538 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE STEUGGLE FOE EQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES 



Bt Professor CHARLES F. EMERICK 



SMITH COLLEGE 



VII 



The Current Trend of Affairs 



"X~TO one in this generation has expressed the idealism of the Arneri- 

 -^ can people as well as Mr. Eoosevelt in his best moments. Speak- 

 ing at Jamestown, Virginia, he said : 



The corner stone of the Kepublic lies in our treating each man on his worth 

 as a man, paying no heed to his creed, his birthplace or his occupation, asking 

 not whether he is rich or poor, whether he labors with head or hand; asking only 

 whether he acts decently and honorably in the various relations of his life, 

 whether he behaves well to his family, to his neighbors, to the state. 



In the pursuit of this ideal, the present era of reform is beset with 

 five difficulties. The first is the difficulty that arises from flattering 

 the intelligence of the common man. A political order in which ever}' 

 man has one vote irrespective of his intelligence encourages the errone- 

 ous idea that one man knows as much as another, and makes the em- 

 ployment of the scientific expert appear to be a waste of the public 

 mone} r . Many a man who has clearly demonstrated his> incapacity to 

 manage his own affairs feels entirely competent to run the much more 

 complicated affairs of the state and the nation. 



Nothing pleases the average mortal more than an assurance that his abilities 

 would have qualified him to do something else much better. It gives him such a 

 comfortable sense of completeness and versatility. Convince a curate that he 

 would have made a capital buccaneer, and he will break most of the command- 

 ments for you. A man of science, persuaded that his first-rate abilities for the 

 practical work of the world are wasted for lack of outlet, is as wax in the hands 

 of the persuader.i 



The second is the difficulty of distinguishing between reformers that 

 are genuine and those that are fakes. According to scriptural writ, 

 "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the 

 kingdom of heaven." Neither is every measure labeled " progressive " 

 necessarily what it pretends to be. "When some profess to be conserva- 

 tives and others profess to be progressives, it is difficult enough to tell 

 which is which, but when practically every one claims to be a reformer 

 it is doubly difficult to draw the line between the quack nostrums of 

 pretenders and well-meaning but unbalanced reformers, on the one hand, 



i Hartley Withers, op. tit., p. 66. 



