back, such as will evenly
distribute the weight of the trunk and limbs over the widest-
possible supporting surface, and with the least. straining of the
parts out of their natural attitudes. And yet only now, after

278 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

these thousands of years of civilization, are there being
reached (and that not rationally but empirically) approxima
tions to the structure required.

Such are the experiences of the first hour ; and so they con
tinue all the day through. If you watch and criticize, you
may see that the immense majority bring to bear, even on
those actions which it is the business of their lives to carry on
effectually, an extremely-small amount of faculty. Employ
a workman to do something that is partly new, and not the
clearest explanations and sketches will prevent him from
blundering ; and to any expression of surprise, he will reply
that he was not brought up to such work : scarcely ever be
traying the slightest shame in confessing that he cannot do a
thing he was not taught to do. Similarly throughout the
higher grades of activity. Remember how generally improve
ments in manufactures come from outsiders, and you are at
once shown with what mere unintelligent routine manufactures
are commonly carried on. Examine into the management of
mercantile concerns, and you perceive that those engaged in
them mostly do nothing more than move in the ruts that have
gradually been made for them by the process of trial and
error during a long succession of generations. Indeed, it
almost seems as though most men made it their aim to
get through life with the least possible expenditure of
thought.

How, then, can there be looked for such power of self-
guidance as, in the absence of inherited authoritative rules,
would require them to understand why, in the nature of
things, these modes of action are injurious and those modes
beneficial — would require them to pass beyond proximate re
sults, and see clearly the involved remote results, as worked
out on self, on others, and on society ?

The incapacity need not, indeed, be inferred : it may be
seen, if we do but take an action concerning which the sancti
fied code is silent. Listen to a conversation about gambling ;
and, where reprobation is expressed, note the grounds of the
reprobation. That it tends towards the ruin of the gambler ;
that it risks the welfare of family and friends ; that it alienates
from business, and leads into bad company —these, and such
as these, are the reasons given for condemning the practice.

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 270

Rarely is there any recognition of the fundamental reason.
Rarely is gambling condemned because it is a kind of action
by which pleasure is obtained at the cost of pain to another.
The normal obtaiiiment of gratification, or of the money
which purchases gratification, implies, firstly, that there has
been put forth equivalent effort of a kind which, in some way,
furthers the general good; and implies, secondly, that those
from whom money is received, get, directly or indirectly,
equivalent satisfactions. But in gambling the opposite hap
pens. Benefit received does not imply effort put forth ; and
the happiness of the winner involves the misery of the loser.
This kind of action is therefore essentially anti-social — sears
the sympathies, cultivates a hard egoism, and so produces a
general deterioration of character and conduct.

Clearly, then, a visionary hope misleads those who think
that in an imagined age of reason, which might forthwith re
place an age of beliefs but partly rational, conduct would be cor
rectly guided by a code directly based on considerations of util
ity. A utilitarian system of ethics cannot at present be rightly
thought out even by the select few, and is quite beyond the men
tal reach of the many. The value of the inherited and theolog
ically-enforced code is that it formulates, with some approach
to truth, the accumulated results of past human experience.
It has not arisen rationally but empirically. During past
times mankind have eventually gone right after trying all
possible ways of going wrong. The wrong-goings have been
habitually checked by disaster, and pain, and death ; and the
right-goings have been continued because not thus checked.
There has been a growth of beliefs corresponding to these
good and evil results. Hence the code of conduct, embodying
discoveries slowly and almost unconsciously made through a
long series of generations, has transcendent authority on its
side.

Nor is this all. Were it possible forthwith to replace a
traditionally-established system of rules, supposed to be super-
naturally warranted, by a system of rules rationally elabo
rated, no such rationally-elaborated system of rules would be
adequately operative. To think that it would, implies the
thought that men's beliefs and actions are throughout deter-

280 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

mined by intellect ; whereas they are in much larger degrees
determined by feeling.

There is a wide difference between the formal assent given
to a proposition that cannot be denied, and the efficient belief
which produces active conformity to it. Often the most con
clusive argument fails to produce a conviction capable of
swaying conduct ; and often mere assertion, with great em
phasis and signs of confidence on the part of the utterer, will
produce a fixed conviction where there is no evidence, and
even in spite of adverse evidence. Especially is this so among
those of little culture. Not only may we see that strength of
affirmation and an authoritative manner create faith in them ;
but we may see that their faith sometimes actually decreases
if explanation is given. The natural language of belief dis
played by another, is that which generates their belief — not
the logically-conclusive evidence. The dependencies of this
they cannot clearly follow ; and in trying to follow, they so
far lose themselves that premisses and conclusion, not per
ceived to stand in necessary relation, are rendered less coher
ent than by putting them in juxtaposition and strengthening
their connexion by a wave of the emotion which emphatic
affirmation raises.

Nay, it is even true that the most cultivated intelligences,
capable of criticizing evidence and valuing arguments to a
nicety, are not thereby made rational to the extent that they
are guided by intellect apart from emotion. Continually men
of the widest knowledge deliberately do things they know to
be injurious ; suffer the evils that transgression brings ; are
deterred awhile by the vivid remembrance of them ; and,
when the remembrance has become faint, transgress again.
Often the emotional consciousness over-rides the intellectual
consciousness absolutely, as hypochondriacal patients show
us. A sufferer from depressed spirits may have the testimony
of his physicians, verified by numerous past experiences of his
own, showing that his gloomy anticipations are illusions
caused by his bodily state ; and yet the conclusive proofs that
they are irrational do not enable him to get rid of them : he
continues to feel sure that disasters are coming on him.

All which, and many kindred facts, make it certain that
the operativeness of a moral code depends much more on the

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 281

emotions called forth by its injunctions, than on the con
sciousness of the utility of obeying such injunctions. The
feelings drawn out during early life towards moral principles,
by witnessing the social sanction and the religious sanction
they possess, influence conduct far more than the perception
that conformity to such principles conduces to welfare. And
in the absence of the feelings which manifestations of these
sanctions arouse, the utilitarian belief is commonly inade
quate to produce conformity.

It is true that the sentiments in the higher races, and espe
cially in superior members of the higher races, are now in
considerable degrees adjusted to these principles : the sympa
thies that have become organic in the most developed men,
produce spontaneous conformity to altruistic precepts. Even
for such, however, the social sanction, which is in part de
rived from the religious sanction, is important as strengthen
ing the influence of these precepts. And for persons endowed
with less of moral sentiment, the social and religious sanctions
are still more important aids to guidance.

Thus the anti-theological bias leads to serious errors, both
when it ignores the essential share hitherto taken by religious
systems in giving force to certain principles of action, in part
absolutely good and in part good relatively to the needs of
the time, and again when it prompts the notion that these
principles might now be so established on rational bases as to
rule men effectually through their enlightened intellects.

These errors, however, which the anti-theological bias pro
duces, are superficial compared with the error that remains.
The antagonism to superstitious beliefs habitually leads to
entire rejection of them. They are thrown aside with the as
sumption that along with so much that is wrong there is
nothing right. Whereas the truth, recognizable only after
antagonism has spent itself, is that the wrong beliefs rejected
are superficial, and that a right belief hidden by them remains
when they have been rejected. Those who defend, equally
with those who assail, religious creeds, suppose that every
thing turns on the maintenance of the particular dogmas at
issue ; whereas the dogmas are but temporary forms of that
which is permanent.

282 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

The process of Evolution which has gradually modified
and advanced men's conceptions of the Universe, will con
tinue to modify and advance them during the future. The
ideas of Cause and Origin, which have been slowly changing,
will change still further. But no changes in them, even when
pushed to the extreme, will expel them from consciousness ;
and hence there can never be an extinction of the correlative
sentiments. No more in this than in other things, will Evo
lution alter its general direction : it will continue along the
same lines as hitherto. And if we wish to see whither it
tends, we have but to observe how there has been thus far a
decreasing coiicreteness of the consciousness to which the re
ligious sentiment is related, to infer that hereafter this coii
creteness will further diminish : leaving behind a substance
of consciousness for which there is 110 adequate form, but
which is none the less persistent and powerful.

Without seeming so, the development of religious senti
ment has been continuous from the beginning ; and its nature
when a germ was the same as is its nature when fully devel
oped. The savage first shows it in the feeling excited by a
display of power in another exceeding his own power — some
skill, some sagacity, in his chief, leading to a result he does
not understand — something which has the element of mystery
and arouses his wonder. To his unspeculative intellect there
is nothing wonderful in the ordinary course of things around.
The regular sequences, the constant relations, do not present
themselves to him as problems needing interpretation. Only
anomalies in that course of causation which he knows most
intimately, namely, human will and power, excite his surprise
and raise questions. And only when experiences of phenom
ena of other classes become multiplied enough for generaliza
tion, does the occurrence of anomalies among these also,
arouse the same idea of mystery and the same sentiment of
wonder : hence one kind of fetichism. Passing over in

termediate stages, the truth to be noted is, that as fast as ex
planation of the anomalies dissipates the wonder they excited,
there grows up a wonder at the uniformities : there arises the
question — How come they to be uniformities ? As fast as
Science transfers more and more things from the category of
irregularities to the category of regularities, the mystery that

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 283

once attached to the superstitious explanations of them be
comes a mystery attaching to the scientific explanations of
them : there is a merging of many special mysteries in one
general mystery. The astronomer, having shown that the
motions of the Solar System imply a uniform and invariably-
acting force he calls gravitation, finds himself utterly incapa
ble of conceiving this force. Though he helps himself to
think of the Sun's action on the Earth by assuming an inter
vening medium, and finds he must do this if he thinks about
it at all ; yet the mystery re-appears when he asks what is the
constitution of this medium. While compelled to use units
of ether as symbols, he sees that they can be but symbols.
Similarly with the physicist and the chemist. The hypothesis
of atoms and molecules enables them to work out multitudi
nous interpretations that are verified by experiment ; but the
ultimate unit of matter admits of no consistent conception.
Instead of the particular mysteries presented by those actions
of matter they have explained, there rises into prominence
the mystery which matter universally presents, and which
proves to be absolute. So that, beginning with the germinal
idea of mystery which the savage gets from a display of
power in another transcending his own, and the germinal
sentiment of awe accompanying it, the progress is towards an
ultimate recognition of a mystery behind every act and ap
pearance, and a transfer of the awe from something special
and occasional to something universal and unceasing.

No one need expect, then, that the religious consciousness
will die away or will change the lines of its evolution. Its
specialities of form, once strongly marked and becoming less
distinct during past mental progress, will continue to fade ;
but the substance of the consciousness will persist. That the
object-matter can be replaced by another object-matter, as
supposed by those who think the " Religion of Humanity "
will be the religion of the future, is a belief countenanced
neither by induction nor by deduction. However dominant
may become the moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of Hu
manity, it can never exclude the sentiment, alone properly
called religious, awakened by that which is behind Humanity
and behind all other things. The child by wrapping its head
in the bed-clothes, may, for a moment, suppress the conscious-

284 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

ness of surrounding darkness ; but the consciousness, though
rendered less vivid, survives, and imagination persists in
occupying itself with that which lies beyond perception. No
such thing as a " Religion of Humanity " can ever do more
than temporarily shut out the thought of a Power of which
Humanity is but a small and fugitive product — a Power
which was in course of ever-changing manifestations before
Humanity was, and will continue through other manifesta
tions when Humanity has ceased to be.

To recognitions of this order the anti-theological bias is a
hindrance. Ignoring the truth for. which religions stand, it
under-values religious institutions in the past, thinks they are
needless in the present, and expects they will leave no repre
sentatives in the future. Hence mistakes in sociological
reasonings.

To the various other forms of bias, then, against which we
must guard in studying the Social Science, has to be added the
bias, perhaps as powerful and perverting as any, which relig
ious beliefs and sentiments produce. This, both generally
under the form of theological bigotry, and specially under
the form of sectarian bigotry, affects the judgments about
public affairs ; and reaction against it gives the judgments an
opposite warp.

The theological bias under its general form, tending to
maintain a dominance of the subordination-element of re
ligion over its ethical element — tending, therefore, to measure
actions by their formal congruity with a creed rather than by
their intrinsic congruity with human welfare, is unfavourable
to that estimation of worth in social arrangements which is
made by tracing out results. « And while the general theo
logical bias brings into Sociology an element of distortion, by
using a kind of measure foreign to the science properly so
called, the special theological bias brings in further distor
tions, arising from special measures of this kind which it uses.
Institutions, old and new, home and foreign, are considered as
congruous or incongruous with particular sets of dogmas,
and are liked or disliked accordingly : the obvious result
being that, since the sets of dogmas differ in all times and
places, the sociological judgments affected by them must

THE THEOLOGICAL BIAS. 285

inevitably be wrong in all cases but one, and probably in all

On the other hand, the reactive bias distorts conceptions of
social phenomena by under-valuing religious systems. It
generates an. unwillingness to see that a religious system is a
normal and essential factor in every evolving society ; that the
specialities of it have certain fitnesses to the social conditions ;
and that while its form is temporary its subsistence is perma
nent. In so far as the anti-theological bias causes an ignoring
of these truths, or an inadequate appreciation of them, it causes
misinterpretations.

To maintain the required equilibrium amid the conflicting
sympathies and antipathies which contemplation of religious
beliefs inevitably generates, is difficult. In presence of the
theological thaw going on so fast on all sides, there is 011 the
part of many a fear, and on the part of some a hope, that
nothing will remain. But the hopes and the fears are alike
groundless ; and must be dissipated before balanced judg
ments in Social Science can be formed. Like the transfor
mations that have succeeded one another hitherto, the trans
formation now in progress is but an advance from a lower
form, no longer fit, to a higher and fitter form ; and neither
will this transformation, nor kindred transformations to come
hereafter, destroy that which is transformed, any more than
past transformations have destroyed it.

CHAPTER XIII.

DISCIPLINE.

IN the foregoing eight chapters we have contemplated,
under their several heads, those '* Difficulties of the Social
Science " which the chapter bearing that title indicated in a
general way. After thus warning the student against the
errors he is liable to fall into, partly because of the nature of
the phenomena themselves and the conditions they are pre
sented under, and partly because of his own nature as observer
of them, which by both its original and its acquired charac
ters causes twists of perception and judgment ; it now remains
to say something about the needful preliminary studies. I do
not refer to studies furnishing the requisite data ; but I refer
to studies giving the requisite discipline. Right thinking in
any matter depends very much on the habit of thought ; and
the habit of thought, partly natural, depends in part on the
artificial influences to which the mind has been subjected.

As certainly as each person has peculiarities of bodily
action that distinguish him from his fellows, so certainly has
he peculiarities of mental action that give a character to his
conceptions. There are tricks of thought as well as tricks of
muscular movement. There are acquired mental aptitudes for
seeing things under particular aspects, as there are acquired
bodily aptitudes for going through evolutions after particular
ways. And there are intellectual perversities produced by
certain modes of treating the mind, as there are incurable
awkwardnesses due to certain physical activities daily re
peated.

Each kind of mental discipline, besides its direct effects on
the faculties brought into play, has its indirect effects on the
faculties left out of play ; and when special benefit is gained

DISCIPLINE. 287

by extreme special discipline, there is inevitably more or less
general mischief entailed on the rest of the mind by the con
sequent want of discipline. That antagonism between body
and brain which we see in those who, pushing brain-activity
to an extreme, enfeeble their bodies, and those who, pushing
bodily activity to an extreme, make their brains inert, is an
antagonism which holds between the parts of the body itself
and the parts of the brain itself. The greater bulk and strength
of the right arm resulting from its greater use, and the greater
aptitude of the right hand, are instances in point ; and that
the relative incapacity of the left hand, involved by cultivat
ing the capacity of the right hand, would become still more
marked were the right hand to undertake all manipulation, is
obvious. The like holds among the mental faculties. The
fundamental antagonism between feeling and cognition, run
ning down through all actions of the mind, from the conflicts
between emotion and reason to the conflicts between sensa
tion and perception, is the largest illustration. We meet with
a kindred antagonism among the actions of the intellect itself,
between perceiving and reasoning. Men who have aptitudes
for accumulating observations are rarely men given to gen
eralizing; while men given to generalizing are commonly
men who, mostly using the observations of others, observe for
themselves less from love of particular facts than from desire
to put such facts to use. We may trace the antagonism within
even a narrower range, between general reasoning and special
reasoning. One prone to far-reaching speculations rarely pur
sues to much purpose those investigations by which particular
truths are reached; while the scientific specialist ordinarily
has but little tendency to occupy himself with wide views.

No more is needed to make it clear that habits of thought
result from particular kinds of mental activity ; and that each
man's habits of thought influence his judgment on any ques
tion brought before him. It will be obvious, too, that in pro
portion as the question is involved and many-sided, the habit
of thought must be a more important factor in determining
the conclusion arrived at. Where the subject-matter is sim
ple, as a geometrical truth or a mechanical action, and has
therefore not many different aspects, perversions of view con
sequent on intellectual attitude are comparatively few; but

288 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

where the subject-matter is complex and heterogeneous, and
admits of being mentally seen in countless different ways,
the intellectual attitude affects very greatly the form of the
conception.

A fit habit of thought, then, is all-important in the study
of Sociology ; and a fit habit of thought can be acquired only
by study of the Sciences at large. For Sociology is a science
in which the phenomena of all other sciences are included.
It presents those necessities of relation with which the Ab
stract Sciences deal ; it presents those connexions of cause
and effect which the Abstract-Concrete Sciences familiarize
the student with ; and it presents that concurrence of many
causes and production of contingent results, which the Con
crete Sciences show us, but which we are shown especially by
the organic sciences. Hence, to acquire the habit of thought
conducive to right thinking in Sociology, the mind must be
familiarized with the fundamental ideas which each class of
sciences brings into view ; and must not be possessed by those
of any one class, or any two classes, of sciences.

That this may be better seen, let me briefly indicate the
indispensable discipline which each class of sciences gives to
the intellect ; and also the wrong intellectual habits produced
if that class of sciences is studied exclusively.

Entire absence of training in the Abstract Sciences, leaves
the mind without due sense of necessity of relation. Watch
the mental movements of the wholly-ignorant, before whom
there have been brought not even those exact and fixed con
nexions which Arithmetic exhibits, and it will be seen that
they have nothing like irresistible convictions that from
given data there is an inevitable inference. That which to
you has the aspect of a certainty, seems to them not free from
doubt. Even men whose educations have made numerical
processes and results tolerably familiar, will show in a case
where the implication is logical only, that they have not ab
solute confidence in the dependence of conclusion on premisses.

Unshakeable beliefs in necessities of relation, are to be
gained only by studying the Abstract Sciences, Logic and
Mathematics. Dealing with necessities of relation of the sim
plest class, Logic is of some service to this end ; though often

DISCIPLINE. 289

of less service than it might be, for the reason that the sym
bols used are not translated into thoughts, and hence the con
nexions stated are not really represented. Only when, for a
logical implication expressed in the abstract, there is sub
stituted an example so far concrete that the inter-dependencies
can be contemplated, is there an exercise of the mental power
by which logical necessity is grasped. Of the discipline given
by Mathematics, also, it is to be remarked that the habit of
dealing with necessities of numerical relation, though in a
degree useful for cultivating the consciousness of necessity, is
not in a high degree useful ; because, in the immense majority
of cases, the mind, occupied with the symbols used, and not
passing beyond them to the groups of units they stand for,
does not really figure to itself the relations expressed — does
not really discern their necessities ; and has not therefore the
conception of necessity perpetually repeated. It is the more
special division of Mathematics, dealing with Space-relations,
which above all other studies yields necessary ideas ; and so
makes strong and definite the consciousness of necessity in
general. A geometrical demonstration time after time pre
sents premisses and conclusion in such wise that the relation
alleged is seen in thought — cannot be passed over by mere
symbolization. Each step exhibits some connexion of posi
tions or quantities as one that could not be otherwise ; and
hence the habit of taking such steps makes the consciousness
of such connexions familiar and vivid.

But while mathematical discipline, and especially disci
pline in Geometry, is extremely useful, if not indispensable, as
a means of preparing the mind to recognize throughout Nature
the absoluteness of uniformities ; it is, if exclusively or too-
habitually pursued, apt to produce perversions of general
thought. Inevitably it establishes a special bent of mind;
and inevitably this special bent affects all the intellectual
actions — causes a tendency to look in a mathematical way at
matters beyond the range of Mathematics. The mathemati
cian is ever dealing with phenomena of which the elements
are relatively few and definite. His most involved problem
is immeasurably less involved than are the problems of the
Concrete Sciences. But, when considering these, he cannot
help thinking after his habitual way : in dealing with ques-

290 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

tions which the Concrete Sciences present, he recognizes some
few only of the factors, tacitly ascribes to these a definiteness
which they have not, and proceeds after the mathematical
manner to draw positive conclusions from these data, as
though they were specific and adequate.

Hence the truth, so often illustrated, that mathematicians
are bad reasoners on contingent matters. To older illustra
tions may he added the recent one yielded by M. Michel
Chasles, who proved himself incapable as a judge of evidence
in the matter of the Newton-Pascal forgeries. Another was
supplied by the late Professor De Morgan, who, bringing his
mental eye to bear with microscopic power on some small part
of a question, ignored its main features.

By cultivation of the Abstract-Concrete Sciences, there is
produced a further habit of thought, not otherwise produced,
which is essential to right thinking in general ; and, by im
plication, to right thinking in Sociology. Familiarity with
the various orders of physical and chemical phenomena, gives
distinctness and strength to the consciousness of cause and
effect.

Experiences of things around do, indeed, yield conceptions
of special forces and of force in general. The uncultured get
from these experiences, degrees of faith in causation such that
where they see some striking effect they usually assume an
adequate cause, and where a cause of given amount is mani
fest, a proportionate effect is looked for. Especially is this so
where the actions are simple mechanical actions. Still, these
impressions which daily life furnishes, if unaided by those de
rived from physical science, leave the mind with but vague
ideas of causal relations. It needs but to remember the readi
ness with which people accept the alleged facts of the Spiritu
alists, many of which imply a direct negation of the mechan
ical axiom that action and reaction are equal and opposite, to
see how much the ordinary thoughts of causation lack quan-
titativeness — lack the idea of proportion between amount of
force expended and amount of change wrought. Very gen
erally, too, the ordinary thoughts of causation are not even
qualitatively valid : the most absurd notions as to what cause
will produce what effect are frequently disclosed. Take, for

DISCIPLINE. 291

instance, the popular belief that a goat kept in a stable will
preserve the health of the horses ; and note how this belief,
accepted on the authority of grooms and coachmen, is repeated
by their educated employers — as I lately heard it repeated by
an American general, and agreed in by two retired English
officials. Clearly, the readiness to admit, on such evidence,
that such a cause can produce such an effect, implies a con
sciousness of causation which, even qualitatively considered,
is of the crudest kind. And such a consciousness is, indeed,
everywhere betrayed by the superstitions traceable among all
classes.

Hence we must infer that the uncompared and unanalyzed
observations men make in the course of their dealings with
things around, do not suffice to give them wholly-rational
ideas of the process of things. It requires that physical actions
shall be critically examined, the factors and results measured,
and different cases contrasted, before there can be reached
clear ideas of necessary causal dependence. And thus to in
vestigate physical actions is the business of the Abstract-Con
crete Sciences. Every experiment which the physicist or the
chemist makes, brings afresh before his consciousness the
truth, given countless times in his previous experiences, that
from certain antecedents of particular kinds there will inevi
tably follow a particular kind of consequent ; and that from
certain amounts of the antecedents, the amount of the conse
quent will be inevitably so much. The habit of thought gen
erated by these hourly-repeated experiences, always the same,
always exact, is one which makes it impossible to think of any
effect as arising without a cause, or any cause as expended
without an effect ; and one which makes it impossible to think
of an effect out of proportion to its cause, or a cause out of
proportion to its effect.

While, however, study of the Abstract-Concrete Sciences
carried 011 experimentally, gives clearness and strength to the
consciousness of causation, taken alone it is inadequate as a
discipline ; and if pursued exclusively, it generates a habit of
thought which betrays into erroneous conclusions when higher
orders of phenomena are dealt with. The process of physical
inquiry is essentially analytical ; and the daily pursuit of this
process generates two tendencies — the tendency to contemplate

292 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

singly those factors which it is the aim to disentangle and
identify and measure ; and the tendency to rest in the results
reached, as though they were the final results to be sought.
The chemist, by saturating, neutralizing, decomposing, pre
cipitating, and at last separating, is enabled to measure what
quantity of this element had been held in combination by a
given quantity of that ; and when, by some alternative course
of analysis, he has verified the result, his inquiry is in so far
concluded : as are kindred inquiries respecting other affinities
of the element, when these are qualitatively and quantitatively
determined. Plis habit is to get rid of, or neglect as much as
possible, the concomitant disturbing factors, that he may ascer
tain the nature and amount of some one, and then of some
other; and his end is achieved when accounts have been
given of all the factors, individually considered. So is it, too,
with the physicist. Say the problem is the propagation of
sound through air, and the interpretation of its velocity — say,
that the velocity as calculated by Newton is found less by one-
sixth than observation gives : and that Laplace sets himself to
explain the anomaly. He recognizes the evolution of heat by
the compression which each sound-wave produces in the air ;
finds the extra velocity consequent on this ; adds this to the
velocity previously calculated ; finds the result answer to the
observed fact; and then, having resolved the phenomenon
into its components and measured them, considers his task
concluded. So throughout : the habit is that of identifying,
parting, and estimating factors; and stopping after having
done this completely.

This habit, carried into the interpretation of things at large,
affects it somewhat as the mathematical habit affects it. It
tends towards the formation of unduly-simple and unduly-
definite conceptions ; and it encourages the natural propensity
to be content with proximate results. The daily practice of
dealing with single factors of phenomena, and with factors
complicated by but few others, and with factors ideally sepa
rated from their combinations, inevitably gives to the thoughts
about surrounding things an analytic rather than a synthetic
character. It promotes the contemplation of simple causes
apart from the entangled plexus of co-operating causes which
all the higher natural phenomena show us ; and begets a ten-

DISCIPLINE. 293

dency to suppose that when the results of such simple causes
have been exactly determined, nothing remains to be asked.

Physical science, then, though indispensable as a means of
developing the consciousness of causation in its simple definite
forms, and thus preparing the mind for dealing with complex
causation, is not sufficient of itself to make complex causation
truly comprehensible. In illustration of its inadequacy, I
might name a distinguished mathematician and physicist
whose achievements place him in the first rank, but who,
nevertheless, when entering on questions of concrete science,
where the data are no longer few and exact, has repeatedly
shown defective judgment. Choosing premisses which, to say
the least, were gratuitous and in some cases improbable, he has
proceeded by exact methods to draw definite conclusions ; and
has then enunciated those conclusions as though they had a
certainty proportionate to the exactness of his methods.

The kind of discipline which affords the needful corrective,
is the discipline which the Concrete Sciences give. Study of
the forms of phenomena, as in Logic and Mathematics, is
needful but by 110 means sufficient. Study of the factors of
phenomena, as in Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry, is also
essential, but not enough by itself, or enough even joined
with study of the forms. Study of the products themselves,
in their totalities, is no less necessary. Exclusive attention to
forms and factors not only fails to give right conceptions of
products, but even tends to make the conceptions of products
wrong. The analytical habit of mind has to be supplemented
by the synthetical habit of mind. Seen in its proper place,
analysis has for its chief function to prepare the way for syn
thesis : and to keep a due mental balance, there must be not
only a recognition of the truth that synthesis is the end to
which analysis is the means, but there must also be a practice
of synthesis along with a practice of analysis.

All the Concrete Sciences familiarize the mind with certain
cardinal conceptions which the Abstract and Abstract-Con
crete Sciences do not yield — the conceptions of continuity,
complexity, and contingency. The simplest of the Concrete
Sciences, Astronomy and Geology, yield the idea of continuity
with great distinctness. I do not mean continuity of existence

294: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

merely ; I mean continuity of causation : the unceasing pro
duction of effect — the never-ending work of every force. On
the mind of the astronomer there is vividly impressed the idea
that any one planet which has been drawn out of its course
by another planet, or by a combination of others, will through
all future time follow a route different from that it would
have followed but for the perturbation ; and he recognizes its
reaction upon the perturbing planet or planets, as similarly
having effects which, while ever being complicated and ever
slowly diffused, will never be lost during the immeasurable
periods to come. So, too, the geologist sees in each change
wrought on the Earth's crust, by igneous or aqueous action, a
new factor that goes on perpetually modifying all subsequent
changes. An upheaved portion of sea-bottom alters the courses
of ocean-currents, modifies the climates of adjacent lands, af
fects their rain- falls and prevailing winds, their denudations
and the deposits round their coasts, their floras and faunas ;
and these effects severally become causes that act unceasingly
in ever-multiplying ways. Always there is traceable the per
sistent working of each force, and the progressive complica
tion of the results through succeeding geologic epochs.

These conceptions, not yielded at all by the Abstract and
Abstract-Concrete Sciences, and yielded by the inorganic Con
crete Sciences in ways which, though unquestionable, do not
arrest attention, are yielded in clear and striking ways by the
organic Concrete Sciences — the sciences that deal with living
things. Every organism, if we read the lesson it gives, shows
us continuity of causation and complexity of causation. The
ordinary facts of inheritance illustrate continuity of causa
tion — very conspicuously where varieties so distinct as negro
and white are united, and where traces of the negro come out
generation after generation ; and still better among domestic
animals, where traits of remote ancestry show the persistent
working of causes which date far back. Organic phenomena
make us familiar with complexity of causation, both by show
ing the co-operation of many antecedents to each consequent,
and by showing the multiplicity of results which each in
fluence works out. If we observe how a given weight of a
given drug produces on no two persons exactly like effects,
and produces even on the same person different effects in dif-

DISCIPLINE. 295

ferent constitutional states ; we see at once how involved is
the combination of factors by which the changes in an organ
ism are brought about, and how extremely contingent, there
fore, is each particular change. And we need but watch what
happens after an injury, say of the foot, to perceive how, if
permanent, it alters the gait, alters the adjustment and bend
of the body, alters the movements of the arms, alters the fea
tures into some contracted form accompanying pain or incon
venience. Indeed, through the re-adjustments, muscular,
nervous, and visceral, which it entails, this local damage acts
and re-acts on function and structure throughout the whole
body : producing effects which, as they diffuse, complicate in
calculably.

