MODERN SCIENCE 227
' But all the practical results of the victories over Nature have till now — for a considerable time past — gone to factories that injure the workmen's health ; hae produced weapons to kill men with, and increased luxury and corruption ' — replies a plain, reasonable man — ' and, therefore, the victory of man over Nature has not only failed to increase the welfare of human beings, but has, on the contrary, made their condition worse. '
If the arrangement of society is bad (as ours is), and a small number of people have power over the niajority and oppress it, every victory over Nature will inevitably only serve to increase that power and that oppression. That is what is actually happening-.
AVith a science which aims not at studying how people ought to live, but at studying whatever exists — and which is therefore occupied chiefly in investigating inanimate things while allowing the order of liuman society to remain as it is — no improvements, no victories over Nature, can better the state of humanity.
' But medical science } Vou are forgetting the bene- ficent progress made by medicine. And bacteriological inoculations.'* And recent surgical operations.^' ex- claim the defenders of science, — adducing as a last resource the success of medical science to prove the utility of all science. ' By inoculations we can prevent illness, or can cure it ; we can perform painless opera- tions : cut open a man's inside and clean it out, and can straighten hunclied-backs,^ is what is usually said by the defenders of present-day science, who seem to think that the curing of one child from diphtheria, among those Russian children of whom 50 per cent, (and even 80 per cent, in the Foundling Hospitals) die as a regular thing apart from diphtheria — must con- vince anyone of the beneficence of science in general.
Our life is so arranged that from bad food, excessive and harmful work, bad dwellings and clothes, or fron) want, not children only, but a majority of people, die before they have lived half the years that should be
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