Page:Earle, Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty, 1920, 160.jpg

160 such matters are regulated by the unvarying perpetual law which, like all of the laws of Perfect Wisdom, have and always will produce like results from like causes.

It should never be forgotten that, as has been well said: "Natural justice is the conformity of human laws and actions to natural order, and this collection of physical and moral laws existed before any positive institutions among men.  And while their observance produces the highest degree of prosperity and well-being among men, the non-observance or transgression of them is the cause of the extensive physical evils which afflict mankind.  If such a natural law exists, our intelligence is capable of understanding it; for, if not, it would be useless, and the sagacity of the Creator would be at fault.  As, therefore, these laws are instituted by the Supreme Being, all men and all states ought to be governed by them.  They are immutable and irrefragible, and the best possible laws: therefore necessarily the basis of the most perfect government, and the fundamental rule of all positive laws, which are only for the purpose of upholding natural order, evidently the most advantageous for the human race.  * * *  How could man understand the necessity of labor to obey the irresistible instinct of his preservation and well-being, without conceiving at the same time that the instrument of labor, the physical and intellectual qualities with which he is endowed by nature, belongs to him exclusively, without perceiving that he is master and the absolute proprietor of his person, that he is born and should remain free?

But the idea of Liberty cannot spring up in the mind without associating with it that of property, in the absence of which the first would only represent an illusory right, without an object. The freedom the