While, in multitudinous ways, the Science of Life thrusts
on the attention of the student the cardinal notions of con
tinuity, and complexity, and contingency, of causation, it in
troduces him to a further conception of moment, which the
inorganic Concrete Sciences do not furnish — the conception
of what we may call fructifying causation. For as it is a
distinction between living and not-living bodies that the first
propagate while the second do not ; it is also a distinction be
tween them that certain actions which go on in the first are
cumulative, instead of being, as in the second, dissipative.
Not only do organisms as wholes reproduce, and so from small
beginnings reach, by multiplication, great results ; but com
ponents of them, normal and morbid, do the like. Thus a
minute portion of a virus introduced into an organism, does
not work an effect proportionate to its amount, as would an
inorganic agent on an inorganic mass ; but by appropriating
materials from the blood of the organism, and thus immensely
increasing, it works effects altogether out of proportion to its
amount as originally introduced — effects which may continue
with accumulating power throughout the remaining life of
the organism. It is so with internally-evolved agencies as
well as with externally-invading agencies. A portion of
germinal matter, itself microscopic, may convey from a parent
some constitutional peculiarity that is infinitesimal in relation
even to its minute bulk ; and from this there may arise, fifty
years afterwards, gout or insanity in the resulting man : after
this great lapse of time, slowly increasing actions and prod-

296 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

ucts show themselves in large derangements of function and
structure. And this is a trait characteristic of organic phenom
ena. While from the destructive changes going on through
out the tissues of living bodies, there is a continual production
of effects which lose themselves by subdivision, as do the
eifects of inorganic forces ; there arise from those constructive
changes going on in them, by which living bodies are distin
guished from not-living bodies, certain classes of effects which
increase as they diffuse — go on augmenting in volume as well
as in variety.

Thus, as a discipline, study of the Science of Life is essen
tial ; partly as familiarizing the mind with the cardinal ideas
of continuity, complexity, and contingency, of causation, in
clearer and more various ways than do the other Concrete
Sciences, and partly as familiarizing the mind with the cardi
nal idea of fructifying causation, which the other Concrete
Sciences do not present at all. Not that, pursued exclusively,
the Organic Sciences will yield these conceptions in clear
forms : there requires a familiarity with the Abstract-Concrete
Sciences to give the requisite grasp of simple causation.
Studied by themselves, the Organic Sciences tend rather to
make the ideas of causation cloudy ; for the reason that the
entanglement of the factors and the contingency of the results
is so great, that definite relations of antecedents and conse
quents cannot be established: the two are not presented in
such connexions as to make the conception of causal action,
qualitative and quantitative, sufficiently distinct. There re
quires, first, the discipline yielded by Physics and Chemistry,
to make definite the^deas of forces and actions as necessarily
related in their kinds and amounts ; and then the study of or
ganic phenomena may be carried on with a clear conscious
ness that while the processes of causation are so involved as
often to be inexplicable, yet there is causation, no less neces
sary and no less exact than causation of simpler kinds.

And now to apply these considerations on mental discipline
to our immediate topic. For the effectual study of Sociology
there needs a habit of thought generated by the studies of all
these sciences — not, of course, an exhaustive, or even a very
extensive, study ; but such a study as shall give a grasp of

DISCIPLINE. 297

the cardinal ideas they severally yield. For, as already said,
social phenomena involve phenomena of every order.

That there are necessities of relation such as those with
which the Abstract Sciences deal, cannot be denied when it is
seen that societies present facts of number and quantity. That
the actions of men in society, in all their movements and pro
ductive processes, must conform to the laws of the physical
forces, is also indisputable. And that everything thought and
felt and done in the course of social life, is thought and felt
and done in harmony with the laws of individual life, is also
a truth — almost a truism, indeed ; though one of which few
seem conscious.

Scientific culture in general, then, is needful ; and above
all, culture of the Science of Life. This is more especially
requisite, however, because the conceptions of continuity,
complexity, and contingency of causation, as well as the con
ception of fructifying causation, are conceptions common to
it and to the Science of Society. It affords a specially-fit dis
cipline, for the reason that it alone among the sciences pro
duces familiarity with these cardinal ideas — presents the data
for them in forms easily grasped, and so prepares the mind to
recognize the data for them in the Social Science, where they
are less easily grasped, though no less constantly presented.

The supreme importance of this last kind of culture, how
ever, is not to be adequately shown by this brief statement.
For besides generating habits of thought appropriate to the
study of the Social Science, it furnishes special conceptions
which serve as keys to the Social Science. The Science of
Life yields to the Science of Society, certain great generaliza
tions without which there can be no Science of Society at all.
Let us go on to observe the relations of the two.

CHAPTER XIV.

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY.

THE parable of the sower has its application to the progress
of Science. Time after time new ideas are sown and do not
germinate, or, having germinated, die for lack of fit environ
ments, before they are at last sown under such conditions as
to take root and flourish. Among other instances of this, one
is supplied by the history of the truth here to be dwelt on —
the dependence of Sociology on Biology. Even limiting the
search to our own society, we may trace back this idea nearly
three centuries. In the first book of Hooker's Ecclesiastical
Polity, it is enunciated as clearly as the state of knowledge in
his age made possible — more clearly, indeed, than was to be
expected in an age when science arid scientific ways of think
ing had advanced so little. Along with the general notion of
natural law — along, too, with the admission that human ac
tions, resulting as they do from desires guided by knowledge,
also in a sense conform to law ; there is a recognition of the
fact that the formation of societies is determined by the at
tributes of individuals, and that the growth of a govern
mental organization follows from the natures of the men
who have associated themselves the better to satisfy their
needs. Entangled though this doctrine is with a theological
doctrine, through the restraints of which it has to break, it is
expressed with considerable clearness : there needs but better
definition and further development to make it truly scientific.

Among re-appearances of this thought in subsequent Eng
lish writers, I will here name only one, which I happen to
have observed in An Essay on the History of Civil Society,
published a century ago by Dr. Adam Ferguson. In it the
first part treats " of the General Characteristics of Human Na-

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 299

ture." Section I., pointing out the universality of the grega
rious tendency, the dependence of this on certain affections
and antagonisms, and the influences of memory, foresight,
language, and communicativeness, alleges that "these facts
must be admitted as the foundation of all our reasoning rela
tive to man." Though the way in which social phenomena
arise out of the phenomena of individual human nature, is
seen in but a general and vague way, yet it is seen — there is a
conception of causal relation.

Before this conception could assume a definite form, it was
necessary both that scientific knowledge should become more
comprehensive and precise, and that the scientific spirit should
be strengthened. To M. Comte, living when these conditions
were fulfilled, is due the credit of having set forth with com
parative defmiteness, the connexion between the Science of
Life and the Science of Society. He saw clearly that the facts
presented by masses of associated men, are facts of the same
order as those presented by groups of gregarious creatures of
inferior kinds ; and that in the one case, as in the other, the
individuals must be studied before the assemblages can be
understood. He therefore placed Biology before Sociology in
his classification of the sciences. Biological preparation for
sociological study, he regarded as needful not only because
the phenomena of corporate life, arising out of the phenomena
of individual life, can be rightly co-ordinated only after the
phenomena of individual life have been rightly co-ordinated ;
but also because the methods of inquiry which Biology uses,
are methods to be used by Sociology. In various ways, which
it would take too much space here to specify, he exhibits this
dependence very satisfactorily. It may, indeed, be con

tended that certain of his other beliefs prevented him from
seeing all the implications of this dependence. When, for
instance, he speaks of " the intellectual anarchy which is the
main source of our moral anarchy " — when he thus discloses
the faith, pervading his Course of Positive Philosophy, that
true theory would bring right practice ; it becomes clear that
the relation between the attributes of citizens and the phe
nomena of societies is incorrectly seen by him ; the relation is
far too deep a one to be changed by mere change of ideas.
Again, denying, as he did, the indefinite modifiability of spe-

300 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

cies, he almost ignored one of the cardinal truths which Biol
ogy yields to Sociology— a truth without which sociological
interpretations must go wrong. Though he admits a certain
modifiability of Man, both emotional and intellectual, yet the
dogma of the fixity of species, to which he adhered, kept his
conceptions of individual and social change within limits
much too specific. Hence arose, among other erroneous pre
conceptions, this serious one, that the different forms of so
ciety presented by savage and civilized races all over the
globe, are but different stages in the evolution of one form :
the truth being, rather, that social types, like types of indi
vidual organisms, do not form a series, but are classifiable
only in divergent and re-divergent groups. Nor did

he arrive at that conception of the Social Science which alone
fully affiliates it upon the simpler sciences — the conception of
it as an account of the most complex forms of that continu
ous redistribution of matter and motion which is going on
universally. Only when it is seen that the transformations
passed through during the growth, maturity, and decay of a
society, conform to the same principles as do the transforma
tions passed through by aggregates of all orders, inorganic
and organic — only when it is seen that the process is in all
cases similarly determined by forces, and is not scientifically
interpreted until it is expressed in terms of those forces ; —
only then is there reached the conception of Sociology as a
science, in the complete meaning of the word.

Nevertheless, we must not overlook the greatness of the
step made by M. Comte. His mode of contemplating the
facts was truly philosophical. Containing, along with special
views not to be admitted, many thoughts that are true as well
as large and suggestive, the introductory chapters to his
Sociology show a breadth and depth of conception beyond
any previously reached. Apart from the tenability of his so
ciological doctrines, his way of conceiving social phenomena
was much superior to all previous ways : and among other
of its superiorities, was this recognition of the dependence of
Sociology on Biology.

Here leaving the history of this idea, let us turn to the
idea itself. There are two distinct and equally-important
ways in which these sciences are connected. In the first

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 301

place, all social actions being determined by the actions of
individuals, and all actions of individuals being- vital actions
that conform to the laws of life at large, a rational interpre
tation of social actions implies knowledge of the laws of life.
In the second place, a society as a whole, considered apart
from its living units, presents phenomena of growth, struc
ture, and function, like those of growth, structure, and func
tion in an individual body ; and these last are needful keys to
the first. We will begin with this analogical connexion.

Figures of speech, which often mislead by conveying the
notion of complete likeness where only slight similarity ex
ists, occasionally mislead by making an actual correspondence
seem a fancy. A metaphor, when used to express a real re
semblance, raises a suspicion of mere imaginary resemblance ;
and so obscures the perception of intrinsic kinship. It is thus
with the phrases "body politic," "political organization," and
others, which tacitly liken a society to a living creature : they
are assumed to be phrases having a certain convenience but
expressing no fact — tending rather to foster a fiction. And
yet metaphors are here more than metaphors in the ordinary
sense. They are devices of speech hit upon to suggest a truth
at first dimly perceived, but which grows clearer the more
carefully the evidence is examined. That there is a real anal
ogy between an individual organism and a social organism,
becomes undeniable when certain necessities determining
structure are seen to govern them in common.

Mutual dependence of parts is that which initiates and
guides organization of every kind. So long as, in a mass of
living matter, all parts are alike, and all parts similarly live
and grow without aid from one another, there is no organiza
tion : the undifferentiated aggregate of protoplasm thus
characterized, belongs to the lowest grade of living things.
Without distinct faculties, and capable of but the feeblest
movements, it cannot adjust itself to circumstances ; and is at
the mercy of environing destructive actions. The changes by
which this structureless mass becomes a structured mass, hav
ing the characters and powers possessed by what we call an
organism, are changes through which its parts lose their orig
inal likenesses ; and do this while assuming the unlike kinds

302 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

of activity for which their respective positions towards one
another and surrounding things fit them. These differences
of function, and consequent differences of structure, at first
feebly marked, slight in degree, and few in kind, become,
as organization progresses, definite and numerous; and
in proportion as they do this the requirements are better
met. Now structural traits expressible in the same

language, distinguish lower and higher types of societies from
one another; and distinguish the earlier stages of each so
ciety from the later. Primitive tribes show no established
contrasts of parts. At first all men carry on the same kind of
activities, with no dependence on one another, or but occa
sional dependence. There is not even a settled chieftainship ;
and only in times of war is there a spontaneous and temporary
subordination to those who show themselves the best leaders.
From the small unformed social aggregates thus character
ized, the progress is towards social aggregates of increased size,
the parts of which acquire unlikenesses that become ever
greater, more definite, and more multitudinous. The units of
the society as it evolves, fall into different orders of activities,
determined by differences in their local conditions or their
individual powers ; and there slowly result permanent social
structures, of which the primary ones become decided while
they are being complicated by secondary ones, growing in
their turns decided, and so on.

Even were this all, the analogy would be suggestive ; but
it is not all. These two metamorphoses have a cause in com
mon. Beginning with an animal composed of like parts,
severally living by and for themselves, on what condition
only can there be established a change, such that one part
comes to perform one kind of function, and another part
another kind ? Evidently each part can abandon that orig
inal state in which it fulfilled for itself all vital needs, and
can assume a state in which it fulfils in excess some single
vital need, only if its other vital needs are fulfilled for it by
other parts that have meanwhile undertaken other special
activities. One portion of a living aggregate cannot devote
itself exclusively to the respiratory function, and cease to get
nutriment for itself, unless other portions that have become
exclusively occupied in absorbing nutriment, give it a due

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 303

supply. That is to say, there must be exchange of services.
Organization in an individual creature is made possible only by
dependence of each part on all, and of all on each. Now

this is obviously true also of social organization. A member
of a primitive society cannot devote himself to an order of
activity which satisfies one only of his personal wants, thus
ceasing the activities required for satisfying his other personal
wants, unless those for whose benefit he carries on his special
activity in excess, give him in return the benefits of their
special activities. If he makes weapons instead of continuing
a hunter, he must be supplied with the produce of the chase
on condition that the hunters are supplied with his weapons.
If he becomes a cultivator of the soil, no longer defending
himself, he must be defended by those who have become
specialized defenders. That is to say, mutual dependence of
parts is essential for the commencement and advance of social
organization, as it is for the commencement and advance of
individual organization.

Even were there no more to be pointed out, it would be
clear enough that we are not here dealing with a figurative
resemblance, but with a fundamental parallelism in principles
of structure. We have but begun to explore the analogy,
however. The further we inquire, the closer we find it to be.
For what, let us ask, is implied by mutual dependence — by
exchange of services ? There is implied some mode of com
munication between mutually-dependent parts. Parts that
perform functions for one another's benefit, must have appli
ances for conveying to one another the products of their
respective functions, or for giving to one another the benefits
(when these are not material products) which their respective
functions achieve. And obviously, in proportion as the
organization becomes high, the appliances for carrying on
the intercourse must become involved. This we find to hold
in both cases. In the lowest types of individual organ

isms, the exchange of services between the slightly-differen
tiated parts is effected in a slow, vague way, by an irregular
diffusion of the nutrient matters jointly elaborated, and by an
irregular propagation of feeble stimuli, causing a rude co-ordi
nation in the actions of the parts. It is thus, also, with small
and simple social aggregates. No definite arrangements for

304 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

interchanging services exist ; but only indefinite ones. Barter
of products — food, skins, weapons, or what not — takes place
irregularly between individual producers and consumers
throughout the whole social body : there is no trading or dis
tributing system, as, in the rudimentary animal, there is no
vascular system. So, too, the social organism of low type,
like the individual organism of low type, has no appli
ances for combining the actions of its remoter parts. When
co-operation of them against an enemy is called for, there
is nothing but the spread of an alarm from man to man
throughout the scattered population ; just as in an unde
veloped kind of animal, there is merely a slow undirected
diffusion of stimulus from one point to all others. In

either case, the evohition of a larger, more complex, more
active organism, implies an increasingly-efficient set of agen
cies for conveying from part to part the material products of
the respective parts, and an increasingly-efficient set of agen
cies for making the parts co-operate, so that the times and
amounts of their activities may be kept in fit relations. And
this, the facts everywhere show us. In the individual organ
ism as it advances to a high structure, no matter of what class,
there arises an elaborate system of channels through which
the common stock of nutritive matters (here added to by ab
sorption, there changed by secretion, in this place purified by
excretion, and in another modified by exchange of gases) is
distributed throughout the body for the feeding of the various
parts, severally occupied in their special actions ; while in the
social organism as it advances to a high structure, no matter
of what political type, there develops an extensive and com
plicated trading organization for the distribution of commod
ities, which, sending its heterogeneous currents through the
kingdom by channels that end in retailers' shops, brings
within reach of each citizen the necessaries and luxuries that
have been produced by others, while he has been producing
his commodity or small part of a commodity, or performing
some other function or small part of a function, beneficial to
the rest. Similarly, development of the individual organism,
be its class what it may, is always accompanied by develop
ment of a nervous system which renders the combined actions
of the parts prompt and duly proportioned, so making possible

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 3Q5

the adjustments required for meeting the varying contingen
cies ; while, along with development of the social organism,
there always goes development of directive centres, general
and local, with established arrangements for inter-changing
information and instigation, serving to adjust the rates and
kinds of activities going on in different parts.

Now if there exists this fundamental kinship, there can be
no rational apprehension of the truths of Sociology until there
has been reached a rational apprehension of the truths of Bi
ology. The services of the two sciences are, indeed, recipro
cal. We have but to glance back at its progress, to see that
Biology owes the cardinal idea on which we have been dwell
ing, to Sociology; and that having derived from Sociology
this explanation of development, it gives it back to Sociology
greatly increased in defiiiiteness, enriched by countless illus
trations, and fit for extension in new directions. The lumi
nous conception first set forth by one whom we may claim as
our countryman by blood, though French by birth, M. Milne-
Edwards — the conception of "the physiological division of
labour," obviously originates from the generalization pre
viously reached in Political Economy. Recognition of the
advantages gained by a society when different groups of its
members devote themselves to different industries, for which
they acquire special aptitudes and surround themselves with
special facilities, led to recognition of the advantages which
an individual organism gains when parts of it, originally
alike and having like activities, divide these activities among
them ; so that each taking a special kind of activity acquires
a special fitness for it. But when carried from Soci

ology to Biology, this conception was forthwith greatly ex
panded. Instead of being limited to the functions included
in nutrition, it was found applicable to all functions what
ever. It turned out that the arrangements of the entire or
ganism, and not of the viscera alone, conform to this funda
mental principle — even the differences arising among the
limbs, originally alike, were seen to be interpretable by it.
And then mark that the idea thus developed into an all-em
bracing truth in Biology, returns to Sociology ready to be for
it, too, an all-embracing truth. For it now becomes manifest
that not to industrial arrangements only does the principle of
21

306 ™E STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

the division of labour apply, but to social arrangements in
general. The progress of organization, from that first step by
which there arose a controlling chief, partially distinguished
by his actions from those controlled, has been everywhere
the same. Be it in the growth of a regulative class more or
less marked off from classes regulated — be it in the partings
of this regulative class into political, ecclesiastical, etc. — be it
in those distinctions of duties within each class which are sig
nified by gradations of rank ; we may trace everywhere that
fundamental law shown us by industrial organization. And
when we have once adequately grasped this truth which Bi
ology borrows from Sociology and returns with vast interest,
the aggregate of phenomena which a society at any moment
presents, as well as the series of developmental changes through
which it has risen to them, become suddenly illuminated, and
the rationale comparatively clear.

After a recognition of this fundamental kinship there can
be no difficulty in seeing how important, as an introduction
to the study of social life, is a familiarization with the truths
of individual life. For individual life, while showing us this
division of labour, this excbange of services, in many and
varied ways, shows it in ways easily traced ; because the
structures and functions are presented in directly-perceivable
forms. And only when multitudinous biological examples
have stamped on the mind the conception of a growing inter
dependence that goes along with a growing specialization, and
have thus induced a habit of thought, will its sociological
applications be duly appreciated.

Turn we now from the indirect influence which Biology
exerts on Sociology, by supplying it with rational conceptions
of social development and organization, to the direct influence
it exerts by furnishing an adequate theory of the social unit — •
Man. For while Biology is mediately connected with Soci
ology by a certain parallelism between the groups of phenom
ena they deal with, it is immediately connected with Soci
ology by having within its limits this creature whose prop
erties originate social evolution. The human being is at once
the terminal problem of Biology and the initial factor of
Sociology.

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 3Q7

If Man were uniform and unchangeable, so that those
attributes of him which lead to social phenomena could be
learnt and dealt with as constant, it would not much concern
the sociologist to make himself master of other biological
truths than those cardinal ones above dwelt upon. But
since, in common with every other creature, Man is modi
fiable — since his modifications, like those of every other
creature, are ultimately determined by surrounding condi
tions — and since surrounding conditions are in part consti
tuted by social arrangements ; it becomes requisite that the
sociologist should acquaint himself with the laws of modifica
tion to which organized beings in general conform. Unless
he does this he must continually err, both in thought and
deed. As thinker, he will fail to understand the increasing
action and reaction of institutions and character, each slowly
modifying the other through successive generations. As actor,
his furtherance of this or that public policy, being unguided
by a true theory of the effects wrought on citizens, will proba
bly be mischievous rather than beneficial ; since there are
more ways of going wrong than of going right. How needful
is enlightenment on this point, will be seen on remembering
that scarcely anywhere is attention given to the modifications
which a new agency, political or other, will produce in men's
natures. Immediate influence on actions is alone contem
plated ; and the immeasurably more important influence on
the bodies and minds of future generations, is wholly ig
nored.

Yet the biological truths which should check this random
political speculation and rash political action, are conspicu
ous ; and might, one would have thought, have been recog
nized by everyone, even without special preparation in Biol
ogy. That faculties and powers of all orders, while they grow
by exercise, dwindle when not used ; and that alterations of
nature descend to posterity ; are facts continually thrust on
men's attention, and more or less admitted by each. Though
the evidence of heredity, when looked at in detail, seems ob
scure, because of the multitudinous differences of parents and
of ancestors, which all take their varying shares in each new
product ; yet, when looked at in the mass, the evidence is over
whelming. Not to dwell on the countless proofs furnished by

308 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

domesticated animals of many kinds, as modified by breeders,
the proofs furnished by the human races themselves are
amply sufficient. That each variety of man goes 011 so repro
ducing1 itself that adjacent generations are nearly alike, how
ever appreciable may sometimes be the divergence in a long
series of generations, is undeniable. Chinese are recognizable
as Chinese in whatever part of the globe we see them ; every
one assumes a black ancestry for any negro he meets ; and no
one doubts that the less-marked racial varieties have great
degrees of persistence. On the other hand, it is unquestion
able that the likenesses which the members of one human
stock preserve, generation after generation, where the condi
tions of life remain constant, give place to unlikenesses that
slowly increase in the course of centuries and thousands of
years, if the members of that stock, spreading into different
habitats, fall under different sets of conditions. If we assume
the original unity of the human race, we have no alternative
but to admit such divergencies consequent on such causes ;
and even if we do not assume this original unity, we have
still, among the races classed by the community of their lan
guages as Aryan, abundant proofs that subjection to different
modes of life, produces in course of ages permanent bodily
and mental differences : the Hindu and the Englishman, the
Greek and the Dutchman, have acquired undeniable contrasts
of nature, physical and psychical, which can be ascribed to
nothing but the continuous effects of circumstances, material,
moral, social, on the activities and therefore on the constitu
tion. So that, as above said, it might have been expected that
biological training would scarcely be needed to impress men
with these large facts, all-important as elements in sociological
conclusions.

As it is, however, we see that a deliberate study of Biology
cannot be dispensed with. It is requisite that these scattered
evidences which but few citizens put together and think about,
should be set before them in an orderly way ; and that they
should recognize in them the universal truths which living
things exhibit. There requires a multiplicity of illustra
tions, various in their kinds, often repeated and dwelt upon.
Only thus can there be produced an adequately-strong convic
tion that all organic beings are modifiable, that modifications

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 399

are inheritable, and that therefore the remote issues of any
new influence brought to bear on the members of a commu
nity must be serious.

To give a more definite and effective shape to this general
inference, let me here comment on certain courses pursued by
philanthropists and legislators eager for immediate good re
sults, but pursued without regard to biological truths, which,
if borne in mind, would make them hesitate if not desist.

Every species of creature goes on multiplying till it
reaches the limit at which its mortality from all causes bal
ances its fertility. Diminish its mortality by removing or
mitigating any one of these causes, and inevitably its num
bers increase until mortality and fertility are again in equi
librium. However many injurious influences are taken away,
the same thing holds ; for the reason that the remaining in
jurious influences grow more intense. Either the pressure on
the means of subsistence becomes greater ; or some enemy of
the species, multiplying in proportion to the abundance of
its prey, becomes more destructive ; or some disease, encour
aged by greater proximity, becomes more prevalent. This
general truth, everywhere exemplified among inferior races of
beings, holds of the human race. True, it is in this case vari
ously traversed and obscured. By emigration, the limits
against which population continually presses are partially
evaded ; by improvements in production, they are continually
removed further away; and along with increase of knowl
edge there comes an avoidance of detrimental agencies.
Still, these are but qualifications of an inevitable action and
reaction.

Let us here glance at the relation between this general
truth and the legislative measures adopted to ward off certain
causes of death. Every individual eventually dies from ina
bility to withstand some environing action. It may be a me
chanical force that cannot be resisted by the strengths of his
bodily structures ; it may be a deleterious gas which, ab
sorbed into his blood, so deranges the processes throughout
his body as finally to overthrow their balance ; or it may be
an absorption of his bodily heat by surrounding things, that
is too great for his enfeebled functions to meet. In all cases,

310 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

however, it is one, or some, of the many forces to which he is
exposed, and in presence of which his vital activities have to
be carried on. He may succumb early or late, according to
the goodness of his structure and the incidents of his career.
But in the natural working of things, those having imperfect
structures succumb before they have offspring : leaving those
with fitter structures to produce the next generation. And
obviously, the working of this process is such that as many
will continue to live and to reproduce as can do so under the
conditions then existing : if the assemblage of influences be
comes more difficult to withstand, a larger number of the
feebler disappear early ; if the assemblage of influences is
made more favourable by the removal of, or mitigation of,
some unfavourable influence, there is an increase in the num
ber of the feebler who survive and leave posterity. Hence
two proximate results, conspiring to the same ultimate result.
First, population increases at a greater rate than it would
otherwise have done : so subjecting all persons to certain
other destroying agencies in more-intense forms. Second,
by intermarriage of the feebler who now survive, with the
stronger who would otherwise have alone survived, the gen
eral constitution is brought down to the level of strength re
quired to meet these more-favourable conditions. Tbat is to
say, there by-and-by arises a state of things under which a
general decrease in the power of withstanding this mitigated
destroying cause, and a general increase in the activity of
other destroying causes, consequent on greater numbers,
bring mortality and fertility into the same relation as before
— there is a somewhat larger number of a somewhat weaker
race.

There are further ways in which this process necessarily
works a like general effect, however far it is carried. For as
fust as more and more detrimental agencies are removed or
mitigated, and as fast as there goes on an increasing survival
and propagation of those having delicately-balanced constitu
tions, there arise new destructive agencies. Let the average
vitality be diminished by more effectually guarding the weak
against adverse conditions, and inevitably there come fresh
diseases. A general constitution previously able to bear with
out derangement certain variations in atmospheric conditions

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 3H

and certain degrees of other unfavourable actions, if lowered
in tone, will become subject to new kinds of perturbation and
new causes of death. In illustration, I need but refer to the
many diseases from which civilized races suffer, but which
were not known to the uncivilized. Nor is it only by such
new causes of death that the rate of mortality, when decreased
in one direction increases in another. The very precautions
against death are themselves in some measure new causes of
death. Every further appliance for meeting an evil, every ad
ditional expenditure of effort, every extra tax to meet the cost
of supervision, becomes a fresh obstacle to living. For always
in a society where population is pressing' on the means of sub
sistence, and where the efforts required to fulfil vital needs
are so great that they here and there cause premature death,
the powers of producers cannot be further strained by calling
on them to support a new class of non-producers, without, in
some cases, increasing the wear and tear to a fatal extent.
And in proportion as this policy is carried further— in propor
tion as the enfeeblemeiit of constitution is made greater, the
required precautions multiplied, and the cost of maintaining
these precautions augmented; it must happen that the in
creasing physiological expenditure thrown on these enfeebled
constitutions, must make them succumb so much the earlier :
the mortality evaded in one shape must come round in
another.

The clearest conception of the state brought about, will be
gained by supposing the society thus produced to consist of
old people. Age differs from maturity and youth in being
less able to withstand influences that tend to derange the
functions, as well as less able to bear the efforts needed to get
the food, clothing, and shelter, by which resistance to these
influences may be carried on ; and where no aid is received
from the younger, this decreased strength and increased lia
bility to derangement by incident forces, make the life of age
difficult and wearisome. Those who, though young, have
weak constitutions, are much in the same position : their lia
bilities to .derangement are similarly multiplied, and where
they have to support themselves, they are similarly over- taxed
by the effort, relatively great to them and made greater by the
maintaining of precautions. A society of enfeebled people,

312 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

then, must lead a life like that led by a society of people who
had outlived the vigour of maturity, and yet had none to help
them ; and their life must also be like in lacking that over
flowing energy which, while it makes labours easy, makes
enjoyments keen. In proportion as vigour declines, not only
do the causes of pain multiply, while the tax on the energies
becomes more trying, but the possibilities of pleasure decrease :
many delights demanding, or accompanying, exertion are
shut out ; and others fail to raise the flagging spirits. So that,
to sum up, lowering the average type of constitution to a level
of strength below that which meets without difficulty the or
dinary strains and perturbations and dangers, while it fails
eventually to diminish the rate of mortality, makes life more
a burden and less a gratification.

I am aware that this reasoning may be met by the criti
cism that, carried out rigorously, it would negative social
ameliorations in general. Some, perhaps, will say that even
those measures by which order is maintained, might be op
posed on the ground that there results from them a kind of
men less capable of self-protection than would otherwise exist.
And there will doubtless be suggested the corollary that no
influences detrimental to health ought to be removed. I am
not concerned to meet such criticisms, because I do not mean
the conclusions above indicated to be taken without qualifica
tion. Manifestly, up to a certain point, the removal of de
structive causes leaves a balance of benefit. The simple fact
that with a largely-augmented population, longevity is greater
now than heretofore, goes far towards showing that up to the
time lived through by those who die in our day, there had
been a decrease of the causes of mortality in some directions,
greater than their increase in other directions. Though a
considerable drawback may be suspected — though, on observ
ing how few thoroughly-strong people we meet, and how
prevalent are chronic ailments notwithstanding the care taken
of health, it may be inferred that bodily life now is lower in
quality than it was, though greater in quantity ; yet there has
probably been gained a surplus of advantage. All. I wish to
show is, that there are limits to the good gained by such a
policy. It is supposed in the Legislature, and by the public
at large, that if, by measures taken, a certain number of

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 313

deaths by disease have been prevented, so much pure benefit has
been secured. But it is not so. In any case, there is a set-off
from the benefit ; and if such measures are greatly multiplied,
the deductions may eat up the benefit entirely, and leave an
injury in its place. Where such measures ought to stop, is a
question that may be left open. Here my purpose is simply
to point out the way in which a far-reaching biological truth
underlies rational conclusions in Sociology ; and also to point
out that formidable evils may arise from ignoring it.

Other evils, no less serious, are entailed by legislative ac
tions and by actions of individuals, single and combined,
which overlook or disregard a kindred biological truth. Be
sides an habitual neglect of the fact that the quality of a so
ciety is physically lowered by the artificial preservation of its
feeblest members, there is an habitual neglect of the fact that
the quality of a society is lowered morally and intellectually,
by the artificial preservation of those who are least able to
take care of themselves.

If anyone denies that children bear likenesses to their pro
genitors in character and capacity — if he holds that men
whose parents and grandparents were habitual criminals,
have tendencies as good as those of men whose parents and
grandparents were industrious and upright, he may consist
ently hold that it matters not from what families in a society
the successive generations descend. He may think it just as
well if the most active, and capable, and prudent, and con
scientious people die without issue ; while many children are
left by the reckless and dishonest. But whoever does not
espouse so insane a proposition, must admit that social ar
rangements which retard the multiplication of the mentally-
best, and facilitate the multiplication of the mentally-worst,
must be extremely injurious.

