556 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



business of the future calls for the manager and the administrator 

 rather than the speculator or the promoter, for the steady, routinized, 

 narrowly specialized worker rather than all-round men so familiar in 

 the early industrial history of the United States. The traits of the 

 pioneer, the backwoodsman and the hunter, those traits due to varied 

 and changing experiences of the early settler, continue, however, and 

 are transmitted from generation to generation long after the stimuli 

 which produced them have ceased to act and have been overwhelmed by 

 the rising tide of civilization. If modern life offers inadequate oppor- 

 tunity in the ordinary course of daily life for the expression of these 

 inherited impulses, if they are inhibited from all beneficial or desirable 

 expression, they will find expression in abnormal or undesirable ways. 

 Gambling, sport of all kinds, drinking, carousing, are some of the 

 many forms in which these inhibited traits find a vent. The assimila- 

 tion of the recent immigration will dilute and diminish the strength 

 of these characteristics; but they should not be smothered and cast 

 aside, they should be utilized and turned into new and modern channels 

 of activity. 



Mr. John A. Hobson in a recent article touches upon this point. 

 {t The factory employee, the shop assistant, the office clerk, the most 

 typical members of modern industrial society, find an oppressive 

 burden of uninteresting order, of mechanism, in their working day. 

 Their work affords no considerable scope for spontaneity, self-expression 

 and the interest, achievement and surprise which are ordinary human 

 qualities. It is easily admitted that an absolutely ordered (however 

 well ordered) human life would be vacant of interest and intolerable; 

 in other words it is a prime condition of humanity that the unexpected 

 in the form of happening and achievement should be represented in 

 every life. Art in its widest sense, as interested effort of production, 

 and play as interested but unproductive effort, are essential." 5 If 

 modern industrial and commercial life is being placed upon a stable, 

 sure, scientific, calculable basis, if chance and luck are being replaced 

 by skill and efficiency, if routine and dead uniformity are replacing all- 

 round effort and variety, if the home environment is becoming more 

 monotonous and artificial; other social institutions must furnish 

 pleasurable change and variety. If elevating institutions as the school 

 or the church do not cope satisfactorily with the situation ; other much 

 less desirable ones will, and the spirit of gambling, of riotous living, 

 of carousal, of living for the sake of sport, will enter society and take 

 a firm hold. Old instincts are not easily eradicated; education must 

 never overlook them. The recent additions and contemplated additions 

 to our educational system are the concrete results of some of the 



6 International Journal of Ethics, January, 1905. 



