relieving it. On the one hand, they never trace the reactive effects which charitable donations work on bank-accounts, on the surplus capital bankers have to lend, on the productive activity which the capital now abstracted would have set up, on the number of laborers who would have received wages and who now go without wages; they do not perceive that certain necessaries of life have been withheld from one man who would have exchanged useful work for them, and given to another who perhaps persistently evades working. Nor, on the other hand, do they look beyond the immediate mitigation of misery; but deliberately shut their eyes to the fact that as fast as you increase the provision for those who live without labor, so fast do you increase the number of those who live without labor; and that, with an ever-increasing distribution of alms, there comes an ever-increasing outcry for more alms. Similarly throughout all their political thinking. Proximate causes and proximate results are alone contemplated; and there is scarcely any consciousness that the original causes are often numerous and widely different from the apparent cause, and that beyond each immediate result there will be multitudinous remote results, most of them quite incalculable.
Minds in which the conceptions of social actions are thus rudimentary, are also minds ready to harbor wild hopes of benefits to be achieved by administrative agencies. In each such mind there seems to be the unexpressed postulate that every evil in a society admits of cure; and that the cure lies within the reach of law. "Why is not there a better inspection of the mercantile marine?" asked a correspondent of the Times the other day; apparently forgetting that within the preceding twelve months the power he invoked had lost two of its own vessels, and barely saved a third. "Ugly buildings are eyesores, and should not be allowed," urges one who is anxious for æsthetic culture; and, meanwhile, from the agent which is to foster good taste, there have come monuments and public buildings of which the less said the better, and its chosen design for the Law-Courts incurs almost universal condemnation. "Why did those in authority allow such defective sanitary arrangements?" was everywhere asked, after the fevers at Lord Londesborough's; and this question you heard repeated, regardless of the fact that sanitary arrangements, having such results in this and other cases, were themselves the outcome of appointed sanitary administrations—regardless of the fact that the authorized system had itself been the means of introducing foul gases into houses.[1] "The State should purchase the railways," is confident-
- ↑ Of various testimonies to this, one of the most striking was that given by Mr. Charles Mayo, M.B., of New College, Oxford, who, having had to examine the drainage of Windsor, found that, "in a previous visitation of typhoid fever, the poorest and lowest part of the town had entirely escaped, while the epidemic had been very fatal in good houses. The difference was this, that, while the better houses were all connected with the sewers, the poor part of the town had no drains, but made use of cesspools in the gardens. And this is by no means an isolated instance."