For if the unworthy are helped to increase, by shielding
them from that mortality which their unworthiness would
naturally entail, the effect is to produce, generation after gen
eration, a greater unworthiness. From diminished use of self-
conserving faculties already deficient, there must result, in
posterity, still smaller amounts of self-conserving faculties.
The general law which we traced above in its bodily applica-

3H THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

tions, may be traced here in its mental applications. Removal
of certain difficulties and dangers which have to be met by
intelligence and activity, is followed by a decreased ability to
meet difficulties and dangers. Among children born to the
more capable who marry with the less capable, thus artificially
preserved, there is not simply a lower average power of self-
preservation than would else have existed, but the incapacity
reaches in some cases a greater extreme. Smaller difficulties
and dangers become fatal in proportion as greater ones are
warded off. Nor is this the whole mischief. For such mem
bers of a population as do not take care of themselves, but are
taken care of by the rest, inevitably bring on the rest extra
exertion ; either in supplying them with the necessaries of
life, or in maintaining over them the required supervision, or
in both. That is to say, in addition to self -conservation and
the conservation of their own offspring, the best, having to
undertake the conservation of the worst, and of their off
spring, are subject to an overdraw upon their energies. In.
some cases this stops them from marrying ; in other cases it
diminishes the numbers of their children; in other cases it
causes inadequate feeding of their children ; in other cases it
brings their children to orphanhood — in every way tending
to arrest the increase of the best, to deteriorate their consti
tutions, and to pull them down towards the level of the
worst.

Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good,
is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing-up of miseries
for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity
than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of
imbeciles and idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in multi
plying, is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our
descendants a multitude of enemies. It may be doubted
whether the maudlin philanthropy which, looking only at di
rect mitigations, persistently ignores indirect mischiefs, does
not inflict a greater total of misery than the extremest selfishness
inflicts. Eefusing to consider the remote influences of his in
continent generosity, the thoughtless giver stands but a de
gree above the drunkard who thinks only of to-day's pleasure
and ignores to-morrow's pain, or the spendthrift who seeks
immediate delights at the cost of ultimate poverty. In one

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 315

respect, indeed, he is worse ; since, while getting the present
pleasure produced in giving pleasure, he leaves the future
miseries to be borne by others — escaping them himself. And
calling for still stronger reprobation is that scattering of
money prompted by misinterpretation of the saying that
"charity covers a multitude of sins." For in the many
whom this misinterpretation leads to believe that by large
donations they can compound for evil deeds; we may trace
an element of positive baseness— an effort to get a good place
in another world, no matter at what injury to fellow-crea
tures.

How far the mentally-superior may, with a balance of bene
fit to society, shield the mentally-inferior from the evil results
of their inferiority, is a question too involved to be here dis
cussed at length. Doubtless it is in the order of things that
parental affection, the regard of relatives, and the spontane
ous sympathy of friends and even of strangers, should miti
gate the pains which incapacity has to bear, and the penalties
which unfit impulses bring round. Doubtless, in many cases
the reactive influence of this sympathetic care which the better
take of the worse, is morally beneficial, and in a degree com
pensates by good in one direction for evil in another. It may
be fully admitted that individual altruism, left to itself, will
work advantageously — wherever, at least, it does not go to the
extent of helping the unworthy to multiply. But an unques
tionable injury is done by agencies which undertake in a
wholesale way to foster good-for-nothings : putting a stop to
that natural process of elimination by which society continu
ally purifies itself. For not only by such agencies is this
preservation of the worst and destruction of the best carried
further than it would else be, but there is scarcely any of that
compensating advantage which individual altruism implies.
A mechanically-working State-apparatus, distributing money
drawn from grumbling ratepayers, produces little or no
moralizing effect on the capables to make up for multiplica
tion of the incapables. Here, however, it is needless to dwell
on the perplexing questions hence arising. My purpose is
simply to show that a rational policy must recognize certain
general truths of Biology ; and to insist that only when study
of these general truths, as illustrated throughout the living

316 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

world, has woven them into the conceptions of things, is there
gained a strong conviction that disregard of them must cause
enormous mischiefs.1

Biological truths and their corollaries, presented under
these special forms as bases for sociological conclusions, are
introductory to a more general biological truth including
them — a general biological truth which underlies all rational
legislation. I refer to the truth that every species of organ
ism, including the human, is always adapting itself, both
directly and indirectly, to its conditions of existence.

The actions which have produced every variety of man, —
the actions which have established in the Negro and the
Hindu, constitutions that thrive in climates fatal to Euro
peans, and in the Fuegian a constitution enabling him to bear
without clothing an inclemency almost too great for other
races well clothed — the actions which have developed in the
Tartar-races nomadic habits that are almost insurmountable,
while they have given to North American Indians desires
and aptitudes which, fitting them for a hunting life, make a
civilized life intolerable — the actions doing this, are also ever
at work moulding citizens into correspondence with their cir
cumstances. While the bodily natures of citizens are being
fitted to the physical influences and industrial activities of
their locality, their mental natures are being fitted to the
structure of the society they live in. Though, as we have
seen, there is always an approximate fitness of the social unit
to its social aggregate, yet the fitness can never be more than
approximate, and re-adjustment is always going on. Could a
society remain unchanged, something like a permanent equi
librium between the nature of the individual' and the nature
of the society would presently be reached. But the type of
each society is continually being modified by two causes— by
growth, and by the actions, warlike or other, of adjacent
societies. Increase in the bulk of a society inevitably leads
to change of structure ; as also does any alteration in the
ratio of the predatory to the industrial activities. Hence con
tinual social metamorphosis, involving continual alteration
of the conditions under which the citizen lives, produces in
him an adaptation of character which, tending towards com-

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 317

pleteness, is ever made incomplete by further social meta
morphosis.

While, however, each society, and each successive phase of
each society, presents conditions more or less special, to which
the natures of citizens adapt themselves ; there are certain
general conditions which, in every society, must be fulfilled
to a considerable extent before it can hold together, and which
must be fulfilled completely before social life can be complete.
Each citizen has to carry on his activities in such ways as not
to impede other citizens in the carrying-on of their activities
more than he is impeded by them. That any citizen may so
behave as not to deduct from the aggregate welfare, it is need
ful that he shall perform such function, or share of function,
as is of value equivalent at least to what he consumes ; and it
is further needful that, both in discharging his function and
in pursuing his pleasure, he shall leave others similarly free
to discharge their functions and to pursue their pleasures.
Obviously a society formed of units who cannot live without
mutual hindrance, is one in which the happiness is of smaller
amount than it is in a society formed of units who can live
without mutual hindrance — numbers and physical conditions
being supposed equal. And obviously the sum of happiness in
such a society is still less than that in a society of which the
units voluntarily aid one another.

Now, under one of its chief aspects, civilization is a process
of developing in citizens a nature capable of fulfilling these
all-essential conditions ; and, neglecting their superfluities,
laws and the appliances for enforcing them, are expressions
and embodiments of these all-essential conditions. On the one
hand, those severe systems of slavery, and serfdom, and
punishment for vagabondage, which characterized the less-
developed social types, stand for the necessity that the social
unit shall be self-supporting. On the other hand, the punish
ments for murder, assault, theft, etc., and the penalties on
breach of contract, stand for the necessity that, in the coiirse
of the activities by which he supports himself, the citizen shall
neither directly injure other citizens, nor shall injure them
indirectly, by taking- or intercepting the returns their activi
ties bring. And it needs no detail to show that a fundamental
trait in social progress, is an increase of industrial energy,

318 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

leading citizens to support themselves without being coerced
in the harsh ways once general ; that another fundamental
trait is the gradual establishment of such a nature in citizens
that, while pursuing their respective ends, they injure and
impede one another in smaller degrees ; and that a concomi
tant trait is the growth of governmental restraints which
more effectually check the remaining aggressiveness. That
is to say, while the course of civilization shows us a clearer rec
ognition and better enforcement of these essential conditions,
it also shows us a moulding of humanity into correspondence
with them.

Along with the proofs thus furnished that the biological
law of adaptation, holding of all other species, holds of the
human species, and that the change of nature undergone by
the human species since societies began to develop, has been
an adaptation of it to the conditions implied by harmonious
social life, we receive the lesson, that the one thing needful is
a rigorous maintenance of these conditions. While all -see
that the immediate function of our chief social institutions is
the securing of an orderly social life by making these condi
tions imperative, very few see that their further function, and
in one sense more important function, is that of fitting men to
fulfil these conditions spontaneously. The two functions are
inseparable. From the biological laws we have been contem
plating, it is, on the one hand, an inevitable corollary that if
these conditions are maintained, human nature will slowly
adapt itself to them ; while, on the other hand, it is an inevit
able corollary that by no other discipline than subjection to
these conditions, can fitness to the social state be produced.
Enforce these conditions, and adaptation to them will con
tinue. Relax these conditions, and by so much there will be
a cessation of the adaptive changes. Abolish these conditions,
and after the consequent social dissolution, there will com
mence (unless they are re-established) an adaptation to the
conditions then resulting — those of savage life. These are con
clusions from which there is no escape, if Man is subject to
the laws of life in common with living things in general.

It may, indeed, be rightly contended that if those who are
but little fitted to the social state are rigorously subjected to
these conditions, evil will result : intolerable restraint, if it

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 319

does not deform or destroy life, will be followed by violent re
action. We are taught by analogy, that greatly-changed cir
cumstances from which there is no escape, fail to produce
adaptation because they produce death. Men having consti
tutions fitted for one climate, cannot be fitted to an extremely-
different climate by persistently living in it, because they
do not survive, generation after generation. Such changes
can be brought about only by slow spreadings of the race
through intermediate regions having intermediate climates, to
which successive generations are accustomed little by little.
And doubtless the like holds mentally. The intellectual and
emotional natures required for high civilization, are not to be
obtained by thrusting on the completely-uncivilized, the need
ful activities and restraints in unqualified forms : gradual de
cay and death, rather than adaptation, would result. But so
long as a society's institutions are indigenous, no danger is to
be apprehended from a too-strict maintenance of the condi
tions to the ideally-best social life ; since there can exist
neither the required appreciation of them nor the required ap
pliances for enforcing them. Only in those abnormal cases
where a race of one type is subject to a race of much-superior
type, is this qualification pertinent. In our own case, as in
the cases of all societies having populations approximately
homogeneous in character, and having institutions evolved by
that character, there may rightly be aimed at the greatest
rigour possible. The merciful policy, no less than the just
policy, is that of insisting that these all-essential requirements

of self-support and non-aggression, shall be conformed to

the just policy, because failing to insist is failing to protect
the better or more-adapted natures against the worse or less-
adapted ; the merciful policy, because the pains accompany
ing the process of adaptation to the social state must be gone
through, and it is better that they should be gone through
once than gone through twice, as they have to be when any
relaxation of these conditions permits retrogression.

Thus, that which sundry precepts of the current religion
embody — that which ethical systems, intuitive or utilitarian,
equally urge, is also that which Biology, generalizing the laws
of life at large, dictates. All further requirements are unim
portant compared with this primary requirement, that each

320 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

shall so live as neither to burden others nor to injure others.
And all further appliances for influencing the actions and
natures of men, are unimportant compared with those serving
to maintain and increase the conformity to this primary re
quirement. But unhappily, legislators and philanthropists,
busy with schemes which, instead of aiding adaptation, indi
rectly hinder it, give little attention to the enforcing and im
proving of those arrangements by which adaptation is ef
fected.

And here, on behalf of the few who uphold this policy of
natural discipline, let me emphatically repudiate the name of
laissez-faire as applied to it, and emphatically condemn the
counter-policy as involving a laissez-faire of the most vicious
kind. While holding that, when the State leaves each citizen
to get what food for himself he can, and to suffer what evil he
brings on himself, such a let-alone policy is eventually bene
ficial ; I contend that, when the State leaves him to bear the
evils inflicted by other citizens, and can be induced to defend
him only at a ruinous cost, such a let-alone policy is both im
mediately and remotely injurious. When a Legislature takes
from the worthy the things they have laboured for, that it may
give to the unworthy the things they have not earned — when
cause and consequence, joined in the order of Nature, are thus
divorced by law-makers ; then may properly come the sug
gestion — " Cease your interference." But when, in any way,
direct or indirect, the unworthy deprive the worthy of their
dues, or impede them in the quiet pursuit of their ends, then
may properly come the demand — " Interfere promptly ; and
be, in fact, the protectors you are in name." Our politicians
and philanthropists, impatient with a salutary laissez-faire,
tolerate and even defend a laissez-faire that is in the high
est degree mischievous. Without hesitation, this regulative
agency we call the Government takes from us some £100,000
a year to pay for Art-teaching and to establish Art-museums ;
while, in guarding us against robbers and murderers, it makes
conviction difficult by demurring to the cost of necessary
evidence : even the outlay for a plan, admitted by the taxing-
master, being refused by the Treasury ! Is not that a disastrous
laissez-faire ? While millions are voted without a murmur
for an expedition to rescue a meddling consul from a half-

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 32!

savage king1, our Executive resists the spending- of a few extra
thousands to pay more judges : the result being not simply
vast arrears and long delays, but immense injustices of other
kinds, — costs being run up in cases which lawyers know will
never be heard, and which, when brought into court, the
over-burdened judges get rid of by appointing junior counsel
as referees : an arrangement under which the suitors have not
simply to pay over again all their agents, at extra rates, but
have also to pay their judges.3 Is not that, too, a flagitious
laissez-faire ? Though, in our solicitude for Negroes, we
have been spending £50,000 a year to stop the East- African
slave-trade, and failing to do it, yet only now are we provid
ing protection for our own sailors against unscrupulous ship
owners — only now have sailors, betrayed into bad ships, got
something more than the option of risking death by drowning
or going to prison for breach of contract ! Shall we not call
that, also, a laissez-faire that is almost wicked in its indiffer
ence ? At the same time that the imperativeness of teaching
all children to write, and to spell, and to parse, and to know
where Timbuctoo lies, is being agreed to with acclamation,
and vast sums raised that these urgent needs may be met, it is
not thought needful that citizens should be enabled to learn
the laws they have to obey; and though these laws are so
many commands which, on any rational theory, the Govern
ment issuing them ought to enforce, yet in a great mass of
cases it does nothing when told that they have been broken,
but leaves the injured to try and enforce them at their own
risk, if they please. Is not that, again, a demoralizing laissez-
faire — an encouragement to wrong-doing by a half-promise
of impunity ? Once more, what shall we say of the laissez-
faire which cries out because the civil administration of jus
tice costs us £800,000 a year — because to protect men's rights
we annually spend half as much again as would build an
ironclad ! — because to prevent fraud and enforce contracts we
lay out each year nearly as much as our largest distiller pays
in spirit-duty ! — what, I ask, shall we say of the laissez-faire
which thus thinks it an extravagance that one-hundredth part
of our national revenue should go in maintaining the vital
condition to national well-being ? Is not that a laissez-faire
which we might be tempted to call insane, did not most sane

322 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

people agree in it ? And thus it is throughout. The policy of
quiescence is adopted where active interference is all-essen
tial ; while time, and energy, and money, are absorbed in
interfering with things that should be left to themselves.
Those who condemn the let-alone policy in respect to matters
which, to say the least, are not of vital importance, advocate
or tolerate the let-alone policy in respect to vitally-important
matters. Contemplated from the biological point of view,
their course is doubly mischievous. They impede adaptation
of human nature to the social state, both by what they do and
by what they leave undone.

Neither the limits of this chapter, nor its purpose, permit
exposition of the various other truths which Biology yields
as data for Sociology. Enough has been said in proof of that
which was to be shown — the use of biological study as a prep
aration for grasping sociological truths.

The effect to be looked for from it, is that of giving strength
and clearness to convictions otherwise feeble and vague. Sun
dry of the doctrines I have presented under their biological
aspects, are doctrines admitted in considerable degrees. Such
acquaintance with the laws of life as they have gathered in
cidentally, lead many to suspect that appliances for preserv
ing the physically-feeble, bring results that are not wholly
good. Others there are who occasionally get glimpses of evils
caused by fostering the reckless and the stupid. But their
suspicions and qualms fail to determine their conduct, because
the inevitableness of the bad consequences has not been made
adequately clear by the study of Biology at large. When
countless illustrations have shown them that all strength, all
faculty, all fitness, presented by every living thing, has arisen
partly by a growth of each power consequent on exercise of
it, and partly by the more frequent survival and greater multi
plication of the better-endowed individuals, entailing gradual
disappearance of the worse-endowed — when it is seen that all
perfection, bodily and mental, has been achieved through this
process, and that suspension of it must cause cessation of prog
ress, while reversal of it would bring universal decay — when
it is seen that the mischiefs entailed by disregard of these
truths, though they may be slow, are certain ; there comes a

PREPARATION IN BIOLOGY. 333

conviction that social policy must be conformed to them, and
that to ignore them is madness.

Did not experience prepare one to find everywhere a degree
of irrationality remarkable in beings who distinguish them
selves as rational, one might have assumed that, before devis
ing modes of dealing with citizens in their corporate relations,
special attention would be given to the natures of these citi
zens individually considered, and by implication to the na
tures of living things at large. Put a carpenter into a black
smith's shop, and set him to forge, to weld, to harden, to
anneal, etc., and he will not need the blacksmith's jeers to
show him how foolish is the attempt to make and mend tools
before he has learnt the properties of iron. Let the carpenter
challenge the blacksmith, who knows little about wood in
general and nothing about particular kinds of wood, to do his
work, and unless the blacksmith declines to make himself a
laughing-stock, he is pretty certain to saw askew, to choke up
his plane, and presently to break his tools or cut his fingers.
But while everyone sees the folly of supposing that wood or
iron can be shaped and fitted, without an apprenticeship dur
ing which their ways of behaving are made familiar ; no one
sees any folly in undertaking to devise institutions, and to
shape human nature in this way or that way, without a pre
liminary study of Man, and of Life in general as explaining
Man's life. For simple functions we insist on elaborate spe
cial preparations extending through years ; while for the most
complex function, to be adequately discharged not even by
the wisest, we require no preparation !

How absurd are the prevailing conceptions about these
matters, we shall see still more clearly on turning to consider
that more special discipline which should precede the study
of Sociology ; namely, the study of Mental Science.

CHAPTER XV.

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY.

PROBABLY astonishment would make the reporters drop
their pencils, were any member of Parliament to enunciate a
psychological principle as justifying his opposition to a pro
posed measure. That some law of association of ideas, or
some trait in emotional development, should be deliberately
set forth as a sufficient ground for saying " aye " or " no " to a
motion for second reading, would doubtless be too much for
the gravity of legislators. And along with laughter from
many there would come from a few cries of " question : " the
entire irrelevancy to the matter in hand being conspicuous.
It is true that during debates the possible behaviour of citizens
under the suggested arrangements is described. Evasions of
this or that provision, difficulties in carrying it out, probabili
ties of resistance, connivance, corruption, &c., are urged ; and
these tacitly assert that the mind of man has certain charac
ters, and under the conditions named is likely to act in certain
ways. In other words, there is an implied recognition of the
truth that the effects of a law will depend on the manner in
which human intelligence and human feeling are influenced
by it. Experiences of men's conduct which the legislator has
gathered, and which lie partially sorted in his memory, fur
nish him with empirical notions that guide his judgment on
each question raised ; and he would think it folly to ignore all
this unsystematized knowledge about people's characters and
actions. But at the same time he regards as foolish the pro
posal to proceed, not on vaguely-generalized . facts, but on
facts accurately generalized ; and, as still more foolish, the
proposal to merge these minor definite generalizations in gen-

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 325

eralizations expressing the ultimate laws of Mind. Guidance
by intuition seems to him much more rational.

Of course, I do not mean to say that his intuition is of
small value. How should I say this, remembering- the im
mense accumulation of experiences by which his thoughts
have been moulded into harmony with things ? We all know
that when the successful man of business is urged by wife
and daughters to get into Parliament, that they may attain a
higher social standing, he always replies that his occupations
through life have left him no leisure to prepare himself, by
collecting and digesting the voluminous evidence respecting
the effects of institutions and policies, and that he fears he
might do mischief. If the heir to some large estate, or scion
of a noble house powerful in the locality, receives a deputation
asking him to stand for the county, we constantly read that
he pleads inadequate knowledge as a reason for declining :
perhaps hinting that after ten years spent in the needful studies,
he may have courage to undertake the heavy responsibilities
proposed to him. So, too, we have the familiar fact that when,
at length, men who have gathered vast stores of political in
formation, gain the confidence of voters who know how care
fully they have thus fitted themselves, it still perpetually hap
pens that after election they find they have entered on their
work prematurely. It is true that beforehand they had sought
anxiously through the records of the past, that they might
avoid legislative errors of multitudinous kinds, like those com
mitted in early times. Nevertheless when Acts are proposed
referring to matters dealt with in past generations by Acts
long since cancelled or obsolete, immense inquiries open before
them. Even limiting themselves to the 1126 Acts repealed in
1823-9, and the further 770 repealed in 1861, they find that to
learn what these aimed at, how they worked, why they failed,
and whence arose the mischiefs they wrought, is an arduous
task, which yet they feel bound to undertake lest they should
re-inflict these mischiefs ; and hence the reason why so many
break down under the effort, and retire with health destroyed.
Nay, more — on those with constitutions vigorous enough to
carry them through such inquiries, there continually presses
the duty of making yet further inquiries. Besides tracing the
results of abandoned laws in other societies, there is at home,

326 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

year by year, more futile law-making to be investigated and
lessons to be drawn from it ; as, for example, from the 134
Public Acts passed in 1856-7, of .which all but 68 are wholly
or partially repealed.1 And thus it happens that, as every
autumn shows us, even the strongest men, finding their lives
during the recess over-taxed with the needful study, are obliged
so to locate themselves that by an occasional day's hard riding
after the hounds, or a long walk over the moors with gun in
hand, they may be enabled to bear the excessive strain on their
nervous systems. Of course, therefore, I am not so unreason
able as to deny that judgments, even empirical, which are
guided by such carefully-amassed experiences must be of
much worth.

But fully recognizing the vast amount of information
which the legislator has laboriously gathered from the
accounts of institutions and laws, past and present, here and
elsewhere ; and admitting that before thus instructing himself
he would no more think of enforcing a new law than would a
medical student think of plunging an operating-knife into the
human body before learning where the arteries ran ; the re
markable anomaly here demanding our attention is, that he
objects to anything like analysis of these phenomena he has
so diligently collected, and has 110 faith in conclusions drawn
from the ensemble of them. Not discriminating very correctly
between the word "-general " and the word " abstract," and re
garding as abstract principles what are in nearly all cases
general principles, he speaks contemptuously of these as be
longing to the region of theory, and as not concerning the
law-maker. Any wide truth that is insisted upon as being im
plied in many narrow truths, seems to him remote from reality
and unimportant for guidance. The results of recent experi
ments in legislation he thinks worth attending to ; and if any
one reminds him of the experiments he has read so much
about, that were made in other times and other places, he re
gards these also, separately taken, as deserving of consideration.
But if, instead of studying special classes of legislative experi
ments, someone compares many classes together, generalizes
the results, and proposes to be guided by the generalization,
he shakes his head sceptically. And his scepticism passes into
ridicule if it is proposed to affiliate such generalized results on

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 327

the laws of Mind. To prescribe for society on the strength of
countless unclassified observations, appears to him a sensible
course ; but to colligate and systematize the observations so
as to educe tendencies of human behaviour displayed through
out cases of numerous kinds, to trace these tendencies to their
sources in the mental natures of men, and thence to draw con
clusions for guidance, appears to him a visionary course.

Let us look at some of the fundamental facts he ignores,
and at the results for ignoring them.

Rational legislation, based as it can only be on a true theory
of conduct, which is derivable only from a true theory of
mind, must recognize as a datum the direct connexion of action
with feeling. That feeling and action bear a constant ratio, is
a statement needing qualification ; for at the one extreme
there are automatic actions which take place without feeling,
and at the other extreme there are feelings so intense that, by
deranging the vital functions, they impede or arrest action.
But speaking of those activities which life in general presents,
it is a law tacitly recognized by all, though not distinctly for
mulated, that action and feeling vary together in their
amounts. Passivity and absence of facial expression, both
implying rest of the muscles, are held to show that there is
being experienced neither much sensation nor much emotion.
While the degree of external demonstration, be it in move
ments that rise finally to spasms and contortions, or be it in
sounds that end in laughter and shrieks and groans, is habitu
ally accepted as a measure of the pleasure or pain, sensational
or emotional. And so, too, where continued expenditure of
energy is seen, be it in a violent struggle to escape or be it in
the persevering pursuit of an object, the quantity of effort is
held to show the quantity of feeling.

This truth, undeniable in its generality, whatever qualifica
tions secondary truths make in it, must be joined with the
truth that cognition does not produce action. If I tread on
a pin, or unawares dip my hand into very hot water, I start :
the strong sensation produces motion without any thought
intervening. Conversely, the proposition that a pin pricks,
or that hot water scalds, leaves me quite unmoved. True, if
to one of these propositions is joined the idea that a pin is

328 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

about to pierce my skin, or to the other the idea that some
hot water will fall on it, there results a tendency, more or less
decided, to shrink. But that which causes shrinking1 is the
ideal pain. The statement that the pin will hurt or the water
scald, produces no effect so long as there is nothing beyond a
recognition of its meaning : it produces an effect only when
the pain verbally asserted, becomes a pain actually conceived
as impending — only when there rises in consciousness a repre
sentation of the pain, which is a faint form of the pain as
before felt. That is to say, the cause of movement here, as
in other cases, is a feeling and not a cognition. What

we see even in these simplest actions, runs through actions of
all degrees of complexity. It is never the knowledge which
is the moving agent in conduct ; but it is always the feeling
which goes along with that knowledge, or is excited by it.
Though the drunkard knows that after to-day's debauch will
come to-morrow's headache, yet he is not deterred by con
sciousness of this truth, unless the penalty is distinctly repre
sented — unless there rises in his consciousness a vivid idea of
the misery to be borne — unless there is excited in him an
adequate amount of feeling antagonistic to his desire for
drink. Similarly with improvidence in general. If coming
evils are imagined with clearness and the threatened suffer
ings ideally felt, there is a due check on the tendency to take
immediate gratifications without stint ; but in the absence of
that consciousness of future ills which is constituted by the
ideas of pains, distinct or vague, the passing desire is not
opposed effectually. The truth that recklessness brings dis
tress, fully acknowledged though it may be, remains in
operative. The mere cognition does not affect conduct —
conduct is affected only when the cognition passes out of that
intellectual form in which the idea of distress is little more
than verbal, into a form in which this term of the proposition
is developed into a vivid imagination of distress — a mass of
painful feeling. It is thus with conduct of every

kind. See this group of persons clustered at the river side.
A boat has upset, and some one is in danger of drowning.
The fact that in the absence of aid the youth in the water
will surely die, is known to them all. That by swimming
to his assistance his life may be saved, is a proposition denied

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 329

by none of them. The duty of helping fellow-creatures who
are in difficulties, they have been taught all their lives ; and
they will severally admit that running a risk to prevent a
death is praiseworthy. Nevertheless, though sundry of them
can swim, they do nothing beyond shouting for assistance or
giving advice. But now here comes one who, tearing off his
coat, plunges in to the rescue. In what does he differ from
the others ? Not in knowledge. Their cognitions are equally
clear with his. They know as well as he does that death is
impending ; and know, too, how it may be prevented. In
him, however, these cognitions arouse certain correlative emo
tions more strongly than they are aroused in the rest. Groups
of feelings are excited in all ; but whereas in the others the
deterrent feelings of fear, &c.,' preponderate, in him there is a
surplus of the feelings excited by sympathy, joined, it may be,
with others not of so high a kind. In each case, however,
the behaviour is not determined by knowledge, but by emo
tion. Obviously, change in the actions of these passive spec
tators is not to be effected by making their cognitions clearer,
but by making their higher feelings stronger.

Have we not here, then, a cardinal psychological truth to
which any rational system of human discipline must con
form ? Is it not manifest that a legislation which ignores
it and tacitly assumes its opposite, will inevitably fail ? Yet
much of our legislation does .this ; and we are at present,
legislature and nation together, eagerly pushing forward
schemes which proceed on the postulate that conduct is
determined not by feelings, but by cognitions.

For what else is the assumption underlying this anxious
urging-on of organizations for teaching ? What is the root-
notion common to Secularists and Denominationalists, but
the notion that spread of knowledge is the one thing needful
for bettering behaviour ? Having both swallowed certain
statistical fallacies, there has grown up in them the belief
that State-education will check ill-doing. In newspapers,
they have often met with comparisons between the numbers
of criminals who can read and write and the numbers who
can not ; and finding the numbers who can not greatly exceed
the numbers who can, they accept the inference that igno-

330 TIIB STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

ranee is the cause of crime. It does not occur to them to ask
whether other statistics, similarly drawn up, would not prove
with like conclusiveiiess that crime is caused by absence of
ablutions, or by lack of clean linen, or by bad ventilation, or
by want of a separate bed-room. Go through any jail and
ascertain how many prisoners had been in the habit of taking
a morning bath, and you would find that criminality habit
ually went with dirtiness of skin. Count up those who had
possessed a second suit of clothes, and a comparison of the
figures would show you that but a small percentage of crim
inals were habitually able to change their garments. Inquire
whether they had lived in main streets or down courts, and
you would discover that nearly all urbane crime comes from
holes and corners. Similarly, a fanatical advocate of total
abstinence or of sanitary improvement, could get equally-
strong statistical justifications for his belief. But if, not
accepting the random inference presented to you that igno
rance and crime are cause and effect, you consider, as above,
whether crime may not with equal reason be ascribed to
various other causes, you are led to see that it is really con
nected with an inferior mode of life, itself usually conse
quent on original inferiority of nature ; and you are led
to see that ignorance is simply one of the concomitants, no
more to be held the cause of crime than various other con
comitants.

But this obvious criticism, and the obvious counter-conclu
sion it implies, are not simply overlooked, but, when insisted
on, seem powerless to affect the belief which has taken pos
session of men. Disappointment alone will now affect it. A
wave of opinion reaching a certain height, cannot be changed
by any evidence or argument : but has to spend itself in the
gradual course of things before a reaction of opinion can
arise. Otherwise it would be incomprehensible that this
confidence in the curative effects of teaching, which men
have carelessly allowed to be generated in them by the re
iterations of doctrinaire politicians, should survive the direct
disproofs yielded by daily experience. Is it not the trouble
of every mother and every governess, that perpetual insisting
on the right and denouncing the wrong do not suffice ? Is
it not the constant complaint that on many natures reason-

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 33!

ing and explanation and the clear demonstration of con
sequences are scarcely at all operative ; that where they
are operative there is a more or less marked difference of
emotional nature ; and that where, having" before failed, they
begin to succeed, change of feeling rather than difference of
apprehension is the cause ? Do we not similarly hear from
every housekeeper that servants usually pay but little atten
tion to reproofs ; that they go on perversely in old habits,
regardless of clear evidence of their foolishness ; and that
their actions are to be altered not by explanations and
reasonings, but by either the fear of penalties or the ex
perience of penalties — that is, by the emotions awakened in
them ? When we turn from domestic life to the life of the
outer world, do not like disproofs everywhere meet us ? Are
not fraudulent bankrupts educated people, and getters-up of
bubble-companies, and makers of adulterated goods, and users
of false trade-marks, and retailers who have light weights,
and owners of unseaworthy ships, and those who cheat in
surance-companies, and those who carry on turf -chicaneries,
and the great majority of gamblers ? Or, to take a more
extreme form of turpitude,— is there not, among those who
have committed murder by poison within our memories, a
considerable number of the educated — a number bearing as
large a ratio to the educated classes as does the total number
of murderers to the total population ?

