The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1889-07-11
THE TEACHERS COUNCIL.
Professor Small on the Dynamics Of
Social Progress.

BETHLEHEM, N. H., July 10.-The third
session of the American Institute of Instruc-
tion was opened at $50 this morning with
devotional exercises. The first address of
the morning was on "Manual Training and
Industrial Education" by Mr.. Henry q.
Hardon, master of Shurtleff School, Boston.
The topic was discussed by Messrs. Frank
A. hill, master of the Cambridge, Mass,
High School, and G. 7. Fletcher, agent of
the State Board of Education, Northamp-
ton, Mass, and others. After the rendition
of several musical selections, Prof. Albion
W. Small of Colby University, Waterville,
Me-, read paper on 'The Dynamics of So
cial Progress" He said:
Social progress, so far as it is not the re-
sultant of physical action or something
closely analogous, is the reorganization of
human relations by more or less intelligently
directed efforts to exchange discomfort Of
want seeks safety repression seeks freedom
helplessnesS invents resource; unreaSOn
searches after nationality; wrong creates de-
mand for right.
The substitution of the better for the worse
may proceed either by infnisessimal incre-
ments or by seismic upheavals of society.
The evolution of the modern city, with its
pavements, drainage, lights, conspicuously
designated streets, parks, water works. rap
i'd transit and communication, its sanitary,
police and charitable organizations, its grad
ed schools and its ungraded churches, is an
Illustration of the former process. The his
tOrical revolutions, from the exchange of the
Judges for kings to the exchange of emper-
ors for presidents, and depotism for consti-
tutionalism are instances Of the latter
The most radical social reorganizations
are not the devices Of individuals, they are
the result OF change of mind, re-aiming
of desire, q redirecting of effort by associated
units. All revolutions, from discharges of
thunder bolts to dethronements of dynasties,
are evolutions. Ideallsts are the social
nerve centres, both sensory and motor. The
idealiSts of whom | am thinking are men
who have thought out something more per-
feet which they are impatient to put in the
place of something less perfect Social
progress under Democratic government in
wolves first the development of the popular
talent for misery, and second or conversely,
the development of popular idealism The
enlightened desp0tism which Aristotle pro-
posed and which Frederick the Great in a
measure realized, may organize and direct
meagre minorities can comprehend. Dom
Ocracies can progress only when conscious
ness of misery and Imagination Of means of
relief sway masses numerous enough to con-
troll a permanent balance of power; nay in
many cases intelligent and determined
idealists must compose an actual majority.
The Conqueror could nationalize the land of
England by coup d'etat at Salisbury; but
land leagues, and race enthusiasm, and
humanitarian sympathy and support in
from the Democratic Empire OF Great
Britain deliverance of the Irish peasant
from the thraldom of rack-rent. Our nation
in arms could destroy the legal institution OF
negro slavery, but our nation in peace has
not so much as heard that there Is the eco
nomic institution of industrial slavery,
more inexorable and more goddess than the
slavery we have destroyed.
In order that society may will to progress
and may achieve in the direction of its will
it must know itself. Political quackery will
continue to dose us with the nostrum OF pop
ular education, compounded of reading, writ
ing and arithmetic, until we learn that such
prescription no more strikes at the root OF
matter than injections of morphine cure the
opium habit. The fulcrun of social progress
is consciousness of misery distributed among
the social atoms. The desirable misery. re-
suits from perception that any truth affect
Ing human welfare is disregarded in the So
cial order. That man is spiritual being,
but in the vast aggregate. confined by con-
vention and satanic contrlvance rather than
by necessity to the existence OF thing; that
man is a mortal being, with no right to
sensuous qualification which limits his or an
others spiritual development. or annuls or
weakens moral obligations; that man Is an
| Industrial being, designed by faculty and
capacity to the exploitation of material re-
| source-nOt to the end that warehouse and
palace and bank vault may loom ana bulge
with material products or their representa-
tives, but that this footstool OF God may be-
come the footstool of race of men grown
| like to God that man is a political being, as
| sOciating with his kind not as gamesters con-
| gregate to plunder each other by comDina-
| tion of wit and chance, but constituted in
| nationality in order to find the means. which
would otherwise fail, to demonstrate spirit
ual worth and exert spiritual power; these
| are some of the knowledges which belong Of
| right to all men. Only through the under
| standing of these, with their context and
| their corrollaries, can men become suscepti-
BILE of that benign misery which is the pre-
| The task of social leadership is the crea-
| tion of profound social discomfort through
| the discovery and demonstration of human
| relations out of Joint. Ii this work is not
begun for the masses in III me common schools
| difficult to imagine that it can anywhere else
| be even attempted on an adequate scale. The
systematic evolution of higher from low
| er, a better from worse social order, can by
| no means be made so sure as by rescuing
some of the years wasted between the fifth
and the fifteenth upon sterile reading writ.
ing, arithmetic and geography, with little
grammar and physiology, and deyoting them
to moral and social philosophy!
| maintain that the MIND of child can
take in profounder truths about the structu.
raj facts Of society than our social systems
have ever allowed it to confront. A child
NAV learn about morals as exactly as about
muscles, at all events. He may understand
social as well as animal physiology. He
| might be made to comprehend the funda.
| mental relations between the divided and di
visor in the mill as well as between those in
the arithmetic.
Democracies must be able to discriminate
between pathological and physiological con
ditions. Whether or not private property II
land. for example, is normal or an abnor
mai social growth, ,San should ID be subject nt
more obscure tnan the relations of thu
body. 1t is these structural and functiona
| phenomena of society which are the proper
subject matter for democratic education
plead for broader outlook than we ha
bitually take over the field which our posi-