488 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" SCIENTIFIC CHARITY." 



Bt A. G. WAENEK, Ph. D. 



IN 1844 C. C. Greville made this entry in his journal : " We are 

 now overrun with philanthropy, and God only knows where 

 it will stop, or whither it will lead us ! " When he wrote these 

 words he was appalled lest the malign influence of philanthropy 

 should avail to secure additional legislation for the protection of 

 women and children in the mines and factories of England. 



During the first half of the present century the English phi- 

 lanthropists and the English economists joined issue squarely 

 upon two great questions, and the victor in one case was van- 

 quished in the other: the economists won in the fight for the 

 reform of the poor-laws, the philanthropists in the fight for fac- 

 tory legislation. Of course, no sharp line of distinction can he 

 drawn between the two classes thus labeled, but in the main it is 

 true that the apostles of self-sacrifice were on one side and the 

 apostles of self-interest on the other. Especially in the struggle 

 for factory legislation were the two classes distinct, and distinctly 

 antagonistic. Cobden doubted the sincerity of Shaftesbury, and 

 Shaftesbury rejected the reasoning of Cobden. Results have 



indicated that 



" Each was partly in the right, 



And both were in the wrong." 



While political economy was getting itself called the " dismal 

 science," it was actually fighting the battles of the poor as well as 

 the rich ; and while philanthropy was being charged with a mis- 

 chievous meddlesomeness, hurtful to the poor and fatal to the 

 industrial supremacy of England, it was, in truth, cutting the 

 tap-root of the Chartist agitation and re-establishing the founda- 

 tions of British industry. From these dual experiences of success 

 and failure in the attempted solution of social problems the 

 obvious conclusion has been that neither class of thinkers can be 

 regarded as infallible, while at the same time the conclusions of 

 neither can be considered valueless. 



The conclusion is commonplace enough, but the unusual feat- 

 ure of the case is that both parties seem to have accepted it 

 entire. All are pretty well agreed that both sense and sentiment 

 are necessary to guide us properly along the devious paths of 

 politico-economic investigation. He who approaches a social 

 question from the side exclusively of the reason, or exclusively of 

 the emotions, is apt, like the blind man feeling of an elephant, to 

 mistake a part for the whole, and to err accordingly. In conse- 

 quence of a fuller appreciation of the necessity for the many-sided 



