BY K. M. JOHNSTON, E.L.S. 7 



members are locally only of equal concern to a corresponding 

 evil in a foreign state similarly constituted. The necessary 

 gravitation and concentration of interests and sympathies 

 around home and fatherland are as natural as perspective in 

 optics ; the greatest density must be near the centre of — self, 

 home and family — becoming weaker and weaker as the relative 

 riDgs of friends or relations, club, townsmen, nation, race, are 

 passed through to the thinner sympathies lying beyond, em- 

 bracing humanity generally, where foreign races and states are 

 bound in ; and they themselves are related obversely to us in a 

 similarly graduated series of interests and sympathies. It is 

 this grand gravitation of human interests and sympathies 

 which make possible ideas and forces, which make home, friend, 

 and fatherland ; and these — not nominal cost of products — 

 are the great factors which determine the energies and 

 welfare of any community. Commercial laws tend to 

 destroy the heart of all ideas which centre in home and 

 fatherland, and if the nation is to live, it must carefully 

 guard against its decrepitating influence. Its shuttle seems 

 just as ready to weave the shroud of a nation as to bind 

 nations in bonds of broader sympathies. 



Dominating Wants Determine Occupations and Neces- 

 sarily Produce Inequalities in the Form op 

 Services. 



Hitherto in the writings of Social Reformers the greater 

 part of their attention has been confined to the monopoly by 

 the poor of the lands, houses, railways, and other instruments 

 connected with the production, security and distribution of the 

 necessary wants of human beings. It is generally assumed 

 that there is abundance of primary satisfactions for each 

 one if the aggregate products annually created were more 

 equitably distributed. But if even the necessary primary satis- 

 factions were annually produced in sufficient quantity for the 

 wants of all, it would go to prove the curious and inexplicable 

 circumstance that the present haphazard training and supply 

 and demand of those who are engaged, or who are being 

 trained to engage in the various divisions of labour, are in 

 perfect harmony with conditions which combine to effect a 

 result which might seem too formidable if undertaken by the 

 most absolute regulations of intelligent prevision. The 

 present supply of satisfactions is determined by the estimates 

 or combined action of self-interested producers. It cannot 

 be affirmed on the basis of producers' self-interest, that wants 

 are produced with the sole idea of providing the highest quota 

 <rf satisfactions to each individual ; at best they favour the 

 minimum supply, as self-interest is best rewarded by a keen 

 demand involving high prices ; a result which would not be 



