OBSERVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE. 



the happiness of the working-men ; but, instead 

 of reconstructing established institutions, corpo- 

 rations, or guilds, he broke them up violently 

 without listening to the ^leas of the parties in- 

 terested. The result was, that the masters freed 

 themselves from all obligations to their men, and 

 the workmen lost the rights which had been 

 theirs for centuries. About the same period 

 Adam Smith, after ten years of solitary medita- 

 tion in a place remote from workshops, explained 

 better than any writer had ever explained before 

 the part played by labor in the production of 

 wealth, and formulated the famous law of supply 

 and demand. This law, though valid with re- 

 spect to prices of commodities, cannot be applied, 

 except by a palpable fallacy, to the relations be- 

 tween master and workman,' since the labor of 

 the workman, or, in other terms, the daily life 

 of his family, is not capable of being accelerated 

 or suspended according to the fluctuations of the 

 market, and herein differs from merchandise. 

 Sundry other writers have advocated an absolute 

 / tissez-faire : enamored of sounding phrases, and 

 heeding little the stern reality of facts, they even 

 in our own day proclaim "the individual freedom 

 of labor " as the only solution possible. We hear 

 much of the benefits to be derived from associa- 

 tion, free competition, participation (sharing in 

 the profits), from syndicates, and from coopera- 

 tion. One cannot be too wary of such experi- 

 ments. Being inspired by generosity, by Utopian- 

 ism, or by ambition, rather than by experience, 

 they always end in suffering where they fail, and 

 sometimes even lead to bloodshed. It is not with 

 the mutual relations subsisting between men as 

 with the relations between man and the physical 

 world. The latter, being modified by material 

 progress, are ever assuming new forms ; but the 

 former, being closely connected with man's moral 

 nature, are hardly subject to change. The expe- 

 rience of ages has firmly established the funda- 

 mental principles of social life, and has passed 

 judgment on the few combinations of which they 

 are susceptible. In truth, there remain no dis- 

 coveries to be made, whether as to the regulation 

 of the family at home, or the usages of labor in 

 the workshop. Nor is there anything novel in 

 the much-lauded schemes of reform. Many of 

 .them were known long ago, tried, and abandoned; 

 and most of the difficulties which we ourselves 

 are striving to overcome have been obviated or 

 solved in divers ways, according to the time and 

 the place. "Why should we go on squandering our 

 means on experiments that our predecessors or our 

 rivals have already made at their own expense ? 



In a dialogue preserved for us by Xenophon, 

 Pericles asks how might the Athenians regain their 

 ancient virtues, and the reply of Socrates was : 

 " There is nothing like mystery here ; let them 

 adopt the customs of their forefathers .... else 

 let them at all events follow the example of the 

 nations that are now dominant." And Montes- 

 quieu says the same thing. Thus, then, the coun- 

 sel of the wisest thinkers, as well as the history 

 of modern science, warns us against theoretical 

 speculation and invites us to direct observation of 

 facts ; by these means only can we reach definite 

 results, or conclusions that will stand. But hu- 

 man society is a vast field, in which we shall be 

 certain to lose our way, unless we have a guide. 

 What guide can we trust, and what method shall 

 we choose ? 



First of all, we have to reject that method, 

 however plausible it may appear, which would 

 fain discover in the anatomical constitution of 

 tissues or in the embryogenic evolution of organs 

 the cause of man's moral faculties, or even the 

 secret of the laws of society. We cannot but 

 regret the waste of energy and of talent on the 

 part of those ingenious philosophers who set up 

 the principles of sociology on so questionable an 

 experimental basis as this. We can understand 

 the ground of their error : many of them are of 

 opinion that " in order profitably to apply to so- 

 cial science the habits of miud produced by study- 

 ing all the other sciences, it suffices to master the 

 main ideas furnished by each." Considering how 

 some of these writers handle scientific processes, 

 one is tempted to say that they are easily satis- 

 fied, like Figaro when he mastered the "main 

 ideas" of government and of the English lan- 

 guage. Does any one suppose that, by isolating 

 the ganglia of an ant, or by placing under a micro- 

 scope the nerve-cells of a bee, he is enabled to un- 

 derstand in their causes and in their details the 

 habits of ants or the structure of the honey- 

 comb? Who would dream of preferring such 

 work as this to the wonderfully instructive, direct 

 observations of such men as Reaumur or Huber ? 

 And surely it were still more preposterous to sup- 

 pose that, from anatomical dissection of the dead 

 body, or even from a psychological analysis of the 

 living subject, we could infer the laws of human 

 societies — laws still more delicate and complex, 

 inasmuch as here the fixity of instinct is super, 

 seded by the free play of will. 



Nor would recourse to statistics alone be x>f 

 any greater avail. How should we find, in tW ab- 

 stract units and behind the nameless totals, the man 

 of flesh and blood who lives, loves, and suffers ? 



