American Journal of Sociology (Sep. 1916) Vol. 22, No. 2. p. 159-176.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2763818
Sentimentality and Social Reform1
Arthur James Todd
The tragedies of leadership in social reform result in the main from failure to work out a practicable basis of partnership between ideas and sentiments. Men recognize theoretically that ideas always appear swaddled in feelings. But many of us go about the day's business apparently on the assumption that ideas are as clear-cut and unemotional as hammers or rifles. Hence our projects fail to capture men's hearts and imaginations. We have to recognize that after all reason in men is only the very tip of their iceberg of mental life. We live by our sentiments, even by our illusions. They furnish the real motive power which makes things go. They are at the bottom of our choices. And while educated choices are the prerequisite to any sort of social change worthy the name of progress, the process of education must include some canalizing of the sentiments. The reformer who does not include this in his program of good works is foredoomed to failure.
But it is notorious that in many of our fellow-citizens both sentiment and reason have been short-circuited into bathos and sentimentality. And the words "social reformer" have become almost an epithet of derision, because some would-be leaders with insufficient sand and iron in their systems have capitalized this tendency toward sickly softness, and, as a result, have scored personal successes with indecent haste, have scratched paths which could not be followed and which must be resurveyed and laid out at great cost and inconvenience. I asked a friend recently about the speech of a housing reformer she had been urged to hear. "It was too sticky-mouthed," was the curt comment. But it is that very stickiness and sweety-sweetness, or the "tear in the voice," that scoops in votes and money from certain sections of the population. Some people are organically drunk, or so nearly so, that the slightest whiff of sentimentality starts them reeling; and a big dose may induce delirium.
Since social reform must steer between the two dangers of cold, sterilized, depersonalized ideas and warm, saccharine, oily, oozy, intoxicating, overpersonalized sentimentalism, we must be sure that we recognize sentimentalism when we see it, and do not hit the wrong heads in the name of reason and clear thinking.
In the first place, enthusiasm is not sentimentality. George Meredith, the savage baiter of sentimentalists, remarked that "Nonsense of enthusiasts is very different from nonsense of ninnies." I doubt if any American would consider ex-President Taft as either soft-minded or tender toward the "sob-squad." But he said last year, in a notable address, " Give me misdirected fervor, wild theories, if only the sincere spirit of service is alive, because the hard experience of practical results will temper this into useful activity later." That is, the enthusiast is honest, but the sentimentalist will fudge the truth and stage a lie if it will snare the silly fowl he is after. Here we must beware of confusing the issue by accepting the distinction sometimes made2 between social reform as "passionate" and economic theory as "intellectual. Such reformers as Plato, More, or Comte were not passionate. The real distinction, if there be one, should be made between theories of social reform and economic theory; or between social reformers and economic reformers. To illustrate: protectionists, bimetallists, ship-subsidists, and laissez-faireists have been just as passionate in their way as are the most eloquent pleaders for "social justice" or eugenics, or single tax, or widows' pensions, or minimum-wage legislation. Professors of Greek defending some theory of interpretation have been known to fan up a pillar of fire equal to the most ardent enthusiasm of the most passionate social reformer. Human life is dynamic, and its calory value may be expressed equally in the field of theory or practice. If acrimony be counted a species of passionate negative enthusiasm, I challenge any fair-minded person to produce from the field of social reform any person or project betraying more ardor of passion or prejudice than is displayed by the critics or opponents of reform. Enthusiasm for social reform is no more reprehensible than enthusiasm over breeding a new strain of cattle or formulating a new theory of value. Constructive social reform ought to look upon itself and be looked upon merely as the administrative aspect of a developing body of economic and political laws. It must recognize the limitations imposed by those laws, and without hysteria. But at the same time it is quite appropriate for the reformer to see in these "laws' only relative fixity, and to accept them only as working conventions, as shore-marks of levels in the scientific and practical experiences of the past. This attitude of mind may be irreverent or heretical or contemptuous, with or without heat; but it is hardly to be called sentimental.
