Social pathology / by Samuel George Smith.

  • Smith, Samuel George, 1852-1915.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Social pathology / by Samuel George Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    365/408 (page 351)
    but in the variation from the average among different classes and different individuals. And this can be seen in studies of wealth, health, production, income, and everything else that affects the family group. Rhythmic law, or the law of recurrence is useful, but must be accepted with a good deal of caution. Under this law economic depressions, commercial panics, and even epidemics and wars recur, while their opposites are found with pretty constant regularity. To take the last question for analysis because it is perhaps the most convenient and most easy, there does seem to be a certain recurrent thirst for blood upon the part of the human family. After a number of years a nation forgets the desolated homes, the enor- mous and abnormal consumption of commodity and the general distress which a war occasions even to the party which is victorious. It does not, however, seem to be mere idealism to suggest that here is a social phenomenon which must some day be affected by the enormous increase in number and exactness of the death- dealing mechanisms of conflict both on sea and land and the promise of increasing slaughter where wars arise. This will doubt- less act as a deterrent. Commercial interests become more and more controlling and more and more interlace the principal nations together in a federation of production and exchange, and these bonds continually make for peace. Nor is it impos- sible that a day will come when those psychical forces which to many now seem purely idealistic will have more definite and accurate value in determining conflicts between nations. The brotherhood of man is first of all economic. It may become vitally humanitarian to such an extent that those sentiments which have always been most forceful in human history will avail here to bring in a world program of peace through the operation of courts of conciliation and arbitration. The object of this discussion of war is to show that social problems are not static and that society is at every period moving toward something different. This indicates that the law of large numbers, the average of statistics, and whatever other doctrines may be based upon a static form of life, will at last break down because they are only available for short periods of time on account of the constant social changes. The “law of error” by indicating certain