338 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
opinion as there are voting precincts in the city. Of course, all these opinions cannot be correct. How shall we find out who is right ? Some discoveries must evidently be made. I have no doubt there are several thousand people in Chicago who would undertake to settle the labor problem in the United States tomorrow, if they could be made Czar of the United States for that purpose. One of them might then silence all the other opinions, and make everybody else act according to the Czar's opinion. Whether right or not, his plan would control the country, till it convinced everybody or until it collapsed from structural weakness. But, fortunately or unfortunately, no one of us can be a czar, and the next best thing is to get the neces- sary multitudes to think the same way about a great many com- plicated matters of fact and of judgment. All this calls for the same sort of discovery that is necessary in science or in the mechanic arts. For instance, it is a commonplace idea that we are not using our coal in the best way to produce power. A fortune is all ready for the man who shall discover a better way. Meanwhile, nobody thinks of damning "society" for not developing power direct from the coal. We want to do it, but how ? Again, everybody knows that a considerable part of our fuel goes up the chimney. It is easy enough to say, " That fuel ought not to be wasted," but I have heard no social agita- tors declaim against ;' society " because the fuel still is wasted. We have yet to discover how to prevent the waste. Until we make the discovery, it is useless to call each other names for not saving the loss.
Once more, I have heard chemists express the opinion that the time will come when we shall be able to get food enough to feed the human race directly from the air, without resort to the soil. They say it is possible, only chemistry has not yet dis- covered ways of doing it profitably on a large scale. Meanwhile, there are people on the verge of starvation. Do I hear some- body say that we " ought " to get the use of the food carried in the air? I agree with him, but I hope I shall not hear him denounce anybody, and especially not the government, or the church, for not giving us the neglected means of subsistence.
