Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/20

12 bridge received state-approval. So too with prevention of disease. It matters not that under the management or dictation of state-agents some of the worst evils occur: as when the lives of eighty-seven wives and children of soldiers are sacrificed in the ship Accrington; or as when typhoid fever and diphtheria are diffused by a state-ordered drainage system, as in Edinburgh; or as when officially-enforced sanitary appliances, ever getting out of order, increase the evils they were to decrease. These and multitudinous such facts leave unabated the confidence with which sanitary inspection is invoked—invoked, indeed, more than ever, as is shown in the recent suggestion that all public schools should be under the supervision of health-officers. Nay, even when the state has manifestly caused the mischief complained of, faith in its beneficent agency is not at all diminished; as we see in the fact that, having a generation ago authorized, or rather required, towns to establish drainage systems which delivered sewage into the rivers, and having thus polluted the sources of water-supply, the water-companies have come to be daily denounced for the impurities of their water; and, as the only remedy, there follows the demand that the state by its local proxies shall undertake the whole business. The state's misdoings become, as in the case of industrial dwellings, reasons for praying it to do more.

This work of the Legislature is, in one respect, indeed, less excusable than the fetich-worship to which I have tactilytacitly [sic] compared it. The savage has the defense that his fetich is silent—does not confess its inability. But the civilized man persists in ascribing to this idol, made with his own hands, powers which in one way or other it confesses it has not got. I do not mean merely that the debates daily tell us of legislative measures which have done evil instead of good; nor do I mean merely that the thousands of acts of Parliament which repeal preceding acts are so many tacit admissions of failure. Neither do I refer only to such quasi-governmental confessions as that contained in the report of the Poor-Law Commissioners, who said that "we find, on the one hand, that there is scarcely one statute connected with the administration of public relief which has produced the effect designed by the Legislature, and that the majority of them have created new evils, and aggravated those which they were intended to prevent." I refer rather to those made by statesmen, and by state-departments. Here, for example, in a memorial addressed to Mr. Gladstone, and