of the tropics, the too great contentedness of tropical peoples has been brought out prominently. Some one has said that if a colony of New England school-teachers and Presbyterian deacons should settle in the tropics, their descendants would, in a single generation, be wearing breech-clouts and going to cock-fights on Sunday. Certain it is that the energy and ambition of the temperate zone are hard to maintain in warmer lands. The negro's content with hard conditions, so often counted as a virtue, is one of the difficulties in the way of solving the race problem in our South to-day. Booker T. Washington, and others who are laboring for the elevation of the American negroes, would try first to make them discontented with the one-room cabins, in which hundreds of thousands of families live. If only the desire for a two- or three-room cabin can be aroused, experience shows that family life and industrial qualities may be improved in many other ways.
But impossible hopes lessen gratifications
Not only in America, but in most civilized lands to-day, is seen a rapid growth of wants in the working-classes. The incomes and the standard of living have become increasing, but not so fast as have the desires of the working-classes. Regret has been expressed by some that the workers of Europe are becoming "declassed." Increasing wages, it is said, bring not welfare, but unhappiness, to the complaining masses. If discontent with one's lot goes beyond a moderate degree, if it is more than the desire to better one's lot by personal efforts, if it becomes an unhappy longing for the impossible, then indeed it may be a misfortune. But a moderate ambition to better one's condition is the "divine discontent" absolutely indispensable if energy and enterprise are to be called into being.
Wants grow refined as wealth advances
It is a suggestive fact that civilized man, equipped with all of the inventions and the advantages of science, spends more hours of effort in gaining a livelihood than does the savage with his almost unaided hands. Activity is dependent not on bare physical necessity, but on developed wants—in the economic sense of the term. Such social institutions as property and inheritance owe their origin and their justification to their average effect on the motives to activity. If society is to develop, if progress is to continue, human wants—not of the grosser sort, but ever more refined—must continue to emerge and urge men to action.
§ II. DESIRES FOR NON-MATERIAL ENDS, AS SECONDARY ECONOMIC MOTIVES
The real man in economics
1. The spiritual nature of man must not be ignored in economic reasoning. There has been much and just criticism of the earlier writers and of their conclusions because so little account was taken by them of any but the motive of self-interest in economic affairs. Generally it was assumed that men knew their own interest, and sought in a very unsympathetic way those things which would gratify their material wants. Thus man in economic reasoning was made an abstraction, differing from real men in his lack of manifold spiritual and social elements.
Desires for the non-material may become economic motives
2. The main classes of non-material wants that are secondarily economic are fear of temporal punishment; sentiments of moral and religious duty; pride, honor, and fear of disgrace; and pleasure in work for itself, for social approval, or for a social result. The first is best illustrated by slavery, where the slave is not impelled to seek wealth for his own welfare, but is driven by punishment to perform the task. The object is to create within the mind of the slave a motive that will take the place of the ordinary economic motive. The feeling of religious or moral duty leads men to act often in direct opposition to the usual economic motive. The taboo is faithfully observed by the members of a savage tribe who suffer as a result the severest hardships. A religious injunction prevents the use of food that would save from starvation. Pride, either of family or of calling; the soldier's honor leading him to sacrifice not only his future but his life; the love of social approval, holding men to the most disagreeable tasks—these illustrate how strongly social sentiments oppose the narrower motive of immediate self-interest as generally thought of. Pleasure in work for work's sake, and pride in the result, may act as motives quite as strong in some cases as desire for the product that can be used. And even where this does not change the kind of work done, it comes in to influence the interest and earnestness with which the work is performed.
Economists must overlook no influence on value
3. Whatever motive in man's complex nature makes him desire things more or less, becomes for the time, and in so far, an economic motive. These various social and spiritual motives sometimes work positively, in the direction of magnifying man's desire for things; sometimes negatively, to diminish it. If we are to understand economic action, we must take men as they are. A religious motive that leads men to refrain from the eating of meat or to eat fish in preference on certain days, is a fact which the economist has but to accept, for it is sure to affect the value of meat and fish at that place and time. Moral convictions, whatever be their origin, whether due to the teaching of parents, to unconscious influences, or to native temperament, may be quite as effective as the pangs of hunger in determining what men desire. Therefore, while these various motives are primarily social or moral or religious, they may be said to be secondarily economic motives, and they may become in certain cases the most important influences of which the economist must take account.
CHAPTER 3
WEALTH AND WELFARE
§ I. THE RELATION OF MEN AND MATERIAL THINGS TO ECONOMIC WELFARE
Man is the center of economic reasoning
1. The gratifying of economic wants depends on things outside of the man who feels the wants. Man is to himself the center of the world. He groups things and estimates things with reference to their bearing on his desires, be these what are called selfish or unselfish. If we were discussing the economics of an inferior species of animals, things would be grouped in a very different way. But economics being the study of man's welfare, everything must be judged from his standpoint, and things are or are not of economic importance according as they have relation to his wants and satisfactions. Things needful for any of the lower animals are spoken of as "ministering to welfare" in the economic sense only in case these animals are useful to men. Examples are the mulberry-tree on which the silkworm feeds, the flower visited by the honey-bee. In the same view some men are seen to minister to the welfare of other men and therefore bear the same relation for the moment to the welfare of the others as do material things. In any case we study man's welfare as affected by the world which surrounds him.
Physical nature is an unchangeable fact
2. Material things and natural forces differ in kind and nature. This is an axiom which we must take as a basis for reasoning in economics. Things have certain physical qualities quite apart from any action or influence of man. They are operated on by mechanical laws; the force of gravitation causes them to fall at a certain rate under given conditions. They differ in specific gravity, reflect the rays of light, absorb or transmit heat. All these things are for man ultimate physical facts, but unless he knows these facts he cannot take full advantage of the favorable qualities of things or weigh properly their importance to his welfare. Things differ in a multitude of ways in their chemical qualities. Niter, charcoal, and saltpeter, combined in certain proportions, give certain reactions; different combinations give various results. Solids combine to form gases, and liquids unite to form solids, and these qualities and reactions of material things are for man ultimate truths of chemistry.
