Albion Woodbury Small

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is better work for scholars than criticism of men and measures from a distance. It is timely to proclaim a different ideal for American scholars from that which has dominated the learned world for the last fifty years. May American scholarship never so narrow itself to the interests of scholars that it shall forfeit its primacy among the interests of men! ”

“ Modern thought assumes that the fixed factors in human conditions are insignificant as compared with the elements that may be determined by agreement. Popular judgment is just now intoxicated with the splendid half truth that society is what men choose to make it. Popular social philosophy in its countless forms is today unanimous in speculation about institutional rearrangement without due estimate of human limitations. ”

“ Politics never made stranger bedfellows than would straightway consort together in compelling these anarchists to resume allegiance to society. In the face of a common peril, proletarians would forget their jealousy of capital, and employer and employed, railroad manager and railroad operative, banker, merchant, walking-delegate and contractor would join forces against a species of monopoly menacing to all alike. The view which nations take of refusal by a people to continue trade relations with other peoples is sanctioned by the same tacit assumption. ”

“ Whoever regards it, whether as claimant or critic, to be merely a species of literature, or the ideal of a few leaders of thought and action, or the copyrighted effusions of any particular school of theorists, or any mere method of work, or the fad of the fashionables, so totally misconceives the movement as to be incapable of seriously entertaining the idea of any vital relationship between it and the church, on the common ground of Christianity. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Yet if the minister lose his charge, or the lawyer his clients, or the doctor his patients, or the teacher his pupils, neither his skill, nor his learning, nor his need gives him any legal claim upon a chance to work worthily of his manhood in his own support. He is in a world that is parcelled out among others. The world has the same attractions for him that it has for them. He might put the world to as worthy uses as they, but other men have bonded it to themselves. ”

“ Man, tugging to master the contents of newly surcharged consciousness, is the supreme fact which today's scholarship encounters. We cannot deal with this fact without "forgetting 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. ”

“ Security of right to be on the earth and to use the full measure of personal power to gain happiness, is not yet completely assured in human society. Every human being who belongs in society at all belongs there as a citizen, not as a suppliant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Unless they have a monopoly of such fundamental and circumstantial and comprehensive social philosophy, accredited by every pertinent scientific sanction, many men exercising the office of public teacher today are grievously sinning against their fellows by aggressive and inflammatory sociological dogmatism. Science makes common cause with every other human interest when it insists that there must be adequate investigation and formulation of the conditions of human welfare before there can be any credible programmes for the wholesale promotion of welfare. ”

“ Once more, it is well for all that some men have genius to organize capital, and labor, and natural resources for manufacture on an enormous scale. It is a very stupid man who would begrudge to such organizers large rewards for their work. But men are beginning to see that the merits of the organizers of industry, as well as of the inferior laborers, are frequently credited to stockholders. The claims of stockholders to surplus values, after market rates of interest, and rent, and wages are paid, may possibly represent a presumed service to society which stockholders as such do not perform. ”

“ In the first place some men are surely forgetting that even in the fundamental law of civilized states there is no such idea as absolute ownership by individuals. In theory, approached in practice whenever necessity dictates, the state may impoverish every individual of its membership, to defend national honor and national existence. Not goods alone are thus subject to social draft, but no citizen can call even his life his own when his nation demands his service. The idea of absolute ownership is therefore at best an accommodation. ”

“ Now, without attempting to draw a final and specific line between things which may be owned and things which the common interest forbids men to hold, except upon certain enforceable terms of use and release, I argue that we have sufficient reason today for beginning to challenge the rationality of the prevailing extension of the concession of ownership.
Let us resort to the homely precept: "It is lawful for a man to do what he will with his own." ”

“ We all understand that if a farmer is forced from his land, the law allows him no claim to any other land except a life lease of a place at the poor farm. We understand that if a weaver or a switchman loses his job no law compels another employer to hire him. Few men outside the wage-earning class have fairly taken in the meaning of this familiar situation. ”

“ Back of all formal contracts or statutes or institutions, therefore, is this unwritten law of civilization that every citizen shall be a public servant. The cycles of social growth, arrest, decay, have always illustrated in turn observance, neglect and violation of this law. Men and institutions have begun by serving their day and generation in a socially needful way. They have sometimes ended by making their day and generation serve them in a socially harmful way. ”

“ Dives and Lazarus are no more alike in craving food and drink when hungry and thirsty, than they are in the ambition of each to stand erect and be a man. In many cases the modern Lazarus knows better than Dives how to appraise the relative worth of material and spiritual goods. The keen sting of modern social contrasts is not in the fact that Dives may bathe in champagne while the men who sweat for his dividends can hardly bathe at all. ”

“ Like all other enlightened people in the world, Chicago citizens are eager for comfort and culture, for the enjoyment of music and art, for the benefits of high standards of honor, for the security that comes from progress in genuine learning, morality and religion. But scholar, priest, preacher, philanthropist, politician and financier are frankly agreed in Chicago that however desirable the flowers and fruits of human development may be, there is no short-cut to the possession of them by the average man ”

“ If a bookkeeper, or salesman, or teacher, or doctor, or lawyer, or minister be thrown out of employment, with no title to land, and no property in stocks controlling natural agencies, he is literally a man without a country. Whatever his personal ability to extract the supply of his wants from nature's resources, the opportunity is closed. He has no stock in nature. The resources of the world are divided up among the members of the propertied caste, and the remainder of men depend upon the members of this caste for permission to get a share of nature by labor in improving nature. ”

“ If it is contrary to public policy for a father to have liberty while living to put an incompetent son in charge of a business which it is the father's duty to manage, it is also and much more subversive of public interest to establish for that son an owner's right in such management in case of the father's death. The only ground upon which these propositions may be challenged is the presumption that a poor social device is the best possible device ”

“ The most impressive lesson which I have learned in the vast sociological laboratory which the city of Chicago constitutes is that action, not speculation, is the supreme teacher. If men will be the most productive scholars in any department of the social sciences, let them gain time and material by cooperating in the social work of their community. ”