Morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven [Conn.]) 1848-1894, 1885-02-16
Monday, February 16, 1855.
SOCIAL PROBLEMS.

man Smyth-What is Fair Share of
Prohts2-The Relation of Capital and
Labor.
Following is the discourse in full deliver
ed by Rev. DIR. Newman Smyth yesterday
forenoon at Center church:
What profit hath man of all his labor which he
taketh under the sun Eco. 1, 3.
Suppose that the machinery of steamship
is not working as smoothly as might be wish
ed. The screw at one moment tears the wa
ter, at another barely serves to keep steerage-
way upon the ship. The engine frets and
grinds. Different persons who are concerned
III the safety and progress of the ship may be
conceived as regarding that laboring machin-
cry in the following ways: One person might
say to himself and few others, things can
not run on long in this way without disaster
let us secure the life preservers, and when
the disaster which must come shall come, we
will look out for ourselves and divide what
ever we may find left of the cargo upon the
rocks. A second person might say, it is true
things are not working as well as they might;
there is an occasional chafng and grinding
but we have always had good luck thus far,
and SO long as there is no immediate danger
ahead, we sh al not borrow trouble, but con-
tinue dancing in the cabin. A third person
of that ships crew might be conceived as
looking into the engine room, and delivering
discourse upon the perfect engine of the
future. He might claim that disaster is only
a question of time unless the present kind of
engine, with its thrust back and forth be-
tween two dead points, can be transformed
into the perfect rotary engine of his ideal
But the fourth man, of practical common
sense as we'll as of good will to all his
fellow-passengers, would quietly observe
the engine at its work notice jour
mails We're heating, upon what bearings were
thrown excessive strains, where waste of pow
Ell might be stopped, or little oil would pre-
frio 7 in
these words the positions of different people
towards the present constitution of society,
and the progress of mankind. The first man
mentioned, who watches eagerly for the hour
when society shall go to pieces, and the spoils
after the wreck be divided, is the Anarchist.
He would be willing to see innocent persons
drown, provided the rich cargo of civilization
shall be redistributed. The second person
represents the easy, Indifferent class of citi-
zens. Occasionally their nerves may be dis
turbed by some unusually violent Earring of
the social machinery, but ordinarily they do
not care. When thrown into momentary
alarm they become violent in their express
sions concerning what needs to he done. In
the case of these two classes, the anarchists
| and the social indiferentists, we have anoth-
er illustration of the old sdage, that extremes
meet; for neither of them are helpers to hui
man progress, and each alike, although from
opposite quarters, furnish material for future
civil disorlssand disaster. Social indiffer-
| entism on The part of the good is so much
dry fuel for the sparks of the bad. Read any
of the papers of the social democrats, and
you can hardly fail to notice how the indif-
ferentisnl of the rich or the educated becomes
a weapon in their hands for the excitement
of popular prejudice and passion. The eff
feet of social indifferentism among those who
ought to be interested in all social progress
is indeed more to be dreaded than the posi-
BILE acts of handful of wild schemers, or
criminal trifiers with dynamite.
The third person in my comparison, the
man with the plan of perfect rotary engine
in his head, into which he would change,
piece by piece the existing machinery, repre-
sents the socialist pure and simple. He has
an idea of the cooperative commonwealth, p"
which shall work without any dead points in
the distribution of social force, in which all
jarring and friction between different parts
of society shall be reduced to an almost ap-
preciable minimum, if indeed he has not
at last discovered the secret of perpetual
social motion. 1--WE Socialists have been
born in the world" says Mr.. ,Grunlund, "a
guarantee that society will go forward, not
was claimed to be fulfllment of that dream
of mechanics the perfect rotary engine. Even
to my unskilled eye, however, there were
noticeable points of waste and future trouble
in its working; but was ssrenely told that
| measures were being devised to prevent the
difficulties. / have since neither heard of
that engine, nor of the fortune which was to
be reaped from it. "The Cooperative Com
monwealth, - or, as I should call it, the per-
feet rotary social engine, is beyond the pow
ers of human nature. Only omniscience
could construct it, or work it.
The fourth and last person of my
parable is the man who is neither
alarmed and careless he has no fine scheme;
he simply tries to determine the points of
grinding and waste, to locate evils, and to do
what he can to make things work together
for good i'll this world.
Last Sunday 1 closed with an enumeration
of alleged industrial evils and dangers. The
next thing for us to do, if we would have the
wisdom of the practical social engineer, is to
locate these evils as closely as we can. But
in the attempt to locate existing evils precise
ly, we shall have to part company with the
mere social declaimer, and the whole tribe OF
political demagogues Before thinking OF
remedies we should seek to discover exactly
where in our present complex industrial ma
chinery the dead points are. This problem
of the location of social waste and woes we
may approach from two different directions
the purely economical and the moral and
we should rest satisfied with no conclusions
in which both lines of investigation do not
meet. The economist takes up these ques-
tions as pure social mathematician he has
to figure out in terms of value the equations
of human life. Men, women and children
for the time being may be to him simply as
the letters Z, y and z, in his problem of in
dustrial figures and forces Then the social
philosopher takes up the worked-out values of
the economists tables, and the figures live
before his eye with human interest. He
comes from the homes of men, and he must
interpret the values of the economist in
terms of human happiness or want The
social philosopher, the Christian friend of
4. Ill L.
shall not violate in his philanthropy the So
ciAl laws to be deduced from them; but he
will bring to the question, and carry through
its discussion, the instincts of justice and
the sympathies of humanity, and he will
never rest satisfied with any existing status
in which a mercy and truth are not
met together.
1t is not my duty as q preacher of the gos-
pei to teach economic science; but it is the du-
ty of the ministers and disciples of him who
had compassion on the multitude to apply
economic science in their teachings and lives
to the needs of men in this present life
In order that we may locate more definite
ly the evils alleged, let us first be sure that
we do not exaggerate them. We shall find
wrongs enough in the world to be righted
without any exaggeration of the evil tenden
cies of things. Mr.. Henry George, with a
sincerity which is pathetic, wrote q book in
which he assumed that progress 10 making
poverty, that wealth is gained at the cost of
increasing poverty. The fact that this book
has had a sale which above that of any other
recent book might be compared with the
first sale of ''Uncle Toms Cabin" indicates
the extent of the existing feeling of discon
tent with the results of modern civilization.
Many hopes of humanity have been disap-
pointed in the apparent results of the indus
trial revolution wrought by machinery. But
now the economists and statisticians are fol-
lowing closely after Mr.. George, and they
prove that his fundamental assumption that
increase of wealth has been accompanied by
increase of poverty is illusion. Mr.. Rae
shows by careful statistical comparisons that
Mr.. George has made the mistake which a
traveller might make who should look out of
the window of rapidly moving train, and
conclude that train advancing more slowly
on parallel track was going backwards, and
then should coil himself up in the corner and
evolve the reason from his own thoughts
Notwithstanding the fact that the diffusion
of the gain of civilization has not been as
general as we should wish, still, according to
the same authority, these two statements
can be proved of the condition of the labor
ing class in England first, that the standard
of living has advanced, and, secondly, that
the proportion of the population who are not
able to rise to the improved standard of liv-
ing has diminished. Now, for instance, to
be without pair of shoes would be mark
OF extreme indulgence; it was the common
Ii