Mr. Justice Brandeis: Exponent of Social Intelligence

It is common observation that progress in social sciences has not kept pace with mastery of natural sciences; that ability to deal effectively with modern industrial life offers a very poor parallel to the expertness with which scientific questions are considered. There are perhaps two explanations.First, research in mechanical, chemical, and electrical science has yielded, as by-products, a vast crop of new problems in human affairs. While invention and discovery created the possibility of releasing men and women from the thralldom of drudgery, new dangers to liberty appeared with the introduction of the factory system and the development of the business corporation. Large publicly owned corporations replaced small privately owned concerns; ownership of the instruments of production passed from the workman to the employer; personal relations between the proprietor and his help ceased. The individual contract of service lost its character because of inequality between employer and employee. Group relation of employee to employer, with collective bargaining, became common; indeed it was, in the opinion of some, absolutely essential to the worker's protection. These changes, in turn, called for ever-increasing governmental regulation. One result has been to emphasize anew the essential unity of economics, politics, and law.Second, progress in dealing with social matters has not kept pace simply because few men of talent and ability have bent their efforts to this field. It would be difficult indeed to point to any contributions to social research that begin to compare with those made by Steinmetz, Michelson, Millikan, Pasteur, and many others in the scientific field. Even seemingly elementary questions are still calling for solution. Is machine production, which tends more and more to exceed the possibilities of reasonable consumption, and to flood the world with goods for which there is not sufficient demand, to be restricted ? If so, how ? Why is our economic and political machinery so clumsy and inefficient that men are permitted to go hungry in the cities while wheat is being fed to hogs in the West? Why are factories closed when so large a percentage of the human race is undernourished, underclothed, and clamoring for jobs? Should unemployment be left to the hard settlement of supply and demand, or are unemployment insurance and the dole to be recognized and established by law as necessary features of the new world economy? Why, in the midst of so many labor-saving devices, is there so little leisure for the workers? How, in short, can men be taught to think more about human welfare and less about property and vested interests? How can the economics of production and distribution be reorganized so that everybody will have more of the good things of life and less of poverty, misery, and distress? It is certainly an extraordinary and challenging fact that our parents, with comparatively few of the conveniences and labor-saving devices that are ours, were nevertheless more contented, peaceful, and secure.