778 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tlie limitations just mentioned, we are entitled to do what we 

 please with our own, and this also seems to be in accord with the 

 principles of justice, of which, indeed, the law of equal freedom is 

 the embodiment. But does this cover the whole extent of our ob- 

 ligation ? Every right has for its correlative a duty to be per- 

 formed. Are all such duties included in the limitations upon 

 rights that have been mentioned ? Has society no just claims upon 

 its members other than those of mutual forbearance ? Clearly not, 

 for rights are not the measure of duties. The latter occupy a 

 much larger field of life, and, although their consideration is 

 chiefly confined to ethics proper, yet in the study of economics a 

 clearer recognition of social duties and an insistance upon their 

 needfulness as factors in securing the greatest economic return 

 for efforts expended will tend to put the science upon a surer 

 foundation. Take, for instance, the great question of laissez- 

 faire. As Prof. Sidgwick says: "We can not determine what 

 government ought to do without considering what private per- 

 sons may be expected to do ; and what they may be expected to 

 do will, to some extent at least, depend on what it is thought to 

 be their duty to do ; and, more generally, it was before observed 

 that in the performance even of the ordinary industrial functions 

 with which economic science is primarily concerned, men are not 

 merely influenced by the motive of self-interest, as economists 

 have sometimes assumed, but also extensively by moral consider- 

 ations.^' * 



We have here reached also an explanation of the residuum of 

 existing sentiment in regard to the distribution of wealth. The 

 duties which its creation imposes upon all the men who produce 

 it are not distinctly realized by the mass of mankind. On the 

 contrary, individuals and classes are more often concerned with 

 their own rights and the duties of others. Dissatisfaction natu- 

 rally follows, as we are sure to find fault with others for the non- 

 performance of duty, while forgetting that our own neglect must 

 produce the same dissatisfaction elsewhere. This applies as well 

 to the laborer as the employer or capitalist. All owe it to society 

 that they shall exercise their economic functions in such a man- 

 ner as to enhance the social well-being. For, " it should not be 

 forgotten here that, at least in the higher stages of the economy 

 of nations, scarcely any work or saving is possible without the 

 co-operation of society. And society must be conceived not only 

 as the sum total of the now living individuals that compose it, 

 but in its entire past, present, and future, and also as being led 

 and borne onward by eternal ideas and wants." f 



This is not the only economic service which society renders to 



* " Principles of Political Economy," p. 583. 



f Roscher's "Political Economy," vol. i, pp. 235, 236. 



