SOCIAL SCIENCE IN SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
JOURNALISTS, at all events, are to have a week's holiday this coming autumn. There is to be no meeting of the Social Science Association. For once the columns of the daily newspapers will not be filled for days together with addresses, papers, and discussions. The public mind will be allowed to lie fallow for a year—possibly to bear twelve months later a proportionately luxuriant crop of social theories, but possibly also to hear no more of them through the particular machinery with which the Association has made us familiar. Will it be taken as evidence of undue frivolity of mind if we confess that we received the news with a distinct sense of satisfaction ?
We know all that can be said about the services which the Association has rendered during the twenty-seven years for which it has talked and written. We would not deny, or even question, a single one of its claims to live in the grateful recollections of its countrymen. It deserves to be. re membered, and we doubt not that it will be remembered.
The only point we care to make is that it is in recollection that we should most wish it to live. Every one knows what it is to feel that he is glad to have been at such and such a place, or to have undergone such and such an experience.
He does not pretend that it was pleasant at the tirae—he could not pretend it without losing his self-respect. The memory of what he suffered is too vivid to allow of any self-deception on this head. But he is glad all the same that his memory is charged with that special burden. He recognises that the suffering has not been all loss ; that, weary as he may have been at the time, he has been mentally richer afterwards. This is the kind of feeling which the news that the Social Science Association is to have no Congress this year—perhaps is never to have a Congress again—will awaken in many Englishmen. They recognise the gain that has resulted from these gatherings ; but they are human, and they cannot forget how terribly dull they felt while they were takingin this intellectual food. There is an intellectual as well as a physical dyspepsia, and the mere mention of the Social Science Association is enough to provoke it in many feeble spirits. Some day, perhaps, these things will be better managed. Some new form of ana3sthetic will be discovered under which the patient will be able to have social science injected into his mind without his being conscious of what is going on. What a millennial state of things this would be. Fancy mastering the argument against bi-metallism, or the doctrine of general average, without knowing it. The audience, instead of passing the time in fruitless efforts to look interested, or in cheering in order to keep themselves awake, would be laid out before the operators in frank and improving slumber. They would close their eyes in ignorance of the great questions they had come to be instructed in, and they would open them again with the work done and the knowledge gained. But until that blessed time comes, we must be permitted to rejoice if the Social Science Congress should henceforth be a thing of the past. There may be men living who have attended seven-andtwenty of them. Is not that a thought to be entertained in solemn silence ?
Is it the matter or the operators, or some subtle connection between the two, that make a Social Science Congress a thing by itself? It is hard to say, but we incline to the last of the three explanations. Under other conditions some of the questions debated are found to be keenly interesting. Property in land, or the housing of the poor, excites, outside the domain of the Association, as much passion as any more purely political issue. It is only when it is transplanted within that domain that the indurating process begins. "Thy hand, great Anarch," we may say to the Association, "lets the curtain fall." The same speakers again will on other platforms acquit themselves creditably ; how, then, can the blame of their unmistakeable tedium at a Congress be laid at their own door ? A man who is listened to with interest at a Mansion-House meeting, and is found intolerable at a Social Science meeting, may not unnaturally plead that the fault must be in his. surroundings, and not in himself. When we know more than we yet do of the mysteries of the influence that man exercises over man, this may no longer seem strange. The difference may be in the audience or in those who immediately surround the speaker. It is the young men of the Social Science Association that are so terrible. The great lights at these Congresses are ordinarily chosen by reason of some eminence which they have attained outside the Asso ciation. The lesser lights are chosen by reason of the eminence which they have attained inside it, and eminence of this sort is a bad eminence indeed. A young man who devotes himself to Social Science from the first dawn of reason—and there are such young men—is predestinated to be a prig. He cannot escape his doom. It is written on his forehead. Now, the fault of the Social Science Association is that it deadens the sense which a healthy mind ought to have that it is in the presence of prigs. The theoretical dislike to the quality remains undiminished, but the sensibility to its neighbourhood is greatly lessened ; and to tolerate prigs is to be some way on the road to becoming one. There is something catching about their method and their manner. You look at a subject in their company, and by-and-by you find that you are looking at it from their standpoint. More often, unluckily, it is other people, not you, that find this out. You yourself remain blind to it, as you do to most other changes that take place in your own character. If in a sense, therefore, it is the fault of the speakers that Social Science Congresses are dull, in a far truer sense it is the fault of the human atmosphere. Yet the world would have been poorer in some respects if there had been no Social Science Association. The discussions at successive Congresses have familiarised mankind with much of which they would otherwise have remained ignorant ; and though one is tempted to say that in these cases ignorance was bliss, yet we know that it was not altogether blissful. The tree of social knowledge bears a very mixed crop ; but there are some of its fruits which we cannot afford to leave untested. The questions which were once debated at Congresses, and at Congresses only, are now part of the common heritage of . educated men and women. They concern us all ; and we have come to see that they concern us. Other influences besides those of the Association have been at work to.bring about this change ; but we cannot doubt that it is in part due to the popularisation of these subjects effected by the Social Science Congresses. They have taken their place in conversation, in books, in Parliamentary debates, in Royal Commissions, in the Statute-book itself, because they have been brought forward autumn after autumn, until at last a careless public has been driven to become, or to pretend to become, an interested public. That is a solid victory in its way, and it is one to which the Social Science Association may fairly assert its title. But they have won it without thought and without mercy. They have paid no heed to that social charity of which the first and great commandment is, "Thou shalt not bore thy neighbour ;" and on that ground the Congresses—if we have really seen the last of them—will have few mourners, and will deserve no more regret than they will obtain.
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