This belief in the moralizing effects of intellectual culture,
flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd a priori. What imag
inable connexion is there between the learning that certain
clusters of marks on paper stand for certain words, and the
getting a higher sense of duty ? What possible effect can ac
quirement of facility in making written signs of sounds, have
in strengthening the desire to do right ? How does knowledge
of the multiplication-table, or quickness in adding and divid
ing, so increase the sympathies as to restrain the tendency to
trespass against fellow-creatures ? In what way can the at
tainment of accuracy in spelling and parsing, &c., make the
sentiment of justice more powerful than it was ; or why from
stores of geographical information, perseveringly gained, is
there likely to come increased regard for truth ? The irrela-
tion between such causes and such effects, is almost as great

332 TUE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

as that between exercise of the fingers and strengthening of
the legs. One who should by lessons in Latin hope to give a
knowledge of geometry, or one who should expect practice in
drawing to be followed by expressive rendering of a sonata,
would be thought fit for an asylum ; and yet he would be
scarcely more irrational than are those who by discipline of
the intellectual faculties expect to produce better feelings.

This faith in lesson-books and readings is one of the super
stitions of the age. Even as appliances to intellectual culture
books are greatly over-estimated. Instead of second-hand
knowledge being regarded as of less value than first-hand
knowledge, and as a knowledge to be sought only where first
hand knowledge cannot be had, it is actually regarded as of
greater value. Something gathered from printed pages is sup
posed to enter into a course of education ; but if gathered by
observation of Life and Nature, is supposed not thus to enter.
Reading is seeing by proxy — is learning indirectly through
another man's faculties instead of directly through one's own
faculties; and such is the prevailing bias that the indirect
learning is thought preferable to the direct learning, and
usurps the name of cultivation ! We smile when told that
savages consider writing as a kind of magic ; and we laugh at
the story of the negro who hid a letter under a stone, that it
might not inform against him when he devoured the fruit he
was sent with. Yet the current notions about printed infor
mation betray a kindred delusion : a kind of magical efficacy
is ascribed to ideas gained through artificial appliances, as
compared with ideas otherwise gained. And this delusion,
injurious in its effects even on intellectual culture, produces
effects still more injurious on moral culture, by generating
the assumption that this, too, can be got by reading and the
repeating of lessons.

It will, I know, be said that not from intellectual teaching
but from moral teaching, is improvement of conduct and
diminution of crime looked for. While, unquestionably,
many of those who urge on educational schemes believe in
the moralizing effects of knowledge in general, it must be ad
mitted that some hold general knowledge to be inadequate,
and contend that rules of right conduct must be taught. Al
ready, however, reasons have been given why the expectations

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 333

even of these, are illusory ; proceeding1, as they do, on the as
sumption that the intellectual acceptance of moral precepts
will produce conformity to them. Plenty more reasons are
forthcoming. I will not dwell on the contradictions to this
assumption furnished by the Chinese, to all of whom the high
ethical maxims of Confucius are taught, and who yet fail to
show us a conduct proportionately exemplary. Nor will I
enlarge on the lesson to be derived from the United States, the
school-system of which brings up the whole population under
the daily influence of chapters which set forth principles of
right conduct, and which nevertheless in its political life, and
by many of its social occurrences, shows us that conformity to
these principles is anything but complete. It will suffice if I
limit myself to evidence supplied by our own society, past and
present ; which negati ves, very decisively, these sanguine ex
pectations. For what have we been doing all these many
centuries by our religious agencies, but preaching right prin
ciples to old and young ? What has been the aim of services
in our ten thousand churches week after week, but to enforce
a code of good conduct by promised rewards and threatened
penalties ? — the whole population having been for many gen
erations compelled to listen. What have the multitudinous
Dissenting chapels been used for, unless as places where pur
suance of right and desistance from wrong have been unceas
ingly commended to all from childhood upwards ? And if
now it is held that something more must be done — if, notwith
standing perpetual explanations and denunciations and ex
hortations, the misconduct is so great that society is endan
gered, why, after all this insistance has failed, is it expected
that more insistance will succeed ? See here the proposals and
the implied beliefs. Teaching by clergymen not having
had the desired effect, let us try teaching by schoolmasters.
Bible-reading from a pulpit, with the accompaniment of im
posing architecture, painted windows, tombs, and " dim re
ligious light," having proved inadequate, suppose we try
bible - reading in rooms with bare walls, relieved only by
maps and drawings of animals. Commands and interdicts
uttered by a surpliced priest to minds prepared by chant and
organ-peal, not having been obeyed, let us see whether they
will be obeyed wrhen mechanically repeated in schoolboy sing-

334 TOE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

song to a threadbare usher, amid the buzz of lesson-learning
and clatter of slates. Not very hopeful proposals, one would
say ; proceeding, as they do, upon one or other of the beliefs,
that a moral precept will be effective in proportion as it is
received without emotional accompaniment, and that its
effectiveness will increase in proportion to the number of
times it is repeated. Both these beliefs are directly at vari
ance with the results of psychological analysis and of daily
experience. Certainly, such influence as may be gained by
addressing moral truths to the intellect, is made greater if the
accompaniments arouse an appropriate emotional excitement,
as a religious service does ; while, conversely, there can be no
more effectual way of divesting such moral truths of their
impress! veness, than associating them with the prosaic and
vulgarizing sounds and sights and smells coming from
crowded children. And no less certain is it that precepts
often heard and little regarded, lose by repetition the small
influence they had. What do public-schools show us ? — are
the boys rendered merciful to one another by listening to re
ligious injunctions every morning ? What do Universities
show us ? — have perpetual chapels habitually made under
graduates behave better than the average of young men ?
What do Cathedral-towns show us ? — is there in them a moral
tone above that of other towns, or must we from the common
saying, " the nearer the Church," &c., infer a pervading im
pression to the contrary ? What do clergymen's sons show
us ? — has constant insistence 011 right conduct made them
conspicuously superior, or do we not rather hear it whispered
that something like an opposite effect seems produced. Or, to
take one more case, what do religious newspapers show us ? —
is it that the precepts of Christianity, more familiar to their
writers than to other writers, are more clearly to be traced in
their articles, or has there not ever been displayed a want of
charity in their dealings with opponents, and is it not still dis
played ? * Nowhere do we find that repetition of rules of right,
already known but disregarded, produces regard for them ; but
we find that, contrariwise, it makes regard for them less than
before.8

The prevailing assumption is, indeed, as much disproved
by analysis as it is contradicted by familiar facts. Already

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 335

we have seen that the connexion is between action and feel
ing ; and hence the corollary that only by a frequent passing
of feeling into action, is the tendency to such action strength
ened. Just as two ideas often repeated in a certain order, be
come coherent in that order ; and just as muscular motions,
at first difficult to combine properly with one another and
with guiding perceptions, become by practice facile, and at
length automatic ; so the recurring production of any conduct
by its prompting emotion, makes that conduct relatively easy.
Not by precept, though heard daily ; not by example, unless it
is followed ; not only by action, often caused by the related
feeling, can a moral habit be formed. And yet this truth,
which Mental Science clearly teaches, and which is in har
mony with familiar sayings, is a truth wholly ignored in
current educational fanaticisms.

There is ignored, too, the correlative truth ; and ignoring
it threatens results still more disastrous. While we see an
expectation of benefits which the means used cannot achieve,
we see no consciousness of injuries which will be entailed by
these means. As usually happens with those absorbed in the
eager pursuit of some good by governmental action, there is a
blindness to the evil reaction on the natures of citizens. Al
ready the natures of citizens have suffered from kindred
reactions, due to actions set up centuries ago ; and now the
mischievous effects are to be increased by further such reac
tions.

The English people are complained of as improvident.
Very few of them lay by in anticipation of times when work
is slack; and the general testimony is that higher wages
commonly result only in more extravagant living or in drink
ing to greater excess. As we saw a while since, they neglect
opportunities of becoming shareholders in the Companies they
are engaged under ; and those who are most anxious for their
welfare despair on finding how little they do to raise them
selves when they have the means. This tendency to seize
immediate gratification regardless of future penalty, is com
mented on as characteristic of the English people ; and con
trasts between them and their Continental neighbours having
been drawn, surprise is expressed that such contrasts should

336 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

exist. Improvidence is spoken of as an inexplicable trait of
the race — no regard being paid to the fact that races with
which it is compared are allied in blood. The people of Nor
way are economical and extremely prudent. The Danes, too,
are thrifty ; and Defoe, commenting on the extravagance of
his countrymen, says that a Dutchman gets rich on wages out
of which an Englishman but just lives. So, too, if we take
the modern Germans. Alike by the complaints of the Amer
icans, that the Germans are ousting them from their own
businesses by working hard and living cheaply, and by the
success here of German traders and the preference shown for
German waiters, we are taught that in other divisions of the
Teutonic race there is nothing like this lack of self-control.
Nor can we ascribe to such portion of Norman blood as exists
among us, this peculiar trait : descendants of the Normans in
France are industrious and saving. Why, then, should the
English people be improvident ? If we seek explanation in
their remote lineage, we find none ; but if we seek it in the
social conditions to which they have been subject, we find a
sufficient explanation. The English are improvident

because they have been for ages disciplined in improvidence.
Extravagance has been made habitual by shielding them
from the sharp penalties extravagance brings. Carefulness
has been discouraged by continually showing to the careful
that those who were careless did as well as, or better than,
themselves. Nay, there have been positive penalties on care
fulness. Labourers working hard and paying their way, have
constantly found themselves called on to help in supporting
the idle around them ; have had their goods taken under dis
tress-warrants, that paupers might be fed; and eventually
have found themselves and their children reduced also to
pauperism.4 Well-conducted poor women, supporting them
selves without aid or encouragement, have seen the ill-con
ducted receiving parish-pay for their illegitimate children.
Nay, to such extremes has the process gone, that women with
many illegitimate children, getting from the rates a weekly
sum for each, have been chosen as wives by men who wanted
the sums thus derived ! Generation after generation the hon
est and independent, not marrying till they had means, and
striving to bring up their families without assistance, have

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 337

been saddled with extra burdens, and hindered from leaving
a desirable posterity ; while the dissolute and the idle, espe
cially when given to that lying and servility by which those
in authority are deluded, have been helped to produce and to
rear progeny, characterized, like themselves, by absence of
the mental traits needed for good citizenship. And then,
after centuries during which we have been breeding the race
as much as possible from the improvident, and repressing the
multiplication of the provident, we lift our hands and exclaim
at the recklessness our people exhibit ! If men who, for a
score generations, had by preference bred from their worst-
tempered horses and their least-sagacious dogs, were then to
wonder because their horses were vicious and their dogs
stupid, we should think the absurdity of their policy paral
leled only by the absurdity of their astonishment ; but hu
man beings instead of inferior animals being in question, no
absurdity is seen either in the policy or in the astonishment.
And now something more serious happens than the over
looking of these evils \vrought on men's natures by centuries
of demoralizing influences. We are deliberately establishing
further such influences. Having, as much as we could, sus
pended the civilizing discipline of an industrial life so carried
on as to achieve self-maintenance without injury to others,
we now proceed to suspend that civilizing discipline in
another direction. Having in successive generations done
our best to diminish the sense of responsibility, by warding-
off evils which disregard of responsibility brings, we now
carry the policy further by relieving parents from certain
other responsibilities which, in the order of nature, fall on
them. By way of checking recklessness, and discouraging
improvident marriages, and raising the conception of duty,
we are diffusing the belief that it is not the concern of parents
to fit their children for the business of life ; but that the na
tion is bound to do this. Everywhere there is a tacit enuncia
tion of the marvellous doctrine that citizens are not responsi
ble individually for thebringing-up, each of his own children,
but that these same citizens incorporated into a society, are
each of them responsible for the bringing-up of everybody
else's children ! The obligation does not fall upon A in his
capacity of father, to rear the minds as well as the bodies of
23

338 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

his offspring ; but in his capacity of citizen, there does fall on
him the obligation of mentally rearing the offspring of B, C,
D, and the rest; who similarly have their direct parental
obligations made secondary to their indirect obligations to
children not their own ! Already it is estimated that, as mat
ters are now being arranged, parents will soon pay in school-
fees for their own children, only one-sixth of the amount
which is paid by them through taxes, rates, and voluntary
contributions, for children at large : in terms of money, the
claims of children at large to their care, will be taken as six
times the claim of their own children ! And if, looking back
forty years, we observe the growth of the public claim versus
the private claim, we may infer that the private claim will
presently be absorbed wholly. Already the correlative theory
is becoming so definite and positive that you meet with the
notion, uttered as though it were an unquestionable truth,
that criminals are " society's failures.'' Presently it will be
seen that, since good bodily development, as well as good
mental development, is a pre-requisite to good citizenship, (for
without it the citizen cannot maintain himself, and so avoid
wrong-doing,) society is responsible also for the proper feeding
and clothing of children : indeed, in School-Board discussions,
there is already an occasional admission that no logically-
defensible halting-place can be found between the two. And
so we are progressing towards the wonderful notion, here and
there finding tacit expression, that people are to marry when
they feel inclined, and other people are to take the conse
quences !

And this is thought to be the policy conducive to improve
ment of behaviour. Men who have been made improvident
by being shielded from many of the evil results of improvi
dence, are now to be made more provident by further shield
ing them from the evil results of improvidence. Having had
their self-control decreased by social arrangements which less
ened the need for self-control, other social arrangements are
devised which will make self-control still less needful ; and it
is hoped so to make self-control greater. This expectation is
absolutely at variance with the whole order of things. Life
of every kind, human included, proceeds on an exactly-oppo
site principle. All lower types of beings show us that the

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 339

rearing of offspring1 affords the highest discipline for the
faculties. The parental instinct is everywhere that which
calls out the energies most persistently, and in the greatest
degree exercises the intelligence. The self-sacrifice and the
sagacity which inferior creatures display in the care of their
young, are often commented upon ; and everyone may see
that parenthood produces a mental exaltation not otherwise
producible. That it is so among mankind is daily proved.
Continually we remark that men who were random grow
steady when they have children to provide for ; and vain,
thoughtless girls, becoming mothers, begin to show higher
feelings, and capacities that were not before drawn out. In
both there is a daily discipline in unselfishness, in industry,
in foresight. The parental relation strengthens from hour to
hour the habit of postponing immediate ease and egoistic
pleasure to the altruistic pleasure obtained by furthering the
welfare of offspring. There is a frequent subordination of
the claims of self to the claims of fellow-beings ; and by no
other agency can the practice of this subordination be so
effectually secured. Not, then, by a decreased, but by an
increased, sense of parental responsibility is self-control to be
made greater and recklessness to be checked. And yet the
policy now so earnestly and undoubtingly pursued is one
which will inevitably diminish the sense of parental responsi
bility. This all-important discipline of parents' emotions is
to be weakened that children may get reading and grammar
and geography more generally than they would otherwise do.
A superficial intellectualization is to be secured at the cost of
a deep-seated demoralization.

Few, I suppose, will deliberately assert that information is
important and character relatively unimportant. Everyone
observes from time to time how much more valuable to him
self and others is the workman who, though unable to read, is
diligent, sober, and honest, than is the well-taught workman
who breaks his engagements, spends days in drinking, and
neglects his family. And, comparing members of the upper
classes, no one doubts that the spendthrift or the gambler,
however good his intellectual training, is inferior as a social
unit to the man who, not having passed through the approved
curriculum, nevertheless prospers by performing well the

340 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

work he undertakes, and provides for his children instead of
leaving them in poverty to the care of relatives. That is to
say, looking at the matter in the concrete, all see that for
social welfare, good character is more important than much
knowledge. And yet the manifest corollary is not drawn.
What effect will be produced on character by artificial appli
ances for spreading knowledge, is not asked. Of the ends to
be kept in view by the legislator, all are unimportant com
pared with the end of character-making ; and yet character-
making is an end wholly unrecognized.

Let it be seen that the future of a nation depends on the
natures of its units ; that their natures are inevitably modified
in adaptation to the conditions in which tliey are placed ;
that the feelings called into play by these conditions will
strengthen, while those which have diminished demands on
them will dwindle ; and it will be seen that the bettering of
conduct can be effected, not by insisting on maxims of good
conduct, still less by mere intellectual culture, but only by
that daily exercise of the higher sentiments and repression of
the lower, which results from keeping men subordinate to the
requirements of orderly social life — letting them suffer the
inevitable penalties of breaking these requirements and reap
the benefits of conforming to them. This alone is national
education.

One further instance of the need for psychological in
quiries as guides to sociological conclusions may be named —
an instance of quite a different kind, but one no less relevant
to questions of the time. I refer to the comparative psychol
ogy of the sexes. Women, as well as men, are units in a
society ; and tend by their natures to give that society certain
traits of structure and action. Hence the question — Are the
mental natures of men and women the same ? — is an impor
tant one to the sociologist. If they are, an increase of femi
nine influence is not likely to affect the social type in a
marked manner. If they are not, the social type will inevi
tably be changed by increase of feminine influence.

That men and women are mentally alike, is as untrue as
that they are alike bodily. Just as certainly as they have
physical differences which are related to the respective parts

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 341

they play in the maintenance of the race, so certainly have
they psychical differences, similarly related to their respective
shares in the rearing and protection of offspring. To suppose
that along with the unlikenesses between their parental activ
ities there do not go unlikenesses of mental faculties, is to
suppose that here alone in all Nature, there is no adjustment
of special powers to special functions.6

Two classes of differences exist between the psychical, as
between the physical, structures of men and women, which
are both determined by this same fundamental need — adapta
tion to the paternal and maternal duties. The first set of
differences is that which results from a somewhat-earlier
arrest of individual evolution in women than in men ; necessi
tated by the reservation of vital power to meet the cost of re
production. Whereas, in man, individual evolution continues
until the physiological cost of self -maintenance very nearly
balances what nutrition supplies, in woman, an arrest of indi
vidual development takes place while there is yet a con
siderable margin of nutrition : otherwise there could be no
offspring. Hence the fact that girls come earlier to maturity
than boys. Hence, too, the chief contrasts in bodily form :
the masculine figure being distinguished from the feminine
by the greater relative sizes of the parts which carry on ex
ternal actions and entail physiological cost — the limbs, and
those thoracic viscera which their activity immediately taxes.
And hence, too, the physiological truth that throughout their
lives, but especially during the child-bearing age, women ex
hale smaller quantities of carbonic acid, relatively to their
weights, than men do ; showing that the evolution of energy
is relatively less as well as absolutely less. This rather earlier
cessation of individual evolution thus necessitated, showing
itself in a rather smaller growth of the nervo-muscular sys
tem, so that both the limbs which act and the brain which
makes them act are somewhat less, has two results on the
mind. The mental manifestations have somewhat less of
general power or massiveness ; and beyond this there is a per
ceptible falling-short in those two faculties, intellectual and
emotional, which are the latest products of human evolution
—the power of abstract reasoning and that most abstract of
the emotions, the sentiment of justice — the sentiment which

342 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

regulates conduct irrespective of personal attachments and
the likes or dislikes felt for individuals.6

After this quantitative mental distinction, which becomes
incidentally qualitative by telling most upon the most recent
and most complex faculties, there come the qualitative mental
distinctions consequent on the relations of men and women
to their children and to one another. Though the parental
instinct, which, considered in its essential nature, is a love of
the helpless, is common to the two ; yet it is obviously not
identical in the two. That the particular form of it which
responds to infantine helplessness is more dominant in women
than in men, cannot be questioned. In man the instinct is
not so habitually excited by the very helpless, but has a more
generalized relation to all the relatively-weak who are depen
dent upon him. Doubtless, along with this more specialized
instinct in wrornen, there go special aptitudes for dealing with
infantine life — an adapted power of intuition and a fit adjust
ment of behaviour. That there is here a mental specializa
tion, joined with the bodily specialization, is undeniable ; and
this mental specialization, though primarily related to the
rearing of offspring, affects in some degree the conduct at
large.

The remaining qualitative distinctions between the minds
of men and women, are those which have growrn out of their
mutual relation as stronger and weaker. If we trace the
genesis of human character, by considering the conditions of
existence through which the human race passed in early bar
baric times and during civilization, we shall see that the
weaker sex has naturally acquired certain mental traits by its
dealings with the stronger. In the course of the struggles for
existence among wild tribes, those tribes survived in which
the men were not only powerful and courageous, but aggres
sive, unscrupulous, intensely egoistic. Necessarily, then, the
men of the conquering races which gave origin to the civil
ized races, were men in whom the brutal characteristics were
dominant ; and necessarily the women of such races, having
to deal with brutal men, prospered in proportion as they pos
sessed, or acquired, fit adjustments of nature. How were
women, unable by strength to hold their own, otherwise en
abled to hold their own ? Several mental traits helped them

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 343

to do this. We may set down, first, the ability to

please, and the concomitant love of approbation. Clearly,
other things equal, among women living at the mercy of men,
those who succeeded most in pleasing would be the most likely
to survive and leave posterity. And (recognizing the pre
dominant descent of qualities on the same side) this, acting on
successive generations, tended to establish, as a feminine trait,
a special solicitude to be approved, and an aptitude of manner
to this end. Similarly, the wives of merciless savages

must, other things equal, have prospered in proportion to
their powers of disguising their feelings. Women who be
trayed the state of antagonism produced in them by ill-treat
ment, would be less likely to survive and leave offspring than
those who concealed their antagonism ; and hence, by inherit
ance and selection, a growth of this trait proportionate to the
requirement. In some cases, again, the arts of persua

sion enabled women to protect themselves, and by implication
their offspring, where, in the absence of such arts, they would
have disappeared early, or would have reared fewer chil
dren. One further ability may be named as likely,. to
be cultivated and established — the ability to distinguish
quickly the passing feelings of those around. In barbarous
times a woman who could from a movement, tone of voice, or
expression of face, instantly detect in her savage husband the
passion that was rising, would be likely to escape dangers run
into by a woman less skilled in interpreting the natural lan
guage of feeling. Hence, from the perpetual exercise of this
power, and the survival of those having most of it. we may
infer its establishment as a feminine faculty. Ordinarily, this
feminine faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing
the state of mind through the external signs, end simply in
intuitions formed without assignable reasons ; but when, as
happens in rare cases, there is joined with it skill in psycho
logical analysis, there results an extremely-remarkable ability
to interpret the mental states of others. Of this ability we have
a living example never hitherto paralleled among women, and
in but few, if any, cases exceeded among men. Of
course, it is not asserted that the specialities of mind here de
scribed as having been developed in women by the necessities
of defence in their dealings with men, are peculiar to them :

344 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

in men also they have been developed as aids to defence in
their dealings with one another. But the difference is that
whereas, in their dealings with one another, men depended on
these aids only in some measure, women in their dealings
with men depended upon them almost wholly — within the
domestic circle as well as without it. Hence, in virtue of that
partial limitation of heredity by sex, which many facts through
out Nature shows us, they have come to be more marked in
women than in men.7

One further distinctive mental trait in women, springs out
of the relation of the sexes as adjusted to the welfare of the
race. I refer to the effect which the manifestation of power
of every kind in men, has in determining the attachments of
women. That this is a trait inevitably produced, will be
manifest on asking what would have happened if women had
by preference attached themselves to the weaker men. If the
weaker men had habitually left posterity when the stronger
did not, a progressive deterioration of the race would have
resulted. Clearly, therefore, it has happened (at least, since
the cessation of marriage by capture or by purchase has
allowed feminine choice to play an important part), that,
among women unlike in their tastes, those who were fasci
nated by power, bodily or mental, and who married men able
to protect them and their children, were more likely to sur
vive in posterity than women to whom weaker men were
pleasing, and whose children were both less efficiently guarded
and less capable of self-preservation if they reached maturity.
To this admiration for power, caused thus inevitably, is ascri-
bable the fact sometimes commented upon as strange, that
women will continue attached to men who use them ill,
but whose brutality goes along with power, more than
they will continue attached to weaker men who use them
well. With this admiration of power, primarily hav

ing this function, there goes the admiration of power in gen
eral ; which is more marked in women than in men, and
shows itself both theologically and politically. That the emo
tion of awe aroused by contemplating whatever suggests
transcendent force or capacity, which constitutes religious
feeling, is strongest in women, is proved in many ways. We
read that among the Greeks the women were more religiously

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 345

excitable than the men. Sir Rutherford Alcock tells us of
the Japanese that " in the temples it is very rare to see any
congregation except women and children ; the men, at any
time, are very few, and those generally of the lower classes."
Of the pilgrims to the temple of Juggernaut, it is stated that
"at least five-sixths, and often nine-tenths, of them are fe
males." And we are also told of the Sikhs, that the women
believe in more gods than the men do. Which facts, coming
from different races and times, sufficiently show us that the
like fact, familiar to us in Roman Catholic countries and to
some extent at home, is not, as many think, due to the edu
cation of women, but has a deeper cause in natural character.
And to this same cause is in like manner to be ascribed the
greater respect felt by women for all embodiments and sym
bols of authority, governmental and social.

Thus the a priori inference, that fitness for their respec
tive parental functions implies mental differences between
the sexes, as it implies bodily differences, is justified ; as is
also the kindred inference that secondary differences are
necessitated by their relations to one another. Those uiilike-
nesses of mind between men and women, which, under the
conditions, were to be expected, are the unlikenesses we actu
ally find. That they are fixed in degree, by no means follows :
indeed, the contrary follows. Determined as we see they some
of them are by adaptation of primitive women's natures to the
natures of primitive men, it is inferable that as civilization re
adjusts men's natures to higher social requirements, there
goes on a corresponding re-adjustment between the natures of
men and women, tending in sundry respects to diminish their
differences. Especially may we anticipate that those mental
peculiarities developed in women as aids to defence against
men in barbarous times, will diminish. It is probable, too,
that though all kinds of power will continue to be attractive
to them, the attractiveness of physical strength and the
mental attributes that commonly go along with it, will de
cline ; while the attributes which conduce to social influence
will become more attractive. Further, it is to be anticipated
that the higher culture of women, carried 011 within such
limits as shall not unduly tax the physique (and here, by
higher culture, I do not mean mere language-learning and an

346 TEE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

extension of the detestable cramming-system at present in
use), will in other ways reduce the contrast. Slowly leading
to the result everywhere seen throughout the organic world,
of a self-preserving power inversely proportionate to the
race-preserving power, it will entail a less-early arrest of in
dividual evolution, and a diminution of those mental differ
ences between men and women, which the early arrest pro
duces.

Admitting such to be changes which the future will prob
ably see wrought out, we have meanwhile to bear in mind
these traits of intellect and feeling which distinguish women,
and to take note of them as factors in social phenomena-
much more important factors than we commonly suppose.
Considering them in the above order, we may note, first, that
the love of the helpless, which in her maternal capacity wom
an displays in a more special form than man, inevitably
affects all her thoughts and sentiments ; and this being joined
in her with a less-developed sentiment of abstract justice, she
responds more readily when appeals to pity are made, than
when appeals are made to equity. In foregoing chapters we
have seen how much our social policy disregards the claims
of individuals to whatever their efforts purchase, so long as
no obvious misery is brought on them by the disregard ; but
when individuals suffer in ways conspicuous enough to excite
commiseration, they get aid, and often as much aid if their
sufferings are caused by themselves as if they are caused by
others—often greater aid, indeed. This social policy, to which
men tend in an injurious degree, women tend to still more.
The maternal instinct delights in yielding benefits apart from
deserts; and being partially excited by whatever shows a
feebleness that appeals for help (supposing antagonism has
not been aroused), carries into social action this preference of
generosity to justice, even more than men do. A further
tendency having the same general direction, results from the
aptitude which the feminine intellect has to dwell on the con
crete and proximate rather than on the abstract and remote.
The representative faculty in women deals quickly and clearly
with the personal, the special, and the immediate ; but less
readily grasps the general and the impersonal. A vivid im
agination of simple direct consequences mostly shuts out from

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 347

her mind the imagination of consequences that are complex
and indirect. The respective behaviours of mothers and fathers
to children, sufficiently exemplify this difference, mothers
thinking chiefly of present effects on the conduct of children,
and regarding less the distant effects on their characters ; while
fathers often repress the promptings of their sympathies with
a view to ultimate benefits. And this difference between their
ways of estimating consequences, affecting their judgments on
social affairs as on domestic affairs, makes women err still
more than men do in seeking what seems an immediate pub
lic good without thought of distant public evils. Once more,
we have in women the predominant awe of power and au
thority, swaying their ideas and sentiments about all institu
tions. This tends towards the strengthening of governments,
political and ecclesiastical. Faith in whatever presents itself
with imposing accompaniments, is, for the reason above as
signed, especially strong in women. Doubt, or criticism, or
calling-in-question of things that are established, is rare among
them. Hence in public affairs their influence goes towards
the maintenance of controlling agencies, arid does not resist
the extension of such agencies : rather, in pursuit of immedi
ate promised benefits, it urges on that extension ; since the
concrete good in view excludes from their thoughts the re
mote evils of multiplied restraints. Reverencing power more
than men do, women, by implication, respect freedom less —
freedom, that is, not of the nominal kind, but of that real kind
which consists in the ability of each to carry on his own life
without hindrance from others, so long as he does not hinder
them.

As factors in social phenomena, these distinctive mental
traits of women have ever to be remembered. Women have
in all times played a part, and, in modern days, a very nota
ble part, in determining social arrangements. They act both
directly and indirectly. Directly, they take a large, if not the
larger, share in that ceremonial government which supple
ments the political and ecclesiastical governments , and as
supporters of these other governments, especially the ecclesi
astical, their direct aid is by no means unimportant. Indi
rectly, they act by modifying the opinions and sentiments of
men — first, in education, when the expression of maternal

348 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

thoughts and feelings affects the thoughts and feelings of
boys, and afterwards in domestic and social intercourse, dur
ing which the feminine sentiments sway men's public acts,
both consciously and unconsciously. Whether it is desirable
that the share already taken by women in determining social
arrangements and actions should be increased, is a question
we will leave undiscussed. Here I am concerned merely to
point out that, in the course of a psychological preparation for
the study of Sociology, we must include the- comparative psy
chology of the sexes ; so that if any change is made, we may
make it knowing what we are doing.

