CHAPTER III

SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT--THE SCIENCE OF MOLDING INSTITUTIONS

After a gardener has produced his seed, guaranteeing a good heredity by breeding together those individual plants which possess in the highest degree the qualities he desires to secure, he turns his attention to the seed bed. First of all, the location must be good--the bed must be on a southern slope, where it will benefit by the first warm rays of the spring sun; then the soil must be finely pulverized, in order that the tiny rootlets may easily force their way downward, finding nourishment ready at hand; when the seeds have been planted, in ground well prepared and fertilized, they must be watered, cultivated, weeded; and as they develop into larger plants, thinned, transplanted, pruned and sprayed. The wise gardener considers environment as well as heredity. By sowing choice seeds in well prepared soil, he ensures the excellence of his crop.

Modern society may well be compared to a garden. The plants are living, moving beings, with some freedom to act on their own initiative. Moreover, it is they who make and tend the gardens in which they grow. Like the gardener in the story, they must look to environment as well as to heredity. The seed bed must be carefully prepared, and the young plants, as they appear, must be given all the attention which science makes possible. Modern society is a garden of which the products are men and women. The sowing, weeding, cultivating--carried forward through social institutions--determines by its character whether the race shall decay, as other races have done, or progress toward the Super Man.

The science of social gardening--Social Adjustment--has been given a great impetus, in recent years, by the increased knowledge of the relative influences of heredity and environment in determining the status of the individual. This knowledge has led us to a belief in men.

Earlier beliefs conceived of the majority of men as utterly depraved. Some indeed were among the elect, but the remainder, born to the lowest depths of the social gehenna, were outcasts and pariahs, helpless in this world and hopeless in the next. This doctrine of total depravity set at nought all progressive effort. Here stands a man--society has called him a criminal. Last year he attempted to steal an automobile, less than three weeks after his release from serving a two-year sentence for grand larceny. To-day he is in court again, charged with entering a lodging house and stealing three pairs of trousers and an overcoat. The man is on trial for burglary--what shall be the social verdict regarding him?

"Alas," mourns the advocate of total depravity, "God so made him. It is not our right to interfere."

"Wait," says the social scientist, "until I investigate the case."

The case is held over while the scientist makes his investigation. After careful inquiry, he reports that the young man's criminal record began at the age of nine, when he was arrested for stealing bananas from a freight car. Locked up with older criminals, he soon learned their tricks. He was "nimble" and could "handle himself," so his prison mates taught him the science of pocket picking, and initiated him into the gentle art of "shop lifting." He was released, after two months of this schooling, and slipping out into the big, black city, he tried an experiment. Succeeding, he tried again, and yet again. Before the month was out, he was detected stealing a silk handkerchief, and was back in prison. There his education was perfected, and he entered the world to try once more. From the world to jail, from jail to the world--this boy's life history from the age of nine, had been one long attempt to learn his trade; fortunately or unfortunately, he was somewhat of a bungler, and sooner or later he was always caught.

When he was a boy, he sneaked up a dingy court, and three pairs of dirty stairs to a landing where, in the rear of a battered tenement, was an abode which he had been taught to call home. His father, a dock laborer, earned, on the average, about $300 a year. Sometimes he worked steadily, day and night, for a week, and earned $25 or $30; then there would be no work for ten days or perhaps two weeks; the money would run out; the grocer would refuse credit; and the family would be hungry. It was during one of these hungry intervals that the nine-year-old urchin made his descent on the bananas in the freight car, and received his first jail sentence.

His mother, good hearted but woefully ignorant, made the best of things, taking in washing, doing odd jobs here and there, tending to her children, when opportunity offered, and at other times letting them run the streets.

"There," concludes the social scientist, "is the story of that boy's life. His only picture of manhood is an inefficient father who cannot earn enough to support his family; his concept of a mother expresses itself in good hearted ignorance; his view of society has been secured from the rear of a shabby tenement, the curb of a narrow street and a cell in the county jail. The seed bed has been neither prepared, watered, nor tended, and the young shoot has grown wild."

