The Ethical Library
SOCIAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES
ADDRESSES TO ETHICAL SOCIETIES
By
LESLIE STEPHEN
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
LONDON
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.,Limited
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1896
NOTE.
The following chapters are chiefly a republication of addresses delivered to the Ethical Societies of London. Some have previously appeared in theInternational Journal of Ethics, theNational Review, and theContemporary Review. The author has to thank the proprietors of these periodicals for their consent to the republication.
L. S.
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| The Aims of Ethical Societies, | 1 |
| Science and Politics, | 45 |
| The Sphere of Political Economy, | 91 |
| The Morality of Competition, | 133 |
| Social Equality, | 175 |
| Ethics and the Struggle for Existence, | 221 |
THE AIMS OF ETHICAL SOCIETIES.1
I am about to say a few words upon the aims of this society: and I should be sorry either to exaggerate or to depreciate our legitimate pretensions. It would be altogether impossible to speak too strongly of the importance of the great questions in which our membership of the society shows us to be interested. It would, I fear, be easy enough to make an over-estimate of the part which we can expect to play in their solution. I hold indeed, or I should not be here, that we may be of some service at any rate to each other. I think that anything which stimulates an active interest in the vital problems of the day deserves the support of all thinking men; and I propose to consider briefly some of the principles by which we should be guided in doing whatever we can to promote such an interest.
We are told often enough that we are living in a period of important intellectual and social revolutions. In one way we are perhaps inclined even to state the fact a little too strongly. We suffer at times from the common illusion that the problems of to-day are entirely new: we fancy that nobody ever thought of them before, and that when we have solved them, nobody will ever need to look for another solution. To ardent reformers in all ages it seems as if the millennium must begin with their triumph, and that their triumph will be established by a single victory. And while some of us are thus sanguine, there are many who see in the struggles of to-day the approach of a deluge