But despite the real gains in social morality that came in
the wake of the abolition of the slave trade, despite the rise in the status of women, despite the benefits that came from the enactment of child - labor laws and the establishment of the welfare state, did not the nineteenth century also bequeath to us those proposed «solutions» to social ills that led to mass starvation in Russia and China, to the utopian nightmares of communism and fascism, to wars unending, and ¯ in those societies that actually managed to abolish most social evils ¯ to a hedonism that is undermining society from within?