Albion Woodbury Small

“ It is a very callow sociologist who imagines that he and his colaborers are inventing the subject-matter of a new science. They are trying to perfect means of answering obtrusive questions about society which the ordinary man is proposing every hour. They are not creating but merely representing popular curiosity. Life is so much more real to the people than to the schools that the people are no sooner possessed of some of the tools of thought, and some means of observation, than they proceed to grapple with more vital questions than the scholars had raised. ”

“ In other words, a corporate franchise has no reason for being, except as it is in effect a pledge on the part of the corporation to do a public service to the greater advantage of the public than could otherwise be secured. Any theory of corporations, or of contracts smuggled into the doctrine of corporations, which denies to the public the right to get itself better served by adjustment of claims and termination of contract and franchise, is fiction for the gullible. ”

“ Equal revenues from unequal services is an immoral conception. Desire for such a condition deserves no sympathy from honest men. Desire for equality in title to a place in the world where happiness may be pursued without power of veto by any other human being is an outcropping of our common humanity. Civilization is so far inhuman until men have learned to live together upon terms which insure gratification of this desire. The equal claim of men to this satisfaction cannot rightfully be denied to any normal man. ”

“ Thus: "Monopolies are odious, contrary to the spirit of a free government and the principles of commerce, and ought not to be suffered." I venture the prediction that the time will come when the citizens of industrially freer America will regard these omnibus denunciations of monopolies as equally naïve with the colonial proscription of attorneys at law. We shall learn that monopoly is like fire—a good servant but a bad master. ”

“ It is only such a worker that can expect to utilize in the elucidation of our human and historical problems that vast store of knowledge which the sciences upon which history rests are now ready to contribute.
Nor is it easy to see how any fair-minded person, not committed to opinions on either side, can look round today at the social sciences generally and not have to admit that they are all in much the same state as history. It would be difficult to imagine any more remarkable situation than that presented in our day by the science of economics. ”

“ Let there be careful study of the developing needs and opportunities of society, and let the results of study declare themselves in developing legal principles of social self-control. I am not now referring to any particular measures, but to the principle that legislation which creates corporations without corresponding regulation is as anomalous and socially dangerous as a regime of domestic relations ruled solely by the instinct of propagation, without responsibilty for the training of children. ”

“ And it has been, perforce, to the economist alone that society has had to turn for instruction. In the present state of knowledge there has been absolutely no science of society in any larger sense than his, to which the world could look for help and guidance in the problems with which it is struggling in a kind of agony that gives a note to the entire literature of our period.
To turn from history and economics to professional philosophy is only to find the same lesson repeated. ”

“ A quickened social consciousness is assuming the rigt, the privilege, the duty of life—"life more abundant," in the individual and in society. As never before in the history of society, we are anticipating problems of social order, and proposing solutions, instead of being satisfied to explain solutions after the centuries have worked them out. We are learning to formulate what we want as freely in civics as in mechanics. We are learning to set ourselves in as businesslike fashion in the one field as in the other to the task of getting our wants supplied. ”

“ Men's social wants seemed, a century ago, to be potentially assured, with the conquest of political freedom. Social man today finds political freedom, without industrial security, a delusion, a fraud, and an insult.
The latest phase of man is thus a new order of fact. Scholarship cannot contemplate these facts without finding itself face to face with the tardily unsealed order of nature—"Be thou a forceful part of that continuous cosmic enterprise which forever unmakes the things of today to recreate them in the things of tomorrow!" ”

“ It is hard for the ordinary man to understand that a railroad corporation is not held to be above the law-making power, when a state law regulating railroads within the state is declared unconstitutional by a United States court, on the ground that the law is a regulation of commerce. Yet, in spite of such afflictions to the lay mind, the accepted rules of law are sufficiently explicit to leave no proper doubt that in theory corporations are held to be accountable to the people for their stewardship of public trusts. ”

“ We have boasted of "rights," but the suspicion is rife that the majority of men have never understood a tithe of their rights, and that the rights which our institutions assure are possibly not more than a tithe of the goods upon which complete men will insist. We have appealed to "ethics," but at this late day there is no more open question than. What is ethical? We declare the sacredness of life, but men are asking, What is life? What does life presume? What does life involve? What should life contain? To whom does the prerogative of life belong? ”

