150 Kinley—The Direction of Social Reform. 
character can so organize itself socially as to get out of itself 
a conduct which is not proportionately faulty, is an utterly 
baseless belief.”* 
It is not in political, legal, or industrial conditions, then, 
that we must seek the ultimate change. We do need a new 
distribution of work as between the state and private individ¬ 
uals, in some particulars, and we need a purification of our 
political life, an uplifting of our political morality. But that 
new distribution and that purification will be results, not 
causes, of a better moral life. We do need a better adaptation 
of our juridical, or legal, system, to modern industrial condi¬ 
tions. But that adaptation will come only as a result of a 
perception of the essential injustice of the present system. 
And that perception, too, will be the result of the nobler 
altruism of a better moral life. In short, any social reform 
can be permanent only as it develops individual character, and 
it is toward the improvement of this that our main efforts 
must be directed in the future as in the past. 
True, in the long meanwhile that must elapse before the har¬ 
monious adjustment of the various departments of social life to 
the highest ethical standard can be attained, our duty is im¬ 
perative to seek by every legitimate though temporary 
means, to lessen the jarring, the injustice, the suffering that the 
existing ill-adjustment produces. To erect barriers against 
injustice until we can remove its cause and prevent its recur¬ 
rence; to repress evil until the conditions of life come to be 
such as of themselves to reduce it to its uneliminable minimum \ 
to change, even arbitrarily if necessary, existing juridical mis¬ 
conceptions and defects, until the environment of essential 
justice on which the system is founded shall have had time to 
evolve a “fitter” structure; to remedy, here and there, faults of 
the existing industrial system at the same time that we work to 
evolve an entirely new and better one; in short, to treat the 
social body directly for its specific ills even while we seek to 
bring it as a whole to a state of good health: these are duties 
incumbent on the social reformer and the philanthropist in the 
present, none the less because he is at the same time working 
* Study of Sociology, p. 22. 
