460 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mission "was. The same may be said of the alphabet and printing. 

 If one reads the vivid account Lord Macaulay gives of the found- 

 ing of the Bank of England, of the debates thereon, and the still 

 more violent debates on the usefulness or danger of the gold- 

 smiths who originated banking, he will get a good illustration of 

 the utter unconsciousness with which social improvements are 

 made, and the universality with which they arise from a desire 

 for the attainment of some immediate individual end. The great 

 financial invention of our own day building and loan associa- 

 tions has begun in the desire of wage-earners, who never heard 

 of Mill, or Spencer, or Das Kapital, to get homes for themselves 

 and each other, and has been perfected in humble and unknown 

 hands till now, having built a million homes, earned a high rate 

 of interest for millions of members, they have grown to hold 

 more money than the savings banks, and may at length aspire to 

 engage the notice of Chauncey M. Depew when next he tells the 

 public what to do with a thousand dollars of savings. Industrial 

 improvements unfold as silently and modestly as the leaf on the 

 tree. New structures, for new uses, do not spring from old 

 structures, fixed in other uses, but from the undeveloped part 

 of the organism, and gradually by inconsidered increments the 

 mightiest economic changes are made. These characteristics of 

 social evolution give us greater faith in the natural progress of 

 society, and have a most important and decisive bearing upon 

 many of the questions agitating social philosophers so much and 

 the rest of the world so little. 



Evolution teaches us to expect further changes to be additions 

 to the present state rather than anything like subversions. There 

 will be a continual increase in division of labor, increased social 

 stability, and we may expect increased industrial co-operation by 

 means of market reports, by which production in the various 

 trades will be kept more perfectly equilibrated than at present, 

 and the overproduction of any one product prevented. All labor 

 will become more and more specialized, and unskilled labor will 

 have a continual tendency to disappear. 



Perhaps the most important and interesting topic that evolu- 

 tion brings into political economy is the vast subject of industrial 

 disorders. That these are capable of scientific treatment no evo- 

 lutionist will deny, because they are essentially like all other ills 

 of humankind. What are industrial disorders ? How do they 

 originate ? What course do they run ? How and when do they 

 subside ? Evolution can and will treat these great questions in a 

 comprehensive way, and when it does we shall for the first time 

 have clear ideas on the most engrossing subject of our own day. 

 That evolution has a panacea to offer I do not believe, for it re- 

 minds us at every turn that pain and sufl^ering are an inseparable 



