Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Methods of Social Advance: Short Studies in Social Practice
No small part of our indecision and failure in dealing with social difficulties is due to our lack of any clearly conceived social purpose. Our real purpose, I take it, is to make and keep our people competent. We would add to their ability, energy, and resources, strengthen their affections, and increase their pleasure in a healthy, robust existence; and, as we do this, it would follow, as the night the day, that their power of preserving their independence in all the ordinary contingencies of life and in the strain of hard times would increase pro portionally.
It follows, further, that to make the people more com petent our appeal must be made, not to their weakness, but to their strength, however elemental or undisciplined that strength may be. We must add strength to strength. This view is of vital importance. It affects the whole question of relief and the use of means. Relief or even increased wage or income will not help the people (of whatever class they be), but will rather weaken them, if it does not coincide with some movement on their part which makes for better social habit. In this, and not in any new form of dependence, does the remedy lie. All the experience of that long history of the enfranchisement of the poorer classes from system after system of social control and eleemosynary or statutory serfdom enforces this conclusion; and, so far as we can yet judge them by results, the experience of German, colonial, and other schemes for the new dependence of the infirm and the aged tells the same tale.
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