The Sedalia weekly bazoo. [volume] (Sedalia, Mo.) 187?-1904, 1884-10-28


stating this mission in general way,
the writer discusses it as applicable to
our modern ideas and workings of
social science. This branch of science
he says, "has concerned itself largely
in our own generation with the rela.
tons of capital to labor, in the i'm
provement of mems homes and streets,
of prisons and almshouses and
hospitals. One Of the most encourage
ing features of the social progress of
our time has been the hearty and
often generous interests which land
lords and capitalists. men of the
various professions, have shown in
bringing every latest scientific dircov-
cry to bear upon the practical eleva-
ton of the poor, and the physical and
intellectual improvement of the less
favored. The immense sums of
money spent for placing educational
advantages within the reach of these
masses who spend their lives in daily
toll, and the sums, scarcely less vast,
which, in our mother country, if not
in our own, have been spent in build
ing model cottages and tenements,
and even factories, for the poor, is .
demonstration of this- But in all
this expenditure of money and wealth
there is often involved an experience
of discouragement which it is idle to
ignore. The classes who are most
benefited by these reforms do not
care for fcciai science. Model
dwellings and rules of hygiene are
equally distasteful and embarrassing
to them. If you appeal to them to
conform their lives to wiser rules of
cleanliness, temperance, frugality and
forecast, too often you appeal to them
in vain. Essays on light and drain
age and ventilation, which laboriously
you circulate among them, are left
unread. Even the most elaborate and
costly schemes for their advantage
fail of any practical effect. These
have Stunned homes involving rules
of decency, cleanliness and self re-
straint, which have been to them in.
tolerable, as they would have Stunned
a prison and the Peabody model ten
ements became the homes of the bet
ter class of skilled mechanics, and |
even of clergymen and other profess
sional men, by whom they were in no |
sense needed. In other words, no ar
gument of the science of sociology by |
itself was strong enough efficiently to |
reach the class to whom it was ad.
dressed"
The bishop wrote these words from
a very high point of vision, and much |
of what he says can have, by the
nature of the surroundings aud con-
ditions, very scant application to such
q city as our own. But still, there is
STOOD for thought" in these words
The application CT well recognized
and generally admitted principle in
s ,cial.science is no tlimited to the great
centers of trade, industry, capital and
its opposite. We have no long rows
of tenement houses with their hum
dreds of toilers, with women who
know nothing of the sweet influences
of home, with children clamorous for
the scant daily food and growing upl
untutored only in the school of
vice and unchecked in the practic of
the lessons there learned, but We
have, nevertheless, a broad field for
the practical application of Christian
ethics, in leavening the lump of social
life in our midst.
We desire to emphasize the word
practical" Glittering generalities
are not the thing needed. The
of Aristotle may have
suited the schoolmen of the middle
ages, but in this day of dollars and
cents, when men are rated by their
ability to add to the general wealth
Of Q community, rather than BY their