“ In the second place, let us encourage legislation that shall prescribe the lines within which corporate action must recognize public interest. I admit that this is only another way of saying: Let us face the necessity of evolving superior citizens in order that there may be superior legislators. In other words let public opinion register itself in authoritative public standards as rapidly as the social consciousness becomes intelligent. ”

“ The ultimate social fact—man—is a fact whose many phases and many potencies already enter with new powers into the social equation. Man always wanted life and liberty and happiness, but never did these wants mean so many things to any man as they do to some men today. Never did the mass of men bring within the sweep of their wants so large a fraction of that which complete man will demand and obtain. ”

“ I am sure of this, that so long as men agree to maintain society, they will more and more agree that the question of private or corporate or public control of the industrial opportunities upon which the good of all depends is in the last resort a question of administration. Is the public welfare most likely to be subserved by public or by proxy management? ”

“ Some may think that people who have nothing and earn nothing, cannot suffer from the burden of taxation; but this is a mistake, since those who support them could afford to supply their wants more liberally if there were no taxes to be paid. There is not a man or woman or child in the whole city who has not a personal interest in preventing unnecessary taxation. There is not a single individual who is too rich or too poor to be benefited by any effort which will tend to secure the utmost wisdom and economy in the collection and expenditure of every penny that goes into the city treasury. ”

“ That unity of life now everywhere visible throughout the lower sciences, which causes them to run into each other at every point, and which renders strict lines of demarcation between them almost impossible, is nowhere to be found in the higher branches of knowledge. The workers in many of them still live in an earlier world of ideas which has long since passed away elsewhere. Unconscious of how the world has been moving, some of them seem even anxious to tell us that they know nothing of any other science, and that they desire to know nothing. ”

“ The first lesson in political economy of which I have any distinct recollection was to the effect that no government can carry on any industrial enterprise as profitably as it can be managed by individuals. As an abstract proposition this may be true. It cannot at present be proved or disproved. It has been abundantly demonstrated, however, that governments can and do carry on some very important classes of business with financial, political and social advantages to the whole public, incomparably superior to those obtainable previously from private performance of the same service. ”

“ All our contemporary discontent with social institutions and conditions runs back to the fact that the present generation is trying to make dead trunks of social ideas bear living fruit of social force. We are trying to feed the humanity of today from the desiccated stalks of yesterday's conceptions. All the familiar denunciations of social evils, and of the individuals or classes that are said to cause or aggravate them, point to the one radical fact which men have hardly begun to admit, viz., that the words around which our civilization has rallied no longer convey our ultimate ideas ”

“ The most definite and workable definition of a semi-public corporation that I can propose or discover is that it is every corporation which is not public. The public corporation is distinguished in kind from other corporations by the fact that it is inclusive and involuntary. All other corporations are exclusive, but at the same time they are related to the members of the body politic, because whatever they do sooner or later in some measure affects these fellow-citizens. ”

“ On the contrary, the aim of science should be to show the meaning of familiar things, not to construct a kingdom for itself in which, if familiar things are admitted, they are obscured under an impenetrable disguise of artificial expression. If sociology is to be of any influence among practical men, it must be able to put its wisdom about things that interest ordinary men in a form which men of affairs will see to be true to life. ”

“ If it were our duty to believe that the thing which now is must always be, it would be treason to describe desirable things not yet achieved. If, before pointing out possibilities of improvement, it were necessary to know the whole process by which the actual may be changed into the rational, hope would be forever dumb. If approach to completer justice in future society involved resort to ameliorative injustice in present society, we might well distrust prophecies of progress. ”

“ Many an evolutionist can trace the processes of progress in every moment of history except the present. It is neither consistent nor intelligent to act as though evolution terminates in us. The things of today are but crude products which yesterday began to shape, which a thousand tomorrows will mould toward perfection. A primary inference from the law of evolution as we now read it is the decree to every intelligent person: "Apply today's force to make tomorrow's fact!"
Men's instincts accept more frankly than their intellects the provisional and mediate character of present institutions. ”

“ Such an institution as feudalism, for example, served its purpose as a division of labor between warriors and magistrates on the one hand, and tillers of the soil on the other. When the world grew more compact, when causes of war affected larger populations in common, when peaceful intercourse rather than perpetual feud was the obvious interest of great peoples, the feudal machinery became first cumbrous, then obstructive, then oppressive. ”