In the report of the first of a series of lectures on sex hygiene recently given to fathers and mothers in the public school buildings of Chicago, we find the lecturer saying: "The American mothers are unable to nurse their children for the necessary nine months. This is the cause of all the infant mortality we hear so much about." And it is to the economic conditions of "the last fifty years" that this deplorable state of things is ascribed. Now persons who are conversant with mortality statistics, either at first hand or through the columns of the newspapers, know that while it is true that "we hear so much about" infant mortality, what we hear is not that it is increasing but that it is declining—declining in the City of New York especially, at a rate so steady and so rapid as would have been pronounced incredible a quarter of a century ago. But the mothers who were drinking in the lecturer's words were led to believe that our modern society is responsible for an ever-increasing slaughter of the innocents. Nor is this an isolated case, either in regard to the particular subject concerned, or to questions of social welfare generally. The mere fact that the evil of avoidable infant mortality is dwelt upon in our time as never before was taken by this lecturer—and has been taken by others—as meaning that that evil is growing ever worse; whereas the real reason of its prominence is precisely that it is now for the first time being hopefully and successfully attacked by comprehensive and systematic efforts. And this substitution of the assertion that an evil is growing worse for the mere fact that it exists, so far from being uncommon, is met with in connection with almost every branch of social-betterment agitation.

One of the most striking manifestations of this was furnished by Alfred Russel Wallace in his book, Social Environment and Moral Progress, which appeared shortly before his death. "It is not too much to say," he declares, "that our whole system of society is rotten from top to bottom, and the social environment as a whole, in relation to our possibilities and claims, is the worst that the world has ever seen." In support of this assertion the book as a whole does nothing but present in eloquent language various deplorable features of our existing civilization; apparently the idea that in order to justify his conclusion comparison with former states of the world is essential hardly crosses Mr. Wallace's mind. That it did obtrude itself in a measure appears, however, from the devotion of one little chapter to the subject of "Indications of Increasing Moral Degradation." These indications are three in number; and not only are they pitifully inadequate for the support of his statement, but his interpretation of the statistics cited, in regard to the matter to which he gives most prominence, can be easily shown to be utterly superficial and inconclusive. The three matters to which the statistics relate are deaths from alcoholism, suicide, and deaths of infants soon after birth. The increase of deaths from alcoholism in the past half-century is given the leading place. This increase has been, roughly, 25 per million inhabitants—from 40 per million annually to 65 per million annually; and it does not occur to Mr. Wallace that modern advances in medicine and sanitation may account for far more than 25 drunkards per million inhabitants who in former times would have been carried off by all sorts of diseases but who now survive long enough to die of "alcoholism." The temper of the man of science wholly fails to assert itself in the weighing of facts which his zeal as a reformer impels him to view in the light of a preconceived judgment.

Some recent phenomena in the field of public discussion in our country have shown on a large scale the kind of loose thinking in regard to facts which is at the bottom of the exaggerating spirit. When the McNamara dynamitings were revealed, a wave of excitement swept off their feet a large part of our whole humanitarian army. They had been so filled with the idea that we are living in a strange and awful time, that this series of crimes, committed in secret by members of a single trade union, was acclaimed as something new under the sun, a fearful sign and portent. The tremendous railroad riots and burnings of 1877; the anarchist troubles at Chicago, culminating in the Haymarket massacre; the widespread and ominous railroad labor struggle of 1894, which took on an aspect bordering upon civil war—all these things were forgotten, and it was solemnly asserted that we were confronted with a crisis quite without precedent or parallel, which demanded a new and radical examination of the very foundations of the social order. The swift spread over the country a year ago of the notion that starvation wages for women were, if not the sole, at least incomparably the chief, cause of female vice and degradation, was a somewhat similar phenomenon. One that at first sight presents no resemblance to it, but which strikes me as a peculiarly interesting manifestation of the same thing, is to be found in the domain of ordinary politics. A leading feature of the Progressive crusade was the identification of the "reactionaries"—the business world and the conservative newspaper press—with bossism and the corruption of politics generally. Mr. Roosevelt continually talked as though there were a cynical alliance between all the leading New York newspapers on the one hand, and Murphy and Barnes and the whole system of political corruption on the other; and doubtless there were millions of good people who completely forgot not only that a large proportion of these papers had persistently fought for civil service reform and tariff reform and election reform, but that they were waging an uncompromising war against the whole brood of bosses, whether Republican or Democratic, for many years during which Mr. Roosevelt was an excellent friend of Quay, got along very fairly with Platt, and did not find it in his heart even to lift a finger against the unspeakable Addicks.