The social scientist has not been content with an analysis of social maladjustment; going further, he has transplanted the young shoots from the defective seed bed to better ground. Dr. Bernardo organized a system for taking the boy criminals out of the slums of English cities, and sending them to farms in Australia, South Africa and Canada. Nearly 50,000 boys have been thus disposed of. Though in their home cities many of them had already entered a criminal life, in their new surroundings less than two per cent. of them showed any tendency to revert to their former criminal practices. A little tending and transplanting into a congenial environment, proved the salvation of these boys, who would otherwise have thronged the jails of England.

Careful analysis has convinced the social scientist that, in the absence of malformation of the brain, or of some other physical defect, the average man is largely made by his environment. As serious physical defect is quite rare, being present in less than five per cent. of the population; and as only a small percentage of the population, perhaps two or three per cent., is above the average in ability, more than nine-tenths of the people remain average--shaped by their environment; capable of good or of evil, according as the good or evil forces of society influence their youth and early maturity.

The eighteenth century philosophers had embodied the same conclusion in the doctrine that all men are created free and equal. Victor Hugo, in the first half of the nineteenth century, based most of his inspiring novels on the theory that in every man there is a divine spark--a conscience--which will be developed by a good environment or crushed and blackened by a bad one.

Each year added new proofs of the theory of universal capacity, until Ward was able to write his _Applied Sociology_, demonstrating that opportunity is the key-note of social progress.[16] For, says he, up to the present time nine-tenths of the men, and ten-tenths of the women (nineteen twentieths of society) have been denied a legitimate opportunity for development. Grant this opportunity, and at once, without any change in hereditary characteristics, you can increase, nineteen fold, the achievements of society.

Ward's estimate may be or may not be exactly correct. His contention that universalized opportunity would greatly augment social achievement is, however, fundamentally sound. Social Adjustment aims, through the shaping social institutions, to provide every individual with an opportunity to secure a strong body, a trained mind, an aggressive attitude, the power of concentration, and the vision of a goal toward which he is working.[17] In short, the object of Social Adjustment is the provision of universal opportunity.

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear many a gem of purest ray serene. Even the most gifted individual, thrown into an adverse environment, will either fail utterly to develop his powers, or else will develop them so incompletely that they can never come to their full fruition. Thomas A. Edison cast away on an island in the South Pacific would be useless to his fellows. Abraham Lincoln, living among the Apache Indians, would have left small impress on the world. A sculptor, to be really great, must go to Rome, because it is in Rome that the great works of sculptured art are to be found. It is in Rome, furthermore, that the great sculptors work and teach. A lawyer can scarcely achieve distinction while practicing in a backwoods county court, nor can a surgeon remain proficient in his science unless he keep in constant touch with the world of surgery. "I must go to the city," cried a woman with an unusual voice. "Here in the country I can sing, but I cannot study music." She must, of necessity, go to the city because in the city alone exists the stimulus and the example which are necessary for the perfection of her art.

A congenial environment is necessary for the perfection of any hereditary talent. Lester F. Ward concludes, after an exhaustive analysis of self-made men, that such men are the exception. That they exist he must admit, but that their abilities would have come to a much more complete development in a congenial environment he clearly demonstrates.

The rigorous persecution of the Middle Ages eliminated any save the most daring thinkers. Men of science, who presumed to assert facts in contradiction of the accepted dogmas of the Church, were ruthlessly silenced, hence the ages were very dark. The nineteenth century, on the contrary, through its cultivation of science and scientific attainments, has reaped a harvest of scientific achievement unparalleled in the history of the world. Men to-day enter scientific pursuits for the same reason that they formerly entered the military service--because every emphasis is laid on scientific endeavor. The nineteenth century scientist is the logical outcome of the nineteenth century desires for scientific progress.

The environment shapes the man. Yet, equally, does the man shape the environment. A high standard individual may be handicapped by social tradition, but, in like manner, progressive social institutions are inconceivable in the absence of high standard men and women.

The institutions of a society--its homes, schools, government, industry--are created by the past and shaped by the present. Institutions are not subjected to sudden changes, yet one generation, animated by the effort to realize a high ideal, may reshape the social structure. Can one conceive of a paper strewn campus in a college where the spirit is strong? Parisians believe in beauty, hence Paris is beautiful. Social institutions combine the achievements of the past with the ethics of the present.

"Let me see where you live and I will tell you what you are," is a true saying. The social environment, moldable in each generation, is an accurate index to the ideals and aspirations of the generation in which it exists.