Social Ethics.

The lecture on social ethics by Professor Peabody in Sever 11 last evening attracted an audience that nearly filled the hall. In opening, Professor Peabody said he had attempted in his lectures not to be original or interesting, but simply to be sound and just. Social questions can no longer be repressed or ignored; they have swept over the minds of all people like an epidemic, and in them no man can escape his responsibility more than this, it is a great blessing to have questions to the front that are so large that they take men somewhat out of their selfishness, and still so real that men feel their own selves bound up in this solution. It makes the moral atmosphere wholesome and invigorating.

The great need in social reform is unity of action, and that unity can spring only from an adequate philosophy of the movement. At present, we have political economy and ethics but both are only parts of the greater philosophy needed. Political economy treats man as a gold seeking animal and simply observes the general laws that govern his conduct as such. It teaches that in the social world the great law of the survival of the fittest holds. Such teachings inspire the successful with complacency, but they drive the unfit into despair and revolt.

Economics is not and cannot be a panacea of social evils; something more is needed that recognizes other qualities in man besides his mere covetousness, and that will add to the question. Will it pay? the deeper question, Is it right? Economics is like a great mechanism, but it must get its motive power from the moral sentiment of the people. Science and sentiment join hands, - both are absolutely essential. Science without sentiment makes a man hard-hearted; sentiment without science makes a man soft-hearted. The influence of love must temper the reign of law.