346 LOUIS BELL 



or automobiles — they would have offered hemlock to the 

 man who tried to start a telephone exchange; and yet no 

 people ever reached a higher plane of thought or action. 

 Likewise our little Japanese friends, cheerfully hailed as bar- 

 barians fifty years ago, had in reality risen to a mental and 

 spiritual height that enabled them in thirty years to grasp the 

 material advances of well nigh thirty centuries. 



The lesson to be learned, then, is to value the achieve- 

 ments of modern science and industry not upon their proceeds 

 in dollars and cents next week or next year, but by their effect 

 upon the growth of human kind and the evolution of society. 

 In discussing, then, the effects of a particular branch of tech- 

 nical progress, it should be considered in this broader aspect, 

 not merely from the so-called " economic" standpoint, which 

 is concerned exclusively with the balance sheet. To come 

 down to the concrete, in the larger view of things it is of 

 little consequence that John Doe should contract for electric 

 power at an annual saving of $10,000, as in nine cases out of 

 ten he will merely put the money in his pocket; the real im- 

 portance of the gain is measured by the number of people 

 benefited by it. If, on the other hand, the contract enables 

 John Doe to put out his goods at a lower price, or to reduce 

 the hours of labor, or to do anything else to the advantage 

 of his fellowman as well as himself, that contract is of direct 

 value to the community. On the contrar}", if a similar con- 

 tract enables Richard Roe to start an industry where none 

 was before, to open a new bit of territory to human activity, 

 the community is at once directly the gainer and electric power 

 is no longer an instrument of private gain, but of general 

 welfare. 



Of course, one may say that all private gain goes ultimate- 

 ly to the increase of industry; but unhappily the self consti- 

 tuted redistributor of wealth is not always a philanthropist in 

 the proper sense of the term, and vague and indirect methods 

 are usually inefficient ones. The special topic of interest 

 here is the direct usefulness of electric power in the generaliza- 

 tion of human activity, rather than its impossible indirect 

 value in enabling John Doe's heirs to assist in developing 

 the French automobile industry. 



