Las personas preocupadas por el porvenir cultural suelen recurrir a consejos especulativos sobre lo que se debe hacer para retener firmemente aquello que es bueno en la herencia cultural, y lo que además se debe hacer para acrecentar el talento que se le ha confiado a esta generación.
El remedio práctico ofrecido es comúnmente alguna propuesta de medidas paliativas, algún llamamiento al sentimiento filantrópico, estético o religioso, algún esfuerzo por evocar con el nombre de uno u otro de los epifenómenos de la cultura moderna. Se cree que algo debe hacerse, y este algo toma la forma de organizaciones benéficas, clubes y
378 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE societies for social " purity," for amusement, education, and manual training of the indigent classes, for colonization of the poor, for popularization of churches, for clean politics, for cultural missionary work by social settlements, and the like. These remedial measures whereby it is proposed to save or to rehabilitate certain praiseworthy but obsolescent habits of life and of thought are, all and several, beside the point so far as touches the question in hand. Not that it is hereby intended to cast a slur on these meritorious endeavors to save mankind by treating symptoms. The symptoms treated are no doubt evil, as they are said to be ; or if they are not evil, the merits of that particular question do not concern the present inquiry. The endeavors in question are beside the point in that they do not fall into the shape of a business proposition. They are, on the whole, not so profitable a line of investment as certain other ventures that are open to modern enterprise. Hence, if they traverse the course of business enterprise and of industrial exigencies, they are nugatory, being in the same class with the labor of Sisyphus ; whereas if they coincide in effect with the line along which business and industrial exigencies move, they are a work of supererogation, except so far as they may be conceived to accelerate a change that is already under way.