824 THE DEPENDENT GROUP 



We are students of causes in a rational system of life ; only we are 

 trying to discover forces and conditions which will bring about a 

 desired result, and we are not merely trying to explain a fact com- 

 pleted. We set before us not merely an effect to be accounted for, 

 but a state of society and of persons which we desire and will to 

 produce, on the ground that we represent it to ourselves as desirable. 

 We are mentally adjusting a system of means to good ends, and not 

 merely looking for the process by which what actually exists once 

 came to be. One of these processes is just as truly scientific as the 

 other, although the difficulty of prevision and provision is greater 

 than that of explaining the past. 



Ill 



Elements in a Social Policy relating to the Dependent Group 



(1) We need to distinguish as sharply as possible, both in social 

 thought and action, the members of this group from those who belong 

 to the industrial group. Perhaps one of the most disastrous forms of 

 mental confusion is that of confounding these two groups and so 

 treating them alike. The dependents have long been played off 

 against the wage-earners, and are even now frequently used to lower 

 the standard of living of the competent so as to reduce many of the 

 self-supporting to beggary, shame, and demoralization, with a long 

 train of vicious consequences through heredity for the future race. 

 The typical historical example here is the national degradation 

 which threatened the English people before the reform of the poor- 

 law about 1834, when poor-relief was given as a supplement to wages, 

 with the consequence that all common, unskilled laborers were fast 

 becoming paupers as a condition of mere existence; and pauper labor 

 proved to be incapable of producing wealth enough to support the 

 nation. 



But we do not have to go so far to discover flagrant illustrations of 

 the same tendency, even in the fortunate economic conditions of the 

 United States. There has not been an important strike in the past 

 decennium, involving large numbers of low-skilled laborers, when 

 charity-supported or charity-assisted persons or semi-criminals did 

 not offer themselves in crowds to compete with the strikers. 1 The 

 " parasitic industries " are found in all cities, that is, industries in 

 which the income which supports the family comes partly from 

 wages, partly from charity, partly from vice, and partly from the 

 physical and moral capital of the next generation. 



Under a previous head the minimum standard of human existence 

 has been defined as closely as the nature of the subject and our 



1 It is notorious that many of the professional " strike-breakers " are of the 

 vagrant class, on the borderland between vice, pauperism, and crime. 



