Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/207

 who finds butter beyond his means wants to use oleomargarine, it is an improvement to give him the chance to do so.

The laws about convict labor are other instances. The Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the clamor is a proof that something is wrong, and that the clamorers are not bound to solve the problem or propose a remedy; that they need only present their objections to what is and demand that the powers that be find a remedy. The labor bureaus themselves might be offered as a case of legislation by clamor; the necessity of justifying their own existence, and of conciliating the laborers, makes labor bureau literature one of the trials of the day. The doctrine that clamor is a proof of a grievance is so easy and summary that it is sure to be popular, and its broad availability for the purposes of the world-betterers need not be pointed out. It is also characteristic of this school of thought that the legislature is commanded to find a remedy for the alleged grievance. A legislature, if it acts rightly, has to reconcile interests and adjust rights. In so doing it can rarely give to any one interest a clear and prompt remedy for what that interest chooses to consider a grievance. Are convicts to be idle? Are the tax-payers to be indefinitely burdened? These are parts of the problem of convict labor; but, so far from having made a comprehensive solution of the convict labor question, including these elements of it, the people who have assumed to direct legislation show that they have not even mastered the comparison of the three plans proposed for using prison labor.

The Illinois Commissioner says that a wrong ought not to be overlooked because it is a little wrong. That is a thoroughly sound doctrine, and it would be easy