8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be beneficial ? An answer, and often a very decided one, is forth* 

 coming at once. It is not thought needful, proceeding by deliberate 

 induction, to ascertain what has happened in each nation where an 

 identical institution, or an institution of allied kind, has been estab- 

 lished. It is not thought needful to look back in our own history to 

 see whether kindred agencies have done what they were expected to 

 do. It is not thought needful to ask the more general question how 

 far institutions at large, among all nations and in all times, have justi- 

 fied the theories of those who set them up. Nor is it thought needful 

 to infer, from analogous cases, what is likely to happen if the proposed 

 appliance is not set up to ascertain, inductively, whether in its ab- 

 sence some equivalent appliance will arise. And still less is it thought 

 needful to inquire what will be the indirect actions and reactions of 

 the proposed organization how far it will retard other social agencies, 

 and how far it will prevent the spontaneous growth of agencies having 

 like ends. I do not mean that none of these questions are recognized 

 as questions to be asked ; but I mean that no attempts are made after 

 a scientific manner to get together materials for answering them. 

 True, some data have been gathered from newspapers, periodicals, 

 foreign correspondence, books of travel ; and there have been read 

 sundry histories, which, besides copious accounts of royal misdemean- 

 ors, contain minute details of every military campaign, and careful 

 disentanglings of diplomatic trickeries. And on information thus ac- 

 quired a confident opinion is based. 



Most remarkable of all, however, is the fact that no allowance is 

 made for the personal equation. In political observations and judg- 

 ments, the qualities of the individual, natural and acquired, are by far 

 the most important factors. The bias of education, the bias of class- 

 relationships, the bias of nationality, the political bias, the theological 

 bias these, added to the constitutional sympathies and antipathies, 

 have much greater influence in determining beliefs on social questions 

 than has the small amount of evidence collected. Yet, though, in his 

 search after a physical truth, the man of science allows for minute 

 errors of perception due to his own nature, he makes no allowance for 

 the enormous errors which his own nature, variously modified and dis- 

 torted by his conditions of life, is sure to introduce into his perceptions 

 of political truth. Here, where correction for the personal equation is 

 all-essential, it does not occur to him that there is any personal equa 

 tion to be allowed for. 



This immense incongruity between the attitude in which the most 

 disciplined minds appi-oach other orders of natural phenomena, and the 

 attitude in which they approach the phenomena presented by societies, 

 will be best illustrated by a series of antithesis thus : The material 

 media, through which we see things, always more or less falsify the 

 facts: making, for example, the apparent direction of a star slightly 