Neither will clear thinking confuse sentimentalism with ideals, dreams, or Utopias. No thoroughgoing Utopist was ever sentimental; the more radical and complete his Utopia the less he is open to the charge. To take only one test, no sentimentalist would for a second think of breaking up the family; on the contrary, he weeps at the idea of a hard-hearted juvenile-court judge separating a child from its drunken and wastrel parents. But every Utopist, from Plato and Campanella and More down to Sir Francis Galton and the eugenists, has advocated some more stringent form of social control over the family. The "practical man' frequently makes the mistake of classing the "dreamer" with the soft-hearts. But while dreams may be wrapped in emotion they are often as devoid of sentiment as a formal syllogism. Sentimentality never leaves a solid precipitate; but remember that every institution, every invention, every sober gray law was once a dream in the heart of some human being. The social reformer must dream and dream magnificently; the very poignancy of his dream stings him into the attempt to cast it into the mold of realized fact. Because he dreams while other men merely slop about in feeling or stumble into hasty action, he may come nearer scoring a bull's-eye on the target of truth. That is why Aristotle seems to have counted the poet more reliable than the historian as an interpreter of serried facts. The idealist, too, belongs rather with the dreamer and the Utopist than with the sentimentalists. It is a matter of surprise and regret that such a really great social scientist as Professor W. G. Sumner should have heaped contempt upon ideals as a motive factor in social development. For ideals are really the finished sketches by which social reconstruction is to be guided. Ideals, Sumner says, are illusions. But so is a tool, so is a house, so is science, so is history, if you take the trouble to analyze them far enough. Every man who counts for anything in the world is an idealist. He is a sentimentalist only if he fails to take his ideals seriously and uses the slap-stick or exposes his beating heart in order to wring a spasm of factitious feeling from his audience. The genuine social reformer demands social reconstruction, not because existing arrangements are out of joint with his particular ideal scheme, but because he believes he can show that it is possible to replace them by others more in harmony with existing human character and human resources. Indeed, it takes a sturdy heart to be a real idealist. It was no mean-spirited or defeated man who could write credo quia absurdum as the key to the program of revolutionary idealism laid down by the pioneers of the Christian church: Tertullian was no tender-minded "soft pedagogist."
Moreover, imagination is not sentimentalism. Sentimentality never raised a single human being one inch above his old level. But, we are told, "moral evolution has consisted almost wholly in the increasing liberation of the imagination." The social reformer must not hesitate to use his imagination. Indeed, if he is to succeed at all, it must be in large part because he can slip into the skins of his fellows and put himself in their places. He must master the new "psychology of attitudes, which in plain English means the ability to use the imagination as a guide in interpreting prejudices and preconceptions. As Mr. H. G. Wells points out, if we are going to arrest our present pretty clear drift toward revolution or revolutionary disorder, it must not be through training a governing class to get the better of an argument or the best of a bargain; it must be through laying hold of the imaginations of " this drifting, sullen, and suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the country." It takes imagination to lay hold of imagination. Sentimentality will not do it.
We may pass by with only incidental reference the obvious fact that much of conservatism is merely sentimental attachment to what is old and familiar: the dotard is always sentimental. The young radical may be wrong-headed and self-centered, but he is less likely, by contrast, to be soft. He may be dogmatic, uncompromising; he may fit exactly Peacock's satire and say to himself,
After careful meditation
And pronounced deliberation
On the various petty projects that have been shown,
Not a scheme in agitation
For the world's amelioration
Has a grain of common sense in it, except my own.
But the more dogmatic, the harder he is. Radicalism and heresy run the risk of degenerating into sentimentalism only when they, too, have been passed in the race and are about to be relegated to the shelves of conservative and accepted truth.
The "practical man," whether he be a social reformer or whether he decry meddling with the social order, is frequently if not always a bit of a sentimentalist, just as the dotard conservative and the self-made man and the amiable easy-going parent are sentimentalists; and for much the same reason. They all are inclined to drivel over their own pet virtues, to fondle them, to make them the ready excuse for certain ineptitudes in thinking or certain gross breaches of good taste.
It is precisely these practical conservative men and women who are so suspicious of preventive measures in the field of charitable relief. They sentimentalize over the maintenance of existing class lines and fear any move to eliminate the patron or to promote real independence and self-help. A sweet, pretty, friendly visitor, of the type that goes calling on the poor in a limousine, was discussing socialism recently with a student."Good heavens!" she cried, "I don't want any of this horrible socialism. If we get socialism I won't have any poor to visit.' Nero is still in our midst, stimulating his digestion by parading the poor before him. I hoped, evidently in vain, that we had buried the attempt to store up merit by practicing on the poor. It is just these parasites who have brought discredit upon the phrase "social service."' I confess a growing tendency in myself to delete it from my vocabulary, simply because it is so often a mixture of pious cant, meanness, cloudy vis on, and sentimentalism.
