SOCIAL REFORM PROGRAMS AND MOVEMENTS: Their Historical Develop ment.
The programs and movements for social reform date back in their origins almost to the dawn of written history. Oppression of certain classes existed in the first historic societies and it is not surprising that some of the earliest literature reflects the growth of discontent among the subject groups. As Professor Selig man has pointed out, the desire to improve the social environment has ever been the dynamic impulse back of the evolution of economic doc trines, though it is .quite true that theories which have once been the harbingers of prog ress may later be utilized as a bulwark of the existing order. While proposals for the better ment of social conditions have appeared in all ages, they have been most numerous after great social and economic revolutions which have al tered the status of existing classes and have brought an abnormal amount of misery to those whose condition was most seriously affected by the transition. The development of Athens into a commercial empirehe growth of the R plutocracy in the Roman Republic, the disinte gration of Roman society in the 4th and 5th cen turies A.D., the breakdown of feudalism and the
origin of the national states, the rise of the bourgeoisie following the Commercial Revolu tion, that greatest of all social and economic revolutions — the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries — and the growth of modern imperialism with the expansion of European civilization throughout the world are well-known examples of social and economic transformations which have produced their ac companying programs of social reform. Though it might be interesting to deal in some detail with the early social reform movements preced ing the Industrial Revolution, the far greater significance of those which have followed it must constitute the reason for devoting the greater portion of this brief survey to a sketch of the more significant social reform move ments and programs which have developed since the opening of the 19th century.