Assent to the general proposition set forth in this chapter,
does not depend on assent to the particular propositions un
folded in illustrating it. Those who, while pressing forward
education, are so certain they know what good education is,
that, in an essentially-Papal spirit, they wish to force chil
dren through their existing school-courses, under penalty on
parents who resist, wTill not have their views modified by
what has been said. I do not look, either, for any appreciable
effect on those who shut out from consideration the reactive
influence on moral nature, entailed by the action of a system
of intellectual culture wrhich habituates parents to make the
public responsible for their children's minds. Nor do I think
it likely that many of those who wish to change funda
mentally the political status of women, will be influenced by
the considerations above set forth on the comparative psy
chology of the sexes. But without acceptance of these illus
trative conclusions, there may be acceptance of the general
conclusion, that psychological truths underlie sociological
truths, and must therefore be sought by the sociologist. For
whether discipline of the intellect does or does not change the
emotions; whether national character is or is not progres
sively adapted to social conditions ; whether the minds of
men and women are or are not alike ; are obviously psycho
logical questions ; and either answer to any one of them, im
plies a psychological conclusion. Hence, whoever on any of
these questions has a conviction to which he would give legis
lative expression, is basing a sociological belief upon a psy
chological belief ; and cannot deny that the one is true only

PREPARATION IN PSYCHOLOGY. 349

if the other is true. Having admitted this, he must admit
that without preparation in Mental Science there can be no
Social Science. For, otherwise, he must assert that the ran
domly-made and carelessly-grouped observations on Mind,
common to all people, are better as guides than observations
cautiously collected, critically examined, and generalized in a
systematic way.

No one, indeed, who is once led to dwell on the matter, can
fail to see how absurd is the supposition that there can be a
rational interpretation of men's combined actions, without a
previous rational interpretation of those thoughts and feelings
by which their individual actions are prompted. Nothing
comes out of a society but what originates in the motive of an
individual, or in the united similar motives of many individ
uals, or in the conflict of the united similar motives of some
having certain interests, with the diverse motives of others
whose interests are diff erent. Always the power which initi
ates a change is feeling, separate or aggregated, guided to its
ends by intellect ; and not even an approach to an explana
tion of social phenomena can be made, without the thoughts
and sentiments of citizens being recognized as factors. How,
then, can there be a true account of social actions without a
true account of these thoughts and sentiments ? Manifestly,
those who ignore Psychology as a preparation for Sociology,
can defend their position only by proving that while other
groups of phenomena require special study, the phenomena of
Mind, in all their variety and intricacy, are best understood
without special study ; and that knowledge of human nature
gained haphazard, becomes obscure and misleading in propor
tion as there is added to it knowledge deliberately sought and
carefully put together.

CHAPTER XVI.

CONCLUSION.

OF readers who have .accompanied me thus far, probably
some think that the contents of the work go beyond the limits
implied by its title. Under the head, Study of Sociology, so
many sociological questions have been incidentally discussed,
that the science itself has been in a measure dealt with while
dealing' with the study of it. Admitting1 this criticism, my
excuse must be that the fault, if it is one, has been scarcely
avoidable. Nothing to much purpose can be said about the
study of any science without saying a good deal about the
general and special truths it includes, or what the expositor
holds to be truths. To write an essay on the study of Astron
omy in which there should be no direct or implied conviction
respecting the Copernican theory of the Solar System, nor any
such recognition of the Law of Gravitation as involved ac
ceptance or rejection of it, would be a task difficult to execute,
and, when executed, probably of little value. Similarly with
Sociology — it is next to impossible for a writer who points out
the way towards its truths, to exclude all tacit or avowed
expressions of opinion about those truths ; and, were it possi
ble to exclude such expressions of opinion, it would be at
the cost of those illustrations needed to make his exposition
effective.

Such must be, in part, my defence for having set down
many thoughts which the title of this work does not cover.
Especially have I found myself obliged thus to transgress,
by representing the study of Sociology as the study of Evolu
tion in its most complex form. It is clear that to one who
considers the facts societies exhibit as having had their origin
in supernatural interpositions, or in the wills of individual

CONCLUSION. 351

ruling men, the study of these facts will have an aspect
wholly unlike that which it has to one who contemplates
them as generated by processes of growth and development
continuing through centuries. Ignoring, as the first view
tacitly does, that conformity to law, in the scientific sense of
the word, which the second view tacitly asserts, there can be
but little community between the methods of inquiry proper
to them respectively. Continuous causation, which in the
one case there is little or no tendency to trace, becomes, in the
other case, the chief object of attention ; whence it follows
that there must be formed wholly-different ideas of the ap
propriate modes of investigation. A foregone conclusion
respecting the nature of social phenomena, is thus inevitably
implied in any suggestions for the study of them.

While, however, it must be admitted that throughout this
work there runs the assumption that the facts, simultaneous
and successive, which societies present, have a genesis 110 less
natural than the genesis of facts of all other classes ; it is not
admitted that this assumption was made unawares, or without
warrant. At the outset, the grounds for it were examined.
The notion, widely accepted in name though not consistently
acted upon, that social phenomena differ from phenomena of
most other kinds as being under special providence, we found
to be entirely discredited by its expositors ; nor, when closely
looked into, did the great-man-theory of social affairs prove
to be more tenable. Besides finding that both these views,
rooted as they are in the ways of thinking natural to primi
tive men, would not bear criticism ; we found that even their
defenders continually betrayed their beliefs in the production
of social changes by natural causes — tacitly admitted that
after certain antecedents certain consequents are to be ex
pected — tacitly admitted, therefore, that some prevision is
possible, and therefore some subject-matter for Science.
From these negative justifications for the belief that So
ciology is a science, we turned to the positive justifications.
We found that every aggregate of units of any order, has
certain traits necessarily determined by the properties of its
units. Hence it was inferable, a priori, that, given the
natures of the men who are their units, and certain charac
ters in the societies formed are pre-determined — other charac-

352 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

ters being determined by the co-operation of surrounding
conditions. The current assertion that Sociology is not
possible, implies a misconception of its nature. Using the
analogy supplied by a human life, we saw that just as bodily
development and structure and function, furnish subject-
matter for biological science, though the events set forth by
the biographer go beyond its range ; so, social growth, and the
rise of structures and functions accompanying it, furnish
subject-matter for a Science of Society, though the facts with
which historians fill their pages mostly yield no material for
Science. Thus conceiving the scope of the science, we saw,
on comparing rudimentary societies with one another and
with societies in different stages of progress, that they do
present certain common traits of structure and of function,
as well as certain common traits of development. Further
comparisons similarly made, opened large questions, such as
that of the relation between social growth and organization,
which form parts of this same science ;— questions of tran
scendent importance compared with those occupying the
minds of politicians and writers of history

The difficulties of the Social Science next drew our atten
tion. We saw that in this case, though in no other case, the
facts to be observed and generalized by the student, are ex
hibited by an aggregate of which he forms a part. In his
capacity of inquirer, he should have no inclination towards
one or other conclusion respecting the phenomena to be gen
eralized ; but in his capacity of citizen, helped to live by the
life of his society, imbedded in its structures, sharing in its
activities, breathing its atmosphere of thought and sentiment,
he is partially coerced into such views as favour harmonious
co-operation with his fellow-citizens. Hence immense ob
stacles to the Social Science, unparalleled by those standing
in the way of any other science.

From considering thus generally these causes of error, we
turned to consider them specially. Under the head of objec
tive difficulties, we«jglanced at those many ways in which evi
dence collected by the sociological inquirer is vitiated. That
extreme untrustworthiness of witnesses which results from
carelessness, or fanaticism, or self-interest, was illustrated;

CONCLUSION. 353

and we saw that, in addition to the perversions of statement
hence arising, there are others which arise from the tendency
there is for some kinds of evidence to draw attention, while
evidence of opposite kinds, much larger in quantity, draws no
attention. Further, it was shown that the nature of socio
logical facts, each of which is not observable in a single object
or act, but is reached only through registration and compari
son of many objects and acts, makes the perception of them
harder than that of other facts. It was pointed out that the
wide distribution of social phenomena in Space, greatly hin
ders true apprehensions of them ; and it was also pointed out
that another impediment, even still greater, is consequent on
their distribution in Time— a distribution such that many of
the facts to be dealt with, take centuries to unfold, and can be
grasped only by combining in thought multitudinous changes
that are slow, involved, and not easy to trace. Beyond

these difficulties which we grouped as distinguishing the
science itself, objectively considered, we saw that there are
other difficulties, conveniently to be grouped as subjective,
which are also great. For the interpretation of human con
duct as socially displayed, every one is compelled to use, as a
key, his own nature — ascribing to others thoughts and feelings
like his own ; and yet, while this automorphic interpretation
is indispensable, it is necessarily more or less misleading.
Very generally, too, a subjective difficulty arises from the lack
of intellectual faculty complex enough to grasp these social
phenomena, which are so extremely involved. And again,
very few have by culture gained that plasticity of faculty
requisite for conceiving and accepting those immensely-varied
actualities which societies in different times and places dis
play, and those multitudinous possibilities to be inferred from
them. Nor, of subjective difficulties, did these exhaust

the list. From the emotional, as well as from the intellectual,
part of the nature, we saw that there arise obstacles. The
ways in which beliefs about social affairs are perverted by in
tense fears and excited hopes, were pointed out. We noted
the feeling of impatience, as another common cause of mis-
judgment. A contrast was drawn showing, too, what per
verse estimates of public events men are led to make by their
sympathies and antipathies— how, where their hate has been
24

354: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

aroused, they utter unqualified condemnations of ill-deeds for
which there was much excuse, while, if their admiration is
excited by vast successes, they condone inexcusable ill-deeds
immeasurably greater in amount. And we also saw that
among the distortions of judgment caused by the emotions,
have to be included those immense ones generated by the
sentiment of loyalty to a personal ruler, or to a ruling power
otherwise embodied.

These distortions of judgment caused by the emotions, thus
indicated generally, we went on to consider specially — treat
ing of them as different forms of bias. Though, during edu
cation, understood in a wide sense, many kinds of bias are
commenced or given, there is one which our educational sys
tem makes especially strong — the double bias in favour of the
religions of enmity and of amity. Needful as we found both
of these to be, we perceived that among the beliefs about social
affairs, prompted now by the one and now by the other, there
are glaring incongruities ; and that scientific conceptions can be
formed only when there is a compromise between the dictates
of pure egoism and the dictates of pure altruism, for which
they respectively stand. We observed, next, the warp

ing of opinion which the bias of patriotism causes. Recogniz
ing the truth that the preservation of a society is made possi
ble only by a due amount of patriotic feeling in citizens, we
saw that this feeling inevitably disturbs the judgment when
comparisons between societies are made, and that the data re
quired for Social Science are thus vitiated ; and we saw that
the effort to escape this bias, leading as it does to an oppo
site bias, is apt to vitiate the data in another way. While
finding the class-bias to be no less essential, we found that it
no less inevitably causes one-sidedness in the conceptions of
social affairs. Noting how the various sub-classes have their
specialities of prejudice corresponding to their class-interests,
we noted, at greater length, how the more general prejudices of
the larger and more widely-distinguished classes, prevent them
from forming balanced judgments. That in politics the
bias of pai'ty interferes with those calm examinations by
which alone the conclusions of Social Science can be reached,
scarcely needed pointing out. We observed, however, that
beyond the political bias under its party-form, there is a more

CONCLUSION. 355

general political bias — the bias towards an exclusively-political
view of social affairs, and a corresponding- faith in political
instrumentalities. As affecting the study of Social Science,
this bias was shown to be detrimental as directing the atten
tion too much to the phenomena of social regulation, and ex
cluding from thought the activities regulated, constituting an
aggregate of phenomena far more important. Lastly,

we came to the theological bias, which, under its general form
and under its special forms, disturbs in various ways our
judgments on social questions. Obedience to a supposed
divine command, being its standard of rectitude, it does not
ask concerning any social arrangement whether it conduces
to social welfare, so much as whether it conforms to the
creed locally established. Hence, in each place and time,
those conceptions about public affairs which the theological
bias fosters, tend to diverge from the truth in so far as the
creed then and there accepted diverges from the truth. And
besides the positive evil thus produced, there is a negative
evil, due to discouragement of the habit of estimating actions
by the results they eventually cause — a habit which the study
of Social Science demands.

Having thus contemplated, in general and in detail, the
difficulties of the Social Science, we turned our attention to the
preliminary discipline required. Of the conclusions reached
so recently, the reader scarcely needs reminding. Study of
the sciences in general having been pointed out as the proper
means of generating fit habits of thought, it was shown that
the sciences especially to be attended to are those treating of
Life and of Mind. There can be no understanding of social
actions without some knowledge of human nature ; there can
be no deep knowledge of human nature without some knowl
edge of the laws of Mind ; there can be no adequate knowledge
of the laws of Mind without knowledge of the laws of Life.
And that knowledge of the Laws of Life, as exhibited in Man,
may be properly grasped, attention must be given to the laws
of Life in general.

What is to be hoped from such a presentation of difficulties
and such a programme of preparatory studies ? Who, in
drawing his conclusions about public policies, will be made to

356 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

hesitate by remembering the many obstacles that stand in the
way of right judgments ? Who will think it needful to fit
himself by inquiries so various and so extensive ? Who, in
short, will be led to doubt any of the inferences he has drawn
or be induced to pause before he draws others, by conscious
ness of these many liabilities to error arising from want of
knowledge, want of discipline, and want of duly-balanced
sentiments ?

To these questions there can be but the obvious reply — a
reply which the foregoing chapters themselves involve — that
very little is to be expected. The implication throughout the
argument has been that for every society, and for each stage in
its evolution, there is an appropriate mode of feeling and
thinking ; and that no mode of feeling and thinking not
adapted to its degree of evolution, and to its surroundings, can
be permanently established. Though not exactly, still approxi
mately, the average opinion in any age and country, is a func
tion of the social structure in that age arid country. There
may be, as we see during times of revolution, a considerable
incongruity between the ideas that become current and the
social arrangements which exist, and are, in great measure,
appropriate ; though even then the incongruity does but mark
the need for a re-adjustment of institutions to character.
While, however, those successive compromises which, during
social evolution, have to be made between the changed natures
of citizens and the institutions evolved by ancestral citizens, im
ply disagreements, yet these are but partial and temporary — in
those societies, at least, which are developing and not in course
of dissolution. For a society to hold together, the institutions
that are needed and the conceptions that are generally current,
must be in tolerable harmony. Hence, it is not to be expected
that modes of thinking on social affairs, are to be in any con
siderable degree changed by whatever may be said respecting
the Social Science, its difficulties, and the required preparations
for studying it.

The only reasonable hope is, that here and there one may
be led, in calmer moments, to remember how largely his be
liefs about public matters have been made for him by circum
stances, and how probable it is that they are either untrue or
but partially true. When he reflects on the doubtfulness of

CONCLUSION. 357

the evidence which he generalizes, collected hap-hazard from
a narrow area — when he counts up the perverting sentiments
fostered in him by education, country, class, party, creed —
when, observing those around, he sees that from other evi
dence selected to gratify sentiments partially unlike his own,
there result unlike views ; he may occasionally recollect how
largely mere accidents have determined his convictions. Rec
ollecting this, he may be induced to hold these convictions
not quite so strongly ; may see the need for criticism of them
with a view to revision ; and, above all, may be somewhat less
eager to act in pursuance of them.

While the few to whom a Social Science is conceivable,
may in some degree be thus influenced by what is said con
cerning the study of it, there can, of course, be no effect on
the many to whom such a science seems an absurdity, or an
impiety, or both. The feeling usually excited by the proposal
to deal scientifically with these most-complex phenomena, is
like that which was excited in ancient times by the proposal
to deal scientifically with phenomena of simpler kinds. As
Mr. Grote writes of Socrates —

" Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine
class of phenomena, in which human research was insane, fruitless,
and impious."1

And as he elsewhere writes respecting the attitude of the
Greek mind in general : —

"In his [the early Greek's] view, the description of the sun, as
given in a modern astronomical treatise, would have appeared not
merely absurd, but repulsive and impious : even in later times, when
the positive spirit of inquiry had made considerable progress, Anaxago-
ras and other astronomers incurred the charge of blasphemy for dis-
personifying Helios, and trying to assign invariable laws to the solar
phenomena." 2

That a likeness exists between the feeling then displayed
respecting phenomena of inorganic nature, and the feeling
now displayed respecting phenomena of Life and Society, is
manifest. The ascription of social actions and political events
entirely to natural causes, thus leaving out Providence as a
factor, seems to the religious mind of our day, as seemed to
the mind of the pious Greek the dispersonification of Helios

358 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

and the explanation of celestial motions otherwise than by
immediate divine agency. As was said by Mr. Gladstone, in
a speech made shortly after the first publication of the second
chapter of this volume —

" I lately read a discussion on the manner in which the raising up
of particular individuals occasionally occurs in great crises of human
history, as if some sacred, invisible power had raised them up and
placed them in particular positions for special purposes. The writer
says that they are not uniform, but admits that they are common — so
common and so remarkable that men would be liable to term them
providential in a pre-scientific age. And this was said without the
smallest notion apparently in the writer's mind that he was giving
utterance to anything that could startle or alarm— it was said as a
kind of commonplace. It would seem that in his view there was a
time when mankind, lost in ignorance, might, without forfeiting en
tirely their title to the name of rational creatures, believe in a Provi
dence, but that since that period another and greater power has arisen
under the name of science, and this power has gone to war with Provi
dence, and Providence is driven from the field — and we have now the
happiness of living in the scientific age, when Providence is no longer
to be treated as otherwise than an idle dream."3

Of the mental attitude, very general beyond the limits of
the scientific world, which these utterances of Mr. Gladstone
exemplify, he has since given further illustration ; and, in his
anxiety to check a movement he thinks mischievous, has so
conspicuously made himself the exponent of the anti-scientific
view, that we may fitly regard his thoughts on the matter as
typical. In an address delivered by him at the Liverpool Col
lege, and since re-published with additions, he says : —

" Upon the ground of what is termed evolution, God is relieved of
the labour of creation ; in the name of unchangeable laws, He is dis
charged from governing the world."

This passage proves the kinship between Mr. Gladstone's con
ception of things and that entertained by the Greeks, to be
even closer than above alleged ; for its implication is, not
simply that the scientific interpretation of vital and social
phenomena as conforming to fixed laws, is repugnant to him,
but that the like interpretation of inorganic phenomena is re
pugnant. In common with the ancient Greek, he regards as
irreligious, any explanation of Nature which dispenses with
immediate divine superintendence. He appears to overlook

CONCLUSION. 359

the fact that the doctrine of gravitation, with the entire sci
ence of physical Astronomy, is open to the same charge as this
which he makes against the doctrine of evolution ; and he
seems not to have remembered that throughout the past, each
further step made by Science has been denounced for reasons
like those which he assigns.4

It is instructive to observe, however, that in these prevail
ing conceptions expressed by Mr. Gladstone, which we have
here to note as excluding the conception of a Social Science,
there is to be traced a healthful process of compromise be
tween old and new. For as in the current conceptions about
the order of events in the lives of persons, there is a partner
ship, wholly illogical though temporarily convenient, between
the ideas of natural causation and of providential interference ;
so, in the current political conceptions, the belief in divine in
terpositions goes along with, and by no means excludes, the
belief in a natural production of effects on society by natural
agencies set to work. In relation to the occurrences of indi
vidual life, we displayed our national aptitude for thus enter
taining mutually-destructive ideas, when an unpopular prince
suddenly gained popularity by outliving certain abnormal
changes in his blood, and when, on the occasion of his re
covery, providential aid and natural causation were unitedly
recognized by a thanksgiving to God and a baronetcy to the
doctor. And similarly, we see that throughout all our public
actions, the theory which Mr. Gladstone represents, that great
men are providentially raised up to do things God has decided
upon, and that the course of affairs is supernaturally ordered
thus or thus, does not in the least interfere with the passing
of measures calculated to achieve desired ends in ways classed
as natural, and nowise modifies the discussion of such meas
ures on their merits, as estimated in terms of cause and conse
quence. While the prayers with which each legislative sitting
commences, show a nominal belief in an immediate divine
guidance, the votes with which the sitting ends, given in pur
suance of reasons which the speeches assign, show us a real
belief that the effects will be determined by the agencies set
to work.

Still, it is clear that the old conception, while it qualifies
the new but little in the regulating of actions, qualifies it very

360 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

much in the forming of theories. There can be no complete
acceptance of Sociology as a science, so long as the belief in a
social order not conforming to natural law, survives. Hence,
as already said, considerations touching the study of Sociology,
not very influential even over the few who recognize a Social
Science, can have scarcely any effects on the great mass to
whom a Social Science is an incredibility.

I do not mean that this prevailing imperviousness to scien
tific conceptions of social phenomena is to be regretted. As
implied in a foregoing paragraph, it is part of the required
adjustment between existing opinions and the forms of social
life at present requisite. With a given phase of human char
acter there must, to maintain equilibrium, go an adapted class
of institutions, and a set of thoughts and sentiments in toler
able harmony with those institutions. Hence, it is not to be
wished that with the average human nature we now have,
there should be a wide acceptance of views natural only to a
more-highly-developed social state, and to the improved type
of citizen accompanying such a state. The desirable thing is,
that a growth of ideas and feelings tending to produce modifi
cation, shall be joined with a continuance of ideas and feelings
tending to preserve stability. And it is one of our satisfactory
social traits, exhibited in a degree never before paralleled,
that along with a mental progress which brings about con
siderable changes, there is a devotion of thought and energy
to the maintenance of existing arrangements, and creeds, and
sentiments — an energy sufficient even to re-invigorate some
of the old forms and beliefs that were decaying. When, there
fore, a distinguished statesman, anxious for human welfare as
he ever shows himself to be, and holding that the defence of
established beliefs must not be left exclusively to its " stand
ing army " of " priests and ministers of religion," undertakes
to combat opinions at variance with a creed he thinks essen
tial ; the occurrence may be taken as adding another to the
many signs of a healthful condition of society. That in our
day, one in Mr. Gladstone's position should think as he does,
seems to me very desirable. That we should have for our
working-king one in whom a purely-scientific conception of
things had become dominant, and who was thus out of har-

CONCLUSION. 361

mony with our present social state, would probably be detri
mental, and might be disastrous.

For it cannot be too emphatically asserted that this policy
of compromise, alike in institutions, in actions, and in beliefs,
which especially characterizes English life, is a policy essen
tial to a society going through the transitions caused by con
tinued growth and development. The illogicalities and the
absurdities to be found so abundantly in current opinions and
existing arrangements, are those which inevitably arise in the
course of perpetual re-adjustments to circumstances perpetu
ally changing. Ideas and institutions proper to a past social
state, but incongruous with the new social state that has
grown out of it, surviving into this new social state they have
made possible, and disappearing only as this new social state
establishes its own ideas and institutions, are necessarily, dur
ing their survival, in conflict with these new ideas and insti
tutions — necessarily furnish elements of contradiction in
men's thoughts and deeds. And yet as, for the carrying-on
of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not
ready, this perpetual compromise is an indispensable accom
paniment of a normal development. Its essentialness we may
see on remembering that it equally holds throughout the evo
lution of an individual organism. The structural and func
tional arrangements during growth, are never quite right :
always the old adjustment for a smaller size is made wrong
by the larger size it has been instrumental in producing —
always the transition-structure is a compromise between the
requirements of past and future, fulfilling in an imperfect
way the requirements of the present. And this, which is
shown clearly enough where there is simple growth, is shown
still more clearly where there are metamorphoses. A creature
which leads at two periods of its existence two different kinds
of life, and which, in adaptation to its second period, has to
develop structures that were not fitted for its first, passes
through a stage during which it possesses both partially —
during which the old dwindles while the new grows : as hap
pens, for instance, in creatures that continue to breathe water
by external branchiae during the time they are developing the
lungs that enable them to breathe air. And thus it is with
the alterations produced by growth in societies, as well as

362 TIIE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

with those metamorphoses accompanying1 change in the mode
of life — especially those accompanying change from the pred
atory life to the industrial life. Here, too, there must be
transitional stages during which incongruous organizations
co-exist : the first remaining indispensable until the second
has grown up to its work. Just as injurious as it would be to
an amphibian to cut off its branchiae before its lungs were
well developed ; so injurious must it be to a society to destroy
its old institutions before the new have become well-organized
enough to take their places.

Non-recognition of this truth characterizes too much the
reformers, political, religious, and social, of our own time ; as
it has characterized those of past times. On the part of men
eager to rectify wrongs and expel errors, there is still, as there
ever has been, so absorbing a consciousness of the evils caused
by old forms and old ideas, as to permit no consciousness of
the benefits these old forms and old ideas have yielded. This
partiality of view is, in a sense, necessary. There must be
division of labour here as elsewhere : some who have the
function of attacking, and who, that they may attack effectu
ally, must feel strongly the viciousness of that which they
attack ; some who have the function of defending and who,
that they may be good defenders, must over-value the things
they defend. But while this one-si dediiess has to be tolerated,
as in great measure unavoidable, it is in some respects to be
regretted. Though, with grievances less serious and animos
ities less intense than those which existed here in the past,
and which exist still abroad, there go mitigated tendencies to
a rash destructiveiiess on the one side, and an unreasoning
bigotry on the other ; yet even in our country and age there
are dangers from the want of a due both-sidedness. In the
speeches and writings of those who advocate various political
and social changes, there is so continuous a presentation of in
justices, and abuses, and mischiefs, and corruptions, as to leave
the impression that for securing a wholesome state of things,
there needs nothing but to set aside present arrangements.
The implication seems ever to be that all who occupy places
of power, and form the regulative organization, are alone to
blame for whatever is not as it should be ; and that the classes
regulated are blameless. " See the injuries which these insti-

CONCLUSION. 363

tutions inflict on you," says the energetic reformer. " Con
sider how selfish must be the men who maintain them to their
own advantage and your detriment," he adds. And then he
leaves to be drawn the manifest inference, that were these
selfish men got rid of, all would be well. Neither he nor his
audience recognizes the facts that regulative arrangements are
essential ; that the arrangements in question, along with their
many vices, have some virtues ; that such vices as th£y have
do not result from an egoism peculiar to those who uphold
and work them, but result from a general egoism — an egoism
no less decided in those who complain than in those com
plained of. Inequitable government can be upheld only by
the aid of a people correspondingly inequitable, in its senti
ments and acts. Injustice cannot reign if the community
does not furnish a due supply of unjust agents. No tyrant
can tyrannize over a people save on condition that the people
is bad enough to supply him with soldiers who will fight for
his tyranny and keep their brethren in slavery. Class-suprem
acy cannot be maintained by the corrupt buying of votes, un
less there are multitudes of voters venal enough to sell their
votes. It is thus everywhere and in all degrees — misconduct
among those in power is the correlative of misconduct among
those over whom they exercise power.

And while, in the men who urge on changes, there is an
unconsciousness that the evils they denounce are rooted in
the nature common to themselves and other men, there is also
an unconsciousness that amid the things they would throw
away there is much worth preserving. This holds of beliefs
more especially. Along with the destructive tendency there
goes but little constructive tendency. The criticisms made,
imply that it is requisite only to dissipate errors, and that it is
needless to insist on truths. It is forgotten that, along with
forms which are bad, there is a large amount of substance
which is good. And those to whom there are addressed con
demnations of the forms, unaccompanied by the caution that
there is a substance to be preserved in higher forms, are left,
not only without any coherent system of guiding beliefs, but
without any consciousness that one is requisite.

Hence the need, above admitted, for an active defence of
that which exists, carried on by men convinced of its entire

364: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

worth ; so that those who attack may not destroy the good
along with the bad.

And here let me point out distinctly, the truth already im
plied, that studying Sociology scientifically, leads to fairer ap
preciations of different parties, political, religious, and other.
The conception initiated and developed by Social Science, is
at the same time Radical and Conservative — Radical to a de
gree beyond anything which current Radicalism conceives ;
Conservative to a degree beyond anything conceived by pres
ent Conservatism. When there has been adequately seized
the truth that societies are products of evolution, assuming, in
their various times and places, their various modifications of
structure, and function ; there follows the conviction that
what, relatively to our thoughts and sentiments, were arrange
ments of extreme badness, had fitnesses to conditions which
made better arrangements impracticable : whence comes a
tolerant interpretation of past tyrannies at which even the
bitterest Tory of our own days would be indignant. On the
other hand, after observing how the processes that have
brought things to their present stage are still going on, not
with a decreasing rapidity indicating approach to cessation,
but with an increasing rapidity that implies long continuance
and immense transformations ; there follows the conviction
that the remote future has in store, forms of social life higher
than any we have imagined : there comes a faith transcend
ing that of the Radical, whose aim is some re-organization
admitting of comparison to organizations which exist. And
while this conception of societies as naturally evolved, be
ginning with small and simple types which have their short
existences and disappear, advancing to higher types that are
larger, more complex, and longer-lived, coming to still-higher
types like our own, great in size, complexity, and duration,
and promising types transcending these in times after exist
ing societies have died away — while this conception of so
cieties implies that in the slow course of things changes
almost immeasurable in amount are possible, it also implies
that but small amounts of such changes are possible within
short periods.

Thus, the theory of progress disclosed by the study of

CONCLUSION. 365

Sociology as science, is one which greatly moderates the
hopes and the fears of extreme parties. After clearly seeing
that the structures and actions throughout a society are de
termined by the properties of its units, and that (external dis
turbances apart) the society cannot be substantially and per
manently changed without its units being substantially and
permanently changed, it becomes easy to see that great altera
tions cannot suddenly be made to much purpose. And when
both the party of progress arid the party of resistance perceive
that the institutions which at any time exist are more deeply
rooted than they supposed — when the one party perceives
that these institutions, imperfect as they are, have a tem
porary fitness, while the other party perceives that the main
tenance of them, in so far as it is desirable, is in great measure
guaranteed by the human nature they have grown out of ;
there must come a diminishing violence of attack on one
side, and a diminishing perversity of defence 011 the other.
Evidently, so far as a doctrine can influence general conduct
(which it can do, however, in but a comparatively-small de
gree), the Doctrine of Evolution, in its social application, is
calculated to produce a steadying effect, alike on thought and
action.

If, as seems likely, some should propose to draw the seem
ingly-awkward corollary that it matters not what we believe
or what we teach, since the process of social evolution will
take its own course in spite of us ; I reply that while this
corollary is in one sense true, it is in another sense untrue.
Doubtless, from all that has been said it follows that, suppos
ing surrounding conditions continue the same, the evolution
of a society cannot be in any essential way diverted from its
general course ; though it also follows (and here the corollary
is at fault) that the thoughts and actions of individuals, being
natural factors that arise in the course of the evolution itself,
and aid in further advancing it, cannot be dispensed with, but
must be severally valued as increments of the aggregate force
producing change. But while the corollary is even here par
tially misleading, it is, in another direction, far more seriously
misleading. For though the process of social evolution is in
its general character so far pre-determined, that its successive
stages cannot be ante-dated, and that hence no teaching or

3G6 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

policy can advance it beyond a certain normal rate, which is
limited by the rate of organic modification in human beings ;
yet it is quite possible to perturb, to retard, or to disorder the
process. The analogy of individual development again serves
us. The unfolding of an organism after its special type, has
its approximately-uniform course taking its tolerably-definite
time ; and no treatment that may be devised will fundamen
tally change or greatly accelerate these : the best that can be
done is to maintain the required favourable conditions. But
it is quite easy to adopt a treatment which shall dwarf, or de
form, or otherwise injure : the processes of growth and de
velopment may be, and very often are, hindered or de
ranged, though they cannot be artificially bettered. Similarly
with the social organism. Though, by maintaining favour
able conditions, there cannot be more good done than that of
letting social progress go on unhindered ; yet an immensity
of mischief may be done in the way of disturbing and dis
torting and repressing, by policies carried out in pursuance of
erroneous conceptions. And thus, notwithstanding first ap
pearances to the contrary, there is a very important part to be
played by a true theory of social phenomena.

