the things that are behind and reaching forth unto the things that are before." Scholarship must either abandon claims to the function of leadership, and accept the purely clerical rôle of recording and classifying the facts of the past, or scholarship must accept the responsibility of prevision and prophecy and progress.
Political philosophers, from Plato to Montesquieu, treated problems of government most of the time as though there were no deeper questions involved than the efficiency of forms of administration. Social philosophers of certain schools today would have us believe that the consummation of social philosophy will be reached when we shall have formulated the physics of group reactions in past and present human associations. The majority of contemporary social "reformers" act as though society would at last have its foundations on the rock, if it would adopt this or that expedient—civil service reform; equalized taxation; the referendum; profit-sharing; government ownership; industrial arbitration. The paramount duty of social scholarship at this moment is to reckon with the epoch-making fact that today's men have gradually cut the moorings of ethical and social tradition after tradition, and that society is today adrift, without definite purpose to shape its course, and without a supreme conviction to give it motion.
Let us listen to the anarchistic indictment of society.[1]
"Injustice is enthroned in the statutes of civilized nations; for example—in the laws relating to land tenure, to the money of commerce, to public franchises, to public and private corporations, to the collection of debts, to the enforcement of contracts. In consequence of this perversion of law, the privileged class is built up at the expense of the poor, the land of the United States has passed into the hands of the few, opportunity for self-employment is closed, wage slavery has been substituted, the condition of the poor is growing worse. It follows that a republic is as impotent as monarchy to do justice. Despotism belongs to the principle of government as such."
Let us hear from the other extreme. A Christian minister
- ↑ Report of the Congress of Anarchists, Chicago, October 1893.
