io THE WORKING FAITH OF 



our way to these reforms ? How is it that, while we have 

 tried to handle a few of these problems in a most timid 

 and tentative way, most of them neither party in the state 

 has dared even to touch ? It is not that we do not desire 

 these and similar reforms. It is not selfishness only, nor 

 even primarily, that arrests our efforts and paralyses the 

 will for good. Who would not wish to see the inequalities 

 of wealth levelled, and levelled upwards which is eco- 

 nomically not impossible ; the collision of interests, all 

 known to be necessary to each other, mitigated ; individual 

 and social activity growing together ; a nation that is 

 sober ; its workers better housed ; its children and its 

 youths better educated ; its aged poor spending the 

 evening of their laborious day in some ease and comfort ? 



The answer is plain : We do not see our way to these 

 ends. The reforms we all desire, more or less vividly, 

 seem to us, and indeed veritably are, for the most part 

 impracticable. But they are not intrinsically impracti- 

 cable ; they are, we believe, only impracticable at the 

 present time ; and they are made so by our ignorance. 



We acknowledge the social evils, but we know no 

 remedy, or we dare not apply it. Such is the magnitude 

 of the issues involved and the complexity of the texture 

 of modern social life, that we are afraid of the unknown 

 perils of dislocating our accustomed ways ; we prefer to 

 endure the evils we know. In this region of moral and 

 social phenomena we are not able to trace the incidence of 

 our acts, nor follow the lines of antecedents and conse- 

 quents. As a rule, practical men engaged in municipal 

 and other social work have no theory on these matters ; 

 and such is the state of popular ignorance that they are 

 probably better without it. Nevertheless, the wider the 