So far our analysis seems clear enough. But now comes a troop of questions not so easily answered. Is it sentimental to be interested in one's fellow-men? Is it possible really to love them, or at least to have some social regard for them, their rights, their interests? Or have all the lovers of mankind been merely soft pretenders? Is "enlightened self-interest"' the only safe guide out of the sloughs of sentimentalism? A recent lecture by a prominent business man closed with this stirring appeal and god-speed to his student hearers: "I hope you all make a barrel of money!" Shall we lie tamely down, accept the tip, and pass it along to ardent youth that the only things worthy the interest of sane, healthy, virile, scientific, sensible men are stocks and bonds, laws of exchange, principles of finance, and the whole round of mere money-grubbing ? Or permit to go unchallenged that time-honored fallacy, the economic man? Shall we brand as silly and sentimental the principle that we are all part and parcel of each other, a principle as sound in sociology as it is in ethics? Or shall we lay as the basis for all social polity, all social tegislation, all social reform, the absolute rock of fact, namely, that we are each and all of us social to the very core, and that we are only real men and women as we are vitally interested in others and disposed to co-operate with as well as exploit them? Sociology is not sentimentality. It is not merely the science of making poor folks richer and happier at other people's expense. It is a science in the making which is attempting to tell us that we are hopelessly bound up one with the other, and that none of us are safe or sane so long as any stupid, wretched, ignorant, or profoundly miserable folks are tolerated in our midst. Interest in fellow-men turns out to be science, not sentimentality.
Here we might stop and summarize. Sentimentalists, it appears, are essentially parasites, spiritual Malaprops. They are cheats, who try to get something for nothing. They are, as George Meredith declared, "they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done'; and their practices "a happy pastime and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a damning one to them who have anything to forfeit. They are the folks who decry organized effort to prevent poverty and try to obtain a bargain-counter dose of warmth and coziness from a nickel slipped to a street beggar or from a bunch of dirty cast-off clothes conferred upon the worthy poor on Bundle Day. They are the people who drive us to madness by their "impaired waterworks. I am reminded of the matinee idol who, exasperated to the quick by ill-timed tears, blurted over the footlights, "Now ladies, please: I want you to cry, I'm paid to make you cry, but for God's sake cry in the right place!" "To everything there is a season,' said the Preacher; "a time to weep and a time to laugh. But he assigns no place to sentimental insipidity, for every sane man knows that sympathy must always walk with science. It must never get away from understanding, and must always be sure that it is playing in time and tune. That is why we give short shrift to both the person who is always "feeling his feelings,"' and to the"Gawdsaker." The"Gawdsaker,"' according to Wells, is the curse of all progress, the hectic consumption that kills a thousand good beginnings and promising experiments in social welfare. He is "the person who gets excited by any deliberate discussion and gets up wringing his hands and screaming, 'For Gawd's sake, let's do something now!' "
There is no lack of concrete social problems confronting the reformer by which to test our analysis of sentimentality. In some quarters it is still considered sentimental or worse to speak of the abolition of poverty. But Professor Hollander and other economists are proving statistically that the modern civilized world is producing enough and more than enough of food, clothing, and shelter to provide decently for every human being; hence that poverty, as we are familiar with it, is unnecessary. Poets like Heine, anarchists like Kropotkin, and socialists like Hertzka told us this long ago, but we smiled indulgently and called them dreamers drunk with feeling. But now that the problem can be put to us in mathematical form and pictured in statistical graphs we begin to foresee the solution of poverty as not only practicable but as good form.
The same holds true of the problem of unemployment. Men were called sentimental who declared that a reserve pool of underpaid and irregularly employed laborers is not only bad ethics but bad business. The prevailing business code held, and it still holds in certain financial circles, that underemployment is in the nature of things, is one of the laws of economics; and that therefore it is as useless to try to solve the problem of unemployment as to solve the problem of gravitation. But last year the president of the Steel Trust woke up to the fact that perhaps this business axiom was wrong, and became chairman of the New York Committee for the study of unemployment. A few days ago the president of the American Blower Company sent me a copy of the Detroit plan for relieving and perhaps eliminating unemployment. These men—and their number is increasing—are not sentimentalists. Several years ago the greatest authority on unemployment in England declared that:
Practicability is never anything but a relative term—dependent upon the urgency with which an object is desired and upon the inconveniences which men are prepared to undergo in its pursuit. It is practicable for most people to run a mile to save a life. It is not practicable for anyone to run a mile unless he is prepared to get warm. So it is not practicable for a nation to get a mastery of unemployment without being prepared to submit to some change of industrial methods and customs.
