the national wealth is made a matter of trivial importance, and the whole country falls down and worships the few into whose hands it has fallen in the most immense proportions.

Yet what indescribable folly it is! Is there any one sign that the possessors of fabulous riches are one whit happier or better than men of moderate means? On the whole, is not the reverse the case? Is a man's daily enjoyment of life quickened by having twenty thousand or a hundred thousand a year at his disposal? What is the element of happiness involved in the command of an army of servants, of carriages and horses by the score, and of houses which serve the sole purpose of awakening other people's envy? It is an opinion which will be shared by few persons who are believers in what is termed our modern civilization; but, for myself, I believe in the old theory, that in a healthy condition of the commonwealth, private possessions will be modest and public possessions magnificent. I should love to see rich Englishmen less rich, and poor Englishmen less poor, than they now are; and our national monuments and treasures ten times as numerous and splendid as we yet have made them.

And all this can only come about by a revolution in men's fundamental estimate of life and its pleasures. Legislation can do nothing towards it. It can upset feudalism and help to consecrate the triumphs of commerce. It can establish free-trade, and tax any portion of the community which parliament may single out for the burden. It can set up kings, or republics, and reform the lords, or leave them unreformed. But it cannot touch the inner motives of men. It can only substitute one channel for another for the outlet of existing passions, and change the names of the idols in the national Pantheon.

Whether or not we may look for a revolution in men's motives from any other source, it is fruitless to speculate. That the spirit of Christianity is in radical antagonism to our money-worshipping spirit, cannot seriously be doubted. But then, when has the spirit of Christianity been dominant in any section of Christendom? And if it has never been the ruling power among Christians, is there any probability that it is about to win victories hitherto denied it? What is to be the practical issue of that pouring of the new wine of criticism into the old bottles of tradition, which is the characteristic of the religious activity of to-day? Will liberalism of thought regenerate mankind, when Rome and England and Geneva have alike conspicuously failed? Who can say? An impenetrable cloud shrouds futurity from our gaze, and we cannot tell whether we are standing upon the edge of a precipice, or whether our path is to lead us through rich pastures, and blooming gardens, and fields of golden J. M. CAPES,

corn.

THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

I. OUR NEED OF IT.

Ο

VER his pipe in the village ale-house, the labourer says very positively what Parliament should do about the "foot and mouth disease." At the farmer's market-table his master makes the glasses jingle as, with his fist, he emphasizes the assertion that he did. not get half enough compensation for his slaughtered beasts during the cattle-plague. These are not hesitating opinions. On a matter affecting the agricultural interest, it is still as it was during the AntiCorn-Law agitation, when, in every rural circle, you heard that the nation would be ruined if the lightly-taxed foreigner was allowed to compete in our markets with the heavily-taxed Englishman: a proposition held to be so self-evident that dissent from it implied either stupidity or knavery.

Now, as then, may be daily heard among other classes opinions just as decided and just as unwarranted. By men called educated, the old plea for extravagant expenditure that "it is good for trade," is still continually urged with full belief in its sufficiency. Scarcely any decrease is observable in the fallacy that whatever gives employment is beneficial-no regard being had to the value for ulterior purposes of that which the labour produces; no question being asked what would have resulted had the capital which paid for the labour taken some other channel and paid for some other labour. Neither criticism nor explanation appreciably modifies these beliefs. When

there is again an opening for them they are expressed with undiminished confidence. Along with these delusions go whole families of others. People who think that the relations between expenditure and production are so simple, naturally assume simplicity in other relations among social phenomena. Is there distress somewhere? They suppose nothing more is required than to subscribe money for relieving it. On the one hand, they never trace the reactive effects which charitable donations work on bank-accounts, on the surplus capital bankers have to lend, on the productive activity which the capital now abstracted would have set up, on the number of labourers who would have received wages and who now go without wages— they do not perceive that certain necessaries of life have been withheld from one man who would have exchanged useful work for them, and given to another who perhaps persistently evades working. Nor, on the other hand, do they look beyond the immediate mitigation of misery; but deliberately shut their eyes to the fact that as fast as you increase the provision for those who live without labour, so fast do you increase the number of those who live without labour; and that with an ever-increasing distribution of alms, there comes an ever-increasing outcry for more alms. Similarly throughout all their political thinking. Proximate causes and proximate results are alone contemplated; and there is scarcely any consciousness that the original causes are often numerous and widely different from the apparent cause, and that beyond each immediate result there will be multitudinous remote results, most of them quite incalculable.

