arose, what remedies were
applied or sought to be applied, and with what result,--to treat all
this with due reference to the whole social and intellectual evolution
of which it formed a part, may well call forth the powers of our
acutest and most thoroughgoing inquirers, and will, when it is done,
give essential data for some of the most vitally important problems of
the day. This is what I understand by an application of the scientific
spirit to social and political problems. We cannot try experiments, it
is said, in historical questions. We cannot help always trying
experiments, and experiments of vast importance. Every man has to try
an experiment upon himself when he chooses his career; and the results
are frequently very unpleasant, though very instructive. We have to be
our own experiments. Every man who sets up in business tries an
experiment, ending in fortune or in bankruptcy. Every strike is an
experiment, and generally a costly one. Every attempt at starting a new
charitable organisation, or a new system of socialism or co-operation,
is an experiment. Every new law is an experiment, rash or otherwise.
And from all these experiments we do at least collect a certain number
of general observations, which, though generally consigned to
copybooks, are not without value. What is true, however, is that we
cannot try such experiments as a man of science can sometimes try in
his laboratory, where he can select and isolate the necessary elements
in any given process, and decide, by subjecting them to proper
conditions, how a definite question is to be answered. Our first
experiments are all in the rough, so to speak, tried at haphazard, and
each involving an indefinite number of irrelevant conditions. But there
is a partial compensation. We cannot tabulate the countless experiments
which have been tried with all their distracting varieties. Yet in a
certain sense the answer is given for us. For the social structure at
any period is in fact the net product of all the experiments that have
been made by the individuals of which it is and has been composed.
Therefore, so far as we can obtain some general views of the successive
changes in social order which have been gradually and steadily
developing themselves throughout the more noisy and conspicuous but
comparatively superficial political disturbances, we can detect the
true meaning of some general phenomena in which the actors themselves
were unconscious of the determ