Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/458

442 Act, commanding inspection of white-lead works and bakehouses, regulating times of employment in both, and prescribing in detail some constructions for the last, which are to be kept in a condition satisfactory to the inspectors.

But we are far from forming an adequate conception if we look only at the compulsory legislation which has actually been established of late years. We must look also at that which is advocated, and which threatens to be far more sweeping in range and stringent in character. We have lately had a cabinet minister, one of the most advanced Liberals, so called, who pooh-poohs the plans of the late Government for improving industrial dwellings as so much "tinkering"; and contends for effectual coercion to be exercised over owners of small houses, over land-owners, and over rate-payers. Here is another cabinet minister who, addressing his constituents, speaks slightingly of the doings of philanthropic societies and religious bodies to help the poor, and (apparently ignoring the Poor Law) says that "the whole of the people of this country ought to look upon this work as being their own work"; that is to say, some wholesale government measure is called for. Here, again, is a radical member of Parliament, who leads a large and powerful body, aiming, with annually-increasing promise of success, to enforce sobriety by giving to local majorities power to prevent freedom of exchange in respect of certain commodities. There is a rising demand, too, that education shall be made gratis for all: the payment of school-fees is beginning to be denounced as a wrong—the state must take the whole burden. Moreover, it is proposed by many that the state, regarded as an undoubtedly competent judge of what constitutes good education for the poor, shall undertake also to prescribe good education for the middle classes—shall stamp the children of these, too, after a state pattern, concerning the goodness of which they have no more doubt than the Chinese had when they fixed theirs. Then there is the "endowment of research," of late energetically urged. Already the Government gives every year the sum of many thousand pounds for this purpose, to be distributed through the Royal Society; and, in the absence of those who have much interest in resisting, the pressure of the interested, backed by those they easily persuade, may by-and-by establish that paid "priesthood of science" long ago advocated by Sir David Brewster. Once more, plausible proposals are made that there should be organized a system of compulsory insurance, by which men during their early lives shall be forced to provide for the time when they will be incapacitated.

Nor does enumeration of these further measures of coercive rule, looming upon us near at hand or in the distance, complete the account. Nothing more than cursory allusion has yet been made to that accompanying compulsion which takes the form of increased taxation, general and local. Partly for defraying the costs of carrying out those ever-multiplying coercive measures, each of which requires an