Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace.

  • Alfred Russel Wallace
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    73/180 page 61
    X] Adulteration, Bribery, Gambling We see, then, that the whole commercial fabric of our country—our immense mills and factories, our vast exports and im¬ ports, our home trade, wholesale and retail, and innumerable transactions in our Stock Exchanges—is permeated with various forms of dishonesty, gambling, and direct robbery of individuals or of the public. No class is wholly free from it, and it increases in volume from decade to decade, just as our boasted commerce and accumulated wealth increases. I have here called attention to these various forms of immoral practices be¬ cause they are so often ignored. Yet they are all officially admitted by the enormous mass of the various Royal Commissions, Parliamentary and other Reports, as well as by the hundreds of Acts by which successive Parliaments have endeavoured to deal with them, but which have, one and all, proved to be either wholly or partially ineffective. The reason of this failure is that in every case symptoms and isolated results only have been considered, while the underlying causes of the whole vast mass of social corruption have never been sought for, or, if known, have never influenced legislation. 6i
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