beyond their ken. The air of mystery has
been blown away from natural phenomena, but it is encouraged and
permitted to surround social changes. While it endures, an intelligent
direction of social life is, of course, quite out of the question.

This attitude is being broken down, however. The past hundred years of
experiment and experience with a competitive order have convinced
multitudes that such an order is unworkable. During the same period, the
development of economic organization on ever broader lines has
emphasized the need of common purposes and common activities.

Recent social experience teaches plainly that an injury to one is an
injury to all; that a benefit to one is a benefit to all; that men rise
in the scale of well-being with their fellows and not from them, and
that a co-operative social life is the only one that will prove livable
and workable. These four propositions include the best thinking of the
modern world on the fundamentals of a social structure that will prove
livable and workable.

The acceptance of any such standards of social life involves a
right-about-face in the basic social philosophy of the world.

1. _The doctrine of laissez-faire must be accepted for what it is--an
exploded theory that has promoted, not social well-being, but the
interests of favored classes._

2. _Catastrophe must be recognized as the most costly avenue to
progress._

3. _Social science must be made at least as effective, in guiding the
life of the world as is physical science._

Social science alone will not protect men from the dangers that surround
them. Every social group is dependent for its effectiveness upon the
kind of individuals of which it is composed, and their ideas and ideals
limit the ideas and ideals of the group. At the same time, a carefully
thought out course of social action, like a carefully thought out course
of individual action presents a standard toward which society may work.

A plan for social organization is like the blue-print with which the
mechanic works. Science comprises his rules and methods of procedure,
but the driving power comes, not from the blue-print and not from the
formulas, but from the man himself. This holds equally true of society.

7. _Conscious Social Improvement_

Conscious social improvement is the improvement made by society in
pursuance of plans that are prepared and carried out with the knowledge
and approval of the mass of