238 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



heavy discount, tliey never repudiated, as did Queen Elizabeth and 

 Philip II, a single obligation. While the Jews were most cruelly 

 persecuted by the militant exemplars of piety elsewhere, they wel- 

 comed them. Like Athens before her degradation by war, they 

 welcomed also every alien laborer and every product of alien indus- 

 try. Protection of their own industries was a form of foreign and 

 domestic aggression to which they never resorted in the hour of their 

 direst needs. Among them the relations of the sexes offered the 

 most striking contrast with those of Prussia, Italy, France, and 

 Spain of the same period. " They hold adultery in horror," says 

 Guicciardini. " Their women are exceedingly circumspect, and are 

 constantly allowed much freedom. They go alone to make visits, 

 and even journeys, without evil report." It was in industrial Hol- 

 land that labor received its most generous reward, and the poor 

 and sick their most solicitous care; it was there, too, that crime was 

 the most rare and its punishment the most humane. Her prisons 

 are described as more like schools than jails, and their inmates as 

 oftener foreigners than natives. It was, finally, of this wonderful 

 creation of peace and honest toil that Thorold Rogers said that " the 

 debt which civilization and liberty owes " to her " is greater than that 

 which is due to any other race." 



III. 



Setting forth the business of physical science, Prof. Ernst Mach 

 says : " It endeavors by comprehensive and thorough description to 

 make the waiting for new experience unnecessary ; it seeks to save us 

 the trouble of experimentation by making use ... of the known 

 interdependence of phenomena, according to which, if one kind of 

 event occurs, we may be sure beforehand that a certain other event 

 will occur." That is precisely the business of social science. Only 

 as it serves that purpose has it any title to the name it bears, or any 

 value as a guide to human conduct. By a study of social phenomena, 

 it seeks to discover their interdependence, and then to frame such a 

 comprehensive statement of that interdependence as to permit with- 

 out further study or experiment the prediction of the results of any 

 dominant form of social activity. But such a statement is to be 

 found in the induction of jMr. Spencer that if the dominant activity 

 of society be militant, the thoughts, feelings, and institutions of men 

 will be those of barbarism ; if it be pacific, they will be those of civili- 

 zation; or, if there be a commingling of the two, as is now the case 

 in Europe and America, they will be a compromise. That is to say, 

 in proportion as society is militant or pacific, in precisely that degi'ee 

 will there be freedom or despotism, honesty or dishonesty, humanity 

 or inhumanity, m^orality or immorality. As I have shown, no part of 



