Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/747

Rh follow the direct results of his measures. Thus, to take a case connected with one named above, it was not intended through the system of "payment by results" to do anything more than give teachers an efficient stimulus; it was not supposed that in numerous cases their health would give way under the stimulus; it was not expected that they would be led to adopt a cramming system and to put undue pressure on dull and weak children, often to their great injury; it was not foreseen that in many cases a bodily enfeeblement would be caused which no amount of grammar and geography can compensate for. Nor did it occur to the practical politicians who provided a compulsory loadline for merchant-vessels, that the pressure of ship-owners' interests would habitually cause the putting of the load-line at the very highest limit, and that from precedent to precedent, tending ever in the same direction, the load-line would gradually rise—as from good authority I learn that it has already done. Legislators who, some forty years ago, by act of Parliament compelled railway companies to supply cheap locomotion, would have ridiculed the belief, had it been expressed, that eventually their act would punish the companies which improved the supply; and yet this was the result to companies which began to carry third-class passengers by fast trains, since a penalty to the amount of the passenger-duty was inflicted on them for every third class passenger so carried. To which instance concerning railways, add a far more striking one disclosed by comparing the railway policies of England and France. The law-makers who provided for the ultimate lapsing of French railways to the state never conceived the possibility that inferior traveling facilities would result—did not foresee that reluctance to depreciate the value of property eventually coming to the state would negative the authorization of competing lines, and that in the absence of competing lines locomotion would be relatively costly, slow, and infrequent; for, as Sir Thomas Farrar has shown, the traveler in England has great advantages over the French traveler in the economy, swiftness, and frequency with which his journeys can be made.

But the "practical" politician, who, in spite of such experiences repeated generation after generation, goes on thinking only of proximate results, naturally never thinks of results still more remote, still more general, and still more important than those just exemplified. To repeat the metaphor used above he never asks whether the political momentum set up by his measure, in some cases decreasing but in other cases greatly increasing, will or will not have the same general direction with other such momenta; and whether it may not join them in presently producing an aggregate energy working changes never thought of. Dwelling only on the effects of his particular stream of legislation, and not observing how other such streams already existing, and still other streams which will follow his initiative, pursue the same average course, it never occurs to him that they may presently unite