That this was sound sense and not sentiment is amply demonstrated by the fact that the social urgency bred by the present crisis of war has so reorganized British industry that unemployment is less than at any other time in the last thirty years.
Much criticism of the existing industrial order is branded by standpatters as ebullition of parlor socialists and extravagant youths fed upon too much sociology. But President Taft, in his message of February 2, 1912, recommending a commission on industrial relations, took occasion to say:
Numerous special investigations, official and unofficial, have revealed conditions in more than one industry which have immediately been recognized on all sides as entirely out of harmony with accepted American standards. It is probable that to a great extent the remedies for these conditions, so far as the remedies involve legislation, lie in the field of state action.
What clearer sailing orders could any social reformer ask, and who would charge their author with ebullition?
The whole tendency toward state control over wide areas of social activity spells sentimental degeneration to the old-fashioned laissez-faireist. One of the first notable court pronouncements for state control occurred in the famous case of Munn vs. Illinois. The United States Supreme Court held that "when one devotes his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use and must submit to be controlled by the public, for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has created." The court later, in a great decision compelling railroads to equip their cars with safety devices, rejected the plea of the railroads that the law would work hardship upon them. It accepted Lord Eldon's maxim that it is better to look hardship in the face than to break down the rules of law, and went on to point out that a preventable accident injures somebody.
Such an injury must be an irreparable misfortune to someone. If it must be borne entirely by him who suffers it, that is a hardship to him. If its burden is transferred, so far as it is capable of transfer, to the employer, it is a hardship to him. It is quite conceivable that Congress, contemplating the inevitable hardship of such injuries, and hoping to diminish the economic loss to the community resulting from them, should deem it wise to impose their burdens upon those who could measurably control their causes, instead of upon those who are, in the main, helpless in that regard.
The court may have reasoned fallaciously, but very few critics have charged it with erring on the side of sentimentality in cases involving the police power or social reform in general. If American courts are sentimental at all, it is in the other direction, that is, toward soft-hearted regard for precedent, for the old, for the well-established.
Again, the demand of labor and labor's apologists for what they call a fair share in the products of their toil may sometimes exude sentimentality. But what of the deliberate attempts to provoke sentimental responses made by labor's opponents? What about the myth of "widowsanorphans"? Or the drool about free trade and empty dinner pails? On the first day of the great Lawrence strike the president of the American Woolen Company said in the course of a public statement:
While manufacturers under normal conditions would be glad to see their employees earn more money, the Massachusetts mills are paying all that they can afford to pay in the present situation. The mills are still suffering from a long period of extreme depression due to the tariff agitation at Washington.
Yet we are assured by a reputable authority that one of the very factories in question had paid for itself, equipment and all, in the two years since its completion. Is criticism of such mendacity sentimental? Is it sentimental to criticize the Colorado situation? The report of the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics for 19o9-10 stated baldly that the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company sought to nullify and violate laws calculated to protect the interest of the miner and used its "powerful influence to defeat the enactment of any law that had for its purpose the safeguarding of the lives and health of its employees."
We all recognize that no little perverse sentimentalism has gone into the plea for restrictions upon the labor of women and children, and we condemn it without stint. But what of the sentimental interest of employers in maintaining woman's right to work as many hours as she wants to, or in permitting children to become captains of industry at any age they please? People, strange as it may seem, are still able to stir up a claptrap sort of sentimental indignation over the poor widow whose child is prohibited from following his calling as newsboy or gum-seller or messenger-boy on city streets late at night. Other people are still gullible enough to swallow the sentimental appeal of the less efficient employer for aid in averting the destruction to industry and to nation if child labor is withdrawn or if the twelve-hour shift for men and night work for women are prohibited. Such feeble folk need some such bracing and manly tonic as a notable Connecticut employer gave not long ago on the subject of child labor. He said, " we are not here primarily to do business; . . . . any business which employs children so young that their physical and moral growth is dwarfed and stunted is, to the extent to which it so employs them, an evil in the community, and not a benefit. But a lot of patient, hard thinking must be endured by a considerable section of the public before it becomes quite immune to such patent disregard for social welfare under the guise of sincere pleading for the "worthy poor." Not all police or school authorities are yet immune. Some are. I remember hearing the superintendent of a California cannery fly into a passion one day and declare that he could whittle out of a shingle better men than the local school board because they were so sentimental as to insist that the schools should open on the day set by law.
