782 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mental to society, it is our duty to point out the limitations of 

 this right, and to do so with the greater insistence, because the 

 natural propensities of man will generally lead him to choose 

 immediate rather than remote advantages, although the latter 

 always coincide with the well-being of society. In other words, 

 morality becomes the basis of our economics ; for it is the " cardi- 

 nal trait of the self-restraint called moral " that it is made up of 

 those representative and re-representative feelings which, becom- 

 ing increasingly ideal, enable us to postpone immediate for future 

 gratification.* 



The basis of the old political economy was self-interest; its 

 fundamental assumption, that " men strive to obtain the maximum 

 of satisfaction with the minimum of sacrifice " ; and the creature 

 that it studied was the "economic man." There was much of 

 truth in all this, but not the whole truth. Our ethical economics 

 adds to self-interest the social interest, and the being whom it 

 studies, "the starting-point as well as the object-point of our 

 science, is man " f as he is, with all those thoughts and feelings, 

 those longings, desires, and wants, both of the body and the mind, 

 which are a product of the social factor. 



The history of our economic thought and economic action is a 

 further proof of this. There seems always to have been a tend- 

 ency to the establishment of a moving equilibrium between those 

 forces which make for individualism and those forces which make 

 for socialism, and an extreme development in one direction brings 

 more strongly into play the opposite tendency. Individualism 

 has jusfc had its day ; socialism seems now to be coming to the 

 front, but, if not curbed before it has gone too far, the pendulum 

 will again swing toward unappeasable individualism. Happily, 

 however, for man, he is more susceptible of change in the direc- 

 tion of his nobler impulses and toward an ever-growing sense of 

 justice and duty ; and, wherever sympathy does not conspire to 

 produce this result, it is eventually brought about by self-interest. 

 "Whenever the public opinion of any community allows men to 

 " enforce their rights with hands of iron, while they disclaim their 

 duties with fronts of brass," a reaction is sure to occur sooner or 

 later, and, in order to preserve and retain some of the rights which 

 this reaction imperils, greater concessions must be made to the 

 opposing sentiment. These concessions, once obtained, become the 

 starting-point for new rights and duties, and when these are found 

 to be useful to society they are preserved. A new adjustment is 

 inaugurated, but this time upon a higher moral plane than the 

 former. Thus, " at the suggestion of some immediate interest or 

 convenience," or through the impulse of the higher moral feelings 



* See Spencer's " Data of Ethics," chap. vii. 

 f Roscher's "Political Economy," vol. i, p. 51. 



