Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/251

 in the adult. The advantages attending little bits of protective law-making often blind us to their ill-effects. It is no doubt very useful to provide, as we do provide, that condensed milk, when deprived of its full proportion of cream, shall only be sold in packages notifying that deprivation. If we did not do this children would be starved by their parents' ignorance. But the necessity for this enactment is at least in part created by the existence of a host of similar laws, the aggregate effect of which is to give a general impression that anything sold as food is good and useful unless it bears some warning to the contrary; and meantime every evasion of commercial morality which does not come under legislative restraint is naturally held to be perfectly justifiable—not at all a good thing for commercial morality. Now it would be a highly perilous measure to abolish, at a stroke, all protective legislation against adulterated or impoverished foods. We have built up a social condition in which every man thinks himself entitled to be protected against such frauds. But in a community which has been taught to take care of itself, and protect itself against frauds by its own intelligence, such protections would be retrograde and injurious. The aim of legislatures in the next century will be to foster all kinds of self-reliance. They will perceive that even the high importance of a reform which can be more