it would be to give him employment instead of taking care of him. All modern philanthropic legislation has relied upon palliatives; it has undoubtedly ameliorated the near effects of poverty, but unquestionably it has failed to remove its remote causes. We must believe that these social evils of pauperism and crime are incurable, or that the treatment of them is wrong and pernicious.
The latter conclusion leads us all the more to the firm belief that Philanthropy should be established upon a definite and exact scientific basis. In his address before the Academy, in 1880, Victor Sardou said that sympathy impelled men to apply a remedy before they ascertained the cause of the disease—to trust in the efficacy of panaceas, rather than in the vis medicatrix. This he called sentimental Philanthropy. The conflict between the sentimental and scientific methods in social science has come from the intrusion of what may be called the sympathetic Bias—that is, the former class allow their emotions to predominate over their judgments, while the latter subordinate their feelings of sympathy to their faculty of reason. The sentimentalist employs in sociology the empiric method; in ethics he builds upon intuition; in political economy he favors the principle of co-operation. The innumerable Reforms, Leagues, and Associations are evidences of the unscientific nature of the remedy administered for deep-seated evils. Therefore, all measures of public relief must depend for their success on the correctness and certainty with which the laws of mental and biological science are applied; and the legist must likewise depend, not on short-lived and hastily-contrived plans for relief, but on the logical precision with which he draws his conclusions from these scientific studies to shape the course of his present and future policy. M. Fouillée declares that the aim of philanthropy will be to establish among the social classes solidarité—union between the rich and the poor. In the terms of evolution, our modern Philanthropy will produce a state of social equilibrium—"a state of human nature and social organization such that the individual has no desires but those which may be satisfied without exceeding his proper sphere of action, while society maintains no restraints but those which the individual voluntarily respects."[1] Unhappiness will be the result of imperfect adjustment of faculties to their functions and conditions, while happiness will consist in the due exercise of all the faculties consistent with the similar exercise of the like faculties of others. Without one word of displeasure to those tender-hearted philanthropists who have committed grievous errors by short-sighted plans, let us speak with pleasure of the labors of Arkwright, Stephenson, Whitney, Bessemer, Siemens, and others—scientific philanthropists, who have been all the time "weaving the web of concord among nations." The spirit that animated Faust to dig and drain vast territories has led these practical
- ↑ "First Principles," p. 612.
