1893 - State Library Information Center

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTIONS OP BUREAUS. 59oft-repeated prophecy, " the poor ye have with you always/' isso often quoted with complacency in high places.All governments in the past have had to deal with this questionof securing subsistence to the unemployed laborers, and theeconomists would mistake their vocation did they fail to recognizethat the experiment of obligatory industrial insurance asinstituted by Germany and Austria within the present decade,as well as the adoption by railroad corporations and largeemployers of labor of various schemes for insuring workmen, arebut other attempts to deal with this ever-recurring problem*And should our economists fail to study their operation andresults, and to draw correct conclusions therefrom, we shall findthat all such efforts, now beitig brought into use, will prove asimpotent to deal successfully with the difficulties that confrontus, as were those used in antiquity to the discomfiture of theancients. There is but little of real importance known in economicsto-day that escaped their observation. Aristotle saw clearlythe transition from barter to purchase, and we have no betterdefinition of the function and use of money to-day than thatwhich he has given in the first book of his Economics andPolitics. The most complicated phenomena of the division oflabor were investigated by them. In the second book of Plato's" Republic "—an analysis of which the moat learned disciple ofAdam Smith might well feel proud of, and which, twenty-twocenturies after its writing, made the glory and fortune of AdamSmith—the ancient philosopher says plainly : " If in our thoughtswe conceive a state, our first impulse would be to supply ourmoflt urgent wants. Is not the greatest of our wants that uponwhich our life depends, food ? The second want, that of shelter ;the third, that of raiment? And how can a state furnish thesewants ? Would it not be necessary that one should be a cultivator; another, architect; another, weaver; another, shoemaker,etc. ? Shall each one do fer all the others that for which he isbest fitted ? or shall each prepare his own food, weave his owngarments, build his own house, etc.? I think the first waywould be the best. I reflect that we are not all born with thesame talents: that one has more aptitude to do one thing, andanother to do another thing." We may see by this passage thatPlato does more than show the advantage of the division of