53° POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The conditions under which labor is fluid give opportunity for the 

 growth of a half-employed and migratory class, who are, as a class, a 

 tax upon the well-being of society. It is the greatest of all problems 

 in the old world to see how the educative influence of society can be 

 brought to bear so that it shall rear as much as possible the sort of man 

 who is ' capable of standing on his own feet and of contracting when 

 and how to render services to those who are willing to offer services 

 he wants in return.' The question, What is to be done with those who 

 can not and will not thrive on this system? is constantly presenting 

 itself in new forms. For our present purpose it may suffice to recog- 

 nize that this question exists, and that even when the conditions of race 

 and history and social surroundings are similar they do not produce 

 one type of individual only. Under these circumstances we can no 

 longer take for granted that human aims and activities are becoming 

 closely similar in all parts of the globe, even for economic purposes. 

 The individual estimate of the utility and disutility of labor at any 

 given moment may often be very different from that which the econo- 

 mist would assume to be the natural conclusion. It is obviously absurd 

 to suppose of vast numbers of our fellow-creatures that they are in the 

 habit of acting in accordance with what appears to be common sense 

 to the average traveling Englishman, but they need not necessarily be 

 fools on that account. 



II. What is true of unconscious assumptions in regard to individ- 

 uals personally also holds good for the mechanism of society; we can 

 not assume that it works everywhere in the same way. The classical 

 economists were inclined to limit their investigations to the areas and 

 regions where free competition has been dominant, and thereby to ex- 

 clude from consideration all those important problems which arise from 

 the contact of individuals of two races, with different economic habits 

 and ideals, upon the same soil. But even if the ages and areas of free 

 competition could be cut off from the rest of the world, and we fixed 

 our attention exclusively on this single plane, we should not find sim- 

 plicity and uniformity throughout the whole region. The habits of 

 business practise and labor organization differ in different lands; the 

 banking system in Scotland is by no means the same as that in England, 

 and a form of currency which finds favor in one is illegal in the other. 

 There is also a want o'f complete conformity between the eastern and 

 the western states in this matter; we can not argue directly from the 

 one to the other. When this is true about the medium of exchange, 

 it is obvious that the differences between one highly advanced com- 

 munity and another in regard to the terms on which labor is carried on, 

 or the method in which land is managed, will be even more striking. 



The great difference in the working of the mechanism of society, 

 as we know it in England and as we find it in other lands, was the chief 



