APPLETONS' 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



OCTOBER, 1899. 

 THE HELP THAT HARMS. 



By the Right Keverexi> IIENKY C. POTTEE. 



THE analogies between the life of an individual and that other 

 organism which we call civilized society are as interesting as 

 for any other reason because of their inexhaustible and ever-fresh 

 variety. The wants, the blunders, the growth, the perils of the 

 individual are matched at every step by those other wants and 

 dangers and developments which rise in complexity and in variety 

 as the individual and the social organism rise in intelligence, in 

 numbers, and in wealth. It ought to interest us, if it never has, 

 to consider from how much that is mischievous and dangerous 

 we should be delivered if we could revert from the civilized to 

 the savage state; and it is undoubtedly true that serious minds 

 have sometimes been tempted to question whether civilization is 

 quite worth all that it has cost us in its manifold departures from 

 a simple and more primitive condition. 



Such a question may, at any rate, not unnaturally arise when 

 we ask ourselves the question. What, on the whole, is the influence 

 upon manhood — by which I mean, here and for my present pur- 

 pose, the qualities that make courage, self-reliance, self-respect, 

 industry, initiative — in fact, those independent and aggressive char- 

 acteristics by which great races, like great men, have climbed up 

 out of earlier obscurity and inferiority into power, leadership, and 

 distinction; what is the influence upon these of conditions which 

 tend, apparently by an inevitable law, to beget or to encourage in- 

 dolence, inertia, parasitic dependence? 



One can not but be moved to such a question by either of two 

 papers which have recently appeared in these pages: I mean that 



VOL. LV. 50 



