Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/29

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
PRESENT DAY ECONOMICS
15

work out in that way. We have got to have them agam. Whether this will be in 1924 or 1925 I do not venture to predict. I foresee however that we must have adversity in order to bring about correction, and instead of deploring it we ought rather to welcome it, hoping of course that it will be slow and grinding, giving everybody a chance to adjust himself, rather than being acute.

We must pray for disinterested and intelligent leadership. We must learn to become acquainted with the facts and then to face them. The inspiration is not going to come out of the masses. It must come from the intelligent few. The psychologists have proved to us beyond peradventure that the great mass of our people are of insufficient intelligence to enable them to appreciate economic problems. The psychologists have proved to us moreover that the masses can never be raised by education or otherwise to such degree. The biologists have shown us that ideas of the beneficent influence of good environment are fallacious and that heredity is determinative. Indignant philanthropologists have risen in anger against this as being a repudiation of the principles of democracy. They do not know what they are talking about with respect to this any more than they usually do with respect to anything else. Instead of being undemocratic the differentiation of opportunity and rights is a necessary corollary of the truly democratic ideal. The biologists have shown us that very many of the recent sociological ideas have been opposed to the working of the great natural law of the survival of the fittest. These thoughts exemplify the ways economists lock hands with psychologists and biologists.