Page:Gilman human-work 1904.pdf/17

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CHAPTER ONE
7

so desires, amass enough knowledge in these lapping sciences to appall the uninitiated; but a mere practical farmer can learn enough of the nature and habits of hens to insure a profitable supply of eggs, without over-taxing his brain. There may be fields of sociological science quite beyond the average mind, and rightly left to the learned specialist; but that is no reason why we should not learn enough of the nature and habits of society to insure a more profitable and pleasant life.

With our fertility of resource and high attainments in skill, knowledge, power, and their material product, it is strange indeed that we have made so little progress in the management of our social processes. The civilisation natural to our age is conspicuously retarded by ignorance, disease, crime, poverty, and other disagree-able anachronisms. These things no more belong to this period of civilisation because they coexist with it than do the Bushman and Hottentot because they co-exist with it, or than the vermiform appendix belongs to our stage of physiological development because it still exists in it—a mischievous rudiment. Our sociological rudiments cause us increasing pain.

The growing social consciousness of our times is most keenly stirred by a sense of pain. We are beginning to feel the great common processes of human life; but we feel them, at first, only when they hurt. Our individual distresses we have always felt; and have voiced our anguish and resentment more and more loudly as civilisation progressed. Earlier man—and in particular the unhappy savage, with his unavoid-

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