Is it sentimental to show up and to fight the state of business mind illustrated by the following editorial in the silk manufacturers' official journal?
An ideal location would be one in which labor is abundant, intelligent, skilled, and cheap; where there were no labor unions and strikes; where the laws of the state made no restrictions as to the hours of work or age of workers; where people were accustomed to mill life; and where there were no other textile mills in the vicinity to share in the labor and bid up its price. . . . . In towns where there is a fair population and no manufacturing industries of moment a good supply of female help can usually be had at low prices; but should other industries come to the town, the demand for help may soon exceed the supply and the employer find, owing to the bidding up of the labor, that its cost is greatly increased, and its character arrogant and independent, and with no growth to the town equal to the increasing employment offered, he finds himself in a very uncomfortable position. . .
This is just that combination of shrewdness and driveling self-pity that disgusts us in a loquaciously drunk man or woman. A friend of mine was once indiscreet enough to volunteer to pilot a drunken woman homeward. The woman leaned heavily on her, and they zigzagged down a crowded sidewalk, to the incessant refrain, "My heart is broke. Now would you believe it? My heart is broke.Now would you believe it?"
Only Shakespeare and a jury of angels could unscramble the mixture of sentimentalism, piety, and probity which every social worker or reformer sooner or later encounters. Perhaps nowhere is he more likely to run afoul of it than in the field of housing and sanitation. Here is a sample: The president of the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company, of Birmingham, Alabama, wrote an indignant protest against the report of Birmingham's industrial conditions published in the Survey early in 1912.
Why [he cried], who is there in his right senses will deny that hogs are the natural and logical scavengers of a mining camp? Sanitary conditions in a mining camp! Pooh! I'd rather have twelve hogs than ffty men cleaning up my camps!
This is the grotesque side of such drunken slaver. But sometimes the intoxication is much more subtle. The report of the New York Consumers' League for 191o described an interview with a prominent Philadelphia merchant at a settlement house in which he was deeply interested. He said:
I have 1,200 girls working for me. These girls come to me healthy, happy, full of spirit. They work a year and grow thin and sickly and then go home, and come back again after a while, and work a little longer and go away too weak to work, and I find they have died of tuberculosis. But nothing can be done about it. It is the dust in the air.
"But, said his interlocutor, "surely something can be done. You could remove the dust in the room by opening the windows."'
No [he went on], we cannot open the windows, because it creates a draft which moves the fine dust from,the machines and impairs the purity of the white cloth. It would bring less in the market and my stockholders would not stand for it.
Crocodile tears; disgusting crocod le tears.
In such cases the real sentimentalists are those ready apologists for spiritual wickedness in high places, those who whitewash the business gorilla and indict his critics. Let me cite a flagrant example. In September, r9rr, the dam owned by the Bayless Pulp and Paper Company broke and wiped out the town of Austin, Pennsylvania. The engineering journals bitterly condemned the owners and constructors of the dam, and charged that the disaster was without excuse, because the owners knew only too well that it was a flimsy and menacing structure. But a neighbor of the owners said after the coroner's inquest over the 76 victims:
Throughout the whole community these men stand well. They are exceedingly fine characters—capable, honorable, and public-spirited. . . . . They are liberal in their help to some of the most worthy causes in the city, and their wives also are similarly interested. . . .I have talked with many people since the terrible disaster at Austin, and I have not yet heard one harsh or bitter word against either of these men. . . . . I saw them both for a few minutes on the day following the disaster. They were utterly prostrated. Neither of them is physically robust or rugged . . . . [etc., ad nauseam].
This is simply a survival of the ancient cult of criminals; the elder, vigorous superstition has merely faded out into mawkish, reverential sentimentality.
A somewhat similar form of sentimentalism has cropped out recently in the belief that industrial democracy can be brought to pass by sending young millionaires down into Colorado mines to dig in overalls for twenty minutes, or to dance with miners' wives and children, or to play Big Brother with the Miners' Federation. There is little to choose between the sentimentalism of unbreeched reform legislation and the sentimental vacuity of benevolent feudalism.
