and life-degradation as objects in truth outside the science. Our
value-concept is a price-mechanism hiding behind a phrase. If we are to
play a part in the social readjustment immediately ahead, we must put
human nature and human motives into our basic hypotheses. Our
value-concept must be the yardstick to measure just how fully things and
institutions contribute to a full psychological life. We must know more
of the meaning of progress. The domination of society by one economic
class has for its chief evil the thwarting of the instinct life of the
subordinate class and the perversion of the upper class. The extent and
characteristics of this evil are to be estimated only when we know the
innate potentialities and inherited propensities of man; and the
ordering of this knowledge and its application to the changeable
economic structure is the task before the trained economist to-day."

A little later I saw one of the big men who was at that Economic
Association meeting, and he said: "I don't see why Parker isn't
spoiled. He was the most talked-about man at the Convention." Six
publishing houses wrote, after that paper, to see if he could enlarge it
into a book. Somehow it did seem as if now more than ever the world was
ours. We looked ahead into the future, and wondered if it could seem as
good to any one as it did to us. It was almost _too_ good--we were dazed
a bit by it. It is one of the things I just cannot let myself ever think
of--that future and the plans we had. Anything I can ever do now would
still leave life so utterly dull by comparison.




CHAPTER XVII