50 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pers. In our time a large proportion of the public and private funds, 

 distributed among the poor, is spent in actually diminishing their in- 

 dustry, frugality, and self-reliance. Yet the evil of indiscriminate 

 alms-giving is diminishing under the influence of sounder knowledge 

 of social laws, and genuine charity is more and more directed by care- 

 ful study of the means by which wealth may be spent for the distinct 

 benefit of society. Such examples as these show clearly the imperfec- 

 tion and untrustworthiness of traditional, or what is called intuitive 

 morality, in deciding on questions of right and wrong, and the neces- 

 sity of appealing in all cases to the best attainable information of so- 

 cial science to decide what actions are really for or against the general 

 good, and are therefore to be classed as virtuous or vicious. 



Moreover, it is not too much to say that the comparatively small 

 advance which moral science has made, since barbaric ages, has been 

 due to the repugnance of moralists to admit, in human action, the 

 regular causality which is the admitted principle of other parts of the 

 action of the universe. The idea of the influence of arbitrary will in 

 the individual man has checked and opposed the calculations which 

 now display the paramount action of society as an organized whole. 

 One point in M. Quetelet's doctrine of society requires a mention for 

 its practical bearing on morals. There has seemed to some to be an 

 immoral tendency in his principle that virtuous and vicious acts are 

 products, not merely of the individual who does them, but of the socie- 

 ty in which they take place, as though the tendency of this view were 

 to weaken individual responsibility, and to discourage individual effort. 

 Yet, when properly understood, this principle offers a more strong 

 and definite impulse to the effort of society for good and against 

 evil, than the theory which refers the individual's action more ex- 

 clusively to himself. M. Quetelet's inference from the regular pro- 

 duction of a certain amount of crime year by year, from a society 

 in a certain condition, is embodied in his maxim that society prepares 

 the crime and the criminal executes it. This should be read with 

 a comment of the author's. " If," he says, " I were to take up 

 the pavement before my house, should I be astonished to hear in 

 the morning that people had fallen and hurt themselves, and could 

 I lay the blame on the sufferers, inasmuch as they were free to go 

 there or elsewhere?" Thus every member of society who offers a 

 facility to the commission of crime, or does not endeavor to hinder 

 its commission, is, in a degree, responsible for it. It is absurd to 

 suppose that the crimes in great cities are attributable altogether to 

 the free agency of the poor wretches who are transported or hung 

 for them. The nation which can and does not prevent the exist- 

 ence of a criminal class is responsible collectively for the evil done 

 by this class. This we can see plainly enough, although the exact 

 distribution of the responsibility among the different members of 

 society may be impossible to determine. Such a theory, of course, 