We all agree that many grievous blunders have been made in the field of social pathology through poor-law administration. And I think none of us would deny that sentimentalism has gone hand in hand with a certain hardness and dogmatism in the interminable debates over public-poor-law policy. But we must never forget that there is a sentimentality that bewails the shiftlessness and thriftlessness of the poor while condoning identical qualities in the pauperized well-to-do. It is just that very sentimentalism which breeds disastrous forms of social counter-selection against which social reformers train their guns. Their aim may be askew: Mr. Carnegie's scheme for abolishing large inheritances, for instance, may be a poor sort of projectile; but the target is plainly visible to anybody who will take the trouble to look straight.
Sentimentality plays havoc in the domain of child welfare. It has killed a thousand times more babies than perished in Herod's massacre. Nearly anybody with a slight equipment of passing good looks and a bit of nerve can organize and foist upon the soft, credulous public a charity for babies or children. "Save the kiddies"' will wring tears and dollars from thousands who would pass unheeded a call to "Prevent infant mortality. Time was when any little company of good ladies could open an orphanage or home for foundlings. And nobody seemed to think of connecting sentimentality with the tremendous death-rate in those jerry-built institutions, or with the narrowed, hampered, and broken lives in store for the pitiful survivors. So long as one was "doing good," he or she could not be held responsible for such grievous results.
Hence when state boards of charity proposed to visit, inspect, and check up these children's charities they were charged with hardheartedness and coldness and meanness and lack of elementary human sympathy. The same story might be told of the foundation of " tours" for the reception of illegitimate infants. They permitted baptism and the saving of souls, but they promoted infant mortality, desertion, and illegitimacy in the name of good works.
It is quite possible to refuse complete assent to the overwrought pleas of the eugenists and workers for prevention of feeblemindedness, to recognize the sentimental twang in much of the chatter about race suicide and the fittest racial stocks, and still to support reform legislation aimed at taking out of their families those feeble-minded persons who seem to menace the welfare of a community. There has been altogether too much sentimental red fire over the threatened break-up of the family when a social worker or a court attempted to remove a feeble-minded household drudge from lazy or designing parents. And it is sentimentality of a peculiarly rancid sort that crows over a clever job done when it has succeeded in marrying off a feeble-minded village butt. In this connection may I protest in the name of decency against those sentimental judges who think they have solved the problem of happy marriage and community peace when they coerce a young rake into marrying an impressionable girl who succumbs to his seduction, or when they tell two people in whom the light of love has burned out to "go right home now and make up?" Let no man join what God hath put asunder.
In housing reform much slimpsy work has had to be undone and done over because people have felt and wept and legislated first, and investigated afterward. Shame and disgust over the presence of nasty housing conditions in one's city can only become efficient shame and cathartic disgust when they are illuminated by the fullest study in the coolest frame of mind of the widest possible array of facts from one's own and from other cities. The tear in the propagandist's voice must be balanced by tolerance and determination to know the truth on the part of the constructive reformer. Whether housing laws come or not is a matter of secondary import. A tenement law based upon tears is either repealed or pigeonholed.
In this analysis of sentimentalism I approach with a good deal of trepidation the subject of mothers' pensions. Without attempting to pass upon the merits or demerits of such pension legislation, or without deciding whether or not mothers' pensions are merely left-handed outdoor relief, it must be noted that much of this legislation in its rapid spread from state to state has been in the nature of sentimental infection. In by no means every case have its protagonists considered carefully their local problem---they have heard of such laws in other states; they have "caught the spirit'; they have simply responded to suggestion and imitated, or seen a chance to win popularity. It is an example of mob mind; you will recall that mob mind is a social phenomenon in which thought bears an inverse ratio to feeling. It is unnecessary and perhaps altogether unwise to ask for the repeal of any of these laws. But it surely is the path of sound social policy to ask that any further demands for the extension of similar legislation should be met with counter-demands to show proper grounds of fact and not mere vaporizings over the perhaps mythical virtues of home life as it is not infrequently practiced.
The sentimental doer of good plagues the constructive reformer in many spots, but of the whole devil's brood of sentimental inventions none is more exasperating than the "Tag Day." In some American cities every day seems to be Tag Day. We are held up in the streets to buy a miserable little paper flower for the orphans, or a wilted real flower for the cripples. And in Pittsburgh a while ago women on the streets and signs on the street cars bade us buy a tag and save a soul at the rescue mission. Such sentimentality not only defrauds legitimate welfare-work, it also hinders the development of sound institutional finance and recruits the army of street beggars.