A few words to those who think these general conclusions
discouraging, may be added. Probably the more enthusi
astic, hopeful of great ameliorations in the state of mankind,
to be brought about rapidly by propagating this belief or
initiating that reform, will feel that a doctrine negativing
their sanguine anticipations takes away much of the stimulus
to exertion. If large advances in human welfare can come
only in the slow process of things, which will inevitably bring
them ; why should we trouble ourselves ?

Doubtless it is true that on visionary hopes, rational criti
cisms have a depressing influence. It is better to recognize the
truth, however. As between infancy and maturity there is no
shortcut by which there may be avoided the tedious process
of growth and development through insensible increments ; so
there is no way from the lower forms of social life to the
higher, but one passing through small successive modifica
tions. If we contemplate the order of nature, we see that
everywhere vast results are brought about by accumulations

CONCLUSION. 367

of minute actions. The surface of the Earth has been sculp
tured by forces which in the course of a year produce altera
tions scarcely anywhere visible. Its multitudes of different
organic forms have arisen by processes so slow, that, during
the periods our observations extend over, the results are in
most cases inappreciable. We must be content to recognize
these truths and conform our hopes to them. Light, falling
upon a crystal, is capable of altering its molecular arrange
ments, but it can do this only by a repetition of impulses
almost innumerable : before a unit of ponderable matter can
have its rhythmical movements so increased by successive
etherial waves, as to be detached from its combination and
arranged in another way, millions of such etherial waves
must successively make infinitesimal additions to its motion.
Similarly, before there arise in human nature and human in
stitutions, changes having that permanence which makes them
an acquired inheritance for the human race, there must go in
numerable recurrences of the thoughts, and feelings, and
actions, conducive to such changes. The process cannot be
abridged ; and must be gone through with due patience.

Thus, admitting that for the fanatic some wild anticipation
is needful as a stimulus, and recognizing the usefulness of his
delusion as adapted to his particular nature and his particular
function, the man of higher type must be content with
greatly-moderated expectations, while he perseveres with un-
diminished efforts. He has to see how comparatively little
can be done, and yet to find it worth while to do that little :
so uniting philanthropic energy wTith philosophic calm.

POSTSCKIPT.

EVEN in conversations about simple matters, statements
clearly made are often misconceived from impatience of at
tention. The tendency to conclude quickly from small evi
dence, which leads most people to judge of strangers on a first
meeting, and which causes them to express surprise when to
the question — " How do you like so and so," you reply that
you have formed no opinion, is often betrayed in their habits
as listeners. Continually it turns out that from the beginning
of a sentence in course of utterance, they have inferred an
entire meaning ; and, ignoring the qualifying clauses which
follow, quite misapprehend the idea conveyed. This impa
tience of attention is connected with, and often results from,
inability to grasp as a whole the elements of a complex propo
sition. One who undertakes to explain an involved matter to
a person of undisciplined intelligence, finds that though the
person has understood each part of the explanation, he has
failed to co-ordinate the parts ; because the first has dropped
out of his mind before the last is reached.

This holds not of listeners only, but of many readers.
Either a premature conclusion positively formed from the
earlier portions of an exposition, makes further reading seem
superfluous ; or else the explanations afterwards read do not
adequately modify this conclusion which has already ob
tained possession, and on behalf of which some amour propre
is enlisted ; or else there is an incapacity for comprehending
in their totality the assembled propositions, of which the
earlier are made tenable only by combination with the later.

I am led to make these remarks by finding how greatly
misunderstood have been some of the doctrines set forth in

25 369

370 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

this work. Where I had, as I believed, made my meaning
clear, and where, on re-reading, the statements still seem to
me adequate, I have been supposed to express views quite
different from those I intended to express. The issue of this
revised edition affords an opportunity for rectifying these
misinterpretations, and I gladly take it.

I will begin with one which, partly ascribable to the
causes just indicated, is partly ascribable to another cause. It
shows in a striking manner, how established modes of con
ceiving things hinder the formation of alien conceptions :
even to the extent of producing an apparent inability to form
them.

In Chapter XIV., I have contended that policies, legislative
and other, which, while hindering survival of the fittest,
further the propagation of the unfit, work grave mischiefs. In
the course of the argument I have said : —

" Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good, is an
extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate stirring-up of miseries for future
generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of be
queathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and
criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as
maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies.
It may be doubted whether the maudlin philanthropy which, looking
only at direct mitigations, persistently ignores indirect mischiefs, does
not inflict a greater total of misery than the extremest selfishness
inflicts."

After insisting on the blameworthiness of those who, by
thoughtless giving, increase suffering instead of decreasing
it, I have guarded myself against misinterpretation by say
ing:—

" Doubtless it is in the order of things that parental affection, the
regard of relatives, and the spontaneous generosity of friends and
even of strangers, should mitigate the pains which incapacity has to
bear, and the penalties which unfit impulses bring round. Doubtless
in many cases the reactive influence of this sympathetic care which
the better take of the worse, is morally beneficial, and in a degree
compensates by good in one direction for evil in another. It may be
fully admitted that individual altruism, left to itself, will work ad
vantageously — wherever, at least, it does not go to the extent of help
ing the unworthy to multiply."

POSTSCRIPT. 371

And the reprobation I have expressed is mainly directed
against the public agencies which do coercively what should
be done voluntarily : as where I have said that

"A mechanically-working State-apparatus, distributing money
drawn from grumbling rate-payers, produces little or no moralizing
effect on the capables to make up for multiplication of the incapables."

Little did I think that these passages would bring on me
condemnation as an enemy to the poor. Yet in four French
periodicals, representing divergent schools of French opinion,
have I been thus condemned. Here is a passage from the
Bulletin du Mouvement Social, 15 Juin, 1879 : —

"Qu'un economiste imbu exclusivement des principes du Dar-
winisme se mette a raisonner sur la condition des miserables, votis le
verrez arriver a un VCR mis&ris aussi barbare que le vce victis des an-
ciens. II vous dira que, dans Finteret du progres de Fespecc, il faut
sacrifier sans pitie ceux qui ne sont pas armes dans la lutte pour
Fexistence. Je le ne leur fais pas dire. Ecoutez Spencer," &c.
And here are passages from a review of the Study of Soci
ology, published in the Revue des deux Mondes, Vol. VI. of
1874, pp. 107-8 :—

" Condamner d'avance la faiblesse et Finfirmite, c'est revenir a la
theorie lacedemonienne de 1'exposition des enfans. Si Ton etait meme
consequent, il ne sufflrait plus de laisser mourir, il faudrait aller jusqu'a
supprirner."

Then representing it as monstrous to "afficher ces conse
quences barbares au nom d'une loi biologique," and reproach
ing me with paying no regard to the social sentiments, to the
tenderness for the feeble, and so on, the reviewer winds up by
exclaiming : — k

"Quelle ecole de philosophic que celle ou un Las Cases, un Vincent
de Paul, un abbe de 1'fipee, un Wilberforce, seraient considered comme
les ennemis de Fespece humaine ! "

M. Paul Janet, a member of the Institute of France, is the
writer of these last passages. I have recognized, as who would
not, the beneficence of " parental affection " as fostering the
feeble ; and yet he describes me as practically desiring a re
turn to the Spartan practice of exposing infants ! I have said
that "the regard of relatives" may rightly "mitigate the
pains which incapacity has to bear : " and yet he asserts that
I would leave the infirm to die, and, logically, am bound to
wish them destroyed ! I have admitted that '' the spontaneous

372 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

generosity of friends and even of strangers " should qualify
" the penalties which unfit impulses bring round ; " and yet
the " consequences barbares " of my doctrine are represented
as being not simply absence of aid to the inferior but active
suppression of them ! I have said that "individual altruism,
left to itself, will work advantageously ; " and yet it is alleged
that I must consider the distinguished philanthropists he
names as enemies of the human race !

That M. Janet's reproaches are unwarranted, and that he
has circulated statements of my views widely at variance with
the truth, is sufficiently manifest. A thing not so manifest is
that he does not see, or will not see, that the general doctrine
urged, is urged as being more humane instead of less humane.
He is apparently blind to the fact that a kindness which con
siders only proximate effects may be, and often is, much less
in degree than a kindness which takes into account ultimate
effects. A sympathy which thinks only of the suffering an
operation will give, and exclaims at the cruelty of performing
it, is a sympathy inferior to that which, equally affected by
the pain inflicted, nevertheless inflicts it, that dying agonies
may be escaped and restoration to health and happiness
achieved. Anxiety for the welfare of the poor and efforts on
their behalf may coexist with profound disapproval of, and
strong opposition to, all policies which forcibly burden the
worthy that the unworthy may be fostered. If an illustration
of their coexistence be asked, I can furnish a conclusive one
in the case of a late relative of mine, the Rev. Thos. Spencer,
for many years clergyman of a rural parish in Somerset
shire. Uncared-for as were his parishioners when he went
among them, he established first a Sunday-school, then a vil
lage day-school, then a village-library, then land-allotments
for labourers, then a clothing club. To his local philanthropic
actions were added general ones. He made efforts for church-
reform (thus offending his bishop and destroying his chance
of preferment) ; he publicly shared in a movement for extend
ing the suffrage ; he took an active part as writer and speaker
in the Aiiti-Corn-Law agitation ; he gave countless lectures in
furtherance of temperance. When not otherwise occupied he
wrote pamphlets (twenty-two in number) all directed in one or
other way to improving the condition, bodily and mental, of

POSTSCRIPT. 373

the masses ; and he eventually died prematurely from the
effects of over-work in seeking to ameliorate the lives of the
less-happily placed and the less-happily constituted. And
now what were his views on the question here at issue ? Orig
inally, while yet his experience of results was narrow, he
was always on the side of the pauper and against the over
seer ; but as his experience widened, first in his own parish
and then as chairman of the Bath Union, he became an
avowed opponent to all compulsory charity. Of his four
tracts under the title Reasons for a Poor-law considered,
dated 1841, the first, setting out by adverting to the evils a
Poor-law entails, asks, " whether there are any adequate rea
sons that such a law should exist at all ; " and the remaining
three are occupied in showing that there are no adequate rea
sons. In the course of the argument he gives cases, coming
under his own observation, of the sufferings caused. He
names industrious men for many weeks out of work, com
pelled to pay rates and starve their children, that the idle
might not be hungry ; men invalided, whose allowances from
sick clubs to which they had for years subscribed, were in
part swept away by the overseer's agent ; widows whose off
spring had to be further pinched that support might be given
to women with illegitimate offspring ; artizans settled in other
parishes, losing their goods by distraint for nonpayment of
rates and obliged to return to their own parishes as paupers.
These and other such atrocities committed in the name of
Law, strengthened in him the conviction otherwise reached,
that public charity is essentially vicious ; and the evidence I
have given proves that not lack of deep sympathy with the
inferior and the miserable was the cause, but a still deeper
sympathy with good men in adversity, whose difficulties,
already great, were artificially made greater.

While to repudiate M. Janet's interpretation of my views
has been one purpose of the foregoing paragraphs, a further
purpose has been that of illustrating the truth set forth in
Chapter III., that in every society there is maintained a gen
eral congruity between the nature of the aggregate and the
nature of the units — a truth which I have elsewhere (Data of
Ethics, §§ 38, 50) reverted to as implying that always a gen
eral harmony between institutions and opinions establishes

374 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

itself. For with a clearness greater even than I was prepared
to find, we are here shown how the form of a social organiza
tion and the entailed social habits, generate a correlative mode
of thinking from which it seems scarcely possible to escape.
M. Janet and those various other French critics who have
expressed the same view, are so habituated to the thought of
State-control as extending over all social affairs, that they
have become almost incapacitated for conceiving of social
affairs as any of them otherwise regulated. Everything in
their experience being administered, they are scarcely able to
entertain the idea that anything can do without administra
tion. The question with regard to each public matter is —
Will it be better for the Government to take this course or that
course ? and the question— Will it be better for the Govern
ment to do nothing ? is a question which can scarcely find
entrance. Hence in the case before us, it happens that the
only possible alternatives recognized, are fostering the inferior
or suppressing the inferior. Tbat public agency should neither
foster nor suppress seems to have become inconceivable. For
there is entirely ignored the conclusion I have urged, that the
unworthy, and those whose defects bring evils on them, while
they should be left free to do the best they can for themselves,
should receive such help only as private sympathy prompts
relatives, friends, and strangers to give them.

From the doctrines set forth in this work, some have
drawn the corollary that effort in furtherance of progress is
superfluous. " If," they argue, " the evolution of a society
conforms general laws — if the changes which, in the slow
course of things bring it about, are naturally determined ;
then what need is there of endeavours to aid it ? The hy
pothesis implies that the transformation results from causes
beyond individual wills ; and, if so, the acts of individuals in
fulfilment of their wills are not required to effect it. Hence
we may occupy ourselves exclusively with personal concerns ;
leaving social evolution to go its own way."

This is a misapprehension -naturally fallen into and not
quite easy to escape from ; for to get out of it the citizen must
simultaneously conceive himself as one whose will is a factor
in social evolution, and yet as one whose will is a product of

POSTSCRIPT. 375

all antecedent influences, social included. How to unite
these conceptions will best be seen on reverting to the rela
tions between the social organism, and its components, as
most generally stated.

In Chapter III. the truth that the nature of an aggregate
is determined by the natures of its units, first illustrated in
the cases of aggregates of simpler kinds, was then alleged of
the social aggregate. It was pointed out that the particular
set of relations into which the members of a community fall,
depends on their characters — that where their characters are
of a certain kind, no social structure at all arises ; that where
some ability to co-operate is shown, they habitually present
some common traits implied by submission to control ; and
that, on comparing societies of all orders, those which differ
widely in their structures are found to differ widely in the
natures of their members, while those which are but little
dissimilar do not present great dissimilarities of popular
character. Further, we saw that there goes on a reciprocal
action and reaction between each people and its institutions.
If by altered circumstances, such as those which continuous
war or prolonged peace involve, some social structures are
rendered inactive and dwindle, while others are brought into
greater activity and grow, the natures of citizens are modified
into congruity with them. While, conversely, if changed
modes of life change the characters of citizens, their changed
characters presently cause responsive changes in their in
stitutions.

But now under what condition alone can the changed
characters of citizens work changes in their institutions ? The
condition is that their changed characters shall display them
selves in changed actions. To expect that the society will
evolve further while they remain passive, is to expect that it
will evolve further without cause. Each man in whom dis
satisfaction is aroused by institutions which have survived
from a less civilized past, or whose sympathies make certain
evils repugnant to him, must regard his feelings thus excited
as units in the aggregate of forces by which progress is to be
brought about ; and is called on to expend his feelings in
appropriate deeds. An analogy will best show how there
may be reconciled the two propositions that social evolution

376 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

is a process conforming- to natural laws, and yet that it results
from the voluntary efforts of citizens.

It is a truth statistically established, that in each com
munity, while its conditions remain the same, there is a uni
form rate of marriage : such variations in the numbers of
marriages as accompany variations in the prices of food,
serving to show that so long as the impediments to marriage
do not vary the frequency of marriages does not vary. Sim
ilarly, it is found that along with an average frequency of
marriages there goes an average frequency of births. But
though these averages show that the process of human multi
plication presents uniformities, implying constancy in the
action of general causes, it is riot therefore inferred that the
process of human multiplication is independent of people's
wills. If anyone were to argue that marriages and births,
considered in the aggregate, are social phenomena statistically
proved to depend on influences which operate uniformly, and
that therefore the maintenance of population does not de
pend on individual actions, his inference would be rejected
as absurd. Daily experience proves that marrying and
the rearing of cliildren in each case result from the pur
suit of exclusively private ends. It is only by fulfilling
their individual wills in establishing and maintaining
the domestic relations, that citizens produce these aggre
gate results which exhibit uniformities apparently inde
pendent of individual wills. In this instance, then, it is ob
vious that social phenomena follow certain general courses ;
and yet that they can do this only on condition that so
cial units voluntarily act out their natures. While every
one holds that, in the matter of marriage, his will is, in the
ordinary sense of the word, free; yet he is obliged to rec
ognize the fact that his will, and the wills of others, are
so far determined by common elements of human nature,
as to produce these average social resxilts ; and that no such
social results could be produced did they not fulfil their
wills.

Similarly, then, with these changes constituting progress,
which are desired by the philanthropic. Though higher in
stitutions will evolve in conformity with general laws, when
the natures of citizens permit ; yet they will do this only in

POSTSCRIPT. 377

proportion as each citizen manifests in action, that nature to
which they are the correlatives.

But now instead of these reasons for passivity which may
thus be met, there come from some, other reasons for passivity
more difficult to meet. Admitting that social evolution can
result only if the natures of citizens issue in appropriate con
duct, and that therefore those who have human progress at
heart must use fit means, some will put the question — What
are fit means ? Impressed by the evidence that legislative
acts, and deeds prompted by benevolence, prove in multitu
dinous cases injurious rather than advantageous, they hesitate
lest they should work evil instead of good. They ask how
the apparently beneficial but really mischievous measures,
are to be distinguished from measures that are essentially
and permanently beneficial. Let us listen to one of them.

"When goldsmiths, and mercers, and fishmongers, and
traders of other kinds, severally formed guilds for the pro
tection and regulation of their respective businesses, they
would have thought insane the prophecy that centuries
afterwards the guilds would be composed of men uncon
nected with these businesses, who would spend the vast funds
accumulated chiefly in gigantic and luxurious feasts. Those
who in past times founded schools for the poor, never dreamt
that the funds they bequeathed would be perverted to the
use of the rich ; nor could they have believed that by pro
viding what was then thought good education they would
eventually hinder the spread of better education. How do I
know that an agency which I aid in establishing to achieve
one end, will not similarly be turned in future to some other
end ? or that what now seems to me a benefit, wrill not
eventually prove an evil by standing in the way of greater
benefit ? Am I told that in future, more control and better
judgment will prevent corruptions and perversions ? I can
not hope it. Even now I see recurring, mischiefs of the same
nature as have before occurred under like conditions. For
instance, there are signs that again in Ireland, the steps taken
to meet distress are working evils akin to those worked dur
ing the distress of 1847, when the relief -system fostered 'an
organised combination to discourage the cultivation of the

378 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

soil, and to persuade the people that if they leave it until led
the Government and Parliament will forever be obliged to
maintain them ' (Debates, February 19, 1847) ; and when a
landlord, responding- to the request of his tenants for seed-
wheat, but doubting their intentions, had the 800 stones he
bought ' steeped in a solution of sulphate of iron and then
announced that they might have it, but they, finding they
could not eat it, would not take a grain;' (Times, March
2(5th, 1847). Every day brings examples of the -ways in
wThich measures work these unexpected results : instance the
evil which has come along with the good promised by State-
telegraphy. Just noting that within the metropolis teleg
raphy has been doubled in price that a lower uniform rate
might be given for all places — observing, too, that as the
telegraph-wires extended into remote districts yield miserably
small returns, it results that the more populous places are
taxed for the benefit of the less populous ; I pass to the fact
which chiefly strikes me. Improvement in telegraphy has
been arrested since State purchase of the telegraphs. As Dr.
Charles Siemens, the highest authority points out, before this
change England led the way in telegraphic inventions ; but
since this change telegraphic inventions come to us from
America, where telegraphs do not belong to the State, and are
here introduced not at all or with difficulty after great delay.
And further proof is now furnished by the Times (May 27,
1880), which tells us that its chief difficulty in establishing
Parliamentary reporting by telephone, has been the opposi
tion of the Post-office.

" More reasons for pausing are disclosed on observing the
wider results produced. Beyond the special effects of each
measure taken for artificially curing evils or achieving bene
fits, there comes a general effect of an unobtrusive but moment
ous kind. Every extension of public action limits the sphere
for private action ; modifies the conceptions of private re
sponsibility and public responsibility ; makes further exten
sions of public responsibility easier ; and tends eventually to
make them needful, since the more help the more helplessness.
Obligations even of primary kinds are willingly transferred by
individuals to the community, when the opportunity is given.
Witness the history of the Bureau Municipal des Nourrices

POSTSCRIPT. 379

in Paris, which has existed for more than a century, at a cost
latterly of £20,000 a year, to assist the bourgeoises in finding
wet-nurses — an institution under which the mortality of chil
dren has varied from 45 per cent, downwards, and which has
been at length abolished (see Medical Times, February, 1870).
And if, where parental affection might be expected to resist,
such a perversion of normal into abnormal relations between
parent and offspring may take place, still more may it take
place where the natural resistance to be anticipated is less.
Certain sequences of State-teaching now showing themselves
amoiig us, may presently have large developments. Already
in London there have been set up in connexion with Board-
schools, sundry nurseries where infants are taken care of
while the elder children are taught their lessons : and, con
venient as they are, such school appendages, multiplying, may
make public nursing a familiar idea and the care of infants
by their mothers a less peremptory obligation. Public feed
ing, too, has been not only suggested but even effected, though
not yet in Board-schools (see Times, May 17th, 1880, where
the advantages derived are insisted upon). Some urge that
shoeless and ragged children should be provided with cloth
ing by the Parish, that they may be more fit to attend school ;
and presently, perhaps, some steps in this direction, first small
and then large, will be taken. Though at present there seems
little fear that the rearing of children will be made a State-
business instead of a family-business, which is the logical out
come of the policy, yet the tendency in that direction must
increase with the widening of popular power. Every exten
sion of the policy affects at once the type of social organiza
tion and the concomitant social sentiments and theories. As
fast as there are established by the help of taxes, public libra
ries, public museums, public gardens, public gas and water
supplies, public industrial dwellings, and by and by public
railways as well as telegraphs — as fast as there are multiplied,
inspectors of schools, of factories, of ships, of mines, of lodg
ing houses, and of multitudinous things down to water-closets
and prostitutes — there is strengthened the idea that corporate
agency is to do everything and individual agency nothing.
The inevitable result is an increasing dissociation of faculty
from prosperity; first as realized in experience and then as

380 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

established in the general belief. The greater the number of
benefits provided by public means for all, and the fewer bene
fits provided by each for himself, the less marked becomes the
advantage of merit and the less effort is there to be meritori
ous. This uridiscriminating distribution of aids, as its effects
grow familiar, becoming popular with the inferior who form
the majority, must tend ever to grow where the majority can
get their way by voting or by intimidation— the more so since
each generation, habituated to it from childhood, accepts it as
the natural order of things and becomes impatient if every
suggested good is not provided or evil cured. One who recalls
the cry of the Eoman populace ' bread and games,' may see to
what lengths this policy and its concomitant theory may go.
Long-established and spreading usage can produce the most
perverse ideas. Who, for instance, would have imagined that
the State-licensing system under the French despotism would
have generated the belief that ' the right of working is a royal
right which the prince can sell and subjects must buy.' And
if thus by a certain social system, the correlative doctrine may
be carried to so astonishing an extreme in one direction ; so,
to an equally astonishing extreme, may another social system
carry its correlative doctrine in an opposite direction. In the
alleged ' right to a maintenance out of the soil,' claimed for
each man whatever his conduct, which was the popular
dogma under the old Poor-law, we have a conception which,
fostered by ever-multiplying public agencies for carrying
home benefits to individuals irrespective of labour expended
by them, is capable of developing into the conviction that the
personal well being of each is a matter not of private concern
but of public concern : the manifest limit being absolute com
munism.

" And then if I go a step further, and ask how these ideas
and usages react on the characters and capacities of citizens,
there is forced upon me the conclusion that they work towards
industrial inefficiency and national decay. This equalising,
so far as may be, the results of merit and demerit, slowly pro
duces in a large community effects that are not easy to trace
and identify ; but in small corporate bodies the effects are
quickly and clearly shown. A typical instance is furnished
by the history of the Chamounix guides. Some twenty years

POSTSCRIPT. 381

ago things stood on their proper footing. Climbers of the
high peaks chose guides whose skill and trustworthiness had
been well proved ; while guides of characters not so well es
tablished, received smaller pay for less difficult expeditions.
At the same time there was a free choice of mules, and travel
lers naturally picked out the best. Afterwards arose an incor
poration of guides which put a check on this liberty of selec
tion ; and their system was further developed on the annexa
tion of Savoy to France: with French annexation came
French officialism. Guides had to pass an examination ; and,
when certified, were placed on a list from which travellers
had to accept them in rotation. The mules, too, had to be
taken in turn. That is, differences of efficiency were, as much
as possible, prevented from producing their normal effects.
And now what has happened ? Mr. Wills, a late president
of the Alpine Club, writes (and his statement is confirmed by
another late president, Professor Tyndall) : — ' I have been a
resident in Savoy during a part of every year since the an
nexation, as well as having known it very well before, and I
have seen with pain and sorrow the rapid deterioration brought
about by a system so fearfully and wonderfully perfect in all
the arts and means by which public spirit, independence, and
self-respect can be crushed out of the national life. Now the
influences here seen operating in a special way, on a small
scale, and in a short time, inevitably operate in a general way
on a large scale, and in a long time, throughout a nation
which divorces individual worth from individual prosperity.
When funds raised from all citizens, are turned into advan
tages distributed in common to all citizens, the better and the
worse are to that extent reduced to the same level ; and the
more multitudinous the ways in which this is done, the more
are the lives of the efficient and prudent made like the lives
of the inefficient and imprudent. Inevitably, therefore, socie
ties which pursue this policy which impedes the multiplica
tion of the better while aiding the multiplication of the worse,
must so deteriorate in average nature that in the struggle for
existence they must go to the wall before societies which allow
the worthy to reap their rewards and the unworthy to suffer
their penalties.

" Thus when I consider what steps I ought to take in

382 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

furtherance of social evolution, there rise before me so many
probabilities of evils likely to be entailed by this or the other
measure proposed, that I think it safer to remain passive."

But now, admitting in full these arguments, which rein
force arguments set forth in sundry of the foregoing chapters,
it may be contended that, so far from justifying passivity,
they render all the more imperative a special kind of activity.
For if the outcome of them is that evil arises from divorcing
cause and consequence in conduct, then the implication is
that good arises from making the connexion between cause
and consequence more definite and certain. And in improv
ing the means to this end there is ample scope for effort.
Contemplate a moment the obverse of .the proposition above
set forth.

Though in low societies, formed of unadapted men held
together by coercion, no better arrangement is practicable
than that under which the relation between effort and benefit
is traversed by force, so that those who work enjoy but little
of that which they produce, while that which they produce is
largely appropriated by others who have not worked ; yet we
recognize this regime as one not consistent with the greatest
individual welfare or greatest sum of happiness. Along with
advance to a higher social state, in which life is carried on not
by compulsory cooperation but by voluntary cooperation,
there has grown the moral perception of what we call equity.
Continued through many generations, the discipline of indus
trialism (implying in every transaction fulfilment of contract,
which involves respect for the claims of others and assertion
of the claims of self) has developed the consciousness that
each ought to get neither more nor less than an equivalent for
his services, of what kind soever they may be : the amount of
such equivalent being in every case determined by the agree
ment to give it. And, considered in their ensemble, the pro
gressive improvements of laws, and all those political amelio
rations which bring after them improvements of laws, have
as their general effect the better maintenance of this normal
relation between effort and benefit.

It follows, then, that successful endeavours to make the
administration of justice prompt, complete, and economical,

POSTSCRIPT. 3S3

will bring1 pure benefit ; or if not pure benefit, still, an im
mense surplus of benefit. That which the philanthropist and
the political reformer leave almost unthought of as an object
to be laboured for, is that which, above all other objects, is
worthy of their labour. Attracted as their attention is by
special evils to be cured, they think little of the universally-
diffused evils which the non-enforcement of equity entails.
Nor do they see that many of the beneficial changes which
they fail to achieve by direct measures, would be achieved in
directly were easy remedies for all injustices within the reach
of every citizen. Let us consider the matter under its several
aspects — some familiar, some unfamiliar.

On the individual sufferings entailed by the uncertainty
and costliness of law, it is needless to dwell. Every family
can furnish one or more histories of lawsuits by which rela
tives seeking- justice have been impoverished. When I have
repeated the remark lately made to me by a judge, in agree
ment with another judge he quoted, that he often wished he
could charge the costs of the suits brought before him, on the
lawyers who conducted them — when I have conveyed the
feeling of a solicitor expressed to me but yesterday, that how
ever strong his case might be, he would rather toss-up with
his antagonist which should yield than go into court ; I have
said enough to remind all how vicious is the judicial system
under which we live, and how often ruin rather than restitu
tion comes to those who seek its aid when wronged. Usually,
indeed, it is thought that these evils which, extreme as they
are, custom reconciles us to, are evils felt only by the classes
carrying on business and by those who possess property.
Though in rural districts there frequently occur such aggres
sions on labourers as those which take away rights of com
mon — though by magistrates belonging to the upper ranks,
the punishments inflicted for offences committed by those be
longing to the lower ranks are often utterly disproportioned—
though the assault which, in default of money, brings impris
onment on the poor man, brings on the rich man only a fine
easily paid ; yet the silence concerning law-reform at work
ing-class meetings, and the coldness with which the topic is
received if introduced, imply the current belief that a better
administration of justice is a matter which touches the few

384 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

rather than the many. But besides the ways in which they
individually suffer from time to time from injustices for
which no remedy is to be had, the people at large suffer uni
versally in diffused ways.

For maladministration of justice raises, very considerably,
the cost of living for all. Payments to lawyers form one of
the current expenses of business in general. Manufacturers
and merchants and traders have to take account of these items
in their outlays, and average extra profits on their transac
tions have to be made to meet these items. Further, there are
bad debts — debts which are crossed off from ledgers because,
even if recoverable at all, their amounts would probably be
exceeded by the costs of recovering them ; and there are also
occasional losses by bankruptcies, made needlessly great by
the involved legal process of liquidation. These, too, are
items of expenditure which have to be met by larger profits
on the commodities sold. Moreover, the rise of prices necessi
tated in these several ways is cumulative. The producer has
to charge extra to the wholesale distributor ; the wholesale
distributor must add to this extra charge a further extra
charge to the retail distributor ; and the retail distributor must
do the like to the consumer. Nor after observing that the
effect is thus triplicated shall we fully appreciate the total rise
caused. For on recalling the truth that every tax on a com
modity increases its price by a greater amount than the
amount imposed, because of the extra capital employed and
business transacted, we must infer that similarly, the loss
which maladministration of justice entails on the producer,
the wholesale dealer, and the retailer, raises each of their
prices by a greater amount than is directly needed to meet it :
all three of these enhancements eventually coming on the
consumer.

