Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/203

Rh vitiated by the consequent inequities. While defending laissez-faire in its original and proper sense, I have pointed out that the policy of universal meddling has for its concomitant that vicious laissez-faire which leaves dishonesty to flourish at the expense of honesty. In the second place, there are numerous other measures conducive to "the improvement of the condition of the working-classes" which I desire quite as much as M. de Laveleye to see undertaken; and simply differ from him concerning the agency by which they shall be undertaken. Without wishing to restrain philanthropic action, but quite contrariwise, I have in various places argued that philanthropy will better achieve its ends by non-governmental means than by governmental means. M. de Laveleye is much more familiar than I am with the facts showing that, in societies at large, the organized arrangements which carry on production and distribution have been evolved not only without State-help, but very generally in spite of State-hindrance; and hence I am surprised that he apparently gives no credence to the doctrine that, by private persons acting either individually or in combination, there may be better achieved multitudinous ends which it is the fashion to invoke State-agency for.

Speaking of the domain of individual liberty, M. de Laveleye says—

"To be brief, I agree with Mr. Herbert Spencer that, contrary to Rousseau's doctrine, State power ought to be limited, and that a domain should be reserved to individual liberty which should be always respected; but the limits of this domain should be fixed, not by the people, but by reason and science, keeping in view what is best for the public welfare" (p. 488).

I am a good deal perplexed at finding the last clause of this sentence apparently addressed to me as though in opposition. "Social Statics" is a work mainly occupied with the endeavour to establish these limits by "reason and science." In the "Data of Ethics," I have sought, in a chapter entitled the "Sociological View," to show how certain limits to individual liberty are deducible from the laws of life as carried on under social conditions. And in "The Man versus The State," which M. de Laveleye is more particularly dealing with, one part of the last chapter is devoted to showing, deductively, the derivation of what are called "natural rights" from the vital needs, which each man has to satisfy by activities pursued in presence of other men who have to satisfy like needs; while another part of the chapter is devoted to showing, inductively, how recognition of natural rights began, in the earliest social groups, to be initiated by those retaliations which trespasses called forth—retaliations ever tending to produce respect for the proper limits of action. If M. de Laveleye does not consider