Only second to Tag Days in their potential irritation to the healthy-minded are subsidies from the public treasury granted by sentimental legislators to private charitable enterprises coddled by their sentimental constituents. I am not here concerned with the charge that such subsidies are a "slush fund"' for financing corrupt politics. I am rather tilting at that attitude of mind which the legislator assumes when he answers a critic of some notoriously inefficient applicant for subsidies with.a benevolent smile and an emotional quaver: "Ah, but they're such nice people; they mean so well; they aren't your cold, hard, scientific folks who ask a lot of questions and do nothing; they mean well, and they do a lot of good. Ain't that what we're here for, to do good?"
The most dangerous aspect of these movements for Tag Days, Bundle Days, Mothers' Pensions, and the like is that they represent "organized emotion." Mob mind in the old days was fairly easy to control, because it could be localized, shamed, or frightened out of itself: a cannon, a troop of mounted police, or a persuasive orator could disperse it. But modern means of communication—newspapers, magazines, reports, telephone, telegraph—all permit mob mind to gather headway almost imperceptibly over wide areas. Whole cities, states, and even the nation may be caught in its swirl. The newspapers, always on the alert for the "human interest"' story, will exploit anything not absolutely tabooed or libelous which will move to tears. The cardinal virtue in newspaperdom seems to be not exact truth but "punch'; and punch must be considered as the technique of obtaining attention under false pretenses, the "ability to achieve the end without the means'; not the art of getting results, but the legerdemain trick of getting an appearance of results. The sentimentalist, needless to say, fails to see through the trick. Moreover, certain questionable associations, like the notorious Mothers' Pension League, conduct a nation-wide propaganda for profit. Such subtle stimulants to emotionalism can only be neutralized gradually by requiring that the journalist's professional training shall include the study of economics, finance, social legislation, and the administration of charities and correction; and by nerving social workers to stand resolutely against any compromise with buncombe.
It should be perfectly apparent by this time that the Promised Land of wholesome social life cannot be seen clearly by eyes dimmed with easy tears; nor can the calls to constructive social work be heard above the thumping of a fluttery heart. Social reform of any and every kind must be thought out and carried through in the scientific spirit. No one should insist that it confine itself to statistics and a cold, hard voice. It must, if it be truly scientific, utilize to the fullest every worthy quality of human nature—sentiment, humor, imagination. The great religious teachers, the master dramatists, the makers of modern science, knew the secret of communicating their visions. Huxley could kindle enthusiasm for evolution just as effectively as Shakespeare evoked faith in a moral universe through Macbeth or Lear. Social reformers should likewise take their cue. In a word, social reform must more and more get away from any suspicion of driveling appeal to the froth in human nature, and must learn the art of purging its ideas with facts and of projecting those ideas upon the plane of imagination. The leaders who can learn this art will steer a safe and fruitful course between the timid and squint-eyed standpatter on the one shore, and, on the other, the silly dabster who thinks this old world of ours can be changed by a turn of the hand or a quickened heartbeat.
It is perhaps beside the mark to inquire which science or group of sciences may hold the master-key to this delicate art. But at least enough has been said to hint that while sociology may well be "first aid" to sick communities, it is not to be considered as the good-looking doctor who allows female hypochondriacs to weep on his shoulder and sentimentalize over their imaginary woes. Those of us who have assumed a certain leadership in applied sociology must set our faces resolutely against tremulous haste or muddled sentiment in the process of instigating social change. And while maintaining hospitable, elastic, open minds, we must discipline ourselves to the practice of that decent reticence and self-control which ought to mark a real profession, and which come only from rigorously thinking through a mass of evidence proportionate to the gravity of each problem as it rises in the day's work.
Am I leaving the impression that the social reformer must be a monster of blood and iron, or that social amelioration must be a policy of Schrecklichkeit as bitter and unrelenting as natural selection? I have, it is true, been emphasizing, for the sake of arriving at a proper balance, the negative side of this problem; but not by any means to the exclusion of its positive aspects. Because we are human beings dealing with other human beings we must have, as I said at the beginning, warmth, imagination, enthusiasm, heroic self-sacrifice, and plenty of them; but all these amiable qualities must be conserved, knit together, focused, and reinforced by the will to think clearly and the will to know profoundly. When faith and love, vision and disciplined intelligence, can be welded into one, we shall have such a corps of expert leadership that the very gates of hell itself shall not prevail against.