242 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



will be honestly carried out, that each and every man will do his 

 duty, that there will be no " combines " on the part of overseers 

 and administrators to turn the means of production to their own 

 use and defraud the masses. For it is very certain that state 

 socialism administered or superintended by such a class of men 

 as that which recently met at Minneapolis to nominate their man, 

 or the class that usually control the machinery of government in 

 this " free" country, would not only fail in its purpose, but result 

 in civil war, or the conditions of life would be worse than hu- 

 manity has ever experienced. 



Similarly, philosophical anarchism and the doctrine of non-in- 

 vasion must fall short of its purpose unless all men confine them- 

 selves to their own business, and do not interfere with their 

 neighbors. But the presence of a handful of men in an anarch- 

 istic community, who determined to live by plunder, would suffice 

 to destroy either anarchism or the community. 



Anarchy reminds one of a certain Chinese puzzle, the solution 

 of which depended upon getting a number of different-shaped 

 blocks together and dropping them at the same instant, so that 

 they fell exactly into their respective places. If one happened to 

 fall slightly out of place, it upset the entire number. Philo- 

 sophical anarchy can only exist when all men have attained that 

 condition where each fits his place and is content to remain in it. 



I contend that no science of economics will elevate society to 

 the condition its advocates believe, unaccompanied by a system of 

 ethics. It is more a question of every man doing right, fulfilling 

 obligations, guiding his conduct by some standard, than it is of 

 the nationalization of land or the abolition of privilege. When 

 every one is governed by his noblest impulses, in place of selfish 

 instincts, poverty and misery will begin to disappear. Then the 

 so-called science of economics will be rewritten, and a new basis 

 of human action accepted. And, without this, no reform system 

 will accomplish the purpose of its author. 



" Whether it is possible," said Prof. Max Mailer, at the International Oriental 

 Congress, " to account for the origin of languages, or rather of human speech 

 in general, is a question which scholars eschew, because it is one to be handled 

 by philosophers rather than by students of language. I must confess, the deeper 

 we delve the further the solution of the problem seems to recede from our grasp ; 

 and we may here, too, learn the old lesson that our mind was not made to grasp 

 beginnings. We know the beginnings of nothiDg in this world, and the problem 

 of the origin of language, which is but another name for the origin of thought, 

 evades our comprehension quite as much as that of the origin of our planet and 

 of the life upon it, or the origin of space and time, whether without or within us. 

 History can dig very deep, but, like the shafts of our mines, it is always arrested 

 before it has reached the very lowest stratum." 



