Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
emancipation from their shackles. It is doing more than anything else
except the post-office department to teach people that there is no
connection between merit and benefit; that they have the right to look
to the State rather than to themselves for maintenance; that they
are under no obligations to see that they do not take from others,
in the form of salaries not earned nor intended to be earned, what
does not belong to them. In the face of this wholesale destruction of
fellow-feeling such as occurred in France under the old _régime_ and is
occurring to-day in Italy and Spain, and the inculcation of the ethics
of militant activities, such as may be observed in these countries as
well as elsewhere in Europe, is it any wonder that the mind-stuffing
that goes on in the public schools has no more effect upon the morals
of the American people than the creeds and prayers of the mediæval
ecclesiastics that joined in wars and the spoliation of oppressed
populations throughout Europe?
Since the path that all people under popular government as well
as under forms more despotic are pursuing so energetically and
hopefully leads to the certain destruction of the foundations of
civilization, what is the path that social science points out? What
must they do to prevent the extinction of the priceless acquisition
of fellow-feeling, now vanishing so rapidly before the most unselfish
efforts to promote it? The supposition is that the social teachings
of the philosophy of evolution have no answer to these questions.
Believing that they inculcate the hideous _laissez-faire_ doctrine of
"each for himself and the devil take the hindmost," so characteristic
of human relations among all classes of people in this country, the
victims of this supposition have repudiated them. But I propose to
show that they are the only teachings that give the slightest promise
of social amelioration. Although they are ignorantly stigmatized as
individualistic, and therefore necessarily selfish and inconsiderate
of the welfare of others, they are in reality socialistic in the best
sense of the word--that is, they enjoin voluntary, not coercive,
co-operation, and insure the noblest humanity and the most perfect
civilization, moral as well as material, that can be attained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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