8 14 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
essential modification. I would now lay more stress upon cer- tain parts of the general argument, and somewhat less on others, but the argument as a whole still stands as worked out in that volume. As democratic governments must be representative I see no way to increase their intellectual status except by increasing that of constituencies, and I still regard this as the one great desideratum. If the social consciousness can be so far quickened as to awake to the full realization of this truth in such vivid manner as to induce general action in the direction of devising means for the universal equalization of intelligence, all other social problems w r ill be put in the way of gradual but certain solution.
But there are some who will say that if this little is all there is to sustain the claim that society is one day destined to take its affairs into its own hands and conduct its business like a rational being, it would be as well to abandon it. If the long period of human history has shown so little advance in the direction of a social intelligence we might better leave matters entirely to the two spontaneous methods described in the two preceding papers. The first answer to this is that the sociolo- gist does not profess to be a reformer, and is not advocating any course of social action. All he feels called upon to do is to point out what the effect of a certain course of action would be as deduced from the fundamental principles of the science, and to state what he conceives the tendencies to be as judged from the history of development.
The second answer to this objection is that it is the one that is always raised whenever anything is mentioned which is differ- ent from that which now exists, that it is based on the natural error that things are stationary because they seem to be so, and grows out of the difficulty of conceiving a state of things widely different from the actual state. If we were to indulge in fable, a lump of inert matter would be laughed at by the other lumps if it should assert that it would one day become a graceful tree- fern, and shade the earth with its feathery foliage ; a plant that should declare its intention to break away from its attachments
