conflict In Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (1903) Ward theorizes that throughout human history conflict and war have been the forces that are most responsible for human progress. It was through conflict that hominids gained dominance over animals. It was through conflict and war that Homo Sapiens wiped out the less advanced hominid species, and it was through war that the more technologically advanced races and nations expanded their territory and spread civilization. Ward sees war as a natural evolutionary process and like all natural evolutionary processes war is capricious, slow, often ineffective and shows no regard for the pain inflicted on living creatures. One of the central tenets of Ward's world view is that the artificial is superior to the natural and thus one of the central goals of Applied Sociology is to replace war with a system that retains the progressive elements that war has provided but without the many miseries it inflicts. Influence on U.S. government policy Ward influenced a rising generation of progressive political leaders, such as Herbert Croly. In the book Lester Ward and the Welfare State, Commager details Ward's influence and refers to him as the "father of the modern welfare state". As a political approach, Ward's system became sometimes known as social liberalism, distinguished from the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries associated with such thinkers as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. While classical liberalism had sought prosperity and progress through laissez-faire (a "natural" state of stratified relations achieved by the restriction of state and legal patronage to elite economic interests), Ward's "American social liberalism" sought to enhance social progress through direct government "intervention" (as laissez-faire proponents see it) or state accountability to the diverse working-class, as egalitarians like Ward understand it. Like many Enlightenment and revolutionary thinkers before him (Rousseau for example), Ward believed that in large, complex and rapidly growing societies, inclusive human freedom (egaliberte) could only be achieved with the assistance of a strong democratic government acting in the balanced interests of universal individual development. The element of Ward's thinking that has most alarmed his inegalitarian and anarchist opponents was his confidence that a government, acting on the empirical findings and scientific theory of the science of Sociology, could be diverted from elite domination and patronage and harnessed instead to create democratic justice and security. Ward's work toward this end