TO THE POOR. 259 



little predictable. History seems to be the proper name 

 for such a study, whose chief business is a description of 

 what has been and of what now is. At least, if sociology 

 be styled a science, it is certain that it cannot look far 

 into the future, however it may explain the past ; and 

 still more certain that it need not be appealed to in 

 order to bind men's hands in the shaping their own 

 fortunes, by the spectre of necessity in the shape of 

 scientific law. 



For the subjects of the supposed science, being men 

 and not physical or chemical substances, are not the 

 same from generation to generation. Nay, men may 

 change even within the limits of a generation, under the 

 strengthening and vivifying force of a new faith. They 

 are modifiable by themselves, or by circumstances, when 

 living in isolation, and they are eminently modifiable 

 when associated together in masses. 



Where Science might fairly find a useful exercise for 

 her deductive powers would be in the logical derivation 

 of our present social disorders pauperism, crime, im- 

 morality from our present conception of life as a com- 

 petitive race, from our present constitution of society, 

 from our present imperfect definition of property, from 

 our present consecrated system of individualism, from 

 our present conventional morality not differing essen- 

 tially from its opposite in so many cases. Given this 

 general state of things, and our worst social maladies are 

 given which flow as surely and necessarily from it as the 

 properties of a triangle from the definitions and axioms 

 of geometry. Deductive Science, we say, might find a 

 profitable field for her labours in the logical affiliation 

 of our social evils to our social system ; but she would 

 greatly hazard her credit for prophesying, if she ventures 

 to predict that the many who see the present evils, and 



