2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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, ou the productive activity which the 

 capital now abstracted would have set up, on the number of laborers 

 who would have received wages and who now go without wages; 

 they do not perceive that certain necessaries of life have been with- 

 held 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 labor, so fast do you 

 increase the number of those who live without labor ; 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 be- 

 yond each immediate result there will be multitudinous remote results, 

 most of them quite incalculable. 



Minds in which the conceptions of social actions are thus rudi- 

 mentary, are also minds ready to harbor 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 corre- 

 spondent 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. c< Ugly buildings are 

 eyesores, and should not be allowed," urges one who is anxious for 

 aesthetic 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 in- 

 curs 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 

 authorized system had itself been the means of introducing foul gases 

 into houses. 1 "The State should purchase the l-ailways," is confident- 



1 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 gar- 

 dens. And tnis is by no means an isolated instance." 



