SOME SOCIAL ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 197
training to produce young men and women marred for the industrial career but unqualified to grasp a higher. Could the socialist's dream of equal privileges and possessions for all mankind become at once a fact, the unnatural relations and the natural dislocations consequent upon the change would wreck the social organism. The duty to usher in a juster, wiser economic dispen- sation is less imperative than the duty to fit men, now, in their present actual relations to their family and society, to be worthier the demands of the existing order and capable of using and profiting by new improved conditions as they arise, so that abuse of privileges will cease to cause a reaction in favor of con- tinuing ancient restrictions. The supreme law of gradual prepa- ration and development should govern. Attempts to get larger opportunities for the laborer or to restore his diverted rights ought not to be spasmodic, lifting him, then neglecting him till he falls lower than before. Whenever the worker is capable, then he may rule. Let us help to make him capable, instead of aiding him to seize power while yet he is unfit. Universal equality of condition might not remain a chimera, if philanthropic endeav- ors were more bent upon raising and perfecting the type and less set upon rendering the poor abjectly content, as a Christian duty, with a lot in which they must always resemble beasts of burden. On the contrary it were wiser to develop in the breadwinner a loftier moral nature even at the risk of revulsion from his material environment. Higher knowledge is not to be discouraged because it brings bitterer repinings and keener insight into the injustice of the existing economic rule, because the drudgery and nega- tions of life entail more suffering as one's perceptions and sensi- bilities sharpen. Discontent has noble uses ; and the negations of life are for the present inevitable.
One means of widening the wage-earner's horizon is to edu- cate him in the line of industrial expcrtness and supremacy. What is the main reason for the small trader's failure and the shirt maker's despair? The small trader cannot keep accounts, has no business training; and the shirt maker never learned to sew. It is a grievous mistake to suppose that those who