Not by the raised prices of commodities only, does the con
sumer, and especially the poor consumer, suffer from imper
fect enforcement of equity. He suffers, too, in the rela
tive badness of the things he buys. It is needless to enlarge
on the prevalence of adulteration. All it concerns us here to
observe is that the nutritive qualities of food eaten and the
wearing qualities of fabrics worn, are diminished, often very
greatly, by breaches of contract, which good laws well admin-

POSTSCRIPT. 385

istered would prevent. Whoso sells as the thing asked for,
that which is in part some other thing-, breaks the tacit agree
ment to give so much of the commodity for so much money ;
and a legal process easily available ought quickly to bring
punishment on him for the fraud.

But the immediate evils resulting from a system which
affords inadequate protection against aggressors, are not the
sole evils — not, indeed, the chief evils. A further evil is the
multiplication of aggressions. That impunity generates con
fidence — that the man who has committed a wrong and es
caped punishment is thereby encouraged to commit another
wrong is a trite remark. As certain as it is that pickpockets
would multiply if the police became less efficient in catching
them, and that the cooking of joint-stock companies' accounts
would be made still more common were there no prospect of
possible imprisonment on discovery ; so certain is it that in all
cases, failure of justice tempts men to injustices. Every un
punished delinquency has a family of delinquencies. Those
on whom is urged the need for a judicial system which shall
give to the citizen easy remedies for injuries suffered, com
monly reply that the amount of litigation would become
enormous. But they overlook the fact that with facilities
for obtaining remedies the occasions for seeking remedies
would decrease. As it is clear that the criminal aggressor
would not commit a crime if he were quite certain to be
caught and punished ; so it is clear that the civil aggressor
would not do the inequitable thing he is tempted to do, did he
know that the aggrieved person would without difficulty at
once obtain justice. So that intelligible laws and a good
judicial system, would advantage everyone, not simply by
righting him when wronged, but by preventing him from
being wronged.

And then there has to be added the remoter but no less cer
tain result — a raised moral tone. If punishments follow trans
gressions with certainty, and if the temptations to transgress
are, by the prospect of certain punishment, more effectually
repressed, such temptations must diminish in strength. Ener
gies directed to the illegitimate pursuit of advantages, will be
turned to the legitimate pursuit of advantages ; and with the
decrease of those antagonistic relations among citizens caused
26

386 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

by injustices, by the fears of injustices, and by the precautions
against injustices, will go a growth of good feeling and more
sympathetic social relations.

Here, then, is an ample iield for efforts that must, beyond
all question, be beneficent. If, as above shown, more evil
than good eventually results from measures which give to in
dividual citizens benefits which their individual efforts have
given them no claims to ; then, contrariwise, more benefits
than evils, if not pure benefits, will eventually result from
measures which ensure to them the full advantages due to
their efforts. Enforcement of justice is nothing else than
maintenance of the conditions to life as carried on in the so
cial state. And the more completely justice is enforced, the
higher will the life become.

NOTES.

NOTES TO CHAPTER I.

1 Of various testimonies to this, one of the most striking was that
given by Mr. Charles Mayo, M. B., of New College, Oxford, who, hav
ing had to examine the drainage of Windsor, found " that in a previ
ous visitation of typhoid fever, the poorest and lowest part of the town
had entirely escaped, while the epidemic had been very fatal in good
houses. The difference was this, that while the better houses were all
connected with the sewers, the poor part of the town had no drains,
but made use of cesspools in the gardens. And this is by no means
an isolated instance."

2 Debates, Times, February 12, 1852.

3 Letter in Daily News, Nov. 28, 1851.

4 Recommendation of a Coroner's Jury, Times, March 26, 1850.

5 Revue des Deux Mondes, February 15, 1872.

6 Journal of Mental Science, January, 1872.

7 Boyle's Borneo, p. 116.

NOTES TO CHAPTER II.

1 Daily paper, January 22, 1849.

2 The Theocratic Philosophy of English History, vol. i. p. 49.

3 Ibid., vol. i. p. 289.

4 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 681.

5 La Main de VHomme et le Doigt de Dieu dans les malheurs de la
France. Par J. C., Ex-aumonier dans 1'armee auxiliaire. Paris, Dou-
niol & Cie., 1871.

6 The Roman and the Teuton, pp. 339-40.

1 Short Studies on Great Subjects, vol. i. p. 11.

8 Ibid., vol. i. p. 22.

9 Ibid., vol. i. p. 24.

387

388 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

10 Ibid,, vol. i. p. 15.

11 History of England, vol. v. p. 70.

12 Ibid., vol. v. p. 108.

13 Ibid., vol. v. p. 109.

14 Short Studies on Great Subjects, p. 59.

15 The Limits of Exact Science as applied to History, p. 20.

16 Ibid., p. 22.

11 Alton Locke, new edition, preface, p. xxi.

18 Ibid., pp. xxiii. xxiv.

19 Ibid., preface (1854), p. xxvii.

NOTES TO CHAPTER V.

1 Thomson's New Zealand, vol. i. p. 80.
8 Hallam's Middle Ages, ch. ix., part ii.

3 Principles of Surgery. 5th ed. p. 434.

4 British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, January, 1870,
p. 103.

5 Ibid., p. 106.

* British Medical Journal, August 20th, 1870. I took the precau
tion of calling on Mr. Ilutchinson to verify the extract given, and to
learn from him what he meant by " severe." 1 found that he meant
simply recognizable. He described to me the mode in which he had
made his estimate ; and it was clearly a mode which tended rather to
wards exaggeration of the evil than otherwise. I also learned from
him that in the great mass of cases those who have recognizable syph
ilitic taint pass lives that are but little impaired by it.

7 A Treatise on Syphilis, by Dr. E. Lancereaux. Vol. ii. p. 120.
This testimony I quote from the work itself, and have similarly taken
from the original sources the statements of Skey, Simon, Wyatt, Acton,
as well as the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review and
British Medical Journal. The rest, with various others, will be found
in the pamphlet of Dr. C. B. Taylor on The Contagious Diseases Acts.

8 Professor Sheldon Amos. See also his late important work, A
Systematic View of the Science of Jurisprudence, pp. 119, 303, 512,
and 514.

' Quoted by Nasse, The Agricultural Community of the Middle
Ages, &c., English translation, p. 94.

10 In one case, " out of thirty married couples, there was not one
man then living with his own wife, and some of them had exchanged
wives two or three times since their entrance." This, along with

NOTES. 389

various kindred illustrations, will be found in tracts on the Poor-Law,
by a late uncle of mine, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, of Hinton Char
terhouse, who was chairman of the Bath Union during its first six
years.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VI.

1 Warton's History of English Poetry, vol. ii., p. 57, note.

2 Burton's Scinde, vol. ii., p. 13.

3 Speke's Journal of Discovery of Source of the Nile, p. 85.

4 See pp. 71 and 115.

5 Summary of the Moral Statistics of England and Wales. By
Joseph Fletcher, Esq., one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools.

6 lieeves's History of English Law, vol. i., pp. 34-36. Second edi
tion.

I Brentano's Introduction to English Gilds, p. cxcv.

8 Lubbock's Prehistoric Times, p. 344. First edition.

9 Mrs. Atkinson's Recollections of Tartar Steppes, p. 220.

10 Quoted in M'Lennan's Primitive Marriage, p. 187.

II Burton's History of Sindh, p. 244.

12 Wright's Essays on Archaeology, vol. ii., pp. 175-6.

13 Hid., vol. ii. p. 184.

14 Only four copies of this psalter are known to exist. The copy
from which I make this description is contained in the splendid col
lection of Mr. Henry Huth.

15 Kinder- und Ilausmarchen, by William and James Grimm.
Larger edition (1870), pp. 140-2.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VII.

1 M. Dunoyer, quoted in Mill's Political Economy.
y Mill's Political Economy.

3 Mill's Political Economy.

4 Translation of Lanfrey's History of Napoleon the First, vol. ii.,
p. 25.

5 Ibid., vol. ii., p. 442.

6 M. Lanfrey sets down the loss of the French alone, from 1802 on
wards, at nearly two millions. This may be an over-estimate ; though,
judging from the immense armies raised in France, such a total seems
quite possible. The above computation of the losses to European na
tions in genera], has been made for me by adding up the numbers of

390 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

killed and wounded in the successive battles, as furnished by such state
ments as are accessible. The total is 1,500,000. This number has to be
greatly increased by including losses not specified— the number of killed
and wounded on one side only, being given in some cases. It has to be
further increased by including losses in numerous minor engagements,
the particulars of which are unknown. And it has to be again increased
by allowance for under-statement of his losses, which was habitual
with Napoleon. Though the total, raised by these various additions
probably to something over two millions, includes killed and wounded,
from which last class a large deduction has to be made for the num
ber who recovered ; yet it takes no account of the loss by disease.
This may be set down as greater in amount than that which battles
caused. (Thus, according to Kolb, the British lost in Spain three
times as many by disease as by the enemy ; and in the expedition to
Walcheren, seventeen times as many.) So that the loss by killed and
wounded and by disease, for all the European nations during the
Napoleonic campaigns, is probably much understated at two mill
ions.

7 Burton's Ooa, &c., p. 107.

8 See Tweedie's System of Practical Medicine, vol. v. pp. 62-69.

9 Dr. Maclean : see Times, Jan. 6, 1873.

10 Report on the Progress and Condition of the Royal Gardens at
Kew, 1870, p. 5.

11 My attention was drawn to this case by one who has had experi
ence in various government services; and he ascribed this obstructive-
ness in the medical service to the putting of young surgeons under
old. The remark is significant, and has far-reaching implications.
Putting young officials under old is a rule of all services — civil, mili
tary, naval, or other ; and in all services, necessarily has the effect of
placing the advanced ideas and wider knowledge of a new generation,
under control by the ignorance and bigotry of a generation to which
change has become repugnant. This, which is a seemingly ineradicable
vice of public organizations, is a vice to which private organizations
are far less liable ; since, in the life-and-death struggle of competi
tion, merit, even if young, takes the place of demerit, even if old.

13 Let me here add what seems to be a not-impossible cause, or at
any rate part-cause, of the failure. The clue is given by a letter in
the Times, signed " Landowner," dating Tollesbury, Essex, Aug. 2,
1872. He bought "ten fine young steers, perfectly free from any
symptom of disease," and " passed sound by the inspector of foreign
stock." They were attacked by foot and mouth disease after five days
passed in fresh paddocks with the best food. On inquiry he found

NOTES. 391

that foreign stock, however healthy, " ' mostly all go down with it '
after the passage." And then, in proposing a remedy, he gives us a
fact of which he does not seem to recognize the meaning. He sug
gests, " that, instead of the present quarantine at Harwich, which con
sists in driving the stock from the steamer into pens for a limited
number of hours," &c., &c. If this description of the quarantine is
correct, the spread of the disease is accounted for. Every new drove
of cattle is kept for hours in an infected pen. Unless the successive
droves have been all healthy (which the very institution of the quaran
tine implies that they have not been) some of them have left in the pen
diseased matter from their mouths and feet. Even if disinfectants
are used after each occupation, the risk is great — the disinfection is
almost certain to be inadequate. Nay, even if the pen is adequately
disinfected every time, yet if there is not also a complete disinfec
tion of the landing appliances, the landing-stage, and the track to
the pen, the disease will be communicated. No wonder healthy cattle
" ' mostly go down with it ' after the passage." The quarantine regu
lations, if they are such as here implied, might properly be called
" regulations for the better diffusion of cattle-diseases."

13 Fischel's English Constitution, translated by Shee, p. 487.

14 See Report of the Committee on Public Accounts, nominated on
7 Feb., 1873.

15 Times, April 3, 1873 (I add this during the re-revision of these
pages for permanent publication, as also the reference to the telegraph-
expenditure. Hence the incongruities of the dates).

NOTE TO CHAPTER VIII.

"Decline and Fall" &c., chap. ii.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IX.

1 Burton's Abeokuta, vol. i. pp. 43, 44.

2 Burton's Histoiy of Scotland, vol. ii. pp. 281-2.

3 1 make this statement on the authority of a letter read to me at
the time by an Indian officer, written by a brother officer in India.

4 Hawkesworth's Voyages, vol. i. p. 573.

5 Forster's Observations, &c., p. 406.

6 Parkyns's Abyssinia, vol. ii. p. 431.

7 Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, vol. i.
p. 100.

392 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

8 Companions of Columbus, p. 115.

9 Times, Jan. 22, 1873.

10 Times, Dec. 23, 1872.

11 Lancet, Dec. 28, 1872.

18 Essays in Criticism, p. 12.

13 Times, Jan. 22, 1873.

14 Most readers of logic will, I suppose, be surprised on missing
from the above sentence the name of Sir W. Hamilton. They will not
be more surprised than I was myself on recently learning that Mr.
George Bentham's work. Outline of a New System of Logic, was pub
lished six years before the earliest of Sir W. Hamilton's logical writ
ings, and that Sir W. Hamilton reviewed it. The case adds another to
the multitudinous ones in which the world credits the wrong man;
and persists in crediting him in defiance of evidence. [In the number
of the Contemporary Review following that in which this note origi
nally appeared, Professor Baynes, blaming me for my incaution in thus
asserting Mr. Bentham's claim, contended for the claim of Sir W.
Hamilton and denied the validity of Mr. Bentham's. The month
after, the question was taken up by Professor Jevons, who, differing
entirely from Professor Baynes, gave reasons for assigning the credit
of the discovery to Mr. Bentham. Considering that Professor Baynes,
both as pupil of Sir W. Hamilton and as expositor of his developed
logical system, is obviously liable to be biassed in his favour, and that,
contrariwise, Professor Jevons is not by his antecedents committed on
behalf of either claimant, it may I think, be held that, leaving out
other reasons, his opinion is the most trustworthy. Other reasons jus
tify this estimate. The assumption that Sir W. Hamilton, when he
reviewed Mr. Bentham's work, did not read as far as the page on
which the discovery in question is indicated, though admissible as a
defence, cannot be regarded as a very satisfactory ground for a coun
ter-claim. That in Mr. Bentham's work the doctrine is but briefly in
dicated, whereas by Sir W. Hamilton it was elaborately developed, is
an objection sufficiently met by pointing out that Mr. Bentham's work
is an " Outline of a New System of Logic ; " and that in it he has said
enough to show that if, instead of being led into another career, he
had become a professional logician, the outline would have been ade
quately filled in. While these notes are still standing in type,
Prof. Baynes has published (in the Contemporary Review for July,
1873) a rejoinder to Prof. Jevons. One who reads it critically may, I
think, find in it more evidence against, than in favour of, the conclu
sion drawn. Prof. Baynes' partiality will be clearly seen on compar
ing the way in which he interprets Sir W. Hamilton's acts, with the

NOTES. 393

way in which he interprets Mr. Bentham's acts. He thinks it quite a
proper supposition that Sir W. Hamilton did not read the part of Mr.
Bentham's work containing the doctrine in question. Meanwhile, he
dwells much on the fact that during Sir W. Hamilton's life Mr. Ben-
tham never made any claim; saying — "The indifference it displays
is incredible had Mr. Bentham really felt himself entitled to the
honour publicly given to another:" the implication being that Mr.
Bentham was of necessity cognizant of the controversy. Thus it is
reasonable to suppose that Sir W. Hamilton read only part of a work
he reviewed on his own special topic ; but " incredible " that Mr. Ben
tham should not have read certain letters in the Athenceum /—the fact
being that, as I have learnt from Mr. Bentham, he knew nothing about
the matter till his attention was called to it. Clearly, such a way of
estimating probabilities is not conducive to a fair judgment. Prof.
Baynes' unfairness of judgment is, I think, sufficiently shown by one
of his own sentences, in which he says of Mr. Bentham that, " while
he constantly practises the quantification of the predicate, he never
appears to have realized it as a principle." To an unconcerned ob
server, it seems a strong assumption that one who not only " con
stantly practises" the method, but who even warns the student against
errors caused by neglect of it, should have no consciousness of the
" principle " involved. And I am not alone in thinking this a strong
assumption : the remark was made to me by a distinguished mathe
matician who was reading Prof. Baynes' rejoinder. But the weakness
of Prof. Baynes' rejoinder is best shown by its inconsistency. Prof.
Baynes contends that Sir W. Hamilton " had been acquainted with the
occasional use of a quantified predicate by writers on logic " earlier
than Mr. Bentham ; and Prof. Baynes speaks of Mr. Bentham as hav
ing done no more than many before him. But he also says of Sir W.
Hamilton that, " had he at the time, therefore, looked into Mr. Ben
tham's eighth and ninth chapters, the mere use of a quantified predi
cate would have been no novelty to him, although, as I have said, it
might have helped to stimulate his speculations on the subject." So
that though Mr. Bentham did not carry the doctrine further than
previous logicians had done, yet what he wrote about it was calculated
"to stimulate" "speculations on the subject" in a way that they had
not been stimulated by the writings of previous logicians. That is,
Prof. Baynes admits in one part of his argument what he denies in
another. One further point only will I name. Prof. Baynes says : —
" Professor De Morgan's emphatic rejection of Mr. Bentham's claim,
after examining the relevant chapters of his 'Outline,' is in striking
contrast to Mr. Herbert Spencer's easy-going acceptance of it." Now

394 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

though, to many readers, this will seem a telling comparison, yet to
those who know that Prof. De Morgan was one of the parties to the
controversy, and had his own claims to establish, the comparison will
not seem so telling. To me, however, and to many who have remarked
the perversity of Prof. De Morgan's judgment, his verdict on the mat
ter, even were he perfectly unconcerned, will go for but little. Who
ever will take the trouble to refer to the Athenaeum for November 5,
1804, p. GOO, and after reading a sentence which he there quotes, will
look at either the title of the chapter it is taken from or the sentence
which succeeds it, will be amazed that such recklessness of misrepre
sentation could be shown by a conscientious man ; and will be there
after but little inclined to abide by Prof. De Morgan's authority on
matters like that here in question.]

15 These words are translated for me from Die Entwicklung der
Naturwissenschaft in den letzen Junfundzwanzig Jahren. By Profes
sor Dr. Ferdinand Cohn. Breslau, 1872.

16 1 am told that his reasons for this valuation are more fully given
at p. 143.

" Revue des Deux JUondes, 1 Fevrier, 1873, p. 731.

18 CEuvres de P. L. Courier (Paris, 1845), p. 304.

19 Histoire des Sciences et des Savants, &c.

20 Before leaving the question of Academies and their influences,
let me call attention to a fact which makes me doubt whether as a
judge of style, considered simply as correct or incorrect, an Academy
is to be trusted. Mr. Arnold, insisting on propriety of expression, and
giving instances of bad taste among our writers, due, as he thinks, to
absence of Academic control, tacitly asserts that an Academy, if we
had one, would condemn the passages he quotes as deserving condem
nation, and, by implication, would approve the passages he quotes as
worthy of approval. Let us see to what Mr. Arnold awards his praise.
He says : —

" To illustrate what I mean by an example. Addison, writing as a moral
ist on fixedness in religious faith, says: —

'" Those who delight in reading books of controversy do very seldom ar
rive at a fixed and settled habit of faith. The doubt which was laid revives
again, and shows itself in new difficulties; and that generally for this reason,
— because the mind, which is perpetually tossed in controversies and disputes,
is apt to forget the reasons which had once set it at rest, and to bo disquieted
with any former perplexity when it appears in a new shape, or is started by a
different hand.'

" It may be said, that is classical English, perfect in lucidity, measure, and
propriety. I make no objection ; but in my turn, 1 say that the idea expressed
is perfectly trite and barren," &c., &c.

NOTES. 395

In Mr. Arnold's estimate of Addison's thought I coincide entirely ;
but I cannot join him in applauding the " classical English " convey
ing the thought. Indeed, I am not a little astonished that one whose
taste in style is proved by his own writing to be so good, and who to
his poems especially gives a sculpturesque finish, should have quoted,
not simply without condemnation but with tacit eulogy, a passage full
of faults. Let us examine it critically, part by part. How

shall we interpret into thought the words " arrive at a ... habit " ?
A habit is produced. But " arrival " implies, not production of a
thing, but coming up to a thing that pre-exists, as at the end of a
journey. What, again, shall we say of the phrase, " a fixed and settled
habit"? Habit is a course of action characterized by constancy, as
distinguished from courses of action that are inconstant. If the word
"settled" were unobjectionable, we might define habit as a settled
course of action; and on substituting for the word this equivalent,
the phrase would read " a fixed and settled settled course of action."
Obviously the word habit itself conveys the whole notion; and if there
needs a word to indicate degree, it should be a word suggesting force,
not suggesting rest. The reader is to be impressed with the strength
of a tendency in something active, not with the firmness of something
passive, as by the words " fixed and settled." And then why " fixed
and settled"? Making no objection to the words as having inappli
cable meanings, there is the objection that one of them would suffice :
surely whatever is fixed must be settled. Passing to the next

sentence, we are arrested by a conspicuous fault in its first clause —
" The doubt which was laid revives again." To revive is to live again ;
so that the literal meaning of the clause is " the doubt which was laid
lives again again." In the following line there is nothing objection
able ; but at the end of it we come to another pleonasm. The words
run:— "and that generally for this reason,— because the mind . . ."
The idea is fully conveyed by the words, " and that generally because
the mind." The words " for this reason " are equivalent to an ad
ditional "because." So that we have here another nonsensical dupli
cation. Going a little further there rises the question — Why "contro
versies and disputes " ? ' Dispute ' is given in dictionaries as one of
the synonyms of ' controversy ' ; and though it may be rightly held to
have not quite the same meaning, any additional meaning it has does
not aid, but rather hinders, the thought of the reader. Though,
where special attention is to be drawn to a certain element of the
thought, two almost synonymous words may fitly be used to make the
reader dwell longer on that element, yet where his attention is to be
drawn to another element of the thought (as here to the effect of con-

390 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

troversy on the mind), there is no gain, but a loss, in stopping him to
interpret a second word if the first suffices. One more fault remains.
The mind is said " to be disquieted with any former perplexity when
it appears in a new shape, or is started by a different hand." This
portion of the sentence is doubly defective. The two metaphors are
incongruous. Appearing in a shape, as a ghost might be supposed to
do, conveys one kind of idea ; and started by a hand, as a horse or a
hound might be, conveys a conflicting kind of idea. This defect,
however, is less serious than the other ; namely, the unfitness of the
second metaphor for giving a concrete form to the abstract idea.
How is it possible to ' start ' a perplexity I ' Perplexity,' by deriva
tion and as commonly used, involves the thought of entanglement
and arrest of motion; while to 'start' a thing is to set it in motion.
So that whereas the mind is to be represented as enmeshed, and
thus impeded in its movements, the metaphor used to describe its
state is one suggesting the freedom and rapid motion of that which
enmeshes it.

Even were these hyper-criticisms, it might be said that they are
rightly to be made on a passage which is considered a model of style.
But they are not hyper-criticisms. To show that the defects indicated
are grave, it only needs to read one of the sentences without its
tautologies, thus : — " The doubt which was laid revives, and shows it
self in new difficulties; and that generally because the mind which is
perpetually tossed in controversies is apt to forget the reasons which
had once set it at rest " &c. &c. Omitting the six superfluous words
unquestionably makes the sentence clearer— adds to its force without
taking from its meaning. Nor would removal of the other excres
cences, and substitution of appropriate words for those which are
unfit, fail similarly to improve the rest of the passage.

And now is it not strange that two sentences which Mr. Arnold
admits to be "classical English, perfect in lucidity, measure, and
propriety," should contain so many defects : some of them, indeed,
deserving a stronger word of disapproval f It is true that analysis
discloses occasional errors in the sentences of nearly all writers— some
due to inadvertence, some to confusion of thought. Doubtless, from
my own books examples could be taken ; and I should think it unfair
to blame any one for now and then tripping. But in a passage of
which the diction seems " perfect " to one who would like to have
style refined by authoritative criticism, we may expect entire con
formity to the laws of correct expression : and may not unnaturally
be surprised to find so many deviations from those laws. Pos

sibly, indeed, it will be alleged that the faults are not in Addison's

NOTES. 397

English, but that I lack the needful aesthetic perception. Having,
when young, effectually resisted that classical culture which Mr.
Arnold thinks needful, I may be blind to the beauties he perceives ;
and my undisciplined taste may lead me to condemn as defects what
are, in fact, perfections. Knowing absolutely nothing of the master
pieces of ancient literature in the original, and very little in trans
lation, I suppose I must infer that a familiarity with them equal to
Mr. Arnold's familiarity, would have given me a capacity for admiring
these traits of style which he admires. Perhaps redundance of
epithets would have afforded me pleasure; perhaps I should have
been delighted by duplications of meaning ; perhaps from inconsistent
metaphors I might have received some now-unimaginable gratifica
tion. Being, however, without any guidance save that yielded by
Mental Science— having been led by analysis of thought to conclude
that in writing, words must be so chosen and arranged as to convey
ideas with the greatest ease, precision, and vividness; and having
drawn the corollaries that superfluous words should be struck out,
that words which have associations at variance with the propositions
to be set forth should be avoided, and that there should be used no
misleading figures of speech ; I have acquired a dislike to modes of
expression like these Mr. Arnold regards as perfect in their propriety.
Almost converted though I have been by his eloquent advocacy of
Culture, as he understands it, 1 must confess that, now I see what he
applauds, my growing faith receives a rude check. While recogniz
ing my unregenerate state, and while admitting that I have only
Psychology and Logic to help me, I am perverse enough to rejoice
that we have not had an Academy ; since, judging from the evidence
Mr. Arnold affords, it would, among other mischievous acts, have
further raised the estimate of a style which even now is unduly
praised.

21 Culture and Anarchy, p. 16.

22 Ibid., pp. 130—140.

NOTE TO CHAPTER X.

1 Shortly after the first publication of this chapter, I met with a
kindred instance. At a Co-operative Congress : — " Mr. Head (of the
firm of Fox, Head, & Co., Middlesbrough) * * * remarked that he
had thrown his whole soul daring the last six years into the carrying
out of the principle involved in the Industrial Partnership at Middles
brough with which he was connected. In that Industrial Partner
ship there was at present no arrangement for the workmen to invest

398 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

their savings. A clause to give that opportunity to the workmen
was at first put into the articles of agreement, but, as there was only
one instance during three years of a workman under the firm apply
ing to invest his savings, that clause was withdrawn. The firm
consequently came to the conclusion that this part of their scheme
was far ahead of the time." — Times, April 15, 1873.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XI.

I Fronde, Short Studies on Great Subjects, Second Series, 1871,
p. 480.

Ibid., p. 483.

Ibid., pp. 483-4.

Daily papers, Feb. 7, 1873.

Times and Post, Feb. 11, 1873.

Times, Nov. 25, 1872.

Ibid., Nov. 27, 1872.

Craik, in Pid. Hist., vol. iv., p. 853.

Ibid., vol. iv., p. 853.

0 When, in dealing with the vitiation of evidence, I before re
ferred to the legislation here named, I commented on the ready
acceptance of those one-sided statements made to justify such legis
lation, in contrast with the contempt for those multitudinous proofs
that gross abuses would inevitably result from the arrangements
made. Since that passage was written, there has been a startling
justification of it. A murder has been committed at Lille by a gang
of sham-detectives (one being a government employe) ; and the trial
has brought out the fact that for the last three years the people of
Lille have been subject to an organized terrorism which has grown
out of the system of prostitute-inspection. Though, during these
three years, five hundred women are said by one of these criminals to
have fallen into their clutches — though the men have been black
mailed and the women outraged to this immense extent, yet the
practice went on for the reason (obvious enough, one would have
thought, to need no proof by illustration) that those aggrieved pre
ferred to submit rather than endanger their characters by complain
ing ; and the practice would doubtless have gone on still but for the
murder of one of the victims. To some this case will carry convic
tion : probably not, however, to those who, in pursuance of what
they are pleased to call " practical legislation," prefer an induction
based on a Blue Book to an induction based on Universal History.

II See case in Times, Dec. 11, 1872.

NOTES. 399

NOTES TO CHAPTER XII.

Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, vol. ii. p. 370.
Ibid., vol. ii. p. 22.

Lubbock's Prehistoric Times. Second edition, p. 442.
Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, vol. ii. p. 11.
Five Years' Residence at Nepaul. By Capt. Thomas Smith.
Vol. i. p. 168.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV.

1 Probably most readers will conclude that in this, and in the
preceding section, I am simply carrying out the views of Mr. Darwin
in their applications to the human race. Under the circumstances,
perhaps, I shall be excused for pointing out that the same beliefs,
otherwise expressed, are contained in Chapters XXV. and XXVIII.
of Social Statics, published in December, 1850 ; and that they are
set forth still more definitely in the Westminster Review for April,
1852 (pp. 498—500). As Mr. Darwin himself points out. others be
fore him have recognized the action of that process he has called
" Natural Selection," but have failed to see its full significance and
its various effects. Thus in the Review-article just named, I have
contended that " this inevitable redundancy of numbers— this con
stant increase of people beyond the means of subsistence," necessitates
the continual carrying-off of " those in whom the power of self-pres
ervation is the least ; " that all being subject to the " increasing
difficulty of getting a living which excess of fertility entails," there
is an average advance under the pressure, since " only those who do
advance under it eventually survive ; " and that these. " must be the
select of their generation." There is, however, in the essay from
which 1 here quote, no recognition of what Mr. Darwin calls " spon
taneous variation," nor of that divergence of type which this natural
selective process is shown by him to produce.

2 And even then there are often ruinous delays. A barrister tells
me that in a case in which he was himself the referee, they had but
six meetings in two years.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XV.

1 " The Statistics of Legislation," read before the Statistical So
ciety, May, 1873, by Frederick H. Janson, Esq., F.L.S., vice-president
of the Incorporated Law Society.

400 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

J Among recent illustrations of the truth that frequent repetition
of Christian doctrines does not conduce to growth of Christian feel
ings, here are two that seem worth preserving. The first I quote
from The Church Herald for May 14, 1873.

" Mr. J. Stuart Mill, who has just gone to his account, would have
been a remarkable writer of English, if his innate self-consciousness
and abounding self-confidence had not made him a notorious literary
prig. ***** His death is no loss to anybody, for he was
a rank but amiable infidel, and a most dangerous person. The sooner
those ' lights of thought,' who agree with him, go to the same place,
the better it will be for both Church and State."

The second, which to an English manifestation of sentiment yields
a parallel from America, I am permitted to publish by a friend to
whom it was lately addressed : —

" (From a Clergyman of 28 years' service.)

" U. S. America, March 10th, 1873.

" J. TYNDALL, — How it ought to ' heap coals of fire on your head,'
that, in return for your insults to their Religion, in your various
works, the American people treated you with distinguished considera
tion. You have repeatedly raised your puny arm against God and
His Christ ! You have endeavoured to deprive mankind of its only
consolation in life, and its only hope in death (vide ' Fragments of
Science,' &c.), without offering anything instead, but the ' dry-light '
of your molecules and atoms. Shall we praise you for this? We
praise you not !

" ' Do not T hate them, 0 Lord, that hate Thee?'

