THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 59 



we have grounds for inferring that, along with the progress to a regu 

 lative organization higher than the present, there will be a change of 

 the kind indicated in the conception of honor. It will become a matter 

 of wonder that there should ever have existed those who thought it 

 admirable to enjoy without working, at the expense of others who 

 worked without enjoying. 



But the temporarily adapted mental state of the ruling and em- 

 ploying classes keeps out, mere or less effectually, thoughts and feel- 

 ings of these kinds. Habituated from childhood to the forms of 

 subordination at present existing regarding these as parts of a natural 

 and permanent order finding satisfaction in supremacy, and con- 

 veniences in the possession of authority ; the regulators of all kinds 

 remain unconscious that this system, made necessary as it is by the 

 defects of existing human nature, brings round penalties on them- 

 selves as well as on those subordinate to them, and that its pervading 

 theory of life is as mistaken as it is ignoble. 



Enough has been said to show that from the class-bias arise further 

 obstacles to right thinking in sociology. As a part of some general 

 division of a community, and again as a part of some special subdi- 

 vision, the citizen acquires adapted feelings and ideas which inevitably 

 influence his conclusions about public affairs. They affect alike his 

 conceptions of the past, his interpretations of the present, his antici- 

 pations of the future. 



Members of the regulated classes, kept in relations more or less 

 antagonistic with the classes regulating them, are thereby hindered 

 from seeing the need for, and benefits of, this organization which 

 seems the cause of their grievances ; they are at the same time hin- 

 dered from seeing the need for, and benefits of, the harsher forms of 

 industrial regulation that existed during past times ; and they are also 

 hindered from seeing that the improved industrial organizations of the 

 future can come only through improvements in their own natures. 

 On the other hand, members of the regulating classes, while partially 

 blinded to the facts that the defects of the working-classes are the 

 defects of natures like their own placed under different conditions, and 

 that the existing system is defensible, not for its convenience to them- 

 selves, but as being the best now practicable for the community at 

 large, are also partially blinded to the vices of past social arrange- 

 ments, and to the badness of those who in past social systems used 

 class-power less mercifully than it is used now ; while they have diffi- 

 culty in seeing that the present social order, like past social orders, is 

 but transitory, and that the regulating classes of the future may have, 

 with diminished power, inci'eased happiness. 



Unfortunately for the Social Science, the class-bias, like the bias 

 of patriotism, is in a degree needful for social preservation. It is like 

 in this, too, that escape from its influence is often only effected by an 