Now all these various forms of exaggeration, distortion and misrepresentation converge in our time upon one object, contribute toward one common effect. Whatever be the purpose held in view by any particular reformer or exhorter, however far from his desire it may be to foment dangerous unrest or to promote a revolutionary propaganda, every extravagant picture that he draws of the depravity or the wretchedness of our time inevitably does produce these effects, and that upon a large scale. There are a great number of people of all ages, and especially of young people, who, without having thought deeply upon the problems of society, feel about them very deeply indeed. Many of them attest the sincerity of their interest by useful and noble work; the world has certainly never seen anything like so widespread a devotion of the energies of young men and women among the fortunate classes to the betterment of the lot of the unfortunate. A far greater number, without devoting themselves to such work, are stirred by the same emotions of sympathy and good-will. Upon these minds and hearts the depiction of evils associated with the existing economic order produces more than a mere transient pang of distress or regret. What is wrong in the world they do not merely deplore; they wish to set it right. And if the wrong is so pervasive, the evil so deep-seated, the depravity so general, as these manifold presentments make it out, what more natural than that they should sum up the whole case in the conviction that the existing order of society is a failure, and be ready to welcome almost any experiment that holds out the promise of something better?

It is for this reason, above all others, that he who recklessly or thoughtlessly distorts or exaggerates the facts of our time assumes a grievous responsibility. Even in regard to each particular question, the element of degree may be of vital consequence: what measures ought to be taken, what objections ought to be weighed, what collateral consequences ought to be ignored, in regard to such a matter as the minimum wage, or unemployment insurance, or child labor, may depend essentially both upon the present extent of the evil and upon the influences already acting upon it. But it is the larger question that is most deeply involved, the question whether the institutions and traditions which have been slowly built up by ages of human effort and trial and struggle are to be thrown aside as worthless. To the reformer bent upon his own specific purpose it may seem a venial offense to depict poverty as increasing, when it is really diminishing, so long as there is poverty; to represent the press of the country in general as deliberately suppressing ordinary news of public affairs, so long as there are some newspapers which suppress some kinds of news; to talk of two millions of children linked to the belts of factories and mills or pining underground in mines, so long as there is child labor; to speak of avoidable infant mortality as an evil peculiar to our time though the reverse is the truth, so long as there is infant mortality which is avoidable. But between seeing these things as they are and seeing them as they are not, the difference is not trifling, but fundamental. For upon that difference turns the whole issue between conservative improvement and reckless innovation. The world is full of persons who are eager enough to prove all things, but who seem to forget the other half of the injunction. If we apply the probe carelessly, if we report what we find untruthfully, how can we hope to hold fast that which is good?

NATURAL ARISTOCRACY

One evening not long since, in a certain New York club of authors and scholars, the conversation turned, as it is so accustomed to turn, on the politics of the day; and we were astonished when one of the circle, a distinguished student of sociology well-known for his radical opinions, said with conviction and emphasis that we were talking of little things and that the one great question of the day was whether a democratic society could develop a natural aristocracy. By chance I had with me that night an excellent new book on The Political Philosophy of Burke, by Prof. John MacCunn, late of the University of Liverpool, and as we left the club I showed it to one of my fellow writers with a word of commendation. "Ah," he said, handing it back unopened, "Burke! he's dead, isn't he?" Well, Burke, I dare say, is dead for us, as so many other great memories have perished, and Lord Morley (plain John Morley then, a fairly practical statesman) was indulging in the usual illusion of the biographer when, just twenty-five years ago, he closed his luminous volume with the prophecy that "the historic method, fitting in with certain dominant conceptions in the region of natural science, is bringing men round to a way of looking at society for which Burke's maxims are exactly suited; and it seems probable that he will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years than he has been within the whole of the last eighty." The historic method has an odd way of discrediting the authority of history, and certainly in the lustrum since Lord Morley's predicted score of years the world of Lloyd George and Mr. Roosevelt has not been referring abundantly to Burke's maxims. Yet, with the words of my radical sociological friend in my ears, I could not help reflecting on the coincidence that Professor MacCunn, a writer thoroughly imbued with modern ideas, should have led the whole of Burke's political philosophy up to the same question of natural aristocracy. "For Burke's feet," he says, "were never on surer ground than when, as we have seen, he argued that a civil society, by the very conditions of social struggle and growth, must needs evolve 'a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.'" And then, being sufficiently trained in the historic method, he proceeds to show how Burke entirely missed the real problem that faces society to-day in its effort to create such a leadership—as if human nature had first sprung into existence with the Reform Bill.