" Every suicide in our land (and they are of daily occurrence) is
indirectly the effect of the bestial doctrines of yourself, Darwin, Spen
cer, Huxley, et id omne genus.

" ' The pit is digged up for you all?'

" ' Woe unto you that laugh now, for ye shall mourn and lament.'
" With the supremest contempt, I remain,

«A. F. F ."

3 To show how little operative on conduct is mere teaching, let me
add a striking fact that has fallen under my own observation. Some
twelve years ago was commenced a serial publication, grave and un
interesting to most, and necessarily limited in its circulation to the
well-educated. It was issued to subscribers, from each of whom a
small sum was due for every four numbers. As was to be expected,
the notification, periodically made, that another subscription was due,
received from some prompt attention ; from others an attention more
or less tardy ; and from others no attention at all. The defaulters,

NOTES. 401

from time to time reminded by new notices, fell, many of them, two
subscriptions in arrear ; but after receiving from the publishers letters
intimating the fact, some of these rectified what was simply a result
of forgetfulness : leaving, however, a number who still went on receiv
ing the serial without paying for it. When these were three subscrip
tions in arrear, further letters from the publishers, drawing their
attention to the facts, were sent to them, bringing from some the
amounts due, but leaving a remainder who continued to disregard the
claim. Eventually these received from the publishers intimations
that their names would be struck off for non-payment ; and such of
them as continued insensible were at length omitted from the list.
After a lapse of ten years, a digest was made of the original list, to
ascertain the ratio between the number of defaulters and the total
number ; and to ascertain, also, the ratios borne by their numbers to
the numbers of their respective classes. Those who had thus finally
declined paying for what they had year after year received, constituted
the following percentages : —

Subscribers of unknown status . . . .27 per cent.

Physicians 29 „

Clergymen (mostly of the Established Church) . 31 „

Secularists 32 „

Journalists 82 „

Admitting that the high percentage among the journalists may
have been due to the habit of receiving gratis copies of books, we have
to note, first of all, the surprising fact that nearly one-third of these
highly educated men were thus regardless of an equitable claim.
Further, on comparing the subdivisions, we discover that the class
undistinguished by titles of any kind, and therefore including, as we
must suppose, those whose education, though good, was not the high
est, furnished the smallest percentage of defaulters : so far as the evi
dence goes, it associates increase of intellectual culture with decrease
of conscientiousness. And then one more thing to be noted is the
absence of that beneficial effect expected from repetition of moral pre
cepts : the Clergy and the Secularists are nearly on a level. So that,
both in general and in detail, this evidence, like the evidence given in
the text, is wholly at variance with the belief that addressing the in
tellect develops the higher sentiments.

4 Even after the reform of the Poor-Law, this punishment for good
behaviour was continued. Illustrations will be found in the before-
mentioned Tracts on the Poor-Laws, by a late uncle of mine— illustra
tions that came under his personal observation as clergyman and as
guardian.

27

402 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

5 The comparisons ordinarily made between the minds of men and
women are faulty in many ways, of which these are the chief : —

Instead of comparing either the average of women with the aver
age of men, or the elite of women with the elite of men, the common
course is to compare the elite of women with the average of men.
Much the same erroneous impression results as would result if the
relative statures of men and women were judged by putting very tall
women side by side with ordinary men.

Sundry manifestations of nature in men and women, are greatly
perverted by existing social conventions upheld by both. There are
feelings which, under our predatory regime, with its adapted standard
of propriety, it is not considered manly to show ; but which, contrari
wise, are considered admirable in women. Hence repressed manifesta
tions in the one case, and exaggerated manifestations in the other ;
leading to mistaken estimates.

The sexual sentiment comes into play to modify the behaviour of
men and women to one another. Respecting certain parts of their
general characters, the only evidence which can be trusted is that fur
nished by the conduct of men to men, and of women to women, when
placed in relations which exclude the personal affections.

In comparing the intellectual powers of men and women, no proper
distinction is made between receptive faculty and originative faculty.
The two are scarcely commensurable ; and the receptivity may, and
frequently does, exist in high degree where there is but a low degree
of originality, or entire absence of it.

Perhaps, however, the most serious error usually made in drawing
these comparisons is that of overlooking the limit of normal mental
power. Either sex under special stimulations is capable of manifest
ing 'powers ordinarily shown only by the other ; but we are not to
consider the deviations so caused as affording proper measures. Thus,
to take an extreme case, the mammas of men will, under special excita
tion, yield milk : there are various cases of gynaecomasty on record,
and in famines infants whose mothers have died have been thus saved.
But this ability to yield milk, which, when exercised, must be at the
cost of masculine strength, we do not count among masculine attri
butes. Similarly, under special discipline, the feminine intellect will
yield products higher than the intellects of most men can yield. But
we are not to count this productivity as truly feminine if it entails
decreased fulfilment of the maternal functions. Only that mental
energy is normally feminine which can coexist with the 'production
and nursing of the due number of healthy children. Obviously a
power of mind which, if general among the women of a society, would

NOTES. 403

entail/lisappearance of the society, is a power not to be included in an
estimate of the feminine nature as a social factor.

6 Of course it is to be understood that in this, and in the succeed
ing statements, reference is made to men and women of the same
society, in the same age. If women of a more-evolved race are com
pared with men of a less-evolved race, the statement will not be true.

1 As the validity of this group of inferences depends on the occur
rence of that partial limitation of heredity of sex here assumed, it
may be said that.I should furnish proof of its occurrence. Were the
place fit, this might be done. I might detail evidence that has been
collected showing the much greater liability there is for a parent to
bequeath malformations and diseases to children of the same sex, than
to those of the opposite sex. I might cite the multitudinous instances
of sexual distinctions, as of plumage in birds and colouring in insects,
and especially those marvellous ones of dimorphism and polymorphism
among females of certain species of Lepidoptera, as necessarily imply
ing (to those who accept the Hypothesis of Evolution) the predominant
transmission of traits to descendants of the same sex. It will suffice,
however, to instance, as more especially relevant, the cases of sexual
distinctions within the human race itself, which have arisen in some
varieties and not in others. That in some varieties the men are
bearded and in others not, may be taken as strong evidence of this
partial limitation of heredity ; and perhaps still stronger evidence is
yielded by that peculiarity of feminine form found in some of the
negro races, and especially the Hottentots, which does not distinguish
to any such extent the women of other races from the men. There is
also the fact, to which Agassiz draws attention, that among the South
American Indians males and females differ less than they do among
the negroes and the higher races ; and this reminds us that among
European and Eastern nations the men and women differ, both bodily
and mentally, not quite in the same ways and to the same degrees,
but in somewhat different ways and degrees — a fact which would be
inexplicable were there no partial limitation of heredity by sex.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XVI.

1 History of Greece, vol. i. p. 498.

2 Ibid. vol. i. p. 466.

8 Morning Post, May 15, 1872.

4 In the appendix to his republished address, Mr. Gladstone, in
illustration of the views he condemns, refers to that part of First

404: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

Principles which, treating of the reconciliation of Science and Relig
ion, contends that this consists in a united recognition of an Ultimate
Cause which though ever present to consciousness, transcends knowl
edge. Commenting on this view, he says :— " Still it vividly recalls to
mind an old story of the man who, wishing to be rid of one who was
in his house, said, ' Sir, there are two sides to iny house, and we will
divide them ; you shall take the outside.' " This seems to me by no
means a happily-chosen simile ; since it admits of an interpretation
exactly opposite to the one Mr. Gladstone intends. The doctrine he
combats is that Science, unable to go beyond the outsides of things, is
for ever debarred from reaching, and even from conceiving, the Power
within them ; and this being so, the relative positions of Religion and
Science may be well represented by inverting the application of his
figure.

6 Since the first edition of this volume was issued, there has ap
peared, in the Contemporary Review for December, 1873, the following
letter, addressed by Mr. Gladstone to the Editor: —

" 10, DOWNING STREET, WHITEHALL,
Nov. 3, 1873.

" MY DEAR SIR, — I observe in the Contemporary Review for Octo
ber, p. 670, that the following words are quoted from an address of
mine at Liverpool : —

" ' Upon the ground of what is termed evolution, God is relieved of
the labour of creation : in the name of unchangeable laws he is dis
charged from governing the world.'

" The distinguished writer in the Review says that by these words
I have made myself so conspicuously the champion (or exponent) of
the anti-scientific view, that the words may be regarded as typical.

" To go as directly as may be to my point, I consider this judgment
upon my declaration to be founded on an assumption or belief that it
contains a condemnation of evolution, and of the doctrine of unchange
able laws. I submit that it contains no such thing. Let me illustrate
by saying, What if I wrote as follows : —

" ' Upon the ground of what is termed liberty, flagrant crimes have
been committed : and (likewise) in the name of law and order, human
rights have been trodden under foot.'

" I should not by thus writing condemn liberty, or condemn law
and order ; but condemn only the inferences that men draw, or say
they draw, from them. Up to that point the parallel is exact : and I
hope it will be seen that Mr. Spencer has inadvertently put upon my
words a meaning they do not bear.

"Using the parallel thus far for the sake of clearness, I carry it no

NOTES. 405

farther. For while I am ready to give in my adhesion to liberty, and
likewise to law and order, on evolution and on unchangeable laws I
had rather be excused.

" The words with which I think Madame de Stae'l ends Corinne,
are the best for me : — Je ne veux ni la bldmer, ni Vabsoudre. Before
I could presume to give an opfnion on evolution, or on unchangeable
laws, I should wish to know more clearly and more fully than I yet
know, the meaning attached to those phrases by the chief apostles of
the doctrines ; and very likely even after accomplishing this prelimi
nary stage, I might find myself insufficiently supplied with the knowl
edge required to draw the line between true and false.

" I have then no repugnance to any conclusions whatever, legiti
mately arising upon well-ascertained facts or well-tested reasonings :
and rny complaint is that the functions of the Almighty as Creator
and Governor of the world are denied upon grounds, which, whatever
be the extension given to the phrases I have quoted, appear to me to
be utterly and manifestly insufficient to warrant such denial.

" I am desirous to liberate myself from a supposition alien, I think,
to my whole habits of mind and life. But I do not desire to effect
this by the method of controversy ; and if Mr. Spencer does not see,
or does not think, that he has mistaken the meaning of my words, I
have no more darts to throw ; and will do myself, indeed, the pleasure
of concluding with a frank avowal that his manner of handling what
he must naturally consider to be a gross piece of folly is as far as pos
sible from being offensive.

" Believe me,

" Most faithfully yours,

" W. E. GLADSTONE."

Mr. Gladstone's explanation of his own meaning must, of course,
be accepted ; and, inserting a special reference to it in the stereotype-
plate, I here append his letter, that the reader may not be misled by
my comments. Paying due respect to Mr. Gladstone's wish to avoid
controversy, I will say no more here than seems needful to excuse my
self for having misconstrued his words. " Evolution," as I understand
it, and " creation," as usually understood, are mutually exclusive : if
there has been that special formation and adjustment commonly meant
by creation, there has not been evolution ; if there has been evolution,
there has not been special creation. Similarly, unchangeable laws, as
conceived by a man of science, negative the current conception of
divine government, which implies interferences or special providences:
if the laws are unchangeable, they are never traversed by divine voli
tions suspending them ; if God alters the predetermined course of

406 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

things from time to time, the laws are not unchangeable. I assumed
that Mr. Gladstone used the terms in these mutually-exclusive senses ;
but my assumption appears to have been a wrong one. This is mani
fest to me on reading what he instances as parallel antitheses; seeing
that the terms of his parallel antitheses are not mutually exclusive.
That which excludes " liberty," and is excluded by it, is despotism ;
and that which excludes " law and order," and is excluded by them,
is anarchy. Were these mutually-exclusive conceptions used, Mr.
Gladstone's parallel would be transformed thus : —

" Upon the ground of what is termed liberty, there has been rebel
lion against despotism : and (likewise) in the name of law and order,
anarchy has been striven against."

As this is the parallel Mr. Gladstone would have drawn had' the
words of his statement been used in the senses I supposed, it is clear
that I misconceived the meanings he gave to them ; and I must, there
fore, ask the reader to be on his guard against a kindred misconcep
tion.

[In the earlier-sold copies of the second edition of this volume, there
here followed a paragraph, one part of which was based upon an ab
surd misconstruction of the second sentence contained in the first of
the two passages quoted from Mr. Gladstone — a misconstruction so
absurd' that, when my attention was drawn to it, I could scarcely be
lieve I had made it, until reference to the passage itself proved to me
that I had. I am greatly annoyed that careless reading should have
betrayed me into such a mistake ; and I apologize for having given
some currency to the resulting misrepresentation.

In a letter referring to this misrepresentation, Mr. Gladstone ex
presses his regret that his letter to the Contemporary Review did not
explicitly embrace both the passages I quoted from him ; and he adds
that in his opinion, there is " no conflict between the doctrine of Provi
dence and the doctrine of uniform laws." My description of his view
as anti-scientific, the reader must therefore take with the qualifica
tion that Mr. Gladstone does not regard it as involving the alleged
antagonism.]

INDEX.

Abstract science, discipline given by,
288-91, 296, 297 ; investigation of
physical action, the province of,
291.

Action, relation to feeling, 327 ; not
produced by cognition, 328-335.

Acts, building, 3 ; contagious disease,
149; parliamentary, 203 ; licensing,
247 ; public, 325, 326.

Adaptation of organisms to environ
ment, 316. 317, 319, 361 ; to social
conditions, 319, 361; need for, 340.

Admiralty mismanagement, 146-147,
153.

Allotropic form, of oxygen, 205 ; of
carbon, 205.

Alton Locke, extract from, 38.

Altruism, 165-168, 173, 182 ; individual,
315, 316.

Amity, religion of, 163-169 ; truths ig
nored by adherents to the religion
of, 174-178.

Analogy, between individual and social
organisms, 301-305.

Analysis, chief function of, 293.

Anomalies, manifested by human na
ture, 11-14.

Antagonistic creeds, 181 ; social states,
223, 224.

Anti-patriotism, 196 ; bias of, 197 ; ex
ample of, 197 ; effect on sociologi
cal speculation, 210.

Anti-theological bias, distortions of
judgment caused by, 274 ; errors
from, 281, 284.

Antithesis, series 9f, 10, 11.

Anti-Tobacco Society, report from, 72.

Appliances for discipline, 242 ; undue
belief in, 245.

Art-museums, 320.

Aryan races, 308.

Astronomy, progress in, 205 ; sidereal,
205 ; idea of continuity from, 293 ;
theories in, 350 ; charge against,
359.

Athanasian Creed, 271.

Athenian democracy, 240.

Atomicity, conception of, 204.

Atomic theory, 204.

Automorphic interpretation, 103, 104 ;

illustrations of, 105, 106 ; necessity

for guarding against, 132.
Average intelligence, inadequate for

guidance, 276, 277.

Barbarities, committed by Europeans,
192.

Bias, educational, 161-184 ; patriotic,
1&5-218 ; class, 219-238 ; political,
239-265 ; theological, 266-285 ; of
enmity, 180 ; of the wealthy. 236.

Biological truth, a check to rash politi
cal action, 307 ; underlying legisla
tion, 316 ; laws, 318 ; use of, 322.

Biology, preparation in, 298 ; position
assigned by M. Cointe, 299 : cardi
nal truth of, 300 ; contributions to,
207.

Buddhism, 193.

Building acts, 3.

Bureaucratic system, 111.

Calico, demand for, 16 ; consumption

of, 16.
Causation, physical, 4 ; crude notions

regarding, 290 ; fructifying, 295,

296 ; continuous, 351.
Changes, destructive and constructive,

296.

Character, genesis of, 342.
Charles I., 159.

Chemistry, progress in. 204, 205.
Circulating libraries, effect of, 61.
Civilization, course of, 317.
Class-bias, 219, 220; illustrations of,

221-223; truth obscured by, 229,

230, 233. 234 ; in China, 236.
Cognition, 327, 328.
Commemorative structures, 127, 128.
Commerce of literature, 60, 61.
Commons, enclosure of, 36 ; House of,

245, 252, 254, 263.
Commune, reign of, 139.
Comparative psychology of the sexes,
340-346.

407

408

THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

Compromise, between old and new be
liefs, 359-361.

Conceptions, complex, 112; sociologi
cal, 115, 119.

Conceptlve faculty, want of, 120 ; plas
ticity of, 120, 121, 126.

Conclusions, general, 366, 367.

Concrete sciences, discipline given by,
293, 294, 2%.

Conformists, warped judgment of,
273.

Confucius, maxims of, 333.

Conservatism, 364.

Consolidation, the result of war, 176,
177 ; of Germany, 177.

Constitutions, belief in, 248 ; useful only
when products of national charac
ter, 250-255.

Continuity, conceptions of. 293, 294.

Cooperative industry, 227-229, 231.

Corollary, from the doctrine of evolu
tion, 365.

Cotton, its price, 16, 17.

Courage, 170, 182 ; over-estimate of, 171,
172.

Credulity, its coexistence with untruth-
fulness, 107.

Creeds, 208, 269 ; Athanasian, 271 ; re
actions against^ the, 274 ; antago
nistic, 181.

Crime not the result of ignorance, 330,
331.

Cromwell, 159.

D

Davy, experiments of, 204, 205.

Democracy, a despotism, 250.

Despotism, lesson of, from France, 250.

Difficulties of the social science, 65-67 ;
objective, 68-102, 352 ; subjective,
101, 133-160, 353.

Discipline, mental. 286 ; effect on habits
of thought, 2H8 ; acquired by study
of abstract science, 288 ; acquired
by study of physical science, 290,
291 ; sole study of physical science
inadequate as a, 291, 293. 355.

Dissenting organizations, 215.

Divine government, outgrowths from

theory of, 124.
— strategist, 25.

Doctrine of averages, 41.

Domestic relations, 121, 122.

Drainage, 60, 73.

Dutch, not imaginative, 200.

E

Easter-eggs, 112.

Education, national, 340.

Educational institutions, 61, 70, 71.

Egoism, 165-168, 173, 182, 186 ; reflex,
190 ; general, 363.

Embodied power, emotion excited by,
159-160.

Emotion, effect on judgment. 133 ; illus
trations, 134-136; excited by em
bodied power, 154-157.

Employed, conceptions of the, 224-231.

Employers, bias of, 231 ; mental atti
tude of, 231.

English, early history of the, 127-131 ;
self -depreciation by, 197 ; ideas of
the, 200 ; enterprises of the, 200 ;
inventions of the, 201 ; imagination
of, 209 ; science, 214 ; improvidence,
335.

Enmity, emotions enlisted by, 163, 168-
173 ; religion of, 180.

Equilibrium, between fertility and mor
tality, 309 ; between conflicting
sympathies and antipathies, 285.

Ether, units of, 283.

Ethics, 208 ; utilitarian system of, 279.

Evidence, untrustworthiness of his
torical, 08, 09 ; distorted, 72, 74, 76 ;
perverted through confounding ob
servation with inference, 84-90.

Evils, suppression of, 19 ; redistribu
tion of, 21.

Evolution, process of, 282 ; individual,
341, 342 ; products of human, 342 ;
arrest of, 340 ; study of, 350 ; charge
against, 358 ; societies products of,
304 ; effect of, 365.

Examinations, results obtained from,
87-89.

F

Factors, cooperative, 183.

Faculty, complexity of, 112; illustra
tions of, 114, 115 ; absence of, 120.

Fallacies, popular, 1-4.

Fertility, balance by mortality, 309.

Fetichism, 282.

Feudal system, 101, 233.

Figures of speech, 301.

Fijians, 230, 207, 268.

Force, correlation and equivalence of,
204.

Froude's opinions regarding social sci
ence, 33-41.

French, undue self-estimation by, 193 ;
soldiers, 194: poets, 194; adminis
tration, 199; Academy, 210-214;
language, 210, 211 ; Revolution, 139-
141, 143 ; lesson from the, 250.

Functions, preparation for, 323 ; ad
justment of special powers to, 341.

G

Gambling, grounds of reprobation, 278.

Generosity in women, 346.

Genesis of character, 342.

of facts, 351.

of the great man, 30-32.

of the belief in universal history,

26-27.

Geology, progress in, 206 ; idea of con
tinuity from, 293.

Germany, self-sufficiency of, 195 ; na
tional costume of, 196.

Gin. quantity distilled in England, 247.

Gladstone's theory, 358.

Government, its duty, 4, 5 ; officers or,
153; regulative agency of, 320.

Great artificer, 25.

INDEX.

409

Great-man theory of history, 28, 29,

351 ; error concerning, 32.
Greeks, 344, 367, 358.

H

Hamlet, quotation from, 246.

Hate, effect on judgment, 338-144.

Heat, as a mode of motion, 204.

Heredity, 307, 308, 313.

Historical evidence, untrustworthiness

of, 68, 69.
Historical sequence denied by Canon

Kiugsley, 38.
History of England, 36 ; science of, 36 ;

limits of exact science as applied

to, 37; scientific method as applied

to, 240.

Hopes, visionary, 366, 367.
Human nature, indefinitely modifiable,

108 ; slow changes in, 109, 110.
Hyde Park, 221 ; riots in, 270.
Hypothesis of atoms and molecules,

283.

Iconoclasm, example of, 275.

Ideas, relative faith in, 199, 200.

Ignorance not the cause of crime, 330.

Illusions, optical, 83, 84.

Impatience, effect of this emotion, 136,
353.

Improvidence of the English, 335-338.

Infanticide, 198.

Institutions, self-preservation of, 17.

Insurance companies, 74.

Intellectual culture, moralizing effects
of, 331 ; appliances to, 332.

Intelligence, average, 27C, 277; culti
vated, 280.

Intuition, guidance by, 325 ; power of,
342.

Invariants, theory of, 203.

Ipecacuanha, 148.

Japanese, 345.

Jews, 128.

Judgments. 32C; affected by coexisting

emotion, 134, 154, 353, 354 ; effect of

love and hate on, 138-144.
Juggernaut, 345.
Justice, abstract, 346.

Kingsley's views regarding social sci
ence. 37-40.

Knowledge, second-hand, 332 ; effects
on moral culture, 332, 333.

Laissez-faire policy, 320, 321.
Land tenure, system regulating, 112.
Language, use of old forms of, 97.
Law, 149-151 ; reverence for, 157.
Legislation, rational, 327.

icensing act, 247.

..ocomotiou. appliances for, 59.
Logic, 202 ; discipline given by, 288.
Loyalty, 157, 158.

M

Married life, healthfulness of, 84 ; cir
cumstances which determine, 85-87.
Master-builder, 25.
Mathematics, 202 ; discipline given by,

Matthew Arnold's method, 197-200 ;
statements of, 199-210.

rleehanics, 48.

dental science, truth taught by, 335.

Mercantile marine, inspection of, 3.

Metamorphoses, 361, 862.

Meteorology, 35.

Mind, laws of, 324, 326 ; true theory
of, 326.

Mod inability of species, 299 ; of man,
300, 300-308 ; of all organic beings,
308.

Monogamy, 121, 122.

Moral code, operativeness of, 279, 280.

nature, effects of war on, 179.
— teaching, effect of, 332-335.

Mordaunt cases, 254.

Mortality, 309 ; of children, 199 ; statis
tics of, 199 ; rate of, 311, 312 ; de
crease in the causes of, 312.

Murders, committed in England, 198 ;
by foreigners, 198, 199.

" Must-do-something" impulse, 18, 19 ;
result of deficient knowledge, 19.

Mutual dependence, of parts, 303, 304 ;
of sociology and biology, 305.

Napoleon, his despotism, 142, 143.
Nature of the aggregate determined

by the nature of the units, 43-48 ;

objection to this theory, 48.
Naval and Military Bible Society, 131.
Nonconformists, judgment warped by

theological bias, 273.
Nonconformity, 216.
Non-restraint system, 12.

O

Observations, systematic, 320.

Old beliefs, reaction from, 275, 276.

Old-English periods, 119.

Optical illusions, 83.

Organization, regulative, 363 ; mutual

dependence of parts necessary to,

301, 302.

Parable of the sower, application of,

296.

Parenthood, mental influence of, 338.
Parliament, acts of, 263 ; member of,

324.
Patriotism, 185, 186 ; effects on beliefs,

187, 188 ; leads to a low estimate of

410

THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.

other peoples, 188, 189, 193 ; effects
on sociological judgments, 196, 354.

Personal equation, 9.

interests, 75.

Phenomena, 357 ; interpretation of, 358.

Philanthropy, a means of evil, 314.

Policy, 319, 320 ; conducive to improve
ment. 338.

Political bias, 239 ; perverting effects
of, 240 ; subtle form of, 255 ; op
posed to sociological conceptions,
264. 354.

economy, 136, 137 ; flaws in, 138 ;

laws of, 138.

— Instrumentalities, 252-255.
Polyandry, 121.

Poor-laws, examples of. 93, 94.
Positive philosophy, faith pervading,

299.

Positivism, 105.

Power, manifestation of, 344 ; rever
ence for, 347 ; its influence on po
litical beliefs, 144.

Preglacial period, 126.

Press. 112.

Prevision, 34 ; scientific, 34 ; of social
phenomena, 41 ; impossible, 50 ;
possible 51, 52, 351.

Proaromut Florte Xor<r-Ho!lan(U<t, 207.

Progress in chemistry, 204, 205 ; in
mathematics, 202 ; in physics, 203 ;
in astronomy, 205 ; in geology, 206 ;
in biology, 207 ; in psychology, 208;
in ethics,' 208.

Properties of aggregates determined
by properties of its units, 53, 111.

Protestantism, 272.

Proximate causes, 2.

— results, 2, 310.

Psychological inquiries, need for, 340 ;

analysis, 343.

Psychology, 208 ; preparation in, 324.
Public affairs, better management of,

255 ; conversation concerning, 256-

Quaternions, 202 ; value of, 6.

R

Radicalism, 364.
Reign of Terror, 140, 144.
Religion, of amity. 270, 271 ; of enmity,

270, 271 ; of humanity, 283.
Religions, 161 ; antagonistic, 162-164 ;

conflict between, 165.
Religious conceptions, 123-126.
— sentiment, development of, 282,

283.

Representative faculty, 346.
Results proportional to appliances, 241 ;

fallacy that, 242-255.
Revolution. French, 139-141, 143.
Rhone Hydraulic Company, 200.
Ribot, extract from, 208.
Roman Catholicism, 272.

S

Sacrifices, human, 96.
Samoans, 266, 268.

Sandwich-Islanders, friendly conduct
of, 191.

Sanitary arrangements, 3.

Savages, as described by various writ
ers, 26(3 ; morality of, 207 ; bar
barity of, 191 ; kind treatment by,
191.

Science of life, related to the science
of society. 299 ; importance of study
of, 296, 297.

Sciences, abstract, 202 ; abstract-con
crete. 203.

Scurvy, 147.

Self-control, 338.

— depreciation, origin of, 197.

— regard, evils resulting from, 186,
193.

— sacrifice, 162 ; untenability of the
doctrine of, K55.

Sexes, mental differences, 340-346.

Shakspeare, 31.

Slave-trade, 321.

Small-pox epidemic, 134.

Social actions, complexity of, 16, 17.

— phenomena, relations of , 4 ; should
be studied in conformity with meth
ods employed in physical research,
5 ; false method of investigating,
10 ; prevision in, 18 ; ascertainable
order of, 21 ; no absolute repetition
of, '35 ; explanations of, 48 ; two
modes of interpreting, 87 ; per
verted conceptions of, 181 ; origin
in the phenomena of individual
human nature, 299 ; factors in
volved in, 340, 347 ; imperviousness
to, 360.

science, ideas alien to, 26-33 ; de
nial of, 33 : positions taken by Mr.
Froude regarding. 33 ; free-will in
compatible with, 33 ; denial of a,
37 ; recognition of, 39 ; reply to
criticisms concerning, 39, 40 ; na
ture of, 52, 53 ; definite conception
of, 53 ; value of the study of, 63,
64; difficulties of the, 65-67, 352;
right thinking in, 181 ; political
partizanship in the way of, 239 ;
balanced judgments in, 285 ; men
tal science necessary to, 349 ; con
clusion regarding, 350 ; conception
developed by, 364.

Social structures, development of, 54-
56.

Society, multiplicity of factors in
volved, 14, 15 ; structure and
growth as related in, 56-62; its
physical quality lowered, 311-313 ;
its intellectual and moral qualities
lowered, 313-316 ; type modified,
317.

Sociology, necessity for the study of,
1-21 ; hindered by sentiments of
loyalty, 157 ; class-bias opposed to
right thinking in, 237 ; political bias
opposed to, 264 ; a fit habit of
thought important to the study of,
288 ; its dependence on biology,
296, 299 ; difficulties of. 352.

Solar spots, constitution of sun implied

INDEX.

411

by, 6-8 ; Wilson's hypothesis re
garding, 6 ; counter-hypothesis, 7 ;
Kirchhoff 's hypothesis, 7 ; hypothe
sis, reconciling facts, 8.

Spartans, 172, 179.

State agency, 147-157 ; confidence in,
154 ; education through, 329.

Statutes, penal, 149.

Stone age, 175.

Strategy of Providence, 25.

Structure and growth, 56-59 ; law in
social organisms of, 59, CO.

Subjective difficulties, intellectual, 103-
132, 352 : emotional, 133-100, 353.

Sun's distance, error in estimating, 187.

Supernatural genesis of phenomena,
22-24.

Superstitions, 5.

Survivals, of the fittest, 174, 175 ; of
primitive practices, 97-101.

Svnt IK-SIS, practice of, 293.

Syphilis, 76-82.

T

Tailor in heaven, story of, 125.

Tasmanian devil, 168, 170.

Temperance societies, growth of, 70 ;
results of, 246.

Tendency, destructive and construc
tive, 363.

Testimony, necessity for discounting,
71 ; personal interests affecting, 74;
political influences affecting, 75.

Theological bias, leading to misinter
pretation of social facts, 266 ; effect
of, 270 ; obscures sociological truth,
271 ; leads to erroneous estimates
of societies and institutions, 271,
355.

Theory of Mr. Gladstone, 358.

Theory of light, 203.

Titles, 159.

Trade-unions, genesis of, 119 ; ideas of
legislative action entertained by,
157 ; internal governments of, 224.
225 ; general policy of. 229.

Transitional periods, 362.

Trinity, 125, 271.

Truth, taught by mental science 335

Two-headed nightingale, 68.

U

United States, truth displayed in, 251.

Untrustworthy evidence, the result of,
subjective states of the witnesses,
69-74, 352 ; of personal interest, 74-
82 ; of confounding observation
with inference, 84-90 ; distribution
in space, 90, 91 ; distribution of
facts in time, 92-101.

Vagrancy act, 36.
Veracity, habitual, 107.

W

Wallace, contradictory estimates of the
character of, 188.

Walter-press, genesis of, 115-119.

War, the means of consolidation, 176 ;
of industrial habits, 177 ; of retro
gression, 178 ; its effects on the
moral nature, 179 ; general effects
of, 180.

Women, mental characteristics of, 340 ;
physical peculiarities of, 341 ; traits
of intellect and feeling peculiar to,
346-348.

Spencer, Herbert

The study of sociology

B
1652

«A^ *
v.12