Some Mistakes of Social Reformers. 
139 
may be so shaped as to place a dead weight on a community in 
the race for industrial supremacy.”* 
At this point, as it seems, practical economists and social 
reformers are in dangeh of making two mistakes. In the first 
place, the language used to deny economic perpetualism and 
■cosmopolitanism seems, in some instances, rather strong. The 
idea has at times been conveyed that economic Icnos are varia¬ 
ble; that the laws underlying the economic and social develop¬ 
ment of one time or nation, are different from those by which 
the life of another time or nation has been moulded. But this, 
surely, is a false view. Economic laws, properly consid¬ 
ered, are ‘‘natural laws” or laws of nature, for they are expres¬ 
sive of relations of cause and effect. Given the same economic 
or social conditions, the same results must follow. Such are 
the “laws” of physics, of chemistry, and of every other 
•science. The law of gravitation tells us that a body is 
attracted to the earth with a force that varies as the mass and 
the inverse square of the distance. The fact that a body of 
given dimensions has a different weight at the sea-level on the 
equator from what it has on the same level at the poles, does 
not prove the law false or inoperative. Other factors have 
entered the problem. It is the same law acting under different 
conditions—the law constant and universal, the media through 
which it operates, variable, temporary or local. So of economic 
and social laws. They are as truly “natural” as the laws of 
physics in their universality of time and place. But national 
characteristics and institutions differ; geographical, climatic, 
and natural industrial opportunities and conditions differ. 
And so the same laws work out different results. There are 
“diversities of operations,” but the same laws. 
The other mistake, which is really a corollary of this one, 
consists in the application of empirical plans for the cure of 
social ills. Two features of the present period will strike the 
future historian with astonishment. One is the great number 
■ of schemes proposed for social reform; the other, the large 
number of intelligent and educated people who believe in one 
*Ely: Taxation in American States and Cities, p. 55. 
