Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/12

4 the skilled, and much more the unskilled, are liable to mistakes in the identification of disorders and in the appropriate treatment; and that, having disregarded the warning derivable from common experience, he was answerable for the consequences.

We measure the responsibilities of legislators for mischiefs they may do, in a much more lenient fashion. In most cases, so far from thinking of them as deserving any kind of punishment for causing disasters by laws ignorantly enacted, we scarcely think of them as deserving reprobation. It is held that common experience should have taught the druggist's assistant, untrained as he is, not to interfere; but it is not held that common experience should have taught the legislator not to interfere till he has trained himself. Though multitudinous facts are before him in the recorded legislation of our own country and of other countries, which should impress on him the immense evils caused by wrong treatment, he is not condemned for disregarding these warnings against rash meddling. Contrariwise, it is thought meritorious in him when—perhaps lately from college, perhaps fresh from keeping a pack of hounds which made him popular in his county, perhaps emerging from a provincial town where he acquired a fortune, perhaps rising from the bar at which he has gained a name as an advocate—he enters Parliament, and forthwith, in quite a light-hearted way, begins to aid or hinder this or that means of operating on the body politic. In this case, there is no occasion even to make for him the excuse that he does not know how little he knows; for the public at large agrees with him in thinking it needless that he should know anything more than what the debates on the proposed measures tell him.

And yet the mischiefs wrought by uninstructed law-making, vast in their amount as compared with those caused by uninstructed medical treatment, are conspicuous to all who do but glance over its history. The reader must pardon me while I recall a few familiar instances. Century after century statesmen went on enacting usury laws which made worse the condition of the debtor—raising the rate of interest "from five to six when intending to reduce it to four," as under Louis XV; and producing undreamed-of evils of an indirect kind, such as preventing the reproductive use of spare capital, and "burdening the small proprietors with a multitude of perpetual services." So, too, the endeavors which in England continued through five hundred years to stop forestalling, and which in France, as Arthur Young witnessed, prevented any one from buying "more than two bushels of wheat at market," went on generation after generation, increasing the miseries and mortality due to dearth; for, as everybody now knows, the wholesale dealer, who was in the statute "De