146 Kinley—The Direction of Social Reform. 
harmoniously to its new environment. Harmony is .to be 
restored only when the same relative degree, of progress is 
attained by all departments of society. For the functions of 
the organs of the social body are interdependent, and their 
healthy action goes on only when they are tuned, so to speak,, 
to the same pitch. Otherwise “ beats ” are inevitable. Ac¬ 
cordingly, most of the social and industrial evils at present 
experienced are due to the fact that industrial development has 
outrun the juridical, the social, and the practical ethical arrange¬ 
ments of society. “ The source of present complaint is found in 
the fact that the conception of the rights and duties, of liberties 
and constraints, of privileges and responsibilities, which lies at 
the basis of our juridical system, is not applied to the highly 
developed industrial system of the present. Difficulties have 
arisen because the industrial life and activity of the social organ 
ism have grown to a different plane from the one which underlies 
the juridical system.”* The rapidity of the industrial change 
and the emphasis of the social side of production have so 
changed the re.ations between employers and employed that old 
ideas of justice between the classes have been upset. 
The great structure of society rises little by little, now this 
corner, now that, until at length harmony of level is attained, 
or rather approximated. For no organ of society can be 
regarded as strictly quiescent while others are growing up to 
it. At no period of history, certainly not of the history of the 
progressive races, has such a period of rest, or quietude, or 
social harmony, ever been attained. Social forces are never at 
rest, never at a quiet level, never in stable equilibrium. No 
sooner has the restoration of the disturbed equilibrium been 
secured, than the social life reaches out further in some line of 
its activity, and the series of jars and shocks and readjustments 
begins anew. 
Considerations like the the foregoing make a priori schemes 
of social reform justly open to suspicion, and furnish safe, even 
though rough, data of the mode in which progress should be 
made. They enable us to gauge approximately the claims to 
consideration of many plans now presented. We can endorse 
* Science Economic Discussions, page 88. 