Minds in which the conceptions of social actions are thus rudimentary, are also minds ready to harbour wild hopes of benefits to be achieved by administrative agencies. In each such mind there seems to be the unexpressed postulate that every evil in a society admits of cure; and that the cure lies within the reach of law. "Why is not there a better inspection of the mercantile marine ?" asked a correspondent of the Times the other day; apparently forgetting that within the preceding twelve months the power he invoked had lost two of its own vessels, and barely saved a third. "Ugly buildings are eye-sores, and should not be allowed," urges one who is anxious for æsthetic culture; and, meanwhile, from the agent which is to foster good taste, there have come monuments and public buildings of which the less said the better, and its chosen design for the Law-Courts incurs almost universal condemnation. "Why did those in authority allow such defective sanitary arrangements?" was everywhere asked, after the fevers at Lord Londesborough's; and this question you heard repeated, regardless of the fact that sanitary arrangements having such results in this and other cases, were themselves the outcome of appointed sanitary administrations

-regardless of the fact that the authorised system had itself been the means of introducing foul gases into houses.* "The State should purchase the railways," is confidently asserted by those who, every morning, read of chaos at the Admiralty, or crosspurposes in the dockyards, or wretched army-organization, or diplomatic bungling that endangers peace, or frustration of justice by technicalities and costs and delays,—all without having their confidence in officialism shaken. "Building Acts should insure better ventilation in small houses," says one who either never knew or has forgotten that, after Messrs. Reid and Barry had spent £200,000 in failing to ventilate the Houses of Parliament, the First Commissioner of Works proposed that, "the House should get some competent engineer, above suspicion of partiality, to let them see what ought to be done." And similarly there are continually cropping out in the press, and at meetings, and in conversations, such notions as that the State might provide "cheap capital" by some financial sleight of hand; that "there ought to be bread-overseers appointed by Government that "it is the duty of Government to provide a suitable national asylum for the reception of all illegitimate children."§ And here it is doubtless thought by some, as it is in France by M. de Lagevenais, that Government, by supplying good music, should exclude the bad, such as that of Offenbach. We smile on reading of that French princess, celebrated for her innocent wonder that people should starve when there was so simple a remedy. But why should we smile? A great part of the current political thought evinces notions of practicability not much more rational.

That connections among social phenomena should be so little understood, need not surprise us if we note the ideas which prevail respecting the connections among much simpler phenomena. Minds left ignorant of physical causation, are unlikely to appreciate clearly, if at all, that causation so much more subtle and complex, which runs through the actions of incorporated men. In almost every house, servants and those who employ them, alike believe that a poker

* Of various testimonies to this, one of the most striking was that given by Mr. Charles Mayo, M.B., of New College, Oxford, who, having had to examine the drainage of Windsor, found that in a previous visitation of typhoid fever, the poorest and lowest part of the town had entirely escaped, while the epidemic had been very fatal in good houses. The difference was this, that while the better houses were all connected with the sewers, the poor part of the town had no drains, but made use of cesspools in the gardens. And this is by no means an isolated instance."

† Debates, "Times," February 12, 1852.

Letter in "Daily News," Nov. 28, 1851.

§ Recommendation of a Coroner's Jury, "Times," March 26, 1850. "Revue des Deux Mondes," February 15, 1872.

leaned up in front of the bars, or across them, makes the fire burn; and you will be told, very positively, that experience proves the efficacy of the device-the experience being that the poker has been repeatedly so placed and the fire has repeatedly burned; and no comparison having been made with cases in which the poker was absent, and all other conditions as before. In the same circles the old prejudice against sitting down thirteen to dinner still survives: there actually exists among ladies who have been at finishing schools of the highest character, and among some gentlemen who pass as intelligent, the conviction that adding or subtracting one from a number of people who eat together, will affect the fates of some among them. And this state of mind is again displayed at the cardtable, by the opinion that So-and-so is always lucky or unlucky-that influences are at work which, on the average, determine more good cards to one person than to another. Clearly, those in whom the consciousness of causation in these simple cases is so vague, may be expected to have the wildest notions of social causation. Whoever even entertains the supposition that a poker put across the fire can make it burn, proves himself to have neither a qualitative nor a quantative idea of physical causation; and if, during his life, his experiences of material objects and actions have failed to give him an idea so accessible and so simple, it is not likely that they have given him ideas of the qualitative and quantitative relations of cause and effect holding throughout society. Hence, there is nothing to exclude irrational interpretations and disproportioned hopes. Where other superstitions flourish, political superstitions will take root. A consciousness in which there lives the idea that spilling salt will be followed by some evil, obviously allied as it is to the consciousness of the savage filled with belief in omens and charms, gives a home to other beliefs like those of the savage. It may not have faith in the potency of medicine-bags and idols, and may even wonder how any being can reverence a thing shaped with his own hands; and yet it readily entertains subtler forms of the same feelings. For, in those whose modes of thought we have been contemplating, there is a tacit supposition that a government moulded by themselves, has some efficiency beyond that naturally possessed by a certain group of citizens subsidized by the rest of the citizens. True, if you ask them, they may not deliberately assert that a legislative and administrative apparatus can exert power, either mental or material, beyond the power proceeding from the nation itself. They are compelled to admit, when cross-examined, that the energies moving a governmental machine are energies which would cease were citizens to cease working and furnishing the supplies. But, nevertheless, their projects imply an unexpressed belief in some store of force that is not