488 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



If the Labour Party acts up to its professions, it will very abundantly justify its 

 claim to be the Party of hand-workers and /z<?<^/-workers alike. 



II 



To have realised that, to be successful, political action and social legislation 

 must be based on rigorous scientific study of sociology, is perhaps half the battle — 

 but probably less : and anyhow the second half or part of the battle is the worse. 

 In other words, it is far easier for a scientifically-educated man to realise that he 

 must be as scientific in his legislation as the engineer and chemist and physician 

 in their arts than for him to determine exactly what he ought to do. 



He has to analyse phenomena far more intertangled — often almost hopelessly 

 intertangled— than any presented to the chemist or the biologist. He cannot 

 institute deliberate experiments on human society to determine whether a given 

 procedure will be beneficial or fatal ; and he has no substitute for vivisectional 

 experiments on chloroformed animals. Observation of past successes or failures — 

 chiefly failures — is of but very limited availability : and inductions drawn from 

 such observations are often liable to the objection that, since social conditions 

 have meantime changed, the inference from the past no longer holds good. 

 Finally, in sociology more than in any other branch of science, even more, I think, 

 than in psychology, the most scientific and most conscientious worker is liable to 

 be all unconsciously biassed by the personal equation. It unhappily does not 

 follow that two gifted scientific men both trained alike in the sciences especially 

 preliminary to sociology, and both equally single-minded, will draw the same con- 

 clusions from the same data. To take an example now a generation old — Huxley 

 and Herbert Spencer, both earnest single-minded lovers of their fellows, both 

 deeply trained in biology and psychology, and personal friends and comrades 

 to boot, arrived at very different conclusions as to the necessity for or ruinous 

 effects of interference by the State in certain departments. Spencer consistently 

 advocated laissez faire ; while Huxley declaimed against administrative nihilism. 

 If such doctors disagree, how can a plain man dare to act ? Yet act he must : for 

 in politics, whether he be a legislator or only a voter, inaction — i.e., abstention 

 from legislation or from voting — is a form of action. 



Ill 



Here we confront the principal objective of this article — viz., the examination 

 of Spencer's fundamental political doctrine, which, advanced as a rigorous 

 deduction from well-ascertained biological "laws," cuts at the very root of all 

 that is implied in that somewhat loose term socialism. No socialist reformer, 

 maybe, has ever surpassed Spencer in his desire to serve his fellows and to build 

 a new Jerusalem : but in their conceptions of the necessary methods Spencer and 

 the socialists were utterly antithetic ; for the life-saving tonic of the one was the 

 poison of the other. 



Briefly, Spencer's doctrine may be stated thus : that, as regards each indi- 

 vidual, it is equally in accord with the demands of rigorous justice and with the 

 vital permanent interests of the community that he should suffer or fail exactly in 

 proportion to his merits— i.e., to his abilities, industry, character, and conduct ; 

 and that, as regards his children, it is in accord with natural biological justice, 

 vital to the progressive betterment of society, and in the long-run most merciful 



